 I fundamentally now believe that if you put together a advertising-based business model with all-knowing technology that can stitch together the most riveting feed of content that will trigger every single base emotion that you have and keep you coming back for more, if you pair those things with the advertising business model, you end up in a bad place because you end up with a service that will keep taking and taking and taking and ultimately manipulating and manipulating and manipulating until we're at war with each other. This is Startup to Storefront. Today's guest is Tim Kendall, former director of monetization at Facebook, former president of Pinterest and the current CEO of Moment, an app designed to help you develop a healthier relationship with your phone and the amount of time you spend on it. And in case you're wondering, he is all too aware of the irony. It's this kind of resume that also made Tim stand out to the producers of a much-talked-about documentary, The Social Dilemma, where he lends his industry insight into how tech companies are manipulating and controlling us through social media platforms. If you've thought as much without having seen the documentary, the problem is probably worse than you'd imagine. So listen in as we cover everything from the downside of trying to optimize your work-life balance, why Tim predicts that the inevitable end of social media will leave us at war with one another and perhaps most importantly, how to gain back control over your phone. Now, back to the episode. All right guys, welcome to the podcast. On today's show, we have Tim Kendall, founder and CEO of Moment. Tell us a little bit about what are you working on? Yeah, one of the ways I like to explain what Moment does is we wanna help people get out of their own way. So I think in my own life, I've seen how I can definitely get in my own way in terms of being on my phone for too long, eating too much sugar, drinking too much coffee. And so we think there's a really interesting opportunity. I mean, we think that in a phrase, people have lost control of their phones and how they use their phones. And so we are building different apps and experiences that we believe will help people take control again of how they use their phones. And what we find is that when people do get control back over their phones, they're happier, they're more grounded, they're more present and their relationships are better. And obviously this is a bit of a can of worms, but we've all seen the movie, the social dilemma is like trending everywhere. And so let's talk a little bit about going back to what made you want to start the company. What was the aha moment for you? Yeah, so I have two girls. I was six-year-old and a four-year-old. And when my six-year-old Taya was born, I started to really notice in a pronounced way that my phone was just drawing all of my attention. And I would find myself, I'd be trying to parent and I would kind of sneak off into the guest room or sneak off into the bathroom or sneak into the pantry and steal some time to kind of get a hit of my phone. And that could have been a frivolous scroll through Instagram, it could be a silly video that someone sent me. But I think what I started to notice was, to my earlier point, I was getting in my own way. What I was getting in the way of was my aspiration of being a really present engaged dad. Look, admittedly, at a few months old, like what's the big deal, you know, probably a fair point. But I thought it, what scared me was that I thought it was a precursor to how I was gonna be later, which was just this absent, absent dad. And so it really was a wake-up call for me. And I started to just look a lot more deeply about why it was that these things sucked so much of our time and attention from us. And I believed that there potentially was an opportunity to really help people get out of their own way in terms of staring at this piece of glass for way longer than they want to every day. And I thought that there might be a business there too. One of the things I always think about is, so before I got into tech, it was like, I'll call myself a decently efficient human. And then I got into tech and all of a sudden, I was wanting to figure out exactly what to put in my body to just get the most out of my day, working seven to 10, making sure I wasn't sluggish during any investor meeting or during, even with your employees, right? Hiring a team and all these things. And it was the first time an Apple Watch came out and I remember meeting Keith Roblois and he had it first. He had it like the day, and I was like, we had a meeting with him and he had it the day before it came out, of course. And I just remember getting one and thinking, this is it. Like I've hit the human efficiency limit, right? Now I don't need to even think. I know that there's a Zoom happening. I know I have a meeting in this conference room. And I kind of wanna break this discussion into how you see this for somebody like yourself, like me, who was super focused on just productivity, to then just your normal person who's just trying to get through their day and probably doing a little bit more with the content as it relates to watching fun videos or just engaging in content, liking a bunch of stuff and then to the creators. But we'll start with