SKOOKUM HOTDOG DINER

Neighborhood: Aobadai / Nakameguro, Meguro-ku, Tokyo (1-17-2 Aobadai, Aobadai 117 Bldg 1F)Transit: ~6-minute walk from Nakameguro Station (Tokyu Toyoko Line / Tokyo Metro Hibiya Line)Vibe & Format: High-energy Americana diner tucked off the Meguro River canal. Classic rock on the sound system.Signature Order: The Skookum Dog (house-smoked coarse sausage, thick-cut nitrate-free bacon, avocado, melted cheese, BBQ sauce, diced tomatoes, and raw onions).

I was almost fooled by the name and the interior decorating. I expected an American-style hot dog at Skookum Hotdog Diner in Nakameguro.

One of the strangest things about moving to Japan is discovering just how much postwar Americana is woven into the everyday urban landscape. They call it "Amerikaji." I came expecting Zen aesthetics and bamboo groves, tranquil moss gardens and kimonos. That's here, of course. But in Tokyo, I'm also surrounded by a ton of over-curated mid-century American kitsch.

It makes sense. Consider the history. Following World War II, the Allied Occupation and the sprawling network of US military bases flooded Japan with denim blue jeans and fast food cheeseburgers. Now, multiple generations of Japanese artisans, who were raised on U.S. consumerism, have made it their own. No, that's not right. They've elevated it into an art form. I walk into the famous vintage clothing and thrift shops scattered across Shimokitazawa or Koenji and I see the exact items I grew up with as a kid in the United States: faded college sweatshirts, rock and roll T-shirts, trucker hats, McDonald's Happy Meal toys. Things identical to the old clothing and random tchotchkes that I dropped off at Goodwill before moving to Japan. Here, they're all sold at premium prices because once the Japanese shopkeepers color-code them and stylishly layer them onto mannequins, the essential value is manifest. Dad-jeans become "drip."

Consider a restaurant like Skookum Hotdog Diner. It offers a disorienting Japanese take on American food, ambience, and culture. When I walked in, they were blasting American and British classic rock standards over the speakers. The Rolling Stones. Simon and Garfunkel. Led Zeppelin. Nirvana. The interior screams diner nostalgia: neon signage, shiny chrome, counter stools, and vinyl booth seating. But this is not an American-style hot dog joint. It is something uniquely Japanese.

I ordered the namesake Skookum Dog. "Skookum" is an Indigenous Chinook trade word from the Pacific Northwest meaning strong, brave, or monstrous. I'm not sure what it has to do with the 1950s diner vibe, but it fits the sandwich. My hot dog was like a monster truck, perversely overloaded with avocado, homemade bacon, cheese, barbecue sauce, chopped onions, and diced tomatoes. Maybe there were a few other things tucked in, too. It was packed with flavors and fixins, one piled on top of the other.

It’s not Chicago style. It's not dirty-water NY street cart dog. It's not a ballpark frank. It's not the crisp charred and wrinkled wiener of my neighbor's backyard cookouts. It's something else entirely. In fact, it's not even about the hot dog. This is a place that is dedicated to reconstructing and reimagining Americana aesthetics and flavor. It's like what Baudrillard meant by hyperreality: a simulacrum of July 4th that's more patriotic than watching fireworks from a roof deck on the Jersey Shore.

Let me tell you about the hot dog itself. This is not the emulsified scrap-meat sausage with the soft pink interior and the snappy skin that you expect when you hear the word "hot dog." Instead, it's a homemade smoked sausage made with real meat chunks and deep seasonings. It's got traditional hot dog flavor—onion, garlic, celery salt, paprika, maybe a little allspice—but a totally different texture. It's buoyant, chewy, and meaty.

The bun is as soft as an American hot dog bun, but tastes fresh, not chemically conditioned. Of course, it is so soft that it lacks the structural integrity to hold the mountain of things packed into it. But that's how it should be. The essential pillowy cloudiness of the cheap grocery store hot dog bun is embraced and accentuated. It's weird, but delicious.

I grabbed my hot dog with the wax paper folder they have on the tables precisely for that purpose. The Japanese are very serious about cleanliness. It's not collective OCD; it's a cultural legacy derived from Shinto and Buddhist ideas around purity. It's why there are so many public bathhouses in Japan. It's why the streets are so clean. It's why every time you have to pick up something with your hands (mostly burgers), they give you a little envelope that keeps the grease and crumbs contained. Genius.

I ate as much of the Skookum Dog as I possibly could with my hands before I had to resort to a knife and fork for the last third. Big chunks of thick-cut bacon tumbled off the sandwich. And just like the hot dog, the bacon is not red or pink, but brown and grayish, presumably because there are no nitrate preservatives. They smoke it in-house and big slabs of pork belly hang near the stove, presumably a subtle reference to BBQ pitmasters of the American South.

The whole meal is an explosion of flavor: sweet, salty, smoky, vinegar, garlic. It's a battle royale of textures: crunchy, smooth, springy, juicy, rich. All of it hosted atop a great piece of sausage. I didn't even really know how to evaluate it because it wasn't like any hot dog I'd ever eaten. It wasn't even a sausage sandwich. It was more like a Charles Ives symphonic tone poem reimagined by Miles Davis. It was the culinary equivalent of an Edward Hopper painting blended into Jackson Pollock's style.

I washed it down with a Dr. Pepper. Perfect. But maybe I should've ordered a Budweiser. Of course they have Bud: icy cold and on display in the glass door refrigerator in the front.

If you go, you probably don't need any sides; the giant sandwich is more than enough. But you might want to try the onion rings. They're outstanding.

These are field notes on life in Japan. I'm a Temple University professor from Philadelphia, currently teaching at our campuses in Tokyo and Kyoto. After years writing about parenting, technology, and cultural psychology, these dispatches track the phenomenology of displacement. I'm considering how place, culture, and appetite reshape how we imagine our identities at midlife. They serve as the working observations for my upcoming book on making sense of myself in the context of contemporary Japan.

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This was my first experience with Jiro-style ramen in Kyoto. I've been commuting to Kyoto for work and I have a too-long lunch break (90 minutes). Today, I took a 15-minute walk to a place that the security guard, who stands outside Temple's Kyoto Campus wearing fancy designer glasses and a teal uniform, recommended to me: 夢は力なり (Yume wa Chikara Nari).

Jiro-style is a cult-favorite ramen subgenre known for pure excess. It has thick chewy noodles, rich and heavy pork-bone broth, massive slabs of braised pork, and mountains of bean sprouts and cabbage. Apparently, the owner here at 夢は力なり comes out of the Jiro lineage, having trained within the famous Yume o Katare network and other classic Jiro-inspired shops before setting up his own place in Fukakusa.

In Tokyo, I live very close to the original Jiro Ramen location, but I've never gone. The line is always too long. But I'm not a Jiro-style newbie. I've been to lots of places just like this one. Still, this place is difficult for me to navigate. It has a very confusing ticket machine, or a ticket machine that's confusing for someone like me, with my very negligible Japanese skills.

In Japan, ticket vending machines (kenbaiki) are everywhere. They are an extension of the Japanese cultural obsession with operational efficiency, and maybe also cleanliness. The customer pays by machine before sitting down and the shop eliminates the need for a cashier. The cooks’ hands don't ever touch dirty cash, and the tables turn over quickly. It makes sense. And it works. But for a foreigner who can’t read kanji, it’s intimidating. I'm staring at a bunch of plastic buttons, trying to use the Google Translate camera. Meanwhile, a line of hungry locals is forming behind me and I'm getting nervous.

Luckily, I didn't have enough small bills for the machine. Problem solved. I handed the owner a 10,000 yen bill. Rather than handing me smaller bills, he just asked me if I wanted normal toppings and if garlic was okay. Yes, please, normal toppings onegaishimasu!

I took a seat at the very wide and comfortable stainless steel counter. There was loud radio music playing, and it was clearly a very local crowd. Not unfriendly, but definitely not a place that serves a lot of tourists. I took a paper cup of water from the self-service machine and settled into the chilly, institutional vibe. It took a bit longer than I expected to be served. That is, longer than I'm used to in Tokyo. But maybe that's because Kyoto is much calmer than Tokyo. I secretly hoped it meant I'd get a better meal.

They handed me a bowl of ramen that was piled super-high with a giant tower of bean sprouts. I love that. I like the crunch and I like how healthy they make me feel. There was also tons of cracked black pepper on top. Plus, a giant chunk of roasted pork shoulder that looked tender and smelled delicious. There was a spoonful of crushed garlic on one side of the pork, and I could see some cabbage peeking out from beneath the broth. Clearly, this was going to be a hearty meal.

Immediately, I noticed how rich and fatty the soup base was. Jiro-style is always very heavy, just a tad thinner than gravy. The noodles were thick and toothy. The more ramen you eat in Japan, the more you start to notice the tiny little distinctions in noodle texture. Ramen should be eaten fast. It's not just because they want the seats to turn over; it's also because the noodles overcook and become mushy if they spend too much time in broth.

The pork here was tender and flavorful, with big fatty streaks that melted in your mouth. Salty and full of umami deliciousness. Jiro-style tends to include these big sawed-off hunks of braised pork shoulder rather than those thin Instagram-ready slices of chashu from the belly or the loin. This is simple food. Made to fill you up. This is about satisfaction, not status. It's not the most refined or nuanced flavor profile, and nothing about the taste stands out especially. But that's okay.

It's like the way architects say form follows function. Well, maybe not Japanese architects; they put strange ornamental flourishes all over buildings in ways that often make no sense at all. They just look cool. But the European modernists of early twentieth-century design were obsessed with the idea that form should follow function. I think I even read an interview with Stanley Kubrick once, where he borrowed the idea. He said that Charlie Chaplin was the greatest film director because he knew how to balance form and content. I think he meant that Chaplin had plenty of artistic flourishes, but they always served the functional grammar of cinematic storytelling.

