#967 - Jeffrey Katzenberg & Hari Ravichandran - Hollywood Trouble, Big Tech & The Crisis With Kids

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31:36I've got this. This is a very nascent idea, right? So it might be total bullshit, but we can stress test it today. We'll call you out. Don't worry. Good, good, good. I figured you would. I think that we are at a interesting post -COVID arc now, more interesting than we have been maybe since everything reopened back up from lockdown. I'm noticing it amongst me, bunch of my friends, bunch of the people that I work with, just stuff that I'm observing. I think a lot of the liberation or constriction that people went through around COVID, which caused change, right? Some people didn't have to go to work.

32:12I was a nightclub promoter. And all of the nightclubs got shut down, so that was a big change for me. But also, that meant that people started working from home. And some people felt liberated by that. I know the company that owns C4, the energy drink. They, in a desperate attempt to try and get people back into the office, built a $40 million campus in Austin. So you can state of the yard, there's on -site chef. You can get your VO2 max tested, there's body work, and people wage sage around and stuff. Still pretty difficult to get people to go back into the office. Yeah. But I think that one of the things that we will see or that I'm just like early on set noticing I think people are getting sick of not being around other people.

32:53I think that it's human. It's human nature people want to be connected That's why when you talk about movies and movie theaters You know, it is one of the true great connectors the shared experience I'll be in a movie theater, that shared laughter, that shared fear, scare, the role of coaster that you're on. I don't care how big your TV set is or how good your screening is in your home. That shared, expect communal experience of going on a journey in a movie is exceptional. Sporting events, why do music events, that all of those things have never been bigger? right? Concerts going out to concerts and stuff.

33:38And so yeah, I agree with you. I think there is that sort of rebound, if you will, out of that area of isolation. Human beings need other human beings. We are a social beast. You know, I think when we were going through COVID, from me, I felt like you had this sort of unique opportunity to kind of connect with their family more because you're there. So you felt like, you know, especially with my kids, like the bonds got tighter. You know, there were, there's some positive elements that came out of that because before that I was traveling a lot, I was never really, you know, static in one place just for work.

34:18So you were sort of forced into captivity in some ways with, you know, with their family. So that to me, actually ended up being much more positive than I thought. Now, the aftermath of it has been really interesting. And so, you know, we're talking about some of adults here with kids, now, you know, the levels of anxiety and the levels of sort of how much stress those two years cost is, is, we're just starting to unfold that now, right? You know, like, you know, like some of the work we're doing now is around some of the, the mental health challenges that these kids have that are ramped up and amplified.

34:55So if you look at the stats, you see the study escalation of things like, you know, emotional distress and stress, depression, anxiety for adolescents, something they've always had, and sort of climbing up those two years. And it's the cohort, and it's really almost like three or almost four years. And it's that cohort that you can see how they're, as they are aging, now they are, you know, when you take the five to six, seven, eight year olds who are now nine, 10, 11, 12 year olds. I mean, it's insane. you can see there's a pattern of behavior there. Like the levels of anxiety are higher than ever.

35:34You know, kids using negative coping strategies like cutting or restricting calories. Like those types of things have become massive. And most, any medical professional you talk to, will tell you that, hey, something happened during COVID. Like we can't put our finger on it. But things are going, you know, they're kind of bad and they're kind of climbing up a little bit. But two years of compression, then it just went up like this. So I do think we did some long -term damage in some of our choices during those two years. We had sort of a very idyllic way for our family. We had some positive things that came out of it.

36:09But I think for the entirety of the population, having these kids that are meant to be out there social, interacting with their friends and doing these developmental windows of time, putting them sort of in a contained environment, and I think we did a lot of damage there that is just starting to reveal itself as my views. Let me add another level of complexity and reason to be discontent. I had a great conversation with this guy called Dr. Paul Turk. He's just written in new book, he's an evolutionary pediatrician. So he looks at child rearing from a developmental perspective and also from a medical perspective using an evolutionary lens.

36:48So looks at hunter -gatherer societies and then compares how children would have been raised previously to now. And one of the big differences that you have between developmentally and Sastra versus now is that you would have mixed age cohorts of kids playing together So I understand and I agree you lock kids that are supposed to see other children's faces facial expressions in a house Trying to teach them through an iPad. They don't get out. They don't get there's mom and dad is stressed with they don't know What's going on all of this stuff? They tons and tons of stuff that can go wrong But even before that, you have primed kids, they would not have typically played.

37:24There wasn't enough kids around that were also three. Yeah. To have had an entire group of three -year -olds. They would have been three -year -old, with a five -year -old, and an eight -year -old, and there would have been girls, and there would have been boys. And there's just a much more mixed group, which I think expedites learning for the younger kids and expedites learning of care for the older kids. So you have this sort of switch -routine going on. Whereas if you've got a classroom of between 10 and 35 year olds, well, everybody's going to be at a similar sort of developmental trajectory.

37:55And then when you roll that even more and you thought, okay, let's compare that, and especially that's a bit restricted, perhaps, to what we would have been used to. And now we're going to make it, we can turn that up to 11. So yeah, it doesn't surprise. I mean, look, given that especially for yourself, you tried to make kids happy for a very long time. I imagine that you're quite concerned about what's happening with their mental health now. Usually, I mean, it is so bad, Chris, that we are seeing the pain and damage that is being done to a generation of kids, Jonathan Heide, wrote a great book about this, but it's the world that we've been working in now for the last two years, and it's why we've become mission -driven.

38:41You know, Aura, which is a company that Harry founded, started out about how do you bring safety to, I'm sorry, security to us for consumers online. We're all online all the time in this and we have become, you know, more and more and more vulnerable. If I came to your home and robbed your home, I probably get a little bit of jewelry and no cash and probably some electronics and stuff. But if I broke into your phone and I got your social security or credit card or bank account, I could do extraordinary damage to you. Criminals go fish where the fish are. And if you look at the statistics, I'm just here in America three years ago, So, homerobri was just over $3 billion a year.

39:40And digital theft was just under $3 billion a year. This last year, now, homerobri's are just over $4 billion. And digital theft is over $15 billion. So all of us are getting assaulted left and right. There's no one that you talked about. I promised we have raise your hand in this room. Somebody has had been scammed, fished, something negative has happened to them. We have one of our cinematographers here shaking their head. And if you haven't then it's somebody in your family that has. It's that much of a tidal wave of problems. Well, that was great. And that was, I would say, a great...

40:30There was an opportunity to go solve this problem for consumers. Many companies were out solving it for enterprise for companies where we would hear about JC Penny getting all of their data stolen and this one and that one. Sony had a huge bridge. You know, you know, you're huge, right? So lots and, you know, billions and billions of dollars invested in cyber security. But for consumer, for everyday people, not so much at all. There's been very little innovation. And that was the sort of brilliance that started hurry on this of building or it. But then, and I want him to tell a story a year and a half ago, two years ago, yeah, a 13 year old.

41:14And he should talk about his own experience because this is where the mission driven part of this kicked into gear for us. Yeah, look, I think we're talking earlier about purpose versus mission, right? And so I think being purpose driven, you see a big problem, you say, look, I've got the scale. I'm going to go try to solve it. But the mission part of it again, for me, with one of my four kids, again, this is sort of like the post -COVID thing we were talking about. I do feel I'm both with her friends and with many of the people of her age group. There's both this isolation element we were talking about where they're sitting, you know, they're not mixing with kids their own age or higher age or lower ages.

42:03but there's also this like shift in life from physical to digital. Like, they're on their devices, on their phones all the time all day long. In a not way, like the truth of their lives are not in physical land. It's almost on their device. It's a great take. And we didn't understand this. It's more like a hyper privacy -focused family. We don't look at kids phones. We don't do any of that type of stuff. And you know, it was about two and a half years ago. where she said, hey, I don't feel great, except it's like a February 8th thing. And we said, look, you're in the middle of school, there's a lot of stuff going on.

