HELLO FUTURE: How Do You Actually Get People to Put Their Phones Down?

Speaker 1 (00:07):
Dumb phones are having a moment and it is worth
five billion dollars. Remember the Sidekick, Remember the BlackBerry, Remember
the flip phone and that game you would play Snake.
I would be sitting a snood on my Ti eighty
three plus calculator. I remember back in the day, I
would do that. Everybody wants to bring back the dumb phone,
the flip phone, because they're sick and tired of their smartphones.
Hello Future, it's me keV. This is a dispatch from
the digital frontier. Who knew the future could look so
much like the past? Back to the Future. My name
is Kevin Sirelli. You can get the latest Hello Future
episodes however, you get your podcasts however you listen to them,
but of course you can also find them on the
iHeartMedia app. Today we're talking about dumb phones, and we're
talking about why so many young people are trying to
get off of their smartphones. And I want to welcome
back to the program Jason Morales. He has been one
of the leaders in this renaissance or comeback if you
want to call it. I mean people have heard of Brick.
There's a company that literally sells dumb phones, which are
those retro early two thousand flip phones that just whatever.
There's this whole market now. It's kind of like parental
controls for adults that will block apps, or there's even
one where you have to do a certain number of
pushups in order to get into your social media. Jason's
company until untill he used to work at Microsoft. It
actually is like a time out for you to unscreen
from your cell phone, and it times you to see
if you can just get to fifteen minutes of no
cell phone, because that's the world we're living in. And Jason,
you know, as you've assessed this, I mean you're the board,
the advisory board you've built for this as people from
like Call of Duty, Fortnite, I mean all of these games.
But why do you think that there's this huge burgeoning
market for this retro tech if you want to call it,
or the dumb phone market or to get people offline.

Speaker 2 (02:06):
Yeah, Kevin, thank you, great to be back. It's so interesting.
These colleagues who we've worked with, they spent a lot
of time understanding how they could get you back to
the game. How do they keep you on the game,
how do they keep you going? We looked at the
topic and said, let's make a game out of the
just the opposite. Let's figure out how we could get
you so into not being on the phone and turn
that into something that feels rewarding, that is social, that
is difficult to achieve and yet achievable, and see the
growth and development through through those behaviors.

Speaker 1 (02:41):
But why didn't culturally? We're here because I remember when
I first came to Washington, I was working at Politico,
and it's widely documented that the BlackBerry culture was ripe
during that time. And I remember I got my job,
and I got a press badge, and I got a BlackBerry.
And this is the thing that you've got to check.
We were talking about this before we came on air,
just about how actually responding to emails twenty four to
seven doesn't necessarily correlate to being more productive. So have
we gotten that wrong? I mean, put on your cultural
analysis cap. Why do you think there's this market and
sort of hustle culture mixed with tech and trying to
be on twenty four to seven. It's not really a
good use of efficiency for a CEO's team or for
an employee's work life balance.

Speaker 2 (03:32):
I can't agree more I think there is an inherent
fallacy in this idea that quantity equates to quality, and
so we do think if we're just spending more time
doing a certain thing that I guess will be better
at it. Inherently, this is particularly relevant when you think
about how connected we have to be, or or feel
we have to be, how much our jobs or the
respective things we do in our lives have to consume
us in order to get the best out of us.
It's a flawed premise, but it's one that is projected
in our lives left and right. I mean, the other
side on it culturally is that, frankly, success has been
sort of framed as this zero sum game where if
we you know, winner take all and there's no place
for anything but that. And in that process, a lot
of the technology development that's come about has been designed
to absorb our time and attention frankly, and techniques have
been deployed through the technologies and the designs that frankly
lead to very unhealthy behaviors. They play on our base
emotions and our instincts in ways that frankly create a
very unhealthy experience not only for us as individuals, but
for society at large, and so now here we are
just addicted to these apps or finding ourselves in this
really problematic usage, and I think it's sort of grown
out of control that this is what demonstrates success in
a cultural basis. This is where money is to be made,
is to take advantage of our time and attention in
these ways.

