Ep.19: Chris Kaspar – Founder of Techless & Creator of the Wisephone

Chris: Yeah, and now you're getting right into the heart of some of our UX design principles is that we want to incentivize good yet challenging behavior that builds character and disincentivize the stuff that ruins it. So we may never just totally blacklist a specific behavior, but we want to make it as painful as possible. So if you had a Whataburger, in your pocket 24-7 and it was hot and warm and delicious, how often would you eat Whataburger? All the time. But if you have to drive 30 minutes to a surrounding town and oh, what do you know, a water burger hamburger cost $25 Like all of a sudden you're like, it's what I'll go do it once a month instead Is it worth it? And so we get to control because we own the platform and the device level controls We can control the incentive structure to push people towards in real life interactions and further out of digital interactions And that's again the couch co-op thing. That's better. Now is it better to play outside with the Frisbee? Yes, but we get to nudge people that direction and the defaults of all the devices out there are pulling us the opposite.

Evan: Welcome to Y'all Street, today I speak with Chris Kaspar the founder of Techless and the creator of the Wisephone. So Chris you're in a cup of coffee? All right, so we got you this man of wisdom coffee mug For the Wisephone because you are quite the man of wisdom.

Chris: I love it That is awesome. Thank you so much.

Evan: So, you know Tarek asked me to kind of fill in for him today on the podcast, but I I think he has some ulterior motives, you know. He knows I'm Gen Z, and so he thinks that I have this like perpetual phone addiction simply because I'm Gen Z.

Chris: Okay. What's your screen time?

Evan: Oh no, you're right. Oh gosh, uh, so he thinks I have a perpetual phone addiction and I undoubtedly . . . Oh No, all right, let's look it up. Okay. I work on my phone a lot. Okay, three hours and 40 minutes.

Chris: Okay, that is a record-low actually.

Evan: Today . . . daily average is like seven and a half hours. Not terrible?

Chris: Yeah, you're about average. Tarek is kind of right, but it's all good. Let's have a good conversation about it.

Evan: So you started Wisephone and Techless, so kind of walk us through, what is Techless? What is the Wisephone and you know, what was the genesis of them?

Chris: Sure. Sure. So about six years ago or so, my wife and I had foster kids. We were taking care of 10 and 13 year old girls and the caseworkers dropped them off at our house and we filled out the big two-inch stack of paperwork because we're taking on a new sibling set. They walked out the door and right as they were walking out they said, "Hey don't let these girls near anything that looks like a smartphone." We said why not and it's because they've done some really dark stuff with their devices previously And they told us some details and it was pretty bad. And in that moment, we had this really sticky conundrum that actually all parents have which is what do I do? Am I a jerk and take away these kids phones and don't let them have this freedom that they're used to and acclimated to that the world expects them to have, and be Luddites and sticks-in-the-mud or do we just let it slide and let this thing that destroys the very essence of who they were as human beings go . . . and that catalyzed a bigger question of, hey, what's wrong with kids technology? Why is this such a question? And we sort of dove into it. And I can dive into more detail, but basically that was the beginning of the journey—the first question—that moment that said, something's really broken here. What should we do about it?

Evan: So how did y'all handle it with those girls? How long did you have the girls?

Chris: Yeah, so around that time it was fascinating I was actually working in a fifth-gen family business—manufacturing company—

Evan: Yeah.

Chris: And we were working on bringing Lean Methodology into the family business. And one of the tenants of lean is To error proof systems, which means create a system that cannot be bypassed or usurped— it just works and it functions the way and it removes user error. A simple example, if a door constantly forgets to be locked you're like you could say, oh, these people aren't locking the door, or you could just put in a new lock that automatically locks. Now, no one can forget to lock the door. So that's an error proof system. And at the end of the day, the phone itself wasn't inherently evil. But the systems, the design philosophy was, and so we thought about it and came up with an Amazon Alexa device. Back in the day the, you know, the long skinny trash can tube, and we gave it to them and said, here you go. No boundaries. No restrictions because the very nature of the device itself was error-proofed from doing the things that were destroying them. It was this non-visual interface to the internet. They could do all kinds of stuff. The worst they could do is listen to some explicit music. That was nothing, compared to what they'd had previously and so basically, out of that I came up with this principle that, hey, device level boundaries are good. And what that did is our relationship with them got so much better. That was the catalyst, was really like, hey, this thing —I gave it to you— I trust you with it. We empowered them with the device and at the same time we weren't the bad guys, and right now in most tech world—parent tech relationships parents have to play defense, they're constantly arguing with their kids, and there's this tension, and so device-level design is was a breakthrough for our relationship.

Evan: So did you have them for a little bit of time with no phone, no technology, nothing? And then did you introduce this after a few weeks?

Chris: This was a matter of days because I didn't want to go too far. So when they arrived they didn't have phones. So thank goodness. We didn't have to take away anything, And so we just had to ask, what do we do. And we wanted it to be quick. We really wanted to be like, those first few days, when you get foster kids, establishing normalcy as soon as possible as good. And we've already had probably four kids come and go in our house previously, and we just wanted to be as normal as possible. So this was a very quick—like—all hands on deck. Let's come up with a solution. So I think it was two days after we received them. We said, "Hey, here's this Amazon Alexa device. Have fun."

Evan: And so you gave them something that there were no boundaries on but at the same time you kind of pulled out any need for self-control,

Chris: because they didn't have the option in that Amazon Alexa to do things that would be harmful for them. Sure, and there might have been a few settings that we changed so we could actually have some boundaries, but they loved it I mean they plugged it in all over the place. They'd go downstairs and plug it in and talk to it and play—ask it jokes and they go upstairs and do stuff and then they would take it outside and there's a couple times— I think one time they left it in the rain, and it didn't quite—the music wasn't as good after that I said, hey, this was your device. This is your responsibility. And so that trust—here you go—was that was the breakthrough as we trusted them with this thing.

