#66 - They’re Hunting Our Kids Online — And We’re Handing Them the Weapon! w/Ben Gillenwater

What if your kid’s screen time is more dangerous than you think?

In this must-hear episode, 30-year cybersecurity expert Ben exposes how social media is engineered like a digital drug—fueling addiction, mental health crises, and skyrocketing teen suicide rates. He shares real dangers happening right now, and what parents must do to protect their kids—before it’s too late.

This conversation will make you never look at your childs "safe and regulated" devices the same again...

To follow along and support Ben and his business visit:

Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@family.it.guy

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@FamilyITGuy

- Here are the links from my website that we talked about:

https://www.familyitguy.com/digital-danger-zone.html

https://www.familyitguy.com/ai-and-your-child.html

https://www.familyitguy.com/dns-filtering.html

https://www.familyitguy.com/iphone-setup-guide.html

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Family IT Guy Ben
• 12:27 Technology As Digital Drugs
• 25:49 Mental Health Crisis and Social Media
• 46:12 Sextortion: The Growing Threat
• 1:05:11 Solutions and Parental Controls
• 1:25:53 Keeping Kids Safe in Public Schools
• 1:45:28 AI Dangers and Final Recommendations
• 2:08:46 Closing Thoughts and Encouragement

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:09

well, dude, let's get into it. All right, ben, welcome to the show. I'm really excited for this one because, as this world evolves in with technology, games, apps, platforms, phones, everything our games, apps, platforms, phones, everything Our children, I feel, are one of the biggest targets and easiest targets and, as our generation, we didn't grow up with it, we've just been introduced to it and we don't know everything, like our kids are learning and being pulled into. So you are a 30 year cybersecurity expert, yep, and now you're trying to help parents or anybody in general, learn in how to protect and just know what's going on in the dark side of things. And so I saw you on Matt Todd's on the ranch podcast and I knew immediately I've been praying for somebody like you to come across so I can invite on. So here you are. So I guess we just dive into it. Man, let's just who you are and what got you into all this.

Speaker 2: 1:15

Yeah, no, thanks. Uh, thanks so much for having me. So yeah, my name is Ben Um, I'm the family it guy. So, uh, I have been in the computer business since 1995. And in my 20s I was, so I'm currently 44. In my 20s I was very fortunate to have some opportunities to do some cool stuff and gain a lot of experience into, like, how computer systems work at a global scale. What's cool stuff? So cool stuff is. At age 27, I was the chief technologist for a $10 billion IT company Damn Okay. And that IT company was actually a defense contractor Really so right in your world. Okay. So I worked for Northrop Grumman.

Speaker 1: 1:54

Oh, okay.

Speaker 2: 1:55

So Northrop Grumman at the time they were a $40 billion annual business. $10 billion of that was in IT Damn, and so I was the most senior technologist for that group at 27, 27.

Speaker 1: 2:09

How did you get into that position at such a young age?

Speaker 2: 2:13

I asked, I asked if I could do more stuff Really, and I asked the right people and they said yes, okay, and uh, I'd heard people say that, like, you can only get things if you ask for them, absolutely, and so I um, I I started working on northrop when I was when I was 24, and I used to run the data center for the f-18 fighter jet program and the f-35 fighter jet and some of the drone programs, so we had this these huge data centers, like it looked like it was out of the movies yeah when I first started working there.

Speaker 2: 2:43

It was so cool, I bet. Going to this password protected door that was inside of another password protected door and you go up steps cause it's got like a raised floor and you walk into this room. That's all noisy and freezing cold. I had to wear a big jacket. Really. Rows and rows and rows of servers and robotic arms moving backup tapes around and they, as a kid, they they gave me the opportunity to operate that data center. No kidding, yeah, damn good for you and it was awesome. Man, I had some great teammates and so in the process, so I was a very technical person, sort of like. Up until my mid-20s, I was purely technical.

Speaker 1: 3:21

Okay.

Speaker 2: 3:25

And then we had this gal that was part of the senior management team flew out from D Okay. And then we had this um gal that was part of the senior management team flew out from DC I was in LA flew out from DC and gave a talk to like hundreds of us in this room and I walked up to her at the end of the thing it was like, hey, I want to do bigger stuff. Like what do you got? She was like, okay, well, we're looking for a strategist, like a technology strategist. You're like, I'm in. I don't know what that means, but count me in. Really Good for you. I know how computers work. I don't even know what the word strategy means, but I'll figure it out.

Speaker 1: 3:50

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 3:51

So then I moved to DC, moved to Virginia, and sort of long story short. My teammates liked me, my bosses liked me and they put me into these programs to get mentorship and I was like I want to be a CTO, I want to be a chief technology officer and so I ended up being the chief, what they called the chief technologist for the group a couple of years later, and that allowed me to be.

Speaker 2: 4:15

So. The military and defense world, as you probably know, is like split into programs. It's like a million little pieces, some of which cooperate, some of which don't, and so Northrop Grumman is actually a conglomerate of like thousands of different businesses, and so I got to sit at a level above them all and go across all of them and be a consultant on whatever programs needed help. How cool was this? It was cool, man. I got to. I got to tour aircraft carriers and fighter jets and walk through submarines that were under construction and see like stealth jet boats that were being built for the seals, and everywhere we went all over the country.

Speaker 2: 4:52

You know, me and my teammates would get a tour of whatever they were doing really you know, and the place where they they tested the rockets for the apollo mission you know, down in san clemente, california, some like kind of unknown little facility down there and um, and then the they needed help on an nsa program. So they ended up getting me cleared for an nsa program and then I would go in and consult with them on like how they should structure their computers you got some clearances I did yeah, yeah, they've expired now.

Speaker 1: 5:19

oh yeah, it sucks because I cussed. Yeah, that's a pretty intense thing to go through as well, especially probably for the level that you were. Yeah, it took years, oh Years.

Speaker 2: 5:28

And how deep they dig. Dude, it was actually totally off topic, but it's a fun story, yeah, and why not?

Speaker 1: 5:34

This is wild chaos, bro, like we just Wild chaos.

Speaker 2: 5:37

Wherever it goes, so. So when I was a kid, I was in I think it was sixth grade, and I thought it was a good idea to steal a musical instrument from the music room at school. Okay, Me and my buddy were just like bad kids, Like not really, but like you know, I didn't know what I was doing. You just go this way or that way Right. Got kicked out of school, got expelled, got like the police involved.

Speaker 1: 5:59

Really.

Speaker 2: 6:00

And luckily the police asked my parents like, hey, do you want to take him home or do you want us to take him? And so they said, okay, we'll take him home, Is that? And they said, okay, you know what, Don't worry about it, because you're taking him home, this is scratched. Just you know, please don't do that anymore. And the reason I bring it up is so that I'm. It says here that you had a police record in sixth grade. I was like how did you? How did you find what? How did you find that?

Speaker 2: 6:27

They said that that wasn't even a thing, and that was in the how old was.

Speaker 1: 6:31

I, I don't know like 1990 or something you know.

Speaker 2: 6:34

So, anyways, that's hilarious, but luckily they were like well, it's okay, we'll still give you a clearance.

Speaker 1: 6:38

you know there's a crazy story, I let's do it. There's a crazy story. I have a buddy of mine. He um, we all ran steroids in the marine corps, right and no, but nobody ever knew we had like a mama, son that was like my, aka my wife that was ordering it for us all they, he was, he's a, he's a federal agent, he's going through a top secret clearance.

Speaker 1: 6:58

And they straight up like, okay, so you were doing steroids during this time to this time, and he's we've never talked like in the ring or you. I mean, it's half my team was actually my whole team was on it. But yeah, nobody spoke of it. Yeah, and they straight like they knew and I'm like, well, if they knew, you I'm definitely on that list too. But it's crazy because I've had a secret. I didn't ever went top secret, but I had a secret clearance and do what. I mean I was working in afghan, I was, you know, doing a contract and over there, the, the levels that they, they peel and I mean they're asking old friends and exes and you're just like, oh god, like what are they gonna?

Speaker 2: 7:35

say one of them probably told them oh 100.

Speaker 1: 7:38

At some point it's. It's crazy though, man, that's insane mean just by asking some questions, and that's where I'm one of those people. I've always been like I in the military there was don't ever volunteer for anything, don't ever, don't ever raise your hand, and I was always the guy for everything.

Speaker 1: 7:54

I was the guy like, hey, we need three. And I, yeah, don't get me wrong Probably 60 to 75 percent of time it was shit, shit and you're like, yeah, but every now and then it was like, hey, we need you guys to like take this van, drive to 29 palms. You're gonna stay up there for three or four days and we would just go on these working parties and just party our ass off, yeah unsupervised.

Speaker 1: 8:14

We're troops and I'm like I knew it'd pay off, so I always volunteer for everything. And it opened so many doors and it taught me, like man, if there's ever anybody ask and I I'm always been one of those people like I'll figure it out, I'll do it, I'll try it and and they'll be like no, no, no, don't say shit. And then it's opened up so many doors so to be able to hear you just like, yeah, I don't know what it is, but I'll figure it out to get you to the level that it did yeah to show it's proof that volunteer ask even if you don't know what the hell you're doing.

Speaker 2: 8:42

Do it yeah, I'll figure it out and I've had phone calls in recent years where I've called my old colleagues and bosses and thank you very much for giving me the opportunities you know and putting me into these mentorship programs I got to become a mentor, um, and so all that, to say that so I've, I've been involved with like designing and maintaining and operating and thinking about and making budgets for like global scale computer systems that were like super important, that like had to work every time. Lots of redundancy all the way down to. You know, sometimes it's just as difficult to get your grandma's computer to work on a reliable basis and everything in between. And since then I've, I've, you know, know, I've gotten into a lot of business side and I've been an entrepreneur for the past 15 years or so and I've gotten to travel all over the world and stuff. And so I tell the story because I am a technical expert yes, which I think is great for the people listening and watching.

Speaker 1: 9:39

You're not just a guy, you're not just some dad. That's now gone. This is the chapter you're in. You you have experience in the tech technology world. Yeah, you've been buried in it.

Speaker 2: 9:51

I'm sure you've seen some shit yeah so it's, it's good to know a little bit of the background yeah and not to say, oh, these are my credentials, because I don't care about credentials. What matters is experience, and so the reason that I am, that I've created this brand called the family IT guy is because I found out that, even as a technical expert, once I became a dad, that's different.

Speaker 1: 10:16

Okay.

Speaker 2: 10:17

The mesh up is where I made some serious mistakes and where I learned the critical nature of the conversations we're going to have today about keeping kids safe on the internet. Okay, so I gave my kid an iPad when he was five.

Speaker 2: 10:34

Now I put all the parental controls and all the things, but there was like I went into it without realizing how blind I was. I knew at the time all the business incentives and technical incentives of all the companies involved in social media. My friends work at Facebook and Google and Microsoft and all these companies and we've talked in depth about how do you guys make decisions, how do you guys function, how do you make money, what do you care about? I knew all that and yet I gave him an iPad with YouTube on it, with the parental controls enabled. But I was naive and thinking that those things would be effective, so that I could deliver an educational device and I could deliver a safe entertainment device, and that was not the case.

Speaker 2: 11:19

So, immediately, youtube, of course. Looking back, it's like, dude, I knew this, but I'm here to say I made the mistake of, of course, youtube sent him down rabbit holes that were completely inappropriate, even though I told YouTube what his age was and they have all the things, okay, cool. So I took off YouTube. I was like, well, there's YouTube kids and well, this is my first kid, so, but it says kids and actually, at the time, ceo of the of youtube. So youtube is owned by google, but they have their own ceo. A lot of google's, like big business divisions, have their own ceo, cfo, all that stuff was a gal named susan.

Speaker 2: 11:55

She's a grandma, right? Okay? So you've got this. You've got this product with the word kids in the name, run by a grandma, and what that tells me as a human is that a woman, especially a grandmother, is going to have a primary job of looking after kids.

Speaker 1: 12:15

Right.

Speaker 2: 12:16

We would like to think Correct. Now. I don't know her and I have nothing I will. I'm not here to judge her or anybody that works with her, but what I am here to say is that that product is not for kids, absolutely not. And that product, okay.

Speaker 2: 12:31

I will recognize the fact that if you build a global scale software system, it becomes nearly impossible to police it and moderate it in an effective fashion. That's the thing I want people to know. That's what I want parents to know is that if you come across a software system, no matter what the age rating is, no matter what the name of the system is, if it has content that's produced by strangers so they call them in the tech world, we call it user generated content. Okay, user generated content is what you come across, if anything, that's like social media, video streaming, any of that kind of stuff. So YouTube is one of them, right?

Speaker 2: 13:10

Other people make the videos, they upload them to YouTube, and then those they upload them and they say, like it actually asks you like I'm sure you know. It says is this made for kids? When you upload a video and you say yes or no, and then, if you say yes, there's more questions. So there's like a the person that uploads the video has to classify the age rating, and then YouTube has a whole bunch of really complex systems in place that do catch most things that are not correct, but they don't catch them all. So my kid ended up seeing like nightmare content sexual content, right, I told the system what age he was and it still let him have that content. Okay, so I took YouTube kids off. So now he's got an iPad with some games, and the games looked innocent enough, but what I noticed was that he was behaving in the same way that an addict behaves.

Speaker 1: 13:57

How? So what were some of the signs?

Speaker 2: 13:59

Woke up early in order to go to the iPad, came home from school and, instead of going to his buddy's house across the street, went to the iPad Went to bed later because of the iPad.

Speaker 2: 14:12

If we weren't around the iPad, he was asking about the iPad, right? So the device is so beautifully effective in its design that in and of itself, no matter what's on it, it's attractive and it has a draw, absolutely by side with the software engineers and the hardware engineers and the and the people that do the design in order to maximize that draw, in order to actually maximize the dopamine drip.

Speaker 1: 14:52

That's fascinating. That's always been something that I've thought about If they have employees. So you're saying that these companies YouTube, whoever it is that have these giant platforms have psychology paid hired staff psychologists? On staff just to tell them how to get us addicted to it more.

Speaker 2: 15:13

Yeah, that's scary.

Speaker 2: 15:14

It is scary. That's a weapon Indeed. So what I like to look at and what I learned through my these opportunities I was exposed to in my business career was a very important concept of what gets measured, gets done, Okay, Right. So incentives are key. So one of the messages I want to share with parents today is that, if you haven't already consider what the incentives might be for the systems that you interact with and for the systems that your kids interact with, Explain that, so I'll. How. Explain that, so I'll give you some specific examples. Every social media program Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat when their team gets together and they go okay, how are we doing? How's our business right? Their primary metric is how much time do they get from each person each day and each week and each month and each quarter?

