8/18/26: Tariff Refunds Boost Corporations, MAGA Sheriffs Revolt On Border Wall, Screens Ruining Education

This is an "I Heart" podcast. Guaranteed Human. If you're bookshelf and you're for you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture. With your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions. Yeah, I'm obsessed, I'm obsessed. Listen to Pro Society on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I survived nine months in captivity, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the survivor files. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the survivor files with Elizabeth Smart on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Hoda Kotby, host of the podcast, Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby. You know, I'm always searching for inspiration and useful tools to maximize joy. Like when my friend Henry Winkler offered advice to aspiring actors and really anybody hoping to stand out. You're not hired just to fill time in space. You're hired to fill the space with you. Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. - Hey guys, Saga and Crystal here. - Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election, and we are so excited about what that means for the future of the show. - This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. - So if that is something that's important to you, please go to breakingpoints.com, become a member today, and you'll get access to our full shows, unedited, ad-free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. - We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at breakingpoints.com. - Everybody here remember a liberation day and Trump randomly announced this whole chart of tariffs that were gonna be charged on including some island that only had penguins on and it was the whole thing, it was ultimately struck down by the Supreme Court. And so now all of the companies that paid those tariffs are coming to the government, had hands saying, "Hey, pay us back." Let's put this up on the screen. Wall Street Journal reports that tariff refunds are here and they are turbocharging earnings. Apple Nike and FedEx are just a few companies recovering big sums relatively quickly. Some are passing at least a share on to customers. Well, that's rather interesting, isn't it? So we've got billions of dollars that are changing hands here. Apple alone is getting $2.2 billion tariff refund. Nike is getting 986 million FedEx, about 800 million Amazon 640 million GM 500 million. Have you received any tariff refunds for the additional prices that you paid? Because of course the way this worked is yes, the companies paid the tariffs. They then passed on much of them. There's been a lot of analysis of this. Much of that price hike went straight to you, the consumer. So you do have a handful of companies that are saying that they're gonna provide their customers with refunds. Most of them are not consumer facing companies. They're companies that sell to other businesses or it'll be the businesses that get those refunds down the line. But meanwhile, this is really padding quarterly earnings for these large businesses. So as if they weren't already reaching record profits in many instances, they're getting even more profitable because of this whole tariff situation. Apple said its tariff refunds contributed 11 cents to per share earnings in the most recent quarter. That's about 5% of the quarter's total GE health care tech said tariff refunds had contributed 18 cents of their $1.24 share. It reported in earnings for the quarter end of June 30th. Companies said it had received 107 million in refunds and expected 38 million more. So got to love the way that just once again, consumers left here holding the bag for all of this. - Right, and by the way, the thing is, do you ever needed money from the government? It's kind of right, like if you ever overpay your taxes, they owe you some money. I think I once waited 10 months. This was rolled out in a matter of months to get as much cash from the government's hands back into the S&P 500 Fortune 500 companies as quickly as humanly possible. It's kind of like when you pay your taxes, they take that money the day that you submit it. But if you ever need anything back, good luck to you. And it's amazing that whenever it's a big company and they need a bunch of money, they get it instantaneously. The top line is that 40 S&P 500 companies have reported 9.6 billion in tariff refunds. To over $10 billion. By the way, that's not even the most amount that is left to be doled out. As of now, 128 billion in refunds have been processed and a total of 166 billion in tariffs have been invalidated under the IEPA Emergence International Emergency Economic Powers Act. So there's still billions more dollars that are left to flow into the economy. Almost none of that is coming back. What's even crazier is how it shows that these companies it's all financial engineering. It's all literally based on a tariff refund that they're boosting in terms of their bottom line. And we're getting nothing from it. I mean, many of these firms, they say, refunds are dwarfed by the tariffs that they still pay is what they claim in some cases. But in general, especially for a lot of these technology companies, they are not like lowering their prices whatsoever. Well, actually, we'll really know when iPhone, I think iPhone comes out, the new iPhone is gonna come out next month at the World Wide Developer Conference. Let's see what the price is at retail. If it's still higher, bullshit, okay? Everybody goes, you got your refund. Yeah, that's the other thing is they raise prices to reflect the tariffs. When the tariffs go away, do they bring the prices back down? Maybe I haven't seen any evidence of that. I would like to see some statistical analysis of whether or not that is happening. But we know when it came to inflation, especially the COVID era inflation, they would raise prices not only to deal with the inflation of their inputs, they would raise it beyond that. And then once inflation goes down, they don't lower the prices. For you, the price is only go one way. And then they're getting their refunds and they're still not bringing the prices down. And they're certainly not sending, you know, a little kick back to all of their customers who helped them float this thing up front. So it is very illustrative of how our economy seems to work. And also really important now, because Trump is still holding on to some, there's some tariff regime in place so it continues to be relevant there. But also as we head into another period of increased inflation due to the Iran war, you know how all of these companies will operate. They will do the exact same thing. And that's why if you look at trends, historical trends, corporate