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

Summary

Modern Wisdom Podcast Episode #967: Jeffrey Katzenberg & Hari Ravichandran - Hollywood Trouble, Big Tech & The Crisis With Kids

Release Date: July 14, 2025

Host Chris Williamson engages in a profound conversation with Jeffrey Katzenberg, renowned film producer and co-founder of DreamWorks Animation, and Hari Ravichandran, entrepreneur and co-founder of Aura—a company dedicated to enhancing online safety for children. This episode delves into the evolving landscape of Hollywood, the disruptive impact of Big Tech, and the escalating mental health crisis among today's youth.

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1. Understanding Talent and Storytelling

Jeffrey Katzenberg opens the discussion by reflecting on his core competencies:

"I know how to find a good idea, recognize a good person, a talented person... having an instinct for quality, for smarts, for ambition, vision, dreams."
—B [00:12]

Katzenberg emphasizes the importance of storytelling, drawing inspiration from Walt Disney's philosophy:

"There's no such thing as a great story without a great ending."
—B [02:37]

He highlights the pivotal role of well-crafted villains in narratives:

"The better the villain, the greater the challenge for the protagonist... the greater your victory is in it."
—B [04:15]

2. The Current State of the Movie Industry

Chris inquires about the contemporary challenges facing cinema, particularly with the rise of streaming platforms:

"What do you make of the modern world of cinema we keep hearing about? Is cinema in crisis?"
—A [16:53]

Katzenberg responds with a balanced perspective:

"It's a moment of extraordinary disruption and transformation... the industry is navigating its way through pretty challenging, if not treacherous times."
—B [16:53]

He remains optimistic about the enduring power of movies as a unique form of storytelling despite technological disruptions.

3. Big Tech's Influence and the Rise of Streaming Series

The conversation shifts to the proliferation of movies being adapted into streaming series, exemplified by franchises like Star Wars and the Avengers.

Katzenberg notes successful expansions:

"There have been phenomenal examples of great success... I'm an optimist in this."
—B [20:22]

He acknowledges the challenges but remains hopeful about the future integration of movies and series.

4. Impact of Social Media and Technology on Youth Mental Health

A significant portion of the discussion centers on the detrimental effects of social media and technology on children's mental health. Chris introduces the "peak-end rule," illustrating how endings significantly impact memory and perception, a concept applicable to storytelling and, metaphorically, to users' experiences with technology.

Hari Ravichandran shares his personal journey leading to the founding of Aura:

"When my 13-year-old daughter started experiencing severe depression... we realized the urgent need to address digital safety for kids."
—C [41:25]

He presents alarming statistics from Aura's beta testing:

"46% of them are depressed. 35% have social withdrawal... 52% have eating issues."
—A [47:05]

5. Introducing Aura: A Solution for Digital Safety

Aura aims to empower parents with tools to monitor and guide their children's online activities without invasive spying. The platform utilizes AI to analyze usage patterns and detect signs of distress or harmful behaviors.

Ravichandran explains the technology:

"We run models locally on your phone... We can identify when your kid is distressed and alert you."
—C [72:03]

Katzenberg underscores the importance of parental involvement:

"Parents are on the front line... the more they get educated, the more they understand that this is not like a weird thing."
—B [67:02]

6. Reinventing Parenting in the Digital Age

The hosts discuss strategies for parents to navigate the complexities of raising children in an era dominated by digital interactions.

Ravichandran offers insights into effective interventions:

"If we can create a customized blueprint for a child, we can guide their digital interactions towards positive outcomes."
—C [86:33]

Katzenberg highlights the flexibility of tools like Aura to adapt to different ages and developmental stages:

"The tools allow every parent to have a bespoke relationship with their child at a given moment in time."
—B [91:17]

7. Cultural and Societal Implications

The episode touches upon broader societal issues, including misinformation and the portrayal of adolescence in media. Chris references the documentary "Adolescence," critiquing its simplistic narrative linking social media to violent behaviors.

Katzenberg cautions against vilifying technology:

"It's a big marker for cyberbullying outbound, basically... but to simply villainize and demonize a thing is too simplistic."
—B [88:09]

Ravichandran emphasizes the need for nuanced understanding and data-driven approaches to address these challenges.

8. Personal Resilience and Overcoming Failures

Both Katzenberg and Ravichandran share personal anecdotes about resilience in the face of setbacks. Katzenberg recounts being fired from Disney despite the success of projects like "The Lion King," advocating for learning from failures:

"I've learned more from my failures than from my successes—they've made me very resilient."
—B [94:50]

Ravichandran mirrors this sentiment, highlighting the importance of continuous learning and adaptability.

9. Concluding Thoughts

The episode wraps up with reflections on the collaborative dynamic between Katzenberg and Ravichandran. They underscore the mission-driven approach of Aura to safeguard the mental well-being of the next generation in an increasingly digital world.

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Key Takeaways:

• Storytelling Excellence: Recognizing quality narratives and strong antagonists is crucial for engaging and impactful stories.

• Industry Adaptation: The movie industry is undergoing significant transformation due to streaming platforms and technological advancements, yet traditional cinema remains a resilient form of storytelling.

• Digital Safety for Kids: The pervasive use of social media and digital devices poses severe risks to children's mental health, necessitating innovative solutions like Aura to empower parents.

• Parental Empowerment: Providing parents with actionable insights and tools is essential for navigating the digital challenges of modern parenting.

• Resilience Through Adversity: Personal and professional setbacks can foster resilience, a trait valuable for both creators and entrepreneurs in dynamic industries.

Notable Quotes:

• "There's no such thing as a great story without a great ending." —B [02:37]
• "Success is measured in so many different ways. And sometimes it is purpose driven and sometimes, as Hari's saying, it's mission driven." —B [14:08]
• "We have to give parents the tools to help children get a learner's permit, get their driver's license, and get on the road safely." —B [59:12]
• "Our mission is not just about protection, but empowering parents to proactively support their children's well-being." —C [72:03]

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This episode offers valuable insights into the intersection of Hollywood's creative processes, the disruptive influence of technology, and the pressing need to address the mental health crisis among youth. By combining the expertise of a seasoned film producer and a forward-thinking entrepreneur, listeners gain a multifaceted understanding of contemporary challenges and potential solutions.

Transcript

[A]

Jeff, what made you so good at what you did? I don't actually understand what your skill set is like. It's obvious that you're talented, but I don't actually know person to accuse me of. I don't actually know what you're talented at.

[B]

I'm not sure I am either. Let's see. Certainly a good storyteller, I think. You know what, I'm a truffle hunter. I, 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, you know, ambition, vision, dreams, you know. You know, I've spent most of my career helping other people realize their dreams, their stories, their ideas. 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, the unknown, the, you know, unimaginable, and 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.

