Hollywood Trouble, Big Tech & The Crisis With Kids - Jeffrey Katzenberg & Hari Ravichandran
Guests: Jeffrey Katzenberg, Hari Ravichandran
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
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Jeff, what made you so good at what you did? I don't actually understand what your skill set is. It's obvious that you're talented, but I don't actually know. You're not the first person to accuse me of. I actually know what you're talented at. I'm not sure I am either. Let's see. Certainly a good storyteller.
I think I'm a truffle hunter. I know how to find a good idea, recognize a good person, a talented person. I think that's probably the most valuable skill set, which is having an instinct for quality, for smarts, for ambition, vision, dreams. I've spent most of my career helping other people realize their dreams, their stories, their ideas. Um, and you know, in order to, I think, recognize a dreamer, you need to be a bit of a dreamer yourself. You have to be an optimist. You have to believe in, you know, uh, the unknown, the, you know, unimaginable. And, uh, you have to have a lot of enthusiasm.
And I think those qualities are, I'm a happy person and an optimist, bottomless well of optimism. I've heard you say that you're a good home run hitter, but you don't do singles and bunt. Well, yeah, that's sort of a different, that's sort of in my ambition column, sort of different lanes that I like to take on things that are very, very, very challenging. And I like to say that I like doing things that are improbable, if not impossible. That's kind of my home address. And, uh, you know, the outcome of that is, is that, you know, when you, one, you can't hit a home run if you don't swing for the fence, um, and more time, at least many times you will swing for the fence and you won't get there, you know? So, um, you gotta accept that, you know, with success comes failure.
You mentioned, uh, being able to pick a good story. except that with success comes failure. You mentioned being able to pick a good story, one of the core skill sets with 400 something movies, 80 animated, da, da, da. What in your opinion makes for a good story? Well, there are many things. I have been very lucky to have many great mentors and teachers over my career, one of
which I actually never met because he had passed away by the time I arrived at the Walt Disney Company in 1984, which is Walt Disney himself. He had this amazing archive of his work, his work process, his creative blueprints. Many great lessons learned about storytelling from him, particularly around his animated movies. One of my favorite ones, he says, there's no such thing as a great story without a great ending.
Seemed pretty obvious, right? There's no such thing as a great story. Your story, let me say, my movies are only as good as their villains, is one of the things he said. And you think about that through, you know, his filmography and it's, it's pretty extraordinary. And so, you know, for me, I look at Ursula or Scar or Jafar or Farquad or T'ai Lung or I could go on and on and on.
And because when I read that and I understood it, it became a kind of a North star. What is it about the villain? Well, the better the villain, the greater the challenge for the protagonist, right? So, you know, whatever you have to overcome, whatever you have to defeat, the greater that is, the greater your victory is in it. Walt Disney said, I make movies for children and the child that exists in every one of us. That's kind of the North Star of the company.
It was for him, it was for my decade there, it continues to be today. And so lots of these great lessons along the way around storytelling and what are the essential ingredients of a great story. Interesting to think about the ending of this great idea from psychology called the peak end rule, which you might be familiar with.
Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel prize, uh, found that across a person's memory of an experience, the most, uh, memorable parts were the peak intensity, the highest, and then the end. So they did this study with colonoscopies. Uh, in one iteration of the study, uh, people went through it and you can tell the amount of discomfort by the amount of movement and they were asked to rate the discomfort afterward. How did you remember it afterward?
In the next iteration of the study, different cohort, they did the exact same, but then just left the endoscope in for a while, but didn't move it for a couple of minutes. So the final part, the end of the experience was less discomfort and the, uh, self-rated after the fact, uh, pain was lower. So implications for that. If you're a comedian, finish on your best joke. If you're a rock band, finish on your biggest song.
Uh, if you are making a movie, you know, finish on an emotionally salient, real high energy sort of feel good. Uh, as you were explaining this and I was imagining all the different things that I could respond to you around colonoscopy. And I just thought, you know what? Just leave that one alone. Yeah. But yeah, you know, it's, it's really true.
It's really true to think about, huh, well, if you've got this compelling protagonist, but you don't have somebody that sits up against it. What's the victory? Yeah. What's the mountain you're climbing? I'm interested in the role of taste. It's very difficult to define, like the ability to choose between something that's good and something that's not good.
I guess a lot of people would say that you've got great taste given the productions that you were a part of. How would you advise someone to cultivate great taste? Well, that's a mystery to me. I really don't know how you define taste. I don't know how you define taste. I don't know how you acquire taste. I've been so lucky to be around people of exquisite taste my whole life. I guess just maybe it just rubbed off or something because I have no idea.
My mom was an artist. I think she had good taste. You know, crafting and creative and then along the way different people in my career had obviously extraordinary tastes. That's the mystery. You I, I know that all of us always are so, um, uh, interested and the, of the mystery of like, well, where does talent come from? How does somebody, how did Elton John know how to just sit at a piano and. With, with just lyrics in front of him that he's never seen, never read before, that Bernie Taupman would do it,
and literally just create. Where does that come from, right? Where does that, and I mean, we can talk about, you know, great athletes and things that, you know, that they achieve and, you know, you just wonder, how can Steph Curry, you Steph Curry just shoot that ball from the three point world? Like, how does Messi do it? He's, I have no idea.
That is one of the great mysteries of where does unique or exceptional or special talent come from. Observing it and wanting to know and others certainly have no idea for myself. Mm-hmm. Uh, there's an Elton John diary entry, uh, which is maybe one of the most legendary diary entries of all time says woke up, watched grandstand, wrote candle in the wind, went to London, bought Rolls Royce, Ringelstar came for dinner. Like, yeah, it's not a bad day. I mean, there are many, many wonderful artists
that I've had the privilege of watching. Guillermo del Toro, the writer, filmmaker. He's a philosopher, he's a poet, and I could just sit and listen to him all day long, where it comes from. You know, his life experiences, his knowledge, his education, where, you know, where do those moments come from? And obviously, I've spent decades in partnership with probably the greatest storyteller of
our lifetime, Steven Spielberg. What's it like working with him? Dazzling. I mean, you know, he's just a very singular and unique and special guy. And it's been a, you know, it's privileged, uh, you know, to be there and be a partner and, and, and a business partner and a friend and, um, cheerleader and, you know, likewise, you know, I, I had him as a, as a mentor and all those different roles, one, one person for many, many decades. And, but watching him as a storyteller, it's so natural.
It's so instinctual. It's, it's amazing to see him on a set. I imagine is to see, you know, Leonard Bernstein, you know, conducting an orchestra. Someone in mastery. Yeah, just his life. He's just so comfortable and confident and certain and effortless. It's really amazing.
And you talk to people that have worked with him as, you know, uh, uh, crafts people or actors or, you know, any, anyone in it, they, they just, uh, he just knows and in a way that's hard to understand. I'm not sure he can explain it. Mm. Both of you guys are very driven. What's driven you?
I'm kidding. What's driven you independently to what you do, what you do? Wow, that's a unique ability or skill set that I have, whether it's building a business around it or evangelizing an idea or whatever it is, that's very motivating because it feels like it's something, uh, unique that, that I can apply my perspective to that problem to be able to bring, you know, bring that forth to lots of people that potentially have the same problem as well. Um, I think the build of it in a lot of ways for me is extremely motivating because
it feels like a personification of the things that I know how to do that I can actually put out there in a lot of ways. So I would say basically I've had points in my life where I've felt very mission driven, but a lot of my life has just been very purpose driven, I guess is sort of the easy way I would think about it, which is the purpose has been, hey, can I take what I feel or sort of what I'm able to see in my head and build things that others can get benefit from, others can see as well. So that's been a big driving factor for me in my life. Jeffrey, what about you? Well, so many things, you know, I mean, I think it's, you know, it's a sort of an alchemy of things that motivate me. I found by accident along the way that the most beautiful thing in the world to me is
actually laughter, and in particular the laughter of children. It's why we tickle our kids. We torture them by tickling them, but it makes us happy to hear that laughter. And, uh, and so literally as, you know, whatever, you know, somebody's greater plan coincidence, I land at a company where your job is to get up and make movies and TV and animation and things that bring laughter to the world.
