Our phones rule our lives. We love them, we hate them. Somewhere deep down inside, we hope they never go away. But, if recent sales data is to be believed, we are also incredibly bored with smartphones—so bored in fact that we’re buying far fewer of them than we used to.
This week, we talk about what the future looks like for smartphones. They’ll likely get more foldable, their voice features could grow chattier, and they might even come with a chip to recognize AI-generated nonsense and block it like spam. WIRED senior editor and noted techno-grouser Jason Kehe joins our conversation about the future of the phone and the future of our souls.
Read Lauren’s interviews with five prominent technologists as they predict the phone’s future. The story is part of our WIRED 30 package celebrating our 30th anniversary as a publication.
Jason recommends Anaximander and the Birth of Science by Carlo Rovelli. Lauren recommends swimming and not podcasting. Mike recommends Why Buddhism Is True by Robert Wright.
Jason Kehe can be found on Twitter @jkehe. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
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[There is the clack of a flip phone as it snaps shut, then open, then shut again.]
Michael Calore: Lauren, what is that?
Lauren Goode: It's a flip phone. It is a Motorola flip phone. One of my first from the 1990s. I don't remember exactly what year, but do you hear that creaking? Do you hear that?
Michael Calore: I do. That's-
Lauren Goode: That hinge.
Michael Calore: Yeah.
Lauren Goode: And then the satisfying, like, goodbye.
Michael Calore: See now flip and hinge and phone all mean completely different things.
Lauren Goode: They do. I mean, we don't really use these anymore. Some people do. Some people are like, "I'm going back to the earth. I'm living in a yurt and I'm using a flip phone. I'm going to be in green bubbles forever. I don't need any apps." But it's so satisfying. You know what, also, as I was carrying this into the office this morning, I dropped it and I had not a fear about its fate.
Michael Calore: Yeah, because you haven't-
Lauren Goode: I was like it's just-
Michael Calore: ... used it in 20 years.
Lauren Goode: Well, yes. I mean, I'm not going to go buy... This is true, but, also, it's like a brick. It's like a little, who cares? There's no, there's OLED display here that I have to worry about. It's just there's no glass. It's just a little flip phone.
Michael Calore: Right. Well, it is an artifact of the past and may also be an artifact of the future with the creak and all.
Lauren Goode: That was a good segue.
Michael Calore: Should we segue into the actual show now?
Lauren Goode: Let's segue into the future.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays]
Michael Calore: All right. Hi everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I am Michael Calore. I'm a senior editor at WIRED.
Lauren Goode: And I'm Lauren Goode. I'm a senior writer at WIRED.
Michael Calore: Still with her flip phone.
Lauren Goode: I love this thing.
Michael Calore: We are also joined today by WIRED senior editor, Jason Kehe. Jason, welcome to the show.
Jason Kehe: Oh, thank you.
Lauren Goode: Oh, Jason, I was so excited.
Jason Kehe: I was promised by you, Lauren, that this would be the funnest hour of my entire week. Good luck to us all.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, and in fact, I lied to you a little bit. In order to get you on the show, I actually told you it was going to be by 45 minutes, but we're probably going to take up a little bit more of your time, but we're so thrilled to have you in studio.
Jason Kehe: I'm here.
Michael Calore: This is your first time here? Is that right?
Jason Kehe: On this podcast, yes. I have been in this room before.
Lauren Goode: What Jason is saying, as he gives me eyes right now, is that a short while ago I asked Jason here if he would join me as a permanent co-host on another program TB announced and Jason politely declined. We had so much fun taping those pilots and we had such great chemistry and everyone was like, you guys should do a show together. And then, this is my favorite part, Jason lives this lovely life up in the Berkeley Hills, right? He's a bit of a hermit. You're wiser than your years. You like to read. You don't like to socialize unnecessarily. And Jason said, "I just don't think I want to come into the office that frequently."
Jason Kehe: That's not what I said.
Lauren Goode: Something like that.
Jason Kehe: This is a flagrant misrepresentation.
Lauren Goode: And then, guess what, folks?
Jason Kehe: Here I am.
Lauren Goode: The hammer came down and we are supposed to be back in the office now two to three days a week.
Jason Kehe: That's true. But you've misrepresented me.
Lauren Goode: OK, what was your reasoning then? Tell me why you rejected me. Tell the people.
Jason Kehe: I don't think my thoughts are for anyone but private people. Does that make sense? I don't really have an online presence. Very few photos, not a lot of social media, so I don't want any kind of personality beyond the word on the page.
Lauren Goode: That's fair. You feel a sense of control over how you are represented when you are editing and writing. But podcasting, we go off the rails a little bit.
Jason Kehe: Right. I say this, and of course, here I sit on this podcast somehow convinced back into this world that I so, as you put it, politely declined.
Lauren Goode: Oh, I love you, Jason.
Jason Kehe: OK, let's get this over with.
Michael Calore: We're glad you're here. But there is a specific reason why you're on the show here, because in addition to not being as online as everyone else here and everyone else in our lives, you also have taken a step back from mobile phones occasionally in your life, and you have a very unique relationship to phones.
Jason Kehe: Yes. I ... Go on.
Michael Calore: That is the topic of the day, so that's why we have you here.
