the rest of the success to mainland new zealand. you're in the stream. has the enter brought us closer hi, i'm lisa fletcher and i'm on the stream and you will met a family spending a year who put it to the test and deciding to live like it's 1986 with rotary phones and paper maps and what they learned from wi-fi for living and households choosing to go off the grid and is big data watching you and some are riding personal information trails from the internet and why it's a lot harder than you might think.

my digital producer and cohost is here and bringing feedback through the conversation and a lot of people go off the grid or pull back from technology for environmental or political reasons but when you realize how we are all trapped there is a personal protection reason you want to do it too. >> i went off the grid and lasted 13 minutes without my smartphone and for today's show i took it back to 1984 and letterman jacket and channelling tom cruise for all the right moves and we describe this life to the community and life off the grid and a life without phone and basically life in hell basically and we did seem to manage just fine over ten years

ago without smartphones and now maybe two days and the days were impressive but say i see less about cell phones and internet and more about being responsible and i would love to take stewardship of a piece of land and my own life. >> living in the digital age revolutionized how we live, love, interact and process information but at what cost? as we become dependent on smartphones and tablets more ask if it is to the detriment of family lives, social skills and even intelligence and a video created by gary turk recently went viral with 28 million views urging the online generation to look up more often. >> took a step back and opened my eyes and looked around and realize the media of social is anything but when we open the computers and it's the doors we shut. all this technology we have, it's just an illusion,

community, companionship, a sense of inclusion yet when you step away from this device and delusion you awake and see a world of delusion. >> we may not to look down any more, a pew report of future of digital life predicted by 2025 we will essentially be one with the internet and one of the reports contributors said we won't think about going online or looking on the internet for something, we will be on line and just look. it also said that will fundamentally change what it means to be social. >> there is pizza at the next corner. >> how do we embrace rapidly changing technology without losing the very things that create the complex emotional human experience, could reaching back to similar times for some things be the answer? we are joined up with guests who unplugged to recharge and joshua and cofounder of the website the

minimal list and author of everything that remains and blogs about simple living and goes for days without using the internet. out of canada blair and morgan, they and their children just completed a year of living without modern technology as if it were the year 1986, thanks to all of you for being here. blair, you and morgan are raising two young kids and one day your five-year-old son was playing outside on a beautiful day and wants to be in the house on his tablet and that really got you thinking. >> yeah, it just started making me think about how different life was when i was a kid when you didn't have these modern gadgets in your face. >> so how did you approach morgan with this and when you did was she open to the idea of living like it was 1986 for a year? what did you do come up and say gee honey let's go back 25 years ago? >> she was on a business trip

and i sent a text message and i said i have an idea that is good for the family but it will involve you putting away the ipad and she just came back with what? no, way, i'm not really feeling that but i'll listen to it and now we have an mullet and we are here. >> morgan, what convinced you to do it and what was the adjustment like going back more than 25 years in time essentially? >> i guess it shows i love him since i did it. but when he first told me i thought he was crazy and i wasn't quite sure about it but i would support him in what he needed to do and when i thought about it i said we will not lose out on this and we will win either way and do it. in the beginning i was a stress case going up to it and just knowing how much stuff i had to get rid of and i was stressed out for probably weeks after too but once we got the hang of it it was all right. >> what did it do for your family? what did it do for your kids after you got over the initial

shock? >> well, when we started the project we moved into a house that basically mirrored the 80s and we wanted to have our house basically be like the house i was raised in with your dinner table and no technology on the main floor and you had your t.v. room in the basement sort of deal. i think it forced our sons to play together a lot more, they were not distracted as much and it also helped me and morgan just helped them out and be with them even more because we were not distracted with our phones and little things like that. >> lisa before the show we were talking about how our job and getting inundated with technology and takes away from the human interaction and world peace says then hanses the quality of the connection while lowering the quantity and he is talking about going off the grid of technology. official tweets and it takes skills to tweet and post but that doesn't equate to

