How Boredom Works

0:00This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. Let's be real. Eating is a huge part of our lives. It fuels us. It brings us together, and yes, it's one of life's great pleasures. But once a meal's over, we don't think much about what happens next, unless something starts to feel off. Introducing Eating Interrupted, a new podcast from I Heart Ruby Studio, hosted by longtime journalist and Crohn's patient, Cynthia McVadden. Listen in to unpack what it means when your body doesn't always respond to food the way you expect and what science is now revealing about why. Listen to Eating Interrupted on the I Heart app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When you're in Do It Yourself Mode, the last thing you want to do is drop everything to pick up that one-parter tool that you need. That's where my Lowe's Rewards and my Lowe's Pro Rewards come in. Place your order and Lowe's handles the rest. Lowe's will make the run for you, with free, same-day delivery. Lowe's get more at Lowe's, $25 minimum in loyalty membership required.

1:01Order eligible items by 2pm, subject to weight and size restrictions and availability. Terms at Lowe's.com slash shipping terms. I'm Martha Stewart from the Martha Stewart Podcast. When you want to make your best, it's got to be McCormick. From everyday meals to hosting dinner parties, turn to McCormick. Their convenient versatile flavors elevate every dish. McCormick has been and is an essential in the kitchen. Now they have a new line of signature seasonings crafted by flavor experts. With everyday favorites like garlic and olive oil, globally inspired ones like chimichurri and more. McCormick's signature seasonings make it easier to add bold flavors that make each bite of your meal more delicious. Try the chimichurri blend to get elevate grilled meats. Explore the full array of blends and find your favorite at McCormick.com. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast and I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too.

2:05And we are going to do the opposite of making you bored with this episode on board home. That's right. Before we get going though, we want to recommend a podcast to our listeners from our always friend and former colleague. Forever friend. Forever. He's our FF. But former colleague, we used to work with Mangech had a cedure at House to Forks and I'm not lying when I think we'll all agree because Jerry's listening to that mangech is one of the like sweetest, sweet hearts, kindest, like most intelligent, nicest dudes of all time. And that's reason enough to listen to anything that he does. He's a high quality person. He's the best. Mangech is great. He's a show out called How to Live Forever, which is not like, here's how you live forever. It's more like trying to understand this sort of movement that's going around of people that want to try and like extend life into like, you know, hundreds of years or forever,

3:06which is super up, Stuff You Should Know listeners, Allie I think. Yeah. And it's a great show. He wants to recommend in particular, if you want to just give it a shot, he said the third and the fifth episodes are really standouts. And I listen to episode five because it sounded super interesting. And it is, buddy, because in episode five, mangech kind of goes investigator to track down this startup that's trying to create brain dead clones for billionaires so that when you get to be like, you know, 90 years old, you can do a body replacement and transfer it like this is real. It's future Rama kind of stuff. The transfer like the head of a billionaire to like a younger body. And this is actually having Peter, Peter Thiel is a funder of this thing. So is Arpa H and it's just kind of crazy stuff. So that's episode five, but the podcast is How to Live Forever and it's awesome. Yeah. And mangech is super interesting and entertaining.

4:07And if you're like, not quite convinced of this mangech guy put this in your pipe and smoke it. He along with another colleague of ours, Will Pearson, co-founded mental floss. Yeah. And the day when he was in college. Yeah, man. Yeah. That's all you need to know. Yeah. Mangech is the best. So check out How to Live Forever. I'm going to get all corporate here and say wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, is it guaranteed human? I think so. Okay. Great. Okay, Chuck. So we're talking about boredom. I found it exceedingly hard to concentrate while I was studying this. Did you? Yeah. It was. I hate it to say it, but it was kind of boring. I actually liked it. Really? Yes, I did. At first I was like, this is kind of boring. It's very dry. But if you put it all together, it actually boredom did become a little more interesting to me than it would have been before. Let me just say it like that. How about that? Well, that's good. But it's like when we researched sushi or yawning or whatever I wanted sushi, I couldn't

5:07stop yawning. Right. Right. Like reading about boredom actually makes you like, it's hard to concentrate, which is one of the traits of boredom. I just thought that was very interesting. For sure. If you want to talk about just how boredom is sort of defined, it is the experience of wanting to engage in something that is like satisfying to you, but not being able to and being left in a state. In this case, it's called an adaptive state. Yeah. Where you don't have an optimal energy level. Maybe there may be some discomfort. This is a big part of boredom is it urges new action because as we'll see, just being bored can lead to you doing really dumb things just so something is happening. If you put all that together, man, it really just sounds like you need a snickers. Right. You know?