That's, that is what, you know, you know, that was the legacy that, you know, sort of I had the baton for a decade and then went on to do it, you know, at DreamWorks myself. And nothing made me happier than to stand in the back of a movie theater and listen to the laughter of an audience from something that, you know, we all had a hand in making. I have a bottomless well of a need to win. So I'm always looking for, you know, that an outcome that is a success.
And success is measured in so many different ways. And sometimes it is purpose driven and sometimes as Hari is saying, it's mission driven. The one we're doing right now started purpose driven and then through a set of circumstances became mission driven, which in a way is maybe the most rewarding. What's the difference between purpose and mission? I'm not sure. In my mind, a mission sort of is pushing towards some sort of an external outcome. Purpose is just who you are.
Like that's just how you're made up. And that's just, you know, whatever the situation, that's just how you react. Like if you're a builder, you build. And sometimes if you get very mission driven, you know, whatever the situation, that's just how you react. Like if you're a builder, you build. And sometimes if you get very mission driven, you're building towards something to be able to solve a problem. But you know, if you're a purpose driven person, whatever the circumstances, even if you're not
motivated by an external outcome, this is how you present yourself to the world in your work, I guess, is how I see it. Yeah. in your work, I guess, is how I see it. Yeah. Purpose to me is a tactical and mission to me is, has just a whole, has sort of a humanity involved in it. There's some greater outcome than just being successful or just winning.
That you, there's goodness involved in it, that you're going to do something that is going to make a contribution to the world that's unique and invaluable. More often it's by accident. These things happen to you. You know, people always say, well, how do you win an Academy Award? And I go, well, there is no, there is no path to win it. It happens to you.
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That's drink LMNT.com slash modern wisdom. What do you make of the modern world of cinema? We keep hearing about is cinema in crisis, is streaming platforms made a dent in the ability for you to make movies in the way that you used to? What's your read on that situation? Well, it's complicated. I think people always want to distill it down to simple things.
I think it is for sure a moment of extraordinary disruption and transformation. Every time everyone wants to declare movies and or a moment of extraordinary disruption and transformation. Every time everyone wants to declare movies and movie theaters dead, you know, something else comes along and sort of shatters that idea. And you know, whether it's Barbie or Oppenheimer or Minecraft or whatever the latest thing is, is that when Sinners, you know, it's just, which is just a phenomenal, you know, movie and it just gives people that sort of renewed,
not only optimism that, oh, there's still a place for this, but we, you know, the world is changing all the time, you know, you can't, you know, you have to understand and navigate your way through it. And I think the industry as a whole is navigating its way through pretty challenging, if not treacherous, times, whether it is digital distribution, whether it is AI tools, consolidation of these companies, tools, consolidation of these companies, legacy businesses, declining, and how do you transition to the next? And I've lived through a couple of them myself and they are really, really hard and they're really,
really challenging. And much of the time you are having to navigate through really uncharted places. And so lots of uncertainty in that, a lot of fear with it. But I still remain quite optimistic that movies are a great form of storytelling and a unique form of storytelling, and they're not going away. What do you make of this world where movies get ported out into series for streaming? We've seen this happen with Star Wars. We've seen parts of the Avengers franchise have this, like a Lord of the Rings,
massive bet by Amazon, which I don't know the books, but not convinced how great of an investment that was. What do you make of this sort of expansion out into other areas like that? Yeah, I think it's, I mean, listen, there have been phenomenal examples of great success. I just watched the latest season of Daredevil, which is a spin-off of a spin-off of a spin-off. I thought it was incredible. I was just completely mesmerized and engrossed in it
and following just like I can't wait for the next season of it. I've been now almost a decade of Handmaid's Tale Um, it, it just, you know, I'm, I've been now almost, you know, almost a decade of Handmaid's Tale and watched the latest episode last night, my head almost exploded. So I thought Sinners, as I said, was just a remarkable movie and oh my gosh, you've got to, I mean, it's just, it's an incredible performance. It's incredibly made. It's beautifully written. It's, I mean, it's just, it's an incredible performance, it's incredibly made, it's beautifully written, it's special.
And the audience somehow or another, they knew it, they sensed it, they got there, the word of mouth of it. You know, and so again, I'm an optimist in this, so, you know, also it's not my job anymore, so it's easy for me to be. Side line. To be outside. Yeah, exactly.
Like that old Monday morning quarterback. And I'm sure many people in Hollywood. Tell you what's interesting on that. Movies going to series is the inverse, which would be Peaky Blinders. Oh my God. Four series that's going to finish the entire narrative arc with a movie. Okay. Have you seen Mobland?
Not yet. Okay. Well, it's so interesting because I literally, it's almost, it's not done yet either. And I literally, I was watching a couple nights ago with the latest episode of Mobland with my wife. And I said to her, I said, you know,
this really just feels like the modern version of Peaky Blind is one of my favorite shows of all time. Spectacular. Oh my God. Even with like a lot of these shows that have repeats, they get reset in time. Like as like the sort of the modern pattern change, like the five versions of Spider-Man. You go look at the old one and look at the new one.
It's really interesting because it's much more mapped to the current site guys, like how our people are thinking about it. So a lot of those elements, as there's like a new generation of people that are sort of re-engaging with superheroes and stories from the past, to me, it's like a nice connection point with my kids. You know, we- This was what was happening when I was young.
This is what is happening now you are young. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, it's the same story, but just told a completely different way, but it's something we can connect over. We can talk about it. That's a really, really good point that you have when you run it back with a movie. What is the cultural milieu at the moment? What's happening?
What are people worried about? Yeah, like the old Superman, you know, like, you know, when my son looks at it and says, well, why does it look like it's, you know, cut out of like cardboard? I said, probably was. Yeah. At the time. I was like, you know, so it's sort of a, it's like, it's a cool moment that kind of brings people together as well.
How many movies now have got some, uh, lone wolf AI powered evil. It's the Jafar of the 2025 powered by chat GPT. Yeah. You know, why is that? Well, it's because people have got concerns about the sort of ascendancy of AI. There's issues to do with inequality a lot of the time now. So you're looking at what's happening from a working class perspective, what's happening from an upper class perspective in a way that may not have been done previously.
You've got much more complex villains, right? Suicide Squad was bad guys being bad, but needing to be good in order to stop worse guys from doing something. And you know, that's not- That dance was very good. Yes. I just want to say that beautifully done. Do you hear that?
Very good. Um, what would you do if you were in charge of the Star Wars franchise? It seems like that's something that's on treacherous water right now. Um, you know, I don't, it's always hard. I think that to stand outside of, uh, these and to be, I don't know enough to know, but, you know, George Lucas, along with Steven Spielberg, among the greatest storytellers of our time. And, you know, I think probably getting back closer to its roots is where it will find its authenticity and you know, and ors, again, you can see glimmers of brilliance.
