Transcription
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Okay, anyone who's followed the channel for a while probably already knows that I'm a pretty outspoken critic of the general technology industry. In particular, I think social media is an avatar of intellectual destruction. And with that in mind, a decent chunk of the videos that I make explore topics like decreasing attention spans because of Tik Tok, lower self-esteem because of things like Instagram, or a multitude of negative side effects where younger generations are becoming increasingly burdened by these applications, even if the immediate effects of that process are not yet entirely visible. I stand by those videos absolutely 100%.
But there's an interesting thing that typically happens when I talk about younger generations being academically stunted. When I go down the road of negative impact, talking about things like social media or more recently programs like chat GPT, for example, there's a pretty big range of typical responses. On one side, I see people in agreement, sure, a lot of them. But on the other side, I pretty much always receive a deluge or barrage of comments or even direct messages at times saying that every generation complains about the ones that come after them. It's basically this, the old man shouting at clouds meme is what they say with the feedback that just because the trends are different doesn't make them bad and that kids in the modern era of technology are not actually less intelligent, they just don't conform to a set of outdated standards.
At the risk of violating one of the cardinal rules on YouTube, that feedback is wrong. Obviously, there's a grain of truth in the sense that older generations often complain about innocuous differences like music taste or fashion trends. But today, I want to explore the reality that generation Z and Generation Alpha for the first time since the late 1800s. Generation Z and Gen Alpha are less cognitively capable than their parents. Just to rip the band-aid off, I mean straight up less intelligent. Literacy, numeracy, memory, attention in basically every single measurable cognitive category that we use. Period. They're worse. And the idea of dismissing that as anything other than deeply alarming is a bit of an issue for me.
Let's set the foundation with this. Speaking in front of Congress in January of 2026, Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, former teacher, now a cognitive neuroscientist, said basically the exact same thing that I just repeated there. Here it is.
>> Um, so a sad fact our generation has to face is this. Our kids are less cognitively capable than we were at their age. Um, since we've been standardizing and measuring cognitive development since the late 1800s, every generation has outperformed their parents. And that's exactly what we want. We want sharper kids. Until Gen Z. Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to underperform us on basically every cognitive measure we have from basic attention to memory to literacy to numeracy to executive functioning to even general IQ. Even though they go to more school than we did. So why what happened? What happened around 2010 that decoupled schooling from cognitive development? The answer appears to be the tools we are using within schools to drive that learning. Across 80 countries. As Gan was just saying, if you look at the data, once countries adopt digital technology widely in schools, performance goes down significantly to the point where kids who use computers about 5 hours per day in school for learning purposes will score over twothirds of a standard deviation less than kids who rarely or never touch tech at school. And that's across 80 countries. Bring it home to the US. Let's go to the US. We have our NA. That's our big data. Take any state. Here's here's a fun experiment you can try. Take any state NAPE data, compare that to when that state adopted onetoone technology widely, and watch what happens. The NAPE data will plateau and then start to drop.
All right, I'll put a full link down below to the video of his testimony. It's about 5 minutes for him, and then the entire hearing is roughly 2 hours long. But there's a couple of extremely notable items that I want to expand on. First, his main focus is on the actual school system, which is understandable, but the real suite of problems contains many other things like short form video feeds, algorithmic or dopamine-driven addiction loops, and a lack of sufficient parenting. Most of all, however, narrowing the focus here to precisely what Dr. Horvath talked about, we hear the term one to one, which isn't just a random turn of phrase. It's actually a very calculated, insidious program, which I want to talk about right after today's video sponsor.
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Okay, back to it. One to one was an education initiative in the 2010 era. It was backed and propagated heavily by something called Project Red, which no longer exists by the way. It served a purpose, accomplished a goal, and was later disbanded. But Project Red at the time of its operation was all about revolutionizing education by adding one computer for every one student in every classroom around the country. This institute, I guess I'll call it, was founded and sponsored by companies like Intel and HP, whose products would be the ones purchased by the government and forced into every classroom. Because the goal wasn't to advance education. The goal was to sell more computers.
There's actually a sort of companion video I did a while back which fits in very nicely with this one called even the tech bros don't want their own tech looking at how executives and other millionaires in Silicon Valley in particular don't let their children use screens at all in the private schools that they attend. I'll link that one down below as well. But the short version is that technology companies funded research, manipulated research I might add, to sell more units, similar to how alcohol companies will fund research, saying that like a glass of red wine is really good for you because of the antioxidants, but that's literally funded by the companies that want to sell more wine. Anyway, uh manipulated research was funded by technology companies that the government then used as direct justification for buying those units and sticking them in classrooms all over the country. Meanwhile, in the decade or so after that happened, every single benchmark of learning has notably declined, leaving us in a very real situation where it's not just old man yelling at clouds like a typical generation looking down on the kids because the kids are actually dumber now than they were before as new generations are being cognitively crippled.
