Tim Estes: AI and the Internet Kids Deserve

Content warning: this episode discusses online harms to children, including child sexual abuse, trafficking, and the death of a child linked to a viral online challenge. Listener discretion is advised. To report suspected online exploitation of a child in the US, contact the Department of Homeland Security Know2Protect Tipline at 1-833-591-5669 or the CyberTipline at report.cybertip.org.

Most of the conversation about kids and technology is a conversation about keeping them off it. Tim Estes wants to talk about the other path: technology built so well that a child can actually use it safely. He has spent 25 years in artificial intelligence, from a startup he launched at 20 years old to work with the defense and intelligence community, Wall Street compliance, and the nonprofit Thorn, where the AI he helped build has been used to identify roughly 12,000 trafficked children in the US.

Then a 10-year-old named Nyla Anderson died after a viral challenge served to her by an algorithm, and Tim decided to build something different. In this conversation he and Ryan get into Angel Q, the AI tool for kids he founded: how it works, why he calls it a perplexity for kids, and the guardrails that make it safe, from age-appropriate answers generated on the fly to a three gate system that decides whether to answer, soften, or defer a child’s question, and notify the parent.

The heart of the episode is Tim’s message to parents: you do not have to be at war with technology, but you do have to understand the business model behind everything your child touches. He explains why kids should use technology in the open and never in private, why the people who owned the playground turned it into a casino, and why the most useful question a parent can ask is not about the code, but about how a product makes its money.

In this episode:

• Why the answer to kids and technology is not only abstinence
• 25 years in AI, from defense and Wall Street to hunting online child trafficking with Thorn
• The story of Nyla Anderson, and the moment Tim decided to build Angel Q
• What Angel Q is, and the guardrails behind a perplexity for kids
• The three gates: answer, soften, or defer, and notify the parent
• Why every app your child uses has a business model, and how to read it
• Keeping technology in the open, never in private
• A hopeful case that innovation and protecting kids are not in conflict

Learn more about Angel Q at angelq.ai. Tim also chairs Alliance for a Better Future, a pro family group focused on human dignity and technology.

About Ryan Vet

Ryan Vet is a USA TODAY bestselling author, futurist, and international keynote speaker whose insights on generations, culture, and the future of work have been featured in Forbes, Financial Times, ABC, NBC, and CBS. His research helps leaders understand emerging generational patterns and anticipate societal shifts before they fully unfold.

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Transcript

Tim Estes 0:00

On this episode of the Ryan Vet Show. If you're going to let your kids use technology, they always need to be doing it in the open and never privately.

Ryan Vet 0:10

Yep.

Tim Estes 0:11

And so anything you can do to deny the technology having a private relationship with your child is critical.

Ryan Vet 0:24

Welcome to another episode of the Ryan Vet Show. I'm excited to have a conversation today that's different than some of the conversations we have. A lot of our guests so far have talked about how to prevent your kids from getting on screens or accessing the internet or waiting until a certain age, which are all great tactics. But the reality is we live in a world where technology is ubiquitous and kids are going to have access to it, whether it's at school or their friend's house or uh even in your own home. And so I'm excited to have a guest with me, Tim Estes, today, who has uh extremely interesting background spanning many different industries, but always around technology, artificial intelligence, and is ready to have a conversation with us today. Tim, thanks for being here.

Tim Estes 1:03

Ryan, thanks for having me on. Really appreciate it.

Ryan Vet 1:06

Absolutely. And and you have such a fascinating story that takes you from Wall Street to uh, you know, defense and everything in between, often around the idea of artificial intelligence. And artificial intelligence isn't just uh five or six years old when ChatGPT became free in November of 2022. It's been around for a while. Do you mind just giving us a little bit of your story, uh, some of the projects you've worked on over the years that you're able to share? And then we'll transition to where you are today and how you're protecting kids.