the tech piece of it. I think this is something that I had to realize where I was going to bed at 11.08, Tim, to the dot, like 11.08 to the, and my wife made, it wouldn't matter what I was doing, okay? Made conversation. It was 11.08, I'm out. And by the way, I was on my laptop. So as soon as I saw 11.08, I'd close it down. Yeah. And I was like, what's happening? And I didn't think what's happening to me until years later. So was that kind of the genesis a little bit for you too where you were just so hyper focused on maybe efficiency at the beginning as opposed to just consuming content? Yeah, I mean, I think there was, I think there definitely was a, I was telling myself this story that having email and text messaging in my pocket allowed me to keep tabs on, you know, work at Pinterest and be present with my family, right? I thought you could, I believe that could really multitask. Yeah. In that regard, right? I could be super dad and super husband and I can be the president of Pinterest, no problem. Right. And I think that, I think that's a farce. Like I just, I believe that, you know, and I think this is true in the reverse which is that part of my experience in being a dad of young kids and having a relatively intense job as president of Pinterest was, when I was at home, I felt like I needed to be at work. And when I was at work, I actually sometimes very often I actually frequently thought, oh, I should be at home with my kids. I never could find kind of equanimity in being right here and now, right? There was always this obsession with when is this meeting gonna be over with and the next meeting is gonna start? Like it was always this fascination and hook into what was happening next, how much faster could now get over with? Right. And that just felt like a, intuitively, it just started to feel like that was a shitty way to live. That makes sense. I kind of deconstruct this in two ways. So obviously you were at Facebook at one time and I think the whole goal is just stay on the platform, make it simple, like stay on the platform. At Pinterest, I kind of view it a little differently where I think Pinterest was built in the sense of like, like you're picking things out for your wedding or your DIY home project. And so the whole goal there is get inspo and then go do the thing that the inspo was about, right? And I thought that was such an interesting paradigm to me. It was like, oh, this makes a lot of sense. It's like, it doesn't want you actually in the platform. 100%. And so I guess this makes the question even more obvious. Was that how you were thinking about it? I would imagine too. And then I was thinking about Pinterest when I was there and I don't, you know, I have a real bone to pick with social media companies right now. I don't think of Pinterest as a social media company. I would agree with that, yeah. For the reason that you just explained. You know, we never had a goal there around maximizing, you know, Diego's time spent. Whereas at a place like YouTube, that is expressly the top level goal aggregate hours on the platform of all the users and how do we make that grow as fast as possible? Right. And so then your objectives and what you build and how the product feels to users is very different. And look, the outcomes are different. Sure. I would be, I mean, I haven't done the study on the incidents of depression or anxiety linked to Pinterest. I'm sure it's not zero, but I'm sure it's, you know, is dwarfed by what a Facebook and a YouTube does in terms of impact on state of wellbeing and mental health. The issue I have personally is that I've never looked at social media as something for me. I've always looked at it through the lens of an entrepreneur. And so I had started companies. So Facebook came out, I was in college and I started a company shortly thereafter. And for the first time in my life, I could run an ad to you, Tim. I could run an ad to someone in this zip code under this demographic that happens to wear this certain product, which is exactly who I'm looking for. And I was blown away by this as an entrepreneur. And then I looked at Twitter as, oh my goodness, these people have done an amazing job already bringing a market to me. And all I have to do is be on the platform, use a couple of hashtags and maybe they'll see exactly what I'm trying to sell. And this is always how I viewed it. So I don't know if that's a creator mindset or just an entrepreneur mindset. And then all of a sudden the election's happening between Hillary and Trump. And on my feed for six months is just Hillary stuff, right? And it's maybe of where I went to school and who my friends are. And I'm just like, this is shocking. Like not even on Fox News or on CNN, am I seeing one side? It was really strange to me that I was not seeing anything about Trump. And I think this is where people really believe that the election was gonna be a landslide. Election day happens and Trump wins. And half of my office is crying in San Francisco on Ninth Street. They're like, and I'm like, wow, people are really convinced, they were really convinced that, this is gonna win. And that's when to me, all the red, everything went off. And this isn't really Russian collusion. It's not that. For me, what went off was, we're not seeing the whole picture. And it's because the