 Hi, and welcome to Screen Time Reset. I'm your host, Lauren Pair. Today, I'm pleased to welcome Mark Prinski back to the show for round two of our debate. Mark is an influential thought leader in the education and technology space. He's probably best known for coining the term digital native, referring to the younger generation who never knew a world prior to the internet and digital revolution. He's been a speaker at far more conferences than I can list in over 35 countries. This year, he's spoken to the Ministry of Education in Spain and Saudi Arabia. Past notable speaking engagements included the World Economic Forum at Davos, UBS's Megatrends Conference, numerous school districts in the U.S., and the Schools of the Future Conference here in Hawaii in 2017, the Hawaii Association of Independent Schools' big annual conference. Mark has written a number of books on the topic of technology and children, including Don't Bother Me, Mom, I'm Learning, Digital Game-Based Learning, From Digital Natives to Digital Wisdom, Brain Gain, and most recently, Education to Better Their World. Mark and I agree on some of the problems of education today. However, our solutions are radically different. Mark has been a strong advocate of bringing more tech into the classroom and gamifying learning. He believes we need to go even further still in integrating children and technology to the point of creating symbiotic hybrids in order to prepare children for the 21st century. I, on the other hand, am concerned about the growing body of empirical research and anecdotal accounts that link growing screen time to an explosion of attention issues as well as anxiety, depression, and other mental health problems among youth. It seems to me we've rushed to over-integrate kids and technology during critical developmental years. I believe we must hone children's human competitive advantages in order for them to take advantage of the huge opportunity technology provides as they get older. Today, we're going to focus first on the question of brain science and addiction, and then later on the question of my theory of human competitive advantages versus Mark's theory of symbiotic hybrids as the way to prepare children for the future. And with that, welcome back, Mark. It's great to have you. Yeah, so as I said, you know, we talked a little bit last time about brain science and research, and we were supposed to get back to it, but we didn't. We got to into our talk, which I think was great. We went with the flow, but you know, I wanted to come back to that because you're saying that we should be careful with research. On the same hand, we should really be careful, I think, in exposing our kids to a very stimulative, not really a substantive, stimulative devices that are certainly affecting their brains, affecting their development without research, that it's okay. And the preliminary research we have isn't really encouraging. The World Health Organization just came out with new guidelines strongly encouraging people not to let children under one have any screen time, children under five, keep it to one hour. And I mentioned on our last show, you know, JAMA pediatrics, which is the journal of the American Medical Association, did a study that they released in the last six months or so that looked at 2,500 kids, looked at their screen exposure when they were two or three, and then noticed developmental delays by the time they were five and motor and speech. And so, you know, does this not concern you? Do you have research that is not industry-backed that contradicts it? Or I mean, how do you think about and look at these results that are coming out? I look at the kids. And I don't have, I'm not going to go research to research with you. I don't think that's the right thing to do. What I observe are kids who say to me, for example, as one girl did, I said, do you play video games? And she said, no, my parents deprived me. So the problem comes from whether we are in, in service of what a great responsibility of adults, which is the safety of our kids, whether we are, in fact, depriving them of things they could, they could benefit from. And you just don't see any value in scientific research in medical journals. I see that the scientific research in medical journals is often and very often proved wrong in future medical journals. So that while we can say this is the best research that we think we have today, tomorrow we will have different research. Shouldn't we go on the best research we have today? I mean, if what you said was true, we could never get a cancer drug passed, right? Because in the future it passed this trial, but in the future maybe it wouldn't. Well, those are big, those are big questions. And the questions are, for example, do we wait until we are absolutely sure that somebody is safe before we give them an experimental drug? Those are, those are very big societal questions. I think this is a very big societal question. Let me finish, please. The important thing is that, is that we look at our kids, pay attention to how they're developing, do it not on a blanket. Let's do this for every kid under this age or at this age. Pay attention to kids individually. And so, for example, I would be, if you asked me for my recommendations, they would be, yes, we want quality human time with kids. Kids absolutely deserve that. I would say that if they get that, that equal quality time with quality software probably will not hurt them. And it's very hard to know when you