SHAWN STEVENSON: You are now listening to The Model Health Show with Shawn Stevenson. For more, visit themodelhealthshow.com. Welcome to The Model Health Show. I remember the statement from the one and only Whitney Houston in stating that, "I believe the children are the future." At this time, I was one of those children, all right?

So it hit different. It's like, "Oh, am, am I the future? Do I have all this potential? What about the environment? What about the things that seem to be stacked against me in becoming the future?" You know, a leader, somebody who has, uh, uh, gifts to give and aspirations and a life of meaning. And today, more than ever, this sentiment has never been more important because what you're gonna learn today are the facts about what's happening with our children's education.

As we stand here today, our children, this current generation, throughout time, as long as we've been tracking this stuff, every generation has outperformed the one before it, has essentially become smarter and smarter and more and more educated, but that phenomenon has reversed. Our children are now less cognitively capable than previous generations.

Something is going seriously awry, and we have to put an end to this. Our children are born into these circumstances. This is not their choice, and I believe that they are the future, and that future is up to us. In this episode, sometimes you need to hear a conversation that pisses you off a little bit.

Sometimes you need to hear something that really hits your, your heartstrings, hits you deeply to get you to realize that this is unacceptable, and I'm so grateful for this incredible conversation and this incredible neuroscientist. And also, what's so phenomenal about our special guest, not only is he a highly acclaimed, prestigious neuroscientist, but he's also somebody with decades of experience as an educator for children And so again, we need to know what the problem is, of course, but we also need to be pointed in the direction of real solutions.

And so I'm very grateful to be able to share this conversation with you today. Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath is a neuroscientist, educator, and best-selling author who specializes in human learning and brain development. He's 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 he's worked with more than 1,000 schools around the world. He's the author of six books, including his newest, The Digital Delusion, and he's published over 50 peer-reviewed articles.

And today, he's about to share with you the real data showing what technology is doing to our children's brains and their ability to learn. Let's dive into this conversation with the incredible Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath.

Jared. Hello. I'm so excited to talk to you today. Thank you so much for having me here.

Let's start off with the big question. Let's talk about the cognitive abilities of modern children. What do we all need to know?

JARED COONEY HORVATH: The hardest thing to say, and I, but it has to be said, is that our children are less cognitively capable than we were at their age. Um, uh, since we've been recording cognitive ability, since the late 1800s, every generation outperforms their parents on basically everything, memory, attention, literacy, numeracy, creativity.

And the reason for it, we've tracked back, was always education. And it makes sense. Education is where you cut your cognition. Every generation a kid spends more time in school than their parents did. You see why we go up. And unfortunately, Gen Z has done something different. Um, even though they go to more schools than we do, since about 2010, they've now decoupled, and their cognition is going down.

So depending on what you care about, if you want to, you, IQ, down. Working memory, down. 

Sustained attention, down. Everything is going in the wrong direction. So our big argument was always why? It's, it's, school hasn't changed that much. Biology, evolutionary-wise, hasn't had time to change, so what changed? I think the answer is, as probably people can figure out, digital technology.

Mm. It was one of those, once tech entered school, learning just started to tank miserably, and that's where we find ourselves today.

Well, we're gonna dig in on all the whys and the different parts, but you mentioned biology. Yeah. Like, our biology hasn't changed in all this time, and that's one of the parts of learning that I don't think we think about.

We just think it's just, like, brain stuff, and it's, it's just all about the brain. Yeah. But learning is biological itself, and you kinda highlight that in the book. Absolutely. Talk

about that. I think we have this weird fascination with the brain. We've, we've put it on a pedestal it doesn't deserve.

Most people think they are a brain in a body. You're just h- gray matter hitching a ride. You are a body. You are as much your heart as you are your lungs, your stomach, your spleen. You're not just walking around. You are all of this, which means all of this will influence your cognition, your learning, your development.

Mm. It's not just a sit-and-think issue. And so, I mean, w- y- take this to something as simple as writing. When we type, typing is the most uniform thing ever. The keyboard never changes. Doesn't matter how hard or soft you hit a key, it's always gonna be exactly the same thing. So typing basically just becomes verbatim thought transformation.

I have an idea, I'm gonna get it out, transcribe it, cool. When we write by hand, every small muscle movement you make, every... the position of your body, the breaths as you're doing it, all of that feeds into the ideation going into it to a point where people say handwriting is thinking. Mm. It's not reflecting your thought, it is guiding your thought as you go through it.

So we, I think once we start to recognize that, yeah, we're not-- it's not just, we're not a computer, and we can't think of humans just like advanced computers. We are all of this, and we've gotta accept that and learn how to then play all of this.

SHAWN STEVENSON: I love this. It's so crazy because we have, you know, typically it's personal development people saying to s- to write it out, use hand write, write your, write your goals down w- by- with hand.

JARED COONEY HORVATH: Yeah.

SHAWN STEVENSON: You know, with y- with your handwriting. And now we have real evidence showing that we do in fact learn better when we're writing things- Yeah ... by hand.

JARED COONEY HORVATH: If you take notes, say typing versus handwriting, with- you do nothing different in your life, you're just learning and you take notes by hand, you will learn significantly more than if you type those notes.

If you are handwriting a draft to something that you care about, a novel or a book you're writing, if you handwrite it, it will come out broader, more creative than if you type it. Just think about, uh, like if you have a kid, so my kid's three and a half, your handwriting is as unique as your fingerprint.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Mm.

JARED COONEY HORVATH: So if you ever get to see a kid write their name for the very first time, that's why I always say it's not just their name. That is, it's a statement. Th- that, that name says, "This is me. It's not my name, it's an identity marker." And that's, and that's what I love when you can't get that in a digital environment.

It just doesn't work the same way.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. All right, let's talk about this digital environment.

JARED COONEY HORVATH: Yeah.

SHAWN STEVENSON: And, you know, this is one of those things where I know, again, being a student and I was in that kind of grace period when things were changing. Like, I remember the Dewey Decimal System.

JARED COONEY HORVATH: Yeah  of course. ,

SHAWN STEVENSON: And then of course I remember we got the first computers in the library as well, and just like, oh my God, this is amazing.

We're gonna be able to do all these things. We have technology-

JARED COONEY HORVATH: Yeah ...

SHAWN STEVENSON: in the classroom. We have access now. And as a result, again, we were promised certain things, and we believed certain things. Mm-hmm. But again, it hasn't really, it hasn't really, um, kind of panned out to be that way.

