February 14, 2025 • 34 mins
Use HAPPY at g-mee.com for a $40 discount on G-Mee Connect Pro (down from $189 to $149).
A former Channel 9 tech commentator reveals why he abandoned his media career to create a safer phone for kids after witnessing the devastating effects of unrestricted device access. In this eye-opening conversation, Charlie Brown shares shocking insider stories about social media dangers and offers hope to parents navigating the digital landscape. If you've ever worried about giving your child a phone, this episode could change everything.
Quote of the Episode: "Do not ever let them have unfettered access to the internet on any device at all, ever." - Charlie Brown
Key Points:
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The age of first phone adoption is getting younger while devices are becoming more powerful and potentially dangerous.
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Most parental controls have significant limitations or can be circumvented.
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Social media platforms deliberately make frequent changes to stay ahead of parental understanding.
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The impact of current tech decisions on children won't be fully understood for 5-10 years.
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Parents need to work collaboratively with children rather than taking an adversarial approach.
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Device-free car rides create opportunities for meaningful family conversation.
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The dangers of TikTok extend beyond individual privacy to potential sociopolitical manipulation.
Resources Mentioned:
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Spriggy (banking app)
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TikTok
Action Steps for Parents:
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Implement some form of parental controls on all devices.
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Create tech-free zones and times (like car rides) for family connection.
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Have regular conversations with children about their digital experiences.
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Build trust so children feel safe discussing online challenges.
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Consider alternatives to standard smartphones for younger children.
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Remove unfettered internet access from children's devices.
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Model healthy tech habits by reducing your own screen time.
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Work collaboratively with children rather than taking a purely restrictive approach.
Use HAPPY at g-mee.com for a $40 discount on G-Mee Connect Pro (down from $189 to $149).
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Welcome to our special Saturday edition of a Happy Families podcast,
Real Parenting Solutions every Day on Australia's most downloaded parenting podcast.
Earlier in the week, Kylie and I had a chat
about my discussion with Charlie Brown, and today you hear
the conversation in full. From explaining the latest gadgets on
Australia's TV screens to tackling one of modern parenting's biggest challenges,
(00:29):
Charlie Brown has been at the forefront of helping Australians
navigate the ever evolving world of technology. He's the creator
and face of Cybershak TV, Australia's longest running tech TV show,
and the voice behind Life and Technology, the well loved
radio program. Charlie has spent over two decades making complex
tech accessible to everyday Australians. He's a UNI of Western
(00:51):
Sydney graduate with the background of marketing in it, but
he does a whole lot more beyond the traditional media
Stuff Today Show, Current Affair. But his company CBN has
him working closely with leading tech companies to bridge the
gap between innovative technology and consumer understanding. In twenty nineteen,
Charlie took on what I think is his most significant
(01:13):
challenge yet, that is addressing the growing concern around children's
digital safety. I think it's fair to say that Charlie
was ahead of the curve, and while I was still
saying I'm not quite sure, but I think most of
this is okay, but some of it's not, Charlie was
saying exactly the opposite. It led to the creation of GM.
It's a smart device designed to tackle the delicate balance
between digital access and online safety, a project that emerged
(01:35):
from his years of understanding both the potential and the
pitfalls of our connected world. Okay, it's quite an intro,
but I wanted to make sure that people know just
what you've done. Charlie. Good to have you, good.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
To talk to you justin I've been watching your stuff
for a long time and a big fan of your
content as well, so it's good to have a chat
to you and talk to you about all the things
that are flowing around in this area.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
You swung by my house during the summerhole all days
and dropped off a GM phone. I was thinking about
giving it to my daughter. Since then, I've decided that
she's only not even eleven yet, and she's homeschooled, she
doesn't actually need it, so we're going to hold off
on giving her that phone. But there are so many
parents who are not in that position where they can say,
we can hold off because our child is with us,
(02:18):
the kids are going to school, the kids are out there,
they're living their lives. Before you created g ME, what
were the most common concerns that you heard from parents
about kids and phones while you were being a tech commentator.
I presume that the concerns that you heard led you
to creating GM. So what was it that precipitator all
of this, Well, I.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Guess my job. I've spent a lot of time looking
up the road at what's coming, or what I saw
was the age of first adoption of phones was getting
younger and younger. Phones were getting faster, that's the actual
processing ability of each one. The screens are getting richer,
the connectivity was getting faster, and all of that was
sort of being melted in to this opportunit unity to
(03:00):
give at some point phones to kids. And at the time,
I think this was sort of mid twenty fifteens around there.
And I then started seeing social media being blended in
in a portable manner. I mean, we'd seen you know,
the Instagrams and facebooks and all those kinds of things
(03:22):
coming in, but they were then being used younger and
younger and younger as well, and there was this sort
of you know, alarm bells going off of Has anyone
actually thought whether this is okay for the people who
are going to be engaging with this content and with
these devices. And the more I thought about it, the
(03:42):
more worried I got. And as a father of three
daughters myself, I knew that we were getting to that
point in our own family. And the catalyst for Jamie
was my wife said to me, Okay, well, when we
were growing up, we had Sony Walkman's and those kinds
of things. We had tapes and CD and then we
played MP three files and all of that. And Rachel
(04:04):
said to me, everything's streaming now, so how are our
kids going to get their music? They've got Spotify, But
every device out there has got a camera on it.
And then when I went looked at the devices that
were out there, I didn't like any of them. I
went and I went, I went everywhere. I didn't just
go to Harvey Norman and JP Highway. I went to
Alibarba dot com, right right into the belly of the
(04:26):
beast of Chinese manufacturing. There was nothing and so that's
that's where all of this sort of crashed together and
I thought, well, someone's going to do something about it,
it might as well be me.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
It's a really big call. As you talk about that,
I remember walking down Crown Street in Wollongong, that's where
we lived the time, and thinking to myself, I need
to get a new phone. And I was so excited.
I was enthralled because Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, the
biggest social media platforms in that sort of twenty ten
through to twenty fourteen stage, they were free. You got
(05:02):
free data when you signed up for this plan or
that plan, and I didn't since the insidiousness of it.
It's not free because they want to give us something
because it's nice. It's free because these platforms know that
the more it's free, the more people will use it.
The more people use it, the more they build their platforms,
the more compelled we are to use it, the more
it becomes ubiquitous. It's absolutely everywhere, and of course now
(05:26):
we've seen where we've landed Charlie, listening to your story
makes me wonder how your perspective on kids and tech
has changed since you started this process. I mean, it
seems to me like you looked down the road and
saw something that a lot of other people were equivocating
on or were actually embracing completely. Have you had any surprises?
(05:50):
Has your perspective changed since you started this?
Speaker 2 (05:54):
So my perspective originally around kids in tech was sort
of nothing, and then it became dead set fear in
the early sort of twenty tens to fifteen through a
number of examples of things that I was involved with
because I was working in media, and I'll explain those
to you in a second. And then it became once
(06:17):
I actually got into the difficultness of creating a product,
convincing people that it's worth looking at, and then seeing
the world start to just spin a little bit differently
in this area, becoming more positive about where we're going
and where I think we're going. The first thing about
(06:39):
the fear was that, you know, working in broadcast, I
would get people in the community who had gone past
that position of control and being completely out of control
with their families, with their kids, with engagement with content
and they would be nowhere near a solution and absolutely
(07:00):
no understanding of what they could do to fix the problem.
