Practical Tips for Better Digital Habits

In the previous episode, you heard from neuroscientist David Eagleman We talked about brain rot, neuroplasticity, and whether spending too much time on our phones is making us dumber David doesn't seem to think so He considers himself a cyber optimist It would be very hard for me to accept any argument that somehow as a species, we are getting dumber After speaking with David, I wanted to dig a little deeper into the multitude of ways in which technology may be impacting our brains. So I called up someone who would give me a research perspective along with some tangible ways to actually combat brain rots But the days when I'm like you know, on my laptop all day All I want to do is like slither out of my chair across the living room to the couch so I can look at another screen. You know what I mean Manouch amaroti is a longtime journalist, host of NPR's Ted Radio Hour, and the author of two books, Bard in Brilliant and most recently Body Electric She spent years researching and reporting how our technology changes our bodies, brains, and behavior by running her own experiments. She was part of these experiments herself with thousands of people She's driven by her curiosity to, in her words Find ways for us to feel less like crap In my conversation with Manche, we talk about the recent lawsuit that found two tech giants, Meta and YouTube, responsible for designing addictive, harmful platforms for kids And we dive into the research that illustrates what technology is actually doing to our attention, our memory, and our bodies. Here, we go Again Again Hey, I'm Calpen and this is Here We Go Again, a show that takes today's trends and headlines and asks Why does history keep repeating itself This is an IiHart podcast Guaranteed human If you love audiobooks or you just really love a great story, I want to tell you about my other podcast, Earsay, the Audible and IHart Audiobook Club Every episode, I nerd out with amazing guests and dive into the best new audioobooks from Audible. Sci fi, comedy, romance, thrillers, you name it No reading required. Just listening Beause let's be honest, having a great story read to you is kind of the next level Check out your say on the IiHart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts OndDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team or bridging cash flow gaps, ONDeck' loans up to four hundred thousand dollars make it happen fast. 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New users can get five hundred bonus spins in their first month on games like Huff and lots of puff and more. It's simple and rewarding to play your casino favorites. Download and play today. Must be twenty one plus and physically present in New Jersey. mininimum wagering within five days required to unlock bonuses. Full terms and wagering requirements at horseshoe onnlinecasino dot com slash promos If you are someone you know is a gambling problem, call one eight hundred gambler Hello. How are you G, how are you I'm really well, yeah I am ing myself I'm a nooe Zamaroti and I've been a journalist for decades, or I will say, I am a nooe Zamaroti and I am trying to figure out how technology is changing your body, your brain, and your behavior Well, I'll just dive in because it's been a busy couple of months, I guess. I guess it's never not. This meta and YouTube lawsuit. So for our listeners Landmark decision in a Los Angeles jury found that Ma, Instagram and YouTube were responsible for designing platforms that were intentionally meant to be addictive and harmful to kids And I guess, as a journalist who's been studying how technology impacts humans, what was your initial reaction to this lawsuit and what did it mean to you No one ever feels bad for Meta, right? No one's like, Oh my god, I'm so sorry. that sucks for you. ever. I mean, I was kind of shocked to be honest because as you know, we have seen no movement in Congress regarding putting parameters around any of the tech companies, what they are able to do. And part of that has been because this debate over the First Amendment and seectction two hundred thirty, right? This idea that If we can't control what people put on them, we're not responsible. So what the lawyers did is they had a really interesting tactic was what as you said, they looked at the design, like infinite scroll, algorithmically deciding what you see based on what you tell them, sort of personalizing the feed to the point the prosecutors argued that people were becoming addicted, that they were it was a consumer hazard, essentially I think it's extraordinary that it took us this long to like actually say we want to hold tech companies accountable. However I think taking one person, one young woman's experience and deciding that, this company was responsible for her mental health problems. This is not going to be a popular opinion I think it's questionable because I've been talking to a lot of the researchers who have said, you know The worry is by putting all the blame and onus on the tech companies, we're missing the bigger picture. Yes, kids are sadder. But if we're like, great, take away their phones, ban social media We aren't going do the other things that they need, which is not only is there a teen mental health crisis, there's a grownup mental health crisis. And the number one thing that correlates to teen well