Just as cigarettes were once marketed as healthy despite mounting evidence of their dangers, modern technology and social media are following a similar pattern of widespread adoption despite concerning mental health impacts. Research shows that after 2010, when smartphones and social media became ubiquitous, there were dramatic increases in depression, anxiety, and suicide rates among young people, particularly affecting girls. The episode explores how investors are building, investing, and giving to change our relationship with technology for the better.
Guests: Andy Crouch, Amy Crouch, Jonathan Haidt, Tristan Harris
Adults spend an average of 4.5 hours on their smartphones every day.
The scale of our addiction to technology is only getting worse. In our lives and the lives of our children, smart devices suffocate us. We struggle to turn away and turn them off.
What can we do to solve technology addiction?
It’s not about looking the other way. Technology will always be with us. Christians can shape it in a redemptive direction while also keeping it in its proper place.
Discussion Questions:
Jim Stollberg: Act one. Do we know what we're inhaling?
Narration: Something wonderful happens when you change to Philip Morris. You will feel better.
Narration: Did you say I'll feel better smoking Philip Morris?
Narration: Yes, you will feel better. And here are the reasons why. In case after case coughs due to smoking disappear, parched throat clears up that stale smoked out feeling vanishes.
Narration: That is wonderful.
Jim Stollberg: Yes, those are real ads for cigarettes. Yes. They really make you wonder. Did we know anything about cigarettes 40 years ago? Hindsight does give us a great service as we hear these phrases now. It's almost preposterous to imagine a doctor suggesting you try a cigarettes, let alone 20,000 doctors agreeing with that diagnosis. But it happened. And it makes you think, is there anything in the modern world that we're inhaling at an alarming rate without even realizing it?
Jim Stollberg: On April 3rd, 1973, Motorola engineer Martin Cooper placed the world's first mobile phone call. Fast forward 50 years, and as of 2022, there are 8.58 billion mobile subscriptions compared to a global population of 7.95 billion. That's right. There are more cell phones and iPads than people.
Jim Stollberg: This ubiquity seems weirdly normal, but so did smoking on airplanes once. To put the rise of the technology that's in your front pocket or purse into perspective. From 2000 to 2022, phones went from less than 1 billion to 8.59 billion. That's over a 600% increase in that 22 year span.
Jim Stollberg: Again. Technology's everywhere. We know this in the same way A fish knows that it's swimming in water. How much fish contemplate that really is unclear. But what exactly is all this technology doing to us? That's the question we're asking today. Much like the surgeon general in 1964, we're going to take a second look at something that in our current age feels commonplace. And we're going to find that the promise technology made to us may not have come true. And it's going to come down to us to determine what to do about it.
Jim Stollberg: Hi, I'm Jim Stollberg, former marketplace technology leader. As an engineer and former leader of engineers. I appreciate and love technology. Yet as a father of two kids, the risk of technology addiction has never been far from my mind. Today, I'm a member of Solving the World's Greatest Problems team. As previous co-CEO of Halftime, I had the privilege of helping high capacity leaders get clear, get free, and get going on a life of significance. And what can be more significant than solving the world's greatest problems?
Jim Stollberg: Act two. Breaking boundaries and building limits.
Steve Jobs: This is a day I've been looking forward to for two and a half years. Every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything. And Apple's been very fortunate. It's been able to introduce a few of these into the world.
Steve Jobs: 1984. We introduced the Macintosh. It didn't just change Apple. It changed the whole computer industry. In 2001, we introduced the first iPod. And it didn't just. It didn't just change the way we all listen to music. It changed the entire music industry.
Steve Jobs: Today we're introducing three revolutionary products of this class. So you can have three things a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough Internet communications device. An iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator. An iPod.
Steve Jobs: A phone. Are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device. And we are calling it iPhone.
Jim Stollberg: It's difficult to overstate the seismic shift this announcement created not only for Apple as a company, but for the entire world. Suddenly, a device we had used solely to speak with one another was about to do a whole lot more and then a whole lot more. And so on.
