Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Author, Filmmaker Tiffany Shlain discusses her films, book 24/6, and the human side of tech (#047)

Episode Date: May 20, 2020

   #TechShabbat #character #neuroscience Filmmaker, and author Tiffany Shlain discusses her life, films and her book 24/6, about the neuroscience of how technology reshapes our brains and how the practice of turning off all screens 24 hours each week can make us healthier and more creative. http://tiffanyshlain.com https://twitter.com/tiffanyshlain Get the book   This practice of turning off all screens for twenty-four hours each week, which she’s done for over a decade with her husband and kids (sixteen and ten), has completely changed their lives, giving them more time, productivity, connection, and presence. She and her family call it “Technology Shabbat”, which has become a worldwide movement. Learn more about it at https://www.24sixlife.com/ Drawn from the ancient ritual of Shabbat, living 24/6 can work for anyone from any background. With humor and wisdom, Shlain shares her story, offers lessons she has learned, and provides a blueprint for how to do it yourself. It has become even more important recently, in wake of the worldwide pandemic that has made so many of us reliant on screens for work, shopping, socializing, even exercise. COVID-19 has changed how we use the Web in some beneficial ways, but it has also made us even more dependent on screens for our every need. We are now spending almost all day online, and many of us are finding that it’s just too much. Turning off screens now feels like it provides double resilience for the soul. Having a much-needed boundary and separation — a day unlike the others, a day dedicated to being present, reflecting, resting, and connecting with those around me — helps us make sense of this unusual way we are living, where time seems to blur between days and between work and family and life. Because that’s what Shabbat is all about — carving out time to appreciate and find joy in what’s right in front of you, and focus on what truly matters. As Heschel calls it, it’s creating a “Palace in Time.” Watch Tiffany’s award-winning, provocative short films discussed in this interview: The Adaptable Mind https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://www.letitripple.org/adaptable_mind__;!!Mih3wA!WZVDrv6-nVu20ycjHqIolC9bGENbbVxnJmwlaU513fzuzNLlBUFhv4BFELjEqiFx$ The Science of Character  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome, everybody, to Into the Impossible. A program coming to you from the University of California, San Diego. I'm Stuart Volko. It is my pleasure to introduce today our guest, Tiffany Schlein. She's an author and a filmmaker, and her new book is 24-6. We'll be discussing her book and several of her films. Welcome, Tiffany. It's great to be here.

So I'll start at the beginning. The book 24-6, and you're a company, Let It Ripple. It has a large body of work. 24-6 has become more than a book. It's even a, maybe it's a movement. It's become a trend. Tell me a little bit about how you got the idea for the book. And why you decided to write this book?

Because I know you have more than one book in you. Yes. One note, it's led at ripple.org. It's a non-profit film studio in San Francisco. And the book 24-6, I have a background in technology. I love technology. I founded the Webby Awards many years ago. And I'm always experimenting with it at my film studio,

making films and using the web to make people think and rethink the way we're living and issues around technology and humanity. But around over 10 years ago, I was starting to feel like the screens were making me distracted all the time, sure like most people feel. And I had this very dramatic series of events happen where my father, Leonard Schlane, died of brain cancer within days of my daughter being born. And it really felt like life was grabbing me by the shoulders and saying focus on what matters.

And at that point, my husband and I and our daughters started turning off all screens one day a week for what we called our technology Shabbat. And it's just simply been the best thing I've ever done in my life. And I'm Jewish, but I'm not religious. So I don't come at it from a religious point of view. But I see deep wisdom in the concept of Shabbat. And the longer I've done it, I make a lot of films about neuroscience. So I decided to write a book about it because it felt like something everyone needed. Because the longer we did it, the better it became, and the more everyone became addicted in society.

So I started writing a book several years ago, and I go into like the history of the concept of rest and technology and the neuroscience benefits and psychology and philosophy around rest and productivity. And then the book came out this last fall and it's called 246, The Power of Unplugging one day a week. And it's been really exciting because people, you know, all over the world are reading it. And then during the COVID lockdown, there's been this huge resurgence of interest around it because everyone's on screen so much more for work, for connecting, for homeschooling, which is like, obviously it's a lifeline and great. But our tech Shabbats during this period have been like 10 times more important because we're so, we're on the screen so much.