And they would come to me because they would see
me as the public tech guy that well, he'll know.
And I remember standing at the chiefest staff desk at
nine News one day at about five forty pm and
six o'clock news. It's still a major news bullet but
back those days sort of twenty thirteen, this occurred. That
(07:24):
was the key thing, that was the main news piece
of the day. And there was a woman on the
phone to me in absolute tears because her daughter, who
was about sixteen, hadn't left her bedroom for the past
four or five days because someone created a Facebook page
about her, completely bullied, cyber bullying her in the worst
possible way. So they morphed a face onto a naked body.
(07:46):
They've done all of this terrible stuff. This girl hadn't
left her room and a mum was worried because the kid,
in mum's opinion, was suicidal. She's crying to me saying,
and I could hear I could hear this girl opening
the door and screaming at her mom down the hallway
that it's you know that nothing is worth anything anymore,
(08:08):
and this is wrong and it's worth as bad as
you could you could imagine it. And I'm standing there
on the phone to her, going, well, what's the problem.
I mean, why is the page still lot? How long
is the page? But she said, I've been up for
three or four days. They keep flagging it. It doesn't
get taken down. It was a Facebook page, mind you.
And I said, okay, fine, just just just wait there.
(08:32):
Let me see if I can make a phone call.
And I rang. I won't say who, but somebody, very
very senior at Facebook. It's now called Meta. And I said, okay, look,
I'm standing over the desk from the cheaper staff. This
is the story. It's running a story number three in
twenty five minutes unless this page is taken down in
three minutes. And they said, oh, we can't do it,
(08:53):
and I said, okay, well, well i'll speak to you
after after the story runs. Three minutes later, the page
was taken down. So this page had been up for
four days. This teenager was in the emotional state. She
was in the mum was in a similar emotional state.
And I'm listening to all of this, and then with
a one phone call to one person less than three
(09:15):
minutes the pages down, and I thought to myself, there
is something very, very wrong with everything that is going
on here. This is one example. Where are we going
from here with this? And what is everyone else going
to do that doesn't find a way to contact people
like me who can actually help. And with all of
that in the back of my mind, that was sort
(09:36):
of one of the most extreme examples, and that really
set things off and set me thinking about how bad
the community was going to be for our children in
the future. Once device has got more powerful, got faster,
better connected, once more people got them younger ages, and
that's where we That's where I went off from there,
(09:59):
And I had mother smaller examples, all sorts, but that
was sort of the most extreme one at the time,
and I haven't I don't get those as many anymore.
I don't get them like that anymore. I still get
asked for help in various ways, but the reach for
the solution is a much shorter one. It's not as
(10:20):
extreme as that anymore. And that gives me a lot
of confidence.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
Yeah, I reckon, there's a whole lot of people who
are wishing that they had that same phone number of
that same person and had the capacity to make that
kind of a threat. I mean, it's just so hard
to get action from those major tech companies no matter
how much you report, the system is fundamentally broken. When
you talk to parents today, Charlie, what's the general response
(10:45):
what a parent's saying to you. Is it just I
want my kids off the screen or I'm worried about
their safety. What's the standard line that you hear from
parents day in day out about kids in tech.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
Well, I think they think that everything's okay, right. I
think that this feeling that everything's okay, and it comes
from the behavior of the kids when you give them
these devices, right. So, I honestly I don't have any
ill feeling to parents about the challenges that kids are
going through, the bad decisions that are being made about them.
(11:18):
But one I look at parents today and we've got
more of them in the family, more parents in the
family working to pay the mortgage than ever before. So
there's all of those kinds of financial challenges. They are
being bombarded with this area of their life that they
never experience growing up, and this is something that changes monthly.
(11:38):
Like kick a platform, any platform you want Snapchat or
Instagram or whatever it is. There is more change going
on within that platform, not just the whole tech industry.
Within that platform, then I have ever seen within a
software program, Right, So Snapchatti do something one way and
(12:00):
then you'll learn it, you'll understand it, you'll build rules
around it. And these are the parents who are engaged.
And then three months later they'll change it, well, adds something,
and then the parents have got to go and learn
it all over again. And they're trying to do for
one child the same for the next child who's two
years younger, the next child who's probably two years younger.
(12:20):
But it's changed consistently through that entire life development of
that product.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
I'm going to sound I'm going to sound so old
saying this, Charlie. But even podcasts, whether you listen to
Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen to them,
that the operating system keeps on changing. And I'm like,
hang on, I just figured out how to listen to
my podcast and the way it works for me, and
now it's changed. Once you throw in the stuff that
the adolescents are doing, what the teenagers are doing. Yeah,
it's monumental and like you said, it's just this rolling, forward, moving,
(12:51):
progressing thing that parents. I mean, the majority of parents
that I speak to are worried about their kid's device usage.
They're worried about what they're taking photos of or what
they're accessing on their phones. But they're also kind of
the kids become what's the word. They become fairly passive.
They become pretty easy to deal with. You put a
(13:12):
screen in front of their face, and all of a sudden,
things are calm, things are quiet. Yeah, everything's taken care of.
And when, like you said, when parents are facing the
precious that they're already facing, sometimes that feels good. Again, not
to bag up parents. I do it myself from time
to time because I just need a break. Every now
and again. I want to lay on the bed and read.
Well again, I'm old school. I want to lay on
the bed and read a book, and the kids more
(13:33):
interested in watching something on Disney Plus. Let me ask
you this, Let's talk about device management. You've developed a
phone that is literally about device management to overcome many
of the challenges that today's apps, platforms, and hardware the
phones themselves put into our children's way. That is not
always in their best interests. Tell us this is your
(13:56):
opportunity for like a one and a half two minute
add about your GM phone. What did you develop it?
Why is it different? Because this is the thing that
parents need to, I guess, get their head around in
order to keep their kids safe.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Yeah. I looked at the market and I sort of
took twenty years of understanding and engaging with technology, and
I was quite aghast at what was out there, and
I found that solutions that sort of worked were quite
expensive from a point of view. There was some commercial
solutions out there that you pay five ten dollars a
(14:29):
month and you could have this, and I thought that
was a bit expensive for a service, and I sort
of thought, well, I don't want something that is going
to involve parents having to make big financial commitments to
this area. It should just be something that is just
you know, below this age, you get this, it's cost effective,
you don't have to pay a lot of money for it,
and then you know that you've got control of what
(14:51):
your kids have seen. So that's the first thing. The
second thing was that I went, well, what do kids need? Well,
at the heart of everything was connectivity. Parents want to
be connected to their kids, and the kids want to
be connected to their parents and then also connected to
their friends as well. How do you manage that? Well,
I thought, well, you just got to give parents a
very simple platform that they can remotely turn things on
(15:13):
and turn things off. Trap kids manage who's calling them
and texting them, and who they are calling and texting,
and it's just got to be really simple for the
parent to use. And we thought if we start with
that and then we sit back and listen, then we're
going to have parents start to tell us well, we
like that, but we want that to do this as well.
