How to Protect Kids from the Dark Side of Technology | Real Talk

[Music] I've been having many discussions about the dangers of children being exposed to sex through social media and Technology I also recognize that we can't keep technology and phones away from our kids forever and so what safety tools can we use to protect our kids Sean Clifford is the CEO of canopy an app that prevents dangerous sexting pornography and more if you're seeking practical advice on Tech safe options this episode will be helpful so Sean uh thanks for sitting down with me I'd love to just hear how you got started in this work that you do of course first I have four kids and so as I think about the world that my kids are going to be growing up in and what they're going to be exposed to I wanted to try and figure out how we could create a way for them to be kids as long as possible and to really push off a lot of the forces that really with the devices encroach on them ultimately I want my kids to grow up to be happy to fall in love to get married and be happy in that marriage and all of that is harder if we can't keep some of the toxic content that's out there at Bay second thing is I had a very good friend who I sat down with this was back in 2007 and he asked me what I would do if I made $50 million never had to work a day again so I thought and I gave him my answer and then I asked him the same question and he said he would dedicate himself to try to overcome the scourge of pornography and this was the first time that someone said this was an issue that warranted greater attention in my mind back then this was kind of like a back burner thing it was a nuisance but ever since then it's kind of in the back of my mind I have just seen the suffering that can be caused when people fall down this rabbit hole and then the third thing is I think that two of the great questions animating our age are how can we live well with technology given how prevalent it is today and how early we're adopting it into our lives and then secondly how should we think about regulating our appetites as we raise kids in an era in which they have almost immediate access to anything that they can want to satiate any what does it look like to actually put guard roils in place so put those things together and um the opportunity to try to actually create a Redemptive story for technology where there was a tool that could actually help us as opposed to Simply putting designs Upon Our Time uh was very enticing how did you get access to this world of technology you came from the policy world or or the technology world so I spent about a decade in Washington DC doing public affairs a lot of our clients at that time were in the technology space and so I became very familiar with that Arena how they were thinking about the world and in particular how they were thinking about products that were impacting families so that was kind of the the first part the second is I was also doing a big project in Israel and was introduced to a company that had been developing technology explicitly to try and protect kids online and so through those two worlds that was uh where we ultimately were able to kind of bring together the team uh to try and Tackle this problem why was the technology developed in Israel what did you see there that you decided to bring to the United States the team there was very focused on how kids were being impacted by technology in a way that we were not seeing the same attention paid by the big Silicon Valley providers now I think our Tech Team in Israel is world class I think they're inventing things and pioneering advances that can't be replicated elsewhere so I want to give them a lot of credit but they're also asking questions that five years ago I did not hear being asked in Silicon Valley what is the impact of this on kids as they're growing up when they're exposed to toxic contents when they can find anything and everything at the click of a couple of buttons um and there was a greater attention to that in Israel that I think the big questions that we ask in the United States one of the biggest questions is how are we going to tackle climate change so a lot of people then start thinking about how they can leverage Innovation and policy and what not to to address that um there's a big emphasis on family in Israel and so a lot of the energy was going into how can we make sure that families have a fighting chance to navigate this Digital World which is novel it's completely unlike anything you and I grew up with and still emerge on the other end healthy intact and able to use these tools responsibly what have you been seeing in the tech world that is dangerous for kids oh gosh where to begin the first thing that I would say is um we should note that kids today are struggling like the the first thing is that we should actually look at the data and there have been a lot of people that have done this um perhaps the most notable in the cinema world is the social dilemma which talked about the risks that kids confront Dr Jee twangy wrote a book called I which really documented how the smartphone which really didn't come about till 2007 so we're still in the early stages of this has been tied to increased anxiety depression suicidal ideation so a whole host of things but if I were to take a step back and kind of put it in it's addiction to your device itself to screen time to social media to the validation that that seemingly provides it is exposure to indecent content which is what we spend lot of our time at canopy trying to address to make sure that kids aren't through no fault of their own exposed to a lot of pro problematic things out there and then I think the third thing is the anxiety that usually attend social media where you are very conscious where you stand where you're left off where you can be Cyber Bullied right and so it's it's the addiction piece it is the indecent content and then it's the broader anxiety that comes from your entire social life being played out online your specific technology focuses on things like sexting and sextortion and so what caused you to