The Battle Against Distraction with Larry Rosen, Professor Emeritus and author.

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:01) Today, we're talking to Larry, author of The Distracted Mind, Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World, all about why we're more distracted than ever and how we can win our focus back. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:18) Larry, what's up, man? How are you?

(Larry Rosen at 00:00:20) Good. How are you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:22) Fantastic. The Distracted Mind, how did you get into this research? What caused you to get into research about distracted minds?

(Larry Rosen at 00:00:31) So I've been looking at the effect of technology since the mid-1980s, believe it or not. And so as things change in our world, they change rapidly. And somewhere along the way, there seemed to be three major game changers that just rocked our world. One was the World Wide Web, which made everything just touch screen, touch, touch, touch, click here, click on this icon. It's great. And then almost simultaneously, social media and smartphones. And so if you figure maybe ten, eleven, twelve years ago when the original iPhone came out and started to spread, and when the original Friendster and Myspace and then sort of burgeoning out of control. In the meantime, as we were doing research, every single change in our world electronically produced more interesting research. I mean, along the way, we studied online dating, studied video game violence. As things change, we just studied it.

(Larry Rosen at 00:01:34) And when it got to mid, like 2014, 2015, it became very clear that everybody was distracted. People started carrying their phones. I used to have my students in class go out for a half hour and watch people and report back how many people were carrying their phones in their hand or where they were between classes. And the interesting thing is around five, six, seven years ago, people literally started carrying them everywhere. In their hands, women would tuck them in their bra, just to be close to that phone.

(Larry Rosen at 00:02:08) And we realized that the phone had taken on this significance. It was no longer just a phone, a little computer that you carried around. It was your everything. And so it seemed to me that that distraction was going on, and did some little bit of research and decided I wanted to write a book on it. And I'd written six books before that, some with co-authors, some by myself, but I really felt like I needed a co-author on this one.

(Larry Rosen at 00:02:35) I felt like I needed somebody who could explain what goes on in your brain when this happened. And I went to a conference in San Francisco and I went to hear this one guy talk. And right after him, I was kind of right in the middle of a row and I didn't feel good creeping out of the row. So I got his stuff and he's got white hair and he starts talking about his research and it blew me away. He was showing research that showed basically that you could change a 60- or 70-year-old person from a non-multitasker, a not very good multitasker, to as good as a 20-year-old.

(Larry Rosen at 00:03:14) And he did it just with a video game. And so at some point I decided, I just called him up. And I said, would you be interested in writing this book together? I said, I'm really looking forward to finding somebody who can relate. And it seems like from your talk here, you can really relate.

(Larry Rosen at 00:03:32) And he took a couple months. But at some point, Adam Gazzaley, who's his name, came back to me and said, yep. We're going to do this together. And so it took a lot of process, but we ended up with a book where the first half of the book basically is the neuroscience of distraction in a very easily readable way. And then the second half is kind of my psychology of distraction.

(Larry Rosen at 00:03:59) And then at the very end, he puts a chapter in that says, here's how you can fix yourself from what we know about neuroscience. And I put in a chapter that says, here's how you can fix yourself from what I know from psychology. So it all just kind of fell together. And it's very funny because I don't usually keep track of sales. I mean, I just know that the book's selling every once in a while, I get a little check and it dribbles in. And I just tried to buy myself some books, and there are no more hardbacks anymore. Hardbacks are all gone, all sold.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:29) On Amazon?

(Larry Rosen at 00:04:30) Yeah. No. My publisher.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:33) Oh, your publisher?

(Larry Rosen at 00:04:34) No hardbacks left.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:36) Oh, man. What's the name of the book?

(Larry Rosen at 00:04:38) It's called The Distracted Mind, Ancient Brain in a High-Tech World.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:41) It's such a great subtitle because everyone can relate to that. When you hear that, it's really not a question of if it's true. You just inherently, instinctively know, yeah, that's what's going on. It just makes so much sense because our biology takes so much time to adapt.

(Larry Rosen at 00:04:59) Yep. And we really have a brain that hasn't changed much since caveman days, basically, since we had brains. And what's interesting is we're dealing with different problems than the caveman did back then. Caveman was dealing with survival and had to, and Adam writes some beautiful analogies about this in the book about how caveman goes out and has to have his senses going and has to kind of multitask to make sure that he doesn't smell anything of a jaguar or look around and make sure he doesn't see one lurking in the trees or whatever. And so they had to use their brains in a very different way.

(Larry Rosen at 00:05:43) Now if you think about it, we ended up in this world with technology that makes us multitask. It makes us distracted. And you can see, I was just reading today. There's a New York Times story today, I guess maybe not in the paper, but online. And they had interviewed me for the story. But what was interesting is Gloria Mark, who is at UC Irvine, has done research in this for a long time, has talked about how our focus has shrunk over time. And she's been studying this since the early 2000s. And she goes in and she looks at people and how they work. And she, here's how they work in their real environment. And she said our focus now is down to fifty seconds, fifty-seven seconds or something like that.

(Larry Rosen at 00:06:30) And that's frightening because that literally every minute you're sort of distracting yourself or you're being distracted.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:39) I'm going to drill down in a bunch of different areas because I'm just a curious person, and you let me know if we get outside of an area or something like that. Right? First question, I got one about multitasking and then one about the focus shrinking. So with multitasking, you've brought it up a couple times already, but wasn't there a section in the book that there's no such thing as multitasking? And if so, what's the context of how you're using it?

(Larry Rosen at 00:07:07) Okay. So as human beings, we can multitask. But in order to multitask, say you have two tasks. If one of them is pretty repetitive, pretty ingrained, and the other is cognitive, meaning it takes some of your brain to work on, you can do that. You can drive and talk to someone or listen to a podcast or whatever, because driving is pretty much of an automatic kind of thing.

(Larry Rosen at 00:07:32) I mean, we feel like we've just kind of gone into some world where our brain is driving and we're not worried about it. What the problem is is that people these days try to multitask two cognitive tasks. And I always tell people, to understand this, go watch CNN for a while. And first, stare at the scroll on the bottom and read it to yourself and try to hear anything that you can hear from what the host is saying. Now turn it around and listen to the host, look at the host, but that now puts your gaze down to the words, but listen to the host.

(Larry Rosen at 00:08:04) We can't do both. It's impossible to do both. So we live in a world where there's lots of cognitive tasks. And God love us, we have taken this thing, this phone, and we have allowed it to interrupt us at will. We've allowed it to ding when we have a text message.

