The Family IT Guy: Big Tech, Bad Policy & Real Online Safety for Kids

Julie Barrett is joined by Ben Gillenwater — The Family IT Guy, a cybersecurity expert with 30+ years of experience building and securing large‑scale systems. Ben has become one of the most trusted voices helping parents understand what’s really happening behind the scenes of kids’ technology, apps, and devices.

In this interview, we dig into the truth behind today’s “child safety” laws — including the App Store Accountability Act, KOSA, and the growing wave of age‑verification mandates sweeping the country. These policies claim to protect kids, but Ben explains why they actually create massive data‑collection systems, expand surveillance, and give Big Tech and government unprecedented control over digital identity.

We cover:

Ben’s background in cybersecurity and why he started The Family IT Guy

How “kid‑safe” apps still expose children to harmful content

Why age verification = identity verification = surveillance

The hidden risks inside the App Store Accountability Act

How KOSA incentivizes platforms to over‑collect data and over‑restrict speech

Why these laws don’t stop kids from accessing harmful content

What parents can do TODAY to protect their kids without relying on Big Tech or government

Practical device setups, routines, and digital literacy strategies that actually work

If you’re a parent, policymaker, or anyone concerned about privacy, digital rights, or child safety, this conversation is essential.

Check out Ben's website and follow him on socials: https://www.familyitguy.com/

👉 Subscribe for updates, alerts, and more interviews on tech policy, parental rights, and digital safety.  
👉 Learn more about Protecting Kids Online at protectingkids.online

Transcript

Why Digital ID Is Expanding

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey everyone, I'm Julie Barrett with Conservative Ladies of America. I've got a special treat for you today on the podcast. If you've been watching our channel for the last several months, you know that we have been deep diving into these digital ID policies, these tech policies that claim to protect children and empower parents, but they do neither. They actually implement a digital ID framework that creates massive data collection, surveillance, and censorship, as you will hear from my guest today. We are talking to Ben Gillenwater, known as the family IT guy. And he has a wealth of information and a long cybersecurity background. He's also a dad who has been helping other families navigate the parental controls and all of the things to keep their kids safe online in our digital world. He has also worked in high-level security roles. So he understands how these systems function behind the scenes, and he's taken that expertise and turned it into practical parent-friendly guidance that anyone can use. Ben has helped thousands of parents take back control of their kids' digital lives, not through government mandates, not through surveillance systems, but through simple, effective tools and routines that actually protect children. I'm thrilled to have Ben here today to talk about what's really happening with these so-called child safety tech policies and why they missed the mark, and most importantly, what parents can do to keep kids safe. Ben, welcome. I am so glad you have joined me today. It is an honor to have you on the podcast, and we have a lot to talk about and dig into today. So let's not let's let's get right into this.

From Cybersecurity To Family IT

SPEAKER_00 1:53

Tell me a little bit about how you went from spending decades in cybersecurity and large-scale tech companies to being the family IT guy.

SPEAKER_01 2:06

It's a great question. Thanks for having me on the show, Julie. Appreciate it. Yeah, I mean, I've I've been doing IT stuff professionally for 31 years and um, you know, have played roles such as uh you know chief technologist for a $10 billion IT company, um dealing with organizations like the NSA, you know, doing a lot of national security stuff. And then I became a dad. And you know, oh yeah, I I I've I've know all the things about how these things work. I can figure this out, right? And turns out that even for those of us that have expertise with with computers, it's it's hard to map child raising to the internet. Um in fact, they they don't really map well at all. And so I I I started doing this family IT guy thing back in early 2024. Um, after not only stumbling myself, and I'll tell you a bit about how I've stumbled, uh, just to make other people feel better, hopefully, that it's not just it's not just you, it's me too, you know. Um yeah, and basically like I, you know, having also a lot of other friends and parents and and people in the community asking me for help. Like what do I what do I do here? And then in trying to help answer their questions, finding out that there's not like sometimes there's not very uh certainly not very easy answers, um, nor you know, nor is some of the stuff easy to understand. So I've I've spent a lot of time and I'll share with you today on how I've distilled all the craziness out there into some fairly simple ways to look at what's going on and what to do about it.

The YouTube Kids Nightmare Lesson

SPEAKER_01 3:48

Um, but yeah, I mean basically when you know as a as a an anecdote that I I think is has a special sort of irony to it, like I gave my kid an iPad when he was six, I put YouTube on it.

SPEAKER_00 4:04

YouTube kids or just regular YouTube?

SPEAKER_01 4:07

Regular YouTube.

SPEAKER_00 4:08

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 4:10

So current day me thinks that's insane. Right. But I tell the story because five years ago, me thought I can manage those things. They have settings and controls, and with the right supervision, and if he's only using YouTube here or there, like we can figure it out. And it only took a couple of days to find out that that's not the case, right? And so YouTube was short-lived, took away YouTube, and then we put on YouTube kids. Well, actually, by we, specifically me, like my wife was in on what was going on, but I did it. Like, I'm the guy that put YouTube on his iPad, I'm the guy that gave him the iPad. Uh, I'll take full responsibility. Um, we we took off YouTube and put on YouTube Kids because it's called kids, and because at the time the CEO of YouTube was a grandma, so like hey, like there's a it's gotta be safe for kids. Um, with like the world's best technologists work at Google and YouTube, and you know, this should be the best kids product. It's not that was a big mistake. I took taking that for granted was a massive mistake. I found out that it has nightmare material, it has sexual material. He had nightmares for years because of the stuff he saw on YouTube kids. Videos that are intended to give kids nightmares. There's videos of superheroes having sex with each other that are shown to young children on a pr on a platform because you you pick the age ranges, and so at the time I I told it uh um I okay what the range was, but he was six, and I might have told it he was five or something. Like he's he was in the younger bracket and it was showing him all this horrific stuff. That's insane. It really is, it's very disappointing. Like it it I learned a lot about humanity during this process. Like you can't take for granted that a thing called kids made by a grandma isn't going to hurt a kid, which is very sad. But that is the case. So took off YouTube Kids, he was left with an iPad that had uh he did video calls with family members and he had some games, but the iPad itself was just so it's such a well-designed device that it's it it in and of itself, it has a an uh it was helping him develop addictive tendencies towards I want to wake up earlier to go to the iPad, I want to go to sleep later because of the iPad, I want to come home from school, and instead of going outside to play with my friends that live on the block, I want to stay inside and be on the iPad. And so then I I recognized these as like the patterns that he was exhibiting. I was like, that's addiction. Yeah, I've given my kid a drug. And so then I took the drug away and explained to him why, and that like, I'm sorry, that was a mistake, but like you the iPad's gone. Um and then um, so now he just is left. He has an Apple Watch that he can use as a as a phone and uh it's super restricted and it's a tool, it's not a toy, and there's no more, he doesn't have internet access anymore. And now he's 11. Um, and uh it was very it was very educational for me, you know. Like I say, like like I understand how the internet works, I understand all the background and how the businesses are structured, and I fell right into it. And so now my mission is helping parents set their kids up for success in an internet world. If you're if your kids are gonna be exposed to the internet, which whether you do it or somebody else does it, they're gonna be exposed to the internet on the school bus, on the schoolyard, at home, whatever it might be. What do we need to know? What does that mean? And what do we do about it? That's that's my whole uh deal with family IT guy. It's all I focus on now.

SPEAKER_00 8:05

That's awesome because I think you know, it gives parents that maybe aren't don't have that tech background like you do, that they're feeling like like they don't, they're they're missing it, right? Like they're they're not you know hitting all of the the control, like they just it's overwhelming to them. And here you are, a guy with so much IT background saying, I missed, you know, all these things too, and I had to pull it back. And I think um, you know, I just want to point out that uh for the people watching today that Ben was able to take away the iPad. After he realized the negative impact he was having on his child, he took it away. He didn't need a government mandate, he didn't need the legislature to pass a law that told him he could take his kid's iPad away. Um, you know, we as parents really need to, I know it's hard. Um, setting these boundaries uh can be really, really difficult and challenging because kids really fight them, but it that's our job as parents to do the hard things. So I hope that our conversation today will empower a lot of parents who are in this right now with their kids trying to set boundaries, trying to protect their kids online. We're gonna get into some of the policies that uh that we've been talking about on this channel for uh almost a year now that I know that you've also addressed in in your work, Ben, because it's it's important because parents hear about these policies that are being proposed in their state legislatures or in Congress, and they think, oh, finally, a solution to uh the concerns I have with my child. And so we're gonna we're gonna uh talk about what these age verification child safety policies are really all about. Um and so let's let's just kind of start there.

What Age Verification Really Means

SPEAKER_00 9:54

Let's start with the idea of age verification. For those of us that don't have any tech background, what just sort of high level, what does age verification mean?

