The Answer Was Outside All Along | Wacky Wednesday

Everyone keeps telling us Gen Z has ten different problems.

AI relationships.

Bed rotting.

Loneliness.

Phone anxiety.

Declining friendships.

Falling mental health.

This week, Chad Law asks a different question:

What if they're actually all the same problem?

Following scientific research, physician-led nature prescription programs, public policy, and decades of behavioral data, this episode makes the case that America didn't lose another generation...

We simply forgot to send them outside.

This isn't an episode about nostalgia.

It isn't anti-technology.

It's about rediscovering one of the simplest, cheapest, and most overlooked solutions hiding in plain sight.

Episode Highlights

• 80% of Gen Z would consider marrying artificial intelligence
 • The rise of "bed rotting"
 • Why loneliness is becoming America's hidden epidemic
 • The surprising science behind nature prescriptions
 • How childhood quietly changed over the last generation
 • Public land, parks, beaches, and America's forgotten advantage
 • Dogs, purpose, and human connection
 • Why complicated solutions often ignore obvious answers

Memorable Quotes

"We built an AI companion when the companion was sitting in a shelter the whole time.""We've become a country that'll believe anything except the obvious.""The door never disappeared. We just stopped walking through it.""You cannot ask a kid to save a planet you never let fall in love with.""An hour of America's biggest problems... and the answer was a screen door and an afternoon."

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00:00 Cold Open – Would You Marry AI?
01:24 One Problem Wearing Ten Different Hats
05:27 The Excuses We Tell Ourselves
10:05 The Billion-Dollar Wellness Industry
17:25 Why Are Kids Not Okay?
18:45 Doctors Are Already Prescribing Nature
23:09 What Childhood Quietly Lost
27:22 When the Outdoors Became a Luxury
29:13 Oregon's Common Sense Solution
31:11 The Answer Was Outside All Along
34:52 Reagan Reminder
36:40 Live Audience Q&A

#CommonSense

#GenZ

#MentalHealth

#Nature

#ArtificialIntelligence

#Podcast

#GoOutside

#WackyWednesday

#ChadLaw

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

America, there's a survey out there, a real one, that found 80% of Gen Z would consider marrying an artificial intelligence. Not dating. Marrying. And three out of four of them said a chatbot could completely replace a human being. So somewhere in America tonight, a young man is writing wedding vows to an app. In sickness and in health, and whenever the Wi-Fi is strong. Meanwhile, the average Gen Zer now spends about 21 days a year bed rotting. That's a real term. Lying in bed, lines down, phone up, doing absolutely nothing on purpose, and calling it self-care. And when the phone rings, they panic. There are now, and I promise you I'm not making this up, courses, classes. You can sign up as a grown adult to be taught how to answer a telephone. We put a man on the moon in a tin can with less computing power than a doorbell, and we are now running seminars on hello? So here's what I couldn't stop chewing on. A generation that'll marry a robot but can't answer a call? That treats staying in bed like an Olympic event, and every week there's a new headline, a new syndrome, a new expert, a new app? What if those weren't ten different problems? What if they're all the same one? Hang on. First, one quick thing. Ladies and gentlemen, if common sense has become part of your weekly routine, ChadParlaw.com is your home base. Every week you'll find something new, whether it's my latest books, a new editorial, the gaily news, the free Common Sense Conservative Manifesto, or everything else we're building together. And if you've got a question, an idea for an episode, or you think I completely missed the mark, call or text me at 252 Chad Law. Some of the best conversations on this show start with your messages. All right, we'll be right back after these words.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

When you need common sense, come see Chad Law. The boldest pundit you ever saw. It's true, truth. It's hard and the talk is real. Reality rules and that's the appeal. Spread truth. That's this card opening. Who needs a part when the new common stance comes to Chad? He lays down the law when the lights get bad. I may think you're dense. Come where it's real.