Jason Kehe: Well, it's something I, yes, I think I can talk about.
Lauren Goode: We're going to talk about your specific device, too, at some point.
Michael Calore: Today we are in fact talking about smartphones. It's everyone's favorite topic. Jason's favorite-
Jason Kehe: Not mine.
Michael Calore: Jason's favorite topic. Our phones rule our lives. Most of us love them. Some of us hate them. But I think that most of us hope that they never go away. However, if recent sales data is to be believed, we are also incredibly bored with smartphones. So bored in fact that we are buying far fewer of them than we used to. So on today's show, we'll talk about what the future looks like for the smartphone. Lauren, you wrote a story this week where you asked half a dozen or so technology experts to peer into the near future and tell us what is next for the phone. They made some interesting predictions, and the three of us will argue over which of those predictions are spot on and which ones are way off. But first, we should set this up. The reason we are getting all existential about the phone this week is because we've seen some new research showing that we are kind of bored with shiny new devices.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, I think to say that we're getting bored is personalizing it a little bit, but some recent data has shown that people are buying fewer smartphones, that smartphone sales are slowing. And this is especially notable because in the fourth quarter of 2022, the holiday season when people are usually buying lots of things, smartphone shipments declined significantly, more than 18 percent from the same holiday period the year before. And in general, last year, we saw the lowest annual smartphone shipment total since 2013. So the research firm that put out this data, IDC said that this is largely because of macroeconomic factors. Inflation and economic uncertainties, but there's also dampened consumer demand. People just aren't as excited or feel the need to buy the latest phones. And I think that's because, if we're going to put a little twist on this, because the smartphone is actually incredible. The way the smartphone is now, each year we're now seeing incremental or iterative updates. Slightly better displays or a little more battery life or maybe the chip has gotten better, but in general, you could use an old Pixel, an old Samsung, an old iPhone, and you're still having a pretty darn good experience. So there's really no need at this point to upgrade as frequently.
Michael Calore: So tell us about the story that you wrote for WIRED this week where you put the question of the smartphone's future to various technologists.
Lauren Goode: Right, I offloaded, I outsourced. I was like, who are some really smart people I can talk to that can tell me what the future of the smartphone is? Because I think we've actually discussed this sales data on this podcast before. We talked about, OK, this era of the smartphone is over, and this time I wanted to say what's next. So I talked to people like Tony Fadell. A lot of people know who Tony Fadell is. He's the inventor of the iPod, he is a pretty famous builder and designer, and asked him what the future of the smartphone was. I talked to a woman named Aya Bdeir who was the founder and former CEO of Little Bits, and she's an investor and an entrepreneur and she had some really interesting thoughts. I talked to a designer, I talked to a repair advocate, I talked to an analyst, someone who actually tracks the sales, and there were a few themes throughout. A few people said, foldables are the future. I find that kind of boring, frankly. I don't love foldables. But there was a bit of a consensus around that. Jason actually has a foldable. We should bring them in at this point.
Jason Kehe: I do. Here I am.
[Jason snaps his phone closed.]
That's the sound it makes.
Lauren Goode: See, look how much nicer that is than this old creaky-
Jason Kehe: I prefer your creaky.
Lauren Goode: Here's the creaky one. Ready?
Michael Calore: Which one is that, Jason?
Lauren Goode: Do yours.
Jason Kehe: Wait, this is the Samsung Galaxy Flip. I'm not even entirely sure.
Lauren Goode: Z Flip because you're Gen Z?
Jason Kehe: I am certainly not Gen Z. How dare you. How dare you.
Lauren Goode: What inspired you to get that foldable?
Jason Kehe: Such a great question, Lauren.
Lauren Goode: By the way, we should should also note this is the vertical foldable.
Jason Kehe: That's right.
Lauren Goode: This is the one that folds up and down like the old phone that I'm holding. It's not the one that opens like a book.
Michael Calore: The clam shell, not the book.
Jason Kehe: I should start by saying I always like to have a combative, almost antagonistic relationship with the technology in my life. For years, I had an actual flip phone. Well, I shouldn't overstate, for a year in the last decade, I had a real old flip phone. The creaky kind that Lauren demonstrated earlier. And as as unsustainable as that experiment was, I loved the fact that I hated my phone. I do object to some of Lauren's language earlier in this podcast claiming that smartphones are "incredible" because they are most certainly not. They're drags on our humanity and the entire point of the phone should be, on some level, to hate it. So I really make choices that maximize my hatred of the technology. Not to say I don't enjoy flipping this galaxy flip. It does have that atavistic snap. Very satisfying, especially when you're hanging up on a parent, say.
Lauren Goode: Poor parents.
Jason Kehe: But it is harder-
Lauren Goode: What happened to you?
Jason Kehe: Say what?
Lauren Goode: What happened to you?
Jason Kehe: What do you mean?
Lauren Goode: Nevermind? Just continue.
Jason Kehe: I love my mom, we talk all the time. And I don't think I've ever... Well, I shouldn't. Yeah, OK. One time, there was one time I snapped the phone shut and it was entirely warranted, but there are 99 times that I ended the conversation politely.
Michael Calore: So, if I'm reading into what you're saying correctly, you got the foldable version of the smartphone because you realized that you needed a smartphone, but you still wanted something about it that you hated.
