Phone Addiction Scientist: Doing This Gives You An Hour Back Every Day! | Dr Sahar Yousef

As a founder building a business when I was in my early 20s, I think I always had a deep sense of imposter syndrome because there was something that I wasn't good at and that thing was finances. Finance and understanding your financial position as a small business is the great enabler of all of your dreams. I was running from it until I discovered a platform called Xero. Xero is an accounting and financial management platform specifically for small businesses and it brings accounting, payments, payroll and analytics all into one place even for people that don't love doing finances. Xero wants to do the financial work for you but its core ambition is to go beyond keeping the financial record because Xero wants to help you understand what's happening in your business and increasingly, and this is maybe the most important thing, is help you make decisions. Finally we have a partner who can enable us in a simple way for those people that are both left brain or right brain and enable our dreams. You can learn more about Xero by going to xero.com. Thank you to Xero. Thank you for sponsoring this podcast but also thank you for helping me to scale my business as somebody that quite frankly has never loved finances that much. Every single time you switch your attention you pay for it. Multitasking is a 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 attention. Okay let's do this. All right are you ready? Yeah. Get ready, go. Oh my gosh 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 two 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 in this box? We're gonna go 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 candy just going straight in. There's no backstop but we can use reverse neuroscience to reverse this entire thing. Where's the first place to stop? First put your phone in gray. Research from my lab shows grayscale 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 productivity toolkit there is a clock. Yeah this 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 prototypes 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 I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins. 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. Sahar Youssef, 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 mission 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 and 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 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, what, 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 the most amazing piece of, I would say, modern human invention. You said innovation there. One of the things that innovators often think about is working backwards from the customer, i.e. 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 public communicator, you've received a lot of feedback from people as it relates to productivity on what they're really struggling with and how they like describe it in their own words. How can they relate to everything you've just said? What are the words that in their head they're using to describe the problem that your work solves? I hear a lot about brain fog. That'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 like, where were your thoughts before? And that's the heartbreaking truth. I think people aren't 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. 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. If you put yourself into that sort of setup and state, when is it that 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 experience and the reference points that you draw from? Where did you study? What is it you run now? What studies have you done? I'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. Key word there is that root plastic, plasticity. The brain is constantly changing and evolving and adapting. I 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 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. 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. That's what I've always been obsessed with. Wait, you can make me superhuman? I mean, yes. Really? We have to define it, though. Of course, yes. Okay. I think you're probably already a fair bit there. No, no, no, no, no. There's room for improvement. Always, always. For myself as well, always. I do practice quite a bit of what I preach, but we are human at the end of the day. But I would like to be superhuman. So hopefully we can do that today. You mentioned working with a female CEO there. What is the broad spectrum of people that you've worked with? I've worked with a lot of executives. One of the first execs I worked with, and of course I can't say who, but it would be a Fortune 10 company. I used to do these observations. Let's say if I did this for you, by the way, you'd say, okay, for the next couple of days, I'm going to have this weird doctor lady, this neuroscientist follow me around, and she's just observing me. I would notice everything from what you're eating and drinking throughout the course of the day, if you take breaks, how you work. I'd follow you to a bunch of your meetings. I'm just with you for a bit, observing, taking notes, and then we would do an overhaul. Then I would intervene and then be like, all right, we got it. This is going to get changed up. 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, glass everywhere. So he's sitting in a glass box in the middle of a busy floor. This is a Fortune 10, and he's the boss. 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. He's like, yeah, that's what I'm doing. I'm like, that's fine. You do you. I'll be back here. I see him. He's on his computer, but he has a second monitor, and the second monitor has his email open. Then he has two phones, personal and professional, and they're both face up right next to him. He had an Apple Watch on. So as he's sitting down to focus, it's just like, bzz, bong, bing, boop, bop. Then all of this is happening, and then there's people walking by. Then at some point, his chief of staff comes in, and he's just like, excuse me, don't forget this. He's like, uh-huh. So he's sitting there. I swear, Stephen, 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 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 doesn't waste their best thinking. They don't 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 do do do do do do. And it's just constant ping-ponging like this all day. What is this? Just sit down for 20 minutes and just focus. 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. Forget becoming superhuman. We just need to become human. 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 can relate 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. 