 our students are joining us just because they're very curious and so that part will be a little bit more like an organic conversation. So they'll ask their own question instead of being channeled through? Something like that, like we've prepared a list of interviews that are project specific. Yeah. And then some of the students aren't a part of the project but are going to be joining the conversation in an organic kind of way. So maybe I'll introduce myself first. My name is Julia, I'm the vice principal and this is Chet, Chester. So he teaches media elective as well as media PBL. And this is Nick, he teaches English as well as music PBL. And these are our students. So maybe you guys can introduce yourself. Yeah, so my name is Gino and I am the student that's here for the organic presentation. Okay, okay. I'm currently studying in the eyes of a different program from what they're studying. I am in a separate program. You're in? In a separate program. In a separate program? Yeah. What was it about? It's basically a bit more linked towards the traditional way of education. So we read, we search, we produce. Ah, okay. Okay, cool. Hi, my name is Alice and I am also a student at MTIS. We're all students. The ISCAS students. I think I am very interested in music and media and arts. So this project is really, it really interests me. Cool. Thank you. Maybe you can give a tiny little intro. The project is about? Yeah. The project for this semester is related to music and media because our teacher is music and media teachers. And what we're doing is we're trying to open a thrift shop that also has elements connected to music and media. So we have integrated DJ elements into the thrift shop. And we're trying to open a business of our own. That's like, yeah, just we're trying to create a business. And where would that be located? Is that where? Body square, like Grand Sands. We're doing a Grand Sands called the 23 Music Shop. Music room. That's where we've done it once and then we've got one more coming up on the 17th. Which is this Sunday. Next Sunday. Next Sunday. Okay. And we've got around maybe one or two more for the semester ends. So for the first thrift shop we earned like 7,000 I remember. Yeah, we got a decent amount of traffic from the first one. Yeah. Yeah, they want to talk about sort of goals for the project. Well, the biggest thing we want to do is essentially help fast fashion. We know clothes are going around really quickly. You go to H&M or you go to Zara. There's tons of clothes and that's changing like every month, every week. We see that and we're trying to create a platform essentially for people to trade or sell their clothes. That's essentially what we're doing. The method you guys are going with is right now is consignment. So someone will provide the items and then you sell it for however much and then you keep a percentage and they keep a percentage. That was the first one. We did that with the first one and then right now we're just taking in an entry fee for the spot. Because people were complaining about getting taxed on from us. We thought it would be like a better idea that's just get entry fee and then they can keep whatever they make essentially. Okay. Can you give us a little bit about the high school for high school part of that? Yeah, and we did some research and based on research there's no high school thrift shops. These shops targeted to high school consumers yet. So we wanted to open something that's related to our age and our interests and something that we can connect Taiwanese high school students all together as one. Okay. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, okay. I'm Ray. I'm also in the project. I'm more of a tech person than music and media. Then it's people always like mandatory. So like I kind of just got placed in here. But I'm also interested in the thrift shop part of the class, the course. Yeah. So what element of the project are you working on specifically? It's a lot more management and getting things organized and planned. Yeah. And I'm Richard. I'm in a different PBL project, which is about making like an art business. And oh yeah. This is our business card. Okay. Wow. Pretty nice. And what's it about? We're basically creating a business about art. So we're going to find partners to work with and make them logos or posters or anything that's what it's about. Logos and posters. Yeah. They're a design company. Uh huh. Yeah. So like a company, company. We try to be, we're two different groups. These guys are working with music and business. Yeah, we're totally different projects. They do the design. We do our own thrift shop. But the two of you are in the same project. So you write papers. Yeah. I read papers. I'm sure I can write a paper about how they sell stuff. Okay. So how should we structure our conversation? We've got a few questions. We want to start with that. Right. The first question is what are some of the most effective advertising campaigns that you've worked on? And what are some consistency that you found through the campaigns, right? Because we're trying to promote the thrift shop. We want to know what's like the best way to do it. Like the most effective way to do it. When you say effective, what do you mean? Like how do we get people to come essentially? Like how do we get people to know about us, be interested in us and then, you know, either join or come to the thrift shop? So you're interested in actually converting that into a physical visit instead of an abstract idea or something. Yeah. So it's not really advertising for a cause. It's advertising for a place. Not necessarily a place, but like the brand, right? A brand. Because we're not going to be doing that 23 every single time. It's going to be, it's like, it's going to be changing, but then it's going to be us that's helped. That's doing it, right? So you can talk a little bit about sort of like our, what we've, the experience you've had and sort of the experience that we're hoping for. You know what I mean? Like what was our... Right. So we started with like students from our, from our, from our class, right? And then we now expanded to our friends, right? Like we've reached out to our friends, like I used to, to join and we've got, we've got a few responses, right? And