Evan: And so you realize that these principles, that technology is not inherently bad, it is not inherently evil, but when it goes too far it can cause bad, it can cause evil. And you just immediately think I need to start smart dumb phone company. I mean, how would you describe it?

Chris: It was a journey. I had probably like seven different business ideas of things that I wanted to do and started running numbers. I was more like 25, bunch of ideas. Started running numbers on the top few—a very intentional journey at the middle of this experience. We were having with our kids and that journey with the kids got more personal. It was like hey something's wrong with the kids devices. There's nothing out there for kids. But it opened up this deep dive for me on a theological level, on a personal level, on a family level, on a societal level. What's wrong with our technology? How do we even get to the place where our technology is just screwing up our kids. And went and realized it's not just kids. It's actually much bigger than kids. It's society at large and I think now, everyone's starting to say it, see it, feel it. Five years ago, I was the crazy guy in the room that said no this stuff is starting to really mess with us in a bad way. and so through that journey of wisdom and understanding and knowledge I basically came to the understanding that this is one of the greatest opportunities for impact in the world. And so I have this lens of I want to have the greatest impact I possibly can and this rose to the surface out of the different ideas and I said, okay, this is what I'm gonna do is and so I dove in, you know piece by piece, but took increasingly larger risk personally to make this come to life.

Evan: Personally from like, a financial perspective or time perspective? I mean, dove in fully?

Chris: Financially, risk, relationship. I mean you go out and say I'm gonna do a startup and you're doing an established business established job established role, like, people may not understand that, and so there was relational risk associated with it. And I said, hey, this is an unproven market. No one's done a kid's phone before. Oh, wait. I started doing more research . . . there's a bunch of people that did do kids phones and they all failed! Disney launched a kid's phone and you haven't even heard of it because there's a lot of complexity and nuance to the product category itself. And so I called up a founder that launched a kid's phone and failed—I did research and read articles and started doing market research, and I said, you know what? I'm gonna put in $50,000, and we're gonna test the market and see if there's enough viability and do fake ads to see if there's traction here and product market fit, and I had certain thresholds. If that does well and we get certain metrics come in line then we're gonna get other investors involved and put in half a million dollars and do tests and basically stage-gate the investment both personally and financially, professionally, etc into making this thing come alive. But at any given point, four different moments, it could have been like, nope. We didn't make it, close down shop, but doors kept opening.

Evan: Wow yeah, and they typically do. I think that's a theme people see and a business like yours and with a theme and a morale like you guys have. I mean, I think you know we know where the solution is going you come to a phone that looks a lot like an iPhone or an Android, right? I mean y'all are now with Samsung, correct?

Chris: Yes. We use Samsung hardware.

Evan: Okay, so y'all use Samsung hardware and you can't really tell that much of a difference, but you don't have a lot of the opportunities for bad. I think from coming from a Gen Z standpoint, phone addiction is like a massive deal. Right? Like, we all make jokes about like, I do not want to raise an iPad kid. I refuse to raise an iPad kid. And then what do we keep seeing you go to a local Chili's and Everybody has an iPad kid and it's like why do they have an iPad kid because it's it's always become sort of like babysitting It's so easy. It's so easy. It's so easy. You're tired— you worked a long day. It's so easy! But I think it goes beyond that of like, addiction is one thing. But I had multiple friends and in college who who really struggled with looking at things and watching things on their phone that they shouldn't have. And their solution was a flip phone. I had multiple friends who walked around with a flip phone, and they totally embraced it, and they loved it. But it was absolutely necessary. And so you have flip phone on one end, right? You have iPhone that you can access anything in the world on the other end. That's a spectrum I mean, there's no easy answer. Talk us through sure all the different decisions that you had to make where y'all have come to. How has it changed over time?

Chris: Yeah, you're hitting on some very important philosophical breakthroughs we had in our product development. So, you're right. The choice was—flip phone—Amish—Luddite—completely disconnected, T9 texting. This is terrible—or fully connected. And maybe if you're fully connected you could have, in the instance of your college buddy, some type of accountability partner or people helping you. But regardless, even with a smartphone, and you're trying to be intentional, people that delete apps . . . you end up reinstalling them. The whole system pulls you to hyper-connected. All the defaults, everything. And so that's the binary that people had when I first launched Wisephone. And when we first launched, we very intentionally did research. We asked, "Why did kids phones fail?" The form factor, is that they were pink, and Barbie, and kiddy-like. Do the baby test: if you give a kid—a little nine-month-old—a toy smartphone or a real smartphone, we know which one they're gonna play with. If the nine-month-old wants it, What about the 12 year old! So, legitimately, kids don't want kids phones. So we said, okay, we're going with standard, off-the-shelf, hardware. Then, we got interviewed to Y Combinator. In our Y Combinator interview, the president of Y Combinator, the top accelerator program in the world, said, "Chris, hardware isn't broken, It's only the software." It's the design philosophy. So I was like, okay, let's not mess with hardware and we don't need to make fancy new things here, that's isn't what's broken. And so when we first launched we started out as a minimalist phone. Okay, we created eight apps, ground up. We made our own OS, and that was it. We had a zero trust system—only our eight apps—nothing more to it. And it was restrictive, and the inconvenience hurdle was high, just like a flip phone. Flip phones are hard to use; this was less hard to use. But still, 2% of people could actually use it and live in their normal life. And so we've actually shifted from Wisephone One was a minimalist phone; Wisephone Two, completely different product philosophy—was a healthy phone.

Evan: Okay, so let's go through Wisephone One. Eight apps. What are those eight apps? What were the mental challenges and the philosophical challenges, the theological challenges that you guys wrestled with, and what did we land on for Wisephone One?

