Why Movies, Tech & Mental Health Feel Broken - Jeffrey Katzenberg & Hari Ravichandran (4K)

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 I don't actually person to accuse me of I don't actually know what you're talented at. I'm not sure I I am either. Uh, let's see. Uh, certainly a good storyteller. Um, you know, I think, um, you know what? I'm a truffle hunter. I I know how to find a good idea, recognize a good person, a talented person. Um, 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, uh, you know, I've spent, um, most of my career helping other people realize their dreams. their stories, their ideas. Um, and you know, in order to, I think, recognize a dreamer, you need to be a bit of a dreamer yourself. You have to be an optimist. You have to believe in, you know, uh, the unknown, the, you know, unimaginable and, uh, you have to have a lot of enthusiasm. And so I think those qualities um are I'm a happy person and an optimist. Bottomless well of optimism. I've heard you say that you're a good home run hitter, but you don't do singles and bunts. Well, 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 uh 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 uh you know, the outcome of that is is that you know, when you one, you can't hit a home run if you don't swing for the fence. Um and more time, at least many times, you will swing for the fence and you won't get there, you know. So um you got to accept that you know with success comes failure. You mentioned uh being able to pick a good story one of the core skill sets with 400 something movies 80 animated D. What in your opinion makes for a good story? Um well there are many things I you know one of I have been very lucky to have many great me mentors and teachers. um uh over my career. Um one of which I actually never met cuz he had passed away by the time uh I I arrived at the Walt Disney Company in 1984, which is Walt Disney himself. and he had this amazing uh archive of his work, his work process, his uh creative uh uh uh sort of blueprints and um so many great lessons learned about storytelling from him, particularly around his animated movies. Um one of my favorite ones he says, you know, there's no such thing um as a great story without a great ending. seem pretty obvious, right? Um, uh, there's no such thing as a great story. Um, your story, uh, your story, uh, let me say, "My movies are only as good as their villains." It's one of the things that he said. And you think about, uh, that through, you know, uh, his filmography, and it's it's pretty extraordinary. And so, uh, you know, for me, I I look at, uh, uh, Ursula uh or Scar or um Jafar or Farquad or Tylon or I could go on and on and on and because when I read that and I understood it, it became a a kind of a north star. What is it about the villain? Um well, that m how the the better the villain, the uh the greater the challenge for the protagonist, right? So you know whatever you have to overcome um uh 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 northstar 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 uh of a great story. M 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 um Daniel Carnean who won the Nobel Prize uh found that across a person's memory of an experience the most uh memorable parts were the uh peak intensity the highest and then the end. So they did this study with colonoscopies. Uh in one iteration of the study uh people went through it and you can tell the amount of discomfort by the amount of movement and they were asked to rate the discomfort afterward. How did you remember it afterward? Uh in the next iteration of the study, different cohort, they did the exact same but then just left the um endoscope in for a while uh uh but didn't move it for a couple of minutes. So the final part, the end of the experience was less discomfort and the uh self-rated after the fact uh pain was lower. So implications for that, if you're a comedian, finish on your best joke. If you're a rock band, finish on your biggest song. Uh if you are making a movie, you know, finish on an emotionally salient, real high energy sort of feelood. uh as you were explaining this and I was imagining all the different things that I could respond to you around colonoscopy and I just thought you know what just leave that one alone but yeah I you know it it's it's really true it's really true to think about huh well if you've got this compelling protagonist but you don't have somebody that sits up against it what's the victory yeah what's the mountain you're climbing I'm interested in the role of taste it's uh very difficult to define like the ability to choose between something that's good and something that's not good. Uh I guess a lot of people would say that you've got great taste given the productions that you were a part of. How would you advise someone to cultivate great taste? Well, that's that's a mystery to me. You know, I I really don't I don't know how um you define taste. I don't know how you acquire taste. Um, 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 cuz I have no idea. Uh, my mom was an artist. Um, I think she had good taste. um you know uh crafting and creative and um uh and then along the way different people in my career had obviously extraordinary tastes. Um that's the mystery you know I I I know that all of us always are so um uh interested and the of the mystery of like well where does talent come from? How does somebody how 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 Talpin 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 uh unique or exceptional or special talent come from you observing it and wanting to know and others certainly have no idea for myself. Mhm. Uh there's an Elton John diary entry uh 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 Star, came for dinner." Like, yeah. Yeah. It's not a bad day. It's not about dinner. I you know I mean there are many many wonderful artists that I've had the privilege of watching you know Germa del Toro you know the uh uh 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've spent decades in partnership with probably the greatest storyteller of of of our lifetime. Steven Spielberg, what's it like working with him? Dazzling. I mean, you know, he's just a very singular and unique and special guy and it's been a, you know, privilege to, you know, to be there and be a a partner and and and a business partner and a friend and um cheerleader and, you know, likewise, you know, I I I had him as a as a mentor and in all those different roles. one one person for many many decades. And but watching him as a storyteller, it's so natural. It's so instinctual. It's it's it's amazing to see him on a set I I imagine is to see, you know, Leonard Bernstein, you know, conducting an orchestra. Yeah. It just is like he's just so comfortable and confident and certain and effortless. It's really amazing. And you talk to people that have worked with him as, you know, uh, uh, crafts people or actors or, you know, any anyone in it, they they just, uh, he just knows and in a way that's hard to to understand. I'm not sure he can explain it. Both of you guys are very driven. What's driven you? What's driven you independently to what you do what you do? Uh, well, it's a good question. Um you know it feels to me like when there are large problems or big like big big sweeping issues um if there's sort of a unique ability or skill set that that I have you know whether it's you know uh building a business around it or sort of you know evangelizing an idea or whatever whatever it is that's very motivating because it feels like it's something uh unique that that I I can apply my perspective to that problem to be able to, you know, bring that forth to lots of people that potentially have the same problem as well. Um, I think the build of it in a lot of ways for me is extremely motivating cuz it feels like a 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 I would I would I would say basically I've had points in my life where I've felt very mission driven but a lot of my life has just been very purpose- driven I guess is sort of the easy way I would think about it which is uh the purpose has been hey can I take what I feel or sort of what I'm able to see in my head and build things that others can get benefit from others can see as well. So that's been a big driving factor for me in my life. Jeffrey what about you? Um well so many things you know I mean I think it's you know it's a sort of an alchemy of of things that that motivate me. I um uh I found by accident along the way that the most beautiful thing in the world to me is actually laughter and in particular the laughter of children. It's why we tickle our kids. We torture them by tickling them. But it makes us happy to hear that laughter. And uh and so literally as you know whatever you know somebody's greater plan coincidence I land at a company where your job is to get up and make movies and TV and animation and things that bring laughter to the world. That's that that is what you know um you know that that was a legacy that you know sort of I had the baton for a decade um and then went on to do it you know at DreamWorks myself and um 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 uh you know we all had a hand in making. Um I have a bottomless well of a need to win. So I'm I'm I'm always looking for you know that uh an outcome that is a a success and success is measured in so many different ways and um uh sometimes it is uh purpose driven and sometimes as Har's saying it's it's mission driven. The one we're doing right now started purpose- driven and then through a set of circumstances became missiondriven which in a way is maybe the most rewarding. What's the difference between purpose and mission? I'm not sure. Uh in my mind uh a mission sort of is pushing towards uh 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 missiondriven, you're building towards something to be able to solve a problem. But you know, if you're a purpose- driven person, uh, whatever the circumstances, even if you're not motivated by an external outcome, it's just how you present yourself to the world in in your work, I guess, is how I see it. Yeah. Purpose to me is tactical and um mission to me is um uh has just a whole has sort of a humanity involved in it. there's some greater uh 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 um invaluable. And often it's by by accident, you know, that's not you 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?" And uh so before we continue, you've probably heard me talk about Element before, and that's because I'm frankly dependent on it. 