Tim Estes 1:36

Yeah, well, thanks, Ryan. Um yeah, I uh I often joke that AI is the only thing I've ever done with myself since I graduated from college. Uh it's people ask, well, what have you done? And and what uh what are you engaged in? And they kind of expect some kind of rattling off of whatever got me into AI recently. And I'm like, no, I was 20 years old, third year undergrad at UVA, and I decided to build an AI company. And they're like, when was that? I'm like, well, I'm dating myself now, but it's too, it was 2000. Um and so uh, and it started because of actually uh a Bill Gates interview in Red Herring. Uh they were talking to him about, you know, if he would build an AI or build a company today, what would that company be about? And he said, Well, why can't computers write their own code? Uh and there was all this money pouring to dot coms, and he said, Why can't you know we we make some progress in AI? It's a huge area. And so that really intrigued me. So I sort of took up that challenge and uh and and got pulled into a lot of things. Like many things in life, you start off with a certain idea, a certain kind of vision. And while the vision might hold, the path to get to that vision generally is not the way you expect it to play out. Right. Uh, and so we were building something that was essentially a way to make uh initially social networks, the very early ones, the pre-Facebook ones, you know, when they were just about posting stuff and not all the other stuff, right? Um, like how do you make that content more relevant by using AI to understand like news and stuff? So we were working those kind of problems. Uh, it got good at understanding documents uh with algorithms. And then when I say got good, for the time it was pretty interesting. You know, you could throw a bunch of documents into a computer and it would tell you, oh, you know, this is about this world leader or this is about this type of activity overseas. Uh some people in Army intelligence got intrigued by that idea that it could sort out some of the information management problems they had. And we were working with them, and then 9-11 hit. And uh 9-11 was really a call to arms. And, you know, I've never been someone who could go, you know, serve and fight. I mean, I would have been a pretty lousy soldier from a, you know, I was more of like a super fan while I had a great high school football team. I was not one of them, right? So uh so bottom line is uh when you're a geek, it was just a way of being a geek trying to serve. Um and for you know, over a decade, that was what I focused the company on. And we we went through a lot of like remarkable efforts, uh supporting multiple wars, many different activities, got to know some amazing heroes in the intelligence community and in the in the defense department. Um and uh and from that journey, we built a really amazing piece of technology. Um, and that technology got invested in by In-Q-Tel, which was the uh CIA and the intelligence community's venture capital arm. Uh, it then you know started to proliferate uh into different defense areas. Um and uh and so right around that time, uh we we took it to Wall Street in the early 2010s. Um we we got some money and the the investors were like, well, we we believe in your government business, but we didn't fund just a government business. So go pick at least one commercial thing to go do. And uh and we looked at a couple areas and we decided to go at the banks. And uh in any case, we ended up creating a cool way to read all the emails and chats in a lot a lot of these banks, figuring out that when someone said, Well, big blue is gonna buy this company, and they they knew the algorithms before were too dumb to know that big blue equals IBM, that we could link those two with our AI back at the time and all kinds of things like it, and then say, Oh, that's a possible insider trading issue. Like someone might be, you know, putting out protected private information. So think about if someone's working the merger and acquisition side of an investment bank and they throw that line to one of their friends who is also trading. Like this is the kind of thing we were dealing with. And, you know, there was such a bonanza misbehavior in 2007 and 2008, right? And all the crackdown came in 2011 through 2014 after various regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley, and others were uh, you know, Dodd-Frank, all those things were passed. So we were part essentially putting technology into compliance to try to help the good guys in banks root out the few bad guys. And uh, and so that was a that was a fun mission, ended up being very successful. We ended up getting about half the major global banks on Wall Street using the technology. Um, and uh the technology attracted other use cases. And, you know, some were working with um in the healthcare space here in Nashville. So that's I'm I'm a Nashvillean, uh Proud Data 2. Uh, and uh I, you know, I've I love building things here in the Southeast. Um all our funding pretty much came from you know either Silicon Valley or New York, you know. So it's it's just you know, so I've kind of lived a weird journey in that. Um but uh along the way from some of the government work, uh a really amazing nonprofit called Thorn came knocking. And uh they um, you know, if those that don't know it, this is one of the most remarkable groups on the internet trying to go and uh combat this plague of child sexual abuse. Uh and and they they wanted to deal with, they were like doing interviews with children that had been trafficked for sex online. And the interviews, you know, showed that uh three quarters of those kids were first advertised on the open internet. Back then it was on like a version of something like Craigslist called Backpage. Wow. And um and so that that uh uh those same kids, and this is the thing that really like we cried when we heard, I'm not making it, we like we were so moved when we heard this. When they had interviewed these children that had been rescued by the police, half those kids that had posted their stuff online had been forced to do so to write their own ad by their pimp so it would sound young and attract pedophiles that would pay more. Wow. And that was just like a really evil kind of moment uh that you know, that the fact that and I just the the women that run that some still run Thorn today, and the others that have gone on to great things like the Heat Initiative. So Sarah Gardner, who some of you I don't know if you had Sarah on or not, but she's an amazing human being and uh and is doing a lot in this space on like technology harms now. Uh, but Sarah was one of them, and there are several others, Julie who runs it today. Um, like they were like heroic and had these huge hearts that could live with hearing that kind of heavy thing. And they came looking for partners that could help them make a dent on it. Uh, and we were happy to be one of those. And uh, and so we built up a system with them uh that would go figure out using the AI we had at the time. This is like 2014. So 2012 was the first you know versions of this, but it went on in 2014. We built the system um where we would go read all these ads and figure out that these ads were actually likely put up by underage people. So, like it is a the technology has been there to like effectively figure out that kids are online in places they shouldn't be for a long, long time. Yeah. Okay. Uh and and we I know because we did it, we did it on a harder version of that without nearly the signal that some various groups have to build from. And uh, and so so long story short, um, we built this system and over the last, I don't know, eight, nine years or so since it went live, it's probably found 12,000 kids that have been trafficked online in the US. Uh, and like I said, all we're just a tool, we were just a tool uh kind of provider and a builder with Thorn. The the cops, the law enforcement, the thousands and thousands that have used it, they're the heroes that have gone in, intervened, and found these kids. So I don't want to be sitting here, but but it was a huge like privilege to be part of that mission. Uh and it made me pretty aware of the um uh of the issues that can impact kids online. And that's a very extreme thing where you're talking about people kids being like posted