look at these studies, because people are so complex that it's very hard to isolate out the factors that say, well, these kids had screen time and therefore that caused any future issues that they may have. We try, but we don't do very well at that. I don't know if we don't do very well. I mean, this, the same, that same argument could be put against almost any, you know, research from science on kids, because there are a lot of factors. We are complex. You quoted last, it's not research, but it's an observation that you had. Kids in Hawaii, when the surf is up, they go surfing and they go, and they're late to work and their bosses don't like. They skip work, yeah. Or they skip work. Does that mean we should ban surfing? No. But that's the same or limit severely the time that they can surf. I don't think so necessarily. I think that we have to look at things in a perspective of what's good for each individual kid. But I don't think that anyone is. There are certainly no studies I'm aware of. I don't hear a lot of people observing a correlation between surfing and inability to pay attention and things like that. I mean, you know, again, it seems kind of dangerous to me to dismiss out of hand without saying, you know, you say you won't go into specifics. That sounds to me like you're just dismissing research that you don't like because it doesn't suit your narrative. I mean, can you provide me quality research that's not industry funded that shows that it's you talk about the expanded brains kids have. Do you have research showing that it expands their brains that it increases, you know? I'm not going to base. Again, research is nice. Research is something that in the 20th century was considered important to do it in a certain way. That whole field is changing enormously. And we are looking very much now at data in a very different way. And so I think I don't buy the idea that you put forth that I have research that was published in a journal that was not industry funded. And therefore, that means something. It means something, of course it does. But it doesn't necessarily give you the answers that you want that we want to have. And I think that the answers that we want to have come from looking at kids individually, from deciding what's good for a particular kid at a particular time. Well then, would you agree it's concerning if you say that? You know, we discussed last time, some kids have self-control. I believe in the Marshmallow study, they did at Stanford. However long ago, a few decades ago, it was about 30%. I looked at the statistics recently, 95% of teenagers have smartphones. So would you be in favor then of reducing the number of teenagers with smartphones by at least 2 thirds? Obviously, we're not doing it individually. What I would be in favor of is helping kids understand if they're a kid who has self-control or if they're a kid who needs help with self-control. And if they need help with self-control, they should perhaps do certain kinds of things. And their parents should perhaps do certain kinds of things with them to increase their self-control if that's what they want. And if they are a person who has a lot of self-control, then they should be going in different directions. I think that that- So when you say do certain things, what do you mean? I mean, should they really be given such a compelling, addictive device that you talk about listening to kids themselves, kids themselves, Common Sense Media did a survey. 50% said they were addicted to their devices. Common Sense Media is the most horrible group I know. So I'm not gonna even talk about that. Other than JAMA pediatrics, right? No, JAMA pediatrics can be fine when it comes to many things. But it doesn't mean- Not screen time research. That they're fine with the screen time research. It doesn't mean that that research is accurate. But we will find out these things. What I think is that it's very important for us to keep figuring out how to give kids the combination, the maximum number of kids, the combination they need of good, strong human interactions and good, helpful interactions with technology. And I think that is a combination. If a kid, for example, and there's many kids who have very poor human interactions, very poor. It's been increasing. It's been increasing dysfunctional family or whatever it is. I think many- Or they're on their screens all the time. No, I think I'm gonna say that many of those kids would be better off being raised as one kid put it to me one time. I was raised by a machine. I think machines can do a better job than dysfunctional parents and not caring parents and absent parents of raising a kid. On the other hand, we can get a lot better at making those machines better. And they are not necessarily- I mean- I don't think it's the machines. I think it's the software. Completely disagree. Not that dysfunctional parents are good, but this idea that the machines have the best interest of the kids in mind at all. Again, I cited and could cite plenty more of people in the tech industry. It's not that the machines have the best interest of the kids in mind. They sure don't. Well, sometimes they do. It's that the machine doesn't get angry. The machine lets you do things. The machine interacts with you in ways that are very pleasant. And those things- Not always. That's not true. Well, I don't know a lot of examples other than when a machine is used to do something that a human would do, like bullying, that's clearly unpleasant and