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Hey everybody. It's Mariel.

I am in a constant battle with my phone because I don't want to live inside of a device, right?

I want to live in the world among the trees and the sky and the people.

Okay, only sometimes the people.

But I, like so many of us, spend so many hours

scrolling through stuff on my phone. And often it starts like this. I pick up the phone to look at

something for work. I see, oh, my friend texted. Oh, I have an email. And then I'm sucked into a black hole.

That's the allure of smartphones. It's essentially you went to your smartphone. You opened it up to do something and you end up doing something else.

And it's hard to quit because my phone plays so many roles in my life. It delivers messages. It's my alarm clock, my GPS, my camera.

It's what I used to quickly get a ride to the other side of town. But we have learned there is a path forward here to something less

hectic, less all-consuming, and more human. My name is Jose Briones, and the title of my book

is Low Tech Life, a guide to Mindful Digital Minimalism.

Jose is the guy to talk to about this.

He had this problem himself right after college.

He realized he was spending 12 to 13 hours a day tethered to screams, especially his phone.

What he needed was for his phone to be less interesting.

He needed a boring phone.

Yeah, a boring phone or a simple phone as opposed to a smartphone. They look like a smartphone, but they don't have access to all of the

apps that a regular non-filtered, non-customized smartphone will have. So essentially anything with an app

store would be a smartphone to me. And anything without

...