SPEAKER_00 2:27

With common sense. I'm Chad Law, the last gay conservative, America's binary brother, the common sense extremist living in radical reality, broadcasting truth on the only rainbow that matters: the red, white, and blue rainbow. And this is Common Sense. The show where we read the fine print so you don't have to, where we bring receipts instead of outrage, where politics is just the starting point for something much bigger. This is the shelter for the politically homeless where reality gets a vote, results matter, truth matters, and common sense matters. Welcome home, America. All right, now I've got a stack of headlines on my desk tonight that supposedly have nothing to do with each other. Different topics, different experts, different panic. Or so everyone keeps telling me. Tonight, we find out if everybody is wrong. Here's the pile. Somewhere in America right now, there's a 24-year-old who's emotionally attached to a chat bot and physically cannot order a coffee out loud. We've got a word for lying in bed all day accomplishing nothing, and we've decided it's a wellness practice. And young people today are dating less, seeing friends less, calling less, leaving the house less than any generation we have ever put a number on. And every single week, there's a fresh headline about it. You notice that, folks? A new syndrome, a new study, a new panel of extremely serious people furrowing extremely serious brows, asking the same question in forty different outfits? What is wrong with these kids? Now I'm not up here to dunk on a generation. That's cable news's job, and frankly, they've unionized. No. The part that grabs me isn't the kids, it's us, it's the response. Because for every one of these problems, we've built something. An expert, a study, a brand new syndrome with a brand new app to match. A whole industry that shows up the second a young person feels bad. Apps for counseling, apps for talking, apps for companionship. And here's the part that keeps me up at night. None of it is working. We're spending more, building more, studying more than at any moment in human history. And the generation we're aiming at, all of it, is lonelier, sadder, and more stuck than the one before it. So tonight we're not going to do what everyone else does. We're not going to grab one headline, wave it around, act appalled, and go home. Because I don't think these are ten different problems, folks. I think it's one problem wearing ten different hats. And once you see the running thread underneath all of it, the bed rotting, the AI boyfriends, the phone anxiety, the empty Saturday nights, you will not be able to unsee it. It's going to change the way you read every one of those stories for the rest of your life, and you're welcome. Now, full honesty, I already know the answer. I've had it this whole time, and I'll tell you why I'm a little nervous to say it out loud. It's not complicated. It's not new. It is not expensive. In fact, it is so cheap, so old, and so ridiculously simple that when I finally say it, probably about 20 minutes from now, a good chunk of you are going to fold your arms and go, that's it, that's your big answer, Chad buddy, you've lost it. So good. Hold on to that feeling, because that reaction, that there's no way it's that simple. That is the show tonight. How did most obvious answer on earth get so buried that saying it out loud makes me sound like the crazy ones? But I need three places to show you where this is happening. Three stops, if you will. First, the excuses. Then the experts and the very strange thing they all leave out. And then the thing we quietly stopped doing that used to be the whole point of being a kid. Get comfortable. Not bedrotting comfortable. Sit up. Let's go find the thread. Alright, first up, the excuses. The stories we tell ourselves about why we can't. And we're gonna start in bed. Because that's apparently where the whole generation is. Bed rotting. You get in bed, you pull the blinds, you get your phone, and then nothing for hours. That's the event. That's the whole itinerary. And the part that gets me, it's not framed as a problem. It's framed as self-care. It went through the marketing department. One survey clocked the average young adult at around 21 days a year doing this. 21 days? That's a vacation. People take less time off than that. And look, I'm not above a lazy Sunday, blinds down, football on, ignoring the world, been there. But the difference is nobody handed me a wellness certificate for it. We called it being a bum and got up eventually. Now, one bed rotting headline, that's a giggle. That's a Tuesday. But watch what happens when I put the next card down. Because the staying in isn't just a bed thing, it's everything. The government literally measures how we spend our day. And the number that jumps off the page, we now socialize actual in-person face to face about 35 minutes a day down from 45 20 years ago. And the young ones, 15 to 24, they cut it damn near in half. Thirty-five minutes. That's one sitcom. That's the length of the thing they're watching about people who have friends. And here's where it stops being funny for a second, just a second. The most