6:08Yeah, maybe so because boredom, you know, boredom definitely urges you to pursue something different than what's going on. That's sort of the whole point behind it. Yes. Now, whether what you pursue is up to you and it can be negative, it can be positive, it can be really bad for you. It can actually be great. And this is like, this is like, it's really well studied. I think one of the things I appreciated about it is the philosophers starting in the 19th century with Chopin Hour and then Nietzsche, like they really thought a lot about boredom and what boredom was. And they created a great basis for it. That science then took over and science has done a really good job of investigating it and explaining it to. And I love topics like that because we cover so much stuff. Like I like it when it's like no one understands this and here's this theory and here's that theory, right? Topics like that. But I also like topics where it's all like, oh, all the components are here and we can put them together and now I understand it. Yeah, for sure.

7:09I agree too. If there's boredom happening, that means there's obviously nothing new or stimulating happening. There may be a time distortion, like things are really dragging on and it might feel meaningless. And you mentioned Chopin Hour, he put forth that boredom in pain or like the twin poles of life and you just kind of swing between those. Yeah. Yeah. And Nietzsche came along and he was like, I agree. He said, yes, and I think boredom can actually lead to creativity. I don't think it's all bad. And he went on to say, which I think is going a little far, that God created humans because God was bored. Okay. It's a little, it's like, how are you going to prove that? And he said, I'm a philosopher. I have to prove a **** thing. Emily has always, you know, I've since gotten on board when you know, when you have a kid, you know, I'm bored. I'm bored. You hear that a lot. From the very beginning with Ruby was like, well, you know, it's on the other side of boredom, creativity and Ruby's tired of hearing that.

8:11But that's a good way to handle it with kids is, and they say to like, you know, don't hand them something to do. Like your boredom here, do this and do this and like try and solve their problem. Right. You know, like, solve it yourself, go find something to do. And if all goes well and generally does, at least with my daughter, although sudden she's, you know, drawing something or writing something. That's neat. Yeah. Or you're like, where did she get that pony? Right. All of a sudden. I know. I'll creative. So one thing that the philosophers did have in common, Chuck, was that they considered boredom important. And I think today most people, including me, I did not think of boredom as particularly important. But if you look at it a certain way, say like, um, have science now does, it's extremely important in that if you think about us never getting bored, we would just sit around either blissed out all day or sitting around doing nothing. Right. Like boredom actually prompts you to action.

9:15And they believe now that essentially it's because your brain is constantly seeking new novel stimuli. Yeah. That when it's not granted that when you, when it doesn't have the opportunity to do that anymore. And then we'll see in a second, there's different reasons why that can happen. It just basically shuts down to a certain extent. And that's not just it. If it just kind of shut down, you would just be daydreaming. There's also a negative rouse will state to where you just feel restless, agitated, you can't concentrate. And that those two things combine make boredom kind of unpleasant and spur you to action to go do something that will give your brain the novel stimuli it gets to search for. Like to search for signal among noise and then engage with the signal is how I saw it put. And that when it can't do that, that's where boredom comes. Yeah. I thought that was really interesting in that because I was today years old when I found

10:15out that the brain is constantly predicting sensory inputs. Right. I always just kind of thought the brain was processing information as it receives it. The brain is predicting like actively predicting sensory inputs. And the brain loves it when those predictions are validated. But what it really loves is when it's in an environment where it makes a prediction that is slightly different than what it predicted in reality. Yeah. We would call that learning in other words, right? Yeah. And that's where the brain gets a little dose of dopamine because we talked about dopamine before. It's a reinforcing reward chemical, right? Yeah. It's not like, oh, I ate the stickers and there's dopamine. That's a misstatement of what dopamine is. Dopamine is what our brain gets when we get it, our brain gets it slightly wrong so that it learns. It says, this is important. Here's what the correct answer was. And now your brain just learned. And that's what it seems to like the most like you said.

11:15Yeah, for sure. And boredom could also, or at least what it could represent is a faulty prediction. Where the brain has an unrealistic award or reward that they think is coming. So in that case, it varies from like the prediction, but not in a good way. So like there's a hypothesis that if you're prone to boredom, that your brain isn't predicting well. It's like bad at predicting what's happening. Yeah. Right. There's other situations that they've identified where you can get bored or where boredom sets in. One is obviously where you're just not getting enough stimulation. Like an example I thought of is let's say your quality control for the shot's brewery production line and your job is to look for a glove on a bottle. It's only happened one time and it's never happened since and you're really getting bored by this point because you know that nothing new is coming along. So your brain is like, I'm bored, right?

12:16Yeah. You'll see as a terrible state for you to be in as a worker for years and years on end. And then the other one is the opposite. Like you're getting so much information that you don't understand that you get bored because your brain can't find signal in the noise. And a good example I saw of that is like a really dense lecture on a topic that you are totally unfamiliar with. Oh, yeah. You know? Yeah, for sure. I fall into that trap a lot. I feel like. Yeah, I think most people do. Yeah. And you can become really restless if you're trying to become mentally engaged. And then if you fail to, that a real listlessness can follow. I mentioned the time thing. It can really feel like time has slowed down and that there's no value in what's going on and your concentration is off. We did talk about like you don't necessarily on when you're bored, but you can, you on when you're bored. Like you can change your like physical state. You could slouch a lot more.

