282. No Tech Bros Allowed, The Death of Coworking and Managing Zero Ambition. PLUS! Can we really multitask?

0:01Coming up this week in work. A Silicon Valley startup is only hiring people over 50. No tech bros allowed. The CEO says younger engineers trust the models, but veterans know when they'll break. So in an industry obsessed with youth and speed, could deep experience actually be the competitive advantage? And is co-working actually dead? A recent article I read suggests it's certainly on the way out and a brand new concept looks set to replace it. Think of it as hybrid hybrid. Don't worry, I'll explain what I mean shortly. And in truth or lie, can some people genuinely multitask? It feels like we're all doing five things at once at the minute, especially with AI apparently handling half our workload.

0:44But does the brain actually work that way? Can we multitask? And in the workplace surgery, is it a problem if someone does great work but has zero ambition to progress? These people are reliable, low drama, just get on with the job and then switch off and go home. So how do you view someone like that as a leader? This is Truth, Lives and Work, the award-winning podcast where behavioural science meets workplace culture. Brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Al, I'm a business owner. I'm here to ask the questions you might be afraid to.

1:14Thank you, Natalie, for that line. And my name is Leanne, I'm a chartered occupational psychologist and I'm here to answer them. And together we help you simplify the science of work and build amazing workplace cultures. And if you're regular listeners, you know what I'm about to say now. We'll be right back after a quick word from our sponsors. Are you right? That's music when you go into the sponsors bit. Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, let's see if you're right. HubSpot makes impossible growth impossibly easy for their customers. And here's a perfect example. Lee, your turn. Morehouse College needed to reach new students with fresh, engaging content.

1:49But with a massive 900-page website, even the tiniest updates took 30 minutes to publish. Breeze, which is HubSpot's collection of AI tools, helped them write and optimize their content in just a fraction of the time. The results? 30 % more page views, and visitors now spend 27 % more time on their site. If you're ready for impossible growth like this, visit HubSpot.com.

2:18Welcome back. I hope you enjoyed that as much as we did. I very much enjoyed it. What's funny is that if these people are, People might be listening to this episode in a year's time. And it'll be a different ad for each month. This is insider information. But it runs the same ad for a month. And then we change it. And we don't know when we're recording what ad's going on there. Do you remember a couple of weeks back? I think it was February ads. I recorded it and it said something like, now after those two idiots have stopped speaking, now we're going to go. Yes, and on one episode we had two guests on.

2:48I know. And when I listened back to it, it was like, okay, oh my God. Anyway, but you knew what I mean. You know what we mean. Yeah, anyway. So, Leanne, what have you been doing this week? The Paralympics started out on Friday. I feel like my Olympic world is back. I missed it for those, like, 10 days. We didn't have any. I don't know what we could do for the next four years. But yeah, the Paralympics started on Friday. And you know how we were saying that, like, the Winter Olympics is just really unhinged and really dangerous and people are throwing themselves down mountains. Try doing it without legs.

3:19Child's play. That was child's play. i've watched and honestly i go what the about every three minutes when i'm watching the paralympics because there's things that blow my mind and i won't go into all of them because we simply don't have the time but one of them so down the downhill skiing we get all the slaloms and the super super g and the slalom the grand slalom great slalom all that kind of stuff people who have visual impairments so they can't see so they have a guide in front of them who is talking to them through a headset telling them what's coming up oh my god so they're throwing themselves down a mountain up to 100 kilometers an hour they can't see i'm slightly disappointed they don't have guide dogs on skis well they wouldn't be fast enough out they wouldn't be fast enough simply wouldn't be fast no you just you wouldn't get it past the animal ethics committee but then it's like then i'm watching the snowboarding i'm like oh this is very you know cool isn't it and they're like oh yeah of course there's um i'm making these names because i can't remember there's josh amesworth uh yeah lost both of his legs in a shark attack i'm sorry what would you not think that if you if you've been attacked by a shark you go well the last thing i do is put myself in another dangerous situation but that's the thing that's the thing there are so many examples there was one guy who was diagnosed with motor neurone disease at 30 given three years to live he's now just competing his first paralympics the age of 37 wow yeah and there's another guy who is an olympic skier regular olympics had a horrible accident broke his leg had to have his entire knee replaced and is now just represented italy in his first winter paralympics and won gold i suppose i can see why you would have paralympics um as like a natural follow-on from when you have your winter olympics and you crash then it's just like it's like that next step isn't it so uh i'm sure it's not what voluntarily make but yes it's making the most of it but it just it's unbelievable the level of bravery and strength and just fuck it these people have there's no other way to say it like they are extraordinary extraordinary it makes me sad actually that i'm not seeing as much about the paralympics in the news because it is next level good talking of news it is time for How's that for a segue link?

