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

Are you trapped in a cycle of digital distraction, and brain fog despite working harder than ever? Dr. Sahar Yousef reveals how to take back control of your attention, stop digital addiction, and unlock your true cognitive potential. Dr. Sahar Yousef is a renowned cognitive neuroscientist, professor at UC Berkeley, and the founder of the Becoming Superhuman Lab. She specializes in cognitive neuroplasticity, human performance, and optimizing the biological operating systems of the brain. Her ground-breaking research focuses on building practical frameworks that help high-performers achieve extreme focus, strategic automaticity, and deep workflow mastery without burning out. In this episode, she explains: ■ The Attention Trap: Technology platforms are deliberately engineered by behavioral neuroscientists to maximize engagement and exploit your brain's survival wiring rather than support your productivity. ■ The Grayscale Hack: Switching your phone's color to grayscale significantly reduces neurological stimulation and can instantly reclaim hours of your scrolling every single week. ■ The Focus Sprint: Breaking your major goals down into granular execution lists with strict time blocking allows you to leverage anticipatory brain networks and double your output. ■ The Myth of Multitasking: Task-switching creates severe attentional baggage that drains your cognitive energy and makes you up to 60% slower than monotasking. ■ The Power of Boredom: Why allowing your mind to wander is the vital mechanism that activates neural network problem-solving and produces your best creative insights. Chapters 00:00:00 Intro 00:02:27 What's Holding Us Back Today? 00:06:48 Why Should We Listen To You? 00:08:20 What's Stopping Us From Being Productive? 00:12:14 The Productivity Toolkit 00:14:17 Why Is Focus Essential For Your Health? 00:17:34 Does Productivity Software Actually Work? 00:21:50 Why Do We Feel Pressured To Reply Instantly? 00:24:58 How To Separate Signal From Noise 00:27:20 Why The Modern World Fights Our Biology 00:29:11 How To Stop Avoiding Discomfort 00:32:40 How Big Tech Hijacks Your Brain 00:43:52 How To Break Phone Addiction 00:53:17 Ads 00:55:19 The Focus Sprint: How To Double Your Productivity 01:00:48 How To Prioritise Tasks: MITs Vs. LITs 01:04:29 How To Find Your Goals: Finding Your Everest 01:08:42 What Creates True Human Connection? 01:13:52 Why Small Steps Work Better 01:17:46 How To Avoid Distractions: Should You Work To Music? 01:19:58 Do Productivity Timers Actually Work? 01:24:50 Why Boredom Is Good For You 01:30:49 How To Spark Creative Ideas 01:33:17 How To Stop Overthinking And Negative Thoughts 01:36:18 Ads 01:37:27 How To Find Your Chronotype 01:46:11 How Big Tech Manipulates The Public 01:51:21 What Tech Companies Hide About AI 01:55:44 Why Is Thinking For Yourself Getting Harder? 01:59:52 Why Multitasking Doesn't Work 02:05:52 How To Become Luckier In Life Follow Dr. Sahar Yousef: YouTube - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/1wlOOZy Instagram - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/8bkc1Uq LinkedIn - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/9DlHLga TikTok - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/FyYDi72 Facebook - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/1zDXa74 Go to MMM Institute - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/t7Wy1O to take the Digital Dependence Index, test your attention span, and more. You will get your personal results and see how you compare to others, while contributing to global open research. Go to MyChronotype - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/51zrfNX to take the chronotype assessment for free use the code: DOAC Independent Fact Check: https://stevenbartlett.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/DOAC-Dr-Sahar-Yousef-Independent-Research-Further-Reading.pdf The Diary Of A CEO: ◼ Join DOAC circle here - https://doaccircle.com/ ◼ Buy The Diary Of A CEO book here - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/BWjLTZK ◼ Shop The Diary Of A CEO collection: https://thediary.com/collections/shop ◼ Get email updates - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/5IB1H6E ◼ Follow Steven - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/AGU9QP4 Sponsors: Ketone - https://ketone.com/STEVEN for 30% off your subscription order Linkedin Talent Solutions - http://linkedin.com/DOAC

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Steven Bartlett?

  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 Zero. Zero 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. Zero wants to do the financial work for you, but its core ambition is to go beyond keeping the financial record because Zero 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.

• 0:45Steven Bartlett?

  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 Zero by going to zero.com. Thank you to Zero. 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.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  Every single time you switch your attention, you pay for it.

• 1:06Steven Bartlett?

  So multitasking is a myth.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. So what we're 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.

• 1:15Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, let's do this.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  All right. Are you ready?

• 1:17Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  Get ready, go.

• 1:19Steven Bartlett?

  Oh my gosh, this is a shit show.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  Done?

• 1:21Steven Bartlett?

  So on a daily basis theoretically, I'm losing 60% of my productivity just by switching between two different types of tasks at once.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:40Steven Bartlett?

  So what is in this box?

• 1:41Speaker 01

  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 assembling line of food and candy just going straight in. There's no backstop, but we can use reverse neuroscience to reverse this entire thing.

• 2:05Steven Bartlett?

  Where's the first place to start?

• 2:06Speaker 01

  First, put your phone in grave. 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.

• 2:28Steven Bartlett?

  I can see in your productivity toolkit, there is a clock.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. This is a huge, huge game changer in terms of productivity, but also there was a focus sprint to help people to do up to two times as much as they would otherwise do. And we can talk about biological chronotypes that dictate the ideal time you should be doing your focus sprints. But also I have another amazing thing to strengthen your mind and make you better at focusing. So I'm gonna teach you all this stuff.

• 2:52Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so let's get into it.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  So the first thing we ought to really focus in on is.

• 2:57Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 3:31Steven Bartlett?

  Dr. Sahar Youssef.

• 3:35Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 3:44Speaker 01

  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 wanna do away with it. And I know that there are fundamental laws of biology, but we blissfully ignore these laws of biology.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  We're obsessed with sort of innovation, but we're doing that with this.

• 5:15Steven Bartlett?

  With our brains.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  With our brains. This is a biological system. Isn't it a good idea to take a step back and learn how the system actually works? I just feel like there's so much friction with how we're working and living today. And I would say the number one thing that seems to be getting in the way of all of this is, at the moment, technology, which is such a shame because it's also, and the most amazing piece of, I would say, modern human invention.

• 5:42Steven Bartlett?

  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? Like, what are the words that in their head they're using to describe the problem that your work solves?

• 6:12Speaker 01

  I hear a lot about brain fog.

• 6:13Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  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.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  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, we're not listening. We don't hear the inside of ourselves anymore. I think there's some sort of global discomfort with being with ourselves and we've been distracted completely 24/7. Like every little second and minute in between all of our tasks and to-dos and meetings and calls and this and that is filled in with technology and scrolling. We're just constantly consuming. And if you put yourself into that sort of setup and state, when is it that you, your mind, is supposed to say, hey, what about this?

• 7:12Speaker 01

  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 wanna 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 wanna do and still be happy.

• 7:52Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 8:00Speaker 01

  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. Keyword there, sort of that root, plastic, plasticity. So the brain is constantly changing and evolving and adapting. And 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, you know, my lab has colloquially been called the Becoming

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Superhuman Lab because my area of interest is increasing things like your attention span, your memory, your general fluid intelligence. So these cognitive traits that we have and these cognitive skills, I wanna increase the volume on all of those things. I wanna make people better, faster, stronger. So that's, that's what I've always been obsessed with.

• 9:02Steven Bartlett?

  You can make me superhuman?

• 9:04Speaker 01

  I mean, yes.

• 9:05Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 9:06Speaker 01

  We have to define it though, of course, yes.

• 9:07Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  I think you're probably already a fair bit there.

• 9:10Steven Bartlett?

  No, no, no, no, no. There's room for improvement. Trust me.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Always, always. For myself as well, always. But I do practice quite a bit of what I preach, but there's, you know, we are human at the end of the day.

• 9:20Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm, but I would like to be superhuman.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 9:23Steven Bartlett?

  So hopefully we can get, 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?

• 9:30Speaker 01

  I've worked with a lot of executives. One of the first execs I worked with, and I, of course, I can't say who, but it's a fortune, it would be a Fortune 10 company. And I, I used to do these observations. So I would, let's say if I did this for you, by the way, you'd, you know, you'd say, okay, for the next couple of days, I'm going to have this weird doctor lady, this neuroscientist, like, follow me around and she's just observing me. Like, I would notice, like, everything from what you're eating and drinking throughout the course of the day. If you take breaks, how you work. I'd follow you to a bunch of your meetings, you know, I just like, I'm just like with you for a bit, observing, taking notes. And then we would do an overhaul. And then I would intervene and then be like, all right, we got it. This is going to get changed up.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  And I, I have this very distinct memory because this was a huge point of transition for my work. I'm sitting there in his office and it's a modern, as you might have, glass everywhere, you know? So he's sitting in a glass box in the middle of a busy floor. It's a Fortune 10 and he's the boss. So everybody can, it's like, you know, he can see everyone, everyone can see him. So you've now put this human being, this extremely intelligent human being that controls billions of dollars. And you've put him in a glass box. Now, he also has in mind, he's working on a deck for a board meeting. Extremely important. He's pulling together data that different teams have sent him and he's looking at things. He's making pretty big decisions. And he's like, yeah, that's what I'm doing. I'm like, that's fine, you do you. I'll be back here.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  And I see him, he's on his computer, but he has a second monitor. And the second monitor has his email open. And then he has two phones, personal and professional, and they're both face up right next to him. And he had an Apple Watch on. So as he's sitting down to focus, it's just like, bing, bing, boop, bop. And then all of this is happening. And then there's people walking by. And then at some point, his chief of staff like comes in and he's just like, excuse me, you know, you know, don't forget this. And 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, a study done, 47 seconds is the average amount of time. A knowledge worker stays focused on one screen before another one distracts him.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  If I told you, I want to give you a billion dollars. And I'm here to support you, you know, and advise in any way that I can. But your goal is in fact, let's say to cure cancer. And it's you. So hopefully you can galvanize the best minds from all around the world. How would you want them to go about trying to solve this global issue of such importance? Would you strap them up with an Apple Watch, a bunch of notifications, a Slack? And then litter their day with a bunch of meetings and calls? And then hope that in the next few years, they cure this thing?

