Cal Newport On Kids And Smartphones (What Age Is Safest to Get a Device?)

00:00:00.000 | So that's the deep dive we want to do today.

00:00:01.880 | Today's deep question is, are smartphones bad for kids?

00:00:06.880 | And if so, how do we know that?

00:00:11.020 | That's what I want to get into.

00:00:12.120 | So I have some of my slides here from my talk.

00:00:15.000 | So, you know, if you're listening,

00:00:16.560 | you might want to consider watching.

00:00:18.600 | This is episode 246.

00:00:21.200 | You can find it at youtube.com/calnewportmedia

00:00:24.920 | or at thedeeplife.com if you don't like YouTube.

00:00:29.160 | Episode 246.

00:00:30.280 | I'll explain what I'm saying.

00:00:31.360 | You don't have to watch it, but I'm just saying,

00:00:33.000 | if you want to see some of these graphs I'm referencing,

00:00:35.840 | watching the video version of this might be suggested.

00:00:39.880 | So as I looked into this question

00:00:42.760 | of when did researchers become concerned

00:00:46.580 | about kids and phones and why,

00:00:49.400 | the whole story seemed to break up into three acts.

00:00:53.080 | That's why I called this in my talk, a saga in three acts.

00:00:57.940 | The first act we can start,

00:01:00.120 | I'm gonna call it roughly 2012 to 2017.

00:01:05.120 | That's the first act of the story.

00:01:07.260 | I call it an alarm is sounded.

00:01:10.920 | So this is the period where people

00:01:13.000 | first began to notice warning signs.

00:01:16.480 | This was actually the period in which

00:01:18.460 | the potential issues with smartphones

00:01:20.280 | and young people was first brought to my attention.

00:01:22.560 | So I remember as a young professor at Georgetown,

00:01:25.800 | this would have been in 2012,

00:01:27.980 | I was giving a talk somewhere on campus

00:01:30.140 | and I was walking to the talk with someone

00:01:32.140 | who was involved with the student mental health center

00:01:35.740 | at Dartmouth, it's called, or not Dartmouth, Georgetown.

00:01:38.340 | It's called CAPS and if you're watching on the screen,

00:01:40.700 | you see a picture of the counseling center.

00:01:42.660 | And I remember smartphones and tech in general

00:01:44.940 | was not in my portfolio in 2012 as a writer.

00:01:48.060 | So we were just having conversation

00:01:50.060 | and this person mentioned to me, she said,

00:01:52.340 | "There's been a big change recently.

00:01:55.560 | "The number of students that we are now treating

00:01:59.740 | "with mental health counseling here at Georgetown

00:02:01.840 | "has jumped up."

00:02:03.340 | And not only has it jumped up,

00:02:04.780 | but it has disproportionately jumped up

00:02:07.300 | to be anxiety or anxiety related disorders.

00:02:10.540 | So we're seeing a lot more overall students

00:02:12.380 | and a much bigger proportion of the students we see

00:02:14.340 | are here for anxiety.

00:02:16.980 | I thought that was interesting.

00:02:17.820 | She said, "Oh, what's going on?"

00:02:19.100 | She didn't skip a beat.

00:02:20.520 | She said, "Smartphones."

00:02:22.540 | And that caught me off guard at the time.

00:02:24.340 | Smartphones, what do you mean?

00:02:25.340 | She said, "Oh, it's really clear to me anecdotally

00:02:28.180 | "that the first group of students to arrive on campus

00:02:32.240 | "having had smartphones during their adolescence

00:02:34.880 | "were showing up way more anxious

00:02:36.200 | "than we'd ever seen before."

00:02:37.840 | We can now look back retrospectively

00:02:41.200 | and see that this was not an isolated anecdote

00:02:44.160 | happening at just one university.

00:02:45.480 | I have a chart on the screen here

00:02:46.820 | for those who are watching.

00:02:47.760 | This is from the American College Health Association

00:02:49.840 | annual survey.

00:02:51.120 | It's showing percentage of US undergraduates

00:02:53.640 | diagnosed with a mental illness.

00:02:55.080 | And what do we see?

00:02:56.200 | At 2012 forward, a very sharp uptick

00:03:01.520 | in anxiety and depression,

00:03:02.880 | which are of course quite interlinked by anxiety.

00:03:06.680 | So the dark vertical line, if you're watching this online,

00:03:09.720 | is 2012.

00:03:11.460 | So what this one person at Georgetown was noticing

00:03:14.360 | was actually a nationwide trend,

00:03:15.920 | that something changed around 2012.

00:03:17.680 | Keep that date in mind.

00:03:18.680 | It's gonna come up again.

00:03:19.920 | I think the issue got brought

00:03:22.640 | to the public's attention writ large.

00:03:24.980 | So it expanded from individual educators

00:03:28.480 | and mental health professionals being worried

00:03:30.700 | to the culture writ large being worried

00:03:33.340 | about maybe smartphones are causing an issue.

00:03:35.140 | I think Jean Twenge really helped make this

00:03:39.320 | a national issue in her 2017 cover article

00:03:43.880 | for The Atlantic that was titled,

00:03:45.800 | "Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?"

00:03:48.860 | Now the thing about Twenge is that her expertise

00:03:53.560 | is in studying differences between demographic generations.

00:03:57.580 | That's what she does.

00:03:58.620 | How is this generation different than that generation?

00:04:01.500 | She's very good at teasing out what's real and what's not.

00:04:04.100 | And as she said in this article,

00:04:05.300 | and I have it on the screen as well,

00:04:07.380 | she'd been doing this for 25 years.

00:04:09.940 | And she says, "Typically the characteristics

00:04:11.420 | "that come to define a generation appear gradually

00:04:14.240 | "and along a continuum.

00:04:16.340 | "But then I began studying Gen Z.

00:04:18.600 | "Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts

00:04:21.320 | "in teen behaviors and emotional states.

00:04:23.220 | "The gentle slopes of the line graphs

00:04:24.660 | "became steep mountains and sheer cliffs,

00:04:27.460 | "and many of the distinctive characteristics

00:04:28.900 | "of the millennial generation began to disappear.

00:04:31.100 | "In all of my analyses of generational data,

00:04:33.400 | "some reaching back to the 1930s,

00:04:34.920 | "I had never seen anything like it."

00:04:38.980 | So this demographer was thrown by how different Gen Z was,

00:04:42.620 | and not just Gen Z in general, but Gen Z starting in 2012.

00:04:47.620 | She began to make the connection

00:04:49.580 | that I think this has to do with smartphones.

00:04:53.360 | Here's another, I think, culture-defining moment.

00:04:57.160 | This was also 2017.

00:04:58.760 | A big article in the New York Times Magazine

00:05:00.600 | written by Benoit-Denisette Luz.

00:05:02.700 | The article is titled,

00:05:03.860 | "Why are more American teenagers than ever

00:05:05.840 | "suffering from severe anxiety?"

00:05:08.840 | And it's important because Benoit goes into this article,

00:05:11.560 | it's clear from the tone of the article

00:05:13.400 | that he is not very hospitable

00:05:16.320 | to the technology hypothesis.