who wanted to have a... To join. What is it made? What's it called? People are coming in to sell stuff, right? Yeah. Yeah. And this is like the first thrift shop we did. Yeah. There were a lot, quite a bit of foot traffic. And then like these are the pictures. We also put like DJ in our thrift shop. And like we kind of placed a whole vibe. Like I think what made us unique was the vibe and like how we're targeting to like high school students rather than like the general public. I think that a very specific audience. Yeah. Like a specific niche. Yeah. And what we found was that there really wasn't a place for teenagers to go on weekends, right? Like look around like where do you go on weekends? It's either movies, we go to nice restaurants. And that was really about it. Yeah. There wasn't like, well maybe concerts but like it's pretty rare. Like and then what we found was okay. That's how about how about we create a space for people to chill, right? Because we don't find good spaces. Why don't we create one? And then now we have people in our friends that are joining that. They're coming in to sell clothes. They come to checking it out. How do we go on from there? Like how do we get more people to come and join us in selling stuff? Or like in recycling secondhand items? Like as I understand it, the purpose, the objective of the project is to raise awareness, increase awareness for sustainability and sustainable practices as well as how do you exercise the things that you know the creative kind of past times that one might have in music or producing or or bringing people together for good. And how do you provide a platform for people that maybe don't have space to come together and form a community, right? Because the first one was mainly focused on clothing. But then we've actually got artists, like high school artists that's willing to sell their drawings or at least display their drawings. It's a place for them to show off their work, right? It's the same thing with DJs, the same thing with the artwork. It's a place for people to show off what they've done, right? And we have not seen that, like a platform like that. Okay, and the broad thing you chose is what's the name for this idea? The name is called the Strawberry Frog Thrick Shop. What did it say? Strawberry Frog Tsumumi Tsingwa. And the reason why I wanted to go with this name is because I think Strawberry Frog is a really artsy, cute, unique name that's interesting to look into, I guess. It was like... It really just started out with... With one of our... It's really hard to find a name, right? You're going to be stuck out finding a name for ages and we thought, okay, anyway, bye ideas. And then Strawberry Frog just popped up and it sounded nice and that's really how we got it. Yeah, it's kind of cool to us, so we went with that name. It's already a name for advertising and marketing agency. So are you Strawberry Frog? Yeah, Strawberry Frog. It's got a Wikipedia entry. I mean, are you connected? We're not connected. We're in Sao Paulo and New York and Amsterdam. This is Strawberry Frogs. Oh, okay, okay, more than one. Like, we also have... Strawberry Frogs is a thrift shop. Yeah, I'll ask because people will do what I do now. They hear a hashtag or something and they will Google it or they will search on Twitter or Instagram on a hashtag. Now, if you have something like... I don't know, Taiwan can help. It's very hard to misspell that and I printed out name cards and everything. So it's very unique but we don't claim patent or anything on it, so everybody is free to use it and so it catches on become viral. And it has a kind of potential, right? Initially it's only used on WHO, WHA related campaigns like Taiwan Help in the World Health Assembly but we found that it could work on any of those SDG items so that on a name card we connected 17 colors with Taiwan Can Help. So it's quite effective. Now, if we need to spell it Strawberry Frog, it's frogs, right? It loses the same kind of potential that allows for the viral advertisement or viral marketing to come. So I'm not so sure about the plural Strawberry Frogs. It's kind of hard to remember. What's the hashtag that we have? Yeah, yeah. That was our hashtag. Very froggy. Yeah, okay, that's slightly better. So what makes a good hashtag? Well, like you can't unsee it, right? It combines like previously unconnected ideas in such a way that sounds natural afterwards. So Taiwan Can Help is like that. Ice Bucket Challenge, right? Nobody before the campaign connected Ice Bucket with Challenge. Once it's connected, actually Challenge becomes a journey. Everybody now starts Challenge for this Challenge for that so it was super effective. Now, Berry Froggy. Well, I think in some ways they nailed the criteria because nobody thought that strawberry can go along with frogs. Except for a certain Amsterdam design. But yeah, I think that's interesting sort of the idea of creating something viral that's sort of the Ice Bucket Challenge, like going that route. Yeah, because I'm pretty sure that they've already trademarked Strawberry Frog. But not in Taiwan. But still, it's going to be a challenge for you to communicate using that hashtag and I don't think Plaro is the solution. But Berry Froggy, I can see that. I think Berry Froggy is more natural. And even if we just take out the Berry from Strawberry Frogs, we can just go with Straw Frogs. It might not sound as... It's a Straw Frog argument. I can't see that. How would you suggest this if we want to rebrand ourselves? Is it too late to rebrand ourselves? What do you think we should do? I think Berry Froggy is more catchy than Straw Frogs. First, Froggy doesn't have a plural form and nobody used that yet. I mean, there's a Twitter account with that name. But that person hasn't been posting very relevant to your cost materials. And the follower account is 26. I think you'll survive. Not like it's going to be trademarked or anything soon. So I do recommend Berry Froggy, but you need to find, in addition to this very vivid picture, I can't honestly say Berry Froggy, some connection from that to whatever call to action you're doing. People are going to ask, why am I going to join the thrift shop setting? How is it related to Berry's? How is it related to