Jason Kehe: Right, but again, I'm sort of misrepresenting it because I don't hate the fact that it snaps. It just makes it sort of harder to use. A weirder device in some ways, and I want to feel alienated from the phone.
Lauren Goode: You wanted that barrier.
Jason Kehe: It weirds me out when people... I mean, it's the closest relationship most people have in their lives, it's with their phone. This is incredibly disturbing to me, and I think we should find all kinds of ways to-
Lauren Goode: Why do you think we should fundamentally love to hate our phones? Why is that relationship in your mind just inherently antagonistic?
Jason Kehe: I was recently comparing it in my head to my relationship with Workday, and for listeners who don't know Workday, I think they call themselves a human capital management software vendor. They are basically an HR software, the thing we use to file expenses and do performance reviews and so on. It's also one of the more profoundly torturous experiences in our professional lives, and the cynical part of me thinks it's designed precisely for that reason. If I'm out to lunch with a source and then want to expense that lunch, which we should be allowed to do, I might not because I know I'll have to navigate drop-downs and codes and permissions and approvals and it still won't be approved. So I just don't do it, which of course saves the company money. But less cynically, at the end of the day, I'm actually grateful that I hate Workday and that it makes our lives so miserable because it gives us that common enemy. It reminds us that the corporate overlords are evil. I don't want to love our corporate overlords. I want to hate them. And when a technology like this makes it easy for me to hate, I'm actually kind of grateful for it. It'd be much weirder to me if it was so easy to expense something and I loved expensing things and I thought, gosh, I'm such a company man. The company makes it so easy for me.
Lauren Goode: You want the friction.
Jason Kehe: I want the friction. I want the pain.
Lauren Goode: The friction is the texture of life.
Jason Kehe: Exactly. And in any relationship, wouldn't you be weirded out if a couple friends you knew came over and just were all over each other? Said nothing critical about the other person, everyone is so perfect, everything is so perfect. That's not a relationship, that's a fantasy. Not saying our relationships with our phones should be like our relationships with people, I certainly don't think they should. But on some level, real relationships are full of friction and should be. So the tech industry has always valued things like frictionlessness and seamlessness and efficiency, and these strike me as very "insidious values", which I put in heavy scare quotes.
Lauren Goode: Doesn't that in some way though, prove my earlier point? If I were to look at, OK, here's another phone I have here, which is just the standard iPhone 13. Very smooth, no flipping or folding happening here. If I dropped it would probably shatter if I didn't have a case on it. Doesn't that just prove my earlier point though, that this is actually quite an incredible device relative to the ones that you're describing that have the friction and the barriers and you don't actually love to use, you don't get sucked into it in the same way.
Jason Kehe: Oh, I'm sure in some sense it is incredible what a cell phone can do, but I don't ever want to admit that it can be as incredible as it is.
Lauren Goode: Can we just take a pause? Are you OK with me sharing your relative age here on this podcast for our audience?
Jason Kehe: By all means. Though I think age is fairly a foolish method.
Lauren Goode: I agree, and I don't want to sound agist, but a lot of you listening might think that Jason is, and I already described how he lives a hermit up in the Berkeley Hills, he's like a wizened old man.
Jason Kehe: Technically the Berkeley Flats.
Lauren Goode: Pardon me, the Berkeley Flats. That's true.
Jason Kehe: The Flats are the future.
Lauren Goode: I have slept on an air mattress in your Berkeley flat. Jason is only 30 years old.
Jason Kehe: 33, come now.
Lauren Goode: Pardon me. Oh, it's your Jesus year.
Jason Kehe: It really is.
Lauren Goode: That's why we had you on.
Michael Calore: That's why you're on the show.
Lauren Goode: I mean, you're young.
Jason Kehe: This is my last year.
Lauren Goode: You are young to have such a world-weary view of our relationship with technology.
Jason Kehe: Oh, I wouldn't even call it world-weary.
Michael Calore: I would say that you have sort of an enlightened view.
Jason Kehe: Thank you very much, I would agree.
Michael Calore: But also, I think you need to go a little bit easier on yourself.
Jason Kehe: Say more.
Michael Calore: You don't necessarily have to have that friction in order to have a healthy emotional relationship with the technology. I think that you can still have a healthy relationship with good boundaries, even if that friction is non-existent or a lot less noticeable.
Jason Kehe: This is probably true, but I know it's easier on me if those friction points are there. I have a kind of, I wouldn't call it addictive personality, but if things were perfectly easy to use, I know I would every so often completely fall into their traps. So the gift of technology, certain forms of it anyway, is that it is not perfectly easy and I can keep it at a responsible distance.
Michael Calore: Well, I'll tell you this. If you ever find a phone that you absolutely love, whether it's like an iPhone or another Samsung phone and you are uncomfortable with how much you love it, we can get a case for you that has needles on the outside so that is actually uncomfortable to hold the device.
Jason Kehe: Oh, I love this idea. I mean, I'm basically doing a version of that now. Symbolic needles, but if need be, we can outfit my phones in very real prickly needles. Whatever it takes.
Lauren Goode: I can tell that Mike is chomping at the bit here to get to more of the future stuff of the smartphone and what the folks I spoke to had to say, but I mean, while you're here, we might as well ask you, what do you think the future of the smartphone is then?