(15:33):
Oh and by the way, I found that when I
did this, it didn't do what I wanted to I
wanted to do this. Can you change that? And if
you start listening to them and start tweaking it from there,
you're going to get it. You're going to have the
parents having something they want, the kids have something they want,
they have the connectivity they can you can allow them
games and you can. I mean one parent came to
us and said, yeah, my kid uses your phone as
(15:55):
the screen for displaying what he's drone is seeing as
he's flying it around the backyard. I thought, great, So
here's the technology. The kid wants a drone, the screen
needs to be part of the drone experience, but the
parent is able to manage that bit better because they're
using our phone as that screen. Awesome. So we're enabling
the technology, but we're not allowing the technology to have
(16:18):
unfettered access to everything else. It's just the drone experience
that the kids they would get. And then I thought
about where they're going next. We'll parents want to makesh
kids have got money, So we put an NFC chip
onto the phone so you can tap and pay with
your bank app and that kind of thing. There's different
apps around. Spriggy, for example, has an app you can
(16:38):
put on for pocket money and stuff, and you can
use the tap and pay on that to tap and
pay with the phone. And you were just thought, you know,
no camera. I thought, God, if I see another fourteen
year old or twelve year old taken selfies with their
kids and filming each other doing stupid stuff, Well, if
(16:59):
I take the or away, they can't do that. They
can do the stupid stuff once they get a bit older.
And that's and that was and then the other thing
we thought about was, Okay, that's the extra handset. Just
we thought, well, we've got to make this and make
it available to everyone worldwide. It's not just an Australian thing.
This is a global problem. So we have to make
it available in all the big developed countries, and then
(17:19):
we have to go with further than that. So we're
selling in the UK, Europe, USA, Australia. We get people
from outside of those countries buying from the online marketplaces
that are selling them in those countries like the Middle East,
for example, we sell a lot of phones out of
Europe into the Middle East, and then this year and
next year we'll go even further places like India and
(17:41):
Mexico and those kinds of places where there's a lot
of kids, and there's when you actually look at the
issues around parents and kids and looking at the wrong
content and all that kind of those issues are in
those countries, and in my opinion, just because you're not
living in a wealthy country, it doesn't mean that your
kids should have access to the wrong kind of content
(18:03):
if you choose them not to. So we're making sure
GMI is available as soon as we can in those
countries too.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Okay, so you've got a phone that doesn't have a camera,
it has access to apps out of the Google Play Store,
but those are all going to be monitored via the
app on the parent's phone to make sure that they've
got access to the stuff that's okay, and they don't
have access to the stuff that parents are judging to
be not satisfactory. And their phone is essentially controlled from
the parents app on their phone. Am I getting that right?
Speaker 2 (18:30):
Correct? Correct? And the other thing is when you deep
dive into all these parental controls on all these other platforms,
Like Apple's got a really good one with the screen
screen time, but you've got to have an Apple iPhone
or iPad to manage it, right.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
So, yeah, and the kids still do get around.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
It, they still get around it. And then with the
Android system, guess what if you're running the family Link
system at the age of thirteen, yes, singing a happy
birthday to your kid, and this happened in our family,
you get this a little lord that says Family Link
has been discontinued on this device. You know a second,
I didn't want that to happen. No, at thirteen, the
kid could turn family Link off. So with our system,
(19:08):
you canna have an iPhone. You're gonna have an Android
as a parent, and there's no auto age conclusion to
the service. You as the parent, decide when it's turned off.
You can have a running till they're sixteen or seventeen
if you choose to. It's really acute. And in the
United States, we've got families over there who have been
testing our advice. Is one of them. The kid has
got the kid's got massive anxiety issues and the mummy
(19:32):
Mulmyn said, she's just gone off to college. She would
never have gone to college if it wasn't for your
phone and all of micro steps that she took in
leaving the house with your phone, knowing that we were
a phone call away and we could track her and
we could we could go pick her up if something happened.
But all of these life development skills that this kid
(19:53):
has learned, she did it with our phone in her pocket,
and the parents were able to remotely support that digital experience.
And now she's gone off to college and you're sitting
there thinking we helped enable that, right, Like, what would
that kid have done? With that kid and I'd have
got through college. Maybe they're going they would have gone,
(20:14):
maybe not as early as they would have wanted, but
we helped enable that and that's really cool.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
Yeah, it really is. We'll link to the GME phone
in our show notes to the people who want to
know more about the device can five links and check
that out, Charlie, Beyond just managing the device, which is
really what that conversation was, what do you think of
the key conversations that parents need to have with their
(20:40):
kids so that the kids can be safe online and
have the digital literacy that we're always banging on about.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
Well, and that's the challenge, right. We keep sticking more
devices in front of them, like laptops for schools and
all these kinds of things, and then at the same
time we're saying, oh, yeah, keep using these devices. By
by the way, there's a lot of danger in them.
If you, I mean, if you're a ten year obviousitting
and they go, well, hang on a second, is it's
dangerous or should I be using it? I think at
the end of the day, what we want parents to
(21:08):
do is to use some kind of parental control, like
using our phone or not somebody else's phone or an
Apple or good or whatever. Use it and understand it
as best as you can do, not ever let them
have unfettered access to the Internet on any device at
all ever, Right, that's the first thing. Second to that,
(21:29):
you've got to sit down and make the time to
talk to them about this kind of stuff. You've got
to get your kids to a position where they can
come and talk to you, good or bad about what's
going on in their digital life, and they have that
level of trust where they can come and talk to
you in the same way as anything else bad or
good that's happening in their life. They can sit there
and talk to you about this as well, because you
(21:52):
will learn from those conversations what they're interested in in,
what they're doing, and what you're comfortable with and what
you're not comfortable with. Things that get through those cracks
that you have put in place, you will learn about it.
You'll also learn what other kids and other parents are
doing in this space. Some of it that I learned
about absolutely horrifies me, and other bits that I learn
(22:16):
about these are through my own family connections and my
own children's experiences. I'm really pleased to hear parents out
there are taking initiative and making these hard decisions, but
you will learn what they are the catalyst for us,
for Chela and I was probably six nine months ago.
Our sixteen year old we're talking about parental controls and
(22:39):
not letting our eleven year old and thirteen year old
do certain things. And the sixteen year old this was
in the car. Family five are in the car. Sixteen
year old turns the eleven and twelve and the thirteen
year old who are complaining about the parental controls and
not being allowed to access this, and she said, look,
it's really annoying what dad's job is. But you get
to my age and you look back on when I
(23:02):
was at your age and you actually think, yeah, there's
a lot of merit in what mum and dad was saying,
and I'm better off for it.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
Was yeah, voice of experience, love it, sixteen year old.
My olders took a little bit longer to get there,
but it's pretty it's pretty reassuring, it's pretty nice when
it happens. All right, Charlie, I'd like to do a
lightning round with your. Lightning rounds are fun, very very
short answers, just quick questions, and feel free to fire
anything at me as well. I'm going to give away
my answer to the first one. First The very first
(23:31):
ever mobile phone that I owned was an NEC Fire
though I don't know if you remember that phone. It
was a tiny, little brick phone. What was your first
ever mobile phone?
Speaker 2 (23:42):
Nokier Thirshy something I don't even remember.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
It sounds like it was a precursor of the Noocky
fifty one to ten brick that everyone laughs about.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
Yeah, it was. It was very very early, very early.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
What's the longest you've ever gone without checking your phone?
Speaker 2 (23:58):
I'd put my phone away. When I'm not wanting to
be around my phone, I put it away. I have
a box, so I'd say six hours probably. When I
don't want my phone to interrupt me, I'll put it
in a box with the other kids phones and we
leave it there. What's hours?
Speaker 1 (24:15):
What's the most embarrassing tech failed that you've had while
you're doing a live TV segment? Has anything just gone
the bottom fallen out on Telly?