42:38Let's wait till the summer. Summer rolls around. And we're like, okay, where? It's the summer vacation, like great. There's not as much stress. It actually went the opposite way. She went just completely dipped. Like, it was hard to get her out of bed. She was not in a good headspace, severely depressed. And there was, there was, you know, like, like, we were looking at them, well, we don't know what's going on. Seemed to keep getting worse, you ask her, she's, oh, everything's fine, like, I'm okay, you know, and, but clearly you can see she's not. Then she started going on the path of sort of a bunch of negative coping strategies, like, you know, things that kids ought not to consider, but, you know, things that are happening much more frequently.

43:17And we had no idea. And it got to a point where we said, I think we need to take her in to get care, like, to get treatment. And so we take her in, I drop her off, and I would say probably, this is one of the hardest things I've ever done. Like you take a kid, you drop her off at a facility where you feel like she's struggling and you don't know what to do. It's, you don't know if you're doing the right thing. Come back home, they don't let kids keep phones at this facility. So as a first time I actually looked at her phone, and I said, I can't believe this. This is insane. Like how could we not know this kid's going through so much stuff?

43:49There's so much happening. She's struggling with a lot of stuff. completely invisible. We could not have gas and we said, well, where are we like terrible parents? Like how could this have happened? So that's when we started looking around to say, is this just us or, you know, like, is it happening? It's everywhere now. Like, I think people are starting to talk about it more and more, but the stats are staggering. And so let me, yeah, it's an epidemic. And this experience that they can analogy go back here. You know, when I was growing up, my parents knew where I was, what I was doing and who I was with.

44:29Today, you can have a child teenager sitting across the table from you and you actually don't know where they are, what they're doing or who they are with. They're on the device and maybe physically a hear, but they're not. They're somewhere else. And so when from a parenting standpoint, for so much of the things that we need to do to help our children navigate successfully through all the things that we all go through, you know, that, that, you know, drinking, driving, smoking, drugs, sex, like there, that's life. And as parents, you know, So you have tools, you have insights, you have the ability to help navigate your kids through that.

45:19And what we have found is, is when it comes to social media, there are no tools. And parents are actually right now, they're blind. They have no ability to see what's going on. I, the analogy I use is that when your kid is going to learn to drive, you know, you get a learner's permit, you go to Walmart parking lot with nothing around and you help onboard them. You teach them. You show them the rules of the road. you show them how to respect a vehicle and how fast it can go and how long it takes to stop and all of the various things around it. And there is this process, it actually takes several years before that first moment of a kid sitting behind the wheel of a car and you're giving them the keys to the car and say, you're good to go.

46:20I know you know the rules of the road. In the world of social media and the online world, there are no boundaries. There's no, you have no ability to navigate, to help your kids navigate. And that's the problem that Harry went out to saw. But I want to just frame for you here. That's why I asked him to bring back my phone because we started a beta version of this online safety. So remember, I said we started with online security. And then the mission became out of Harry's personal experience. It was like a hard pivot to let's expand this into how do we protect our kids? Much more important than protecting our bank account.

47:12So there are 2 ,500 kids between the ages of 12 and 17 years old that were on the beta version of this for three or four months starting in January of this year. So that's a pretty wide, 2500's at very good sample, both geographically and otherwise. Here are the stats. 46 % of them are depressed. 35 % have social withdrawal. 22 % are up at night scrolling and being on when they shouldn't be. 30 % with low self -esteem, 22 % have self -harm suicidal thoughts, and the staggering 52 % have eating issues. So 80 % of girls, 18 years old and younger don't like their body shape. 80 % and more than half of them are doing things that are unhealthy or harmful as a result of that.

48:16Have you got any idea? I mean, those are shocking stats, but I always wonder about what the base rate is. So it's stuff like that. Have you got any idea what this would have been like 30 years ago? Yeah, so it's really interesting. There's actually stats that they publish every year around this. The increase pre -COVID to post COVID, like we were talking about before it happened to now. in many of these areas are like several hundred percent. Because it was really interesting, because you asked a really interesting question, because I actually had the same question, which is, hey, like, are we now just better at talking to our kids or identifying these things?

48:47Is this just an endemic part of being a teenage girl, but now we can see this? Now we can see you identify, right? So this is the same question I had, and I was like, well, you know, is it that now, it's become more normal for kids to talk about or have parents much more in tune with it? So we actually went to Boston Children's Hospital, who's one of our big partners, and we said, hey, this is what we're grappling with. What are you guys seeing? Like what are you seeing out on the floor? What are you seeing in the ER facilities, et cetera? There we go. And this is not pretty universal with every hospital is, we're not sure what's going on.

49:18There was sort of life before COVID, life after COVID. Life after COVID, if there were like, you know, 10 kids coming in that had cut themselves so deeply that they need a care, because especially with girls, one of the coping strategies go through this cutting, which has now become very, very prominent. 11, 12 % of the girls cut. They said, there's like 10 in a week. Now we're seeing 100. So to me, I was like, wait, something is actually happening here. Something's happening underneath. Is it a combination of social media, kids being on smartphones, the compression inside a COVID land, but the data is very, very clear.

49:52It's not self -reporting. It's not us identifying more of these cases. Something got messed up. like it's hard and we can't quite tell. Again, I think it's unfair to say, hey, like, you know, the phone made it all bad. It's causal, that type of stuff. Like I don't actually believe that. I think that there are many benefits that come from the technology, but I do think that some of these side effects get massively amplified. And, you know, like with my, with my daughter's eighth grade graduation, the kid that did the speech, her speech was about how she'd been cutting herself for two years. And now she's really excited that she's over it.

50:30They do figure out, they find their way, many of them find their way through it. So it is a real problem. What's your current working hypothesis for this? I mean, you know, Gene Twangies got her thing, Heights got his thing, there's some skepticism around Jonathan's data, which I'm sure that you guys have looked at too. And he's a good friend, I love him, but you know, he's like, there's a lot going on. Well, we have the data. Okay, there's no like ours is not this is not our interpretation or Projection of it. We're actually just seeing hard data where we had 2500 now. We've got 10 ,000 users on it and we're When it comes to a mechanism what what's your you just some potential sort of calls of explanation Yeah, what you think's going on here all global all together type thing I mean, I can kind of give you my perspective again.

51:20This is just a perspective. So take it for what it is. I think that We started giving kids smartphones. If you look at the growth of smartphones and the growth of emotional negativity, there's clearly, it looks very, very correlated. Like one's going up to other ones going up as well. So it almost seems like when you unleash something for it to get to a critical mass and see the follow on effect of it, take some time. Right? I mean, it's like opening Pandora's Box in some ways. Like you open it, it doesn't destroy the world right away. Like it takes some time for things to get around and actually kind of, you know, make things rough.

51:56So I think we've hit this critical juncture now where the amount of time that kids are spending on these, the amount of engagement they're getting from lot more content that's now available, it's hit a tipping point now where, you know, and there's enough proliferation of that across the world that it's starting to now prickly it up. There's always like an underlying theme as kids are going through adolescence, because it's hard, it's just a hard being an adolescent. So there's this amplification element. There is enough of this happened for enough time now that we're now seeing the impact of it.

52:32I think it's been building up by the way, I don't think it's that. It's accelerated. It did a no question. When you, I mean, you just see the amount of, well, one, the devices themselves in terms of usability and uh, um, uh, interactivity. Effectiveness of being compelling. Yes. And the effectiveness of being able to, uh, uh, you know, reach people and to communicate with people and to bring them into different places here. Um, there's so many good things that we can talk about. And so we're not here, you know, uh, looking at social media and saying that it's this bad evil thing. There's just a dark place in it and there and and our kids are particularly vulnerable if they are if they are not helped in navigating their way through it.

53:33So in some ways I think we've kind of hacked ourselves right? I mean that's what's happening. Like I mean you literally have like 10 million engineers whose entire job is to get you more plugged into apps and devices, et cetera. That didn't happen when we were kids that wasn't a thing, right? I mean, now you've got, and again, there's no no shade, but again, like we set up the ecosystem, we told a bunch of really smart incentives are gonna incentive, right? We set up incentives where you say, I mean, if you're a big social media company or doing your earnings. Maximize time on site. Yeah, if you're doing your earnings and you say, guys, we did a great thing.