Chris: Sure, and I'll throw in there the financial challenges too! We had a small team—finite budget. I think we had raised around two and a half million to date, and we were trying to do something that legitimately cost 12+ million. So it was a very ambitious project what we did, but we just said, hey, we're gonna start with no trust. We're gonna guarantee some very bold things. No explicit content. No addiction. No distraction. No media. And to do that we had to build, from the ground up, eight apps. So, Maps, Clock, Calculator, Camera, Phone, Messaging, the core OS, you know, Settings, a parental hub that you could actually see everything on the device so every call, message, location history, could be tracked—very robust in complexity. And we even had our own app distribution platform, because philosophically, Google did not believe in some of the core product features that we advertised. Like hypothetically the messaging app. We had our messaging app hosted on the Google Play Store, and it could never get approved because it was too invasive which meant that parents could see what kids are messaging. We philosophically think that that's a good thing. They didn't. So, what do we do? We had to build our own app distribution platform. Because they wouldn't even allow you to be on the platform. They literally bricked devices because they would not allow our messaging app because it's an interconnected app. So, like I said, we innovated, we figured out how to work past it. So we basically created that, and it was extremely locked-down. And the user experience— very, very intentional, very minimal. We had two key people help us with this: one was Josh Banko. He created the Apple iPad. Like, Gen-1 iPad, team lead, at Apple. He helped us with the thinking through some of these questions and making something that served people. And the other one was Eddie Lobanovskiy, and he's the #1-rated UX designer in the world. If you go to dribbble.com, which is like an industry UX design world, and type in "UX designer", Boom! He's the #1 that pops up. And so we put our heads together. The interface was made entirely—all the apps—everything—two colors, two fonts. It was an off-white kind of paper color, and then a dark gray. There was actually no pure black. No pure white; it was shades within. And then, we did a few opacity versions between them. And then icons, we had four icons—the entire device: four icons, two colors, two fonts.

Evan: You know, that's hilarious because one of the things that I have done before that I always revert back to for whatever, you know, rationale I get myself, but on my iPhone, I can put on grayscale., so everything is gray. And I find I'm like, I'm watching the same in Instagram reels or whatever that I'm normally watching and I'm like, "This is just not nearly as fun." And I'm like, I don't want to do this and you hear like the dopamine effect of the colors and how they're kind of coming after you for everything. Yeah, so it's a an interesting decision y'all notice that and said, "We're not gonna be a part of this."

Chris: It was magical! And the truth is, people, like you said, they pick up their phone and they would look at it, and like, want to do something on it and then they would be like, "I can't do anything." They'd put it BACK!! And before long, they disassociated with it. People regularly would just leave their phone. Like, they'd go out to eat dinner, and they would just leave their phone at home! Because it's not this part of who they are anymore. It's no longer enmeshed in their identity, taking up mental space.

Evan: Well, I feel like everyone's natural reaction initially is like, "No, I mean, it's not that bad like it's not that much of an issue." But when you say that, you make me think of like . . . so many times my phone has run out of power—and every five minutes I find myself—pulling it out,

Chris: Yeah

Evan: And clicking it and being like, "Oh it's out of power."

Chris: Yeah

Evan: And then pulling it out, and then pulling it out, and then pulling it out—over and over and over. And those are the times that you realize like this is, "This is kind of an issue." But your experience is that, over time, people get used to it, and they say, "I don't even need this."

Chris: Yeah, 30 days! We've even charted it out. It's very predictable at this point. And that is (laughs) "Ghost Hand syndrome," or whatever you want to call it—a very real dynamic of what occurs in that experience. And there's this journey of like, "Wait, I thought I really needed this thing." And you're like letting go of all these conveniences that you thought were serving you, and you realize, wait a second, no, they're not. And then 15–20 days in, you start to realize wait, I feel different—more peaceful, more, you know, present. I had more eye contact. I feel more human. And all of a sudden, you find ways, little "micro" ways to innovate around some of the challenges or the boundaries we've set. You don't know—you can't look up this thing on a browser— what do you do? You call up your friend and ask him a question! Like that's a very different thing than using Google!

Evan: That sounds, like it sounds crazy! You know, I mean it just does! It's just so against everything that you think of!

Chris: Yeah, What I'm excited about, like to give you context . . . before we launched Wisephone Two, we wanted to be super, super deeply intentional about the product feature set and the way we do that is user interviews. We went and we had another Google product manager who launched a billion-dollar product at Google come in and do exhaustive . . . She did 40 one-hour research interviews, just like this, with our users. She's post Google, been out for 10 years, extremely data, analytical, factual, just like, matter of fact, you know, you can't phase her. And she told me, for the first time in her career, she teared up because she was interviewing our users. And she was just blown away by the sheer amount of transformation in the lives that was occurring within these people's lives. And she was like, "I've never had this happen before!" And so, there are challenges. It's difficult. It's not easy, but neither is eating healthy, or working out. And so basically we have "cracked the code" in changing lives around your relationship with technology in a very profound way.

Evan: You say eating food, right? Do you eat healthy? Working out. Working out's hard—working out stinks.

Chris: Yeah.

Evan: It's a lesson in delayed gratification. I think that in my generation there's, you know, I don't know how small the subset it is, but there's definitely a subset of people that are very health focused, right? there's been a lot of talk about a lot less alcohol consumption in my generation, right? Of like, I think is a Covid thing, but it's like, I want to have interactions, right? And I would say, You know, health has been a big thing, and there's a lot of talk about mental health. But it's interesting that this phone thing is not really one that I guess I hear a bunch in mainstream

Chris: Yeah.

Evan: And I think one of the objections to like how Wisephone One was that people like this have is like, "Hey, from a safety perspective, I need Uber."

Chris: Yes.

Evan: I need Uber on my phone, or, you know, I need my banking apps or something like . . . Has that changed since Wisephone One?