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What do you make of the modern world of cinema? We keep hearing about is cinema in crisis. Is streaming platforms made a dent in the ability for you to make movies in the way that you used to? What's your read in that situation? Well, it's complicated. I think people always want to distill it down to simple things. I think it is for sure a moment of extraordinary disruption and transformation. um every time everyone wants to declare movies and movie theaters dead, you know, something else comes along and sort of shatters that idea and you know, whether it's Barbie or Oppenheimer or Minecraft or whatever the latest thing is is that when 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 uh uh not optimism that no there's still a place for this. Um 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, um consolidation of these companies, um uh you know legacy businesses um uh declining and how do you transition to the next? And I've lived through a couple of them myself and they are they are really really hard and they're really really challenging and much of the time you are having to navigate through really uncharted places and uh so lots of uncertainty in that a lot of fear uh with it but um I I still remain quite optimistic that uh movies are a great form of storytelling and a unique form of storytelling and um they're not going away. What do you make of this world where movies get ported out into series for streaming? We've seen this happen with Star Wars. We've seen parts of the Avengers franchise have this go Lord of the Rings, massive bet by Amazon, which uh I don't know the books, but uh not convinced how great of a investment that was. Um, what do you make of this sort of expansion out into other areas like that? Yeah, I think it's I mean, listen, there have been phenomenal examples of great success. Um, I just watched the latest season of uh Daredevil, you know, which is a spin-off of a spin-off of a spin-off, and it I thought it was incredible. I mean, I was just completely mesmerized and engrossed in it and following just like I can't wait for the, you know, the next season of it. And um it it just, you know, I'm I've been now almost, you know, almost a decade of Handmaid's Tale and watched the latest episode last night. My head almost exploded. M um so I thought Sinners as I said was just a remarkable movie and oh my gosh you you got to I mean it's just it's an incredible performance. It's incredibly made. It's beautifully written. It's it's it's special and the audience somehow or another they knew it. They sensed it. it got there, the word of mouth of it, you know, and so again, I'm an optimist uh in this. So, you know, also it's not my job anymore. So, it's easy for me to be sideline the outside and you know, like that old Monday morning quarterback and I'm sure many people in Hollywood tell you what's interesting on that um movies going to series is the inverse which would be peiquey blinders. Oh my god. series that's going to finish the entire narrative arc with a movie. Okay. Have you seen Mob Land? Not yet. Okay. Well, it's so interesting cuz I literally It's almost It's not done yet either. And I literally let I was watching a couple nights ago with the latest episode of Mob Land with my wife and uh and I said to her, I said, "You know, this really just feels like the modern version of Peiquey Blinders. One of my favorite shows of all time." Oh my god. E 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 you look at the new one. It's really interesting because it's much more uh mapped to the current Zeke guys like whatever however 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 uh stories from the past. To me, it's like a nice connection point with my kids. You know, we this was what was happening when I was young. This is what is happening now. You are young. Yeah. Exactly. And so, you know, it's the same story but just told a completely different way, but it's something we can connect over. We can talk about it. That's a really that's a really really good point that you have uh when you run it back with a movie the what is the cultural millu at the moment what's happening what are people worried about Superman you know like you know my son looks at well why does it look like it's you know cut out of like cardboard was 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 well how many movies now have got some uh lone wolf AI powered evil. It's the Jafar of the of 2025 powered by chat GBT. You know that why is that? Well, it's because people have got concerns about the sort of ascendancy of AI. Um there's issues to do with uh 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 Nathan was very good. I just want to say that beautifully done. Do you hear Do you hear that? Very good. Um what would you do if you were in charge of the Star Wars franchise? It seems like that's something that's on treacherous water right now. Um, you know, I don't it's always hard. I I mean I think that to stand outside of uh these and to be I don't know enough to know um but uh you know George Lucas along with Steven Spielberg among the greatest storytellers of our of our time. Um and you know I think probably getting back closer to its roots is um where it will find its authenticity and you know andor's uh 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. Um uh but my my guess is I would go back to the Bible and you know find my aspiration inspiration and probably road map by by getting back to its roots. Yeah. you were I mean you were asking earlier about this sort of um switch in media like maybe you start with the book then you go to a different you know sort of a a medium for for for a story. It's really funny with uh with my son uh during COVID, he got he's he's he's a little guy. He's he's probably three and a half, four at the time. And he got obsessed with um with the Star Wars, like the 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 on, 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 uh in the game in the game. like he'd literally go through the entire book, you know, with the Lego characters basically, right? And so, and then he got like super interested in it. He's like, "Oh, wow. Like, 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 5-year-old or four and a half, 5-year-old, it it felt very advanced. But since he'd gone through that, you know, now he was like, "Oh, I I know these characters. I 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 uh the power of light over dark that seems to come through and it seems not sort of time specific or media specific. It just seems like, you know, as long as you can get that through, like it just captures uh the audience. And I totally hadn't thought about the, you know, I know that the movie industry, the music industry, and the TV industry, I think all of those combined is smaller than the video game industry. I think that's right. I think that's right. Which, you know, tells us everything you need to know about how well video game designers understand human behavior. Yep. They are better able to maybe that's that's maybe not fair. the the uh um degrees of freedom that video games are able to play with are able to access human psychology in the story. Yeah, you're you're part of the you're a protagonist in this, but I mean, look at GTA 6. Yeah. You know, I mean, that thing is going to I 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 uh throughout most of the process of this and they were explaining about why the delay um the single player campaign's been ready for 6 months now. It is completely bulletproof. Everything's locked off. But the online experience that they knew GTA online was going to be this huge thing. They're prepping apparently they're prepping for 70 million concurrent players on launch. 70 million concurrent players. It will be the biggest event event launch of any entertainment property ever. Yeah. Like we know that today. It's almost like the other video game companies are looking at it and going, "Well, that's coming out. I'm going to wait. I'm not going to launch other games." Yeah. Give it six months. No one's playing anything for 6 months. Exactly. So, yeah. I just absurd, dude. And I I I didn't think about the prospect of being able to move a uh 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 law or the cannon or the world or whatever. I mean, look at uh George RR Martin did uh a world of ice and fire. He wrote that Wikip like encyclopedia Wikipedia thing with the two people that made an online wiki about his book. So, you know, there's this reverse fanfiction inclusion with the author thing where you go, this has got to the I mean, Fifty Shades of Gray. Yeah. Starts off as a fanfic and then gets turned around and 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, uh, yeah, it's it's cool. It's cool to see this. I swear we were talking about something else that had some other fanfiction that had been converted into something else. So yeah, I mean here not only are the mediums changing but even the direction of contribution from creator to audience and then the audience starts to sit on the other side and and comes back in. It's wild. Yeah, it's very interesting. I'm interested. Both of you guys have had to leave old chapters behind a lot. What have you learned about reinventing yourself or dealing with change? Well, God, you go first. Wow. um it's hard it's not it's not easy to kind of go back and uh look at something backwards very objectively. So that's one thing I've learned now over the years is you know when you look back can you distill some number of years where you were doing something uh and not necessarily look at it and say here's all the things I did wrong but you know distill the lessons from it and say here's some great things I learned and how do I apply this to the future. Uh I think the big thing for me that's always been beneficial is I'm a I'm a curious person and so I have a lot of humility around learning and so I when I approach something even if it's something related to something I've done in the past uh 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 uh there might be new things because times have changed there could be new things because it's a new area there could be better experts or people that know it better uh so can you apply or can you sort of approach it with humility? where um the process of taking all these things you've distilled from things you've done that you've learned something from uh and now absorb a lot of new things around the next thing you're going to do and so I feel like that compounds like for me I feel like the older I get and the more things I do somehow I seem to both enjoy it more and I feel like I might actually be slightly more competent now because there's this like you know interaction of things that are my own learnings and this a desire to want to learn more as well. 