Straw Frogs? To have a story that you can't explain in 280 characters on that. So it's a kind of branding setting move. So why that? Why did you come with this? So maybe we came up with it somewhat randomly, but we could go from random to meeting, right? Yeah, you can retronome it. Retroactively find a cause. Right. I think one of the things with our school and the way that our program works is we have like four and a half months to try to create a project that has some meaning to the students and isn't sort of something that just sort of disappears right away after. So the students sort of came up with this idea of the thrift shop and of secondhand clothes and so I think we're still maybe searching for that specific sort of underlying message that doesn't mean we necessarily have to... We still can find that. I think sometimes even connecting to things like Straw Brain Frogs and at least in our class, in the culture of the class, it's sort of uplifted the students and like, oh, it's become the sort of meme within for us. So I wonder if we could, yeah, try to find some sort of purpose could be interesting there. Yeah, there's all sort of Berry's too, not just Straw Bear. Okay, so that's that. I think find a hashtag, have the syllables preferably rhyme, which is great because the new one actually rhymes and come up with a retroactive story that connects the two ideas into whatever your cause is and that would make a seed out of a pretty viral campaign. I hope that answers your question. Okay, thank you. For the next question, because we're like opening a couple, we want to open this business, so if we are interested in getting government funding for our project, what are the first steps to think about when applying grants and what is the government looking for? Sure. So if you simply search for Xin Chuan Yuan Meng Wang or I believe the keyword to use is you've probably already got it, right? So you will see pretty much everything that there is for the startups to get government funding and you can choose between whether you're in ideation stage, which I believe you're in right now, the bootstrapping stage or in the later funding stages and it will connect you to various funding sources. So that's like if you're in it for a purpose that's aligned with a certain government institute, then they will consider their purpose and how they align with yours and so that's the first thing. Now we also have another resource which is the social innovation Taiwan, the kind of reason for this lab to exist. It's at si.taiwan.gov.tw and if you search for si, space Taiwan, you'll find it and it's got an English website too and if you got to the first menu, that's information and government resources, they list not just grants but kind of in-kind contributions, mentorships like non-financial resources as well provided by pretty much all the different ministries and all of them have a kind of dedicated window so that you can actually call or email that person to ask to pitch your idea essentially and then just take them out there. So don't think that if you're a company don't think that only the Ministry of Economic Affairs is the one making grants. Actually there's roughly a dozen or so ministries and commissions making grants if you're a company. Now if you choose an association or a co-op or something, you have access to some extra resources as well but you do not have the access to investors if you want to hand out shares so that's a balancing choice. Right. Well, let's go on to the fast fashion. So we believe that fast fashion is harmful and not sustainable, right? It's skip the sex education. Or do you have any perspective or insight should I say like this about Taiwan's current sex education? Yeah, I just had a really nice interview with me in the post with the Xiao Hong Ma. They used to call themselves Little Red Hood but now they call themselves With Red which is I think easier to remember fewer syllables. And the With Red people specialize in period education and getting the communication out about period poverty, period equity and things like that and they very successfully you've seen that the Taipei Vice Mayor I believe, Wang Shanshan endorsing eliminating period poverty as one of her agenda and we've also seen like very successful convincing in the municipalities and townships based on this like, why not, philosophy, why not include temples and so on in the restaurants as free resources, why not and so I do believe that by founding as a association rather than a company by working with the temple makers and so on as partners instead of, you know, as supply chain members and so on they are in a what we call a social entrepreneurship space where their main call to action is social like asking people who buy paths with an excess like buy one deep one free buy don't need one right now to just donate it to their classes and so on and that sparkles conversations and then they can train the trainers make the teachers aware of how to start a conversation around this and then make sure that even universities and so on start offering courses around sex education but it's a very soft approach this is not a very hard advocacy they mainly just say, you know, why not be more inclusive so I would recommend you to look into that particular social entrepreneurship they just wanted Diana or something I think they've got something right on the topic of sex education a lot of these sex education are focused on kids in schools right do you believe that the older generations are missing that, right, maybe parents oh right, because they're still having sex right so okay well, yes and no I mean we've seen a lot of resources also dedicated like in community colleges and in the health and welfare outreach centers and even for the LLA I think with Red has this outreach campaign where they interview grandmas about their stories and so on so I think this is a all age conversation but I do think we need to make it more like cultural, bound cultural themed like be more sensitive about the coaches because the adults they don't really like to be re-industrinated by anything, it has to be something that they proactively contribute that makes sense in their community which means that you need to be sensitive to whatever culture they are in so