[A]

I've heard you say that you're a good home run hitter, but you don't do singles and bunts well.

[B]

Yeah, that's sort of a different, that's, you know, sort of in my ambition column, you know, sort of different lanes that, you know, I like to take on things that are very, very, very challenging. And you know, I, I, I like to say that, you know, I'm, I, I like doing things that are, you know, improbable, if not impossible. That's kind of my home address. And you know, the outcome of that is, is that, you know, when you one, you can hit a home run, if you don't swing for the fence and more time, at least many times you will swing for the fence and you won't get there. You know, so you got to accept that, you know, with success comes failure.

[A]

You mentioned being able to pick a good story, one of the core skill sets. With 400 something movies, 80 animated, what in your opinion makes for a good story?

[B]

Well, there are many things I, you know, one of, 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. And he had this amazing archive of his work, his work process, his creative sort of blueprints and um, so many great lessons learned. About storytelling from him, particularly around his animated movies. One of my favorite ones, he says, you know, there's no such thing as a great story without a great ending. Seem pretty obvious, right? There's no such thing as a great story. Your story, your story. Let me say my movies are only as good as their villains. So one of the things that 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, I look at Ursula or Scar or Jafar or Farquaad or Tai Lung or I could go on and on and on and. Because when I read that and I understood became a kind of a north Star.

[A]

What is it about the villain?

[B]

Well, that the better the villain, the. The greater the challenge for the protagonist. Right. So, you know, whatever you have to overcome, whatever you have to defeat, the greater that 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 in it. And so lots of these great lessons along the way around storytelling and what are the essential ingredients of a great story?

[A]

It's interesting to think about the ending. There's this great idea from psychology called the peak end rule, which you might be familiar with. Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize, found that across a person's memory of an experience, the most memorable parts were the peak intensity, the highest, and then the end. So they did this study with colonoscopies. In one iteration of the study, 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 self rated after the fact 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. If you're, you are making a movie, you know, finish on an emotionally salient, real high energy, sort of feel good.

[B]

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.

[A]

Yeah, but yeah, you know, 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?

[B]

Yeah. What's the mountain you're climbing?

[A]

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?

[B]

That's, that's a mystery to me. You know, I really don't, I don't know how you define taste. I don't know how you acquire taste. I've been, you know, so lucky to be around people of exquisite taste my whole life, and I guess just maybe it just sort of 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, and then along the way, different people in my career had obviously extraordinary tastes. That's the mystery. You know, I, I, I know that all of us always are so interested and the, of the mystery of, like, well, where does talent come from? How does somebody, how does 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 Kalpin would do it and literally just create. Where does that come from? Right? Where does that, I mean, we can talk about, you know, great athletes and things that, you know, that, that, that, you know, that they achieve. And, you know, you just wonder, how can Steph Curry, you know, just shoot that ball, you know, from the three point, you know, world like, you know, how does Messi do what he's, I have no idea. You know, it's a, that is one of the great mysteries of where does, you know, unique or exceptional or special talent come from? You know, observing it and wanting to know in others. Certainly have no idea. For myself.

[A]

There's an Elton John diary entry which is maybe one of the most legendary diary entries of all time. It says, woke up, watched grandstand, wrote Candle in the Wind, went to London, bought Rolls Royce, Ringo Starr came for dinner. Like, yeah, yeah, it's not a bad day. It's not a bad day.

[B]

You know, I mean, there are many, many wonderful artists that I've had the privilege of watching. You know, Guillermo del Toro, you know, you know, 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, where do those moments come from? And obviously I spent decades in partnership with probably the greatest storyteller of our lifetime, Steven Spielberg.

[A]

What's it like working with him?

[B]

Dazzling. I mean, you know, he's just a very singular and unique and special guy. And it's been a, you know, privilege to, you know, to be there and be a, a partner and, and, and a business partner and a friend and cheerleader and, you know, likewise. You know, I, I, I had him as a, as a mentor and all those different roles, one, one person for many, many decades. And, but, but watching him as a storyteller, it's so natural, it's so instinctual. It's amazing. To see him on a set, I imagine, is to see Leonard Bernstein conducting an organization. Yeah, 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 craftspeople or actors or, you know, any, anyone in it, they, they just, he just knows. And in a way that's hard to, to understand. I'm not sure he can explain it.

[A]

Both of you guys are very driven. What's driven you? What's driven you independently to what you do, what you do?

[C]

Well, that's a good question. It feels to me like when there are large problems or big sweeping issues, if there's sort of a unique ability or skill set that I have, whether it's building a business around it or sort of evangelizing an idea or whatever it is, that's very motivating because it feels like it's something unique that I can apply my perspective to that problem to be able to bring that forth to lots of people that potentially have the same problem as well. 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 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.

[A]

Jeffrey, what about you?

[B]

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, 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, 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, that is what, you know. You know, that that was a 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, you know, we all had a hand in making. I have a bottomless well of a need to win. So I'm, I'm, I'm always looking for, you know, that an outcome that is a, a success. And success is measured in so many different ways. And sometimes it is purpose driven and sometimes, as Hari's 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.

[A]

What's the difference between purpose and mission?

[C]

I'm not sure in my mind. Purpose, ambition 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'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, in your work, I guess, is how I see it.

[B]

Yeah. Purpose to me is 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, that you're, you're going to do something that is going to make a contribution to the world that's, you know, unique and, and invaluable and more often that's by, by accident, you know, that's not. These things happen to you. You know, people always say, well, how do you, 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. You don't make that happen, you know.

[A]

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[B]

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 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 theater thing is is that when, you know, sinners, you know, it's just, which is just a phenomenal, you know, movie. And, and it just gives people that sort of renewed, not only optimism that no, there's still a place for this, but we, you know, the world is changing all the time you, you know, you can't. You, 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, you know, legacy businesses declining, and how do you transition to the next? And I've lived through a couple of them myself and they are, they're really, really hard and they're really, really challenging. And much of the time having to navigate through really uncharted places. And so lots of uncertainty in that, a lot of fear with it. But I, 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.

[A]

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 Lord of the Rings massive bet by Amazon, which I don't know the books, but not convinced how great of a investment that was. What do you make of this sort of expansion out into other areas like that?

[B]

Yeah, I think it's, I mean, listen, there have been phenomenal examples of great success. I just watched the latest season of Daredevil, you know, which is a spin off of a spin off of a spin off. And I thought it was incredible. I mean, I was just completely mesmerized and engrossed in it and following. It's like, I can't wait for the, you know, the next season of it. And 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 a 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 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.

[A]

To be sidelined the outside.

[B]

Yeah, exactly like that old Monday morning quarterback. And I'm sure many people in Hollywood.

