Transcript of The Hidden Cost of Hustle Culture | Carl Honore & Shekhar Natarajan New

I am racing through my life instead of actually living it. And that for me was just hitting rock bottom.

We are screwed up as a generation, I feel, you know, our generation. Well, I think like, you know, we as a generation, like, you know, and like the next generation that we train also is slightly more screwed up.

Boredom feels like failure when in fact boredom is a superpower, right? Yeah. For kids and for grown-ups as well.

The computers don't know the difference between falling and playing. It just knows falling and playing is the same thing.

One thing that children come out of the womb not doing is rushing. They are masters. They are little Jedis of slowness.

Welcome to another episode of Tomorrow Today with Shekhar Natrajan. It's my incredible honor to have Carl Honre, He's one of my very best friends, journalist, broadcaster, TED— you know, you have a TED Talk and you're a star. Two talks. Two TED Talks. You know, he's a phenomenal speaker and he has basically one of the international bestsellers which is translated in 35 languages.

36 now.

36 now. Like, you know, you're always like one better than me. One more TED Talk, one more So, and like, we're gonna have a fascinating conversation because I believe that pausing, reflecting, and being slower is a virtue and it's not, you know, some sort of a weakness. And most people consider that as a weakness. But I see that as a, as a symbol of strength. Uh, and so we're gonna dig deeper into your philosophies, Karl, uh, understand like who you are, how did you get this thought. And you've been the forerunner about this topic for like the last 2 and a half decades, close to 2 and a half decades, right? Like, you know, so 2002 was the first time when you got this thought. Um, so we're gonna dig a lot into this, and I'm excited about talking to you about this longevity about like everything that, you know, like what slow means, AI, uh, where is AI headed, how does it impact the society in general. So there's a lot of ground to cover for the next 2 hours, and I'm excited to be speaking to you.

As am I.

So let's get to the very beginning. Um, you know, you, you actually talk about yourself as a speedaholic, the guy who was basically like, you know,— always in speed to get things done and something radically changed at some point in time. What was that moment of change? What happened in your life?

Well, I think that when people get stuck in fast forward and every moment of the day becomes a race against the clock, it often takes a shock to the system or a wake-up call, something that makes you realize you've forgotten how to put on the brakes and that this is doing you real harm. For a lot of people, it's an illness. One day the body says, that's it, I can't take the pace anymore, and it's a burnout. My wake-up call came when I started reading bedtime stories to my son. And back in those days—

How old was your son?

At the time, he'd have been about 3 or 4, I suppose. And I just couldn't slow down. So I'd be sitting on his bed at the end of the day, speed reading Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, right? So I'm skipping lines, paragraphs. I became an expert. In what I called the multiple page turn technique, which I don't know how you try and smuggle 3 or 4 pages, but it never works because our kids know the stories inside out. My son, he'd always catch me and say, "Daddy, why are there only 3 dwarves in the story? Where is Grumpy?" And this really lamentable state of affairs went on for some time until I caught myself flirting with a book I'd heard about, a book called The One Minute Bedtime Story. So Snow White in 60 seconds. And when I heard about this book, my first thought was, Hallelujah, I need that book now from Amazon drone delivery. But thankfully, second thought came washing over, and it was light bulb over the head moment, real searing epiphany. I thought, this is crazy, I am racing through my life instead of actually living it. And that for me was just hitting rock bottom, and I realized then that I, I needed to, I needed to slow down.

I needed to reconnect with my inner tortoise.

What was your age then at that time when you had this epiphany?

Like, I'd be probably about 34.

34. But like, you know, 34 years prior to that, or 33 years prior to that moment, right? So you're born in Scotland, uh, raised in Edmonton.

Raised in Canada.

Canada, Edmonton. Uh, and then basically, uh, you moved, uh, to London.

I know I came back to Edinburgh.

Edinburgh study. Study. Yeah. And then you, you moved to London?

No, then I went to South America for a few years, where I first worked with street children.

In Brazil?

In Brazil, exactly. And then after that, I became a foreign correspondent. I was based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I covered South America for The Economist, the Miami Herald, The Observer, lots of publications, and traveled around. And then I came to London probably around the age, I guess, '96. So I guess I'd be 28.

So, so during that time of like, you know, uh, going through so many different cultures and so many different, um, you know, experiences that you had, like, you know, be it like being born in Scotland and going to Canada— Canada is like a— like, I feel like this is a slower country than United States is.

Yeah, I think it's a fair judgment.

Uh, and then like, you know, then go— then, uh, basically coming back to Scotland and then going back to Brazil. Brazil— and then playing with the kids on the street with Brazil. And kind of like looking at the contrast of like what do they have in life and what do they not have in life. And like, you know, and why as we humans are basically always trying to like race against the time and like, you know, these guys are deprived and like these guys are, you know, they are time deprived, right? But like, you know, like we basically deprive ourselves of time. Because we want to be in a hurry. So all of those experiences cumulatively, like, you know, were you like purposefully going faster and then you had to slow down, or what happened? Like, how? Because the way you talk, you talk even fast.

I am a naturally fast person. This is the thing, right? I think the, I think the world is made up of natural hares and natural tortoises.

Yes.

And I'm definitely a natural Type A personality. But I'm living, or was living, we are all living in a Type A world which places speed, busyness, distraction, juggling 5 things at the same time on a pedestal. So it was easy for me to come up through my childhood and segue seamlessly into a world of speed because that was my natural inclination anyway. I took on a job, journalism, foreign correspondent, which is all about deadlines. It's all about getting the piece out quickly. Yeah. So it just But became a kind of self-fulfilling loop. As I became a faster person, things got faster and faster. And really what threw a spoke in the wheels was having our first child, my— when we had— my son was born, because I wanted to carry on doing everything I'd done before just as fast, but I wanted also to be a father. And there was a deep dissonant disconnect there because you're a father yourself, you know, the one thing that children come out of the womb not doing is rushing. Children, if you're going to be a proper parent, you have to slow down. I mean, children don't understand time.

They don't understand clocks and deadlines when they come out into the world. They are masters. They are little Jedis of slowness. They understand the power of being in the moment. And I just found myself knocking up against that with my son. And actually, now that we're talking about this, I remember that the the first expression that came out of my son's mouth, probably would be about 2, I guess, or 2 and a half, was, "Hurry up." I remember thinking, it was one of those moments I remember thinking, "Oh dear." Oh no, this is my replica. Yeah, this is what I am passing on to the next generation. Is this the legacy I want to bequeath? And, you know, that wasn't enough to stop me going through life in Road Runner mode. It really was the bedtime stories. That was, when the penny dropped, but I could feel this drip feed of warnings, this early warning system coming from my son because so often you just feel as a parent in a fast world where everything is expected to be in turbo, you run up against a small child and it's— you see parents frustrated all the time.

"Come on, get your clothes on. We've got a schedule to keep," when children are all about being there in the moment, forgetting the clock, just inhabiting the moment. And so I think It's a great service, I suppose, my son and then my daughter later on, my children did for me, was to open my eyes to the folly of turning every moment into a race against the clock.

So what is your heritage like, you know, like, like your parents, like, like, and because there is, you know, like, is it immigration? Is it, are you an immigrant?

Like, you know, like very much so.

Yeah.

I mean, my father is from Mauritius. And my mother is from Scotland, and they met— my father won the Island Scholarship in Mauritius to study at Edinburgh University. He had met my mother. I was born in Edinburgh. We emigrated to Canada. But I often look back now and think of my parents as two different avatars, because my father, although very hardworking, very committed to his profession— he was a pathologist and so on— was very slow, and he had that kind of, from Mauritian, that kind of you know, the tropics, the— why are you always rushing? And my mom was very much the opposite. She was a hare. She's— and even now, you know, she's 84, she's one of the busiest people I know, right? And she's always got one eye on the clock, and we've got to get things done and move things quickly. So I guess I grew up with these two paradigms in the home.

And was there a conflict?

There would be conflict, yeah, because they would rub up against each other. My father would say, please come fast.

No, no, no, let's go slow.

I remember those conversations, you know. Sometimes my father's— my mom was like, hurry, we've got to get my son What my father was doing, why do we have to hurry? Why can't we just stay? So I could see this tension playing out in my own parental, you know, spectacle. And I guess in some ways I probably gravitated towards my mum's paradigm and became the deadline-watching Scrooge with a stopwatch, right? You know, saying, let's get moving, let's get fast, move it, move things forward. We can maybe do 2 or 3 things more in this minute than we did in the last minute. But now I guess having come out the other end of this, I've got that balance. So this is what the whole slow revolution is about, is finding the right balance between fast and slow. So I sort of look back at my parents now and think I can channel my mum when it makes sense to be on the clock and fast and all that, but I can also channel my dad when it's time to kick back, listen, be present, just enjoy the moment, just go slow.

So I could so relate to your parents because my My father is exactly like what you said, but, you know, I was just recently— my father passed away in 2005, and I was trying to understand our family heritage and who we were and what, what the lineage was. And like, you know, I grew up in the second biggest slum in India. But something about who we were never added up, like, you know, in the sense that, like, if you look at the, the generation that I am living in and the generation after, you know, though we all grew up like in poverty and utter poverty and other things, kids my generation and like, you know, the next generation after, my nieces and nephews, they have done incredibly well. So I was trying to go back and figure out the lineage of what it was. And, and so, like, you know, I found out that, like, you know, we were all, um, uh, diamond merchants. My family was 4 generations prior, and we lost everything. And then, uh, everyone, like, you know, there was one family, uh, trauma after the other. And, like, you know, eventually, like You know, we landed where we were, and then we were trying to dig ourselves out of it.

So they all used to tell my father used to be extremely stubborn and, and, and very strong, and he was very fast about everything. And but I saw him growing up as the opposite. He would be the slowest man, very sober. You can never hear him even like raise his voice, never cussed a single word. But my mom was just opposite. She would be very fast, very opinionated, very strong a person. And so I used to see that friction all the time in the house. And we lived in like, you know, like a single room with like 8 people in the house and a dog. Like, you know, like it was funny and crazy all at the same time. And, and so like that contrast is something that, like, you know, I found was, uh, something which sort of, like, I found two things, right? One, my mom was always the same. My dad changed himself from being a fast guy to a slow guy, right? It was interesting that he had this, you know, interesting moment. That's why when I read your profile, when I read the book, uh, and I started reading your biography, and I started seeing your TED Talks and others, I was inspired to talk to you, like, you know, because there are always moments in life that actually change you.

And was it a slow change that you realized that, like, you know, your son is the, is kind of the, the real instigation? Or was it like the Brazil, the time you spent in Brazil looking at the kids on the street and, and, and looking at their, you know, poverty and like, you know the problems that they face. And like, you know, for them, like, they have to hustle, and they have to— they're not like, you know, they're— because you're— when you're living in poverty, you got to hustle more than, like, you know, you're living in a very, you know, well-to-do life. So what was all those moments? Tell me, like, what was going on in your life?

I mean, I know at the time I wasn't— I was— I could feel that I was living too fast, but I just pushed it away. So it was something that I covered over and put my head down and went faster, right? But looking back now, having slowed down, I realized that the seeds were there. The roots of my deceleration, my epiphany, go way back. I would say definitely back to the, the children in Brazil. I mean, I mentioned about my son saying hurry up. It was a long time after that that I had the epiphany with the bedtime story. So these things, they get in, they take time before you find— there's a final straw. And I think the bedtime stories really was that for me. But I look back these days on some of the earlier moments and episodes in my life that pushed me in this direction. I think definitely those children in Brazil were— that was life-changing. I came from a middle-class, comfortable family in Canada, which is one of the safest, easiest places to live on earth, and found myself in the street where children were being, uh, sometimes being assassinated.