SPEAKER_01 10:09

It means uh so let's actually start off with an example that's existed for as long as any of us that are listening to this would remember, which is um age verification when you walk into a bar. Right? So when you go to a place that is legally required to not sell things to people of a certain age, not do business with people of a certain age, um, a gun store, a bar, cigarettes, whatever it might be. Um, shoot, even at the grocery store if you try to buy beer, right? There's an age verification process. There's a person that is tasked with I need to know your age so that I know if I'm allowed to do business with you, because if I don't do that, then I get penalized by the government. And so I'm required to do that. Up until this point, that has been a completely offline process. And so that is a visual check of a plastic card that says your date of birth. And as long as they check that plastic card and your date of birth is when it's you know prior to a certain point in time that defines your age. You can go into the bar, you can buy the beer, you can buy the cigarettes, you can buy the gun, you can whatever. When you go into the bar, when the bouncer lets you into the bar after checking your ID, he says, okay, you can go in. He does not then follow you into the bar and stand next to you and take notes on all your conversations, and take notes on who you're hanging out with, and take notes on where you came from before you got to the bar, and take notes on where you went to after you left the bar, and take notes on what you're, you know, almost on what you're thinking about. No, you go in and you do your thing. There's no there's no privacy problems there with that process itself. Now, when that the reason I start with that analogy is because if you map that to a digital interaction, because there's no human at a door or at a cashier, uh that process has to transit across the internet, and anything that gets transited across the internet gets stored. And so if I if if Julie comes to my website and wants to buy something, and for whatever reason the government has told me that, well, I have to check Julie's age, Julie now has to transmit personally identifiable information that is government validated and or validated via like a biometric process, like a face scan or an eye scan or a fingerprint. And then I have to capture that information and put it into my database so that my computers can then read the information and say, I have validated that Julie is the age that she says she is, I'm allowed to do business with her. We can now proceed. And then we go on to do business. But guess what? That record is still in my database. And now, because that record is attached to Julie, anytime Julie does something on my website, I know where Julie lives. I know, of course, how old she is, and I know what she does on my website and where she came from and where she goes next. And if my website is a social media website, I know all of Julie's hobbies and habits and fears and interests. If my website is an AI product like ChatGPT, I know everything that's in your head, that's in your work, that's in your email, and it's attached to your government ID. And then the reason why we do that is because if Julie comes and and then it turns out that Julie is a child, or it's Julie's child, or it's my kid, or my 11-year-old comes to my to my website and and then I check the ID and I go, Oh, nope, you can't come in. You're too young. You're 13. Um, so you can't do that. Now what's happening is now I I've captured this 13-year-old information, and or if they sometimes they have to show the ID of their parents because kids don't have IDs. So now their family's information and address and all the stuff is in my database as a decline transaction. Um that that creates a breadcrumb trail, and it it is the process, effectively what I'm doing is I'm I'm censoring them. So in order to age verification is, by definition, fundamentally censorship. We are sent the idea is to censor things for young people so that if the things are dangerous, we don't let them access it. Right? That's that's the basic idea. But if that that is censorship, the trouble is what is what is the immediate downstream effect of building a censorship system that the government controls? That means that immediately downstream of keeping kids safe on Roblox, keeping kids safe on Instagram, keeping kids safe on Chat GPT is the government defining the list of what is safe. AKA defining the list of what is allowed. What information are you allowed to access? And then now that that system exists, uh historically speaking, anytime we build a central information system, that information gets used for other things. And so we saw this with um the uh I have the word censorship in my head, and now I can't think of the actual um the census.

SPEAKER_02 16:00

Oh, right.

SPEAKER_01 16:02

The US Census in the early 40s, was it late 30s, early 40s, went around and asked everybody to document who you are, where you came from, family background, how many people in the household, all the things, right, that you collect on a census. And on the form where they asked people to give over all their private information, it said, like, this is protected by law. And there was actually laws put in place as um in order to enable that census to occur that were very protective. They were like, this is very private data, and we never want it to get misused. And then they collected the data. Now, back then they didn't have databases, they had filing cabinets, which is the set that is an analog database. A database is a digital filing cabinet. So they put all this stuff in filing cabinets. And then Pearl Harbor happened, and then we're like, okay, the the executive branch and the US military were like, we need to know where all the Japanese people are because they could be the enemy. Oh, we actually have a list of them in a in a filing cabinet from the census. Oh, but we can't access that list because it's protected by law. Okay, well, it turns out that laws, I like to think about laws as policies. Policies are temporary. Policies can be changed. The information that's gathered as a result of a law or a policy doesn't change. But the policy that manages the information is temporary. And so that's what happened. So then the president of the United States at the time signed an executive order that canceled the privacy protection laws, that then gave the census information to the law enforcement entities that went to all the Japanese-American homes with a gun and took them and put them in internment camps for three years. None of them were um accused of a crime or convicted of a crime, yet they were imprisoned for three years and then came back to all of their homes and businesses having been occupied and/or sold or destroyed. So when you gather information in a central place by a government, you should be extremely careful and/or aka don't gather the information. The only way to protect people's information is to not gather it. And age verification laws fundamentally function based on the gathering of information and are based on functionally a censorship system, neither of which we want, neither of which keep kids safe, neither of which have anything to do with the problems that we're trying to talk about when it comes to kids being on the internet. The entire thing is irrelevant. And so I'll, you know, I could go on for this all day, and I'm and we will, I think, but I'll pause there for a minute because just you know, to let you kind of chime in too. But this that that's the fundamentals of of these things. And then I think there are correct solutions, and then we and then we'll let's talk about those two.

Databases, Hacks, And Third Parties

SPEAKER_00 19:14

Yeah. So you you make a really good point about how this creates a database. And I think a lot of people don't really understand that database aspect of these policies, you know, because they they a lot you'll hear a lot of people compare it to the examples that you gave. You walk into a bar, you have to give your ID. Yeah, but it's not, you know, the bartender isn't keeping it and watching where I go after I leave the bar and where I, you know, came from before I got there, and you know, how many times did I use the bathroom and all of those things. Um, you you made a really good point about this database, which I think is really important. And one of the things I want to ask you about before we move on is that a lot of these uh age verification in practice are going to roll out is through third-party age verification companies. Um, and there is an association called the Age Verification Providers Association. They're actually out of the UK, but they are lobbying heavily in the United States, where they represent all of these third-party age verification providers. So let's say that we have, let's just use Meta as an example, Facebook, Instagram. They're going to use a third party to do their age verification, let's say. So, how does that in terms of the database? Because now we've added it's not just a transaction between me and Meta. Now we've got, you know, the ABC age verification company that's that's in the mix now, too. What does that add to this whole data collection, data privacy and security process?

SPEAKER_01 20:58

It adds a lot of opportunities for mistakes and a lot of opportunities for intentional collection and sale and leverage of people's private information. Um I will say, and I think it's important to recognize that there's the age verification piece itself, there's different ways to do it. There are ways that require databases, and those databases have already been hacked. So, like the French government just got hacked by a 15-year-old. Um, Discord's age verification uh third party partner got hacked. Um I think it was Twitter's age verification partner got hacked for like a year, year and a half before everybody even found out that they were hacked. Um, which by the way is the best the best types of hacks are the ones that are persistent because a hacker doesn't want to go in once and then get caught. They want to go in there and live in there. Forever. Right, right. And then, and then and then that happens all the time. That's happening right now to a bunch of places that we don't know because they haven't gotten found out yet.

SPEAKER_00 22:08

Right. We only know the ones that have gotten caught.

SPEAKER_01 22:11

Right. Yeah. And there's a lot of those, but there's a lot that don't get caught. And I know the guys that do it who are professionals at not getting caught. That's a thing. That's so just because we don't know about it doesn't mean it's not happening. Now, so there's ways to do it where you can do imagine you go into a government office because you you want to go to the bar, but you don't want to show the bartender where you live on your ID. So the government comes up with a program where you go to the you go to a government office and you show the government your ID, and then they give you a little green check mark that you carry around that has a stamp of the government on the back of it. And then you go to the bar and you show them the green check mark and they go, Oh, you have an official green check mark. You can go in. I don't need to know, I don't even need to see your ID. We in the digital world we call that a token. So you can issue tokens to people where they they validate their ID once with a central provider, and then they're issued a secure token, and that token gets given to Instagram and Chat GPT and so on, and the token is either green or red. You have been verified that you're allowed, or you've been verified that you're not. And so I bring it up because there's a lot of conversation around the security of the age verification process itself. And a lot of people get hung up on fair enough, on like how do we do this age verification thing? It's almost mostly done wrong. Like nobody's there's there's very few entities that are actually trying to do it right. It's expensive to do it right, it's annoying to do it right. However, as it turns out, it doesn't matter. Because regardless of how secure the age verification process is, you still have to build censorship infrastructure. You're still building a censorship system, which means that when I take my green check mark and I and I show my token, and that token, as it turns out, is issued by the US or it knows that I'm in the US, and the U.S. government has decided that my token is not allowed to see as an adult, because now it's a censorship infrastructure. They've decided to use the censorship infrastructure, which they will. That's a I I would bet for sure. Well, it is to possibly bet that is almost a guarantee. You can be sure that they will use the censorship infrastructure. That and and right now we don't have that in the US. Some countries do. China has a censored internet, they have what they call the great firewall. No internet traffic leaves China or enters China without going through a government filter. Now, the U.S. does that to a certain extent, but not as much as other countries. And it's not personalized, it's generalized. This is a personalized, individualized censor. So my broader argument or suggestion to people is it doesn't matter how we do age verification.

Censorship Infrastructure And Mission Creep

SPEAKER_01 25:28

The only thing that matters is whether or not we build a censorship infrastructure. And when we do that, because it's already being done, there's already a bunch of states in the U.S., there's already a handful of countries around the world that have already built the censorship infrastructures. We're seeing it now in Utah. Utah passed their App Store Accountability Act. They passed an age verification law. Guess what they're doing now? Because it didn't work, now they're trying to make VPNs illegal. A VPN is nothing but a vehicle with which to access the internet. The state government of Utah is now saying is now directly violating the First Amendment of every citizen, not just kids, because this affects everybody. And that's just step one downstream. Step two is oh, well, that didn't work either. So now what we're gonna say is we don't want anybody, and in fact, you have this with uh with porn. So porn in Utah, and then I'm in Idaho. In Idaho as well, the state governments have decided that you can't access porn without age verification, and so they they've already started censoring the internet. Um and so that that's actually yes, age verification by itself is problematic from a privacy perspective, but it pales in comparison to the concept of building a universal censorship system that can be used to censorship individuals regardless of their age. That that is the problem these laws create, and that is something that we need to avoid however we can possibly avoid. Nobody should be censored by strangers who get to tell me or you what information we can access. That is I I have the book right here.

