Put Your Phone Away: Yondr CEO on the Philosophy Behind Phone-Free Spaces

They’re incredible pieces of technology, they’re unbelievably useful, and we feel lost without them. Nonetheless, smartphones have become the bane of our existence. So Graham Dugoni started Yondr with a surprisingly simple and analog solution to their ubiquity: locking pouches that force cell phone users to put away their device while still keeping their phones on them. Now, they’re used everywhere from comedy shows, to concerts, courtrooms, and weddings. After the success of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, more and more states and school districts are instituting cell-phone bans — and, oftentimes, Yondr is the first company they turn to when they need help. Kara and Graham talk about the push to ban phones from schools, the company’s success, and his philosophical take on smartphones, social media and technology. Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected] or find us on Instagram and TikTok @onwithkaraswisher Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. Today, I'm talking to Graham Dugoni, the founder and CEO of Yonder. It's a company that's mainly known for making pouches that lock cellphones. They can only be unlocked with a proprietary magnetic key, and if you've been to a comedy show in the past few years, there's a decent chance you've had to lock up your phone in a Yonder pouch. If you're an American student in middle or high school, there's a very decent chance you've either had to lock up your phone in one of these pouches, or you will in the coming years. The pouches are a simple but ingenious solution to a paradox caused by smartphones. We love them, and we need them, but they also can ruin everything, from weddings, concerts, and comedy shows to court proceedings.

• 0:56Speaker 00

  Graham started Yondr in 2014, before most people had caught on to how pernicious cellphones can be. He takes a philosophical approach to technology, and I want to talk to him about that, because we know our phones are killing us. Come on. They're addictive, they're problematic, they're necessary, you have to have them for work, and they also cause all kinds of problems, and we need to get a hold of our issue. The other issue is, technology leaders then have complete control of us, and you know we don't want that, especially these days. We have two expert questions for Graham, one from Jonathan Haidt, whose book, The Anxious Generation, has kick-started a conversation about the effects of cellphones on kids, and Dr.

• 1:37Speaker 00

  Shamis Taylor, the principal of Phoenixville Area Middle School in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. Stick around, and Dr. Taylor, go Phantoms.

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• 3:06Speaker 00

  Graham, thanks for being on On.

• 3:09Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me.

• 3:11Speaker 00

  I've actually wanted to have you here a lot, actually. I've used Yonder Pouches for many years, mostly at concerts. But this is a topic that I talk a lot about on Pivot and have talked about a lot over the years, and I have a lot of kids. So it's a critically important issue, and I think it's kind of an interesting approach to this problem of screen time in young people, which is a more physical approach. But let's get into it. You started Yonder after seeing people film a drunk concert goer. Is this your origin story, presumably against his wishes and without his knowledge? Talk about that moment. Lots of companies have their origin stories, some of which are true, some of which aren't.

• 3:53Speaker 00

  But talk about what prompted you, this issue around privacy, because this happens every day. People tape other people all the time now. It seems constant.

• 4:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was a crystallizing moment, I would say, for me. But it wasn't necessarily the origin. I mean, I was at a music festival in San Francisco about 2012.

• 4:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:13Speaker 03

  And I saw someone recording someone who was drunk and dancing, and they were posting it to the internet without their knowledge.

• 4:19Speaker 00

  Right.

• 4:19Speaker 03

  And that was a crystallizing moment because if you follow that that line of thinking all the way through, I realized that it bumped up really strongly against this tech idea that everything was going to become more connected everywhere all the time, and that was going to lead us to this kind of this great place. But the background knowledge that kind of led me there was, you know, I fell down a rabbit hole years before, reading people like Kierkegaard and Heidegger. And a lot of people had been examining the question of technology for hundreds of years, and so I kind of took that.

• 4:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, the original rabbit hole, by the way, just for people who are.

• 4:52Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 4:53Speaker 00

  Was well read.

• 4:53Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 4:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, so that was kind of the origin. But looking at that and then what the tech world was proposing, I just saw things going down, I thought, a very different route.

• 5:02Speaker 00

  Okay, I saw the same route, and I read all those same people, including Camus and Sartre and everybody else. But talk about why that was, because, you know, obviously, people were thrilled with the idea that you could film anywhere and you could do, you know, your phone was an extension of yourself, essentially, of your eyes, except that it recorded. Why did you go down a more negative path? I have ideas why I did, but I was worried about, I'm always worried about consequences, and a lot of people in tech are not. I think that's one of the things.

• 5:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, I think it was more to me, anytime there's radical, radically new technological development, there are going to be possibilities and unforeseen consequences. So for me, it was going, if this theme has been building for hundreds of years and everything is getting faster, easier, cheaper, everywhere, all the time, that's the theme. I thought that the advent of the smartphone was a fundamental shift in the sense that it changed the way you existed in the world. And this younger generation in particular, digital natives, were going to be born without that frame of reference, of the difference between the online, the offline world.

• 6:02Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 6:03Speaker 03

  And so these issues related to privacy in the public sphere, related to the development of critical thinking faculties, these were going to have to be things that were examined in light of something that changed your experience so radically. So for me, it wasn't necessarily the negatives. It was more, how are we gonna move constructively into the future and incorporate these tools? And I didn't think that the things I was hearing from the tech world sounded right to me.

• 6:25Speaker 00

  So they're always up and to the right. They're always, it's all gonna be great. I mean, it's very common. And now, of course, we're seeing another iteration of where it leads to. But right now, about 2 million students use your pouches and more than a million concertgoers use them every month. Explain how you got the funding and how the pouches work for people who haven't encountered them. You really have cornered the market on phone-free solutions in this regard. And it's kind of a basic idea, right? It's not like that complex.

• 6:56Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, in a way. But in 2014, you know, I was going around, the initial funding came from me selling my car. You know, so I had $7,000. And all the initial prototypes of the pouch, which I can describe, you know, I made myself at a hardware store in San Francisco, sewing them together. But the idea really is phone-free spaces and phone-free schools. And when I kind of created that concept, there was no vernacular for it. So the closest analog I had in my mind was kind of like creating a system of national parks inside a society, you know, recognizing that there are no more frontiers. You've read the postmodernists and you get that. So how do we get to carve out these spaces that allow people to experience

• 7:36Speaker 03

  life temporarily, kind of outside the pull and tug of, you know, our modern lifestyles? But if you're a concertgoer, or you're a kid going to school where yonder's being used, you know, your experience is a little different, but similar in the sense that at a show, you walk in, you know, you know, it's gonna be a phone-free show beforehand. You're handed a pouch, your phone and your wearable tech all goes inside the pouch. Once it closes, it's locked, and it's handed back to you. So you have possession of your device at all times.