that's that sorry oh sorry so we believe Fastback was hard for them not sustainable like this was sort of related to the first question it's more about how do we get the word out like it's a trouble to get the word out after like all your friends are knowing about it well it's not sustainable of course how is it harmful? well isn't it harmful? what's the harm? like environmental aspects, no? okay like concretely what's your pitch? what kind of harm does it reduce? Fastback is harmful because the materials they use, I remember and then there was over 12 labor involved a lot of clothes are dumped to Africa and all like the place in Africa it's polluted because of these clothing fast fashion so we think fast fashion is becoming a more serious problem because of all of these pollution environmental harm that it's causing okay so you're focusing on like poxons, greenhouse gases you know these like externalities as we say because there's also people who focus on the human rights or specifically about water or deforestation and so on so when I ask what kind of harm it's not rhetorical because you can't really go and say oh it has 70 different harms people are not going to remember that so you've got to focus and what I've heard is that you're going to focus on toxins and maybe greenhouse gases is that the idea? so yeah then if you're going there I think you're in very good company because if anything the Taiwanese people are very scared when it comes to food safety and toxins and well it's slightly more rational nowadays but that remains to be the number one topic when you ask people, random people on the street researchers actually did that like what's the kind of number one thing that you feel is dangerous I think they did it a couple years back before the pandemic and they're like of course toxins so that's a good angle and connects to food safety and the entire ecosystem safety the greenhouse gases requires more mass requires more work you have to actually do a carbon impact assessment but this year of course all the rage was the net zero movement so it's good as a subtopic but it will require more research from you so yeah I think it's a good angle and I would encourage you to simply you know instead of saying that it has all kinds of harms and it's not sustainable one or two specific harm it could be anecdotal it could be research but make it like palpable I believe that you've you've done like secondhand shops in like you've done that before and what's that like but it's it's C2C auction it's not a physical shop so yeah the company that I hope co-found back in 1996 or something did work on Taiwan's first C2C auction website so it's a little bit like eBay the name was Covid and the reason why was not sustainability at all but rather at the time people are very interested in the possibility on the websites so that people can kind of express themselves it's on the very early days it's like the NFTs nowadays but websites so what better way to show once kind of taste and expression than well opening a virtual thrift shop on the web so that was one of the earlier ideas it's all about self expression and not that much about sustainability which is why it's called cool biz it's about being cool so that's my experience but it's locally dated many many years ago what are some of the important questions you would try to answer in order for a business to grow like how would you let a business grow so that more and more people would know about the business and would want to support the business yeah but why is the business here in the first place that you need to ask first so it's more about looking at what problems does it solve or what positive impact does it provide to the society or environment so I mean it doesn't have to be solving anything one can be like purely creative but one need to kind of justify the time that your customers and your fellow citizens spend their business as worthwhile and to do that you need to generate meaning and to generate meaning you need to let them see that their actions are being impactful and not in a pathway so they could be like that impactful so avoiding harm is a very good first step if you say your business is causing harm then of course you should do like the business in a better way that's one way to do it or if you're not actually solving anything but just providing an outlet for expression at least you can say it doesn't cause external harm it also helps you or the community to be better in some specific way so that's the question to answer it's what's your positive impact I think what when we started this project I think where we're kind of stuck is we wanted to create a space kind of like we were talking about before to come together that wasn't necessarily about just going to movies or going to restaurants especially to avoid the sort of drinking culture that's prevalent too I think throughout this we've sort of gotten lost on the way we sort of always believed changed it a few different times it's important to try to get influencers to join it's important to make money how much is sustainability a problem so I think we're sort of lost in this what is success and usually one sure way to reorient it yourself is to ask you're still loyal like partners and stakeholders, customers and say you know why do you still choose to spend your time with us like why do you choose us and maybe the answer was surprising how important do you think a good motive is like good causes when we're trying to picture this idea to maybe partners it's either we go to them we're doing this eco-friendly thing or we go to them we're doing a business, you can earn money what's different what's the thing is that they can't earn money anywhere there are no shortage of online C2C auction sites it cost them literally nothing nowadays it's good to start an online thrift shop so going with the physical route means dedication and being extra time spent and then for what so you have to answer this and then for what but it doesn't need to be you it could be the people themselves creating a culture and trying to make the vibe communicable start but anyway that one can help to identify that vibe with something positive in their lives and then of course they will have to generate some sort of income but what's