[A]

Tell you what's interesting on that movie's going to series is the inverse, which would be Peaky Blinders. Oh my God, that's going to finish the Entire narrative arc with a movie.

[B]

Okay. Have you seen Mobland?

[A]

Not yet.

[B]

Okay, well, it's so interesting because I literally. It's almost. It's not done yet either. And I literally let. And I was watching a couple nights ago with the latest episode of Modeling with my wife and. And I said to her, I said, you know, this really just feels like the modern version of Peaky Blinders. One of my favorite shows.

[A]

Spectacular.

[B]

Oh, my God.

[C]

Even with like a lot of these shows that have repeats, they get reset in time like as like the. The sort of the modern pattern change. Like, like the five versions of Spider Man. Like 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 zeitgeist. Like, whatever. How are 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.

[A]

You know, this was what was happening when I was young. This is what is happening now. You are young.

[C]

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.

[A]

That's a really. That's a really, really good point that you have when you run it back with a movie. The. What is the cultural milieu at the moment? What's happening? What are people worried about? What are their fears?

[C]

Like Superman, you know, like, you know, my son looks at him and says, well, why does it look like it's, you know, cut out of like cardboard? That's what it was.

[A]

Yes.

[C]

At the time. You know, so it's sort of a. It's like, it's a cool moment that kind of brings people together as well.

[A]

How many movies now have got some lone wolf AI powered evil? It's the Jafar of the. Of 2025 powered by ChatGPT. You know that. Why is that? Well, it's because people have got concern 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. You know, that's not that math was very good. Yes.

[B]

I just want to say that is beautifully done.

[A]

Do you hear, do you hear that? Very good. 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.

[B]

You know, I don't. It's always hard, I mean, I think that to stand outside of 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, 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, andor's, you know, again you can see glimmers of brilliance and I say glimmers. It's not a glimmer, it's a, you know, that's a glowing light of, you know, North Star of something, you know, wildly entertaining and wildly successful. So the movies have seemed to have, you know, struggled a bit. But my, my guess is I would go back to the Bible and find my aspiration, inspiration and probably Roadmap by getting back to its roots.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, you were asking earlier about this sort of switch in media. Like maybe you start with the book, then you go to a different sort of a medium for a story. It's really funny with my son during COVID he got his. 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 Legos video game. So that's how he started was like playing, you know, playing with me. So it's like a way that we would connect. We'd like, you know, go through the story. You go through all seven in the game. In the game, like he'd literally go through the entire book 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 was like, oh, I know these characters, I understand what's going on. So he was excited about it. But 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 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.

[A]

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.

[C]

I think that's right. I think that's right.

[A]

Which, you know, tells us everything you need to know about how well video game designers understand human behavior.

[C]

Yep.

[A]

They are better able to. Maybe that's. That's maybe not fair. The. The degrees of freedom that video games are able to play with, are able to access human psychology in your mind, in the story. Yeah. You're part of the. You're a protagonist in this. But I mean, look at GTA 6.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

You know, I mean, that thing is going to. So there's a great Reddit post. 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.

[B]

It will be the biggest event, event launch of any entertainment property ever.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Like we know that today.

[C]

It's almost like the other video game companies are looking at it going, well, that's coming out. I want to wait. I'm not going to launch other games.

[A]

Yeah. Give it six months. No one's playing anything for six months.

[C]

Exactly.

[A]

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 Wikipedia, like encyclopedia Wikipedia thing with the two people that made an online wiki about his book. So, you know, there's this reverse fan fiction inclusion with the author thing where you go, this has got to this. I mean, 50 shades of gray.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Starts off as a fanfic and then gets turned around and you 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 fan fiction 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.

[C]

Yeah, that's.

[A]

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?

[B]

Well, you go first.

[C]

It's hard. 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 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 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. And so 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? You know, can you go in there sort of, you know, wanting to absorb knowledge because there might be new things, because times have changed, with new things, because it'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 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.

[A]

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[B]

We'll call you out, don't worry.

[A]

Good, 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 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 and all of the nightclubs got shut down. So that was a big change for me. But also that meant that people started working from home and some people felt liberated by that. I know the company that owns C4, the energy drink. They, in a desperate attempt to try and get people back into the office, built a $40 million campus in Austin. State of the art. There's on site chef, you can get your VO2 max tested. There's bodywork and people wave sage around and Stuff. It's still pretty difficult to get people to go back into the office.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

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 human.

[B]

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. The shared experience of being in a movie theater and 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, you know, is in your. In your home. That shared. Expect communal experience of, you know, 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. That area of isolation. Human beings need other human beings. We need. We are a social beast.

[C]

You know, 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, especially with my kids, the bonds got tighter. There's some positive elements that came out of that, because before that I was traveling a lot. I was never really sort of static in one place just for work. So you were sort of forced into captivity in some ways with your family. So that, to me, actually ended up being much more positive than I thought. Now, the aftermath of it has been really interesting. And so, you know, we're talking about sort of adults here with kids now. You know, the levels of anxiety and the levels of sort of, you know, how much stress those two years cost is, 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 the. 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. They've always had it sort of climbing up those two years.

[B]

And it's the cohort, and it's really almost like three, almost four years. It's that cohort that you can see how they're. As they are aging now. They are. You know, when you take the 5 and 6, 78 year olds who are now 9, 10, 11, 12 year olds.

[C]

It's insane.

[B]

You can see there's a pattern of behavior there.

[C]

Like the levels of anxiety are higher than ever. You know, kids using negative coping strategies like cutting or restricting calories, like those types of things have become massive. And most any medical professional you talk to will tell you that, hey, something happened during COVID like we can't quite put our finger on it, but things were 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. We had sort of a, 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, interacting with their friends and during these developmental windows of time, putting them sort of 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.

[A]

Let me add another level of complexity and reason to be discontent. I had a great conversation with this guy called Dr. Paul Tuck. 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, 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, try and teach them through an iPad. They don't get out, they don't get mum and dad are stressed, they don't know what's going on. All of this stuff, 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 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 35 year olds. So, well, everybody's gonna be at a similar sort of developmental trajectory. And then when you roll that even more and you go, okay, let's compare that ancestrally, that's a bit restricted perhaps to what we would have been used to. And now we're gonna make it, we can turn that up to 11.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

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.

[B]

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 on, on online. We're all online all the time in this and we have become, you know, more and more and more vulnerable. And 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. You know, 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. Right. 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, of problems. Well, that was great. And that was, I would say, a, a, a great, a need. And you know, there was a, A, an opportunity to go solve this problem for consumers. People were, they were many, many companies were out solving it for enterprise, for companies, you know, where we would Hear about, you know, J.C. penney getting all of their data stolen and this one and that one.

[A]

And Sony had a huge breach.

