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Raising Good Humans
Practical Tools to Protect Your Kids in the Digital Age: Phones, AI Chatbots & Online Safety w/ Founder of Aura Hari Ravichandran
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The following podcast is a Dear Media production.
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Welcome to Raising good humans. I'm Dr. Eliza Pressman, and today I'm interviewing the founder and CEO of Aura. I wanted to do this because we had a recent episode that really freaked people out, talking about, talking about fake friends and AI and ChatGPT. And I don't like scaring people without solutions. And this is a partner that I feel really great about because they're doing incredible work. So we're talking to Haree Ravishandran, who started Aura for general safety online, like I use it personally. But then he started Aura for parents because kids interact in ways that we can't possibly keep up with. And none of this is meant to be like Big Brother is watching you. This is very much like a incredibly practical solution to safety precautions for underaged users of phones. And I really, I. I can confidently recommend this. Again, no secrets from your young people. They should know that this is just kind of like part of the deal. But we're talking about that today what you can do to protect your kids from things like interacting with AIs as companions and the kinds of things that I probably scared you about during that episode a couple of weeks ago. So you can also get a discount. So go to aura.com humans and you can protect your kids for less than $5 a month. It's really. This is good, high quality. I really wouldn't. This is too serious for me to mess around with. And I think Aura is a brand that I feel great about. So I hope you enjoy this conversation. I hope you sign up to get Aura for your kids, for their phones and for any devices that you're using. And when I say kids, I'm still like hoping that you're. They're much older than kids and they're more like real deep in teenagers. But whatever you're doing, whatever devices, especially because it's the holidays and one of the most asked for items is a device. Okay, so visit aura.com humans and get this on your kids devices. Also, make sure no devices in their bedrooms, no devices at mealtime, and all the other good stuff that we've talked about so much. But today, again, we're just talking about this particular app that really does a great job at flagging when there's danger, keeping privacy when it's necessary, and supporting your parenting in this digital age. I'm really excited to have this conversation because we actually just had a really hard conversation about AI and some people were rightfully sort of panicked about solutions. You know, in the absence of larger solutions for AI and social media platforms and young people. And so I think Aura provides that, that step and to help parents feel a little bit less panicked. So I really am excited to learn more about it from you and give everybody sort of the. I don't, you know, is this peace of mind? I'm not sure, but some actionable strategies. So, Hari, can you tell us about what Aura is and what you started when you started thinking about protecting young people?
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Yeah. So I can give you a little historical context and then a little bit sort of the things we've been working on most recently and sort of the journey there. But generally the way we thought about it is that over time, when you think about consumers and families, what you see is a trend line of people adopting more and more technology. So whether it's sort of starting like in the 90s with desktop computers, and then you fast forward, you got the Internet and then you've got smartphones, then you got social media, then now you have AI. Each one of these sort of big step functions in technology adoption comes with a ton of good stuff. And then it comes with a lot of stuff that is also painful. For all the convenience we get, we get a lot of the negative that comes with it as well. So our company has really been focused, would say, to think about safety of families and consumers, but over time, so it doesn't matter, really. Five years ago, we weren't all that worried about AI, but now we are. So how do we make sure that we keep families safe with the most current and pressing security and safety threats that they face? It turns out that maybe five years ago it could have been transaction monitoring or scams and spams, which we still have today. But there's a bigger emerging safety issues where if you go talk to families, I would say four out of five families tell us that they are very concerned about the relationship of both themselves and particularly their kids. Adolescents with technology, and that's with the devices, with smartphones, with social media. The amount of time that kids are spending on devices and generally feeling like there's this gap between what's really happening in the kid's life, which seems much more enhanced inside the digital world, even more so sometimes in the physical world. And parents feel like they have no visibility into that. And, you know, and there's a lot of safety issues that come with it, safety issues that are direct safety issues like, hey, are you getting bullied? Are you talking to folks that you shouldn't be? Is there private information leakage? And then the knock on Effects which are, hey, you're on these devices so much that it's getting more and more difficult to have a real life set of interactions and healthy relationships because so much of the life is kind of getting translated to online usage, which then means that there's a lot of knock on mental effects that come with that as well. So we've been very focused on all those issues. And I think that the latest version of our product now tries to identify behavioral changes in kids. It looks for things that could be worrisome, could be sort of risky coping strategies that kids are leveraging that maybe parents don't know about all the way to, hey, what are things that your kids could be doing online that's really safe for them, that lets them have a healthy relationship with technology?
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So I want to take it back. Can you just tell us overall, what does Aura kind of do? And then we can get into the specifics of how it can be helpful with the various categories of sort of digital wellness.