algorithm is designed in some way that way. I don't know the specifics, but that was for me the moment. And look, I don't need to get political. I really didn't care who won. I never, a president really never did anything for me on either side, or I just never cared that much. But when I saw my employees crying, I was like, this is a big problem. I wonder what's gonna happen. And here I was like, just like you, right? And in Silicon Valley trying to grapple with this. And it was almost like the way I view it, the social media companies, specifically Facebook was all of a sudden like, we were at recess, we were having a great time. And then Donald decided to grab the ball and throw it on the roof. And we were all playing with the ball and everything was fine. But now we didn't like what he did using the rules that were allotted to him. And now it's like, is that really the issue? Is what's the, what are we really upset about? There's a lot there, I realize that. But that's just giving you a window into like how I've interpreted social media. And I think that is because of that, I feel removed from the realities of it. And I'm trying to better understand the realities of it as it relates to your experience. Obviously you guys, I would imagine you're, when you were there anyway, are creating a product really for the consumer to be consumed. And was it always a linear path to doing the advertisements? Was it always like, hey, if we make a platform and we find out the most about people then the advertisers went, was that always linear? Or cause I can't imagine that being a linear thought, but I don't know. And by linear, you just mean that it was sort of naturally where we thought we would all end up. Yeah. Hey, you've got this, you got a website. I mean, basically what we had on our hands and when I joined was a college website for about five million college kids. And by the way, it had engagement that no one had ever really seen. You had five million people on it, six million people on it and half of them were coming back every day. No one, this is pretty smart phone. No one had seen engagement like that before. You didn't have services where people, half the users came back every day. Maybe once a month, half of the users came back. So it was clear that it was really engaging. It was clear that it could be bigger in that this seemed like a service that other people could use. Look, they had done it with Friendster. They had done it with MySpace. What Facebook figured out was the biggest breakthrough of Facebook, in addition to building a terrific product, was that they got lucky by virtue of starting in college and drafting off of the .edu email signup process. Because by virtue of drafting off of the, everybody had to have a .edu email to sign up. Yeah. And so the first 10 million people that signed up for Facebook were who they said they were. Because there was no alternative. You couldn't create a fake account. Because wherever you went to school, had a clearing house for one person, gets one email address, and it's consistent with what their real name is. Right. And Facebook drafted off all of that. So verifiable and authentic identity was inherent in the first 10 million users. And I think that norm just persisted as the service grew. That's more of an aside about why Facebook, in my opinion, won over the other services and became so dominant. And then look, there were very good people there and they executed very well. And they continued to make the product. One word for it is better. Another word for it is addictive. But they just kept adding feature after feature that added utility to people's life for sure. But also, and I don't think this was the express intent of me or the people there, but also these features triggered and played on our base instincts. Right? I mean, status updates and photo tagging and all of that. That plays on vanity and voyeurism and popularity and comparison. Yeah. That was certainly the playbook there. When I showed up in 2006, my mandate was, as the director of monetization was to figure out how we're gonna make a sustainable business here. So we tried a bunch of things and advertising was far and away the most straightforward. And the context there, everyone else who has a web business at the time is making money off of advertising. Google, Yahoo, MySpace, et cetera. So it just was sort of the natural, it seemed like the natural conclusion and we were attracting so much user attention and it seemed like, look, we can turn that user attention into money. And that ended up proving out to be true in space. Yeah. Which I loved as a early entrepreneur. It was like the best place on earth. You're gonna run ads anyway, right? Like you're already doing it, you have the platforms. At what point for you personally did you start to think, oh man, maybe we're building a beast. Maybe we're building something that isn't working. I think for the world, including myself, it might have been the election. I don't know if that's true. I don't know if for you, maybe you said, I'm sure you picked up on it much sooner, but do you have a remembrance or a timeframe and when you thought, not sure about this? I think I started to have doubts around the election. Okay. So I was sort of right there with you. Yeah. I still was pretty vocal that I didn't