173 - Empowering Parents: Understanding the Challenges of Digital Parenting with BrightCanary Karl Stillner

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes.

So let's get started. On Brian Canary, that's of concern.

That's right.

I don't know if you know this, but that's one of the things that I teach. I teach people how to have those difficult conversations and how to deal, especially with children, how to deal with children's emotions.

Oh, interesting. Okay.

Yeah, no, that's very much a hot-button issue for us.

We, uh, we know that most parents are not equipped, um, and a little bit of a, you know, ignorance is bliss phenomenon going on with a lot of parents where they don't really want to know what their kids are doing online because they don't even know how to address it. And so, um, it's certainly something that's front of mind for us.

We, uh, well, we can talk about it. Maybe we could talk about it after, after we record. But, um, one of the things that I do, I mean, I do a lot of different things around emotions and conflict because I'm a lawyer turned peace painter professionally. But, you know, maybe there's a way that I can be a resource to your customers if they're looking for how do I talk to my children about this stuff? What do I do?

And yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, no, let's talk about it. We actually, right now we have this ChatGPT-4 informed.

I saw that.

Yeah, and it's, um, I actually think it does a pretty good job, um, providing a framework for parents who are incredibly flat-footed when it comes to this stuff. I would say, you know, in terms of the range of sophistication, it's probably, um, you know, probably more like a 2 out of 10 versus, you know, an 8 out of 10. But a 2 out of 10 is better than a 0 out of 10 for most.

That's right. It's a— we've been— a colleague and I have worked, and we've been working with ChatGPT-4, and we can actually get it to provide correct prompts, right input. It's really quite amazing how the, how the system works. But anyways, let's get on. We could talk about this later. Sure. Just so you know, the podcast is 30 minutes long. Okay. We'll record both audio and video. It'll eventually go up to YouTube, Spotify, you know, all the usual places. My— I'm— I record about between 3 and 5 podcasts a week. So my team is way behind me.

Okay.

In terms of getting caught up.

Sure.

And what this is all about is you.

Yeah.

You, you, you, you're a serial entrepreneur. Uh, you, if you can imagine, we're— my audience is a small group of CEOs, C-level people who listen because they listen because I'm having a conversation with their peers and they want to— they're always interested in what other people's stories are, what their successes are, what they've learned along the way. Yeah. So that's what we'll talk about.

Okay. That's not good.

You'll have 30 minutes and it's going to go faster than you can possibly imagine.

Okay, that sounds good.

No, Chad, because I want to make sure I introduce you properly. Carl Stillner, founder, CEO. You're a co-founder, right?

Co-founder, correct.

Yeah, I want to make sure I don't piss off your partner.

First things first.

Absolutely. Carl Stillner, co-founder, CEO of Bright Canary, brightcanary.io.

Yes.

Okay, Carl Stillner, you are the co-founder and CEO of Bright Canary, and that can be found at brightcanary.io. Welcome to Listening with Leaders.

Thanks, Doug. Happy to be here.

So let's do— before we go anywhere else, Bright Canary is such an interesting idea. Uh, I know you're a serial entrepreneur, we'll get into that in a minute, but just first give the audience a sense of this unique idea you've developed. Then you've gotten through your Series A financing too, which is great. Tell us about Bright Canary.