Speaker 2 (24:25):
Yes? The worst one. We were doing a robot lawnmower
and we set this thing up in the studio at
the Today Show and it was just mowing this synthetic
grass area, and we'd set it all up the way
we were told to set it up, but the robot
lawnmer kept wanting to run out of the pen that
we'd set up. And I'm talking with Ben Fordham and
(24:47):
talking about this robot lawnmower and it's running towards his
foot and it would have run over his foot had
he not stomped on the emergency stop button. And this
is all on live TV, and I was looking at it,
just going I almost I almost took Ben's foot today.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
Yeah, yeah, probably not going to sell so many of
those robot lawnmllers if that had to happen.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
They're much better today than they were ten years ago.
I'll leave it at that.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
What app would you permanently delete from existence if you could?
Speaker 2 (25:18):
TikTok? Absolutely no question of that. I would get rid
of TikTok so fast. I would burn the server farm
down forever if I had the choice. I think that
app is the worst app for so many reasons, across
so many different areas of analysis and discussion, from privacy settings,
(25:44):
from the general happiness of people who use it and
how it can go wrong for them. It is just
it is. So We're in the United States where they
just last couple of weeks and they shut TikTok off
for a day old. Yeah, yeah, well that's it. My
sixteen year old who begrudgingly she uses it and I
(26:05):
don't want it to but she's sixteen so she can
use it. She says to me, Dad, I've got an
Australian TikTok account, but I'm off I've been turned off
when Yeah, so you know that TikTok knows exactly where
in the world you are at any one time, don't you.
And she was just like right, and I was like, yeah,
well I know your location, that's not all I know
about you. That's one example. That's why TikTok's not working now.
(26:27):
So that's it. That's the probably too long an answer
for what you're looking for. But I would permanently get
rid of TikTok.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
For me.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
The biggest concern about TikTok, and that's the one that
I would get rid of as well, is the socio
political ramifications of having this thing. So if the CCP
wants something to happen, they just escalated into the algorithm
and all of a sudden, everybody's on that side because
there's so much material. It's just it's a propaganda machine.
Designed by the CCP for China's ends. If China decides
that they want to invade Taiwan, I would imagine that
(26:56):
they would start to put a whole lot of propaganda
out on TikTok, and when the young generation is flooded
with it, they start to believe it. I just think
it's a devastating and dangerous app. From a socio political perspective.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
TikTok is not good for so many different reasons, and
that's one of them.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
Yeah, it's a lightning red And I know this is
a parenting podcast, not a political podcast. But if they
can do that when it comes to the politics of
the world, global politics, it's no surprise that they can
do all sorts of things and do allow all sorts
all sorts of things when it comes to our young
people and their well being or lack thereof. Last one
for you in the lightning round, before we get back
to a couple more serious questions and wrap things up, Charlie,
(27:36):
if you could use only We're going to go in
the other direction now. If you could use only one
app for the rest of your life, what would it be?
What is your favorite app?
Speaker 2 (27:43):
The one that I use all the time is maps.
I use maps all the time, and I use it
to get places faster, and I use it to get
places on public transport because I love public transport. And
I use it for learning about businesses and little small
businesses that I can try and give business to, like
(28:05):
cafes and restaurants and all those kinds of things. And
I use it for exploring the world, Like I'll be
sitting on a bus and I'll be like, going, where's
a good place north of Sydney that's got a beautiful
beach that allows me to camp in the woods nearby?
And all that maps Google Maps.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
You know what I hadn't thought about the incredible amount
of time that I use maps for. I'm in the
process sometime this month. I'm supposed to get my new phone,
the light Phone three, because I'm really trying to reduce
my reliance on technology. But one of the essential things
that it had to have was access to maps. If
I can't get maps, then a phone is useless to me.
(28:43):
So I hear what you're saying there, Okay, last couple
of questions for you, looking ahead, let's say five years,
maybe even ten years, what challenges do you think parents
are going to be facing with tech that we might
not be considering today, or would you say that it's
just going to be more of the same.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
I think the ramifications of the poor decisions that we've
been making and the poor allowances that we've been making
are going to be much more present, and that is
the impact of these products on our kids is going
(29:21):
to be much more present. So the fifteen year olds
will be twenty and twenty five, for example, five teen
years we're going to really really see what those impacts are.
I don't think we've really got an understanding of what
they are yet. People like yourself obviously much more across
what the likelihoods of those things are going to be
than I am. That's the first thing I think. I
(29:42):
actually do think the world is getting to the point
where we're turning around to tech as parents and saying
we'll make the decisions here, not you. And you know,
we've seen Norway bring in these laws. They haven't enacted
them yet about social media. Australia second, we haven't enacted
them yet, but they're there. I think we're going to
(30:02):
see country after country after country dropping those similar kinds
of rules on their population. And I think as a
group of people, we will be turning to big tech
and saying, look, mate, we will make the decisions. Thank you.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to upload every
single photo I've ever taken and tell me who's in
(30:23):
them and who I should connect them with and all this.
Thank you for all of these services. But I'm going
to start making a few more decisions around what's right
for me. And I'll give you one example. Right, So,
for people who have who look at their screens too often,
the hardest bit of pulling your screen away from your
face is immediately when you do it. But I guarantee
(30:46):
you in the hours and days leading from that point
of reducing your screen time, you will feel better. You'll
feel better, and parents should be done doing this, and
kids should be doing this, and everyone in the everyone
in the community should be doing it because you will
feel better and you will have, in my view, a
(31:08):
happier life from doing it.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
Yeah, well, said Charlie. Let's wrap this up. If there
was just one thing something we would really concentrate on
in the Family's podcast is as much as there's so
much information out there, we can have a nice lengthy
conversation like this and explore and unpack and play with ideas,
but sometimes it's nice to distill it down to just
the one thing. If there was just the one thing,
(31:32):
the most valuable piece of advice that you could give
to parents who are struggling with their kids in tech.
Maybe it's something that a parent has said to you,
maybe it's your own advice. What would that one thing
be to give them some hope, some reassurance, or some
direction as they grapple with the never ending creep of
tech into our families lives.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
I think the thing is as hard as this is
for you as the parent, just remember it's even harder
for the kid who's going through it, because this desire
to be using all this technology and apps and services
is part of them wanting to part of them going
through that transition of engagement and positive responses from their
(32:20):
parents to engagement positive responses from their peers. It's right,
So they're going through that transition. This is bundled in
with that right, and it makes it really hard for
them to do things that are different from what everybody
else is doing. And I think you when you start
with that understanding, everything that flows on from there will
(32:43):
allow you to have the humility and the positivity towards
working with them versus sitting there and telling them you
know that what they're doing is like a bad thing,
and that right sort of instead of scolding them, you're
working with them. You're trying to work and engage with
(33:04):
them and support them. And the more you do that
with them, the better you will be and the better
that they will be and when you come out of it,
because it's only a team thing. Really, it is only
a team thing in the level of concentration that we've had.
