Plain English with Derek Thompson - Are Smartphones Really Driving the Rise in Teenage Depression?

Episode Date: May 14, 2024

Today—a closer critical look at the relationship between smartphones and mental health. One of the themes we’ve touched on more than any other on this show is that American teenagers—especially girls—appear to be “engulfed” in historic rates of anxiety and sadness. The numbers are undeniable. The Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which is published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, showed that from 2011 to 2021, the share of teenage girls who say they experience “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” increased by 50 percent. But there is a fierce debate about why this is happening. The most popular explanation on offer today in the media says: It’s the smartphones, stupid. Teen anxiety increased during a period when smartphones and social media colonized the youth social experience. This is a story I’ve shared on this very show, including with Jonathan Haidt, the author of the new bestselling book 'The Anxious Generation_.'_ But this interpretation is not dogma in scientific circles. In fact, it’s quite hotly debated. In 2019, an Oxford University study titled "The Association Between Adolescent Well-Being and Digital Technology Use" found that the effect size of screen time on reduced mental health was roughly the same as the association with “eating potatoes.” Today, I want to give more space to the argument that it's not just the phones. Our guest is David Wallace-Wells, bestselling science writer and a columnist for The New York Times.  He says something more complicated is happening. In particular, the rise in teen distress seems concentrated in a handful of high-income and often English-speaking countries. So what is it about the interaction between smartphones, social media, and an emerging Anglophonic culture of mental health that seems to be driving this increase in teen distress? If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: David Wallace-Wells Producer: Devon Baroldi Links My original essay on the teen anxiety phenomenon https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/04/american-teens-sadness-depression-anxiety/629524/ "Are Smartphones Driving Our Teens to Depression?" by David Wallace-Wells https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/01/opinion/smartphones-social-media-mental-health-teens.html 'The Anxious Generation,' by Jonathan Haidt https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/book Haidt responds to his critics https://www.afterbabel.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic Our original episode with Haidt https://www.theringer.com/2022/4/22/23036468/why-are-american-teenagers-so-sad-and-anxious Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sure, the weather is getting warmer and you're probably planning your next vacation with your family, but what better way to avoid your family on that vacation than listening to three dudes argue about quarterback tears, if you can trust a wide receiver over 30 years old, and if Jim Harbaugh still thinks chickens are nervous birds? Join me, Craig Horlebeck, along with Danny Hifitz and Danny Kelly every week on the Ringer Fantasy Football Show. Today, a closer look at the relationship between smartphones and our mental health. One of the themes that we've touched on in this show, maybe more than any other in the last year, is the idea that American teenagers, and in particular teenage girls, appear to be engulfed in historic rates of anxiety and sadness.

The numbers are undeniable. The Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which is published by the CDC, showed that in the decade between 2011 and 2021, the share of teenage girls who say they experience, quote, persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, increased by 50%. But as clear as the numbers seem, at least to me, there is still a fierce debate over why this is happening. Some people say teens are just reacting to a more anxious world. Others blame an evolution toward more accommodative parenting, which seeks to protect kids from harmful experiences. I've talked a lot in the show about my alarm at the general decline of friendships and social time among all Americans, but in particular among young people.

But there's no question that the most popular explanation on offer today in the media is, it's the smartphone stupid. Teen anxiety very obviously increased during a period where smartphones and social media colonized the youth social experience. Offline time with close friends went down. Time spent alone, staring into a virtual void, went up. This is a story I've shared on this very show, including with Jonathan Haidt, the author of the new bestselling book, The Anxious Generation.

It's a story I've defended in several levels. articles in the Atlantic, as various studies, I think, have shown a pretty clear correlation between smartphone use and mental distress in this country and in many others. But this interpretation is not dogma in scientific circles. And what I wanted to do several times this year is publish episodes that directly questioned theses that I put out maybe a week or several months before. In 2019, an Oxford University study entitled The Association Between Adolescent, well-being and digital technology use, found that the effect size of screen time on reduced

mental health was roughly the same as the association with, quote, eating potatoes and mental health. Eating potatoes. Hight, to his credit, responded to that particular paper in an essay on his substack, and we're going to link to that essay in the show notes that you can read both the link to that Oxford University paper and his defense in full. But today, I wanted to give more space to the argument that it's not just the phones, stupid. Something more complicated is happening. And our guest, our tour through this world of complications is David Wallace Wells, a best-selling science writer and a columnist for The New York Times. Most compellingly, I think, David points out that smartphones are a global phenomenon, but the rise in teenage anxiety is really

