Flipping Off Phones

this labor day at lowes get up to 45 off select major appliances plus deals on select materials and tools to keep the job moving right now get a free dewalt 20 volt max battery two pack when you buy a select dewalt 20 volt max tool at lowes we have what you need to keep your job moving valid through 913 while supplies last selection varies by location see lowes.com for more details this episode is brought to you by google chrome you think you know a browser but gemini and chrome that's new it can help you with practically anything on the web like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks gemini and chrome is here for it ready to make anything online make sense there's no place like chrome check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus there's been this sort of clamor for something to happen for long enough that even people who wouldn't really care to be reading the news of tech policy every single day will be internalizing this idea of like social media and smartphones are really bad for us and i should be trying to use mine less i'm charlie warzel and this is galaxy brain a show where today we are going to talk about what our phones are and aren't doing to us it's obviously the phones that was the title of a viral substack essay that came out march of 2024 magdalene taylor a writer who focuses on sexuality and culture was trying to articulate why fewer americans were having sex or going out with friends there were she argued all kinds of factors at play here for increased isolation and alienation in american life but all of them she argued felt abstract to the one that was staring her in the face the problem she wrote is obviously our phones it's obviously the phones is less an argument that cites endless empirical evidence as much as it says look around look how everyone is behaving how could these devices that we carry around with us every moment of the day not be changing us now about a week after taylor's essay jonathan height a contributor who's here at the atlantic published an essay it had the title end the phone-based childhood now came out just before he published the anxious generation in which he argues that a new childhood around screens and devices has unleashed a mental health epidemic among teens and young adults the book was an instant bestseller and it acted as this accelerant for this debate between the height camp and those who argue that heights claims are not quite supported by science according to one criticism of height in the journal nature quote most data are correlative when associations over time are found they suggest not that social media use or causes depression but that young people who already have mental health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers now i found this debate endlessly fascinating and also really frustrating studying the effects of phones or social media are often quite difficult to do at scale because you can get stuck in this chicken egg situation where it's unclear if social media is causing a behavior or exploiting people who are more susceptible to it or if none of that matters at all and the end result is just this causes harm to people here's one recent example of this dynamic just this week the national bureau of economic research published a large study on the effects of phone bans inside schools and the results are honestly complex schools that made students keep their devices in locked pouches during the day obviously saw phone use decline significantly but in the first year according to the study student suspensions in children's phones are not the only thing that is causing harm to children's phones because the number of phone bans increased by an average of sixteen percent now after an adjustment period students did however report a better sense of personal well-being but the survey which tracked more than 40 000 schools since 2019 also showed that strict phone bans had quote close to zero effect on average test scores the bans also did not improve student attendance or online bullying see what i mean this is far from tidy and as a journalist who covers technology i'm really wary of theories that take this complex and messy social behavior of humans at internet scale and just try to tie it all up in a bow as a human who uses technology and has a tortured relationship with his own phone i'm constantly feeling some personal version of of course it's the phones in my own life i found that heavy screen time use outside of my job definitely tracks with periods where i'm feeling anxious and it's very clear to me that extended time on my phone and on social media apps has profound short-term effects on my social media life and the way that i feel both physically and about the world around me like a lot of people i experiment with phone free time and i daydream about what it would be like to just get rid of the device forever now recently my colleague caitlin tiffany did just that caitlin's been covering the internet and social media for years and over the last decade or so she's been chronicling these debates about social media phones screens and the really messy not always conclusive research about what they're doing to us all in that tradition she recently traded her iphone for a flip phone to report on a burgeoning tech movement called month offline what i've always appreciated about