Jim Stollberg: When the iPhone was introduced, the future seemed unlimited. There were so many possibilities. This device brought into reality, so many things we hadn't yet dreamed possible were about to happen. At the time of the launch. It was only exciting. There was no dread or worry or fear of what we might be unleashing on ourselves. Jonathan Haidt, American social psychologist and author of The Anxious Generation, is able to shed light on the flip side of an exciting technological breakthrough.
Jonathan Haidt: In 2010, most almost all American kids have a flip phone. They have everyone has a cell phone, but it was a dumb for what we now call a dumb was then mostly a flip phone, which they use to connect to other kids. And so that's great. Still, technology is wonderful. It's amazing. You know, the kids are going to be so smart all by their all techno whizzes. That's 2010.
Jonathan Haidt: By 2015, 80% have a smart phone. They've got high speed data, which they had high speed Internet they didn't have in 2010. Mostly they've got a front facing camera which wasn't there in 2010. It was introduced in 2010. They have Instagram, which was introduced in 2010.
Jonathan Haidt: And so the daily life of a young person in 2010 was still recognizably a human childhood where technology was a tool they used to connect. By 2015, it was not recognizably a human childhood. It was spent most of the waking hours that were not in school. Actually, and even hours in school were spent looking at this small screen and doing stuff that disconnected them from the people next to them.
Speaker 5: Rates of depression and anxiety in the U.S. rose by more than 50% from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate rose 48% for adolescents between the ages of ten and 19. And for girls ages 10 to 14, the suicide rate rose 131%.
Jonathan Haidt: Humans had a play based childhood for millions of years because that's what mammals do. All mammals play that they have to play to wire up their brains. But that play based childhood began to fade out in the 1980s in the United States, and it was gone by 2010. And that's because right around 2010 is when the phone based childhood sweeps in our children are now raised, largely with a phone at the center of everything.
Jonathan Haidt: And let's talk about what happened when that when that change happened. Another way I can summarize my book is by saying we have overprotected our children in the real world and we have under protected them online. And both of those are mistakes.
Jonathan Haidt: So a month or two ago, Derek Thompson, a great data writer in theater analyst in The Atlantic, had an article when the Pisa scores came up. This is the one global assessment of how students are doing around the world, 15 year olds, how are they doing academically? And what what Derek pointed out, what people are seeing in this new data is that scores in math and reading and those were all fairly steady. And then all of a sudden after 2012, they they drop.
Jonathan Haidt: These are real life implications for how technology affects our ability to learn. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Things get even more dire when we start talking about mental health. Across almost any assessment you want to make. Gen Z, born 1996 and later is doing poorly and it's very sudden. It happened very suddenly in the early 20 tens.
Jonathan Haidt: So we can see this. I first saw this on college campuses. Greg Lukyanov actually was one of the first to spot it. Something was changing about students who arrived in 2014 compared to, say, those who arrived in 2012. Up through 2012, they were all millennials. But as we go on in the decade, you see a number of things rise a little bit. ADHD is up a little bit, learning disability up a tiny bit.
Jonathan Haidt: But it's really this yellow line, which is psychological disorders. That's what rises fast. That's the big difference between Gen-z and the Millennials is that Gen Z has very high rates of mental mental illness, especially depression and anxiety.
Jonathan Haidt: Now, this is data collected from university health systems. And what we see is these are UC undergraduates with a variety of conditions. And all the graphs that I show, if you track the data up through 2010, you see nothing that is even in the 90s and especially the 2000s, mental health was not getting worse and on some measures it was getting a little better. The millennials actually were a little more mentally healthy them Gen X before them. Gen X is 1965 through about 1980.
Jonathan Haidt: But what you see as we go on into the 20 tens is this everything goes up, but it's especially depression and anxiety. They are now at such high levels. It's just a normal part of being a teenager in the United States. These are college kids, but it's just a normal part of being a young person now that you are depressed and anxious. It's not that the majority is, but it's almost I mean, it's around 30, 40% are depressed and anxious.
Jim Stollberg: What makes this reality most shocking is that it is intended result. The devices we use are designed for this exact purpose. Addiction. Tristan Harris, former Google design ethicist, is someone who knows all about this.