connected humans in the history of the species. A thousand friends, a screen in their palms since birth, and they are, by every measurement we've got, the loneliest. The actual United States Surgeon General put out an advisory saying chronic loneliness is about as bad for your body as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. Read that back. A generation that would never touch a cigarette, they'll lecture you about yours, quietly absorbing the health equivalent of a pack a day from sitting alone. Now, if you're keeping score, they're in bed. They're not going out, they're lonely. So naturally they went out and found companionship. Just not the kind with a pulse. They're dating robots. And I know. Chad, that's a fringe thing. Is it? One survey of high schoolers found one in five said they or someone they know has had a romantic relationship with a chatbot. One in five, that's not a corner, that's a classroom. Four kids dating a human being and the fifth in a committed relationship with autocomplete? And the wild part? By the numbers, the app's more reliable than dating a person right now. It answers, it listens, it never says we need to talk. Bad for the species. Great for the customer. So they can't leave the bed. They won't leave the house. And you'd think, okay, at least they're comfortable with the phone. Oh, sweet summer child. They're terrified of the phone. It rings and they freeze. There's a word, telophobia. And there are actual courses, classes, where a grown adult can be professionally coached on how to answer a ringing phone and say the word, hello? Picture the customer service version. You call a plumber and a recording goes, we can't come to the phone right now. Phones give us anxiety. Please express your emergency through a series of small texts. Now I'll be fair because we do fair here. Some of the phone phobia panic is overcooked. A chunk of it is just nobody likes a spam call, and I'm right there with them. So we'll leave that one as the comic relief it is and keep moving. But the pile's getting tall. Because here's the one that stopped me. They're dating less, seeing friends less, marrying less. A remarkable share of young men report not one date in a year. That in-person social time for young adults, it fell from about 13 hours a week to around five. Five hours a week only of being in the room with another person. We are watching a generation quietly close the door on dating, on friendship, on the whole messy, wonderful business of being around people. And then we act shocked, we convene a panel when they tell us they feel alone. So the natural question, the one everyone asks, is what happened? What broke? Hold that because there's an answer, and it's not the one the panels reach for. But first I've got to clear one thing off the table, the big one. The excuse that ends every one of these conversations before it starts. Money every day. Chad, it's not that they don't want to go out. They can't afford to go out. And listen, this is where every host turns into either a jerk or a sap. And I'm trying to do neither. Some of it's real. Going out got expensive. A cocktail can be twenty, twenty-five bucks now. Two-thirds of young people say a night out just isn't worth the damage to the wallet. And on the price of drinks alone, they've kind of got a point. They do. But here's where I've got a push. Because I was broke. Genuinely memorably broke. And here's what being broke did to my generation. It didn't send us to bed. It made us creative. Couldn't afford the club? You found the dive with the two dollar beers and a popcorn machine, and you made that the whole night. Couldn't afford a vacation? You threw a case of water in the truck, drove out to nowhere, built a fire, watched the sky, fishing was free, camping on public land was free, driving around with the windows down, going absolutely nowhere with your friends, free. Figure it out. Go find the free fun. And here's the part that flips this whole thing on its head. This generation has more tools to be cheap than any humans who've ever lived. The app that finds the happy hour, group on, discount codes, a phone that'll locate the cheapest fun within two miles in about four seconds. My generation found the two dollar beer by wandering into it. These kids are carrying a supercomputer that hands them the deal and using it to order delivery to a bed with the blinds down. So somewhere I'm broke, stopped being a starting line and became a permission slip to rot. Same two words. Used to mean get creative. Now it means stay home. And okay. Say you buy that. Here's the next wall, and it's a good one. It's not the drinks, it's the travel. Nature costs money. Gas is expensive. Flights are expensive. I can't just go to Yellowstone, Chad. And there it is. That's the sleight of hand. You caught it, right? Who said anything about Yellowstone? That's the trick. It makes you picture the postcard, the plane ticket, the rental car, the week off, the national park with the big wooden sign. It quietly turns going outside into a vacation you have to fund. And once nature means an expedition, of course you can't afford it. Nobody can afford an expedition every