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Yeah. So what we do is to make sure that we're an all in one solution to make sure that we keep families and individuals safe when they're using anything digital. So kind of think of it as your digital safety net that makes sure that whether you're using computers, you're using banking services, financials, gaming systems, any of these things, any of the potential risks that come with it, we adapt to your lifestyle and we make sure that we keep you safe online.
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And I use Aura for me for making sure that I'm not hacked. But I think what we're focusing on today is, and I only say that to say it's a trusted.
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Yeah, we have about 2 million customers that are using it. So it's got, you know, lots of folks that use it, leverage it, that seem happy with the service.
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Yeah. But what I want to talk specifically about are your parental controls because I think a lot of people, you know, put like time limitations for kids phones or they are embarking on. And the reason we're having this conversation is both because people are worried about this and want plans and also it's the holiday season and this is like such a big time to get a new phone or your first phone or your first iPad or something digital. And so with that, how do we set parents and kids up to do it in a way that keeps everybody safe? And I think it should be very open. Like I don't think sneaky parental controls is very useful because it undermines the relationship. It's just very straightforward. Like of course we're keeping you safe. And here's how. So how are these. How do these parental controls work now? And in what categories?
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Yeah, look, I think you hit a lot of pretty important points. And this is what we hear from parents. I'm a parent, I have four kids. I've kind of gone through this journey with my own two teenage daughters. I think transparency is pretty critical. They have to be part of the journey. Because at the end of the day, what we as parents are trying to do is make sure that we're keeping these kids safe and healthy. And so I think the notion of trying to sneak something in that they don't know about is both unhealthy and I don't think it's necessary. I think the way that I've approached it with my kids is to tell them, look, they're in the middle of trying to get their driver's license now. Well, I'm not going to let you go drive on the interstate without getting a permit. And until I'm sure that you are safe driving around. And this is the same thing when you go online, I want to make sure that you're safe. Safe and protected. And that's how I think about these sets of controls. There's sort of two dimensions to this one. There's basically just immediate dangers, right? Like if kids might not know that providing, for example, their personal information or their physical residence or these types of private information on online services could potentially be exploited. So there are those kinds of things where you want to make sure that we're keeping those checked and guardrailed. There's another bucket of things which are, how much are you using your device? Because again, we're seeing more and more studies, and we've done one of these and we've actually sort of released some data on this. It feels like with a lot of kids that have phones, it's almost akin to cigarette smoking, because they wake up and the first thing in the morning that they do is start to kind of open their phone and they kind of go through all the stuff inside it. So it's the same sort of receptors in the brain are getting triggered again, which means how do you set healthy controls around that? In a way that kids develop good habits. And interestingly, we talked to a lot of kids, and a lot of them, if you ask them, hey, do you feel like you have a healthy relationship with technology? Many of them say, no, I don't think so. And then we say, well, why are you on your phone for so much time? They're like, why don't know how not to be. I'm just so used to it now that I don't know how not to be. So I think there's a desire amongst younger population to want to learn the skill. It's almost like a skill development about how to actually have a healthy relationship with technology. There's that one second bucket and then there's Probably, I'd say 20, 30% of the population that are probably in active distress, meaning they have kids that are developing negative strategies to cope with stress, whether it's with cutting or restricting calories, suicidal tendencies. All the things that I'm sure we see sort of in the media, and we do see that in a lot of our population as well. Well, how do you make sure that you kind of help parents kind of understand what's happening there as well and give them intelligence? So that's sort of the three buckets is basically making sure we're doing all of the filtering of making sure that we're keeping kids safe as they're using online apps and kind of giving parents insights into behavioral changes in kids.
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Okay, so how do you do this? And how did you come to do this? Because I, I, I would. If you're comfortable sharing a little bit of your personal story, I think, I think it would be helpful.
