X Gets a Brazilian Ax + Founder Mode + Listeners Respond on School Phone Bans

25:50And one of the things that people pointed to as evidence of that was that they had not actually opened an office in Myanmar and yet had become the dominant social media platform there. So I think what you're seeing on the part of countries, yes, obviously there's some desire to control speech on these social networks because now governments understand that that's an important place that political speech and disagreements are happening. But I also think it reflects the underinvestment of these social media companies in learning about and establishing some local context for the many places around the world in which they operate.

26:21And countries, I think, understandably are saying, wait a minute, you can't just like parachute a social network in here and expect that that's going to be OK with us because we have different values, we have different priorities. And in Brazil, where they did just have, you know, an attempted insurrection, a riot after an election where there was a lot of misinformation involved, I think there's some arguments for national sovereignty there and being able to say to a platform like X, wait a minute, you actually can't just play by your own rules. You also have to play by ours if you want to operate in this country.

26:50That's the steel man version of the argument. I think that makes sense, you know, but at the same time, do we think that if there is a country that is oppressing its citizen and they have no right to free expression, like should American companies try to provide tools for those people to communicate and post online? Or should they just say, well, no, that goes against the local laws and so we're going to stay out of it? I don't know. I mean, I think that is sort of the defining question that faces not only the platforms, but these governments. Jack, do you have thoughts on that? Do you have thoughts on American tech imperialism, Jack?

27:19Are you for or against? I'll say I'm just not going to criticize Judge Marais, that's all. But I think as journalists, this is why we love this story so much, because there's really good points on both sides. I think it's really reasonable for governments to expect a company that has a huge effect on society, a huge effect on democracy in their countries, to want to have a way to hold those companies accountable. And at the same time, I think it is great, potentially, if some of these companies, in situations when there are governments that are overstepping or acting in sort of an autocratic way, have a way to still give people a tool to communicate.

27:59So this is messy stuff. Yeah. Well, Jack, thanks for coming on and explaining all this. Or as they would say in Brazil, obrigado. Boa. De nada. All right, Jack. Thank you. All right, thanks, guys. When we come back, fire the person closest to you. We're going founder mode. That's pretty good.

28:39All right, Kevin, are you ready to go founder mode? I sure am. You know what? Founder mode is not just something that's incredibly fun to say and just a word you can use to justify any behavior. It is also the subject that Silicon Valley has been obsessed with as they debate an essay by the venture capitalist Paul Graham called founder mode. Yeah, so periodically in the tech world, there are just kind of these ideas that catch fire and become very central to the tech industry's sort of conception of itself, how founders and CEOs and investors think companies should be run. And we've seen a number of these over the years, but this one, founder mode, has really taken hold over the past week.

29:18It's all anyone is talking about on my feed, at least. Yeah, founder mode is kind of the hawk tour of venture capital this year. And if that means anything to you, I'm sorry. So what was this essay? Well, look, Paul Graham, who is often called PG, that's how he's known, was a co-founder of Y Combinator, the very successful, influential Silicon Valley incubator that gave rise to Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, and many other companies. and he wrote an essay recently that was based on a talk given by Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb. And in that talk, Brian Chesky said that he had come to believe that he'd been given really bad advice about how to run a company and that the conventional wisdom on how to run a company is you should hire great people and get out of their way.

30:06Just let them run, right? I've heard this myself many times over the year. This is the way to be a good manager, right? Hire good people, get out of their way. And Brian Chesky did that, and he felt like it started to have really bad effects for the company. All of a sudden, he was less aware of what was going on. The company's performance started to tank. And so, Kevin, that's when he decided he had to go founder mode. And how would you explain founder mode to someone who has never heard of it? I mean, if I wanted to be glib, I would say it's micromanaging. If I wanted to be less glib, I would say, well, instead of just delegating almost everything to a bunch of trusted lieutenants, you decide you're really going to keep your hands in all of the details.

30:46And one of the ways that Chesky has described it is, I don't want my company to be working on anything more than I personally have focus for, right? So we're not going to have a million different businesses that I know almost nothing about. We are going to keep it limited to my field of view, and that is what is going to bring a success over the long run. And PG picked up on that and ran with it. And I think he probably ran further with it than Chesky would have. But he really situated it in this debate that Silicon Valley has been having for the past few years now, which really comes down to how much power should employees have versus how much power CEOs have, right?

