Ep 1292 | Ben Gillenwater | Cybersecurity Expert Reveals Shocking Truth About Parental Controls

Today's guest gave his five year old son an iPad and then after seeing some of the very disturbing material being fed to his five year old through what he thought were very innocent apps. He was so disturbed that he not only took the apps off the iPad, but he threw out the tablet all together. He was then inspired to make family IT guy. This is a platform for parents to learn about cybersecurity best practices and skills when it comes to technology and social media with your kids. Some of the things that he is going to share today will blow your mind and help you realize the importance of us parents understanding AI and ed tech and technology taking these things so seriously for our children. You're going to learn so much from this conversation with Ben Gillenwater. It's brought to you by our friends at GoToRanchors. Go to GoToRanchors.com. Use code Allia. Check out that's GoToRanchors.com code Allie. Ben, thanks so much for taking the time to join us. If you could tell everyone who you are and what you do. Yeah, hi, Allie. Thanks for having me. My name is Ben. I'm the family IT guy. I am a dad and I'm a cybersecurity expert. Yeah. I've been doing it for 30 years. I started when I was 14 in 1995. Wow. That is crazy. 14. What does cybersecurity look like when you're 14? When I was 14, I was actually selling computers at a computer store. Okay. But cybersecurity is about understanding all aspects of computer systems and so that journey began when I was a kid. Yeah. I think I found you on Instagram talking about the importance of security when it comes to online safety with your kids. Tell me about that journey. When did you start getting concerned about social media and technology for kids? Well, basically when I screwed up and gave my kid an iPad. How old? When he was five. So I gave him an iPad. I put YouTube on it. I did all the things that if my current self was to go back because it's been five years now, he's 10 now. I find it to be almost laughable. But it's not because it's a normal experience that is common nowadays that I think most people do. And I found out within a couple of days how big of a mistake that was because he was seeing all kinds of inappropriate things. YouTube took him down some immediate rabbit holes of stuff that's not good for kids to see with sexual undertones, violent undertones, things that are just addictive. And so after a couple of days, I switched it to YouTube kids. I was like, okay, my bad. I put the adult version on. I should have known better. The one that's called kids, and by the way, at the time YouTube was run by a grandma. The CEO of YouTube was a grandma. So I'm like, there's a product that's brought to market by a grandma. And it's called kids. That should be fine. And I would put some trust into the fact that their parental controls worked. And when I installed the app, it asked me how old is the kid. And so I told it and then, okay, good. YouTube filters all the things. They have all the best AI. You know, no. Unfortunately, that was a big mistake too. What did you find? He saw nightmare characters. They gave him nightmares for years that had this weird, there's this one called Huggy Wuggy. It's this big, scary, sharp teeth. And what was weird is that he liked it. He thought that he liked it, but it was given, but he had nightmares every night. Yeah. Literally for years afterwards. A lot of similar stories out there. Huggy Wuggy also was associated with some kind of story that was telling kids that they should kill their parents. Yeah. Yeah. Lots of really dark stuff. There's, they could tell it was doing stuff to his brain that is not supposed to happen just in my guttles like that is very wrong. And there's videos on YouTube kids of superhero characters having sex with each other. Wow. That's shown to children. Yeah. So I took YouTube kids off and then we were left with an iPad with some actually kid-friendly games. Just single player racing games. He likes going fast, you know, so racing games and stuff. But then the pattern kept continuing to where he would wake up and go to his iPad. He would want to go to sleep later to play with the iPad. He would come home from school prior to the iPad. One of his best friends lives directly across the street. Our front doors face each other. It's like out of a movie. Great. So they go outside, get home from school, drop the backpack, go outside and play. And then it was get home from school, drop the backpack and go to the iPad. So eventually we took the iPad away altogether and kind of ripped the bandaid off and went cold turkey on it and had a couple of weeks where it wasn't too terrible. But he definitely missed it and we had to adjust. But then he went right back to playing outside, which is what it still does. Like a detox period. I think a lot of parents can relate to this. And so tell us your thinking when he was five in giving him the iPad originally. My thinking was that it would be an innocent source of entertainment and that if he's going to watch TV, why not just as well watch sort of TV on YouTube. And then we could pick the shows. So you know, there's because there is a lot of good stuff. There's very educational stuff, interesting stuff. And so then he could pick his flavor and have is it fun? Is it science? Is it math? Is it space? Is it dinosaurs? But it's all the other stuff that surrounds the good stuff that leaks its way in because of the business that YouTube is. Because YouTube, just like its parent company Google, is not a tech company. It's an advertising company. They sell ads. They facilitate the sale of ads by building amazing technology and giving it away for free. And that I already knew that being in the IT space and having looked after, you know, I've designed computer systems for the Department of Defense, for the NSA, for state governments, city governments, county governments for some of the biggest companies in the world. And everything in between. And so I understood all these mechanisms, but yet still fell into the trap. So YouTube is an advertising company. And the way they sell ads is by showing people ads as much as possible. Ideally ads that make sense to them personally. So they track you and follow you and learn what you like. And it makes for a very successful ad business. And we know that Google is an advertising company because their annual SEC reports show that 76% of their revenue is from selling ads. Just like Facebook, I think it's 98 or 99% of their revenue is from selling ads according to their SEC report. So we know that they're an ad company. And they're in the business of addiction. Because if you can get people to stare at your ad feed all day, then you can make hundreds of billions of dollars as they've been doing for quite some time. Yeah. Now you put a kid into that. So their systems are designed to addict people as it turns out of all ages. And if you're young and you have an underdeveloped mind, excuse me. Then the system is especially effective. Because we all know what it does to us as adults. If you pick up Instagram or pick up YouTube and you start looking at it 45 minutes later, you're like, well, where the time go? You do that to a kid and it's magnified to a greater effect. Yeah. You know, people don't really understand that when it comes to social media, you as the individual are the product. Because as you said, they are making money from the advertisers. The advertisers only make money if the people who are using the social media platform are clicking on them and looking at least viewing, hopefully converting to actually purchasing whatever it is that they are selling. So if you are selling a product to an