Chris: Yes So that is actually the fundamental difference between Wisephone One, which was a minimal phone and Wisephone Two, which is a healthy phone.

Evan: Okay, just for context I genuinely did not know that! That is crazy that . . . that's encouraging

Chris: This is what comes out of user interviews. And like I said, you put a hundred people in a room and two people could use Wisephone previously. And they would love it! It would change their lives. But the inconvenience hurdle was high. Transportation—I mean, I would travel. I travel the world with Wisephone One and what did I do? I printed out my itineraries, and my boarding passes—ahead of time—in a folder. And I would take them. You know, that's different than what you do. So fundamentally the difference between One and Two is, with Two, we have same control over the OS and such and some of our core apps, but we have allowed third-party tools. So, practical useful things, which you just listed a few of them, we are now allowing them, and we have levels of protection to prevent exploitation or abuse around those things. But banking apps: good. Uber, transportation apps: great. YouTube: no. Games: no. So there's this continuum of unhealthy to healthy, and we are green lighting these and we're curating and we're kind of probably leading in the world— asking that question: what's good for us? What's not good for us—parsing it out. It's not a simple question actually, and allowing good things on the device. And that's now, most people in a room would use it and benefit from using Wisephone Two.

Evan: Yeah, I mean it's not a simple question. I think thats the kind of story that you can put up. That should be the slogan: "It's not a simple question." Because, there's so much of like, yes, but to what extent, right? Are apps good? Yes, to what extent? Is food good? Yes. To what extent? Is working out good? Yes. To what extent? Is work good? Yes. To what extent, right? It's always a question of to what extent. And so y'all have made the extent, if I'm understanding correctly, "Yes" to specific apps that you guys philosophically think are okay. And, then you give the most minimal phone to the parents and you allow them to check or no, like as a second check? Is that how it works?

Chris: Yeah. Basically we have approved only to date around . . . I mean the App Store has millions of apps. We have green lit around 350.

Evan: Oh, wow. Okay, so that's a lot!

Chris: Yeah, and possibly up to a thousand in the next, you know six months or so. But, we have an internal process that includes everything from human audits to AI audits to research to looking at corporate responsibility of the company itself, and if they are just a screwball company, there's inevitably gonna be screwball code if that makes sense. And so we are having a very multifaceted approach, pulling in psychology. We're reading Harvard research studies. What is good for us? What's not? And, as of this moment, It's binary. Yes. We're approving this app. No, we're not. In the future, we are going to evolve that to a more sophisticated system where it's a continuum and a rating of how "unhealthy" are you willing to accept, if that makes sense. And so, yes—you could eat it Chipotle, but not McDonald's—type of question. And we're going to evolve into that.

Evan: That is fascinating. I think that you know a big thing that I did see on it is "solo media." I Remember, you know, you did a Podcast with Matt Fradd a few years ago and solo media was a big piece of this.

Chris: We we saw like almost 3,000 phones off that one podcast episode. It was awesome.

Evan: You should I mean that it's a fantastic podcast, but. And he's just fantastic interviewer.

Chris: He's a good thinker. Yeah. Those are my favorite podcasts, when people come in with good questions, it makes a huge difference.

Evan: Solo media. Tell us what solo media is, and tell us your stance on solo media.

Chris: Yeah, so I came up with the phrase and it is what it sounds like. It's a person by yourself, looking at a device. Solo, I'm enjoying this. And if you even think about like video games . . . I don't know if you actually . . . have you done couch co-op video games in your life, sitting beside someone on a couch? Oh, oh, yeah Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah without a doubt.

Evan: I mean me and my friends used to play every Sports or shooting game that you could find.

Chris: Okay, so there's a huge difference between Halo, which is four people sitting sharing a screen—a split screen—and the new Call of Duty which is one person in one house and another person in another house with a headset on. Like the physical presence of "solo" is different. And so, if anyone ever is just completely checked in to their phone, it's just them in the device. That's like one of the worst interactions we can possibly have. So like, back to our continuum of how healthy is an app for you, if there's a game, and it's a conversation app game and we're sitting beside one another talking with another, that's very, very different than a game where I'm sitting here by myself, you know. So, and you could find slight iterations between that and the other, you know? If we're sitting here side-by-side both touching the device, that's different. It's a little bit better. And so, basically anytime you can just hop in, check out, particularly video streaming, short-form content, that's where it starts getting really bad for us.

Evan: Well, so would you say that somebody Like talking on the on, you know, your mic with your friends who's in a different room. Would you say that that is a form of solo media that you would kind of be against?

Chris: It's worse than sitting side-by-side. It's a different experience, like, literally, your memories, your relationships. Like for example, I get sucked into video games. I love them, like it's my weakness, right? I could go for 20 hours. But I don't own an Xbox for that reason! I really don't. I don't trust myself with it. But, in the future, for the first time, I have entertained the value of, hey, me and my kids, sitting side-by-side, playing something together. That could be a wonderful memory for our family possibly. So that is on the table for me as a father figuring out my family. But am I ever gonna let them just sit there and say, "Here's the Xbox. Here's the screen. Have fun. Go for yourself." Even if they're playing with a friend on the other side of town. That's probably not in the cards at this moment, you know, in my looking at it. So there's a there's a difference there

Evan: Yeah, I mean, I think that that's a great example of a "to what extent" question.

Chris: Yeah, and it really is a continuum. And right smack dab in the middle is music. Like, Spotify. That was a hard one! Our team debated heavily. Do we include this or not. Because it is, like, you plug in your headphones and you check out. But then you look at research studies and show that music improves people's moods. And then at the same time— think about our relationships with music versus 20 years ago, when you had to buy a CD and have it and there was a lot of hassle, I mean, even vinyl. The inconvenience around playing a song actually increased our enjoyment of it historically.

Evan: Okay . . .

