A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens from Smartphones

First Things Podcast

First Things

Religion & Spirituality

4.6 • 699 Ratings

🗓️ 10 July 2025

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, Clare Morell joins Rusty Reno on in the First Things office to talk about her recent book, “The Tech Exit: A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens from Smartphones.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, welcome to the editor's desk.
0:07.5	This is the podcast where we take a closer look at the essays and articles in the latest print issue of First Things magazine.
0:14.7	I'm Rusty Reno on the editor of First Things magazine, and I'm here with you today at the editor's desk.
0:24.5	Well, welcome, Claire, to First Things Office, and thank you for this wonderful book.
0:31.6	Oh, thank you.
0:32.3	Tech Exit.
0:34.4	What's the subtitle?
0:35.8	A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens from Smartphones.
0:41.3	Great. Well, so before we get into the substance of the book, which I think is so essential right now, the message I think is very, very important.
0:50.3	Let's talk more about Claire Morel.
0:53.3	So how did you get to this subject matter of tech and kids?
1:00.2	Yeah, it's a great story. So I was serving in the last Trump administration, working at the Department of Justice, and I started in the office on violence against women. And so it was kind of firsthand, just observing how much of the crimes of sex trafficking and child sexual abuse had moved online, how much predators were using online means to exploit their victims. And so that was kind of a first real exposure to
1:29.1	some of the issues, then worked at the White House and then ended my time back at the Department
1:33.8	of Justice working for then Attorney General Barr. And he was very concerned about big tech,
1:39.5	particularly the threats to free speech on the online platforms, but also their role in facilitating crimes,
1:46.7	knowingly facilitating crimes like child sexual abuse material being propagated on their platforms
1:53.7	and them not taking it down, or their algorithms connecting victims to traffickers and predators,
2:00.3	making it easier for them to find those children.
2:03.0	And so he really took on kind of this task force looking at Section 230, which is the law that
2:09.7	governs the internet for those who may not be familiar and wanted to examine what kinds of reforms
2:15.3	were necessary to update this law, you know, 20 years after it had
2:19.5	been passed. And so that was my first kind of exposure to the kind of really big harms of big
	...

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