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

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

I'm not sure I am either.

Let's see.

Certainly a good storyteller.

You know, I think, you know what?

I'm a truffle hunter.

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.
And 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 the unknown, the unimaginable, and you have to have a lot of enthusiasm.

And I think those qualities are, I'm a happy person and an optimist, bottomless well of optimism. I've heard you say that you're a good home run header, but you don't do singles and bunts.
Well, yeah, that's sort of a different, that's 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 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, da, da, da.

What, in your opinion, makes for a good story?

Well, there are many things.

You know, I have been very lucky to have many great mentors and teachers over my career, one of which I actually never met because he had passed away by the time I arrived at the Walt Disney Company in 1984, which is Walt Disney himself. And he had this amazing archive of his work, his work process, his creative sort of blueprints.

And so many great lessons learned about storytelling from him, particularly around his animated movies.

One of my favorite ones, he says, you know, there's no such um as a great story without a great ending seemed 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 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 tai long or I could go on and on and on because when I read that and I understood it it became a kind of a North Star. What is it about the villain? Well that the better the villain the greater the challenge for the protagonist right right? So, you know, whatever you have to overcome, whatever you have to defeat, the greater that is, the greater your victory is.
And Walt Disney said, I make movies for children and the child that exists in every one of us. That's kind of the North Star of the company.
It was for him. It was for my decade there.

It continues to be today in it. And so lots of these great lessons along the way around storytelling and what are the essential ingredients of a great story.
Interesting to think about the ending of this great idea from psychology called the peak end rule, which you might be familiar with. Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize, found that across a person's memory of an experience, the most memorable parts were the peak intensity, the highest, and then the end.
So they did this study with colonoscopies. In one iteration of the study, people went through it, and you can tell the amount of discomfort by the amount of movement, and they were asked to rate the discomfort afterward.
How did you remember it afterward? In the next iteration of the study, different cohort, they did the exact same, but then just left the endoscope in for a while, but didn't move it for a couple of minutes. the final part the end of the experience was less discomfort and the uh self-rated after the fact uh pain was lower so implications for that if you're a comedian finish on your best joke if you're a rock band finish on your biggest song uh if you are making a movie you know finish on an emotionally salient real high energy sort of feel good uh as you were explaining this and i was imagining all the different things that i could respond to you around colonoscopy and i just thought you know what just leave that one alone yeah but yeah i you know it's it's really true it's really true to think about huh well if you've got this compelling protagonist but you don't have somebody that sits up against it what's the victory yeah what's the mountain you're climbing i'm interested in the role of taste it's uh very difficult to define like the ability to choose between something that's good and something that's not good.
I guess a lot of people would say that you've got great taste given the productions that you were a part of. How would you advise someone to cultivate great taste? Well, that's a mystery to me.
I really don't know how you define taste. I don't know how you acquire taste.
I've been so lucky to be around people of exquisite taste my whole life. And I guess just maybe it just sort of rubbed off or something because I have no idea.
My mom was an artist. I think she had good taste, you know, crafting and creative.
And then along the way, different people in my career had obviously extraordinary tastes. That's the mystery.
You know, I know that all of us always are so interested 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 just lyrics in front of him that he's never seen, never read before, that Bernie Taupin would do it, and literally just create. Where does that come from, right? Where does that, and I mean, we can talk about, you know, great athletes and things that, you know, that they achieve.
And, you know, you just wonder, how can Steph Curry, you know, just shoot that ball, you know, from the three-point, you know, world like, you know, how does Messi do what he's, I have no idea. You know, it's a, that is one of the great mysteries of where does, you know, unique or exceptional or special talent come from.
You know, observing it and wanting to know in others, certainly no idea for myself uh there's an elton john diary entry uh which is maybe one of the most legendary diary entries of all time says woke up watched grandstand wrote candle in the wind went to london bought rolls royce ringo star came for dinner like yeah yeah it's not a bad day it's not Yeah, it's not a bad day. I mean, there are many, many wonderful artists that I've had the privilege of watching.
Guillermo del Toro, the writer, filmmaker, he's a philosopher, he's a poet, and I could just sit and listen to him all day long, where it comes from, you know, his life experiences, his knowledge, his education, where, you know, where do those moments come from? And obviously, I spent decades in partnership with probably the greatest storyteller of our lifetime, Steven Spielberg. What's it like working with him? Dazzling.
I mean, you know, he's just a very singular and unique and special guy. And it's been a privilege to be there and be a partner and a business partner and a friend and cheerleader.
And likewise, I had him as a mentor and all those different roles, one person for many, many decades. But watching him as a storyteller, it's so natural.
It's so instinctual. It's amazing.
To see him on a set, I imagine, is to see Leonard Bernstein conducting an orchestra. Someone in mastery.
Yeah, he's just so comfortable and confident and certain and effortless. It's really amazing.
And you talk to people that have worked with him as craftspeople or actors or anyone in it. He just knows in a way that's way that's hard to to understand i'm not sure he can explain it both you guys are very driven what's driven you what's driven you independently to what you do what you do uh well that's a good question um you know it feels to me like when there are large problems or big, big sweeping issues, if there's sort of a unique ability or skill set that I have, whether it's building a business around it or sort of evangelizing an idea or whatever it is, that's very motivating because it feels like it's something unique that, that I can apply my perspective to that problem to be able to bring that forth to lots of people that potentially have the same problem as well.
I think the build of it in a lot of ways for me is extremely motivating because it feels like a personification of the things that I know how to do that I can actually put out there in a lot of ways. So I would say basically I've had points in my life where I've felt very mission-driven, but a lot of my life has just been very purpose-driven, I guess is sort of the easy way I would think about it, which is the purpose has been, Hey, can I take what I feel or sort of what I'm able to see in my head and build things that others can get benefit from others can see as well.
So that's been a big driving factor for me in my life. Jeffrey, what about you? Um, well, so many things, you know, I mean, I think it's, you know alchemy of things that motivate me.
I found by accident along the way that the most beautiful thing in the world to me is actually laughter. And in particular, the laughter of children.
It's why we tickle our kids. We torture them by tickling them, but it makes us happy to hear that laughter.
And 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 is what, you know, that was a legacy that, you know, sort of I had the baton for a decade.
And then went on to do it, you know, at DreamWorks myself. And nothing made me happier than to stand in the back of a movie theater and listen to the laughter of an audience from something that, you know, we all had a hand in making.
I have a bottomless well of a need to win. So I'm always looking for, you know, that an outcome that is a a success and success is measured in so many different ways and um uh sometimes it is uh purpose-driven and sometimes as harry'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 mission-driven, which in a way is maybe the most rewarding.

What's the difference between purpose and mission?

I'm not sure.

In my mind, a mission sort of is pushing towards

some sort of an external outcome.

Purpose is just who you are.

That's just how you're made up.

And that's just whatever the situation,

that's just how you react.

If you're a builder, you build.

And sometimes if you get very mission-driven, you're building towards something to be able to solve a problem. But, you know, if you're a purpose-driven person, whatever the circumstances, even if you're not motivated by an external outcome, this is how you present yourself to the world in your work, I guess, is how I see it.
Yeah, purpose to me is tactical, and mission to me has just a whole, has sort of a humanity involved in it. There's some greater outcome than just being successful or just winning.
There's goodness involved in it, that you're going to do something that is going to make a contribution to the world that's unique and invaluable. And more often, it's by accident.
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. For the last three years, I've started every morning with Element.
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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. every time everyone wants to declare movies and movie theaters dead, something else comes along and sort of shatters that idea.
And whether it's Barbie or Oppenheimer or Minecraft or whatever the latest thing is, is that when Sinners,, Sinners, you know, which is just a phenomenal, you know, movie, and it just gives people that sort of renewed not only optimism that, no, there's still a place for this, but, you know, the world is changing all the time't you you know you have to understand and navigate

your way through it and i think the industry as a whole is navigating its way through pretty challenging if not treacherous times whether it is digital distribution whether it is ai tools consolidation of these companies, you know, legacy businesses declining, and how do you transition to the next? And I've lived through a couple of them myself, and they are really, really hard, and they're really, really challenging. And much of the time, you are having to navigate through really uncharted places.