JARED COONEY HORVATH: Yeah.

SHAWN STEVENSON: And one of the things that you talk about, and I wanna talk about all the things, but it's, it's the human aspect- Yeah

that's been taken out of the equation as well. It's not just the fact that we are designed to learn, it's that we've also evolved learning from each other.

JARED COONEY HORVATH: Yeah.

SHAWN STEVENSON: So let's talk about some of the promises of big tech and ed tech specifically you talk about in the book. Yeah. There's lots of different names that it can go by.

But why has this not really borne out as we've been promised?

JARED COONEY HORVATH: It's, it's, uh, and I, I gotta give everyone the benefit of the doubt, at least parents, teachers, schools. When digital technology was sold to schools, and that's, so we call it ed tech, educational technology, it made sense in the sense that exactly as you said, hey, how could more access to information be bad for learning?

How could easing access to practice problems make learning worse? So I think it sounded good on paper, but the problem was that the people who develop digital technology, especially ed tech, have no clue about learning. They've, they're not teachers, they're not educators, they're not researchers, they're engineers.

So their view of learning was very much like a computer. It's just about downloading information. The more you get, the better it's gonna be. Mm. That's never been how learning is. Like, take a lot of schools now are like, "You can use tech to go three times faster." Do you think speed is the defining characteristic of good learning?

Never. If, if anything, the slower you learn, the deeper and better that learning becomes. Biology is not the same as technology. So I think we just, we kind of opened the doors and welcomed this in 'cause it sounded good. We didn't have evidence for it. We never asked for proof. We never asked for proof of safety.

We just said, "Do it." And unfortunately, the data is now very clear that that was bad. You do the same stuff on tech that you do live and in person, you learn less. Literacy is down. Numeracy is down. Uh, critical thinking, the ability to even form an argument is going way down now, and we're staring the culprit in the face.

Mm. And I think the scariest thing was so- Everyone, uh, COVID hits, they shut schools. Of course you're gonna go tech. That's, I mean, it's, it's, if it's the choice between tech or nothing, take tech. I mean, you, it's not that you can't learn from it, it's just that learning is gonna be very shallow and weak, but it's better than nothing.

COVID ended. Our hope was that that would've been the s- the wake-up call to everyone to say, "Whoa, I saw my kid for six months try and learn online. It stinks. Let's get them back in the classroom. Let's get back to textbooks. Let's do..." And instead, everyone doubled down. Mm. After that, school districts started buying kids computers.

Now 88% of school districts give kids a computer specifically and say, "This is now your new learning tool." So what was a Band-Aid during COVID, I, I, that I thought would be the wake-up call, no one ever ripped that Band-Aid off. And now, like you said, when we think about tech Eh, I, I remember the computer lab.

I remember the dot matrix printer. That was us. A lot of parents don't realize kids, over half of our kids spend between one and four hours on a screen at school every day, and over a quarter spend over four hours. So I mean, we're in a world where all we're trying to do in our homes is try and get screens away from our kids, get our kids back in the real world.

They go to school, which we just assume is basically a safe haven, and they're put right back on a screen again.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Hmm. All right, let's talk about why it's not working.

JARED COONEY HORVATH: Yeah.

SHAWN STEVENSON: So one of the things, again, I just kind of alluded to is we've evolved learning from people- Yeah ... learning from each other, and we've taken this thing that I would argue that our genes expect us to do, and we've just removed it from the equation.

Yeah. Now you're just learning from a screen. So let's talk about that part. What's the role of the teacher today?

JARED COONEY HORVATH: Yeah.

SHAWN STEVENSON:You know, you give some examples of just looking at all of these faces that are glowing with the computer light versus engaging with the children.

JARED COONEY HORVATH: How hard is that? It's, yeah, if you talk to a teacher, and like, "I used to see kids' faces.

Now I see that dang Apple logo. That's all I look at all day." But it's, so you're, you're spot on. One of the things that makes humans human, that makes us so powerful, is we have evolved 150,000 years, and a million years before that, to develop what's called affective empathy. So when we often talk about empathy, people assume that's a feeling or an emotion or a personality trait.

I am empathetic. Yeah. The truth is, you don't have empathy. Nobody has empathy. Empathy isn't a personal trait. It's what's called a transpersonal emergent property. So what happens is when two pairs of biology come together, those sets of biology can start to resonate, and we call that empathy. So in a very real sense, if you and I start empathizing, our hearts are gonna beat at the same pace.

We're gonna blink at the same time. We're gonna start to breathe in sync. If I can image our brains, our brains start to look almost identical. So in a very real sense, we can measure empathy. You don't do it. No one drives it, and in fact, there's a lot of debate about how it even happens, but my goodness, it happens.

Turns out that empathy, that biological synchrony, is one of the biggest drivers and predictors of learning.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Hmm.

JARED COONEY HORVATH: So I don't wanna get into the weeds on, on data and stuff, but when we look at all the different kind of learning pedagogies and strategies, an, an empathetic relationship between a teacher and a student is one of the highest effect sizes, one of the most stable effect sizes we've ever seen.

So that's just a very good sign that says, yeah, our genes, our biology says what makes humans, what our superpower is, is you don't actually have to do things. You can simply be with someone who is doing something and learn equally as well from them. Now, imagine you're a kid- Uh, learning from a teacher and you guys are starting to resonate.

In that moment, you're no longer learning from them, you are thinking like them. Hm. And you're making connections the same, everything is easier, understanding goes up. And flip it, if I'm the kid and I'm starting to struggle, all learning is hard. I start to struggle, and the teacher's empathizing with me, she's now in my head, and she knows exactly what steps she needs to take me through, so it also drives motivation.

Now bring in a computer. What does a computer absolutely not have? Biology. It is literally impossible, not difficult, not give me another piece of software, we'll get it next year. It is impossible to resonate with a piece of technology. So one of the biggest drivers of learning we have just goes by the wayside.

It's gone. So, and, and, and that's where people are like, "Well, with AI especially, kids are gonna love, you know, their computers. They're gonna wanna fall in love with them. They're gonna-- they really like them." And I'm like, "Cool, fine." All of those are personal emotions, but they will never get the learning benefit because the mechanism isn't there.

Like, if I showed you a picture of a sun, a lot of people will say they start to feel warmer, but you'll never get a tan because the mechanism isn't there. It's the same here. It doesn't matter if you feel like you love the machine, the resonance cannot occur, learning cannot go faster or up or deeper without it.