caitlin's work is that she's not afraid to eschew easy answers for the nuance and she's also somebody whose own relationship to technology honestly just seems a lot less tortured than my own so i brought her on today to talk about what she learned ditching her smartphone and where she stands now on the great phones debate caitlin welcome to galaxy break hi charlie thanks for having me okay so i want to start with this you have been writing about technology for a long time we've known each other and worked together for for a while i wanted to start before we get into anything what is your relationship to your phone as it exists you know in 2026 my relationship to my phone i think my phone is very beautiful i think an iphone is like very satisfying to hold it's like wonderful what it can do i love using it and then other times which i think is a very relatable experience that many people talk about at other times i feel sort of like i don't really know what i'm doing with my phone like i'm just doing phone you know you can kind of you can kind of sit down and be like i'm gonna have a cup of coffee and stand up in 10 minutes and like go about my day and then 45 minutes later be like oh i was just doing phone you know i don't really know what occurred during that time um but most of the time i think of my phone as just like this lovely useful device that once in a while causes me to enter like a time warp if that makes sense yeah well i also find that talking about how they're like they're beautiful is i think it's it's on under disgust like sometimes i will like my case will get all like messed up and i'll take it out of the case for the first time and experience the phone just like you know without any of the stuff on it and i'm just like i i become sort of like like i marvel at it again for the first time of like this is lovely like let me clean off the screen and really get to like you know play with this thing totally and i also i i very much feel that uh the time warp thing i like the idea of like having a name for it of just of doing phone i find i do that the most like on weekend morning when i like have the whole world in front of me i don't have to be working and i'm like i just like i lost this period of time i don't know what happened mine is definitely very tortured is yours is sort of less of that it's more just like you can you're wary of those moments when you get sucked in and and you try to you know not have that happen how would you describe the quality of that relationship like what adjectives would you use to describe it i feel like i feel like it's not tortured most of the time there are times where where i realize in a startling way that i need to recalibrate which is like for instance when i'm trying to look at my phone while i'm brushing my teeth or something that's when i'm like okay this is this isn't how i want things to be i need to like deliberately not do this the reason why i that baseline is you recently wrote about undergoing a sort of detox experience or dry january for your phones tell me about month offline what is month offline how did you become aware of it what's the deal yeah it started last year in dc um as yeah basically literally what it sounds like a group of people who would do a month offline but in this case offline is referring to the iphones or smartphones specifically which is sort of interesting because i think that's kind of a cultural thing we've started doing too um saying the internet and meaning instagram on my phone um but in any case it it started with a group of people who switched fully to like dumb phones flip phones for a month and committed to doing that and meeting up once a week to talk about what was good about it and what was hard about it and etc and it's evolved since then so now it's in dc and new york but it's also kind of a phone company so the flip phones that you get now if you participate in a phone company you get a phone company and you get a phone company participate have this pretty interesting, I think, technologically speaking, like custom operating system so that like your iMessages, your WhatsApp messages, your regular texts and phone calls will be forwarded from your smartphone to this dumb phone more or less seamlessly. I had like a few issues with it. And then it also has Google Maps, Uber, which I never used, Microsoft Authenticator, like a couple of other things that people were saying, oh, I, you know, I could really use this. And then I would be willing to switch to a dumb phone. It's $25 a month for the phone plan. And they're starting to build up this sort of company that treats a flip phone like an accessory to an iPhone, almost like an Apple Watch. And the idea is that you would be able to leave your smartphone at home for extended periods of time. They did tell us to always leave our phones plugged in and charging and on because the four. Boarding didn't work as well, I suppose, if they were off. But yeah, that's, that's the general idea. So I signed up to do the March cohort and went to these meetings in Bushwick with about 30 other people, I would say, and used a flip phone. Could a person just go and get the phone and not have the experience of, like, are they just straight up selling phones for people who want them and you can subscribe to this, you know, this plan, this thing? Yes. It's called Dumb Dog. And