1KHO 748: Public Schools Should Serve Students, Not Screens | Dr. Jared Horvath, The Digital Delusion

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast

Episode: 1KHO 748: Public Schools Should Serve Students, Not Screens

Guest: Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, Author of The Digital Delusion

Release Date: March 24, 2026
Host: Ginny (Jenny) Yurich

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Episode Overview

In this powerfully relevant episode, host Ginny Yurich sits down with Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, cognitive neuroscientist, educator, and author of The Digital Delusion, to critically examine the explosion of educational technology (EdTech) in public schools. Drawing on research, personal experience, and historical context, Dr. Horvath pulls back the curtain on the real, measurable impacts of screens and digital devices in the classroom—arguing that the tech-saturated classroom experiment is harming a generation of students by undermining real learning, memory, creativity, and even mental health.

This conversation challenges the prevailing wisdom that more technology equals better education, explores the science behind human learning, and offers significant, research-backed recommendations for reclaiming hands-on, analog methods. Ginny and Dr. Horvath connect these ideas to the core 1000 Hours Outside philosophy: children (and adults) thrive best when engaged deeply in the real world.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Dr. Horvath’s Journey to Becoming a Leading Voice in EdTech Critique

• Background: Started in filmmaking, became fascinated by how humans think and learn, switched to teaching, then neuroscience.
• Motivation:
  • Dr. Horvath realized, “I just never thought the ed tech thing mattered... Once you know learning, of course technology is not going to be helpful… That's not what it does” (01:29-04:00).
  • COVID-19 lockdowns moved all learning online, and when schools didn’t return to pre-pandemic methods, Dr. Horvath decided to formally address the impact of EdTech.

2. The EdTech “Experiment” and Its Scope

• History:
  • Before about 2000, computers were limited to dedicated labs; tech was not integrated into most learning (05:14).
  • Around 2004, the shift to 1:1 device programs began, with no solid evidence to justify the switch.
• Scale:
  • “In the United States, 88%, almost all of public school districts now operate one-to-one device programs.” (07:48)
  • EdTech is now a $400 billion industry with aggressive expansion and vested interests.

3. Cognitive Collapse in the Digital Classroom (08:36)

• Historical Progress:
  • For over a century, each generation outperformed the previous one in cognitive measures due to increased schooling.
• The Reversal:
  • “Gen Z is the first generation in history to underperform their parents on every measure, even basic working memory.” (09:46)
  • Schooling has been decoupled from cognitive development; tools-based digital education is narrowing rather than expanding adaptability.
• Key insight:
  • “The more our kids were spending on tech at schools, the worse everything was getting. Their literacy was going down, their numeracy was going down, their critical thinking was going down.” (07:06)

4. The Myth of “Preparing Kids for the Future” through Digital Skills

• Device Lock-In:
  • Tech companies battle to get devices into kids’ hands young, building lifelong customers. Kids trained on Apple, for example, become Apple lifetime users. (11:45-13:03)
• Employability:
  • “Maximizing employability shouldn’t be the ultimate goal of education. But even if it is, chasing digital skills is exactly the wrong strategy… The best preparation… isn’t tool-specific training, it’s broad general knowledge.” (Jenny quoting Jared, 13:41)
  • Employers are reporting that young people are less “job-ready” even with greater digital exposure (14:09).

5. The Evidence: Sixty Years of Research on EdTech’s Impact

• Hard Data:
  • International tests show a negative correlation between tech use in school and performance (14:36).
  • "The very first meta-analysis done with EdTech was done in 1977, and it showed that tech was harming learning compared to analog methods... The latest meta was just published last month, 2026, and it found the exact same result.” (16:28)
  • “It is not the specific program or training. The tool itself does not resonate with human learning, and so no matter how you use it, it will diminish learning compared to working with a teacher.” (17:49)

6. Paper vs. Screen: The Science of Reading and Memory

• Place, Memory, and Comprehension:
  • “Buy a printer, print everything out… If you do nothing different with your life but have paper instead of a screen, you will learn more, comprehend better, retain longer.” (23:53)
  • Human memory is spatial; screens destroy spatial cues, leading to skimming, not deep reading (25:00-26:00).
• Consequences for Kids:
  • “We’re undermining our children… perhaps the cruelest part is they don’t even know they’ve lost anything.” (28:26)

7. Handwriting vs. Typing: The Power of Analog Skills

• Deep vs. Shallow Notes:
  • “When we take notes for learning… typing, you just take copious amounts... But if you’re taking notes with a pen and paper, by definition you have to be parsing, meaning you have to be thinking deeply… The only way to guarantee that is pen and paper.” (33:30)
• Transferable Skills & Complexity:
  • Writing by hand is a deeply flexible, complex skill that transfers broadly; typing doesn’t build these skills (37:01-39:56).
• Literacy Link:
  • “The parts of the brain we have to develop to write by hand are the same parts… we use to read.” (42:01)

8. Downtime, Waking Consolidation, and the Danger of Constant Screens

• Cognitive Downtime:
  • Learning is consolidated in breaks and downtime, not just during sleep; constant device use eliminates essential rest for the brain, leading to poorer retention and learning (43:44-47:23).
  • “Learning happens when you stop... you could estimate probably 80 to 90% of all learning happens when you quit paying attention.” (44:00)
• Bell-to-Bell Bans:
  • It’s only schools with a hard, bell-to-bell device ban that show learning improvements.

9. Addiction, the Reward Cycle, and Mental Health

• Habit Formation:
  • The cue-action-reward cycle of phones becomes an anticipatory craving; students check devices every four minutes for relief, not joy (49:43-53:17).
  • “Learning, by definition, is uncomfortable… most kids have trained themselves to use uncomfort as a cue to touch my phone.” (50:35-53:15)
  • Hard bans—not just policies—are necessary for breaking the cycle.

10. Philosophical and Moral Considerations: Neil Postman’s Warnings

• Tech as Worldview:
  • Dr. Horvath channels media theorist Neil Postman: “There is no such thing as a neutral technology. Every technology is embedded with a worldview. When you use it, you have to assume that worldview.” (55:36)
• Moral Overreach:
  • “Compulsory, one-to-one computing is not merely technological overreach. It’s moral overreach.” (55:15)
  • Public schools’ mandatory device programs force a worldview and undermine parental values.

11. Data Harvesting and the EdTech Business Model

• Surveillance Concerns:
  • EdTech platforms openly track students’ facial expressions, voice, typing cadence, and more; data becomes another commodity (13:30-13:40, 62:01).
  • “None of this is altruistic… no one in the field of digital technology gives a rat’s patootie about student learning or child development. They are not in this to make better humans. They are in this to make bigger profits.” (60:12)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Gen Z is the first generation in history to underperform their parents on every measure, even the basic measures of just basic working memory.”
  — Dr. Jared Horvath (09:46)

• “The more our kids were spending on tech at schools, the worse everything was getting. Their literacy was going down, their numeracy was going down, their critical thinking was going down.”
  — Dr. Jared Horvath (07:06)

• “Buy a printer, print everything out… If you do nothing different with your life but have paper instead of a screen, you will learn more, comprehend better, retain longer.”
  — Dr. Jared Horvath (23:53)

• “Taking notes by hand leads to significantly better learning than typing notes on a computer... The slower writing promotes deeper thinking, and there is no shortcut for that.”
  — Dr. Jared Horvath (41:21-41:25)

• “Learning happens when you stop... you could estimate probably 80 to 90% of all learning happens when you quit paying attention.”
  — Dr. Jared Horvath (44:00)

