Johann Hari
Author of Chasing the Scream, Lost Connections, Stolen Focus and Magic Pill
Where to hear and read about Johann Hari1 episode or test
Johann Hari is a nonfiction author (Chasing the Scream, Lost Connections, Stolen Focus, Magic Pill) who builds each book on hundreds of in-person interviews. The lesson most worth taking is to pin a few real questions to your door, cut everything that doesn't serve them, and earn each insight with a true, complicated story.
True intelligence is about making complicated things comprehensible to everyone.
This Research System Will Change How You Write — Johann Hari
Johann Hari: the story and the lessons
1Johann Hari's path from personal problem to book
Hari starts every book from a problem in his own life. Addiction ran in his family, and an early memory of failing to wake a relative started Chasing the Scream. Lost Connections began when he was about to turn 40 and depressed, Stolen Focus with 'Why can't I read anymore?', and The Magic Pill with the new weight loss drugs.
The systemic view comes last, after he follows the personal question. He had ideas going in, but not a conclusion he wanted to prove.
He writes for people like the family that raised him. His grandmother, who raised him, left school at 13 and his parents at 15. His father drove a bus and his mother was a nurse.
The feedback he likes best is 'I don't normally finish the books I start and you changed my mind.' The worst thing a reader can say is that they are confused.
A wrong story about his depression sent him the wrong way. As a depressed teenager he was told he lacked serotonin and took Paxil at ever higher doses for years.
That story led him away from getting help with what had happened to him. He says antidepressants help some people and that they should keep taking them if they help.
Reporting turned him from a columnist into a listener. At 22 he was a columnist whose job was to stand above readers and tell them what to think. Between 21 and 31 he did columns and reported from places like the Congo and Dubai.
On his first trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories his pre-existing narrative blocked his view of what was in front of him. He now talks much less and listens much more, and invites readers to reach their own conclusions.
2How Hari researches and interviews for a book
He writes his questions and a talk-to list before researching. At the start of every book he lists the questions he wants answered, then asks who could carry each part of the story for the reader. He ends every interview by asking who else to talk to.
Each lead becomes a link in a chain. He compares it to chasing bees to find a hive: after about 50 bees you find it.
He does 200 to 300 interviews per book and uses about 20%. About 80% never reach the page, and he sits with people in person because it gets far more than phone calls.
He answers the 'wasted' charge by comparing it to a detective who questions 12 suspects when the 12th did it. Nobody knew in advance.
He casts people to carry each part of the story. For Chasing the Scream he wanted a dealer, a cop who backs the drug war, a cop who doesn't, and a cartel member. Vocal NYC introduced him to Chino Harden, a trans former crack dealer he met in a Brooklyn diner and interviewed for years.
He interviews believing the person knows something he doesn't. He goes in prepared but humble and looks for a reason to love the person. He sat on the tunnel floor in Las Vegas so he was never standing over homeless interviewees.
With Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whom he morally opposed, he learned that Arpaio's mother died giving birth to him and his siblings blamed him. That reframed the man without excusing him.
He asks open questions and leads people as little as possible. He asks 'How did you feel?' rather than 'Did you feel bad?' and speaks provisionally when he challenges someone, such as 'I could be completely wrong.'
Asked neutrally, one man said he was surprisingly happy the day his mother died, an answer a loaded question would have buried.
He returns to the same people for years. He is still replaying Vegas interviews from 2011 for a book 14 years in the making.
'Often it's the eighth time you interview someone that they'll reveal something really important.'
He sends people the exact quotes he will use, without giving veto power. He asks whether they want to add anything, whether it is fair, and whether they misspoke.
It guards against taking words out of context and often yields something new. One man revised a remark about his dad to 'he wasn't all bad.'
3How Hari turns hundreds of interviews into a book
He pins the book's questions to his front door for three years. The Stolen Focus questions were: is attention getting worse, why, who is doing it, how do we fix it, and who is fixing it. They kept him from chasing rabbit holes while he traveled and wrote.
He cuts anything that doesn't serve the questions, even his best lines. He tightens Fitzgerald's 'kill your darlings'. The most interesting find, the most lyrical line or the best insight still goes if it doesn't serve the questions and the reader's journey.
'What you put into your book is not the most interesting stuff you found out.'
