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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Jeremy Relosa is usually a pretty punctual guy, even on early weekend mornings. He puts his slippers on 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 9 a.m. And we made plans on the way. 9 a.m.? Yeah, 9 a.m. The Premier League games start early here.
Okay. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah. Jeremy and his buddy Matt had planned their early morning soccer viewing the night before. We were like, 9 a.m., 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 9.35, more than half an hour after the agreed-upon time.
Y and Z. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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Chapter 2: What inspired Jeremy to live without a smartphone?
Matt wasn't there.
And I'm like, wow, he must have shown up left and 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 landline. Remember those landlines, copper, physically connecting our communication devices?
Yeah, we all used to have those. 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 millennials who will pick up a call from an unsaved 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, man. Hey, Jeremy. This is Grace.
Red leader. This is blue leader. Yo, Jeremy. How about that game? Oh, my God.
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Chapter 3: How did Jeremy's friends react to his landline experiment?
I have someone to set you up with, so you should call me back. Bye.
Hi, Jeremy. This is Andrea's sister, who is good friends with Sydney. And I know she's giving 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 talked 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 Anne-Marie Sievertson, and you're listening to Endless Thread. Coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR. Today's episode, leave a message after the... Cell phones had a huge impact in the 90s by making it easier to call each other on the go.
But the advent of the smartphone, really in 2007, 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 2011, they found that 35 percent of American adults at the time said they owned smartphones.
And then just five years later, in 2016, that number had doubled to 70 percent. Fast forward to 2025 and 95% 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 bleh.
And we yearn for that time before. Nostalgia itself is booming. In a 2023 survey, 60% 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 out things that were before dial-up. Often, admittedly, with the help of the internet. Millennials, too.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did Jeremy face during his landline life?
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 90s.
Hey, Scully, it's me. I was born in the 90s. Hi, Harry. Hello. Hi. Hi. So I didn't really get to like kind of like live that lifestyle like fully as an adult.
Believe it or not, George isn't at home. Please leave a message at the beep.
I just tell friends at parties, it's like, oh, how great would it be to just use a landline and not have to text or be on our phones constantly.
Believe it or not, 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 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.
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Chapter 5: How did Jeremy's social interactions change without a smartphone?
What were you spending your time doing on there?
I think I was actually put off by the amount of texts I was getting from friends and group chats. And that was kind of the primary mode of communication with most of my life. I think the thesis for this was I don't think we were meant to have... 80 open conversations going at once. And I wanted to like really simplify that.
My group chat is sometimes it is blowing up so hard. And I just like, those are the times at which I most recede, you know, where I'm like, oh, 20 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. And 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, the 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 couldn'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.
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.
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Chapter 6: What impact did the experiment have on Jeremy's dating life?
So he 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 FOMO, though, in the sense of, like, to not... be reachable in all of the group chats. There could be whole inside jokes developed without you.
Everybody 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 with the Donut Man. Thanks, guys.
This isn't the Donut Man.
My friends would call me and then I'd ask, can 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 know him, but he comes around the office every time he's here and has a huge plate of donuts from Dunkin'. I love that guy already. 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? And I'm like...
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Chapter 7: What were the surprising benefits of using a landline?
He's our senior 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, Ben. How do I know? The donut man is a thing. Okay. 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 in my personal life or my real life, which is such a weird thing to say that like 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. Smartphones 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're 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.
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Chapter 8: How did Jeremy's work environment adapt to his landline use?
It's Sydney. I have someone to set you up with, so you should call me back. Bye.
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 maybe a little hesitation to communicate solely via the landline, even 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... That's kind of cool. No, it was interesting.
Like, you know, we set up a date and, you know, this time and 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 6 p.m. so we can hang. Cool. See you there. Jeremy and the woman his friend set him up with had two good dates, but ultimately...
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