striking in only a handful of high income and often English-speaking countries. According to the Gallup World Happiness Report, which was published, I believe, just a month ago, I'm now reading from that report. Page 5, quote, since 2006 to 2010, happiness among the young, aged 15 to 24, has fallen sharply in North America to a point where the young are less happy than the old. youth happiness has also fallen, but less sharply in Western Europe. By contrast, happiness at every age has risen sharply in central and eastern Europe, so that young people are now equally happy in both parts of Europe. In the former Soviet Union and East Asia, too, there have been large increases in happiness

at every age. Again, smartphones are a global phenomenon, but the rise in teenage anxiety does not seem to be a universally global phenomenon. Happiness seems to be declining in the U.S. more than in other countries, and this is particularly interesting to me because it's in line with other sociological mysteries that I want to explore on this show. For example, in another Gallup survey that was released just last month,

the U.S. is last in confidence in national institutions among all G7 countries. We're behind Canada, the U.K., Germany, France, Japan, and Italy, and we are significantly behind these countries. Something seems to be going on with the culture of pride, positivity, well-being in the United States that does seem somewhat distinct. And I am interested in any theories, big and small, that can explain why the U.S., in particular,

seems to be experiencing the great gloom. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. David Wallace Wells, welcome to the show. Really good to be here. Really good to talk to you. I wanted to have you on this show because we've done a number of episodes about the youth anxiety crisis. And my belief is that phones are a major contributor to that anxiety crisis among teens and young people.

This is the subject of a bestselling book, The Anxist Generation, by Friend of the Show, Jonathan Haidt. I've had Haid on the show to talk through the thesis that he expounds on in that bestselling book. I know his argument. I respect it. I believe it. I think. Your new column in the New York Times is critical of this height argument that smartphones are a major driver of the teen anxiety crisis. You don't entirely buy the case that smartphones and social media are behind this phenomenon. I want you to walk us through your argument and walk us through your critique. But first, I want to begin at the highest level. Do you think, there is a teen anxiety crisis to begin with? I think a lot hangs on what you mean by the word

crisis there. In general, I think it's fair to say most people interacting with teenagers, especially in the U.S., but indeed around the rich world, are seeing more and more of them experiencing and reporting mental distress. We're seeing in most countries, though not all, increases in the rates of depression and anxiety among teens. The scale of those changes are different place to place, but the direction of change, I think, is pretty clear. But exactly how much of that is an increase in what experts call the underlying incidents, which is to say how many people are really suffering more acutely than their counterparts did 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. And how much of it is changes in the way that we talk about, think about mental health, mental illness,

the stigma around treatment and therapy, how open we are to treatment, how clinicians have been trained in different ways over the years, I think is very much an open question. And over the last five years, we've seen a sort of conventional wisdom take hold among, you know, really people like us, that is to say people in like the pundit class, but also a lot of people with whom we share, you know, a lot of demographic characteristics, like relatively well-off, relatively well-educated people who are now in sort of childbearing years. And I think it's quite conventional wisdom now among that cohort that phones are really, phones are really, really damaging to the mental health of teens. And the thing that's been

most striking to me in doing this work and this thinking about this and the research I've done, the people I've spoken to is that that is not conventional wisdom among the academics and scientists who study this work. The first compelling objection to the smartphone thesis is that we are measuring mental health very differently than we used to. You brought to my attention for the first time, a 2024 analysis from New Jersey,

which found that what appeared to be a sharp increase in suicidal behavior in children was mostly driven by changes in screening recommendations. This can get a little bit technical, but can you explain in simple terms what this paper looked at? The first is that the Affordable Care Act, as part of the Rollout of the Affordable Care Act, it was recommended for the first time that primary care physicians screened their teenage girls for depression annually.

And that meant that you just immediately started seeing a significant rise in a number of people who were being identified as depressed, being referred to other doctors for treatment for depression, but also if they were to come into contact with the hospital system, would be regarded as someone with a history of depression. And that happened nationally. It wasn't just in New Jersey. It also happened nationally that for the first time, this was required to be covered by health insurers, which means, again, that you're probably seeing some amount of change

in the way that clinicians are interacting with patients, not just the manner, but the scale of that interaction. And then there was another change, actually two kind of adjacent changes, in which the U.S. adopted, it's all technical and bureaucratic, but adopted a new way of coding hospital admissions such that they used to sort of require you to put in a data point for what the injury was that brought the person to the hospital. And then in a second column, in a second place, you could say whether this was an intentional injury or an accidental injury. And in a lot of

cases, the admissions process meant that they just didn't fill out that second form. And the WHO recommended this set of changes actually a long time ago in the late 90s. It swept across the world. Different countries adopted the policy change at different times. And in the U.S., at the national level, you can see when that happened actually like overnight and almost doubling in the reporting of self-harm admissions to hospitals across all age groups, not just among young women or young men. Then in New Jersey, there was a related second coding recommendation put out to clarify exactly how this should be done.