interpersonal ability, good human to human real time connection enhances dwighting and social media so you don't have a mullet and look like a christopher from the 1970s, i have to say that, social media is just a tool. at the end of the day. we can't live without it, my job depends on it but how can we use it responsibility without di connecting from the present moment and people? >> it's important you talk about responsibility because i think with great power comes great responsibility. >> yes. >> exactly. so figuring out how we can use these things more deliberately like a chain saw and if you buy a chain saw you can cut down a tree about to fall on your house or hack somebody up, chain saw massacre style, it's all about how you use the technology whether or not it's adding value to your life or whether or not it's adding to noise. i found i have long periods of time by removing things as a minimalist, i don't think it's about deprivation but sometimes

i'll do this experiments to try to remove technology from my life to see how i can bring it back in but use it in a more intentional way. >> we see videos like the look up video at the top of the show and 38 million views and it's resonating with people and people feel conflicted with technology in their life. >> we talk about how eventually we will be on line is part of our life but right now we are in this moment going from the way things were in 1986 to the way things are now. and the question isn't should we live without technology, the question is how can we use it more deliberately. i'll sgi -- give you an example, i went for a couple months and got rid of my smartphone and there are few pay phones these days and had no phone at home but learned about myself and learned the

smartphone was a great tool but i could use it differently and no longer needed facebook or e-mail on my phone but i have music on it, gps, helps me get around and i have twitter on it because i enjoy a quick tweet now and then and how does it add value to your life and it is different for each one of us and mine may not add value to yours. >> how has your year-long experience changed how you and morgan and your family view modern technology? >> i can say i agree with what joshua just said. you just want to decide how you want to use it. right now we are in the stage he is talking about, deciding what we want to use and what we don't want to use and ultimately it's allowing us to use our tools better we can say. >> your year-long experiment ended you choose not to go back to all the technology, you are

slowly integrating what you need? >> yeah, for us basically right now the internet is a treat. we don't have the internet at our house yet but we have been over to my brother in laws and parents' house and used the internet and that is how we got our twitter account but we just haven't picked it up yet. we are still behind and stuck in the 80s, check out the hair. >> we love the hair, thanks to both of you and thank you for being on the show. coming up, next life completely off the grid, a fascinating couple from hawaii has lived independently of the power grid for more than 20 years in a homeworking entirely off solar energy and we talked to them about getting on the grid for an hour to tell us why they did it. a bit later hiding from companies who make billions collecting data about you, is it even possible to stay in the shadows? we will see you in two minutes. sound complicated.

but don't worry. i'm here to take the fear out of finance. every night on my show i break down confusing financial speak and make it real. >> these protestors have decided that today they will be arrested >> these people have chased a president from power, they've torn down a state... >> what's clear is that people don't just need protection, they need assistance. >> from cupcakes to cronuts, what makes food fashionable? plus culinary and craft-brew creations building a billion doll

♪ as a communications professional i cannot live off the grid nor would i want to, interactions on social media helped me network for my career but i can understand the allure of a tech-free lifestyle. teaching kids away from the digital distraction can strengthen family bond. >> welcome back and discussing ways people are disconnecting from modern technology and out of maui, hawaii are people who lived off the grid for more than 20 years and believe disconnecting made their family more connected and we are joined by michelle, a science journalist who stopped living

off the grid after 15 years of doing so and says this lifestyle allowed her to live more comfortably and thanks for joining us and no baby steps for you guys and you went all out. what motivated you to go off the grid? >> well, what we really wanted to do is live in a way that was earth friendly and because of that we decided to find a way to generate our own electricity and to grow food and to create housing in a way so that if everyone, if the population of the planet lived in similar ways that the planet would benefit and not be polluted and hurt. but we did it, a process, we are totally in a sense we are off the grid but the idea that we are disconnected, we decided to go for complete connection so we are on the internet. we have electricity.

we have washing machine and satellite t.v. the difference for us is we brought the grid and integrated it with nature and the natural life, with growing food and being in nature. >> so, michelle, you know there are two kinds of living off the grid, the kind that will and kalema do integrated in society but for environmental and political reasons they have chosen to do this on their own. then there is the other kind where you move to a comune and isolated and completely off the grid and the latter is what you chose. what was that like for you? >> well, we were disconnected in a sense in that we were living in an isolated place. we were 70 miles from the closest, small regional airport. probably 100 miles from a

