Right, home from work, walk the dog, kids are back.

Mom!

Up the stairs for something.

Ugh, back down, no idea what I went up for.

Mom, what's for dinner?

Chop, sizzle, done.

Hello, fresh, can't slow life down, but it makes bringing everyone together around the table a whole lot easier.

So its phones down, forks up.

Hello Fresh. Bring back dinner time.

There's been this sort of clamor for something to happen for long enough that even people who wouldn't really care to be reading the news of tech policy every single day will be internalizing this idea of like social media and smartphones are really bad for us.

And I should be trying to use mine less.

I'm Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain,

a show where today we are going to talk about what our phones are

and aren't doing to us.

It's obviously the phones.

That was the title of a viral substack essay

that came out March of 2024. Magdalene Taylor, a writer who focuses on sexuality and culture,

was trying to articulate why fewer Americans were having sex or going out with friends. There were,

she argued, all kinds of factors at play here, for increased isolation and alienation in American life.

But all of them, she argued, felt abstract compared to the one that was staring her in the face.

The problem, she wrote, is obviously our phones.

It's obviously the phones is less an argument that cites endless empirical evidence, as much

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