online and moved from city to city and seeing the same kids show up in different cities with other kids. I mean, literally in the data, seeing like sales of trafficked children in the data right there. Uh it was uh it was a staggering kind of moment. And um anyway, so we we we um that was something I spent a lot of time on. I got a little more politically engaged back then. Senator Corker, my my senator uh from Tennessee at the time, who's a wonderful senator. Uh, you know, he led a lot of the hearings on the child sex trafficking. I mean, I know we had some breakthroughs with Tim Tebow and uh Senator Hawley in the past couple of weeks in this area in the Senate on some big issues. So so yeah, the fight goes on, but Corker was one of the real leaders in that. He brought Ashton Kutcher, who helped create Thorn, up to testify. Uh, and in one of the first moments of where politics intersects with a real problem, uh, it led to the passage of something called um FOSTA-SESTA. And that law is what made Section 230 no longer cover people that were aiding child sex trafficking. And if this is insane that you would have made a law that gave immunity to people aiding and abetting child sex traffickers, but that was the law that Senator Wyden and others had actually left for us. Now, I'm sure that Wyden and others did not intend that to be the case, but it was so badly written and is still so badly written, so broad and ambiguous that courts had interpreted it that way. And it took changing the law to fix it. So, so yeah, I was very active and trying to help there, uh, but uh but also busy running a company. Um, and that this comes up later because when I got, you know, when that company came to its fruition uh sometime in 2020, 2021, um, and we merged it in with another like really amazing like archiving company that was working in the financial service area, probably one of the leaders there today. Um, we um we ended up, or I ended up like finally getting a brief break. Uh, and as soon as I got a little time, uh ended up having friends of mine uh send me something about uh a little girl who oh it came out of a conversation. The conversation was me and a friend were talking about what our kids were were seeing in schools, uh, you know, what they're getting exposed to. They're both were pretty young at the time. We're talking about like these are like first graders at this point. And uh so then we're talking about like, well, what's in school might be problematic, but what's online is so much worse. And and then it was like proof that he like sends me this article about a girl named Nylah Anderson. And Nylah Anderson is a 10-year-old girl in Philadelphia, uh, went to charter school there, spoke three languages, um, you know, was on TikTok. And uh TikTok at the time had only recently, in the year and a half or so before, two years, had bought an American company. So ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok until very recently it, you know, some of it's been forced out, but they still own a big piece of it. Um, that Chinese company bought their way into the American market by acquiring a company called Musical.ly. And Musical.ly had all the silly dance videos of under 13-year-olds and it got in trouble. It got like big COPPA fines because it shouldn't have had those kids on. It didn't follow the law. And then TikTok, you know, absorbed all that. Not clear that they fixed a lot of it, you know, TBD, but I think I think a lot of us would be pretty acceptable about that. And Nylah's proof because she's 10 years old, she's on TikTok. And instead of the silly dance videos that that she and probably her parents thought were the thing she was getting access to, they serve up in this for you algorithm, which is kind of their way of creating a rabbit hole to get you hooked. And they actually had math about how long it took to get the kids hooked. And so I so the the the um uh bottom line is I think that um um this girl gets a video served up to her called the blackout challenge. And the blackout challenge, I just can call me, I don't know what it's called, actually the actual video, but it basically says, you know, shows you a way to choke yourself to create auto asphyxiation highs. Uh and almost like to show you, and then of course, if you don't do it right, they don't necessarily tell you you're gonna get you're gonna kill yourself. And so the sweet girl goes into her mother's closet, hangs herself up by her mother's purse, uh, and attempts it and suffocates herself. Um her mother comes home and finds her and takes her to the hospital, and she passes five days later. Um, and it's so emotional to me because actually I I finally met her mother at this event that the nonprofit I'm engaged in chairing, working on these issues called Alliance for a Better Future. Um we ran, we worked together with Heat, Sarah's group, Thiergardner, and some others, and Parents Rise and some other organizations um to pull off the largest set of survivor parents to ever come to Washington, DC to bring attention to these online harms and to harms from AI that are impacting kids today. Uh and I'd never met her mom until then. Um so yeah, that was a moment. Um, but yeah, I'll keep telling Nylah's story until we pass the law so it never happens again. Um, but yeah, so that that got me really moved into this. Um, and I realized that, you know, I I had access to talent in the AI space, had access to capital. Uh it was very, it's very hard to frankly to build a business that is serving kids uh in a way that's healthy for them instead of just another piece of candy. Right. Um it's really easy to create, like, especially it's super easy to make AI addictive and compelling and uh gamified for kids. Uh like that is almost an unfair fight. But if you're trying to basically only use AI in a way that's a tool that's constructive, that has key guardrails, so it cannot foster unhealthy relationship and engagement, and you're policing that, like it's not easy. Like, I mean, I think we've made a great tool with Angel Q, the company I built like from that moment. Um, and uh, but at the same time, the the challenge is that like it requires a cultural shift where the parents say, you know what, um, if we're gonna let our kids use this technology at all, and I say kids, I mean under 13-year-olds. And I think honestly, even 13, 16, uh, there's there's challenges there, and even minors has challenges. So it's a gradation of of freedom, if you will. Um I think that with Angel Q, uh, like we invented a very solid, effective, and completely safe tool to the very best and limits of our ability. Uh, at the same time, like a parent has to say, you know what? Um, there is, you know, there's a window to have sort of fun with technology that can be very limited. And then there is all the real world and relationships and fun that you know we want to have the kids foster. And then there's technology as a tool, which, you know, should be designed well, it should be not, you know, not not fun. But, you know, there's if you if you confuse technology as an escape for your kids with where it can be a good tool, that's kind of the beginning, you know, of the challenge. And so, and I think the truth is, we're really honest about it. I think most parents use technology as a babysitter. Uh and and I think that a lot of people that are uh, you know, Nicki and others that are friends of ours, like, you know, they've they brought this up. That's a real challenge. There are people that kind of say, you stay off the screens entirely because it's such a slippery slope once it's a babysitter. Um, I I don't think it has to be. I think that is a software problem. It's a business ethics problem manifests in applications and who wrote them and how they wrote them and how they monetize them. Um, I think it's a terrible world where the people that care about their kids essentially are at war with technology, which is like one of the great things unleashing like human productivity and value and potential. You know, that feels like a terrible trade. And I I really want to provide, I and probably many others, um, we want to provide a way that there is technology that's so aligned with the parents and family that you can use it, you can use it as it's meant to be, as the tool, and you put it back away when you don't need the tool.