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Ideally, you want them to be in an environment with a setup that is not distracting? And like, doesn't waste their best thinking? They don't like wake up in the morning and it's like, oh, hey, by the way, instead of thinking about that whole cancer bit, you need to jump onto this call and we need to talk about this thing. And it's just constant ping ponging like this all day. What is this? Just sit down for 20 minutes and just focus. And so it's, it's almost, it's what's hysterical is I studied far more complex things than I find myself talking to people about, which is hysterical. We just need to focus on cleaning this shit up. That's why I call it digital hygiene. There are obstacles in the way of productivity and performance and focus.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Forget becoming superhuman. We just need to become human. Like, do we know, do you, do we all understand collectively here? How this human system works? So that we can accept again, those laws of biology, as you see, we come back to this.

• 13:19Steven Bartlett?

  I am, 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. This is,

• 13:41Steven Bartlett?

  you can, you didn't want to make it an app, but there is some of the stuff you talk about is in this box. I guess as someone that wants to be able to do the best work of my life, think clearly, interview well, build businesses, innovate, be creative, all of those things that you were pointing at through your explanations. I want to know, like, where's the first place to start? What's the first domino? Like, if I fuck up my sleep, is that the first, do I have to meditate? Like, what is the?

• 14:06Speaker 01

  There's one that I have to begin with the foundational, which you already mentioned yourself is 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, the mind of the listeners here. And I've had the interesting and distinct pleasure of having many a CEO and an executive who is haggard, tired, especially the founders that are grinding, uh, come to me and ask, okay, I want to become one person better. And I find out that they're averaging five hours of sleep a night. Like, okay, can I paint a picture for you of what this feels like? It feels like you've taken your car to the mechanic. And as a mechanic, I'm looking at it and the thing is on fire. Like, it's literally like, it's on fire.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  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 baseline performance. So that's the thing. When you don't get enough sleep, and mind you, that's a minimum of seven hours a night. If you're not getting enough sleep, it's impacting your cognitive performance, your emotional regulation. So it'll be irascible, you know, in the office and with other people. Like, the, the, the system is messed up. So sleep is for sure the foundation.

• 15:20Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  We gotta 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.

• 15:38Steven Bartlett?

  What is that?

• 15:39Speaker 01

  This is a phone lockbox. So we would theoretically put your technology inside and then lock it away from you. You want to do it?

• 15:47Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, go for it.

• 15:48Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, let me just make sure it's off.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  You're like, let me just get rid of some of the things on the screen.

• 15:53Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, turn that upside down.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  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.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  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, there, it's impossible to divorce those concepts from one another. They're connected in the most connected way that they can be. The way that they're connected is you cannot remember anything that you do not attend to. You think about that.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  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. And I don't want people to think it's just phones necessarily. It's this, it's notifications in general. And if you're monitoring the, your inbox all day and it's constantly available to you, what's your plan for having deep thoughts?

• 17:32Steven Bartlett?

  The rebuttal that comes to mind, although I don't even believe it. But this is the rebuttal that I think a lot of, you know, me and my listeners will be thinking right now. Yes, but what if something happens? I have my email open because maybe a big, a big email comes in. Or I have my WhatsApp right there because maybe my fiance is going to tell me I need to let her in the house. Or some, you know, something's going to happen.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  Totally. Fires. So we call them, right? Fires, urgencies. I get it. I'm a caretaker for both of my, you know, it's, I, I get it. I call these, by the way, VIPs. These are VIP notifications and messages. Can I paint a picture for you for a second?

• 18:08Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  We figured this out for mail. If you have an extremely important package coming to your house, how do we deal with this in the mail system? Somebody knocks. It needs a signature. Like, we're not leaving this outside. Somebody needs to be home, knock, knock, knock. I'm going to come and get your attention. To me, that knock, knock, knock, you need to sign for this 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.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  The default settings of all of our technology are designed, by the way, by people like me.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  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 TikTok and all of that. 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."

• 19:47Speaker 01

  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?

• 20:32Speaker 01

  What do they want out of me as a customer?

• 20:34Steven Bartlett?

  And when you say bottom line, for those that don't know, you mean profit incentive, right?

• 20:39Speaker 01

  Yes, 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. Its engagement is the currency. So, everything from the little, the sound that your email client makes when you send an email off, that's been tested. Tested of what will feel the best and sound the best to the human. Everything from the vibrate functionality that you feel in your phone has been highly

• 21:19Speaker 01

  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 push is, 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.

• 21:41Steven Bartlett?

  It sounds obvious, but it's totally not obvious that a productivity tool's incentive actually isn't your own productivity. It is your engagement with the tool.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:53Steven Bartlett?

  Because you're totally right. When these companies report to investors or whatever, they have to show how much engagement, i.e. 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.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 22:54Steven Bartlett?

  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 shall I do?

• 23:01Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  My first name, I'm a little lucky, I have a more rare first name. So if somebody says Sahar, I'm like, "Okay, you've got, what is it?" You know? Because otherwise, what's our reality, Stephen? Like, we're CC'd on email chains with like seven other people sometimes, and they're just talking to each other. I do not need to get a ping every single time Stacy and Stephen 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.

• 24:20Steven Bartlett?

  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 I, 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, my sort of sub-question was like, I bet they're, I bet they're often seen as rude.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:40Steven Bartlett?

  Or like, I bet they have to develop a muscle against people-pleasing.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  Indeed, yeah. I honestly, probably, the, the first person that came to my mind is, honestly, my husband. Yeah. Who's, who's a faculty, he's here.

• 24:54Steven Bartlett?

  No, he's in there, isn't he?

• 24:56Speaker 01

  Besides to me...

• 24:58Steven Bartlett?

  You'll get him right to reply.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  I'm 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. And we run a company together, which, by the way, two people at the helm that's default no, default yes, I think makes a really good balance, because we debate it out. Everything becomes a discussion. I'm like, "Oh, this, what a great opportunity, we should totally do this." And he's like, "This is not the objective. Stay on the obje..." I'm like, "Well, but it's a shiny new object and this thing and the 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, I'll channel him, he'll say, "Yeah, maybe it's disappointing to some that I did

• 25:41Speaker 01

  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."

• 26:03Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 26:19Steven Bartlett?

  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 the, 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, I saw Johnny Ives being interviewed, and Johnny Ives was describing Steve Jobs. And Johnny Ives said, "The most remarkable thing about Steve is his focus." And he said, "Focus isn't doing one thing instead of another. Focus is waking up in the morning and thinking something is a brilliant idea, and with every bone in your body, you know that that thing is brilliant and you want to do it,

• 27:04Steven Bartlett?

  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, 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.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 27:36Steven Bartlett?

  And I, I, I've, 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. So...

• 27:45Speaker 01

  You're well on your way because you've already given me your thumbs.

• 27:47Steven Bartlett?

  I know, that's...

• 27:48Speaker 01

  I'm not even kidding.

• 27:49Steven Bartlett?

  I'm anxious about that.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  I'm not even kidding, though. This is the noise. You can either increase the signal, or you can decrease the noise. What do you think is easier?

• 28:01Steven Bartlett?

  Decreasing the noise.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  For sure. As a first step?

• 28:03Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  As a first step, of course.

• 28:05Steven Bartlett?

  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 the radio was, the job was to reduce the noise.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 28:15Steven Bartlett?

  They never mentioned increasing the signal.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  Because it's rather difficult. It's, it's possible.

• 28:19Steven Bartlett?

  There.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  It's there.

• 28:21Steven Bartlett?

  It's there.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  It's literally get the shit out of your life.

• 28:25Steven Bartlett?

  We, we now think that multitasking or context switching is a skill. And we think you mentioned a term earlier on, which I've never had mono.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  Monotasking?

• 28:35Steven Bartlett?

  You said the brain is a monotasker.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a monotasking machine.

• 28:38Steven Bartlett?

  What do, prove that to me. How, this thing here. This is a monotasking machine.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  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. Like, I mean, I work out, but I can't fight off like an actual predator, you know? Like my nails aren't teeth, my teeth aren't that sharp. It's, we are kind of puny. But where we're not puny is this. So it is in my ability to strategize, think and focus where I can outsmart predators. That's how human beings have survived. That's how we're running the world. Do you know about a third of the human brain? Like I, and I say that the cortical real estate, so real estate across this human cortex

• 29:28Speaker 01

  is dedicated just to looking and listening.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  That's a lot. Just eavesdropping, loud sounds, anything that might come into view. So we're designed to be hypervigilant to anything that might come in our environment, which, I mean, think of an open office. Think of a typical setup where people are working. Like the example I gave of that executive, literally sitting in a glass box with all the people that he works with, walking by constantly and all this noise, and he's trying to find the signal and he's trying to tap into the signal. And I'm like, no. I want our species to keep advancing and I want us to advance as fast as humanly possible. And I know we can. But all the brilliance of humanity is currently being sucked away by these distractions.

• 30:15Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 30:21Steven Bartlett?

  Or the thing pings or whatever, the Apple Watch vibrates. The other is we're in the middle of work and we stumble across something which is a little bit difficult or tricky or a little bit uncomfortable. And we go seeking out the distraction. So you know, we might be in the middle of an essay. It's a little bit tricky. And so we could reach for a WhatsApp and we're chatting in a group chat about the weekend.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:41Steven Bartlett?

  Is that a true sort of accurate reflection of how humans behave?

• 30:46Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 30:47Steven Bartlett?

  It is. Cause I was just thinking about my own behavior. Sometimes, yes, ping. I don't have notifications on. Well, I don't have most notifications on. But I still find myself reaching for the phone every minute.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  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 feeling a little depressed, a little FOMO, lonely? What are some other ones?