And I say glimmers, it's not a glimmer, that's a glowing light of North Star, of something wildly entertaining and wildly successful. So the movies have seemed to have struggled a bit. But my guess is I would go back to the Bible And, you know, find my aspiration, inspiration, and probably roadmap by, by getting back to its roots. Yeah. You were, I mean, you were asking earlier about this sort of, um, switching media. Like maybe you start with the book, then you go to a different, you know, sort of a medium for, for, for a story. It's really funny, with my son during COVID, he's a little guy, he's probably three and a half, four at the time, and he got obsessed with Star Wars,
like the story of Star Wars, and a lot of how he interacted with it was with the LEGO's video game. So that's how he started, was playing with me, so it's like a way that we would connect,, like, you know, go through the story, you go through all seven, uh, in the game, like he literally go through the entire book, you know, with the Lego characters basically. Right. And so, and then he got like super interested in it.
He's like, oh, wow, this is cool. It's like a good story. And I know all these characters now he's like, oh, can I watch the movie? Which again, for a five year old or four and a half, five year old, it felt very advanced. But since he'd gone through that, you know, now he's like, oh, can I watch the movie? Which again, for a five year old or four and a half, five year old, it felt very advanced, but since he'd gone through that, you know, now he was like, oh, I know these characters, like I understand what's going on. So I was excited about it. Well, what's interesting is whether it's sort of the game or when I watched it
or when he watches it, like the heart of the story is just, uh, the power of light over dark that seems to come through. And it seems not sort of time specific or media specific. It just seems like, you know, as long as you can get that through, like it just captures the audience. I totally hadn't thought about the, you know, I know that the movie industry, the music industry and the TV industry, I think all of those combined is smaller than the video game industry.
I think that's right. Which, you know, tells us everything you need to know about how well video game designers understand human behavior. They are better able to... That's maybe not fair. The degrees of freedom that video games are able to play with are able to access human psychology. You're in the story. Yeah. You're part of the... You're a protagonist in this, but I mean, look at GTA six. Yeah. You know, I mean, that thing is going to, so there's a great Reddit posts.
I always, I'm always skeptical about these burner account Reddit post things, because you think how legitimate is this? But it was somebody who claimed to have worked at rockstar throughout most of the process of this, and they were explaining about why the delay, the single player campaign's been ready for six months now. It is completely bulletproof, everything's locked off, but the online experience that they knew GTA Online was going to be this huge thing. They're prepping, apparently they're prepping for 70 million concurrent players on launch, 70 million concurrent players.
It will be the biggest event launch of any entertainment property ever. Yeah. Like we know that today. It's almost like the other video game companies are looking at it and going, well, that's coming out. I want to wait. I'm not going to launch other games. Yeah, give it six months.
No one's playing anything for six months. Exactly. So yeah. I just absurd, dude. And I didn't think about the prospect of being able to move a universe forward, a story forward through maybe even the actual Legos themselves. Maybe there's a way that you can add something in if someone really cares about the lore or the canon or the world or whatever. I mean, look at George R.R. Martin did A World of Ice and Fire. He wrote that like encyclopedia Wikipedia thing with
the two people that made an online wiki about his book. So there's this reverse fan fiction inclusion with the author thing where you go, this has got to the stab in 50 Shades of Grey. Yeah. It starts off as a fanfic and then gets turned around. Okay, we've gone full circle here into a movie that was maybe even bigger than the thing that it meant to be copying originally, which was Twilight, I think. So, yeah, it's cool.
It's cool to see this. I swear we were talking about something else that had some other fanfiction that had been converted into something else. So yeah, I mean, here, not only are the mediums changing, but even the direction of contribution from creator to audience. And then the audience starts to sit on the other side and comes back in. It's wild. Yeah, it's very interesting. I'm interested, both of you guys have had to leave old chapters behind a lot.
What have you learned about reinventing yourself or dealing with change? Well, it's hard. It's not, it's not easy to kind of go back and look at something backwards very objectively. So that's one thing I've learned now over the years is, you know, when you look back,
can you distill some number of years where you were doing something? And not necessarily look at it and say, here's all the things I did wrong, but, you know, distill the lessons from it and say, here's some great things I learned and how do I apply this to the future? I think the big thing for me that's always been beneficial is I'm a curious person. And so I have a lot of humility around learning. When I approach something, even if it's something related to something I've done in the past, can you go in there with an open mind?
Can you go in there wanting to absorb knowledge because there might be new things because times have changed, new things because there's a new area. There could be better experts or people that know it better. So can you apply or can you sort of approach it with humility where the process of taking all these things you've distilled from, things you've done, that you've learned something from, and now absorb a lot of new things around the next thing you're going to do. And so I feel like that compounds. Like for me, I feel like the older I get and the more things I do, somehow I seem to both enjoy it more.
And I feel like I might actually be slightly more competent now because there's this like, you know, interaction of things that are my own learnings and this desire to want to learn more as well. That's sort of a nice central point for me. We'll get back to talking in just a minute, but first, if your workouts feel flat, your recovery is slow, or you've just been feeling off, it might not be a training plan or your diet, it might be something a bit more boring, like a testosterone. So if you're not performing in the gym or the bedroom, the way that you would like,
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to the link in the description below by heading to livemomentus.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's L I V E M O M E N T O U S.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom. A checkout navigating change is something that I think a lot of people are sort of dealing with at the moment. I'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, a bunch of my friends, a bunch of the people that I work with, just stuff that I'm observing. I think a lot of the liberation or constrict of the people that I work with, just stuff that I'm observing. I think a lot of the, uh, liberation or constriction that people went through around COVID, which caused change, right?
Some people didn't have to go to work. I was a nightclub promoter, uh, and all of the nightclubs got shut down. So that was a big change for me. Uh, but also that meant that people started working from home and some people felt liberated by that. Uh, 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, state of the art, there's onsite chef, you can get your VO2 max
tested, there's body work and the people wave sage around and stuff. It's 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 onset noticing, I think people are getting sick of not being around other people. I 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, it is one of the true great connectors. It is one of the true great connectors. The shared experience of being in a movie theater, that shared laughter, that shared fear, scare, the roller 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, that communal experience of going on a journey in a movie is exceptional. Sporting events, why do, you know, music events that, you know, all of those things have never been bigger. Right? Concerts, going out to concerts and stuff. And 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. I think when we were going through COVID, for 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's some positive elements that came out of that because before that I was traveling a lot. I was never really sort of, you know, static in one place just for work. So 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 we're talking about sort of adults here with kids. Now, the levels of anxiety and the levels of sort of how much stress those two years cost is, we're just starting to unfold that now, right? Like, you know,
like some of the work we're doing now is around some of them, the mental health challenges that these kids have that are ramped up and amplified. So if you look at the stats, you see the steady escalation of things like, you know, emotional distress and stress, depression, anxiety for adolescents, something they've always had, it's sort of climbing up, uh, those two years. And it's the cohort and it's really almost like three, 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 and 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. 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 quite put our finger on it, but things are going, you know, they were kind of bad and they were 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, you know, we had sort of a, you know, in a very idiosyncratic way for our family,
like we had some positive things that came out of it. But I think for the entirety of the population, having these kids that are meant to be out there, social, you know, interacting with their friends and during these developmental windows of time, putting them sort of in a, in a sort of a contained environment. I think we did a lot of damage there that is just starting to reveal itself is my view. 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 a 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. So 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,
uh, ancestrally 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 are stressed with, they don't know what's going on, all of this stuff, there's tons and tons of stuff that can go wrong.
But even before that, you have primed kids, they would not have typically played. There wasn't enough kids around that were also three to have had an entire group of three-year-olds. There would have been a 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, uh, expedites learning for the younger kids and expedites learning of care for the older kids. So you have this sort of switcheroo thing going on.