(Larry Rosen at 00:08:26) We've allowed it to make all sorts of sounds, to vibrate, to do this, and to notify us. And that's making us multitask. Say I'm talking to you and I get, I'm not multitasking. Now I'm just listening to you and I'm talking to you. All of a sudden my phone beeps.

(Larry Rosen at 00:08:41) What happens to me? Physiologically, what happens is if you do a skin conductance test, your galvanic skin response, the sweat in your hands, in your fingers, in your pits, whatever, registers. And what happens is you'll be doing this task and you go along and all of a sudden your phone beeps and you go like this. You'll spike, what's called a GSR spike, which means that you're aroused. What is that arousal?

(Larry Rosen at 00:09:09) Well, it's a blast of chemicals in your brain that says, wait a minute. I've got to see what I just got notified about. I've got to do it. I've got to do it. And it makes you look to your phone and pick it up and do it.

(Larry Rosen at 00:09:21) It makes you multitask. And we allow it to. I mean, some of the research that we've done with young kids, teenagers, and sort of Gen Z, I guess they call them, they get upwards of 100 notifications a day from their phone. Upwards of 100. And they're spending seven-plus hours per day on their phone.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:46) So I got sick of it about, I think, about three years now. Three years ago, I was just so sick of the pickups, and I had this app that came out that talked about screen time that showed you your pickups per day. And so I said, I'm going to run an experiment because I'd already been doing the show for a couple years at this point, and I'd gotten comfortable with this idea of having to put it into do not disturb when I do the show. So I said I was going to run an experiment. Said I'm going to take two weeks, and I'm going to turn off all notifications from my phone.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:19) Just disable them all. And I'm going to see if I like it better or not. Very unscientific, very simply subjective. Hey. Do I like this better or not?

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:28) They haven't come back on. Two of them have. My wife can break through anything. So her and my calendar, my notifications of when I have my next meeting. And that's it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:39) So I've got, and I want to be interrupted on those two things. Everything else is just gone. And sometimes I look at my phone, and I've missed 30 calls over the past four days or something like that. I'm like, if it's really important, it gets to me. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:53) Because I'm still on email, and I'm still on, you know, Slack and all of these other forms of communication. And everyone knows that if they really need to get to me, they can just call my wife. And if you don't know my wife, then you don't really need to get to me.

(Larry Rosen at 00:11:09) Well, interestingly enough, what you did was get rid of all the external notifications. What you didn't do is get rid of the internal notifications. Correct. You can't. So what Gloria has found and what we always found in our research is that about half of your interruptions are external and half are internal.

(Larry Rosen at 00:11:29) We don't see what's going on that makes this internal thing pinging us, but we know from the research that it's due to some sort of anxiety. And that anxiety could be very little, it could be very big, but it pushes you, like I said, it pushes you to grab your phone. So for example, if you're an avid text messenger and you have not checked your text and you've turned off your notification site, and you haven't checked your texts in a period of time, your brain is going to tell you, you better check that or I'm going to make your body really nervous and really anxious. I'm going to spew out cortisol at a rapid pace so that your body gets really anxious and really nervous. And the more anxious and nervous you get, the more you need to distract yourself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:23) Okay. So I want to talk about that. Fully agree. And my pickups, they went down probably about 50%. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:31) They didn't go down completely. They're still absurdly high. Eighty pickups a day or whatever it may be. It's a lot.

(Larry Rosen at 00:12:38) I mean, it's a lot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:39) And so I started watching myself. I like to look at myself like a monkey. I'm like, what's this monkey doing? Right? And I tried different things to get control of this autonomous uncontrollable physiological situation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:54) Now the only thing that I have done to be successful is I look at it like a drug. Okay? I used to be very overweight. So for me, it's like chocolate. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:03) So I look at it like that. And here's the thing. If I have a little bit of chocolate, I'm going on the bend. I'm off. I'm in chocolate city.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:13) Right? So if I stay away from it completely, I'm good. Right? And so I took that and applied it to this, and I said, okay. How can I control myself with this?

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:25) Many experiments tried, failed, didn't do it. Like, you know, oh, only during these times, you know, different ways. Now I'm getting into the details a little bit there, but I'll back up and say the only way I've had success with it is in the morning, I don't touch my phone until everything that I want to do is done, and that's usually around 09:30 in my local time zone. And I don't have one meeting scheduled prior to 09:30, so I know every single day of the week that there is nothing on my calendar to 09:30. And that's when I deal with my faith, my fitness, my mindset, my wife, my kids, my breakfast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:09) You know, those things are happening. The things that are really important to me, whether I have a lot or I have a little, they're getting done before I enter distraction city, which lasts until I put my phone down for bed at night. So I get distracted 09:30 to 08:30 at night or 09:00. So I'm getting it for twelve hours a day, man. I'm not sitting here saying that I've completely solved this, but I have this beautiful window from 05:30 AM to 09:30 that's like before technology existed, and I love it.

(Larry Rosen at 00:14:42) And that's smart. Let me tell you a little study that was done that kind of corroborates what you're saying. So this researcher went and found, I don't know, sixty, seventy families that had a mom and dad and a teenager. And before they started, they did all sorts of surveys that showed how much they used each different kind of technology. So how much they use social media, how much they use email, how much they use messaging, whatever, everything.

(Larry Rosen at 00:15:09) Then what they did is they had them swab themselves, meaning they take a swab, put it in a little container, put it in the refrigerator, mark down what time it was, and they do that right as they woke up. They do it thirty minutes later, and then I don't remember how much during the day because that was unimportant to me. What they found was they first looked at, is there any relationship between your cortisol levels, because that's what they were measuring, between the time you wake up and thirty minutes later? Okay. So you got the scenario.

(Larry Rosen at 00:15:40) So for moms, no amount of technology related to their ups or downs of cortisol between waking and thirty minutes. By the way, when we awaken, cortisol starts. It's the thing that gets us going in the morning. And so if there's stuff there, there's cortisol there anyway. When they looked at dads, the only type of technology use that correlated with the cortisol was email.

(Larry Rosen at 00:16:06) So those dads who did more emails showed a bigger change between awakening and thirty minutes later. Now when they looked at the teenagers, only also only one correlated with an increase in cortisol. Those teens who use more social media showed more of an increase in cortisol between awakening and thirty minutes later. Yeah. That's frightening. I mean, that goes along with what you just said about what you do for yourself. What you're doing is you're avoiding having that happen to you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:39) Yes.