13:16It's, you know, sometimes this may be a signal to other people that we're with of like, you know, this party's lame. Let's let's get out of here. Yeah. Right. Yeah, because I remember in our yawning episode that they, one of the theories was that it was a signal that others that danger was nearby when we were anxious. Oh, yeah, that's right. Danger. So there's been studies about what it's like to be bored. All of us know what boredom is like, but I think if you just took me aside and, and, you know, five days ago said like, okay, what is boredom? Like you explain it, describe it. You take this. I probably, yeah, I probably wouldn't have been able to. So people have studied to try to figure out subjectively what boredom's like. You ticked off a lot of it, but it seems like the studies that really kind of got to the root of it went to the furthest extreme and induced the deepest possible boredom that you can through sensory deprivation. And what they found is that the brain just goes haywire when it's bored to those extreme

14:21levels. Yeah, they did, you know, they didn't study like this, you know, for decades, but there was one in the 50s at McGill University in Montreal, shout out Montreal, where they paid people 20 bucks a day to stay in these little rooms. You had to wear like sensory deprivation goggles and headphones and gloves and cardboard tubes on the arms. I didn't quite get that. I guess they just wanted you to be fully sort of, I don't know, block down. No sense of touch, maybe. Yeah, I guess so. And I think it was over the period of a few days. They never went longer than a week. Right. But it was not good, you know, people couldn't think of like fix on anything like any thought for any length of time at all. And their word pattern recognition got all over the place. Their arithmetic skills were terrible. They started like hallucinating and they became more susceptible to supernatural beliefs. So obviously something like solitary confinement and prison, which I think did we do a whole episode on solitary or just?

15:21Yes, we did and we concluded it's, it's not only inhumane, it's inhuman. Yeah, completely. Because it physically alters the brain, like it shrinks your hippocampus, which is the part of the brain that, you know, we talk about a lot, but it's involved in emotion, control, spatial orientation, memory, that kind of thing. So you're basically just, you're shrinking that part of your brain when you throw someone in solitary. Right. You want to take a break and come back and talk about how boredom can be useful. Yeah, let's do it. The following song has been rated dangerously catchy and may not be suitable for grown-ups. A-B-C-D in the morning, brush your teeth. A-B-C-D in the morning, brush your teeth. A-F-G-H, hurry up and don't be late.

16:23A-F-G-H hurry up and don't be late. Lingo Kids, only suitable for kids. If it gets stuck in mom's head, that's not our problem. Mabel Kids! Everything Kids Love, download now for free. Did you know that Apple has a new tool for helping businesses like yours grow? It's called Apple Business, and it's free to get started today. Just claim your location and control how your business shows up across Apple Apps, including Maps, Siri, and more. And now you have a new way to show up to an even wider audience of potential customers, with ads on Apple Maps, available in the US and Canada. Sign up for Apple Business today. Hey everybody, we have a very important question for you. Is there anything that reflects who you are more than your home? We don't think so. That's the answer. Everything in there says something about you. It's your home. Well, Wayfair gets that. That's right, they got stuff for every style and budget, so it's easy to find exactly what you're looking for to fit into your home and to fit you. You can trust what you're buying too, because Wayfair verified products undergo a 10-point

17:25quality inspection everybody. Yeah, you don't get 20 million verified five-star reviews unless you're doing something right. Wayfair makes it easy to find what you're looking for, whether it's a new sofa or Halloween decor, so transform your space with pieces that hold up to real life. Join Wayfair Rewards today and get 5% back on every purchase. Head to Wayfair.com or shop the Wayfair app for all things home. That's w-a-y-f-a-i-r dot com. Wayfair every style, every home. No, some fish have no, some fish have no. All right, Chuck, so we've basically talked about how boredom is not pleasant and that kind of prompted a lot of researchers to be like, well, then why are we experiencing boredom? If we experience boredom and it seems like a lot of different animals experience boredom too, as we'll see, um, there has to be some sort of a lot of work that we're doing.

18:25There's some sort of evolutionary benefit from it for it sticking around for clearly tens or hundreds of millions of years, right? And what they- what they finally landed on was the same thing that Shopeenauer and Nietzsche and Henry David Throw and a bunch of other philosophers pointed to, which was it prompts you to go out and do other stuff. And it doesn't necessarily prompt you to go out and do the safest thing. It turns out that it prompts you to go do anything else. The stuff that is outside of your comfort zone, if it's an alternative to whatever you're doing now and you're bored, you will- you're much likely to go try it then when you're not bored. And that's what a bunch of researchers turned up. Yeah, I mean, that's, you know, you think about the scenario of a bunch of kids bored in the summertime. They're like, hey, let's go jump off the roof of the house right now and see what happens. Yeah. And that's the thing. There was a study in the, I guess it's a scientific paper, Emotion or a magazine.