5:46I've got something else for you before we dive into that. Okay, what, what, what, what? I'm not sure we've got the time for this either, but you know how... I'll edit it out, don't worry. You know how I really enjoy Gen Z. You love Gen Z. I love them. Equally, I appreciate why some people would find them annoying. And I've always been very, you know, team Gen Z, until I saw this on Instagram. Uh-oh. I want your thoughts on it, Al. Okay, so... You ready? Oh, wait, it's gone. I'm going to play it to you and see if you can hear it, okay? Okay, go. Ready? Yes. What year does someone have to be born in to be considered old?

6:231990. Like 2000. 1995. 2002. Late 1900s is like old. Uh, like 2005. 1992. Please stop. 2000. Please stop. The late 1900s. Get in the bin, you wanker. Don't say 1900s. We said 1900s, meaning like 1900 to 1909. Oh, man. So I was born in 1977. So these people must think that basically... They can't even think that far back. They could barely pluck a number out of the 80s, let alone the 70s. Well, pluck you, Gen Z. Not impressed by that at all. if anyone's listening or whether you are listening and you're slightly um on the more mature side like like i am um then let's let's let's get together and have a nice cup of tea and and chat about how bad the jigs about the late 1900s about the late 1900s and we we talked last week about exennials or zennials we're not quite sure which the exennials i swear if you haven't if you if you haven't listened to last week's tuesday go back and listen because it's like sort of 85 % rubbish and 15 % pretty good anyway anyway I think it's time for your favourite time of the week it's about time isn't it it's about time it's time for your favourite time of the week it's time for the world famous no it's not it's time for the news roundup it is I'll cue that jingle I'll cue the jingle meanwhile do you want to get your notes together and tell us what you've been looking into this week I have a new word you as you always do I do you know what I went through a long stretch where I couldn't find a new word but there just seems to be a lot popping up i guess people in winter people have more time on their hands don't they so they start making up words maybe the word factory is there's a word is there a word factory yeah sure anyway carry on brand well-being thoughts um that sounds a bit stupid that sounds like you've taken two words you've gone well-being and we've gone oh we'll call it at least like with green washing and well washing and stuff and whatever you call it at least that's like a bit of a clever word this is just someone who's basically gone well-being brand in front.

8:31So I don't even understand why we're talking about it. Well, let me tell you why. So this comes from an article from Sean Looney, excellent surname in Fast Company. I love our surnames. And the idea is basically a brand's long-term success depends on the overall well-being of three groups, its employees, its internal culture, and its customers. Wow, groundbreaking. brand isn't just its logo or its products. It's an ecosystem, Al, made up of people and relationships and shared values. And if one part of that ecosystem isn't healthy, the whole thing weakens. Can I ask you a quick question? Sure.

9:13Is Sean Looney by any chance in, is he a brand strategist? I'd imagine he would be. I think he is in content creation, yes. Okay, Sean, I'm sorry. I love your surname. I hate this article. Wow. Okay. What else have we got? What are you hating about it? Because it just sounds like a load of bollocks. As in it's obvious or is in... As in like brand. Well, brand is the same as organisation. It's just, it's like, yeah. Indeed. I don't, I'm not saying... Sure, I'm sorry. I love you, dude. But this is not news to me. Well, it's not news to you, but it might be news to people listening, Al. I look forward to your letters.