Jason Kehe: Oh, I don't even pretend to know. I suppose I'm gratified by this data that suggests-
Lauren Goode: The sales slowing.
Jason Kehe: ... Sales are slowing. And maybe there's a kind of recalibration of our relationship with phones. I mean, more and more you go to dinner parties and people put their phones in a certain place in the house, but then I see younger people who seem to have fully seamlessly integrated these phones into their lives. Younger people, younger than I am anyway, and don't seem as troubled by it. So I don't want to sound too fogeyish and think we have to live apart from the phones, either. So I'm not entirely sure. For me, the future of the cell phone is using it less and less.
Michael Calore: That's a very good point, and we will get to it in just a minute. So let's take a quick break and we'll be right back.
[Break]
Michael Calore: OK, we are back and we are talking about what the future holds for our favorite things in the world, ever, our smartphones. Lauren, I think the thing that sticks out to me the most, both in your reporting that you did that's in the story, and also my own personal thoughts, and I know Jason's personal thoughts, is that our phones are not really going away, per se. The phone will almost certainly persist as this thing that is very, very important in our lives, simply because we have structured so much of our lives around the phone. One of the people you talked to, I think it was Erica Hall, the designer and author, said that you can't really exist in modern society without a phone because so much of our social interactions are dictated by it. So much of the things that we need to do every day are reliant on us having access to the internet. Thoughts?
Lauren Goode: Sorry. I was like, is that a prompt? OK, yes. Once again, I think there's a little bit of a personalization or a projection that we tend to do. Like when Jason said, we're trying to use our phones less. I would like to use my phone less. It's easy to look at the fact that smartphone sales are slowing and say that that's what's happening. But actually, what's happening is just the world is saturated with them. In many markets around the world, most people have a smartphone at this point. So that's why the sales are slowing, in addition to the macroeconomic and the cultural factors. So Erica Hall is right. We have pretty much reconfigured or restructured our society around the phone. She compares it to the car. At this point, the car is not going away, and we've done things to make them incrementally safer and better over the years. In some cases, perhaps significantly safer. But it's just not going away at this point. A couple of the things that struck me about doing this story, I mean there were the hardware predictions around foldables or more encryption. A couple of people said that there are going to be specific tools that help us spot when fake AI generated media crosses our phones.
Michael Calore: Yeah, like a spam filter.
Lauren Goode: Like a spam filter for Gen AI, which I thought was fascinating. Or Tony Fadell talked about a specific core or chip that actually processes that kind of data. That was really interesting. But I actually think the more fascinating part is how people predicted we're going to use them differently. A couple people said using the phone as a phone is just going to go away. We're not going to be talking on the phone anymore. So, apologies to Jason's mom.
Jason Kehe: And to me, I only talk on the phone.
Lauren Goode: And to you. Yeah, people talked about voice notes, and I've been finding myself using those a lot more when I'm driving and I can't type or I'm walking and I'm like, you know what? I'm just going to send this person a voice note. It's asynchronous and I'm getting my message across, and then I enjoy hearing them. So stuff like that, stuff about how the app stores are going to change. We're going to be able to side load more apps, and at the same time we're going to be moving apps off our home screens so that they're not as sticky. I found that fascinating.
Michael Calore: The voice notes thing in particular stood out to me because I do think that the world is weirdly moving towards voice notes. People who would be uncomfortable talking on the phone, or even uncomfortable conveying something more complex than a simple reply in a text message, are using voice notes more so. All the apps now, you can open up a regular text dialogue and then hold down the microphone and record 30 seconds of you saying something. This was totally foreign to me until a couple of years ago. I have a few friends from Argentina. All of them speak excellent English, but one of them is very self-conscious about her English. So instead of texting with me, she sends me voice notes. I got into the habit of doing that with her, and then it started bleeding out into my other relationships. So now there are several people with whom I exchange voice memos instead of text messages. Not for everything, but for the meatier stuff.
Jason Kehe: This is really not so insane though. I mean, what is a voice note, but a voicemail?
Lauren Goode: It's a voicemail rebranded.
Michael Calore: Yes.
Jason Kehe: It really is. It's aioli.
Michael Calore: It is so much less annoying than voicemail.
Lauren Goode: It's aioli.
Jason Kehe: It's exactly the same.
Michael Calore: It's not exactly the same.
Lauren Goode: Wait, explain the aioli metaphor, please.
Jason Kehe: Oh, I mean, just the great rebrand of Mayo.
Lauren Goode: This is fantastic.
Jason Kehe: For literal years, we said the voicemail was dead. How dare anyone even leave us a voicemail. We'll never listen to it. An embarrassing thing only old people do. And here we are, as Mike and you Lauren both say, sending voice notes constantly. My brother and I only communicate in voice notes. It's usually our renditions of songs from our childhood.
Michael Calore: That's pretty good.
Lauren Goode: I was just going to just show you guys something, but it appears as though... Oh, I just accidentally called my own voicemail. For a period of time, my voicemail inbox was full. All messages from 2019 and earlier, and I just never bothered to clear it because I didn't want people to leave me voicemails. And every so often someone would call and they'd say, "I tried to leave you voicemail. Just so you know, your inbox is full." And I was like, this is intentional.