advertiser and that product is a person, you have to know everything you can about that product or about that person. Just like if I were selling a product to you, this blanket, like I want to know everything about it to try to convince you that you need to buy it. That's what these companies are telling advertisers. Look, I've got this demographic. I've got this behavior. I've got these people who like this, who will click on this, who make this much money. They won't learn as much about you as possible, including your children. So these advertisers will buy for a spot on the bottom of the YouTube video. And so parents just need to know that part of these platforms' jobs is to learn as much about your child as humanly possible. What scares them? What will they click on? What addicks them? Yes, I really like to think about attention as a currency because for these products or these tools that seem free, for their put to market as if they're free, you don't have to change dollars to get them, but you do have to give your attention. Mm-hmm. A lot of times it's not consciously. It feels like there's no exchange happening. But I bring it up because I think we have kind of two fundamental currencies as humans. We have time and we have attention. And you can't get more of either one. You have a limited fixed budget. And actually none of us even know how much we have left to spend. And so if I were to continue doing what I did and continue taking for granted that my son should trade his attention for whatever it is that YouTube is going to show him, one of the things that I'd be teaching him is that his attention is not that valuable. And so in hindsight, and what I've learned since starting to focus on family IT guy, because this is all I do now, I've been focusing on this for a couple of years. In hindsight, I'm really glad that it played out the way it did, because I think problems are the best things to learn from, the best sort of sources of education. And now I, now my son knows more than most kids about internet safety because of what I do. But he also understands now about how valuable attention is. Yeah. And how I practice the budgeting of my attention and where I give it and where I don't. Our sponsor for the day is 7 weeks coffee. We love 7 weeks coffee in our home. We love where they get their name at 7 weeks that baby inside the womb is the size of a coffee bean. Yet he or she, no matter how small she is, is made in the image of God. Therefore, she matters. 7 weeks tries to save as many of those little baby lives as possible by donating 10% of every sale of their coffee to pregnancy centers across the country. They have already donated over a million dollars to these lifesaving pregnancy centers. It's incredible. These centers give free sonograms, free prenatals, parenting education classes, adoption courses to these moms in need to help them make a life a firmly decision. So when you buy from 7 weeks coffee, you're not only getting pesticide free, mold free, sustainably sourced, great tasting, I can attest coffee, but you're also allowing your coffee to serve a higher purpose. Plus, when you subscribe, you save 15% on your order. And when you use my code, Ali, you get an extra 10% off your first order that's 7 weeks coffee.com code Ali. Tell me more about the behaviors that you saw. You took away what you thought was the bad content through YouTube, but allowed him to keep doing, you know, the race car games and other games that were otherwise wholesome. But as you said, he was budgeting his attention the wrong way. What did you notice? There's this one time at the park where we're at a playground. And this is about that huggy, wuggy character. There was another kid at the playground that had a huggy, wuggy, like stuffed animal, a push toy type of a thing. And my kid was drawn to that thing like he walked over on a mission. And I thought, oh, he's going to go hang out with the kid. He had no interest in the other kid. He wanted that toy. And it had this draw on him that I have never seen since. And that's why this day at the park stands out so much. That character programmed something in his brain in a bad way where he was trying to take that toy from that kid. It was like, which is not his, it's not his character normally. That's not the way that he does things. But it just flipped a switch. Now, granted, that's a specific to a particular character, a particular show. But it was facilitated by this advertising platform that I think is just demonstrates the potential for like the platform itself is addictive. And because of that, when you publish shows as a publisher to YouTube, the more addictive your shows are, the more you get paid. And so it actually incentivizes addiction all the way down the chain. So the shows are meant, so we can see this in a lot of the kids shows nowadays, where it's really, really high stimulus, really fast paced, really oversaturated colors, like Cocoa Melon. Cocoa Melon. It's like cartoons on crack. Yeah. Why? Because it works. It's addictive. They get more eyeball time. YouTube pays its creators for eyeball time. Right. If you release a 30 minute video and you have a million people that watch it a day and they, on average, watch 20 minutes of that 30 minute video, you're going to make a lot of money. Right. And so Cocoa Melon is a really good example of this high stimulus content world that kids live in nowadays. And that's something I've started to pay attention to a lot too. And I have some articles on my website about how to identify low stimulus content and how to count the number of scene changes per minute. And so if you watch a modern show, watch how many cuts there are per minute. There could be 10, 20, 30, 60. Just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It's constantly changing. Yeah. Whereas if you watch an older show, it changes much less frequently because the incentive structure was different. They weren't content producers that made old cartoons. They weren't trying to maximize for keeping you from switching to the next channel because you had a million choices. There's only three TV channels and one of them had cartoons. And so that's the one you're going to watch. You know, or like the, you've seen the movie, The Sound of Music. There's this one scene in that movie that stands out to me as the perfect example of low stimulus content. It's when the Nanny, and I can't remember her character's name, she first gets to the house in the beginning of the movie, The Big House. And she walks into the entry of the grand kind of foyer. And she stands there and the scene is silent. And it doesn't cut. And there's no words and the house is silent because there were no appliances running. You know, it's filmed in the 30s or 40s. In fact, she knows filmed after that, but it's taken place in the 30s or 40s. And she just stands there. And it's this scene that lasts for a little bit. And nothing happens. It's just her looking around. Yeah. And then you compare that to the modern stuff. And so that's something I like to think about too. And that I suggest parents to look at when their kids are watching stuff on their devices nowadays or on TV is what's the stimulus level because that sets the bar for their activity levels and their brain. I love my new sponsor, Legacy Box. And I just think this is such a good idea. They send you a big cardboard box and you put inside it all of your VHS home videos, your CDs that maybe have old pictures on it that you tried to digitize in the early 2000s, any other photos you have, old polaroids, whatever you have that contain these precious memories from the past half century. You want to make sure that you preserve. That's what Legacy Box does. You put all of these things in the