0:03

But then again, if I lose my phone,

0:05

I freak out. It's very disturbing for me.

0:07

I lost my phone last year for a

0:09

week. Oh, I was beside myself not

0:12

having a phone. Do you know what I missed

0:14

out on that week? The thing that happened? Nothing.

0:19

Nothing at all. I think some automotive

0:21

marketing or something. It turns out

0:24

I'm not that special. And

0:26

I have great news. Neither are

0:29

any of you. You're

0:31

all God's children, rainbows and snowflakes and all

0:33

that stuff on the credit cards. I'm not

0:36

saying otherwise. All I'm saying is if somebody

0:38

has to reach you by phone right now,

0:40

it's not going to be fun. If

0:43

I get a phone call and I have to deal with

0:45

it right then, it means that I got to drive a

0:47

friend to the airport or help another Congressman bury an intern.

0:58

Hello and welcome to the Political

1:01

Orphanage, a home for

1:03

plucky misfits and problem solvers.

1:06

I'm your host, Andrew Heaton, a

1:08

man whose technological prowess is

1:11

rooted in the late 1990s and

1:14

whose fashion sense is tethered to the

1:16

1890s. Earlier

1:19

this year, my friend Rex appeared

1:21

on the program to ask if

1:24

you could shut down the Internet. Would you? Would

1:28

life be better, pound

1:30

for pound, with or without the Internet,

1:33

with all of the distractions and stress that

1:35

it has brought? Would

1:38

it be better to go back to 1990

1:40

or to press forward? It

1:43

was a good conversation and it's linked to in today's

1:45

episode description should you like to check it

1:47

out. Well, well,

1:50

well, well. Well,

1:53

it turns out one of my

1:56

friends did it. Moody

2:00

and his wife thought about

2:03

this question in general and

2:05

decided that for them the

2:08

constant connectivity of modern life,

2:11

the looming threat of distraction

2:13

afforded by their smartphones each and

2:15

every waking moment, and

2:17

all else that comes from the

2:20

glittering electric rectangles of sadness which

2:22

dominate our lives, was

2:25

distracting them from living theirs.

2:29

So they unplugged, they banished

2:31

the internet from their home in

2:34

a rural part of America that

2:36

does not have cell phone reception. So

2:40

if you ever wondered if life

2:42

would be better if you could just dial things back

2:44

to 1990, if you could

2:47

not become Amish but simplify things,

2:50

would it be worth it and

2:53

how would you go about doing it? Just

2:56

what we're going to learn today. Not

2:59

just what Chris discovered about life without

3:01

the internet, but steps that you can

3:04

implement in your own life to ensure

3:06

that technology is something you use rather

3:08

than something that uses you. Right

3:12

here on The Political Orphanage.

3:17

I am joined today by Mr. Chris Moody. He

3:21

is a freelance writer based in

3:23

Boone, North Carolina where he teaches

3:25

journalism and broadcast media at Appalachian

3:27

State University. His work appears in

3:30

the New York Times, the Atlantic,

3:32

the Washington Post, and more. He's

3:34

a former senior correspondent for CNN

3:36

Politics and legally my friend.

3:39

Hi Chris. It's great to be here Andrew. Thanks

3:41

so much for having me on the show. I'm

3:43

delighted to have you on the show. So a couple

3:46

of things. You've been on the show previously way back

3:48

in the day. When

3:50

the show's forerunner, Something's Off with Andrew Heaton,

3:52

was a daily program on a network. You

3:55

and your lovely wife, Christy, came on when you

3:57

were in the midst of your van life adventure

3:59

which ... inspired me to buy

4:01

a camper, not quite to the same extent

4:03

you did, but nonetheless, you are inspirational to

4:06

me in terms of owning your

4:08

own life and making your life what you want it

4:10

to be, as opposed to just going along with what

4:12

everybody else is doing. Well, we'll see what

4:14

happens at the end of this episode where your life

4:16

takes you. But yeah, we were

4:18

living in a van for two years, traveled about

4:20

50,000 miles across America, trying

4:23

to tell stories about people living differently in

4:25

this strange time of

4:27

a shifting American dream or definition

4:30

of the American dream, and that

4:32

continues as we've tried to

4:34

find a way to live a sustainable, good life

4:36

in the United States in what

4:38

appears to be a difficult time to do

4:40

so in many ways. Absolutely

4:43

so. However, I think that something you and

4:45

your wife have always had is you

4:47

are very intentional in the life that

4:49

you were living. A

4:52

lot of it so, where you go,

4:55

this is the kind of life we'd like to have. We'd

4:57

like to have a meaningful life where we have a rich

4:59

social life and we

5:01

are not frittering our time away on

5:03

frivolous things. We want to make sure that the

5:05

balance between money that we need

5:08

to earn is not overshadowing, all those things.

5:10

I feel like you're very deliberate and very

5:12

conscious about the life that you want to

5:14

have and are very good at

5:16

pursuing it too. Well, it

5:18

does take work and I'm excited to talk

5:20

about the latest thing that we've tried to

5:23

make our life better going forward.

5:26

The reason we work so hard at this, at

5:28

least for me personally, and Andrew, maybe you can

5:30

attest to this, is that I'm just a

5:33

real sinner and I know my own

5:35

sins and know my own pitfalls and

5:37

traps and I try very hard to

5:39

try to head those off in

5:42

ways that might be a little

5:44

unorthodox, but it at least keeps me on

5:46

a path that I know I

5:48

should be heading instead of just

5:50

falling into just common normal life

5:53

that can so easily entrap us.

5:56

We are fellow travelers, however, I think we have

5:58

different perspectives on this. I'm ultimately

6:00

a utopian in my personal life where she

6:02

were a reformed sitter. What I mean by

6:04

that is unbeknownst to listeners,

6:07

I have been going to communes in this

6:09

country and in the United Kingdom and interviewing

6:11

people that live at communes unabashedly

6:14

stealing from them, going, I would kind of like

6:16

to create a commune at some point. By

6:19

the way, completely turned around on old folks' homes

6:21

because I started thinking about it. I

6:23

was like, you know what I really want is I'd really like to

6:25

have my own apartment where I have my own kitchen and my own

6:28

living room, but I could go out in the hall and there's like

6:30

a big dormitory living room where I can hang. Then I went, oh

6:32

my God, it's a retirement home. I want to live with a retirement

6:34

home. I would just prefer the ages be like 30 to

6:36

50, but I think that'll mean

6:38

that retirement is going to be way better when I get there.

6:41

But I don't want to focus on my stuff. I want

6:44

to focus on your stuff and I will add as a premise to

6:46

this, Chris. The last

6:48

few days I've had people go, have you

6:50

read this article in The Atlantic about a crazy guy and his

6:52

wife who gave up the internet? Every

6:54

time I was like, is it Chris Moody? They're

6:57

like, I think sort of like, oh, buddy's with

6:59

Chris. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that guy. Yeah,

7:01

he's crazy. He's a crazy dude, but I think

7:03

he's quite happy too. So that is the jumping

7:05

point for what we're going to talk about today.

7:09

You can talk about the piece specifically, but

7:11

it's keying off of your life experience. What

7:13

did you do? Why are you

7:16

either proselytizing your way of life or

7:18

alternately, why is the world coming to

7:20

you to investigate you with a magnifying

7:22

glass? Well, for many years, my wife

7:24

and I have talked about the way we wanted

7:26

to live our lives and certainly

7:29

ways we did not. And we really

7:31

saw the culture and the society really

7:34

falling into, I think, a

7:36

trap of being constantly consumed

7:38

by technology and

7:40

having that technology follow them into

7:42

every space they're going into. Think

7:45

people that bring Bluetooth speakers on

7:48

national park trails, people that text

7:50

while they're in church. People

7:53

that watch videos with the sound on while

7:55

they're in the stall in a public

7:57

restroom. These are faces very high, low. Technology

8:00

is just becoming this thing that

8:02

is so ubiquitous and everywhere, and

8:05

we have always wanted to have

8:07

spaces where we are free from

8:09

that. Now, not completely

8:11

free from it. I have a smartphone.

8:13

I use a computer. I use technology

8:15

quite often. But

8:17

we found ourselves in a position where

8:20

those spaces were dwindling by the day.

8:22

There was no safe place we could

8:24

... I mean, no place

8:26

we could go that it couldn't get

8:29

its claws on, and that included our

8:31

own home. Even

8:33

though, despite our best efforts, being people that were

8:35

like, we're not going to be those kind of

8:38

people that are on our phones all day in

8:40

the house or are streaming Netflix or this or

8:42

that, we're going to live intentionally. After

8:46

we had our first child last year

8:48

in kind of that chaos of the

8:50

baby being there and just ... not

8:52

chaos, but it is

8:54

very different than being just single people hanging out

8:56

going to brunch, right? Or

8:59

parentless people, or childless people, excuse

9:01

me. We

9:04

found that, at least for me, I was

9:06

really being consumed even more by the phone.

9:08

I always thought, I don't want to be

9:10

a person on my phone around my child.

9:13

It was just because I was tired. As

9:15

a father, in those first couple of months,

9:17

you are doing less in terms of keeping

9:19

the child alive and giving them the food

9:22

that he needs and everything. I

9:26

realized how unhappy that

9:28

this was making me, this time that

9:30

I was spending on this device. It

9:34

wasn't just me sitting there scrolling. It

9:36

was even just being there as a

9:38

possible distraction, something that, oh, every seven

9:40

or eight minutes, let me just pick

9:43

that up. Let me see what's going

9:45

on. What's the new post? What's the

9:47

new thing? I realized that my days,

9:50

even in times I had no

9:52

business reading the news or being

9:54

online, was just being punctuated by

9:56

all these interruptions. I was like,

9:59

am I going to live with this? this way? For the rest

10:01

of my days, am I just going to

10:03

have my days start with a device giving

10:05

me information and then just be interrupted every

10:07

couple of minutes? And I'm not saying it's

10:09

interrupted even because not even that there's a

10:11

text message or there's a ping interrupted by

10:13

my own lack of self-will of being able

10:16

to just, let me just check, right? And

10:20

my wife and I really just had a moment where we

10:22

said, you know, what should we do here? What

10:25

can we do that's different? And she said, it sounds like we

10:27

need to get rid of the internet. Now let me

10:29

give you a little more context here. Heaton, I

10:31

live in the mountains of North Carolina in a

10:33

log cabin made out of old railroad

10:35

ties. It is a log cabin, let me

10:38

tell you. It's

10:40

in a North Carolina Appalachian holler. There

10:42

is no cell reception because of the

10:44

mountains all around us. And

10:47

if we turn off our Wi-Fi, we are

10:49

completely cut off the grid, the

10:52

digital grid. So there's no cell phone reception

10:54

in your area. It had to be hardwired

10:56

in via Wi-Fi. That's right. And we were

10:58

getting our cell reception through Wi-Fi at

11:00

the time. And

11:02

so we decided to not

11:04

only just turn off the Wi-Fi, which we

11:06

had before, we had a timer

11:09

we bought like at Walmart that would shut

11:11

off your Wi-Fi router at say 8 o'clock

11:13

PM and not turn it back on until

11:16

8 AM. So you'd have that nice 12

11:18

hours. Well, Chris just gets a

11:20

hankering for some tweets and he just turns it

11:22

right back on, you know, it's no thing. Or

11:25

we had rules that said, hey, no cell phones in

11:27

the bedroom. Well, of course, I just bring it in

11:29

anyway, just break the rules. And so

11:31

we decided to go big. And we turned,

11:34

we went to the internet service provider and

11:36

we said something that they have never heard

11:38

in all of their days. We said, we'd

11:40

like to remove

11:42

our internet service and install a

11:44

landline telephone. And the woman

11:46

at the service rep kind of looked at us as

11:48

though we had it backwards and just said, well, that's

11:50

the first. Okay. And we

11:53

did the deed and turned off the internet.

11:55

We opted into a landline telephone.

11:58

And we've been doing that for the batter. better part of

12:00

the last year and it has been one

12:02

of the greatest decisions our family has ever

12:04

made together. Okay. So

12:08

immediate follow-up questions. There are

12:10

many, yes. You have not become Amish. So

12:13

it's not that you do not use the internet.

12:15

Rather for you to use the internet, you drive

12:17

it. Like I know that you're an educator, you're

12:20

a professor of journalism. So when

12:23

you're on campus, do you feel comfortable using

12:25

your phone and Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi on your

12:27

phone? Does Christie

12:30

go to the local library? Is

12:32

it sort of like you don't have plumbing in your house, but

12:34

if you go into the village and there's plumbing, you can get

12:37

your water there and bring it back? Yeah,

12:39

we absolutely use technology. And I

12:41

want to just say that technology,

12:43

I think, is phenomenal in terms

12:45

of the way it can connect

12:47

people. The only problem

12:50

is that the damn thing is so

12:52

powerful that we can't really often control

12:54

ourselves. And if you're listening to this

12:56

and you're like, well, I can control it. Well, I mean, good

12:58

for you. If you're being honest with yourself, most people are like,

13:00

you know, this thing really has kind of consumed my life in

13:02

ways that make me uncomfortable. And

13:04

so as we watched the

13:06

spaces dwindle where you couldn't be reached, Andrew,

13:09

you're a hiker. I'm a hiker,

13:12

a backpacker. I have gone

13:14

to the most distant national

13:16

forests and parks I can find just to

13:18

have a couple of days to be off

13:20

grid. I've spent time with monks and monasteries

13:23

just to have those pure times where you

13:25

are not distracted by anything just to think

13:27

and meditate and be. We

13:30

said, why do we need to go to Alaska

13:33

to find this place? Let's create this

13:35

space in the one

13:37

place we have control. And that's

13:40

our home. Because I certainly don't want to go

13:42

out there and control other people's lives except for

13:44

those people that play TikTok videos without earbuds and

13:46

the airplane. They're the history's greatest monsters and they're

13:48

the first against the wall if I'm in charge.

