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Speaker 1
Reverse Uno, as I call it. They use neuroscience to get us hooked. And I think we can use reverse neuroscience to reverse this entire thing.
If they increase the stimulation, as we talked about before, you reduce it. And the ways in which you reduce the stimulation, one, if you keep your phone in gray. So literally going into something like grayscale makes the phone less neurologically stimulating, so it's a heck of a lot easier for you to actually get off your phone.
You do this in settings. And again, this is, by the way, a beautiful example of the default settings are not here to help you. The default settings are here to help them make money off of your attention and your time.
So you are better than the default settings, Stephen. 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.
Speaker 2
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?
Speaker 1
I've tested it. So in my lab, we took a large sample of healthy working professionals. And all I did was turn their phones into gray and ask them to stay in gray for three weeks.
That's it. And we saw, on average, people spent one hour less on their phones every single day.
Speaker 2
Wow.
Speaker 1
That's seven hours a week. The way I always talk about, that's the difference between you getting that workout in.
Speaker 2
Yeah, that's crazy.
Speaker 1
Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 2
It's crazy.
Speaker 1
When you go around and you talk to these busy people, they're like, oh yeah, I'm trying to do this. I want to read that book. I want to listen to your podcast, 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.
Speaker 2
Thank you. Did you hear that? She's from Berkeley.
That's an amazing university. She's a doctor.
Speaker 1
Long. No, it's true, though.
Speaker 2
She also said subscribe if you didn't.
Speaker 1
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.
Speaker 2
Completely agree.
Speaker 1
Of course you do. It's like, no one's paying me to say this. But no, long form content, like a film, like a good film has been shown to increase empathy in young people.
Just think about that. So like, again, the message is not, oh my God, technology is bad. All screen time is evil.
No, no, no, no, no. I'm a huge fan of your content diet. Like, make sure that whatever, if you want to sit down and watch a movie, sit down and watch a movie, like get into your pajamas, make a bowl of popcorn, like romanticize it, turn the lights down.
You'll put Netflix on. Everyone's also got the phone out. So they're doing two things at once.
This has just become like, we've accepted this apparently, that you no longer have people's undivided attention. So the way in which we're making content now is assuming that someone is looking at something else as well. This is so sad.
And please tell me how, if this is how bad our attention spans have gotten, how are, first of all, kids supposed to learn in school? You told me that you have this interest in becoming superhuman, to experiencing the full potential of your own mind. How are you supposed to do that if you can't even pay attention to a fucking movie anymore?
Speaker 2
Do you know what's funny? I was watching, um, I was watching a complicated old movie last night.
Speaker 1
Complicated?
Speaker 2
It's one of those ones where if you miss a word, the next three hours is, you're lost.
Speaker 1
Oh yeah.
Speaker 2
Because they've named a planet Kololubublu. And if you don't understand what Kololubublu is, you're fucked. And I was like, 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 catered 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 effort I was putting into to stay focused on this movie last night. I've been 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.
Speaker 1
You just sit there and watch.
Speaker 2
There might be some people at some level thinking, yeah, but I love short form. I love it.
Speaker 1
I love candy too. If we have too much short form, we already know this. You're more depressed.
You're more anxious. Your attention span is shot. Like, why would you want that?
You literally feel shittier and your brain operates at a lower level, cognitively speaking, if you over consume this stuff. And it's your choice, by the way. I'm not here to tell people how to live their lives, but I want people to wake up to realize, one, the fundamental needs are there.
So my goal is for you to meet those needs. And the way that you do that to increase the satiation is you actually go learn something new. You actually spend time IRL in real life with real human beings, hold people, touch people, talk to people, have dinner parties, have conversations, hang out with your friends, your family, actually meet that fundamental need for social connection.
And if you do that, you will notice that you're full and you will magically actually like short form less. You are far less likely to lose yourself scrolling until two o'clock in the morning and then feeling like shit the next day because you didn't get enough sleep.
Speaker 2
I think that feeling like shit the next day is a good way to navigate life, which I heard Jack Dorsey back in a couple of years ago when he was still at Twitter talk about one of them new metrics was reducing regrettable minutes. And this idea of like regrettable minutes, I think is because with skittles, honestly, they would feel good in a moment, but I'd probably regret if I had a massive bag of skills, probably regret in a couple of hours, probably the next day because, you know, send you on a bit of a roller coaster. And with platforms like TikTok, when you look at the data, they found that 60% of active TikTok users experience negative welfare and would rather live in a world where it didn't exist, where the platform didn't exist.