"starbucks." >> that would kill me. >> yeah, we were connected with our neighbors and we were connected with the people in the small town that we lived near and close to. but we were completely off the grid in the sense that all of our power was produced by solar panels and we similarly we still had internet. i could still work as a journalist remotely. i traveled for reporting trips. but and we had some creature comforts and we had hot water and i could run my laptop and all those things but there were small things we didn't have, a toaster and drier and things that use a lot of power. >> when did you go back to a more traditional way of living? >> it wasn't that we were really uncomfortable living off the grid. it was that where we had bought land, where we could afford to buy land in an isolated place was disconnected from a larger

community. and i have a five-year-old daughter and as she got older it was clear she would be much happier being within walking distance of her friends, things like that. so we tried to create our own community and in the end found that we needed to plug into that larger community. >> so many community members want to live the life that you are living and scott says what do you miss about life without technology and it's peacefulness and all caps and he says getting there i have rooftop solar and storage and electronic vehicles but it's tough to be 100% off the grid and said i deleted facebook three separate times, instagram twice, this is my second twitter account and it's addicting and feels like you are always missing out and i want to get you in the conversation and i'm not crunchy like lisa and

i'm soft like peanut butter and i would die in the opening credits, how do you make a guy like me to be more like you and like robinson cousteau? >> you have to bring the balance you are missing back in your life and do it in baby steps because humans don't like to change quickly most of the time. we are like dinosaurs and take as long time to get the message to our brain when we step into water. so the rising waters are forcing us to integrate this new way of life into our collective awareness and the internet is helping us to do that as well. it's an incredibly valuable tool. but, you are right, you can get trapped in it. so my suggestion is to look for balance in your life, whatever it takes to balance it and try to stay there, a balance is illusive and you will jump in

and out and you will try things like the minimalist tried to restrict certain things to see how that feels and then rebalance but it's all about taking responsibility personally and collectively to integrate and to become more balanced. >> so, joshua, you lived off the grid for four months at a cabin in montana. >> yeah, i moved into a cabin in the middle of no where on the side of a mountain and there was one traffic life and i was inspired by a pond and compare it to turning down the volume all the way, getting out into the middle of no where allowed me to figure out what was really important in my life and as i reintegrated, it was a temporary experiment and i think it's something anyone can do for a week or summer and it was silence and for me it was four months in a cabin and i wrote the most resent book i wrote there and unplugging allowed me

to turn the volume all the way down so i could slowly turn it backup as i reintegrated myself in the real world. >> how do you embrace rapidly-changing technology without losing these things that make us human, those complex emotional relationships? >> you feel like you are always missing out but here is the key, no matter what you do you will miss on 99.9 percent of everything that is going on in the world and you have to be able to accept that and figure out what are the things that add value to your life, if it's twitter or television that is great, if it's living in the middle of no where and focusing on a small community that is great, it's about you and what will add value to your life. >> thanks to our guests and michelle and joshua and we talked about how living off the grid helps preserve your state on mind and what about your privacy and we will find a search engine that doesn't track

your every move like google and others, we will see you in two minutes. >> audiences are intelligent and they know that their needs are not being met by american tv news today. >> entire media culture is driven by something that's very very fast... >> there has been a lack of fact based, in depth, serious journalism, and we fill that void... >> there is a huge opportunity for al jazeera america to change the way people look at news. >> we just don't parachute in on a story...quickly talk to a couple of experts and leave... >> one producer may spend 3 or 4 months, digging into a single story... >> at al jazeera, there are resources to alow us as journalists to go in depth and produce the kind of films... the people that you don't see anywhere else on television. >> we intend to reach out to the people who aren't being heard. >>we wanna see the people who are actually effected by the news of the day... >> it's digging deeper it's asking that second, that third question, finding

that person no one spoken to yet... >> you can't tell the stories of the people if you don't get their voices out there, and al jazeera america is doing just that. welcome back. we're discussing contemporary ways individuals opt out of the we are discussing ways people are opting out of modern technology and the ways some concerned citizens are responding to on line personal data collection and joining us out of san francisco, cofounder and ceo of whitaker that self destricts your pictures and audio and video messages for you and on skype is gabrielle of the search engine duck, duck, go and first of all why are you wearing sunglasses? >> so far there is no pictures of my eyes on google. trying to keep it that way as long as possible. >> is there something about the eyes that allows you to be more

