SHOW NOTES

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TRANSCRIPT

Elizabeth Smart: Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Smart Talks by the Elizabeth Smart Foundation. I am Elizabeth Smart, and today I am joined by the two founders of Cyber Dive and it's Jeff Gottfurcht and Derek Jackson, and I am very excited to have them on this episode. They're doing some very exciting, innovative things, especially for kids.

So starting right off, if you could, if one of you, Jeff or Derek, if you could give me just kind of a general overview of what Cyber Dive is, that would be great. A great start. 

[00:01:25] Jeff Gottfurcht: Wonderful. Wonderful. Thank you for having us. It's a pleasure to be on. We're happy to share about our company and so forth. And what we've done in Cyber Dive is that we've created a smartphone for kids called Aqua One that allows parents to monitor all of their kids' social media activity, as well as all of their texts. And we bundled that with a mental health check that gives parents great insight into the wellness of their children and in turn it helps parents understand the wellbeing of what their kids are doing on social media, because we wanted to do one thing, stop social media from becoming a social disaster.

[00:02:08] Derek Jackson: So basically what that means is you would be able to buy the Aqua One smartphone for your child. They would be able to access any social media that's out there. Snapchat, TikTok, Discord, et cetera. But then on your side, as a parent, you'd be able to see all of the videos they're watching, all the connections that they're making, who they're talking to.

And you'd also see how they're answering questions in this mental health check. Like, "do my parents keep their promises?" "Do you feel safe when you have sleepovers at your friend's house?" Things like that. And so it really decreases the barriers between parents and their kids when they give them a smartphone and introduce them to the internet for the first time.

[00:02:46] Jeff Gottfurcht: And what really sparked our company being born was I had just returned from summiting Mount Everest, and I followed along a story about a young girl who had been sexually assaulted and then her pictures put up all over social media. And at that juncture realized that this young lady was being victimized twice, essentially.

And at that juncture decided we really wanted to create a tool that would help parents to be able to kind of bridge the digital divide and kind of see what their kids were posting and how we could help kind of be a rescue product in that arena. 

[00:03:30] Derek Jackson: And when Jeff and I met and started talking about the idea, I was able to essentially bring the perfect experience to the table to help make that happen. Because I had spent five years on active duty in the army, three years of that with a special forces group. And I deployed in 2016 overseas with them to Jordan and Syria and led a team of analysts. I was looking at how ISIS would use social media to recruit foreign fighters and also spread their propaganda.

And so all of the techniques and tradecraft that we use in the military and my experience is what we were able to bring into our software here to build and package and power this smartphone. That's the only thing out there that gives parents the full ability to see all of the content that their child is interacting with, all of the context of where they're seeing it and why.

And also all of the connections that they're making. 

[00:04:19] Jeff Gottfurcht: And for us, we realized one thing, while parents are binge-watching things, their kids are binge scrolling. We wanted to binge build products that help keep kids safe while they're on social media.

[00:04:32] Elizabeth Smart: Wow. I mean, I love, like, I love what you described. I mean, I sit and think about my kids all the time and they're still pretty young and, but I, nobody has just a landline anymore.

You know, everyone has their own individual smartphone and my daughter, I mean, she's six and she's already been like, "when do I get a phone mama?" And I'm like, "never, you never get a phone." But I mean like the thought has already gone through my mind and like, "what am I going to do?" And so hearing like, you know, about your product, that is very interesting to me, and that you have this mental health check along the way is very interesting. 

Another organization that I've done some work with the Child Rescue Coalition they're based out in Florida and they, I mean, they're incredible. I don't know if you've ever heard of them, but they do a lot of online. I mean, their focus is on, you know, stopping online crimes or, you know, helping to target the physical location of where these traffickers are, where this child sexual assault material is being made. And as I have been following them and staying up to date with them, like they've been posting stuff on how there's like the secondary language that's being used across social media.