want to develop that kind of solution for people we saw a real Gap where a lot of companies had been adopting what we consider to be a blunt instrument like a mallet approach to the problem so if you look at the broader category of princial control which is not a popular one uh in part because there's been kind of a lot of crude attempts to address this problem the way in which companies tried to solve this was Walling off whole parts of the internet where you couldn't go if there was any concern that there might be problematic content there and we've come to a point in which the internet is so Dynamic where not only are there brand new websites being created every few minutes that might contain inappropriate content for kids but some of the largest most popular platforms out there like Twitter like Instagram like Tik Tok have a lot of problematic content on it and so we wanted to make sure that there was a way for kids to live in the world where you didn't have to wall off huge Gardens but that you could with a scalpel kind of take out just the bad and so that really drove a lot of the development of the technology we wanted to be able to give you the good of the internet without the bad without significant time delays without meaningfully harming the overall user experienced okay so I'm going to try to wrap my head around what you guys do my kids are still little uh but my oldest is almost 10 I know that in a few years he's going to want to get on social media of some sort and my my girls as well right and so your point is that we can basically have them live in a bubble and never go on social and never and not hand them the cell phone but that doesn't seem very feasible and so you guys have developed a technology that will basically allow parents to hand the phones to their children and and while doing whatever on Tik Tok and and on Instagram protect them for in in in some ways is that basically the concept behind it yes we wanted to get to a world in which you didn't have to choose between the safe safety and well-being of your kid and letting them be online and so our first attempt to address that problem was to have software that you would install on your kids devices smartphone tablet computer that as they browsed could identify bit by bit image by image word by word video by video and separate out what is acceptable and what contains something that might not be consistent with your values so how does that work so the way it currently works right now is that we have a VPN which effectively think of all the traffic from your Chop's device gets routed through our server and we are able to look at every word image and Video in milliseconds and identify if any of it contains nudity minimal clothing something that might not be appropriate for a kid to see and either if too much of it's bad block the whole site or just remove this image just remove that video but still serve up everything else so the great example is you can still go to twitter.com and see the Elon Musk jokes and your little cap videos and your sports scores confident that pornography which there's a lot of on Twitter will not actually populate on your kids screen what does the app do with does it shut down Twitter once it's it's just describe to me how that it actually functions we have something called quilting which is imagine that you go great example is like a one of these British tabloids where you have like legitimate news articles and then some questionable tabloid type images there we will just remove the Tabloid the the individual image of video that contains problematic content and still you can see everything else so we're not shutting down the whole site unless that site has been determined to be you know 55% pornographic content in which case we'll shut it all down so you download the app onto your child's phone and it kind of like coats the other apps in that way where it protects it from showing up with pornography or any inappropriate content like that yes so it was designed to work in the background we do not want to frustrate the kids's ability to use the technology how it's designed to be used because we know if it results in a bad user experience kids are going to complain they're gonna have a fight with the parent they're going to take it off um without getting too much into the weeds it works a little bit differently app to app operating system to operating system there are some apps that we can filter in like Tik Tok on iOS we can filter all inappropriate content in there we currently can't filter within the IOS app it uses an encryption and so we give parents the choice do you want your kid to be an Instagram the app or an Instagram on a browser where we can filter everything within a browser we've just developed the capability to push our filter from a server down onto the device which will effectively mean that everything offline content you could be in a zoom you could be doing a live stream and the second anything inappropriate appears on screen will cut the feed so one of the things that you described to me is this new trend called sexting and extortion uh can you just tell me a little bit more about that and how your technology is GNA help navigate through those issues yes so I I know it seems uh crazy but U sex SC effectively where you take a selfie of um you wearing minimal clothing or no clothing whatsoever and so um while many parents still think that this is crazy one of the stats that jumped out to me was that two-thirds of American teenage girls have been asked to send a nude photo ofs to someone that they know so this is much more prevalent than people think and it's really alarming in terms of not only the incidents that it's happening but the consequences after it gets out there so in order to address this we've taken our technology which can identify nudity and minimal clothing in real time and apply that towards photos taken by a device itself so the second you take a selfie let's say you're in a bikini or you're wearing no clothes our software flags that and says hey are you sure you meant to take that photo and then you as