Whereas if you're, you know, you've got a classroom of between 10 and 30, five year olds, so everybody's going to be at a similar sort of developmental trajectory. And then when you roll that even more and you thought, okay, let's compare that ancestrally, 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. Um, so yeah, it doesn't surprise me. Look, given that, especially And now we're going to make it, we can turn that up to 11. Yeah. 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. Hugely. 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 Haidt 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, you know, Aura, which is a company that Hari 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 you know probably some electronics and stuff but if I broke into your phone and I got your social security or a 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, home robberies was just over $3 billion a year. And digital theft was just under $3 billion a year. This last year, now home robberies 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, I promise 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 need. There was an opportunity to go solve this problem for consumers. Many, many companies were out solving it for enterprise, for companies, where we would hear about JCPenney getting all of their data stolen and this one and that one and Sony had a huge breach. Oh yeah huge right so lots
and you know billions and billions of dollars invested in cybersecurity 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 Hari on this, of building Aura. But then, and I want him to tell his story a year and a half ago, two years ago, he had a 13 year old and he should talk about his own experience because this is where the mission driven part of, of this kicked into gear for us. Yeah, look, I think we were talking earlier about purpose versus mission, right? And so I think being purpose driven, you know, you see a big problem, you say,
look, you know, I've got this skill, I'm going to go try to solve it. 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, 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 not mixing with kids their own age or higher ages, lower ages, but there's also this like shift in life from And we didn't understand this as a 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 something that we were trying to do.
We were trying to do a lot of things that we didn't know about. And so we were trying to do a lot of things that we didn't know about. And so we were trying to do a lot of things that we didn't know about. And so we were trying to do a lot of things that we didn't know about. And so we were trying to do a lot of things that we didn't know about. And so we were trying to do a lot of things that we didn't know about. And so we were trying to do a lot of things that we didn't know about. And so we were trying to do a lot of things that we didn't know about. And so we were trying to do a lot of things that we didn't know about. And so we were trying to do a lot of things that we didn't understand this as we were like a hyper privacy focused family. We don't look at kids phones.
We don't do any of that type of stuff. Um, and you know, it was about two and a half years ago, she said, uh, Hey, like I don't feel great. It's like February, I think. And we said, look, you know, you're in the middle of school. There's a lot of stuff going on. Let's wait till the summer. Summer rolls around.
Uh, and we're like, okay, where it's a summer vacation. Like great, like this, you know, there's not as much stress. It actually went the opposite way. She like, when vacation? Like, great. Like this, you know, there's not as much stress. It actually went the opposite way. She like, when just completely dipped, like, you know, it was hard to get her out of bed. She was like not in a good head space, severely depressed. Um, and there was, uh, there was, uh, uh, you know, like, like, we were looking at going, well, we don't know what's going on.
Seemed to get, keep getting worse. You ask her, she's like, oh, everything's fine. Like I'm, I'm okay. You know, and, and, but clearly you can see she's not. Then she started going down 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 and 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. 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, uh, 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 that's the 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? There's so much happening. She's struggling with a lot of stuff, completely invisible.
Like we could not, we could not have guessed. And we said, what, what are we like terrible parents? Like how could this have happened? Um, so that's when we started looking around to say, Hey, is this just us or, or, you know, like, is it happening? It's everywhere now.
I think people are starting to talk about it more and more but the stats are staggering. It's an epidemic and this experience that, make an analogy, go back here. When I was growing up, my parents knew where I was, what I was doing and who I was with. Today 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're with.
They're on the device. They may be physically here, but they're not. They're on this, the device, it may be physically a here, but they're not, they're somewhere, 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 are, we all go through, you know, that, that, you know, drinking, driving, smoking, drugs, sex, that's life. And as parents, you have tools, you have insights, you have the ability to help
navigate your kids through that. And what we have found is when it comes to social media, 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. The analogy I use is, 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. I know you know the rules of the road. In the world of social media and the online world, there are no boundaries. You have no ability to navigate, to help your kids navigate. That's the problem that Hari went out to solve. But I want to just frame for you here,
that's why I asked him to bring back my, my phone because we started a beta version of, of, uh, this online safety. So remember I said, we started with online security and then the mission became out of Hari'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, you know, our bank account. So 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, 2, 2500 is a 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%. 80%. And more than half of them are doing things that are unhealthy or harmful as a result of that. Have 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, it's really interesting. There's actually stats that, you know, they publish every year around this. The increase pre COVID to post COVID, like we're talking about from before it happened to now in many of these areas are like several hundred percent because it is 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? Is this just an endemic part of being a teenage goal? Yeah. But now we can see it. Identify, right? Yeah. 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 it or the 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 sort of 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? Their view, and this is now pretty universal with every hospital, is we're not sure what's going on.
There 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 needed care, because especially with girls, one of the coping strategies they go through is cutting, which has now become very, very prevalent, like 11, 12% of the girls cut.
They said, you know, there's like 10 in a week, now we're seeing a hundred. So, so to me, I was like, wait, like something is actually happening here. Like something's happening underneath, you know, is it a combination of social media, kids being on smartphones, the compression inside a COVID land. But the, the, but the data is very, very clear.
It's not self-reporting. It's not, you know, us identifying more of these cases. Something got messed up. Like it's, 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, um, 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. They 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 Twenge's got her thing, Height's 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. Like ours is not, this is not our interpretation or a projection of it. We're actually just seeing hard data.
We had 2,500, now we've got 10,000 users on it. And we're- When it comes to a mechanism, what's your, just some potential sort of causal explanations and what you think's going on here, or global altogether type thing. I mean, I can kind of give you my perspective again, this 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, clearly it looks very, very correlated. One's going up, the other one's going up as well. It almost seems like when you unleash something, for it to get to a critical mass and see the, the follow-on effect of it takes 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 kind of get around and actually kind of make things rough. So I think we've hit this like critical juncture now where, uh, the amount of time that kids are spending on these, the amount of engagement they're getting from a lot more Content that's now available. It's hit a tipping point now where you know it and there's enough proliferation of that across The the you know the world that
It's starting to now percolate up. There's always always like an underlying theme as kids are going through adolescence. It's hard It's just just 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. I think it's been building up by the way. I don't think it's like a... It's accelerated. You know, it didn't pop up. There's no question that when you, I mean, you just see the amount of, well, one, the devices themselves in terms of usability and interactivity. Effectiveness of being compelling. Yes. And the effectiveness of being able to reach people and to communicate with
people and to bring them into different places here. There's so many good things that we can talk about and so we're not here, you know, 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, uh, if they are not helped in navigating their way through it. I think 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. I mean, that didn't happen when we were kids. That didn't, 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, I mean, incentives are going to
incentive, right? We set up the incentives where he said, I mean, if you're a big social media company or doing your earnings, yeah. If you're doing your earnings and he said, guys, like we did a great thing. Like, you know, we made everybody super healthy. We made everybody super healthy. But our problems are down. People choose the things that they want to do.
If they didn't like it, they wouldn't choose it. And so it's asymmetric warfare, though. So it's not quite the right metric to use. Yeah. So I think that we set up the ecosystem, you know, we sort of empower smart, you know, 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, you know, there's been enough
sort of, uh, uh, medium through which you can kind of get this, you know, out, which is whether social media, smartphones or some combination, I think now we're looking at it saying, Oh no, like, what did we do? Like, and we did this all without thinking about the guard rails. Yeah. So that's really where we are. Like people trying to figure out how do you guard? Cause it's never going back by the way, you can't close the box.