And I mean, like so much of it, like I still don't know, but for example like they give like these acronyms and the meanings next to it. So like for instance, they have the word "plug" and they're saying it's a term used to refer to someone who can connect you with drugs or a drug dealer, or like "kys" normally I would not know what that means, but apparently it means kill yourself or "body count," like the number of people someone has slept with. When you're doing like, do you, as your mental health check, like, does it recognize those kinds of things? And when it sends the material onto the parents, does it flag these things be like, this is a predator.

[00:06:38] Jeff Gottfurcht: Yeah, that's a great question. What we actually did was we knew that parents had a screaming pain and we have kids as well, just like you said, there, you have your child who's saying, "when am I going to get my first phone?" When did we, "when am I gonna get my first phone?" And we wanted to create a product that wasn't like product adjacent.

We didn't want to create a solution that, hey it, let your kid know if they set a current. That's great. I mean, that, that doesn't do parent any good because our, unfortunately we have been, so the bottom eyes and big tech is the puppet master in both our kids' lives and unfortunately, our lives, we really wanted to create a product that really was able to bring the parent and child back together.

So for us being able to have a product that shows the parent everything their kid was doing on TikTok, everything their kid was doing on Snapchat, all the videos they're watching on YouTube, everything they're doing on Discord. And of course, parents don't really know what Discord is as well as a number.

Yeah. And that's the thing that is so great. We cover platforms where parents obviously understand what Facebook and Instagram are, but they don't understand how does TikTok, you know, they might understand TikTok, but like you said, there, they don't know what Discord is. They don't know what Twitch is, they don't know what Lipsey is.

So we wanted to make a tool that in a dashboard that allowed parents to see everything that happened on that phone, goes into that dashboard where it's very clean in a simple way of viewing that word, show them here's the video that your kid is watching. And in regard to the mental health check, we wanted to create something that was very useful because we knew one thing.

First off last year, mental health claims in kids went up 100% compared to the year before. Self harm claims went up 333%. We knew that 50% of all 10 and 11 year olds who have a phone have that phone overnight unsupervised. So, and obviously on platforms that are not meant for them. So we took what we had learned with our software and with our initial parents who were using that, and we included this mental health check where we have child psychologies have built it and they built in, Elizabeth, age based questions. So it's not just questions that are for that. For five to 12 girls, we broke it up into five to eight, nine to 11, 12 to 16, and they're age based questions. And when we initially came up with the idea, we kind of thought let's have it be, "are you happy?" "Are you sad?" You know, that was just because we're not psychologists, but we had our psychologists go in there. They wrote some questions that were so incredible for the parents to see. 

Some of those questions, "do my parents keep their promises." "Do I like having sleepovers?" "I'm hungry when I go to bed at night." "Am I the bully?" "Who out of my family do I miss?" So we really created a tool that not only gives parents great insight to what their kids are doing on social media, but allows questions to be asked to the child that normally parents, especially me and most parents don't have the inclination to even ask their kids and so forth.

The great thing about what we've done is a child says yes on a question that says, "are you happy? Are you sad today? Do you have anxiety?" And they're like, "I'm happy. All is great." But the parent is able to see that the child is watching animal mutilation videos on YouTube. There's a great disconnect there.

And the parent is able to say, "well, I understand that in your mental health check, you wrote that you're great, but you're watching mutilation videos." So for us, we really wanted to create something that helped bring back parent and child. And especially we didn't build this for kids who are 16, 17, and 18 year old, because they've already had their time on social media without a seatbelt.

And it's kind of like when cars, when I was younger, cars, it wasn't mandatory that you had to wear seatbelts yet, but that didn't happen until the eighties and so forth. So those kids have already had been driving without them. We really have geared them exactly to like who you are your age and as Derek said as well, that parents who have young kids who are wanting a first phone, and we also wanted to create something really importantly, that, a child who's six, seven or eight doesn't necessarily need a $1,300 iPhone. You know, it's like when your kid is 16, you're not going to buy them the top of the line Mercedes when they're 16. So we created something where there was no contracts. We replace the phones for free. So if you have a seven year old and they have the phone and they throw it against the wall and they break it, we replace it.