13:52

But I don't want to control other people.

13:55

Right. And I believe

13:57

that very strongly. I want to influence them and their

13:59

decisions if I can. But I can

14:01

control my home. And so this is

14:03

not an anti-technology. This is just putting

14:05

technology in its place. So when I

14:07

leave the home and I go to

14:10

work, I'm online. I'm having Zoom calls,

14:12

Zoom meetings with people. I'm

14:15

writing. I'm researching. But

14:17

it requires access to Wi-Fi, which for

14:19

me is 15-minute drive down the mountain

14:21

to my office or to the public

14:24

library, the university library. There

14:26

are some times where I just need to send that last email

14:29

of the day, but I'm already home. Maybe I have

14:31

a meeting in the morning. I need to confirm something.

14:33

I drive a mile down a mountain and I pull

14:35

my car over and pull it on cellular service and

14:39

I use it. I use technology like anyone else.

14:42

But when I cross the threshold of

14:44

my home and our family is at

14:46

home, there's a line that is

14:48

crossed and we're in a space

14:51

of togetherness, intentionality, and

14:53

focus. There are no distractions other than

14:55

maybe a landline phone call, which

14:58

is kind of fun in its own way. You

15:00

don't know who it's going to be. It's like the 90s. It

15:02

could be anybody. So you're even, you know, hello, just like

15:04

you did when you were a kid. But

15:08

it creates a space where

15:11

you have nowhere to be

15:13

but together. There are no

15:15

distractions. There is no one

15:17

that might pull your attention away

15:19

from what's important and that is

15:21

your family. For

15:24

a lot of us, technology has allowed

15:26

us to work from home and that has been,

15:28

I think, a real blessing for a lot of

15:30

people. I fully support it. I

15:32

think people should have the liberty to work where they

15:35

do their best stuff. But

15:38

that has come as a bargain. That has

15:40

been a trade-off. We

15:43

might be able to work from home, but then

15:45

again, our boss possibly can reach us at all

15:47

hours and he or she will do so and

15:49

expect a response. And you know, that's

15:51

a trade-off that a lot of us don't feel

15:53

comfortable with. And I think something that even the

15:56

employers have kind of the upper hand, even though

15:58

if we feel like we're free, we We

16:00

can work from wherever, and we still haven't

16:02

gotten that balance quite where we want it. But

16:05

when I'm at work, I'm at work, and when

16:07

I'm at home and I'm at home, and it

16:09

is far more of a thick line

16:12

of separation that is more alike

16:15

my parents or grandparents had, but

16:19

I am finding that drawing that

16:21

line, really there is a

16:23

benefit to it. There's something about turning off work

16:26

when you get home and not having it allowed

16:28

to reach you. I agree. I

16:30

think one of the things that will be difficult for

16:33

you to ... Well, maybe not for you specifically, but

16:35

for our generation to explain to our children is,

16:37

as pointed out

16:39

in your article, our generation, if you're

16:42

a millennial, is the last generation that

16:44

has a memory of pre-internet connectivity. When

16:47

I was a child, if we

16:49

went in the backyard, it was literally impossible to get

16:51

a hold of us if we were in the backyard.

16:53

If we went out to dinner, we might

16:55

get a message on the phone when we got back.

16:58

We'd check the messages when we came in, but if

17:00

we went out to dinner, you couldn't get a hold

17:02

of us. So it was much more ... It was

17:04

just accepted that communication

17:06

was more spotty and had more lag time to

17:09

it. The downside being it was spotty and had

17:11

more lag time to it. The upshot being you

17:14

did not have a panopticon

17:17

in your pocket with you at all

17:19

times. With the employee thing, I

17:21

very much agree with you, by the way. I

17:23

am self-employed, so unfortunately, I'm in my own head all

17:25

the time, but in one of

17:27

the few instances of me having a spine as

17:29

an employee, back when I worked at News Corp,

17:31

when I was in primetime television, on

17:34

one Friday, there was some sort of breaking

17:36

news story that was almost certainly going to happen. My

17:39

producer and friend went,

17:43

hey, check your email periodically because we might

17:45

need to come in. I went,

17:47

I'm not going to do that. He went, what? I

17:49

went, I will absolutely come in. I understand that that's a

17:51

part of my job. You just have to call me. That's

17:54

it. I'll have my phone on me. I'll come into the

17:56

office, just call me, and I won't even be mad about it. I'll

17:58

come in, but what I'm not going to do. is spend

18:01

my weekend checking my email every 15 minutes. That

18:03

sounds like a living hell. I have earned my,

18:05

I didn't give him this big of a monologue

18:07

mind you, this is what's going on in my

18:09

mind was I am available, you just have to

18:11

call me, but I am going to take back

18:14

my mental space this weekend and I'm not going

18:16

to just be in a vestibule of

18:18

work for 72 hours or 48 hours as it was.

18:21

And I very much agree with you on

18:23

that. Now noting that, do

18:26

you ever miss out on things that that

18:30

are problematic? So the first thing that my mind

18:32

goes to when I hear not having internet in

18:34

the home is what if I miss out on

18:36

something? What if there's an important

18:38

text message? What if there's an important email? It's

18:40

time sensitive and I don't find out

18:42

about it till the following day where I don't find out

18:44

about it until I go back to work or whatever. Does

18:47

that ever happen to you? That is

18:49

definitely a possibility, which is why I want

18:51

to bring up when people think

18:53

about turning off the internet in their home. They think

18:55

that you just pull the lever and

18:57

it's done and you have made no plans

18:59

or changed your life in any way. And you're

19:01

thinking of it in 2023 terms where

19:04

in reality, my wife and I

19:07

kind of had to make contingency plans that

19:09

had us thinking what was life

19:12

like in 1995? What were the

19:14

ways that we needed to plan

19:17

for this? And the land

19:19

line was certainly one of them. And

19:23

knowing that if we knew there was something

19:25

important that we had to be, say, on call

19:27

for or be on the lookout for, I

19:29

will give people my land line number in

19:31

a similar way that you gave your producer

19:33

or your boss that number. Which by

19:35

the way, here's the hell out of everybody

19:37

because everybody would be alive today views, making

19:39

phone calls with the same trepidation that someone

19:41

20 years ago would write a speech and

19:43

give to a large group of people. Right.

19:45

So you're basically saying, here you go. If

19:47

it's important enough to give a speech at

19:49

a podium, give you a call, you better

19:52

earn it. Right. No, but we make these

19:54

plans so that we can live this way.

19:56

We ordered a telephone book, a

19:58

phone book. It's called The Real yellow

20:00

pages, it's free. They send it to

20:02

you in the mail, and that's how

20:04

we know the phone numbers

20:06

of businesses and the people in our

20:08

community. So we're not just flying blind

20:11

out there. But

20:14

people around us also know kind of

20:16

the situation, and if they want to

20:18

reach us, or we make plans to

20:20

go check in during the day in

20:22

town. And so

20:25

I worry less about missing things. Now, I

20:27

don't necessarily have the fabulous,

20:29

robust social life I might have in my 20s

20:31

when I'm just running around town and getting

20:33

into trouble like we used

20:35

to as a parent now. I'm more at

20:37

home anyway, so I do recognize that bias.

20:41

But I have also found that it's

20:44

pretty rare that you actually miss out

20:46

on something truly important. The things you

20:48

do miss out on don't

20:51

matter that much quite often, or

20:53

you make other IRL plans that are even

20:55

better than what you would have missed out

20:57

on. And what you're certainly not doing is

21:00

sitting on Instagram, scrolling other people's lovely Sunday

21:02

afternoons, wondering why theirs is better than yours,

21:04

which is just the worst thing you could

21:06

possibly do. And I've also

21:08

found that when I get back to the

21:11

office on Monday morning, and I turn on

21:13

my phone, and I check email, there

21:15

are far fewer really important

21:17

emails. There's almost nothing that

21:19

needed to be addressed over the weekend.

21:22

And before I used to check it constantly, even

21:24

though I didn't have a boss who was telling

21:26

me to like in the situation you mentioned, but

21:29

I still was doing it. And

21:31

why? Was I just hoping that somebody would want

21:33

to contact me on a Sunday morning about some

21:35

business related thing? No, they weren't. And the people

21:38

that I love and care about and want to

21:40

spend time with know that they can just call

21:42

my landline and invite me out to brunch if

21:44

they want me to go. I

21:46

think you're absolutely right on all of those points.

21:51

While there's a part, I guess particularly when I

21:53

when I started doing this job, which is a

21:55

great job, I love my career very much. It

21:57

felt unreal to me the first two years I was

21:59

doing it. It felt like three

22:02

kids in a trench coat had snuck into a

22:04

real person job and everybody was like going with

22:06

it till it fell apart. So I lived in

22:08

terror of when finally everybody realized I was a

22:10

fraud and never they caved out. Apparently this is

22:13

very common, by the way, this feeling that I

22:15

have. And I realized,

22:18

one, nothing ever happens

22:20

after two o'clock on a Friday,

22:23

ever. I have never received any

22:25

important missive at three o'clock

22:27

on a Friday because everyone in America has

22:29

the exact same feelings you do about Friday

22:31

afternoon, which is you're leaving early, or you're

22:33

just dicking around, looking at news and tell

22:35

your boss to let you go. But no

22:37

one's like getting into really big stuff, right?

22:39

So it took me a long time

22:41

to just become comfortable with the fact that I

22:43

could actually just lean in to taking it easy

22:45

on a Friday afternoon and I was not going

22:47

to miss anything. And then the other bit is

22:49

that there's this red phone mentality that

22:52

I have in my mind that

22:54

I think I got from News Corp. Because when

22:56

I was working in primetime television, I did have

22:58

to be checking my email literally every three minutes

23:00

because very, very, very, very time

23:03

sensitive stuff was coming through regularly. A guest

23:05

has canceled. A guest has gone

23:07

to the wrong building. I have

23:09

to update the news story. It was extremely time

23:11

sensitive because it was primetime

23:13

TV. And that varied over to

23:15

me thinking of all email like that. And

23:17

the reality is the show I'm doing is

23:20

mostly evergreen. I don't know

23:22

when this episode's going to drop that we've done, Chris,

23:24

probably pretty soon, but it's reasonably evergreen content. I could

23:26

do it in a month. And

23:28

so- I

23:31

did an interview with you about three years ago. I'm still waiting

23:33

for it. That's

23:35

true. Wait,

23:37

was that the one on- that was

23:39

for the sci-fi podcast. Yeah. I have to say, that

23:42

was a very, very challenging edit. Ironically, the internet connection

23:44

dropped out on your end five or six times over

23:46

the course of that one. Back when I had no

23:48

idea. Oh, I had no idea. I had no idea.

23:50

Oh, wow. Yeah. So we'll talk about that later. Trust

23:52

me, it wasn't for the content. It was for the

23:54

editing that made that go problematic. But

23:57

like I did into this habit here recently that it-

24:00

a really bad habit I need to get out of

24:02

is I'll wake up and I'll, I'm,

24:04

I'm, I arise from sleep as

24:06

if from open-heart surgery every morning. I am not

24:09

an easy riser. And so I'll grab my phone

24:11

and I'll, I've inevitably got three or

24:13

four messages on WhatsApp or my texts,

24:16

but they're not important. It's usually my

24:18

friend Turner or Kaplan found a

24:21

funny dog video or something, or

24:23

they, they're ranting about some particular

24:25

story involving some

24:27

culture war issue that they find amusing in New

24:29

York. It is not time sensitive in any way.

24:32

And I think it's a really bad habit on my

24:34

end because I, this goes for everybody. I think that

24:36

you should spend at least an hour from when you

24:38

wake up to when you get on your phone or

24:40

you check your email for no other

24:42

reason than I think it's a

24:44

very bad way to begin a day by

24:47

immediately being reactive to literally everybody else in

24:49

the universe, saying I am

24:51

at the beck and call of literally anyone who

24:53

can get a hold of me and all of

24:55

my goals and all of my agenda are secondary

24:57

to that. I think that's a hard wake up,

24:59

get your coffee, go on a walk, figure

25:01

out what you plan to do with your

25:03

day and then let the world beat down

25:05

your door and adjudicate as necessary. But I

25:07

think it's very, very bad to be reactive

25:09

that early. So you're describing my regular mornings,

25:11

which are incredibly peaceful. And the world doesn't

25:13

need to beat down your door. You can

25:16

choose when you want to engage with the

25:18

world on your terms, which is, I mean,

25:20

you and I both do engage with the

25:22

world. You mentioned earlier, I'm

25:24

not Amish. I'm not locked

25:27

away opting out of society.