54:08Like, you know, we made everybody super healthy. We made everybody super healthy, but people choose the things that they want to do if they didn't like it, they wouldn't choose it. Asymmetric warfare though, so it's not quite the right symmetric teases. Yes, I think that we set up the ecosystem. We sort of empowered smart, sort of ambitious people to go in and start hacking us in some ways, right? And so that's happened long enough and there's been enough sort of medium through which you can kind of get this out, which is whether social media, smartphones, or some combination. I think now we're looking at a thing, oh no, like what did we do?

54:45And we did this all without thinking about the guard rails. Yeah. So that's really where we are. Like people turn a figure out, how do you go? Because it's never going back by the way, you can't close the box. This episode is brought to you by Nomadic. Summer is here and travel season is in full swing, but let's be honest, your backpack was probably built for a school field trip, not international adventures, which is where Nomadic comes in. I've been able to travel the world with this bag right here because it's designed by people who actually understand the chaos of being on the move. Everything has its place and no space goes unused.

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55:46That's nomatic .com slash modern wisdom. What's your proposed reason for why it's getting worse over time despite the fact that kids have had social media for a long time? Is it that the current 15 -year -olds have had it for over a decade? Is it simply time and detention? Is it the effectiveness and how compelling these are? is it the distribution? What do you think is going to be? I definitely think distribution is a big part to play in it. And I think that the way we're targeting now has gotten much smarter. Right? So basically, like, let's say, you know, you tell some social media platform in some way, you know, whether it's sort of talking to it or, you know, to clicking on a piece of content that you like, CarRex.

56:24Or you maybe you're doing a project for school and you say, I want to look at a picture of a car crash, right? You look at it. And now, all of a sudden, the engine says, which is last smarter now than it was 10 years ago, Oh, you like car crashes. So the next thing you scroll up a machine at a car crash. Oh, here's another variant of the car crash So you get so now you're sort of in this cycle of feeding that neural pathway With these things that kind of continues you like I would mostly get by the way you like look at them say Did you actually want to see that? Many of us know does a great book a human compatible by Stuart Russell?

56:55Yeah, you read that. Yeah, phenomenal So Stuart wrote the textbook for AI, probably not anymore, actually, I guess, in the modern world of LLM. But this thing got translated into pretty much every language on the planet. And if you wanted to learn how to do coding and how to do AI, you're going to read Stuart's book. And he wrote a couple of sort of popular normal people books. And I learned this fucking terrifying thing from him. It was so interesting. There's two ways the algorithms are able to better predict what it is that humans are going to click on. one is to be able to become increasingly accurate at working out what it is that Jeffrey's going to press on his phone, right?

57:34Like that, this is, I get closer and closer toward your preferences and I deliver to you things which are tighter and tighter aligned to what that is until it's a perfect overlay like this. That's the first one. The second one is that the algo nudges your preferences so that you become more predictable. And this you by directional relationship because this is the crazy thing about any kind of optimizing function, right? It's like get people to click. Yep. Okay. Well, you're not saying how it's just going to do a thing until it works out. And this is how you get, was it move 14 in that leesu don go game?

58:12Well, no one could actually work out. So why did you do that? It's the reward system. Yeah, that's correct. You can't, you get these sort of really orthogonal moves that nobody could have predicted. and one of them would be, well, you can become better at predicting what the user wants, or you can make the user more predictable. And the fact that algorithms are reprogramming users. And this, I think, explains a lot of polarization, extremism, and beliefs. And Chris, human beings have dark thoughts. Little human beings, medium human beings, old human beings. We do have dark thoughts. And this will send you down the rabbit hole.

58:51and once you go down that rabbit hole, it's a very, you can get into super, super scary territory. I mean, we just need to, we need to give parents the tools to help children, get a learner's permit, get their driver's license, and get on the road safely. I mean, I think intuitively, kind of people have figured this out, right? Which is basically, create a neural pathway for a certain kind of action, listening to a certain kind of reaction, just by observation, like you're saying, which is, hey, if I did this thing, what are you gonna do? Can I not measure it? And can I create the probability around it to see if you're gonna do it again?

59:32I'm gonna keep doing that. So I think that what's happened now is we've gotten really good at that. Over decades and decades, so many people doing lots of programming, et cetera. And then what do human beings do? You commercialize. So now you figure out, okay, well, we have the skill, you gotta go figure out how to commercialize it, which means I need more people to look at my thing. That's my main mode of commercialization. And it turns out that kids are easier to program than perhaps you're thinking. Okay, so let's just sort of dig in for a second, I think about Australia's got a social media ban now for under 16.

1:00:09It seems to me that although what you guys are doing with Aura is great and necessary, that the nuclear option is just to go like no social media for anyone under 16. I mean, you could probably for men for males, you could probably look at no social media under 25 and make a justification for that, right? Prefrontal cortex still develop it. Mine feels like it's still going out. Why should we not just be putting all of our efforts into lobbying the fuck out of government to say no social media for anyone under 16? I mean, I think besides the practical elements of can we actually pull it off, right?

1:00:46Which is again a whole another question. It you know, we invented it because there was a reason there's a human reason why this thing came to be know again, you know, like most things for human beings, we push it to the edge and then we push it beyond the edge. And that's just how you know, we're all wired. But you know, there is like I mean, there are kids that are very introverted, you know, there are kids that you know want to have a community that their kids that want that that, you know, have that desire to connect with other humans to learn. to see things, to explore the world. So there is a real need there is just that like everything else we just you know you think about the access to knowledge that comes with being on this device and the fact that that is that barrier just goes down to almost, you know, you could be on the Masai Mara and a, you know, in a hut there and you could actually now have a device in the hands of a kid with the ability to learn and to see and travel the world and travel history.

1:01:51And surely the vast majority of teenagers are not spending most of their time on their devices, is getting it to explain Charles Darwin's origin of species. There's no, but so let me ask you this. So how many hours would you think a kid spends on their device per day? Like somebody between color to 11 and 18? Six. About eight hours. Right. Eight hours of days. So probably more time than they're asleep. Yeah, so I mean, yeah, that's exactly right. And you know, you're awake for, you know, call it whatever, you know, 12, 18 hours a day. And you're spending the majority of it on these devices. And it goes from spot to spot there are, You know, you actually do see kids are spending time learning.

1:02:29They're using Google class. They're using Things to make themselves more productive. There's more language and the link go we do a link We can go on to so many good things here. So this idea that You're just gonna ban it. Hmm. You know for under six. I think don't drive. Yeah, but would there not be a way to I'm not talking about banning phones. We're talking about banning social media like how much is Instagram TikTok, Facebook, how much of these platforms really facilitating learning? I think they facilitate more connection than learning. I would say that's one thing, but like even take this analogy of driving a car.

1:03:04I mean you can take and this actually we're seeing this in the stats too, but if you you can take multiple approaches here, which is hey like driving a car is a scary thing, right? Don't drive the car till you're 25. That's one approach, right? Which again, you know how it's sort of sets up repercussions. There's one that says you know, hey driving a car at 16, but then going through these stages. So you have a healthy relationship with cars, healthy relationship with safety, sort of another approach. But the way that came about was regulated, right? I mean, if there's no regulation, nobody's going to seatbelt.

1:03:35So in some ways, your question around, hey, why doesn't the government intervene and do something about it? I think it's a good question they should, because this is now sort of an epidemic level issue. The search in general's letter two years ago was literally about this issue. They were like, it is the nation's largest epidemic at the moment, you know, mental health for adolescents. But again, there's perverse forces, right? I mean, you've got large companies with incentives, lots of capital, lots of, you know, resources that obviously don't want for this to happen. So that's the dichotomy of the thing.

1:04:08But again, the mission that we got on, which is we're not legislators, we're not politicians and as we're business people and we look at it and said, well, whether or not it should be banned or not banned, we all have our opinions about that. You know, I think again, just going back to the car analogy because it's so simple, which is regardless of whether you're able to drive at 10 or 12 or 14 years, you have to wear seatbelt. Yes, yes, yes. And so our ambition was parents and parents are good at parenting when they have tools, then they have knowledge. And so, for our goal was, let's now use what is the state -of -the -art technology today, which is phenomenal.