weekend. But that's not what's out there. Three out of four people in America's biggest cities live within a ten minute walk to a park. Not a drive, a walk. You don't need gas, you don't need shoes. There's a national wildlife refuge, real wide open space, within an hour's drive of most major metros in this country. Not a flight, a half a tank already in your car, and a Saturday. And my favorite one, because it kills the hardest version. Somebody says, Yeah, well, I live in California, it's all concrete and mansions. Is it? There's an ocean, eight hundred and forty miles of Pacific coastline. And here's the kicker. It belongs to you. By law in California, the right to the beach is written into the state constitution. A billionaire bought the only road to a beach and tried to lock everyone out, and he lost. The state pried it back open. The most expensive real estate in America and the sand in front of it is legally, permanently yours. And my home state did it best. Oregon, 1967, a Republican governor named Tom McCall looked at the whole coastline and said, This belongs to the people, all of it. Every beach public forever, no matter whose mansions behind it. A place, in his words, where your bank account doesn't buy you a better wave. That's the whole coast free, waiting since before I was even born. So total up the wall. 245 million acres of BLM land. Another 193 million in national forests, a refuge an hour from nearly every city, a park ten minutes from most front doors, and an entire ocean the law says you already own. That's what the I can't afford to get to nature excuse is standing on, which is nothing. Now, before you think government's totally on our side here, one for the road because it's too good, in that same beautiful everything's for the people organ, as of this year, if you want to float down a river on an inner tube, you have to buy a permit. They expanded the waterway rules to cover pretty much anything that floats, and yes, that includes a couple of inner tubes lashed together. No permit, and it's a hundred and fifteen dollar fine for the crime of floating. But you can do fentanyl in the streets, no problem. In fairness, it's twenty bucks a year, kids ride free, and it keeps invasive muscles out of the lakes, which is real, but they don't come from inner tubes. So they've got a little bit of a point, but sit with the image. Because none of it, not the permit, not the drinks, not the gas, none of it is the real wall, folks. The stuff is there. It's free, it's close. And in a lot of places the law already handed it to you with a bow on it. The door isn't locked, it's all sitting right there exactly where we left it. Which is what makes the next part so strange. If the answer's this free and this close and this obvious, why is there not a single expert in a single one of these panic pieces willing to say it out loud? That is a very good question. So let's see what the smart people had figured out, because Lord knows we've got enough of them. I want you to understand the size of the operation we've built to explain sad young people. For every single thing we talked about, the loneliness, the bedrotting, the anxiety, the robot romance, there's now an entire industry standing by to explain it to you. There are studies. There are studies about the studies, think tanks, research centers, task forces. There's a podcast, actually 400 podcasts, where two people in very nice headphones say the words dysregulated back and forth for an hour. There's a TED talk, there's always a TED talk. A guy on a red circle with a headset mic and a slow, meaningful walk going, what if the real crisis is connection? And then he sells you the book and the journal and the app that reminds you to breathe, which your body historically has handled on its own. There is actually a wellness startup in a warehouse right now with a foosball table and forty million dollars in funding. And their entire business model is a wristband that buzzes when you're stressed. The wristband tells you you're stressed. You did not know you needed the wristband. Look, some of these people are serious, folks. Some of the work is real. And I'm not here to mock a scientist. But step back and look at the whole factory. Billions of dollars, thousands of experts, all pointed at one question. Why are these kids not okay? And I told you at the top it's getting worse. The factory's running full tilt, and the thing it's supposed to fix keeps growing. Which, if this were a business, if you walked into a company that had spent a decade and a billion dollars on a problem that only ever got worse every quarter, you would not order another study. You'd walk in and go, okay, what's the obvious thing that nobody at this table is saying out loud? So I went looking for the obvious thing. And here's where it gets strange. Because the research does exist. It's just not in the panic pieces. Here's the first one. Scientists took about 20,000 people and measured how much time they spend out in nature against their actual health and happiness. And they found there's a dose. A specific amount of time outside where people start reporting they feel meaningfully better. Guess the number. We