Derek is going to pick up on some of those questions, you asked about the human trafficking aspect and so forth. But for us, we really wanted to create something that helped the parent get back in the life and understanding that we come from a place of involvement is better than limitation.

We didn't want to be a company that said, "Hey, turn off your kid's phones at 10 o'clock at night. Because, guess what? When they get back on 6:00 AM the bullying, and all of that stuff, it still continues. It doesn't stop you just because you pause it. So that's kind of what we did with that.

[00:12:09] Derek Jackson: And I want to go back to, I'm really glad that you mentioned an organization like the Child Rescue Foundation, because we also are involved and partner with organizations that are involved in the fight against sex trafficking and human trafficking, specifically the Phoenix Dream Center and Streetlight USA, which are two organizations local to us that help rehabilitate girls and boys of different ages who are victims of sex trafficking and help reassimilate them back and help rehabilitate them out of that serious trauma. And one thing that we identified, and this specifically comes from my experience as an intelligence officer in the army, when we're trying to fight against something like that, a big problem that's societal, that's cultural, that's spread very far, it's not enough to just attack it from one side. And right now, a lot of organizations out there are rehabilitating girls after their victims or they're rescuing girls or targeting people after crimes have been committed. 

We also know that social media is such a big part now because it gives predators such easy access to kids. It's very easy to pretend to be someone that you're not and reach out to anyone online. And if you just troll through Instagram, reaching out to a bunch of different young girls, trying to get them to react to something that you're saying, like, "I hate my parents. What about you?" Eventually, you're probably going to find someone who says, "yeah, I do too." And that's where it starts. 

So what we really tried to do is figure out what is it that stopping parents from being more involved in being more proactive? And it's how difficult it is. All of that friction that exists. No parent has the time after they spent all day working to go home and make dinner and feed their kids and then take their phone, remember all the passwords log into all the, of the, of the accounts, scroll through everything, learn all of those acronyms, like you mentioned, and keep track of all of them. And so that's why we built something that gives parents the ability to see that feed just like they log into Facebook and they scroll and see a feed of all of these posts from their friends.

With us, with our Cyber Dive dashboard, they can log in and see a feed of the video that their child watched on TikTok, the new follower that they connected with on Instagram, the private message that that follower just sent them and what they responded with. All of that content, the parent can see in its raw form.

And it also gets run through our artificial intelligence algorithms that are trained and powered by all of that very nuanced information, like you mentioned, related to predators and how they interact with people in these acronyms used online. I mean specifically for us, like Jeff mentioned that mental health check piece is so vitally important because we know that not every child is going to, going to go through that type of experience, but the effects that social media has on kids' mental health is something that is just starting to be understood. And it's something that we're realizing is more universal than we thought. 

This last year was last couple of years with COVID and lockdowns and kids not being in school, they've been sitting at home and their parents still have to work, so they've spent their time watching YouTube or interacting with their friends on Discord or Snapchat. And they don't realize the effects that that has on their mental health and parents don't also like also don't realize the effects that that has.

That's why this mental health check is so important because that child's phone now becomes the tool to help them become more self aware about how those things are affecting them. It would lock down Snapchat when they're sitting in their bed at 10:00 PM, scrolling for two hours and say, "how are you feeling?" ask a question related to the content that they're viewing. Give them a second to stop mindlessly scrolling and interacting on one of these social media platforms and actually bring them back to this place of self-awareness. And after they've completed that they can get back to social media and then their parents can see those responses.

So it really is a tool that instead of social media and access to a smartphone and the internet becoming this thing that introduces this weird disconnect, vis a vis the parents feel, it can be used as something that advances that relationship and continues to bring them closer together. 