[C]

Right.

[B]

So lots and pieces, 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 this kicked into gear for us.

[C]

Yeah, look, I think we're 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 the 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 amazed 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 shift in life from physical to digital. They're on their devices, on their phones all the time, all day long. In an odd way, like the truth of their lives are not in physical land. It's almost on their device.

[A]

It's a great take.

[C]

Yeah. And we didn't understand this. We're like a hyper privacy focused family. We don't look at kids phones, we don't do any of that type of stuff. And you know, it was about two and a half years ago. She said, hey, like I don't feel great, et cetera. So 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. 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 went just completely dipped. Like, you know, it was hard to get her out of bed. She was like not in a good headspace, severely depressed. And there was, there was, 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 oh, everything's fine, like I'm okay. You know, 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. 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 thought, are we, like, terrible parents? Like, how could this have happened? So that's when we started looking around to say, hey, is this just us? Or, you know, like, is it happening? It's everywhere now. Like, I mean, I think people are starting to talk about it more and more, but the stats are staggering. And so let me.

[B]

Yeah, it's an epidemic. And this experience that. Make an analogy. Go back here. You know, when. 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 were they're with. They're on this device. They may be physically 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, drug sex, like, there. That's life. And as parents, you know, you have tools, you have insights, you have the ability to help navigate your. Your kids through that. And. And 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 that when your kid is going to learn to drive, you get a learner's permit, you go to a Walmart parking lot, but there's 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 is 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, I know you know the rules of the road. In the world of social media and the online world, there are no boundaries. There's no, there's no, you have no ability to navigate to help your kids navigate. And 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 this online safety. So remember I said we started with online security and then the mission became out of Ari's personal experience. It was like a hard pivot to let's expand this into how do we protect our kids? Much more important than protecting our bank account. 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 2500 is a very good sample both geographically and otherwise. And 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.

[A]

80%.

[B]

80%. And more than half of them are doing things that are unhealthy or harmful as a result of that.

[A]

Have you got any idea? I mean those are shocking stats, but I always wonder about what the base rate is with stuff like that. Have you got any idea what this would have been like 30 years ago?

[C]

Yes, it's really interesting. There's actually stats that 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 was really interesting because you asked a really interesting question, because I actually had the same question, which is, hey, like, are we now just better at talking to our kids or identifying these things?

[A]

Is this just an endemic part of being a teenage girl but now we.

[C]

Can now identify, Right?

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

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 is 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 prominent. Like, 11, 12% of girls cut, they said there's like 10 in a week. Now we're seeing a hundred. 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 Covid land? But the data is very, very clear. It's not self reporting, it's not us identifying more of these cases. Something got messed up, it's hard, and we can't quite tell. Again, I think it's unfair to say, hey, the phone made it all bad, it's causal, that type of stuff. 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 daughter's 8th 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's a real problem.

[A]

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.

[B]

Well, we have the data. There's no. Like ours is not. This is not our interpretation or projection of it. We're actually just seeing hard Data. We had 2500, now we've got 10,000 users on it. And we're.

[A]

When it comes to a mechanism, what's your. Just some potential sort of causal explanation to what you think's going on here, Global altogether type thing.

[C]

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 sort of the growth of smartphones and sort of the growth of emotional sort of negativity, clearly it looks very, very correlated. Like one's going up, the other one's going up as well. So it almost seem like when you unleash something for it to get to a critical mass and see 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, you know, make things rough. So I think we've hit this like critical juncture now where 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, and there's enough proliferation of that across 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 her being an adolescent. So there's this amplification element. There is enough of this happen 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 it's accelerated.

[B]

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.

[A]

Effectiveness of being compelling.

[B]

Yes. And the effectiveness of being able to, you know, 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. If they are not helped in navigating their way through it.

[C]

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 shade. But again, like, we set up the ecosystem. We told a bunch of really smart.

[A]

I mean, incentives are going to. Incentive, exactly.

[C]

Right. We set up the incentives where he said, I mean, if you're a big social media company, you're doing your earnings.

[A]

Maximize time on site.

[C]

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.

[A]

But our problems, people choose the things that they want to do. If they didn't like it, they wouldn't choose it. It's asymmetric warfare, though, so it's not quite the right metric to use.

[C]

Yeah. So I think that's. But we set up the ecosystem. We sort of empower smart, sort of ambitious people to go in and start hacking us in some ways. Right. And so that's happened long enough, and there's been enough sort of medium through which you can kind of get this out, which is whether social media, smartphones, or some combination. I think now we're looking at it saying, oh, no, what did we do? And we did this all without thinking about the guardrails. So that's really where we are. Like, people trying to figure out, how do you guard? Because it's never going back, by the way. You can't close the box.

[A]

This episode is brought to you by Nomatic. Summer is here, and travel season is in full swing. But let's be honest, your backpack was probably built for a school field trip, not international adventures, which is where Nomatic comes in. I've been able to travel the world with this bag right here because it's designed by people who actually understand the chaos of being on the move. Everything has its place and no space goes unused. It's compact enough to fit under the seat, but somehow fits everything that you need when you're on the go. And if you're still on the fence, that product will last you literally a lifetime. The lifetime guarantee. So this is the final backpack that you'll ever need to buy and you can return or exchange any product within 30 days for any reason. So you can buy a new bag, put your possessions in it for a full month 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 nomatic.commodernwisdom that's nomatic.com/modern wisdom. What's your proposed reason for why it's getting worse over time? Despite the fact that kids have had social media for a long time? Is it that the current 15 year olds have had it for over a decade? Is it simply time and detention? Is it the effectiveness and how compelling these are? Is it the distribution? Like what? What do you think?

[C]

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 sort of talking to it or you know, clicking on a piece of content that you like car wrecks or you. 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. Oh, here's another variant of the car crash. So now you're sort of in this cycle of feeding that neural pathway with these things that kind of continuously, with most of these kids, by the way, you look at them and say, did you actually want to see that? Many of us say, no.

[A]

There's a great book, Human Compatible by Stuart Russell. Have you read that?

[C]

I have, yeah.

[A]

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 wrote a couple of sort of popular normal people books. And I learned this fucking terrifying thing from him. It's 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. The second one is that the algo nudges your preferences so that you become more predictable and bidirectional 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. Was it move 14 in that Lee Su Dong Go game where no one could actually work out? So why did you do that?

[C]

The reward system? Yeah, that's correct.

[A]

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 in beliefs and.

[B]

Chris, human beings have dark thoughts. You know, little. Little human beings, medium human beings, old human beings. We do have dark, you know, dark thoughts. And, you know, this will 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.