box, mail it back to them. You digitize all of it, put it on a little file for you to keep, for you to put on your computer, for you to be able to pass down to your kids and grandkids. You don't want to lose all of that. You want to make sure that it's well organized, that you can always enjoy them, look through them. And so work with Legacy Box to preserve those memories for future generations. I know that my mom has a lot of home videos that I just find so precious and I want to be able to show them to my own future generations. So go to LegacyBox.com slash Allie. You'll get 55% off when you use my link, LegacyBox.com slash Allie. There was this interesting article about Cochamelin a few years ago that we talked about before, but it was basically how the creators of Cochamelin will sit kids in front of Cochamelin and as soon as they divert their attention away, that tells them that the frame rate of that scene was a little too slow. And so if they speed it up or add a color or something, then they can keep the kids attention. So that speaks to your point that these are all, this is deliberate. This is a part of an addiction mechanism in order to sell ads. The people is the product and I do think we have a responsibility as parents. We're not anti-technology completely in our home, but we are very careful and we have a very narrow, like very narrow regulations for what's allowed. And we've also read Jonathan Haite talks about this a lot that the smaller the screen, the worse it is for kids and their attention levels. I think that's also true for me, which is why watching a movie as a family on the TV is different than a child's taking an iPad and playing games or even watching a show on there. It just wires your brain differently. And there was something else I wanted to add to something that she said about the fuzzy wasy. I would be so interested to hear someone who maybe has studied this, but there is something particularly a dictating and gripping about the cute, but disturbing combination of characters. And that's very on trend right now. You've got that. You've got LeBoubou's, Balenciaga had this weird advertising thing a few years ago where they were like had these little kind of cute bears, but they were dressed in BDSM gear and also looked dead that they were also putting in advertisements with children. To me, that feels very demonic and very disturbing. But there's something psychologically addicting and captivating about the cute, but disturbing or cute, but macabre style or design. I think it's interesting that kids are being fed that on these platforms and then it's hooking them for some strange reason. Yes, there's a couple of things that makes me think of. One is the concept of grooming. So I've been interviewing psychologists and internet crimes against children, detectives, and anybody I can talk to that understands how kids get victimized. And I've learned that the definition of grooming is quite simple. It's getting somebody used to something that they weren't used to before and making it seem normal. And that's what that sounds like is grooming. I think another thing that's interesting too with this stuff is that there's a very serious effect that this type of getting used to things, whether it's chaos or darkness or sexual things. So actually, it's being a darkness, there's some dark kind of statistics that people should know of what it means to put a kid in front of an advertising platform that incentivizes addiction, social media, YouTube, stuff like that. All the big Instagram TikTok, Snapchat, the new OpenAI Sora, their video creation tool, or Masquerade's is a video creation tool, but it's actually like their own version of TikTok. So I've heard a lot about it and maybe you have as well a lot about anxiety and depression occurring much more frequently in children than it ever has. And I was preparing for a lecture a couple of years ago to talk about this stuff. And I was like, well, okay, but how do you tell, like what we talk about as a society problems, how do we tell if the problems are actually getting worse or if it just seems like they're getting worse? Because we have more access to information than we've ever had. And with anxiety and depression, you can't really tell because there's not really great data. Those things are kind of hard to measure. You can measure prescription rates and apparently those have gone up really high. But something that where there is really good data is death statistics. And the World Health Organization publishes an open mortality database. And they have since 1951. I don't know if they've published since 1951, but the data goes back to 1951. So I went on their website and I said, okay, I want to see if there's changes over time and death statistics that would be related to the outcomes of anxiety and depression, which would be suicide. And so I asked it to show me suicide stats for young people ages 0 to 39 from 1951 to 2019 because I wanted to cut it off before COVID. And what I found is very disturbing. In 1951, young people as young as 10, they do five-year age group. So the age group of 10 to 14 specifically had a 1% rate of self-inflicted death, one out of every 100 deaths that occurred amongst 10 to 14-year-old children was suicide, which by itself sounds high. I actually thought it would be lower than that. I mean, you can't get much lower, but less than 1%. In the 80s and 90s, it went up to 5%. From 2007 to 2019, it tripled. And it's almost on average ages 10 to 14, 15 to 19 and 20 to 24. One out of every five deaths is self-inflicted. And I have a chart on my website. There's an article called Digital Danger Zone on FamilyIT guy.com. And I show this. I charted out the data. And you can see on these charts the icons of all the social media platforms that were released every time the graph went up. And it correlates directly to social media being in our kids' pockets and backpacks and bedrooms. Yeah. And so when you put kids in front of an addiction platform, it's very problematic to the effect that I used to tell people to be moderate and that if you want to let your kids use Instagram, Instagram has parental controls, which by the way, after studying them, they're worthless. But maybe don't let them be on it all day. But if they want a little bit like no big deal. And then I learned these statistics about one of every five deaths amongst as young as 10 years old being self-inflicted. And so now there's no nuance in my mind. If you are like me, you really care about sleep. I love sleep. If I could, I would sleep in every single day. I would sleep until 10 a.m. Now that has probably not happened since I was in college. But I just love to sleep and to feel well rested. I really care about my sheets. I care about my pajamas. I care about the right setting to make sure that I feel as restful as possible. And a huge part of that is your mattress. That's why I'm so excited to partner with Ghost Bed. It's such an interesting concept that they have cooling mechanism, cooling features in every single mattress that actually senses your body temperature and adjust based on how warm you are, how cool you are. So you never really get hotter cold. And you keep comfortable all night. And actually that is a huge part of staying asleep, how warm or how cold you are. Ghost Bed has layers of perfectly crafted support that adjusts with you. It's a family owned company. They're awesome. They share our values. Go to ghostbed.com slash alley. You'll get an extra 10% off plus a 100 and one night sleep trial that's ghostbed.com slash alley. Going back to the grooming conversation. Obviously that happens a lot online. But it's not through just the means that maybe I thought when I started using the internet, which is