9:55So to go through it briefly, because I've lost Al already, there's three dimensions to brand well-being employee well-being you'll know what that is culture well-being whatever that is it's about meaning and connection apparently and consumer well-being so how a brand shows up in people's lives that's something that sonja thompson would have a lot to say about that's true actually um she has a brilliant podcast all around inclusion marketing so definitely check that out um i do you want me to say more on this or are we just going to put it put it in the no pile al no no no because people may not share my grumpy maybe i just broke a bit grumpy okay well basically sean makes the point that this isn't just a nice to have there is a business case behind it for example the article cites and research commissioned by the insurer signer we used to be with signer oh yeah very good very expensive yeah but they found employer well-being programs deliver an average return of investment of about 47 percent which means roughly$1.47 return for every dollar invested.

10:54I'm not going to lie, that's high compared to any other research I've seen, but let's just assume it's backed on based on fair data. It also references analysis from WellHub when 99 % of HR leaders report that wellbeing programmes improve productivity. I'm not sure I've met many HR leaders that would say that, but okay. And the broader meta-analysis apparently has found reductions in absenteeism and healthcare costs sometimes with ROI approaching 140%. Again, these are figures I've never seen in any research before. Okay. It's looking more and more loony by the minute. Yeah. I think even you, you're starting to lose a bit of loss there on this.

11:39It's taking the shine off a little bit on this, isn't it? Yeah. Do you know what I think? What I enjoyed about this article is it's kind of making a point that well-being isn't just something that's like a nice to have fruit in the bake room break room type thing it is actually more about the workplaces we're designing the values and behaviors we're fostering and our customers are part of that that ecosystem as well so i enjoy that well-being is being talked about beyond the individual and how that actually as we move forward and we know this from all the research we've seen around gen zed and millennials as well actually that well-being is taken really seriously in terms of employer brand and we like it the article does mention some companies experimenting with this l 'oreal the nba black rock morgan stanley volvo basically the the idea is the most effective companies don't treat well being as a marketing campaign they integrate it into how the organization actually works and that is what I'm here for Al.

12:41Yes yes. Not sure about those data points check check those uh yeah dig deeper into those I'm I'm skeptical as to as to that and would yeah anyway what have you seen this week Al? Well I look forward to you crapping on my article from a great height uh so um my article is all about co-working and um it's actually a couple of months old but um I went to it and i read it again just i mean i'm sure everyone knows what co-working is um by the way if you haven't seen the apple we work series it is really good it doesn't come off very very well the gerard not gerard i can't remember his surname the um the guy who started it doesn't come off very well but it is great a great drama uh but co-working traditionally was you'd go somewhere and you'd sit and you work you'd be like a you know a solopreneur or something and you just work in a big room.

13:32A few years back, we were in Bali, weren't we? Don't go to Bali. We were those people, yeah. And we went to a co-working space and oh my God, it was full of, now I can't use that word on this pod, but I think people who are British and Australian. People with lots of charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent.

13:52We've just lost a few listeners. So sorry if that was offensive. You've watched RuPaul. Come on now. No, I have. No, no, no, I understand. I understand. It's just perfect. basically co-working started off as like people going there to work in a communal space ended up just full of just poses poses they're called bromance abroad they're sort of like digital nomads but they're bros and they've got man buns and like t-shirts yeah and they walk around with one nipple hanging out and you know yeah it's just horrible stuff horrible stuff and they and they have these like really noisy uh skype calls going yeah well i'm series a yes series a investment and very interested and then looking around the room as if to go did people hear me people know that i'm important anymore anyway so there's that side of it and that's where co-working seems to have gone something has shifted though and basically this article in forbes is and the link is in the show notes obviously basically arguing that professionals who were co-workers biggest customers like lawyers or finance teams mortgage consultants that sort of thing they're quietly leaving not because necessarily they hated it even though if they went to bali they were is because their work has outgrown it.