Tristan Harris: Well, the main one I say all the time is just that your phone is basically a slot machine because every single time you check it, you either got invited to do the Rubin report or you just get another newsletter. We were going to send you a regular mail or something, but it seemed to an hour, not very 20:07 p.m.. Right, Right.
Tristan Harris: But it's because of the fact that when you turn your phone over, it could be a match on Tinder with that hot whatever that you want to date. It could be the email. That's really exciting. It could be the text message from that person you really wanted to text you. Or it could just be nothing. Literally, it's like a slot machine. Every single time you turn it over, you're playing.
Jim Stollberg: The way this happens is through a combination of variable rewards and the encouragement of repeat behavior, something both Facebook and Snapchat have mastered.
Tristan Harris: I've noticed a lot of times people are on Facebook just scrolling, right? And their needs are completely insane. You see a picture of a baby, then you see Trump might start a war with North Korea, right? Then you see a cat video and then you see a baseball game and it's like, this is for me, this can't be right for our brains. Yeah.
Tristan Harris: Can you talk about that a little bit? So with Snapchat, Clay invented a feature called Streaks that shows the number of days in a row that you send a message back and forth. And so if you're a kid, you have like 30 of these things going on. Like, for example, it'll say you have 180 days going with this friend, and what they just do is they then it's something that now these two kids don't want to lose. And so it's not even that they're having real conversations with each other. They're going just to make it through their day. They have to send a message of a photo or a wall. And you can just just sort of tap the other side of the shoulders. And they have to send the message back.
Jim Stollberg: Somehow we have become both the drug addict and the drug dealer. We keep our addiction close to us at all times and reach for it over and over again day by day. Andy Crouch, author of The Tech Wise Family, has done extensive work around creating redemptive frames for our technology use. So much so, his daughter Amy, has also gotten involved. Listen, as she points out the effect devices have on the way we interact with the world around us.
Amy Crouch: And I think that all of our devices are just extraordinarily good at giving us what we want or what we think we want. This is certainly true when it comes to the kinds of distracting powers of our devices. When we think about the nonstop entertainment that's available to us in the moment, when you are bored, frustrated or lonely, some instantaneous distraction is exactly what you want.
Amy Crouch: You can think of it as kind of a Band-Aid on the surface of your pain, and you have that kind of instantaneous gratification. So I think that it's certainly true that we love our devices because they offer us what we think that we need, what we think that we want right away. But that is not how you actually become the kind of person that God created you to be.
Amy Crouch: And one of the things that we speak about so much as a family is how the most important things in life. Come from a little bit of risk. The most important connections, the kinds of conversations and relationships that make life worth living. They come from the risks of being vulnerable and not just presenting a perfect surface to the world.
Amy Crouch: Developing any kinds of good skills and gifts and talents has to come from trying something that you're not actually good at yet. You have to take a little bit of risk. And if our devices are only ever giving us the easy option, the sort of flattened pleasure of you get what you want, we're going to miss out on what makes life truly the life that is life.
Jim Stollberg: Act three Our families need a complete reorientation.
Jim Stollberg: Let's quickly go back to where we began. Despite the rise in lung cancer in the 1920s, neither the public nor most physicians recognized a significant health threat from smoking. With the end of prohibition in 1933, advertisers started to make overt and false health claims to sell these products.
Jim Stollberg: In 1935, Camel said, Cigarets, don't get your wind. Philip Morris said in 1941 they would play safe with your throat. All gold even promised in 1946 their cigarets were fresh as mountain air. Smokers of camels were even encouraged to smoke a cigaret between every course of a Thanksgiving meal as an aid to digestion.
Jim Stollberg: In the early 1950s, evidence implicating smoking as a cause of lung cancer began to appear more frequently in medical journals and the popular press. And while cigaret sales declined in 1953 and the first part of 1954, they quickly rebounded after the introduction of filtered cigarets to allay health concerns.
