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Up Your Average is the “no nonsense” podcast made for interesting people who think differently. Learn to navigate your life with unconventional wisdom by tuning in to Keith Tyner and Doug Shrieve every week.
Probably one of the greatest things in life is social connection. And I know the youngsters can do it on their video games. They can I've watched Caleb have a blast with his friends on his on his video games, but there's something to do with that eyeball to eyeball just to let somebody see a real life smile and to let them know you care.
Narrator:Welcome to the Up Your Average podcast, where Keith and Doug give no nonsense advice to level up your life. So buckle up and listen closely to Up Your Average.
Keith:Good morning, Doug. Hey. We have a we have a full house today. We even got Caleb on board.
Caleb:That's right.
Keith:Alright. We have guests the next couple of weeks joining us, and I thought we would just have a dialogue today without a guest. How's that?
Caleb:That works for me.
Keith:The title I came up with dates back to the 1980s from Styx, their song Too Much Time on Your Hands, and then I made it The Art of Doing Nothing, and I had a motivation thinking about that, and I was thinking of the economics for young couples today. One of our realtor friends put a post out there on the internet that the first time homebuyers now are 40 years old. We see demographics consistently that people aren't having kids, And so there's something that's shifted over time, and I wanted to hit the rewind button, Doug, and go back to the nineteen sixties and seventies, and then we'd spring forward to the ninth or the February for Kayla. But I was just thinking, what was life like prior to to what people think is normal today? And part of this came I was doing some research for an Anchor article on how much square footage per person in a house there was when I was growing up versus today, and whether more square footage actually improved your quality of life.
Keith:And I think probably all of us know the answer to that question, don't you?
Doug:Probably depends on the day. Sometimes more square footage sounds pretty good.
Keith:It can more square footage could reduce crime, maybe some some murders or something in the house or something. But, yeah, you're exactly right. One of the things Connie has caught me doing, and this is me being just forthright with all of you, is she'll come into the room, and I'll be having a full blown conversation, and it'll be with my AI. And so a lot of the research I do these days, instead of going to the library, I just have full blown conversations. I don't know.
Keith:How how do you guys do your AI? Do you type it, or do you talk to it, or how do you do that?
Caleb:I think for me, it depends on what I'm what I'm doing. I'll I'll talk to it sometimes, like, I have a question in the car or if I'm, like, cooking dinner or something. But for the most part, I feel like I just type it out.
Doug:I would say I'm probably mostly a typer just because we have a a lot of lives still happening in our house. But if it were me alone, I I would definitely be a talker.
Keith:Yeah. I mean, I have literal full blown conversations, and I argue and everything. So I generally don't do it in public because people think I'm losing my mind. But it it it's been a really good thing to improve my thinking skills. And this I didn't really wanna spend time with AI, but this is a leadership principle that I'll throw out there to you for for joining us today.
Keith:This is free for you. You don't have to pay a dime for this. AI is a bear. Now I know some of you don't want to mess with it, but if you can just conceptualize it as a bear, it's a big deal. Because when you go out west, if you are gonna go in the woods, there's a high possibility there's a bear in there.
Keith:And I don't know if you guys have you been in some place where you thought there's probably a bear close by? Yeah. It's a little intimidating. And I remember I went on a run one day, and I saw fresh bear prints where I was running, and the KOA guy told me it was safe where I was running. I was like, he would lie to me about a lot of things.
Keith:But when I say AI is a bear, it is you don't have to be an expert at it. Like, if you're gonna be in the business world, all I have to do is push Caleb down and get in front of Caleb, right, with a bear. And all I have to do is be ahead of the next financial adviser. I don't have to be the sharpest one out there. And so if you're afraid of the bear, you don't have to be afraid of it.
Keith:You can just put yourself in a place where you're ahead of somebody else, because most people are still looking at it like the bear, and they're not gonna go out in the woods. That's my leadership principle for today.
Doug:Yeah, I think AI is it's just been so helpful for me. It's so helpful for me to develop my thinking, expand my thinking, tap into some knowledge at a very quick pace, and stay curious and really sharpen my curiosity.
Keith:Yeah, so the full blown conversation I had last week was really about this topic, too much time on your hands. And when when we didn't have screens everywhere, you're you had to be pretty imaginative how to fill in the space because nobody really cared to hear you say, I'm bored. Like, I don't know if you ever had somebody, Oh, I'm glad you said that to me, Doug. Did you ever say that as a kid? Do you remember ever saying that?
Keith:What, I'm bored? Yeah. Yeah. Did you get a positive response? No.
Keith:Yeah. And I don't think people have the possibility of being bored with a cell phone anymore, right? No. The brain time, I think boredom is really healthy for you, but that brain time has been absorbed by things that aren't maybe as healthy. Yep.