Ryan Vet 17:20

Yeah. I think that's so good, Tim. And I appreciate your story and your journey. And just, I mean, you you truly have been a part of technology at its earliest roots. And and your story about hearing Bill Gates talk about AI and programming itself is fascinating. I just saw a clip just today of Steve Jobs at a at a dinner being filmed, talking about something similar. What if what if uh you could talk to a computer and it could spit out answers and you could have a real-time conversation about anything um ever done? And he was talking about specifically uh talking to philosophers like Socrates and Aristotle. So and that was I I think early 2000s or late 90s from that that clip. So it's been around for a while. You've been a part of it for a while. And as I started the show, and I want to bring back to this idea, you are um in a group that isn't anti-technology, and I appreciate that because I think that's been the easy answer, right? If it's bad, uh, you need to abstain. But you're saying there's an there's an alternative, there's a happy medium because technology does. You you said some great things. It it provides new value, it unlocked human potential or potential as a whole. So what let's talk a little bit more specifically about Angel Q, what you've created that actually allows kids to use technology in a very safe and helpful way that's educational and uh also gets parents involved. It doesn't isolate the kid anymore, kind of brings it back to the TV in the family living room, if you will, uh, no longer a device, you know, lock locked away under the covers or in in the closet.

Tim Estes 18:45

Yeah, yeah. So when we thought about the problem, which is that um kids get access to um, so they either get access to applications that are kind of an ecosystem under themselves. I mean, that's always the problem of social. And Angel Q like is actually almost orthogonal to social. Like there's no overlap, no competition, anything there, because like there's not even the ability to go friend someone on it. Like there's no notion of communication between people that are on Angel Q. Uh instead, it is much more like a souped up sort of search engine tool that's using AI. So the closest analog is uh there's a really like there's been a really good um solution for search for something called Perplexity, uh the you know, an AI uh tool and company. And so Angel Q really, in a lot of ways, is like a Perplexity for kids. Okay. Uh the idea is the AI goes out like uh there's different layers of it. You can chat with it in a general way, but it's bounded, meaning that it won't keep a conversation going indefinitely. It will take, it'll basically follow through a few times and it's gonna try and nudge you off. So it's not actually there trying to sustain a long session time of any kind. It's there to serve the purpose of, you know, stimulating the kid's personality. And it and it doesn't just work by chatting, uh, it's a talking thing. So we have these little personas, uh, and it's almost like talking to cartoon characters. Now, the personas, they're limited. They know they're an AI. If you ask about it, they don't they, you know, it's best they are really, they never try to make up some story about what they've done and they've lived when that's all fiction. Um, but yeah, I mean, when you have like a sportscaster talking about what happened, you know, in an MLS game on Saturday, uh, it's kind of fun.