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Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemus.com/modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom a checkout. That's lie mus.com/modernwisdom and modernwisdom a checkout. Navigating change is something that I think a lot of people are sort of dealing with at the moment. I've got this this is a very naent idea, right? So, it might be total [ __ ] Um, but we can stress test it today. We'll call you out. Don't worry. Good, good, good, good. I figured you would. Um, I think that we are at a interesting postcoavid arc now. More interesting than we have been uh maybe since everything reopened back up from lockdown. I'm noticing it amongst me, a bunch of my friends, bunch of the people that I work with, just stuff that I'm observing. I think a lot of the uh uh liberation or constriction that people went through around COVID which caused change right some people didn't have to go to work I was a nightclub promoter uh and all of the nightclubs got shut down so that was a big change for me uh but also that meant that people started working from home and some people felt liberated by that uh I know the company that owns C4 the energy drink uh they in a desperate attempt to try and get people back into the office built a $40 million campus in Austin state-ofthe-art Uh there's on-site chef, you can get your V2 max tested, there's body work, and people wave Sage around and stuff. Still pretty difficult to get people to go back into the office. Um but I think that one of the things that we will see or that I'm just like early onset noticing, I think people are getting sick of not being around other people. I think that it's human. It's human nature. People want to be connected. That's why when you talk about movies and movie theaters, you know, it is one of the true great connectors, the shared experience of being in a movie theater, that shared laughter, that shared fear, scare, the roller coaster that you're on. I don't care how big your TV set is or how good your screening, you know, is in your in your home. that shared ex that communal experience of uh 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 that area of isolation. Human beings need other human beings. We need we are a social beast, you know. I I think uh when we were going through co um uh for for me I I felt like you had this sort of unique opportunity to to kind of connect with your family more cuz you're you're there. So you you felt like you know uh especially with my kids like the bonds got tighter. You know there were there's there's some positive elements that came out of that because before that I was traveling a lot. I was never really sort of you know uh static in one place just just for work. So you were sort of forced into captivity in some ways with you know with your family. So um 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, uh, 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 caused is is we're just starting to unfold that now, right? Like, you know, like some of the work we're doing now is um around some of the the mental health challenges that these kids have that have ramped up and amplified. So if you look at the stats uh you see the steady escalation of things like you know emotional distress and uh stress depression anxiety for adolescence something they they've always had it sort of climbing up uh those two years 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 and now they're you know when you take the five to six 7 8 year olds who are now 9 10 11 12 year olds it's you can see there's a pattern of behavior there 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 uh massive and most any medical professional you talk to will tell you that hey something happened during co like we can't quite our put our finger on it but things are going you know they were kind of bad and they were kind of climbing up a little bit but two years of compression then it just went up like this so I I do think we did some long-term damage in some of our choices during those two years you we had sort of a in 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 the entirety of the population having these kids that are meant to be out there social, you know, interacting with their friends and during these developmental uh windows of time, putting them sort of in a in a sort of a contained environment. I I think we did a lot of damage there that is just starting to reveal itself is my view. Let me add another level of complexity and reason to be uh discontent. I had a great conversation with this guy called Dr. Paul Turk. He's just written a new book. He's an evolutionary pediatrician. So he looks at child rearing from a developmental perspective and also from a medical perspective using an evolutionary lens. So looks at hunter gatherer societies and then compares how children would have been raised previously to now. And one of the big differences that you have between de developmentally uh ancestrally versus now is that you would have mixed age cohorts of kids playing together. So I understand and I agree. You lock kids that are supposed to see other children's faces, facial expressions in a house, trying to teach them through an iPad. They they don't get out. They don't get there's mom and dad are stressed with they don't know what's going on. All of this stuff like tons and tons of stuff that can go wrong. But even before that, yeah, you have primed kids. They would not have typically played. There wasn't enough kids around that were also three. Yeah. To have had an entire group of three-year-olds. There would have been a three-year-old with a 5-year-old and an 8-year-old and a there would have been girls and there would have been boys. there's just a much more mixed group which I think uh expedites learning for the younger kids and expedites learning of care for the older kids. So you have this sort of switcheroo thing going on whereas if you're you know you've got a classroom of between 10 and 30 5y olds well everybody's going to be at a similar sort of developmental trajectory and then when you roll that even more and you think okay let's compare that ancestrally that's a bit restricted perhaps to what we would have been used to and now we're going to make it we turn that up to 11. Yeah. Um, so yeah, it doesn't surpe yourself you tried to make kids happy for a very long time. I imagine that you're quite concerned about what's happening with their mental health now. Hugely. I mean, it's it it it is so bad, Chris, that we are seeing um the pain and damage that is being done to a generation of kids. Uh Jonathan height wrote a great book about this. Um but it's the world that we've been working in now for the last two years and it's why we've become missiondriven. You know uh Aura uh which is a company that uh Har 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. Um, if I came to your home and robbed your home, I'd 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 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 just here in America, uh, three years ago, home robberies was, uh, just over $3 billion a year and, uh, 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 to. I promise we ask 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 title wave of of problems. Well, that was great. And that was um uh I would say uh a a a great um uh uh a need and you know there was a a a uh an opportunity to go solve this problem for consumers. people were they were many many uh companies were out solving it for enterprise for companies you know where we would hear about you know J Penney getting all of their data stolen and this one and that one and and Sony had a huge breach huge right so lots and you know billions and billions of dollars invested in uh cyber security but for consumer for everyday people not so much at all there's been very little innovation and that was the sort of brilliance that started uh hurry 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 uh this is where the missiondriven part of of this kicked into gear for for us. Yeah. Look, I think we were talking earlier about purpose versus mission, right? And so I think uh 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. Uh the mission part of it again for me uh with one of my four kids uh again this is sort of like the postcoid thing we were talking about. Uh I do feel I mean both with her friends and with with the um many of the people of her age group. Um there's both uh this isolation element where we're talking about where there's you know they're not mixing with kids their own age or higher ages lower ages but there's also this like u shift in life from physical to digital like I mean they're they're on their devices on their phones all the time all day long um in in an odd way like the truth of their lives are not in physical land it's almost on their device. It's a great take. 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. Um and you know it was about 2 and a half years ago. She said uh hey like I don't feel great et 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. Um and we're like okay 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 headsp space, severely depressed. Um, and there was uh there was uh uh you know, like like we were looking at going, well, we don't know what's going on. Seemed to get keep getting worse. You ask her, she's oh, everything is fine. Like I'm I'm okay, you know, and and but clearly you can see she's not. Then she started going down the path of sort of a bunch of negative coping strategies like, you know, things that kids ought not to consider, but you know, things that are happening much more frequently and we had no idea. And it got to a point where we said, I think we need to take her in to get care, like to get treatment. So, we take her in, I drop her off, and I would say probably, this is one of the hardest things I've ever done. Like, you take a kid, you drop her off at a facility where you feel like she's struggling and you don't know what to do. It's uh you don't know if you're doing the right thing. Come back home, they don't let uh kids keep phones uh at this facility. So, that's the first time I actually looked at her phone and I said, I can't believe this. This is insane. like how could we not know? This kid's going through so much stuff. There's so much happening. She's struggling with a lot of stuff. Completely invisible. Like we could not we could not have guessed. And we said, "Well, are we like terrible parents? Like how how could this have happened?" Um so that's when we started looking around to say, "Hey, is this just us or or you know like is it happening?" It's everywhere now. Like I mean I think people are starting to talk about it more and more uh but the stats are staggering and you know so let me Yeah, it's an epidemic and this experience that make an analogy. Go back here. You know, when when I was growing up, um 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 w they're with. They're on this the 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 uh the things that we need to do to help our children navigate successfully through all the things that are we all go through, you know that that you know drinking, driving, smoking, drugs, sex, like they're that's life. And as parents, you know, you have tools, you have insights, you have the ability to help navigate your your kids uh 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. M I the analogy I use is is that um uh uh when when your kid is going to learn to drive, you know, you get a learner's permit, you go to a Walmart parking lot, but there's nothing around and you help on board them. You teach them. You show them the 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 uh 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 Hurry went out to solve. But I want to just frame for you here. It's why I asked him to bring back my my phone because uh we started a beta version of of uh this online safety. So remember I said we started with online security and then the mission became out of Ari's personal experience. It was like a a hard pivot to let's expand this into how do we protect our kids much more important than commit than protecting you know our our bank account. So there are 2500 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 when they shouldn't be. 30% with low self-esteem. 22% have uh self harm, suicidal thoughts. And the staggering 52% have eating issues. So 80% of girls 18 years old and younger don't like their body shape. 