Yeah, so Bright Canary is a, is a company that was born out of myself and my co-founder's experience having kids. I have an 11-year-old and an 8-year-old boy, or boys, and my co-founder has two twin 13-year-olds, or twin 13-year-olds. And we've both for quite a while lamented the fact that it's incredibly difficult being a parent in the digital age. It's fraught with all kinds of problems that never existed even 20 years ago. And as technologists, we've been looking for a way to provide a solution for that. And so we, you know, in our prior business that we were working on, and, you know, water cooler conversations, always kind of kick around different ideas for how we would build up service. And we spent quite a bit of time surveying the existing market 'cause there are quite a few companies that are trying to address this in some way or another. But what we found was no one really hit it on the head for what we thought was the appropriate way to go about it. One, on one end of the spectrum, you kind of have the laissez-faire parenting, which is you hand over the iPad or the phone for 5.5 hours a day on average for kids who are tweens and 8.5 hours a day for teenagers. And you hope it all works out. And for some kids it works out great, for other kids it doesn't work out great, as evidenced by all the research that's coming out about the mental health crisis, specifically with adolescent girls. There's all kinds of negative ramifications of social media. We really don't need to get into that because it's kind of become standard fare. Everyone kind of understands it at this point. And so that's one, one end of the spectrum. On the other end, there is the approach of locking down the device and trying to block what the kids are doing and seeing. And kind of engaging in a cat and mouse game. Ultimately, the kids become much more sophisticated than we ever will be with these devices, and it's almost like a challenge for them to engage in. If you say, look, I'm gonna try and lock down your use of Instagram or lock down your use of whatever social media property for this amount of time, the kids will figure out a way around it. It also doesn't seem to really prepare the kid for living in the digital age. You're kind of providing these very hard constraints as opposed to training the kid how to actually, live and thrive in the digital world, which these kids will be subject to for the rest of their lives. No question. So there's an acknowledgement in this kind of middle path that we are taking, which is, look, these kids are a product of the digital age, and the parents have a window of opportunity between the ages of 7 and let's call it 12 or 13 to help habituate the right kind of behaviors that we want our kids to engage in over their entire lives. But you have this window of time where the kids are relatively malleable. Open to the parents' engagement where you can kind of help set those habits in motion. And so Bright Canary is a service that allows parents to stay engaged with what their kids are doing across digital properties. So again, it's not trying to block what they're doing, but allow the parent some kind of insight into what their kids are doing. What, what content, for example, are the kids watching on YouTube? What kind of searches are they engaging in Google? What we do is we take that content down and we run it through machine learning models, and we scored against things like self-harm or weapons or pornography. And then we alert the parent if the kid is engaging in some kind of content that necessitates a conversation with the parent, basically allowing the parent to be a parent, which up to this point, we don't think the parents had really been given any kind of ammunition in this war. They've basically been caught flat-footed, and the kids have had all the power in terms of what they were able to do. And so we're trying to basically provide some more of them, some more, uh, more leverage back to the parents in this equation.

So Bright Canary, early warning system, canary in the coal mine, right?

That's correct. That's correct.

What you're doing is giving parents early warning of problems that their children might be getting into.

That's exactly right.

Wow, sounds like a great service. And you just started the service, you're in beta now, or you—

we, we launched it, we launched it in December, uh, late December of '22. And so we've been in market almost 6 months now, um, on iOS only currently, um, but we've been adding new services. So we're about to add Roblox to the platform platform, for example. And so right now we have about 4 platforms that we cover, but we'll be expanding that. We're learning a lot along the way. And so it's been very, very educational, very inspiring, because we're actually getting feedback from consumers and from very concerned parents about what's going on in the market. And of course, there's been a huge national discourse about this. It's really gained momentum in the last 6 months as well. There's all kinds of legislation that's pending across numerous states. There's federal legislation that's in the works as well. So we kind of hit a hot-button issue at the right time.

Good for you. Well, let's go back to you. Tell us a little bit about your backstory.