1:05:01Again, this is the positive side of it, which is the things that we're able to do today using AI are to be able to read sentiment and insight and observation as opposed to spine because if you spy on your kids, if you're gonna, they're gonna find a way to circumvent us, right? So this is the thing that Harry experienced for himself personally, if I only knew and you hear that over and over and over again, if I just had some insight, I could have helped them navigate. So I'll go back and give you like one of the things that we've learned here is that as our user base gets bigger and bigger, you start to see patterns of behavior.

1:05:47And so we have insights and can be somewhat predictive. Now where we are today versus where we think will be in a year or two or three. Big of a day. Yeah, as a data gets greater than knowledge. Well, so you've, let me give you a great one, Chris, here. because it's so fascinating to me, which is if you're a teenage girl and you download a calorie tracking app, we actually know like that's step one. Now the step one lead to the cliff that you dive off, you know, that somebody will dive off of. No, but it sure is a directional thing. If you as a parent knew that, you could just say, hey, why you tell, you know, Well, not no, don't do that.

1:06:32But what are you trying to get out of that? How is that gonna help you in this in it? And once again, you can be a great parent and help them make their way through it if you just knew that. Well, I'll say two things. I mean, to your question around Australia and the band, if I could go back in time, I would wait to get my kid a smartphone till 16. I think that that's just good, most parents will probably tell you that after they've kind of been through stuff, well, they're teenage kids. It's a hard thing because all their friends get stuff and now you've got all the Coordination problem. I think Heights proposal is you get weird like commune and digital commune.

1:07:08It's families together and you say okay no one's gonna but they can be friends but they you know. But that's what they're doing a lot of schools in California. I don't know how effective that'll be and how much it'll propagate because again they go to you know friends homes that are not in the same school now they have phones. You got all of those types of things. So that's one thing and the other thing I'll say is in this battle at least should have in this battle that we are watching unfold every day, the parents are the front line. So it's not like regulations, all that type of stuff, it's gonna have to work its way to that.

1:07:41But really it's the parents that are in the front line of the problem. So the more they get educated, the more they understand that this is not like a weird thing, it's happening culturally everywhere. And we're all sort of at a loss for what to do. And there's a brewing problem that's happening. and the more that becomes visible to people, say, hey, now I need to actually go learn something. Like I need to go learn how to interact with my kid when these things happen, et cetera. So, and so if you talked a lot of clinicians and psychologists, that's what they tell you. Like, there's 6 ,000 of us, clinicians and psychologists.

1:08:14Case, let's go on up through the roof. Train somebody to be good at that. It's gonna take a long time, right? Decades plus. So where do you find the help? Like, it's the parents. Like, get them smarter on these issues, just get them to understand that, you know, the desire and the motivations there, they want to raise great kids that are happy, they're healthy, you know, so that's, uh, Talk to me about some of the other, uh, insights that you've learned from the data that you've got. I mean, that one around the calorie tracking thing is just fat. It's like about harrowing but fascinating. Yeah, I'll tell you a couple more like, you know, if kids are on social media for half an hour before they go to sleep, their sleep is interrupted more often.

1:08:52How are you tracking sleep? So basically when kids wake up they pick up their phone so we see traffic on their on their device Or if they have a wearable we can track that that information as well if they're gonna go to sleep We see for example like a really interesting thing We do see that if there is a lot of activity outside of your digital life It's a huge positive thing like so you could be on your phone for four hours a day If I was fine, they're also going playing sports and you're you know hanging out with your friends and playing soccer like those types of things are very common. How do you know if they're doing that?

1:09:21Because you can tell on geotracking where they're out and about basically, so you can start a little more. Oh, okay. As opposed to the person who's just in at home for most of the day. Just rolling the whole time. Like on their devices, and you could see the amount of activity that they have, right? And then other interesting to be, I'll give you boys and girls are very different. The patterns are quite distinct for the two. Boys that are on gaming platforms for long windows of time don't seem to have the same negative outcomes as girls on social media. Why? I think it's because for boys, it developmentally, I think it is sort of a way of interacting their own bunches on these platforms.

1:10:01It's just like, you know, like it's more close to real life in some ways. There's not as much, hey, look at this person doing this thing, you know. So when girls and social media, it becomes what is this view of how I should be because I'm seeing this influencer be a certain way. They have a million followers. They're doing these types of things. And so that seems to somehow end up driving behavior a bit more in girls. And again, we're only talking about in this window of time, like we're just like, you know, 12 to kind of 16, 17. But those are, I mean, really interesting to us that, you know, because if you know these things, if you have a boy, you're like, okay, well, this is kind of the stuff we need to go do to make sure this kid's okay, you know, type of thing.

1:10:39So, and here's a kind of fascinating because we're talking about, you know, what's drove us into this area is watching sort of these 10 to 18 -year -olds, but here's really interesting thing about it, which is so that we're focused on at first because that's where it's a crisis. I mean, it's just a synomity of just tragedy, right? But interestingly enough, Wouldn't you be interested in somebody objectively giving you insight and analysis of your online behavior, meaning how much time you're spending on there? What are the things that you are doing that are healthy around that? What are the things that you are doing that have negative implications?

1:11:27Like a wearable track if you're a digital consumption. And so like again, because that's very much more like a theme. I know you're very sort of passionate about, which is like creating people that can be their best self. Right. So it's not just physical, you know, kind of your mental state, your emotional state. We don't get a lot of data on that. There's no observation about that in it. So today, actually, that's the beauty of, you know, this is where the innovation of tech is phenomenal in this. And what's your, how are you going to work that out? how can people learn more about themselves?

1:12:03So like for example, you look at, so we now have a system where we can run models locally on your phone. So based on patterns, what apps you're using, how you're using them, except we'll never send the data out of your phone basically, we'll do the compute locally that says, okay, well, here's sort of what your work life balance sort of looks like because you see what work apps you're using, what personal apps you're using. We can say when you're on these things, you know, all your patterns of behavior and relative to your mental. And like even sentiment right so we look at it and say like when you're on these things doing this kind of work You're not at all notice that your mood is actually sort of how do you know mood?

1:12:37So we do a sentiment composite and you can do it with a lot of features even things like how fast you type on your phone You know how hard you push the keys no way Yeah, so you can get all these markers that basically say hey like you know or the frequency like you know Let's see you're in an angry mood and you know how quickly you're responding back to somebody right If the user allows, we can also get text and we can look at the text as well, which again is up to the user if they want to or not. So you take all these things, it's almost like a... And you feed it back to you in a possible way, in a usable way, where the language that comes back to you is in a coaching manner.

1:13:14I'm under the... Chris, yesterday, you were not having a great day. Something happened along the way here. you know, you went to a store, you know, got in a tried exchange, something you got in our like, yeah, it will And then I look for it for myself So where are you out with the how how that's net? We want to get through the teenage thing which we just launched right? That's the fourth quarter of this year sort of the first first MVP of it come on. I was showing Luke This and he was like, I really need this for my Okay, I need to I do need to call this out. So Luke regularly posts, whatever the opposite of a flex is, he posted 12 hours of screen time 10 hours of which was on WhatsApp, previously if you follow him on Instagram, but he'll famously compare that to his sleep.

1:14:04So he had twice as much screen time as sleep time for a little bit of it. I mean, look, I think that that idea of some kind of wearable tracker before anything, We can see a little bit of the insights from a wearable coming out of, you know, your activity. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that I would, I would use that in a hot bag. That wearable is actually more about your physical, of course, the algebra. This is actually about your mental, right? We can tell now by that eight hours a day, what you're doing on that device, your state of mind, you're, you know, when you're happy, when you're not. What's making that?

1:14:45I don't know whether you're going to break some degree of data protection. You can use front -facing camera to do micro expression stuff. You could. I think there's a little bit when you start looking at images, there's CSAM regulations that you have to worry about when TikTok's got it in that type of service. Honestly, I think that even just tabulating stuff and saying here's what we're seeing for broad patterns, we see users like, wow, I didn't know that. That's really like Luke posting, you know, even Shrene Time to eat. Yeah, yeah. You know, which I, I mean, I'm using external apps because even though Apple's tried to become more sophisticated with screen time and limitations, it's not good enough.