said it at the top of the show. Two hours a week. Two hours a week. That's not two hours a day. That's not a lifestyle. That's one lunch break spread out in a park over seven days. That's the whole prescription. There's your wristband. Okay, one study's a fluke. Fair. Keep your arms crossed. Here's the second. Different scientists. They sent people on a ninety minute walk, half through nature, half along a busy city street. Same length, same exercise. The only difference is what they were looking at. Then they scanned their brains, and the nature walkers came back with measurably less activity in the exact part of the brain that lights up when you sit and stew. That grinding looping, why did I say that? Machinery that runs underneath depression. Nature quieted it. The city walk did nothing. So a walk, a free walk, same walk, just pointed at a tree instead of a traffic light, measurably changed people's brains. We are running clinical trials on the radical intervention of going or a stroll. That's two, and I could keep stacking. Outdoor exercise beats the same workout indoors. Sunlight does things for your mood, your ceiling light never will. Time outside sharpens focus, and this is the funny part, helps people solve problems better, which is ironic because we can't seem to solve this one. And somewhere around study four, it stops feeling like a coincidence. This isn't one weird paper. It's a growing, boring, well-documented pile of evidence that being outside is quietly good for nearly everything we're paying billions to fix indoors. And look, honest here, because this matters. None of this says nature is a cure. Nobody's claiming a hike fixes clinical depression or that a sunset pays your rent. A lot of this is cautious, associated with, linked to. I'm not selling any miracle. But you all know me. I'm asking a smaller stranger question. If there's a cheap, free, well-studied thing that's associated with feeling better across the board, how is it not even in the room? How does the door not come up one time in a thousand articles about why these kids can't get off the floor? They don't go outside. I couldn't find it. And I looked. You see how I research. Could not find it. And at that point I was ready to call it a giant expensive blind spot, an entire industry that walked right past the obvious until I found the last one. And this is where I put the papers down. Because it turns out the experts do know, not the panel guys, not the wristband people, the actual doctors. There are programs now, real growing, thousands of doctors signed up where a physician, an MD in a white coat, looks at a patient, reaches for a pad, and writes a prescription for nature. A prescription to go outside. One program's partnered with the National Park Service. Your doctor can hand you a slip of paper that is functionally a note that says go touch some grass. And I swear this is true. And the dose they recommend is about two hours a week. The same number. The scientists found the number and the doctors are already writing it. So sit in this with me. We just spent 20 minutes walking through the experts, the panels, the studies, the apps, the billion dollar factory, built to explain why a whole generation feels terrible. And the entire time there were doctors in the back quietly writing, Go outside on a prescription pad like it's medicine. Because near as anyone can tell, it kind of is. And it's free. And it's everywhere. And nobody thought to lead with it? Which leaves me with one question, and it's not, does nature help? The doctors answered that. The question is stranger. If the research is real, and the doctors already know, and they're writing the prescription, then how did we ever stop? When did a country full of people who used to live out there, who fished and camped and ran outside till the streetlights came on, quietly pack it in and move indoors for good? Well, that's the last stop. How does a country that lived outside just come inside and lock the door? Let me show you the receipt that reframed this whole thing for me, because I came in expecting a funny episode about lazy kids, and then I found this study and I put my coffee down. Researchers in Denmark did something you could only do now with satellites. They looked at nearly one million children, a million, and measured how much green space each kid grew up around from birth about age ten. Then they tracked those same kids for years into adulthood. And controlling for the obvious stuff, income, family history, the kids who grew up with the least green space around them had up to 55% higher risk of developing a psychiatric disorder later in life. A million kids. 55%. And I have to be careful, and I want to be. This is a correlation, not a stamped and sealed cause. Nobody's saying a shrub is medicine. But you can't look at a million children in a number that size and go, hmm, weird coincidence, and change the channel. Something about where these kids grew up, followed them in adulthood and into a doctor's office. Think about that. So this isn't a bit about bedrotting anymore. This got bigger and it flips the question. All night we've asked, what's wrong with these kids? Wrong question. The