By the time they get to the end of high
school and into UNI or not UNI or whatever, that
so many of them drop off this. And I can
have another conversation with you about why the tech companies
(33:26):
are scared stiff of these laws of no social media
to under sixteens, for example, because they know they know
as soon as they miss the engagement at that age,
they're not getting them at a later age, and that's
a loss of income. But getting through this stage with
them and working with them, you will be happier and
so will they. But by doing it collaboratively and positively
(33:48):
with them, you'll be better off for it, and you
will get through it.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
Really appreciate your time, Charlie. Charlie Brown has built a
career around technology and its impact on families. He's worked
with Channel nine and now he runs GME Phones. He's
developed GME phones we'll linked to them in the show notes,
aiming to balance children's access to technology with parental peace
of mind. Charlie, wish you all the best with the phones,
(34:17):
and thanks so much of the conversation.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
Great to talk to you justin. Look forward to talking
to you again mate, and appreciate you having me on
the podcast.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
Pretty sober in conversation and a lot to think about.
Hopefully it's been helpful for you and the decisions that
you're making around tech and your family. The Happy Families
podcast produced by Justin Rouland from Bridge Media. If you
would like more information about the stuff we've talked about,
check the show notes and visit Happyfamilies dot com dot au.
Welcome to our special Saturday edition of a Happy Families podcast,
Real Parenting Solutions every Day on Australia's most downloaded parenting podcast.
Earlier in the week, Kylie and I had a chat
about my discussion with Charlie Brown, and today you hear
the conversation in full. From explaining the latest gadgets on
Australia's TV screens to tackling one of modern parenting's biggest challenges,
(00:29):
Charlie Brown has been at the forefront of helping Australians
navigate the ever evolving world of technology. He's the creator
and face of Cybershak TV, Australia's longest running tech TV show,
and the voice behind Life and Technology, the well loved
radio program. Charlie has spent over two decades making complex
tech accessible to everyday Australians. He's a UNI of Western
(00:51):
Sydney graduate with the background of marketing in it, but
he does a whole lot more beyond the traditional media
Stuff Today Show, Current Affair. But his company CBN has
him working closely with leading tech companies to bridge the
gap between innovative technology and consumer understanding. In twenty nineteen,
Charlie took on what I think is his most significant
(01:13):
challenge yet, that is addressing the growing concern around children's
digital safety. I think it's fair to say that Charlie
was ahead of the curve, and while I was still
saying I'm not quite sure, but I think most of
this is okay, but some of it's not, Charlie was
saying exactly the opposite. It led to the creation of GM.
It's a smart device designed to tackle the delicate balance
between digital access and online safety, a project that emerged
(01:35):
from his years of understanding both the potential and the
pitfalls of our connected world. Okay, it's quite an intro,
but I wanted to make sure that people know just
what you've done. Charlie. Good to have you, good.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
To talk to you justin I've been watching your stuff
for a long time and a big fan of your
content as well, so it's good to have a chat
to you and talk to you about all the things
that are flowing around in this area.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
You swung by my house during the summerhole all days
and dropped off a GM phone. I was thinking about
giving it to my daughter. Since then, I've decided that
she's only not even eleven yet, and she's homeschooled, she
doesn't actually need it, so we're going to hold off
on giving her that phone. But there are so many
parents who are not in that position where they can say,
we can hold off because our child is with us,
(02:18):
the kids are going to school, the kids are out there,
they're living their lives. Before you created g ME, what
were the most common concerns that you heard from parents
about kids and phones while you were being a tech commentator.
I presume that the concerns that you heard led you
to creating GM. So what was it that precipitator all
of this, Well, I.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Guess my job. I've spent a lot of time looking
up the road at what's coming, or what I saw
was the age of first adoption of phones was getting
younger and younger. Phones were getting faster, that's the actual
processing ability of each one. The screens are getting richer,
the connectivity was getting faster, and all of that was
sort of being melted in to this opportunit unity to
(03:00):
give at some point phones to kids. And at the time,
I think this was sort of mid twenty fifteens around there.
And I then started seeing social media being blended in
in a portable manner. I mean, we'd seen you know,
the Instagrams and facebooks and all those kinds of things
(03:22):
coming in, but they were then being used younger and
younger and younger as well, and there was this sort
of you know, alarm bells going off of Has anyone
actually thought whether this is okay for the people who
are going to be engaging with this content and with
these devices. And the more I thought about it, the
(03:42):
more worried I got. And as a father of three
daughters myself, I knew that we were getting to that
point in our own family. And the catalyst for Jamie
was my wife said to me, Okay, well, when we
were growing up, we had Sony Walkman's and those kinds
of things. We had tapes and CD and then we
played MP three files and all of that. And Rachel
(04:04):
said to me, everything's streaming now, so how are our
kids going to get their music? They've got Spotify, But
every device out there has got a camera on it.
And then when I went looked at the devices that
were out there, I didn't like any of them. I
went and I went, I went everywhere. I didn't just
go to Harvey Norman and JP Highway. I went to
Alibarba dot com, right right into the belly of the
(04:26):
beast of Chinese manufacturing. There was nothing and so that's
that's where all of this sort of crashed together and
I thought, well, someone's going to do something about it,
it might as well be me.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
It's a really big call. As you talk about that,
I remember walking down Crown Street in Wollongong, that's where
we lived the time, and thinking to myself, I need
to get a new phone. And I was so excited.
I was enthralled because Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, the
biggest social media platforms in that sort of twenty ten
through to twenty fourteen stage, they were free. You got
(05:02):
free data when you signed up for this plan or
that plan, and I didn't since the insidiousness of it.
It's not free because they want to give us something
because it's nice. It's free because these platforms know that
the more it's free, the more people will use it.
The more people use it, the more they build their platforms,
the more compelled we are to use it, the more
it becomes ubiquitous. It's absolutely everywhere, and of course now
(05:26):
we've seen where we've landed Charlie, listening to your story
makes me wonder how your perspective on kids and tech
has changed since you started this process. I mean, it
seems to me like you looked down the road and
saw something that a lot of other people were equivocating
on or were actually embracing completely. Have you had any surprises?
(05:50):
Has your perspective changed since you started this?
Speaker 2 (05:54):
So my perspective originally around kids in tech was sort
of nothing, and then it became dead set fear in
the early sort of twenty tens to fifteen through a
number of examples of things that I was involved with
because I was working in media, and I'll explain those
to you in a second. And then it became once
(06:17):
I actually got into the difficultness of creating a product,
convincing people that it's worth looking at, and then seeing
the world start to just spin a little bit differently
in this area, becoming more positive about where we're going
and where I think we're going. The first thing about
(06:39):
the fear was that, you know, working in broadcast, I
would get people in the community who had gone past
that position of control and being completely out of control
with their families, with their kids, with engagement with content
and they would be nowhere near a solution and absolutely
(07:00):
no understanding of what they could do to fix the problem.
And they would come to me because they would see
me as the public tech guy that well, he'll know.
And I remember standing at the chiefest staff desk at
nine News one day at about five forty pm and
six o'clock news. It's still a major news bullet but
back those days sort of twenty thirteen, this occurred. That
(07:24):
was the key thing, that was the main news piece
of the day. And there was a woman on the
phone to me in absolute tears because her daughter, who
was about sixteen, hadn't left her bedroom for the past
four or five days because someone created a Facebook page
about her, completely bullied, cyber bullying her in the worst
possible way. So they morphed a face onto a naked body.
(07:46):
They've done all of this terrible stuff. This girl hadn't
left her room and a mum was worried because the kid,
in mum's opinion, was suicidal. She's crying to me saying,
and I could hear I could hear this girl opening
the door and screaming at her mom down the hallway
that it's you know that nothing is worth anything anymore,
(08:08):
and this is wrong and it's worth as bad as
you could you could imagine it. And I'm standing there
on the phone to her, going, well, what's the problem.
