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Are Smartphones Actually That Bad For You? — Interview With Tim Kendall

May 2019 🇺🇸 This Is Your Life in Silicon Valley podcast

On this episode of the podcast 'This Is Your Life in Silicon Valley,' hosts Sunil Rajaraman and Jascha Kaykas-Wolff interview Tim Kendall, then CEO of the screen-time app Moment, about his path from Facebook's early monetization team through the presidency of Pinterest and into building tools meant to counter habits he helped design. Kendall says he regrets aspects of his earlier work, describes Facebook as unusually effective at engineering habitual use, and argues that simply swapping one app for another — trading social media for news or browsing — does not resolve compulsive phone use on its own. He also discusses limiting his own young children to brief, passive screen time and calls Apple's Screen Time feature an insufficient response by itself. TechKids Foundation includes this interview as a detailed, first-person account of his reasoning as both a former platform executive and a parent.

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CITATION

Rajaraman, Sunil, and Jascha Kaykas-Wolff (hosts). "Are Smartphones Actually That Bad For You? (Guest: Tim Kendall, CEO of Moment, Former President of Pinterest)." This Is Your Life in Silicon Valley, May 23, 2019. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/are-smartphones-actually-that-bad-for-you-guest-tim/id1367030514?i=1000439177696

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