WEBVTT

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So, a few years ago I heard
an interesting rumor.

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Apparently, the head
of a large pet food company

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would go into the annual
shareholder's meeting

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with can of dog food.

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And he would eat the can of dog food.

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And this was his way of convincing them
that if it was good enough for him,

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it was good enough for their pets.

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This strategy is now known
as "dogfooding,"

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and it's a common strategy
in the business world.

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It doesn't mean everyone
goes in and eats dog food,

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but businesspeople
will use their own products

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to demonstrate that they feel --

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that they're confident in them.

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Now, this is a widespread practice,

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but I think what's really interesting
is when you find exceptions

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to this rule,

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when you find cases of businesses
or people in businesses

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who don't use their own products.

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Turns out there's one industry
where this happens in a common way,

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in a pretty regular way,

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and that is the screen-based
tech industry.

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So, in 2010, Steve Jobs,
when he was releasing the iPad,

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described the iPad as a device
that was "extraordinary."

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"The best browsing experience
you've ever had;

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way better than a laptop,
way better than a smartphone.

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It's an incredible experience."

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A couple of months later,
he was approached by a journalist

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from The New York Times,

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and they had a long phone call.

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At the end of the call,

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the journalist threw in a question
that seemed like a sort of softball.

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He said to him, "Your kids
must love the iPad."

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There's an obvious answer to this,

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but what Jobs said
really staggered the journalist.

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He was very surprised,

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because he said, "They haven't used it.

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We limit how much technology
our kids use at home."

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This is a very common thing
in the tech world.

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In fact, there's a school
quite near Silicon Valley

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called the Waldorf School
of the Peninsula,

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and they don't introduce screens
until the eighth grade.

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What's really interesting about the school

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is that 75 percent
of the kids who go there

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have parents who are high-level
Silicon Valley tech execs.

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So when I heard about this, I thought
it was interesting and surprising,

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and it pushed me to consider
what screens were doing to me

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and to my family and the people I loved,

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and to people at large.

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So, for the last five years,

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as a professor of business and psychology,

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I've been studying the effect
of screens on our lives.

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And I want to start by just focusing
on how much time they take from us,

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and then we can talk about
what that time looks like.

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What I'm showing you here
is the average 24-hour workday

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at three different points in history:

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2007 -- 10 years ago --

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2015

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and then data that I collected,
actually, only last week.

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And a lot of things haven't changed

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all that much.

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We sleep roughly seven-and-a-half
to eight hours a day;

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some people say that's declined slightly,
but it hasn't changed much.

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We work eight-and-a-half
to nine hours a day.

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We engage in survival activities --

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these are things like eating
and bathing and looking after kids --

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about three hours a day.

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That leaves this white space.

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That's our personal time.

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That space is incredibly important to us.

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That's the space where we do things
that make us individuals.

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That's where hobbies happen,
where we have close relationships,

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where we really think about our lives,
where we get creative,

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where we zoom back and try to work out

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whether our lives have been meaningful.

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We get some of that from work as well,

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but when people look back on their lives

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and wonder what their lives have been like

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at the end of their lives,

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you look at the last things they say --

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they are talking about those moments
that happen in that white personal space.

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So it's sacred; it's important to us.

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Now, what I'm going to do is show you

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how much of that space
is taken up by screens across time.

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In 2007,

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this much.

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That was the year that Apple
introduced the first iPhone.

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Eight years later,

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this much.

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Now, this much.

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That's how much time we spend
of that free time in front of our screens.

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This yellow area, this thin sliver,
is where the magic happens.

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That's where your humanity lives.

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And right now, it's in a very small box.

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So what do we do about this?

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Well, the first question is:

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What does that red space look like?

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Now, of course, screens are miraculous

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in a lot of ways.

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I live in New York,

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a lot of my family lives in Australia,

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and I have a one-year-old son.

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The way I've been able to introduce
them to him is with screens.

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I couldn't have done that
15 or 20 years ago

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in quite the same way.

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So there's a lot of good
that comes from them.

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One thing you can do is ask yourself:

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What goes on during that time?

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How enriching are the apps
that we're using?

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And some are enriching.

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If you stop people while
they're using them and say,

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"Tell us how you feel right now,"

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they say they feel pretty good
about these apps --

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those that focus on relaxation,
exercise, weather, reading,

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education and health.

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They spend an average of nine
minutes a day on each of these.

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These apps make them much less happy.

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About half the people, when you interrupt
them and say, "How do you feel?"

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say they don't feel good about using them.

