← TRIGGERnometry
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- [00:02]
A
What do we know about the mechanics of how screens and what we see on screens affects our brains?
- [00:09]
B
It's exactly what you would expect. None of it is great. A parent asked her, when should I give my kid a cell phone? And her response was, when are you ready for them to watch porn? That's gonna be the first thing they do when they pick up that machine.
- [00:22]
A
That's a great answer. One of the things I found absolutely shocking. This generation of children are cognitively inferior to their parents generation. And you associate that with screens.
- [00:33]
B
Yeah, and there's no easy way to say it. 50% of kids have a special plan that gives them extra bonus time to help them because they have a learning disorder, typically an attentional disorder. 50% you can have what's called induced ADHD, where basically you act as though you have it, but you genuinely do not. Over half of our kids are on a computer one to four hours every day for learning. And imagine I had a drug, I invented a new drug, and you say, what does that drug do? And I go, mm, why don't you give it to your kids and we'll find out.
- [01:05]
A
Jared, welcome to trigonometry.
- [01:07]
B
Thank you so much.
- [01:08]
A
We're so looking forward to the conversation because the things you talk about, in our view, are really important. Before we get into them, tell us a little bit about your background. What's your story? How have you come to do what you do and say what you say?
- [01:21]
C
Yeah.
- [01:21]
B
Well, similar to Francis, I was a teacher originally, so teaching was my passion. But I got into neuroscience, um, because when I was teaching, that was a decade of the brain. So everything was brain, books, brain, gym, brain, this. So I figure, all right, that must be the next evolution. So I'll go learn that stuff, bring it back to my classroom, thinking that'd be a year or two. That has ballooned into 18 years now. I've been stuck in academia. I can never quite get out, but my whole focus has been. Yeah, on the science of learning. How do human beings learn? Can we bring that back to schools and say, if this is learning, then what does that mean for teaching? What does that mean for studying, for the tools we use?
- [01:55]
A
And the way I came across your work is a friend of the show sent me a clip of you on C Span. I think it was. I think you were testifying in Congress.
- [02:04]
B
Yeah, I think it was Senate, one of those.
- [02:05]
A
Senate. Senate, Right. Yeah. Well, yeah, Senator Cruz was there, actually. I remember now. And you were talking about the impact of screen time and screens on children, on learning. And on their brains. And one of the things I found absolutely shocking was, but also kind of made sense to me is that this generation of children are cognitively inferior to their parents generation. And likewise, whereas prior to now, every generation basically got cognitively better, actually, we're now seeing a decline. And you associate that with screen.
- [02:39]
B
Yeah. And there's no easy way to say it. Like, you've got to find the nicest way to say that sentence that the next. Our kids are cognitively less developed than we are, but it is just where it is. So since we've been recording cognitive development turn of the century, late 1800s into the 1900s, every generation outperforms their parents, you name it, on basic iq, memory, attention, literacy, numeracy. And we always attributed that to school, that the more kids spent time in schools, the more their general competencies went up. And it makes sense. That's where we're cutting our teeth. And then 2010 rolls around and all of a sudden schooling and development decouple kids today spend more time in schools than we did growing up. But all of their scores are down lower than ours. They're now. They're equivalent to us in about 1992 now in literacy and numeracy, in executive functioning. All these things have gone down. And you can't say, look, school didn't change all that much. Biology didn't change all that much. So what changed? It was the stuff we were putting in schools. The screens that they were now being taught through seemed to be having a big impact on that.
- [03:47]
C
That's so depressing, because what we're actually talking about is we're going backwards as a species.
- [03:54]
B
Yeah. And some people say, look, going backwards is fine because if you just take general IQ, right. Our generation, we have about 130 IQ compared to our great grandparents, 100 IQ. So if you slice it one way, that means half of us are geniuses. Or slice it the other way, half of our great grandparents were mentally decrepit. Of course, that doesn't make sense. So. So you've got to recognize what we've been developing through IQ isn't general intelligence. It's a real specific kind of intelligence that we'll call school ability. Or almost like a scientific conceptual way of viewing the world. Our grandparents were very physical. If it didn't matter to me and my farm and my immediate surrounding, they didn't need to know it. We have a much broader view. So as kids start to kind of regress back, somebody made the argument, well, maybe they're getting better at physical Stuff they're just going back to what our great grandparents were doing. Have you hung out with young kids? The one thing they are not is hyper physical. So it's not that we're going back in a good way. We're kind of regressing into an unknown where I don't see any real benefit or growth to what they're doing, anything better than what anyone else has been doing.
- [04:59]
C
And how much of this is due to the lack of a concentration span?
- [05:05]
B
There's where you're gonna get your correlation is a lot of people think their concentration, their attention is kind of going down. Realistically, if you go into labs, it's not that far down. And you could say that probably came after a lot of the tech stuff. So here's an interesting kind of fact. So if you take how long a kid spends on a screen, this is an average 8 to 18 year old across the US per year. They will spend about 450 hours every year learning from a screen, which is massive. That's way more than most people think. But they will also use that exact same screen to passively consume rapidly switching media for over 2,500 hours every single year. So basically it's just straight training. If all you're doing is using a tool with the attention economy constantly flipping, constantly jumping. Now I sit you in front of that tool and say, time to focus and learn. You make it about six minutes till you go back to open a tab. Look at this. It's like Pavlov's dog. So I don't think their attention span caused anything. I think we've basically ruined their attention span by the tool we're using. Get rid of the tool. They can still sit there for three hours and watch a movie if they have no distractions. They can still read if they learn how to do it. We're just not teaching that anymore.
- [06:17]
A
And how much of it you mentioned that it's about what we're doing in school. Is it about that or is it also, as you say, what we're doing outside of it? I mean, I had literally, to me, it was probably one of the most shocking things I've seen with my own eyes in recent years. I took my son to a playground near where I live and he was going up and down on the slide and there was a kid next to him with his grandfather who literally would not even put his phone down, which he had in his hand playing the same stupid game or something. I don't know, maybe like a 5, 6 year old. He would go down the slide while staring at his phone, could not pull it away.
- [06:56]
B
Right. And that's where school used to be seen as a unique context. There's a teacher up in Canada named Andrew Cantorudi. He calls it the walled garden. We're very similar to, like, a hospital or a movie theater. The context sets your expectations. And if you don't heavily control the context, don't be surprised when people don't meet your expectations. So school used to be that safe zone where whatever you were doing out there, at least here we got hard rules. But then this weird thing started happening where we tried to make school more like the real world. Well, if kids are doing that out there, then surely they should be doing it in here as well. And once that bleed started to happen. So I think you're right. It's going to be a mix between the outside and the inside world of school. And really the problem is the more the inside of the school tries to mimic the real world for whatever reason. And we could talk about digital literacy and jobs and stuff. That's where now those behaviors out on the playground, we're seeing in a classroom as well. If you can't even focus long enough to slide, good luck trying to learn chemistry or algebra.
