Leave a message after the beep

Jeremy Rellosa used to watch TV shows and movies from the '90s and revel in how the characters walked around untethered to a smartphone, with no expectations of constant connectivity. So he decided to run an experiment on himself: he'd live for at least two weeks without a smartphone. No Slack. No text messages. No Instagram or WhatsApp. If his friends, family, or boss wanted to reach him, they'd have to call him on his landline. Sure, landlines were the norm just a couple of decades ago. But in our always-online world, how feasible is the landline life, really? Ben and Amory call Jeremy up to find out. Show notes: "I Turned Off My Phone for a Month and Used a Landline" (New York Magazine https://nymag.com/strategist/article/replacing-iphone-with-landline-phone.html#comments) This episode was written and produced by Grace Tatter and edited by Meg Cramer and Dave Shaw. It was co-hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson. Mix and sound design by Paul Vaitkus.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for WBUR comes from the Quiet Tension Podcast. When Joe Missoula got the Celtics job, Steve Paliuka sat up until 1:00 in the morning, typing him 25 things about leadership. Dr. Sharon Turbin asks what came first on the list. Listen closely wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:19Amory Sivertson?

  Support for Endless Thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.

• 0:34Speaker 02

  Ugh, I hate Mondays.

• 0:36Speaker 03

  King's Hawaiian cinnamon swirl bite?

• 0:37Speaker 02

  Uh, Taylor Hansen? Sure, I'll try one. Mmm.

• 0:43Speaker 04

  Hey, let's get back to work, please.

• 0:45Speaker 02

  But Taylor Hansen's making my day way better with these new soft and swirly King's Hawaiian cinnamon bites.

• 0:49Speaker 04

  Taylor Hansen? Nice.

• 0:51Speaker 03

  Try one.

• 0:52Speaker 04

  Mmm.

• 0:56Speaker 05

  King's Hawaiian cinnamon bites. There's nothing like it.

• 1:05Amory Sivertson?

  WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

• 1:15Amory Sivertson?

  Jeremy Rellosa is usually a pretty punctual guy, even on early weekend mornings.

• 1:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  He puts his slippers on on time. He brews his coffee on time. Even when he gets out of the house, he does it on time. Usually. Earlier this year, Jeremy was supposed to meet his friend Matt at a pub in Manhattan.

• 1:38Speaker 05

  I watch soccer with my friends on the weekends at this pub, and I was supposed to meet him there at 9:00 a.m. And we made plans on the way.

• 1:44Amory Sivertson?

  9:00 a.m.?

• 1:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, 9:00 a.m.

• 1:46Amory Sivertson?

  On a weekend?

• 1:48Speaker 05

  The Premier League games start early here.

• 1:50Amory Sivertson?

  Okay, oh, that makes sense, yeah.

• 1:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  Jeremy and his buddy Matt had planned their early morning soccer viewing the night before.

• 1:57Speaker 05

  We were like, 9:00 a.m., we'll see you tomorrow. I was like, great.

• 1:59Amory Sivertson?

  But then, later that night, there was a huge snowstorm. In the morning, all the trains were massively delayed.

• 2:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  Train delays in the city of New York? Shocking, we know. Attention, passengers. We are experiencing delays on

• 2:18Ben Brock Johnson?

  Jeremy ended up getting to the pub at 9:35, more than half an hour after the agreed upon time.

• 2:28Ben Brock Johnson?

  And Matt, Matt wasn't there.

• 2:36Speaker 05

  And I'm like, wow, he, he must have shown up, left because, and like waited and then left because I didn't show up.

• 2:45Ben Brock Johnson?

  You may be thinking, why did Jeremy not just text Matt to give him a heads up? Service isn't guaranteed, but it's getting better on the train.

• 2:54Amory Sivertson?

  The reality is Jeremy hadn't used his cellphone in weeks. It was dead, in a drawer, at home. When he'd made plans with Matt the night before, it was on a landline.

• 3:08Ben Brock Johnson?

  Remember those landlines, copper, physically connecting our communication devices? Yeah, we all used to have those. Luckily Jeremy had Matt's number on him because he'd written it down. Again, because of the whole landline thing.

• 3:24Amory Sivertson?

  So Jeremy asked the bartender if he could use the bar's phone to call Matt, who apparently is one of the few millennials who will pick up a call from an unsaved number.

• 3:34Speaker 05

  And he's like, I'm so glad you called because I'm, I'm running late too in the snowstorms.