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and if you don't like it, they'll just give you your money back and they ship internationally. Right now you can get a 20% discount and see everything that I use and recommend by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomadic.com slash modern wisdom. That's nomadic.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 under tension? Is it the effectiveness and how compelling these are? Is it the distribution? Like what do you think is going on here? I definitely think distribution has 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, clicking on a piece of content that you like car wrecks. Or 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,
which is a lot smarter now than it was 10 years ago. Oh, you like car crashes. So the next thing you scroll up, I'm going to show you another car crash. Well, here's another variant of the car crash. So you, so now you're sort of in this cycle of feeding that neural pathway with these things that kind of continuously, like most of these kids, by the way, you like look at them and say,
did you actually want to see that? Many will say no. There's a great book, Human Compatible by Stuart Russell. Yeah. Have you read that? I have. Yeah. Phenomenal.
So Stuart wrote the textbook for AI, probably not anymore actually, I guess, in the modern world of LLMs, 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 that 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? Like 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. 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 bi-directional relationship, because this is the crazy thing about any kind of optimizing function, right? It's like get people to click. 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, uh, was it move 14 in that Lee Su Dong go game, uh, where no one could actually work out. I said, why did you do that?
It's the reward system. Yeah, that's correct. Yeah. 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, you know, dark thoughts and, you know, this'll send you down the rabbit hole. And once you go down that rabbit hole, it's, it's a very, you can get into super, super scary territory. And 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, you know, create a neural pathway for a certain kind of action, you know, eliciting a certain kind of reaction just by observation, like, like you're saying, right? Which is, hey, like, if I did this thing, what are you going to do? Like, oh, can I now measure it? And can I create the probability around it to see if you're going to do it again? I'm going to keep doing that, right? So I think that what's
happened now is we've gotten really good at that. You know, over like decades and decades of, you know, many people doing lots of programming, et cetera. And then what do human beings do? You commercialize, right? So now you figure out, okay, well, we have the skill. We've got to 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 and me. Okay, so let's just sort of dig in for a second, I think about, look, Australia's got sort of dig in for a second. I think about. Well, Australia's got a social media ban now for under 16. It seems to me that although what you guys are doing with aura is, uh, 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 now. Um, 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? Well, I mean, I think besides the practical elements of can we actually pull it off, right?
Which is again, a whole nother question. You know, we invented social media for anyone under 16? Well, I mean, I think besides the practical elements of can we actually pull it off, right? Which is again, a whole nother question. You know, we invented it because there was a reason, there's a human reason why this thing came to be. Now 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. It's 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 barrier just goes down to almost, you could be on the Masai Mara 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. Surely the vast majority of teenagers are not spending most of their time on their devices, getting it to explain Charles Darwin's origin of species. They're not, 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 call it 11 and 18. Six. About eight hours. Right. Eight hours. 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, uh, 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 devices. And it goes from spot to spot. There are, you know, you actually do see kids are spending time learning. They're using Google class. They're using things to make themselves more productive. There's more.
Language, Duolingo. We can go on to so many good things here. So this idea that you're just going to ban it, you know, for under 16 years. 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. Right. I 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, has, it's sort of sets of 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, there's no regulation, nobody's wearing a seatbelt, right? I mean, so 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 Surgeon 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, you know, incentives, lots,
lots of capital, lots of, you know, uh, resources that obviously don't want for this to happen. So that's the dichotomy, I think. But again, the mission that we got on, which is we're not legislators, we're not politicians, and this we're business people. And we looked 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 the, again,
just going back to the car analogy, cause it's so simple, which is, regardless of whether you're able to drive at 10 or 12 or 14 years old, you have to wear a seatbelt. Yes, yes, yes. And so our ambition was parents and parents, parents are good at parenting when they have tools, then they have knowledge.
And so our goal was let's now use what is the state of the art technology today, which is phenomenal. Again, this is the positive side of it, which is the things that we're able to do today using AI, um, are to be able to read sentiment and insight and observation as opposed to spying. Because if you spy on your kids, if you're going to, they're going to find a way to circumvent us, right? So, uh, this is the thing that Hari 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. And so we have insights and can be somewhat predictive now where we are today versus where we think we'll be in a year or two or three. Yeah. As the data gets greater, the knowledge.
Well, so you've, but let me give you a great one Chris here, cause 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, what tell, you know, not
no, don't do that. But what are you trying to get out of that? How is that going to help you in this? And once again, you can be a great parent and help them make their way through it. If, if you just knew that. Yeah, I'll say two things. I mean, to answer your question around Australia and the band, if I could go back
in time, I would wait to get my kid a smartphone until 16. I think that that's just good. Uh, you know, sort of most parents will probably tell you that after they've kind of been through stuff with their teenage kids, it's a hard thing because, you know, all their friends get stuff and now you've got all the coordination problem. Yeah. I think Hyde's proposal is you get a weird like commune, digital commune of 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, it'll propagate because again, they go to, you know, friends homes that are not in the same school. Now they have phones. So 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 sort of in this battle that we are watching kind of unfold every day, the parents are the frontline. You know, it's not, you know, like regulations, all that type of stuff. It's, it's going to have to work its way to that.
But really it's the parents that are in the frontline 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, like this brewing problem that's happening and the more that becomes, uh, 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 talk to a lot of clinicians and psychologists, that's what they tell you. Like there's 6,000 of us, clinicians and psychologists, caseloads going up through the roof to train somebody to be good at that is going to 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, get them to
understand that, you know, and the desire and the motivations there, they want to raise great kids that are happy, they're healthy, you know, so that's. Talk to me about some of the other 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 obviously 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.
How 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 information as well. If they're going to sleep, we see, for example, 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. So you could be on your phone for four hours a day if either it's fine.
If you're also going playing sports and you're hanging out with your friends and playing soccer, those types of things are very positive. How do you know if they're doing that? Because you can tell on geotracking where they're kind of, you know, out and about basically. So you can kind of start recording. As opposed to the person who's just in at home for most of the day. Swirling the whole time and like on their devices.
And you can see the amount of activity that they have. Right. And then other, like another interesting to be, I'll give you like boys and girls are very different. The patterns are quite distinct for, 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, developmentally, I think it is sort of a way of interacting their rambunctious on these platforms. It'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 on 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 saying like, you know, 12 to kind of 16, 17. Um, but those are, I mean, really interesting to us that, you know, cause 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. So, uh. And here's a kind of fascinating thing 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 tsunami 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, you know, what are the things that you are doing that are healthy around that? 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? Like a wearable tracker for your digital consumption. For your mental health.
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. And this, and this.
What's your, how are you going to work that out? How can people learn more about themselves? So 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, et cetera, 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 can see what work apps you're using, what personal apps you're using. We can say when you're on these things. All your patterns of behavior relative to your mental. you can see what work apps you're using, what personal apps you're using. We can say, when you're on these things. You're sleeping. All your patterns of behavior, 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 notice that your mood is actually sort of dipping. How do you know mood? So 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,
how hard you push the keys. No way. So you can get all these markers that basically say, hey, like, or the frequency, like, let's say you're in an angry mood and how quickly you're responding back to somebody, right? And 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 positive way, in a usable way, where the language that comes back to you is in a coaching manner. Chris, yesterday, you were not having a great day. Something happened along the way here. You went to a store, you, you know, got in a, try to exchange something, you got in an art, like it will actually.
And that- I'm looking forward to it for myself. So where are you at with the, how- That's net. We want to get through the teenage thing, which we've just launched, right? That's the- So fourth quarter of this year is sort of the first,
first MVP of it. I was showing Luke this and he was like, I really need this for myself. Okay. I need to, I do need to call this out. So Luke regularly posts, it's 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. So 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. You don't have to wear anything. But the insights from a wearable coming out of, you know, Your activity. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I would use that in a heartbeat. That wearable is actually more about your physical, of course, 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, your, you know, where, when you're happy, when you're not. What I don't know whether you're going to break, you know, where, when you're happy, when you're not, what? I don't know whether you're going to break some degree of data protection here. Can you use front facing camera to do micro expression stuff? You could. I think there's a little bit when you start looking at images or CSAM regulations that you have to worry about. TikTok's got it in that service. Honestly, I think that even just tabulating stuff and saying, here's sort of what we're seeing for broad patterns.
