"If you don’t tell media where you want it in your life, it’ll put itself in where you don’t want it."

-Smith Alley

Smith Alley is a rising star in the area of tech safety and digital awareness. At age 17, he has already battled social media & early exposure to pornography, recognized a growing need in society for teen advocacy, and testified in Utah state legislature. He is a leader in promoting “real life living” and enjoying every moment.

Smith offers perspective on what it is like to be a teen growing up in today’s world and encourages us all to “Live Life Bigger."

Healthy Screen Habit Takeaway

For more information on Smith and his organizations:

Protecht Strong

Live Life Bigger Foundation

Resources Mentioned:

Show Transcript

Hillary Wilkinson: (00:03) Thank you so much for joining us. Our guest today is someone who is beyond a rising star in this niche of the world. He's kind of this rocketing meteor explosion of hope and light and awareness to, like I said, this area of the world called screen safety and protection against early pornography exposure. I'm so excited to share with you his story of how by age 17, he's already battled social media and early exposure to pornography. He's founded a nonprofit called the Live Life Bigger Foundation. He's testified in state legislature started a podcast. The list goes on and on. He's done this all while going to high school, playing lacrosse, doing chores, living the life of a teenager. He's on a mission to inspire kids to live life bigger and find health whenever, wherever they need it. Without stigma attached. If you don't know who I'm talking about, I would say, get ready to hear his name a lot, because what I'm sure of is this guy's going places, Smith Alley, welcome to Healthy Screen Habits.

Smith Alley: (1:31) Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to talk today.

Hillary: (01:35) I'm so excited to have you Smith. I really think that one of the gifts that you have is you, you have this resonation with people of all ages when they hear your story and your struggle with pornography, the effects of social media that you've experienced. You're so real, and you're so relevant to all ages to share that kind of vulnerability, you probably had to dig pretty deep and sometimes digging that deep comes from actually hitting rock bottom. I just wanna know, are you kind of up for taking us through your journey? I don't want to ask things that are beyond your scope today. I want to be respectful of where you are.

Smith Alley (02:21): Yeah, of course.

Hillary  (02:24): So can you take us through your journey you grew up in Bountiful, Utah, and can you just take us down the path?

Smith Alley (02:34): Yeah. so I grew up in Bountiful, Utah. I have an amazing family, amazing parents. I have three sisters, two older, one younger, so I'm kind of sandwiched by girls and that's a lot of fun. I think that that has taught me a lot in my life, but you know, really going into my story. I had a stutter when I was a little kid and I think this was like, when I look back to, this was the root of my insecurities and this was the route where, you know, I kind of learned to stop loving myself. And I got to this point, so, you know, I was made fun of in kindergarten, first, second grade. And then, you know, once we got into third, fourth grade, we started seeing development and speech therapy. And so once that happened, there were less jokes and there were less, you know, I wasn't the blunt of every joke. But--

Hillary  (03:33): You really remember that time.

Smith Alley (03:36): Yeah. I think that, that, that really stands out to me. Like, I don't remember a lot of kids kindergarten through first, second grade. But that's, that's pretty vivid to me. And I remember like by the time I was in third, fourth grade I didn't really need the kids making jokes. Cause I was just kind of hard on myself and I was down on myself. And the other thing is I've always been a bigger kid, you know, now I'm six two. But there was a lot of time where once I got onto social media, then I was just comparing myself because I was kind of a smaller chunkier kid. But it was at age nine that I was exposed to pornography on this little Android tablet that I'd gotten for Christmas the year before. And I think that because my parents, my parents have always been really outspoken and have talked to us about pornography and what it is and what we need to do when we see it. And so I was pretty quick to like get off of it.

Hillary  (04:42): So you recognized what you were seeing even from the start, because that's one of the things that I know with the early exposure educators they talk about is the importance of talking about pornography with children and teaching them what it is.

Smith Alley (04:59): Yeah. And, and my parents had done very well teaching me what that is. And like I knew immediately that I had to turn off the Android tablet, but what, what happened is because I was still ashamed of what I'd seen, I didn't go and tell my parents. And even though I was fairly quick to turn that off and you know, get rid of it. I still remember the feelings that it gave me and the, you know, the chemical release that happened. And so going later into life, once I'm, you know, having an iPod touch and I'm getting onto social media and doing all of this stuff that's when that's when it creeped back into my life and it was about 10, 10 and a half years old. And I remember, I remember I had remembered the feeling that pornography had gave me.