80%. And more than half of them are doing things that are unhealthy or harmful as a result of that. 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? Yes. It's really interesting. There's actually stats that you know they publish every year around this. The increase precoid to postcoid like we're talking about from before uh it happened to now in many of these areas are like several hundred%. Cuz 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 is this just an endemic part of being a teenage girl but now we can identify right. So this is the same question I had. I was like, well, you know, is it that now it's become more normal for kids to talk about it? Are 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, um, this is sort of what we're grappling with. What are you guys seeing? Like, what are you seeing out on on the floor? What are you seeing in the ER facilities, etc. Uh, their view, and this is now pretty universal with with every hospital, is um, we not sure what's going on. There was sort of life before COVID, life after COVID, life after CO if there were like you know 10 kids coming in that had cut themselves so deeply that they needed care because especially with girls one of the coping strategies they go through is cutting which has now become very very prevalent like 11 12% of the girls cut. Um they said you know there's like 10 in a week now we're seeing 100. So to 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 uh co land but the the but the data is very very clear it's not self-reporting it's not you know us identifying more of these cases something got messed up like I it's it's hard and we can't quite tell again I think it's unfair to say hey like you know the phone made it all bad it's causal that type of stuff like I don't actually believe that I think that there are many benefits that come from the technology, but I do think that some of these side effects get massively amplified. And you know, like with my with my daughter's um 8th grade graduation, the kid that did the speech, her speech was about how she had been cutting herself for 2 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 it is it is a it's a it's a real it's a it's a real problem. current working hypothesis for this. I mean, you know, Gene Twangi's got her thing, Height's got his thing. There's some skepticism around Jonathan's uh data, which I'm sure that you guys have looked at, too. And he's a good friend. I love him. But, you know, he's like there's a lot going on. Well, we have the data. There's no like ours is not this is not our interpretation or uh 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 the when it comes to a mechanism, what what's your just some potential sort of causal explanations of what you think's going on here? Global altogether type thing. I mean, I can kind of give you my perspective. Again, this is just a perspective, so take it for what it is. I think that um we started giving kids smartphones you know so if you look at sort of the growth of smartphones and the great and sort of the growth of uh emotional sort of negativity there's clearly it looks very very correlated like one's going up the other one's going up as well so it it almost seems like when you unleash something for it to get to a critical mass and see the the followon effect of it takes some time right I mean it's like opening Pandora's box in some ways like you open 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 make things uh rough. So I think we've hit this like critical juncture now where uh the amount of time that kids are spending on these the amount of engagement they're getting from a lot more content that's now available. It's hit a tipping point now where you know and and there's enough proliferation of that across uh the the you know the world that it's starting to now percolate up. There's always always like an underlying theme as kids are going through adolescence. It's hard. It's just her being an adolescent. So there's this amplification element. There is um enough of this happened for enough time now that we're now seeing the impact of it. I think it's been building up by the way. I don't think it's accelerated. There's no question that when you I mean you just see the amount of well one um the devices themselves um in terms of usability and uh um uh interactivity and effectiveness of being compelling. Yes. and the effectiveness of being able to uh uh you know reach people and to communicate with people and to bring them into different places here. Um there's so many good things that we can talk about and so we're not here, you know, uh looking at social media and saying that it's this bad evil thing. There's just a dark place in it and there and and our kids are particularly vulnerable if they are uh if they are not helped in navigating their way through it. I think in some ways I 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 etc. I mean that didn't happen when we were kids. That didn't that wasn't a thing, right? I mean, now you've got and again there's no no shade, but again like we set up the ecosystem. We told a bunch of really smart I mean incentives are going to incentive. Exactly. We set up the incentives where he said I mean if you're a big social media company you're doing your earnings maximize time on site. Yeah. If you're doing your earnings and he said guys like we did a great thing like you know we made everybody super healthy. We made everybody super healthy but our people choose the things that they want to do. If they didn't like it they wouldn't choose it. And and so it's asymmetric warfare though. So it's not quite the right metric to use. Yeah. So I so I I think that we set up the ecosystem you know we sort of empowered smart you know sort of ambitious people to go in and start hacking us in some ways right and so that's happened long enough and there's you know there there's been enough sort of u uh medium through which you can kind of get this you know out which is whether social media smartphones or some combination. I think now we're looking at it saying, "Oh no, like what did we do?" Like, and we did this all without thinking about the guard rails. Yeah. So, that's really where we are. Like people trying to figure out how do you guard because it's never going back, by the way. 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Right now, you can get a 20% discount and see everything that I use and recommend by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomadic.com/modernwisdom. That's nomatic.com/modernwisdom. 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 15year-olds have had it for over a decade? Is it simply time and detention? Is it the effectiveness and how compelling uh these are? Is it the distribution? Like what what do you think? 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 you 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 another car crash. Oh here's another variant of the car crash. So you so now you're sort of in this cycle of feeding that neural pathway with these things that kind of continuously you and like with most of these kids by the way you you like look at them and say did you actually want to see that? Many will say no. There's a great book uh human compatible by Stuart Russell. Yeah. Have you read that? I have. Yeah. Phenomenal. Um so Stuart wrote the textbook for AI. probably not anymore actually I guess in the modern world of LLMs but this thing got translated into pretty much every language on the planet and if you wanted to learn how to do coding and how to do AI you're going to read Stuart's book and he wrote a couple of sort of popular normal people books and uh I learned this [ __ ] terrifying thing from him 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 Jeffreey's going to press on his phone, right? Like that. This is uh I I get closer and closer toward your preferences and I deliver to you things which are tighter and tighter aligned to what that is until it's a perfect overlay like this. That's the first one. The second one is that the algo nudges your preferences so that you become more predictable. And this birectional relationship because this is the crazy thing about any kind of optimizing function, right? It's like get people to click. Yeah. Okay. Well, you're not saying how. It's just going to do a thing until it works out. And this is how you get uh was it move 14 in that Le Sudong go game? Uh where no one could actually work out. So why did you do that? The reward system. Yeah, that's correct. You you can't you get these sort of really orthogonal moves that nobody could have predicted. And one of them would be well you can become better at predicting what the user wants or you can make the user more predictable. Yeah. And the fact that algorithms are reprogramming users and this I think explains a lot of polarization, extremism in beliefs. And and 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. I mean, and I, you know, I think intuitively kind of people have figured this out, right? which is basically you know create a neural pathway for a certain kind of action you know eliciting a certain kind of reaction just by observation like like you're saying right which is hey like if I did this thing what are you going to do like oh can I now measure it and can I create the probability around it to see if you're going to do it again I'm going to keep doing that right so I think that what's happened now is we've gotten really good at that you know over like decades and decades of you know many people doing lots of programming etc and then what do human beings do you commercialize right so now you figure out okay well we have the skill Well, 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. Uh, and it turns out that kids are, you know, easier to program than perhaps you or me. Okay. So, let's let's just sort of dig in for a second, I think, about Look, Australia's got a social media ban now for under 16. It seems to me that although what you guys are doing with Aura is uh great and necessary that the nuclear option is just to go like no social media for anyone under 16. I mean you could probably for men for males you could probably look at no social media under 25 and make a justification for that right prefrontal cortex still develop it. Mine feels like it's still going now. Um, why should we not just be putting all of our efforts into lobbying the [ __ ] out of government to say no social media for anyone under 60? Well, I mean, I think besides the practical elements of can we actually pull it off, right? Which is again a whole another question. You know, we invented it because there was a reason. There's a human reason why this thing came to be. Now, again, you know, like most things for human beings, we push it to the edge and then we push it beyond the edge. And that's just how, you know, we're all wired. But you know there is like I mean there are kids that um 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 things to explore the world. So there is a real need there. It's just that like everything else, we just, you know, you you think about the access to knowledge that comes with being on this device and the fact that that is um that barrier is just goes down to almost, you know, you could be on the Masai 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. 