unpleasant. Yeah, there is an issue of kids watching YouTube videos and there was really disturbing content inserted. Like lots of things can happen and addiction. Do you not buy addiction then, any of the research that looks at brain scans and sees sort of similar patterns? The brain scans I don't buy very much because we are so early. Why not? As one brain scientist put it to me not too long ago, it is that those scans that we see, the fMRI scans are an incredibly primitive tool that really doesn't give us the kinds of information that we need. It's the only tool we have now so people spend a lot of time showing off those pictures. I do think it gives some valuable, I mean, there are very clear patterns in the brains of addicts, for example. So that is valuable information for seeing how addictions affect certain parts of the brain, no? That may be true, but the interesting thing about addiction that we don't hear a lot about is that it affects some people a lot more than others. There is something called an addictive personality and if we want to be smart, we would separate out the people who have addictive personalities and be very, very careful with the things that we give them that might cause them to become addictive. There is an issue. There's a great book I like called Irresistible which is by Adam Alter, who's an NYU marketing guy and he talks about how, uh-huh, yeah, he studies marketing. Behavioral addictions are completely on the rise because they've gotten so good at hitting our reward systems and that's absolutely true. They don't really, it's new in our evolutionary ability and there are, you know, on this issue, there are just so many doctors that have written books that are concerning and, you know, they're concerned about a doctor, Victoria Dunkley, Richard Freed, Andrew Doan, Jane Healy, Nicholas Cardaris and I don't, Robert Lustig, I don't see them. I don't agree with them at all and I think there are many, many other doctors who don't agree with them at all. I think that they're used to be a doctor. Which doctors don't agree with them? Why aren't they writing books? No, I'm not gonna, I'm not naming names here and I'm not going to deal with, no. If they're not willing to be public about their opinions, I think that's a real thing to question. I'm very sorry, but the fact that you can name a certain amount of studies and I'm not, doesn't make you right. In fact, I think that you're very misguided in what you're saying here and you're picking the evidence. The fact that you just dismissed the studies without any actual arguments against them other than you don't trust studies I think is pretty concerning but we're gonna have to leave it here. We're gonna go to the break because I know you also really wanted to talk even more about the symbiotic hybrid versus my human competitive advantage theory. So we could argue about this forever, debate this forever. We'll go to the break, come back and switch focuses to that piece of the talk. Hey, loha, my name is Andrew Lanning. I'm the host of Security Matters Hawaii airing every Wednesday here on Think Tech Hawaii live from the studios. I'll bring you guests. I'll bring you information about the things in security that matter to keeping you safe, your coworkers safe, your family safe, to keep our community safe. We wanna teach you about those things in our industry that may be a little outside of your experience. So please join me because Security Matters, aloha. Hi, Mabuhay. My name is Amy Ortega Anderson inviting you to join us every Tuesday here on Pinoy Power Hawaii with Think Tech Hawaii. We come to your home at 12 noon every Tuesday. We invite you to listen, watch for our mission of empowerment. We aim to enrich, enlighten, educate, entertain and we hope to empower. Again, maraming, salamat po, Mabuhay and aloha. Welcome back. So next we wanted to talk about, where did Mark go? There he is. Okay, cool. Scared me for a second there. So now we wanted to talk a little bit about this competing theories we have. I believe in honing children's human competitive advantages. I think that will set them up for success in the future. And Mark believes that further integrating children with kids into what he calls symbiotic hybrids which doesn't actually mean implants, at least not yet. But just that integration of children even more deeply is what will set them up for success. So I will hand it over to you, Mark, to talk a little bit about your theory and your thoughts on mine. Well, let me talk, I will talk in a second about where things are going, but let me just say that if you are a parent watching this kind of a show and you're concerned about your kid as you should be, my advice to you is to watch your kid very carefully and to try to understand what they're doing and why they're doing it, to have discussions with them, not to say that one thing is good and one thing is blanket bad, but to try to have the kinds of conversations with your kid, even when they're very small, that will help them grow and understand. And those conversations are about the kinds of technology that they're using as well. I mean, I agree that parents should be talking to their kids a lot about these topics and media use and how to use it well and reflecting on their usage. But you believe that integrating children more deeply to create symbiotic hybrids is what's going to prepare children to excel in the future, right? Can you tell us a little bit about that? I will be happy to. I think that it's not that