Yeah, so, um, I'm, you know, first and foremost, I'm a parent of 2 kids. I'm a husband, um, and I'm a tech entrepreneur. I've been doing tech now for quite a while. Um, I started my business career, um, out of undergraduate a long time ago in the management consulting field. I was a liberal arts background, and so I didn't have any kind of business training whatsoever. And so I went into management consulting for a few years right out of college. Found it to be a fantastic crash course in learning the ins and outs of, you know, the practicalities of business. Did that and then I kind of got caught up in the first dot-com boom and I went and joined a startup in 2000 and did that and helped write the S-1 filing for the company before it went basically bankrupt. And so that was an education in and of itself. Realized I had enough of that, went back and got my MBA for 2 years, graduated in 2003, and decided I wanted to move out to the West Coast and work in tech. I had the fortune of choosing, I think more by accident than anything else, as opposed to any great foresight, the wireless industry. So I moved out to Seattle, started working for AT&T Wireless a few versions ago, and ended up working in the instant messaging space for AT&T Wireless, which provided me a great foundation across the tech ecosystem because my— the companies I was working with were MSN, were AOL, were Yahoo. At the time, those were the big players, and I had a direct line of communication with them. So I got to see how those organizations worked and kind of get a network pretty quickly. Um, so I did that for a couple years and then realized that the tech or the big company ecosystem wasn't where I wanted to spend the rest of my career. So then ever since then, I've been working in the startup space. So not as a founder initially, but more as going in as an early employee and learning the, you know, the ins and outs of how that's, you know, how funding is done and how you build a team and the like. It took me a while to actually get the courage to go and actually start my own thing. Like I mentioned, I was very early, but I wasn't willing to take the, you know, the real risk of going without a salary and having everyone else's paycheck depend on me for quite a while. But I eventually decided that was, you know, the, you know, the endgame. If you're going to work in the early stage ecosystem, at least that was for me, that I really wanted to kind of feel it viscerally and feel the weight on my shoulders, both positively and negatively. And so I ultimately started a company with my current co-founder, but we started a company called Pushspring back in, back in 2012 or '13 that was in the advertising technology space. So very different than what I'm working on right now, a very nuanced space, but fun from the perspective. It's super dynamic. It's moving very fast. There's a lot to learn. Very smart people in the ecosystem. Lots of customers, lots of, lots of dollars being spent in it. So spent probably 7 years building that company now. Got it to profitability, sold it to T-Mobile where I was for a few years. And then after T-Mobile decided I want to take one more, one more, one more swing at it and started Bright Canary. So here I am.

That's quite the journey.

Yeah. Yes.

So as you think about, as you think about what you're doing now, you got a brand new startup. I mean, you don't have any, you have very few employees, right?

Correct.

Correct. I think I saw on the website.

Yeah, it's very early stage. And so there's, there's 5 of us currently.

5.

Okay. So very early stage. I'm still figuring out exactly what the product is we have and where the fit is in the market, but we're absolutely convinced there's, there's a need here. And so it's just a matter of figuring out exactly what the right way is to market for that.

Yeah, it sounds like you're kind of engaged in a lean process where you just, you're getting that minimal viable product out there, seeing what happens, and then designing around what the input is you get from the consumer.

Yeah, just learning really fast. So getting the feedback and, you know, optimizing the product based on that feedback and kind of trying to be as nimble as we possibly can because we know that's how we'll win. You know, there's, it's a big enough space that big companies will be focused on this, and so we're going to win by being super nimble, right?

So what, what gets you up in the morning? What gets you really excited?

Well, it's interesting, you know, when I was working in advertising technology, it was the challenge of a new space and learning something that was kind of Byzantine and, and, and, and hard to understand. I view that as a challenge. More recently though, the challenge for me has been this is a real societal need. I feel pretty strongly that this is a major social issue that's facing not only United States but countries across the world almost uniformly. And that is this teen mental health crisis and how we are not teaching our kids how to use these devices in a responsible way. And so to me, it's like this—

that assumes the parents know how to use the devices in a—

that's exactly right. I mean, there's— that's part of the problem here is that parents are modeling oftentimes worse behavior than their kids. And so this is a deep-rooted problem and there's no easy solution, but I firmly believe this is one of the big, big problems of our day. And, um, you know, I'm happy to be trying to provide something that's of service to some parents out there in the fight. Um, you know, I think that it, it, to me, it's very, um, invigorating to actually have that. And it's also great from a perspective of finding people who want to work on this too. There's a passion element to it. So I found, you know, we haven't hired many people obviously, but we started having quite a few conversations and It's amazing how easy it is to, to find really high-quality people when you're working on something that people share a passion for.

I get that.

It wasn't necessarily the case in advertising technology.

So are you guys all virtual? You're all remote, or, or, um, yes and no.