1:15:21Yeah. So you know what I always think about? It's so funny. You remember when, but before there was the torch function on your home screen? Yeah. There was third party apps. Yep. There was a torch that had worked out. Oh, you, I think you went and recorded a video, but didn't press the video thing and turned the torch on. You know, you had to jailbreak your own iPhone in an attempt to try and get it to do the thing you wanted it to do. And it seems to me like this is another situation where the lumbering Leviathan behemoth that is a combination of governmental regulation, tech, cultural inertia understanding what it is that parents should be doing.

1:15:57All of these things can't keep up quickly enough, which is precisely the sort of entrepreneurs do. Yeah, you get out of this. They find a lane. Yeah, that's a good point. See where something is missing. and just innovate like crazy around that idea. Even at some point maybe these behemoths will be motivated by what we are doing to take on some of the stuff. We saw this with the link tree. You're in a link tree? So it was like a way for you to have a very simple listing of a bunch of different links. So in Instagram you could only have one link on your bio But lots of people wanted to link to multiple things maybe you're a recording artist You wanted your new album and you wanted your most recent live set and you wanted your merch and you wanted your website You wanted your email form or whatever it was and link tree allowed you supers in no coding needed You know dragon drop like making another social media thing and you would press that this thing was worth It was Australian company.

1:16:59It was worth a couple of billion Simple problem day one day day one worth a couple of days a thousand worth a couple of billion Next morning, they wake up to find out that Instagram has incorporated a little links onto that bio. So you have to be smart about it because you have to be able to see that at some point the trend will change. So it's really interesting to us because again, the existential issue is, hey, as a company, as a human being and as a dad, we would welcome this very much. Obviously, all of the social media companies kind of integrating together and saying, let's make sure everybody's safe.

1:17:34But if you're looking at it from an entrepreneur company lens, right, you say, okay, well, what happens if they just copy, they just look at this as it's really good. We should do this for all our users. They go to what you're talking about with Linkry, right? It's a really interesting thing that we see. Like if you do one thing and that's the purpose of the one thing, basically, and it's broad enough thing that you're doing not just drag and drop in a link, but hey, like we can really tell you sort of emotional, mental, well -being, et cetera. users gravitate to worst things that you are hyper focused on and very good at, let's say, I'm just making this up, Apple decides that this is all available out of the box, which, like you know, you look at a life 360 and fine mine.

1:18:15Right? Fine mine is available for free. Life 360 is a $4 .5 billion dollar company. They solve the one case, which is, where's my kid? Like, I want to know where my kids are. But they've doggedly focused on the one use case. So users say, okay, well, the services are better now in my mind, If I need that, I gotta, so you gotta get there early enough and it's gotta be broad enough and you gotta make sure that you sort of imprint in the user's mind that hey, like, you know, when you have this problem come to us Which is why you know we have amazing storytellers like Jeffrey and our work is you gotta get the story kind of out there So a bunch of other people like Robert Downey, Jr Yeah, it's been a ride just working through this with Jeff.

1:18:53I was trying to go to the good time I'll tell you a funny tidbit. While we were trying to get people on our board, Jeffery is helping us quite a bit, especially for people that had big platforms. So Jeffery said, we should talk to Tom Hanks. And so, okay, that sounds good. So I will come out to Philadelphia. I go out to Philadelphia. We're sitting at breakfast with Tom and Rita and Jeffery sort of going through stuff. And Tom Hanks says, oh, I'm going to go to the White House to see if they can see the president. And so Jeffery said, oh, I just came from there last week. And so now Tom Hanks is like, I'm going to write to a Jeffries.

1:19:27I'm going to write you a letter. You should take it and give it to the president when you see him today. So there's a letter. His phone rings. I look down and it says sir Elton John. I'm thinking I'm like twice. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we've had lots of great sort of you know such things where Jeffries has been a huge part of like getting us plugged into this world of people that sort of you know have original large platforms that they can get you know sort of ideas out. There's that through Jeffrey as well. Those are the quick aside, if you haven't been feeling sharp or energized as you'd like, getting your blood work done is the best place to start, which is why I partnered with Function.

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1:20:35And for the first thousand modern wisdom listeners, you get another hundred dollars off, making it $399. So you can go to the link in the description below or head to functionhealth .com slash modern wisdom. That's functionhealth .com slash modern wisdom. I remember just going back to the speed of typing, which again, you're all fucking alone, my mind. I remember reading an article about Chinese health insurance companies using the accuracy of users on the website, inputting their data when they apply and big data sets now, correlation stuff to go, oh, is this early onset out Ximers? There's some neurological decline that you've got in here.

1:21:24So you can see how this could be data's data, right? And you can draw correlations wherever you want, but the fact that you guys can do it to try and intervene. And I certainly think as well, people feel like there is a, at best, slightly adversarial relationship with most technology going down to what was like an outright malicious intent by people are on the other side of it. And if you were to say, I'm going to Africa, I'm going to spend some time in Africa. Okay, what are the things that I'm going to do to allow me to enjoy the best bits of Africa and protect myself from the worst bits? Well, I'm probably gonna get some deep mosquito spray and I'm probably gonna wear long sleeves and I'm probably okay So what have I got?

1:22:10I have something that helps me to experience the good bits But protect me from the bits that I don't want. I feel like most people don't almost no one knows how to code Yeah, and even if you do know how to code your iPhone's pretty robust at stopping you from getting in there I'm fucking with it unless you want a jailbreak in which case the whole thing becomes unusable. So I think giving, and I'm sure that you've considered this before, but giving some degree of power back to users around what it is that they want would be phenomenal. And then, you know, roll the clock forward a little bit more.

1:22:42Can we get to the stage where we can choose our own algorithms a little bit? We're starting to see tiny little glimmers of that. Yeah, I mean, like the notion of like even with doom scrolling, right? It's like a very simple concept. I think it was like maybe it was a pen curse, maybe it was the first one that came up with which is this concept of what's not what's talking about that, like the car crashes, right? You're scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. A very simple thing which says, you actually want to see this content, or do you want to see something else, right? And if people say, no, I actually never want to look at a car crash, I was just doing it for homework.

1:23:08You say, no, now the algorithm says, I'm going to show you something different. So that's taking a little bit of control back, right? But it's actually a very powerful thing, because now you can say, okay, well, I know I need the dopamine head. I'm going to keep pushing and scrolling, but now the social media company is giving you a little bit of power back to actually go a little bit at something else. So when you say, hey, can you take some of these algorithms and sort of work them backwards? You know, more of those types of things that should be very good for users, I think. Right. Yeah. What about younger kids?

1:23:39Have you looked at the classic story, parent with crying child in restaurant, iPad in front of child? How concerned are you about, I don't even know what you call it, infant use? I mean, it's totally easy. You're teaching them the patterns from early on, right? And again, it's hard. Like, I definitely see why you do it because this kid screaming or in the rush and trying to get dinner and you know, you gotta make sure that you're gonna play again. I'm just like, after you try a few things, like here's your iPad, go play on it. But I do think that if it's unregulated where that becomes the norm, you're now teaching them sort of something.

1:24:16Like, you know, it's like teaching them that, you know, when you feel bad, you should go to a device. when you feel like you can't cope with their emotions, like that's how you do it. So with every one of these actions you're doing it, so, but that being said, we're all social, like we all wanna be out with our friends, and we wanna make sure our kids can get involved with that too. So it's not a trivial thing on how to sort of, you know, make that work, but I do think there's some negative things that are coming out of that as well, because I think we're teaching them that you can start relying on this for emotional support.

1:24:48Those, again, I don't know whether this is Jonathan Heitz, work or somebody else is talking about how kids are affected developmentally when they see parents phone go off and parent look at phone. You've seen this study I'm talking about. I don't know the specific one, but we've heard many of these things, which is basically with kids, especially when they're like eight or ten on above. You can tell them a lot of stuff, I'm going to put limits on your phone, I'm going to do They're looking at going, okay, well, you're telling me one thing. So when I get a bit older, I can do that. So you're kind of teaching them a different thing, basically.

1:25:24So I do think that that's why we kind of went down this adult path. Well, there's not, she's not just the kids. We want to make sure that adults are also self -aware. And again, if you're of a certain age, you may not have gotten hooked on it early enough. So you might have actually developed some patterns where you're like, okay, I know how to put the phone down because I grew up during a time when I didn't have a phone. So I kind of learned that skill. They're talking about these kids are on their iPads at 6 .78. That is native. That's how they're growing up. You never teach them about their side.