(Larry Rosen at 00:16:39) Teenagers can't do that. They can't avoid it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:43) You can't really expect them to. Their brain's not even formed. So—

(Larry Rosen at 00:16:47) That's true. That's true. Their brain, this part of the brain, which makes all your decisions for you in the prefrontal cortex, which directs everything in your mind, in your brain, everything in your body, is not fully developed until you're in your twenties. If not—

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:00) I know when it developed for me because I went on a spiritual exploration, and I've talked to some other people and they have had similar experiences. Around 25 to 27, I had this awareness of self in a different way. You know, I'd say I was self-aware all through my twenties, but it was just a different way of I'm this human in this world, and I have this impact, and I can gather these resources, and this is kind of what's going on around me. It didn't happen till 25 to 27. I mean, and right when I got to that moment, I was like, oh, man, we let people vote and all that stuff before, at 18? We need to raise that to at least when they're... Look, I'm all about freedom, 100%. I'm super into it, but we should let the people that make the rules at least have the physically detectable thing that is helping them think be completely developed, right?

(Larry Rosen at 00:17:56) And teenagers don't, and 18-year-olds don't, and probably 21-year-olds don't completely. I mean, it's a process. What happens is when you're born, all of your neurons in your brain are like live wires. And what happens is these little cells called myelin start wrapping around the neurons like rubber around a cord that goes into the wall. When you are a baby, for example, your neurons are all just like live wires. So babies just flail around, and that's why they tell you to swaddle them because it's kind of painful for them to have these neurons flare. And as you get older and they start getting coated with this myelin, then you're able to better transmit information and deal with information coming in and going out because peripheral cortex is dealing with all this stuff from everywhere, right? With sounds, sights, things people do, and that takes a long time in the prefrontal cortex. It's the last part of your body to be myelinated. And if it's not completely myelinated, it might be okay at 21. It might be maybe 70% myelinated, maybe at 21. Some people might not even be that at 21. But at 18, you're definitely not. And that's a big difference.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:14) And I definitely respect that spectrum, right? There's always going to be that 16-year-old that's far, like, the one in a million that's way farther ahead in their development. But you don't make rules on the exception. You make rules on the rules, you know? With all of your experience and the interviews that you do, you must have one takeaway, one thing that someone can do to improve the quality of their life given all of these distractions.

(Larry Rosen at 00:19:44) So one of the things that I think is most important, one of the things I took away from The Distracted Mind, is that what distraction does is it stops you from having a good focal attention. And it doesn't necessarily cause major problems, but it can. But what we need to do is to learn how to focus. And for Gloria's work, we can't focus for 57 seconds is our max. I mean, some of my research shows two minutes, three minutes, four minutes. One of the studies I did showed we had somebody study something super important for 15 minutes and somebody watch over their shoulder. They were able to study something very important for nine minutes out of the 15. So they're not doing a very good job. So what I've come up with is a strategy that is very simple, that helps you mold your attention, increase it, make it better, make it more consistent. It's called a tech break.

(Larry Rosen at 00:20:43) And basically what you do is you take your phone like this. You set the alarm for one minute, two minutes, some small amount. During that one or two minutes, you can look at anything you want. Look at anything on your phone. Look at anything on your laptop if it's there or whatever screens you have. When that alarm goes off, you close everything. If you're using your laptop, you do not minimize it. Because if you minimize it, then it's down at the bottom and it can still distract you. So you literally shut everything down on your laptop, you shut everything down on your phone. And then what you do is set the alarm for 15 minutes. Put this upside down right in front of your face. Upside down. The reason we put it upside down is so you don't see anything flashing on screen. The reason it's in front of your face is because it's a signal to your brain, to your prefrontal cortex, that says, don't worry, you will get to me in 15 minutes or less. When the alarm goes off, you set it for one to two minutes, whatever you choose, do whatever you want, do whatever you want. Go get something to eat, do whatever you want in your one to two minutes or however many minutes, doesn't matter. Set it for 15 minutes again. What happens is you start getting better and better at the 15 minutes. And you know you're better when all of a sudden the alarm goes off and you go in your head, wait, wait, wait, I want to finish what I'm working on. Want to finish writing this. I want to finish this email. I want to finish reading this paragraph. Then what you do is you can crank it up. So instead of 15 minutes, make it 20 minutes. Or if you're really bold, make it 30 minutes. And so you slightly edge your attention up. And I think, by the way, if you can get 30 minutes out of attention these days, given our attention span is about a minute, if we're lucky, then that's great. And it all comes from you exercising these tech breaks so they work.

(Larry Rosen at 00:22:29) Now you don't have to do them when you're just studying, when you're just working. You can do them at the dinner table because everybody brings their phones to the dinner table, and they're always looking at them. You could bring it to the restaurant when you're out with friends, and they all have their cell phones, and they're all looking periodically. You make tech breaks out of it. You literally make tech breaks. You can do it when you're watching a movie with your spouse. My spouse tends to multi-screen. I would rather set it so for two minutes, we can talk. She can multi-screen, whatever. And then we go back to focus on what we're looking at on TV. You can use it everywhere. It works perfectly because it builds your brain into realizing that, oh, I can attend. I'm not screwing up anything by not looking at this phone for 15 minutes or 20 minutes or 25 or 30 minutes. However, you do have to alert everybody you're doing it because otherwise they'll start texting you mad. Like, why aren't you... are you mad at me? Are you angry with me? Why aren't you responding to my text? Blah, blah, blah. And I always tell my students when I taught this stuff to go and look online and look for something that's called Key and Peele.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:31) Oh, yeah.

(Larry Rosen at 00:23:33) And they did one called texting. And if you look at that, it shows what happens with texting going bad, that we just misinterpret. So you have to tell everybody you're doing this. You have to say, look, I'm trying to get my attention up. I will get back to it within 15 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever. So tell all your social media friends too because, otherwise, they'll start posting and bugging you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:56) We do that at work a little bit. So we have Slack as our team messenger, and part of your onboarding process is configuring your Slack work hours. That way, if people do want to message you after work hours, you don't get notified of it. So that was one step that we took. The other one was, you're exactly right. When I did that experiment, I started telling everybody, definitely at the company and everybody that was near me, hey, I'm not going to be at my phone for these periods of times. But you keep mentioning this concept that I want to just go a little bit further into, and it's the decision. So when I was thinking, oh, yeah, I'll just use this a little bit less or I'll try not to do it as much, I failed. But when I put on my calendar and made a decision, this is how I'm going to live my life, my success rate is significant. Now it's not perfect all the time. I'll have a good streak of a month or two, and then I'll get off for a couple weeks, and then I'll be back on it for a month or two. So it's not perfect, right? It's always a work in progress. But the big difference that allowed me to get over the hurdle of just utter failure on an every other day basis was I put it in my calendar, and I made a decision to myself. And here's the thing. If you look at my calendar, which my whole team can see my calendar, you will see from 5:30 to 9:30, there's activities the whole way down. Now I know what they are, so I don't have to look at my phone. But I always know that if I get distracted and want to pick up my phone or if I'm at a loss of what I'm going to do, it's already predetermined what I'm doing in that time. Because if I just chose a giant block of time, I was failing because it was just like no phone time. And then I wouldn't have things set up to do. I'm like, well, I might as well see what's going on in the sales chat, you know?