• “There is no such thing as a neutral technology. Every technology is embedded with a worldview. When you use it you have to assume that worldview.”
  — Dr. Jared Horvath (55:36)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:29 – Dr. Horvath’s journey: from filmmaker to neuroscientist to education reform advocate
• 04:07 – EdTech as classroom experiment, history of integration in schools
• 08:36 – Cognitive collapse: why results for Gen Z are dropping
• 13:41 – Debunking the employability argument; why digital skills training is a losing strategy
• 16:28 – Sixty years of research: meta-analyses on EdTech and learning outcomes
• 23:53 – Paper vs. screen: the science of memory, space, and comprehension
• 33:30 – Why handwritten notes trump typing for deep understanding
• 37:01 – Transferable skills: handwriting’s role in overall brain and skill development
• 43:44 – Downtime, waking consolidation, and why we need screens off for learning
• 49:43 – The addiction cycle: dopamine, relief, and distraction in classrooms
• 55:36 – Neil Postman, worldviews, and the moral dimension of EdTech
• 60:12 – Data harvesting, digital dependency, and the business of EdTech

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Solutions & Practical Takeaways

• Reclaim analog methods: Print materials, encourage handwriting, and fight for device-free learning time.
• Advocate for real policy: Bell-to-bell device bans, not just “away during class,” actually work.
• Prioritize downtime: True learning is cemented during breaks—every hour outside is an hour consolidating what’s been learned.
• Push for transparency and opt-out rights: Parents should have a right to opt out of 1:1 device programs, especially at the elementary level.
• Understand the worldview: Remember, technology is never neutral. Schools should reflect community and parental values—not simply default to the latest device.

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Recommended Reading

• The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids’ Learning and How to Help Them Thrive Again by Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath
• Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman

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Final Note

This episode was a clarion call to question the direction of public education in a tech-saturated world. Dr. Horvath’s grounded, research-based critiques offer both a sobering warning and clear actions for educators, parents, and communities who want children to thrive, not just survive, in—and beyond—the digital classroom.

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Transcript

[Podcast Host - Sponsor Announcer]

This episode is brought to you by Peloton Break through the busiest time of year with the brand new Peloton Cross Training Tread plus, powered by Peloton iq. With real time guidance and endless ways to move, you can personalize your workouts and train with confidence, helping you reach your goals in less time. Let yourself run, lift, sculpt, push and go. Explore the new peloton cross training Tread [e-mail] Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast.

[Jenny Erton]

My name is Jenny Erton, the founder of 1000 Hours Outside. We are going to be talking about such a pertinent topic today. We're going to be talking about EdTech and Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, the author of the Digital Delusion, which is a fantastic book. How classroom technology harms our kids learning and how to help them thrive again is here. Jared, thanks so much for writing this book and thanks for spending this time with us today. Welcome.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Thank you for having me on. I'm really looking forward to this.

[Jenny Erton]

So you've got quite the background here. PhD and a master's in education. Neuroscientist, educator, best selling author. You specialize in human learning and cognitive development. You're creative of the learning Blueprint. So many accolades here. You conducted research and taught at Harvard, Harvard Medical School School, University of Melbourne, worked with more than 1,000 schools around the world, published over 60 research articles. Your work has appeared anywhere people think work could appear. New Yorker, Atlantic, and this is just one of six, six books we're going to be focusing on this one Digital Delusion. But you've written a lot of books. Can you give us a background on how you got interested in this topic of ed tech?

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Oh my gosh. And let me just for anyone who just got bl. I hate, there's nothing worse than hearing somebody talk about the things you've done. I'm just a normal dude. Things happen. I don't care. Like I'm not.

[Jenny Erton]

But also like normal dudes don't also have six books. I mean, I do think there's something to be said about accomplishment, you know, because there is a vast majority of people that are like, you know, I go to my. And I don't think that there's anything wrong with it, but they're like, I go to work, I come home, you know, and we watch watch Netflix. So there are.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Contributor]

There is a cohort of people.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

That's what I do too. I just so happen my work is I sit at a computer and I type things up. It's fine at the end of the day, I'm just a normal dude. So set the stage. I, I was a teacher originally, so education, teaching is kind of my passion actually. I'll take you a step back. I was actually a filmmaker before that. So I, my undergrad was in film. I thought I would be a director, but I, you know, doesn't really work out. And that's when I realized why was I interested in film? Because I liked people. How they thought, how they acted. Why do I like people? I like helping them develop and think, so why not be a teacher? And that's where that really kind of started to bubble in. And then I got into to learning stuff that was, I was teaching during the decade of the brain. So everyone was talking about brain books and brain gym and brain this, that. So I think, cool, I'll go learn that stuff. It'll make me a better teacher. So I go study neuroscience. That ends up taken. I've been doing that for about 18 years now. But my focus has always just been on how do human beings learn. And so what I teach, most of the time when I work with schools, I just teach teachers and students about learning. If here's how human beings learn, it's a very specific process. If you know that, what does that mean for being a better teacher? What does that mean for studying at home or as a parent? What does that mean for helping my kid with homework? And I just never, I never thought the ed tech thing mattered. So like, believe it or not, if you took like a 30 hour course with me, say at university about learning, towards the end, I like for about 30 minutes, I would say, okay, digital technology, now that we know all this stuff about learning, I want you to have a discussion. And digital technology, would it be good? Would it be bad? And 30 minutes later everyone would come back and say, yeah, it's not good. I'm like, good, there you go. It was always just this flipping thing where once, you know, learning, of course technology is not going to be helpful for that's not what it does. And then Covid hit and everyone got stuck online. And then Covid stopped and everyone stayed online and schools went hardcore into the tech. And that's where I just said, okay, clearly I got to put all this together to say, stop, the experiment is done. It wasn't working, it's not useful. Let's go back to what we know is best for our kids and their development.

[Jenny Erton]

And what a sad thing that it's an experiment. That's the thing you talk in this book, the digital Delusion about like this one school where they're we're going to switch back. Like they've had 12 years of one to one laptops and they're going to make the switch. And then obviously like some parents don't like it and some parents do like it, but I was like 12 years is a whole childhood. So there is a cohort of kids that started in the kindergarten or first grade with one to one laptops possibly and had it all the way through or you know, in the older years, like they had it for their whole high school. And there was a parent that you had quoted in the book who said, oh, I guess my kid's just gonna be the experiment. Because you know they're like the people

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Contributor]

who are fighting for edtech, which is

[Jenny Erton]

the ones are making tons of money.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Contributor]

They're like, well you're just using it

[Jenny Erton]

wrong or you know, we haven't have enough time to quite figure out. And so then the parents are like, well is my kid like just an experiment for you to figure out your edtech situation? So can you give a little bit of the history here? So like I, you know, we had computer lab growing up. It was Apple Computer. You went to computer lab almost like you went to gym class. It was probably like once a week you go to computer lab for an hour. And we played Oregon Trail. That's all I remember.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

And I think we learned how to

[Jenny Erton]

type actually, which is a useful skill. We learned how to type and we played Oregon Trail and that was, it was one hour a week Computer lab. It was in a specific location. You talk about starting in the year 2000, things really began to change.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Yeah, I think that's, you could push it even a little further than that. So computers used to be exactly what you were saying. It was like wood shop. There was a specific spot in school where you go do that skill and then you go back to school and do everything else. Yeah, it was never integrated with everything else. And then realistically it was right around 2004 when personal computers started to get a bit cheaper that I think Maine was the first one to come out and say let's just give everyone a computer and it'll make it easier. Now go back to that date when they, because they're the first state in the union to ever do a one to one program. This was decades before some other states did it. Not decades, a decade. And ask them why? Why would you give every kid a computer? Where's the evidence that it would help them, that it will support them? That it will help them develop. Their argument was never that we proof. This will help our argument. Their argument was always, we think this will help. We think this should help. Well, mate, I think my shoe should earn me a million dollars. Shoulds don't mean anything in this world until you can demonstrate, yeah, that shoe is plated in gold. It is worth a million dollars. Hooray. Evidence matters in this context, and that's why you're spot on, is we started following this ideology that because the world is becoming more digital, kids should also be more digital. And we started moving all learning online, thinking that was going to somehow prepare them for the world ahead of them. But what really ends up happening is the more our kids were spending on tech at schools, the worse everything was getting. Their literacy was going down, their numeracy was going down, their critical thinking was going down. All of these skills, we thought we were benefiting, we were actually harming. And I would hope that after a decade or so that we would have figured it out. It's been probably 20, 20 good years, 25 in some cases. And people still haven't quite cottoned on to the fact that all of this decline we're seeing in cognition. By all means, there's some cultural things going on too. Smartphones at the home, broken families. Absolutely. But my goodness, in schools, what's been the big change? It's just the tools we're using. We moved it from a computer lab, something we learn about, into every class, something we learned through. And that was the big mistake. We made huge change.