Speaker 1 (05:20):
It feels like the technology should help us to be
more human, and so much, especially with cell phones and smartphones,
is it's rewiring our brains and not necessarily in a
healthier way. I mean, it's fascinating to me because Mark
Zuckerberg has been really bullish on eyewear and smart classes
and even back, you know, decades ago, if you read
some of the predictions that technologists have made. Just because
we are all used to having smartphones doesn't mean that
they're going to be around for the next twenty years.
It was literally in two thousand and nine when President
Obama became the first president to ever have a smartphone
in as a p and in nineteen twenty nine, less
than one hundred years ago, folks, President Hoover was the
first president to put a phone in the oval office.
So just think of how fast technology has entered into
our lives, and the polling suggests, like consumer polls suggest
people are really fed up with the distraction that the
device has created. And and you know, for me, I
come from being you know, folks know this. I used
to be the chief Washington correspondent for Bloomberg, and trust me,
every time the President tweeted, my phone would blow up
and stop what you're doing and report, report, and and
all of that. And I think so many I'm not unique.
I think so many industries can relate to your phone
buzzing and having to drop everything. But then you get
like whether it's news alerts or SoC alerts or if
you're a sports fan. I mean, there's just so many
businesses like buzzies that are zapping you. And the first
time the phone was quit in the White House was
eighteen seventy seven, and then nineteen twenty nine, Hoover puts
it in the middle, like, think about what was going
on in nineteen twenty nine, and then two thousand and
nine our president gets a smartphone. It happens so fast
that I'm kind of optimistic that there might be a
new device that emerges in the next twenty years that
just kind of replaces this thing. I think it can
do a lot of good. I think people are really
fed up.

Speaker 2 (07:23):
You're saying something really important here, though, Kevin, and we
can't dismiss it. These technologies in some ways have also
made our lives.

Speaker 1 (07:29):
Better, yes, say mass So we have to.

Speaker 2 (07:32):
Also recognize that there is positive opportunities that are latent
in some ways built into these technologies, even these apps,
even into social media. There are certain things that are
available to improve our lives. The invasive part or the
part that feels frankly even sinister. It's interesting when young
people are growing up knowing and feeling like this is
a bad thing and that they don't have a way
to get away from it.

Speaker 1 (08:00):
High addiction, and there's a huge difference.

Speaker 2 (08:02):
That's right, where there's something else playing on our being,
our brains, then technology alone, or even the opportunity that
comes out of positive social engagement in community, that's where
the distinction is. That's where there is Backlasher's movement, there's
community development and work to say, let's look for alternatives.
How can we again understand these problems deeply and dig
into the good stuff that's available and start to mitigate
the risks that are rising from the negative parts that
are driven by monetization. I mean, there's literally clearly a
mindset that the only way to monetize this is to
then develop compulsive and addictive and really problematic behaviors for
users of those technologies. And again, how can those of
us who have vested interest in this dedicate our time
a re source, invest ourselves into the opportunities where we
can find alternatives.

Speaker 1 (09:06):
It is wild. I mean, just in the last five years,
ever since the pandemic. I mean when you think of
just how much life has changed, just in America in
terms of words that we didn't have before the pandemic,
work from home, and these cultural cornerstones of what professional
life looks like. And then you throw in these addictive
apps and whatnot? Last word, final word, anything else if
folks want to learn more about until where should they go?
And anything else you want to add?

Speaker 2 (09:34):
Yeah, find us on our Website's a great starting point.
Until dot app. We use two l's U N T
I L L dot app. You know, this is something
that we are growing and working on. This we're building
the plane as we're flying. In some ways we need
the support. We really appreciate this exposure Kevin, and look
forward to syncing up with you and going unscreening, going
offline together and helping build this movement.

Speaker 1 (10:01):
Amen, it is a movement. Great way to end it
and have a great tomorrow Today