Speaker 1: 16:09

It's all they care about.

Speaker 2: 16:10

Time, eyeball time. So because those companies are not social media companies, they're advertising companies, they sell advertising, they're in the business of selling advertising. So I think the somewhere in the 90 percentile range of Facebook's revenue, or meta, is the parent company. Facebook comes from selling ads no kidding um, and they do.

Speaker 1: 16:36

I can't remember what the number is, but it's in the three digits billions yeah, um, google in 2024 did like 300 and something billion.

Speaker 2: 16:45

74% of it was from selling ads, right? So Google is not a search company, google is an advertising company, makes sense? Microsoft is even turning into an advertising company, like, they have ads in the start menu now, right and so okay. So what if you run a business that sells ads, specifically digital ads, that business needs to know how to most effectively sell those ads to the companies that are purchasing them. So they need to know. So, for example, if you play, one of the reasons these things are so effective is because digital ads allow targeting.

Speaker 1: 17:21

Yep.

Speaker 2: 17:22

So you can target demographics, geographics and psychographics. So you can say I want to show an ad to women that are in between the age of 35 and 40, that live in the following zip codes, that have this type of income, this type of phone, these types of hobbies, have visited these websites and are members of these Facebook groups websites and are members of these Facebook groups and so I can show them.

Speaker 2: 17:48

I can show that group of people an ad which is from an advertising perspective is amazing, because now my advertising dollar is efficient and the digital advertising ecosystem allows me to measure did they see the ad, did they engage with the ad and did they follow the call to action which is click here to buy, and did they actually buy?

Speaker 2: 18:07

And so it's very important to recognize incentives.

Speaker 2: 18:10

And so when our kids are using social media, they are using advertising programs. They're not using programs that are meant for social connection. That is a byproduct that is there in order to maximally sell ads, and so, therefore, when we put a phone in their pocket that has social media on it, we are placing an advertising device in their pocket that tracks where they go and who they're with and what they see and what they say and what they do, by analyzing their chats, their movements, their photos, their friends lists and like if you ever noticed, for example, if you go hang out with some friends and then later that night or the next day you start to see stuff in your feed, that's along the lines of what they're interested in, because they can tell that all your phones were in the same room at the same time for a certain amount of time, and they can. They can see that like. Well, if there's five guys there and four of them are into this one thing and the one other guy isn't into it yet, let's show him it's that in depth?

Speaker 1: 19:13

yeah, that's. Is that so for people listening, because they're probably, you know there's there's older generation. I have a lot of my numbers are all I have. I cover it all with the show at like, for instance, is in like apple just did a new update and it's feeding the ai tracking and I just went through and turned it off all of our phones, but it's like it's automatically set it every 15 minutes. It's sending a report every 15 minutes of what you're doing on your phone yeah and that's what they're doing.

Speaker 1: 19:44

They're taking that information and then are they shooting that to google, meta and then they're collecting that information. Is I mean, is that kind of like, uh, along the lines, yeah, basically, okay, yeah so there's a couple things in place, like.

Speaker 2: 19:56

One is like when you use the apps themselves, as long as the app is open, it enables it to do things, got it, and so if the app is attractive and if it causes you to get eyeball time, you have it. That means you have it open more. And if you have it open, then it can say okay, where?

Speaker 2: 20:12

are you located, what are you looking at, who are you near? And then, oh, you've. These things are like upload your photos to like show everybody what you're doing, right? And then in the photos, they're analyzing the location. Who's in them? What are their potential moods or mental states based on their facial expressions? What products are they holding in their hands or what's near them or what's in the room? And this type of analysis was being done. One of my friends at Google worked on Google Photos and I was hanging out with him in, I think, 2014. We're at a party together and he was telling me he's like dude, we don't even need your GPS data to tell you where you were. We just analyze your photos and we can see what's in the background and we can very accurately figure out where you were. That was 10 years ago, right.

Speaker 1: 20:55

I just saw a guy talking about how there's a program now. He took a picture in a room, an empty room in a closet, and it geo tagged and it actually swapped. It found the house and everything because it was listed on a listing for for sale at one point. So the inside of your home even if somebody's bought your home in the past and the listing agent is put photos inside it's on the internet, yeah.

Speaker 1: 21:20

And I don't think it was like available to the public type of app, but he's one of those guys that can dig and he went into a room and he took a picture of an empty room with a closet and it popped right up and it showed him exactly where he was because of a listing from years prior.

Speaker 2: 21:33

Absolutely.

Speaker 1: 21:34

That's very very like.

Speaker 2: 21:36

That's the ability, and that's exactly it the ability to correlate data. Right? An image is a grouping of data. Yep, right, an image is a grouping of data yep, um. And the ability to correlate that data to other things and to actually like I mean, that's like in the military and intelligence world, like that's the whole game I'm sure, like right now, what's going on in california, and all these people and they're taking all these photos, they're tracking everybody everybody's gonna get caught. And they're writing in front of a federal building.

Speaker 1: 21:59

A federal building is a giant sensor package, so you have one tattoo that shows under a sleeve like they got you.

Speaker 2: 22:07

Or they can scan your retinas from hundreds of feet away and identify you just as well as they can with your fingerprint.

Speaker 1: 22:14

Oh, my God.

Speaker 2: 22:15

So, you know, people think they're going to wear a mask, but their eyeballs are showing. Well, you know, it's not very effective.

Speaker 1: 22:22

No, so, so, okay, We'll get to that no, so I found out.

Speaker 2: 22:27

So okay, got a kid, I screw up, I give my kid these. Effectively, these are drugs. These are drugs that are designed to maximize exposure. They're there to get his attention and to get his time.

Speaker 1: 22:42

With that statement. So you have to accept giving your child drugs at a young age yes it's essentially the same thing, correct? It is chemically and objectively true statement so if you're giving your kid an ipad with youtube or anything, you might as well be giving him a narcotic. It has the same dopamine drops. Obviously they're not going to overdose, but no, no, no, no.

Speaker 2: 23:06

They know they can and they do that's scary, okay, yeah no, there's like clinics that are dedicated to this. Now for kids that are recovering we have recovering like ipad kids.

Speaker 2: 23:16

Yeah, I mean, I believe it yeah, no, I just got a text from a friend of mine here in town that one of her kids school mates just got sent off to one of those recovery centers because he stopped eating, he stopped going to school, he stopped sleeping, he got sick. He was just like literally sick and it's very sad. And it's not the kid's fault, it's not the parent's fault. This is by design, right. We are so, so, so here. So here's the deal until 2007,.

Speaker 2: 23:44

If you're a human being and you produce a child, your genetic code has some understanding of what to do to keep that kid alive. And apparently we're pretty good at it. Because there's 8 billion of us. None of us get an instruction manual introduced. And I'm singling it on the iPhone as an example. Within three to five years after the iPhone got introduced you had, of course, every year is a new iPhone, right? So then, okay, cool, the iPhone three and four and five.

Speaker 2: 24:13

And then the parents go like, well, oh, like, verizon's going to give me the new one for free. And then I got my old one and like, here you go, give it to my kid. And then now they got a phone and they got music and they got maps and I can call them if there's an emergency and like a right on, okay, cool, give it to them. So then we start putting these surveillance devices and these um, these advertising tracking devices into their pockets, and we didn't know at the time. We, the collective we have as parents, didn't know at the time what that meant, even for us as adults, let alone for for the kids, and we're still here trying to figure that out. It's still, generally speaking, on a global scale, there's a general unawareness, a general lack of awareness as to like what that means. But we'll talk about that today. And so, in 2007, being a human parent changed. Now you have to be a technical expert.

Speaker 1: 25:08

Yeah, which, none of us are.

Speaker 2: 25:11

None of us are Right, so that's why I'm here. This is my mission. That's why I'm sitting in this chair right now. So I am here to help with that, and we need a lot more people like me. But it's a difficult thing to crack, and so okay. So now there's an entire topic that would require an extensive college education and decades of experience in order to figure out. So stop all your parenting and go do that right, just to try to help your kid.

Speaker 1: 25:40

Yeah, save your kid.

Speaker 2: 25:42

Yeah, just to try to even like, keep them mentally healthy and physically safe, and we're gonna talk. Those are the two things we're gonna focus, or that I'd like to focus on I would love to touch on those as well yeah, so okay.

Speaker 2: 25:55

So if you have this giant topic that now you have to you, no choice. Whether we like it or not, here it is right, we have to be technical experts in order to be parents. So there's a million things to think about. So I'm going to. I'm going to talk about two. I've identified and distilled this down into two things, and if you address these two things, they can take care of the majority of the problems. And so the first thing is on the mental health side. I'll focus there first, because I think it's the most important and it's actually the biggest of the two problems is addictive algorithms correlate directly to mental health.

Speaker 1: 26:28

We hear about algorithms. Well, the algorithms change the algorithm, the algorithm, the algorithm. It's all you hear about.

Speaker 2: 26:35

So everybody's watching like oh, I've heard that word. Yeah, the heck, does that mean? Right? Oh, okay. An algorithm and a technical thing is like this advanced mathematics and all this stuff. Okay, screw. An algorithm and a technical thing is like this advanced mathematics and all this stuff. Okay, screw all that. An algorithm is if you open an app and it doesn't stop scrolling as a bottomless feed. That's an algorithm, okay.

Speaker 1: 26:54

Never looked at it like that.

Speaker 2: 26:55

Yeah, and so that's like this is okay. Parents, that are not technical experts. That's what an algorithm is. If your child has a bottomless feed, their mental health is at risk.

Speaker 1: 27:06

I've never heard anybody refer to it as a bottomless feed, and when you word it like that, for me it hits completely different. Yeah, it's never.

Speaker 2: 27:16

It's very digestible, right. It's very like and you can envision it in your head because we all use bottomless feeds all day. So that's the mental health side, and the reason that that's important to focus on is because I have some anecdotes and I have some some data. The anecdotes are that anxiety and depression are off the scale problems for children. Scale problems for children. It's so bad for young, single digit age Children have severe anxiety and depression problems, according to statistics.

Speaker 2: 27:53

But I think about this stuff and I'm in the business of data, right, generally speaking, and just my brain likes data, I like numbers, you know, that's why I do what I do. So I'm like, okay, okay, I like good data. Anxiety and depression statistics are not good data because they require them being reported. They require them being measured in a consistent way, and that's just not how that's done. So what is reported on in a consistent way and actually what is fantastic data is suicides.

Speaker 2: 28:27

So when you die, you get a certificate, okay, and the government and all the world's governments are pretty good at putting files and file cabinets and issuing certificates. So you get a serial number. When you're born, you get a certificate for being and then you get another certificate when you die, that means that your serial number is expired and you no longer get benefits and all that stuff is put into filing cabinets and put into databases now, and the CDC and the World Health Organization both keep track of those things and they actually have public databases that you can peruse. And so I was preparing for a lecture last year. I was going to give a local lecture here in town, near the Boise area, on this topic and I'm like, okay, anxiety and depression, not good data, let me go find some data. Oh, cool, got these public databases, let me go check them out.

Speaker 2: 29:18

I stumbled across some very interesting information. So you can get death certificate data all the way back to 1951 and all the way up to 2021, or as of last year anyways. And so I said, okay, um, show me for the U? S cause, you can actually get global data, but show me for the U S. Uh, what are the changes over time for suicide rates across different age groups and across each gender? And what I found was that in 1951, young people under the age of 25, the the percentage of deaths that were self-inflicted was generally 1%.

Speaker 1: 29:57

Okay.

Speaker 2: 29:59

In the eighties and nineties. For those age groups the little bit of variation was roughly 5% Huge increase. That's a 5X increase in like 40 years, right Between 2010 and 2012,. Three of the age groups that were identified in the database. They break them into five-year groupings 10 to 14, 15 to 19, and 20 to 24. Those three age groups, if you, if you plot a chart, you know the Y axis on the vertical and the X axis on the horizontal. The Y axis is the percentage and the X axis is time. The charts we hit 2010, 2012,. It starts to go like this and it went from 5% to 20% in 10 years, really so 2007 was the introduction of phones 2007 was the introduction of the iPhone.

Speaker 2: 30:53

Right around there was when Facebook came out, but only on desktop computers, not on the phones. Okay, in the early 20-teens I think it might have been 2012, is when Facebook came out on the phone, that's right around. An Instagram came out. So I did on this chart and I'll send you a copy of the thing. I would love to see this and it's on my website. If you go to family it, guycom and you go to um, what's the article on there? I have an article on my website.

Speaker 2: 31:21

Uh, I can't remember the title chart the logos of all the companies that introduced addictive products during those times. Oh, okay, so, like a scientist will say, well, correlation is not causation. Okay, fine, give them that. There's some pretty like, there's some strong correlations, however you want to call it, that indicate a direct correlation in time between the release of some of these products. And the graph goes bump, bump, bump, like TikTok in 2016,. Another bump to where we go from. One in 20 deaths for young people all the way down to age 10. One in 20 deaths were self-inflicted to one in five. That's a 400% increase in 10 years.

Speaker 1: 32:10

So one out of five kids is killing themselves. So that's.

Speaker 2: 32:14

One out of five deaths. Okay, one out of five deaths is self-inflicted.

Speaker 1: 32:20

So that would be 20 out of a hundred. Yeah, so out of a hundred deaths, 20 of them are self-inflicted.

Speaker 2: 32:27

Yes, All the way down to age 10.

Speaker 1: 32:29

And these are the ones that are being reported. These are accurately reported.

Speaker 2: 32:35

These are relatively accurately reported because it's on the death certificate.

Speaker 1: 32:39

Okay.

Speaker 2: 32:40

So the death certificate. There's a code that gets applied to indicate the cause of death, okay, and there's actually like a primary and secondary code, but a primary code is self-inflicted and then they have secondary codes as to like overdose. It's kind of crazy man, like it's dark stuff like hanging. You know they have the different methods and so I just looked at the bigger group, the primary group, the different methods, and so I just looked at the bigger group, the primary group.

Speaker 1: 33:08

so out of a hundred deaths, it's safe to say, I mean 20 of them are self-inflicted, and this is the in it between the ages of 10 and 24.

Speaker 2: 33:16

That's insane. It is.

Speaker 1: 33:17

It's very, very bad I'm one of these people. If there's a spike, there's an agenda, something's being pushed because of a natural curve. You see a natural growth yeah and I've, I are, and not to get off topic, but my only example is you see, the trans spike. That's an agenda to me yeah, it's not a net, I mean it's.