00:05:17.840 | He was seeing this as a standard

00:05:20.600 | moral panic-type argument, the same thing we always say,

00:05:24.160 | rock and roll music is gonna corrupt the teens' brains,

00:05:27.400 | video games are gonna corrupt teens' brains,

00:05:29.280 | and he came into it with that frame.

00:05:31.400 | But there's a key point in this article

00:05:34.280 | where he talks to actual anxious teenagers.

00:05:36.420 | And I'm quoting him here.

00:05:38.840 | "To my surprise, anxious teenagers tended to agree."

00:05:43.080 | They didn't say, "Hey, old man, leave our phones alone."

00:05:46.120 | They said, "Yeah, these things are a problem."

00:05:48.620 | So by 2017, we've gone from spot reports of,

00:05:53.160 | wait a second, something is changing here.

00:05:55.840 | These young people, there's something different going on.

00:05:57.800 | And by 2017, we were openly debating,

00:06:01.520 | is it phones causing these issues?

00:06:03.340 | All right, this brings us to the second act, the data wars.

00:06:09.240 | This takes place roughly between 2017 and 2020.

00:06:13.680 | This is when researchers begin to seriously try

00:06:15.960 | to gather or study the data to get a stronger,

00:06:19.280 | more data-driven conclusion on this question

00:06:22.120 | of is smartphones somehow involved in these increases

00:06:24.480 | in anxiety that we're seeing?

00:06:26.300 | This was a period of both proposals and critiques,

00:06:29.280 | which is good.

00:06:30.120 | This is how new sciences emerge,

00:06:32.960 | especially in social psychology,

00:06:34.360 | which is, by definition, a complicated field

00:06:37.520 | that rarely has super strong signals.

00:06:39.580 | There was proposals and critiques

00:06:41.160 | or responses to the critiques,

00:06:42.380 | and so that's why I call this the data wars.

00:06:44.440 | This was the period in which almost any New York Times

00:06:47.480 | article on this issue would say with big caveats,

00:06:50.840 | there is some data, but it's contested.

00:06:53.640 | It's 'cause this data war period

00:06:54.880 | is when the science was actually happening.

00:06:56.960 | Let me talk about two troubling streams of data

00:06:59.680 | that came out of this period,

00:07:00.760 | the critiques and the responses to the critiques.

00:07:03.080 | So the first bit of troubling evidence that emerged

00:07:05.400 | as we got more serious about this question

00:07:06.960 | was simply the timing, that 2012.

00:07:11.560 | That was a really, it's circumstantial evidence,

00:07:15.000 | but a really strong pointer towards smartphones at play,

00:07:17.800 | and here's why.

00:07:18.880 | There's lots of different reasons you could come up for,

00:07:22.680 | come up with for why young people,

00:07:25.120 | between 2012 and 2020, were becoming more anxious.

00:07:29.700 | The world felt like an anxious place.

00:07:32.360 | We had the financial crisis,

00:07:34.080 | we had the financial insecurity that that caused,

00:07:36.940 | we had the extreme partisanship and unrest

00:07:39.720 | that followed in the Trump era,

00:07:42.440 | and so it did seem like a period

00:07:44.280 | of lots that were going on.

00:07:45.760 | The problem is none of this fit 2012 in particular.

00:07:49.400 | The financial crisis was 2006 to 2009.

00:07:52.760 | The financial insecurity was felt strongly

00:07:54.480 | by the millennial generation,

00:07:55.880 | we were entering the job force then, not Gen Z.

00:07:58.480 | By the time Gen Z was entering the job force,

00:08:00.440 | that was largely in the rear view mirror.

00:08:02.660 | There was a lot of political partisanship and unrest

00:08:05.240 | that arose later in the 2010s,

00:08:08.520 | but that was after 2012.

00:08:11.280 | 2012 was the Barack Obama, Mitt Romney election.

00:08:15.680 | There was not an increase in partisanship there

00:08:18.040 | as compared to, let's say, even just a 2008 election

00:08:20.720 | in which we had Sarah Palin involved in that movement,

00:08:23.980 | compared to the Contract for America,

00:08:26.320 | Newt Gingrich in the Clinton era,

00:08:28.520 | that type of partisanship.

00:08:29.440 | There wasn't something new that happened in 2012

00:08:31.880 | that wasn't also there in 2009,

00:08:34.200 | wasn't also there in 1999.

00:08:36.540 | The populist revolutions of Trump, et cetera,

00:08:39.220 | that didn't really pick up speed until '15 or '16,

00:08:41.980 | so that explanation doesn't quite fit it.

00:08:44.620 | Also, as we got more data,

00:08:46.960 | we saw these anxiety rises among young people

00:08:49.240 | happening in many, many countries,

00:08:51.180 | so we could not pin this on particular American dynamics.

00:08:56.180 | So what did fit this?

00:08:58.900 | Well, here's Gene, oh, let me just show,

00:09:01.300 | let me show a couple of graphs here.

00:09:02.300 | These are just a couple other graphs

00:09:04.460 | that are showing 2012 being a big deal.

00:09:07.420 | So we see female, especially with female reports

00:09:11.180 | of sadness and hopelessness between 2011 and 2021,

00:09:16.180 | we see a significant increase from 36% to 57%.

00:09:21.600 | I'm also showing US teens with major depression,

00:09:23.700 | especially with girls, we see 145% increase

00:09:26.780 | as we move from 2012 to 2020.

00:09:29.660 | So these are just examples of lots of things

00:09:31.380 | were pivoting on 2012.

00:09:34.080 | Here's Gene Twenge.

00:09:36.620 | She said, okay, what does match 2012?

00:09:41.220 | It was exactly the moment when the proportion

00:09:43.060 | of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50%.

00:09:46.580 | That's what's changed then.

00:09:47.940 | After that point, you were much more likely

00:09:51.700 | as an adolescent to have a smartphone.

00:09:53.500 | Before that point, it was much less likely.

00:09:55.980 | None of these other potentially anxiety-producing trends

00:09:58.280 | match that date nearly as well.

00:10:01.780 | All right, so this was the first bit

00:10:02.980 | of troubling evidence to emerge, right?

00:10:04.540 | It's circumstantial.

00:10:05.820 | And there's critiques.

00:10:06.820 | I would say one of the big critiques,

00:10:07.980 | and I'm showing this on the screen in example now,

00:10:10.020 | was this idea that, no, no, no, we agree with you

00:10:12.680 | that there's not world events or cultural events

00:10:15.880 | that match the 2012 outside of smartphones,

00:10:18.740 | but the thing that really changed in 2012

00:10:21.060 | was not smartphones, this critique says.

00:10:22.720 | It was that this new generation was coming of age

00:10:25.300 | and they're more comfortable talking about mental health.

00:10:29.220 | They're like, "That's," so this was a big critique

00:10:31.060 | in the early part of the data wars.

00:10:32.900 | You see rises in depression and anxiety

00:10:35.060 | because more people are willing to say,

00:10:37.820 | "I'm anxious," or, "I have depression."