15:00The article gives this example of this law firm that spent two years at a well-known co-working brand and then started losing clients. And it was nothing to do with their work. It's just because on every Zoom call, there was background noise and some fella walking past in shorts and flip-flops with a man bomb. So people stopped taking them seriously. And that is obviously a real, real problem. And then COVID obviously happened. Now, what was happening is it was quite, you know, we got used to working on our own. at home and so therefore co-working wasn't even a possibility for two or three years and so people got used to this idea of being quiet and so now this article says there's a new thing called pro-working see what they've done there pro-working which is for professionals who and basically you rent out a private room in a co-working space so you can sit in your office and do your quiet work and then you can open the door and you're back into like the the co-working stuff so you get the best of both worlds because if you're working at home hang on late you've got questions yeah go ahead i've been to many co-working spaces well before covid that had private rooms that you could rent ah yeah but the person who's written this article is has got one of these pro-working things so he's trying to say it's a brand new thing is i think him and oh this is the owner of said pro-working space yeah it's called say no more carry on it's called flex something i can't remember exactly what it is i'll leave a link in the article.

16:26So basically, this is going in the same pile as your Sean Looney article. Yeah. It ain't new. It ain't new. Can't fool us. No, no, absolutely. So the idea is you get a private space but then you can open the door and you're in co-working. Not brand new, but... And now I'm saying it out loud, I realise this isn't my strongest piece of it. I think we both fall into that trap this week, Al. I think we both have. Yeah, sometimes things look good and when you visit them again three days later, they just don't stand up the way you expected. They don't, so... One thing I would say about co-working spaces, I am quite introverted, so I do enjoy quiet, but then I've also worked in very busy places, so I'm very good at blocking out the noise.

17:08What I really liked about co-working spaces, the really good ones, the one in Cambodia. Do you remember? Oh, yeah, that was brilliant. So good. The most amazing coffee. Every desk had plugs. Yep. Blows my mind when you go to a co-working space and not everywhere has a plug. yep what why why why just a cafe what do you think we came here for exactly um oh that was good anyway what i enjoyed about it sorry reminiscing i was back in cambodia what i enjoyed about co-working spaces is the body doubling what's that have you heard about this no so it's typically a technique that's recommended for people who are neurodiverse and can struggle to focus on a task independently at times or struggle to get started whereas body doubling is basically like I'll go with you to a co-working space because I have to do my tax return that I've been putting off.

17:59But that's going to be the task I do as I sit next to you. And we work together and that presence of just having another body there kind of motivates you to get a task done. So I used to find it quite motivating for that because if I started to get a bit distracted I'd look around and people watching is always nice as well. And then you see somebody like really hustling and you'd be like, oh, I should probably do that. Anyway, when should we go to Cambodia? Oh, Cambodia. If you're listening you've not been to Cambodia, it is amazing. We much preferred it over Thailand. Sorry, over Vietnam. Don't know about necessarily over Thailand.

18:28Oh, Thailand's pretty great. But Cambodia, yeah, we went to Siem Reap, which is famous for all the monuments and the temples. But really also a really cool place and it feels like Manchester in that London is Phnom Penh and really busy. Siem Reap was a bit more relaxed. Yeah, and And it was quite hipsterish, but not an annoying in your face way. And lots of entrepreneurial things happened there. So, yeah. Yeah, very cool. And lovely, lovely people. We have this kind of theory that if you've had in the past, you've had quite a recent tough time, then generally the people are going to be very, very nice to you.

19:09We found that in the Balkans as well. High on hope, aren't they? High on hope. Yeah. That should be the name of your book. Or your first single. Okay, Lee, what else have you seen, my love? I'm nervous about how this is going to go down. I don't know. Let's find out. This headline caught my attention because it basically said, tech bros need not apply. I love this. This is all about a Silicon Valley startup that's hiring only people over 50. So it's called Snowcap Compute. It's based in Palo Alto, if you're interested. And they are building superconducting computing platform. Oh, yeah. I don't know what that is, but it sounds important.

