How to Escape the Smartphone Doom Loop | Larz May, Elise Hu | TED

Elise Hu: Tell us a little bit about what led you here and what it means to you to be a digital wellness entrepreneur. Larissa May: The beginning of digital wellness started with digital sickness. I literally was scrolling to death. I was a college student spending 10 to 12 hours a day behind my screen. I was scrolling more than I was walking, sleeping, or socializing. And luckily, I had an RA that saved my life. But I was going to the psychiatrist every day, and I found it really interesting that they asked me about drugs, sex and alcohol, but not the drug that was in my pocket. And that was the beginning of the big idea, 10 years ago, which was maybe digital wellness is the new wellness, in that as humans, we have to cultivate a healthy relationship with technology if we want to be around for another millennia. EH: Right. How did it show up for you, when you said that you were kind of feeling sick?

LM: Well I think the thing that I’ve learned in the 10 years of exploration is that screens are really just symptoms. So many young people -- and adults too -- we go to our screens because it's more comfortable than actually dealing with the emotions -- whether it's sadness, depression, anxiety. And for me, I just didn't have the skills, the emotional resilience in the digital age that I needed. But I was given a device and was told to, "Hey, go through this life milestone, go to college, figure out how to be a human. And by the way, you're going to have a stage in your pocket the entire time." And then I started looking into it. I think most of us, we look around, we see our kids, our parents on their phones. And then I realized, do we want to chase our dreams? Or do we want to be behind these things that are making billions of dollars for a couple of guys in Silicon Valley? EH: You have said, and I'm quoting you to you, "The systems were not in place for the younger generations to develop healthy relationships with technology from the start."

So a system that was sort of broken here. What did you mean by that? And are things getting better, now that we're in this age where we realize it? There's a lot of books about this, and a lot of discourse about social media and sort of the risks of it. LM: The fact that I started this with $250 in my dorm room, and I’m now on this stage, alone, is a win. It’s a win for the movement that TED believes that digital wellness is critical for the future of humanity. Now when we talk about systems and systems change, a lot of you might be in a state where there might be a phone-free ban. And across the nation, because we haven't had a national legislation in 30 years past, almost 40 states, this back to school, said, "We want to ban phones now." There was a problem with that. Creating a policy that you can't have phones in school does not fix all of the problems. And so what I did was say -- we actually started this with the governor in New York -- "Why don't we build the next generation of digital wellness activist athletes?"

Let's train them, let's give them grants, and let's have them help us implement and create a new story and a new brand for digital wellness, from "phone free" into "phone-free fun." And so what I believe is that we have to put young people at the center, but we also have to educate all stakeholders. We need to ensure, in the future, that there are financial incentives for big tech to actually edit these platforms, in the same way that we've created tax incentives for the environmental movement, because nothing has changed, but humans are changing. EH: OK. Two follow-ups to that. One is, what are young people saying to you? LM: Well young people want to be heard. They want to be in the rooms where decisions are being made about them, because they're the ones that are now forced to take their tests on iPads. There is no longer that period of time where you're feeling stressed to take a test, then you're relieved, and you don't get your grade back for a week. These kids are getting it from all sides -- socially, academically, a lot of pressure from their parents -- and they're the ones that give me hope, that say, "Hey, we want to be the leaders.

We want to show our school how to not just take away phones, but how to make sure the kids that use phones at lunch because they didn't have a place to fit in can sit at our friendship table." Or "We want to take phones away, and we actually want to make screen-free proms and make this feel fun." Because if it's all about abstinence and the lack thereof, you're never going to get kids on board. EH: I get it, I grew up in Texas, where abstinence was taught in schools -- look at how well that worked. We're talking a lot about systems and then both kind of big picture, but also a lot that can be done individually and how we can make changes in our own families or in our own homes. I guess my next question is why is the onus on us? You know, there's so many conversations about, like, what we need to be doing to help our kids become more literate, what we need to be doing to help solve for this anxious generation or so-called anxious generation in our own homes. What do those incentives look like at a system-wide level?

Like, how do we incentivize technology makers and companies to do something different that would be healthier for the rest of us? LM: I’ve been trying to do that for 10 years. We still don't have a national legislation passed, and AI is moving faster than any other social media platform in history. So at this point, as humans, the way I think about this is that technology is more like food than anything. We have our own media metabolisms. Every child is different. Every family is different. We must learn how to consume technology in a way that is going to support us rather than hurt us, because unfortunately, the systems are not built for us to thrive. But the hope is that we can retrain young minds. And if we start early, well -- I can't believe I'm going to say this -- the average toddler, 40 percent of them have devices before they're even in preschool. So if we're not starting then, the moment a child sees a blue light, then we're going to be losing ourselves to big tech.

And, guess what, it's no longer about billionaires. It's now about trillionaires and everyone else. EH: How do you want kids as young as age six to be educated? LM: I've been doing it for the last decade, and what I believe is that wicked problems need wicked games, and that if we want to drive behavior change, we have to do it in a playful way that kids are going to engage with. We know that just having PowerPoint slides and telling kids what not to do doesn't work. So I wanted to rewrite that playbook and put young people at the center of designing, creating, and now I’m even building technology that young people are helping me design -- because I know what's out there. Surveillance and stalking our kids is not enough to support them emotionally. And our world is broken. EH: How should we be supporting them emotionally? LM: Well I think one of the things I always say is that if you’re a parent or a grandparent, or even just someone that lives with someone you love, is that you should never have more devices than people in a room.