00:10:40.360 | This quote from the New York Times in 2018

00:10:42.640 | is sort of typical of this period.

00:10:44.380 | Here's Richard Friedman writing the Times.

00:10:46.020 | He says, "Look, there are a few surveys

00:10:47.540 | "reporting increased anxiety in adolescents,

00:10:49.260 | "but they're self-reported measures

00:10:51.260 | "from kids or their parents,

00:10:52.440 | "and they're overestimating rates of discords

00:10:54.720 | "because they're detecting mild symptoms,

00:10:56.340 | "not clinically significant syndromes.

00:10:58.720 | "This was claimed a lot during the early period

00:11:01.120 | "of the data wars."

00:11:02.700 | So as good science does, it said,

00:11:04.420 | "Well, how can we look into this counter hypothesis?"

00:11:08.660 | And the right way to look into this counter hypothesis

00:11:10.940 | is to say, "Let's find stronger proxies for anxiety

00:11:14.540 | "that have nothing to do with self-reporting."

00:11:17.560 | And in particular, I put two charts on the screen here,

00:11:19.540 | and these are both tragic,

00:11:20.820 | but they also give us deep insight.

00:11:22.640 | The first chart is US teens admitted to hospitals

00:11:27.060 | for non-fatal self-harm, ages 10 to 14.

00:11:30.660 | This gets around the self-reporting process.

00:11:33.320 | These are people who tried to harm themselves

00:11:35.160 | due to anxiety, and these are from hospital records.

00:11:37.860 | Look at girls.

00:11:40.300 | 188% increase between 2010 to 2020,

00:11:45.300 | with the increase getting particularly stark around 2012.

00:11:50.280 | Even more tragically, we look to the right,

00:11:52.640 | we see suicides among US teens.

00:11:55.660 | 2012 jumps up, 134% increase among girls

00:12:00.660 | starting around that 2012 point.

00:12:03.500 | So it was a reasonable hypothesis that,

00:12:06.380 | well, maybe around 2012,

00:12:08.700 | we just got more comfortable talking about anxiety,

00:12:11.780 | and we were just picking up mild self-reported symptoms.

00:12:14.340 | Unfortunately, the hospital records show

00:12:17.180 | these indications rose at the exact same rate.

00:12:19.540 | So there really was an increase here.

00:12:21.140 | Kids are, and starting around this period,

00:12:23.980 | having worse mental health.

00:12:25.500 | The second strand of troubling evidence

00:12:28.780 | was the correlational studies.

00:12:31.060 | So social psychologists often will work

00:12:33.100 | with these giant data sets,

00:12:34.740 | these giant data sets where researchers will go out

00:12:36.660 | and talk to tens of thousands of people

00:12:38.260 | and ask them about everything.

00:12:40.500 | And then after the fact, you can come back as a researcher

00:12:43.180 | and look for all sorts of connections within this data.

00:12:46.660 | If you wanna know if people who like the color red

00:12:50.260 | as their favorite color are more likely

00:12:51.880 | to have had back surgery in the last six months,

00:12:55.660 | you can just go and look at this data

00:12:57.220 | and find those things and look for correlations, et cetera.

00:13:00.300 | So they did this.

00:13:01.140 | They said, "Let's start looking at this data.

00:13:02.460 | "We'll look at young people,

00:13:03.700 | "and we'll look at correlations

00:13:04.840 | "between these technologies and negative outcomes."

00:13:08.820 | And they began to find lots of strong connections.

00:13:10.840 | Here's just one of many, many graphs

00:13:12.340 | that were produced in this period.

00:13:13.980 | This particularly one looked at UK adolescents

00:13:16.940 | with clinically relevant depressive symptoms.

00:13:19.640 | The X-axis is number of hours per weekday on social media.

00:13:24.640 | The Y-axis is percentage of teens

00:13:27.340 | who used that much social media

00:13:28.460 | that were diagnosed as depressed.

00:13:31.420 | And as you see, when you increase

00:13:33.340 | from no time on social media to five plus hours,

00:13:36.740 | you get a significant increase

00:13:38.860 | in percentage of teens that are depressed.

00:13:42.940 | This is particularly high for girls,

00:13:45.260 | where you go from a 11% depression rate

00:13:49.520 | for girls who don't use social media

00:13:51.480 | to almost a 40% depression rate

00:13:53.920 | for girls who use four to five hours of social media.

00:13:57.280 | All right, so we saw a lot of studies of this type.

00:14:00.300 | This generated critiques.

00:14:02.420 | So other researchers came along and said,

00:14:03.960 | "Yeah, you're finding these correlations,

00:14:05.180 | "but it's easy to find correlations between things.

00:14:08.780 | "The effect sizes are small."

00:14:10.920 | And perhaps the most famous of these papers

00:14:13.120 | was published in 2019 by Przybylski and Amy Orbin.

00:14:18.120 | This is known by researchers in the field

00:14:20.160 | colloquially as the Potato Study.

00:14:23.320 | They went in and looked at one of these big datasets

00:14:25.320 | and said, and I'll read them here,

00:14:27.420 | the connection is negative but teeny,

00:14:31.320 | indicating a level of harmfulness so close to zero

00:14:34.440 | that it is roughly the same size as they find

00:14:36.920 | for the association of mental health

00:14:38.400 | with eating potatoes or wearing eyeglasses.

00:14:41.100 | So they said, "Look, we looked and found

00:14:42.480 | "these, yeah, you use more digital technology,

00:14:46.360 | "you're less happy, but the effect is the same we found

00:14:48.480 | "for eating potatoes on your happiness

00:14:50.880 | "or wearing eyeglasses on your happiness."

00:14:52.440 | Their point being, these are so small

00:14:54.280 | that they're basically arbitrary.

00:14:55.480 | You're finding artifacts in the data.

00:14:57.740 | This article, the potato article was cited a lot.

00:15:01.420 | Even until very recently, you would see major newspapers

00:15:04.940 | like the New York Times often saying,

00:15:07.400 | because this was very influential,

00:15:10.040 | studies show a potential connection

00:15:12.680 | between these technologies and negative mental health,

00:15:16.080 | but the effects are small.

00:15:18.080 | This is the type of paper that caused that.

00:15:20.800 | So as good science does, we looked at this.

00:15:23.960 | Now here's a response to the potato paper

00:15:26.680 | co-authored by Gene Twenge and John Haidt.

00:15:29.400 | It was published in Nature, Human Behavior,

00:15:32.840 | and it was called Underestimating Digital Media Harm.

00:15:36.240 | In this article, Haidt looked at Przybylski and Orban

00:15:40.720 | and said, "Well, wait a second, wait a second,"

00:15:43.280 | and I'm gonna read his words here.

00:15:44.960 | "The first issue to note is that the potatoes comparison

00:15:48.960 | "was what they reported for all digital media use,

00:15:53.160 | "not for social media use specifically.

00:15:55.700 | "Digital media includes all screen-based activities,

00:15:58.160 | "including watching TV or Netflix videos with a sibling,

00:16:00.700 | "which are not harmful activities.