(Larry Rosen at 00:25:49) Or just grab your phone and randomly tap something, some icon.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:52) Gotta tap something.

(Larry Rosen at 00:25:53) People have tried all sorts of strategies. I mean, they've tried, you know, a whole weekend up in the mountains where you don't get phone reception. They've tried anything you think of, they've tried. Just like it sounds like you went through a bunch of different things. I mean, they tried the Do Not Disturb, but the Do Not Disturb on an iPhone is stupid because it allows you if it goes off, you can change it. I mean, if it tries to disturb you, you have the option to change it right there so you can go, oh, wait, I'll be disturbed right now. It's not foolproof. It also makes people crazy, quite honestly, because they're not controlling it. That's where the tech break, you're in control. That's why I like it, is you're in control. You decide what attention span you want. It's your choice. If you want to be constantly interrupted, be constantly interrupted. One of the cool ones that I heard that I think could augment this is if you buy a little light, a little round light that is either red or green, and you put on your desk at work, and when you are working, you make it red. So it's a little signal to everybody else, hey, don't come in my cubicle and bug me and talk to me because I'm working. When you're available, maybe you're working, but you're available, turn it to green. So people then know. It's a silly little trick, but it allows you more chance to be able to focus that attention and then not be distracted. By the way, distraction is terrible. When you're distracted, the cool little experiments that I've seen that go on, when you're distracted, you don't go back to exactly where you left. You have to thumb back a ways. It's like if you're reading a chemistry book, for example, or whatever, and you are distracted, even if you put your finger right where you were distracted at that point, you still won't remember and you still have to flip back. What I read, I read fiction a lot. And if I'm reading fiction and then I get distracted, something happens, I get distracted, come back... Typically, the resumption lag is typically about 20 minutes, by the way. That's the typical one in business at least. Takes you about 20 minutes to get back to where you were. If I'm reading that book, I have to flip back four or five, six pages because I've lost in my brain where I was. And so I have to build up those brain structures again so that I basically get back to where I was. Well, that's fiction. Think about what happens in the business world. You get distracted, you're working on a project, you're writing something, whatever you're doing, you have to go back and reconnect with it and restructure it. And maybe you won't be able to put it together the way you had left it. I mean, if you think about it, and it's kind of as a brain structure, this is not really true, but think about lighting up this whole area to do what you're working on. When you come back, that area is not lit up anymore. You have to pour the blood over there and the glucose and the oxygen that your neurons need to work and build that back up. But you may not be able to build it back up to where it was before. Maybe this real epiphany, but that epiphany is gone.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:48) There are so many people listening to this right now that are probably freaking out that you just nailed it because my background is software engineering. We solve complicated problems through software. And I used to try to explain to my wife because she was in veterinary world where there was maybe trauma and everything was in real-time situation, where I was in problem-solving world where I had to put this complex problem, all of these models into my head, and try to figure out how to solve relationships between them. And then someone would come in, and they'd be like, hey, Joel. And now I have to go load everything back up. So I used to refer to this for the past 20 years. I called it clearing my cache. You know, in your browser, you've got the memory. It's like if somebody interrupts me or something when I'm working on a hard problem, it's clearing my cache. It feels so good right now. It feels better than a notification right now to hear you tell me that there's some sort of biological reasoning that it's actually happening, that you know as a professor that this is something that happens versus it just being in my head. Because I've had people roll their eyes at me all the time. Oh, you know, it's not that big of a deal.

(Larry Rosen at 00:29:53) Well, this is... I mean, this is what the first half of the book is about. This is what Adam explains, why this happens to us, why we have to reconnect with our brain. And it's fascinating to me. I'm not a neuroscientist. I've read a bunch of neuroscience. I'm not a neuroscientist by any stretch of the imagination.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:10) You sound like one, by the way.

(Larry Rosen at 00:30:12) Well, I understand just enough to be dangerous.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:14) Yeah.

(Larry Rosen at 00:30:14) I understand just enough to give you analogies about stuff in your brain. But what I do know is that everything emanates from our brain. Everything emanates from our brain. And it's all about the biochemistry of your brain and the electrical energy in your brain. I mean, for example, I have Parkinson's disease. Parkinson's disease is a lack of dopamine. It's funny because we think of dopamine as, well, wait, isn't dopamine the thing that you get when you're a video game player and you get a rush of dopamine, and you need to keep playing more and more to get more and more dopamine? Well, I have a limited amount of dopamine in my brain. Has nothing to do with video gaming. What it has to do with is dopamine also monitors and modifies, and it is responsible for your walking, your gait, your arms, your legs. My left arm does not swing when I walk. That's because I have very little dopamine. But it's also responsible for other things. For example, when you're Parkinsonian, one of the first early symptoms is your sense of smell. Lack of dopamine makes your sense of smell go away. So it's all biochemical. And this is what Adam so nicely explains in the first half of the book because he understands. He's not only a medical doctor in neuroscience or neurology. He has a PhD in neuroscience too. So he understands both the neurology of it and the more important perception. And he does a beautiful job. I mean, we wrote for almost two years back and forth and back and forth on this book because we wanted to make it readable for anybody. We were a little worried because we're both kind of, you know, up in that world where you publish or perish and you do a lot of heavy-duty research. And how do we then explain the research? How do we explain the brain, the psychology to somebody who doesn't really know anything about what we're talking about? And so we were able to bring it down to a level that we didn't dumbify it, but we made it readable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:10) You're like the Neil deGrasse Tyson of psychology.

(Larry Rosen at 00:32:13) Which is why I love Neil deGrasse Tyson because he's able to take astronomical stuff which is very complex and bring it down to a level that you can understand. Good example.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:24) Do you think any of these vitamins that improve focus, do they have any validity to the neurochemistry or the biochemistry?