We see users like, wow, like I didn't know that. Like that's really like, like Luke posting, you know, even between time data, you know, which I'm using external apps because even though apples tried to become more sophisticated with screen time and limitations, it's not good enough. Yep. So you know what I always think about? It's so funny.
Um, you remember when, but before there was the torch function on your home screen, there was third party apps that was a torch that had worked out. Or you, I think you went and recorded a video, but didn't press the video thing and turn 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, all of these things can't keep up quickly enough, which is precisely the sort of- This is what entrepreneurs do. Yes, you get out ahead. Yeah. They find a lane. Yeah, that's a good point.
They see where something is missing and just get in there. Innovate like crazy around that, that idea. Even, you know, and you know, at some point, maybe these, you know, behemoths will be motivated by what we are doing to take on some of this. Well, I mean, look, we saw this with the link tree, you know, 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 want you to link to multiple things. Maybe you're a recording artist and you wanted your new album and you wanted your most recent live set and you wanted your merch and you wanted your website, your email form or whatever it was. And Linktree allowed you super, no coding needed, you know, drag and drop, like making another social media thing. And you would press that this thing was worth, it was Australian company. It was worth a couple of billion.
Simple problem. Day one, day one worth a couple of day, a thousand worth a couple of billion. Next morning, they wake up to find out that Instagram has incorporated multiple links onto their bio. Yeah. So, so you have to, you have to be smart about
it because you have to be able to see that, you know, at some point the trend will change. So, so it's really interesting to us because again, the existential issue is, Hey, like as a company, again, as, as, is, hey, like as a company, again, 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.
But 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, oh, this is really good, we should do this for all our users. They go to what you're talking about with linkery, 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 dragging and dropping a link, but Hey, like we can really tell you sort of emotional, mental wellbeing, et cetera, users gravitate towards things
that you are hyper focused on and very good at. You know, let's say, I'm just making this up, like Apple decides that this is all available out of the box, which like, you know, you look at like a Life360 and FindMy, right? FindMy is available for free. Life360 is a four and a half billion dollar company. They solved the one case, which is where's my kid? Like I want to know where my kids are, but they've doggedly focused on that one use case. So users say, okay, well, the service is just better. And now in my mind, if I need that, I got to, so you've got to get there early
enough and it's got to be broad enough. And you've got to 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 board, cause you got to get the story kind of out there so people understand that. And a bunch of other people like Robert Downey Jr. Yeah. Who's a part of this too.
Yeah. It's been a ride just working through this with Jeffrey. It's funny because we were talking about Elton John earlier. I'll tell you sort of a funny tidbit. While we were trying to get people sort of on our board, Jeffrey was helping us quite a bit, you know, especially for people that had big platforms. So we, Jeffrey said, you know, we should talk to Tom Hanks. And we bit, especially for people that had big platforms.
Jeffrey said, we should talk to Tom Hanks. I said, oh, okay, that sounds good. He said, well, come out to Philadelphia. He said, go out to Philadelphia. We're sitting at breakfast with Tom and Rita and Jeffrey sort of going through stuff. And Tom Hanks said, I'm going to go to the White House this evening and see the president. And so Jeffrey said, oh, I just came from there last week. And so now Tom Hanks is like, I'm going to write to, uh, Jeffrey's, I'm going to write you a letter. You should take it, give it to the president when you see him today. So there's something there writing the letter. His phone rings.
I looked down and it says, sir Elton John. I'm thinking I'm like twilight. So, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we've had lots of great sort of, you know, such things where Jeffrey's 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. So Robert, we met through Jeffrey as well. Those were the...
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I remember just going back to the speed of typing pressure, which again, is still fucking blown 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 Alzheimer's? There's some neurological decline that you've got in here. So you can see how this could be data is 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, uh, going down to what was like an outright malicious intent, uh, by people that 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 going to get some DEET mosquito spray and I'm probably going to wear long sleeves. Okay, so what have I got? I 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 and fucking with it. Unless you want to jailbreak it, in which case the whole thing becomes unusable. Useless. Yeah. And even if you do know how to code your iPhone's pretty robust at stopping you from getting in there and fucking with it, unless you want to jailbreak it,
in which case the whole thing becomes unusable. Yeah. 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, um, would be phenomenal. And then, you know, roll the clock forward a little bit more. Can 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 like maybe it was Pinterest, maybe it was the first one that came up with it, which is this concept I was talking about that like the car crashes, right? You're scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. A very simple thing, which I say, do you actually want to see this content or do you want to see something else? Right? And if people say, no, I actually never wanted to see this content or do you want to see something else? Right? And people say, no, I actually never wanted to look at a car crash.
I was just doing it for homework. You 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 look 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 actually would be very good for users, I think. Yeah. What about, um, what about younger kids?
Have you looked at the classic story, parents 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? So you could totally use. You're, you're teaching them the patterns from early on, right? I mean, it's, again, it's, it's hard. Like I definitely see why you do it because this kid's screaming, you're in a restaurant trying to get dinner and, you know, you got to make sure
that you're going to play game. I'm just like, after you try a few things, like here's your iPad, go, you know, go, 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 like, 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. Like, so with every one of these actions, you're doing it. So, but that being said, we're all social, like we all want to be out with our
friends and we want to make sure our kids can get involved with that too. So it's not a trivial thing, uh, on how to sort of, you know, uh, make that work. But I do think there's some negative, uh, things that are coming out of that as well. Cause I think we're teaching them that, you know, you can start relying on this for emotional support. Basically. So there was again, I don't know whether it's Jonathan Heights work or somebody else's talking about how kids are affected developmentally when they see
parents phone go off and parent look at phone. Have you 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, you know, eight or 10 and above. Uh, you can tell them a lot of stuff. I'm going to put limits on your phone.
I'm going to do all this stuff. And you're sitting there at dinner on your phone. They're looking at it going, okay, well, you're telling me one thing. So when I get a bit older, I can do that. You know, so you're kind of teaching them a different thing, basically. So 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 of, you know, how to. And again, if you're of a certain age, you may not have gotten hooked on it early enough, so you might've 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. If you're talking about these kids that are, you know, on their iPads at six, seven, 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. If you're talking about these kids that are, you know, on their iPads at six, seven, eight, that is native. Like that's how they're growing up.
You never teach them the other side of things. You 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 Haidt around some 25 British girl, very clever. And she, I was bringing up to her about a common criticism. Why are young girls, especially being so affected by what happens online? This isn't even real life. You know, 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. Yeah. I think that's the switch that hasn't gone off, you know, broadly, by the way, because people, I mean, it's amazing to me because like I'll be at a dinner, you know, it'll be like, you know, 10, you know, couples and, you know, parents. And, you know, I say like, how you know, 10, you know, couples and, you know, parents and, you know, I say like, how many of 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 look at that 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, oh, they're fine. They're just like on their phone, you know, I don't like that. They're not taking drugs. They're not out at night. Yeah. But there's like stuff happening there that's the same impact as, you know,
like, uh, like taking a drug and rewiring your brain. Yeah. I, uh, I think when it comes to where are people going to get their 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, why do I even get started here? I have this choice between being a, a social isolationist tyrant that forces my child to be a fucking Luddite. Yeah.