- [07:56]
A
And what do we know about the mechanics of how screens and what we see on screens affects our brains and especially children's brains?
- [08:05]
B
It's exactly what you would expect. None of it is great. The fun thing about it, about the brain is it is. It's wickedly malleable. The thing that makes our brain powerful is it's constantly changing. So if you read books really deeply, your brain will change to make sure you can sustain focus. So basically, just whatever a kid is doing on a screen, it's a good rule of thumb that the brain will now start to seek that out. It will adapt and say, that must be normal. Give me more of that. It's all malleable. We can push it back if we choose to. But if you then want to kind of go deeper, I think some of the more interesting stuff is, like, the relationship side of things when we interact live and in person. Like right now, if we're getting along, our bodies will release a certain set of chemicals, one of which is oxytocin. We call that kind of a bonding chemical. You see it when people are breastfeeding. You see it when people are making love, when they're interacting. When kids interact online, their bodies don't release oxytocin. They're more likely to release tachy kinins. So That's a completely different chemical. This chemical leads to depression. That's a marker of isolation. So it's a real good sign that human biology does not appear to recognize digital communication as a form of actual interaction. It recognizes it as isolating and threatening. Now, if I'm a kid spending more and more time online, feeling more and more lonely, what do I do? I reach out to more people online, thinking, that's gonna be the cure. And realistically, the poison starts to cycle, so you get emotional disturbances, you get bodily disturbances in your country. Sophie Winkleman, she's kind of like my counterpart in the uk. Wonderful. She talks about all the physical changes, your hormones, changes, your bone structure. More kids today are myopic than at ever, ever any other point in history. And you can ask, act, surprise, and say, this is all correlational. You can actually have a real discussion and say, well, there's something's changed. And it's not books.
- [09:56]
A
Well, it's something that kind of is obvious. Like, we are here in the US now. My wife and son are back in the uk. I miss them. I talk to them on the phone. And it's just not the same thing. Right. I kind of like, we do it because we want to keep in touch, but you don't feel the same way having a zoom call with somebody as you do sitting down, face to face.
- [10:16]
B
And even on the device, you know, as fathers, all I want to do is call my daughter. But on that machine, my brain is also thinking about, should I check my mail while I'm here? Should I do all this? And it's just killer. But I think another interesting thing, if you drive learning, there's a concept called empathy. Everyone's heard of empathy. Empathy is a key driver of learning. So that's where a lot of people think, well, cool. We want teachers who are empathetic. But the joke is empathy isn't a trait. It's not an emotion. It's not a thing that you have. It's a resonance between two biologies. If you and I start to empathize, it's a measurable thing. What's going to happen is our heart rates are going to start to beat simultaneously. We're going to breathe at the same rate. We're going to blink at the same time. Empathy is resonance. And when you're resonating now, I'm in your head, so that's why it's so easy to learn from you. I'm making the same moves you are on a screen. It is ridiculously difficult to get Resonance. So if I'm talking to someone on a phone with a screen versus in person, it's real hard to sync up to them. That's why zoom learning during COVID was just didn't work as well. And so then a lot of people said, well, get rid of the teacher, just go right onto AI or something. Well, look, if I need two pairs of biology to resonate and it's hard to do it over a screen, getting rid of the other person and just having a tool, there is no more biology for me to resonate with. That's why dropout rates online are about 85%. As soon as a kid starts struggling online, there's no sense of momentum, no sense of connection. They just drop out, go to the next thing.
- [11:44]
C
And the great irony in all of this is social media in particular has said to us, this is the best way of staying connected.
- [11:52]
B
Yeah, wasn't that the sales pitch all along? Was this was going to bring the world together? What's the one thing it did? It just drove a wedge right between everyone. It makes you feel lonely, isolated, and it gives you. And you could bring that back to learning too. It gives you the echo chamber. You're not hearing the breadth of the world, you're hearing your little slice of it. And that's great. I mean, to be fair, I like these kind of videos or I like these kind of things. It's not a horrible problem. But it really isn't opening my perspective to anything new so much as it's just locking me down to what I already know.
- [12:24]
C
And also, let's be honest, social skills, you have to practice them.
- [12:28]
B
Yeah.
- [12:28]
C
You have to, unfortunately, sometimes say an awkward thing. People look at you go, francis, what were you thinking when you said that? And eventually, over time, you kind of learn not to do that. Do you see? But you see what I mean? And you see some of these Gen Z kids, particularly in our space, in the political space, and the way they talk to each other and the way they talk to people who are old enough to be their father or their grandfather, I find horrific, to be honest.
- [12:55]
A
They talk to each other, including face to face, the way people talk to each other on social media. Yeah, that's all that's happening. Right.
- [13:03]
B
I just had one of those yesterday where there's a young researcher talking to me about all this stuff. And, and I. My only response was, I appreciate the confidence, mate. I'm waiting for that wisdom. Give it two decades. Because that's not how you actually interact with someone that you've never met before that you're trying to have a discussion with. So I was in Australia for 12 years and it's exactly that is kids weren't learning in primary years how to line up to go to the bathroom, how to raise your hand to ask a question. These are all things we don't come into the world born with this. You've got to experience it and you got to fail at it. You got to get in trouble a couple times before you start to really lock it down. With digital technology, we just don't do that. Everyone's kind of got their free for all. So they brought in somebody from the UK to come in and teach behavioral skills. Man. Australia almost kicked him out. They tried to ban him. They were calling his methods draconian. How dare you teach my kids routines and structure. But that is how you develop executive function. That's how you learn to interact, to run this and interact with those in a meaningful way. And we just so go to these schools now where it's AI all day, every day. Don't be shocked if your kid doesn't know how to talk to somebody, to order at McDonald's or to actually go up to a till and buy some clothing. They're not prepared for that kind of stuff.
- [14:20]
C
And then that really nicely segues us into the kind of mental health aspect of this conversation, because I talk to a lot of Gen Z's and at first I was like taking the piss that, yo, what is it? You find a phone call anxiety inducing,
- [14:35]
B
but a lot of them really do without practice. How do you get resilience is it's forged through fire. How do you get understanding is you've got to fail. Look at a kid learning to walk. How often are they on their bum? That's part of the process. If you don't ever let your kids fail or struggle, none of these skills kind of come out. So my wife, she went, she's a psychologist, she went to Nepal to help women with female empowerment and resilience. She calls me about three days into the trip. She's like, these women need resilience training about as much as I need another handbag, which is to say I don't. And it's because they might not know the word, they might not have been taught it, but my God, they live it all day. If they didn't have it, they wouldn't be here right now. And then schools start to say, well, instead of actually forging resilience through interaction with other kids, and maybe there's bullying involved, maybe you become A bully. At some point, we teach them about resilience. We teach them about well being without ever putting them in a situation where they have to actually experience it. And so you're just left with these kind of stunted people. Can I tell you, this is a story. No one believes me when I say this, but it's very true. Remember how, like, I haven't been to McDonald's in years? Have you been there recently? Per chance you're not missing out. They have kiosks now, so you can't order to a person. You got to actually do a buttony thing. I got no time for that. So I went up to the counter and waited till the person came and I order from them. And I guess all the kiosks then were broken because a kid came up to me and said, can you help me? Do what? Order. Why just use the kid. And they're like, kiosk's not working. Can you help me? What do I do? I'm like, what do you do to ask for food from another person? And the same thing like, I'm, part of me is going, what is wrong with you? But the other part of me is, no. You've probably never actually practiced ordering food from another person. And you're willing to ask me for help, which is lovely. I'm grateful. But man, that's just scary.