19:28A journal, yeah. Journal. Quarterly maybe? I don't know. A rag. A white paper. By doctors, Heather Lynch and Shane Bench, Lynch and Bench, where they subjected the participants to stimuli that would make them bored, either a neutral board, positive board or negative board. And across all the studies, they, people reporting high boredom were more likely to choose something unfamiliar, which included negative experiences. And people bored by positive conditions sought out negative experiences. And if you were bored by negative content, you sought out positive experiences. So almost like you're seeking out the opposite of whatever you're experiencing in your boredom. Exactly. Yeah. And even if it was positive, they're like, do you want to switch to the negative pictures? It's like cockroaches and stacks of dirty dishes. And the people were like, yes, please hurry up. Yeah. So yeah, that's pretty good study pointing out that, you know, it will leave our comfort zone.

20:34At least we'll go look at pictures of dirty dishes if we're bored, right? And then other studies have kind of followed this up. There was one in 2014 that attached as something that could deliver an electric shock around participants' ankles and then just left them to be bored in a room alone for 15 minutes. And see if anybody would press the button that gave themselves a shock. Knowing that if they pressed this button, that's what was going to happen. It wasn't like a surprise. And people did. A lot of people did as a matter of fact, they got so bored. They're like, I guess I'll just give myself electric shocks. I could see myself totally doing that by the way. I think it depends on the shock. I would at least try it once, probably eventually. Yeah, my deal. I would try it once and be like, well, I got to see what the button does. There's like, no way I'm just going to sit here and not know. Right. Yeah. One guy apparently pressed the button 190 times in that study. Yeah, I think they should do so follow up studies with that guy. And just that guy. So something's going on there.

21:34Exactly. So circling it back around to evolution, what they basically put all this together is that just sitting around like a campfire or something, if we got bored or tuk tuk got bored, that might prompt them to be like, I'm going to go see what's over here. I'm going to go see what's down this river. And then maybe tuk tuk encountered a new animal that tuk tuk had never seen before. And tuk tuk was kind of forced to create a new weapon to hunt that animal. Or even better, even better, tuk tuk made friends with that animal. And all of a sudden, both of their brains just enlarged because of the empathy and love that developed between them too. Yeah, I mean, that could go either way, but you know, I've talked a bit about watching the survival TV show alone. And a common theme among all participants on that show is like, you're out here by yourself and like, it gets boring. And sometimes that has led to them making decisions that leads to like the end of their

22:36stay there because they did what tuk tuk did. They're like, Hey, I'm bored. I want to go across that stream that I thought it was probably a really bad idea to cross and turns out that was correct. And all of a sudden they're getting helicopter it out. Yeah, but it can also work out too and that you go make a friend with an animal on the other side of the stream. Right. Yeah, or kill it and eat it. So I think also one of the more prevalent interpretations among lay people like us, meaning people who like to just lay around. Yeah. Um, is that dumb people are more prone to be bored? And apparently this is the idea of Henry David the row. He was like, if you're, if you're smart, you can always find something that occupies yourself. And I was like, shut up the row. We know that you're so smart and cool. We get it. You don't have to put everybody else down. These have not borne out the rose idea. It finds that intelligent people and people of lower intelligence are not neither ones

23:36more likely to become bored more easily. But there are personality traits that create like trait boredom. There's trait in their state just like optimism. There's trait boredom in their state boredom. And trait boredom seems to be kind of identified with two different types of people. Yeah. This psychologist named John Eastwood that said, if you're, if you're an impulsive person, and if you're always like looking for that new thrill, uh, and that, you know, generally kind of understimulated by the world around you, then that totally makes sense that you would be prone to boredom. Uh, this one, I don't know, it can't make sense of, but if you're highly sensitive to pain and fearful of the world around you, um, maybe you're unsatisfied by the idea, like the safety net of not leaving your comfort zone. So you might be more prone to boredom, but I guess maybe more willing to live with it. Yes. Your, your anxiety or your fears overcome your, your, your aversion, your natural aversion

24:39to boredom as a human because you, and so you're just not feeding your brain any new stuff anymore. So you become bored. It's very sad reason for, for being prone to boredom. Yeah. In school, you know, you were talking about intelligence and school boredom is a big, you know, it can be a big challenge for any student, uh, but there are eight precursors for boredom in school, which is your, uh, under challenge, like maybe you're, you're in a, um, like a remedial class and you're a little more advanced, uh, over challenge and go the other way too, where if you're like, I just don't get this stuff so you just slip into boredom, right? Like you were talking about earlier, uh, monotony in classrooms, uh, if you don't like your teacher, uh, if you think there's a lack of meaning, and, um, you know, you're in going to school or I lack of involvement. Uh, and then the other one is just the, you know, man, I could, I could be doing whatever. I could be outside throwing the first B right now and said to be in this dumb class. Yeah. And if you're an adolescent, you're essentially born to be bored. Yeah. Like your boredom levels peak between the ages of 10 and 17.