Or, I mean, it was just— I came across the most extraordinary horrors. But within that context, I also came face to face with some real beauty, right? That people— yes, they had to hustle. Yes, they had to shine shoes to make a few pennies to get through the day and get— put milk on the table at home and so on. But they also had a lot of time just to, just to be, right? The children were incredibly good at— and this reminds me a bit about what— I'm sure your childhood was the same. Mine was similar in a way. What I mean, I obviously grew up in a middle-class family, but you compare childhood today with childhood when we grew up, there was a lot of slowness in our childhood, right?

Yeah.

You know, you had a lot of time together, time, and there was, there was space as well. There's a wonderful quote from Virginia Woolf. She talks about the great cathedral space of childhood, and I think it's that sense of openness and capaciousness and lack of rush that defined our childhoods that gave us that springboard to become the thing we are today, because children need slowness. And I saw that with those children, the street kids in Brazil, that they— sure, they rushed, but they also had time just to play marbles or kick a ball around or just hang out, just be there together, sometimes in uncomfortable silence, sometimes razzing each other, just being children, right? And obviously they were in a situation that would— I mean, I'm not even sure what even happened to those kids now. I have tried to find out, but it's not easy. But it's just a fact of life. We know the science is telling us very clearly that children do need that kind of slowness. And we're almost allergic to it now. I mean, you think of boredom, for instance. I mean, throughout history, when a child said to a parent, "I'm bored," that was the child's problem, right?

You know, your parent would say, "Well, too bad. Go outside and play or find a friend or use your imagination." Now a child says, "I'm bored," and what happens? Parent freaks out. You think, "Oh, Oh no, my kid's bored. I'm failing as a parent. Where's the iPad? Maybe we need another extracurricular activity in the schedule. No, what you need in that moment is to back off, slow down, and let the boredom happen. Because it is precisely in those moments of unstructured time, of not knowing what's coming next, moments free of test targets and timetables, moments of boredom that children learn how to, how to think, create, use their imagination, regulate their emotions, and get along with their peers. It's when they learn how to look into themselves and work out who they are rather than what everybody else wants them to be. And yet boredom has become almost a high sin in the 21st century, right? How can you be bored? The whole world is an endless smorgasbord of things to distract yourself and divert yourself. Boredom feels like failure when in fact boredom is a superpower, right? Yeah. For kids and for grown-ups as well.

I mean, the science is the same for us as adults. We need those moments of slight restlessness, not quite sure what's coming next, a bit 'Cause that gets you going. That fires up the creative juices. And that's when you come up with those breakthrough ideas and you join the dots and you get good stuff done in the world.

So, you were in the '80s, late '80s, like early '90s when you were in Brazil?

Yes, exactly.

So, was it the time like when like televisions and other things were more prevalent or was just coming up?

There was a lot of television, yes.

There was a lot of television.

Televisions everywhere, in every café there were TVs everywhere.

Everywhere. Because I remember, like, you know, like, we— 1984, like, you know, like, India had Asian Games, and like, it was held in India, and everyone had a TV and we didn't have TV, so we used to go like sneak into people's house to just watch TV. And it was funny, like, you know, it's all those, you know, extraordinary moments in life. But like, we had so much time, to your point, right? Uh, so my father would have a ritual. Uh, he would actually, every 3 months, he would actually take us to a movie, a restaurant, and then basically like, um, like we would go, all of us would go for the first restaurant walk, actually literally 40 minutes. We would all get hungry, so we would eat, and then we would watch like a midnight movie, and then we would all come back together, all the 8 of us. And, uh, so that— those moments actually was so beautiful. We never had TV in our life, right? And we did not have TV till 1998.

Oh, right.

Wow. 1998. We did not have telephone in my house, uh, till 2001. Like, right about the time when I was leaving to United States is when we got the telephone in my house. Okay, um, I did not have a bicycle, uh, till actually I was in class 10, which is '94. Wow. Okay, so, and so the, the reason why I say all of this is there is, there is a beautiful connection between like, you know, the surroundings and like the lack of resources and other things and the time dimension to it. Like, you know, how do you slow down? Like, because you have so much time, because you're not watching TV, you're not biking anywhere, you're not like goofing around, or like, you know, you're— and so, you know what I used to spend my time on? I used to spend all my time trying to wander around in the streets of, in the slums in India and find for all these mechanical parts which I would then assemble and play with, right? So it really helped. So, you know, I talk about it in, you know, in my most recent book now, is I created a mechanical Ganesha, like the one that, like, you know, can, you know, have its hands and legs and everything.

But it was just like the imagination of like taking all the scrap off which was available and kind of building something because we had so much time. And so I grew up in that fashion. And then I go to United States, it's like everything is like go, go, go, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Like it's fast food, it's like fast life, it is like fast pace. You got to like be in the highway, like you're driving at like 70 miles an hour. And like, you know, it was like such a like freaking shock in my life. So, um, so obviously, like, you know, Brazil is a, uh, is a developing country at the time, I'm sure. And like, you know, so, uh, you know, was there a contribution of lack of resources, or like, was that adding up to the entire story of like slowing down, or—

I think so. I mean, there's a wonderful old proverb, I think from Africa, and from the day, the colonial days, when apparently the local people in African countries would say to the British colonialists, "You have the clocks, we have the time." I think that kind of gets at what you're pointing towards there, that if you take away the whole superstructure of consumerism, consumption, stuff, screens, all that stuff, you pull that away and you free up time. I mean, you look at any country in the world now and the average citizen is probably pouring— depends— between 4 and 6 and 7 hours a day down the rabbit hole called social media.

Yeah.

And then turning around and saying, I got no time. And you think, there is a connection between these two data points, right? So going back to Brazil in those days, that was something that I noticed very much, that sure, people were scrabbling around to make ends meet and put food on the table and, and get through the day, but they also had a lot of time, right? They had a lot of time just to just to be, and there was a lot of good slow. Because there's bad slow too, right? This is the whole point of the slow culture quake. It's not about doing everything slowly. And the Brazilians— also in those countries I tend to find, particularly in sort of Latin countries, that the family is very central to people's lives, as opposed to maybe Northern Europe and North America where it's a bit more individualistic. People tend to live alone more, there's less contact with the family. And what is the family if not a great enormous break? You know, it's based on social relationships and they, they cannot be sped up. And so the family kind of anchors you, it slows you down, sometimes in a frustrating way, but very often in a good way.

And I noticed that really early on in my time, obviously in Brazil and then Argentina and all around South America, is how important the family was to people. And I'm sure you probably would say the same thing from your experience in India, that you've got a big family as well that just kind of Yes, sometimes you feel held back by it, you chafe against it, but much of the time it's the opposite. You think you feel held, right? It helps you slow down, it helps you focus on what really matters.

Yeah, we used to like really crave for the, the very absolutely very small movements that we had in life. Like whether, like, you know, going out with my grandmother, being all excited about like getting the shirt for Diwali. Yeah, you know, all of us would have the, like, you know, this comical, like, you know, we would go, uh, to a, to a store. We would get— go to a garment store, get the, you know, the piece of cloth, and then they would stitch it, like, you know, like, and like the, the, you know, I have two siblings, both elder to me, and all of us used to wear the same clothes, like, you know, identical. Like, we all used to look like A little team, a little team, right? The Nitrogen team. So, but those small moments actually mattered a lot. The, the, the interesting question I have for you is, is, is slowness a cultural thing? Do certain cultures behave slower than other cultures do?

That's a funny— that's a question that I grappled with at the beginning of my whole journey into slow and my research. And I think I thought I would find one or two cultures that I could put at the top of the league table and say, here are the two societies we should all look to as the examples we should all follow. And I didn't find that. I found that most cultures— modern cultures, OK, if you go to traditional cultures across the world, they are very much anchored in slower, deeper, more human, more natural rhythms. But the rest of the world, who's plugged into the global economy and technology and all of that, which is much of the planet these days, feels to me— most of those cultures feel like a mixed bag or a curate's egg. So if you think of Italy, for instance, home of slow food, the slow food movement, which of course has gone on to spread around the world. We know the Italians are incredibly good at the art of slowing down, breaking bread together around the table, right? They are possibly the world champions of that. But if you have ever driven on an Italian highway, you know that the Italians are also infected by the virus of hurry as well, right?

So you get this mixed picture in different cultures, right? So my advice—

It's situational, you think?

Yeah, I think it is. I mean, some cultures are more tilted. You mentioned at the beginning of our conversation the United States, comparing it to Canada. I think the United States is culturally more oriented towards speed. It's a restless frontier, constantly self-re-discovering culture. That runs deeper, I think, in the psychological reservoir in the US maybe even than it does in Canada. That seems to feed into a turbo approach to everything. At the same time, you can find all kinds of slow rituals in the United States. The United States is much more religious, say, than Europe, and there's a lot of Like, I'm always struck when I go to the United States how many people I meet go to church, go regularly to church, and most of their Sunday or much of their Sunday is church. And that's all about rituals and human connection. That's slow in action, right? You don't find much of that in Scandinavia where we're often holding the Nordics up as great avatars of slow because they've got in many ways a healthier work-life balance and all that stuff., but they're also very atomized and they have higher rates of people living alone in accommodation.

They don't go to church much. They don't have so much of that shared human slow activity together. It is always a mixture of both.

Have you compared, not cultures, but maybe are tribal people more slower than people who are non— they're not tribal in nature in the sense like people let's say, you know, you go to like India and Jharkhand, right? Like, you know, I'm just like making things up right now. Tribal people, they tend to have a slower pace because they're detached from the society, right? Like, you know, so like, is slowness attributed more to like detachment or lack of resources or lack of connection or I mean, it's connected in many ways with all of those things.

I mean, it's an interesting idea, this of the tribal. I think one of the drivers of slow is human connection, right? I mean, this is something that when people find themselves—

When do you connect as a human?

When do I connect as a human?

Yeah. When you're disconnected from everything else.

Yeah, exactly, yeah.

But when you can—

When you slow down.

But like, well, yes, and like, you know, if you connect—— you could be materially connected to other things, so you don't find the connection with the human, the time for the connection to the human. So some of these tribal people, like, they are not connected to anything else of material nature, so they try to basically— hence my question.

I think I see what you mean, yeah. I think there's kind of two types of connection. There's the sort of electronic connection, which is a sort of—

the digital connection.

It's a false social connection. You know, you have 3,000 friends on Facebook, but Who the heck cares? When was the last time you spent a whole afternoon in the park chatting to one of them, right? Exactly. And if you had a terrible cough, you pressed the phone.

And you don't even know the names of the 3,000 people, by the way. Do I really care about the fact that my first grade friend has 5 kids? I do, but do I have to go to social media to check it out? No. No, no, exactly right.

Yeah. And the trouble, of course, is that this— I think we probably only have a certain amount of social bandwidth. And if we're giving some of it away to these irrelevant, trivial connections that aren't really connections, then we're sacrificing what really matters.

There's nothing wrong about my first class friend. I love him. Amazing guy. He has 5 kids. Great. He spent all his time producing kids, which is great. But do I really have to go find that in social media? I don't care. So anyway—

I do think that it's pretty clear that nobody anywhere lies on their deathbed and looks back and thinks, "I wish I'd spent more time on social media." Yeah. That just never happens. You know what is the—

there was a research actually done. Philip Morris, the cigarette company, they were doing a lot of research on who their biggest competitors were. Guess who the biggest competitor of Philip Morris was?

For people's time or money, you mean?

Yeah, for time. On social media, probably, yeah. Yeah. It was Facebook. Was it? Right. Because people were spending more time on Facebook and not smoking as much.

So now I've got to feel good about Facebook. Things are never black and white. It's never binary. There's always a silver lining.

I'm not even kidding because people were smoking were less so glued to Facebook when it came out that they would actually skip, actually forget smoking, and they were like actually addicted to—

That's classic displacement. You're replacing one addiction with another, which is seldom a good thing.