- [16:28]
A
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- [18:12]
C
one of the things in previous years, if there was a child, for instance, in my class who wasn't able to do the very basic things like that or wasn't able to cope in those very, very ordinary run of the mill situations, we would talk about, they weren't raised properly or even the word neglect might be used because you're being neglectful as a parent because you're not parenting your child and you're not preparing them for life.
- [18:41]
B
Yeah. So Australia bans social media and I was just down there last month so I got to get the kind of inside scoop on how it's all going. Schools are fine with it. Teachers, great principals, great kids, great. The biggest pushback has been from parents because parents are saying, what do I do with my kid? Oh yeah, like they're just not trained now in parenting. I guess when you've offloaded your whole childhood and now, cool, I can take you to a museum. But what am I going to do the other five days of the week with my kid? And that scares the daylights out of me. There was a survey done with girl Scouts here in the US and one of the questions was how frequently does your parents use of tech interfere with your ability to connect with them? And over 60% said all the time, frequently. And so that's where, yeah, I think as parents we've kind of lost our way in that structure to say, look, school isn't babysitting. School isn't there to teach your kids morality or ethics. Maybe it is at some level. Fine. But that is your job as a parent to raise your kid. We're here to teach them context. We're here to teach them skills and understanding. We're not here to tell them what's right and wrong. And if you're not willing to do that as a parent, that becomes really tricky.
- [19:54]
A
Yeah. And look, I feel for parents. You're a dad. I'm a dad. I remember her. So my wife, as I always say, she's a complete screen Nazi. And we took a flight from London to Florida for vacation. It's a 10 hour flight and we don't do screens. Right. And so we're sitting here, there's a family with a kid similar age over there. He's on the screen all for 10 hours. And we're entertainment here. You know what I mean? It's difficult. And, and once it's become part of your life as a parent, then it's even more difficult for a lot of people to be like, well, how am I gonna not let my kid be on the same devices that I'm on all the time?
- [20:29]
B
Yeah.
- [20:30]
A
And what we found is we actually had to be conscious about not using devices in front of our son so that we could, then he, so then he didn't have the idea that it's what people do.
- [20:41]
B
Yeah. And it's, it's all that structure and how hard is it? I'm same as you. We're trying our damnedest to make sure our kid doesn't see it. But you just get into that routine and every once in a while I find myself on my phone with my daughter there. I'm like, that's okay. This, no, it's, it's, it's not. What am I training her to do? That anytime you're uncomfortable, anytime there's a lull, pull something out and get entertained. And that's. So what are we teaching to them as well?
- [21:02]
A
But here's another, like maybe a little bit of a counterargument. I, I, as I think I mentioned before we started, I, I love video games. I've been playing video games since I was a kid.
- [21:10]
B
Yeah.
- [21:11]
A
And I think if I added up the total number of hours I spent on video games, it'd be quite a lot. And if I put that time into other things, it'd be quite productive. But I'm okay. I've done all right with my life. But what I have found actually is if I'm playing like a historical video game about stuff, I've actually learned a lot from video games and it sparked my interest to go and then read about this particular medieval period that I'm playing the game about and whatever.
- [21:35]
B
Yeah.
- [21:36]
A
Wonder whether the AI teaching is gamifying learning in a way that might actually be quite productive. Is that possible or are you skeptical about it?
- [21:46]
B
No. Yay and nay. I, I, I completely respect that you like you play assassin's Creed. And you're like, man, Rome was cool. Let me learn more about Rome. Totally understand that the percentage of people doing that are going to be very slim. But the ones for. The ones that it works for. Absolutely. Gamification was one of ed Tech's biggest mistakes was so games work via addiction. Basically, we want to keep your attention on a screen. And so the official metric would be called engagement. But engagement is not synonymous with learning. You can be wildly engaged. There have been movies, like superhero movies. You're wildly engaged with. Couldn't tell me anything about it two days later. And then sometimes you're less engaged, like a hard movie like Affliction or Schindler's List, you're not as engaged. It's not easy to watch. But because of the thinking you're doing throughout it, the discussions you're having, you remember a ton about it two decades later. So engagement is not the right metric. But when we gamify something, what happens is we end up focusing on the mechanics of the game. How does the game work? So I always say my example is always Oregon Trail. So I grew up, I'm part of the Oregon Trail generation. To this day I can tell you everything about that game. I know which buttons to press to shoot. I know where to go to find bear instead of rabbits, how to ford a river. I got it only recently did somebody tell me that was meant to be a history lesson. That wasn't a game. That was supposed to be a lesson for kids to learn. The Oregon Trail mate. I couldn't tell you anything about the Oregon Trail today. I don't know who did it, when it happened, where it went. I probably ended in Oregon. That's my best guess. But the reason was because I was focused on the mechanics rather than the content of the game.
- [23:20]
A
Now as you explain that and I think about gaming, I go, sure, I will read about historical figure afterwards. But if I think about a thousand hours I spent playing this game, they were spent on exactly what you're talking about. Which button do you press? How do you jump off this?
- [23:34]
B
You know, that's the Duolingo issue by the way, is so somebody just did research comparing Duolingo, which is gamified to Babbel, which is a non gamified learning app. And I do, I do not get funding from anyone. This is just research. And they found people use Duolingo about two times more than Babel, but they learn less. So you're for every hour on Babel, you're spending two over here. Yet somehow you're learning less than in that hour over here. And it's just because you're focused on how do I get my bird a little bow tie or whatever the. How do I get the high score? It keeps you engaged, but it doesn't necessarily focus you on the content.
- [24:06]
A
Use our code trig to get a discount on the PayPal subscription.
- [24:10]
B
That's horrible. I know. We'll have to cut that. That research generic language app.
- [24:18]
A
I was just kidding.
- [24:20]
C
But I'm really glad you use the word addiction because when it comes to phones, it really feels like addiction. One of my friends who's got three young boys and he goes to meet Francis, when I take the tablet away from them, yeah, it's like I'm taking heroin away from a junkie. They lose their minds. And these are well brought up, well behaved boys. And you know, they're doing a great job in parenting. And they have tablet hour once every. Once every every Sunday. Yeah, but he said when tablet hour is over and then they try and take the tablet away from the kid, he goes, it's, it's like withdrawal symptoms.
