Our Digital Delusions - A Conversation with Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

When you introduce a new technology into a context, it's ecological. Everything changes. I always say it's like a garden. If you bring a new beetle and put it in your garden, you don't have the same garden plus a new beetle. You have a whole new ecosystem. Everything is going to change. That's what tools do.

Hi everyone, and happy new year. Welcome back to the first episode of 2026. My name is Tim Logan, and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. In the current context of ubiquitous digital technology and runaway generative AI, you'd think that a book calling out our collective delusions about digital tools in relation to learning wouldn't make much of a splash. But Jared Koenig-Horvath's latest book, The Digital Delusion: How 'Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids' Learning and How to Help Them Thrive Again' is currently number 1 on the Amazon bestseller list in educational psychology and has been receiving a lot of acclaim, including from the actor and educational activist Hugh Grant and author of 'The Anxious Generation,' Professor Jonathan Haidt. Jared is an old friend of the podcast, so I was really happy to invite him back on for a conversation about our shared concerns about the impacts that digital technology is having on our young people, the dubious motivations of big tech companies, and the strange and growing alliance that is developing between people of all educational persuasions about this issue. Jared is a neuroscientist, educator, and bestselling author who specializes in human learning and brain development and is the creator of The Learning Blueprint, an international award-winning program helping educators and students better understand how learning works. You can find links to all of Jared's previous books and his Learning Blueprint website in the show notes.

So first thing is, it's just really good to see you again. It's good to have you back. It's been a while. And, um, it was—

when was our last one?

It was a good couple of years ago now. So yeah, time has flown. Kids have grown.

I can always tell by the background. Now I'm in this shack. Yeah, it's— we move every couple months to new Airbnbs, so I'm guessing, I think that was probably almost a year and a half, 2 years ago then.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. No, it's great and really good to see the book and have a sneak preview of the book coming out. And, um, I had this really weird feeling as I was reading it. I was like, I couldn't quite work out what it was. And then I was like, oh yeah, God, I'm agreeing with almost everything he's saying. And this is like a really weird feeling for me.

Oh no. I thought I was, I'm, there's supposed to be disagreement and anger and fight.

Exactly.

But that's good. Hey man, if we're saying things in the right way than hope. Because you're right, there's, there's still a big debate going on with traditional education and, and progressive education and memory versus this. So there are still a lot of big fights going on. So we're probably pretty primed to be like, what side am I on right now?

Exactly.

But that's what I think is so interesting about this, and I'd love to get into it, that, that this issue really is like a new space that I think is going to be a strange You might find a bit of kind of messy coherence of people who actually find themselves really agreeing with you, but from radically different, almost ideological positions, I would say. I think, because, well, let's get into it, but it feels like this issue is just so resonant with so many people that it's gonna speak to people on all sides of the aisle, let's say, you know?

And it'll be interesting to see why it resonates with them. And you're right, it might be different, but if it's that one thing we can all gather around and have a, conversation about, then maybe that's the best thing that we can hope for.

Exactly. So let's— yeah, well, let's go there, because I think even in the early parts of the book there were some bits where I was like, yeah, okay, I can feel why people might come differently to this. But perhaps you could just lay out, like, right at the beginning of the book, even just in the prologue, you lay out really powerfully the predicament we are in. And I think we're all— I mean, as we've just been talking about off air, like, we're all kind of trapped in this predicament. It's a very collective predicament, but you, you say, we will allow technology to hollow out the human practices that education has always rested upon without ever collectively considering what is lost in this exchange. Just great, great line. But yeah, maybe you could just lay out some of what is this predicament that we find ourselves in.

I go back, and the intro starts with the Luddites, which is— now if you're a Luddite, that means you hate technology. But now if you go back, what you realize is the Luddites were a group of people who realized that no technology is neutral. When you introduce a new technology into a context, it's ecological. Everything changes. I always say it's like a garden. If you bring a new beetle and put it in your garden, you don't have the same garden plus a new beetle. You have a whole new ecosystem. Everything is going to change. That's what tools do. Along comes digital technology, and we just started shoving it into schools for no reason other than it existed, and it seemed cool, and the promise was there. Hey, this is going to make learning faster, easier, better. But in so doing, it has completely shifted the ecological world we're living in when it comes to K through 12 education. What has always been a general education is now becoming a tools-based education. What has always been a human endeavor is now becoming a work-based endeavor. And I think I'm trying not to say whether or not it's good or bad, but it's worth stopping and saying, wait a second, we need to reckon with how the entire world has shifted with these tools. And now once we start to say, what are the questions, start saying, what is this doing to us, to what we're trying to do in education? We can also say, what is it harming in education? Is it helping? Like, what do we get from it? What are the pros and cons? And the more you dig into it, you just realize there's not a whole heck of a lot of pros out there. What we were doing with education, this is gonna sound corny, but late '90s into the early noughts, golden age of education in the West. Whatever the heck we were doing there, we didn't know it, but my gosh, we were knocking it out of the park. And then right around 2002 was when tech really started to infiltrate. That's when everything flipped, and that's our marker to start saying, whoa, what changed here?