25:42Apparently where you and I are in life right now is, um, where boredom levels dip the, the most. Yeah. Uh, I, I can't too. It's not like I'm, I'm always doing something meaningful or important. I just don't feel bored ever. That's all. I don't even, yeah, even when I'm not doing anything, I'm never bored. Say, man, I don't, I don't feel bored of anymore. It's kind of great. Yeah. It's great. I wonder if it's just getting to a certain point in your life where you're maybe just satisfied with where you are or maybe drink in the small things more. I don't know. Yeah. I think that's definitely part of it. And apparently it starts to go back up as you get older, which I'm not looking forward to. Yeah. Let's avoid that. Let's agree to avoid that. Yes. All right. Agreed. Pinky swear. Pinky swear. Um, but nothing compares to your, your levels of boredom from 10 to 17. Part of it is that your brain is still developing. So you said impulse control, um, and needing stimulation.

26:42Yeah. Is it is one, or one group of people who get bored more easily. Well, adolescents by nature are like that because their brain is still developing. And then also they have much less agency or control over their lives. And control or lack of control is positively correlated with boredom. Oh, sure. Right. So, uh, yes. So if you're like, I want to go buy a mad magazine at this awesome used comic book store, um, but I can't, because I can't drive. And it's all the way on the other side of town. You're probably going to really resent the situation that you're in right there. And nothing is going to make you like you're not going to say, I'll just go play duck hunt then and be happy. You're just upset about that. And that can, can create like a sense of boredom in and of itself. Buddy, do you remember the feeling you got when you got that driver's license? Um, no, not really.

27:44I don't really. Yeah. Man, that, that is, uh, and it might just be me then. It, that was one of the single most like important sort of things that happened in my life up to, you know, my 20s or 30s, even. Well, that's awesome. That freedom, when I finally got that car key and was able to go and leave the house by myself to go do something and go somewhere there. I wanted to go. That's cool, man. It was incredible. I remember the feeling of just being like, now I can leave. No, I mean, no shade toward my family or anything. I've talked before about that. Not having the greatest to like situation with my parents and all. So yeah, I wanted to get out of there, but just the freedom to go to my friends house or whatever, go to the, the turtles record store or whatever. No, I remember those. Yeah, it was incredible. Yeah, no, totally. You prize freedom. Yeah. That makes sense. We should probably talk about digital media though, because if you look at like boredom

28:44generationally, it's a different ball of twine these days. Yeah. So I think most people think when you get bored, you pull out your smartphone, you go on Instagram or Facebook or TikTok, I guess is how you pronounce it. And like now you're not bored any longer. And there are theories starting with our good friend Arthur Schopenhauer that you are still bored. What you have done is actually lowered your cognitive levels so that you're not bored anymore. You're not going and doing something meaningful or fulfilling to stave off boredom. You've just undertaken a deeply maladaptive response to boredom, which is I'm going to stop thinking so much. And that's what you're doing when you go scroll on social media. Yeah, I guess it's a temporary sav kind of thing. But like chronic exposure to that, to like your smartphone is basically pushing up the

29:47standard of what you find engaging enough to keep you from being bored. Does that make sense? Yeah. And that's so that's a little different from what I'm saying. That totally makes sense to me. The one I'm talking about is this idea that what you're engaging is existential escape. And there's a whole school of thought that boredom represents a threat to meaning. It shows you what you're doing right now is not meaningful. What you're doing is meaningless. Maybe your entire life is meaningless. Maybe everyone's life is meaningless. So you're threatened by that. And then it generates those thoughts in you. So when you go pick up your phone and start scrolling, you are escaping those existential thoughts by not thinking about that kind of stuff. And when people spend hours and hours every day on their phone and everybody has it in their pocket, we have now this quick and easy way to just stop thinking and stop going

30:48and doing something else is more meaningful to you personally. Not necessarily to society, but something that's more meaningful to you. And so we get trapped in this state of living to a lesser degree than we would if we weren't social media apps on smartphones. Seriously, it's as cut and dry as that. Yeah, for sure. I'm getting a dumb phone. Are you? Yeah, I got to figure it out because I just started sort of looking into it. I want to be able to have both with the same phone number because in certain situations, I'm going to still want my iPhone like when I'm traveling or whatever. A lot of situations where I'm going to want it. But I want to get one and I just have to and maybe if someone knows how to do this, that would be great if they could write in. But I want to get one that works with the same phone number on the same carrier. I'm happy to pay for the extra or whatever it costs to manage that account or whatever. But yeah, in a lot of most situations, I would try to have the dumb phone on me.

31:53I'm just like talking out of turn here, but it seems like spoofing your sim would be the answer to that. And I don't know how you would do that, but that would be my guess. I don't know what spoofing a sim means. Your sim card is what gives your phone its individual characteristics like your phone number and all that stuff. Oh, okay. So you can figure out how to duplicate that or spoof it. I got you. You could conceivably have two phones with the same number getting the same info at the same time. You know, I don't know why Apple doesn't put out a dumb phone that's like, here's another thing we can sell you that works perfectly with your phone number and everything. Like, I think they would sell a ton of those because people would be like, yeah, I want two phones. When I'm out with my friends, I want my dumb phone so I can just stay present and when I whatever, I want my smartphone. I think that I think you just kind of answered it that there's people who would say because generally people in charge don't want you to be present.

