Justin Brewer, Welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for having me.

I haven't done podcasts for a while, so this is fun cool.

The last time we met was at the Happiness Conference.

You've just reminded me where you not only introduced me because you were a MC, but you spoke at it as well, which you've just said you wouldn't recommend because you're just juggling different balls.

What did you speak about?

Tell our listeners what you spoke about.

I've spoken at that a couple of times.

I think I actually did something quite different, which was an eyes closed process.

So it actually gave the.

Presentation asking people to close their eyes and just consider how their brains work and how much information we actually consume in a day.

So rather than lots of slides and people who are desperate to you know, capture it all taking photos of the slides, actually ask people to close their eyes and just allow their mind to sort of go back to the nineties.

Almost interesting.

How did you find when you ask people to close their eyes?

And I know it's it's probably hard at the Happiness Conference because we're on a big stick.

Could you see people and could you see if they were closing their eyes or.

Not even look to be honest.

And did you have your eyes closed in your presentices re reading it?

Because it's basically a way to cheat a bit too, when you want to do something different and you haven't memorized your entire keen.

Yeah, and because mine changed all the time.

I actually am terrible at memorizing things because there's so many bits of information in my head about all of these different topics.

But I always invite people to close their eyes.

I know for some people that's not particularly safe.

But also at something like happiness and its causes, which ultimately is run by you know, the Vajoyana Institute, and it's full of two are probably very very good at meditating and being mindful processes.

Yeah, most people kind of take that opportunity, and I guess I also just don't give them anything to look at.

So whether or not you're staring at this, you know, at me being a dot on the stage, or you know the kind of emptiness behind me, you are not you know, smashing that visual cortex full of more information.

That often is kind of I mean a lot of what I talk about is how much information we're consuming and what impact that's having on ultimately a really ancient operating system.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And we will dive into the reason I asked you if you could see the audience because when I do corporate talks, not all of them, but in some of them, I ask people to close their eyes and go to and there are I would say just roughly fifteen to twenty percent of people.

Who don't close their eyes.

And it's really quite interesting, right that they just don't feel comfortable with their eyes shut.

But anyway, we're not going to dive into the psychology on this.

So you are a psychologist, but you interesting.

What caught my eye is you are interested in cyber psychology, which is something that is I think interesting for all of us, and particularly now with the social media ban with the under sixteens.

I'm just going to introduce this actually because I want to read just an article that I have just been reading, right, social media use trajectories and cognitive performance in adolescents.

Right, So they looked at six and a half thousand adolescents at age nine to thirteen years.

Some of them had very low social media use, which was half an hour day or less, and then some of them had low but in increasing social media use, which sort of increased from the age of nine at about half an our day up to over and r at the age of thirteen.

And then they had the third group of high social media use, which increased from about the age of nine about half an our day or right up to more than three hours at the age of twelve and thirteen.

And they looked at aspects of cognitive performance and a number of different validated cognitive performance tests, and you will not be surprised to hear that there were.

Low, even low.

Levels of early adolescent social media exposure were linked to poorer cognitive performance.

And this paper suggested this massage suggest support for stricter age restrictions, right.

Can I point out though, that already under thirteen should not be on social media?

Social media really, you know.

Like if we had have just started by banning it for under thirteens, which is really what the terms of service already say.

We know that those.

Little brains, you know, you're ultimately watching lots of TV really really quickly.

There's not a lot of creativity that goes into that.

It's just mindless scrolling and what I would call often digital dunk food.

If we haven't curated to make sure that some of what we watch might be actually you know, beneficial.

Yeah, yeah, you can get into that, but.

Yeah, yeah, no, no, no, we will, we will definitely unpack it.

But I just wanted to bring this right up front.

Now, you also talk about digital nutrition.

You know that that's your big thing.

So how did that start?

How did you, as a psychologist go okay, this is an area that I'm going to start specializing in.

Yeah, it all started when I was a high school teacher.

So I was teaching at a selective boys' school in Sydney and I got into the New South Wales Department of Ed's School Counselor Retraining program.

And so as I was becoming a psychologist and had to do my honors thesis, I was like, what should I study?

What can I research?

And the principle said to me, you should work out what's going on with boys and games.

It was two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine, and we were handing out laptops to every kid in year nine across Australia when we hadn't really taught teachers how to teach with technology.

We were just crossing our fingers and hoping that they'd be engaged, and they were because they were hacking the flyward wall on those laptops to play all sorts of games.

So that's how I got into it in yeah, two thousand and nine when I wrote that thesis.

Then and then I just was like a dog with a bone, because I was realizing, as a thirty two year old who'd gotten a smartphone, that this was having a really big impact on me, that my own habits and social media use were getting a bit wobbly.

And I had like this, you know, apparently fully developed brain.

So I started looking to digital detoxing, and that actually sounded to me like a real problem, like yoyo dieting and all of the culture stuff that was like really gross at the time, and I guess still is.