• 3:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  This is how it used to work. Once you left your house, you were unreachable. People had to leave a voicemail on an answering machine with a cassette tape in it, or it was digital. All you people leave your voicemail boxes full so you don't ever get new voicemail? Do you even remember what voicemail sounds like? Hey buddy, hey man. Hey Jeremy, this is-

• 4:06Speaker 04

  Grace. Red Leader. This is Blue Leader. Yo, Jeremy. How about that game? Oh, my God.

• 4:18Amory Sivertson?

  And if you weren't home when they called, you wouldn't get their message until hours later.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  Hi, Jeremy. It's Sydney. I have someone to set you up with, so you should call me back. Bye. Hi, Jeremy. This is Andrea's sister, who is good friends with Sydney. And I know she's given you a heads up. But they have made it their life's mission to connect us. So I wanted to go ahead and call and leave my number.

• 4:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  Jeremy is friends with producer Grace Tatter. He is also an associate editor at New York Magazine, and he wrote an article about this experiment to live without a cellphone for two weeks, at least.

• 4:53Amory Sivertson?

  Jeremy wanted to live a dream many of us have had of being untethered to our smartphones, living a perhaps simpler life, spending less time looking at a screen.

• 5:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  So we talked to Jeremy about his experiment and how it's changed his friendships, his love life, also how it's changed him.

• 5:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm Ben Brock Johnson.

• 5:17Amory Sivertson?

  I'm Anne Marie Sivertson, and you're listening to Endless Thread.

• 5:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  Coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR, today's episode, Leave a Message After the

• 5:38Ben Brock Johnson?

  Cellphones had a huge impact in the 90s by making it easier to call each other on the go. But the advent of the smartphone, really in 2007, absolutely changed things because you could be on the internet all the time.

• 5:53Amory Sivertson?

  It took the Pew Research Center a few years after, at least the iPhone came out, for them to do their first survey about smartphone ownership. In 2011, they found that 35% of American adults at the time said they owned smartphones. And then just five years later, in 2016, that number had doubled to 70%.

• 6:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  Fast forward to 2025 and 95% of American adults had a smartphone. We are now constantly jacked into the internet. The borders between the meat space and our pixel space have essentially collapsed. It is a pixelated meat mess.

• 6:34Amory Sivertson?

  And despite all that connectivity, we're feeling pretty bleh. And we yearn for that time before. Nostalgia itself is booming. In a 2023 survey, 60% of Gen Z adults said that they wish they could return to a time before everyone was plugged in. More and more, they're searching out things that were before dial-up, often, admittedly, with the help of the internet.

• 7:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  Millennials too, we're all feeling it, man. We want to go back, including our landline lover, Jeremy, who loves watching TV shows and movies from the 90s.

• 7:13Speaker 05

  Hey, Scotty, it's me. I was born in the 90s. Hi, how are you?

• 7:16Speaker 03

  Hello, hi, hi.

• 7:17Speaker 05

  So I didn't really get to like, kind of like, live that lifestyle, like, fully as an adult.

• 7:34Speaker 05

  I'd just tell friends at parties, it's like, oh, how great would it be to just use a landline and not have to like text or use, like, be like on our phones like constantly?

• 7:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  And his friends would be like, sure, sure, but life with a landline seemed like a fantasy.

• 7:51Speaker 05

  But then, I don't know if you guys remember this, but there was a, like, a Verizon outage, kind of like a nationwide outage in January. And here in New York, a lot of Verizon customers went without service for a few hours.

• 8:13Amory Sivertson?

  Jeremy was one of tens of thousands of Verizon customers who couldn't connect to local cellular networks at all for most of the day.

• 8:21Speaker 05

  And the next day at work, we had like a pitch meeting and we were all talking about the outage. And it was clear that there were like two camps that formed. There was like people who were like, this was the worst thing because I couldn't get anything done on my phone. I had the worst time. It was such an unproductive day. And then there was another camp of folks in the meeting that were like, that was the best day I've ever had. Because I was completely off my phone. I didn't have to check it. And how nice it was to just take a break from our screens.

• 8:50Ben Brock Johnson?

  That gave Jeremy the idea of ditching his smartphone on purpose. His only phone would be a landline.

• 8:59Speaker 05

  I thought, oh, this like goes hand in hand with my 90s fantasy to live a little bit more simply.

• 9:07Amory Sivertson?