- [24:58]
B
It's the same it was with TV for when we were growing up. I remember my mom saying, every time I turn off the tv, you would flip out. And it was like, all right, Here comes a 30 minute meltdown. But it, it is addiction. It doesn't look like it. It literally is a physical, physiological addiction. So what happens is here's how addictions basically break down. Every addiction starts with a cue. Something has to grab your attention. So let's say my phone dings. That's an attention grabber. But cues can also be internal. I feel uncomfortable. I just woke up. I gotta go to the bathroom. In response to a cue, you can now undertake an action to try and resolve it. So if my phone dings, I look at it. Sweet. If you resolve a cue with an action, your brain will give you a hit of dopamine. You're gonna feel good. There's your reward. So cue, action, reward. Cue, action, reward. That's kind of the cycle. Now what happens? You do that enough times in a row. Your brain's not stupid. Eventually it's going to preempt you. You're going to go, Q ding. And your brain's going to say, I know what's coming. And it's going to spit the dopamine out before you've done any action. So here's the trick. When you get dopamine, after you've done an action, feels really good. You get that Exact same chemical. Before you've done an action, it no longer feels good. It feels like a craving. Now it feels like an urge. Now you have to do the action just to calm your system down and get a sense of relief. So once you've moved from cue action reward to cue reward action, you've built a habit cycle, you've built an addiction, and now you are forced to behave in a way just to regain homeostasis. So that's all technology is trying to do. They don't even hide it anymore. There was a time when tech people were like, we're trying to be altruistic. We're here for the people. We love you. And now they don't even kid. They're like, we're going to pay the highest salaries to psychologists in history of the world just to build habit cycles on our machines. So when you take it away and the kid gets the cue, whether it's discomfort or my mom talked to me. And they don't have that action that they can go to the dopamine ramps. They get worse and worse and worse. They get more uncomfortable. You get yourself a meltdown. So it's very much a trackable addiction cycle.
- [26:58]
C
And it's not just that. I remember we did sex ed classes because I taught year six, that's 10 and 11 year olds, and it was very much about how to protect yourself, et cetera, et cetera. And one of the parents said to me, I don't want my child attending these classes because I'm religious. I don't agree with it. And I said, okay, fine, but your child has an iPhone. He goes, yeah, so what? I went, well, what do you think he's watching on that iPhone? He went, what do you mean? I went, you can access literally hours and hours and hours, thousands if not millions of hours of hardcore pornography on that. You think your son hasn't seen that? And he went, he just couldn't believe it.
- [27:38]
B
Isn't that trippy? Like best argument? I was someone from Seattle, Emily Shurkin. A parent asked her, when should I give my kid a cell phone? And her response was, when are you ready for them to watch porn? That's gonna be the first thing they do when they pick up that machine.
- [27:53]
A
That's a great answer, man.
- [27:55]
B
We're all the same. But now imagine so bring that exact device now into a school. And so how do we learn? Learning requires deep focus and sustain. I've now put something in front of you that you have spent thousands of hours doing nothing but addictive cycles. Porn having Fun. And now I say, okay, 40 minutes, let's learn. It's no wonder kids make it, on average, about six minutes before they start going off task. And it's just a pure training thing. I always say, man, if you assume it takes 10,000 hours to master anything, whether or not that's accurate, who knows? Within four years of being introduced to a screen, kids have mastered basically messing around on it, not sitting down and learning. And now when we bring ed tech into schools and we're like, tech, we'll teach them how to learn, that is giving them heroin and saying, can you use this heroin to learn about weights and measures? Well, technically you could, but I don't think anyone is actually going to do that. You could use beer to learn about buoyancy, but an alcoholic probably isn't going to learn fluid dynamics from it. It's the same problem with tech in schools.
- [28:57]
C
Absolutely. And then you get onto the issues of things like adhd, where we have all of these kids being diagnosed with adhd, and you go, all right, I guess I understand that some children will have this disorder, but the amount of kids that we have and how much of that is kids going on TikTok. I mean, if TikTok doesn't give you ADHD, then you're probably not a human being.
- [29:20]
B
That is. And it gets shorter and shorter. We used to have at least two minutes was kind of the average interaction with tech. That's now about 40 seconds is now the average interaction before you go to the next thing with tech, I. I get in a lot of trouble when I talk about adhd. So I'm going to be very, very measured in what I say here. There is genuine adhd, and that ADHD we can track, we can treat it with medication. We know what's going on. 50% of kids do not have that yet. That's about the diagnostics. In most districts around the US, 50% of kids have a special plan that it gives them extra bonus time to help them because they have a learning disorder, typically an attentional disorder.
- [29:58]
A
50%.
- [29:59]
B
That's not all of them will have the diagnostic of ADHD. Some will get an ASD diagnostic, some will get a tactile. But 50% have some special treatment. Most of it is going to be attentional. And the trick with ADHD is this. Oh, gosh. You can have what's called induced adhd, where basically you act as though you have it, but you genuinely do not. And we can tell by, based on how medication is going to interact with you, if you have biological ADHD. Nine times out of 10, about. Well, eight and a half times out of 10, the medication will treat the symptomology. We know we're dealing with something real in the real world. If I give the majority of people who are demonstrating ADHD medication, they will just ramp up. It doesn't help them. It makes it a little bit worse, which is a sign you didn't actually have it. You were acting as if you had it.
- [30:47]
A
And then you gave them speed, and
- [30:48]
B
then we gave them speed, and then we gave him coke, which makes it even more fun. And then. And so you, you, you go, why do we act like we have adhd? It's that. Have you. So we have what's called our threshold. Basically, ADHD is measured by a threshold. Your brain. There's too much stuff hitting your brain at any one moment. You can't take it all in, so your brain has a hard limit that says, cool. Anything above this, you can pay attention to. Anything below this, we're not even going to process. ADHD is marked by having a very high threshold. Almost nothing gets into their brain. So that's why you get that real flitting beh. When it's there, it's above my threshold, but then it's gone and then it's a bird and now it's gone and now it's here and now it's gone. Just nothing is breaking through. So you give them speed and what happens is just same as us, their threshold lowers. It just started sedang high that when it lowers, it lowers into a more normal level. Now they can sustain focus. But we set our threshold to our context. If I'm in a very quiet spot where nothing is coming in, I can set my threshold real low. If I'm in a hyper noisy, crazy place, without any problem, I will set my threshold high just to block all the extra noise out. That's what we're doing as a society. I pumped gas earlier today. There was an advertisement on the gas pump saying something to me. I'm like, I can't even have this minute to myself. All right, what do you want me to buy? There is so much going on that just naturally, we've all set our threshold so high that we're acting as though we have adhd, but we genuinely don't. So what can we do in schools? Reset the threshold, Just make the context of school much calmer. We can start to get rid of it, but instead we're going to give them screens in schools which is going to say there's Nothing louder or noisier than a screen. So you're going to set your threshold high when you play with it.
