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We spent a few minutes just catching

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up, talking, laughing, sharing what's going on in our lives. That short conversation reminded me how powerful

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a single call can be.

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It doesn't take hours to make someone feel seen. It just takes picking up the phone.

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Those moments felt simple, but they stay with you.

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And you know, over all these years

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and phone calls at&t has been there,

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connecting people in meaningful ways.

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This is more than a story of technological innovation. It's a story of human connection. So today, call someone you care about.

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One conversation can mean everything. Connecting changes everything. AT&T

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dreaming about escaping to your happy place, Let celebrity cruises take you there on the kind of vacations you'll talk about for years. Whether you want to kick back completely in the Caribbean, be charmed by Europe, or finally check out Alaska's wild wonders, they've got the getaway for you. You'll eat at restaurants that are as creative as they are delicious. Find yourself reconnecting during date nights that last the whole day. And dive into pool days that feel like a vacation inside your vacation. Why not add some check marks to your travel bucket list? And remember, celebrity cruises didn't find your happy place, they built it. Join them and see for yourself. Visit celebrity.com, call 1-800-celebrity or contact your travel advisor. Ships registry Malta and Ecuador when we talk about well being, we often focus on what we eat, how we move, or how we manage our thoughts. But our environment matters too, especially the air we breathe every day at home. Many people don't realize that allergens like pollen, dust might matter and pet dander don't just stay outside. They can linger in the air inside

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and get trapped in fabrics around us.

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That's why Clorox Pure Allergen Neutralizer Daily Air Spray really stands out. Developed with allergists, it neutralizes common household allergens in the air, helping you create a more comfortable space before those allergens can get in the way of you feeling your best. And because allergens don't just live in the air, Clorox Pure also has a flavor fabric and carpet spray that works on carpets, curtains and bedding, where allergens love to hide. Add Clorox Pure to your daily routine to stop allergens before they become allergies. Find it in the air care aisle at a retailer near you.