• 31:32Steven Bartlett?

  I think you nailed it.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  Those are all the ones.

• 31:34Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  Um, 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?

• 32:13Steven Bartlett?

  TikTok, Shake Shack, pornography.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 32:33Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 32:43Steven Bartlett?

  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 um, do you know what? It sounds crazy, but in a way, that's kind of what we're doing with our phones.

• 33:24Steven Bartlett?

  In a way, when my phone dies, and I'm just going to be honest, because I don't think there's any point in me trying to fucking pretend I'm something I'm not. When my phone dies, I, it's like a mild feeling of anxiety when my phone dies. And I'm most certainly addicted to my phone. I spend an unbelievable amount of hours with that thing. I probably pick it up 200 times a day just to check. So we're going to remove the phone when we're doing deep work. We're going to turn off notifications as it relates to the phone. Anything else?

• 33:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:52Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  There's plenty. I liken what the tech, big tech essentially, what technology has done to really honestly hijack the brain and make it addicted. I find that it is eerily similar to how the food industry got us addicted to sugar and processed food. My humble belief is that it's the exact same three-part framework and it's the playbook was copied nearly identically. We have obviously a fundamental need to eat. Now, if you look at the food industry, how might we hijack biology and the brain? Yeah, I know. Evil fingers.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  How might we hijack the brain to actually get it addicted to sugar and to processed food? If we know there's a fundamental need there. Well, how you do that is you increase the stimulation of the food and you do that by actually just injecting sugar wherever you can. I'm not sure how it is in the UK, but if you, and 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? Doesn't have to be a sweet loaf. But lo and behold, there it is. So we're injecting all of this sugar and increasing the stimulation of the food. Right?

• 35:18Speaker 01

  And that's how you can get somebody hooked. Now, why would humans be already sort of naturally addicted to sugar? Because food used to be scarce. It's hard to find. So we're naturally going to be inclined to these things that are indicators of jackpots. Salt, fat, sugar, yummy, yummy, yummy. It's how you make food really delicious. Right? And we're all naturally inclined to desire those things and covet those things and be really, really stimulated by them. So what you do is you inject those yummy, yummy things. So you're increasing the stimulation of your food. Oh, it's so amazing. Then you decrease the friction. Let's make it easier for people to get this stuff. You make everything adorably packaged and portioned out so that, and you make it easy and easy, fast, like fast food, fast, easily accessible

• 35:58Speaker 01

  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, I'm hungry. I want to eat something.

• 36:21Steven Bartlett?

  Satiating being full.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  Being full.

• 36:24Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Yes. My body needs things that would make me full. And what makes us full in food? Protein. Fiber, candy.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  Nope, there's no protein, there's no fiber. So the food industry has figured this out. Technology's done the same thing. They've done the exact same thing. They followed the exact same playbook. They increased the stimulation by increasing this color saturation of the icons and the light that's emitted from the screen. So that your actual technology looks more visually stimulating. And that visual stimulation, as we were talking about before, huge part of your cortex is your visual cortex, your occipital lobe. So it's super, super stimulated by all of that color saturation. So it's like, oh my gosh, think of like a casino. You've never been to a casino and you're like, oh, they went with neutrals.

• 37:10Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  You know what I mean? It's all the colors, all the time, all the lights. It's all the things. So it's stimulating and you keep looking at it. The other way that we've increased the stimulation with technology is short form reels. Short form content, super, super fast, TikTok style, so that it's uber stimulating and you can't look away. And by the way, there's an entire field, intermittent variable rewards. You get these jackpots once in a while. Right? What's fascinating about the algorithm, by the way, and your algorithm, I'm sure is exactly the same. Your algorithm knows you really, really well. And it knows what content you're going to love that day. So it's got all this like saved up content for you. So it's got like, ooh,

• 37:53Speaker 01

  Stephen's going to love this. Oh, he's really going to love this. He's even liked this thing like a week ago, like something like this. Okay. And it's got this treasure trove of stuff that it's holding for you. You get on to one of these apps and you start scrolling. It's not going to show you the stuff it knows you're going to love. Not in the beginning. That's bad business. Don't you think? You just came into the store. You have all the energy in the world. You obviously have nothing better to do. So you've now sat down. And in the beginning, I can show you meh content. I can just show you like, hmm, in the beginning. Because I have your attention and it knows how long it has your attention. Every person is a little bit different.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  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 do, 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.

• 38:50Steven Bartlett?

  Darmstadt clip.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's like, there he is. It's that Bartlet again, but I can't look away. And I like.

• 38:57Steven Bartlett?

  People are watching this reel right now.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  Right now.

• 38:59Steven Bartlett?

  And they're thinking, this was the one. I was just about to bounce.

• 39:02Speaker 01

  This is the one. You love this, right? You love this.

• 39:04Steven Bartlett?

  But there's science behind this. I remember being 16 years old in psychology class and reading about the pigeons and variable rewards.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 39:11Steven Bartlett?

  What is this? What is this variable rewards phenomenon?

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Oh my gosh, it's so, humans are fascinating. I find humans to be the coolest thing in the known universe. I've, we're so ridiculous.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  Human beings, believe it or not, do not love consistent reward. We become more addicted when it's in fact intermittent and somewhat variable.

• 39:39Steven Bartlett?

  So when we don't know when it's coming, but we know it's coming.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is I have a whole theory on like people who are in toxic relationships. Like seriously, think about like love bombing. This is the science of love bombing. Like I'm an asshole. I'm an asshole. I'm like ghosting you and then bam, oh, I hit you with a bunch of love and people like, oh my, and then they become addicted to these toxic fucking relationships. Similar concept. 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.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  You dude, you know that slot machines are programmed. It's a computer program. It's all math. They want you to lose a bunch of money, be in the red and then have you make up a dollar fifty and then be like, oh, I'm back in. And it's this is the, this is the game. This is the human game. So the algorithm works exactly the same. That's how they increase the stimulation. So then they also decreased the friction, just like food. Here you have the infinite scroll. We've literally removed the backstops. Do you remember the early days of like YouTube and Instagram? You to like, you only, by the way, saw the things that you followed, that you subscribe to, by the way, subscribe. But like, this is the point is, is actually the subscription model allows you to curate your feed a little bit more.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  It's a, 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 in a, it just keeps going.

• 41:36Steven Bartlett?

  It used to be pagination. It used to be like page one, page two, page three.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 41:40Steven Bartlett?

  In the early internet, now it's just infinite.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  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 decreased 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

• 42:27Speaker 01

  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 want, 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.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  So you have, 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, so hard, 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? You've, 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.

• 43:28Steven Bartlett?

  Of course I have. But I want to eat more Skittles later.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  Okay, there we go.

• 43:32Steven Bartlett?

  That's the problem. If I have these drunk calories, then in six hours' time, I'm, I'm back looking for more drunk calories.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  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 beautifully. Think about the difference between some 30 second reel that someone has made and then they inject like two quick facts versus sitting down and actually sinking into a multi-hour show. You're attracted to both. One is a lot harder to sit through than the other. But what I'm telling you is this is what's actually going to satiate you.

• 44:19Speaker 01

  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 you, by the way, you just watched. Test it. Seriously, I'm not kidding. Do the quick short form for a while. And in the moment you're like, oh my gosh, I just learned a fun fact about this. And this is, you think you're learning. It's an illusion. What I believe we're, by the way, Stephen, up for right now

• 45:01Speaker 01

  is I think the world is waking up to this now. And this is going to be the new big

• 45:07Speaker 01

  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 setting, Stephen.

• 45:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 46:15Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 46:24Speaker 01

  I've tested it.

• 46:24Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, okay.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  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.

• 46:40Steven Bartlett?

  Wow.

• 46:41Speaker 01

  That's seven hours a week. The way I always talk about, that's the difference between you getting that workout in.

• 46:46Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, that's crazy.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  Do you know what I mean?

• 46:48Steven Bartlett?

  It's crazy.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  When you go running, 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, Stephen, 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.

• 47:06Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you.

• 47:08Steven Bartlett?

  Did you hear that? She's from Berkeley. That's an amazing university. She's a doctor.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  Long, no, it's true though.

• 47:14Steven Bartlett?

  She also said subscribe if you didn't.

• 47:16Speaker 01

  You didn't get that.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  No, but honestly, it's true. It's really, it's not like made up. Short form content has even been shown, by the way, in some cases to increase attention span.

• 47:29Steven Bartlett?

  Completely agree.

• 47:30Speaker 01

  Of course you do. Yeah. It's like no one's paying me to say this. But no, long form content, like a film, like a good film, has been shown to increase empathy in young people. Just think about that. So like, again, the message is not, oh my God, technology is bad. All screen time is evil, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, no, no, no, no. I'm a huge fan of your content diet. Like make sure like whatever, if you want to sit down and watch a movie, sit down and watch a movie, like get into your pajamas, make a bowl of popcorn, like romanticize it, turn the lights down. You'll put Netflix on.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  Everyone's also got the phone out. So they're doing two things at once. This has just become like, we've accepted this apparently. That you no longer have people's undivided attention. So the way in which we're making content now is assuming that someone is looking at something else as well. This is so sad. And please tell me how if this is how bad our attention spans have gotten, how are first of all, kids supposed to learn in school? You told me that you have this interest in becoming 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?

• 48:41Steven Bartlett?

  Do you know what's funny? I was watching, um, I was watching a complicated old movie last night.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  Complicated?

• 48:49Steven Bartlett?

  It's one of those ones where if you miss a word, the, the next three hours is you're lost.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 48:54Steven Bartlett?