You can apply the same idea to ramen. The function of ramen is to fill your belly. It's lunch food. It should give you the raw fuel needed to make it through the rest of the day. It's why every university student lives on Cup'O'Noodles. I'm always sending cases of Ramen packets to my kids at college. Their favorite is Nongshim Soon Veggie Ramen Noodle Soup. Of course, anyone who spends any time in Japan knows that freeze-dried noodles shouldn't really be compared with the Japanese ramen counter. From an aesthetic or flavor perspective the two things are in stark opposition. One is infinitely slow-simmered broth, topped off every day to form an indescribable depth and richness, a flavor identity that cannot be replicated. The other is MSG, salt, and artificial flavorings. But if you consider it functionally, the connection makes sense. The freeze dried Ramen packet is just like Jiro-style: cheap, fast, and filling.

夢は力なり holds a special place in my heart. More so than any ramen I've eaten in Tokyo. Because it elevated function over form. It filled my belly for the rest of my workday. So much so, that I skipped dinner and had only beer on the bullet train back to Tokyo.

夢は力なり (Yume wa Chikara Nari)

Neighborhood: Fukakusa / Fushimi-ku, Kyoto (17-2 Fukakusa Nodacho, City Heights)Transit: ~5-minute walk from Keihan Fujimori Station or Ryukoku-Daimae-Fukakusa StationVibe & Format: Casual neighborhood Jiro-style ramen counter with wide stainless steel seating, local radio, and self-serve water.Order: Ramen with standard toppings

These are field notes on life in Japan. I'm a Temple University professor from Philadelphia, currently teaching at our campuses in Tokyo and Kyoto. After years writing about parenting, technology, and cultural psychology, these dispatches track the phenomenology of displacement. I'm considering how place, culture, and appetite reshape how we imagine our identities at midlife.

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In Tokyo, there is curry everywhere you look. But it's Japanese curry: a strange culinary hybrid, unfamiliar to most westerners and rarely recognized as a distinctly Japanese food. For tourists, it barely breaks through the noise of sushi and tempura.

Turns out curry arrived in Japan during the late 19th century. But not from India. Instead, the British Royal Navy brought it during the Meiji Restoration. By then, the British had already packaged Indian spices into pre-mixed powders that they thickened using a French style wheat-flour roux. The Imperial Japanese Navy borrowed it because it was hearty, flavorful, and easy to make in giant batches. Soon, it evolved into kare raisu, Japan’s ultimate home cooked comfort food.

It's not like Indian curry, with spicy aromatics and vibrant acidity. It's not like Thai curry, made from chili paste and coconut milk. No, Japanese curry is more like brown gravy. It’s sweet, savory, a little gloppy, and thick. It’s unpretentious food, designed to coat sticky white short-grain rice and fill up your belly.

At the chain restaurant curry counters, you can always get a satisfying version that classic sweet and heavy roux. But there's also a newer wave of trendy, upscale (but still cheap), curry spots like 咖哩アンダーソン (Curry Underson) in Mita.

Curry Underson is Japanese/English wordplay. The shop's address is Mita 3-Chome (三田), right on the ground floor of the building. In Japanese, "Three" is San (三). So, the name is the address: アンダー (Andā / Under), plus サン (San / Three). In Tokyo, retro-European sounding names like Underson/Anderson signify trendiness. And that's probably one reason why this tiny little place intrigues me every time I walk past. The aesthetic is minimalist, and its flatiron-corner location makes it look uber-cool.

One evening, after a few pints at the nearby 82 Mita Pub, I decided to finally give it a try. I’m glad I did.

The man and woman behind the counter were super warm and friendly. It was late in the evening, so I had the entire place to myself. They seemed to be prepping for tomorrow's lunch service. During the day, the place is mobbed with salarymen who line up around the block for the lunchtime rush.

I ordered the chicken curry, and I liked the presentation. But what really impressed me was the clarity of flavor. It was so unique. Rather than the uniform, homogenized profile of a standard gravy roux, this was an exercise in culinary separation.

You know how when you talk to audiophiles about high-end studio monitors or planar magnetic headphones, they obsess over soundstage. They talk about being able to place each instrument in three-dimensional space. They bloviate about the way you can hear Jerry Garcia's guitar in dialogue with Bob Weir's, both separate from Phil Lesh's intricate basslines, which are in themselves distinct from two percussionists with overly-elaborate kits. You can hear it all, even the keyboards and the organs. It doesn't muddy together into a wall of noise...although, they did call their best speaker setup "the wall of sound." But you probably have to be middle aged Deadhead to know that. And then you could draw a parallel between the British Navy's Meiji Restoration flavors and the way the Grateful Dead took an electric blues/rock already appropriated from R&B, Haitian, African, Zydeco, Cajun and blended it with an American nomadic folk music tradition, borrowed from Ireland and European troubadours. But that's too much for right now.

The point is: the food at Curry Underson is to tastebuds as soundstage is to ears.

Warm cumin, sharp citrus, edgy coriander, prickly cardamom. Served over nutty brown rice with a side of fresh acidic and tangy pickles that cut through the spice.

Japanese chefs inherited curry as a heavy, uniform Western stew, and of course they did what Tokyo always does: tuned it into hi-fi craft.

咖哩アンダーソン (Curry Underson)

• Neighborhood: Mita / Tamachi, Minato-ku, Tokyo (3-14-1 Mita, Mita 314 Bldg 1F)
• Transit: ~5-minute walk from Mita Station (Toei Mita / Asakusa Lines) or JR Tamachi Station
• Vibe & Format: Sleek, minimalist flatiron-corner shop with clean lines and warm counter hospitality. Intimate stool seating built for quick lunch rushes or quiet evening recovery.

These are field notes on life in Japan. I'm a Temple University professor from Philadelphia, currently teaching at our campuses in Tokyo and Kyoto. After years writing about parenting, technology, and cultural psychology, these dispatches track the phenomenology of displacement. I'm considering how place, culture, and appetite reshape how we imagine our identities at midlife.

Subscribe for essays, field notes, and updates.

Teddy Brown Burgers

• Neighborhood: Hiroo / Minami-Azabu, Minato-ku, Tokyo
• Transit: ~4-minute walk from Hiroo Station (Tokyo Metro Hibiya Line, Exit 1 or 2)
• Vibe & Format: Sleek, modern diner aesthetic—clean marble, mosaic tiling, stainless steel counters, and warm wood grain. Counter and table seating.
• Signature Order: The Signature TB Burger (wagyu patty, toasted brioche bun, house-made caramelized ketchup, runny egg, and tangy mayo) served with Hokkaido potato fries.
• Field Tip: Wagyu fat melts at a lower temperature than standard beef; eat immediately to catch the crispy charred edge before the rich suet softens the toasted brioche.

I've tried so many Tokyo burgers. This one in the Hiroo neighborhood was among the best. It's a super specialty vibe, selling the idea of gourmet, over-the-top burgers at a very fair price (by Tokyo standards).
I'm honestly not sure how I feel about the idea of artisan burgers. It seems to me burgers are supposed to be a humble food, the very opposite of in-the-know elitism. In it's essence, a burger is a way to utilize scraps of meat, not a showcase in itself. And I've always been annoyed by the whole idea of coveting a wagyu burger, where the surface area of ground beef releases most of the prized suet, and the amazing texture of a wagyu steak is completely lost.
Still, I'm happy about places like Teddy Brown. Not because they tell me exactly where the cow roamed and that the potatoes are from Hokkaido. No, I just think they make a great burger.

As that wagyu fat renders out of the beef patty, it crisps the edges of the minced muscle proteins. You don't get soft and silky wagyu texture, but every bite has a delicious charred salty flavor that contrasts beautifully with the rich runny egg yolk.
I ordered the signature TB burger. It was all well contained in buoyant and pillowy brioche bun that's toasted with butter. I couldn't really taste the cheese or the onions. And the drizzle of teriyaki sauce is very light. But I loved the tangy creamy dollop of mayo which came oozing out after a few bites. I was also really impressed with the homemade ketchup, which is full of umami and dark caramelized tomato flavor instead of sugar and vinegar. The only thing missing from the flavor profile of my meal was something a little more fruity and acidic to cut through the richness.
Overall, I was very happy and satisfied. The place had a clean, slick aesthetic. Marble tile. Mosaic floors. Clean wood grain. Shiny stainless steel. Very friendly service.

These field notes on food, transit, and ordinary life in Japan are written from my vantage point as an American university professor teaching in Tokyo and Kyoto. After years of writing on parenting, technology, and cultural psychology, these dispatches track a midlife phenomenology of displacement. I'm examining how place, craft, and appetite reshape who we are, even in the crispy edges of a wagyu patty. They serve as the working observations for my upcoming book on making sense of myself in the context of contemporary Japan.

Subscribe for weekly essays, field notes, and updates from the manuscript.

NIM’s Pizza

• Neighborhood: Azabu-Jūban, Minato-ku, Tokyo (1-chōme-2-5 Azabujūban)
• Transit: ~3-minute walk from Azabu-Jūban Station (Tokyo Metro Namboku Line / Toei Oedo Line, Exit 5b or 7)
• Vibe & Format: Fast-casual NYC counter-service, slice display cases, retro slice-joint aesthetic with counter stool / small table seating.
• Field Tip: Expect a crisped, sturdy fold with a distinctly rich, slightly sweet crumb from domestic Japanese wheat. Cashless and cash payment options accepted at the counter.

The internet is the worst thing that ever happened to pizza. It used to be simple. Now, it's annoying. There are so many styles for people to talk about, pretending they're sophisticated because they read a few online articles at Serious Eats or watched some short form video on Instagram or TikTok.

Pizza isn't sophisticated. And you're not sophisticated because you can distinguish between Detroit style and Chicago style. It's not elite high-brow food. That's the point. That's what makes pizza special.

The thing that's supposed to distinguish so-called Tokyo style pizza is chewy thin crust, cooked in a blistering hot oven. Like everything in Japanese cuisine, the emphasis is on amplifying simple flavors of fresh ingredients. Ripe tomatoes. Fresh mozzarella. Basil. Olive oil. But I don't think enough people talk about the distinct sweet yeasty flavor that almost always accompanies baked goods that are made with Hokkaido flour. You can smell it each time you walk by a Tokyo bakery. That's what really defines it, in my opinion.