And so... 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 they're not going away.
What do you make of this world where movies get ported out into series for streaming? We've seen this happen with Star Wars. We've seen parts of the Avengers franchise have this, like a Lord of the Rings, massive bet by Amazon, which I don't know the books but 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 spinoff of a spinoff of a spinoff.

And 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 it just, you know, 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. Um, so I thought Sinners, as I said, was just a remarkable movie.
And oh my gosh, you, you've got to, I mean, it's just, it's an incredible performance. It's incredibly made.

It's beautifully written. It's special.
And the audience, somehow or another, they knew it. They sensed it.
They got there. The word of mouth of it, you know.
And so, again, I'm an optimist in this. So, you know, also it's not my job anymore.
So it's easy for me to be. Sideline.
To the outside. Yeah, exactly.
You know, like that old Monday morning quarterback. Correct.
Sure, many people in Hollywood Right

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Sure my job anymore so it's easy for me to be sideline the outside yeah exactly 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 peaky blinders oh my god four 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 because i

literally it's almost it's not done yet either and i literally let and i was watching a couple nights ago with the latest episode of mob land with my wife and uh and i said i said you know this really just feels like the modern version of peaky blinders one of my favorite shows of spectacular oh my god even with like a lot of these shows that have repeats they get reset in time like as like the the sort of the modern pattern change like like the five versions of spider-man like you go look at the old one and look at the new one it's really interesting because it's much more uh mapped to the current like 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 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 milieu at the moment what's happening what are people worried about yeah like the old superman you know like you know well my son looks at him so well why does it look like it's you know cut out of like cardboard it's like it's sort of uh it's like it's a cool moment that kind of brings people together as well how many movies now have got some uh lone wolf ai powered evil it's the jafar of the of 2025 powered by chat gpt yeah 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 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...

Yeah. to what's happening from an upper-class perspective in a way that may not have been done previously.
You've got much more complex villains, right? Suicide Squad was bad guys being bad but needing to be good in order to stop worse guys from doing something. You know, that's not...
That math was very good. Yes.
I just want to say that it's beautifully done. Do you hear that? Very good.
What would you do if you were in charge of the star wars franchise it seems like that's something that's on treacherous water right now um you know i don't it's always hard i mean i think that to stand outside of uh these and be, I don't know enough to know, but George Lucas, along with Steven Spielberg, among the greatest storytellers of our time. and you know I think probably getting back closer to its roots is where it will find its authenticity.
And, you know, and or, 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 something wildly entertaining and wildly successful. So the movies have seemed to have struggled a bit.

But my guess is I would go back to the Bible and find my aspiration, inspiration, and probably roadmap by getting back to its roots. Yeah.
I mean, you were asking earlier about this sort of switch in media. Like maybe you start with the book, then you go to a different, you know, sort of a medium for a story.
It's funny with uh with my son uh during covid he got 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 lego's 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 with 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 this is cool it's like a good story and i know all these characters now he's like oh can i watch the movie which again for a five-year-old or four and a half five-year-old it felt very advanced but since he'd gone through that you know now he was like oh i know these characters like 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 the audience.
I totally hadn't thought about the, you know, I know that the movie industry, the music industry and the TV industry, I think all of those combined is smaller than the video game industry. I think 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 you're in the story yeah 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 six months now it is completely bulletproof everything's locked off but the online experience that they knew gta online was going to be this huge thing they're prepping apparently they're prepping for 70 million concurrent players on launch 70 million concurrent it will be the biggest event event launch of uh any entertainment

property ever yeah like we know that today it's almost like the other video game companies are looking at it going well that's coming out i want to wait i'm not going to launch other games oh yeah give it six months no one's playing anything for six months exactly so yeah i just absurd. 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 lore or the canon or the world or whatever i mean look at george rr martin did uh a world of ice and fire he and Fire.
He wrote that encyclopedia, Wikipedia thing with the two people that made an online wiki about his book.

So, you know, there's this reverse fan fiction inclusion with the author thing where you go, this has got to the, I mean, Fifty Shades of Grey.

Yeah.

Starts off as a fanfic and then gets turned around.

Okay, we've gone full circle here into a movie that was maybe even bigger than the thing that it meant to be copying originally which was twilight i think so 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 fan fiction that had been converted into something else so yeah i, I mean, here not only are the mediums changing,

but even the direction of contribution from creator to audience,

and then the audience starts to sit on the other side

and comes back in.

It's wild.

Yeah, that's...

Very interesting.

I'm interested, both of you guys,

I've had to leave old chapters behind a lot.

What have you learned about reinventing yourself or dealing with change well? You go first. It's hard.
It's not easy to kind of go back and look at something backwards very objectively. So that's one thing I've learned now over the years is 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.
And so I have a lot of humility around learning. And so when I approach something, even if it's something related to something I've done in the past, can you go in there with an open mind? Can you go in there wanting to absorb knowledge because there might be new things because times have changed.
New things because it's a new area. There could be better experts or people that know it better.
So can you apply or can you sort of approach it with humility where the process of taking all these things you've distilled from, things you've done that you've learned something from, and now absorb a lot of new things around the next thing you're going to do. And so I feel like that compounds for me i feel like the older i get and the more things i do somehow i seem to both enjoy it more and i feel like i might actually be slightly more competent now because there's this like you know interaction of things that are my own learnings and this desire to want to learn more as well that's sort of a nice central point for.
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dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout navigating change is something that i think a lot of people are sort of dealing with at the moment i've got this this is a very nascent idea right so it might be total bullshit um but we can stress test it today we'll call you out Don't worry.

Good, good, good, good.

I figured you would.

I think that we are at test it today. We'll call you out.
Don't worry. Good, good, good.
I figured you would. I think that we are at a interesting post-COVID arc now, more interesting than we have been maybe since everything reopened back up from lockdown.
I'm noticing it amongst me, a bunch of my friends, a bunch of the people that I work with, just stuff that I'm observing. I think a lot of the liberation or constriction that people went through around COVID, which caused change, right? Some people didn't have to go to work.
I was a nightclub promoter. And all of the nightclubs got shut down.
So that was a big change for me. But also, that meant that people started working from home.
And some people felt liberated by that. I know the company that owns C4,4 the energy drink uh they in a desperate attempt to try and get people back into the office built a 40 million dollar campus in austin yeah state of the art there's on-site chef you can get your vo2 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 yeah um but i think that one of the things that we will see or that I'm just like early onset noticing,

I think. difficult to get people to go back into the office yeah um but i think that one of the things that we will see or that i'm just like early on set noticing i think people are getting sick of not being around other people 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 and that shared laughter, that shared fear, scare, the roller coaster that you're on.
I don't care how big your TV set is or how good your screening, you know, is in your home. That shared, that communal experience of, you know, going on a journey in a movie is exceptional.

Sporting events.

Why do... your home, that shared, that communal experience of, you know, going on a journey in a movie is exceptional.
Sporting events, why do, you know, music events that, you know, all of those things have never been bigger, right? Concerts, going out to concerts and stuff. And so, yeah, I agree with you.
I think there is that sort of rebound, if you will, out of that area of isolation. Human beings need other human beings.
We are a social beast. You know, I think when we were going through COVID, for me, I felt like you had this sort of unique opportunity to kind of connect with their family more because you're there.
So you felt like, you know, especially with my kids, like the bonds got tighter. You know, there's some positive elements that came out of that because before that I was traveling a lot.
I was never really sort of, you know, static in one place just for work. So you were sort of forced into captivity in some ways with, you know, with their family.
So that to me actually ended up being much more positive than I thought. Now, the aftermath of it has been really interesting.
And so, you know, we're talking about sort of adults here with kids. Now, you know, the levels of anxiety and the levels of sort of, you know, how much stress those two years cost is, we're just starting to unfold that now, right 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 are 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 adolescents something they've always had it's sort of climbing up.
Those two years- And it's the cohort, and it's really almost like three, almost four years, and it's that cohort that you can see how they're, as they are aging, now they are, you know, when you take the five and six, seven, eight-year-olds who are now 10, 11, 12 year olds, 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 massive.