So it's been a really interesting journey. And I keep understanding it. the benefits of it more and more, like, especially right now. We're reading so much news and we're reacting to so much. And really on my tech-free days, or the day I really reflect and think bigger picture. And I'm able to think and not just responding to everything coming at me. So it's just been such a valuable tool to think for perspective,

to connect and to think about how we want to rebuild moving forward. A quick shout out, by the way, to your late father, Leonard Schlane. Since we're coming to you from the Division of Physical Sciences, he wrote a book called Art and Physics, which I remember clearly, and that's how I met your father when he gave a talk on that at the Bodie Tree Bookstore in L.A., which is indirectly how I got to meet you. But back to your current book and the mission of the texture bot, what is wrong? you've done a lot of research on the problems. By now, I think a lot of people have heard the literature and the research that's done on the detrimental effects of screen addiction

and being on the screens too much for both adults and kids. But maybe you can talk just a little bit more about that. What's wrong with it? Oh, well, where do I start? I mean, there's so many things that are right. So just know I'm not anti-tech in any way. And there's so many great things to use technology for, especially in science and interdispone studies, to collaborate. to create all the stuff. But being on screens all the time. I mean, first let's just start with the news. The news is really important right now. There's a lot of news coming out. It's very stressful. When you get stressful news, you're going to get extra cortisol, which is a stress hormone, and having your body bathed in that all the time is not healthy. Binging on social media

or on shows or on video games, you're setting your dopamine level so high that you just, you always you always need to get to that point. And suddenly just doing nothing feels like such a vacuum of stimulation. And I actually think, and there's lots of research to back this up, that daydreaming and doing nothing and not being stimulated can lead to some of the biggest breakthroughs in creativity. So we need to teach ourselves to not always be stimulated

and teach our kids that it's okay to be bored. It's okay to not be doing anything, which a lot of kids are doing right now. But then they're on the screen. They're so quickly grabbing to the screen. and then the habitual nature of reaching for a screen every time you're bored for your phone, for the iPad, you're just rewiring your brain to want to do that every time. And what these full screen free days do is just give such a sense of a break from that addiction. I also sleep the best on Friday nights because there's no phones near me.

I think better. I have my best ideas on Saturday. Now that I've done it for 10 years, I can see so many kind of bigger benefits where all of my good ideas come on Saturday. So what does that say? it says that, you know, in neuroscience there's a term called the default mode network, which is that when your brain is focused on something,

it's in a task positive network. And the default mode network is when you're not focused on something. And it lets you process everything that's already in your brain. And that's why you have your best ideas when you're in the shower, when you're on a run, when you're doing the dishes. And we don't leave a lot of room for that kind of thinking anymore. And it's wonderful. You can do time travel.

I mean, think of Arthur C. Clarke. That's when you do, you can think about, the past and the future and your mind goes all over the place. And that's where these insights and creative breakthroughs happen. So there's benefits with creativity. I also feel like I'm way more productive by giving myself a true day of rest. And I think as a society, we're so into optimizing every single moment. Take a walk.

We'll listen to a podcast. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that. And we just, there's value in just laying fallow and giving your mind rest and putting it into a different mode.

And then the biggest part, which I think is why I started doing it, was just feeling a much more present and connected way with my kids and my husband and myself that I just was feeling all over the place. And a lot of times on the other six days, I mean, I do all these other strategies which I talk about in my book that I do the other six days to bring more balance back. But I would say this one day week seems to kind of reset me and us as a family and just so many benefits to it.

So you've got a lot of tools that you have out there for helping people to implement this. Maybe you can talk about a few things that people can do and where they can go to get more information, how to do it. Yeah. Well, the main website for it is 246 Life and that's 24S-S-I-X-L-I-F-E.com. That has information on getting the book and resources and I've made quite a few short films about the topic. And then my nonprofit film studio, Let It Ripple, we are going to be launching a Zoom interactive experience slash challenge. If people want to try it, kind of hold your hand through it. And we're doing research with UPenn and Harvard to kind of, you know, changing habits, changing behavior is very interesting to us.