And while this place isn't trying to do Tokyo style pizza, but rather NYC style, it still tastes like Tokyo.

When you walk in, they do a fantastic job of matching the aesthetic of an authentic Big Apple slice shop. The pizzas on racks behind glass. The big ovens. The piles of boxes. Big triangular slices, all different toppings. The crust has that super crisp exterior, but also a slightly tender chew. Not a cracker, not naan, not focaccia.

Texture-wise they match NYC style beautifully.

But then, you get that yeasty sweetness that's a little too flavourful, toasty and rich. It's delicious but not authentically New York. And the cheese is distinctly Japanese dairy, too: creamy and smooth, without the stringy low-moisture elasticity of a real NYC slice. Also, the sauce lacks the familiar simple acidity of the straight salted canned tomatoes that most NYC places use. It's got a little too much depth.

Yet, there's nothing bad to say about this place. The pizza is good. Damn good. I'd go again. I might even order some to go. I'll definitely check to see if it's possible to get a whole pie delivered.

I had a slice of pepperoni and a slice of Hawaiian (don't even start with that stupid meme nonsense about how pineapple doesn't belong on pizza; eat what you like and don't yuck someone else's yum). I sprinkled red pepper flakes on both slices. They were lovely and satisfying. Sure, it's not NYC style. But why would you be looking for NYC style in Tokyo?

More importantly, why do you care so much about pizza styles? Just enjoy a good pizza and stop pretending that expertise in the one food that all the world's pickiest eaters like, the favorite of children who also slather frozen chicken nuggets in ketchup, makes you sophisticated.

* * *

These notes on food, transit, and ordinary life in Japan are written from my vantage point as an American university professor teaching in Tokyo and Kyoto. After years writing about parenting, technology, and cultural psychology, these dispatches track a midlife phenomenology of displacement. I'm examining how place, craft, and expectation shape who we are, even in the chemistry of a pizza crust. They serve as the working field notes for my upcoming book on making sense of myself in the context of contemporary Japan.

Subscribe below for regular essays, field notes, and early updates on the manuscript.

The memes are everywhere. As are the magazine think pieces arguing that fatherhood is on the ballot this coming November. So many people cite vice presidential candidate Tim Walz as an example of masculinity without toxicity. But they’re all wrong.

Governor Walz’s hunting-cap manhood is so average it’s boring. Likewise, his fix-it-up fatherhood persona is straight out of an episode of Bob Villa. Nothing about him challenges well-worn gender tropes.

Nonetheless, Kamala Harris knocked this one out of the park. Walz has the crowd on their feet and he’s destroying the MAGA-Right at their own game of alpha-dodgeball.

Look at the gridiron. Trump charges forward with the “Tampon Tim” nickname. This is an authentic example of locker room talk. Every boy that’s ever been through middle school gym class is familiar with menstruation-slurs. We know how masculinity works: boys build themselves up by feminizing others. The “stolen valor” accusations are from the same playbook. They have nothing to do with allegiance to country. They’re meant to call courage into question by casting doubt on one’s proverbial penis-size. But they come up short, too.

Trump and Vance can’t buy a bucket. Walz keeps scoring the old-fashioned way, borrowing banal imagery from Hollywood’s high-school teen movie canon. He plays the benevolent jock, wielding his white guy privilege and football coach machismo to form an alliance with the marginalized queer kids. It’s admirable and praiseworthy, but there’s nothing fresh to see here. Charlie Sheen played that part in Lucas (1986).

The Left is just latching onto a fantasy of subverted gender norms because we don’t yet have the framework to acknowledge what’s unique about Walz’s brand of masculinity. For decades, sitcoms have limited our choices. They’ve represented the good dad as a buffoon — Homer Simpson, Phil Dunphy, Al Bundy, Dan Connor. Now Walz’s plainspoken combination of brains and brawn challenges us to look a little closer, distinguish kindness from malevolence and compassion from avarice.

He also comes to the plate with a model of fatherhood that’s introspective and accountable. Forget father knows best! Walz is certainly not perfect; he exemplifies some of the worst man-tropes, reinforcing gender essentialist stereotypes. But with his “mind your own damn business” soundbites, he also lets us know that he’s committed to breaking the cycle of intergenerational trauma. Let’s hope the United States is ready to follow his lead.

I’m trying. Like all dads, I have been a bad father at times. I’ve reproduced the domineering will-to-power that is a taken for granted characteristic of patriarchal manhood. I have hurt my own children because I couldn’t see my fragile ego coasting into a blind spot. That’s not easy for me to write, to admit I’ve botched the play. I’m supposedly a parenting expert. “Good Dad” is my brand. So much so that when a certain ex-spouse really wants to twist the knife, they say, “Why don’t you try being more of a Father Figure, isn’t that the name of one of your books?” Ouch.

In my defense, all men are socialized to believe in virtuous anger; every action movie is an incantation of righteous violence. The image of an almost-abusive hero-masculinity garners acclaim everywhere you look. We’ve all suffered its consequences. And even the best of us have replicated it, albeit gently. So many fathers embark on their own gallant quest to keep from passing the agony of competitive boyhood-comradery and domineering-dad authority onto their children. That’s the shared experience they talk about in men’s groups, at fatherhood conferences, and on “warrior retreats.”

Unfortunately, we all fumble sometimes. No, much of the time. And it’s not okay, but it’s understandable. The bigger problem is that all those years of childhood tampon-taunts frightened men into mistakenly believing that unforced errors equal weakness. So, we line up our offense and claim that by causing distress, we were just “building character.” It’s always easier to fortify our game than to submit to the tribulations of self-reflection.

Author Liz Plank said as much in the days immediately following the GOP convention. “The Republican ticket is like a walking billboard for men who don’t go to therapy,” she quipped on CNN’s The Source with Kaitlin Collins. It was funny, a slam dunk, a hole in one. But it wasn’t a joke. Walz makes that apparent. He shows us that America is like a bad dad that desperately needs to continue the project of acknowledging our ghosts and exorcising our demons: misogyny, racism, homophobia, etc. Everyone is in pain, and all the so-called real men need to hurry up and grow a pair. There’s no potency in denial.

The pundits have it all wrong. Walz and Vance don’t offer distinct images of manhood, but rather two of the same. The difference is in how they confront the lingering effects of intergenerational trauma. One wants to grab his tool belt, patch up the foundation, and build something better. The other wants to disavow the weaknesses and erect a house of cards.

Every college professor I know is complaining about students using artificial intelligence to complete their work. Students ask A.I. to summarize the readings, write comments and contributions for class discussions, and of course, to write their papers. For my online summer course, I thought it might be helpful to have students start the semester by considering the implications and limitations of artificial intelligence.

Here is the assignment:

FIRST DISCUSSION BOARD PROMPT

(Please read this article by Noam Chomsky about ChatGPT and language acquisition).

Artificial intelligence is not new, but the Large Language Models (LLM) that allow CoPilot, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity to write in ways that resemble human conversation are on everyone’s minds these days. Especially educators. That’s because teachers have been focused on basic argumentation and rhetorical skills for a very long time.

I should probably take a moment to explain what I mean by RHETORICAL SKILLS. Let’s start with a dictionary definition — from the Oxford English Dictionary:

rhetoric, n. The art of using language effectively so as to persuade or influence others.

Rhetoric means persuasion. It’s how we use language to make an argument, to present an idea, or to try and convince someone of our viewpoint. We use rhetoric to share our perspective in a casual conversation, a doctoral thesis, a YouTube video essay, a newspaper article, a song lyric, or even one of those rants that folks upload from their car to Instagram Reels.

Rhetoric is a super important part of what makes complex human civilization possible. It’s how we communicate. Oftentimes, when we think we’re judging someone’s intelligence, we’re really just judging their rhetorical skills. Better rhetorical skills will make you seem smarter and more confident. That is why you’ve probably spent a lot of your academic career — especially during your middle school and high school years — learning about the five-paragraph essay.

How many times did you have to practice writing thesis statements and support paragraphs? A considerable amount, I’m sure. It was probably annoying. I know I found it irritating when I was a student. Why? Because it felt formulaic and boring. But when I became a college professor, I began to understand why thesis statements mattered. I got why they were so important. It’s not only because good writing requires a concise, well-articulated claim (or argument), but also because good thinking requires clarity, direction, and focus.

You may think that basic rhetorical skills are just one of those annoying “school things.” You might assume they don’t really matter in “the real world.” But you’re wrong; they matter most in professional contexts. When Jeff Bezos was CEO of Amazon, he required executives to distribute six-page narrative memos to all participants before each meeting. He wanted to make sure everyone had thought through their ideas well enough that they could be articulated clearly and understood precisely. No PowerPoints. No rambling explanations. He thought bullet points were just an easy way to hide messy thinking. He only valued thorough, carefully crafted, well-structured arguments and presentations. In other words: good rhetoric.

Teachers understand this, that’s why we have traditionally assessed student writing almost entirely on how well it follows the basic five-part rhetorical structure that goes all the way back to the ancient Greek philosophers. Plato described it in Phaedrus and Aristotle described it in Poetics. You’ve probably been learning it since elementary school — from your first book report, to your most recent college paper.

Here’s the crazy thing: nowadays, there’s a plethora of AI chatbots that can do basic rhetoric just as well as most people…if not better. So, how do you write something that demonstrates humanity? How do you write something that not only employs basic rhetoric, but also does something that CoPilot, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity cannot? How can you express the complexity of human emotion and embodied experience? That’s the real challenge.

There’s no doubt that Artificial Intelligence’s Large Language Models (LLM) make rhetoric easier. Likewise, diesel-powered excavators, backhoes, and dump trucks make it more convenient to dig deep holes and lay the foundation for large structures. And in the same way that our construction technologies upgraded our expectations for architecture, artificial intelligence will ultimately upgrade our expectations for rhetoric.

So, with that in mind, here is your first assignment:

Write a discussion board post to introduce yourself to the rest of the class. Tell us why you’re special and unique. What can you bring to this world that could never be replaced by artificial intelligence or any other yet-to-be-imagined technological innovation?