Speaker 1: 33:45

It's happened for thousands, it's been. It goes back to the roman eight, I mean. But now, all of a sudden, in the last five, five, eight years, ten years, I mean, there's this giant spike. There's something, there's something driving that, something going on, something happening. Now we're seeing this huge spike in these young, younger generations. Deaths are self-inflicted. So clearly, something's happening.

Speaker 2: 34:09

Something's happening and I feel comfortable saying that that thing is social media. That is terrifying. And the thing in social media that's problematic by design is the addictive nature of the algorithms that drive the systems in order to maximize time. So we started off talking about what gets measured, gets done. What are the incentives of these programs there to maximize time? What is your primary currency as a human Time? Are you giving it to something, on purpose, intentionally, that's valuable to you, or is it being taken? Or are you allowing it to be taken because you don't even know, because your biology is not even designed to respond to this mechanism, because this is new, right? So I so I think it's important for parents to be aware and for kids, because a lot of my content I make for parents and I get a lot of feedback from parents that say I showed your video to my kid.

Speaker 1: 35:10

Absolutely.

Speaker 2: 35:11

We have Dude Awesome and like kids. With every day that goes by, I find out that I underestimate kids how smart they are how capable and competent and understanding.

Speaker 1: 35:22

They're always listening and watching.

Speaker 2: 35:24

Yeah, and so I want parents and kids to know what the situation is. This is the situation If you, as a human being, are exposed to an addictive algorithm, it will be effective and it will take your time and take your attention and it will take your mental health, and that is borne out in the statistics.

Speaker 1: 35:49

Not to stay on topic for a little bit longer the, the suicide it's, it's, it's so scary to me. Yeah, I have a teenage daughter. She has a private account which I have full access to. Only people and we I want to get into this later but only people that are. Fault that she that follow her people, that she personally, even people when that she's like you know it's got nope, like even if my friends of mine, nope, because I personally think it's weird. I'm not, as a 40 year old man, why am I gonna follow a teen? I don't even follow buddy's wives, right, you know?

Speaker 2: 36:22

yeah, right, because it's just me Like yeah yeah, unless I'm very close Like dude.

Speaker 1: 36:30

But what grown ass man's going to follow a teenage girl. That to me, is creepy, very inappropriate.

Speaker 1: 36:37

I agree, yep, generally speaking, that seems fair, right Seems fair In a logical mind, I feel, but it's so scary to me because she comes home and this is a big part of the benefits of homeschooling. She's constantly talking and she'll come home. Sorry if I'm putting you on blast right now we can edit this out if you want but she comes home from her youth group and she comes home from these events and hanging out with these other kids that are all in public school and the biggest thing that she talks about she's like I can't have such a hard time relating because of how depressed these girls are in these groups and all of them are kind of she's like it's hard for me to like talk about my problems because I feel so many of these other kids have so many deeper problems and they're all depressed, they're all battling suicidal thoughts and tendencies and she comes over and tells us this we're like you're 16, 17 years old, like what is so horrible?

Speaker 1: 37:35

that you're, these girls, and I'm speaking with the girls cause I'm a girl dad, I'm, you know, I'm sons and I'm, so I don't get to hear that side of things.

Speaker 1: 37:41

But yeah it's so scary and it's so sad and devastating, as a parent that's involved in their child's life, to hear that these there's this huge generation of kids that she's growing up with and around that are all depressed and it's like where is, is it? And you want to be like oh, it's the schools and it's the, it's the bullying. These girls, these kids, are so cannibalistic and we've talked about it on the show before and they all turn on each other. But I feel all of that relates to social, because their snap streak isn't. They broke a snap streak. They don't have the newest, baddest clothes and shoes and whatever it is, and that's that self-image, because they're sitting there scrolling this endless pit yeah of perfect models, perfect people, perfect life.

Speaker 1: 38:28

And then you have this girl that is trying to oh, that's, that's the life I want to live, when reality nobody's living this life. And now these, now these kids, that's what they're on it all day and that's what they see. They see these guys and, oh, this is how I do this. I grew my business and now you have that for the on the male side of things. And now you, oh, you got. If you're not driving a ferrari, you're not making a hundred thousand a month. What are you doing? You're a loser, like I saw some, some fucking guy the other day say that I'm like, if you're not making a hundred thousand, eight, yeah, you know, but that's what social is feeding these kids.

Speaker 1: 38:59

And it's so sad to me and it it's devastating that a child gets that depressed and sucked in, yeah to a platform, that they're ended up taking their own life. That. That to me, that is a, that's a, that's a pandemic, that that's a problem that we have in this country. And it's like, why is this? Why is this not in the forefront of, of what's going on on? And with politics and everything that's going on, you'd feel like these politicians, like that should be their battle right now is saving the youth in our generation of what's going on on these phones. Limiting things or putting ages on require, I don't, but how do we do that, you know? But that's, it's a scary. Do that, you know, but that's, it's scary. Man, when you're mentioning this and it's like it makes so much sense and like then I want to see him like is it attention, you know? And and is it just for them to? Is it a cry for help?

Speaker 2: 39:57

but I mean, the numbers don't lie the numbers aren't lying, if they're, if the data is good, then the numbers aren't lying. If the data is good, then the numbers don't lie and the death certificate data is good.

Speaker 1: 40:07

Unfortunately, I wish it wasn't.

Speaker 2: 40:09

Yeah, absolutely. You know, when I first made that chart, I titled it with like a technical name, you know, suicide rates over time and this and this age groups and cohorts and whatever. But like the actual title of the graph is, everybody else is perfect. How come I'm not perfect? Ouch, that's what I thought about when I saw it. You know, and that's what these kids are going through, absolutely, um and so I think it's very so my perspective on parenting and I'm a security guy, so I have my own perspective For sure but I look at it as follows my primary job for myself and my family is to assess risk and to manage risk. What is the risk? Where is it? How does it occur? What do I need to know so that I have situational awareness and so that I have tools in place with which to manage the risk and so that I can expose my kid to the risk on purpose and not on accident, so that he can learn and grow Absolutely In a very intentional and strategic way.

Speaker 1: 41:17

And turn that into a lesson. Yeah, so it's educational. Yeah, it's awesome. You say that this was a while back. We've pulled everything since. But, like my daughter, what's what's what's? Can you play robot Roblox, which I want you to dig into that? Yeah, but one night she came on and she was. She was like oh, I met this and she's in closed circuits and I have one of my Marine Corps buddies and it's it's his kids and her, that's it. They're in their own little that's cool their own little world. Yeah, we've, we do these little reunions or guys that like there's a group of us and so they've all met and they but it's kind of their way of being like pen pals and they get a little bit of screen time, they all get to play together, so in doing their thing. But she came to me one day and she's like oh, I met this friend and I'm like, instantly, as a dad and in this world I'm like red flags, I'm like, well, a friend who was talking to my kid.

Speaker 1: 42:16

You know like instantly as a dad. But I'm like, what friend? And she's like, oh, this girl came in and and she was cool and she was telling us that. And I'm like, how do you know she's a girl? And I'm like, how old is she? How do you know it's a kid? And then you see the like because we educate, we talk, we were, we're very open about the dark side of everything. But then you could see and see like I'm like, just because they're stating that doesn't mean that's what it is, this is the internet.

Speaker 1: 42:43

Remember our car, but it was right then. And like I mean, but if she wouldn't have brought that up, who knows she could have logged back in. That could have been an ongoing thing. That's gone over weeks, months, until you know grooming, and so, yeah, instantly shut it down. So now it's the only time that you're doing is in these, these closed I don't even know what they're called worlds yeah, they've got the different games.

Speaker 2: 43:03

Have they got private realms?

Speaker 1: 43:05

yeah whatever servers and all the things which I would like to go into that as we get down this conversation. But that was instantly like, absolutely, but we I instead of me, like I would, I don't want to call and say lazy parents or uneducated parents been like, oh, you made a friend on roblox, but the world that I live in and as a dad, who's the friend like you, shouldn't I? I, because I'm under the understanding like talk to the wife grown, she's not, there's, no, she's not communicating. That's what I'm one of mine and which wasn't an argument. But yeah, there's no outside communication, you don't know anybody, you're not talking.

Speaker 1: 43:39

But then that's when she brought it and said so I turned it into a lesson. Like okay, how, who? Okay, can you tell me what? Where did she have? Did they ask you questions? And then she was like actually, and I'm like then because she's very aware she's always one of those like this weird creepy guy was walked by me twice. Because I tell him you see something more than once, it's a pattern. Like that's how I raised my kid. And so she's like I saw this guy's the second time, seeing him like, well, she's like it's a this guy. It's the second time I've seen him. I'm like, well, she's like it's a pattern. I'm like, okay, keep an eye out, right. So she's one of those, but it's, it's so simple. Yeah, even though I would say for at her age, she's more than average of awareness and knows what's going on, even though I don't put trust in it.

Speaker 1: 44:23

Like, but it's that easy, that's right it's that easy that this little girl joined your friends and now is asking you questions because you can't see a face. It's just some character running around the world and you're building blocks and blowing up things. It's all it takes and so.

Speaker 2: 44:38

So that is the perfect segue into the second thing.

Speaker 1: 44:41

Okay, so the first thing is mental health and addictive algorithms go together, go ahead before we jump in yeah, there's this thing going on and I don't know if this is going to be in the second. Say wait, there's, there's this sextortion yeah, that is this.

Speaker 2: 44:59

That is the uh. Yes, go ahead, let's talk. Is this?

Speaker 1: 45:02

what you're about to get into. Okay, I'll shut the fuck up then. Okay, sorry, I I thought okay because I well because I just my wife, was showing me this thing, how this kid got pulled into it and ended up killing so far. I'm devastated, so okay. So let's get into this second segue. Sorry, I didn't mean to jump the gun on you. I thought we were going to go somewhere else away from that, so teed it up.

Speaker 1: 45:19

Okay, sorry, it's perfect one is on my thing did I just seen this and not just saw it? But when I first saw this, I was devastated over this same I mean it's it's horrifying it's like the.

Speaker 2: 45:31

It's um, it's the only time I've found myself, um, like, crying at my desk a hundred percent, reading about this stuff hundred percent and researching this stuff so that I can help other people know about it. It is so sad. And so if you cover off mental health and you say, okay, if I expose my kid to an addictive algorithm, that is a drug and it is not of any of their conscious choice but to fall victim to that drug and that drug you can identify it by seeing if it has a bottomless feed. Okay, so sextortion. Physical health is the second thing. So we're going to distill all the complexity into two things physical health the primary thing that affects physical health on the internet is online chat. Okay, which is exactly what you were just talking about and exactly what you just say. It was your daughter that was. You just saved your daughter from that interaction. That gives me chills, and in the most beautiful way, because the risk occurred, the risk was managed and it was learned from and removed, and removed Immediately.

Speaker 2: 46:42

And it's the most effective education was managed and it was learned from and removed and removed immediately and it's the most effective education. And you said, the most important thing is you guys talk about it. So okay, so let's talk, let's go through this. So there is 8 billion people in the world. 6 billion of them are on the internet. 5 billion of them are on social media. My hypothesis is that there is of them are on the internet. 5 billion of them are on social media. My hypothesis is that there is a sickness in humanity that is growing.

Speaker 1: 47:13

Evil.

Speaker 2: 47:14

Yes, however that is and what it is, I think that the further away we get from nature, I think our, our biological entities and the scale at which we exist and the density at which we exist are manifesting a disease, and I think that it is furthered by, and perhaps caused by, a disconnect from nature by, and perhaps caused by, a disconnect from nature. And so how often do we stand on the real ground? How often are we exposed to real light? How often are we exposed to our tribe? How often are we exposed to people directly, eyeball to eyeball, like this, as opposed to through a device that represents a tribe or represents a social connection or represents a human connection and can only physically do so partially?

Speaker 2: 48:17

So there's this huge scale of people out there that are connected to these systems and that we are now interconnected. We are tribal beings, right, like we come from tribes, we operate best in small groups. As far as I can tell, there's a bunch of business philosophy and all kinds of stuff on this. There's even companies that are structured around being small groups, because if you exceed something, like some people say, like 120 people, stuff starts to break down, because then you don't know that guy's name and you don't know who his kids are and her name and her kids.

Speaker 2: 48:51

And you say hey, sally, how's it going? And the, the guy in engineering doesn't know the gallon accounting, doesn't know the person in manufacturing, right, so same thing socially. And so we're now, not only do we have more than 120, we've got 5 billion. If you connect to social media, if you play let's take a, like you mentioned Roblox 68 million people a day play that game.

Speaker 2: 49:13

Holy cow 68 million people a day. The game is a, you could say, and in this context it's kind of ironic. It's a social game. It has online chat and what you just described, that was potentially happening with your daughter, happens all the time.

Speaker 2: 49:33

Every day there is an enormous amount of sickness and people hunt children on the internet. Because it removes accountability, it removes identity, it removes connection, it removes humanity and it allows for the worst forms of evil to take place, and it takes place at such a sickening scale that I don't even know how to process it in my brain. And so, for example, and so, for example, snapchat, snapchat has internal reports that, as of 2024, one or two years ago, they had internal reports of 10,000 sextortion cases per month, just on Snapchat. That's reported.

Speaker 1: 50:22

Reported how many? I would probably say that percentage aren't being reported. I mean most. I guess. Kids are embarrassed.

Speaker 2: 50:27

Hide, you get caught up, yeah, and it's a kid. Like kids don't know, like, what does reporting mean to a kid? Right, like a thing happens they get embarrassed, they get ashamed, they get hurt, they delete it.

Speaker 2: 50:44

So report and their internal report actually specifically said that that actually the real number is likely much more. That's just on Snapchat 10,000 a month. 10,000 a month. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children gets, on average, 800 reports a week of sextortion. They have like a hotline that you can call. So again, that's reports that are just calling a single hotline. The FBI says that sextortion is like the fastest growing crime against children. Now what that means and what the numbers around that because we're talking about good data versus bad data that's an anecdote, but it's meaningful.

Speaker 2: 51:17

The simple fact of the matter is that there's two forms of evil that I see. Uh, on this. One is interested in money. So there are international criminal organized systems that take advantage of teenagers, specifically teenage boys, biology. So what they do is and there's actually so the group that used to do the nigerian prince emails okay, yeah, to get like wire fraud and all you know and steal your money back in the early 2000s. They're called the yahoo boys because they from yahoocom. They used to use the yahoo email system to like do their thing okay they're still around same group.