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. They're not. But so let me ask you this. So how many hours would you think a kid spends on their device per day? Like somebody between call it 11 and 18? Six. About eight hours, right? Eight hours. So probably more time than they're asleep. Yeah. So I mean yeah that's that's exactly right and you know you're awake for you know call it whatever you know 12 18 hours a day and uh you're spending the majority of it on these devices and it goes from spot to spot there are you know you actually do see kids are spending time learning they're using Google class they're using uh things to make themselves more productive there's more language you know lingo 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 drive. Yeah. But would there not be a way to I'm not talking about banning phones. We're talking about banning social media. Like how much is Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook. How much are these platforms really facilitating learning? I mean I I I I think they facilitate more connection than learning. I would say that that's that's one thing. But like even take this analogy of driving a car, right? I mean you can take and this actually we're seeing this in the stats too but if you you can take multiple approaches here which is hey like driving a car is a scary thing right don't drive the car till you're 25 that's one approach right which again you know has its sort of set sets of repercussions there's one that says you know hey uh driving a car at 16 but then going through these sta stages so you have a healthy relationship with cars healthy relationship with safety sort of another approach but the way that came about was regulated right I mean if there's no regulation nobody's wearing a seat belt Right. Right. I mean, so so, so in some ways your question around, hey, why doesn't the government intervene and do something about it? I think it's a good question. They should because this is now sort of an epidemic level issue. The surgeon general's letter two years ago was literally about this issue. They were like, it is the the nation's largest epidemic at the moment, you know, mental health uh for adolescence. But again, there's perverse forces, right? I mean, you've got large companies with, you know, incentives, lots lots of capital, lots of, you know, uh, resources that obviously don't want for this to happen. So, there, you know, that's the that's the dichotomy, I think. But again, the mission that we got on, which is we're not legislators, we're not politicians and we're business people. And we looked at it and said, well, whether or not it should be banned or not banned, we all have our opinions about that. You know, I think the again just going back to the car analogy because it's so simple, which is regardless of whether you're able to drive at 10 or 12 or 14 years, you have to wear a seat belt. Yes. So, um and so our ambition was parents and parents are good at parenting when they have tools, tools, then they have knowledge. Mhm. 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 um are to be able to read sentiment and insight and observation as opposed to spying because if you spy on your kids, if you're going to they're going to find a way to circumvent this, right? So, uh this is a 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 uh 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 days. Yeah, as the data gets greater, the knowledge you 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 that if you as a parent knew that you could just say hey why you what tell you know not no don't do that but what are you trying to get out of that how is that going to help you in this and it and once again you can be a great parent and help them make their way through it if if you just knew that I mean I'll say two things I mean to 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 until 16. I I think that that's just good. Uh uh you know, sort of most parents will probably tell you that after they've kind of been through stuff with their teenage kids. It's a hard thing because you know, all their friends get stuff and now you've got all this coordination problem. Yeah. I think height height's proposal is you get a weird 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." A lot of schools in California. I don't know how effective that'll be and how much it'll it'll uh propagate because again they go to you know friends homes that are not in the same school now they have 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 uh you know unfold every day the the parents are the front line you know so it's not you know like regulations all that type of stuff it's it's going to have to work its way to that but really it's the parents that are in the front line of the problem. So the more they get educated, the more they understand that this is not like a weird thing. It's happening culturally everywhere. And we're all sort of at a loss for what to do and there's a like this brewing problem that's happening. And the more that becomes uh visible to people say, "Hey, now I need to actually go learn something like I need to go learn how to, you know, interact with my kid when these things happen, etc." So and so if you talk to a lot of uh clinicians and psychologist, that's what they tell you. We there's 6,000 of us uh clinicians and psychologists. Case loads going up through the roof. To train somebody to be good at that is going to take a long time, right? Decades plus. So where do you find the help? Like it's the parents like get them smarter on these issues. Get them to understand that you know and the and the desire and the motivations there. They want to raise great kids that are happy that are healthy, you know. So that's uh talk to me about some of the other uh insights that you've learned from the data that you've got. I mean that one around the calorie tracking thing is just f it's harrowing but fascinating. Yeah, I'll tell you a couple more like you know if kids are on social media for a half an hour before they go to sleep their sleep is interrupted more often. How are you tracking sleep? So basically when kids wake up they pick up their phone so we see traffic on their on their device or if they have a wearable we can track that that information as well if they're kind of uh uh going to sleep. We see for example like an really interesting thing we do see that if there is a lot of activity outside of your digital life it's a huge positive thing like so you could be on your phone for 4 hours a day 5 it's fine if you're also going playing sports and you're you know hanging out with your friends and playing soccer like you know those types of things are very how do you know if they're doing that because you can tell on the on geot tracking where they're kind of you know out and about basically so you can kind of start as opposed to the person who's just in at home for most of the day scrolling the whole time and like on on their device that there doesn't and you can see the amount of activity that they have right and then other like another interesting typically 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 why 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 in in it's more close to real life in some ways. There's not as much uh hey look at this person doing this thing, you know. So when girls on social media, it becomes what is this view of how I should be because I'm seeing this influencer be a certain way. They have a million followers. They're doing these types of things. And so that seems to somehow end up driving behavior a bit more in girls. And again, we're only talking about this window of time like we're just say, you know, 12 to kind of 16 17. Um, but those are I mean really interesting to us that you know cuz if you know these things if you have a boy you're like okay well this is kind of the stuff we need to go do to make sure this kid's okay you know type of thing. So uh and here's a kind of fascinating because we're talking about you know what's drove us into this area is watching sort of these 10 to 18 year olds. But here's really interesting thing about it which is so that we're focused on at first cuz 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? Uh, 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 wearable tracker for your digital for your mental for your mental emotional health right and so like again cuz and that's very much more like a theme I know you're very sort of um uh passionate about which is like creating people that can be their best self right so it's not just physical u you know kind of your mental state your emotional state we don't get a lot of data on that there's no observation about that in it so today actually that's the beauty of you know this is where the innovation of tech is phenomenal in this and is what's what's your how are you going to work that out or how can people learn more about themselves with 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 uh patterns what apps you're using how you're using them etc 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 you using what you know personal apps are using. We can say when you're on these things, you know, all all your patterns of behavior relative to your mental and like even sentiment, right? So, we look at it and say, hey, like when you're on these things doing this kind of work, you notice that your mood is actually sort of dipping. 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. No way. 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 a in an angry mood and you know how quickly you're responding back to somebody right if the user allows we can also get text and we can you know you know 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 and you feed it back to you in a 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 tried to exchange something, you got in an art, like it will actually I'm looking forward to it for myself. So, where are you at with the how how that's ne we want to get through the teenage thing which we just launched, right? That's the So, fourth quarter of this year is sort of the first first uh MVP of it come I was showing Luke uh this and he was like, I really need this for myself. I'll see you. Okay, I need to I do need to call this out. Uh, 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. Uh, but he'll famously compare that to his sleep. So he had twice as much screen time as sleep time. Yeah. Uh, for a little bit of it. I mean, look, I uh I think that that idea of some kind of wearable tracker, you don't have to wear anything. All but the insights from a wearable coming out of you knowity. Yeah, exactly. I mean that that I would I would use that in a heartbeat. That wearable is actually more about your physical physical 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 your you know where when you're happy when you're not what's making you happy I don't know whether you're going to break some degree of um data protection here can you use frontfacing camera to do micro expression stuff you could I think there's a little bit when you start looking at images or cam regulations that you have to worry about with Tik Tok's got it in their terms of service you know honestly I think that uh even just tabulating stuff and saying here's sort of what we're seeing for broad patterns. We see users like wow like I didn't know that like that's really