It ranks as number one in terms of regret in this regard, because people report that their time was distorted. They opened the app and lost an hour or two hours and they walk away from it without clarity like what they gained. So this idea of regret like, OK, skittles taste nice.
It was cool to scroll for a second. But how did I feel thereafter is something that I guess in the food analogy is pertinent.
Speaker 1
Yeah. I'm telling you, we're waking up.
Speaker 2
People are waking up.
Speaker 1
Young people are waking up. That's the that's the coolest thing.
Speaker 2
I saw the graphs from the Financial Times which showed time spent online had started to plateau since 2022 for young people first.
Speaker 1
Thank God. I mean, but listen, it's still a push.
Speaker 2
Yeah.
Speaker 1
So the stats are less than half of graduating high school seniors have ever been on a date. Compared to what was, I believe, something like 80 or 90 percent. And I would say our generation.
Speaker 2
That's crazy.
Speaker 1
That's crazy. I think something like, what is it, a third of U.K. nightclubs are also now like engagement in the nightclub scene has gone down to a third. Dinner parties.
There's this recent piece in The Atlantic that just came out about the sort of the death of dinner parties. So people are spending increasingly more time alone. And not with others.
So they're hungry. Unfortunately, these platforms are taking advantage of that perpetual hunger and keeping us locked into the cycle of distraction. And now, by the way, it's socially appropriate for us to always hold our phones.
It's always in our pocket. So one of the best things that you can do is actually to aim it is to introduce portion control back into how you are consuming content. Portion control.
So you increase the friction. You do things like that phone parking lot bit, like put your phone out of sight, out of mind. Turn the notifications off.
Turning the notifications off would be decreasing the stimulation, but increasing the friction is. Listen, if I'm telling you this stuff is addictive and you want to do less of it, don't have it right there. It's like it's like sitting down with someone who is freshly trying to become sober as an alcoholic and just be like, you don't mind if I just put this beer down in front of you, do I?
Or do you? Just as you're working and going about your day.
Speaker 2
I think the skittles analogy is pretty good. Like I wouldn't walk around with skittles in my pocket because if I did, I'd eat them every time I was stressed or bored.
Speaker 1
Totally. So this process is what I advocate. I think every young person in the entire world should learn this and know this.
I speak mostly to older adults, 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.
Speaker 2
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 co-owner in the company.
I became an investor in the company. And so it's with great pride that I can tell you that this exists. If you haven't tried these shots, go to ketone.com slash 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. I've talked 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.
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Because deep work is something that, I mean, all of my team have to do deep work. They have to edit code, could be right. We're doing a lot more writing than ever before, in part because of AI.
So we're trying to push against that. But in a world that is so distracted where my phone is there, what advice would you give me for doing deep work predictably well?
Speaker 1
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.
Speaker 2
How many steps are there in a focus sprint? Five. There are five steps.
Speaker 1
There are five steps.
Speaker 2
So these five steps will make me 200 percent more productive.
Speaker 1
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 increasing cortisol and adrenaline, right?
I mean, think about how amazing our biology is. I am sitting at rest. And even though I am sitting at rest, because I am anticipating that I'm about to get up and maybe do some public speaking, my brain is going to help me by giving me an extra boost and 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, they can all see that you're sitting down to do a focus sprint because your calendar is public. So it also deals a little bit with that social guilt people feel and that feeling that they need to stay, I need to be responsive to all the things.
And now that you've done that, you go to step two, which is you've got to identify what the heck you're going to do and you need to define it. You need to break it down in clear, simple terms. So instead of saying, I'm going to sit down and I'm going to work on X, unless you're going to finish X, that's not going to feel good.
This has everything to do with dopamine, by the way. Dopamine is the brain's primary, consider it a motivation molecule. So it's going to get us not only excited and motivated to do a task, but it's also going to reward us a bit if we really do more than we even expected, especially.
Which brings me to a few pieces of advice. One, you've got your massive to-do list, yes? You're going to shop from that to-do list and you're going to say, in this focus sprint, I'm going to take out this one piece, this one.
So you have your massive to-do list and you're like, that's the one thing I'm going to focus on, right? Just this one. And then you're going to take that one and then you're going to break it down into small, manageable pieces.
You're going to break it down and you're going to time block every piece. You're going to say, instead of saying, oh, I'm going to work on this deck, I'm not going to finish it, but I'm going to work on it. You're going to say, I'm going to work on slide three for about, I think it'll take me about seven minutes to finish that slide.
Then I actually need to probably send a follow-up email to John for the data that I need for slide 17. Then I'm going to work on this table that I want to put here. 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?
