As investors, we keep looking for new advantages. A better use of our brain, a great gift that we already have, might be a very intriguing path worth pursuing. My guest today has incredibly insightful advice for all of us.
Lucas Miller is a cognitive neuroscientist, author, and human performance researcher, as well as the youngest faculty at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
At Berkeley, Lucas teaches MBA students and is best known for his course called "Becoming Superhuman: The Science of Productivity and Performance". He also co-runs the Becoming Superhuman Lab, which conducts research on how to help busy leaders and their teams get their most important done, in less time, with less stress.
Since COVID began, Lucas has given over 300 talks and keynotes to financial institutions, private equity firms, and investment funds on how to optimize their workflow and enhance creative thinking.
• We began with Lucas recounting his childhood and upbringing, discussing how his early experiences fueled his interest in neurosciences and shaped his career path.
• Lucas shed light on the mismatch between modern work habits and our brain's natural inclinations, emphasizing the challenges of today's working culture.
• We dove into common mistakes people make regarding work hygiene, with Lucas providing insights on open offices, the psychological effects of self-view on Zoom, and the interruptions caused by phone notifications.
• Lucas shared more on our discussion about the impact of phone location on cognitive capacity and the distractions they introduce.
• We discussed the pitfalls of unstrategic scheduling. Lucas explained why early rising isn't suitable for everyone and offered advice on optimizing our daily schedules.
• Touching on productivity, Lucas delved into the problems of excessive multitasking.
• Lucas offered insights on long-term brain health, emphasizing the importance of sleep, regular sun exposure, and keeping devices outside the bedroom.
• The conversation shifted to the power of meditation, with Lucas sharing its cognitive benefits.
• Lucas shared his thoughts on the importance of our working environment, discussing how quieter locations can be beneficial and contrasting them with bustling cities like New York.
• To wrap up, Lucas reflected on his personal definition of success, providing a deeper understanding of what drives him and his aspirations.
https://www.becomingsuperhuman.science/
Show notes / references below (with specific timestamps). Feel free to tweak based on the format you usually use!
6’34’’
Lucas’s book on Amazon - Beyond Brilliance: The Blueprint for Learning Anything: https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Brilliance-Blueprint-Learning-Anything/dp/1540421236
8’15’’
Becoming Superhuman MBA course at UC Berkeley: https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/classified-becoming-superhuman-course-teaches-the-science-of-productivity-performance-and-wellness/
Lucas’ training and consulting company Becoming Superhuman:
https://www.becomingsuperhuman.science/
17’59’’
The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration (Bernstein, 2018): https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2017.0239
20’18’’
Stanford researchers identify four causes for ‘Zoom fatigue’ and their simple fixes: https://news.stanford.edu/2021/02/23/four-causes-zoom-fatigue-solutions/
25’01’’
Brain Brain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity (Ward, 2017): https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/691462
44’00’’
Discover Your Chronotype: www.mychronotype.com
Use code “TALKINGBILLIONS” (to bypass the paywall and access the assessment for free)
1:18’39’’
Meditation experience is associated with increased cortical thickness (Lazar, 2005): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1361002/
Enhanced brain connectivity in long-term meditation practitioners (Luders, 2015): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053811911006008
Stress reduction correlates with structural changes in the amygdala (Hölzel, 2010): https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/5/1/11/1728269?login=false
---- Crisis Investing: 100 Essays - My new book. To get regular updates and bonus content, please sign-up for my substack: https://bogumilbaranowski.substack.com/ Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/bogumil_nyc Learn more about Bogumil Baranowski Learn more about Sicart Associates, LLC. NEVER INVESTMENT ADVICE. IMPORTANT: As a reminder, the remarks in this interview represent the views, opinions, and experiences of the participants and are based upon information they believe to be reliable; however, Sicart Associates nor I have independently verified all such remarks. The content of this podcast is for general, informational purposes, and so are the opinions of members of Sicart Associates, a registered investment adviser, and guests of the show. This podcast does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any specific security or financial instruments or provide investment advice or service. Past performance is not indicative of future results. More information on Sicart Associates is available via its Form ADV disclosure documents available adviserinfo.sec.gov
Lucas Miller: AI-Generated Transcript, may contain errors.
[00:00:00] Bogumil: Well, hello Lucas. It's nice to see you again. How are you?
[00:00:02] Lucas Miller: I'm doing wonderfully. How are you?
[00:00:04] Bogumil: I am doing great. You and I met in Zurich at John Al Jevs, M o I, global, and I gave a talk about my experience of what I learned during the Covid years of leaving New York, living in the woods, and then spending some time on a tropical island. And I talk about the environment, the distractions, the focus, the need for walks and quality of sleep.
And after my talk, John walked up to me and said, you have to talk to Lucas. And then you had your talk that I really enjoyed. And then we had a long conversation and I was really looking forward to having you on the show and diving in a lot deeper into some of the advice, the mistakes that you talk about that can improve the quality of work of pretty much all knowledge workers, not just investors.
So if you indulge me, I like to start those conversations with , childhood and upbringing. And I'm very curious how you think that time influenced your path, your career, and led you to where you are today.
[00:00:57] Lucas Miller: Sure, happy to start at the beginning. There's so much we can cover today. Now I'm gonna do my best to talk fast packing as many insights as I can, but I would, I'd love to start at the beginning I'm from Southern California originally. I grew up in a neighborhood in Orange County in between Los Angeles and San Diego.
And it was a very safe, nice upbringing, but it was a little bit insulated. I felt like I was in a vacuum, and when I was thinking about where I wanted to go to school, I was choosing different schools within the United States. And I chose Berkeley because it was just far enough away from home where it felt like a different world.
Like I could expand my horizon, meet new people, get a taste of what felt like a new state or a new place, but it was still close enough that it was more affordable and I could be close to family. And it felt like the best of both worlds. And when I went to Berkeley, it was a complete shock. I was just exposed to so many different cultures and languages and different ways of thinking, and it was exactly what I was looking for.
Coming from a place that. Like I said, was a wonderful place to grow up, but I didn't think really pushed me to think differently about all the different ways that you can do life. And when I got to Berkeley, I was originally going to be a mechanical engineer. That's what I thought I wanted to do. I thought I wanted to really build the next generation of planes or cars, something physical, even though for some reason I, I should have had the self-awareness.
But you know how we are when we're young, I was awful. I Legos as a kid, awful. Anyone could have told me that you should not become a mechanical engineer. But I liked math and I liked physics and so I, I chose that path. Lasted one semester, realized this isn't for me. I can't do this. But I've always been driven by curiosity.
I've always been a reader. I'm not sure where that comes from, but I, I was interested in a lot of different subjects, so I decided, okay, what. What makes sense next And at the time, and, and still today, computer science was really popular. It's very extensible. It applies to so many different domains of life.
And I thought now maybe, maybe I'll do that. It's still math, it's still sciencey. And I did that for three semesters and I learned enough, I got a foundation, and then I realized I'm in classes with thousands of people. I'm getting literally zero attention from the graduate student directors, from professors.
I, I feel like I can learn enough on my own here. I can always learn more programming, but I, I don't wanna miss out on the experience of really getting to dive deep with people and indulge that curiosity in a one-to-one and, and small group based format. So I decided two years through, for some reason, I'm gonna just abandon everything I've studied and I'm gonna switch to a different major.
As, as you can tell, I have a lot of curiosities and so I. I wanted to do something differently and I asked myself, okay, what have I always been interested in? And when I really think about it, it's the deep questions of life. Why are we here? What does it all mean? What is the purpose of our time here? And I, I was thinking, okay, well I have two options then.
There are really two different paths I see. If you wanna explore those deep, hairy, why questions of life, there is the outside perspective, the external physics. Where did we come from? How did it start? The Big Bang, how does matter work? And all of that. Then there's the inner world, which is, how does this work?
This three pound massive tissue in between our ears that dictates literally everything. What we remember, what we pay attention to, who we trust, what narratives we construct, what information we see, and don't see the biases we have. And I decided to opt for the brain a topic I've always been really passionate about, and I found.
In the cognitive science department at Berkeley, that it was just this phenomenal playground to explore the broad umbrella that is cognitive science, how our brains work, how they work best, how we can improve them, how to protect them as we age. And it was a natural fit. And so after getting into the neuroscience world, I very quickly started pursuing my own research first at the individual level, and then in collaboration with another researcher and lab on campus.
The the first foray was, I realized pretty early on in college that so many of the best students did not sacrifice everything to get good grades. They did not sacrifice exercise, healthy eating time with friends, sleep. They found a balance. They figured out a way to make it work and sort of have their cake and eat it too.
And I realized that. So many of these students had figured out whether they had been taught or whether they learned over time that there is a science of how we learn best. There are techniques that work and don't work. There is sort of a blueprint for how students should approach learning, and it's something we're never taught in school, ever.