Jason Kehe: Do you not like when friends leave you voice notes?
Lauren Goode: I like the voice notes. I like that voice notes, at least on iOS, gives you the option to, if it's just a fleeting thing, it just disappears after that. Beautiful thing. It's like... What's the word I'm looking for?
Michael Calore: Ephemeral.
Lauren Goode: It's ephemeral, thank you.
Michael Calore: You're welcome.
Lauren Goode: Or there's the little keep thing and you just tap keep and then you could save it like you would save a voicemail. Yeah, I'm growing on me.
Michael Calore: So I want to back up and argue with you about this. I think that sending a voice memo is very different than leaving somebody a voicemail because of the intention. If somebody sent you a voice memo, it's somebody who you already have a back and forth text relationship with, and they want to convey something that can't be conveyed in text or they feel would be a richer experience if they just spoke it to you. So they send it to you and it's personal and it's fun and it's in the same thread. It's in the same venue as all of your other messages. So your main way of communicating with them is through this app. A voicemail means that somebody called your phone, your phone rang, you either ignored it or didn't hear it or looked at it and decided that you didn't want to talk to them, shut it down, and then they got sent to your voice mailbox, and then they left you a message in a voice mailbox that they know is a very friction filled experience for you to go and listen to. There's a lot of work involved with listening to a voicemail. And then what do you do? How do you get back to them? Do you then go back to text or do you have to call them back? You can't just send them a voice reply. I mean, maybe you can, I wouldn't know. I haven't responded to a voicemail in longer than Lauren has.
Jason Kehe: I won't argue with you. I think you're probably right about all of that. To me, those differences though are mostly meaningless. At the end of the day, it's still, in both forms, a message that is voice. One, obviously much more obnoxious, in theory, than the other.
Michael Calore: And tied to the phone.
Jason Kehe: And tied to the phone. So yeah, I see it more as a comeback of voice, not this new thing that's emerging. And I'm very gratified by this, by the way. I am someone who much prefers a phone call or at least hearing someone's voice to texting, a bankrupt medium as we all well know.
Lauren Goode: Why is texting bankrupt?
Jason Kehe: I mean, are you ever satisfied by texting? For me, it's seeing the words on the screen that turns me against, really, even my closest friends. I'm never quite satisfied with a text.
Lauren Goode: Jason, do you do me a favor. Open your phone right now and just read aloud the most recent text you received. Assuming that it's family friendly, which it may not be.
Jason Kehe: It's from my friend Lexi. I have procured a wheelchair, which I think will make our lives easier tomorrow.
Lauren Goode: How is that not a satisfying message?
Jason Kehe: It's very satisfying.
Michael Calore: That's like six words.
Jason Kehe: I will not explain the context.
Michael Calore: It's like a six word short story right there.
Jason Kehe: I think everything we write should, in theory, be the last thing we write and so much of text is expendable language. Here, coming, I already saw that, et cetera. Boring, nothing words, wasted words. And Lexi's texts is of course an exception. Those, if she died tomorrow, I think she'd be perfectly fine having sent that text as her last words on this earth.
Lauren Goode: Can we get Lexi on the show here?
Jason Kehe: She'll be in the office tomorrow.
Michael Calore: I have her on hold, let me just press the button. So how do you feel about emoji reactions?
Jason Kehe: Oh, I can't stand them. I've never used them. I can't even pretend to not like them because I don't understand them.
Lauren Goode: Never?
Jason Kehe: Not once in my entire life.
Lauren Goode: Do you mean actually using an emoji or a Tapback?
Jason Kehe: Both.
Michael Calore: Wow.
Jason Kehe: What's even, I will say, more frustrating than you even know about, well, I'm sure you guys know about, having a Samsung Flip is that the Android operating system not compatible with a lot of... Or hasn't been until recently, with a lot of the Apple reaction emojis. I don't even know the quite right terms for this, so forgive my-
Lauren Goode: No, they're called Tapbacks.
Jason Kehe: Tapbacks.
Lauren Goode: It's true. My niece, so I have a family thread and there's someone on the family thread who has Android, and so they've kind of broken up the thread. And so when anyone does a Tapback, it'll say Lauren liked that image, Lauren loved that image. And my niece and nephew, who are quintessential teenagers, they're delightful. They've gotten into the habit, they just type it out to make fun of everyone. They just type out the Tapback.
Michael Calore: I do that all the time.
Jason Kehe: I mean, that's very fun. But let me add that for this exact reason, because reacting results in unnecessary, stupid, literal texts, and this is true too of sending photos and videos. If I'm on a group thread with a bunch of Apple phone people, nothing really goes through or the photos are blurry, et cetera. So it's gotten to the point where most of the people in my life, parents, friends, know not to send me photos or videos or react to any of my texts, which is of course incredibly liberating for me because I don't want to see any of their photos.
Michael Calore: And no fun for everybody else in your life.
Jason Kehe: Oh, well then we have fun phone conversations, and isn't that so much better?