Jim Stollberg: This illusory fix didn't last long. But the 1964 report of the Surgeon General's Advisory Committee marks the beginning of a significant shift in public attitudes about smoking. Declining adult per capita cigaret consumption after 1964 followed increasing public appreciation of the dangers of tobacco use, accompanied by increasing efforts to regulate the use, sale and advertising of tobacco products.
Jim Stollberg: Now, if we can look at this timeline and compare it to our current experience with modern technology is comparable to say that we are somewhere near the filtered cigaret phase. There's an acknowledgment that technology may not be the most healthy thing for us, but with a few filters and limits, it's really fine. But as Andy Crouch keenly reminds us, much of these decisions are made without an ounce of critical thinking.
Andy Crouch: I think most of the technology choices, if you want to call it that, parents and kids make our default. That is, they aren't actually made based on really thinking carefully. What do we want our home to be like? What do we want our children's experience growing up to be like?
Andy Crouch: Instead, we have this kind of pressure wave. I feel like the best image I have for it is a tsunami that's kind of, you know, flooding in on our whole culture that carries us in a certain direction. And crucially, that makes many things easier.
Andy Crouch: I think the reason kids are first handed a screen is it's actually rarely to solve even the kids problem. It's to solve the parents problem. How do I get in and out of the grocery store to and from the grocery store in the minivan without committing murder against my three year old? Whatever is screaming and anxious and, you know, angry and bored and you hand them a screen and it does solve their problem, but really more deeply and solves the grownups problem.
Andy Crouch: And when you make any one of these choices, life in the moment feels easier. But these choices also cut us off from what actually forms us as persons. How do you become a person who is able to get to the grocery store and back without breaking down something that some adults of us on our bad days would still have trouble with that. And we know when we grow up, this is like an opportunity to exercise patience. It's an opportunity to exercise a kind of discipline.
Jim Stollberg: The onus here, as Andy reminds us, is so much on the parents. But as his daughter Amy shares, it isn't solely for the benefit of the children either. The adults have just as much reason to create for ourselves rules which we want those around us to adhere to as well.
Amy Crouch: I have never, ever in my whole life doubted that my mom and my dad will always love me unconditionally, and that is the grounding force from which you can go out into the world and suffer. And of course, as I grew older, I know that as much as my parents love me, it is really the love of God, which is the unconditional grounding force that allows me to go out and take risks in life.
Amy Crouch: And so I don't want us to get kind of lost in the heavy side of things. So that encouragement to go out and take risks from our parents. My brother and I knew that we were being told to take those risks because we could never risk the most important thing, which was the love of God that is, you know, was directed through our parents for their love for us. So you can only take those kinds of risks and be vulnerable in the world if you know that the most important thing is already done. You're already beloved.
Amy Crouch: So that's the big picture moving in towards the sort of smaller picture, though, of like practically how did we react to our parents having these kinds of rules for us? You know, there were all kinds of frictions that happened. But what I like to remind people is that these rules were not just for the kids. They were for the whole family.
Amy Crouch: And that really fundamentally changed my perspective. And I think also my brothers, because we could be annoyed with our parents for, you know, I just wanted to play this fun game or I just want to be able to do X, Y, Z, but I know I never had a sense of they're just telling me to do this and how do I put this? I always knew that these were commitments that were binding my parents as well.
Amy Crouch: It wasn't just me and my brother who couldn't have screens in our bedrooms. It was also my parents. Nobody could take out their phone at the dinner table. And sometimes, you know, mom and dad had more reason to have to be on a screen at the dinner table. But they made that commitment.
Amy Crouch: Certainly my mom and dad have both models. The kinds of wise behaviors around social media use that really inform and inspire me. And so it wasn't all sunshine and roses. And obviously my brother and I were kids and we often got annoyed, but there was never a sense that these were top down rules from the parents to the kids. We were all on the same team. We were all a family. Who had to do this together.
Amy Crouch: And I think maybe the final thing I would say is if both the adults and the kids have to follow these rules, that shows you as a kid that it's not just that you are foolish or immature or that your parents don't trust you. What your parents are showing you is in a healthy way that they do not trust themselves.
Jim Stollberg: Act four Build, invest, give. The solution to all. This isn't easy. But Andy Crouch has a place for us to start.