the child are given a choice you can either send it to your mom and dad for approval which hopefully you wouldn't do or you can just delete it no questions asked and move on so if the child decides to send the picture of her or him being nude some alert shows up and it basically says if you're going to continue sending this it would also send it to your parents is that right if you want to keep that photo your parent is going to receive a copy of it uhuh and so we hope that creates a little bit of a deterrent effect that like and in some cases you know again we have one filter setting for nudity and one for minimal clothing so in some cases it could be an innocuous a couple of friends are at the beach there's nothing wrong like send it to Mom and Dad they'll approve it and then you're fine no issue yes so what does canopy do with the images the sexs once they're transferred into the system great question so obviously this is very sensitive content um that's out there so first thing to say is canopy doesn't keep any of this data on our servers we do not collect or store any data about our customers for any reason we don't rent it out we don't sell it anything like that we really strive to make sure that we have good data privacy practices because we're dealing with sensitive stuff in the instance in which a kid takes a text and actually sends it to their parent for approval which like has happened before shockingly enough once the parent looks at it and approves it or deletes it it's gone and we feel very strongly that you know parents need to know that if they're going to trust a software company to come in and try and walk alongside them this is being done not by humans but by artificial intelligence right no human ever looks at any content on a user's device it's all AI based machine learning algorithms that have been trained to identify this so there's no canopy employee there you know it's kind of going through sitting and watching all the images what's so incredible about sexting is that first of all it's become so common but it's also illegal right I mean it's just you can actually go to jail even as a minor if you're sending nude pictures of of yourself or other girls and and and sharing that but it's just become this like common thing it can be prosecuted as the transmission of child pornography which again if you're under the age of 18 by the legal definition of pornography that's what it is it's problematic from that perspective I think a lot of kids aren't aware of the risks that attend doing it um but it's also problematic as you and I well know digital is forever um and even if you're sending it via a platform like Snapchat which supposedly has disappearing images um someone else can take a screenshot of it and it circulates and so the stories that I hear that I think are most disconcerting to parents are where they have a son or a daughter that takes a photo and sends it to someone in a moment of trust um and then it gets out and once it's out there the consequences uh especially psychologically can be significant it's just not something that kids um I think are kind of prepared or when they take the photo they're really thinking about that you know one of rule of thumb that we've heard is like don't send a photo that you wouldn't be comfortable having your grandmother see which like maybe goes a little bit too far but I think a little bit of discretion in terms of what's being sent uh is warranted given just the sheer number of horror stories I've heard around this I mean this is one of those things that teenagers are doing these days right it's like their new way of dating they'll send pictures of of of each other and one another but then they break up and then they use it for something called sextortion right which is a whole another scary thing yeah and so often times that's from you know significant others or ex's where that comes into play We also see this where kids are you know on platforms and they'll start sending relatively innocuous things but then each time they send it they'll get to a point where they've crossed the line and the individual that's kind of engaged in the exploitation will say do XY or Z or I'm going to release this and oftentimes it's send more photos which further um empowers them to kind of extort them and have leverage over them which uh which is obviously pretty frightening what are the punishments for a minor who is sending pornography I mean this is pornography and what are the punishments for somebody who's tried as an adult it can be jail time it can be a pretty significant fine it depends on whether you're merely trafficking it or you're actually engaged in the production of it the fines and penalties for the actual production which if you're taking a sex that is what that's classified as um is more significant and look it's it's still relatively new but during covid during the first few months of the lockdown just the number of Google searches how to take a good sext went up you know by 500% and so this is becoming regrettably very common to be asked for sure but then to actually participate in it the last St that I saw was that one out of seven American uh teenagers has sent a nude photo of them themselves to someone else and that predates Co so I can only imagine that it's um it's moved up considerably since then oh my gosh I mean so we talked about the legal element element of it but there's also the mental element of it and specifically boys and girls in some ways and different ways are really mentally impacted by this new sex early sexualization of children and using these devices to create this irrevocable damage one of the things that you told me a few weeks ago when we when we spoke was how there are these times where there was Spike spikes in pornography viewership which I think is just shocking yeah so this actually came from PornHub which is one of the largest porn websites in the world and every year they put out a um data analytics report that kind of walks through how their platforms being used most search for terms usage statistics things like that but they also put