32:56Yeah, maybe so. That's, yeah, it's my guess. I just saw where social media companies are being sued for $220 billion by hand full of states. Good. For getting children addicted to social media, which they 100% did. Yeah. I'm really curious how that pans out. Yeah. I mean, it's a slam dunk case. It's just those guys are so powerful. Yeah. I mean, they make the tobacco companies look like, you know, a local auto body shop. Yeah. I'm with you and hats off to Australia because they mandated countrywide and no social media for any children under 16. Yeah. They did that a while back, didn't they? I don't know how recently, but they're sort of leading the way in a lot of other countries are like, hey, maybe that's not such a bad idea. And certainly, you know, we're going to do that in our family. And I don't even think 16, man, I would love to see Ruby get through all of high school without any exposure to social media. That would be something really great. Yeah. I think it's very sad and I think it's going to be something that we, it's just going

33:57to get more and more clear as time goes on like just how harmful that was. And especially as it gets more and more fake and deepfaked in AI to the point where people are sitting around staring at something that has even real ever. Yeah. I tend to hope though, Chuck, that it's been ground in so hard in such a compressed amount of time over the course of just several years that people are just going to have a natural backlash against it. And maybe like the cool thing will be to spend all your time outside doing stuff, you know. I hope so, man. I would love to see it swing. And things a lot of times do swing back hard the other way. I would love to see that of like people like smashing their smartphones and being like, no, man, it was things were better before. Let's go back to that. Yeah. That'd be great. Uh, maybe we'll take a break and talk about animals and benefits of boredom. Does that sound good? Yeah.

34:58All right. We'll be right back. Mom, are we there yet? 10 more minutes. Only 10 minutes. Can you drive slower? What's up with them today? Lingo, kids. That app we downloaded last week. They love it. The games, oh, this funny baby bot character. Kids, we're almost there. No. With more than 4,000 interactive games, songs and shows little ones can't get enough of. Lingo, kids, is the number one entertainment platform for young kids. Why didn't we download this sooner? Everything kids love. Download it for free. Hey, everybody. We want to talk to you about quints because quints focuses on high quality wardrobe staples made with premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton and marina wool. Yeah, you know, those pieces in your closet that you always find yourself wearing on repeat?

35:59Well, those are the pieces that make getting dressed easy and that's what quints does best. And quints also makes premium pants, fitities and polos and breathable active wear. Quality basics designed to work across your wardrobe and hold up to everyday wear. Yeah, chucking that 100% Mongolian cashmere sweater you mentioned. Uh-huh. It's just $60. So you get the softness and quality you'd expect from a luxury brand without the luxury price tag. To find your next fall favorites at quints, download the quints app for app exclusive offers or go to quints.com slash should know. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in Canada and the UK too. That's q-u-i-n-c-e.com slash should know. Hey everybody, we have a mnemonic device that's going to blow your mind. If your skin squeaks, your barrier is weak. Serivifacial cleansers don't strip the skin. They work to give you a stronger skin barrier from day one.

36:59So your skin will never squeak. That's right. Serivifacial cleansers gently cleanse the skin of dirt, oil and makeup without disrupting the skin barrier. They're fragrance-reep and won't clog pores and get this. They were developed with dermatologists. Yep, and they have different products depending on what you need. There's the foaming facial cleanser which gently removes excess oil, dirt and makeup, formulated with three essential ceramides, hyaluronic acid and niacinamide to provide long lasting hydration and 12 hour oil control. They also have a hydrating facial cleanser which cleanses without disrupting the skin's protective barrier for 94% less dryness in a stronger skin barrier from day one. No matter your skin type or concern, Serivif has facial cleansers perfect for you and your skin barrier. Serivif is the number one dermatologist recommended cleanser brand and offers a range of facial cleansers for all types. Find yours. No, some fish have no, some fish have no.

38:08All right, everyone, we're back after our little rant. I hope it was taken in the right way. Tim Cook is like, those guys really hurt my feelings. Tim Cook is like, oh, he gives me credit when they end up in a dumb phone that they can tell you for like $700. Yeah, at least. You can text and get the map to places and call people and not be $700. Right. You're paying not to get one of the cogs to be client. I think that's really what the price reflects. All right. So I promise to talk about animals getting bored, animals that aren't us that is. And they have done research and basically kind of said, like yeah, animals for sure get bored. I think we, I mean, people that are, you know, dog and at least dog owners have seen their own dogs get bored and get like get destructive because they're not stimulated enough. And I think that's kind of the same thing. But they've studied mink, like the animal, the mink that's, they house them in non enriching environments. It was terrible.