We, we always focus on teachers and parents. We focus on the what of
school, what are we learning this semester? Okay? You're learning world history and chemistry. It's always the what. What am I gonna be learning? What's on the test? It's never the how. It is never how do we learn best? How does this brain actually work?
How do we get the most out of our time? And so I realized there's a lot of students who picked this up, but I don't really see a good guide for how we learn best. And so I spent about, I. Better part of a year in my junior senior years of college, combing through the research on learning science, trying to pull different tactics from different labs into an operating manual for students, high school, college grad students on how we learn best.
And I just, I was so enthralled by that process. I thought it was so fun to take all of the science that exists in labs out there, but as often in dense, unapproachable papers that nobody reads and are very difficult to understand
and pull it together into something that people could use and understand easily and put into action.
And so shortly after that, I decided I love research. I love this cross of translating what's out there into a form that people can use. And that sort of dovetailed into teaching a course at uc, Berkeley partnering up with another cognitive neuroscientist to build a company around really translational science, teaching people tools that are really actionable and really easy to implement to get their most important work done in less time with less stress and to really leverage how our brains work best.
And so that's, that's where I'm now doing lots of teaching, like you saw in Zurich, doing some research at the university and then always keeping an eye out on new fund research that has it yet trickled out into the public. And try my best to put it into fun terms that people can use right away.
[00:08:09] Bogumil: I will include links to all your resources and courses and, uh, everything that you offer in the notes so the audience can find. There was one really powerful quote that I remember from Zurich when you said that the way most humans work today is fundamentally misaligned with how our brains and bodies work best. Can you talk about it? I think it's such a powerful revelation that we all, uh, find out in some way, but you tell us what to do about it and why are we actually right? Thinking that way.
[00:08:38] Lucas Miller: Sure, sure. So this is really our lab's fundamental thesis for, for some context, I co-run along with Dr. Sahar Yusef, who's another cognitive neuroscientist and faculty at uc, Berkeley. They're becoming Superhuman Lab
and it's a playground for us to. Find out and test and educate people about new tools for working smarter, essentially.
And the lab's thesis is, as you just mentioned it, is that the way we work today, and I know it sounds a bit controversial, but I'll explain it, is fundamentally misaligned with
how our brains and bodies work best.
And what I mean by that is really that there are fundamental laws of how we work best. And before jumping into what those are and explaining what they mean, I'll just start with a different field that we can all agree on.
And that is that in physics there are fundamental laws that we understand and we try to leverage, for example, the law of gravity. What goes up must come down.
I test it every day, and it's always there. We don't, we don't fight that law. We don't go, okay, I'm, I'm gonna wake up this morning and, you know, I don't think I'm gonna work with gravity today.
I get, I'm just not feeling it. So we're gonna ignore that. We don't do that.
We, We, lean into it. Even Elon Musk listens to the laws of gravity. He does not question the laws of physics. And when we understand these laws and we leverage them, we can do cool things like send rockets into space and three D print materials.
We can do all sorts of amazing things when we understand and lean into these laws. And in another domain, the domain of biology. There are also fundamental laws. There are laws that dictate how our brains and our bodies work best. And the trouble is our world has evolved so quickly. Over the last 50 years since the advent of the modern computer and email and smartphones and slack and dozens of tools now that we have to stay connected and shuffle information around and stay on top of all the signal and often noise
that's out in the world.
And we have a disconnect between how our brains and bodies work best, which is really old. 'cause evolution does not work that quickly. We have really old hardware and we're trying to get by and we're trying to be productive and we're trying to make it all work and have balance in a modern, high tech world that is throwing so much distraction and so much stimulation at us and it's really difficult.
But that's the fun fundamental disconnect that we have old brains in a modern world and it causes friction. It causes a daily challenge to prioritize, to fend off distraction, to not burn out, to form habits that last and can stand the test of time, given all the variance in our routine and all the different tools that we need to use.
So that's the fundamental foundation, and from there we can get into, okay, well what are these laws, what are the pieces of truth that I need to understand so that I can use my brain as best as I can so that I can gain an edge over other people that maybe don't understand how their brain works. They're focused on the what of their work and all of those facts, but not the algorithm that they bring to their job,
the hardware that they bring to their job, which is really your brain as a knowledge worker that is your biggest asset.
I like to say that knowledge workers are Olympic athletes from the neck up. We're not doing physical competitions, but our, but our brain is this incredible piece of hardware that can do amazing things if we learn how to use it well. And that's, that's my push to everyone today. Let's, let's take a step back from what we all do on a daily basis.
Whether you're an investor focused on how to get returns above the market, or you're a student who's trying to figure out how to get good grades or learn quickly, or you're a parent trying to figure out how to juggle your career and kids, whatever it is, let's take a step back from the what of the day-to-day and focus today on how we do things.
How do we work, how do we approach our days? How do we approach our schedule? How do we approach our smartphones?
And so with that foundation, I'd, I'd love to jump in and let's, let's see how much we can cover and, and dump, jump into a few of those mistakes.
[00:13:21] Bogumil: I, I love it. And I wanna talk about the first one, which is poor hygiene. And, uh, I'll, I'll ask you in a second, but I have an image of one of my early jobs when I had a cubicle, and the cubicle was positioned in a way that people were passing behind me all the time. And you explained to me how we respond to that on a primal level, when you have people passing behind you, then you have a phone on your side that can ring any minute.
Then you have email notifications that can ping any second. And I was thinking, how is it even possible to get any work done in an environment like this? So let me phrase the full question. You talk about the open office, you talk about cell viewing zoom and phone notifications as the source of mistakes of poor hygiene in our daily life at work and, and outside of work.
Can you talk about that? I, I thought it was really fascinating.
[00:14:08] Lucas Miller: Sure, sure. So there's a lot on that question. So let's, let's break this down. First, I wanna talk about the mistake of poor hygiene, and
then I'll talk about sort of those three buckets of. Self-view and zoom your smartphone and notifications and, and open offices. So when it comes to poor hygiene, this is a foundational mistake that so many of us make.
And what I mean, poor hygiene, what I'm really talking about is two things. Number one, environmental hygiene. So that would be everything in your physical environment around you while you
work. And then number two, your digital hygiene. So that's gonna be all of your devices around you and your relationship with, and your habits surrounding those devices.
So you talked about, uh, open offices and how it can be difficult to work, which, which is absolutely true for many people. But taking a step back, the reason that poor hygiene affects us so much and that we sometimes make the mistake of having poor hygiene, poor environmental hygiene, is that human brains are wired to constantly scan their environments.
Constantly scan their environments for any possible threat or opportunity.
And the reason we do that is because of survival. Think back to prehistoric times. We were fending off threats every day. Other tribes, animals, poisonous plants. We were constantly in a battle to survive. And because humans, if you actually look at yourself right now or think about humans are not that strong, we're not that physically competitive in the animal kingdom.
Our nails and our teeth are not that sharp. Our, you know, muscles are not that big. We're not that strong compared to lions, tigers, and bears. We evolved to dedicate massive amounts of real estate to scanning everything around us so that we could very quickly react to a possible threat. If you look at the neural architecture in our brains, 35 to 40% of any given brain is dedicated to two different functions.
Number one, seeing,
and number two, hearing, that's a lot of real estate. That's, that's a massive amount of real estate. We're talking 35 to 40% just goes to processing what you see and what you hear when you're in your, your environment. And so the implication of that is when you're in an open office and you see people getting up to go get a cup of coffee for the third time, someone going to the restroom, people chattering in the back about something that is, you know, potentially relevant to your work or it's a side conversation or some gossip if it is possibly threatening, which almost everything historically was because we're not that competitive.
You're gonna notice, you're gonna look up, you're gonna wonder what those people are talking about. If you've ever seen the movie up, the Pixar movie, you're like
the dog from that movie going, squirrel. Squirrel. We can't help it.
Because of this constant scanning, which helped us survive for so long, many of us deeply struggle to work in an open office that has constant noise and movement and distraction that your brain perceives as potentially relevant as a potential threat or an opportunity.
And the research on this, you know, I could spend 30 minutes talking about open offices, but I'll just, I'll summarize it briefly. The research on open offices is clear. When people move from a closed office, think cubicles old school, more privacy to an open office with plenty of space class, it looks very sexy for the millennials, maybe there's kombucha on tap.
People become less productive. They simply get less done because of the additional distractions and also their stress levels go up.
In a 2018 study from Harvard,
one of the first studies showing the impact of going from closed to open. One of the first empirical studies researchers found that stress levels as measured by salivary cortisol actually had folks spitting into tubes to measure their stress levels went up.
And the reason for that, if you ask any biologist, we could have told you before making this huge transition to open offices. If you put a bunch of people with their backs turned to people walking by where they're susceptible to all sorts of things happening around 'em that they can't see or control,
[00:18:34] Bogumil: Uhhuh
[00:18:35] Lucas Miller: it's gonna freak us out.