And then I thought, well, what if we actually flipped this and started thinking about how can what we do with technology nurture us so that we can be well and be connected rather than this binary notion of one is good and one is bad, and pofline is better and outdoor is better and all of these sorts of things, because technology is so embedded in our lives, and that really doubled down obviously in COVID and in lockdowns where quite frankly, thank goodness we had that technology, so we didn't absolutely go about shit crazy, I mean to what you know further because of what happened there, So we obviously are then paying for that.

And with the young people who have.

Come through, who really were products of those lockdowns and their technology, you's got really really ingrained again because no one had stopped to teach media and digital literacy or digital wellbeing or any of really the skills that we need to know how to navigate this, you know, colonization of digital technologies into our life.

And so let's talk about overall digital stuff, right, so not just the social media, but.

The overall exposure to digital because.

We're nice seeing and you will see it, and I see it a lot.

You're writ in restaurants and there's families there, and the little kid who's one year old, maybe not even has got an iPad and it's the a iPad B a B sitter.

What are the pros and cons of that?

Short term and long term?

Yeah, And I think that's a really important kind of distinction.

Is the short term is we get to go and have a nice dinner and our kid isn't winging and wanting to run around or play or all of those things.

You might have noticed that young children are not actually designed to be in cafes and restaurants, And the cafes and restaurants are just something I didn't do when I was growing up.

You maybe went to the Chinese for a special meal once in a while, but you're on your best behavior, and I think you know again, there's this sense of we want to kind of live a particular life, and we expect kids to be almost seen and not heard, like my grandfather would say to me, rather than they're not.

Designed for that.

And I literally will only go to a restaurant that my eight year old can run around that and a lot of the pubs and clubs actually have worked out that there's a really big.

Market in making sure that their kid friendly, because we really do.

I'm in the convenience even when you talk to parents about I have a whole room in my house dedicated to craft and it's messy.

It drives me crazy.

An iPad is really neat and tidy and containable.

But obviously the long term consequences, especially for little ones, is language acquisition.

So when you're actually sticking something in between that call and response of how we learn to have a conversation.

We actually see some research that says kids actually end up with you know, a thousand words less by the time they go to preschool because we're stickingless.

Yeah, because they're still you know, like even if they're not on the iPad, even if we are interrupting that because you're so cute, go do that thing again, or do it again for mummy, and we're interrupting, and we're sending a really big signal that you know, the phone, not my hand obviously is the phone in this case, I don't have my phone with me, you know, is something to be negotiated.

And it's like a still face experiment sometimes if you've seen that before, if you know, a parent goes still face, the baby doesn't know what to do because we're seeking that biofeedback and nodding.

And that's an interesting I remember and seeing some research around and particularly toddlers in prams, and what we noticed in my wife combents all the time is that you will see parents are walking with their little toddlers and a pram and the parents are on their pilms and that's an issue because the little bob in there wants to see mom or Dad's fiercial expressions, and when they're just there, they can't see them.

That's a problem, isn't it.

Absolutely Yeah.

Similarly, being in a front facing pram and rather than looking at the world and developing, you know, especially if you're outside developing that you know, your eyes literally the way that the eye wires up.

You've got kids with content sitting there, smashing their brains full of really quick content.

So the cadence of the you know, what happens in an episode of Poor Patrol, you know, eight minutes is much more than used to happen in an episode of Shera or The Smurfs or whatever we were watching.

So even that that, you know, the pace of what kids are consuming and the like, the dramatic tension that needs to be in things is really part of that problem as well.

So rather than you know, observing your environment and spotting the bird and all of those things, kids are you know, consuming, consuming, consuming.

Which is much more appealing to the brain.

All of that fast, right, and then they're not kicking in the environment, which I don't think it's just just around kids like, if you look at movies today, I just can't watch this just there's so much noise and action and it's just an assault on the senses.

And then you know, we've got our kids.

And we want to watch some all movies and ten and it's in there, gone, this is boring as much.

Yes, yeah, my daughter just watched and she's like, when's this going to start?

Nothing's happening, and I said, yeah, that's kind of the point though, right, And there's formulas to that, like they're literally to get a show made in Hollywood or for Netflix, and you know all these big things you have to have like twenty eight dramatic tension points in a twenty four minute episode, like a right, there are there's a I can't remember exactly what the formula is, but literally and you know the cliffhangers, and it's more than just the cliffhangers, and you've.

Got many more stories that are happening within that.

Yeah, it's not the same as if even if you go back and you watch mad Men.

I really recommend that for a kind of really low cadence pre phone show, to watch that series, which was probably made about between fifteen and twenty years ago now is a really interesting one to compare to some of this you know, high action, dramatic tension stuff that comes out now.

Yeah, I think of one of my favorite movies, The Deer Hunter, which two three hours long and takes like an r to build up.

Like, there's just no way that my kids would sit in front of the freaking Deer Hunter to start to get hooked into the to the story.

But so let's let's let's let's talk about.

What what are some of the good things that can come from digital stuff before we completely slam it, right, I think lots of people are increasingly aware of the negatives, But what are some of the advantage whether it's social media, whether it's video games, general TV, what are some of the useful things?

Yeah, I think the common things that the people use that can be really useful is YouTube.