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. You didn't want to make it an app, but some of the stuff you talk about is in this box. 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 out through your explanations, I want to know where's the first place to start? What's the first domino? If I fuck up my sleep, do I have to meditate? What is the... There's one that I have to begin with the foundational, which you already mentioned yourself as sleep. 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 mind of the listeners here. 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, come to me and ask, okay, I want to become 1% better. 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. As a mechanic, I'm looking at it and the thing is on fire. 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 to begin to assess your base. 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. The system is messed up, so sleep is for sure the foundation. 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 lock box, 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 make sure it's off. You're like, let me just get rid of some of the things on the screen. Okay, turn that upside down. There we go. You don't necessarily 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 is impacting your memory. Another word for memory is learning, right? Attention and memory, by the way, 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. Think about that. It is only things that come into 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. I don't want people to think it's just phones necessarily, it's notifications in general. If you're monitoring your inbox all day and it's constantly available to you, what's your plan for having deep thoughts? The rebuttal that comes to mind, although I don't even believe it, but this is the rebuttal that I think a lot of me and my listeners will be thinking right now. Yes, but what if something happens? I have my email open because maybe a big email comes in, or I have my WhatsApp right there because maybe my fiancé is going to tell me I need to let her in the house, or something's going to happen. Totally. Fires, as we call them, right? Fires, urgencies. I get it. I'm a caretaker for both my, you know, 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. 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 a sign for this, 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 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? And when you say bottom line, for those that don't know, you mean profit incentive, right? Yeah. Their goal 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 overconsumption? Not really. Well, the same is true for email. The same is true for any kind of platform. It's 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, 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. It sounds obvious, but it's totally not obvious that a productivity tools 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 I, how much you used it. And it's almost like antithetical to the mission of the tool for them 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. Absolutely. Which is why I sort of scoff when I, 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 need, we've never, as a human species, been able to communicate and collaborate at this scale. Technology's 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. So 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? Okay. My, 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, your, your, 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, Steven? 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 Stacy and Steven are chatting with each other about something, 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. A 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, 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? You'll get him right to reply. Like besides to me, he mostly he's 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. 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 object. I'm like, well, but the 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 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. I 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. 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 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 anyway. 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. And 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. You're well on your way because you've already given your thumb. I'm not even kidding that this is the noise. You can either increase the signal or you can decrease the noise. What do you think is easier? Decreasing the noise. For sure. As a first step? As a first step, of course. I 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. The job was to reduce the noise. They never mentioned increasing the signal. Because it's rather difficult. It's possible. And it's there. It's there. It's there. It literally gets the shit out of your life. We now think that multitasking or context switching is a skill. You mentioned a term earlier on which I've never heard. Mono... Monotasking? You said the brain is a monotasker. Yeah, it's a monotasking machine. Prove that to me. This thing here. This is a monotasking machine. It 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. I mean, I work out, but I can't fight off an actual predator. My teeth aren't that sharp. 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, and I say the cortical real estate, it's a 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 them. 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. There 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 give reach for our WhatsApp and we're chatting in a group chat about the weekend. Is that a true sort of accurate reflection of how humans behave? Yes. It is, because I was just thinking about my own behaviour. 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. So 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. Hmm. What are some other ones? You're feeling a little depressed, a little FOMO, lonely. What are some other ones? I think you nailed it. Those are all the ones. Anger, you know, frustration. Your brain also, by the way, is your friend. It doesn't, 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. So it goes, well, we're overwhelmed. Fuck this. How do I avoid this? So it's going to try to solve the problem. Now, there's two ways to solve what you're overwhelmed about, right? 