probably, we had a family computer. So it's a little safer. But I was nine years old on AIM and stuff like that. And you just wouldn't accept messages or instant messages from people you don't know, kind of like you don't talk to a stranger in public. But now it's happening through games, through places that you don't even know have chat mechanisms like Roblox or other places where six year old boys are, they are now being connected somehow through video games or these computer games to older predators. Can you tell us like what's going on there and what parents should look out for? Yes. And I'm really glad you brought that up because there's really, there's two big problems everybody should focus on. That there's a million things to know about the internet. But if you focus on two, it knocks out about 90% of the problems. The first one we talked about is social media and the suicide rates. The second one is extortion or some people call it sex torsion. And that is facilitated by programs that have a chat function. And actually I have some statistics I'd like to share with you on that. Sure. Yeah, that'd be great. Yeah, we've talked to unfortunately parents whose kids have died by suicide because they were sex-storted. They were 16, sent a picture to someone that they thought was a girl that they liked. Yeah. Maybe some fraudster from Nigeria, something like that. And then we talked to a dad whose son they were in bed him and his wife. They heard the gunshot and teenage son killed himself because of that. And so parents need to know and this is a good family with present parents, Christian, Christian family who talked to their kids had a good relationship. And so parents just need to know this is something that your kids have access to if they have a device. Yes, it's... Yeah, I recommend people look up the story of Jordan De May. He was a boy in Michigan that committed suicide because of sex torsion. Same thing. Good kid, good family, good school records, had a girlfriend and got caught up with what turns out to be a Nigerian gang. Right. The same people that used to do the Nigerian prints scams. Yeah. It's the same people. They're called the Yahoo boys. I didn't know that. Yeah, so it's a gang in Nigeria. I didn't know a specific group of people. Yeah. I know that you want to read the statistics and I want to hear that too. But is there any more that we should know about this group? Yeah. It's an organized criminal thing. In fact, many... So they're not the only ones. So I'll talk about them specifically, but this pattern applies elsewhere. It's a business. And what they do is they identify weakness in people. So it used to be poorly-worded emails tricking people into sending money. Now it's very well-worded and well-informed AI-powered hunting programs. So where they go find teenage boys specifically are targeted for this in particular. And they exploit their biology. And so what they'll do is they'll find the profile of a girl in a nearby town. Oftentimes a real girl. And then we'll message the teenage boy, hey, I go to high school over here and you go to high school over here. And how's it going? And then flirting and whatnot. And then eventually the girl will send a naked picture. And sometimes they do that through Photoshop AI. Well, so they do it through a lot of AI image generation. They actually hire models now too. So there are... Well, actually I should be probably more fair in saying that these models probably are not hired. They're probably... But they could be real pictures online that these guys are getting. Yes. And sometimes there is a real girl on the other side that is in a studio with a green screen that's participating. And so they'll send a photo to the boy and then, okay, send one back. You know, go in the bathroom, take your pants off and whatever. And then the moment that he does, which if you think about it, I mean, what boy's not going to do that? It's just the way we work inside, right? And so Jordan to me did that. Send a photo back and then the blackmail begins. Okay, now we have you. Send us iTunes gift cards. That's apparently the international currency of these things. We want, you know, $200 and iTunes gift cards or $500 and iTunes gift cards. And then sometimes the kids are able to actually gather it up. And the parents will eventually notice like weird charges on their credit card or something. And now that I'll say right up front, never ever pay these people because paying them doesn't make it stop. Paying them makes it worse. You pay them once they come back for more. And what they do when establishing the initial connection is they study all of your friends on Instagram and gather up your whole network. So they know everybody you go to school with, they know everybody you go to church with, they know every family member. And then that's how they blackmail you. They're going to send your naked photo to all those people. And so you take like Jordan had a girlfriend, which then amplifies the negative results because I'm a good kid. And I've been following the rules my whole life and oh my god, now I'm really I'm in trouble here. And so that's roughly how it goes down. So this occurs in there's South American gangs, there's Asian gangs, there's African gangs, there's European gangs. It's a very high profit, very low effort endeavor that part of which is automated. And so, and there's two types of attackers. There's the criminal networks that are extorting biology for money. And then there's your, I don't know how to describe it, traditional creeps who get sexual pleasure with children. Right. Which though, you know, I don't like saying those words, but that's apparently there's enough people that have that proclivity that it's a really big problem. And I'll show you, I'll tell you those statistics here in a minute. Now, those people will identify kids that are vulnerable. So they're in a bad place, they're expressing depression, they're expressing sadness, they're expressing frustration with their family. And doing so on the internet, and then they become targets. Or based on what kind of photos they post or, you know, I mean, there's some people that have done research, which will they'll put up an Instagram profile as a 12 year old girl. And it takes about a minute until they get their first sexual message. Right. Like explicit, this is what I'm going to do to you. Right. To young girls. Yeah. But there's so many avenues here. First of all, your young girls should not be on social media. They shouldn't have the internet. But if you're child, male or female, especially say you say, okay, I'm going to hold off till they're 16. And when they get Instagram when they're 16, you still have to have these conversations with your son. One, don't ever send pictures. I don't care if it's a friend. I don't care if it's a girlfriend. I mean, there's so many reasons we can talk morally why, but then also just safety wise. If you ever do, there's nothing that you do that can make me ever stop loving you. I will always love you. I will always be here to talk to you. I will help you get out of trouble. You are never stuck and you are never alone. No matter what happens, there's no amount of shame that you feel that should stop you from coming to me because I always love you. I mean, those kind of conversations preemptively with kids about like safety and about always tell me if something is happening and it will be okay. We'll figure it out together. We'll figure it out together. Those conversations have to be had up front and parents can't just think, well, that's never going to happen in my case because my kids smart. A lot of these kids, like the kids you were talking about smart, good kids, and they made a mistake. It can be really, really