Speaker 1every single time you switch your attention
Speaker 2you pay for it so multitasking is
Speaker 1a myth yeah so what we are going to do is get a sense of the amount of time and energy that you essentially waste every single time you switch your
Speaker 2attention okay let's do this all
Speaker 1right are you ready yeah get ready go oh my
Speaker 2gosh this is a shit show done so on a daily basis theoretically i'm losing 60 of my productivity just by switching between two different types of tasks at once yeah and over
Speaker 1two hours a day is the average now of how much time is being wasted bouncing between screens and different tasks if we stay this distracted we will live a life that we don't like living so what is
Speaker 2in this box we're gonna
Speaker 1go through the box i'm gonna teach you all the science for productivity and human performance because i know that the default settings of all of our technology are designed by people like me to maximize engagement for example the infinite scroll is like going to a buffet and just opening your mouth and there's just an assembly line of food and you're like oh my god i'm so tired of this i'm so tired of this i'm so tired of this i'm so just going straight in there's no backstop but we can use reverse neuroscience to reverse this entire thing
Speaker 2where's the first place to stop first
Speaker 1put your phone in gray research from my lab shows gray scale makes the phone less neurologically stimulating and we saw on average people spent one hour less on their phones every single day that's seven hours a week next is choosing long form over short form content if we have too much short form your attention span is shot you literally feel shittier and your brain operates at a lower level i can see in your
Speaker 2productivity toolkit there is a clock yeah
Speaker 1this is a huge huge game changer in terms of productivity but also there is a focus sprint to help people to do up to two times as much as they would otherwise do and we can talk about biological chronotypes that dictate the ideal time you should be doing your focus sprints but also i have another amazing thing to strengthen your mind and make you better at focusing so i'm going to teach you all this stuff okay so let's get into it so the first thing we ought to really focus in on is guys
Speaker 2i've got a favor to ask before this episode begins it's the algorithm if you follow a show will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed so when we have our best episodes on this show the most shared episodes the most rated episodes i would love you to know and the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button but also it's the simple easy free thing that you can do to help us make this show better and i would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button thank you so so so much dr saha yusuf what is the mission that you are on if you had to try and capture it in a couple of sentences and why does it matter to the people that are tuning in and listening right now the
Speaker 1mission i am on is to first and foremost bring science education to the world in a way that allows people to work more in line with how their brains and their bodies actually work best this is my philosophy that there are fundamental laws of how the brain and the body actually work and i always liken these things to the laws of physics there are laws of physics we don't question the laws gravity i don't ever wake up one morning go you know what i want to do away with it and i know that there are fundamental laws of biology but we blissfully ignore these laws of biology we don't question the laws of biology we don't teach kids when they're in school at an early age how their brains work so that they might be able to study a little bit easier you know find flow actually be able to manage things like stress physiological stress we don't teach people the fundamentals of sleep and my area of expertise is productivity we focus so much on what what's the deliverable what's the long-term goal what's the annual goal what's the quarterly goal what what what but not the how how should we go about getting these things done what is the best way in fact that a human being might sit down and have an innovative thought like truly like what's like let's for example the neuroscience of innovation we're all obsessed i'm from silicon valley we're obsessed with sort of innovation but we're doing that with this with our brains this is a biological system isn't it a good idea to take a step back and learn how the system actually works i just feel like there's so much friction with how we're working and living today and i would say the number one thing that seems to be getting in the way of all of this is at the moment technology which is such a shame because it's also and the most amazing piece of i would say modern human invention you said
Speaker 2innovation there one of the things that innovators often think about is working backwards from the customer i understanding the customer problem and then reverse engineering a solution from there so i present you with the same challenge with my audience today having been out there as a productivity on what they're really struggling with and how they like describe in their own words how can they relate to everything you've just said like what are the words that in their head they're using to describe the problem that your work
Speaker 1solves i hear a lot about brain fog
Speaker 2okay
Speaker 1that's a big one i remember working with this female ceo she said something that's always stuck with me and she's like i can hear my own thoughts again that's always stayed with me i'm and that's the heartbreaking truth i think people aren't we're not listening we don't hear the inside of ourselves anymore i think there's some sort of global discomfort with being with ourselves and we've been distracted completely 24 7 like every little second and minute in between all of our tasks and to-dos and meetings and calls and this and that is filled in with technology and scrolling we're just constantly consuming and if you put yourself into that sort of setup and state when is it that you your mind is supposed to say hey what about this i can't cure cancer that's not my area i can't do some of the amazing things that people right now are working on the problems that they're working on to make the world a better place but in some small part if i can help unblock people to go do the amazing things that they want to do in the world if i can just bring the science of productivity and performance of focus energy management attention all of these things back into our lives then this is my small part that i can help people do all of the amazing things that they want to do and still be happy what is the
Speaker 2experience and the reference points that you draw from where did you study what is it you run now what is it that you're doing right now what studies have you done
Speaker 1i'm the founder and managing director of the becoming superhuman lab which is a lab focused and obsessed with productivity and human performance our goal is to help people get the most done in the least amount of time with the least amount of stress i've done my entire academic career at uc berkeley my area of expertise is cognitive neuroplasticity so how the brain actually changes and evolves keyword there sort of that root plastic plasticity so the brain is constantly changing and evolving and adapting and i'd like to tap into that if the brain is constantly changing evolving and adapting that means it could be getting better which is why my you know my lab has colloquially been called the becoming superhuman lab because my area of interest is increasing things like your attention span your memory your general fluid intelligence so these cognitive traits that we have and these cognitive skills i want to increase the volume on all of those things i want to make people better faster stronger so that's that's what i've always been obsessed with
Speaker 2you can make me superhuman
Speaker 1i mean yes we have to define it though of course yes okay i think you're probably already a fair
Speaker 2bit there no no no there's room for improvement
Speaker 1always oh i for myself as well always but i do practice quite a bit of what i preach but there's you know we are human at the end of the
Speaker 2day but i would like to be superhuman okay so hopefully we can get we can do that today you mentioned working with a female ceo there what is the broad spectrum of human that you've worked with
Speaker 1i worked with a lot of executives one of the first execs i worked with um and i of course i can't say who but it's it's a fortune would be a fortune 10 company and i i used to do these observations so i would let's say if i did this for you by the way you'd you know you'd say okay for the next couple of days i'm gonna have this weird doctor lady this neuroscientist like follow me around and she's just observing me like i would notice like everything from what you're eating and drinking throughout the course of the day if you take breaks how do you do that and i would say okay for the next couple of days i'm gonna have this how you work i'd follow you to a bunch of your meetings you know i just like i'm just like with you for a bit observing taking notes and then we would do an overhaul and then i would intervene and then be like all right we gotta this is gonna get changed up and i have this very distinct memory because this was a huge point of transition for my work i'm sitting there in his office and it's a modern as you might have glass everywhere you know so he's sitting in a glass box in the middle of a busy floor this is a fortune and he's the boss so everybody can like you know he can see everyone everyone can see him so you've now put this human being this extremely intelligent human being that controls billions of dollars and you've put him in a glass box now he also has in mind he's working on a deck for a board meeting it's extremely important he's pulling together data that different teams have sent him and he's looking at things he's making pretty big decisions and he's like yeah that's what i'm doing i'm like that's fine you do you i'll be back here and i see him and i'm like okay i'm gonna do this i'm gonna do this i'm gonna he's on his computer but he has a second monitor and the second monitor has his email open and then has two phones personal and professional and they're both face up right next to him and he had an apple watch on so as he's sitting down to focus it's just like and then all of this is happening and then there's people walking by and then at some point his chief of staff like comes in and he's just like excuse me you know don't forget this and he's like uh-huh so he's sitting there i swear steven he probably got 30 seconds you know the average there was a study done 47 seconds is the average amount of time a knowledge worker stays focused on one screen before another one distracts him if i told you i want to give you a billion dollars and i'm here to support you you know and advise in any way that i can but your goal is in fact let's say to cure cancer and it's you so hopefully you can galvanize the best minds from all around the world how would you want them to go about trying to solve this global issue of such importance would you strap them up with an apple watch a bunch of notifications a slack and then litter their day with a bunch of meetings and calls and then hope that in the next few years they cure this thing ideally you want them to be in an environment with a setup that is not distracting and like doesn't waste their best thinking they don't like wake up in the morning and it's like oh hey by the way instead of thinking about that whole cancer bit you need to jump onto this call and we need to talk about this thing and we did it and we need to talk about it and it's just constant ping-ponging like this all day what is this just sit down for 20 minutes and just focus so it's it's almost it's what's hysterical is i studied far more complex things than i find myself talking to people about which is hysterical we just need to focus on cleaning this shit up that's why i call it digital hygiene there are obstacles in the way of productivity and performance and focus and i think that's what i'm trying to do and i think that's what i'm trying to forget becoming superhuman we just need to become human like do we know do you do we all understand collectively here how this human system works so that we can accept again those laws of biology as you see we come back to this i am i can
Speaker 2relate so much to everything you just said in part because i'm an executive but actually it doesn't really matter if you're an executive in this context because we all live in this very very noisy world um i want to now go through all of the solutions you called it getting all this shit out of our way cleaning up our digital and physical environments there is a box here this is you can you don't want to make it an app but there is some of the stuff you talk about is in this box i guess as someone that wants to be able to do the best work of my life think clearly interview well build businesses innovate be creative all of those things that you were pointing at through your explanations i want to know like where's the first place to start what's the first domino like if i fuck up my sleep is that the first do i have to meditate like what
Speaker 1is the there's one that i have to begin with the foundational which you already mentioned yourself asleep that's true the way that i by the way talk about sleep and i hope this visual stays in your mind and maybe the the mind of the listeners here and i've had the interesting and distinct pleasure of having many a ceo and an executive who is haggard tired especially the founders that are grinding uh come to me and ask okay i want to become one person better and i find out that they're averaging five hours of sleep a night like okay can i paint a picture for you of what this feels like it feels like you've taken your car to the mechanic and as a mechanic i'm looking at it and the thing is on fire like it's literally like it's on fire the flames are and then you're sitting there like unaware of the fact that it's on fire and you're like can we soup up the engine i'm like dude let's put the fire out first i don't even know where the fire is and i'm to begin to assess your baseline performance so that's the thing when you don't get enough sleep and mind you that's a minimum of seven hours a night if you're not getting enough sleep it's impacting your cognitive performance your emotional regulation so it'll be irascible you know in the office and with other people like the the system is messed up so sleep is for sure the foundation okay we got to check that box i would say next biggest thing that i will tell you right now this is a global issue it is impacting everyone from senior citizens to children it's your relationship with technology what is that this is a phone lockbox so we would theoretically put your technology inside and then lock it away from you oh you want to do it yeah yeah go for it okay let me just
Speaker 2make sure it's off you're like let me just get rid of some of the things
Speaker 1okay turn that upside
Speaker 2down there we go you don't
Speaker 1necessarily need to get a lockbox but the point of something like this is for you as a human being and your brain as a focus machine as a monotasking machine to actually be able to focus focus and attention are so fundamental to all things personal and professional mind you that means any kind of distraction that is diminishing your focus and your attention is diminishing your focus and your attention is is impacting your memory another word for memory is learning right attention and memory by the way they're it's impossible to divorce those concepts from one another they're connected in the most connected way that they can be the way that they're connected is you cannot remember anything that you do not attend to you think about that it is only things that come into your mind that you your aperture of attention that you're aware of in the first place so we cannot learn anything we cannot remember anything unless we're paying attention and attention spans our ability to sustain attention has been linearly decreasing since the advent of this thing and i don't want people to think it's just phones necessarily it's this it's notifications in general and if you're monitoring the your inbox all day and it's constantly available you're not going to be able to what's your plan for having deep thoughts the rebuttal that
Speaker 2comes to mind although i don't even believe it but this is the rebuttal that i think a lot of you know me and my listeners will be thinking right now yes but what if something happens i have my email open because maybe a big a big email comes in or i have my whatsapp right there because maybe my fiancee is going to tell me i need to let her in the house or something you know something's going to happen
Speaker 1totally fires so we call them right fires urgencies i get it i make caretaker for both of my you know it's i i get it i call these by the way vips these are vip notifications and messages can i paint a picture for you for a second we figured this out for mail if you have an extremely important package coming to your house how do we deal with this in the mail system somebody knocks it needs a signature like we're not leaving this outside somebody needs to be home knock knock knock i'm going to come and get your attention to me that knock knock knock you need to sign for this and i'm going to get your attention and i'm going to get your attention is a notification that's the fire right and everything else by the way just gets shoved in the mailbox or left by the door this is what i advocate for we are all by the way smart enough we should respect ourselves enough truly to demand better than the default settings that our apps our email our phones come with the default settings of all of our technology are designed by the way by people like me these are cognitive neuroscientists behavioral neuroscientists that work at these companies to get you hooked because if you think about this by the way what's the bottom line for even microsoft outlook forget like tiktok and like all of that just leave that aside for a second like the boring stuff that runs the world email for those of us adults right what do you think the bottom line is when you have a company that has an annual contract with another company that installs things like slack things like just communication software how do you make sure that you re-up that contract you show engagement at the end of the year you go look look at these engagement numbers everyone is using everyone's constantly talking to each other 24 7 so you can't do what you do without us so that means the way that these softwares and products are designed is for them to be as engaging as humanly possible so the default setting that your phone is going to be comes with the default setting of every single app that you download on that phone of yours the default setting of email of any messaging software that all of our teams use the default setting is there to maximize engagement not to make your company more productive these companies don't give a shit about your productivity that's not their problem that's your problem you need to figure that part out i'm a big advocate for thinking about this in the sense of default settings because it is in fact i have a sweet tooth so think of a chocolate company a candy company what's the what is their bottom line what do they want out of me as a customer
Speaker 2and when you say bottom line for those that don't know you mean profit incentive yes yeah okay their
Speaker 1goal is to sell as much of their product as humanly possible is it their business or responsibility to think about whether or not i get diabetes or if i'm having trouble with over consumption not really well the same is true for email the same is true for any kind of platform its engagement is the currency so everything from the little the sound that your email client makes when you send an email off, that's been tested. Tested of what will feel the best and sound the best to the human. Everything from the vibrate functionality that you feel in your phone has been highly optimized by people like me to keep you obsessed with the thing and addicted to the thing to increase your engagement on the platform. And so my big pushes in the goal of, again, productivity, the first thing we ought to really focus in on is getting rid of the drains of our productivity first.