31:25This is a discussion that we've had before in the context of like how Elon Musk changed Silicon Valley after he bought X, right? He came in and he said, you employees, you've had too many ideas. I'm gonna go founder mode. He didn't actually say that, but he acted as if he had, right? I'm going to go founder mode and I'm going to be the sort of the last word on everything around here, right? It really galvanized a lot of people. And I think Paul Graham sort of sees something similar in Brian Chesky. Yeah, I mean, this is something that I've been sort of observing for a few years now. When Elon Musk took over Twitter, I think a lot of people saw that acquisition as a disaster and his management of the company as being an example of how not to run a business.

32:04But I also started hearing from sources in Silicon Valley who were founders and CEOs and investors, people with stakes in large successful businesses who actually looked at what Elon Musk did at Twitter and said, that actually is appealing to me. So Elon Musk, in a way, like became kind of a management hero. Basically, the bosses of Silicon Valley were kind of rooting for what Elon Musk did at Twitter to succeed and wondering if they could do a similar version of that at their own companies. Yeah, and of course, I don't think PG's essay would have taken off had he only said CEOs should have more power or they should be more involved in their businesses.

32:40In order for it to really take off, he would have to denigrate someone. And that people wound up being the managers that these CEOs hire to delegate some of their work to. And here was his quote. Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great when it's described that way, doesn't it? Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground. So that is the quote I think that explains why Silicon Valley got obsessed with us because, of course, there are way more managers than there are founders.

33:13And Silicon Valley and Y Combinator in particular are obsessed with the cult of the founder, right? These founders are these almost religious figures who sort of step into the world with a brilliant idea, and they give rise to these empires. And Y Combinator is always sort of promoting this idea that it is the founder from which all innovation springs. And there were a lot of managers who had something to say about that, which was essentially, PG, you're going a little crazy here. Right. I mean, I think we should just say, like, why it matters that people in Silicon Valley are talking about founder mode all of a sudden.

33:48And to me, the real stakes here are that the workplace and management trends that start in Silicon Valley often spread throughout the economy, right? I mean, years ago, some HR executives at Google had this idea about bringing your whole self to work, right? That was like a line that was very popular at Google for basically telling people, you know, you're not just a corporate drone. We want you to be yourself. We want to create this sort of safe psychological environment for you at work. And that rippled out to all these other companies and all these other industries that had nothing to do with tech.

34:20And so if your manager at your, you know, shipping company or your restaurant started all of a sudden talking about bringing your whole self to work, that was because of something that had happened at Google years earlier. Yeah, I brought my whole self to work and they asked it to leave. So I think it really matters. You know, this is just one essay. this is just a small number of companies who are sort of talking openly about this idea of going founder mode. But I think it really speaks to a frustration that a lot of executives in a lot of different industries are having. And it may signal a kind of shift away from this other mode where you delegate work to people, you hire talented people, and you give them room to run.

35:00Absolutely. Now, by this point in the discussion, Kevin, I imagine that a lot of listeners are out there wondering what mode is my company in right now and what does that mean for me? And so I thought I could present some sort of business case studies for you in a new game I'm calling Founder or Flounder. Let's do it. Okay. So in this game, I'm going to present you with a business case study and then you'll tell me whether this is a case of founder, of a founder and founder mode, or flounder, a flounder maybe stepping a little bit too far away from the reins. I thought flounder mode was when you just decide that you're going to solve a organizational problem by like diving to the bottom of a pool and just kind of laying there for a while.

35:38That's a different kind of flounder, but there's also one where you just watch Finding Nemo. But in this one, I want you to tell me when the CEO is maybe not doing the best job. Okay. Ready? Great. Okay. Case study number one. The year is 1996. Struggling Apple CEO Gil Emilio negotiates a deal to buy Next computer, a fledgling company run by one Steve Jobs. Jobs comes back to the company, dramatically reduces the number of products the company makes, and goes on to revive the fortunes of the Mac, invent the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. He helped maintain his focus by denying the paternity of his daughter, Lisa, for several years, illegally driving without license plates, and berating his engineers.