Or a dopamine, endogenous dopamine dealer that's going to commit them to a life of social anxiety and depression. Yep. I mean, I think the guard railing concept is what appeals to me the most personally. We just sort of the reason we went down 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 devices till they're 16, we can ban it, et cetera. The difficult thing is it's not a, universally people don't believe it's like a bad thing. Like cigarettes, you know, at some point when you believe that everybody a universal, 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. There'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, et cetera.
So in that type of an environment, the best I think we can hope for is empower 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. Like give them, because most parents you talk to, they just say, look, I don't know what to do about it. I have no idea. Like, and we hear 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.
So what are they actually doing? Oh, that's the current solution? Well, a third of them. Yeah. up their phones and spend 45 minutes looking through to see what the kid was doing. So what are they actually doing? Oh, that's the current solution? Well, for a theoretical. Yeah. So they go through and now it's like, you know, you're a parent, you're overwhelmed, you don't have time for anything. Now you've got to come up 45 minutes, you don't know what you're looking for.
It's a needle in the haystack too. Wow. Yeah. So yeah. Okay. So I guess one area that we haven't talked about yet 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 backbiting social dynamic that I'm very glad that I wasn't a female to have to navigate through. Um, 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 kind of think of that as the North Star for this kid, right? Then start reverse engineering to say, okay, well, what are the different things that are chinking away from this kid to not get to that place? Oh, 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 spent 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 craft their day in this sort of a way with their device, I mean, we're only talking about devices here, uh, that seems to have the best possible outcome. Again, the physical world we can't, well, 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 kids shouldn't be able to look at Instagram for 30 minutes before bed. Those 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 in an objective way.
And again. And 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. And so being able to, um, not only at the outset, but as a, again, I go back to the, 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 step further and further away from your oversight. That's what the tools allow every parent to have a bespoke relationship with their child at a given moment in time. Yeah. It's 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 the opposite way, you know, one of the three.
At some point, you're like, okay, I'm 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 very, very high. So, yeah. I guess another interesting element here, Jeff, you've spent your life
around high achievers and celebrities. I think the most common job, or to top five most common jobs, at least two or three of them has 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? Well, I think that fame is fleeting. So it has its good moments and its bad moments.
It tends to be, 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, you know, this sort of roller coaster that a celebrity has, it's brutal. And it's a very challenging thing emotionally, I think for anybody to go for an athlete, you know, you, you think of these, 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 too highs and
don't let the lows take you too lows. And for the most part, it's not fatal. You know, for me, I've always believed that and don't let the lows take you to lows and for the most part it's not fatal. For 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 scar? 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% of them were dogs.
The only one that has a pretty stellar track record are the animated ones because the process is, frankly, just much more generous in terms of producing something of quality and success more reliably. But, you know, movies, television, music, they're brutal. And so maybe that's just the armor that you, you know, you get, that you wear, that you learn. And, you know, I've, you know, had those super high moments and super lows at probably the moment of my, early in my career,
my greatest success at Disney, I got fired. It's crazy. When you look at the summer of 1994, the biggest movie in the world was Lion King. The biggest soundtrack in the world was the soundtrack from Lion King. The number one TV show was Home Improvement. Beauty and the Beast was a hit show on Broadway. Tool Time was the number one book on,
just anywhere you could go in the world of culture and creative measures. We were sort of, it was like a, what they call it, like a goat moment. I got fired. It was a grand a goat moment. I got fired. It was a grand slam. Yeah. I got fired.
Can you tell me the story behind that? Uh, it's, you know, it's, it's a Shakespeare. It's complicated, I think, you know, and, uh, uh, you know, for me, uh try to, as I said, own it, move on. You know, I've sort of had two different missions. I've had one became like a sort of my motto and later in life, and one was sort of my mission and 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 on my mind or Beauty and the Beast or Lion King or Pretty Woman or any of these things. It's just not. Um, it's fine.
I would like this. I, you know, I've not been working with Jeffrey about, you know, seven, seven and a half years, and I probably talk to him every day. And people ask me, what's it like? And that to me is the most amazing thing. Like somebody that's done as much as he has, I don't think we have ever in the last seven years really talked about the past at all.
It's always what's coming, like what's coming. Forward focus. Yeah. What did you guys learn from working with each other? Well, you know, I have think you guys learn from working with each other Well, you know I I have you know, I've watched a brilliant entrepreneur You know, which you know, 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
you know is Hari, you know, it's that thing, still waters run deep. He runs deep. You can see it in these conversations. He's very, very thoughtful, very, he has great empathy. And that empathy is what's revealed itself in these 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 an amazing, admirable quality to have, not that many people do. And so. I mean, look, I hope to be like Jeffrey when I get older. It's like the amazing work ethic. I've never seen anything like it. 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, we have world class investors. We have very smart people that have helped us build many things in the past, but, uh, 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, uh, to know. Um, and I have seen, you know, seen sort of some of
the ups and downs, like, you know, between some of the early sort of investments at Quibi, et cetera, and, and, and sort of some of the ups and downs, like, you know, between some of the early sort of investments at Quibi, et cetera, 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, objectively from the outside, that's how I've always seen it, which is, wow, 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 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. And he did that so gracefully. And I thought that's a good lesson. Like that's something for you.
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 you should own your garbage. So, you know, it's, it's, uh, it's also great around, you know, team, you know, uh, not everybody has that resilience. I always say I have rhino skin, you know, that's very hard to, you know, really for me to feel that pain.
I've built that up over the years and this. And as I said, you learn that these things are, you know, you pick yourself up and, 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 a 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 gonna 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 in bringing up this generation of kids. Wow. 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 a couple of really great researchers, Tony Volk is one of them, Tracy Vying-Kor is another,
she's the head of Canada's Anti-Bullying 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, or why is it worst 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. Well, we actually have it, and we can tell. We can identify it, not necessarily 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 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 kinds of kids with certain sort of usage and behavioral patterns, that it just pushes past the line, like it pushes past the line. You can see, you can see for certain kinds of kids with certain sort of usage and behavioral patterns, that it just pushes past the line. Like it pushes past the line. You can see, you can identify it.
You can see that that's happening because we actually can look at all of the. Somebody's being abusive. Yeah. Right. To somebody else. On a game. Well, no.
So you can see that they're being abusive where 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, right? Which is, hey, like, what are the things that are markers for us that tell us
that there is a certain kind of behavior, 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 rambunctious during games that are much more, again, in that context it's completely fine, they're not bullying or anything like that, tends to be a big marker for cyber bullying outbound. Yeah.
I mean, it's a huge passion. And, and, and so one, you can see it two ways. You can see outgoing behavior that has bullying in it, but more, more importantly, you can see what it's inbound. Yep. Right. So it immediately, and that's the great thing about this is, is there are certain things that are red lines.
And that's the great thing about this is, 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 can tell or anything that's predatory, you know, nude pictures, all of those toxic things, it instantly spots that and puts that in front of the parent. That's a danger zone. So, you know, there's one thing about sentiment
and guidance, the other is, wait a minute, you just jumped the stop sign. You didn't 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're just smarter
and more in tune with it. I have not run the data, but I would guess, and I'm curious now, so we'll go check it out and see what it says, that known 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 guardrail that better where it's not increasing at the same exponential rate as some of the more new ones, like cutting or, uh, restricting calories or, you know, uh, like behavioral sort of, you know, uh, adaptations from overusing stuff, which is very helpful, which means that, you know, when parents kind of get more aware of these things and start to guardrail, maybe you can kind of quell that.
So you need to expedite the learning for parents as well. Yeah. 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?