identifying than the rest of your features? >> it's just trying to decrease your digital foot print in any way that you can. that is one of the ways i have been successful so far and i try to keep it going. >> how are you so hyper vigilant of on line issues? >> i have been educated by the best hackers in the world and they have taught me that the n.s.a. adjust what we deal with snowden here is just the tip of the iceberg. surveillance has gone mainstream. i now teach kids how to eavesdrop on your cell phone calls and look at your text messages and turn on your interfacing camera on your smartphone or lab top or smart t.v. and people are doing these things very easily today and i don't think most people realize it's going on. >> so they mentioned n.s.a., your website traffic actually

had an enormous jump after revelations that the n.s.a. was tracking american's personal data. why do you think we saw this level of response from the public? >> you know, we always knew that people didn't want to be tracked and they don't know what to do about it and we see you and people highlighting the alternative and switching to with little or no sacrifice to reduce your digital foot print and when people understand they can do that a lot of people do make the switch. >> well they both mentioned digital foot print and asked the community is it possible to have a zero digital foot print in the digital age and they say collecting answers from those off the grid will send via pigeon post and i will layout crump's for pigeons. anything i do on line i assume it's in the public realm. is it possible to have zero digital foot print and speaking

of facebook and if i don't want to be tagged and i am tagged and four square feel check me in i can't control other people's behavior, should we try to achieve zero foot print or just minimal? >> everyone on the show today has a digital foot print of sorts and if you are off the grid you use internet to get food and so it's not really about having zero digital foot print and believing big brother telling you that resistance is futile. it's about being aware and controlling your digital foot print and all the ways that you choose work for your lifestyle. i personally choose to boycott facebook. and i don't use any social networks because if you read their privacy policies of facebook, twitter, snapchat, swipe, -- skype you have to give up a transferral license for eternity for the company for

anything you input in the service and a privacy policy should be called an ownership policy and people would read it. >> what search engine do you use? i'm just curious. >> i use google search engine and assume everything on there is being tracked. one of the things i do there is feed it a lot of miss information. i also use google maps because i don't see another way that works well for my lifestyle. so i'm aware of those two. i also use blako on super privacy search doing health searches because health searches are valuable and thousands of lists out there sold by data brokers all the time with lists of rape victims or erectile sufferers, mental disorders and these data brokers are collecting every piece of information they can about you from search engines and social sites and all the different things you do out there. >> so you started the search

engine called duck, duck go and how is it different from the other ones that niko just referenced? >> at duck, duck go we are anonymous in a sense we don't store any personal information so our privacy policy is very safe in that regard. but we also focus on over all better search experience. in particular instant answers about results so when you go out and search and generally a site out there you are looking for that has the answer and we made it our job through our community to pair searches with the right answer and put them above the links in real time for you. >> in europe basically it allowed people to perjury now this digital history and we asked the community should they be allowed to perjury digital history and says it should not replace cautious usage but should be able to expunge their on line past. do you think users should expunge their past and do you think it's doable in this day

and age? >> i agree with nika it's not a black or white thing and you should try to reduce your foot print whenever possible if that is easy for you and what is nice is that there are some simple things you can do that really gets you a lot of the way there without much sacrifice. using duck, duck go or private search engine is certainly one of those things. you can install a few add ons in your browser that make you stay on encrypted connections a little more and block third-party tractors and it may sound complicated and they are not and it what's a download and when you do that your foot print is reduced a ton and i'm sure everyone noticed the ads on the internet, all that is as a result of the tracking and that is a, annoying and b they can charge higher prices on the internet and can be reduced by a few simple measures. >> good advice from both of you and thank you to you and your guests and until next time we

will see you online.

cities are doing right now that the rest of america can learn from. also going mobile. why investors are getting into trailer parks. plus robots down on the farm. that technology that has cows pretty much milking themselves. i'm ali velshi. this is "real money."