Hello Carl, this is Isabel from Spain and I have a question about teenagers and phone use. I have recently got a job as a secondary school teacher and I am responsible for a group of 15 years old. They have told me that they use their phones a lot and a lot means eight hours, the days they don't have to go to school or four hours, the days they have to go to school and they are basically on TikTok, WhatsApp and Instagram, right?

They also think that they are not good at studying and obviously I have connected the dots, right? And my question is how do I make them connect the dots from the perspective, from the point of view of a teacher which I think I'm someone they don't really trust like a parent and I would like to make them at least question what they do with their time.

So if you have any advice I will be very grateful because it's my first job as a teacher. Thank you very much. Bye. Well, you know, it is a universal problem. I think teenagers and their usage of these phones is extreme. You know, they do use them all the time.

Now there's an interesting question here before we get to a solution is, okay, what's new about this and what's not? I mean, I think it's certainly true that if we went back to the 1980s or the 1990s, you know, what you would probably see is that teenagers used to watch a lot of TV.

So they probably were watching as much TV as they could instead of using their phone. So it's not like they were before social media, we should be clear about that, like before social media, they would come home from school and be like, all right, mommy dear, I shall be in the library.

I shall be in the library studying. Perhaps I will get a spot of tea in the conservatory as I take notes in my notebook. But if you need me, I will be thinking deeply. And then when social media came along, they were gone. Okay. It wasn't like that. But we have to first ask this question, TV versus what's happening with social media.

Is it worse? Is it the same? Is it better? That's the place I want to start. I have my thoughts. Jesse, you and I grew up in a time when it would have been TV at this age. What do you think? More stupefying, but better worse than four hours of TikTok?

Definitely worse. There we go. Yeah. Why does that mean? TV, you would sit down and be dedicated, then you could go outside or something. Now they're always bringing the phone with them. That's true. And TV was bad. It's not that entertaining. Compare ALF, which was on when we were kids, to algorithmically optimized TikTok videos that have been selected based off of a 1,200-point data vector that has been analyzed with recurrent neural networks to figure out exactly what to show you that is going to make you want to watch that through to the end.

Compare that watching ALF to, "There is a complicated, distressing social dynamic happening at my school unfolding in these comments on Instagram posts, and people are talking about me, and my standing is shifting. I'm going to look the hell out of that. I'm going to be on that phone and seeing what's going on." All of that is much more compelling than ALF.

And as you're saying, it can come with you everywhere. It comes with you in the car, it's on the bus, wherever you go, you can be looking at it. So I think I agree. We have ramped up the invasiveness and the addictiveness of the tools. What can this teacher do?

A couple optimistic things to say. When I was on the road selling my book, Digital Minimalism, I was surprised by the positive response from teenagers. So the thing about teenagers is there is an emerging counterculture where the countercultural behavior is to not use these tools. And we actually should not be surprised by the rise of this counterculture because we've seen this be successful before.

Jesse, do you remember from when we were younger, the anti-smoking commercials that were sponsored by was called "The Truth"? Somewhat, vaguely, yeah. Basically what happened is, if I remember this correctly, is in the '90s, the Ad Council, which is a federally funded organization that puts out television advertising for positive purposes, they hired a super fancy ad agency and said, "Okay, we want to figure out how to do ads to get basically young Jesse and young Cal to not smoke." And so they brought in real good ad people.

And basically what they figured out was, focus in on the degree to which the tobacco companies are exploiting young people and manipulating them. And they're these old guys in suits that are trying to trick you into smoking. And that was really effective. They did a lot of faux hidden camera work with blurred faces, but it was really effective because teenagers hate this idea of being co-opted or exploited or manipulated by some 60-year-old guy in a suit.

That was very powerful. And smoking rates, teen smoking rates, are much lower here in the countries. And that was partly to do with it. A similar dynamic, I believe, is fueling the anti-social media emergent counterculture among teenagers today is that, as they get more aware, now it's not old guys in suits, it's 37-year-olds in t-shirts, but they're exploiting them.

They're like, "Do I really want to be Mark Zuckerberg's puppet, helping him be richer?" You know, they don't like these tech guys right now. They don't like these tech titans. And as they understand more, that this whole ecosystem is just designed to turn you into the cow in the milking machine in the barn.

We're just sucking data out of your brain and selling it. And you're the thing we're selling. You're a tool for a hot $500 billion company that's trying to make a very small number of people who live in Northern California richer. Teenagers don't like that. And I began to pick up that thread when I was selling digital minimalism.

I was on the road in 2019, and I would meet teenagers who were finding great comfort in being a part of this counterculture and great respect from their peer group where they say, "Yeah, I don't use this stuff." So this is what we have right now is a tension between this has been designed to be incredibly appealing and addictive toward exactly your developing teenage brain.

But on the other hand, your teenage brain hates the people who make these. You hate being their pawns, and you might get some really good social street cred by being someone who doesn't use it. Both these things are happening at the same time. And so it's a matter of what is going to win.

And I think the countercultural message is going to win. Teens love to be ahead of something, feel cool, feel authentic. And this is giving them exactly that capability. The actual logistical social interaction piece of social media, that's largely moving the chat tools and text threads. So it's not like you're going to be ostracized and not know what's going on if you're not on TikTok as a 15-year-old.

It's not like if you're not on Snapchat as a 14-year-old, you're going to be cut out of social circles. Now, these non-social media text-based coordination, collaboration, alternatives like WhatsApp and just text threads and iMessage, those are taking over the logistical roles anyway, so it's much easier to step away.

And that's what I think is going to happen. All we need, and this is John Haidt's theory, all we need to get a tipping point is not that most young people don't use social media, but that most people know someone who doesn't use social media. You just need a validation of that possibility in your immediate social sphere.

