The Thinking Class
Her answer, animated: two minutes of her own words, with captions.
Background
Dr. Sahar Yousef is a cognitive neuroscientist who teaches at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, where her course is called Becoming Superhuman: The Science of Productivity and Performance. In an episode of The Diary of a CEO published in October 2026, she talked with Steven Bartlett for more than two hours about focus and memory.
Near the end, about an hour and fifty-three minutes in, the talk turns from what one person can do with their attention to what a whole species might lose. It runs about three minutes. What follows is a summary of it, with one line quoted and the full episode below.
The Everest
She calls it the Everest for our species. Digital dependence, she says, is the great climb ahead of us, and she means it. Technology, artificial intelligence especially, could bring advances in everything from medicine to economics if it is used well. Used badly, it comes with a great number of downsides.
The relationship is what matters. How we relate to technology, in her view, is critical to whether our species continues to thrive on this planet.
Her fear
Bartlett asks what she is afraid of. Her answer is something she says she has heard about, somewhat disturbingly, in real meetings she has sat in with leaders in the AI space.
“What we are creating is a future where there will be a thinking class.”Dr. Sahar Yousef, The Diary of a CEO
A very small subset. The thinking class, as she describes it, is a small part of the human population that is educated and has the attention span and the ability to focus to think critically on its own: to question things and come up with ideas. She says she has heard it called that, “in a creepy way.”
Everyone else. That small group runs the world. The rest are not expected to think; their job is to do as they are told. It is far easier, she says, to control a population that is distracted and not thinking. They are not awake. That, she says, is her fear, and it is what motivates her every day.
Her Everest
To show what a healthy relationship looks like. Her own climb, she says, is to illuminate a healthy, intentional relationship between minds and machines, so that we don’t lose our meaning. Right after, she adds that she is obsessed with giving agency back to people and waking them up: if we stay this distracted, we will live unintentionally, a life we don’t like living.
The whole conversation
The full episode, 2 hours 16 minutes. The passage starts at 1:52:52: start there on YouTube.
Worth knowing
She doesn’t name the leaders or the meetings, and she offers the thinking class as a fear, not a forecast with figures behind it. The animated clip shortens her pauses and leaves out a false start and the words “in my humble opinion”; her full answer is in the episode at 1:52:52.
Copyright. The episode is © The Diary of a CEO. This page summarizes one passage and quotes one line; the animated clip uses about two minutes of her answer, credited on screen throughout. The whole conversation is on The Diary of a CEO’s own channel.
Go to the source
The full episode on YouTube →
“No.1 Neuroscientist Reveals How To Unlock Superhuman Focus & Perfect Memory!” on The Diary of a CEO, from the start of this passage.
Dr. Sahar Yousef at Berkeley →
Her faculty page.
How I Use AI →
On this site: the three levels of artificial intelligence, an essay by Travis Hellstrom.