And the inclusion of YouTube in that social media band was really quite controversial for a number of reasons, one of which is that when you log in and you kind of can train it, you can look at educational content.

Right, There's lots of places that have produced really great how to right, and when the Prime Minister says go learn an instrument, many kids would go to YouTube to learn those things, you know, go learn new sport, Well, you go and learn through that, unless, of course you have the resources to have one hundred dollars an hour piano lesson or whatever and such.

Just a quick quick point on not just so my little gay Oscar is starting to play golf, right, I took him to have one lesson, but then he's been watching stuff on TikTok about improving golf, which brings up another point which we will get into.

Liot that he's fifteen.

All of his friends are fifteen.

He says he does not know one of them that has not.

Circumnavigated the social media band to this point.

Now that may be because they're fifteen, but just to underscore the point that there are some benefits, particularly some of the platforms in terms of the education.

Absolutely right, and for many people.

You have your tiktoks on TikTok, but you've shared it out to YouTube shorts and it's across different platforms, so you know, and there's huge amounts of that, some of which we know with mental health.

Is completely wrong.

And we've got a lot of people sharing data information but it goes like wildfire and Again, something that I was reading yesterday talked about how the TikTok algorithm actually amplifies mental health content.

Then they know that that will go like wildfire.

The other thing to say about that, though, too, is that the algorithm in the West is very different to in China.

So in China TikTok promotes all of the educational, you know, content there, and they've got moods to make sure that anyone who is influencing on in online spaces actually have doctorates in the topic area they're speaking on wow.

So they're actually.

So interesting because and I reckon part of it is the Chinese going right, we want we want to control what our population sees because we want our population to be smart and short.

And you know what, all this bad ship we can fleck over to the guys.

At the West because it's you know, what we would call a weapon of mass distraction.

While we're distracted.

And dumbing down and confused by a lot of the content there, we're not thinking critically and creatively, we're not connecting with one another.

We're actually, you know, Australia today is at risk of super division because we're not actually coming together and sitting you know, holding space with one another, really looking eyed eye.

We're you know, scrolling through and doing you know what we'd call the digital disinhibition effect.

We're not actually face to face with one another and our humanity a lot of the time.

So digital disinhibition is basically by spending time in a digital device.

It's the opportunity cost of that that we are not having fierce to fierce interactions which are much richer.

And Yeah, and we say and do things that we wouldn't say if we were standing face to face looking at another human.

We forget that.

Well, we think we're anonymous sometimes and certainly there are some platforms where anonymity is breed some of the most gross stuff that happens.

But also we think that we're above the law when it comes to what we say in those online spaces when and again in Australia, you're often not because we have an Online Safety Act which prevents us from being abused in online spaces.

Yeah, and I remember seeing stuff about about bullies online bullies that when they are actually then brought fierce to fierce with the victim and told of the impact that it has, they're kind of like all shit, right, because you don't see the real human you don't.

You know, if you're seeing something really nasty to someone fierce, fierce, you see the impact, right Number one, you're not likely less likely to do it.

But then it's the impact, just a little diversion because we want to combust it.

But I want to do the version.

Because we talk about China, there are bad actors in terms of social media, reading some really interesting stuff about I don't know if you saw it about a lot of the MAGA influencers in the United States were actually being paid by Russian bad actors to actually produce their content and essentially and when I heard, I'm like.

Okay, now that makes so much sense.

Is that that the whether it's Iran or whether it's Russia, they're actually using social media to try to try to destroy the social fabric and democracy and.

It's breaking working beautifully, isn't it.

Yeah.

I mean it's a propaganda machine.

Yeah.

And if you have.

The money and the influence, surprise, surprise, within the capitalist society, then you're going to have that influence.

And we've seen pushback.

I guess.

I guess in very small media outlets across Australia.

That I'm I'm kind of aware of.

That breaks some incredible stories and are growing a lot of traction because we often can't necessarily trust the media to.

Just do good journalism anymore.

Yeah, yeah, I look like that.

That that's under the umbrella of psychological warfare and being ex military.

I know that it is.

It's an increasingly big part of warfare and it's very, very effective.

But anyway, that was a little aside, So let's focus on the social media bank for the under sixteens of Australia, right, So first of all, so there's lots of Australians who listeners, but there's lots of overseas people.

So talk us through from your perspective, because I'm sure you probably get your finger on your pulse pulse a bit more than me.

How is it working?

Do you think it was a good idea?

Do you think sixteen, sorry, sixteen is the right age.

Do you think it's a good idea?

Has it been well implemented?

What does the future look like?

All of that.

Okay, I'll try and be as brief as possible, so.

You don't have to be brief, be comprehensive.

You know, it's quite complex and so there's many facets to it.

Do I believe that young people need, and in fact do all of us need, protection from big tech and the way that technology is influencing us, both just to scroll mindlessly and be sedentary and all the impacts of that, but also the toxic algorithm and the fact that we don't have a lot of control over that.

Absolutely, I think we need to do something.

What we've done, though, is a.

Very poor.

Attempt at what could have been a lot better if we had have taken more time.