[Jenny Erton]

This book is phenomenal. So you talk about this is now a $400 billion mega industry that really has only been around for a couple decades. So this has just skyrocketed. You really give get a sense in your book the digital delusion about how pervasive this is. In The United States, 88%, almost all of public school districts now operate one to one device programs. And you say today's ed tech is nothing like what we grew up with. And parents have no idea just how far things have spiraled. So there's a time component here. You talk about reading and writing and you really talk about, you use the phrase cognitive collapse. And at a time, this was what you wrote. When we need children who are sharper and more adaptable than we are. So can you talk about the cognitive collapse and why it matters even more

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Contributor]

than maybe it would have when people were working in factories all the time?

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Yeah, absolutely. So since we've been recording cognition and cognitive development, so this is since the late 1800s, every generation has outperformed their parents on every measure. We have memory, attention, general iq, literacy, numeracy. We're always going up. And that's exactly what we want. Each generation. As the world grows more complex, we need a generation of kids that can handle that complexity better. And the reason why we've always seen this growth was school. Each generation of human beings went to more school than their parents. School is where we train you how to adapt to a changing world. And I want to make that absolutely clear. School has never been a tools based institution where we teach you how to do something. School has always been a general thinking institution where we teach you how to drive your own thoughts and cognitions. That's how we adapt. So I always say, like think about an ITT Institute. If you want to learn welding, you go to school, you study welding for two, two years. That's a tools based institution.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Contributor]

Yeah.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

I will now not expect you to also be a good plumber or a good carpenter because we trained you in tool.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Contributor]

Yeah.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

K through 12. Education doesn't train you in tools. We train you how to think through knowledge. We're not teaching you history because I want you to be a historian. I'm not teaching you how to write because I think you're going to be a novelist. We're teaching you how to think through knowledge so that when you are old enough and the world starts to change, you understand the patterns you have to go through to adapt, to twist your thinking to make that new knowledge work. So that's why the more time we spent in school, every generation was better at adapting to the world. Until now. We now hit Gen Z. And Gen Z is the first generation in history to underperform their parents on every measure, even the basic measures of just basic working memory. They are now lower than us even though they spend more time in school. So that was my kind of big aha moment when I realized somehow schooling, which was always driving our cognitive development, decoupled from our cognitive development right around 2000 to 2010. And what was the big change in it's the tools we started to use. We started to Change K through 12 general education into a tools based system. We're going to teach kids how to use computers. Why mate? Nobody taught me how to use a computer. I'm doing pretty dang good on it. In fact, millennials are more digitally literate than Gen Z. They never taught us any like you. They just taught us typing program. That was as far as we ever got with it. Why are we so good at computers without being trained on it because they taught us how to think, they taught us how to solve problems. Now when a new computer program comes along, we're fine. But kids who are taught only on tech, as soon as the tech evolves, they're toast because they don't know how to think beyond what they were trained on. And this, by the way, there's two. And I'm sorry to go on a tangent here, but there's two things to recognize about that. I just want to bring it home for the audience. You yourself, if you have a phone and sometimes you get a phone update you didn't ask for and now all of a sudden you don't even know how to use your own dang phone because everything is haywire.

[Jenny Erton]

Yeah.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Now, luckily, as adults, we were trained to think we can adapt. Some kids, as soon as the phone changes, they're done. They don't know how to adapt. So they're like, I can no longer find this. Can you teach me how to do it? That's what happens in a tools based system. And I think going forward, that's where the world is only going to change faster. We're going to get new tools, we're going to get new techniques. I don't care that they're digital or analog. Doesn't matter what the tool is going to be. We need a generation that can move faster than we can. Unfortunately, we're locking them down into a very specific thinking style, which means they can't go one way or the other. And tech companies know that. That's why the biggest battle. Thank goodness all the papers are starting to come out. The biggest battle is between Microsoft and Apple to see who can get the kids youngest. Because if you're trained on an Apple, you will forever use Apple. If you're trained on a PC, you will forever use. Very rarely do people switch between the two. Like me, I've never used an iPhone. I don't know how. I'm. My wife never used an Android. She doesn't know how. I'm sure I could learn. I just don't care. So that's the battle is now, can we get younger and younger. The first computer they get will be the system we expect them to use. You've now built a lifelong customer, which does my head in.

[Jenny Erton]

Unbelievable, Jared. And it makes so much sense. And that's why they're giving out iPads

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Contributor]

to five year olds.

[Jenny Erton]

And they are, they're getting them in kindergarten, you wrote, because it's a $400 billion industry and also, they are taking everyone's data. This is a wave of invasive tools designed by for profit companies. Many to edtech platforms openly track personal data. Including there was a list and it's like in another spot in my not notes but it was like the way that they're, you know, the way that their faces look. I mean it's taking all of this data. So. Yeah, and to your point, there are constantly new tools and AI would be an example of a new tool.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Contributor]

So I want to read what you wrote.

[Jenny Erton]

This is a fantastic book. It's called the Digital Delusion. Maximizing employability shouldn't be the ultimate goal of education. But even if it is, chasing digital skills is exactly the wrong strategy. Ironically, the best, the best preparation for a volatile, rapidly changing workforce is isn't tool specific training, it's broad general knowledge. Rather than trying to anticipate every future trend, schools serve students best by cultivating the cognitive skills and habits of mind

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Contributor]

that let them adapt to whatever the

[Jenny Erton]

world throws their way. Employers increasingly report that young people are arriving less job ready than previous generations. And last thing, today's essential tools often become tomorrow's trivia. Schools aren't meant to train students on passing trends. They're meant to prepare them in, to thrive in whatever comes next. The more we narrow the focus of education, the more we limit our children's futures. Can you talk about how there is so much research to support that this is not working?

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Yeah, that's if you. So if you look at international test data on anything so literacy, numeracy, science, creativity, anything you. A lot of these international tests and these are the tests that are given to hundreds of thousands of kids across dozens of countries. One of the things they'll do is they'll also ask survey questions like hey, where are you from? How many parents do you have? What's your favorite book? And one question they'll typically ask is how often do you use technology at school? And then they might ask them for different purposes. In all of those examples, when you line up performance on the test with how often do you use a computer at school for learning purposes, scores go down significantly. And this is, this has been happening since 2012. We've started getting this data. So we've got this hard data showing the more our kids are using tech, the worse they're getting at these higher order skills that we would want them to have. But of course most of that is correlative. What you want is causative data. So how do you do that? You run research. Well, luckily we've had research going on since 1962, is the first paper I've ever found on. Back then it was called Information computing Technology. So we've got data for decades looking at what happens specifically, causatively, when tech enters the picture. Does it boost? Does it harm learning? Since 19, the very first, what we call meta analysis. So what we do in research is you run dozens and dozens of studies, right?