Interesting. And just to clarify, what is it that you're resting that statement on in terms of golden age? Like what, academic achievement results?

If you look at academic achievement results, any what we'll call cognitive measure, cognitive measures of memory, of attention span, of creativity, of critical abilities, any cognitive measure we've had peaked right around, even IQ, general IQ across the West, as much as you wanna take IQ as anything, all peaked right around the late '90s. And that was when, I guess, school was just nailing it.

Interesting. And yeah, I mean, it's so much, isn't there? Because just like your garden is ecological, so is school nested in an ecology as well. And so it's actually really, it's quite difficult in a way to isolate school from the ecology. But I mean, no, definitely take your point on the measures. And I mean, Then what you lay out is the 5 myths that, because as you say, we kind of just accepted a lot of these neutral tools that, as you say, we're gonna just, we're gonna help the process. So maybe just lay out all or some of what are those kind of core myths that really we just kind of seem to swallow whole, but without a lot of critical—

If you had to boil down where it goes, the myths, and this is where you'd see there is no neutral tool. Like, people who say it's just a computer, how you use it matters, you forget, no, every tool comes embedded with a worldview. A hammer dictates to you what a world needs to look like, what's important, what's not, pay attention to this, don't pay attention to this. So there is no such thing as a neutral tool. So I think when we brought out tech, we let the people who invented the tech start to tell us the story of education. And that's— I— it's gonna sound crazy, I blame TED Talks, man. Most people got their news about education from TED Talks, and all you go through any TED Talk, all you will hear here is that education is broken, and that it is in dire need of a revolution. And the joke is, when that argument started, back in 2004, we were right at the end of a peak of education. By what measure could education possibly have been broken? I mean, all gaps were closing, more access to it, more kids were succeeding through it, outcomes going into university acceptance were out through the roof. There was no real problem with education, but it's real hard to sell a tool if you don't have a problem. So they had to invent these kind of problems. And so from that offshoot of education is broken, they had all these extra ideologies tacked on, like the learner knows best when it comes to learning, let the learner drive the show, they'll be fine, give learner access to information and that's enough for them to drive it themselves. That's where curiosity and creativity and stuff come from. And so I think if you— the big theme of edtech is school is broken, learners know best, all you need is access to information and learners will do the rest. And that's where you just start to see none of that is accurate. And, and I don't think we would accept that argument anywhere else. When it comes to driving a car, we don't think the 16-year-old knows best, just throw them in there, they're going to do fine. When it comes to swimming, we don't think, yeah, my 2-year-old kid knows best, just throw them in the water, they'll figure it out. We realize in life our job is to raise adults. We don't have adults, we have kids that we need to raise into adulthood, and we have structures through which to help to make that process easier. And that's where I think edtech had to break those structures down and pretend that they were all broken in order to be a viable tool. And it worked. People took it hook, line, sinker.

Yeah, interesting. I mean, so the— yeah, I mean, the T in TED is technology, right? But the other thing that I've always found very interesting is even the phrase 21st century skills was invented by a coalition of— I forget what they're called now, but they're a coalition of tech companies, Microsoft and Cisco and all of the, you know, the big ones in the early 2000s. So I do agree there was definitely something happening around that time. But clearly this whole podcast is predicated on some version of Myth 1, right? That education is broken, right? And I do genuinely believe that that is the case. But what's interesting is that there's a long history to the debate about a kind of, let's say, to coin a phrase, industrial education system, right? And resistance to an industrial education system of which perhaps the Luddites were Clearly they weren't railing against the industrial education system, but they were railing against industrialization of their métier, right? Of their world just being disrupted by these looms and this new technology was coming into their life worlds. And so there's something important there that I guess I would just challenge on that myth is that the education is broken myth didn't start in the early 2000s. It's been around a long time. But where I do fully agree is that the tech companies weaponized that myth to sell a whole bunch of product.

Yeah, and they did it successfully. And if you look at the way they, they say it's broken, is they're not having any big ideological arguments. They're not coming at us saying we need to build a holistic kid versus an employee versus the Prussian model versus this. And we can go into that. They never cared about any of that. They don't even know any of that. That's the joke, is the depth of knowledge of education, educational history, pedagogy, students is zero in edtech. They're all engineers. They don't care. They think about what I did in school, and here's a cool tool, go for it. So their big argument was basically that kids aren't job ready, is that we're not pumping out kids who— they are not learning right, and they're not ready to go enter the market. But the joke is, if you rewind the clock and actually track all of that data, kids started to become less happy, less healthy, less knowledgeable, and less job ready once tech entered the equation. So in a very real sense, the means by which they're saying education is broken, the cause is technology. Yeah. If, if we want to say it's broken in that way, then you broke it. It wasn't broken until you came in and started shoving all this stuff at us, which is very strange. But I guess that's— it's like I said, it's hard to sell a cure if you don't have a disease, right?

For sure.

For sure. But, but also simultaneously that tech was radically shifting work, the world of work as well. And so there was, there's an ecological thing happening there as well, right?