And most any medical professional you talk to will tell you that, Hey, something happened during we can't quite our feet put our finger on it but things are going you know they were kind of bad and they were kind of climbing up a little bit but two years of compression then it just went up like this so i do think we did some long-term damage in some of our choices during those two years you know we had sort of a you know in a very idioscratic way for our family, like we had some positive things that came out of it. But I think for the entirety of the population, having these kids that are meant to be out there social, interacting with their friends during these developmental windows of time, putting them sort of in a contained environment, I think we did a lot of damage there that is just starting to reveal itself is my view.
Let me add another level of complexity and reason to be discontent. I had a great conversation with this guy called Dr.
Paul Turk. He's just written a new book.
He's an evolutionary pediatrician. So he looks at child rearing from a developmental perspective and also from a medical perspective using an evolutionary lens.
So looks at hunter-gatherer societies and then compares how children would have been raised previously to now. And one of the big differences that you have between developmentally, ancestrally versus now is that you would have mixed age cohorts of kids playing together.
So I understand and I agree. You lock kids that are supposed to see other children's faces, facial expressions in a house, try and teach them through an iPad.
They don't get out. They don't get, mom and dad are stressed.
They don't know what's going on. All of this stuff.
Tons and tons of stuff that can go wrong. But even before that, you have primed kids.
They would not have typically played. There wasn't enough kids around that were also three to have had an entire group of three-year-olds.
There would have been a three-year-old with a five-year-old and an eight-year-old. And there would have been girls and there would have been boys.
And there's just a much more mixed group, which I think expedites learning for the younger kids and expedites learning of care for the older kids. So you have this sort of switcheroo thing going on.
Whereas if you're, you know, you've got a classroom of between 10 and 35 year olds, so well, everybody's going to be at a similar sort of developmental trajectory. And then when you roll that even more and you thought, okay, let's compare that ancestrally.
That's a bit restricted perhaps to what we would have been used to. And now we're going to make it, we can turn that up to 11.
So yeah, it doesn't surprise. I mean, look, given that, especially for yourself, you tried to make kids happy for a very long time.
I imagine that you're quite concerned about what's happening with their mental health now. Hugely.
I mean, it is so bad, Chris, that we are seeing the pain and damage that is being done to a generation of kids. Jonathan Haidt wrote a great book about this, but it's the world that we've been working in now for the last two years, and it's why we've become mission-driven.
Aura, which is a company that Hari founded, started out about how do you bring safety to, I'm sorry, security to us for consumers online. We're all online all the time in this, and we have become, you know, more and more and more vulnerable.
If I came to your home and robbed your home, I'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 a credit card or a 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 mean, just here in America, three years ago, home robberies was just over $3 billion a year.
And digital theft was just under $3 billion a year. This last year, now, home robberies are just over $4 billion, and digital theft is over $15 billion.
So all of us are getting assaulted left and right. There's no one that you talked to.
I promise we have to raise your hand in this room. Somebody has been scammed, fished, something negative has happened to them.

We have one of our cinematographers here shaking their head. And if you haven't, then it's somebody in your family that has, it's that much of a tidal wave of, of problems.
Well, that was great. And And that was, I would say a great need.
There was an opportunity to go solve this problem for consumers. Many, many companies were out solving it for enterprise, for companies, where we would know, JCPenney getting all of their data stolen and this one and that one.
And Sony had a huge breach. Huge, right.
So lots and, you know, billions and billions of dollars invested in cybersecurity. But for consumer, for everyday people, not so much at all.
There's been very little innovation. And that was the sort of brilliance that started Hari of building Aura.
But then, and I want him to tell his story a year and a half ago, two years ago, he had a 13-year-old. And he should talk about his own experience because this is where the mission-driven part of this kicked into gear for us.
Yeah, look, i think we're 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 gonna 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 post-covid thing we were talking about uh i do feel i mean both with her friends and with with uh many of the people of her age group uh there's both uh this isolation element 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 uh shift in life from physical to digital like i mean they're on their devices on their phones all the time all day long um it's 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 and we didn't understand this is more like a hyper privacy focused family we don't look at kids phones we don't do any of that type of stuff um and you know it was about two and a half years ago she said uh hey like i don't feel great because i was like february i think and we said look you know you're in the middle of school there's a lot of stuff going on let's wait till the summer summer rolls around uh and we're like okay where it's a summer vacation like great like this you There's not as much stress. It actually went the opposite way.
She went just completely dipped. It was hard to get her out of bed.
She was not in a good headspace, severely depressed. We were looking at it going, well, we don't know what's going on.
Seemed to keep getting worse. You ask her, she's, oh, everything's fine.
Like I'm, I'm okay. You know, and, but clearly you can see she's not.
Then she started going down the path of sort of a bunch of negative coping strategies. Like, you know, things that kids ought not to consider, but you know, things that are happening much more frequently.
And we had no idea. And it got to a point where we said, I think we need to take her in to get care, like to get treatment.
So we take her in, I drop her off.

And I would say probably this is one of the hardest things I've ever done.

Like you take a kid, you drop her off at a facility where you feel like she's struggling and you don't know what to do.

It's, 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. 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 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's everywhere now.
I think people are starting to talk about it more and more, but the stats are staggering. It's an epidemic.
And this experience that, make an analogy, go back here. When I was growing up, my parents knew where I was, what I was doing, and who I was with.
Today, you can have a child, teenager, sitting across the table from you, and you actually don't know where they are, what they're doing, or who they're with. They're on the device.
They may be physically here, but they're 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 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 kids through that.
And what we have found is, is when it comes to social media, there are no tools. And parents are actually right now, they're blind.
They have no ability to see what's going on. The analogy I use is that when your kid is going to learn to drive, you get a learner's permit.
You go to a Walmart parking lot, but there's nothing around. And you help onboard them.
You teach them. You show them the rules of the road.
You show them how to respect a vehicle and how fast it can go and how long it takes to stop and all of the various things around it.

And there is this process.

It actually takes several years before that first moment of a kid sitting behind the wheel of a car and you're giving them the keys to the car and say, you're good to go. I know you know the rules of the road.
in the world of social media and the online world, there are no boundaries. You have no ability to navigate, to help your kids navigate.
And that's the problem that Hari went out to solve. But I want to just frame for you here, that's 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 harry's personal experience it was like a hard pivot to let's expand this into how do we protect our kids? Much more important than protecting, you know, our bank account.
So there are 2,500 kids between the ages of 12 and 17 years old that were on the beta version of this for three or four months starting in January of this year. So that's a pretty wide, 2,500 is a very good sample,

both geographically and otherwise.

And here are the stats.

46% of them are depressed.

35% have social withdrawal.

22% are up at night,

scrolling and being on when they shouldn't be.