25:29

I'm very engaged with it. It's just

25:31

on my own terms. And the culture

25:33

and society and all that noise doesn't

25:36

get to just flow into my house. Look, when

25:38

I was growing up in the

25:40

80s and 90s, it was broadcast television. And

25:42

you turn on the TV and anything

25:45

could come up. It could be anything in your

25:47

house. I always remember my parents getting

25:49

so mad and like, I can't believe they would

25:51

use that language on television and I can't believe

25:53

they would show it. And I'm like, well, you're,

25:56

you're the one with cable. You're the one that is

25:58

playing it in our, in our house. our living room,

26:00

filling up the entire house with all of the

26:02

noise, you

26:06

don't have to share the values of Hollywood

26:08

executives. It's

26:11

even worse now with

26:13

the access to all

26:15

of the broadcast channels

26:18

and digital streaming and all this stuff

26:20

that just comes in. One

26:22

thing that has always bothered me is when you're hanging

26:25

out with somebody and it's very pleasant and

26:27

something dings on their phone and they get

26:29

some kind of outrage click thing and they're

26:31

like, oh, did you hear about the transgender

26:33

people today or whatever it is, right? And

26:36

it's like, dude, it's Sunday afternoon and we

26:38

were talking about baseball and now you're mad

26:40

because your phone just said, don't forget to

26:43

be mad today. And

26:46

I just, I wanted more control over

26:49

how the content we consume has

26:51

its effect on me. And I wanted to be able

26:53

to opt in to when, okay, I'm going to sit

26:55

down, I'm going to read the New York times and

26:57

I'm going to encounter stuff that bothers me and stuff

26:59

that I enjoy, but it's on my own terms and

27:01

it's not just blaring into my house. I'll

27:04

tell you about the craziest thing

27:06

we get in our house is just NPR on

27:08

the radio. That's about as wild as we get

27:10

these days. And you also got to

27:12

remember not having

27:14

the internet means no streaming, no

27:16

Netflix, no Hulu, no streaming services

27:18

of any kind, which might sound

27:20

crazy to people these

27:22

days, but we still have

27:25

a DVD player and we go to

27:27

the library and we curate

27:29

what we wish to watch very thoughtfully.

27:31

And we bring home physical media and

27:33

at this appointed hour we sit and

27:35

we watch a high quality film or

27:38

a series or something like that. But

27:41

it's not that thing where you're just

27:43

sitting and scrolling or you're just looking for something.

27:46

You're still engaging with the world's content.

27:48

It's just on a more thoughtful level.

27:51

You thought, what kind of thing do

27:53

we want to encounter tonight? What do

27:55

we want to be entertained by? And

27:58

you talk about it. And then

28:00

in the same way you used to go

28:02

to Blockbuster, right? You know, and you get

28:05

the thing. And it completely changes the way

28:07

you consume media. You

28:10

know, I don't know about you, but I just always ended up

28:12

just watching my favorite episodes of The Office because I couldn't think

28:14

of anything at the time. But

28:17

putting that thought into it really does

28:19

make an important difference. That

28:22

makes total sense to me. I mean, like, that's one of the

28:24

ironies of our time is that between

28:26

Netflix, HBO, and Amazon Prime,

28:28

we have far

28:30

more television options than when

28:32

you and I were growing up. And I

28:34

would argue far higher quality, both in terms

28:36

of writing and in terms of just overall

28:38

budget. And yet, when I

28:40

go on Netflix, I will spend 30 minutes

28:43

going, hmm, nah,

28:46

I don't think so. You know,

28:48

something that I did on my end, I probably

28:50

mentioned it on the show before, is I while

28:53

I'll watch streaming services on my laptop, I don't

28:55

have a TV in my living room. And

28:57

I have no problem watching TV. But the thing is,

29:00

when people come over, I want them to be the center

29:02

of attention. When I have friends over, I have

29:05

arranged my room so that you are the most important thing

29:07

in my house when you come over. And so I'm going

29:09

to be sitting facing you. And I don't like, I wouldn't

29:11

want to have a, most people I

29:13

know have this situation, I don't particularly like it,

29:16

where the living room, there's an altar in the

29:18

front, which is the television, and a bunch of

29:20

couches and chairs that are all facing it. And

29:23

so you come in and you sit down, and

29:25

now we're going to collectively watch a thing that's

29:27

not us. Hold on, before I

29:29

forget this, can you download

29:31

things? By which I mean like, podcasts

29:33

and music, do you go down the

29:36

mile to your Wi-Fi zone and go, all right, I'm

29:38

going to catch up on S-town

29:41

or whatever the podcast, like, do you still listen to

29:43

things? It's just that you have to fill up your

29:46

tank and then go back up the mountain? That's exactly

29:48

what I do, Andrew. I

29:50

choose which podcasts I want to listen to when

29:52

I'm back home. I go

29:54

to the library app on my

29:56

iPad and I download digital

29:59

copies of the The New Yorker of

30:01

Harper's Magazine of whatever

30:03

I'm reading at that time, and

30:05

this is the beautiful thing, is that you

30:08

bring it home and your media

30:10

has a beginning, middle, and most

30:12

importantly, an end. There

30:15

is no infinite scroll. You are reading

30:17

a product that has a narrative arc

30:19

to it and ends

30:22

at a certain point, and that's

30:24

all there is. And that changes

30:26

the way you read. When

30:29

you are reading, let's say you bring

30:31

a book out to the woods, and that's the

30:33

only media that you have, it's

30:35

an incredibly different experience to read

30:37

a book in that context than

30:40

it is in your fully connected

30:42

online home where you can be

30:44

distracted by anything at any

30:46

time. Even if you're not looking

30:49

at a second screen, you're still thinking

30:51

a little bit about a second screen.

30:53

And my reading over the past year

30:56

has become so much deeper and thoughtful,

30:59

and it's really interesting. The day

31:01

that we disconnected from the internet, for

31:03

the next three or four days, I

31:06

was just rabidly hungry for

31:08

content to give it just

31:11

that word. But just like I was reading

31:14

everything I can get my hands on, because I had

31:16

been programmed to be devouring content, 24, not 24, but

31:18

12 hours a day. And

31:23

I just started voraciously diving into books and

31:25

everything. And I don't know if you do

31:27

this, Andrew, but when I read, I often

31:30

see quotes and things like, oh, I

31:32

want to share that on social media,

31:34

or I want to send this to

31:36

somebody, and then I get distracted, and

31:38

I go down a whole rabbit hole

31:40

on the internet or something. But now

31:42

I'm reading just for reading's sake. It's

31:44

this private, intimate moment between myself and

31:46

the author, which is much

31:49

better than thinking of how can

31:51

I performatively share this essay

31:53

that I'm reading to show everybody how smart I

31:56

am, or how mean I can be to just

31:58

slap that person down for their stupid right?

32:00

There's none of that. I'm just reading for reading's

32:02

sake. But yes, I do fill up the iPad.

32:04

I fill up podcasts,

32:06

including this one. I download it every time

32:08

there's a new one. And I listen to

32:11

it. And there's a beginning, middle, and end. When

32:14

it's over, it's over. And that's

32:16

something I really, really love about it

32:18

because it is that endless scroll, that

32:21

casino slot machine mentality, constantly hitting it

32:23

for more and more and more that,

32:25

I don't know about you, but man,

32:27

it really gets me. And having that

32:29

end matters. And so

32:32

being able to read and engage

32:34

with the world on

32:38

a downloaded kind of offline mode is so

32:41

much better to me than online. That

32:44

has great appeal to me, mostly

32:46

in terms of time

32:49

management and distraction. So

32:51

as I said earlier,

32:53

I don't rise easily in the morning.

32:55

And so not every day, but once or twice

32:57

a week, I like to wake up, get

33:00

a cup of coffee. Once my head is like 20

33:02

degrees above the surface, Wallace, my dog is aware of

33:04

this and ceaselessly pushes me

33:06

outside. And so I'll limp

33:09

to the hammock with a magazine and a cup of coffee

33:11

so he can run around and try and make with squirrels

33:13

or whatever he's up to. And I'll start reading. But

33:17

I am in reading mode at that time. So

33:20

I am in low energy,

33:22

passive information consumption. I've got

33:24

The Atlantic, The

33:26

Economist, Reason in the Week, and I'll just kind

33:28

of scroll through them and figure out what I don't read all of them.

33:30

That's a lot of reading, but I'll kind of look through the contents and

33:32

things as opposed to let's say somebody

33:35

sends me an interesting article. My

33:37

mom texts me interesting articles all the time. I

33:40

might be in the middle of working on

33:42

some problem or I'm in the middle of researching

33:44

for an episode or something like that. And it's

33:46

an interesting article, but now I'm shutting everything down

33:48

to kind of check on it. So it becomes

33:51

a an interesting distraction and I'd rather shove it

33:53

all in a bucket that I just look at

33:55

in the morning. And as opposed

33:58

to now where it's all kind of peppered throughout the day. day

34:00

in this shotgun pattern of information coming

34:02

at me. On

34:05

that note, it is my understanding

34:08

that not just that smartphones facilitate

34:11

distraction because we get notifications and

34:13

such, but that the mere

34:15

existence of them does so. So

34:17

on my, you were

34:19

opting in, I am opting out. I

34:22

am fairly liberal with turning my phone on airplane mode. It's

34:24

on airplane mode right now as we're talking to make sure

34:26

that nobody can bother us during the interview. Thanksgiving,

34:29

it was on airplane mode, et cetera. But

34:33

I've read that even when you put your phone on

34:35

airplane mode, where it's just in the standby state and

34:37

not actively receiving information, merely having

34:39

it on you or within visual

34:42

distance of you still lowers people's

34:44

cognitive abilities because there's a part of the brain

34:47

relentlessly going, I had to check my phone. I

34:49

should check my email. I should check my phone.

34:52

Does that ring true to you? The

34:54

data bear it out and also just in my

34:56

own life. We have this tendency

34:58

as human beings to wonder if there's something better

35:00

out there. Maybe there's something a little bit better

35:03

than what I'm doing. That FOMO

35:05

that you talked about, right? Even

35:07

if you have the greatest day of

35:09

your life. I remember when I was living in the

35:11

van and we were traveling in

35:13

national parks and just having the

35:15

most incredible afternoon in the most

35:17

beautiful place. And I'd still look

35:19

at Instagram and be like, well, so-and-so had a

35:21

nice brunch today. You know,

35:24

like, why did that make me feel that way? Why am I checking that?

35:26

The heat zones are pretty good, but the

35:28

pasta here is not as good as Palermo.

35:31

But no, it's just natural. There's

35:34

nothing that bothers, there are a few things that bother

35:36

me more than when you sit down to eat with

35:38

someone and they put their phone face up in front

35:40

of them on the table. First

35:42

of all, gross. Your phone is full of fecal

35:44

matter. Yours, it's disgusting because you used it in

35:46

the bathroom 10 minutes ago. But also,

35:48

just having that there, it says to me, you

35:51

must be expecting something or hoping for

35:53

something better. And it's just this natural

35:55

thing that we put

35:58

out in front of us that could at Anytime,

36:00

just jump up and go, I'm distracting

36:02

you, or I've interrupted you. And

36:05

I don't think we should allow

36:07

these outside forces to have that

36:09

control over our attention, because we jump

36:11

when it dings. Who's in control

36:14

here? Who's the real tool? Is

36:16

it the tool, the thing that's supposed to be the tool,

36:18

the phone, or is it us? And I

36:20

think increasingly on that seesaw,

36:22

we're becoming far more the

36:25

tool of these devices than they are for

36:27

us. And that's part of

36:29

this experiment in the living, is trying to

36:31

just get some control of it, not opting

36:34

out of using it entirely, but using it

36:36

on my own terms in a

36:38

way that works best for me. Because look,

36:40

man, the amount of

36:42

money, the billions of dollars that these

36:44

tech companies put into getting your attention,

36:46

you've heard of the attention economy, they

36:49

do not survive unless they have

36:51

your attention, and they spend so much money

36:54

getting it. We are

36:56

organic, limited beings, and we are

36:58

no match for these billions of

37:00

dollars. We're no match for these

37:02

techniques that they use to get

37:04

our attention. We cannot overcome them,

37:06

which is why we should be

37:08

completely unsurprised when we see tech

37:10

moguls say publicly that, oh, I

37:12

would never let my children use

37:14

these products that I spend my

37:17

hours, working hours making, or Steve

37:19

Jobs saying, I would never let

37:21

my child use an iPad. And

37:24

yet, here we are putting iPads in front of

37:26

our own children. They know. They

37:28

know what they've built, and I think

37:30

we should listen to them when they tell

37:32

us that. And it's not just children. I

37:34

mean, it's adults. Adults

37:36

are as addicted as children are at risk

37:38

to these things. But

37:40

I do see the pendulum swinging on this. I

37:43

see people, just the

37:45

response to this article I wrote for The Atlantic, seeing

37:48

moves in school districts around the world

37:50

and in this country included of saying,

37:53

you know what? No

37:55

cell phones during school hours. How distracting those can

37:57

be and all the negative effects. Just

38:00

people are coming to the around I think to

38:02

the idea that there are spaces There

38:05

are sacred spaces and I don't even

38:07

mean that in a religious context But

38:09

you know sacred holy holy means set

38:11

apart, right? Right there should be some

38:14

space in your life Where

38:16

you are set apart from this where

38:18

you can declare your independence as a

38:21

human being this is all to

38:24

bring I guess a religion religious aspect

38:26

to it the The

38:28

Jewish idea of Sabbath is

38:30

a declaration of independence from

38:32

material things It's exiting the

38:35

material world and entering into

38:37

a space with God

38:39

a holy space And

38:42

and they make you know if for the

38:44

Orthodox they really take this very very seriously

38:48

And it just says I'm not owned by

38:50

materialism. I am NOT owned by this world.