36:17Founder or flounder? Founder mode, baby. I mean, that is the classic example that is always cited by these people of someone who was sort of the archetypal founder mode CEO. And Steve Jobs, as we know, was not a pleasant person to work for all the time, but he got results. So I think a lot of people have sort of said, well, why don't we learn from him as an example? Very good. All right. That leads us to case study number two. The year is 2007. And a couple of guys say, hey, what if we let people stay in our apartment and we gave them breakfast. The company they called Airbnb. And recently, we have a clip from the CEO, Brian Chesky, talking about what he thought he should do to get his company back on track.

37:03Let's play the clip. So what I used to do is I was very hands off. I thought my job was like strategy and capital allocation. And here's the weird thing. The less hands on I was, the more I got sucked into problems. And by the time I got sucked into a problem, it was like 10 times as much work. So then I decided I'm going to do something different. I'm going to do very few things and I'm going to be involved in every single detail. I would review everything. So I had these things called CEO reviews. And every single project in the company, I had a program management function and I would review everything either every week, every two weeks, every four weeks or every quarter.

37:37And then we track the progress. And then, you know, then everything would ship on a single deadline. Initially, people hated this. No one wanted to collaborate. People didn't want to have imposed deadlines on them. They were wondering, why are you meddling? Why are you reviewing all the work? But eventually, it created a culture. And I was trying to teach a sense of quality. I was trying to be like the editor or the orchestra conductor. And that was Brian Chesky on the This Week in Startups podcast last year. Kevin, the result of this is a company whose stock declined 19 % in the last year and is now trading around$115, which is about the cost of the cleaning fee for a two-night stay in an Airbnb.

38:14So, Kevin, founder or flounder? I mean, this is also founder mode, right? This is Brian Chesky talking about how he took Airbnb from a manager mode company to a founder mode company in the process, causing some frustrations for people on his team. But it seems like also resulting in a company that he's much happier with. What do you think of this? Well, you know, he does seem really happy. And like, you know, Brian Chesky, a tremendously likable guy, very well regarded as a CEO, I think, for good reasons. And yet at the same time, I think it's important to point out, financially, this company is not in great shape.

38:45You know, it might be more fun to run, but it's not exactly Apple yet. So I think sometimes these founders get it into their heads that if I just had more control, I could build a juggernaut. And in the case of Airbnb, I just kind of wanted to point out, not really a juggernaut quite yet. Yeah. All right, Kevin, I got one more for you. I'm gonna paint you a vision. The year's 2003. A brilliant young entrepreneur from Stanford sets out to improve the healthcare industry by focusing on an incredibly common product, the humble blood test. Kevin, why draw an entire vial of blood with a painful needle when you could simply prick someone's finger and run the entire test on a single drop of blood?

39:22This is the question that Elizabeth Holmes set out to answer. And with her partner, Sunny Balwani, the duo would go on to raise more than$700 million for Theranos. And were they beset by doubters and haters on all sides? They were. Did people say, that's not safe? Or your technology doesn't work? Or you defrauded your investors? You bet they did. But while I haven't checked in with Theranos since 2018, you have to admit, it does sound like a pretty cool idea. So Kevin, founder or flounder? I mean, I think this one started with founder intentions, but maybe became more of a flounder as the blood test didn't work.

39:56It really did. And I bring this one up because I just want to say once again, founder mode can go wrong, right? There is a reason why sometimes we want to involve more people in decisions and give more managers visibility into what is going on at every level of the company. And that is that sometimes these people, well, they can get some pretty crazy ideas in their head. Totally. Yeah. I was actually so entertained by the debate around Founder Mode this week that I created a Founder Mode translator. Oh, really? Yeah. So basically, I said to ChatGPT, I created a custom GPT, and I gave it, you know, I said, you know, read Paul Graham's essay about Founder Mode and then sort of make a translator where when I input something, you sort of spit out what it would sound like if someone who's dedicated to founder mode said it instead.

40:47So I thought I would just read you a few of these. So one of the prompts that I gave my founder mode translator was, hey, Sarah, do you know if we're getting more Keurig pods for the coffee machine this week? Here's what that sounds like in founder mode. Sarah, coffee pods, Keurig pods, we're not here to wait for caffeine to just materialize like magic. We're here to build an empire. If the coffee machine is running low, that's not just a supply chain issue. That's a sign that we're too reliant on traditional systems. It's pretty good. Hell yeah, brother. Okay. All right. My next prompt was, hey, Rob, any progress on that PowerPoint deck?