real one is, what did these kids stop getting? Let me inventory. Not Misty Eye, just the list, because there was this whole machine that used to run in the background of being a kid and nobody designed it, it just ran. Fishing off a dock with a bucket and no plan. Camping, where the whole activity is just figure it out. 4-H, a kid raising an animal, keeping the thing alive, showing up when they didn't feel like it. Scouts, gardening, neighborhood adventures with zero adult supervision and one instruction. Be home when the street lights come on. Riding your bike to the edge of the known world, which was about four miles, and riding back. And here's the thing that nobody clocked at the time. None of it was about nature. Nobody sent a kid to catch a fish for the mental health benefits of catching a fish. But look at what the kid was secretly absorbing. Patience, boredom, and how to survive it, how to lose, how to fix something, how to be responsible for a life that wasn't yours, how to be alone with your own head for an afternoon and come out okay. We used to build all of that on accident for free in a field. Now we buy an app that gamifies resilience and wonder why it's not taking. There's actually a study on the 4-H kits, the hands-on animal and dirt ones. Compared to their peers, they are four times more likely to get back to their communities, twice as likely to be civically active. We didn't just lose the fishing trip. We lost the factory that quietly stamped out capable, show up for your neighbor adults, and it ran on dirt. Nature. Okay. Petting an animal. This is measured, this is real, lowers the stress hormone in your body and raises the bonding one. The same chemistry that makes a person feel connected, and a dog get this. Dog owners have about 24% lower risk of dying from just about anything. And the effect is strongest for people who live alone. Read that back. The single loneliest, most isolated version of the modern young person, the one we're all wringing our hands about. There's a four-legged tail wagging, free at the shelter thing that gets him off the couch twice a day, gives him something that needs him, and is linked to him living longer. We built an AI companion. The companion already existed. Been sitting in a kennel this whole time, going, I've been right here. Or hear me out. Get a dog. Go in nature. Get a dog. That's the fix. And that's the punchline underneath all of it. It's not like America ran out of outside. We didn't pave it. It's still there. One of the greatest outdoor systems on earth, the public land, the forests, the refuges, uh, the two coastlines, the law already handed you. We're the richest people in history in this one specific way: space. And we're using none of it. It's like inheriting a mansion and living in the closet. And it's all out there, paid for, and we're inside watching a video of content creators being outside. So if it's all still there and free and this good for us, how does a kid today not get it? And here's the uncomfortable answer, and it's the widening of this whole thing. For a lot of kids, the outdoors has quietly turned into something you buy. Let me tell you something personal. Sixth grade, I got shipped off to Catalina, the island off the coast of California. A marine science camp, snorkeling, dissecting squid, sleeping in a bunk, the ocean up close for the first time. And I'll be honest, 30 something years later, I can still feel that trip. It rewired something inside me. Now, that camp still runs 15,000 kids a year. But here's what changed. Whether your kid goes on the trip I went on now depends entirely on the zip code of the school and the size of the parents' checkbook. The wealthy private school, every year, it's in the brochure. The strapped public district three miles away had to cut the field trip. So the free everybody's birthright outdoors has quietly become a premium package. We have somehow managed to make dirt a luxury item. And the cruel twist, the kids getting the least of the outdoors are disproportionately exactly the kids who'd benefit from it most. The kid with the least access to a tree is often the kid already carrying the heaviest load. We're rationing the free medicine and rashing it away from the sickest patients. So is this just how it has to be, a luxury? No. And this is my favorite receipt in the whole show because my own state already solved it. In Oregon, there's a thing called outdoor school. A full week in the woods, fifth and sixth graders been around since the 50s. And it started slipping budget cuts till only about half the kids got to go. So in 2016, the voters just fixed it. Ballot measure passed with 67%, 34 of 36 counties, red ones and blue ones, and set aside a slice of the lottery to guarantee a week of outdoor school for every single fifth and sixth grader in the state. Public-private homeschool doesn't matter. Around 40,000 kids a year, free to the family organs, the only state that doesn't. So one of the only things they do right here. Two-thirds of the state, every kind of county, said every kid gets the woods, not just the rich ones. That's not a left or right thing. That's a bunch of grown-ups remembering