Founder's Story - Inside the Alarming Teen Mental Health Crisis—and the AI Solution That Could Change Everything | Ep. 257 with Jeffery Katzenberg & Hari Ravichandra

Episode Date: August 15, 2025

In this urgent and eye-opening conversation, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Hari Ravichandra reveal the disturbing reality of what kids face online—and why most parents have no idea it’s happening. From shocking statistics about teen mental health to hidden dangers of AI chatbots and predators on social media, they explain why online safety now matters more than learning to drive. More importantly, they share how Aura is using AI for good—turning technology into a lifeline for families. Key Discussion Points: The personal story that inspired Hari to pivot Aura from identity protection to child safety What Aura’s data reveals about the state of teen mental health today How AI chatbots are creating dangerous, hyper-personalized interactions with kids Why online safety education should be treated like driver’s ed The single most important device rule every parent should implement How Hollywood and tech can join forces to create positive change The moral responsibility of tech founders to protect their users Why prevention—not reaction—is the future of online safety Takeaways: You can’t protect your kids from what you don’t understand—awareness is step one Technology is neutral—it’s how we design and use it that decides its impact Sleep disruption is a silent driver of mental health decline among teens The best safety tools empower parents without breaking trust with kids Closing Thoughts:Katzenberg and Ravichandra are on a mission to rewrite the story of tech’s impact on the next generation. Their message is clear: with the right tools and conversations, we can give our kids the freedom to explore online—without losing them to it. Get more leads and grow your business. Go to https://www.pipedrive.com/founders and get started with a 30 day free trial. Ditch the other hiring sites, and let ZipRecruiter find what you’re looking for — the needle in the haystack. Try it FOR FREE at this exclusive web address: ZipRecruiter.com/WORK. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Today's episode is sponsored by Pipe Drive, the number one CRM tool for small to medium businesses. I'm excited to share more about them later in the episode. So I have to say, I'm always very excited to have two guests on because I think it brings more perspectives and you each have a very fascinating background as to how you got here. But I want to dive right in because AI is the topic of everything. And there's a lot of reasons why AI can be good. And I think there's a lot of reasons why AI could be bad. But what you're doing at ORA, I think, would be considered AI for good. And I'd love to understand how you got to this point and why is this company so important to you both.

Sure. Yeah, I could start. So we kind of find ourselves here, I would say, a little bit of tourists, I would say, in some ways. Because again, when we started the business, the focus was very much on safety. And sort of the definition of safety at the time, which was seven years ago, was very much around things like financial safety, making sure that your identity was safe, privacy, device safety, and those types of things. And about two years in or two years ago, I had a personal incident and then sort of that led to sort of an addition of a variety of things inside our charter.

I have four kids, and one of my kids actually went through a really hard time. I was basically struggling with mental health issues. And again, we're a very sort of privacy-focused family. So we'd never actually looked at her phone or her devices or anything like that. And we actually was going through a real dip was the first time we actually started looking at it. And when we did, it was a pretty stark contrast between what we saw in real life and what was on the device in terms of like how she was feeling and the way that she was engaging with different things. and social media, et cetera. So this is like a moment of awakening for me as a parent,

which was the truth of what's happening with our kids is really more on device than it is in physical life. And the problem is, as a parent, you don't really know what's actually going on inside this device. It's a big black hole because kids are on these devices eight hours. They're doing lots of stuff on it. They're engaging with lots of different apps and lots of things are going on.

There's real safety issues in the physical world. from that. And certainly a lot of residuals from mental and emotional negatives that come from being on these devices for so long. And so in that situation, if you think about it, it's a real needle in the haystack type of thing because every kid is on different devices for different amounts of time and you've got different apps. If you're a parent, you know, and we talked with a lot of parents and many said, look, when my kids asleep, I grabbed their phone, I spent 45 minutes looking through it. I don't know if I actually looked through the right stuff or not, but I try to do my best. So there's a real problem area here and a real lack of knowledge. So to us,

