What Every Parent Needs To Hear About Smartphones
6/17/202634 min
The UK has announced a ban on under-16s using social media. Jake and Damian's reaction is immediate: the ban is right, but it cannot do the job alone. In this episode they go back into the archive to hear from the people who saw this coming.
Jonathan Haidt on the phone-based childhood we built without realising what we were dismantling. Johann Hari on the 10,000 engineers paid to undermine your self-control. Alex Greenwood on the body image spiral that started at 15. And the guys talk Liam Lawson, whose episode drops Monday, on what happens when your phone explodes and the world turns on you overnight.
Jake shares the Ofcom data that should stop every parent in their tracks and Damian reads a message from Daisy Greenwell, co-founder of Smartphone Free Childhood, the grassroots movement that helped make today's law happen.
Listen to the full episodes:
Jonathan Haidt https://pod.fo/e/2a4563
Johann Hari https://pod.fo/e/267393
Alex Greenwood https://pod.fo/e/30cbd0
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsJake Humphrey· Host0:00
[gentle music] Hi there. Welcome along to another episode of High Performance, and this is one of the Wednesday episodes where myself and Damian look back on some of the guests who've joined us over the past few years. We delve deep into a specific topic, and today's specific topic is the use of smartphones. So if you've got a teenager in your life, if you've got a younger person in your life, if you yourself are struggling with your phone use or your use of social media, if you feel that it's stealing life from you, then you need to listen to this episode, because we are gonna be talking the truth about social media, the truth about being online too much, the harm that it causes. We're gonna be hearing from high-profile people, we're gonna be hearing from experts, and we're gonna be giving our instant reaction to the ban that's been announced that comes into place in December 2027. Your initial reaction to Sir Keir Starmer's announcement, Damian?
Damian Hughes· Host0:50
Absolute delight. I think you, you can't have been in the seats that we've been lucky enough to be in over the last six years, sat opposite some of the finest minds on the planet that have explored the impact of social media, especially on young people, and not come away with a sense of alarm- Mm ... about what it's doing and what, and what we're sort of allowing to happen unchecked. So to see somebody draw the line and to not take away social media, but to give back the life, the opportunities, the fun that we grew up experiencing, that to me just leaves me delighted.
Jake Humphrey· Host1:24
And it's exactly the point that Sir Keir Starmer made when he announced this. He said, "It's not about us taking something away,