I'm excited to talk about one of your latest works, "Unhackable," great title. What's would you say is perhaps the most surprising and fascinating discovery you made about us humans and how we pay attention these days, when putting together the book? - [Interviewee] I'll tell you what, I wrote a fiction book called, "The ELIXIR Project" in 2016 about a future society where people's brains get hacked, and that was my first stab at fiction. And when the book came out, people said, "Man, this is not just a fiction book, "like this is happening." And so, they kind of said, "Turn this into a nonfiction book "for people in the workforce, in business." And so, basically, I did a ton of research and found out that, a hack is basically when someone or something gains unauthorized access to a system or a computer. And think back to biology class, and sure enough, we were made up of pulmonary circulatory, respiratory system. So, our bodies are like systems and our brains are like super computers. So, in a real way, humans are getting hacked. Anytime we get distracted from our ultimate destiny, our dream. And the distractions are crazy big these days, and I'm sure we'll get into it, it's pretty fun topic. - [Interviewer] So, what do they call that? A threat actor, I think is the term they use a lot. Whether that's a nation or a company or an individual, you know, kid in a basement. A threat actor is kind of getting unauthorized access into our heads, but sometimes it's us. What's the universe of threat actors that are kind of the big culprits of hacking our systems? - [Interviewee] You know, it can be a lot of things. Unsexy hacks are just laziness or Netflix, or these types of things. But in a real way, the human species is now wired to crave distractions. We know from all the psychology that distractions produce a break from stress. And we know that smartphones create dopamine and addictions. So, I'm all for technology, I love technology, however, human knowledge once doubled every thousand years. So, think about that. It took, essentially, from the year zero to 1500, to double human knowledge. And then the next time was 250 years. And it kept going and going, and now, we live in a world today, where every 12 hours, human knowledge is doubling. And so, we can no longer keep up. Our ancestors made a handful of decisions a day, back not too long ago. Today we make 35,000 decisions. And so, we literally wake up with this limited attention. And throughout the day we dip into that and we create what's called decision fatigue, so, that at the end of the day, we're saying things like I'm burnout, I'm running on fumes, I'm on empty. And in a real way, we can no longer keep up with the amount of stress and distractions that are in front of us today. - [Interviewer] When we talk about human knowledge doubling, is that kind of like the printing press or like unique content published? Is that what you mean by knowledge? - [Interviewee] Everyone has become a publisher. Everyone has become a content creator. We used to have gatekeepers, where you would try to get a record out, you would try to get your thoughts out and be printed in the paper. We now have YouTube. We all are our own TV station, press release system, newspaper. I mean, we are literally producing mountains and mountains of information. Not to mention computing, AI. I mean, you name it. It's just an exponential curve, and our brains haven't upgraded. So, technology is upgraded, but our brains have not. And not only that Pete, but we now have new terms, Digiphrenia. So, schizophrenia was you know, multiple personalities, this type of thing. Well, Digiphrenia is a legit term that basically means that we exist in multiple places at once in the digital space. So, most people have a Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn. And so now, not only am I existing right now Pete, but online, I have a persona that's existing that may be getting tweets, it may be getting comments, not only that but you have the stress of trying to be consistent on all platforms at once. And so, there's a tearing of the mind that happens. It's literally a stress. And not only that, the average person touch, clicks, taps, swipes, their smartphone 2,600 times a day, according to Dscout. We now have five hours a day, but this is on screens, but it's in 32nd bursts. And technology's not the enemy, but I'm saying technology used to be a tool that we used, now, we're the tool that technology is using.