So my co-founder and I are both in Seattle. Um, we have a couple people in suburbs of Seattle as well. Um, we are going to Seattle area. We're going to be hiring for key roles though, more more locally. We started working on the remote model, and I think what our conclusion is, is it's very hard to find that, that kind of, that magic formula of ideas, sharing of confidence, of trust, everything that comes with being in person remotely. We've just found it very, very difficult. So we're not gonna do it 100%, um, um, locally for all roles, but for key roles, like key product and marketing roles, we're gonna move that to more of a centralized location.

Interesting. And what do you think it is that's unique about you that you bring to the table?

Uh, good question. I think I'm a good generalist. I'm not particularly, um, great at any one thing, but I'm good at across a variety of different disciplines. But I do think one thing I excel at is identifying talent. I'm able to figure out, um, you know, who is the right talent at the right stage, which for early-stage companies is a hugely different equation than what it is working at a big company, for example, because there's a personality type that, that, that thrives in a seed environment or an A environment. It's very different than a C-round environment. And I think I'm able to tease that out pretty effectively early on, even before perhaps they know it, because I've had the experience working across the different rounds or different stages, that is. And so I feel like that's kind of my strength, is being able to identify talent and, and figure out when that talent is most beneficial for both parties.

You know, it's interesting, um, of the over 100 interviews I've done this year since I started the podcast, every, every startup and midsize CEO that I talked to says the most important job of the CEO is hiring, is the hiring decision. The first 5 people are your most important hires, and they make or break the company.

I totally agree with that. I totally agree.

Really, and it's consistent across the board.

That's right.

And it makes sense because, and what one guy told me, he said, so I asked him, what's the criteria that you use? I said, can they hire good people? Are they knowledgeable themselves? Do they have experience? And can they attract?

Yeah.

Yes. So you can't scale unless you've got people that can do that.

Yeah, well, that's absolutely right. Um, when, if I look back on my previous experience, um, at Push Spring, we're an ad tech My co-founder and I, we didn't know ad tech at all. And like I mentioned, it's a very, very complicated space for someone to jump into. And we were not in, you know, we were in an area that was pretty, pretty nuanced, but we made incredibly good hires super early on and were able to empower those people to run. And that's what made the company. Without that, I think we would never have had any kind of success whatsoever. So it was totally dependent on our ability to identify those people super early on and get them excited about the mission.

So in terms of the work you do, obviously you're not—

you're a technologist, but you're not a developer, correct? I mean, you hire people to do the hard work of coding and the planning and all that stuff.

Yeah, so my co-founder and I have a pretty clear, um, division of labor. Um, he's a CTO, he's very technical, um, and he manages all that, and I manage the commercial side.

Okay, the business.

And we've both worked together for a long time, so we understand each other's strengths and weaknesses, and, you know, we know where those those, um, those, those divisions of labor occur naturally.

Wow. So this show is called Listening with Leaders because listening is— I believe that listening is a foundational skill that's completely ignored by many people. How important have you found listening to be in your career?

Yeah, I know, it's, um, it's interesting. Um, that's one of my, my, one of my favorite quotes I learned from one of my first board meetings. We had a board member who, uh, who looked at me and he said, some of the best advice I ever got was, you have two ears and one mouth, use them proportionally. And, uh, I've liked to employ that as much as I possibly can across my career, and I think it's done me great service. And so I'm a big believer in that. I think it— that alone, I think, is a huge differentiator, uh, in terms of— this is kind of a rare art where people actually listen intently and are present. You know, I think listening is really an exercise in being present.

It really is. And how often do you run across people that don't listen, they can't listen, they won't listen? And what's that experience like?

Well, I think it's unfortunately very common, and I think it's a function of a lot of things. But I think, you know, if I were to point at one thing in society right now, it's just become something that we actually have to work on. I think if you went back 100 years, I don't think listening probably was as much of a developed skill set as it is today. But just by virtue of the fact that when I'm sitting here You know, I have Slack going off and text messages, and it requires effort and foresight to turn those things off before you actually engage with someone and actually make yourself available to that person 100%.