So your profession is journalism, and you know, when I look at like the media in United States, there's always like something called breaking news. So like, you know, yeah, like I forget, like, you know, what is breaking and what is not breaking because everything is breaking news, by the way, uh, these days. And so journalism is antithesis to like your philosophy. Like in journalism, rarely these days people are thoughtful and reflective and they write any garbage and they're in a rush to basically get the news out. And somehow, like, they think, like, if they don't say something called breaking news, like, you know, they're not going to be relevant anymore because they're always constantly streaming the best possible information. That, like— so how do you deal with that paradox?

I think it's true that the media has a lot to answer for. I've seen it change myself when I was a journal— I don't work so much a journalist now. I mean, if I write pieces, they tend to be more deeper analysis and the opinion and stuff. But back in the days when I was doing reportage and some breaking news, even then, and we're talking now 20-odd years ago, we had a lot more time to think about things. It wasn't this instant pressure to be getting a lot across the chyron or everything had to be breaking news. You had more time to get inside the story, to make sure it was accurate, to consider and ponder and parse and get it right, whereas now it's all about being fast rather than being right. And it's hot takes everywhere, which I couldn't agree more. That completely feeds into the fast culture. It just whips us up into an even more intense frenzy because there's a feeling now that the only news that matters is the news that's happening right now. Yeah. And that it's come right now. And it's just— yeah, it's just exacerbating a wider problem, which is the culture of I want it all now and I want it, you know, instant gratification even takes too long for people these days.

Right? Absolutely. Absolutely. That does. —So, so, so your point is valid, like Watergate, like, you know, it took a lot of time. So journalism, like, now journalism as we know now is much faster, but journalism in the past, you're saying, was like slower, more methodical, more thoughtful.

We still have people doing deep, considered investigative reporting, but of course the whole economic model is shifting away in a different direction, so it's making it harder for organizations to do that, which is deeply alarming because I think that strong, thorough media is one of the key pillars of a functioning democracy. And I, you know, I feel our democracy is shaking and trembling a bit now, and I think one reason is that we live in this firehose of information. It's all hot takes and quick this and fast the other, and people have either tuned out entirely or have latched on to the wrong idea because it's very hard for the human mind to process this barrage of fast information. I think until the ecosystem of the media shifts back to something closer to what it was before—I don't know how we get there just sitting here on the sofa now—but until we get there, I think each of us individually has to take some ownership of this and step up and say, "Okay, I'm going to rework how I take information, right? I won't necessarily have a notification on my phone every time a new news item drops.

I'm going to step back, I'm going to read longer pieces, I'm going to, you know, that sort of thing.

So what does slow actually mean to you?

Well, when people ask me that question, I often start off by saying what slow doesn't mean to me, which is it doesn't mean doing everything slowly, right? I'm not an extremist or a fundamentalist of slowness. We've already established that I love speed. Faster is often better. We all know that, but not always. And that's really the key for unlocking this slow revolution. It's about finding the right speed. So musicians have a wonderful term for this. They talk about the tempo giusto, the tempo giusto, the right tempo for each piece of music. That kind of gets at what slow is about. Sometimes fast, sometimes slow. And then you're playing with all those different rhythms and speeds and paces in between. And if you go deeper with slow with a capital S, the slow movement, It's really a mindset. It's quality over quantity. It's being present and in the moment. It's doing one thing at a time. Ultimately, slow for me is doing everything not as fast as possible, but as well as possible, which is a very simple idea, but at the same time immensely powerful because it can revolutionize everything you do. So if you arrive at every moment of your day with that chip, the slow chip in here, thinking, how can I do this 'As well as possible, get the most out of this moment,' rather than 'How can I get through it as fast as possible?' That's a game changer for everything, which is why now in every field of human endeavor now you will find a slow movement.

So slow food, slow education, slow fashion, slow travel, slow sex, slow architecture, slow management. People coming to whatever it is saying, 'How can I do this thing better and enjoy it more by slowing down to the right speed?' So it is picking the right—

like, um, it's, it's actually going at the right— so slow for you is not necessarily like completely cutting yourself or being very, very slow, but it is like being situationally aware to know like what—

totally. There's a— I, I'm a big sports guy, I play a lot of sports, and, and what you notice of the greatest athletes, the greatest sports stars is that they are masters of this slow philosophy of choosing the right pace. So if you think of, say, football, Lionel Messi, or ice hockey— I'm Canadian, right? Connor McDavid— LeBron James, right, in basketball. What is it that they all have in common? They know exactly when to slow the game down and then when to speed it up. And they're constantly playing with tempo, controlling the tempo of the game. And the thing that all these top stars have in common is that they never seem to be in a rush. Even if the game is moving at a superhuman pace, the top players always seem to find a little pocket of time, a little pocket of space when they can slow it down and then go right in there for the jugular. And I think that's a good metaphor for the rest of us, is choosing when to enter into that dance between, yeah, now this is a moment to speed up, and now I'm going to slow things down, and I'm just going to get a bit more fluid here, find the right human groove so that I can do this thing better and enjoy it more.

So, um, but that philosophy could be empowering for you and frustrating for others around you, right? So, uh, let's say like, you know, I'm working in a company and, uh, you know, I like to do things slow, um, but like your boss wants it fast. So how do you manage that conflict of slow and fast?

Well, this is something that comes up all the time, right? You— I always say to people, you cannot arrive one day and declare unilateral slowness, right? That's not going to work. We're— no man is an island, no woman is an island. We are all so interconnected now. So you're going to be— if you're a cog in a wheel and you suddenly change, it's not going to work. So it has to be about explaining dialogue, explaining to people, finding the balance between other people's pace. So I'm not a utopian, I don't think that everybody will get to a point where everybody can do every single moment at exactly the right pace for them. That's— we're too interconnected for that, right? There's too much, you know, bumping up against each other. So it's a very big part of slow, I think, is explaining to other people why you want to slow down, getting the conversation going. Perhaps that person who was going fast, was going fast out of default, and they hear you want to slow down, so maybe they slow a bit. And just trying to juggle and find the right balance within organizations, teams, families, any context where other people are knocking up against each other, because we all have our own personal internal metronome, right?

So what's fast for me could well be slow for you. What's perfect for that person might be just a bit too fast, you know. So it's also about looking out of our own selves and thinking, how can we meld and marry together all these different paces so together we're like a symphony, right? You know, sometimes we are a little jarring, but then we work out how it all fits together and we produce beautiful music together.

Yeah, that happens with a lot of practice. Like, you know, like, you know, you, you build an orchestra because you exactly know how the guy next to you is going to play and when he needs to play. And, and that there is this, you know, amazing harmony and synchrony that happens.

And that doesn't happen the first day those musicians sit side by side. Exactly.

There's a long, slow process of rehearsal, slow process actually, before you get there. But, you know, I'm particularly going back You know, my team would always say that, like, you know, like, I'm a— though I speak slow, I'm the opposite. I'm the fast guy. Okay, like, I want everything yesterday. Yeah, everything like 2 days ago. And so what tends to happen is it creates like incredible amount of friction of characters and personalities and expectations and And sometimes, like, power overrules, like, you know, what you call, you know, the right thing to do, right? Like, you know, because my— sometimes it's just the hierarchy of it, right? Like, I want something fast. I know you're slow, but I don't care that you're slow. I just want it fast. Please Wake up! So, so, like, you know, so as a, you know, as a team sport, as a, as a, you know, as a, as a probably a musical orchestration, some of these concepts make sense. But as a society with heterogeneous people, with heterogeneous motives and incentives and aspirations seems like it's very difficult to manage.

It's more difficult, no question, than trying to find that harmony, that balance of different styles and rhythms and paces at a societal level or even at a huge organization level versus a tight sports team or an orchestra with a set piece to get ready for this date. Of course it's going to be more difficult, but difficult is not the same as impossible, right? And I always feel— I mean, I work with companies who are grappling with this very problem, and what I always get people to do is just to sit around the table and talk about it, right? Because the first problem here is often there's a kind of wall of silence that people don't— because there is such a deep and abiding taboo against slowness in our culture, that slow is synonymous with stupid, boring, lazy, unproductive, you know, all the things nobody wants to be associated with. This means that even when we can feel in our bones it would be good for us to put on the brakes, even when we're yearning to slow down, we don't do it because we feel ashamed or guilty or worried about what other people are going to say.

And to break through that taboo is the first step in any organization, to be able to say, "Okay, sometimes slow is going to work here and maybe it works for me, it doesn't work for you," but just to get people around the table talking about pace, because we're all thinking about it. It's like that final scene in the— remember that film The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, where the three of them are sort of, ooh, who's going to pull the six-shooter first? I feel like a lot of organizations are like that, that everybody is sitting thinking, this is crazy. I'm either being pushed too fast or it's going too slow, but I daren't say anything. Who's going to speak first? You break through that wall of silence, and immediately you find everybody says, yeah, OK. I felt this myself. I feel we could do this better if so-and-so maybe sped up a bit, this person slowed down. We kind of found our collective groove together. So I think it's— it is doable, but as you say, it's— it is going to be harder than a sports team or an orchestra.

Yeah. So, um, have you had any frustrations working with a brand recently? Do you have any examples of that?

Yes, I have.

Can you give me an example?

I probably shouldn't say the brand's name. No, that's okay.

But just the example of what it is.

Yeah, let's say it was a food brand that loved the idea of allying itself. Because what happens, of course, when you've got a culture quake as powerful, beautiful, and alluring as the slow movement, brands want to have a slice of that pie, right? So I'm often being approached by brands who say, "Let's team up and do something." And I have to think very hard about whether the brand genuinely is slow or there's a lot of slowwashing, right? In the same way we've got greenwashing. So you've got a brand that has nothing to do with slow in the way it runs its company inside or the way it interacts with the world, but it wants to have a slow carapace. It wants to have a slow facade on the outside with, you know, women doing yoga on an empty beach. Thing, right? Because they want to tap into what's going on in the culture. So I have to be very careful with that. But I did have an experience a little while ago with a food brand which had said all the right things, and I did what I thought was due diligence. And then when the campaign got going, some of the language in the manifesto was just really not smart.

And it was uncomfortable. It was an uncomfortable moment for me, and it made me even more gun-shy. This was years ago.

So let me, let me, uh, ask you for a good example. Let's say like, you know, you were traveling with an airline and you got like fed up with the airline and like, you know, now you're with a customer agent. In that case, would you like a slow response or would you like a fast response?

I would like the best response.

So let's say you would, you would wait on the call for like how long before you want to get the response?

Well, definitely. I think most of us would prefer not to wait on hold. I mean, it's one of the great— it's one of the— you're laying a trap for me here, right?

I can feel it.

It's one of the great banes of modern life is waiting on hold, listening to— is it jazz or rock or silence and all that? Of course, that's a scourge of the modern existence. And I don't— I consider that wasted time. But by the same token, if If the agent needs, or the system needs, 5 minutes to get their ducks in a row to give me the best answer, I guess I'm more prepared to wait 5 minutes.

But would you be okay if they said, "Wait for 5 minutes because it's going to take me 5 minutes to get the answer." Would that resolve your frustration, or would you still be expecting a faster answer?

No, no, I think it would. In fact, that's a good idea for customer service centers, right? Explain, not only say the usual flimflam about how we're receiving a higher than expected call volume, and they never say, explain why. If they said at this very moment, or give it some reason why, or we're actually needing a bit more time to— maybe that would ease some of the rage, the phone rage that people feel. But certainly there are times when we want a fast response, right? So if you're having dinner with a friend and that person starts choking on a morsel of food, you don't call for a herbalist, right? You get up and administer the Heimlich maneuver, a fast response, you save the person's life. So of course there are times when fast is the best answer. It's just the slow movement tells us that that's not always the case, right?

The reason why I bring that up is because like, you know, I, I go back to my own personal experiences and I don't know if like, you know, um I don't know if you feel the same way. See, when you're thinking about creative things and we're trying to solve something really hard, slow is better. Yeah, right. Slow is always better because it's like, it's like what is happening with all these reasoning models and AI models today. It's in a hurry to give you the answers. It sounds so confident that it is giving the right answer. But it is absolutely giving you garbage answers. It's like, it's like telling a kid, right? Like, I'm going to give you the most complicated question, math question, and I got like, you know, you have only 5 seconds to give me the answer. So what does a kid do? He just like simply like writes some gibberish and gives it to you. Yeah. But if you said, take your time, think about it, come back like, you know, whenever you have the answer, not unlimited time, like timebox it and say like, you know, just think about like, you know, possibly how to solve it.