think the business model was the fundamental problem with how the company was set up and the whole dynamic with users and advertisers and then the company. But I think by virtue of working with the filmmakers for the social dilemma and working on moment, my view shifted. And I fundamentally now believe that if you put together a advertising-based business model with all-knowing technology that can stitch together the most riveting feed of content that will trigger every single base emotion that you have and keep you coming back for more. If you pair those things, right, all-knowing technology that can trigger every emotion knows you better than you know yourself with the advertising business model, you end up in a bad place because you end up with a service that will keep taking and taking and taking and ultimately manipulating and manipulating and manipulating until we're at war with each other. I never thought of the human condition as fixed until you just gave me that example, right? It's not the human that's evolving in this matrix. The human is the fixed variable in this equation. And so everything, which is, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That's kind of depressing in some way, but also, yeah, yeah, I guess that's the realization you may have had at one point. Yeah, and that's what I'm scared about. And this is the, when you watch movies like The Terminator and you see these artificial intelligence robots that basically turn on us, that's always our conception of what Elon Musk warns us about. But it doesn't look like that. It looks like what's happening right now. Yeah, it's happening. It's just under the covers and it's subterranean. And you talked about it when you explained your experience of the election, right? We're not all seeing a complete picture of reality. In fact, I would argue some of us are seeing completely distorted versions of reality. And it's unfortunately these algorithms are becoming incredibly adept at dividing us. Not because Mark and Cheryl are saying, hey, divide the country, make more money. Because that is what it's fundamentally, it's designing itself to do that because that's the best way to drive the most engagement. Yeah, I won't ask you for a fix because I don't know that there is one. It's something that I've seen and I think COVID has also made it more clear. There's so many people, right? Everyone has an opinion on COVID now. Should we weren't, no one's listening to science anymore. Yeah. But I also think we just do such a bad job. I had a meeting yesterday and somebody said, so what do you think of this COVID thing? And I'm like, honestly, here's what I think. I think this is like, it's like 1985 and someone gave us a smartphone. And we, instead of accepting that, we might not know the whole detail of this thing yet. We're like hitting it and it's doing things and then it rings at certain times and we're like, oh, we figured it out. We have to work, like I was wearing a mask. And so therefore, correlation equals cause it. You know, it's like this whole, it's like really best step. And so now we have multiple opinions. The tests weren't accurate. And that's just part of what it is. But at the same time, we were able to map its genome in like a month which we would have never been able to do 50 years ago or 60 years ago. And so people just live in these worlds of like absolutes but some of these problems are inherently not, they're just not, it doesn't work that way. Yeah, I think that's right. I was at a building real estate development and we had the LAPD come and cause we heard there was drug activity inside. And so anyway, sidebar. So I'm talking to the police officer I'm asking him like, what is this like for you? And he, you know, this time given BLM and given the whole media almost is like turning its back on the entire police force, not the bad ones as depicted on the media but just like the entire police force. And he was telling me, you know, he's walking down the street and he has a son himself, four year old son. He sees a little kid and he says hello and the kid flicks him off. And then the mother tells the kid not to look at the officer, like doesn't say don't flick him off. And he was telling me like, this is what we deal with every single day now. And it's just like, I don't know what Facebook does. I know obviously it's not just social media here. There's a whole lot to blame but it feels like social media has the ability to just add a tremendous amount of fire so quickly. And journalism has gone out the window and the truth is frankly like whatever you want it to be at this stage, I don't, you know, you can believe whatever you want and you'll find supporting documents. I always thought a long time ago that I don't know if I thought like what if Facebook could blockchain news, right? What if we could create truth somehow and Facebook could be the purveyor of that. And obviously that's extremely difficult and I don't even know, I kind of did some research on how do we do this but it seemed incredibly difficult and time consuming. Do you think as a platform they have any, like any of these social media outlets have any, I don't even wanna say like obviously not responsibility but maybe that to scrub for truth? I think they do. Okay, that's good to know. I mean, I think that, I think