AI in that situation was the best tool for the job. And again, we were less concerned about what is the technology or what is it, you know, like we're not trying to build something just for the sake of technology, but there's a problem that customers are having, families are having from a safety perspective. And this happened to be the right tool to fit in to be able to solve the issue. So with all the changes of gen AI, and it seems like AI tools and such are advancing at a rate that we can't even keep up, how do you see parenting transforming in this digital age? Jeffrey, you want to take that? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, in the age of generative, yeah, there's obviously as you started, there's good and there's bad. The good

news is, you know, you can use these tools for good, meaning being able to identify behavioral patterns, being able to identify things that are trends about your child. And really using those as conversation openers, how we think about it, which is, you know, can we create this moment of connection where if the parent knows something that's very, very relevant to the kid, even if something as simple as say, like, you know, I am really excited about, you know, something that happened inside this video game even, like something like that. It can create this moment of connection. It can kind of create this moment where you can have a conversation with their kid as it relates to technology, which is where a lot of their lives are. Now, the negative

of it is, it also sort of brings up lots of new stuff that we hadn't worried about from a safety perspective, like one thing I'll tell you, like, recently we've been seeing lots of kids engaging with AI chatbots. This is not something we saw six months ago or a year ago, and, you know, many of these are meant to have age verification. They do not. And the nature of conversations that kids have with the chatbots are highly sexual with kids that are probably, you know, anywhere from 10, 11, 12 on up, basically. And so, so that's the negative of it. You can actually sort of, you know, really take it to the extreme end, we just sort of, what's happening here. So they're definitely good and bad and it means that for parents as you're

going through this, this is now like a new skill you've got to teach your kid. Like it's, you know, just like we teach our kids, you know, maybe 10 years ago is like, you know, how to use the computer safely or something like that, you know, or teach them drive a car. One of the biggest game changes I've seen for founders isn't another pitch deck, another tool or even another investor. It's how you manage sales. And I'll be real when we first started, we were getting leads, we were getting business, but the pipeline was so messy. Leads were falling through the cracks. We weren't following up. We were losing tons of revenue and money and everything was all over the place. It was chaos. That's when we started using Pipe Drive, today's sponsor and the number one CRM for small and medium

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This is something that the parent needs to take on as a job, a skill that they need to should have to be able to impart on their kids so they can have a healthy relationship with technology. I really understand and respect the responsibility that we had as storytellers to mom in particular. And so when Hari got on to, you know, both the problem and the solution, I felt very compelled in the ability to do good while doing good, which I've tried to make a part as much as I can of as many of the things that I have done in my career. I've always felt great reward in the success is not an outcome in itself that's having good things quality

things things that bring goodness into the world and if you look at the landscape that aura has sort of you know found itself in the middle of it's kind of shocking and so just to share with you some statistics about uh teenagers to So we did a pretty extensive beta on this before we launched it of 12 to 17-year-olds, several thousand of them. And here are the statistics on this, which is the thing that really, I think, got us quite fired up about this. 46% of the kids are depressed, 35% have social withdrawal, 22% in late-night scrolling.

So what that means is when they should be sleeping, they're actually up and they're on their devices, which is maybe one of the most unhealthy things is possible, you know, for kids not to be getting a full night's sleep, 30% with low self-esteem, 22% with self-harm, suicidal thoughts, and 52% with eating disorders. So when you take that, and that's a snapshot that I think is highly accurate, and if that's not enough to send you into a pretty panic mode there's something wrong this is the next generation again i'm not here to say that there aren't many great benefits and valuable things out of social media it's not all in you know one dark lane in it but there is one and parents have been left literally without any tools any ability any access they're adrift they're a drift in the you know hanging on

on by their fingertips in the middle of an ocean with no lighthouses, no nothing. And that's what I am so proud of Marie and ORA and what they have built. And we now hear it because we've got tens of thousands of people that are on this and every day. And the beauty of it is it's not about spying. It's literally about observation and then coaching. he already made the point here today if you have a teenager they and they're going to start driving what happens you have this onboarding process that takes place over two years you get a learner's permit you go to a Walmart parking lot where you can't damage you anything you you know you tool around there and

you know they hit the brakes and you know you teach them and as they get older they get more freedom and they have responsibility. And so by the time they're 18 years old, you put the keys in their hands, you've shepherded them onto the world of driving. Well, here's a newsflash. The on-world of social media is, you know, by a factor more dangerous than being in a car.

And we should at least give parents the tools to onboard, you know. I like the idea of a driver's license for social media. I am under the thought process or impression myself and being a parent. I'm so torn with social media. It's like you said, there's so many great things. But I personally almost feel like it could be the destruction of humanity in the future. That's just my personal thought. Yeah.

