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

“This is not a normal legal dispute.”

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:34Speaker 01

  So one thing you guys will love.

• 0:36Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Because this is a tech angle, is in Brazilian Portuguese, there's no words that really end in a hard consonant. So everything kind of ends in a vowel.

• 0:45Kevin Roose?

  Okay.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  And as a result, when they adopt English words, they become very, to us English speakers, funny. For example, Facebook in Brazil is Facei Bulki.

• 0:56Kevin Roose?

  Facei Bulki. Yes, and before that, there was Orkut, or as I understand, they called it in Brazil, Orucuchi.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly, Orucuchi. And Youtubey. And Tiki Talky.

• 1:10Kevin Roose?

  Tiki Talky?

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it goes on to so many different words. I mean, Pingy Pongy, Internetchi, Kingy Kongy, Picky Nicky. I mean, it's so good. It's so good, man.

• 1:21Kevin Roose?

  Do you think our podcast is called Harji Forky?

• 1:23Casey Newton?

  Harji Forky.

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Harji Forky, yeah. It literally is Harji Forky, yeah.

• 1:27Casey Newton?

  It's literally Harji Forky.

• 1:28Kevin Roose?

  Wow.

• 1:32Speaker 01

  Do you want me to give you a call to the Brazilian listeners? For, you know. Obrigado por ouvir Harji Forky aqui. Bem-vindo para todos os ouvidores do Brasil. Então, Casey, Kevin, eles adoram o Brasil e eles gostam do Internet. E também, você deveria seguir o Tiki Talky deles também.

• 1:51Kevin Roose?

  Period.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Vamos lá.

• 1:55Kevin Roose?

  I understood all that. And let's just say I endorse it 100%.

• 2:03Casey Newton?

  I'm Kevin Roos, a tech columnist at The New York Times.

• 2:05Kevin Roose?

  I'm Casey Newton from Platformer.

• 2:06Casey Newton?

  And this is Hard Fork. This week, X's banned in Brazil. Will it ever come back? Then, we're going founder mode. What a viral essay tells us about how Silicon Valley is thinking about power. And finally, schools are going phone-free. We'll hear from teachers and students about how it's going.

• 2:39Casey Newton?

  Well, Casey, have you ever been to Brazil?

• 2:41Kevin Roose?

  I have, but I would love to go. Have you been there? I have. Yes, I went about 15 years ago to visit my friend who was living there at the time.

• 2:47Casey Newton?

  Hmm, and what did you learn about the people of Brazil?

• 2:50Kevin Roose?

  I had a delightful time. We went to a very nice beach and I learned that they have this very good fish stew there called moqueca that I absolutely loved and think about all the time and have not been able to find in the US.

• 3:03Casey Newton?

  That's right, but lately, Kevin, the Brazilians have been stewing about something else altogether.

• 3:09Kevin Roose?

  What a segue. Yes, so since last weekend, X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, has been blocked in the entire country of Brazil. This came after a long battle between Elon Musk and a Brazilian Supreme Court justice. And this has become a big, sort of sprawling story. It's a really big deal. You know, we've had tech platforms that have been banned in certain countries before, but Brazil is one of the world's largest democracies. It's the largest economy in South America, and it's one of the countries that uses the internet the most in the world. And so it's a pretty extraordinary step for them to ban an entire social media platform.

• 3:47Casey Newton?

  Yeah, we expect democracies to have stronger protections around the freedom of expression than we would see in a China or a Russia. And so to see an entire social network go dark, as we have over the past week, has really been extraordinary.

• 3:59Kevin Roose?

  Totally. So I want to talk about it today because this is not only a story about a standoff between a tech platform and a government, it is also about all these themes that we talk about: free expression, content moderation, Elon Musk's sort of embrace of the far right, and the growing tensions between tech platforms and governments. And we've got a great guest today to help us sort through this. My colleague, Jack Nickis, who's the Brazil bureau chief of The New York Times, is going to be joining us to talk about what the ban has actually looked like on the ground in Brazil. But before we bring in Jack, let's just walk through briefly what has happened leading up to this ban, because it's been a pretty complicated story with a lot of different twists and turns, and I think we should just sort of situate ourselves in what's been happening.

• 4:42Kevin Roose?

  So in 2022, Brazil had an election. In that election, former President Jair Bolsonaro, who was the right wing, they called him like the Donald Trump of Brazil, lost the election and, much like happened in the US in 2020, questioned the results of that election, accused it of being rigged. His supporters stormed Brazil's Congress and Supreme Court, their version of January 6th. And in the aftermath, there's been a lot of efforts in Brazil to stamp out online misinformation, which is being seen as sort of responsible for this uprising and these anti-democratic movements that have taken root on the right in Brazil.

• 5:21Casey Newton?

  That's right. And even before that election, the Brazilian government empowered this Supreme Court Justice, Alexander de Marais, to investigate and gave him these broad, sweeping powers to look into what he called "digital militias." And that involved going on to platforms like X and finding people who might have been questioning the election or fomenting violence. And Marais was sending out these sealed orders to platforms like X, saying, "You have to remove these accounts, get rid of these, or there will be consequences." And while other platforms complied, X, starting in April, said, "You know what? We don't think we're going to do that."

• 5:58Kevin Roose?

  Yes, so they refused to comply with the court's order back in April. Elon Musk then sort of went on a rampage against this justice, called him a dictator, sort of accused him of undermining Brazilian law. There were escalating threats from this Supreme Court justice toward X, saying, basically, you need to comply with this order. X then wrote a letter saying that they actually would comply and block these accounts that this justice had ordered them to remove. But then sort of reversed its course. And last month, there was sort of a standoff where this judge threatened to arrest the local representative that X had designated there in the country. And in response to those threats, Elon Musk said, well, actually, we're going to close

• 6:43Kevin Roose?

  our office in Brazil and pull our physical presence out of the country altogether.

• 6:48Casey Newton?

  Yeah, so this was a huge escalation because the reason that countries want there to be a local representative like this is for the purpose of shaking them down and say, no, you got to go to your boss and you got to get him to remove all of these accounts. But instead of going along with that, the way that most platforms do, X said, we are going to take our ball and go home.

• 7:05Kevin Roose?

  Yes, so in response to X's decision to pull out of Brazil, Justice Marais actually ordered the entire service blocked. As of last Friday, X is banned in Brazil and you cannot go on it if you are using a Brazilian internet service provider. And actually, the judge went further than that and said that if you are using a VPN to get around the ban, you can be fined for that as well.

• 7:30Casey Newton?

  Which is a really extraordinary step, even not just for a democracy to take, but really any country to take. We don't see these sort of huge fines being threatened. The judge also initially had ordered Apple and Google to remove X from the App Store and wanted them to remove some popular VPN apps that he knew that Brazilians were going to be using to access X. So this was really the full court press to make sure that no one in Brazil truly ever used X ever again.

• 7:58Kevin Roose?