Andy Crouch: But we always had this kind of fundamental guiding question, which is, is this helping us develop wisdom and courage as a family? And if it is awesome, I mean, so we watched movies as the kids got older. I mean, there's amazing films out there for every age, every stage of life. You know, our kids did our son especially learned coding when he was in his early teen years because he loved that it came naturally to him.
Andy Crouch: I think the other thing that came along, just as our kids were exiting high school, which we can have a long conversation about, but I'll get over to you, Rusty. But the algorithms started really were and Amy is the most A.I. algorithm person on the planet. She can go on and on about algorithms. They're going can ask her if you want.
Andy Crouch: But I think that shift in how our devices related to us, that they more and more had this feedback loop that allowed them to figure out what scratches our itch. And it's, of course, driven the rise of TikTok as the most effective algorithmic kind of social media yet. And it's the most sticky, the most absorbing.
Andy Crouch: We sort of we avoided that until our kids had enough prefrontal cortex in place to actually make pretty healthy choices. Whether dad makes healthy choices is another question. But all these things are still coming at us and you have to have that Northstar question Is this helping us develop as human beings who have wisdom and courage together?
Jim Stollberg: This question, of course, is just the beginning. And as Andy continues to explain, dealing with technology from both an individual and a family perspective is a process that happens over time.
Andy Crouch: Working this out with any given technology, you know, probably takes a certain amount of time and kind of even for a whole society to come to grips with it. I think the more that all technology is deployed to help us live lives of heart, soul, mind and strength. Love help us. Love with heart, soul minus drink. They're great.
Andy Crouch: And some of them really augment our minds and help us love the world more with our minds. And that's great. Some of them should help us lot more with our strength. A great sneaker, which is technology of a kind, helps you run and enjoy running in a way that you might not, at least unless you're one of these barefoot runner people who apparently think it doesn't help. But sure, it helped me.
Andy Crouch: My bicycle is a piece of technology compared to something anyone else has had in human history. You've got amazing high tech bicycles now, and when I'm out on the bike, it's an amazing experience as a human being, and I grow in my love for God in the world as I ride my bike because I'm actually involved with my strengths as well as my mind and my heart and maybe even my soul as I ride.
Andy Crouch: On the other hand, there's a lot of technology that explicitly is designed to displace human beings to replace him with. And often that says, you should be able to just relax and let the machine or the computer or whatever do the work, let the artificial intelligence do the work.
Andy Crouch: And when it replaces I don't mean replacing certain aspects of human labor and activity that really aren't necessarily that fulfilling. I'm all for computers taking over some of those things, but when it replaces human presence in the world is heart, soul, mind, strength, Complex is designed for loves, then it's a problem. And we should recognize it's actually not going to help in the long run.
Andy Crouch: So this is the basic distinction that I wrote about in my last book between devices, which just ultimately are designed to replace and displace us and leave us with very little to do, more and more disengaged, more and more kind of adrift in the world versus instruments which actually fully engage us.
Andy Crouch: Like right now, we're using a ton of technology to have this conversation, but because it's working well, it's putting each of your faces in front of me. I can sense to some extent what you're thinking and feeling. We can have this conversation together. I'm very engaged, right as a person. And. Hopefully the people listening to it also find themselves drawn in and actually engaged as a person.
Andy Crouch: If it does that. Go for it. But if you start feeling disengaged, if you start feeling like, ah, I'll just let the machine do the work, I'll just let the machine do the entertaining, you know, I'll just let the machine kind of run things. I think you're seeking a kind of magic that will not actually last and will not be good for human beings.
Jim Stollberg: While most of Silicon Valley was very busy creating more addictive apps too, fathers in Nashville were sitting around their kitchen tables watching their kids grow up in the glow of screens and thinking there has to be a better way. Keith Wilson and Joey Odum weren't tech giants. They were just parents who saw their phones getting in the way of bedtime stories and family dinners instead of just complaining about it.
Jim Stollberg: They did something that seems almost radical these days. They built a solution that encourages people to use technology less, not more. Their venture, Eero, started with a simple idea Create physical spaces in our homes where phones don't belong.