profits as a percent of GDP are at an all time high. That means they are eating more of the economy and there is less left for you. So this is just one more example of how, even though initially they were pitching fit and they're suffering, et cetera, at the end of the day, now they're getting these tariff refund checks and they're using it to pad their earnings and you still were able to charge you higher price. - And I just checked, so for example, I remember because at the time, baby year went sky high with tariff. So I just checked, the price of the stroller that I bought is still well over $150 more today than it was at the time I bought it. - This is 14 months ago. - That's so crazy. - It's not that long ago that I bought the stroller. The car seat is also $120 more than what I bought it for. So same thing, they incorporated it in the tariff, but the tariff price, they just never lowered. So, I mean, and I've talked about this before, you can't buy a used car, I mean, you can, if you're it's on secondhand market, like in terms of Facebook marketplace, something, you're not supposed to buy a used car seat. It's one of the few things that you can't recycle in terms of baby gear. So a new stroller, new cars, a lot of new parents these days, you're getting slammed because over 90% of this stuff is all made in China and all of it was hit initially by tariff, they increased the price. Now they're getting the refund. I just checked their website. There isn't shit showing up on the one side of the stroller. And these are all the stroller companies from what I can see. There's a website which actually put them side-by-side for where they are. Many of them are either one to two to $300 more than they were. I mean, back in the 90s, that's the entire cost of a stroller, not just the price increase of where they are. - That's exactly right, not even that. I mean, it's not that long ago. - Yeah, maybe you're right, I don't know. - There's a term for they call it taking price. And it just means like what they can get away with. And so they found they could get away with this. People accepted the prices 'cause they had no other alternative and so they're gonna continue paying, forcing you to pay those prices even though they no longer have to pay the tariff. There are a couple other economic stories that we wanted to get in here as well. So as prices go up for you and consumer budgets continue to be stretched, debt, personal debt reaches new all-time high levels. Let's see what our president is doing to help alleviate the burden. He's thinking about reducing capital gains tax. Of course, this would be overwhelmingly the benefit would go to who, the rich. So he's literally, this is how I don't touch this guy. It really is incredible. He's seeing this as a way to boost his position in the midterms by calling for cutting the taxes of the rich. He thinks that is going to be a winning midterm strategy. country club boomers around the world celebrate your working class bill >> Yeah. >> Work here, guys. Congratulations. >> Country Club men across the United States celebrate this potential. So I'll explain because it's actually even crazier. Trump has expressed interest in indexing capital gains and exemptions for homes of sale worth $2 million or less. So this would be the greatest boomer tax cut in the history of the United States to extend and increase cap gains up to 2 million for these people who probably bought it like a couple hundred thousand and make them pay nothing in addition to making it, who remember, who owns the vast majority of these stocks and who are these people doing capital gains sales to fund their lifestyle. And it's all the retired people, rich retirees. So those are the people who it would be a dramatic cut for. Also I think it would have a cyclical effect where some idiot, your idiot nephew who's a day trader on his way to going broke, but well, I got to do it because capital gains are going down. And so he would be even more encouraged to lose all of his money. I just saw a study yesterday that it's, quote, "day trading is directly correlated with IQ and education." So if you are a modern day day trader and you do not work for Susquehanna partners are one of these, you're probably an idiot and you should probably stop, okay? >> So wait, the more likely you are to day trade the lower your IQ is. >> Lower your IQ and lower your education level. So it is, it is a direct correlation of education and IQ. >> It makes sense because I'm just so angry. >> Yeah, cuz it's quite rich. >> It's gambling. >> Yeah, it's gambling. >> Exactly. >> What it is. Yeah, well so, okay, the steel man argument for the capital gains reduction for the $2 million houses is that this would help encourage boomers to sell those homes and move and downsize and move. And I'm just thinking, you can't think of any other way to accomplish this goal than giving them another tax cut, than giving rich people even more money. Look at the taxes, they have broken the progressive taxes. It does not exist, especially for the actual ultra wealthy. It does not exist for them. But yeah, if you are a homeowner, you're already getting a much sweeter deal than renters from the tax code. And so the only way you can think of to try to gently encourage people to downsize, move out of these homes is to give them yet another tax cut. If there's got to be another way, that's going to be more effective than what we're talking about. >> Right. And I might be, some CPA might come after me, but I'm pretty sure that if you're married filing jointly, yeah, you're right around, so that's what it's, you're married filing jointly. And if all of your long term gains are, if you make less than, let's say you withdraw $98,000 from the market. If you're married filing jointly, and that's your income, you pay $0 in capital gains. You pay nothing. And then even in terms of the capital gain, I don't know if he mentioned short term and long term because obviously that's the difference. But dropping it down to seven, I mean, that would be a massive win, like these are for people who are extraordinarily wealthy, like we really can't comprehend how much wealth these people are sitting on. How is reading a story about the number of people with $5 million in their Vanguard accounts is like millions of people now. Like millions of Americans are in the five and the 10 million range. More power to, I'm happy for you. You saved, you retired. I'm not saying we're going to take it, but it's like 15% ain't all that much to ask for. Whenever we're talking about a cat long term capital gain, especially when you and I are sitting here paying, I don't know, after tax income rate of something like 20, 30, whatever percent just a W2 income. And then for average Joe, I mean, especially if you're a normal middle