Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of Left Podcast. This is a sample of our recent bonus episode usually only available to members.

These episodes are comprised of our crew of researchers, Amanda, and myself all getting together

for a roundtable discussion on topics that we find interesting. So here's a few minutes for free so you can

know what all the fuss is about.

I saw her want to apologize. I sent around these articles and there was one that like really probably would have been

valuable but we're already talking about enough things and it's called the schools that banned smartphones and it was

written by a guy who went and gave a talk at a private high school and he had no

idea that they had any sort of ban on cell phones. He just went to give a talk and was like, whoa, what's going on here? Everyone's focused on me while I'm giving a speech. They're not even like looking down or looking around or like

Clearly not paying attention I haven't heard any beeps or buzzes people seem to be having conversations with each other like what's going on here and so the

administration told yeah like that's a school policy you know we don't have cell phones here and because it's a private

school and they've been doing things differently for a while, they had the ban in place before COVID.

And so it was this really interesting natural experiment from having the ban before COVID and everyone was cool with it and then COVID happened

and they very consciously relaxed the rules because they're like,

and you know, good everything's messed up, let the people use the phones,

and you gotta talk to someone, they gotta connect,

and then as everyone knows COVID's gone,

we're done with that.

And so people continue to use their phones because it hadn't been part of the school

culture for two solid years and so people continue to use their phones.

Like they still have the policy in place like we're a no phone campus, and you could very

flagrantly use your phone and no one would say a thing about it. And so the administration talked with the upperclassmen and we're like,

we think that, no, I'm sorry, it may have actually been student council,

...