like like Luke posting you know even screen time data you know which I I mean I'm using external apps because even though Apple's tried to become more sophisticated with screen time and limitations it's not good enough. So, you know what I always think about? It's so funny. Um, you remember when before there was the torch function on your home screen? Y that there was third party apps y that was a torch that had worked out or you I think you went and recorded a video but didn't press the video thing and turn the torch on. You know, you had to jailbreak your own iPhone in an attempt to try and get it to do the thing you wanted it to do. And it seems to me like this is another situation where the lumbering Leviathan behemoth that is a combination of governmental regulation, tech, um cultural inertia, understanding what it is that parents should be doing. All of these things can't keep up quickly enough, which is precisely this is what entrepreneurs do. They get out. They find a lane. see where something is missing and just go innovate like crazy around that that idea. Even you know and you know at some point maybe these you know behemoths will uh be motivated by what we are doing to take on some of the look we saw this with the link tree you know link tree so it was like a um 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 Linkree allowed you super no coding needed, you know, drag and drop like making another social media thing and you would press that. This thing was worth it was Australian company. It was worth a couple of billion simple problem day one day 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. So, so you have to you have to be smart about it because you have to be able to see that you know at some point the trend will change. So, so it's really interesting to us because again the existential issue is hey like as a company again as as as a human being and as as a dad well we would welcome this very much obviously is all all of the social media companies kind of you know integrating together and saying let's make sure everybody's safe. But if you're looking at it from an entrepreneur company lens, right, you 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 linkery, right?" It's 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, etc. M users gravitate towards things that you are hyperfocused 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 life 360 and fine my right fine is available for free life 360 is a $4.5 billion company they solve the one case which is where's my kid like I want to know where my kids are but they've doggedly focused on that one use case so users say okay well the services 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 that a bunch of other people like Robert Downey Jr. is part of this too. It's been a ride just working through this with Jeffrey. I was funny because we were talking about Elton John earlier. I'll tell you sort of a funny tidbit. Uh while we were trying to get uh people sort of on our board, Jeffrey was helping us quite a bit, you know, especially for people that had big platforms. So we uh Jeffrey said, you know, we should talk to Tom Hanks. And we said, "Oh, okay. That sounds good." He said, "Well out to Philadelphia." So I go out to Philadelphia. We're sitting at breakfast with with Tom and Rita and you know Jeffreey's sort of you know going through stuff. Uh and and uh and Tom Hanks says, "Oh, I'm going to go to the White House this evening and see the president." And so Jeffreey's like, "Oh, I just came from there last week." And so now Tom Hanks is like, "I'm going to write you uh Jeffy's 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 sitt 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. Yeah. So, we've had lots of great sort of, you know, such things where Jeffy's been a huge part of like getting us plugged into this world of people that sort of, you know, have original large platforms so they can get, you know, sort of ideas out there. So, Robert, we met through through Jeffrey as well, though. Those are the 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 100 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 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 $100 off, making it $399 bucks. So, you can go to the link in the description below or head to functionhealth.com/modernwisdom. That's functionhealth.com/modernwisdom. I remember just going back to the speed of typing pressure there, which again [ __ ] blown my mind. I I remember um 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 have there's some neurological decline that you've got in here so you can see how this could be uh data is data right and you can draw correlations wherever you want, but the fact that you guys can do it to try and intervene and I I certainly think as well people feel like there is a at best slightly adversarial relationship with most technology. Y uh going down to at worst like an outright malicious intent uh by people are on the other side of it. And if you were to say, I'm going to Africa. I'm going to spend some time in Africa. Okay. What are the things that I'm going to do to allow me to enjoy the best bits of Africa and protect myself from the worst bits? Well, I'm probably going to get some deep mosquito spray and I'm probably going to wear long sleeves and I'm okay. So, what have I got? I have something that helps me to experience the good bits, but protect me from the bits that I don't want. I feel like most people don't almost no one knows how to code. Yeah. And even if you do know how to code, your iPhone's pretty robust at stopping you from getting in there and [ __ ] with it, unless you want to jailbreak it, in which case the whole thing becomes unusable. Yeah. Uh so I think giving, and I'm sure that you've considered this before, but giving some degree of power back to users uh around what it is that they want um would be phenomenal. And then, you know, roll the clock forward a little bit more. Can we get to the stage where we can choose our own algorithms a little bit? We're starting to see tiny little glimmers of that. Yeah. like the like the notion of like even with doom scrolling, right? It's like a very simple concept. I think it like maybe it was uh Pinterest maybe was the first one that came up with it which is this concept I was talking telling about that like the the 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 it you know 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 that's taking a little bit of control back right but it's actually a very powerful thing because now you can say okay well I know I need the dopamine head I'm going to keep like you know pushing and scrolling thing, but now the social media company has given 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. Yeah. What about um 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 what you call it infant use. I mean it's it's you're you're teaching them the patterns from early on, right? I mean it's again it's it's hard like I I definitely see why you do it because this kid screaming you're at a restaurant trying to get dinner and you know you got to make sure that you're going to play Kam. It's like after you try a few things here here's your iPad go you know go go play on it. But I do think that if it's unregulated where that becomes the the norm, you're now teaching them sort of something like, you know, it's like teaching them that, you know, when you feel bad, you should go to a device. When you feel like you can't cope with your emotions, like that's how you do it. Like, so with every one of these actions, you're doing it. So, but that being said, we're all social. Like, we all want to be out with our friends and we want to make sure our kids can get, you know, involved with that, too. So it's not a trivial thing uh on how to sort of you know uh make that work but I do think there's some negative uh things that are coming out of that as well cuz I think we're teaching them that you know you can start relying on this for emotional support basically. So those again I don't know whether this is Jonathan height's work or somebody else's talking about how uh kids are affected developmentally when they see parents phone go off and parent look at phone. Have you seen this, you know, study I'm talking about? I I don't know the specific one, but we've heard many of these things, which is basically with kids, especially when they're like, you know, eight or 10 and above. Uh, you can tell them a lot of stuff. I'm going to put limits on your phone. I'm going to do all this stuff. And you're sitting there at dinner on your phone. They're looking at going, "Okay, well, you're telling me one thing, so when I get a bit older, I can do that." You know, so you're kind of teaching them a different thing, basically. So, I 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, you know, how to and again, if you're of a certain age, you may not have gotten hooked on it early enough. So, you might 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 are, you know, on their iPads at 6, seven, eight, that is native. Like, that's how they're growing up. You never teach them the other side of it. Well, 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 height around some 25 British girl. Very clever. Um 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, she can they not have a little bit more resilience? and she made the same point you guys have, which is, well, they spend more time on digital devices than they do in the real world. So, the digital world is their real world. It's more real than the real world. Yeah. I I think that's the switch that hasn't gone off, you know, broadly, by the way, cuz people I mean, it's it's amazing to me cuz like I'll be at a dinner, you know, it'll be like, you know, 10, you know, couples and, you know, parents and, you know, I say, "Hey, like, how many of you think that your kids are doing really well and everything is great?" all 10 will raise their hands and it's statistically not possible. It's just not possible. So, 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 know, I don't like taking drugs. They're not at night. Yeah. But there's like stuff happening there that's the same impact as, you know, like uh like taking a drug, which indogenous drugs, just not exogenous drugs. Yeah. I uh I think when it comes to where are people going to get their sense of control from, especially around what it is that their kids do, I imagine I have to imagine that for most parents, they feel like it's kind of like a [ __ ] like I 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 [ __ ] lite. Yeah. Or uh a a a dopamine endogenous dopamine dealer that's going to commit them to a life of social anxiety and depression. Yeah. I mean, you know, look, I 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 going to 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, etc." The 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 they can give their kids devices etc. So in that type of an environment at 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 I can now intervene like give them cuz most parents you talk to they just say look I I don't know what to do about I I have no idea like like and we hear like 30% of moms usually moms when their kids go to bed will pick up their phones and spend 45 minutes looking through to see what the kid