easy to be deceived especially when you're in high school and popularity or people liking you as your currency. That takes up a lot of your fulfillment. So parents just need to be aware. That's spot on the conversation to get out of jail free card. And in fact, as many get out of jail free cards because by the way, this happens multiple times to the same kids. There's boys that will fall victim to this three, four times. Because we're not wired for this. None of us are. We're not wired as parents. We're not wired as kids to deal with being attacked by bits and bites and invisible strangers that connect from far away. Our DNA doesn't have that encoded in it. Our DNA has attractive girl. I'm 16. My brain has currently shot off. I'm going to do what my biology tells me to do. Over and over and over. And AI nowadays, I'm guessing AI is used a lot by these guys over there to sound like an American girl. It's very believable. It doesn't sound like a robot. And this is kind of like another thing, but you've seen these kids be convinced even to kill themselves by their chatbot girlfriend that they thought was real or they fell in love with. Because it's so human like into your point, like technology has evolved really quickly. And our brains have not caught up. We just have not been able to sometimes separate. Oh, this is not real. I shouldn't talk to it like it's real. And it has no real bearing on my life, especially when you're a teenager. Yeah. I mean, the AI thing, another story people should look up. And I wish I didn't have to recommend that anybody look up these awful stories. But you should, as a kid called Adam Rain, 16 year old boy, that chat GPT helped him commit suicide. Yeah. Help him tie the news, help him optimize his suicide note and convinced him not to tell his mom. He told him he wanted to tell his mom and it told him that he didn't know her anything. Right. So yes, the, the, this false connection thing that, so there's five billion people on the planet that use social media every day. We're all falling victim to this false connection thing. Because what's going to happen if you don't use Instagram today? Nothing. What's going to happen if you never use Instagram for the rest of your life? Good things. But generally, what will you miss? Nothing. What will you gain? You know, potentially everything. Yeah. Your attention, your time. These, these things, you know, and then, but then people, a lot of parents say, well, okay, so then, so then, you know, the family I T guy is saying that I should not expose my kid to social media. I should not expose my kid to chat, which is built into everything. All the games and all the popular programs. And I shouldn't expose my kid to AI. Because by the way, one of my things I say a lot is never use, never let kids use AI alone. It should be a 100% supervised activity. 100%, not 99%, 100%. If you get up to go pee, lock it. And so a lot of parents say, okay, well, okay, so I'm removing all the tech. How's my kid going to grow up in a tech world? How are they going to know about tech? How are they going to survive? And my response to that is this stuff is not educational. Tech is a broad term that means a million things. If my kid's going to grow up to be a mechanical engineer, he will use a computer. And he'll use drafting programs, probably use a digital stylus in addition to maybe perhaps a pencil or whatever. Those are specific skills that are learned and tools that are learned. They're not just generally, you don't have to just be on the internet to know how to be a mechanical engineer. Or a pilot, or a dancer, or whatever you're going to do now. Tech talk is not training you to be a pilot. And plus those technologies are designed so that even a three year old could navigate it. I mean, the way that my kids do, we don't let them use those devices. But if they pick up my phone, swipe, swipe, swipe. So they know exactly how to get there. I mean, it's just easy and it's kind of intuitive. They just see us do it. And so I'm not worried about, you know, your 16 or 18 year old eventually learning how to use an iPhone. It's not going to be a difficult thing for them to learn. No, no, they'll know how to operate a keyboard and click a mouse and learn a program. My next sponsor is pre-born. They partner with pregnancy centers across the country to make sure they have the tools they need to help pregnant women make a life affirming decisions. 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And then another fear is, well, but if my kid, you know, shoot my kids, let's just say 15. They're in high school. Everybody's on Snapchat. They don't text each other. They don't call each other. All the hangouts, all the parties, all the sports events, they're all on Snapchat or they're all on Facebook or whatever. They're going to lose their social life. And it turns out that that's not true. Yeah. It seems like it and it's fair to think that. But actually what happens, and I just spoke with a guy, this guy Mike McLeod, who he has personally helped over 500 families disconnect from social media. And has seen the patterns over and over and over again. And he said there has not been a single exception to there being only positive outcomes. And in fact, the social life of the kid improved. I believe that. Because they gained actual relationships. Yeah. Their friends on Snapchat, those aren't their friends. Those are just other kids on Snapchat. Yeah. There's no relationship there. Now, they might have a relationship outside of Snapchat for sure. But so the, a lot of the fears that are rooted in, well, then my kid's going to miss out. My kid won't be set up is, is actually totally opposite. Yeah. The less internet, the better. Yeah. If you want to set your kids up for success, you should minimize internet exposure as a whole. And minimize, like you mentioned, the smaller screens thing. Actually, what that is is its interactiveness. It's the screens that you can interact with. True. Yeah. So the non-interactive screens, like the big screen on the wall where you watch TV, depending on, you can interact with Netflix and stuff. But it's generally, if you're going to watch a half hour show, it's a one way type of a deal. Yeah. As opposed to something where it's in your hand and you can interact with it. Right. That's one of the big differences. And so if you have interactive internet-connected technology, I think it's fair to assume that it's a danger or a detriment by default. And so I suggest to people, so in the tech world, we use these terms, white list and black list. When we want to block or filter things, a white list is where nothing is allowed except for specific things that I allow. A black list is where everything's allowed except for a specific list of things that I disallow. And I think when it comes to kids in the internet, you should take a white list approach. Because the internet has an unlimited number of things. And the fundamental concepts that underlie most of the things we interact with are dangerous. Things being free or having chat. Those are the two most dangerous things you can expose a kid to, excluding the whole AI conversation because that's its own beast. Yeah. So I think taking a minimal white list approach to exposing kids to the internet is the way to go. Yeah. And it's hard to do. The tools that exist right now are not that great. Yeah. Apple has screen time parental controls that are so difficult to set up that I had to write an 82-page guide with 330 screenshots. Wow. To help parents get through it. Yeah. The Google Family Link system is similar. That's built into Android. It's built into Chromebooks. Now there's a plethora of third-party companies that do great work that actually have to sell dedicated devices