Speaker 2It sounds obvious, but it's totally not obvious that a productivity tool's incentive actually isn't your own productivity. It is your engagement with the tool. Because you're totally right. When these companies report to investors or whatever, they have to show how much engagement, how much you used it. And it's almost like antithetical to the mission of the tool for them to be, to be removing your distraction in that regard. Because engagement and distraction are like opposites in the way that you described them. Like Slack is distracting me under the premise that it's making me better at my work.
Speaker 1Absolutely. Which is why I sort of scoff when I hear some of these products and tools call themselves productivity software. Because I'm like, well, and I'm not suggesting, right, we don't need to communicate with each other. I have team members in different time zones. Like we, obviously, we've never as a human species been able to communicate and collaborate at this scale. Technology is amazing. I'm not a Luddite. What I advocate for is people telling themselves this mantra of I deserve better than the default settings. I am better than the default settings. The default settings are not there to help you.
Speaker 2So what do you suggest then for someone like me who, you know, I probably spend 10 hours a day on my phone according to my screen time. What should I do?
Speaker 1Okay. My number one suggestion is especially because you yourself brought up the fear around missing important things, right? Again, I called, you know, the fires, the urgency, so on and so forth, is I would recommend setting up what I call VIP notifications in both your phone, your inbox, every single different communication software. And what that means is you come up with your VIP list. This is your partner, if you have a boss, your boss's boss, if you're client facing or customer facing, your top 15 clients. Like these are your VIPs. And it's if, for example, these numbers call me or text me, it pushes through the filter. There are no defenses. I need to get that immediately. I have three keywords, by the way, set up in my email inbox. My first name, I'm a little lucky. I have a more rare first name. So if somebody says Sahar, I'm like, okay, you've got, what is it? You know, because otherwise, what's our reality, Stephen? Like we're CC'd on email chains with like seven other people sometimes. And they're just talking to each other. I do not need to get a ping every single time Stacey and Stephen are chatting with each other about something. Like they're solving their own problem. Like I need to focus on leading. I don't need to be get, like you're all figuring this out. And I'm not saying, I do kind of want to be CC'd sometimes. I need to be kept abreast of what's going on, but I don't need to be interrupted. My train of thought doesn't need to be interrupted when I'm finally sitting down to focus.
Speaker 2A lot of people don't want to be rude. And there's so much social pressure to respond quickly, to say yes, to take the meeting, to do the thing, go to the whatever. So the question I was going to ask you is, who is like the most, focused person you've ever met in this regard? And then my sort of sub question was like, I bet they're often seen as rude. Yeah. Or like, I bet they have to develop a muscle against people pleasing. Indeed, yeah. I honestly probably, the first person that came to my mind is, honestly, my husband. Who's a faculty, he's here. No, he's in there, isn't he? Besides to me. You'll get a right to reply.
Speaker 1I'm like, besides to me, he mostly, he's like, his defense is like, his default, his default is no. I have a sense everyone has a default. I'm a default yes person. You know, and he's a default no person. And we run a company together, which by the way, two people at the helm that's default no, default yes, I think makes a really good balance. Because we debate it out. Everything becomes a discussion. I'm like, oh, this, what a great opportunity. We should totally do this. And he's like, this is not the objective. Stay on the objective. I'm like, well, but it's a shiny new object and this thing and blah, blah, blah. And it's like, oh, impact and all of the things. He protects his resources and his most important thing and his most precious resource is his time. His time and his attention. I'll channel him. He'll say, yeah, maybe it's disappointing to some that I did not make it to that meeting. But I think people will find over time that my unique contribution to that meeting would have not been relevant. They were just fine without me. And the fact that I did not attend that meeting allowed me to sit down and finish this and do this thing and come up with this idea, which is helping the entire ecosystem of work.
Speaker 2I sat and interviewed Kevin O'Leary and he said something to me which has stayed with me ever since. But I know it's also stayed with my listeners because they say it back to me out in the world. He talked about his experience working with Steve Jobs and also Elon Musk. And he talked about this concept of signal versus noise. Yes. And he said Steve Jobs had the most remarkable ability to focus on the signal versus the noise. He described it as 80-20. And for anyone that doesn't understand the analogy, signal is like the most important thing I should be doing today. Noise is everything else. He says the thing about Steve Jobs, is it was always like, why are we talking about this? This is the most important thing. And then I saw Johnny Ives being interviewed and Johnny Ives was describing Steve Jobs. And Johnny Ives said, the most remarkable thing about Steve is his focus. And he said, focus isn't doing one thing instead of another. Focus is waking up in the morning and thinking something is a brilliant idea. And with every bone in your body, you know that that thing is brilliant and you want to do it. And you say no to it anyway. He said, Steve was the most remarkably focused person I have ever met. And he would often go up to Johnny Ives and ask him what he had said no to. And Johnny said he would have these sacrificial things that he wasn't remotely interested in in any way. And Steve would know that and push him even harder. Like what have you said no to that with every bone in your body, you knew was a brilliant idea, but you said no to it because we are focused on this. And the last part of that story is Kevin O'Leary said that Elon is the only person he's ever encountered that is more focused than Steve Jobs. Wow. And I, I, I, this is part of the reason why I'm so excited to speak to you because I want to be more like that. I want to get to 80, 20.
Speaker 1So you're well on your way because you've already given me your thumb. I know that's what I'm anxious about. I'm not even kidding that this is the noise. You can either increase the signal
Speaker 3or you can decrease the noise. What do you think is easier?
Speaker 1Decreasing
Speaker 2the
Speaker 1noise. For sure. For sure. For sure. For sure. For sure. As a first step, as a first step, of course.
Speaker 2I think that's actually what they do. And again, I don't know a ton about this, but I actually think that's what they did when they discovered the radio was the job was to reduce the noise. They never mentioned increasing the signal.
Speaker 1Because it's rather difficult. It's possible. It's there. It's there. It literally get the shit out of your life.
Speaker 2We now think that multitasking or context switching is a skill. And we think you mentioned a term earlier on, which I've never heard. It's called mono. Monotasking? You said the brain is a monotasker.
Speaker 1Yeah, it's a monotasking machine.
Speaker 2What did. Prove that to me. This thing here. This is a monotasking machine.
Speaker 1It is. Yes, it is. So this entire system is designed for survival. Human beings are. I always kind of joke and say, we're not quite competitive in the animal kingdom. Like, I mean, I work out, but I can't fight off like an actual predator, you know? Like my nails aren't. My teeth aren't that sharp. It's. We are kind of puny. But where we're not puny is this. So it is in my ability to strategize, think and focus where I can outsmart predators. That's how human beings have survived. That's how we're running the world. Do you know about a third of the human brain? Like I. And I say the cortical real estate. So real estate across this human cortex is dedicated just to looking and listening. That's a lot. Just eavesdropping, loud sounds, anything that might come into view. So we're designed to be hypervigilant to anything that might come in our environment, which, I mean, think of an open office. Think of a typical setup where people are working. Like the example I gave of that executive, literally sitting in a glass box with all the people that he works with walking by constantly and all this noise. And he's trying to find the signal and he's trying to tap into the signal. And I'm like, no. I want our species to keep advancing. And I want us to advance as fast as humanly possible. And I know we can, but all the brilliance of humanity is currently being sucked away by these distractions.
Speaker 2There seems to be, as I was thinking about that, there seems to be two ways that distractions find us. The first is the notification comes to us or the thing pings or whatever, the Apple Watch vibrates. The other is we're in the middle of work and we stumble across something which is a little bit difficult or tricky or a little bit uncomfortable and we go seeking out the distraction. So, you know, we might be in the middle of an essay. It's a little bit tricky. And so we could reach for a WhatsApp and we're chatting in a group chat about the weekend. Is that a true sort of accurate reflection of how humans behave? Yeah. It is. Because I was just thinking about my own behavior. Sometimes, yes, ping. I don't have notifications on. Well, I don't have most notifications on, but I still find myself reaching for the phone every minute.
Speaker 1So the human brain is a, it's a problem solving machine. It's important to keep this in mind. So I'll stack, a few, again, biological laws here that brings us to understanding why we all, all have a tendency towards what I would consider to be avoidance of discomfort. Now, discomfort, let's list out some uncomfortable feelings. Overwhelm, stress, anxiety, confusion. What are some other ones? You feeling a little depressed, a little FOMO, lonely. I think you nailed it. Those are all the ones. Yeah. Anger, frustration. Your brain also, by the way, is your friend. If you don't want to feel them, your brain is you and doesn't want to feel them either. Your brain is designed to help you and problem solve. It goes, well, we're overwhelmed. Fuck this. How do I avoid this? It's going to try to solve the problem. Now, there's two ways to solve what you're overwhelmed about. You could either deal with it head on, which sounds like a heck of a lot of work, or you could avoid it. No? Emotional avoidance. Now, what's the fastest and easiest way in the modern world we can avoid what's going on inside of us?
Speaker 2TikTok, Shake Shack, pornography.
Speaker 1So we immediately go numb. And I think normalizing that is the first step, because what our phones have done for us is created an exit, a very fast, cheap exit to reality.
Speaker 2I know you would have heard about those studies where they put people in a room and give them the opportunity to electrocute themselves. So essentially, the study is people get electrocuted before the study starts, and then they're put in a room on their own with a button that would electrocute them again. They describe, before the study starts, on average, being willing to pay to not be electrocuted again. But once they're put alone with this electrocution button, many people continue to shock themselves over and over again. And in the study, men shock themselves more than women. One particular study, which I think is really interesting, is that there's a study called Electrocute Yourself. And in the study, a particular guy in the study electrocuted himself hundreds of times when left alone and being asked to sit and do nothing. And the conclusion from the study is that we'd rather electrocute ourselves than sit alone in silence these days. And do you know what? It sounds crazy, but in a way, that's kind of what we're doing with our phones. In a way, when my phone dies, and I'm just going to be honest, because I don't think there's any point in me trying to fucking pretend I'm something I'm not. When my phone dies, I, it's like a mild feeling of anxiety when my phone dies. And I'm most certainly addicted to my phone. I spend an unbelievable amount of hours with that thing. I probably pick it up 200 times a day just to check. So we're going to remove the phone when we're doing deep work. We're going to turn off notifications as it relates to the phone. Anything else? Yes.
