When our phones are just phones with Kai Tang and Joe Hollier of Light

Hello and welcome to how I built this lab. I'm Guy Rise. So imagine you're waiting somewhere, right? Maybe you're in the checkout line at the grocery store or at a restaurant and just waiting for the bathroom to open up. And while you wait for a few minutes. What are you doing?

I bet there's a high chance that you take out your smartphone and just start scrolling. I do it, I'm embarrassed to say. In fact, a recent study found that on average, American adults spend almost Three hours a day, three hours staring at their smartphones. Of course, smartphones are amazing. They brought massive convenience to our everyday lives.

But they've also let tech companies access intimate details of our private lives for advertising. They've also allowed our work to creep into our personal time off, and of course smartphone use has been linked to an increasing anxiety and depression, especially in children and teens. Well, Kai Tang and Joe Hollier looked at these problems and they thought, what if there was a different kind of phone? And so they set out to design a phone that would give people a set of useful functions without the endless stream of social media content and other distractions. They called it the Lightphone, and it has calling and texting, but it also lets you do things like play music or podcasts and get directions. You can take notes on it and set up a hotspot, but no apps.

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