It is the question of our time is it all the smartphone's fault. It's the question that everybody seems to be asking whether it's the mental health crisis the political crises or just seemingly everything

being driven by our obsession and addiction to the devices in our pockets.

NYU professor and best-selling author Jonathan Hite argues,

yes, it is the smartphone's fault.

He believes there's a direct correlation between smartphones,

social media news feeds, front-facing cameras,

and pretty much everything going wrong in society at the same time.

His new book is chock full of data and charts supporting this claim and he particularly

focuses on the mental health crisis among young people.

Now, my personal belief is, I think it's complicated.

I don't think it's as simple as smartphones equal bad.

Smartphones ruin kids. As somebody who's very familiar with the data on the subject,

the story is very complex and there's a lot of nuance to it. So in today's episode, I challenge

Dr. Hyde on some of his claims and we get into the nitty gritty of the issue.

We look at the research and we ask ourselves, why doesn't some of this make sense?

Now he's been on pretty much every podcast under the sun this year talking about this subject so I really

wanted to try to take this conversation in a different direction. Some of the things

that we cover include if it is the phone's fault why aren't we seen

mental health crises in every other part of the world? Why does this seem to be limited to the English speaking world?

Also, is this just another moral panic? I mean, I remember when I was a kid people were freaking out about

cable TV and violent video games and the corruption of the morality of our youth and

how we're all gonna be drug addicts shooting each other on the streets.

...