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? TikTok, Shake Shack, pornography. So 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. I 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 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, 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. 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? 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 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. We're injecting all of this sugar and increasing the stimulation of the food, right? That's how you can get somebody hooked. Now, why would humans be already naturally addicted to sugar? Because food used to be scarce. It's hard to find. 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? We're all naturally inclined to desire those things and covet those things and be really, really stimulated by them. 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 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. Satiating being full. Being full, yes. My body needs things that would make me full. What makes us full in food? Protein, fiber, candy. Nope, there's no protein. There's no fiber. The food industry has figured this out. Technologies have done the same thing. They've done the exact same thing. They've followed the exact same playbook. They increase 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. That visual stimulation, as we were talking about before, a huge part of your cortex is your visual cortex, your occipital lobe. It's super, super stimulated by all of that color saturation. 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. 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. By the way, there's an entire field, intermittent variable rewards. You get these jackpots once in a while. 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. It knows what content you're going to love that day. It's got all this like saved up content for you. 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. 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. Boom. Diamond CEO clip. Like that. Bang. Exactly. It's like, there he is. It's that Bartlett again. And I can't look away. People are watching this reel 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. Totally. What is this? What is this variable rewards phenomenon? Oh 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. So when we don't know when it's coming, but we know it's coming. Yeah. I have a whole theory on people who are in toxic relationships. Like seriously, think about love bombing. This is the science of love bombing. I'm an asshole. I'm like ghosting you. And then bam, I hit you with a bunch of love. 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 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 $1.50 and then be like, oh, I'm back in. And 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 only, by the way, saw the things that you followed, that you subscribed 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? When people don't, and so the algorithm will just be like this, this, how about this? How about this other thing? 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. It 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. There'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, maybe your friend posted another picture of their sandwich, like 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 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. So 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. But I want to eat more Skittles later. Okay, there we go. That's the problem. If I have these drunk calories, then in six hours time, I'm back looking for more junk calories. Exactly. Shoots 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. Think about the difference between some 30-second reel that someone has made, and then they inject 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 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, by the way, you just watched. Test it. Seriously, I'm not kidding. Do this quick short form for a while. In the moment, you're like, oh my gosh, I just learned a fun fact about this. You think you're learning. It's an illusion. What I believe we're, 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, Steven. I am better than the default settings. 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. Have 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? I'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. Yeah, that's crazy. Do you know what I mean? It'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. That's seven hours a week. Think about what you could do with that time. Next is choosing long form over short form. Thank 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 catch that. Honestly, it's true. It's not made up. Short form content has even been shown, by the way, in some cases to increase attention span. I completely agree. Of course you do. 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. Again, the message is not, oh, my God, technology is bad. All screen time is evil, no, no, no, no. I'm a huge fan of your content diet. If you want to sit down and watch a movie, sit down and watch a movie. Get into your pajamas. Make a bowl of popcorn. 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. 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. Please tell me, 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 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? Do you know what's funny? 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, you're lost. Oh, yeah. Because they've named a planet Cololublublu. And if you don't understand what Cololublublu is, you're fucked. And 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 was just super front of mind. Because I just remember the effort I was putting in to stay focused on this movie last night, and 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. You just sit there and watch. There might be some people at some level thinking, yeah, but I love short form. I love it. I 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 over consume 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 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 two o'clock in the morning and then feeling like shit the next day because you didn't get enough sleep. I 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 skills, probably regret in a couple of hours, probably the next day, because, you know, send 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 like what they gained. So, this idea of regret, like, okay, skittles taste 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. Yeah. I'm telling you, we're waking up. People are waking up. Young people are waking up. That's the coolest thing. I saw the graphs from the Financial Times, which showed time spent online had started to plateau since 2022 for young people first. Thank God. I mean, but listen, it's still a push. 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% in, I would say, our generation. 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 the 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 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. It's like sitting down with someone who is freshly trying to become sober as an alcoholic and just being 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. I think the skittles analogy is pretty good. Like, I wouldn't walk around with skittles in my pocket because if I did, I'd eat them every time I was stressed or bored. Yeah, totally. 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, so 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. This has had probably the single biggest impact on my office. 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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 in terms and conditions apply. What I really want, quite selfishly, is advice on how to do deep work better. Because deep work is something that, I mean, all of my team have to do deep work. They have to edit code, could be write. 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? What 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 the method. First step. How many steps are there in a focus sprint? Five. There are five steps. There are five steps. So these five steps will make me 200% more productive. First, 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 some big event or a big speech that you need to give, like some butterflies? You get this increase in cortisol and adrenaline, right? I mean, think about how 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 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. OK, 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 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? So the goal becomes an output, not the input? 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 do, I'm going to work on this thing or I'm going to, 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, that's really interesting. It's the outcome with a breakdown. Like I want to see an execution list. That feels like a lot of work. I'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 B, and they don't immediately know what step one C is or what step two 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? That's when you lose people. That's when you lose your focus. 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 of those amazing hormones and those anticipatory networks. Then step two, step two, you set the goal. And the goal is an output and it's specific and it's broken down into sub goals. Yes. 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? 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, MITs, your most important tasks. Your MITs or your most important tasks are the one, two, maximum three things on any given day that you would want to accomplish if you want your day to be a success. So we've got a little chart there, I think, of the MITs, right? Yeah, we do. 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 today? Three hours. That's a good day. That's a good day. Like uninterrupted focus time. Not uninterrupted, but I can make it uninterrupted. Beautiful. 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 MITs? 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 for? 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 maybe it's a little bit out of our area of competence. We don't like finance. We don't like investing. We don't like operations. So we avoid that and it's like opening the fridge, as you say, and we reach for the thing that we know we love and we do that. Those are LITs. LITs like an email, a DocuSign, right? I always say like toilet paper from Amazon or something like whatever, like the little tiny things that will take five minutes, a couple of 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 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 MITs 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 MITs. And then if you've got 15 minutes between some meetings and calls, you shove the LITs in there. So MITs are most important goals, LITs are least important goals. Okay. 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 we assuming that people will know what the MIT is? Yeah. 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 important? 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 is your Everest? What is 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, 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 do 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, and I don't know where this comes from. We probably need a therapist on with us to unpack this one. I'm a firm believer in servant leadership. I think I've been put on the planet to help in whatever ways that I can. My job is to serve and to make this world a better place with what I do and what I can bring to the table. That's my obsession. 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 personal sacrifices, but it seems to be the flavor of my mind is that I'm squarely focused on building better systems for humanity. It was 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 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 think that I achieved things that they can too, and to be evidence of that. The second one was around that I'd made the world a better place. So they were clear on the philanthropic impact that their father had had. So that was really clarifying because it basically gave me three clear priorities, which are family and having a big family, being a good role model to them, and then them having evidence that me being here was net positive to planet. You know, but it was really clarifying because of how there's really three things that matter. So that gives you your direction. Yeah, it does. So if you wake up every single morning now with that level of clarity. I can go, the Skittles are not going to bring me closer. Fuck the Skittles. Yeah, fuck Skittles. 