being is how well their grownups are doing. And the grownups aren't doing that great either. Do I feel bad for the tech companies? No, should they be let off the hook? Absolutely, freickaking not. Was this quite an interesting legal maneuver that was pulled, that the design mechanisms were addictive? fascinating. And I'm not sorry it worked, but I worry that we're like, great, cleaned up that mess. now we go on. And I just don't think that policy is the only issue here. And also, where's the money going to go? I really hope it goes into more places for kids to hang out, more after school programs, more ways of connecting kids To your point about, you know feeling like, well, people are just going to feel like, well, we've solved that now and let's move on. What are you seeing as fixes for, you know, like you said, the adults aren't doing well either are we Scapegoating Our addiction to these things way too much is there Dare I say and sound like a right winger, what is the role of personal responsibility here, both for parents and for individuals I assume that's part of a very fair conversation around this stuff. Absolutely. I mean, okay, so my obsession has been We talk so much about the mental health issues that there are because of our tech use, but I think we're leaving out the actual physical effects of our tech use. And rather than like shaming kids, like get off your phone, we need to look at like, okay, instead of telling them not to do something, what should we be telling them to do? What opportunities can we offer them I mean, you can't be an adult in the world without being on a screen these days. So how do we begin to coach them at a young age to be able to manage themselves the risk of sounding like a right winger, unfortunately. some of it, it does come down to personal responsibility. That is the state of the United States today. We cannot look to policymakers to fix things for us at least Not as of now. Yeah, sure So I've sort of fell down this rabbit hole over the pandemic because I was like, I don't understand I'm sitting on like all my screens all day long. I am not moving. Why do I feel so tired at the end of the day? Like my question was where is my energy actually going And around this time, I actually read some really interesting research by a physiologist at Columbia University. His name is Keith Diaz. And Keith's job, like he has said made it his mission to figure out like what is the least amount of movement that the human body needs so that our like screen filled sedentary lives don't? kill us early And he had found an answer, which I thought was amazing. He found that just five minutes of gentle movement every half hour, offset a lot of the harms, blood pressure spikes, glucose spikes, exhaustion, all of those things I was like, I saw this and I was like, well, if that's the answer You know, that's so simple Oh wait, that means I would have to get up every half hour to like move. I called Keith and I was like, listen I think you found a solution. Do you think people can do it? He's like as a practical. Yeah. he's like, I did it in the lab, whatever I was like, well why don't we I was like, well, why don't we ask people? So he and I partnered and we did this was very exciting for me. NPR in Columbia partnered to do a clinical trial. So we got twenty thousand people to be the resident weirdo at the office on campus in their families who stood up every half hour and like moved side to side like this for five minutes. or whatever they did, they took the dog out, they vacuumed, they just got more movement in their lives And the results were extraordinary I should tell you first, I actually went and was a guinea pig in his lab So like I was there for two days. So one day I sat on my ass for eight hours straight and they measured my blood sugar, my blood pressure, my mood, my ability to focus, all of this stuff Needless to say it was pretty bad Then I came back a second day and they measured all those things, but I took these five minute breaks on a treadmill. And it was two miles an hour. We're not like talking like sprinting or burpees or anything, like a stroll My blood sugar was cut in half The day I was there, my blood pressure dropped by five points. I So much better, I was able to focus and concentrate. I wasn't depressed. I actually went home and had enough energy to make dinner for my kids It was extraordinary. So I felt great asking twenty thousand people like try it. This was my experience. giveive it a shot you just I feel like we hear a lot about how there aren't enough studies on these things, but you're even if it's not longitudinal, like what you're describing is obviously it does mean something You said this was right after COVID His original lab findings came out in twenty twenty one, and we did our clinical trial in twenty twenty three. So Those findings are being peer reviewed, but I ended up for my book that's coming out Body Electric. I went through all of the stories and the data that like twenty thousand people laid on us. and I tried to figure out like what did they do? Was it individual responsibility as we've been talking about, or were they able to change the system in some way You know, if you're a professor You're running a three hour like workshop. Yeah. You can get your students to stand up, maybe not every half hour, but do it every forty five minutes an