you can just get the phone. They're not making their own hardware. They're TCL flip phones. It's like a flip phone that they are sourcing and then preloading with this custom OS and then shipping to you. And yeah, you can just, you can just buy one online. Okay, so now, so you sign up for the thing in March, first time at the meeting. Describe for me the crowd, like who is participating here? And like, what are, was there like a very standard pool of like gripes or concerns or reasons for it? Like, paint that picture for me? Because I have one in my head of like a Bushwick cell phone free meetup thing. And I want to hear from you what it was like. To be clear, I'm a huge Bushwick fan. I love Bushwick. Like, I know what the cultural trope is of Bushwick. But I think it's a fantastic neighborhood, really interesting, lots going on, lots of different kinds of people. I will say, though, what you are picturing is probably pretty close to accurate. Everyone, everyone there, to my knowledge, everyone there that I spoke to was around the ages of like 26 to 32. Mostly, you know, creative class jobs, maybe tech, maybe tech jobs, some grad students, almost all women, I think of the 30, there were maybe four or five men. And yeah, like, super nice, thoughtful people. But I think all kind of on the, same wavelength of like, I have a job or a lifestyle that kind of requires me to look at a smartphone or a laptop a lot. And that is bleeding into me doing it all the time in my personal time. And maybe like a little bit of just angst about like, how you're living your life in general, you know, like, I think people talked about losing all this time to their iPhones and not having time to do anything. And I think that's a really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, or write songs or make new friends or go, you know, go do whatever they would want to do in New York City. They weren't experiencing acute, specific harms that they that they mentioned from anything they were doing online. It was just like the loss of time, like all the time they felt they were losing. What's your mindset going into this? Is it like, this could be good for me in this? Is it just I just want to have the experience and and just sort of see what it does? Or was it I'm actually more interested in the ways that like, I can watch, you know, other people give feedback? How much of this was for yourself? And how much of it was for just the reporting experience of being around this group? I think it was mostly for the reporting experience. Like I said, you know, I don't find it hard to put my phone away. If I think if I think of it, if I think like, oh, I use my phone too much, I'm using my phone a little too much, it's easy for me to correct that. So I kind of knew it wasn't gonna do that much for me personally. But I was really interested in it mostly because in New York, over the past couple of years, there has been this like palpable shift or like, rising kind of energy around being anti smartphone, anti social media, literally walking around the streets, there's posters everywhere that say, you know, big tech is watching you or, you know, kick the screen time or the ads for month offline, say flip off. There's just a lot of it everywhere. The anti AI spirit is pretty palpable in New York, too. You know, our colleague Mateo wrote about the friend AI subway campaign that was defaced all over the city. So I've been I've been curious, I guess, about how much of that is real. And like, what kinds of people are interested in it, whether it's just sort of smaller hobbyist groups, or whether there's kind of a popular appeal. And so I think that was kind of the main motivation was to actually meet some of these people who are contributing to this, I guess, for lack of a better word vibe that I've been getting. But first, a quick break. This Labor Day at Lowe's get up to 45% off select major appliances, plus deals on select materials and tools to keep the job moving. Right now, get a free DeWalt 20 volt max battery two pack when you buy a select DeWalt 20 volt max tool. At Lowe's, we have what you need to keep your job moving. Valid through 913. All supplies last. Selection varies by location. See Lowe's.com for more details. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. they want to flip it and flip it and flip it. Right. You know, the guy at the coffee shop Or somebody at the bar would say, oh, my God, it's a flip phone. Where'd you get that? I kind of want one, etc. Like there was I felt like anyone who saw it was kind of like tickled and intrigued, but probably also because they're like they were all like roughly my age. So flip phones were hot stuff. You know, those were the best phones you ever had. The most exciting thing you ever purchased or received, probably. So that was kind of the vibe. Yeah, no, they were they were great. They were like super, super durable. There was this like tactile pleasure that you got with it. It was like a little bit of like a device that didn't work all that well to like navigate any kind of like early part of the kid. It made phone calls really reliably well, but it's also like had this fidget spinner like quality to it. Right. Or you could just like click around with it. And it was it was it was pleasurable in that way. So so people people liked it. How did it go for you? You wrote about some