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. Bronnie Ware is a hospice nurse, and she sat with many, many dying individuals. What an honor to do such a thing. Something that I hope to do in my lifetime is to sort of be, you know, exercise my death duel skills and to be with folks who are passing on. And what an honor it is to sit with them because, oh boy, you get some clarity. So she asked these people, what are your regrets? And she would keep a log of the answers they gave. And the number one regret across all 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. We come into this world alone and we do die alone, no matter how much we love each other. This is one of the paradoxes I find of love and human 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. We'll 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, the 100 million da-da-da-da-da-da-da. And then the next moment, it's another. And the next moment, it's another. We continue to be dynamic, but that's its own little rabbit hole. But 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 is doing the tango with someone else's. It is intertwined. And as I say, everyone can think of those moments when you look at someone and you go, I don't know what it is, but at some deep level, me and this person, 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 talking about their childhood, their 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 on 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 no longer thinking about you as an other and I as I, I and you have become this energetic we. But again, that bit more spiritual. No, but it perfectly dovetails into work because we can all think of flow states where we drop into work and three hours passed and 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 set 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. And 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 MITs as easy as a list of LITs. And how you 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. My husband just climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. Oh, wow. Yeah, amazing things that I do not choose to do. You said no to that. I said no to that. That's exactly what it is. I do know how to say no. It's typically with really difficult physical feats. I have my own, but I prefer the mental ones. But yeah, he went, he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. And when he came back, he said that the mantra of these amazing 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 with them. It's amazing. And carrying a bunch of shit with them. It's 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, pole, pole, slowly, slowly. Pole, pole. Pole, pole. 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 I 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 telling 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 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 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 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 say he couldn't remember the cycle, which I think is this flow state. It is. Other remarkable thing that he said to me off camera was he went, Stephen, 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 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 Harvard Business Review study where they asked 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 MITs into these LITs because the reason I like the LITs is because I get the progress principle. Yes. I get the like, oh, I'm making, I feel like I am going somewhere. Yes. The MITs, it's hard to get that feeling unless you do what you just said, which is breaking them down. Yeah. Which brings us to step three, beautifully. The best 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 now you've got your Everest. Pole, pole, you know the next step. Pole, pole, I love that phrase. Slowly, slowly, 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 is your opinion on listening to music to do work and putting headphones on? What does the science say? People are different, of course. So some people seem to be distracted by it and they prefer silence. And 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 because you start to become overstimulated by the real sounds 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, and 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 a day, that hits your three hours. So you can use the noise canceling only for when maybe you wanna 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 sprints, 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 for success. Then set a timer, set a timer. Human beings, and fun 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 mean, is it time ticking down or time ticking up? So is it going from 60 minutes down or is it going from zero to 60? We're keenly interested in any sense of progress, so progress bars. Okay. Yeah. Having said that, where I find from a productivity standpoint, you will get a lot of interesting benefits 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 bins and da, da, da, and clean up, they're gonna, by the third thing they pick up, but guess best of luck, right? They're off, they're looking at something else and 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 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 song. At Parkinson's Law. 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 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. This idea got stuck in my head about five years ago, so I'd like to stick it in some other people's heads. 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 interrogate that. I was like, is that really it? Is the game of my life really, first and foremost, how I allocate my time? Of course, then it's when 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, my achievement, the age that I get to the deathbed, my health, all of it really is 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 lot. It feels like a lot of pressure to set a timer. But 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. 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 L-I-T's. Anyway, sorry. I think you were very close, dangerously close to quoting Katy Perry there. I really was, right? I think so, isn't it? It's like I'm a plastic bag floating in the wind. That's how I can feel in the modern world. It is true. No, it's true though. And 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, 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. 