[C]

I mean, I think intuitively kind of people have figured this out, right? Which is basically create a neural pathway for a certain kind of action, eliciting a certain kind of reaction just by observation. Like you're saying, which is, hey, if I did this thing, what are you going to do? 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. 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 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, you know, easier to program than perhaps you and me.

[A]

Okay, so let's. So let's just sort of dig in for a second. I think about, look, Australia's got a social media ban now for under 16s.

[C]

Yep.

[A]

It seems to me that although what you guys are doing with Aura is great and necessary, that the nuclear option is just to go like no social media for anyone under 16. I mean, you could probably. For males, you could probably look at no social media under 25 and make a justification for that.

[C]

Right.

[A]

Prefrontal cortex still develop it. Mine feels like it's still going down. 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 60?

[C]

Well, I mean, I think besides the practical elements of. Can we actually pull it off? Right. Which is, again, a whole nother question. We invented it because there was a reason, there's a human reason why this thing came to be. Again, 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 we're all wired. But there is, like, I mean, there are kids that. That are very introverted. You know, there are kids that, you know, want to have a community that. There are kids that want that, that, you know, have that desire to connect with other humans, to learn to see.

[B]

Things, to explore the world.

[C]

So there is a real need there. It's just that like everything else, we.

[B]

Just, you know, you think about the access to knowledge that comes with being on this device and the fact that that is, that barrier just goes down to almost, you know, you could be on the Masai Mara in a, you know, in a hut there, and you could actually now have a device in the hands of a kid with the ability to learn and to see and travel the world and travel through history.

[A]

And surely the. 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.

[C]

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.

[A]

Right.

[C]

Eight hours.

[A]

So probably more time than they're asleep.

[C]

Yeah. So I mean. Yeah, that's exactly right. And, you know, you're awake for, you know, call it whatever, you know, 12, 18 hours a day, and you're spending the majority of it on these devices, and it goes from spot to spot. There are, you know, you actually do see, kids are spending time learning, they're using Google class, they're using things to make themselves more productive. There's more language.

[B]

Duolingo.

[C]

Duolingo.

[B]

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.

[C]

60, that's like saying, don't drive.

[A]

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 are these platforms really facilitating learning?

[C]

I think they facilitate more connection than learning. I would say that's one thing. But even take this analogy of driving a car, right? I mean, you can take this. Actually, we're seeing this in the stats too, but you can take multiple approaches here, which is, hey, driving a car is a scary thing. Don't drive the car till you're 25. That's one approach which again has its sets of repercussions. There's one that says, hey, driving a car at 16, but then going through these stages. So you have healthy relationship with cars, healthy relationship with safety is sort of another approach. But the way that came about was regulated, right? I mean, if 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, this is the nation's largest epidemic at the moment in mental health for adolescents. But again, there's perverse forces, right? I mean, you've got large companies with incentives, lots of capital, lots of resources that obviously don't want for this to happen. So that's the dichotomy, I think.

[B]

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 Lou 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, because 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.

[A]

Yes, yes.

[B]

And so our ambition was parents. And parents, parents are good at parenting when they have tools, tools, then they have knowledge. And so for our, 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 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 gonna, they're gonna find a way to circumvent us. Right. So 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, 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.

[A]

Bigger data.

[B]

Yeah. As the data gets greater, the knowledge.

[A]

Well, so you're, you've.

[B]

But let me give you a great one, Chris, here, because it's so fascinating to me, which is if you're a teenage girl and you download a calorie tracking app, we actually know, like, that's step one. Now, does 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 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 you just knew that.

[C]

I'll say two things to your question around sort of Australia and the ban. If I could go back in time, I would wait to get my kid a smartphone till 16. I think that that's just good, 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 all their friends get stuff. And now you've got all this coordination problem.

[A]

Yeah. I think Haidt's proposal is you get a weird like, like commune, digital commune of families together and you say, okay, no one's going to, but they can be friends. But they, you know, but that's what they're doing.

[C]

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, you know, watching kind of, you know, unfold every day, the parents are the front line. It's not regulations, all that type of stuff. It's gonna have to work its way to that. But really, it's the parents that are on the front line of the problem. So the more they get educated, the more they understand that this is not like a weird thing. It's happening culturally, everywhere. And we're all sort of at a loss for what to do. And there's this brewing problem that's happening. And the more that becomes visible to people saying, 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. And so if you talk to a lot of clinicians and psychologists, that's what they tell you. There's 6,000 of U.S. clinicians and psychologists, caseloads going up through the roof. To train somebody to be good at that is going to take a long time, decades plus. So where do you find the help? It's the parents. Get them smarter on these issues, get them to understand that, and the desire and the motivation is there. They want to raise great kids that are happy, that are healthy. You know, so that's.

[A]

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. It's harrowing, but fascinating.

[C]

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.

[A]

How are you tracking sleep?

[C]

So basically, when kids wake up, they pick up their phone. So we see traffic on their device, or if they have a wearable, we can track that information as well. If they're kind of going to sleep, we see, for example, like a really interesting thing. We do see that if there is a lot of activity outside of your digital life, it's a huge positive thing. So you could be on your phone for four hours a day. Five, 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.

[A]

How do you know if they're doing that?

[C]

Because you can tell on geotracking where they're kind of out and about basically. So you kind of start to correlate.

[A]

As opposed to the person who's just in at home for most of the.

[C]

Day scrolling the whole time and on their devices that there isn't. And you can see the amount of activity that they have. Right. And then other like another interesting tip I'll give you, like boys and girls are very different. The patterns are quite distinct. For, for, for the two boys that are on gaming platforms for long windows of time don't seem to have the same negative outcomes as girls on social media.

[A]

Why?

[C]

I think it's because for boys developmentally, I think it is sort of a way of interacting. They're 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. 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 just saying 12 took it at 16, 17. But those are, I mean really interesting to us that you know, because if you know these things, if you have a boy, you're like, okay, well this is kind of the stuff we need to go do to make sure this kid's okay, you know, type of thing.

[B]

So, and here's a kind of fascinating because we're talking about, you know, what 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, 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 have negative implications like a.

[A]

Wearable tracker for your digital for your emotional health? Right.

[C]

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.

[B]

There's no observation about that in it. So today, actually, that's the beauty of, you know, this is where the innovation of tech is phenomenal in this. And what's.

[A]

What's your. How are you going to work that out? Or how can people learn more about themselves with.

[C]

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 are using, what, you know, personal apps are using. We can say when you're on these.

[B]

Things, you know, all your patterns of behavior relative to your mental and like even sentiment.

[C]

Right. So we look at it and say, hey, like when you're on these things doing this kind of work, you're not. I notice that your mood is actually sort of.

[A]

How do you know? Mood?

[C]

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, you know, how hard you push the keys.

