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Episode Date: June 4, 2026

Jeremy Rellosa used to watch TV shows and movies from the '90s and revel in how the characters walked around untethered to a smartphone, with no expectations of constant connectivity. So he decided to run an experiment on himself: he'd live for at least two weeks without a smartphone. No Slack. No text messages. No Instagram or WhatsApp. If his friends, family, or boss wanted to reach him, they'd have to call him on his landline. Sure, landlines were the norm just a couple of decades ago. But in our always-online world, how feasible is the landline life, really? Ben and Amory call Jeremy up to find out. Show notes: "I Turned Off My Phone for a Month and Used a Landline" (New York Magazine) This episode was written and produced by Grace Tatter and edited by Meg Cramer and Dave Shaw. It was co-hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson. Mix and sound design by Paul Vaitkus.

Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrum School of Business. A recent episode explores the challenges and opportunities in decarbonizing one of the world's most carbon-intensive industries, ocean freight shipping. Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. 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 lift.

On a weekend? 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. You're 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 935, more than half an hour after the agreed upon time. Why? And Matt? Matt wasn't there. And I'm like, wow, he must have shown up left 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 W&EGELMAN. 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. Teddn. Hey, Jeremy. This is Grace. Red leader. This is Blue Leader. 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 Sydney. 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 Sidney. 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. finding 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 Amory Severson, 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% of American adults at the time said they owned smartphones. And then just five years later in 2016, that number had doubled to 70%. 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. We're all feeling it, man.

We want to go back, including our landline lubber, 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, hi. So I didn't really get to, like, kind of, like, live that lifestyle, like, fully as an adult.

But George isn't at home. We leave a message at the beat. I'd just tell friends at parties. It's like, oh, how great would it be to just use a landline and not have to, like, text or use, like, be, like, on our phones, like, 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 remembered this, but there was a 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 90s 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 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 like, I don't think we were meant to have like 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. Yeah. 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 to 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.

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 month. 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, was there FOMO, though, in the sense of, like, like to not be on, to not be reachable in all of the group chats and the, you know, there could be whole inside jokes developed without you. 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. It's all right. We replaced you. We replaced you with the donut man. Yeah, great. Thanks, 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 Salts. 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 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? And I'm like, Mom, he's won a Pulitzer Prize. He's our teenage 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 between.

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 my real life is, I guess I should say more in person. But all the important things my friends would just 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 for 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 rolletics. They have made it their life 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. So 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 leave a voicemail knowing I wouldn't answer as like a little safeguard to. That's kind of cool. It was, 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, I know that sounds like what an awful payoff. Sorry, guys. You're like, oh, great. That was the worst story ever. Okay. Even in the halcyon 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 suckant. Support for this podcast comes from, Is Business Broken? 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. I'm Dean Russell, co-creator of WBUR's new family-friendly podcast, The Midnight Rebellion. This story transports you to a future shaped by climate change. The water is high, seaweed is everywhere, and the city is ruled by salty robots. The good news, you choose what happens. The decisions you make can turn the tide.

All episodes are out now. This summer, find your next great adventure at WBUR.org slash midnight or wherever you get your podcasts. Emery, you know I love a cold call, and I love, love, love to leave a voicemail. I call you for no reason. Oh, do you ever been? Oh, baby boy, the brats, the box are calling. And I love that you love. to leave a voicemail.

I'm calling you. I'm calling you to figure some stuff out. So do you, though. So do you. Where is them? Where is then? 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 over-scheduled 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 Relosa, 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 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'm answering because you called.

Like, that's, that's, that was kind of a secret goal. It was just like more serendipity. Serendipity, though, has its drawbacks. Like, spontaneous plans kind of were out the, out the door. I couldn't really make plans on the fly when I was out, 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. Unless you start knocking 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 was my last grasp at kind of like an analog life. So on my way from work, I just walked by his apartment. And I rung 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 end to the experiment. They're like, oh, this is like people, it's, people just have to pop him by. 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. have to send letters. And I was like, oh, God. Oh, 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 2026. Jeremy ultimately made it 51 days without a smartphone. Before being pulled back in by things like pictures of his baby nephew in the family group chat, or to be able to switch up plans on the spot. Can you kind of summarize what role your smartphone plays in your life now? 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 50% of how 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 I mainly use it almost like a dumb phone in some regards where I just answer. 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, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I,

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 replicate 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 call our friends more?

Absolutely. I think we should be just calling off the rip just hey what's up man I will say I will say one of the delights of having a landline was getting really really trivial voicemails basically the text equivalent of a voicemail being left from my friend because it felt like I was kind of tapped into that world so I think we should call our friends more and when they don't answer leave a voicemail Exactly, right. Love you, men. I hope you have a great day. Peace. Oh, my gosh.

Where's my phone? Okay. Bye for real. Peace, brother. Wow. Catch you later. See you. Come new.

So have a good evening, and I'll talk to you there. Bye. Hey, this is Jeremy. I can't make it to the phone right now. Just leave your name and number, and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. Thanks. Hey, Jeremy. This is Amory Severson from the podcast, Endless Thread.

And I'm going to read some credit. for you. Oh, Jeremy! It's your old buddy Ben Brock Johnson, Colin, from WBUR. Endless Threat is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was written and produced by Grace Tatter and co-hosted by me, Amory Severson. It was edited by Meg Kramer and Dave Shaw,

mixed and sound design by our production manager, Paul Vikis. The rest of our team is Dean Russell, Koyani Saxana, Emily Jankowski, and our managing producer, Sumitajoshi. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between not getting a text back from that person you went on a date with because they're just not that into you or because they got rid of their cell phone to write a magazine article. If you have an untold history and unsolved mystery, some other wild story from the internet or your voicemail you want us to leave for you? Hit us up. Endless Thread at WBUR.org.

Okay, goodbye. Okay, bye. Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken? a podcast about the Morotra Institute at BU Questrum School of Business. Follow is Business Broken, wherever you get your podcasts, and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Valerie Thomas, Professor of Industrial Engineering at Georgia Tech, on whether the ocean freight shipping industry can reach net zero emissions by 2050.

It's technically feasible. That's a very simple question. Will we get there? Will it all be deployed? We're going to see. I just want to add in there that, yeah, we've talked a lot about the difficulties for shipping in getting to net zero. This is not the only thing that's going to be going on. Aviation is seeking to do the same thing, maybe even faster, and the other uses of petroleum are all transitioning. You may think, and in some ways, that makes the problem even bigger.

There are other ways that it makes it easier. Some of the fuels that are used for shipping are very similar to those used for aviation. So as infrastructure gets built out, shipping can benefit. Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken, wherever you get your podcasts. And learn more about the Morotra Institute for Business, Markets, and Society at ibms.bu.bun.org.