they don't think they do. They think that they don't wanna be the arbiters of truth. Right. So essentially what they do is they say, we're not gonna be the arbiters of truth but we will take down content that incites violence directly but there's a lot of hateful content on there that stays up and there's a lot of distorted information on there that stays on there. And they have in a couple of cases taken a scalpel and said, well, let's actually take this out. For instance, I think they've done a decent job with COVID because not maybe not an excellent job but a decent job because the consequences were grave if the notion that Lysol was a viable treatment got propagated. So they sort of convinced themselves that it was in the public interest to get rid of that medical misinformation. And so they did it, which is interesting in my mind because it means that they can do it if they want to. For all the other content though that remains, they leave it and say, it's free speech, we don't wanna be the arbiters of truth. The problem with that in my opinion is that then the algorithm becomes the arbiter of truth. Somewhat blindly and it shows you your echo chamber of facts and information and it shows someone else a different set of facts and information based on what will create the most engagement. It's not maximizing or truth, right? It's maximizing for engagement. And if we just showed everybody the same set of facts and optimized for truth, we actually would likely see a big decline in engagement. And I think that's where the rub is and oh, by the way, that's where the misalignment is between, in my opinion, the business model of advertising and having a social media service. I think it leads to ultimately bad outcomes. It does in some way to me though, especially in recent times, it feels like the social media outlets are starting to understand that they, I don't wanna say they have to pick a side, but it's starting to feel like the censorship is becoming a snowball, right? There's the, oh, it inflicts harm. Okay, well, let's talk about all these things that may or may not inflict immediate harm. And now that becomes an opinion and now that snowball can only grow from this moment because it's almost like COVID, like right now restaurants can be open, but a brewery cannot. And it's like, what's the difference? It's really, they're in a, I'm frustrated with the company because I think they've been negligent in terms of not staying ahead of this in these problems. But I also have compassion for the difficulty of the problem that is now sitting squarely on their lap. It's tough. I mean, they will be, if this election goes sideways, it will be, the blame will be placed on them, fair or not. Right. Any predictions for the election coming up here? It's a who knows for me. Yeah. Based on how the last one went. It's a who knows for me too. I have no idea, not my area of expertise in terms of predicting what's gonna happen. The only thing that bums me out about Facebook presently and even Instagram is, we had the district attorney who's running for Los Angeles on the podcast. And we talked to him shortly, he's progressive and he used to be the San Francisco district attorney actually. And now he's running here in LA and he's viewed as progressive, which is an interesting word. I wouldn't put progressive on him. He just seems like he's a human, but the media labels him as progressive and he's trying to give away or not give away, but do away with a lot of these incarcerations as it relates to marijuana and attacking more of like mental health and trying to help, which all makes very logical sense in my head. Yeah, absolutely. So we do this podcast and I just tried to put ads on it on Instagram to get the word out here in LA and it's blocked. And nothing about it is me endorsing this candidate. It's just getting his talking points out into the public. And it wasn't like I was like, oh, amazing. I agree, so cool. It wasn't that. And it was just like this, the censorship, right? It goes back to the censorship. What? They didn't provide a reason. They basically, well, no, they didn't. And I appealed it a few times and then I just kind of gave up and called it what it was. I was like, oh, I get it, right? I guess I understand it. They asked for a license and then for me to like register as an affiliate, like a political affiliate or something. And that's just not me or the podcast. So it didn't, I was like, I don't need to go through the six week process just to find out, just through this one episode. But that was a bummer, you know? It's like a bummer, like you wanna share that and then you don't know if, because of that, it's just not many people are gonna get educated on, let's say, that particular candidate. So those kinds of things bum me out. Let's talk about moment. Let's switch gears to what your, what gets you inspired every day. So I downloaded it. I've been using it for I think two weeks now, basically since the social dilemma oddly enough. Some of the good things that came out of that movie. So I never had notifications on to begin with, which was great. So I was like, oh, that's great. I'm right there. And then I downloaded Moment and I've been using it. I'm sure you get this question all the time. Apple has the product of screen time. To me, that one just