And actually, within New Jersey, that had the bigger impact on exactly how many people were reported as being hospitalized for attempted suicide. And the authors of this paper show that if you factor in all these things, you actually see what looks like a quite alarming trend line from, you know, say, 2010, to to 2018 completely disappear, that there's no trend line at all within New Jersey. Now, New Jersey, not necessarily representative state. It's wealthy. Basically, everybody already had health insurance before may have been ahead of the curve nationally in terms of openness to therapy and that kind of thing. But nevertheless, in this setting, which is the only one that's

been studied extensively, we saw that what looked like these really alarming trend lines completely disappeared when we accounted for just a couple of these changes in the way that we think about and process mental illness at the individual level and at the sort of hospital system level. Is there a historical analogy that we can pull in here? Like, is there a modern precedent for a change in coding or diagnosis to drive an apparent change in mental health? When we talk about the changing nature of a diagnostic culture, that can sound pretty squishy and evasive, like we can't really know anything. And maybe we're just sort of coming up with excuses to explain trends that really look horrifying on graphs.

But I also think it's important to keep some parallel stories in mind here. For instance, that over the course of just the 1990s, we saw a 4,000-fold increase in the diagnosis of bipolar disorder among American teens. And, you know, nobody looking at that data now says, Well, over the course of that decade or so, you know, 4,000 percent, the rate of bipolar disorder increased by 4,000 percent. Everybody understands it's because psychologists, therapists, and doctors learned how to look for it and became preoccupied with diagnosing it among a certain cohort. You even see some of these effects when you look at like, you know, American pets are now given many, many more anti-anxiety and antidepressant. anti-depressant drugs than they were 10 or 15 years ago. We know that that's not because pets are more depressed or anxious than they were back then.

It's because we think that they're more depressed and anxious, and possibly because we feel more depressed and more anxious, and we have more confidence in the drugs than we did a generation ago. And that's not to say that what we're seeing in these trend lines is a total illusion. I think we did need to do a lot more work there. But I just think we should bring to bear on this question all of the knowledge and wisdom that we've accumulated in our lives, seeing things like, you know, more people identifying as depressed, more people talking openly about depression, more people seeing therapists, more people getting medications. We know that all these phenomena are happening. And we should assume, therefore,

that they're happening also among teens and probably explain at least some chunk of the increase that we see when we look at just what the CDC says, the rates of depression are. We've talked a bit about how reporting biases or changes in reporting standards can shape what appears to be an increase in mental distress. But there's one truly objective statistic that we can look at, and that is suicide. And the fact about suicide is that it has gone up a lot for young girls. Suicides have more than doubled, nearly tripled for American girls between 10 and 14. suicide is increased for older teens as well, both boys and girls.

As a skeptic, as a careful reader of all of this data, tell me what you see when you look at the suicide data. So, you know, in the U.S., teen suicide rates have grown among teen girls more dramatically than for teen boys. That's true. But it's true actually only in percentage terms, which is to say girls are becoming more suicidal from a very low baseline. Young women have historically, and really across cultures,

are like the least likely people to die by suicide. Middle-aged men are typically the most likely to die. But even the difference between teenage girls and teenage boys is really significant. And over the last decade or so, as we've seen this increase in American suicide rates, there's actually been a larger absolute increase in suicides among young men than among young women. Young women grew from about, I think, three and a half suicides per 100,000 to about six, which is almost a doubling. And young men, it grew from 16 to 22 per 100,000, which means in absolute terms, we had six, you know, six suicides we wouldn't have had before among young men

and two and a half suicides that we wouldn't have had before among young women. And I don't want to say that that's a better metric than a percentage increase. They're both important, But it's also important to remember that as we're talking about all of these trends, one thing that we're really describing is a kind of a gender convergence where young women are behaving a little bit more like young men. And they're still actually quite far below the way that young men normally behave. And that's concerning. It would be better if young men were behaving more like young women just because of where the trendlines are. But it may also say something else perhaps even profound about our culture, that these two groups that a generation ago were more culturally distinct are becoming more culturally similar. But it is also true that the U.S. is undergoing a suicide epidemic across demographic groups such that the rate of increase in almost all groups is roughly comparable to the rate of increase among teenagers here. And that's tragic in its own right.