(Larry Rosen at 00:32:34) If anybody out there is listening from a company that puts this together, no. No. They're worthless. Same thing with the brain games that you can get online and things like that. Well, the research shows that they might help you a little bit, but no. I mean, what helps you is understanding what is causing you to move your focus and attention away. And often it's you distracting yourself. We've done some research. You were talking about pickups.

(Larry Rosen at 00:33:07) How many times you pick up your phone and open it up? We did some experiments with some Gen Z kids, like average age 25. So they're on that cusp of that prefrontal cortex. And we gave them some strategies that would help with the idea to help them use their phone less. And we told them, pick a couple of these strategies that we think might help use your phone less.

(Larry Rosen at 00:33:28) And we taught them tech breaks if they wanted to use it. We had like 20, 21 different kinds of strategies that they could use. Any ones they wanted to pick three. And then we charted it, looked at their number of pickups and the amount of time they spent over like all day long, up to when they started it, and then right during it and after. And what we saw is this is pickups.

(Larry Rosen at 00:33:50) Pickups started here. When we started this three weeks, went down a little, stayed down, stayed down, stayed down. At a three-week period, popped right up to where it was before, if not a little higher. So we thought we made a mistake. Six weeks should do it.

(Larry Rosen at 00:34:05) Same thing with six weeks. Stayed fine for a little bit for six weeks, popped right back up again. These kind of things that we try to do don't work. Pills don't work. These strategies, these book strategies in general don't work.

(Larry Rosen at 00:34:24) What you need to do is to be really aware of why you're doing it. I mean, that was the whole purpose of the book, was to help you understand from both the biological neurological perspective and my psychological perspective, what's driving this? What is making you crazy out there? And then how can you back up and take some of these strategies that we offer—we offer a lot of strategies—and implement them in your life just like you have to cut your anxiety down and to make you more productive, basically.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:55) I find the words "reducing anxiety" to be more valuable than "stopping distraction." I don't know why, but I do, because I know what anxiety feels like and I hate that. And I hate it when an external thing is causing this anxiety. So yeah, just to back up for a second. When you said they were going, the number of pickups and then they stopped for six weeks. Can you remind me again?

(Larry Rosen at 00:35:27) They didn't stop. They reduced the pickups.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:29) And what was causing that reduction?

(Larry Rosen at 00:35:32) They were doing these strategies that we asked them to do. So, for example, they were doing tech breaks. So they were on... Let's see. What were some of the others? Oh, they were taking each one of their social media icons, putting them in folders and hiding them in the hopes that that would help them not spend more time because everybody has their main social media right on their front page of their phone.

(Larry Rosen at 00:35:54) And so they were hoping—we were hoping—that would happen. We asked them to tell their phone to forget all the passwords for all the social media sites. So they had to redo all the passwords when they wanted to get in. They were smarter than us. What they figured out is they could use one password to get into all of them.

(Larry Rosen at 00:36:08) And so that one didn't work. But there were three that kind of worked, that kind of worked and kind of got a little bit of a reduction in their usage. But then it shot right back up after three weeks or after the six weeks. You have to be able to do it yourself. Let me tell you an interesting study that my colleague, Nancy Cheever, did, which will explain to you what the anxiety is. So what she did is she took people, brought them into the lab, sat them down in front of a monitor, and she explained to them. She said, "I'm going to take these two little clips. I'm going to put them on your fingers. They don't hurt. They're just on your fingers."

(Larry Rosen at 00:36:42) And she said, "This one measures your heart rate. This one measures your arousal, your galvanic skin response." And then she said, "Okay, just put your phone next to you and let's start. And there'll be a test afterwards." I don't remember if she gave them a bonus if they did well on the test. I don't remember what that was about. But what I do know is after a minute or two, she said, "Wait, wait, wait. We have to stop.

(Larry Rosen at 00:37:06) The phone right next to you is interfering with these little gizmos on your fingers. I'm just going to move the phone back here about five feet on this table. Is that okay?" And they said, "Sure." Now what she did is during the next 20 minutes, something like that, she texted them four times. They couldn't do anything about getting their text. She texted them four times.

(Larry Rosen at 00:37:23) First time she texted them, spike. Second time, spike. Third time, spike. Fourth time, spike. Every single time the text message went off, arousal spike. That is biochemical. That is probably cortisol, alpha-amylase, a bunch of chemicals in your brain. Now it's interesting because you would think that someone like Anderson Cooper, for example, might be able to focus better because he's on television all the time.

(Larry Rosen at 00:37:54) He has to focus, he has to pay attention, he has to not get that cortisol rush. So we brought him into the lab because they came and interviewed us for 60 Minutes, and he did exactly the same thing. Spike, spike, spike, spike. When we talked to him afterwards, he said, "Yeah. I was afraid I was missing something.

(Larry Rosen at 00:38:11) And my anxiety went up." He said, "I could feel it. It went up." So it's interesting because if you go to my website, DoctorLarryRosen.com, you'll see at the top a link there. And I encourage people to go and watch what happens because even if Anderson Cooper can't do it, how could we do it?

(Larry Rosen at 00:38:26) And by the way, we had teenagers do it too. Not part of that study, but somebody else, Nancy brought in some teenagers, teenage girls, and they spiked higher. More anxiety. Thirty-one percent of teenagers will have an anxiety episode during their teen years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:41) Yeah. Well, women tend to be more social anyways. Right? And so these devices are largely associated with our ability to communicate.

(Larry Rosen at 00:38:49) Although, yep. It's changing between usage from girls and usage from boys. It's almost identical.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:55) Oh, it's almost identical.

(Larry Rosen at 00:38:57) It's almost identical now. We think girls would be on their phones more often because they're more talky, more chatty, more communicative. It's not the same. Boys are on just as much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:07) But what are they doing on the phone?

(Larry Rosen at 00:39:09) Well, that's yeah. They're doing different things on the phone. Although, what you see a lot of that is video game playing while you're talking to other friends at the same time. So it's connection. It's communicating. It's just different.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:22) Yeah. That's most of my childhood. Right? Playing video games while making friends online. And yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:29) Now I'm curious to know, did anything in your research or from your colleagues' studies talk about this concept that back in the '80s, everything was sort of distributed in the sense that my money was over here at the bank that I walked into, and my food was over here, and my dollars—or that's the same example. But, you know, my communication, maybe where I sit down and write letters, all of these places were somewhere different. And now they've all condensed into this. My safety. This is my safety. If I need an ambulance, this is my money.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:08) If I need money, this is my food. I order Instacart. They bring me groceries. This is so important to me.

(Larry Rosen at 00:40:14) Oh, this is my camera. This is my GPS. This is my everything.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:19) Yeah.