what a childhood's supposed to include and refusing to make it a coupon. Give every kid what the rich kids already get? Turns out it's not expensive, it's not complicated, and it works. And that's what finally lands it for me. Because here's the last piece. You know who grows up to actually protect a river? Not the kid who read a pamphlet about it. The kid who fished it. You know who defends a forest? The one who got lost in one as a ten year old and never forgot it. People don't protect a spreadsheet, they protect a place, what they've stood in, what they've loved. Which means when we keep a generation indoors, when we make the outdoors a luxury and hand them a screen instead, we're not just raising sadder, lonelier, more anxious kids. We're raising the first generation with nothing outside worth defending. You cannot ask a kid to save a planet you never let him fall in love with. So we started this whole hour thinking it was a show about Gen Z. Phones, bedrotting, robot girlfriends, kids who won't answer a call. But it was never about Gen Z, like always, it's about us. About a thing every generation before us got almost for free, took for granted, and then quietly stopped handing down. It's crazy. I mean, just look at what we did. We took a generation that's lonely and we sold them a wristband. We took a generation that's isolated and we built them a robot to date. We took kids who couldn't get out of bed and we gave the bed a name and called it self-care. And every single time we did the same thing. We reached for something more complicated, another expert, another app, another diagnosis, another $45 million startup promising to fix the human heart with a subscription. And the whole time, the whole time there were doctors in the back writing, go outside on a prescription pad. And a shelter full of dogs and an ocean the law already handed us, and nobody wanted to say it because it was too easy. And that's the thing that stuck with me. It's our relationship with a simple answer. We've gotten world classic complicated. If a solution costs 400 bucks and comes with an app and a 900-page study, we'll trust it with our lives. But tell someone the answer is free and old and takes two hours a week and watch their face. They get suspicious. That can't be. Where's the catch? We've become a country that'll believe anything except the obvious. So here's my promise to you from tonight on. The next time you're scrolling and you hit the headline, the AI girlfriend, the bed rotting, the brand new syndrome with the brand new name. You're gonna know everything sitting underneath it now. And you're gonna hear a little voice, mine, God help you, offering the one solution that nobody in that article never had the nerve to print. Go outside. That's it. Get a dog, walk the beach. That's it. That's the whole show. An hour of the saddest, smartest, most expensive problems in America, and the answer is a screen door in an afternoon. And I'm not here to beat up on these kids. I mean that. It's not their fault the door got heavy. It's not the phone's fault either. Not selling you some magic golden past. There wasn't one. This isn't about going backward. It's about the thing we forgot we're standing on. Because here's the good news, and it's enormous. Nobody took it. That's the part that gets me. It's all still there, still free, still ours. Every advantage that used to make in American childhood the envy of the planet is sitting exactly where we left it, waiting with the porch light on. The door never disappeared. We just stopped walking through it. And a door you stopped walking through, that's the easiest problem in the world to fix. You need a knob and a nudge. Go outside. That's the solution. That's how you fix a generation of bed rotting. Go outside. Which brings me to the man who'd have had a field day with tonight. 1985, State of the Union, Reagan gets up in front of Congress and says this word for word. Quote, there are no constraints on the human mind, no walls around the human spirit, no barriers to our progress, except those we ourselves erect. Except those we ourselves erect. Every wall we talked about tonight can't afford it too far. The phone's easier. Nobody built those but us from the inside. And here's the Reagan part. There's no program for this one. The government can hand you an ocean and 193 million acres of forest, and it cannot make you stand on it. This is the one thing Washington genuinely can't do for you. Or a limited government guy, that's kind of beautiful. This one's yours. It's the same reason the guy who fishes a river is the one who picks up the trash on it, not the fine. He loves the thing. You protect what you've stood in. And it's not left or right. A Republican governor made a whole coastline public so a broke kid gets the same wave as a billionaire. Nobody out there's fighting over the sunset. So that's the reminder. The wall keeping a whole generation inside is one we built ourselves, which is the best news you'll hear all week because it means we can walk right through it. So when this ends, and it's about to, don't reach for the next one. Turn it off. Go find the door. You know the one. If you see us, share