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Yeah. So look, I mean, I, I think when so oris always been, as I said in the beginning, in this family safety space. And family safety has meant different things at different points of time just because the safety landscape has changed. And I'd say about two and a half years ago, one of my kids, she was going through a hard time. I think it was probably about February of that year where she was saying, hey, I just don't feel right, I feel bad, et cetera. And we said, okay, it might just be because you're overloaded at school. Let's wait till the summer comes along and then it might get a whole lot better. June rolls around. It actually went the other way. She started like having a hard time getting out of bed. She was very depressed and very sort of down quite a bit. And, and then we basically, as we're sort of monitoring and observing this, it got to a point at some point where we had to have an interception, like a, like an intervention, where basically said, look, we have to get her some medical help. And we did. And that was a very difficult thing for our family. And up until that point, I'd never looked at her phone. She'd had her phone for about a year and a half at that Point. And we were very sort of privacy conscious at home and were, you know, want to make sure kids have a lot of agency, they can make their own mistakes, they can learn from it. And so we dropped her off at this facility and they couldn't have devices there. And so when I got home, it was a very hard thing to drop your child off someplace even though it's the right thing to do. Came home, I looked through her phone for the first time, because that was the first time they said, you can't have your phone in here. And I looked at my wife and said, this is like super scary. Like, I had no idea that it was all these things going on with this kid. And we see her every day, she's at dinner, we ask her how are things, you know, what's her ups and downs for the day. She tells us everything's fine. And everything seems like, you know, they're going, going, going the right way. But there's this whole sort of internal thing that's happening that, you know, we had no idea all of this stuff was happening with her until we looked at the phone. And that ranges from the kind of influencer she's interacting with, how she. When she's like, you know, talking to folks about how she's actually feeling, et cetera, there's a separation between. We knew she was struggling a little bit, but the perception of what we had versus what she sort of self internalized, there's a pretty sizable divide. And so I called our CTO and I said, listen, this kid's gonna be back here in a couple weeks. And I know we're gonna ask her, how are you doing? And she's gonna keep saying everything's fine, but clearly it's not. And me as a parent, I have no idea how to dissect between how bad things are. Is this just like a transitional thing? So what can I put on our phone that makes sure that we keep her safe? And we looked around. We spent like two weeks looking around. There's some sketchy software out in Romania or something that was like spying type software. I was like, I just don't feel comfortable putting any of this on my kid's phone. So the thing that I said was, listen, we're very close to the space anyway because we're worried about safety of kids, safety of families. Digital safety is actually very important and sort of high on the list for most families anymore. But there's nothing that's being done that is evidence based. There's nothing that has any clinical backing and so the two things we decided to go do was, one, build something that families and parents could trust, which meant having a lot of transparency about what we collect, how we collect it, how we use it, how we're leveraging that information to give you insights. That was sort of one big bucket. The second is that it had to have some real clinical backing. So we hired a chief medical officer. Now we've got a bench of about 10 clinicians on staff that basically spend a fair amount of time helping to train the AI models in the back end, making sure we don't want to have it to be an alarmist thing. We see some solutions out in the market where they just send you a litany of alerts, et cetera, which causes more anxiety than. It's actually worth it. So from our perspective, it's basically the bar we've set up internally is if your child was in real life counseling, would the psychiatrist actually call the parents or not? And if the answer is yes, then let's send an alert and then make sure that we're keeping the bar very high. So then we've done a bunch of partnerships with folks like Boston Children's Hospital, with the folks I know maybe Katie and Claire have mentioned to you, but we're doing a big partnership with Common Sense Media that we're about to announce, I think, tomorrow. So we've been trying to work with people that really have that sort of vested interest in making sure these kids are safe and thinking about the product in that manner, basically.
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Okay, so when it's so great, because I do think that we have this other issue, which is that kids feel watched all the time and monitored, and then how do they develop autonomy and how do we support them this way? And also, this digital world is fraught with safety issues. Yeah, yeah. Just because, like you said, technology has, like, a lot of amazing things, and then it has some dangerous things, and we don't have, like, the legislation in place yet for these protections. And so I think what you guys are doing kind of does what. Hopefully at some point, these things will just, like, be in place.
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So, yeah, honestly, I think this should already all be there. Like, you know, we shouldn't have to go build a product for this. We were already on a journey keeping people safe. This feels like it ought to be the. But it feels like it's. It's a long time away from coming.
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Yeah, but.
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But I do agree with you. Yeah, yeah.
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So I want to use an example. I want to walk me through. Like, I just want to use this Example, because we just had an episode on Chat GPT Fake Friends, and I think it really freaked people out. And I try not to. Like, my tone is typically fairly calm because I think there's, you know, very few things where alarm bells need to be so intense.
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Yeah.
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But this one really worried people. And so I want to. Can you sort of walk through a kid? It has access to ChatGPT. What. What can aura do to help us assess what those conversations are and establish some safety guidelines around it?