Speaker 1Okay. There's plenty. I liken what the tech, big tech essentially, what technology has done to really, honestly hijack the brain and make it addicted. I find that it is eerily similar to how the food industry got us addicted to sugar and processed food. My humble belief is that it's the exact same three-part framework and it's the playbook was copied nearly identically. We have obviously a fundamental need to eat. Now, if you look at the food industry, how might we hijack biology and the brain? Yeah, I know, evil fingers. How might we hijack the brain to actually get it addicted to sugar and to processed food if we know there's a fundamental need there? Well, how you do that is you increase the stimulation of the food. And you do that by actually just injecting sugar wherever you can. I'm not sure how it is in the UK, but if you, here in the United States, look on the back label of pretty much any loaf of bread, that you want to buy, and there's sugar in it, I can bake bread. You don't need sugar necessarily to make a loaf of bread, right? It doesn't have to be a sweet loaf. But lo and behold, there it is. So we're injecting all of this sugar and increasing the stimulation of the food, right? And that's how you can get somebody hooked. Now, why would humans be already sort of naturally addicted to sugar? Because food used to be scarce. It's hard to find. So we're naturally going to be inclined to these things that are indicators of jackpots, salt, fat. Sugar. Yummy, yummy, yummy. It's how you make food really delicious, right? And we're all naturally inclined to desire those things and covet those things and be really, really stimulated by them. So what you do is you inject those yummy, yummy things. So you're increasing the stimulation of your food. Oh, it's so amazing. Then you decrease the friction. Let's make it easier for people to get this stuff. You make everything adorably packaged and portioned out, and you make it easy and easy fast, like fast food. Fast, easily accessible, and available all of the time. So you're decreasing the friction. You no longer need to eat a lot of food. You can eat a lot of food. You don't need to make yourself something. You don't need to make a meal. We have fast food. It's right there, right available. Open up a bar. Good to go. Then you decrease the satiation. You decrease the satiation by removing the parts of food that make food satiating. Because remember, this is a fundamental need. I'm hungry. I want to eat something.
Speaker 2Satiating being full.
Speaker 1Being full. Yes. My body needs things that would make me full. And what makes us full in food?
Speaker 3Protein. Fiber. Candy. Nope. There's no protein. There's no fiber. So the food industry has figured this out. Technology has done the same thing.
Speaker 1They've done the exact same thing. They followed the exact same playbook. They increased the stimulation by increasing this color saturation of the icons and the light that's emitted from the screen so that your actual technology looks more visually stimulating. And that visual stimulation, as we were talking about before, huge part of your cortex is your visual cortex, your occipital cortex. And that's what we're talking about. Your occipital cortex, your occipital lobe. So it's super, super stimulated by all of that color saturation. So it's like, oh my gosh, think of like a casino. You've never been to a casino and you're like, oh, they've went with neutrals. You know what I mean? It's all the colors all the time, all the lights. It's all the things. So it's stimulating and you keep looking at it. The other way that we've increased the stimulation with technology is short form reels. Short form content. Super, super fast TikTok style so that it's uber stimulating and you can't look away. And by the way, there's an entire field, intermittent variable rewards. You get these jackpots once in a while, right? What's fascinating about the algorithm, by the way, and your algorithm, I'm sure, is exactly the same. Your algorithm knows you really, really well. And it knows what content you're going to love that day. So it's got all this like saved up content for you. So it's got like, oh, Stephen's going to love this. Oh, he's really going to love this because he even liked this thing like a week ago, like something like this. Okay. And it's got this treasure trove of stuff that it's holding for you. You get on to one of these apps and you start scrolling. It's not going to show you the stuff it knows you're going to love. Not in the beginning. That's bad business, don't you think? You just came into the store. You have all the energy in the world. You obviously have nothing better to do. So you've now sat down. And in the beginning, I can show you meh content. I can just show you like, in the beginning, because I have your attention and it knows how long it has your attention. Every person is a little bit different. So it knows how long it can just serve you up medium to like low entertaining content and interesting content before you say to yourself, I'm done. This is boring. I'm going to get off and I'm going to go do something else. It knows the moment you're about to do that. And right before you do that, hits you with a jackpot.
Speaker 2I'm going to see a clip like that. Exactly. It's like, there he is. It's that Bartlett again. And I can't look away. People are watching this reel, right? Right now. And they're thinking this was the one I was just about to bounce. This is the one. You love this, right? You love this. But there's science behind this. I remember being 16 years old in psychology class and reading about the pigeons and variable rewards. What is this? What is this variable rewards phenomenon?
Speaker 1Oh my gosh. It's so humans are fascinating. I find humans to be the coolest thing in the known universe. We're so ridiculous. Human beings, believe it or not, do not love consistent reward. We become more addicted when it's in fact intermittent and somewhat variable.
Speaker 2So when we don't know when it's coming, but we know it's coming.
Speaker 1Yeah. This is, I have a whole theory on like people who are in toxic relationships. Like seriously, think about like love bombing. This is the science of love bombing. Like I'm an asshole. I'm an asshole. I'm like ghosting you. And then bam. Oh, I hit you with a bunch of love and people like, oh my. And then they become addicted to these toxic fucking relationships. Similar concepts. So the algorithm works exactly the same way. If it showed you every single thing that you wanted to see, by the way, only diary of a CEO clips. That's it. The whole feed for like five hours straight. It's just like, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Believe it or not, you'd be less likely to get addicted. We're addicted to like the, you know, just mess with me. I don't know when the good stuff's coming. I don't know when it's coming. This is how casinos work. This is how slot machines work. You lose. Dude, you know that slot machines are programmed. It's a computer program. It's all math. They want you to lose a bunch of money, be in the red and then have you make up a dollar 50 and then be like, oh, I'm back in. And this is the, this is the game. This is the human game. So the algorithm works exactly the same. That's how they increase the stimulation. So then they also decreased the friction, just like food. Here you have the infinite scroll. We've literally removed the backstops. Do you remember the early days of like YouTube and Instagram? You would to like, you, you only, by the way, saw the things that you followed that you subscribe to by the way, subscribe. But like, this is the point. is actually the subscription model allows you to curate your feed a little bit more and say, this is what I want to see, not the rest of this bullshit, right? And so the algorithm will just be like this, this, how about this? How about this other thing? It's just getting you to shop around. But most importantly, it's we've removed the backstop. Now we have something called the infinite scroll. And the infinite scroll is like going to a buffet and just opening your mouth. And there's just an assembly line of food and candy just going straight in, right? There's no backstop. It's just keeps going.
Speaker 2It used to be pagination. It used to be like page one, page two, page three. Totally. In the early internet. Now it's just infinite.
Speaker 1There's no end. You're not going to reach the end of TikTok. It's not going to happen. I don't know if you remember this or if people remember this, there was an end. I remember when Instagram first came out, you would literally like run out of things to see and then just be like, that's it. That's all for today. Come back tomorrow for maybe your friend posted another picture of their sandwich. You'd reach the end. There's no longer an end. So that's decreasing the friction. There's no friction anymore. It's just the never ending scroll. Then they also decrease the satiation. This is extremely important, Stephen, going back to that fundamental need for human connection. We have a fundamental need, like the same need we have for food to be connected to one another, to be social, to feel a sense of belonging. What a social media has done is it's created the illusion of social connection. Because we have the data, we have the information, we have the data to support the longer you spend on these apps and on these platforms, the lonelier you are. So you're lonely. I'm disconnected. I'm at home. I have a sense of loneliness and FOMO and I'm seeking connection. I want to go meet this need. I have this fundamental need for connection and belonging and I want to then go meet this need. So what do I do? Well, the fastest, cheapest and easiest way to do that is grab my phone. You get on and you think that you're meeting that need. It's like candy. Let's say you're hungry for dinner. Your body is craving things that actually make you full, nutrients that you need. But the thing is, if I gave you a bag of Skittles or something, then you might be thinking, well, Sahar, it's calories. Aren't calories calories? It's food, right? It tastes good. It's calories. And it's going to meet that need. I'm hungry. It's going to meet that need. Well, darling, what's going to happen when you eat candy when you're hungry? I'm sure you've done this before. At least I've done it. And if you say no, then you're the healthiest human and I must study you. Of course I have.
Speaker 2But I want to eat more Skittles later.
Speaker 1Okay, there we go.
Speaker 2Problem. If I have these junk calories, then in six hours time, I'm back looking for more junk calories. Exactly.
Speaker 1Shoots up, then everything crashes down. Another law of biology, what goes up must come down. So what does this look like when we're scrolling? I seek a sense of belonging. I'm seeking also, by the way, stimulation. We have a fundamental need for novelty and learning, which by the way, I think is it podcasts do this beautifully. Think about the difference between some 30 second reel that someone has made, and then they inject like two quick facts versus sitting down and actually sinking into a multi hour show. You're attracted to both. One is a lot harder to sit through than the other. But what I'm telling you is this is what's actually going to satiate you. You have, we all do, have a natural fundamental need for learning and novelty. Because again, survival. Because this new piece of information might be a huge unlock for me to thrive even more in this world. This is a huge unlock for me to thrive even more in this world. This is a huge unlock This is the hijack of social media and short form content is you think you're getting that. But I promise you, just like with the Skittles, you end up getting off and you don't remember anything that you by the way, you just watched. Test it. Seriously, I'm not kidding. Do this quick short form for a while. And in the moment, you're like, Oh my gosh, I just learned a fun fact about this. And this is you think you're learning. It's an illusion. What I believe we're at, by the way, Stephen up for right now, is I think the world is waking up. To this now. And this is going to be the new big reverse Uno, as I call it. They use neuroscience to get us hooked. And I think we can use reverse neuroscience to reverse this entire thing. If they increase the stimulation, as we talked about before, you reduce it. And the ways in which you reduce the stimulation. One, if you keep your phone in gray. So literally going into something like grayscale makes the phone less neurologically stimulating. So it's a heck of a lot easier. For you to actually get off your phone. You do this in settings. And again, this is, by the way, a beautiful example of the default settings are not here to help you. The default settings are here to help them make money off of your attention and your time. So you are better than the default settings, Stephen. Everyone who's listening, you are better than the default settings. Push back against the default settings and put your phone in gray. When you do that, your phone is immediately it looks dead to you. It's way easier to not go from app to app to app to app. And then do that thing where we mindlessly scroll, especially late at night when our willpower is low. And then you're like, I'm just going to check for a second, just for a second. And then you find yourself just gorging essentially on this and binging on content.
Speaker 2Have they ever tested that engagement with devices when they are in grayscale or in a different color saturation? Or is it just generally what the neuroscience points to?
Speaker 1I've tested it. So in my lab, we took a large sample of healthy working professionals. And all I did was turn their phones into gray and ask them to stay in gray for three weeks. That's it. And we saw, on average, people spent one hour less on their phones every single day. Wow. That's seven hours a week. The way I always talk about, that's the difference between you getting that workout in.
Speaker 2Yeah, that's crazy. Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 1It's crazy. When you go around and you talk to these busy people, they're like, oh, yeah, I'm trying to do this. I want to read that book. I want to listen to your podcast even, but I just don't have the time. Well, darling, just making this one tiny change will give you an hour back a day. Think about what you could do with that time. Yeah. Next is choosing long form over short form.
Speaker 2Thank you. Did you hear that? She's from Berkeley. That's an amazing university. She's a doctor. No, it's true, though. She also said subscribe if you didn't. If you didn't catch that.
Speaker 1No, but honestly, it's true. It's really, it's not like made up. Short form content has even been shown, by the way, in some cases to increase attention span.
Speaker 2Completely agree. Of course you do.
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah. It's like no one's paying me to say this. But no, long form content, like a film, like a good film has been shown to increase empathy in young people. Just think about that. So, like, again, the message is not, oh, my God, technology is bad. All screen time is evil. No, no, no, no, no. I'm a huge fan of your content diet. Like, make sure, like, whatever. If you want to sit down and watch a movie, sit down and watch a movie. Like, get into your pajamas. Make a bowl of popcorn. Like, romanticize it. Turn the lights down. You'll put Netflix on. Everyone's also got the phone out. So they're doing two things at once. This has just become, like, we've accepted this, apparently, that you no longer have people's undivided attention. So the way in which we're making content now is assuming that someone is looking at something else as well. This is so sad. And please tell me how, if this is how bad our attention spans have gotten, how are, first of all, kids supposed to learn in school? You told me that you have this interest in becoming a teacher. You told me that you have this interest in becoming superhuman, to experiencing the full potential of your own mind. How are you supposed to do that if you can't even pay attention to a fucking movie anymore?
Speaker 2Do you know what's funny? I was watching, um, I was watching a complicated old movie last night. Complicated? It's one of those ones where if you miss a word, the next three hours is, you're lost. Oh, yeah. Because they're gonna, they've named a planet Cololubulublu. And if you don't understand what Cololubulublu is, you're fucked. And I was like, I was. I was having to pay so much attention to this movie. And I remember this from my childhood. I used to just sit there on the sofa with my family and just look at the screen. But it was like I was resisting an urge now in 2026 when watching this very complicated old movie, as if there's now a mismatch between the media that I'm used to versus the way that I and many of us live our lives. And it's just, it was just super front of mind because I just remember trying to like the, the effort I was putting in to, to stay focused on this movie last night. I've been trying to make sure I understood every single word, but I never did that when I was younger. You would just sit there and watch.
Speaker 1You'd just sit there and watch.
Speaker 2There might be some people at some level thinking, yeah, but I love short form.
Speaker 1It's a heart.
Speaker 2I love it.