And the genesis of.

This, very briefly was news corp Ran and let Them Be Kids campaign, as well as a radio dude called Whipper and his little crew of many men under the banner of thirty six months also had a campaign that wanted to raise the age of social media access to sixteen.

They presented lots and lots of signatures and asked the Prime Minister live on air would you back this?

And he went okay, And then we suddenly had introduction of legislation which was debated and brought into law within nine days.

Wow.

When we stopped and we said, could we please have a committee that like really looks at this, they were given twenty four hours for submissions, and fifteen thousand submissions were.

Made chiump and Jehovah.

The committee was given half a day you are kidding me, no, and we're expected to then that was on a Friday, I think, and then we were expected to come back on the Monday, and then on the twenty eighth of November.

Literally within nine days, this legislation came through without a key component, which was the digital duty of care.

Now, this was the component that says, well, how I would describe it actually is.

This is the difference between saying what we ended up with was ten social media platforms not being allowed is kind of like saying to under sixteen year olds, you're not allowed to drive in these ten cars, right right, you can't be in those cars.

Those parts the dangerous, rather than.

These seat belts and safety features must be in every platform that are available for everyone.

That's the digital duty of care.

That's saying safety by design, designing for safety in mind must happen.

And if you have these particular features, you know that, you know you can go and look in the legislation exactly what they are to do with the algorithm and et cetera, et cetera.

Then that shouldn't be available.

So we unfortunately had I believe it was the Liberal party.

Go no, we don't want that digital duty of care in there.

Let's just stick with this part of the legislation, which saw the ten at the moment ten social media platforms being on the age restricted list.

That doesn't include platforms such as Discord, which is very very popular with young people and operates.

In my mind, it's very similar to social media.

It's a great platform.

I use it myself, and well.

Now I become much more popular because of this.

Time Yeah, and Roadblocks, which is sort of like imagine a virtual time zone where you go in and there's four million different gaming experiences that you can choose, which is sort of well known for having predatory I've heard of that they have proactively started to age as sure, so if you get an account at the moment, they will check your age and then put you into certain parts of Roadblocks, so you're only communicating with other kids your age.

And there are very.

Good parental controls on pretty much all of these, but Roadblocks have good parental controls.

It's just that many parents don't, unfortunately, spend the time to understand.

What those controls are, so you know.

Without this legislation, my suggestion was always wait until your kids are thirteen to get on social media and know how to use it and what it does and how to put the controls in place.

That would have been, like, we could have done really great work if we had have focused.

On that instead.

I think what is happening is parents go, it's not my problem, you need to be off that, and they're not because the age verification technology isn't working.

As well as we would like it.

And we knew that because there were many trials that came out and said, oh yeah, it kind of works eighty five percent of the time.

And there's all of these other new platforms that are popping up that kids are using.

So my daughter's nine year old friend, she still has access to TikTok, but she's also on one of the newer platforms that have risen up in the chart, and she was telling me this morning, Oh, it's okay because it's much more positive.

Right, this is.

A nine year old, Yeah.

You know safe it is for her to be on this other social media platform to watch videos.

So that's very small sample size, but you know it will It will be interesting to see what the long term effects are.

Yeah, so do you think that that maybe they've just gone right blanket bamd.

We want to get something done, we want to be first in the world, and then they're going to look at it and judge it and bring that whatever that panel was that you were talking about of experts to go.

Okay, n how do we actually refine it?

Yeah, I'm sure you hope and I hope that that's the case.

Do you think that's going to be the case?

I would have loved it to be the case.

And there is a really awesome expert advisory that has been put together.

However, when it came to voting to make sure that any rickons made from that panel were implemented, No, that was voted.

Out voted I by by.

A range of people I can't remember exactly.

That was relatively recent A legra spender, the Wentworth MP had pushed to make sure that that advisory, those recommendations were like mandated, like if we say you should do this, you should do it.

No, that wasn't actually then part of the legislation.

Wouldn't it be interesting to see to just know how many lobbyists are on the other side looking.

Yeah, I would really recommend folks check out Cam Wilson from Kriik's reporting on this.

Craik is an excellent independent, sort of progressive publication and he has written over forty four thousand words on the social media ban and has exposed the folks from thirty six months as basically taking sponsorship when they were to the un And you would have heard about the Anaka Wells, the Communications Minister spending one hundred thousand dollars on flights to New York to go and scrough how good the ban is before the band had started.

They actually then were looking at you know, you could do a sponsor, provide sponsorship for one hundred and fifty grand to be a part of that.

So you know, some.

People would say, oh, well, to stop these billion dollars tech companies, and that's just.

What you have to do.

I would say, that's some really interesting lobbying that's happening by you know, ultimately an organization that makes TV commercials.

So one of the guys it works for a production company who also makes ads for the gambling industry.

So you know, we've been waiting four years for gambling ads to be banned in social media and online.

Spaces that we Oh, no, that takes time.

You can't rush things.

You've got to get the legislation right.

But a blanket ban with really bad features nine days, done and dusted, won't you think about the kids?