Keith:Maybe kind of even destructive to your soul if you don't have some downtime.
Doug:I can tell you a way I've been doing that lately. Since we have a little more sunshine after dinner, I've been going on some walks, and I don't put these things in my ear. I don't take my phone. I just enjoy my neighborhood, say hi to my neighbors, and we live in the woods, so I get to see birds and squirrels, and I know that sounds pretty simplistic, but it's been pretty great not to be attached to anything and just have some thinking time, or no thinking time.
Keith:In the 1960s when I was a kid, Michael Beverly and I would race to get up in the morning on the summers, and we would grab our shovels and start digging in his backyard. Like, this is a pre 08:11 call, but I don't even think there was buried things too much back then, But we would go sunrise to sunset, and we never really needed anybody to tell us what to do. We were always curious, and so I thought I would our friends back to the 1960s and 70s and point out some unique things, and then maybe go with some dialogue about that. In the 1970s, late 60s, you had a shared family car. I don't know if you remember that in your time, Doug, but it was a big deal when we went from the Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser to the Vista Cruiser and an old beat up Volkswagen.
Keith:So we went to kinda one and a half is what we did. We were big time. With with the with the shared family car, you had less expense, and you had more family time because you you had the kid alive. You couldn't you didn't split everybody up, right? So everybody was together more.
Keith:Often, then you had one income, maybe one, one and a half. And so you had smaller places because you only had one income, and you had less stuff because you only had one income. And so those things create they cause creativity and imagination. Like, I know it like on a snowy day, literally bread bags were part of your glove system. Like, it sounds weird, but that was how it was back then.
Keith:It was like, I'm going out, I'm not staying inside, I'm gonna put these stupid bread bags on with the rubber band around, and I'm going out. You had to know stuff back then. Like, didn't repair, you replaced things, or you didn't replace things, you repaired them. You didn't hire people to do stuff, you had to do it yourself, because there just wasn't the cash flow. And so people, like people in the neighborhood knew stuff.
Keith:Like we didn't have garages in my neighborhood who had carports, and there was constantly a car up on Jack's and somebody like, both houses across the street, they were constantly working on cars. And I don't even know the last time I've seen that, but it was kinda interesting. You just people you knew everybody in the neighborhood knew stuff, and and you also knew your neighbors. Right? This was the kind of the one that kinda cracked me up was my my dad and my uncle were both engineers, and so we were probably one of the first ones in the neighborhood with a television, particular colored television, because Uncle Bill worked at RCA, and it might've been like that Johnny Cash song.
Keith:Was it was it Johnny Cash song where he stole the parts every day and had a he built a Cadillac or something? I don't know where the parts came from, but we had a colored TV before that was cool. And my dad would say to me, Why would you watch someone else make a living? Like, why would you come in and watch TV when you could go out and do something? And I always thought that was stupid when I was a kid, but the older I got, I go, Oh, kind of makes sense, which is kind of the same thing with these, right?
Keith:Like, the more time you look at that, you're watching somebody else make a living, and you're not really expanding your horizons. So the kickoff of the conversation is I wanted to talk about your unscheduled childhood. Like as a kid, Doug, the seventies and the early eighties, what would you do with your time before you put it in front of a screen? And I'll banter back and forth. And then what it was like in the February with your free time when you actually had screens.
Keith:How did you do it? And then maybe there's some creative things that people could take away to expand their social horizons as well. Tell me about a normal tell me about a normal day in the summer for Doug Shreve, some things you would spend time doing.
Doug:As a kid, I was really fortunate, my parents bought a house in a neighborhood that was a great neighborhood to grow up in, and so we had other boys within a mile bike ride, and we had freedom to go places, So we would play a lot of tennis. We'd play a lot of football in the vacant lot where the house had not been built. That lot was our football field. It was our baseball field. And my dad was gracious enough to cut out a wooden backboard and bolt on a basketball hoop over our garage door, and so spent a lot of time dreaming of playing for the Muncie Central Bearcats in some fashion or another.
Keith:Now tell me this, Doug. Did your dad, when he assembled that basketball hoop, was it attached to the or did it stick out so the ball wouldn't get stuck behind?
Doug:Oh, I don't remember that. That's funny. We weren't engineers, so we didn't even think about that.
Keith:Yeah. The rich guys down the street had the legitimate one where the the backboard stuck out. I'd have to get the I'd have to get the ladder up and climb up on the roof to get the ball down from behind it.
Doug:Oh, I see what you're talking about. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I remember now.
Doug:Yeah. We the the ball would definitely go behind the the backboard, and we had to climb up and get it. I always enjoyed jumping off the the the roof of our house. My mom didn't really appreciate me doing that, but I always enjoyed that myself.