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 gonna 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 the timer will 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. Oh, okay. So on this break, take a break. At the very start, you were talking about innovation and creativity. Rick Rubin was out 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 see the future. Because I look back at his decision-making and it was always so unexpected. And at the time, really contrarian. There's a great video of him 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 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 as productivity people, we're always like, 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, maybe is this what you're talking about or is it something else? This 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 gonna take a break. And what is the most common way to take a break? TikTok or something, some other distraction. Some 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 gonna pause now that you've worked and you're gonna 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 gonna really rebound from being fatigued. But the other options were TikTok style scrolling, looking at nature or just staring ahead of yourself. It 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. You were 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 gonna pick up this block for a second. Let's say this is heavy, and I'm 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 a set of weight lifting? Rest. You rest. What would you say if in between, instead of actually resting, I start lifting low grade weights? This is not a rest. So that's what scrolling is. And it's not even just scrolling, by the way. 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. The point is to rest this thing. How? Do nothing at all. I almost don't know how to do nothing. I'm like, what does that look like? Everything I thought of was a thing. Yeah. It's hard in the beginning. But I will say this. I have an idea for you. Okay. And that is to do something that is cognizant. 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. My DJing, what about my DJ? I'm learning to DJ. Are you really? That's why all the decks are out there. There's like four decks out there. I didn't notice. I've been learning for four years. So it's, yeah. But that's my break. Awesome skill, awesome skill. And it's, you're learning so it's immersive. I'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. Great. 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. Cooking stuff. Yeah, exactly. And as soon as 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 and that, you know, like for example, like boil some water, put the kettle on, like then do the thing. Like romantic, like use, put yourself in a system where you are, you're 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 least, I assume people are maybe even at least 50% as hungry as I am. So I love lots of snacks. Is 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 complex problem, come up with my best ideas, is there anything else you'd recommend? The 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, Steven, are thinking about the problem. Are you going—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 to all of a—ideas are like two neural networks that are crossing paths, and you go, inside 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. Does this apply to negative thinking? Yeah. And rumination? Negative thinking and rumination. I have loads and loads of opinions about— Why did you roll your eyes then? I rolled my eyes because— People don't like them. No, it's not that. It's—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 the thoughts that you end up ruminating on go away by talking about them over and over and over again in the exact same way. If you keep doing that, you're just deepening and deepening that neural network so it's even more robust and strong. If you repeatedly—I mean, you mentioned atomic habits. I mean, think about how habits are formed, right? It's that repetition. If you keep telling yourself, oh, this trauma happened for me, this occurred, and I was a victim, and then I was a victim, and then I was this trauma, this trauma, and then that's why I am this way that I am, I am this way that I am, I am this way that I— At some point, it might become your identity. Pretty quickly, huh? The only way out is to stop that. You have to redirect your attention. 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 that you want to feed? Because again, this electrical system is—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—then do something about it. You can atrophy this one a little bit and increase the weight that you hold, the load on this one, and lo and behold, you'll get a different outcome. If you think of the mind and really 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 that I've made for you. I realise that the Diverseo audience are strivers, whether it's in business or health. We all have big goals that we want to accomplish, and one of the things I've learnt 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%. Actually, this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success here. What we've done so that you at home can accomplish any big goal that you have is we've made these 1% diaries, and we 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 colours and to make some minor tweaks to the diaries, 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? The 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? 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 minimise 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. 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 creatures. We are creatures of light, but we don't all share one rhythm of exactly the ideal time that we would go to sleep and wake up. These different circadian rhythms are in fact called chronotypes. 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. There are three chronotypes. There are AM-shifted individuals. This is like the science behind morning birds. Okay, so people that like doing stuff early. Yeah. Again, it's genetic and it's hormonal. These individuals, naturally, their cortisol levels spike really, really early in the morning. 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. It's not their fault necessarily. 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 morning, and let's say I'm controlling. 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 the best hotel in the world with the most comfortable bed, fully blackout. 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. Yeah. I mean, everything starts. School started at 9 a.m., so you had to be up at 7. That's part of the reason, many reasons, but that's part of the reason I hate school so much. Oh, totally. I like staying up really late. Same. 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? Otherwise, yeah, it would be strange to have different sleep schedules and stuff like that. I can't see in the dark. 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 a village now together, and everybody went to bed at 10 p.m. and woke up at 6 a.m., what would happen in the middle of the night when a competing tribe comes to slaughter all of us? Yeah, the night is like the most dangerous time, isn't it, 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. You need a 24-7 team. 