• 8:02Speaker 00

  Because sometimes they take them away. Some concerts take them away, which makes people really crazy, you know, in terms of finding them later. It's actually somewhat chaotic if you do it in that fashion.

• 8:12Speaker 03

  Definitely. And also, it doesn't meet people where they're at because people say, "Hey, I have a babysitter home with the kids." And we're able to say, "Hey, that's fine. Your phone's on you. If you need to use it, go to a phone use area." It's like a smoking section. So that was always my approach, is trying to meet people where they're at and not, we're trying to open a window for them to have a perspective on tech and their lives. So you have to do it in a certain way.

• 8:32Speaker 00

  Right. And so you, so you, it locks and then it unlocks when you leave. People have the keys to unlock them when you leave?

• 8:39Speaker 03

  Correct. At the, at the exits for every venue, they're unlocking stations. People just walk by, tap the pouch on there, and it unlocks. It's the same in a, in a school setting.

• 8:48Speaker 00

  The lock is a, is a magnetized lock, correct?

• 8:51Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 8:52Speaker 00

  I've seen different versions, a magnetized lock that, it's a soft pouch that protects the phone from being dropped and things like that. Now, you said, when you're getting yonder off the ground, the people who weren't positive, the only people that weren't positive about it was people in Silicon Valley, which is how I knew it was a good idea. Talk a little bit about that. And, and, and how do you, how do you feel about those people? And how do they feel about what you're doing now?

• 9:17Speaker 03

  Well, the zeitgeist has changed so much. It's, it's honestly, it's hard for me sometimes to remember what it was like back then because I was going to, you know, eight or nine schools every single day, going in person, driving up. And at that time, I had an old, like, 1978 Toyota Dolphin. All my pouches were in the back. I was rolling up. And I would go to two, two or three music venues at night.

• 9:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:38Speaker 03

  But I felt like tech people I talked to, they, everyone was following this playbook so religiously and innovating and kind of this narrow alleyway that the idea that tech would not be omnipresent, or that things weren't going exactly where they thought they were going, was not even computing. So when I was, I got laughed out of a lot of rooms when I was trying to find early investors. Ultimately, I'm glad that happened because it just made me actually go out in the world and talk to people about what I was trying to do. And that's where I found teachers and I found artists who said, "Yeah, this is a problem for me. Can you help me?" And that's how I learned.

• 10:10Speaker 00

  This is for artists interrupting their performances and, and comics, or singers, or whatever, theaters, and then with, with teachers not having people pay attention, essentially. Having kids pay attention. What, who funded you? What was the funding situation? And what was the breakthrough in terms of getting funding?

• 10:30Speaker 03

  I mean, the breakthrough is probably scraping together kind of an early friends and family rounded 2015, 16 of $100,000, which for me was a lot of money at the time. But probably the most meaningful investor over time was soon after that was probably Dave Chappelle coming on as an investor. And when I met him, he was the first artist who really understood what I was trying to do, and he understood, I think, the value for, for his art form, not just from an IP perspective, but for freedom of expression and having an audience that was fully there.

• 10:59Speaker 00

  Right. And from an IP is people record these performances and, and take away their IP. That, that is their, in fact, their IP for people to realize it. It's fine to take a quick snapshot and things like that, but a lot of people were doing more than that, correct?

• 11:12Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, of course. But also for the art form and for music as well. It's funny, even artists who tend to approach us first from an IP perspective, when I talk to them over time, what it usually morphs into is purely the experience. The idea of being and performing at a phone-free show, you know, like when we do shows at Madison Square Garden, it's hard for people to imagine sometimes you're walking into a venue with 20,000 people. And it's not just the fact that you're not seeing phones at the show, those blinking lights, it's the 30, 40 minutes beforehand as people step in, they get into the mood. The whole atmosphere radically changes.

• 11:46Speaker 00

  They're staring at their phones. It's a very different experience, which of course jars people, I think, when they don't have them now, because that's where they go when they're bored for a second and a half or, or anything else. Because kids, many of us used to just be bored. That's all. We just stared into the, into the abyss constantly, speaking of existentialism. Was there a different experience when you went to teachers at schools? Because I want to get into this idea of, of, of what was that reaction? They knew that kids were losing attention, correct? It was not that hard to figure that one out.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, I mean, even in 2014, I was going around and you would, teachers at that time fell into two camps, I would say. Both knew that cell phones were a massive problem in education. One camp saw it as so far gone, they couldn't even imagine how we could put the genie back in the bottle. And the other also agreed it was a problem, but was searching for answers. That some of them were trying to put phones into shoeboxes and things like that. But there was no structural or policy way to help them actually do that.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  Right.

• 12:47Speaker 03

  But they were already seeing back then, and it just got worse. You know, a tremendous amount of violence in schools day to day, driven through social media and unwanted recording and distractions and critical thinking. And so that was already happening in 2014.

• 12:59Speaker 00

  Right, distractions, cheating, all kinds of things people could do with them. What was interesting is that around that time, I started when I'm doing meetings, I used a box, I put them in a box, phones in a pile or something like that, meetings. I was had my kids had a, my kid had a party, maybe fourth or fifth grade, or maybe later, probably later. And all the kids were talking to each other on cell phones at the party. They were texting each other. So I took them all and ran, which was, and then I said, enjoy, enjoy yourselves. But it was, it was a much more, you'd have to be very, very aggressive. But let's, let's go to COVID. So this was something, the pandemic and school closures came with it changed kids' relationships to tech. What did you hear when teachers and principals started opening back up?

• 13:43Speaker 03

  In terms of growing the company, it was a hard reset for us because, I mean, during, when COVID first hit, we were on a company trip in camping in Joshua Tree. No one had their phone.

• 13:52Speaker 00

  Right.