Like that's the first primary question, right? The second is, they're on these things all day long. What are they doing on this stuff? Like what's actually happening on these devices? And the third is sort of the thing you're asking, which is what can I do about it? And so there's some sets of interventions that go from, depending on where the child is in the spectrum,
so if the child is sort of on the really distressed side, we do a sort of a set of resources online where they can go talk to other parents, that they can accelerate the learning, they can ask questions. We set of resources online where they can go talk to other parents that they can accelerate the learning, they can ask questions. We have clinicians that go and respond to questions and we pay for it. And there's things like CBT or DBT, like, which are, you know, formal learning programs that if the parents, even if they do like a quick 30 minutes on CBT, uh, like
when, when, when our child was going through it, we did 23 weeks of an hour a week for the whole family of DBT. Which one's DBT? It's a dialectical. So it's basically for kids that are going through, so like cognitive is sort of the, the more the mental part of the dialectical is more, uh, also coming up with a framework and a language that we can all speak saying, Hey, like I'm distressed. I know what your signals are,
what words you're going to say to me that makes me kind of understand that. So it was really helpful. And so some of this, I mean, like the kids were like rolling their eyes and saying, I don't know why I have to do this. But at the end of that 23 weeks, uh, 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 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 it can get like a lot of the gist of it out there in 30 minutes type of thing. So. 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, is so important. What makes you, so I was bullied as a kid, uh, classic only child syndrome where you're under socialized, um, spoke differently to the place that I was from. Went to a very sort of rough and ready primary school, state school, sixth form 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. So you just stand out in a variety of different ways. I played cricket, which wasn't massively, you know, it's a fantastic way to make yourself cool in a working class school, to play cricket when everyone else wants to play football or rugby.
And, um, yeah, I, I look, many of the things that we appreciate in ourselves, I think, are born out of the challenges that we've gone through. Uh, and, you know, if you look at, you know, butterfly effect, your way back, you realize that if you're happy with where you are now, that you have to be happy with where you were then, because without that, the likelihood of you ending up here probably would be a little bit lower. You don't know whether this was, uh, uh, like determined or simply coincidence. Um, but it's something that I really just want to give, especially to kids that feel alone, especially kids in the, 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 exit. It takes so long as an adult to relearn shit that could have taken you a couple of months as a kid and you know, you're having to forcibly go through this very sort of slow cognitive process of, Hey, other people might have your best interests at heart. Hey, if you're struggling, you can speak to someone. Hey, if things are bad, perhaps you should call a friend. Like it's this very laborious, conscious front brain thing.
Because as a kid, the physics of your system once set up in such a way as to that, 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. I guess it has an impact on how you like, you know, even like learning to ask for help, right?
If you go through an experience like that, I suspect it's a little harder, right? You know, cause you just didn't kind of establish the pattern. You don't think anyone's got your back. Yeah. So you think like, I mean, 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 I got this? It's all because you've never learned to be able to open up to someone. Yep.
And you know, it just percolates through so much and that, you know, you can't lay at the feet so much of this is just personality. It's not to say that you've been puppeted by people that were in school. Yeah. Um, but I, it's, it's definitely a, uh, 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 a hundred schools in the North, the North of the UK. Uh, and we're looking at trying to do some of these evidence based bullying interventions.
And you know, if you guys have got a tech platform that can further propagate that, uh, holy shit. You know, if you could say, Hey guys, like 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 identifying.
It'd be unreal. Yeah. So yeah. Uh, have you guys got, I do there just for identifying. You'd be unreal. Yeah, so yeah. Have you guys got, did you watch adolescence? I did, I have very strong opinions around adolescence. Very strong opinions. I have a fear to watch it.
Scary. Okay, let me give you my, let me give you a little bit of spiel on adolescence. Yeah. Um, I've spent a lot of time in and around the sort of, fringes of the Manosphere, right? In one form or another, I'm often accused of being a part of it, despite the fact that they hate me.
And I've never identified as one of them. But I guess if you're a guy that gives advice to guys online, that you kind of get, 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. He didn't mean to go and hurt this girl. It was simply, um, uh, kind of an accident as the physical altercation began. But all of the post show reaction was around what this is evidently motivated by the sort of content that he's been seeing online. It was sort of only slightly paid lip service
toward 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
oppressing our daughters and so on and so forth. That was a narrative that was taken around with it. I don't know whether you saw, I think it was this morning or good morning or BBC Question Time. Kemi Badenoch, who's a British politician and a bunch of other people, raked over the coals by morning, morning question time presenters saying, you're telling me that you haven't taken time to watch this documentary.
And she holds her finger up and goes, not a documentary. And they go, you haven't taken time to what this is one of the most important cultural moments later in the same conversation. This documentary is one of the, not a documentary. It's like, you know, in the same way as we should be concerned around ogres that live in f**king 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?
You're suggesting that ogres don't live in swamps? Ah, that's true. Yeah. Now, is it tapping into some trends? Absolutely. Is this stuff that we should be interested in? I think- You're suggesting that ogres don't live in swans? Ah, that's true. Yeah. Misinformation. I get slightly concerned about creating such a huge cultural moment over something that's a fictional piece of work. Yeah.
It is hugely open to interpretation. Stephen Graham meant to do this. Like it's, 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. It comes from an intact home. Very, very rare.
Comes from like a good, a good background. Didn't seem like there was that much abuse. Like dad shouts sometimes, holy shit. Like, you know, that's a life that many kids would have dreamed to have had as comes from like a good, a good background. Didn't seem like there was that much abuse. Like 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. Uh, but it's being used as some sort of landmark event to explain where young boys are going wrong. I'm like, have you bothered speaking to young boys about what they're
actually that concerned about? Are you bothered speaking to young boys about what they're actually that concerned about? Or are you using a very successful, highly fictional series to inform policy? 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.
Like that was, you know, you get, it gets the heart rate going a little bit. So you just, not blown out of, I had a lot of conversations, had a lot of conversations, had a lot of conversations around it. And, um, fascinating, really, really interesting cultural moment. Uh, 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 that these kids are using? You know, like actually what is the language? Yeah, it's a lot easier to jump on a train that's already moving, right? 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 a finger and just say, okay,
like that's why this happened. Like that's, you know, that's never that simple. That's Jaffa. It's like, you know, it's never that simple. That's Jaffa. It's like, you know, it's like, that's the villain, right? So, but I, but I think, I think a little bit, uh, it's never like, it's really interesting because we do these like, um, wellness labs with kids at the Boston terms hospital, we bring in kids of like different ages, you know, starting like eight, nine, 10 up to like 18 different socioeconomic backgrounds. We bring a different set of parents in and so we do
the setup. 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. You know, that's one part of a much bigger composite, right? And so, 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. I mean, even to you, there's obviously an incentive, there would be an incentive for you guys
to just lay everything at the feet of smartphones. It would make your job a lot easier. Yeah, but it's not the truth. Like, I mean, you have to search for the truth. And I think for us, you know, that's in the truth. Like, I mean, you have to search for the truth. And I think for us, you know, that's in the data. And because if you really want to make something that's meaningful, that actually helps people, like, like, like
the simple way I think about it is when I came back from that, when my, 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 questions would 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, are you like, like what is like the, the,
the, what is the search for the truth? Like, and so in a lot of ways, I think it's a lot easier to just say, Hey, that train's moving. We're going to make that the villain. We're going to jump on that thing. Cause it's, you know, it's taken 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.
It's accurate. Yeah. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. Guys, I appreciate both of you. It's fascinating. It's really, really fascinating stuff. Uh, where should people go? They're going to want to find out more about what it is that you're doing.
Easy. Aura.com. A U R A, not the O U R A. Uh, yeah. Well, you've got both. I have both. I love that one. Very important.
So, uh, it's, it's you've got both. Yeah, both. I love that we're in. Very important. It's really, really important. Thank you 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. Thank you. Great.