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Yeah, no, it's a great example. So I think, you know, if you thought about a kid's sort of behavioral patterns, the way we look at it at the moment, and it's going to continue to keep evolving, but we look at sleep as sort of one big dimension. We look at what apps are the kid using and what patterns, basically, like, you know, what are the different applications inside? And then we have another big driver, which is sentiment. We're able to assess mood and sentiment based on many factors, including who they're engaging with, what they're saying to different people, and basically even things like how fast are they typing, how hard are they pressing the keys on the phone, et cetera. So it's a fairly accurate model that gives us that. Then for the parents that turn on keyboard monitoring, we have topical modeling so we can look at the big cluster of things that the kid is concerned about. We set a baseline of what the kids general behaviors are based on these three big dimensions. And then as we start to see variations, then we start to look to see, okay, well, what is actually causing some of those variations, and then try to triangulate around it. So in the case of ChatGPT, for example, where a kid is effectively using the bot to try to get something off their chest, trying to understand something, they have some questions about something, et cetera, what you'll typically find there's a fair degree of patterns around it. Right. So if you take the ChatGPT conversation by itself and said, okay, well, is this dangerous or not? In some cases, if the questions are very probing, it may seem very dangerous, but it may not be. It may be just like a thing that the kid is trying to understand something and just having a dialogue with the bot, sometimes it could be very subtle where it doesn't feel all that dangerous, but it could actually be part of a bigger systematic set of things that are happening with the kid. So when you're looking at this longitudinally over like a week or two weeks, you're not looking at just one conversation. You're Looking at all these behaviors that are happening on the phone. Like if you think about it from a kid's perspective, they might get interested in an influencer that is talking about this particular topic, whatever it is that they're distressed about. Right. I mean, it could be looking at blogs, it could be searching for stuff on the browser, it could be then also having the conversation with ChatGPT. It could be talking to friends, for example, and patterns of those changing as well. And if you have topical modeling turned on, then you have the ability to kind of see what they're talking to them about. Though we never share that with the parent, by the way, these things go into the model.
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You read my mind. You read my mind. Say more.
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Yeah, so we will never share this with the parents. Unless, like in real world, if you thought about when would a clinician tell parents anything that's like actual conversation? If they're about to hurt themselves or somebody else, then we will give them raw information. The rest of the time we only provide insights. And we're actually turning on features now where the parent can choose to show the same exact insights to their child as well. So there's full transparency so the kid can also see what the parent is seeing, unless it's one of these very scary outlier type events, basically, in which case it only goes to the parent. We take all these things and then we come up with a view of whether we need to be worried or not, depending on the probability at the moment. Almost every one of these escalations now go to our clinical office. So the clinicians will actually look through the entire case and then they will reach out to the parents if it feels like it's a really scary thing, basically. So we actually do the work in the middle of that as well. Over time, it will be probability driven where basically if the probability that we're right is very high, the alert might go directly to the parents. If we're not sure, it'll still go through the human in the loop, who will then go through the case and then train the models further to say, okay, well, if these things happen, here's how we need to actually think about it. And interesting things will come up that are basically things that we don't know how to deal with it in the sense that, for example, we had a case, again, it's all anonymous, so we never see who the child is. But there was a child that was looking at 2am for testicular lumps and looking for this through a variety of stuff. Now we say, well, so the Clinical office was like, well, is this something that we should actually alert the parents about or not? Right. I mean, we don't want to be sort of in a privacy oriented challenge of the child isn't what you talk about, but it could be a safety related thing. So now how do we deal with it? And so again, our standard is always, hey, if this happened in real life, would you be calling the parents? And we typically will check that with multiple clinicians on the team and then triangulate and say, okay, it is the case and we have to do this fast because you can't give a lot of time lapse because some of these things are scary things and you want to make sure the family's able to intervene if we're able to get to them pretty quickly, basically.
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It is so interesting because I think if you're totally transparent with your kids and teenagers and present this as and again, thinking about this time of year when everybody's gearing up to consider giving a smartphone or, or a device that it's like the, the time to say here's how we're choosing to both give you access and also make sure that in this wild west we've got some protections that we're going to be super transparent about so that when something comes up, you're not like shocked and feeling invaded. But it's like, you know, part of the deal. It's part of, part of how, part of the agreement, I guess 1 million percent.
