Reflecting on the analog experiment

Support for endless thread comes from Mathworks, creator of MatLab and Simulink software to design and develop engineered systems , accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks. com . Support for this podcast comes from Is roken, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BUQESRM School of Business. A recent episode explores the challenges and opportunities in decarbon izing one of the world's most carbon intensive industries, ocean freight shipping, stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode . W BUR podcasts , Boston . Jeremy Rolosa is usually a pretty punctual guy, even on early weekend mornings. He puts his slippers on time, he brews his coffee on time. Even when he gets out of the house, he does it on time . Usually . Earlier this year, Jeremy was supposed to meet his friend Matt at a pub in Manhattan. I watched soccer with my friends on the weekends at this pub, and I was supposed to meet him there at nine AM and we made plans nine AM. Yeah, nine AM really games The Premier League start early here. Okay, oh that makes sense. Yeah . Jeremy and his buddy Matt had planned their early morning soccer viewing the night before. They were like, nine AM, we'll see you tomorrow. I was like, great. But then later that night, there was a huge snowstorm. In the morning, all the trains were massively delayed. Train delays in the city of New York? Shocking, we know. Attention passengers, we are experiencing delays on the following lines , A , B, C. Jeremy ended up getting to the pub at nine thirty five more than half an hour after the agreed upon time. Why? didn't see Sorry for the inconvenience and Matt , Matt wasn't there . And I'm like, wow, he might He must have shown up left because and like waited and then left because I didn't show up. You may be thinking why did Jeremy not just text Matt to give him a heads up? Service isn't guaranteed, but it's getting better on the train. The reality is Jeremy hadn't used his cell phone in weeks . It was dead, in a drawer , at home. When he'd made plans with Matt the night before, it was on a l andline . Remember those landlines, copper, physically connecting our communication devices? Yeah , we all used to have those. Luckily Luckily, Jeremy had Matt's number on him because he'd written it down, again, because of the whole landline thing. So Jeremy asked the bartender if he could use the bar's phone to call Matt, who apparently is one of the few millenn ials who will pick up a call from an unsavaved number . And he's like, I'm so glad you called because I'm running late too in the snowstorms This is how it used to work. Once you left your house, you were unreachable. People had to leave a voicemail on an answering machine with a cassette tape in it, or it was digital . All you people leave your voicemail boxes full so you don't ever get new voicemail . Do you even remember what voicemail sounds like? Hey buddy. Hey Jeremy, this is Grace. Red Leader . This is Lule Liter. Yo, Jeremy . How about that game? Oh my god . And if you weren't home when they called , you wouldn't get their message until hours later. Hi Jeremy. It's Sidney. I have someone to set you up with, so you should call me back by Hi Jeremy. This is Andrea's sister who is good friends with Sydney and I know she's given you a heads up , but they have made it their life's mission to connect us. So I wanted to go ahead and call and leave my number . Jeremy is friends with producer Grace Tatter . He is also an associate editor at New York Magazine and he wrote an article about this experiment to live without a cell phone for two weeks , at least. Jeremy wanted to live a dream many of us have had of being untethered to our smartphones, living a perhaps simpler life , spending less time looking at a screen. So we talk to Jeremy about his experiment and how it's changed his friendships, his love life , also how it's changed him . I'm Ben Brock Johnson. I'm Amma Reeves and you're listening to Endless Thread coming to you from WBUR Boston's NPR today's episode Leave a message after the Cellphones had a huge impact in the nineties by making it easier to call each other on the go. But the advent of the smartphone , really in two thousand seven absolutely changed things , because you could be on the internet all the time. It took the Pew Research Center a few years after at least the iPhone came out for them to do their first survey about smartphone ownership. In twenty eleven , they found that thirty five percent of American adults at the time said they owned smartphones. And then just five years later in twenty sixteen , that number had doubled to seventy percent. Fast forward to twenty twenty five and ninety five percent of American adults had a smartphone. We are now constantly jacked into the internet. The borders between the meat space and our pixel space have essentially collapsed . It is a pixelated meat mess. And despite all that connectivity, we're feeling pretty bl ack. And we yearn for that time before . Nostalgia itself is