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Researchers at the University of Virginia ran a study that I find poignant. They asked participants to sit alone in a room with their thoughts for 15 minutes. No phone, no book, no music, just sitting. The only thing in the room was a button that, if pressed, would deliver a mild electric shock. 67% of men and 25% of women chose to shock themselves rather than sit quietly with their own thoughts. One man shocked himself 190 times. 190 times. Pascal was right. In 1654, we just now have the neuroscience to understand exactly why. And we have something he couldn't have imagined. An industry that has spent billions of dollars making the avoidance of your own mind not just easy, but irresistible. Now I want to talk to you about how the attention economy surgically removed boredom from your life. I want to be really precise here because I don't think this is an accident. I don't think that you feeling bored and feeling like it's a weakness or the need for constant stimulation is your fault. I don't believe this is something that you did to yourself. I think it is a designed outcome and the people who designed it knew somewhat what they were doing. In 2017, Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, began speaking publicly about something he'd witnessed from the inside. He described how the technology industry doesn't simply make products, it makes persuasion machines, systems explicitly engineered to capture and hold human nature for as long as possible using the same psychological techniques developed for slot machines and gambling. Harris called it the race to the bottom of the brainstem. Not a race to make you smarter or more connected or more fulfilled. A race to find the lowest, most ancient, most reflexive part of your neurological architecture, the part that responds to novelty, to social approval, to potential threat, to pattern and reward and plug directly into it. The core mechanism is intermittent, variable reward, the same mechanism that makes slot machines the most addictive gambling devices ever invented. You pull the lever, you scroll down, and sometimes you get something rewarding. A funny video, a surprising piece of news, a notification that someone liked what you posted. And sometimes you get nothing interesting. The randomness is not a flaw. The randomness is the feature. It's what makes you keep pulling the lever, keep scrolling, keep checking. Your dopamine system was not designed for this. It evolved to motivate you to pursue food, warmth, safety and connection, scarce resources in a world where effort was required to find them. It was not designed to interface with a system that provides infinite, instant, algorithmically optimized stimulation calibrated specifically to the profile of your individual psychology. And so you find yourself, as most people do, checking your phone somewhere between 96 and 150 times per day. Not because you decided to, not because you want to, but because a system smarter than your conscious mind has learned exactly which lever to pull, exactly when to pull it, and exactly how to keep you coming back. Stop scrolling. I need you to understand this about notifications. Every notification is an interruption. Every interruption breaks your focus. And researchers at the University of California, Irvine, have found that after an interruption, it takes an average of 23 minutes to return to the same level of deep focus you were at before 23 minutes for a single notification glance. Most of us receive dozens of notifications per day, which means most of Us, Never, not once, not for a single sustained period, reach the depth of focus and the depth of mind wandering necessary for their default mode, network, to do its best work. But here's the thing about your attention being stolen. You can reclaim what was taken. And this is where we go back, way back, to the people who understood the value of empty moments more clearly than almost any thinkers in history. I want to talk to you about the ancient art of doing nothing. What the wisest humans who ever lived knew about the sacred gap. The Stoic philosopher Seneca, writing 2000 years ago in ancient Rome, was surrounded by precisely the same problem Pascal would observe 16 centuries later. Rome was a city of spectacle, gladiator games, theatrical performances, political intrigue, constant noise and crowd and stimulation. Seneca watched his fellow citizens lurch from entertainment to entertainment, from party to party. And he wrote something that reads like it was composed yesterday. Seneca wrote, it is not that I am brave enough to be bored. It is that I know what boredom is for. He called it otium, often translated as leisure. But that translation loses something crucial. For Seneca, otium was not relaxation. It was not passive rest. It was purposeful emptiness, deliberately cultivated spaciousness, time not organized around doing or consuming, but around being, around allowing the mind to roam, to integrate, to discover what it actually contains. Seneca believed that the quality of a person's otium determined the quality of their thinking. Not their reading, not their study, their otium. The time when the books were closed and they just sat. He wrote letters in that state. He had his deepest philosophical insights in that state. He believed that you could not genuinely know yourself without regular, intentional time spent in silence with your own mind. So what I want to share with you is the practice of how to be bored. I want to give you something real, not a manifesto, not a list of things to feel guilty about. A practice. First, understand what you're actually doing. When you reach for the phone, you're not making a decision. You're executing a reflex. A reflex that has been installed and strengthened over years of training. The first step is simply to notice it, to put a tiny gap between the stimulus, boredom, and the response scroll. You don't have to resist it, just notice. Oh, I'm bored and my hand moved. That noticing over time is everything you cannot change. A reflex you're not aware of. Second, practice, what I call the three minute hold. When you feel boredom arriving, that restless, uncomfortable itch, make a deal with yourself. Three minutes. You're going to hold still for three minutes. No phone, no book, no music. You're just going to let the discomfort be there. Look at a wall. Look at the sky. Look at your hands. For the first minute, it will feel terrible. Your mind will ping pong. It will tell you this is a waste of time. It will generate a small flood of anxious, mundane thoughts. Things you need to do, things you said, things you're worried about. This is all normal. Sit with it. In the second minute, something usually shifts. The chatter doesn't stop, but it changes character. It becomes slightly less urgent. Your gaze, if you let it, will start to drift and soften. Your breathing will slow without you telling it to. In the third minute, something opens. Not always, not dramatically, but a quietness begins to gather. And sometimes, sometimes something arrives from below. A thought you didn't expect, A memory you hadn't planned to have. A connection between two things in your life that you suddenly see clearly. A feeling that had been waiting patiently behind all the noise. That's your default mode network coming online. That is otium third. Every day, do one thing that allows you to be bored. Walk without headphones. Eat breakfast without your phone. Sit outside for 10 minutes after work doing nothing. Lie in bed for 5 minutes after you wake, before checking your phone. Wash your dishes without any distraction. These are not sacrifices. These are investments. Each boring ritual is a deposit in the account of your inner life. Each one is giving your default mode network, your creativity, your empathy, your self understanding. A little bit of time to run. The remarkable thing is how quickly it compounds people who begin simple boredom. Practices just like these often report within two or three weeks that they feel more creative, more emotionally present, more able to access their own feelings, more interesting to themselves. Not because they've learned anything new, but because. Because they've given the knowledge they already have space to breathe. Number four, and this is the most important one. Get bored on purpose. Before your hardest problems, before a difficult creative challenge, before a decision that matters, before a hard conversation you need to have. Take 10 minutes and do something mindlessly mundane. Wash the dishes, fold laundry, Take a short walk. You're not procrastinating. You're activating your most sophisticated cognitive machinery. You are greasing the right wheels. What seems like wasted time is often the thing that makes everything that follows work. I want to come back to Pascal. He wrote his sentence in 1654, long before slot machines, long before television, long before the algorithm that knows you better than your friends do, that has mapped the exact contours of your restlessness and is a piece of content already selected, already queued, already waiting for the precise moment your attention Starts to drift. Pascal looked at kings and philosophers and soldiers, people with every resource, every advantage, every stimulation their world could offer. And he saw them running. We are all running. Running from a person, running from a place, running from silence, running from ourselves. I'm not judging you. I'm grieving. What you're missing out on. I want you to know that the most important things, the things that make life worth living, that make humans capable of wisdom and love and genuine creativity, those things could only be found in one place nobody wanted to go. The quiet stillness, the peaceful room, the empty moment, the uncomfortable, awkward silence, that's where it all is. That void is not empty. It only looks empty from the outside, from the inside, if you can hold still long enough to get there, it is. The most populated, most alive, most genuinely yours place you will ever stand yourself is in there. Your best ideas are in there. Your deepest relationships being shaped in there by the quality of the attention you're developing, all destroying. Right now, today, in every idle moment, the technology is not going anywhere. The algorithm is not going to develop a conscience. Nobody is going to give you your boredom back. You have to take it one uncomfortable minute at a time. Now you know, go be bored. Thank you so much for listening to this conversation. If you enjoyed it, you'll love my chat with Adam Grant on why discomfort is the key to growth and the strategies for unlocking your hidden potential. I don't believe that comparison is the thief of joy. I think envy is the thief of joy. I think social comparison is invaluable. Making space for ourselves is one of