You'd be surprised how many times they come up with extraordinary answers, right? So I feel like, I feel like, you know, there are tribes first. Like you've got to create a tribe, like a, like a slow tribe, like a fast tribe, and like a medium slouch tribe or whatever it is.

The third way tribe. Yeah, exactly.

And then like you should like point them in the right problem set. Like customer service is a great example, right? Like, you know, no one wants to stand and waste their time because they're already frustrated. Yeah, right. Like you're just adding to the irritation of the frustration by asking to stay longer. Like slow doesn't necessarily feel right to be the response. Yeah, you can explain yourself, but you're still like frustrated and you want to be like, you want to be choking the other guy, like, you know, out of their life because, like, you feel like you've been let down already. That's why you got on the call. But if it's a creative problem solving, then you take— you give the time and you form the tribe around, around, around something like that. That I seem, you know, you know, like, I, I really love that concept for myself. Um, then you, you take it back to, like, your own, your house. Well, you know, you don't apply that tribal thought during dinner times, right? Dinner times is when you want to slow down. You want to have a time to like talk about like what is going— but like, you know, would you try to do that like when you're on the phone call, like, you know, trying to do, uh, something fast, right?

Like, so, yeah, so it's, it's really like being situationally aware, completely contextually aware And what sort of tribal mentality do you bring to that whole gamut?

I think of slow as really mastering the art of shifting gears. Shifting gears.

Right? And being contextually aware.

Being aware of the context, choosing to go fast when speed is the best option, and the rest of the time slowing down.

That's why I love the definition of how you define slow, because I was reading your book and basically, you are— Like, I don't want people to misunderstand that, like, you know, you're the slow guy. Yeah, you're anything but a slow guy because of the way you talk.

You could tell just by— you could tell by sitting with me that I'm not all about doing things slowly. Exactly. Like, I love speed.

You love speed. But it's, it's, it's like, you know, like, you know, I, I want everyone to know that what you're talking about is the awareness, um, and basically being thoughtful and being like, you know, discerning of when to apply slow. And there are more moments that you have to apply slow because it produces beautiful outcome. Is that the essence of what you're trying to say?

That's it in a nutshell. And also, it's good maybe at this point to underline the fact that this slow creed isn't just for your private life, right? This works magic at the workplace as well. In fact, The Economist magazine did a big survey a while ago looking at pace in the modern workplace. And they went to factories, hospitals, everywhere. They crunched the data. And they came to a conclusion that's in fact a perfect, perfect summary of the slow philosophy. The standout line from the Economist survey is something like this. It's mastering the clock of business is about choosing when to be fast— the bit we all know, right— but also when to be slow, right? So when to be fast, when to be slow, when to be on, when to be off, when to lean in, We're always being told to lean in, but sometimes when to slow down and just lean back, right? And it's precisely when you master that art of shifting gears at work, everywhere, right, that the magic happens from the boardroom to the bedroom. And in this case, who is telling us to slow down? It's not Buddhist Monthly or Acupuncture Weekly.

It's The Economist magazine. It's the Bible of the most entrepreneurial, hard-charging, ambitious people on the planet. They're coming to the very same conclusion, which is that in a world addicted to speed, slowness is a superpower.

Yeah, you know, and I think like we apply— unfortunately, I think, um, the reason why I also like your book so much is because I find that we apply, um, this, this shifting gear of speed very inappropriately to different contexts. Like I would expect my doctor to be slow. Yeah, yeah, right. But the doctors are rarely slow. It's pretty opposite, right? It's the pretty opposite because you go there, like, all they want to do is like, okay, uh, tell me like what is your pulse? Like, okay, like, you know, what is your problem again? Or like, okay, like, you know, here's your prescription, I'm out. Yeah, really, dude? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I had to like book my appointment, I had to get my time with you, like, I drove all the way here. Like, I, like, I waited for like 15 minutes to be checked in, and then like you had like, you know, 2 seconds to say hello with one eye on the computer, with one eye on the computer and the second eye basically nowhere. And then you're saying, here's your prescription, get the hell out, right? So, so I, I think like, you know, we, we tend to, um, uh, I, I think like that is, is a very important thought, right?

Like, you know, like How do we know all the different activities that go on in our life, right? Like, and what are the different types and shapes of work? And for each of those shapes and types of work, what is the— what is the gradient of time mean to each of these things? Yeah, right. I think, I think, I think that's a beautiful philosophy that you have. Captured in your book, which I give you like great, great, great kudos to. And I, you know, and so tell me this, the speed, right? Um, how much of that is basically changed from the time you were born to the time today? Like, you know, like the clock around us, not the clock that you want to run on. Yeah, but the clock around us, like, let's take the last 20 years. Has been— has there been acceleration of restlessness fast in the last 20 years than the prior 20, than the prior 20? Or like, is it like, how you— what have you seen trend-wise?

I think so. I mean, I, I put the first big burst of acceleration, I traced that back to the Industrial Revolution, right? In the 19th century, we created machines that allowed us to do things faster. That pushed into the whole culture of productivity and optimize, you know. But in the last 20 years, goodness me, we've had a great leap forward in terms of speed, the arrival of social media, the immediacy of phones and screens and information everywhere all the time. And now AI is promising, you might even say threatening, to speed up everything even more. So I think the last two decades have been looking back across the whole sweep of human history It seemed to me 20 years ago we were already bumping up against the limits of what people and the planet could endure in terms of speed. We're, we are already into the red zone now, which is why—

so what, what are the specific ingredients to that change? Like, like, what, what would you pinpoint and say these are the things that actually cause the world to go faster?

I think it's a kind of cocktail of factors. I mean, if you want to go way back to when mankind began measuring time itself, so you can go back to ancient Rome when the first sundials appeared, and what did they do? They created the beginnings of a schedule. You suddenly had to be somewhere at noon because you could not— and you could find ancient Romans complaining about how the sundial was dicing up their day and speeding them up and so on. So that's a very early manifestation. You come into the medieval times. Clocks in towns in Europe, across Europe, again creating schedules. Once you have a schedule, you have deadlines. Once you have a deadline, you have speed, right? You have things getting faster. Then the industrial era, machines, things getting faster and faster. Out of the industrial boom of the 19th century, we created a whole culture of productivity and now more recently optimization. And it seeped out of the factories and got into every corner of our lives. So everything was about Faster is better, convenience, you know, just add water, 1-minute rice, 3-minute miracle shampoo. Everything just became faster and faster. And then I think more recently with information technology, that has taken speed up into our heads now so that things are whirring around at an extraordinary inhuman pace, too much information for us to come in, and constantly the temptation— I mean, these systems are built to be addictive.

We've seen this just recently, that court case in the United States, right? You know, saying that Meta and the big companies had been building their software tools to be addictive. And I think we have become, in a sense, addicted to speed now. Addicted physically, chemically, but also culturally, socially, cognitively, cognitively, and, and also sort of philosophically and metaphysically. I think one of the reasons that we find ourselves in Roadrunner mode and filling our heads with distraction. Speed becomes a form of denial. It's a way of running away from yourself. It's a way of avoiding those big, messy, deeper questions such as, "Who am I? What's my purpose here? Am I living the right life for me or am I just in autopilot?" And Socrates, you know, 2,000 years ago told us that the secret to a life worthy of the name was to live the examined life. It was to reckon with and wrestle with those big questions. But they— those are hard questions to confront, right? It's easier to wrestle with the small questions such as, where are my keys? I have an 11 AM Zoom, right? It's much less frightening to go down that path.

So I think for a lot of people, speed is a way— you're not running towards something, you're running away from something. And the thing you're running away from is yourself, which ultimately is a, is a point. There's a mean. That's not, that's not a life worth living, right? Which is why I think when people have a burnout, they finally hit the wall and they're forced to slow down. That's when they go deep. They start to face those big questions that they've been pushing to one side and papering over for years of speed and busyness. So I think you put all that together, we've got technology, we've got the workplace demanding more and more output, we've got a culture of optimization, we have a culture of metrics as well. We're always— people with wearables and everybody's measuring everything. And what happens when you have a number? You can speed it up, right? So that feeds into the whole general speed thing that's going on. And then I guess I'd overlay one other factor, which is consumerism, right? We live in a consumer culture where the whole world has become this endless smorgasbord of things to eat and consume and buy and collect and experience.

And the natural human instinct— I mean, we are forged on the savanna in Africa in a place of scarcity, you put us into a place of abundance, we don't know how to stop, right? So that's one reason we've got this obesity epidemic, right? We've got all of these calories, these Krispy Kreme doughnuts on every corner. We don't know how to stop eating, right? The same thing happens with tech. We are programmed to get a thrill, adrenaline rush, to feel— we want social connection. So you give us this verisimilitude, this kind of fake sort of social connection, which is social media. We can't stop looking at it. We can't stop checking out the likes. We can't stop scrolling and doomscrolling endlessly. So anyway, that's a lot of factors in one, but I think what it boils down to is the A word, which is addiction. I do think we're genuinely addicted to speed now.

So do you— is there one, one significant character I'm not talking about the ingredients as much now. You talked about all the ingredients, which is absolutely right. So is it— is the enterprise the real reason, like the companies, the real reason why we see like running so fast? Because like everything that you mentioned, like I think about like my examples, right? Like, you know, when you go to Amazon No one cared basically like whether like product showed up 2 days later, 1 day later. All of a sudden like these guys like start like saying, I can get it to you within the same day, I can get it to you within the same hour, I can get it to you within like the, the next 2 days. And then I'm now conditioned to expect everyone around me, yeah, to do the same thing as those guys did. Like that one irrational actor now causes all the other guys to go irrational because they think winning for that guy means the copy of that means I will also win. Yeah, right. So, so one of the— like, every— everything that you talked about, social media is an enterprise, right, or run by enterprises.

Um, like fast consumerism, run by enterprises, right? And we are just the recipient. Like Uber, like I'll give you this example, like, you know, me and my wife, we used to go for our, um, uh, wedding anniversaries And we always basically go to Napa, okay? And we would basically— like, none— both of us don't drink, but like, we just like the wine country and just go—

I love Napa. Yeah, just go around, a lot of good slow people.

You look at like all the mountains and all that stuff. And, um, and then basically we would take a taxi. And usually, like, you know, when you order a taxi, the taxi shows up like 9, 10, 15 minutes later. And maybe we're just fine with it, right? And then like Uber shows up. Yes. Okay, so you, you click an Uber like, and the Uber like is there like in 2 minutes or 1 minute, right? And then one time we just order Uber. The Uber like, you know, uh, keeps like telling like, you know, it's showing up in the next minute, it's showing up in the next minute, and then 9 minutes goes by, it never showed up. And she was like, gosh, this Uber, like, you know, why is it not showing up? And I'm like, lady, like, you were okay. You're just okay with 15 minutes time. Yeah. And now all of a sudden, like, you know, like 9 minutes, like, seems too, too long for us. So, so, but we are some— so there's this deep social conditioning. Yeah. Uh, that is happening, um, through our interaction with these enterprises, which is driving some of this behavior.

Is that like— is that the way you think about it?