Chris: Now you can hit the play button and just listen to six hours of streaming music and there's no burden on you to do it. People's general enjoyment of music is lower than it ever has been in history because of that. We're wrestling with that tension of, "should we allow it or not," you know? So there's that smack dab middle of the road. Is it healthy or not for us?

Evan: I mean and it goes back to the idea of, "This isn't bad, it's how you use it." And, I mean, you said it yourself, I can attest myself . . . the lack of self-control today, is crazy. Like, me first, right. The lack of self-control, is ridiculous. And so how do you make decisions in order to not give yourself the easy option, right, make it inconvenient. One thing for me is, I really try to eat healthy. I try to eat healthy, but I love Whataburger. There's just something about it, I don't know what it is. And I, like, I love some ice cream, whatever it is. And so what I have to do is I have to make a decision one time a week—one time a week I go to the grocery store, and I have to make a good decision, one time a week. I have to check out with healthy food. And I take that healthy food home, and then I'll eat healthy. And every now and then, you know, I might go grab a bag of Cheez-Its or whatever. Yeah, but I'm like, "Man. I'm craving somethin' terrible." I'm like, "Dang it. I don't have it in the house. Let me eat some blueberries." And I feel better, my mood's better, my stomach is better. Everything is so much better. And I have to make that decision one time a week. Versus, if I make a bad decision that one time a week. I have to make that decision almost constantly if that food is in the house. So it's a similar kind of principle, but you have all these . . . Spotify is not bad, as long as it's used correctly. YouTube is not bad, as long as it's used correctly. But where on the spectrum is it of how easy it is, and how likely you are to misuse that? I would say, YouTube, you're probably more likely to misuse in a worse way, in a more significant way, than you are a Spotify, where you can still totally misuse a Spotify, and put things in your head that you probably shouldn't be having in your head, especially when we talk about children.

Chris: Sure. Yeah, and now you're getting right into the heart of some of our UX design principles is that we want to incentivize good yet challenging behavior that builds character and disincentivize the stuff that ruins it. So we may never just totally blacklist a specific behavior, but we want to make it as painful as possible. So if you had Whataburger in your pocket 24-7, and it was hot and warm and delicious, How often would you eat Whataburger? All the time. But if you have to drive 30 minutes to surrounding town and, oh, what do you know, a Whataburger hamburger cost $25, all of a sudden you're like, "I'll go do it once a month instead." And so we get to control, because we own the platform and the device-level controls. We can control the incentive structure to push people towards in real-life interactions and further out of digital interactions. And that's, again, the couch co-op thing. That's better. Now is it better to play outside with the Frisbee? Yes. But we get to nudge people that direction, and the defaults of all the devices out there are pulling us the opposite way.

Evan: Well, let's go back to the couch co-op thing because I think this is important because I think it is a very real

Chris: I'm trying to think of people from my my age group in my perspective

Evan: I think it's a very real possibility that somebody is listening and saying, "No, I think that me being on a headset with my friend is good because if not, I wouldn't be talking to them." But I challenge that person, and I'm challenging myself right now to think like . . . how many times in high school could I have gone and seen my friend who lives five minutes away? But it was a lot easier to say, "Hey, you're gonna hop on tonight?" and sit on the couch and just hop on. And the trade-off wasn't, sit alone and stare at a blank wall, versus talk to my friends. That's what I told myself the trade-off was, but the trade-off, I think a lot more likely is that it was, go hang out with my friends in person versus do this which seemed more convenient at the time.

Chris: Yeah. And the truth is, in that trade-off, say it was go and stare at a blank wall— I promise you, because I've read the research, that's better for you . . . Legitimately! We have lost the art of being bored. Our brains do not even have time to synthesize thoughts anymore, because we have no quiet time, no downtime. I wrote a song about this when I was 16. Legitimately, if we had as a culture 30 minutes a day to just sit and stare at a blank wall like you said, we would be a different world.

Evan: I would love to talk about that. So you said, we have lost the art of being bored. This has been a big thing for me. I've struggled to sleep for a long time. And so one of the things I did is, like, Andrew Huberman did a six-part sleep series. One of the things that the guy who was interviewing said was, a big reason that people really struggle to sleep or that people have their best Thoughts in their showers is because it's the only time that you're not doing something that your brain actually has an ability to process. And so I found myself, like, this is the only time in the day that I'm not actively doing something, and I can't sleep for two hours whenever I lay down, because I have so much that my brain needs to process about work about, you know, social life, about personal life, whatever it is, and I can't even stop to think. What is your opinion on that, , and how does that relate to kind of what y'all do with the Wisephone?

Chris: Yeah I mean So yes You're talking about the health thing, and that starts getting to the edge of my realm of expertise. But in the digital world specifically, the digital world is incentivized and makes money off of you the more you stare at a screen. All the venture capital funds, all the billions, all the whatever's, they make money off of eyeballs on screen. So all of their design principles point you towards screens. And so, is that good for us or not? They don't care, because it's eyeballs on screens, eyeballs on screens equals money, period. End of story. They're not asking that question of what's healthy for us. And so, in a sense the default of the world doesn't care what the answer that question is. Just about more time. I mean legitimately actually, I think it was the CEO of Netflix said that his number one competitor was sleep. If that tells you his perspective on time, attention, eyeballs on screen, that's what he's trying to tackle is, how can I make them sleep less? That was a public statement that he made, and other every other company thinks like that.

Evan: I mean that they're incentivized to make you addicted. Yeah, I mean, genuinely, it kind of makes me sad.