38:52

There's something greater than I'm a part of

38:56

And I think you can apply that to

38:58

this and just say no I can exist

39:00

without this for a time or in a

39:02

certain space And I think it's important to

39:04

remind ourselves through our actions that We

39:07

can have that and that we while we

39:10

are reliant upon these devices for so many

39:12

things that honestly have made our lives better

39:16

We are not wholly reliant on them

39:18

that we have an

39:20

independence to us that remains and that

39:22

is crucial to establish and

39:24

announce through our actions I Love

39:27

that and I I think that

39:30

idea of prioritizing Setting

39:33

your own priorities rather than letting technology or

39:35

the world set them for you is particularly

39:38

salient right now Thanksgiving

39:40

was just this last weekend from the perspective of Chris

39:42

and I This will probably

39:45

come out shortly before shortly after

39:47

Christmas, so it's the holidays regardless and

39:50

Being able to go when I

39:53

went to Alva for Thanksgiving There

39:55

was a moment where I was putting my phone on airplane and

39:57

my brain went do you really want to put your phone on?

39:59

airplane would have someone who needs to get ahold of you. And

40:01

then I had like lawyer my way through it and

40:04

go, who could possibly get mad at

40:06

me for not picking up the phone on Thanksgiving? Who's

40:08

not in this car right now? Like

40:10

every, the only people that have preemptive ability to get

40:13

ahold of me, they would be angry if they couldn't

40:15

write, or who I'm with at this moment. I

40:17

think that we are most

40:20

human and most honest in life

40:23

in moments of ecstasy and misery.

40:26

Like a couple of years ago, I had to

40:28

drive a family member under lumenical circumstances to the

40:31

hospital. And it was kind of the

40:33

same situation where, look, if anybody needed to get ahold

40:35

of me, they could screw off. Like this was very

40:37

important. And like if somebody needed, there was some quasi

40:40

work thing that I'm in the hospital with a

40:42

family member, you can go away now. Like this

40:44

is, and if you got mad at me, that's

40:46

your problem, right? Then you flip it under much

40:48

more positive circumstances. It's Thanksgiving. This

40:51

is exact, this is a hundred percent where

40:53

I'm supposed to be in life right now.

40:55

There is no other location anywhere in the

40:57

entire universe that I am meant to be

40:59

more than here right now, which means that

41:01

I can turn my phone off because no

41:05

one needs to reach me. And if they do,

41:07

they can call the fire department, come to the house to get

41:09

ahold of me, but nothing more than that. Sounds

41:13

like this has been overwhelmingly positive. I

41:15

am curious into terms of how your mind works.

41:18

Do you find you have better

41:20

attention? Do you have more depth

41:23

or mental endurance in terms of reading, things like

41:26

that? In terms of any type

41:28

of neuroplasticity, do you think there's been anything concrete

41:30

that's happened with you being disconnected from the internet

41:32

in your home? I would love

41:34

to do a test of my brain

41:36

to see how it has changed in the past year.

41:39

But just from anecdotal observational experience,

41:41

the answer to all of that

41:44

is yes, absolutely. The

41:46

reading I'm doing is not only more focused,

41:49

it is higher quality. Take

41:52

just getting news, Andrew. Before

41:54

I would get a lot of my news through social

41:56

media feeds. And in doing so, I

41:59

would see the news. through the lens

42:01

of whoever had shared that. And then

42:03

my understanding of that news would

42:05

often be colored by the commentary that

42:07

was provided. Oh, this article sucks, click.

42:11

This article's great. And

42:13

the algorithm of social media would feed me

42:16

certain types of articles based on my behavior,

42:18

which we all know, it's all tailored

42:20

to us. But now I

42:22

read entire publications and books and

42:24

things just on their own terms.

42:26

And in doing so, I am

42:28

far more exposed to a

42:31

wider range of ideas, things that I

42:33

never would have otherwise read, but because they're

42:35

in a magazine, they're all together and you

42:37

have a series of different articles that complement,

42:39

but also contrast with one another. You're

42:42

not just reading the things that the algorithm

42:45

thinks you'll like, you are exposing yourself

42:47

to a broad sheet of

42:50

content. And that is important.

42:53

And I think that makes you a

42:55

better reader and also just a better,

42:57

more well-rounded person. But

42:59

more specifically to your question, so

43:02

many things are such higher quality.

43:04

The time with family being

43:06

together is just

43:09

so much better when you aren't distracted. Everyone

43:11

you want to be around you or everyone

43:13

you want to talk to is already there,

43:15

like you said in the car there. A

43:19

big part of this was really trying to

43:21

get back to that feeling. I don't know

43:24

if any listeners have had this experience on

43:26

a childhood holiday vacation, say out to a

43:28

lake house or something where you were away

43:30

from your home and your TV or whatever

43:33

the technology was at the time. And

43:35

you just had this time in that cabin

43:37

or lake house where time just

43:39

seemed to expand. There wasn't much to

43:41

do, but be together to cook,

43:43

to play games, to go take a

43:46

walk. And the richness

43:48

of the conversations you had during

43:50

that time. I've

43:53

seen that in my own life when cell phones came

43:57

in to being over the 2000s. The The

44:00

time when our family would all

44:02

get together with the extended family

44:04

would be disrupted by people just

44:06

looking at their phones instead of

44:08

having those long, aimless, beautiful conversations.

44:11

My wife and I would try to replicate this

44:13

on a small scale of

44:15

recreating vacations, but

44:18

while we were at home, and so say after

44:20

a day at work at 6 p.m. from 6

44:22

to 10, the phones

44:24

would go off and we would do what we

44:26

called cabining, where we would do the things you

44:29

would do at that lake house or that cabin.

44:31

And man, let me tell you, it was like

44:33

I had a vacation every night, a vacation every

44:35

weekend, and it made time

44:37

expand and made time more high quality.

44:40

And now, when I'm at home,

44:44

it feels like I'm on vacation.

44:46

And it might just be the next day I go to work and it's

44:49

just a couple hours away, but the

44:51

separation of that time from work digital

44:53

connected time to cabining time, and you

44:55

don't have to live in a cabin.

44:58

We did this in our apartment in

45:00

New York City, you know, is

45:03

profound the way time expands and

45:05

also increases in quality. And you

45:07

will just feel so much more

45:09

rested and also just

45:11

that you have entered

45:13

into that vacation space that you so

45:16

enjoyed when you were a child in

45:18

the before times, as it were. I

45:20

buy in on the rested thing too, something that I've been

45:22

doing here recently. I've

45:25

been getting very tired around sunset recently. I'm

45:27

afraid that it's just entropy and debt, but

45:30

I think it's a lifestyle change in that

45:33

I've been fairly good the last few

45:35

months about in the evening, I do

45:38

not watch TV or play video games. I'm

45:40

fine with watching TV, by the way, but

45:42

like you, I'm very conscientious about it now.

45:45

So if there's a show that I am looking forward to

45:47

watching where I actively want to

45:49

go watch this program, I will. But

45:52

if it's a passive thing where I'm bored and I

45:54

just want to have something distract me, I'll put on

45:56

an audiobook. And it's

45:58

basically I just I feel like I have a with something when

46:00

I finish an audiobook. I feel like I've, I

46:03

feel kind of slimy when I watch bad television

46:05

for a lot of periods of time. So it

46:07

was just my emotional state. But I think

46:09

what's happening, I think the reason I'm getting tired

46:11

is that I am not using screens after about

46:14

7 p.m. most evenings. And so my brain around

46:16

sunset goes, you should go to sleep now in

46:19

a way that did not previously happen where I'm watching,

46:21

you know, the office on Netflix or whatever it is

46:23

in my laptop, which is maybe three feet from my

46:25

face, where I'm playing a video game

46:27

and I'm getting that dopamine rush from fighting

46:29

the Persians or whatever in Age of Empires 2. And

46:32

as a result, like I just go to sleep a lot earlier

46:34

than I used to. And I can still stay awake if I

46:36

want to, but I can go to sleep earlier if I want

46:38

to, which is awesome because turns out

46:40

a lot of the time there's not a lot going on in

46:42

my life after 9 o'clock anyway. So I

46:45

would just assume go to sleep, then stay

46:47

awake for two extra hours watching trash television.

46:49

All right, I got another question for you. Four

46:52

of them. So it would seem to me

46:55

if you've got a phone on you, I think

46:59

my problem with the, I'm good about social media.

47:01

I'm really not on social media a lot. I'm

47:04

not that interested in it. And

47:07

I don't think I do scroll very much.

47:09

And I deleted Reddit because I found that I was

47:11

using that more than I wanted, even though I like

47:14

Reddit. But what I have noticed

47:16

is the second I

47:19

am bored anywhere in line

47:21

at the grocery store, on an escalator,

47:23

in an elevator tends to be obligatory

47:26

moments of transit, but

47:29

could be anywhere. The second I am bored, I

47:31

will take my phone out, probably check my email

47:33

for no reason, just to see if something amazing

47:35

has come up in the email that happens, you

47:37

know, amazing three times a year. Most of the time it's

47:41

some smoothie shop I went to eight years ago, decided to

47:43

start a newsletter and I got to delete this now. I'm

47:47

wondering, are you bored all the time?

47:49

And two, is it good to be bored to some extent?

47:53

It is good to be bored.

47:55

The research bears that out. boredom

47:57

fosters creativity. It forces us

47:59

to see. seek things out

48:01

in our own thoughts and in our

48:03

own social lives. So yeah, like boredom

48:05

has a place. I

48:08

wouldn't say that I have been bored in

48:10

the negative sense of the term,

48:13

like when we were kids, like, I'm bored, you know, like, it's

48:16

just the dreaded boredom of 1994 when you're eight

48:19

years old or whatever, you know. But

48:23

I have had more time to do the

48:26

things that I really know that I should

48:28

be doing, the high quality things,

48:31

starting a garden and going out to

48:33

tend that, spending time with my child,

48:36

reading a book that I've always wanted to read

48:38

but was too distracted to do so. I

48:41

still fill the time with things

48:44

that interest me. It's just higher quality

48:47

because I've already, in my, in

48:50

the time when I had really strong

48:52

willpower, I curated a list of high

48:54

quality books, podcasts, and,

48:56

you know, audio books, and those

48:58

are the things I have access to when I have

49:01

my period of, you

49:04

know, of not being able to make good decisions.

49:06

Well, I can't make the bad decisions because I

49:08

don't have access to them. But

49:11

I do think that it is really important to

49:13

have those kind of off moments and not just

49:15

be distracted by a TikTok video. I'm reminded of,

49:18

I think it's in a movable

49:20

feast where Hemingway talks about, he's

49:22

like, well, I had 15 minutes between

49:25

meeting this person and that person, so I

49:27

ducked into a cafe, got an espresso, and

49:29

worked on my novel on a sketchbook, Pat.

49:31

And I'm thinking like, oh my goodness, like,

49:33

what if Hemingway, who, you know, did not

49:35

have a lot of self-control, what

49:38

if Hemingway had TikTok? Do

49:40

we get Hemingway, do we get that man

49:43

sitting in his cafe working on his short

49:45

story or his novel, just getting those little

49:48

bursts of creativity, or do we

49:50

get him scrolling and we have

49:52

no Hemingway? David Foster

49:54

Wallace was the same way when he was

49:56

trying to write. He knew how distracted he

49:59

could be by broadcasting. television and he would

50:01

remove his television. It just had this very,

50:04

from what I've read and understand, just this

50:06

complicated relationship with it because he knew that

50:08

he would just sit and watch TV all

50:11

day. And if he hadn't taken those precautions,

50:14

we don't get any of his essays or any

50:16

of his novels. I know he's controversial with people,

50:18

but he still has done some, he did some

50:20

amazing work in his life. And

50:23

I start to wonder like, what are the things that I haven't

50:25

done because I've just been distracted?

50:27

Or the thoughts that I haven't thought? Or

50:29

the, we talk about

50:31

YouTube rabbit holes, but what about mental rabbit holes

50:33

of just like going deep in thought and figuring

50:36

out a problem or things like that

50:38

if we just are constantly distracted?

50:40

And that's what we are. We're

50:42

not given the opportunity to have

50:44

those big bored thoughts that become

50:46

grand things that we want to

50:48

do because we're constantly being distracted

50:50

by small, stupid things. And

50:52

they get me, and that's

50:55

why I just don't want those things to

50:57

cloud out the high quality stuff. And in

50:59

order to do that, I just have to

51:01

shut them out because I don't have the

51:03

willpower to do so. So that's why we

51:05

have put this wall up

51:07

that don't allow us to reach the cookies in the

51:09

cookie jar. That's the smart way to do it.

51:12

Cass Sunstein, who I'm a fan of, wrote

51:15

Nudge years ago, which is I think where

51:17

he entered the intellectual

51:19

zeitgeist and talks about if you're

51:21

looking to lose weight, relying

51:25

on willpower as a regular mechanism is not

51:27

going to work. You have to restructure things.

51:29

It's the structure that counts, right? So he

51:31

had a bowl of candy on his desk

51:33

that he would nibble all the time, and

51:36

he just got rid of the bowl of candy. He could still go

51:38

get the candy if he really wants it. Like I

51:41

don't keep liquor in my house. I drink

51:44

socially a lot. I'm very social, Chris.