41:27I really need it to show at the board meeting next week. And this is what it sounds like in founder mode. Hey, Rob, forget the PowerPoint. If the board needs slides to understand the vision, they're the wrong board. We're building a company, not a middle school presentation. Tell them the plan in five sentences, no fluff. If they don't get it, maybe they don't belong on the ride. An important point of founder mode is just constantly threatening to fire everyone. So that really did nail it. And then the last one I gave it was, hey boss, my colleagues and I are unhappy about our pay and working conditions and are considering unionizing.

42:00Any thoughts? and my founder mode bot said unionizing let me stop you right there the moment you start thinking about forming a union you're admitting you're not playing the game at a high level this company is a rocket ship if you're not here for that you're missing the point want more earn more results speak not demands well the national labor relations board just filed a complaint against that answer actually um so uh obviously we're having a lot of fun with this but i do think this is something that is worth keeping tabs on, because on one hand, like complaints about bureaucracy and middle managers are some of the oldest complaints in the world, right?

42:38Like everyone hates bureaucracy. It's a very popular thing to rail against. And if you're a venture capitalist or someone who, you know, runs a big tech company, like of course it's in your interest to lionize founders. But at the end of the day, like I just can't help but thinking that it's a very paranoid ideology, right? It's saying these people who you have hired to manage your business for you, are in fact working against you, right? They're like a secret, you know, deep state within your own company that has to be sort of eliminated or weeded out because only you, the founder, can be trusted to make the strategic decisions that really make the company.

43:13And look, if you build a company, if you start a company, that's well within your rights to do. But like the argument on the other side is, well, if you look at the companies where the founders have a lot of top-down control, their employees are often very unhappy, right? That is not a recipe for people feeling like they are empowered and valued if you have the CEO or the founder constantly looking over your shoulder and second-guessing you and micromanaging. And I would actually love sort of a comparison chart of like the correlation between companies where the founders go founder mode and like employee satisfaction, right?

43:46Because that seems like it would be a very interesting data point in all this. Yeah, I think there's a really benign version of this, which is that some founders should rethink the things that they have delegated and the amount they have delegated and maybe reclaimed some decisions that they once entrusted to other people. I think that's a totally normal and fine idea, and we'll be having that debate forever. And then I think if you take this idea to its logical conclusion, it turns into America is a king, which is another idea that circulates in Silicon Valley, and I think it's really toxic and dangerous.

44:16It also feels very rooted to me in the economic situation in the country, right? For For years, we had an environment where there were many more sort of openings for tech employees than there were people who wanted those jobs, right? Companies needed to be worker-friendly because they were trying to attract talent. And so people, you know, don't want to go work for companies where they're going to be, like, treated as peons. They want to go places where they have agency and control and authority, and they can sort of run their own little part of the empire. And in that sort of world, it makes a lot of sense to position your company as being very friendly to workers.

44:52But now we have a situation where things have turned a little bit. A lot of these companies have done layoffs. They're a lot smaller than they used to be. And so the leverage is just shifting from workers back to bosses. And so I think in that way, it makes a lot of sense that the bosses are starting to say, wait, why do we give our employees all that power again? And should we be taking some of that back? Absolutely. So if we want to have a check on founder mode, we are going to need to bring back zero interest rates. So if the Fed could do anything about that, we'd really appreciate it. Yeah.

45:23I could also refinance my house. When we come back, we've been calling out for listeners to tell us how phone bans are going in your schools. When we come back, we'll hear what you said.

45:41Thank you.

46:11in public schools. Yeah. And as you might imagine, we heard from listeners about that. In fact, we spent the past couple weeks asking you to send in your thoughts on the subject. And we heard from so many of you who had smart things to say that we said, why don't we actually spend some time playing those on the show? Yeah, and I always love hearing from our listeners, but I was especially interested to hear from them on this topic of smartphone bans in schools, because it seems like a thing where a policy is being made or many policies are being made around the country. and the reality on the ground of what those policies actually look like when you try to ban phones in a school is just a lot more mysterious to me.