Speaker 1I love candy too. If we have too much short form, we already know this. You're more depressed. You're more anxious. Your attention span is shot. Like, why would you want that? You literally feel shittier and your brain operates at a lower level, cognitively speaking, if you overconsume this stuff. And it's your choice, by the way. I'm not here to tell people how to live their lives, but I want people to wake up to realize, one, the fundamental needs are there. So my goal is for you to meet those needs. And the way that you do that to increase the satiation is you actually go learn something new. You actually spend time IRL in real life with real human beings. Hold people. Touch people. Talk to people. Have dinner. Have parties. Have conversations. Hang out with your friends, your family. Actually meet that fundamental need for social connection. And if you do that, you will notice that you're full and you will magically actually like short form less. You are far less likely to lose yourself scrolling until 2 o'clock in the morning and then feeling like shit the next day because you didn't get enough sleep.
Speaker 2I think that feeling like shit the next day is a good way to navigate life, which I heard Jack Dorsey back in a couple of years ago. When he was still at Twitter, talk about one of them new metrics was reducing regrettable minutes and this idea of like regrettable minutes, I think is. Because with Skittles, honestly, they would feel good in a moment, but I'd probably regret if I had a massive bag of Skittles. Probably regret it in a couple of hours, probably the next day, because, you know, it sends you on a bit of a roller coaster. And with platforms like TikTok, when you look at the data, they found that 60% of active TikTok users experience negative welfare and would rather live in a world where it didn't exist, where the platform didn't exist. It ranks as number one in terms of regret in this regard, because people report that their time was distorted. They opened the app and lost an hour or two hours and they walk away from it without clarity on what they gained. So this idea of regret, like, OK, Skittles tastes nice. It was cool to scroll for a second. But how did I feel thereafter is something that I guess in the food analogy is pertinent.
Speaker 1Yeah, I'm telling you, we're waking up.
Speaker 2People. People are waking up. Young people are waking up.
Speaker 1That's the that's the coolest thing.
Speaker 2I saw the graphs from the Financial Times, which showed time spent online had started to plateau since 2022 for young people first.
Speaker 1Thank God. I mean, but listen, it's still a push. Yeah. So the stats are less than half of graduating high school seniors have ever been on a date compared to what was, I believe, something like 80 or 90 percent. In every. I would say our generation gets crazy. That's crazy. I think something like what is it? A third of UK nightclubs are also now like engagement in the nightclub scene has gone down to a third dinner parties. There's this recent piece in The Atlantic that just came out about this sort of the death of dinner parties. So people are spending increasingly more time alone. And not with others. So they're hungry. Unfortunately, these platforms are taking advantage of that perpetual hunger. And keeping us locked into the cycle of distraction. And now, by the way, it's socially appropriate for us to always hold our phones. It's always in our pocket. So one of the best things that you can do is actually to it is to introduce portion control back into how you are consuming content portion control. So you increase the friction. You do things like that phone parking lot bit, like put your phone out of sight, out of mind, turn the notifications off. Turning the notifications off would be decreasing. The stimulation, but increasing the friction is. Listen, if I'm telling you this stuff is addictive and you want to do less of it, don't have it right there. That's like it's like it's like sitting down with someone who is freshly trying to become sober as an alcoholic and just be like, you don't mind if I just put this beer down in front of you. Do I or do you just as you're working and going about your day?
Speaker 2I think the skills analogy is pretty good. Like I wouldn't walk around with skills in my pocket because if I did, I'd eat them every time I was stressed. Yeah. I'm bored.
Speaker 1Totally. So this process is what I advocate. I think every young person in the entire world should learn this and know this. I speak mostly to older adults or parents, and they're tired of being bad cop at home. They're constantly like, oh, get off your phone, get off this, get off that. So I think this ought to be taught in schools.
Speaker 2This has had probably the single biggest impact on my office of all the products that I've tried that I've given. Given me productivity gains or cognitive boosts. I would say that exogenous ketones are in the top three most pivotal things that have given me a massive productivity gain. It's some Stanford graduates that have been able to basically bottle up the effect you get from being in a ketogenic diet in a small shot that you can take that makes you feel incredibly focused and gives your brain an incredible source of energy. And the clinical studies that have been done on exogenous ketones have absolutely blown my mind. I reached out to them. I became a ketone. I'm a co-owner in the company. I became an investor in the company. And so it's with great pride that I can tell you that this exists. If you haven't tried these shots, go to ketone.com slash Stephen for 30% off your subscription order. And you'll also get a free gift with your second shipment. I still buy my ketone shots predominantly online. But thankfully, I can now grab them at Target whenever I drive past them here in the United States as well, because we're now stocked in Target, where your first shot is completely free. When I talk to new founders, they all carry the same belief that the biggest threat to their small business. is having a bad product. It's not. The biggest threat they face is hiring the wrong person for their small team, because bad hires put the handbrake on growth and rapidly infect company culture. And I get it. When you're starting out, you need A players to grow your company, but you don't have 40 spare hours to spend sifting through interviews. So you hire fast to fill the seat. But this ends up costing you even more in the long term. What any small business actually needs is a reliable and efficient way to find the right talent without stalling momentum. That's where our long-term sponsor, LinkedIn, and LinkedIn Hiring, can help you. It streamlines the entire hiring process from drafting a job description to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Nearly 60% of hirers who've used this tool have found a candidate to interview within a week. Hire right the first time around. And get started by posting your first job for free at linkedin.com slash DOAC. That's linkedin.com slash DOAC. Terms and conditions apply. What I really want, quite selfishly, is advice on how to do deep work. Because deep work is something that, I mean, all of my team have to do deep work. They have to edit, code, could be right. We're doing a lot more writing than ever before, in part because of AI. So we're trying to push against that. But in a world that is so distracted where my phone is there, what advice would you give me for doing deep work predictably well?
Speaker 1What we call in our lab and in our work, deep work is a focus sprint. Now, a focus sprint is a method of working. It's a method of working that, according to research, our research, has allowed people to do up to two times as much as they would otherwise do, while also reducing the number of mistakes. And you feel better. Because, again, you're working in line with your brain and your body. You don't have that sense of friction where it's like, oh my gosh, I'm exhausted, you know, after doing one of these sprints, right? It feels good to do that kind of deep work. So a focus sprint is a method.
Speaker 2First step. How many steps are there in a focus sprint? Five. There are five steps? So these five steps will make me 200%? 100% more productive.
Speaker 1First, set aside time in your calendar in advance to block the time off. You benefit from essentially anticipatory networks in the brain and body. So if you know, for example, that you have a speech that you need to give, a presentation, what's the feeling that you get before, like some big event or a big speech that you need to give, like some butterflies? You get this, like, increase in cortisol and adrenaline, right? I mean, think about how interesting, amazing our biology is. I am sitting at rest. And even though I am sitting at rest, because I am anticipating that I'm about to get up and maybe do some public speaking, my brain is going to help me by giving me an extra boost in cortisol and adrenaline and all these amazing things so that I'm a little bit more focused and high energy and I can deal with the thing. It's a bit of a stressor. So, you know, especially if someone has a fear of public speaking, they might be sitting there and they're like, you know, heart rate goes up, their hands start to get clammy. Those are all the markers. Those are all the markers of physiological arousal, as we know them to be. So we know that if you can, you know, a focus sprint is coming, you're going to get a little boost. So I'm a huge fan of set it up, know it's coming. Like, I'm going to sit down and I'm going to do a one-hour focus sprint, okay? The other beautiful thing about this from a team perspective is if your team can see your calendar, they can all see that you're sitting down to do a focus sprint because your calendar is public. So it also deals a little bit with that social guilt people feel and that feeling that they need to stay, I need to be responsive to all the things. And now that you've done that, you're going to be able to do a focus sprint. And now that you've done that, you go to step two, which is you've got to identify what the heck you're going to do, and you need to define it. You need to break it down in clear, simple terms. So instead of saying I'm going to sit down and I'm going to work on X, unless you're going to finish X, that's not going to feel good. This has everything to do with dopamine, by the way. Dopamine is the brain's primary, consider it a motivation molecule. So it's going to get us not only excited and motivated to do a task, but it's also going to reward us a bit if we really, do more than we even expected, especially. Which brings me to a few pieces of advice. One, you've got your massive to-do list, yes? You're going to shop from that to-do list. And you're going to say, in this focus sprint, I'm going to take out this one piece. This one. So you have your massive to-do list, and you're like, that's the one thing I'm going to focus on, right? Just this one. And then you're going to take that one, and then you're going to break it down into small, manageable pieces. You're going to break it down. And you're going to time block every piece. You're going to say, instead of saying, oh, I'm going to work on this deck, I'm not going to finish it. But I'm going to work on it. You're going to say, I'm going to work on slide three for about, I think it'll take me about seven minutes to finish that slide. Then I actually need to probably send a follow-up email to John for the data that I need for slide 17. Then I'm going to work on this table that I want to put here. And then blah, blah, blah. I want to see in granular detail what the execution list is. And this, by the way, increases your dopamine for getting this work done. If you're not going to finish it, how is that motivating?
Speaker 2So the goal becomes an output, not the emotion. A hundred percent. Okay, that's an interesting one. Because I think a lot of us do create a goal, which is an input. Like, I'm going to work on this thing, or I'm going to think about this, or I'm going to strategize this. Not like the output, which is the thing that's going to be measurable and come out of this work. Yeah. Okay, that's really interesting.
Speaker 1It's the outcome with a breakdown. Like, I want to see an execution list.
Speaker 2That feels like a lot of work.