No, I mean, listen, it's easy to go to the dark space in this. And we are, you know, we have a bottomless well of optimism. So we're not going to go there with you. You know what hiring feels like, like searching for a needle. at Haystack. You post a job, get flooded with resumes, but most just don't have the right experience or mindset. That's why I tell every founder I meet, use ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter finds amazing candidates fast, and right now you can try it for free as ZipRecruiter.com slash work. Here's why I love it. Their smart tech instantly pinpoints top town and starts

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One more time, ZipRecruiter.com slash work. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. But what we do want to do is we want to make sure that we give parents and kids the opportunity to go into this world, armed and prepared to actually be successful in this, meaning getting the rewards of the world and not being taken down into places that they just do not need to be. So if these platforms reached out to you and said, hey, we want to make some change. changes. We want to do some things differently. What advice would you give to them? The big thing is basically access to data, right? I mean, so like if you're trying to build an ecosystem of safety, a platform provider would have a hard time. And even if they did, by the way, it would only be partial because kids use multiple different apps, multiple different

platforms. So if you came to a set of standards where people said, listen, you know, we want to make sure that, you know, we want to make your kids data accessible to you in an easy way. And if the parent says, look, like, I want to be able to analyze it. I want to be able to to take a look at what's going on there. None of that is super easy. At the moment, you can't get information. Like if you're a parent, you know, even of my 14-year-old, and I want to get a sense of, hey, how was she engaging with this thing?

And I think that's part of my job as a parent, unless I extract the password from her or give her some sort of a... Yeah, I've seen some countries that are looking to, you know, put some age restrictions and such, but if you were to give maybe one habit that every parent could start, today one digital habit or however you want to call it that they could implement right now what would that be i would definitely say keep the kids away from their phones overnight you know it's a it's a simple obvious thing but we see so much sleep and eruption and that's at a core part of kid well-being um having it's a very simple thing to do like take their phones and put it outside

and even tell them like you know like that's what we do at home now is you know because we were noticing on on our app that one of my kids was actually up like a 12 1 o'clock you know on social we need have browsing through and we said look we're going to put the phone here and i don't you know and if you really feel like you have to come get it uh come do it but when you add that bit of intentionality uh you know she she doesn't let me she doesn't come get her phone and you know we've been seeing lots of positive benefits from that so i never thought about that when it comes to sleep interruption i've had i have sleep apnea so if i don't sleep i get very anxious depressed it really my memory fades i i couldn't imagine like you're saying if this is in the the phases of our life when

we're going through so much development, at least now, you know, my memory fades. I already know it's going to happen. But if you're a teenager, the long-term benefits of that, I mean, that could be detrimental. I am curious, just changing gears slightly. When it comes to view, when you look at success, you both have pioneered your industries from entertainment to technology and health. You've had what people would probably say is, you know, that I would love to be the two of you at some point in my life. Like, I strive to be you. You are on my vision board. But what does success look like to you now? Listen, I shared it with you earlier in this, which is that for me, I love doing good. I love being successful, but having that come from things that just have a positive.

positive contribution out there in the world and whether it's making people happy or making them smarter or making them more successful themselves, like doing things that help other people have some kind of positivity around it are the things that I personally just am attracted to and I find the most rewarding. You know, making movies for all those years, particularly family films, the thing that I love most about it was laughter. And so the reward for me was to go stand in the back of the theater and hear 300, a family of 300, you know, kids and parents laughing at, you know, Lion King or Madagascar or Shrek or whatever it was. The reward was laughter. And being in the back of that theater and hearing that outcome from something that, you know, 500 of us spent four years working on was.

beyond the greatest feeling. And so in the tech world that I'm in today, I look for the equivalence of that. Look, I think the thing that I tell myself and I tell my kids and I tell, you know, execs that our company is at the end of the day, really the big thing to do is to just take a step. It's not, you don't need to kind of think about, oh, like, I'm going to go change the world. I'm going to go do all these things. I want to make a billion dollars. Like whatever it is that motivates you or drives you, right? The difficulty comes when you've got that vision that's pretty far away and then you are in the present reality of where you're sitting. And so typically, you know, like a sense of self-belief, self-worth and confidence comes from

just taking a step and then take another step and then it starts a compounder. It kind of gets there. So just having a bias for action after you've got that big vision of whatever it is you want to go accomplish, really helps ground it. And then, you know, over time you get better. You don't make the same mistakes over and over again. You get smarter. You get, you know, faster, all of these things.