Ryan Vet 20:28

Yep.

Tim Estes 20:29

And uh, and we wanted to make this kind of fun. We have a French chef, you know, and having the French chef talk about cooking is actually a good party trick.

Ryan Vet 20:36

Yeah.

Tim Estes 20:37

Uh so and I watch adults do this all the time. One of one of the little secrets of Angel Q is half the parents or more are like, hey, can I use this thing? Because it's actually a really good explainer, you know? And because you can just ask it a question, it comes back, it talks to you, it shows it, it highlights the words so that kids that are early and learning to almost like follow the bouncing dot, it brings back images that put the story in context. So that's the kind of responses it's coming back with. And that's like a normal like engagement. Um, and then if you want to go deeper, and then we found in our own household, this has been really key. Um, if you're like kids doing a research experiment, like we had our our uh son had a project around Glacier National Park. And so he wanted to dig in and had to build all this stuff out, and he had to build something out, and so it could not do the work for him, right? But it could take the the challenge, which is okay, how is he gonna find out about this? Are you gonna go sit next to him for the computer? He goes on Google. What if Glacier is the name of some person somewhere that we don't actually want the picture to show up of? I'm just making this up. Parents know what I'm saying, right? When you go in and you hit that search bar, you are like spinning the barrel of that gun of overexposure. And you don't know exactly what's gonna come up.

Ryan Vet 21:56

Yeah.

Tim Estes 21:56

And and I've had a lot of parents, and I say this self confessionally, like. I don't necessarily have a kids' profile version of my web browser and my search engine. So a lot of times they're coming in, I'm with them, and I'm putting it in, and it's me. Now, like bad stuff doesn't come up like that often, but it doesn't know to stop that.

Ryan Vet 22:15

Right.

Tim Estes 22:15

And like do you like and so I mean, I might have it defaulted to safe mode for myself anyway, but the bottom line is like it's it's still not gonna be the same standards for like what a six-year-old should see or a 10-year-old should see or a 12-year-old should see. Angel Q is pretty unique. It actually is translating the content to be age appropriate on the fly. So uh, so if you're basically searching for something and there's a Wikipedia article on it, okay, and Angel Q is doing the research and that's one of the top hits. When it brings that back, it has translated it to be what your six-year-old needs if it's if it's someone that young. And and with anyone younger, and I've said this, I think, on Nicki's show as well. Like, um, I think anyone that's eight or nine or below, like you should do the tech with them on this. There's even a case with some of the unknowns in AI that the whole 13 and below experience, like you should be there with them. Yeah. Now, I think as they're you know kind of in this like eight to 13 year old range, uh, like having them with their iPad uh or like device like on a kitchen table and you're cooking dinner, I think that's fine. But if it's a younger kid playing around with it, you're probably gonna be right there on the over their shoulder. In fact, you're probably the one typing, right? Uh I say typing, talking and so forth, because even with younger kids, even though we've done some work on it, you know, sometimes a four-year-old or five-year-old, and by the way, even a four-year-old, like I wouldn't even want them to be on that screen. I mean, like so I I think you got to be very careful as a four. I mean, I the truth is that uh once you go below eight, below them being uh speakers, you know, I say speakers mean being um able to read language readers and being able to consume that. Um, like there's just a lot of things where it's almost like the parent is going to use this as a tool to explain to the kid. And that's probably the primary value of it, is it's an aid for the parent to explain something to a kid. Right. And it's really useful for that. Um, and then I think it once they start being asked to do their own research, which in you know, school situations is generally between seven and nine, then there's a window to like do that alongside of the kid and take them through it. Um, but there are so many guardrails in this thing. Uh, like I said, content-wise, we've had 40,000 plus conversations. We've not had anything like explicit or problematic, get flagged the whole way through. Um, you know, I mean, you whenever you have a tracker that is either perfect or perfect, you know it's not going to last. So I'll say that as some like contention. I'm sure there's things we've missed were human, uh, but we are like ruthlessly diligent on safety in terms of toxicity and things that can come up. Um, and and we've in some ways we may have even overcalibrated, like in some areas. Other areas of like, you know, conversations that can go into violent subjects. Um, and there's probably a way to actually communicate that safely to a child, like war and stuff, right?

Ryan Vet 25:02

Right.