[A]

No way.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

So you can get all these markers that basically say, hey, like, you know, or the frequency, like, you know, let's say you're in an angry mood and how quickly you're responding back to somebody. Right.

[A]

Wow.

[C]

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.

[B]

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 know, you were not having a great day. Something happened along the way here. You know, you went to a store, you, you know, got in a. Try to exchange something. You got in an art like it will actually.

[C]

And I'm looking forward to it for myself.

[A]

So where are you at with the how?

[B]

Let's net. We want to get through the teenage thing, which we just launched. Right.

[C]

That's the fourth quarter of this year. Sort of the first. First MVP of. Come on. I was showing Luke this and he was like, I really need this for myself.

[A]

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. Yeah, for a little bit of it. I mean look, I, I think that that idea of some kind of wearable.

[B]

Tracker, you don't have to wear anything.

[A]

But the insights from a wearable coming out of, you know, activity. Yeah, exactly. I mean that, that I would, I would use that in a heartbeat.

[B]

That wearable is actually more about your physical. Physical, of course, physiology. 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 when you're happy, when you're not, what makes you happy.

[A]

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?

[C]

You could. I think there's a little bit. When you start looking at images, there's CSAM regulations that you have to worry about.

[A]

TikTok's got it in their terms of service.

[C]

Honestly, I think that. But even just tabulating stuff and saying, here's 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 screen time data.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

You know, which I, I mean I'm.

[A]

Using external apps because even though Apple's tried to become more sophisticated with screen time and limitations, it's not good enough.

[C]

Yep.

[A]

So you know what I always think about, it's so funny. You remember when, before there was the torch function on your home screen.

[C]

Yep.

[A]

That 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 turned the torch. 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.

[B]

Which is precisely the entrepreneurs do.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

You get out ahead, they find a lane.

[A]

Yeah, that's a good point.

[B]

See where something is missing and just go innovate like crazy around that. That idea even, you know, at Some point, maybe these, you know, behemoths will be motivated by what we are doing to take on some of the stuff.

[A]

Why am I not? Look, we saw this with the link tree. You're in a link tree. So it was like a way for you to have a very simple listing of a bunch of different links. So in Instagram you could only have one link on your bio. But lots of people 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, you wanted 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 thing was worth it was Australian company, it was worth a couple of billion.

[C]

Simple problem.

[A]

Day one. Day one worth a couple 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.

[C]

So you have to be smart about it because you have to be able to see that at some point the trend will change. So it's really interesting to us because again the existential issue is hey, as a company, again as, as a human being and as a dad, we would welcome this very much. Obviously is 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, you say okay, well what happens if they just copy? They just look at this. This is really good. We should do this for all our users they go to. Which is what you're talking about with linktree, 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, well being, 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 find my right. Find my 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 doggedly focused on that one use Case. So users say, okay, well, the services are better now in my mind, if I need that, I got to. So you got to get there early enough, and it's got to be broad enough, and you 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, because you got to get the story kind of out there so people understand.

[A]

That a bunch of other people like Robert Downey Jr. Is part of this, too.

[C]

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 of a funny tidbit. While we were trying to get people sort of on our board, Jeffrey was helping us quite a bit, especially for people that had big platforms. So Jeffrey said, we should talk to Tom Hanks. And we said, oh, okay, that sounds good. He said, well, come out to Philadelphia. So I go out to Philadelphia. We're sitting at breakfast with Tom and Rita, and Jeffrey's sort of going through stuff, and Tom Hanks says, oh, I'm going to go to the White House this evening and see the President. And so Jeffrey's like, oh, I just came from there last week. And so now Tom Hanks is like, I'm going to write you. Jeffrey said, I'm going to write you a letter. You should take it, give it to the President when you see him today. So they're sitting there writing the letter. His phone rings. I look down and it says, Sir Elton John. I'm thinking, I'm in, like, Twilight Zone.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

[C]

So we've had lots of great sort of such things where Jeffrey's been a huge part of getting us plugged into this world of people that sort of have original large platforms that they can get sort of ideas out there. So, Robert, we met through. Through Jeffrey as well. Those are the.

[A]

A quick aside. If you haven't been feeling as sharp or energized as you'd like, getting your blood work done is the best place to start, which is why I partnered with Function. They run lab tests twice a year that monitor over a hundred biomarkers. They've got a team of expert physicians that then take that data, put it in a simple dashboard, and give you insights and actionable recommendations to improve your health and lifespan. They track everything from your heart health, health to your hormone levels, your thyroid function and nutrient deficiencies. They even screen for 50 types of cancer at stage one, which is five times more data than you get from an annual physical. Getting your blood work drawn and analyzed like this would usually cost thousands, but with function it is only $499. And for the first thousand modern wisdom listeners, you get another hundred dollars off, making it 399 bucks. So you can go to the link in the description below or head to functionhealth.com Modern Wisdom. That's functionhealth.com ModernWisdom I remember just going back to the speed of typing pressure, which again, fucking blown my mind. I remember reading an article about Chinese health. 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's data. Right. And you can draw correlations wherever you want. But the fact that you guys can do it to try and intervene, and I certainly think as well, people feel like there is a, at best, slightly adversarial relationship with most technology.

[C]

Yep.

[A]

Going down to what was like an outright malicious intent 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 gonna wear long sleeves and I'm pro. 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. 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 wanna jailbreak it, in which case the whole thing becomes unusable, Useless.

[C]

Yep.

[A]

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 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.

[C]

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 telling you about that, like the car crashes, right? You're scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. A very simple thing which says, hey, do you actually want 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 hit. I'm going to keep like, you know, 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. Right.

[A]

Yeah. What about younger kids? Have you looked at the classic story, parent with crying child in restaurant, iPad in front of child. How concerned are you about. I don't even know. You call it infant use.

[C]

I mean, it's. You're teaching them the patterns from early on, right? I mean, again, it's hard. Like, I definitely see why you do it. Because this kid's screaming, you're at a restaurant trying to get dinner, and you got to make sure that you're going to play kidding them. It's like, after you try a few things, here's your iPad. Go play on it. But I do think that if it's unregulated, where that becomes the norm, you're now teaching them sort of something. It's like teaching them that when you feel bad, you should go to a device when you feel like you can't cope with their emotions, that's how you do it. So with every one of these actions, you're doing it. So. But that being said, we're all social. Like, we all 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 on how to sort of make that work. But I do think there's some negative things that are coming out of that as well, because I think we're teaching them that you can start relying on this for emotional support.

[A]

Those. Again, I don't know whether this is Jonathan Haidt's 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?