Smith Alley (05:55): And at this point in my life, I was on social media and comparing myself. And I really just, I was in a really bad spot personally, and as such a young age too, which is really sad to think about. And so I was battling that and I was battling, you know, the insecurities that I already had in myself. And you know, because of those insecurities, I'd kind of just pushed my family away. And I always tried to keep them at an arms distance so that they can really be close to me and really know what's going on with me. And just as like a, just as a quick note here I've as a little kid, I was the happiest kid ever. My parents always talk about how you'd walk into a room and I'd just be laughing at a wall.

Smith Alley (06:44): One of the things that I always tell parents is we, especially parents like to write this off as a high school stage or a teenage boy stage or a phase. And I think that's one of the, that's one of the worst things that we can do is just to write something off as a phase, because I truly believe that kids were meant to be happy and kids were, you know, there's such a creativity and this ability to love and to kind of adapt to your surroundings that kids are supposed to be happy and they're supposed to be loving. And I think that if there's ever anything wrong with your teenage boys or, or girls, it's not just a phase it's because something's going on. And

Hillary  (07:45): Yeah, so that kind of gets around too your "why" of how you ended up in this space. Is that, am I right in thinking that?

Smith Alley (07:59): Yeah, I mean, I think that, I think that there's a lot of, I felt that there's a lot that I can bring to this space because of me being young and because you know, especially with talking to kids and talking to youth it's almost, I've decided it's almost like a cool factor, you know, where kids are gonna listen to me more because I'm where they are. And I'm not just an adult talking to them and giving them information and statistics, there's a lot that I can bring to that, but you know, I, I got into pornography pretty heavily at 10 and a half and it just got worse as time went by. And with that going in that kind of spiraling down my social media addiction spiraled down the same way. And 

Hillary  (09:08): Do you find, you kind of use them hand in hand or was one exclusive of the other?

Smith Alley (09:13): No. Yeah. I definitely got a lot of the porn that I watched from social media. I found it other, other places, but I do think that it, it worked hand in hand also in the way that, you know, social media made my, made me compare myself to others. I felt terrible. I felt worthless. And so the only love that I felt worthy of was the love that, or the fake love, you know, I didn't know that what I was really doing to me.

Hillary  (09:47): You say on other areas, you, you have this saying about, it's like the cost of social media.

Smith Alley (09:56): Yeah. When you buy love and entertainment from social media or pornography, you're buying love for your brain, but the cost is your heart. And it really like these, these sources of love or entertainment there, they give you all of the chemicals that your brain wants, but it leaves you emotionally torn and it leaves you feeling worthless, worthless, and leaves you feeling worse than you did before. And so it just kind of all spiraled down. And at 13, 14 years old, I was viewing pornography four to five, sometimes six times a day and you know, super depressed and just in a terrible spot. But I think I was really good at putting on masks. I was really good at reading my parents and my friends and the people around me and making sure that I was never pushing too far, you know, and making sure that I'm really good at sneaking around really good at deleting history, finding sneaky ways to get the pornography's finding all of this stuff. Yeah. all the loopholes I like to call them and that's

Hillary  (11:06): The benefit of being the digital native. Right.

Smith Alley (11:10): And so I got to this point 14 years old where you know, I got involved in some deeper trouble and that trouble led my parents to finding out. And I remember that day just being the most relieving day of my life. And I was so scared, but I was finally, like, I was just so relieved that finally I could use my parents and I could use the support that I had to fight this demon.

Hillary  (11:43): So profound to hear that like the worst day of your life, you view also as the most relieving day of your life, that you were just finally able to share what you'd been carrying this burden.

Smith Alley (11:58): Yeah. We talked to a lot of families now and my parents are on the phone a lot with other parents who are calling us, telling us that they found out that their kid's struggling with pornography, all the things like that. And you know, I hear my mom tell them a lot. She always says, I know this feels like the worst day of your life, but you'll look back and it'll be the best because you know what you have to fight and what you have to fight is now in the light and you can see it and you can destroy it. And I think that's, I think that's how we felt really. And I think that once my parents got over this kind of the primary emotion of being upset and, you know, worry, I think that we were really relieved that, you know, all of this trouble, all of the everything that I was going through, the way that I was acting, it was all explainable now. And we could actually work towards that.

Hillary  (13:02): You could work towards being in that light. That's great. Okay. Before we move on to the mission of your nonprofit, I want to go ahead and take a little break.

Advertisement (13:46)

Hillary: Today we are talking with Smith alley, the 17 year old founder of the live life, bigger foundation. So Smith, I love the mission of your nonprofit, which is to inspire, inform, and empower people to live life bigger. The sound of that just gets me excited and pumped up. Can you kind of paint a picture for me? Tell me what can someone do to live life bigger?