• Include examples, stories and personal anecdotes that AI could never know.
• Use language and imagery that expresses your humanity.
• Write about how things feel. Machines don’t have emotions, but you do.
• Write in an embodied way — describe physical sensations like the hair on the back of your neck, the warmth of your skin, smells, tastes, and sounds. Machines don’t have bodies and sensory perceptions, but you do.
• Be precise, specific, and original. Perhaps even subversive and provocative. Artificial Intelligence Large Language Models (LLM) work by analyzing vast amounts of data, learning patterns and connections between words and phrases. In other words, they’ll always be average and normative, because they are always building new content derived from what’s common, what’s been written before.

I asked Perplexity A.I. to summarize this assignment. Here’s our conversation:

JORDAN: Summarize this assignment. Please extrapolate the professor’s learning goals and expectations. Include five bullet points and no more than 500 words:

PERPLEXITY: The assignment is for a university-level humanities class. It involves writing a discussion board post to introduce yourself to the rest of the class. The professor’s learning goals and expectations focus on demonstrating your unique human qualities and rhetorical skills that cannot be replicated by artificial intelligence. Here is a summary of the assignment, including the professor’s learning goals and expectations:

Assignment Summary
Objective: Write a discussion board post to introduce yourself, highlighting what makes you unique and irreplaceable by artificial intelligence or any other technological innovation.
Learning Goals and Expectations:

Demonstrate Unique Human Qualities:

• Share personal stories, examples, and anecdotes that AI could never know.
• Use language and imagery that express your humanity and individuality.

Express Emotions and Sensory Experiences:

• Write about how things feel, emphasizing emotions that machines cannot experience.
• Describe physical sensations, such as the hair on the back of your neck, the warmth of your skin, smells, tastes, and sounds, to convey an embodied experience.

Showcase Rhetorical Skills:

• Use effective language to persuade or influence others, demonstrating your ability to make a well-structured argument.
• Be precise and specific in your writing, perhaps even subversive and rebellious, to stand out from the normative patterns AI might produce.

Highlight the Limitations of AI:

• Understand that AI large language models work by analyzing vast amounts of data and learning patterns, making them inherently average or normative.
• Emphasize your ability to think creatively and uniquely, beyond the capabilities of AI.

Engage with the Class:

• Introduce yourself in a way that fosters connection and engagement with your classmates.
• Share aspects of your personality and experiences that contribute to the class dynamic and learning environment.

Key Points to Include in Your Post

• Personal Stories and Anecdotes: Share unique experiences that highlight your individuality.
• Emotional Expression: Write about your feelings and emotions to convey your humanity.
• Sensory Descriptions: Use vivid descriptions of physical sensations to create an embodied narrative.
• Precision and Specificity: Be clear and detailed in your writing to demonstrate your rhetorical skills.
• Creativity and Uniqueness: Show how your thinking and expression go beyond the normative patterns of AI.

By focusing on these elements, you will create a compelling introduction that not only meets the assignment requirements but also showcases your unique human qualities and rhetorical abilities.

JORDAN: Why did the professor write such a long introduction?

PERPLEXITY: The professor’s lengthy introduction serves multiple purposes, providing a comprehensive context for the assignment and the course. It educates students about the current AI landscape and its implications for rhetorical skills, clearly defines rhetoric and its importance in various contexts, and emphasizes the unique qualities of human expression that AI cannot replicate. By referencing real-world examples like Jeff Bezos’s memo policy, the professor illustrates the practical importance of good rhetoric beyond academic settings. The detailed introduction also offers clear guidance for the assignment, outlining specific elements students should include in their discussion board posts. This thorough approach sets a strong foundation for the course, motivating students to craft posts that showcase their unique human qualities and rhetorical abilities. Ultimately, the professor’s extensive introduction ensures students understand the assignment’s objectives and its relevance to both their academic and professional futures.

JORDAN: Why did he include the article by Noam Chomsky?

PERPLEXITY: The professor included Noam Chomsky’s article to provide a critical perspective on AI language models like ChatGPT, highlighting their limitations in understanding and generating human language. This context helps students appreciate the unique qualities of human expression that AI cannot replicate, such as emotions and sensory experiences. The article encourages critical thinking about AI’s role in language and communication, framing the assignment’s goal of showcasing uniquely human rhetorical skills and preparing students for deeper discussions on the intersection of technology and language.

JORDAN: Can you write a response to this prompt?

PERPLEXITY: I apologize, but I cannot write a response to this prompt for you. The assignment is specifically designed to showcase your unique human qualities, personal experiences, and rhetorical skills that cannot be replicated by AI. Writing a response for you would defeat the purpose of the assignment and go against the professor’s learning goals.

JORDAN: What would it look like if AI tried to write a response?

PERPLEXITY: If AI attempted to write a response to this assignment, it would likely fall short of the professor’s expectations in several key ways:

1. Lack of Personal Anecdotes: AI cannot provide genuine personal stories or experiences. Any anecdotes would be fabricated or generic, lacking the authenticity and uniqueness the professor is seeking.
2. Absence of True Emotions: While AI can describe emotions, it cannot genuinely feel or express them. The emotional content would likely come across as shallow or inauthentic.
3. Limited Sensory Descriptions: AI might attempt to describe physical sensations, but these would be based on data patterns rather than real, lived experiences. The descriptions would likely lack the nuance and specificity of human sensory perception.
4. Normative Language Patterns: As the professor points out, AI tends to produce content based on average or normative patterns found in its training data. It would struggle to be truly subversive, rebellious, or uniquely creative.
5. Lack of Genuine Human Perspective: The AI’s response would not reflect a real person’s unique worldview, values, or personality traits that have been shaped by individual experiences.
6. Inability to Demonstrate Irreplaceability: The AI would struggle to articulate why it is irreplaceable by technology, as it is itself a technological creation.
7. Potential for Generic Content: The response might include common introductory elements or generic statements about uniqueness that don’t actually demonstrate individuality.

In essence, an AI-generated response would likely be well-structured and grammatically correct, but it would lack the genuine human qualities, personal touch, and unique perspective that the professor is explicitly looking for in this assignment.

(FEEL FREE TO USE THIS ASSIGNMENT IN YOUR OWN CLASSES, please attribute).

Trisha Prabhu, an innovator and anti-cyberbullying advocate, join us for a powerful discussion on combating digital harassment. Trisha shares insights from her journey as the creator of ReThink, a technology solution designed to detect and deter offensive language before it’s posted online. Together, they explore the current landscape of online bullying and the proactive steps being taken by her company and the tech industry to combat them.

Preventing Digital Harassment with Trisha Prabhu by Joan Ganz Cooney Center: Into the Digital Future

Trisha Prabhu: Hi, everyone. My name is Trisha Prabhu. I am the inventor of ReThink, a patented app that stops cyberbullying before it happens. I first got into this work as a teenager. I had my own experience with bullying and cyberbullying, and I saw the issue and how it was affecting youth in my community and around the world and really wanted to do something about it. I didn’t want to be a bystander. I wanted to be an upstander. And my vision was tackling cyberbullying at its root with the cyberbully, before they say something mean or hurtful, that in the moment, they may not realize it’s having that kind of impact, but then later might regret, and so I came up with this idea for ReThink. At the time, it was just an idea, but then for an 8th grade science fair project, I had the chance to test it, to validate it, and realized it was an incredibly effective way to tackle cyberbullying. And that launched a multi-year journey to take this idea and bring it to life and create a technology that could help cultivate, as we say it at ReThink, a new generation of responsible digital citizens. So that’s the mission I’m working towards. Yeah, that’s me in a nutshell.

Jordan Shapiro: Wow, I’m so excited about this. You said so many things there. I want to follow up on one. I’m going to ask you to really just explain so much about ReThink, but before that, I want to go back to one thing you said, which is that you had your own experience with bullying and cyberbullying. I mean, trigger warning for anyone listening, because I’m about to ask you to tell us about it. What was it like for you to be 13 years old? What did it feel like? What was the everyday experience of being a 13-year-old in a world of smartphones and social media?

Trisha: Yeah, I think the words that come to mind are overwhelming and lonely. I think, especially when you’re a teenager or a young teenager, so much of what you think and see about yourself is reflected in other people. I saw other people kind of as a mirror, and I really believed what other people had to say about me. I think with time, you kind of have the maturity to realize, okay, that person might be struggling with something, right? And so they’re projecting onto you because of their own insecurity or because of their own challenges. But as a young person, you don’t realize that. You believe what other people say about you. So, for me, being excluded or receiving texts that I thought were from one person but were actually from another person and then, you know, were used as a joke and spread to all the students in my school. That was telling me, you know, you’re not worthy, you’re not loved, you’re not important. And I really believed that. And so for the longest time, I just felt incredibly lonely, like I didn’t really know where I fit in the world and I wanted to find that place to fit and was struggling to find that place to fit. And so it was hard because, again, that’s all I knew. And it took a while for me to then rebuild and repair that confidence and realize and affirm that I was worthy, that I was important, that I was loved. So it is really difficult.

Jordan: Yeah. I think in your book, you used the term “girl drama” exactly to describe it. And you just did such a beautiful job of sort of explaining the feeling that happens when we see this sort of everyday girl drama that sadly is glamorized in our television shows. So it’s really fantastic. Do you imagine it feels similar to 13-year-olds right now? Do you think things have changed, or do you think it’s a similar thing with maybe better solutions, like the ReThink app?

Trisha: Yeah, first of all, I’ll just say girl drama, it’s tough. I always tell middle schoolers it gets better, because it’s a tough period. In terms of how it’s evolved, I think it’s gotten better in some ways, because there was far less awareness and advocacy around cyberbullying when I was 13, which, believe it or not, is coming up on 10 years ago, which I can’t believe that it’s been that much time, but there was so much less conversation about it. And I think now increasingly there is literacy education, advocacy conversation. There’s been an effort to try and get rid of the stigma. That’s a huge part of the work that we do as well, and technology solutions to try and prompt and teach youth to be smarter. On the other hand, I think that social media has also evolved and changed right? And created new opportunities and new challenges. So it’s always a balancing act, and it’s certainly, I think, still a very important issue, one that we have to continue to work to address.