• 13:52Speaker 03

  And so when we came out, it was like a zombie movie. Everything was closed down. We were like, what's going on?

• 13:57Speaker 00

  Right.

• 13:58Speaker 03

  The concert business stopped, you know, all schools shut down. So it was a reset company wide. But I, I felt even in that moment, that it ultimately would be a tailwind for us because I thought that there was going to be so much more exposure to online learning and all these things that parents were going to see what was actually happening. And that's what came to pass. As schools opened up and things came back, we had a huge inflow from, a lot of it was from parents and, and from teachers. Teachers were saying, we've noticed a dramatic change in our students in terms of two years of loss of kind of in-person interaction and socialization. And parents, I think, just saw what kids, what it meant for them to be online that much.

• 14:36Speaker 00

  Right.

• 14:36Speaker 03

  Whether it was through learning or their interactions, and they, they were concerned.

• 14:39Speaker 00

  Did you think the addiction increased during the pandemic?

• 14:44Speaker 03

  Well, again, the trend has been developing for so long and I try to stay away from the word addiction, honestly, not because it's not true, but because if I'm a young person and we're using that kind of language, I don't know it's the most empowering or inspiring language to use, you know?

• 14:59Speaker 00

  The problem is, Vivek Murthy, who's the surgeon general, said is, these are useful too. It's not like it's a cigarette where there's very little use for it besides addiction and presumably pleasure for some people.

• 15:12Speaker 03

  I totally agree. And that's the thing, that's why I try not to paint it that way. But absolutely, I mean, look, it's a, what, people are, you're going to take the, and young people are no different, they're going to take the path of least resistance when it comes to learning or social interaction. So to me, digital tools, most of it follows a path of least resistance. If it's easier or less stressful to text someone than to talk in person, get in a vacuum, people are going to do that than this. So how are we, you know, we have to create structures, I think, to help young people orient towards the online world, not negate it, but kind of give them a frame of reference because it's not fair to ask someone who was born into something to immediately have perspective.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  Stop using your blank. I mean, they did that with television with people, they did that with...

• 15:54Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 15:55Speaker 00

  You know, so right now, schools, is that correct, are your biggest source of revenue? And in more states, I think 19 states either ban or restrict cellphone use in schools, localities are doing this, and a lot of education policy is done on a local level, state and local level. Virginia and South Carolina's policies went into effect this month. Talk about, is this the trend happening, education, where cellphone bans are what happens everywhere? It seems to me that's the case.

• 16:25Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, I mean, it's accelerated incredibly quickly. So again, 10 years ago, when schools and teachers were reaching out, it was mostly at the classroom level. They were saying, hey, I need help.

• 16:36Speaker 00

  Teachers themselves, yeah.

• 16:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, my principal or superintendent's not ready, but I need help. And we tried that. Again, what we learned over time is that you really have to do bell to bell and a holistic solution for a whole bunch of reasons. But in terms of legislation, we've kind of grown along with that curve, I would say. Whereas we were mostly working with districts a couple of years ago. Now we're engaging with entire states and helping them kind of inform going, "Hey, you you want to create a phone policy?" And it's probably important to distinguish between the idea of a phone ban, which some a state like Florida kind of moved on the concept, but nothing's really happened on the ground.

• 17:11Speaker 00

  Right.

• 17:11Speaker 03

  Versus what we term like a phone-free school, which is actually the devil's in the details. How do you support teachers and principals to do it?

• 17:18Speaker 00

  Was there a resistance or just inertia that's very common among school districts?

• 17:24Speaker 03

  Resistance to the idea of becoming a phone-free district or school?

• 17:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:29Speaker 03

  I think it's it's really interesting. It depends a little bit on what part of the country you're talking about and the demographics involved. But in general, the support now is, I would say, over eighty percent in most districts and understanding of and appreciation of what it is. In the past, most resistance would come from parents.

• 17:46Speaker 00

  You said earlier that demographics affect the reaction to cells in school. Talk talk about that. I've noticed that, but talk a little about demographics.

• 17:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's it's it's it's kind of it's fascinating. We work in schools of all sizes, you know, all sizes, urban, suburban, rural. And I would say there's a couple of things. One is, you know, when we roll out the other program, it's a program. It's not just a pouch. We help with the pre-planning, the communication, the policy creation, also the implementation and the rollout, and also the ongoing support.

• 18:18Speaker 03

  But in terms of demographics, something I've noticed over time is in some of the, you know, the poorer areas that are especially in very dense urban settings, the phone can become for students more than just a tool. Because there's not, let's say, extracurriculars or athletics and things like that going on, it can become this window to the world.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:37Speaker 03

  You know?

• 18:37Speaker 00

  In a positive way, yeah.

• 18:40Speaker 03

  Well, in in just a very deeply rooted way, I would say. And so that that attachment is is emotional and not just psychological. And so trying to unwind that and create a space where all students are in, you know, in a phone-free school day from beginning to end is something you really have to work in communicating with parents and them understanding the need for it.

• 19:00Speaker 00

  Go ahead.

• 19:01Speaker 03

  Oh, well, yeah, the other part I would just say about that is we learned very early on also, you really can't, you can't try to create a policy in a punitive way. So picking out students who can't control themselves or things like that does not work. It's really important that all students are in the same boat together. That's what makes it work.

• 19:17Speaker 00

  Right. I would say Jonathan Haidt's book, The Anxious Generation, has arguably been the catalyst for the increase in interest around the school cell phone ban. Talk about the book's effect. And obviously, there's some controversy around the book, but, but the cellphone ban thing is pretty explicit. And is that, is that, has that heightened it? He said that by September, a great majority of schools in this country will be phone free. Does that sound realistic to you?

• 19:44Speaker 03

  I mean, it's moving incredibly fast. And I think that his work, I think articulated in a way that people could understand and relate to, and that had a tremendous effect. If you follow the trend that we've seen, because, look, we're not just in the US. We're in 35 different countries. So we've watched this trend develop. It was moving this way, I think, very quickly. But what I think his work did is also help parents understand that the things they're worried about and they see in their young, their young, you know, their children.

• 20:09Speaker 00

  Themselves.

• 20:10Speaker 03

  This is a, exactly. This is something that we can articulate and we can wrestle with. So I guess in terms of that general collective action problem, you know, 10 years ago, where I always saw myself and yonder is the action part.

