Greetings Eddies!

Later this week, we're dropping a must-listen podcast episode featuring Joshua Fields Millburn - one third of The Minimalists, the trio behind 200+ million podcast downloads, a Netflix documentary, and four bestselling books about living with less.

In the episode, he tells the long-form version of a story he shared a glimpse of when The Minimalists hosted Isaac last year - about why he pulled his daughter out of school and, more importantly, what she did next.

Let's dive in.

Joshua's daughter was having anxiety attacks every day in first grade when he decided to pull her out. The stomach aches were the last straw.

Four years later, she was running her own company. 

By age 10, she had started her own business: PAWS, or Pretty Awesome Walking Service. She's made thousands of dollars walking dogs at five bucks a pop.

"I feel like it's a job she would do for free anyway," Joshua says. "She's dog sitting at someone's house, and she just gets to play with their dog for five hours, and then they give her money."

No curriculum taught her customer service, scheduling, or reliability. She learned it because she wanted to, and the results speak for themselves.

Watch the clip

The Minimalists took a full year off social media after reaching half a billion views. Joshua's takeaway was that most of those views lasted eight-tenths of a second, which made him wonder what exactly he was measuring.

Their recent TEDx Talk lays out the data: frequent users who scroll 2+ hours daily are 3x more likely to be diagnosed with depression and 40% more likely to have sleep problems. Social media, they argue, is designed to "milk" your nervous system for emotional responses, leaving you too depleted to nurture real relationships.

So, should we ban cell phones? No - they say. Instead, we should treat them like cigarettes. When you need to check a message, step outside. Make the habit visible, and let the social pressure do its work.

Watch the full TEDx Talk

Jack and Charles Winston are Gen Z brothers who grew up with smartphones in their hands. Jack worked at EY and DraftKings, Charles at Google. They watched their whole generation struggle with phone addiction and tried every screen time app they could find, but nothing worked.

So they built BePresent, which uses gamification to make screen time reduction feel like a game rather than a punishment. You compete with friends and earn real rewards for staying off your phone. It's the first generation to grow up with smartphones building the antidote.

I downloaded the free trial, accidentally forgot to cancel my subscription, and it's been saving me from excessive doom scrolling on Twitter ever since.

The ancient Greeks had a word for what social media is built on: pleonexia, which means greed for things that can be counted. Views, likes, followers, square footage, GPA.

Joshua's question in the TEDx Talk: "How many square feet of joy do you have in your life? How many yards of peace have I acquired this year?"

The things that matter most resist quantification, which is exactly why the algorithm (and the factory education system) ignores them.

That's all for today!

P.S. Thursday's podcast with Joshua Fields Millburn goes deep on education, screens, and what happens when you remove all the desks. Subscribe on YouTube to get alerted when it drops.