Especially freaks out men who are used to being positioned with their back to the wall, able to scan the environment. And it all goes back to survival.
[00:18:45] Bogumil: Mm-hmm.
[00:18:45] Lucas Miller: And so, My push to people is, you know, first off, if you're in an open office right now or you're in an environment that you find it difficult to work in, number one, you're not alone.
It's very normal to get distracted in an open office. And number two, if you've gotta work with that, get creative. Find a different area of the office that you can use to carve out an hour or two of focus time per day. Find a conference room, find a phone booth. Try to turn your desk or move your monitor so you can block some of the foot traffic.
Position yourself a little bit away from all of that constant noise and movement. Throw in headphones and make it clear to other people, Hey, when I got my noise canceling headphones on, don't talk to me. And then if you take them off, then you're open to chatting and you can go about lighter activities.
But, but put your headphones on when you're in deep focus time. I. So that's, that's open offices. It is a deep drain. And of course, at home people have different distractions. They have their dog, their kid, the gardener, they have all sorts of noises. And it's really important for people to think about before they even get their work done.
What's the physical environment I'm in
and is it conducive to focus or is it actively throwing distractions at me? So that's the first pillar of hygiene, poor hygiene, what's your physical environment look like? And then quickly, I'll jump in and do the next two. The second one was hiding self. You in Zoom or any video conferencing platform for that matter.
And really, the problem here is it's a newfound covid phenomenon, but when you jump into Zoom or Google Meet or Microsoft Teams or whatever platforms you use any given day, I guarantee you the default is that you can see your own reflection. That's the default. But let's, let's think about how weird that is.
Right, Emil, when, when you are going into an in-person meeting in New York and you're meeting with a client and you're sitting in the conference room in your office, think about how weird it would be if you brought a compact mirror to that meeting and, and you gave a, and you gave a compact mirror to your client and you said, Hey, you know, during this meeting, just, just to make sure we can see ourselves and we can make sure that our hair looks good and there's no spinach in our teeth and we're properly emoting,
here's this compact mirror and let's just hold it up and, and while we're looking at each other, let's hold up this compact mirror so that we can look at our reflections.
That would be the weirdest thing ever. You, that client would probably think you're super vain and strange and, and it just would never fly. But we literally do that all day on Zoom. The default is you can see your reflection. And some people might be thinking, well, I'm not vain. I'm not like Lucas. I'm not like Bo Il.
I will ignore myself. I don't care what I look like. You actually cannot. There's a particular area of the brain called the fusiform face
area, otherwise known as the F F A for short. And this brain area does one thing and one thing only. It processes human faces, especially, or up. And some studies, some newer studies suggest that about 20% of the energy that you expend on video calls just goes to processing your own reflection.
What
a waste, what, what a unnecessary tax
on our energy, on our finite energy that we bring to the table every day. You don't need to know what you look like. I get it. You know, check yourself out in the morning, you get ready, you brush your teeth, you do your hair, and then treat all these video calls we're on, like in-person meetings.
You don't know what you look like. You're not bringing Amir to those
meetings. You check yourself out once you accept good enough, and then you jump into the call and you focus on the other person, on the content, on the conversation. And so the solution to this new phenomenon, just constantly staring at ourselves all day, which I, I know we're doing, is to do something called hide self view in Zoom.
If that's your primary platform, what you're gonna do is you're gonna find your window and in the top right you'll see a little ellipsis. You click that and then you click hide Self-view. We can link this in the show notes so folks, depending on the platform you use, can figure out how to hide self-view in your video conferencing platform.
It, unfortunately, it's not a default
setting, so you have to do it every time. My solution, it is quick and it's dirty, but it works is I have a stack of post-its on my desk and in my work bag, and regardless of of the tool that I use, I get in the call, I figure out what I look like, and then I slap a post-it on my face.
So I'm not spending that whole call just staring at my own reflection all the time. 'cause it's just unnecessary. And we, we have finite energy that we need to protect, and there's no reason it should go to processing what you look like. Okay? So that's, that's self-view. It's a really pernicious drain that is one of the primary culprits of zoom fatigue or video fatigue, which so many people have been complaining about over the pandemic and in this new world of remote and hybrid work.
The last bucket I want to talk about as it relates to poor hygiene is our smartphone.
You know, once again, every one of these topics could be its own little mini episode, but as it relates to smartphones, I'm just gonna assume that your audience is fairly well up to date on some of the research behind smartphones and how much money and how much brain power goes into making them addictive and making them something that.
We feel like we can't escape from, and
it's such an integral part of our life. And so on that front, the basics will get you far Turn off notifications that are not important. Do not accept the default notification being on. You don't need most of them. You don't need them for the news. Social media, the weather, have 'em on text.
Calls for family, friends, everything else. Silence the noise. But something that most people don't know about as it relates to their smartphone is that the location of your smartphone throughout the day actually impacts your cognitive performance. Now this, this study scares the living hell out of me.
It's probably the scariest study I've come across over the last 10 years, and it's a study conducted in 2017 out of UT Austin. And the researchers in this study were trying to test. If the location of your phone would actually impact your scores on a variety of different cognitive performance metrics.
And the tests they were using were complex working memory, general fluid intelligence. These are standard metrics of basically how smart you are. And in this study, researchers recruited a bunch of smart, healthy, high performing young students from UT Austin. And they had them do this battery of cognitive assessments in three different conditions, condition number one, and, and before all these different conditions, the researchers asked the students in the experiment to please power down their smartphones.
Just turn 'em off, fully off. So it's like a prop. It's just a dead phone off to the side. It's not ringing, dinging, nothing like that. Dead phone. Here are the three different conditions. Condition number one, as researchers, we're gonna keep the phone in the waiting room. We're gonna send you into this.
Testing booth. It's a glorified closet with a desktop in it, and you're gonna take those assessments in that room
and there's no distractions in there. It's just you and the computer and the tests. That's condition number one. And we saw that these students, they're smart, they're high performers, they scored really well.
They scored above average for the population condition. Number two, the researchers come in and say, great job with round one. Now we're gonna give you your phone back. The phone's still off. It's still completely off, but we're gonna let you put the phone either in your pocket or your bag dealer's choice, and then you take the assessments.
Again. We saw a significant reduction in both complex working memory and general fluid intelligence. These students, these adults, became objectively dumber now that their phone was in their pocket or their back. And it gets worse. Gets worse. Condition number three is, all right, take the phone outta your pocket or your bag, place it face down on the desk next to you so that while you're looking at the test here, you can see your phone off to the side and the phone's still dead.
It's always been dead. Another significant drop in both working memory and general fluid intelligence. If you're curious, working memory is the number one cognitive trait associated with two things. Number one, career success in whatever you choose to do. And number two, your overall satisfaction with your life.
You want
working memory to be as high as humanly possible, and we saw that just by having your phone visible, even though it was off significantly stole your cognitive capacity. And there there's a direct quote from the study, the mere presence of a smartphone, even if it's turned over and even if it is off.
Drains your cognitive capacity. That's just terrifying.
You know that that's something that it is. I I, I, I saw the study and I went, I don't believe this. It looks, it looks fake. I, I wanna look at the data. I, I wanna actually, and, and it turns out it's real. It checks out. That's the fun part of science that you can, you can call BSS and you can ask for the raw data and you can replicate it yourself and it checks out.
And there have been follow up studies that have shown that it doesn't even have to be your phone. It could be someone else's phone, you know, so thinking if you go into meetings and there's six people and you, you sit down and then plop, boom, boom, boom. Six phones all plop onto the table just because those phones are on the table.
Every single person in that room is objectively dumber. And I'm, I'm not gonna say that you're six times dumber than one phone. We, we don't quite know if it linearly scales like that, but the mere presence of that phone drains your capacity. And I would venture to guess. I haven't seen the papers yet on Apple watches, but I would venture to guess.
It's the same with smart watches. Any device that you have that you can visually see is going to be a reminder of this connected world that we're a part of, of your email, of your texts, of your friends. These devices are our lifeline. We get good news from them, bad news from 'em. They tell us about our past.
We have photos and videos and memories. They tell us about the future. We have our to-do list and our calendars, and if you can see this device, I'll pull mines off to the side. So I'll make myself a little dumber right now for the podcast, but I have my phone out now. If I can see this small little rectangle in a moment of boredom during a meeting or a task in a moment of I'm stuck on this, or I'm tempted, or I'm just wondering what's going on in my connected world, I can look at it.
And even though it's not pinging me, even though I'm not actively doing anything with it, it's silently yet pernicious, draining away the finite energy and focus I have to bring to my day. And so that's, that was a really scary study that I've seen. You know, there's a lot of sort of nefarious research that we could go into on smartphones, but I think this is the most powerful piece of advice, and that is when you wanna bring a hundred percent of your focus to something, whether it is reading a 10 k, or it is having a conversation with a loved one, or reflecting on how your 2023 went, whatever it is, if you wanna bring up your full focus and capacity to something, you can't do that if your phone is next to you, if it's visible.