seems like it, it doesn't do anything really, right? It just says, hey, here's your activity, which is kind of like the caveman's approach to a problem. It's like, uh, uh, uh, there's a rock and that's it. And then it just lets you handle it. How do you think about what your app is doing and some of the things you're building to help people get off of social, or not maybe not get off, but just become more aware of how they spend their time. Yeah. Well, the, the, when I think about this problem, which is basically just like phone, you know, us losing control over our phone. If you believe you've lost control over your phone, we sort of at moment believe there are three, sort of three sequential steps you can take to get control back. And these steps are really embedded in the product. The first is awareness, which is the measurement piece. It's like understand how much time you stare at your phone all day and importantly understand how much time you, how many times you pick it up because there's an attention span thing. You know, some people don't spend a ton of cumulative time on their phone, but they pick it up. You know, they'll pick it up a hundred times and that fragmenting of your day-to-day life makes people feel bad. And people are always surprised by how many times they pick it up every day. And they're also very surprised by how much time they spend on it. So, you know, the average user spends, the average person in the United States spend four hours a day on their smartphone. If you ask those people how long they think they spend on the phone, it's two hours. Right. So just that awareness step can be really helpful in terms of changing your behavior. The second piece is, you know, just guidelines. Basically, we provide a bunch of guidelines that help people and steps that they can take, removing notifications, setting limits on certain apps that help people really shift and get back control. And then the final thing, which is new in our most recent version of Moment, is we think that real behavior change, and this bears out in a lot of the scientific research, happens when groups of people co-commit and groups of people hold each other accountable. So you can create different groups on Moment of your friends or people that you're, you know, your family, and then the service basically allows you each to see the other screen time and pickups. And that, just that basic leaderboard concept can really help people develop much better sense of how they're doing and a sense of kind of accountability and transparency with the people around them. And so that's, it's really basic at the moment, the app, but it's really based on those principles, awareness guides, and then group, I'll call it group accountability, group transparency. Do you ever think of, so one thing I'm always caught, so I haven't had a television in like six years and now there's one behind me because of COVID, I'm pretty sure. Yeah. So the good news is we were able to watch the social element HD. The bad news is I love not having a television because I read a stat that's like the average American, at least the TV is on for like 13 hours a day, whether they're watching it or not is a different story, but let's pretend they're watching it. Yeah, the TV usage is pretty high still. It's amazing. It's amazing. And so I love not having it because if people came over, friends came over, we would just turn music on and then talk, like we would have a conversation, which is almost like, and they'd come over like, oh, this is so nice. We just talk. And I'm like, what do we, where has the world gone? Do you ever think about integrating with other platforms whether it's smart TVs or just to give someone like a holistic view on? Yeah. No, we've certainly thought about that. I mean, we've got to, we're not very big as the company. So, you know, I can see that down the line for sure. The other things that we are working on just in terms of problem spaces, there's one other big one, which I call sort of social health. And the point of this category, if you will, is that, you know, because of these phones, we spend a shit load of time scrolling through a feed of things that actually don't matter to us, including people who don't really matter to us. Yeah. Friend 745 is not very interesting to me. Right. But what that does is it actually pulls time away from time that I used to have to maintain and nurture the relationships that really mattered to me. And so our social health is deteriorating as a result of that. And so we fundamentally believe that there are going to be services and we're building and prototyping these services today that are going, that people are going to pay for, that are going to help them in lieu of scrolling through a feed for three hours at night, instead have people spend some of that time focusing on nurturing and developing the relationships that matter the most to them. I'm sure when you talk to some people, obviously you've done a lot of interviews, they think that's crazy, right? They're like, what is he talking about? On the reverse of that, do you feel like you're the first mover to some extent? Like do you feel the complete reverse of that where there's gonna be more, Tim Kendall's is gonna be, like you're just the beginning and there's gonna be four or five moments coming