[Jenny Erton]

Yeah.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Now any study can show anything. So there was a study published a couple years ago that showed physicists found a particle that moves faster than the speed of light. Of course, later papers come out and say that's not true, but we have. I could we go look it up right now there's a paper out there saying we found faster than light. So because any single study can find anything. It's very noisy.

[Jenny Erton]

Yeah.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

What you have to do is do what's called a meta analysis. You pool all of that research together and say collectively. Here's what's being said. And the very first meta analysis done with EdTech was done in 1977, and it showed that tech was harming learning compared to analog methods. It doesn't work as well as other things we were doing.

[Jenny Erton]

Wow.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Since then, we've had hundreds of meta analyses. The latest meta analysis was done in, first published actually last month, 2026, it was published here. So we've now had hundreds of meta analyses. Pool all those together. What have we found? The exact same value. Digital technology harms learning compared to analog methods at the exact same value. Nothing has changed for 60 years. Doesn't matter that we've got the Internet. We got AI now. Things have gotten faster, things have gotten cheaper. The systems themselves have not improved in a causative way. And that says to me a very clear thing. Look, you've had 60 years to prove worth. You haven't been able to do it. You've had billions of dollars, you've had hundreds of different programs of platforms. It hasn't worked yet. Why do we continue to assume that next time will be better? Give me just another five years and we'll get this right. Give me just one more year of your kid's life and we will figure this out. No, you won't. And it says to me that we're not looking at a problem of implementation. It's not that the programs aren't good enough or that the tech isn't fast enough. It's that somehow tech is just going against human biology. It does not align with how we learn. And it's not the specific program or training. It's not that. It is. The tool itself does not resonate with human learning, and so no matter how you use it, it will diminish learning compared to working with a teacher and having actual interaction with physical objects and human beings.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Contributor]

Yeah, this is such a fun announcement to make. Womb Bikes is officially the 2026 bike partner of 1000 hours outside. And if you've been around here long enough, you know that's not a casual partnership. We care deeply about the tools that help families reclaim childhood, and Womb is doing exactly that. Womb was founded by two dads in a Vienna garage who simply couldn't find a bike that actually fit their kids, so they built one. And what makes Room different is that they don't start with engineering, they start with empathy. Every part of the bike, from the lightweight frame to the brakes, sized perfectly for small hands, is designed to help kids feel capable and competent in a screen dominated world. Bikes are more than bikes. They are freedom. They are connection. They're miles of memories before the street lights come on. So this spring we're launching something brand new, the 100 Hour Ride Challenge. We'll release a brand new tracker chart just for logging 100 hours outside on bikes and for app members. Stay tuned. Integration inside the 1000 hours outside app is coming if you've got little learners. The Womb Go bikes are incredible. Available in six bright colors, including the sweetest new powder pink that just feels like spring. If you are working toward your 1000 hours outside this year, a great bike makes it a whole lot easier. Womb designs lightweight bikes built just for kids so they can ride farther and ride happier. Go to whoom.com and use code outside 10 at checkout for 10% off your bike purchase and excluding the womb. Wow. That's outside 10 for 10% off at w o o m.com these days I'm all about quality over quantity, especially in my closet. If it's not well made and versatile, it's just not worth it to me. That's exactly why I love Quince. The fabrics feel elevated, the cuts are thoughtful, and the pricing actually makes sense. Quince makes high quality wardrobe staples using premium fabrics like 100% European linen, 100% silk, and organic cotton poplin. Their lightweight cotton cashmere sweaters are perfect for the Chang seasons, and I'm loving the seasonal colors and prints for spring. These are versatile, well made pieces that make getting dressed simple and I appreciate how they do business. Quince works directly with safe, ethical factories and cuts out the middlemen you're not paying for brand markup or fancy retail stores, just quality clothing. The difference is in the details. The linen is breathable but substantial. The cotton poplin is crisp and holds its shape. Everything is built to hold up season after season, including the stitching, the fit and the fabrics. These are pieces you'll reach for over and over. That quince cotton cashmere sweater has become my go to. It's light enough for layering but still feels luxe. And it didn't cost what I thought quality cashmere would. Stop waiting to build the wardrobe you actually want, you don't need a closet full of options. You need pieces that work. Go to quince.com outside for free shipping and 365 day returns. That's a full year to wear it and love it. And you will now available in Canada too. Don't keep settling. For clothes that don't last. Go to Q U I n c e.com outside for free shipping and 365 day returns or quinn's.com outside every season I find myself wanting our home to breathe a little easier. Not a full renovation, just thoughtful updates that make the space work better for our real everyday life. That's why I love shopping at Wayfair. Our style leans warm and collected, a little modern, a little lived in. This spring we refreshed a few spaces. Lighter bedding, a couple accent pieces in the living room, and some outdoor furniture to make our patio feel like an actual gathering space instead of just yard furniture. Wayfair made it so easy to narrow things down by style, size, price and I always read the reviews. Thousands of 5 star reviews make it feel less like guessing and more like choosing confidently. I also love how many functional pieces they carry. Storage solutions, shelving for work from home spaces, even options for assembly. If you don't want to DIY it. It feels seamless. From browsing to delivery, the pieces we ordered fit right into our rhythm. Beautiful but practical. And that's what I'm always after. Find furniture, decor and essentials that fit your unique style and budget. Head to Wayfair.com right now to shop all things home. That's W A Y-F A I R.com Wayfair Every style, every home.

[Jenny Erton]

I want to talk about some of that because you talk about paper versus screens for reading. You talk about writing versus typing. The book actually has so many topics. One of the topics about downtime, I want to make sure we get to you talk about Neil Postman, which I think is incredible because I've always been like what would he be Saying about this, I love his books. You're talking about anxiety. There is a lot covered in this book called the Digital Delusion. One of the things that you say is that it's just so much wasted time. You know, they're going to sit down for an assignment and six minutes in they're already drifting into some sort of a distraction. And that the these products, they have to flash faster and they have to move quicker. And they're like, this is the opposite of how people assimilate and take in information and really have it become a part of them. You know, we need stillness and stability and sustained thought, which is opposite of screens. So let's talk then about this all in the book about reading. So paper versus screen. Now we home school and I speak at different conferences and I've had people come up to me and I didn't know this Jared. And like to your point earlier where you said today's tech is nothing like we grew up with. And many parents have no idea. So people have all sorts of different reasons for, you know, changing what they're doing for education. And I had this family come up and they were like, every single one of our kids textbooks is on the computer. And I was like, what?

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Yep.

[Jenny Erton]

You know, and I had no idea. And apparently this is the norm. This is awful. So let's talk about the one thing, just even about place. Your brain is searching for place. But this actually really affects so much. It affects comprehension, it affects retention. Like, what in the world. We have their math books and all of their textbooks on screens.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

This is one of the. If when I teach freshmen at university, they'll always ask me, hey, what's the number one trick for studying? Like, what's the one thing I can do that's going to make me better at all? This answer has always been the same. Buy a printer, print everything out. If you do nothing different with your life but have paper instead of a screen, you will learn more, comprehend better, retain longer than doing the exact same stuff on a screen. And exactly to your point, you just nailed it. The reason is space. So one of the big.