hour. like you have the power to do this. or if you're the boss, if you have walking meetings or walking Zoom calls That's within your control. And we actually Keith has shown that productivity did not suffer because of this. It actually rose for participants by like not a ton, but a little bit. It didn't all those interruptions did not make people less productive. So it's this mind shift that Oh my God, I'm really working as long as I'm sitting and I'm locked in for as long as possible. And that's just not the case Can you back up and kind of slowly walk us through What did you personally have to do in this study? Be I find it so interesting. I mean, the results are fascinating, but I'm also curious about like the methodology and And what your role was in getting it up and running. It can't be easy having a sample size of twenty thousand people. No, no, no. Well, o, so first of all, we couldn't measure like the glucose levels and blood pressure of twenty thousand people. And I should also say this was a self selecting group like public radio nerds who clearly were feeling some pain that they joined us. So those are the caveats there. But what we ended up doing was we would text them and have surveys that We gave them instructions. You could choose a cohort. you could choose to move for five minutes every half hour every hour or every two hours. and then we sent them surveys constantly. And that's a pretty standard format for big group studies that were going on. And then we were able to measure things like fatigue. Fatigue was the people who, well, I should say, the people who said, yes, I'm going to do this for two weeks embarked on it eighty percent of them stuck with it for the full two weeks And we saw an average of twenty five percent reduction in fatigue A lot of people talked about like their back feeling better. Like, can you measure that? No, but they felt like their back was better. There were people who felt like they could concentrate more. They got rid of aches and pains. They like had energy in the evening to go for a big walk with their kids as opposed to coming home and lying on the couch.ow. Becauseuse I don't know about you, but the days when I'm like you know, on my laptop all day All I want to do is like slither out of my chair across the living room to the couch so I can look at another screen. Yeah's very difficult to motivate to do anything physical for me if I'm having that kind of a day And it's not because you're a bad person. It's it's also because a bad person. Well, you might be Other people are not. It's their biology as well. And that's what I also wanted to understand. like what is going on in your body when you sit there That especially like where does the screen come into this? That was my other question too. And you want to should we nerd out Please. Okay. so there's Really interesting reasons. Okay, so first of all, when you're sitting like this, you got to think of your legs as like kinked garden hoses. Okay You know how like with a garden hose, like the pressure gets backed up and you're like, o oh, this thing's gonna blow. So when you're sitting, you kink yourself at your knees and your hips and that keeps blood flow from doing its things, circulating. And when you don't have blood flow that diminishes the amount of oxygen that gets sent to your brain. What do you need to think, focus, feel good? You need oxygen. Okay. So that explains one thing Another thing, your leg muscles do so much work. When they are stimulated and activated, they're the things that push that oxygen up to your brain. It's like you need that sort of If they're just stagnant, they don't pull out the sugar from your blood and they don't push the oxygen to your brain So there's that. Another one, sitting like this compresses your diaphragm. So if you go for long hours sitting like this, you're an actor, you know, you need Big air, right? Well, we start taking short breaths, We get less oxygen to the brain, more CO two builds up, all those things Okay, but then here comes the screen part, which I think is really interesting. And this is a new area of research. It's a sense called interception So you've heard of like perception or intception, but this is interroception. And so the idea is your internal sensing of what is going on in your body. So that can be subconscious. You just took a drink of your selzer. Your body was like, yo, thirsty, do it, right? I get sweaty, take off my jacket But also we can be conscious of that like, ooh, I am feeling anxious right now. Maybe it's time to get off Instagram O oh my Godd, my eyes are stinging and killing me. I need to step away and take a break from the screen All of these things we don't pay attention to those messages that our body is sending us when we're like staring at a screen and so into what we're doing, we are I mean, this has happened to me where my foot has fallen asleep after hours of sitting in a weird position. Or, oh my God, I have to pee so bad when was the last time I peed. I don't know because I've been on Zoom for meetings back to back to back to back So this idea that we lose sort of touch with what our body is telling us it needs because we're listening so carefully to what the screen is telling us it needs for us to do. And how much of that I'm always curious about the neuroscience or the the sort of quote unquote addictive nature of it is is