was doing. So what are they actually? Oh, that's the current solution. Well, for a third of them. Yeah. So they So they go through and now now it's like, you know, you're you're a parent, you're overwhelmed, 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 hay stack, too, you know. Yeah. Um 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 uh girls interact with each other on social media, the comparison, the ostracization, the sort of um uh backbiting social dynamic that I'm very glad that I wasn't a female to have to navigate through. Um, have you thought about what some potential interventions are to tune down the more negative behavior that happens socially on digital devices? Yes, we think about this a lot uh in in the sense that when you know what the mood is of a child when they're going through certain things, right? Right? So like like think of like a a utopian state like you know a kid wakes up in the morning they are super happy everything that day is going great everything is 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 3 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 end for that child where you say if we can kind of you know craft their day in this sort of a way with with their device we're only talking about devices here uh that seems to have the best possible outcome again the physical world we can't know we're not in that zone so if you can create that sort of customized blueprint and then give parents the tools saying hey you know what you ought ought to set up a time limit where your kid 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 set things up that's really outcome based because you're at that point you're saying hey like I'm driving towards making sure my kid is actually thriving and doing really well in an objective way and again and the tools are meant to be incredibly uh 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 the level of insight and controls you want of a 12-year-old are quite different from a 17y old. And so being able to um not only at the outset but as a again I go back to the it's the easiest thing here on the driving analogy here which is as you see your child getting better and better uh and being responsible, reliable, whatever those things are, you stop 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. I mean, it's sort of like a nicaderm patch in some ways, right? It's probably the more per 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 what you're trying to do is get these kids not to get hooked on habits that are negative for them while not having to throw away all the goodness that comes with it like your you know Africa example is very I think so yeah I guess another interesting element here and Jeff you've spent your life around high achievers and celebrities I think the most common job to top five most common jobs at least two or three of them is something to do with becoming famous becoming an influencer becoming a YouTuber But what do most people not realize about the reality of fame and attention in that way? Well, you know, um it's I I think that, you know, fame is fleeting. So, it has its good moments and its bad moments. tends to be, you know, I've watched it now for decades uh particularly um uh around uh stardom of uh whether it's any type of artist, writer, director, producer, actor, actress, TV, musician, bands, you know, this sort of roller coaster that um uh celebrity has uh it's brutal and uh you know, it's it's It's it's um you know it's a it's a very challenging thing emotionally uh I think for anybody to go for an athlete um you know you you think of the these ups and downs that you have um and um you know mine just as always as best one can don't let the highs take you to highs and don't let the lows take you to lows and for the most part. It's not fatal, you know. Um, for me, I've always believed that I've learned more from my misses and my failures than I have from my successes. Um, and they've made me very, very, very resilient, very. Um, how do you ensure that misses and failures get alchemized into something that's useful for you as opposed to become a a trauma or an issue that you hold on to, a star? I believe in owning my failures. I think it's important to 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 uh 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 uh much more generous in terms of uh producing something of quality and success more reliably. Um, but you know, movies, television, music, uh, 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, um, 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 summer of 1994, the biggest movie in the world was Lion King. The biggest soundtrack in the world was the soundtrack from Lion King. The number one TV show was Home Improvement. Beauty and the Beast was the hit show on Broadway. Uh, 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 uh uh 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. I got fired. It was a grand slam. Yeah. I got fired. Can you tell me the story behind that? uh it's you know it's it's a Shakespeare it's complicated I think you know and uh uh you know for me uh I I try to as I said own it move on uh you know I've sort of had two different mission I've had one became like a sort of my motto in 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 uh 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 and I actually don't have a very strong memory gene. It's very very weak. I don't reminisce. Um, unless you ask me questions, there's not a morning that I wake up and I like Shrek is on my mind or or Beauty and the Beast or Lion King or Pretty Woman or any of these things. There's just not. Um, it's funny like that's I I you know, now I've been working with Jeffrey about, you know, seven seven and a half years and I probably talk to him every day. Um, and people ask, well, what's it like? And that to me is the most amazing thing. like somebody that's done as much as he has. I don't think we have ever in the last seven years really talked about the past at all. It's always what's coming like what's coming forward focus. So, what have you guys learned from working with each other? Well, you know, I I have um you know, I' I've watched a brilliant entrepreneur uh 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 um you know is just uh uh you know hurry 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 um uh he has uh great empathy and uh 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 um uh and managed to turn that to something so positive. It's a amazing admirable quality to have not not that many people do. And so I mean look I I hope to be like Jeffrey when I get older at like the amazing work ethic I've never seen anything like it. Jeffrey works seven days a week. uh 15 hours a day like the level of follow through on stuff, the level of engagement when you have a problem, you know, we we have we have, you know, world-class investors, we have, you know, very smart people that have helped us build many things in the past, but uh I know that if I call him, he'll pick up, he'll come, you know, help, he'll roll up his sleeves, he's there, which is great, uh to know. Um and I have you know seen sort of some of the ups and downs like you know between some of the early sort of investments like Quibby etc and and and sort of the grace with which he comes out of it like you know when 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. Like that's I've always I think I've probably always gotten too much credit for the successes that I've been associated with. It's made me feel like okay well you should own your garbage. So um you know it's it's uh it's also great around you know team you know uh not everybody has that resilience. I always say I have rhino skin you know that's very hard to you know really for for me to feel that that that that pain. I mean, 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 uh, 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 gonna make the world a better place. You know, to get up today and to be able to be on a mission to help parents be more successful in bringing up this generation of kids. Wow. Like what could be more rewarding? I was talking to Luke actually. Uh bullying is something that I've been very interested in, not in doing but in trying to fix. and uh the uh a couple of really great researchers. Tony Vulk is one of them. Uh Tracy Vayancor 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. Uh how come it seems to uh stop as people grow up? Uh why is it worse at these particular ages? What's the typical dynamic? It's an algorithm not too dissimilar to the one that you guys have, just slightly less precise. Well, we actually have it and we can tell what you're we can identify necessarily fix it basically which I think is some of that. Yeah. Well, we can identify uh what sort of triggers uh kids have that sort of you know make them uh 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 uh a lot of camaraderie and you can see for certain kind of kids with certain sort of uh uh 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 the the uh if somebody's being abusive right to someone. Well, no. So you can you can see that they're being abusive where one of the big feature markers that we see are their behavior during video gaming uh ends up becoming a highly predictive feature for some of the things that we see in other other behaviors. So cuz for us continuously it's basically the causal pieces right which is like what are the things that are markers for us that tell us that there is a certain kind of behavior good or bad right positive or negative. Uh so in our models one of the things we see is you know kids that tend to be a lot more rambunctious during games that are much more again in that context is completely fine. They're not bullying or anything like that uh tends to be a big marker for uh cyber bullying uh outbound basically. M so yeah I mean it's a huge passion and and so one you can see it two ways you can see outgoing behavior that has bullying in it but more more importantly you can see when it's inbound right so it immediately and that's the great thing about this is is there are certain things that are red lines so anything that is actually um physically or or mentally harmful to your child on a device, it'll instantly alert you. Right? So that'll you so and bullying being one of the sentiments that you can can tell or anything that's predatory, you know, uh uh 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, um, you know, there's there's one thing about sentiment and gu and guidance. The other is wait a minute, you just you you just jumped the stop sign, stop for a stop sign. That's could be fatal. You know, like there's a really interesting thing which is um I think you asked a question earlier about how much of this are we like self-identifying now because, you know, we're just smarter and more in tune with it. I have not run the data, but I would guess and I I'm curious now. So, we'll go check check it out and see what it says that known problems like bullying that have been around for a while or sexual predators for example that have been around a while. I think the system has figured out how to guardrail that better where it's not increasing at the same exponential rate as some of the more new ones like you know hey like cutting or uh restricting calories or you know uh 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 they start to guard rail maybe you can kind of quiet so you need to expedite the learning for parents as well here that's exactly right because have you got an idea of of training parents on how to intervene, how to have these conversations also. Yeah, we we spend a lot of time on that. Um, which is basically I think we try 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 a sort of a a set of resources online where they can go talk to other parents that they can accelerate the learning, they can ask questions. We have clinicians, we have clinicians that go respond to questions and we pay pay for it. Um and there's uh uh things like CBT or DBT like which are you know uh formal uh learning programs that if the parents even if they do like a quick 30 minutes on CBT uh like with when when our child was going through it we did 23 weeks of an hour a week for the whole family of DBT. Which one is DBT? 