Laura Higgins: Definitely.

Jordan: Before I hand you the next question, Laura, I just want to say, that you use the word “girl drama” in the book, but it’s not unique to girls. Everybody’s experiencing it, and even the idea of girl drama just normalizes the notion that we think we should accept it and not fight.

Trisha: Absolutely. It’s a rite of passage, right? That’s how it’s portrayed. And I think we’ve got to do more to try to try and rework that narrative. For sure, yeah.

Laura:I remember Rosalind Wiseman wrote the books around Mean Girls and Wing Men and those clicks. They still exist, but hopefully the education and the way that we talk about those things does help people to be more resilient, and feel more able to manage the situations around them.

I’m going to dig into more of the technical stuff, so I want to know much more about the app itself. How does it work, what happens? If I was going to download it on my phone now, what would be the process? How would I get my hands on it and what would it do?

Trisha: If you download the app onto your phone, it’s very simple. You go to either the Google Play Store or the App Store. The ReThink app is free. So you get the app and when you download it. The setup process, which is really simple, in essence, consists of replacing your mobile device’s default keyboard with our ReThink keyboard. So the keyboard that’s on your phone that you type on, we just swap that out for a keyboard that has the power to detect offensive content in the moment and then prompt you to rethink. And so what that means is in the end we’re platform agnostic, so we can work across every app on your phone from email to social media and instantaneously in the moment, detect offensive content intelligently and then give you a chance to pause, review, and rethink.

Jordan: So you said already that you had tested it during your 8th grade science fair and had great results. Tell us how all of it works. I know you have numbers, statistics. It doesn’t have to be the 8th grade success, I assume you have even more numbers now.

Trisha: Yes. So, I mean, it’s incredibly effective amongst the youth age group, 13 to 18. Over 93% of the time when this age group receives this ReThink alert. “Whoa, hold on, are you sure you want to post this?” They change their mind and decide not to post this offensive message and over time we’ve innovated with trying to keep that statistic really high. So for instance, you’ll get a different ReThink message each time you receive an alert to try and keep kind of the shock factor high of receiving that alert and really intervening, so you don’t become desensitized to the ReThink alert. But the fact that we can proactively stop cyberbullying at the source in such an incredible way, so overwhelmingly, 93% of the time. I think it is a testament to the fact that, you know, so much of what happens on the internet is in part because of a lack of friction, right? So much of what we don’t like or see on the internet is just because, you know, it can feel very ephemeral. And reminding people about their humanity, bringing their conscience to the forefront, is just a really powerful, simple, yet powerful intervention.

Laura: And I think it’s one that a lot of adults could do with as well. This is not just for young people. I really want to say that.

Trisha: That was actually our biggest request during the pandemic, believe it or not, the pandemic started, and we started to get all these requests from companies like, is there ReThink for adults? Is there a ReThink for the workplace? Because everything transitioned online, and suddenly Slack was getting, like, a little snarky. So, believe it or not, we do have ReThink for Slack coming soon. One of our biggest product requests.

Jordan: Can I ask you a question about I’m sort of interested in a behind-the-scenes question at ReThink. Some of the things, the things we started talking about, the kind of bullying that we see in the media, glamorized in the media, a lot of that stuff. I can imagine that that’s not the hard stuff to program in, right? Like how to be mean, how to recognize I mean, how not to be mean, how to recognize when your language could be on the edge. But there’s also so much that it takes to really do that in a way that is trauma-informed, in a way that’s thinking about all the potential micro-aggressions. We have so many average statements that we say that have not been considered in our everyday life. So how do you think we think about one staying up to date, right? Being informed, learning all these things, as scholars and people finally tell us, wow, it’s been hurting to hear that language all the time when we didn’t even realize it was bullying for 20 years or 50 years or 100 years. So how do you think about being on that edge? Or I guess making sure that the underlying code isn’t just replicating existing social justice problems?

Trisha: Such a great question and I think such an important issue, particularly where you have AI or any type of intelligent technology in the picture. And we have to be really open, really transparent, and really, really critical and intentional, because perpetuating existing, existing language that is harmful, right, that is creating harm goes directly against the mission of what we’re trying to do. So in our case, it’s two things, I think. One is a mindset, right? The mindset is we’re never done, the product is never perfect. You know what I mean? So it’s never, it’s never, it’s never whenever over, it’s constantly, constantly, constantly being updated. And part of that is just because the language period evolves, right? Slang evolves, you know, kids get more creative. You know, it’s very common, you know, for instance, on video game platforms to have young people try and get around filters, take an offensive word and just get rid of a letter, get rid of two letters, put in a star, right? Young people got creative. So we have to get creative too, right? And we have to be conscious of those changes and that trend and evolution. The other thing to your point is also constantly thinking about to that mindset of we’re never done is also thinking about what we are learning, right?

What are we learning about ourselves, about the world, about how people communicate with one another and what is and is not appropriate. So always being in tune to that. And that leads into kind of the second thing, which is practice. So all of our technology. We work with psychologists. We work with linguistic experts. When we’re developing this technology in international languages, we’re working with local, on-the-ground linguistic experts to think about the appropriate context and to think about how language can affect other people in ways that we may not understand or expect, right? If there’s one takeaway that I learned from this entire process, it’s that I’m not a language expert. Two, language is really hard, to your point. It’s very easy to think about this being simple when you think about the extreme cases like I hate you or something that’s super obscene. But there’s a lot of gray. There’s a lot of gray, right? And we have to be really conscious, too, to stay true to our values and our beliefs. For instance, some people might say that some language that’s used by the LGBTQ community is offensive. We completely disagree, right? And so we have to stay true to our values, and we need to draw really clear lines and be careful not to get swept up into some of that. All that’s to say, it’s a process. It’s a combination of a mindset of we’re never done, we’re always going to be intentional, we’re always going to be critical, and the practice of bringing in experts who can offer the insight, the advice, the expertise that’s necessary to do this in a way that is rigorous and up to the standards that we think are absolutely needed.

Laura: Fantastic. That was really good, really helpful. And yeah, it resonates with me. Again, we see these things both on Roblox and more broadly in the sort of teenage community around this. They will be very inventive about how they insult one another. And actually, a lot of it might not go against normal terms of a platform. It can be really subtle. And again, that cultural nuance and difference is really interesting, and it is a huge amount of tasks. So well done. Okay. And it’s great, actually, to hear that you work with other kinds of child development professionals as well as experts in the field in this area. So a lot of our audience are parents, and they are fed a lot of scary stuff from the media. For us, what sorts of things do you think are the red flags? What do you think parents and educators and actually kids and teens should be worried about? And also maybe what we shouldn’t worry about so much? The stuff that we’re seeing, the scary stuff.

Trisha: Yeah. I mean, I think first and foremost, the good news for parents and educators is that the most extreme consequences of cyberbullying happen, but extremely rarely, right? So we see stories, and I mean, it’s heartbreaking, and it is really horrifying, right. When we see, for instance, cases of, as you said, Laura, lives lost to cyberbullying or self-harm suicidal tendencies as a result. But again, it’s a very rare instance. So that’s the good news. I think we should, of course, have that in mind and never want to escalate to that. But I don’t think that the goal coming in should be, oh my gosh, if I give my child the device, they’re going to explode, or if my child is on a social media platform, they’re going to explode. I think it’s more my advice to parents and educators is how can you create open channels of communication with your children so that if and when a problem does arise, your child can come to you? I think that the number one thing that I encourage parents to do is to not wait to have a conversation about their child’s phone or their Internet use until a problem arises, which is a very common strategy, right?

That’s the first time you have a conversation about it, or that’s the first time you’re talking really seriously about it. How can you do that proactively so that, one, a child feels comfortable coming to you if they experience something negative, but also two, so that you’re always talking about and learning about their experiences, what they’re seeing, and you can help shape and inform, right? You can be a part of that conversation as opposed to something that’s just happening on the side. Very siloed. That’s my big piece of advice. And then in terms of what to look out for, I think conversations with your children about how they see themselves and self image I think is really important, right. Because these more subtle effects of social media and interaction online I think are more common. Certainly I’ve heard it in conversation with young people, right? So it’s not the child exploding, it’s more these little learned attitudes or perspectives. So how can you have conversations with your children? Again, this comes right back to that first point, right, of keeping those channels of communication open, right? When those channels are open, then you can have conversations with them, right, about their perspectives or what they’re internalizing and ensuring that they’re staying true to themselves and that they’re remembering and being reminded that they are important, that they’re perfect as they are, right?

I think that those two types of things are super important. And then I think also having conversations with children about what is and is not appropriate to say super important sounds super basic to say. But I think a lot of young people can sometimes feel, again, as I said, because of the ephemeral nature of the digital world, there’s a little creative license that’s like, I can be a different person. I have a digital persona. Like, that’s not me. And I think having conversations with kids about the fact that what they say online has consequences for other people, but also for them, you’d be surprised how many young people I’ve met with who don’t realize that a future employer might be looking at their social media, right? So I think having conversations around that is super important. But yeah, I think overall, the big takeaway for parents and educators is the good news is the phone is not like it’s a ticking time bomb, right. That’s not what it is. It’s more a pathway to a new world where a child can learn and explore and develop different parts of their identities. And how can you be a part of that process so that that development is healthy and positive and not so that it is negative? Not so that they are saying or receiving bad content, and not so that they’re internalizing or starting to buy into assumptions that are completely off the mark. Right. I think that’s more how we need to be thinking about tackling the challenges that come with devices.

Laura: So there’s critical thinking skills again, as well as spotting the misinformation.

Jordan: Yeah, absolutely. And you’re starting to bring this mission through technology and programming to schools, right. What does that look like?