that, you know, with the Let's take nicotine or smoking, right? I feel like almost exactly what you described, you could say the same about a cigarette, right? Somebody who is addicted to smoking,, however they took it up, they're like, I know it's bad for me. I know it's causing all these issues I can't go for a hike without wheezing but I'm still smoking Are there comparisons that you see or is that just a totally left field question do see comparisons. I think where the comparisons fall apart is that smoking will fucking kill you, right? And like These things won't kill you putting aside, you know other lawsuits regarding kids who've been coached by their chat bots to take their own life. But generally, billions of people every day use their devices for good to talk to their mom, to make sure they get their groceries to exist in the world Are there some things that are problematic? Yes. Does it show addictive tendencies? Yes. shouldhould we use the word addiction? experxts are still debating that idea. But you know just things like I learned about something called dark patterns. So dark patterns are where software designers will replace something in an app And you're so used to with muscle memory hitting a certain button, but maybe they want you to try a new feature. So they throw the new feature in the part like in Instagram when they introduced reels. like used to hit there to posting a picture. They moved reels there. so everyone was like, shit, what is this? Oh, what is this new? Oh, and they made you try reels essentially. You know, you know how to get on a bike and you just go, Well, you know how to post on Instagram if you do it enough too. So just sort of like taking over these neural pathways for design reasons. You can also do that for good, and that's why it's tricky, right? Like we can nudge people to get more exercise or you know, eat better food or per breaths I think that is what makes this such a difficult conversation in that it's A, very personalized. Every person is different and that it's not black and white. S tech is good, some tech is bad. It's tricky. ONDeck is built to back small businesses, like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team or bridging cash flow gaps, ONDeck loans up to four hundred thousand dollars help make it happen fast. Rated A plus by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five star trrust pilot reviews, ONDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at onndDeck dot com d Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OndDeck or Celtic Bank. OndDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amount subject to lender approval. When it comes to looking your best, Beach Bum tanning does it better. Beeachbum delivers advanced sun and spray tanning, luxury skincare, and an elevated salon experience designed around you. It's why so many guests trust Beachbum for flawless color and real confidence And now Beachbum is expanding wellness services to many locations. with Rd light therapy and infrared sauna, with more on the way. Rcharge your body, refresh your skin. Ret your day. Beachbum isn't just hanning. It's full spectrum wellness. Visit beachbum. com to find a location near you. Horseshoe Online Casino has a special offer for you, New Jersey. New users can get five hundred bonus spins in their first month on games like huff and lots of puff and more. It's simple and rewarding to play your casino favorites. Download and play today. Must be twenty one plus and physically present in New Jersey. mininimum wagering within five days required to unlock bonuses. Full terms and wagering requirements at horseshoe onnlinecasino dot com slash promos. If you are someone you know is a gambling problem, call one eight hundred gambler First pipe, A dead water heater The AC calling it quits. Who do you call? Home Serve is an easy way to handle unexpected home repairs. with plans covering stuff basic homeowners' insurance usually won't. Instead of scrambling for a contractor, you make one call to get the repair process started. Join the millions of customers who trust Homeerve right now. Go to homeomeserve dot com slash podcast for fifty percent less your first year. That's Homerve dot com slash podcast Svings compared to rewal price v in Florida So first thing I do in the morning, like I assume most of us Alarm goes off, it's my phone alarm. It's not even a separate you know, alarm on a side table or anything. So you reach for your phone to turn it off, but then obviously you're grabing your phone and like I'm not on Twitter, I'm not on TikTok, but I do still like I open at Instagram to look at the dogs. O. O I'll go to NPR and just read, you know, NPR Al Jazeera, the Guardian, whatever, sort of just, what's the top Really first thing in the morning. Terrible way to wake up is my point Why do I do this? What is? A, what's the obviously some of it is just like, well, you just need better habits. whyy don't you plug your phone up across the room and then you can just go brush your teeth? What is that scrolling due to our brains. Does it do something or is it like you were saying earlier, is it more the physical memory or is there something neurological? Okay, so I want to put a caveat out there.. I am not a neuroscientist. However What I doodcast Nody's listen to a podcast for real. What I have done though, is talk to neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists, physiologists teechnologists, all the people doing allud theologies. The number one thing that I've come to is Easy Isn't it easier for you to like tap something and have thoughts broadcast into your brain rather than lying there And thinking about things and being like, shit, I have a lot to do today Or man, oh my God, did I really say that last night or like you know, having thoughts isn't always pleasant. Maybe sometimes people like you come up with incredible characters and it's lots of fun up in there. But I think for a lot of people, they've lost the muscle or they never got it to begin with because it's just so easy with boredom comes discomfort. and it's really being able to sit with that discomfort takeake the time to either work your way through it, reach for help think through, find the answers. And what we know is that's what happens when you get bored As for what happens when you scroll, It's very stimulating, right? It's super stimulating. One of the most fascinating research that I learned about was from an informatics researcher. This informatics is the study of computers and humans and how they interact So Gloria Mark, she studies how interruptions work with people on their devices And she found that like if you have an hour where you're constantly being interrupted by pings on your phone and messages and you don't have Twitter notifications, but for people who do or Instagram notifications, All those interruptions, your brain will get into a pattern that you're used to being interrupted. So even if all those interruptions go away the next hour you will start to Wait for it, gal. Interrupt yourself You get stuck So you're like, you know that I call it like my cracked out feeling where I'm like, gotot a check, gota check. What's the weather? Oh, my god, did I get another check? Actually, I checked everything and I'm still checking everything and I really don't feel like going on Pinterest, but I'm doing it anyway. like I see that in myself and I'm like, okay, just blow it down, girlfriend, like chill it out. And because I know what happens, like that uses all that switching uses a ton of cognitive energy swwitch switch switch, you're using glucose, glucose, glucose, more oxygen and then you start to lose the activity in the part of your brain where you make decisions, you go over to the side that's just like this, that side where you're not even really looking at what you're scrolling at. That part like is like, I got you. You can't make any more good decisions. So I'm going to take over for you. We're fine here. J scroll, just scroll and chill And that's where you're like, you know, binging on shit that you don't really want to look at, but you're doing it anyway because like the thought of meditating sounds like ridiculously hard or even just getting up and going to bed Oh yeah, yeah Yeah, how many times are you just like, why am I doing? I could be asleep for an extra forty minutes? This is ridiculous. Which would be delightful Is it as delightful Can I really get up? I don't think so. That's because you're youre literally you've depleted the energy in your body, No wonder. So this experiment you ran a little over ten years ago, Bd and brilliant. Oh yeah withith your audience. canan you walk us through that one And I kind of love it because like twenty sixteen is back again. So I feel like I was a little ahead of my time in terms of trends.. So this was for me and it's I thought I think it sounds quaint now, but I guess if you were like ten years old And now you're twenty, you're like, wait, what? that makes total sense. But anyway, I'm like, God, I've been talking about this for so long But I just was confused. I was like, I had this feeling like there was sand in my brain. I can't It's not wasn't writer's block. It was like a It was like a stuck feeling. I can't really explain it. And I started to think like, well, okay, so what is different about my life? It was twenty fifteen. What is different about my life now and say like, twenty ten Well I didn't have the iPhone because I'm not an early adopter. So I realized like every single moment in my day when I was like waiting in line for coffee or sitting on the subway or all those times where I would just kind of like space out I had something to do. I could be productive, I could what I had to do next. I could look at the headlines, I could text my husband, I could look at like some cute pants that I might want to buy. There was constantly something to do. And it just made me wonder like, well, wait, what had been happening in my brain when I wasn't doing these things, like I was bd And we always like I grew up thinking like, oh my god, only boring people get bored. I was like, well, maybe boredom was actually good. So I went on this journey to understand what happens when you get bored. And at that time, Mind wandering research was hot So this was a thing. I love finding the nerds who are like, oh yes, you're referring to mind wandering and the default mode in your brain. I'm like, great, tell lay it on me. When you get bored, that can sort of lead you to your mind wandering, right? Like and clearly, you have this mind wandering tendency that can click in really fast, right? It's a network of your brain called the default mode, founded by a researcher named Marcus Reichl. And this can be like, you when