So if you go to let it ripple.org, you'll find information about that aspect as well. And then, you know, if you sign up for my email list, I've been doing a weekly newsletter during COVID. Normally, I do a quarterly newsletter called Breakfast to Tiffany's. And if you just go to Tiffany Shlain.com, and that's sh-l-a-in.com. If you sign up for the newsletter, you'll really be connected to all of this. That might be the easiest thing. But I really approach these ideas through films, through this book, through talks. I just had a show at MoMA in New York right before the lockdown.

It was like the last moment I could have had that show. called Dear Human, where I really explored a lot of these issues, and I had a lot of interactivity with the audience and the theater. So it's like, if you could look at my whole career, I would say that I'm most interested in the relationship between technology and humanity. And when does using technology amplify who we are, and when does it amputate and diminish who we are, and how to distinguish the two?

Because there's so many great things that technology does. And, you know, every Saturday night, I reappreciate technology all over again. I'm like, oh my gosh, I live in 20, 20 and I have the web and just imagine the pandemic if we didn't have the web. I mean, it's, I mean, it's good to think about that 30 years ago what it would have been like if this happened, like the Spanish flu or. An award-winning movie called Connected, which explores this relationship in depth and

your own personal journey, which I suppose is the backstory to how you got to where you are now. And I encourage people to go see that. And I'll link to it. and you have a couple of new short films. You have a certain film-making style, which is incredibly distinctive and imaginative. And it actually reminds me of Charles and Ray Eames movies that they created.

And to me, it's almost like your short films are mini novels, visual novels. And you condense so much information in these five to 15-minute films. You have a term for where you crowdsource parts of the film, which is also very interesting. Cloud films, I think you call it. And there's a couple of things in those films I wanted to talk about. One is you have one about the adaptable mind. And because we are the Clark Center for Human Imagination, that film in particular does explore aspects of neuroscience, neuro psychology, cognitive science, and imagination.

And I wanted to talk a little bit more about that. you already talked about the term the default mode. And in that film, it goes into this a lot more. And I'd like you to describe a little bit more about that film and where you're going with that. Yeah, that film is really interesting because we made it in 2015, but we just re-released it two weeks ago because it's so relevant to today. So the film, the question we were asking in that film was, what are the skills we need to thrive in the 21st century?

And we crowdsource. We asked everyone what they thought those skills were, which we often do. We like asking interesting questions into the web and seeing what comes back. And we were looking for examples of a great adaptable mind. And we learned of this artist in L.A. named Mary Beth Heffernan,

who saw during the Ebola epidemic all the PPE outfits and how scared the paper. must have been as they were dying or really sick not being able to see anyone's faces. So she had this brilliant idea of putting a photo of the doctor, a health care worker smiling and pinning it to the PPE, the front of the outfit. Now at the time, that had never been done. And it was such humanity, bringing humanity to science together, and it's such a beautiful story.

And the way she struggled to even make it happen and travel to make it happen is an incredible story. And, of course, we released that in 2015. And then as I was seeing all these PPP outfits and people just as scared in COVID. And there's a researcher at Stanford who wanted to revitalize this project. So we re-released the film. And you can watch that if you go to let it ripple.org and click on films. That's an 11-minute film. And I love that film.

I just feel like it's so powerful to see today. And I love Mary Beth's story. And so I think in all of our films, we're trying to highlight the best of humanity and inspire people to rise up and be the best that we can be because there's certainly so many forces speaking to our lesser natures. And I was really worried about the web, even just two months ago at the MoMA show, the crux of this piece was like, I had such hopes for the web when I first started the webbies and so much. But I felt like so many tech companies were manipulating our behaviors and it was bringing out the worst and the weakness. of humans. And I ended that show saying, what will it take to rethink the web

and make us rise to the best of humanity? And then this happened. And I feel like I have had restored faith in the web and humanity. There's so many beautiful moments of compassion and creativity and humor and collaboration and people coming together in new ways and coming on Zoom and making the web more human. And I ultimately feel like after being on screens 24-7 for however long this is going to be.