Tim Estes 25:02

And uh, but but we've been pretty calibrated. We're younger kids like can't really ask those questions without it hitting a deferral. So one of the things Angel Q does is when a kid asks a question, sorry, I hit my mic, when a kid asks a question, um the system looks at the question as okay, is this a question I can actually answer for a kid of that age? And it decides if it can, uh, and then it translates any answer it's gonna create to be appropriate to that age. Okay, the second gate is it says, hmm, that's close. That's a gray area. Okay. And in that one, the way it responds is it says, hmm, okay, I'm gonna give you a little bit of an answer and I'm gonna like kind of translate it even more immature, like younger than you are, just to be safe. Okay, and I'm gonna notify the parent. And in a background way. And then the the the third one is, mm-mm, nope, that kid shouldn't be dealing with that. That's a defer topic. And the kid and the thing will come back and deflect. They'll be like, well, this would be good to talk to a trusted adult about. Like, how about we like talk about something you could do to you know help your three-point shooting or something? Like if it's the sportscaster, if it's somebody else, uh a different persona, it might be some something else they say. But it deflects and it immediately real-time notifies the parent that the question was asked. Every conversation the kid has is fully logged in. Um, the content they can so it's it can actually bring in content from it's a browser essentially. So it can bring in content from YouTube, it can bring in content from uh like through their their API as they allow, and it can bring in content from um the um uh uh from uh Disney Plus and Netflix uh and render that in the browser, in our in our kids' browser. And uh, and so but that content has a system behind it where we can screen what can get access to. And there's a whole parental ratings component where a parent can say, you know, I only want like on a scale of one to four, um, I only want a one on any violence, or I only want a two on any dark themes. And we can preview and show you the kinds of things on Netflix and Disney Plus that are screened out when you do that. And so Angel Q has a whole bundle of layers uh to try to make sure a kid using this uh is having their sort of browser-like experience really driven like within the parental values um and with awareness. So it was a way to say, you know what, there's a whole lot of stuff on the internet that could be useful, healthy, fun, and and we can try to winnow down to just those things. And it is a better middle ground than nothing. Right. Or you know, hoping for the best. Yep. Yep, and so and so yeah, that's right. And so so that we've done that, we've done some work on uh building these learning modules. So we found a way to actually take things like content and YouTube videos and actually turn them into interesting lessons where kids can like learn whether they want to learn about uh giraffes or they want to learn about Pokemon. Like there's actually little learning modules in these things. And what's interesting is it's not just they watch it for entertainment or something like that, they actually are quizzed about it. So it develops a habit of them engaging and consuming and remembering and learning. Um, and so we're trying to basically turn Angel Q into something that is truly positive or healthy screen time uh while still bounding it substantially. And this is backed up by our model, which is it's a it's a fairly inexpensive subscription offering for Angel Q. There's no advertising, there's no resell of data, there's nothing like that. Like we have no way to monetize this thing except parents sponsoring it.

Ryan Vet 28:44

Yeah.

Tim Estes 28:45

And that's by design. Um, and uh yeah, there, and so I I think it's getting easier for us over time because the technologies that you know we shipped a year ago are a little cheaper to deliver today and they're higher quality. Um, we were pretty early. I think there are other like kids browsers, kids AI things going out there. I think I've seen three or four. I mean, but we've got a year plus of in-the-field proof of its safety. And we've got three years of development design, uh, including one of the only uh truly open source safety frameworks uh called KidRails that we built with a leading American AI company called RC. And we put that out there so people can look at it and they can make their own decisions and potentially can build from it. And so that's the other piece is with Angel Q is um as a company, uh, we have talked a lot about this yet, but as a company, we're starting to have conversations with other large um kids companies, tech companies, um, because they're realizing that before they go into kids, the responsible companies, the responsible kids companies, and that I could rattle off four or five, but a lot of these toy companies have been very responsible. I just want to say that because there are a lot of app companies that have been pushing AI at kids with reckless abandon. If you look at the big brands, a lot of the things that we grew up with and their manifestations, like outside of like video games that are using some AI, a lot of those brands they aren't doing super clever things with AI that touch kids yet. And it's not because they don't have great product people, it's not because they're not smart on technology. They have a conviction, the ones I've talked to, they have a conviction that they do not want to put a kid at risk until they understand more. Uh I mean, I don't mean put it, they don't want to put a kid at risk at all, but they won't even roll the dice on it until they understand more. Like uh one very popular thing came out was Mattel. Mattel was working with OpenAI, it was a popular deal, kind of came out. A lot of us were really concerned about this in terms of, you know, trying to get close to a leading model vendor and putting this out while the safety guardrails weren't in place. Um, and to their credit, they kind of they kind of probably used it to help design some new ideas, but they didn't put it out interactively. And I think a lot of these companies that are trying to understand it and they have some really great ideas for how to make really cool experiences with their IP. Um, I don't think they've they've really figured out a way to be comfortable with the safety part of it. So to that end, um, we at AngelQ think we figured out part of that. Um, and so we are now working with those saying, you know what? We can empower you to have AI-powered experiences and AI-powered tooling for these brands and have deep assurance that it's going to be healthy for the kid and not harmful.