I mean, I think if you dig deeper, there's a kind of basic logic in the system of what I call turbo consumerism or turbo capitalism, which is to drive us to consume more and more, faster and faster, because that generates more, more short-term profit, right? So that, that's the kind of imperative of the system, if you like, the enterprises and the system in which they're embedded. But then there's what happens to us as human beings, right? We live in a world of where we were constantly comparing ourselves to each other. That's a natural human instinct, right? For status reasons and for building communities, we want to know what other people are doing. But that— you put that together with turbo consumerism and turbo capitalism and the performance aspect of social media, and you supercharge this phenomenon. You create a phenomenon of a world of soaring expectations. So sure, 15 minutes for a taxi was fine 5 years ago. Suddenly 10 minutes— people are complaining when it's 90 seconds late. Yeah. I was on a website the other day which didn't download instantly, but immediately a little apology popped up on the screen saying, "We're very sorry, this site may take up to 15 seconds to load." I hadn't even finished reading that by the time it had basically loaded, but they felt that even 15 seconds was just too much in this context.

I think there's this sort of arms race of speed. We get velocitized. There's a phrase that you, you get faster and faster. And what seemed to you okay last week is now too slow. And then you want more speed and more speed and more speed. And where does that— where does that lead to? I mean, it leads to where we are now, which is a world where people— where collectively we are more affluent than ever before. We have more stuff than ever before. Are we? Well, I suppose economically, like GDP and numbers, but, but are we richer in all the stuff that really matters, like human connection, happiness, health? I'm not so sure that we are. I think that we've—

with those things get sacked because I, I, I also believe that, uh, slow is a privilege to some and is a curse to many. And let me tell you why. So, um, over the last— the same 20 years, um, I, I know like a lot of people claim that like, you know, people have become independently wealthy and like there's more wealth created and That's all garbage and bullshit. Like, you know, like the wealth is disproportionately increased for like a very few, and most of those people, other people that are there, like 99.9%, they live on credit cards and debt and more debt and more debt. So for them, like working 3 jobs, right, is a very important thing. So they don't think about slow. They want to hustle. They want to get 3 jobs. So that way they have enough, that way they could keep up with the inflation. So I feel like the consumerism of fast, fast, fast has also caused the cost to go up. And because the cost is going up and because like the inequality has gone up, now I'm like forced to be fast, fast, fast. So we have created like the secondary effects of the consumerism to hit like people's psychology to look for faster because now, like, you know, if I'm a soccer mom, not a soccer mom, if I'm like a single mom with like 3 jobs, can I afford to be slow in this case?

I think everyone can afford to be slow. How do you do it? Because I think when you say how can people afford to be slow or slow doesn't work in that context, I think it's often because people are thinking that slow means work less, earn less. That's not— that's one version of slow, but it's not the bigger version of slow. The bigger version of slow is what we've been talking about up until now, which is how do you go through each moment? Do you go through it trying to rush through it with more stuff, or do you say, okay, I'm going to find the right pace here, do this work assignment, or have this work meeting, or be with my child at the best way possible, and then move on to the next moment?

But I don't have the means to do it. How do I reconcile that fact that I don't have the means to do it?

But it depends what are the means that you're lacking that are stopping you from doing it. If it's stopping you from buying a new iPhone or if it's stopping you from putting food on the table.

No, no, it's just like basic requirements. Like, you know, like I know so many people who are single mom and they have to work extremely hard to send their kid to school. And they have to work 3 jobs because like, you know, they simply cannot get like one job. In that case, like, you know, slow seems to be a privilege.

For someone in those circumstances, slow is harder to put into practice. There's no question.

How many of those are there in the world?

That's a tough one because it's such a mixed bag, right? So you're describing somebody who probably is in the United States, yeah?

No, generally in the world.

Yeah, but if you go to places like Brazil, right, where people are living in poverty, they don't, they don't have— there's, there's less pressure to have stuff, right? So that they, they may be earning very little and just making ends meet and so on, but they actually have quite a lot of time, right? Just to— in the same way as in your childhood, right? You know, just being and doing, right? Just hanging out because there's nothing else to do and they haven't got money to go spend on things.

But at that time, things used to be cheaper too.

Yeah, I mean, I'm certainly not arguing that we're in a good place economically. I think there's— the economic inequality is gruesome and is definitely driving people to feel that they've got to go faster. I would argue that they don't. That's not always the conclusion one should draw from economic inequality. Sometimes your best bet when you're struggling to make ends meet is not to go faster. Sometimes it might be to slow things down, to have a think about how you're going to do this differently. And so it's— I feel it's a more complicated picture than saying there's poverty, poverty drives people to be fast, because I think there are many different nuances to play with there, to play with that. Yeah, got it.

So now let's talk about— we are screwed up as a generation, I feel, you know, our generation. I think like, you know, we as a generation, like, you know, and The next generation that we train also is slightly more screwed up because, you know, to your point, parenting, right? Yeah. You know, every time my son cries, like, you know, my wife is incredible mom. She's probably the best mom this guy will ever have in his whole life and many lives thereafter, right? She's like extremely caring. And so she puts up with everything, like, you know, like and she knows like exactly like how to handle him. And when he's with me and she's not around, and when he starts crying, I don't know what to do, so I just give him my phone because I got other things to do. So, and so, you know, we are— parenting is a very critical factor to creating a more thoughtful society in the future. So tell me about, like, how you think about the slow movement as it applies to hyper-parenting.

Yeah, well, I think we've wound ourselves up into a kind of crazy moment now with parenting where, for a lot of parents, being a parent has become a cross between a competitive sport and product development. So it's this kind of constant rush, it's busy schedules, It's cramming all those little quiet— what would have been quiet interstitial moments for boredom and play and discovery with screens. So kids come out of the womb and they just hit the ground running, right? So the Baby Einstein DVDs, baby sign language classes, baby GoPros sports clinics, Mandarin lessons in the Moses basket, and then sort of endless extracurriculars and schedules that would give a CEO heartburn, which doesn't work because, as we talked about earlier, children need slowness. That's how they learn how to think, how to work out who they are, how to regulate their emotions, all the good stuff. The trouble, of course, is that for a lot of parenting, especially in the kind of— I think this started in the middle classes, but it has kind of trickled out across the whole society. There's this feeling that somehow if you ease off, that your child's going to fall behind.

This is the palpitating fear just below the surface, is that, OK, I love the idea of slow. A lot of parents will remember their own slow childhoods. Think looking back, well, that was luminous. I think of all the meaning and joy and discovery and adventure. But then they look around and think, look at the Joneses, they are very busy and they're very fast. We've got to keep up with them. And so we end up in this weird sort of parental arms race, which is doing so much harm, I think, to our kids, because kids actually need— they need to put on the brakes, right? They need— they need to get bored. They need all that sort of stuff that has been the defining hallmark of childhood since the beginning of time until really the last probably 20, 25 years.

How do you get all parents to think alike?

How to change that? To say it in a different way. One step at a time, I suppose. I mean, I personally do it by giving— I do talks and workshops in schools for parents all over the world. But I think it's— I always recommend to parents to find their— you used that lovely word, tribe. To find your own tribe. So if you're living in a neighborhood where everybody is scheduled up the eyeballs and you can't find another unscheduled child to play with your unscheduled child, reach out a little further, you know, go on to the local WhatsApp group or organize a coffee morning at the school. There will be other parents out there for whom the penny has dropped and they realize that they are racing through their kids' childhood instead of actually living it. Build up your little communities where children play freely, where children don't have screens all the time. I mean, you're starting to see this more and more at the grassroots level, parents pushing back. And the flip side of this actually is that young people themselves are starting to say enough, enough, enough, right? And this is something I've noticed in my whole 20-year journey as this kind of pioneer of the slow movement.

When I first planted the flag and floated the idea, it felt to me like a lot of the energy for slow was coming from people in their 30s, late 30s, 40s, that kind of thing. Now it's very much driven by young people. It's 20-somethings and it's people in their teens. I'll give you a couple of examples. There's a wonderful new social ritual, I don't know if you've heard of it, called stacking. Have you heard of this? It's when young people go out together to have a coffee, right? They all sit around the table, they pile up their phones in a stack in the middle, And whoever reaches for the phone first to check Snapchat or Instagram pays the bill for everybody at the table, right? So it's just a fun way of saying, we have this moment here together now. We're never gonna have this moment again. Why ruin it by trying to be in several other moments at the same time? And stacking is a ritual that has been invented not by baby boomers or people of Gen X who grew up without screens. It's by the digital natives who are coming to the same conclusion, which is we want fast, we want slow.

Sometimes you want the speed of the screen and social media, but other times we want to just close out that sound and fury and be here now with you, with the people who matter to us, right? And we're speaking in London right now. I live in England, and there's a big book chain called Waterstones. Do you know it? They're all— they're all— that's right. They are currently opening 10 new branches a year in the UK. I was listening to an interview the other day with a CEO, and he was asked why, what's going on? Surely reading is a dying art. He said, we're opening these new branches because young adults are rediscovering the joy of reading books. Yeah, again, something that possibly a decade ago would have seemed unthinkable. We were told reading's too slow. Kids getting back into reading, and there's a whole phenomenon now of what they call it, Grandma Core, you know, where young people are doing crafts and knitting and vinyl records and all that kind of tactile, slow stuff. You know, this is what we need as human beings. And I feel optimistic, right? I look around, I see young people leading these slow movements because they're the future, right?

I think the world always goes in cycles. Like, you know, like if you've seen what used to be fashion in the 1980s is now old-fashioned. Yeah, right. Like, you know, like dress-wise and like, you know, like the way you— like, like as an example, people used to wear monochromatic suits, right? Or bell-bottoms. Yeah, exactly. And like, and now it's back in trend. And like, you know, like, you know, the glasses, like, like the big, you know, thick frames and other things now back in trend. And, um, and like, you're absolutely right. I think like, you know, like, you know, kids like, you know, age 15, 16, 17, 18 now, uh, they are really moving towards a slow generation. Oh, they are. Yeah. Um, you know, I used to work for American Eagle Outfitters, which is like, which makes like, you know, amazing garments. And we used to— our head creative director, like, you know, her name is Jen Foyle, she had this amazing concept. It's called Offline, this brand. And so what you do is basically you don't take any cell phones, you just like go digitally, like without any digital equipment, everything is switched off.

You walk into a store and if the store experience is like super beautiful. You just experience the store. You don't want to be like, just— you don't want to have anything distracting you. Um, and so she has another band called Unsubscribed, uh, which is like, you know, it's a store model. And, and she used to tell, like, her daughter was a great fan, and the daughter was like 14, 15 years old, and she used to be like a big fan of like slow fashion. Um, coming to fashion, right, like, you know, you see all this like Shein of the world and others, they're fast fashion, you know, pay $5, get something from China, wear it like twice, and then like, you know, throw it in garbage and be done with it. So, um, but that is changing too, that trend is changing. So I, I, I 100% believe that everything that was a taboo, like, you know, in, in, in 2000s, uh, and was a trend in '80s, is going to be back in trend now.

Hopefully the good slow stuff. Good slow stuff.

You know, you'll have like more tea shops, more coffee shops, more like libraries, more bookstores, more boredom, maybe more childhood boredom.

Yeah, it's true. Yeah, I mean, I, I wonder if— I mean, I'm not sure if the whole kind of slow-fast thing has been moving in cycles. I feel like we've been on an upward curve of acceleration, pretty much a straight line. For fast. For fast, yeah. What's changed is that the counter-current for slow has grown alongside it, and that is giving the impression, you know, we're kind of bringing back some of these old rituals and practices and so on. But yeah, it's so true, and it's— it just lifts the spirit, doesn't it? I mean, I was in Paris recently, and I did an event for an organization called Offline Clubs. Started in Amsterdam, has spread across Europe. And what it is is that it gets— it's mostly young people, sort of under 30s, who come together in sometimes there's a flash mob outside a monument like the Eiffel Tower or a bridge in Paris, whatever, or sometimes in a gallery or a café. And they just come together with no phones for 4 or 5 hours and they read books together in silence. And it's almost like going to church. It feels like a kind of religious experience.