00:16:02.360 | "In their own published report,

00:16:04.260 | "when you zoom in on social media only,

00:16:07.660 | "the relationship is between two and six times larger

00:16:11.240 | "than for digital media.

00:16:13.240 | "Also crucial is that Orban and Przybylski

00:16:15.880 | "lumped together all teens, boys and girls,

00:16:17.960 | "while many studies have found that the correlations

00:16:19.940 | "with harm are larger for girls."

00:16:21.600 | So Haidt is saying it's almost like you're intentionally

00:16:24.960 | trying to reduce the negative impact.

00:16:29.480 | You're only showing the connection

00:16:30.780 | between all possible digital media use

00:16:33.140 | and negative social harms,

00:16:34.340 | even though your dataset you were using

00:16:35.960 | had social media broken out,

00:16:37.640 | and all the discussion has been about social media.

00:16:40.380 | And Haidt and Twenge said,

00:16:41.560 | "So we looked at your same dataset

00:16:43.320 | "and just looked at social media,

00:16:44.880 | "and you had a much, much bigger response,

00:16:47.140 | "a response that, especially if you break out girls,

00:16:48.960 | "was six times worse than eating potatoes,

00:16:50.940 | "a very significant response."

00:16:53.360 | So I say here on the slide,

00:16:54.720 | this is John Haidt being polite,

00:16:57.080 | because when you really read this critique,

00:17:00.000 | you're wondering how is there any other explanation

00:17:02.800 | for the potato paper other than a set of researchers

00:17:04.980 | who are saying, "We want to report

00:17:07.360 | "there's not really a difference here."

00:17:09.800 | It's otherwise hard to explain why they would

00:17:12.920 | choose what they chose and not talk about

00:17:15.520 | these other aspects to their paper

00:17:17.320 | if they were really just trying to understand

00:17:18.820 | is there harm here.

00:17:19.760 | All right, so let's get to the third act of this story,

00:17:23.940 | this research story on smartphones and kids.

00:17:26.520 | I call this third act, "A Consensus Begins to Emerge."

00:17:30.100 | This covers the period of 2020 to 2023.

00:17:32.680 | So until today.

00:17:34.080 | Essentially what has happened in the past two or three years

00:17:36.920 | is the critiques have largely fallen away,

00:17:40.240 | and a consensus is emerging in the field that yes,

00:17:43.400 | especially for girls, there is a strong negative connection

00:17:47.280 | between these technologies and mental health.

00:17:49.660 | The reason why this consensus emerges,

00:17:52.520 | first of all, the critiques as we talked about before,

00:17:55.320 | the main critiques during the data war

00:17:57.240 | were pretty thoroughly debunked.

00:17:59.960 | After the potato paper, it's not like there was a lot

00:18:02.220 | of more stronger papers that said,

00:18:03.860 | really made a strong case that there wasn't

00:18:05.360 | a strong connection there.

00:18:06.320 | And the timing argument really seems to have been one

00:18:08.760 | for the people who are worried about smartphones.

00:18:10.560 | So that happened, but then what we began to get,

00:18:12.880 | and this is how a lot of emerging literatures

00:18:15.000 | begin to coalesce around a consensus,

00:18:16.760 | we began to get multiple other independent sources

00:18:20.960 | of investigation that pointed towards the same conclusion.

00:18:23.760 | When you have multiple different types of threads

00:18:25.840 | that all begin to weave around the same answer,

00:18:28.080 | that's often what happens in complex literatures

00:18:30.720 | that points it towards a conclusion.

00:18:32.300 | And that really began to happen in the last couple of years.

00:18:35.020 | So one of the threads was natural experiments.

00:18:38.440 | Here's a cool paper written by an economist, Elaine Gu.

00:18:41.280 | And she looked at, in Canada, I believe,

00:18:45.600 | the arrival of high-speed wireless internet

00:18:47.800 | in a given province from town to town.

00:18:50.760 | When high-speed wireless internet arrived,

00:18:53.480 | heavy social media use became possible.

00:18:55.480 | Then you could have a smartphone

00:18:56.540 | and you could use it on the app.

00:18:58.300 | And so she looked at, if we have nearby towns,

00:19:01.420 | demographically and culturally very similar,

00:19:04.360 | but we end up in this natural experiment situation

00:19:06.740 | where one town gets wireless high-speed internet

00:19:09.100 | before the other, can we compare what's happening

00:19:11.100 | with teenage mental health in these two towns

00:19:12.660 | and see if there's a change?

00:19:14.060 | Yes, there was.

00:19:15.100 | Girl, teen girls, severe mental health diagnoses

00:19:19.140 | increased by 90% when the wireless internet arrived.

00:19:24.100 | So it was a nice, natural experiment.

00:19:26.860 | We also had some direct randomized

00:19:28.500 | control trials experiments.

00:19:29.660 | Here's a good paper by Melissa Hunt et al.

00:19:32.540 | They just took 143 undergraduates

00:19:34.360 | and randomly assigned them to either stop using social media

00:19:39.360 | or keep using it as normal.

00:19:41.160 | So it's a randomized prospective control trial.

00:19:44.700 | What did they find?

00:19:46.020 | The group that was told to limit their social media use

00:19:48.220 | showed significant reductions in loneliness and depression

00:19:52.220 | as compared to the control groups.

00:19:56.040 | So that's interesting.

00:19:57.340 | I think maybe one of the strongest forces

00:20:02.140 | in helping a consensus come together was self-reporting.

00:20:05.940 | Just talking to teenagers themselves.

00:20:09.100 | So when Francis Hagan leaked all of those data

00:20:12.340 | from Meta a couple years ago,

00:20:14.140 | what was known as the Facebook files,

00:20:15.740 | that's what the Wall Street Journal called it,

00:20:17.340 | one of the big interesting findings

00:20:20.180 | in these leaked documents from Meta

00:20:22.320 | was the fact that they had done survey on teens

00:20:25.660 | and had found, and I'm quoting here,

00:20:27.820 | "Teens blame Instagram for increases

00:20:30.100 | "in the rate of anxiety and depression.

00:20:32.140 | "This reaction was unprompted

00:20:33.500 | "and consistent across all groups."

00:20:35.280 | So the teenagers themselves are saying,

00:20:36.660 | yeah, this is why we're more anxious and depressed.

00:20:38.780 | This app, these phones.

00:20:41.140 | Other data began to find the same thing.

00:20:43.460 | I put on the slide, put up here a slide

00:20:46.580 | from research out of Australia.

00:20:48.180 | These are Australian teens.

00:20:49.900 | By far, the number one reason they give

00:20:51.820 | for why they think youth mental health

00:20:53.260 | is getting worse is social media.

00:20:55.660 | I think this was the final smoking gun

00:20:58.340 | is the teens themselves are saying,

00:20:59.940 | this is hurting me.

00:21:02.140 | This is causing a problem.

00:21:03.860 | It is really hard to be a potato study style skeptic

00:21:07.540 | in the face of the teens themselves saying,

00:21:09.520 | yes, this is causing me harm.