30% with low self-esteem. 22% have self-harm suicidal thoughts.
And the staggering 52% have eating issues. So 80% of girls 18 years old and younger don't like their body shape.
80%. 80%.
And more than half of them are doing things that are unhealthy or harmful as a result of that. Have you got any idea? I mean, those are shocking stats, but I always wonder about what the base rate is.
So it's stuff like that. Have you got any idea what this would have been like 30 years ago yeah so it's really interesting there's actually stats that you know they publish every year around this the increase pre-covid to post-covid like we're talking about from before uh it happened to now in many of these areas are like several hundred percent because it's really interesting because you asked a really interesting question because i actually had the same question which is hey like are we now just better at talking to our kids or identifying these things just an endemic part of being a teenage girl yeah now we can now we can see identify right yeah 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 is sort of what we're grappling with.
What are you guys seeing? Like, what are you seeing out on the floor? What are you seeing in the ER facilities, et cetera? There we go, and this is now pretty universal with every hospital, is we're not sure what's going on. There was sort of life before COVID, life after COVID.
Life after COVID, if there were like, you know, 10 kids coming in that had cut themselves so deeply that they needed care, because especially with girls, one of the coping strategies to go through is cutting, which has now become very, very prominent, like 11, 12% of the girls cut. They said, you know, there's like 10 in a week, now we're seeing 100.
So to me, I was like, wait, like something is actually happening here, like something's happening underneath, you know, is it a combination of social media, kids being on smartphones, the compression inside COVID land? But the data is very, very clear. It's not self-reporting.
It's not, you know, us identifying more of these cases. Something got messed up.
Like it's hard and we can't quite tell. Again, I think it's unfair to say, hey, like, you know, the phone made it all bad.
It's causal, that type of stuff. 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 with my daughter's eighth grade graduation, the kid that did the speech, her speech was about how she'd been cutting herself for two years. And now she's really excited that she's over it.
They do figure out, they find their way. Many of them find their way through it.
So it's a real problem. What's your current working hypothesis for this? I mean, Gene Twangy'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 okay 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 2,500.
Now we've got 10,000 users on it.

And we're actually just seeing hard data. We had 2,500.
Now we've got 10,000 users on it. When it comes to a mechanism, what's your, just some potential sort of causal explanation to what you think is going on here, a global altogether type thing? I mean, I can kind of give you my perspective.
Again, this is just a perspective, so take it for what it is. I think that we started giving kids smartphones.
So if you look at sort of the growth of smartphones and sort of the growth of emotional sort of negativity, clearly it looks very, very correlated, like one's going up, the other one's going up as well. so it almost seems like when you unleash something for it to get to a critical mass and see the

the follow-on effect of it takes some time right i mean it's like opening pandora's box in some way

it's like you open it it doesn't destroy the world right away like it takes some time for things to kind of get around and actually kind of you know make things rough so i think we've hit this like critical juncture now where 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 there's enough proliferation of that across the world that it's starting to now percolate up. There's always like an underlying theme as kids are going through adolescence.
It's hard. It's just hard being an adolescent.

So there's this amplification element.

There is enough of this happened for enough time now that we're now seeing the impact of it i think it's been building up by the way i don't think it's accelerated you know there's no question that when you i mean you just see the amount of well, one, the devices themselves in terms of usability and interactivity. Effectiveness of being compelling.
Yes, and the effectiveness of being able to reach people and to communicate with people and to bring them into different places here.

There's so many good things that we can talk about. And so we're not here, you know, looking at social media and saying that it's this bad, evil thing.
There's just a dark place in it. And our kids are particularly vulnerable if they are uh if they are not helped in navigating their way through it i think in some ways i think we've kind of hacked ourselves right i mean that's what's happening like i mean you literally have like 10 million engineers whose entire job is to get you more plugged into apps and devices,

et cetera.

I mean, that didn't happen when we were kids.

That didn't, that wasn't a thing, right?

I mean, now you've got, and again, there's no 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

or 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, I mean, if you're a big social media company or doing your earnings.
Maximize time on site.

Yeah.

If you're doing your earnings and he said, guys, we did a great thing.

Like, you know, we made everybody super healthy.

We made everybody super healthy. People choose the things that they want to do.
If they didn't like it, they wouldn't choose it. It's asymmetric warfare, though, so it's not quite the right metric to use.
I think that we set up the ecosystem, we sort of 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's, there's been enough sort of 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 guardrails 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 you can't close the box this episode is brought to you by nomadic summer is here and travel season is in full swing but let's be honest your backpack was probably built for a school field trip not international adventures which is where nomadic comes.
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What's your proposed reason for why it's getting worse over time, despite the fact that kids have had social media for a long time? Is it that the current 15 year olds have had it for over a decade? Is it simply time and attention? Is it the effectiveness and how compelling these are? Is it the distribution? What do you think is going on here? I definitely think distribution is a big part to play in it. And I think that the way we're targeting now has gotten much smarter, right? So basically, like, let's say, you know, you tell some social media platform in some way, you know, whether it's sort of talking to it or, you know, clicking on a piece of content that you like car wrecks.
Or maybe you're doing a 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 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 like with most of these kids by the way you like look at them and say did you actually want to see that many will say no there's a great book uh human compatible by stuart russell yep 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 LLMs. But this thing got translated into pretty much every language on the planet.
And if you wanted to learn how to do coding and how to do AI, you're going to read Stuart's book. And he wrote a couple of sort of popular, normal people books.
And I learned this fucking terrifying thing from him. It was so interesting.
There's two ways that algorithms are able to better predict what is that humans are going to click on. One is to be able to become increasingly accurate at working out what it is that Jeffrey's going to press on his phone, right? Like that, this is, I get closer and closer toward your preferences and I deliver to you things which are tighter and tighter aligned to what that is until it's a perfect overlay like this.
That's the first one. The second one is that the algo nudges your preferences so that you become more predictable.
And this bi-directional 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 lisa dong go game uh where no one could actually work out so why did you do that it's the reward system yeah that's correct you can't you get these sort of really orthogonal moves that nobody could have predicted and one of them would be well you can become better at predicting what the user wants, or you can make the user more predictable. Yeah.
And the fact that algorithms are reprogramming users, and this, I think, explains a lot of polarization, extremism, and beliefs. And Chris, human beings have dark thoughts.
You know, that's- 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 think intuitively people have figured this out, which is basically create a neural pathway for a certain kind of action, eliciting a certain kind of reaction, just by observation, like you're saying,, hey, like, if I did this thing, what are you going to do? Like, oh, can I now measure it? And can I create the probability around it to see if you're going to do it again? I'm going to keep doing that, right? So I think that what's happened now is we've gotten really good at that, you know, over like decades and decades of, you know, many people doing lots of programming, et cetera. And then what do human beings do? You commercialize, right? So now you figure out, okay, well, we have the skill.
We got to go figure out how to commercialize it, which means I need more people to look at my thing. That's my main mode of commercialization.
And it turns out that kids are easier to program than perhaps you are. Okay, so let's just sort of dig in for a second, I think, about...
Look, Australia's got a social media ban now for under-16s. It seems to me that although what you guys are doing with Aura is great and necessary, that the nuclear option is just to go, like, no social media for anyone under-16.
I mean, you could probably, for males, you could probably look at no social media under 25 and make a justification for that, right? Prefrontal cortex, still develop it. Mine feels like it's still going now.
Why should we not just be putting all of our efforts into lobbying the fuck out of government to say no social media for anyone under 16? Well, I mean, I think besides the practical elements of can we actually pull it off, right? Which is, again, a whole nother question. You know, we invented it because there was a reason.
There's a human reason why this thing came to be. Now, again, you know, like most things for human beings, we push it to the edge and then we push it beyond the edge.
And that's just how, you know, we're all wired. But, you know, there is, like, I mean, there are kids that are very introverted.
You know, there are kids that, you know, want to have a community that there are kids that are very introverted. There are kids that want to have a community.
There are kids that have that desire to connect with other humans. To learn, to see things, to explore the world.
So there is a real need there. It's just that, like everything else, we just, you know.
You think about the access to knowledge that comes with being on this device and the fact that that barrier just goes down to almost, you know, you could be on the Maasai Mara in a hut there. and you could actually now have a device in the hands of a kid with the ability to learn and to see and travel the world and travel history 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 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 a day.
So probably more time than they're asleep. Yeah.
So, I mean, yeah, that's exactly right. And, you know, you're awake for, you know, call it whatever, you know, 12, 18 hours a day, and you're spending the majority of it on these devices.
And it goes from spot to spot. There are, you know, you actually do see kids are spending time learning.
They're using Google Class. They're using things to make themselves more productive.
There's more. Language, duolingo.
Duolingo. We can go on to so many good things here.
So this idea that you're just going to ban it, you know, for under 16 years. That's like saying don't drive.
Yeah. But would there not be a way to, I'm not talking about banning phones.
We're talking about banning social media. Like how much is Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, how much are these platforms really facilitating learning? I think they facilitate more connection than learning.
I would say that's one thing. But like even take this analogy of driving a car, right? I mean, you can take, and this actually, we're seeing this in the stats too, but if you, you can take multiple approaches here, which is, hey, like driving a car is a scary thing, right? Don't drive the car till you're 25.
That's one approach, right? Which again, you know, has it's sort of sets of repercussions. There's one that says, you know, hey, driving a car at 16, but then going through these stages.
So you have a healthy relationship with cars, healthy relationship with safety is sort of another approach. But the way that came about was regulated, right? I mean, if there's no regulation, nobody's wearing a seatbelt, right? I mean, so in some ways, your question around, hey, why doesn't the government intervene and do something about it? I think it's a good question.
They should, because this is now sort of an epidemic level issue. The Surgeon General's letter two years ago was literally about this issue.
They were like, this is the nation's largest epidemic at the moment, mental health for adolescents. But again, there's perverse forces, right? I mean, you've got large companies with incentives, lots of capital, lots of resources that obviously don't want for this to happen.
So there's, you know, that's the dichotomy of what I think. But again, the mission that we got on, which is we're not legislators, we're not politicians, and us, 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, again, just going back to the car analogy, because it's so simple, which is regardless of whether you're able to drive at 10 or 12 or 14 years old, you have to wear a seatbelt. Yes, yes, yes.
And so our ambition was parents and parents.