And, and so I- I'd say, yeah, when, when all the kids are like, "I'm gonna marry my AI," I'm like, "Sweet, just don't learn from it." That's why the dropout rate of digital learning is still around 85%. Once the learning gets hard, if you don't have that other human being to start to bond with, it just, everyone quits.

They go, "That's enough for me."

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah, yeah. Now, again, this is not to say that we cannot learn via these means. No. We're talking about true effectiveness.

JARED COONEY HORVATH: Yes.

SHAWN STEVENSON: And we're also looking at, you know, there are certain You know, nature or nurture or personality types that do excel with that mean of lear- uh, mode of learning.

But the majority, we're looking at the majority of cases-

JARED COONEY HORVATH: Yeah ...

SHAWN STEVENSON: learning is suffering. Uh, the cognitive abilities and capacities- Yeah ... are suffering with our children. Now, speaking... This is a great segue because I've always been curious about this, um, especially when switching to these screen relationships when everything shut down.

JARED COONEY HORVATH: Mm-hmm.

SHAWN STEVENSON:: I was very curious about, you know, the ability to connect, you know, the chemistry that occurs when we're with other people and we're in rapport. Yeah. You know, we're very good at bonding and oxytocin and all these different... Uh, y- you just mentioned even our brains syncing up, you know? Yeah. This was data from Princeton, like, two decades ago.

Like, we've known this, that our brainwaves literally sync up when we're in a conversation with somebody. Now, what happens versus that when we go online and we- Yeah ... are having a conversation with FaceTime or on a Zoom meeting or whatever the case might be.

JARED COONEY HORVATH: Yeah.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Do we still have that same activity taking place, that same level of empathy?

What ha- Is it the same? Is it different? Like, what's going on there? Uh- I've always been curious ...

JARED COONEY HORVATH: So there's gonna be three levels, and you nailed it. So a good marker of resonance is gonna be oxytocin. Anytime you see oxytocin, that's a sign that biology's about to link up. It's one of the markers that something's happening.

When you interact live and in person with another human being, surge of oxytocin, good sign you're gonna connect. When you move that to Zoom, oxytocin diminishes significantly, but it's still there. So if you, if we're making a hierarchy, you say in person, best. Over Zoom, so long as you can hear the other person's voice, that's gonna be second-best.

The worst is typing. If you try and have a relationship while typing, the brain, our biology does not recognize that as actual human interaction, and instead of releasing oxytocin, it releases a secondary suite of chemicals, one of which we believe is tachykinins. Now, tachykinins, that's a protein linked to isolation and depression.

The more tachykinin we see, Tac2 specifically, in your blood, you start to get... Y- that's a marker in animal studies of isolation. They start to become highly, um, threat, uh, aroused. They're, they're, like, always on the lookout for pain and fear, and then they become wickedly lonely. So when you have kids texting primarily to each other over online and all that stuff, they tend to become lonelier.

They tend to feel more isolated. And the trick is, what do you do when you feel lonely? You reach out to more people. And they're gonna do it on their phone, which is gonna lead them to feel more lonely, and then they're gonna cycle it again and again. And in this case, the poison-- we're mistaking the poison for the cure.

So I'd say if you can, as much as possible, you go live and in person. If for some reason you can't, hear the person's voice, call them on the phone, do a Zoom, go one-on-one on that kind of tech. Absolute bottom of the barrel is just texting somebody and assuming that that's somehow then gonna form a connection, 'cause that's n- that just doesn't appear to work

SHAWN STEVENSON:Today, highly refined sugar is infused into so many of the things that are on our grocery store shelves, and we've gotta make a change.

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Now, back to the show. Thank you for sharing that. That's amazing. Again, it's... The thing is, it's Captain Obvious. It's so obvious, you know? But now we have some data to affirm-

JARED COONEY HORVATH: Yeah ...

SHAWN STEVENSON: We need each other. Yeah.

JARED COONEY HORVATH: And and we're getting mechanisms. So that's what I always say. That's why I love neuroscience.

Nothing I've ever discovered about the brain is novel. It just explains why things happen. Yeah. And for some reason, when people have a mechanism... It's like when you're sick, if you don't know what it is, it's scary. But as soon as someone diagnoses you, "Oh, you know what? You've got a fever. It's a cold," you're like, "Oh, okay.

I'm good now." It's the same thing here. We know all of this stuff, but if we can just come in with the words that say, "You were right. Here it is," maybe then people will start to act on it a little bit more.

SHAWN STEVENSON: I wanna circle back to why this is not working and some of the, the promises and the perspective of you know, success and some things that are really attractive, like gamification. You know, humans, I know that I do, I love winning, I love games, I love competing. And so if there- if I can tie that into learning, wow, like, let's do it. And so that's one of the modalities that's been promised with edtech is, like, gamification.

And so again, I'm curious, like, what's going on there if gamification is something that is, appears to be very attractive and a- appe- appears to be effective-

JARED COONEY HORVATH: Yeah ...

SHAWN STEVENSON: What's really going on behind the scenes?

JARED COONEY HORVATH: Here's a g- a good rule of thumb where what is actually good for learning versus what feels good for learning are typically two very different things, and human beings are n- we're really good at pegging what feels good, what I want to do, what I prefer.

Very bad at saying, "Yeah, but this is what I need to do." And I guess that's beyond learning. That's probably humans writ large. But the trick with gamification is games are very engaging. Engaging is not synonymous with learning. I mean, you could... A, a simple example, you can think of a movie that you were wildly engaged in.

Like, I'm thinking, like, I don't know, the superhero movies, like Thor or something. At the time, that's a fun two hours. You were there, you were engaged. Today, you can't tell me anything about the movie. I don't know. It had Chris Hemsworth. He threw something around. Cool. You were engaged, but you weren't learning.

And flip it, there are other times when you're less engaged, like a very hard movie, like Schindler's List or something. You're not as engaged. It's not comfortable, but because of the conversations you have about it, the thinking you're forced to do about it, the debates you have the next day about what did this mean, you remember a ton about it today.

So engagement and learning are not synonymous. Games tap into engagement, which keeps you going, which keeps you chugging, which keeps you excited. But very rarely, what is- what's happening is in order to be engaging, what you're focused on when playing the game is the mechanics of the game itself. The content behind those mechanics largely gets lost.