  Because they're going to, they've named a planet, Kola Lublublub. And if you don't understand what Kola Lublublub is, you're fucked. And I was like, I was, I was having to pay so much attention to this movie. And I remember this from my childhood. I used to just sit there on the sofa with my family and just look at the screen. But it was like I was resisting an urge now in 2026, when watching this very complicated old movie. As if there's now a mismatch between the media that I'm used to versus the way that I and many of us live our lives. And it's just, it was just super front of mind because I just remember trying to like the, the effort I was putting in to, to stay focused on this movie last night. I mean, trying to make sure I understood every single word, but I never, I never did that when I was younger. You would just sit there and watch.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  You just sit there and watch?

• 49:38Steven Bartlett?

  There might be some people at some level thinking, yeah, but I love short form. I love it.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  I love candy too.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  If we have too much short form, we already know this. You're more depressed, you're more anxious, your attention span is shot. Like, why would you want that? You literally feel shittier and your brain operates at a lower level, cognitively speaking, if you overconsume this stuff. And it's your choice, by the way. I'm not here to tell people how to live their lives. But I want people to wake up to realize, one, the fundamental needs are there. So my goal is for you to meet those needs. And the way that you do that, to increase this satiation, is you actually go learn something new. You actually spend time I R L, 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.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  And if you do that, you will notice that you're full and you will magically actually like short form less. You are far less likely to lose yourself scrolling until 2 o'clock in the morning and then feeling like shit the next day because you didn't get enough sleep.

• 50:48Steven Bartlett?

  I think that feeling like shit the next day is a good way to navigate life, which I heard Jack Dorsey back in the, a couple of years ago, when he was still at Twitter, talk about one of them new metrics was reducing regrettable minutes. And this idea of like regrettable minutes, I think is, because with Skittles, honestly, they would feel good in a moment, but I'd probably regret if I had a massive bag of Skittles. Probably regret it in a couple of hours, probably the next day. Because you, you know, it sends you on a bit of a roller coaster. And with platforms like TikTok, when you look at the data, they found that 60% of active TikTok users experienced negative welfare and would rather live in a world where it didn't exist, where the platform didn't exist.

• 51:30Steven Bartlett?

  It ranks as number one in terms of regret in this regard.

• 51:36Steven Bartlett?

  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, it was cool to scroll for a second, but how did I feel thereafter? Is something that I, I guess in the food analogy is pertinent.

• 51:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. I'm telling you, we're waking up.

• 51:59Steven Bartlett?

  People are waking up.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  Young people are waking up. That's the, that's the coolest thing.

• 52:03Steven Bartlett?

  I saw the graphs from the Financial Times, which showed time spent online had started to plateau since 2022 for young people first.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank God. I mean, but listen, it's still a push.

• 52:15Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 52:15Speaker 01

  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%. And I would say our generation.

• 52:32Steven Bartlett?

  That's crazy.

• 52:32Speaker 01

  That's crazy. I think something like, what is it, a third of UK nightclubs are also now, like engagement in the nightclub scene has gone down to a third. Dinner parties, there's this recent piece in the Atlantic that just came out about this, sort of the death of dinner parties. So people are spending increasingly more time alone and not with others. So they're hungry. Unfortunately, these platforms are taking advantage of that perpetual hunger and keeping us locked into the cycle of distraction. And now, by the way, it's socially appropriate for us to always hold our phones. It's always in our pocket. So one of the best things that you can do is actually to, is to introduce

• 53:14Speaker 01

  portion control back into how you are consuming content. Portion control. So you increase the friction. You do things like that phone parking lot bit, like put your phone out of sight, out of mind. Turn the notifications off. Turning the notifications off would be decreasing the stimulation. But increasing the friction is, listen, if I'm telling you this stuff is addictive and you want to do less of it, don't have it right there. That's like, it's like, it's like sitting down with someone who is freshly trying to become sober as an alcoholic and just be like, you don't mind if I just put this beer down in front of you, do I? Or do you? Just as you're working and going about your day?

• 53:52Steven Bartlett?

  No, I think the Skittles analogy is pretty good. Like, I wouldn't walk around with the Skittles in my pocket because if I did, I'd eat them. Every time I was stressed or bored.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 54:00Steven Bartlett?

  So.

• 54:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 54:22Steven Bartlett?

  This has had probably the single biggest impact on my office. Of all the products that I've tried that have given me productivity gains or cognitive boosts, I would say that exogenous ketones are in the top three most pivotal things that have given me a massive productivity gain. It's some Stanford graduates that have been able to basically bottle up the effect you get from being in a ketogenic diet in a small shot that you can take that makes you feel incredibly focused and gives your brain an incredible source of energy. And the clinical studies that have been done on exogenous ketones have absolutely blown my mind. I reached out to them. I became a curator in the company. I became an investor in the company. And so it's with great pride that I can tell you that this exists.

• 55:04Steven Bartlett?

  If you haven't tried these shots, go to ketone.com/steven for 30% off your subscription order. And you'll also get a free gift with your second shipment. I still buy my ketone shots predominantly online, but thankfully I can now grab them at Target whenever I drive past them here in the United States as well, because we're now stocked in Target, where your first shot is completely free. Whenever I talk to new founders, they all carry the same belief that the biggest threat to their small business is having a bad product. It's not. The biggest threat they face is hiring the wrong person for their small team. Because bad hires put the handbrake on growth and rapidly infect company culture. And I get it. When you're starting out, you need A players to grow your company, but you don't have 40 spare hours to spend sifting through interviews. So you hire fast to fill the seat.

• 55:48Steven Bartlett?

  But this ends up costing you even more in the long term. What any small business actually needs is a reliable and efficient way to find the right talent without stalling momentum. That's where our long-term sponsor, LinkedIn and LinkedIn Hiring Pro, can help you. It streamlines the entire hiring process from drafting a job description to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Nearly 60% of hirers who've used this tool have found a candidate to interview within a week. Hire right the first time around and get started by posting your first job for free at LinkedIn.com/DOAC. That's LinkedIn.com/DOAC. Terms and conditions apply. What I really want, quite selfishly, is like 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.

• 56:33Steven Bartlett?

  They have to edit code, could be write. And we're doing a lot more writing than ever before, in part because of AI. So we're, 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?

• 56:48Speaker 01

  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 a method. First step.

• 57:21Steven Bartlett?

  How many steps are there in a focus sprint?

• 57:23Speaker 01

  Five.

• 57:24Steven Bartlett?

  There are five steps.

• 57:25Speaker 01

  There are five steps.

• 57:26Steven Bartlett?

  So this, these five steps will make me 200% more productive.

• 57:30Speaker 01

  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, like some big event or a big speech that you need to give, like some butterflies? You get this like increase in cortisol and adrenaline, right? I mean, think about how interesting, amazing the, our biology is. I am sitting at rest.

• 58:00Speaker 01

  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. Okay? The other beautiful thing about this, from a team perspective, is if your team can see your calendar,

• 58:45Speaker 01

  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. Just you 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.

• 59:31Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  So 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?

• 1:00:26Steven Bartlett?

  So the goal becomes an output, not the input.

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 1:00:29Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, that's an interesting one, because I think a lot of us do create a goal, which is an input, like I'm gonna do, I'm gonna work on this thing, or I'm gonna, I'm gonna think about this, or I'm gonna strategize this, not like the output, which is the thing that's gonna be measurable and come out of this work.

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:46Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, that's, that's really interesting.

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  It's the outcome with a breakdown, like I wanna see an execution list.

• 1:00:51Steven Bartlett?

  That feels like a lot of work.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  I'm not kidding, give me a minute and a half. Here's the problem, 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?

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  People, that's when you lose people, that's when you lose your focus. In, in deciding what the next step is, this is a sprint. I don't want you to figure out how to play the game when you're in the middle of the game, we need to outline what the heck the game is, and then you're gonna go into it and be like, let's go, sprint, and we go, go, go, go, go. So you block the time, you've communicated to, to the people on your team, they know what's happening, you're benefiting from all those amazing hormones and those anticipatory networks, then.

• 1:01:45Steven Bartlett?

  Step two.

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  Step two, you set the goal.

• 1:01:48Steven Bartlett?

  And the goal is an output, and it's specific, and it's broken down into subgoals.

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  Yes, and by the way, you've got in here, a diary. So if you've got a daily planner of sorts, something like this, I want you to treat your to-do list, your massive task list, I know you've got one, we all have one, like your refrigerator. Do you have urgent items on your to-do list, like what is the thing, did you defrost chicken? Because that's a ticking time bomb, that needs to get used. So every single day, you wake up in the morning, and you're about to choose, what are my, I call these, by the way, in our lab, MITs, your most important tasks. Your MITs are your most important tasks, or 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.

• 1:02:37Steven Bartlett?

  So we've got a little chart there, I think, of the MITs, right?

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Every single day, I want you to, in a way, open up the refrigerator, open up the pantry, open up the freezer, and I want you to ask yourself, first, first, how much time do I have available today?

• 1:02:54Steven Bartlett?

  Three hours.

• 1:02:55Speaker 01

  That's a good day. That's a good day, like uninterrupted focus time.

• 1:03:00Steven Bartlett?

  Not uninterrupted, but I can make it uninterrupted.

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  Beautiful, we'll take it. Three hours is beautiful.

• 1:03:05Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:03:27Steven Bartlett?

  It's an interesting question, because we often reach for the easiest things, and there's the thing that we're not quite ready to do yet, because we don't have the information, and we're, and you know, and maybe it's a little bit out of our era of competence, we don't like finance, we don't like invest, we don't like operations, so we avoid that, and we kind of, you know, it's like opening the fridge, as you say, and we reach for the thing that we know we love, like, and we do that.

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  Those are LITs. LITs, like, an email, a doc you sign, 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 minutes, but it makes me feel like I can cross something off, and it's like, I've done the thing, I've done the thing, I've done the thing. These are the easy things to do, that make me feel a sense of progress. We consider these, by the way, these LITs, fast dopamine. And my humble opinion is, most of the, the things that push our businesses forward, the things that push our lives forward are typically here to the right, they're the slow dopamine bits.

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  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 gonna push you towards your goals, your long-term goals, the 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.

• 1:04:59Steven Bartlett?