[Jenny Erton]

I don't know.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

So there was a video game I used to play growing up called Grand Theft Auto. I don't know if your audience knows this, but. So the original video games we had were always straight lines like Super Mario. You just run in a line. Yeah. Grand Theft Auto comes out and that's just a giant world. And now you can go anywhere you want to. You can go up, down, left, right, free to you. But to make sure you never got lost. What they did is they put a little map in the corner of the screen which always showed you where you were. So you always knew in the bigger scheme of things. Cool. Here's my location. Your brain has that same map. The world around us is so large and chaotic that we have an ever updating map in our brain. And any and it's just telling us where things in space are happening. And every time you make a memory, that memory will become stamped with a three dimensional location. Where did that just occur? So space is a huge part of human memory. Now why does that matter? What books? Books have an unchanging three dimensional location. Until this book I'm holding burns into dust, the word commercial will be 10% of the way through. Left page, top left hand side, it ain't going nowhere. That becomes a part of my memory. Boom. That makes that memory much deeper. Now if you're an avid reader, you know that when you finish books you might not not know verbatim what you just read, but you will know exactly where in the book everything occurred. If there's an action sequence you want, you can almost flip directly to it. If there's like a quote, you're like, oh, I remember I read something. There it is. The space is part of the learning. Now go to a screen. I read the exact same thing on a screen. All of a sudden the word commercial starts in the bottom of the screen, scrolls through the middle, goes out the top. There is no three dimensional location. An entire aspect of human memory just gets dumped. This is why when we read on screens, we, after about five minutes we just start skimming. Because everyone, like your brain, recognizes you're not actually locking any of this down. So we just, so you can tell how a person is reading based on their eyes. When we're actually reading, our eyes will move in nine letter jumps. It's like a very specific sequence thing. If I just watch your eyes, I can tell you if you're reading or not. When we read a book, you'll see these nine letter jumps. Once we read a screen, after a couple of minutes we go from nine letters to huge jumps to vertical, where all of a sudden we just move our eyes down the page. And every once in a while you'll see a sideways glance and that's a sign that you're not actually reading, you're just skimming. That's what happens when you move textbooks online. Kids will just start skimming. They're not actually reading, they're not remembering anything. They're reading it becomes a waste of everyone's time. Just print it out. So if you're a parent, number one thing you can do to help your kid, Plant a tree, buy a printer, print it all out. It's just gonna homework assignments, print it out readings, print it out. They gotta do survey. Print it out. Whatever you're doing, just get it onto paper. Things are gonna get better.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Contributor]

Wow. What a ridiculous thing that we have

[Jenny Erton]

done to our children is putting all these textbooks online. You wrote your brain is searching for a place, but on screens, place doesn't exist. Screens strip text of any static location. And unfortunately, location is a key anchor of human memory. Readers can often tell where in a book something appeared. About 20 pages in left hand page near the top. Even if they can't remember the exact word, reading from screens often triggers an unconscious shift. They don't even know what's happening. And actually, one of the things that you said was that you said somewhere we're undermining our children. You say somewhere along the way, we've stripped something vital from them. And perhaps the cruelest part is they don't even know they've lost anything. They don't know. They don't know that in 1987, every kid got these heavy textbooks and you had to, you know, wrap them in a grocery bag and, and make a cover. Remember that you didn't ruin it then you'd color it in, you know, but. And then they were heavy. But also, actually, that's probably good for you too, because it's helping with your bone structure. Humans are meant to walk and carry weight until we've switched these to. Until a child wouldn't even know that people used to do. Oh, there's definitely take it cognitively. Yeah.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

If you've never read a book, if all you've ever done your entire life is skim, you have no clue that there's a. That reading actually is supposed to be engaging. It just is words to you. You've never sat down and experienced. Actually, you do realize reading does something to you. No, it's just, just scrolling just through a page. And that's where it's like, like if you grow up, say, say you grew up with one lung and somebody says, what's it like to have one lung? You'd be like, I don't know what it's like to have two. So I can't. I can't tell you anything. It's just life. How much are our kids like they think here's one of the scarier things about Gen Z into Gen Alpha. We have demonstrable proof that they are performing work. Their memory is down, their attention is down, their cog, their creativity is down, but their confidence is way up. They think they are doing so much better than everyone else has ever done before. And that's where you just don't realize. They mistake their low level creative thinking for actual creativity because they've never experienced what it is to actually design, iterate, make something real. And I have a sneaking suspicion when they grow up and they do start experiencing that stuff, when they hopefully, fingers crossed, the real world kicks them enough that they have to start learning they can't just phone it in anymore. My hope is they're going to be real mad at us and they're going to look back and they're going to say, what did you do? You took 12 years of my life to teach me and instead of helping me develop and understand what the world is, you just gave me a screen and the simplest, smoothest, easiest path to growing up. That didn't prepare me for anything. So I generally, it's a weird thing, but I genuinely hope Gen Z gets mad at us for what we did did and then they start to push back and hopefully with Gen A we don't make the same mistakes running the same experiment.

[Jenny Erton]

Wow. I agree. I mean, and what a thing. The cruelest part is they don't even know that they've lost anything because they don't know what it was like before. And this is a topic then that you cover extensively in this book called the Digital Delusion. Because not only do you talk about the problems, you also talk about the solutions. And there are really, really good ideas in here about how to increase comprehension and attention and focus and delight and enjoyment of learning in this book. So there's a whole page on how to bring long form reading back. It's on page 240. Go pick it up. The Digital Delusion. Then you also talk then about handwriting. So there's two parts here that I

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Contributor]

want to focus on.

[Jenny Erton]

First of all, it's the fact that when you're taking notes, and I remember this from a kid, you're constantly having to make these small decisions about what am I going to write and what am I not going to write because you can't type, you know, you write a little bit slower so there's that there's more thought going. But then the other part is that this is a transferable skill. This is the phrase you use when you're writing. And I never even considered this. You Said there's all sorts of micro adjustments. Are you using an ink pen? Are you using a mechanical pencil? Are you using a fat marker? You know, are you writing on paper? Are you writing on construct?

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Contributor]

Are you.

[Jenny Erton]

You know, it's just so interesting that, that it's this flexible.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Contributor]

You say it's a deeply flexible skill.

[Jenny Erton]

So can we talk about why we should be using our hands more than we're typing?

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Absolutely. So there's that big debate for a while. Do we still teach handwriting in the, in the age of typing? What about curse of all this stuff? Of course you do. So two things to know about handwriting, and then you just nail them. So go back to just straight note taking. Let's say you can write. So we're talking about older kids now, and we're taking notes. When we take notes for learning, there are two kind of flavors of notes you could take. One are called shallow. That's when you just take copious amounts of notes. You hear a word, you write a word, get it all like a courtroom stenographer. Get everything out. The other flavor is deep notes. That's when you take notes on themes, meaning, linkages. How do ideas fit together? When you take shallow notes, the only thing of importance is the sound and the order of the word. Did I hear it? Did I write it? Did I hear it? Did I write it? The meaning is totally irrelevant. So if you ever see kids taking huge amounts of notes, ask them, hey, what do we learn today? They'll tell you, I don't know. I got to go read my notes. Oops. When you go to deep notes, that's when you get learning. Because now you have to make decisions. How do ideas piece together? What's the theme? What are the concepts? Most kids, older kids, anyway, they can type about as fast as I speak. So if you're typing notes in my classroom, chances are you're just going to be taking copious amounts of notes. You're not learning anything. But, man, there ain't a human in the world who can handwrite as fast as I speak. So if you're taking notes with a pen and paper, by definition you have to be parsing, meaning you have to be thinking deeply. And that's where note taking becomes the learning. It's not about getting the material down. It's about thinking through the material. And the only way to guarantee to do that is pen and paper. Paper. So when we think about just plain note taking, never type notes. Handwrite them, because it's going to force you to do it in a different way that's actually going to boost learning.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Contributor]

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[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