And so I always say, like, my favorite example was I grew up in the generation of, um, uh, Oregon Trail. If you're of a certain age, you played it. Now, to this day, I can tell you every single button to press on the Oregon Trail. I know how to shoot a bear. I know how to load your wagon. I know... It was fun as heck.

I know exactly what to put in the wagon, how do you ford a river. I got it all. The one thing I can't tell you is anything about the Oregon Trail.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Mm-hmm.

JARED COONEY HORVATH: I don't know when it started. I don't know where it started. I don't know when it went. I don't know why everyone was dying of dysentery back then. That game was meant to be a history lesson, and instead, it was a lesson on how do you play this game.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Right.

JARED COONEY HORVATH: So the, the more you gamify things, the more you also gear attention towards I- ideas and information that might be tangential to what you're actually hoping to learn from the process.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yeah. What I can see this as very clearly is, like, a good complement. Like, what if we have the game plus human interaction and conversation around it?

JARED COONEY HORVATH: Now we can... And, and, and if you then, the game is, is there for moments of engagement, fine. If you then acknowledge that during the learning portions of what we're gonna do, there's gonna be something different, and that's where... And so that's where it's funny. The, um, Duolingo is, like, the best example of this.

So Duolingo is a gamified learning app. There's another learning app called Babbel, which is not gamified. It's a learning app, it's just very much pedagogically based. Billions of people have used Duolingo. Very few have used Babbel, but the research is clear. For every hour you spend on Duolingo, you really only needed about 40 minutes on Babbel, you would've learned the same thing.

So almost half the time you're getting equivalent learning over here. It's the rest of the time is just filled with you jibber jabbering on that game and how little you then take away from that

SHAWN STEVENSON: Another one of the promises with edtech is personalized learning, and it sounds so attractive. Mm. It sounds really, really good.

You talk about a concept in the book of fluency illusion.

JARED COONEY HORVATH: Yeah. Let's talk about that. Okay. Oh, uh, damn. This is another... This is a great example. The easier something is to you, the more deeply you think you understand that stuff. But when it comes to learning, what that means is when given a chance to study, most people will take the easiest route.

When given a chance to learn, we will always take the easiest route, and the easiest route is easy, and because it's easy, it makes us think, "I am really, really good at that. Do you see how quickly I got through that? Man, I'm, I'm nailing it." Meanwhile, when you do something that's incredibly difficult, you tend to underestimate how well you're doing on that.

It's much harder, so you think, "I suck. I don't know what's going on," when in truth, if I test you, no, you're actually growing. Mm. Congratulations. So if you would take this back to learning, one of my favorite experiments was a guy had one group read the same book passage four times. Now, rereading is easy, just, just read it, read it again, read it again.

He then said, "Okay, I'm gonna give you a test in a week. How well do you think you're gonna do?" And they're like, "Pff, 80%," say. Give them the test a week later, they're at about 40%. Their confidence versus their reality was miles apart. Mm. Now flip it. He has another group read the passage once, then do a really difficult recall task.

"So I'm gonna ask you questions. You have to tell me what you remember about that. Who was this character? How did it work?" Much harder, not fun, not fluent at all. Because these kids are stumbling, he says, "How well do you think you guys are gonna do on a test?" They say, "Mm, maybe 50%." Give them a test a week later, they're sitting around 60%.

Mm. They undershot how well they were actually learning. Mm. And so that's where, uh, we... When we start thinking about personalized learning, about digital tech that can cater to your preferences, to your needs, how do you learn best, one of the dangers is we're now making learning way too easy. We're making it feel way too good for you, so you're becoming overconfident.

You're moving too fast, and if we ever take you away from that program and test you over here, you're not actually getting much of anything, but you think you are. And so that's when we're, we try and say, "You know what? You're not learning much on tech." "But it felt better than this really-" Mm ... "hard activity we were doing in class."

It's like the gym, man. If you go to the gym and you're feeling good You're not working out. If you come out of the gym and you're just like, "Whoo, that was great," you didn't... If you're in the gym and you're huffing a bit and you're sweating and you get those moments of, "Ooh, I don't think I can do an eighth set.

All right, we're gonna do it anyway," that's where the effort, the effort leads to the outcome. Mm. And unfortunately, when it comes to learning, a lot of the personalized learning is, is stripping away effort, making it too comfortable and easy for them to learn.

SHAWN STEVENSON: So the personalized learning is like the little pink dumbbells?

JARED COONEY HORVATH: The little... You, you're doing something, and, uh, and,

uh, hey, if anyone asks, I was at the gym for an hour today. But did you actually push yourself? Probably not. Can you talk about the mode effect? Yeah. Oh, goodness. So the mode effect- Anytime a human being is asked to perform a task online, they will perform that worse than when they do it analog.

And so we call that the mode effect. The mode in this case is the medium you're using. The mode is tech. Tech harms learning. Now, this is a bi- if you're a parent, you know what's, what's coming. Most standardized tests, state tests, entrance exams, SATs now, they're now digital which means all of our kids should be performing worse on those tests.

If they would just keep the test analog, we'd see, have a much better measure of what our kids know and can do. So what do tests do? Why haven't we seen this huge drop? We've seen drop, but it's more... So every year kids are getting worse, worse, worse on these tests. Turns out they're getting worse than we think they are.

Mm. Because in order to cover for the mode effect, what te- digital tests do is they do what's called renorming. They're basically gonna hide it. So let's say everyone doing an analog test gets 100. Everyone doing the exact same test online gets 80, 20 points lower. All we're gonna do is give the kids who took the test online 20 bonus points, so that way no one notices that the mode effect just kicked in.

Now, that's a problem, 'cause now we don't genuinely know what people can do or not. We're just kinda futzing data so it looks equivalent. So I always say, if you have a chance of... If you really wanna know what your kids know and can do, analog, analog, analog. It's a much better reflection of our knowledge and our, our skills, our performance.

Um, if you wanna get really scary now, so most tests when they went digital, things got so bad they started to hide it- Yeah ... just through stats. Fair enough. The SATs in particular, when they decided to go digital, things were going to get really bad. So bad they couldn't even statistically cover it up. So instead of just renorming the test, they decided to rejig the entire test.

They dec- they decided to just rebuild it so that you wouldn't notice. Now, here's, here's what it looks like. This is nonsense to me. I- if you ever took a reading comprehension test, here's a passage of about 750 words. Here are 10 to 12 inferential questions about that passage. Let's do that five times.