you're folding socks and then you look down, you're like, Ohh, I folded all the socks. Look at me.. It's like when your body goes on autopilot and you're not like, I'm going to hit the tennis ball not meditation where you're not trying to have thoughts, where your mind just sort of goes where it wants to go in that default mode, this is where they think some of the most original thinking happens. It's where you're like, Oh, I saw that guy wearing that shirt, but that was pretty similar to one from like nineteen thirty two and then you like Oh, come up with a new fashion idea, like creativity, right? You take one idea, you take another one, you smash them together, you create something new You also do something which I love autobiographical planning. So this is literally looking at your life, taking notes of like the highs and lows, telling yourself your story, your narrative to how you got to be sitting here right now and then casting into the future, like time travel, like Well, well what' I mean, that could be like the next hour, that could be next week, that could be ten years from now. and you're setting goals and then you're figuring out like, okay, well how am I going do that? I guess I could go to college. Do I need to go to college? I don't know. Like Ray all of these things that make up fororming a life Pretty basic, right? But if you're not doing it No wonder you feel bl It's hard work. It is not easy. It is uncomfortable And if you dig deeper, there are actually several types of mind wandering. So there's the kind where you ruminate and you're like, person. I never should have said that. I suck. partart's not good, but there's also positive constructive daydreaming, which is that original thinking, problem solving, creative thinking, autobiographical planning My theory was you can coach yourself to be like gettingetting bored feels uncomfortable or for some of the younger people in our study, they were like, I have no idea what you're talking about. I have never been bored in my life. Okay. I was like, okay, so we're all going to do it together for a week. We're gonna get more bored. You're going to understand the science of it. You're going to understand the history of it. You're gonna to understand sort of why things have been designed the way that they have, because at that time, this whole idea of making money off of your attention span was relatively new. And then like see what happens. We got you. And so we did it for a week, twenty thousand of us W. G thousand people. Okay. Yeah. And we actually also so this was before phones could measure like how much time you spend on your phone So we like contacted this guy who like white labeled his app for us so we could measure our time on our phones. And like we didn't cut that much time off collectively But I think like some scientists who I worked with were like, dude, do you know how hard it is to change someone's habits in five days? really hard. But if you got one person twenty thousand people to go for a walk without listening on their, you know, earbuds or not without checking their messages, that's like pretty big And so we just heard great stories from people like I finished my dissertation because I figured out what I needed to do at the end or like I started playing my guitar again or I reached out to my dad because I thought about it and I really just like really nice stuff. For those five days, what were the rules? Just no phones period? Well, we gamified, of course, Cal, 'cause you gott to like hitem, you know, you gotta take what you got, right So every day we gave them a challenge, like some way to try and like use their technology differently. So like one day was like Don't put your phone on your body. Don't hold it in your pocket Don't like hold it in your hand when you go to the bathroom because I know you do Put it on a table, tryry to let it live its own life for the day separate from you Another day was like, don't take a photo, like not one single photo. and just like observe Oh, I feel uncomfortable. This is when I would usually pull out my phone to take a picture. I'm not going to Is that good? Is that bad? No judgment. Like maybe you're like, fuck this, I really like taking photos. knock yourself out. It's more just like We are being experimented on non stop by these companies. So we kind of need to experiment for ourselves too. like what works for you and what doesn't? and it's going be different for everyone Was there a reason behind the reason? like why did you choose those specific challenges? And were there specific things that each one revealed about our relationship to our phones Each one was based on like, I'm a nerd, right? So I was like, there's new research into how taking photos at the time, how taking photos affects our memory So I wanted to understand that. And this idea of like outsourcing your memory to your phone, which You know At first you're like, that's terrible. You're not gonna have any memories of your life if you take only photos. but this's just not true, right? Like I use my phone to take a picture of where I parked so I don't forget where my car is, do you know what I mean? There are use cases. and I think for me, it's breaking it down to you saying like Is this a good use case? Do I want this? In fact, and then like go for it. if you're like You know what? I really just want to watch My niece blow out her candles and somebody also take photos. It's fine. I'm just gonna sit here and watch Be in it And that's fine too, you know? ONDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. 