But take it even back now to the to the younger kids Skills. In this world, very few skills are what we call freely transferable, right? If you learn how to do something in one realm, it does not automatically make you good at something else in another realm. You have to go through a process called transfer, which is a conscious process of taking that skill, adapting it, and moving it over here. Now, the best way we have to make transfer easier is to make the initial skill you learned as hard as possible. The harder the skill is that you've learned. Now, when you have to transfer, most times you have to do less than what you initially learned. Transfer becomes very easy. So think about it like this. If you grew up learning how to drive using a manual transmission, you got your stick shift, you got your clutch, and now I say, can you drive an automatic transmission? Yes. Why? Because, man, I trained much harder than I had to perform. Going from one to the other is much easier. Transfer is smooth. But flip it. If you do it the other way around, if you learn in a very easy way and you now need to transfer that skill to a very hard concept, you can't do it because you're basically stuck. You never actually developed the skills necessary. So if you grew up learning in an automatic car and I put you in a 1977 four on the floor, let a rip, you ain't going to know what to do because you never even tell you, like, I'm sorry. Back to square one, right? So let's take it to writing now. Now, Stan Dehaen, he's arguably the most important living neuroscientist today. He has said handwriting is the most complex things human beings can learn. It is ridiculous. We don't appreciate just how hard handwriting is. To your point, what makes handwriting so tricky is not only the subtle movements you need. You need to develop what are called fine motor skills, which are very hard to do. And there's nothing harder than holding a pencil and making it do what you want to. But it's also the minute changes every time. When I move from this pen to that pen, I got to do stuff subtly differently. When I move from this piece of paper to this hard desk, I'm going to have to do things. All of these minute changes make for a skill that is ridiculously dense and deep. Now, when I say, can you transfer that motor ability anywhere else? The answer is yes. Because if you ask me, can you type? Heck, yeah. This is so much easier than this. But you teach a kid how to type and now say, can you go learn how to handwrite? Nope. Because these gross motor movements do not translate to this really minute fine motor movement over here. So when it comes to learning, take it back. One of the most important things we have is friction. Learning needs to be difficult. Learning needs to be complex. Because in that learning is where you would have develop the set of hard skills that now can transfer more easily into a world that's starting to adjust around you.

[Jenny Erton]

Yeah.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

What is the one thing tech does? It makes everything as easy as is humanly possible. It reduces as much friction as you can reduce friction from learning. Do not be surprised when kids cannot perform in complex situations when they got older because they just never actually train that way. So that's why I go going back to handwriting. Do we need it? Yes. Why? Because kids are going to handwrite as adults? No, because we're teaching transferable learning skills. I don't. I don't let my kid climb a tree because I think she's going to become a professional tree climber as an adult. I'm doing it because she's developing the minute skills that will allow her to learn how to manipulate her body in a way that maybe in the future will be meaningful for her. So hopefully that all kind of makes sense.

[Jenny Erton]

It's good. And it's so important. Since we've switched to this one to one laptop situation where the reading is online and the writing is typing, we are taking away so much from our kids. Wrote. Taking notes by hand leads significantly to significantly better learning than typing notes on a computer. And note taking is not passive. It shouldn't be passive transcription. You know, like that. You're not a.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Contributor]

What's it called?

[Jenny Erton]

A stenographer. Like, you know, that is a job. It is. But that's only one job out of however many, you know, tens of thousands of jobs there are. There's one type of person that sits in a courtroom and types out everything. Everybody else is not doing that job.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Training everyone to do that one job.

[Jenny Erton]

Yes.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

All 10 million kids are gonna fight for that one position now. Yeah.

[Jenny Erton]

You say note taking is not. It shouldn't be passive transcription. It should be an active cognitive task that deserves the same time structure and intention as any other classroom activity. The slower writing promotes deeper thinking, and there is no shortcut for that. Additionally, there's so much in this book I'm just like. Like, I'm just bopping over different parts. But you do say also that children who can write fluently by hand are more likely to read fluently by eye. So all of this is interrelated, and it matters an incredible amount.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

So I want to hit that.

[Jenny Erton]

Yeah.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Because I think your listeners should know that. So.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Contributor]

Yeah.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

The parts of the brain we have to develop to write by hand are the same parts of the brain we will use to develop literacy and read, read. So in a very real sense, reading and handwriting correlate. They. They grow together. As one grows, the other grows with it. So that's another thing. If you train handwriting, literacy goes up without you doing much of anything, which is huge.

[Jenny Erton]

It's so important to know. Handwriting activates thinking in ways typing can't.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Contributor]

Okay.

[Jenny Erton]

I think that page 101 in this book called the Digital Delusion is one of the most important pages that anybody should read. And here is what it's about. Okay. What it's about is that we have to have downtime. So I talked to this man named Dr. Bruce Perry, and he said, in order to learn, you have to have dosing and spacing. Dosing and spacing. You get a small dose of information, and then there's space. And so you're talking about. I loved it because you talked about it with Piano. And I play piano. So I'm excited about this example. But you're like, okay, someone learns a piano piece. And you, I think everybody kind of knows, like, when you wake up the next morning, you're a little bit better at it. You're like, something in my brain has happened, and I'm a little bit better. But here's what you say even when you're awake. So if you learn the simple piano piece, even when you're awake after learning this little piano piece, as long as there's some rest, your brain is replaying the notes that you had just learned hundreds of times. And so what you're talking about is that this consolidation time, which is not just. I've only learned about it, Jared, from sleep, but this consolidation time is happening all day. It can be happening all day as long as there is downtime. And now these phones and screens, this is one of the biggest issues, is taking away all of that.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Yep, there is. Who did I just. I read a stat yesterday, and I might butcher this. So somebody call me out on this if this is totally wrong. But somebody said there's a chance that the kids this year in school will only have an estimated 15 minutes of downtime throughout the day, because they will be on their phones in between every single thing. And you see it, man. Go to the. Go to. On a bus, people are on their phones. Go to the bank, people on their phone. And we're not immune to it, man. I'm an adult. I do the exact same thing, and I hate myself for it. But imagine a kid who hasn't quite even figured out how much they hate themselves yet for doing this, because they're like, it's just what we do. So exactly what you're saying. Learning happens when you stop. You could estimate probably 80 to 90% of all learning happens when you quit paying attention. Attention. And it's happening through a process called consolidation. And we for exactly as you said, we always thought that happened only when you slept. You learn something once somebody tells you something one time today. So the only way biology changes, by the way, is through repetition. The key to all learning is repetition. But we rarely get enough repetition to change biology. So biology does it itself. Let's say somebody tells you their phone number. Cool. When you go to bed that night while you're dreaming, one of the things your brain is going to do, your hippocampus is going to replay that phone number hundreds, if not thousands of times. All it's doing is cycling, cycling, cycling. That's how it's building that memory. And like you said, we always thought that was a sleep based thing. Turns out we call it waking consolidation. It's actually starting when you're still awake, when you stop. And now you can go do something. It's just, you just have to get out of cognitive mode. So you can walk with a friend,

[Jenny Erton]

kick a ball, go outside.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

This is what we used to do with kids on a playground in between classes. What do you do? You go make jokes, you go to your locker, you go drink from the water fountain. All of that is fine. It's the when you're actively cognitive, when you're thinking about something or something is really quickly grabbing your attention, just like a phone does. That's when you can't get into what waking consolidation. So what is waking consolidation? When you're awake, what's happening is your brain. Now in those moments of downtime, it's going to start to recycle those memories really quickly. Not as much as when you're asleep, but let's say dozens or maybe a hundred times. What's happening is that's basically stamping that bit of information telling your brain tonight when you go to bed, this is one thing you absolutely must lock down. So if it's flippant, you just had a coffee, your brain won't replay that. Your friend gives you a high five. Your brain won't replay that. Someone teaches you, one plus one equals two. Now during a rest, your brain goes cool, one plus one equals 200 times. It says it to itself. Now when you go to bed that night, your brain's going to say cool, what was important? Well, you did that a hundred times. Must be important. Let's cycle out a thousand times now. So that's how the brain is learning. What is important, what's not. You don't have downtime, you never been your memories, you lose memories, you go to bed that night and your brain doesn't know what's important, doesn't know what to lock down. Waking consolidation drives everything thing. So by all means, between class periods is not a. That's why schools, when people were talking about cell phone bands and other schools are like, we don't need a ban, we just have a policy. Don't use it during class, but you can use it on your own time. In schools with policies, you saw no difference. Learning didn't change at all. It was only in schools with a hard bell to bell band that you saw learning go back up. Why? Because it's as important during lunch not to be doing this during Recess. You cannot be on your phone. It's. The whole system has to work together.