SPEAKER_00 27:23

1984. Yep, yep, it's very 1984. I have it on my bookshelf too. Um, and I think you know, you really like like censorship is it sounds like kind of your big um big alarm on this bill, in addition to the data collection, data privacy, and the surveillance that these cause. And um that's a I I don't really drill down on this censorship as much as I do the other things, but you know, the way that you're talking about it, it is such a critical piece of these policies, all of these tech policies, whether it's age verification or it's you know, COSA, their duty of care. And we're gonna get into that a little bit later. Um, all of these things, it is like you said, it is censorship and it is someone else. It's the government deciding who can access what information and what is the, you know, what's the ticket? You know, what's the cost of you being able to access that information and it's your data?

SPEAKER_01 28:22

100%. And and so and and and ever all the above are all problems, and they all coexist in these in these bills. And and I think there's like a fundamental thing underneath is who is responsible, and more specifically, who is accountable for the safety of other individuals, old or young? The answer is nobody. Nobody is responsible for Julie's safety, nobody is responsible for Ben's safety, and I'm responsible for my safety. Okay, so that's for adults. Okay, how about for kids? Who is responsible and who is accountable for the safety of my son? I am, and my wife is, and that's it. Yep, amen. Now we can we can extend that accountability under our own decision and free will to grandma, to uncle, to cousin, to friend, to whoever. But we are the ones that are accountable, and the way that you know that is who takes care of the kid if they get hurt? That's the accountable party. Yeah, but uh a glob in DC that nobody's ever met doesn't take care of your kid when they get hurt, nor will they ever, nor should they. Right. And so that that's where this stuff, like underneath, you know, if you're like, okay, why are we doing this? We're doing this because we want our kids to be safe. Why do we want our kids to be safe? We because safety is not the goal, safety is not the ultimate, like, aha, we're safe. We made it. Safe is a means to an end. Safe is a component in living a life that the the the end is freedom, happiness, love, and and so let's talk about uh freedom because that's that's where this stuff really comes into play.

SPEAKER_00 30:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:36

You so first of all, let me let me talk about what I mean by freedom. Freedom to say whatever you want to say without somebody coming to hurt you as a result of you saying it. Freedom of you traveling wherever you want to travel, without somebody stopping you in the middle of the road to check your papers. And that's digital too. That's physical and digital. Um, freedom of working wherever you want to work, without somebody saying, like, oh no, your political affiliations preclude you from, you know, I can't hire you, I'm not allowed to. Um, freedom of living where you want to live, freedom of loving whoever you want to love, right? That's what I'm talking about when it comes to freedom. I'm talking about human expression, human freedom. Can my kid become a free individual to do whatever he's meant to do without somebody else telling him, no, you can't do that because I've decided that you're in a database and I've already I've already X'd you out of that possibility. I don't want anybody Xing anybody out of any possibilities. Um, so that's what I like. I want my kid to be safe so he can be free. So I want freedom. So if we if we do age verification, on its face, it's a privacy violation. Yes. And if you violate privacy, you then eliminate the potential for freedom because you cannot have freedom without privacy. Because if you have somebody constantly watching you and surveilling you and controlling you, you're not free. Right. And so it's counter if we if we if we just go all the way to the end of like, what are we trying to do? What do we want? These age verification laws do not get us there, they get us to a different place that does not have freedom, that does not have privacy, that does not allow me to view whatever information I want to view, which is not what I want. And I think if anybody thinks about it, it's not what they want either, right? Even though it's scary.

SPEAKER_00 32:42

Yeah, and I think when you lay it out the way you do, it makes it really clear to people exactly what is going on. And hopefully, people that think that this, you know, age verification for to download apps, that sounds good. Hopefully, as they hear you laying it out there in such a clear way, they're they are kind of thinking about it going, oh, maybe that's not exactly what I had in mind. Um, because I think, especially for those of us that um don't have the background that you do, you know, in cybersecurity and technology, um, don't have as much knowledge of it. And so we don't necessarily maybe understand all of the different implications that these policies are going to have.

Digital Footprints And Child Privacy

SPEAKER_00 33:26

Um, I want to talk a little bit while we're kind of on this data collection. All of this creates our digital footprint, right? Like what we're posting on social media. Um, you know, when we post pictures of our kids on our Facebook or, you know, on X or whatever your social media is. And then we give our kids um uh an iPhone, let's say, and they've got their own social media accounts. My kids are between the ages of 20 and 30 now. So, you know, we're we're kind of out of that age. And and it really started, my oldest, you know, it really started to come, you know, come out, you know, all these, all this technology advanced while she was going through school. And so, you know, I think I was kind of among the first generation of digital parents. Um, and so your kid gets back then, you had to be, I think, over 13 to create a Facebook account. Um, and you're sharing pictures, you're sharing, you know, where you're going, you're checking in at places, whether it's the gym or church or what have you. So we're creating this digital footprint, right? I don't like I feel like as parents, we have a responsibility to protect our child's digital footprint because it's something that never goes away. You know, when you and I were probably, you know, out of high school applying for jobs as teenagers, no one could go back and look at what we posted online and make a hiring decision based on our social media posts, but they can and they do do that now. So don't we also have a responsibility to our kids to sort of protect them from themselves in creating a digital footprint they don't want to carry through life?

SPEAKER_01 35:13

Absolutely. I think that's that's a really great question. And I think that I look at it like this our children's privacy is is is a fundamental thing to protect because without it, they can't become free. They can't be free. They don't understand what it is, they don't understand the value of it, and they won't until they're adults or maybe just more mature. Some you know, some kids mature faster than others, of course. And so I I think it's also worth stating that their privacy does not belong to us, right? It's theirs. But we are, I think, along the lines of what you're saying, we are the stewards, we should be the stewards of their privacy. Because they can't protect it themselves, they don't even know what it is, right, for the most part. It's on us to take that and steward their privacy to uh minimize it's how it if it gets violated, ideally not at all, and to maximize the awareness on why it's valuable. Now, this is this is where I I think this is one of the reasons why this conversation is as complicated as it is, is because here I am talking about the fact that kids don't know how to value their own privacy. Well, as it turns out, the vast majority of adults don't either. Right. Because if you if you tell somebody, you know, oh, I want to have the freedom of speech and I don't want the government prosecuting me for saying the wrong things or controlling what I say or what I read. And then people say, Well, uh, you know, I'm not saying anything wrong, and so I don't have a problem with it. It's like, no, I'm like that, that, that's a flawed premise. Like you you if you give if you let somebody else control what you're allowed to say, you're no longer free. And then you and then there's all the things I listed earlier all fall apart to speak, to move, to love, to live, to work. That's all just that's just a that's the waterfall that that falls down. Um and so I think that's like a hard place to to like that that's a that's a one of the reasons why I talk about this stuff publicly a lot, is try to just impress upon people the importance of privacy and the value of their own privacy so that they can share that with their kids. Because I think one of the things is like we didn't like generally speaking, the current uh generations of humans that are alive right now, like especially in the US, did not have to earn the privacy that we have, even though a lot of it's been taken. The privacy that we do have, we didn't earn it. It was given to us. And so we're in easy mode. And so therefore it's easy to take for granted. For sure. Um, you know, but then you look at the the census thing, you look at um all the stuff that happened after 9-11 where where the government destroyed privacy in the name of safety, which is ironic because you can't be safe if you're not private by definition. Um, and just started surveilling everybody. Everybody, every phone call, every text message, every email, every social media post of everybody on the planet, including US citizens that had not been accused of or convicted of a crime.

SPEAKER_02 38:49

Right.

SPEAKER_01 38:49

And so when we start moving into it, it it puts us, we we live in a world now of pre-crime. Everybody's focused on, well, we have to prevent the crime, and we're gonna do that by implementing laws and penalties that prevent the crime. And we're and tell you what, just don't worry about your privacy. We'll keep you safe. You know, the government will keep you safe, which is not true because they're not accountable. If you get hurt, who comes to help? They don't, right? So therefore, they're not accountable, therefore they have nothing to do with it. It's irrelevant, it's it's a false premise. And so I think like helping people understand why privacy is important, like what the world looks like without privacy. Um, you know, you have like I don't know, I keep what keeps coming to mind too is you have groups like uh like Palantir that they're in the business of what they do, and this is what they've done from the beginning, um, because I remember using their stuff a little bit when they were early, like 20 plus years ago. They go and help government entities access the databases of other government entities. So, like typically a database in Medicare is not accessible by an employee at the Department of Treasury or an employee at the FBI. But Palantir sells software to the FBI or to the CIA or to all the other law enforcement intelligence communities that they say, hey, we've already established all the database connections. And if you buy Palantir, you get access to all that. And so now you have uh Department of Homeland Security agents going around with faulty facial recognition profiles, holding people at gunpoint, yeah, and having identified where they live and where they are based on their Medicare records. Right? Like the the that is that's a picture of a violation of privacy.

SPEAKER_02 40:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:51

Because the government provided healthcare to Medicare recipients and then stored all the data in their filing cabinets, in their digital filing cabinets. And because of the privacy violation, that data is now given to third parties. And the people that that gave the data in the first place, they weren't asked for permission, you know, because that data no longer belongs to them. When you give data to somebody else, when you put your data on somebody else's filing cabinet or servers, it's theirs now. Yep, yeah. Once you give it, you don't get it back. The internet is permanent, the internet is public, you know. So the the privacy thing, I think, is is a massive um thing. Like, yes, we must be stewards of our kids' privacy. And so therefore, we must uh uh fight against these attempts at violating their privacy.