Keith:I would have been a little older than this age, but I was showing off my athletic prowess, and not everybody used plywood to make those things. And so I went up for a dunk on my friend's basket, and it was made out of press wood, and I just almost got knocked out by the rim when it because the water absorbed it and it just dissolved and just about took me out.
Doug:Yeah. That that happened at our at our house too. But that's all good. But yeah. So great childhood doing those kinds of things.
Doug:And then I I think, you know, even with the electronics and stuff, like this guy driving me right now, fighter pilot Warner. Warner. I think they've had a great childhood too because my wife and I both, we just believe in doing outside things, and so we'd tell them to get outside all the time, And I think their memories will not be of their iPhones even though that was cool when they got them. I think it will be of playing trampoline football in the backyard and shooting hoops just like I did. I I think it'll be on their rip sticks and playing bucket golf.
Doug:They all still play bucket golf. And so just getting outside and and and doing stuff, I I think that's where it's at. Where it gets tough is when you're living in Indiana and it's February. So what's coming on in February? Some of That's us are one or just tired of looking at screens, but let's just face it, February's tough.
Doug:Give yourself some grace. If you looked at a screen every day in February, don't sweat it. Spring is here and it's coming. You're gonna be getting outdoors. I know Caleb's been running a lot, and so there's just there's there's great opportunities happening right now.
Keith:Ask Warner this, Doug. Ask him if he's ever put the garden hose on the trampoline.
Doug:Oh, yeah. They they've definitely done that. Yeah.
Keith:Yeah. That's That's life right there.
Doug:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Keith:Our during during the seventies when you had a trampoline, there was no they they were usually rectangular, and there was no screen around it. Right?
Doug:Our first one didn't have a screen, and we decided that wasn't very smart. It's probably not very smart to have a trampoline in the first place, but the screen does help, and the nice thing about the screen is you can do some cool diving catches up against the screen to get the football. So that's kinda cool.
Keith:Nice. Caleb, tell me two or three things in growing up. Like, what year would you say you remember playing as a kid? What like, what would be the first year that comes to mind roughly?
Caleb:I don't know about first year, but definitely, like, elementary age. Like, 2009,
Keith:2008? Yeah. Probably. What were some things you would do to entertain yourself that didn't involve a screen?
Caleb:I mean, outside, I know me and a bunch of the neighbors would play basketball in our backyard. We would very rarely get a big enough group of people to play kickball. I know football was a big one because we found a way to play it with just three people. You had a quarterback, receiver, and defender, and you could just alternate like that. So we'd play that in our side yard.
Caleb:I know the two other things that came to mind were when it was nighttime, we'd play flashlight tag around the neighborhood. So we go and hide around, and the person seeking everyone would have have a flashlight. And if you got in the line of the flashlight, you are out. And I think the last one is over in the cul de sac. It was just all dirt and everything.
Caleb:And we made a couple trails for the bike and couple ramps. So we'd just go around that old track and ride the bike.
Keith:I love it. I love it. So so bicycles, I think, are probably that that's probably a thing that I would encourage people of all generations to immerse the kids in that. Just the bicycles form some creativity, I think. Yeah.
Keith:Yeah. I I love seeing
Doug:Especially if if you have the freedom to use them.
Keith:Yeah. Yeah. I love I love seeing kids ride wheelies. I love seeing them ride them. Like, when they're learning to ride, they ride them into a bush.
Keith:All of that. All of that's just good stuff. We we just literally had to do things outside. And I grew up on a street in Evansville called Lombard, and it's a mile long. It starts at the the south end with projects.
Keith:Just north of that is duplexes. Just north of that is 12 to 1,500 square foot houses. You cross Main Street, you go to probably 20 200 square foot two story houses, and you go all the way to the end of that where the president of the University of Evansville lived in a pretty expensive house at the far end. So it was a very diverse culturally speaking street. I just I just discovered our friend Gary Urban actually as a newlywed, lived south of where I did in the duplexes.
Keith:So I was as a young kid, I was doing a little better than Gary was because that's that's the next step. You would go from the duplexes up, but we had probably one acre yards, which we had small houses, but big yards, so it just offered you the chance to do stuff. We played football out there. We played all kinds of we had a tetherball court. We played badminton, volleyball, we played all those things in the yard.
Keith:We played hide and seek. We had those back in the day, they had metal swing sets. I don't even know if they have those anymore. Do you guys know?
Caleb:I feel like they do at schools.
Keith:Yeah. These are these are like cheap metal ones. The
Doug:We had one of those.
Keith:Yeah. And and you get that thing rocking. They've been. Just starts rocking. Right?
Keith:Like, you're you're wondering, are we gonna tip it over this time or not? So that That was the goal. Yeah. Exactly. I remember imagining I could go all the way over the top of that thing.