Speaker 2: 52:00

Still around now they're in the business of blackmailing teenage boys.

Speaker 1: 52:04

I guess for people listening. Before we start, what is sextortion? Okay, very good. Yes, a lot of people just are clueless to this. So what is sextortion? For people listening?

Speaker 2: 52:15

Sextortion is. I have a sexual image of yours because you gave it to me and I'm going to use it as leverage against you unless you do what I say. It is extortion, sex torsion, right, the sexual images. It's a form of extortion. It's a form of blackmail. Um, and the FBI has an entire dedicated website, an entire resource center, like a whole bad, it's terrible. Um, it's global, it is. It is very thoroughly pervasive. If you connect a child to an online chat system, they are likely to be hunted and that is so scary.

Speaker 1: 53:01

Yeah, it, it's, it's um but we see global, but this could be the neighbor next door. Oh yeah, it's extorting Cause. The only reason I say that is the first time I ever heard about this. A good buddy of mine in salt Lake. Their neighbor's daughter killed herself and it was a mom of a teenager that didn't like her and they ended up tracking it down and finding it out and she ended up acting like a boy, got the girl to send pictures and then threatened to like email them to all the students in the school and it was a fellow classmate's mom boy. That's the first time I've heard it and it more like it mortified me that this was a thing. And then now it's like growing. So when you say globally, yes, but I don't want parents to think like, oh, if I keep my kids off from away from the Yahoo boys, it's not going to happen. It could be the neighbor down the street that finds your kids Instagram, yeah, that easy, and that is commonly the case.

Speaker 2: 54:00

Really, every city has cases of this.

Speaker 1: 54:03

Really, every city, really every city, has cases of this really every city, every small town, every big town, every neighborhood. I have goosebumps, man. This is. I'm so glad we're having this conversation. This is the shit that that parents need to hear.

Speaker 2: 54:15

It's very important.

Speaker 2: 54:17

I think it's important to recognize what it means to make trade-offs okay will you trade the convenience and the entertainment and the low friction method of being on these systems in exchange for the potential of these real risks. And so you have. You have the money form and then you have the truly evil, like sexual form. So tim tebow was just on the sean ryan podcast and he was talking about the, the sexual form and indicating that. So he's working with some organization now that's trying to bring awareness to the pervasiveness of child sexual abuse material and that he said there's over 100,000 unique IP addresses that have been caught up in the United States alone of producing producing not just distributing producing child sexual abuse material, and that the primary producers are biological fathers.

Speaker 1: 55:13

Saw that. That stood out to me. The biggest producer of that is biological fathers.

Speaker 2: 55:19

That stood out to me. That's why. That's why I kind of started this little piece off here talking about the sickness.

Speaker 1: 55:24

Yeah, absolutely, oh 100%.

Speaker 2: 55:25

There's something wrong man.

Speaker 1: 55:27

100%. There's something wrong. 100%.

Speaker 2: 55:29

This is not what we're supposed to do. I mean now, granted, especially his father. That's what I think. Maybe I'm wrong. That's not what I'm supposed to do. Definitely not wrong. That's not in me, my biology, my genetics. I'm involved here to protect children. I'm involved to help children grow. I'm here to make sure that my child, and every child that I come into contact with, has the best opportunity at happiness and safety. That should be everybody's, I agree. And that is not the case.

Speaker 1: 55:57

That is why I trust nobody. Yeah, I have dudes that I have deployed with they will help me bury a body right now. Yeah, I wouldn't. I trust one. One in my wife is the same. She trusts two men in this world, with my kids, me and my father. That's it, yeah.

Speaker 2: 56:15

Yeah, I think that. I mean, I think that's the way, man Cause the risk is real, it's not paranoia. Because the risk is real, it's not paranoia, it's not, it's not a conspiracy. The numbers speak, the numbers speak, and so what I'm here to say is that there are explicit trade-offs that you can make that can maximize the positive effects for your children.

Speaker 1: 56:39

God, it is so sorry. It is so important for us as parents to sit your children down and let them know once you send a picture, it's not coming back.

Speaker 2: 56:52

That's right.

Speaker 1: 56:53

What have I told you? From day one? When you got a phone, I have beat it into her through text, always text that the world's going to see it, that's going to be put on the news.

Speaker 2: 57:04

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 57:05

You know I don't follow that. I'll tell some motherfuckers off, but I'll, I'll, I'll read my those, my decisions later. Send every text as if it's going to get posted on the news that when you send a picture it doesn't come back. It is so scary and I feel that there's not enough parents teaching this. Yeah, all it takes is this your, your teenage son, to get hit up by some beautiful young other teenage girl yeah and they start a chat and she's in the school district next that's exactly next over.

Speaker 2: 57:41

Yeah, is that? Is that a big? That's. That is the um. Financial blackmail that occurs is just as you described and send me a picture.

Speaker 1: 57:49

They get something. Boom hey, I'm a, I'm a grown-ass dude. This is what I want now yeah and then these kids are too embarrassed to go to their parents yeah and end up taking their life yeah, about one a month.

Speaker 2: 58:00

Is committing suicide because of this? Oh my goodness. According to the fbi, it's one a month. Is committing suicide because of this? Oh my goodness. According to the FBI, it's one a month.

Speaker 2: 58:09

That we know of that they're finding this out that we know of. So like I've had some pretty heavy conversations with some people. Recently I talked to a dad whose son committed suicide because of this and he said that they didn't even find out why for eight weeks. How'd they end up finding out? Did he go through his phone? Somehow? Somebody went through his phone and found out and like, oh, that's what happened. Oh, good kid, church school, good grades, good relationship with his family. Went to bed that night, was contacted by somebody while he was in his room on his phone. Two hours later he was dead.

Speaker 1: 58:53

That's horrible, it, uh yeah and they can't even track these people, I mean, probably most of the time. Are they even finding out who does it?

Speaker 2: 59:03

No. These people are just getting away with murdering children over extortion and the text message threads show that they don't even care. The kids are literally telling them Like Jordan DeMay is a name that you guys should look up. Everybody watching should look up. A kid from Michigan killed himself and his mom, told the spoken public and said I never even heard of sextortion, I didn't even know what it was I'm sure a lot of.

Speaker 1: 59:30

I'm sure there is a majority of people listening to this that have no idea. Kid probably didn't hear about it either jordan probably didn't who's sitting down and teaching teenagers about sextortion, that's right. When you give your kid a phone, here you go, buddy, right, call me when you're done with your game, I'll come pick you up.

Speaker 2: 59:44

Yeah, yeah. So this if you'd like we can segue into the part about what do you do?

Speaker 1: 59:53

Yes, absolutely.

Speaker 2: 59:54

Okay, so we've covered the problem, so let's talk about the solutions. Okay, so since we're on the topic of sextortion and the physical health component, let's start there. The combination of an internet connected camera and an online chat system is a very dangerous recipe. Okay, if those two things coexist, sextortion is a very real possibility, and every video that I've made and that I've posted to my tech talk and my Instagram, I've gotten many messages, many messages I don't know hundreds, I haven't counted them. A lot of like this happened to me and this happened to everybody I know a lot internet connected camera combined with an online chat system, whether that chat system be social media or a game.

Speaker 1: 1:00:46

So when you say online internet connected camera, my mind automatically wants to go to a webcam. But you're talking on a phone On a phone, so you're which. You give a kid a phone. You gave them both of those things that you just listed. That is correct. Okay, Just for people listening, this isn't just a oh, they got to get on, log on to my desktop, turn the camera on and then now they're connected through that. This is a phone.

Speaker 2: 1:01:10

Right, this is what is the lowest friction path to responding to your biology when the cute girl sends you a naked picture and asks you for one back, that you can, within seconds, do so. No second thought, no like. Oh, I accidentally bumped into my parents on the way to go grab my actual camera that I was going to then plug into my computer and upload the sd card, and you know yeah that can happen too, but I'm I'm sitting here talking about, like, what's the most common scenario, and so um.

Speaker 2: 1:01:40

So a couple things that are very interesting. You cannot buy a smartphone in the United States that does not have a camera. Including all the kid-safe phones, they all have cameras.

Speaker 1: 1:01:54

I've never thought of that.

Speaker 2: 1:01:58

It's not good. It's not good. Now, if your kid has a phone most do the camera can be disabled. So on Apple, their parental control system is called screen time. You can turn the camera off. It cannot be accessed by any app.

Speaker 1: 1:02:17

Okay.

Speaker 2: 1:02:18

On Android it's oddly not that good. You can disable the camera and then it still works sometimes.

Speaker 1: 1:02:28

But I don't want you to put that out there as like this is this is an option because these kids are. I mean they're so. I mean they have calculator apps that they're hiding all their other apps inside. I mean these kids are learning how to jailbreak and unlock and do all that stuff. So as a for so for you saying that you could turn that off, don't think, unless maybe you have to put a code into it. I don't know, I've never turned a camera off on a phone, but I feel most of these kids you turn something off on their phone, they're on YouTube two seconds later as you drop them off to school and they're and they're turning right back on.

Speaker 2: 1:03:05

It's always workarounds. The the iPhone restrictions for the camera are pretty good, okay, okay, but what's important to recognize is that every solution to what we're talking about today has a technical side and a non-technical side. The non-technical side is way more important than the technical side. Okay, so fine, the technical side. You disable the camera, you disable the social media apps one or both, you know, but don't definitely don't have them together. Okay. The non-technical side is that don't allow devices to go into private areas of the house. Is this you?

Speaker 1: 1:03:33

guys rooms no rooms here, brilliant spot on I I thought with the wife, but as a having teenage daughters yeah daughter. They have their discussions with other teen and I'm cool with that, I allow them, but she dad, can I go? Yeah she comes and asks dad hey, can I go call?

Speaker 2: 1:03:53

I don't need to hear her teenage conversation yeah, I don't need to hear yeah, but yes, right please.

Speaker 1: 1:03:58

Phones are charged out out. There's no charging in the room. Your phone's not plugged in in your room yeah doesn't go in your room.

Speaker 1: 1:04:03

But if you want to have private time, I'm, I accept it. Oh yeah, Private social scrolling time, it's hey, if you're you're in a group chat, I don't want to hear your phone Even though as a parent it's probably the wrong thing to say like the buzzing and the Dean. But when her group chats, oh my God, it'm cool with it, I have no problem. But that's my rules. I'm not saying that's for everybody. But yes, no private areas.

Speaker 2: 1:04:31

But then what you're saying is actually the most important thing is to have the conversation. Have the conversation. Show them what can happen. Talk about it 100%. Bring them to internet safety events hosted by Officer Gomez in the Boise area or whatever PTA or police department thing operates in your area. Bring them to these events. Let them hear about how often these things occur. Connect with the uh, they call it the ICAC internet crimes against children. It's a police force, like a task force, you know. Look into that. Expose your kids to these problems. Talk about these things and do not allow the devices in private areas. Cause that. That. Actually, that helps with the mental health side too. For sure, this is just like a healthy habits thing, but it's also like a safety thing.

Speaker 1: 1:05:20

Well, I feel it's it creates hermits.

Speaker 2: 1:05:26

Yeah, well, and then, all of a sudden, before you know it, it's 2 am and you haven't gone to sleep yet and you know, because the devices are doing what they're supposed to do for sure they're pulling, they pull these kids away.

Speaker 1: 1:05:32

That's what she'll. She'll be in her room doing homework yeah I'm like where's, where's chrissy?

Speaker 1: 1:05:36

like she's being a hermit. I haven't seen her all day. Like where is she? I haven't seen her a few hours. Like that's how my mind works, because we're around our kids so much, so like, if I'm not seeing them, what are we doing? And she probably drives her nuts. But what are we? Are you working? What are we working on? What is it? Because I, I'm not. I refuse to be that parent. That's, I'm not. I can't be a statistic parent. I refuse. Like it's, it's not.

Speaker 1: 1:05:59

After I had a friend, a friend joined in. That was where I was like, okay, it's that easy, which, you had your aha moment too, but yeah, it's, it's. I feel when you give your kid a phone and then you're allowing them to go to their room. They're on xbox, they're playing their, their games, and then they're in there, just they're buried in it, and then that then now they're not out with the family. I want kids because we're very open here, we're very. We communicate about everything. We talk every there's certain girl things I don't even know about as a dad yeah I got.

Speaker 1: 1:06:29

Hey, I'm cool, yeah, but everything else I'm going to be involved in, if you like it or not, because that until you move out of my house, that that's my rule. I'm going to know, but not in like a bad way where I'm shutting things down, but we should, you should be able to have that conversation. But why are we in there? What's going on? Those are the questions that I'm asking. Why has she been in her room all day? You know, oh, she's got a mic. Okay, cool, phone's been charged? Okay, I didn't see the phone out here. Okay, cool, I'll leave you alone. Sorry, do your thing. But yeah, hey, you've been in here too long, let's get out. You know that's. Those are.

Speaker 1: 1:06:58

That's how I am as a father. Yeah, but I feel, as we're so busy, we're so busy these days, our fucking parents were busy too, but we were up there ass 24 7 because we didn't have phones. I just feel it's, it's. I really don't want to say lazy parenting, but I, I that's. The first thing that comes to me is when these parents like here you go, it's here, it's the new pacifier, it's the modern pacifier. Yeah, it's the. It's the new pacifier, it's the modern pacifier.

Speaker 2: 1:07:23

Yeah, it's the, it's the well the babysitter, I should say there's a, there's a an extreme lack of awareness and and and fair enough as to why that's the case, but that is the case, right? So, like lazy or not, people just don't know.

Speaker 2: 1:07:41

Yes, and I think like so you and I are both in the security business in different ways, right? So I'm looking at the bits and bytes and you're a physical security guy. Yes, absolutely so. We are in the business of risk management and we're very savvy on like yes, risk is real. Risk needs to be identified, it needs to be assessed, it needs to be managed. Throughout my career, I have struggled to get on the same page with people as to the nature of risk as a concept, and so, um, I accept the fact I struggle with it, but I I've, uh, had to accept the fact that there's something in human nature that just doesn't really want to deal with the fact that, like, risk is real.

Speaker 1: 1:08:28

Which is weird, it's. I'm with you on this.

Speaker 2: 1:08:32

Okay, it just seems to be the case. You know why? Why?

Speaker 1: 1:08:36

why do we the risk versus reward? I guess in a way, but like oh it's, it's not going to happen to me or it's not gonna happen to my kids, I don't know.