Right.

And that's hard to do in an office environment when things are happening. And, and, you know, I, I, I'm, and I'm certainly not perfect at it. I, I work at it and I struggle with it a lot, but I do believe that it's, um, something that requires practice. It's like anything else, especially in today's day.

There's a lot of new brain imaging studies that show that the way we listen can have a dramatic effect on ourselves and on other people, which I've studied.

Interesting.

As a lawyer turned peacemaker, oftentimes I'm called into conflicts to mediate where there's a huge amount of money at stake and emotion.

Mm-hmm.

Nuclear, right?

Right, right.

Yeah.

So how— so having the ability to go in and get people calmed down in appropriate ways has been a pretty powerful part of what I do. It's so powerful that, that I'm, I'm now teaching it to other people because it's a skill set that I, I want to make sure that is spread out there as far and wide as possible. It sounds like, you know, you, you've got your listening skills are at a place where you see the importance of it and practice it to be— make yourself authentic and present and available for people.

Yeah, I certainly see the value in it. And, you know, I think having kids has actually taught me a lot about it as well, because, um, you know, I've— you know, we, just like any other parent, we've struggled with how to, uh, how to raise kids who have their own opinions and their own ideas. And very much making them feel heard is a big part of it. So before you kind of engage in any kind of problem solving, you know, the best practices I've been told is you're supposed to empathize with them and make them feel heard, kind of repeat what they're saying and kind of say, look, you, you, I'm listening to you.

Absolutely, absolutely correct. I, I would, I even take it deeper. I say ignore their words and listen to their emotions, right? Reflect their emotions. Oh, you're really frustrated, you're really angry, right?

Exactly.

I teach my people de-escalate and problem solve.

That's right.

And so that's especially with children.

Yes, yes. And so it's been super helpful for me because I don't think I had that understanding before having a very strong-headed voice.

Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, people, until they're forced to recognize that they have to listen, they don't, they really don't understand the importance of the skill. And if you, if you're a really diligent parent, like it sounds like you are, then you recognize that listening to your kids is one of the most important things you can do for them.

It is, it is being present for them. And, and, uh, yes, so that's something I've been working on.

So cycling back to Bright Canary, how do you see the company going? You've got 5 employees, you're a brand new startup, you've gotten some VC backing, which is pretty good. Um, where does it go from here?

Yeah, so we're, um, I'd say we're still in the learning mode, um, still figuring out exactly what market we're going to target, uh, and focus on going forward. I think getting, you know, infinitely smarter about it now than we were 6 months ago. Um, you know, I think we're honing exactly what our message is in terms of how we're actually appealing to people. You know, when we, when we first came out, we're like, hey, we're, we're going to help you monitor your kids' activities. Well, it's really not about that. It's really about how, how do we help parents onboard their kids into the digital age, right? Because there's really a lack of tools and services available for parents. I mean, that's critical Yeah, when during this critical phase when a kid's getting their first device, there's no tools. I mean, we have driver's permits, we have driving school for kids when they get a car, but nothing when they actually start using the internet.

Yeah, and that's a really good point. And, and to what we discussed a little while ago, most parents are, are inept around digital platforms themselves.

That's right.

And so they have a clue about how to teach their kids what's safe, what's smart, what's intelligent, what's right, and how do you use discernment. I think that's probably the most important thing that you can teach a kid is, you know, how do you discern what's appropriate, what's not appropriate, what's safe, what's not safe, what's true, what's not true, right? Right. Because there's not— there are no gatekeepers out there.