So you can probably hear that I'm really cynical, and I guess the reason for that is that there's so much research that said this probably isn't going to work.

We do that.

Could we do this instead?

That, you know, and that's a longer slower path, that is, you know, lack with any good work.

Is multifactorial and complex, but would actually make a longer term difference and have participatory approaches because what happens now, like kids are booted off and then they come back in maybe with a slightly more developed prefrontal cortex, but actually with no other training wheels or driving.

Skills for these digital spaces.

Yeah, and you know, just because now you're sixteen and you're old good and you can access anything, yeah, it doesn't mean that it's going to be good.

That then brings me to the whole idea of the rule of parents in all of this, because I know I've got a nineteen year old girl and a fifteen year old boy, and I know from conversations with them over the years that there's a number of their friends who not only is their social media completely unrestricted, their parents have no idea how much time they're spending on screens, that they have phones in the room at night, that they have computers in their room at night.

And I know that that quite a lot of these kids are up late on social media and boys gaming, and it's impacting on their sleep, which impacts the cognitive function, which impacts.

A whole heap of shit and parents.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean that it's just the excuse me, the sleep.

Alone, and the knock on effects of that on behavior, on likelihood of exercising the next day, and through the impacts on leptin, on far behaviors, through the impacts on grelling, on stress, on all of this stuff.

No effect, right, That's where I start.

I start when kids come to me, or really really any client comes to me, but often it's the kids with the social media or the gaming addiction.

We fix their sleep first, protect sleep at all cost because of that cascade effects.

I talk about the mood, metabolism, and memory.

That's ah.

Nice.

I like those three things because look, and I'm happy to be hardcore on this.

If you're a parent and you do not know and monitor and regulate your kid's phone use first and foremost, but also social media, you're being a shit parent.

Yeah.

It's a tricky one, right, because we talk about kids as digital natives.

And they you know, oh, they just grew up with it and they know what to do.

No, they're not.

They're digital orphans.

They're growing up without a generation of you know, older people, trusted adults, parents who know some of the risks and are willing to actually do the tough work around parenting, which is to set limits, which is to set a good example.

And often you know, parents are doing their best.

I would like to generally say, but we're also I think asleep at the wheel a lot of the time because we haven't asked the right questions.

Now, when I used to be a teacher, I taught commerce, and the first lesson in commerce is caveat emptal let the buyer beware.

And I think as consumers we are not aware enough of what we're doing.

And you know, for a variety of reasons that many parents are really disregulated themselves.

I was going to say, you're saying that that the parents are doing the best.

I think some parents are doing the best.

Some of them are as addicted to the digital smack, as I would call it digital heroine, and some of them are spending so much time on their own digit heroin that they are either don't have the time or the inclination to regulate their kids stuff.

Absolutely right, And I think it is a massive coping strategy maladaptive for a lot of people.

And it's sometimes.

Really hard then to sort that digital candy from the digital kale, because it's all.

In one body.

Yeah, so you know, like your your email and even being kind of addicted to email and getting that secondary gain from I've got to reply to this, and I've got to keep my inbox manageable or zero or whatever, and that kind of constant, always on urgency principle of being pulled into things, I then think sets up neural pathways even if you're not mindlessly scrolling.

For you know, I'm getting all these ads for cellulite creams that are magically gonna you know, and like how many people would just buy into that and then get into that zone of like seeking hoping for that kind.

Of thing versus the literacy to go.

I know that that's total bullshit that they like cellulite.

Doesn't nothing get rid of cellulite really even being skinny, you know?

Anyway, That really is those differences of like I went on just to catch up with that one person, then I got sucked into these ads.

Then I went to kind of respond to this other thing over here about the netball oranges or you know, a million parent WhatsApp groups, and then I found myself over there.

And it's really really hard.

To stay on task when if you haven't managed your notifications, if you're not really clear on intention and purpose, if you've never learned any of these executive functioning kind of skills that we usually only teach to kids who have ADHD, Like executive function skills I think are something that everyone needs lessons in.

I think we are having declines in executive function because of the immediacy and all the little green hits.

And the concerning thing, particularly from a neural development stance, is that these young developing Briands are getting completely hijacked and we are changing the trajectory of Brian development in kids, and we're sleepwalking right into this shit.

Don't we including our use of educational technology as well.

So I think we have to really pull that out, the idea that just because it's for learning doesn't mean that suddenly you're sitting at your desk with your shoulders back and you're making sure that you're looking at something in the long distance so that you're not you know, at myopia.

All of our tech use really needs to be examined.

We need to examine whether or not those teachers who back in two thousand and nine who never got the lessons, actually you're getting the lessons now.

Victoria actually considering bringing in legislation that says that teachers can only use screens for ninety minutes of the school day.

I I think that it would be a wonderful thing because to your point, So my fifteen year old, who I've got a really open relationship, he tells me that lots of his meutes when the teacher is.

Teaching, they're on games.

They they know how to hack the system, and they're playing games in class.

Yeah, constantly.

Even if they're not doing that, they can be in Google classroom on a Google doc, messaging one another.

Right, Like I used to pass notes.