  So since neither of us are experts in Brazilian politics and national affairs, we wanted to bring in someone who is, and that's where my colleague Jack Nikas comes in. Again, Jack is the Brazil bureau chief of The New York Times. He's based in Rio de Janeiro, and he used to be my colleague in San Francisco. He covered tech companies when he was out here, including Apple. So he's really well positioned to speak to the kind of growing tensions between X and other social media companies and the Brazilian government. So let's bring him in. He also has great recommendations for what to do during Carnival. It's true. It's true. He does go to Carnival. And from the looks of his Instagram story, he has a great time.

• 8:41Kevin Roose?

  Jack Nikas, welcome to Hard Fork.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 8:43Kevin Roose?

  Hello. So, Jack, first question, how are you doing without X? And is X actually pronounced "sheesh" in Portuguese, like I saw someone claim on YouTube?

• 8:56Speaker 01

  It is absolutely pronounced "sheesh." And if it weren't for the fact that I had to cover this, my life would definitely have a large improvement in quality. I don't think Brazilians know the gift they've been given here, actually.

• 9:10Kevin Roose?

  So what actually happens, like if you go onto your phone or your browser and try to open the X app, what do you see right now?

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Well, I just want to make clear to Supreme Court Justice Alex Chandra Jimenez, I said, "I'm not using a VPN," which would potentially bring a 50,000 HEI, it's fine. But basically, if you're not using a VPN, on your app, it's just the old app, it's the old tweets that don't refresh, the tweets from before times that are sort of frozen in time. And on your desktop, it's just an error message. It doesn't open.

• 9:44Kevin Roose?

  Wow. Now, would you like us to print out our For You pages and mail them to you? We could just fill you in on what's been going on.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  I've been wondering, so that'd be really appreciated. Thank you.

• 9:56Kevin Roose?

  Okay. Well, the first thing I saw today was that someone was questioning whether the Nazis were actually the bad guys in World War II, so.

• 10:02Casey Newton?

  Yeah. And Elon Musk reposted that, so.

• 10:05Kevin Roose?

  All right. That's what you're missing, Jack.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  You know what's weird, actually, is I signed up for Elon's tweet alerts before this whole thing went down, or during the moment when he basically said he was closing the X office, I saw this coming, so I set up tweet alerts. But now I'm still getting his tweet alerts. It's weird. So the notifications are working, so I see he's tweeting, but when I click through, I can't get through to anything, so.

• 10:31Casey Newton?

  Wow, it's almost like there's some sort of technical problem at X that they haven't managed to solve, which is interesting. Hopefully, they can take a look at that.

• 10:39Kevin Roose?

  So, Jack, I want to get into this story, but first, just give us a sense of like how ordinary Brazilians are reacting to this. Is X like a super popular platform there? Has this been very disruptive to people's experience of the internet? Or like, what is the sort of mood on the ground there?

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Brazil is an extremely online nation. Some surveys show that Brazilians spend more time on the internet than perhaps any other nation. And in one evidence of that was when the X ban went down, all of a sudden, all of the stan accounts across Twitter, you know, all the celebrity fan accounts started announcing, "We're all run from Brazil, we're shutting down." And, you know, a lot of people on Twitter realize a lot of this site is fueled by the creativity of Brazilians. And so I think that people are searching because there's not really a clear alternative. And so people are kind of now splintering off between Blue Sky and Threads. And we'll see, I think, probably, if this goes on, which one of those two wins.

• 11:41Casey Newton?

  Which I think just shows you what a miscalculation this has been for Elon Musk, right? Because as extraordinary as a move as we have seen Brazil make, it also seemed inevitable, after they declared that they simply weren't going to comply with the court's order, that there was going to be some kind of pushback, right? There was going to be some kind of consequence. Brazil has banned or blocked apps, at least temporarily in the past. So I do think this was well within the realm of possibility for what can happen. And so Elon Musk has been setting up a situation for himself where he's about to have 20 million of his most- Passionate users with nowhere else to turn but another social network that probably

• 12:23Casey Newton?

  is going to comply with local laws and will be a much more stable platform to operate in the long term. So just from a pure business analysis perspective, I think this was a crazy miscalculation.

• 12:34Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  I think that's a really good question. I think the question to me is, does Elon Musk care more about the bottom line at X? Or his moment to present himself as a political fighter? And I think that he's gaining a lot of political capital with the right around the world for this, but he's hurting his business in the process.

• 12:54Kevin Roose?

  Well, it's such an interesting topic because Elon Musk's obviously motive for buying Twitter and turning it into X, it was all about preserving free speech. But he also has said that they would basically follow the law in whatever country they were operating with. That was sort of his definition of what it meant to be a free speech platform.

• 13:14Casey Newton?

  Oh, I would love to read you a quote about that, by the way.

• 13:16Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 13:17Casey Newton?

  So last year in India, he's facing a similar situation where the government of India, which is a more right-leaning government, had ordered X to do some things that were, that went against free speech, but Musk complied. And when the BBC asked him about this last year, he said, quote, "The rules in India for what can appear on social media are quite strict, and we can't go beyond the laws of a country. If we have a choice of either our people go to prison or we comply with the laws, we will comply with the laws." Now, in Brazil, this last month, he had the same situation where one of his employees was going to go to prison, and instead of complying with the laws, he said, "We are just going to walk away from this country."

• 13:56Kevin Roose?

  So what, like, what is the reasoning there? Why is he complying with? I mean, I'm curious to hear your take on this too, Jack. Like, why do you think Elon Musk is sort of waging war against this Supreme Court justice in Brazil, but also has complied with similar censorship requests from other governments around the world?

• 14:16Speaker 01

  I don't think we can, we're not inside of Elon Musk's head, but what we can say is him defying the government in Brazil fits very in line with his increasingly right-wing politics.

• 14:26Kevin Roose?

  Because that, Brazil has a left-wing government that he is defying, and these other countries that X is taking down content under orders from are more right-wing, more authoritarian governments.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  And not, yes, absolutely. And not only that, Elon Musk is worshipped on the right in Brazil. He is being hailed as a savior for a lot of Bolsonaro supporters who felt forgotten and felt under attack from the Supreme Court. And, and I think he's been tweeted at for months and for years, actually, you know, people have been begging him to do something like this. And he spends a lot of time on his site, and that may have something to do with it.

• 15:05Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. I mean, what's clear to me is just like how personally invested he is in this. He's not like dispatching some lawyer to argue with the Brazilian government. He's been just railing on, against this judge, more eyes on X. He called him an outright criminal, an evil dictator. Recently, he posted like a faked image of him being sort of a cross between Voldemort and a Sith Lord. So this is not like a normal legal dispute, the kind that happened all the time between tech platforms and governments around the world.

• 15:36Casey Newton?