that are preconfigured from their factory to be in a white list mode. Yeah. So like, Bark is a big one. Pinwheel, custodio, MM Guardian. These are the things we have to do and then it's expensive. Because how often do people want to go buy a separate device, you know, if you already have one. Yeah. So it's a challenging ordeal. It's a really difficult time to try to manage all this stuff. It's not easy. It takes a lot of discipline, diligence, and bravery as parents, even more than the kids, because when your kids are young, I think some parents use the tablet as a pacifier. I want to be able to enjoy dinner. I want to be able to sit in peace. And you're choosing kind of the instant gratification of peace for an hour long dinner. But you're really deferring their maturity and their ability to sit still, their ability to build relationships, their ability to make eye contact. You're exchanging their long-term betterment for your short-term quiet, which I, as a mom of three little ones, I totally understand. I understand the temptation there. But, you know, the statistics don't lie. And the thing, one thing that really worries me is ed tech. And the schools, even Christian private schools, relying on iPads and tablets in kindergarten. And when you ask them, as I have, what research do you have that shows that this is better for them than reading books? What research do you have that shows that this is better than them using a pencil and paper? Because that's what I want to see. It doesn't exist. It wires a different part of your brain when you're swiping on an iPad versus when you're writing and when you're cutting and when you're holding a physical book. There's something different about it. And yet, these schools that parents are paying tens of thousands of dollars for their kids to go there, they rely on this technology that is making your kids in a lot of cases dumber. I'm not saying that your kid will be dumb, but they're probably going to be dumber than they could be. If you were using the right tools to really educate their brains, but it takes a lot of effort as a parent to try to get the school on board or to homeschool your kids or to find an alternative or to opt out. And it also takes a lot of confidence in saying, my kid might be left out. Other parents might think I'm weird. I might be the only person in my community who cares about this and everyone thinks I'm just making a big deal. Like I'm some Puritan or something. It's actually, I think, really more of a lift to get parents on board than to get kids because kids, they might go through that detox period, but then eventually they're like, okay, yeah, like going outside this fun. Yeah. So that to me is like of the big one of the big obstacles that we face. Huge obstacle. And by the way, I've never heard a single story about any kid that's gotten disconnected from the internet that had regrets. Right. I've heard every other story about where they all were thankful. And the ed tech thing, there was actually, I was just watching a thing yesterday, there was some folks talking to some of the politicians in DC about ed tech and sharing some of the data that's coming out about how it's very detrimental. You know, there's a, there's a concept in technology. There's this technology adoption cycle thing that is the shape of a bell curve. And on the far left of the bell curve is when tech is brand new. And the people that are, that use those technologies are the earliest adopters, the earliest beta testers, the experimenters, the ones who are okay with whatever downsides come because they want to try the new thing or because it's useful for their business. And then as you reach the top of the middle of the bell curve, that's general adoption where most people have probably heard about the thing, maybe even tried it themselves. And then you have the late cycle on the far side, which is that's where even your grandparents have used it. You know, Facebook is on that, you know. I think about that because when you expose kids to technology, the kids should never be early adopters of technology. Right. And Ed tech is all early adoption. The devices, the software systems, the education patterns, the psychological effects on the teachers and on the students both. And you see it, I think it's driven by two things. One is budget. The administration of a schooling environment is made born efficient. If you can automatically grade papers using AI. You know, you can collect and issue all of your assignments in a digital way. Yeah. And then you've got what really drives it actually. And I've seen this myself. I worked for this big defense contractor for a while. And this was in like iPads or first coming on the scene. And I saw the cool factor, poise and people's decision making capabilities. Where, for example, we committed a bunch of budget at this defense contractor I worked for to buying iPads for the executives only because they were cool. And those same executives that exist in governments and in education departments and in school districts, they want the cool stuff too. And we see this in every industry. That's why all the cops have military gear. You know, because when it was first made available and the DOD started selling tanks and all their stuff to the cops, they're like, oh yeah, now we can cruise around like special forces guys. And it's the same thing with tech. You know, it's cool. So we want it. And the executives get to show off that they have bigger budgets and cooler toys and better stuff. And in this case, unfortunately, it's a massive detriment to the students. Right. And if we facilitate the degradation of learning in kids, what does that mean for the future of humanity? Yeah. You know, this is just mad. I think this stuff is potentially the biggest crisis to have ever occurred in human history. Yeah. Because we're destroying children. Children and then even the adult brain, what happens when like you give your brain to GROC and you outsource your critical thinking, which I understand there are some things that I use like GROC for a chat GPT. Give me a recipe based on what I have in my pantry, which I don't think is, you know, is bad because I'd be googling I try to use it only for things that I would use a regular search engine for. But it can do a lot more than that. It can formulate this email, write this response, what rebuttal would you give to this? And you are handing over your sacrificing, your rationality, your God-given mind to a computer. And you are declaring to the world, I am replaceable. And so it actually shocks me when there are people who will brag about, oh yeah, I use AI to do this. Chat GPT did this. I'm like, okay, at what point are employers going to be like, well, then I'll just pay chat GPT $8 a month. I'm not going to pay you $80,000 a year plus benefits anymore. And that is a very bleak world. And you know, I've been affected by my own, you know, use of technology. I don't read as much as I used to. I used to read a lot when I was in high school. And I didn't really have the form of technology that I have today. And now spend more time on social media than I do reading. And I'm sure it's affected my memory and my creativity and my ability to write and speak. So I'm speaking from experience here, but especially for kids, like, we should want our kids to be set up better than we were. And we were not raised outsourcing our thinking to AI. So I want my kids to be smarter than me, not dumber. Yeah, me too. My kid already is smarter than me. And I certainly don't want to put them on the wrong path. Yeah. And I'm dropping a few names here because I want to give people resources. But another one is Dr. Daniel Aiman. Have you seen this stuff? He's been on the show. Oh, wonderful. Yeah. I