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 uh also coming up with a framework and a language that we can all speak saying hey like I'm distressed I know what your signals are what words you're going to say to me that makes me kind of understand that. So it was really helpful and so some of the I mean like the kids were like rolling their eyes and saying I don't know why I have to do this but at the end of that 23 weeks uh I felt like they just sort of subconsciously like learn a lot from it. they don't say a lot about it and as a parent like we learned a lot so it accelerated our journey a little bit. So for I think for a lot of parents if we can get that into a mode where you don't have to spend you know 23 weeks like learning it but can you get like a lot of the gist of it out there in 30 minutes type of thing. So it's really interesting to think about what sort of parenting can be accelerated by this and uh yeah the the bullying piece in particular I think is is so important. What makes you? So, I was bullied as a kid. Uh, classic only child syndrome where you're undersocialized. Um, spoke differently to the place that I was from. Went to a very sort of rough and ready primary school, state school, sixth form college. I think maybe two other people from my entire 200 person year group in secondary school went on to university. So, it was a very sort of low um rate of of higher education. And that was something that that I wanted to do. So you just stand out in a variety of different ways. I played cricket which wasn't massively, you know, it's not a fantastic way to make yourself cool in a a working class school to play cricket when everyone else wants to play football or rugby. And um yeah, I I look many of the things that we appreciate in ourselves I think are born out of the challenges that we've gone through. Uh and you know if you look at you know butterfly effect your way back you realize that if you're happy with where you are now that you have to be happy with where you were then because without that the likelihood of you ending up here probably would be a little bit lower. You don't know whether this was uh uh like determined or uh simply coincidence. Um, but it's something that I really just want to give, especially to kids that feel alone, especially kids in the in 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 cuz it it takes so long as an adult to relearn [ __ ] that could have taken you a couple of months as a kid. Yeah. And you know, you're having to forcibly go through this very sort of slow cognitive process of, hey, other people might have your best interests at heart. Hey, if you're struggling, you can speak to someone. Hey, if things are bad, perhaps you should call a friend. Like, it's this very laborious, conscious front brain thing. Yeah. Because as a kid, the physics of your system weren't set up in such a way as to that that for that to be implicit. And I think that the level of safety and 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 because it has an impact on how you like, you know, even like learning to ask for help. Mhm. Right. If you go through an experience like that, I suspect it's a little harder, right? You know, cuz you just didn't establish the pattern. You don't think anyone's got your back. So you think like I and 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 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. Um, but I it's it's definitely a uh a passion project of mine at the moment and I'm currently in conversation with the head of a group that looks after I think about 100 schools in the north the north of the UK. Uh, and we're looking at trying to do some of these evidence-based bullying interventions. And you know, if you guys have got a tech platform that can, you know, further propagate that, uh, holy [ __ ] you know, if you could say, "Hey guys, like if you put this on your phones, then you're going to end up Yeah, we we'll talk to you about this sort of offline. I think there's some cool things we could do there just for identifying." Yeah. So, yeah. Have you guys got I did you watch adolescence? I did. I have very strong opinions around adolescence. Very strong opinions. Watch it. Scary. Okay. Let me give you my let me give you a little bit of spiel on adolescence. Um, I've spent a lot of time in and around the sort of uh fringes of the manosphere, right? In one form or another. I'm often accused of being a part of it despite the fact that they hate me and I've never identified as one of them. Um, but I guess if you're a guy that gives advice to guys online that you kind of get get classed as that. Um, 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 u 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 uh um kind of a an 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. But if you've actually looked at the um 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 to tie together, but because it's quite a uh 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 that that was a narrative that was taken around with it. And I don't know whether you saw I think it was uh this morning or good morning or BBC question time uh Kem Badinok who's a a British politician and a bunch of other people rad 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 [ __ ] swamps. Like it has the same amount of realworld uh accuracy as one of those. Now, is it tapping into some trends? Absolutely. Is this stuff that we should be interested in? I think it's interesting that ogres don't live in swamps. Ah, that's true. Yeah. Misinformation. Um, I get slightly concerned about creating such a huge cultural moment over something that's a fictional piece of work. Yeah, it is hugely open to interpretation. Steven Graham meant to do this. Like it's it's beautifully done because you just do this thing. There's purposeful obfiscation and there's uh 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 a life that many kids would have dreamed to have had as opposed to the one that they grew up in. Uh but it's being used as some sort of landmark event to explain where young boys are going wrong. I'm like, have you bothered speaking to young boys about what they're actually that concerned about 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 [ __ ] It's It's rated 15. Yeah. So, you're going to show it to 11y olds and 12y olds and 13y olds and 14y olds and 15y olds that maybe aren't ready to see it. You're going to show them this thing that at some points to me is like, 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 it not blown out of that. Yeah. But I I had a lot of convers had a lot of conversations. Had a lot of conversations around it and um fascinating. Yeah. really really interesting cultural moment. Uh probably going to be the beginning I would guess of more conversations like this. But I think what you guys are doing the approach of people like Tracy uh 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? It's it's it's a it's a lot easier to jump on a train that's already moving, right? I mean, 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 in the mainstream, right? I mean, and it's it's sort of a easier for us to just villainize something, you know, like cuz because it it just makes it easier for us to like point a finger and just say, "Okay, like that's why this happened." like that's, you know, it's never that that's Jaffer. It's like, you know, it's like that's that's that's the villain, right? So, but I but I think I think a little bit uh it's never like it's really interesting because we do these like um wellness labs with kids at the Boston Children's Hospital. We we bring in kids of like different ages, you know, starting like 8 n 10 up to like 18, different socioeconomic backgrounds. We bring a different set of parents in. And so we we do the setup and like a lot of them you ask them saying, "Hey, like you know, uh what do you think the impact of social media is in your life?" They're like, "I'm so tired of talking about this." Everybody thinks that because I'm on social media, my entire life is garbage because that's that's like the villain. Like, you know, I'm so tired of talking about my smartphone being the worst thing, you know, in my life. I got a lot of stuff going on. You know, that's one part of a much bigger composite, right? And so so and again you know there's definitely an amplification element that's happening from these devices etc. But I think sometimes that's why I'm careful to say like I nobody knows that it's causal like we all see that it's amplifying but to simply villainize and demonize a thing and saying hey like that's the root of all evil. I think that's too simplistic. I 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 lot easier. Yeah. But but that'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 cuz if you really want to make something that's meaningful that actually helps people like like like the simple way I think about it is when I came back from that when my when my kid was coming back from the hospital if I had come to me and said here's this product here's what it's doing like would I actually use it? Like cuz my questions would be well what are you basing that on? Like are you just telling me that she's using social media for 6 hours and so she's messed up? like, you know, are you like like what is like the the the what is the search for the truth? Like and so in a lot of ways I think it's a lot easier to just say, "Hey, that train's moving. We're going to make that the villain. We're going to jump on that thing cuz 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 of things. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Guys, I appreciate both of you. It's fascinating. It's really, really fascinating stuff. Uh, where should people go? They're going to want to find out more about what it is that you're doing. Easy or.com. A U R A, not the O U R A. Uh yeah. Well, you've got both. I got both. I love the word. Very important. Uh it's it's really really important. I think thank you for for having us and you know for letting us uh share the story and um now finally we get to sit across the table from you. So thank you. It's amazing. Yeah, this was so fun. Thank you. My pleasure. Thank you guys. Thank you. Great. Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, you will love my full-length conversation with the one and only Naval Ravocant right