I mean, why is the page still lot? How long
is the page? But she said, I've been up for
three or four days. They keep flagging it. It doesn't
get taken down. It was a Facebook page, mind you.
And I said, okay, fine, just just just wait there.
(08:32):
Let me see if I can make a phone call.
And I rang. I won't say who, but somebody, very
very senior at Facebook. It's now called Meta. And I said, okay, look,
I'm standing over the desk from the cheaper staff. This
is the story. It's running a story number three in
twenty five minutes unless this page is taken down in
three minutes. And they said, oh, we can't do it,
(08:53):
and I said, okay, well, well i'll speak to you
after after the story runs. Three minutes later, the page
was taken down. So this page had been up for
four days. This teenager was in the emotional state. She
was in the mum was in a similar emotional state.
And I'm listening to all of this, and then with
a one phone call to one person less than three
(09:15):
minutes the pages down, and I thought to myself, there
is something very, very wrong with everything that is going
on here. This is one example. Where are we going
from here with this? And what is everyone else going
to do that doesn't find a way to contact people
like me who can actually help. And with all of
that in the back of my mind, that was sort
(09:36):
of one of the most extreme examples, and that really
set things off and set me thinking about how bad
the community was going to be for our children in
the future. Once device has got more powerful, got faster,
better connected, once more people got them younger ages, and
that's where we That's where I went off from there,
(09:59):
And I had mother smaller examples, all sorts, but that
was sort of the most extreme one at the time,
and I haven't I don't get those as many anymore.
I don't get them like that anymore. I still get
asked for help in various ways, but the reach for
the solution is a much shorter one. It's not as
(10:20):
extreme as that anymore. And that gives me a lot
of confidence.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
Yeah, I reckon, there's a whole lot of people who
are wishing that they had that same phone number of
that same person and had the capacity to make that
kind of a threat. I mean, it's just so hard
to get action from those major tech companies no matter
how much you report, the system is fundamentally broken. When
you talk to parents today, Charlie, what's the general response
(10:45):
what a parent's saying to you. Is it just I
want my kids off the screen or I'm worried about
their safety. What's the standard line that you hear from
parents day in day out about kids in tech.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
Well, I think they think that everything's okay, right. I
think that this feeling that everything's okay, and it comes
from the behavior of the kids when you give them
these devices, right. So, I honestly I don't have any
ill feeling to parents about the challenges that kids are
going through, the bad decisions that are being made about them.
(11:18):
But one I look at parents today and we've got
more of them in the family, more parents in the
family working to pay the mortgage than ever before. So
there's all of those kinds of financial challenges. They are
being bombarded with this area of their life that they
never experience growing up, and this is something that changes monthly.
(11:38):
Like kick a platform, any platform you want Snapchat or
Instagram or whatever it is. There is more change going
on within that platform, not just the whole tech industry.
Within that platform, then I have ever seen within a
software program, Right, So Snapchatti do something one way and
(12:00):
then you'll learn it, you'll understand it, you'll build rules
around it. And these are the parents who are engaged.
And then three months later they'll change it, well, adds something,
and then the parents have got to go and learn
it all over again. And they're trying to do for
one child the same for the next child who's two
years younger, the next child who's probably two years younger.
(12:20):
But it's changed consistently through that entire life development of
that product.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
I'm going to sound I'm going to sound so old
saying this, Charlie. But even podcasts, whether you listen to
Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen to them,
that the operating system keeps on changing. And I'm like,
hang on, I just figured out how to listen to
my podcast and the way it works for me, and
now it's changed. Once you throw in the stuff that
the adolescents are doing, what the teenagers are doing. Yeah,
it's monumental and like you said, it's just this rolling, forward, moving,
(12:51):
progressing thing that parents. I mean, the majority of parents
that I speak to are worried about their kid's device usage.
They're worried about what they're taking photos of or what
they're accessing on their phones. But they're also kind of
the kids become what's the word. They become fairly passive.
They become pretty easy to deal with. You put a
(13:12):
screen in front of their face, and all of a sudden,
things are calm, things are quiet. Yeah, everything's taken care of.
And when, like you said, when parents are facing the
precious that they're already facing, sometimes that feels good. Again, not
to bag up parents. I do it myself from time
to time because I just need a break. Every now
and again. I want to lay on the bed and read.
Well again, I'm old school. I want to lay on
the bed and read a book, and the kids more
(13:33):
interested in watching something on Disney Plus. Let me ask
you this, Let's talk about device management. You've developed a
phone that is literally about device management to overcome many
of the challenges that today's apps, platforms, and hardware the
phones themselves put into our children's way. That is not
always in their best interests. Tell us this is your
(13:56):
opportunity for like a one and a half two minute
add about your GM phone. What did you develop it?
Why is it different? Because this is the thing that
parents need to, I guess, get their head around in
order to keep their kids safe.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Yeah. I looked at the market and I sort of
took twenty years of understanding and engaging with technology, and
I was quite aghast at what was out there, and
I found that solutions that sort of worked were quite
expensive from a point of view. There was some commercial
solutions out there that you pay five ten dollars a
(14:29):
month and you could have this, and I thought that
was a bit expensive for a service, and I sort
of thought, well, I don't want something that is going
to involve parents having to make big financial commitments to
this area. It should just be something that is just
you know, below this age, you get this, it's cost effective,
you don't have to pay a lot of money for it,
and then you know that you've got control of what
(14:51):
your kids have seen. So that's the first thing. The
second thing was that I went, well, what do kids need? Well,
at the heart of everything was connectivity. Parents want to
be connected to their kids, and the kids want to
be connected to their parents and then also connected to
their friends as well. How do you manage that? Well,
I thought, well, you just got to give parents a
very simple platform that they can remotely turn things on
(15:13):
and turn things off. Trap kids manage who's calling them
and texting them, and who they are calling and texting,
and it's just got to be really simple for the
parent to use. And we thought if we start with
that and then we sit back and listen, then we're
going to have parents start to tell us well, we
like that, but we want that to do this as well.
(15:33):
Oh and by the way, I found that when I
did this, it didn't do what I wanted to I
wanted to do this. Can you change that? And if
you start listening to them and start tweaking it from there,
you're going to get it. You're going to have the
parents having something they want, the kids have something they want,
they have the connectivity they can you can allow them
games and you can. I mean one parent came to
us and said, yeah, my kid uses your phone as
(15:55):
the screen for displaying what he's drone is seeing as
he's flying it around the backyard. I thought, great, So
here's the technology. The kid wants a drone, the screen
needs to be part of the drone experience, but the
parent is able to manage that bit better because they're
using our phone as that screen. Awesome. So we're enabling
the technology, but we're not allowing the technology to have
(16:18):
unfettered access to everything else. It's just the drone experience
that the kids they would get. And then I thought
about where they're going next. We'll parents want to makesh
kids have got money, So we put an NFC chip
onto the phone so you can tap and pay with
your bank app and that kind of thing. There's different
apps around. Spriggy, for example, has an app you can
(16:38):
put on for pocket money and stuff, and you can
use the tap and pay on that to tap and
pay with the phone. And you were just thought, you know,
no camera. I thought, God, if I see another fourteen
year old or twelve year old taken selfies with their
kids and filming each other doing stupid stuff, Well, if
(16:59):
I take the or away, they can't do that. They
can do the stupid stuff once they get a bit older.