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the most important things we can do,

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giving ourselves the time and the room

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to try new things.

B (29:55)

Well, it turns out our feet benefit

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from more space too. That's why I just picked up a

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pair of Ultra running shoes. The Ultrafit design has more room for my toes, so they're comfortable, they keep me balanced.

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And seriously, my feet actually feel stronger.

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I've even started running more because of it. And honestly, I didn't expect to notice it this quickly, but from my first

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walk, it just felt different.

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Lighter, more natural. I've been wearing them on my morning walks and it genuinely makes getting out there feel easier. Treat yourself to a pair of ultras@ultrarunning.com and use code purpose 10 for 10% off. That's a L, T R-running.com. stay out there.

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We spend so much time managing stress and wellness, but sometimes it's the unseen things around us that throw us off. Like allergens hiding in the air we breathe.

B (30:44)

At home.

A (30:45)

That's where Clorox Pure Allergen Neutralizer Daily Air Spray comes in. Developed with allergists, it neutralizes common household allergens like pollen, dust mite matter and pet dander right where they can linger

B (30:57)

most in the air.

A (30:59)

There's also Clorox Pure Allergen Neutralizer Fabric and Carpet Spray for carpets, couches, and bedding, where allergens can lurk. Add Clorox Pure to your daily routine to stop allergens before they become allergies. Find it in the air care aisle at a retailer near you.

C (31:16)

A Better Help ad May is Mental Health Awareness Month, a reminder that whatever you're going through, you don't have to do it alone. Right now, most Americans are struggling. Nearly two thirds report feeling anxious. More than half say financial stress is a major source. And even though 85% of people believe seeking support is important, many still don't take that step. That's where BetterHelp comes in. With BetterHelp, you can connect with a licensed therapist who's there with you to listen, understand, and support you on your terms. Schedule sessions conveniently via the app, and talk to your therapist by video phone or live chat. BetterHelp matches you with a therapist who's with you through life's ups and downs. Because no journey should be alone, sign up now and get 10% off@betterhelp.com that's betterhelp.com.

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this is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.