- [32:26]
C
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A
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C
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A
As you grow, Shopify grows with you, handle more orders, expand into new markets and manage everything from one simple dashboard. In 2026, stop waiting and start selling with Shopify. Sign up for your one pound a month trial and start sell today at shopify.co.uk trigger. Go to shopify.co.uk trigger that's shopify.co.uk trigger one of the things France and I have been discussing is like, education is the least sexy subject for us to talk about on the show, literally ever. And Catherine Burble Singh, who is a, who's a headmistress of Michaela School in London, she kind of drilled this point into me pretty, pretty aggressively. But I went to visit the Michaela school.
- [34:44]
B
Yeah.
- [34:45]
A
And the day I turned up, there were two police officers at the gate inside the door. And her school is known for its strict discipline. So I was like, I don't know what's going on here. And it turned out on that day, sorry, the day before, a school right next door, which has the same sourcing pool. They're not selective school. They get kids from the same inner city area that Catherine school. There was a kid who was being bullied or we don't know, went into that school, stabbed two kids while shouting Allah Akbar, then ran to a mosque and was crying there and has been arrested and whatever. And then you go into her school and the kids are learning, they're incredibly well behaved, they're very patriotic. Even though from the very, very, very mixed backgrounds, lots of first generation immigrant families there, etc, they all love Britain, you know, sing, dance and all of that stuff. And he just points out to you how important education is. But for some reason, like we, I think as a society we just don't get it. And we were talking this morning about like trying to work out where that was. And I think partly it's because we kind of a, in a lot of people's minds, I think education is just daycare. It's like where you shove your kids so you can go to work.
- [35:48]
B
Yeah.
- [35:49]
A
Another thing is I think we kind of all assumed the education is broadly speaking, the same as it was when we were there, you know, and for some reason just this issue just doesn't, it doesn't resonate.
- [36:00]
B
Yeah. And why. And I, we all have experience with it too. And I think a lot of us look back on our own schooling and go, oh, that sucked or that wasn't fun, so who cares? And I think you're right, it's the most important yet less least sexy thing you could possibly talk about. And I. When we think back to our own schooling, believe it or not, oddly enough, we were in school during the golden page, golden era. If you were in school basically from around 90 to about 2008, 96 to 2008, in that window there, you didn't know it, but you were hitting home runs. Everything about school, that was when more kids were succeeding, more kids, the gender gaps were closing, racial gaps were closing, more kids had access to it, that was it. But it still wasn't fun. And that's where people think learning should be fun. Right. Working out isn't fun. Sometimes when you need to move your biology in a new direction, which learning is, you're forcing your biology to reinterpret the world around you. It's a slog, it ain't easy. It needs structure. Now it doesn't mean it can't be fun, it just means it's not going to be fun 24 7. But I think by bringing in tech now. So when we went to School, I think just think of tech. We had a typing class once a week and word class once a week where they taught us how to use Ms. Word and paint and all that stuff. Today, kids are spending in the US right now. Over half of our kids are on a computer one to four hours every day for learning and over two, a quarter or four or more hours every single day on a screen. So the whole structure is kind of shifted in there. And with that then has kind of come a very big change of meaning. So why would some schools, we're talking about like school crises, right? When was the last time you heard a school crisis in military schools? They don't exist. Last time you heard a crisis in an art school, they don't exist. Or a religious school. Why? Because they have a very clear reason for existing. They know the type of person they are trying to build. That's what education is. It's not there to serve a society. What do you need? We'll make sure the kids can do that. It's there to build a society. What do we desire? That's what we are going to create. But public schooling by and large has become a service industry. We've forgotten who we are trying to create, what kind of society we want to build. So we just ask the world, what do you want, workers? And what are we doing? All we think about education is, will it get my kid a job? I got no problem getting kids jobs. No. Yeah, well, and I'm happy to talk jobs, but believe me, I've been a teacher for a long time. I don't know what any of my kids do for a job. Except for one. He worked in my lab. There you go. I know what one of my kids do. I don't care. There's not a teacher in the world who cares about work. We care about the person. What is the in. So if a school has a very clear understanding, we're here to create a UK citizen, we're here to create an American citizen. What does that mean? Now we have a goal, now we align according to that.
- [38:48]
A
Well, and that's, I fear, has become quite difficult for political reasons nowadays because there's so much, partly perhaps due to the social media driving people apart, it just feels like even saying, you know, we're trying to make American citizens, now there's half the country that's going to think that's somehow evil or oppressive or whatever, right?
- [39:06]
C
Yeah.
- [39:06]
B
And that's scary if you can't even talk about helping create a unified society because, I mean, what's the point I always say, interesting thing about the brain, we do not all live in the same world. For a long time we had this debate, do we all live in the same world, we just describe it differently? Or do we all live in very different worlds? And we now are very much falling on this side where what you see, what you taste, what you hear is very different than what somebody else will see taste here in the exact same context. So we don't take the world in clean. We're constantly just creating it up here. So give me a million kids as kindergarteners. They're all going to come in with completely different stories. Isn't the job of a public education at some level to unify all of them under a single comprehensive narrative so that we can all live in the same basic world together? We don't got to agree on everything, but at least there is one narrative. So we're all tasting the same stuff, we're all smelling the same things, at least in this context. And that's why I think you're going to see in the US Especially, school is going to become smaller and smaller and smaller. I think it went from local communities were controlling the school to then districts to states. A little bit of federal touched in and now I think you're going to see it swing way back where we're going to say, look, if we can't do this at a national level, we can't do it at a state level. We'll just do it at a local level and we will drive our own curricula in this community here.
- [40:30]
C
Talking about schools, this has sparked a memory in me. I remember in 2010, interestingly enough, I went for a job as a drama teacher. And one of the questions in the interview was, why can't you have an exceptional lesson without technology? And I made the point. I'm like, well, you can. They were like, well, what do you mean? I went, well, that then presupposes that before technology there were no exceptional lessons. Now I didn't get the job.
- [40:57]
B
How dare you?
- [40:59]
C
Yeah, no, but I annoyed someone shoved
- [41:02]
A
right in their face.
- [41:03]
C
And that's how trigonometry started. Yeah, exactly.
- [41:05]
B
The next day came here.
- [41:07]
C
But I think the point nevertheless is kind of an important one and that we do worship technology now.