And that's and that was and then the other thing
we thought about was, Okay, that's the extra handset. Just
we thought, well, we've got to make this and make
it available to everyone worldwide. It's not just an Australian thing.
This is a global problem. So we have to make
it available in all the big developed countries, and then
(17:19):
we have to go with further than that. So we're
selling in the UK, Europe, USA, Australia. We get people
from outside of those countries buying from the online marketplaces
that are selling them in those countries like the Middle East,
for example, we sell a lot of phones out of
Europe into the Middle East, and then this year and
next year we'll go even further places like India and
(17:41):
Mexico and those kinds of places where there's a lot
of kids, and there's when you actually look at the
issues around parents and kids and looking at the wrong
content and all that kind of those issues are in
those countries, and in my opinion, just because you're not
living in a wealthy country, it doesn't mean that your
kids should have access to the wrong kind of content
(18:03):
if you choose them not to. So we're making sure
GMI is available as soon as we can in those
countries too.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Okay, so you've got a phone that doesn't have a camera,
it has access to apps out of the Google Play Store,
but those are all going to be monitored via the
app on the parent's phone to make sure that they've
got access to the stuff that's okay, and they don't
have access to the stuff that parents are judging to
be not satisfactory. And their phone is essentially controlled from
the parents app on their phone. Am I getting that right?
Speaker 2 (18:30):
Correct? Correct? And the other thing is when you deep
dive into all these parental controls on all these other platforms,
Like Apple's got a really good one with the screen
screen time, but you've got to have an Apple iPhone
or iPad to manage it, right.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
So, yeah, and the kids still do get around.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
It, they still get around it. And then with the
Android system, guess what if you're running the family Link
system at the age of thirteen, yes, singing a happy
birthday to your kid, and this happened in our family,
you get this a little lord that says Family Link
has been discontinued on this device. You know a second,
I didn't want that to happen. No, at thirteen, the
kid could turn family Link off. So with our system,
(19:08):
you canna have an iPhone. You're gonna have an Android
as a parent, and there's no auto age conclusion to
the service. You as the parent, decide when it's turned off.
You can have a running till they're sixteen or seventeen
if you choose to. It's really acute. And in the
United States, we've got families over there who have been
testing our advice. Is one of them. The kid has
got the kid's got massive anxiety issues and the mummy
(19:32):
Mulmyn said, she's just gone off to college. She would
never have gone to college if it wasn't for your
phone and all of micro steps that she took in
leaving the house with your phone, knowing that we were
a phone call away and we could track her and
we could we could go pick her up if something happened.
But all of these life development skills that this kid
(19:53):
has learned, she did it with our phone in her pocket,
and the parents were able to remotely support that digital experience.
And now she's gone off to college and you're sitting
there thinking we helped enable that, right, Like, what would
that kid have done? With that kid and I'd have
got through college. Maybe they're going they would have gone,
(20:14):
maybe not as early as they would have wanted, but
we helped enable that and that's really cool.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
Yeah, it really is. We'll link to the GME phone
in our show notes to the people who want to
know more about the device can five links and check
that out, Charlie, Beyond just managing the device, which is
really what that conversation was, what do you think of
the key conversations that parents need to have with their
(20:40):
kids so that the kids can be safe online and
have the digital literacy that we're always banging on about.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
Well, and that's the challenge, right. We keep sticking more
devices in front of them, like laptops for schools and
all these kinds of things, and then at the same
time we're saying, oh, yeah, keep using these devices. By
by the way, there's a lot of danger in them.
If you, I mean, if you're a ten year obviousitting
and they go, well, hang on a second, is it's
dangerous or should I be using it? I think at
the end of the day, what we want parents to
(21:08):
do is to use some kind of parental control, like
using our phone or not somebody else's phone or an
Apple or good or whatever. Use it and understand it
as best as you can do, not ever let them
have unfettered access to the Internet on any device at
all ever, Right, that's the first thing. Second to that,
(21:29):
you've got to sit down and make the time to
talk to them about this kind of stuff. You've got
to get your kids to a position where they can
come and talk to you, good or bad about what's
going on in their digital life, and they have that
level of trust where they can come and talk to
you in the same way as anything else bad or
good that's happening in their life. They can sit there
and talk to you about this as well, because you
(21:52):
will learn from those conversations what they're interested in in,
what they're doing, and what you're comfortable with and what
you're not comfortable with. Things that get through those cracks
that you have put in place, you will learn about it.
You'll also learn what other kids and other parents are
doing in this space. Some of it that I learned
about absolutely horrifies me, and other bits that I learn
(22:16):
about these are through my own family connections and my
own children's experiences. I'm really pleased to hear parents out
there are taking initiative and making these hard decisions, but
you will learn what they are the catalyst for us,
for Chela and I was probably six nine months ago.
Our sixteen year old we're talking about parental controls and
(22:39):
not letting our eleven year old and thirteen year old
do certain things. And the sixteen year old this was
in the car. Family five are in the car. Sixteen
year old turns the eleven and twelve and the thirteen
year old who are complaining about the parental controls and
not being allowed to access this, and she said, look,
it's really annoying what dad's job is. But you get
to my age and you look back on when I
(23:02):
was at your age and you actually think, yeah, there's
a lot of merit in what mum and dad was saying,
and I'm better off for it.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
Was yeah, voice of experience, love it, sixteen year old.
My olders took a little bit longer to get there,
but it's pretty it's pretty reassuring, it's pretty nice when
it happens. All right, Charlie, I'd like to do a
lightning round with your. Lightning rounds are fun, very very
short answers, just quick questions, and feel free to fire
anything at me as well. I'm going to give away
my answer to the first one. First The very first
(23:31):
ever mobile phone that I owned was an NEC Fire
though I don't know if you remember that phone. It
was a tiny, little brick phone. What was your first
ever mobile phone?
Speaker 2 (23:42):
Nokier Thirshy something I don't even remember.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
It sounds like it was a precursor of the Noocky
fifty one to ten brick that everyone laughs about.
Speaker 2 (23:51):
Yeah, it was. It was very very early, very early.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
What's the longest you've ever gone without checking your phone?
Speaker 2 (23:58):
I'd put my phone away. When I'm not wanting to
be around my phone, I put it away. I have
a box, so I'd say six hours probably. When I
don't want my phone to interrupt me, I'll put it
in a box with the other kids phones and we
leave it there. What's hours?
Speaker 1 (24:15):
What's the most embarrassing tech failed that you've had while
you're doing a live TV segment? Has anything just gone
the bottom fallen out on Telly?
Speaker 2 (24:25):
Yes? The worst one. We were doing a robot lawnmower
and we set this thing up in the studio at
the Today Show and it was just mowing this synthetic
grass area, and we'd set it all up the way
we were told to set it up, but the robot
lawnmer kept wanting to run out of the pen that
we'd set up. And I'm talking with Ben Fordham and
(24:47):
talking about this robot lawnmower and it's running towards his
foot and it would have run over his foot had
he not stomped on the emergency stop button. And this
is all on live TV, and I was looking at it,
just going I almost I almost took Ben's foot today.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
Yeah, yeah, probably not going to sell so many of
those robot lawnmllers if that had to happen.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
They're much better today than they were ten years ago.
I'll leave it at that.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
What app would you permanently delete from existence if you could?