out something that demonstrates when there's relative spikes throughout the day so unsurprisingly you'll find that from 10 p.m. to midnight is when consumption goes up there's one other period during the day where you see a spike relative to the time before and after and that's between 3:30 and 4:30 p.m. which is right when kids are coming out of school my God and so it that's uh one data point but it's very much corroborated by all the other data trends that we're seeing which is the age of exposure to graphic pornographic content is coming earlier and earlier for kids and this very much attends that we've distributed devices smartphones tablets to kids at earlier and earlier ages where at a couple clicks of the button through no Faults of their own more often than not one stat that horrifies me is that 62% of first exposure to problematic content is accidental they're not even trying to find something but it's finding them and so kids are growing up and they're being put in situations where they're confronting this type of content early before often times they've been prepared and that kind of oftentimes can set in motion curiosity they're trying to understand what it is and as they go searching for answers it's not often times to the parent but it's this online world that might have different lessons to teach than what you or I would if we're sitting down talking to our kids your team has done incredible research about the impact of a child's brain when exposed to this early sexualization will you tell me a little bit more about that yes and we think this is incredibly important because if you look at the broader history of people that are trying to talk about how pornography impacts kids it often time comes from a a posture of um you know person of Faith who has a moral argument against pornography and they're advancing that and I think one the things that is interesting over the last 20 years is that there's been a lot of advances in Neuroscience where we now actually understand the impact of pornography on the brain and we can talk about how a pornography addiction mirrors other types of addictions in terms of the parts of the brain that it lights up and the difficulty stepping away from it how it hijacks the reward system how it leverages dopamine U we can talk about all these things now from a scientific perspective so it's no longer conjecture there are actually a lot of people from Johns Hopkins and Harvard who are studying this in their white lab coats and saying this is what's happening to your child's brain when um they're exposed to this type of content and so I think it's really shifted the conversation from one in which um you know the various sides kind of retreat to their Corners to one in which um you have authorities from the medical and scientific Community saying yeah this raises a lot of questions and um exposure could be a big source of harm for kids that's really shifted how uh the broader conversation is progressing so what are the things that you've learned from from this research that really have an impact on we can talk about how the way to think of your kid's brain is that it's like clay and it's wet clay and the earlier your child the younger your child is you can mold it and the older they get it hardens a little bit and becomes harder to mold and so the earlier they are exposed to different types of Highly intense content the more that it can shape them which is why the age of exposure to something like pornography has a big impact in how they will think about it we can study this at the neurochemical level or we can talk about their sexual template and their understanding and expectations of what's normal and so we understand that secondly we've come to understand that there is a brain's innate desire for novelty especially with respect to sexual reward and it's actually called the coolage effect but the brain effectively constantly needs novelty in order to reach satiation and so this is why when kids are exposed early often times if someone then becomes a pornography consumer for two years their taste will change dramatically and we now know why it's in pursuit of that high that you have to kind of constantly introduce a transgression or taboo or more extreme content and so this is why you'll see teenagers Go in radically different directions and start to seek out more violent oftentimes content as they progress We Now understand at a neurochemical level why that's happening and what's kind of driving that and then I think third just the big thing is we have a lot more information now about the extent to which pornography can be addictive and how it lights up the brain and how it's got an escal escalation function built in now that we can understand what's actually happening to a child's brain I think it gives a lot of people license to come out and have this conversation it's Taboo it's icky right like people don't want to talk about this um despite the fact that it's causing a lot of harm and you can see this in evidence and data about psychology whether it's um physical effects right shockingly and we're seeing uh increase in erectile dysfunction among 20-year- olds which like shouldn't happen why do you think this is happening because they were exposed to pornography at an early age yeah it's called Uh porn induced erectile dysfunction typically is found among men of a certain age where like the pipes just stop working porn induced erectile dysfunction has nothing to do with the viability of their broader body it's all psychological they need to see a certain type of extreme content in order to be aroused and so pornography has created the environment in which only certain types of things that really are kind of pushing the boundaries will get them to that state and so is this mostly impacting boys only or is it also impacting young girls and women I think historically we tend to think of this as a problem for for boys and for men in particular the data is that you still find that the majority of kind of the regular users are boys but girls are very quickly catching up and I think a big part of