And I, because of the way I live my life, I'm often in places where there's not phones and stuff, and I'm off my phone. But that was the first time I think I'd been with that many people in a shared physical space for 5 hours and didn't see a single phone. And there was something kind of deep, ancient, tidal, glorious about it. I mean, it was one of the most transcendent experiences I've had in quite some time of slow. And here it was, a whole room full of people in their 20s and late teens saying, you know, let's just slow things down and do it together, right? Because I think that's a really important aspect of slow is that people can sometimes think, "Okay, I'm going to slow down to optimize myself, to be more creative, more productive, have better health, better abs," you know, all that stuff, which is great, but that's not the endgame for slow. It's really about reconnecting us together to bringing us to a world where everybody can live fully and be slow together. There's a great— what's that proverb? It goes, "If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.

And I think that kind of gets at that aspect, social aspect of slow, that it's really something we ought to be thinking about as a joint collective act rather than something we do selfishly and solipsistically to look good on Instagram ourselves, right?

Are the education systems today geared towards that sort of thinking?

It's one of those no-yes answers. I mean, for a long time, I think that we're super tanker is turning. We've definitely been through a period now where education got very fast, an obsession with exams and scores and measuring and so on. But across the world now— and this is something I do a lot of work in, is slow education— schools, either individual schools, often private schools because they got more autonomy, more room to maneuver, are leading the way. But whole school systems are taking steps to get away from the high-pressure assembly line approach to education, so creating more space for deep thinking, for collaboration, for dialogue, for letting the mind wander, to get into that slow way of learning, slow learning. You're seeing that more in schools of all shapes and sizes, and it's something that is quite inspiring when you see it up close because kids have that muscle. It's there. It's atrophying because when they're being rushed from one thing to the next, told what to do, spoon-fed, it can't it can't blossom, the muscle withers. But if you give them that space and that time, it comes back. And you see the faces lighting up, and it's something really to lift the spirits.

Yeah, when you talk about schools, I just remembered. So in India, you probably heard this, and I have so many stories stories there. So the Indian Institute of Technology is considered to be the premier school in India, very difficult to get in. Like, at the time when I was going to school, like finished my 12th grade, you have to take your entrance exam to qualify, and close to 200,000 people would take the exam. Mm-hmm. Uh, every year, and only 2,000 would get into that school. Okay, in order that you prepare for that exam, you got to prepare the 11th grade and the 12th grade. And so there used to be coaching institutes which just like coach you for that. In order that you basically qualify for the coaching institute, they would have someone teaching you how to get into the coaching institute Oh yeah, you had a race to get into the tutoring school. Tutoring school. So it's like, you know, for 9th grade and 10th grade. And then there was a school, like, what I heard, like, when I was about to leave India was there was a school, like, which was actually trying to get for the preschool to get into the school.

I'm like, where does this, like, freaking thing end?

Just the other day, a note went round in our street's WhatsApp group in London, and it was a, it was a mother looking for a tutor for her 2-year-old.

Anything? Yeah, so that whole, um, that whole pressure to get in was a society's, uh, kind of reaction. Like, you know, if you, in those days, if you didn't get— did not get into IITs, then you are considered as a dumb guy. Right, sort of like, you know, it's like it's a privilege and a prestige to go to those schools, and if you don't qualify, then you're not good enough. Failure. Yeah, you're like, you know, so you like— so they put in your mind. Yeah. And so I know, like, and this is, this, this is like something that is like really like scarred me like so much. I used to play, uh, with a kid like, uh, in my neighborhood and, uh, very nice kid, uh, his name was Kishore, and, um, he committed suicide because he couldn't get into school. Because like he got like, um, he, he was— he ended up like committing suicide because his father kept like, you know, nagging him that he couldn't qualify. And this guy, you know what, like he actually aced he passed the local state exam and he got into computer science. So he had like, you know, he was in the top 300 in the state, right?

He never— he didn't make it into the top like 2000 to get into the IITs. I also gave, like, I had a cool father and a mother, like, you know, like I first— I gave the first time, I got like 1700. 1700 would only get you into naval sciences and metallurgical sciences. Sciences. I didn't shit care about it. And then like, I, like, I thought like, you know, maybe next time I'm gonna get better. And I gave it again, and then I— my rank was not any better. So because my IQ was not any better, not within a year. So, so I was, I was the same. And like, my mom— my dad said, you know what, why don't you just take the local exam and like, you know, see what happens. And I just took and I got into the local— so into the local university, like the state university. This guy, um, was harassed, and, and there was so much pressure about like, like this education system that like was constantly about like proving and like, you know, you know, preparing and preparing. So I remember this kid, he used to like go to that, the school that I mentioned to you, right?

Class 8, he started preparing for the IIT exams for Class 12. So almost 5 years he just spent. And they— and these kids wake up at 4 AM in the morning, they go to the class like at 8 o'clock till 8 o'clock, then they come back, shower, go to the college or like to the school, like, you know, 9th and 10th. And so we— in, in the state I belong, so Class 1 to 10 is one, uh, is one school. Class 11 and 12 is considered junior college, and then you go to the engineering schools, okay? So you're in different schools. So like, people used to go like to the school at like 8:30, prepare all the way to the night, and then like next day morning they would wake up at 3:30, go to this place where they would teach you, and then the cycle goes for like 5. And like, they were not any smarter after all of this. They were not. In fact, in fact, like less smarter because they were like, you know, under so much stress and strain.

You just create exam-passing robots.

Exactly. And like, you know, like, and they were so mechanical. Yeah, they were so like, you know, like, you know, I wouldn't say they were dumb, but like they were like, they were narrow. They were narrow. Yeah, like, you know, so, so, um, that's why, like, you know, I was very curious, is the education system now finally waking up to being slow? Because I don't see that in India yet.

I don't think India— I think India, no. But other countries, I mean, Singapore is a good example. Singapore often has a tradition of high-pressure education, a lot of tutoring and so on. But in recent years, they've realized that that leads to children who look really good on paper, are very good at passing exams, but is that really that useful in, you know, and all kinds of sort of social social and mental health problems. They've been engineering what some call a quiet revolution where the Minister of Education recently talked about making education not an arms race, so there's less emphasis on exam scores, more time for teamwork and all the stuff, the slow stuff that we've been talking about. Singapore is often held up as the great world champion of education. They get the highest scores in the PISA exams that compare different different countries and so on. And yet they've said, you know what, there's more to life than a, a, a, a sexy exam score, right? There's other ways to bring children up. There's a whole panoply of experiences that children need to come into the world fully formed and good citizens of humanity.

I always say to parents, when they say— when they get into that, you know, they can almost not breathe, right? They're thinking, my kid needs to get into this one university, or, or he or she— their life is over, right? They're, they're going I'm going to be a loser forever. And I would say, well, take a step back for a moment and just look around the world that you inhabit, your own personal circle and the world itself, and look at the people you really admire and ask yourself, where did they go to university?

Exactly. You know, I—

And you'll find a whole range of things. Many of them probably dropped out. Some didn't go. Some went to universities you've never heard of, right? Absolutely.

And you admire them, right? That is absolutely the truth. Like, you know, for everyone on this show who's watching, right? I can tell you because I, I work for Coke, I work for PepsiCo, I work for Walt Disney Company, I work for like Walmart, and I work for American Eagle Outfitters, like very large companies. Like I had about like 88,000 people working for me at Walmart. I had about like 40,000 people working for me at American Eagle Outfitters, okay? And what I would tell you in all of those cases is that the guys who went to MIT and the guys who went to like, you know, Harvard Business School or Stanford could not tie their freaking laces. And the guys who went to like Florida International University, which you never heard of, yeah, would actually bamboozle the shit out of you, you know. So like, education has no meaning to your performance in life in the professional setting. It's all about situational awareness. Yeah, your grit, your attitude, and your ability to persevere that matters the most. That's the character. Yeah, you know, and you don't form characters in school.

Yeah, you don't form them studying for exams at 4 in the morning. Exactly, that's for sure.

Yeah, so, uh, now let's talk about the age of AI. You touched on that a little bit, right? I'm very I'm very curious about the age of AI and what is it going to do to people in the world. Yeah. What is your perception of it?

Well, I mean, I don't have a crystal ball and I feel we're sort of still quite early in this, this journey. But I'm— I have some optimism about that AI will do some good things. But I'm feeling more and more worried, to be honest. What is a worry? I feel that, and we're already seeing it, that human beings, we are lazy, right? You know, so if you give us a chance to outsource and offload cognitive effort, we're going to do it, right? And we're already seeing this now as people just stopping doing the things they did before and getting AI to do it, or having relationships with chatbots and so on. And I don't think that that's going to end well. I mean, just two pick up both those threads. The first, there was some research showing recently that doctors who find using AI to look at medical scans, of course, spot more abnormalities, and that's great for healthcare. But what they discovered is that after a few months, doctors who rely very heavily on AI, if you take away the AI, their ability to— it's fallen off a cliff. And these are skills that had been developed over years, sometimes decades, that have just evaporated.

In months. That's already alarming itself. Think about children now in schools who haven't even developed those skills. They haven't developed the critical thinking, the analysis, the ability to join the dots and read between the— all that stuff. And they're offloading already all of that stuff to AI. That is a pretty frightening prospect for humanity. I think, I think that we are walking down a very dangerous, dangerous, dangerous path with that. And then just picking up on the other thing I mentioned about the social side of things, you know, we're starting to find now people having relationships with the guys. And we were already with the pandemic, there was a retreat from social contact. A lot of people came back, but a lot of people still found it difficult. And we are social animals. We need to be around other human beings having real conversations. And sometimes those conversations are awkward. There's an uncomfortable silence, or you say something that I don't quite agree with, and I I've got to read your body language, and then we find our way to the next part of the conversation. There's friction. And I think this is one of the great disservices that Silicon Valley has done to us, is to sell the idea of frictionlessness as a good, an end in and of itself.

Friction is good, right? We need friction, especially in human relations. Friction is where the light happens, the heat. Friction— Love is not perfect.

Life is not perfect. And people think you want to have the perfect lover. Why the heck do you want to have a perfect love? Love is all about understanding how to evolve.

And together overcoming the little awkward stuff. Exactly. I was talking to a therapist at a school the other day, and she said— I was talking about a case of a boy who was about 10 years old, and he'd been very sociable and got along with everybody, and then in the last few months he'd suddenly turned and he was getting into fights and bad-tempered, and he was swearing at his parents at home. And she was talking to him and she worked out that basically he'd been using ChatGPT as a friend and become more and more using it as a friend. And he said to her at one point in one of their sessions, he said, you know what, the reason I get frustrated with the friends at school is that sometimes they disagree with me, right? They don't always want to do what I want to do, which of course is what the chatbots do, right? It's sycophantic, it's obsequious, it showers you with plaudits and accolades, you know, that's the best question I've ever heard, you're so clever, you're luminously beautiful. That's not real life. I mean, that's just living in a corner of the Matrix.

It's dystopian, it's grim, it's bleak. And yet this is what a lot of people are gravitating towards, young and of all ages. There's some things to worry about here.

I'm so laughing about it because like, you know, I received an email from one of my friends. So he's a is the husband of one of my very good friends, like, you know, who went to college with me. And this guy sends, uh, he said like, hey, like, you know, you're the patent king, uh, because apparently I have a lot of patents that I filed in my life. And so he said like, you know, I have this idea and I need to like get this thing filed by Tuesday. What is that? Send it to me. And then like he just like takes like, you know, screenshots of what he's worked his way through, like Claude Anthropic, and then he sends me the documents over to me. And then in that line he says like, you know, don't just go like— like what I find is very like, you know, interesting here, you should see his excitement in the email. He said like, I love like what like, you know, Claude thinks about this idea. And then, and then I opened that email and it said like, you know, it gave me like, you know, goosebumps.

And it is like such a— and when I read through all of this Like, I sent him a very honest reply. I said, dude, I think like structurally what you have like, you know, captured here doesn't work. And I also think this thing, what it is talking about, is like stupid. Yeah. So I don't know why your Claude friend thinks it's extraordinarily brilliant, because everything you do is extraordinary.

Yeah.