Parents are good at parenting when they have tools.

Tools.

Then they have knowledge. And so for our goal was let's now use what is the state-of-the-art technology today, which is phenomenal.
Again, this is the positive side of it, which is the things that we're able to do today using AI are to be able to read sentiment and insight and observation as opposed to spying. Because if you spy on your kids, they're going to find a way to circumvent us, right? So 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 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.
Bigger days. Yeah.
As the data gets greater, the knowledge. 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 that's step one.
Now, does step one lead to the cliff that you dive off, that somebody will dive off of? No, but it sure is a directional thing. If you as a parent knew that, you could just say, hey, why are you, what, tell, you know, not no, don't do that.
But what are you trying to get out of that? How is that going to help you in this? And once again, you can be a great parent and help them make their way through it if you just knew that. I'll say two things.
I mean, question around so australia and the ban if i could go back in time i would wait to get my kid a smartphone till 16 i think that that's just good 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 the coordination problem yeah i think height height yeah. I think Haidt'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 in a lot of schools in California.

I don't know how effective that'll be and how much it'll propagate because, again, they go to, you know, friends' homes

that are not in the same school, now they have phones.

So you've 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,

Thank you. friends' homes that are not in the same school.
Now they have phones. So you got all of those types of things.
So that's one thing. And the other thing I'll say is in this battle, at least sort of in this battle that we are watching kind of unfold every day, the parents are the frontline.
It's not like regulations, all that type of stuff. It's going to have to work its way to that.
But really it's the parents that are in the frontline of the problem. So the more they get educated the more they understand that this is not like a weird thing it's happening culturally everywhere and we're all sort of at a loss for what to do and there's a like this brewing problem that's happening and the more that becomes uh visible to people say hey now i need to actually go learn something like i need to go learn how to you know interact with my kid when these things happen etc so and so if you talk to a lot of clinicians and psychologists that's what they tell you like we there's 6 000 of us clinicians and psychologists caseloads going up through the roof to train somebody to be good at that is going to take a long time right decades plus so where do you find the help like it the parents, like get them smarter on these issues, get them to understand that, you know, and the desire and the motivations there, they want to raise great kids that are happy, that are healthy, you know? So that's a- Talk to me about some of the other insights that you've learned from the data that you've got.
I mean, that one around the calorie tracking thing is just fat. It's obviously harrowing, but fascinating.
Yeah, I'll tell you a couple more. Like, you know, if kids are on social media for half an hour before they go to sleep, their sleep is interrupted more often.
How are you tracking sleep? So basically when kids wake up, they pick up their phone. So we see traffic on their device or if they have a wearable, we can track that information as well if they're going to sleep.
We see, for example, example like a really interesting thing we do see that if there is a lot of activity outside of your digital life it's a huge positive thing like so you could be on your phone for four hours a day fire it's fine 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 geotracking. So you can kind of start recording.
Oh, okay. As opposed to the person who's just in at home for most of the day.
Just scrolling the whole time on their device. And you can see the amount of activity that they have, right? And then another interesting tip, I'll give you, like, boys and girls are very different.
The patterns are quite distinct for the two. Boys that are on gaming platforms for long windows of time don't seem to have the same negative outcomes as girls on social media why i think it's because for boys developmentally i think it is sort of a way of interacting their rambunctious on these platforms it's just, you know, like it's more close to real life in some ways.

There's not as much,

hey, look at this person doing this thing, you know?

So when girls on social media,

it becomes what is this view of how I should be because I'm seeing this influencer be a certain way.

They have a million followers.

They're doing these types of things.

And so that seems to somehow end up

driving behavior a bit more in girls. And again, we're only talking about this window of time, like we're saying, like, you know, 12 to kind of 16, 17.
But those are, I mean, really interesting to us that, you know, because if you know these things, if you have a boy, you're like, okay, well, this is kind of the stuff we need to go do to make sure this kid's okay, you know, type of thing. And here's a kind of fascinating thing because we're talking about, you know, what's drove us into this area is watching sort of these 10 to 18 year olds.
But here's really interesting thing about it, which is so that we're focused on at first, because that's where it's a, it's a crisis. I mean, it's just a tsunami of just tragedy.
Right. But interestingly enough, wouldn't you be interested in somebody objectively giving you insight and analysis of your online behavior, meaning how much time you're spending on there? You know, what are the things that you are doing that are healthy around that? What are the things that you are doing that have negative implications? Like a wearable tracker for your digital consumption.
For your mental health. For your mental health.
And so, like, again, because that's very much more like a theme I know you're very sort of passionate about, which is, like, creating people that can be their best self, right? So it's not just physical, you know, kind of your mental state, don't get a lot of data there's no observation about that in it so today actually that's the beauty of you know this is where the innovation of tech is phenomenal in this and what's what's your how are you going to work that out how can people learn more about themselves so like for example you look at so we now have a system where we can run models locally on your phone so based on patterns what apps you're using how you're using them 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 using what you know personal apps are using we can say when you're on these things. You're sleeping.
You know, 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're not happy. We notice that your mood is actually sort of different.
How do you know mood? So we do a sentiment composite and you can do it with a lot of features. Even things like how fast you type on your phone.
You know, how hard you push the keys. No way.
Yeah yeah so you can get all these markers that basically say hey like you know or the frequency like you know let's say you're in an angry mood and you know how quickly you're responding back to somebody right wow 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 like a 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 you know chris yesterday you know you were not having a great day something happened along the way here you know you went to a store you you know got in a try to exchange something you got in an art like it will actually i'm looking forward to it for myself so where are you at with the how that's net we want to get through the teenage thing which we just launched right that's the fourth quarter of this year is sort of the first first uh mvp of i was showing luke uh this and he was like i really need this for myself 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 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 but the insights from a wearable coming out of you know activity yeah exactly i mean that that i would i would use that's use that in a heartbeat that wearable is actually more about your physical physical of course this is actually about your mental right we can tell now by that eight hours a day what you're doing on that device your state of mind you're 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 use front-facing camera to do micro expression stuff you could i think there's a little bit when you start looking at images there's c-sam regulations that you have to worry about when tiktok's got it in their terms of service yeah honestly i think that uh even just tabulating stuff and saying here's sort of what seeing for broad patterns, we see users like, wow, like I didn't know that. Like that's really, like Luke posting, you know, even screen time data.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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.
Yeah. 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 yep that there was third-party apps yep there was a torch yep 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 yeah 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. you get out ahead yeah they find a lane yeah that's a good point 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 this well i mean 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 link tree 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 of day a thousand thousand worth a couple of billion next morning they wake up to find out that instagram has incorporated multiple links onto their bio yeah so so you have to you have to be smart about it because you have to be able to see that you know at some point the trend will change so so it's really interesting to us because again the existential issue is hey like as a company again again, as a human being and as a dad, we would welcome this very much, obviously, is all of the social media companies kind of innovating together and saying, let's make sure everybody's safe.
But if you're looking at it from an entrepreneur company lens, you say, okay, well, what happens if they just copy, they just look at this, this is really good, we should do this for all our users. They go to just what you're talking about with linkery, right? It's a really interesting thing that we see.
Like if you do one thing and that's the purpose of the one thing basically, and it's broad enough thing that you're doing, not just dragging and dropping a link, but hey, like we can really tell you sort of emotional, mental wellbeing, et cetera. Users gravitate towards things that you are hyper-focused on and very good at 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 find my right find my is available for free like 360 is a four and a half billion dollar company they solved the one case which is where's my kid like i want to know where my kids are but they've doggedly focused on that one use case so users say okay well the services is better now in my mind if i need that i gotta 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 yeah 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 So we, uh, Jeffrey said, you know, we should talk to Tom Hanks.
And I said, oh, okay, that sounds good. He said, well, come out to Philadelphia.
He said, go out to Philadelphia. We're sitting at breakfast with, with Tom and Rita and, you know, Jeffrey 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 Jeffrey's like, oh, I just came from there last week.
And so now Tom Hanks is like, oh, I'm going to write you, uh, Jeffrey's, I'm going to write you a letter. You should take it, give it to the president and so jeffrey's like oh i just came from there last week and so now tom hanks is like i'm gonna write you uh jeffrey's i'm gonna write you a letter you should take it give it to the president when you see him today so they're sitting there writing the letter his phone rings i look down and it says sir elton john i'm thinking i'm in like twilight zone yeah yeah yeah so we've had lots of great sort of you know such things where jeffrey's been a huge part of like getting us plugged into this world of people that sort of, you know, have original large platforms that they can get, you know, sort of ideas out there.
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I remember just going back to the speed of typing pressure, which again is still fucking blown my mind. I remember reading an article about Chinese health insurance companies using the accuracy of users on the website inputting their data when they apply.