- [41:15]
B
It has become something I tell people, make a list. The aqueducts, the Hanging gardens of Babylon, the pyramids of Giza, going to the moon, the atom bomb. These are all things we did before digital, modern digital technology. What human beings can achieve by ourselves when we think and work is ridiculous. Yet I think you're right. We've crossed some sort of threshold where we think without tech, we are nothing. Without this boost, I can't do anything. And to be fair, as adults, I'm fine with this. So think of something like AI Right? If you I AI as far as I'm concerned, I call it the the tool nobody asks for. Solving problems nobody has. I have no reason why large language models exist. No one else does. The guys who invented it don't. They're like, oh, it's just science to us. Enjoy. But if you can say it's for anything, it's for experts to offload or outsource their thinking. So, like me, I'm really good at stats, but it's going to take me two hours to do stats. I'll just use the machine. I'll do it in two seconds. But it only works because I can immediately vet what happens. My expertise allows me to go, yep, that's correct. Or oh, no, that's wrong. What did I do different? I'm going to change it up. The tools we use as experts to make our lives easier are not the tools a novice should be using to learn how to become an expert. When they use those tools, they do not learn a thing. They do not learn the process, they don't learn the material. All they know is the output, copy, paste, give it to you. So that's why think about calculators. Kids who learn math on a calculator typically outperform kids who learn math with pen and paper. So long as they have their calculator, as soon as you take the calculator away, they drop to basically nothing. Because they weren't learning math, they were just learning how to type things so that you would go, right answer. And so a lot of this tech stuff, maybe as adults we can use it. And that's where I can see some people saying, if I'm trying to invent the next space shuttle, technology can help.
- [43:11]
A
Cool.
- [43:12]
B
But if you're trying to learn about space or what it means to build something or how engineering works, all of that stuff should be done analog and offline. Don't use the tool you use to make your life easier before you understand what the process is. First, my undergrad, I was in film school, and the way my so they wouldn't let us touch cameras till our second or our third year, junior year of film school. Couldn't touch any equipment. We were pissed. All we did was yell at them, no, we want to make movies. But the argument they said, Was an idiot with a camera is still an idiot like mate, I could give you one today, but you're gonna have nothing to say. But if we spend years figuring out how do you think through the medium of film? Film, what's the language, what are the patterns, what are the processes? Now you have something to do with the tool. So you can only use tools down from where you're at and kids are nowhere. So I. I'd say most the best lessons will never touch tech.
- [44:03]
C
Let me say this because I know I'm not alone. At some point, your body just stops bouncing back the way it used to. You train hard, you travel, you push yourself, and suddenly recovery takes longer. You wake up stiff, joints complain, skin, hair, nails. Things don't look or feel quite right anymore. So many people listening to this know exactly what I'm talking about. What surprised me is that this isn't just getting older. In some vague sense, a huge part of it is collagen. Your body starts producing less of it from your mid-20s onwards. Collagen is basically the glue that holds everything together. So when your levels drop, you feel it everywhere. That's why I started using Bub's naturals collagen peptides. And I've stuck with it since I've added it to my routine. Recovery is noticeably better, joints feel stronger, and my skin and hair have improved. I genuinely feel better now than I did a few years ago. And that's not a placebo effect. It's fixing something fundamental. It's also effortless. I put it in my tea, coffee or any drink. No taste, no smell, no clumps. You forget it's even there. And Bubs isn't just another supplement brand. It was created in honor of Glenn Bub Docherty, a former Navy SEAL who was killed saving Americans in Benghazi. The brand is built around discipline, self improvement and doing things properly. They also donate 10% of all profits to charity through the Glen Doherty Memorial Foundation. The product itself is clean. No sugar, no fillers. Third party tested, NSF certified for sport Whole 30 approved. Sustainably sourced from grass fed pasture, raised cattle. Over 100,000 people use it and it was named best collagen of 2024 by health.com if you recognize yourself in what I've just described, this is worth trying. Live better, longer. For a limited time, get 20 off your entire order at Bubsnaturals.com with code TRIG or click the link in the description of this episode. That's B U b s naturals.com code trig. And when they ask where you heard about them, tell them trigonometry sent you once more for 20 off. Use code trig@bubsnaturals.com
- [46:19]
A
I think about that a lot with history because history and historians is a subject that we cover a lot on the show. We have lots of guests who are brilliant historians. And the thing that the reason we do is I do think certainly in my school, into my generation, I went to a pretty good school. History was taught very badly because it was kind of taught like a calculator in the sense of like, here's some dates, you need to memorize these dates, and here's one or two bits that you need to remember. But you weren't taught actual history, which is effectively a story about human nature repeating in different ways over centuries and millennia. Right. That's all it is. And I think part of the reason so many people are now disconnected from the fact that there is a human nature, and they all think in this kind of blank slate, utopian way is they don't really understand history because they were not taught a property. And I don't see how an AI tool is going to teach you that. Understand. It can teach you dates, it probably can teach you dates way better than a human.
- [47:17]
B
And you drill the daylights out of it.
- [47:19]
A
You will remember and you'll remember what the machine told you the cause of World War II was, but you're not going to understand human nature because you don't have that context. And you know one thing that I think I don't understand why this isn't a bigger talking point. You see it clearly with the big tech developers. They none of them let their kids use the devices that they generate. I mean, Steve Jobs famously didn't have a tablet and all this stuff. And then you go, well, you want to give this to my kids when you're keeping. Like, if I went to a restaurant,
- [47:50]
B
your kids don't care. Your kids are the, the guinea pigs, right?
- [47:53]
A
But if I went to a restaurant and the guy who ran that restaurant was not prepared to give the food to his kids, I'd be like, whoa, maybe I go, I'm gonna go to a different restaurant, but we just carry on.
- [48:06]
B
That's such a good analogy. Yes. If you won't even eat your own food, why should my kids eat your food? But we do it, and we do it at scale. The amount of money we're shoving into it is insane. Go back to the AI. So we've got things here in the US I don't know if it's hit the UK yet. Called Alpha schools. Have you heard of those yet? Good. Don't. So basically it's a tech bro school. They said we can 10x your learning any 10x man. Anytime someone uses business lingo in education run, it's not going to make any sense. But they said we can 10x your learning by just using an AI digital tutor 2 hours a day. That's all your kids are going to need. They're going to pass every test.
- [48:42]
A
I have friends who do that, so fair enough.
- [48:44]
B
So I guarantee you you can pass a test in two hours a day. That's fine. What you forget is the rest of the day in school, we're not just doing numbers and facts and skills now we're hopefully what we're doing for the rest of the class. We might do 10 minutes on facts in class. Now we're going to do what's called deep learning. We're going to have a discussion about it. How does that link with what we learned yesterday? How does tied over here? How can we apply this? The reason why school is slow is because it's developmentally appropriate and we're pushing deeper rather than just pure breadth. So as these schools say, we can just run kids right through this material. Cool. That's surface learning. Exactly as you said. Maybe these tools, who's Justin Reich out of mit said a great. He says maybe these like AI tools will be good for learning to read, but they're never going to be really good for reading to learn. Once you actually want to do something with the skill, go deep, it's basically stuck on just surface data. Here's the next pattern. Off you go. And so I think that's a really interesting. If you think about the history of edtech, where it came from, how it moved. It was basically sold to us as this is going to stop drilling, kill. Tech is going to free up creativity. It's going to let your kids flourish and be huge human beings. They are not going to have to sit there and just rote memorize anymore. Yay. Well, cut to today. When's the only time digital technology appears to work for learning? When you use it to rote, drill and kill. When you lock things down. Now, a lot of people think maybe that has something to say about tech and it does. But I also think that has a lot to say about learning and actually what is required for learning. If they would have stopped 20 years ago and said, okay, what is learning? Before shoving these tools in front of kids, maybe we would have saved 20 years of down slope to get to this point where we're like, you know what? Humans matter, teachers are important. Depth matters.