You can pass notes and you look like you're doing work.

A client who's written a forty three thousand word outline that's just the outline for her fan fiction projects while looking like she was doing work at school.

So you know, where there's a there's a way.

And what I like to examine is not screen time like we're counting digital calories, but what's actually in the digital diet, because is there enough protein and play?

Is there enough creativity?

Is there enough you know?

And again even ninety minutes for teachers to be using that I want to work praise whether or not you're using educational technology that's actually not gamified and designed with all of those hijacked principles in mind, just because we're so desperate for engagement and we're competing with short form media and influencers who are masters of summing up information in quick, easy bites, and that's, you know, I think something that we need to keep our eye on.

The prize around ed tech as well, and that move, you know, we all had to bring our own device and now we're moving back away from that.

So yeah, there's so much to consider here that again we sort of get allured by the the promise of technology, but for many of us, it just makes the world more complicated, yeah.

And besier.

So let's start about some advice for individuals who are just listening tests for themselves, but also for parents for kids.

So what are they?

What are the building blocks of good digital nutrition?

What does that look like?

So I'm just in the process of finalizing my updated version of a technology use agreement.

It sounds really boring and it's really hard to come up with the jazzy name for it.

It just does what it says in the box.

It's a way to co design your family's tech use agreement.

I think we need to have explicit conversations about the role that technology plays in our life when it is welcomed and when it is shut down.

And this is not something I guess you know that is very sexy or very cool, and parents often want to be the cool parents, Like you actually need to sit down and have hard conversations and you know, be the parents, so to speak.

Yeah, not their friend, their friend parent.

There's time to be friends, and you can be friendly, but you know, you have to hold firm on the things that are most important.

I find too, so in my course, Basically what I do is I help parents understand all the things that we've never learned, because where are the lessons for all of this?

Ye public, No, no one does, and there's no one size fits all because we're all so different and our kind of digital diets need to be different too when they change, just like your nutrition as a toddler is really different to a fifteen year old or if you're an athlete.

So we really need to examine, like what are our predilections, what are some of the things that we're allergic to.

I'm allergic to TikTok my brain and TikTok do not go well.

It sets my brain on fire and I get really dysregulated.

So I know not to go there, right, But that's you know, you.

Know, I've never seen to It's.

Just really quick videos and a lot of a lot of slop, right, a lot of junk, and you go looking for the good stuff and it's really hard to find.

It's like you know, panning for goals.

You get a little bit and you think I've got to keep going to you know, end on a high or whatever.

So knowing knowing yourself and knowing how things work and knowing some of the risks, So parents really need to invest a little bit of that time to.

Educate themselves, sometimes side by side.

The expert in.

Technology in your family is your teenager probably, but you're the expert in your family, and you're the expert in you know, brain development hopefully and switching on some of those boundaries to protect their brain development.

We also know that.

Explaining to kids how the neurobiology works helps them make better decisions.

So when I've worked with kids, and I did a project recently with the Telstra Foundation where we explain to kids the neurobiology of sleep and why it was important.

Using that you know in your mood, your memory, and your metabolism, they automatically prioritize sleep because they understood why it was so important, how it could benefit.

Them, right, Yeah, So you comment so.

Similarly when they understand, I say, so, how much do you does TikTok pay you for your attention?

You're paying attention to TikTok?

What's that worth an hour?

And they're like, oh, nothing, I do it for free.

And I'm like, if you went to the mall and got a job in one of their fast food outlets, would you work for free?

Because you, you know, would you give them that time?

Would you give no?

And I'm like, well, that's kind of what you're doing.

And suddenly they value their attention and their time differently.

So there's some things like that just to it's not lecturing, it's not telling them what to do, it's saying, here's some information.

When you now that you have that information, do you think you want to do things?

Differently?

And depending on the age of the kids, so again like on the primary schoolers we're going to work with really really differently.

So the kids who maybe have already had the technology, who have already circumvented the ban to say, hey, here's some information, how would you.

Like to use that to shape your future?

And getting kids connected to their future and understanding that self control you need to actually put off what's right now in order to get that thing in the future and get that goal is really really helpful.

My master's thesis in cyber psychology was all about the role of self control.

If we haven't taught self control and we haven't given kids something in the future to look forward to, like having a planet that's not on fire or being destroyed by war, then what you know, what are they giving up that, you know, their community, their regulation, their coping, their escapism.

For so, I think that's a huge important I'll give you a little personal anecdot, but firstally self control.

The Dunedin Study on self control showed that and this has been following a huge amount of people in the Dunedin in southern South Island of the South Island, New Zealand, and.

They've been following them from birth.

They've got genetic stuff on them and they do these huge assessments every couple of years on them, and the people are now in their forties right.

It's one of the biggest longitudinal studies and so much really cool shit comes out of it.

But they have.

Concluded self control is the single biggest predictor of success in life, way above intelligence, above education about social your social status or your economic status.

Self control is the most important predictor of success in life because it is to your point earlier, it's self control that when I'm a kid says well, I need to study because I want to do well in my exams, and it's self control.