(Larry Rosen at 00:40:19) It's not a computer. It's not a phone. It's a computer. It's more than a computer. It's a computer plus an iPad plus GPS plus all of this crammed into this one little device, and we can't be without it.

(Larry Rosen at 00:40:30) Watch people at stoplights when the light turns red. They immediately grab their phone because they have 45 seconds. I need 45 seconds to do something, and then the light turns green and everybody behind them starts honking. You just cannot stop yourself from grabbing that phone. That's why I do the tech breaks to tune you into realizing how you can't focus for 15 minutes.

(Larry Rosen at 00:40:49) Some people have to start with five minutes of focus because they can't do the 15.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:54) Well, when I drive my RV, we have a big RV, and when I do that, my wife has possession of my phone.

(Larry Rosen at 00:41:01) Cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:02) You know, just because it's a giant multi-thousand-pound rig. And even if I'm at a stoplight or something, it just helps so much if you put the barrier up that this is just not going to happen.

(Larry Rosen at 00:41:14) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:14) And one of the things that we do from time to time—it comes and goes—is we do what we call "no phone time," and my kids love to yell "no phone time." And basically, whenever they yell "no phone time," we let them grab our phones and put them in the cupboard. And then—

(Larry Rosen at 00:41:29) Now how old is this?

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:31) Five, three, and three months.

(Larry Rosen at 00:41:33) So three months old. Six years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:36) Yeah. What's going to happen in six years?

(Larry Rosen at 00:41:38) Your five-year-old will be 11 years old, will have his or her own phone, will hide in the bedroom and not come out for hours because the 11-year-old's been busy doing what 11-year-olds do, which is playing Fortnite or whatever, or watching other people play Fortnite or talking to friends while they're playing Fortnite or whatever is hot at that point, who knows what it would be. And they will be less communicative to you because they're communicating more online. And five, that's cute for them to say "no phone time" because they're modifying your behavior.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:09) Yeah.

(Larry Rosen at 00:42:10) Yep. If you yelled "no phone time" at 11, well, I can tell you because I have two 10-year-old grandkids, a nine-year-old grandkid, and then five, three, one just born. And the 10-year-old and the nine-year-old boys, very hard to get them off their iPads. Very hard. Even when they're doing things that I think are appropriate, like watching—one of them plays soccer online.

(Larry Rosen at 00:42:34) It's a program, I guess. It's a game that they can—yeah, they can actually, it does the World Cup, so they could pick a team they want, play each game with the team, and they can control it and all this. The other one looks at football stuff because he's into football. It is so hard to drag them away.

(Larry Rosen at 00:42:50) Literally, their mom will say, "Okay. Done." And she'll shut it down, whoop, from a distance. And then I've seen this happen several times where they go up and they're, "Oh, Mom, please, please. I told you five minutes ago I was going to turn it off.

(Larry Rosen at 00:43:07) Please, just another five minutes. I just need. Please, please, please. I'll do anything you want." Literally, I watched one of them get down on his knees in front of me. "Please let me do just five more minutes."

(Larry Rosen at 00:43:18) Now if you're a good parent, what you recognize is you set the behavior first with the consequences attached to it at the same time. So you say, "I'm going to set the phone for 15 minutes. I'm going to set my phone for 15 minutes. You can play for 15 minutes. When the phone goes off, I'll set it for another two minutes so that you can wrap up what you're doing. And if you do that, great.

(Larry Rosen at 00:43:41) You'll get more time later on today and get to use more time. If you don't, you'll lose time. Not that I'm going to take it away because that never works. Not that I'm going to take it away, but you will lose time. So instead of 15 minutes, if you don't do it, you might lose 10 minutes.

(Larry Rosen at 00:43:55) You only have five minutes the next time." So you tell them the behavior they need to do and the consequences, so there's no pleading. You can't plead with me. Here's what we did. Here's the chart that said, "Do it.

(Larry Rosen at 00:44:07) Do your 15 minutes. Stop when I tell you to stop, and you will get extra five minutes later on or next 10 minutes later on or whatever."

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:15) Yeah. That's why it's important to try to do it as early as possible. So, I mean, we do the app limited time. So let's say they get an hour, and then at this age, so far, when it's up, they are like, and then they just hand it to us. But we don't—we haven't yet had to pry it away from them.

(Larry Rosen at 00:44:34) Yeah. Five years old. Five years old, probably not. Maybe in a couple years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:37) I'm sure. Oh, I'm sure. 100%.

(Larry Rosen at 00:44:40) Is it a he or a she?

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:41) I have a daughter who's five, a son who's four, and then my other son's three months.

(Larry Rosen at 00:44:45) Yeah. So the five and the four-year-olds are going to start wanting to connect because all their friends are connecting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:51) Well, that's exactly what happened. Thank you, Michael Wade. My buddy who listens to the show, he's an investor in the company and everything, he was driving through. He's got, I think, five girls, kids, and I have a little farm outside of Nashville because we got sick of the cookie-cutter stuff, and we're like, I'm on technology all day. We live in this busy little neighborhood.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:10) So let's go out in the middle of nowhere and live out there. So we did, and he was driving through Tennessee, and he's like, "Hey. I'm driving through." So they stayed the night at our house and introduced our kids to Fortnite. And so now our kids know what Fortnite is, and they know that they can talk to Michael Wade's children on Fortnite.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:26) And so now Fortnite has app-controlled limitations on it.

(Larry Rosen at 00:45:32) And you know what? They're little kids. Think about when they're 10, 11, 12, when they're teenagers. Oh my God. Parents are having so much trouble with this with teenagers because first of all, the pandemic didn't help this.

(Larry Rosen at 00:45:45) It just rapidly increased the screen time and also was very difficult for parents because they had to work at home. And so it felt right that when the kids were done with school that you just give them iPads, let them play for an hour so I can get some work done. It really messed things up. And same thing with any online class and online education. It's just difficult because you're online so much.

(Larry Rosen at 00:46:12) And it seems like that's your world. That's where you should be. And the kids just kind of think that they're one with their phone, one with their iPad. I mean, it's not an iPad. It's an appendage now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:25) Oh, yeah. It's an extension of ourselves. Just to give you context for this whole thing, I'm 35.

(Larry Rosen at 00:46:32) And I'm 72, by the way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:33) Are you really? You're 72? Yep. Wow. I was going to guess early '60s, man. Congratulations. You're doing well.