1:25:52It's made a great point about this, the digital world is the real world for these. And there's a great girl, Freya India. She writes with Jonathan Height around 25 British girl, Ferry Clever. And she, I was bringing up to her about a common criticism. why young girls especially, I think so affected by what happens online. This isn't even real life. Can they not have a little bit more resilience? And she made the same point you guys have, which is, well, they spend more time on digital devices than they do in the real world. So the digital world is their real world. It's more real than the real world.

1:26:33Yeah. I think that's the switch that hasn't gone off broadly, by the way, because people, it's It's amazing to me because I'll be at a dinner, it'll be like 10 couples and a bit of parents and say, I mean, if you think that your kids are doing really well and everything is great, all 10 will raise their hands. And it's statistically not possible. It's just not possible. So I looked at them and say, well, there's an underlying thing because when they're on their device, physically they seem safe. So parents just kind of check out, they're like, they're fine. They're just like on their phone. I don't like it.

1:27:06They're not taking drugs, they're not having a night. Yeah, but there's like stuff happening there that's the same impact as you know like like taking a drug And dodgy drugs just not yeah, yeah, yeah, it's such a stress Yeah, I uh, I think when it comes to Where are people going to get the sense of control from especially around what it is that their kids do I imagine I have to imagine that for most parents they feel like it's kind of like a I don't even get started here. I have this choice between being a social isolationist tyrant that forces my child to be a fucking liddite or a dopinging endogenous dopinging dealer that's going to commit them to a life of social anxiety and depression.

1:27:56I mean, I think the guard railing concept is what appeals to me the most personally. We just sort of the reason we went on this direction, which is you know like if you You can't put the thing back in the box It's there like we're in it now like it's gonna be there like you can try lots of you know little hacks along the way saying Oh, let's not give you know kids kids a device until they're 16 we can ban it etc The difficult thing is it's not a universe and people don't believe it's like a bad thing like cigarettes You know at some point when you believe that everybody is bad people mobilize around it.

1:28:29There's a lot of people that think that devices are actually good for their kids and it's good for them because they can go to dinner and then give their kids devices, etc. So in that type of an environment, at the best I think we can hope for is empowered them and give them the tools so they understand kind of what's happening because when you understand it, you say, okay, I see what's happening. I can now intervene and I give them because most parents who talk to they just say, look, I don't know what to do but I have no idea. Yeah, like, and we see it, like 30 % of moms, usually moms, when their kids go to bed, will pick up their phones and spend 45 minutes looking through to see what the kid was doing.

1:29:04So what are they actually doing? Oh, that's the current solution. Well, they're a third of them. Yeah, so they go through and now it's like, you know, you're a parent, you're a one, don't have time for anything. Now you gotta come up to 45 minutes. You don't know what you're looking for, it's needle and haystack too, you know? Wow. Yeah. Okay, so I guess one area that we haven't talked about yet That is the social, relational content of what's going on. I think especially for young girls, this seems to be an area of concern. The way that girls interact with each other on social media, the comparison, the ostracization, the sort of back biting social dynamic that I'm very glad that I wasn't a female to have to navigate through.

1:29:48Yeah. Have you thought about what some potential interventions are to tune down the more negative behavior that happens socially on digital devices? Yes, we think about this a lot. In the sense that when you know what the mood is of a child when they're going through certain things, right? So like think of like a utopian state. Like you know, a kid wakes up in the morning, they are super happy. Everything that day is going great, everything's positive, right? So they kind of think of that as the North Star for this kid, right? Then start reverse engineering to say, okay, well, where are the different things that are chinking away from this kid to not get to that place?

1:30:27Oh, we noticed that you spend three hours today on social media and we see that your mood dipped, right? When we compare that to a day where you only spend 30 minutes, your mood was really good, right? So you can come up with a bit of a blueprint for that child where you say, if we can kind of in a craft, they're dating this sort of a way with their device, and they're only talking about devices here, that seems to have the best possible outcome. Again, the physical world we can't know we're not in that zone. So if you can create that sort of customized blueprint, and then give parents the tools saying, hey, you know what, you ought to set up a time limit where your kid shouldn't be able to look at Instagram for 30 minutes before bed.

1:31:03Those types of things are starting to kind of give the parents some tools to now understand, and that kind of set things up. That's really outcome based, because you're at that point you're saying, hey, like I'm driving towards making sure my kid is, actually thriving and doing really well and objective way. And again, the tools are meant to be incredibly flexible in that every child and frankly every parent is going to have their point of view, their perspective about what level of insight and what level of control do they want. And the level of insight and controls you want of a 12 -year -old are quite different from a 17 -year -old.

1:31:46And so being able to not only at the outset, but as again, again, go back to the easiest thing here on the driving analogy here, which is as you see your child getting better and better and being responsible, reliable, whatever those things are, you start, you step further further away from your oversight. And that's what the tools allow every parent to have a bespoke relationship with their child at a given moment in time. I mean, it's sort of like a nicoderm patch in some ways, right? It's probably the more perverse example of it, which is, you know, like you start with step three, then you work down to step two, then you know, or maybe sob as a way, you know, one at a three.

1:32:35At some point, you're like, go get them off the patch, which is really what you're trying to do is get these kids not to get hooked on habits that are negative for them while not having to throw away all the goodness that comes with it. Like your, you know, Africa example is something I don't know. I guess another interesting element here, Jeff, you've spent your life around high achievers and celebrities. I think the most common job is to top five most common jobs, at least two or three of them is something to do with becoming famous, becoming an influencer, becoming a YouTuber. What do most people not realize about the reality of fame and attention in that way?

1:33:17Well, I think that fame is fleeting. It's good moments and it's bad moments. I've watched it Now for decades, particularly around stardom of whether it's any type of artist, writer, director, producer, actor, actress, TV, musician, bands, this sort of rollercoaster that celebrity has. It's brutal. And, you know, it's a very challenging thing emotionally, I think, for anybody to go for an athlete. You know, you think of these ups and downs that you have. And you know, mine just as always, as best one can, don't let the highs take you to highs and don't let the lows take you too low and for the most part it's not fatal.

1:34:26For me I've always believed that I've learned more from my misses and my failures than I have from my successes and they've made me very, very, very resilient, very. How do you ensure that misses and failures get alchemized into something that's useful for you as opposed to become a trauma or an issue that you hold onto a star. I believe in owning my failures. I think it's important to not look to point fingers at others. And remember, those 400 movies, 80 percent of them were dogs.

1:35:08The only one that has a pretty stellar track record are the animated ones because the process is It's frankly just much more generous in terms of producing something of quality and success more reliably. But movies, television, music, they're brutal. And so maybe that's just the armor that you get that you wear that you learn. and I've had those super high moments and super lows. It's probably the moment of my early in my career, my greatest success at Disney. I got fired. It's kind of crazy. When you look at the summer of 1994, the biggest movie in the world was Lion King, the biggest soundtrack in the world.

1:35:56It was the soundtrack from Lion King. The number one TV show was Home Improvement. Beauty and the Beast was a hit show on Broadway. way, uh, tool time was the number one book. I'm like, like, just anywhere you could go in the world of culture and, and, and, and, you know, uh, uh, uh, creative, you know, measures, you know, we were sort of, you know, it was like a, what, you know, what they call it, like a goat moment. I got fired. It was a grand slam. Yeah. I got fired. Can you tell me the story behind that?

1:36:33It's a Shakespeare. It's complicated. I think, you know, for me, I try to, as I said, own it, move on. I've sort of had two different missions. And I've had one became like a sort of my motto and later in life, and one was sort of my mission in my day to day. And so my motto in the sort of later in life is never let your memories be greater than your dreams. And so I get up every day and genuinely, I'm excited about today, I'm excited about tomorrow and next week and I actually don't have a very strong memory gene. It's very, very weak. I don't reminisce unless you ask me questions. There's not a morning that I wake up and I like shrek is like my mind or beauty and beast or lion king or pretty woman or any of these things.