Speaker 1I'm not kidding. Give me a minute and a half. Here's the problem. When people start something, and I'm sure you've experienced this too, then the moment they get done with, let's say, step one, step 1b and they don't immediately know what step 1c is or what step 2 is and it's not clearly outlined and it's not just hey execution mode like a machine they go what's the next step what should i do next people that's when you lose people that's when you lose your focus in in deciding what the next step is this is a sprint i don't want you to figure out how to play the game when you're in the middle of the game we need to outline what the heck the game is and then you're going to go into it be like let's go sprint and we go go go go go so you block the time you've communicated to the people on your team they know what's happening you're benefiting from all those amazing hormones and those anticipatory networks then step two step two you set the goal and the
Speaker 2goal is an output and it's specific and it's broken down into sub
Speaker 1goals yes and by the way you've got in here a diary so if you've got a daily planner of sorts something like this i want you to treat your to-do list your massive task list i know you've got one we all have one like your refrigerator do you have urgent items on your to-do list like what is the thing did you defrost chicken because that's a ticking time bomb that needs to get used so every single day you wake up in the morning and you're about to choose what are my i call these by the way in our lab mit's your most important tasks your mit's or your most important tasks are the one two maximum three things on any given day and you're going to have to figure out how to do that and you're going to have to figure out how to do that that you would want to accomplish if you want your day to be a success so we've
Speaker 2got a little chart there i think of the mit's
Speaker 1right yeah every single day i want you to in a way open up the refrigerator open up the pantry open up the freezer and i want you to ask yourself first first how much time do i have available
Speaker 2today three hours
Speaker 1that's a good day
Speaker 2that's a good
Speaker 1day like uninterrupted focus time not
Speaker 2uninterrupted but i can make it uninterrupted
Speaker 1beautiful we'll take it three hours is beautiful yeah now you open up the fridge the pantry and the freezer and you ask yourself with this three hours what are my mit's what are the most important tasks that if i were to do them today would make my day a success another phrasing for this that we've done research on is what will your future self thank you
Speaker 2for it's an interesting question because we often reach for the easiest things and there's the thing that we're not quite ready to do yet because we don't have the information and we're and you know maybe it's a little bit out of our era of competence we don't like finance we don't like invest we don't like operations so we avoid that and we kind of you know it's like opening the fridge as you say and we reach for the thing that we know we love like
Speaker 1and we do that those are lits lits like an email a docu sign right um i always say like toilet paper from amazon or something like whatever like the little tiny things that will take five minutes a couple minutes but it makes me feel like i can cross something off and it's like i've done the thing i've done the thing i've done the thing these are the easy things to do that make me feel a sense of progress we consider these by the way these lits fast dopamine and my humble opinion is most of the the things that push our businesses forward the things that push our lives forward are typically here to the right they're the slow dopamine bits and i'm not suggesting by the way that you don't do lits my suggestion is you identify one two or a maximum of three mit's that are actually going to push you towards your goals your long-term goals of things that actually matter and i assure you the lits will fill in all of the other nooks and crannies for your day like if you've got an uninterrupted hour that's when you attack one of these mit's and then if you've got 15 minutes between some meetings and calls you shove the lits in there
Speaker 2so mit's are most important goals lits are least important goals
Speaker 1okay so going back to the focus sprint when we said step two is set the goal what you would ideally do and this is by the way you could do one of two different kinds of sprints you could do a sprint on one mit and what you would do is you take that mit and then you would actually break it down into small manageable chunks okay okay in order for me to do that big mit today in this one hour of time i'm going to spend 20 minutes on this 15 minutes on this five minutes on this three minutes on this so you make an execution list or you could do an lit sprint you could do like 15 lits are
Speaker 2we assuming that people will know what the mit is like yeah you i look at this list of 69 things on my to-do list how do i is there a way for me to know which one is the most
Speaker 1important if you don't know then i would that would urge us to take an even further step back and sort of do a bit of awareness training on what your long-term goals are where do you want to be both personally and professionally let's say in five years what
Speaker 2is your everest what
Speaker 1is your everest if you have a sense of what your everest is you then ought to have a sense of what your next step is if everest is that way you're not going to go this way that way is also quite dangerous and i will say this this is um i'm a huge fan of talking about death because i find that it puts everything into perspective my humble opinion is that the best framing is to really think about yourself on your deathbed is if you take yourself onto your deathbed and you think to yourself and truly by the way you can visualize this right now even with me let's say you're the tender age of 110 with all of the modern technology and longevity medicine that's going to come out what looking back on your life
Speaker 3do you need to have experienced accomplished done in order for you to leave with a smile on your face and to just say it's been real i did good i had an amazing life i did what i wanted to do here and i'm ready to go see what's next what's your answer to that i want to have loved deeply i want to and this is my own
Speaker 1and i don't know where this comes from we probably need a therapist i'm on with us to unpack this one but i'm a firm believer in servant leadership i think i've been put on the planet to to help in whatever ways that i can so my job is to serve and to make this world a better place in the with what i do and what i can bring to the table and that's my obsession and it's come at a great cost of not doing a lot of other things and not having a lot of what maybe other people see as fun or um personal sacrifices but it seems to be uh the the flavor of my mind is that i'm squarely focused on building better systems for humanity it was very um it
Speaker 2was very clarifying when you asked me to do that as well because when i closed my eyes and started thinking about my deathbed i was in a room and what i noticed was first and foremost who was there that was like the first thing and then my second thing was what do they think of me so there was like so i imagined my romantic interest being here and then i imagined all of my kids being around the bed and i imagined what they thought of their dying father and there was really like three things that i wanted them to think i wanted them to to think that i achieved things that they can too and to be evidence of that um the second one was around that i'd made the world a better place so they'd like they were clear on the philanthropic impact that their father had had yeah so that was really clarifying because it basically gave me three clear priorities which are like family and having a big family um being a good role model to them and then them having evidence that me being here was net positive to planet you know so that but it was really clarifying because of all there's really three things that matter so
Speaker 1that gives you your direction yeah
Speaker 2it does so if you wake up every
Speaker 1single morning now with that level of clarity i can
Speaker 2go the skittles are not going to bring me
Speaker 1closer fuck the skittles yeah like what is that like in what way like who on their deathbed is sitting around and going damn i wished i watched more netflix netflix please don't come after me who's sitting around going damn i wish i spent more time scrolling and less time with my kids or less time on my mission on my obsessive mission like nobody um brawny ware is a hospice nurse and she sat with many many dying individuals what an honor to do such a thing um something that i hope to do um in my lifetime as to sort of be you know exercise my death doula skills and to be with folks who are who are passing on and um what an honor it is to sit with them because oh boy you get some clarity so she asked these people
Speaker 3what are your regrets and she would keep a log of the answers they gave and the number one regret across
Speaker 1all of the people that she asked this question to who were dying was i wish i lived a life more true to myself cared less about what others thought so for you steven it sounds like all that matters to you at the end of the day is what your family thought of your accomplishments and how you spent your time is how you think and it's by the way it's not even them because you'll never really know what the other person thinks so i wish i lived a life more true to myself and i wish i lived a life more true to myself we come into this world alone and we do die alone no matter how much we love each other this is uh one of the paradoxes i find of love and humanity in connection is that from that first cry that a newborn screams out when they're born they're crying out for connection they're scared and they're saying wait i feel disconnection in this moment i was connected before and now i feel disconnected and they're seeking connection i think humans we are seeking this connection and this belonging for the rest of our lives but the paradox of it the mindfuck of it if i may is we'll never get it we die alone like i will never understand your mind this is the fascinating thing about consciousness you have your consciousness i have mine and even moment to moment my consciousness now in this moment is different than it was the last moment i've changed things continue to change and evolve the same moment never repeats itself which means the same self never repeats itself every second that's going by i am in fact sahar v 100 million and then the next moment it's another and the next moment is another like we continue to be dynamic but that's its own little rabbit hole
Speaker 2but on that own little rabbit hole there's moments i completely agree and accept what you're saying there are these moments when you just feel like your consciousness has is doing the tango with someone else's it is intertwined and you can we as i say everyone can think of those moments when someone and you go i don't know what it is but at some deep level me and this person are with our consciousness is dancing yeah it's connected and that's a very real thing i experienced it a lot on this podcast because you know i sit here with someone for three hours talk about their childhood trauma whatever you feel a deep deep sense of connection to this other human being sometimes it's almost it can be a spiritual experience in a weird but enjoyable way i think you hit the nail
Speaker 1on the head there i think it's spiritual i think it's energetic i think when we feel that experience of what by the way feels like flow i don't know if it feels that way to you but you feel in flow with the other like if you and i can connect in that plane and i felt it by the way even when we were just doing that that bit about the deathbed and talking about consciousness and i felt you your eyes just all of a sudden zoomed in and i even was i wasn't really focused on you necessarily in that moment there was something about me expressing i think what is necessary for two humans to have that flow together that energetic dance together is a loss of the sense of self i think the self must die in those moments and it does when we completely lose ourselves in this we i think when we are stuck in our own self and identity then i am aware of another i am aware of your perception of me and you will be aware of my perception of you but i think those moments where it feels just magic and we've completely blended that i'm not no longer thinking about you as an other and i as i i
Speaker 3and you have become this energetic we
Speaker 2but again that bit more
Speaker 3spiritual no but it
Speaker 2perfectly dovetails into work because we can all think of flow states where we dropped into work and three hours passed and we were like oh we had no idea that time was passing we were so in and it to some degree feels the same as those moments like when i'm really into my work i just time does stop and i'm so glad it did i didn't even notice time was a thing and that's actually the same as being a podcast when you have really great conversations you walk out and you go what four hours what the fuck happened like so okay so you've
Speaker 1set your goal you have your execution list you've taken your mit you've broken it down you've made it as easy and simple as like a list of lits another way by the way to describe this is an mit slow dopamine is like a rat going through a maze and there's a big hunk of cheese at the end of the maze but that's a lot of work that is a long arduous journey to get to that hunk of cheese whereas fast dopamine and lits are like little bits of cheese that you're like can you just eat that crumb and it's like sure that seems easy enough eat right there right so the goal is to make your mit's as easy as your a list of lits and how you do it and i think that's a really good way to do that is you take that big hunk of cheese and you sprinkle it throughout the maze so you make your big everest seem like a series of one step to the next step to the next step lao tzu said it best a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step uh my husband just um climbed uh mount kilimanjaro oh wow um yeah amazing things that i would do not choose to do
Speaker 2you said no to that i said no
Speaker 1to that that's exactly there is i don't know how to say no it's typically with really difficult physical feats um i have my own but i prefer the mental ones but uh but yeah he went he climbed mount kilimanjaro and when he came back he said that the the mantra of these amazing um sherpas that take you up and down that come with you by the way they're superhuman like literally running up and down this mountain even with all of the elevation as if it's nothing it's like drinking water them it's amazing and carrying a bunch of amazing magic magic but he came back and he said what really stuck with him and it's become a thing that we say to each other sometimes and all of these amazing guides would keep telling everybody hey slowly slowly slowly slowly slowly it's the only way up to the top if all you focus on is the everest you will not get there if you don't focus on taking the step every day a little closer a little closer a little closer you speak to olympic athletes they do the exact same thing that's what
Speaker 2i was thinking of i was thinking of seeing who was sir david brailsford who's the guy quoted in the first chapter of atomic habits of turning the british cycling team around marginal gains beautiful he's a good friend of mine on and off camera and everyone knows about the marginal gains idea focus on the smallest things he said to me on air he said um he banned his team from thinking about the podium which is very much what you're saying as well and he really got them focused on like today's work so this phrase emerged that i say to my team i've said it three times this week pedals over podiums and what that means is like really focus on the pedals today because the he said that when he had christopher hoy you know again that he took the british cycling team from being down and out to the greatest of all time when christopher hoy was thinking about the the world record or the podium whatever his time would get worse and when he got christopher hoy if he got him to sort of drop into a meditative state and ban him thinking about that not only would his time get better around the velodrome but christopher hoy would get off the bike and and say he couldn't remember the cycle which i think is this flow state and the it is another remarkable thing that he said to me off camera was he went steven when we started focusing on the small things and broke goals down into really really small goals people stopped leaving at 5 p.m and started staying till 1 a.m in the morning because we felt like we were going somewhere and this this is what i referred to as from that conversation as the progress principle which is like the feeling of progress yes and there's this incredible um harvard business review study where they ask people what their favorite day in work was and it was when they had a small feeling of progress so it really resonated with me when you said turn the like mit's into these lits because the reason i like the lits is because i get the progress principle yes i get they're like oh i'm making i feel like i am going somewhere yes the mit's it's hard to get that feeling unless you do what you just said which is breaking
Speaker 1them down yeah which brings us to step three beautifully a way to increase the signal or to get to x whatever it may be is to remove obstacles as opposed to adding remove the obstacles turn down the fucking noise and you turn down the noise by cutting distractions so you now you've got your everest pole pole you know the next step pole
Speaker 2pole i love that phrase slowly
Speaker 1slowly the next step and it's the same thing it's the pedal not the podium cut out the distractions hygiene hygiene hygiene so phone out of sight out of mind notifications off if you're in a noisy environment or if you benefit from listening to music then you put on headphones what
Speaker 2is your opinion on listening to music to do work and putting headphones on what does the science
Speaker 1say people are different of course so some people seem to be distracted by it and they prefer silence and if you don't if you cannot be in a silent environment you may benefit from noise canceling right i don't recommend listening to noise canceling or having noise canceling headphones on for more than three four hours a day it's not a good idea to have headphones on for more than three four hours a day it's not a good idea of the world around you because it changes your baseline of what the world ought to sound like and your brain starts to adjust and it starts to think wow this is the world you can hear a pin drop no darling the world is much noisier than that so then the moment you don't have the noise canceling on you become you're like oh my god and you start you start getting anxious and you start becoming overstimulated and also your auditory system starts to actually adapt to the noise canceling so noise canceling i would say use it for focus sprints only so if you told me you got three hours of noise canceling on you you're like oh my god you're like oh my god you're like oh my god you're like oh my god you're like oh my god you're like oh my god you're like oh my god that hits your three hours so you can use the noise canceling only for when maybe you want to do focus sprints if you benefit from the silence if you're gonna listen to music ideally music with no lyrics at all or lyrics in a language that you don't understand you can also benefit from having one particular playlist that you invest in that your brain will over time if you invest in it slowly associate with focus so you can have like a focus mode playlist you can have an email sprint you know playlist and then very very different from what you might listen to to wind down after work or to sleep you should have different playlists for different brain states okay so you've set yourself up in that way
Speaker 3for success then set a timer set a timer human beings and
Speaker 1fun fact most mammals are highly influenced by what are called markers of progress which means if we see time ticking by we will just work faster do you
Speaker 2mean is it time ticking down or time ticking up so is it going from 60 minutes down or is it going from 0 to 60 we're keenly
Speaker 1interested in any sense of progress so progress bars okay yeah um having said that where i find from a productivity standpoint you will get a lot of interesting benefit is like just to hustle and to stay focused is seeing the time ticking down using a very childlike example of cleanup songs little kids are highly distractible creatures now if you ask them to they've like strewn about all of their toys let's say in a classroom and you ask them to put their toys away like put all the toys in the in the bins and and clean up they're gonna by the third thing they pick up but guess best of luck right they're they're off they're looking at something else and they've they're distracted and playing here comes the science of cleanup songs you teach all these kids and this is true by the way across the world when when they're little teachers will teach them to have a cleanup song in class now there is a clear beginning and a clear end to what they're trying to do and it keeps them focused it keeps them on task and they know the song is going to end and because the time is ticking by and the song is going to end they all of a sudden start getting very goal oriented and focused and they start putting the toys away especially near the end of the
Speaker 2song at parkinson's
Speaker 1law parkinson's law states that work will expand to fit the time that you give it so if you give yourself an hour to get the damn deck done it'll probably take an hour if you give yourself five it'll take five yeah so if you give yourself an hour to get the So time yourself. By the way, time yourself with everything. You need to clean your house. You have some errands to run. Time yourself. You will just work faster.