(Larry Rosen at 00:46:37) Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:37) But I was there for when the internet came out in a larger sense. Like, very aware of when Myspace happened.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:48) I can remember that really easily. I can remember a lot of the advancements in technology. And I did want to make one quick correction. It wasn't Fortnite. It was Roblox.

(Larry Rosen at 00:47:00) Oh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:00) Right? I don't know.

(Larry Rosen at 00:47:01) The new thing. My kids—four minutes old now. It's Roblox now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:09) Yeah. It's Roblox. You're not a Luddite. Okay? You're not saying don't do this and get rid of it and all of that, but you are saying this is how it works. Be aware of it, and here are some tactics for how you can increase your attention span or your focus.

(Larry Rosen at 00:47:27) Exactly. And okay, not only am I not a Luddite, but I'm one of the worst offenders. I mean, when I get my weekly Sunday pop-up that says you've used how much screen time, I ignore looking at it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:39) My wife won't let me look at hers often.

(Larry Rosen at 00:47:41) I don't want to know. And particularly bad, I'm a Dodger fan. So baseball season, it's really bad because I watch all the games on my phone. And so it's like, oh, yeah, I used eighteen hours last week, twenty-four hours last week, fifty hours. It's like, okay, it's meaningless. But I do have this phone. This phone never is very far away from me. It's now about six inches away at the most.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:04) Now do you podcast, or do you talk to other people about this?

(Larry Rosen at 00:48:07) I write about it sometimes on Psychology Today, but no. I mean, that's why I wrote The Distracted Mind. It's like, put it in one place, let people hear what it's about, and then hope that people will take it and try some of the things we suggest. And that's all we're asking is just try these. Here's a couple. It's an interesting one. Our brain gets overloaded when we do anything for too long. So we are on, I mean, when you're at work, you're on all day, right? Straight time, you're on your phone, you're on the device, some screen. Too much screen time in a row kind of jumbles your brain. It's like your brain starts to not be able to function as well after sixty to ninety minutes. And so one of the recommendations, it's been a longstanding recommendation in our world, is that you take a break every sixty to ninety minutes. And you literally take a break. You set your alarm for ten minutes saying, do something. One of the best things you can do is go out in nature. There's solid research that shows that if you are walking in a very rough area where there's lots of traffic and stuff, your brain is going and going and going and going, trying to process everything. As soon as you step into something like a park, for example, the activity goes way down and you mellow out. It takes maybe ten minutes at the most. And there's other suggestions in there too that you can do, but we need to kind of give our brain a rest about every hour. We don't because if you work in a company, you're working eight hours a day, ten hours, twelve hours, you're on your screen. You need to take a break and go do something that's non-technological.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:42) Well, I'm very blessed because when we made that move out here to the farm, I built the studio about 25, 50 yards from the main house. And you can't see neighbors. It's just forest and woods all around us. And so when I walk back and forth for lunch and things like that, I'm just sort of walking through nature. And you're exactly right. Sometimes I'll just stare. Especially when the seasons change, we get a lot of deer and turkey and gophers or whatever walking through the property. But yeah, it's amazing how good I can feel even just on that thirty-second walk. You know? So I'm glad that there's some science behind that.

(Larry Rosen at 00:50:24) If an EEG were kept on you, it would be all electrical everywhere in your brain until you walked outside. And then you'd see the electrical not go away, but it calms down. It's not as crazy electrical. So yeah, you are calming your brain. Something we don't think about because we're so hooked onto screens. There are screens everywhere. There are screens at work, there are screens in our cars, there are screens everywhere. We're almost always inside of a screen. And it's just overloaded. It's not bad. It's just overloaded. I'm not telling people to take, you know, a week break, an hour break, or anything. Ten minutes works.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:59) When are we going to put it into our brain? And then there's no screen. We just see it in our head.

(Larry Rosen at 00:51:04) Well, that is one of the fears of changes over time. I mean, I remember reading a book, I don't know, maybe fifteen years ago. I don't even remember the name of the book, but people would come home and they'd plug into the wall, and they'd be in this internet kind of thing. It was before the internet, but this thing where they would be now in the middle of, and somebody told me that, you stepped into the matrix. That's kind of what our world has become. We're screen-embedded already. And are we going to get it literally embedded in us? Well, possibly. At some point, there are people that have that done. There's a company, I forget what they are, that all of their—

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:49) Neuralink.

(Larry Rosen at 00:51:50) Yeah. All of their people are chipped.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:52) Oh, yeah. I read about them too. I did a special episode with a guy who's a transhumanist, and he did a documentary about all the people embedding. There's a whole—do you know about this underground network of people that embed electronics into their body?

(Larry Rosen at 00:52:06) No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:06) They work with tattoo parlors and piercing shops, and they embed—because those people know how to do that type of stuff with the skin—they embed electronics into their bodies to do all sorts of things. One guy took his Honda Civic and put an RFID chip in his palm, so it only reads to that. Another person put a light on the top of their head. It's permanently there, and it changes colors based off of mood or something of that nature. It's on Amazon. It's a free, I think it's a free documentary, but it's so interesting because they go into these underground places where these people are working on these projects because it's not legal to some degree. There's, I don't think there's a shop you can go to and walk in the front door and say, hey, cut me open and put this sensor inside of my arm.

(Larry Rosen at 00:52:49) Yeah. And I don't know whether it'll be in our arms, our palms, our brains, but it will be there. It will be there at some point in our world, maybe not in my world, maybe even not in your world, but maybe in your kids' world or grandkids' world. That will be the reality. I mean, it's funny because you say that because, again, with my Parkinson's, it's very interesting. One of the treatments is to embed this thing in your brain that sends a nine-volt battery shock through your brain and seems to work on some level to get rid of the tremors that Parkinson's patients experience. So, yeah, there's a lot of stuff embedded already. There's a lot of things that people in the real world have tried, not just underground, but in the real world have tried—

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:34) Oh, yeah.

(Larry Rosen at 00:53:35) With approval from wherever they're getting the grant from.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:38) I want you to imagine in your head—have you ever seen those films where they're, like, stop animation? You know, maybe like a cardboard character, and they just take a frame here and there, so it's kind of a jagged animation.

(Larry Rosen at 00:53:50) Mm-hmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:51) And then imagine the evolution and integration of silicon to humanity and computing to humanity. And what you will see if you play that movie out up until this point is you'll see it starting in big rooms, you know, giant, and then getting smaller and closer to us and smaller and closer to us. And so, and that keeps repeating all the way down to the fact that there's hundreds, if not thousands, of embeddable medical devices right now that you can—from your heart to your brain to everything. And then if you just, it's not a hard leap to just say, alright, let that trend continue for fifty years, and now the computers are inside of us 100% of the time.