39:08And then they said they definitely experienced boredom like states because they found that they would, these mink would approach anything novel shown to them. Even if it was like a predator, like what they thought was a predator, like a predator shadow and the noises of a predator, the mink was like, well, I'll go check it out. I don't care anything but this cage. Yeah. And then interesting though, it increased curiosity in them, like because they were bored. So that kind of goes to support that evolutionary idea too. There's another one that studied rats where basically they switched up foraging material and the flavor of the pellets under the foraging material for some rats. And then others, they just gave them the same ones over and over again. And the ones that got the same ones over and over again exhibited behavior like trying to find the exit out of their cage and other really sad stuff. So what's hardening about this is animal welfare people are pointing to this and saying like, if you have a pet or an animal that you keep, you have a greater responsibility to

40:08it than just keeping it alive and giving it food and water, maybe taking it for a walk, animals get bored, which means you have to, you're responsible for stimulating something that gets bored if you've taken responsibility for it in any way. Yeah, for sure. My one dog Gibson is a, a hound dog and he is very stimulated by smelling stuff obviously. So they say when you take your dog for a walk to let them smell. Like if you're constantly just pulling your dog, you know, because you're trying to get your steps in, they get more worn out from a 20 minute sniff walk than an hour like hardcore exercise walk. And my walks with Gibson, like they're 45 to 50 minutes long and I bet half of that is standing around while he smells stuff. I am so glad you said that, dude, because that is absolutely true. And I, you see a lot of people who are like, come on. And that's, yeah, it doesn't, like that's how your dog like enjoys life is by sniffing other stuff. Yeah, it's great. And it's a good lesson for me, like as a person, like I, I thought you were learning to

41:12sniff things. No, no, just to slow down, like yesterday, another weird example is I got, I went, sometimes I'll go out to play golf by myself. If no one's around and get in like a little, you know, if they don't pair me with anyone, it's kind of great because I can, you know, drop as many balls to take the shot over again and really like just sort of treat it as practice. But I went out to do that the other day and they paired me with these two old fellers that were probably mid 80s to 90s. Oh, wow. And boy, these guys were slow, slow, slow. And I was like, you know what, Chuck, this isn't that day. You're just going to be there with them. You're going to help look for their balls. You're going to carry the clubs to them when they drop them. And you're going to slow it down. And it was a really lovely, relaxing experience. I didn't get bored. I tried to like, revel in the slowness of it all, you know, they kept dropping their clubs. No, like, you know, you carry a pitching wedge and a putter to the green and you drop your pitching wedge to put. I always go like, it's kind of how I always go, catty their club form or get their ball

42:16or whatever, you know, try to help these guys out. I got you now. They didn't like me very much of that. It was still fun. So, yeah, I think that's great advice to just to slow down and stay present and mindful. Yeah. And all that I think comes around to the boredom thing is like there are many ways to keep yourself from being bored. And one might be to just try and look at the circumstance ran in a different way. For sure. Also, I think it's important to bear in mind that you like what's meaningful to you or what's boring to you is boring or meaningful to somebody else. Right. It's not like you'll get all sorts of advice like go out and read a book, go and write a bike. That might not necessarily be meaningful to you. There's something else that's going to be meaningful to you. And that's advice that's typically given to deal with boredom, which is identify things that you care about and then go do those things. Just have them on hand. You know, you don't have to do them all the time.

43:17You don't have to become the best at them. You don't have to drive yourself. You don't have to share your experience with anybody else. Yeah. But just identify some things like this is meaningful to me so that if you do find yourself bored, you don't necessarily just pull out your phone. You go, hmm, maybe I'll go to rescue guppies out of elementary school aquariums. Right. Whatever it is. Whatever it is. Yeah, I mean, it definitely can lead to creativity. There's a psychologist named Sandy Mann that says that embrace that boredom. That was a study that she did where she had people copying numbers from a telephone directory. And she found that they were more creative after like she gave them a task like, hey, try and think while you're doing this, try and think of new uses for plastic cups. And once they were subjected to the tedium of just copying numbers, it allowed their, you know, they embraced that boredom in their mind, wander, doll these creative things they could do with the cups. Beer pong was born.

44:17Exactly. And there's something called the default mode network where if you're not doing anything that gives your brain space to go in that default mode where your brain isn't engaged in a specific thing, but it can like get creative. Yeah, we talked about that a lot over the last few years. And I know it's a big deal with ADHD that it's really hard to get out of your default mode network. Right. So surprise boredom can be a part of ADHD too. Yeah, for sure. And you know, we're talking about some of the positives that can also be a negative thing because we talked about risk taking and risky behavior just to do something different. They definitely tied boredom to like, you know, gambling, substance abuse and stuff like that, like the promise of a stimulation that you're seeking because your bored can sometimes be like a really bad thing. You can turn to, we've been picking on smartphones and sorry to everybody who's like, you guys

45:21are too preachy these days. That was definitely very preachy. But it is a pretty good example. It's not the only one. People take up drugs, literally take up drugs because they're bored with life. They start drinking sometimes. Studies show that people who are bored consistently go to lower quality or low nutrition snacks over, you know, something better for them when they have the option. Like it, you can just, you go in a place where you're going to find some sort of stimulation. And yeah, that's, so there are a lot of risk behaviors associated with boredom that you're going to do something because that you got to get rid of that arousal state that's unpleasant which is boredom. But it's not necessarily going to be going and volunteering at the cancer ward at your local hospital. It might be, I'll go see what cracks all about. Man, you're so preachy. Some people do, we get that from time to time.