[Jenny Erton]

This is one of the most important, critical things I think everybody has to know about this waking consolidation. And it's kind of exciting to know that, like, when I'm taking breaks, hey, my. My brain is practicing that I'll Fly Away piano song that I just learned. And same for my kids. It's a really big deal. And for people that are getting outside, which is what we're trying to do, if you're getting out for a thousand hours, that's a thousand hours of waking consolidation time that you have phones take it away. And I even, you know, I like. The Bell to Bell is like a phraseology that's been used, you know, I think more recently, which I think obviously is critically important. But honestly, I feel like it should be longer than that, because what about the bus ride home? You know, it's like that was a time where you kind of, like, stare out the window, you know, the bus ride in, all of that, or, you know, sitting on the, you know, in the car with your parent on the way home. It's like, that's the time we got a little bit of downtime. And it's like people are going straight to their phone, and this is affecting waking consolidation. And then that is contributing to this cognitive collapse. This is a huge thing to know. It's on page 101 of the Digital delusion. Okay, sticking with the Bell to Bell policy, then, I want to talk about this fact that kids are reaching for their phone every four minutes on average. If it's in class, it's 14 times per class. But they're not reaching for it because it brings them joy. And I think everyone will relate to this. They aren't grabbing their phones because it brings them joy. They're grabbing it because they need to, because it's bringing them relief.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Yep.

[Jenny Erton]

They're quieting their nervous systems by grabbing a phone every four minutes on average. What an awful thing to do to children.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

So what happens is. And by the way, go back to what you're saying. The no society should need a belt Bell to Bell ban because no kids should have a cell phone. That was always my argument. People say, when is your kid gonna have a cell phone? You kidding me? When she can buy it, I ain't gonna give her one. That's where I was always like, the need for a Bell to Bell is like a band aid for a problem that shouldn't have existed in the first place. If I have yet for someone to tell me a reasonable reason why a kid would need a smartphone. If you need to get a hold of your kid and you think they need a phone, get a dumb phone, get a flip phone. You can do everything the same there. And that stops them from gaming or doing whatever the heck else they're doing.

[Jenny Erton]

Yeah.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Contributor]

Or the watch.

[Jenny Erton]

You can get the little watch.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

You don't need a smartphone. But anyway, neither here nor there. Bring it back. So it's called the addiction or habit cycle. Is the way the brain kind of builds habits is this. You start with a cue. Something in the world has to grab your attention. So let's say it's your phone dings. Or let's say someone says, hey, you. In response to a cue, you can undertake an action. I got a ding. Maybe I'll check my messages. Anytime you undertake a successful action in response to a cue, an action that resolves the cue, your brain will give you a hit of dopamine and make you feel good. So you've got this kind of pattern. Cue, action, reward. Cue, action, reward. So when kids first touched a phone, that's what they were doing to them. It was nothing. And then cue, oh, here's a flash action. I press the flash, the phone turned on.

[Jenny Erton]

Reward.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Cool. Cue, action, reward. Q actual reward. Your brain is not stupid. You do that in the same order enough times, eventually your brain is going to preempt you. It's going to go Q ding. And your brain's going to say, I know what's coming. And it's going to give you that hit of dopamine before you've done the action in anticipation of the action, your brain's like, I know what's coming. And so it kind of preempts you. You. The problem is when you get dopamine after doing an action, it feels good, it's rewarding. When you get dopamine, the exact same chemical, before you've done an action, it no longer feels good. Now it feels like a craving, now it feels like an urge. Now it feels like a poll. Now you have to do the action just to stop the dopamine release and calm your nervous system down. Get a sense of relief when you've gone from q action, reward to cue reward, action. You've now built a habit cycle and you have to act in a certain way just to regain homeostasis, to control your system again. And that's how addicted kids. And not, not just kids, it's adults. If you've ever got a phantom phone signal or something, we're all part of it. That's why every four minutes, they're reaching for their phone because they're getting these. Now you can say, what are the cues? The cues are anything. Am I starting to feel slightly uncomfortable? That's a cue. Have I woken up today? That's a cue to check my phone. We've built so many cycles into these phones now. Think about it. So most kids will have built a cycle that says, anytime I feel uncomfortable, I gotta reach for my phone. Someone is making me feel awkward, I'm gonna reach for my phone. Girlfriend is making fun of me. I'm reach for my phone. Learning, by definition, is uncomfortable. If learning was comfortable, you're not learning. It's like if you go to the gym and you're not uncomfortable, you're not working out, you got your stair separate on too. You're there. But it's only when you're huffing that you're actually now in the mode where your body is changing. Because learning, by definition, is uncomfortable. And most kids have trained themselves to use uncomfort as a cue to touch my phone. You can see why in a classroom, it becomes the most wicked thing you could have possible there. Now people say, well, what are you gonna do? Get rid of it. The brain is also, again, like I said, it's not stupid. You get rid of the action, so you get the craving, oh, I feel uncomfortable. I gotta touch my phone. You don't have access to your phone for eight hours. Your brain will ramp, and then it will release, and now it will start to decouple that cue from that reward. And so you can get to the stage where all of a sudden, yeah, after a couple of minutes, I'm fine. Now in a classroom, I gotta find a different way to deal with this discomfort, which is exactly what we want. We need you to find a different way to deal with it called learning. When you feel uncomfortable, engage with the material. That's the cue I want.

[Jenny Erton]

I was like, so many things in this book is like, this is critically important. This is critically important. Everyone needs to read this. And, you know, I think it really gives a good sense of. It helps you gain a better sense of why it doesn't work for them to keep their phone in their locker. Because what you say is they're. They're anticipating. So the anticipation, it builds and it builds and it builds. Then they're completely distracted for the last 40 minutes of class or whatever. And because the craving is building, building, building. And they know, you know, during passing time, that's what I'm gonna go do. And then there's. That's a whole other issue that's messing with the waking consolidation, that's messing with their social skills. It's just a whole mess. So that's a critically important topic that's talked about in the book the Digital Delusion. I want to mention that in this book you have tons of drafts, like an opt out letter for parent or you know what a letter to the parent from the who says this is why we're going to have less screens. Maybe a letter from school administration because sometimes it's.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Contributor]

Or I've heard a lot that the

[Jenny Erton]

parents are the ones pushing back because

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Contributor]

they're like, I want to be able

[Jenny Erton]

to get rid of my. I want to be able to get a hold of my child. But you're like, well there's a lot of ways to do that besides them having a smartphone. But I do not want to run out of time. Before we talk about the fact that you had a big part in here about Neil Postman and there was a line that said we've reduced humans to lesser versions of the machines we build.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Contributor]

That's huge.