initial struggles. I think you said, quote, at times like these, I felt as though this experiment in freeing myself was doing just the opposite. What were those times? Explain the explain the struggle. Yeah, well, the main thing was that, as you know, we have a specific technology. Two factor authenticator app that we are required to use for our jobs for our work laptops. So I actually couldn't leave my iPhone at home. I had to bring it to work with me every day inside the yellow cardboard box that I had been given to stow it. So it was a little silly in that sense. I was just carrying it in a cardboard box. It's like thumping around while I'm walking. And then the one time that I actually did leave the house without it. I mean, I mean, I left the house without it. I left the house without it a few times on the weekend. And this was on the weekend. I was going to a coffee shop to do some work on my computer and realized that I was locked out of it. I had to like call my fiance on my flip phone and be like, Can you please bring me my iPhone so that I can touch the iPhone with my thumb and then put it back in the box so that I can use this computer that is sitting in front of me currently. That felt a little ridiculous. And then I also talked about in the story, my sister, one of my sisters got into like a medical residency, texted our family group chat. The text did not come through to my dumb phone. Neither did anybody's like reaction texts to it. And I just coincidentally, five or 10 minutes later, texted them all. You know, if you guys were thinking about drafting say a Suzuki early in our fantasy family fantasy baseball draft, he just got he injured his knee. And the world baseball classic. So she was like, what? And then I also talked about in the story, my sister, one of my sisters got into a coffee shop to do some work on my flip phone. And I just coincidentally, five or 10 minutes later, texted her. them like I'm not having me I'm not like noticing people I think I was just like more engaged in like hearing other people's conversations and like kind of participating more in things that were around me and the degree to which I was using Instagram reels as like a nighttime like pacifier kind of like I was never the type of person who needs to stay like who stays up for hours like inadvertently scrolling but I loved the feeling of getting in bed cuddled into my into my duvet and like scrolling through Instagram reels for like 10 minutes before bed and just like seeing what the girls were up to the girl in Kentucky who's redoing her kitchen the like the girl in the van life and whatever just like what all my girls are up to um and it was really hard to give that up to just get in bed and be like I have no I have no treat I just have my thoughts I just have my worries about everything I did wrong today and everything I might do wrong tomorrow that's it good night yeah yeah in in that sense did you feel like then it created you know people talk about with um food like having like food noise right like even when you're not hungry or whatever like you know this idea of when I'm gonna eat what I'm gonna eat how like you know a lot of people struggle with that type of thing did you find that this created like scroll noise for you or something like that yeah I think there were definitely times where I felt like this like irritation like the same kind of irritation you might just generalized irritation like you might feel if you if somebody forced you to stop drinking coffee or something I was just I was like this is so stupid but I was like this isn't fair like I I I want to listen to my Bravo podcast and I feel like I'm being punished um yeah I did have that a little bit this labor day at Lowe's get up to 45% off select major appliances plus deals on select materials and tools to keep the job moving right now get a free DeWalt 20 volt max battery two-pack when you buy a select DeWalt 20 volt max tool at Lowe's we have what you need to keep your job moving battle through 913 while supplies last selection varies by location see Lowe's.com for more details this episode is brought to you by Google Chrome you think you know a browser but Gemini and Chrome that's new it can help you with practically anything on the web like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration process to a new one or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks Gemini and Chrome is here for it ready to make anything online make sense there's no place like Chrome check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus okay so with that in mind this is like a decent way I think to segue into this like the broader conversation which we touched on a little bit about you know I feel like you've spent the last four or five whatever years wrestling with this question this big debate that has been happening between you know the it's the phones it's definitely the phones crowd like social media addiction and the idea that like you know it's actually really hard to prove what is happening it's difficult to measure what is happening you wrote for us at the Atlantic here in 2023 this long feature on the topic with the in this idea that there's this uncomfortable reality here, right? That the mental health and social media connections are actually tough to net out. I was wondering if first, if you could just tell me a little