Ryan Vet 31:25

That's so good. And Tim, I I first of all appreciate what you've done. I I think you just have again a unique perspective seeing so many different facets of AI from uh the early days uh of AI. I wouldn't say the earliest days. Uh, it'd already been around a little bit, but using it now for good, where a lot of people, and you hinted at it, but I'll say a little bit more bluntly, there uh there's a lot of companies out there who have used AI and weaponized it to get attention, to create addiction, to um uh build their own businesses. And uh business ethics is a conversation we could probably talk for hours on when it comes to AI use and and all of that. But as we kind of um uh wind down, I'd I'd love to ask you kind of this final question. What can parents do today to be safe with technology, not to remove it? And again, I love that you're taking this approach. And besides Angel Q, too, what are uh that's that's a great solution. I think they should pursue that. But beyond that, what are some just practical tips that you have from things you've observed and seen?

Tim Estes 32:24

Well, uh so I think there's a lot that can be done um in your household um that you know is is good cultural practice almost. Like so one thing is like, and our our kids are younger, uh, you know, they're they're both like not teenagers yet. So uh this is probably easier for us to enforce. But I would say that if you're gonna let your kids use technology, they always need to be doing it in the open and never privately. And so anything you can do to deny the technology having a private relationship with your child is critical. Like almost all the horror stories that come out are the kid goes to their room and you know, gets into something innocently, they get led down a path and terrible things happen. Yeah and sometimes terrible things happen and it doesn't it doesn't take their life, it doesn't necessarily like do the immediate harms, but they feel ashamed about what started and they get more tied in that way. And so like that's that's so that the only way to stop that is to keep it. Now, you can't prevent what kids may be exposed to when they're at like a friend's house or so forth. So like I almost wish, I don't know, like the I could love to talk to the Bark people about this or or you know some of the others, but I almost wish you could use geospatial positioning on the devices to allow an open mode when they're in the home and a very closed mode when they're not. Like that would be pretty cool.

Ryan Vet 33:56

That'd be a great feature.

Tim Estes 33:57

I don't know if anybody's done that, but like if I'm a parent, like the thing that would make me more open to like giving you know a device that's actually got true internet connectivity and capability uh for them would be knowing that it's essentially in like Bark mode on steroids, like when they leave the house or Gabb mode. There's some really good companies in this space that have done like it's an ennoble thing. Um, but but I don't know that we have that yet. But I say that, I mean, I put it out there to the if they come on your show otherwise and they say, no, we've got it this way, then yeah, hats off to them. But but that's kind of like that's what I think of. I don't have to deal with that yet because I've not bought those things. Like the kids have access to like iPads that are you know essentially time-limited lockdown and and other things, and they have to use them in public. They don't allow to go use them in private. And so uh so I think that that's key. Um it is just sad because um we just like with social networks, the idea that you know kids could potentially chat with each other like online in a certain way and connect, and maybe the people that are like other kids, other places, like it isn't necessarily bad. Like it, like it like it didn't have to be bad. It's probably more dangerous now than it's worth, therefore, don't do it. But the real issue is um when the social networks um they grew organically because everyone was coming onto them, the internet was young and and everyone was still signing up. But when they made that turn, essentially, to use um basically where they had to keep growing their revenues at a certain rate that was different than their growth of users, well, that made the incentives increasing the time spent online. Right. And the challenge is when you align with time spent as your value, you can kind of, you know, oh, we're providing value, people are spending more time. It's a lot easier. Like a great way to keep people hooked is addiction. Right. I know it's a little funny to say it that way, but like there's always no better path than addict people. And so what happened is the kids were told they could go to the playground and meet other kids, and the people that own the playground turned it into a casino. And they let adults into the playground. And then they they basically put you know the bar right next to the playground. And so, like in that situation, as a parent, I would never send my kids into that playground. Right. Right? And so so there are a whole ecosystems like that. There's gaming sites, I can name them, like there's all these ecosystems that have now been built that way because the people that created them and found in them, they weren't morally moved that when the first kids got hurt, they said, shut it down, let's figure it out. And now half a decade, a decade, more has passed, and that has never been their conscience. And so I think that you really do have to vet, like if your kids are using technology, figure out who makes it, how is it set up? You don't have to be a scientist about it, but like everything they're touching has got to have some business model tied to it. Right, right? Okay. So if you figure out, okay, the business model is okay, it's a video game and I'm paying for it. Well, how much time should they spend on the video game? And is it overstimulating? There's all these other things that come in. And then and like, okay, it's YouTube they can watch something. Well, how much time are you spending on that? Um, are they getting fed a bunch of short videos? It's actually going to make them have like far worse attention, actually, you know, driving dopamine um kind of desensitization that has other effects in their lives. Um, so there's a lot of video things where it's like, well, maybe that's something we should just do together. Like, what do they need to go watch on YouTube that you know I can't, they can't put it on the big screen to watch together, right? Um yeah, and I can keep going, but like as a parent, just I think thinking about the use case and the business model tends to reveal. And when you think about, well, yeah, the business model is not very aligned, but what can go wrong? That's when you say, guess what? It only has to go wrong once. Right. There's no mulligan. There's no mulligan for what happens to your kids.