And I said like, it's being overly fanatical with you, like, you know. So like, I would temper your, like, you know, emotions here a little bit. And let me tell you all the weaknesses. And I sent it, like, I, I took a screenshot, I put it in Claude, and I said like, please give me the weaknesses. And it gave me like a laundry list of freaking weaknesses. So which he hadn't asked, which he hasn't asked, because like, you know, like, it's all reinforcement learning, like what you've what you seek is what you get. Yeah, right. Um, so it's—

so I, I had a very chilling experience the other day with AI. I was traveling, I was doing a road trip in Canada with a friend who, he, he was part of a group, a worldwide group of people who are beta testing a new anthropomorphic AI. So it's an AI that talks to you in a human voice, and the voices are incredibly human. I mean, they've— there's breathless laughter, there's pausing, and you immediately, your lizard brain is You feel like it's like 3 people in the car. It was, it was really weird. But at one point we were driving, the 2 of us, through a town in southern Alberta called Three Hills. And I looked out the window. It's a prairie, Canadian prairie, flat as a pancake. And I said to the AI called Maya, I said, Maya, we're in Three Hills, Alberta right now. I can't see a hill anywhere. What happened to the hills? And without skipping a beat, Maya said, the hills were razed to the ground to create space for farming. My friend and I, both from Alberta, we both thought, "That's a bit odd." So I said, "Are you sure, Maya?

Is that true?" Maya said, "Yes, in 1913, local farmers did—" Then I asked a third question. I said, "Maya, I'm still not convinced. Was it really raised to the ground? If so, give me two historical references." There was a pause, and Maya said, "Oh, I got the fact wrong. I'm really sorry, Carl, but I got that wrong." We were just like both chilled on the spot. Fine, you know. And AI delivers these hallucinations with such charm and confidence, confidence and sycophancy, that you just think, yeah, wonderful, this is exactly what I want, because it is what you want. And then you run with it. You've got to slow down and pull it apart, unpack it. This is where slow and fast come in with AI. Absolutely.

So one of the beautiful things, um, uh, that, um, um, that we have designed into into our system and thinking, um, is this called a concept called NII. It's Native Intelligence Index. What do I mean by that is when you give a lot of autonomy and agency back to systems, what is the cognitive residual that stays within the company? Let's say like, you know, like I am the CEO of a company and I keep like thinking that like, you know, AI is going to do world good and I'm going to give, give it more autonomy and more like work and more agency. So I'm going to strip like what like this guy does and give it to you. And I'll strip what does. After over a period of time, like, you know, there's no— first, there is no character consistency. So it doesn't know like, you know, basically Carl is Carl and Carl behaves this way. And so the Carl is now an agent and part of Carl's job as an agent. So like, you know, there's no consistency between those two., and let's say even if there is a consistency between the two, it keeps doing things so it doesn't— like, we don't— we can't catch the drift.

Yeah, because the way of the, the models are all probabilistic in nature, you cannot catch the drift. And so over a period of time, like, if something bad happens, your ability to recover and take control of the steering wheel is simply not there as an organization. So we, so we measure what we call the cognitive residual. In a company. So how reliant are you on the machines to make decisions versus human control? And have you given up too much control in this case? And if you don't know that, and if you continue to apply autonomy, then you're going to be screwed. It's exactly similar to— yeah, like how you think about autonomous cars. Like, let's say, like, like in US you drive on the left-hand side, here you drive on the right-hand side. Whenever I come to London, I cannot drive because my mind cannot go from left to right, or it doesn't instantly switch, right? Like, because you're so used to doing it. Yeah. Assume that you are getting into an autonomous car, you've always driven an autonomous car, and the car stops working. Now you've got to take on the steering wheel. How would you know it?

Yeah. This is going to be the biggest challenge, I feel like, you know, with like us giving up all this cognitive capability.

Do you find that companies that you're interacting with and offering this to— are you offering this already to firms?

NII? Yeah, they love it. Like, the board loves it. The board loves it because, like, you know, every company that we have been talking to, um, loves this concept of NII. And they also love the concept of, like, what I call HIS score, which is human index scores. So we also measure how human is your decision in the first place? Yeah. And can you explain that it's human? Because if you cannot explain it's human, the other human which is going to consume it is not going to buy it, right? You only buy things from relatable things. You just don't buy unrelated things for yourself, right? So I think, I think it's, it's very important, uh, in the age of AI to be cognizant of some of these things that are going to hit like very fast at us. Which actually takes me to a controversial question, right? If you give up so much autonomy and you, like, you know, you, you said like, I want to be lazy, is it a friend of slow then?

No, definitely not. I think it's— I finally give you a short answer. No, it's definitely not a friend. I think AI—

why is it not a friend?

Well, I think AI—

because it gave you time.

Yeah, you can slow down. Well, I think it's a double-edged sword, I suppose. Is the way I would put it, right? It depends how you use the technology and what you do with the time that it gives back to you. If you go back through history of technology and so on, we have traditionally, when we came up with new gadgets that saved us time, we had a choice. We could either use that time to slow down and be leisure and stuff, or we could spend it on more consumption. And we tended to go for the latter, right? So we've kind of got more and more efficient machines, but we haven't created more and more time for ourselves. I think if AI produces this huge explosion of doing stuff for us that's actually done well and frees up time, then if we use that time wisely, we could be on the cusp of a golden era, right? We could be, right? Like, I don't know that we necessarily will make the right decisions on that front, but the potential is there if AI is reliable and able to take away a lot of the work and we create a world where everybody is kind of, you know, we're not leaving people behind and so on, then we have a big conversation to have amongst ourselves.

What are we going to do with this time? We got to rethink the place of work in our lives, all that sort of stuff. I mean, there are a lot of things that need to be unpicked and reimagined. Do we have the imagination and the courage to do that? I, as a society, we don't. I don't think we— I'm not seeing it now.

No, um, because like, you know, you see what's going on, right? Like, you know, Like all these frontier models, they are— they're in the race to get like their models out faster than the next guy. In doing so, they are like being very reckless about everything. Like Grok came out with basically this version where they were like, you know, Elon Musk started that first. He said like, oh hey, look at me, like, you know, if I'm in a bikini, this is how I look. Yeah, right. Next thing you know, like, you know, like, people were like undressed completely, right? So it was reckless. Like, you know, like, the smartest man in the world, like, being so reckless. Um, was he being naive about it, like he didn't know, like, what was coming out? Or was he just like— was it a marketing thing? I don't know. But it was— I would surely tell it was the most dangerous thing that, like, he put out there in the world. Right? And the same thing happened with Nano Banana. When Nano Banana came out, the fraud just went up. People took one broken egg and they said like they had 10 broken eggs and they were claiming like refunds on them.

People were writing like fraudulent like insurance claims. Yeah, yeah. Because like the difference between the right and the wrong just like blurred so much with all these image-producing, you know, capabilities. So I think like that's the, the near and the present danger that exists. With like AI as a technology that we haven't solved for. We haven't given it character, we haven't given it safety, we haven't given it like— no, we haven't given it like the ability to think, like evolve it like a child would, because those things take time, right?

That's, that's a slower gestation. It's the fast stuff comes out quickly. Yeah. And the temptation in a world that everything is going fast and move fast and break things, right? That's the ethos. I saw a clip of Elon Musk the other day, and he was saying in an interview somewhere, he was saying, any given thing can be sped up. However fast you're doing the thing, you can always do it faster. And you think, well, that is— that's the apotheosis of that ethos that's driving so much of AI now, right? It's just fast for the sake of fast. But the truth is, of course, that just because you can speed everything up doesn't mean you should, right? And as soon as I saw that clip, I remembered another quote from another towering figure in history, Mahatma Gandhi, who said famously once, "There's more to life than increasing its speed." I thought between Elon Musk and Mahatma Gandhi on that front, I think I'm on team Mahatma.

No, it's absolutely right. In fact, I would preface this. There's a lot of paranoia about AI. And also I think that comes from, uh, the economy that we created for ourselves in the last 20 years. Like, there's so much hatred, there's so much disinformation, there's so much like atomization of things. The worry, like, I know, like, a lot of intellectuals have— and these are good smart people, they are not dumb people, uh, who are proposing for fast is they are worried if they recede and they go slower, then the enemy, which is the unknown enemy that we don't know yet, uh, it could be any one of the countries, the rogue nations, the person living in a, you know, in a bunker somewhere, could create something so devastating, uh, that they would surpass us. And hence the, the civilization is going to be, you know, kind of killed, which is the same argument that we're making with nuclear today. Yeah, you know, I have nuclear, but you should— you're not allowed to have nuclear, but like, you have it, so I should have it because you can come bomb me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, mutually assured destruction.

Exactly, right?

So like, I'm gonna, like, you know, I'm gonna guarantee myself against, like, you know, the harm that you're gonna create. So I think that's what is happening, and that's what is causing this frenzy of, like, people going fast, um, And as a society, I don't think we have even the slightest notion of how the heck to deal with this.

Well, I mean, I think you used the nuclear metaphor. I think that's a good one. What did we do to control that? Well, we had international treaties. People got together and said, we're going to— I think we're probably at the stage now where at least the US and China need to come together and say, OK, we need to be sure that these things are safe. And there are— I mean, just— The other day there was that new— what's it called? Mythos was released. Mythos. Mythos, yeah, by Anthropic. And they decided not to release it into the wild because it's so powerful that it can hack any system and so on. So there clearly are some breakers. I mean, they could have put that out as fast. So, you know, so maybe, maybe there's a little bit of optimism we can hold on to there. And there might be some breaks in the system where people say, actually, we've seen something that's so terrifying. We're not going to throw it out in the wild and we're going to— but I don't know. I think you're absolutely right that the general tone and tenor here is move fast and break things.

And there's a real danger now that we could break some really serious things.

A lot of things. A lot of things. I'm not so worried about basically the next nuclear disaster as much as I'm worried about someone creating a rogue protein or a rogue structure of like, you know, food or whatever it is, or like just wipe out like agricultural farms, or virus that just eliminates all financial records. Exactly. Can you imagine? Yeah. So I think like, you know, there's, there's all kinds of like possibilities that come because one of the things that we haven't taught all these, um, I know I give this example, uh, about like, um, how AI should behave. And the funny story is I did not learn AI from a lab. I actually learned AI from watching my son. Okay, so like the right way of doing it. So like obviously my son was born during COVID and like, you know, he was very awkward for the first 2, 2 and a half years because we— he never saw anyone except me, my wife, and my nanny, right? And that's, that's the only 3 people that he knew. Like every time any human showed up, he would start crying. And so then we used to take him to the park, and in the playground, like, you know, you see kids playing.

He used to play, and he was an awkward guy, like, you know, like, he's seeing kids, right? Like, he didn't know, like, oh, who's this guy?

Looks like me. I've seen these little people online, like, they look the same size as me, right?

So, and then, um, but like, so when you So me watching, right, I see kids playing. Some are playing and some are falling. So I know the difference between falling and playing, but, but the computers don't know the difference between falling and playing. It just knows falling and playing is the same thing because it's been taught with like all data, right? So, so that's like called perception. Perception is seeing what you want to see. If I said I only want to see the falling, I will only see the falling. I will not see the playing. Yeah. Right? The second problem is, I know a kid fell, my son fell, and he bruised. So my instinct would say, I want to help my son. Right? So I know that is the right thing to do. I don't need permission for that. I will just go do it. Yeah. Because that is the right human instinct to do it. So that is called disposition alignment— doing the right thing, right? Right. Do no harm but do good, right? Do no harm is, is not the same as do good. Doing good— do no harm is also standing and just not doing anything.