1:37:38It's just not. It's fine. I've not been working with Jeffrey Watts in a seven, seven, in half years, and I'd probably talk to him every day. And people ask, what's it like? And to me, it's the most amazing thing, like somebody that's done as much as he is, I don't think we have ever, in the last seven years, we've actually talked about the past at all. It's always what's coming, like what's coming. The full focus. Yeah, so what did you guys learn from working with each other?

1:38:07Well, I've watched a brilliant entrepreneur, or which I'm a builder, I've been a builder my whole life and watching a fellow entrepreneur go from nothing to something and to then into greatness. It's just, you know, Hari is setting still waters run deep. He runs deep. You can see it in these conversations. He has a great empathy. And that empathy is what's revealed in his last couple of years just in watching how he has externalized a very difficult personal experience and managed to turn that to something so positive. It's amazing, admirable quality to have, not that many people do. and so I hope to be like Jeffrey when I get older.

1:39:09It's like the amazing work ethic I've never seen anything like Jeffrey works seven days a week, 15 hours a day, like the level of follow through on stuff, the level of engagement, when you have a problem, and we have, we have, you know, world class investors, we have, you know, very smart people that have helped us build many things in the past, but I know that if I call him, He'll pick up, he'll come, you know, help he'll roll up his sleeves. He's there, which is great to know And I have seen sort of some of the ups and downs like in between some of the early sort of investments like Quibi, etc and sort of the Grace with which he comes out of it like you know when he says oh like I own the problem That's like from you know, we've never really talked about this But you know, jack totally from the outside.

1:39:57That's how I've always seen it which is why like a lot of people spend a lot of time trying to position massage and make a bad thing look good and it's a lot of energy and effort. It's so much easier to just say, hey, like, I messed up, like, that's what it is. I, you know, and he did that so gracefully and I thought that's a good lesson. I've always probably, I think I've probably always gotten too much credit for the successes that I've been associated with. It's made me feel like, okay, well, should own your garbage. So it's also great around a team. Not everybody has that resilience. I always say I have rhino skin.

1:40:40It's very hard for me to feel that pain. I've built that up over the years. As I said, you learn that these things are, you pick yourself up been, you know, you climb the next mountain. And, you know, I'm always looking forward. I was looking forward to this morning and coming and meeting you and having this conversation with you and, you know, just follow a little bit of what you've done with your career to me. It's like, wow, I'm a lucky guy today. This is fun for me. This is exciting and interesting. And we can be here evangelizing something that we think is just going to make the world a better place, you know, to get up today and to be able to be on a mission to help parents be more successful and bringing up this generation of kids.

1:41:30Wow, like what could be more rewarding? I was talking to Luke actually, bullying is something that I've been very interested in, not in doing, but in trying to fix. And the couple of really great researchers, Tony Volk is one of them. Tracey Vyingkor is another, she's the head of Canada's Antibullian Association. There's some really wonderful evidence -based interventions now because they've tried to reduce bullying in schools and the dynamic of why it happens, how come it seems to stop as people grow up, why is it worse at these particular ages, what's the typical dynamic? It's an algorithm, not too dissimilar to the one that you guys have just slightly less precise.

1:42:09Well, we actually have it and we can tell if you're a people. We can identify it literally. really fix it basically, which I think is some of the... Tell me more. Yeah. Well, we can identify what sort of triggers kids have that sort of, you know, make them push more into bullying. So, for example, like with games, like with boys, for example, that's a pretty prevalent thing that we see. Like, they're on their headsets, you know, they're talking, it's just, you know, like a lot of camaraderie. And you can see for certain kind of kids with certain sort of usage and behavioral patterns that they just push us past the line like it pushes past line You can see you can identify it you can see that that's happening because we actually can look at all of the The Somebody's being abusive.

1:42:56Yeah, right to some of the games Well, no, so you can you can see that they're being Abusive were one of the big feature markers that we see are their behavior during video gaming ends up becoming a highly predictive feature for some of the things that we see in other behaviors. Because for us continuously, it's basically the causal pieces, which is a like, what are the things that are markers for us that tell us that there is a certain kind of behavioral good or bad, right? It's about positive or negative. So in our models, one of the things we see is, you know, kids that tend to be a lot more remunctious during games that are much more, again, in that context is completely fine.

1:43:33They're not bullying or anything like that. tends to be a big marker for cyberbullying outbound basis. Yeah, I mean, it's a huge passion. And so one, you can see it two ways. You can see outgoing behavior that has bullying in it, but more importantly, you can see when it's in the end. Yeah. Right. So immediately, and that's the great thing about this is there are certain things that are red lines. So anything that is actually physically or mentally harmful to your child on the device, it'll instantly alert you. Right. So that'll, you, so, and bullying being one of the sentiments that you can tell or anything that's predatory, you know, new pictures.

1:44:27all of those toxic things, it instantly spots that and puts that in front of the parent. That's a danger zone. There's one thing about sentiment and guidance. The other is, wait a minute, you just jump the stop sign. Stop for a stop sign. That could be fatal. You know, like there's a really interesting thing which is I think you asked a question earlier about how much of this are we Like self identifying now because you know, we were just smarter and more in tune with it I have not run the data But I would guess and I am curious and I will go check check it out and see what it says That no one problems like bullying that have been around for a while or sexual predators for example that have been around a while I think the system has figured out how to guard rail that better where it's not increasing at the same time of the story as some of the more new ones like, you know, hey, like cutting or restricting calories or, you know, like behavioral sort of, you know, adaptations from overusing stuff, which is very hopeful, which means that, you know, when parents kind of get more aware of these things, and then it's hard to guard real, maybe you can cut cool.

1:45:41You need to expedite the learning for parents as well here. That's exactly right. Have you got an idea of a training parents on how to intervene, how to have these conversations also. Yeah, we spent a lot of time on that, which is basically, I think we're trying to answer three questions. The first one is, is my kid safe? That's the first primary question. The second is, there are on these things all day long, what are they doing on this stuff? What's actually happening on these devices? And the third is the thing you're asking, which is, what can I do about it? Right? And so there's some sets of interventions that go from, depending on where the child is in spectrums, the child is sort of on the really distressed side.

1:46:20We do a sort of a set of resources online where they can go talk to other parents that can accelerate the learning, they can ask questions. We have clinicians that go in our staff questions and we pay for it. And there's things like CBT or DBT, which are formal learning programs that if the parents even if they do like a quick 30 minutes on CBT, like when our child was going through So we did 23 weeks of an hour a week for the whole family of DBT. It's a dialectical. So it's basically for kids that are going through, like cognitive, sort of the more the mental part of the dialectical is more. Also coming up with a framework and a language that we can all speak, saying, hey, like, I'm distressed.

1:47:04I know what your signals are. What words you're going to say to me that makes me going to understand that. So it was really helpful. And so some of the things, I mean, like the kids were rolling their eyes and saying, I don't I have to do this, but at the end of that 23 weeks, I felt like they just sort of subconsciously like learn a lot from it, they don't say a lot about it. And as a parent, like we learned a lot, so it accelerated our journey a little bit. So I think for a lot of parents, if we can get that into a mode where you don't have to spend, you know, 23 weeks like learning it, but can you get like a lot of the justific out there in 30 minutes type of thing?

1:47:35So, oh. It's really interesting to think about what sort of parenting can be accelerated by this. And yeah, the bullying piece in particular, I think, is so important. What makes you exactly? So I was bullied as a kid. Classic, only child syndrome where you're under -socialized, spoke differently to the place that I was from, went to a very sort of rough and ready primary school, state school, sixth -home college. I think maybe two other people from my entire 200 person, your group in secondary school went on to university. So it was a very sort of low rate of higher education and that was something that I wanted to do.

1:48:18So you just stand out in a variety of different ways. I played cricket, which wasn't massively but you know, it's a fantastic way to make yourself cool and work a working class school to play cricket when everyone else wants to play football or rugby. And yeah, I look, like many of the things that we appreciate in ourselves, I think, are born out of the challenges that we've gone through. And if you look at butterfly effect your way back, you realize that if you're happy with what you are now, that you have to be happy with what you were done, because without that the likelihood of you ending up here probably would be a little bit lower.