That's reading comprehension. That's what it's been for decades. On the SATs, here is the reading comprehension section Here is a single sentence of about 75 words. Here is one fact-based question about that sentence. Next. Hmm. Here's another sentence, one fact-based question about it. Next. Reading comprehension is now 54 short snippets of text-

with one question about each. Now, anyone with a brain realizes that's not reading comprehension, that's skimming. Why would we do that? Because what do kids do on a screen? They skim. So when they move the test to a s- to the screen, rather than deciding what do we want our kids to be able to do, they simply changed the entire construct to say, "If that's what they do on a screen, that's what we're now gonna call reading comprehension."

That's, that, I mean, that is the example of building the world to fit the tool rather than creating a tool to better fit the world that we want, and that just breaks my heart.

SHAWN STEVENSON: I just heard DJ Khaled.

JARED COONEY HORVATH: Yeah.

SHAWN STEVENSON: It breaks my heart.

JARED COONEY HORVATH: Breaks my heart.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Oh, man, that is-

JARED COONEY HORVATH: Dude, you wanna... There's another scary thing that...

So writing section, there was about a 16-year window, some of us will have hit it, I think I was right on the cusp of it, where if you took the SATs, you had to do a writing, uh, portion, which is exactly what you think it is. Here's a blank piece of paper, write something. Like prove a... You have to make an argument, you have to prove a point, show something.

They reinstituted the writing section when they went digital. Here's what it looks like. Here's a sentence with a single typo, here are four options, what's the typo in that sentence? Now-

SHAWN STEVENSON: Wow ...

JARED COONEY HORVATH: that's, to most people, that would s- sound like editing. Why would we call editing writing? Mm.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Mm-mm.

JARED COONEY HORVATH: And one of the arguments under the table is, with ChatGPT, kids no longer have to write, they just need to edit output. Are, is that what we're really getting to?

That we're n- we're, we're gonna completely change any assessment of learning to make it look like our kids are still learning, and we're gonna do it by completely redefining everything into something much lesser than it meant 10 years ago? That's not the right way to do this.

SHAWN STEVENSON: But an argument would be, well, we're freeing up capacity, you know, mental capacity. We don't need to do that thing.

JARED COONEY HORVATH: Yeah.

SHAWN STEVENSON: So what's the big deal?

JARED COONEY HORVATH: Oh, that is the, the biggest misconception in learning and in human development is that, is because we now have access to information, we now no longer need to learn it. All we need to do is simply look at it, and now we can focus on being creative.

We can be critical thinkers. We can be communicative. There is, there is no more pernicious thought than that. A sad fact of human cognition is all of your higher order skills, critical thinking, co- uh, creativity, they're not separate from what you know. They emerge directly from what you know. Your knowledge base is the ground through which your higher order skills grow.

Now, notice when I'm saying your knowledge base, I'm not saying what you have access to. Since the invention of the printing press, we have never struggled to access information, but that's never stopped any generation from needing to learn it. You have to embody it. You have to personalize it. Only when that information is in your long-term memory can your creative processes start using it.

And if you... I, I don't wanna get into too much detail, 'cause it gets, it can get tricky fast, but all you need to know is a massive chunk of everything we call higher order thinking skills, be it creativity, um, um, collaborative abilities, all these things, happen subconsciously. They happen when you start, stop paying attention.

Like, one of the, the, the vast majority of your creative ideation happens when you step away from the problem, when you let your biology get to work. That's why if you go to bed with a problem, you'll wake up with a solution. You come up with your best ideas in the shower. This does work, but it can only do work with what you have already embodied within it.

This cannot look up things on the internet. This cannot just ask ChatGPT for an answer. So your limit to all of your skills will be what have you put inside of yourself already.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Mm.

JARED COONEY HORVATH:And so this is... So when people say, "Don't worry about learning stuff," if you don't learn stuff, there's nothing left for you.

You're, you're done. And I, I think the b- just the best phrase of this was, um A lot of researchers were always leery to be the first to pull the trigger. Um, a guy named, uh, uh, Paul Kirshner, uh, a cognitive psychologist, he just finally did it a couple years ago. He said, "Okay, I'm gonna say it. Long-term memory is the seat of all human cognition."

That's the mic drop. That's what we all wanted to say, that if it ain't in here, there's nothing you can do with it, and one of us finally said it. So now we can all go, "Yep, you're right."

SHAWN STEVENSON:This is, I mean, what's more important? W- what you just shared, what's more important than that? Our creative capacity is one of the things that we're kinda really banking on in this age of artificial intelligence, and we're taking away the foundation of it.

JARED COONEY HORVATH: Yep.

SHAWN STEVENSON: And we need more creativity than we've ever needed. We have the most crazy, complex, just multifaceted, uh, chaos around us- Yeah ... than we've ever seen in human history, and we need creativity to be able to solve complex problems more than we ever have with this generation right now.

And we are robbing them of their ability to truly learn so that they can access that creativity. So what's probably gonna happen is a bunch of dumb ideas, if we just put it bluntly. What's probably gonna happen is a lot of confusion, a lot of infighting.

JARED COONEY HORVATH: Yeah.

SHAWN STEVENSON: A lot of, uh, a lack of ability to collaborate.

That was another thing that you mentioned as well. Yeah. And we need more collaboration than we've ever needed. So again, this is

JARED COONEY HORVATH: And we're gonna struggle to do it ...

SHAWN STEVENSON: wow. Like, this is so important. Thank you, man.

JARED COONEY HORVATH: Thank you. No, it's not... And I, I think one of the best stats on that is, 'cause some people still struggle to, to believe that In 2018, there's a test called the PISA, which is an international test of reading, math, and science.

They give this to hundreds of thousands of ninth-grade kids across 60-plus countries every couple of years. 2018 they did it, but they added something. In 2018, they also, because the OECD was talking about creativity as the future skill, they added standardized measures of creativity, creative ideation, um, divergent thinking, all this stuff.

Now, when they looked at which countries performed best on the knowledge test, reading, math, science, one country just killed everyone: Singapore. And that didn't shock anyone 'cause Singapore has such a rigorous academic system. Everyone knows you're gonna know a lot of stuff. Then they looked at the creativity data.

One country blew everyone out of the water. No one was even close to them. Guess who it was? Singapore. The country that knew the most stuff was the most creative. Hmm. The second country, Hong Kong, well, city, hon- country, Hong Kong, number two on knowledge, number two on creativity. Number three, Japan. Number three, Japan.