  So MITs are most important goals, LITs are least important goals?

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:05:03Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  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'd take that MIT, and then you'd 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 gonna spend 20 minutes on this, 15 minutes on this, five minutes on this, three minutes on this, da, da, da, da. So you make an execution list, or you could do an LIT sprint, you could do like 15 LITs.

• 1:05:34Steven Bartlett?

  Are we assuming that people will know what the MIT is? Like.

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:39Steven Bartlett?

  You, I look at this list of 69 things on my to-do list, how do I, is there a way for me to know which one is the most important?

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  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 wanna be, both personally and professionally, let's say, in five years?

• 1:06:03Steven Bartlett?

  What is your Everest?

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  What is your Everest?

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  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 gonna 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 gonna come

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  I did good, I had an amazing life, I did what I wanted to do here, and I'm ready to go.

• 1:07:11Speaker 01

  See what's next.

• 1:07:14Steven Bartlett?

  What's your answer to that?

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  I want to have loved, deeply.

• 1:07:26Speaker 01

  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, but I'm a firm believer in servant leadership. I think I've been put on the planet to, to help, in whatever ways that I can. So my job is to serve, and to make this world a better place, and with what I do, and what I can bring to the table. And that's my obsession. And it's come at a great cost of not doing a lot of other things, and not having a lot of what maybe other people see as fun, or personal sacrifices, but it seems to be the, the flavor of my mind, is that I'm squarely focused on building better systems for humanity.

• 1:08:12Steven Bartlett?

  It was very, 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 there was, like, so I imagined my romantic interest being here, and then I imagined all of my kids being around the bed, and I imagined what they thought of their dying father. And there was really like, three things that I wanted them to think, I wanted them to, to think that I had 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'd like, they were clear on the philanthropic impact that their father had had.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:55Steven Bartlett?

  So that was really clarifying, because it basically gave me three clear priorities, which are, like, 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, so that, but it was really clarifying, because there's really three things that matter.

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  So that gives you your direction.

• 1:09:13Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, it does.

• 1:09:14Speaker 01

  So if you wake up every single morning, now with that level of clarity.

• 1:09:18Steven Bartlett?

  I can go, the Skittles are not gonna bring me closer.

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  Fuck the Skittles.

• 1:09:23Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, fuck the Skittles.

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  Like, what is that, like, in what way, like, who on their deathbed is sitting around and going, damn, I wished I watched more Netflix, Netflix, please don't come after me? Who's sitting around going, damn, I wish I spent more time scrolling? And less time with my kids, or less time on my mission, on my obsessive mission? Like, nobody. Bronnie Ware is a hospice nurse, and she sat with many, many dying individuals, what an honor to do such a thing.

• 1:09:59Speaker 01

  Something that I hope to do in my lifetime, as to sort of be, you know, exercise my death duelist skills, and to be with folks who are, 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.

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  What are your regrets?

• 1:10:22Speaker 01

  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, Stephen, 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. It's 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 a, one of the paradoxes I find of love and human connection is that

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  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

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  for the rest of our lives. But the paradox of it, the mindfuck of it, if I may, is we'll never get it.

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  We die alone. Like, I will never understand your mind. This is the fascinating thing about consciousness. You have your consciousness, I have mine. And even moment to moment, my consciousness now in this moment is different than it was the last moment. I've changed.

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  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 is another. Like, we continue to be dynamic, but that's its own little rabbit hole.

• 1:12:10Steven Bartlett?

  But on that own little rabbit hole, there's, there's moments, I completely agree and accept what you're saying. There are these moments when you just feel like your consciousness has, is doing the tango with someone else's. It is intertwined. And you can, we, as I say, everyone can think of those moments when you look at someone and you go, I don't know what it is, but at some deep level, me and this person are with, our consciousness is dancing.

• 1:12:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:35Steven Bartlett?

  It's connected. And that's a very real thing. I experienced it a lot on this podcast, because you know, I sit here with someone for three hours, talk about their childhood, 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.

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:13:27Speaker 01

  I think what is necessary for two humans to have that flow together, that energetic dance together, is a loss of the sense of self. I think the self must die in those moments. And it does when we completely lose ourselves in this we. I think when we are stuck in our own self and identity, then I am aware of another. I am aware of your perception of me. And you will be aware of my perception of you. But I think those moments where it feels just magic and we've completely blended, that I'm not, no longer thinking about you as an other and I as I.

• 1:14:12Speaker 01

  I and you have become this energetic we.

• 1:14:19Speaker 01

  But again, that bit more spiritual.

• 1:14:21Steven Bartlett?

  No, but it perfectly dovetails into work, because we can all think of flow states where we dropped into work and three hours passed. 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.

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  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 an MIT, slow dopamine is like a rat going through a maze. And there's a big hunk of cheese at the end of the maze, but that's a lot of work. That is a long, arduous journey to get to that hunk of cheese. Whereas fast dopamine and LITs are like little bits of cheese that you're like, can you just eat that crumb? And it's like, sure, that seems easy enough. Eat right there, right? So the goal is to make your MITs as easy as your list of LITs. And how you do that is you take that big hunk of cheese and you sprinkle it throughout the maze.

• 1:15:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:15:45Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  Amazing things that I would do not choose to do.

• 1:15:50Steven Bartlett?

  You said no to that.

• 1:15:51Speaker 01

  I said no to that. That's exactly, there is, I don't know how to say no. Typically with really difficult physical feats. I have my own, but I prefer the mental ones. But, but yeah, he went, he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. And when he came back, he said that the, 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 to them. It's amazing. And, 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.

• 1:16:31Speaker 01

  And all of these amazing guides would keep telling everybody, hey, pole pole, slowly, slowly. Pole pole.

• 1:16:40Steven Bartlett?

  Pole pole.

• 1:16:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:17:00Steven Bartlett?

  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, turning the British cycling team around marginal gains.

• 1:17:09Speaker 01

  Beautiful.

• 1:17:09Steven Bartlett?

  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, 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. Cause the, he said that when he had Christopher Hoy, you know, again, that he took the British cycling team from being down and out to the greatest of all time. When Christopher Hoy was thinking about the, the world record or the podium, whatever, his time would get worse. And when he got Christopher Hoy, if he got him to sort of drop into a meditative state and ban him thinking about that,

• 1:17:51Steven Bartlett?

  not only would his time get better around the velodrome, but Christopher Hoy would get off the bike and, and say he couldn't remember the cycle. Which I think is this flow state. And the.

• 1:18:01Speaker 01

  It is.

• 1:18:02Steven Bartlett?

  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 5:00 PM and started staying till 1:00 AM in the morning because we felt like we were going somewhere. And this, this is what I referred to as from that conversation as the progress principle, which is like the feeling of progress.

• 1:18:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:18:25Steven Bartlett?

  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 like MITs into these LITs. Cause the reason I like the LITs is because I get the progress principle.

• 1:18:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:18:40Steven Bartlett?

  I get the like, oh, I'm making, I feel like I am going somewhere.

• 1:18:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:18:44Steven Bartlett?

  The MITs, it's hard to get that feeling unless you do what you just said, which is breaking them down.

• 1:18:51Speaker 01

  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 you, now you've got your Everest. Pole pole, you know, the next step.

• 1:19:15Steven Bartlett?

  Pole pole, I love that phrase.

• 1:19:16Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:19:30Steven Bartlett?

  What is your opinion on listening to music to do work and putting headphones on? What does the science say?

• 1:19:35Speaker 01

  People are different, of course. So some people seem to be distracted by it and they prefer silence. And if you don't, if you cannot be in a silent environment, you may benefit from noise cancelling. Right? I don't recommend listening to noise cancelling or having noise cancelling 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 could hear a pin drop. No, darling, the, the world is much noisier than that. So then the moment you don't have the noise cancelling on, you become, you're like, oh my, and you start, you start getting anxious and you start becoming overstimulated. And also your auditory system starts to actually adapt to the noise cancelling.

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

  So noise cancelling, 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 cancelling only for when maybe you want to do focus sprints, if you benefit from the silence. If you're gonna listen to music, ideally, music with no lyrics at all, or lyrics in a language that you don't understand. You can also benefit from having one particular playlist that you invest in, that your brain will over time, if you invest in it, slowly associate with focus. So you can have like a focus mode playlist, you can have an email sprint, you know, playlist. And then very, very different from what you might listen to, to wind down after work or to sleep. You should have different playlists for different brain states. Okay?

• 1:21:03Speaker 01

  So you've set yourself up in that way for success.

• 1:21:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:21:26Steven Bartlett?

  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?

• 1:21:33Speaker 01

  We're keenly interested in any sense of progress, so progress bars.

• 1:21:36Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:21:36Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:21:49Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:21:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:22:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:22:43Steven Bartlett?

  Like Parkinson's Law.

• 1:22:44Speaker 01

  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 want to, you need to clean your house, you have some errands to run? Time yourself, you will just work faster.

• 1:23:07Steven Bartlett?

  This idea got stuck in my head about five years ago, so I'd like to stick it in some other people's heads.

• 1:23:11Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:23:11Steven Bartlett?

  I read this thing, and it said, "The center point of your influence on this planet is the allocation of your time." And I really tried to, like, interrogate that. I was like, is that really it? Is, like, the game of my life really, first and foremost, how I allocate my time? Of course, then it's like, well, you know, how, when I show up, or the things I allocate it to. But the essence here, everything I described on my deathbed, having great relationships with my fiance, having great relationships with my family, achievement, the fact, the age that I get to the deathbed, my health, all of it really is, you know, downstream from the allocation of my time. What do I put my time on? Going to the gym?

• 1:23:51Steven Bartlett?

  Or do I put it on something else? And I just think that's a really important point, because when we talk about saving time and treating time in such a precious way, one of the rebuttals is, oh, this is stressful, this is a, this is a lot. It feels like a lot of pressure to, like, set a timer. But, you know, time really is the currency for me. I just think, I think it is for all of us. And I think as well, what I hear from your work is, it's not about there being a good and bad way to live one's life, it's just about being intentional with the time.

