Let’s be honest: you’re probably reading this on your phone. The same phone you checked before getting out of bed this morning. The same one you’ll check again before you finish this sentence.
Welcome to Episode 8, where Tim and James tackle the concept of “disconnecting” — and discover fairly quickly that neither of them is particularly good at it.
The Inciting Incident
It started, as most great tragedies do, with a bike falling on an iPhone. Tim dropped a bicycle directly onto his phone, which responded by going full disco — flashing, glitching, lines everywhere. Not “cracked screen you can squint through” broken. Actually, genuinely unusable broken.
Off to the Apple Store, where he was informed that the repair would take about three hours. Three. Whole. Hours. Without a phone. In suburban Columbus, Ohio — a place that, unlike the woods of a mountain trail, is entirely built for phones.
The parking lot? Park Mobile app. Can’t pay. Fingers crossed, no ticket. The waiting room? Full of people either staring at their phones or staring into the void — and you could tell exactly which ones had also broken theirs.
James had his own version of this story: dropped off his wife’s Tesla for new tires, handed over his phone (because the phone is the key), and sat in a waiting room for 45 minutes with absolutely nothing to do. No plan. No activities. Just vibes.
Intentional vs. Forced Disconnection: A Very Important Distinction
Tim pointed out something worth sitting with: going off the grid on a camping trip is completely different from having your phone ripped from your hands in a strip mall.
When you’re hiking, everyone around you is also disconnected. There are no parking meters. The moose don’t have phones. But when you’re phoneless in civilization, you’re a ghost — no data trail, unreachable, completely at odds with every system designed to process you as a human being. It’s the same feeling as being naked in a burning building.
James felt this comparison needed some unpacking. It got unpacked at length.
The Vulnerability of Going Phoneless
Stripped of his device, Tim described feeling genuinely naked and vulnerable — the kind of awareness that you normally suppress by immediately opening Instagram.
James brought up “raw dogging” flights — the trend of sitting on a plane for hours with zero entertainment, just existing with your thoughts. Tim’s verdict: he could do it, but he would absolutely not be getting off that plane in a better mental state. Two hours of staring at the seat in front of you is not the meditative retreat people claim it is. It’s just suffering with good posture.
The phantom buzz conversation was equally illuminating. James gets them. Tim doesn’t — because his Garmin watch buzzes for the things that actually matter, so his phone stays on silent, and the phantom anxiety moves to his wrist. This is progress, technically.
Hobbies That Actually Help (Sort Of)
Tim gardens. Leaves his phone inside because he’s afraid it’ll get dirty. The Garmin handles the important stuff. This counts as disconnecting.
James plays pickleball — sometimes for two to four hours at a stretch, phone in the bag, wife calling because she doesn’t believe anyone actually plays pickleball for that long. He also went through a Pokémon Go phase where he kept his phone in his pocket during matches to hatch eggs, which he confirmed was very distracting and not worth it.
They also discussed sharing location with spouses. Tim does it. It’s dramatically reduced the “where are you, are you in a ditch” texts. The downside is that it creates a searchable record of how many taco restaurants you visit at 1am. The answer, apparently, is: a lot. And sometimes you stay in the parking lot after to talk about the tacos.
Would You Rather: The Disconnection Edition
No episode is complete without putting Tim and James in impossible situations:
Round 1: Four weeks off the grid but you return to 10,000 emails that must be read in chronological order, no triage — OR no vacation at all this year?
Tim nearly took “no vacation” just to avoid reading 60-email threads out of sequence. It was a near thing.
Round 2: Lose the ability to mute notifications forever — OR never send a message after 5pm?
Tim sends 2am messages “with no expectation of response” purely to clear his mental buffer. The idea of not being able to do this created visible distress. James pointed out you could just… put your phone in another room. Tim had genuinely not considered this as an option.
Round 3: Laptop shuts off after 8 hours — OR chair that delivers a small electric shock every 15 minutes past 8 hours?
Tim chose the shock. Immediately. Without hesitation. The man pre-games his coffee with an energy drink — small jolts of electricity every 15 minutes is just called Tuesday.
Round 4: One hour a month for your favorite hobby — OR unlimited hobby time, but it’s critiqued in real-time by your most judgmental family member?
Tim noted this is more or less his current living situation. His wife did not review this episode favorably.
Round 5: One full year completely off the grid — OR 10 years of normal life with at least one notification every 30 minutes (unmutable)?
Tim would genuinely thrive off the grid. He’d garden, he’d hike, he’d be fine. His only concern: coming back to a year’s worth of layered internet memes with no context. “You’d need 20 to 30 years of internet history to decode some of these jokes.” A fair point.
The conversation then evolved into a detailed plan for Tim to go rogue on Survivor — specifically, to make it to the finale before dramatically crashing the winner’s announcement, naked, having eaten bark for six months, to prove a point about who the real survivor is.
Jeff Probst, if you’re reading this, the door is open.
The Takeaway
Disconnecting is good. Intentional disconnecting is better. But if a bicycle falls on your iPhone and forces the issue, that works too.
Also: unsubscribe from marketing emails. Tim did it at the start of the year and bought significantly less stuff. Then spent the episode explaining how to game discount codes by abandoning your cart and waiting for the re-engagement email. So, you know — it’s complicated.
Find Breaking the Build wherever you get your podcasts. Apple, Spotify, or wherever strangers are politely ignoring each other in waiting rooms.
New episodes drop regularly. Tim’s phone is currently in one piece.