When we see humans in person, I hope we will use it as an opportunity to really understand to put those screens away, to realize the preciousness of being with other people and not waste that time with everybody staring down

at their phones all the time. So I really think this can be an opportunity for change just as 10 years ago, actually it was almost 11 years ago, when I had this dramatic moment that made me start doing text shabots of losing my dad, And we're in this other dramatic moment.

And I think these moments of pain and death and rethinking things are opportunities if we choose to make them. If we say, okay, what did I just learn from that? And how do I want to change the way I'm living? Because you never know how long you're going to be living for. The other thing that you've become well known for is your study and your short film and your program on character development, which I think is also important now because we have our kids at home and we're going to get into that. a little bit, your advice to parents, and you've got a couple of messages for them. But the character development program that you put together in the film, it also gets into

and overlaps with what you just talked about, the adaptable mind and how to grow that mind. So maybe you can summarize a little bit about your philosophy of that on the character building. And, of course, how our situation now is very character building, because you need to prioritize your life in a different way. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I'm really,

so my father was a surgeon who wrote and studied a lot about neuroscience and my mother is a psychologist and she's still with us. And so I grew up with those two interests because they taught me so much. And when I first learned about the positive psychology movement and that there was, you know,

Marty Seligman and Peterson had kind of subsectioned your character under 24 character strengths. I was fascinated. I just thought, oh, that's such an interesting way to think about yourself. Your character is made up with creativity and perspective and humor and love and teamwork and all the 24 character strengths. And it was very helpful to think about what things I wanted to strengthen in myself and what things I could build on what weren't strong, what I wanted to make stronger. And then all the interesting research on certain particular practices to strengthen

things like empathy or courage or perseverance and that those become like your toolbox to developing who you are. So I made a film called The Science of Character, which is eight minutes. And I love making short films because I really want to show you a film that really sparks your own journey and leave enough time for either an in-classroom discussion or company discussion. So that film launched Character Day. So we did that for six years. We might not do it next year because we're working on a new film series on tech and humanity. And it grew so big. It took up all over time. But we made a lot of films for it and a lot of resources,

which we will continue to make available to the public. But I do think you're right that this time is really testing people's character because you have to be resilient. I really think you need to focus on gratitude. Like I wake up every day and I write in a gratitude journal. I don't call it that. I use something called the five-minute journal, but I don't look at my phone.

I wake up and I don't look at my phone. That is a huge advice to everyone listening. That when you wake up and you look at your phone, you were letting the world set the tone of your day. I think it's much stronger to wake up and think about your dreams, set your own intention for the day, then look at the news. It's just, it's so powerful. It's a switch I made after the 2016 election.

And, you know, the longer I was doing tech shabot, I was trying to incorporate things into my other six days that would make a more healthy balance with tech. That one's huge before I go to bed. And when I wake up, I'm not looking at my screen. And I do other things that bring me joy. So it's not like I'm not getting. something. I just replace it with something that I really enjoy doing. But I think this notion of resilience

and gratitude and resourcefulness, and listen, we've all been told to stay at home for the last six weeks, and it might last another like five months. Who knows? And you're going to have to get really creative and be adaptable. I mean, that word adaptability, like we had that big show at MoMA, February 15th. We thought the whole next year was going to be traveling the country with that show, Dear Human. And then the whole world changed. And you're like, okay, how are we? we going to rethink what we're doing? So I've been doing these, I just did my first experiment last week on Zoom, which is a technology full of constraint because there's not much you can do on it. And I tried to really stretch the parameters of Zoom. So that's exciting to me. So we're doing

more of those. And I'm really trying to bring up some of the ideas and topics in an interesting way on Zoom that I did at MoMA. And people can find out about that on Tiffany Shlane.com or any of those sites I listed. But that's about adaptability. Okay, I mean, I'm very excited by a lot of companies and organizations that used to do this one thing. And then we all have to survive and make a living and figure out a new way to do what we did before in a different way. And even my husband's a professor of Berkeley. His name's Ken Goldberg, and he had a lab meeting last night on Zoom.