(Larry Rosen at 00:54:27) Yeah. We won't need to have the thing that you tap to see what your blood chemistry's like. You can put this thing on your side and embed it, and it'll tell you if you have a problem with what you're eating. Yeah. It changes. It says no. You eat spaghetti now. It's going to jack up your whatever and change your numbers, and you're not going to get the appropriate readings that you want. I mean, so it's still now we're really a short hop away from that being completely embedded, not just attached.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:55) Have we made any progress as far as—last time I looked into it was maybe three to five years ago—our understanding of consciousness, and I was specifically looking at people who did anesthesiology. Have we made any progress on our understanding of consciousness, or is it about where it was about five years ago?

(Larry Rosen at 00:55:12) Yeah. It's interesting you say that because in the New York Times today, there was a big article about AI and consciousness. It's called the C word. They don't talk about it. The C word? I kept reading through the article. What is the C word here? It's not the C word I know of. But, yeah, they talk about the fact that AI dabbles just at the edge of talking about whether it's conscious or not. And what is consciousness? What is a conscious entity, like an AI entity? What makes it conscious?

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:42) I know people who are less conscious than ChatGPT. You can ask it things, and it gives you answers. I know people that don't even—you can't even do that. You know? So it's like, what is it? It's hard to define. And if you take that farther, I can give it instruction, and it can do things it wasn't specifically programmed to do. And I was like, if that's not interacting with a person and training them for a new job, then I don't know what is. The only difference right now, I believe, or one of the main differences right now, although humans are very dynamic and I still leave room for spiritual concepts as well. But one of the main differences is the physical representation in reality in the sense that it doesn't have its exoskeleton fully operating yet. But as far as processing information, I mean, man, it's—and it's funny because you'll see, who did I see? I think it was Andreessen Horowitz, or Mr. Andreessen from the Andreessen Horowitz investors and, Mark, I think is his name, and then Musk and some other people. And they were sort of poking fun at these Neanderthals who thought GPT was conscious and whatnot. I was like, guys, it's not that far off. I mean, I've been writing this out for over twenty years. Like, it's—

(Larry Rosen at 00:56:55) It's at the edge, but where it changes and what they were talking about in the article, which is interesting, is how will people react when you start moving your software in this direction? Because so far, AI has really just been a tool that uses kind of a neural network to make something, you know, an entity or really just a computer program, as you know, to learn and to get better and get better and better and better at learning, but it's not conscious. It's not consciousness. You just, you've fed it in there. You just let it see all the examples of whatever it is you wanted to do, and it can then do it. I mean, they can talk to you and they can talk back and forth as though they're real human beings, but they're not. It's just a neural network in there that's been processing, and it's been shown hundreds of thousands of cases to allow it to come to some point where it can do a task. But it's not conscious. There's no place—

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:47) But how do you—you're saying it's not conscious, and you can't even define consciousness, though. Right?

(Larry Rosen at 00:57:51) Well, the interesting part is I think the definition of consciousness to them is when it can start programming itself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:57) I mean, there's programs, I believe, that can program themselves under specific circumstances.

(Larry Rosen at 00:58:03) And so this is the edge of kind of artificial intelligence consciousness. Can it program itself to do a task? Go read the old book called When HARLIE Was One. It's by the guy who wrote a bunch of Star Trek episodes. I think he wrote "The Trouble with Tribbles." It's, again, a program. HARLIE is a—I can't remember what the acronym stands for. But it's a program that eventually learns to program itself. Yeah. And it's fascinating because most of it is dialogue between the person who started the programming and then HARLIE talking back and forth. And you can see over time as you read the book that HARLIE gets more and more conscious.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:42) It sounds like me in my twenties realizing that I'm a person and I can change myself and I can grow myself. I mean, was I conscious before then? I don't know. You know? Right?

(Larry Rosen at 00:58:52) But back to distraction.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:54) Yeah.

(Larry Rosen at 00:58:54) This is a great detour into the areas. But back to distraction, one of the things that I think is really important to understand is that we have been sucked in along the way. We did not hop on this train. We just got here. I mean, I don't think people can look back and say when it happened. When did it happen that I became so vulnerable to being distracted? I don't know if they will look back, but we allowed it in. And it's not going away. I mean, it's not going away. They're just building more and more distractible kind of technology that distracts you even more. And you have to be the person who figures out how personally you can avoid it as best you can because it's sweeping you away. It's sweeping all of us away. Somebody asked me the other day, I was doing an interview with somebody, I forget, and they asked me, well, what do you think in the long run? Societally, what's going to happen? And my answer is, I worry that we'll get to a point like they did in the days when they had to do something globally about drugs or about cigarette smoking. When cigarette smoking got out of hand, which was kind of funny because that's when I grew up, everybody smoked. My bar mitzvah, I put cigarettes on the table and matches, matchbooks and stuff. You remember that? Everybody smoked everywhere. Doctors smoked in their offices. And then all of a sudden, they realized that smoking was bad for you. So they put all these commercials showing people what happens when you smoke for your whole life. I remember the Marlboro Man shoot. They showed that he had had to have a thing cut in his throat to breathe, and he was still putting cigarettes there and smoking them. So that is what happened with cigarettes and took a long time, obviously, warnings on packages and all that. But now smoking is way down, and you don't see people smoking in general anywhere. Same thing with drugs. I don't know if you remember the commercials. This is your brain, splat with the egg. This is your brain on drugs. That was a whole campaign to try to help people understand that drugs could be dangerous and could fry your brain. Again, I don't know how effective it's been, but again, it raised our awareness. I think we're going to have to have something like that. Not mere jokingly aside, something like this is your brain, this is your brain on your phone. Like that, that we're just—we need somebody at a higher level to be able to say, look. The phone's great. It's had a great ride with it. Now you need to cut it back a little bit. I mean, you need to be in control and not the phone. When I think right now, we're tugging away with the phone. Sometimes I think we're in control of our phone. Sometimes I think the phone's in control of us.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:35) I think that's a good way to wrap up this conversation. Larry, this is better than I expected. I have been fully engaged. You are incredibly brilliant, and you have answered all of my—you've satiated my curiosity.

(Larry Rosen at 01:01:53) Well, thank you very much. I do like to talk about this because I think it's really important. I think it's one thing to be an academic and, you know, talk to students about all this stuff and write research and publish these things in journals and stuff. And I really think that it's time that people stand up and say enough is enough.

(Joel Beasley at 01:02:11) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you would like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.