[00:16:19] Jeff Gottfurcht: And for us, we really wanted to do one thing with the phone is allow parents and kids to participate in what we call KTIs, kitchen table issues.

And that is having the parent be able to identify if something negative has happened in the kid's life, or if something great is happening. If they are putting up pictures on Instagram about Egypt and mummies that allows the parent to be able to see that on the dashboard and be able to say, "Hey, my child is into Egypt. I'm going to buy them a book on King Tut off of Amazon, and we're going to talk about it tonight at dinner."

So we really wanted to be able to kind of stop that fundamental privacy issue that kids were having with what they're doing on social media and what parents want to be able to do in getting back into their children's lives.

So we created something that we know is a ladder product in that it takes parents to a place they've never been able to go. 

And we know this on average, it takes 18 minutes for a predator to reach out to a child, and get them to send their first piece of sexual content on social media. We want it to be more proactive in that in hopefully allowing the parent to see that that's happening as opposed to when it's far after that and things have gotten worse. 

[00:17:35] Elizabeth Smart: I mean, 18 minutes to think it's that short is so disturbing. I mean, I've definitely been guilty of, you know, being, I don't know, caught on a zoom meeting or at a restaurant and my kids are all screaming and like, I've definitely handed them like my phone or an iPad. And like, they've had phones or iPads in their possession for 20 minutes and right now everything's pretty much locked up to them except like Disney Plus, or like the movies that we've bought off of Apple. But, just to sit there and think that like, while we're waiting for, you know, to order at a restaurant and for our food to arrive, to think that a predator could have contacted them, made contact with them and convince them to send some kind of sexual material to him just in that short little amount of time is pretty terrifying.

[00:18:34] Jeff Gottfurcht: I agree. And I think that is what you've identified as thing that we've all done. We've all used our smartphones and, you know, for our kids as babysitters, like we're at dinner with our spouses and we just want to talk to our spouse for five minutes. So we do that and we didn't really understand some of the true things that are happening because most of the time a child is not going to say, "hey, someone from school just sent me an animal mutilation video," or "someone reached out to me" cause they don't want us to take their phones. So we really wanted to get to the core root of the issue and really begin to understand how could we build something that dealt with the screaming pain that we have as parents. Even yesterday, in the Wall Street Journal, there was an article about Instagram and how 33% of the teen girls who were on Instagram feel bad about themselves. And that pushes them to have some sort of eating disorder. 

[00:19:32] Elizabeth Smart: I mean, frankly, I'm not surprised. Like even as a grown adult, I follow, a lot of people, people that I don't personally know, but you know, for whatever reason, like I enjoy following them. But sometimes like when I feel down about myself and it looks like they have a perfect home, a perfect family, it must always be clean, it must always be pristine. They must never go to McDonald's. They must always have like a five course homemade dinner. And right around that point is usually when I'm like, "oh, I'm not doing so well." 

[00:20:05] Derek Jackson: I'm first of all, I'm glad you said McDonald's because I would really like to use go to McDonald's right now. That sounds delicious. 

But I also want to say, you know, we, we believe that technology isn't this thing that's solely just bad. It's something that has such power because it's advanced over the last years into these places that it can recommend content to us faster than we can even think about what it's recommending to us.

It's, it's almost like the ocean, right? The ocean's beautiful going out there and hearing the waves and swimming and everything is amazing, but the bad things can happen if you aren't properly teaching your young child how to swim or how to be in the ocean safely. It's not just something where you take your child to the ocean and think this can be a great thing for you and you throw them in without teaching them how to use it. Right now, that's essentially how the internet and how social media is. You give your child a phone at whatever age, and it's just like good luck. 

[00:21:04] Elizabeth Smart: I mean, just out of curiosity, like within your business, what is the average age that parents are buying your product for their children at? 