that Jonathan height I think was the one who made this um point that we are now spending a lot more time dwelling in visually oriented platforms and that this is what is kind of creating an expectation and Norm um that the very next logical step is um some familiarity with pornography I one of my greatest concerns when I think about sexing and extortion is I I actually have been very focused on the girls and the women because what it does to their mental state and the depression and you know people looking at them and sharing all these images of them um but I think people have are and maybe even myself are forgetting how dangerous this this is even for young boys who are essentially going to be living with this you know problem for many years if we don't address it yes well I I think you're right I mean if you look at the data today um Dr Jee twangy and Jonathan height have come out with a lot of research that really shows that among teenagers girls are struggling at a much higher level than boys are if you look at the last 10 years both boys and girls have seen a dou doubling of major depressive episodes in a year but boys it went from about 4% to about 10% girls went from about 12% to 25% so one out of four girls over the course of years having a major depressing episode which is problematic and so I think you're right to focus on that the data suggests that they're struggling with much higher level with social media I think to understand the impact on boys the right mental model is think of pornography as radiation you may not see the effect of radiation immediately but it's resulting in Failure to Launch it's resulting in marriages that are being dissolved it's resulting in physical changes that are problematic and the data is there to support that you don't see it as much right when there are 16 to 18 um but when you get past 18 that's when boys really are demonstrating that they're being left behind they're not going to college they're dropping out of college they're not graduating from high school they're not entering into relationships they're not holding down job and I'm not for a second suggesting that pornography is the root of all of this um but I do think it has a role to play one of the things that I think about you guys after when after we hang out with all of you techies as I go home and I say to my husband this is what I keep hearing them say don't get high on your own Supply right and so so many of you are not actually allowing your kids to be on social media and early years you're trying to limit social media and so I I mean I just think that I wish the world would hear this because if the people who are making this content are aware of the fact that it is addicting uh that it's going to hurt them that it's going to sentence them with a more difficult life the rest of the public should hear this too and so I'd love for you to comment a little bit about that and and just how do you guys navigate through this life of you know you're in the tech world you're obviously using the this technology to advance yourselves and Advance the world but on the other hand you are preventing your children from being you know uh on these devices is it tricky question and I come at this with a lot of humility I've got four kids um and we're kind of bumbling our way trying to figure this out and I think one of the bigger points is that parents today have to have a new playbook like I can't look at what my parents did with me and my sister because it's a completely different world so the first point is just we have a lot of humility with how we try and address what we're doing in our own household that said I think the more that you understand how technology is being developed and a lot of the incentives that are at play especially with Google and Facebook you'll see that these are companies that profit by harvesting your attention and they've effectively figured out to use the the the words of James uh Williams who wrote a fantastic book on this called Stand Out of our light they have business models that hack your cognitive vulnerabilities they've identified your weaknesses and these these companies employ big teams of neuroscientists to do this and they're going up against your adolescent hormonal kid trying to figure out their way in the world and they know exactly what buttons to push to get them to spend that incremental 5 Seconds minute I mean if Tik Tok hour on the device engaged with their content and so at the very outset I think you have to recognize that the designs of these companies are not necessarily what the designs that you as a parent would have for your kids what they want to achieve what their objectives are are not your objectives and so that is why we in our household have adopted a very cautious skeptical approach we're big fans at canopy but also in the Clifford so just push this stuff off as long as you can we're not anti-tech I think Tech's amazing I think during co tech was a Lifeline for so many people in terms of your ability to continue studying to keep in touch with loved ones so much of our social life has moved online it only accelerated during Co so I don't think it's a bad thing and I don't want to live in a world where we take all of this away where that's the only option that you uh confront as a parent but I do think we have to figure out how to live with technology well and we're still kind of struggling to figure that out so what is your advice I know you have these three rules so let's hear them okay so this is for parents so the first is you have to update your Paradigm and I think parents need to be very acutely aware of what it means for a kid to grow up in a digital world their social life is their digital life and vice versa and the extent to which you're intervening in their Digital Life you're intervening in their social life un understanding what they can confront online returning to pornography I think a lot of parents they have this uh mental model where it's a Playboy under someone's B they do it's it's a very different thing these days right it is completely different the potency of