We've had a lot of media discourse around deaths of despair and suicide. And we've talked about, you know, the tragic plight of teenage boys in America in recent media hype cycles. And all of these are legitimate reasons for concern. But if the question is, why are American teenage girls committing suicide at much higher rates than they used to? I think one answer is, well, Americans in general are committing suicide at much higher rates than they used to. And when you look at the international data, that pattern almost entirely disappears, which is to say the trend where we could say teenagers are committing suicide at higher rates than they used to. In almost no country in the world outside of the United States, is that true? I really want to talk about the international data because this is a powerful point you've made, and Eric Levitz has made it in Vox as well.

I think a lot of the smartest academic critics have made a version of the same objection. And that is this. If you look really hard at the global data, the decline in teen mental health is not happening everywhere. And that's a problem for the smartphone thesis, because smartphones are everywhere. I could talk about any number of international studies, but we're talking about suicides now. So let's scrutinize the suicide data. Between 2012 and 2019, the suicide rate among teenagers in France declined. In Denmark, suicide declined.

in Ireland, declined. Suicide rates are falling all over the world. At the same time, that theoretically there's a crisis as smartphones making young people distressed. Now, Height points out that there are also many countries where mental distress seems to be rising,

but they're mostly English-speaking countries. And this might be the thing I'm most fascinated by at the moment. The question I don't think is getting enough attention is, why does the teen mental health crisis seem to be an English-speaking crisis. Because it's the anglosphere where negative mood is increasing the most.

It's America. It's the UK. It's Australia to a certain extent. Maybe even Scandinavia, which is closely related to the anglosphere. David, what would explain the idea that smartphones are increasing anxiety specifically and especially among English-speaking countries,

but not among some of their non-English-speaking neighbors? For me, the simplest answer is that these are countries that are culturally very similar. And it's likely that their cultures of mental health and mental health care are moving somewhat in parallel, in closer parallel than, for instance, the mental health culture in South Korea or Japan or somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa may be changing. It is not, you know, I mean, literally like the scientific, the world's biggest scientific journals are UK and U.S. based. they're establishing a lot of the parameters and standards for not just clinicians, but academics all around the world, but especially among people who read natively in those languages. And of course, we're also cultures that are, you know, demographically similar.

We have, you know, similar longstanding parallel roots with one another. To me, it's not remarkable that if you see something happening in the U.S., you see some version of it happening in Canada and the UK. You know, Australia and New Zealand may be slightly more different, but in general, these countries are all quite culturally similar. And I think the mental health patterns are similar. So if what we're seeing here is more people growing more open to diagnoses of depression and anxiety, kids feeling more comfortable, coming to their parents or their teachers or their doctors with those worries, those doctors and teachers and parents responding more positively to them, which is to say with more concern, more genuine, you know,

support wanting to do something, including diagnosis and prescription, then probably those are phenomenon that are going to be happening in parallel in all of these places. But I think there are some other things to consider too. I mean, you know, I would say that there is a sort of a narrative of cultural decline that is shared in the U.S. and the U.K. in particular. Now, in the U.S. it feels a little more broken from reality, but in the UK, they're actually, their per capita GDP has shrunk over the last 15 years. They've suffered through a lot of austerity measures. The NHS has really backed up. They're farther along past their peak of, you know, imperial might. There are a lot of reasons why people in the UK are feeling kind of despondent

about the future of the country, reckoning with the aftermath of Brexit, you know, the brokenness of their politics, which is, you know, maybe not as broken as actually. but nevertheless more broken than many in the UK would want it to be. And these are also memes that are shared between like cultures in ways that are a little harder for them to transmit past larger cultural barriers. The psychologist Darby-Saxby came on the show a few months ago, and we talked about a phenomenon that she's been tracking called prevalence inflation. and the theory of prevalence inflation,

and I want anyone who hears any wrong definition on my part to blame me rather than Darby, the theory of prevalence inflation says something like this. Over the last few years, we have tried very hard and very explicitly to destigmatize anxiety and depression. And that process of desigmatization has in many ways been a mitzvah.