important is that they are now in it and they can co-create new models so you don't have to do all the business development yourselves and people who identify with the vibe, with the cost and then do business developments with you so try to think with your customers not for your customers that's the main idea it's super helpful because otherwise they're not going to refer other people in and if you are in the bootstrapping phase that's what you need because people don't stay in the same hobby forever like what you were saying we've done progress in the past and they kind of stayed there it was something that the school worked right afterwards it's gone next term it's how do we define success for a project and how do we make it live on essentially you don't want to be spending half a year of your time at something that's not going to live I think the Ministry of Education and Human Administration prides itself in turning student projects, just student projects into sustainable companies I think more than half of the USTART funded companies actually live on to be very sustainable so there's nothing inherent about a student project that doesn't survive the project itself but of course the USTART ecosystem is quite unique in that they have a very large network of entrepreneurs that started their first startup during their school and so the kind of mentors know exactly what you're talking about and they frankly speaking, if you have a startup idea and then you're a high school or a university student you can pivot infinite times the society is going to be very in whatever pivoting you're doing and even if you don't meet any of the bottom lines about the social environment or financial bottom lines you can't write a paper about it so there's no loose situation when you're in school and so I would encourage you to not necessarily apply for USTART but look at the USTART network and look at how they structure their incubation parents and so on so that you can see whatever project you're doing as something that's like a seed to the future pivots that you may try out a double year's down line so build a human network is what I'm saying I think this is super helpful I'm just thinking of the members who aren't here today would they have asked anything channeling they would have told you happy birthday very happy birthday we still have some time for free chats did you know there was something you didn't want to talk about? time for the organic chats that was the industrial farming yeah alright so okay a bit of an introduction to myself the field that I am interested in is I'm interested in finance and politics and I'm currently doing study on morals yeah and when reading the projects that you work on like GOV like the zero you've been working a lot on projects that bring citizens closer to politics right like recently I started to research on politics I've noticed that throughout the history there are there are always consequences of getting too much people involved in politics which has populism and problems I thought you were going to say it's such a democracy but I I'm not expressing my opinion here something like that let's say what is your ideal structure of a society what's wrong with populism? well I think politics should be based on rationality and why? rationality makes the best best approach of judgment for individuals but why for a group? why for a group? it's not hard doing for an individual level doesn't a group of individual go like equals to a group enter doesn't a group of individual then become a group's collective goal yeah if they share a common purpose and populism is one way to unite them into a common purpose it's not always the most rational it's irrational but why is it not good in your opinion I'm not challenging you when looking at past examples populism leads to extreme extreme consequences such as Nazi right, violence okay so if there is some sort of nonviolent populism would that work for me? would that work for me? because we're talking about trending hashtags that's one kind of nonviolent populism I think it still depends on the assessment of consequences and benefits yeah of course the point I'm trying to make is that populism is dangerous because it could be violent to the excluded so if someone is casted as an outsider by the populist ideology then of course it gives reason to harm them as nonhumans as Nazis in the name of denazification anyway so that's the danger but the point I'm making is that by getting the politics more accessible it doesn't necessarily lead to casting other people as enemies or others you could also say that it makes people more understand feels more empathy with each other and one really good example we've had is that the mask thing right it's a trending hashtag it is a trend people I think as early as April 2020 all the popular brands turned their logos pink to celebrate the pink mask episode and then they later on would turn them rainbow so must become a self-expression item it gained popularity not because the government mandated a rational choice because medical and mask reduced our value of the coronavirus but because it is something cool something people wear to express themselves and build to come on purpose but masks are probably the most nonviolent technology there it is I can't imagine the viral news that masks ask americans you would say different I know I know but the point I'm making is just because in America in the beginning of the coronavirus they were trying to say that wear a mask to show respect to the elderly to show respect to the medical professionals and if someone you know is of the counter-cultural sort or if they don't live with elders the name means nothing to them but in Taiwan when we say wear a mask to protect your own face against your own wash hands wear a mask to express yourself to be cool to show your aesthetics or whatever and then it catches on and it's a sort of populism but it's thoroughly nonviolent is the point I'm making and another another question that happened is like should we really should everyone really be able to have the right to be involved in political business because let's say who are you excluding what? and who are you intending to exclude let's say okay let's say should we trust people let's say that doesn't necessarily know what is best for the nation to do to make the decision of the nation's future well if they're unwilling to learn then of course that's one reason to exclude who are stubbornly refusing to learn that's why I'm pretty against equal decision rights basically I believe that there are some sort of people that doesn't know what is going on what their goal is if they do they probably pick short term over long term that would be healthy for the nation on the long run and do you think it's a incurable condition do you think they stay like that for life I'm not certain of that but I'm trying to say that that concept could be dangerous combining what we said if they're medically clinically non-conscious then of course you can see a reason of saying they shouldn't be able to vote on the other hand of course modern research show that there is an off chance that they become unconscious again but in outside of those friendly speaking edge cases most people are enjoying what we call neuroplasticity meaning that they're able to for long term thinking potentials which is why education is not limited for people under 18 which is why we do lifelong education and political participation especially on the community level where they can't really influence national decisions like Xiu Qi, Guan Wei, Huai the communities that try to make a certain apartment building the decisions on whether to collect garbage on IPM or 10PM or something like that but if you do not give them that chance there's no chance for them to learn to think holistically thinking long term rational thinking decision making which is why the first question I ask is that are there specific sorts of people you think are there's just no hope that they will be able to function in the community even given the chance to learn and it is a really deep question and I don't have a perfect answer on that but at this particular moment I think that really only people who are clinically diagnosed as not being able to be conscious ever then maybe we can think about taking away the voting rights but even doubt to make the sense maybe wrong how scared are you about the algorithm data right it's really really on the table how data is being gathered there might be a day where algorithm knows us better than we know ourselves really and when would that be like it's our moment right what if one day Google will be able to know us based on the data that they have if you look at the biometric data if you look at the the routine that we go through the Google searches the emails that they have they will essentially know everything about us except what we're going to do more or less not just going to advance yeah but I mean up until you're maybe four years old your parents probably know you better than you do yourself and that's a fact but we eventually grew out of it but when they know us better than we know ourselves we will start consulting them on things we talk to a teacher for example or a professor because they know more they know more than us we're going to start asking maybe one day Google like where should I go this evening then they'll give us like really really logical answers or maybe Google will know who we prefer like for candidates or like parties of what I like but the thing about a teacher is that a teacher cannot stop you from consulting other teachers the whole idea about teachers instead of just parents raising their child by themselves is that they're a panel and they come from different life experiences and indeed in some of the areas where they specialize they may know your research interests better than yourself but they're not your parents they don't necessarily know everything about you so and that's true even for kindergarten teachers and so the point I'm making is that there's Google but there's also other algorithmic teachers so to speak and all of them of course can claim that they know in some areas you better than you do yourselves indeed I know many coach leaders would claim that gurus but at the end of the day you're free to consult multiple lines and if all of them sounds helpful they don't agree actually and then with the difference that's when your individuation started to show so I think anyone with good enough data can come up with interpretation that's explanation of why you're doing something that sounds very convincing but at the end of the day still you decide what you're going to do next but if you build a addiction and you consult only one guru that's called a cult to the exclusion to every other source of advice now that's a real danger so what should we be scared about is actually this what we call a dark pattern of addiction and exactly the same reason why we're afraid of exposing children to heart threats because it's a kind of irrevocable path it builds a dependency and upon that dependency the society would have to spend a lot of time to detox that dependency so I don't think algorithms that claim to know us better than we do have anything that's inherently more dangerous than a really wise teacher but a very wise teacher would not use dark patterns to build a hopeless dependency from the student to that teacher for life and some algorithms are trying to do that so we should find the dark patterns but not necessarily algorithms but is it necessarily wrong for like let's say we're talking about addiction or a dependency for addiction on technology on technology but I think the rule of that is caused by let's say when the product is first designed it's meant to be addictive so you will use it 24-7 you can't blame the company for doing that because that's how we make money okay say that to the tobacco and liquor companies we do blame them for that because it's still a business they're only purpose of existence they just want to make money they probably have seldom of employees and they probably have family to raise sure and so does the toxic food makers the fact that they're a business does not justify negative externalities now sometimes it's purely economic so through a pigovian box or tax or whatever tax you can reclaim some of the externalities into a fund to deploy in a way to kind of lessen the dependency and sometimes as in the case of hard drugs there's no far as I know no legislator in Taiwan say oh let's