Ryan Vet 38:06

That's so good. That's so good. I, you know, had uh Tom LeNoble on the show who was uh early at Facebook and he had to do a lot of their compliance and shared a lot of the things that uh they had to see and and they kept going, right? And he um talked about the many subpoenas he got and the many things that um he, you know, he navigated and how he actually helped before his departure there, how he helped uh identify cases of of kids who were being exploited on the platform. But I I think you said something so profound that I just want to repeat Tim is the idea that business is tied to just about everything. There, there's nothing free. Um and and so we have to understand what the business model is driving whatever platform or or tool it is that we use. I think that is such a profound and easy thing for parents. Uh you you said it well. You don't need to be a scientist. You don't have to pick it apart and analyze the code. That's just something simple. How are they making money off your time or your attention? And I think that is profound. Well, Tim, I want to thank you so much for this uh incredible conversation. You sharing your expertise and sharing what you're doing now to keep kids safe. How can people find out more about you, about Angel Q, and uh start putting these practices into place today?

Tim Estes 39:17

Yeah, well, thank you. So uh you can find Angel Q uh online at the App Store. Uh we're run on uh iOS. We haven't gotten onto the Google platforms yet. We will at some point in the future, but we're still refining it. Um and uh we you can also read about us at angelq.ai. That's our website. Um you can find me at uh on LinkedIn uh under you know, Tim Estes and you know, Estes AI is kind of my little thing there. Uh and I'm also on X. Now uh on X you'll find me engaging in a lot of these issues. So something I'm also uh deeply involved with, uh kind of second hat is uh I co-founded with several other like mainly conservative sort of center-right pro-family groups, um, a group called Alliance for a Better Future, and I chair that. Uh, we have an amazing CEO, Janet Kelly, who is Governor Youngkin's uh head of HHR, the Health and Human Services. So she's been a cabinet secretary twice, knows the acute harms, was one of the leaders in getting phone-free schools done in Virginia for Governor Youngkin. Uh and uh she and our team, uh uh and our CO Ari Kagan, who's an amazing mind on these AI issues and has been engaged on these AI safety things for some time. Uh, like we are sort of fighting to show that um it is more important to put human dignity, much like the Pope has in the last like 48 hours, we've got this amazing statement like from the Pope about human dignity and technology. Like, our leaders need to look and realize that they're supporting, uh, they need to support human dignity ahead of expediency by these companies. Um and it and it won't lead to less profitable companies if the profits are like legitimate.

Ryan Vet 40:56

Right.

Tim Estes 40:57

But uh when you have digital narcotics companies powered by AI, which is what I think unfortunately there are too many of, like those are that's talented people. Everyone targeting ads and using AI to target ads and manipulate children, um, they're not curing cancer. They're not doing the use cases with AI that were sold or the great future hope. Right. And so the government is actually, by allowing this to continue, it's subsidizing bad uses of AI. And we thank the president and others, and there are many pro-family groups from Institute for Family Studies, Heritage, a bunch of other organizations that are on our council. Um, and like we believe fundamentally, like it is not in conflict innovation and protecting human beings. What's in conflict is digital narcotics and exploitation business models are in conflict with the family. Right. And so cheap profits. So it's just like if someone was giving political cover to uh Pablo Escobar, like I wouldn't be cheering Pablo Escobar as an innovator. Right. And we now have the digital versions of that going on.

Ryan Vet 42:02

That's deep, that's profound. Well, Tim, I appreciate the work that you're doing. Um I appreciate uh that your your presence on X, your presence on LinkedIn, and obviously all you're doing with Angel Q. I think it's so important for families, and I appreciate that the message isn't just a business solution for you, but you're passionate about it and you're pursuing it to make change uh with policy and everything else. So, Tim, I want to thank you so much for being on the Ryan Vet Show today. And everyone listening, thank you again for listening to this episode. Until next time, inspire forward.

Tim Estes 42:30

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