• 20:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:22Speaker 03

  How, how do you facilitate that? You have to do something about it. And it starts with concrete, tangible things.

• 21:29Kara Swisher?

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• 23:49Speaker 00

  So to explain how the problem works, you said earlier you have to have a bell to bell approach. We talk about that idea. It has to be the entire day, no lunch, break, et cetera, et cetera.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, in the early days, we so we would help a teacher who reached out and said, I need support from my classroom. What we found out really quickly was when you did that, you know, you have it falls to the level of classroom management. So some teachers are going to be strict, some are going to be lenient. Almost invariably, though, over time, they'd be worn down and the policy would just kind of float away and disintegrate.

• 24:18Speaker 00

  Right.

• 24:18Speaker 03

  So what we found is also the benefits of a phone free school day, it's not just in the classroom and distractions, it's in passing period. It's not having kids filming other kids and posting it to the internet in the locker room. It's things we hear even now from schools about kids eating more at lunch because they're not afraid of being filmed or recorded. So

• 24:36Speaker 00

  Right.

• 24:37Speaker 03

  We realized that bell to bell, you had to take kind of holistic approach and go for it in order to give the benefits, not just to students, but also to teachers who are, you know, who are leaving the profession and huge numbers largely because of the working environment.

• 24:51Speaker 00

  Right. And it's actually harmful. It's not just in the classroom. There's research showing that how harmful they are in the entire learning environment.

• 24:58Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 24:59Speaker 00

  Yeah. So what's the cost? What do schools pay and how does it get paid for?

• 25:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's $30 per student for for the program. So it's a purchase. It's not a recurring cost for them. But that comes with everything I talked about, which is all the hardware, all the setup that helps them. Every student is assigned a pouch, kind of like a textbook at the beginning of the year.

• 25:18Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 25:19Speaker 03

  We also have our unlocking mechanisms set up by all the exits and the office and mobile unlocking mechanisms. But the program is is more than half of what we provide. And that is, you know, every time we launch a large district, we help them go phone free. It's kind of like a it's kind of like a mini campaign. And so if a district comes to us and they say, hey, we want, you know, 100,000 pouches in two weeks, our answer is, that's great. We're happy to help you. But have you done this? Have you talked to your community? Have you answered their questions? Have you talked to students? Have you kind of walked through all the checklist?

• 25:51Speaker 00

  Right.

• 25:52Speaker 03

  And we we kind of force districts to do that so that we know they're ready to go. And they're, you know, kind of seeing around corners a bit.

• 25:58Speaker 00

  And do they buy new pouches for students each year?

• 26:02Speaker 03

  If they if they need them, but usually they'll buy a little bit of an overage, just like they'll do for Chromebooks or whatever else.

• 26:07Speaker 00

  Right, right, whatever else they're doing. It's not that thing. So you just released a white paper with research that shows an increase in academic performance for schools that started using pouches. I've heard anecdotally that from teachers. Talk us through your, obviously, it's in your interest that to show this, but what, talk about your research, and it's certainly something I've heard from teachers over and over again. No question.

• 26:30Speaker 03

  I mean, and by, you know, by the end of this, this, this school year, we're going to have a lot more because we partnered with a lot of different universities for studies in districts and statewide rollouts. So we'll, we'll know a lot more. But we've been hearing for years, we get information from districts and schools that launch about wild reduction in behavioral issues and fights, like a reduction of 50% within two or three weeks, improved academic performance, better teacher retention, all the stuff you kind of expect to see, but we've been seeing kind of the numbers from these districts for a while. And then we also, we try to get survey questions from, from parents and from students wherever we can. And one of the surprising things, and this goes back longer than you'd expect,

• 27:11Speaker 03

  this is five or six years, we've known for a while that even students who initially don't like the concept, they will admit to you privately, not around their friends, that after a month or so, they actually enjoy being in a phone-free school and they actually, you know, they feel less anxious in general.

• 27:27Speaker 00

  Right. No, a lot of, I've talked to a lot of students about it. They do like it. They are annoyed by it initially, and then they like it. It's sort of a freedom thing in a weird way. I want to get to tech companies being against this, but I mean, obviously, they can, they do a lot of attempting to whitewash what they're doing, but I'm sorry, I'll use the term addicting. They're, they're selling addictive devices. So, but you said some of the resistance comes from parents, and some of them want to stay in touch with their kids and don't want to give that up. This is an issue, I've heard teachers complain about this, too, that parents text and call during class, even monitor the kids' screens remotely. Talk about how

• 28:07Speaker 00

  Parents are pushing back here because it's a smaller group, but it certainly exists and they're quite loud, I would say, in the schools I've been involved in.

• 28:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, again.

• 28:19Speaker 00

  I only know that because I have to give speeches to the parents and I'm like, you need to fucking back down. Like, you strange helicopter people. Anyway, go ahead.

• 28:28Speaker 03

  Oh, look, I get it. And that's changed. That's changed a lot over the years as well. Whereas, you know, when we would go to launch, let's say, in a wealthier area, and this might have been three or four years ago. Those areas in particular, parents could get very prickly about the idea of access to their students throughout the school day. So that has changed where now we've run into that far, far, far less, because again, the zeitgeist has kind of turned. But one thing we always try to do is we try to take that concern that the average parent has about watching their kids scrolling TikTok endlessly and watching them become more socially disengaged and worried about what is their education going to be like? What are they going to grow up to be? And we try to tie that to

• 29:08Speaker 03

  all right, what can we practically do to affect that? This is a huge nebulous problem affecting people of all ages across society. And our kind of what we say is, well, we can affect the six to eight hours today they're in school and giving them a break from that. And here's what a phone free school does. And here's how it bumps up against your concerns. But also just trying to paint a picture that when a parent is calling or texting their student through the day, what is that doing to the learning environment? What does that mean for the teacher? And trying to paint that in vivid terms? Because they don't always necessarily get that right off the bat.

• 29:38Speaker 00

  Sure, absolutely. But some parents are using the excuse of safety. New York City announced the cell phone ban and then backtracked in part because they got complaints from parents who weren't able to reach kids during the lockdown, which is an unfortunate, increasingly common event. Most security experts think this is nonsense. You want the kids to focus on staying safe, not texting.