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I would say, by the way, like, so as people are going into the holidays, I'd say two things. Number one, wait as long as you can. You know, if you can wait till your kids are 15 or 16 and sometimes it's hard because all their friends are on devices. And you know, unless there's sort of a community agreement, you may have to get them a phone sooner because you know, you don't want your kid to be the weird kid that isn't sort of, you know, in the, in the group of people that are sharing lots of stuff on their phone. And it could be like actual, like, you know, this is how kids are socializing now. Right. And so you don't want to kind of completely block that off. But if you can, I'd highly recommend if I could go back in time, I'd wait another two years before I got my kids phones, smartphones, I would say I think my oldest got it at yeah, as long as you can. But then when you do it, cut the deal up front. Like if I would do it again now, I would make both my kids sign a contract saying, hey, here is the deal. Like, you know, you get the phone, but here's the things I'm going to make sure are on your phone. Here's all the things I'm going to see. I want to be transparent with you, but, you know, it's the same as if I bought you a car. Like, I'm not going to let you go drive a car if I don't know that you're going to wear a seatbelt. You've been trained to use the car. You know how to keep yourself safe. And so without these things, the phone is like that. It's, you know, you know, it's not. It doesn't seem that obvious. It can be just as lethal as a vehicle. Like, so I think in some ways, taking that kind of an approach and cutting that deal right up front is immensely helpful because if you go re. Cut the deal, then you've got like World War Three. I mean, they are like, you know, upset, they're screaming, they're like, you know, they're basically like, you know, try to figure out 18 different ways to try to get the thing off their phone. So then it becomes a big cat and mouse game versus that's just the way it is. Like when you got the phone, you got stuff with it that keeps you safe and they're so excited about getting the phone that, you know, they'll. Yeah, exactly.
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And I think what, you know, a phone doesn't necessarily mean all these other features like social media, chatgpt and all of that. And also this is another way to sort of monitor. And again, I just want to keep stressing this because I think it's so important. Like, you're not secret monitoring. You're not. You're really on the.
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And by the way, like, when we survey families, 80 plus percent of the families said no, we just don't want to do anything sort of secretly. We want our kids to know that we're doing this and we want this to be a joint exercise. Because if you thought about this just in the physical world, how often are you going to let your kids go off into something that you have no idea where they're going, what they're doing, how long they're going to be there. No parent would be okay with that. You're kind of doing the same thing on the device. It just doesn't feel like it's a real thing because it's virtual. But on average, these kids are on there like eight hours a day. And that's A lot of time on device. And so I think kind of keeping them safe is critical.
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B
So what are the two questions? Actually, the first part of the question is what's the difference between Aura and Bark? And the other sort of. I don't know if we're allowed to talk specifically about other companies, but kind of what sets Aura's product apart? And the second part of that is like, for all the parents that are like, I put parental controls and my child, I keep saying child and kid, but I'm really hoping we're talking about teenagers. Yeah, but I, you know, like they figured out the password or whatever. So that to me feels like it's we're cat and mousing and we're sneaking. So I guess the first part is kind of what sets Aura like as more sort of holistic in the approach and having a better product. But also what do you see in terms of kids getting around it versus not?
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Yeah, look, I think again, not speaking specifically to any particular competitor, but the last generation of products, they were very much like semantic search based. Right. So that would be like simple.
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What does that mean?
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Like means searches, like if the kid types in, like, you know, I had a similar product because again, as I was going through some of the stuff, we were testing a lot of stuff with my own kids. So I would get a note saying, hey, like, you know, your kid is engaged in sexual activity. So now I open the thing up, I look at it. It turned out that she bought a Sex Pistols T shirt and that's what that was. And then there's like another one where I got a note saying, hey, like, your kid is involved with some violent activity. I'm like, oh, this sounds scary. So I look at it. It turned out that she had signed up for the mspc, the mass Society for Premature Cruelty animals. And they have like kill shelters that were sending notes saying, hey, adopt this dog. Or if not, they're gonna be. So the tool picked up all of these things and it sent it over. Now, I'm appreciative of the fact that I got the intel, but the problem is it was like 100 times out of 100 wrong. And so at some point you're like, wait, yeah, now I get anything. It's like the boy who cried wolf. I don't even bother looking at it. Right. So we were super careful to say, listen, we're not going to do very simple text search because that's going to come up with so many false positives and so many sort of like spurious stuff. So that's why we went down this path of really having it be a much more concise behavioral map of the kid. Because again, kids behaviors tend to be pretty consistent. And that's actually a very hard problem. Even though in the front end, if you're creating a grid saying, hey, we have detection, you have detection, you can both put a check mark on it. Like the amount of investment we've made behind the scenes and the amount of work we've done on the deep tech side of this, it's pretty robust. Bringing the clinicians on staff is another huge thing. Tying that all to the overall safety of the family is another big thing. And so the overall experience, it just tends to be much more insightful in a lot of ways. So like, for example, like last week I got one for my oldest kid. The alert basically said, hey, she's had a couple nights of interrupted sleep and she seems interested in hallucinations. And she's been looking around and trying to understand hallucinations and the impact of sleep on hallucinations. And so I looked at this and I sat down with her that night and I said, hey, are you having trouble sleeping? And she said, yeah, I've had two nights where it's been tough to sleep. And I thought the other day that I was seeing stuff, so I was worried that it might be from lack of sleep. So we talked about that for a while and then I called her pediatrician and said, hey, if it continues, does she need to be on something that's like an overnight sleep medication? And they said, yeah, let's watch it for two more weeks and if it looks bad, just bring her in and then we'll think about whether or not she needs to have sleep meds for a little bit or not. So it's those types of things that when you get the insight, you can act on it. And ideally you get them early enough that you don't have to deal with it on the back end of it, where you're in the ER with your kid worried about how exactly to kind of get this kid back to us, a safe and healthy place, basically.
