[001] Be greater in the modern world.

[jingle]: 00:02

A broadcast for a greater world. Log off. Spread love. Be greater.fm.

Garrett: 00:09

Welcome. You're listening to begreater.fm, the broadcast for a greater world. This is your host, Garrett speaking. This station is being broadcast from the beautiful coastal state of North Carolina. And wherever this transmission happens to find you, maybe you are driving somewhere, walking around, sitting outside, working, relaxing, or just staring at the ceiling.

Garrett: 00:36

Welcome. I'm glad you found us. This is actually our first broadcast, which is pretty cool. I've always loved the idea of a radio show. Someone sitting behind a microphone in one little place broadcasting a signal out into the world, not really knowing exactly who it's going to, and when or where they're gonna pick it up.

Garrett: 00:58

And fun fact: some of the tallest structures here in North Carolina are broadcast towers. Giant antennas sending television and radio signals out across the state. So I figured why not build our own little broadcast tower? Create something positive, some good vibes, and put that into a radio signal and broadcast that out into the world. See who picks it up.

Garrett: 01:23

And hopefully leave the world on the receiving end of that broadcast just a little bit better than it was before. We're gonna get into what Be Greater. is, who I am, and why I started this whole thing in the first place in just a minute. But I want to start these broadcasts a little bit differently. Because there's already an endless supply of bad news and drama available to you out there at any moment. And I don't think that ignoring the bad stuff is the answer. We're definitely gonna talk about some things that are difficult here.

Garrett: 01:56

But I also think we've gotten pretty good at forgetting how much good is happening at the same time. So every broadcast transmission, before we get into anything else, we're gonna start things off with a little bit of:

[jingle]: 02:09

Good news from Earth.

[jingle]: 02:11

Good news from Earth.

Garrett: 02:17

Alright this is Be Greater. FM checking in from the surface of planet Earth for signs of good news. And it turns out, it's not all bad down here. One pretty incredible milestone happened last year: Renewable energy has now reached the point where it's overtaking coal as a source of global electricity.

Garrett: 02:36

Wind and solar have gone from being relatively small parts of the grid to major sources of power around the world. We still have a long way to go on climate change, but that's real progress. Humans identified a problem, built better technology, and are actually changing the way that we power civilization.

Garrett: 02:55

And in other news from the giant rock floating in space: Humans went around the moon this year! NASA's Artemis II mission carried four astronauts around the moon.

Garrett: 03:06

The first crewed lunar mission since Apollo seventeen back in 1972. And during this flight, the crew reached more than two hundred and fifty two thousand miles away from Earth, setting a new record for the furthest any human beings have ever traveled from our home. Just four little primates inside a spacecraft a quarter million miles away, looking back at this entire planet. Pretty cool stuff if you ask me. So yeah, there's plenty of things we need to fix down here, but we're also building cleaner ways to power the world and sending human beings further into space than we've ever gone before.

Garrett: 03:43

Not too bad, Earth. Keep up the good work and remember to be greater. This has been your Good News From Earth.

[jingle]: 03:50

Good News From Earth.

Garrett: 03:59

Alright, that news was pretty good. Now I should probably explain what "Be Greater" actually means in case you're new to this whole idea or movement. Because the phrase itself could be intense if you take it the wrong way. It doesn't mean to be greater than everybody else or to feel superior to other people. It doesn't mean being perfect and it's definitely not one of those like self improvement, wake up at 4AM, take an ice bath, and make a million dollars and optimize every second of your life type of things either.

Garrett: 04:32

I mean, if that's your jam, then more power to you. Shout out to the Mamba Mentality. I mean, I respect it. But that's not what I mean by this. To me, Be Greater is much more simple than that.

Garrett: 04:44

It means trying to live life with a higher standard. Trying to do the better thing when you can instead of doing the easy lazy thing just because everyone else is doing it. Because when the world around you is doing the easy thing, it gives you permission to do it without looking like you're taking the easy way out. It's just the normal thing. But don't let that change you.

Garrett: 05:07

Keep a higher standard for yourself. Try to pay a little bit more attention to yourself and life and the world around you. Try to let yourself care and actually try hard with things instead of being all nonchalant all the time. Try to leave things a little bit better than you found them. Because most of the time that doesn't mean anything huge.

Garrett: 05:29

It can just be a small action. Picking up trash that isn't yours, putting your shopping cart back or even someone else's, putting your phone down when someone's talking to you, calling somebody that you've been meaning to call, admitting when you're wrong about something, reading something that makes you think, or actually reading a book at all, being kind when it would be a lot easier to be rude, maybe telling the truth when it would be easier to go along with everybody else and a lie. I mean none of it is revolutionary, but that's kind of the point. The world is built out of all these little decisions like that. Culture is not some giant thing happening somewhere above us.