  So what was your relationship to your smartphone before this? What were you spending your time doing on there?

• 9:15Speaker 05

  I think I was actually put off by the amount of texts I was getting from friends in group chats. And that was like kind of the primary mode of communication with like most of my life. I think the thesis for this was like, I don't think we were meant to have like 80 open conversations going at once. I wanted to like really simplify that.

• 9:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  My group chat is sometimes it is blowing up so hard. And I just like, those are the times at which I most recede, you know? Where I'm like, oh, 20 messages, I'm not catching up with this.

• 9:53Speaker 05

  Absolutely. It almost felt the same way I feel when I have a lot in my inbox, like for work.

• 10:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 10:01Amory Sivertson?

  Yes.

• 10:01Speaker 05

  I was like, I shouldn't be feeling this way about my friends reaching out to me.

• 10:05Amory Sivertson?

  And what about social media? Are you, you know, are you someone who's spending time on TikTok, Instagram, all the things?

• 10:13Speaker 05

  The only app, social media I have is Instagram. I felt like I was like taking in so much information from people who I just didn't have any real relation to in person, like in my personal life. It was just like, kind of like an overload of information that I felt like was just piling up in my brain.

• 10:33Ben Brock Johnson?

  So Jeremy texted his closest friends and family and made an Instagram story for everyone else to say, "Call my landline."

• 10:43Amory Sivertson?

  He planned to run this experiment for two weeks. Of course, in today's world, Jeremy couldn't go totally offline. He works at a magazine. His job is to know what's going on.

• 10:54Speaker 05

  I set some rules. I was like, well, I do have to use my laptop and email for work.

• 11:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  But he didn't download the desktop versions of smartphone apps like iMessage or WhatsApp. And he wouldn't log into apps like Instagram using a browser. He powered down his phone and put it in a drawer.

• 11:21Speaker 05

  The first few days were so exciting. It really felt like the days were longer because I was just seeing so much more, just like on the train and like on my walks to work and to the train station. I think it was the second day where I was like, oh, I can do this for a month.

• 11:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  So he decided to keep going, baby.

• 11:43Amory Sivertson?

  Instead of getting regular updates from group chats, he talked to his friends on the phone at the end of the day. And that's it. Was there FOMO, though, in the sense of like, to not be on, to not be reachable in all of the group chats and the, you know, the...

• 12:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  There could be whole inside jokes developed without you. Everybody could be talking about the Donut Man when you get back. And you're like, who's the Donut Man? And they're like, oh, yeah, you weren't in the chat, man. I don't know what to tell you.

• 12:15Speaker 05

  We replaced you. We replaced you with the Donut Man.

• 12:20Speaker 05

  Thanks, guys. Yeah.

• 12:21Ben Brock Johnson?

  This isn't the Donut Man.

• 12:23Speaker 05

  My friends would call me and then... I'd ask, can any updates from the group chat? And they would just relay it to me on the phone. And that was really fun.

• 12:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  You got the digest version.

• 12:33Speaker 05

  I got the digest version, yeah. My friends would just tell me over the phone, the important, like, kind of like more concrete, important things.

• 12:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  Like, you've been replaced by the Donut Man. That's an example of an important thing.

• 12:48Speaker 05

  So, it's so funny you say Donut Man, Ben, because there's our senior art critic, Jerry Salz, I don't know if you've seen, if you know him, but he comes around the office every time he's here and has a huge plate of donuts from Dunkin'.

• 13:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  I love that guy.

• 13:03Speaker 05

  That he just passes around to everyone. And my mom, it's so funny, my mom is like, oh, is the Donut Man in the office today? I'm like, Mom, he's won a Pulitzer Prize. He's our senior art critic. He's not just the Donut Man. It's like, oh, that's right.

• 13:19Ben Brock Johnson?

  Am I in the group chat?

• 13:22Speaker 05

  We can add you now, Ben.

• 13:23Ben Brock Johnson?

  How do I know? The Donut Man is a thing, okay.

• 13:29Amory Sivertson?

  Okay, so Jeremy was getting the landline digest. As for Instagram, he admits he probably missed some big life events from old friends, semi randos, and somewhere in betweens that he's followed on social media for years.

• 13:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  And no offense to those people, for the most part, he does not care.

• 13:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, it felt like a lot of my feed on Instagram and a lot of just people online were not the real people that were important to me in my personal life or my real life, which is such a weird thing to say that like, my real life is, I guess I should say like, more in person. But all the important things, my friends would just like, kind of catch up with me about.