51:46

But I also know myself

51:48

well enough that if I had a well-stocked bar

51:50

in my house, I would probably have a cocktail

51:52

every night. So I can walk across

51:54

the street if I want, go to a bar, but I do have

51:56

to walk across the street. There has to be enough of a

51:59

speed. bump for me that I

52:01

kind of think about it. Ditto

52:03

with ice cream, things like that, and with

52:06

telecommunication and with all of the information.

52:10

I'll add to that that I think in addition

52:12

to the fact that the data is

52:14

that boredom is actually a kind of

52:16

mulch that goes into our mental garden

52:18

and provides something. Either our

52:20

brain gets so frustrated that it comes up

52:22

with creative things to not be bored or

52:25

it's just sort of using that as downtime

52:27

that comes fertilizer for better ideas later. I

52:30

think that we might also be

52:32

overly productive right now in modern society. Like

52:34

if you were to look at my schedule,

52:36

I'm a one-man band. I mean, Eric

52:39

does a wonderful job editing this program, but in terms

52:41

of the production of this show and everything else I'm

52:43

doing, I'm a guy banging a drum with the cymbals

52:45

between my legs like one of the street performers. And

52:48

if you look at my schedule, it's extremely tight. And

52:51

I've noticed here recently that I am practically

52:53

very good at figuring out what I need

52:55

to do day by day, but

52:57

on a yearly basis of what do I want to

52:59

do to change things? What

53:01

direction do I want to take my career,

53:04

my life? There's not a lot of time

53:06

to contemplate that. And that contemplation requires being

53:08

able to walk around outside for a few

53:11

hours and just kind of let ideas

53:13

come to you as opposed to 15-minute session

53:15

where I drink coffee and think about strategy. That's going

53:17

to be a difficult thing to put in a bottle.

53:21

Yeah, that's the truth. And you kind

53:23

of need those extra places of nothingness to

53:25

have the big ideas that you want to have and the

53:28

things that you want to do. That's why we have

53:31

some of our best ideas when we

53:33

take hikes, especially without earbuds

53:35

in where we're just walking and listening to

53:37

nature. And it's so funny to me that

53:40

we all do this where we're like, oh,

53:42

why don't I do this for a while?

53:45

It's kind of like going to the gym. We

53:47

don't regret it afterwards. You're like, oh, it feels good, even

53:50

though it's hard to get to that place. And

53:53

yet we still allow ourselves to be constantly

53:55

distracted. And so I would just ask my

53:57

question again to people like, what is your...

54:00

your one space in your

54:02

day or in the world where you cannot

54:04

be distracted or reached? Do you ask yourself,

54:07

this is the first step, do

54:09

you have at least one place in the

54:11

entire world you can go where you will

54:13

A, not be tempted or not be able

54:15

to be reached? And

54:17

the answer for many people will probably be, I do not have a

54:19

place like that. And it used to be the

54:22

bathroom, not

54:24

anymore. It

54:26

used to be synagogue, your church,

54:28

your mosque, not anymore. How

54:31

many times have I seen people in church with their Bible

54:33

app and then the notifications come

54:35

in and then they're down the rabbit hole

54:37

online? All the time. These

54:41

spaces are gone. Do you have

54:43

one place that you have created for yourself

54:46

that you can declare this independence? And

54:48

if not, get out and get yourself

54:50

one. For me, for my family, it was

54:52

our home. But that's not going to

54:55

be the case for everybody. And I totally get

54:57

that. Don't get me wrong about me thinking I'm

54:59

preaching this to everyone. Like, yo, I got to

55:01

turn off your internet, right? No, no, no. You

55:03

just need that space. We decided our home is

55:05

the space because that's what we have control over.

55:08

And we also have this child that we want

55:10

to raise a certain way and interact with him

55:13

in a certain way. But your space can

55:15

be much smaller. It doesn't have

55:17

to be your whole house, but

55:19

at least have one place like that. Wonderful.

55:22

I'm going to get to that in a moment because I

55:24

want to pepper you with some

55:26

actionable steps that listeners could take on

55:29

a spectrum of wherever they are right now to where you are.

55:32

Before we do that, though, I just have a couple of quick questions

55:34

for you about your life experience so far. You've

55:36

got a child, a year old, right

55:38

about now, so not at

55:40

the point where he would have an

55:43

Atari or whatever kids today play with. They all

55:45

play Atari. They all play Atari. They can't get

55:48

off it. So like you mentioned,

55:50

Kevin, earlier, we've got this cabin in Wagner that I go

55:52

to pre-work periodically and I spent part of the pandemic there.

55:55

In that cabin, there are a bunch of books, a lot

55:57

of Star Trek novels from when I was made

56:00

their way there. There's a Jenga Tower, there's a risk

56:02

board, and there's a couple other things. So like when

56:04

I've had friends over, we will just play board games

56:06

and things. With your

56:08

kid, are you all going to do

56:10

like family game night, or you're going to like form

56:12

a family band, or will you eventually

56:14

let your kid have an iPad but restrict the

56:17

amount of hours that your child is using the

56:19

iPad? Like what does the internet and screen look

56:21

like for your kid moving forward, knowing that it

56:23

could very likely change as you work this out?

56:27

This is a fraught place because people feel very

56:29

judged when you talk about children, and I don't

56:31

want to do that. But I've met children, and

56:33

I'm not that impressed with a lot of them.

56:36

They're just little zombies addicted

56:38

to their phones and iPads, and if they're

56:41

a certain age, I guarantee you they're just

56:43

watching a lot of porn if

56:45

you give them unrestricted access. We

56:50

want to apply the way that we're living to

56:53

our child and make sure that he

56:55

is tech literate. We're not raising the child thinking

56:57

he's born in the 1800s. We're really going for the 1990s,

56:59

not the 1890s, but we want him to be able to

57:01

use technology

57:06

in its own place, but we don't want

57:08

it to rule his life. We really want

57:10

him to

57:13

have a childhood that is free

57:15

from the worst that

57:17

technology has to offer. For many young

57:20

people that manifest itself in social media,

57:22

in the social pressures, in

57:24

the envy economy, all those things

57:26

that are just wreaking havoc on

57:29

young people, and

57:31

also that reliance on the

57:34

screen, that the child being

57:36

incapable of existing in public

57:39

without the screen distracting them.

57:42

This is not judgment on other parents or anything, but

57:44

my goal is to not ever

57:47

provide a screen at a dinner table,

57:49

at home, or at a restaurant for

57:52

the child. I want him at any age

57:54

to be able to engage in conversation and

57:56

know when it's okay to speak and when

57:58

it's not, and have the skill to do

58:00

that, which I feel like we're

58:02

robbing some of our kids of the ability to flex

58:05

that muscle, to practice. Now, look, I get

58:07

it. We're all tired. I'm exhausted. And

58:11

you want to just say, here, watch this while we

58:13

adults talk at the restaurant. But

58:16

I don't want to rob him of the opportunity to be able

58:18

to know how to exist, how to speak at

58:21

a restaurant. And so, no,

58:24

we're not going to raise ... I mean, as you said,

58:26

with a caveat, things could change. We

58:28

want to raise him with an iPad and say,

58:30

he's never really used one. No, he's never used

58:32

one. The only

58:34

screen time our child has is to FaceTime

58:36

with grandparents, which I think is a worthy

58:38

trade-off for using a screen for a child.

58:40

But short of that, we really want to

58:43

keep things ... Where do you think that you go

58:45

to the library, or you go to ... In public,

58:47

when we're out ... like sitting at a park on

58:49

a Saturday afternoon, we'll FaceTime with the grandparents. Okay.

58:53

Whenever we have the opportunity to be online, we'll get

58:55

that in. And that's one of the things we have

58:57

sacrificed, was kind of like those daily

58:59

pop-ins with the

59:02

grandparents on FaceTime. Now, they talk

59:04

to him on the landline now,

59:06

and he knows how to ...

59:08

I mean, he knows how to answer ... Not answer a phone,

59:10

but he'll pick up the phone and say, huh? He

59:13

kind of knows what it's for,

59:16

but he doesn't know really what a phone

59:18

is, as terms of a smartphone. He doesn't

59:20

know what an iPad is, and we don't

59:22

want to give him access to it until

59:24

much later in his childhood, and

59:26

even if we do it just

59:28

on a very, very limited

59:31

basis. Where

59:34

do you think we're going to go moving forward? And

59:36

I ask this because I think you're

59:38

right that ... I am

59:40

new to this through your article and through a

59:42

series of articles that I pinged off of after

59:44

that. Dumb phones are on the rise.

59:46

So we call them smartphones. They should be called smart

59:48

... We have a supercomputer that has an app which

59:51

makes phone calls, of the 50 apps on your

59:53

supercomputer. It's not a phone. It's a supercomputer. It

59:55

has an app that's a phone, right? But

59:57

there's dumb phones, and they're on the rise. They're like actually

59:59

a ... lucrative and growing industry

1:00:01

of phones that have been intentionally

1:00:03

pared down to just talk texting

1:00:05

and then your mileage varies

1:00:07

thereafter. I read an article

1:00:09

about a group called the Luddite Club in New

1:00:11

York, which I

1:00:14

gathered to be some Gen

1:00:16

Z hipsters who have decided very similar to you

1:00:18

to consciously either give up their smartphones or at

1:00:20

least when they meet, none of them bring their

1:00:22

phones with them. They just all agree when they

1:00:24

hang out of the coffee shop, they're not going

1:00:26

to bring their phones. So do you think that's

1:00:28

going to, are we going to have kind of

1:00:30

a tech, I don't want to say counter revolution,

1:00:32

but tech rebalancing in life or do you

1:00:34

think it's going to get worse and there's going to be a

1:00:36

small core of people that do this? How do you think this

1:00:38

plays out? Yeah, I

1:00:41

think the 2010s were a period

1:00:43

where we were very, very excited about all

1:00:45

the possibilities that tech had to offer. Zuckerberg,

1:00:48

Musk were all good guys. Bezos,

1:00:53

these people were bringing us these

1:00:55

technologies that were so fun. Uber

1:00:58

replaced the horrible taxi experience that we

1:01:01

all have for so many years, getting

1:01:03

ripped off by taxi drivers. Airbnb

1:01:06

allowed you to travel, all these things. And

1:01:09

we just gave up so much just

1:01:11

to opt into all these things because

1:01:13

of what they promised. And

1:01:15

now we're starting to think about what we traded

1:01:17

in return in terms of data and all this

1:01:19

kind of stuff. So I think there

1:01:21

is a pushback, there is a skepticism of

1:01:24

technology that we didn't have, say in

1:01:27

2011, that we certainly have now, certainly after

1:01:29

a couple of elections where we see how

1:01:31

people can get so easily swayed by online

1:01:33

content and all that. It

1:01:36

is interesting to me and I teach

1:01:38

at a university and I work with

1:01:40

Gen Z all the time. Man,

1:01:43

they are so much more aware

1:01:46

of their own addictions than I

1:01:48

think millennials and certainly Gen X

1:01:51

are. They know that they're hooked on this

1:01:53

stuff and they are hooked.

1:01:55

They don't like that they're hooked and they're

1:01:57

desperately trying to find a place and a

1:01:59

way. to have a better relationship

1:02:02

with their technology. And sometimes awareness of

1:02:04

it is kind of the first step

1:02:06

and really important. But

1:02:08

that article you mentioned, that was Gen Z kids

1:02:10

that were doing that, the dumb phone club or

1:02:12

whatever, the letter club. I read that

1:02:15

article and Gen Z

1:02:17

is kind of leading the way in a lot

1:02:19

of this stuff. They

1:02:21

have seen their parents addicted

1:02:25

and they have been ignored their

1:02:27

whole childhoods while their parents stare

1:02:29

at a rectangle instead of them.

1:02:32

And it hurt them and they

1:02:34

do not want to be

1:02:37

treating their children like that. But they know

1:02:39

how powerful this stuff is and that they

1:02:41

are addicted to and they are really trying

1:02:43

to do something about it. I

1:02:45

was talking to a friend the other day who

1:02:47

has a handful of children and

1:02:49

she overheard them saying, hey, when we grow

1:02:51

up, can we not be addicted to our

1:02:53

phone like mom is? It

1:02:56

really hurt her feelings. So

1:03:00

I think Gen Z is really kind of on the cutting

1:03:02

edge of doing this. But I also think that there is

1:03:04

going to be a split here. You are going to have

1:03:07

this largely being among the

1:03:09

elites. I mentioned

1:03:11

in the article that there is a privilege

1:03:13

to opting out of a thing

1:03:16

that people rely on for daily life.

1:03:18

I get that. People

1:03:21

need to be connected and I have chosen to make

1:03:23

it harder to be connected because I can do that.

1:03:26

I have had to build systems that make it possible.

1:03:28

It did not just come out of nowhere. But

1:03:31

I think you are going to see elites doing it.