46:48Like, I don't actually know. It's one thing to say we're gonna ban smartphones, but when you actually start a school year and you open school and kids come to school with their cell phones and you tell them they can't use them during class, I was just very curious to see how that is actually playing out. Absolutely. You know, we talk so often about these policy debates on the show, Kevin, but what's really interesting to me is what is happening on the ground. How does it feel? How do these things get implemented? And how does life change afterwards? So we have a really cool selection of students and teachers describing what it is like at their schools that have banned phones, in some cases just in the last few weeks.

47:24So I know we're gonna learn a lot from this and I think we should get into it. Let's get into it. All right. So first up, we're gonna hear from students. We heard from several students who made a similar argument, which went something like this. Even though the phone ban seems to be helping them focus better in class, it's not clear to them that this outweighs all the friction that has come from enforcing that policy. So to give us a little glimpse into what that looks like, here's Robert Eves. He's a high school student in Virginia. Well, I understand the idea behind banning phones. I believe it is a mixed bag.

48:01On one hand, it's definitely noticeable that there are fewer distractions in class. However, the execution of this ban has been too strict. We're not allowed to use the phones at all, and this has created some challenges. For example, some students like me will eventually need to use external laptops or devices other than our Chromebooks for specific courses, and this is no longer permitted. Teachers have told all of my classes that they dislike the ban because they want to enforce a phone ban when they themselves want to, not the school board or administration. They dislike the idea of having to constantly monitor the students.

48:35In fact, every high school teacher I've talked to has expressed their distaste for it. Overall, while the intention might be good, the band's current form doesn't consider the practical needs of students and teachers, at least in my district. Interesting. Kevin, what do you make of Robert's point here? So this is really interesting to me because I think what we're starting to see as these bands actually kick in in a lot of schools this fall is that it's just pretty messy. Like the actual process of how do you get phones out of students' hands during the classroom day is not particularly straightforward.

49:07And there are going to be exceptions. There are going to be places where it does cause friction because, yeah, some students may be using their phones for school-approved activities or even coursework. It's just not going to be a very simple, neat policy to kind of lay down. Yeah, and in order for it to work the way we think it should, you do have to get the phones out of everyone's hands. If one person has a phone, that's incredibly distracting for the entire class. So, you know, I can understand why teachers who already have so much on their plate are saying, wait, now I also have to play phone cop all day.

49:38That doesn't sound very fun. Let's hear a similar point that was made by Charlotte. She's a high school student in Indiana, where a state Senate bill recently went into effect requiring schools to adopt and publish policies limiting cell phone use. I have mixed feelings about this bill. For one, I feel like I'm focusing better in school. I'm not thinking about my phone since it's usually in a phone cubby or in my backpack, but it is annoying that I can't have my phone during study hall. When I don't have any homework to do, I just kind of sit there. It's also a hassle during my newspaper class.

50:08Whenever I'm walking through the building to an interview, recording it, etc., I have to wear a lanyard around my neck that says press pass with a paragraph that states that I am actually allowed to have my phone. No one's bothered me about it yet, but I always feel like I'm doing something illegal. Charlotte, I'm here to tell you, you're not doing something illegal. You're doing something incredibly cool. Okay. If I could have walked around my high school with a pass that said press pass using a piece of technology that no one else in the school was allowed to use, I truly never would have felt cooler.

50:35Totally. And it does make me think that at least in this one particular school, the newspaper class is about to become the most popular class in the school. Yes. They're going to start 15 different newspapers at this school because everybody wants to use their phone. Yes. But I will say on a less jokey note, like I have some sympathy for students who say, well, I'm used to having my phone to sort of like kill time during study hall after I finished my work and I'm sort of bored without it. But I also feel like, man, that feeling of being bored, of just sitting there with nothing to distract you and having to kind of like sit there with your own thoughts or, you know, doodle or maybe sort of think through some idea, Like, that is actually, like, a classic part of the learning experience.

51:20At least it was for me. Yeah, I think that as boring as it is, there is a case to be made for sitting there with your own thoughts. You know, these days, I'm not alone with my thoughts often. I always have my earbuds in. But I do think it was an important part of my development. Do you think doodling is going to make a comeback? I think it should. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, kids these days, they don't even know how to do the fancy S. All right, now you sound 400 years old. So something else that we heard in voice memos from students is that each school is implementing their phone ban just a little bit differently.