So when you want that focus, and it doesn't have to be all the time. I'm not saying you have to be a hundred percent all the time, but when you want it, put it out of sight, out of mind, put it in another room, put it on your chair, put it behind you so that it's not in your visual field. Draining away those cognitive resources.
[00:30:45] Bogumil: Wow, this is remarkable. The way I picture it is the, the brain is ready to be poked and it's looking for reasons to be poked. And if you do some mental work, if you're actually using your knowledge, collecting information, analyzing things, and you want a hundred percent of your capacity available to you because you're in the middle of an exam or in the middle of analyzing a business opportunity or whatever it is you're working on, you really have to pay attention.
Uh, and think about all those aspects. You know, the environment that you talked about, whether it's a cubicle, whether it's the right space at home. Then the video calls. I don't think they're going away. You and I are watching each other on video as we're recording audio right now. I don't think they're going away, so we have to find a good way.
To use that tool so that we are not draining our brain through those calls and maybe have fewer of those and maybe don't look at ourselves as we're recording. And I think the phones are a window to the world, but also in a massive distraction, right? So we go from just looking around ourselves and all the bushes around us for snakes and other danger to having something that can bring us all kinds of news, good and bad, as you said.
And it's just poking and poking and draining our, our mental capacity throughout the day. I have a, go ahead.
[00:32:02] Lucas Miller: I, I love that framing that the brain is waiting to be poked and it's, it's true. And, and another way I think about it is that there are active drains in the system. Active drains in your brain that if you don't address, are going to sap your focus and energy throughout the day. And one of the best ways to be more productive.
Is by using a principle that we all know well. And that's the principle of inversion that Charlie Munger talks so much about. And that is, instead of trying to be more productive and add things and buy more products and do more, let's first address how we're getting poked. How our energy and time and focus are being drained.
What are the things that we're unintentionally doing that get in the way of us performing better? And, and that's a starting point where I think there's so many quick, easy wins that people can get just by avoiding mistakes and not necessarily doing anything novel or advanced or new.
[00:33:10] Bogumil: It's very true. There was one other big theme that you and I talked about, and it has to do with the day and the schedule, and there are those books and ideas to be, for example, an e early riser, start your day at 5:00 AM and you explained that we're not all the same, and I noticed those patterns among.
People I work with, but also myself, that I have two peaks throughout the day. I clearly know that I'm really productive in the morning, but not very early morning, and then in the evening or early, early evening, late afternoon and in between, I'm not at my best. So if I have an important call or important meeting or important project, I try to schedule those around those peak hours.
But I found this out by just experimenting with my day. But you told me there's all kinds of science that proves that we're not the same. There are different types of, I dunno if you call them personalities or just ways of, uh, using time throughout the day. Can you talk about that? I found it really fascinating because it gave me permission not to wake up at 5:00 AM and it allowed me to focus on the two peaks of the day where I can do a lot more done than at any other point of the day.
[00:34:18] Lucas Miller: Yes, this is one of my favorite topics, and I'll say, you know, Bo Mill, you, you have really high self-awareness. So this, this is something that you've, you've intuitively learned about yourself just by being mindful of your energy levels and what leads to really good days and what leads to really bad days.
And you've, you've basically figured out this piece of advice that's based on science by experiment.
And I think that that's a powerful lesson that now there is always a scientific answer. There is always a formula. There is always an ideal that someone says is the best, but there is no substitute for self experimentation
and figuring out what works for you and doubling down on it and what doesn't work for you and rejecting it.
So I just want to say before I jump into the science, Experiment with all of these techniques. Everything we talk about in this episode, experiment and figure out how you, your brain, your body work best and lean into that. And so taking a step back, alright, I'll start with what you first said, which is, I, I wanna give permission to everyone listening to not necessarily wake up at 5:00 AM since that's a very powerful point.
So I'll just address it head on that advice that you see literally everywhere. Now I'm sure you've seen it, it's in every book and blog and podcast and Instagram post and it's on LinkedIn. That pretty much says something to the tune of, if you wanna be the c e o of your company someday, or you want to be the best leader you can be, you gotta wake up at 4:00 AM and then meditate, and then take a cold plunge and then write down two things that you're grateful for, and then process your email for 45 minutes before new emails start coming in.
Otherwise, you're never gonna be successful. That's the stupidest piece of advice I've ever heard. You do not need to pretend to be a Navy Seal and wake up at the crack ass of dawn and go through the motions on a bunch of self-improvement habits to be successful, what you do need to be healthy and productive is enough sleep.
We know that simply
sleep is the foundation of your health and your performance, and you should be aiming for at least seven hours a night on average. That's the minimum depending on the person, you'll need between seven and nine hours to wake up feeling fully energized and refreshed. But seven is minimum.
So if, if you're going to sleep at midnight and waking up at 4:00 AM to do all of these habits well, you're showing up at work completely exhausted, completely emotional, completely different than what you would be and how you'd be able to perform if you had a full night's breath. Full night of breath.
So Chuck, that advice out the window. And the reason why you should chuck it is because we know that there are different circadian rhythms that humans can have. They're otherwise known as chronotypes. And these chronotypes are genetic optimal rhythms that are preset, and they dictate how your energy levels are going to fluctuate on a 24 hour timescale on any given day.
And what's interesting about these chronotypes, and this is fairly new research, the, the Nobel Prize in 2017 was given to three researchers who discovered this concept. The, the fascinating thing about chronotypes is that they're different. There are multiple, we do not all have the same circadian rhythm that is rise and fall with the sun,
where you wake up early in the morning, you're really energized and focused, and then you linearly decrease in energy over the course of the day.
We're, we're not all like that. In fact, that part of the population. What I'm jumping into now is sort of the science equivalent of pop psych terms like morning birds and night owls and some of those terms. You may have heard the distribution looks like this. 20 to 25% of the population are what are known as am shifted people.
These are those classic morning birds and they're gonna wake up early no matter what. Even if they go to sleep late, their hormones are very strong in the morning. They wake up with the sun and it is that linear decrease in energy over the course of the day,
but it's the minority of the population. It's 20 to 25%.
Then you have by phasing individuals, this is the second chronotype. And I would venture to guess that you are in this camp. I am in this camp, and by phase it folks have two peaks, comes from the Latin by phase, or two phases or two peaks, and these people tend to wake up feeling a little groggy. You know, seven out of 10 on the energy scale.
You gradually ramp up and you hit your stride. You are at your peak. 10, 11:00 AM maybe noon, and it's that mid late morning that is your peak cognitive performance period. And then you come down in the afternoon, there's an afternoon dip that we've all heard about. If you have too many carbs or too much pasta, you're gonna want to take a nap.
It is very normal and you're not lazy or unmotivated if you get tired in the afternoon. It's very typical for folks to feel like they could go to sleep seven to eight hours after they wake up, and then by phasix will come up again for a second peak in the evening. And if they're not careful, I, I know you've had these nights and you stay up late reading, or you have blue light from your screen if you're not careful when you go to sleep late, you can sleep in am shifted. People can't do that. They're gonna wake up early no matter what. Whereas biphasic can sleep in and they're fairly flexible in terms of when they go to bed and wake up and they can shift along the. Time axis. Even though the structure of their energy curve stays the same, they're
generally better mid, late morning, have that dip and then go up again in the evening.
Then you have the third chronotype. These are PM shifted individuals. It's about 15 to 20% of the population. And these are the classic night outs. They are real, they are genetic. They do prefer to go to bed later and wake up later. And our hypothesis as to why these people exist in the first place, because you know, we can admit the world's not kind to pm, shifted people.
We're all on a morning schedule. It, it is tough to be a PM shifted person. The reason we believe they exist in the first place goes back to an original lesson from early on, the podcast, survival. Humans needed diversity and everyone to be looking out to protect the tribe.
And so if every single person went to sleep at 10:00 PM and woke up at 6:00 AM.
Well, that's eight hours when a competing tribe or a lion or some other threat could come in and slaughter everyone. And so that's not gonna work. We needed people to tend the fire to be the knight's watch. And so over time, we believe families evolved and we saw genetic drift to make it easier for certain people to stay awake at night and be vigilant and then sleep during the earlier parts of the morning.
And so that, this is the reason why we have chronotypes. This is a different form of diversity that really says that. You perform better or worse at different times of the day. You are not the same as the day progresses. Your energy, your focus, your motivation are not the same at 9:00 AM
versus 2:00 PM versus 11:00 PM And so it's imperative that you figure out what your chronotype is because when folks are able to carve out that time, you know, let's say you're biphasic and it's that mid late morning, you get a two hour pocket of time during that window, when you're cognitively at your best, that's when you're gonna get into flow.