He tells the story aloud to a 12-year-old and records it. His transcripts pile up taller than War and Peace. A 12-year-old can follow almost anything but gets bored fast, so he can see what to drop.
Chino's story takes about 15 minutes this way. Few people get blocked when they speak, because speech compresses the way a rewritten draft does.
He frames an intellectual journey as a physical one. For Stolen Focus he traveled from New Zealand to Iceland to MIT, because that is how he learned the material.
His promise to the reader is shared: 'I don't know the answer. You don't know the answer.' He travels to the people who do and is honest about the doubt.
He opens every book with vulnerability, then a goal the reader shares. He learned from deep canvassing at the LA LGBT Center to connect emotionally before arguing. Lost Connections opens with a near-fatal pesticide apple in Vietnam, and only after a shared goal does he lay out evidence.
In Vietnam he collapsed after four days of vomiting, and his fixer Hang overruled him and took him to the hospital. The doctor's line 'you need your nausea' became the book's point that pain is a signal, not a malfunction. He opens with it even though it is unflattering.
He earns each insight with a story and keeps it complicated. Chasing the Scream opens with Billie Holiday and Harry Anslinger, who launched the war on drugs, rather than the claim that the drug war was racist.
He does not present Holiday as a saint, because a flat, morally clean story earns nothing.
He confesses his doubts to the reader. He avoided visiting Portugal for Chasing the Scream because he feared decriminalization had failed too. Telling the reader that fear unblocked him.
'When I experience doubt, what I do is I candidly confess it to the reader.' He says hiding doubt weakens a piece and confessing it strengthens it.
4Hari's writing routine and how he protects his focus
He drafts in order, rests it a month, then cuts on paper. He writes start to finish to simulate what the reader knows, sets the draft aside for a month, prints it and cuts by hand. He then rewrites, prints again and rereads on his phone for a fresh view.
Three close friends read it, then his editors. He reads sections to the people he wrote about, then fact-checking follows. Will Self told him the hardest part is managing your nausea at what you've produced.
He puts clarity first and strikes out whatever sounds like writing. He quotes Georges Simenon's rule and allows lyrical passages only at moments of real emotional truth for the people he writes about.
His style is meant to express a democratic, clear attitude. As a child he translated for his Swiss father, who spoke poor English, and between class worlds in London.
He treats writer's block as a signal, not a disease. Block can mean he is out of material and must go back into the world, or that something he is saying is inauthentic. He writes out the nature of the doubt and tells the reader why.
'When you are blocked that contains wisdom.'
He breaks blocks by recording arguments with friends. Magic Pill is punctuated with recorded conversations with friends for and against the new weight loss drugs. A friend told him he kept framing it as health benefits versus risks when it was really about vanity.
That broke the block much faster than working alone. He says clarity often arrives in the heat of an argument.
Writing about attention changed how he guards his own. A plastic K-safe locks his phone away for up to a whole day, and he uses it eight hours a day. The Freedom app blocks sites, social media is blocked on all his devices, and his assistant posts for him.
He also walks for an hour a day with only a notebook and no technology. It is usually his most creative hour, because mind wandering combines ideas that were not connected.
5How Johann Hari sees people and what persuades
He shows people as complex, never as devils or angels. Arpaio ran a Tent City prison where women with addictions slept in desert heat. Hari did not suspend his horror, but his rule is 'There are evil acts. There are no evil people.'
He won't turn homeless people into angels either, since that denies them the dignity of being real. He cites The Philadelphia Story: 'The time to make your mind up about someone is never.'
He reads the deeper currents, not the day's winds. On San Francisco Bay the currents are more forceful and predictable than the winds, and he says most journalism watches the winds. Years of thinking about a subject let a writer see the currents.
Before the 2016 election, a woman in West Cleveland meant to say 'when I was young' but said 'when I was alive'. He heard that she feels she has died, saw no evidence she was racist, and says scorning her is cruel and worsens the problem.
He goes to the territory instead of trusting the map. Public argument happens at the level of abstractions, so his method is hundreds of boots-on-the-ground conversations with the people involved.
He recommends Michel Houellebecq's novel The Map and the Territory. He cites a psychologist who said one of the most powerful things you can do is give someone a story about their pain.