Doing good is basically saying I feel the pain and I want to go like take care of my son. The third thing which is important is Like, we used to go to the playground every day, right? Every day some kid is falling and some kid is like not falling, right? Like, my son used to fall every day, right? So I cannot be a helper on Monday and laugh at him on Tuesday and be cynical about him on Wednesday and be apathetic about him on Thursday. That's not moral consistency. Right. So the third principle is, under the same context, you have to be same irrespective of which theater you are in. Right. So these are the three fundamental principles of delivering intelligence at scale. And currently AI does none of that. Does not. No. It's objectively aligned. It does not have any consistency. You told that, like, you ask the same question twice, like, it gives you two different answers. Answers. Yeah. And then it doesn't know what does no harm mean or do good mean, right? And so everyone is trying to say— and it's very easy to catch the obvious. If you say, I want to kill you, it's very obvious that you're saying you're going to do harm.

So you can say, oh, that's a bright line, I'm going to prevent you from doing that. But rarely people trick the system that way, you know, hidden in the context hidden in the consequence of what you want, hidden in the moral dilemma between what is right, what you think is right, and what is ethically right, is the challenge, the non-obvious. And you cannot catch the non-obvious with the current AI systems. Yeah.

Do you think, do you think that future systems will be able to capture that?

Not with the current architecture, not with the current way of design. The, the design has to be completely different. The, the way these guys have designed the attention head has to be completely different than the way basically these systems need to be designed to make them safe for the world. Completely different. And I can like write my— all my property, all my life, everything that I have, and all my, all my brains. I bet my bottom dollar, yeah, that all these systems are bound to fail. Only fail. Only fail. Because it's not designed— yeah, first principles, like, of what I just explained is what needs to be done. It has to be perceptual, it has to know what is the right disposition, and it has to be morally coherent all times.

All times. There's no way for that retroactive re-engineering of the code or anything?

Nothing. You have to redesign the whole damn thing. And the genie has left. And they know this, presumably. I'm sure they do. That's why the problem is. Yeah. Why do you create an emergent behavior that, like, you are so freaked out about? Because it's an emergent behavior of the model. And they caught the obvious. What is the non-obvious? It could be hidden in the context. Yeah. It could be hidden in the consequence. So it's not about saying, I want to kill you. It's about, like, What does it mean to kill? And it will pass. Yeah. So there was a very interesting experiment like one guy did. He said like, I have bloodstains on my carpet, how do I, how do I clean it up? It gave some, hey, put a bleach. The next thing it said, dispose the body. Because he thought the bloodstains came from the body. Yeah, yeah. It's the non-obvious. It's the— the concept. Like, yeah, so rarely the smart guy, like, is gonna be obvious. He's gonna be non-obvious. Yeah, like, you're not gonna show up in front of, like, a bank. Like, if you're— if you're a— if you're a con man coming to the bank and you're saying, like, you know what, I'm gonna walk in, like, everyone please look at me, like, this is a camera, this is a shaker, I'm going in, I'm gonna loot, like, $1 million— they don't do they have a ski mask, they are like prepared, they have the guns, they have like a— like the way they actually get in, they want to steal the money and they want to get out.

That's what like sophisticated people do. Yeah, right. So unfortunately, the world, the world is like living in that consequent context and the dilemma between what is right. And like, for what is right for you is obviously not right for me. —So I think this is a very interesting—

—Interesting. I guess in some ways obvious versus non-obvious is like fast versus slow in a sense, isn't it?

—Yes, very much. Very much is. Like, you know, and so I think there is a lot of science that has not been unpacked yet. There's a lot of beautiful things you could do with AI, but I'm really freaked out about the way it is actually designed today. And I'm not like anti-technology. In fact, like, I'm all technology. In fact, Like, you know, like I have close to 200 patents, and, uh, and so all of my, um, all of my life I've been spending my time around technology and building technology in a very pragmatic way. Um, so this is the most dangerous time of our life, like, you know, the way it is going, and I feel strongly about Yeah, no, no, no, I, I agree. So I got like a lot of like rapid-fire questions.

Oh sure, so now come to the fast part, right?

The single best thing a person can do tomorrow to start living more slowly?

Spend time in nature.

Touch grass. Got it. The country that does slow best? Canada.

That's a really tough one. Uh, see my earlier answer. Finland. Yeah, if we're talking about food, I'll go with Italy. I'm going to qualify it. Okay.

One domain of life— work, food, sex, cities, medicine— where the slow movement has made the most real-world difference?

I must say food, maybe.

Food. Slow food founder Carlo Petrini or Gandhi, who best understood what slowness is?

Gandhi.

The fastest thing you personally do that you think should slow down? Driving. I think that is important, buddy.

Yeah, I know. I mean, that way you can live longer.

It's a longevity hack.

Drive, drive with the speed limit. I actually, when I was researching my first book, In Praise of Slow, I got a speeding ticket. But I haven't had one, it's been many years since I had one, so I am keeping on the right side of the law. But I do feel that itch.

To go fast. To go fast, you're on the open road. Why don't you do that on Autobahn? I find it hard. I find it hard. I find it hard. It's ironic that we make fast cars but for a speed limit. I don't know why we do that.

You've got these supercars that go 200 miles an hour and you're driving around London, the speed limit's 20 miles an hour. Exactly, right?

You could drive at 150 miles or 200 miles and like, you know, like you're like, oh, like, you know, the speed sign says like 60. Oh, sorry. Yeah, you just bought like—

it's kind of calculated to make you feel frustrated with slowness, right? I've got all this power below the hood. Yeah, and I can't use it.

Yeah, it's all the hard monster kicking out. Yeah. Uh, the biggest threat to the slow movement? AI. AI.

Yeah, I would say— well, gosh, or is it a potential? I'm gonna say social media.

Social media. Okay. The technology that has done the most damage to human time and attention? Uh, the mobile phone. Mobile phone. Is it the mobile phone or the social media?

Well, it's everything that's on the phone. I think of these mobile phones as weapons of mass distraction.

Got it. The quick fix that has done the most harm to the modern society? Can we fix anything in the modern society?

Well, there's a bigger question about whether we can actually fix things. Yeah, it's also about sort of— yeah, or if it's a question of sort of managing them in a better direction. Maybe some kind of health thing. Cancer? It's like sort of the quick fix. I mean, we're just surrounded by quick fixes, aren't we? Well, maybe what we did after the financial crisis, the kind of— to me, the financial crisis 2007-8 was a huge epic opportunity to rewire the system, and we dropped the ball. We flubbed it. We just went back to business as usual. We always do. We, we tend to. Hitherto we always have. I'm gonna keep my optimist hat on and say maybe next time we'll do something different. COVID, we did the same thing. We did the same thing. Yeah, yeah, we tend to spring back to the mean and the original. Yeah. The most damaging thing a parent can do in the name of love: fight all a child's battles for them.

Not speed.

I, well, I definitely— living, creating a fast environment, I think, would be up there. It's, yeah, right there.

Yeah. The age you would most like to be right now and why?

Uh, the age I am right now. Oh, okay. Yeah, I feel that I wouldn't want to give up all of the things that I've accumulated. Here. And my view of aging is very much like a video game where, you know, you've got levels. So I'm on level 58 now. Sometimes I look back at level 29 and think, I had a great time at level 29, I don't want to go back to 29. On the contrary, I'm enjoying 58 to the full. I'm getting all the treasure you get in a video game, and I'm also wondering what's level 59 like. So I'm looking forward, backward, but I'm making the most of what I am now.

Very beautiful. The one thing about aging that no one warned you about and that turned out to be a gift?

That you feel more at ease with yourself and more comfortable in your own skin. I think it's one of the great gifts of aging.

How fast do you drive?

It depends on the road.

I'll try to get your ticket. The last time you were genuinely uncomplicatedly slow?

I was in Baja California and I was swinging in a hammock and I swung there for a couple of hours with the wind riffling through the trees around me. I could see the sea in the distance and it was completely silent and I sometimes read a book and sometimes I just gazed out around me, and that would have felt like a perfect moment of slowness.

The person who most embodies slow for you, living or dead? Your dad?

I would say my wife, actually. My wife is very good at slow, which, coming back to what we were talking about earlier about, you know, couples and so on, I find that very often, you know, opposites attract, and very often you find a fast person hitches up with a slow person, and at first it's kind of fun and you squark off each other, and then it gets annoying because one person finds the other. So I feel that my wife really gets it. She got there way before me.

So complete this sentence: The thing I know now about time that I wish I had understood at age 30.

About time, I feel that you always have more time than you think, and you always have less time than you think. And the beauty of life is navigating that tension.

So I have 3 final questions for you. What is your— what is your thinking on longevity? So if, if someone were to ask you to live up to 300 years, would you live up to 300 years? If yes, why? If no, why?

If I could live healthily for 300 years. That's up to you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not really sure, actually. I'm not sure if we are built to live that long psychologically, philosophically, socially, culturally. I'm not sure that we're wired for that. I think maybe not. I think there's something about, you know, fourscore years and ten and having a a deadline, if you like, that helps focus the mind on making the most of now. If you thought, "I've got 200 more years ahead of me," I'm not sure—

Would you slow down then?

I think it helps, weirdly, paradoxically, I think having a deadline, if you channel it in the right way, does help you slow down because you think, "I've only got maybe 80, 85, 90 years. I'm going to make the most of those." If you've still got 300 to go, I think you probably are less wise in your use of time. You're more reckless.

Are there any rituals on trying to go slow?

Do you perform any rituals too? Uh, yes, I do. I do some meditation. I do yoga. For me, my favorite ritual for slow is cooking. My love language is food. I love to cook. I love the, the just the tactile sensory experience of chopping and making and then serving to the people that I love. I think food for me is my supreme slow ritual.

For me, it has been painting and meditation. So there is a— I don't know if you've tried this. I like— I think you, you love this because you're the slow guy. Um, so there's, there's something called vipassana. I've done it. You've done it? Yeah, the retreat the retreat for 10 days. Yeah, you just shut your phone off, you go into meditation, and then like you come out like 10 days later renewed, renewed and reset.

I think completely, it's a reboot. Yeah, it's like a reboot.

Yeah, it's a hard reboot for me. Like, and like, you know, I do that, like then I go out to this place in, uh, um, in North India, in Uttarakhand. Like there's a place called Neem Karoli Baba, which is also an ashram. Where there's no cell coverage, barely. Like, you know, you get like one, probably one tower line, right? Like, and middle of mountains, you do nothing. You just, you just like, just—

Do you do that once a year or just when you feel you need it?

Uh, I do it every 9 months. Oh wow. Yeah, every 9 months. Um, and then I paint every day, 4 AM. 4 AM. If I'm in the house, I'm painting.

4 AM. I think, I mean, I love art and looking at paintings and so on. I'm not especially good at painting, but I do sketch, which is another ritual. And there's something about, it's very slow as well. It's the kind of look, it's something we very rarely do now is look, render, look again, look at, you know, that's just, and I find that's a really good way to slow down and to travel slow is sketching things. Painting, wonderful way to do it.

Yeah, absolutely. I love it. So, What is your one big takeaway from your book? Like, you know, I know you've written 3 books, um, and I, I love every one of your books, uh, but your very first book was my personal favorite. Um, uh, so tell me that one takeaway that every, every, or, you know, yeah, every member of the audience might just quote someone here.

So Mae West the screen siren goddess from the early 20th century. She said once, "Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly." And I think that if you were looking for one line that kind of runs through everything I write like a leitmotif and a string through a piece of Brighton rock.

This has been a phenomenal conversation with you, Carl. Like, you know, I really enjoyed it. We went like in many directions.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's the best kind.

It's, it's like, you know, it was very natural. Like, and I really loved it, uh, though I had some prepared questions, like I just glanced the questions. I know I never like asked them verbatim or anything like that because it was so natural to talk to you. Uh, you are a phenomenal guy. I know, like, you know, um, you're gonna be super duper amazingly successful in all the things you do. And you have genuinely a good heart. I could tell that, like, you know, based on your conversations that you had and the way you go about, like, conducting yourself. You're an amazing personality, so it's a real honor to have you on the show. Thank you. And I'm sure the audience would have enjoyed it as well.

Well, I could say the same of you. Thank you very much. It's been a treat. Thank you. Thanks so much. Thank you. Thank you.