we have to do it. I think that it's happening without us and that we ought to recognize it and understand that a kid in the future, for me, it's like clothing. Nobody goes outside into the public without clothing. Clothing is a requirement. Clothing is a technology, of course, but it's a required technology that over time has been understood to facilitate human interactions. And if you go naked into a public situation, you're not gonna be very welcome. And I think that's where technology is headed. It isn't there right now, but I think it is. And I think the kinds of actions that we will have and the kinds of affordances that we will have as people will be partially very dependent on our technology and partially very dependent on us. So something like compassion. We don't expect that to come from technology, but reading and writing and research and translation, those are things that are moving quickly as to be the technology parts of us. Yes, although I would argue it's hurting not, I mean, again, I know you don't like research but UCLA researchers had kids, they were using tech, they sent them off to a five day nature camp with no tech and they had a control group. And then they measured their empathy before and after the five days and the kids that were off at the nature camp, they had significantly better empathy scores. They could read people better, perhaps because they weren't looking at their devices or were actually like looking people in the eye. And I agree with you that it is happening already, this integration of children and technology. It's not without us, we give the kids the devices. So we are a huge piece of how that's happening, but it is absolutely happening. And what I question is whether that's the best for kids or you seem to think it's improving their socializing skills and I don't agree. What I am saying is that if we want empathy, if we want ethics, if we want to have dreaming and imagination from kids, then we need to encourage that and we need to spend time on those kids. And part of that can be taking them out to nature. But if we spend all the time that we have kids telling them they should be reading and writing and learning languages and doing the kinds of things we used to do in the past, then they are learning machine skills. And it's like the book, we want a book. They are learning machine skills? I like the, yes, they're learning machine skills. And I like the book that Jiang, the Yang Zhao reading, the Yang Zhao put out, he said, never send a human to do a Michigan's job. So for example, have you spent any time with Google Books? No. Google Books, it's called Talk to Books. If you have a question about something that happened, like what is, what do various people think about anything you want, about the topic we're talking about, you can add Google Books and it will read and search 150,000 books in half a second and it will give you all the parts of that. The problem is that very few kids are using it for that. I see kids, I do go to schools and work on, and they're like before class, they're like all playing video games, not perusing Google Books. Yes, but we both see the same problem. Yeah. But your solution is to say less screen time. Right. My solution is to say better screen time. My solution, it's the same way. You would find sophisticated ways to keep them off games. How would you keep them off the games? Hang on, I'm gonna ask you a question here. Would you say because a lot of human interaction and we can debate the percentage is really bad for kids, people, kids are yelled at, kids are abused, kids are all this stuff, that we should ban human interaction with kids? Of course not. What we should do is improve human interaction with kids. But you're still not asking how. I see all the kids on their video games and you haven't told me how. You're not for taking smartphones away. I'm for limiting their access to devices. That's nothing. But seriously limiting it. So if you're not going to do that, what are you gonna do? And I don't love your, I mean not that all parents are perfect, but you seem to constantly be painting this picture as like mean abusive parents in this benevolent computer. Like parents get frustrated, humans are not perfect. Most parents care deeply about their kids and are trying their best and slip up, but most are not, the majority of parents are not abusive ogres, you know? Well, again, we could talk about that because it's not clear how many are or we are. We all have an ideal that we're all wonderful, but talk to kids. They're not happy with a lot of the adults in their lives. And mostly what they say about those adults is I'm not trusted, I'm disrespected, I'm not allowed to do what I think is best for me. But that's the idea of kids. Kids are under parents watch because they don't have developed brains. They don't make the best decisions. And of course kids always think they should have more agency, more respect, more control over all of their lives. This goes back to like our talk about ice cream. They think they should be able to have ice cream every day for dinner, but like they should not necessarily, right? Well, no, that's a very interesting perspective because other than keeping our kids safe, if we know something is gonna really hurt them, if they're gonna go play out in traffic or they're gonna do this, that's our responsibility to keep them safe. After that, it's really questionable what our responsibilities are. You don't think parents have any responsibility