bit about digging into that topic, working on that feature. Obviously, things have evolved since then. We can get into that. But like, what's drawn you into that? And what have you kind of learned, again, wrestling with that nuance? It's notable that six or seven, eight years ago, we were talking about this urgent need to like rein in the powers of big tech companies. And we were talking about it in terms of intervening in what they were doing. We were talking about like antitrust solutions or privacy legislation or something that would limit their ability to make money the way that they were making money and amass power the way that you were amassing power. And then I think something. Maybe during the beginning of the pandemic and slightly afterwards, where instead we started talking about how to protect kids from the Internet by limiting their access to it. And it was being presented as something that had a really firm scientific basis and, you know, urgent. Kind of public health component to it. So I just think that's really important to understand as best as we can. And there are a lot of scientists who have been trying for a long time to understand it. It's really complicated because as we've been talking about in this conversation, like a lot of things get sort of flattened or simplified into the same sentence. You know, like our boys and girls relating to this technology differently. How could we possibly know because this technology changes all the time? And by the time a study comes out, like people are using the technology for different things. It's very complicated and I think really interesting and also like really, really important. Despite the fact that there are certainly people who would argue, I don't care what the science says. Like, I know what I'm seeing and we need to act now. Um, in dramatic fashion, um, I think it's important to know exactly what we're acting on. Where do you feel we are on that continuum right now? And, and, you know, like of the, like, of course it's the phones to like, it's really unclear. Like where, where is that discussion at the moment? I mean, I think culturally we're at, of course it's the phone. Um, I think scientifically we're at, you know, we spent a decade looking for proof of population level harms of a direct relationship between social media and anxiety and depression and other like terrifying mental health outcomes. And that relationship on a population level has not materialized. That doesn't mean that social media or, you know, heavy smartphone and screen use isn't bad for certain people, um, or isn't bad in certain ways. Something can be bad. It can be bad before it approaches the level of directly causing someone to develop a mental illness. Culturally, we're at a place where we aren't speaking with a lot of nuance. Scientifically, I think there are researchers who are, who are digging more into the nuance, but they're not really getting a lot of attention for those, um, those studies. And one of, one of your, your articles, I believe around the, the social media trials that, that, that recently happened, one in California, one in New Mexico in which both ruled against. The social media companies, you quoted this professor of psychology names, I'm probably getting the pronunciation wrong here, but Pete Etchells, I believe his name, uh, uh, in Bath, uh, university in England. And he told you that he found the situation, just the general situation in this, uh, quote, really frustrating. And to quote you, one side denies that anything's wrong. The other side compares social media to cigarettes, even though that makes little sense. And he says, we're not talking about a biological substance you could consume that has a demonic or a demonstrable chemical effect. I think that's really interesting, right? Because you have on one hand, something that like we are consuming in our brains and yet these easy comparisons, or maybe not even easy, but these, these comparisons that feel in the moment, especially when people struggle with them, that are so apt, like yes, cigarettes or alcohol or whatever. It's like one thing is actually like being physically consumed into our like bloodstreams and changing that. It's sort of like a cultural consumption and that that feels to me like a, like a really important and also like super annoying distinction to have to make right when people are feeling a certain way that you have to be like, well, actually it's not cigarettes because you're not like smoking social media. Yeah. I had like one of my, um, one of my notes apps of like story ideas that make no sense. I had one at one point that was just like most, it was like headline, most things just aren't that much like other things, um, like so stupid. No, no. This is a classic writer thing. You have to have a notes app full of like totally crackpot ideas that make no sense to anyone but you. Otherwise you're doing it wrong. Yeah. It's just like when you're talking in metaphors, then it becomes like, okay, okay. But like, that's useful to a point, but like we're, it's not what we're literally saying, which I actually, I have been sort of reflecting on as a reporter, I feel like seven or eight years ago. I was certainly part of a cohort of journalists who were writing about, you know, the extractive nature of social media, the way that it was like gaming. profiting