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. There's no 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, 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 7? 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 my clearest thinking, the most energized, the most clear headed 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 tendency to be the most artistic and creative. There you go. Can you say that again? Look at the camera and say that again. Most artistic and creative. I didn't. I seem to get those genes. 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. 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. 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? 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 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, 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. 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 brazenly, like, hey what are you doing at 10 tonight? Right? I woke up this morning and did a 7 a.m. meeting because it was very important and obviously I'm in LA 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 that at my performance of 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 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? It's about the way the world is going. I'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 give people more agency and will inspire them. Because of my job and because of where I live I have access to sitting and being invited into meetings and rooms with a lot of amazing human beings that are creating the future. I 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? It's a bit depressing. But 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. My 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 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 is a beautiful word for this. 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. Okay, 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 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. Just like me, this little thing here. Go ahead. An email 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 it's billion dollar outcomes. Mm-hmm. What I will say is that, first of all, I don't think anyone is inherently evil or bad. 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 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, if leveraged properly, to give us amazing advances in everything from medicine to economics. It's game-changing. Technology is amazing, especially artificial intelligence. However, it comes with a great number of downsides if used improperly. Our relationship with technology is fundamentally critical for, in my humble opinion, whether or not our species continues to thrive on this planet. What's your fear? My fear is actually, in fact, something that I have maybe somewhat disturbingly heard about. This is a real story from real meetings that I have sat in with leaders in the AI space. What we are currently up against is what is likely to happen at this point, truly, 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. 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 is motivating me on a daily basis. 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, 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 algorithms and AI. AI is taking a lot of the thinking away from us. And I am using my words quite carefully there. It's taking it away from us because we're also letting it. Early on, I said we're writing more than ever. And the reason I said that was because I'm actively trying to resist the temptation of allowing AI to think for me. And I had a conversation actually yesterday with one of my colleagues who reports to me. And the feedback was, 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 actually better than me, AI, because you have more context. You have more real-world context. And I think it's a really interesting moment for people to resist the temptation to let chatGPTU and LLM think for them. But gosh, it's going to be so bloody tempting. It's tempting. Oh, Stephen, 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 wired for shortcuts, meaning if there is a shortcut to food and calories, we're going to 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 give some props to Daniel Kahneman. Danny Kahneman, Go Bears, UC Berkeley professor, may he rest in peace. Also the first psychologist, first and 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. 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? What am I attracted to? What am I motivated to actually go get? It's just trying to decrease the amount of energy that it takes to make all of the decisions. Otherwise, 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, parses all this information, and it's designed for shortcuts. Daniel Kahneman is famous. One of my favorite quotes of his, thinking is to humans as swimming is to cats. They can do it, but they would prefer not to. Okay, cats can swim. They don't like it. So thinking is the same way. It's against our survival instincts of energy conservation, relaxing, preserving, you know, especially in a world you talked about earlier about whether calories weren't abundant. Like even doing this conversation now requires a lot of thinking. It's burning a lot of calories. If we need Skittles. Exactly. The more calories I burn, my days are numbered from an evolutionary perspective. So that's an interesting thing that we don't actually want to think. It's important not 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 around it. 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 a blood test, essentially, 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. One of the things I'm terrible at is, I think I mentioned this earlier, is 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, so I can show the audience my iPad. What is this thought experiment or task that highlights the myth? It'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. And what is this going to prove from a high level? What 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. We shall see. Okay, let's do this. We shall see. Okay. 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. Okay. And then at the bottom line, you're going to write the numbers one through 20, and you will do this as fast as you possibly can, and I will time you, okay? And I will read out the times out loud. All right. Are you ready? Yeah. Get ready? Yeah. Get set. Go. From zero to 20? Uh-huh. Expletives are natural. Okay. There you go. Done. Done? Yeah. Okay. Okay. Beautiful. I want you to do this one more time. Okay. This time, the way in which you will arrive will be a little different. Okay. You're going to alternate. So you're going to start at the top line, and you're going to write the letter I. You're going to drop down to the bottom. Don't start yet. I'm going to time you. Yeah. Down to the bottom line, number one, back up to the top line. Letter A, down to the bottom line. Number two, back up to the top line. Letter M, down to the bottom line. Number three. So on and so forth until you finish both lines. Okay. I'm going to give you one other option, because if you're thinking, Sahar, this hand is a NASCAR. 