Just to clarify something before I go into a bit more of the data side, COVID certainly didn't help with this problem. Locking down the school system for as long as we did for what we now recognize was a completely overestimated problem further exacerbated the underlying issues. But COVID was a black swan event and the reality behind why younger generations are straight up less intelligent and capable than the generations that came before them. That's systemic.
Take a look at this. This is data put together by the an e Casey Foundation looking at fourth grade reading proficiency levels. And what you immediately see is that the percentage of fourth graders who are below basic reading proficiency is increasing dramatically. Below basic, by the way, means functionally illiterate, honestly. And yet from 2017 to 2022, the percentage of grade four students who are at this level has increased from 33% to 41%. Understandably, a lot of people are probably wondering, why am I focusing on grade 4 in particular? And the answer is because reading proficiency in grade four is seemingly correlated highly with the likelihood that a student eventually drops out of high school for some reason. It's actually one of the stated public health goals for the Department of Health and Human Services in the United States to try and raise the number of students who have reading proficiency in grade 4 with a target of 41.5%. But the number isn't rising. It's falling. It's getting worse. Because the same government now attempting to raise the literacy rate for that age bracket is the same government who used research from tech manufacturing companies as justification to buy a ton of their computers and products and have now crippled the incoming generations.
The entire thing is an incredibly complex problem. No one singular platform or decision is responsible for why the next generations are declining in cognitive function. But let's just name a few of those problems. A. Obviously, Project Red and the one-to-one schooling initiative. B. Social media platforms like Tik Tok are verifiably lowering attention spans corroborated by research and meta analysis from basically every single reputable institution out there. C. Tools like chat GPT and other language models which are now invasively utilized by students in school almost ubiquitously create something called cognitive debt negatively impacting memory engagement and even basic brain activity which was measured with EEG scans. And then D the amount of time that children and teens are spending on their devices is dramatically increasing. On average, 13 to 18 year olds in 2015 were spending 6 hours and 40 minutes on a screen per day, whereas in 2019, that number had risen to 7 hours and 22 minutes, with the most recent figure, alarmingly, being 8 hours and 39 minutes.
Here's the thing about people, though, especially young people. They adapt the environment around them. If something is intellectually difficult, they'll solve the problem. And just like practically any other activity ever, the more you do something, the stronger you get. Going to the gym and repeatedly lifting a heavy weight makes you physically stronger. While going to school and repeatedly tackling complex problems, analytical, grammatical, all of them, makes you mentally stronger. In the past, as in even just 15 or 20 years ago, the process of getting mentally stronger was pretty straightforward. You get presented with problems and you solve them. Even in the early days of computers, figuring out how to install something and make it run successfully often required iteration.
But flash forward to now, 2026 and beyond, the technological environment is entirely different. Smartphones and even laptop computers for that matter aren't even made most of the time so that you can change the battery. At this point, the process of selecting, loading, and running programs or applications has become as streamlined as humanly possible. Every single facet of the modern technological world is seemingly built to remove friction. Everything we do is modeled after the concept of press one button and get the result that you want. From opening and browsing social media all the way to online shopping. When the entire world is built for convenience, the necessity that a teenager actually do some critical thinking is dramatically lowered by definition. In school, they just copy and paste the question into chat GPT. At home, they can just aimlessly scroll TikTok. If they need something to wear, they can use Amazon OneClick and so on and so forth. Removing as much of the difficulty as possible from every task imaginable creates idiots. And at the risk of alienating a portion of my own audience right now, that's exactly what's happening in the modern world.
I don't know a precise number when it comes to comments about how every generation looks down on the ones that come after. Thousands probably. But this isn't a typical situation that somehow mirrors the same generational gaps that we've seen previously for centuries. The new generations are genuinely legitimately and unironically less qualified, intelligent, and capable than the ones that came before them. Not because of intrinsic biology or anything like that, but because the world is failing them.
Oftentimes I get asked, well, what can people do about this? And in this case, the answer is extremely simple. Your kids will hate it, but here here goes. Take away all the devices. No smartphone until high school, no laptop, no chat GPT, and very limited, if any, ever social media. Don't stick them in front of an iPad. And don't offload the burden of parenting onto a ruthlessly simplified tech industry and brutally manipulative internet. Because the result of doing that is an idiot child. Not because I have some malformed impression of younger generations as a result of getting older, but rather because the way that the world now functions is making us dumber. Don't let it.
That's it. If you want to support the channel, check out the links down below. The video sponsor incognips, etc., etc. But I'll cut it there and stop rambling. As always, thank you all for watching. Question everything and have a nice night. Heat. Heat.