That's when you're going to lose your sense of time and self and really think deeply and be your most intelligent self. You know, there's tons of studies showing that people get up to a five times increase in their productivity and performance during that window. I'm skeptical of those stats. You know, I don't like magic numbers.
But it's not a 10% improvement. It's not, I had a great cup of coffee or a great snack and I'm slightly higher performing. That's a huge non-linear return on those hours compared to other hours. And I think that it speaks to this new world that we're in, which is that the linear relationship between the hours you put in to your work and the results you get has been broken for many fields you know of.
Of course, there are certain fields where you, you put an extra hour in, you get an extra hour of goods or output. But for investors, for example, or knowledge workers that are tasked with having good judgment and making good decisions, that relationship is broken. We've all had some of our best ideas in the shower when we were not thinking about a problem.
Right? When, when you're not trying to be productive and we've all spent four hours. Banging our heads against a wall, trying to produce a piece of work that ultimately doesn't get used or we throw away or has no impact. And so nowadays I push people, you know, creativity is the new productivity, and you have to be thinking about when your brain is at its best
and it's not every hour of the day.
You, you have a finite window of time when you are sharp and you are clear thinking and you're not gonna make mistakes. And you need to figure out that window and lean into it and protect it and guard it as much as possible. May not be every day, but a couple days a week. You need to protect that time so that you're not doing what so many other people are doing, which is, I'm just gonna throw more hours at my job, I'm gonna throw more hours at whatever I'm trying to do.
Because you're gonna run out of hours quick. And sometimes more hours. Doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna have a better result. And so if, if you are curious what your chronotype is, we can link this in the show notes. But one of the best ways to figure it out without needing to do genetic testing or anything fancy, is a website that my lab put together in collaboration with a sleep lab at uc, Berkeley.
And the website is my chronotype.com. And we'll, we'll put a code in the show notes so you can take that assessment for free. It's about a two to three minute assessment that will output your chronotype and give you a very detailed report on what's your chronotype, what is your 24 hour circadian rhythm going to look like?
And then it will give you a blueprint for how to think about strategically designing your day. When do you do focused work? When should you take breaks? How do you mitigate the afternoon dip? When should you do creative work? Uh, it's, it's usually at a different time of day than when you're most focused and analytical.
And you can start with that blueprint to start experimenting with. How to design your day best so that you can get more out of the finite hours that we all have because we're done with throwing more hours at the problem. You can't get more of those. There's no market for them. You know, you can't buy hours.
We're all constrained by 24 in a day and, and so I really do believe that people can be more impactful and be more productive by thinking about the When
When do they do certain types of work? When do they avoid certain types of work? And experimenting with designing their day in a way that fits as best as they possibly can.
Their preset prototype, which is not gonna change and dictates your performance on so many different levels.
[00:45:37] Bogumil: I, I wrote down so many notes and I'm loving what I'm hearing. You know, there are those myths of, uh, famous people that would wake up at 3:00 AM Napoleon, I think was one of them, and Margaret Thatcher. And when it's taken out of context, you feel like, well, if I don't wake up at 3:00 AM and start working, how will I ever achieve any success?
And you talk about the permission and the awareness. The awareness of what, who are you and how your day really works best for you. And then the permission to follow your. Type. If you are the person that has two peaks, organize your day around that. And you mentioned how the best ideas don't happen at the desk.
I actually gave a TEDx talk and one of the points I shared in my talk about becoming a better investor was that my best ideas never really happened at a desk. It was on a walk. Conversation, a hike, swim. When? Well, in the shower as well, but away from the desk. 'cause that's when the inspiration hits us.
And that reminds me of the time during Covid, when my wife and I left New York, we were living in a cabin in the woods and we both would organize our day, working in the morning, then going for a walk, a hike, and then working in the afternoon. But that middle of the day was not very productive for both of us.
We knew that's the time for us to, to walk, talk thing. Just, just breathe outside. And I remember that my original office work many, many years ago would be focused on having a big lunch meeting with a lot of ideas and research and talk in the middle of the day. So when I listening to you, I'm thinking it's the wrong time of the day for most of us in the room.
Most probably. We all have phones in front of us. And if that's not enough, And let's put a meal in front of everybody and think that you can get anything done over the noise of people eating sandwiches. But now when I'm listening to you, I see how this is not the way to go, but that's how things have been done for so long.
So there's room for improvement. Don't push harder, but work smarter. That's what I'm hearing when I'm listening to you.
[00:47:31] Lucas Miller: Yes. Yes, absolutely. I mean, there's always room for improvement and a lot of this research is new as well, but I think slowly over time, as artificial intelligence takes over more
work and humans need to defend why we're needed,
we will start to understand that it's not just about being more productive, about checking off more tasks, because we can automate so much of that work.
If we can create rules around
it, it's gonna be more about how do we make better decisions? How do we be more creative? How do we capitalize on what makes humans different? Than machines. And that is random in organic and serendipitous. And it requires taking stock of how humans work and treating them as really key aspects of any business.
'cause that is a business, it is a sum of humans and we should figure out how they work. And I'm very encouraged by the direction we're headed. But there's gonna be lots of pushback. There's gonna be lots of, we've always done it this way, but at, at the end of the day, I think AI actually may be the trend that accelerates the focus on, let's make sure the way humans are working is sustainable and is in line with our biology.
I, I think it's a connection that is underappreciated. Um, there
there was one other aspect of your, your story around chronotypes that I wanted to highlight as well, and that is that, well, first I'll ask a question. Do you think your wife is biphasic as well?
[00:49:08] Bogumil: think we both are. Yes, we, we overlap, not perfectly, but we overlap. I can tell
[00:49:12] Lucas Miller: got it. Well then you, you are living in the, the beautiful world of chronotype alignment where it is, you know, relatively easier to figure out when to go to sleep and wake up and, and you can sync up in, in many ways. And it's a beautiful thing. It's not the case for everyone. And so for those who maybe have a partner who's PM shifted and their AM shifted, or they have a boss who believes that they need to be, and they should be their highest performing self at seven 30 in the morning and they're not, you know, take this assessment and start a conversation.
Start a. Diversity, and it may not lead to any significant changes in your schedule, but it feels good to be seen and understood
for our differences. And just having that conversation helps other people understand you better and hopefully will lead to a better working dynamic. Especially if someone's on a completely different schedule or has different beliefs, you can, you can often bridge the gap with understanding and with explain, explaining, using science like, this is real, this is how I work, and, and here's the data behind it and, and here's why.
[00:50:27] Bogumil: No, I love it though. Just the awareness and the ability to start a conversation, whether it's with your partner or with your coworkers or with your boss. I think that opens up a whole window of opportunity to just work better. And when I'm listening to you, I'm thinking of the highest value added things we can do, and.
There's an endless list of things that we all have to do throughout the day, and I could easily work, you know, 24 hours and not catch up with the things that I have to do. And I have to choose which things add value, which are important, which are urgent, and kind of classify them. And I wanna ask you about excessive multitasking, which is something that you touch on quite a bit, because we are under the impression that if we're holding all the devices and have another screen or multiple screens in front of us, we could potentially do it all at the same time.
It's not true. Uh, not, not entirely true. Tell me why.
[00:51:15] Lucas Miller: It is, it's absolutely not true, and this is a, this is a fundamental mistake that I talk about
so often, the mistake of excessive multitasking. We, we believe that if we are checking email during a meeting or we are checking our phone while working on a Google document, or we're constantly doing two things at once or three things at once, that we're gonna be more effective.
And unfortunately not just one, not just two, not just a dozen, literally thousands of studies going back 50 plus years show that human beings aren't terrible at multitasking, including the youngest generation that grew up with smartphones and grew up with this multitasking behavior. They're awful at it too.
And what I mean by that is when we multitask, which is essentially context switching, every time we switch from, I'm checking email to now, a notification came in on my phone. Every little switch, we pay a fine, both in terms of time and energy. Now this fine is often small, it's often imperceptible, but it is real, it's measurable, and it adds up over the course of the day and in many different field studies.
Where productivity researchers like myself go around and they track what knowledge workers do over a given day. They track everything they do, how long they work, when they take a break, how many times they switch between different programs. And all of these studies conservatively two hours and, and in my opinion, it's much more,
two hours per day is wasted just due to the aggregation of all of these small switches.
Some of the new stats are absolutely terrifying. People switch between programs or apps every 90 seconds or less. So every single minute and a half there's a switch.
You know, that may sound normal to people, but think about. In this way. Imagine if for some reason, you know, I'm just gonna paint a somewhat comical scene here.