Garrett: 06:12

We make it, we take part in it every day. With what we pay attention to, what we support, what we tolerate, how we treat people, and what kind of standard we accept for ourselves. And I think that's really where this whole thing starts. Not with becoming some perfect version of yourself, but just asking, Could I be doing this better? Could I be more present in this moment right now?

Garrett: 06:38

Or could I be leaving this person, this place, or this situation a little bit better than I found it? What's stopping me from doing that? That's what Be Greater means to me. Not perfection, not superiority, just a higher standard for yourself, the way you treat people, and the world that you help create. And I think that matters now more than ever because the world we're helping create has changed pretty dramatically in a very short amount of time.

Garrett: 07:18

So that's what it means to be greater. But why is that so important now? How has the world changed so much, and why do I care so much about this topic? A lot of why I care about this stuff really comes back to the world we grew up in and how quickly we watched it change. I was born in 1999, right before the turn of the century, which puts me in this weird little window between two eras of history.

Garrett: 07:44

The Internet existed for my whole childhood. I'm not gonna pretend I grew up in 1950. We had computers and video games. There was cable TV. Technology was already a huge part of life.

Garrett: 07:57

But that technology still had somewhere to stop. The internet was a place that you could visit. There was a computer somewhere in the house where you could sit down, log on, do whatever you wanted to do, and then eventually you would complete the task and log off and stand up to go do something else. The internet was a place that we could visit. It was not a place that we lived constantly.

Garrett: 08:22

And then within a surprisingly short amount of time, that started changing. I remember flip phones and slide phones with keyboards. I remember iPods. I remember when the first iPhone was launched in 2007 and smartphones still felt like this crazy new piece of technology. And then slowly, or maybe not even that slowly, smartphones went from being this cool new thing that the really connected had, to being basically the center of our everyday lives.

Garrett: 08:54

Your camera went into the phone, your music went into the phone, your friends went into the phone, your maps, news, entertainment, shopping, work, eventually almost everything ended up on the same little piece of glass in your pocket. And I wanna be really clear about something here. A lot of that is incredible and beneficial to humanity. I am not anti technology. I love technology.

Garrett: 09:21

The fact that I can be sitting here in North Carolina speaking into a microphone and sending this broadcast frequency out into the internet, out into the world for anybody to hear even on the other side of the planet is pretty incredible. I mean, that's insane. That's awesome. But I also think that when something changes human life this much and this quickly, we're allowed to stop and ask: What else changed along with it? Because somewhere along the way, being online stopped being an activity.

Garrett: 09:55

It became the default. We became reachable all the time, entertained all the time, informed all the time, compared to everybody else all the time. Even the empty spaces, the moments in between started disappearing. Waiting in line, sitting in a waiting room, riding somewhere in the passenger seat, being bored for five minutes. There's always something waiting for you in your pocket now to fill that space immediately.

Garrett: 10:26

And nobody really sat humanity down beforehand and said: "Alright, guys. From now on, you're all gonna carry the entire Internet around with you every waking hour. Alright? Here's what that's probably gonna do to your attention spans and your culture, so be careful. Keep an eye out for that."

Garrett: 10:44

There was no warning. We just did it. We made the technological advancements, and we figured out what we could do with it. And then slowly those became normal. Fast enough that the world before it already feels like another era lost to history.

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You're listening to Be Greater. FM. Enjoy.

Garrett: 11:12

So that was the world that we grew up in. You may hear me use terms like: The Offline World or The Last Offline Generation, and this is exactly where these terms come from. People around my age got this really unique vantage point. We were old enough to remember the offline world, the pre smartphone world, before the internet could follow us around in our daily lives, but we were also young

Garrett: 11:40

enough to grow up alongside the Internet and see it in its early, more wild, crazy, creative years and have computer lab classes at school and learn about it as many adults were learning about it as well. We experienced both of those environments, an offline childhood and then an increasingly online adolescence and adulthood.

Garrett: 12:05

And I think there's something valuable about remembering both of those different eras. Not because the old world was perfect, it definitely wasn't. And not because I think we should all throw our phones into the ocean and pretend it's 2004 again. Although some days, you know, I consider it. But because if you've experienced both sides of this transition, you can compare them.

Garrett: 12:29

You can notice what got better and you can also notice what got worse. And maybe you can recognize what was valuable enough that we shouldn't accidentally leave it behind.

Garrett: 12:49

And now is probably a good time to tell you a little bit more about me, your host here, the man behind the microphone. My name is Garrett. And the simplest way I can describe myself is I'm just a dude from North Carolina who loves the beach, being outside, skateboarding, swimming, being active. I like reading and thinking about philosophical stuff and trying to live with a little bit more peace, love, and positivity in this crazy world.