• 29:59Speaker 00

  Even if it makes for a dramatic story sometimes when they're reporting these terrible incidents. But how do you address that that fear of parents? They've got to, if there's a lot, you know, if this happens. Talk about that, the safety issue, because there are certain things that happen, even if they're rare, that parents worry about locating their kids.

• 30:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, you're right. And that's something in the pre-planning for a launch, that's something we always encourage districts to do. And a lot of them now, actually, it's the director of safety and security in the district that's helping bring yonder in. And usually, though, in this local law enforcement, to talk to parents and answer questions around emergency response and explain, like you said, why students are not safer in an emergency. It's also important for parents to know that the students have possession of their devices at all time when yonder's being used. So if they have to evacuate or they're in lockdown, they can unlock them in that class and have access to them, which is really important. So those are all kind of things that we encourage the district to be proactive in talking to parents and going, hey, in an emergency, here's the communication plan. Here's how we will contact you.

• 31:03Speaker 03

  And just be really explicit about that, because, as you know, in today's day and age, like, people's immediate response to things like that, and for good reason, I mean, I have a kid, is visceral and kind of emotional. And you have to walk people through the trade-offs, which is true in all aspects of modern society. You can have, let's say, you know, to use another different example, you can have CCTV on every corner in London, and that you can make an argument that makes people safer. There's also a profound trade-off in terms of privacy.

• 31:32Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 31:33Speaker 03

  You know?

• 31:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's really interesting to think about that that argument. And I, you totally understand why it's completely emotional. Your kid's not in school yet, though, right? Correct? You have a younger?

• 31:45Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, he's, he's two and a half.

• 31:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, he's, he's, he'll be in school. So some kids also have started to, to resist them. They, there's a change.org petitions against yonder pouches. One said he understood the use of patches in class, but, quote, "completely confiscating them all day seems excessive in disregard their role in a crucial communications tools." They want to use their phones at lunch, talk. To each other. What is your best argument to kids? I think kids like it. Most of them, some of them don't. But what, uh, what, what's your argument to kids? You know, this is my freedom. This is my thing. This is my social life, et cetera.

• 32:23Speaker 03

  Well, part of it is, uh, we, we never tried to win a cool contest with kids coming into school. We tried to explain why, why it's important, the benefits so that they can hopefully grasp on to those as they get used to being in a phone free school. But we're not going to try to win a cool contest and it's part of kids' job to push back against things that other people are, you know, kind of, their, their principal, their superintendent, or their parents are dictating. I, I can appreciate that. But a big goal for me, honestly, is this, again, digital natives, they, they were born into a world that's almost part of a little bit of a thought experiment, you know, uh, of what it's going to be like to navigate the online world. I'm not big into telling people what to do or what to think, but I felt like it's my generation's responsibilities, a crossover generation,

• 33:08Speaker 03

  to give them at least a frame of reference and a perspective of the difference between those two worlds.

• 33:13Speaker 00

  Right.

• 33:13Speaker 03

  So when they're in there, they can understand and maybe it will give them a perspective on, hey, how do I feel about spending this much time online? And that can drive cultural change.

• 33:22Speaker 00

  Right.

• 33:23Speaker 03

  Over, over time. And that's also where the artist side of what we do plays because a lot of young people go to those shows. And it's, to me, stepping into a big concert experience where you're phone free is a sense of freedom and adventure for a young person.

• 33:36Speaker 00

  Even if you can't record it, right?

• 33:37Speaker 03

  Exactly. In a way that you can't get through the mediated world of online, you know, interaction.

• 33:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, there is a pull to record it, right? Like if you're Taylor Swift concert, at whoever concert you happen to be at, there's a pull to do it. She did not have them. She did not have yonder pouches, which was interesting. Um, I think she wanted those photos, uh, everywhere. And it was a different experience. It was a stadium experience, which is different, I guess.

• 34:01Speaker 03

  We do stadiums too, but I, of course, I agree with you. I mean, I, I would love to do.

• 34:06Speaker 00

  A Taylor Swift concert? Yeah, you'd like to do. Yeah, she, I don't think she wanted it. I'm just recalling, yeah. But, um, every week we ask an outside, uh, expert question. We got two questions for you, just so you know. Uh, here's the first, and we thought it was important to have two. Different types of questions. Let's hear the first one.

• 34:24Speaker 05

  I'm Dr. Shemese Taylor, and I have been a middle school principal for over two decades. There is an entire generation of children that has only known life with cell phones. At the middle school level, I've observed that students are often not developmentally ready to consume and process the vast amount of information to which they are exposed daily. While I am a proponent of limiting cellphone use for middle schoolers, I also understand the value and importance of teaching children how to use these powerful devices responsibly. The big question I would ask Graham is how does yonder balance the need for limiting distractions in schools with the importance of teaching students responsible and mindful technology use?

• 35:10Speaker 00

  All right, first that one.

• 35:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a great question. I think, and we get that a lot. It comes down to the details a little bit. How do you think you're going to educate young people how to use these devices? Again, if you're asking the fish swimming in water about the water, that's not really a fair question. So to me, if you get down to how we're going to educate young people, mostly technology to me interacts with your nervous system. And so when you actually, when a student steps into school, their phone goes inside a pouch and it's in their pocket, they're going to be several times, especially in the first hour, where they have that phantom vibration, you know, they feel, they reach for it. And then their hand touches the pouch and it gives you a chance to interrupt the impulse, you know, that pathway that's been carved. And to me, if you do that repeatedly, what you're doing is you're breaking

• 35:56Speaker 03

  kind of the physiological tie and allowing a new habit and pattern to form. So at that level, I think the physical separation of boundaries is one of the best ways to deal with the influence and the role of technology, because that's how it operates. It's very difficult to just attack it at the world of rational ideas, because that's not really how it works. The other is, as you go in and educating kids about a phone-free space and giving them the experience, to me, that has a chance of making a much deeper imprint on them and giving them perspective about the way technology, not just phones and the internet, but TV and other things, are part of their daily life. So the details about how to educate kids, I think, are really important, but you can't, it's very hard to have that conversation

• 36:39Speaker 03

  in a meaningful way while they're fully inundated with it.