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What's interesting about these --

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dating, social networking, gaming,

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entertainment, news, web browsing --

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people spend 27 minutes a day
on each of these.

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We're spending three times longer
on the apps that don't make us happy.

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That doesn't seem very wise.

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One of the reasons we spend
so much time on these apps

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that make us unhappy

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is they rob us of stopping cues.

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Stopping cues were everywhere
in the 20th century.

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They were baked into everything we did.

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A stopping cue is basically a signal
that it's time to move on,

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to do something new,
to do something different.

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And -- think about newspapers;
eventually you get to the end,

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you fold the newspaper away,
you put it aside.

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The same with magazines, books --
you get to the end of a chapter,

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prompts you to consider
whether you want to continue.

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You watched a show on TV,
eventually the show would end,

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and then you'd have a week
until the next one came.

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There were stopping cues everywhere.

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But the way we consume media today
is such that there are no stopping cues.

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The news feed just rolls on,

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and everything's bottomless:
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram,

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email, text messaging, the news.

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And when you do check
all sorts of other sources,

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you can just keep going on and on and on.

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So, we can get a cue about what to do
from Western Europe,

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where they seem to have a number
of pretty good ideas in the workplace.

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Here's one example.
This is a Dutch design firm.

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And what they've done
is rigged the desks to the ceiling.

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And at 6pm every day,

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it doesn't matter who you're emailing
or what you're doing,

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the desks rise to the ceiling.

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(Laughter)

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(Applause)

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Four days a week, the space
turns into a yoga studio,

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one day a week, into a dance club.

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It's really up to you which ones
you stick around for.

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But this is a great stopping rule,

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because it means at the end of the day,

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everything stops, there's nowhere to work.

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At Daimler, the German car company,
they've got another great strategy.

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When you go on vacation,

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instead of saying,
"This person's on vacation,

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they'll get back to you eventually,"

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they say, "This person's on vacation,
so we've deleted your email.

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This person will never see
the email you just sent."

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(Laughter)

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"You can email back in a couple of weeks,

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or you can email someone else."

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(Laughter)

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And so --

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(Applause)

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You can imagine what that's like.

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You go on vacation,
and you're actually on vacation.

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The people who work at this company feel

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that they actually get a break from work.

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But of course, that doesn't tell us much

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about what we should do
at home in our own lives,

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so I want to make some suggestions.

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It's easy to say, between 5 and 6pm,
I'm going to not use my phone.

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The problem is, 5 and 6pm
looks different on different days.

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I think a far better strategy is to say,

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I do certain things every day,

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there are certain occasions
that happen every day,

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like eating dinner.

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Sometimes I'll be alone,

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sometimes with other people,

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sometimes in a restaurant,

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sometimes at home,

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but the rule that I've adopted is:
I will never use my phone at the table.

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It's far away,

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as far away as possible.

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Because we're really bad
at resisting temptation.

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But when you have a stopping cue
that, every time dinner begins,

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my phone goes far away,

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you avoid temptation all together.

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At first, it hurts.

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I had massive FOMO.

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(Laughter)

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I struggled.

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But what happens is, you get used to it.

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You overcome the withdrawal
the same way you would from a drug,

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and what happens is, life becomes
more colorful, richer,

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more interesting --

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you have better conversations.

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You really connect with the people
who are there with you.

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I think it's a fantastic strategy,

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and we know it works,
because when people do this --

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and I've tracked a lot of people
who have tried this --

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it expands.

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They feel so good about it,

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they start doing it for the first
hour of the day in the morning.

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They start putting their phones
on airplane mode on the weekend.

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That way, your phone remains a camera,
but it's no longer a phone.

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It's a really powerful idea,

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and we know people feel much better
about their lives when they do this.

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So what's the take home here?

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Screens are miraculous;
I've already said that,

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and I feel that it's true.

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But the way we use them is a lot like
driving down a really fast, long road,

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and you're in a car where the accelerator
is mashed to the floor,

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it's kind of hard
to reach the brake pedal.

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You've got a choice.

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You can either glide by, past,
say, the beautiful ocean scenes

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and take snaps out the window --
that's the easy thing to do --

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or you can go out of your way
to move the car to the side of the road,

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to push that brake pedal,

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to get out,

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take off your shoes and socks,

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take a couple of steps onto the sand,

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feel what the sand feels like
under your feet,

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walk to the ocean,

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and let the ocean lap at your ankles.

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Your life will be richer
and more meaningful

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because you breathe in that experience,

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and because you've left
your phone in the car.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)