Speaker 2This idea got stuck in my head about five years ago. So I'd like to stick it in some other people's heads. Okay. I read this thing and it said, the center point of your influence on this planet is the allocation of your time. And I really tried to like interrogate that. I was like, is that really it? Is like the game of my life really first and foremost, how I allocate my time? Of course, then it's like, well, you know, how will I show up or the things I allocate it to? But at the essence here, everything I described on my deathbed, having great relationships with my fiance, having great relationships with my family, achievement, the fact, the age that I get to the deathbed, my health, all of it really is, you know, downstream from the allocation of my time. What do I put my time on? Going to the gym? Or do I put it on something else? And I just think that's a really important point. Because when we talk about saving time and treating time in such a precious way, one of the rebuttals is, oh, this is stressful. This is a, this is a lot. It feels like a lot of pressure to like set a timer. But, you know, time really is the currency for me. I just think, I think it is for all of us. And I think as well, what I hear from your work is it's not about there being a good and bad way to live one's life. It's just about being intentional with the time. Yeah. I think about how unintentional the average day is these days. Because you're just pulled around like a plastic bag in the wind by fucking LITs.
Speaker 1Anyway, sorry. I think you were very close, dangerously close to quitting Katy Perry there. I really was very close.
Speaker 2I think so, isn't it? It's like I'm a plastic bag floating in the wind. That's how it can feel in the modern world. It is true. No, it's true though.
Speaker 1And all of this, by the way, is in pursuit of just giving people more of their own time back. By the way, the way in which we're working with all of these distractions around us, one, according to the progress principle, makes people feel like shit. Like, right, they're not happy. They're not happy. People want to get good, high-quality work done. People want to make an impact. They want those things. Because you're hiring amazing people. And from when we were all little, we were told, good job, you got in it. We love that progress. We want to get the gold star. So if we've trained an entire generation of human beings, to want to get the gold star, and now you're surrounded by all these people, and you're like, hey, by the way, I know you have this massive to-do list, but you're not going to get anything done. Instead, you just have to answer all these messages and go to all these meetings and calls and then feel like shit at the end of the day because your to-do list is still there and you didn't make progress on anything. It doesn't feel good. So people don't feel good about it. And then all that work is still left. And then they end up working evenings and weekends to catch up. And that takes time away from your family. And then your deathbed self is like, this is terrible. So we're, I'm, the timer, we're like, I'm going to do this. We'll help you condense the damn work. So you gamify it. You make use of the dopamine. You make use of all those amazing hormones that get you all excited to get the work done so that you can actually take a break and do other things.
Speaker 2Oh, okay. So on this break, take a break. Yeah. At the very start, you're talking about innovation and creativity. Rick Rubin was sat here a couple of weeks ago and I've done a lot of research around Steve Jobs to figure out how he was able to like see the future. Cause I look back at his decision-making and it was always so unexpected. And at the time, like really contrarian. There's a great video of him sort of stood at a developer conference and the developer stands up and basically berates him and says like, why are you doing this again? You're like removing this particular software that every developer needs. This was Steve Jobs, like removed, I think it was flash. Was it flash from our devices so that we could stream video better? Removed the stylus from phones, the keyboard. And he could, and he was right in hindsight. But my question is like, how did he see the future so clearly? Rick Rubin and him, seemed to share a practice, which is boredom. So, you know, as productivity people, we're always like, it'll work, work, work, work. But then I studied these greats, these visionaries and I go, oh, they had like a boredom practice where they just like stood away from the picture. And so when you said brain break, I was thinking, ah, maybe, is this what you're talking about or is it something else?
Speaker 1This is tactical. Okay. Brain break is just defined as a short period of time where you're not processing information. And this brings me to really attacking how most humans seem to be taking breaks these days. People will take a break from work and be like, oh, I was just like doing all these things and I'm going to take a break. And what is the most common way to take a break?
Speaker 2TikTok or something. Some other distraction.
Speaker 1Some other thing. By the way, there was a 2024 nature paper that just came out that actually measured everybody's fatigue levels. Okay. Before they started working, then they would have them work. So essentially, let's imagine like do a focus sprint. So you're focused in doing all this work and then they measure their fatigue levels after they're working. And then they're like, okay, now we're going to pause now that you've worked and you're going to take a break. They put them into four different groups. One of those groups was no break at all. So you just keep going. And then you measured fatigue levels again. And lo and behold, of course, no break is not great, right? You're not going to really rebound from being fatigued. But the other options were TikTok style scrolling,
Speaker 3looking at nature, or just staring ahead of yourself.
Speaker 1It turns out the best kind of break is in fact, no surprise there, being exposed to nature. Humans come from nature. I have a sense we might have a affinity for it. Even if it feels like sometimes we don't and we're city folk, there is a visceral calm that comes when humans spend time in nature. So that's the best kind of break. But shortly thereafter, it's just doing nothing at all. And the worst break was TikTok style scrolling. We're just consuming more information. That's not a brain break. Your brain is not in fact taking a break at all. Do you weight lift? Sometimes, yeah. Sometimes, okay. So if you're lifting a weight, here, I'm going to pick up this like block for a second. Let's say this is heavy and I'm like picking up this weight, okay? And I'm doing this and my muscles are working very hard. And then what do we do after we've done like a set of weight lifting? Rest. You rest. What would you say if in between, instead of actually resting, I start lifting like low grade weights? I'm still, this is not a rest. So that's what scrolling is. And it's not even just scrolling, by the way. It's, I don't want people thinking like, oh, I was reading the news. You're reading. That's not resting this muscle. You're still using this thing. Reading, writing, arithmetic. Like the point is to rest this thing. How? Do nothing at all.
Speaker 2I almost don't know how to do nothing. I'm like, what does that look like? Everything I thought of was a thing.
Speaker 1Yeah. It's hard in the beginning, but I will say this. I have an idea for you. Okay. And that is to do nothing. To do something that is cognitively challenging enough such that you can't think of all of your other worries and things. This is my barometer for a good, like a really high quality break.
Speaker 2My DJing. What about my DJ? I'm learning to DJ.
Speaker 1Are you really?
Speaker 2That's where all the decks are out there. There's like four decks out there.
Speaker 1I didn't notice. I've been learning for four years.
Speaker 2So it's, you know, that's my break.
Speaker 1Awesome skill. Awesome skill. And it's, you're learning. So it's immersive.
Speaker 2I'm totally focused because the song's about to end and I have to mix it. And it's the most, locked in I am all day other than this. Yeah. So that's perfect.
Speaker 1Great. Even for like a simple brain break though, my humble recommendation to get yourself to not like scroll, check the news, get on LinkedIn, like whatever else it may be. Do something with your hands. So I'm a big, I'm a firm believer in systems. We just need systems. I don't like willpower. Like, oh, I should really do that. I ought to do that. Like, it's really difficult. If you create systems for, and what I mean by that is don't have grab and go snacks anymore. Force yourself to make things. Like, yeah, exactly. And this is, you have to be cooking. Like again, you're in the middle of the workday. My point is instead of like one of those tiny little cheeses that come pre-packaged, like, get the big hunk and take it out of the Ziploc and, like, cut it and, like, oh, I've cut myself a piece of cheese. Instead of having the pods, you know, like, for example, like, boil some water, put the kettle on, like, then do the thing. Like, put yourself in a system where you are forced to use both of your hands in order to get yourself hydrated, caffeinated, or get yourself a snack so that you can't scroll and do the thing at the same time. So that's it. Like, an easy way to take a brain break is just rehydrate, have another snack. Ideally, honestly, go expose yourself to some natural light, get some fresh air, move, go on a little walk. But I know those are easier said than done often. So at the very least, I assume people are maybe even at least 50% as hungry as I am. So I love lots of snacks.
Speaker 2Is there anything else on this point of, you know, when you're thinking about how to have your great, innovative, most creative ideas, if I wanted to solve a very common problem, I would say, is that I would have to do a lot of work. I would have to do a lot of complex problem, come up with my best ideas. Is there anything else you'd recommend?
Speaker 1The science behind innovation and creative insight is the process of truly understanding and thinking about the problem. So loading up all of the data related to the problem that you're trying to solve. It should be top of mind, meaning those neural networks that are related to, yeah, the neural networks related. To thinking about the problem, okay? Whatever problem it is that you're trying to solve, you want those activated and top of mind. Now, this is one of my favorite quotes attributed, I think, to Albert Einstein. Who knows if he actually said it though? So many quotes are attributed to him. Nobody was, who's fact-checking this shit, right? But no problem can be solved by the same level of consciousness or the same mindset that created it. So when you're sitting there and you're thinking about a problem, I kind of think about this like, it's like a traffic gridlock like this, right? You're sitting there and you're going, well, okay, this, this, and this, and it's like, and you don't know. And by that, I mean, by gridlock, I mean, you don't know the solution immediately. In fact, you're thinking about the problem. There lies the brain state of the problem defined as this, defined as X. X brain state is the brain state where you, Stephen, are thinking about the problem. Is this the solution state? No. By definition, this is the problem state. So there you are in a gridlock of certain neural networks where you're thinking about the problem. Ah, the next step, walk away. Walk away and go do something else. Walk the damn dog. Go do something else. Wash the dishes. You're introducing another stimulus here, right? Shower, new stimulus, new environment. These neural networks begin to loosen. New neural networks are becoming activated. New electrical, they're all electrical. Neural networks are getting activated. And all of a sudden, that might allow one idea. All of the ideas are like two neural networks that are crossing paths and you go, insight, the light bulb that we're all searching for. And then you get that magic and you go, wait a minute, that's, there it was right in front of me the whole time, right under my nose. So you have those amazing insights typically when you loosen and you walk away.
Speaker 2Does this apply to negative thinking and rumination?
Speaker 1Negative thinking and rumination, I have loads and loads of opinions about.
Speaker 2Why did you roll your eyes then?
Speaker 1I rolled my eyes because.
Speaker 2People don't like them.
Speaker 1No, it's not that. It's, um, I find that in the modern world, we've gotten ourselves into a bit of a pickle where we've made it okay to continue to rehash and exhaustively talk about and think about our traumas. When you do that, you're just deepening the damn neural networks. Really? Yeah. I mean, think about it. You're like, if I'm sad about something, I'm not saying don't acknowledge your feelings, but after, feel your feelings. But if the goal is, let's say, for example, you've gotten yourself into a rut of rumination about something or worry, rumination is sort of the same thought over and over and over again. The only way out is to break the cycle. You do not make your feelings and, you know, the thoughts that you end up ruminating on go away by talking about something.
Speaker 2At some point, it might become your identity.
Speaker 1Pretty quickly, huh? So the only way out is to stop that. You have to redirect your attention. So my solve for things like rumination is acknowledge why it's happening in the first place and then quite quickly after that, redirect your attention when it's happening. It's sort of a, anytime you're in that, oh, it's starting again, redirect and then put your attention somewhere else. What's your Everest? What's a different version of the story? What's the narrative? What's the narrative that you want to feed? Because again, this electrical system is, it's, think of yourself as the gardener or the architect of this thing. You're designing it. It's a muscle like anything else. It's like someone sitting around and going, well, I don't love the fact that my right bicep is slightly larger than mine. Then do something about it. You know, you can atrophy this one a little bit and increase the weight that you, that you, that you hold the load on this one. And lo and behold, you'll get a different outcome. So if you think of the mind, and the, and truly the brain from a neural perspective, as different neural networks that you're either deepening, strengthening, and feeding, feeding with your thoughts, your time, your attention, be careful which ones you feed. Because whichever one you feed will in fact become stronger and louder. This is something
Speaker 2that I've made for you. I've realized that the Diverse Hero audience are strivers, whether it's in business or health, we all have big goals that we want to accomplish. And I think that's something that I've made for you. And I think that's something And one of the things I've learned is that when you aim at the big, big, big goal, it can feel incredibly psychologically uncomfortable, because it's kind of like being stood at the foot of Mount Everest and looking upwards. The way to accomplish your goals is by breaking them down into tiny, small steps. And we call this in our team, the 1%. And actually, this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success here. So what we've done is that you at home can accomplish any big goal that you have, is we've made these 1% goals. And we've made these 1% goals. And we've released these last year, and they all sold out. So I asked my team over and over again to bring the diaries back, but also to introduce some new colors and to make some minor tweaks to the diary. So now we have a better range for you. So if you have a big goal in mind, and you need a framework and a process and some motivation, then I highly recommend you get one of these diaries before they all sell out once again. And you can get yours at thediary.com. And if you want the link, the link is in the description below. I can see in your productivity toolkit, there is a clock. Why is there a clock?