Speaker 2: 1:08:45

but I think that trying to, at the very least, raise awareness and bring attention to where risk is uh, I will say, on a positive note, that it has. I have had a positive effect on others in that way. I've had feedback from people going like thank you, I didn't know. Now I know, now I'm going to, now I can behave accordingly.

Speaker 2: 1:09:12

Worth everything that you've done If you saved one child out of everything that you've done? Worth it? Beautiful? Yes, a hundred percent, and so so it's, it's out there, but I just try to set my own expectations of like. It's just seems to be like the path of least resistance thing, seems to be like a human nature thing of like, what is the path of least resistance? That's where I'm going. Whether I realize it or not, whether I'm conscious of which path I'm choosing, I'm going down the path of least resistance, um and and this topic requires resistance.

Speaker 1: 1:09:38

The hard path.

Speaker 2: 1:09:39

Yeah, this, this topic requires saying I'm not here to be normal. I'm not here to do what everybody else is doing, absolutely not. I'm not here to do a thing that when my kid goes, but, like every single one of my friends has an iPhone, I'm the only one that doesn't have an iPhone. All of my friends are on Snapchat. All of my friends are on Instagram. The football practice is coordinated on Facebook or on freaking Snapchat, even like the school events and the Boy Scouts and all the things are like coordinated on social media, because people don't necessarily know as to like what that really means, and then I'm the only one that's not on there. I'm like that's not a reason to be on there and it's still a real risk and that just means that those people are not fortunate enough to know, um, but I'm not here to be normal.

Speaker 2: 1:10:32

You know I don't like normal, sorry. Normal is in the middle of the bell curve. I want to be on the right side of the bell curve. I want to have the maximum potential for positive opportunity for me and my kid and my wife.

Speaker 1: 1:10:44

I love the statement that. Well, everybody else had fun, all their other kids have phones, so we got our kid a phone, all right because, everybody's got phones okay yeah I don't give a what. I don't give a fuck what value comes of that you're 10 years old.

Speaker 1: 1:10:55

What do you need? What do you need a phone for? I didn't have a phone until I joined the marine corps, got my first paycheck, went to verizon and bought a flip phone. That's when I got my first phone. Yeah, like you, you mean to tell me you're 13 years old and you need an iPhone 16. Get it, I don't care. There's. No, I don't care who sits in front of me and tries to justify that your child needs needs to be exposed to the internet. I think it was off the Sean Ryan show or one of the shows, but it hit where it's one of. Somebody stated this at one point. I could probably I'll probably screw this up, but it said what used to take a sailor a lifetime to experience, takes a 10 year old a week. Oh man, yeah that's right.

Speaker 1: 1:11:38

Yeah, and that's not good man, I mean obviously, but like but if you think about that and if you really process that what used to take a sailor a lifetime to experience is taking a child a week, because you're giving them this, you're giving them the inner, you're not. You're not. You're not giving your kid the internet, you're giving the internet to your kid, you're exposing them to everything. Yeah, and I feel if more parents just re-thought of oh hey, everybody else is on. Oh, snapchat, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, hey, honey, I'll let you have snap Snapchat so we could do the filters. The faces are fun, we'll send them to each other.

Speaker 2: 1:12:14

Yeah, yeah, well, and so, and so here's here's another really important thing that I think about parenting, which is, I think, behavior modeling is like a key component of parenting, right? Like, however we behave on our kids naturally, oh, absolutely, that's how I should behave, absolutely. And so how do we behave with our technology? Right, this is not just a kid problem. Okay, as parents, this is I don't mean this in like a judgmental way, but I'll just say, generally speaking, it's a parenting problem. How do we behave as parents? What behavior do we model? What habits do we model? What habits do we show?

Speaker 2: 1:12:51

So, for example, I would like to encourage everybody to go and use the screen time feature on your phone and see how much time do you spend every day on which apps, so that way you can become conscious of it and you go, okay, cool.

Speaker 2: 1:13:06

So if I'm doing that and and with all like empathy and acceptance to the fact that it's normal to have four to six hours a day of screen time, that's normal, okay, so I'm not, I'm not here to criticize, I'm here to say that that is normal and that is currently. It is okay. Whatever your current situation is, that is okay. And if the situation is not the way you want it to be. It's beautiful because it's an opportunity for positive change. And then when you make a positive change and you share that change and you experience that change with your kids and you show them vulnerability and you show them that failure is actually a very wonderful thing because it enables positive change. People are very afraid of change. That is human nature. I've learned that in systems design. One of the first things I was taught was that humans do not like change.

Speaker 1: 1:14:01

Absolutely, you get comfortable.

Speaker 2: 1:14:03

Right, and so what a wonderful thing to teach a kid is how to make positive change and say hey, son, I would like to show you something. Check this out. I just found out that I spend four hours a day on my phone and two and a half hours of it is on Instagram, and I get no value out of that. That's time that has been taken from me, which means that's time that's been taken from you. I needed to hear this.

Speaker 1: 1:14:29

That's time that has been taken from me, which means that's time that's been taken from you.

Speaker 2: 1:14:31

I needed to hear this, and so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into my phone and I'm going to put on the limit. If I'm at two and a half hours on Instagram, let me make a bite-sized change so I can recognize that my own biological tendencies will be afraid of making a huge one. Let me drop the limit down to two hours. So then tomorrow when I'm using it, the thing goes out hey, it's been two hours, oh, right on, okay, cool, all right, let me close that. And then, two weeks later, drop it down to one and a half. Two weeks later, drop it down to one, eventually get rid of it and find out the fact that you are missing nothing, absolutely nothing, and that you have gained everything.

Speaker 2: 1:15:20

Say that again. Say that for the people in the back. So I I removed social media from my life and I have missed nothing, and I have gained. I have gained my time and my attention, which, now that I'm a family man, that time and attention gets to go to the people in my house, not to the people in San Francisco or New York or Beijing or anywhere else that I've never met, that are there to take from me. I took my time back and now I get to intentionally do with it as I please and that is there for us. It is okay and it is normal that we all have fallen victim to these machines A hundred percent.

Speaker 2: 1:16:01

Because they are very good at taking advantage of us, but the same machines have counters on them that show us how much they're taking, which I'm surprised they did that right. It's very interesting. I'll give a lot of credit actually to apple, because apple is one of the very few companies in the technology space that is a product company. They're not an advertising company and they've actually done things that have damaged the advertising industry in huge ways, which is really very good.

Speaker 1: 1:16:33

Really how so.

Speaker 2: 1:16:34

Um, ios 14. So currently we're on iOS 18. So four years ago on iOS 14, apple made a little little tiny, invisible technical change behind the scenes on the on the iPhone. That breaks the ability for the advertising tracking functions to work and they legit put the hurt on Facebook.

Speaker 1: 1:16:57

Really.

Speaker 2: 1:16:58

They damaged their revenue that same year Tanked, and so I give a lot of credit to Apple Interesting.

Speaker 1: 1:17:08

I thought Apple was one of the main sources, or the hub of all of this.

Speaker 2: 1:17:13

They make addictive devices. They make devices that are so wonderfully designed that the youngest of children can pick them up and immediately know how to use them. Fascinating it's, it's so it. From a? From a technical perspective, they're the best. Yeah, they are a product company. They are not an advertising company. They're one of the very few, and so they do have the screen time function, and then Android has that now too, and so it's there for us to use. So, behavior modeling how do we behave, how do we want to behave? Um, I, uh, one of the things I like to do is just is be publicly vulnerable, because I think that, um the more I kind of acknowledge the fact, with everybody watching here, like I said, I'm 44.

Speaker 2: 1:18:15

I for the very first time, like a month ago, identified what my values are. I wrote them down. Okay, I was in a psychology session, a family psychology session, and, uh, this wonderful, uh woman that we see here in town said, hey, um, what are your guys' values? Here's some paper, Go ahead and write them down. It was awesome, man. My wife, my son and I were all sitting there writing them all. I had a whole. Each of us had a whole page. My nine-year-old son wrote the most beautiful things. I was like, wow, like kids are so impressive. You know, this kid is so freaking cool man. And and then I wrote down my stuff and, right, my wife and then a bunch of our like top three top five are actually the same.

Speaker 2: 1:18:52

Really, you know, it's like honesty, hard work leading by example, stuff like that. Yeah, and what that exercise showed me was that it was just crystal clear that, like, the things on that paper do not match the values expressed by the systems that exist on my phone or on my computer, or the values that the politicians that operate our governments express. Those people are not on our team. Those people, fair enough. They're there for them. I'm here for me and I'm here for my family.

Speaker 2: 1:19:28

They're there for them, I'm here for me and I'm here for my family. They're there for them. That's okay. But it allowed me to identify that on paper and to compare that against the things that I'm exposed to and the things that I expose my, my child to, and so I just throw it out there. It's like try it out. Sit down with your family, take a blank piece of paper, and each of you on your own, so you don't bias each other's things, you know, without looking or whatever, just write down your own. See what your kids write down, see what you write down.

Speaker 1: 1:19:57

I like that.

Speaker 2: 1:19:58

And then compare it to the things that you interact with.

Speaker 1: 1:20:00

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:20:01

And it's really beautiful and really valuable. So I got to do it at the first time at age 44, thanks to this wonderful therapist lady here in town.

Speaker 1: 1:20:11

Interesting.

Speaker 2: 1:20:12

So I just want to focus on how are we, as leaders, as parents, yeah, how do we lead? What do we show? Nope, I think that's where it starts, actually, I think that's yes, yes, yes.

Speaker 1: 1:20:26

We parents, we should be leading, leading everything. I think the father should. Obviously, you know, a complete home is the father should be the head of the household and lead and it's his direction. And that's how. That's how we operate here, my wife and I. We are evenly yoked on our children, on our faith, on business, on everything. It took a long time. We weren't always like that. Yeah, we trust me, we've not been perfect, but yeah, as we've grown and we've always been really evenly keeled on how we're gonna raise our kids and I and I feel these parents and I see it, I have buddies that have younger kids and they'll go to correct or their wives will stop them and step on them and override and and it's just like you're like what is that? Showing children right out the gate?

Speaker 2: 1:21:14

that yeah, yeah, that's tough there's.

Speaker 1: 1:21:16

You know the different directions and, okay, I'm gonna go to mom for the you're, there's no mommy daddy games in this house. You get your ass chewed by one. You go running the other one, they're gonna chew your ass for going to you. We're doing that and they and they're going to take you back and then, hey, so that got it eliminates that. So it's, there's no questioning it. I feel as a complete household. Yeah, absolutely. It should come from the parents, and that's how your children are watching everything and they see that you're putting good out. You see that you're the struggles, the highs, the mountain peaks to the valleys, and our kids are involved in everything and they see that and so it's. But they, they, there's so many lessons that come with every single one of those things, along with life and business and the struggles and the successes and whatever else comes with it. I mean, that's how I think so.

Speaker 2: 1:22:04

Well, and I think what this values exercise did for me was it allowed me to look at things in terms of principles instead of rules, and skills instead of rules. So, instead of like, hey, you're not allowed to have your phone in your room, it's, our values are such and such and so, therefore, our principles are as follows, and those are enabled by us looking after each other and by me looking after you and your health and your safety and your wellbeing, and that doesn't match having your phone in your room.

Speaker 1: 1:22:33

See and that's, and so, instead of that's a great point, because it's not just hey, no, not not happening, it's hey, listen, too much of this. This is why it takes that, and this is where it comes down to where it's. It's not easy being a I want to say, involved parent, not even a good parent, an involved parent, because instead of being like no, I don't like it, hey, do this, go, do that. That's not how it works for kids, at least in my opinion, not for me.

Speaker 2: 1:22:58

You know it didn't work for you.

Speaker 1: 1:23:00

Hey, don't go touch that. As soon as you turned your back, I was like it was like I, that's that's how. So with us it's hey, this is why this is what's going on, this is what we're trying to avoid, this is what it's going to help, or whatever the scenario is. But, like you, if you explain it to your children, then if they cross that line, then they knew they, they know why there's no exploring, because kids are, so they want to explore. And if it's one of those things like, hey, let's let, I'm going to show you this. Okay, you want to see the dark side? Let's figure this out. Let's see what happens if this continues.

Speaker 1: 1:23:34

This is the path that we have potential of going down, and that's where it takes being involved with your kids to be like oh, hey, hey she asked for a picture, absolutely not Because you've gone down. You've sat on their bed at freaking midnight talking to them like, hey, listen. Their bed at freaking midnight, talking to them like, hey, listen. In having those deep, connected conversations where your kids trust you and then they take your word with value hey, I'm not going to go against that, because I've been explained, I've been taught this. There's been so many examples where she comes home and she's like, oh my god, thank god, you guys told me about this like, oh my so, and so is doing this. And oh, I was like, nope, I'm out, I don't want to, because she's we've explained things to her along to prepare her for the world and they're gonna, they're gonna screw up. They're teenagers, they all do.

Speaker 1: 1:24:21

If they don't, then something's off yeah, you know she has it, yeah so I mean, except for some dings in my truck that I find here and there, um, but you know it's, it's, it's expected. But there's been so many scenarios where she's come home and been like, oh my god, I dodged this. Oh I, you explained this that one time and I saw it coming and it's like, okay, cool, they're listening. But it's by having those conversations and being very open with your kids, and I feel that needs to start at a very young age. Yeah, it's not one of those things. You have a teenager who's come here, sit down, son.

Speaker 1: 1:24:53

I'm gonna explain this, because the whole time the kids can be like, oh, shut the fuck up, I don't care. Like, oh, yeah, dad, you know dad, but if you have that relationship from a front from a young age, hey, listen, son, this is, this is, this is what's happening. These girls, it's, it's ai, it's not even a real woman that's hitting you up. But if you've had these conversations as they grow, and I'm not saying expose your kids to the world For us, we want to keep our kids as safe as possible, but you have to expose them to the realities, the little tastes of it, just so they know. And it's like, hey, if you have more questions? Cool, we'll explore that, but let tastes of it, just so they know. And it's like hey, if you have more questions, cool, we'll, we'll explore that, but let's do it together. Yeah, not. No, I don't want you looking at that. No, don't go look at, I don't want you to having that on your phone why, right, but if they know why, this is what it leads to.

Speaker 1: 1:25:40

These are the problems that it can open up and that's it all comes down to, I feel, and people can argue, but it's open line of communication with your kids and it's hard it is it's hard and it takes a lot, sometimes too very frustrating and so. But when they come back to you and they're like oh my, there, there's so many times where she's come back I'm like dad man, when you're talking about this 100 saw it happening like nice man.

Speaker 2: 1:26:05

That is the. That is the most wonderful thing it really is like boy talks.

