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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Digital wellness innovator Larissa May was scrolling herself to death in college. She says she was spending 10 to 12 hours a day behind a screen, more time scrolling than she was sleeping, walking, or talking to anyone.
Eventually, she got help, and then she decided to do something more. Today, she's talking about what young people can do to escape the smartphone doom loop.
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 guys in Silicon Valley?
Larissa is the founder of Hashtag Half the Story, a nonprofit she started in her college dorm room with $250. And she's co-founder of Ginkgo, a clinician-backed AI platform for families. I sat down with her on the TED Next stage to talk about her work and her vision for the future. She makes the case that the answer to digital wellness isn't abstinence.
Chapter 2: What is the smartphone doom loop and how does it affect young people?
It's education, intention, and putting young people at the center of the solution.
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.
That conversation is coming up right after a short break.
And now our conversation of the day.
Tell us a little bit about what led you here and what it means to you to be a digital wellness entrepreneur.
Well, 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. Right, right.
How did it show up for you when you said that you were kind of feeling sick?
Well, I think the thing that I've learned on 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 and the digital age that I needed
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Chapter 3: What actions can young people take to escape the smartphone doom loop?
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...
Hmm, 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 guys in Silicon Valley?
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?
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, hey, we want to ban phones. Now, there is 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, hey, 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, and we actually 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.
OK, two follow-ups to that. One is, what are young people saying to you? 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.
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Chapter 4: How does Larissa May's background influence her approach to digital wellness?
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.
OK, which brings us to Ginkgo 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?
Absolutely. Well, and looking at all 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, is that your kids are always going to win.
What I saw in the market is that, I mean, we've seen a lot of open AI'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. So 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 those 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 Ginkgo 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.
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