Chris: Yeah. So I'll just tell you, one of our design principles is we do as much as we possibly can to pull people out of digital worlds into real worlds. I mean we whether it's on a relational perspective. We have a relational hierarchy, and we say that, hey, face-to-face is better than a phone call, or a video call, a video call is better than a phone call, a phone call is better than a text message, a text message is better than an emoji. Or a like. We are constantly wanting to push people up, and there's a cost associated with it. It's inconvenient Oh, for you to go to your friend's house and hang out with him, you have to get in a car, or ask your mom if you're young, to go. I mean, that's a painful non default way to go but it's better for us. And the digital world wants to push this down. They celebrate likes and follows and, think about all the things that are awarded— it's all on the lower end of that spectrum. And so we're at tug-of-war. And so, since we control the digital environment, we're pushing people upwards towards them and That's that's the big difference between the two worlds here.

Evan: I like that analogy because I've heard before in social media you become worse and worse and worse friends with more and more and more people. Over and over and over again. I remember when I first got Instagram—I was late compared to a lot of my friends, which was probably 10th grade when I first got Instagram and—one of my friends had like 1,500 followers. And I remember asking him, "Do you have 1,500 friends?" And he was like, "No, dude I don't know who like 90% of these people are." Like that is crazy! And so you're trying to make people . . . I mean, there's just a reality of scarcity of time and that, you know, Britt Harris was on the on the podcast, and he said you can't have quality time without quantity of time. And so there's a scarcity of who we can interact with, and you're just attempting to get people off their phones.

Chris: Yeah! An example: is I had the chance to go spend time in Pakistan recently. And so as I was spending time in Pakistan, I was in a city of six million people. There were two movie theaters, in the whole city. Can you imagine a US city was six million? They're gonna have 2,000. Six million people and two movie theaters. And everybody there . . . first of all— multigenerational family living, so parents live downstairs and their kids and their child or children live upstairs—and secondly, they would sit around and they would talk. They would have coffee —they would just interact like this for hours a day. And they were not as glued to their devices. And honestly, they were more human than we are on a relational aspect. They had wherewithal; they had wisdom. Even the people on the lowest end of the social economic totem pole look you in the eyes and there was sincerity and grace and you could slap them in the face and they would still love. There was something there that's just totally missing today, and I largely attribute that to the amount of entertainment and distraction and just the digital noise that we're facing here versus that experience there. And so, there's a correlation with how digital is your life, the less human you are, I mean, on many levels.

Evan: I mean, I would argue that that is not a fought-against idea. I would argue that the vast majority of people today, I mean, different than what you said like five years ago, but today, I would argue that the vast majority of people agree that that is the case and it's just the struggle of making that decision over and over and over again, right? Like, the grocery example. Make the decision one time to get something like a Wisephone.

Chris: Yes, and that's what I'm really trying to do, is create healthy defaults for a life instead of evil defaults. And that's the very heart of it is, because, legitimately, prior to Wisephone parents didn't have the choice. Even if they wanted to, they aspire to, they couldn't. I mean, there was a Deloitte study probably three years ago. They're like 56% of people want to cut back from their smartphones but they can't, like, they aspire to, like you're saying, but there's just . . . they don't see the option to do it. And so, we're yearning for something that doesn't exist and that's what we're trying to do is fill that gap.

Evan: And I think a big point is that it's not fun, It's not always fun. But I think, like . . . if you're three year old's running around with scissors in their hand they might not really like you at that moment when you take the scissors away, but you know, it's best for them. So from that advice from being a parent, you know . . . I'm engaged; gonna be married. Salt-of-the-earth woman, you know. I want a million kids. We always joke about that.

Chris: I'm on six.

Evan: Hey, Let's Go! So I think it's something that, since I've been engaged I've been wrestling with a lot more, you know. I have time until these decisions get made, and that. But from a parental standpoint, there has to be some level of tension, right? You know, maybe it's not only in your family specifically, but families that you've seen. What are some of those stories? What is that like typically?

Chris: Is it just something that you have to like bite the bullet and say like, "I'm gonna be OK whether they like me or hate me for this decision"?

Evan: I mean, talk through that.

Chris: So that's a huge question. I'm wondering if I can summarize the core truths that lean into the dynamic you're asking about. So first of all. All parents feel stuck. Particularly the ones that are genuine and loving. Like, if you really care about your kids. This is a conundrum that is universal. So that's just the feeling because they haven't solved this thing yet. The other dynamic here is that the world that we're raising our kids in currently—all of the cultural expectations are for hyper-connected worlds; digital worlds. So, they have to, to be a courageous parent you have to fight against the default or norm, which automatically makes you a black sheep in the community, makes your kids a little bit weird. So, there's that dynamic that makes parents feel more stuck.

Evan: Yeah

Chris: The other dynamic at play is that kids actually, you talk about Gen Z and phone addiction and kind of joking with Tarek about it— the truth is is that the younger people are the more aware they are that this is a real issue.

Evan: Yeah

Chris: So I gave that Deloitte study that 56% of adults don't want to, want to cut back from their smartphone usage— I spoke in Shiner. We did a poll of both schools here—450 students—and we said, "Hey, if you could live in a world with no internet, no social media, never has been, never will be, just a pure analog world, how many of you would prefer that world over this one?" And 95% of the students raised their hands. Because they know, they actually yearn and crave and want that parental authority and guidance in their life, even though they won't tell you, if that makes sense. We actually went and got line-by-line. We asked specific students surveys and said, what would you tell your parents if you couldn't and kind of summarize. I mean, we had 400 responses. And some of them were like, oh I look at terrible stuff or, oh I can't tell you what kind of pictures I'm getting on Roblox. I mean just terrible awful stuff. But the number one thing was, "Mom and Dad, you have no idea what's happening to me. You need to do something!" That's the invisible cry that they may not tell you explicitly, but they want. They want a bad guy, even. Even if you're the bad guy if you're like, "Ah, my mom won't let me have a phone!" They have comfort in that statement even as they're ridiculing that, they know that you love them. So, these are the overarching trends in the parental world. But it just takes parents of courage. And, honestly, we found that it works when like a group—five parents—come together, and they make this thing happen together. And that's the impetus for cultural change.

