Reimagining Screen Time Through Creativity and Connectionwith Rob LoCascio

Unless you experience the assault, and I'll say it's an assault that devices have on your children, you just don't know it from afar. Like I've read the books and I read the articles, and then I had kids and then they took my device and iPads and they go, and all of a sudden you see these behavioral changes. You see them being addicted to this stuff.

Thanks for having me, Justin. Glad to be here.

Yeah. So, I'm from originally New York and I started a company called LivePerson in 1995. It was a different name company, but it eventually became LivePerson. And in 1997, I invented web chat for websites. If you ever chatted on a website, I invented that technology. I was building websites and I had e-commerce customers and it got obvious that a website wasn't a vending machine and that it'd be good if you could talk to them, not the human. And at that time you had to pick up a phone or send in an email and I thought, why can't you chat on a website? So, now that web chat is pervasive and there's ChatGPT and there's a lot around chat, I guess I'm like the godfather of that technology. I ended up building it into a leading conversational AI company. I pivoted to AI in like 2016 and 17 and it was a public company for 22 years, about 3,000 employees, over half a billion in revenues. So I'm proud of what I accomplished there but I decided three years ago it was time for me to do some other things in the AI space that I thought could be pretty impactful and felt like I kind of did what I needed to do over 28 years at LivePerson.

Yeah. So I have two companies. One's called U.A.I. And U with the letter U. And the other one is called Kid. And both are closely related strategically in my mind. And when I left LivePerson and obviously the boom of large language models and everything, I started to think of a different type of world of AI and one that would empower humans and allow them to use AI for good and community and connection and creativity. Versus what I felt was the narrative which is there's these giant large language models. They're smarter than human beings, are eventually going to take our jobs and who knows what else they're going to take from us. And I just felt there's a path where people could have their own models. So small models, we call that a human life model. And then devices like devices where these models can live on. And in both scenarios, whether it's for children or adults, it's about having control. It's about parents and kids and adults having control over AI as a tool for good. And I felt the only way we could do that is through creating products that would allow that good to happen versus talk about good and compliance and safety of AIs and blah blah blah in the terms of service. Let's make products that deliver on that promise.

Yeah. You know, I have these three young kids now, nine, seven, and four. A girl, boy, boy. Unless you experience the assault, and I'll say it's an assault that devices have on your children, you just don't know it from afar. Like, I've read the books and I read the articles and then I had kids and then they took my device and iPads and they go and all of a sudden you see these behavioral changes. You see them being addicted to this stuff and what you come to realize is that, and I don't know if you know Jonathan Haidt, this NYU professor wrote a book called The Anxious Generation last year and he really nailed the research which is the physical device itself with the cameras and everything plus marry that with social media and you've got yourself a weapon, a weapon to get children to be unhappy, to hurt themselves potentially and to have depression and all that. And I started to think, I don't want my kids to grow up in that. And my kids are so fortunate because they're going to be an AI generation of kids. But yet if it's not done right, they're going to end up being like AI addicts. They're going to end up being the bad part of all this. And I saw it firsthand a couple years ago. It was like I woke up in the middle of the night and I heard downstairs a noise and there was my son who at that time was about four and he's scrolling. He stole an iPad from our room, hijacked out of our room and just was scrolling at 3:00 in the morning. Didn't know what he was doing. He didn't know what time it was. He didn't know what he was watching. And I looked and I said, 'What the heck is going on?' And I looked at the content. I realized they're programming this stuff. And they're creating addicts out of our children. And I just don't want my children to have that future. So, I'm going to do something about it. I'm going to build a company around it.

So like if I look at this is the Kid device, you can see it here. It's round. First of all, there's no scrolling. There's nothing to scroll here. You can connect with these are little buddies. And the center button is about creativity. A kid through just, we can make a picture, buddies, we can make stories, I make stories with my children. So if you take out the scroll and the zombie stuff, what I call it, you know, consumption behavior, and you flip it and say okay the device is about kids tapping into their creativity, it's about them talking to buddies in a safe way, there's tutors on here and everything, you just can change the game on it. And then the big part is that I started to realize, like you probably know this, like when I hand my kid my device it's almost like I hand it to them and I walk away. I don't do things with them on it. And this is made to have a child and a parent come together and create things together. So I call like bringing back the bond is what I'm trying to do. So if you design not for consumption but if you design for creativity and connection, it's easy. It's just that they didn't want to do it, you know, because it's easy to do like addictive behavior for children, it's easy to program. Like it's harder to make a device that's for creativity and connection.