51:55And that subtle differences in enforcement can wind up having a really big effect on how students feel about the ban. So here's a student who says he's been able to get permission to use his phone whenever he's really needed it. His school has been using these pouches called yonder pouches. Have you ever used a yonder pouch? I never have. Have you? You know, I haven't, but they're increasingly common. If you go to, like, see a stand-up comedian, for example, they'll sort of take everybody's phones and throw them in their pouches. I imagine Yonder is having a great business year with how many schools are passing these bans.

52:25But these are these pouches that allow people to keep their phone on them inside a locked pouch that can only be unlocked with a special device. And according to this student who sent in a voice memo, the pouches are working pretty well. So let's hear from Jackson McClure in Redwood City, California, right by us, Kevin. Hey, Hard Fork. I'm a ninth grader at Design Tech High School. And actually, just today, I had to fix my tooth because I chipped it on a mountain biking trip. Yay. And believe it or not, it wasn't actually that hard to just go to the front desk and say, I need to use my phone to call my mom for the appointment.

53:04and then they allowed me and then I took photos of my tooth and then had a conversation. We logged it back up and I went on with my day. It seems like it's not too hard just to get access to it if you really need it. And honestly, not having it really seems like just a benefit anyway. So this is why I think that students shouldn't be allowed to ride their mountain bikes inside the classroom. It's too dangerous. We're seeing too many of these injuries. No, Jackson, I hope you're feeling better. But, you know, this is an interesting point that he makes, which is essentially, hey, everybody relax.

53:37If you have an emergency, go to the front desk. What's the big deal? What do you think, Kevin? Yeah, I totally buy that. I mean, I think that the students will still have many ways to contact their parents or guardians if something does happen to them. You know, this one resonated with me because I actually did have a tooth chipping incident. When I was in seventh grade, I chipped my tooth while doing a professional wrestling move on one of my friends. What was that move? It was the spear. This was Goldberg, who was a professional wrestler back in the 90s. He had a move called the spear. That's right.

54:09Which involves, like, running headfirst into someone. And I was trying to spear my friend, and he moved out of the way. And so instead I speared a locker, and my tooth chipped. But you know what? That locker also took a fair bit of damage. So you should see the other guy, basically. And I'll never forget it because one of the people who was watching as this all happened was my crush. And so she saw me with a chipped tooth sort of bleeding out of my mouth, and I'll never recover from that. So anyway, what I'm trying to say is that I made my way to the nurse's office, and I was able to call my mom and get to the dentist to fix my tooth.

54:43And this was before cell phones. So what I'm saying is the students of America do actually have resources if they chip their teeth during the school day, and I'm glad that Jackson found that out. But Kevin, don't you wish in retrospect that somebody had had a cell phone so they could record you sparing a locker and sort of put that on TikTok in a compilation called Terrible High School Nerd Fails? Actually, now I'm very glad that cell phones with cameras did not exist back then. And look, on a more serious note, like there will obviously be reasons that students need to contact their parents during the school day.

55:17And actually, this is one of the big objections that many parents have raised to these cell phone bans is, what if something horrible happens and my child needs to get in contact with me during the school day? And, you know, I have some sympathy to that. I do too. As a parent, as someone who, you know, like worries a lot about my child's safety, like I get wanting to be able to contact your kid during the school day on a cell phone. But I also think that there were ways for students to do that before cell phones. There will continue to be ways. it's not that hard to sort of get to the principal's office, get to the nurse's station.

55:50There are going to be avenues for students to contact their parents in an emergency. There's something very funny to me about the words, please open my yonder pouch. Why is that? I don't know. It kind of sounds like a pickup line. Anyways, so we've heard from students, but Kevin, we should also hear from teachers. You know, as we sort of mentioned earlier, these are often the folks who are charged with implementing these bans. And we were very curious to hear what they've been noticing. So this first clip comes to us from Ryan Beddingfield, who is a high school AV teacher in Atlanta, Georgia. And he told us how his opinion on phone bans has changed a little over the last three weeks.