It says, you know, I want to get to university now, so I have to study and not have the night side, and then when you're university it self, controller goes, I want to actually get a good degree so as I can get a job, So I'm not going to go on the pist seven nights a.

Week, and then when you're in a job, blah blah blah blah blah.

But so, so the point of this about the conversation.

We are constantly talking to our two kids around the education.

You know, I've got a background in neuroscience and psychology, and it's really interesting.

Nineteen year old girl, fifteen year old boy, our nineteen.

Year old girl.

She is currently in Nicaragua a right, traveling backpacking around.

Give us a little bit of the app.

But it's like, this is this is the life experiences that you need.

But I got a notification on my phone saying Kira wants fifteen more minutes on TikTok.

She's nineteen years old.

When she went to university.

We're like, Kira, you're an adult and I we don't need parental controls, and she said I want them.

So Kira in year ten, because she was very very motivated, driven by doing well, having that conversation around social media, frontal lobe development, all of those things.

She was like bomb straight away.

Since she's been in year ten, she's got ten minutes on TikTok, she's got twelve minutes on Instagram, and like seven minutes on Snapchat.

And she actually came to us in year twelve and.

Asked to get them cut back because she understands the impact on her and she sees it in other people.

She sees the impact on their mood, on their anxiety and all of these things.

So that is just underscoring from a personal perspective how important it is to have those conversations.

But fifteen years.

Really want that, right, Yeah, actually really.

Want more rules, and people like, no, they don't, and I'm like, what are they getting games?

They get really clear rules.

Yes, so they actually are crying out for us to say here's what to do so rather than below open slater.

And often that's because we then know that we can't be hypocrites.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And the whole thing about sleep and the education on sleep, and so.

You know, our kids, nobody has cut phones in their bedroom.

But it's interesting the fifteen year old boy, it's much more of a fight, right, both in terms of getting social media at that age, and then the time limits, which we had to do, you know, a pretty negotiation around those time limits and stuff like that.

But he's driven by different things, right, He's not as as driven by awards at school and all of those sorts of things.

So I think the conversation needs to be different, right.

You got to understand who you're talking to and what pushes their buttons and try to push the right buttons for them, I think.

And that's that's the hard work as apparent, isn't it, And.

That sometimes you know, if they're not motivated by these things, you've.

Just got to go, well, they're the roots, that's right.

And you've got to be unpopular.

That's right, don't.

You don't have to want to you know, great things, but you do have not negotiables and they again that that can be a range of different things.

Because like my daughter does have a phone in her room because she listens to something as she's falling asleep.

That phone is locked down, but technically there is a phone in a bedroom, so we want to really interrogate.

Can't she can't access the.

Social media any of that?

No, No, it's just like a crappy old phone that she uses literally with two apps, one to listen to books and one to you know, listen to music or whatever.

So again, we just want to interrogate that and look at the differences in our kids.

So when I teach that tech use agreement, there's an umbrella agreement for the family.

So that might be something like we bookending the day is a really good one.

We don't use tech right up before bed, and we don't use it first thing in the morning.

But then individual emas for different people based on, you know, what their interest in online spaces are.

Some people really like your daughter might have.

Really I want to just have a little taste.

I want to see my friends, I want to kind of know what's going on, but I'm not.

Interested in being there.

Other kids are deep into games, they're running communities, they're admitting servers.

They've got real, you know, responsibilities within the communities they've built, and they need different time.

What I suggest there, though, is that we kind of use the big rocks kind of analogy from corporate Everyone probably knows this.

You know, if you've got a jar, you've got to put the big rocks in first, then the pebbles, and then the sand, because if you put the sand or the screen use in First, you're not going to fit.

It's going to displace the sleep and school and those things.

So again that's built into that course is actually examining the idea that screens are the sand, and we have to do the big rocks first.

We have to protect getting enough sleep and making sure we're going to school, putting some sport in there or some movement.

Some people don't like the word sport if you're not a sporty person, but moving your body.

And not being sedentary.

And then the pebbles are, you know, your extracurriculars, family engagements, your chores, all of those other.

Things, and then the sand goes in.

So when we do it the wrong way, wrong way round, we're displacing those really important things and that's where the wheels come off and we see big problems.

But we still need to be focused on the content as well, because obviously any minutes of exposure to some really horrible material is too many minutes.

And what can parents do about that?

So there's a range of kind of I guess net nannies we used to call them back in the day, and on every platform you can filter certain words so that those words won't show up.

Places like Instagram.

It's not particularly well known or well advertised.

Before the social media bank was even discussed, Instagram launched teen accounts, so if you were between thirteen and seventeen, you will automatically put into kind of a sand pit version of Instagram where you needed parental controls to or a parent's permission to actually change some of these settings.

So all of the content if you're between thirteen or now sixteen and seventeen.

Is PG rated plus night mode.

It has the ability to reset your algorithm.

In fact, everybody on Instagram can reset their algorithm and change their content preferences.

So there are features within many of the platforms that I recommend people go to the e Safetyoffice e safety dot dot au, whether you're inside of Australia or not.