us. And America, this has been common sense. Stick around while I answer the questions that came in during the live show at 252 Chad Law. Take ten seconds to reset the studio, and we'll be right back. Alright, everyone's still there. Doors are locked. Serious parts over. Let's read these texts. Alright, Eric in Ohio. 4741. Chad, love the show, but come on, some of these kids literally cannot afford rent. Telling a broke 24-year-old to go outside feels a little rich coming a guy coming from a guy with a ranch. Yeah. You know me, Mr. Spoiled, got handed everything in my life, right? Uh you're doing the exact thing I warned you about. You heard go outside and pictured my backyard. I'm not telling a broke kid to buy a ranch. I'm telling him the park's free, the trail's free, and the bench in a whole lot of this country is legally his. The rent's real. I never said it wasn't. What I said is that I'm broke used to send us out to find the free fun, and somewhere it flipped into a reason to stay in. The couch isn't cheaper than a walk, brother. They're both free. One of them just doesn't have any blinds. All right, Priya. Oh, I like Priya in Washington, eight eight two nine. We know Priya. She always sends us great stuff. What she got today? You breezed past sunlight in the experts part. Is there actually something to the sunlight thing or oh no, it's uh it's a huge thing. It wasn't a filter. And uh I didn't want you to turn into your aunt's Facebook page, but real quick, sunlight's tied to your mood, your sleep, your vitamin D, the stuff that runs the whole machine quietly in the background. I kept it short on purpose because the second you go on a long sunlight, somebody shows up trying to sell you a $90 lamp that pretends to be the sun, which I cannot stress this enough, is already outside for free. Comes up every morning, no subscription required. But yes, huge majority of this country is deficient on vitamin D, which comes directly from sunlight. The numbers are way higher than they ever were for vitamin D deficiency, which proves my point from another medical perspective that people aren't going outside. Younger people aren't going outside, which is why they're depressed and marrying AI bots. What's next? Danielle in Texas, 2093. Okay, what is with the small why do you guys call me smart guy? Okay, smart guy. I'm a single mom, two jobs, a kid exhausted. When exactly am I supposed to fit your magic two hours of nature? Uh, you might be the person that this helps the most, and I say that with total respect for how tired you are, so hear me. It's not a fourth job. It's two hours a week, 20 minutes a few times on the walk you're already taking. Take your kid to the actual park instead of the app. Eat your lunch on a bench instead of at your desk. I'm not adding to your plate. I'm telling you the thing you already white knuckling through indoors works better with a tree next to it. You're not failing at this. Nobody handed your generation the manual. That's kind of the point of tonight. I'm trying to help. All right, Cody in Montana, ending in 5560. You mentioned Catalina in sixth grade. Be honest. Did you actually love it or were you the kid crying to go home? I normally was the kid crying to go home, but I loved that trip. Um, I was not the rugged one. Day one, I was a little marketing brain city kid studying at a squid. I was supposed to dissect like it owed me money. Did not want to touch the ocean. And I grew up on the beach. I wasn't afraid of it, but the ocean in Catalina's weird. I didn't want to touch the squid. The bunk beds were beneath me for sure. And then somewhere around night two, the bonfire, no phone, salt in the air, something just clicked. I came back a different kid. I don't know how to explain it. Sounds dramatic, but I was a different kid when I came back. And 30 years later, I can still smell that cove. That's the thing no one can sell you. That's why I got loud about it tonight. Thank you. Jordan in Florida, ending in 7714. Most important question of the night. You're on death row. Last meal. What are you eating? What is wrong with you people? I love you guys so much. Uh finally, a real question. And the fact is, is that I have thought about this so many times, but for me, it's a New York strip steak. Corn fed, not this grass-fed. Corn fed beef is where it's at. Corn fed New York strip steak, out of the middle of strip steak, with the middle of the country, with amazing sides like lobster mashed potatoes and crab gnocchi and cream corn and basically everything you find at the Mastros menu. Great question. All right, guys, I guess that's it for tonight. That's the show. As always, you know the phone number, 252 Chad Law. Text me, call me, scream at me. And remember that America is common sense. God bless you, President Reagan. And as always, may God save America. Don't forget to go on ChadParkerLaw.com, check out latest books. Got them here. Paperback, hardback signed copies, Amazon, all over the place. Check them out.

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Yes, you made my life so glamorous. You can't blame me for being. It's so marvelous. That's you should change for me. It's marvelous.