class guy between FICA, but yeah, between FICA health insurance and the progressive income tax rate and you get your paycheck, especially if you live in New York or something like, you're looking it looks 60% of your money. That's crazy. It's crazy. Yeah, no. And these are the people by and large, you know, when we're talking about older people with these multimillion dollar homes, who benefit the most from the most prosperous for the middle class? Exactly. Like, time period in American history. So to, you know, to pay the capital gains, the long term capital gains tax on your multimillion dollar residence doesn't seem too much to ask, but don't worry. It's not only rich people that this administration is looking out for. They're also looking out for money launders and other variety of con artists. Let's put this last piece up on the screen. This is very significant. So it sounds very technical. It's pretty straightforward. Actually, Finsign is permanently ending beneficial ownership reporting requirements for the frame rate of millions of small business owners. So previously, when you were setting up a business in LLC, something of the sort, you had to report out who actually was the owner of this business. So you couldn't, and this is a relatively new regulation, passed by Congress by partisan way. They wanted more transparency here. Why? Because LLCs tend to be used extensively for money laundering and financial fraud. So you would have all of these series of shell companies of various LLCs that would hide the true owner, which would end up being some Russian mobster or something of that nature. Okay? So they put this in place to try to crack down on that, and by all accounts, it was somewhat successful. And there was a whole registry of who are the actual beneficial owners of these companies, who actually owns them, who's actually benefiting them. It also comes into play in terms of real estate transactions in major cities that become the playgrounds not only for global leap, but ways of them laundering money from illicit crimes that they're committing around the world. So anyway, Trump decided we're not doing that anymore, at least not for domestic businesses, foreign businesses still have to do it. And not only are we not doing that anymore, we are going to delete the entire previous registry that existed, so that all of the information that was already collected is now going to be disappeared and impossible for law enforcement, for example, to use to try to crack down on various money laundering and other fraud schemes. Yeah. And look, small business guys, I get it. You and I had to fill this out. It took me an hour. It was a pain in the ass. I'm with you. It's an hour, all right? It's not that big a deal, let's be honest. It's still annoying. It was annoying. You know, why do they need all this information from me? I get it. I hear you. I'm with you. The paperwork, all the taxes. It's super annoying. That said, that said, we should consider that a small business people that it's actually us who are the most screwed by this type of system because predominantly we're mostly the people who actually comply, whereas a lot of these loopholes are being used by the ultra-rich or shady vehicles to hide around and to move money for beneficial ownership status, specifically to evade the taxes, which, again, most of us law-abiding small business people actually pay. And so in the long run, it's actually to our benefit, you know, the more that I looked into it because you're like, well, by not capturing that, you know, you're actually giving them much more, you're basically giving them the free pass while you go through all the regulatory compliance, which most of us do. And I think that's why it really pissed me off is because looking into it, this was quote, sold as a victory for common sense and for American small business. Like they said, this CTA was to unmask domestic shell companies. The problem, though, is that the shell company problem was very real. Part of the reason why Congress passed this law in the first place. So yeah, it is ridiculous. And I know that this has been a bugaboo for the ultra-rich in particular and some small business guys who just don't want to fill out any paperwork. But just generally, like the cap gains thing and this, to me, I was just like, how are you like, you've got even the, even the Ken Paxton is out there being like $25,000 tax deduction for health insurance. You know, all of these crazy doubling the child tax credit. And Trump is like, let's have the cap gains rate for boomers. Yeah. The last thing on the fraud part, right, this administration that talks a lot about fraud when it's convenient for them, when the targets are convenient for them. For example, in Minneapolis, right, and JD Vance is the czar of rooting out fraud or whatever. Doge was supposed to be about rooting out fraud. They found literally, there were no prosecutions that came out of they're gutting the federal government. It's supposedly to try to root out this kind of fraud. The reality is number one, Trump has gone on a pardon spree of many high level fraudsters who have ripped off Americans to the tune of millions of dollars. And not only they're not having to serve their prison time, they're not having to pay back. The people that they defraud, it's just reading a story about a guy who was ripped off by some pyramid scheme. That fraudster was pardoned no longer is he going to get that restitution. And this is a guy who voted for Trump's like, what the hell, federal white collar prosecutions are at a 40 year low. So if you're a white collar criminal, you can just basically get away with it at this point. Especially if you, you know, slips the money to to MAGAR to the Trump campaign or the ballroom or whatever particular thing he's raising money for now. And now you have this action which blatantly makes it easier to commit fraud and financial crimes. This is not just, this isn't a standalone action. This is very consistent with a widespread pattern of enabling and encouraging frankly white collar crime from this administration. Yeah. All right. Let's get to Big Ben. Sorry, we filmed out of order sometimes. I said standing by. You definitely didn't just record it. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and health captive for nine months. I survived and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart and these are the survivor files. You just remember this low taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the hunting. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. Their stories about what it takes to make it out alive, listen to the survivor files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your for-you-page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Pro's Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters and that is a Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro's Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages. On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus, or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I choose option B. I'm Julie Bignero and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word Solita, trading the pity for possibility. Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people and they were like, "You smiled at us, not a lot of people smile around here." It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is and not the lies you're sold about it. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind, or wake up to a new version of yourself. So whether you're a solo travel veteran, or you're too nervous to book your first trip, I hope you listen to Solita on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm very excited now to be joined by friend of the show Isaac Saul, he's the founder of Tangle News, great friend of the show. Good to see you man, thanks for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me, always glad to be your starter. So Isaac, you have been at the forefront of highlighting the construction of a border wall, or at least that's what they're saying that it is, that's going down in Big Bend National Park. Let's go and put this up here on the screen. Some of the video of the destruction in the National Park. This is particularly drawn scrutiny because as you have pointed out, this is a very low traffic area, significant amount of destruction to the park is happening. In addition, it appears that some Trump contractors are involved. So before we get to the Trump administration pausing construction, it appears at the request of the governor of Texas, give us the background about what led to this national outcry. Yeah, sure. So I mean, as you probably know, in your audience, I know President Trump has promised to build a continuous wall across the Southwestern border, and they have made some progress in California and Arizona in parts of Texas, and now they're moving down into Southwest Texas, which is the Big Bend region. So there are plans right now for these 30-foot steel-bullard walls actually outside the national park, in some of the counties that run into the national park and are on both sides of the park. They had plans for 30-foot steel-bullard walls inside the park. There was such an outcry when those plans were released that they sort of updated their maps to say, no, actually, we're just doing vehicle barriers, which are these four to six-foot tall walls and roads, and we're going to put some fencing in and some new technology, but we're not going to put in these 30-foot steel-bullard walls. Then there was a bunch of outcry and rage about that, because, as you mentioned, there are basically no migrants who cross through the national park. There's about 100 to 200 a year who are found inside the park, and just for context, in a single month in October, fiscal year 2025, in the Swanton border sector, there were about 1,000 migrants who were apprehended. The Swanton border sector is the border sector with Canada. It's Vermont and New Hampshire and parts of Massachusetts. That's 1,000 migrants there in Big Bend National Park. In the entire last fiscal year, there were 100 to 200 migrants who were found in the national parks. People who are outdoorsmen, Republican sheriffs, hunters, local businesses, my family lives on the border-eye property there. My cousins have a river guiding business. They're about to be blocked off from the Rio Grande. They won't be able to do tours down the river, because there's going to be border wall outside the park and fencing and vehicle barriers inside the park, cutting off their access. There's been a huge five-partisan outcry, and finally yesterday, the CDP commissioners said that he was pausing construction and heading down to the park to put boots on the ground, which I'm grateful for. You would think he would have done that before the construction started, but I'm glad, at least for now, there's a pause. Let's put D2 up on the screen. There's a Trump donor that was awarded some of these construction contracts within the park. What can you tell us about this? This is a big part of the story, and something a lot of people are focusing on, which is this construction company Barnard construction is owned and operated by a guy who gave over a million dollars to the Trump campaign in 2024, and then got awarded this $1.7 billion contract to bring construction of the border wall down to the big-done region. And obviously, for anybody who's paying attention, this looks like somebody who just bought a billion-dollar grant from the president for a border wall that's unnecessary and unwanted in this part of the country. So one of the big things that we're trying to figure out now is what they're going to do with all that money. This CDP says we're not putting this border wall, this 30-foot tall border wall up in the park, but the roads and the pathways that they're constructing in the national park follow the exact same line on the original map that they release showing where the 30-foot steel ballad walls were going to be. So I want to take the government at its word, but a lot of people down in this area are obviously skeptical that this is just going to be a road or just going to be some four to six foot tall vehicle barriers. A lot of people think they're going to clear this land and then eventually this wall is going to come in. And it just looks like a cash grab by these contractors who were just taking a bunch of federal money, our tax dollars to go destroy a national park and then destroy this region outside the park, which it should be said in the lower 48 is the most pristine, untouched part of the United States. It is literally the Wild West, four to five hours from the closest airport. You can drive on roads for two hours without seeing a single person. It is a treasure of America's pastime and especially of Texas and it's why so many tourists go there every year, it's just kind of escape and go off the grid. And now it's that risk of becoming part of the big security state. Right, and I think I want to underscore this is not some liberal outcry. The governor of Texas Greg Abbott gave a press conference yesterday saying there will be no border barrier built on Big Ben National Park. It appears like what you're talking about, family members, West Texas ranchers and others, hardcore Republicans in our plus 40 districts are the people who are pushing heavily against this. We do have the video of the CBP Commissioner talking about the pause. Let's go ahead and take a listen guys, we'll get your reaction Isaac. I just landed in Texas, headed to Big Ben