19:48That conducts super... Superconducting computing. Yeah. Lovely. Oh, you're so stupid. It isn't the technology I'm interested in, though, Al. You won't be surprised to hear. The company has 18 employees now, and the average age is over 50. So really opposite to what the classic startup stereotype is, where you kind of got your bros in. The CEO is a guy called Mike Lafferty. He told the Wall Street Journal that this is completely intentional. His view is that the kind of hardware engineering they're doing requires people who have, in his words, seen and felt enough pain over their careers to understand what can actually go wrong.

20:29Because, he says, unlike software startups where you can kind of test ideas quickly, hardware design works very differently. It can take seven, eight, nine months to get feedback on whether design works. And if you get it wrong, huge amount of time lost, which to a startup can be suicide, can't it? so Mike says he's deliberately looking for engineers who spent decades in the field people who've built ships watch projects fail and learn the limits of the models engineers use to predict what will happen in the real world his argument is that young engineers are often trained to trust those models whereas veterans are more skeptical because they've seen them break interestingly as well most of the team don't live in Silicon Valley only four of the engineers work from the Palo Alto office the rest is spread across the country remotely and it's working brilliantly because they're because they're older people who are sensible and they've got families and they've got homes and they've got roots somewhere else but their expertise is needed so why relocate everyone when you can just do things remotely and come together every few months to work in person because it's necessary so when snow cap does hire uh mike laffty says he's looking for people who have failed before who understand why they failed and what they learned from it yes he avoids candidates who are either repeating the same mistakes or become paralyzed by failure um our thoughts well that's me i should go and get a job there i'm nearly 50 i've failed many many times and i've understood my most of the time understood why question is it called snow cap because it's for people who got slight gray hair so it's like a little snow cap on their head oh that would be I think that's probably coincidental.

22:09I don't know. Maybe. I did connect with Mike and see if he wanted to come on the podcast, but I've not heard back yet. No, he's too busy building something very, very important that neither of us understand. But also, you talk about digital bros, maybe the opposite of that is digital pros. Ooh, like pro-working. Like pro-working. Oh, my God. Look, ultimately, I love it. I think that there was a company who I'm, a guy who I met a long, long time ago, and he was called something like grey consulting and basically he only recruited people for sales who had got grey hair, who were older. Because when you're doing a sales of, not like selling mobile phones, but selling something quite big, then it's good to have someone older in the room sitting there.

22:53Like we're buying a house right now. It's a prefab house from Bosnia. The salesperson, probably the same age as me, maybe even older. Older. Yeah, older you reckon. And you kind of get this feeling because not only are they great at sales, but also they're not like hey come and buy this thing come on let's do it now he's like okay all right take your time take your time so i'm a huge fan of that sorry i took this slightly off no i agree i agree and it is surprising to me and it's talked about a lot because we are seeing increasing number of people over 50 not in the workplace are struggling to get jobs after being laid off and it's always confused me a little bit why there's this false assumption that once you're kind of 50 plus you don't have the same value as somebody under 50 when you've just spent the last 30 years building up experience and knowledge so i did a little research just to kind of labor this point out so studies looking at mature workers have consistently found that performance doesn't decline with age in the way that people assume task performance and creativity are broadly the same as younger workers in fact older employees stand out in some really important behaviours such as organisational citizenship so that's like helping colleagues supporting the wider team much stronger safety behaviours isn't isn't you know makes sense we do get a bit more cautious we get older less likely to engage in counterproductive behaviours like lateness or absenteeism and bring yeah experience professional networks and accumulated judgment to recognise risks and spot when something doesn't add up and I think when we think about the cognitive decline that we potentially are seeing with AI, and I'd hate to say it, potentially Gen Z, you've got to wonder if these older work is going to be even more important.

