Hey, everybody, this is Kelly with an invitation.

We have never, in the five years that this podcast has been on the air, so to speak,

organized a face-to-face live event, and we're going for it.

It is Thursday, July 31st in Bozeman, Montana. And I want to give you the background on the event

and then tell you more about it and where to go for all the detail and information.

I don't know if you read The Atlantic, but the February issue, the cover story was called

The Anti-Social Century by Derek Thompson.

And the article goes to great lengths to set up the moment that we're in right now, which is, as I'm sure you know, from various sources,

a time of weird and problematic and dangerous isolation from one another.

So, for instance, we spend 19 hours a week watching TV,

and much of that time, we do alone. We don't seem to be

responding, quote, to the biological clue to spend more time with other people. And so these

solitude levels are off the charts. And he takes a beat to describe the way things were. So from 1900 to

1960, church membership was going up, labor union participation was going up, marriage rates were at an

all-time high, the birth rate had the famous boom. There were book clubs and the branch library system

was drawing people in and putting them together in important ways. We went to the movies in person.

We went to music venues and playgrounds and other kinds of gathering places. And then the suburbs

grew and more people had their own swing sets

and their own large televisions and their own book collections. And the typical adult,

thanks to all the conveniences, gained six hours a week in leisure time. That's 300 hours a year.

And rather than playing pickup basketball, as Derek Thompson says, they funneled almost all of that

extra time into watching more TV. And his point is that technologies shape our behaviors

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