  No, but to that point, Kevin, like, that's exactly it. These sorts of disputes do happen all the time. Almost every government in the world is going to Meta, is going to Google, is going to X, is going to Snap and saying, there's something on your platform that is illegal and needs to be off, or we need information about this user to help us with a law enforcement investigation. And some of those requests are legit, and some are bogus. And the way this gets negotiated is it gets fought in court. The key there, though, is you have to show up in court. And so what Elon Musk has chosen to do instead is instead of just fighting the fight in court, which I do think he maybe could have won, instead he's like, I'm going to litigate this on my social media platform, which it

• 16:21Casey Newton?

  turns out does not have a lot of legal authority in Brazil to make decisions.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  One really interesting point on that is you're right. He's playing this game on his own terms and almost in a performative way. So much so that when the Brazilian government sent official legal notice to him that he had 24 hours to comply with the demand to have a physical presence in the country, they did so in a post on X, tagging the X. And to the Brazilian government, the official receipt of that order was Elon Musk replying with an AI-generated image of toilet paper with the judge's name on it.

• 17:02Kevin Roose?

  Is that, Jack, I don't know a lot about the judicial system in Brazil, but is that a typical way that one might respond to a court order?

• 17:11Speaker 01

  I think it's probably the first time, probably. I did enjoy writing that in the stories. I think that in a way, though, it says a lot about the way he's fighting this fight. I mean, this is not something that he's having lawyers do because he cares about the legality about it. He is making a show of this. He wants to make a political point.

• 17:32Kevin Roose?

  Well, and one question I've had about this whole incident is it seems like this judge is basically doing to Brazilian social media and Brazilian political actors what conservatives in the US have been scared that tech platforms would do to them. Like, he is actually, you know, demanding the removal of content that he doesn't like without much reasoning behind it. Actually, many of these orders I read in one of your stories have been sort of ordered to remain secret. So it's like, we want you to take down all this content that I don't like, but you're not allowed to tell anyone that you're doing it, and we don't have to explain our reasoning, just do it. And that is constantly something that people on the right in America are scared will happen.

• 18:14Kevin Roose?

  And so Brazil sort of offers them a sort of picture of what it would be like if their worst fears about censorship on the internet came to pass.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  Yes, I think you're completely right. The fact that there's a manifestation of this boogeyman has been a really strong political tool for the right in Brazil to attack. Recently leaked files published in one of Brazil's biggest newspapers showed that the way in which he was picking out people, he was, you know, people, sort of right-wing pundits were criticizing him on X. He was sending that in a WhatsApp message to an investigator who was finding a justification to ban them. And then he was sending a sealed order to social media companies and not giving any reason why this person was banned. So. It does show the danger of letting a single person decide about what can be said online.

• 18:59Casey Newton?

  I mean, this is the part of the story that I find most frustrating because it's the part that makes me defend Elon Musk, a person who I think has been like a singularly maligned force in the world of social networks. And despite all of that, I do think that having one person that can say, "You can no longer have a social media account for a reason I'm not going to tell you," just seems like a really bad thing for democracy and free expression, right? So I do, and that's why I say, I think Elon Musk could have fought this in court, right? He could have sent his lawyers and he could have said, "Look at the way that this has been handled, right? Look at how our users' rights to free expression are being trampled." But instead, he took his ball and he went home.

• 19:40Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm curious, Jack, what you think his options were, given that, you know, it's not, I mean, you say he could have taken this to court, but this is the court. This is a Supreme Court justice in Brazil, sort of doing these unilateral acts of what you might call censorship. So, Jack, what do you think Elon Musk's better options might have been here?

• 19:58Speaker 01

  That's a really good question. I think another issue with the way the Supreme Court is operated is that there has not been a lot of accountability. A lot of appeals have been dismissed outright, including, you know, Starlink here. This judge froze Starlink's assets to try to collect on fines against X, which was really potentially questionable legal maneuver. When Starlink appealed, a different Supreme Court justice just dismissed it, you know, within hours. And so there is a concern that the Supreme Court is acting above the law because they don't have their own accountability and it is difficult. But the reality is, the way that this is supposed to be done is to file a legal appeal, try

• 20:41Speaker 01

  to file a lawsuit and fight it in court. And there is a lot of cases in Brazilian history and many other countries' history of this working. I mean, Supreme Court does change its mind and there are people with different viewpoints on the Supreme Court.

• 20:55Casey Newton?

  I also want to get into the question of like, what could the court do actually? Because again, even if you're sympathetic to the idea that like, one person in Brazil shouldn't be able to unilaterally remove people from the internet. At the same time, Brazil does have some clearly stated rules around, you want to have a social media platform in this country? Okay, you have to designate a local representative. We have to be able to contact that person. You have to comply with these certain laws. And X has just said, straight up, "We are not going to do that." And in that world, I don't actually know, like, what is the basis for appeal here? Right? Like, I can't see the Brazilian Supreme Court saying, "We're going to grant an exemption

• 21:37Casey Newton?

  to Elon Musk because we think speech is important and so therefore it doesn't have to follow our laws." So, I mean, Jack, what outs do you see here for X to get back online in Brazil, if there are any?

• 21:51Speaker 01

  This is why I think there's a very good chance that this is not a temporary ban.

• 21:57Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  I think that X really could be going away in Brazil, because I really don't see the Supreme Court, and certainly not this justice, backing down, because that would be a capitulation saying that, "Okay, our laws don't matter." At the same time, it doesn't appear that Elon is prepared politically to back down either. He has really made this a pet issue and appears prepared to take the financial hit that it's going to inflict on his business. And so, this may be the end of X in Brazil, and it may be, you know, Mark Zuckerberg in threads, or Blue Sky gets the sort of the bounty of these 20 million very online users.

• 22:37Casey Newton?

  Do you think that's actually the fallout here? If X remains banned in Brazil, is it actually likely that Brazilians will move to other social networks? Or do you think they'll just all download VPNs and keep using X? And there'll be sort of this like, you know, underground of secret Brazilian X posters?

• 22:57Speaker 01

  There will be. There already is. I mean, people, despite even the fines, people are on X and using it to some degree. But I think that it- Well, just A, it's kind of a barrier to entry. It's not really a great thing to be downloading VPNs. And I think, especially if this fine stays in place, the kind of people who are going to be doing it on their work computers, you know, there's all sorts of questions about that. And I think it just becomes less interesting. If you're, if most, all the Portuguese speakers are going to other platforms, there's not that many people to talk to anymore. And so I think we know how social networks work, you know? They're good when a bunch of other people are there. It's just like a party. And I think when people leave the party, you're going to leave too.

• 23:38Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I mean, one other ripple effect here that we haven't really talked about is how other governments around the world may react to what's happening in Brazil by trying to ban X in their country or to take action against certain accounts that they don't like. So I'm curious, Jack, what do you feel the, the sort of international impact of this incident is going to be? Are we going to see a bunch of other countries start banning social platforms because they don't like what's going on there?

• 24:05Speaker 01

  I think that we certainly are seeing a more aggressive tact from countries around the world. I mean, you, you talked about India. Certainly, Europe has seen this as a grave threat themselves, and they have become far more hands on. And there's also been good reporting that even, you know, the Biden administration during COVID was weighing in and enforcing, urging Facebook to take down COVID misinformation and things like that. So even the US government, in some ways, I think, is showing an openness to this, depending on the administration. I think that there is growing comfort on the part of nation states with getting involved in the messy work of basically policing what can be said online,

• 24:48Speaker 01

  which was really, for the most part, largely left to the tech companies themselves. And that is only going to inflame this debate more. I don't think this debate over the culture wars and what's okay to say and what's not is going away anytime soon as a result.