24:36I think they probably will. This is probably, we probably can't get into this now, but I'd imagine that it would be illegal to say, I only recruit people who are over 50, you have to do something. Yeah, it would be unlawful. Right. So you'd have to demonstrate exactly why somebody over 50 you needed that for the job more than likely you couldn't say over 50 but you could specify an amount of experience 30 years yeah no not necessarily i mean possibly but again you'd have to really prove why 30 years is a magic number it'd be more like in-depth experience of all of these things which just by its nature would take time to accumulate but that's not to say that somebody who is 25 could have spent five years really digging deep into hardware tech super computing and have the same knowledge level as somebody in their in their 50s of course they're not going to have the same scenario analysis you'd have to word it carefully you'd have to prove it otherwise you could be done for unlawful unlawful hiring but who checks really yeah not many people and particularly in this instance where you're actually hiring from a minority group yeah okay Okay, Lee, does that conclude our news roundup?

25:52It does. Thank you so much. And apologies to Sean and the guy from the pro-working place where we did kind of like shit a little bit on your article. Oh, I'm here for the pro-working. I enjoy a pro-working space. I just questioned whether it was new. But I'd love to go. Where are his places? Let's go. I will check. I can't imagine there's too many around Mostar in Bosnia. I'm sure he'll fly us out somewhere, won't he? Sure. Just giving him a big old shout out. Have we actually given them a shout out what to name the company? We might get something for free. Go on. Yes. I've not written that down.

26:24Okay, so after the break, we've got the truth or lie. This is where I ask Leanne a question and I say, I've heard this. Is it true or is it a lie? And Leanne, being a psychologist, a chartered occupational psychologist, no less, she answered the question. So we'll see you in a second. Billion Dollar Moves, hosted by Sarah Chen Spellings, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination of business professionals. Join venture capitalist and strategist Sarah Chen Spellings as she asks the hard questions and learns through the triumphs, failures and hard lessons of the creme de la creme.

26:56So you too can make billion dollar moves in venture, in business and in life. Maybe start with episode 124 where you're going to hear how industry giants from Canva to YouTube define leadership. Listen to Billion Dollar Moves wherever you get your podcasts.

27:14Welcome back. it is time for truth or lie and this is something i am genuinely excited about because well for a number of reasons i'll go into in a second the one thing we're asking right now is can some people genuinely multitask so i i think the backstory is that every generation thinks they've mastered multitasking because i know that my mom used to boast about cooking dinner and helping with homework and also drinking whiskey um at the same time um and then there was loads of people you see lots of people who um like on um suits and stuff where they're chatting to someone but also writing an email and we've got obviously the ai version where you spin up you open your laptop you spin up a few ai agents you get one to summarize a report another one draft a presentation a third to analyze data a fourth to i don't know create an email i don't know it does feel like currently we're doing five things at once and then also we add on top of that slack messages then we've got meetings we've got everything happening all at the same time however i also have a feeling that psychologists have been arguing about multitasking for a very very long time.

28:18Lee, does multitasking work? Can some people genuinely multitask? You're right Al, we do as psychologists spend as much time defining what we're talking about as we do studying what we're talking about. So in terms of multitasking there's two ways to look at it really. Either if somebody is multitasking we're saying they can can perform two demanding tasks at the same time without getting worse at either of them or that a person can switch between tasks so quickly it feels simultaneous okay so psychologists are basically looking at attention and what it means in terms of mental processes that we decide to focus on and those that we ignore attention i think can sometimes feel a bit limited I think we can all feel a bit over stimulated at times but as you said there are also lots of examples that we can multitask quite successfully so we can talk when driving we can cook while listening to podcasts so researchers have spent a long time actually trying to test the idea of multitasking what it is in controlled environments to understand if that is what we're actually doing are we multitasking can we be good at it or are we just switching tasks faster.