When we correlated creativity scores with knowledge scores, they correlated at .92, which is basically perfect, which is the only signal I've ever needed to point to to say, "This is why we teach kids stuff. This is why we continue to learn things. We're not teaching you history so w- 'cause we think you're gonna become a historian.

We're teaching you how to embody and think through knowledge so that you have ammunition when you're ready to start doing things." And if you take away knowledge, you take it all away.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Are you about that snack life? The paradigm of snacks have changed dramatically in recent years. I grew up, my snacks, animal crackers, little Capri Sun, maybe some random candy from my grandma's purse.

You know, she's got the butter scotches and peppermints in there. All right, of course, got little, little chips, little cookie. Listen, that's all fine and dandy, but our paradigm of eating candy has really messed us up. And so trying to get healthier, I started having granola bars, right? Had granola bars as a kid as well.

Super sweetened with a picture of a guy with a wig on, you know, looked like one of the Founding Fathers on the box. You know what I'm talking about. But trying to get healthier, you know, I switch over, I do the granola, healthier, lower sugar, or low-fat paradigm of these cereal bars, but still really missing the point.

And then today, we had all these innovations in these newly invented chemical complexes to try to trick our bodies with fake fats or fake sugars, and we end up with an ultra-processed conglomeration of a new kind. What about something real? What about utilizing the paradigm of a food bar, something on the go, but with all real food ingredients?

And that's what we have with the Paleo Valley Superfood Bars. Not only does it have over eight organic superfoods and collagen-rich 100% grass-fed bone broth protein, there are no added sugars or sugar alcohols. They come in a variety of flavors, including red velvet, lemon meringue, apple cinnamon, and what I have right here, dark chocolate chip.

These are the only food bars that we keep here at the studio for our team and our guests, and I keep these at home for my family, and I travel with these as well. Huge fan of the Paleo Valley Superfood Bars. And right now, you get access to 15% off their amazing Superfood Bars when you go to paleovalley.com/model.

That's P-A-L-E-O-V-A-L-L-E-Y.com/model for 15% off their phenomenal Superfood Bars, plus all of their other incredible snacks and superfood whole food-based supplements, so much more. Head over there, check them out, paleovalley.com/model. And now, back to the show You also mentioned a part of that equation is processing.

You know- Mm ... time for, to be, um, you know, with this default, default mode network kicking on, right? Yeah. Time to be, quote, "bored," where we're not doing things. And boredom rarely exists today in this modern world because we're always opening up the phone, you know, opening up an app. And what about what it's happening in the process of supposed learning, where you're supposed to be doing certain things in, in class, but then you're going off task because you're on the same device that has access to all the stuff that you are accustomed to going to.

Yeah. Let's talk about that phenomenon of going off task.

JARED COONEY HORVATH: Yeah, yeah. So this is, uh, arguably the worst thing you can do for learning is multitasking. For as much as we love to do it, and we do it all day, no human being can actually do it. We are really bad at it. When we try and do two tasks at once, our speed drops significantly, our accuracy drops, and our memory tanks.

Our brain starts using a secondary memory network. It's not good. So I always just say, if there's one thing you don't do when you learn, it's multitask. Just stay focused. Now, give a kid a screen and say, "Time to learn from this screen." If you track how kids use screen, over 2,500 hours every single year, age 8 to 18, kids will use computers for multitasking.

It's what they do. Let me open a tab, let me watch a movie, let me check this. Now I say, use that same machine to learn. What are they gonna do? On average, if they're using a computer at home for studying, they make it six minutes before they start multitasking, during which time, man, studying's done. Go home.

Um, when they use Z- Zoom for, like, live learning sessions- At the beginning of COVID, they were making it about 15 minutes. By the end of COVID, two minutes, which meant over half of our kids were logging on, waving at us, and immediately going and doing something else. When kids use a computer in the classroom with the teacher there 24 to 38 minutes of every hour, they will be off-task multitasking.

And it's not, and, and a lot of people think, "Oh, the next generation's weak," or, "It's a moral decrepitude." No, it's a pure training thing. If you accept that it takes, say, 10,000 hours to master anything as a rule of thumb, after four years of being introduced to tech, our kids have mastered one thing, multitasking every time I see a screen.

Now you're telling me I need to stay focused on this for 50 minutes? I won't be able to do it. And I, I, I always kind of liken it to this. Like, it's, it's a bit of a crass analogy, but give me a group of alcoholics, sit them around a table, put a giant jug of beer in the middle of that table, and say, "All right.

I want you guys to use this beer to learn about buoyancy. Go." There's nothing about beer that says you can't learn buoyancy. The tool is perfectly suited to the task. There's nothing that says you can't learn from tech. It works. But everyone around that table has a very different story about what beer should be used for, and every kid has a different story about what tech should be used for, and it ain't learning.

So even if we managed not to drink the beer, I promise we wouldn't have gotten anything about fluid dynamics. We may have learned a little self-control. That's as far as that's gonna get. So that's why the, the, if, if for no other reason, take empathy off the table, take transfer off, take everything off the table.

The moment the computer left the classroom and entered the home, and more importantly, the pocket, that should've been the death knell. It was no longer considered a learning tool. 

It's now an entertainment tool, and that war is over. So if nothing else, if that was the only data point we had, I'd say that was enough of a data point to shut this whole experiment down.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Thank you, man. This is important stuff. Um, now, something else I wanna talk about is it's not just that modern children are less cognitively developed. They're also significantly less healthy and less happy-

JARED COONEY HORVATH: Mm-hmm ...

SHAWN STEVENSON: than previous generations. You know, and it's, again, it's coming all together at one time, but we're just explaining it away, and oftentimes, again, doubling, tripling down on we need more of these things, more tech, more, um, medicalization of these things that are manifesting with our kids instead of what is the root cause?

JARED COONEY HORVATH: Yeah.

SHAWN STEVENSON: So let's talk a little bit about that because these things are not separate issues.

JARED COONEY HORVATH: When, when everything is going in the same direction and everyone knows exactly why It's-- I, I'm always confused as to why so few people are willing to just get up and say it. I mean, it's common sense at this stage.

If only learning was going down, we would have a discussion. If only wellbeing was going down, but everything else was staying up, we'd have a discussion. But when everything, physical, mental health, everything is going down, you can say there's a common culprit here. What changed? If since this date, everything has gone on a downward slope, what started to happen on that date?