• 25:04Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I think over the past several years, we've already seen the normalization of this idea that if you want to operate in our country, you have to designate a local representative. And the main reason that countries pass those laws is so they can have someone they can shake down when they want a piece of content removed, or they want a user account removed. They want to be able to say, hey, we're going to throw your person in jail. This has turned out to be extraordinarily effective in getting companies to change course, reverse their decisions. We've seen it in India, we've seen it in Russia. It started out as this very authoritarian country-led idea. Now it is showing up in democracies like Brazil, and I sort of assume it will just eventually be everywhere, and this will be how business gets done.

• 25:44Kevin Roose?

  You know, I want to just take the sort of steel man argument on the other side here to what you just said, which mostly I agree with. But I do think there is also the context here that a lot of these countries around the world have felt a kind of invasion from these American-led social networks, where all of a sudden, millions of people in their country are using these platforms that are based in the United States to do their sort of communication, their speech. And these companies, for the most part, have not invested a ton in learning about the local context in which they operate, right? We saw this in countries like Myanmar, where Facebook was accused of fomenting a genocide. And one of the things that people pointed to as evidence of that was that they had

• 26:27Kevin Roose?

  not actually opened an office in Myanmar, and yet had become the dominant social media platform there. So I think what you're seeing on the part of countries, yes, obviously, there's some desire to control speech on these social networks, because now governments sort of understand that that's an important place that political speech and disagreements are happening. But I also think it reflects the underinvestment of these social media companies in learning about and establishing some local context for the many places around the world in which they operate. And countries, I think understandably, are saying, wait a minute, you can't just like parachute a social network in here and expect that that's going to be okay with us, because we have different values, we have different priorities. And in Brazil, where they did just have, you know, an attempted insurrection, a riot

• 27:11Kevin Roose?

  after an election, where there was a lot of misinformation involved, I think there's Some arguments for national sovereignty there and being able to say to a platform like X, "Wait a minute, you actually can't just play by your own rules. You also have to play by ours if you want to operate in this country."

• 27:24Casey Newton?

  Right.

• 27:25Kevin Roose?

  That's the steel man version of the argument.

• 27:26Casey Newton?

  I think that makes sense, you know, but at the same time, do we think that if there is a country that is oppressing its citizen, they have no right to free expression? Like, should American companies try to provide tools for those people to communicate and post online? Or should they just say, "Well, no, that goes against the local laws, and so we're going to stay out of it"?

• 27:42Kevin Roose?

  I don't know. I mean, I think that is sort of the defining question that faces not only the platforms, but these governments. Jack, do you have thoughts on that?

• 27:50Speaker 01

  This is why I think-

• 27:51Casey Newton?

  Do you have thoughts on American tech imperialism, Jack? Are you for or against?

• 27:55Speaker 01

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

• 28:35Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. Well, Jack, thanks for coming on and explaining all this, or as they would say in Brazil, obrigado.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Boa. De nada.

• 28:44Kevin Roose?

  Thanks, Jack.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 28:45Kevin Roose?

  Thanks, guys.

• 28:48Casey Newton?

  When we come back, fire the person closest to you. We're going founder mode.

• 28:53Kevin Roose?

  That's pretty good.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner, Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.

• 29:46Speaker 04

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• 30:52Casey Newton?

  All right, Kevin, are you ready to go founder mode?

• 30:54Kevin Roose?

  I sure am.

• 30:55Casey Newton?

  You know what? Founder mode is not just something that's incredibly fun to say and just a word you can use to justify any behavior. It is also the subject that Silicon Valley has been obsessed with as they debate an essay by the venture capitalist Paul Graham called Founder Mode.

• 31:11Kevin Roose?

  Yes, periodically in the tech world, there are just kind of these ideas. That catch fire and become very central to the tech industry's sort of conception of itself. How founders and CEOs and investors think companies should be run. And we've seen a number of these over the years, but this one founder mode has really taken hold over the past week. It's all anyone is talking about on my feed at least.

• 31:33Casey Newton?

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

• 32:13Casey Newton?

  And that the conventional wisdom on how to run a company is you should hire great people and get out of their way. Just let them run, right? I've heard this myself many times over the year. This is the way to be a good manager, right? Hire good people, get out of their way. And Brian Chesky did that, and he felt like it started to have really bad effects for the company. All of a sudden, he was less aware of what was going on. The company's performance started to tank. And so, Kevin, that's when he decided he had to go founder mode.

• 32:40Kevin Roose?

  And how would you explain founder mode to someone who has never heard of it?

• 32:44Casey Newton?

  I mean, if I wanted to be glib, I would say it's micromanaging. If I wanted to be less glib, I would say, well, instead of just delegating almost everything to a bunch of trusted lieutenants, you decide you're really going to keep your hands in all of the details. And one of the ways that Chesky has described it is, I don't want my company to be working on anything more than I personally have focus for, right? So we're not going to have a million different businesses that I know almost nothing about. We are going to keep it limited to my field of view. And that is what is going to bring a success over the long run. And PG picked up on that and ran with it. And I think he may probably ran further.

• 33:24Casey Newton?

  With it than Chesky would have, but he really situated it in this debate that Silicon Valley has been having for the past few years now, which really comes down to how much power should employees have versus how much power CEOs have, right? This is a discussion that we've had before in the context of like how Elon Musk changed Silicon Valley after he bought X, right? He came in and he said, you employees, you've had too many ideas. I'm going to go founder mode. He didn't actually say that, but he acted as if he had, right? I'm going to go founder mode and I'm going to be the, the sort of, uh, the, the last word on everything around here, right? It really galvanized a lot of people and I think Paul Graham sort of sees something similar in Brian Chesky.

• 34:03Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I mean, this is something that I've been sort of observing for a few years now. When Elon Musk took over Twitter, I think a lot of people saw that acquisition as a disaster and his management of the company as being an example of how not to run a business. But I also started hearing from sources in Silicon Valley who were founders and CEOs and investors, people with stakes in large, successful businesses who actually looked at what Elon Musk did at Twitter and said, that actually is appealing to me. So Elon Musk, in a way like became kind of a management hero. Basically, the bosses of Silicon Valley were, were kind of rooting for what Elon Musk did at Twitter to succeed and, and wondering if they could do a similar version of that at their own companies.

• 34:45Casey Newton?

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

• 35:26Casey Newton?

  And Silicon Valley and Y Combinator in particular are obsessed with the cult of the founder, right? These founders are these almost religious figures. Who sort of step into the world with a brilliant idea and they give rise to these empires. And Y Combinator is always sort of promoting this idea that it is the founder from which all innovation springs. And there were a lot of managers who had something to say about that, which was essentially, PG, you're going to look crazy here.

• 35:54Kevin Roose?

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

• 36:33Kevin Roose?

  And so if your manager at your, you know, shipping company or your restaurant started all of a sudden talking about bringing your whole self to work. That was because of something that had happened at Google years earlier.