Garrett: 13:16

I've always had this feeling that while I'm here and while I get this tiny stretch of time to live in this body, on this earth, in this universe, I wanna do something good with it, something cool and creative and positive. I want to leave behind something that will make the world a little bit better. Even if I'm not here and I have kids or just people, anyone who wants to see what I stood for and what I was about, I want to spread a positive message and hopefully we can all influence culture in a better direction and really change this place for the better. Even if we're just doing something small, even if we just help somebody think a little bit differently or put their phone down for a little while or be more kind to somebody or clean up a little bit of extra trash or read a book or go outside or remember that this life here is actually pretty awesome. That's really where Be Greater comes from.

Garrett: 14:14

I didn't start this because I thought I had life figured out. I started it because I wanted a place to explore what living better could actually look like, especially in this wild modern world that we all got dropped into. And this whole thing has grown alongside me. It started with videos and this idea of trying to put something positive out there into the world. Then in the winter, I actually started writing and publishing it online because I wanted to have a real respected voice in the world and how we can change it for the better.

Garrett: 14:47

A lot of these ideas needed more room than just a short video could give them. That writing became the Be Greater. newsletter publication on the website. Longer essays about culture, technology, attention, the offline world, optimism, and mindfulness, and what it means to live with a higher standard. And along the way the movement became something physical in the real world too. It turned into shirts and apparel, things you could actually wear out into the real world to hopefully spread that positive message a little bit further and eventually, hopefully use that support for good causes to actually make a real difference.

Garrett: 15:30

But also I still had that creativity and I had a vision of what this could be like from an artistic standpoint and the newsletter really didn't portray it. I had a specific idea for how this could be transmitted out into the world in a nostalgic, timeless way. But a lot of people don't read very often or they don't want more emails or a subscription to anything. And they want something they can listen to while they're driving or doing things out in the offline world. So now this whole movement has evolved into this radio station.

Garrett: 16:06

This broadcast transmission that we're sending out into the world. And there's probably other parts of my life that have influenced this whole thing as well. I spent most of my life training martial arts. I'm a fifth degree Taekwondo master. And I think spending a lot of that time around discipline, standards, self control, and trying to improve yourself probably left a mark on the way that I think about all this.

Garrett: 16:31

But I'm also just figuring it out just like anybody else. I get distracted. I spend too much time on my phone sometimes. I overthink things. I don't always live up to the standards I'm talking about.

Garrett: 16:43

And I think that matters because Be Greater isn't supposed to be me standing above anybody else and telling you how to live. I'm standing right here by you in the same strange modern world as everybody else. I'm down here in the trenches with you friends. I'm just trying to pay attention to what's going on down here and see if there's a way that we can make it better. I'm trying to ask better questions, make some better choices, and hopefully broadcast something positive while I'm here.

Garrett: 17:11

So that's the man behind the microphone. And the main question for this station and the same question that I keep coming back to in everything that I create is: How do we live well and maybe become a little bit greater along the way while this world keeps changing around us?

Garrett: 17:35

So that's pretty much the foundation for all of this. Going forward, this broadcast is gonna be a place to explore a lot of these questions out loud. How do we live well in a world that keeps changing?

Garrett: 17:48

How do we use technology without letting it use us? How do we protect our attention? Stay present, think for ourselves, stay hopeful, and still enjoy all the amazing things about being alive right now? We're going talk about culture, technology, the last offline generation, reading, mindfulness, nature, optimism, and probably a whole bunch of random things along the way. But the connecting theme running throughout all of this is pretty simple.

Garrett: 18:20

How do we make ourselves and the world around us a little bit greater? And I think that's a great place to leave this first broadcast. I don't think the answer is to go backwards. The world's gonna keep changing, the technology is gonna keep advancing, and we're all gonna keep changing and growing as well. But we still get a say in what we carry forward with us into the future.

Garrett: 18:45

Attention, presence, curiosity, kindness, real connection, the ability to actually be where we are. We don't have to reject the future to protect the things that make life meaningful. We just have to remember that they're worth protecting.

Garrett: 19:05

And before we sign off and end this first broadcast transmission, I wanna end this first episode the way I hope to end every episode. With a little bit of

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Gratitude because it makes you happier.

Garrett: 19:20

That's right, friends. Every transmission from begreater.fm includes good news and gratitude guaranteed. Unless of course we decide to change the format of the show going forward, but hey, that's life. But yes, there are several things that we can be grateful for today. That we're all sharing this beautiful home called Earth.

Garrett: 19:47

That we have blue skies and beaches and trees and forests. Just the fact that those exist alone and we can go enjoy them is awesome. So visit and take care of your local nature, your beaches and your forests, anything like that. Take care of this home that we all share. We're all roommates on this floating rock in space.

Garrett: 20:13

So be a good neighbor. Thank you all for listening and tuning in to this first transmission of Be Greater. FM. I hope you enjoyed it, and if you didn't, then hopefully you find a show elsewhere that you enjoy. Either way, hope you all get out there, enjoy life, and make this world a greater place for all of us.

Garrett: 20:36

Log off, spread love, be greater.

[jingle]: 20:40

A broadcast for a greater world. Log off, spread love, Be Greater. FM