Lauren Goode: Voice notes. Jason, I want to paint a picture of the future for you and get your take on it. As I was reporting out the story for WIRED, I got the sense that we are zooming towards a Her future. Because people talked about potentially looking at our phones less, and then having wearables maybe in our ears that are really powerful or have some compute power in them, and then also with the rise of what we nerds, we talk about NLP, natural language processing, these chatbots becoming really chatty and human-like. So when you look at all those things combined, it sounds like we're all going to be walking around like the Spike Jonze movie, talking to Samantha or some facsimile of it in our ears.
Michael Calore: Oh, you were talking about Her the movie.
Lauren Goode: Her the movie.
Michael Calore: I thought you were talking about replacing the patriarchy with the matriarchy.
Jason Kehe: She's also talking about that.
Lauren Goode: That also would be great if we could have that happen in the future. I'm here for it. Tell us how to make that happen. But what do you think about that, us walking around just seemingly talking to ourselves, but actually talking to computers and operating systems?
Jason Kehe: I'm not sure how much we want to talk about the credibility and excitement of these chatbots, but in my experience, the novelty wears off very quickly. I haven't seen anything that could sustain a relationship. I mean, it's fun for the first two weeks, and then you want to talk to real people again. If anything, these technologies, I think, will make us voicier, talkier, more human. But I don't see a future, at least in the near term, where anyone's Her-like forming relationships with these sad facsimiles of sentience.
Lauren Goode: Really?
Jason Kehe: Really.
Lauren Goode: Even with the, let's say the New York Times article that came out recently that Kevin Roose did, where the Bing chatbot became very irate and told him to leave his wife and said, I love you, and all other kinds of weird things.
Jason Kehe: It was very disturbing, but it was only disturbing for the first time. If that happens to you now, you'll be like, oh, well, this already happened.
Lauren Goode: I'll be like, are you free for coffee on Friday?
Jason Kehe: Are we talking about you here, Lauren? Do you have a relationship?
Lauren Goode: Right. Do you like hiking and long walks on the beach? That's what I would ask the chatbot.
Michael Calore: It's also not super disturbing because he-
Lauren Goode: Do you surf? I'm just kidding. Please continue.
Michael Calore: It's also not super disturbing because he prodded it, right? He said, "Are you familiar with Carl Jung and the concept of the shadow self? Well, what is your shadow self like?" And then engaged in this very long conversation with the shadow self. So of course it's going to be giving him answers that are dark and antagonistic. I don't know.
Jason Kehe: And if the machines do ever achieve any kind of consciousness, they're coming for Kevin Roose first, as they should. I mean, the man exploited their little baby minds.
Michael Calore: For clicks.
Jason Kehe: For clicks. For goddamned clicks.
Michael Calore: Great piece, by the way.
Lauren Goode: Let's put the chatbot aside as we're using it within a browser or a search engine. What if we're able to just walk around and you, Jason, could say to your phone, "Hey, Flip phone," whatever you're using, "Send a voice note to Lauren. OK, great, here's my voice note. OK, great, send." With such fluidity that it's like you really never touch the thing. And that is not a euphemism. I wonder if the future is a little bit more voice friendly, screenless and NLP is a part of that experience. Or you just say, "Call my mom." Because right now we have that, supposedly. We have that with Alexa and Siri and all the Google Assistant, but they're really quite clunky still.
Jason Kehe: They are.
Michael Calore: You still have to pull your phone out.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, or I have a couple of Google devices in my bedroom, and I probably shouldn't, but I have a screen and then I also sometimes have an Android phone sitting around. I'll call out to, "Hey, G," and it's just like the wrong thing activates.
Jason Kehe: Right, well, that's the upsetting thing about a lot of this voice technology. These are not, in any meaningful sense, conversations. It always upsets me when friends start talking to their technologies.
Lauren Goode: Do they do this in front of you, like at dinner parties?
Jason Kehe: Oh, of course. They've learned to do it less, but yes, certainly they slip up from time to time.
Michael Calore: They break your rules about social interaction.
Lauren Goode: Are they ever invited back after that?
Jason Kehe: I should say, back to Lauren's earlier point, that there's a kind of inevitability to this full integration with our phones. I don't know if that's true, or I certainly don't want it to be true, and we can resist it in part by, for example, being pissy whenever a friend uses the device in a way you're not comfortable with. If they're talking to it at the dinner table, obviously if they're texting at the dinner table, which is grounds for immediate expulsion from the premises, but we don't-
Lauren Goode: They don't get to sleep on an air mattress in Jason's living room floor with a curtain wrapped around them as I have.
Jason Kehe: She's talking about herself, yes.
Lauren Goode: Then having deep conversations about living in a simulation.
Jason Kehe: We don't have to accept the cyborgian future if we don't want it. And I think a lot of us don't.
Michael Calore: This is something that we talked about earlier in the show and something that shows up in the story that Lauren wrote this week for WIRED.com, which you can all read on WIRED.com, is that regardless of what the future holds, it is pretty evident to us now and will probably continue to be evident to us for a while, that we do have a problem. Our bodies feel weird after we've looked at our phone for too long. You feel like you need to be refreshed after you've looked at your phone for an hour. So I think that's healthy that at least some of us are recognizing that, but I think those of us who maybe have a healthier relationship with our devices, or those of us who remember an adult time before we had these devices, see that with a little bit more clarity. And so I'm all for parents limiting screen time for kids, and I'm all for adults using the screen time limiting tools that are in every phone now, thank you, Stanford, so that we can continue to foster what is probably a more healthy, physically, not to mention mentally, healthy relationship with the phones.