Speaker 1The clock represents the power and the science of when. Let me explain. If we said that the MITs and the LITs that we talked about before, that represents the what. I have my Everest. I have my MITs now. What am I doing today to move incrementally? Closer to meeting my Everest goal. That's the what. What am I doing today with the three hours of uninterrupted focus time that you said that you had, right? What? Focus sprints are the how. How am I going to then go attack that one MIT or that litter of LITs? How am I going to go do it? You're going to do it in the methodology of a focus sprint if you want to 2x your time and minimize the number of mistakes made. That's the how. The science of chronotypes will tell you the science of when. When should you go about doing all of these different things? Human beings do not share one circadian rhythm. What does that mean? Well, have you heard of a circadian rhythm before? I have. Okay. So we all, we have circadian rhythms. Animals do as well. But we don't share one as a human species. Meaning we don't all go to sleep around the same time. We're not all creature. We are creatures of light, but we don't all share one rhythm of existence. Exactly. The ideal time that we would go to sleep and wake up. These different circadian rhythms are in fact called chronotypes. So your chronotype is your genetic biological ideal time. It's essentially a profile of the hormones and your energy levels throughout the course of the day. And there are three chronotypes. There is AM shifted individuals. These are essentially, this is like the science behind morning birds.
Speaker 2Okay. So people that like doing stuff early.
Speaker 1Yeah. And it's, again, it's, it's genetic and it's hormonal. These individuals naturally, their cortisol levels spike really, really early in the morning. And some people are like the four o'clock in the morning people. They're the five o'clock in the morning people, six o'clock in the morning people. They are naturally AM shifted. Like it's not their fault necessarily. It's, and by the way, how do you know that you're truly AM shifted? How you know you're truly AM shifted is if you go to bed, even if I keep you up at two o'clock in the morning until two o'clock in the you no longer have young children that are going to wake you up. you no longer have any meetings, nothing at all. I've put you in this, the best hotel in the world with the most comfortable bed, fully blackout, not, you can't, you can hear a pin drop. There's nothing that would otherwise wake you and you can sleep as long as you want. And I kept you up until two o'clock in the morning. Oh, don't you worry. That pituitary gland is very strong. Your body knows when it's five o'clock in the morning. It doesn't even need to see light. It naturally will wake you up. So now you're sleep deprived, but you have no choice. So it's just people that naturally wake up at early hours of the day, regardless of when they went to bed the night before. Those are AM shifted individuals. And it's all about their cortisol levels first thing in the morning. That is about, by the way, 25% of the human population. It's not the majority. My humble opinion is the world seems to be oriented around these people, right? Early bird gets the worm.
Speaker 2Yeah. I mean, everything starts, school started at 9am. So you had to be up at seven. That's why I, part of the reason, many reasons, but that's part of the reason I hate school so much. Oh, totally. I liked staying up really late.
Speaker 1Same. Yeah. Then you are likely the minority of the human population, like me, PM shifted. PM shifted people. Anthropologically, by the way, the only reason we imagine why people like you and me exist, because otherwise, by the way, it's somewhat dysfunctional, no?
Speaker 2Otherwise, yeah, it would be strange to have different sleep schedules and stuff like that.
Speaker 1Like we're not, I'm like, I'm not a, I can't like see in the dark. Like it's somewhat dysfunctional. That we're awake all night. But think about it this way. If you and I were in the same tribe, along with my team and your team, and we're all like, okay, we're, we're a village now together. And everybody went to bed at 10pm and woke up at 6am. What would happen in the middle of the night when a competing tribe comes to slaughter all of us?
Speaker 2Yeah. The night is like the most dangerous time, isn't it? For, for anybody. So you need some people that are awake. And then even in the morning, you need some people that are. So you do need to stagger in a tribe, stagger the time in which people are highly functional. Which makes evolutionary sense.
Speaker 1You need a 24-17. You need to make sure someone's always awake. So you and I belong to a tiny subset of the human population. According to research from my lab, we're at 16% from what we've gathered around the world. So 16% of the human population is PM shifted, meaning genetically, we tend to be able to stay up quite late and we can sleep in. And our energy levels rise as opposed to shoot up early in the morning and then linearly decrease as the day progresses. AM shifted people usually are the best. They do their best focus, their best thinking straight away early in the day. And they just seem to lose steam as the day progresses. Like there's no like second wind for them really. I mean, there's a little bit of a bump, but their ideal time, like when would you take a standardized test? If I wanted to test your intelligence, I said, come to my lab, the Becoming Superhuman Lab, like let's, let's test your intelligence, your attention span, memory, all of it. When would you schedule that test? For AM shifted people, they're like, are you free at seven? Right? Because they're the best in the morning. For PM shifted people like you and I, honestly, the afternoon, in my younger years, oh my gosh, the evening, I do my best work like 9pm on. It's the clearest thinking, the most energized, the most clear headed, you know, up until the wee hours in the morning, but it's not super functional, but it's genetic and you can make use of it. PM shifted people also have a most artistic and creative.
Speaker 2Yeah, there you go. Can you say that again? Look at the camera and say that again. Most artistic and creative.
Speaker 1I didn't, I seem to get those, whatever. Then you have the vast majority of the human population. And those are people who are biphasic. Biphasic stands for the Latin two phases or two peaks. And these individuals wake up a little groggy, but within about 45 minutes to an hour, they're ramped off to the races. They're feeling great. Right. Biphasic, two phases or two peaks. So they peak once in the morning. They come down for the biggest afternoon dip comparatively to all those three types. And then they will then come back up for a second wind if they play their cards right. So those are the three corona types. My humble opinion is you should know which one you are because it will dictate the ideal time you should be doing your focus sprints. When? When is the ideal time? I am a big bag of blood, guts and chemicals. I'm not a machine. Right. I, there are biological laws. Like I'm not the same at 8 a.m. versus 2 p.m. versus 8 p.m. I am a different version of self with different abilities and skills. And my attention span is not a constant. That's another, a law that I would love people to know a bit more and accept, I should say, to know and accept. Our cognitive abilities are different throughout the course of the day, which means when we do certain things does matter, at least in some small part. And I'm not suggesting we can architect our days because you, I mean, you and I are actually prime examples of this. As p.m. shifted people, you know, the world doesn't give a shit about us. The world doesn't care. Like as in the world is more a.m. shifted. We have to do a great deal of adjustment. It's not like I can schedule meetings with people like brazenly at like, hey, what are you doing at 10 tonight? Right. It's so true.
Speaker 2I woke up this morning and did a 7 a.m. meeting because it was very important. And obviously, I'm in L.A. So, you know, I'm working to other people's schedules. And I was shit. I don't know how else to say it. It was I was like, gosh, that's a terrible version of me that I've just portrayed such an important meeting. So I bent my schedule to do it. But actually, because it was important, I should have pushed it as late as I possibly could have in hindsight, because I really I look back on my performance at that meeting. I go, that was terrible. You know, even with the podcast, one of the things we set as a rule where I never ever do podcasts before 11 a.m. So this is why this starts at 11 a.m. today. And because I tried it and the brain wasn't on. It's important. I think, you know, people are looking for big steps forward in life. But some of these things that seem to be small and marginal can have such a profound compounding impact over the long term. What is the most important thing we haven't talked about that we should have talked about for the people that are at home and they're struggling with all the they've got the customer problems we've described? They're brain fogged. They've got these priorities. They're distracted all the time and they feel a sense of guilt around that distraction. They know they could be doing more, but they the noisy, external, tempting world is constantly winning. What else can we give them as a tool?
Speaker 3It's about the way the world is going.
Speaker 1I'm at risk of sounding a bit doom and gloom for a second, but I do hope that there's a light at the end of this tunnel that I hope will
Speaker 3give people more agency and will inspire them. Because of my job and because of where I live, I have
Speaker 1access to sitting and being invited into meetings and rooms with a lot of amazing human beings that are creating the future.
Speaker 2I mean, there is an email there, isn't there, that we didn't touch on, but maybe this is a good time to reference that. You don't like referencing it?
Speaker 1It's a bit depressing.
Speaker 2But I think it's important because you live in San Francisco and you did make the case that those big companies are coming to people like you to figure out how to hijack attention.
Speaker 1My area of expertise is how the brain changes and evolves, how you train it. An area of this that I know quite well because it's extremely important in the pursuit of actual cognitive training is something that I've been doing for a long time. I've been doing it for a long time. It's something that we call strategic automaticity. Strategic automaticity is just getting people to do stuff without meaning to do stuff. So when a habit, right, this is also James Clear's Atomic Habits, phenomenal book, obviously, on habit formation, touches on these kinds of concepts. You want, ideally, you have a behavior or habit happen without thinking, right? Automatic. Think about something that you do without a great deal of thought or deliberation. No deliberation. For me, it's like brushing my teeth at night. I could be passed out. I could literally fall asleep somewhere on the couch while I'm doing something. And lo and behold, at some point, I will stir awake and be like, oh, no. And then still, before I get to bed, I will brush my teeth. Children don't do this naturally. They're forced into brushing our teeth at an early age. But it becomes a habit over time. And it becomes a habit that I do without deliberation. I don't deliberate whether I'm going to make my coffee typically in the morning. It's just quite automatic, right? So that habit has achieved strategic automaticity. We have removed the deliberation out of it. And now it happens quite automatically. OK, that's the goal for any habit. Again, I have studied addiction. I study habit formation. And I do cognitive training research, which means I'm trying to get people to do stuff automatically. That's my goal. I don't want to have to send them a text message and ping them every time I want them to do the thing, right? People like me have been hired hand over foot by tech companies to do things. And I've been hired by tech companies to do things. And I've been hired by tech companies around the world. And this is historical. This isn't even a now thing. This was 2010, 11, 12, 13, 14. I myself have been attempted to be recruited more times than I can count to bring everything that I know and I've studied and I've done research on into certain tech companies that I've been legally told I'm not allowed to name by name.
Speaker 2Just slide me this little thing here. Go ahead. Any more you received? Just. you know, to paraphrase, just says, "Hi, Sahar, we came across your work on strategic automaticity at uc berkeley and we'd love to connect we're looking to increase engagement and make our product more sticky would you be open to a quick call research collaboration opportunity lots of people i guess in your field get these invitations because if they can retain people on their platforms more
Speaker 3it's billion dollar outcomes what i
Speaker 1will say is that i first of all i don't think anyone is inherently evil or bad like this is not it's just opportunities these are work opportunities right and the promise by the way for scientists like myself is you can keep doing what you're doing we love what you're doing in fact love it we love what you're doing we just want you to do it in-house so that we can also implement a lot of these things so mind you i am allowed to say this i'm not allowed to name the companies but i am allowed to say that that particular email came with an attachment of what the job was the description and of course the compensation the compensation for that particular role was four times my annual salary doing public research at that time it's tempting game changing for somebody for their life for their life trajectory right so these were tempting offers these are tempting offers modern day i would say that digital dependence is going to be the everest for our species and i really mean that it has the potential
Speaker 3if leveraged properly to give us amazing advances and
Speaker 1everything from medicine to economics it's game changing technology is amazing especially artificial intelligence however comes with a great number of advantages and i'm not saying that it's not going to be a great number of downsides if used improperly our relationship with technology is
Speaker 3fundamentally critical for in my humble opinion whether
Speaker 1or not our species continues to thrive on this planet what's your fear
Speaker 2my
Speaker 1fear is actually in fact something that i have maybe somewhat disturbingly um heard about this is really the first time that i've heard about this real story from real meetings that
Speaker 3i have sat in with leaders in the ai space what we are currently up against is what is likely to happen at this point unless we
Speaker 1truly honestly unless we turn the wheels and try to do something differently what we are creating is a future where there will be a thinking class there will be a very small subset of the human population that is educated that has the attention span and the ability to focus such that they can think critically on their own they can question things they can come up with ideas and this small subset of the human population in a creepy way again i've heard it called the thinking class they will run the world and the rest of the world will not be expected to think instead their job will be to just do as they're told and it is far easier to control a populace when they are distracted and not thinking they're not awake and this is my fear and this is in fact what has what is motivating me on a daily basis and i'm not going to go into too much detail about this but i'm going to go into this is my everest at this point is to illuminate what is a healthy relationship an intentional relationship between minds and machines such that we don't lose our meaning and this is what i'm obsessed with on a daily basis at the moment is giving agency back to people and trying to wake them up and get them to realize that if we stay this distracted we will live a life unintentionally that we don't like living you will end up on your deathbed with more regrets than you can count and at a social and global level we are going to have a drastic change from this last century this last century is going to be a change that is going to be a change that is going to be a change that is going to be a change that is going to happen in the next century by the way has been absolutely amazing as it relates to education for people we have been educating more human beings think of girls and how much progress we've made in the pursuit of equity and equality for women how many women are now extremely highly educated and doing amazing things where we would not have had that luxury a few generations ago one generation ago in fact we've made such amazing strides in fact to expand the thinking class the thinking class used to be small and i'm telling you now that it is shrinking again because of
Speaker 2algorithms and and ai and ai is taking
Speaker 1a lot of the thinking away from us and and i am using my words quite carefully there it's taking it away from us because we're also we're letting it earlier when i said we're
Speaker 2writing more than ever and the reason i said that was because i'm actively trying to resist the temptation of allowing to think for me and i had a conversation actually yesterday with one of my colleagues who reports to me and the feedback was um i no longer can hear your thinking i can't hear your voice but actually i said to this person in real life your reasoning is so much stronger than when you send me things that are written and that is because that's not you you're you're actually better than me ai because you have more context you have more real world context and and um i think it's a really interesting moment for people to resist the temptation to let chat gpt or an llm think for them but gosh it's going to be so bloody tempting it's
Speaker 1tempting oh steven what's wrong it goes back what's wrong what's wrong and what's right at the same time it's another paradox it's another paradox is those damn biological laws the human brain is
Speaker 3wired for shortcuts meaning if there is a shortcut
Speaker 1to food and calories we're gonna take it yeah we're supposed to because food used to be scarce we'd be idiotic not to remember survival this whole system is there for survival we are designed to take shortcuts now i will um give some props to daniel kahneman danny kahneman uh go bears uc berkeley professor may he rest in peace also the first psychologist person only if i'm not mistaken psychologist to win the nobel prize in economics now dan kahneman is quite famous for not only writing the world famous book thinking fast and slow but as a researcher my humble opinion more famous in my world of illuminating cognitive biases and these are not necessary i don't want people to think like oh no they're bad it's not like a disease model here these are the shortcuts we're talking about the human brain is trying to figure out very very quickly can i trust you do i like you do i like what's happening what do i want to do like what what am i attracted to what am i what am i motivated to actually go get it's just trying to it's trying to decrease the amount of energy that it takes to make all of the decisions otherwise this the world is far too stimulating and full of way too much data and information it would overwhelm us so the brain is designed to make all of these parts that parses all this information and it's and it's designed for shortcuts daniel kahneman is famous i one of my favorite quotes of his
Speaker 3thinking is to humans as swimming is to cats they can do it but they would prefer not to okay cats can swim
Speaker 1they don't like it so thinking is the same way it's against our
Speaker 2survival instincts of energy conservation relaxing preserving you know especially in a world you talked about earlier about where their calories weren't abundant like even during the this conversation now requires a lot of thinking it's burning a lot of calories and we need skittles
Speaker 1exactly the more calories
Speaker 2i burn they're like my days are numbered right like from an evolutionary perspective so that's an interesting thing that we don't actually want to think it's important
Speaker 1not to have shame around it this is also connected by the way to the scrolling and our relationship with our technology there's no shame if you find yourself dependent on scrolling addicted somewhat and you're not happy with your relationship with technology it's okay please don't feel shame or guilt it's natural congratulations you have literally hundreds of experts that have designed these tools to be as addictive as they are lo and behold you have a brain that we understand and your brain became addicted so there's no shame in it it's just what do we do next and my humble opinion is first assess get like a blood test essentially like get get data on how bad the situation is where are the bleeds and where is it worse and where is it okay and then go implement some of the tactics that we talked about
Speaker 2one of the the things i'm terrible at is i think i mentioned this earlier as i i think multitasking is i've always believed it is a thing It is a more productive solution. And I consider myself to be a very proud context switcher. But then I heard about this exercise that you do to prove to people that multitasking is a myth. I have my iPad here and it's recording the screen. OK. So I can show the audience my iPad. What is this thought experiment or task that highlights the myth?