1:48:54or you don't know whether this was determined or simply coincidence. But it's something that I really just want to give, especially to kids that feel alone, especially kids in the UK. I just really want to try and help some young boy or girl that does not feel like they have anywhere to turn, that doesn't feel like anybody's got their back to try and take it takes so long as an adult to re -learn shit that could have taken you a couple of months as a kid. And you're having to forcibly go through this very sort of slow cognitive process of, hey, other people might have your best interest at heart.

1:49:38Hey, if you're struggling, you can speak to someone. Hey, if things are bad, perhaps you should call it, frankly, it's this very the laborious, conscious, front -brain thing, because as a kid, the physics of your system won't set up in such a way as to that, for that to be implicit. And I think that the level of safety and reassurance that you have that just sort of follows you around through life, it's way easier to not have to relearn that, or to learn that for the first time as an adult, as opposed to just assuming it as a kid. It has an impact on how you're even learning to ask for help. If you go through an experience like that, I suspect it's a little harder.

1:50:19Because you just didn't establish the pattern. You don't think anyone's got your back. So you think it's okay. And then you've got this bizarre scenario where you start dating and you've got weird secrets from a partner. And you go, why have you got this? It's all because you've never learned to be able to open up to someone. And it just percolates through so much. And that, you know, you can't lay at the feet so much if this is just personality. It's not to say that you've been puppeted by people that were in school. Yeah. But I, it's definitely a passion project of mine at the moment. And I'm currently in conversation with the head of a group that looks after I think about 100 schools in the north, the north of the UK.

1:51:04And we're looking at trying to do some of these evidence -based bullying interventions. and if you guys have got a tech platform that can further propagate that holy shit, if you could say, hey guys, if you put this on your phones, then you're going to end up. Yeah, we'll talk to you about this sort of offline. I think there's some cool things we could do there just for identity. Have you guys got, do you watch Adolescence? I did. I have very strong opinions around Adolescence. Very strong opinions. Watch it. Okay, let me give you my, Let me give you a little bit of spiel and adolescence. I've spent a lot of time in and around the sort of fringes of the manosphere, in one form or another.

1:51:46I'm often accused of being a part of it, despite the fact that they hate me. I've never identified as one of them. But I guess if you're a guy that gives advice to guys online, that you get classed as that. Couple of problems that you have around it. The main one being the type of language that was being used to motivate why this boy committed a murder during the series was it didn't seem at any point that he actually intended to go and do this thing. It seemed like a very accidental killing. That was what happened. That this boy had a knife, but he didn't mean to get the knife. His friend just kind of had it on him.

1:52:24He didn't mean to go and hurt this girl. it was simply an accident as the physical altercation began, but all of the post -show reaction was around what this is evidently motivated by the content that he's been seeing online. It was only slightly -paid lip service to ward how that had contributed to it. We've actually looked at the situation itself as it was fictionally portrayed by a fictional boy killing a fictional girl in a series. That didn't really seem to tie together, but because it's quite a trendy line to say the young boys are broken and misogyny is rampant and these 13 year olds are repressing our daughters and so on and so forth.

1:53:09That got that that that was a narrative that was taken around with it. And I don't know whether you saw I think it was this morning or good morning or BBC question time. Kemi Badenak is a British politician and a bunch of other people. raked over the calls by morning question time presenters saying, you're telling me that you haven't taken time to watch this documentary. And she holds a finger up and goes, not a documentary. And they go, you haven't taken time to watch this is one of the most important cultural moments later in the same conversation. This documentary is one of the not a documentary.

1:53:46It's like, you know, in the same way as we should be concerned around and ogres that live in fucking swamps. Like it has the same amount of real world accuracy as one of those. Now, is it tapping into some trends? Absolutely. Is this stuff that we should be interested in? I think it's interesting. The ogres don't live in swamps. Ah, that's true. Misinformation.

1:54:12I get slightly concerned about creating such a huge cultural moment over something that's a fictional piece of work. It is hugely open to interpretations. Stephen Graham meant to do this. It's beautifully done, because you just do this thing. There's purposeful obfuscation and there's voids that are left in the story. You don't fully understand why it is that the boy did the things that he did. What his motivations were, where he came from, comes from an intact home, very, very rare. Comes from a good background, didn't seem like there was that much abuse. Dad shouts sometimes, Holy shit, like, you know, that's a life that many kids would have dreamed to have had as opposed to the one that they grew up in.

1:54:52But it's being used as some sort of landmark event to explain where young boys are going wrong. Have you bothered speaking to young boys about what they're actually that concerned about? Yeah. Or are you using a very successful, highly fictional series to inform policy? it's we're going to show this around the UK. This should be shown in every school. It's fucking, it's rated 15. So you're going to show it to 11 year olds and 12 year olds and 13 year olds and 14 year olds and 15 year olds that maybe aren't ready to see it. You're going to show them this thing that at some points to me is like, that's kind of a little bit disturbing.

1:55:35Like that was, you know, you get, it gets a heart rate going a little bit. So you just, it not blown out of, I had a lot of conversations around it. Fascinating, really, really interesting cultural moment. Probably going to be the beginning, I would guess, of more conversations like this. But I think what you guys are doing, the approach of people like Tracy and Tony with evidence -based interventions, what are we actually seeing on the ground? What does the data tell us about the sort of sentiment analysis that we can derive from this? What's the kind of language these kids are using? You know, like actually what is the language?

1:56:16Yeah, look at it. It's a lot easier to jump on a train that's already moving, right? I mean, I haven't watched the show, but you know, sort of the way you're describing it, it just seems like this is like in the mainstream, right? I mean, and it's sort of easier for us to just villainize something. You know, like, because it just makes it easier for us to like, you know, point of finger. And just say, okay, like that's why what's happened. like that's, you know, that's, that's juffle. It's like, you know, it's like, that's the, that's the, that's the bill. It is. But I think, I think a little bit, it's never like, it's, it's, it's really, interesting because we do these like, wellness labs with kids at the Boston University Hospital.

1:56:58We bring in kids of like, different ages, you know, starting like 8, 9, 10, up to like 18 different socioeconomic backgrounds. We bring a different set of parents in. And so we, we do the set up. And like a lot of them, you ask them say, hey, like, you know, what do you think the impact of social media is in your life? They're like, I'm so tired of talking about this. Everybody thinks that because I'm on social media, my entire life is garbage because that's, that's like the villain. Like, you know, I'm so tired of talking about my smartphone being the worst thing, you know, in my life, I got a lot of stuff going on.

1:57:31You know, that's one part of a much bigger composite, right? And so, and again, you know, there's definitely an amplification element that's happening from these devices, et cetera. But I think sometimes that's why I'm careful to say like, nobody knows that it's causal. Like we all see that it's amplifying, but to simply villainize and demonize a thing and saying, hey, like, that's the root of all evil. I think that's too simplistic. But I mean, even there's obviously an incentive that would be an incentive for you guys to just lay everything at the feet of smartphones. It would make your job a lot easier.

1:58:01Yeah, but it's not the truth. with like when you have to search for the truth. And I think for us, you know, that's in the data. And because if you really wanna make something that's meaningful that actually helps people, like like a simple way I think about it is, when I came back from that, when my kid was coming back from the hospital, if I had come to me and said, here's this product, here's what it's doing. Like would I actually use it? Like as my question, so it'd be, well, what are you basing that on? Like are you just telling me that she's using social media for six hours? And so she's messed up, like you know, What is the search for the truth?

1:58:34And so in a lot of ways, I think it's a lot easier to just say, hey, that trains moving, we're gonna make that the villain, we're gonna jump on that thing because it's taking us to a place. It's harder to do it the other way, but it's a worthwhile journey because you actually get to the truth. I'm a tacky part of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Guys, I appreciate both of you. It's fascinating. It's really, really fascinating stuff. What should people go? They're gonna want to find out more about what it is they're doing. Easy, or a .com, a -u -r -a, not the O -u -r -a. Yeah, well, you've got both. I love the word, I love the word.

1:59:05It's really important. I think for having us and for letting us share the story and now finally we get to sit across the table from you. So thank you. It's amazing. It was so fun. Thank you. My pleasure. Thank you guys.