You can use a lot of the resources that are there to tame technology and to work out how you can use some of the parental controls and limits, both from a platform perspective, a device perspective, and even an ISP or a modem perspective as well.

The trick to that is to always make sure you're talking to your kids about what you're doing, because if you don't know what you're doing.

They are probably the ones that you will.

Go to to say, oh, can you help me with these controls or the hack their way through them.

And I've seen lots of people say, oh, my gosh, my kids hacked through in certain name of you know software.

Can somebody help me?

You know, they've locked down my laptop and I can't finish the annual report or whatever importance.

So I think honesty is usually the best policy and transparency and using change management processes to get kids along for the ride to say, hey, things are not working, we need to change them.

How do you want to be part of the solution.

But yeah, and I think and I'm doing this because I love you and I care for you, and I want you to have good mental health, you know, I want you to grow up to be a good responsible at that think.

I think that intention.

I say kids all the time.

Yeah, I said to kids all the time.

You know when your mum's nagging in you know that nagging voice, and you can just feel it, nagnagnag.

You know what she's saying, right, And you know, we go through this process and like what's going on there?

And they're like they will finally go oh.

Because she loves me.

Yeah, and it's like yeah, And when we're asking you and we're anxious and maybe we're not, you know, giving you options, it's because it's our job to protect you, and we love you enough to protect you and to do that, and you don't need to like us, and that's totally okay.

There are times where I don't like my daughter.

I love her, but I do not like the behavior.

Yeah, you know, so I think kind of digging into some of those things can be really helpful.

And being really curious too about our kids.

Being curious not furious is like this thing.

I should get paid every time I say that.

I don't know you originally said it.

If it was, it's pretty cool.

Yeah, when we.

Choose connection over correction, we get a lot further with young people, and because it is our job and we go into protective you know, mama bear puppa their kind of mode, but being able to be like I would really like to understand how you made that choice or what you're thinking when you're doing that, so that I can then help you meet those needs.

I think if you've ever learned anything about self determination theory, yes, psychological nutrients that I call the three c's, competence, connection, and control.

Understanding how they play into screen behavior is really really important too.

I've got a whole quick lesson that people can get if they want to understand screens and psychological nutrients, because that will then help you understand why it's so alluring and how we can then build those psychological needs outside of screens so that we can try and have them met without all the dopamine hits and the toxic algorithm and the anisphere.

And yeah, and I you know what, I need to fess up on this because my wife said something similar about be curious, not furious.

It wasn't exactly that terminology, but it was like, you know, I was coming in.

I was, I was, I.

Was like, you're spending too much time on this, blah blah blah.

And she's like, why don't you sit down with Oscar and just ask him why he likes these platforms and try and understand what he does and then we can work with them on that.

And I did, and you know, and as soon as she said, and I'm like, yeah, okay, you need some autonomy in this and we need to have that relatedness and.

And and it was really really helpful.

So I fully endorse being curious not furious, as a reformed furious reactor to social media.

Right, and look, just this has been awesome.

And I got to say, I love the idea of digital nutrition and how you've broken that down.

It's very very clever.

Have you got a book on this?

I should you do that?

You need to have a book.

Yeah, I need to have a book.

I know.

I yeah, maybe one day I had the range of courses.

And look, I just feel like everything changes so quickly.

If I had written that book last year, it would have been out of date.

Almost a good point because we're talking about AI chatbots and loneliness and yeah, kids who are using that to develop deep friendships and never have the friction of somebody you know, all the friendship problems.

Yes, if you have an AI chatbot friend who's just sick, aphantic and agrees with everything, it really makes real life friends who sometimes your friends and sometimes aren't.

All the friendship dramas go away.

So I tell you what, that is a really scary world, these these chatbots, not only friendships, but relationship Since that, I mean, wow, we're going into a dangerous vortex right there, But that's probably a whole nother podcast.

Another podcast.

But parents should just be really really aware of that because it is so common.

It's something like half of kids are using have used a chat what she took to them about companionship and friendship stuff.

Wow, it's not.

Even like just chat to BT like can you do my assignment for me?

But this happened today?

What should I do?

YEA, yeah, so that's my next big project.

But I do have lots of course, there's lots of freebies on my website so people can dive in and take a little bite.

And your website is Joscelyn Buwer sorry bro dot dot com, which I will put the link into that and would encourage every parent and you don't, I guess you don't have to be a parent.

It's going in there and understanding.

Yourself, that's right.

Like my market is literally anyone who picks.

Up a digital device and goes, what is this doing to my brain?

That's my market and that's a pretty big market.

My business coach says, you should probably niche down, and you know, my my niche under that is parents, but really it's for any anyone who's curious about how their their brain is being impacted by digital technologies, how our society is right, it's waybey on the individual.

It is very important work and it's it's certainly certainly a growth area that you're in.

You're not going to be out of a job with AI, that's for sure.

You're going to be the last.

Future proof.

Yeah.

Absolutely, Just to thank for your time, This has been awesome.

Yeah, we'll put all we'll put all the links in there and your parents go and get on it.

Be parents, not friends.

Much appreciated.

Thank you, bye for now,