- [50:28]
C
One of the things I really noticed when I was teaching is how I started in 08 and there wasn't a lot of tech in the classroom. And as it progressed till the time I left in 20, 2012 years, it became more and more tech focused. There were iPads, you know, you went to the computer lab. There was interactive whiteboards. There were other things that we were doing as well. There were other types of pads that we were using in maths lessons. And part of me, I remember when I was teaching going, how much of this is actually for the kids? And how much of this there's a financial incentive being conspiratorial? I mean, does this actually work? Have we done enough testing into this?
- [51:11]
B
None. None of it was driven by data or learning. There wasn't a single decision made, I would say, across edtech ever for learning. So we've got data out the wazoo that shows the more time kids spend on tech at school for learning purposes, the more learning goes down. And it's basically linear. It's not some is okay, a lot is bad. It's just kids who don't use it at all. Great. Kids who use it a little bit, little bit worse, a little bit more, a little bit worse. To the point where kids who are using it six hours a day basically all online, are two thirds of a standard deviation worse on average than kids who don't touch tech ever at school. So it's the data across standardized tests, international tests, national tests, local tests, all shows that same thing to which a lot of people say, well, cool, that's just correlation. Correlation isn't causation. Very true. How do you make correlation causation? And first I would like to say, well, here, step one, triangulation of correlation. The argument correlation isn't causation was really a salve against single data sets to be very wary of one data set. But if you see the same correlation across hundreds of countries, across decades, across subjects, across age levels, that saying no longer means the same thing. So triangulation of correlation, that's exactly what was going on with tech. It didn't matter where we looked, we were seeing that same pattern. So the next step then is you do convergence of evidence. Now you do research, you get into the lab and you say, okay, what's actually going on here? And that's where we learned, yeah, human biology does not align well with digital tech. How we Read. We don't read on a screen the same way we read on paper, how we think when we write. Handwriting is very different than typing. And all of the digital stuff was lesser than all of the analog stuff we were looking at. So now we've got correlation data, we've got hard data, and then you get mechanisms. That's where I come in as a neuroscientist and I say, here's what's going on in the brain, here's why. This explains all the patterns you're seeing. So the data's there. So why then did we ever go down this path? That's why I say, I always tell people, look, I can show you about 100 graphs showing tech harms learning. And people say, that's correlation. Show me any, show me 10 correlations that show benefit. They don't exist. There's no real pattern going the other direction. So why are these tools in schools? The only other option has to be some sort of economic incentive. They're not there for learning. There is no evidence to prove they work. Imagine, and maybe that's the whole thing. Like I always say, imagine I had a drug, I invented a new drug. And you say, what does that drug do? And I go, mm, why don't you give it to your kids and we'll find out. Now imagine every government in the world says, that's a great idea, let's do it. That's basically the edtech model.
- [53:58]
A
We think it will be good for them, so let's give it a go.
- [54:00]
B
So let's give it, let's, let's do something.
- [54:03]
A
So Jared, that being the case, we're coming to the end of our conversation which has been really informative and super brilliant. What does this mean for parents and what does this mean at the level of our societies? What should we be doing? Should we, I mean, to me banning school funds from schools is like a complete no brainer, right? But what else should should we do at the level of first the government and policy and then as a parent, you know, that's the one thing that when you become a parent you kind of go, I actually don't particularly give a shit what the government's doing. I just want to protect my kids against whatever because I can't control that, but I can't control this. Right? So the bit that we probably can't control but can influence is the government and then our own kids give us the ideas, right?
- [54:46]
C
I'm going to level with you. I'm not a gamer, even though I look like one, I'm not going to pretend I've been grinding through RPGs between recordings or that I have strong opinions about which Final Fantasy was the best one. I think it's Japanese and I think there's a sword. That's genuinely everything I know. But our social media guy showed me this app and I genuinely thought that's quite clever. It's called Snaxy. Basically, game publishers need new players and they're willing to pay to get them. Snaxy just passes that money on to you. You play games you were probably going to play anyway. You earn coins and you cash them out for real rewards. PayPal, Amazon, Netflix, gift cards if you prefer gaming credit, you can redeem for PlayStation, Xbox, Steam and Nintendo. Actual money, not just points that expire. It takes a few minutes to set up. You open the app, swipe through the game offers, pick something that looks decent, play it, earn redeem. That's the whole thing. There's a sign up bonus worth up to $10 if you use our link which is in the description of this episode. That's S N A K Z Y Snacksy. Click the link in the description to get started and when you sign up, use the code triggerpod. That's T R I G G E R P O D to claim your $10 bonus. And the app is mobile only, so click the link from your phone, not your laptop.
- [56:10]
B
Highest level you do a massive tech audit. If you're a government, you put a kibosh no more new ed tech for the next two years until we get a sense of what we've got, how much money we've spent, how it's working right now and what you'll find through that kind of in each school will have to do their own audit based on that. But what you'll find is 90 to 95% of everything we're blowing money on in education just ain't working. It was a waste of time. It was a waste of money. And that and it's it's a zero sum game. The the $21 billion that went into building tech infrastructure for schools necessarily did not go to training new teachers, to increasing the pay rate of current teachers, to lessening workload. So it's if we can stop new tech, do an audit, figure out what's working, and then the government has to build a tech database basically that says you cannot ever go to a school with your product until you have met these standards of safety, of efficacy and privacy. Basically what's going on in the background of your tool and that's got to be hardcore. So basically you just, you just regulate it like you would medicine or anything else. Put some limits on what do we expect from these tools. If they're doing worse than a pen and paper, then no, it doesn't belong in the school. If you can genuinely prove benefit then we'll have a chat that. But go back to the personal level. This is us as parents now is step one, buy a printer. It's like the easiest, stupidest idea. But if you can make your house analog like you've done, that's the best way to get your kids ready to do analog work at school. So we print everything out. You got homework, print it, you got to read, print it. We have our tech free, hopefully home. You have your tech free days if you need to. When you support your kids with their learning, everything is offline. You're taking notes offline, you're doing note cards offline, you're having discussions offline, you just make your home analog. Now as a group of parents, how do we push back? That's when, if you go as one parent. So the easiest way to do it is through an opt out is you go to a school and you say I would like to opt my child out of all non essential tech use. Vermont is about to pass a bill that makes that legal. So once they do it, everyone, so soon it will be illegal in the US to say I do not want my kid using tech. Which is awesome. If you can't get your voice heard, one parent usually is seen as a nuisance. If you're the one parent speaking up, they're like yeah, ignore that one. But if you can get a small coalition, even 10, 10 parents together saying the same thing, that's when they're going to have to listen. And your biggest allies in this entire tech battle and basically it's P.S. just be aware all you're doing is asking for data.