And big data sets now correlation stuff to go, oh, is this early onset Alzheimer's?

There's some neurological decline that you've got in here.

So you can see how this could be data's data, data right and you can draw correlations wherever you want but the fact that you guys can do it to try and intervene and i certainly think as well people feel like there is a at best slightly adversarial relationship with most technology yep uh going down to what works like an outright malicious intent uh by when 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 deet mosquito spray and I'm probably going to wear long sleeves and okay so what have I got I have something that helps me to experience the good bits but protect me from the bits that I don't want I feel like most people don't almost no one knows how to code yeah and even if you do know how to code your iPhone's pretty robust at stopping you from getting in there and fucking with it unless you want to jailbreak it in which case the whole thing becomes unusable yeah uh so i think giving uh 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 i mean like the like the notion of like even with doom scrolling right it's like a very simple concept i think like maybe it was uh pinterest maybe it was the first one they came up with it which is this concept i was talking about that like 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 you know people people say, no, I actually never wanted to look at a car crash. I was just doing it for homework.
You say, no, now the algorithm says, I'm going to show you something different. So that's taking a little bit of control back.
Right. But it's actually a very powerful thing because now you can say, okay, well, I know I need the dopamine head.
I'm going to keep pushing and scrolling. But now the social media company is giving you a little bit of power back to actually go look at something else.
So when you say, hey, can you take some of these algorithms and sort of work them backwards, you know, more of those types of things actually would be very good for users, I think. Yeah.
What about younger kids? Have you looked at the classic story, parent with crying child in restaurant,ad in front of child how concerned are you about i don't even know 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 definitely see why you do it because this kid's screaming you're at a restaurant trying to get dinner and you know you got to make sure that you're going to play can i'm just like after you try a few things like here's your ipad go you know go go play on it but i do think that if it's unregulated where that becomes the the norm you're now teaching them sort of something like you know it's like teaching them that you know when you feel bad you should go to a device when you feel like you can't cope with their emotions like that's how you do it like so with every one of these actions you're doing it so but that being said we're all social like we all want to be out with our friends 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 because i think we're teaching them that you know you can start relying on this for emotional support basically so there was again i don't know whether 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 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 ten 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 do think that that's why we kind of went down this adult path well there's not just not just the kids we want to make sure that adults are also self-aware you know and again if you're of a certain age you may not have gotten hooked on it early enough so you might have actually developed some patterns where you're like okay I know how to put the phone down because I grew up during a time when I didn't have a phone so I kind of learned that skill if you're talking about these kids that are you know on their ipads at six seven eight that is native like that's how they're growing up you never teach them the other side of 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 yeah you know can they not have a little bit more resilience and she made the same point you guys have which is well they spend more time on digital devices than they do in the real world so the digital world is their

real world it's more real than the real world i think that's the switch that hasn't gone off you

know broadly by the way because people i mean it's it's amazing to me because like i'll be at a

dinner you know it'll be like you know 10 you know couples and you know parents and you know i say

like how many of you think that your kids are doing really well and everything is great all

Thank you. 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 say like how many of you think that your kids are doing really well and everything is great all 10 will raise their hands and it's statistically not possible it's just not possible so i look at that and say well there's an underlying thing because when they're on their device physically they seem safe so parents just kind of check out they're like oh they're fine they're just like on their phone you know i don't like they're not 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 and dodgy drugs just not yeah yeah yeah 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 fuck like where do i even get started here i have this choice between being a social isolationist tyrant that forces my child to be a fucking luddite yeah or uh a dopamine in endogenous dopamine dealer that's gonna commit them to a life of social anxiety and depression yeah i mean you know look i think the guardrailing concept is what appeals to me the most personally which is sort of the the reason we went down this direction which is you know like if you you can't put the thing back in the box it's there like we're in it now like it's gonna be there like you can try lots of you know little hacks along the way saying oh let's not give you know kids kids devices till they're 16 we can ban it etc the the difficult thing is it's not a university people don't believe it's like a bad thing like cigarettes you.
You know, at some point when you believe that everybody is bad, people mobilize around it. There's a lot of people that think that devices are actually good for their kids.
And it's good for them because they can go to dinner and then give their kids devices, et cetera. So in that type of an environment, the best I think we can hope for is empower them and give them the tools so they understand kind of what's happening.
Because when you understand it, you say, okay, I see what's happening. I can now intervene.
Like give them, because most parents you talk to, they just say, look, I don't know what to do about it. I have no idea.
Like, and we hear like 30% of moms, usually moms, when their kids go to bed, will pick up their phones and spend 45 minutes looking through to see what the kid was doing. So what are they actually doing? Oh, that's the current solution? Well, for a third of them.
Yeah, so they go through, and now it's like, you know, you're a parent, you're overwhelmed, you don't have time for anything. Now you've got to come up 45 minutes.
You don't know what you're looking for. It's a needle in a haystack, too.
Wow. 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 backbiting social dynamic that i'm very glad that I wasn't a female to have to navigate through.
Have you thought about what some potential interventions are to tune down the more negative behavior that happens socially on digital devices? Yes, we think about this a lot in the sense that when you know what the mood is of a child when they're going through certain things, right? So like think of like a utopian state, like, you know, a kid wakes up in the morning, they are super happy. Everything that day is going great.
Everything's positive, right? So kind of think of that as the North Star for this kid, right? Then start reverse engineering to say, okay, well, what are the different things that are chinking away from this kid to not get to that place? Oh, we noticed that you spent three hours today on social media and we see that your mood dipped, right? When we compare that to a day where you only spent 30 minutes, your mood was really good, right? So you can come up with a bit of a blueprint for that child where you say, if we can kind of craft their day in this sort of a way with their device, I mean we're only talking about devices here, that

seems to have the best possible outcome. Now again, the

physical world, we can't, well we're not in that zone.