SPEAKER_00 41:46

Yeah. Yeah. And it's, you know, we're hearing so much right now about flop cameras, um, you know, and those the ALPRs, the automatic license plate readers have been, you know, installed uh very quietly at local levels throughout across the country. Um and they can do a lot more than just take pictures of license plates. They are really, you know, tracking movements and and different devices besides just your car. You know, if you've got your cell phone with you, you know, your your phone is a is a surveillance device, right? So you're there every, you know, if you get sometimes you can get uh, I think Google does it where it will show you all the places you went this month, which I think is kind of creepy.

SPEAKER_01 42:29

Um yeah, it's a good reminder that you are being followed. Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:35

Yeah, and that's like what we're seeing with these policies is government mandating more data collection for these tech companies.

SPEAKER_01 42:47

Yes. Right. It's because because it's easy to take for granted because we've already been doing it, so we might as well just do more.

SPEAKER_00 42:54

Yeah, why not? And that's one of the arguments that supporters of age verification use is well, you're already giving them all that data anyway. Um you know, so may and maybe you can address uh address that point, like because we're already, you know, using an iPhone and have an Apple, you know, account, what is it, iCloud account. Does that mean then that I should be okay with government mandating age verification?

SPEAKER_01 43:23

Absolutely not. Um when you so right now all of the internet systems you use are disparate, which means when you have an Apple account, Apple knows about you. But that Apple account mean doesn't mean that Google knows what's in the Apple account, right? And Apple doesn't share that with Google. Same if you have a Google account, Google knows about you, but Apple does not if you don't have an Apple account, right? They don't know what goes on in your Google. These are disparate, separate, disconnected systems. When you centralize The identity layer it connects the dots of all the systems. So now everything you do has the potential to be followed. You you leave a personally identified breadcrumb with every single click of your mouse and tap on your screen. That which is what facilitates the censorship infrastructure. Because then that's that's where as you move around the internet, they go, Oh yeah, we know you. You are not allowed to see this and this and this. And then you go to Wikipedia and you go to Facebook and there's posts, and then you come to a post that says restricted, you know, or it's just not show it at all, really. More more likely. Uh, you don't even know people that are being censored don't know that they're being censored. It's not announced that like uh this information was removed, they don't leave a sign behind telling you that they removed your information, they just remove it and you never know that you're even missing it. And and so it's it's it's an invisible monster. But the moment that you collect data, and the moment you can that you take the data that's collected and tie it into can you access X, that's a problem. That is now a permanent, forever censorship infrastructure, and the only things that bureaucracies know how to do, and I'm not criticizing any of the people that administer bureaucracies, the nature of bureaucracies is that they are only incentivized to grow. Yes, and if it's a security mechanism, it will never ever go away because speaking of accountability, whichever politicians cancel a security mechanism will be the ones that never get voted in again during the next emergency. So true. So, like, if okay, let's say that there was a different version of events after 9-11, the Twin Towers fall, building seven falls all by itself just for funsies, and we won't even talk about that. Yeah, that's another podcast that happens, and then bam, all of a sudden we create this gigantic agency called the Department of Homeland Security. Out of thin air, there's 230,000 employees that just appeared.

SPEAKER_00 46:27

And didn't TSA wasn't TSA a result of 9-11 as well?

SPEAKER_01 46:33

Yeah, all the nature of the way we travel, now there's agents at at bus stations that try to tell you what buses you can get on. Like just because I'm flying in the air, now the government gets to tell me, you know, what I can do. And so all these laws get passed that are super inappropriate, super obtrusive, completely deleted the privacy of every single person on the planet. If six months later, a year later, five years later, yeah, because that was in 2001, let's say it's 2005, there's some new crop of politicians, they they propose a thing, they go, we don't like being surveilled, we don't like having to take our shoes off at the airport, we don't like some government employee that gets to tell us where we can go. Because by the way, if you can't, if you don't have freedom of travel, you don't have freedom. That's what the TSA is, that's not freedom. They you they I don't like all that. So I'm a I'm a politician. I've gathered up all my friends who are also politicians, and we're we've passed a law that says we're gonna cancel all that. They cancel all that, and then there's another event that occurs. All those guys' careers are over. Yep, so there's a there's a disincentive to get rid of security mechanisms. So the moment you place a security mechanism in a government bureaucracy, it's permanent. Yeah, and it will only grow, it will never shrink and it will never go away. So that's why I think it's it's like age verification by itself, if it stayed as it was, is problematic. However, it's not going to stay that way, right? The Utah thing is a tiny little example. We're gonna see a bunch more of that. They will grow, they will shift. The moment there's another emergency, that is going to be used immediately. Because look at what happens when there's emergencies in countries that already have active censorship. What happened in Iran when they had protests? They shut the internet off.

SPEAKER_00 48:29

Yep, yep.

SPEAKER_01 48:30

Right? They they censored it. What happens in all the countries that have that type of control? They shut off the information. And the government doesn't own the internet, they behave like they do, but they don't.

SPEAKER_00 48:43

Right.

SPEAKER_01 48:44

The government is a distributed, decentralized system that isn't owned by any individuals. However, they do have the levers to pull to try to filter it, and this is a way that they're building the system that will enable that functionality that they currently don't have. And we should definitely not do that. Right. That is that is nothing but regrettable.

App Store Accountability Act Problems

SPEAKER_00 49:08

Yeah, and that's why, you know, I call this a digital ID framework because that's exactly what it is. And I'm glad you brought up the fact that these policies they don't ever go away, they only grow, which is why, you know, with these policies specifically, the mission creep is so strong. They're not going to stay where they are. And that's exactly what we've seen with these laws that have passed. And you mentioned Idaho, Utah, Louisiana, Texas, Florida. Um, funny that they're all red states, by the way, um for age verification for adult content websites. You know, that's kind of where this started back in 2022, 23. And now it's it's you know, expanding to the app store and to AI chatbots and to the operating system. In fact, um a company called that rhymes with Cornhub uh put out a letter last week to lawmakers across the country as well as in DC, saying that the age verification at the website level wasn't good enough. And so they want the a federal law to be made for uh age verification at the operating system level, specifically to Microsoft, Google, and Apple. Now, this isn't because Cornhub cares about protecting kids, they just want the liability and the work to go to Microsoft, Apple, and Google, get themselves off the hook. But that is a perfect example of where these policies are going. Now, if you get a new, you know, MacBook, you've got to complete age verification before you can even use a computer. That's where this is going.

SPEAKER_01 50:53

It's it's so troublesome. Yeah, in the UK, if you buy an iPhone, you have to scan your face in order to set it up. It's it's horrific. Um, it's and and that's exactly right. It is a game of hot potato of liability. Yep. And ironically, the game exists because of laws that are meant to protect children. So there was a law passed in 1998 called COPA, which is the Children's Online Privacy and Protection Act. That law is why you see the age 13 on software systems. Like you mentioned earlier, you can't sign up for Facebook if you're if you're under 13. Which, like, they'll let you sign up, but they just have to say that because if they don't say that, then they become liable. And so the reason, one of the reasons why the internet is so dangerous today for kids is because of that law. Like what there we we must always look at what are the potential unintended consequences, what incentive structures get created when we mandate certain behaviors and when we attach liability to certain entities for protecting strangers. Yeah. And it it does nothing but cause unintended consequences. And so, as a result, because COPA has a phrase that says that if you have actual knowledge, that's how it's phrase, actual knowledge that a person that's using your system is under the age of 13, you take liability for their safety. Okay, so what happened as a result? The obvious thing that anybody would imagine would happen. All the companies go, okay, well, then I don't want to know how old my people are. Because if I have actual knowledge, then I'm liable. So I don't want actual knowledge, so I want no knowledge. So now we can't build systems that would actually be designed for children, because if a big company designs a system for children, they would have to have actual knowledge that those are children, which means they take liability, which means that they've never designed those systems. That's why Google doesn't have an actual system, well, maybe amongst other reasons, doesn't have an actual kid system. That's why Apple doesn't have an actual kid system. That's why Microsoft doesn't have an actual kid system. All this stuff is built for adults, and they're like, do not tell us if it's a kid. So these laws cause a lot of problems. And in fact, the current, all this liability hot potato that is the real cover or the real thing behind the um all these age verification laws. Because like the App Store Accountability Act says in there that it it uh removes liability of the software developers that are causing the harm. It passes the liability to the app store vendors. It's just a hot potato game, it's not a safety game. And so it's especially ironic. The game exists because of an existing child safety law. That if that law was never created to begin with, the internet would currently be safer for kids. And we wouldn't be sitting here talking about mechanisms with which to create a censorship infrastructure. So it's the it's the account, I I that's why I keep saying the word accountability, because the way that you identify uh who should be involved in decisions is based on who's accountable. So if I if my family's well-being uh is the accountability of my family and my extended family and my friends, maybe my church. When some stranger comes along in a suit or in any form or wearing a badge and says, I'm here to keep you safe. Well, sir, I'm sorry, but that's can't be true because you're not accountable for my safety. So there's something else going on here. Like there, there's there's a a boundary that gets defined if you look at where the accountability lies. The moment you cross the boundary of you can have opinions about my safety all you want, but I don't care what your opinions are because you're not accountable for me. Right. I'm accountable for me because I live in a place that is underpinned the slogan of the place that we live in in the United States, all the spirit of the United States is independence and freedom. You can't have freedom if you don't have privacy. You cannot have independence if you are dependent. If you're dependent on some stranger who's pretending to be accountable for your safety, you are therefore not independent. The spirit of independence and freedom is what is a source of pride and has been a source of pride and should be a source of pride and should be something that people desire because that underpins humanity, because you cannot be a joyous, loving, happy person unless you are free. It if you're not free, it dampens humanity.