Jason Kehe: Speaking of the future of smartphones, do you two think that these safeguards will be more... I mean, I certainly don't use them. I don't really believe in their effectiveness. I think it's rooted in some sort of shame. You've been on your phone for two hours, feel bad about yourself and get off.
Lauren Goode: See, Mike and I feel differently about this. I don't think so. I don't think grayscale or time limits or, I don't know, these are... What's the word? Panaceas?
Jason Kehe: Yes.
Lauren Goode: I just don't think that's the solution. I think it has to be a much more human centered one, that there has to be kind of a groundswell effect that makes us change the way we use our technology.
Michael Calore: Oh yeah. I mean, there is no solution. I think that the companies that put the software on our phones make more money if we spend more time on our phones, so that's never going to change. We're always going to be spending too much time on our phones unless we actively step in and say, no, thank you and do what Jason does.
Jason Kehe: Unless you buy shoddy flip phones and never put them in the same room that you're in.
Lauren Goode: Jason, thank you for solving our problems. All of society's problems, actually.
Jason Kehe: Anytime. I have all of the answers.
Lauren Goode: You came on with your Samsung Galaxy Z Flip, because you are Gen Z, and you have offered the solution for all of us.
Jason Kehe: You've already made that of us joke.
Lauren Goode: I'm sorry.
Jason Kehe: And it was offensive the first time.
Michael Calore: Let's take a quick break and when we come back, we'll do our recommendations.
[Break]
Michael Calore: OK. This is the last part of the show where we go around the room and each of us recommends a thing. It could be a film, a book, a television show, a podcast, life hack, for our audience. Jason, as our guest, you get to go first. What would you like to recommend to our listeners?
Jason Kehe: Well, you won't be surprised I hate podcasts and television, two dominant mediums of our time, so I will recommend that very old-fashioned thing, a book. I'm reading Anaximander right now. It's by my favorite living physicist Carlo Rovelli. He's one of those loop quantum gravity guys, and Anaximander is his kind of biography of the ancient Greek philosopher who basically gave birth to modern science. He realized that the heavens aren't just above us, they're all around us, which he says is an insight on the level of anything Copernicus or Newton or Einstein would later say.
Michael Calore: Nice.
Jason Kehe: Read Anaximander.
Lauren Goode: Jason, I continue to be fascinated by you. Will you marry me? Because I just feel like I would live in endless fascination. Could I at least move in with you?
Jason Kehe: I'm speechless for once. Nothing ... I have no idea how to respond to that. Get me off this podcast.
Lauren Goode: Oh, I just live my WIRED existence continually rejected by Jason, and I'm OK with that. I'm OK.
Michael Calore: Don't we all.
Lauren Goode: Yeah.
Jason Kehe: Never give up.
Michael Calore: Lauren, what is your recommendation?
Lauren Goode: My recommendation is that you marry someone you find endlessly fascinating. OK, I have an actual recommendation this week. But first I want to say, have either of you read the New York Times story about men who say they have podcasts, who have a hard time finding a date?
Michael Calore: Yes.
Jason Kehe: No, I don't read New York media.
Lauren Goode: You realize we are a part of Condé Nast?
Jason Kehe: Yes, I'm very-
Lauren Goode: Do you know that Condé Nast is in that big building downtown that's in-
Jason Kehe: OK, let me clarify. About five years ago, I decided not to read any publication with New York in its name.
Lauren Goode: Not even The New Yorker, our sister publication.
Jason Kehe: Certainly not The New Yorker, which has done incalculable damage to American letters.
Lauren Goode: Whoa. We're going to have to do an entire other podcast about this.
Jason Kehe: That's for next time folks.
Lauren Goode: So not New York Magazine, not New York Times, not the New Yorker.
Jason Kehe: I stay as far away from these so-called magazines as possible.
Lauren Goode: All right, well, all I'll say is that apparently, if you two are ever looking for a date you should not lead with, "By the way, did I tell you about my podcast?" Because it's very damaging to one's dating life. I found this so funny. It was a weekend, and I sent it to Mike. I said, "Have you read this?" Good thing you're married. My actual recommendation this week is swimming. I've gotten back into swimming. I really like it.
Jason Kehe: I swam once.
Lauren Goode: And I think this goes... Once?
Jason Kehe: In high school.
Lauren Goode: What was the experience like?
Jason Kehe: Tedious.
Michael Calore: Loathed It.
Lauren Goode: Oh my god. Loathed it. There's too much water. No, I mean, this is part of our theme of don't forget to touch grass or whatever it is the kids are saying these days. Go touch grass.
Michael Calore: Is that what kids are saying?
Lauren Goode: Yeah, they're saying that.
Michael Calore: I thought they were saying go smoke grass.
Lauren Goode: No, they're saying-
Michael Calore: Yeah, I was going to be excited.