And he said it was so great because students in other countries that haven't started the lab yet, everyone could be on where that normally would have never happened. I just turned 50 a couple weeks ago, and I had every important person in my life on that Zoom, whereas normally if I had a party, I would have had like 70% of the most important people in my life. But there was people from South Africa and Australia. And it was great. So how do you adapt to the situation and try to see the best of it or get really creative on how to achieve the same goals?

And I think that is about adaptability and resilience and resourcefulness. That answer has a lot to unwrap. Sorry. You don't have me a little speechless, so we can't have time to unwrap all of it now. But I do want to ask you a couple of things that pertain to, you know, our center and some of the things we've been discussing. You've already given us some good tips, but you have some interesting leadership tips and your style of leadership, the way you run your company. You've been, you know, a recipient of a lot of awards, accolades, foundation grants, et cetera. your book, you just discussed a couple of tips for lifestyle and for living and high

performers living, but you have some particular interesting leadership skills that maybe you can convey to us a few of those, especially to parents. We're both parents, and we have our kids home all the time. So, for instance, you have the five priorities that you talk about in your book, but maybe you can get into a few other leadership tips for people. in the time of COVID. Well, you know, when COVID started happening, like I said, my whole plan, like everybody, everything changed and got canceled.

And I think really trying to think of the core of what you do and what drives you and what you hope to contribute and how to rethink how you can do it with this ultimate constraint of not leaving your house. So I started doing my newsletter weekly, which has been really wonderful, and including my brother who's a doctor, his insights on COVID. So that was really about adaptability as a leader. The other thing I always say as a leader is I use a lot of humor. I try to bring a lot of humor into my science so that I make you laugh before I give you some evidence-based research.

I think there needs to be a lot more humor with science because I think making science as interesting visually and with humor and different perspective is important. I made this other film called Brain Power about the child's brain development from brain. birth to five years and really tried to visualize in the dynamic way how a child's brain gets nurtured. So going back to what you asked about advice for parents, I would say to forgive yourselves right now. There's a lot more screen use than I'm sure most of us are comfortable with and that's just we are living in an extraordinary situation. I would strongly recommend trying a day of a week without screens. It's just, it seems to kind of make up for the other six days right now. And it's great. And I really talk about how to present that to your kids. Don't say to your kids.

we're turning off screens for one day. They'll cry. You need to present it in a much more fun way, and I go into that in the book. And then I would say no screens at the table. Just have one part of your day. Maybe you all eat breakfast together. We all eat dinner together. That's our meal. We eat together. It lasts 30 minutes. It's not long. But one part of your day, there's absolutely not a screen in sight. Put them away. Even if your table is your workspace, put it officially away off the table, have a conversation. It just reconnects you in an important way. And again, And we're talking 30 minutes out of a day. And then, you know, the full day a week, I just think has been the best thing we've ever done for our family

because we're all on our different things all the other days. And then that day we're just, Zoot, we're back connected. And it's really powerful. Our last episode of this show, we interviewed, Professor Keating interviewed Dave Rubin, the Rubin report. And he does a one month a year. He calls it a tech detox. and that reminded me of your one day a week strategy, which comes from a lot of traditions.

And you mentioned in your films that almost every tradition, every religion, has some version of this. Right, but the problem... It's not by accident. No, and that's what I love, the more I've learned about it and longer I've done it, is any practice that's lasted for 3,000 years.

I'm interested in. It's why I do yoga and meditation too, but coming at Shabbat, the concept of the Sabbath and Shabbat, as a non-religious person, but someone with great respect for the wisdom inside of these rituals has been really powerful. And actually,

the biggest power to me is the weekly nature of the Tech Shabbat. And it's interesting because I do know people that take home on detoxes, and that's super valuable too. But to me, it's the weekliness. Actually, right now, one of the biggest things is this helps me, everyone's saying that time is blurring together, right? Haven't you heard that a lot? Like, they don't know what day of the week it is.