what kids are encountering online is just much much greater than anything that they encountered before you know Playboy was 12 static images you can get infinite access to H it was basically the Victoria Secret magazine right the today's Victoria Secret brochure is what Playboy was years ago basically which is crazy and in fact Playboy because they couldn't keep up with free pornography online for a while actually stops publishing nude photos but be the resume parents need to update their mental model because the world that your kid is growing up with is completely different and the sooner that you understand that and understand that you need to have a new playbook I think the better situated you'll be to navigate this I think the second big thing is you have to communicate with your kids early and often first part of that is you have to create the space for good meaningful conversations and that's going to be different kid to kid one best practice here is like be shoulders shoulder right not necessarily in a um direct contact because hard conversations that need to take place if you are a shoulder shoulder might be easier but find a way a regular outlet where your kid has that opportunity to have hard conversations with you I think the second thing is parents need to explain the why if you're going to embark on a path in which you were limiting the use of Technology as your kid grows you need to tell them why you're actually doing this because you love them and because you want them ultimately to have a good childhood and to grow into the world we have full utilization of all the tools are out there but the ability to use them in ways that actually help them live well and that's why I think the mental model for parents and kids should be that of a car it's like as a parent I want my kids someday to get their driver's license and have the freedom that comes with driving a car but it's a big responsibility and they need to understand that this device can do a lot of harm and that they're going to obtain ever greater levels of use of it as they progress I think the third big thing that parents need to do is actually set the table for success and by that I mean like adopt actions in your own home in your own life that are going to equip your kid to emerge at the other end of 18 with some ability to use Tech responsibly so what does that actually look like number one I think you need to find a tribe go find other parents that are willing to adopt similar rules as you and similar practices and how they use technology if your kid is the only one in their class of 20 that doesn't have access to social media that's hard if they're one of you know eight um that are as that group of eight abstaining it becomes incrementally easier for them to do that so go find a tribe that wants to live out a different way I think the second thing there is that you have to crowd it out if you're going to take something away from your kid give them something in in its place that's actually compelling to them so this will look different for for different people but you know for my son if I got him I was like we're not going to get you a phone and you're not going to have any Tech time but we're going to sign you up for these Ninja Warrior classes for him he would take that trade-off and every time he thought about not being part of something else he would say but this is what I have instead so I think that can be really helpful and then the third is like you need to be an Exemplar there's this great book called The Tech wise family in which Andy Crouch said in 2017 when the iPhone turned 10 there was a generation of 10-year-olds in America who had spent their entire life competing with the iPhone for their parents' attention and often times losing which to me was just heartbreaking um in part because I felt that right like I am prone to on the couch pull it out or we're addicted too yes we're enamored with these devices and we're in this honeymoon period where each individual interaction with it seems so innocuous and so simple and like there's nothing wrong with me checking my email right now but aggregate it up my kids see that and they're saying this is okay I see how this works so being an exampler exampler for your kids is important which think gets to the last point which is I think the extent to which you can adopt a Tech contract that has rules that apply throughout so in the Clifford household no phones at the table ever we do not ever bring phones out at the table restaurant or at home we never let phones into a not even at the restaurant you don't use the pH restaurant no I cannot tell you when we go out to restaurants now and you have four kids we do and it's hard it is not always an enjoyable experience for my wife and I because we are really attuned to it but our kids you know mine are 10 n 6 and three they've gotten to the point now like they can sit at a table and behave and it's beautiful and we as a result have great family dinners now there was like a threeyear period we're like that was miserable but we work through it and I think it's important for them to do that because if you go out to any restaurant today and you just like look around more than 50% of the time groups of people there someone will have it out totally and I think it really distracts from like the interpersonal connection that comes from uh when you're actually engaging with someone and there's no distraction it's powerful especially in postco when we we were so starved for this kind of interaction um if you can do that well I think it's uh makes all the difference but last thing on on the on the contract everyone has to sign up for it if the parents aren't buying in if they're not willing to actually abide by the rules too that's where it really starts to break down so I'd almost advise parents don't adopt rules in your house that you yourself aren't willing to fully follow well well that's always the case right parents who I'm going to threaten you with this and that and they never actually follow up on the threat that's that's actually worse because then nobody believes in