1:03:33

We first started seeing it by super elites building the

1:03:36

tech in Silicon Valley. They do not let their kids

1:03:38

have this stuff. They know how to control

1:03:40

it. And I think you are

1:03:42

going to see that spread in more elite circles. I

1:03:45

do not think it is going to be a super widespread kind of

1:03:47

thing. But also, the

1:03:50

technology is going to change. There is going

1:03:52

to be a market for how can I

1:03:54

be connected without being addicted. And

1:03:56

we are seeing new products coming online here just

1:03:58

in the past couple of weeks. actually, where

1:04:01

we're trying to find ways to contact

1:04:03

people by voice or text that

1:04:05

isn't this

1:04:08

constant device in our hands, or

1:04:11

that can allow us to

1:04:13

be connected without just going off on these

1:04:15

tangents to some other kind of content. And

1:04:18

so we're not always going to have

1:04:20

glowing rectangles. It's going to change. I don't know how

1:04:22

it's going to change, but I think there's going to

1:04:24

be a market for ways to keep people connected without

1:04:26

being stuck. On

1:04:29

that note, on my end, I was thinking about this. My

1:04:32

parents are in good health, thank God. There's

1:04:35

another member of my family who's doing very well, but I

1:04:38

want to be available to him in the event

1:04:40

that something goes wrong. So at

1:04:43

the moment, I feel that I need to have

1:04:45

my phone in my bedroom. A member

1:04:47

of the family has never called, I think he's called

1:04:49

me once during an emergency moment and it was like

1:04:51

at 10 o'clock at night. But in any event, I

1:04:53

tell my family, like, you're on

1:04:55

the favorites list, which means you can call me at

1:04:58

any time and it'll go through. So you can always

1:05:00

reach me. And if there's truly, if there's an actual

1:05:02

emergency, a member of my

1:05:04

family deals with addiction and I've told them multiple times, like,

1:05:07

I would a thousand percent, you'd rather call

1:05:09

me at 3 a.m. and I drive two

1:05:11

hours to go to an IHOP with you

1:05:14

than for you to relapse. I

1:05:16

would be overjoyed if you were to do that and

1:05:18

we could nip this in the bud as possible. But

1:05:22

that also means that I have to keep

1:05:24

my phone within hearing distance of me. Do

1:05:27

you have any tech solutions for me? I've

1:05:29

thought about maybe I could get a

1:05:31

landline and just have like, you know, five people that I

1:05:33

give that number for and keep it in my bedroom. I

1:05:36

wonder if it's possible for me to get one of those

1:05:38

low tech phones and get like a cheap number associated with

1:05:40

it and just have that sitting on

1:05:42

my bedstand as an emergency, Keaton, red phone,

1:05:44

bat phone kind of thing. I don't know.

1:05:47

What would you recommend? I recommend

1:05:49

continuing what you're doing is putting it on

1:05:51

airplane mode with the ability to

1:05:54

contact you among your approved whitelist

1:05:56

of contacts. It

1:05:58

doesn't have to be an arm's reach. It can

1:06:00

be on the mantle away from your bed so when

1:06:02

you wake up it's not just one reach and now

1:06:04

I'm scrolling Twitter. How did I get to the place?

1:06:06

That's a good idea. It could just be 15 feet

1:06:08

away with the ringer on and the white list hopping

1:06:11

and people can contact you. Okay,

1:06:14

that will be the micro step that I take at

1:06:16

this time because right now I plug it in to

1:06:19

recharge it at night which also apparently not very good

1:06:21

for the battery. You're not supposed to leave a phone

1:06:23

charging indefinitely. When are we supposed to charge them? I

1:06:25

don't understand this. I

1:06:28

think it's your car but I've got

1:06:32

multiple shelves in my bedroom so I can leave it on top of

1:06:34

the shelf where I can't reach it from my bed. That

1:06:36

way if there's an emergency good but first thing

1:06:38

in the morning I reach for a magazine

1:06:40

or something like that. On that note

1:06:42

can we go over some actionable steps people could

1:06:45

take in terms of ... Wait, actually hold on.

1:06:47

One more question for you. One more question for

1:06:49

you. All

1:06:51

right. It sounds like this has been

1:06:53

overwhelmingly positive for you. Is

1:06:55

there anything that surprised even you

1:06:58

that's worth bringing up before we sign off of

1:07:00

the Chris Moody experiment? I

1:07:02

think I've been surprised at the

1:07:04

responses that I've received from people. I've

1:07:06

been talking with people a lot about

1:07:09

this before I wrote the article. The

1:07:12

main response I get is people feeling

1:07:15

mildly defensive when

1:07:17

we talk really ... Really? They

1:07:20

say like, what's going on in your life? They're like, well, I've

1:07:22

been doing this new thing in our house. Tell

1:07:24

them about getting rid of the internet. They'll

1:07:27

say, oh, I could never do

1:07:30

that, but I wish I could. They'll

1:07:32

make a series of excuses or whatever because

1:07:35

you're just thinking in terms of how do we live

1:07:37

now in the status quo instead

1:07:39

of like, well, what if you made some changes and then

1:07:41

you do that. Everybody says, I

1:07:43

wish ... Not everybody. Most people

1:07:45

say, oh, I would love to do that, but

1:07:47

I could never for XYZ

1:07:50

reason. I've had friends respond

1:07:52

in very funny ways. One

1:07:54

friend of mine tried to sign

1:07:56

me up for a print subscription to

1:07:58

a pornographic magazine. Wait,

1:08:01

is the Joker is a legitimate altruistic

1:08:03

move? No, he

1:08:05

was concerned that I was not being

1:08:07

stimulated enough without the internet in my

1:08:09

home. There

1:08:13

was an anti-porn law passed in this

1:08:15

person's state that did not

1:08:17

allow you to send gift subscriptions

1:08:19

to pornography anymore, and so

1:08:22

it got blocked. I

1:08:25

rent my house from an evangelical

1:08:27

minister, and I am very

1:08:29

grateful that I am

1:08:32

not on the mailing list for Hustler magazine at

1:08:34

that address. It

1:08:36

was an unwelcome gesture, but I am grateful

1:08:38

to have friends that are thinking of me.

1:08:40

So people ... Yeah. And

1:08:43

then, of course, when people hear about, oh,

1:08:45

this is fun with the landline. When you

1:08:47

have a landline, it totally changes the way

1:08:49

people call you, especially, let's say, people that

1:08:51

are 35 and older get very excited to

1:08:53

call you on the landline. Whoa, they are

1:08:55

so stoked. They love leaving messages. They

1:08:57

love prank calling you. I'm surprised, Heaton, you haven't

1:08:59

sent me a prank call yet, but I'm hoping

1:09:02

for one. Do I have your new number? Because

1:09:04

I absolutely will do that. You'll get it after

1:09:06

the call here. But

1:09:09

if you go down in age, you

1:09:11

get people that hear the

1:09:14

answering machine, and they know they

1:09:16

can't send a text message, and they realize at the

1:09:18

last minute they have to leave a message, and

1:09:20

God bless their hearts. They're not

1:09:22

well practiced, and they leave the, oh,

1:09:25

hi, it's me. And

1:09:27

you're like, now say your name. I

1:09:31

don't have a call waiting. I don't know who it is. Or

1:09:33

they'll call and say, hey. And you're like, who's

1:09:36

this? I have no idea, right?

1:09:39

One friend who's in early 20s called

1:09:41

and said, I think your phone's broken.

1:09:44

And it was the busy signal that she received.

1:09:46

She'd never heard the busy signal before. And

1:09:49

so the reactions are really, really

1:09:52

pleasant. But we did enter

1:09:54

find a time when this was really

1:09:56

put to the test. And that

1:09:58

is one night, my wife and I are watching a DVD,

1:10:01

the baby's asleep, and suddenly

1:10:04

there's this flash across the screen. And

1:10:06

I'm like, how was that? You know, we live in the

1:10:08

woods. Is that a big insect or maybe

1:10:11

it is a bird? Then

1:10:13

there was another one and another one, and I go to turn the

1:10:15

lights and bats have started streaming

1:10:17

out of the fireplace, flying around our

1:10:19

house like in Batman when he's got

1:10:22

down into the cave, you know, for

1:10:24

the first time as a child. And

1:10:27

we're like, holy crap, our house is invaded by bats.

1:10:29

I think they got through the chimney or something like

1:10:31

that. And we hit the deck

1:10:33

and covered our heads and crawled up to

1:10:35

our room and shut the door and put a mosquito net

1:10:38

over the baby. And what would you

1:10:40

do if it's midnight or so and your house is

1:10:42

invaded by bats? Like, what's the first thing you do

1:10:44

once you're in a safe place? You

1:10:48

probably Google it. What do I do with bats? Yes,

1:10:50

I think so. I would do, yes, something like that.

1:10:52

Well, I can't Google it. What am I supposed to

1:10:54

do? What am I supposed to call? It's the middle

1:10:56

of the night and there's bats flying around my house.

1:10:59

And we were just, we just had to

1:11:01

go to sleep. I mean, we were, you

1:11:05

know, we otherwise would have spent the night scrolling bat

1:11:07

content, you know, like what do you do? We get

1:11:09

the following morning, check to see if either of you

1:11:11

is a vampire. No. Right.

1:11:14

Yeah, we also have this baby in the crib and we're

1:11:16

like, oh my gosh, he can't tell if he gets bit,

1:11:18

you know. Of course we had closed off the area. Anyway,

1:11:21

I had to call my mother-in-law

1:11:23

and have her Googled, you know, what to

1:11:25

do with bats and she just read us

1:11:28

the internet and I had to pull out

1:11:30

the phone book and find an exterminator. And

1:11:32

it just all felt very ridiculous. And it was like

1:11:34

in a moment like that, I was like, boy, it

1:11:36

sure would be nice to have the internet right now.

1:11:38

But on the same hand, we probably would have spent

1:11:40

the whole night on the phone looking at bats

1:11:42

and being scared and terrified on ourselves and

1:11:45

thinking we had rabies or whatever. And

1:11:47

we took care of it in due time

1:11:49

in an analog way, minus my mother-in-law reading

1:11:51

me the internet. But

1:11:54

I just want to emphasize that we've talked a

1:11:56

lot about the benefits and the positives, but

1:11:59

you know, there are trade-offs, and that is

1:12:01

important to mention too. My

1:12:04

great-aunt Mildred, I

1:12:06

think she was born in like 1910 or so. When

1:12:10

I was in high school, she called our

1:12:12

landline phone and we picked up and she

1:12:14

just went, this is Mildred and this is

1:12:16

an email, and then proceeded to read what

1:12:18

she thought was an email over the phone.

1:12:20

It was very cute. They'd hung up without

1:12:22

anybody saying anything. She thought an email was

1:12:24

god-breathing mail. It was absolutely lovely. All right,

1:12:26

sounds like the biggest downside to your

1:12:28

lifestyle is bats. We

1:12:31

got rid of the bats, by the way. You did your

1:12:33

best. Okay, I have one more question and then we'll go

1:12:35

to the actionable steps. Have you heard of Green Bank, the

1:12:38

Green Bank Observatory? Are you familiar with this? I

1:12:40

know exactly what you're talking about. It's this town

1:12:42

that they can't use cell phones because it disrupts

1:12:44

the satellites. Right, it is instruments. Yeah, yeah. Yeah,

1:12:47

so you've done a wonderful job. I

1:12:49

feel like I'm talking to somebody that has discovered

1:12:51

vegetables and is now going to talk to everybody

1:12:53

else, being like, you really ought to try these

1:12:55

vegetables. They're very healthy for you. Listen, I'm not

1:12:58

getting anything out of this. I don't have any vegetable

1:13:00

sales. I don't have a vegetable. I'm just telling you,

1:13:02

you like vegetables. We really enjoy vegetables, right? So

1:13:05

you're not doing this because you're angry at the world.

1:13:07

You're having a good time and you want to share

1:13:09

what you've learned for other people, which is very laudable.

1:13:13

But so far, everything we've discussed has been kind

1:13:15

of individual or household-based. And

1:13:17

I'm curious as to what you think life would be

1:13:20

like if you were living in a community of other

1:13:22

people that had eschewed the internet, like Green Bank Observatory.

1:13:24

I've seen footage of it and from what I can

1:13:26

tell, most evenings they go play guitar. They

1:13:29

all go for them like a neighborhood band because

1:13:31

there's nothing else to do other than watch TV.

1:13:34

And so they're more active in their neighborly life.

1:13:36

I don't know. I guess they could watch TV

1:13:38

and they have landline internet. But I don't

1:13:41

know. What do you think would happen if a bunch

1:13:43

of other moody-type people

1:13:45

in your area were to do the same thing?

1:13:48

Pete, do you have a time in college where the

1:13:51

campus internet went out before

1:13:54

cell phones? Like the ethernet thing

1:13:56

just went out? Well, it happened sometime

1:13:58

back in the early 2000s. the

1:14:00

90s, there's just no internet for the next two

1:14:02

hours. Everybody

1:14:05

went outside and hung

1:14:07

out and played Frisbee. They're like,

1:14:09

we should do this more often. Before

1:14:14

we were distracted to death, we

1:14:17

made time for things

1:14:19

to do together. This has been

1:14:22

studied in the book,

1:14:24

Bowling Alone, talking about certain

1:14:28

civic institutions eroding. This

1:14:30

is for things larger. The internet has not killed all

1:14:32

of these things. I'm not saying that. But

1:14:35

you do have a yearning

1:14:38

for community and time

1:14:40

with other people. I

1:14:43

fear that our easy access

1:14:45

to digital entertainment and

1:14:47

distraction serves as a veneer

1:14:50

that scratches that itch but doesn't

1:14:52

fix the problem. It makes us

1:14:54

think that we have

1:14:57

engaged in community. But

1:14:59

when that screen goes off and

1:15:01

you're sitting there alone, you're sad.