booming. In a twenty twenty three survey, sixty percent of Gen Z adults said that they wish they could return to a time before everyone was plugged in. More and more, they're searching for things that were before dial up , often, admittedly, with the help of the internet . Millennials too. We're all feeling it, man. We want to go back , including our landline lover, Jeremy, who loves watching TV shows and movies from the nineties. Hey Sky, it's me. I was born in the nineties. Hi . Hello, hi, hi. So didn't really get to like kind of like live that lifestyle like fully as an adult Believe it or not, George, isn't it at home message to be? I'd just tell friends at parties. It's like how great would it be to just use a landline and not have to like text or use be like on our phones like constantly? I'm not home . And his friends would be like, sure, sure , but life with a landline seemed like a fantasy. But then I don't know if you guys remember this, but there was like a Verizon outage, kind of like a nationwide outage in January . And here in New York, a lot of Verizon customers went without service for a few hours . Jeremy was one of tens of thousands of Verizon customers who couldn't connect to local cellular networks at all for most of the day . And the next day at work we had like a pitch meeting and we were all talking about the outage. And it was clear that there were like two camps that formed. There was like people who were like, this was the worst thing because I couldn't get anything done on my phone. I had the worst time. It was such an unproductive day. And then there was another camp of folks in the meeting that were like, That was the best day I've ever had because I was completely off my phone, I didn't have to check it and how nice it was to just take a break from our screens . That gave Jeremy the idea of ditching his smartphone on purpose . His only phone would be a landline. I thought, Oh, this like goes hand in hand with my nineties fantasy to live a little bit more simply. So what was your relationship to your smartphone before this? What were you spending your time doing on there ? I think I was actually put off by the amount of text I was getting from friends in group chats and that was like kind of the primary mode of communication with most of my life. I think the thesis for this was like , I don't think we were meant to have like eighty open conversations going at once. And I wanted to like really simplify that. My group chat is sometimes it is bl ow uping so hard and I just like those are the times at which I most recede you know, where I'm like, oh, twenty messages, I'm not catching up with this. Absolutely. It almost felt the same way I feel when I have a lot in my inbox, like for work. Yeah. I was like, I shouldn't be feeling this way about my friends reaching out to me. And what about social media? Are you , you know, are you someone who's spending time on TikTok , Instagram , all the things The only app, social media I have is Instagram. I felt like I was like taking in so much information from people who I just didn't have any real relation to in person, like in my personal life. It was just like kind of like an overload of information that I felt like was just piling up in my brain . So Jeremy texted his closest friends and family and made an Instagram story for everyone else to say , call my landline . He planned to run this experiment for two weeks. Of course, in today's world, Jeremy could n't go totally offline. He works at a magazine. His job is to know what's going on. I set some rules. I was like, well , I do have to use my laptop and email for work for work . But he didn't download the desktop versions of smartphone apps like IMessage or WhatsApp, and he wouldn't log into apps like Instagram using a browser. He powered down his phone and put it in a drawer . The first few days were so exciting. It really felt like the days were longer because I was just like seeing so much more just like on the train and like on my walks to work and to the train station . I think it was the second day where I was like, oh, I can do this for a mon th. So we decided to keep going, baby. Instead of getting regular updates from group chats, he talked to his friends on the phone at the end of the day . And that's it. Was there was there FOMO though in the sense of like to not be on to not be reachable in all of the the group chats and the, you know, the whole inside jokes developed without you. Yeah, everybody's could be talking about the donut man when you get back and you're like, who's the donut man? And they're like, Oh yeah, you weren't in the chat man. I don't know what to tell you. We replaced you. We replaced you with see the Donut Man. Nice guys. Yeah. This isn't the Donut Man. My friends would call me and then I'd ask any updates from the group chat and they would just relay it to me on the phone. And that was really fun. You got the digest version. I got the digest version. Yeah . My friends would just tell me over the phone, the important, like kind of like more concrete