29:35Love it. So in terms of the case for, yes, we are good at multitasking, there is some evidence that a small number of people may genuinely handle multitasking unusually well. So there is a well-known experiment by some psychologists called Jason Watson and David Strayer back in 2010. They tested basically people's ability to multitask using a driving simulator so participants sat behind the wheel and they followed a car on a virtual motorway and their job was to hit the brake as quickly as possible whenever the car in front of them suddenly slowed down at the same time they were solving maths problems and memorizing words right so they're driving calculating and remembering information simultaneously the researchers basically wanted to see could anyone do both tasks without getting any worse and the answer was yes Yes, but only five out of 200 people managed both tasks without any measurable declining performance.

30:37So about 2.5 % of the sample and the researchers called them super taskers. Oh, I like that. It's nice, isn't it? Out of interest, does the report say anything about whether those people had other attributes like a much higher IQ or they were all skewed younger or anything like that? No, but some follow-up research a few years later did use fMRI brain scanning to see what was happening in the brains of these supertaskers. So a similar demanding memory task. So people were sat in front of a screen where squares appeared in different positions, while letters were spoken through headphones and participants had to remember what appeared or what was spoken a few steps earlier.

31:24So basically, I had to track two streams of information at once, auditory and visual. What the researchers found was that supertaskers showed less activity in regions responsible for attention control, particularly the prefrontal cortex, which basically means their brains appeared to handle heavy cognitive load, a lot going on, much more efficiently, in that there was less activity, their brain wasn't even that bothered about it. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And then in this research, there was evidence that certain mental abilities affect how well people were able to multitask. And other research has backed this up as well.

32:06So another one from 2011 put participants in a flight simulation thing where they had to fly a plane, monitor several systems at once, respond to problems as they appeared. and they found people with stronger working memory were better at handling several tasks at once and people with stronger spatial ability. So the ability to picture and track things around us, they were much better at coping with tasks that suddenly became more difficult. So it seems as though there is a potential genetic component in terms of how our brain is structured and how it works that makes us super taskers and there could be a cognitive aspect as well in terms of working memory and spatial ability.

32:47So yeah, some people are naturally better equipped to deal with multitasking. So putting that in my nerdy analogy, I'm thinking if I go and buy a laptop that's got eight gigabyte of RAM and I compare it to a desktop that's got 64 gigabyte of RAM, it's got more working memory and therefore I can do more things at the same time on the desktop than I can on the laptop. Is that right? Exactly. So if anyone's ever seen the end screen and see the 350 tabs, Chrome tabs she's got open, then that will be fine on a big old computer. So in order to do that, for the computer to be multitasking, you need more memory.

33:22Yes. Okay. And I would just like to say that currently I only have 18 tabs open, actually. I get stressed when I get more than five. Yes, but it's worth bearing in mind that how rare this is, that only 2.5 % of laptops out there are going to have the higher memory capacity. Got it. Yeah. Love it. Rare resource. Rare. So yes, it's possible, but it seems unlikely at this stage. That the average person. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And in terms of the case against, there is a large body of research that suggests something different. That actually most people can't truly multitask. And actually what their brain is rapidly doing is switching between tasks.

34:05And every time it switches, there's a small cost. so one of the clearest demonstrations of this came from a psychologist called harold paschler way back when in the early 1900s 1992 so in harold's experiment participants were asked to respond to two simple signals first they would hear a tone and press a key and then a fraction of a second later a light would appear and they had to press a different key right get it so they've got two different keys press one when you hear a sound one when you see a light yeah pretty simple task but when the signal appeared very close together something happened very consistently with participants the response to the second signal so to the light signal slowed down right so even though the tasks use different senses one was sound one was sight there was a notable noticeable difference that the brain slowed down when multiple things were happening around us and that's the switching cost you're switching between listening to something and looking at something yeah it's basically our brain has to decide what action to take and it can only process one decision at a time so literally that cost is is related to to time the psychologists at the time called it the response selection bottleneck right but i have called it more switching costs in kind of the general major of things yeah i think cal newport's book is talks all about switching costs called Deep Work, I think it is.