Smith Alley (14:15): Yeah, I think it means, I think living life figure means different things to different people, but I think that truly, it means finding your potential in life and finding what you love and enjoying your passion and, you know, hopefully something that can help other people and being able to utilize that as best as you can and put all your effort into that. Something that's meaningful, something that you feel accomplishes your life goals. And,uthen also just making connections with people. I think that, you know, a lot of people when they hear live life bigger, they think, okay, have to go be outside and be in nature and, you know, do all of this stuff. And I think that the biggest part of living life figure is spending more time and more effort on your connections and on your relationships. And I found as my family, as we try to live life bigger, more,uyou know, we spend a lot of time together and we spend a lot of time laughing and, you know, just doing whatever we can making each other happy. And I think that that's been the biggest part of living life bigger for us is being, becoming more and becoming closer as a family.

Hillary  (15:28): I think that's great. The connections are where it's at. And I think during this time of COVID in quarantine where we've all been living separately, we've had a new appreciation for connections that we may have just taken for granted. One of the things that you've been doing to live life bigger and is remember, and honor the the force that Colin Kartchner was in this field. And one of the things that you did was joined forces with Chris McKenna from protect young eyes. And you, I have been listening weekly to yours myth and Chris' podcast. You guys are just, it's this amazing resource because you have this weekly snippet of hot topics on, in the world of tech safety. And it's so interesting. Cause you get to hear both the dads slash adult perspective from Chris and the teen perspective from yourself and how, how has that going for you? Do you like doing it?

Smith Alley (17:27): Oh, I, I love podcasting with Chris. I love being able to honor Colin. You know, he meant a lot to me and he was a big mentor for me. And being able to, you know, one of the reasons that I'm doing everything that I'm doing is because of Colin. And before, you know, before I even met Colin, I was starting this company ProTech strong to help family set up tech restrictions and everything like that. But after I met Colin, that's when I realized that like there was so much more that I could be doing. And I started speaking with him and I started putting out podcasts and I started doing all of this stuff. And then when he passed away it kind of just made me realize, like I have to go 110% at this

Hillary  (18:45): Oh, well you are definitely being heard loud and clear and definitely continuing on in the footsteps of everything that he was dreaming of doing. So thank you for, thank you for doing this. One of the things I kind of wonder, as you spend week after week looking at this kind of world of tech, you know, the, like I said, the snippets and hot topics is, does it, does it kind of change the way you view the world? I know after I listened to it, sometimes I think, Oh my gosh, what are we up against? But how, how does someone like yourself deal with that?

Smith Alley (19:25): Yeah I think I've always had this realization of like what a crazy world that we live in. But I think that that's amplified as I've gotten to do this podcast it is shocking to see the world that we live in and that does get overwhelming sometimes. But I think that every time, you know, for every horrible instance, there's someone who's battling it out there and there's someone who's trying to make a difference.

Hillary  (20:29): And reaching a hand to help.

Smith Alley (20:31): And I think that, and I think that that's amazing. That's the amazing thing. And as I watch more and more teenagers step up to kind of address this issue, I get more and more hope for our future because, you know, sometimes it does look very grim and it does look scary to hear the stuff that's going on in the world and to hear, you know, about big tech and what every, everything that they're doing and to hear about millions of videos of child sexual abuse material, and to hear about all of this stuff can be super overwhelming. It can get very, tough to listen to. But I think that every time I get to a point where I'm like, what has our world come to? Why do I even do the thing that I'm doing? Look at, look at who I'm fighting, you know, I'm fighting these trillion dollar companies. And I think that's when you hear about someone who's doing amazing work and you hear about someone who is passionate and someone who's really trying to help.

Hillary  (21:38): Right. And this community of tech safety educators and early exposure educators definitely has grown. And so that, that has been exciting to see too. I'm going, to touch base on that policy measure that you talked about. Cause I know you did something really exciting,uin Utah regarding legislature. And we're going to talk more about that after this break: We are back with Smith, Alley, he recently testified for HB 72 - that's House Bill 72 in Utah Smith. Could you explain what that is and why it's important for people to get behind this type of policy and legislature?

Smith Alley (22:54): Yeah. so I remember Chris asking me on one of our podcasts. If I woke up on January 1st, 2020 expecting to get into legislature and the answer's no, but I've been very grateful to be involved with it now and you know, with the team that Chris is on recently representative Pulsifer, she's an amazing she sponsored this bill house bill 72, HB 72, and it's the device filtering amendment. So it requires that all manufacturers who sell their devices inside of Utah, the restrictions and the controls would have to come preset is on instead of off you know, right now they already come off and parents have to dig through settings and figure out how set them up.

Hillary  (23:47): Now it's counterintuitive to have people do this. And so what this bill enacts would, or if it would go through would enact it to be already set up to be a safer place already.