Evan: It even goes a group, I mean, you think of like a like a church community almost, right? A community of people who believe the same things or have the same principles who are able to kind of work off of each other. I think about my parents, you know. I'm the youngest of three. And so they handled myself, my sister, and my older brother a little bit differently. But, I know it's been a big thing for them. Like, they've taught parenting classes at our church since we've been in college and, you know, further on out of college. But I know it's a thought. My mom has asked me just very introspectively so many times like what should we have done different? Did we allow you to do this? Did we not allow you to do this? Did we struggle here? My dad—when I was growing up—always said, "You get what you inspect, not what you expect." So he was always asking me, hey this hey that, and, sure, half the time, I probably lied to him! But at least but I knew he cared! I knew he cared, and then I had to go wrestle with the fact that I just lied to my father about what I was doing on my phone or how much I was on my phone or you know, this or that. And, I think that that's so true of like, yeah, they're gonna push back. It's like, come on. Yeah, you know, but it's it's a courage thing.

Chris: Well, and I can just tell you so you're talking now reflecting back on your parent and that relationship and everything in this podcast right here and I can promise you with full confidence because one of my strengths is futuristic, like I can just see the future. I can promise you, 20 years from now, that your kids—if you're a parent right now, and if you have the courage to love them and set up boundaries and lean into this heavily—that your kids are going to be so grateful. They're gonna thank you. They're gonna respect you. And they are gonna be amazed, and if you don't, your kids are gonna look back with regret at the lost childhood that you took away from them, by being passive and just succumbing to the defaults of the world. That's just, I promise that's the way it's gonna play out. And, so, my message to parents specifically, just have the courage. This is our generation's the talk, right? Our parents didn't want to have the talk and if they did they mustered up the courage for 20 . . . 15 minute conversation. I think we've gotten over that and typically parents now are like, okay, let's lean into this, and let's have multiple talks. And like, this is this generation is the talk which is going to be one of the greatest regrets of us as parents and the kids in the future. So, lean into it, and be ahead of the curve, and don't look back at something tragic because there are tragedies that hit my desk almost every day in this world right now. I'm not trying to be fear-mongering, but there's some very dark stuff going on.

Evan: Yeah, and I think that it's what you've done with Wisephone Two is, you've given all the ability of the parents to make those good decisions, and you've taken away at least the easiest objections. Well, my 16 year old or my 15 year old has to be able to get an Uber. What if, you know, they're out doing something that they're not supposed to. What if they're out drinking at a party and they need To get an Uber. It's better than them driving. There are understandable things that parents could say of, like, I have these safety concerns and so is that kind of where y'all were of like, let's open our arms to more people by kind of throwing these safety concerns out the door.

Chris: Yeah, we wanted to be the easy button. Yes, I want to love my kids. Oh, I just loved my kids. Like that's the goal and at the end of the day— it's so interesting— I just spent two months in the UK for the release of the Online Safety Act, which if you've been following the news at all—high level—it is regulation regarding age verification to access explicit content. A new law. So, in the UK technically if you want to access explicit content, you have to have an ID—all kinds of weird privacy things. . . . But I'm right in the middle of this dialogue with—I mean, we had 44 articles written about some of the stuff I wrote about I mean BBC you name it. I've been in the middle of that conversation. . . . But, at the heart of it. It's a technological solution: age verification. It's this check that's regulating something and It's not gonna be adequate because kids just come up with VPNs or some other solution or workaround or anything. So at the end of the day, actually, our job is to A.) be the easy button for parents. Figure out all the workarounds, all the hacks. We become the experts. We know what all the things are, and that, we are the bad guys also, so that you can be the good guy parent that says, "Hey, here's this device that you can have and I trust you with it and they can hate me."

Evan: Send your complaints to complains@techless@kaspar . . . . (laughs)

Chris: Yeah, and I'm not giving you my email address because I can't tell you how many boys that want to play Minecraft that we don't have on our phone are gonna email me and complain and so be it. I don't care. Like, no skin off my back. I love you enough to not let you waste your entire life playing Minecraft. So we want to be the bad guys, we want to be trustworthy, and we want to be the easy button.

Evan: Well, and you say, want to be the bad guys. I'm sure that, going to bed at that moral, just, kind of conflict with yourself of how far do I go? Have I made something that's foolproof enough that I'm selling to parents and I'm putting my word in my name as a man out there that this product is gonna protect their kids from things that they don't want their kids seeing . . . I mean, is that difficult on you?

Chris: Yeah, and I mean, this is so cool actually, so Tarek has actually been a mentor of mine. So I worked with him very closely seven, eight, years ago? Nine years ago. And, one of the things he said when it came to precious metals is that what we're selling is a commodity, right? It's just gold, just silver. But what we're actually selling is trust. And I'm in that same industry. What we're selling— it's actually not that innovative. All the tech we've had—it's existed for a decade. In fact, Apple, Google, all these guys—they could just snap their fingers flip on the different settings and philosophies that we have and they could solve this. But they won't, because they don't have the courage to take the stances that we have. And, so at the end of the day, we're selling trust. Then—I'm quoting Tarek on that—that's what we're doing. And so yeah, there's a huge responsibility and we're not perfect either. We have a no explicit content policy, but we say we're 99.9% pure. Sounds a lot like gold, right? 99.9%. And then, if you know anything about gold refining—to go 99.99%—exponentially more difficult. You know, four nines versus five nines. I mean, it's just like the innovation it takes to hit that next level of perfection is astronomical. So we're playing in the exact same world. We're selling trust. We have earned that trust. We haven't dropped the ball too many times, but we're not perfect.