Speaker 1It's so simple, too, by the way. So what you're going to do for me, Stephen, and draw two lines on that piece of paper.
Speaker 2And what is this going to prove from a high level?
Speaker 1What we are going to attempt to do is using the most, I would say, ridiculously oversimplified, quote unquote, task. This is insanely easy for you. But what we're attempting to do is get a sense of what we call your switch cost. Your switch cost is the amount of time and energy that you essentially waste every single time you switch your attention from A to B, B to C, so on and so forth. Biological law, another one. There's no free lunch. Every single time you do something with your biological being, you pay for it.
Speaker 2We shall see.
Speaker 1OK, let's do this. We shall see. OK. Whenever you're ready, you're going to go ahead and draw two lines for me. And I'm going to time you, so don't start yet. But what you're going to write on the top line is you're going to write, I'm a great multitasker. And on the bottom line, because you are, right? Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. I'm a great multitasker. OK. And then at the bottom line, you're going to write the numbers 1 through 20. And you will do this as fast as you possibly can. And I will time you. OK. And I will read out. The times out loud. All right. Are you ready? Yeah. Get ready. Get set. Go. From 0 to 20? Mm-hmm. OK. So, I'm going to start at the top line, and I'm going to start at the bottom line, and I'm going to start at the bottom line, and I'm going to start at the bottom line. Until you finish both lines. OK. I'm going to give you one other option, because if you're thinking, Sahar, this hand is a NASCAR. Like, I'm going to lose time going back and forth between these two lines. Fine. You can do it all on one line, but you still have to alternate. So, it still needs to be I, 1, you know, 2A, so on and so forth. So, it needs to, like, alternate all in one line, so it's going to look like a garbled mess. So, it's a little harder to track, in my opinion, but some people prefer it.
Speaker 2Do you know what? If I get to 31 seconds, just tell me, and I'll stop. OK? Because it's that you're already anticipating. OK. OK. Would it be that painful? Yeah. OK. All right. Get ready. Yeah. Get set. Go. All right. Fuck, I forgot how to count. That's weird. Oh, my gosh. This is a shit show. Where was I? There. I think I cheated. I just feel like I've cheated. I'm sorry. We're at 30. How far did you get? I got to number eight. OK. So, that was, my math isn't great, but that is 40% of the speed as when I just focused. I said differently, 60% slower when I was multitasking between numbers and letters. So, on a daily basis, theoretically, I'm losing. Potentially 60% of my productivity, theoretically, just by switching between two different types of tasks at once.
Speaker 1Yeah. So, you're not only getting less done, energetically, one is more expensive than the other.
Speaker 2Do you know what? It was way less enjoyable. It was painful. Do you know the other thing? Yeah. It really did remind me of how I've been working, because every time I went from one line to the other, I went from the letters to the number, I had to, like, remind myself that I'm not myself again, of where I was with the numbers. Yes. Does that make sense? Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then when I went back to the letters, I was like, where are we again with the letters? Totally. So, there was a little bit of a gap there in me, like, trying to figure out what came after the letter I, for example. It's really fascinating, because it, yeah, so illuminating.
Speaker 1Hmm. By the way, there's a name for that concept that you were just, you were feeling it. It's palpable. Yeah. It's called attentional residue. Yeah. And it sounds gross, right?
Speaker 2Yeah, attention, yeah.
Speaker 1I call it attentional. I call it attentional baggage, because I find the visual that that creates better. Meaning, you carry into the next task all the shit, the baggage from the previous task, unless you close out, I say get cognitive closure. Close out the tab, so to speak, on your computer, and just be like, all right, this, I'm going to do, but, but, but, clean up shop, get cognitive closure, close the box, and don't carry one bag into, you know, box or a bag, don't carry it from one to another. Don't carry one thing into the next thing. Try to, as much as possible, get cognitive closure. When you multitask, one, you're barely onboarding to the next task, you're carrying shit from the last one. It's taking you longer to actually finish anything. Up to, you know, by the way, over two hours a day is the estimated average now for the average knowledge worker just bouncing between screens and different tasks. I think it's absolutely wild. I can relate.
Speaker 2So, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. So, the question left for you, very good question left for you, very good question, I love when this happens, is how can the audience become more lucky?
Speaker 3Oh, I love this question, and I have an answer, which is nice. Yes. It's nice when that happens. Luck. Luck. Luck. The way to become. The way to become
Speaker 1more lucky is to prime the mind, to train it, I would say, to look for luck, your luck, because lucky for you, I'm assuming, is very different than my luck and the next person's luck. You have to know what your Everest is again. You need to go to that deathbed, figure out what a good life for you is, figure out what your intentions are and your goals, like what is it that you're looking for? Because if you don't know, then there's nothing for you to look for. We don't even know what you want to get lucky at, right? So, one, you have to get crystal clear on what it is that you want, right? Once you're crystal clear on what you want, you need to ask yourself and remind yourself on a daily basis what that Everest is. And then you need to, it's that, you said it beautifully, it's that pedal versus podium, right? What is the one thing I can do today that is going to make me incrementally closer to that long-term goal? If you prime the mind with what is your goal, what is your Everest, what is, what are your objectives or what you're looking for, what you're hoping to get lucky about, what you're hoping to get lucky in, then if it's on your mind, instead of all the bullshit that we fill the mind with, this is turning the signal up. We talked, all of this conversation has been about turning the noises. And parts, we talk about the signal. When we talk about your ultimate why, your Everest, your long-term goals, that deathbed self. And then we talk about the MITs, which is the pedal. How can I drive my day? What can I do today that's going to make me incrementally closer to that long-term goal, right? That's the what, so to speak.
Speaker 3In order to get more lucky, the mind that's going to make me incrementally closer to that will look for data and evidence to support its beliefs.
Speaker 1Either way? Either way. So if you ruminate, if you stay in that victim mindset, if you stay in that, oh, look at my shortcomings, I'm never going to make it. I'm so far away from that. Everest is all the way up there.
Speaker 3Guess what you will notice? What you will notice are closed doors because apparently you're a victim and they're not for you. You will notice all of your shortcomings and you'll focus on them.
Speaker 1This is a focus machine, as we said. This thing is designed to look for the evidence and find the evidence that confirms its beliefs. It's constantly scanning.
Speaker 3So if you prime this thing, oh, you'll find your luck because your luck is right there. The opportunities are there.
Speaker 1The world is not for you. The world is full of brick walls, the way that it may seem. Those brick walls are doors. They have handles.
Speaker 2I'm a lucky person. I'm a lucky person. I'm a lucky person. I'm a lucky person. I'm a lucky person.
Speaker 1I feel like that's manifestation. I want to push you further. Okay. And if people are into that, I think, great, positive thinking. That's all. It's all lovely and beautiful. I mean, what are you trying to achieve here? What are you trying to achieve is like, do you have a guest that you're trying to bring on that you that you've not been able to find and you're just like, I want you to be able to maybe wake up every single day and just be like, "I will find my way to you. You will find.
Speaker 2Let's get Prabhupada
Speaker 1on this podcast. Let's do it. No, no. If you keep saying it, it will happen. But it's not just about saying it. You will be thinking about like, that is one of my goals. I promise you, you're going to see opportunities. You're going to end up meeting one of his former chiefs of staff at a random. It's just going to happen because it's top of mind for you. And your brain is designed to look for the evidence and the data to support its beliefs. So if you truly believe, Barack will be on this podcast.
Speaker 3He'll find his way to this chair. Now he has to, right?
Speaker 1We've spoken it into the universe. He's got to. He's got to.
Speaker 2I mean, I just love your work for so many reasons. I think sometimes the complicated can stay complicated until it finds someone like you who has the ability to simplify and have the empathy to understand those that they're simplifying it for. And I was super. I was super excited to see you just start a YouTube channel. I did. And I would highly recommend people go and subscribe to your YouTube channel. I'll link it below, but it should be. If we collab, you should be able to see the little icon there. Highly recommend you go and subscribe to Dr. Saha because, you know, she's continuing to do great work. She's continuing to learn and share that knowledge with all of us. And it saves us having to build these superhuman labs that she's built. And we can just go follow her and have the. You know, you don't want the algorithm to be serving up your content. You want the subscription button. So go ahead and follow Dr. Saha. Dr. Saha over on her channel as well. Is there anywhere else people should go to get your work or to understand more about you or to follow you?
Speaker 1I want to help people, one, gain control over their lives and live a life of intention, of their choosing, whatever it is that they want to do. So my humble recommendation is
Speaker 3to gain some data on you, to actually assess your digital
Speaker 1dependence, assess your attention span. Have you ever taken a test of your attention? No. Like, do you know where it falls? Like, maybe it's not so bad. Maybe you're off the charts amazing. We don't need to worry about it. Right? I'm a firm believer the way that. And I would love the world to change in this way. And I know and I hope in some small part we can help make this more of a common thing that people do. But the same way that we go to the doctor once a year and we have this like annual physical, usually, you know, like, how am I doing? I get a blood test. You check all the things. Why is it that we're not checking our minds? We don't do that. We just wait for it to go to shit. And then we do something about it. Like, we wait for the car to be on fire and then we're like, oh, oops. No, we should have things that
Speaker 3we're doing along the way. But how do we know what to do? The data. If we collect data and we
Speaker 1actually have assessments available to people. So I'm extremely passionate about making scientific assessments available to the general public. I think science should be for people, not profits.
Speaker 2Where do I find the assessments? You go to www.mmminstitute.org, www.mmminstitute.org, okay. I'll link that below and I'll put it really big on the screen here. www.mmminstitute.org, free assessments. Thank you so much for being here. Such an honor. And please keep doing the work that you're doing. You're a star. And sometimes once in a while I meet stars and you're suddenly a star. So I'm excited to watch your career unfold from here on outwards. Thank you, Dr. Tara. We're done. Thank you.
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