• 36:43Speaker 00

  So, so we have a second question. That's absolutely true. I think they, there are ways to teach them without having it to be there. We didn't have television on all the time in school. Very good answer. All right, let's, we did, some, sometimes we did. All right, let's move to our second expert question.

• 36:58Speaker 06

  Hi, this is Jonathan Haidt. I'm a professor at New York University and author of The Anxious Generation. My question for Graham is this. Yonder pouches clearly work. The schools that use them are reporting great results. But my daughter and other young people tell me that you just go on YouTube, you find five different ways to crack open the pouches, and so some kids still do have access to their phones during the day. What is yonder doing? What will you be doing to improve security going forward? Thanks.

• 37:30Speaker 00

  I love that one. All right. Talk to Jonathan. Kids are always so clever. How do you fix that?

• 37:37Speaker 03

  They are, and it's part of their, honestly, it's part of their job. And we, we're not naive. We know that. We know certain students are going to bring a burner phone and put it in the pouch, and they're going to put it in their sock. So at one level, we know that, and we talk to, to schools about that. And part of the policy in having everyone on board and parents is, when a student is seen with a phone inside the school, everyone knows what happens next, and there's no ambiguity about it. But in terms of product itself, look, we're, we're moving as quickly as we can to try to keep up and be ahead of kids in terms of, in terms of improving the product's strength and durability and, and being clever about how it's designed, but.

• 38:13Speaker 00

  Maybe hire those kids, like you white hat hackers or something.

• 38:18Speaker 03

  We've, we've talked about it. Definitely. But it is the social pressure and the idea that is the most important. Because again, if you go to a large show, we've done Fenway Park with Bill Burr. If you're going back in the nosebleeds, it's not the pouch that's holding that foam-free space together.

• 38:33Speaker 00

  Right.

• 38:33Speaker 03

  It's the social psychology and the shared belief that this is important.

• 38:36Speaker 00

  Right.

• 38:37Speaker 03

  And that's something I never want to lose sight of by creating a Fort Knox-type of pouch, because in a way, that would send a really weird message to kids.

• 38:45Speaker 00

  Right, which is, you're not going to crack this thing, or you're not. This is, yeah, they're going to want to try to do it, rather than, stop being an asshole, leave it alone, kind of thing, compared to everyone else.

• 38:56Speaker 03

  Exactly. And my hope is, down the road, that kids will start to go, you know what? Hey, get off your phone. Let's have fun together. That would be ideal.

• 39:03Speaker 00

  So, do you have the same problems with concerts? Do people try to get into them in some ways, take pictures, or things like that? They can also get removed from the theater in that regard, or whatever they happen to be at.

• 39:17Speaker 03

  Oh, of course. Yeah, of course. They can be, I mean, everything is very explicit. So if someone is seen with their phone out at a show, everyone knows that they shouldn't be doing that. And usually, it's the people right around them in the crowd who are shaming them and pointing them out, going, hey, don't be an asshole. This is a foam-free show. We're all having fun.

• 39:33Speaker 00

  Right.

• 39:34Speaker 03

  But honestly, it really depends on the show and the artist. If you're doing a Friday night show with a Joe Rogan crowd in some part of the world, that pouch is going to have a little bit different life than a Bob Dylan show in Madrid on a Wednesday.

• 39:45Speaker 00

  Right, right, right. Meaning, which one are you implying is more?

• 39:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 39:49Speaker 00

  Loose style, I guess.

• 39:50Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 39:52Speaker 00

  But you don't, do you see people ripping them apart, or cutting them? Or, sure, you probably see everything.

• 39:59Speaker 03

  Of course, you see everything. I mean, you know, large shows, people are crazy.

• 40:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:03Speaker 03

  But it's been really cool to see over time. We track how many pouches we lose here and there, and it's gone steadily down, down, down. And I think that's partly the normalization of the concept.

• 40:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:13Speaker 03

  And people's understanding that this is a positive thing. And we go through great lengths to try to have those conversations with people as they enter, and kind of put them at ease, because that's important.

• 40:25Speaker 00

  We'll be back in a minute.

• 40:39Speaker 00

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• 43:12Speaker 00

  So I want to ask you very quickly about kids' online safety, or COSA, the Children and Teens Online Privacy Protection Acts, or COPA II, two bills that aim to protect kids online. Both are not without their controversies. You're not a policymaker, but Yonder has lobbied lawmakers. You've obviously thought about these issues. What is your take on these legislative efforts to curb companies' access to kids? I had an interview with Amy Klobuchar, who is one of the people working on these things. Talk a little bit about that on the higher level of protection of kids.

• 43:41Speaker 03

  You know, we've been pulled into some of these conversations because there's a lot of legislative moves are being made and states and districts are going, hey, we want to go phone-free. They reach out to us to figure out, how do we do it? What does that actually look like? But in terms of regulation, it's interesting to see how quickly it's developing. And I think it's obviously necessary. I think I've always pushed on the cultural aspect of things because I think in a way that moves faster and might have, in a way, a deeper and broader impact on young people, is how do you motivate them to want to kind of choose a life, maybe that's a little less online, and seek out these different experiences and change the way to balance about how much they put into the online world versus not. But I think it's positive and it's exciting to see how much groundswell there's been

• 44:25Speaker 03

  behind it. But I am a believer that it's, in a way, when you're on the internet, it's not so much if you're in the deep end or the shallow end. It's like, once you're in the pool, you're getting wet. And so creating the juxtaposition between the two is the foundational lesson to try to teach young people.

• 44:42Speaker 00

  Well, in that regard, though, phones are the only technology in schools. A vast majority of schools have laptops at schools, so many of them are mandated. That's a big phone, right? Now, there is software to restrict what sites and apps these kids can use, but they're resourceful. Is that, and some teachers do not like kids connected to the Internet the entire school day. Talk first about that, and then also, within these concert settings, more and more technology is on the body, right? There's more, there's going to be more and more within glasses and all things like that.

• 45:14Speaker 03

  Well, definitely. So, concerts in in schools, you know, when Yonkers being used, all of that stuff goes inside the pouch together. So, it's earbuds, that's wearable tech, that's glasses.