Smith Alley (24:03): Yeah. Yeah. I think we're just trying to put as many layers as protection as we can in place. And so that's super important. And so it's passed through the house committee, it passed through the full house, it passed through the Senate committee. So now it's going on to the full Senate. And you know, there is a clause in there where five other States have to you know, adopt the same, the same amendment before it goes into action in Utah. But from what I've heard from Chris, there's a lot of other States that are super excited about this and are excited to get it through and excited to, you know, really start this process of trying to keep our kids safe.

Hillary  (24:49): That really is just like going to be a logarithmic in its reach towards, towards getting kids in, in safer places and helping parents, because I think parents are completely overwhelmed with the technology and they're handing kids devices that they don't even realize can hurt them the way they do.

Smith Alley (25:11): Yeah. and another thing is I think that one, one of the, one of the things that I heard against this bill was that we're kind of passing on parental responsibility to big tech. There will never, there will never be a responsibility completely passed over to big tech and to these manufacturers. And I think that it's always going to be important. I think that we need to take a lot more preventative measures. I think that, you know, too much parents today are reactionary and we've had plenty of times when I started this ProTech strong company. I had, you know, talked to our family, friends about it and offer, offer it to them, to come set up their tech safely. And they'd be like, no, that's not for us. We don't really need that right now. And then three months later, they call us finding out that their son's dealing with pornography or that their daughter's harming themselves. And that's when they that's when they want the that's when they want the service. And that's when they want their tech to be safe. But I think that we need to take more preventative measures as a society. And as you know, in this arena, there's to think that your kid isn't dealing with something is to ignore the fact that they're human and your kids are human. And so I think that we need to have, have a better mindset of like, Hey, our kids are human. They're trying, they're growing up in a really scary world. And we need to take as many preventative measures and proactive measures instead of being reactive.

Hillary  (29:30): I agree with you completely. I come from an educational background and my philosophy of education remains the same and that's that education saves lives. I mean, across the board, I can apply it in so many areas. And thank you for joining the ranks of being an educator now, since is the healthy screen habits podcast. It's going to make sense that I ask you for one, a healthy screen habit. I know you probably have way more than just one, but I'm only going to ask for one Smith, you have a tip or takeaway that our listeners could put into place in their homes.

Smith Alley (30:13): Yeah. I think if there's one thing that you can do as a family, it's to create a media immediate goal for your family, and this is really important and it's important that you do it right? Because if you can, if you can make it so your kids are on your team, instead of you're having to go against your kids with technology, you can create a better environment. And so sit down with your kids, sit down with your family and ask them, you know, what they want media usage in your house to look like, and, you know, write down your goals, whether that's, you know, no screens at dinner or no screens past eight o'clock at night so that you can spend family time together, whatever that is ask your kids, like when do you want to see mom and dad off of their phones?

Smith Alley (31:03): You know, when are we on your phones where you'd rather spend some time with us? And if you can get the perspective and the voice of everyone and you, you can create a family team instead of, you know, mom and dad having to control the kids. It creates this amazing atmosphere where you turn into like a dynamic team and you can do almost anything. And then being able to write those things down that you want to accomplish and being able to you know, hang it up somewhere where everybody can see it. So that it's a daily reminder of what your family is trying to do of, you know, the things you're trying to accomplish and where you want media in your life. Because if you don't tell media where you want it in your life, it'll put itself in your life where you don't want it. And so,

Hillary  (31:46): Oh wait, wait, wait. Say that again. If you want...

Smith Alley (31:50): If you, if you don't tell media where you want it in your life, it'll put itself in your life where you don't want it.

Hillary  (31:59): That is so true. Yeah. And I like your, I like your dynamic team reference to the family unit. I think everybody can picture what that looks like.

Smith Alley (32:14): Yeah. And I think that, I think that we've lost that more and more as we turn, like, it's, I feel like every house that I walk into, it's always the kids against the parents and it's a battle. And I think that if we can change that where it's, you know, we live in a crazy world, like we already talked about, and if we can change it so that it's our families versus the world, then we have a hope of winning.

Hillary  (32:37): I think that's wonderful. And thank you so much for all the work that you're doing. You're definitely on the winning side. So thank you so much for spending the time with this Smith. Again, go ahead. Can you give us the websites of where people can reach you?

Smith Alley (32:59): Yeah. So for ProTech strong it's www dot protect, and that's P R O T E C H T strong.com. And then for our foundation that we're starting, it's www.live life, bigger.org. And there's a place to schedule speaking, or there's a place to donate if you'd like you know, we're trying to do everything that we can to put resources out for families who need it. And so

Hillary  (33:25): You do in-person presentations as well as virtual. Am I right?

Smith Alley (33:30): Yeah. Yeah. That's correct. Smith will travel. Yeah. Okay. Super, thank you so much. Thank you.