SPEAKER_02 56:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 56:09

And so the there's like a there's a beautiful sort of simplicity that just comes out of identifying the accountability boundary. And that way, if somebody outside that boundary has an opinion uh about safety, it's like I don't really care what their opinion is. Yeah. Now, if they're gonna come along and put me in jail because I violated a thing they wrote on a piece of paper that's about my safety, then that's where that's that's why we do these things that we're doing. It's why we're having this conversation because they operate the prisons and we don't. Right. And they can come and take us and put them in put us in those prisons or come and take and reach into our bank accounts and take our money if we don't play. Right. But I don't want to play. I want to take, I want to look after myself and my family and my friends. I want to be free and I want to be independent. And if if if um if a if a politician wants to help, I appreciate that, but that's also generally irrelevant.

SPEAKER_00 57:10

Right. Yeah, that I mean the like you said, the simplicity of it, of you know, who is a that question of who is accountable. And when we when we start with that question, it at least to me, it's very clear, right? I'm I don't co-parent with the government, therefore I am accountable for my children and my family. Um, and so that's a I think you're you're right. That that just simplifies it to a really um root level that's pretty easy, I would hope, for most of us to to understand. I want to start kind of diving into some of these specific policies. You mentioned the App Store Accountability Act. So let's start with that. We've already talked about you know in detail about age verification. And so just for people that haven't heard about this bill, it's the App Store Accountability Act. It's been passed in four states Utah, Texas, Louisiana, and then this year it passed in Alabama. There's already lawsuits, um, and there's a um actually, I think it's tomorrow or Wednesday, the Texas bill has a hearing in the uh has oral arguments in the Fifth Circuit. Um, and what the App Store Accountability Act does is it requires age verification at the App Store level. So Apple and Google will have to verify your age before you can download any apps. And all of these bills are slightly different. Um, some of them might be might not include the pre-installed apps that are on your phone, but some of them do include that. And so if you want to download, if you want to, you know, you'd have to age verify to be able to text message, to use Safari, to use the weather app, the things that come pre-installed on your phone. And then you have to age verify for a child as well. And for a child to download apps, they need to be linked to a parent account. And then the parent gives permission for the child to download apps. All of this technology is currently available in both the Apple and Google family that they have on their phones. Um, you can restrict downloads, you can create uh boundaries around times that they can spend on apps, downloads from, you know, in-app purchases. The thing that the App Store Accountability Act does not do, they say it makes things safer for children. So they're not accessing content that they shouldn't be. However, once they go through that download process, they've been age verified, they've downloaded the app, all of the in-app dangers are still there. Nothing inside of the app itself has changed. So if your kid is like talking to strangers on Snapchat, those strangers didn't go away. All of the dangers are still there. Now, then one of the things I've struggled with with this particular policy, and I've brought it up as I've testified in legislatures around the country, this parent-child relationship that is established through this policy. None of the bills that I have seen outline how that relationship is to be made. After what our family went through in Washington State, I see all of this through a different lens and I see how other parents other people can insert themselves between the parent and the child. How from a technology, I guess it's for Apple and Google to figure out how that relationship is going to be made. But that's very concerning to me. Like, how do we ensure that only a real parent is actually the parent in that relationship? And and then what kind of data, like what kind of information will you have to provide to prove that you're the parent?

SPEAKER_01 1:00:56

Yeah, because effectively it's it's uh it's a non-starter. Like you can't you can't validate that. And so then what happens is either A, it's ineffective, which is what will happen initially, it's it's just a waste of time. Um, or B the bureaucracy will grow and it will say, Oh, well, that didn't work. And so now we're going to establish a more government validated link up. And in order to access the internet, you gotta go down to the passport office and then show your thing and give your fingerprints, and then we check your birth records, and then if you're an adopted parent, we have that on file too, and if you're a blood parent, we have that on file. And then we will then decide what we want you to be able to do or not based on that. So it's it's one of those or both of those things together, perhaps. Um and that and that's I I'm glad you brought that up. That these like age verification doesn't even address the problems that need to

The Two Real Dangers Online

SPEAKER_01 1:01:59

be addressed. Right. In a in a very simple form, there are two problems that exist on the internet, and well, now a third with AI, but the two problems are addictive algorithms, aka social media, aka like bottomless feeds. Anytime you scroll and it doesn't stop, that's an addictive algorithm. That's how you know right. That's the that's how you identify the problem. That problem has caused a tripling, a 300% increase of suicide rates amongst 10 to 14-year-olds in the time span between 2007 when the iPhone came out and 2019. And there's actually data after 2019, but I stopped, I stopped my analysis there so that I could exclude COVID data because that affected the suicide rates. Yeah, yeah. So from 2007 to 2019, 10 to 14-year-old children, and I hate I I don't like saying this out loud, like it's uncomfortable to say. But they started killing themselves much, much, much more often to the point where if you look at the current top causes of death for children of that age range, suicide is number two. And that is that's from data from the CDC and from the WHO mortality database. I downloaded their whole database and went through it. So that's problem number one. It's a mental health, emotional health thing. Addictive algorithms are really bad for your head. What's in your head? Problem number two is anonymous chat. So any system that allows a stranger to communicate with your child is extremely risky. There are global criminal networks that focus a bunch of their energy on extorting children because they are vulnerable and they can trick them into sending naked photos. And the moment they send them a naked photo, they bribe them in exchange for iTunes gift cards. This happens all the time. It's one of the fastest growing crimes. It's called sex tortion. It's done by two groups of people. You have sexual predators who are just the creeps that do it because they think that they, whatever, they want to, need to, whatever it is that their sickness has. And then there's the criminal networks that are doing it for profit. So those are the two problems that exist that parents need to think about. Because if you address those two problems, you you eliminate most of the risks that involve uh a kid being on the internet. And that covers a lot of the internet.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:35

Yeah, it does.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:36

Addictive algorithms and anonymous chat is like, well, that that eliminates a bunch of problems, including all the companies that we're talking about with this age verification thing. So those are the two problems. Now, if you take those, okay, cool, that's a current state analysis. That is the those are the problems that exist right now. If you do age verification, it does not affect those problems at all. At all. In any way whatsoever. So what are we trying to do? Like what I had a uh boss back in the day. I used to work for BlackBerry, and his signature question was, what problem are you trying to solve? You know, we would come with an idea, we would come with a thing, we should do this this way or do this that way. What problem are you trying to solve? Think about it, think about it. I don't know, let me think about it. And we'd talk it through and find out that, like, oh, I'm I'm trying to solve the wrong problem. I don't know. My my solution, my idea versus the problem, they don't meet up. They're they're opposite, you know. But but if if you just ask what problem are we trying to solve, well, addictive algorithms cause a suicide epidemic.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:51

And anonymous chat cause one of the fastest growing crimes that currently exists, which is directly specifically targeting children. Those are the problems. How do you address those problems? You address those problems via education and via community. Yep. That is the parents getting educated such that they can educate their children and they can lead by example and having a healthy relationship with technology, where they're not absorbed in their own addictive algorithms all the time. Because there are six billion people in the world that are taken by these addictive algorithms. So education is number one. Community is number two. Because guess what community has? Accountability. Age verification laws have nothing to do with the problems at all. Because, like you said, the problem stays right there. And then look what just happened in Australia. Australia goes like, oh, we banned social media for under 16. Well, guess what? No, they didn't. Because the vast majority of the kids that are using social media are still using social media. Yeah. They've done nothing but just instill censorship structure in their government. That's the only thing they actually did. And Australia is real good at that stuff. They are they operate just like we do, they operate a very dystopian society from a government perspective. And and so it's it's it's almost hilarious in when you look at it through that angle of like, what are we doing? Okay, like hold on, let's level set here. Like, let's get back to we already have age verification where it needs to be, which is in the mind of the parent of the child. I know how old my child is. I don't care if somebody else wants to know how old my kid is. That's irrelevant. I know how old my kid is. I can use the free tools that come with the device if I choose to give him a device, which is by the way, you don't have to do that. Right. This is all consensual. Everything we're talking about limiting, this is all consensual. Nobody forced us to give an iPhone to the kid. Nobody forced me to give an iPad to my kid. Nobody forced me to let my kid use Instagram, which I specifically I don't do that, but a lot of people do. Yeah, nobody forced me to give my kid Snapchat. Nobody forced me to let my kid play Roblox, right? This is all consensual. And so if we're trying to solve the problems, the solutions are rooted in education and community. And they're both hard. The attractiveness of the government is that it's easy because the government comes along and says, you don't even have to do anything. Yeah, we'll keep you safe. Just let me check your ID at the door, and I'm gonna store it in my filing cabinet. But don't worry, I'm gonna keep you safe. Oh, and by the way, um all I'm actually doing is making everything worse. Yep.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:56