just tax them they're also taxpayers I have a question from a teacher's point of so for the classroom and students have phones and phones in my opinion will always be more interesting in us because they're just unlimited amazing possibility screens right in front of students at the same time technology in the classroom can be really cool computers the accessibility of phones and how to use phones so much better than they do and how to use laptops or iPads I'm just curious sort of what your take is on phones in the classroom well I don't see anyone checking their phones during our conversation so obviously you're more interesting at least sometimes that's like proof and you would note that I do open my laptop to search for terms that I'm not familiar with that you raised and so on after I do that when I speak to you and listen to I always kind of close the lid or at least fold the lid so I do believe it's the norm that could be built by the community of people showing each other respect and the fact that we do have phones with doesn't mean that we should use it all the time we only do that involuntarily when we become users that are addicted building the dependency in a way that makes us feel really uneasy when we're not checking our phones and one shortcut I did was always interact with the phones through a stylus or through a keyboard and I found that if my fingers are not touching the screen my brain does not mistake the screen for part of my body so I always remain intentional when I interact with the screen because you first have to find the part of the screen you want the cursors to be and so bear them and I may because of that there's this kind of mental barrier so it makes it very easy for me to put my phone down at any time or not bring my phones to bedrooms or whatever I think everyone can be more aware but you can't build awareness without some exposure to the actual tools right so I think this is a kind of community exercise that everyone can do in my classrooms I sometimes use Slido and I purposefully ask people to scan the QR code and simply say that your phone is very good because it's part of the classroom but if you want to post something press like or whatever things that you're already addicted on I'll do that in public and contribute to the school discussion and so teachers with the smartphone of students are always more interesting than just the smartphones because if they post on Instagram or D-card or whatever they may have to wait for minutes before they get a real interesting feedback right but if you're on the classroom you can pose a really funny question the entire classroom laughs and that's an instant feedback so yeah I don't still ourselves short with synchronous communication which is a classroom we can always be more interesting and just enlist the help of the screens and just interact them in a productive way I believe yeah I think that's interesting I think one of the things that we go back and forth as students community is sort of this idea of technology and social media and the way that it's used both in school and in a classroom setting teachers sort of like I've been on both sides of it of like get rid of phones at the very beginning or let's really use them and integrate them let's do less screen time more screen time so just I think it also depends on the comfort level of the parent or teacher with the screen ourselves right so if we're already addicted go went through the rehab and no longer a user in a drug sense and then we'll be very comfortable because we know exactly it's a charm and we know exactly how we ourselves went out of this addiction and so we can see that this is a symptom of the lack of meaningful connection and not itself the cost of disruption in classrooms but if the teacher themselves is still in the addiction phase is also a user maybe a closet user right and then of course this public display of drug using classroom we really scare the teacher because the teacher is not yet out of the rehab yet so I think we need to ourselves build this healthy relationship with screens first maybe we'll follow the question is just this idea of if you look at tobacco addiction or alcohol addiction those are sort of known society addictions and there's ways to go to rehab for that as well as to cure yourself and I'm curious what your thoughts on do you think technology addiction will get to that point in society when people look at it as oh he was addicted to his phone for six weeks and now he's fine something like that I think it's roughly at a level of liquor use and driving accident rate is very similar so if you check our phones why we drive is as good or as bad as if you have drunk so there's driving under technological influence it is a thing and in many jurisdictions they're already equating the two I do think there were as a society only because smartphones are really new they're around for less than two decades so it takes time to build the societal response the US went through prohibition this whole conversation takes time but I think if it's just touchscreen then we're probably already aware of most of the dark times and the really bad ones related to getting the underage people to overspend the credit card allowances on gambling or whatever that has already been addressed or disclosure of intimate images against the person's will and so on that's criminal and it's being addressed outside of those very hard like scenarios I think generally speaking we're on the alcohol level at this pretty much the consensus around the most democracies at least May I give you for the students a little bit Sure, sure For my experience I don't think students using their phone in the classroom is only caused by addiction that could be a fact too I don't think that's the only causation that exists in the classroom let's say if a student isn't interested in the class content then they go on their phone they check out the internet you can't put their phone down and then concentrate that wouldn't work that wouldn't just shove those things into your head they're just not interested I think that interest of the students is very important when it comes to learning Yeah, but the thing is that it's also viral because a person checking their phone is going to affect people