56:25I teach a tech class. We have MacBooks and all kinds of other things. We record audio on the phones. We shoot photos, videos. We even use a Discord server. And, you know, so I've seen a lot of practical use out of phones in my room. I've tried to kind of be forward thinking and, you know, consider all the ways that I could make technology part of the curriculum. But, you know, my administration, the school's doing the no cell phone thing. And so I tried to get on board. And I got to tell you, it has been kind of amazing, actually. The kids are just so much more engaged and alert. And I feel like I'm connecting with them better.

57:09It sounds so cheesy, but I can't oversell that. So like I said, I worried about the way this would affect my class, but I think there's just no question that the net benefits outweigh the costs or the inconveniences. And I would hate to go back to unrestricted cell phone use at this point already. I'm fully committed. Wow. What do you think, Kevin? I mean, this one really struck me because this is not a teacher who sort of came in as someone who was skeptical about technology in the classroom, right? He did sort of try to use cell phones as part of the curriculum in the classes that he was teaching.

57:48And, you know, I think there's – I admire that. Like there are a lot of teachers who sort of have been opposed to phones in schools from the beginning. But this was a teacher who actually said, well, if students are going to have these things and we're not going to ban them, like let's try to find a productive use. But to me, like trying to find a productive educational use of cell phones in the classroom is a little like trying to find a productive educational use for a swarm of bees in the classroom. Like maybe you can do it, but no one's going to be focused on the lesson. Right. And so I think it's really helpful to hear from teachers who came in thinking, you know, with some skepticism toward these bands and just say as as Ryan does that, like, it has totally changed their classroom essentially overnight.

58:29I mean, it makes sense to me. One of my least favorite things that will happen sometimes when I'm sitting there with friends or family is like there's a brief lull in the conversation and the next thing you know, everyone is looking at their phone. And you can just sort of feel that person's life force draining away from you and sort of being funneled into their phone. And, you know, that can be OK from time to time if you're just having dinner with someone. But like, what if I was trying to teach you calculus? Like, all of a sudden, it feels like we're having a much worse time. So everything that Ryan said there made a lot of sense to me.

59:03So let's hear from another teacher now, Kevin. This comes from Taylor Wynn, and he says that a phone ban in his school has been effective, but only after administrators intervened to get the teachers to stop resisting it. Hey, Kevin and Casey. I am a high school teacher. I teach AP physics. I've been teaching for about 12 years now in Orange County, California. So I've taught through the 2010s. And basically, the phone problem has always been a thing since I started. But when the kids came back from the COVID shutdowns, it was the worst it had ever been. Before the pandemic, yeah, kids would obviously, they'd be on their phones all the time.

59:48They're texting back and forth. They're checking their social media. But there would at least be a lot of noise and sound and socialization in my classroom whenever there was any sort of downtime or if the kids were waiting for me to get something ready. But one of the craziest things was when we first came back from the shutdowns, if there was any sort of downtime, the class would remain absolutely silent. It was the most eerie thing ever because essentially, like if I finished my lessons early and I looked out there, kids would just whip out their phones and they would just all start doom scrolling very silently next to each other, like even if they were like sitting next to all of their best friends.

1:00:27But recently, I will say that about like last year, our admin team put up a huge effort to buy pretty much every single classroom teacher one of those phone pocket charts. It's like this big thing that hangs on your wall. It looks like those things where people can organize their shoes in them, but it's like specifically for kids to put phones inside of those pockets. So there's one for each kid in the room. And at first it was met with a lot of opposition from students. Students didn't want to give up their phones. They were coming up with clever ways to get around it. They would get like burner phones and put the burner phones into the pockets.

1:01:06They would take their phone out of their phone covers and they would put the phone covers into the pockets. So visually it looks like there's a phone there. But if you look closely, there's no phone inside of like the phone case. And honestly, a lot of teachers oppose it, too, because a lot of veteran teachers kind of felt like, you know what? I've been here, done that. It's always been a big issue. This is just kind of a waste of our efforts. But honestly, our admin team actually did kind of just enforce it over and over and over again, kind of like, you know, sort of chastising, you know, teachers that weren't getting on board at first.