Speaker 1: 1:26:10

This is how boys minds are working right now. They don't give a shit. Yeah, they don't. This is what it's on our mind. They're in full rut. All they're looking for is this you're the most beautiful girl. They're going to tell you everything in the world to get that pic. I've told her they will tell you everything you want to hear. To get a picture, yeah, but when you don't send that picture, how long long are they sticking around?

Speaker 2: 1:26:28

That's telling, that's very telling how long are they sticking?

Speaker 2: 1:26:30

around and you know what, man, I'm also here to recognize the fact that sometimes pictures will be exchanged and all this and that. Don't do it on the internet, do not put it online. Just to be realistic about it. If you're really going to do it and you're really sure you want to take that gigantic risk, don't do it on the internet. But the trouble is too like, even if you do it in physical form, it gets on the internet by them going click with their camera. So once it's out there, once that photo leaves, it's gone.

Speaker 2: 1:27:00

The risk you know, talking about being aware of risk and stuff like that's a risk that is just like the internet's forever man, you know, don't, don't let private stuff touch the internet. Nope, because there's no pulling it back. Yeah, it is such a scary world for children these days. Yeah, um, it is man. And I think that the more that we can lead by example and get closer to nature and bring them along with us in the process and talk to them about it and show them why and demonstrate the principles and the values, um, that they'll have a really great opportunity at having a positive outcome 100%.

Speaker 1: 1:27:33

I got some questions because I put it out on social, so I'm going to ask questions. Yeah, let's do it, and yeah, I guess we'll just go from there. But I had some really good ones, and parents, people are curious and so these are all just your opinion. We touched on this one actually teen suicide, teen suicides on the rise. A huge part of that has to do with technology and which I guess. I guess we can skip that one.

Speaker 2: 1:28:00

But um, well, and so then, just to focus back, what part of technology addictive algorithms, aka social media? It's a huge role. Focus on that. Do not give your kids social media Hard stop. No moderation. Okay, that's my opinion.

Speaker 1: 1:28:21

Sorry, no, it's coming, kid.

Speaker 2: 1:28:23

She's over there.

Speaker 1: 1:28:25

My apologies but I'm with you. Oh, here's a good one. Do I need not me? We're not. We're not in public schools. Do parents need to worry about?

Speaker 2: 1:28:44

iPads and laptops that public schools are giving their children to learn on. Ah, yes, really, god. I wish that wasn't the simple answer, but uh are they at risk?

Speaker 1: 1:28:54

So let me just reword this Are children in public schools at risk of being taken advantage of by the technology given to them by school?

Speaker 2: 1:29:05

Yes.

Speaker 1: 1:29:07

Okay, how so?

Speaker 2: 1:29:11

Yes, okay, how? So? In a few ways. So, by default, most schools issue Chromebooks to students. Chromebooks are made by Google. Google is an advertising company. Google is in the business of surveillance. Google is not an education company. Google is an advertising company. Google subsidizes the cost of those devices and the software that runs on them in order to gain access to your children. Damn. And the schools not only issue them Chromebooks, they issue them Google accounts with their full names and some of their private information, without parental consent or even notification.

Speaker 2: 1:30:01

Huh, there have been enough large amount of cases of schools and districts and states and all the entities involved demonstrating that they do not care, okay, and or they're doing their best within the limits that they have, and that is not enough, and that for some reason. Well, okay, I'll take a couple of educated guesses as to what the reasons are. Efficiency is one of them. It is more efficient to administer a school using a Google system than it is to not use a Google system. Much more efficient. Schools are limited on budget, limited on staff, limited on time. The Google systems are actually, from a technical perspective, very good, very good.

Speaker 2: 1:30:54

Some of the companies that I run. I use Google systems in order to run those companies because they're very good and, from a business perspective, you must be practical first. If you have a budget to manage, you must be practical first, and so that's what these schools are doing. If you have a budget to manage, you must be practical first, and so that's what these schools are doing. However, I don't find it appropriate to feed our children to an advertising company, nor. Okay, well, let's just we'll leave that simple piece there. And then the other piece is that these are internet connected devices. By the nature of the device, and the filters that school systems use are not good enough. They they give the kids youtube that's wild to me um, there's a.

Speaker 2: 1:31:43

The nikki riceburg has a is a gal that on on instagram has a channel called scrolling to death okay she's really popular on this whole topic of like kids and the internet and what should parents do.

Speaker 2: 1:31:54

And her story is that and she actually took a video of it. You can find it on her Instagram channel where she went to her daughter's school and opened up the. It was either Chromebook or an iPad, I can't remember which one. It had YouTube. Her daughter told her that she'd been seeing inappropriate things on YouTube on her school issued device. So her mom goes videos the thing. A freaking video pops up showing kids how to cut themselves Like encouraging them to cut themselves, and it's all easy to do and it shows the blood. It shows the blood dripping down and and it's all like this nice little tone to it and like, if I don't like kids don't need the internet to be at school no, they don't and and the.

Speaker 2: 1:32:44

The trouble is and I'll tell you, as a technical expert, my, my succinct opinion on this thing that occurs where, like, people go oh, but the kids need to learn technology so that they're ready for the future.

Speaker 1: 1:32:53

No, they do not okay, I okay, I'm with you, this stuff's not hard to learn.

Speaker 2: 1:33:02

They're learning it at three. They're learning at three if they, if they need to go, if they get into a job where they use technology which they will, because every job uses technology. These are basic, fundamental things. And if you get into a job, that's high tech, that's a specific skill set that can be learned, specifically this general concept of like. Well, how are they going to know how to use the internet if they don't Like? That's not hard, that's not a skill your kid's not learning how to code?

Speaker 1: 1:33:29

No, they don't. Like, that's not hard, that's not a skill. Your kid's not learning how to code? No, like, oh, he needs to learn technology. Is he learning how to code? No, oh, so he has youtube and yeah, and snapchat, so that's him learning technology.

Speaker 2: 1:33:40

So so sweden recently did a thing where they started specifically funding the the purchase of paper textbooks instead of digital books. I would love that. It's amazing. The the minister of paper textbooks instead of digital books. I would love that. It's amazing. The, the minister of education for the country of Sweden got approval to get a. It was like $70 million a year to get textbooks and librarians and go backwards from digital. Imagine that.

Speaker 1: 1:34:08

I wonder when that's gonna right. Everything, everything has. Imagine that. I wonder when that's going to Right. Everything has a cycle. I mean, I know we're just in the beginning of this AI technology cycle, but I hope in our lifetime we get to see a.

Speaker 2: 1:34:19

Okay. So here's the like. Oddly positive side of this is that we must prepare our kids to be exposed to the parts of the internet that we cannot control. When they go to their friend's house, when they go to school and all the other things, right. When they're not in your house, they're not in your, your view, they're not in your sort of not for lack of a better term control. I'm not, I don't like control, but you know what I mean. Then, then you need to prepare them and that, and that goes back to leading by example, talking about principles, talking about values and like what do you, how do you identify risk and what do you do when it occurs? Because it will occur. So now these schools have turned into oh, that's the title of my article digital danger zone. I was going to say they've turned into digital danger zones. The article on my website with the chart, it's called digital danger zone. These schools have turned into digital danger zones. So I guess they're learning how to, how to wade through some risky stuff On their own, though On their own it's just terrifying.

Speaker 2: 1:35:23

My kid goes to public school, which I would very much like to change, but it's currently the case that he goes to public school. I love his teachers. He has like the best team, he has a fantastic team. He's made some scholastic gains in that place with these wonderful women that are his teachers there that help him so much, and so I'm not judging them and I'm not criticizing them as individuals, but part of their system is to say, hey, uh, in your downtime you can go play games on the, on the Chromebook.

Speaker 2: 1:35:55

Those games are free. Those games are funded by ads. Therefore, while he's playing the games, he's watching ads. Who runs the filters for those ads? Google, some third party ad company, who knows? Do I want my kid in an advertising ecosystem? Do I want my kid as, like, a marketing widget? No, and he's addicted to these games, talks about them all the time. He wants me to play them on my computer, he wants to play them on my phone and I'm like no, dude, like the way that they even come up. I'm like no, no, no, that's not healthy Like that. No.

Speaker 1: 1:36:35

You know it's scary about ads and I don't, and this was a while ago. So my, our youngest, had a Christian learning game. It was like an. It was like a kid's way of describing the Bible and breaking it down, barney style, yeah, I hear she's learning and they ask questions and Adam and Eve did this, whatever.

Speaker 1: 1:36:53

Right, I hear an ad pop up and it's a gay trans dating app on a Christian game. Yeah, I, I almost kicked the door off the hinges because I wasn't I can, I was processing the, I can hear everything. Then, all of a sudden, my mind because I wasn't I can, I was processing the, I could hear everything. Then all of a sudden, my mind I hear things. I'm my little girl, shouldn't it be hearing? I fly up and I go in there and I snatched that thing up and I'm like what are we like when? She's like it's an ad and I'm like we're done, and that's when everything went away. Yeah, but here I am thinking as a father oh, my daughter's laying there learning about the Bible, right, what can possibly go wrong? And she gets served a gay dating app where it's showing two dudes holding each other kissing and showing women to get. Yeah, it's a Christian children's app.

Speaker 2: 1:37:52

That to me. I was like no one's safe, very ironic. And that's actually the perfect analogy for the school thing, because the people that make that app probably don't want that ad in there, but they're funding the app by so what? It is okay If you run a website or you run an app and you want to give it for free. If you get eyeball website, you run an app and you want to give it for free. If you get eyeball time, you can insert um uh, ad systems where you say, okay, the screen is this big, I'll give you the bottom of the screen and then every they call it um, uh, it's, it's every thousand views, you get paid. Every time the ad is viewed a thousand times, you get a certain like number of pennies and so, um, okay, I, okay, I'll give you the spot on the bottom of the screen. You can run your ads in there and then that way I can get paid for giving my free app so that I can be compensated for my time.

Speaker 1: 1:38:37

They don't know who's sponsoring that.

Speaker 2: 1:38:39

Right, and so you insert. So there's all these different companies that you can insert that run ad networks. So Google's one of them, there's a bunch of them, and they all have different rates that they'll pay you, and so you find the one that suits your, your business model, and so that's probably what happened here, is they go, okay, that one suits our business model, and like for Google I know this from experience cause I've I've run Google ads in some of my apps you can say, like I don't want these categories, but not all of them have that, and so then this is what happens, you know, and this is what's happening in schools too that's so scary.

Speaker 2: 1:39:10

The schools like the, the folks that made the bible app, maybe not not be experts on, like the advertising ecosystem, and then so crazy stuff happens. What a terrifying world. It's a wacky time. It's a wacky time. Digital, digital ads, to me, are like the downfall and it's only natural. I think it's only natural for technology to occur and if the technology is interconnected, the path of least resistance will be for people to consume technology that's free, and the way that you create free technology is with digital ads. So it's a natural occurrence in my opinion, and it is a big problem.

Speaker 1: 1:39:53

Absolutely.

Speaker 2: 1:39:56

Okay, moving on the app bark.

Speaker 1: 1:40:02

Do you recommend?

Speaker 2: 1:40:03

it Good question, so so, first off, I haven't used it myself, okay, I think we have it here.

Speaker 1: 1:40:08

That's why I'm asking question. So so, first off, I haven't used it myself.

Speaker 2: 1:40:10

Okay, I think we have it here. That's why I'm asking and actually other parents reached out about it. Super popular, okay. Um, I think the general concept sounds great. You know, I've sort of read the brochure. You know I've read the website and checked out the stuff. Um, they, they do some neat things. They're very successful. The, the gal that runs bark, um, also operates like a big uh, parenting in a tech world Facebook group.

Speaker 1: 1:40:31

Okay.

Speaker 2: 1:40:31

There's like 600,000 people in there all talking about hey, what do I do with my kids? And this and that, Um, it seems good, but short answer is I don't know, Cause I haven't tested it. I respect that yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:40:51

What is the worst social media platform that you can allow your child on?

Speaker 2: 1:40:53

Oh I just have to pick one.

Speaker 1: 1:40:54

Yep.

Speaker 2: 1:40:55

Start with the worst if you want.

Speaker 1: 1:40:56

But what would be the if you were? If you were, the, the number one platform, you would do anything. You could do to keep your child off of.

Speaker 2: 1:41:11

I'll just go Snapchat I've been pre dang.

Speaker 1: 1:41:12

No, no, no, no, it's not allowed in this house. No, it's not allowed. Nobody, nobody, I, I don't. I told her if you, I'm with you, I think snapchat was created by satan himself. I think it is the, the, the worst. Uh, it's the worst to me and I have buddies that are cops, that are detectives and they the the amount of pornography, everything that goes on it, because everybody thinks that it goes away and it doesn't go away. No, it's all saved in a server. And the what goes on in snapchat. And now that the snap streaks and these kids are so obsessed with it, I tell her all the time and I don't think couples, I do not think I. I tell her all the time, if you've huge red flag, if you're dating somebody and they will refuse to get rid of Snapchat, they're cheating on you, a hundred percent, I mean you know, I, I.

Speaker 2: 1:42:02

It's potentially hard to argue with, it's okay. The reason I mention it, just to give my rationale, yep, is, uh, the the nature of the system is to exchange photos secretly. Yep, so you know what's generally going to happen on there, and is that really like a kid thing? I don't think so. And then it's got the addictive nature and it has a thing where, like, you could expose your location and that's why they have 10,000 cases of sextortion a month that are reported. So, because I was sitting here thinking like, let's see, mental health, physical health, mental health, physical health. Snapchat has both, they all have both, but, like I don't know, snapchat just jumps out. I'll say that one.

Speaker 1: 1:42:45

Is posting your child on a social media platform safe to do if it's private?

Speaker 2: 1:42:51

No, why? Um, because, okay, um, so safe is. So I'll just, I'll tell you like my version of safe Cause safe is is like we've got to like define what that means, right, okay, let's let's call, let's say, instead of safe, let's use the word secure. Okay, the definition of security in my world is the term CIA. Is it confidential? Does it have integrity? And is it available? So, can it be kept secret? Does it stay in its original form and can I access it when I need to? And one of the things about availability and accessing it when you need to is does it belong to you? So the moment that you put information onto somebody else's servers, it doesn't belong to you anymore and so it violates all three of the tenets of security. So it's not secure. So therefore it's not safe.