off of our attention. The algorithm does X, Y, Z. And I think that was taken extremely literally. And now people can just say the algorithm and it's like there's a boogeyman in the room. It's really hard because like I see that, too. I see a lot of just general if X, then Y with like phone behavior or tech behavior. Right. And getting completely and totally rid of all of the human agency in the process. But then I'm also like, well, it is these these algorithms, too, to a degree. And it's and it's you have to have that part of the conversation. I don't know. I struggle. I struggle greatly with that because I think I don't want to let all of that off. And I do think that like algorithmic social media is very clearly caused like a ton of problems. I mean, would you agree with that? Like where do you sit on that? I think I toggle back. Back and forth. Yeah. Because I mean, first of all, when I talk about being someone who grew up on the Internet and loved the Internet, like a lot of what I'm talking about is an era before everything was centralized onto a handful of platforms that can feel either very boring and uninspired or very like infuriating and nausea inducing and just awful. There are other times where I once in a while still think like, yeah, this is really useful. Like when I was 14. I had no idea what was going on in the world beyond like the one newspaper article a week that I would read because my history teacher told me I had to. Whereas my sisters were, you know, people scoff at learning news on TikTok and on social media. But you can get a general sense of what's going on. Like I think they were very in tune to lots of different discussions about the news, about culture, about politics. I think they were probably way more media literate than I was. It probably took them not as much time as it does people of generations older to like understand what is fake and real. So, yeah, I don't know. It's hard to say. I mean, to be clear, I think all of these companies have done like egregious, destructive, like insidious things. But on the other hand, it's kind of like to. To get to the bottom of it, you know, it's kind of like, you know, this is the internet that we have and we are kind of just talking and talking and talking and talking about whether it's good or bad. This whole conversation just ties me up in knots, right? Like, it's funny, too, because like when you were describing your feeling of like not being able to, you know, watch your thing at the end of the day, you know, have your little social media treats. We all have our little social media treats, I think. Or whatever, and that feeling of like it actually made me physically kind of angry a little bit or frustrated or that feeling of like, ah, like I had to, you know, abstain from coffee. The thing that I find so interesting about that is like that's how people feel when they like go off. Like coffee is a stimulant, right? Like it is a thing that does something to your brain. And yes, when you go off it, you have like this like you have like a withdrawal effect of some kind. It's very clear. I've taken my detoxes. I've taken my detoxes and done those things from social media before my time off. There is a change in like my brain of some kind. But I feel like a rewilding of my attention in a way and also the frustrations of having to not have that on me. And so I think it just it's it's such a great example. And I think like this, what you did of like going and actually trying to interact with technology in a different way, kind of go back a little bit. I think it's really helpful and grounding to anyone who's trying to know that you're going to be able to kind of navigate all of this themselves, because you get to sort of see that like it's both more complicated and less complicated at times, you know, like you feel these things that are like these these polls that that I think are are really serious and worth taking really seriously as a society, like what are these what is this constant connectivity in these ways doing to us as we walk through the world? And then also at the same time, I think it's always so telling that it's like it's not it's not that bad when you do take them away. So then what was the poll really as much as we think? I don't envy having to write about this because it is so hard and so difficult to capture all of the distinct cultural feelings. One of the reasons it's so hard for us to talk about this and come up with solutions is like on a certain level, we're asking, like, what is a good life? Like, what would it mean for me to be happy? So all of those things are mixed together. It becomes understandably emotional and fraught. And so much of it is anecdotal. I really like that. That feeling of like so much of this is, yes, how how to be happy, how to how to like live in the world and make choices that you that you feel good about and how much of agency you've won feels they have in that process. Right. One of my predictions for this year, just, you know, in my head was this feeling of this this back, this cultural backlash to to the phones kind of cloaked in, as you said earlier, like an uncoolness. Right. That just like sitting as life is unfolding around you in public and being just like immersed in like the little black square is like loser behavior. Right. It's just like it's just like it's antisocial and