• 1:24:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:28Steven Bartlett?

  I think of how unintentional the average day is these days, because you're just pulled around like a plastic bag in the wind by fucking LITs. Anyway, sorry.

• 1:24:39Speaker 01

  I think you were very close, dangerously close to quoting Katy Perry there.

• 1:24:42Steven Bartlett?

  That really was right.

• 1:24:44Speaker 01

  I think so, isn't it? It's like I'm a plastic bag floating in the wind.

• 1:24:47Steven Bartlett?

  That's how I can feel in the modern world.

• 1:24:49Speaker 01

  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, like, right? They're not happy. They're not happy. People want to get good, high-quality work done. People want to make an impact, they want those things, because you're hiring amazing people. And from when we were all little, we were told, "Good job, you got in it." Like, 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.

• 1:25:34Speaker 01

  Instead, you just have to, like, 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? 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.

• 1:26:08Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, okay, so on this take a break.

• 1:26:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:11Steven Bartlett?

  At the very start, you were talking about innovation and creativity. Rick Rubin was sat here a couple of weeks ago, and I've done a lot of research around Steve Jobs to figure out how he was able to, like, see the future. Because, like, look back at his decision-making, and it was always so unexpected, and at the time, like, really contrarian. There's a great video of him stood at a developer conference, and the developer stands up and basically berates him, and says, like, "Why are you doing this again? You're, like, removing this particular software that every developer needs." This was Steve Jobs, like, removed, I think it was Flash, was it Flash from our devices so that we could stream video better? Removed the stylus from phones, the keyboard. And he could, and he was right in hindsight. But my question is, like, how did he see the future so clearly?

• 1:26:55Steven Bartlett?

  Rick Rubin and him seem to share a practice, which is boredom.

• 1:27:03Steven Bartlett?

  So, you know, as productivity people, we're always like, "Work, work, work." But then I studied these greats, these visionaries, and I go, "Oh, they had, like, a boredom practice, where they just, like, stood away from the picture." And so when you said "brain break," I was thinking, "Ah, hmm, maybe, is this what you're talking about, or is it something else?"

• 1:27:20Speaker 01

  This is tactical.

• 1:27:22Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:27:22Speaker 01

  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 they'll 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?

• 1:27:43Steven Bartlett?

  TikTok, or something, some other distraction.

• 1:27:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:28:12Speaker 01

  So you just keep going.

• 1:28:12Steven Bartlett?

  Uh huh.

• 1:28:13Speaker 01

  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, have a sense we might have an affinity for it. Even if it feels like sometimes we don't, 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.

• 1:28:56Speaker 01

  You are 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?

• 1:29:04Steven Bartlett?

  Sometimes, yeah.

• 1:29:05Speaker 01

  Sometimes, okay. So if you're lifting a weight, oh, here, I'm gonna pick up this, like, block for a second. Let's say this is heavy, and I'm, like, picking up this weight, okay? And I'm doing this, and my muscles are working very hard. And then what do we do after we've, we've done, like, a set of weightlifting?

• 1:29:21Steven Bartlett?

  Rest.

• 1:29:21Speaker 01

  You rest. What would you say if in between, instead of actually resting, I start lifting, like, low-grade weights? I'm still, this is not a rest. So that's what scrolling is. And it's not even just scrolling, by the way, it's, I don't want people thinking, like, "Oh, I was reading the news." You're reading. That's not resting this muscle. You're still using this thing, reading, writing, arithmetic, like, the point is to rest this thing.

• 1:29:43Steven Bartlett?

  How?

• 1:29:45Speaker 01

  Do nothing at all.

• 1:29:46Steven Bartlett?

  I almost don't know how to do nothing. I'm like, what did that look like? Everything I thought of was a thing.

• 1:29:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's hard in the beginning, but I will say this, I have an idea for you.

• 1:29:55Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:29:55Speaker 01

  And that is to do something that is cognitively challenging enough such that you can't think of all of your other worries and things. This is my barometer for a good, like a really high quality break.

• 1:30:08Steven Bartlett?

  My DJing, what about my DJ? I'm learning to DJ.

• 1:30:11Speaker 01

  Are you really?

• 1:30:12Steven Bartlett?

  That's why all the decks are out there. There's like four decks out there.

• 1:30:14Speaker 01

  I didn't notice.

• 1:30:15Steven Bartlett?

  Been learning for four years, so it's, you know, but that's my break.

• 1:30:18Speaker 01

  Awesome skill, awesome skill. And it's, you're learning, so it's immersive.

• 1:30:22Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 1:30:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:29Steven Bartlett?

  So, okay, great.

• 1:30:30Speaker 01

  Even for like a simple brain break, though, my humble recommendation to get yourself to not like scroll, check the news, get on LinkedIn, like whatever else it may be, do something with your hands. So I'm a big, I'm a firm believer in systems. We just need systems. I don't like willpower, like, oh, I should really do that. I ought to do that. Like, it's really difficult. If you create systems for, and what I mean by that is, don't have grab and go snacks anymore. Force yourself to make things like.

• 1:30:56Steven Bartlett?

  Cooking stuff.

• 1:30:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And it doesn't 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 prepackaged, 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, do, 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,

• 1:31:42Speaker 01

  move, go on a little walk. But I know, those are easier said than done, often. So at the very least, I real, I assume people are maybe even at least 50% as hungry as I am. So I love lots of snacks.

• 1:31:54Steven Bartlett?

  Is there, 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 and come up with my best ideas, is there anything else you'd recommend?

• 1:32:09Speaker 01

  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

• 1:32:50Speaker 01

  was, who's fact checking this shit, right? But no problem can be solved by the same level of consciousness or the same mindset that created it. So when you're sitting there and you're thinking about a problem, I kind of think about this like, it's like a traffic gridlock, like this, right? You're sitting there and you're going, well, okay, this, this, and this. And it's like, and you don't know, and by that, I mean by gridlock, I mean you don't know the solution immediately. In fact, you're thinking about the problem. There lies the brain state of the problem, defined as this, defined as X. X brain state is the brain state where you, Stephen, are thinking about the problem. Are you, is this the solution state? No, by definition, this is the problem state. So there you are in

• 1:33:34Speaker 01

  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 the, 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

• 1:34:18Speaker 01

  amazing insights typically when you loosen and you walk away.

• 1:34:22Steven Bartlett?

  Does this apply to negative thinking?

• 1:34:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:24Steven Bartlett?

  And rumination?

• 1:34:26Speaker 01

  Negative thinking and rumination, I have loads and loads of opinions about.

• 1:34:32Steven Bartlett?

  Why did you roll your eyes then?

• 1:34:33Speaker 01

  I rolled my eyes because.

• 1:34:34Steven Bartlett?

  People don't like them.

• 1:34:35Speaker 01

  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. Well, when you do that, you're just deepening the damn neural networks.

• 1:34:57Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 1:34:57Speaker 01

  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 into yourself into a rut of rumination about something.

• 1:35:13Speaker 01

  Or worry. Rumination is sort of the same thought over and over and over again. The only way out is to break the cycle. You do not make your feelings and, you know, the thoughts that you end up ruminating on go away by talking about 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. So 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,

• 1:35:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:36:02Steven Bartlett?

  Some point it might become your identity.

• 1:36:05Speaker 01

  Pretty quickly, huh? So the only way out is to stop that. You have to redirect your attention. So my solve for things like rumination is acknowledge why it's happening in the first place. And then, quite quickly after that, redirect your attention when it's happening. It's sort of a, anytime you, 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, it's, think of yourself as the gardener or the architect of this thing. You're designing it. It's a muscle like anything else. It's like someone sitting around and going, well, I don't love the fact that my right bicep is slightly larger

• 1:36:47Speaker 01

  than, then do something about it. You know, you can atrophy this one a little bit and increase the weight that you, that you, that you hold, the load on this one. And lo and behold, you'll get a different outcome. So if you think of the mind and the, and truly the brain from a neural perspective, as different neural networks that you're either deepening, strengthening, and feeding, feeding with your thoughts, your time, your attention,

• 1:37:15Speaker 01

  be careful which ones you feed. Because whichever one you feed will in fact become stronger and louder.

• 1:37:23Steven Bartlett?

  This is something that I've made for you. I realize that the diaries here, 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 learned is that when you aim at the big, big, big goal, it can feel incredibly psychologically uncomfortable because it's kind of like being stood at the foot of Mount Everest and looking upwards. The way to accomplish your goals is by breaking them down into tiny, small steps. And we call this in our team, the 1%. And actually, this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success here. So what we've done is that you at home can accomplish any big goal that you have, is we've made these 1% diaries. And we released these last year and they all sold out. So

• 1:38:06Steven Bartlett?

  I asked my team over and over again to bring the diaries back, but also to introduce some new colors and to make some minor tweaks to the diary. So now we have a better range for you. So if you have a big goal in mind and you need a framework and a process and some motivation, then I highly recommend you get one of these diaries before they all sell out once again. And you can get yours at thediary.com. And if you want the link, the link is in the description below. I can see in your productivity toolkit.

• 1:38:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:35Steven Bartlett?

  There is a clock. Why is there a clock?

• 1:38:40Speaker 01

  The clock represents the power and the science of when.

• 1:38:47Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:39:10Steven Bartlett?

  Uh huh.

• 1:39:10Speaker 01

  Right? What? Focus sprints are the how. How am I gonna then go attack that one MIT? Or that litter of LITs? How am I gonna go do it? You're gonna do it in the methodology of a focus sprint if you want to two X your time and minimize the number of mistakes made. That's the how. The science of chronotypes will tell you the science of when. When should you go about doing all of these different things? Human beings do not share one circadian rhythm.

• 1:39:40Steven Bartlett?

  What does that mean?

• 1:39:41Speaker 01

  Well, have you heard of a circadian rhythm before?

• 1:39:43Steven Bartlett?