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There's no rushing to a class, no schedule to work around, and I can move when I want how I want whether that's a full workout or just ten minutes to research And I've noticed I actually listen to my body more. Some days I push, some days I slow down, but I'm more consistent because it fits into my life. Uformer comes with access to over a thousand instructed led workouts on the app, and your first three months are free. It's delivered to your door in under a week And honestly, it just makes taking care of yourself so much easier. Visit yourreformer. com That's yourreformer. com and use the code cry two hundred for two hundred dollars off your outright purchase. Your space, your pace, your reformer I think it's so interesting that the openness to the degrees of these things because I don't know if you feel this way as a New Yorker, but like it's tourist season coming up again. Like if you've got a meeting in in Dumbo or kind of anywhere in Manhattan Aside from like the just get out of the fucking sidewalk, just The picture looks better if you put your back up against the building anyway. so just get out of the sidewalk. But the God, we're so nasty. peopleeople listening to this they're going to be like, Ohh my go, N Yorkers really are awful. Well, that said, you ask any New Yorker for directions and they will happily help you. So you're fine. We also like to look like no at all so. Yes Yes exactly But let's say something like like I'm a big, I'm a big fan of mass transit in the city, especially the ferry Like you're on the ferry in the summer and I get they like, I'm glad there are tourists on the ferry, a great way to see the city. whether it's here, whether it' somewhere like The thing of like somebody who just watches everything through their screen, it's' very much like You're really missing our beautiful city. You're going to go home and watch the same video that you watched while you were on the boat because you didn't takeake it like take the picture. obviously, it looks looks beautiful. takeake a ten second video but in the like you know, twelve minutes that it takes to get from like Williamsburg across the river or whatever And this might just be the like weird actor part of my brain, but Put your phone in your pockets, you can enjoy water smells like. in the early spring or what your full peripheral vision looks like, who you were with. You know, what languages you heard when you were standing there? likeike there's all of that stuff to me I realize I sound like an old man when I'm saying, putut your phones away, but that's the reason that I feel that. And it is to your point an effort, right? I do try to like everybody else, Im like o, this would make a cool photo. I try to limit that to like just take the photo and put it back in your pocket because probably you're never going to look at the photo again anyway reallyally like just feel the presence of where you are. otherwise, just go home and watch a documentary about it. I totally get that and I also worry that I sound like her muchud in But like My concern is that The more I learn about these things, like that old phrase, use it or lose it is just so true. Like if you only look at a screen, your eyeballs will literally change shape and make you near sighted sooner than far sighted. If you only listen to have your earpods on all day long, depending on how you listen and volume, et cetera You will lose your hearing. likeike the body means rest, it needs breaks, it needs to be in nature, it needs sunshine, it needs to look into the horizon. These are, you know, we have not evolved along with our devices. These are ancient Biological needs. and I think the fact that you're in touch with them like I think you are listening to what your body needs. I would say that that is interoception in many ways, that you are saying like, I need a minute, you know And I think That is something that we need to cultivate in younger people that like, Listen to your body. Like my I don't know aboutite you, but like when my kids were little, they would be when they would get off their iPads So like and now I'm saying to parents like, so You know, I made this little chart. I'm like, look at the chart before your kid goes on an iPad, pick that which smiley face or sad face picks is them spend time on their iPad and then measure. How do they feel after? Have them point to the face after. Maybe at twenty minutes, they're still smiley face Maybe at forty five after that, they're like want to throw it across the room because that's what my kids used to do. So like this constant like, what do I need right now? And this is really kind of a sad state, I would say Thanks, capitalism. If we don't answer that question, there are companies standing by who will tell us exactly what we need. Was there any indication from this experiment about any impact on people's relationships with each other whher whether it's people they knew or not, like just sort of that human interaction piece that this is something that I just worry about broadly both in kind of public service hat, but then also in the in the comedy hat where I'm never a fan of anything that