And I always know what day of the week it is, because I'm always looking forward to my Friday night for my Tech Shabbat. I love my Shabbat. And then it gives me a sense of time. And it stops the blurring of time right now. So, and actually the word detox I usually have issue with, and I'll tell you why, because I know it's used a lot. But to me, it feels like you could live without it. And we can't live without tech.

We are living in a tech society. So to me, detox seems like something that you can abstain from completely. And I think it's a mental framing that we need to think, like, how can I coexist in a healthier way? How can I create true space throughout each day and in the week where you're really getting a break from it and thinking big picture and reflecting and putting your mind in a different mode, in the default mode network or in a more connected, present way? Because the other six days is very hard. A lot of us are, you know, juggling our kids and work and trying to manage running things that we ran before, before co-exam. it's a lot. And so I think I've been trying to forgive

and I'm like oh my God I didn't get anything done. Forgive forgive, forgive. We're in an extraordinary situation and just try to do as much as you can and try to have moments where you're thinking and write a journal right now it's so important.

I didn't know much about the Spanish flu and I was surprised I never heard about it from anyone in my family. And I watched a doctor. I watched a documentary and my favorite insights were from people's journal entries. And I really hope people will write about what they're thinking, how they're feeling, what they're experiencing, because we want to leave a record on paper. Because who knows what versions of the internet

might be lost. Keep a written version of what you're experiencing. It's really important. Well, you're an incredibly creative, an imaginative filmmaker. Do you think you can teach people or train people to be creative or is it something that's innate? Is it a talent, an ability, or a skill, or all the above? I think everyone's creative and I think we need to create the right environments to encourage that. I mean, to me, creativity, I mean, scientists are creative, mathematicians are creative, artists are creative. To me, creativity is just looking at making unusual links. And I think this all comes down to giving our mind space to make unusual links. without all the input coming in all the time.

I get lots of input and then create space to be creative. So I think we need to create environments for people to be their creative natural selves. And right now we've created a society that's 24-7 that doesn't leave a lot of room for reflection or to make time to just think and make the creative links on your own. So while I love technology, I think we need to figure out how to abstain from it in poignant ways to let our minds process and create in new ways. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us,

and I want to encourage everyone to study and read and watch. First of all, read the book 24-6 and take the advice seriously because it really can have a big impact on our lives. And let it ripple.org. It's where people can see your short films. And, of course, connected, your feature documentary. And now you've got a new film you're working on. Do you have a name for it yet?

No, no, it keeps changing. It's hard to make a film about right now because every week, doesn't the mood just change so much each week? Like, the film I would have made five weeks ago is so different than the film I would have made now. So creatively, I'm really wrestling with, and with my filmmaking partner, Sawyer, do we wait a bit more and try to put our arms around what just happened?

Or it's an interesting process. I mean, we'll see where it leads us. Thanks, Tiffany. We look forward to having you on again after that film is, after you name it and decide what you're going to make it about. And we're going to start to have a discussion about life after COVID. And I'd like to have you join us for that as well. Oh, wonderful.

Thank you so much, Stuart. It's so great. We've been friends for so long. It's wonderful to be on. Thanks, Tiffany. Okay, talk to you later. Bye-bye. Bye.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. If you enjoyed this episode of Into the Impossible, please subscribe, comment, share, rate, and review. For a chance to win a free copy of our most recent guest's newest book, send a screenshot of your review to Info at Imagine, U-CSD.edu. We appreciate hearing from you and are always open to your suggestions for future episodes. For more information, go to imagination.ucsd.edu.

Find us on Twitter at ImagineUCSD. Watch us on YouTube, listen on iTunes. Into the Impossible is a production of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California. San Diego. Eric Viri, director, Brian Keating, co-director, Patrick Coleman, Associate Director, produced by Stuart Volko.