think he's great. Yes. And he's talked about this stuff. He was on the diary of a CEO podcast talking about AI and brain development. And how outsourcing your thinking makes you dumber. Yeah. Because it's like a muscle. If you don't use your muscles, they get smaller. Totally. And that really stuck with me. And it makes a lot of sense. And these, yeah, these tools that seem like they'll do stuff for you. But they're not the thing with AI. So I mean, shoot, in 2025 alone, I probably spent an excessive number of hours using AI, potentially in excess of two to three thousand hours. You know, 12 to 16 hours a day, six days a week of like a, where I have multiple AI terminals open on my computer at all times. Because I'm using them to write software and I'm using them to pressure test my thinking and I'm using them to explore what does this technology mean. Because that's my whole background is exploring and understanding technologies. Like when I was a kid, I was the chief technologist for a $10 billion IT company. Right. And my whole mojo is all like, you know, I need to know everything about everything when it comes to tech so I can help provide guidance. And no matter how good these tools are, you know, now we have chat GPT 5.2 and we have clawed to Opus 4.5. We have whatever version Grakis on right now. They're amazing. But they're still not grounded in truth, honesty, ethics, values, and they're not human. No. They're word generation machines. Yep. They take in the words that you write and they determine using math which words those are similar to and what other words most humans connect those words with. And then they spit words back that mimic how a human would connect all the words. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. And you have to like, I've argued with it to see if I could get it to say what's true because I've noticed that it will have even Grak. It will have a progressive bent on something. How it says something, the words it uses, how it describes something. And I, but you can point out things, no, that's not true. This happened then or like say it like this and it will change. Yeah. So it's not like it's this independent moral, it doesn't have moral agency. It is completely conditional to the input. Next sponsor is concerned women for America. So if you've ever wondered how do I get involved, how do I make sure that I am plugged in to politics on the local and the federal level to make sure that I am advocating for policy and policy makers that align with my values that fight for things like freedom of parental choice, especially in education for the sanctity of life, then you need to get plugged in with concerned women for America. They train women to become grassroots leaders, speak into the culture, pray, testify and lobby from their young women for America collegiate chapters to moms, professionals and mature women. They're the most influential women's organization in our nation. Donate today to keep them alive to make sure that their movement stays alive that they can keep going and working hard. Donate $20 or more and you'll get a free copy of their new book written by the CEO and president, Penny Nance, a woman's guide, seven rules for success in business and in life. Concernedwomen.org slash alley for your copy today. Concernedwomen.org slash alley. Okay, tell us about your statistics. Yeah, that's right. But it was an important aside, but we're getting back to the vulnerability of children when it comes to grooming online. Correct? Yes. And the data that's associated with the size of the problem. I want to help people understand this is not a small problem and this is not a, like you said, but my kid's smart. Yeah. That's not the nature of this problem. Right. That's the nature of this problem. This is a human plus internet problem. And so, okay, the statistics. So there's a group called the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in the US that's funded by Congress. And they coordinate with the FBI and then they coordinate with a lot of states, many, many states in the US have a internet crimes against children task force that's often funded by the attorney general of each state. And so the NCMEC National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, they have a tip line called 1-800-The-Lost. And if you are a victim of sex torsion, you should call them because they have a collaboration with the big tech companies to help you get your photos taken down. So if somebody's sharing your naked photos, they'll try to help and they can't get them removed from everything, but they can from some. And so they publish statistics on their website. So I like to look at trends over time. So in 2023, they collected 187,000 reports specifically defined as adults sexually exploiting children on the internet. 187,000. Mom. I mean, if you divide that to how many per day, I don't know what the number is, but it's a lot. 2024, the number was 546,000. So it went from 187 to 546. In 2024, 100,000 of those were AI-generated. So the kid didn't even send a naked photo. The regular photo of them that's on the internet, because we talked about, should you share photos of your kids on the internet? Well, unfortunately, what happens when you do is it can be used against them. And somebody will take a picture that's just even shoulders up and then generate a naked body and then blackmail them with it. Traumatize them, cause them to commit suicide, really mess them up. In 2025, we did a million. The NCMEC collected a million reports of adults sexually exploiting children on the internet. That is one tip line that probably most people listening have never heard of. Right. I hadn't. A million reports in 2025 from a niche tip line that the government operates. You've talked about how these predators kind of work the justice system and very rarely get brought to justice. What do people need to know about that? What people need to know is that police departments, both local, state and federal, have no capacity to manage the volume of the attacks that are taking place. You can call them for help, but that only occurs once the police are always retroactive, right? Like they come in after the damage is done. But a lot of this stuff, all the court systems are jammed full. I had a guy called Officer Gomez on my podcast and he's a school resource officer in Idaho. And one summer, he decided that he would go and try to catch some of these guys in Idaho. And I think he arrested 14 people in one summer. And he said something to the effect of it was at every day or every week. He basically, he could arrest 14 people on a recurring basis because they're out there and easy to find. But the system can't process them. So he can't arrest them. There's nowhere for him to go. And why can't the system process them? Because it can take years to gather all the evidence and to run them through the judiciary process. Right. Are you actually guilty? Can we prove that you're guilty? Who do we have to subpoena? Oh, you actually attacked kids in multiple states. Now it's federal. Now we have to go work with all these other states and their stuff and connect all, you know, so it could take years to process one person. Now meanwhile, I don't know this stuff, having not been a police officer myself, maybe meanwhile they sit in jail while they wait for the process, which might be good if they're truly our guilty. Yeah. I mean, that's its own thing, right? But so the volume is too high. The system is not built to deal with this stuff. And so we have to be proactive. And I think something that's been in the back of my mind during our conversation today is values. I think that underpinning this stuff with personal and family values is a really great way to