important things. Like you've been replaced by the donut man that's an example of an important thing. So it's so funny you say Donut Man Ben because there's our senior art critic Jerry Saltz. I don't know if you've seen if you know him but, he comes around the office every time he's here and has a huge plate of donuts from Duncan. I love that he just passes around to everyone. And my mom it's so funny. My mom is like, oh is the donut man in the office today. I'm like , Mom, he's won a Puerto Prize. He's our teeny art critic. He's not just the donut man. He's like, Oh, that's right. Am I in the group chat? We can add you now . How do I know that donut man is a thing? Okay , so Jeremy was getting the landline digest . As for Instagram, he admits he probably missed some big life events from old friends, semi randos and somewhere in betweens that he's followed on social media for years . And no offense to those people, for the most part, he does not care. Yeah, it felt like a lot of my feed on Instagram and a lot of just people online were not the real people that were important to me, like my personal life or my real life , which is such a weird thing to say that my real life is I guess I should say like more in person , but all the important things my friends would just like kind of catch up with me about. So staying in the loop wasn't hard for Jeremy. In fact, it was in some ways easier because without his iPhone and all of his apps, his loop was right sized , circling around the people Jeremy actually cares about . There was one thing that was a little more challenging though , dating . Smart phones have removed a lot of the friction from setting up a first date. I thought the whole point of dating was friction, but whatever. Without a smartphone, you can't text your date as you are approaching to let them know what you are wearing so they don't go up to the wrong person. And if you arrive first, you can't pretend that you're nonchalantly absorbed in your phone while you wait. These days when you no longer even have to pick up a phone and talk to a real person to order pizza , people are kind of phone call phobic. So Jeremy wasn't sure how dating with just a landline was going to go , but he was optimistic . And it's just like nice to just be a person in New York and just experience it that way and kind of leave yourself open to like connections and maybe meeting someone kind of randomly . And I think about two weeks in , I got a voicemail from my friend . Remember this? Hi Jeremy. It's Sydney. I have someone to set you up with, so you should call me back. Bye. Jeremy did call his friend back and a few days later, he came home to a voicemail from someone who wasn't in his Rolodex . They have made it their life's mission to connect us. So I wanted to go ahead and call and leave my number . It was actually really exciting to do something like that . But I could tell there was like maybe a little hesitation to communicate solely via the landline, even like from the get go . Jeremy realized that talking on the phone in real time is more vulnerable because you're not able to wait a few minutes to think about the perfect response or ask friends to tone check texts. Leaving a voicemail was the easier option . Especially when I would tell them like, hey, I'm actually at the office most of the day. So if you call during the day, I won't answer. So they would be a little bit more inclined to like leave a voicemail knowing I wouldn't answer as like a little safeguard to . It was no, it was interesting like, you know, we set up a date and you know, this time in place like two days from now and then you just hope they show up . I mean, that is interesting these days, but also this is how it used to work all the time. Hey, meet me at the candy shop at six PM so we can hang. Cool, see you there. Jeremy and the woman his friend set him up with had two good dates , but ultimately I know that sounds like what an awful payoff sorry guys . You're like oh great, that was the worst story ever Okay Okay . Even in the Halcian days before smartphones, not every example of setting someone up was a success. So no era is perfect , but will Jeremy stay in the past? Or will he be sucked back into the suck of the present? We explore the suck in a second Second Good sleep is everything . That's why Ollie's science back support is made with a blend of melatonin and LDNA for both kiddos and grownups . So when your mind won't switch off, you've got something that can help. You're erasing thoughts and restless nights won't stand a chance . Find Ollie Sleep Solutions for the whole family at Ollie. com That's O . com . Support for this podcast comes from Is roken, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrum School of Business . Ships move the vast majority of the world's goods, and it's cheaper and safer compared to trucks or planes. So the shipping was there centuries and it will remain there in the future . So how does an industry this essential think about sustainability? Follow, is business broken, wherever you get