That's where a lot of people make a big mistake is that's in, I think rightly so in some cases, but let's pretend the function of a K through 12 education is to get kids jobs. I'm happy to argue against that, but let's just for sake of conversation say our kids are coming out less job ready. The assumption was, as the workforce changed, school needed to adapt with it. But the joke is, the workforce had always been changing, school hadn't, yet kids were still coming out ready to adapt. Why? When it comes to K-12 general education, the operative word had always been "general." We were never here to teach you how to do a thing, we were here to teach you how to think through systems. We're not learning history because you need to be a historian, We're learning history to teach you how to think through patterns of history. We're not learning how to write because everyone's going to be an author. We're teaching you how to think through patterns. That breadth is what allows you to adapt to whatever the world throws at you next, which is why kids coming out in the '90s were doing— here's, here's a stat that most people don't know. Millennials, and I come, I think I'm right on the cusp of millennial. I don't know how it works, but I, I I'm like right at the end of the millennial generation. We didn't get technology until we were in our teens, basically, and most of us didn't get it till we were in our 20s. Gen Z was raised with computers. Millennials have better digital literacy than Gen Z and are more work-ready and able to adapt easier at work. Why? Everyone's like, how could this be? There's all these computers at work. Because kids raised on computers were never taught how to think. They were taught how to use a tool, and when the tool changes— here's a new version of that tool— they can't move easily with it. It's the people who were never trained on the tool, who were trained how to think and learn, who now whenever the world changes, we're like, yeah, I know how to adapt. That's what I was taught in a general education. So believe it or not, Gen X is only 2 percentile points behind Gen Z. So kids who were raised with tech, Gen Z, are doing about the same as my dad is doing when it comes to digital literacy. And people think the answer is they need more literacy, they need more tech in schools. The answer is no. My dad had none of it. How can he be literate? Because we taught him how to be literate in things. So that was where, when we forgot that education is here to serve as a foundational ground upon which you can now adapt the rest of the world. And we started to think, no, education needs to prep you for the world as it is today. That's when we started making big mistakes.

It's again, there's like a strange unity there because like, I think there's part of what is in the resistance to the industrial so-called education system is that obsession with human capital development and ready work readiness and straight, you know, the pipeline, right? And actually there are a lot of other very, very deeply important human purposes for which this space of exploration of education, as you say, general competence development, however you want to articulate it, is so critical to providing some kind of a basis on which, and I do, I mean, your swimming analogy resonates in the sense of it feels like, it feels a bit like our kids are drowning right now. Yeah. Actually, like, swimming in this thing that they can't see the edges of. I mean, I've got, as I was just saying, I've got a 12-year-old, a 14-year-old, and a 16-year-old, and they are in it, right? And it's so difficult to navigate as a parent and as an educator, and it's, yeah, it's tough.

I think there's two things to be said for that. There's one is that overlap. I think you're right, is isn't it ironic that the best training for work is holistic general education. So all the people who say school should be about more than work, and all the people who say school should be only about getting kids jobs— cool, the answer to both of those is exactly the same. So I could see that's where you start to recognize, wait a second, both ideologies are speaking to the same outcome, which is go back to a general ed. Not only will you build a holistic human being, you'll also build a far more work-ready human being. So I'm going to tick both of those boxes. Yeah, but I think the next step is going to that kind of swimming analogy. And I'm— I hate to jump around the book, but there's a big chapter that I assume most people will skip, Chapter 7, which is basically the worldview of AI. That's the most left-field one. But I think the, the big argument to recognize there is, as we have progressed through history, one of our biggest bugbears has always been information. When we invent a tool that expands access to information, The next step is you need a way to organize and control that information to help people weed through it. So the real big first move was the printing press. That was the first big explosion of information. And people forget, lack of information is bad. If I don't know anything, yeah, that's bad. But if I have too much information, that's just as bad, because now I don't know what's valid, what's accurate, what's not. So then you come up with social institutions to help you weed through all that information. To help you determine what's relevant, what's irrelevant, how can we think. That is what school did. It's no mistake that the very first standard curricula came out about 50 years after the printing press. It's 'cause the printing press blew up all this information and people said, we now need systems to help people think through this information. And that worked for about a couple hundred years. Along comes the internet and more importantly, AI. Now our kids are in another informational boom. They just, they're surrounded by way too much stuff, which is when we need structure more. When information explodes is when you need to lean even heavier on standard curricula, standard structure, to say, here's what's important, here's what's not, here's what we do, here's what we don't do. Unfortunately, tech companies come and say, with all this information, we need less structure. School doesn't even need to exist anymore. And you start to see, as information explodes, all these organizational structures start to dismantle. Politics— having different party systems was a way of organizing information. A nuclear family was a way of organizing information. School, standard school, the way governments kind of work. As information through the internet and AI exploded, all of these systems are straining and starting to crumble. And so the argument they're making, the tech companies are making, are let them burn, we'll invent new structures. My argument is no, now is when we need structures more than ever, and I don't believe the next structure is going to be able to contain all the information you're popping out. So I would much rather stick with the structures we've got, contain the information as it stands now, rather than let Mark Zuckerberg determine what the next best structure is.

Again, the strange feeling— I'm with you, 100% with you. Mark is not getting in, he cannot get his hands on that. But, and I'm sorry to do this, to go down, it's potentially a rabbit hole, but it's something I care deeply about, that you've used that word information a lot in that discussion, and there's almost an assumption that, that it is an uncontested idea, the information itself, right? And yeah, yeah, and, and I don't want to lose people, but the reason I say that is because I've been really interested in, in the 1940s, there were these things called the Macy Conferences, and they were talking a lot about information at that point. And it was like the origins of AI. It was the really beginning of AI conversations. And Claude Shannon and information theory, and this idea that information is just something you can move from one place to another in an unchanged way. You can decontextualize it, move it, and then put it somewhere else unchanged. This is probably like massively simplistic, but it's become widespread partly because it was useful, because it allowed for a control, it allowed for digitization actually of moving stuff from here to there in ones and zeros. Great. I can like, now we can move stuff, we can move stuff fast, we can generate AI, you know, 80 years down the road. But in those rooms, there were people saying, hold on a minute, maybe information is much more about the meaning of the context in which that Understanding that sense-making is happening. And so you can, you decontextualize information and imagine it's the same thing if I, you know, it's the same as your beetle in the garden again, right? It's an— the information is in an ecology, and I'm going to understand what you say in a certain way because I'm receiving it in my own ecology of all of my prior experiences, my biases, my schemas, my blah blah blah. And the reason I say all of that is because I think part of what is happening now and part of what your book really brings out is even the way we think about information in a digital way has become completely ubiquitous and it's missing this rich soil of like meaning and context and relationship and all of this stuff. And it's like, ah, that's the thing that I'm feeling in your book when you write about this, that's kind of under, underneath it all. It's like, that's what we're missing. And how do we get back to that? And obviously we have to deal with the actual sort sociological issues of phones, etc., etc. But there is— I think there is an underlying deeper layer of, as I say, even just ideas of what information is. Yeah.

So if you had to, if you had to sum that up in one word, and I would say this is kind of the biggest problem with tech writ large, and I think you're right, it bleeds throughout the book completely, it's reification. Reification is the process of taking an ethereal and turning it into a noun. Taking a concept and making it a fact. Reification happens when science— scientists have to define something in order to measure it. So think about something like happiness. Happiness isn't a thing, man. You can't go dig that up in a garden. You can't give me a sack of happiness. But positive psychologists have to measure happiness to tell us how happy we are or not. So what they do is they make a set of questions and they say happiness This is the answer to this set of questions. Now we can actually compare it and measure it. So reification, it's been a— it's, it's been the bugbear of psychology forever. It's been the bugbear of most of science forever, is when we reify non-reifiable things, stuff happens. But digital technology, by definition, requires everything to be reified into exactly zeros, right? And, and we— and this is where the Luddites would say, you Don't accept a tool unless you first reckoned with its ultimate costs. The ultimate cost here is we start to think of the world as reified information. And I think we make a good kind of example of that, just to help listeners kind of follow along, is if you think about the brain. Right around the turn of the 18th century— yeah, early to mid-18th century— we started to use the metaphor of hydraulics for the brain. The brain, the nervous system, worked on a set of hydraulics. Nobody took it seriously. We knew the brain wasn't hydraulics. We were just using it as a metaphor because it was helpful for us to think about it and move on. Mid-20th century, we started to talk about the brain as a computer because that was the new hot tool, and we started thinking about it as digital. Yeah, cool, and the brain works like a machine. Cool. What happens with reification is today we no longer think of the brain like a machine. We think the brain is a machine. People talk about the brain as a computer. The brain isn't a computer. People talk about— Nobel Prize winners talk about how many bits of information the brain can process. There is no bits of information in the brain. It was a metaphor. But when the technology takes hold, when the reification takes hold, we forget that we were using metaphorical language and we start to think only in that reification. And now human beings are machines. We're not like machines but special. We are machines, and we are shitty machines compared to computers. That's why we need AI to run schools. That's why we don't need teachers anymore. We need them The objective machine, that's the biggest danger with reification, and it comes with, with tech.

I love that. I love the way you said that. And exactly that, because then the thing that I feel in my core is all of that is missing life. Let's, let's just use it, use it as a, as a placeholder word for all of that analog stuff, the relationship, all of the stuff I was talking about. And that, I think, is the thing that there is a widespread feeling that is emerging amongst parents and educators and young people themselves that they're missing those, they're missing that thing when they're lost in the digital, when you've been doomscrolling for way too many hours. And, you know, there's a feeling that comes with that. It's like, that's not real, that thing I was just in, but it kind of felt real, but it's not the nuance of actual life.

Yeah, which is interesting. If you go back to the introduction of the book, and this is one of the big things I, I had to hit home, but I had to do it right, was at the end of the day, the book is not about technology, it's about values. All of this boils back down to what do we value? What kind of future? What kind of world do we value? And I think digital technology in schools is a good window to start to recognize we're changing our values by adopting the tools, but are we doing it in a way that people want? Are people even enjoying? What is this? A happier world? Is this a deeper world? Is this a more spiritual, meaningful world? And the argument I think you're finding is even amongst kids is exactly like you said, no, something is missing.

Yeah.

And we're not going to find it by continuing to believe that information is ones and zeros, that there are answers to every question out there, that the best answer is found in human language. And large language models are the one to put that together. And you, you can kind of see where it came from, right? Let's say I'm a district of schools and I need funding, and at some level, as a district as a whole, I need to show where we have moved to determine how much money I can get next year. That's where reification comes in good, at the sociological level, where we can say, yep, compared to last year, our kids are doing better or worse. At the school-wide level, that should mean nothing, and at the individual level, that shouldn't even exist. It doesn't matter what you do. So we're kind of taking an idea, and I think that's where big tech thinks on the massive sociological scale, where sometimes reification helps us make sense of what's going on, because due to emergence, we can't really deal with what's going on at the sociological scale. So we need ways to kind of bring it to our level. But the mistake is to assume that any of that is meaningful at the individual level. And if we stop living at the individual level, then— or we start bringing that down and pretending that we're just computers and some computers are better than other computers, that's— we're gonna, we're gonna hit a real empty in our development.

Absolutely. But what's interesting is, like, talking about values is that— and probably the Luddites experienced this— is they're like challenging the, the seemingly dominant values and trends of the moment, as in innovation or, you know, progress or these kinds of big narratives, right? You then get cast as— and writing this book at this point, liable to this will happen to you, I'm sure, you know, you're cast as the Luddite who's just trying to basically block and get in the way of progress, of the movement forward of new ideas and exciting innovations that are gonna, and so that's super interesting. And what I really appreciated was when then you go into the mechanism, like you say, you make a real point in the book to say, that's partly why we need to explain how this is working.

Harming us.

Harming us, exactly, right? We need to explain the mechanism, then you do that through attention, empathy, transfer. So maybe, I mean, particularly attention, it's like, you know, it's again, it's like a ubiquitous narrative now, attention economy, etc. Could you just talk about that a little bit?

Yeah, so if you go to— so a good rule of thumb is data changes nothing, mechanism changes everything. I think about asbestos. We knew for decades that workers who worked with asbestos were dying of cancer way faster than they should have., but no one did anything until scientists said, hey, look, little fibers of asbestos can lodge in your lung causing tumors. That's where they're getting the cancer. Boom, everything changes. Leaded gasoline— we knew it was harming people forever, but until people said, oh, by the way, lead from gasoline seeps into the, into the street, we breathe it in, and now our kids die— now people go, oh, okay. Once you get mechanism, that's when people start to change. So chapter 2 in the book is all the data that shows that tech harms learning, and believe it or not, We've known the first meta-analysis on informational technology was 1962. So we have 60 years plus of data and it's all been bad. It's never been good. But I always say, who cares? We've known— so for 60 years we've known these are bad tools, yet we're using them more and more. My argument is because no one knows why. And if we know why, then you can't really hide anymore behind the, maybe it's bad data. So I think two of the key mechanisms, one is the attention one. And this basically boils down to the human brain. There are certain bottlenecks we have in our brain. One of them falls square on attention. So the way attention works is you think of it kind of like a filter, a filter that determines what's relevant, makes it into your conscious awareness, what's irrelevant gets blocked out. This is why you can sit in a busy cafe with all these noises going on and you can still focus on your writing because your brain says, cool, you're writing, let that in, we'll block everything else out. So it's a really powerful system. The problem with that system is we only have one attention filter slot in our brain. It's a little nugget here behind your left eye. So this means if you ever want to do two things simultaneously, you literally can't. The best you can do is continuously swap your filter between this task, then this one, then this one. Now every time you swap your filter, that does three things. One, it makes you slower. Two, it bleeds rule sets together, so it makes you less accurate. You start to make mistakes that you otherwise wouldn't. And 3, it shuts down your basic memory system and starts to put memories on a backup, what we're gonna call kind of autopilot system. So anything you're doing while you're multitasking, you're gonna be doing worse, you're gonna be performing worse, you're gonna be going slower, and you're gonna remember a whole heck of a lot less from it. Now that doesn't matter when I'm scrolling my phone for fun. As soon as I bring that phone in for learning, every 6 minutes or so I'm gonna get this urge, this pull to go start multitasking on my phone because that's what I've trained myself to do, and now learning goes down. So because of the attentional bottleneck— and that's a biological problem, you can't fix it, there's no amount of hardware or software updates or new apps that can fix that, that's just how we think— and that is completely antithesis to the attention economy and how people are building edtech tools, how they're building these machines. They're building these things for rapid switching because that keeps you there, doesn't help you learn. Anyone who scrolled YouTube for an hour knows you don't learn anything from it. You don't even remember half the stuff you just saw, but my God, it keeps your attention. Versus learning, which requires a very slow sustain. We can't do that on a machine we've trained ourselves not to do that on. Which brings us then to the empathy issue, which I think is probably even more important. If we talk about biology and development, it's no accident. We haven't had tech forever, so a good rule of thumb is our biology is not built for tech. It's just not going to be. We can use it in a certain way, but it's hard. Reading, We're not biologically built to read. That's why it's so hard to learn how to read. You have to really kind of cram that stuff in. At our very base, human beings are built to learn from each other. We have inborn systems that mimic, mirror, and synchronize with other human beings. That's why a baby can watch another baby do something and then do it themselves. We learn from each other. When we put learning online, when we put a screen between people, most of those mechanisms are either completely erased or very greatly diminished. And this means when we do the exact same learning— let's say you're in a classroom with a teacher, somebody is filming that lesson, and somebody else is watching the exact same lesson on a screen. The person in the classroom— you can't ask questions, you can't, you just have to be there— the person in the classroom consistently learns more, understands better than the person watching the exact same thing on a screen, because you can't synchronize through a screen. So you see, biologically, we're built to learn from humans. It's not cute. We have the mechanisms. That's why they exist. That's probably why humans are what we are, because we have these crazy mechanisms that no other animal's got, and we're not using them as soon as we go online. That's one of the reasons why the COVID hit. We lost— you lose empathy online, you don't learn anymore, you don't try as hard, you don't understand as much, you tap out. So these are these kind of very biological hardcore things that if you understand those, you start to say, well, wait, technology, it's not a matter of we're not doing it right and we're not trying hard enough. It can't win. It never will be able to win compared to what we've been doing for 2,000 years.

Yeah, interesting. And I mean, obviously that's what— particularly the attention issue is what the tech companies are harnessing for profit, clearly. Yeah, but there's something interesting in, in both of those examples that I find also interesting about education, because maybe this is a rabbit hole, but we don't need to go down it. But just to acknowledge it, that the implicit that is going on, like in that empathy example of the, the sensing, the, the, the synchrony, the acknowledgment of the other and the, the relationships— none of that's propositional, none of it's explicit. And that's one of the things I find so fascinating about the, the educative process, whether that's in relationship with parents or in community or in schools. There is something incredibly human and incredibly multi-layered about the interactions that happen. And then there is the flattening, I feel, of the— let's call it the industrial education system— which says you can't learn it unless it's explicit and propositional. And then you hit your attention funnel issue and the cognitive load theory and blah blah blah. But actually, there is so much other, let's call it, information that you are swimming in that is so important as well to the educational process, right?

You would never— that's where I think, if you think about COVID lockdowns, right, that should have been edtech's breakthrough moment. That's their watershed moment. That's when it's like, thank you, our turn to show you what we got. And they shit the bed because they were— that's when I think the world realized this ain't working. You put a kid in a room on a transactional screen with some information they devolve. They become depressed. They don't learn. They don't move. And it's because half, if not more, of what we're doing in school is sitting next to the kid, is playing with the teacher here, is going out and trying to circumvent. Oh, what if I did my homework right now before I hand it in? All those things matter, and we're all learning from all those things. It might not be the measurable stuff, but it's funny if you think— so go back to empathy, right? Empathy is typically measured as synchronicity. I can actually watch when two human beings sync up and they're learning together. Their heartbeats start to beat at the same time. Their breathing starts to pace at the same time. They get the same skin conductance. So we can kind of track where people are going. That synchrony between a teacher and student is huge for learning. If I see that between a teacher and student, you're learning. If I see that synchrony between two students, you're also boosting learning. So it's not even just the teacher and student. It is who am I sitting next to? Is that kid kid syncing, I'm more likely to now sync with this kid. And that's when teachers talk about a vibe in a room. It is a very real thing when we're all clicking together. It is a synchrony that's going on that you literally— it's not difficult to get online, you can't get it online. And that's, that's where some of this, this tech stuff is going antithesis to what we really meant when we were talking about a general K-12 education.

Yeah, 100%. And so that, I mean, we're going to run out of time, but The middle part of the book is, as you know, it's a whole chapter on smartphones, which I just so encourage every parent to read. I mean, it just, it is, as you say, a special kind of bad, right? These things that we give our young people, and I'm the worst culprit. I've done that to my, you know, it's like we're trapped in that. But anyway, that's a whole thing. And then a couple of chapters on AI. And I just got to mention that the tool nobody asked for solving problems nobody had. Which I just think is a brilliant line for AI, right? Or it's not even AI, it's large language models that we're just obsessed with at the moment. And like, what are they doing? That is— oh yeah, anyway, that's a whole rabbit hole.

But ask the people who made it and they'll flat out tell you, we weren't— we didn't do it for anything. We just did it to see if we could do it. And then they gave it to us and said, you tell us what it's for.

Yeah.

No, that's the greatest business model of all time. I invent— here's something I made. What does it do? You tell me, here's a bunch of money. Isn't that just insane? And it's, yeah, I've, I've yet to have anyone tell me what a large language model exists for, what function, what problem does that address?

It's interesting. I did a brilliant episode a while back with the Thousand Brains Project, which you'd probably be quite interested in. They're doing sensory motor learning with AI. So it's a, it's a different approach. It's quite still, I'm sure some challenges with it, but just Vivian Clay and, and Geoff Hawkins, really, really interesting stuff. But just then, maybe just in the interest of time, I don't want to just leave people hanging with like, oh my God, drowning in this stuff, what do we do? Because then you really do go into like practically what can we do? And there's, you know, chapters in the book about parents, children, teachers, school leaders. What can we actually do in the face of this? And this is, you know, it's not necessarily a blanket draconian ban on everything, any digital product, right? It's like, so there is nuance in clearly where we are living in a world that is digital tech enabled. We've got to somehow adapt and learn with that. So yeah, I mean, just maybe in those different categories, what would you recommend to people in terms of what, what we can actually do when faced with this onslaught?

If we, if we start with just kind of the school level, and this is actually across the board for everyone, I'll start here. The big take-home is have a rhyme, have a reason. If you can't justify exactly why you're using a tool don't use it. And so I always say there's 3 questions. If your school says, hey, let's invest in this new digital platform, 3 things. One, what problem is it solving? That it exists is not enough of a reason to bring it in. Tell me exactly what problem it's solving. Two, does it solve that problem better than any other method that we already have? And three, and this is specifically for leaders, then what's the cost-benefit analysis there? Is it gonna break the bank to save us 1%? Or is it going to be cheap as chips and give us 10% improvement? So that last one is really just for the leaders who have to make that kind of monetary guess. But at the end of the day, it's— no one is asking for miracles. You're just asking for reasoning. If learning works in a very specific way, if my children act in a very specific way, where does this tool fit in with it? And I think what a lot of us have come is we've just used digital tech as the default. Because it's there, pull out your lapbooks. Because we have it in the room, everyone get on and Google something. Is that better than looking up in a textbook? I don't know, but the point is, have a think about that. You better be able to justify every time you use tech. So that means typically at the school level, it usually means put a moratorium on all tech, do a tech audit, see what's working, what people are using, what's not. You might find schools on average when they do a tech audit are finding they're wasting $1 million a year on tech that no one even touches. That's a million dollars. If you just divvy that up amongst salaries, Everyone's gonna be a lot happier than having a tool collecting dust in the corner. To wit, then I'd say when it comes to teachers and stuff, the more you dive into kind of the learning process, the memory process, the attention process, then you can start to say what strategies align best. Do tools— like, think about attention and multitasking— do these tools actually feed into attention, or do they distract attention? In which case, why don't I run an experiment? One week, let's use the tool. One week week. Let's not, and let's see what the heck happens. And that's where you'll start to go back to handwritten notes. Kids learn more when they handwrite versus when they type. You'll go back to hard copy textbooks. Kids will learn more from a textbook than a digital textbook. It's easier to scroll through a digital textbook, but you don't really learn from those things. And you start to find those kind of analog methods that we can kind of plug back in. And then also at the school level too, I would, I would argue the best way to make sure everyone is using it well is make an event. Get a computer lab. That's it. If computers are confined to a very specific spot in the school, and as a teacher I now need to sign it out, get my kids up, walk across, sit them down, get them back to the room— if it becomes an event, I will no longer use it as a default. And now I will genuinely have to think, do I need it? Is it essential, or am I just doing it? And so once you get it— that's what they did in Sweden. They put computers back into a lab and now you have to really genuinely think about its use. So, you can still use it, by all means, it'll still exist in the school. It's just you better have a good reason for it, otherwise you're wasting your day. And then if you go then to the parent level, that's going to be a lot of that kind of at-home stuff. Number 1, I would say freshman seminar. Sometimes I have to teach freshman seminar. So, I have 500 kids in a room, freshman university, and they'll say, "Hey, what is the number 1 thing I could do to make university better?" What's the number one thing I can do to boost my study, boost my learning? One answer: buy a printer. That's it. If you live at home, if you're a parent, buy a printer. Print it out. All homework assignments, all readings, anything that comes at you online, print it out. Do nothing different with your life other than have paper versus a screen. You will learn more, perform better. Now there are more techniques and tools we can use, but that is the easiest way to boost performance and understanding by just having paper. And the more you do it at the home They'll start to bleed that into schools. The more schools start to do it, it becomes a little bit easier, hopefully. Which, oh, by the way, and I'll point this one out too, in the US now this is happening. I'm so pumped. So a lot of countries and a lot of states and a lot of schools are starting to ban cell phones. Awesome. A lot of states— Oregon just made cell phones illegal. Boom. It's illegal to have cell phones at schools. Sweet. Love it. I always say that's the lowest-hanging fruit of all time because cell phones never needed to exist in schools. That was the worst— the least of our problems. When people are like, should we ban them? I'm always like, that's not the question. The question is, why would you not ban them? And no one's ever had a reasonable argument for why kids need a cell phone at school. And the biggest one in the US is, what about— and I think it's worth saying— what about an emergency? Like, school shootings are a real thing here. What if I need to get a hold of my kid? Number one problem first responders say during a school shooting: kids having cell phones. As soon as every kid has a cell phone, what happens is they all go on their phones immediately. It clogs the network. Work. Now they can't— the 911 system is down, so first responders don't know what's going on. They get confused. And there was a— it was in Gainesville in 2018, when kids immediately call their parents during an emergency, the parents flood the school. And I don't know if it's the same in France, but if you've ever been to a school during drop-off or pickup time, holy geez, that line stretches about a mile down the road. Ambulances couldn't get there. Kids literally died because parents rushed the scene before the ambulances could get there. So believe it or not, in an emergency, the worst thing is for everyone to have a cell phone. That's when you want a small, dedicated group of people to be in control with a very hard system.

Interesting.

Which is what we've always done.

Unintended consequences.

Yeah, it's— it makes everyone feel safer. I— that's like I always say, if you were to do a PSA announcement, that's it. It's like, do you want to feel stronger or be stronger? That's like the person who goes to the gym and drinks protein shakes but never actually works out. Do you want to feel safer or be safer? The people with cell phones feel safe, but it actually makes you less safe in the real world.

Yeah, yeah.

So I would say, so that's the, the low one. I just want to throw this one out there. The next thing all the governments are doing now are legal opt-out for parents, is you will be legally allowed to opt your kid out of all non-essential tech at school. And when that happens, I think, believe it or not, I think that's going to be a huge— because even if 5% of parents say I'm opting out, schools now will be forced to do analog and digital versions of everything. They will stop doing the digital versions because it's just going to be a waste of their time. That's my hope for it.

Yeah. I mean, I did, I did really appreciate it at the end. You talk about your suggestions for like community forums and really engaging with this dialogically because I think, yes, there's the kind of legislative, we're going to just ban or whatever. But there is also a really important need for engaging in community and in dialogue with other parents, with other educators about this. Because this is, as you say, somewhat counterintuitive to the narratives we've been sold for a long, long time now. And as you said, some people have been raised just in that water, right? So there's a lot of a need for kind of whatever it is, exploring together, learning together, figuring out how we might do this. So I think that's important. And as you know, you give policy examples and stuff in the book, which is, I think, are really super useful. The other thing I really liked was the idea of Analog Week.

Yeah.

So like actually just experience it, right? Because I mean, analog just sounds like, sounds old school then, but it's like, no, life is analog really at a deep level, right? Let's just go back and be back in life. And actually that's my worry about some of this is that it then fuels an increasingly narrow version of what education is that just goes, that does go back some steps into a very propositional and explicit space of just use the textbook, sit in a white box, do the thing. And, you know, we were talking off air about you, you know, putting your lovely daughter into a forest school. I mean, it's like, that is deeply analog, right? In the most profound way. And that is also part of what I think needs to happen is like really thinking about how can we deepen the experience of the layers of life. An analog that can actually happen only in a classroom setting.

So, and if you remember too, and I think you made a good point, it's wickedly counterintuitive. Most of the stuff is so— it's, you, you wouldn't believe it if it didn't punch you in the face. Like the idea that the more kids spend time on tech, the less technologically literate they are. Why? That's the most absurd thing ever. Yet all the data points this— the more your kids use tech, the worse they are at using tech. They don't understand anything. But then you start to see parallels like driving, right? I drive all the time. I got no clue how a car works. So there is no correlation between using a tool and understanding a tool. And if you want literacy, it's not about training on a tool. It's about understanding deeper learning and understanding and processes. And so there's— I think you're right with the conversation. Hopefully that's what this book does. It gives us the data, the mechanisms, the talking points to say, okay, let's think about this a little bit deeper. There's, there's a different way to think about it. And then as you said, let's go— analog doesn't just mean, okay, instead of a textbook on a screen, I'll have a textbook in my hand, right? It means life. It means going back to interacting with human beings. Recess. Go back to recess and PE. There's a school— oh my gosh, a district— the LA— no, it's not the Unified School District. There's a school district in LA where every Tuesday is called I Tuesday. And I just learned this from a podcast I was on the other day. And every class has to incorporate tech, including PE. Basically, the absentee rate on that day is 30% more than any other day of the week because kids hate it. Even in the— you're like telling me in the one time when I don't need to be on tech, when I should be kicking a ball and running around, I still need to incorporate tech. Why? Because you spent money on it. That's not an argument to be made. And that's where it's like, I think we just let the investments drive our decision-making with pedagogy in schools. And we just— let's go back to what do we value? Be a Luddite. The final lines in the book are, I am a Luddite. Will you be a Luddite with me?

Exactly.

That's why I have— rather than wait for people to call it to me, I'll carry a card. I'll print it out. I'm a Luddite. I don't care.

Sign me up.

I'm waiting for more people to join. What are your values? Then go back to that.

Brilliant. No, I love it. Just so appreciate— there's so much I would love to talk to you about more. Cognitive atrophy and all— there's so much there in the book. But yeah, really happy to see it out in the world and good luck with it. I hope we can get it out and about and just some really important hard truths that we actually need to, like, as parents, as educators, really think about. Yeah. So thanks, man.

You too. And give my best to your family. Thank you for everything.

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