Joey Odom looked down at his phone and missed his five-year-old's first soccer goal, and the moment his son turned to the sideline to find his face. That miss reframed everything, and it opens this conversation about technology, attention, and the relationships that actually matter.
Joey, who co-founded a company built entirely around changing our relationship with technology, makes a case that's more hopeful than the usual doom: our least valuable relationship, the one with our phones, has the greatest impact on our most valuable relationships. And that relationship is something you can edit. He and Chris Hart get honest about their own convictions (the "daddy, watch me" moments, reading a bedtime story with one eye on a screen) and name what's actually at stake, from loneliness and isolation to phones dulling our ability to feel and AI dulling our ability to think.
Then it gets practical and doable. Start with the mirror, not your kids. Watch the 3M parent trap (you model a bad relationship, your kids mimic it, then you get mad at them for it). Get aligned with your spouse. Set one sacred time and one sacred place that stay phone-free. And when someone you love says "watch this," put the phone down and mean it.
In this episode:
— Why your least valuable relationship has the greatest impact on your most valuable ones
— The good news hidden inside "Dad, you're on your phone too much"
— Why proximity is the whole ballgame (91% of us keep our phones on us around the clock)
— How phones dull our ability to feel deeply and AI dulls our ability to think deeply
— The isolation trap, and why the promise of connection so often leaves us lonelier
— The 3M parent trap: model, mimic, mad, and how to break it
— Sacred times and sacred places: one of each, phone-free, to change the culture of your home
— The date-night phone swap, and the six words that tell someone they matter more than your screen
This week's small step: For the next seven days, spend 20 minutes a day physically distant from your phone. Not in sight, not on your body. Anchor it to something better: quiet time, a family show, a walk around the block. Treat it like a muscle and build from there. (For scale: two hours a day of distance would hand you back a full month of your year.)
Be Brave. Live Big.
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FOLLOW THE HOSTS
Joey Odom — @joeyodom.life; www.joeyodom.life
Chris Hart — @thechrishart · @thebravecoaches; www.bravecoaches.com
REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE
Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation, and his 2026 TED talk on AI. The idea of cognitive offloading. Blaise Pascal on our inability to sit quietly in a room alone. Stranger Things (the Vecna and "Mr. Sandman" illustration).
Produced by Sonus Podcasts · sonuspodcasts.com