[Jenny Erton]

But Neil Postman was a futurist. He died in 2003. You know, he had some really interesting things to say about computers before computers were so ubiquitous. And one of the things that is a, is a thread here is that technology is pedagogy. You know, technology is worldview to a degree. It's not just a tool. That's one of the things that Neil talked about. So here's what you say. This is huge, compulsory, one to one computing is not merely technology and it's not merely technological overreach. It's moral overreach.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Contributor]

Can we wrap it up with that?

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

So I, I love that you love Neil Postman, that guy. When the one guy I wish was still alive today during AI because I think he would have just demolished it.

[Jenny Erton]

I've actually tried to find his kid. He's got a son. I was like. And I think his son has written like a forward to one of his books. And I was like, is he still alive? Can I talk to him? I think his name's Andrew. True.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Yeah, yeah. That was. So what I tried to do in this book is I tried to channel Neil Postman to say what do I think he would have said about AI and what's going on here? And you're right. His, his big argument was, look, there is no such thing as a neutral technology. Every technology is embedded with a worldview. When you use it you have to assume that worldview. A hammer, A hammer isn't neutral. A hammer makes you think of hitting things because that's what it's designed. So all of a sudden the world shifts and what, what is important becomes highlighted. What, what's irrelevant becomes lowlighted. Everything changes when you use a tool. Yeah, one to one computers, we're not just using that as a tool to learn, we're using that as a tool to define what learning is, what is meaningful, what skills are good, what skills are useless, what information is meaningful, what information is meaningless when we use it. We're teaching you how to exist in, not just exist in the world, but interpret the world around you. Now you've got, got hundreds, thousands of parents who are doing nothing but spending their lives trying to stop their kids from being on a screen at home. They are. There's no TV at home, there's no smartphone at home. Now you send those kids to a school and the school says we have mandatory one to one programming. Well, now you're changing the very value set that I've been working on with my kid, that you're reaching into my home and telling my kids what I've been doing over here is wrong for five years. And then to tell a family you can't opt out, that does my head in. It's like. But there are public schools that say you cannot come here unless you put your kid on a computer in preschool.

[Jenny Erton]

Wow.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Well, cool. I ain't going there. But that is so beyond the purview of what a public education ever should be meaningfully able to do. It just does my head in. So just, just know these are not neutral technologies and there are, are huge amounts of people who are doing their best to give their kids an actual analog childhood. And if you force this stuff on them. So there's a woman working right now in Australia who's basically, because everyone is trying to. Utah's passing laws like this, Vermont's passing laws like this that limit the amount of time young kids can use computers at school. She's trying to say, no, don't limit the amount of time.

[Jenny Erton]

Time none.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

It shouldn't exist in schools, especially primary years from kindergarten through age 5 or 6 or year 5 or 6. There should be zero screens in schools and there should be zero screens in homes too, because this is the most important time for them to start developing. And I gotta say I, I agree 100 with that. I'm helping her out as much as I can.

[Jenny Erton]

I am so trying to find this

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Contributor]

quote that I read. And I don't remember which one of

[Jenny Erton]

his books it was in, but he said something like, like he was like, I don't know if these computers are going to really take over. Like it was like at the, you know, at the sort of the beginning of all that. And he said, but if they do, basically he predicted it's going to be like data mining, we're not going to

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Contributor]

be able to keep up.

[Jenny Erton]

And then, then some people, there's going to be a small set of people that are going to experience benefit at the, at the detriment of everyone else. Yeah, I mean, it's a quote like that.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

He makes a good point that basically that's what every tool has done is you think of something as innocuous as the automobile. Right. As soon as an automobile comes out, everyone thinks that's gonna narrow gaps. No, even with the automobile, you're gonna have different versions of cars.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Contributor]

Yes.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

There's gonna be different peripherals to your cars. The haves will be able to get better versions. The have nots will always start to struggle. And all of a sudden these divides are gonna get wider until somebody wins and somebody loses. There will always be winners and losers. And I think what his big argument with digital technology was exactly that was it was going to get so complex and so unnecessarily confusing that the losers would be the 99.9% of people who simply couldn't keep up with what's going on. And the winners would be the 0.1% who might not even understand what's happening, but they at least pull the levers. And so all of a sudden you've got yourself the biggest divide you'll see. And I tell me he's not wrong.

[Jenny Erton]

And isn't that what we're seeing? It's what we're seeing. They're mining our data. That's basically what he was talking about. And it was like years and years ago before he even knew that people would have personal computers in their home, let alone this one to one situation. And you see it and you know, I, you know, I saw a thing

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Contributor]

just the other day that was like,

[Jenny Erton]

okay, AI is all well and good while it's free. What happens when they start charging you $2,000 a month to use that chat CBT thing and all of a sudden you have, you don't have the skills anymore because you've outsourced them. Never had the skills, and they charge you for it.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Exactly what they're doing, they're trying like you're not that's not a conspiracy theory that is out of their own mouth. If we can make our tool so integral to the way you think, now we control you. Because all we have to do now is say $2,000 if you want to keep using that tool. And you have to pay because exactly like you said, a kid doesn't even know how to think outside of chat GBT anymore. Anymore. None of this is altruistic. None of this is. Is out of the kindness, out of someone's heart. And I promise you, no one in the field of digital technology gives a rat's patootie about student learning or child development. They are not in this to make better humans. They are in this to make bigger profits. And in so doing, they're going to exploit us in any way they can. And the way, the best way they have to do it is to addict us to their profits product, make it so we can't live without it, and then start pulling the rope away. That's exactly what you're seeing.

[Jenny Erton]

All right, Neil Postman. Now, this is someone who died in 2003 and wrote his books, like in the 80s. So this is someone who was like, I mean, this is like simple television. You know, he wrote the book amusing ourselves to death, like in the 80s, you know, in the early 80s, what was on the PBS, you know, that was like the extent of technology for kids. He says to be unaware that a technology comes equipped with a program for social. For social change to maintain that technology is neutral, to make the assumption that technology is always a friend to culture is at this hour, in the 80s stupidity, plain and simple. Technology is a friend of culture. No way. So you talk about this in the book and you were like, this one lady's like, my pediatrician told me my kids aren't supposed to be on screens. And yet this school system is mandating it.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

It.

[Jenny Erton]

And so you say. More than 50 years of research show that when screens enter the classroom, learning almost always suffers. It is a phenomenal book. There's so much more than we even talked about in this conversation. All sorts of good ideas. All homework should be done offline. You say, how do we reclaim effort and rigor? We should definitely be banning data harvesting. Oh, my goodness. They're collecting kids facial expressions, their voice recordings, you know, their typing cadence, their engagement pack patterns. It's a phenomenal book. And we're out of time. It's called the Digital delusion. Jared, what's a favorite memory from your

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Contributor]

childhood that was outside? We always end with that question.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Oh, the first one that always pops to mind. It's a huge rainstorm, one of those wicked rainstorms where it's. You can't even see. And for whatever reason my mom said go outside. And so we were playing inside and outside of the garage, hitting this ball and it was the best. Like it was like swimming outside. It was wonderful.

[Jenny Erton]

I love it.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Contributor]

What a mom.

[Jenny Erton]

Jared. What a book. Thank you for spending this time with us.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Contributor]

Thank you for writing this.

[Jenny Erton]

I think it's a fantastic one for any parent today and I think then you can have all these conversations you can have with your kids. Also, Hugh Grant, is that an actor?

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

That is Hugh Grant.

[Jenny Erton]

That is the Hugh Grant.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

The Hugh Grant has five kids and is very much angry at what digital tech at school did to them. So he is anti ed tech.

[Jenny Erton]

That is wild. It's right in the COVID Hugh Grant says that this is terrifying and essential reading.

[Podcast Co-host or Guest Contributor]

It's called the Digital Delusion.

[Jenny Erton]

I think everyone should read it. Jared, thanks for being here.

[Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath]

Thank you.

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