[C]

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 8 or 10 and above, you can tell them a lot of stuff. I'm putting 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. So you're kind of teaching them a different thing basically. I do think that that's why we kind of went down this adult path. There's not just the kids, we want to make sure that adults are also self aware of. And again, if you're of a certain age, you may not have gotten hooked on it early enough. So you might have actually developed some patterns where you're like, okay, I know how to put the phone down because I grew up during a time when I didn't have a phone. So I kind of learned that skill. If you're talking about these kids that are on their iPads at 6, 7, 8, that is native. That's how they're growing up. You never teach them the other side of it.

[A]

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.

[C]

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 I'll be at a dinner, It'll be like 10 couples and parents and say, 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, they're fine. They're just like, on their phone, you.

[A]

Know, I don't, like, they're not taking drugs. They're not out at night.

[C]

Yeah. But there's like, stuff happening there that's the same impact as, you know, like, like taking a drug, which.

[A]

Endogenous drugs, just not. Yeah, I. 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. Like, where 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.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Or a dopamine endogenous dopamine dealer that's gonna commit them to a life of social anxiety and depression.

[C]

Yeah. I mean, you know, look, I think the guard railing concept is what appeals to me the most personally, which is sort of the. 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. 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 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. 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?

[A]

Oh, that's the current solution.

[C]

Well, for a third of them, 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 got to come up 45 minutes, you don't know what you're looking for. It's a needle in the haystack too, you know.

[A]

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. Have you thought about what some potential interventions are to tune down the more negative behavior that that happens socially on digital devices?

[C]

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 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, you know, craft their day in this sort of a way with their device. I mean, we're only talking about devices here that seems to have the best possible outcome. Now, 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.

[B]

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, 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 start, you step further and further away from your oversight. And that's what the tools allow every parent to have a bespoke relationship with their child at a given moment in time.

[C]

I mean, it's sort of like a nicoderm patch in some ways, right? It's probably the more perverse example of it, which is, you know, like you start with step three, then you work down to step two, then, you know, or maybe it's the opposite way, you know, one of the three, at some point you're like, okay, I'm off the patch. Which is really, 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 Africa example is very up.

[A]

I guess another interesting element here, Jeff, you've spent your life around high achievers and celebrities. I think the most common job are 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?

[B]

Well, you know, it's, I think that, you know, fame is fleeting, so it has its good moments and its bad moments. It tends to be, you know, 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 celebrity has. It's brutal and you know, it's, it's, it's, you know, it's a, 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 is always as best one can. Don't let the highs take you to highs and don't let the lows take you to lows. And for the most part, it's not fatal. You know, for me, I've always believe that I've learned more from my Mrs. And my failures than I have from My successes and they've made me very, very, very resilient, very.

[A]

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?

[B]

I believe in owning my failures. I think it's important, you know, not look to point fingers at others. And, you know, remember, you know, those 400 movies, 80 of them were dog. You know, 80% of them were dogs. You know, 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, you, you, you get that you wear that you learn. And you know, I've, 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 kind of crazy, you know, when you look at the, 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 is a hit show on Broadway. Tool Time was the number one book on like just anywhere you could go in the world of culture and, and, and, and you know, creative, you know, measures. You know, we were sort of, you know, it was like a, you know what they call it, like a goat moment.

[A]

It was a grand slam.

[B]

Yeah, I got fired.

[A]

Can you tell me the story behind that?

[B]

It's, you know, it's, it's a Shakespeare. It's complicated, I think, you know, and you know, for me, I, I try to, as I said, own it, move on. You know, I've sort of had two different mission I've had. One became like a sort of my motto and later in life and one was sort of my mission in my day to day. And so my motto in the sort of later in life is never let your memories be greater than your dreams. And so I get up every day and genuinely I'm excited about today, I'm excited about tomorrow and next week. And I actually don't have a very strong memory gene. It's very, very weak. I don't reminisce unless you ask me questions. There's not a morning that I wake up and I like Shrek is on my mind or Beauty and the Beast or Lion King. Or Pretty Woman or any of these things. There's just not, it's funny.

[C]

I would like that's, I, I, you know, I've now been working with Jeffrey about, you know, seven, seven and a half years and I probably talk to him every day and people ask, oh, 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.

[A]

Focus.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

What have you guys learned from working with each other?

[B]

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 just, you know, Hari, you know, it's that thing, still waters run deep. He runs deep. You can see it in these conversations that 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 a, have amazing, admirable quality to have. Not, not, not that many people do.

[C]

And so, I mean, look, I, I hope to be like Jeffrey when I get older. 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, you know, we haven't, we have, you know, world class investors. We have, you know, very smart people that have helped us build many things in the past. But I know that if I call him, he'll pick up, he'll come, you know, help, he'll roll up his sleeves. He's there, which is great to know. And I have, you know, seen sort of some of the ups and downs, like, you know, between some of the early sort of investments like 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 energy and effort. It's so much easier to just say, hey, like I messed up. Like that's what it is. I. And he did that so gracefully. And I thought that's a good lesson.

[B]

Like, that's always pro. I think I've probably always gotten too much credit for the successes that I've been associated with. And so it made me feel like, okay, well, you should own your garbage. So, you know, it's, it's, it's also great around, you know, team, you know, 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, that, that, that pain. I've built that up over the years in 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, you. I'm, 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 followed 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 going to make the world a better place 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. What could be more rewarding?

[A]

I was talking to Luke actually. Bullying is something that I've been very interested in, not in doing, but in trying to fix. And the, a couple of really great researchers. Tony Volk is one of them. Tracey Vancouver 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? 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.

[B]

Well, we actually have it and we can tell what you're.

[C]

We can identify, fix it basically, which I think is some of the.

[A]

Tell me more.

[C]

Yeah, well, we can identify what sort of triggers kids have that sort of, you know, make them push more into bullying. So for example, like with games, like with boys, for example, that's a pretty prevalent thing that we see. Like they're on their Headsets, you know, they're talking. It's just, you know, like a lot of camaraderie. And you can see for certain kind of kids with certain sort of usage and behavioral patterns that 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.

[B]

If somebody's being abusive, right. To somebody on a game.

[C]

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, which is, hey, what are the things that are markers for us that tell us that there is a certain kind of behavior, good or bad, if it's about positive or negative. So in our models, one of the things we see is 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 cyberbullying outbound, basically.

[A]

So, yeah, I mean, it's a huge passion of mine.

[B]

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 when it's victimbound. Right. So it immediately. And that's the great thing about this is there are certain things that are red lines. So anything that is actually physically or mentally harmful to your child on the device, it'll instantly alert you. Right. So that'll you. So and bullying being one of the sentiments that you can tell, or anything that's predatory, you know, nude pictures, all of those toxic things, it instantly spots that and puts that in front of the, the parent that's, that's a, that's a danger zone. So, you know, there's a, there's one thing about sentiment and guide and guidance. The other is, wait a minute, you just, you, you just jumped the stop sign and stop for a stop sign that could be fatal.