• 45:24Speaker 00

  Ah, okay.

• 45:25Speaker 03

  So, all of it goes in. But where, yeah, in terms of other devices in the classroom, it's interesting to see, you know, not that long ago, Finland, I think, has moved back to books and pen and paper. And they're, you know, so that, these changes, people are talking about, and I hear this from parents all the time, they go, great, we're talking about the phone, what about this other digital curriculum happening in the classroom? Like you said, a lot of these laptops are monitored with different software, but like you also said, students are resourceful. So, it's going to be interesting to see where it goes. The thing that I'm interested in is, especially with the AI and things like that, is going, you know, what's really important for young people in education, I think, is mostly developing critical thinking faculties.

• 46:05Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 46:06Speaker 03

  And so, when you think about the type of assignments they're getting, the tools at their disposal, I think the risk is that young kids are becoming information retrieval machines, and that's not critical thinking. And no matter where we think we're going as a society.

• 46:19Speaker 00

  I love that idea, information retrieval system.

• 46:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, without that, we're not going, we're not going anywhere fast. And that's not necessarily a native faculty, it's a muscle that has to be flexed. So, with a lot of tech, I view it that way, is the foundation must be something like that. And, you know, that's maybe the concern.

• 46:39Speaker 00

  Plus, we're uploading our stuff to them in order to spin it back at us for us to go retrieve it like stupid dogs. But talk about AI. Obviously, it has a lot of teaching potential. And of course, I'm not as obsessed with cheating with AI. I think kids have cheated since the beginning of time. It's just a new way to cheat. But a lot of schools are bringing generative AI in the classroom and will be. Talk of what happens in that situation when you just said that's a really smart idea, the information retrieval machines. This is even beyond that.

• 47:11Speaker 03

  I think that's the thing that makes me highly, to be honest, pretty skeptical.

• 47:15Speaker 00

  You can't put AI in a yonder pouch, let's just say.

• 47:18Speaker 03

  No, this is a broad societal thing. And I think we should approach it very carefully because that's the, to me, that's the likely outcome, is that it's going to be leaned on more and more and more heavily. Because if you're a kid sitting at home and you have your phone or you have AI at hand, and you're given an assignment, what's more likely that you're going to put that away and critically think and go, what do I think about this? And draw on your body of experiences? Or are you going to lean on that? And I think that's already, before AI, a knock on effect, it's happened with the internet and smartphones societally, is kind of this idea that as people spend more time online and they pull out all these ideas and associations and amalgam of images offline, they're living in these like kind of half baked ideas more than their own experience rooted in a community in the

• 48:03Speaker 03

  world. And it's kind of pulling at the social fabric and people's independent worldview.

• 48:07Speaker 00

  Right.

• 48:08Speaker 03

  And I think that's more likely to continue to happen, the more these disaggregated ideas are piled on top of each other.

• 48:14Speaker 00

  Right, right. That's a really good way to put it. Now, as you noted, we talked a lot about kids, but many adults are obviously addicted to their phones. It's something I point out when I talk to school groups. It's like, let's look at the parents here, because you can't tell kids not to be addicted when you yourself have the problem. And I will use the term addicted, as I said. But people get home, they doom scroll. I do it. It's a version of television for me, I guess. You have a tray that you sell, that you put things on. Explain where you go. This is a signal blocking tray that you use at home. Talk a little bit about that, about that idea of what more products you could have. And rather than just, oh, turn off your phones. People can't seem to do that.

• 48:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course. And again, that idea of like, how do you, how do you create new habits around something that's so ubiquitous and also tied up so foundationally in the basic, more and more, almost in a disturbing way, the foundational infrastructure of day-to-day life in society. Like, that's a broader question I'm interested in. That's not being looked at a lot is the need to have a smartphone to navigate the basic necessities of daily life. But um,

• 49:20Speaker 00

  Well, it's necessary for work, too.

• 49:22Speaker 03

  It is, absolutely. And it's a little bit of game theory in there. You know, everyone's kind of running faster to stay in the same place. But we're, we're, we're in a lot of other spaces in addition to schools and concerts. We're in warehousing facilities, work facilities, courtrooms, all different kinds of spaces. So part of the idea, I think, is normalizing that concept. And then people can hopefully adapt that to their own needs, especially in the home. So for us, the, the home tray is something like that. It's um, something that can become part of people's daily ritual. You come home from work, it's dinner time, all the kids, everyone throws their devices inside the home tray, you shut it. It can be locked if you want. Most people don't. It's more about what it symbolizes. You, you've moved from your workday where it's about efficiency and that kind of work-a-day

• 50:05Speaker 03

  mentality into something that is built around not efficiency. It's around family time. And the, you know, the signal blocking thing is important to me because of privacy. I think without, without a basic, you know, and that's something that you, you know how important that is. Without privacy-

• 50:21Speaker 00

  My son calls me, and I stopped taking pictures of me, called me a sharent. That ended it. I stopped taking, I stopped. That's what he did. And that's all it took. But go ahead. Go ahead.

• 50:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, just the idea that the ideas of, of tech companies listening and mining people's data and tracking people, I, I just fundamentally don't like. And it, as a company, look, we, we don't have social media, we don't do paid advertising, and that's part of the reason. I think it's, people are bombarded with enough stuff. It just becomes so derivative, you know?

• 50:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. So they just, and just turning off the phone during dinner doesn't work. Because signal blocking is exactly, you know, I know people have these, a little bit of, of conspiracy theories that, that everybody's listening all the time. But they're listening a little bit. They certainly are. By your usage, you're being tracked. I was, I'm like, you're being tracked. Like an animal all the time. You don't understand how you how quickly you've been tracked. As opposed to being on a when you were on a laptop, they knew you went from website to website. Now they know what directions you asked for, where you stopped, where you had coffee, where you had. It has a it's astonishing how much information they're collecting about us that people don't understand. Or maybe they do, I guess.

• 51:29Speaker 03

  Well, that's always it seems to get people motivated to care about privacy in that way is hard for some reason or the other. But I think looking at through another lens, again, at like a big show or a festival for a young person, experiencing the world where you're you're bumping into people, you have to find your friends. That's a sense of adventure and exploration where you're not being monitored or filtered that I think maybe fuels the adventurous spirit. This younger generation is going to have to have if they're going to find meaning in the world, you know?

