Noble Mobile

Hello, I’ve got a big announcement this week!

In 2020, I ran for President on the vision of Universal Basic Income and a human-centered economy, with the core idea being that AI was going to make the economy more difficult for Americans as jobs were automated away, and the answer was more money in people’s hands.

That process is happening even faster than I imagined it would.

During COVID, I lobbied for cash relief checks and my org gave away $8 million to people who were struggling. I also advocated for Americans having ownership of our own data, which is being sold and resold for hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

One frustration I have had with advocacy – it runs aground of the folks in D.C. getting their acts together, which may take a while.

One person who is attacking America’s cost of living right now is my friend Mark Cuban, who started CostPlus Drugs. CostPlus Drugs buys generic drugs in bulk and then sells them to the American people at a narrow margin. Mark is saving people’s lives every day and slicing billions of dollars from the amount of money that Americans are spending on drugs that are getting marked up by Big Pharma. That’s real impact.

Inspired by Mark, I thought to myself, “Can I help lower Americans’ costs on something we all use or need?” There are a number of costs that are making Americans unhappy right now:

1. Housing

2. Health Care

3. Education

4. Food

5. Fuel

6. Transportation

7. Wireless / Data / Internet

Americans spend about $300 billion a year on our cellphone services and data through companies, and the average American is spending over $1,000 per year ($83/month). There’s a lot of excess in there; the big carriers – Verizon and AT&T in particular - are paying shareholder dividends of over $18 billion per year and spending billions more on marketing and storefronts. In other countries, people are paying less than half as much for their wireless as we are. There’s a data tax of billions that most Americans don’t think about.

Verizon is #1 in market share. I paid Verizon $140 a month for my own cellphone service for years. I know, I’m a chump.

Could I get us our cellphone data more cheaply, and then pledge not to sell or use anyone’s data? Of course discount wireless brands exist, but 9 out of 10 of us don’t use them because they seem low-quality. We would need to build a different kind of brand. If I could get my own costs down to $50 a month I’d save myself over $1,000 a year. We could give people cash back each month for their unused data, and even grow those rewards for them at 5.5% a year to increase their savings even more over time. Right now, a lot of us pay for an all-you-can-eat-data-buffet while simultaneously wanting to use our phones less. We could introduce rewards for using your phone less and let people share in the savings and improve our mental health.

There wasn’t a values-based wireless carrier in the U.S. Market. We could build one.

What would we call it? We spitballed a bunch of names. Human Wireless. Purple. Noble Mobile.

Everyone loved Noble Mobile. Easy to spell, easy to remember, fun to say. Plus, it expressed the mission perfectly. It would be Noble Mobile.

Last year I showed up at the headquarters of one of the major carriers. Happily, some of the employees there were fans of mine. We went and hammered out a deal to license enough data to serve millions of customers.

I went and recruited a team and raised $10 million from like-minded investors who wanted to help people save money and preserve our brains.

We threw a no-phones ‘Offline’ party that drew hundreds of people in New York. There was clearly a big appetite for a better relationship with our phone.

After months of work, we turned on the network to test it. A few weeks ago, I switched from Verizon to Noble.

It was weird; I’d been on Verizon for 25 years. How was it going to work? Would I notice any change?

I sat down and went through the switching process. It took about 5 minutes. The icon on my phone changed from ‘Verizon’ to ‘Noble.’ It was still my phone. Still the same number. I started texting people and making phone calls.

They were like, “Why are you calling?”

“No reason. Just making sure everything works.” It was the same experience. It was that easy.

I genuinely felt freer. Maybe it was the fact that I had just gotten myself away from a vendor that I’ve never loved but felt like I needed, that I knew I had been overpaying but felt sort of beholden to.

It turns out I didn’t need them. What else could I improve?

I felt like Rocky at the end of Rocky IV: “If I can change, then you can change, then we can change!”

I looked at the little savings wheel on my phone. It started out with $20 in a potential data dividend for that month. The more I doomscrolled – which I am as guilty of as the next person – the less money I would get back at the end of the month. And any money I sock away grows at 5.5%. My mobile plan would become a little stash of cash as opposed to something I just threw money at each month. My savings would shoot up if I told a friend.

We are going to take our cellphone plan from something we see as simply an overpriced utility to a tool that can improve our lives and help us achieve our goals: financial health, mental health, and getting out there and living life.

I hope you’ll join us. It’s time to Noble-ize an industry that has lacked humanity for way too long. Check us out at noblemobile.com. And if you call us, you’ll get a human. Heck, it might even be me. We have set up ‘founder’ perks for the first people to join.

The people-centered revolution in data starts now.

This week’s Offline Party in New York on September 18^th is the launch party for Noble Mobile! I am pumped to save Americans a billion dollars or more on our data and get people looking up. Please check Noble out and join us. Our first ad ‘Put Down Your Phone’ is here – filming it was a lot of fun.