Let's say Bo Meal, you're trying to go to sleep tonight, and you get all comfortable and you have your dark room and it's cold, and it's optimized for sleep hygiene. So you're gonna get the best quality sleep, and for some reason, I'm in your room and every single 90 seconds as you're trying to go from awake to asleep and enter those deep stages of sleep, every 90 seconds I just flick you and I flick you so that you wake back up.
Well, you're gonna get, you're gonna get awful sleep.
You'll never get that deep
sleep. Those important stages. What's the same with focus If every 90 seconds as you're trying to sink into something and get into flow and really be your most engaged present self. If every 90 seconds there's a flick and you switch to something else, we are popping yourself out of that focus.
So you're never able to achieve flow and every switch you lose a few seconds and a little bit of energy. And so the, the solution here, it's very simple. It's not rocket science. It is to acknowledge that human beings in fact, cannot multitask. What we can do is rapidly task switch, but there's always a fine and a penalty for doing so.
And when you have an important piece of work, finish it and focus on it the boring way, which is to single task on it
from start to finish. Or I'm gonna do part one out of three parts, and then I'm just focused on that thing. Do not give into the illusion that you can do two or three things at once, because at best you are just splitting your attention very similarly to when you're driving a car and you're listening to a podcast like this one.
Now we, we
can all do that. We can drive a car and listen to this podcast. But you're splitting your attention. Maybe you're spending 30% of your finite attention on driving the car and 70% listening to the podcast. But when you miss your exit or anything goes wrong, instinctually, all of us will turn down the podcast.
Unfortunately, we'll silence our voices and focus back on the road so that you can bring, you can bring a hundred percent of your energy and attention back to the primary task. We all instinctually get that because we don't have infinite attention. It's the same for your work. It's the same for your task.
So when you want to get the most out of an hour, out of an hour, that finally opens up in between meetings and calls, figure out what that piece of work is, outline it. Be very clear on what success looks like. Clean up your hygiene, put your phone out of sight, get rid of email, get rid of slack. Get what?
Get rid of whatever in your environment, environmental, uh, your physical environment or your digital environment that may give you active distractions or be a, a compelling multitasking subject. And then just focus on that thing. And you'll be so surprised by how much you can get out of an hour of intense single tasking focus compared to four hours of feeling like you're half on.
You are continuously, partially attending to all of all of these different things and switching back and forth. There's a very big difference. And I encourage folks to, when you're focusing, be intentional. Be
intense. Do not just throw more hours at the problem. If the low, if the hours are low quality or you're distracted, or you're multitasking because you're just going to do the work slower, you're gonna do the work that needs to get done slower, and you're more likely to make mistakes that you or someone else is going to need to fix at some point.
[00:56:57] Bogumil: No, I, I like that. And I agree, and I think we're under the illusion that we can juggle those things because the tools are in front of us, the screens, the devices, it's all in front of us. So potentially physically you can see how you can do all those things at the same time. But the, the brain clearly cannot keep up with all of them.
And, and I like the idea of breaking up a bigger task into three pieces and doing one at a time. In, in my work, there are a lot of things that I can do all at once, but there are quite a few that are ongoing projects and, and I mentally divide them into pieces. And I like the idea I completed Phase A, my partner's gonna do phase B and I'm gonna come back for phase C.
Mentally, it's really one task that I'm doing one at a time, but it takes a lot of discipline. It's a very deliberate choice that you organize your day this way and you still get interrupted because there's an email that comes in and somebody needs something immediately. But I think it takes a lot of effort and discipline. I wanna ask you about the, the third piece of the big themes that I was thinking about. So we talked about sleep, we talked about devices out of the bedroom, out of the office, out of the working space.
But you talk also about the sun exposure. Can you talk about why sun exposure is so important to us? And I think we all had a shared experience with Covid Covid years, and we were stuck at home without much of a sun exposure. And I think to me it became much more glaring how important it's to go outside and breathe outside air and feel, feel the sun.
Can you talk about that, how that's important to the health of our brain?
[00:58:29] Lucas Miller: Of course, of course. So sun exposure is really crucial for a couple things in particular, and that is number one, setting the clock on your circadian rhythm so
that you have a regular rhythm. It's easy to go to sleep, you get good quality. Sleep. And then number two, for your hormones. For all the hormones that you need to be focused and work and have energy and do all the things that you wanna do in life.
And the reason sun exposure is so important is because historically humans were creatures of the
sun. We would only be able to do what we needed to do aside from the night ELs, protecting the tribe at night. We had our tasks during the day and we used the sun as an indicator of when to wake up and how much longer we have.
And it gave us energy throughout the day to do everything that we needed to get done. And so nowadays, folks are often inside away from windows. They're not getting much sun exposure, and it can wreak havoc on and confuse your body's internal clock. And it's endogenous hormone producers. And one of the easiest ways to.
Really get the benefits of sun exposures to go back to what we used to have, which is we had some exposure every day. And I'm not gonna recommend people go out in sunbathe. The sun can, can cause skin damage and there's all sorts of negatives there, but when you get sun exposure first thing in the morning, if it's sunny outside, it can be as little as 10 or 15 minutes.
That's all you need. If it's overcast or cloudy, 20 to 30 minutes is, is what you should be shooting for. When you get sun exposure early in the morning, set the clock on your circadian rhythm, which is going to give you a very nice, stable and predictable energy curve throughout the day, and it will make it much easier to fall asleep at night when you wanna go to sleep.
If you are not getting any exposure to the sun, your body doesn't know exactly when it should be tired, and that's complicated by the fact that we're getting lots of. Artificial light from our screens, from our phones, from our laptops throughout the day and also at night. That light signal is very important.
Our brain uses light information to tell us, should we be awake or should we be tired? And in the morning, you wanna get that bright light, ideally from the sun. Or if you are in a place that doesn't have much sun or it's winter time, you can use one of those sun lamps or happy lamps. Those absolutely work.
They work well. You can sit in front of it for 10 or 15 minutes and it mimics the light from the sun, and that's gonna get you ramped up and energized during the day. And you can use that for any break during the day if you're feeling a little bit of a lull. After lunch especially, you can sit by a window and get some sunlight.
You can have one of those sun lamps on your desk. You can use that to artificially inject energy. And then at nighttime, you want to avoid sun exposure. You want to avoid bright light that is gonna send the signal to your brain. Hey, wake up. Time to produce cortisol, time to produce adrenaline. And my opinion is so many people have sleep issues nowadays, not because anything has fundamentally changed.
And it's not like we all, for some reason, need to be taking melatonin and all these sleep supplements. Our grandparents didn't do that. What has changed is the light information
we are all getting, we're all getting massive amounts of blue light in particular from our phones and our laptops late at night.
And that confuses our brains into thinking that it's daytime. And one of the best things we can do to stabilize our energy levels to ensure we get consistent high quality sleep is to get that important light information from the sun or a similar equivalent first thing in the morning right after you wake up.
And then to avoid that intense light stimulation at night, which is going to confuse you, suppress the production of melatonin and make it harder to fall asleep and make the sleep that you do get lower quality.
[01:02:36] Bogumil: Uh, Lucas, I have a big question about the environment. So bringing all those ideas together, I. Grew to appreciate as a professional investor that the environment that we operate in and here, I mean everything from an office all the way to the city and your surroundings. And I'm thinking of Buffet that moved to Omaha, away from New York from the, no, I'm thinking of Guy Pier that moved from New York to Zurich, which is a quiet, peaceful city, very predictable with regular timetables and trains running on time.
I'm thinking of John Templeton to move that moved to The Bahamas and he actually admitted that his results improved once he was away from New York. Can, do you have some thoughts about that? I'm not just thinking about investors, but any knowledge worker that benefits from an appropriate environment and not just the cubicle or not, but your surroundings in general.
[01:03:25] Lucas Miller: Yes, there. There are so many examples of people doing what feel like obvious things or crazy things to change their environment and to be in a place where they think that they can think better. But all of these examples that you shared have one foundational theme, and whether these people were aware of it or not, it doesn't matter.
They're all using the same underlying wisdom. And that is a fundamental fact about how the brain works. And that fact is that our brains are constantly forming associations. They're constantly forming associations around. What is expected and unexpected in my environment? What does this environment feel like?
What distractions, what noise, what ways of thinking are going to be around me? And when you're in an environment that's associated with a particular thing, for example, noise and loud conversations, and a fast pace of living like New York, that is going to tell your brain to think in that way. Our, our brain is always trying to form associations like this to save energy and to make it as easy as possible to figure out what behavior is appropriate.
And it's why you get so many examples of people who, for example, like to work outside of their home.
They don't like to work at home.
They like to take, you know, there's so many investors that during covid or have always had a short commute to work. Instead of working at home, they go 10 minutes, 12 minute walk.
And the reason for that is because when you're able to transition to a new space, a new space that has different associations than those that you have at home,
where you rest and relax and enjoy time with your family, that place becomes associated with work and work alone. If you're clear and clean about those associations and you don't muddle 'em, and so that particular place can become a haven where your brain knows, okay, here's what I expect here, here's what I don't expect here.