And what I mean by that is that if you want to watch something, watch it together. If you want to scroll, scroll together. When you're going to bed with your partner and you're on your devices, or you’re sitting in a room with your kids -- a term I call “phubbing” -- when you’re all on your phones. EH: Guilty. LM: I mean, we’ve all been there, but it’s one of the great golden rules that we can start implementing. And at the end of the day, the kids are looking at us, and we are modeling that future, and we need to be able to show them even though the headlines say that you’re a victim and that you're anxious and you're depressed, that's not a story that is going to empower someone to be up on the stage. I pulled myself out of that story. And so I want the next generation of young people to know that it is possible, and that when social media is used as a tool, it can change the world. EH: Do you draw a distinction between social media or just digital tools for consumption versus creation? LM: I love that you asked this question, and I'm going to give my tip at the end on this.

But ultimately, the way that technology was designed was for us to be passive consumers. We were never trained to interact with it any other way. And therefore, many of us, starting at a young age, are caught in this doom loop and this vicious cycle of "I'm going to die," "the world is going to end," "I'm never going to have a job," "What's the point of studying? The world is burning. Kids are dying." However, I believe, and I know, that when we retrain our minds, and we teach our kids to engage with technology, with an intention to lead with creativity and the imagination muscle, that we can actually activate joy and fight against the doom loop into the joy loop, which is really where we take back our creative power and say, "You know what? I'm going to be the creator of my own digital story and my own digital world. And instead of you hacking me, Big Tech, I'm going to hack my devices so I can take back control of my life." EH: OK. Which brings us to Ginko and how you have decided to work with AI.

Why did you decide to use an AI? And can you tell us a little bit more about it? LM: Absolutely. In looking at all of these tools in the ecosystem, I saw that parents were stalking kids, but there was basically broken product-market fit. Because kids, I’m going to be really honest -- they’re smarter than all of us. They break through everything. They create their own Wi-Fi routers. So the truth is that your kids are always going to win. What I saw in the market is that -- we’ve seen a lot of OpenAI’s decisions lately and it’s a little bit scary. I know a lot of kids that have also lost their lives because of how AI impacted them, and the way that social media impacted me. And what I knew is that parents didn't have a doctor-backed compass for the digital world. What do you do if your kid is being groomed? But also, they didn’t have a safe place to go. The reason why I wanted to create an AI-based tool was: one, because I had clinical research that I could build it with. Two, I could make it HIPAA-compliant so people could trust us with their family secrets.

But third, because I wanted to build a tool that could take the data from a child's device, take those insights, and make early predictions for parents of things that could go wrong. Because technology shows us signals. And if Big Tech is making billions of dollars and selling our children face masks, we, as parents, should be able to take that data, get those insights and know, "Hey, if Lars is moving really quickly on her device and experiencing a lot of mood issues and looking at different content ..." My parents, back when I was struggling, might have been able to get a notification that said "Hey, you should take Ginko to the parent, to the doctor's office, and show them, because we think she might be dealing with anxiety or depression or ADHD." And that is the big gap right now, is that there is such a disconnect between our children's inner worlds, the digital world, and our family's world. And I want to rewrite that story. EH: So basically, if you are a parent with a child who has a device, or more than one device, you can use Ginko, is that how?

LM: Just ask Ginko, yeah. Really, our vision, you know, after spending a decade building half the story with young people, I realized the next frontier of digital wellness is bringing it into the healthcare space. This is not something that's going away. And in fact, in five years, we’re going to be sitting, wishing that [we had] asked people to put their phones away, because our tech is going to be embedded in our bodies. And so what we need to figure out is how do we preserve the part of us that makes us human. EH: What is your answer to that question? LM: Well I think we really need to get out of the consumer seat and into the driver's seat, when it comes to technology. And what I mean by that is that you can literally retrain your mind or your child's mind by engaging with technology 20 minutes a day and doing something joyful -- sparking the imagination loop. Instead of having your child scrolling passively on YouTube, sit down [and] let them tell you a story and make it together on AI, and [then] let them watch it appear like magic.

That is joy. That is how technology can be used. But more importantly, it will awaken our senses instead of suffocating them. EH: If I asked you to just paint a picture of a more affirmative vision of the future, in which we have all of this digital technology and AI at our fingertips, but it isn't so suffocating, or at least not so fraught, what would that look like? LM: It would look like young people believing that they have a right to their mind. EH: Say more about that. LM: What I mean is that, like I said, kids have just been taught to be consumers of technology. I am watching kids every day say, "I'm going to put my phone down and I'm going to take back control of my thoughts. I'm going to think before I search. I'm going to reflect before I say." Technology has, quite honestly, told us more about our own stories than we've let ourselves reflect on our own.

And I know that in this new future, we will have no minds left behind if we continue to give young people the tools to rewrite that for the next generation. EH: Before we let you go, what are some small, actionable steps that we can take to get to this more affirmative vision? LM: Swap screens with analog fun. Have a notebook and paper. Get your knitting. Put your phone down. Keep that at your desk. It's a great way to tap into yourself. The second thing is -- and this is hard for all of us -- challenge yourself, one day a week, to not use any AI. EH: And that's from an AI founder, you're saying this. LM: Absolutely, and the truth is we have to retrain our brains to actually answer our own questions. The third thing is actually try to do a screen-free scavenger hunt where, if you have a family, have your kids write down a list of things that they want to find in the world, leave your phones at home, and just go out and do it. Go be free. Escape the wild, wild web and get some screen peace, which is really just peace of mind.

EH: Alright, you heard it from Larissa May -- escape the wild, wild web. Larissa May, thank you so much. LM: Thank you. (Applause)