out here in the next two years. I mean, how do you, cause I could see either or, right? Yeah, I mean, I feel, what do I think? There's some days, look, this is like any entrepreneur. There's some days I'm like, I'm the first mover. I see something that other people don't. Yeah, that's terrifying. There are other days where I think I am totally seeing the world wrong and no one is gonna care about this service. No one wants this service. And I'm not selling a Hershey bar. I'm selling a gluten-free, dairy-free granola bar. Right, right. That people wanna eat if they really understand the impact of eating 20 Hershey bars a day. So, you know, I do think that, just to finish on the social health piece, the whole idea is, hey, we're so deliberate about what we eat. We're so deliberate about, you know, now our sleep, our mindfulness, our meditation, our exercise regime, the biggest driver of how long you're gonna live and how long you're gonna evade disease and how happy you're gonna characterize your life is the quality of your closest relationships. But I leave it to chance. That's crazy. That's crazy, for sure. You could even market it like social obesity is a pants and a neck, I mean, right? Yeah, and people do, to your earlier question, people do hear what I just said and they think I'm crazy. And my follow-up question to them is, well, who are your closest friends? And they think about it and I said, well, when's the last time you talked to them? And that's usually the eye-opener is, oh, yeah. And COVID has changed that a little bit, probably for the better, maybe, in that I actually think that strangely, some people are closer to their closest friends because it's opened up time and space for us to talk more and zoom more and do those sorts of things. But in general, we don't spend that much time nurturing the relationships with the people that are closest to us, apart from maybe our family. That's very true. My brain goes in so many different directions as I'm talking to you because as a creator, social media is our biggest thing, right? And then I think about helping Tim and I go, so Paris Hilton, who's now a speaker and talks about how she was addicted to social media and literally her followers became her friends, became her family. And without that engagement, she felt empty. And then I think about, oh, Tim should hook up and link up with Paris and a bunch of these people who know the end game, right? Who know how bad at Taylor Swift, who know how ugly it gets and go on the record and say, look, what Tim is talking about is, because then you have the reverse of like Gary Vee who famously says, oh, you just sound like the guy that was upset about Elvis shaking his hips in the 50s. And you know, it's like, I don't think that's true either. It's like, there's something here in the middle as a parent, I don't know how old your daughters are, but as a parent, what do you do with phones? Do you say no phone until this age or what? And I'm sure this is a difficult one, but what is that like for you? What decisions have you and your wife made? Yeah, we've been, I mean, when you have a four and a six year old, really you're only just, you're making really decisions about whether you let them watch shows or not. I suppose there's some families that are doing, letting them do interactive things like that, but we're basically at that stage where like, do you let them watch Mr. Roger replays? Did you let them do that? And we do it very sparingly, mainly because we've done trial and error, and when they watch a bunch of shows, they act like monsters. And when they don't, they're really pleasant, and they're more creative, and they have longer attention spans. Yeah. So that's just been our experience. When they get older, you know, there's a model called wait till eight that basically is a framework that parents at the same, where their kids are in school, can say, hey, first grade parents, do you all wanna sign this pledge that says, we're gonna wait till eighth grade, or when the kid is 13 or 14 to give him a smartphone and let them sign up for social media? Because if we can all band together and agree to that, we're probably gonna be making a pretty amazing choice on their behalf. And so I would like to try to do that with each of my daughter's classes. And then I think the final thing that I think parents get wrong on this issue is that whenever they complain to me about how much their kids use their phones, they don't wanna talk about how much they use their phones. They don't wanna look at their own usage. And modeling is everything in my view. I have this funny stat that if you ask parents, 80% of parents think wearing a helmet when you ride a bike is critical, but only 25% actually do it themselves. And so only 40% of kids wear helmets on bikes. Conversely, you look at seatbelts, almost 100% of people think seatbelts are important, adults wear them and kids wear them. We're sort of all in alignment on that. I think with smartphone usage, if your family wants to change, it's got, you gotta change as a unit. And I've talked to doctors who treat families where the kids are diabetic. And the only way that you can sustainably really get your kid in that circumstance to stop eating, to change their lifestyle in terms of how they eat is the whole family has to change. It