He aims to convey reality, not to win the reader. He is pleased if Stolen Focus readers back regulating social media, but another conclusion is fine. 'I'm not here to persuade you.'
His books still end with things he wants people to do and fight for. He says arguing and outrage don't even persuade anyone.
This Research System Will Change How You Write — Johann Hari
Hari shows how to build a nonfiction book on hundreds of interviews, then keep only what serves a handful of questions and a story the reader can follow. The habit worth hearing is that he pins his questions to his front door, tells the story aloud to a 12-year-old, and confesses his doubts on the page.
Hari starts every book from a problem in his own life. Addiction ran in his family, and an early memory of failing to wake a relative started Chasing the Scream. Lost Connections began when he was about to turn 40 and depressed, Stolen Focus with 'Why can't I read anymore?', and The Magic Pill with the new weight loss drugs.
The systemic view comes last, after he follows the personal question. He had ideas going in, but not a conclusion he wanted to prove.
He writes for people like the family that raised him. His grandmother, who raised him, left school at 13 and his parents at 15. His father drove a bus and his mother was a nurse.
The feedback he likes best is 'I don't normally finish the books I start and you changed my mind.' The worst thing a reader can say is that they are confused.
A wrong story about his depression sent him the wrong way. As a depressed teenager he was told he lacked serotonin and took Paxil at ever higher doses for years.
That story led him away from getting help with what had happened to him. He says antidepressants help some people and that they should keep taking them if they help.
Reporting turned him from a columnist into a listener. At 22 he was a columnist whose job was to stand above readers and tell them what to think. Between 21 and 31 he did columns and reported from places like the Congo and Dubai.
On his first trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories his pre-existing narrative blocked his view of what was in front of him. He now talks much less and listens much more, and invites readers to reach their own conclusions.
He writes his questions and a talk-to list before researching. At the start of every book he lists the questions he wants answered, then asks who could carry each part of the story for the reader. He ends every interview by asking who else to talk to.
Each lead becomes a link in a chain. He compares it to chasing bees to find a hive: after about 50 bees you find it.
He does 200 to 300 interviews per book and uses about 20%. About 80% never reach the page, and he sits with people in person because it gets far more than phone calls.
He answers the 'wasted' charge by comparing it to a detective who questions 12 suspects when the 12th did it. Nobody knew in advance.
He casts people to carry each part of the story. For Chasing the Scream he wanted a dealer, a cop who backs the drug war, a cop who doesn't, and a cartel member. Vocal NYC introduced him to Chino Harden, a trans former crack dealer he met in a Brooklyn diner and interviewed for years.
He interviews believing the person knows something he doesn't. He goes in prepared but humble and looks for a reason to love the person. He sat on the tunnel floor in Las Vegas so he was never standing over homeless interviewees.
With Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whom he morally opposed, he learned that Arpaio's mother died giving birth to him and his siblings blamed him. That reframed the man without excusing him.
He asks open questions and leads people as little as possible. He asks 'How did you feel?' rather than 'Did you feel bad?' and speaks provisionally when he challenges someone, such as 'I could be completely wrong.'
Asked neutrally, one man said he was surprisingly happy the day his mother died, an answer a loaded question would have buried.
He returns to the same people for years. He is still replaying Vegas interviews from 2011 for a book 14 years in the making.
'Often it's the eighth time you interview someone that they'll reveal something really important.'
He sends people the exact quotes he will use, without giving veto power. He asks whether they want to add anything, whether it is fair, and whether they misspoke.
It guards against taking words out of context and often yields something new. One man revised a remark about his dad to 'he wasn't all bad.'
He pins the book's questions to his front door for three years. The Stolen Focus questions were: is attention getting worse, why, who is doing it, how do we fix it, and who is fixing it. They kept him from chasing rabbit holes while he traveled and wrote.
He cuts anything that doesn't serve the questions, even his best lines. He tightens Fitzgerald's 'kill your darlings'. The most interesting find, the most lyrical line or the best insight still goes if it doesn't serve the questions and the reader's journey.
'What you put into your book is not the most interesting stuff you found out.'
He tells the story aloud to a 12-year-old and records it. His transcripts pile up taller than War and Peace. A 12-year-old can follow almost anything but gets bored fast, so he can see what to drop.