Uh making everything worse. One of the things, you know, you brought up the the 9-11, like government loves to use a, you know, never let a good crisis go to waste, right? Um, and uh our kids were all, I think we had seventh grade, eighth grade, ninth grade, and tenth grade when COVID hit in our house. So we were full of teenagers. Um, and our school district in western Washington was the first in the country to shut down. Um, but so you have the government that shut things down, forced kids out of school into their homes. They couldn't go places, they couldn't see their friends, they had to do school on a screen, and the only interaction they had with other humans was from behind a screen. And so I bet if you did your research through the COVID period on youth suicides, it would be through the roof. I know we had with um two of our kids spent time in uh residential treatment because of suicidal ideation and other mental health problems. So we've very much uh experienced um just how bad it can be. And there's a a lot of a lot of that comes from online and the devices. And and yet I'm not saying, well, gosh, if only the government had done age verification, this wouldn't have happened to my family, or you know, I should sue Meta because my kid got some bad ideas from Instagram. At the end of the day, it's it's on me. I'm the mom. I gave them the device, I gave them the Wi-Fi access. Um but going back to that point of the government shut these kids in their houses and out of school for a year, maybe more. And in our state, if when I was in Washington, it was two years. Um, and now all these kids are addicted to social media and having all these problems. And so the answer is age verification. The answer is to create these big databases and censorship and surveillance, uh, which I think is a is a point that needs to be talked about more when we hear of these policies, because you know, the government had a hand in in the youth mental health crisis. And the answer is not government mandates, it's it's like you said, it's education and community um and and parents really doing the hard work to solve to solve you know to to address the problem.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:25

Yeah, I think so. And and and and this might sound crazy to some people, but I I have empathy for the politicians that are involved here. Um you know, I I don't know almost all of them, and I've only spoken to a few, but they're in a position where people are coming to them with their problems.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:44

Um, some of the folks I've spoken to say I have constituents that have come to me and said, My child is dead, my son died, because it correlates to Facebook or to whatever and I want you to do something about it. And then he gets another constituent and another constituent because those problems are so big, he's these politicians are getting inbound problem reports and people saying, like, I want you to do something about it. And then if they don't do something about it, they don't get elected next time. Because it looks bad if you don't protect kids. Right. Um, and so it's this terrible situation in which, on one hand, as an outsider, it's easy for me to say that the politicians should just say, Look, I'm so sad to hear about your story, but in the most empathetic way I can say it, that has nothing to do with the government. Right. Like, I'm terribly sorry to hear what you're saying. And you know what? We actually have existing mechanisms that have been working for a long time called lawsuits. And we've had a bunch of lawsuits that have already, like, we already have the liability environment that facilitates the lawsuits so that if you want to bring harm to the parties that you think harmed your kid, you can do that. That's currently there's currently like 2,800 families that are part of a collective lawsuit that's running out of LA. There's there's um attorneys general all over the United States that are suing these companies. There's countries all over the world suing these companies. Um, the state of New Mexico, the attorney general for state of New Mexico just successfully sued Meta for $375 million. And oh, by the way, the the state gets to keep all that money. Um and oh, by the way, after they won the lawsuit, they said they want to do age verification, which absolves Meta of liability, which means they won't even have to pay the bill. But there's already the mechanisms in place. Like that's the thing. All the things that are trying to be enacted, we already have all of them. We have age verification where it matters in the parents' mind. Yeah, we have parental control systems that are free, difficult to use. I wrote, I wrote a um an iPhone uh setup guide for parents. That's like if you give your kid an iPhone, you can you can strip off the internet, you can strip off the app store, you can strip off the camera, you can even strip out the color, you can make it black and white, you can turn it into a boring device where if you do it right, you could give it to a three-year-old and they cannot access anything dangerous. They'd have a phone and maps and whatever you wanted them to have. That guide is 82 pages long and it has 330 screenshots in it because it's so hard to set up an iPhone correctly. But nonetheless, the tools are there. Yeah, and iPhone Apple specifically is actually improving them this September. The update is gonna make it easier. Uh it's still not easy enough, but easier. Um the tools exist, the legal tools, the protective tools, the age verification tools. The these age verification laws, the the only new things they create are damage. That's that's the net effect, is it just makes everything worse.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:07

Yeah. Now I have to ask you something because as you were saying about your um packet that's 80 pages long, I realized that that's been used by Meta's uh folks in testimony in state legislatures to tell them how um how difficult it is for parents to set up parental controls, and that's why they need age verification. Were you aware of that?

SPEAKER_01 1:15:34

Only a little bit. I I was I was um on one of the South Dakota State Senate hearings for their um App Store Accountability Act, and I was listening to people's testimonies, and somebody referenced that iPhone guy. And and and I was like thinking of myself, I was like, that's me. Like I that's you know, little did I know. And and fair, like, you know, I one of the reasons that that people know about that is because I've made videos about it. Like I made a video where I addressed Tim Cook and like, Tim, look, dude, I realize you have a hard job. I I stated the problems as I've stated them here. You know, we have a problem with algorithms, we have a problem with with with predators. You know, here's here's the shape and the size of the problem. If Apple were to address this problem, it would legit help millions, if not, I don't know, hundreds of millions, whatever, kids all over the world. And so it's yeah, the tools are hard to use. And and so then therefore, don't give your kid the thing that's full of risk. That's hard because imagine your kid turns 16, they get a car, they get their driver's license, you send them off with no training whatsoever. Here's the keys, have fun, good luck. I hope you make it back home. Oh, and by the way, your car doesn't have seatbelts or airbags or and the brakes aren't really that good because I couldn't figure out how to put them in. Right. The car didn't come with them, and then they gave me the seatbelt in a box and they said it was free, but I had to put it in myself and it required welding. And I didn't know how to do any of that so that you don't have seatbelts. And then the airbags I had to put in myself. I don't know how to disassemble a steering wheel and a and connect a wiring harness and so that you don't have airbags. And and the brakes, it came with brakes, but the the hydraulics don't work, and I don't know how to deal with hydraulic, so you don't have very good brakes, but you know what? Best of luck, here's a 600 horsepower car that can fly you to the moon. Uh see you for dinner, right? Well, tell you what, don't give them the 600 horsepower car without the seatbelts and the airbags and the brakes, because that's extremely risky. And so then you'd be like, You got to take the bus, man. You know, like, or we're just not going to the place where you want to go. You know, you want to have a device because everybody else has one. Well, that doesn't matter. We're not giving you one because it's not a smart thing to do. And because everybody else is doing it is not a good reason to do it. Exactly. In fact, it's a terrible reason to do it. Because do you want to be normal? Do you want to be average? You want to be right in the middle of the bare the bell curve with the other 90% of the people that aren't making a positive difference in this world? Or do you want to be on the right side of the bell curve where you're not normal by definition because you're above average, because you're educated and because you have a good community, and because you're fortunate enough to, you know, be placed on this planet where not everybody has those things, but some people do. You know, it's it's um like I say, it's all consensual. We uh we are the ones that are giving them the digital drugs, and then it's hard to take them away because of the social dynamics, yeah, but nonetheless, whether we like it or not, nobody is accountable for it but us, right? That's just the reality of the situation, it sucks.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:07

Yep, as parents, our job is to do the hard things, and uh yeah, so what you're saying then is that even though, like even with your 80-page guide that tells parents how to lock down the iPhone or you know, put on a lot of controls, yeah. Even if you put the age verification, you did the App Store Accountability Act, can they then throw out your 80-page guide? Like, are they set then?

SPEAKER_01 1:19:39

That is protection because because the answer is definitely not, you still have to do all that because the age verification did not solve the problem at all. So you still have to do all the same, right? Because if it was actually helpful, but guys, we figured it out. If if if we censor you, then you don't have to do anything else, and it solves the problem. And then everybody goes like, okay, well, I can decide if I want to trade that, even though it's still a bad trade, it's a trade. This isn't even a trade, it's just a pile of garbage, you know. Like the uh, so yeah, no, you still have to do all the things, no matter who's checking your ID and censoring you, you still have to protect the device and go through all the same steps and all the same, you still have to have education, you still have to have community, and you still have to make hard decisions.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:31

Yep. And so I'm I'm excited because I think you're gonna get a second chance to testify on that bill in South Dakota because it died in committee this year. Yeah, I was there and testified in person. You must have been online because I didn't see you there, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:20:50

That and that's why I didn't get to testify, is because they ran out of time for the online people. And I I even was kind of rude and I interrupted the the thing. I remember that. Yeah, and I was like, hey, I would like to testify. Can I testify? And they they said no. Um, but I I tried, you know, I was like, look, I don't know how this works, I've never testified to a Senate before, but like I got stuff to say, and I know what I'm talking about. You know, this is what I do, and I'm and also by the way, I'm the only person in the room who is, I think for the most part, like I'm just me. Yeah, I'm not here representing Meta, I'm not here representing anybody. I was just me. I was just making it so it was the two of us. Good. So perfect.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:32

So it's good to be able to do that. But when you come back next year, you're gonna have to bring it up. You're gonna have to say, so last year somebody used my guide.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:40

I just want to tell you right, yeah, absolutely. I think it's kind of that's kind of crazy to know the way this stuff works, and that's getting referenced as like uh a tool. And Meta, like I've got to hand it to Meta. Um, they're very clever. This is a very, very smart campaign that they are affecting globally, and they are making it happen. Now, I don't like what they're making happen, but I will give them credit for the fact that that's hard to do and they're doing it. And supposedly I've heard they're putting anywhere from 200 to 250 million dollars into this.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:16

Oh, it's a ton of money, and they've been really smart about it. They hit uh conservative think tanks, Christian organizations, parent groups, organizations that people really trust. And so that's one of the reasons why they've gone into these red states. Uh, it's not because all of a sudden big tech has become conservative, quite the contrary, but they have leveraged these organizations and these policy think tanks uh to their benefit. And it's it's working very well for them. You know, it's hard when you've got a pat like I was in Georgia uh testifying in Atlanta, and a pastor testified in support of the bill. I don't think he understood the bill at all, but he said, you know, we got to do this because protect kids, blah, blah, blah. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:06

It sounds good. It does that. That's why it's so genius. It sounds good. You have to dig a couple layers before you go, oh crap, this is actually not that good. But on the surface, I I've actually it's it's been great having conversations like this. And when I talk to people on my podcast or just in general, um, a lot of people come around. Like, I actually ended up on a uh a podcast here in town because I bumped into the podcast host because we're friendly outside of the podcast, and I was telling him about some of this stuff, and he's a real smart dude, and he's really into independence and freedom and stuff. And he was like, Oh, he opened his eyes, like, oh, I thought it was good. I didn't know that it wasn't good, and then I told him why, and he's like, dude, you got to come on the podcast and talk about it. So we did. That's great, and and I think there's a lot of that where people are like, Look, this is so scary, and I don't know what to do, and that sounds really good, and so I think I'm okay with it.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:06

Yep. Well, we are running uh almost to an hour and a half.

