Morning Brew Daily

Kids across the world are experiencing a mental health crisis and smartphones are too blame. That's the thesis of a new book by Jonathan hate called The Anxious Generation that's only been out one week but has already renewed a fierce debate about the relationship between social media and social media.

he's criticized these addictive features that social media apps have rolled out that have just kept kids glued to their smartphones glued to their notifications that come from Instagram and TikTok.

spending a lot of time with your face buried in your phone instead of playing outside is not how children are supposed to be living so some people are saying let's just get out in front of it now even if we can't absolutely nail the data down let's just do what makes sense.

the most important thing is getting phones out of schools put them in lockers or special pouches during the day he also wants to keep smartphones out of kids before high school so they can have basic phones without access to the internet

he said that is sort of a by all these three things are bipartisan ideas that every lawmaker can get behind every company can get behind actually not companies because they want to hook users earlier I rescind my remarks but those are some of the solutions that he puts forward this is a debate we're going to have for the next months and years.

hate is an NYU business professor whose ideas are really influential in Silicon Valley and beyond his blockbuster book about campus cancel culture.

The Coddling of the American Mind was praised by Bill Gates and Stripe CEO Patrick call son and he's been brought in by companies like meta to give talks on social media and society.

Oh, like you read War and Peace. Like what was your favorite part? No one would ever ask you that.

And if I could have dinner with one person, it probably would be Anthony Bourdain. I don't know, he was someone I really admired. He cooked you a fine meal obviously, plus you just have incredible stories from all over the world. He's someone with such a unique perspective. Whenever I watched him on TV or read his book, catch it confidential, he had just really unique perspectives on things.

Stephen King is one of my favorIte authors and he has this quote where he describes wrIting a book as driving in the night wIth headlights on. You can only see so far out ahead of you the rest is dark and unknown.

In a lot of ways I feel like that is like maybe the most enormous hurdle to cross because if you're genuinely interested in a habit There are like endless ways to improve it But if you're not actually interested, you're just kind of forcing the issue or making yourself do it Even the obvious improvements are going to feel like a chore.

And so many of our habits are socially driven like that.

So maybe if my goal is to read a lot this year, I the first thing I should do is create a good reads account Because then my my entire you know reading history will be online and I'll be judged by my peers about whether I hit my goal or not.

You know picking two friends that are also interested in reading and starting a book club is another way to do it You don't even have to start one like you could just join one. That's already going Um, there are there are tons tons of ways to be part of that You know start browsing browsing subreddits with people who love books and just like engage there and leave comments And then now you're kind of like surrounded by other people who are reading and feel like you have a little bit of momentum There there are many ways to do it But the core idea is like how can I build connection with people who already have the habits? I want to have and the more that those people start to become your friends or start to populate your thoughts The more that you're going to feel compelled to do those things as well.

I'm reminded of that quote from Ed Latimore where he says the heaviest weight at the gym is the front door Like there are a lot of things in life. They're like that so Think about the big 10-year vision scale it down to the next hour or five minutes or two Two minutes make it as small as possible and cast some little vote make some little action today That moves you toward that big picture view that you have for the future.

Our swing thought of the day...is dangerous, better to enter with boldness from Robert Greene's 48 Laws of Power.

I'm looking forward to two different books, one is the SPF book by Michael Lewis, which should be super interesting...

if we go back to the 1968 book that we all know Population bomb that book forecasted a 20th century starvation Catastrophe but obviously that hasn't come to pass because technological advances have met increased need and worldwide people have Started to have less kids

I don't know if anyone's read Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis, but there was a phrase that was in reference to the Salomon Brothers.

It's called equities in Dallas.

And it was this pejorative phrase where if you were assigned to Dallas and you were a finance worker, it was back office.

It was lowest of the low.

You did not want to go there.

It was the backwater of the finance world, Dallas compared to New York.

So many recommendations like Great Gatsby, Moby Dick, Catcher in the Rye.

But a new biography of him from New York Times journalist Ron Copeland peels back the layers of a Wall Street icon and what it finds ain't pretty.

The Fund, as the book is called, paints Dalio as building an ego maniacal cold of personality who focuses more on terrorizing his employees than actually returning capital to investors.

Bridgewater obviously is not and was not as the book describes it calling it another one of those sensational and inaccurate tabloid books written to sell books to people who like gossip.

Bridgewater is definitely not the best place to work and they will own up to that and they send you through the ringer and it's like you're either with us or you're against us where you're gonna come in.

So if you want to learn about probably the weirdest corporate culture anywhere uh pick up this book and also I I just learned that uh, it's been optioned for a movie as well for Amazon studio.

The first book that a reporter from The New Yorker Blinked was called Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker in paperback form.

It's 450 pages plus another hundred pages of notes on audible at last 19 hours and 49 minutes.

But over a series of nine blinks it takes just 24 minutes flat to listen to now.

local librarians handing out free copies of children's book called Everyone Poops

In 1974 Shell Silverstein found where the sidewalk ends

And then finally these big American novels I really like like Freedom and The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen.

I don't know if anyone's read that Overstory, but it's a type of kind of protest that if you want to cut cut down these trees, we're in them right now so we don't want you to do that.

You have the outsiders, great Gatsby, The Notebook, water for elephants of those four.

I think I got to see The Notebook.

I've never seen The Notebook actually all the way through the movie, but I would love to see it. I'm sure it's an emotionally apparently you have to bring a lot of tissues to The Notebook.

Like she's Cody from serves up Streisand's autobiography follows on the heels of books from celebs like Viala Davis Jeanette Mercurdy, Matthew Perry, Pamela Anderson, Jada Pinkett Smith, Britney Spears and of course Prince Harry

So I amended the question and asked it to give me books from the 2000s only and now I'm reading Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller.