The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids’ Learning–and How to Help Them Thrive Again by Jared Cooney Horvath PhD Med.

Episode Date: August 17, 2026

The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids’ Learning–and How to Help Them Thrive Again by Jared Cooney Horvath PhD Med. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GPR5NXSM Educator and neuroscientist Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath reveals why digital tools in school consistently undermine learning—and what parents, teachers, and schools can do to push back with purpose. Our children are struggling. Schools, once alive with human connection, are now dominated by screens and digital tools. The result is unmistakable: declining performance, fractured attention, and the slow erosion of rigorous thought. For the first time in recent history, children are falling behind previous generations on many key measures of cognitive development. In The Digital Delusion, neuroscientist and educator Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath reveals how the widespread use of laptops, tablets, and classroom software is undermining how children learn and develop. Drawing on decades of research, he provides practical tools for families to reassess device use at home, equips educators with the means to restore attention-rich learning environments, and helps schools make smarter decisions about technology. He exposes and dismantles the central myths driving the EdTech movement and lays out a clear path for putting people—not programs—back at the center of education. This is not a call to reject technology. It’s a call to reclaim real learning. About the author Jared Cooney Horvath (PhD, MEd) is a neuroscientist, educator, and best-selling author who specializes in human learning and brain development. He is the creator of The Learning Blueprint, an international award-winning program helping educators and students understand how learning actually works. Jared has conducted research and taught at Harvard University, Harvard Medical School, and the University of Melbourne, and has worked with more than 1,000 schools around the world. He is the author of six books, has published over fifty research articles, and his work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Economist, Harvard Business Review, and PBS’s NOVA. He currently serves as Director of LME Global, an organization dedicated to bringing cutting-edge brain and behavioral science to educators, students, and communities.

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Because you're about to go on a monster education role. rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. And folks, Voss here from the Chris Voss Show.com. You gotta love it. Are we gonna... Is that someone in a shower singing? Yeah, I think the Chinese, the Big Iron Lady, she, she flowed there.

Let's see if we can hit that again. See, even she's getting old. She's losing her voice. Just like we're talking about the show. It's just shows old, man. Even the audio clips are aging out. So they can die at any moment. Anyway, guys, we have an amazing show for you today.

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Utah.com,com, Fortess, Chris Foss. And Facebook. book.com for it says Chris Faw. He is the author of the new book that's launching next week, I believe. It is entitled The Digital Delusion, How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids Learning and How to Help Them Thrive Again. Jared Cooney Horveth is on the show with us today. He is a PhD and an MED. I don't know what that is, but it's probably the same as an IED. Get it? Me, IED. No, it's not working. It was a joke. I saw what you did there. It wasn't horrible. I was trying. I was trying, man. Some of many jokes don't fly, man. You just got to roll with it. It's been 70 years, people. I ran on a funny like a 10 year 10.

Can't all be gold. You get one good one a day. You're fine. One good one every couple years. He is a neuroscientist, educator and author who specializes in human learning and brain development. And I'm going to be his best study today. He is the creator of the learning blueprint in international award-winning program that helps educators and students understand. how learning actually works. He's connected research and taught at Harvard University, Harvard Medical School, and the University of Melbourne, and has worked more than 1,000 schools across the world. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the economists, Harvard Business View, and PBS's Nova. He currently serves as Director of LME Global, an organization dedicated to cutting-edge brain and behavioral science to educators, students, and communities, and now he brings to the Chris Fos show, the peak of his career. Welcome to the show, Jared. How are you, sir?

I'm doing good. How are you doing? I'm hanging in there. If I can spell, read, and pronounce stuff, right? We'll be good. That aren't having a seizure. So, Jared, give us a dot-com's work. People find you on the interwebs. Yeah, so I'm on, if you look up the digital delusion, there's a substack for the book. If you want to just keep a tab on what's going on, I also have a YouTube channel called Jared, where we just put out some videos about learning and stuff.

My whole focus is just how do humans learn and what does that mean for us schools. So what's going on in these schools? How is this, how is the digital stuff mucking up the kids? Well, I imagine if you have kids, you probably aren't going to be too shocked by it. But yeah, it's, Gen Z is one of the lowest performing generations. They're the first generation to underperform their parents on basically every measure we have, whether it's literacy, numeracy, science, you let a rip. Are you about that? They seem really well adapted right now. They are part. Well, look, and to be, fair. I always tell Gen Z, Gen Alpha, if you're

struggling, none of that is your fault. Because a lot of the problems that we're seeing from them stem from putting a screen in front of their face at school. Rather than teaching them in ways we know work best, we taught them with a tool that nobody had ever proven before and turned out not to be as good. So I always tell them, look, it's not your fault. You can fix it. Blame us, by all means, get mad at us, but we've got to somehow push in a different direction. I knew I shouldn't have put the hose on him and told them to get off my lawn. That was not a healthy thing to do to him, I guess.

It's crazy. We raise them in this crazy world, and then we're really mad when they're crazy. And it's like, we, they didn't ask for any of this stuff we're giving them yet. We're doing it all the same. We're just going to blame millennials. We're just going to blame millennials and boomers and let them all work out. That's a Jin's X way to go. What is some of the issues you guys are seeing that is directly tied to this? Yeah. So we were talking, if you're just talking about pure learning, name a field, That will go down. But what's going to follow on effect from that is you're going to have diminished attentional spans. You're going to have diminished memory.

You're going to start to have diminished creativity. You're going to have diminished critical thinking. All of these higher order skills that people want from the next generation, they misunderstand how they happen. A lot of people think you have these kind of higher order skills on one side. You have knowledge on the other. Bring them together. Congratulations. But it turns out all these higher order skills emerge from knowledge.