Chino's story takes about 15 minutes this way. Few people get blocked when they speak, because speech compresses the way a rewritten draft does.
He frames an intellectual journey as a physical one. For Stolen Focus he traveled from New Zealand to Iceland to MIT, because that is how he learned the material.
His promise to the reader is shared: 'I don't know the answer. You don't know the answer.' He travels to the people who do and is honest about the doubt.
He opens every book with vulnerability, then a goal the reader shares. He learned from deep canvassing at the LA LGBT Center to connect emotionally before arguing. Lost Connections opens with a near-fatal pesticide apple in Vietnam, and only after a shared goal does he lay out evidence.
In Vietnam he collapsed after four days of vomiting, and his fixer Hang overruled him and took him to the hospital. The doctor's line 'you need your nausea' became the book's point that pain is a signal, not a malfunction. He opens with it even though it is unflattering.
He earns each insight with a story and keeps it complicated. Chasing the Scream opens with Billie Holiday and Harry Anslinger, who launched the war on drugs, rather than the claim that the drug war was racist.
He does not present Holiday as a saint, because a flat, morally clean story earns nothing.
He confesses his doubts to the reader. He avoided visiting Portugal for Chasing the Scream because he feared decriminalization had failed too. Telling the reader that fear unblocked him.
'When I experience doubt, what I do is I candidly confess it to the reader.' He says hiding doubt weakens a piece and confessing it strengthens it.
He drafts in order, rests it a month, then cuts on paper. He writes start to finish to simulate what the reader knows, sets the draft aside for a month, prints it and cuts by hand. He then rewrites, prints again and rereads on his phone for a fresh view.
Three close friends read it, then his editors. He reads sections to the people he wrote about, then fact-checking follows. Will Self told him the hardest part is managing your nausea at what you've produced.
He puts clarity first and strikes out whatever sounds like writing. He quotes Georges Simenon's rule and allows lyrical passages only at moments of real emotional truth for the people he writes about.
His style is meant to express a democratic, clear attitude. As a child he translated for his Swiss father, who spoke poor English, and between class worlds in London.
He treats writer's block as a signal, not a disease. Block can mean he is out of material and must go back into the world, or that something he is saying is inauthentic. He writes out the nature of the doubt and tells the reader why.
'When you are blocked that contains wisdom.'
He breaks blocks by recording arguments with friends. Magic Pill is punctuated with recorded conversations with friends for and against the new weight loss drugs. A friend told him he kept framing it as health benefits versus risks when it was really about vanity.
That broke the block much faster than working alone. He says clarity often arrives in the heat of an argument.
Writing about attention changed how he guards his own. A plastic K-safe locks his phone away for up to a whole day, and he uses it eight hours a day. The Freedom app blocks sites, social media is blocked on all his devices, and his assistant posts for him.
He also walks for an hour a day with only a notebook and no technology. It is usually his most creative hour, because mind wandering combines ideas that were not connected.
He shows people as complex, never as devils or angels. Arpaio ran a Tent City prison where women with addictions slept in desert heat. Hari did not suspend his horror, but his rule is 'There are evil acts. There are no evil people.'
He won't turn homeless people into angels either, since that denies them the dignity of being real. He cites The Philadelphia Story: 'The time to make your mind up about someone is never.'
He reads the deeper currents, not the day's winds. On San Francisco Bay the currents are more forceful and predictable than the winds, and he says most journalism watches the winds. Years of thinking about a subject let a writer see the currents.
Before the 2016 election, a woman in West Cleveland meant to say 'when I was young' but said 'when I was alive'. He heard that she feels she has died, saw no evidence she was racist, and says scorning her is cruel and worsens the problem.
He goes to the territory instead of trusting the map. Public argument happens at the level of abstractions, so his method is hundreds of boots-on-the-ground conversations with the people involved.
He recommends Michel Houellebecq's novel The Map and the Territory. He cites a psychologist who said one of the most powerful things you can do is give someone a story about their pain.
He aims to convey reality, not to win the reader. He is pleased if Stolen Focus readers back regulating social media, but another conclusion is fine. 'I'm not here to persuade you.'
His books still end with things he wants people to do and fight for. He says arguing and outrage don't even persuade anyone.