Speaker 2 (25:18):
TikTok? Absolutely no question of that. I would get rid
of TikTok so fast. I would burn the server farm
down forever if I had the choice. I think that
app is the worst app for so many reasons, across
so many different areas of analysis and discussion, from privacy settings,
(25:44):
from the general happiness of people who use it and
how it can go wrong for them. It is just
it is. So We're in the United States where they
just last couple of weeks and they shut TikTok off
for a day old. Yeah, yeah, well that's it. My
sixteen year old who begrudgingly she uses it and I
(26:05):
don't want it to but she's sixteen so she can
use it. She says to me, Dad, I've got an
Australian TikTok account, but I'm off I've been turned off
when Yeah, so you know that TikTok knows exactly where
in the world you are at any one time, don't you.
And she was just like right, and I was like, yeah,
well I know your location, that's not all I know
about you. That's one example. That's why TikTok's not working now.
(26:27):
So that's it. That's the probably too long an answer
for what you're looking for. But I would permanently get
rid of TikTok.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:35):
For me.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
The biggest concern about TikTok, and that's the one that
I would get rid of as well, is the socio
political ramifications of having this thing. So if the CCP
wants something to happen, they just escalated into the algorithm
and all of a sudden, everybody's on that side because
there's so much material. It's just it's a propaganda machine.
Designed by the CCP for China's ends. If China decides
that they want to invade Taiwan, I would imagine that
(26:56):
they would start to put a whole lot of propaganda
out on TikTok, and when the young generation is flooded
with it, they start to believe it. I just think
it's a devastating and dangerous app. From a socio political perspective.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
TikTok is not good for so many different reasons, and
that's one of them.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
Yeah, it's a lightning red And I know this is
a parenting podcast, not a political podcast. But if they
can do that when it comes to the politics of
the world, global politics, it's no surprise that they can
do all sorts of things and do allow all sorts
all sorts of things when it comes to our young
people and their well being or lack thereof. Last one
for you in the lightning round, before we get back
to a couple more serious questions and wrap things up, Charlie,
(27:36):
if you could use only We're going to go in
the other direction now. If you could use only one
app for the rest of your life, what would it be?
What is your favorite app?
Speaker 2 (27:43):
The one that I use all the time is maps.
I use maps all the time, and I use it
to get places faster, and I use it to get
places on public transport because I love public transport. And
I use it for learning about businesses and little small
businesses that I can try and give business to, like
(28:05):
cafes and restaurants and all those kinds of things. And
I use it for exploring the world, Like I'll be
sitting on a bus and I'll be like, going, where's
a good place north of Sydney that's got a beautiful
beach that allows me to camp in the woods nearby?
And all that maps Google Maps.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
You know what I hadn't thought about the incredible amount
of time that I use maps for. I'm in the
process sometime this month. I'm supposed to get my new phone,
the light Phone three, because I'm really trying to reduce
my reliance on technology. But one of the essential things
that it had to have was access to maps. If
I can't get maps, then a phone is useless to me.
(28:43):
So I hear what you're saying there, Okay, last couple
of questions for you, looking ahead, let's say five years,
maybe even ten years, what challenges do you think parents
are going to be facing with tech that we might
not be considering today, or would you say that it's
just going to be more of the same.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
I think the ramifications of the poor decisions that we've
been making and the poor allowances that we've been making
are going to be much more present, and that is
the impact of these products on our kids is going
(29:21):
to be much more present. So the fifteen year olds
will be twenty and twenty five, for example, five teen
years we're going to really really see what those impacts are.
I don't think we've really got an understanding of what
they are yet. People like yourself obviously much more across
what the likelihoods of those things are going to be
than I am. That's the first thing I think. I
(29:42):
actually do think the world is getting to the point
where we're turning around to tech as parents and saying
we'll make the decisions here, not you. And you know,
we've seen Norway bring in these laws. They haven't enacted
them yet about social media. Australia second, we haven't enacted
them yet, but they're there. I think we're going to
(30:02):
see country after country after country dropping those similar kinds
of rules on their population. And I think as a
group of people, we will be turning to big tech
and saying, look, mate, we will make the decisions. Thank you.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to upload every
single photo I've ever taken and tell me who's in
(30:23):
them and who I should connect them with and all this.
Thank you for all of these services. But I'm going
to start making a few more decisions around what's right
for me. And I'll give you one example. Right, So,
for people who have who look at their screens too often,
the hardest bit of pulling your screen away from your
face is immediately when you do it. But I guarantee
(30:46):
you in the hours and days leading from that point
of reducing your screen time, you will feel better. You'll
feel better, and parents should be done doing this, and
kids should be doing this, and everyone in the everyone
in the community should be doing it because you will
feel better and you will have, in my view, a
(31:08):
happier life from doing it.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
Yeah, well, said Charlie. Let's wrap this up. If there
was just one thing something we would really concentrate on
in the Family's podcast is as much as there's so
much information out there, we can have a nice lengthy
conversation like this and explore and unpack and play with ideas,
but sometimes it's nice to distill it down to just
the one thing. If there was just the one thing,
(31:32):
the most valuable piece of advice that you could give
to parents who are struggling with their kids in tech.
Maybe it's something that a parent has said to you,
maybe it's your own advice. What would that one thing
be to give them some hope, some reassurance, or some
direction as they grapple with the never ending creep of
tech into our families lives.
Speaker 2 (31:54):
I think the thing is as hard as this is
for you as the parent, just remember it's even harder
for the kid who's going through it, because this desire
to be using all this technology and apps and services
is part of them wanting to part of them going
through that transition of engagement and positive responses from their
(32:20):
parents to engagement positive responses from their peers. It's right,
So they're going through that transition. This is bundled in
with that right, and it makes it really hard for
them to do things that are different from what everybody
else is doing. And I think you when you start
with that understanding, everything that flows on from there will
(32:43):
allow you to have the humility and the positivity towards
working with them versus sitting there and telling them you
know that what they're doing is like a bad thing,
and that right sort of instead of scolding them, you're
working with them. You're trying to work and engage with
(33:04):
them and support them. And the more you do that
with them, the better you will be and the better
that they will be and when you come out of it,
because it's only a team thing. Really, it is only
a team thing in the level of concentration that we've had.
By the time they get to the end of high
school and into UNI or not UNI or whatever, that
so many of them drop off this. And I can
have another conversation with you about why the tech companies
(33:26):
are scared stiff of these laws of no social media
to under sixteens, for example, because they know they know
as soon as they miss the engagement at that age,
they're not getting them at a later age, and that's
a loss of income. But getting through this stage with
them and working with them, you will be happier and
so will they. But by doing it collaboratively and positively
(33:48):
with them, you'll be better off for it, and you
will get through it.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
Really appreciate your time, Charlie. Charlie Brown has built a
career around technology and its impact on families. He's worked
with Channel nine and now he runs GME Phones. He's
developed GME phones we'll linked to them in the show notes,
aiming to balance children's access to technology with parental peace
of mind. Charlie, wish you all the best with the phones,
(34:17):
and thanks so much of the conversation.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
Great to talk to you justin. Look forward to talking
to you again mate, and appreciate you having me on
the podcast.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
Pretty sober in conversation and a lot to think about.
Hopefully it's been helpful for you and the decisions that
you're making around tech and your family. The Happy Families
podcast produced by Justin Rouland from Bridge Media. If you
would like more information about the stuff we've talked about,
check the show notes and visit Happyfamilies dot com dot au.
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