In my class as a junior or whatever in the secondary school in Spain where Isabelle teaches, there's two kids who don't use social media. And they're kind of cool, I kind of like that. That's all you need. Now, if you're really feeling like you hate this and you're overwhelmed, and a lot of kids do feel that way, you have permission to leave because you're not doing something new, you're joining that group.

And this is John Haidt's theory. You don't have to get an entire class to stop using social media before your kid will. You need two people in the class not to use social media before your kid thinks it's an option. So I'm optimistic about it. I've said this on the show a lot.

I think these small number of monopoly, giant centralized social media companies dominating internet discourse is a moment that is coming to an end. We're going to look back at it as a 10-year period. The idea that 10 years from now, we're all going to be on two or three of these massive centralized social media platforms, I don't think it's going to be that way.

Their moment has come, their moment is passing. And so, Isabelle, all of this should just be optimism that this will get better, maybe not in the next few months, but in the next few years, perhaps, it will get better. In the meantime, those are the two things to talk about.

A, you're a product, you are being exploited. Update those truth anti-smoking ads to the world of teenage social media use. Hammer that point. You guys are plugged into the pods in the matrix, and Agent Smith is Mark Zuckerberg, right? Push that point. Two, talk about thinking is a skill that you have to practice.

And if you're constantly looking at screens when you're out of school, your mind muscle is going to be weak, and there's a lot of advantages to having a strong mind muscle. It's not just you're going to do better in your schoolwork, which you will, and it'll take less time to study and you'll be happier, but you're going to understand the world better.

You're going to take in more sophisticated information. You're going to be more impactful. You're going to grow into someone who can actually make a difference in a world where intellectual skill is the main skill that matters, where brawn is no longer that relevant anymore. This is a muscle that is hurt.

If you're looking at a screen all the time, you're eating junk food as an athlete. I think that is also a really effective message for young people. Give them the positive. Don't be on the screen all the time exactly because you want to have a stronger brain. If you have a stronger brain, everything will be open to you.

And if you don't, you're plugged into the matrix to help Agent Smith's bank account, and you're going to be worse at thinking, and it's going to, your life, your world, everything's going to be more constrained. Push those two points in the short term. I think that will help. More teenagers are more receptive to leaving social media than you think.

And we are going to see more and more of that in the years ahead as this moment of social media monopoly hopefully comes to a pretty soon end. I don't know. I don't know if you buy that, Jesse. Everyone thinks I'm too optimistic about this, but I'm just not convinced that this moment of monopoly social media is somehow like a persistent state.

One thing that does happen is a lot of teenage kids use Instagram messaging to communicate as opposed to WhatsApp and text message and stuff like that. So I think that goes into part of the problem where they're using that platform to message, but they're also using it to look at a lot of stuff.

Well, Zuckerberg is smart, which is I caution, because I cover this space, I caution journalists. And I made a little bit of fun of him too about the metaverse, right? Because he put out this clunky video where he was trying to introduce people to the metaverse. He's not good on camera.

And I did make fun of him in a New Yorker piece. I talked about how in this video introducing his vision of the metaverse, he looked like a cyborg running out of date software. Because he has this sort of like halting, weird delivery. But here's the thing, he's smart.

There are no other that I can think of, founders from that era that were so young that are still in charge of a company of that size. You know how impossible that is to stay in charge of a company that's approaching a trillion dollar market cap when you started that company when you're 20 years old?

He's a savvy guy. And this is what we see with Instagram. And they bought WhatsApp. He knows this, right? He knows Facebook is on its way out. They bought Instagram. He knows that's going to be taken down by TikTok. They bought WhatsApp because he knows it's actually going to be the unendormed conversation that matters.

Instagram messaging is all about keeping people engaging in the Instagram ecosystem. Oh, as long as I'm here, I might as well look at these photos over here. He knows what he's doing. He knows what he's doing with the metaverse. There is an inevitable shift towards a world in which much more of what we see every day is going to be virtual.

It's incredibly inefficient to actually have to manufacture all of these plastic things that have chips inside of them. And you have to build it at the Foxconn plant in China. And inevitably, the future is going to be, I have on a glass that can make any screen I want running any software I want anywhere I want in my physical space.

Why would I have an iPad, a phone, a computer, and a big screen TV when I could just make any of those screens appear anywhere I wanted? And the only piece of silicon I have to own is the thing that runs these glass. Everything else is in the cloud.

He knows that's coming. And he wants to be out ahead of it. The world is going to virtualize. So he's a smart guy, which is what I'm going to say. So he is an able foe. So his initial ploy-- I mean, this is like Commodore Vanderbilt, if you'll excuse some early American economic history.

Think of Zuckerberg like Commodore Vanderbilt. Think about Facebook like Vanderbilt's fleet of ferries to get across from New Jersey to the Hudson to New York to Manhattan. This is where Vanderbilt began his fortune, was ferry boats. And then he moved to longer range steamships to go up and down the ply, the eastern seaboard.

And then he got into railroads after that. He watched the technological landscape evolve in early industrial America and kept ahead of those trends. And he was ruthless and smart and built one of the world's largest fortunes out of it. That's how they'll think about Zuckerberg. You have to think about Facebook like those ferry boats.

It made him his first couple of billion. But the railroads are coming, the steam shippers are coming, and they're going to be completely different technology. So I think he's going to be around. Keep an eye on him. But his first thing-- let's put all of our information into the screens and look at the-- click on the phones and do social media back and forth.

That's going to go away. So he's going to stay savvy guy. The technological landscape is going to evolve. So I know that's my techno prognostications. Don't sleep on Zuckerberg, but also don't overemphasize the importance of the existing social media platforms. I think that's a little bit-- it's a clunky technology.

It's had its moment.