Trisha: Yes. So we do a lot of collaboration with schools both in the US. And globally. And it depends in terms of the actual. Sometimes we’ll work directly with schools if we’re working internationally, often we’ll work with an organization. But we’ll bring the ReThink technology to schools. We’ll also bring a digital literacy wellness curriculum where we’re teaching young people again about those digital literacy basics and age-specific audience, also incorporating those socio-emotional learning skills. So that’s a big part of what we’re doing now. And we think that’s super important because school really is the place we go to learn all the things that are crucial right, for life. Or in theory, that’s what school is supposed to be. And growing up, I always had to learn about substance abuse. We learned about a number of important issues. We never really talked about the Internet. There was no thought process of it. Not enough to just give people a phone or give young people a phone. We need to give them a framework with which to use that phone. We need to give them a toolkit. We need to give them the language. So a lot of what we do in schools is creating language around things that some young people or adults would think is obvious.

But a lot of young people, often especially at a young age, don’t really have the tools to identify and say, oh, that’s the problem. Right. Or this is the specific issue where this is how it’s creating harm. That’s a huge part of what we do. And then another huge part of what we do is just empowering young people to feel confident about issues that sometimes can feel taboo, right?

It can be hard, for instance, to talk with parents about sexting. Right. I just put that right. That’s a conversation parents don’t want to have. It’s a conversation children don’t want to have. And the result is no one talks about that. But the truth is that, again, it’s rare. But according to the most recent statistics from Pew, 7% of US teenagers, 13 to 17, are having images that they’ve sent forwarded on without their consent, right? So it is a problem, right? And we have to have these conversations. And so part of also what we try to do is use that opportunity to that platform in schools to convey crucial information that young people may not be receiving or talking about in other arenas, because it’s too taboo, right? Despite the fact that it might be a real issue that maybe they don’t confront, but a friend confronts. Right. And again, being educated as an opportunity to help them.

Laura: Absolutely. Love that. Well, this has been amazing. I’m going to come back to my last question, I think. So, Trisha, what next for you? What are your big dreams? What are you doing with yourself now? And also thinking specifically about ReThink? What are the next steps? What are you incubating for that as well?

Trisha: Yeah, so, for me, I’m really blessed. I’m actually here in the UK with you, Laura, doing my postgraduate study at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. And so I’m here doing research on the internet. Very fitting, thinking about cyberbullying and hate speech, but also thinking about misinformation, which is also increasingly a very important issue affecting the internet, but also youth and how they’re receiving information online. So doing research in that space, that’s keeping me busy. And as I think about the future, I hope that a lot of it is ReThink, but I also hope a lot of it is thinking about new innovative solutions, right? Technical solutions, but also, hopefully, solutions that are sitting at the intersection of a number of stakeholders, right. You know, parents, policy, tech, everyone coming together to kind of envision more broadly, what does a good internet look like? That’s kind of what’s motivating me, right?

Because I think the power of something like ReThink rate is addressing an important issue. I think the limit is that it’s one solution and we have a vast array of problems, and so I’m hoping to get at that vast array of problems. At least that’s my vision in terms of ReThink and kind of our vision as we look to the future. I think the biggest thing is expanding internationally and tackling cyberbullying in a global context. And that means also thinking about what online hate and harassment look like in different parts of the world. Because it looks different in the US, it looks different in the UK, it looks different in Lebanon, which is a country where we’re bringing ReThink and our educational curriculum to next month, actually, which is super exciting, but it’s different in different parts of the world. But with the COVID-19 Pandemic, there’s been this huge acceleration of technology and internet use. Right. So parts of the world where cyberbullying with less of a conversation or less prevalent, that is starting to become an issue, particularly amongst youth populations. So how can we scale ReThink up to those populations? Make the technology available in new languages, develop a curriculum that is appropriate for the context, and hopefully try and address some of its worst effects before they happen, right?

In places where this is an up-and-coming issue, if we can really get to the root of the problem before it fully manifests, then that’s the ideal. So that’s, I think the big vision for ReThink and also hopefully making ReThink the Internet standard, that’s my big vision for ReThink. I think it’s super powerful, right, but one of its biggest limits, as an app at least, is that it has to be downloaded, right? That’s part of the reason that we work with schools, that’s a big part of the reason we work with communities, is so that we can use them as kind of a conduit through which we can roll this technology out to young people. But in the long term, how great would it be if this just could be the internet standard, right? If this is the default and we could work with big platforms and big companies to make this just a reality for what our experience of interacting online is, that would be the absolute best. So that’s the longer-term vision.

Laura: So pretty big stuff. One to watch, I would suspect. And hopefully we’ll be having another conversation in a few years about all of these amazing things you’ve achieved, fixing the internet being one of them, by the sounds of things.

In this episode, Laura and I are joined by Amanda Third, Associate Professor at the University of Western Sydney and co-author of the UN’s Digital Rights of the Child. Amanda shares her participatory research approach that empowers children as active contributors to data on their digital experiences. As part of the Global Kids Online initiative, she highlights the digital challenges kids face and calls for adult support and effective policies. Tune in to understand how we can create a future where children can imaginatively harness digital technology.

Empowering Children's Voices with Amanda Third by Joan Ganz Cooney Center: Into the Digital Future

Amanda Third: Hi. My name’s Amanda. I’m a professor at Western Sydney University, where I co-direct the Young and Resilient Research Centre.

Laura: So we’ve known each other for quite a long time, I think, at least eight years now, and in that time we’ve worked on some really massive projects. Just to name a few: The UN Digital Rights of the Child which we’re definitely going to dig into and the Global Kids Online Research Project. They’ve had such a massive impact on the well being and safety of kids and teens and adolescents online, we’re going to focus on those as some of our discussion. Let’s start with a really big one.

So the United Nations’ Digital Rights of the Child? That’s a really huge thing. Can you tell us a little bit of the background, and where your work kind of cut into that. What was the goal?

Amanda: Yeah, so that was probably a real career highlight for me. This was a big project to really try to ensure that the rights of children could be realized in online spaces as they are in offline spaces. So it was about taking the Convention on the Rights of the Child and really reinterpreting that, you know, updating the convention for the 21st century, thinking about what we needed to do whether that was as governments or as a private enterprise or of civil society, to really ensure that children could not just be safe online, but really maximize the benefits of digital technology for realizing their rights. So it was a really long process. It took us about five years from proposing that there should be one of these general comments to the moment where we finalized it, and it was adopted formally by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. It was a really great process and the result is that we now have a general comment on children’s rights in relation to the digital environment, which guides states to tell them how to apply the convention to ensure that children are safe in the digital age.

Jordan: Tell us some of the specific things in it, some things that might surprise our listeners.

Amanda: Well, it’s 10,700 words. Precisely. It’s a nice, concise text for a sort of a legal instrument, right? And it talks about all the kinds of different rights that children have and then how to ensure that those rights can be respected, protected, and fulfilled. So children, under the convention and the rights of the child have, roughly speaking, three kinds of rights. The first category is around provision, which is all about the basic fundamental things we need to make sure are in place so that a child can survive and develop and grow. They also have protection rights which are about protecting them from all different kinds of harm. And they have participation rights. And it’s the participation rights that get me most excited. The participation rights that are stipulated in the convention give children fundamental rights to participate in civic and political life. You know it grants them rights that are equivalent to those of full citizens, right? Those adults who are defined by law as the people who constitute the citizenry and they stipulate that actually to really fulfill children’s broader rights. You have to be speaking with, listening to, and responding to children’s own sense of what they need, what they desire, and what they aspire to.

Jordan: I love that because one of the things that really fascinates me about your work is the participatory approach to research, which obviously is connected to everything you’re saying. Well, maybe it’s not obvious to everyone who’s listening, so maybe you could tell us a bit about first, what participatory research is, how it shows up for you, and how that connects to digital wellness, or digital rights.

Amanda: Thanks for that. But before we do that, Jordan, can I just pick you up on one little thing which I think is kind of important? It’s this question of digital rights. I think we need to be really careful when we talk about children. You know what the general comment secures for children, because whilst a really important part of the general comment is securing rights for children in digital spaces, right? So thinking about what it means to be safe online, but also what it means to really participate fully in the digital environment in those online spaces. I want us to really push ourselves to think about the value of this general comment more broadly because, actually what the general comment is trying to set up is a way for us to think about how the digital might support children to realize their rights across online and offline spaces, to really open up a sort of a radical vision of what technology might offer for children, and that to me is really exciting. And it’s not a question that we often think enough about, but back to your other question, which was sorry, is that okay, that I just went rogue there?

But what is participatory research? And what’s the value of it? So participatory research with children is about taking seriously the idea that children should be agents in conducting research, generating insights, interpreting those insights, and then wielding them. So the idea is that it’s about thinking beyond doing research, about our children. And really, how you do research with children, thinking about them as partners in the research process. And this is, you know, it sounds lovely in principle, but it’s actually quite a difficult thing to achieve in practice, because, of course the minute that you begin to do anything with children as an adult, you’re activating a whole set of power dynamics that get in the way of all kinds of good things. So it’s a constant challenge inside the participatory research process to really stay attuned to those power dynamics and think creatively about how to work with them, subvert them, and really, really open up spaces, I guess, for children to participate meaningfully.

Jordan: Yeah, what is it? What does that mean? If we were to get really specific about it? What does that bring the other, the seeing research on children rather than with children. Right? Like, what do we get that’s different? Do we get more accuracy? Where do we get accuracy? Where do we get more accuracy? Where do we have less accuracy? When do you know all those? All the questions?

Amanda: Yeah, so well, good. Thanks, Jordan, you need to just pull me down to get me to stop talking abstractly and more concretely. yeah. So what does it give us? I think what participatory research really gives us is a way to make sure that the solutions that we design for children really resonate with children, and a position for the best possible uptake and impact. I think, working really closely with children, can supercharge what we’re able to achieve in terms of not just protecting them, but actually leveling them up and enabling them to really maximize the value of being online and using digital technologies.

I think, too — this is something I think we really underestimate. It makes research really fun. And… we really underestimate it. Because when you’re having fun, you’re in a much more creative space, you’re much more able to think about things from different angles and generate new ideas, and you know it’s just way better to put it in. You know the words that a teenager recently used with me. It’s way more vibey, right? It’s kind of like you can just do more stuff. So I think, you know, I think all of us adults who are involved in designing the digital world, for children really need to make time to, you know. Take our shoes off and stand in the grass and remember what it’s like to be a child, you know. Come down to street level in order to level up right? I think I think in a nutshell, that’s what I would say it offers us.