So if you can create that

sort of customized blueprint

and then give parents the tools saying, hey, you know what

you ought to set up a time

limit where your 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 kind of set things up. That's

Thank you. 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 of set things up that's really outcome based because you're at that point you're saying hey like i'm driving towards making sure my kid is actually thriving and doing really well in an objective way and again and the tools are meant to be incredibly flexible in that every child and, frankly, every parent is going to have their point of view, their perspective about what level of insight and what level of control do they want.
And the level of insight and controls you want of a 12-year-old are quite different from a 17-year-old. And so being able to, not only at the outset, but as a, again, I go back to the easiest thing here on the driving analogy here, which is as you see your child getting better and better and being responsible, reliable, whatever those things are, you 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 Nicoderm patch in some ways right so it's probably the more perverse example of it which is you know like you start with step three then you work down to step two then you know or maybe it's the opposite way what 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 so yeah i guess another interesting element here jeff you've spent your life around high achievers and celebrities i think the most common job at the top five most common jobs at least two or three of them them, has something to do with becoming famous, becoming an influencer, becoming a YouTuber.
What do most people not realize about the reality of fame and attention in that way? Well, you know, I think that, you know, fame is fleeting. So it has its good moments and its bad moments.
It 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 a celebrity has, it's brutal.

And, you know, it's a very challenging thing emotionally, I think, for anybody to go, for an athlete, you know, you think of these ups and downs that you have. And, you know, mine just is always as best one can.
Don't let the highs take you too highs and don't let the lows take you too lows. And for the most part, it's not fatal.
You know, for me, I've always believed that I've learned more from my misses and my failures than I have from my successes. And they've made me very, very, very resilient.
Very. How do you ensure that misses and failures get alchemized into something that's useful for you as opposed to become a trauma or an issue that you hold on to a scar? 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 dogs, you know, 80% of them were dogs.
The only one that has a pretty stellar track record are the animated ones because the process is, frankly, just much more generous in terms of producing something of quality and success more reliably. But movies, know, movies, television, music,

they're brutal.

And so maybe that's just the armor that you,

you know, you get, that you wear, that you learn. And, you know, I've, you know,

had those super high moments and super lows

at probably the moment of my, early in my career, my greatest success at Disney, I got fired. It's 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 a hit show on Broadway.
Tool Time was the number one book.

Just anywhere you could go in the world of culture

and creative measures,

it was like what they call a goat moment.

I got fired.

It was a grand slam. moment.
I got fired.

It was a grand slam.

Yeah, I got fired.

Can you tell me the story behind that?

It's Shakespeare.

It's complicated, I think.

And for me, I try to, as i said own it move on uh you know i've sort of had two different missions i've had one became like a sort of my motto and later in life and one was sort of my mission in my day-to-day and so my motto in the sort of later in life is never let your memories be greater than your dreams. And so I get up every day and genuinely I'm excited about today.
I'm excited about tomorrow and next week. And I actually don't have a very strong memory gene.
It's very, very weak. I don't reminisce unless you ask me questions.
There's not a morning that I wake up and I, like, Shrek is on my mind or Beauty and the Beast or Lion King or Pretty Woman or any of these things. It's just not.
It's funny. I've now been working with Jeffrey about seven, seven and a half years, and I probably talk to him every day and people ask 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 forward focus what did you guys learn from working with each other well you know i i have um you know 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, you know, hurry, you know, it's that thing, still waters run deep.
He runs deep. You can see it in these conversations.
He's very, very thoughtful, very, he has great empathy. And that empathy is what's revealed itself in these last couple of years, just in watching how he has externalized a very difficult personal experience and managed to turn that to something so positive.
It's an amazing, admirable quality to have. Not that many people do.
I hope mean look i i hope to be like jeffrey when i get older it's like the amazing work ethic i've never seen anything like yet 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 have 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 investments at Quibi, et cetera, 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. And he did that so gracefully.
And I thought that's a good lesson. I think I've probably always gotten too much credit for the successes that I've been associated with.
It made me feel like, okay, well, you should own your garbage. So, you know, it's also great around, you know, team.
You know, not everybody has that resilience. I always say I have rhino skin.
You know, that's very hard to, you know, really for me to feel that pain.

I've built that up over the years in this.

And as I said, you learn that these things are, you know, you pick yourself up and, you know, you climb the next mountain.

And, you know, 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, wow, I'm a lucky guy today.
This is fun for me. This is exciting and interesting.
And we can be here evangelizing something that we think is just going to make the world a better place, you know, to get up today and to be able to be on a mission to help parents be more successful in bringing up this generation of kids wow like what could be more rewarding i was talking to luke actually uh bullying is something i've been very interested in not in doing but in trying to fix and uh the a couple of really great researchers tony volk is one of them. Tracy Viancourt is another.
She's the head of Canada's Anti-Bullying Association. There's some really wonderful evidence-based interventions now because they've tried to reduce bullying in schools and the dynamic of why it happens.
How come it seems to stop as people grow up? Why is it worse at these particular ages? What's the typical dynamic? It's not too dissimilar to the one that you guys have just slightly less precise well we actually have it and we can tell if you're we can identify literally fix it basically which i think is some of the tell me more 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 lot of camaraderie.
And you can see for certain kind of kids with certain sort of usage and behavioral patterns,

it just pushes past the line.

Like it pushes past the line.

You can see, you can identify it.

You can see that that's happening

because we actually can look at all of the...

Somebody's being abusive, right?

On a game?

Well, no.

So you can see that they're being abusive

where one of the big feature markers that we see

are their behavior during video gaming ends up becoming a highly predictive feature for some of the things that we see in other other behaviors because for us continuously it's basically the causal pieces right which is a like what are the things that are markers for us that tell us that there is a certain kind of behavioral good or bad right if it's positive or negative uh so our models, one of the things we see is kids that tend to be a lot more rambunctious during games that are much more, again, in that context, it's completely fine. They're not bullying or anything like that.
It tends to be a big marker for cyberbullying outbound, basically. Yeah, I mean, it's a huge passion.
And so 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 yeah 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 the device it'll instantly alert you right so that'll you so and bullying being one of the sentiments that you can can tell or anything that's predatory, you know, nude pictures, all of those toxic things, it instantly spots that and puts that in front of the parent. That's a danger zone.
So, you know, there's one thing about sentiment and guidance. The other is, wait a minute, you just jumped the stop sign.
Stop for a stop sign. That could be fatal.
There's a really interesting thing, which is, I think you asked a question earlier about how much of this are we self-identifying now because we're just smarter and more in tune with it. I have not run the data, but I would guess, and I'm curious, and so we'll go check it out and see what it says, that known problems like bullying that have been around for a while or sexual predators, for example, that have been around a while, I think the system has figured out how to guardrail that better where it's not increasing at the same exponential rate as some of the more new ones like 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 guardrail maybe you can kind of you need to expedite the learning for parents as well here that's exactly right have you got an idea of of a training parents on how to intervene how to have these conversations also yeah we we spent a lot of time on that um which is basically the other i think we're trying to answer three questions the first one is is my kid safe like that's the first primary question right the second is they're on these things all day long what are they doing on this stuff like what what's actually happening on these devices? And the third is sort of the thing you're asking, which is, what can I do about it? Right? And so there's some, you know, sets of interventions that go from, you know, depending on where the child is in the spectrum.
So if the child is sort of on the really distressed side, you know, we do a sort of a set of resources online where they can go talk to other parents, that can accelerate the learning they can ask questions we have clinicians we have clinicians that go and respond to questions that 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 when our child was going through it, we did 23 weeks of an hour a week for the whole family of DBT. Which one's DBT? It's a dialectical.
So it's basically for kids that are going through, so like cognitive is sort of the more, the mental part of the dialectical is more also coming up with a framework and a language that we can all speak saying, hey, like I'm distressed. I know what your signals are, what words you're going to say to me.
That makes me kind of understand that. So it was really helpful.
And so some of this, I mean, like the kids were like rolling their eyes and saying, I don't know why I have to do this. But at the end of that 23 weeks, uh, I felt like they just sort of subconsciously like learn a lot from it.
They don't say a lot about it. And as a parent, like we learned a lot.
So it accelerated our journey a little little bit so far 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, I think is so important. What makes you? So I was bullied as a kid.
Classic only child syndrome where you're under socialized. Spoke differently to the place that I was from, went to a very sort of rough and ready primary school, state school, sixth form college.
I think maybe two other people from my entire 200 person, your group in secondary school went on to university. So it was a very sort of low rate of higher education.
And that was something that I wanted to do. So you just stand out in a variety of different ways.
I played cricket, which wasn't massively, you know, it's a fantastic way to make yourself cool in a working class school to play cricket when everyone else wants to play football or rugby. And, um, yeah, I, I look many of the things that we appreciate in ourselves, I think are born out of the challenges that we've gone through.
Uh, and you know, if you look at, you know, butterfly effect, your way back, you realize that if you're happy with where you are now that you have to be happy with where you were then because without that the likelihood of you ending up here probably would be a little bit lower you don't know whether this was uh like determined or simply coincidence um but it's something that i really just want to give especially to kids that feel alone especially kids in the in the uk i just really want to try and help some young boy or girl that does not feel like they have anywhere to turn that doesn't feel like anybody's got their back to try and it takes so long as an adult to relearn shit that could have taken you a