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 I1, 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. Do you know what? If I get to 31 seconds, just tell me, and I'll stop. Okay? Because it's that you're already anticipating it's going to be that painful? Yeah. Okay. All right. Get ready. Yeah. Get set. Go. Go. Go. Go. Go. Go. Go. Go. Go. Go. Go. Go. 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 cheated. I'm sorry. We're at 30. We're at 30. We're at 30. We're at 30. How far did you get? I got to number 8. Okay. So, that was... My maths isn't great, but that is 40% of the speed of when I just focused. Yeah, indeed. I said it differently. 60% slower when I was multitasking between numbers and letters. So, on a daily basis, theoretically, I'm losing. I'm losing, potentially, 60% of my productivity, theoretically, just by switching between two different types of tasks at once. Yeah. So, you're not only getting less done, energetically, one is more expensive than the other. Do 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 remind myself again of where I was with the numbers. Yes. Does that make sense? 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 trying to figure out what came after the letter I, for example. It's really fascinating, because it's so illuminating. By the way, there's a name for that concept that you were feeling it. It's palpable. Yeah. It's called attentional residue. Yeah. And it sounds gross, right? Yeah. 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 a box or a bag, don't carry it from 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, carrying shit from the last one. It's taking you longer to actually finish anything. By the way, over two hours a day is the estimated average now for the average knowledge worker, bouncing between screens and different tasks, which I think is absolutely wild. So we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question to the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. 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? Oh, I love this question. And I have an answer, which is nice. Yes. It's nice when that happens, luck. The way to become more 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 would be, it's 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, you said it beautifully, is it 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 are your objectives there, 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 noise down, 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. In order to get more lucky, the mind, that's spooky, it will look for data and evidence to support its beliefs. Either 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, guess 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. This 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. So if you prime this thing, oh, you'll find your luck, because your luck is right there. The opportunities are there. The world is not full of brick walls, the way that it may seem. Those brick walls are doors. They have handles. I'm a lucky person. I'm a lucky person. I'm a lucky person. I'm a lucky person. I'm a lucky person. I feel like that's manifestation. I want to push you further. And if people are into that, I think, great, positive thinking, that's all lovely and beautiful. I mean, what are you trying to achieve here? What are you trying to achieve is, do you have a guest that you're trying to bring on that you've not been able to find? I want you to wake up every single day and just be like, I will find my way to you. Let's get Barack Obama on this podcast, let's do it. No, no, if you keep saying 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, he'll find his way to this chair. Now he has to, right? We've spoken it into the universe, he's got to, he's got to. I 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. So I'm super excited to see you've just started 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 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? I 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 to gain some data on you, to actually assess your digital dependence, assess your attention span. Have you ever taken a test of your attention? Like, do you know where it falls? Like, 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. Why don't 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 we're doing along the way. But how do we know what to do? The data. If we collect data and we actually have assessments available to people. I'm extremely passionate about making scientific assessments available to the general public. I think science should be for people, not profits. Where do I find the assessment? You go to MMMinstitute.org. MMM. Mind machine and meaning. Institute.org. Okay. I'll link that below and I'll put it really big on the screen here. MMMinstitute.org. Free assessments. Thank you so much for being here. Such a little man. 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. As a founder building a business when I was in my early twenties, I think I always had a deep sense of imposter syndrome because there was something that I wasn't good at and that thing was finances. Finance and understanding your financial position as a small business is the great enabler of all of your dreams. I was running from it until I discovered a platform called Xero. Xero is an accounting and financial management platform specifically for small businesses and it brings accounting, payments, payroll and analytics all into one place even for people that don't love doing finances. Xero wants to do the financial work for you but its core ambition is to go beyond keeping the financial record because Xero wants to help you understand what's happening in your business and increasingly and this is maybe the most important thing is help you make decisions. Finally we have a partner who can enable us in a simple way for those people that are both left brain or right brain and enable our dreams. You can learn more about Xero by going to Xero.com. Thank you to Xero. Thank you for sponsoring this podcast but also thank you for helping me to scale my business as somebody that quite frankly has never loved finances that much.