COSA Duty Of Care And Incentives

SPEAKER_00 1:24:12

Do you have just a couple minutes? Because I'd love to hit on COSA really quick if you have just a few more minutes and then we'll we'll let you go. You've been very generous with your time.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:21

But uh I'm happy, yeah. Let's let's do it. Um luckily I don't have any uh meetings scheduled after this, so we can yeah, we can talk through it.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:28

Awesome. Okay, so I'm gonna bring up that uh post that I made on X that I showed you uh before we started recording. Um that way we have this as reference. So uh COSA is in a markup committee in the Senate. This is in Congress, so this is in Washington, D.C. In the Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday, August 5th. They're marking up COSA, uh, the Screen Act, which the Screen Act is um uh adult content for websites. So uh thinking of like Cornhub, it would be age verification for that. Uh, and then they're doing an AI privacy act as well as the chatbot act, which is um chatbot has age verification to use um AI chatbots as well as their uh kind of behavior monitoring of your conversations if you are under uh if you're a minor. But of course, how do you know who's a minor? You've got to verify everybody.

unknown 1:25:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:27

Um, so here's so the the thing I wanted to, the the big thing with COSA that I'd like us to talk about is this duty of care. Um, and who's responsible for uh the the process of of what kind of content is coming out? And you talked about these addictive feeds and things that are coming out to our kids. Does duty of care actually like is that going to address that?

SPEAKER_01 1:26:03

I think that I mean it occurs to me that we already have that, you know, kind of like that what we were talking about, the age verification, like we already have these things, like we already have apparently duty of care because we have all these lawsuits that have succeeded. And so there's already a premise of if a if a commercial entity harms an individual and they do so in a way that, you know, is not a is not a wasn't made clear to begin with, right? Like like, hey, like, you know, Roblox markets itself to kids. Does Roblox has have a duty of care in that case? From just like a human perspective, I think, you know, I I could see an argument for that. Um are they accountable to those individual people? No, so it kind of fails the accountability test. You know, but I it it uh when I when I when I think about stuff like that, it it I just think, well, what's actually under the covers here? Because we already have this, I think, right? And I mean I'm curious though to like what are your because I'm I'm learning about this duty of care thing uh you know from scratch here and and uh like COSA, like haven't studied COSA. Yeah. What's your perspective on that? And would you offer me any pushback there? Because I I'm certainly naive on the topic, but it, you know, it seems like, like I say, it just seems like we already have that.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:44

Yeah, so they're gonna have to, they're gonna be le they're gonna be mandated to have to have this this duty of care in their process that they, you know, did took the steps to uh eliminate or reduce these addictive feeds. the harmful content, the substance uh abuse kinds of posts in the in kids' minors feeds. Um so like for me the duty of care isn't the biggest issue with COSA um because to me that's more of like why the tech companies are that's sort of their sticking point because I think it creates um more uh process stuff for them to have to implement in their companies which you know is going to take time and money and and all of that. The biggest thing is they have to uh tailor the experience based on the age of the user. Now COSA specifically says there's no mandate for age verification but it comes back to that should have known piece. So in order to make sure that you're not feeding someone the wrong kind of content without age verification you would have to do a lot of data collection to know how old your users are right like it has the same effect just with a different name.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:15

Right. Even if they say that it's not this but you must also do the thing that that describes you must do the age verification but it's not age verification. Right. But it is um yeah I mean and I think anytime you strap a bunch of regulation to any environment that environment gets dumber and slower and more dangerous. Right. And so if if I'm and and it the the thing that occurs to me too is like a lot of these these laws where they mandate like if you mandate duty of care what's downstream of that is liability. And that is a like if you look at incentive structures you have carrots and you have sticks. Right the stick is I'm gonna hit I'm gonna make it hurt if you don't do the thing I want you to do. And the carrot is I'm gonna give you a reward if you do the thing I want you to do. And this is all stick there's no carrot right where we I get like what problem are we trying to solve? Because if we're trying to solve the problem of when a kid goes on the internet it's extremely dangerous for that kid to be there. And what we want to do is reverse the damage that COPA did and actually provide a carrot for good behavior of hey if you invest in RD that builds kid safe products so that when a kid is given a device the parent does not need an 82 page guide. The device already comes like at when you went through your your your uh checkout cart on the internet and you ordered the device you said it's for like a a child of this age range and I want these filters I want no internet I want no app store I want no camera buy and then it shows up at your house and you take it out of the box and you go hey I got you a present and oh by the way it's not extremely dangerous and risky and I don't have to do anything because it's already done and the company set it up for me and it's completely tamper proof and guys like Ben the family IT guy have already reviewed it and they said it's good if we want that which that's what I want that that is actually a solution to the problem. It's it's one of the solutions it would that would help a lot right now companies can't do that because of the existing regulatory environment so how about we create incentives that are positive that so that because the same thing if if you're a doctor and you're walking down the street and then somebody falls down and has a heart attack you give them CPR um there's a term for that it's a uh Good Samaritan Act. There's a good Samaritan act that says that if that doctor actually ends up not saving the person or they they break their ribs as a result of CPR or whatever that they don't get sued. Right. We need that for technology we need a good Samaritan act for technology so that instead of just focusing on how do we bring a big stick to meta which we already have the stick we don't need another one we have one how about a couple things build something that's a carrot if you're gonna do anything at all. And I'd rather honestly that they didn't do anything at all because it's irrelevant because it doesn't pass the accountability test. But if you're just itching to do something because all of your constituents and you're telling you that if you don't do something they're not going to vote for you then create a carrot that encourages the good behavior that you want to see and implement something that says that for like the state of New Mexico when that $375 million check comes in which it's never going to come in but let's just say that it did they would then take that check and invest it into education. Yep. So that like are you actually trying to solve an actual problem that actually exists how do you do that you do that with positive incentives and you do that via fostering education. Yeah I mean I don't know how else to even like these these bills that you know like are just gonna mandate a duty of care like I'm going to regulate the fact that you have to care right that's nonsense that's literally nonsense. Like we're so far deep down this hole of silliness that we need to step back 10 steps and be like whoa okay hold on what are we trying to do what problem are we trying to solve and what do we want yeah what does that look like and do any of these things get us any of that and the answer is no and because the answer is no what's that well so then I hope I do get to testify again because I I want to say these things.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:14

Yeah you need to testify in in more places because one of the things I've noticed is that most of these legislators on these committees they don't understand how this they don't they they just know the talking points that they've been given by um the you know meta's coalition that's out there telling them empower parents put parents back in the driver's seat all these nice sounding things um and they don't have any tech background you know um and so they need to hear from someone like yourself who can actually walk them through some of these tech pieces in in very simple language so that they can understand it. And that's one of the things that I've really appreciated when I've gone and testified I almost always get asked questions by legislators on the committee. And you know my tech it you know my tech knowledge is from you know basically you know picking my husband's brain all the time because he works for big tech and so I get a lot that way and have been really trying to learn and absorb a lot of that there they want to know. I think they have good intentions which you know you mentioned that a few minutes ago. They want to do the right thing and if you know they're they're making decisions on so many different kinds of policies hundreds of bills every session and so they need people like you and I that are willing to come in there and actually educate them on what this policy is and why it's not the right solution.