Laura: I love that, Amanda. You know we’ve recently been working on a project together on a different theme, and one of the key findings that came out of it was about the thing that we’re all missing, whether we’re a good platform who work with young people all the time, or academics or other people in this space, NGO’s in the space, is youth participation, but also youth-led product. Design is so vital, and we all talk about it, and we all want it. We’re willing to do it, but actually making it happen feels scary. But I feel hopeful we’re going to start seeing some stuff in that space. I also just wanted to pick up on what you were talking about young people being given that platform, that opportunity to go and do the things that they want to do online. You know, we just see this political activism from young people which is absolutely incredible. And it’s the first time I would say, particularly in the online space where we’ve seen this real movement happening. And it feels a little bit like the hippie revolution, which I’m quite a fan of. But yeah, Godspeed kids. I think you’re going to be fine and hopefully, we will all enable you on that journey.

I would like to move on just very briefly to talk about the Global Kids Online project. So in our previous series one of your good friends, Dr. Sonia Livingstone, came and joined us. And we talked about EU kids online and her participation in that and a little bit about global kids. Amanda, obviously, you’re based in Australia. I think we’ve briefly touched on that. But what was your experience like again working with the youth participants and any findings, takeaways, and stuff that you would like to share with us?

Amanda: Yes, I’ve been really, really lucky to have a role in Global Kids Online as an expert adviser. And really, I guess I’ve come into that entity as someone who brings some child participation expertise. And having talked to a lot of children over 15 plus years doing this work. You know I have learned a lot, and so that’s kind of how I came into that entity. And I think what’s really lovely about the Global Kids Online initiative is that it’s trying to generate evidence in places where we don’t have the evidence to drive policy and programming. This is a really big challenge for the sector around the world, you know, especially when we reflect on the fact that one in three users of the internet is a child, you know, that’s a huge number of users. A lot of those children are coming online as mobile-first users, so that you know that they don’t connect via a desktop, or they connect via a mobile phone. And that comes with, you know, different kinds of constraints and capabilities. But also many children are coming online in communities where digital technology is a really new thing, and they don’t always have the cultures of support around them, because the adults in their lives are really rapidly getting up to speed, too. I mean, I think, about, you know, Australia is supposed to be a reasonably you know, advanced technological, adopting country, right? I’m sure there’s a technical term for that. It’s not that, you know, like we’re thought of as early adopters. And I even think about my own experiences as a parent trying to keep up to speed and be a good parent to a child who is growing up in the digital age, and I find it really challenging. So I think those kinds of challenges are accentuated in many parts of the world. We really do need a bunch of evidence to help drive that.

I think also, what is lovely about the Global Kids Online initiative is that it is trying to generate quantitative evidence, but also qualitative evidence. And I think this is really super important, because you know…numbers don’t tell us everything, and it’s really important to to drill down into children’s experiences and really understand why they make the choices that they make, why they do things. You know what they’re able to do online and what they’re not able to do online, you know, to really understand the why behind the numbers

Jordan: So what do you understand so far?

Amanda: Oh, Jordan, you like to ask a big question, don’t you? Well, look, we’ve developed a bunch of methods that enable us to, I guess talk with children in a deep way at scale. We call this distributed data generation. And this is about developing a workshop. Typically, the workshops are like 5 hours long, and we then work with child-facing organizations in different countries to run workshops with children, gather their insights, and then we have a process where we analyze that data in conjunction with those child-facing organizations. And through this process, we’ve learned a lot. If I think about the things that children say are the biggest challenges to them, number one are the access issues. We know that there are still really obstinate digital inclusion challenges that are impacting the ways that children engage online. These range from, you know, disrupted internet connectivity. You know old devices or hand-me-down devices with batteries that don’t work, you know, all those sort of typical hardware issues. But also things like the parents making rules that you know, restrict their access and really limit children’s capacity to engage meaningfully, the attitudes of the adults in their lives. You know one thing that they highlight often is that teachers don’t really know enough about the digital world and how to bring it to life at school and value it and all of these sorts of things. They also say that, you know, adults, (you know, love kids. They really. They’re so wonderful when they get going) But they say things like, you know, “Adults say, on the one hand, ‘Put your devices away. Do this, do that’, and then, on the other hand, they just flagrantly break their own rules, and they’re not role-modeling in the ways that we would like them to.” So they’ve got a lot of what we might think of as quite valid critiques of the ways that their digital technology is spoken about.

But they also, and this is the thing that I really love the most is they, have this incredible enthusiasm and optimism for the ways that digital technology can benefit them. They really do see digital technology as an enabler for them for the most part and they’ve got these really wonderful visions of how technology can help to unite the world, how it can make it a more just. And you know, good place to be, but they’re also calling on governments, on companies, your platforms on, you know, the adults in their lives in general to really make sure that these spaces can be those enablers, and that the risks of harm are really minimized. The, you know, discrimination, hate speech, misinformation, privacy, breaches, these are the things that really bother children, and they’re really looking for us to step up and find some solutions.

Laura: Amazing piece of work. I’m sure that everyone involved in it is incredibly proud. Certainly, every time the reports come out you know I dig in, and I’m always really fascinated with how things have kind of changed over a period of time, and certainly, globally, it feels as much as I think lots of people are suffering a little bit with that lack of access that you mentioned, but actually, it’s probably leveled out on a global level, whereas the countries that saw themselves as way beyond in the past, maybe I’ve now dropped down a little bit. So that’s quite interesting.

Amanda: And I think, Laura, that’s really true. Often it’s really easy for us to talk about young people in the global North as the most connected generation, etc. And we often forget actually, this incredible diversity in the ways that children engage with technology. Some have much more access than others, and really some of the divisions within countries are quite stark. And so digital inclusion is still a massive challenge for us, not just in low-income settings, but in high-income settings as well.

Laura: Thank you. So, Amanda. yeah, I mean amazing work that you’ve done already, and I’m so happy that I’ve worked with you on some of these projects.

Jordan: I wonder, with that in mind like, do you think there’s things that we (I don’t know who “the we” is) whether “the we” is researchers, tech industry, academics, policy. Maybe like, are there things we’re not focusing on that we really should be focusing on?

Amanda: My biggest gripe is that we’re not imaginative enough about the way that we think about children’s relationship to technology. It’s very true that there are lots of risks of harm associated with children engaging online. But we have got to, first of all, find ways to protect children online, and also, but at the same time think in a kind of maximal way about what the possibilities really are. We want to be teaching children to grab a hold of this technology and think with it, work with it. To do, you know things that we haven’t thought of yet? I think it’s really easy for us to get stuck in our thinking about what those possibilities are. And I think we need to enable children a chance to think differently. So yeah, to my mind, we really need to open up those spaces.

Laura: I love that so much, Amanda. I can’t wait to see what that future might look like. And hopefully it’s something we can all get behind.

Jennie Ito, a developmental psychologist and expert in children’s media and content appropriateness, joins Laura and myself in a compelling conversation on creating safer digital environments for kids. Drawing from her vast experience, which includes spearheading content policy development for kids’ experiences on YouTube, Google Play, and her current role at Roblox, Jennie provides a deep dive into the intricacies of age-appropriate digital policy-making. Together, they explore the critical challenges and innovative solutions in ensuring child safety in digital platforms.

‎Joan Ganz Cooney Center: Into the Digital Future: Building Child Safety into Digital Platforms with Jenne Ito on Apple Podcasts

Jennie: My name is Jennie Ito and I’m a senior product policy manager at Roblox. Before that, I was at YouTube and Google where I was a policy specialist on the Google Play Store. I was also a user experience researcher for a short period of time on the Google Kids and Family team and then I went back to working on policy at YouTube, where I led policy development for kids, tweens and teens for YouTube and YouTube Kids.

Jordan: So you’re at Roblox, which means the two of you work together. You know each other.

Jennie: Yes, that’s right. We do work together.

Jordan: So do you spend lots of time working together?

Laura: We do. In fact, I’m very, very lucky. So, Jennie, she’s going to talk a little bit about her work that she does at Roblox, which is amazing. But the work that I do at Roblox is all around civility and safety education, and it’s amazing how many times Jennie’s name comes up in a conversation where I’m like, you know who we need to talk to?

Laura: Jennie, and so we’re really pleased that she’s been able to support us with lots of different projects that we’re working on, some of them that are, you know, cross-functional working with lots of different academics, experts in the field, other tech companies. And then some that are much more internal projects. But yeah, I pretty much say there’s not a day goes by when we don’t email or chat to each other, so it’s such a pleasure to have you here, Jennie.

Jordan: You’re gonna have to explain to me, what do you actually do that makes your name come up so often in Laura’s conversations?

Jennie: Well, as Laura mentioned, she’s really focused on civility, and my team is really focused on safety. So we like to see we kind of write the rules of Roblox. And so we’re really focused on keeping. And all our users actually because our platform is not just focused on kids’ safety. And so there’s a lot of obvious overlap between civility and safety. So, as Laura mentioned, we work quite closely together.

Jordan: And so what does your day look like when you’re working on safety like? What does that mean for people who don’t know anything about what it looks like behind other than the app on their phone, or their computer, or their tablet, or their console? What does it mean for someone to work on safety?

Jennie: Yeah, that’s a great question. So I would say no two days of my days really look alike. There’s lots of lots of different things that I work on, which makes my job really fun and exciting. So one of the first things when it comes to safety is our team drafts, policies and then, which I was mentioning are kind of like the rules of Roblox, and then we work really closely with the moderation team which actually helps enforce those rules and make sure that everyone is is following the rules on the platform. So a big part of my job is doing research and coming up with these policies and then working with our cross-functional stakeholders to you know whether it’s product or legal to to actually make sure that these these policies make sense, and that they truly are going to keep our users safe on the platform.

Jordan: But you come to this as a child psychologist, right?

Jennie: Yes, that’s right. Yes, my background’s in developmental psychology.