1:01:42The idea was like, if everybody does it, it just becomes part of school culture. And honestly, we started the school year and everybody, every single staff members on board day one, every teacher was just kind of like, yeah, you know what? You come into the classroom. The first thing you do, you're going to drop your phone into this pocket. It's assigned to you. I'm going to be using it to like double check attendance or whatnot. And it's been going smooth. It's been going great. And better yet, I actually started noticing, you know, that it's healing a little bit. I'm actually noticing more lively discussions.

1:02:17I'm noticing that kids are paying more attention in class and their grades are better. They're doing better. They're more present. So that's, it's honestly been really, really nice. All right, Kevin. So what's the lesson here? I mean, I think the really interesting thing that is going to come out of this, one of them is just that we're going to see a really natural experiment here. We're going to be able to measure the educational outcomes of students in schools that ban phones and schools that do not ban phones. And we're going to see over a period of years, like what effect these policies actually have.

1:02:54I, you know, I don't want to venture a guess, but my initial impression is that at least from the teacher's perspective, this is leading to much better engagement with classroom instruction and, you know, better grades and better participation. And I would not be surprised if students who are in schools with phone bans a couple years from now just have better outcomes. Yeah. And for what it's worth, we did not get a lot of messages saying ever since we banned phones, everything has been a lot worse. And now the students won't pay attention to us. Right. So, you know, that is meaningful, I think.

1:03:24And the other lesson that I'm taking away from this call, Kevin, is that it just takes time to shift the culture of these schools and that, yeah, at first you are going to see students coming up with all sorts of creative schemes to ensure they can keep looking. But over time, eventually they just give up and they actually throw the phone into the pocket. Yep. Now, one sort of final thing to add about this, Kevin, is that we heard from a few listeners outside the United States. One parent in Melbourne, Australia, told us that phones have been banned in his kids' primary and secondary schools for five years, and his kids haven't complained, which seems very suspicious, frankly.

1:04:00That makes me think that they probably have phones that they're just not telling their dad about. And that there's an English-speaking teacher at a public school in Japan where all cell phones and devices are banned, including during sports and clubs after school. And this teacher told us that Japanese students also really seem to embrace the bans. So do we feel like there is actually kind of maybe a growing consensus around this issue? Yeah, I actually, you know, I generally don't like sort of one-size-fits-all approaches to technology and to smartphones in general. But with this one, it does seem, man, like it is just going so well at so many schools across not only the United States, but the world.

1:04:39I just don't hear, you know, obviously there's some wrinkles to be ironed out when it comes to the actual implementation, but this just seems like such a no brainer to me. Yeah. I mean, and I feel like I'm often on the, on the side of arguing for people having access to technology, and yet I did not have a cell phone in high school, and I truly cannot think of a way that it would have improved my life if I could have had it in the classroom during class time, right? I still think that there is a case to be made for maybe some laptop use and digital literacy skills and all of that. But certainly at the elementary school level, I see absolutely no need for these kids to have these phones.

1:05:16And even into high school, it seems like the sort of plurality of people that we have spoken to have said, this is the way to go. Yeah. I mean, one possible effect of this that I'm fascinated to see if it actually materializes or not is that, you know, I don't think students are going to stop using cell phones altogether, like outside the classroom and outside the school building. It may be that they just spend more time on their phones when they're at home with their parents or at soccer practice or whatever. there may actually be kind of a concentrating effect whereby taking phones out of the school during the school day, you end up with kids spending way more time on their phones at night.

1:05:51I would also be interested to see how the usage of apps like Snapchat, apps like Instagram, apps like TikTok, if you could sort of graph their usage among younger users, whether they're going to see significant shifts in when people are using those apps during the day. Yeah, I was going to say, I wonder if this is going to be a reason for maybe the stock prices of those companies to decline because they just lost eight hours during the day that they can show ads to teenagers. I mean, we're laughing, but like I actually think that is probably something that they are having meetings about at these companies right now is like, oh, my God, we're like losing some of our most active users for a big chunk of the day.

1:06:29All right. Well, thank you so much to everyone who took the time to send us voice memos and share your perspectives. Like we said, as much as we love talking about the debate at the high level, frankly, it's just a lot more interesting to hear what's going on at your school. So thank you for that. And in the meantime, class dismissed.

1:07:34Thank you. Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Pui Wing Tam, Dahlia Haddad, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us, as always, at hardfork at nytimes.com, or if you've gone founder mode, you can just give us a nasty performance review.