- [58:48]
A
That's it.
- [58:49]
B
Just show me proof that this is working. Show me proof that in any way this has helped my kid. If you can, cool. We're not asking for miracles, just evidence. And no one's got it. Your school especially won't have it. So if they can't prove it, then we can start to step away. But your biggest allies are going to be teachers. So I've been working in education for a long time. My estimate now is about 70% of teachers are done with tech. They hate it. And if you've been in a classroom longer than 15 years, you know how bad kids are today. Compared to what they were. But teachers can't speak up. Teachers don't have a voice until parents do. When parents start moving, teachers will swoop in behind you and they will say, yep, we can help you. We've got your supports, we've got the data you need. And they become your biggest champions. Unfortunately, they just can't talk because their jobs are on the line. I was working at a district in Kansas recently where the district gave everyone laptops. Here's your one to one programs. Put a program on that, timed how long the laptop was used and for what purposes, sent that data back to the district and they put a marker that said you have to use this 20 minutes in your class every day, otherwise you will lose your job. So if you're a teacher and you know tech doesn't work and you've just been told I have to use tech 20 minutes every single day, otherwise I'm fired. You don't have a voice. You put your head down and you do what you got to do. So that's why parents become essential. You push, teachers will have your back. But we can't wait for teachers to make the move.
- [60:12]
A
I mean, partly because of this I think, and also I think a lot of people have concerns about the politicization of education as well. I meet more and more people now who are planning or are homeschooling already and that seems to be a route that a lot of people are now taking just because of the concerns they have about digital technology, the politics of the classroom and lots of other things that, that are going on.
- [60:36]
B
Yeah, and I think that's once we get the learning settled, that's when we can start having more meaningful debates on what is this all for and then what are the curriculum aspects of it? What is actually being taught here. So my, my focus is 100% on, look, if we're going to take kids 12 years of our kids life, we better be doing best by them and whatever it is we're going to teach them. Maybe that's beyond my purview suite. There is a way learning works. It's a biological process. If you follow these steps, there's a way it works best. If we can go back to that, realign schools with that, then I think we're in a much better place to have better debates about now. What do we teach them? What do we actually want them to take away from this? We're just having. It sucks man. Right. We're having debates on form over function. We're so stuck on what works and what doesn't? And we're so down a path of something that doesn't that we've got to spend so much time and money correcting that before we can get to the deeper, more important question. Why are we here? What are we actually trying to do?
- [61:33]
A
Well, that's the amazing thing, and it's not just with this issue, it's with almost everything, is how rarely anyone asks what works and what doesn't.
- [61:42]
B
Yeah.
- [61:42]
A
So much of it has become about, like, people's moralization of things. You know, if you do this, you're a good person if you do that. And we almost forget, like, there's. There's ideas that work and there's ideas that don't. Yeah, it's kind of crazy.
- [61:54]
B
There's biology, there's things that work, there's things that don't. You have a memory or you don't. You have attention or you don't. And I think at certain levels, that's okay. At my level, a neuroscientist, people are fine with it. It's like, yeah, okay, you're talking about cells, but as soon as you get up to the social level, we're now we're in psychology. And that's where people think it must be different. And maybe it is nuanced, but there still has to be structure to all of this. Otherwise we're gonna have a million kids living in a million different worlds, smelling a million different things as they get older. And I don't think that's going to be a very easy place to live in.
- [62:27]
A
Well, Jared, thank you so much for coming on and sharing this with our audience. We're going to head to Substack where we're going to ask you questions from our audience. Before we do, though, the last question is always the same. What's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be?
- [62:43]
B
What if digital technology and digital skills are irrelevant to the future of work? What if we don't need our kids all to use an iPad in primary years in order to become work ready in the future? What if tech isn't the answer?
- [62:58]
A
Well, hold on, let's explore that before we move on though, because, I mean, counter arguments are pretty obvious here, which is like, everything is becoming digital.
- [63:07]
B
Yep.
- [63:08]
A
Like, what are you talking about?
- [63:09]
B
So if you track digital literacy Amongst students from 2013 to 2023, the percentage of kids who are digitally literate across the world, the countries we've tested has dropped 21%. Despite in that time, the percentage of Kids using tech every day in explicit tech based content schools and classrooms has increased over 600%. So we're teaching tech more and more and more to our kids. They're using it all day, every day, yet they're worse at it at the end. Why? Because maybe tech literacy comes from deep knowledge of other things, of self. I always say if you want to be tech literate, be life literate first and then you move those skills onto tech. So I think if we reset schooling back to humanistic recognition to we're here to teach you literacy, we're here to teach you numeracy, we're here to teach you how to think and how to learn. Now, whatever tool comes down the pipe, you're going to be fine and you're going to be able to adapt to it. And it could be that once we go back to training kids, analog again. Tech is fine, man. No one taught me tech. I use tech just fine. No one taught my dad tech. He can send emojis with the best of them. And maybe when we all come out of there, maybe a lot of us are thinking for work, maybe I don't want to do anything tech. Maybe I want to think more about craft, maybe I want to only use tech to do stats. But that's not going to change the way how I actually run my experiments with actual human beings. So tech will always be there. But I think right now we believe that's the only future people have.
- [64:36]
A
And I suppose the counterargument against my counter argument is what I alluded to in a joking way earlier, which is, I mean, if it can be done on a computer, why wouldn't it be done by a computer 10 years from now?
- [64:48]
B
It's in. Maybe, maybe it will. But all of that stuff is. So you're thinking, is your argument that
- [64:56]
A
I don't know that digital based jobs are going to exist 10 years from now because AI will be doing the jobs, we'll take it.
- [65:02]
B
Which leaves us with nothing more than what else is there. That's what I'm saying about human beings. I can see that. I hope we push back before that day. I hope it's not that AI gets so good that we just relinquish control to of those jobs. And I hope we get to the stage we're like, you know what, screw that, no, I don't want to use that, or I don't want that. And we're just gonna go back to humanistic small scale. You got kids, I talk about this with my daughter. I want the smallest life for my daughter and her choice. Do what you want to do. But like we were, our generation was raised to be huge. If you're not the biggest in the world, you failed. If you're not the best movie star, you're not a real actor.
- [65:43]
A
No.
- [65:44]
B
How can we go back to small scale community where if my daughter just decides to pick up a craft and we live in Italy and she lives in the same village for the rest of her 80 years just making bracelets. Sweet. You don't need tech for that. It's not flash hot. It's not going to change the world but it's going to change your community. Maybe if we think smaller tech becomes less important.
- [66:04]
A
Jared, thank you for coming on. Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk where we ask Jared your questions.
- [66:11]
C
What advice would you give to a curriculum coordinator responding to the AI invasion of our learning space? How can schools develop robust, actionable policies that protect the outsourcing of our children's thinking to AI?