just does not work when they don't. And so I think parents who are really serious about this have to have a reckoning with their own usage. And a lot don't wanna do that, which to me underscores how serious the problem is. There's like, addiction. Guess what's one of the fundamental issues is an addiction, denial. Lack of awareness. Right, just to kinda, let's cherry on top this. What are some of the myths people definitely get wrong and the data just shows completely the other way? Like what are, we've sort of peppered around this, but if you could just succinctly tell us one to three things that people for sure haven't 100% wrong. Well, I mentioned this earlier, but I'll mention it again. People are off by a factor of two in terms of how much time they spend. And I always think it's interesting to frame it in terms of percentage of time in your life, meaning you're awake 16 hours a day. If you're spending four hours on the phone, you're spending a quarter of your life looking at your smartphone. Oh, this one's an interesting one, which is that we've got in our terms of our guides in the Moment app, we can see how effective they are by age and other demographics. And it turns out that 20 and 30-somethings are much more coachable than 40, 50-year-olds. Interesting. They're just in, and you would think, right, that maybe the wisdom and maturity that comes with age would make you sort of more willing to shift and change. But what we learn is that 20 and 30-somethings, that youth comes with a malleability around habits. It's cool to see it, actually. That is really cool. That's like helpful data, right? That's the future. These are the future voters of the future leaders of the world. Yeah, absolutely. Any advice for creators that really leverage these social media outlets to get their message out, whether it's art, whether it's podcasts, whatever it is. And this is the little selfish question for me, too, I mean, this is, I'd say one of the lenses that I do think is interesting is that the zeitgeist around this is starting to come into clear focus. The zeitgeist around this notion that we're addicted to these things. And I've started to see companies, and I think this applies to creators, too, drafting off of that. So Carnival Cruise Lines ran an ad campaign for months that basically marketed the cruise as a time to basically unplug, to take a break from your phone with your family. So, as things like the social dilemma and others make this part of the zeitgeist, if creators and their products are aligned with that, I think it's a societal shift that they can draft off of. That makes a lot of sense. I think that Gary Vee's always talking about TikTok, pay attention to TikTok. By the way, that seems like really sound advice. That platform is scary in that it is riveting. Yes. And so if I were a creator, I would be really going deep on trying to understand the dynamics because it's just like Instagram was so different from Facebook and Snap is really different from Instagram. TikTok is its own thing. Yeah, that's fair. I love what you said though. I mean, something that we can close on this too, it's really just take responsibility for yourself, right? It starts with you. And that sounds so obvious. And I think people get that as it relates to their diet, just like you said, an exercise. Yeah, and this in climate change, I think that was, you know, when Inconvenient Truth came out, that out-or-movie, I think one of the great, one of the wonderful things about that movie in my recollection at least was that I do think there was this awareness about leaving lights on and leaving my air conditioner on all day and do I need three SUVs and maybe I should be just a little bit more mindful about recycling versus regular trash. And that's a, look, I think that shifted hearts. I think the personal responsibility and part of that helped shift hearts and minds. And I have a similar hope with our phones and our relationship with them. Well, I certainly think you're right. I mean, I'll say that much. I think you're, the way I view you, and this is probably just as a hope for humanity too, is you're right. I think you're a first mover. I'm hoping a lot of people follow. I'm hoping the social dilemma might have a chapter two, three and four that we can focus in on. Maybe the story gets better. Yeah. Maybe the human race is just declining. But at least we know, right? And I think the, to your point, awareness is the first step. Yeah. Tim, where can people find you? Tell us all the social media channels that they can jump on to find you. Well, the best place to find us is in themoment.io or moment.io. And in the app store. Yeah, and that's, and in the app store, we're there as well, just under moment. If you go to in themoment.io, you'll see some of the other projects that we're working on, including some of that social health stuff that I referred to. I think you got to double down on that. Social health, social obesity. I think we got to start making a lot of terms. Get Paris Hilton on board. I think, I mean, I would. What choice do we have? Right? If you're already in the deep end, you might as well just, you're just, I'm with you. Well, thanks for coming on the podcast. I'd like to give you a photo of confidence. Yeah, thank you very much. I appreciate it. This was fun.