1:15:05

It's like pornography being

1:15:07

a suitable replacement for sexual

1:15:09

intimacy with another person. I

1:15:13

tried that for a couple of years. It isn't. It

1:15:15

isn't, right. I

1:15:18

do think that if we weren't able

1:15:20

to entertain ourselves in our

1:15:23

private spaces so amply as

1:15:26

we are today, that we

1:15:28

would seek it out in more community-minded

1:15:30

ways. I

1:15:32

see that where I live. I live in

1:15:35

the mountains in a fairly rural area

1:15:38

where people gather together in person

1:15:41

quite a bit. I

1:15:43

think the research will bear out that

1:15:45

the more time you're spending in community,

1:15:47

in a intentional community with other people,

1:15:50

the happier you are. You are reliant

1:15:52

upon those people. If

1:15:55

you have a question, you need to ask

1:15:57

them versus just googling it. My

1:16:00

wife and I started a garden this year and our

1:16:02

neighbor is a multi-generational

1:16:05

farming family. We walked down the street

1:16:07

and I said, how do

1:16:09

I till the garden? I don't even know what tool

1:16:12

I use. I

1:16:15

couldn't text them because we don't get cell service

1:16:17

in our valley. I just walked over there and

1:16:19

asked them. He gave

1:16:21

me some advice and then I'll tell you what

1:16:23

happened next, Heaton. 20

1:16:25

minutes later, a tractor, a

1:16:27

full farmer tractor rumbles down

1:16:30

the street. He tills my

1:16:32

little plot of garden just

1:16:34

as a neighborly thing to

1:16:36

do with his tractor instead

1:16:38

of with my shovel. That

1:16:42

interaction I had, just asking a question,

1:16:46

it created community. He did

1:16:48

something for me. Then

1:16:50

afterwards, as a thank you, I bought him a

1:16:52

case of beer and flowers for his wife and

1:16:54

ice cream for his kids. Community

1:16:57

was blossomed from just going

1:16:59

over to me like, how do I

1:17:01

start a garden? I never would have

1:17:03

done that before. I would have just googled it. Then Heaton like

1:17:05

that and then planted my garden alone.

1:17:07

But instead, I planted it with my

1:17:09

community, with my neighbors. I'll

1:17:12

take that over a Google search

1:17:15

by myself, even if it's more work

1:17:17

and more time and eat it. That

1:17:19

is absolute. Although, I would have loved to be able to

1:17:21

Google bats. That

1:17:24

is wonderful. All right. Well, we're going to sun off in a minute,

1:17:26

but I want to do some actionable steps people could take. It

1:17:29

sounds like for anybody that can,

1:17:31

you would recommend taking the plug and removing the

1:17:33

internet for their home. Based on our

1:17:36

conversation and just me searching my own thoughts in

1:17:38

life, I would say that I think most

1:17:40

people, myself included, are probably a lot less important

1:17:42

in terms of immediacy than we think. I'd

1:17:45

recommend anybody that is toying with this

1:17:48

idea, think about how often you've had

1:17:50

to have the internet. You had

1:17:52

to have it that instance. How many times have you been

1:17:54

attacked by bats? If it's less than once a year,

1:17:56

it's probably not that big of an idea. But

1:17:58

I wonder if we can't come up with some... other things in

1:18:01

between the moody lifestyle and where people

1:18:03

are currently at. So earlier

1:18:06

moody, when I first

1:18:08

met and befriended you, you and your

1:18:10

wife were living in New York. And

1:18:13

I believe at the time you

1:18:15

were playing with, you

1:18:17

had to put your phone in a box at the

1:18:19

front of your house. So if I came over to

1:18:21

your very nice flat in Manhattan, there

1:18:23

was like a little bedstand by the

1:18:26

door and you were just like, you can just leave your phone there. And

1:18:28

it was just kind of like in the same way that other

1:18:30

people, hey, we don't have shoes in the house. We

1:18:34

don't have phones in the house. If you need to check your phone, just go

1:18:37

to the door. It's fine, but we don't have phones out. Did

1:18:39

that work? Did you like it? Would you recommend it? I

1:18:42

do recommend it. It is all based on your willpower.

1:18:44

It's very easy to just go get that phone and

1:18:46

bring it to the couch. It

1:18:48

also creates some awkward social interaction where you have

1:18:50

to be kind of a jerk to your guests.

1:18:52

And I tried to do this

1:18:54

when we had some people over for a

1:18:57

summer cabin experience, just like a summer kind

1:18:59

of vacation. And I was like, hey, would

1:19:01

you guys mind just not using your phones

1:19:03

in the public space? And they

1:19:05

did anyway. And I don't want to be like, hey, I

1:19:07

should don't use your phone. I don't

1:19:09

want to control people. And

1:19:11

it's been fun because we've had guests since

1:19:14

we turned off the internet who

1:19:16

seem to just love their weekend off

1:19:18

grid. They have an amazing

1:19:20

time. They bring the books they've always wanted to

1:19:23

read. I tell them to

1:19:25

prepare for it. And there isn't this paternalistic,

1:19:29

like, please turn off your cellular phone.

1:19:31

It's, oh, we don't have the internet. That's

1:19:34

it. And

1:19:37

so, yeah, that works having that, but

1:19:41

it really is hard to

1:19:43

impose upon other people. You

1:19:46

don't want to ask people not to do stuff.

1:19:48

So that's kind of the downside of that, but

1:19:50

it can work. And if

1:19:53

you have the willpower to leave the phone

1:19:55

in the basket, which I very rarely did.

1:19:57

Okay. Okay. I

1:20:00

might try that. I don't

1:20:03

really mind if I have

1:20:05

people over if they use the phone or something like

1:20:07

that. It's rare enough and if I have a bunch

1:20:09

of people over, it's probably a party, so I'm not

1:20:11

too bothered by that. But I

1:20:14

might try like a month where I only use the

1:20:16

internet in the studio that I'm currently talking to you

1:20:18

from and don't use it the rest of my house.

1:20:20

Then again, I'll probably just live in my studio as

1:20:22

opposed to it. So I don't know that it will make any difference, but I

1:20:24

might try that out. What

1:20:26

about like instead

1:20:28

of limiting it geographically, limiting hours,

1:20:30

you said that you and Christie

1:20:32

had a cabin where you

1:20:35

would like you just kind of after sunset, like

1:20:37

you shut down the internet, like how did that work

1:20:39

and how would somebody use that in their life? You

1:20:42

can buy a timer that can

1:20:45

go into any outlet. So you just plug

1:20:47

it into where your wifi router is plugged

1:20:49

in and then you set it to say

1:20:51

turn off the outlet at this time and

1:20:53

turn it back on at that time. So

1:20:55

it's completely seamless. It just

1:20:57

does it for you automatically and the

1:20:59

internet goes off and then it comes

1:21:02

back on. What matters for that

1:21:04

is the location of your router. If

1:21:06

your router is in an easily accessible

1:21:08

place, you can just reverse

1:21:10

the timer and it kind of defeats the

1:21:13

purpose. Where it really works effectively is where

1:21:15

it's a pain in the rear to get

1:21:17

to that router. Some people have their routers

1:21:19

in a basement or under the stairs or

1:21:21

you got to get over the box of

1:21:23

things and everything. And

1:21:25

that kind of helps is having it out of

1:21:27

reach. Another thing that

1:21:30

I think could be a really nice middle

1:21:32

ground and I might end up doing

1:21:34

someday if I am required to work

1:21:36

from home a little bit more is

1:21:39

just not have wifi at all,

1:21:41

but mirror a hardwire ether that

1:21:43

connects to, that has a cord

1:21:45

of a certain amount of feet. And

1:21:48

that way, like a chained dog,

1:21:50

the internet has its space and

1:21:52

you have to go to a

1:21:54

computer. And that way there's

1:21:56

no screens behind closed doors, especially if you

1:21:58

have children or or husbands

1:22:00

with low willpower, you know, there's

1:22:03

like, you could

1:22:05

keep it in a public space and,

1:22:07

oh, I'm going to go use the

1:22:09

internet for intention or

1:22:12

for work or something like that, but

1:22:14

it's not invading every nook and cranny

1:22:17

of your house. Right. I

1:22:19

think that works. It's kind of your opting in within

1:22:21

your own life as opposed to being ubiquitous. You have

1:22:23

to go sit down in a specific location. Yeah. And

1:22:25

I think that that works really nicely. Now, of course,

1:22:28

your smartphone will probably have

1:22:30

LTE access that's pretty good

1:22:32

and you probably stream a football game over your cellular

1:22:34

network these days. Not everybody

1:22:36

lives in the hall or like I do. I

1:22:39

had a colleague just today that was saying, well, you

1:22:41

know, what do I do? Because even if I turn

1:22:43

off my internet, my phone works great. And it's like,

1:22:46

well, you're going to have to get a flip phone,

1:22:48

I guess. Maybe

1:22:51

the hard wire plus the flip phone, getting rid of the

1:22:53

smartphone, depending on how extreme you want it

1:22:55

to go or how much this matter to you

1:22:57

could be a really, really nice option that gives

1:22:59

you both the access you need to fight the

1:23:01

bats, but then also the freedom to have your

1:23:03

life without it. Yeah. On

1:23:06

that note, what do you think about dumb phones? Like

1:23:09

I checked on this earlier today. Apparently you

1:23:11

can't have a phone number that

1:23:13

goes to two separate phones at once. So I

1:23:15

can't have two mobile phones keying off of the

1:23:18

same phone number. It might

1:23:20

be possible to get a cheap number. I imagine it

1:23:22

is since I would presumably not be using the dumb

1:23:24

phone that much and wouldn't be using it for any

1:23:26

data. And then there's also call

1:23:28

forwarding. And I don't know how complicated that is, but it

1:23:30

might just be a button you push and sends it over.

1:23:33

What do you reckon about dumb phones? Would that be a

1:23:36

good intermediate step? Why not

1:23:38

keep your smartphone, but

1:23:40

just get a cellular plan that

1:23:42

doesn't have data so

1:23:44

that you can have your smartphone

1:23:46

and all the benefits that that has like directions

1:23:48

and Yelp or all those things that you can

1:23:51

plug into wifi. You know, well, I

1:23:53

need to get online. Let me plug in a wifi. I'm

1:23:55

in a wifi zone. And then it acts,

1:23:57

it's an actual dumb phone without, if you're

1:23:59

not. close to plugged into WiFi. There

1:24:02

are certain providers, like AT&T I don't think will

1:24:04

do it, like the big ones I don't think

1:24:06

do that, but I think there are providers that

1:24:08

say, oh yeah, you just want to make telephone

1:24:11

calls with no data? Okay, great.

1:24:14

I've considered doing that because I've thought about getting

1:24:17

a dumb phone, but then I'm like, well then

1:24:19

I have two devices, then I've got another device.

1:24:21

That's kind of adding to

1:24:23

things. Well, what if I made

1:24:25

my smartphone dumb sometimes? If

1:24:29

I'm in a place where I need to get

1:24:31

directions, I can probably find WiFi fairly easily and

1:24:34

do it. I haven't made that step

1:24:36

yet because just haven't done it yet, but

1:24:38

that's certainly something I'm considering. It doesn't sound

1:24:41

like you really need to. I think your

1:24:43

method seems to be where you ... No,

1:24:45

and that actually resonates very much the why

1:24:47

add more technology to try and solve this problem makes a

1:24:49

lot of sense. I've known people that are just sick and

1:24:51

tired of being consumed by their phones and they go get

1:24:54

a dumb phone. You

1:24:56

realize how much texting you do in

1:24:59

life just with your friends and colleagues. The whole

1:25:02

point here is to stay connected with people. We're

1:25:04

not trying to flee from people, but

1:25:07

as nostalgic as it might be to text

1:25:09

using T9, it gets

1:25:11

old real fast. You

1:25:13

want a device that you can text and stay

1:25:15

in touch with people and be able to receive

1:25:17

photos and receive funny things

1:25:19

from your friends and your family. We want

1:25:21

to be connected. Have

1:25:25

not been sold on using the dumb phone because

1:25:27

I've seen other people do it and they get

1:25:29

frustrated and they just go back to the other

1:25:32

device and actually find themselves on the device even

1:25:34

more and it doesn't last. The

1:25:36

idea here is to do

1:25:38

things that are not just make

1:25:40

us tourists in technological experimentation. We

1:25:43

want to build sustainable institutions that work for

1:25:45

us, that allow us to be connected with

1:25:47

our friends and family and loved ones, but

1:25:50

also have control over our life. What balance

1:25:53

is that for you? You'll

1:25:55

know it for yourself in your heart what's

1:25:57

going to work for you and what's not. And

1:26:00

so we need to find a way to make this

1:26:02

work for us because I think we've just given so

1:26:05

much over to the tech companies to say, all right,

1:26:07

you rule my life. You rule me. Let's

1:26:09

take that back. And

1:26:12

it doesn't mean being Amish and just giving up

1:26:14

everything, but it means finding some kind

1:26:16

of balance that works for you. And this is what

1:26:18

works for us, and I think it'll work for some

1:26:20

people, but certainly not all, especially as a lot of

1:26:22

people have loved ones they need to stay in touch

1:26:24

with on a regular basis through text or something, but

1:26:26

also people that work from home, you need

1:26:29

to find something that can work for you.