Did you put something in the water? Did we start serving new food in the cafeteria? And when it's happening everywhere, you can really easily track it back to, oh, when we start giving kids tech in the classroom, learning goes down. When we give them that same tech in their life, relationships and health go down.

I, I, I-- like, I hate to be-- 'cause as a scientist, I always have to temper my arguments. Like, it may be, it could be. But in this case, it's just so dang painfully obvious that anyone who tries to push back against it, it just, it's like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. It's like, just-- I, and I don't believe that they don't-- A lot of the counterarguments against it I don't believe are being made in good faith a lot of the time.

I think it's people who, if you got them over a beer one-on-one in a lab, uh, and just at the end of the day, they'd say, "Yeah, you're right. Kids shouldn't have tech." But due to other reasons, they will not say that out loud.

SHAWN STEVENSON:Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah. Perfect. Perfectly said. What do we do?

JARED COONEY HORVATH: Go home. Nothing. Just throw in the towel. We're done

SHAWN STEVENSON: Just, just go to the lake, take your phone, and- Yeah ... you know, phone it in, literally. So, you know, obviously you've dedicated, uh, this new project, The Digital Delusion, that everybody needs to get a copy of, like, yesterday, and dedicated to what do we do as parents- Yeah

what do we do as teachers and educators, what do we do as people who might have positions of leadership and political influence, and just addressing these things, because if this is going to change in an efficacious way, it's gonna be top-down and bottom-up change. And so I really do appreciate that. And but having you here, I, I wanna get some tips, you know?

For, for the parents who are listening, we have, we do have a lot of educators who listen- Yeah ... as well. So what, what can we start to do to redirect what's happening with our children in a, in a place that we can truly make education, which has been intended to be, effective

so that our kids are going at that same pattern of each generation getting better.

JARED COONEY HORVATH: It's continuing to improve on us. And that's ... Isn't that all we want? Yeah. And nobody wants kids who are underneath them. We all want them to be better than us, and we can do that. So you're right. Uh, so start at home. As parents, we're gonna get to the school issue in a second, but i- you control the tech milieu in your own home, and I know that's sometimes hard to accept and understand because the world is constantly

Uh, you go buy a stroller now, it has a clip for an iPad in it. We're being told- ... tech needs to be here. But it's just like any other physical object. If you have a vase you don't like anymore, you throw it away. You can do that with tech. Yeah, it may have cost a little bit more money, but you're in charge.

You get to do it. So some of just the easiest things I tend to say at home is, first, d- if you do nothing else, buy a printer. If you did nothing different with your life, but you just printed out everything you read. Your kid got homework? Print it out. Your kid got a worksheet? Print it out. If you did nothing but print out all your kids' work, they will learn better, grow faster than if they tried to do all that same homework on a computer.

So go plant a tree, print everything out. Uh, it's the same with us and reading, man

If you genuinely care about an article online, print it out. You-- we don't, we don't learn from online. The way we read online is we skim. We don't really pay attention to it. So if there's something that matters to you, print it out. From there, then you can start to do a tech audit, and you can do this with your kids.

You can do it, just say, "Here's, like, an easy sheet. Let's track how often do we use tech in this house? You wanna make a change? Let's first start by figuring out what we're doing." And no judgment. There's nothing judgmental about it. We're just saying, "When are we using it?" And I think one of the cool things-- So if we're doing that with our kids, they can just kind of track where they're using it.

As adults, we have an extra dimension, is we're tracking how we're using it, and one of the extra questions is, "Did my kids see me use it? And if so, what message did that send?" I think they don't need to worry about that, but we need to worry what are our kids seeing in us, 'cause they're learning their behaviors from us, so...

And then we can start to make the decisions as, "Uh-oh, I see I'm checking my phone way too many times in a day. My kid sees that 50% of the time. I should probably cut that back." Once you've done your audit, that's gonna give you a good sense of what we can change, what we can tweak. And a couple of just simple ones are, you know, tech-free Sunday.

Pick one day a week where no one touches tech. And I mean, maybe you're not ready for that. Do half a day. Do something, but it's not Dad gets to work, but the kids don't get tech. All of us. And how do we fill that day? We come up with something that we do together. We go for a hike together. We'll turn it into a family event.

The first two or three times you try that, it's gonna suck. You're gonna hate it. Your kids are gonna hate it. Everyone's gonna be so uncomfortable. That's 'cause we're addicted. By the fourth time you do it, you're gonna start to hit a groove, and you're gonna start to say, "Wow, why, why haven't we done this before?

Why don't we do this more often?" And then I, I think kind of another thing we can do as parents is help our kids learn this stuff, is Even if we're gonna keep tech in our home, we are gonna control when and where it is. The one thing we're not going to do is allow tech for learning. Anytime learning enters the equation in our home, we are gonna build an analog home.

We're gonna start training you to think analog, not because I'm trying to harm you, not because it, I don't think games are fun, but because we know as adults that learning is better done analog and slow. And you might not understand that now as a kid, but you will thank me later. And the, and the habits you do here, if you have to write your assignments at home, you're gonna start to carry those habits into the classroom, and you're gonna start writing in the classroom, which is gonna start to help you here.

So we kind of build our base there. If you're a teacher, then oh my gosh, there's so much to do. But no, what, what we... I'm a teacher, so just know I'm in the same boat. You- we know, and I'll just say one thing. Teachers know what's going on. We're not stupid. If you talk to a teacher who's been around for longer than 10 years, almost to a man they'll say, "Yep, kids are doing worse."

Why? Tech. They know it. We know it. Yeah. It's fine. The one thing I'll tell teachers, and they'll know this, and so this is important for parents to hear. Teachers don't have a voice. We don't have any say in anything. The principals, the administrators have a voice. Parents have a voice. Teachers do not. So if parents are waiting for teachers to pull the trigger, they're never going to, because our job is on the line.

If I know something is wrong and I speak up, I could get fired. There's a district I worked with in, um, Kansas where every kid has a laptop. The district is tracking how often kids use the laptop, and if a teacher doesn't have the kid use it for a certain amount of time per day, that teacher could lose their job.

Hmm. So you think that's gonna be the person who's gonna stand up and fight back? No. We, we keep our mouth shut. So realistically, the people making the decisions then are the highest up, are the politicians, are the principals, are the superintendents. Most of them, and I'm not being mean, have no clue about education.