National Park last night. I put a pause on all activity in that park as far as construction goes until I can get down there and do a personal evaluation, talk to some stakeholders, talk to local law enforcement in that area, and more to follow this week. So the pause obviously, this was from, I don't know, you tell me, what do you think that the eventual outcome was? It seems to me that the governor and much of the Texas Agriculture Commissioner, many of these other officials seemed to be the ones who really pressured the Trump administration on this. Yeah, Governor Abbott is taking credit for Rodney Scott, the CBP Commissioner, heading down to Big Ben in pause and construction. He said that he had a conversation with him over the weekend and that he believes this is a direct consequence of that conversation. He said that publicly. So I have no reason to doubt that story. I mean, the interesting parts of that video are A, the CBP Commissioner, conceding that construction is happening in Big Ben. We all know this because as you showed, there's videos and photos of bulldozers and backos, you know, running across the Big Ben National Park ground. But it's worth saying the CBP for the last couple of weeks has denied in court and in their public statements that any construction was underway. They were saying that they were surveying and assessing the land and hadn't actually broken ground yet, you know, despite the videos going viral online. So I think it's notable that he acknowledged the construction was real and that he's pausing it. The other thing I'll just say is there's a protest for all of this, for this kind of thing, you know, in national parks and outside national parks, which is, you know, as much as I sometimes load government regulation, there are things like environmental reviews. There are stakeholders who have meetings they get to know. meet with the CBP business owners, say, look, we need this access point on the river or this piece of private property has this value to so-and-so economy. They didn't do any of that. They waived all the environmental laws. They waived all the processes that are normal in this situation and they just started building and that's why the outcry has been so crazy. I mean, people on the border want border security. They just want it to be done in a way that's smart and as you mentioned, we have Maga Sheriff's, Staddeus Cleveland, who, I mean, his Twitter feed is literally him posting pictures of migrants he's capturing in the desert and he's on CNN, he's going on national news, he's posting on Twitter about how stupid the border wall in the Big Ben region is because you don't need it. What you need is technology to be notified that somebody has crossed the border, a movement, heat sensors, those sorts of things. If you bring border wall stuff out there, you're just going to destroy the landscape and build a bunch of roads, by the way, that the cartel and migrants can then use to escape into the United States, which is one of the crazy ironies of this whole story. Just put up some flock cameras. Yeah, but no point in it us pointed that way. On I wrongly. Yeah. Well, last question for you, I saw something about us seeding hundreds of thousands of acres to Mexico as part of this project, which is going on there. Yeah, so the story there is pretty simple. All across the Rio Grande, which is the most precious water source in West Texas. There are private properties that abunt the river that are cattle ranchers. There are river guides like my family, there are outfitters who take people on these off-road journeys or horseback riding or whatever. The map of the wall is right now placed oftentimes hundreds of yards if not quarter half a mile in from the river on the Texas side. So you can't just put a wall in the middle of the Rio Grande River, it floods the construction being possible. So they have to put the wall in the American side. What that means effectively is that they're cutting Americans off from this critical water source. They're cutting Texans off from this critical water source. They're putting a bunch of American, Texan land on the other side of the border wall. What I did through an assessment of the map and putting it into cloth, one of the very few positive use cases I've found with AI, by the way, is figuring out how many acres of land is actually going to end up on the other side of the 30-foot steel ballard wall according to the DHS maps. And it's about 280,000 acres of Texas land that's going to be on the opposite side of that wall. Once the walls are built, the access points are controlled entirely by the federal government by DHS, we've had stories in the past that people who get key codes to get into the river, to get through the wall. There's a gate there. And then they become a target, not just of the cartel, but of locals because they're the person with the key code and the access, creates all these crazy dynamics and scary things for these people who own this land privately that are facing eminent domain threats to have their land taken from the federal government. So it's not a sovereignty, we're still going to control the 280,000 acres of land on the other side of the border wall, but private U.S. citizens are going to lose access to it. For me, that is just an insane thing to do in this moment, is to give away 300,000 acres of precious American land to Mexico, which I think is what the administration is doing. Yeah. Isaac, you've been at the forefront. Matthew McConaughey, where are you, man? You know, you're all this Texas. You got nothing to say. I got to say, there's a lot of ride or die Texas brand people who have not spoken up today. I'm just saying, you know, we've got our eyes on you, you have no doubt about that. You're sipping beers with Shane Gillis with some bullshit soccer game. You don't have shit to say about Big Ben. Get the fuck out of here, man. You know, I don't want to see you down. I don't want to see you in Longhorn's gear, come college football season unless you're going to speak up for the light really didn't occur to me. No, this is a big deal down in Texas, all right? Yeah. Big time. The stars at night. Thank you very much, Isaac. We appreciate you, man. Thanks for having me, man. I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced, but these aren't stories about what's taken from them. Their stories about what it takes to make it out alive, listen to the survivor files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're a bookshelf and you're a four-year page or equally important to your personality, welcome home. I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story, I'm obsessed, I'm obsessed. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, and that is the Trojan horse, whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Welcome to Pro's Society on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is A's Davenport, and Sean Clements. We host the podcast, Hollywood Handbook on the big money players network. Our show is extremely accessible to first-time listeners. Each week we talk to someone in show business, aka The Biz, and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time and no one gets mad at their publicists for letting them do our show. How to greet guests like Sarah Sherman, not that great. I actually, can you help me, can you, can you help me shape this? Yeah. How about we flip it on his head? No. Right. How about we flip this around? Okay. How? What is the surprise one, then? Well, actually, you think is the straight man is actually the one who's acting weird. Adam Scott. Love. This entire time you've been expecting Adam Sandler to come to visit the show. I would never let go of that. I have. I would never set expectations for something like that. It seems like if the universe allows for something like that to happen, I am open to it. I'm always going to accept, you know, Danny McBride, fine. Yeah. It's all this fragile masculinity exuding. I could smell it walking on the hallway, to be honest with you. I was like, "Smell it." That was exactly it. Exactly. No. It's fragile masculinity. Yeah. Ben Stiller, no. I think there's a lot of times out of context, people don't get it, or even know what a circle is. You know what I mean? Like, you're like, "I'm so stupid." Everyone's so dumb. And fake. Right. Fake and also not interested, or just like, "Oh, I've got my life, I don't care about your life." And a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Oh, and by the way, Will Ferrell told us personally he loves the show, and he wants to be a guest on every episode, but he's just so busy. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Very excited now to be joined by Jared Cooney Horvath. He is the author of the Digital Delusion, a tremendously influential book, How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids Learning, and How To Help Them Thrive Again. He is a neuroscientist and has extensively studied this issue, and I'm excited to talk to him. Jared, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate it. Thank you for having me on. So, Jared, you have been, again, one of the leaders in this movement to remove technology from the classroom. We have seen examples of this pervade, both from K through 12 all the way up to college. F2, guys, just the latest example of something we're seeing. College kids are using AI agents to take entire online classes for them, logging themselves directly into course management, software, so they get the grade, but they're not actually doing the work. We see cascading in different types of these effects as technology has entered the classroom. So, big picture, why do you decide to write this book? What data? What surgery? Yeah, my background is just in human learning. How do humans learn? So, I've worked with schools for 15 years on just, if this is what learning is, what does that mean for teaching? What does that mean for student studying and parents? And it was really around COVID. We've known for a long time that digital tech wasn't great for learning. But it was always somewhat peripheral until COVID hit. Everyone went digital rightly so you had to do something. But when COVID ended, no one ripped that bandaid off. Everyone stayed heavy digital and kept pushing forward. And all we've seen is literacy, numeracy scores really just continue to drop lower and lower. So, that's all I figured. Now is the time to just put the data out there and say, look, we know that tech isn't great for learning. We know why tech isn't good for learning. Maybe we make different decisions in schools now. Yeah. So, let's put F3 up on the screen. This is some of the latest data about the way U.S. test scores in most states in the U.N. have been declining while U.S. test scores are earning generation long decline. And there's only a handful of states like Mississippi, Hawaii, maybe one more that have bucked this trend. over the past decade and a half. You're pointing to the advent of ed tech in the classroom. How do you separate that though from, there's a lot that's happened over that time period. We had a reduction in the no child left behind standards. We've had the introduction of personal smartphone use outside of the classroom. So kids are on their screens in an unstructured way outside of school. So how do you look at all, you of course had COVID and you pointed to the more significant learning loss that occurred during that time period? So how do you look at all of those things that happen and pinpoint in classroom ed tech as the single most significant factor here? - Well, this is in to be fair, everything you've just said completely matters for emotional development, for social development. When we just focus on cognition, I think an important thing to remember is we're not stuck in the US. We've got data from over 90 countries now over the last about 25 years from international exams from their own country's testing regimes. And what you can see is in each country, as digital technology moves from a peripheral to a central feature in education, that's when their scores will start to go down. So it's not tacked to any one year. It's unique to win schools and in the US as well when those states adopt digital technology. We can also then go back. Since 1962, we've been doing academic research, which is causative, directly linking digital tech and learning and showing that when a screen enters learning, learning compared to say analog methods tends to go down. And then you can also with COVID, you can start to see, do what we call regression analyses, where you can take the hit of COVID, remove that from data sets and say, is there anything left remaining? Take SES out of the equation. Take non-classroom tech use. Be very specific about where you're using use statistics and we still find the same thing. But I always say, look, the data is one thing and that's very much in our favor, but it's the mechanisms. Once you get down to biology, we have better explanations for why tech doesn't work than anyone else does. And that seems to be the kind of a ceiling factors. We can kind of explain why it's happening and no one else can really do that as well as we can. - Can you go into that? So I think I, in particular, so I'm 34. So when I was coming through K through 12, that was really the height of every student gets a laptop, the interactive PowerPoint. This was seen as a boon to the teacher in the classroom. I was telling you before the segment, my own mother's professor of early childhood education, a big proponent of educational technology, has some challenging questions she