SPEAKER_01 1:35:47

Yeah yeah that's right I think I think that's right because I think it's easy to um it it's it's common to have like a negative opinion about the the the the people that are the politicians. Yeah you know I yeah I I think there's there are there are good intentions that are mixed up with misunderstandings. And a lot of the misunderstandings are being intentionally put on the politicians by tricking them and lying to them and telling them that like oh if you do this it'll help um and then all the while they're like oh sweet we're gonna get rid of our liability you know when this happens right um and a lot of the politicians are savvy to it as well but I do not envy like I would never want to be a politician like like you said reviewing all these bills that like that's impossible. Yeah you're supposed to get it right and and and that's why I like I think societally just just for fun here to dream for a minute it'd be cool if our society shifted more towards a default no on every single new bill where the bar was so high to even be considered would have to pass a test does it violate these principles that are fundamental to how we want our society to be because again what do we want that's why we have a constitution right they're supposed to measure all these policies to the constitution and quite often they don't right I have a theory that way yeah go ahead well I it's I don't it's not a theory but this is my idea is that um legislatures state and congress should have to like every other session they should have to only be able to repeal bills that are bad repeal laws that are bad and then you can you know because like people think oh it's great this guy's a great lawmaker because he passes a lot of bills that means they're that means they're making new laws for us to live under I don't necessarily think that's a good thing. Right no no we want less right less simple we want we want more simplicity we want less complexity yes a complex regulatory environment is nothing but a nightmare right in in every way like that that's just you know it's there there's there's a there's a a a beautiful simplicity that underlies all of this but it's easy to get caught up in the noise and it's just what problem do we what problem we're trying to solve and what and where do we want to find ourselves what does success look like and how do you know if you got there because if if you just ask those questions and nothing else it resolves the whole thing because the dots don't connect and then you go well if the dots don't connect then we shouldn't do the thing. Right. Let's find something where the dots connect yeah unfortunately the answer these guys these legislators often give is we got to do something so they it's like they don't care that it doesn't do you do you have to do something I don't think so no I don't think so either like stand on stand on a strong set of principles and be like listen constituents you know what you may not vote me back because you don't understand but let me at least tell you why I voted the way I voted right I voted based on the following set of principles. Those are my principles if you like those principles vote for me again. If you don't like those principles then don't vote for me but those are my principles you know that's that's where this that's the lacking that's where I have the naive dream of like a set of principles like you said that's the constitution and the Bill of Rights are supposed to be those but those have those have been pushed aside. Yep the First Amendment and the fourth amendment are gone. Yep the the fourth amendment they're trying real hard it's irrelevant yeah the second amendment doesn't exist in a bunch of places right you know the state by state just take it apart it it's so the the the the reality for me has come down to okay well that my dream's not going to happen because it's just a naive dream. We're not gonna have some document that everybody actually agrees to and stands on and makes hard decisions against where they're willing to say no even when it's uncomfortable. Right. Because that's not going to happen most of the time. So all right fine so let's focus on education and community even in people like myself and yourself trying to help these politicians by by help giving them education. Yeah you know and and and spreading education amongst the people that are voting for the politicians so that we know what it is that's going on um and that way hopefully we can all be a little smarter and make more informed decisions as a result.

One Practical Change That Works

SPEAKER_00 1:40:33

Yeah absolutely uh before I let you go I promised the viewers at the beginning that we'd give them some practical tips that they could use.

SPEAKER_01 1:40:45

So if you're talking to a parent who's let's say they've already given their kid a device and they want to like reel it back, what's something that they could do the most universal action that can be taken that works for the most situations so where I don't get to sit down and have like a consultation and like okay let's talk about it for two hours I would just like give you a thing that thing is charge the devices in the living room and never bring them in the bedroom or the bathroom if if you just do that you're you're you're making a really positive change and and the adults have to do it first by the way specifically it's not the the it the the kid doesn't do it first. The adults do it first the parents charge the device in the living room first and they and they put the bin in the living room and they put the charging cables in it like we have one in ours and then you tell your kids I'm doing this because it's bad for me to have my phone in my bedroom. Same as it's bad for you. But I'm gonna run the experiment first I'm gonna tell you how it goes and how I feel and oh by the way right away you tell like the first night that we did it my wife and I literally sat in bed because our phones were not in our rooms we're like this feels like vacation like there was it it was like a whole like whoa this is nice this is different. Wow you're talking to each other yeah there's because even if it's sitting on the bedside table it's still pulling your your brain for sure because they're so attractive and so yeah so I think that's the first one is start with yourself because like I said earlier like the key is leading by example. Yes you I mean that's for all of parenting right and so it includes this leading by example. If you want your kids to have a healthy relationship with technology which is what this comes down to like when they become an adult and they can choose to access whatever they want to choose as long as we don't pass these laws. Right then they can make informed decisions that are based off of experience and based off of principles and values that you have demonstrated by example one of which is the room the bedrooms the private areas of the home are places of solace and rest and recharge and connection the internet is chaos the internet is noise the internet is addiction those two things to be maximally healthy should not mix. Right and so therefore we don't bring our devices in the bedrooms we keep them outside and then we have our kids follow um and we show them why and that starts us down the path of then well if we're going into the restaurant for dinner do I really need to bring my phone no I'll leave it in the car. If we're going into the grocery store and I write my stuff on paper in advance because you know we always have our grocery list on the phone, right? But I write it on paper so that I can leave my phone in the car and then in the grocery store I'm actually like paying attention to my kid because my phone isn't unintentionally just drawing all my attention. And when I come home from work do I look at my phone first or do I look at my kids first?

SPEAKER_02 1:44:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:44:13

And when I wake up in the morning what do I do first? And you know what I mean you you end up going down that path. And so the so yeah so charge the devices outside of the bedroom and and never bring them into the bedroom. And that is the most general piece of advice and I think that sets people up for the the journey.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:33

Yeah that's actually great advice and you know one of my pet peeves now is you go into a restaurant and there's a family of four, you know, a couple kids and their parents and both all the whole family is on their devices or you know you're in the grocery store and mom's got a toddler in the cart and the toddler's on an iPad and it's just like like all of these places that are places where you can connect and engage with your child and teach you know so many teachable moments you know in the grocery store and you know having conversation over dinner. I think it's such a like if we can get parents back to engaging with their kids, I think it I think that's one of the biggest ways that we can heal heal our families and and heal our country and and not not need these, you know, well we don't need these now but people would stop trying to push for this and and uh looking for really the easy button. Uh you do c you mentioned that you do consultations. Can you just tell us a little bit about like if I if I wanted to use your services because I've got my four kids and I've got to I've got to do something to rein this in what what what do you offer you know I wish I had a good answer for that.

SPEAKER_01 1:45:49

I I was more bringing up the consultations as like an example of something that I unfortunately I can't do them because what I've learned through being an IT professional for a long time is it's one thing to to set something up for somebody but then what really happens the hard part is the ongoing support yes and being there when there's a problem which I can't I can't be because I I just don't have time. And so I I'd have to charge a thousand dollars an hour to to to do that. And you know sure some people could afford that. So I just generally don't offer it really but so what I do instead is I try to maximize how much content I put out so like if if if anybody goes on my website familyitguy.com on the bottom is all my social media links and you can find all my videos and on my website is all kinds of articles and resources and things to where you know hey independence and freedom like I'm trying to set up independence because I don't have time to to literally do it with you. Yeah. And so I've got you know all kinds of of content when you click through those buttons on the three pillars you know of of things to focus on um yeah that article right there the digital danger zone that's my kind of capstone um article that includes a long video of me going through the current state of affairs with kids being on the internet and also what do you do about it? That's great. That's a good article this is at uh familyitguy.com everybody and I'll I'll put that in the description as well but this is a great this looks like an amazing resource yeah I've put a lot of time into it um there's a in there and there's a chat bot at the bottom right there's a little bubble on my website that is a robot version of me so it's trained on all of my work and on my principles and all my stuff and you can ask it questions and it will help you. That's very cool. That's very cool so I'm just trying to make it like you can get a little digital version of me sort of but yeah that's awesome. Yeah and then I do I do consult with entities that amplify. So I partner with tech companies that I think are doing a good job when it comes to privacy and security and helping kids. You know I partner with entities to where the education can be maximized. And so I don't do like the one-on-one stuff as much but I'll do if there's I do consult with groups that do like a one to many.

SPEAKER_00 1:48:27

Okay.

Resources, Coalition Work, And Closing

SPEAKER_00 1:48:28

Well good because um I don't remember if I told you this in my email but after I was out testifying around the country this year, I realized that well I mean I've always known this but especially with this particular policy is that the parent voice is missing from the room. You've got the lobbyists and the meta coalition people that are speaking in support of this bill. But as far as opposition it would be oftentimes it was me and a bunch of lobbyists. And so we've got to get the parent voice in there people like yourself and other, you know, there are a lot of parents that understand this and get it. And so I created Protecting Kids Online which is a coalition of parents and citizens and organizations that want to protect kids online and are against these policies that are data collection and surveillance and censorship. And so one of the parts is not just opposing bad policies, but also educating parents and creating that community that you talked about where we can really start shifting the culture of parenting and family back to more connection and engagement and not, you know, stuck to a screen all the time. So I would love to actually talk to you about doing some kind of a virtual training for protecting kids online that we can bring parents in to hear about how they can actually protect kids without government mandates.

SPEAKER_01 1:50:02

Yeah, for sure. I think that'd be great. I I think uh at the end of the day the mission is setting kids up for success and maximizing the potential for love and joy and happiness and freedom and minimizing the potential for harm and uh yeah anything I can do to facilitate that I'm I'm in. Awesome. Well it has been wonderful to have you today are there any last words that you want to leave with our audience I'm gonna have a link to your website uh familyitguy.com in the description of the video so people can go over to check that out you are also all over social media you make great uh reels that give parents a lot of um really good information in in short clips so I recommend uh everybody go to Ben's website and follow him across social media you won't be sorry um but anything else that you would like to leave us with did I miss anything I would just like to say that it is never too late for positive change that's good that's that's a theme that I like to share that when things are seems like they're constantly going a certain way and so we should just keep going that way like nothing's ever perfect and it's never too late for positive change and um there is a lot of positivity to be had there is you know none of this is like too late like there's there's still a lot of good stuff that could be done it's still possible to keep our kids safe and to set them up for success and it's within the realm of everybody listening and um yeah just to just to end on a note of optimism.

SPEAKER_00 1:51:39

Yeah I love that and I just want to say like if you've got teenagers that are you know 15 16 17 and you're like well there's no way I can put you know this genie back in the bottle you can and it's one of the things I've learned as a parent is when I admit to my kids that I made a mistake in my parenting they have you know often had a lot of grace and and you're probably gonna get some you know backlash from from teenagers if you're you know trying to dial things back but but you still can do it. And if they don't thank you now they'll probably thank you later. So everybody please make sure that you check out the links uh in the description of this video go follow Ben all over the place. Thanks for watching please share this video far and wide uh help us spread this message to other parents and citizens and we'll see you next time