couple of months as a kid yeah 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 yeah 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 i guess it has an impact on how you like you know even like learning to ask for help right if you go through an experience like that i suspect it's a little harder right you know because you just didn't kind of establish the pattern you don't think anyone's got your back yeah so you think like i i mean and then you've got this bizarre scenario where you start dating and you've got weird secrets yeah from a partner and you go why have you got this it's all because you've never learned to be able to open up to someone yeah 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. It's not to say that you've been puppeted by people that were in school.
Yeah. But it's definitely a passion project of mine at the moment.
And I'm currently in conversation with the head of a group that looks after, I think, about 100 schools in the north of the UK. And we're looking at trying to do some of these evidence-based bullying interventions and you know if you guys have got a tech platform that can you know further propagate that uh holy shit you know if you could say hey guys like if you put this on your phones yeah then you're going to end up yeah we'll talk to you about this sort of offline i think there's some cool things we could do there just for identifying yeah so yeah have you guys got i do 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 yeah 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 another.
I'm often accused of being a part of it, despite the fact that they hate me, and I've never identified as one of them. But I guess if you're a guy that gives advice to guys online, that you kind of get classed as that.
A couple of problems that you have around it, the main one being the type of language that was being used to motivate why this boy committed a murder during the series was it didn't seem at any point that he actually intended to go and do this thing. It seemed like a very accidental killing.
That was what happened, that this boy had a knife, but he didn't mean to get the knife. His friend just kind of had it on him.
He didn't mean to go and hurt this girl. It was simply kind of an accident as the physical altercation began.
But all of the post-show reaction was around, well, this is evidently motivated by the sort of content that he's been seeing online. It was sort of only slightly paid lip service toward how that had contributed to it.
We've actually looked at the, 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 tie together. But because it's quite a trendy line to say the young boys are broken and misogyny is rampant and these 13-year-olds are oppressing our daughters and so on and so forth.
That was a narrative that was taken around with it. And I don't know whether you saw, I think it was this morning or good morning or BBC question time, Kemi Badenoch is a British politician and a bunch of other people raked over the coals by morning morning question time presenters saying you're telling me that you haven't taken time to watch this documentary and she holds her finger up and goes not a documentary and they go you haven't taken time to what this is one of the most important cultural moments later in the same same conversation, this documentary is one of the, not a documentary.

It's like, you know, in the same way

as we should be concerned around ogres

that live in fucking swamps,

like it has the same amount of real world accuracy

as one of those.

Now, is it tapping into some trends?

Absolutely.

Is this stuff that we should be interested in?

Are you suggesting 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 piece of work yeah it is hugely open to interpretation stephen graham meant to do this. It's beautifully done

because you just do this thing, there's purposeful obfuscation and there's voids that are left in

the story. You don't fully understand why it is that the boy did the things that he did,

what his motivations were, where he came from. It comes from an intact home, very, very rare.

It comes from a good background. It didn't seem like there was that much abuse.
Dad shouts

sometimes, holy shit. That's a life that many kids would have dreamed to have had as opposed to the one that they grew up in.
But it's being used as some sort of landmark event to explain where young boys are going wrong. I'm like, have you bothered speaking to young boys about what they're actually that concerned about yeah or are you using a very successful highly fictional series to inform policy it's we're going to show this around the uk this should be shown in every school it's fucking it's it's rated 15 so you're going to show it to 11 year olds-olds and 12-year-olds and 13-year-olds and 14-year-olds and 15-year-olds that maybe aren't ready to see it.
You're going to show them this thing that at some point to me is like, huh, that's kind of a little bit disturbing. Like that was, you know, it gets the heart rate going a little bit.
So you're just not blown out of it. I had a lot of conversations.
Had a lot of conversations around it and fascinating really really interesting cultural moment probably going to be the beginning I would guess of more conversations like this but I think what you guys are doing, the approach of people like Tracy and Tony with evidencebased 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 show, but, you know, sort of the way you're describing it, it just seems like this is, like, in the mainstream, right? I mean, and it's sort of easier for us to just villainize something, you know, because 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, that's Jafar.
It's never that simple. That's Jafar.
It's like, you know, it's like, that's the villain, like that's you know it's not a simple explanation it's never that simple that's jaffa it's like you know it's like that's that's the villain right but i but i think i think a little bit uh it's never like it's really interesting because we do these like um wellness labs with kids at the boston terms hospital we bring in kids of like different ages you know starting like eight nine ten up to like 18 different socioe backgrounds. We bring a different set of parents in.
And so we do the setup. And a lot of them, you ask them, say, hey, what do you think the impact of social media is in your life? They're like, I'm so tired of talking about this.
Everybody thinks that because I'm on social media, my entire life is garbage because that's 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, 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, knows that it's causal like we all see that it's amplifying but to simply villainize and demonize a thing and saying hey like that's the root of all evil i think that's too simplistic i mean even tell you there's obviously an incentive there would be an incentive for you guys to just lay everything at the feet of smartphones it would make your job a lot easier yeah but but that's not the truth like when you have to search for the truth and i think for us you know that's in the data and because if you really 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 because my questions would what are you basing that on? Like, are you just telling me that she's using social media for six hours and so she's messed up? Like, you know, are you like, like, what is like the, the, the, what is the search for the truth? Like, and so in a lot of ways, I think it's a lot easier to just say, hey, that train's moving. We're going to make that the villain.
We're going to jump on that thing. Cause it's, you know, it's taken us to a place.
It's harder to to do it the other way but it's a worthwhile journey because you actually get to the truth it's accurate yeah so yeah yeah yeah guys i appreciate both of you it's fascinating it's really really fascinating stuff uh where should people go they're going to want to find out more about what it is that you're doing easy or a.com a-u-r-a not the o-u-r-a uh yeah well you've got both i got both i love it love that. Very important.
It's really, really important. Thank you for having us and, you know, for letting us share the story.
And now, finally, we get to sit across the table from you. So thank you.
It's amazing. It was so fun.
Thank you. My pleasure.
Thank you, guys. Thank you.
Great. and entertaining that I've ever found.
Fiction and non-fiction, and there's real-life stories, and there's a description about why I like it, and there's links to go and buy it,

and it's completely free. You can get it right now by going to chriswillx.com

slash books. That's chriswillx.com slash books.