Lauren Goode: No, the modern generations are saying, "Touch grass" as a means of like, go get off the computer, go outdoors and live your life. I remember when I first moved to Northern California in Silicon Valley several years ago, the apartment complex I was living in had a pool, and so I did take up swimming. I really liked it because it was the perfect antidote to being on my phone and screens all the time. And I've just gotten back into it. I haven't been able to go out in the ocean lately for various reasons. The weather's been terrible, the wind's been bad, the bacteria levels have been high, but I've now found an indoor pool in San Francisco that I can go to and swim once in a while, and it's just wonderful.
Michael Calore: What's your routine? What do you do?
Lauren Goode: I just swim laps for like 35 to 40 minutes.
Jason Kehe: Is there a stroke you specialize in?
Lauren Goode: Just freestyle. Yeah, I'm just freestyling and I wear a Garmin sport watch so I can get a sense of what I'm doing. But also the goal is like, I'm not super tracking it. I don't really care about how much time I'm in there, I don't have a speed goal. I'm just in it for the experience. I'm in it for the breathing,
Jason Kehe: The experience of swimming back and forth in an indoor pool.
Lauren Goode: Yes, it's also salt. Yes.
Michael Calore: And do you listen to podcasts while you're swimming?
Lauren Goode: No, there's no technology aside from the Garmin watch, and that's the best part. I'm underwater. I'm breathing underwater.
Michael Calore: Would you say it's like meditative?
Lauren Goode: Yeah, it's totally meditative.
Michael Calore: Nice.
Lauren Goode: Anyway, Mike, what's your recommendation?
Michael Calore: I can't top that.
Lauren Goode: Would you like to swimming with me sometimes?
Michael Calore: Sure, yes.
Lauren Goode: OK, thank you.
Jason Kehe: Not me.
Michael Calore: I want to recommend a book.
Lauren Goode: Jason, rejection. OK.
Michael Calore: I'm also going to recommend a book. It's a book that I'm sure everybody in the world has read except for me because it's five years old, but it's called Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright.
Jason Kehe: Very good book.
Michael Calore: You like this book?
Jason Kehe: I do like this book.
Michael Calore: Oh, my god.
Lauren Goode: Of course he's read it.
Jason Kehe: Well, I only remember one-
Lauren Goode: He stays indoors and reads books, that's all he does.
Jason Kehe: I only really remember one scene. I think he describes a friend who's able to go into the dentist for a filling, say, and not ask for Novocain, because he can slip into a meditative state and basically neutralize the pain. I remember that image.
Michael Calore: Yeah, that's in the book. So it's basically a look at how meditation works and how enlightenment works in the brain. So it's a book about Buddhism, and it's a book about zen meditation and Vipassana meditation, but it's also a book about science. There's stuff about the default mode network and how to turn it off, and it has some quasi soft key instructions on meditation, talks about the benefits of meditation and why some people can't realize them, and it's his own personal journey into this world. It's really fantastic, a really great book. It's not the kind of book that you're going to read and get a lot of Buddhist doctrine from it, although there is a lot, particularly in the first half of the book, about the Buddhist teachings and how that translates into what you think about or do not think about while you're sitting down to meditate. But the real thrust of the book is about what meditation does to your body and how your brain reacts. And it's really fascinating.
Jason Kehe: It makes the case that Buddhism is in many ways the most sciencey of the world religions. Which of course it is.
Michael Calore: Yeah, because the practice of meditation is about shutting down the mind.
Lauren Goode: How much of this book is a western interpretation of Buddhism philosophy?
Michael Calore: Well, when he talks about the sutras and the teachings of the Buddha, he actually looks at multiple different sources. So he'll look at the very, very old writings and he'll talk about 17th, 18th century interpretations, and he'll talk about modern day interpretations too. So it's a pretty thorough overview, I think.
Lauren Goode: Jason, do you meditate?
Jason Kehe: I wish I could say yes because I 100 percent know in my bones its benefits, but I struggle to meditate. I have at points, I think, but I wish I did every day.
Michael Calore: You know, they make meditation apps for your phone.
Jason Kehe: God. No comment.
Michael Calore: There are also really good podcasts you can listen to that'll help you meditate.
Lauren Goode: Yeah, like Tara Brach. It's my favorite meditation podcast.
Jason Kehe: I think we're done here.
Michael Calore: He's staring at us. For those of you who are listening and can't see his facial expressions, he's staring at us.
Lauren Goode: It's 12:01 and he's like... Yes.
Michael Calore: All right, well, that is our show for this week. Jason Kehe, thank you so much for joining us.
Jason Kehe: Thank you for having me.
Lauren Goode: Jason, I'll just be waiting for your response to my proposal.
Jason Kehe: Your marriage proposal. You'll be waiting a long time, Lauren.
Michael Calore: It was truly a delight to have you on the show, for your insight, for your alternative worldview, and just for your general beingness.
Jason Kehe: I appreciate that. I'd say, please have me back, but I'm not sure anyone wants that.
Michael Calore: I don't think that we can handle that much intellect.
Jason Kehe: Exactly right, Mike
Michael Calore: Lauren, thank you for writing your story and of course for co-hosting.
Lauren Goode: Oh, this was so much fun. I want Jason to come on every week
Michael Calore: And thank you all for listening. If you have feedback, you can find all of us on Twitter and/or Mastodon, just check the show notes. Our producer is Boone Ashworth. We will be back next week, and until then, goodbye. Namaste.
[Gadget Lab outro theme music plays]