1:26:31

Yeah, I think you're 100% right on

1:26:33

all of that. It's not that technology's bad,

1:26:35

it's that technology ought to serve us and

1:26:37

serve our better selves. And

1:26:39

being mindful and deliberate about that. I was

1:26:42

taking an Uber from the

1:26:44

airport to my home, getting back from New York here

1:26:46

about three weeks ago. The driver

1:26:48

was from Eritrea, and I went, I

1:26:50

don't know anything about Eritrea. I know it's next door

1:26:52

to Ethiopia, and I know that there's a very meaningful

1:26:54

distinction between the two because I've had multiple conversations with

1:26:56

Eritreans, but I don't know. What

1:26:59

is Eritrea compared to Texas? Is it basically the same? Eritrean,

1:27:01

Texas is basically the same? And he's like, no, they're very

1:27:03

different. And I was like, oh, I figured

1:27:05

that might be the case. How are they different? Like what

1:27:07

struck you as different when you came to Texas? And

1:27:11

he went, oh, the United States is

1:27:13

so isolated. It

1:27:15

is a lonely place. Texas is not as bad as

1:27:18

California. Not as bad as California. I can't do an

1:27:20

Eritrean accent, but he's very lonely. And

1:27:23

he's like, people, they don't talk to

1:27:25

their families. And I thought

1:27:27

I was going to like zag him and

1:27:29

be like, well, did your whole

1:27:31

family move with you to Texas? No,

1:27:33

no, they're scattered. My brother's in Germany.

1:27:35

My mom is in Vegas. My

1:27:37

sister's in California. We're scattered. And I'm like, well, how often

1:27:39

do you talk to them? This is, I thought, going to

1:27:41

be the zinger where it turned out, hey, man, you're doing

1:27:44

just as many goes. My entire

1:27:46

family does a Zoom phone call every day for

1:27:48

two hours at 11 a.m. So

1:27:51

there's eight of us that are there at any given time.

1:27:54

It works out to be dinner for my brother in Germany.

1:27:57

It's breakfast for my sister in California. And I take

1:27:59

a break. during lunch, our kids are all on

1:28:01

it. Not everybody makes it every

1:28:03

single day, but there's usually a critical mass of

1:28:05

eight people or so. We're all able to

1:28:08

... It feels like we're back in the village. It feels like we're

1:28:10

all back in our family compound. I was like, hot

1:28:12

damn, I think you figured out Zoom, brother. I

1:28:14

think you've made that work very well for you

1:28:16

where you're far more connected than I am

1:28:18

and not in a way that's detracting from your family life or

1:28:21

your social life in a way that's bringing it together. Yeah,

1:28:23

my whole extended family did one Zoom call

1:28:25

during the pandemic on Easter Sunday, and

1:28:28

that was it. I'm

1:28:30

quite proud of this. During the pandemic, there

1:28:32

was an app called HousePernity, which is now

1:28:34

gone to put, but I was able to

1:28:37

summon the Heaton family. Every

1:28:39

Wednesday, we started doing it. And then

1:28:41

randomly, because you could see when your friends

1:28:44

were online, my friend Nick Spirdoudi started just

1:28:46

bombing us and going in it. My

1:28:48

dad fell in love with Nick. He made a

1:28:50

stocking for him. He's like,

1:28:53

Nick is now part of the family. I

1:28:57

am the weak link on this because I travel so much.

1:28:59

But when I'm in the States and I'm able to actually

1:29:01

dictate my time, we all

1:29:03

check in for about half an hour every Wednesday. So

1:29:06

me, Nuclear Family, Aunt Marge, and Nick,

1:29:09

we'll all get together and talk. We've

1:29:11

kept doing that post-pandemic and even after the fall

1:29:13

of HousePernity. Couple

1:29:15

more actionable things that we could ask.

1:29:19

Have you played around with making your phone more boring?

1:29:22

So I have heard it on black and white. There you go.

1:29:24

That's what I was going to ask. You're on grayscale, right? Do

1:29:26

you find it to be effective? I did

1:29:28

find it effective, but also not sustainable because

1:29:31

I wanted to use the phone for certain

1:29:33

things and it just, grayscale was

1:29:36

keeping me from checking it and was a

1:29:38

fun thing to do that made me more

1:29:40

mindful of how much I use it, but

1:29:43

I didn't keep the grayscale.

1:29:47

Another thing is doing screen

1:29:50

time to tell you how much screen time that

1:29:52

you're using. I find it, it can be incredibly

1:29:54

shocking to see how much time you're spending on

1:29:56

it when it gives you that little report at

1:29:58

the end of the week. And at my worst,

1:30:00

it was up to four hours a day. And

1:30:03

that was really shocking when I had a child at

1:30:05

home. How was I spending four hours a day looking

1:30:07

at my phone? Shouldn't I have been looking

1:30:09

at the child? He wasn't napping that long. And

1:30:14

I will say that since we turned off the internet,

1:30:16

that phone screen time has plummeted by 80%. And

1:30:21

that's mostly just like sending a text or something. It

1:30:23

might take an hour of the day, but it was

1:30:26

the time that I was on the phone

1:30:28

was actual high quality useful time. I

1:30:31

do want to say, Heaton, we

1:30:34

were talking about the

1:30:36

technology making us a tool. I want

1:30:38

to mention an example. There's a

1:30:40

group of Benedictine monks that I like

1:30:43

to spend time with far out in

1:30:45

the New Mexico desert. This is one

1:30:47

of the most remote monasteries in

1:30:49

the Western Hemisphere. And I've been there many,

1:30:51

many times. And these are off-grid

1:30:53

Benedictine monks. They follow a 1500 year order. And

1:30:58

they, many years ago in the

1:31:01

1990s, started a website

1:31:04

design business. And

1:31:06

it- Really? Yes,

1:31:08

they did. Because they have to be self-sustaining,

1:31:11

so they have businesses. You've heard of monks

1:31:13

making beer, monks building- Right. Trappists.

1:31:16

They have all kinds of things. And they did make beer for a while.

1:31:18

But they got online pretty

1:31:21

early and started making

1:31:23

websites. And doggammit, they were

1:31:25

pretty good. And

1:31:27

these monks started to make some

1:31:30

real serious dough building these early

1:31:32

1990s websites. Well,

1:31:36

if you know anything about the Benedictine

1:31:38

order, there are certain times

1:31:40

during the day where you are working

1:31:42

and it is limited. It is maybe

1:31:44

two to three hours a day. Another

1:31:46

time, the whole point of being a

1:31:48

monk is to spend time in rare

1:31:50

communal worship monk stuff. Right?

1:31:53

That's the whole idea. You are not consumed by the world.

1:31:55

Well, they built this successful internet business. And

1:31:58

it was so successful that they realized that they would have to- to

1:32:00

work more than the allotted time

1:32:02

that the order was supposed to allow

1:32:04

for work. And

1:32:06

you know what they did? They threw it away. They

1:32:09

got rid of it. As lucrative as it

1:32:11

was, they ended the

1:32:13

internet business because it was threatening the

1:32:16

more important things in their life. And they saw

1:32:18

it coming a mile

1:32:20

away. And they said, for us to

1:32:22

continue to sustain this, we cannot

1:32:25

be monks anymore. We have to be an internet company, and

1:32:27

we're not that. We're a

1:32:29

15-year-old Catholic order. And

1:32:32

so they got rid of it. And

1:32:34

it harmed their, I guess bottom

1:32:36

line is a weird thing to say about a monastery, but

1:32:38

it harmed their finances. And

1:32:41

they made that sacrifice because they saw

1:32:43

themselves being a tool not of technology

1:32:45

necessarily, but of hustle

1:32:48

culture, of workism,

1:32:50

work addiction. And

1:32:52

they said, no, we work two hours a day

1:32:54

and no more. And if we can't

1:32:56

find a way to do this two hours a day, we're not doing it. And

1:33:00

I think about that a lot in

1:33:02

terms of something that is very shiny

1:33:04

and promising and fun. Sometimes

1:33:08

it can consume us in many ways. And

1:33:11

it's nice to be able sometimes to

1:33:13

just turn it down and say no.

1:33:17

Well, I always try to end the show on

1:33:19

an anecdote about Benedictine monks. So

1:33:21

we'll go ahead and wrap it

1:33:23

up there. Acknowledging

1:33:27

that you have your ducks straight and your priorities

1:33:30

in order, are there any places you'd like to

1:33:32

send listeners? Are there any Chris

1:33:34

Moody hubs that they could check out your work?

1:33:37

Well, you can look up a lot

1:33:39

of my articles on the Washington Post. There's

1:33:41

quite a few about alternative living and embedding

1:33:43

in communities. You can find me on LinkedIn.

1:33:45

I'm over there. You can follow me there

1:33:47

on X, formerly known as Twitter. I'm at

1:33:49

Moody. And you can

1:33:52

find me there as well. This

1:33:54

conversation is based on the

1:33:57

Atlantic magazine. And you can find it online

1:33:59

at the Atlantic. atlantic.com. And

1:34:01

I will make it easy for everybody and

1:34:03

I will put the Atlantic article we've been

1:34:06

referencing in the episode description today so if

1:34:08

you open up your podcast app and see

1:34:10

what what it's written in the description

1:34:12

I'll put a link there and then I know there's a

1:34:14

lot of people that read Reason magazine and

1:34:16

I think you recently had a thing on van life

1:34:18

and Reason as well so I'll include that too. Yeah

1:34:20

we lived in a van for two years 72 square

1:34:22

feet and Reason asked me to write

1:34:25

a little guide to the things you might need to to

1:34:27

have to live in a van and

1:34:29

travel around and so if you want to get your

1:34:31

van life started follow the

1:34:33

weird off-grid path that is the Moody

1:34:36

family living in a van then trading

1:34:38

up for a cabin in the woods

1:34:40

without Wi-Fi you're welcome to

1:34:43

join me in this bliss. All right

1:34:45

wonderful thank you so much Chris. Thank

1:34:47

you it's great to be here. The

1:34:50

political orphanage is fueled

1:34:53

and powered by two things and two

1:34:55

things alone the

1:34:57

financial support of the people who listen to

1:34:59

it and

1:35:02

high quality honest American plutonium yes

1:35:05

this show would not be possible without

1:35:08

the electricity generated by my small off-grid

1:35:11

handmade plutonium decanter or without

1:35:15

the hard-working plutonium miners who this

1:35:17

country owes so much just

1:35:20

as it would not be possible without

1:35:23

you you can

1:35:25

support the show by going

1:35:28

to patreon.com/Andrew Heaton on

1:35:30

this week's bonus episode little different this

1:35:32

time gang you usually here recently a

1:35:34

lot of the bonus episodes have been

1:35:36

I invite the guest to

1:35:39

go from talking with me on

1:35:41

the main show to retreat with me to the

1:35:43

green room and we do an extra episode going

1:35:45

in a different direction for everybody that's already known

1:35:48

and fallen in love with the guest sometimes

1:35:50

I bring on a whole other guest and a whole

1:35:52

other topic we let our hair down and we have

1:35:54

a fun time we talk about something else this

1:35:57

week the first time ever probably

1:36:00

the last time ever i'm gonna

1:36:02

share what i do to

1:36:04

remain productive in

1:36:06

the onslaught of emails that mark the time we're

1:36:09

living in what what i do to keep my

1:36:11

head above water in a world of juggling

1:36:15

apps and spinning plates

1:36:18

specifically email is emails

1:36:20

the main thing i use is my informational

1:36:22

conduit with the world and i feel like

1:36:24

i have finally got the bull by the

1:36:27

horns last january

1:36:29

i had thirty five hundred emails

1:36:31

in my inbox all unopened and

1:36:33

as of today it is

1:36:36

a hundred and twenty that's right a

1:36:38

hundred and twenty i have successfully kept

1:36:40

that number below two hundred all

1:36:42

year now i'm not sure if

1:36:45

the bonus episode dovetails with chris's

1:36:47

interview or is an outright opposition

1:36:50

to it as this

1:36:52

week's bonus episodes kind of heatin' doing

1:36:55

a productivity hack kind of thing it's

1:36:57

what what i do to stay ahead of the game

1:37:00

in terms of email i feel chris's position has been

1:37:02

a much more eloquent and thoughtful thorough

1:37:04

approach to modern life but in any

1:37:07

event it'll be there for you so

1:37:09

this week on the bonus episode

1:37:11

we'll take a break from political analysis and

1:37:14

mega systems to talk about

1:37:16

micro systems your inbox

1:37:18

specifically your inbox is

1:37:22

a sprawling purgatory of

1:37:24

unopened emails that lingers for

1:37:26

years and decades and

1:37:28

makes you slightly nervous every

1:37:30

time you open the thing i

1:37:33

am here to help i think i can help you

1:37:35

slim down your email inbox

1:37:37

which again normally i

1:37:39

wouldn't do in this program it not being

1:37:41

an advice program but i thought today perhaps

1:37:44

it would dovetail with this week's episode so

1:37:46

that's this week's bonus episode which you can

1:37:48

find by going to patreon dot com

1:37:51

slash andrew heaton that's

1:37:53

patreon.com slash andrew heaton

1:37:56

thanks that

1:37:59

is the show Thank you

1:38:01

for listening wherever you downloaded it to

1:38:03

and then drove up a mountain to

1:38:05

listen to in solitary

1:38:08

Pursuits wherever you are. I assume you're

1:38:10

walking through a stream right now catching

1:38:12

trout maybe hang gliding either

1:38:15

way Thank you for listening. Thank you

1:38:17

Chris Moody for coming on to talk about life sans

1:38:20

internet Thank you Eric

1:38:23

Stipe who edited today's program and

1:38:25

thank you patrons who make the whole

1:38:27

thing possible until next time I've

1:38:30

been Andrew Heaton and so have

1:38:32

you