wants me to ask you. But just generally, what's wrong with that mechanism that you just talked about about technology itself as a medium for learning? Why isn't it the hope that we thought, let's say 20 years ago? - So there's gonna be dozens of different mechanisms, but let's just stick with kind of the reading one. A big aspect of human memory is spatial location, where in space does something occur, becomes a massive aspect of our memory for that thing, and ultimately determines how we can access that information later. Now think of a book. Until this book here burns into dust, every word has a clear rigid, unchanging three-dimensional location. Till this book disappears, the word saddle will be 10% of the way through left page, top left hand side, it ain't going nowhere. That will become part of the memory I form and will ultimately determine what I learned from it. So this is why if you're an avid reader of books, you know when you finish a book, you might not know verbatim everything you read, but you will know where in the book everything occurred. Like there's a quote you're looking for, you can almost flip right to it. Now take that same thing to a screen. All of a sudden, the word saddle is gonna start at the bottom of the screen, pull through the middle, disappear out the top, there is no three-dimensional location. So an entire aspect of human memory gets adamped. So this is why when people read from a screen at about the four or five minute mark, the brain will send you a signal saying, I'm not getting this, like I don't know where any of this belongs and we just start skimming, rather than actually reading, we just start looking for keywords off we go. So this is one of those easy mechanisms where we can say if you have the exact same thing on a piece of paper versus a screen, people will remember more comprehend better from the piece of paper than the screen, just by the way, biology and memory works. - Super interesting. - So let me get you to respond to one of the critiques I read. This is from Chalkby. We can put this up on the screen. So they were talking about the way you analyzed the impact of edtech specifically. And the writer says that the overall impact of edtech in the studies that you cite is actually positive. Horvath says the effect is too small to justify the use of tech because it's smaller than the effect of typical classroom instruction, taking that into account turns the edtech results and negative he says this is a key methodological decision on which your conclusion rests. But according to Elizabeth Tipton, who's a Northwestern University statistician, counts herself as an edtech skeptic. She says this is not the right approach. Your benchmark she says is wildly unrealistic and carefully designed studies in which two groups are both receiving some sort of instruction. Most effects are quite small. In that context, an effect above zero would be encouraging. So my understanding of this critique is basically, when you just look at the impact of edtech without comparing it to what would be happening if you weren't using the edtech, the impact is either negative or somewhat positive. And so it's your choice to say, okay, but instead of the edtech, if we were doing this other instructional method that the learning gains would be more that leads to the result. And again, this statistician is saying that this is not the right approach to do the study. So what is your response to that critique? >> It, there are multiple ways to run statistics. And I hear everyone, but the point we're trying to make is every educational study. Oh, so there's a man named John Haddie down in Australia who's looked at over 350,000 studies in education. Over 95% of them have a positive effect. Basically, his argument is everything works. And this is why because learning is biological. If you change your hat, a kid will learn. If you sing a song, a kid will learn. If you put a kid in a closet for a day, take him out, they will come out cognitively more developed than when they went in. Because biologically, you can't stop it. So the argument from that side of the equation is always, we cannot use nothing as a baseline in education, otherwise everything goes. So you have to have some sort of different baseline in our field to figure out what's better than average. And in his argument, and if you look at any statistician, that value's gonna sit somewhere between 0.4 and 0.5. Now that, that number doesn't have to mean anything to anyone, just know that EdTech really undershoots that value. Whereas things like reading from a book, having a discussion with a teacher, doing a pair and share with your peers, those have values way above that. So you can start to see when we compare different strategies, yeah, some are gonna be far better than others. But if you can go down to a study where you are comparing one tool to something without that tool in an equivalent condition, you hit what's called a randomized control trial. Now those are really, really easy to do, not easy, but doable in fields like medicine, in fields like physics. They are almost impossible to do in social level fields, like school. So imagine you give one school a group, a bunch of laptops, and you don't give another school a bunch of laptops. Then you can say laptops were better or worse than no laptops, right? Wrong, 'cause now we gotta worry about what were the pedagogies each school was using. Were these teachers asking kids to recall and these weren't, were these teachers giving homework and these weren't, there are so many competing variables that when you wanna look at the social level, you have to use these higher level values and use more averaging because we just can't drill down far enough to the specific random control trial mechanism. Right, enough. So I know it sounds like I'm skirting the issue, but it's not, it's just a different form of analysis. No, totally. And social science is require one more so than the other. Right, one challenge I saw, Jared, is he right, across the west IQ scores have began to fall, even as time spent in school kept rising, the answer lies in the media rise of educational technology. But kind of to come back to Crystal's original point, which is really impossible to ignore, how do we separate out the technology from the digital milieu that we swim in? As in, you know, these children, especially 2012, onward are inundated with screen time at home, either from television, on the iPhone, and then you add educational technology onto that, why is that not a modest effect and a significant effect? 