They're not separate to them. They grow from what you know. As schools stop focusing on learning and learning goes down, by definition, all those higher order skills will go down with it as well. Wow. That explains a lot. Is Gen Z, is it true that Gen Z probably, it just occurred to me, is probably the first generation to have all this technology in the classroom,

maybe a little bit with the millennials, but. Yeah. Millennials, if you were late stage millennials, you would have maybe seen some of it, but the majority of us, we did have a computer lab. They taught us typing over in the corner of the school. But yeah,

but Gen Z was the first where tech went from being a peripheral to the central driver of their learning. And in so doing, to be fair, and it's worth pointing out, this is in every country we've seen around the world. Really? So this is... Any country, if you track their digital adoption,

how quickly do they become digital, how much does that become a part of their schooling? Learning inevitably starts to go down with the influx of tech, which is just a good sign that, look, if it was just one country or one state, you could have a nice discussion, but the fact that you see it in 90 countries, every data set we've ever looked at goes in the same direction.

It's a pretty good sign that we've got to really zero in here and see what the tech is doing. Yeah. When I was in typing class, they made us use actual typewriters, like without electricity. Yeah, yeah. They were like, yeah.

And that was right after we learned. to carve hieroglyphs in a rock. With that stone and chisel. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember, really. My school got the first printer. We had, it was that dot matrixy thing.

Oh, yeah, that was great. I remember all that. A little peel off. You had to peel off each side, tear off each side. My mother helped me that's a horrible start to any sentence, but my mother helped me type up my college

application using a typewriter. Yeah, we were still very much in that, genre. Yeah. Now, we've talked a lot on the show from various different authors and researchers like yourself. One of the things, some people, some of the things that people cite is that our brains aren't really designed to deal with this two-dimensional screens. We're designed to see three-dimensional. You and are assigned to sit from each other and read a million cues of nuances of human interaction and rapport and whether I know you're happy or not or you're listening to

or not, or we're going. And there's all these cues that we give off. We watch each other's hands or eye movements or mouth or there's all these things that we learn from. And a lot of that, our brains have a hard time picking up in a two-dimensional thing. And then you have blue light. Are those contributors? Oh, 100%.

One of the biggest drivers of learning is what we call affective empathy. So most people think empathy is an emotion or it's like a personality trait. Empathy is when two pairs of biology start to synchronize. And it's exactly what you said. When I start to pick up your cues and you start to pick up my cues, what's going to happen is our hearts are going to start to beat simultaneously. We're going to start to breathe at the same pace. We're going to blink at the same time.

In those moments, if I could image our brains, our brains start to look almost identical. So in those moments of empathy, you are no longer learning from somebody. You are thinking like somebody. So that becomes one of the biggest drivers of growth and development for humans. But exactly, as you said, as soon as you introduce a screen between people, people, that synchrony really diminishes. And once the screen, like when people use AI instead of a person, that's when you literally can't have that empathetic synchrony. So learning by default will start to go significantly down because of that. Yeah. In fact, I never knew what was Uncanny Valley was

until somebody came on the show and started explaining it to me. And finally, I realized why I get freaking fight or flight or weirded out when I see really bad AI. And they're like, yeah, that's uncanny valley. And that's part of the way that our brains, and here's this new technology, AI, that's supposed to be so great for us. And it sounds like from what you're saying, it may be more detrimental. Oh, gosh, it is one of the silliest things. If you, I consider AI. Whenever I talk about AI, I call it the tool nobody asked for solving problems nobody had. It's who cares about it. It was, there was a time when if you invented something, you had to tell me what it problem had solved. Do you have a stain on your shirt? My thing's going to get rid of that stain. You're

Lettuce is wilting, my fridge will keep it fresh. AI comes along and we said, what is this for? And the developer said, we just did it see if we could. Why don't you tell us? And they gave it to the world and we chomped at the bit. We'll tell you why I'm not a beta tester. I'm not getting paid for this. So if you could say AI is for anything,

you might be able to say it's for adults to make their lives easier. If you're an expert and you're doing a job, AI might help you do that job a little bit faster. easier. But the tools we use as adults to make our lives easier are never the tools a novice, a child should use to learn how to become an expert or an adult. This is an offloading tool for us. It's because we already understand the world that we can use the tool in any meaningful way. But if you replace understanding of the world with the tool in very young kids, they don't really develop much of anything. They don't get the tool. They don't get the world. They don't get,

They just basically have dependence on typing things into a screen. So, yeah, AI is, that's my least favorite innovation in technology. Now, there is a benefit to AI. It's to make billionaires richer. I'll tell you what. There was. Building all those incredible data centers on the moon with self-replicating robots, I believe it. As a scientist, let me tell you, we are ready for that.

Yeah. But who needs water to drink? We need AI. Did you hear what they said the other day? This is just a perfect example. someone was pressing them on it. I think it may have been anthropic, that team.

They were pressing them on that. Your data centers are going to take water. They're going to contribute to carbon dioxide. It's going to accelerate global warming. Their answer was, that's okay because the AI is going to fix all of that for us. It is going to generate water probably. Your argument is human beings, we can't solve these problems.

So what we need to do is exacerbate the problems as much as we can and trust that the computer, which is using our knowledge, is somehow going to come up with the answer we couldn't. That's just so assing it. But it just shows they put the screen above humans every day, and I just don't. There's a certain naivete. I remember watching Mark Andreessen, and Mark's a smart guy. But I was watching him in almost what seemed, I don't know, what he was on, maybe. Maybe that's just him naturally.

but he there was a I think a show he went on maybe it was a Sam Harris or somebody and it was a podcast and he was just what do you call there's a blue skying AI

there was no downside there was no and if anybody knows technology and how new things work and through eons of time there's always the Pandora's box it's like social media when at first ride we were like this is great we're going to have

one world, we're all going to coombia and be friends. Now everyone's fucking enemies. And people don't date or have kids. So good job. Isn't that funny? And it's, I love it. We can track this back to biology too. So when human beings interact live and in person, we'll release a set of chemicals, one of which is going to be oxytocin, which basically contributes to bonding. You no longer feel isolated. You feel like you belong. Congratulations. That's going to boost well-being. That's going to boost emotional mental health. Good. when we interact with people digitally, which was the entire social media movement, the body does not release chemicals like oxytocin.

It releases a secondary set of chemicals, one of which we believe is tachycinns. Now, tachycinins are the chemical precursor to depression. So this is a very, in a very real sense, if I know the concentration of tachycinins in your blood, I can tell you how close to being depressed you are. So this is a very clear sign that human biology simply doesn't recognize text-based digital communication as actual interaction. It recognizes it as isolating and threatening. But we were told so long that social media was connecting us that as soon as a kid starts to feel lonely, what are they going to do? Reach out to more people online, which is going to make them feel lonelier.

And it's one of those perfect. We're using the poison as a cure, and it's just not ever going to work. And I think a lot of women are susceptible to it because they, I think they suffer the highest depression rates from social media, because there's so much fake. and affronting and and you see these you see interviews with women they think that just millionaires grow on trees there's plenty of men out there they just have to find them that drive Lamborghinis that are six foot plus tall and they get the press because they you see people pretending to leave these lives that turns out nine times out of ten are fake right they probably stole or rents the Lamborghini and yet and they'll put up this perfect relationship oh I marry this rich

dude, we have this loving life, and we all get along three years later, and they're divorced. You hear all the horror that was going on. And so sadly, so many people think that's a reality. And they think it's common that, oh, I can get that too. It's like that old line from Fight Club. We were all raised to think we'd all become millionaires and rock stars, and we're slowly learning that we got lied to. And isn't that exactly what social media does and was built to do?

I think now that all the court cases are coming out and we're starting to see their internal documents and we're starting to see their emails, we're starting to see they've known this all along. There's no magic to this thing. They would just fill it Morris with a different product. Absolutely. And I think that's another big problem with that then becomes identity formation. So I was talking about this this morning is during adolescence, that's when we're going to largely be forming our identity. And in order to do, there are going to be periods where we. offload our identity.

We're depending on who we're around, we're going to be wearing different masks and acting differently to see what the response is. I just walk around in the clothes off to see what the response is. Just see what that response is. Sorry, I had to squeeze that joke in there. No, I love it. So we call that, and it's always been good, always been positive. So we call that externalizing your identity.

And that has historically, that's where the myth of narcissists comes from. When people hear about narcissists, they think he fell in love with himself. No, he fell in love with a reflection of himself. That myth isn't about self-love. It's about the dangers of externalizing your identity. Falling in love with that, believing that that is the real you, and then the dangers of realizing later that, no, that's not you. You have to now come to terms with who you really are.

But so historically, we've only done that in small groups. Maybe you had 100 kids at your school that you were externalizing. and they were always offset by periods of isolation where now you'd go home and you'd have two hours before bed at night where it was just you and your thoughts. And that kind of worked okay. Along comes the internet and all of a sudden, externalizing your identity became very common.

Instead of 100 kids, I now have a million people out there. I'm going to put a song online, see how many thumbs up I get. That's going to determine if the song is good or bad. And then along comes social media, which basically says, we're going to now do this nonstop. So when we talk about Gen Z and millennials or in Gen Alpha, becoming more narcissistic,

we're not saying they like themselves more. We're saying we've built a world where they are basically externalizing their identity during adolescence. At no point do they have time to stop and think and reflect and determine who they really are. And so you're left with these people chasing trends rather than generations creating anything new. And a lot of people believe that. the Instagram life that they're posting. They believe the bullshit.

And they all kind of think that they all talk of the same sort of hype. A lot of these, there's probably different terms for them. But they all believe if they just fake it, they can make it. I've heard so many millennials say, fake it to you make it, which isn't the not really how you're supposed to fake it to you make it. I don't think that's what that phrase originally intended. When I started companies, I go out and fake that we were a well-working company that We just weren't new.

But that was fine because we eventually became a well-working company. But if you're fronting, you see these, you hear about people will go spend $30,000, $50,000 in the credit cards to buy all the top brands so they can be in display on their, whatever their Instagram feed. And they begin to believe that they are king's shit and their shit doesn't stink. We did a recent poll of a big 5,000 people dating group up here in Utah. And we did a poll of the women, and we asked them to rate themselves on a scale of one to ten and how they are on the dating marketplace. Because we're all at different levels. I can't ask all the Victoria's Secret Girls that I want. They're not going to go out with me.

And they all rated themselves 10. And we discovered there's this thing where they've all narcissistically decided that they're all tens. And they're, and they believe. And this Instagram and this social thing, it's all branding. So they believe that they're their brand. And they're like, Chris, I'm a 10, even though I'm 100 years old and my tits are down on my knees. But I'm a 10 because I have 500 simps in my DMs and liking my phone. And that's not the measure for men and women.

So extrapolate that now to learning. What is one of the biggest impediments to learning is overconfidence? When you believe that you are more skilled, more knowledgeable than you are, what you end up doing is you chase methods of learning, strategies that come easy to you. And in so doing, you never actually grow or develop. One of the best things you can do is then have teachers who say, you know what, I'm not going to cater my class, my school, to what you're good at. I'm going to use what we know is best for learning. And most of the time as a student, you're going to hate that. Just like if you go to the gym and your trainer says, you're going to do this.

And you're like, I don't want to do it. Put me on the stairmaster for two minutes, whatever it is. But this is where social media in this tech in the real world started to bleed into the behaviors and understanding of kids within the classroom, which in turn started to really harm some of the things we were able to do with them. Now, how do you combat that? Is you based just like Pavlov's dog? If I know you're going to salivate when you see a bell, I never ding a bell. If I know you're going to think of externalizing my identity, overconfidence, I'm a 10.

Every time I see a phone or a screen, what do we do in schools? You're not going to see a phone. You're not going to see a screen. I'm never going to give you the chance to activate that habit. And we're going to build a new way of thinking and learning within these four walls. Out there you might be crazy, but in here you're just never going to have the chance to be that crazy. And that's where I think a lot of schools are coming back to how do we reestablish. our place as a social institution and what does it mean to be inside those walls to actually learn now.

Because the big dilemma for millennials was, was, oh, and I was just going to say, that's, you pretty much outlined the Dunning Kruger experiment there, where the people who are the most confident in the narcissistic and that they know everything are usually the biggest fools. And so, yeah. And I imagine that, I guess from what you said, they collect their own bias, what they call that, bias of data information to confirmation. Oh, confirmation bias. Yeah.

So they do the easy tasks. Like sometimes I'll play games that are super easy that I've beaten probably five trillion times across my lifetime, like Red Alert, the strategy game. I love that little game. And I played it probably 10,000 times. And I can beat it 99.9% of the time. Why do I do it? I don't know, just to give myself a boost or whatever.

I want again. And you're just like, you always win stupid. That's the way you're playing this. And that's fine. Look, as an adult, that's fine, man. I told my mom I wrote this book and she's like, don't worry about it. I know everything I need to know. Cool, you're old.

You can just run your show. But if you're 10 years old, if you're 12 years old, that is not the time you want to start resting on your laurels. That is when we need to push you and go back to fake it until you make it. The underlying pattern of fake it to your make it that they just assumed was you're also doing the work. you're not pretending, you're not faking the work, you're faking the success from the work until the success pays off. But somehow that aspect has gotten lost and now people just assume if I take a picture with a bicycle, I will now own that bicycle.

It's like, no, no, no, do the work. So I used to, when I first, gosh, we're old, but when we get out of college, that's when I learned is when everyone was saying, here's get rich quick schemes, here's success schemes. The only success scheme there is is just longevity. Do good work. Keep working. So long as you keep chugging and do good work, success will follow like night follows day.

It's just most people aren't willing to put in that work. They don't want to take the time it takes to learn. One of my favorite stats, I was thinking about this too. So this is that documentary I'm working on is a lot of people think geniuses are somehow special or magical compared to other human beings. On average, it takes geniuses 12 years of pure studying until they produce their first, what we call original work. And that first work is never their best work. That's 12 years that these people, they weren't magic. They were slogging. They understood their field so much better than anyone else at the time that now they could start creating on top of it. And somehow we've made

the argument that with tech and access to the internet, we no longer have to do that slog. But it's, now that's part and parcel. Yeah. And there's so much to develop. I've often said when I saw during the rise of millennials of social media, 2000s, when did we start the show? 2009, so 2008 I was on Twitter. It was like one of the top 1,000 people on Twitter or whatever, before the stars all getting into it.

And we were sitting there dominating it. And I remember seeing these kids for the first time babies being handed iPads. And I thought, their world is going to be way different than ours. And I grew up, my parents, I don't know, they threw us outside and we threw dirt clods against the wall for entertainment. It was really deep learning and chasing rodents around and I don't know, going through a band,

going through construction sites that were being built. And, but we used our imaginations a lot. Yeah. We built, we built forts and huts and we'd wander all over the place. We were latchkey kids. So our parents think of a fuck about it.

We could disappear for a year and our parents would be like, where'd that kid go? Didn't we have a third one? They had to run commercials that told parents at 10 o'clock. It's 10 o'clock. Do you know where your children are? That's how bad it was. And the answer most of the time was, no.

And then the parents would turn to each other go, hey, do we have children? Isn't that great? But if you now line that up, that was the argument was with tech now, kids are going to, instead of throwing dirt clods and going through construction sites, they're going to be learning the alphabet. They're going to be diving into Plato and Dante's Inferno. And what ended up happening? It's just passive consumption of media.

All they're going to do is watch TV. It's mind-bending media. And that's where I would say, look, if you gave me the choice between throwing dirt clods against a wall or watching an iPad, go throw dirt clods. Get out of the house. I'm back to that stage exactly where all of that stuff was how we grew. It wasn't, was it, yeah, was it dangerous? yes, do we get sick? Yes, did we get hurt? Yes. But all of that contributes to your understanding of the world and how you can then navigate it. And so that gives us the inevitable what we call grit, which is the ability. We know how to resources, man. We were like, and if you get wounded, you get like a flesh wound or something, you just stick a couple bannies on that. And then you go spray it down with the hose out front. Now imagine you never got hurt. This is a true stat is, in, medicine, we've been, we measure what's called incidental injury, which is basically just as

it's not cancer, it's not a car wreck, it's just you got hurt. And historically, teenage boys have always peaked that out. They're always getting hurt. Today, it's 40 to 50 year old men are the top on that scale. Yeah. And when I first heard that, I'm like, dude, I'll lie, yeah, basically every I have a shower. Oh, there it goes. But I'm thinking, why are you? I'm thinking, why are you? are we getting hurt so much? And it turns out we're not. We're not getting hurt anymore. It's teenage boys are no longer getting hurt that they've dropped beneath us. And I was talking about that the other day and someone says, so wait a second, does that mean you want my kid to break his arm? And I'm like, no, but yes. You kind of learned some lessons, right? Exactly. That's where

if you've never broken a bone, if you've never gotten, if you've never broken a rule, if you're never gotten yelled at. Yeah. How do you know how to navigate that when that inevitably happens in your life later and it will? So that's why we do this stuff as kids. We're idiots for the express purpose of learning how not to be idiots as adults. But if we never learned it then, we can't expect them to know it now. My parents and people told me don't put your hand on the hot plate, right?

Don't stick your finger in the electricity thing. But you had to do it to learn it. I don't know how you learn any other way. But once you did it, yeah, you're. were like, okay, I want to do that again. And hopefully you walk. That's a great example, though, is we use boundaries. We use structure to form our identity, to bounce our thinking. As soon as a parent says no, that basically gives the kid an aspiration to say yes. So I remember when we're growing up, the percentage of

kids in our generation who drove at 16 was about 93%. Yeah. We all drove. Why? Because when we were 12 and we said, Mom, will you drive me to my friend's house? She'd say, no, you have a bike or you a feat, figured it out. Plus our parents made the life so insufferable. We wanted to leave the house. Exactly. As soon as we get the chance, Mom, can I get a tattoo? Yeah, when you're 18, as soon as I turn 18, of course I'm going to do it. When people say no,

that gives us things to bounce off of. But when we never say no, when we are so protective of our children, when everyone is correct, when you go to schools and if a kid says, I need more time on a test, and we say, okay. And another kid says, you know what, I really

like to listen instead of read. And we say, okay, we're not setting them up for anything other than an inability to aspire to more in their own lives. They will just always assume I'm good. So today, and I don't know the official stat, but as of last year, the percentage of 16-year-olds who drive is in the 40s around the U.S. They don't drive anymore. And everyone's like, because of Uber? No, because they never had to. Do you remember when we went to school? Why would they want to drive when mom and dad are doing? The mom and dad are chauffeurs. I had this conversation with my nephew.

He turned 16. I go, dude, this is so great. I look forward to this all, my whole life when I was your age. And now I could get a car and I could start dating and meet chicks and stuff. And then just going anywhere. Our parents were really smart back then. They made home life miserable. So you wanted to be out at 18.

You wanted to go away. Nowadays, they make it so comfortable. That kid's never leaving the freaking house. 30 years old, playing video games in the basement still. Yeah. And so I told him, I go, I go, dude, there's all these cool things you can do with a car. He's like, why don't I do that? I got my mom and dad on my show first. That was a direct quote. You see it. I don't know if you've been near a school recently, but at the beginning and end of school for us, it was about 10 buses. Kids got on the buses. They're gone. Now there's like a mile of cars going down the street because everyone has to come drop their kids.

I could not imagine any parent when I was growing up being like, you know what, I'm going to drop you off at school. morning. They're going to be like, get out of the house. Did you miss the bus? Figure it out. And here's the thing. They can't drop them two blocks down or one block down. They have to go into the whatever you call it, right to the front fucking door and drop them off like Uber. And if I had kids, even if they talk me into dropping them off at school every now and then, I'd still be like, okay, it's two blocks. I don't see any pet of files. You'll be okay. I have my tracker on. You'll watch you. I'll watch you walk to the thing.

But yeah, that line, I live by a school. It's about three or four blocks away. And I have to make sure I don't go over there in the mornings and the evenings because it is a traffic. It's worse than the 405 in California. Yeah. And they're backed up. And you just think, you're really coddling these kids.

I learned a lot of stuff walking from through four feet of snow back and forth, uphill both ways when I was a kid. You learned a lot of grit. I slept in a hole in the ground with a tight. That was my... My most favorite story is to tell me about the time that I called her from school, and I think I vaguely remember this, I called her from school, and I left my homework home.

And she gave me a lesson in self-accountability. And she says, no, she'd her remember it. You're going to have to pay for it. And I'm not going to come bring your things to school. And while that seems mean, she was teaching me a very important lesson. What you're developing there are called executive functioning skills, and self-regulated learning. skills, which is a subset of them. And the only way we've ever learned that is by screwing up

and getting pegged by it. Now, cut to today where kids, all homework and everything is going to be done online through learning management systems. So it used to be your teacher would say, you have to do this at homework. We'd have to hold that in our mind. We'd have to go home. We'd have to do it. We have to remember it to bring it in the next day, hand it in. That's all development. Now, teacher says you have to do this homework. Kids go home. They get pinged. A reminder, don't forget to do this. As soon as they're done doing it, the machine automatically submits it for them and checks it, spell checks, and make sure there's no mistake. All of these little interstitial things that people think are non-efficient. And maybe they are non-efficient in the work world are essential for development in a school when kids are learning. And those are the things that tech gets rid of in the workplace may be great, but it also gets rid of them in the school, which is not great at all. So are you suggesting that what we need to do is take it out of schools, but is it what you're feeling on a lot of people that's new coming of age, like even my brother struggled with, do I let the kids have a phone? Do I let them on Instagram? On Instagram, they've shown that young children, as soon as they make a profile and they boot up, the pedophiles come running. They just start within minutes. It's crazy. And so how do you balance? And you kind of want your kid to know computers so they can function in this world. What's the balance there?

Is there a balance? The good rule of thumb is people always say, when do we bring in tech? And I'm just thinking for learning now. At your home, how you choose to do smartphones, computer is totally fine. But within schools, when is it time to give a kid a computer? The answer is always when they've already developed the skill. The moment they don't need the tech is the moment you bring in the tech. If you already know how to do arithmetic, now we can use a calculator.

If we bring it in before that, you're never going to learn how to do arithmetic. You'll just learn how to use the machine. Once you know how to format an essay, now we'll bring in the word processor. So that's where we realize the tool is not the skill. The tool is just a way we are something we use to manifest or demonstrate our skill. But it is not the skill itself. So once the skill is set, that's when tech becomes meaningful. So I tend to say, yeah, when it comes to schools, it's not about getting rid of it.

It's certainly about getting rid of smartphones. We don't need smartphones. One-to-one computers where every kid has a laptop, that's never worked. But it's about controlling it again. Go back to a computer lab. Yeah, if it's time to teach typing class, we have computers. It's just very deliberate. You're going to get up, you're going to walk across the school,

you're going to sit down and log in over there. You are now not going to have access in all your other classes. When it's time to learn the oboe, you go to the music room. When it's time to learn basketball, you go to the gym. When it's time to learn computer skills, we go to the computer lab. That's how we kind of grew up when computers came in at the very end. I think close to college is when the Apple 2 showed up or 2y or something. And that's when they kind of came in.

And even then, they still weren't good enough to like where you spend a lot of time on them. Because half the time you dial up for an hour going, listen to the real. You're like, I've spent an hour. Listen to that. Trying to load it. Yeah, I think it's hard. I talk a lot. I mentioned dating earlier.

And in a lot of different stimuli in life. of being able to go outside and do stuff. But in dating, it used to be that you would maybe meet someone in your local church dance. And you met them in person, so you know what they were like. And you had connection. You could feel that thing where people connect with each other and they're attracted, and then you could try and turn into a family.

Now you've got people that shop online like Amazon. They don't connect. It's a two-d-screen. They're mostly just looking at treating people like a product, where you're just buying a basket off of Amazon. And so they don't ever meet, they don't ever connect. And you or I, we came from this analog world where we can transverse the digital

because we were mature in our brains when we finally got to this digital stuff, very mature. And so we have the two parodies in our brain where we can go, oh, analytic life is like this, and digital life is like this, and I kind of miss things from both of them. And these poor kids that grow up now, Now, that's all they know is that phone in their hand.

It's depressing when you realize, like, if that was a good thing, then that would have been a good thing. But all the data shows that they are less happy, less healthy, less physically developed, less mentally developed, less cognitively developed. All the stuff says that that's just not good. So people always call me, you're nostalgic for a time of the past. if let's say everyone today was dying of a new disease and 10 years ago we weren't, would you call me nostalgic for saying, why don't we go back 10 years to before we were all dying? No, no one would call that nostalgic. They'd say that's probably a good move.

It's the same thing here. I'm not being nostalgic. I loved my life, my childhood. I thought it was great. But I have the data. Yeah, the data doesn't want. It was literally better than what we are doing right now with kids. Maybe we do need to take a page out of that book again.

And you're at the point, you've hit the nail on the head because you're at the point where that data is now available. These kids have gone through a generation and been raised through the systems and you can see what's coming out the other side. And they do seem to struggle in the workplace. I think that's a real common thing. And I'm sorry, Gen Z, you guys get beat up a lot, but I don't know, maybe you deserve it. But maybe your parents deserve it for being helicopter parents. Their parents on top of it, they don't need. They hold their kids up everywhere they go so they don't skin their knee.

Skinny, your best way to learn stuff. This is when I say, man, it's not their fault. Imagine we gave all our kids cigarettes and then we got mad because they started coughing. That's basically what's happened here. They never asked for these screens to be shoved in their face, but we just kept doing it thinking something better would come out. And now we're mad at them for just being exactly who we raised, basically. A lot of parents just kind of became absentee parents and use that as a as a, as a send him, give them the iPad, let them play of that. let him entertain themselves so they leave me alone while I'm on my iPad.

It's like a bunch of idiots running around. When we were kids, just like you were saying, our parents used to kick us out of the house, right? It's 8 a.m. get out. I don't want to see you till dinner. And everyone says, oh, that's bad parenting. Well, cut to today. The kids are in the house all day with the parents, but they're not interacting with the parents. It's not good parenting now. It's still absentee parenting.

It's just they're stifling them by shoving them in front of a screen and then pretending they don't exist. If kids were staying home and 18 hours a day, they were interacting with their parents, building puzzles or doing, that might be different, but that just is not what's actually happening out there. My parents may as talk to each other over dinner. You don't know what hell that was. Yeah, how dare they. It was abuse. That is. But no, we never go home for that reason.

We had a Monday night thing. I think it was like a Mormon thing. We'd have a Monday night. We'd play games or something together. And family time, you had to deal with that. And looking back, it really wasn't that. bad. It was a really good idea. We were just insufferable boys. So what could you do? You're all insufferable back then. It was the 70s. What are you going to do? Everyone was

sufferable. Inufferable. We had lakes were on fire and pollution. It was everywhere and tires. I remember that. Yeah. It was a great time. But no, it's, it's interesting to me. When I started seeing the iPad really come out and it really kicked in with the iPad, I would go out to restaurants and I would see whole families, four person families, two kids, two parents, and they would be all sitting there at the dining table in some restaurant and they're all just phone zombies with the blue screen zombies going like this. None of them were talking to each other, none of them were interacting each other. And I'm like, this is a real fucked up shit's coming down the line.

Yeah. How do we learn this stuff? So my daughter now is three and a half. and it happens. You take her to a restaurant. Sometimes she acts up. And I know if I shove a screen in front of her face, she'll shut up. It'll calm her down.

But how do you learn to act in a restaurant? You get kicked out a ton of times. Yeah. Dad picks you up, takes you outside. Sorry, we're not going to eat. Are you done? Yeah. We're going home then.

That is very hard to do as a parent when you know you have this salve that says, I can just say to you're with my wife, you watch this. But that is so essential. for us to do. We don't come into the world knowing how to line up for the bathroom. We have to be taught these things. And we have to fail at these things in order to do them well as adults. And that's where, yeah, exactly, the dinner table at a restaurant is the best example of just you will now have a teenager who doesn't know how to act at a restaurant unless they have a phone because they've never gotten any practice in that context. It's like a pacifier. It really is. It just, it's a drug. It just calms them right down. That's what I do on my phone. You've actually brought up one of my serious pet peeves up here in Utah. I don't know why it's only in Utah.

Maybe it's because they have more kids per capita up here than the rest of the nation. They really overbreed. And I can't go to just about any restaurant. I'm single. I don't have kids. And kids are fine. It's just I want to be able to eat in silence and enjoy my peace. And even in fairly expensive restaurants of fine dining, these people are bringing their kids here.

I don't know what is about Utah. And they will scoom. scream yell. They will disrupt the whole freaking restaurant to where we're all about ready to get up in arms and start throwing fists. And they will not take those kids out to the car. I spent a lot of time in the car with my dad or mom. Or in the parking lot. Yeah. They would take us out. They'd be like, if you backed up, I will walk you out to the car. And they would do that. They put me in the car and have to sit there. And you can't be in the thing with everybody else. And you'd be like, I'll be better, mom. Right? And then you do that, I don't know, five, ten, I don't have to ask my mom how much. It was probably like five, ten, fifteen, twenty. I don't know. It was a lot. I spent a lot of time getting kicked out of restaurants and my brother too. But you're right. You learn these things. And sometimes it's the only way to learn. It's kind of stove. I think it's it's too. As a parent, there's a really good book called Bad Therapy by Abigail Schreier. And she talks about this concept where historically, as parents, we would turn to our parents or other parents to figure out how to raise kids. It's not easy.

So we'd be like, when I acted up, what'd you do with me? Or if we didn't like our own parents, we'd call someone else and be like, what are you doing with your kids? At some point in the early 2000s, we switched that to psychologists. Our generation was so angry at our parents and how they raised us that we swore we would never be like them. So we started to ask psychologists. what is the right way to raise a kid.

And all the parent help books are now written by psychologists. Now, you've got to remember that a psychologist, by definition, will find a problem. That's why they exist. If there's not a medical condition, they don't have a job. So they've over-medicalized childhood. They've basically said anytime a kid does anything, it's actually a mental problem. And they've scared us so much away from parenting because we don't want to crack down and say no because that might harm their feelings and we don't want to put rules in

place because that might stunt their growth when in truth it's like exactly what you're saying is that becomes now i have a kid who's screaming and because i don't want to be seen as the heavy i'd rather be my kid's friends we will sit here but the kid doesn't really learn much from that either will they just learn that probably not as it just affirms the bad behavior, right? And so that's, it's, there's got to be this middle ground where it's, it's not as bad as it was 50 years ago when we were smacking each other around. But it's not like now where basically kids are many adults and we do not get in their way. They are kids and they need us to raise them and not be their friends. So where is that middle ground where the pendulum

can sit back in the middle and we can say, yeah, you know what? Sometimes I'm your friend, but most of the time I'm here to raise you. And that means I'm going to have to do some hard things with you. I think they need to bring back village beating. And I'm serious about this. Not an abusive. It was abusive. It felt abusive at the time. But in my neighborhood, I don't know about yours, but, you know, that whole line from Hillary Clinton, it takes a village or as a child, if I did some muck up in my neighbor's place or yard, I don't know, I did something that damaged, maybe something of theirs or I behaved poorly, not only would that dad beat me, But then he would walk be on the perp walk back to my house, right, by the caller,

and he introduced me to my mom, tell him what I've been up to, and then my mom would be, and then she'd say, wait to your dad comes home. And that was worse than any beating was the waiting, because it was just dread, right? And then dad would come home and beat you. And then my parents were one of the things I appreciated them doing, it was really hard and hurtful at the time, but I think I understood, that it was going to be helpful in the long run is if I pulled some shit, they would make me get on the phone if I couldn't apologize directly because they'd take me

down the road to the houses. But I think one time I did some sort of thing in school to a teacher. I said, sent some crap or smart mouth or something. And they made me call her and apologize. And I was saying they're falling. That's so good. But I learned. I learned.

That is, there are so many stories about kids acting up now in schools. teachers and the teacher either gets in trouble or gets removed from the situation. I don't know. I don't know what the reason for that is. We are very much afraid to put our flag in the sand and say, you know what? I'm going to be a parent. I'm going to be an adult. I'm going to set rules.

And if you break those rules, there are going to be consequences. And maybe it's just we are afraid of stunting their growth. But I think in so doing, by trying to avoid stunting their growth, we're probably stunting it worse than if we were just being adults. I remember the first time, too. I was in a relationship where I moved in with a single mother gal and she had two kids and she had an 11 or 12 year old son. And I remember I grounded him from the TV and the Xbox in the front living room that I bought

and brought to the house and was there in the living room. And so I grounded him, told him he had to stay in his room for the rest of the night. And then I realized he had a TV and Xbox in there. I didn't have that as kids. When you were banned from the living room, you didn't have shit. You were just looking at your walls and your bed. You had books. And I'm like, I'm like, I just, I just grounded the kid to the best thing he can have.

That wasn't grounding. You just, you did him a favor. He's like, I didn't want to hang out in here anyway. I don't want to hang out with those idiots anyway. As we round out, anything more that I should have asked you about the books, so we can get that teased out some more. Oh, no, I'm just, if you're interested in learning how humans learn and why tech isn't. And so you might be a parent that wants to start pushing back to a,

tech in your schools, you think your kids are having too much tech. That book goes into all the data you need to prove that, yeah, this isn't good, all the mechanisms you need to say, here's why it's not good. And then it has a bunch of for parents, for teachers, and for administrators to say, if you want to start divesting from tech or pushing back, here are some kind of things that can help you do that. Are there any schools out there that are maybe adopting this sort of? Oh, so when I published this book originally in December, I did it because three states

were going to put bills on the Utah was one of them, put bills on the docket about ed tech. And so I just wanted to make sure they had all the information they needed. I think at last count, I think 31 states now have it. It's been moving fast. And there are schools popping up everywhere where because the parents started to push back, the school said, yeah, L-A-USD just banned all screens from kids. Yeah, I'm in first and second grade.

They're taking eye ready, one of their big out of the room. So I lived in Australia for 12 years. So Australia is another place where Victoria just reduced all tech in secondary years to 90 minutes a day, no tech primary. It's happening. They're limiting how much they're consuming total a day then. Yes. And they're pulling it way back, which is a great first step. But that's where I think, yeah, as parents, right now more than ever, your voice will be heard in this field.

So if you need talking points, if you need proof, that's why I wrote this book to just help you say, here's what you're going to go do do you get into the dopamine addiction of some of these kids because some these kids you take their phone away from and they will lose their shit they'll completely come apart yeah so there's a chapter specifically on smartphones which talks about that mechanism but it is that it's the biological mechanisms by which we are addicted to our phones and it's not just kids it's adults me it's just nobody takes away our phone it's the exact same biological mechanism by which we get addicted to drinking, to smoking, to cocaine. There's no difference to it.