But when my kids are overwhelmed with homework, I tell them the same thing, which is, hey, just take a step. Like, just go do a thing. It doesn't matter what the thing is. Just do one thing and then do another thing and then do another. So I think I think compounding towards action, I find to be very helpful for me personally as well. We tend to see from our audience, or they at least let us know that learning about the challenges of the guests is really inspirational for them. Was there ever a moment for, I'm sure there's been many moments, but is there a moment that stood up? out where you just wanted to give up because entrepreneurship can be really freaking hard.

But there's some reason you just kept going. Every single chapter I don't know what give up means. I honestly, it's a, my mantra, which has sort of been mine from literally childhood forward has been two words, exceed expectations. And so no matter what it is that I'm doing, no matter who I'm engaging, with, you know, trying to get something done a little bit faster, a little bit better than, you know, I was expected, you know, exceeding the expectation of my bosses, exceeding the expectations of my, of the audience, exceeding the expectation of a customer,

like just that. And by the way, it doesn't mean you achieve it every time you set out to do it, but at least setting that goal of wanting to just do a little bit better than what is expected of you by others, and I translate that into my life. You know, I've been married 50 years. I'm still trying to exceed the expectations of my wife. Maybe that's a good thing, right? If you exceeded expectations, who knows what happens then, but, you know, you're getting there, but sorry, Ari.

Yeah, look, I mean, adversity, it's, it's always there, right? I mean, it's a very thin line between, you know, when you feel like you have escape velocity and things are going to take off, and the day prior you're thinking, I mean, it's all done. Like, they just need to give up. And it happens. And it's really interesting to me. I think, you know, you always find that around the time you feel like you're about

to give up, you give it a little bit more time. That's when things start taking off. And that's happened over and over again in my life. And now I've kind of learned from it, which is, hey, if I feel like I want to give up, I just got to go another step, another step, another step. And then suddenly you're like, wow, like, I'm so glad I didn't, I didn't give up. And so I think it's pushing through your mindset anchored around the journey versus the outcome helps get through adversity a bit more easily.

So let's say final question, you're in your 20s, or maybe, you know, you've been fired from your corporate job because AI replaced you. Now you want to be an entrepreneur. What would you both look at right now in this current moment in terms of if someone is going to start a business today? I mean, where we started is where we end. You know, definitely sort of, you know, AI is going to change the world. Like, you know, whether you believe it's going to be for the good, for the bad, for whatever

it is, it will. And again, the velocity of change has been just mind-boggling to me about how much has come along in the last kind of 24 months and the potential impact of that. And again, the way I see it, if no more innovation happened in AI, there's still so much that's been done in the last two or three years that it's going to take a decade for it to get its way through the business world, et cetera. And that creates lots of opportunities. And I think, you know, in my mind, anything that you start with first principles, like, is there a real customer problem that with my skill set and with my abilities, I'm able to solve it in a novel way that's unique. And a lot of those things are now coming with some

sort of AI footprint. Those principles haven't changed. The tools you use to get there are a little different now than it used to be when I was my 20. Well, I'm excited because entrepreneurship is alive. I've been addicted to vibe coding. I don't know if you've been doing this, but I've made like, it's it's actually bad because if you're you know someone like myself you just ideate all the time it's like every day i'm making a new app that i'll probably never use but it just i'm so excited that people can make something and not have to raise money not have to raise capital right away they can get to MVP they can get to use cases without raising millions and almost anyone can do it with at least 50 dollars i'm really excited for the future but if people want to get in touch with you they want to find out more about aura and

everything you have going on. How can they do so? My email is hurria.org.com, H-A-R-I-A-R-D-com. So feel free to drop me a line. We'd love to hear from you. Well, Jeffrey and Hari, this has followed both of you for a long time. Obviously, Jeffrey, the things that you did had a major impact in my life growing up. Because my dad and I, when we would spend time together, we were watching movies. And that's what we do.

So both of you, if I thought 20, 30 years ago, I'd be sitting here having this conversation, I probably would be lying to say I would. But it's been a super honor to have you and how you're going to impact the world. Thank you for all that you do in joining us today. Thank you, Daniel. Thank you for having us. Appreciate it.

Thank you, Daniel.