• 36:44Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I brought my whole self to work and they asked it to leave.

• 36:48Kevin Roose?

  So I think it really matters. You know, this is just one essay. This is just a small number of companies who are sort of talking openly about this idea of going founder mode. But I think it really speaks to a frustration that a lot of executives in a lot of different industries are having. And it, it may signal a kind of shift away from this, this other mode where you delegate work to people. You hire talented people and you give them room to run.

• 37:13Casey Newton?

  Absolutely. Now, by this point in the discussion, Kevin, I imagine that a lot of listeners are out there wondering, what mode is my company in right now and what does that mean for me? And so I thought I could present some sort of business case studies for you in a new game I'm calling Founder or Flounder.

• 37:30Kevin Roose?

  Let's do it.

• 37:31Casey Newton?

  Okay. So in this game, I'm going to present you with a business case study. And then you'll tell me whether this is a case of founder, of a founder and founder mode, or flounder. A flounder maybe stepping a little bit too far away from the reins.

• 37:44Kevin Roose?

  I thought flounder mode was when you just decide that you're going to solve an organizational problem by like diving to the bottom of a pool and just kind of laying there for a while.

• 37:51Casey Newton?

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

• 38:32Kevin Roose?

  Founder mode, baby. I mean, that is the classic example that is always cited by these people of someone who was sort of the archetypal founder mode CEO. And Steve Jobs, as we know, was not a pleasant person to work for all the time, but he got results. So I think a lot of people have sort of said, "Well, why don't we learn from him as an example?"

• 38:55Casey Newton?

  Very good. All right, that leads us to case study number two. The year is 2007, and a couple guys say, "Hey, what if we let people stay in our apartment and we gave them breakfast?" The company, they called Airbnb. And recently, we have a clip from the CEO, Brian Chesky, talking about what he thought he should do to get his company back on track. Let's play the clip.

• 39:17Speaker 06

  So what I used to do is I was very hands-off. I thought my job was like strategy and capital allocation. And here's the weird thing, the less hands-on I was, the more I got sucked into problems. And by the time I got sucked into a problem, it was like 10 times as much work. So then I decided, "I'm going to do something different. I'm going to do very few things, and I'm going to be involved in every single detail." I would review everything. So I had these things called CEO reviews. And every single project in the company, I had a program management function, and I would review everything either every week, every two weeks, every four weeks, or every quarter. And then we'd track the progress, and then everything would ship on a single deadline. Initially, people hated this. No one wanted to collaborate. People didn't want to have imposed deadlines on them.

• 40:01Speaker 06

  They were wondering, "Why are you meddling? Why are you reviewing all the work?" But eventually, it created a culture, and I was trying to teach a sense of quality. I was trying to be like the editor or the orchestra conductor.

• 40:12Casey Newton?

  And that was Brian Chesky on the This Week in Startups podcast last year. Kevin, the result of this is a company whose stock declined 19% in the last year and is now trading around $115, which is about the cost of the cleaning fee for a two-night stay in an Airbnb. So Kevin, founder or flounder?

• 40:29Kevin Roose?

  I mean, this is also founder mode, right? This is Brian Chesky talking about how he took Airbnb from a manager mode company to a founder mode company, in the process, causing some frustrations for people on his team, but it seems like also resulting in a company that he's much happier with. What do you think of this?

• 40:46Casey Newton?

  Well, you know, he does seem really happy. And look, you know, Brian Chesky, tremendously likable guy, very well regarded as a CEO, I think, for good reasons. And yet, at the same time, I think it's important to point out, financially, this company is not in great shape, you know? It might be more fun to run, but it's not exactly Apple yet. So I think sometimes these founders get it into their heads that if I just had more control, I could build a juggernaut. And in the case of Airbnb, I just kind of wanted to point out, not really a juggernaut quite yet.

• 41:12Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 41:13Casey Newton?

  All right, Kevin, I got one more for you. I'm gonna paint you a vision. The year's 2003. A brilliant young entrepreneur from Stanford sets out to improve the healthcare industry by focusing on an incredibly common product, the humble blood test. Kevin, why draw an entire vial of blood with a painful needle when you could simply prick someone's finger and run the entire test on a single drop of blood? This is the question that Elizabeth Holmes set out to answer, and with her partner Sunny Balwani, the duo would go on to raise more than $700 million for Theranos. And were they beset by doubters and haters on all sides? They were. Did people say, "That's not safe", or "Your technology doesn't work", or "You defrauded your investors"? You bet they did.

• 41:55Casey Newton?

  But while I haven't checked in with Theranos since 2018, you have to admit, it does sound like a pretty cool idea. So Kevin, founder or flounder?

• 42:02Kevin Roose?

  I mean, I think this one started with founder intentions, but maybe became more of a flounder as the blood test didn't work.

• 42:09Casey Newton?

  It really did. And I bring this one up because I just want to say once again, founder mode can go wrong, right? There is a reason why sometimes we want to involve more people in decisions and give more managers visibility into what is going on at every level of the company. And that is that sometimes these people, well, they can get some pretty crazy ideas in their head.

• 42:28Kevin Roose?

  Totally.

• 42:29Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 42:29Kevin Roose?

  I was actually so entertained by the debate around founder mode this week that I created a founder mode translator.

• 42:37Casey Newton?

  Oh, really?

• 42:39Kevin Roose?

  So basically, I said to ChatGPT, I created a custom GPT. And I gave it, you know, I said, I said, you know, read Paul Graham's essay about Founder Mode and then sort of make a translator where when I input something, you sort of spit out what it would sound like if someone who's dedicated to Founder Mode said it instead. So I thought I would just read you a few of these.

• 43:02Casey Newton?

  Please.

• 43:03Kevin Roose?

  So one of the prompts that I gave my Founder Mode translator was, hey, Sarah, do you know if we're getting more Keurig pods for the coffee machine this week? Here's what that sounds like in Founder Mode. Sarah, coffee pods? Keurig pods? We're not here to wait for caffeine to just materialize like magic. We're here to build an empire. If the coffee machine is running low, that's not just a supply chain issue. That's a sign that we're too reliant on traditional systems.

• 43:31Casey Newton?

  It's pretty good. Hell, yeah, brother.

• 43:34Kevin Roose?

  Okay.

• 43:36Kevin Roose?

  All right. My next prompt was, hey, Rob, any progress on that PowerPoint deck? I really need it to show at the board meeting next week. And this is what it sounds like in Founder Mode. Hey, Rob, forget the PowerPoint. If the board needs slides to understand the vision, they're the wrong board. We're building a company, not a middle school presentation. Tell them the plan in five sentences, no fluff. If they don't get it, maybe they don't belong on the ride.

• 44:00Casey Newton?

  That's an important point of Founder Mode is just constantly threatening to fire everyone. So that really did nail it.

• 44:07Kevin Roose?

  And then the last one I gave it was, hey, boss, my colleagues and I are unhappy about our pay and working conditions and are considering unionizing. Any thoughts?

• 44:16Kevin Roose?