the contract right right I want to ask you a question about um you said start early start talking to them early so how early is the right time in your opinion one of the issues that I have is I struggle with the fact that you know my son is 10 my daughter I have a daughter that's seven and and and another daughter that's four and a half and I want to preserve their innocence on the one hand right and so I don't want to bring up the these conversations about you know sex and even the issues of transgender and all of these political issues that are now creeping into our kids' lives I want to shelter them because I feel like a child should deserve to be a child but on the other hand like you say we need to be the first to have those conversations with them because if we're not the first to have the conversation with them somebody else will be the first and they will taint their Vision on it and have that impact on them and so I think many parents like me are struggling with well how how far can we push it but you know starting too soon is really you know dangerous as well it's a tricky question and I couldn't agree more I don't want to have this conversation with my kids right now my oldest is 10 like I just I still think that it's too soon to go there I don't feel comfortable I don't want to do it and so like I'll acknowledge that at the very outset the thing that has motivated me to have those conversations is that I don't want them to find out about this from somewhere else and that first experience and exposure be something that often times like when you're young and you're trying to figure things out it can be very formative so what do you do I think there are a number of resources out there one that we've used is good pictures bad pictures uh it's a book that in a very age appropriate way for a six and seveny old talks about how people do crazy things out there and it does it in a way where like my kids walked out of that book they still didn't know what sex was um but they did know that there were a couple of like red flags um that they should be mindful of and so there are age appropriate ways to start having the conversation and in mind it's conversations it's not like you know I had the talk we're good like you know check that off my parenting list so I think one is like there are age appropriate things that you can find out there and resources that help you navigate it I think the second thing is really preparing that space to have the hard conversations with your kids I want my kids to know that when they have those types of questions and I've I've said hey you guys are going to have questions especially as you get to this age and your friends are going to say this like this is the time every week where you and I do this where you can like we'll talk about it and sometimes I'll ask questions and sometimes like they'll be the one to bring stuff up but creating that space where your kids do feel comfortable is is hard but I think it will really make a difference that makes a lot of sense I was thinking about this past weekend when I was spending time with my kids where I do allow them to be on social media devices and while right now they're still young and they're just watching things that are totally fine the fact that they're being conditioned to think that they can go and take the device into their room and shut the door and watch something even though what they're watching is okay right now in a few years it won't be okay and so basically at early early years we're going to make these family Rules where if you are on a device you're going to be in the family room not in your own bedroom and and all of those kind of family contracts I think are helpful just to lay the the the field for later days where where it is more difficult right once they hit sixth grade it's so difficult to ask them to do things and and to listen to to us I think that's exactly right and I think if you compare those rules with a strong articulation of the why- which is both what you want for them ultimately which is you want them to get to the point where they can use these devices well but also like what they're up against my wife got her PhD in neuroscience and so we kind of have geeky conversations with our kids but one of the things that that jumped out was understanding and teaching our kids what these devices do to their brains how they've been designed and the consequences of it and I'll just give you one example I know you're very familiar with dopamine it's kind of a malign neurochemical it actually does a lot of good things and so it gets a bad wrap but our devices have been designed to hijack the dopamine system so every time you go on your device they have variable rewards and it gives you little pings when someone likes your message when you get new emails come to your box things like that which oftentimes drive you to spend more time on the device one thing that we've learned and there's a great book out there about this that kind of documented called the hacking of the American mind that dopamine crowns out serotonin so just to take a step back serotonin is the chemical that you feel when you're content when you're happy when you've hiked a mountain and you've summited and you're at the top and maybe you're hungry and cold so it's not the superficial pleasurable feeling it's the like I've done something worthy and you get this when your kid has done well on a project or you reach a milestone in your marriage it's those types of moments that yield this like sense of contentment and what we've disced discovered in the last decade is that dopamine actually blocks serotonin and so the more that these devices flood your brain with dopamine it's actually blocking your ability to fill that true sense of contentment I mean we are literally creating circumstances in which our kids can't feel happy like truly happy which leads them only the pursuit of pleasure which is what dopamine does and so I know that's a lot I know not all kids are ready for that but the more the kids understand that this is what's going on and the you know at canopy one of