do you ever look at your phone and be really honest with yourself about how much time you spend scrolling on this thing and full disclaimer I am just as guilty and more and more of us it seems are craving a way to beat the addiction is it like what's is it really hot back there during the Summers running a barber shop Lizzy already had her hands pretty full I kept reaching for my phone and I point and I think a lot of friends even were like I don't even know why I reach for it it's
like email Instagram text and I think that's where it can get really overwhelming you can get so she made a change investing in an old school Nokia flip phone that helped me recalibrate my own habits like I I had way more quality time with my son it's it's crazy when you think about it and a lot of us the best of best of best parents you still get distracted now she says she's found a healthy balance an iPhone for the business during the day but switching it off after work and having the flip phone for
calls and texts from close friends and family there what about when he starts asking for a phone what do you think you'll do it doesn't feel like the best idea to go just straight to a smartphone just feel like again we're like handing over while their brains are still developing this like the world like try to figure out how to navigate that the growing number of customers that want to scale back their screen time still have different requirements as to what kind of low tech device they're actually after there's still quite a lot of choices
out there Daisy and Will from their home in Los Angeles have started up dumb Wireless to sell low tech devices and help people who want to revert back to a somewhat simpler existence we get all sorts of phone calls we'll talk to anybody but we also have a lot of parents looking to get their kid that first phone and also you know people in their 20s and 30s that want to make a lifestyle change I'd say almost everyone comes in uh with like a list of criteria including apps that they desperately want to hold on
to and they're like if I could only have a phone that has this this this but that list is different for everyone um there is no perfect dumb phone for everyone because there's just something that works best for different people slow motion on this as well is it going to get more popular or do you think this will stay really n well I think almost all the investment is still in smartphones especially for the North American market so but 2025 it looks like there will be more competition and some more compelling options while will still
uses a smartphone for the business Daisy has completely done away with hers and uses a dumb phone model which only does calls texts podcasts and has a map for directions I thought that I would miss more from my smartphone um I thought that I might even find myself switching back from time to time um I I don't I don't really miss anything because I was so sick of it that I I wanted to do something drastic and I wanted to just uh put it behind me just talking to these two it makes me feel like
I would love to do away with my addiction to this thing but even as we're filming here I'm getting breaking news alerts things I need to know about so as a journalist don't think I'm getting rid of this phone just yet this may look like a smartphone but but it's not it's so much better a new phone being launched this summer will allow some functional third party apps like uber but without ones that it believes feed unhealthy screen time pure and simple phone that has the tools I need but it avoids the distractions that I
don't you turn it on and it has nine apps and there's no app icons it's just words and it's very peaceful it's very tranquil we're asking this critical question what's actually good for us and that's what we're putting on our phone instead of just anything and everything that might be conven for us but actually sucking the life out of us so why aren't the big phone companies also jumping on this trend simply said they built themselves on the attention economy the App Store revenue for apple is billions billions of dollars and Google same thing billions
of dollars if they were to come out with something like what we had it would cannibalize their Market I don't think they love what they're doing to the world but they have no choice and so they're stuck in the attention economy so it takes a new bold company with a different Vision different incentives and different investors to come along to change the model back at Lizzy's barber shop it's clear phone usage is a common anxiety outfitting the Sprinter vans too how addicted do you think you are I think I am addicted probably an eight out
of 10 but I realize it I know it um but I'm definitely addicted yeah how many hours do you think you spend on your smartphone I get a little message periodically that says I'm at 4 and 1/2 hours now daily that's a big part of your debt it is but I'm down from 7 hours plus so to me I'm evolving in the right direction probably like 6 to 8 hours a day to be honest I'm trying to cut it down I just deleted some apps on my phone to try to cut that down so it's
a good question right now interesting but yeah I kind of got to a point where I realized it was more than it needed to be what did you delete I deleted Instagram and I deleted Facebook our devices give us a connection to the world like never before but a return to dumb phones shows that more and more of us are concluding that a smartphone's greatest strength has become our greatest weakness