it's like it's just not cool. It's just like not like it's gauche. Right. And I think that that more than any of this stuff to some degree can like I think. I think a cultural driver like that has the potential to actually have the most like more than even regulation of any kind. It's like if we all kind of decide that like being glued to this thing in public is is lame, that will change how we interact. I think you've seen more like moving towards phone free spaces or concerts like artists saying, like, please just put the phone away, try to enjoy the experience. And it's not like they take them away necessarily always, but it's like creating a space and a norm that like if you're doing this at the concert when they say not to, people are going to be like, hey, man, put that away. You know, it's like enforcing that that that that norm. It feels like eventually that's going to continue to grow just because of all of this on we that we're talking about. Do you feel like we are headed towards maybe not like a political, but like just a cultural, durable. Recalibration to how we perform with these devices in public? I hope so. Although I also noticed actually during this month, I was talking to people about how they were saying, like, you know, society is organized around your smartphone now. And it is kind of notable how hard it is to do certain things. Like, as you know, I am obsessed with the Mets. You cannot go into Citi Field without a smartphone. That is the only way to enter the stadium is by displaying a mobile ticket. There's no paper ticket option or printout? There's no paper tickets. You cannot show a PDF. It has to be like the animated thing. Right. And there's certain things like that now where I'm like, that is just wild. Like, it's just wild that you you simply can't go in there unless, you know, you're going with a friend and they do it for you. I was talking to the guy who Jack Nugent, who made the OS, and he said, like, oh, yeah, I have that problem, too. I load the tickets at home on my phone and then bring it in airplane mode with me to the stadium. It's a lot of work. I'm like, that's annoying. Yeah. But yeah, I think we could see people shifting culturally away from, you know, just developing new norms, like, or reaffirming ones that people just haven't really been following that much in terms of, like, don't have your phone out at dinner. Like, why would you need to be on your phone when you're around other people? Like, I think there's cultural stuff that we can do that would make people feel a lot better, honestly. I think a lot of the time in reporting on this for the last whatever, as we both have well more than a decade, I think a lot of times we get into these big, broad conversations about technology and expect these easy answers when the, when you kind of, like, zoom out and look at it. It's like, this amount of connectivity, the speed of the change and development, it is like a completely wild sociological, like, revolution, right? And the idea that we would have some kind of easy fix or easy, or like society would, you know, snap into understanding how to use this stuff right away is actually the thing that's most kind of irrational, I think. And I do wonder if over time, if we will look back on some of these years with all of this, like, I've seen other people, like, in Gen Z describe, like, the phones in schools as being like, this was a social experiment that was conducted on me, right? Whether or not it was okay to just, like, give me this device when I was, you know, in eighth grade and just, like, let me use it in school all day. And I think that, like, that idea of, like, this is, in some ways, an experiment we're running on all of ourselves at once. And eventually, society's going to probably say, like, okay, this is, these are the norms, right? You're going to be socially shunned if you behave this way in public. in a way that like, you know, 10 years ago, that was just how everyone was because we didn't know any better. Yeah. I think we may be in for a norm shift. I'm hoping for a norm shift. I do physically interrupt lots of photo shoots on the streets of Soho around the Atlantic office. So I'm doing my part. Give them the eye roll. Give them the, I'm walking here, you know. That's your right as a New Yorker. You've got to do that. Kaitlin, thank you so much for coming on Galaxy Brain and trying to provide some nuance where historically there is not. Of course. Thank you so much for chatting with me. That's it for us here. Thanks again to my guest, Kaitlin Tiffany. This episode of Galaxy Brain was produced by Rene Klar and engineered by Miguel Carrascal. Our theme is by Rob Smirciak. Claudine Abade is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio and Andrea Valdez. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. If you liked what you saw here, new episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday and you can subscribe on the Atlantic's YouTube channel or on Apple or Spotify or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you want to support this work and the work of my coworkers like Kaitlin, you can subscribe to the publication at theatlantic.com slash listener. That's theatlantic.com slash listener. Thanks so much. And I'll see you on the internet. I'll see you on the internet. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.