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B
So, so how often, like, I'll just compare my experience with Aura monitoring my stuff for safety. Yeah, like I haven't ever had an issue. It sort of like checks in with me and monitors things, but I don't so far, like all is well. And it sort of says that in the subject of the communication that I get. How often would you say you get those kind of alerts for young people? Like, are you thinking that it's balanced between not the boy who cried wolf. But it's not. Not. It's not going to be never. Like what are we talking about in terms of parent investment? I guess.
- [30:52]
A
Yeah, so look, I mean, I think depends on the problem space. Like if you're thinking about things like credit or credit monitoring, identity thefts, scam, spam, et cetera. Even within that there's ranges of alerts. Right. So if it's basically scam prevention, if that's enabled, people get a lot of alerts on that because there's so many scams that are going to go around, whether on phone calls or on like text messages or email. If it's identity theft, it's probably a little bit less. But when it happens it's kind of a real pain because now you got to go change a whole bunch of stuff. Kind of behind the scenes on the behavioral health stuff, I think it lines up really closely with the national averages. So if you're seeing kind of, you know, like 30, 40, 50% of the kids in that sort of high school age that tend to be high anxiety, you know, stressed, especially for girls, you see a lot more like, you know, like body dysmorphia type issues. You see a lot of issues with restricting, cutting, physical harm type of stuff. Suicidal ideation, they line up with the national stats pretty darn closely, like 10% we see that our like suicidal ideation, but they have ideation method and they have time, which is sort of the standard that the team uses and we'll find, you know, unfortunately, which is like completely heartbreaking. Kids that have written goodbye notes to their whole family, et cetera, on their phones, like on notes, the system will pick it up. We're able to then kind of go tell the parents about it. And so that's where the clinical office gets very sort of one on one engaged with the families. And then we'll find other things like, okay, you know, it seems like a lot of device usage, interrupted sleep a lot more frequently than like 8 or 10%, but it does unfortunately happen more often than you would think. And I think the biggest thing that was for me as a parent, both surprising. And when I speak with friends and other parents, I think a lot of times parents are not aware of all of the things that are going on with this kid, with their own kid, because on the outside it all seems okay. Or they're basically saying everything's okay. Sometimes you can pick up on it, sometimes it's subtle enough that you can't even as well Pretty in tune, parent. And so, you know, I think sort of before phones, devices, if, you know, you ask them, how was your day? You know, what's going on, et cetera, you kind of get an answer that seems like it really ties closely to reality. But now with devices, it's not clear to me that what you're hearing versus what they're actually kind of going through is always in lockstep, basically.
- [33:16]
B
And all of this is, like, ultimately, you know, major protections for really bad things, keeping a distance, and just awareness for everything else. And generally kids not trying to bypass the system because.
- [33:33]
A
So, yeah, let's talk about that one. Yeah, let's talk about that one for a bit. Yeah, I mean, so I think that, you know, so we have put good guardrails in place. Like, we have sort of screen time and app deletion, prevention, all those types of things. But kids are smart. Like, we'll find subreddit groups where kids are talking about how exactly to, like, you know, get rid of this thing from here, like, attack this, change this type of thing. So I think the. The biggest. Yeah, the. Like, the biggest thing is to make. Make sure that they understand that this is part of the ground rules. Like, you need them on your team. Like, they need to understand because, I mean, like, this is the. By the way, the same battle I had with my. With my daughter. So, like, you know, hey, dad, why are you doing this? You're being a creep. Why are you looking at all this stuff on my phone? I'm like, listen, girls, like, I. I gotta make sure, like, if I don't do my job now, in five years, you're gonna come back and you're gonna ask me, why didn't you do your job? And I don't want to have. Yeah, yeah, I don't want to have that conversation. So I know this is uncomfortable, but I'm not seeing any private conversations. I do need basic insights. I need to have some guardrails. I mean, they don't love it, but they say, okay, well, we get it, we understand. And then the safety measure on the back end is if something does get turned off, we do alert the parents. We tell them, hey, this is now not sending any more information. You may want to go turn the stuff back on. It's not 100% foolproof, but it gets pretty close to that. So I would say the three parts of it is all the technological sort of guardrails we put in so they can delete stuff. And then the big thing I would say is in the Middle, which is, you know, let's bring these kids along on the journey and help them understand that we're not trying to do this to be, like, weird or creepy. And frankly, this is what I tell my girls. I'm like, if I never get an alert, I'd be the happiest parent. I don't ever want to see any of this stuff. Yeah, that means that you're great. Like, things are good, but, you know, if something does happen, if I don't know about it, I can't do my job. And if I can't do my job, I'm not being a good parent. And so I want to make sure that you understand that's where my intentions are coming from. And then the third part of it is, okay, well, here's the safety net that if something gets broken off, that we do tell the parents, so they can go turn it back on, basically. But I would definitely not say it's a 100% foolproof. But I think it picks up enough signals that I think that in general, even if you're missing a day or two, the models are smart enough to actually figure out sort of, you know, what's actually going on with the child.
