Richard Simon - BOOK - Unplug

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi is Brian Thomas. I'd like to welcome to the
fifty five Catssey Morning Show author Richard Simon. He directs
the website strategy at Georgetown Law and Washington d C.
As a former reporter and webmaster at Baltimore's The Daily
Record that he is now an author Unplug How to
Break up with your Phone and Reclaim your life. Conceptually,
it sounds great, Richard, Welcome to the Morning Show. It sounds,

(00:22):
though very difficult in practice these days. Let's talk about
what you did and of what I actually start by
asking you what drew you to want to write this
particular book.

Speaker 2 (00:33):
Yeah, so the journey definitely starts with me as a
thirty three year old father of two at the time
in twenty nineteen, my smartphone was putting a strain on
pretty much all facets of life, from professional to personal,
and I knew I had to do something about it.
So I decided to turn off my phone for an
entire year, and it was one of the most transformative
periods of my life. And what I realized is that

(00:55):
pretty much all the self help articles out there and
books suggest hacks. Hacks are noble, like deleting social media apps,
turning your phone to gray scale digital sabbaths. All those
things are nice, but for something as addictive as a
phone as a phone, it doesn't go far enough. So
I ended up seeking out dozens of people who had
gone through similar phone breakups, and believe or not, I'm

(01:16):
so glad phone released. It can be on a Cincinnati
show because my book opens up with Nick Costianos when
he was a Cincinnati Red so I profile and interview
him for the introduction because he turned off his smartphone,
and just like me, it was incredibly transformative for him.

Speaker 1 (01:32):
Well, some people just stare constantly at their phones. And
one of the things I do with a segment each
week on the program Tech Friday with Dave Hatter, he
and I are anti app. We don't do apps. All
they are is data harvesters. YadA, YadA, YadA. I was
able to live my entire life up till the time
smartphones existed. I'm coming up on sixty years old. I
never had an app, didn't need them, and I don't

(01:53):
need them now. That's kind of my view and my
take on it. But insofar as to having this smart phone,
this is how we all generally commit unicate. So the
idea of dealing without this. I don't even have a
landline anymore. So what about people that it still needs
to make a phone calls. I mean cutting it off
completely seems literally impossible.

Speaker 2 (02:13):
Yeah, definitely is not. I go through four different breakup
styles in the book, and one of the things I
realized for my dozens of interviews is that something like
this is for everyone. I profile one call anesthesiologists at
Johns Hopkins Hospital, one of the top research hospitals in
the country, a law partner, a social media person, a
software engineer, a school principle, all people who turn off

(02:35):
their phones. Now, the one I think that will have
four different breakup styles in the book, and the one
that I think that will resonate most for your listeners
is switching from a smartphone to a basic phone. And
when you switch to a basic phone, it touches on
that piece you're talking about where you can still make
calls and text, but essentially with the most basic of
basic phones, that's it. And one of the biggest problems

(02:57):
for people is the time suck with a smartphone. The
average can spend more than five hours a day on
a smartphone. It's time you simply don't get back. And
with a basic phone, it's so terrible to use that
you won't want to use it that much. So all
of a sudden you regain time.

Speaker 1 (03:11):
Perfect idea. And see, that's basically what my smartphone is.
It is an intentionally dumb phone because I don't use
any of the apps on it. Now, how about the
you have an off by default recommendation as well, And
this is something that I embrace. Every night, go to bed,
my phone is off, and that's the way again, I
live my life that way. Growing up, you know, you

(03:33):
didn't have phone calls in the middle of the night,
you didn't take them if you did. My dad was
got up early like I did, so he would insist
the phones would be off. So I can handle that.
If there's a phone message on, I'll listen to on
a wake up in the morning.

Speaker 2 (03:44):
Brian, that is that is fantastic. Yeah, So the off
by default approach, I recommend sixty days of at least
sixty days of having your smartphone off to recalibrate, throw
a word pathways in your brain. And with the off
by default approach, for those sixty days, you would have
your smartphone off and own turn it on to complete
a critical task. Then after you finish those sixty days,

(04:04):
you can alter the definition of off by default too.
You only turn your smartphone on if you want to
enhance your life. That way, you have control of your
smartphone rather than it being control of you.

Speaker 1 (04:17):
What about relationships? I understand the toughest. So and you're
going down this path of off by default or not
or going cell phone free? Was your wife?

Speaker 2 (04:26):
That's correct. My wife is a pediatrician. Like any good pediatrician,
she thought through all the various scenarios of what could
go what could go wrong, and we realized that if
I do this, we're really have to set expectations, especially
with kids in terms of coordinating. But one of the
things we realized right away was that on an average day,

(04:47):
we would be texting throughout the day. So by the
time we got home and had dinner together as a family,
we knew what was going on, like there was nothing
to catch up one because we were texting throughout the day.
All of a sudden, a smartphone is removed from our
environment and there's no texting throughout the day. So when
we get back home together, we actually enjoy catching up
with each other because there's stuff to catch up.

Speaker 1 (05:06):
One that's awesome. I understand you got to run. Richard
Simon has been great talking to me this morning. Unplug
How to break up with your phone and reclaim your life.
It's on my blog page. People can easily get a
copy of it. It's a great spending time with you today, Richard.
Thanks for writing the book.