There's no gatekeepers, and there's no— oftentimes it's not, you know, yes or no. Like, there's a continuum like anything else. And so this is why it's necessitating parenting. This is, you know, just like anything else, it's complicated. Parents need to be engaged and understand what their kids are doing and understand the personality of their child and where their kid's at in the journey and kind of tailor whatever response is necessary for that. And so, um, you can't basically just have an algorithm says this is what you should do, X, Y, and Z. It doesn't work that, that simply. And so what we're trying to do is basically allow the parents the tools to figure out how they're going to take— what path they're going to take for this. Um, and so it's, uh, it's a tough message to send, but I also think that we're, we're realizing that parents feel, um, totally disempowered right now with how to raise kids in this, in this era. And so, um, where we originally had this thesis that our, our target customer was kind of coastal, highly educated, high household income, The evidence so far suggests it's actually much, much broader than that. It's people in Middle America who, you know, may not be college educated who are concerned about this. Maybe people with military backgrounds, maybe people who have strong religious beliefs. It's really across the board. And so in many ways, I'm happy our hypothesis is wrong because it means that our market is just that much bigger. It's sad that, you know, this is something that's afflicting everyone, but I think that's the reality of it is everyone's concerned about this. And so, um, that's an opportunity and a challenge. I mean, it's an opportunity because it's, it's much bigger, as I mentioned, but it's also a challenge in terms of how do you actually go talk to very disparate types of customer bases, right?

Different beliefs and values, different ways, different ways of parenting, different ways of thinking about—

that's right—

life in general. And I mean, and, you know, we have so many, so many different beliefs and values that are being broadcast out there today. That's part of the reason why people feel like there's so much polarization is because the internet has amplified every single opinion, every single idea is amplified over and over again.

That's right.

Like we're in this cacophony of shouting that nobody can make sense of.

Yeah, it's super fatiguing.

What's the revenue model? Is this a subscription-based—

subscription-based service? So it's a monthly or annual subscription right now. It's available through, through Apple, of course. And, you know, we might move to more of a freemium model at some point. You know, we've been contemplating how would we offer some of this service entirely for free. Right now we have a 7-day trial, but how would we offer some kind of reduced version of the service and then have a premium tier as well?

People can play with it and see whether or not they like it.

Yeah. And I think there's a couple, a couple thing, couple ways that that might make sense in the future.. But for now, it's a strict subscription service.

And how are you going to decide what platforms to include on the service?

Well, I mean, the reality is, you know, so I've worked, I spent some time in the carrier space. And so I know the realities of teenagers and devices and, you know, something like—

TikTok, Facebook, Instagram.

Well, yeah. Oh, I thought you were talking about Android versus iOS. In the US, 85% of teenagers have an iOS device. It's a crazy statistic. Really?

They don't have Android devices?

No Android devices. Now, of course, it's very different internationally, but in the US, it's heavily, heavily skewed towards iOS. And that's largely because of the iMessage function that basically makes kids feel excluded if they don't have an iOS device. You know, the green versus blue bubble. You know, it's a brilliant marketing product. Strategy. But the reality is that iOS is where the majority of our customers are, and that's also where there's a higher propensity or willingness to spend for this. And so we're focusing on iOS for the near term. In terms of services we, we support right now, we have YouTube and Google, which are kind of the gateway drug for, for kids. I hate to use that analogy, but that's kind of what they start with first is YouTube. Kids are using YouTube 5, 6, 7 all the time. Uh, and kids continue to use it actually for schoolwork as well. So it's one of the things where it's hard for parents to say you can't use YouTube at all because they're using it for school homework assignments, et cetera. And so we support YouTube and Google, um, very aggressively. And so, um, we allow parents to understand all the content, all the videos that kids have watched, even all the ads they've seen on YouTube, which has been really interesting because We've seen in certain cases kids who are 10, 11 getting served ads for alcohol or getting served for, you know, weapon-related things as well.

And so— I guess not.

Yeah, I mean, so it's, I mean, that's not common, but we've seen it happen. And so there's obviously some mistargeting going on in terms of how kids are being aged by the platforms. So we support both those platforms or both those services. We support Instagram and TikTok. We'll be adding Roblox as well. But I mentioned we're kind of, we're starting to focus more on this tween phase where kids can learn these habits and are not using social media as aggressively. So we're focusing on those services that all tweens use and, you know, the snaps of the world and, and, and the other social platforms become irrelevant as you get into the 13 to 18-year-old range. And that's less of a focus for us at this point.