[C]

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 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 nuance, like, hey, cutting or restricting calories, or, you know, like behavioral sort of, you know, adaptations from overusing stuff, which is very hopeful. Which means that, you know, when parents kind of get more aware of these things and then they start to guardrail, maybe you can kind of.

[A]

Cool. So you need to expedite the learning for parents as well here.

[C]

That's exactly right.

[A]

Have you got an idea of training parents on how to intervene, how to have these conversations also?

[C]

Yeah, we spend 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? 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? Right. And so there's some, you know, sets of interventions that go from, you know, depending on where the child is in the spectrum. So if the child is sort of on the really distressed side, you know, 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.

[B]

We have clinicians.

[C]

We have clinicians that go and respond to questions, and we pay for it. And there's things like CBT or dbt, which are formal learning programs, that if the parents, even if they do like a quick 30 minutes on CBT, like when our child was going through it, we did 23 weeks of an hour a week for the whole family of dbt.

[A]

Which one's dbt?

[C]

It's a dialectical. So it's basically for kids that are going through. So, like, cognitive is sort of the more the mental part, and the dialectical is more 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, I felt like they just sort of subconsciously learn a lot from it. They don't say a lot about it. And as a parent, like we learned a lot so it accelerated our journey a little bit. So I think for a lot of parents, if we can get that into a mode where you don't have to spend 23 weeks learning it, but can you get a lot of the gist of it out there in 30 minutes type of thing.

[A]

It's really interesting to think about what sort of parenting can be accelerated by this. And yeah, the bullying piece in particular I think is so important. What makes you so I was bullied as a kid. Classic only child syndrome where you're under socialized. Spoke differently to the place that I was from. Went to a very sort of rough and ready primary school, state school, sixth form college. I think maybe two other people from my entire 200 person year 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. It's not 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 yeah, look, many of the things that, that we appreciate in ourselves I think are born out of the challenges that we've gone through. And if you look at butterfly effect your way back, you realize that if you're happy with 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 determined or simply coincidence. But, but it's something that I really just want to give, especially to kids that feel alone, especially kids in the uk. I just really want to try and help some young boy or girl that does not feel like they have anywhere to turn, that doesn't feel like anybody's got their back to try and act. Because 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. It's this very laborious conscious front brain thing because as a kid the physics of your system weren't set up in such a way as to that for that to be implicit. And I think that the Level of safety and reassurance that you have that just sort of follows you around through life. It's way easier to not have to relearn that or to learn that for the first time as an adult as opposed to just assuming it as a kid.

[C]

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, because you just didn't kind of establish the pattern.

[A]

You don't think anyone's got your back.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

So you think like I. 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. Oh, because you've never learned to be able to open up to someone.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

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.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

But I, it's, it's definitely a, 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 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, you know, further propagate that. Holy shit. You know, if you could say, hey guys, like if you put this on your phones.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Then you're going to end up.

[C]

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. So. Yeah.

[A]

Have you guys got. I.

[B]

Did you watch Adolescence?

[A]

I did. I have very strong opinions around adolescence. Very strong opinions.

[C]

Watch it. Scary.

[A]

Okay, let me give you my, Let me give you a little bit of spiel on adolescence.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

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. 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 kind of an accident. As the physical altercation began, but all of the post show reaction was around, well, 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. 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 got. That was a narrative that was taken around with it. And I don't know whether you saw, I think it was this morning or good morning or BBC Question Time. Kemi 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 watch. 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 fucking swamps, like it has the same amount of real world accuracy as one of those. Now, is it tapping into some trends? Absolutely. Is this stuff that we should be interested in?

[B]

You used to think that ogres don't live in swamps.

[A]

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. It is hugely open to interpretation. Stephen Graham meant to do this. Like, it's beautifully done because you just do this thing. There's purposeful obfuscation and there's voids that are left in the story. You don't fully understand why it is that the boy did the things that he did, what his motivations were, where he came from. Comes from an intact home. Very, very rare. Comes from 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. 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? Or are you using a very successful, highly fictional series to inform policy? It's. We're going to show this around the uk. This should be shown in every school. It's fucking, it's. It's rated 15.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So you're gonna 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 gonna show them this thing that at some points to me is like, huh, 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 convers, had a lot of conversations, had a lot of conversations around it and. Fascinating, yeah, really, really interesting cultural moment. Probably going to be the beginning, I would guess, of more conversations like this. But I think what you guys are doing, the approach of people like Tracy and Tony with evidence based interventions, what are we actually seeing on the ground? What does the data tell us about the sort of sentiment analysis that we can derive from this? What's the kind of language that these kids are using? Yeah, you know, like actually, what is the language?

[C]

Yeah, it's a lot easier to jump on a train that's already moving.

[B]

Right.

[C]

I mean, it's sort of like 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 a, easier for us to just villainize something, you know, like, because, because it, it just makes it easier for us to like point a finger. Point a finger and just say, okay, like that's why this happened. Like, that's, you know, that's Jaffa. It's like, you know, it's like that's the villain.

[A]

Right?

[C]

But I, but I think, I think a little bit. It's never like, it's really interesting because we do these like wellness labs with kids at the Boston Children's Hospital. We bring in kids of like different ages, starting like 8, 9, 10, up to 18 different socioeconomic backgrounds. We bring a Different set of parents in. And so we do the setup. And a lot of them, you ask them, saying, hey, 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 the villain. I'm so tired of talking about my smartphone being the worst thing in my life. I got a lot of stuff going on. You know, that's one part of a much bigger composite. Right. And again, 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, that's the root of all evil. I think that's too simplistic.

[A]

I mean, even. 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. Easier.

[C]

Yeah, but. 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 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? Because 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 gonna make that the villain. We're gonna jump on that thing because 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.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Guys, I appreciate both of you. It's fascinating. It's really, really fascinating stuff. Where should people go? They're gonna wanna find out more about what it is that you're doing.

[C]

Ezaura.com A U R A. Not the A O U R A. Yeah.

[A]

Well, you've got both.

[C]

I got both.

[A]

I love the word very important. It's really, really important.

[B]

Thank you for having us and, you know, for letting us share the story. And now finally we get to sit across the table from you. So thank you.

[C]

It's amazing. Yeah. This was so fun. Thank you.

[A]

My pleasure. Thank you guys.

[C]

Thank you.

[B]

Great.

[A]

I get asked all the time for book suggestions. People want to get into reading fiction or nonfiction or real life stories. And that's why I made a list of 100 of the most interesting and impactful books that I've ever read. These are the most life changing reads that I've ever found and there's descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them. And it's completely free and you can get it right now by going to ChrisWillX.com books that's ChrisWillX.com books.