You can't remember what you never noticed.

Yousef runs the Becoming Superhuman Lab at UC Berkeley. She studies how the brain rewires itself, with the goal of making people sharper. Then she noticed she spends most of her time on something far more basic. “Forget becoming superhuman,” she says. “We just need to become human.”

The most common complaint she hears is brain fog. One CEO she worked with told her something Yousef never forgot: “I can hear my own thoughts again.”

The executive in the glass box

Yousef used to shadow executives for days before redesigning how they worked. One case she still talks about. It was a boss at a Fortune 10 company, working on a board deck in his glass office.

Yousef asks you to imagine you were handed a billion dollars to cure cancer and could hire the best minds alive. Would you give them smartwatches, Slack and a calendar full of calls? Or would you protect their best thinking?

She calls the work digital hygiene. The first job is to clear away what is in the way.

That “where was I?” feeling has a name. Yousef calls it attentional baggage: you carry the last task into the next one, so you're never fully in either. Her fix is to finish the thing and close the tab before you start the next one.

A company that sells messaging software renews its contract by showing engagement. Look how much everyone uses us. So the defaults on your phone, your email and your apps are tuned for engagement, not for your productivity.

The people doing the tuning are, in Yousef's words, “people like me.” Cognitive and behavioral neuroscientists test everything, from the sound an email makes when it sends to the exact feel of a vibration.

The tech industry, she argues, copied the food industry's three-part playbook almost exactly.

The feed knows when you are about to leave

Humans get more hooked on rewards that are unpredictable. It is the same mechanism behind slot machines, and, Yousef says, behind love-bombing in toxic relationships. The algorithm, as she describes it, holds back the content it knows you will love, serves you so-so posts while you are fresh, and plays the jackpot right before you would quit.

Distraction does not only come to us. We also go looking for it. When work gets hard, the brain tries to solve the discomfort, which is its job. Dealing with it head-on is work, and the phone is right there. The phone has become, in Yousef's words, a very fast, cheap exit.

Steven brought up a 2014 study (Wilson and colleagues, Science, 2014). People left alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes could press a button to give themselves a mild electric shock, one they had said they would pay to avoid. In the paper's numbers, 67% of the men and 25% of the women pressed it anyway, and one man did it 190 times.

Yousef's answer is no shame. “You have literally hundreds of experts that have designed these tools to be as addictive as they are.” A brain that gets hooked is working as designed.

Kevin O'Leary once told Steven that Steve Jobs could always separate the signal, the one thing that matters today, from the noise, which is everything else. Jony Ive's version was that focus means saying no to an idea you know is brilliant, because it isn't what you're working on.

Yousef then asked Steven a question. You can turn up the signal or turn down the noise. Which is easier? “Decreasing the noise,” he said. She agreed. So the order here is the foundation first, then less noise, then more signal.

Turn the noise down

2. Make your phone gray. It's under Accessibility on every phone. Without color the phone looks dead to you, as she put it, especially late at night when willpower is low. In her lab, people who went gray for three weeks used their phones about an hour less a day; independent studies found smaller drops.

3. Notifications off, except VIPs. Steven asked what happens when something urgent comes in. Yousef pointed at the mail.

4. Put the phone out of sight. Steven locked his in a box at the start of the interview. “You don't necessarily need to get a lockbox,” she says. Out of sight is the point. Yousef compares it to setting a beer in front of someone trying to get sober. Steven's is Skittles. He doesn't keep them in his pocket, because he'd eat them every time he got bored.

5. Choose long form over short form, and people over feeds. Yousef is not anti-screen. A good film has been shown to build empathy in young people. Too much short form, she argues, leaves people more anxious and less sharp. Watching a movie? Watch the movie, without the phone.

Both sit on a need that's real enough. If the hunger is for company, have dinner with someone who talks back. Do that, she says, and you'll find you crave the feed less. Steven added Jack Dorsey's old metric for Twitter, regrettable minutes: did that hour leave you better off?

Turn the signal up

Cutting noise frees attention. The signal is what you point it at. Yousef works through what matters, then how to do it, then when. The tenth rule, one task at a time, is the one you tested in Part I.

At 110, looking back, what must have happened?

Then write down the one to three tasks that would move you toward it today. Those are your MITs. Three is the limit, on purpose.

Hospice nurse Bronnie Ware kept a log of what her dying patients regretted. Top of the list was not living a life true to themselves, and caring too much about what others thought.

Your MITs

Each morning, treat your to-do list like a fridge. How much focus time do you have today? Then pick one to three MITs, most important tasks: the ones that would make today a success. Her lab has studied another way to ask it: “What will your future self thank you for?”

Everything else is a LIT, a least important task, like the DocuSign or the toilet-paper order. LITs feel good because they give fast dopamine. They fill the gaps between meetings. Your best uninterrupted hour goes to an MIT.

7 · The focus sprint

Yousef's method for deep work. Her lab found it helps people get up to twice as much done, with fewer mistakes. It has five steps.

The timer isn't there to stress you. It compresses the work so you get your evenings back, which is where the deathbed priorities live.

Ranking as described in the episode. The page shows order only, not effect sizes.

Yousef prefers systems to willpower. Can't do nothing? Use your hands. Skip the grab-and-go snacks: cut the cheese from the block, boil the kettle. If both hands are busy, you can't scroll. Steven's break is learning to DJ, which locks him in completely.

For hard problems, the same principle helps creativity. Load the problem fully, then walk away: shower, or walk the dog. A new setting loosens the networks stuck on the problem, and the idea shows up.

Steven held up an email Yousef once received from a tech company. It praised her research on strategic automaticity, the science of making behavior automatic, and asked for help making their product “more sticky.” The attached offer was four times her salary as a public researcher. She says she has been courted more times than she can count, and she doesn't think the people asking are evil. The incentives are that strong.

Her fear comes from conversations with leaders in AI. Unless something changes, she warns of a future with a “thinking class”: a small group with the education and attention span to think critically, ask questions and generate ideas. Everyone else is expected to do as they're told. A distracted population is easier to control.

The last century widened the thinking class, especially for women and girls. She believes it is now shrinking again, because of algorithms and AI. AI is taking thinking away from us, she says, because “we're letting it.”

Why is it so tempting to hand our thinking over? The brain is wired for shortcuts, because energy used to be scarce. Yousef quotes a line attributed to Daniel Kahneman: thinking is to humans as swimming is to cats. They can do it, but they'd prefer not to.

Steven shared a story from his own team. He told a colleague that their reasoning was much stronger in person than in the documents they sent, which read like AI. The person knew more real-world context than the model did. The temptation to let a chatbot think for you will only grow, so he treats resisting it as a skill.

Her first step is to measure. We get an annual physical and a blood test, she points out, but never check our minds. Her institute, the Mind, Machine & Meaning Institute, offers free attention and digital-dependence assessments at mmminstitute.org.