It has helped people who would have otherwise suffered silently to be hooked up with a therapist or with SSRIs or with ketamine in a way that hopefully has been very helpful to them. But there is possibly a way of talking about mental illness too much. There might even be a way of talking ourselves into mental illness by talking about mental illness. by talking about distress and anxiety and depression so much that people begin to regard and interocept their own normal feelings as pathologies. I wonder what you make of the theory of prevalence inflation. Well, the first thing I would say is that whatever its impacts on people's well-being, This theory holds that we are increasingly attentive to symptoms and suffering.

We are talking about that more and more. And then asks the question, what does that mean for the mental well-being of people who are sort of caught up in this in this cultural pattern? And it's important to ask the second question, but I just want to emphasize the first part, which is on some level, what we're saying here is we can all agree. that we are identifying previously unidentified cases of real meaningful mental illness, that people are getting treated and attended to in a more aggressive way than they would have been a generation before. And then we're asking, is this all good or not? And I met I have a couple of different thoughts.

I mean, my first thought is, you know, when we're asking, when we. talk about a lot of these therapies, particularly the prescription of psychotropic drugs, I'm somewhat of a skeptic. You know, at the large scale, I think we know that SSRIs are meaningfully helpful to people who are really deeply depressed. But the data on whether they're meaningfully helpful to people who are more mildly depressed is really ambiguous. And there are a fair number of studies showing that, in fact, placebo effects outweigh the effects

of SSRIs for those people. You know, ketamine, we're sort of just starting to think about the long-term effects of that, and there have been some, I think, concerning signs and studies about what long-term ketamine use means for treatment of some of these disorders. I find myself uncomfortable just at a sort of an animal level at the idea that we have tens of millions of American kids on drugs that we're basically telling them they're going to need to take for the rest of their lives and who's underlying chemical mechanisms.

We don't entirely understand. We just kind of know that they kind of work for the people most in need. And I think we actually see some of these patterns in non-pharmaceutical therapies too. Cognitive behavioral therapy was hailed as a major, major intellectual breakthrough about a half a generation ago

because all of the trial work there was like incredibly promising how it compared to all the previous forms of talk therapy. it did so much better. But as it's expanded, the scale of those impacts has shrunk. And on some level, that's what you'd expect. It's like the people who are, the clinicians who are best at it matched with the people who probably needed it most were likely to be concentrated in the first cohort trying it.

And as you roll it out to more people, you know, you're getting less effective treatment and probably people who are less well matched to the sort of particular program of CBT. But on all of these measures, I would say we don't actually have a very good way of taking care of people who are in mental distress. And so when we talk about the growth of therapy culture and the rapid expansion of the medicalization of unhappiness, I think on net, this is like a good thing. I think it's better for people to be caring more about this rather than caring less. But I don't think it's as easy as saying, well, if someone's depressed, we know exactly how to solve that problem. and we just write them a script or we just put them in a CBT program and we know the solution solved. Mental illness is really, really complicated and we are much farther from knowing how to deal with it than we think.

Then you get into this whole, you know, the whole other level, which you were racing at the top, that was on my preamble. The whole other level of this is like, you know, are we making people more depressed because we're talking about depression more? And I think the short version of my answer is we don't know, but I don't think that that's an insane hyperact. hypothesis. I do think that, you know, I do think that when people think about themselves, when they think about, say, a mental illness diagnosis as a part of their identity that then they carry with them through their life, it may be harder for them to leave behind a period of sadness and think of themselves now as mentally healthy. You know, there is research into this, but as far as I can tell, it's preliminary and, you know, not all that data-driven. But I would

say it seems to me to be certainly an area of important research and inquiry, whether we are, yeah, whether we're talking ourselves into higher levels of depression or whether we just happen to be talking more about depression and seeing the rates spike as a result. One reason why I still find myself persuaded by the phone theory is that I feel it. There are some researchers who are very critical of the height thesis, who say that this is a kind of moral panic. And we have a moral panic about every technology. We had a moral panic about bicycles driving people crazy. We had moral panics about radio warping people's minds. This is just the next generation of a stupid moral panic that we'll look back at in 40 years and feel a kind of nostalgic embarrassment

of. I'm not sure I believe that. When they say, for example, that this is akin to the idea that playing violent video games drives homicides. And that was a popular claim, you know, rap music and, you know, violent video games are driving the homicide crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. Well, that comparison just never connected for me. I played violent video games. I've killed thousands and thousands of virtual people on Golden Eye and Halo and other shooter games. And I've never put down the controller after playing Golden Eye are Halo and felt myself drawn to go outside and commit some light felonies. But if I really pay attention to my inner weather when I spend too much time on my phone,