Speaker 2: 1:43:56

I also think it's worth talking about privacy. That falls in the C, the confidential part, a little bit. But I just want to throw this out there that if you capture your child's being and environment and their development over time because if you take pictures over time and you put those on somebody else's servers when your child is an adult, are they going to be stoked about that? No, when your child is an adult. Are they going to be stoked about that? No, did they consent to having their private information and their likeness and their development and their mistakes and embarrassments and happiness and this and emotions and connections, and shared with a bunch of strangers that don't give two shits about them? And in 10 years time does the company that owns those photos? Is it still ran by the same people?

Speaker 2: 1:44:57

oh, you know who does it belong to then? Right, because the internet is new. The internet has only been here since 1997. Social media has only been here for like 15 years. The dude that started facebook still runs facebook, but the dudes that started google still involved with google. Right, it'll be a change over 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. You think they're going to get deleted? No, who's going to own them then? Who?

Speaker 2: 1:45:26

Edward snowden showed us that our own government steals our data from the companies that hold it right. So we have been shown that if you put your data on somebody else's servers, not only does it not belong to you, you might as well assume that it belongs to all of your worst enemies forever, and whoever their friends are forever. So I'm not a fan of that and I think it sucks because I wish it wasn't that way. Yeah, because it's really cool and it's really beautiful to be able to share your family moments with your grandparents across the country and across the world and to be able to connect with people in that way, and that's sometimes that's people's only connection into their extended family, even sometimes they're a media family when they're deployed overseas and you can connect back and see and reminisce and be like, wow, this is what my family's going on at home right now.

Speaker 2: 1:46:31

I can see them at the barbecue and here I am in the middle of the desert, but the fact of the matter is, man, that it's not secure and it's not safe and it's not private.

Speaker 1: 1:46:44

So that's your side, which is fascinating how I look at it and would answer it would be no, even if it's private, because, like I tell her, do you personally know every single person that follows your private account? Yeah, right, so that right there. Oh, susan sourdough baker, she follows us.

Speaker 2: 1:47:05

I'm gonna let her follow me right well and if you're connected to somebody who is is, let's say, a trustworthy individual and their social media account is logged in on their computer and somebody else in their house that's part of their family can access that computer and they are not a trustworthy individual and they take advantage of your photos. There's layers, there's so many layers. That's a thing. So I think that it is a risky proposition from many angles. If you put your children on the internet, got it?

Speaker 1: 1:47:43

Is there any social media platform you would allow your child to be on and, if so, what age would you approve of that?

Speaker 2: 1:47:53

no, done, okay. By the way, I want to say on the photo thing, on the kids and the internet thing, I'd like to offer a solution so that the the potential for connection can still be facilitated.

Speaker 2: 1:48:04

Okay, so use an app called signal signal. Signal is encrypted to the extent. So there's different ways to encrypt data. Don't really need to go into like the technical sides of it, but what's important to know is that signal specifically cannot access your data. Only you and the person on the other side can access your data. So you can have like groups in there, just the same as you can on a text messaging thing, okay. But in a regular text message the cellular carriers can access your data, the hosting company can access your data, but with Signal, nobody can access your data. So you can have like a family group in Signal and you can share your photos and your videos, okay.

Speaker 2: 1:48:46

Or there's a company called Proton and they actually sponsored me recently and I accepted their sponsorship because I did a bunch of research into them and I found out that they're really legit when it comes to privacy and security. And so I'm putting this out there as objectively saying like even if they, even if they weren't sponsoring me, I would still say that their stuff, they use the same encryption mechanisms and the same technical methods that signal uses where they cannot see your data, even on their own servers. So they do a thing where they give you the keys and they don't have the keys Got it and they cannot access your data. And they have a photo sharing function and that can be a really good way to share with your family and stuff your family and stuff.

Speaker 1: 1:49:26

This question is I know it's, it's, it's, it's a deep, not a deep one, but it's. There's so much going to be to it, but just your quickest to it, okay. As ai develops and the world is now being run by it, is there anything we could do to prepare, preparing our children for it, and what should they be looking out for?

Speaker 2: 1:49:49

Yeah, yep. Maximum skepticism 100%. Yeah, everything that comes out of an AI is bullshit by default and treated as such. And learn from that Great opportunity to learn. It's a massive, massive problem and therefore, the bigger the problem, the easier it is for kids to understand, because it has less nuance. I think, like nuance is difficult for, like the youngest kids, and so maximum skepticism um, it's, it's, it's here, it's coming, it's going to be more, it's going to be very pervasive and so, um, use it, talk about it, demonstrate the risks. I have an article on my website that actually has examples that you can run through with different age kids. You can show them how AI works and what can happen, and how to understand the pros and the cons.

Speaker 1: 1:50:39

I want you to send me all these links so you make sure that we get them linked on these videos, because some of them go wild. So I want to be able to help as many parents be able to have the tools to be able to show their kids. I feel that is the only way that you're able nowadays sitting your child down, and it's almost like a fear factor, like scared straight, you know they take those kids to prison and, like some inmates, trying to pull them through a cage yeah, I love it it's almost.

Speaker 1: 1:51:06

It's, honestly it's. We're almost at the like. That's kind of not that extent, but we don't hide shit from our kids, like the reality of obviously we want to shelter them and keep them safe, but we know the dark side of this world in what these platforms offer. So it's in a way, when they're old enough, mature enough to be able to process it, I feel it's it's a good way to be able to sit kids down. So if there's links or things that you know, like, hey, you should probably have your children watch this, or hey, these are good videos to sit down with parents and kids.

Speaker 2: 1:51:36

I want all of that. Yeah, I'll send you that and, by the way, my website is like totally free familyitguycom. I have a ton of resources with like conversation starters, how to like demonstrate things, how to practice things together, how what to know, like just there's a lot of stuff in there and I'll send you some of the specific links that we talked about.

Speaker 1: 1:51:53

Yeah, this is a question from a dad as a single father 50, 50 custody. What is the appropriate age to give your kid a phone? And if it's not a phone, is there any other form of technology we can give our kids to be able to communicate with parents and things like that? What would you recommend?

Speaker 2: 1:52:14

I, um, I recommend so, like I always have questions, like I'm a consultant, right, so I always like start with questions, but in this case it's not appropriate given the format. So what I'll do is just give some basic suggestions. So the first suggestion is an Apple watch. Okay, um, an Apple watch, okay. So if I'm giving my kid a phone, I'm going to assume that the primary use case is emergency communication. In an emergency communication scenario, the communication device must be reliable. The only reliable watch that has a cell phone built into it is the Apple watch.

Speaker 1: 1:52:51

Okay.

Speaker 2: 1:52:52

It's the only one with good battery, it's the only one with a good set of cellular radios and it's the only one with full scope parental controls that are free and built in. The only caveat is that the parent needs to have an iPad or an iPhone with which to control the parental controls, got it? So if you're not in an, if you're, if, as a parent, you have an Android device, um, google makes a watch. I'll have to send you the name of this one too. They make a watch for kids. It's not as good. It's not the gizmo or something. It's not the gizmo, like a bunch of those, have terrible battery life. This Google one cause. Google bought um Fitbit.

Speaker 2: 1:53:34

Yeah, google does watches now and and they have them for kids. But the thing is that it doesn't use regular cellular voice calls. It does calls over data and like when you're out camping and stuff. Sometimes the data connection is not as good as like a regular voice connection, which is why I go to the Apple watch first. The second thing I would recommend if you want something with an even more robust battery and you want offline navigation and you want offline medical capabilities and you want the potential for a camera, then I go with an iPhone and you can actually take an iPhone and you can disable the internet, you can disable the app store, you can disable the camera, you can make the screen black and white, you can turn it into a boring piece of utility and it's very utilitarian when it's in that mode, and the one thing I sell that's not free on my website is a guide on how to do that. You can take an iPhone and just strip everything off of it. Now you've got this thing where the battery lasts forever.

Speaker 1: 1:54:39

It's not doing anything.

Speaker 2: 1:54:40

It's like airplane mode. It's boring, but it does the thing so like, do you? Like able to call offline navigation and the new iPhones you can do texting over satellite, so that's like if your kid's going camping. That's awesome.

Speaker 1: 1:54:56

I didn't know this. Yeah, okay.

Speaker 2: 1:54:58

It's bad ass.

Speaker 1: 1:54:59

I'm glad we asked that question.

Speaker 2: 1:55:01

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:55:01

Thank you for that answer. I'm sure a lot of parents cause you think I'm not giving my kid a phone. But you're giving a kid a phone stripped You're giving you. You don't recommend giving your kid an iPhone. You give them recommended. You're recommending giving them a stripped iPhone. Oh yeah, Fully locked down.

Speaker 2: 1:55:19

Okay yeah, Fully stripped.

Speaker 1: 1:55:20

Don't give it to a normal which if people want to know, they can go to your website, which we're going to link, and you have that. It's the only thing you charge for on there. But, yeah, worth it, worth it, worth it. Okay, I'm with you. I appreciate this man. These are all parent. These are all questions that people have sent in. I we got a few more. I didn't go through all of them cause there was a lot but, I picked the ones that I feel that are.

Speaker 2: 1:55:42

Yeah, these are good man, I like this.

Speaker 1: 1:55:47

Okay, we just went that one. What is the best way to protect your child from online gaming or phones?

Speaker 2: 1:56:10

Principles and skills. Okay, so a perhaps I'll just state the obvious of like, well then, don't give them the thing you don't want them to have, but then they can still, but then they're around their friends and all the other things. So, therefore, they need the principles and the skills, they need to understand the why, and they need to have seen you demonstrate those principles and skills.

Speaker 2: 1:56:36

But if you're not willing to, oh, and go to the internet safety events that we talked about, like the officer Gomez type of stuff. Take your kids to that. And option three would just remove it all. Yeah, I mean like like I, yeah, I think like generally, like don't give it to them in the first place, Like don't set the precedent Um, I think that's another thing of parenting is like precedent. Like what, what precedents are you setting?

Speaker 2: 1:57:00

So, like don't set the precedent, but then also like to prepare them for where they're going to get connected. Otherwise, you gotta you gotta really expose them to the risk and expose them to the conversation.

Speaker 1: 1:57:11

Makes sense. How do you prevent your kid from ending up on child pornography websites, AI pornography. How do you prevent that?

Speaker 2: 1:57:24

Man.

Speaker 1: 1:57:36

Well, how do you prevent that man? Well, the two biggest things you can do. Pause real quick. Let me re. We at re-ask that question. Okay, okay. How do you prevent your children's? Images yeah, from ending up on pornography websites, AI platforms or anything along those lines.

Speaker 2: 1:57:49

So, in order to prevent that, you need to have those images, not be on the internet in the first place. Okay, it's hard to do, absolutely, because even if you don't put them on the internet, it's fucking crazy man. Don't put them on the internet. It's fucking crazy man. These bloody schools post pictures of kids and put them on the internet. The kid groups and the YMCAs and the things is like oh, it's really fun and we're going to take pictures of what we're doing and we're going to put it up on our social media. Now, your kid's on the internet. So you can't control, excuse me, you can't control it completely, but you can control your own stuff by not putting them on there, and really that's like the majority of it. So I think that's the most effective answer is just not to put them on there.

Speaker 1: 1:58:40

This is from a grandparent which we kind of touched on a little bit. But what should I be watching for while my grandkid is scrolling through youtube?

Speaker 2: 1:58:56

okay, um, okay, I'll talk about the things that might not be obvious, because the obvious things are like oh yeah, sexual material, inappropriate material, everybody's got their own version of what they think is appropriate for that Yep Age of the kid family dynamic. Whatever I like to look at, um, at stimulus levels, and so I kind of like to think about, like, what precedent am I setting for my kid in terms of what is his baseline for what he considers to be entertainment? And so how many scene changes occur every 30 seconds?

Speaker 2: 1:59:36

okay and is it more than three?

Speaker 1: 1:59:40

I feel like what would not be right the time lapse?

Speaker 2: 1:59:44

yeah, because, like now, dude um, one of my kids favorite shows now is, uh, this movie, dog man. This is terrible, but it's a kid yeah, you know about it it's, it's. It's definitely a kid thing, but my goodness man, when you look at through the lens of stimulus flashes just pop, pop, pop, pop, scene change scene scene scene scene scene scene scene scene scene for an hour and a half.

Speaker 1: 2:00:09

And what is that doing to their developing mind, Dude?

Speaker 2: 2:00:12

just like. So I like to like just visualize, okay, A baseline here. Okay, then you expose them to stimulus, and so the baseline goes up, and then you expose them to that level of stimulus, and then the baseline's up here, and and then they go try to read a book and they're like this sucks, man, I'm not reading a book For sure.

Speaker 2: 2:00:31

This is boring. Or they go try to watch National Geographic. They're like this is so boring I can't even stand it. So I like to look at stimulus levels. So it's scene changes per minute, bright colors, loud sounds and super excited um characters that are like on crack and on coffee and just like.

Speaker 2: 2:00:53

Just you know, like, like blippy, right, blippy's. This, this kids show guy that's super popular with younger kids. He puts on a super colorful outfit. The guy's a genius man. He's so popular, he puts on this super colorful outfit and he is amped up like crazy and he goes on and he like drives tractors and drives police cars and does all this rad stuff. Super high stimulus, like he's. Like. My niece was three and she knew what kind of dump truck was, which kind of dump truck Cause of him, which was cool, but like he is crack on a screen, you know. Yeah, that's why he's popular.

Speaker 1: 2:01:25

It works. Crack on a screen, you know. Yeah, that's why he's popular. It works.

Speaker 2: 2:01:27

This is what these kids are so just consumed with dude so, like I'm people watch me on, I'm on tiktok, because that's where parents are.

Speaker 2: 2:01:34

Yeah, you're tiktok so my tiktok is getting a lot of traction, which is really cool, and a lot of people tell me that I am the slowest thing they have ever watched and that and the irony, and it's so great and that's the difference between instagram and tiktok, because we post so many different things and so many different clips and it's so funny to see what tiktok is versus instagram and facebook when you start digging into what the demographics are.

Speaker 1: 2:02:01

That's why, when I found your tiktok, when the wife actually was like he's coming on, I'm like yeah, or have you seen this guy? I'm like yeah, he's coming on the show. And she was, that's what I get. I was like, damn, you actually had a huge, but that's more edge. Like more people that you're breaking it down. It's way too slow for instagram oh yeah, oh yeah.

Speaker 2: 2:02:18

Man, people play me on 2x and I'm still too slow, like people literally have told me in the comments, like for real telling, telling me like you got to talk faster bro. I'm like, well, that's just how I talk. So yeah, sorry.

Speaker 1: 2:02:30

It's a crazy world man.