for healthy nutrition, for example? I think that the- For bed times? That's the idea of healthy nutrition, of bed times all are very, very kid-dependent. Yeah, I mean, from what I've read and talked to teachers, you don't have kids though. No, I don't have kids. Yeah, but like that doesn't, you know, you said your son doesn't like school and loves video games. So from the people I've talked to, kids, especially as they're younger, they need routine. They need constraints. They do well with boundaries. It's not that they don't push up against it, but they crave stability and routine. It's healthy for them, even if they sometimes push back against it. I think that's one of the reasons, you know, humans have like the longest time with their parents of any mammal. There's a reason for that. It takes a long time to develop the skills that we need to be successful in society. Yeah, I think a lot of things are changing. And so for example, if you were to look at, you know, we can put human development and maybe I think that's changing as well and I know many, I knew a student of Piaget's who was very, thought it was very important to reevaluate, for example, what he thought in view of modern times. What's the student? What are their prominent developmental scientists that are proposing and it's so cool, are they? At this moment, I don't remember her name. She died recently, but I will look it up and get back to you with that. But the thing that I think that most people understand is that in terms of their intellectual development, kids today are hugely more intellectually developed. They can do things, they can find things, they know things. A lot of people do not agree with that. There are a lot of complaints that they're not as good problem solvers. They're lacking common sense in how to do things. They don't have communication skills like written or verbal like they used to. I think that from the employers I've been talking to, that's not, I think a small set of kids, that could be true, but for the overall average, that's not, I don't think that that's accurate. I disagree with you and I also think that it's very important not to talk about averages. Averages is something that we used to talk about when we didn't have enough information on individuals. And the big word that you use there that really bothers me is like they used to. I don't think that the communication skills of the future are gonna be the same communication skills of the past. I don't think that the kinds of intellectual skills of the future when kids are enhanced will be the same intellectual skills. You can say that, but kids seem bothered by something like 44% of kids. I think this is from Pew, not common sense. You might be happy to know, are bothered that their friends are so obsessed with their phones when they're hanging out. So they're of this new digital native age. They still like that you're paying attention to me, not your phone, that personal connection. We took millennia and millennia and millennia to evolve. I don't think that just like that, suddenly eye contact, which we've taken so long to evolve into is like not gonna be important. And maybe this is why kids are more depressed or feel less connected is cause they let go of those things, but they're so wired into us to need it for fulfilling relationships. No, well, I don't see it that way. I don't see it that way at all. And I see that what is coming, and we're very much in a transition period. We don't know how to do this connection stuff and this technology stuff well. That's what Facebook is doing. That's why they keep having another edition and another edition, another edition. We tried this, it didn't seem to work really well. We'll try something. We'll try something new and eventually we'll get there. But if you look at, if I look at where we're going, you don't see it the same way. But if I look at where we're going, I see we have many more affordances and then we ever did in the past for communication. I think that in some, whenever I take my kid to meet an old person, I say, look him in the eye. But I certainly don't tell him what to do with his peers and his communications with his peers will be very different. And my suspicion is that despite millions of years of evolution that in 50 years, looking people in the eye is gonna be considered something that people used to do like dancing the minuet. I mean, I completely disagree with that. I don't think that biology and millions of years of evolution disappears like that. And I also really wonder that that lack of eye contact, if that's behind partially why kids are feeling lonely or why they aren't feeling like their friendships are as secure or deep as they used to be. And a lot of these other issues that we're seeing them deal with. Unfortunately, we're out of time again. We never have enough time. But it was great to have you on. And I would love to hear what you, the audience, think about, you know, what do you agree with? Who's right? Is the answer somewhere in the middle? Would love your questions, comments and opinions below or you can email them to screentimeresetatgmail.com. Thanks so much for coming back, Mark. I wish we had more time. I will close with my friend, Eshter Wojcicki's new motto trick. Trust, respect, independence, cooperation and collaboration and kindness. And if you really do those five things, you will have good luck with your kids. Something we can agree on. Good. This is Lauren Pear signing off for screentime reset.