Evan: And so how, I mean, we talked about the struggle and the moral and the philosophical issues . . . from just like being an entrepreneur, I mean, in a business starting a company, right? You said you went from the parent company of Texas Precious Metals, you know, 127-year-old, has a very good foundation as a company to saying, "Hey, I really believe in this and I'm gonna dive in full speed." Was it always easy? Has it always been easy? Have you had to learn like, did you know about like financial statements? Could you read them before that? Like what did that look like?

Chris: Sure. So I got a business degree from A&M, so I've got decent chops. And honestly legitimately working in the family business and with some of these smart minds has actually been surprisingly valuable and there's been so much wisdom I've gained through osmosis and just being immersed. And so, the fundamentals weren't hard. I think the challenges that I did not foresee had to do with how complicated technical innovation is. I was just naive to like, holy smokes, tech innovation is like hard, right? So anyway, I came in as a non-technical founder and I partnered up with some of the best tech people in the world. Even then, it was still tremendous amounts of challenges. So, code is hard. Like, you know, so that was one of the challenges. And then, the other piece is—and I think this applies—there's a huge sentiment against CEOs right now. Kind of like, anti Bezos, you know, type, of course. And some of that's deserved, but I also have a new level of grace because of the sheer— particularly in the early days, which I'm coming out of the early days—we're six years in profitable, you know growing rapidly as a company. Yeah. Thank you. We 5x revenue in the last year. So, it's been really good.

Evan: That's awesome!

Chris: It's starting to get fun. But particularly in the early years—and I mean I walked through this with Tarek at Texas Precious Metals and a lot of family business stuff—there is so much grit and just like, yes, fires are gonna burn and, yes, you're gonna get F's on four of the seven core critical business processes, you know? Like you, just cannot do everything with the finite amount of time, capital, especially if you're dealing with really complex things. And what we were doing was complicated. So the more complicated, ambitious, large, visionary stuff is, the more stuff just burns. So I've had to learn to be content with, "Oh, this shareholder isn't happy because I'm not sending updates every two weeks." Does it mess up the business if I don't because I'm focused on serving the clients? Nope. Okay, I can be content with that dynamic. "Oh this legal agreement is like a 6 out of 10 on its stability." Does it matter? No, OK, who cares? Because you're just moving so fast, and innovating so quickly, and you really have to have clear priorities on what truly matters and let other stuff burn. So yeah, there's been a huge personal sacrifices. I mean 3 a.m. meetings with dev teams and you name. It lots. I wasn't gray when I started this six years ago yet, totally. So, if that means anything. There's a whole hidden cost that, you know? And the family's hopped on board with that and they help out so it's amazing.

Evan: Well, and you also I mean you're it's not like you're selling a hot dog stand. I mean you were directly fighting against the largest, deepest pocketed, the most powerful companies in the entire world that, you know, may or may not have, you know, nobody has perfect morals. But may or may not have you know, the morals that a lot of people would want to agree with specifically for their children. Have you have you come into struggles against big tech companies?

Chris: We've hit mysterious struggles. I'll put that way.

Evan: Really. There seems to be a theme of that.

Chris: Yeah, like I cannot claim or attribute without investigation that is behind firewalls type stuff. But there are I have strong theories and suspicions that we have had some pretty strong things connected to the company. But I will say the one thing that is on the positive side of it. I Have seen policies at Google and Apple— really Google mostly—come across the table that I don't know if we can take credit for but we were guaranteed part of the cultural force that gave them the courage to get across the finish line for some of these things, which I am very excited about. YouTube has age verification now. They did it just a year ago. And I mean early on we called them out for like you can literally go on YouTube and see anything you want. They used to have parental features and they defeatured them. They took them out. Seven, eight years ago—they used to have a little checkbox in the controls where you could have that and then YouTube kids came out and it's for five-year-old's. And first of all the content there isn't actually trustworthy. I'll just say that. Yeah, but they changed from YouTube kids, and then they said, okay if you're six and up, we don't really worry about you. We don't care about that. So they just said we're not gonna . . . they literally took the checkbox and it just disappeared for parental controls for YouTube. And so we're in the middle of this, and I'm seeing waves that I think we are part of the group creating them and I get very excited because it's global scale policy wise and we're affirming behaviors in the tech space that are healthy. It's good stuff.

Evan: I think on behalf of everybody, people agree with this, right? People want something like this. I think for most people, they thought the options were iPhone or flip phone. I mean, I think that that's the reality of the situation is a lot of people don't even know. I personally had no clue that something like this existed until like 48 hours ago. Yeah, right? I mean it was like mind-blown. Like I mean, I'm I guess, sure, maybe I had some understanding, like, maybe there was something in between but not something that is technologically advanced, or at least secure, that I can have the safety features and things that I need that I'm not exposed further than that. And I think that the adjustments on to Wisephone Two break down barriers for people, right? What kind of, what is your excuse, kind of thing. And I think that people would commend you for not only fight not only starting a business and the work that it takes to do that and the grit that it takes, but doing it because of a deeper seated belief. I think it's amazing. To people thinking about this on the fence, maybe it's a younger person. maybe it's a parent with children—what's the what's the final word?

Chris: Sure. So first if anything I just said resonates with you, which statistically it does—my advice first and foremost is just do something. Don't stick your head and be an ostrich because you will be worse off because of it. This is not something that you can bury and be at peace in your life. So I want you to be unsettled? Whether that means you go buy a Wisephone or not doesn't matter to me as long as you're taking steps in the right direction. But if it is something you're interested, go to wisephone.com, grab a device, and buckle up.

Evan: I think unsettled is it is a good way to talk about how I feel personally in the moment, right? I mean just the addiction thing. It takes away. It just is such a waste of time, and it's so unrestful. I tell myself, "Ah, I need to lay down on the couch and get a little bit of rest." And then I scroll Instagram reels for two hours. And I stand up and I'm like, "that was so unrestful." It's terrible. So I think that you're solving problems, you're doing a good thing, and God bless you it.

Chris: Thank you so much.