[00:21:12] Derek Jackson: We really are targeting any parent who's buying their child a phone for the first time. We've seen, like you said, parents who give their child a phone or their child asked for it as young as six, we had a mom tell us, almost reluctantly, that she has a six year old who has an Instagram account. And she, as the mom, had to create that account for her.

We also have parents who aren't giving their child a smartphone until they're 12 or 13 years old regardless of the age that it is that first access is where it's really important to start with a foundation of involvement together. It's something that a parent should be able to see what's going on. They should be able to understand how all of that is working, new people they're connecting with, what it is that they're saying, where they are at all times, but it's also something that from the beginning, kids should have access to something that helps teach them the way that technology affects them. 

We, you gave an example about how, you know, you follow people on Instagram. You see these things and they look like they have a perfect life and it causes you to have these thoughts where you compare yourself. And there's a lot of studies that show that psychologically humans have this bias towards negative content, probably from, you know, our earlier ancestors who had to survive in war-like tribes. And if you didn't pay attention to something that could potentially be negative, you might lose your life. So we developed this sense, and this focus on these negative things. Well, now we don't have to experience that kind of thing every day. 

Instead, we have these algorithms on social media who are solely there to feed us content that we might be interested in. And if we have a bias towards negative content, subconsciously, something that we don't think about, and that algorithm is just going to show us things we might be interested in, naturally, it's going to trend to show us things that make us feel bad because we're going to have that type of negative thought and we're going to stop and look at it or like it, or follow that person.

And they're going to keep showing us content like that because they know that we're interested in it. It's something that having a tool in place for your child that can break that scroll, break that monotonous movement through all of that content can bring them back to reality for a second and help them realize, just like you said, you might be feeling bad in some way, a 6, 7, 8, 9 year old child isn't at a mature enough level to be able to come to that conclusion, his or herself. And that's why we have Cyber Dive here in that mental health check to help teach them that. 

[00:23:47] Jeff Gottfurcht: And to go even further, 40% of us teens feel unattractive or unworthy after being on Instagram. And they've identified why. Because I, and it goes exactly, exactly back to what you're saying, Elizabeth. Instagram continues to feed you stuff about lifestyle, body images, and money. And that is what that algorithm is about. And so when we have young kids who are seeing that every day, that obviously has an effect on them. 

And for us, we know that social media and texting really is a young person's drug. And with our smartphone, it really allows you to kind of see and study those active ingredients that are happening in their life. 

[00:24:36] Elizabeth Smart: Wow. Well, I mean, this conversation has been so enlightening. I mean, some of those other social media platforms that you mentioned, I've never even heard of.

And it's, it's encouraging to know that like, as parents, especially, you do not have to be left in the dark. I mean that you can be involved. I mean, I think that's interesting and quite a powerful tool. So I want to say thank you so much to both Jeff and Derek for coming on today and for sharing your expertise and what you've learned over the years.

I mean, it's been very, very illuminating. And yeah, definitely have to look into that when my, my daughter's a little bit older. 

[00:25:18] Jeff Gottfurcht: Great. We appreciate being on air. For us, we're just pleased that we're able to talk about what we've built and you know, we're on a rescue mission and we're both parents as well.

And I think all of us parents share the same screaming pain. The only difference between us and everyone else, we started a company to address it. 

[00:25:37] Derek Jackson: That's right. 

[00:25:38] Jeff Gottfurcht: And that's, you know, we're all in the same boat. So we appreciate you spending the time with us and it's been thrilling and thank you for having us.

[00:25:45] Derek Jackson: And I just want to personally say thank you to you, and for any parents that are out there who want to learn more about us and even just more about the Aqua One phone or website's really easy. It's just our name, CyberDive.co, cyberdive.co. All of the information's right there.

[00:26:02] Elizabeth Smart: Perfect. I was just going to ask you for that. So thank you for adding that. Thank you to everyone for listening today.

We so appreciate it and make sure you rate us, leave a comment and be sure to subscribe. We will see you next time on Smart Talks. Thank you so much. Bye-bye.