  And my Founder Mode bot said, unionizing? Let me stop you right there. The moment you start thinking about forming a union, you're admitting you're not playing the game at a high level. This company is a rocket ship. If you're not here for that, you're missing the point. Want more? Earn more. Results speak, not demands.

• 44:33Casey Newton?

  Well, the National Labor Relations Board just filed a complaint against that answer, actually.

• 44:39Kevin Roose?

  So obviously, we're having a lot of fun with this, but I do think this is something that is worth keeping tabs on because on one hand, like complaints about bureaucracy and middle managers are some of the oldest complaints in the world, right? Like, everyone hates bureaucracy. It's a very popular thing to rail against. And if you're a venture capitalist or someone who, you know, runs a big tech company, like, of course, it's in your interest to lionize founders. But at the end of the day, like, I just can't help but thinking that it's a very paranoid ideology, right? It's saying these people who you have hired to manage your business for you are, in fact, working against you, right? They're like a secret, you know, deep state within your own company that has to be sort of eliminated or weeded out

• 45:21Kevin Roose?

  because only you, the founder, can be trusted to make the strategic decisions that really make the company. And look, if you build a company, if you start a company, that's well within your rights to do. But like, the argument on the other side is, well, if you look at the companies where the founders have a lot of top-down control, their employees are often very unhappy, right? That is not a recipe for people feeling like they are empowered and valued if you have the CEO or the founder constantly looking over your shoulder and second-guessing you and micromanaging. And I would actually love sort of a comparison chart of like, the correlation between companies where the founders go founder mode and like employee satisfaction, right? Because that seems like it would be a very interesting data point in all this.

• 46:01Casey Newton?

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

• 46:29Kevin Roose?

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

• 47:12Kevin Roose?

  And so the leverage is just shifting from workers back to bosses. And so I think in that way, it makes a lot of sense that the bosses are starting to say, wait, why do we give our employees all that power again? And should we be taking some of that back?

• 47:25Casey Newton?

  Absolutely. So if we want to have a check on founder mode, we are going to need to bring back zero interest rates. So if the Fed could do anything about that, we'd really appreciate it.

• 47:35Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 47:36Casey Newton?

  I could also refinance my house.

• 47:40Kevin Roose?

  When we come back, we've been calling out for listeners to tell us how phone bans are going in your schools. When we come back, we'll hear what you said.

• 47:58Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner, Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.

• 48:32Speaker 04

  AI spend is growing fast, but most businesses still can't see exactly where that money is going. Ramp gives businesses visibility and control across AI providers with real-time guardrails by team and model, helping ensure spend goes to the highest ROI areas. Stop guessing where your AI spend is going. Get started with Ramp. And if you're new to Ramp, you can get $250 off at ramp.com/hardfork. Go to ramp.com/hardfork. Ramp.com/hardfork.

• 49:04Speaker 07

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• 49:38Casey Newton?

  Kevin, would you put away your phone? We're trying to do a podcast here.

• 49:41Kevin Roose?

  I have my phone out. Actually, I do need to put it in do not disturb mode.

• 49:44Casey Newton?

  See, this is exactly what I'm talking about. And you know what? This problem, friends, it is not only happening on podcasts. In schools across this country, we are having the debate of what do we do with phones during school time? And you know, last week, Kevin, on the Hard Fork Podcast, Governor Kathy Hochul of New York came on to lay out her plan for getting rid of phones in public schools.

• 50:05Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 50:06Casey Newton?

  And as you might imagine, we heard from listeners about that. In fact, we spent the past couple of weeks asking you to send in your thoughts on the subject, and we heard from so many of you who had smart things to say that we said, why don't we actually spend some time playing those on the show?

• 50:19Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and I always love hearing from our listeners, but I was especially interested to hear from them on this topic of smartphone bans in schools, because it seems like a thing where a policy is being made, or many policies are being made around the country. And the reality on the ground of what those policies actually look like when you try to ban phones in a school is just a lot more mysterious to me. Like, I don't actually know. It's one thing to say we're going to ban smartphones, but when you actually start a school year and you open school and kids come to school with their cell phones and you tell them they can't use them during class, I was just very curious to see how that is actually playing out.

• 50:54Casey Newton?

  Absolutely. You know, we talk so often about these policy debates on the show, Kevin, but what's really interesting to me is what is happening on the ground? How does it feel? How do these things get implemented? And how does life change afterwards? So, we have a really cool selection of students and teachers describing what it is like at their schools that have banned phones, in some cases, just in the last few weeks. So, I know we're going to learn a lot from this, and I think we should get into it.

• 51:20Kevin Roose?

  Let's get into it.

• 51:21Casey Newton?

  All right. So first up, we're going to hear from students. We heard from several students who made a similar argument, which went something like this. Even though the phone ban seems to be helping them focus better in class, it's not clear to them that this outweighs all the friction that has come from enforcing that policy. So to give us a little glimpse into what that looks like, here's Robert Eves. He's a high school student in Virginia.

• 51:49Speaker 08

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

• 52:32Speaker 08

  Overall, while the intention might be good, the ban's current form doesn't consider the practical needs of students and teachers, at least in my district.

• 52:40Casey Newton?

  Interesting. Kevin, what do you make of Robert's point here?

• 52:42Kevin Roose?

  So this is really interesting to me because I think what we're starting to see as these bans actually kick in in a lot of schools this fall is that it's just pretty messy. Like, the actual process of how do you get phones out of students' hands during the classroom day is not particularly straightforward, and there are going to be exceptions. There are going to be places where it does cause friction because, yeah, some students may be using their phones for school-approved activities or even coursework. It's just not going to be a very simple, neat policy to kind of lay down.

• 53:13Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and in order for it to work the way we think it should, you do have to get the phones out of everyone's hands, right? If one person has a phone, that's incredibly distracting for the entire class. So, you know, I can understand why teachers who already have so much on their plate are saying, wait, now I also have to play phone cop all day? That doesn't sound very fun. Let's hear a similar point that was made by Charlotte. She's a high school student in Indiana, where a state senate bill recently went into effect requiring schools to adopt and publish policies limiting cellphone use.

• 53:44Speaker 09

  I have mixed feelings about this bill. For one, I feel like I'm focusing better in school. I'm not thinking about my phone since it's usually in a phone cubby or in my backpack. But it is annoying that I can't have my phone during study hall. When I don't have any homework to do, I just kind of sit there. It's also a hassle during my newspaper class. Whenever I'm walking through the building to an interview, recording it, etc., I have to wear a lanyard around my neck that says "Press Pass", with a paragraph that states that I am actually allowed to have my phone. No one's bothered me about it yet, but I always feel like I'm doing something illegal.

• 54:14Casey Newton?

  Charlotte, I'm here to tell you, you're not doing something illegal. You're doing something incredibly cool, okay? If I could have walked around my high school with a pass that said "Press Pass", using a piece of technology that no one else in the school was allowed to use, I truly never would have felt cooler.

• 54:27Kevin Roose?

  Totally, and it does make me think that, at least in this one particular school, the newspaper class is about to become the most popular class in the school.