- [35:40]
B
I really, like, cannot emphasize enough how grateful I am for what you've figured out, because I think I don't like telling parents when there's a problem if there isn't, like, a current helpful tip to go along with it. I think we're all waiting for things to get better. And in the absence of that, your, you know, this. This really does provide, I think, an ease and peace of mind that we're. We're looking for. So I really appreciate it.
- [36:17]
A
Thank you for that, Dr. Firstman. The one thing I would say is when we talk with parents, you know, probably about 30% of them tell us that when kids go to bed, they usually will pick up the kid's phone and then try to go through. And they spend like an hour looking through stuff. And then we look at that. Yeah. And we're like, look like, you know, it's. And it's a needle. They have no idea if they feel, you know, if it feels good or bad or whatever else, you know, and so they. And they tell their kids, they're like, oh, like, we do actually look at your phone. Like, sometimes, you know, not always, but, you know, many times they do say that. So in general. And even, like, other things, like, like, it was funny. I was at an event, like a mental health event, and we had a Dr. Wendy Chung who was a really famous pediatrician from Boston Children's. She was one of the speakers on it and she has a couple of boys. And you know, she was saying, I think somebody asked her a question about device usage and time, et cetera, and she said, look, look, I mean, my kids are on their phone a lot and I need to get some intelligence to try to figure out, like, what's actually going on with them. So I make them wear a watch and I look at the hrv. Like, if the heart rate variability goes up a lot, I know they're anxious or stressed about something. So I sit down with my boys and I ask them, hey, what's going on in your life? How do you sort of like, you know, help me? So everybody, like, you know, whether you're sort of a world class pediatrician to like a family like ours that is not particularly medically oriented, we're all trying to figure this thing out. It's, you know, how do you actually get enough intelligence? How do you make sure kids have enough agency? How do you make sure that they're learning, but at the same time we're keeping them safe. It's a very difficult sort of balance to strike and we're doing our best to make sure we kind of, you know, are sort of in the zone where, you know, everybody feels like, you know, it's, it's palatable, basically.
- [37:52]
B
So I so appreciate it. I think emphasizing that, you know, this reduces. Because the other thing is nobody has time to figure this out.
- [38:04]
A
Yeah. And it's hard.
- [38:07]
B
It's hard. I often think, don't even consider getting a device for your kid if you don't have time to engage with this, because that's a perfectly good excuse. This is just a lot. But I do think this helps because that is no way to have to do things, to grab the phone every night. Which, by the way, I do appreciate that you have protection around sleep. But I also think physically removing the device from the room is super important, a million percent.
- [38:38]
A
I mean, because I think when they wake up, that's the first thing they do. Like if it's the middle of the night, they pick it up. And now sleep gets more interrupted. And it's very different for each and every kid is a little bit different. But some of those things, as you well know and as you espouse some of those patterns are, you know, universal. Like if you don't get good sleep, it's going to affect your mood if you don't, you know, so there's some basic sets of Things that, that, you know, that would be good for parents to make sure they're, they're getting some intelligence on. Basically.
- [39:04]
B
Yeah. I mean, I resent myself for not having anybody who can take my device from me. Like the fact that I.
- [39:15]
A
We all have, I mean, look, I mean, I think it's not just kids, it's all of us too, like, including myself. Like, I mean, it's a, the same thing that kind of, you know, drives that sort of addictive power with kids. It, the same thing works on adults as well. And I think, you know, and so we do, we try very consciously at home, like around dinner times to keep all our phones away. We don't try to look at them. And, and you know, it's because otherwise, like you're, you know, you're telling the kid, oh, like I want to put a bunch of controls on your phone. And by the way, I'm on my phone at dinner and you know, they're like, wait, like you're doing this? And you know, why can't I do it?