Uh, they're politicians. What would they know? It's just one more thing in their docket that they gotta worry about. So they make decisions based on gut feeling or what tech companies tell them. "This will help kids learn." Okay, that makes sense. "This program is good." Which means at the end of the day, circle back, the only person with a real voice who can change is gonna be parents. It's going to start with parents.

And if we start speaking up at board meetings, at, at ed conferences, at wh- wherever we can, 

what you're gonna see is that's when teachers can chime in. Teachers are silent, but they are gonna be your best allies. Once you start talking and they have to listen to you, you're a parent, they'll be the ones to sneak in and say, "Yeah, they're right.

I got the data to support what they're saying." And they'll tell you, "Look, the next person you have to talk to is this guy. Let me tell you how to phrase this next time." Teachers are gonna be your best friends when you start talking, but it's gonna start with you. They're never gonna lead the charge. So as parents now, if we wanna impact schools, we push.

Teachers will follow, and administrators w- should listen. Lo and behold, they'll ... I think a lot of them just don't know how bad it's gotten. They'll start to, to, to pay attention.

SHAWN STEVENSON:This is great advice. Yeah. Wow. Thank you so much.

JARED COONEY HORVATH: No, no worries.

SHAWN STEVENSON:So this in and of itself is transformational. You've already changed a lot of lives just being able to hear this, but obviously again, knowledge isn't just power in and of itself.

It's potential power, so it's doing something with it and taking some action. And if folks wanna get more education in the good old-fashioned, tried and true, actually does affect learning in a very positive way to read a book-

JARED COONEY HORVATH: No way.

SHAWN STEVENSON: People can check out The Digital Delusion, August 18th, the updated, expanded a vers- version of the book is gonna be available everywhere that books are sold.

Yep. All right. And so we've got some great resources. Can you tell people about the website as well?

JARED COONEY HORVATH: Yeah, yeah. So if you look at LME Global, so that's learningmadeeasyglobal.net, um, that's just where I put anything I write about it goes there, all the videos, like I'll make YouTube videos about learning are there as well.

And I'll just, for anyone interested, the point of the book was specifically for us to be able to push back. And so what I've learned in my time is you need, you need Well, three things really. One, you need data which, uh, uh, I always thought that'd be all you needed, but data opens the door, and this book will give you every bit of data you need.

Two, then you need mechanisms. Yeah. If you can explain why the data is saying what it's saying better than anything else, that's when people really start to change. So that's why a big p- portion of that book is just mechanisms. If this is how learning works, do you see why the data would say this? Then I'd say the third thing you need is just permission.

And so hopefully this book and everything else is giving you... It's gonna give you everything you need to say, "Let's do something." And for anyone who's read the original version and is wondering what's new on the new one, um, there's-- I say I've added 25% more book. So it's like I always see those, like, like cookies with 25% more cookies.

But what I've added is there are 12 questions people keep getting who are trying to, to-- who go to, like, an ed board. There are, like, 12 ways people push back, so I've addressed each and every one- Yeah ... of those to say, "Here is what you do to go back." And so, like, as an example, and you'll, you'll hear this, the big one is, what about equity issues?

Doesn't digital technology, um, help bridge the gap between the highest and the lowest performers? No. Man, uh, I don't think there's ever been a technology that has bridged the gap between... If you think of any technology, take as something as simple as an air conditioner, there are very different peripherals and versions and types that the haves can buy that the have-nots simply can't.

So even there, most tools are gonna make the gap between people worse. Digital technology, the data is very clear that once tech becomes primary to learning, the kids who are already good at learning do a little bit better. The kids who are struggling with learning, who are now told, "Do it yourself on a screen," go way down.

So the, the gaps in-- The learning gaps since about 2010 have blown up to larger than they've, 

they've been since we've been recording them in the US. So no, tech is not gonna be... So it's those kind of questions where people will say, "Well, isn't this a blank?" Or, "Don't we have to worry about blank?" And I'll lay it all out for the data and mechanisms that no, those aren't, those aren't things to push back with.

Those are problems, not solutions.

SHAWN STEVENSON: I love this. A great FAQ really-

JARED COONEY HORVATH: Yeah ...

SHAWN STEVENSON: is the bonus. Yeah, exactly. You know, like how do you do this stuff? So thank you so much for that. Yeah. Anywhere else people can connect with you?

JARED COONEY HORVATH: Uh, I guess if you, if you just looked me up, Jared Cooney Horvath on YouTube or Substack or stuff.

I just got everything out there. It's just, I'm around, you can't miss me.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Well, I appreciate you so much. This was a delightful, delightful conversation. I feel like I learned a lot. I'm in the room, I'm present, and I'm really picking up-

JARED COONEY HORVATH: I love it

SHAWN STEVENSON: ... some things that I wanna implement myself, and also just to further this mission.

Super important.

JARED COONEY HORVATH:Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you for, for even giving this the, the time of day. Like that just ... We're on the same wavelength, and it's good to know that people like you are fighting for it.

SHAWN STEVENSON: Yes. Yes. Well, with that, The Digital Delusion, pick up your copy. Get a copy for a friend, get a copy for a school district.

JARED COONEY HORVATH: Oh for a principal. Oh, no.

SHAWN STEVENSON: The one and only Jared Cooney Horvath, everybody. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode today. I hope that you got a lot of value out of this. This is a conversation to share. You need to share this in a big, big way. Get this out to the people in your family, your community.

Get this into the hands of educators. There are so many moments in this episode, in this interview, that are highlighting all the different angles of what's happening with our children's education. We need to take back control of our most precious resource and how they're being educated. Again, our children are just born into these circumstances.

They didn't ask for things to be the way that they are. We have so many incredible innovations that do have education-affirming and health-affirming benefits, but there are some huge flaws that simply do not need to be present. And interviews like this are so important in helping to change this paradigm.

I can't tell you how many times episodes here on The Model Health Show have created measurable change in the world. I'm talking about in the political landscape, I'm talking about in the education landscape, I'm talking about in the relationship landscape, and reaching people who really have the power to change what's happening society-wide and community-wide.

I'm talking about there are a lot of mayors and governors and senators who've listened to The Model Health Show, who've been presenting with information from The Model Health Show. You know, people that are now working in the FDA, people that are now working in, again, positions to where they are influencing policy.

And so you never know. You never know whose heart and whose mission you can impact by sharing. So I appreciate you for being a part of this mission. And listen, we've got some epic masterclasses and world-leading experts coming your way very, very soon, so make sure to stay tuned. Take care, have an amazing day, and I'll talk with you soon.