• 14:14Amory Sivertson?

  So staying in the loop wasn't hard for Jeremy. In fact, it was in some ways easier because without his iPhone and all of his apps, his loop was right-sized, circling around the people Jeremy actually cares about.

• 14:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  There was one thing that was a little more challenging, though. Dating.

• 14:34Amory Sivertson?

  Smartphones have removed a lot of the friction from setting up a first date.

• 14:38Ben Brock Johnson?

  I thought the whole point of dating was friction, but whatever. Without a smartphone, you can't text your date as you're approaching to let them know what you are wearing, so they don't go up to the wrong person.

• 14:49Amory Sivertson?

  And if you arrive first, you can't pretend that you're nonchalantly absorbed in your phone while you wait.

• 14:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  These days, when you no longer even have to pick up a phone and talk to a real person to order pizza, people are kind of phone call phobic.

• 15:04Amory Sivertson?

  So Jeremy wasn't sure how dating with just a landline was going to go, but he was optimistic.

• 15:11Speaker 05

  And it's just like nice to just be a person in New York and just experience it that way and kind of leave yourself open to like connections and maybe meeting someone kind of randomly. And I think about two weeks in, I got a voicemail from my friend.

• 15:30Amory Sivertson?

  Remember this?

• 15:32Speaker 02

  Hi Jeremy, it's Sydney. I have someone to set you up with, so you should call me back. Bye.

• 15:36Ben Brock Johnson?

  Jeremy did call his friend back, and a few days later, he came home to a voicemail from someone who wasn't in his Rolodex.

• 15:45Speaker 02

  They have made it their life mission to connect us, so I wanted to go ahead and call and leave my number.

• 15:51Speaker 05

  It was actually really exciting to do something like that, but I could tell there was like maybe a little hesitation to communicate solely via the landline, even like from the get go.

• 16:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  Jeremy realized that talking on the phone in real time is more vulnerable because you're not able to wait a few minutes to think about the perfect response or ask friends to tone check texts.

• 16:17Speaker 05

  Leaving a voicemail was the easier option, especially when I would tell them like, hey, I'm actually at the office most of the day, so if you call during the day, I won't answer. So they would be a little bit more inclined to like leave a voicemail, knowing I wouldn't answer. It was like a little safeguard to.

• 16:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  That's pretty cool.

• 16:36Speaker 05

  It was, no, it was interesting. Like, you know, we set up a date and, uh, you know, this time and place, like, two days from now. And then you just hope they show up.

• 16:47Ben Brock Johnson?

  I mean, that is interesting these days, but also this is how it used to work all the time. Hey, meet me at the candy shop at 6:00 PM so we can hang. Cool? See you there.

• 16:58Amory Sivertson?

  Jeremy and the woman his friend set him up with had two good dates, but ultimately...

• 17:06Speaker 05

  I know, that sounds like, like, what an awful payoff. Sorry, guys. You're like, oh, great. That was the worst story ever. Uh, okay.

• 17:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  Even in the halcyon days before smartphones, not every example of setting someone up was a success.

• 17:27Amory Sivertson?

  So no era is perfect. But will Jeremy stay in the past? Or will he be sucked back into the suck of the present?

• 17:36Ben Brock Johnson?

  We explore the suck in a second.

• 17:53Speaker 00

  Support for WBUR comes from the Quiet Tension Podcast. There's a part of high performance that drives you, shapes you, and pulls at you too. Rarely spoken, almost never examined. That's the quiet tension. Coming up, psychologist and executive coach Dr. Sharon Turbin with Steve Paliuka on what separates the leaders people follow from the ones they don't. Stay with us for a preview. Listen closely wherever you get your podcasts.

• 18:21Speaker 02

  Ugh, I hate Mondays. King's Hawaiian cinnamon swirl bite? Taylor Hansen? Sure, I'll try one. Mmm.

• 18:30Speaker 04

  Hey, let's get back to work, please.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  But Taylor Hansen's making my day way better with these new soft and swirly King's Hawaiian cinnamon bites.

• 18:36Speaker 04

  Taylor Hansen? Nice. Try one. Mmm.

• 18:44Speaker 04

  King's Hawaiian cinnamon bites.

• 18:46Speaker 03

  There's nothing like it.