your podcasts , and stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview of a recent episode about what it will take for ocean freight shipping to reach net zero emissions . Business leaders listen , over half tune into podcasts daily . Reach them with Citi Space Productions, the creative studio from WBUR's business partnerships team. Citi Space Productions crafts custom podcasts for business that showcase expertise, deepen connections , and drive engagement. Turn your vision into a podcast . Visit w br dot org slash creative studio . Emmary, you know I love a cold call and I love love to leave a voicemail for no reason rum bum bum . Oh, do you ever ben Or Damny Boys a broker box calling and I love that you love to leave a voicemail . I'm calling you , I'm calling you , I'm call ing you to figure some stuff out So do you though, so do you? Part of what I love about cold calls is that it involves a little chance. You know, we both happen to be free at the same time in an overscheduled life, a short phone call is something that doesn't require like a calendar invite. It's not like a zoom coffee. You know what I mean? Right. You can't plan for it. It's just chance and magic. Jeremy Rolosa, our man on the landline beat, felt the same way. Weirdly, you'd think do not disturb mode would be something that I would really like , but because of like, oh, I want like an I want like less text, but weirdly like, no, I want people to call me. Like I want like that more intentional just like Yeah. Yeah, like you said serendipity, like, oh, I'm here by the phone. I am answering because you called like that's that's that was kind of a secret goal was just like more serendipity Serendipity, though, has its drawbacks. Spontaneous plans kind of were out the door. I couldn't really make plans on the fly when I was like on a Friday or Saturday night , I just kind of had to stick to the one friend I was meeting and maybe we would go around town somewhere else let's startking knoc on doors . Yeah . I actually did on like the last day of this experiment, I thought it would be nice to just see if my friend would answer his buzzer at his apartment. And let's see if it 's my last grasp at kind of like an analog life. So on my way home from work, I just walked by his apartment and I run his buzzer. And then he answered and let me in. And he was there. Him and his girlfriend were there just like making dinner and they had me in and I left with a piece of cake and it was such a nice little like end to the experiment. They're like, oh, this is like people it's people just have to pop and buy. This is your next experiment, Jeremy, no phones at all, just door knocks. Just oh my gosh. Some friends were like, Oh, the next logical step is just snail mail. You just have to send letters and I was like, oh God . Well, that might take a while . Oh, it might, it would . And even with his apparent laid back disposition, Jeremy has also had to admit, this grounded lifestyle is hard in twenty twenty six. Jeremy ultimately made it fifty one days without a smartphone before being pulled back in by things pictures of his baby nephew in the family group chat or to be able to switch up plans on the spa . Can you kind of summarize what role your smartphone plays in your life now . How do you when do you use it? When do you not use it? What's the new the new Jeremy phone policy ? I use my phone I'd say probably about like fifty percent of how it I used to. So like I don't check it as often . I get less text than I used to because I've been removed from some of the group chats I wasn't replying in, I can tell . So mainly use it almost like a dumb phone in some regards where I just answer . I just I just use it as for the calling feature, which is so funny to say, I use the phone for the calling feature, but that's yeah, I do that. And then I guess I text with intention and like with close friends and my family group chat . Of course, Jeremy knows it would be challenging for a lot of people to replic ate his experiment. His workplace was actively supportive of his unreachability. He doesn't have kids or a pet. He lives in a densely populated area within biking distance of many of his friends. But he says there are ways to capture the magic of the landline life without actually getting a landline. I think it's really helpful to think of our phones as tools because when I was just using my landline , I was like, oh, well how am I going to get to this point? How am I going to find this like restaurant while I'm out. So I was like, oh my phone my cell phone functions like a GPS or a Map. I found it helpful to kind of split all of the use cases or the apps of the phone into like, oh, what am I really using my phone for? And kind of reframing like how I would use it . And I think once I did that or once you do that , it will feel less like this all encompassing kind of like time suck. Is it fair to say that you think we should co call our friends more? Absolutely. I think we should be just calling off the rip, just, hey, what's up man ? I will say