Adam Robinson

Here's what a yonder phone pouch is. It's this contraption that basically prevents you from accessing your phone, which is the greatest drug on earth. I just have this incredibly high level of conviction that some sort of locking phones away is going to be a part of kids' futures, you know, and in a lot of other environments too. And here's where I think the potential for innovation is.

There's a huge opportunity to identify an elegant feature set around this pouch that just makes it work a lot better.

This is the highlight of my career. This is literally, it's only downhill from here. I'm so excited to be here. I feel like I'm on a mountaintop. By the way, I was on a mountaintop all of last week. I was in the woods in Colorado, sitting like a monk, basically.

reflecting on life i was nature getting nature therapy you like really achieve deep inner peace if you're totally unplugged and in solitude it happens to everyone we live like that for a million years before we uh were evolved to do that you know um but it's just hard for people like us, right? You're busy. You have, you know, family maybe or whatever.

And it's like, uh, maybe later, maybe when my kids are older and then you never do it. So I just keep doing it. And it's like so great because it actually helps you with the time with your kids. That's how to prioritize it.

Yeah.

You know, to this nature theme, right? Like we lived in the woods for a million years. And then a couple thousand years ago, we started living in cities, which pulled our brains in a totally different direction that we're not physically evolved to be in. Then 150 years ago, the industrial revolution happened.

And for a large part of the population, it really made them live in a crappy environment. Then connectivity happened whenever it was 10 years ago, which is literally the worst. So the yonder phone patch exists for a lot of reasons, right? Like,

This device is like fentanyl for us, and it's so powerful that we've literally had to create a pouch to go in and respect a comedian, for instance, and actually listen. Otherwise, we'd just be on our phones getting our monkey mind whipped around by whatever alert or text message that doesn't matter from someone that we receive.

I think this like take this device that I know is absolute kryptonite for my well-being and like put it in a place where idiot proof this, like put it in a place where I can't touch it is like a massive market for the future. And it's very in its infancy. You know, how many schools have a yonder patch? Like hardly any.

My guess is in 10 years, 98% of middle schools are requiring people to put their phone in a pouch and lock it during the day. That's my guess.

Yeah, okay, okay. So here's what a yonder phone pouch is. And I hope that I'm going to inspire a lot of innovation out there because the yonder phone patch only works in one way, right? Which I think is the tremendous opportunity because there's a lot of people who would prefer it to not work in this way.

So if you go in Austin, like if you go to Joe Rogan's comedy place called The Mothership, as you walk in the door, They literally require you to take your phone out of your pocket, put it in this pouch. Then they touch the pouch to a device that locks the pouch and you cannot open the pouch until you touch it to that device again. So your phone's there, you're holding it, but you can't access it.

So it requires you to, you know, it just helps you pay attention to the actual device. and participate in the environment that you're in, right? So that's the application for a comedy show. You could see the application for movies and theaters. Education. I just read this book called The Anxious Generation, which I would highly recommend reading.

It's by the guy who wrote The Coddling of the American Mind. These cell phones are just terrible for middle schoolers. Everybody's getting them earlier and earlier. My buddy runs a charter school here in Austin. I'm like, is there a chance that by the time my two-year-old is in middle school, the parents will have agreed to have not given them smartphones. He's like, no shot.

There's always one that will. Because we're getting to the point where everybody had smartphones when they were young who are having kids now. So anyway, that's what it is. It's this contraption that basically prevents you from accessing your phone, which is the greatest drug on earth. And here's where I think the potential for innovation is.

This device, the Yonder pouch, which I'm sure is just growing exponentially, right? I don't know, but like... I just have this incredibly high level of conviction that some sort of locking phones away is going to be a part of kids' futures, you know, and in a lot of other environments too. The pouch works in one way. It's a very, you know, kind of 20th century device, if you want to call it that.

It's very not tech. It's just like, it kind of like works like the theft things in retail stores. You touch it to that device, it locks. You touch it again, it unlocks, right? Like, if you have a 2000 person high school, the practicality of that is not really great. I think there's like, kind of like what Elon did to the car.

There's a huge opportunity to like identify an elegant feature set around this car.

pouch that probably is not that much more expensive than the just what they're doing right now that just makes it work a lot better like oh it charges your phone while it's in there or you know it uh like uh the the principal of the entire school when the bell goes off hits unlock and all the kids can like get into their phones without literally queuing up you know for a half hour to walk out of the building to like tap their device on this thing