• 18:51Speaker 03

  How many discounts does USAA Auto Insurance offer? Too many to say here. Multi-vehicle discount, safe driver discount, uh, new vehicle discount, storage discount, legacy discount.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  How many discounts will you stack up? Tap the banner or visit usaa.com/autodisc量 restrictions apply.

• 19:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  Emery, you know I love a cold call and I love, love, love to leave a voicemail.

• 19:13Amory Sivertson?

  I call you for no reason, rumpa bum bum. Oh, do you ever, Ben?

• 19:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, Davey boy, the box, the box, they're calling.

• 19:28Amory Sivertson?

  And I love that you love to leave a voicemail.

• 19:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm calling you, I'm calling you, I'm calling you to figure some stuff out. So do you, though, so do you. Where is them?

• 19:45Ben Brock Johnson?

  Where is them? Part of what I love about cold calls is that it involves a little chance. You know, we both happen to be free at the same time in an overscheduled life. A short phone call is something that doesn't require like a calendar invite. It's not like a Zoom coffee. You know what I mean?

• 20:03Amory Sivertson?

  Right. You can't plan for it. It's just chance and magic. Jeremy Rellosa, our man on the landline beat, felt the same way.

• 20:12Speaker 05

  Weirdly, you'd think do not disturb mode would be something that I would really like, but because of like, oh, I, I, I want like an, I want like less texts, but weirdly like, no, I want people to call me. Like, I want like that more intentional, just like.

• 20:30Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 20:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, like you said, serendipity, like, oh, I'm here by the phone. I am answering because you called. Like, that's, that's, that was kind of a secret goal was just like more serendipity.

• 20:45Amory Sivertson?

  Serendipity, though, has its drawbacks.

• 20:48Speaker 05

  Spontaneous plans were out the door. I couldn't really make plans on the fly when I was out on a Friday or Saturday night. I just had to stick to the one friend I was meeting and maybe we would go around town somewhere else.

• 21:09Amory Sivertson?

  Unless you start knocking on doors.

• 21:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, I actually did, on the last day of this experiment, I thought it would be nice to just see if my friend would answer his buzzer at his apartment. And let's see if it, this is my last grasp at an analog life. So on my way home from work, I just walked by his apartment and I rung his buzzer. And then he answered and let me in and he was there, him and his girlfriend were there just making dinner and they had me in. And I left with a piece of cake and it was such a nice little end to the experiment. They're like, oh, this is like, people, it's, people just have to pop in by.

• 21:53Amory Sivertson?

  This is your next experiment, Jeremy. No phones at all, just door knocks.

• 21:56Speaker 05

  Just, oh my gosh. Some friends were like, oh, the next logical step is just snail mail. You just have to send letters.

• 22:03Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, God.

• 22:07Speaker 05

  Well, that might take a while.

• 22:10Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, it might. It would. And even with his apparent laid back disposition, Jeremy has also had to admit this grounded lifestyle is hard in 2026.

• 22:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  Jeremy ultimately made it 51 days without a smartphone before being pulled back in by things like pictures of his baby nephew in the family group chat or to be able to switch up plans on the spot.

• 22:34Amory Sivertson?

  Can you summarize what role your smartphone plays in your life now? How do you, when do you use it? When do you not use it? What's the new, the new Jeremy phone policy?

• 22:48Speaker 05

  I use my phone, I'd say probably about like 50% of how I used to. So like, I don't check it as often. I get less texts than I than I used to because I've been removed from some of the group chats I wasn't replying in, I can tell. So I mainly use it almost like a dumb phone in some regards where I just just answer. I just I just use it as for the for the calling feature, which is so funny to say. I use the phone for the call in feature. But that's, um, yeah, I do that. And then I I guess I text with intention and like with with

• 23:33Speaker 05

  close friends and my family group chat.

• 23:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  Of course, Jeremy knows it would be challenging for a lot of people to replicate his experiment. His workplace was actively supportive of his unreachable ability. He doesn't have kids or a pet. He lives in a densely populated area within biking distance of many of his friends.

• 23:57Amory Sivertson?

  But he says there are ways to capture the magic of the landline life without actually getting a landline.

• 24:05Speaker 05

  I think it's really helpful to think of our phones as tools because when I was just using my landline, I was like, oh, well, how am I going to get to this point? How am I going to find this like restaurant while I'm out? So I was like, oh, my phone, my cellphone functions like a GPS or a map. I found it helpful to to kind of split all of the use cases or the apps of the phone into like, oh, what am I really using my phone for? And kind of reframing like how I'd use it. And I think once I did that, or once you do that, you it will feel less like this all encompassing

• 24:49Speaker 05

  kind of like time suck.