So when we say that kids and people are addicted to their phones, yeah, the mechanism is very real. And it's going to take a second. When you strip that tech back, you're going to have a hell of a couple of days, if not a couple of weeks before that kid really starts to calm down. But when you do, one of my favorite stats, I always say, I've worked with 1,000 schools plus around the world. I know a ton of schools who have put smartphone policies in place where kids, they can use it between classes and at recess, but we can't use it during class. A lot of those schools just renege because they didn't see any impact, nothing changed. They're like, who cares? I haven't seen a single school.

I don't know of a single school in the world that has banned smartphones. If we see it, it's ours, it's not allowed on campus. And ever gone back to it. There's not a school I have ever seen that said once phones were gone. And they were like, you know what, school was better when we had phones. Let's bring those back. No, as soon as they're gone, everyone, including the kids, say this is better. This is nicer.

And it's going to be the same thing with the broader tech, the laptops, the day. It's going to be the same with that too. You just gave me epiphany. I realized that school is a community. When you're sitting in a classroom of 30, I think nowadays they have 5,000 kids in a class or something. But when you're sitting in for my school, we'd sit in there for 30. With 30 kids for 45 minutes, an hour and a half, I think we had that block thing for an hour and a half. And you look around the room, you're learning things, you're watching people.

When Jamie asked a question, you're like, what is Jamie? What's going on? And do I need to know that too? And you're interacting with things. And it's a community of people. But one of the problems is a phone is a real isolation device, even in the midst of everyone. I was out at a singles event the other day. And a lot of people on the phones.

And you're like, why are you going to meet someone new? if you don't look up. Can't connect that way. There's a researcher out of New Zealand. He's passed, but his name was Graham Nuttall. And he just did a lot of research in schools, and he estimated 60% of everything kids learn do not come from the teacher. It comes from their interaction exactly, as you said,

in the classroom, listening to other kids, having discussions at the playground. You give every kid a laptop, and you say you now have personalized learning. You will get exactly what you need when you need it. you lose any sense of community, any sense of coherence amongst all your students. And now you basically just have 100 kids in a room, all thinking, acting, behaving in completely different ways.

And you forgot most of what we were doing. Exactly. Like people say, I got math class and I got some kids who are up here, some kids who are down here, what do I do? You teach. They will learn from each other. They will start to poke exactly. Someone will ask a question that will teach this kid something.

You don't try and preempt it and change everything. you just keep teaching the way you always teach. Yeah. My biggest problem in school was my math teacher was really hot, and I was really in puberty. And those jeans that she would wear, they were really tight. I was going to go with the temperature. Maybe there just was no air on in Utah at the time.

No, I didn't learn anything in math. Let's put it that way. But I was very awake and wide awake during the whole time. But that was a different community. I don't know what that was. But I never really thought about that before a classroom as a community. Social endeavor. Because you watch people through the room.

The speaker's doing, you're watching. What's Bobby doing over there? He's picking his nose. Johnny's passing me a note. I've got to give it to. And you're kind of watching. And I would watch people and learn. I'm a big people watcher.

And so you watch people. Why does Johnny pick his nose and that he did that sort of stuff? And you're like, and you're thinking, hey, Margaret's got some cute bangs there going on. I think all of that, all of that matters. And that's the kind of stuff, that interstitial stuff, that social stuff, that just gets stripped away when as soon as the bell rings, everyone picks up their phone. Or as soon as class starts, everyone opens their laptop. It's like, we're losing the point. We ran on for quite some time, but the long shows are the good ones.

That's why I were still chatting. Thank you much for come on the show and putting out the book, Jared. Now I'm going to use this book as a weapon to blame Gen Z for everything. That's why I wrote it. there it is. Chris, let us Gen X off the hook. We can be like,

nope, it was you guys in your stupid helicopter millennial parents. Gen X is the best. Everyone else stinks. I'm fine. That's pretty true.

We learned how to live. We can live on anything. Do you know what's in those hoses? Seriously. Don't even lay in it. As in the hoses that you use to water your lawn? Yeah.

Like now they use, now they use, what do they call? it, it's sewer water or something. It's regurgitated water, but they tell you not to drink it. So they have non-potable water coming out of hoses now. Yeah, in Utah,

they have, they have the secondary water, gray water. Is that what they call it? Gray water? Yeah. And so they're, and so you don't want to drink it. They're like, don't drink the water. And you're like, I used to live on that crap. Oh, that's how you used to drink out of the hose. Any day, it was hot. You go out, and it always tasted like plastic. It had a very specific

tang to it. But now you can't even do that. Yeah. And you'd walk up to anybody's house. It was just legal, I guess, somehow. I don't know if there was laws, but you can walk up to, I went down to my old street a month or two back. And I was like, yeah, I used to drink out of that hose and that hose and that hose. Every 10 feet, I was hitting the hose. And I was BMXing, so I was always racing and do all BMX shit. And, but yeah, people just, no one ever say anything about, nowadays, if you go up to somebody's hose, you're going to get a shot if you want. You do not step on my property. You don't drink out of their hose because that's

Jenaxe bring the hoses back. We need it. Yeah. Oh, that's what I used to spray them off my lawn. Anyway, thank you, Jared, for coming online. Give us your dot coms too, so people are going to find you on the internet. Oh, I don't even know. Oh, LMEglobal.net. It stands for learning made easy. That's where everything I write, everything I do will somehow end up there. So LMEb global. com. Thank you, Jared, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Thanks for our audience for tuning in. Be sure to interrupt his book where refined books are sold. The Digital Delusion. how classroom technology harms our kids learning and how to help them thrive again.

Or just give Gen Z a lobotomy. That might be worked for right now. So I don't know. We're just keeping our fingers crossed for Gen A. Please, guys, Alpha A, you've got to save us, man. Seriously. We can't fluff again. We can't miss.

We can't strike. It's all on your shoulders. Yeah, it's all on you. We had the millennials. We had the Gen Zers. And it's up to you to save it. So, by the way, it's a 50 trillion government debt. Have fun with that.

Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in. Go to Goody's.com and all the places that the Chris Wash Show is at. Tell your friends to subscribe or else you'll unfriend them. No, no, do that. It's not nice. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time.

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