00:21:11.260 | We're not teasing out subtle epidemiological effects,

00:21:15.060 | a slight increase in the background cancer rate

00:21:17.780 | for the towns that were using a different type of pipe

00:21:19.760 | in their water, or the individuals themselves

00:21:21.700 | have no way of detecting this change.

00:21:23.620 | This is not that.

00:21:24.480 | This is a huge, loud, self-observable macro signal.

00:21:29.020 | This thing is making me uncomfortable.

00:21:30.940 | That ultimately is the big difference

00:21:32.380 | between this and past moral panics

00:21:35.940 | around youths and technologies.

00:21:37.840 | When my grandparents, let's say they were upset

00:21:40.600 | that my mom was listening to the Beatles

00:21:42.420 | in the late 1960s, if they went to my mom and said,

00:21:45.580 | stop listening to those Beatles,

00:21:46.900 | it's going to warp your mind,

00:21:48.660 | my mom would have said, get out of here.

00:21:50.480 | What she would not have said is,

00:21:52.140 | I agree, these records are making me

00:21:54.920 | and my friends incredibly anxious.

00:21:56.280 | I wish I didn't have to listen to them.

00:21:59.040 | That would have been a very different situation.

00:22:00.680 | So this is why I think this analogy

00:22:02.240 | to past concerns about youth technology

00:22:05.560 | really begins to fall apart.

00:22:06.880 | Data aside, the teens tell you,

00:22:08.760 | yeah, I know this is making me anxious.

00:22:10.220 | I don't like that I have to be on it.

00:22:12.080 | So why does it do this?

00:22:15.520 | So let's look in particular at social media first,

00:22:17.560 | and then we'll broaden out the smartphones.

00:22:19.400 | Why do researchers think social media

00:22:21.360 | is causing these negative impacts on mental health?

00:22:25.000 | There's a few reasons to come up.

00:22:26.620 | One is loneliness.

00:22:27.880 | Now readers of my book, "Digital Minimalism,"

00:22:30.680 | this will sound familiar because I talk about this

00:22:32.880 | in "Digital Minimalism."

00:22:34.240 | It's paradoxical at first,

00:22:35.920 | but using these social technologies more

00:22:39.040 | will actually lead you to feel less social.

00:22:42.640 | And what's going on here is young people

00:22:45.280 | replace in-person interaction with texting

00:22:48.640 | and social media back and forth.

00:22:50.980 | But this purely linguistic communication,

00:22:53.740 | just sending texts back and forth to each other

00:22:55.840 | or commenting on each other's post

00:22:58.500 | is not interpreted by the social circuits of our brain

00:23:01.520 | as being all that social.

00:23:02.860 | There's no voice modulation.

00:23:05.240 | There's no body language.

00:23:06.240 | You're not in the presence of another person

00:23:07.920 | in the same room.

00:23:08.920 | So you're in your room as a 14-year-old

00:23:11.040 | all day on text messages,

00:23:12.440 | and you tell yourself, wow, I'm so social

00:23:14.360 | because all I've been doing is talking to people.

00:23:16.040 | But as far as your brain is concerned,

00:23:17.640 | you're incredibly lonely

00:23:18.560 | because you haven't seen anyone all day.

00:23:21.500 | Social psychologists call this social snacking.

00:23:23.960 | Lightweight, easy, digital socialization.

00:23:26.740 | We do that instead of having the real meal

00:23:28.340 | and we end up more lonely.

00:23:29.800 | We see this in the data.

00:23:30.980 | I have two charts up on the screen now.

00:23:33.220 | One shows loneliness among teenagers.

00:23:36.020 | And you see again, 2012, whoosh, goes right up.

00:23:39.920 | The other chart shows daily average time

00:23:42.820 | spent with friends starting in 2012

00:23:46.740 | for the ages 15 to 24 goes straight down.

00:23:51.060 | More time on the phone

00:23:53.220 | meant less time interacting in person,

00:23:55.820 | meant loneliness went up.

00:23:57.620 | There's an interesting observation, by the way,

00:23:59.100 | that John Haidt makes.

00:24:00.520 | This got underway around 2012,

00:24:02.780 | and it was so pronounced by the time the pandemic came along

00:24:06.140 | that change wasn't even that big.

00:24:08.020 | And we can see this on this chart.

00:24:09.820 | I mean, certainly we continue to have a steep,

00:24:12.740 | we have a steep fall in 2020,

00:24:15.460 | but we were having a steep fall from 2018 to '19 as well.

00:24:18.980 | So he pointed this out in a newsletter article

00:24:21.660 | he wrote earlier this spring.

00:24:23.820 | These effects of isolation were already so pronounced

00:24:27.420 | because of smartphones among American teens

00:24:29.340 | that the difference of adding isolation through lockdowns

00:24:33.940 | actually didn't even make that big of a difference.

00:24:35.460 | We were already on that trajectory.

00:24:37.220 | Another issue here is performativity,

00:24:40.340 | especially with social media, especially with girls.

00:24:43.380 | Let me read something here from Jean Twenge.

00:24:45.780 | Girls use social media more often,

00:24:48.060 | giving them additional opportunities

00:24:49.700 | to feel excluded and lonely

00:24:51.180 | when they see their friends or classmates

00:24:52.660 | getting together without them.

00:24:54.700 | Social media levy a psychic tax

00:24:56.860 | on the teen doing the posting as well,

00:24:58.980 | as she anxiously awaits the affirmation

00:25:01.160 | of comments and likes.

00:25:03.860 | So you're constantly worried about

00:25:05.580 | what other people are doing

00:25:06.500 | and how people are perceiving you.

00:25:08.080 | Combine that with a teenage brain.

00:25:09.820 | Come on, no way that's gonna be positive.

00:25:13.800 | The final thing I wanna mention here

00:25:14.820 | is the amplification of harmful behaviors.

00:25:17.540 | Online communities, for all their good,

00:25:19.940 | also have the dark side of it allows,

00:25:22.020 | especially vulnerable teenagers

00:25:23.800 | who are trying to find themselves

00:25:25.200 | and are open to suggestions and are feeling vulnerable

00:25:27.460 | and full of all these different chemicals.

00:25:29.780 | It's very easy to get caught in online communities

00:25:33.500 | that will then amplify harmful behaviors

00:25:35.860 | that will directly reduce your mental health,

00:25:38.100 | and in a lot of cases, also your physical health.

00:25:40.480 | We're beginning to see more lawsuits along these lines.

00:25:43.420 | I have a headline up here right now

00:25:44.740 | about a family suing Meta

00:25:46.780 | 'cause they blame Instagram

00:25:48.900 | for encouraging their daughter's eating disorder

00:25:51.760 | and self-harm.

00:25:53.320 | There's all sorts of cases like this.

00:25:54.840 | So this is another source of this connection

00:25:56.940 | between reduced mental health and social media use

00:26:01.060 | is there's a lot of traps on there.

00:26:02.740 | You end up in a community that is cheering on something

00:26:04.940 | that in the end is gonna make you feel much worse.

00:26:07.740 | All right.

00:26:11.920 | Social media is not the whole story.

00:26:15.020 | A lot of this data is looking at social media.