Speaker 2: 2:02:31

Yeah, stimulus levels.

Speaker 1: 2:02:33

That's okay, that's, that's fascinating. I never you've. I guess I've thought of it, but not broken down to yeah, you can.

Speaker 2: 2:02:40

You can like, you can basically measure it measure it interesting.

Speaker 1: 2:02:52

Yeah, um can I trust the safety settings on apple and if I can and if I can do, I trust them all so, um, no technical system is perfect, okay, and I think that security is best done with multiple layers, okay.

Speaker 2: 2:03:10

So, um, the Apple security system is very good. Okay, very good. Um, it's had its flaws over the years. It had a thing for a while where, like, the time limit would go off on the kid. We're like, hey, you're not allowed to use your device after like 8 PM and then 8 PM hits and there was a button where they could request one more minute and they could keep requesting one more minute. But they fixed that bug. That doesn't happen anymore. So there's like little little things, but their system is really good. I like to add other layers, and so one of the layers that I like to add that probably most people haven't heard of is a thing called the dns filter. This is a thing that network engineers use to manage like corporate networks okay

Speaker 2: 2:03:52

and to actually filter what can go in and out of the network and like what systems can be communicated with. But it's available to consumers and it's the first thing I put on all of my devices. So there's a system called next dns n-eE-X-T-D-N-S and basically what it does is, whenever your phone or your computer goes to talk to another computer, they do so via like okay, googlecom, right, do Google search Facebookcom, whatever it is, whatever service you're going to, the systems are communicating over these URLs, over these domain names. Dns is the domain name system. The domain name is the human format. It gets translated into numbers, an IP address, and the DNS system is the thing that does the translation. It's the yellow book, it's the yellow pages for the internet, and so when your phone wants to talk to Facebook, it asks the yellow pages, what's the address of Facebook? And then it comes back with the numbers, with the IP address, and then your computer actually talks to the IP address. And so what a DNS filter does is if, if, if you tell it that I don't want my device to talk to Facebook, when it goes and says, hey, what's the address for Facebook, it comes back with zeros and then your computer goes oh hey, zeros, oh, zeros. I can't talk to the zeros. It broke, oh, facebook doesn't work. It's great.

Speaker 2: 2:05:19

So that's a really good thing to do and you can even. This requires a little bit of tech savvy, but it is possible. You can put it on the router in your home, really, and then everything in your home your vacuum, your TVs, your fridge, your whatever is connected, your thermostat all gets filtered, and so you can actually filter out ads. You can filter out tracking scripts. You can filter out categories. You can filter porn. You can filter games. You can filter malware. Do can filter games. You can filter malware.

Speaker 1: 2:05:47

You have anything a video on your I?

Speaker 2: 2:05:49

do yeah. So, so look up, go on my. I have a search box on my website. When you go to familyitguycom there's a search box. You type DNS in the search box and you'll find my article on it, with instructions and with a video and some information on that.

Speaker 1: 2:06:04

And that you have. You could put it on your router that way as well, on there. Yeah, and some information on that and that you have that you could put it on your router that way as well, on there, yeah, beautiful. Yeah, okay, so that's a good one. I'm so. Multiple layers yeah, this is. This is great man.

Speaker 1: 2:06:16

So you're, when you're explaining that you're, almost every layer is a net yeah and so, as something's trying to get through or a filth, like a air filter, yeah, it's catching different layers or particles of it, so the more nets or layers you have up, the safer it is for your kids.

Speaker 2: 2:06:30

Yeah, okay and I'll also just say to, to make sure this is clear, that the more layers you put in place, the more complex it becomes to manage oh, okay, okay and so, like you have multiple layers in place and then something that you want to work doesn't work, where do you? Where do you? Where do you look first? Right, I got to like, work your way through, so, um, but if you were to just have the Apple controls so to to directly answer that question, are they good enough?

Speaker 1: 2:06:55

Yes, Got it. Last one of the parent questions If there was a game for young children, what would you recommend If was?

Speaker 2: 2:07:10

a game for young children. What would you recommend? If there was a game, which one would it be? Oh, I mean, I think there are. Um, so it seems like nintendo is in the business of making like reasonably kid-friendly games. Okay, say, to try to find games that are not internet connected and try to get them to be played on systems that are not internet connected.

Speaker 1: 2:07:24

Like Wii and Nintendo.

Speaker 2: 2:07:26

Yeah, like we just got our kid an old Game Boy, I don't know, 2ds or something. It's a plastic case that flips open. There's definitely no Wi-Fi or Bluetooth or whatever. There are internet connected games that have reasonable parental controls and that can actually be filtered down, like we were talking about having like private areas for the kids to play. Okay, and actually Minecraft is one of those. So Minecraft has like a. You have to pay for it, but you can play in a private area and the parents can approve the friends that are connected.

Speaker 1: 2:08:01

Is that what Kiki's on? Okay, she plays Minecraft too. Yes, that's good to know which one did we cut out.

Speaker 2: 2:08:08

I thought we just cut okay. Yeah, roblox should be cut out yeah, so I was wrong earlier.

Speaker 1: 2:08:12

Roblox is gone. That's what we, that's what the chat was. So this whole episode I'm fucking going back in my work roadblocks is when she had the friend got invited in to the group. Oh yeah, that's what got. So that went away and we went to minecraft. So that's where. Yeah, so minecraft and she's in a private one and it's her and two other kids that are a dude that I deployed twice with went to boot camp with nice served with. I've known this guy since we were both kids, like 18 years old, when we joined the marine corps together. We were literally a boot camp platoon together. So that's the only those. It's his two kids in their little private. That, for us, is the only thing she's allowed on. Yeah, okay, so you approve of that? Yeah, we're about. I was about to crush Kay's world. I was about to shit in her Cheerios by pulling that from her.

Speaker 2: 2:08:59

And if you go to my website, you type Minecraft in the search box, I have a whole article on how to set it up.

Speaker 1: 2:09:03

Awesome, okay, which I think we're good, but for people listening, yeah, before we finish, there's a topic that's very scary to me and I don't think and if you don't want to touch on it, I'm cool with it, Cause it's it's not. It's not a fun topic at all and that is AI Pulling your trip. We touched all and that is ai pulling your. We touched on it for a second, but how in depth, and I don't think parents really, truly know what somebody's capable of doing with your child's image. Is that something you're willing to like? Just touch on? Oh for sure, okay, yeah, it's a big problem.

Speaker 2: 2:09:42

Okay. So these organized criminal networks that blackmail kids and like with the sextortion thing, a lot of them will take images of real like, so let's say the ones that target the teenage boys. So the criminal will pose as a teenage girl that's from a nearby town. Oftentimes what they'll do is they'll take an image of a real girl and then they'll use ai to make her naked and then they send that to the boy to blackmail him, and so the if your image exists it, it just figure it'll. It can be used for right.

Speaker 1: 2:10:21

They're doing this with babies too, oh yeah I hate to talk about it, but I feel this is one of these things that parents aren't realizing that you can take a picture of your baby and turn it into a video. Now, yeah, yeah, which is the reality of the world that we're entering into with ai, makes my throat.

Speaker 2: 2:10:43

I'm with you, I'm with you, it's, you're right and it's true, and it's uh, it, um, uh. It doesn't even seem to be a small problem, it seems to be a big problem scary there's a lot of really sick people, man, and it's just.

Speaker 1: 2:11:05

It sucks because they're ruining all the good shit that's what scares me you see these, you see these moms that post their back to school pictures and their kids are sitting there with a sign and it's got their, their name, their school they're going to. You might as well put your kid's birth certificate on the internet and I actually I'm I call out moms on this and I get a lot of heat for it yeah, and I don't think they truly understand what you're doing when you're posting any picture, but when you're putting your kid back to school or going to rocky mountain high, whatever it is, yeah, what they're actually doing for predators that are looking for these types of things. I think it seems innocent to the mom that she's proud of her kid going to third grade yeah, but what is that really? Opening up to the dark side of the internet?

Speaker 2: 2:12:02

What's kind of messed up is that? Uh, well, what's very messed up is that um, what's kind of messed up is that? Well, what's very messed up is that kids on the internet actually can get used to leverage other kids. So, for example, somebody's a predator and they identify a target. There's a girl I want to take advantage of. I want to get her pictures. I want to get her to do things on camera for me. I want to get her to come to my house that's nearby in this town and do things for me and not tell anybody about it. Her mom just posted a picture of her brother that says where he goes to school. So I contact her.

Speaker 2: 2:12:40

Hey, I'm a kid just like you. How's it going? What's up? Let's be friends, friends. Do you have any brothers or sisters? I have brothers and sisters. Oh yeah, I have a brother. So and so. And like, long story short, oh yeah, they already know what school they go to. But like, yeah, what school do they go to? Um, I'm gonna go to their school tomorrow and kill them, unless you send me a picture. I'll be there at 8 am, so you better do it right now you got five.

Speaker 1: 2:13:05

That's happening every day. Yeah, all by just a little bit of information, yeah.

Speaker 2: 2:13:13

Now they don't even need the picture of the information of the brother. They could extract that anyways. But if you give the information, you're just making their job easier. And this stuff is like I don't get it, but it's real. And so what are the trade-offs? What's it worth? What value do you get out of posting it? And what are the trade-offs? Most people don't know fair enough that there are the trade-offs. Most people don't know fair enough that there are severe trade-offs and that those things can be used against you and your kids and just sucks, man.

Speaker 1: 2:13:57

But that's the way it is I feel everybody thinks that, oh, it's not going to happen to me until it happens to you.

Speaker 2: 2:14:02

100 of course that's the natural thing, right? Yeah, oh yeah. We hear scary stuff on the news all the time, but it's not going to happen to me man, it's like hearing about this car got broken into.

Speaker 1: 2:14:12

Oh, that sucks, not going to never happen. Oh, hope that doesn't happen to me, yeah.

Speaker 2: 2:14:27

I've had would happen to me, and it did. Shit happens. Shit happens at a large scale on the internet with a high frequency.

Speaker 1: 2:14:31

It's all these people do all day.

Speaker 2: 2:14:34

Kids on the internet get taken advantage of at a high frequency, so proceed with caution.

Speaker 1: 2:14:42

So, from this whole entire conversation, keep your kids off the internet as long as possible.

Speaker 2: 2:14:48

Yeah, a hundred percent.

Speaker 1: 2:14:51

Is there anything in our closing remarks, cause I I feel like we've covered a lot, hopefully. I want to have more conversations with you.

Speaker 2: 2:14:58

Yeah, let's do it. Yeah, be able to help in any way I can. Yeah, I mean sure we can have a whole episode on AI. Maybe we should. I'm deep into that stuff, man. I've been in that. I've been deep into that stuff.

Speaker 1: 2:15:12

I would, I would love to. Okay, so we'll, we'll. Yeah, let's do it again, but I had some questions about facial recognition and stuff and maybe we can save that for then. Is there any last remarks or any last statement that you want parents to know in general, or anything you'd like to share, just as a heads up or an fyi?

Speaker 2: 2:15:35

I just like to offer some encouragement that it's okay to be different and that it's okay to make change, and that it's okay to show your kids that, yeah, that it's okay to be different.

Speaker 1: 2:15:55

It's okay to say no, and that's what you mean by different. You don't have to have the latest and greatest and you don't have to have the apps and the phones and everything else.

Speaker 2: 2:16:05

Yeah, and I think that actually, like, the most positive things can come from that for sure. So I think that there is, um, there's a positive side to all this, in that there is the opportunity for education and there's the opportunity for leading by example, and there's the opportunity to make things better than they are right now.

Speaker 1: 2:16:28

I love it. I just feel it's what's the worst that's going to happen by not opening up that realm to your children. What's the what is, tell me, by me not giving my kid Snapchat, all the apps, by not giving them a phone without any parental controls on there, what is the worst thing that is going to happen to them versus what's the worst thing that's going to happen or potentially happen if you open up those doors to them?

Speaker 2: 2:17:03

the worst thing that can happen is friction, so that's okay. Yeah, I'll settle for that. I'm okay with that, a hundred percent. Yeah, they get over it pretty quick. Yeah, friction's okay, friction's annoying. Friction can be a problem, but uh, I'm down to trade friction for safety I hope every other parent is too.

Speaker 1: 2:17:25

Yeah, me too. Dude, thank you for this conversation. I'm going to take you up on the AI conversation and anything else that you want. I honestly want to open this invitation up to you. If there's anything that you're into or there's things that you're seeing, you can call me anytime and use my platform as well. I know you have a large platform on TikTok. The more the better, man, that's what I'm saying. When it comes to kids and the technology and everything that's going on, I'll have you on every week. I don't care. Like. That's where I'm at as a father in a platform that's growing and a lot of parents follow. Anything that you ever need and want to be able to. I don't care if it's a 30 minute episode.

Speaker 1: 2:18:07

You just want to come top one topic yeah, if I can help you in any way get more information out to more parents and kids, use my platform anytime. I I'm not. We're growing, we're not huge yet, but dude it's all this is use this as much as you can.

Speaker 1: 2:18:27

I hope you really do take me up on that. Obviously it helps me. I'm gaining from it because it's going to be incredible content. But if one parent listens to this and and changes it, but the amount of parents that ask genuine questions and that was just, I think I just took like 16. I was like I just went through and asked the ones that I was also thinking and there were so many 16. I was like I just went through and asked the ones that I was also thinking there were so many.

Speaker 1: 2:18:50

We could save one kid from getting sextortioned and or taking their own life because of the depression and it's causing and in the, the stimulation factors. If there's one kid that we can pull from any of that, from this episode, I'm cool with it and you can use this anytime if we could help a parent in any way. So again, thank you for this conversation. I know it's not always an easy conversation, but but at the same time we didn't even we didn't even scrape the tip of the iceberg on the depths of the evil that goes on, yeah, on these platforms and on these devices that are really being presented to our kids. This was just like an intro.

Speaker 2: 2:19:24

I feel like this is what I like. These are the most important, biggest things to know about in in easy fixes yeah, relatively speaking, I think so okay, thank you so much for this conversation.

Speaker 1: 2:19:38

I appreciate your time. Come back anytime and I'm sure we, every time we have a guest like this or like people, bring it back. We want more, we want more, so I'll I will definitely when have time. I would love to have you back on when you, when you want to talk AI and and any of that stuff.

Speaker 2: 2:19:53

So I'm all for it. Sweet Thanks, man, Cheers Thanks dude, I appreciate you Likewise. That was awesome.

Speaker 1: 2:19:59

Thank you, yeah, that was really good.