• 24:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  Is it fair to say that you think we should cold call our friends more?

• 24:56Speaker 05

  Absolutely. I think I think we should be just just calling off the rip, just, hey, what's up, man? I will say, I will say one of the delights of having a landline.

• 25:10Speaker 05

  Was getting really, really trivial voicemails. Basically, the text equivalent of a voicemail being left from my friend because it felt like I was kind of tapped into that world. So I think we should call our friends more. Leave a voicemail. And when they don't answer, leave a voicemail. Exactly. Right?

• 25:35Speaker 05

  Love you, man. Hope you have a great day.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  Peace. Oh, my gosh. Where's my phone? Okay. Bye for real. Peace, brother. Wow. Catch you later. See ya. Come new. So have a good evening and I'll talk to you soon. Bye.

• 25:49Speaker 05

  Hey, this is Jeremy. I can't make it to the phone right now. Just leave your name and number and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. Thanks.

• 25:57Amory Sivertson?

  Hey, Jeremy. This is Amory Sivertson from the podcast Endless Thread and I'm gonna read some credits for you.

• 26:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, Jeremy. It's your old buddy Ben Brock Johnson calling from WBUR.

• 26:11Amory Sivertson?

  Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was written and produced by Grace Tatter and co-hosted by me, Amory Sivertson.

• 26:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  It was edited by Meg Cramer and Dave Shaw. Mixing sound design by our production manager, Paul Vikes.

• 26:26Amory Sivertson?

  The rest of our team is Dean Russell, Koyani Siksena, Emily Jankowski, and our managing producer, Suma Tojoshi. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between not getting a text back from that person you went on a date with because they're just not that into you, or because they got rid of their cellphone to write a magazine article.

• 26:45Ben Brock Johnson?

  If you have an untold history, an unsolved mystery, some other wild story from the internet, or a voicemail you want us to leave for you, hit us up. [email protected]. Okay, goodbye.

• 26:57Amory Sivertson?

  Okay, bye.

• 27:19Speaker 00

  Support for WBUR comes from the Quiet Tension Podcast with Dr. Sharon Churbin, psychologist, executive coach, and a close listener to what lives beneath high performance. Here she is with Steve Paliuka, who built Bain Capital and helped bring a championship back to Boston, on the thing the best leaders do that most don't.

• 27:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  The best leaders kind of give credit and take blame. When something goes wrong, they're the first ones to take responsibility for it. And they see the good in the other people on the team. They don't immediately try to deflect whatever problem there was, what went wrong. You miss the sales target on the salesperson, they reflect on themselves and what they could do better. Same thing, you know, what Joe Mazzulla does in basketball. If you see his press conferences and the Celtics don't play well, the first thing he says is, you know, "I need to coach better. I made a mistake here. I made a mistake there." Not many coaches do that. But that's why the players love Joe, and that's why, another reason, he's a great coach. So there are things like that that you learn. There are

• 28:21Ben Brock Johnson?

  many, many more things like that I learned from people like Red Auerbach and my classmates from business school and sports and all the rest.

• 28:30Ben Brock Johnson?

  And really, what an array of leaders, because leadership is both the same and

• 28:35Speaker 00

  different depending on the environment that you're in.

• 28:40Speaker 00

  Listen for more of the Quiet Tension wherever you get your podcasts.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  Ugh, I hate Mondays.

• 28:47Speaker 03

  King's Hawaiian Cinnamon Swirl Bite?

• 28:49Speaker 02

  Taylor Hansen? Sure, I'll try one. Mmm.

• 28:54Speaker 04

  Hey, let's get back to work, please.

• 28:55Speaker 02

  But Taylor Hansen's making my day way better with these new soft and swirly King's Hawaiian Cinnamon Bites.

• 29:00Speaker 04

  Taylor Hansen? Nice.

• 29:02Speaker 03

  Try one.

• 29:03Speaker 04

  Mmm.

• 29:07Speaker 04

  King's Hawaiian Cinnamon Bites. There's nothing like it.

• 29:15Speaker 04

  USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day, like superheroes and sidekicks, or auto and home insurance. With USAA, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at usaa.com/bundle. Restrictions apply.