  I have.

• 1:39:44Speaker 01

  Okay. So we all, we have circadian rhythms. Animals do as well. But we don't share one as a human species. Meaning, we don't all go to sleep around the same time. We're not all creature. We are creatures of light, but we don't all share one rhythm of exactly the ideal time that we would go to sleep and wake up. These different circadian rhythms are in fact called chronotypes. So your chronotype is your genetic biological ideal time. It's essentially a profile of the hormones and your, and our energy levels throughout the course of the day. And there are three chronotypes. There is AM shifted individuals. These are essentially, this is like the science behind morning birds.

• 1:40:29Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so people that like doing stuff early?

• 1:40:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:31Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:40:32Speaker 01

  And it's, again, it's genetic and it's hormonal. These individuals naturally, their cortisol levels spike really, really early in the morning. And some people are like the four o'clock in the morning people. They're the five o'clock in the morning people, six o'clock in the morning people. They are naturally AM shifted. Like, it's not their fault necessarily. It's, and by the way, how do you know that you're truly AM shifted? How you know you're truly AM shifted is if you go to bed, even if I keep you up at two o'clock in the morning, until two o'clock in the morning. And let's say I'm controlling, you no longer have young children that are gonna wake you up, you no longer have any meetings, nothing at all. I've put you in this, the best hotel in the world with the most comfortable bed, fully blackout, not, you can't, you can hear a pin drop.

• 1:41:14Speaker 01

  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 those 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.

• 1:41:54Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I mean, everything starts, like, school started at nine AM, so you had to be up at seven. That's why, part of the reason, many reasons, but that's part of the reason I hate school so much.

• 1:42:02Speaker 01

  Oh, totally.

• 1:42:03Steven Bartlett?

  I liked staying up really late.

• 1:42:05Speaker 01

  Same.

• 1:42:05Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:06Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:42:22Steven Bartlett?

  Otherwise, yeah, it would be strange to have different sleep schedules and stuff like that, but.

• 1:42:27Speaker 01

  Like, we're not, I'm like, I'm not a, I can't like see in the dark. Like, it's somewhat dysfunctional that we're awake all night. But think about it this way. If you and I were in the same tribe, along with my team and your team, and we're all like, okay, we're, we're a village now together. And everybody went to bed at 10 PM and woke up at 6 AM. What would happen in the middle of the night when a competing tribe comes to slaughter all of us?

• 1:42:49Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, the night is like the most dangerous time, isn't it, for, for anybody? So you need some people that are awake. And then even 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.

• 1:43:04Speaker 01

  You need a 24/17. You need to make sure someone's always awake. So you and I belong to a tiny subset of the human population. According to research from my lab, it's about 16% from what we've gathered around the world. So 16% of the human population is PM shifted. Meaning genetically, we tend to be able to stay up quite late and we can sleep in. And our energy levels rise as opposed to shoot up early in the morning and then linearly decrease as the day progresses. AM shifted people usually are the best. They do their best focus, their best thinking, straight away, early in the day. And they just seem to lose steam as the day progresses. Like, there's no like second wind for them, really.

• 1:43:49Speaker 01

  I mean, there's a little bit of a bump, but their ideal time, like, when would you take a standardized test? If I wanted to test your intelligence, I said, come to my lab, the Becoming Superhuman Lab, like, let's, let's test your intelligence, your attention span, memory, all of it. When would you schedule that test? For AM shifted people, they're like, are you free at seven? Right? Because they, they're the best in the morning. For PM shifted people, like you and I, honestly, the afternoon.

• 1:44:12Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:13Speaker 01

  In my younger years, oh my gosh, the evening, I do my best work, like, nine PM on. It's the clearest thinking, the most energized, the most clear headed, you know, up until the, the wee hours in the morning. But it's, it's not super functional, but it's, it's genetic and, and you can make use of it. PM shifted people are also, have a tendency to be the most artistic and creative.

• 1:44:34Steven Bartlett?

  There you go. Can you say that again? Look at the camera and say that again.

• 1:44:38Speaker 01

  Most artistic and creative? I didn't, I seem to get those, whatever. Then you have the vast majority of the human population, and those are people who are biphasic. Biphasic stands for the Latin two phases or two peaks. And these individuals wake up a little groggy, but within about 45 minutes to an hour, they're ramped, off to the races. They're feeling great. 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 chronotypes. My humble opinion is you should know which one you are because it will dictate the ideal

• 1:45:22Speaker 01

  time you should be doing your focus sprints. When? When is the ideal time? I am a big bag of blood, guts and chemicals. I'm not a machine. Right? I, there are biological laws. Like, I'm not the same at 8 AM versus 2 PM versus 8 PM. I am a different version of self with different abilities and skills. And my attention span is not a constant. That's another, a law that I would love people to know a bit more and accept, I should say, to know and accept. Our cognitive abilities are different throughout the course of the day. Which means when we do certain things does matter, at least in some small part.

• 1:46:07Speaker 01

  And I'm not suggesting we can architect our days, because you, I mean, you and I are actually prime examples of this. As PM shifted people, you know, the world doesn't give a shit about us. The world doesn't care. Like, as in, the world is more AM shifted. We have to do a great deal of adjustment. It's not like I can schedule meetings with people like brazenly, like, hey, what are you doing at 10 tonight? Right?

• 1:46:27Steven Bartlett?

  It's so, actually, I woke up this morning and did a 7 AM 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 at that meeting, I go, that was terrible. You know? Even with the podcast, one of the things we set as a rule, where I never ever do podcasts before 11 AM. So this is why this starts at 11 AM 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

• 1:47:11Steven Bartlett?

  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, 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?

• 1:47:43Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:48:05Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:48:25Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 1:48:31Speaker 01

  Ah, it's a bit depressing.

• 1:48:34Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 1:48:47Speaker 01

  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 a 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.

• 1:49:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:49:50Speaker 01

  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 is, 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.

• 1:50:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:50:53Steven Bartlett?

  Just like me, this little thing here.

• 1:50:57Speaker 01

  Go ahead.

• 1:50:59Steven Bartlett?

  Any 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?

• 1:51:14Steven Bartlett?

  Research collaboration opportunity."

• 1:51:17Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 1:51:28Speaker 01

  What I will say is that I, first of all, I don't think anyone is inherently evil or bad. Like, this is not, it's just opportunities. These are work opportunities, right? And the promise, by the way, for scientists like myself is you can keep doing what you're doing. We love what you're doing, in fact. Love it. We love what you're doing. We just want you to do it in-house so that we can also implement a lot of these things. So, mind you, I am allowed to say this. I'm not allowed to name the companies, but I am allowed to say that that particular email came with an attachment of what the job was, the description, and of course, the compensation. The compensation for that particular role was four times my annual salary doing public research at that time.

• 1:52:13Steven Bartlett?

  It's tempting.

• 1:52:14Speaker 01

  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

• 1:52:30Speaker 01

  is going to be the Everest for our species. And I really mean that. It has the potential,

• 1:52:43Speaker 01

  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, comes with a great number of downsides if used improperly. Our relationship with technology

• 1:53:07Speaker 01

  is fundamentally critical for, in my humble opinion, whether or not our species continues to thrive on this planet.

• 1:53:17Steven Bartlett?

  What's your fear?

• 1:53:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:53:40Speaker 01

  What we are currently up against is what is likely to happen at this point unless we 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. And this small subset of the human population,

• 1:54:21Speaker 01

  in a creepy way, again, I've heard it called the thinking class,

• 1:54:26Speaker 01

  they will run the world. And the rest of the world will not be expected to think.

• 1:54:34Speaker 01

  Instead, their job will be to just do as they're told.

• 1:54:42Speaker 01

  And it is far easier to control a populace when they are distracted and not thinking. They're not awake.

• 1:54:51Speaker 01

  And this is my fear. And this is, in fact, what has, 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.

• 1:55:17Speaker 01

  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,

• 1:55:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:55:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:56:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:56:36Steven Bartlett?

  Because of algorithms and...

• 1:56:38Speaker 01

  And AI.

• 1:56:39Steven Bartlett?

  And AI.

• 1:56:40Speaker 01

  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, we're letting it.

• 1:56:49Steven Bartlett?

  Earlier 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 ChatGPT or an LLM think for them. But gosh, it's going to be so bloody tempting.

• 1:57:31Speaker 01

  It's tempting. Oh, Stephen.

• 1:57:33Steven Bartlett?

  What's wrong?

• 1:57:34Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:57:47Speaker 01

  The human brain is wired for shortcuts.

• 1:57:52Speaker 01

  Meaning if there is a shortcut to food and calories, we're gonna take it.

• 1:58:00Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:58:16Speaker 01

  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,

• 1:58:40Speaker 01

  more famous in my world of illuminating cognitive biases. And these are not necessary. I don't want people to think like, oh, no, they're bad. It's not like a disease model here. These are the shortcuts we're talking about. The human brain is trying to figure out very, very quickly. Can I trust you? Do I like you? Do I like what's happening? What do I want to do? Like, what am I attracted to? What am I motivated to actually go get? It's just trying to, it's trying to decrease the amount of energy that it takes to make all of the decisions. Otherwise, this, the world is far too stimulating and full of way too much data and information. It would overwhelm us. So the brain is designed to make all of these parts, parses all this information and it's designed for shortcuts. Daniel Kahneman is famous.

• 1:59:26Speaker 01

  One of my favorite quotes of his. Thinking is to humans as swimming is to cats.

• 1:59:35Speaker 01

  They can do it, but they would prefer not to.

• 1:59:39Speaker 01

  Cats can swim.

• 1:59:42Speaker 01

  They don't like it. So thinking is the same way.

• 1:59:47Steven Bartlett?

  It's against our survival instincts of energy conservation, relaxing, preserving. You know, especially in a world, you talked about earlier about where the calories weren't abundant. Like, even doing this conversation now requires a lot of thinking. It's burning a lot of calories.

• 2:00:01Speaker 01

  We need Skittles.