00:26:17.100 | Some of it's looking at smartphones in general.

00:26:19.100 | I wanna just briefly mention

00:26:20.220 | that even if you aren't using social media on a smartphone,

00:26:23.300 | if you're a teenager,

00:26:24.120 | there's other harms we know are there.

00:26:25.980 | Impeded thinking skills is critical.

00:26:28.660 | I talked about this in a somewhat recent episode

00:26:32.200 | of the podcast.

00:26:33.820 | It's talking about Marianne Wolfe's work

00:26:36.860 | on the development of young minds

00:26:38.580 | when they spend more time on screens.

00:26:40.300 | The short version of this is deep critical thinking skills

00:26:44.280 | require training.

00:26:46.020 | Training requires things like reading analog books

00:26:49.060 | that you struggle with.

00:26:49.940 | You can take time to pause

00:26:51.460 | and make sense of what you just read before moving on.

00:26:54.260 | Training requires self-reflection,

00:26:56.000 | the ability to hold thoughts in your working memories

00:26:58.100 | and work on it, having that time alone

00:26:59.780 | and that familiarity with it.

00:27:01.620 | Smartphones get in the way of that training

00:27:04.340 | because it teaches your brain to instead move very quick.

00:27:07.300 | Look like a L-shaped skim

00:27:09.900 | for things that are gonna give you in text

00:27:11.620 | a quick hit of dopamine or excitement.

00:27:14.720 | Flee boredom.

00:27:16.440 | If you have any moments of downtime,

00:27:18.040 | have something right on your screen.

00:27:20.600 | I was watching, Jesse, I was watching this on the flight.

00:27:23.640 | It's not my flight to San Francisco,

00:27:25.840 | it was my flight to Utah a few weeks ago.

00:27:28.320 | I mean, like a 20 year old guy sitting a row up in the aisle.

00:27:32.880 | I was watching him use TikTok.

00:27:34.880 | I mean, it was crazy.

00:27:35.720 | It's like, 'cause he had his phone out.

00:27:37.580 | They'll just be like some weird video.

00:27:39.360 | He was watching on average six seconds

00:27:41.160 | and then he'd swipe and another video would come up.

00:27:43.200 | Then he'd swipe and another video would come up.

00:27:45.240 | That's just all he was doing.

00:27:46.600 | - The whole time?

00:27:47.440 | - The whole time.

00:27:48.260 | Well, I don't know, the whole time for a while.

00:27:49.100 | - Yeah.

00:27:49.940 | - And I was watching over his shoulder.

00:27:51.200 | Like, man, glad I'm reading my Alan Lightman book

00:27:55.120 | about transcendentalism and the human brain

00:27:57.520 | made me feel good.

00:27:58.360 | But you know, the point is,

00:28:00.000 | it's so rewarding in the moment

00:28:02.800 | that you don't do the activities

00:28:04.440 | that would otherwise give you critical thinking skills

00:28:06.600 | and so you're just not good at thinking deeply

00:28:08.600 | and that's a huge harm.

00:28:10.540 | Sleep deprivation is a big deal

00:28:12.560 | for teenagers and these smartphones.

00:28:14.400 | Look, you give a 13 year old boy a smartphone,

00:28:16.440 | they're gonna YouTube until four in the morning.

00:28:18.820 | When I gave this talk, someone in the audience said,

00:28:20.760 | there was a lot of middle schoolers there

00:28:22.440 | and one of the middle schoolers was talking about

00:28:24.080 | how all of her friends who have these smartphones

00:28:26.620 | are on them all night.

00:28:27.920 | And then they come in the class, they're completely tired.

00:28:30.600 | They can't function.

00:28:31.460 | They're doing really poorly on their tests,

00:28:33.520 | but they can't help themselves

00:28:34.800 | because if you have this, it's hard to turn it off.

00:28:37.720 | So teenagers are having a huge sleep deprivation issue.

00:28:40.420 | It's YouTube, video games and social media scrolling.

00:28:45.420 | Solitude deprivation is another issue.

00:28:47.540 | I talked about this in digital minimalism as well.

00:28:50.220 | Our mind is not meant to constantly be processing

00:28:53.260 | information generated by another mind.

00:28:55.520 | We need time alone with our own thoughts to recharge

00:28:57.900 | and to make sense of our world.

00:29:00.020 | Smartphones can eliminate that entirely from your existence

00:29:03.220 | because any moment where before you might've just been alone

00:29:06.040 | with your own thoughts, you can now pull out the thing.

00:29:09.900 | Over time that makes us anxious.

00:29:11.260 | It also harms self-development at an age where we need it.

00:29:14.420 | 14, you're trying to figure yourself out.

00:29:16.940 | You're 15, you're trying to figure yourself out.

00:29:18.180 | You need time alone with your own thoughts.

00:29:20.460 | Your brain needs it.

00:29:21.460 | And finally, we have this issue that smartphones in general

00:29:24.900 | minimize quality leisure.

00:29:27.240 | So the thing you're doing on the phone gets in the way

00:29:28.980 | of the things you should be doing.

00:29:30.980 | It gets in way of the things that's gonna be more meaningful

00:29:33.060 | or quality or sustainable or connect you more

00:29:35.020 | to your friends or your community or build skills

00:29:37.180 | or give you confidence.

00:29:38.180 | It's easier just to look at the phone and to watch Twitch.

00:29:42.200 | And so it gets in the way of something that could be better.

00:29:45.980 | This is often missed when we think about smartphones

00:29:47.780 | and teens will hone in on the exact activity and say,

00:29:51.100 | well, my son isn't on social media.

00:29:52.980 | He's not doing performativity.

00:29:54.220 | He doesn't have to worry about online bullying.

00:29:56.460 | The thing he's looking at is really harmless.

00:29:58.500 | In fact, maybe there's like some science content in it.

00:30:01.340 | The issue there is not that what he's looking at

00:30:03.540 | is a problem, is that because he's looking at it all day,

00:30:05.560 | he's not doing the things to be good.

00:30:08.220 | So we've got harms with unrestricted smartphone access

00:30:11.380 | for young people that go beyond just the specific stuff

00:30:13.740 | that social media can do.

00:30:16.000 | All right, so where is this all headed?

00:30:19.840 | At the national scale, it's an interesting question.

00:30:22.440 | Is there gonna be some sort of legislative shift

00:30:26.420 | that's gonna come out of this data

00:30:27.980 | now that the consensus has emerged?

00:30:29.460 | It's clear that this consensus has been understood

00:30:34.580 | and intaked by legislative bodies and policy makers.

00:30:37.860 | I think it's now accepted that unrestricted smartphone use,

00:30:42.500 | especially for prepubescent kids,

00:30:44.500 | especially for prepubescent girls is very dangerous.

00:30:48.300 | I think this has all been accepted now.

00:30:50.060 | So where's this gonna head?

00:30:51.180 | I'm not quite sure,

00:30:52.940 | but here's one thing I would keep an eye on.

00:30:54.980 | Here's the Surgeon General earlier this year.

00:30:57.980 | He said, "Wait until your kids are 16

00:31:00.500 | "to let them use social media."

