Billie Eilish has a complicated relationship with the internet. The singer talks about deleting social media from her phone and the dangers of the internet in this exclusive clip from hers upcoming appearance the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast.
Eilish and her brother Finneas both visited O’Brien’s podcast as part of the former late-night host’s month full of music-related episodes, with the Eilish/Finneas appearance set to drop in full on March 27.
In the clip, Eilish reveals why she’s now off social media and how it was freeing for her — even as a self-proclaimed “internet kid.”
“I don’t look at it anymore. I deleted it all off my phone, which is such a huge deal for me,” Eilish said of social media. “‘Cause dude, you didn’t have the internet to grow up with. For me, it was such a big part of — not my childhood, I wasn’t an iPad baby, thank god — but honestly, I grew up in the perfect time of the internet that it wasn’t so internet-y, I had a childhood, and I was doing stuff all the time.”
She continued, “And then when I became a pre-teen, there were iPhones, and as I got a little older, there was all of what has become, but being a pre-teen and a teenager on the internet, those were my people, I was one of them.”
However, as her popularity rose, Eilish found herself encountering herself on the internet. “I’m a person who goes on the internet… And to change nothing about the person I am or the life that I live, and to just keep doing what I do over the years, and slowly the videos that I’m watching and the things that I see on the internet are about me. ‘Eww, stinky.’ I don’t like that,” she said.
Eilish also discussed her concerns about the internet at large and the impact it has on impressionable minds. “That’s the other thing that freaks me out about the internet is how gullible it makes you. Anything I read on the internet, I believe. Me,” she said. “I know for a fact that’s stupid, and I shouldn’t do that because I have proof it’s not all true; almost none of it’s true. Small white lies.”
Music month on the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast kicks off March 6 with Norah Jones, followed by Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner (March 13), a Team Coco Radio exclusive episode with Neil Young (March 15), Coldplay’s Chris Martin (March 20) and finally Eilish and Finneas on March 27.