So you're going to be— your target, the children's ages of what, 7 to 12?

7 to 12 or 13, exactly.

Wow.

It's— there's a practicality associated with that as well. I mean, as I mentioned, I think you can really habituate behaviors, good behaviors at that age. But there's also practicality of it's very hard to go to a 15-year-old who's been using TikTok for 2 years or 3 years and say, hey, mom and dad or whomever are going to start monitoring your social media activity now. I mean, the cat's a little bit out of the bag on that. Whereas you can take an 8-year-old and say, hey, you get to use an iPad, you get to use YouTube because mom and dad are using a service like Bright Canary. It becomes an enabler. And so it's a very different conversation if you set that up early on. That just becomes part of the equation, right?

And it's part of the, part of the contract you have with kids.

That's exactly right. And we actually recommend that. That's something we're launching as well as versions of digital contracts for parents and kids so they can sit down and form their own rules. And so a parent can decide with the child, like, what are the rules of the road when they get their phone or get their iPad? You know, what— when can they use it? What kind of content can we consume? When they can— when, when are they prohibited from using the device?

And what are the consequences for violation?

What are the consequences? And, and that should be printed out and should be posted on the, on the refrigerator. And standard fare, and both parties should sign it. And I think if families did that, I think they'd find that a large percentage of the friction or arguments that occur in the household would be avoided because it's just clear what the rules are.

Absolutely. Durable agreement.

That's right, exactly.

Durable agreements prevent conflicts.

That's right.

That's right. I, you know, I'm the co-founder of the Prison of Peace Project and teach people, incarcerated people, how to become peacemakers and mediators in prison to stop prison violence.

Oh, interesting.

And one of the skills that we teach them is how to, how to create an agreement that everybody will want to keep, right? Because in prison, a huge amount of conflict is because people don't do what they say they're going to do, right?

Right. That's interesting.

Learning how to do a durable agreement is a powerful, powerful tool for a parent.

Yeah, I thought when I, when I was first introduced to the concept, I thought there's no way my, I think, 7-year-old at the time would go for it. He's not going to understand this is going to— and shockingly to me at the time, he fully understood it better than I think many adults do. Like, he's like, okay, this is the rules of the road. Like, there was no arguments after we actually both agreed to it, right?

And especially if you give your child input in it. So what do you think about this? Or— that's right, we do that, you know, what, give them, give them some, give them some choice and some agency. And that's what, that's what makes the agreement durable. If you—

that's right—

down somebody's throat, they're going to say screw you. But if you get them engaged in the process That's right. And then you talk about things like, okay, so what are all the things that can get in the way of us following this contract? What are all the barriers that's going to be out there that we might look at?

That's right.

You know, and that's right, something happens and there's a violation, how do we handle that? You talk about all that in advance.

That's right. Yeah. And what we found too is one of the byproducts of, of the conversation was they actually understand the rationale for why you're trying to limit at some of these behaviors in a much deeper way than they did before. And kids are pretty smart at an early age, and they, they respect that. And I think a lot of parents just haven't sat down and actually explained why they want to limit their kids' activities on social media to a certain amount of time per day, or whatever it may be. And if they actually understood that, they might be a lot more understanding of it.

Yeah, this just goes to the point that parents don't know how to have conversations.

It's difficult. It's difficult. Yes.

One more question for Carl, and I'll let you go. Sure. What's one thing about you, Carl Stiller, that we would never know about unless you told us, you revealed it to us?

Oh, that's a good one. Um, okay. I spent the first 3 years of my life living without running water and electricity in the bush of Alaska.

No kidding.

Yeah.

So.

I had some adventures in parents. Wow. To the western part of Alaska when I was 2 months old.

Living, living in the bush.

Living in the bush. Wow.

Well, you survived.

I survived. Might have been a little damage on the way, but I'm still here.

You survived. Good for you. Well, this has been a great conversation. Thank you so much.

Yeah, thanks, Doug. Enjoyed it as well.

You're welcome, Carl.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up, ratings, and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.