00:31:03.620 | This conclusion, I think,

00:31:04.900 | is something that a lot of researchers are coming to.

00:31:07.260 | I talked to John Haidt about this,

00:31:08.580 | and he agreed with that as well.

00:31:10.940 | If you've made it through puberty,

00:31:13.020 | the development as an individual,

00:31:14.800 | as well as the social development

00:31:16.260 | and everything that happens during that period,

00:31:17.680 | if you've made it through all of that

00:31:19.960 | before you then get unrestricted access

00:31:21.700 | to the internet and social media,

00:31:23.860 | you're in a much better position to succeed

00:31:26.760 | because you know who you are, who your friends are,

00:31:28.820 | what you're interested in, what you're about.

00:31:30.560 | You've done all that work.

00:31:32.860 | And now if you get exposed to this,

00:31:34.580 | it's gonna have a much less negative impact

00:31:36.940 | than if you get it at 12 or you get it at 13.

00:31:40.660 | So if you can wait till 16,

00:31:42.020 | this seems to be an emerging consensus.

00:31:44.020 | This might possibly be made into legislation.

00:31:46.420 | One of the relevant things to keep an eye on here

00:31:48.180 | is the 1998 Children's Online Privacy Protection Act,

00:31:51.380 | or COPA.

00:31:52.360 | This act implicitly already encodes 13

00:31:58.460 | as the minimum age that you can sign up

00:32:00.340 | for a social media service.

00:32:01.980 | Now, of course, these social media services

00:32:03.460 | didn't exist in 1998.

00:32:04.820 | The actual wording here is 13 is the minimum age

00:32:07.780 | at which you can consent to give up your data privacy,

00:32:10.980 | which of course you do when you sign up

00:32:13.640 | for an attention economy platform like social media.

00:32:17.180 | The original version of this act had 16 in there.

00:32:19.640 | Tech lobbyists in DC got that pushed down to 13.

00:32:24.300 | There's calls now to amend it back to 16.

00:32:26.560 | So that could happen.

00:32:28.780 | There's other legislative avenues that are being pursued.

00:32:31.940 | It's tricky, but this is one to keep an eye on.

00:32:35.540 | What would happen if that law was changed?

00:32:37.340 | It's not that this would make it really hard

00:32:41.540 | for individual young people

00:32:42.720 | to get access to social media, right?

00:32:44.420 | It's not super enforceable,

00:32:46.260 | but what it would give is a metaphorical chair

00:32:51.020 | to parents that are trying to tame this metaphorical lion.

00:32:53.940 | When you have your 13-year-old again and again saying,

00:32:55.860 | "All my friends have this.

00:32:56.860 | "I want this.

00:32:57.700 | "Why can't I have it?

00:32:58.520 | "All my friends have this.

00:32:59.360 | "I want it.

00:33:00.200 | "Why can't I have it?"

00:33:01.020 | For the parent to be able to say,

00:33:01.860 | "Because it's illegal," is a very strong defense.

00:33:05.980 | And you're not putting these parents in a situation

00:33:08.420 | of having to be social psychology researchers

00:33:10.100 | and understand this literature.

00:33:10.980 | They can say, "It's against the law.

00:33:11.820 | "I'm not gonna break the law.

00:33:13.220 | "You'll just have to learn not to have those friends,

00:33:15.860 | "I guess."

00:33:16.700 | I mean, it would be helpful.

00:33:18.880 | So something like that may happen.

00:33:21.400 | Now, what do I conclude from all of this?

00:33:23.820 | I mean, to me, I would say that 16 age limit

00:33:28.240 | is a smart one.

00:33:29.260 | I think this is good.

00:33:32.780 | I think the data is pointing towards your safest bet,

00:33:35.100 | especially if we're talking about young girls,

00:33:37.340 | is 16 is the age below which you do not want to give a child

00:33:42.340 | unrestricted access to the internet.

00:33:46.140 | If you give a young person a smartphone,

00:33:47.660 | you are giving them unrestricted access to the internet.

00:33:49.900 | You can do some parental controls, they'll get around them.

00:33:52.120 | They're better at it than you.

00:33:53.740 | This is the thing about kids, right?

00:33:56.380 | If we ever went to war, cyber war with China,

00:34:01.040 | and we needed in a sort of ender's game style,

00:34:03.840 | brilliant kids that like help save us,

00:34:05.720 | here's how we would win the cyber hacking war.

00:34:08.380 | Just tell a bunch of 13 year olds

00:34:09.960 | that if you bring down China's whatever infrastructure,

00:34:12.980 | you will get unlimited access to Mr. Beast videos.

00:34:16.360 | Because these kids become Dennis Nidry style hackers

00:34:21.360 | when it comes to trying to get access to these things.

00:34:24.280 | The same kids that can't even motivate themselves

00:34:27.020 | to take the garbage out.

00:34:28.000 | If they think they can access YouTube

00:34:29.440 | on their school's Chromebook,

00:34:30.960 | they're in there with soldering irons.

00:34:32.720 | You know, all right, I'm bypassing the main CPU logic here

00:34:36.000 | and I'm hacking the main security grid

00:34:38.420 | by getting right to the op code lookup table in the ROM.

00:34:41.200 | They become expert computer hackers

00:34:43.960 | if there's a video game they can access

00:34:46.480 | or Snapchat lays just beyond those protections.

00:34:49.320 | So you give a smartphone to a kid,

00:34:50.440 | you're giving them unrestricted internet access.

00:34:52.280 | You give them unrestricted internet access,

00:34:53.460 | they can use social media.

00:34:55.260 | Even the definition of social media

00:34:56.640 | is getting a little bit hazy now.

00:34:58.300 | A lot of the actual performative socialization

00:35:00.360 | has shifted from social media onto group text messages.

00:35:03.320 | So it gets a little bit, it gets a little bit hazy.

00:35:06.000 | And we have all these other harms

00:35:07.160 | that surround the smartphones,

00:35:08.400 | the sleep deprivation, the solitude deprivation.

00:35:10.320 | So it really seems like 16 is the safe time to say,

00:35:13.880 | okay, you can just have a phone

00:35:14.960 | and I'm not gonna care too much what you're doing anymore.

00:35:18.200 | Does that mean that's the only age

00:35:20.700 | where you can have any type of device like this?

00:35:22.640 | Well, again, I actually asked John Heid about this as well.

00:35:24.800 | And his thought was, when you functionally need a phone,

00:35:29.640 | okay, because I don't know,

00:35:30.920 | I'm commuting to school on the city buses

00:35:32.640 | like a lot of kids do at my kid's school.

00:35:34.500 | And you need an ability to maybe text your parents

00:35:37.440 | if there's an emergency or call your parents

00:35:39.080 | if the bus routes cancel or something like that.

00:35:41.120 | When they functionally need a phone,

00:35:42.800 | you can get them a phone that doesn't have internet.

00:35:45.240 | So when you get to an age where I'm independent enough

00:35:48.880 | that having communication ability with me

00:35:51.000 | is gonna enable this independence,

00:35:53.200 | then get them some sort of communication device,

00:35:55.780 | but one without internet.