or when I spend, I won't even judge myself, a lot of time on my phone, I think my phone really does kind of bum me out. I think that I feel pulled out of the physical world and pulled into online ecosystems that are full of stuff that just makes me feel bad. And so, one of the reasons why I've always found the phone hypothesis persuasive is that it's a persuasive explanation of what this technology does to me on a day-to-day basis. Outside of the realm of statistics and bureaucratic biases and cross-tabs, when you, David, think about your own relationship with this technology, do you not feel this under? toe of negative affect that hits you when you spend a lot of time on your smartphone?

No, I mean, I hate my phone. I hate everyone around me. It's using their phone and not talking to be it, you know, like everybody else of our generation. But I think the generational part of that is really important, which is to say, like, you and I grew up at a time when we were the users of video games who were being worried over by an older generation who is not using video games. One of the things that's interesting about this particular moral panic is that while it is focused on teenagers, it is also powered by people who have themselves direct experience of the thing they're worrying over. And that wasn't really true of comic books. It wasn't really true of radio. It wasn't really true of heavy metal or rap music or video games. You can go down the line.

And so we all feel confirmed by our own personal experience and anecdote that like this thing in my hand sucks. I am addicted to it. It bums me out when I use it too much. It probably even bums me out when I don't use it all that much. And probably I should have a healthier relationship to it. Beyond that, everybody I know who works directly with teenagers and young people says that they noted a lot of these changes themselves, not just in their personal lives, but in their classrooms or in their clinics. It is a very common thing for people to say, like, children are definitely suffering more than they used to. But that's not to say that every teenager who's handed a phone is going to turn into a, you know, depressive, fatalistic, you know, suicidal or near-suic person by the time they're 19.

And I think it's important to keep both of those sets of facts in mind at once, which is to say, you know, we may be observed in some real effect here in some subpopulations. but that doesn't necessarily mean that the culture as a whole is sick with this thing or is suffering from this thing. I want to try to stand outside this debate and point out to listeners, and I think also to myself, that there are really two conversations worth having here. One is this debate we've been having, this discussion we've been having, about correlation and causality. To what extent can we say that smartphones are the key driver of a rising mental health distress crisis among young Americans, and to what extent is it happening around the world and especially in English-speaking countries? Right? That's a debate about a phenomenon. But there's a debate we can have about a policy. What do we do about this? And you don't need to have final proof that smartphones berserk our minds

to believe, for example, that we should ban phones from school. So what do you think about the policy idea that height has been floating, that we should ban phones from schools? Over the last couple of months, as we've been talking a lot about phones and their impact and, you know, potentially what we might do about them to sort of take control of this phenomenon. I think one kind of promising middle ground that's opened up is to think about, you know, banning or blocking phones from use in schools. And this to me makes sense not because I'm really worried necessarily about the catastrophic impact on teen mental health, but just in the sense that, you know, a generation ago,

we didn't let kids play video games in school. We didn't let them play, you know, hip hop or, or, or, you know, or heavy metal in class either. That's not because hip-hop and heavy metal caused violence. It's not because first-person shooter games cause violence. It's just because it's bad to be distracted when you're in an environment where you should be learning. And probably we should apply that same standard to schools and phones right now and say,

if you're in a classroom where you're trying to learn calculus, we know that looking at Instagram or TikTok is not going to help you. So we're going to make sure that that doesn't happen. And that imposes some amount of bureaucratic castle on schools, you know, making sure that they keep track of phones or keep them out of classrooms, et cetera. But I think that the benefit to the actual kids in those classrooms would be quite significant. And potentially even significant in some of these emotional ways, too, because their studies showing that when you reduce phone use in schools,

you reduce bullying and that sort of thing. I'm a little less sure that that impact would unfold. But I feel pretty confident that if we take phones out of kids' pockets in the classroom, I'm probably going to do a better job learning whatever the teacher is trying to teach them. David Wallace Wells. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Thank you for listening.

Plain English is produced by Devin Boraldi. Just a quick programming note. I know we were off last Friday. I was in California meeting my nephew for the first time. He's adorable. I'll be off this Friday as well, traveling with some of my high school friends for my birthday this weekend.

We will be back next week to a regular two-episode per week schedule. We will see you then. I'm