• 2:00:02Steven Bartlett?

  Exactly. The more calories I burn, they're like, my days are numbered, right? Like, from an evolutionary perspective. So that's an interesting thing that we don't actually want to think.

• 2:00:11Speaker 01

  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 is 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 like a blood test, essentially. Like, 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.

• 2:00:57Steven Bartlett?

  One of the things I am terrible at is, I think I mentioned this earlier, is I, I think multitasking is, I've always believed it is a thing. It is a more productive solution. And I consider myself to be a very proud context switcher. But then I heard about this exercise that you do to prove to people that multitasking is a myth. I have my iPad here and it's recording the screen. So I can show the audience my iPad. What is this thought experiment or task that highlights the myth?

• 2:01:25Speaker 01

  It's so simple, too, by the way. So what you're gonna do for me, Stephen, and draw two lines on that piece of paper.

• 2:01:30Steven Bartlett?

  And what is this gonna prove from a high level?

• 2:01:34Speaker 01

  What we are going to attempt to do is do, using the most,

• 2:01:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:02:08Steven Bartlett?

  We shall see. Okay, let's do this.

• 2:02:10Speaker 01

  We shall see. Okay. Whenever you're ready, you're gonna go ahead and draw two lines for me. And I'm gonna time you, so don't start yet. But what you're gonna write on the top line is you're gonna write, I'm a great multitasker. And on the bottom line, because you are, right? Wink, wink, not judge. I'm a great multitasker. And then at the bottom line, you're gonna 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?

• 2:02:35Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:36Speaker 01

  Get ready? Get set? Go.

• 2:02:51Steven Bartlett?

  From zero to 20?

• 2:03:04Speaker 01

  Expletives are natural.

• 2:03:07Steven Bartlett?

  Okay. There you go.

• 2:03:09Speaker 01

  Done? 31 seconds.

• 2:03:10Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 2:03:11Speaker 01

  Beautiful. I want you to do this one more time.

• 2:03:13Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 2:03:15Speaker 01

  This time, the way in which you will arrive will be a little different. You're gonna alternate. So you're gonna start at the top line. You're gonna write the letter I. You're gonna drop down to the bottom. Don't start yet, I'm gonna 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. I'm gonna give you one other option. Because if you're thinking, Sahar, this hand is a NASCAR. Like, I'm gonna lose time going back and forth between these two lines? Fine. You can do it all on one line, but you still have to alternate. So it still needs to be I, one, you know, two A, so on and so forth. It needs to like alternate all in one line. So it's gonna look like a garbled mess. So it's a little harder to track, in my opinion. But some people prefer it.

• 2:03:56Steven Bartlett?

  Do you know what? What, if I get to 31 seconds, just tell me and I'll stop. Okay?

• 2:04:00Speaker 01

  Because it's that you're already anticipating it's gonna be that painful? Okay. All right, get ready?

• 2:04:05Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:05Speaker 01

  Get set? Go.

• 2:04:17Steven Bartlett?

  Like, I forgot to count. That's weird.

• 2:04:22Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, my gosh, this is a shit show. But where was I? Uh, there.

• 2:04:31Steven Bartlett?

  I think I cheated. I just feel like I cheated.

• 2:04:37Speaker 01

  I'm sorry. We're at 30. How far did you get?

• 2:04:41Steven Bartlett?

  I got to number eight.

• 2:04:42Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:04:43Steven Bartlett?

  So that was, my math isn't great, but that is 40%

• 2:04:49Steven Bartlett?

  of the speed, as when I just focused. Said differently, 60% slower, where I was multitasking between numbers and letters. So on a daily basis, theoretically, I'm losing potentially 60% of my productivity, theoretically, just by switching between two different types of tasks at once.

• 2:05:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you're not only getting less done, energetically, one is more expensive than the other.

• 2:05:15Steven Bartlett?

  Do you know what?

• 2:05:17Steven Bartlett?

  It was, it was way less enjoyable. It was painful. Do you know the other thing? It really did remind me of how I've been working. Because every time I went from one line to the other, I went from the letters to the number. I had to like remind myself again of where I was with the numbers.

• 2:05:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:05:36Steven Bartlett?

  Does that make sense? And then when I went back to the letters, I was like, where are we again with the letters?

• 2:05:40Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 2:05:40Steven Bartlett?

  So there was a little bit of a gap there in me, like, trying to figure out what came after the letter I, for example. It's really fascinating, because it, yeah, so illuminating.

• 2:05:50Speaker 01

  By the way, there's a, there's a name for that concept that you were just, you were feeling it. It's palpable.

• 2:05:54Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:55Speaker 01

  It's called attentional residue.

• 2:05:57Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:58Speaker 01

  And it sounds gross, right?

• 2:05:59Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, attention, yeah.

• 2:06:00Speaker 01

  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 gonna do, buh, buh, buh. Clean up shop. Get cognitive closure. Close the box and don't carry one bag into, you know, box or a bag. Don't carry it from one thing into the next thing. Try to, as much as possible, get cognitive closure. When you multitask, one, you're barely onboarding to the next task. You're carrying shit from the last one. It's taking you longer to actually finish anything.

• 2:06:46Speaker 01

  Up to, you know, by the way, over two hours a day is the estimated average now for the average knowledge worker just bouncing between screens and different tasks. I think it's absolutely wild.

• 2:06:57Steven Bartlett?

  So how we have a closing tradition on this podcast, where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. The question left for you, very good question left for you. Very good question. I love when this happens, is

• 2:07:09Steven Bartlett?

  how can the audience become more lucky?

• 2:07:14Speaker 01

  I love this question.

• 2:07:18Speaker 01

  And I have an answer.

• 2:07:21Speaker 01

  Which is nice.

• 2:07:22Steven Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 2:07:23Speaker 01

  It's nice when that happens.

• 2:07:27Speaker 01

  Luck.

• 2:07:31Speaker 01

  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, is very different than my luck and the next person's luck.

• 2:07:49Speaker 01

  You have to know what your Everest is again. You need to go to that deathbed, figure out what a good life for you is, figure out what your intentions are and your goals. Like, what is it that you're looking for? Because if you don't know, then there's nothing for you to look for. We don't even know what you want to get lucky at, right? So, one, you have to get crystal clear on what it is that you want, right? Once you're crystal clear on what you want, you need to ask yourself and remind yourself on a daily basis what that Everest is. And then you need to, it's, 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?

• 2:08:33Speaker 01

  If you prime the mind with what is your goal, what is your Everest? What is, what are your objectives are, 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?

• 2:09:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:09:26Speaker 01

  In order to get more lucky, the mind, that's spooky. It will look for data and evidence to support its beliefs.

• 2:09:38Steven Bartlett?

  Either way?

• 2:09:39Speaker 01

  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. But 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.

• 2:10:08Speaker 01

  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,

• 2:10:25Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:10:37Steven Bartlett?

  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.

• 2:10:42Speaker 01

  I feel like that's manifestation. I want to push you further.

• 2:10:45Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 2:10:45Speaker 01

  And if people are into that, I think, great, positive thinking, that's all, it's all lovely and beautiful. I mean, what are you trying to achieve here?

• 2:10:54Speaker 01

  What are you trying to achieve is, like, do you have a guest that you're trying to bring on? That you, that you've not been able to find? And you're just upset, like, I want you to be, wake up every single day and just like, be like, I will find my way to you. You will find.

• 2:11:09Speaker 01

  Let's get Barack Obama on this podcast, let's do it. No, no, if you keep saying it, it will happen. But it's not just about saying it. You will be thinking about, like, that is one of my goals. You, 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,

• 2:11:38Speaker 01

  he'll find his way to this chair.

• 2:11:44Speaker 01

  Now he has to, right? We've spoken into the universe, he's got to, he's got to.

• 2:11:48Steven Bartlett?

  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. And I was super excited to see you just started a YouTube channel.

• 2:12:03Speaker 01

  I did.

• 2:12:04Steven Bartlett?

  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 like on there. Highly recommend you go and subscribe to Dr. Sahar, 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. We can just go follow her and have the, you know, you don't want the algorithm to be serving your content, you want the subscription button. So go ahead and follow Dr. Sahar 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?

• 2:12:39Speaker 01

  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. You ever taken a test of your attention?

• 2:13:03Steven Bartlett?

  No.

• 2:13:04Speaker 01

  Like, do you know where it falls? Like, maybe it's not so bad, maybe you're off the charts amazing, we don't need to worry about it, right? I'm a firm believer, the way that, and I would love the world to change in this way. And I know, and I, and I hope in some small part, we can help make this more of a common thing that people do. But the same way that we go to the doctor once a year and we have this like annual physical, usually, you know, like, how am I doing? I get a blood test, you check all the things. Why is it that we're not checking our minds? We don't do that. We just wait for it to go to shit. And then we do something about it. Like, we wait for the car to be on fire and then we're like, oh, oops. No, we should have things that we're doing along the way. But how do we know what to do? The data.

• 2:13:48Speaker 01

  If we collect data and we actually have assessments available to people. So I'm extremely passionate about making scientific assessments available to the general public. I think science should be for people, not profits.

• 2:14:00Steven Bartlett?

  Where do I find the assessment?

• 2:14:02Speaker 01

  You go to mmminstitute.org.

• 2:14:05Steven Bartlett?

  M M M.

• 2:14:08Speaker 01

  Mind, machine and meaning.

• 2:14:09Steven Bartlett?

  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 man. Please keep doing the work that you're doing. You're a, you're a star. And sometimes, once in a while, I meet stars and you're sadly a star. So I'm excited to watch your career unfold from here on outwards. Thank you, Dr. Sahar, we're done.

• 2:14:31Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:14:56Steven Bartlett?

  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 Zero. Zero 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. Zero wants to do the financial work for you. But its core ambition is to go beyond keeping the financial record, because Zero 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.

• 2:15:41Steven Bartlett?

  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 Zero by going to zero.com. Thank you to Zero. 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.