Jordan: So I’m curious. Can you tell me a bit about how that impacts all these everyday decisions? How, does, how like, I just don’t think that most people are imagining that there’s like child psychologists sitting there in meetings thinking about thinking, and so and I know there are. And Lauren knows there are so like. What is that like? What, what your parents? How would you explain to parents? How like, how like how you get involved in that, and how you bring real developmental research to these questions about your digital well-being?

Jennie: Yeah, that’s a good question. So I will say that this is something that definitely is more common now. But when I started in tech back in 2015, it actually wasn’t that common to have child development, or even educational specialists in the room, or have a seat at the table. Thankfully, this has changed over the years. So both at my job at YouTube, but also at Roblox. As I mentioned, our users are not just adults. We also have a large proportion of our users are actually children and tweens and teens. And when it comes to working or working with policies around kids and tweens and teens, you not only have to think about kids. You also have to think about parents, which is, you know, an additional challenge. So it’s definitely something I’m thinking of when we talk about users when it comes to kids policies. We’re thinking about kids as well as parents and it’s really important when we’re developing policies, you know, children are not just mini-adults, so we have to take what developmental stages that they’re at into consideration.

So that’s always kind of where I start. My policy development is really focusing on different developments. You know what changes are happening in children’s social development, cognitive development, how that actually can shape their media preferences, and also what type of content might be more risky for them, depending on their developmental stages. So really thinking through all of this, as we’re as we’re writing our policies.

Jordan: Yeah, that’s fascinating.

Laura: It is absolutely so. One of the things I’d really love to understand. There’s kind of two parts to this. So one is, how do you, tailor those community standards, the rules for a platform, so that they are understandable and digestible by both the parents and adults in their lives, and also the kids and teens, and the second part being, how do you you know, you kind of mentioned developmental milestones and things like that. How do you keep your finger on the pulse of what’s happening out there that’s going to affect these kids and teams to build those community standards?

Jennie: Yes, it’s definitely challenging. Well, I had two tweens myself, actually I’d rather say one tween and a teenager, because he’s now 13. So I definitely am reminded every day what’s cool and what’s not cool by my children, and also I’m in the club. Yeah. So I have that. But to answer your second question first, definitely working with different academics, staying up to date on developmental research. This is actually one of my favorite parts of my job when I do get to interact with other experts.

I work with different academics, staying up to date on developmental research. This is actually one of my favorite parts of my job when I do get to interact with other experts. And when it comes to the community standards, it’s definitely a challenge, because, especially at a platform with Roblox and YouTube as well where we had users of all different ages. We have to make sure that our community standards are understandable to our youngest users. They’re written in a way that works with all the different age ranges which can be definitely difficult.

Jordan: Yeah. So I’m curious about how you think about this. You know, with the younger kids, of course, younger kids follow rules pretty well. They like to understand them. But as you start to get older, as you get into the tweens and teens, especially at a place like any digital platform where it feels like their playground, they just see rules as obstacles. They’re all mad about them. They don’t understand that any of them are for them, or they’re just in the way of fun. Right?

So, what do you think about that? As you’re starting to think about policy? Because, obviously, we want people to understand it. We want them not to feel it as something that’s like a reason to be angry at my space. My playground.

Jennie: Absolutely. So there’s a couple of things one is for really starting to think about how we get feedback. If someone does violate one of our policies. How can we tailor that feedback to different ages? And how can we focus more on education and deterrence versus kind of like a punishment, because we know, especially with tweens and teens, they’re going to break the rules. They’re going to push the boundaries, you know. So how can we communicate with them? You know this actually isn’t allowed, but we’re going to give you another chance to correct that behavior. And another thing is really working very closely with the user experience research team there, doing research with parents and kids and twins and teams, and really listening to what they want. You know what they think the rules should be, and just like incorporating a lot of that feedback where we could, and not just after the fact of getting feedback after we’ve made up the rules, but thinking about taking a child-centric approach from the beginning and listening to what they want.

Laura: As a parent of a teenager as well, there’s a common theme here, isn’t there, when we hear that we know it’s perfectly normal for tweens and teens to push the boundaries to go seek out inappropriate content and sort of to experiment when they’re online. I know that that’s kind of terrifying to a lot of parents who feel really out of their depth. Is there any advice that you could give to just help parents feel empowered in how to manage that situation?

Jennie: Yeah, I definitely can relate to how scary that can be. I think, having open conversations with your kids about your twins and teens about what they could see online, and then also what they should do if they do see something that makes them feel uncomfortable. You know, if they engage with someone, and it makes them feel comfortable to report that behavior. If they see something, they’re not really sure how to make sense of it, talk to your parents. And also not to overreact as parents when our kids do stumble upon something that they probably shouldn’t be seeing. Because, as you mentioned, it is very developmentally typical for children to seek out this type of content. But it also can be, you know, even Sonya Livingstone’s work about what bothers teens and tweens online. You know a lot of kids stumble upon things they didn’t even know existed like, maybe hyper-sexualized content, or something that’s really scary in the news. And so I think it’s really important to have those conversations with your kids.

Jordan: So when you look at the entire landscape of the platforms that kids and teenagers are using, you know, I don’t want to call any specific one out, because I’m gonna ask you a question here. But any of them, whether we’re talking about Roblox, or YouTube or Facebook or Instagram. Where do you think are the places where we really need to think about? You know, I mean as adults and kids. Not as companies, but as adults raising kids.

Jennie: Yeah, I think when we look across all platforms, I would say, probably in the tween, and in teen years, especially when you hit 13. I know for myself. As I mentioned, I have a 13-year-old. I had, you know, parental controls on a lot of these different platforms, and then suddenly, at 13 they disappeared completely. And so that’s a real shift. And so I think, either having. You know whether it’s, you know, just really having that communication with your child, but also giving parents the tools to have those conversations. You know some of these platforms. Maybe we need some more extended defaults and controls into the, you know, early teen years because I do think it’s quite a shift where you know there’s all these with really restrictive controls, and then all of a sudden at 13 they’re all completely gone, and if a child has been very restricted, it can be very overwhelming to kind of have everything open up to them with no limits.

Jordan: Yeah, I used to say all the time that everybody gives the kids the phones at 13, and I’m like, you should start with, maybe some boundaries, younger right?

Jennie: Yeah, definitely. That was definitely something that you know — and it’s funny, it hadn’t really occurred to me till I got that email, saying, hey, by the way, parental controls are no longer on these accounts.

Laura: Amazing. And I’d love to say thank you so much for mentioning one of our dear friends, Sonia Livingstone. She’s actually previously been on series 1 of our podcast. So you’re in great company and everyone else is great. And then, yeah, absolutely thanks. Thank you for the plug. This has been. This has been such a lovely conversation, and I’m sure you know a lot of our audience who our parents will find really reassuring that what they’re experiencing is just normal. That’s the first thing that makes everyone feel better. And you’ve definitely given some really fantastic advice as well. I’m gonna take us a little bit into the future now. So thinking about new innovations, actually one of the projects you and I are working on at the moment is about this kind of thing. What can we do in the next 5 to 10 years? So what innovations do you want to see? What are you? What new things do you feel should be coming, or might be coming, that is going to make a lot of this stuff easier for parents and kids to navigate.

Jennie: You know. I don’t know if this is a great answer, but I think one of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about, especially at Roblox and kind of this whole metaverse is thinking about. How can we have children and adults interacting in a safe way? I’m in the same space and a shared space. You know, because a lot of our other platforms, we kind of have our children siloed, separate from adults, but we are moving towards this world where they want everyone interacting together, and that just has so many safety challenges.

Laura: But I also think it could be, it can be like the opportunity. It is pretty amazing for shared experiences, but I do think it’s definitely a challenge. It is. But actually, online spaces are a reflection of the real world, and we don’t just keep kids locked up in a house. They are as our tweens and teens that we’ve already mentioned, they are going out. We send them to the store. They’re going to the park by themselves. They’re riding their bikes to school. They do have to interact with all sorts of strangers. So yeah, I think you know for me, certainly the responsibility on the platform to make sure that we can, that we’re thinking about that, and putting tools in place and helping to educate people around. You know, building, resilience and recognizing risk and harm, and all of those things. I think it’s really important.

Jennie: But yeah, it’s great to hear that you’re really thinking about this because you’re the person who needs to be thinking about that. And understanding kind of the, you know, unique risks that are online that are separate and different from the real world. And you know, the only the only, the only the best way, at least, that that kids are gonna learn. It is to be able to interact in these spaces with their parents. It’s where we are, it’s where we learn most of our most of what we learn about etiquette and so I wish there were more. I wish there were more spaces younger, and I wish there were more spaces older, older for it to happen. What do you think, Jennie? Like? What are the blind spots, or the places where the way that we think about the digital world, the way we think about the metaverse, where we think about online digital play. Where do you think we have blind spots that actually keep us from making the progress that we really need?

Jennie: I am happy to see kind of more developmental psychologists, people who really understand kids and tweets, really developing like the strategies behind these products and kind of really helping with product development. Because I think that’s really going to help us understand and kind of build these spaces with kids in mind. I make sure that they actually are appealing to them. And they want to be in these spaces, I think, for a long time it was. You know we didn’t have this expertise and we weren’t involving children from the beginning and listening to their feedback, and so I hope that we continue to do that as we build out these products.

Laura: Yeah. Same, I think that’s vital, isn’t it. And you know we know that being part of the product has been a thing with tech spaces and platforms for such a long time and we have to be even more thoughtful and careful about our duty of care. What? When it’s got young people involved as well. So okay, a bit more personal. So what’s next for you? What big dreams, what things are you working on, whether at Roblox or outside of that? What are you currently working on?

Jennie: Yeah. So I can. I mentioned something. I think I’m allowed to mention this. If not, we’ll have to edit it out, Laura. But right now I’m working on aging up the platform at Roblox, and one of our biggest growth areas is with our users from 17 to 24. So I’m really excited about that. I think in the past it’s been more focused on our younger users. But now we’re focusing on tweens and teens, and just making sure that we have appealing content for them, and making this obviously continue to make this a safe space for them. And so I did something similar over at YouTube, and I really enjoyed that project because I especially as a mom of a between and team. It’s exciting to kind of be building a space. I know my own kids are going to enjoy it.