• 51:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, so you know, you started with some very important philosophers. You Paul Verelio, he's my favorite of these philosophers that you should read him. He's a French philosopher. He said, the ideals of technological culture remain underdeveloped and therefore outside the popular culture and the practical ideals of democracy. This is all also why society as a whole has no control over technological developments. And this is why one of the gravest threats to democracy, it's one of the gravest threats to democracy in the near future. It is then imperative to develop a democratic technological culture. And he predicted in a 1994 interview that virtuality will destroy reality, which was an astonishing thing.

• 52:36Speaker 00

  I'd love you to talk about your your most realistic version of utopian vision for how to change our relationship with phones. You have a two year old son. I think about it a lot with my four kids to talk about these choices and affecting them. I was very happy my two older sons don't took social media off their phones by themselves. I didn't do what they use YouTube and Reddit, and which neither of which I consider social media, mostly for consumption of TV essentially. Which I feel OK with, I feel I watch television, they watch it on YouTube. Talk about your most utopian vision given and do you get a lot of pushback from tech companies in doing this?

• 53:19Speaker 03

  Well, thanks for sharing that quote, by the way. That's beautiful.

• 53:22Speaker 00

  This is a great quote. I'll send it to you.

• 53:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's great. And some of the, when I'm, not to get off track, but when I moved to San Francisco, I got to know Hubert Dreyfus, who was one of the original critics of artificial intelligence. And then I actually got to know Albert Borgman, who is a philosopher of technology in Montana, like a Heidegger protege. These people, like you said, people have been thinking about this for a while.

• 53:43Speaker 00

  A long time.

• 53:44Speaker 03

  So, you know, I think when it comes to phones or future society, what that looks like, I don't think there's ever going to be a utopia. I can't tell you, or I don't think anyone can, what exactly good looks like. I think the best we can do is try to, in civil society and as a culture, try to understand where we're at now and try to deflect ourselves on a slightly better path, you know? And I think that's, that's what I'm trying to do, and I think a lot of people are trying to do. But I do think that, I believe we're living in the age of the technological understanding of man, like as an epic, you know? And there have been other epics in the past. And I think we're starting to realize, and people feel, deep down, in a nihilistic kind of way, that that's not necessarily working for us. And that if everything in your life is built around efficiency, it has a way of hollowing

• 54:28Speaker 03

  out the meaning in your life. So I guess the thing that's important to me...

• 54:32Speaker 00

  They call it seamless. The tech people, you know that, they call it friction, lack of friction seamless. That's the word they love to use.

• 54:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it violates, to me, that idea that if we make everything so easy, we'll have all this time to do all the things we want to do. It kind of violates human nature. I don't see it mirrored anywhere in the natural world. It's more like idle hands do the devil's work kind of thing.

• 54:52Speaker 00

  Right, yeah, yeah.

• 54:53Speaker 03

  So, to me, I think the thing that's important is, in Albert Borgman's concept of this, is this idea of focal things, carving out space for things where the process of doing them is bound up with the meaning of it, like biking, gardening, hiking. And I always ask people, you know, if you think about the things you absolutely enjoy doing most in your life, if you then apply the idea of doing it faster, quicker, easier, cheaper, does that concept even make sense? And almost invariably, the answer is no, because those things are not enhanced by that process. And I think those things are what ground people and root them in their life, you know? And those, if I think of... About a future society, my hope is that the weight of people, what people care about, what they value shifts more towards that than just things.

• 55:37Speaker 00

  So how, let me, the final question, how does that happen? Right now, these billionaires who are richer than ever, richer than ever, a factor of double, Elon Musk, $400 billion, Mark Zuckerberg, huge, 30, 40 billion dollars richer in the past month, essentially. They have enormous unlimited power, they're cozying up to power in Washington now, they've invaded Washington, they followed me here, by the way, Graham, and I'm very upset by that. But what do you say to them? Because they have unlimited, unprecedented power, and now Mark Zuckerberg is removing the guardrails completely. It's all out there now. Yonder is a company with a pouch that has seams. They want seamlessness so that they can run everything.

• 56:21Speaker 00

  That, I think, is pretty safe to say at this point. How do you, what do you say to them? And do they resist what you're doing?

• 56:30Speaker 03

  Well, I don't know. I think maybe there's a fundamental disconnect about the belief of where the future is going, you know? And this tech utopian idea, like I mentioned, that, you know, we're all gonna have smart homes, and to my mind, that some people think, oh, that's gonna be great, well, of all this time to do everything. To me, it's more like, what's the point of that? That we can become passive jelly inside our active homes? But I would say it's not about those people to me necessarily. It's about, it's about young people and about society at large. What do people want? You know, we live in a, in an economy that's becoming largely service-based and information movers.

• 57:05Speaker 00

  And convenience or?

• 57:06Speaker 03

  Inconvenience-based, yeah. Does this younger generation want to have jobs where they sit in front of a computer all day and move information around? Or are they gonna want something else? And to me, a lot of that is driven not just by regulation, but by culture, cultural changes of what people want and simplicity, and hopefully some element of going back to nature. So the idea that powerful people wanna control stuff and make a ton of money is, that's as old as time, you know that? So I think it's about trying to get people to realize maybe that when you step into a phone-free space or what that represents, it's a choice. It's not just a choice of being in that space. It's opening a window for a different lifestyle, you know, for choosing how you control your time and the way your mind thinks, because once you enter the online world, you know, all bets are off.

• 57:49Speaker 00

  Yep, 100%. Graham, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. I think it's just a pouch, but I think it's a greater, it's a bigger idea than that. And it's critically important for people to be thinking that way. I appreciate it.

• 58:01Speaker 03

  Thank you, Kara. I really enjoyed it.

• 58:05Speaker 00

  On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castro-Russell, Kateri Yokum, Jolie Myers, Megan Burney, and Kalen Lynch. Nishat Kurwa is Vox Media's executive producer of audio. Special thanks to Kate Ferby. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Aruda, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you get a special key to unlock your yonder pouch. If not, be like the Swisher boys and take social media off your cell phones. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.

• 58:52Speaker 01

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• 59:35Speaker 02

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