Can More Technology Reduce Smartphone Addiction? - Kai Wei - #010

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hi, friends. On last week's episode, we discussed how people can become addicted to social media, how cognitive biases that we don't know even exist in our brains are being manipulated by almost every social media that exists, and how your phone is essentially a hacker in your pocket. The feedback this week's been absolutely fantastic. I've got so many tweets and messages from people saying that they are trying to reduce their phone time, and this has helped to open their eyes to why it's not necessarily their fault. This week, I'm sitting down with Kai Wei, who is the CEO of thelightphone.com, and they think that they have developed a product which can enable us to spend more time off screen. I do think that there's an important question to be asked here, and it is, can we fix the problem of too much technology with more technology? That's a question you'll have to answer yourself. Also, I do want to say that I was not sponsored or paid to interview Kai, and I found him off my own back because of how interested I was in the product, and I wanted to hear his philosophy on it. I also want to say that I'm considering buying one after my conversation with him, but that's completely independent. So, here we go, Kai Wei.
So Kai, welcome to modern Wisdom. Very good to meet you.

**Kai Wei** (1:49)
Thanks for having me.

**Chris Williamson** (1:50)
Thank you very much for coming on, man. You are CEO of The Light Phone.

**Kai Wei** (1:56)
That's correct.

**Chris Williamson** (1:57)
So I got introduced to the product from a friend who just linked me to it online, and I had a browse around, and it seems, it's a real unique device, as far as I can see. For those people who think that technology is sort of moving in one direction, which is more functionality, more integration with our lives, and you guys have come up with a product which kind of goes in the complete opposite direction. Do you think that would be fair to say?

**Kai Wei** (2:32)
Yeah, actually, a lot of press mentioned us as anti-smartphone, but we always wanted to clarify that we're not anti-technology or anti-smartphone, which is trying to be more human about how we approach technology, specifically the smartphone that we all have 24x7.

**Chris Williamson** (2:53)
Yeah, I understand that. So can you give us some background to yourself and how this concept came about?

**Kai Wei** (3:03)
Yeah, of course. So my background is in design and design research.
Four years ago, five years ago, I quit my job and joined this incubator that Google started in New York, specifically for designers, just because they think that, the hypothesis is that they think designers, when you put designers on the funding table, that product we created with empathy can really create social impact. So we were, my co-founder, Joe and I met in the space, and we were encouraged to do mobile app, just like any other startup. So, very soon, we realized, for both of us, that creating another app is the last thing we want to do. We were doing research about how people interact with smartphones, and we just kind of freak ourselves out. I'm sure you see this everywhere, not just in New York, in subway, in train station, in airport. Everyone is looking, 80% of the time, is looking down. It doesn't matter who are they with or where they are. It is swiping away on the screen. We know that we check our phone 200 times, or more than six hours a day.

**Chris Williamson** (4:35)
Is that the average figure?

**Kai Wei** (4:37)
Yeah, that's the average figure from the research is that we can find that we are...

**Chris Williamson** (4:42)
200 times a day and six hours a day on average.

**Kai Wei** (4:47)
I mean, with teenagers, even worse with social media, that it could be on their smartphone 10 hours a day. They're just not human from our perspective. We can't really stare at the screen 24-7.

**Chris Williamson** (5:02)
Well, that's crazy. I mean, I'd seen... I'm not sure how much truth there is in this, but I read a quote from an article that said something like, In one week, humans get more stimulation, more visual stimulation than they would have gotten in an entire year, typically, during their evolution. And you know, you are right. To look at it, to step back a little bit from typical smartphone use and look at it as an alien, I suppose, looking down on earth, you have all of the complexity and the beauty and the uniqueness of day-to-day life going on. And we all spend so much time staring down at our phones. So what year was this when you first went into the project?