sitting next to them and that's the virality that really scares the teachers if you check your phone on your eye class I assure you no teachers would care but when they become contagious in a classroom then that becomes a problem because when we talk about addiction it's about how hard it is to put things down but when it becomes a norm like people sitting next to you are gossiping about the latest trending hashtag on Instagram it became really hard to defend against this kind of peer pressure even if you're previously not going to pick up your phone and so that's the social aspect that we also need to address especially if you can find some way to check your phone when you're just tuning out without impacting other students I believe your teachers will be very interested in that social innovation I think I would argue back and forth like you know from a formal teacher standpoint of course you watch your students achieve the most right so you wish for them to put their phone down and engage in the class development For me that I don't this sort of thing is an argument about us but I have a disagree I think the reason that I'm worried when a student picks up their phone is that one just sends a message to everyone else that it's okay to pick up their phone those ones are truly interested but it's not even that if somebody was checking their Instagram what to me is the most troubling is can you crush and games like this where it's just so easy to get that dopamine hit so easy to get that sort of this feels good this is easy I get to turn off my brain and coast for me it's just scrolling yeah and I can't blame a person because like once you do start you just kind of go and it's a little bit disrespectful for the classroom for the teachers too it's like when you're teaching you don't want to see everybody not focus on what you're teaching yeah another thing that I find the most risky about self abuse in the classroom is oftentimes like when you might think that you're disinterested or what is being spoken about doesn't apply to you you know or maybe you think you're multitasking you're listening while also looking at your screen but then because you're in full focus you're not present and so something might happen or something might be said or maybe you're less likely to want to think about what's being proposed or less likely to want to try something because you're more dismissive about it and you would rather be looking at your screen so for me that's the biggest problem because then everything else you just kind of want to write off and not engage this is so engaging in front of you yeah and because screens are kind of microaggression because you can't see anything on my screen as in a in a tablet and even if you kind of tilt it a little bit like this it's still inherently communal you're inviting people sitting next to you to see it's like taking notes on a notepad you're kind of well except in doing examinations but in normal classroom you're inviting other people to look at whatever you're doing and maybe share them all that you just taken with them I think there is a distinction between a kind of defensive use where you can't really see what I'm doing and a pro-social use which is you're free to chat with me about whatever on my tablet right now there is an argument of saying you can only use your phone like this but I'm like totally open and that's one way of doing the peer pressure against addiction or the other thing is just to always interact through a stylus on a tablet or a keyboard like this but only through a Bluetooth keyboard or something in both ways it turns it into a more pro-social gesture and the Slido interface is designed so that whatever people see on their individual phones is also projected in front of the classroom and that's another way of doing this are we going to have ideas or coming in now Slido is very good for bringing the attention towards the presentation it's really good to troll your teachers but still trolling in public is a way to remind the teacher that they can do better than this but if you simply start to scroll your phone or play Candy Crush or whatever it's not only a microaggression but it's being avoided because the teacher doesn't know what they're doing wrong and has no way of finding out but if you troll posting a comment it's super interesting it goes on the projector then the teacher knows how to adapt so students having their phones here in the middle of the table just like okay go ahead I think the idea of student needs regulation for phones kind of originating from teacher assuming that taking care of the student's future is their responsibility really? they think that they need to engage into the class they need to bring the class environment up in order to make the student achieve better in class in the future I don't know I don't understand that I think they're just doing their job I think it's bad in respect for human beings not just teachers if you say I'm going to play Candy Crush back home I'm going to drop from this class that's actually still aggressive but not avoidant because it's not telling the classmates around you that Candy Crush is really funny at least you're keeping it to yourself so I think there's still a degree of teachers as the participant in a norm around a classroom a teacher as a kind of dictator of the rules in the classroom and so far all I've been hearing from the teachers is the norm level not the rule level conversation what the thing about norms is that you can boycott that very easily you just out mean that norm you can invent your own way as long as you share a common purpose whereas for the rules there's only voice and exit if you have no voice you must exit and that's a much more clear cut and much more imbalanced and the kind of power imbalance that you just implied I've been hearing is the norm level conversation I just want to remind everyone it's a very interesting topic don't know how we thought well yeah I know it was like I thought it was a nice competition like the prepared questions I'm sort of thinking about and it's really nice to get your thoughts on it there's plenty to go around for yeah email me sometimes I'm going to check up on you I think before we leave I think hella wanted to take out your photo