46:21Yeah, but you're sitting there encouraging people to like engage with the world and to go volunteer for cancer or not to do crack. Like get off your high horse. I think that some people don't like being told what to do no matter what it is. I know. Yeah. I think that, I don't, I feel like also, I think it's our age too. We're just lucky that we're not like the kind who like tell everybody how stupid they are too, you know? Yeah, I mean, I hope people know it's always take it or leave it like, you know, you don't have to be the way we're saying to be, but I love the advice of engaging with the world or volunteering for, you know, sick children in a hospital rather than doing crack. I'll stand, I'll die on that hill. I think also the Chuck is really important that we pointed out that, you know, there's, there's not some ideal thing you should go do. No. That it's all based on what you find meaningful and that's the point. Not what we're saying you should go for. Yeah, for sure.

47:22What you think you should go do, the point is just do something that's going to help you in the long run more than, you know, turning to pot. Right. procrastination is another thing. I know we've talked about that before, but it is definitely a response to boredom. Pronest to boredom increases at someone's tendency to procrastinate generally, which is interesting because it's, you know, doing that thing would solve the boredom problem that like the thing you're putting off a lot of times. I think they're quating it with like looking at your smartphone. You're not actually doing anything. You're just lowering your brain's standards for input. I guess that makes sense. And we talked about some stuff with managing boredom like, you know, identifying ahead of time things that you could go do. Like you said, don't just try to solve it immediately for kids. Let them kind of figure it out on their own. I also saw there was a study where researchers presented kids with a big bag of toys and

48:23they found that the kids played with each one a little bit and then just just stopped eventually. Right. And if they gave kids just like one toy, the kid engaged with that one toy much longer. So that's part of it too. I guess it's robbing children of any sort of choice in life. I think it's the lesson there. I really, what really hit home was when you said to do something meaningful for you. I really like that you said that because that could be going to, you know, working in your garden or whatever. It could be drawing something. It could be writing something. It could be taking a walk. It could be anything. It doesn't have to be some like grand meaningful gesture to other people. Right. That's what I was trying to say that there's not some level that your activities have to rise to to be considered meaningful. If they're meaningful for you, bam. Yeah. Do not say that looking at Instagram is meaningful for you. You're lying. You're lying to yourself. You're lying to Chuck. You're lying to me. You're lying to everybody. I agree with that. I think that's it for boredom for now, huh?

49:25Yeah. It was a good one. I like this one. I did too. And I think since this is the end of boredom, it's time for listener mail. That's right. This is short and sweet. Hey guys, long time listener, first time writer. This is about the irony episode from Nick. And once had a debate about the song, Ironic that you guys talked about from Alonus Morris that the English teacher I worked with, I argue that it is a purely ironic song because it's called Ironic and contains no irony and irony is flipping expectations to a certain degree on a metal level. I really think the song is pure irony. Never really thought about that. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for the great content guys. I used to have playlists for my AP students to listen to. We're introducing subjects and for review and they enjoyed it and it helped lay the foundation for their studies. And that is Nick. Thanks a lot Nick. That was just an all around great email. It's not very often that our minds are just completely blown but I'm pretty sure you just did it for both of us. Yes. If you want to be like Nick and blow our minds, please do.

50:28You can send it in an email to stuffpodcast.iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the I Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. The following song has been rated dangerously catchy and may not be suitable for grownups. APCT in the morning brush your teeth. APCT in the morning brush your teeth. EFGH hurry up and don't be late. EFGH hurry up and don't be late. Lingo kids only suitable for kids. If it gets stuck in mom's head, that's not our problem. Everything kids love. Download now for free. Hey everybody, you ever show up late to the game and your friends have already saved your seat and your drink and even a plate? Well that's looking out.

51:29That's having your back and that's exactly what AT&T does with the AT&T guarantee. They know that staying connected matters so they actually guarantee a network that comes through when it counts. AT&T has connectivity you can depend on or they'll proactively make it right. Just like that friend who takes care of things before you even ask. AT&T connecting changes everything. Terms and conditions apply. Just visit attt.com slash guarantee for details. You know the cost of a bad night's sleep and waking up too hot might be the worst. You don't feel like yourself the next day. With a Tiami mattress, guess where it goes away. Five layers of foam and pocketed coils create a naturally cool supportive mattress finished with a 90% organic cotton top layer. You use your bed every day. Give yourself sleep you love with Tiami. You can have 100 nights to decide plus 35% off a $1,000 value. Exclusively at tiami.com slash better sleep. TIA M.I. Beautifully designed for better sleep.

52:29This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.