Keith:Like, I'm gonna do a loop over that thing. And so when I reflected back over this exercise, what was what I was asking AI was what what did an unscheduled childhood look like in the sixties and seventies? I had I had schedules like athletic things, but mostly we play we played sand lot sports, and I I think that's kinda gone by the wayside. I don't I don't think that's a part of American lifestyle anymore, but we played whether that was a wiffle ball, kickball, football, basketball, all those things, we played those. Horse on the basketball court, that was a that was a normal thing.
Keith:And, like, if you weren't any good, you'd wanna go to pig because you had a bigger chance of winning with pig. You could you could make a couple shots over like, backwards over your head and and beat the big kids playing pig. Foursquare, that they would draw we would draw Foursquare out in the street, play Foursquare. The kids play something like that where they
Caleb:I think it's called like nine ball. Nine ball. Or nine squares
Keith:something. Yeah. It's really cool. It's it's that's a modern version of it. Part of what helped me think about this, Doug, was I was asked to read this book right here.
Keith:And you know, I've talked a little bit about camp the last weeks and the challenges and thoughts behind it. So far, I'd recommend this book. It's written by Michael Eisner, the former CEO of Disney. He was talking about the kids at the camp he went to, and still they sleep on cots. And like, my kids aren't gonna sleep on a cot.
Keith:Like, I'm gonna camp is a version of what childhood was like. Right? Like, people like to go to camp because they're forced outside. And that all that was kinda ruminating through my head when I was thinking about this. Like, a hopscotch, that was Libby's assignment this morning was to put a hopscotch game out in front of Gimbal.
Keith:What what did we get? Dance and groove. Dance and groove is what we have instead. And so I had to break in the Dance And Groove square. There was no traffic, unfortunately, when I I was doing that.
Keith:But we played flashlight tag, bicycles, like we didn't have helmets, so I got a free trip, at least free for me to the hospital with a concussion when I went over the handlebars. I know you went over the handlebars once, didn't you?
Caleb:Yeah, it was not fun. Yeah.
Keith:Libby And reminded me of some of my wealth went by the wayside back then because we used a clothespin and put our baseball cards on the bicycle, and it was such a wonderful sound. And even the front yard games were the backyard games, because that's where all the acreage was, that's where all the sandlot stuff took place. The front yard games were Red Light, Green Light. Did you guys play that?
Doug:Yeah. Okay.
Keith:We played Mother May I and Red Rover? Red Rover. Yeah. That would almost qualify, depending on who was playing. If we weren't sexist, if it was just the guys, we'd have to take it out back.
Keith:But if the girls were playing, then we'd play out front, because you couldn't get any momentum on Red Rover then. But really, one of the ideas that struck me is croquet. Croquet is just such a great invention. And bocce balls? Bocce balls is another thing that you can do outside.
Keith:And I throw all this out there to our friends today that what is it each of us can do as springtime comes to get people outside? Like, what can we do to encourage our neighborhood to embrace the outdoors? Maybe you set a croquet course up in your front yard, not you, Doug, because but you you set croquet up. You maybe you draw some hopscotch out there. Something to encourage the neighbors just to reminisce themselves and maybe slow down enough to jump on the hopscotch.
Keith:Maybe slow down enough to stop and have a conversation with you. What do you guys think? Is there a way to create more like the fact that we only had a carport made the neighborhood more neighborly because the garage door didn't close when the car went in. Right? Like you had to actually, somebody could actually see you, but a lot of times, Dave, the garage door goes down immediately, and you may or may not know your neighbors.
Keith:What do you think?
Doug:Well, I think it just, it starts with me. Yeah. It starts with dad getting his butt off the couch and getting outside or saying, hey. Come along. I love how my boys have been playing bucket golf lately.
Doug:That's that's kinda like the new modern croquet maybe. It's it's probably a little bit cooler than bucket or than croquet. I don't know. But I think it starts with me just getting outside myself and probably turning off the technology while I'm doing it, at least for me. That's what I need to do.
Doug:I spend too much time on a screen.
Keith:And I don't think kicking this idea off is you're limited by age. I think no matter if you're in a neighborhood, you could do it. If you're in assisted living, maybe you put a Tic Tac toe board out in front of your room or something. But I think you can creatively cause community to happen just by getting outside of the screen, thinking differently, realizing probably one of the greatest things in life is social connection. And I know the youngsters can do it on their video games.
Keith:I've watched Caleb have a blast with his friends on his video games, but there's something to do with that eyeball to eyeball, just to let somebody see a real life smile and to let them know you care. Well, thanks for joining us today. Next week, we're gonna have our friend David Morgan join us, and I think it's gonna be a real encouraging, challenging, uplifting idea, talking about how do I prepare myself for the aging process? What are some tricks of the trade to help my family as I mature? Doug, you guys drive safely.
Keith:Caleb, thanks for joining us. Yeah, of course. You all enjoy the sunshine today.