Here's what's appropriate. Here's what's inappropriate behavior. And you can learn over time to associate that particular location with an activity like deep quiet thinking or whatever else you wanna associate it with. It could be a new location. For example, moving to Omaha or Zurich or The Bahamas, something that is completely removed
so that once you're there, you can, in addition to getting rid of all the noise, which we know impacts our performance, create a clean and clear association between that place and how you want to run your practice or how you want to invest.
And there's a number of different ways that I see people leveraging this principle of associations. You know, I I, I'm not sure if it was Guy Spear or someone else, but uh, in, uh, William Green's book, he talks about how some investors have a, a busy desk where they do emails and at meetings and, and that type of work, and then a desk for reading and
thinking, and they keep those desks separate.
[01:06:43] Bogumil: Mm-hmm.
[01:06:44] Lucas Miller: And it's, it's the same principle. If you're in a particular place where you're only thinking one type of way, you can really build that association, reinforce that association, such that when when you're in that place you do a certain thing and you think a certain way, and as long as you're disciplined about it and you don't start checking emails or get on TikTok in that place, then that, then that becomes, that becomes an environment that is conducive to however you're trying to operate and you create separation.
You do different activities elsewhere. For example, if you live in Omaha or you live in The Bahamas, you might take a lot of meetings in New York and when you go to New York and you land there, a whole new set of associations get activated. You're now in a fast-paced, dynamic, diverse place where it's all about achievement and what you're getting done and deals and, and that could be a mode that you want cultivate, and your environment can take care of that for you.
So the underlying principle I want people to be mindful of and to, to take a moment to pause and bring some awareness to is what associations do you have right now
with your work environment? Are they, are they clean and clear or are they muddled? And in most cases, people do all of their work in one location, and that naturally leads to a muddling of those associations where you, you get to work and let's say you're working from home that day, you see your laptop, which is associated with both reading and meetings and calls and emails, and you also see your couch or your kitchen nearby, which is associated with all types of other things.
And I would encourage everyone if you don't want to or it doesn't make any sense for you to move and take a drastic action like moving to The Bahamas or Omaha, you know you're set in your location and, and that's where your family is and your roots are and your businesses. How can you create a Bahamas for yourself?
Can you find a different room in your home that you can associate with a certain type of thinking?
Can you find a different room in your office? Can you make some changes to your environment to rebuild a set of associations that's gonna be conducive to what you want? And you know, if you really don't have any extra space, 'cause I know we're tight on real estate now and it's not always an easy solution.
You can introduce a new stimulus if you're trying to think a certain way to build that association. What do I mean by this? Well, during Covid, so many people were struggling because they were working in an apartment in San Francisco or New York and they were working, living in the same space, and all these associations were muddled.
And a really easy way to tell your brain I'm in work mode versus I'm in home mode, is to introduce a stimulus that is sensory.
[01:09:46] Bogumil: Hmm.
[01:09:47] Lucas Miller: a stimulus could be anything from a particular playlist, could be music such that when that playlist is on, or that white noise, if you don't like listening to lyrics, which can be distracting, is associated with a certain brain state.
And if you use that music only in that situation,
[01:10:06] Bogumil: Mm-hmm.
[01:10:06] Lucas Miller: then it can become a clean and clear association, such that if you're tired, if you're in a different location, if you're not feeling great, doesn't matter if that stimulus is present. Your brain goes, ah, Il, we've done this dozens of times. We, we have, we have done reflection or we have read this type of report
with this white noise playlist in the background
so many times and it will trigger a certain brain state.
And there's, there's some other example. You know, music is an easy one because it is portable, it's free, and once you find something that works, you can just stick with it and abuse it as long as you don't ever play it in a different context. Other triggers that can work are different senses of smell.
Um, you could light a certain candle that has a particular scent
that becomes associated with
reflection or thinking creatively or thinking high level about your business.
And as long as you only smell that scent
when you're doing that type of activity or you're trying to cultivate that type of brain state, then it will work. I had an old professor actually, who, this is a crazy story, but it technically works. When he was an undergrad, he had a different fruit for every single subject that he was taking.
It is, it's hilarious. But here's, here's what he did when he was studying for, let's say, chemistry.
He, I'm, but I'm probably butchering the fruit, but I don't care. It doesn't matter. It's the
principle, not the, not the details. Here, when he was studying chemistry, he had an orange
on his desk and he would see that orange.
He'd be able to smell that orange. And so while he's studying chemistry, all of that information that he is learning is now associated with the sight, the texture, the feel, the scent. Scent is a very powerful sense
of that orange. And over time as you build that association, he would then, whenever he had to take a test, bring that orange to the test.
And that orange, believe it or not, helps you activate a number of different memories and associations because that orange has always been present. And then he had a lemon for math and a grapefruit for a different subject. And it's kind of ridiculous, but it just goes to show you how powerful the associations we have are
and how there are really interesting ways that we can engineer different ways of thinking by adding in a stimulus that we're very disciplined about only having when we're doing that certain thing.
And it's, that's, that's the principle. You can use whatever you want to make it work. But I do highly encourage everyone. If you wanna be able to reliably and easily get into different states, whether it's focus or creativity, or reflection or psychologically detaching from work and getting a real break
to find a different environment, make a different environment, or introduce a new stimulus that your brain can associate with that particular state so that it's easy to get there and you don't have to rely on discipline and willpower, which is really difficult to do.
[01:13:32] Bogumil: I think it's one of the golden nuggets from our conversation that we can guide our brains in a way to serve us better. Better. I was thinking trick, but it's not really trick. You're guiding the brain in a way that allows it to perform the way you want it to perform at the time when you need it. And I think it's a really powerful way of using, whether it's music or the candle or a fruit or even an object that symbolizes that this is the work time.
This is the relax and and distracted other time that you have in your day. I wanna ask you about meditation, and the reason I want to ask you about it is because you brought it up in a conversation we had in Zurich and I've talked to some 50. Experts, money, wealth, investments, wellness on this podcast.
And you would be amazed, or maybe not how many people meditate. Some talk about it more openly, some talk about it less openly. Some call it quiet time. But there's a common thread that they all found a reason and purpose and need to have this kind of time in their day. And you have some remarkable science and research that begs it up and says that meditation actually makes a difference in how we perform.
[01:14:40] Lucas Miller: Yes, absolutely. And this is a particular passion of mine since one of the first research projects that I joined back at Berkeley was focused on the impact of meditation
on cognitive performance and health. And it was really at a time where meditation was first becoming a legitimate subject of scientific inquiry long ago.
It used to be associated with religion or myth, or some just considered it too soft or too fluffy to study and really give credence to. But now, after study, after study has come out showing that it's actually leading to real changes in the structure of our brains. It's become something that is now getting studied all over the world, and I would put meditation in a bucket of three different things that are probably the best.
Three things that you can do for maintaining your brain performance and health, and in some cases even improving your brain performance and health. And that would be number one. Sleep. We've talked about that. Seven hours on average per night, that's the minimum as a foundation for your health and performance.
If you don't sleep, your brain is gonna deteriorate over time. Exercise in particular, aerobic exercise. See, stressing your heart and lungs is phenomenal for promoting neuroplasticity, which is what enables us to learn and grow and make new connections over time. Meditation would be the third one, and meditation for those who aren't super familiar with it is.
Kind of like sport
actually, I think a lot of people mistakenly believe that meditation is one thing,
and it is not just like, sport is not one thing. Now, in general, sports are good for you and in general, meditation is good for you, but there are many different types of sport and there are many different types of meditation.
And if you play a certain sport like weightlifting versus tennis, you're gonna get different outcomes. You're going to get stronger versus more agile. And so when it comes to meditation, the, the general point is that it is incredibly effective at enabling people to become more present versions of themselves, to become more aware versions of themselves and to improve their performance.
It is, it's a phenomenal way to take the hardware you've been given, which is your brain. And upgrade it, make improvements, make it run faster,
make it more self-aware. And the particular type of meditation that I wanna talk about today, since I think that it's the most relevant for the most number of people, is focused attention meditation, known
as FA meditation.
There are two other types. There are actually many other types that are worth talking about, but I'll just talk about FA meditation today. And what focused attention meditation is is it is just focus train. That is it. It is taking your brain to the brain gym and forcing it to do the brain equivalent of bicep curls
for the attention network in your brain, which lives in the prefrontal cortex, right behind your forehead and is your brain's executive.
It's the c E O. It is determining what we pay attention to. It's controlling your cognitive resources. It's giving you an awareness of what you're doing and why, and planning decision making. It's all of that, and you're basically forcing that c e o of the brain to weight train so that that area and that person gets stronger so that you have more control so that you are able to deploy resources more effectively so that you are less distractible, so that it takes less energy to do the same thing and focus attention meditation and it's, it has a number of clear benefits.