- [39:41]
B
And so no meal time matters.
- [39:44]
A
Yeah. And it's, it's a really, it's a, a powerful sort of a system. And unlike when we were growing up, probably now there are probably a million plus engineers and a million plus sort of very, very smart data science type people that are trying to figure out how to get us more engaged on our devices. So in a lot of ways it's a bit of an unfair battle because it's very, a lot of smart people trying to figure out how to keep you on device. And we're fighting that without a lot of tools on our side. And again, it's not that they're bad people or anything like that. It's just that's how we set up the system. Like we said, hey, your company is very successful if you can get a lot of people to use your device or your product. And so it's a little bit kind of a system that we've set up for ourselves in an odd way.
- [40:32]
B
Yeah. So I think anything that can help kind of acknowledge the system exists, but also protect in ways that we otherwise are way out of our league is important. And again, for, certainly for our young people, but also for us and you know, we're certainly modeling all of this, but in, in this, you know, in this particular case, I think, I think we're in over our heads a little bit. And so it's nice to have some practical solutions.
- [41:05]
A
Absolutely.
- [41:06]
B
So thank you for your work and.
- [41:08]
A
Thank you for doing it. Yeah, thank you for having me on your show. This is fantastic.
- [41:13]
B
I'm so glad, truly. It was like I had an episode. I don't like to deliver, you know, bad news without solutions.
- [41:23]
A
Yep.
- [41:23]
B
It's like not that helpful to parents if I'm just like, be very worried about this. So I think this is a very practical solution.
- [41:32]
A
Amazing.
- [41:33]
B
And again, not to give up with legislation and changing the system and making sure we have phones out of our rooms and not at meal times and delaying and all of the things that we can do. But we also, like, reality can sometimes make that more challenging.
- [41:48]
A
Yeah, absolutely. And as I tell our engineering team, I'm the most avid user of the product and every time they have a new feature coming out, I'm like, I really need this for my own kids. So in a lot of ways I can certainly empathize with, with a lot of families that are kind of going through the same. Same set of issues as well, so.
- [42:04]
B
Well, thank you. You can tell in the product that that like, that the thought that's gone into all of the different categories is like, clearly because you're living it.
- [42:15]
A
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely, 100%.
- [42:17]
B
Okay, so I want to circle back to the AI chatbots because I know you found some solutions for this and we're very anxious to hear them.
- [42:25]
A
Yeah. So I would say in general, the thing we're finding is kids are starting to use AI chatbots in ways that I don't think we sort of anticipated. We're seeing like 30, 35, even maybe high 30s percent of the kids that are using these chatbots in a very sexual manner, like young kids, which are basically having hypersexual conversations with the chatbots. We're seeing that kids are spending both a lot of time sort of on sexually oriented content, but also spending 10x more message length or message content with the AI chatbots than they do with their actual friends. So it's a fairly significant amount of like both interaction and interaction that's maybe not very healthy. So I think in general, you know, having some level of permanent controls around just the amount of usage and what kind of chatbots they're able to use. Because some of these chatbots are not particularly. We're not talking about sort of like the big ones like ChatGPT or something, but, you know, there's a lot on the App Store that are sort of fly by night chatbots and they kind of move up the rankings pretty quickly. Kids download it and it comes back around in some other permutation. Even if Apple takes it down so those ones are trying to exploit sort of younger kids to be able to get the eyeballs, et cetera. So we have some stuff that our medical office has sort of published around this in terms of the data and the findings. And I think that in general, keeping a close eye on that, we see that as a new sort of emerging threat for families. That's something. We're working closely with Common Sense Media as well, because they've been doing a lot of work on lobbying work around that as well. But that is something, like, very new, like, in the last three months or so, I would say.
- [43:59]
B
And what are you doing with Common Sense Media?
- [44:01]
A
So we have a big partnership with them. We are doing a variety of stuff, including sort of, you know, sharing data with them to make sure they understand sort of what are the actual granular patterns we're finding sort of inside our, like, the core user base. We're also doing a lot more education work. We're partnering up with them for schools because they have a big presence in schools on some of the bills and the lobbying stuff. We're also helping them with that in terms of sort of trying to figure out how to get all the help we can get to be able to get some regulation passed, because we're big fans of that. Because I think doing some of that stuff will actually help quite a bit.
- [44:33]
B
Thank you. There's so much to think about. But I also. I appreciate that some of the thinking is just, like, not in my wheelhouse. And so I appreciate the tech side of it is just like. Like, it's just not in my lane. And I want to know that good people, smart people are working on it. Please note that this episode may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products and services. Individuals on the show may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to in this episode.