the things that we detect all the time that gives me hope uh in a strange way is that the kids are really unhappy and they know their devices are the cause of it and that gives me hope because they're the ones that recognize this and they want to do something about it fascinating I mean I think it's not just the kids I don't know the parents are aware of just the chem the chemistry behind all of this right I think if if parents are aware of how dangerous these little devices are maybe they'll have a better sense of how to you know prevent their kids from becoming total addicts yes and I think we're still in the honeymoon phase right we've not developed the cultural or social antibodies to really figure out like how to put some healthy boundaries around this and put Tech in its proper place I think the proper Focus remains on kids though because they are in a much more formative phase like when I got my first smartphone I was already out of college right so like my I was more or less set and like you can still change there is neuroplasticity but um it's nowhere near as formative as when you're growing up with this right now they start at age 11 yes if not earlier or if not earlier right yeah and it shapes them in really profound ways that we're still unpacking fascinating well thank you so much for what you're doing I'd love to get a better sense of the actual technology and so I'd love to just hear a little bit about what are some other devices or apps that are out there that are protecting kids from from this stuff and just learn a little bit more on canopy fantastic okay great there's a few things out there the first is if you're going to get a device for your kid you need to make the determination do you want it to be smart or not you want them to have internet connectivity and apps and things like that on their device if you go down that route I think there's kind of two there's a fork in the road you can go with something that's built explicitly for kits there's a company out there called bark that has just launched and released a new phone explicitly for kits to try and allow them to be engaging with apps in the internet but in a responsible way so bark is an actual phone it's not an app burk's a technology company that had software but just launched a phone okay where it's it's the hardware with the software pre-installed there's another company like that called gab which has a kid-friendly phone and another one called pin wheel all three of them are really good options they each kind of focus on different things but if you want to get your child kind of a starter phone I oftentimes will recommend that because it's a way for them to have exposure to it to start to learn how to use it responsibly again with the full intention that eventually they'll get to the full Android or the full iPhone as the case may be then there's the question of If You're Gonna Go the traditional route and get you know an iPhone an Android a tablet laptop for your kid can you install software on that if you do that there's kind of three different types of things that you can do the first is there's software that will limit how much time they're spending on different apps or on the computer or device overall circle is a great example of that Net Nanny is a tool that provides that bark canopy most of the tools can kind of limit where kids are spending time online the second thing is social media monitoring bark I think has the best technology to date that enables you to understand what your kid is doing in the online world if your kid is bullying someone if your kid is being bullied if they're engaging in uh sexual conversations you as the parent will receive notification that your kid is partaken in that and that provides a prompt for you then to go have the conversation with your kid it's like hey and um bark has done well they don't send you everything they only provide you those prompts when it's something that they think is a trigger uh for a conversation and so that's a way to kind of understand what your kid is being exposed to online then the third category is um preventing exposure to indecent content and that's where I think canopy really differentiates itself in our ability to immediately detect all pornographic content and keep it from actually appearing on your phone to stop sex day things like that but all three are very valid and worthwhile things to do so helpful I mean I hear so much about the problem but actually hearing about some potential Solutions and I know there was no silver silver bullet to anything obviously parents still need to be parents and they need to show up and listen and pay attention but having Technologies like this are are it's certainly helpful so let me grab my phone and maybe you can show me a little bit about um how they work and specifically how canopy Works fantastic canopy is a software that you can download to your phone tablet or computer we have an app for parents which is kind of like your dashboard where you can update settings on your kids devices Grant approval for if they want to send you a photo to look at give them more screen time things like that and then we have an app for kits which really is where all the hard backend technology exists that is is the filter that's working in real time in the background again our hope is that the kids know first of all that canop is on their device right we don't want to be one of those companies where they don't know like it's it's a visible app in there and they only go there when they want to request permission to visit a website that has been blocked or have a photo reviewed well part of that is teaching them the awareness as well right knowing that the app is there because there is danger out there yes and our hope is to actually Foster healthy communication between parents and kids we could kind of put it in the background but we want to be a tool that walks alongside families and not something that's the source of friction between them well thank you guys so much for what you're doing and thanks for the app we're trying I love itks thank you Missa [Music]