Jim Stollberg: But is their movement grew, they realized something important. The solution needed to meet people where they are. You can't put the technology genie back in the bottle, but you can teach it better manners. That's why they developed an app to complement their physical product.
Jim Stollberg: Kind of like using a nicotine patch to quit smoking. The app helps track and celebrate time spent away from screens turning what could feel like deprivation into something more like liberation. And in a clever twist, they took the same psychology that makes social media so addictive. The streaks, the badges, the social challenges, and flipped it on its head. Now you're getting dopamine hits for putting your phone down instead of picking it up.
Jim Stollberg: Because here's the thing. This isn't about abandoning technology altogether. It's about being intentional with it, as Wilson puts it. We're not trying to get rid of phones. We're trying to put them in their proper place.
Jim Stollberg: And they're not alone in reimagining our relationship with phones. In TechLess, Chris Casper looked at his five children and saw a future he wanted to change. After fostering two children who weren't allowed to use phones due to past issues, he had a revelation. What if we could build a phone that parents never had to worry about?
Jim Stollberg: His company, Tech Loss took an audacious approach. Instead of adding more features to smartphones, they stripped them down to their assets. The result a phone that does exactly what phones were supposed to do in the first place. Connect us to people we care about. No social media, no games, no endless scroll of distraction. Just the basics. Calls, texts, maps and a camera.
Jim Stollberg: The irony isn't lost on Casper. He's using technology to fight technology addiction. Building what he calls the world's healthiest smartphone. It's like he's trying to return us to the original promise Steve Jobs made when he called the iPhone a bicycle for the mind. Before it came, more like a rocket ship. Launching us into anxiety and distraction.
Jim Stollberg: And while we should note that we're not making any investment recommendations here, it's worth mentioning that TechLess, like many companies trying to solve this problem, currently has investment opportunities open. Because at the end of the day, this isn't just about building better technology. It's about building a better relationship with technology.
Jim Stollberg: And while entrepreneurs are building solutions, some investors are rethinking how we fund technology altogether. Enter Good Water Capital, a venture capital firm that's turning the traditional investment model on its head. The co-founders saw firsthand how technology could transform lives. They were early investors in companies like Facebook, Twitter and TikTok.
Jim Stollberg: But they also witnessed how these same tools could become digital distractions. So they asked themselves a simple question What if we invested in technology that actually made life better, not just more addictive?
Jim Stollberg: Their answer was to create what they call a regenerative investment platform. Instead of just chasing profits, they're backing companies that solve real human needs in health care, education, housing, and, yes, even in helping us develop healthier relationships with our devices.
Jim Stollberg: And here's the kicker. They take their profits and reinvest them to help their portfolio companies serve underserved communities. Again, we're not making investment recommendations here, but it's worth noting that there are people working to change the system from the inside out. Because maybe the solution isn't just building better technology, it's building a better way to fund it.
Jim Stollberg: Tech and social media aren't inherently bad things, but it's important to make sure you're controlling your digital life so it doesn't control you. As Dr. Henry Cloud and Doctor James Townsend wrote in their book Boundaries. These self-made rules are like a fence. But with a gate, you decide when to open or close the gate, and each of us must decide what our gate policy will be for our digital lives.
Jim Stollberg: We are free to use technology, but we must not allow freedom to bring about destruction to us or anyone else. The simplest solution when it comes to altering our personal behavior is this. Find the misery and make a rule. If there is an area in life in which you are suffering, make a personal rule to keep it from hurting you. Preserve the good stuff. Prevent the bad stuff.
Jim Stollberg: The digital age is here to stay, and it's an overall positive development in how people live, work and relate. But make it work for you. Don't work for it. One of the greatest boundaries we can create to stay healthy in this digital world is to have a full life. A full life is one in which we're investing our time and energy in relationships and activities that are meaningful, enjoyable and worth engaging in.
Jim Stollberg: Thank you for listening to this episode of Solving the World's Greatest Problems. You can find links to the solutions mentioned above, as well as so many others that are continuing to find and add that solving the world's greatest problems story. We'll see you all next time.