There are studies that show that when you do FA meditation for a matter of weeks, you see an increase in cortical thickness in areas of the brain related to control, attention decision making. An increase in cortical thickness literally means more brain tissue. That would be like if you're doing bicep curls and your muscle gets larger.
That's the brain equivalent of that. You see more tissue. It's a stronger brain area. And you also see in a number of longitudinal studies, those who meditate versus those who don't see a slowing of the natural aging process in the brain. You see slower rates of normal cognitive decline, which we will all face as we get old, older.
In fact, all of us peak cognitively around 25, and then it's, it's all downhill from there in terms of processing power. But we gain life experience and wisdom. But it, but it is true that we, we tend to peak and we're all on a, on a slow decline, which can be, we can reduce the rates of that decline
or in some cases, delay the decline.
By meditation, by forcing our brains to stay involved, by forcing our brains to stay engaged and training them deliberately so that they don't atrophy over time, much like our muscles will atrophy if we don't strength train and we don't push them past their capacity. And the third benefit we see for meditation, I think it's worth calling out, is that, you know, we're getting an increase in cortical thickness in areas of the brain that help us pay attention and have control and making decisions.
But you also see a reduction in areas of the brain, a reduction in size in a particular area of the brain called the amygdala. The amygdala is your brain's fear and anxiety center. It's a
very small, primitive area of the brain,
but it's basically your brain's give a shit center.
It is what it is. What makes you freak out and panic if there's a perturbation in your environment or a stressor gets introduced.
And after just eight weeks of meditating on average, one hour per week, spread out across multiple sessions, so it doesn't have to be an hour at a time. It could be 10 minutes a day for seven days a week. It could be 20 minutes, three times a week. However you want to break it up,
it's all fine, but an hour per week for eight weeks, we see these structural changes to the brain or certain areas are getting larger, other areas are getting smaller, tilting you in the direction of higher performing and less reactive and less likely to get stressed from the same things that will happen in your life.
Meditation is, it's very simple, but it's really one of the only ways that we know that can structurally change your brain so that you essentially can upgrade. The foundational hardware that you've been given and the way that you do it, the way that I'm gonna recommend folks do it, this is fa Meditation is very simple.
It's three steps. Step one is you pick a place of focus. It could be your breath, it could be an object, your cup of coffee, whatever. It doesn't matter, but it has to be one single point of focus. And it's traditionally the breath. Since that's often easy for people to focus on, then what you're gonna do is you are going to focus your attention on that object.
Notice when your mind wanders, not if when it wanders, because our, our brains are constantly in hyper drive thinking about the to-do list. And did we follow up with this person? Do we need to buy toilet paper on Amazon? Your mind's gonna wander
and it's designed to wander, and then every time it wanders away
from your point of focus, you're going to drag your focus back to your breath.
And that's it. And every time your brain wanders, that is an opportunity to do a bicep curl for your attention network, to bring your focus back to the primary thing you want to attend to. And over time, if you do this enough, and it doesn't have to be crazy, 10 minutes a day will get the job done. There's lots of easy beginner gains that everyone can get.
You will strengthen that attention network and it will become easier to be present. It'll become easier to focus on the same thing without getting distracted or by burning less energy. And it's a tool that's in front of all of us. It's very simple. It's not easy to do because it's very boring and it's hard.
And people wonder, am I doing it right? You are. That's the process. And if you start meditating and you find it difficult, or you've tried in the past and haven't succeeded, you have to trust in the process. It is not like lifting weights where you can see that you're lifting more weight each time. You can see physical changes in your body, which get you addicted to this progress and these quick wins, and you can see the transformation happening.
It's less obvious. You can't actually peer inside your brain and see that certain networks are getting strengthened. You can't see that. You have to trust in the process. Takes a bit of time, on average six to eight weeks. But if you stick to it and you're diligent by the end, you'll find that you're more present.
You see more information, you'll have a wider aperture, and you'll pick up on things that you didn't realize are happening. You will be more aware of your senses, of your emotions, of everything that might be relevant signal in your environment. And what a, what an edge to get in a world where folks seem are just so distracted and so on autopilot and missing so much information and so deep in the noise.
What a, what an edge to really gain. And it's available to all of us, and it's, it's truly one of the most powerful investments you can make in yourself
if you stick to the process and you trust that this, this concept of taking your brain to the brain gym has merit and that you can in a similar way to exercise, or you can get stronger and faster and more agile, more flexible, and all these things that you can do the same with your brain.
You can get more focused, more intentional, more aware, more energized, more creative, all of it. The same principles apply upstairs as they do with our body.
[01:25:06] Bogumil: No, I, I love it and I think you give all of us the permission to experiment with it more and the fact that so many people are doing it, even if they don't talk about it too much, and there's remarkable science that you share that actually proves that it, it works and it can help us improve our brain capacity.
Lucas, I could keep you all day, but I have one last question,
[01:25:28] Lucas Miller: I know, I know.
[01:25:29] Bogumil: and I certainly hope I have you back because there's so much more we could talk about. I wanna ask you about success. Your own definition of success, professional, personal, how much you wanna share, how do you think about it?
[01:25:40] Lucas Miller: So success is, it's a concept that I think is deeply personal.
[01:25:46] Bogumil: Mm-hmm.
[01:25:46] Lucas Miller: Now we, we want to find a definition of success out there. So that we don't have to do the thinking.
So many of us do that. We, we read and we ask people questions, and we seek advice because we're trying to get a magic answer so that we don't have to do the thinking and we can just, if, if someone else gives us the map, we can just follow that map and then life will be great and we'll have enough money and we'll be happy and all is well.
But unfortunately, success is deeply personal. The definition of success for a person who chooses investing as a career versus someone who is deeply into solving people's complicated childhoods and traumas,
for example, a therapist. Now those skills and those interests and those pre elections are completely different.
And so you could, you couldn't possibly give both of those people the same de definition of success. And so for me, the definition of success, Is getting what you want out of life. It's very simple, and the key there is you getting what you want. And in order to define what success is for yourself, you need to know what you want.
You need awareness. You need awareness. of what your values are, what you want your life to look like, where you are going.
[01:27:16] Bogumil: Mm-hmm.
[01:27:17] Lucas Miller: And so before I could give anyone or help anyone with a definition of success, we have to start with awareness and understanding of who you are and what you want. And then once you know what you want, you're successful if you can get it.
And that means you have to figure out what action do I need to take to get me there? How do I take a small step each day, each week, each month to get in that direction? And if you take the right action, And you learn and you adapt your process so that you can take better action and more informed and more accurate action, you'll get the results that you want.
And of course, it's complicated because sometimes in getting results, you change what you're looking for in the first place. You change what you want out of life. And, and it's a beautiful process. But I think the same general principle applies. You know, you at, at any point in your life, you should have a sense of what you want and why.
That way you are being intentional. Now that can change if you have a child and it's now changed your conception of what is important to you and the purpose of work, and you know that that's the experience of so many new parents. That's okay. We are not static creatures.
We change and our values change.
But that does not mean. That we cannot, at any given point in our time, have a sense of where I'm trying to go and why, and a rough blueprint for how I'm gonna get there. So that's, that's my definition of success. It's getting what you want out of life, which requires two things, knowing what you want, having self-awareness, and then taking the right actions to hopefully over time get the results that you're seeking.
But it is a deeply personal thing that you will never find in a book or a podcast like this one. It has to, it has to be, it has to be something you come up with that is born out of curiosity and understanding and empathy. And it's also dynamic as well. Like I, I encourage people so that you can take some pressure off of yourself to know that your definition may change over time, and that is okay.
What is important is to be intentional. Always be intentional with what you're trying to do. But if there's new information, if you don't like a job or your primary partnership isn't serving you anymore, you're both unhappy in that relationship, whatever it is, then you can change. But just be intentional and I think the whole world could benefit more and we would all be more productive and more helpful and less, there would be fewer misunderstandings in the world if we all tried to be more intentional with ourselves and how we conduct our days and the directions we're trying to head in.
[01:30:16] Bogumil: I like the sound of it. It sounds like a journey, an ever evolving journey. A pursuit that can. Continue to change as we go and uh, the goals that we have today might be different than the ones we're gonna have 5, 10, 20 years from now. But I think at the end of the day you wanna have fun with it. Enjoy the right.
For me, curiosity is a big part of it. I like discovering new things, learning new things, meeting new people. And it was definitely a joy meeting you in Zurich and it was really remarkable to have you on the show and learn so much more from you. And I hope to have you back on the show and learn further.
I'll include all the links, all the resources so people can take the test that you mentioned, find out about everything you do, your courses and everything else, and continue to learn with you. So I want to thank you for today.
[01:31:00] Lucas Miller: Thank you as well. Its an absolute pleasure. Have fun talking to you.