• 54:36Casey Newton?

  Yes, they're gonna start 15 different newspapers at this school because everybody wants to use their phone.

• 54:43Kevin Roose?

  Yes, but I will say, on a less jokey note, like, I have some sympathy for students who say, "Well, I'm used to having my phone to sort of like kill time during study hall after I finish my work and I'm sort of bored without it." But I also feel like, man, that feeling of being bored, of just sitting there with nothing to distract you and having to kind of like sit there with your own thoughts, or, you know, doodle, or maybe sort of think through some idea, like, that is actually like a classic part of the learning experience. At least it was for me.

• 55:14Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I think that as boring as it is, there is a case to be made for sitting there with your own thoughts. You know, these days, I'm not alone with my thoughts often. I always have my earbuds in. But I do think it was an important part of my development.

• 55:28Kevin Roose?

  Do you think doodling is gonna make a comeback?

• 55:29Casey Newton?

  Hmm, I think it should.

• 55:31Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 55:31Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 55:32Kevin Roose?

  I mean, kids these days, they don't even know how to do the fancy S.

• 55:35Casey Newton?

  All right, now you sound 400 years old. So something else that we heard in voice memos from students is that each school is implementing their phone ban just a little bit differently and that subtle differences in enforcement can wind up having a really big effect on how students feel about the ban. So here's a student who says he's been able to get permission to use his phone whenever he's really needed it. His school has been using these pouches called yonder pouches. Have you ever used a yonder pouch?

• 56:04Kevin Roose?

  I never have. Have you?

• 56:05Casey Newton?

  You know, I have it, but they're increasingly common. If you go to like see a stand-up comedian, for example, they'll sort of take everybody's phones and throw them in their pouches. I imagine yonder is having a great business year with how many schools are passing these bans. But these are these pouches that allow people to keep their phone on them inside a locked pouch that can only be unlocked with a special device. And according to this student who sent in a voice memo, the pouches are working pretty well. So let's hear from Jackson McClure in Redwood City, California, right by us, Kevin.

• 56:36Speaker 10

  Hey, Hard Fork. I'm a ninth grader at Design Tech High School. And actually, just today, I had to, I had to fix my tooth because I chipped it on a mountain biking trip. Yay. And I, and believe it or not, it wasn't actually that hard to just go to the front desk, say, I need to use my phone to call my mom for the appointment. And then they allowed me. And then I took photos of my tooth and then had a conversation. We logged back up and I went on with my day. It seems like it's not, it's not too hard just to get access to it if you really need it. And honestly, not having it really seems like just a benefit anyway.

• 57:16Casey Newton?

  So this is why I think that students shouldn't be allowed to ride their mountain bikes inside the classroom. It's too dangerous. We're seeing too many of these injuries. No, Jackson, I hope you're feeling better. But you know, this is an interesting point that he makes, which is essentially, hey, everybody relax. If you have an emergency, go to the front desk. What's the big deal? What do you think, Kevin?

• 57:33Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I totally buy that. I mean, I think that the students will still have many ways to contact their parents or guardians if something does happen to them. You know, this one resonated with me because I actually did have a tooth chipping incident and I was in seventh I chipped my tooth while doing a professional wrestling move on one of my friends.

• 57:53Casey Newton?

  What was that move?

• 57:54Kevin Roose?

  It was the spear. This was Goldberg, who was a professional wrestler back in the 90s. He had a move called the spear.

• 58:01Casey Newton?

  That's right.

• 58:01Kevin Roose?

  Which involves like running headfirst into someone and I was trying to spear my friend and he moved out of the way. And so instead I speared a locker and my tooth chipped.

• 58:10Casey Newton?

  But you know what? That locker also took a fair bit of damage. So you should see the other guy, basically.

• 58:16Kevin Roose?

  And I'll never forget it because my, one of the people who was watching as this all happened was my crush. And so she saw me with the chipped tooth sort of bleeding out of my mouth and I'll never recover from that. So anyway, what I'm trying to say is that I made my way to the nurse's office and I was able to call my mom and get to the dentist to fix my tooth. And this was before cell phones. So what I'm saying is the students of America do actually have resources if they chip their teeth during the school day. And I'm glad that Jackson found that out.

• 58:44Casey Newton?

  But Kevin, don't you wish in retrospect that somebody had had a cellphone so they could record you spearing a locker and sort of put that on TikTok in a compilation called Terrible High School Nerd Fails?

• 58:57Kevin Roose?

  Actually, now I'm very glad that cell phones with cameras did not exist back then. And look, on a more serious note, like there will obviously be reasons that students need to contact their parents during the school day. And actually, this is one of the big objections that many parents have raised to these cellphone bans is what if something horrible happens? And my child needs to get in contact with me during the school day? And you know, I have some sympathy to that.

• 59:21Casey Newton?

  I do too.

• 59:22Kevin Roose?

  As a parent, as someone who worries a lot about my child's safety, like I get wanting to be able to contact your kid during the school day on a cellphone. But I also think that there were ways for students to do that before cell phones. There will continue to be ways. It's not that hard to sort of get to the principal's office, get to the nurse's station. There are going to be avenues for students to contact their parents in an emergency.

• 59:46Casey Newton?

  There's something very funny to me about the words, please open my yonder pouch.

• 59:50Kevin Roose?

  Why is that?

• 59:50Casey Newton?

  I don't know. It kind of sounds like a pickup line. Anyways, so we've heard from students, but Kevin, we should also hear from teachers. You know, as we sort of mentioned. Earlier, these are often the folks who are charged with implementing these bands. And we were very curious to hear what they've been noticing. So this first clip comes to us from Ryan Beddingfield, who is a high school AV teacher in Atlanta, Georgia. And he told us how his opinion on phone bands has changed a little over the last three weeks.

• 1:00:18Speaker 11

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

• 1:01:01Speaker 11

  Like, it sounds so cheesy, but like, I can't, I can't oversell that. So, like I said, I worried about the way this would affect my class. But I think there's just no question that the net benefits outweigh the costs or the inconveniences. And I would hate to go back to unrestricted cellphone use at this point already. I'm fully committed.

• 1:01:24Casey Newton?

  Wow. What do you think, Kevin?

• 1:01:25Kevin Roose?

  I mean, this one really struck me because this is not a teacher who sort of came in as someone who was skeptical about technology in the classroom, right? He did sort of try to use cellphones as part of the curriculum in the classes that he was teaching. And, you know, I think there's, I admire that. Like, there are a lot of teachers who sort of have been opposed to phones in schools from the beginning. But this was a teacher who actually said, well, if students are going to have these things and we're not going to ban them, like, let's try to find a productive use. But to me, like, trying to find a productive educational use of cellphones in the classroom is a little like trying to find a productive educational use for a swarm of bees in the classroom. Like, maybe you can do it, but no one's going to be focused on the lesson.

• 1:02:10Kevin Roose?

  And so I think it's really helpful to hear from teachers who came in thinking, you know, with some skepticism toward these bands and just say, as, as Ryan does, that like, it has totally changed their classroom essentially overnight.

• 1:02:22Casey Newton?