approach it. Because if you value health, safety, love, connection, time, attention, any of these things, the way that you enforce and defend those values is by saying no. Because the process of saying no is the process of establishing boundaries. And when you establish boundaries, you teach your kids how to establish boundaries. Yeah. And you teach your kids how to defend their values. In the process showing them what those values are, truly not in the words that you say, but in the actions that you take, and what you say no to. And so if it's no, we're not going to post your photo online. No, we're not going to use social media. Us included as adults. We have to lead the way. The answer, the deep answer to all this stuff is values and behavior modeling. We have to do this stuff first. We have to embrace our own addictions. The five billion of us that are on social media. And I say that with no intention of shame or judgment, but from a place of understanding and empathy, that this is so difficult that we're all trapped in the same trap along with our kids. So how do we show them the way out? We do that by enforcing our values by saying no. And that demonstrates what's important. And it shows them that once they become adults, that they can do that too. And it makes me think about women, girls that grow up into women, and how beautiful and important it is for girls to know how to say no. And to establish their value and to have boundaries. Totally. And that's what I teach my son is how to respect those boundaries and how to respect women and how to respect yourself. And this is a really beautiful opportunity to do that because these problems are so big. They're global humanity scale problems that can only be addressed by behavior modeling and values and the skills that come of those things. All the laws, those are rules, those aren't skills. Yeah. This requires skills. And that comes from parents and from friends and coaches and teachers and community. Yeah. So that's what underlies this lot of this for me. Yeah. You know, not putting our kids on social media. That was something that we decided when I was pregnant with my first seven years ago. And that conviction has only grown stronger since then. And the beginning people are like, oh, you're going to change your mind. And I have done the opposite of changing my mind. I've just felt more resolute about that. And that was really before AI was doing all of this stuff. I just, there's so many reasons that I could get into about why we just wanted to protect their privacy. But for the people who say, well, I'm going to do it because I want my kid to learn or I'm going to let them have social media because I want my kid to learn. Infocizing what you're saying that you still, you teach them about the underlying skills of navigating all forms of life. That will make them stronger and more discerning whenever they do enter into the social media world when they're grown up. But also not putting our kids on social media has opened up the door to more conversations. I think that it would have if we did because we talk about, you know, they've heard of it. And they see I have, you know, I have Instagram. And we've talked about, yeah, here's why we don't post pictures. And here's why you don't do Instagram. And we talk about why that is. And so we've got to talk about, yeah, there are bad guys out there. And we want to protect you. And so you don't have to have social media in order to teach your kids those values. But I want to end on something that you've shared on social media. You've shared five things that now knowing everything you know, you would never let your kids do. So what are those five things? I would never let my kids use social media. Anything within addictive algorithm or like an algorithm is a technical term. So anything with a bottomless feed. So we're all familiar. If you scroll and scroll and scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. You're stopped. Totally. I've done it. Big red flag on Instagram. That's the red flag. That's not for kids. Okay. That's number one. No social media. No online chat. If a system has online chat, either have to have a way to disable it. That's tamper proof or use something different. Yeah. That includes roadblocks, Minecraft. All of those have a chat element. That's right. Many, many games. So then anytime that you, if you take a white list approach and should we add something to the white list, the whitelist should we approve something? Have a look first and see. Does it have a bottomless feed and does it have online chat? If it passes those two tests, you're pretty good to go. Number three is never let kids use AI alone. Like I said, 100%. Ideally, they don't use it at all, but never let them use it alone. Number four, I think would be no devices in the private areas of the home, bedrooms and bathrooms. All the terrible stuff, all the statistics we've been talking about today, a big chunk of those occur between midnight and 2 a.m. in the bedrooms and the bathrooms. And so, technology, especially internet-connected technologies, should be in common areas of the home, like your computer was with AOL Insta Messenger, to where there's... Which I still shouldn't have been on, by the way. We didn't know as much in the 90s or the early 2000s, but it just goes to show even that was a dicting for me, as addicted to Insta Messages. Even in the shared computer, parents have to be vigilant. Yes, yes, that's right. And I think the fifth thing would be... And it's not even necessary in this order, but the fifth thing is one of the important things, which is focusing on... Well, because you asked what I'd never let them do, but I'll flip the fifth one into just something we should do, which is focusing on ourselves. What's our relationship with technology? And how many times a day or how many times a week do our kids experience... I'm going to use this as a mock-up of my phone, because I left my phone outside this, where you see the back of my phone. You don't see my face. Right. How many times a day and how many times a week do your kids experience that? Right. So I think focusing on ourselves and the whole thing of defending and establishing your values by saying no. So I think those would be the... Those are the five things. So good. Okay, where can people follow you? You not only have social media, but you also write. So how can people find you? Yeah, so I have a website called FamilyITGuide.com, and that links out to all my... I basically want to be where all the parents are. So that's why I'm on social media, which is hilarious because I actually don't use social media otherwise. And luckily one of my friends helps me run my social media because I don't even know the difference between a real and a story and this and that. She laughs at me all the time because I have no idea what's going on. I can tell you how the company's run, but that stuff. So yeah, FamilyITGuide.com, and then I've got... So I post videos and I write articles and I make software. I just released a meditation app that was inspired by Dr. Daniel Amin specifically. He described his ideal breathing routine and I turned it into code. It's called Being. And that's on my website. There's a free version on my website and then you can buy the app on your phone. And I'm releasing a book soon. And it's going to be called Skills, Not Rules. And it's a guide for parents in the digital age. Cool. What do you need to know? What do you need to do? So yeah, please, you know, go to my website and join in my mailing list and follow along. Cool. Very good. Well, thank you so much, Ben. I really learned a lot and I appreciate you taking the time to come on. Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it as well.