00:35:57.540 | 16 is when you can give them a smartphone that has everything

00:35:59.860 | that seems to be the emerging consensus.

00:36:01.700 | I think five to 10 years from now,

00:36:03.160 | that will just be accepted.

00:36:04.960 | If you have a child right now

00:36:07.080 | and your oldest child is two,

00:36:09.060 | you're not gonna have to think about this

00:36:10.420 | when they become 12, the cultural have shifted.

00:36:13.580 | You won't be giving an iPhone to your 12 year old,

00:36:16.120 | that will just be accepted.

00:36:17.240 | We're right now in this intermediate transition period

00:36:20.880 | where parents still have to make these decisions

00:36:22.440 | on their own.

00:36:23.800 | As far as I can tell, that's my best read of the literature.

00:36:27.520 | When it becomes, they're independent enough

00:36:29.120 | to functionally communication,

00:36:30.320 | give them a phone like a light phone, which looks great

00:36:32.800 | and can text well, but has no internet.

00:36:34.700 | Wait till 16 to give them unrestricted access

00:36:36.640 | so you can't have your own iPad or your own smartphone

00:36:38.480 | till you're 16.

00:36:40.020 | They will yell and gnash their teeth, but come on.

00:36:42.760 | Everything in the history of the world

00:36:43.920 | that teenagers have wanted that their parents don't want,

00:36:46.060 | the teenagers have said, all my friends are doing it,

00:36:48.000 | you have to give it to me.

00:36:49.480 | This is not necessarily different.

00:36:51.080 | So I think that's where we're heading.

00:36:52.740 | Obviously there's lots of caveats here.

00:36:54.720 | Some kids have a much easier experience

00:36:56.320 | with these technologies than others.

00:36:58.240 | Parents clearly know their own kids.

00:37:01.360 | The one thing I'll also point out is I've heard before

00:37:05.040 | when I've been on the road or talked about my book

00:37:07.560 | is often sort of socially elite people have the storyline

00:37:12.560 | that less socially elite or less economically elite people

00:37:18.760 | need these technologies and it's somehow classist

00:37:23.600 | to talk about this, that somehow having a 14 year old

00:37:26.560 | not use a smartphone is like a yoga thing.

00:37:28.680 | It's like a luxury thing.

00:37:29.520 | And I can say, having worked with lots of different groups

00:37:32.520 | from lots of different backgrounds on this issue,

00:37:35.900 | they would say nonsense to that.

00:37:38.320 | Everyone is worried about the kids with this.

00:37:40.280 | Kids are worried about this

00:37:41.280 | in all sorts of different backgrounds,

00:37:42.540 | all sorts of different economic classes.

00:37:44.040 | So I don't think this is a yoga issue.

00:37:46.120 | It's just like a teen smoking issue.

00:37:48.620 | No teen should smoke.

00:37:50.300 | So we said you should wait till you're 18 to do it.

00:37:52.240 | I think it's closer to that than it is to,

00:37:55.320 | it would be nice to do meditation

00:37:57.400 | if you have the time for it.

00:37:59.320 | So we'll see.

00:38:00.720 | But Jesse, that seems to be where the data is right now.

00:38:03.440 | And it looks like the policy makers

00:38:04.920 | are trying to get behind that.

00:38:06.440 | So we're getting close to a point where parents

00:38:08.080 | aren't gonna have to figure this all out

00:38:09.140 | on their own anymore.

00:38:09.980 | There'll be some more of these consensuses.

00:38:11.320 | But I think that like you're 12, here's your smartphone,

00:38:14.680 | give us another five years.

00:38:17.220 | That's gonna be considered something,

00:38:18.520 | ooh, wow, don't do that.

00:38:20.080 | - So will they still go on social media on their desktop?

00:38:23.480 | - Well, yeah, but desktops are controlled.

00:38:26.600 | Here's the family laptop, you use it in the kitchen,

00:38:28.900 | I can see what you're doing.

00:38:30.720 | Much different situation.

00:38:31.920 | I mean, there's a lot of great stuff to do on the internet,

00:38:33.840 | but doing it through the family laptop,

00:38:36.240 | you know, like we know a kid who's really into sports.

00:38:40.260 | And so their family got them a subscription

00:38:42.160 | to the athletic.

00:38:43.120 | Like, this is great.

00:38:43.940 | Like if I was really into sports and I was 13,

00:38:46.320 | to be able to,

00:38:47.160 | one of the activities I was able to do

00:38:48.880 | was like to go on the family computer

00:38:50.280 | and get super in-depth sports coverage.

00:38:51.840 | That's great.

00:38:52.680 | It's feeding an interest that the kid really has.

00:38:54.240 | You know, another kid who's really into chess

00:38:55.540 | and they can do, you know, these chess games online.

00:38:58.120 | All that's great.

00:38:58.960 | But if all that's done through the family computer,

00:39:00.780 | it's like watching TV.

00:39:02.240 | You can't watch TV all the time, right?

00:39:04.320 | The parents say, no TV now,

00:39:05.720 | the TV is in the living room, they're in charge of it.

00:39:07.100 | But you're gonna watch a fair amount of TV and it's nice.

00:39:08.960 | And like, that's what the internet should be

00:39:10.060 | for a 13 year old.

00:39:10.900 | There's all these cool things on here that you can do,

00:39:14.320 | just like there's cool TV shows you could watch,

00:39:16.040 | but you can do them during times when it's appropriate

00:39:19.280 | on a machine where we kind of see what's going on.

00:39:21.000 | - Yep.

00:39:22.340 | And even if they have school issued laptops

00:39:24.000 | that like some of the private schools around here,

00:39:25.360 | there's probably some controls on that as well.

00:39:27.140 | - Yeah, they all get around them.

00:39:28.360 | - Yeah.

00:39:29.200 | - They all get around them.

00:39:30.020 | Yeah, the school, it's funny.

00:39:31.600 | We had a six, one of the neighbors who's always over,

00:39:34.840 | one of the neighbors is I think seven, maybe eight,

00:39:39.160 | hacked into YouTube on the Chromebook.

00:39:41.060 | I'm telling you, these kids

00:39:45.520 | that'll like stare at you for an hour

00:39:48.440 | if you ask them to do a fraction,

00:39:50.880 | if they could get access to YouTube,

00:39:53.200 | they are building a quantum processor

00:39:57.080 | to break the encryption based on whatever.

00:40:00.640 | But like good news, I have a 128 qubit quantum processor

00:40:05.240 | I packed together in the playground

00:40:08.580 | and we're able to break the public key encryption

00:40:11.160 | that was keeping us out of Mark Rober videos.

00:40:14.880 | They become hackers.

00:40:15.880 | Anyways, all right.

00:40:18.200 | So that's some thoughts.

00:40:19.640 | That's where I think the research lies right now.

00:40:22.200 | I think that's where we're roughly heading.

00:40:24.920 | (upbeat music)

00:40:27.500 | (upbeat music)

Cal Newport On Kids And Smartphones (What Age Is Safest to Get a Device?)

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