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

• 1:03:04Casey Newton?

  has been effective, but only after administrators intervened to get the teachers to stop resisting it.

• 1:03:11Speaker 12

  Hey Kevin and Casey. I am a high school teacher. I teach AP physics. I've been teaching for about 12 years now in Orange County, California. So, I've taught through the 2010s and basically, the, the phone problem has always been a thing since I started. But when the kids came back from the COVID shutdowns, it was the worst it had ever been. Before the pandemic, yeah, kids would, obviously, they'd be on their phones all the time. They're texting back and forth. They're checking, you know, their social media. But there would at least be a lot of noise and sound and socialization in my classroom whenever there was any sort of downtime, or if the, the kids were waiting for me to, to get something

• 1:03:54Speaker 12

  ready. But one of the craziest things was when we first came back from the shutdowns, if there was any sort of downtime, the class would remain absolutely silent. It was the most eerie thing ever because essentially, like, if I finished my lessons early and I looked out there, kids would just whip out their phones and they would just all start doom scrolling very silently next to each other, like, even if they were like, sitting next to all of their best friends. But recently, I will say that about like last year, our admin team put up a huge effort to buy pretty much every single classroom teacher one of those phone pocket charts. It's like this big thing that hangs on your wall. It looks like those things where people can like organize their shoes in them.

• 1:04:39Speaker 12

  But it's like specifically for kids to put phones inside of those pockets. And there's one for each kid in the room. And at first, it was met with a lot of opposition from students. Students didn't want to give up their phones. They were coming up with clever ways to get around it. They would get like burner phones and put the burner phones into the pockets. They would take their phone out of their phone covers and they would put the phone covers into the pockets. So visually, it looks like there's a phone there. But if you look closely, there's no phone inside of like the phone case. And honestly, a lot of teachers oppose it too, because a lot of veteran teachers kind of felt like, you know what, I've been here, done that. It's always been a big issue. This is just kind of a waste of our efforts. But honestly,

• 1:05:25Speaker 12

  our admin team actually did kind of just enforce it over and over and over again, kind of like, you know, sort of chastising, you know, teachers that weren't getting on board at first. The idea was like, if everybody does it, it just becomes part of school culture. And honestly, we started the school year and everybody, every single staff member's on board. Day one, every, every teacher was just kind of like, yeah, you know what, you come into the classroom. The first thing you do, you're going to drop your phone into this pocket. It's assigned to you. I'm going to be using it to like a double check attendance or whatnot. And it's been going smooth. It's been going great. And better yet, I actually started noticing, you know, that it's, it's healing a little bit. I'm actually noticing

• 1:06:07Speaker 12

  more lively discussions. I'm noticing that kids are paying more attention in class and their grades are, are better. They're, they're doing better. They're more present. So that's, it's honestly been really, really nice.

• 1:06:23Casey Newton?

  All right, Kevin, so what's the lesson here?

• 1:06:25Kevin Roose?

  I mean, I think the really interesting thing that is going to come out of this, one of them, is just that we're going to see a really natural experiment here. We're going to be able to measure the educational outcomes of students in schools that ban phones and schools that do not ban phones, and we're going to see over a period of years like what effect these policies actually have. I, you know, I don't want to venture a guess, but my initial impression is that, at least from the teacher's perspective, this is leading to much better engagement with classroom instruction and, you know, better grades and better participation. And I would not be surprised if students who are in schools with phone bans a couple of years from now just have better outcomes.

• 1:07:06Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and for what it's worth, we did not get a lot of messages saying, ever since we banned phones, everything has been a lot worse. And now the students won't pay attention to us, right? So, you know, that is meaningful, I think. And the other lesson that I'm taking away from this call, Kevin, is that it just takes time to shift the culture of these schools and that, yeah, at first you are going to see students coming up with all sorts of creative schemes to ensure they can keep looking. But over time, eventually, they just give up and they actually throw the phone into the pocket.

• 1:07:34Kevin Roose?

  Yep.

• 1:07:35Casey Newton?

  Now, one sort of final thing to add about this, Kevin, is that we heard from a few listeners outside the United States. One parent in Melbourne, Australia, told us that phones have been banned in his kids' primary and secondary schools for five years, and his kids haven't complained, which seems very suspicious, frankly. That makes me think that they probably have phones that they're just not telling their dad about. And that there's an English-speaking teacher in a public school in Japan where all cellphones and devices are banned, including during sports and clubs after school. And this teacher told us that Japanese students also really seem to embrace the bans. So, do we feel like there is actually kind of maybe a growing consensus around this issue?

• 1:08:15Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I actually, you know, I generally don't like sort of one-size-fits-all approaches to technology and to smartphones in general. But with this one, it does seem, man, like it is just going so well at so many schools across not only the United States but the world. I just don't hear, you know, obviously, there are some wrinkles to be ironed out when it comes to the actual implementation, but this just seems like such a no-brainer to me.

• 1:08:41Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I mean, and I feel like I'm often on the on the side of arguing for people having access to technology. And yet, I did not have a cellphone in high school, and I truly cannot think of a way that it would have improved my life if I could have had it in the classroom during class time, right? I still think that there is a case to be made for maybe some laptop use and digital literacy skills and all of that. But certainly at the elementary school level, I see absolutely no need for these kids to have these phones. And even into high school, it seems like the sort of plurality of people that we have spoken to have said, this is the way to go.

• 1:09:15Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. I mean, one possible effect of this that I'm fascinated to see if it actually materializes or not is that, you know, I don't think students are going to stop using cellphones altogether, like outside the classroom and outside the school building. It may be that they just spend more time on their phones when they're at home with their parents, or at soccer practice, or whatever. There may actually be kind of a concentrating effect whereby taking phones out of the school during the school day, you end up with kids spending way more time on their phones at night. I would also be interested to see how the usage of apps like Snapchat, apps like Instagram, apps like TikTok, if you could sort of graph their usage among younger users, whether they're going to see significant shifts in when people are using those apps during the day.

• 1:10:00Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, I wonder if this is going to be a reason for maybe the stock prices of those companies to decline because they just lost eight hours during the day that they can show ads to teenagers.

• 1:10:09Kevin Roose?

  I mean, we're laughing, but like, I actually think that is probably something that they are having meetings about at these companies right now is like, oh, my God, we're like, using, losing some of our most active users for a big chunk of the day.

• 1:10:21Casey Newton?

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

• 1:10:58Speaker 00

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• 1:12:40Kevin Roose?

  Hard Fork was produced this week by Rachel Cohn, Davis Land, and Whitney Jones. We're edited by Jen Poyant. We're fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Daniel Ramirez. Original music by Marian Lozano, Diane Wong, Rowan Nemusdo, and Dan Powell. Our audience editor is Nell Galogly. Video production by Ryan Manning and Chris Schott. You can watch this full episode and all of our episodes on YouTube at youtube.com/hardfork. Special thanks to Paula Schuman, Puweng Tam, Dahlia Hadad, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us, as always, at [email protected]. Or if you've gone founder mode, you can just give us a nasty performance review.

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