Johann Hari

Were you always told to multitask in the office? Has multitasking taken over office culture? Award-winning author Johann Hari says that multitasking is actually detrimental to our work. In this insightful and dynamic keynote, Johann will break down the myth of multitasking and why society has come to value it so much. Packed with information that will help you choose to focus on a single task over multitasking and real-world solutions that can be applied immediately, Johann will transform not just employee habits, but the work culture to promote greater success, productivity, and collaboration.

There was a mystery haunting award-winning investigative journalist Johann Hari. He was thirty-nine years old, and almost every year he had been alive, depression and anxiety had increased in Britain and across the Western world. Why? In this eye-opening talk, Johann shares the incredible forty-thousand-mile journey he took across the world to interview the leading experts about what causes depression and anxiety, and what solves them.

His findings are all shared in his bestseller Lost Connections, and in its companion TED Talk with over 20M views!). He outlines nine research-backed causes of depression and anxiety―and that this knowledge leads to a very different set of solutions: ones that offer real hope. An empathetic investigation of a worldwide issue, this talk will leave your audience hopeful, fascinated, and full of knowledge that can help all of us—whatever our experience with depression and anxiety—to make our lives more connected and psychologically healthy.

For award-winning author Johann Hari, drugs have always been personal. One of his earliest memories is of being unable to wake a relative. Since then, he’s watched loved ones struggle with addiction, all the while believing in the basic story about drugs and dependency echoed by our teachers and governments. That is, until he set out to find his own answers. Embarking upon a 30,000-mile, 12-country journey to really understand the war on drugs, Johann uncovered a much different narrative—that everything we’ve been told about addiction for the past 100 years is wrong.

As Johann learned, emerging science proves that addiction isn’t actually caused by drugs, but by conditions of social isolation and pain. Addiction isn’t the result of a moral failing or depravity, or the inevitable result of a chemical dependency, but a product of our social environments. This means we need to pursue a radically different approach to addicts. “The opposite of addiction is not sobriety,” Johann writes. “It is human connection.” We must abandon conventional cycles of shame, stigma, and incarceration, and instead adopting greater capacities of compassion.

In this eye-opening talk, Johann discusses the landmark studies that demonstrate the connections between addiction and environment. He investigates the countries that have witnessed incredible success by accepting these findings: plummeting rates of drug use, addiction, violent crime, overdoses, and more. And he issues a call to treat the addicts in our lives much differently, changing both our politics and our hearts. Combining the best social science with vividly human anecdotes, this is a transformative talk about what it means to be addicted, and what it means to recover.

While writing the bestselling book Chasing the Scream (later adapted into an Academy Award-nominated film), Johann Hari discovered that the drug war has very different motives and results than those described by our businesses and governments. Not only has strictly enforced prohibition claimed countless victims to incarceration, poverty, and murder around the world, but it’s actually led to more addicted users—the opposite of its touted purpose.

In this keynote, Johann traces the development of a global moral injustice, highlighting the previously untold story of how Billie Holiday was stalked and killed by the founder of the war—and what this tells us about what’s motivated it ever since. He relates the stirring testimonies of people whose lives have been transformed by ill-conceived policies, and the doctors and activists resolutely trying to change them. And he talks, with inspiring examples, on the alternative policies that show a clear way forward.

From the killing fields of northern Mexico, home of some of the world’s most dangerous cartels, to the teeming US prison system, to nations like Portugal that choose to pursue innovative solutions, this keynote condenses Hari’s years of deep reporting into a riveting talk on the war on drugs: its human and economic tolls, and its compassionate, economically sound solutions.