'Cause to my eye, what's happening in the home and in the rest of the world and all of that general screen time, which we know reduces general IQ, should actually be more of a significant factor. Or please challenge my general line of questioning. No, and it absolutely is, for general level IQ, it's gonna be very difficult to parse things out. But we're lucky in school we can do these specific measures where we can flat out ask kids, how often do you use tech at home? How often do you use tech for these purposes at home? And we can also ask them, how often do you use tech in schools? How often do you use tech for these purposes in schools? So in a lot of our data sets are international ones anyway, we can differentiate between those two modes. Again, account for one and say what's left. And probably the biggest example of that would be East Asian countries. Is everyone knows East Asian countries are highly technological. Their economies are based on technology. Their kids are spending more time on tech for gaming purposes than anywhere else. Believe it or not, those are or pre-COVID were the least tech-using countries in the world when it came to school. Singapore, Japan, China, Korea, these people were not using tech in schools. They said use tech outside of the classroom. But when you're in a classroom, we're going with analog methods that we know work. And it's no surprise. that up until COVID, they had always peaked out on literacy, numeracy, science scores, they were always beating everyone else. Even though their kids used more tech in the real world than kids say in the U.S., they used less tech in school and they still saw better cognitive growth than we did. How do I get hung up on some of this as a parent in particular is, understandably, we tend to talk about just tech as a broad bucket or just screen time as a broad bucket where, obviously, like when my kid is just mindlessly scrolling YouTube shorts, that is a really terrible brain rotting thing, whereas to be honest, I think there's an argument that some of the video games that they play that require a lot of like language and social interaction and problem solving, etc., which is what a lot of the East Asian screen time is centered around. I'm not sure that that's bad for them in terms of brain development, at least in some level of reasonable moderation. How do you think about the quality of screen to do you have a hierarchy of which types of device time are better or worse for kids developing minds? Yeah, so again, I won't focus on out of school. Any time you use a screen for entertainment, let it rip, go for it. I'm just talking about straight learning. In our context, when we're talking about digital technology and learning, it's any internet connected student-facing device that is going to lead them down a path of non-learning. But if you twisted my arm on the other stuff, you're right, I mean, something like video game where you can hear another person's voice, and I didn't know this till recently, but that's what kids are doing. They have headsets on and they're actually talking to other human beings. If you can hear another person's voice and you're actually communicating with them, that's fine. I mean, it's not great, but I mean, go to town with it. It's versus like texting. So we can do this kind of hierarchy, right, where if a group of human beings are hanging out together, we can measure the type of chemicals that are being released to demonstrate what kind of social bonding they're showing. And as you'd expect, when they're hanging out together, you get a lot of these social bonding chemicals. When kids are interacting via text, you get none of those social bonding chemicals, which is a good sign that text-based communication isn't recognized as actual social interaction biologically. It's more recognized as isolating and threatening, which is one of the reasons why kids who use a lot of texting-based tech, like social media and stuff, usually have lower scores on sense of belonging those things. But if you can hear someone's voice, so like when we were growing up, we used to call each other all the time. You'd have that long cord on the phone, you'd go sneak into the pantry. We didn't know it, but when you hear somebody's voice, you can get the same type of chemicals you get from social interaction. They're not as strong, but they're definitely there. They're not absent like texting. So I'd say, if you had to do a hierarchy, I'd say, look, if you're going to play video games, sit on the couch next to the person, like we used to do, N64, you're going to get the best benefit. Next to that, as long as you can hear people in your talk noon, that's going to be next down the line. And then if you're just gaming by yourself quietly, that might be third down the line. But you're right, it's just kind of how we're using them. Yeah. And there's also just like a modern reality of my son's in middle school, and he's a gamer, and this is what he and his friends do. If I was to tell him like no video games, that we cut him off from a lot of his social life that he has now, because this is just sort of the reality of the world that we live in. So reflect on that, but also, you know, how do you, and I know you focus more on text deployment in school specifically, but you've also spoken and thought some about how parents should approach technology in their home as well. How do you approach that conversation without putting the entire burden on parents and shaming them at a time when look, everybody's doing their best and we're up against these like multi billion dollar companies that spend a lot of money trying to make their tech addictive and make sure that your kids are glued to the screen. Yeah. And that's one of the hardest things we have to face is it's the cigarette problem all again, is we've we're giving something to our kids that we know is dangerous. I don't think there's a parent out there that's thinking, you know what? My kid needs more tech. We all kind of know that the as soon as they're done with tech, we're going to have this half-hour window where they're just crazy, they're going to have to deep get off of that. But you're right, it's how they built their social life. We basically lost that battle. So what I tend to say with to families, when it comes to learning, anything that has to do with learning, if it's homework, if it's a reading, if you could ask to do a worksheet, write it out, buy a printer, do everything learning-based analog. The first thing we have to do is separate the screen from learning. Kids view the screen as an entertainment medium. And rightly so, that is what they do. They spend over 2,500 hours every single year using this machine to rapidly switch between media content. When we now say, now use the same exact tool to learn, which requires sustained focus, they can't do it. Most of them only make it about six minutes before they go right back to, well, I'm just going to open this tab. I'll check this out. So any time it comes to learning in your house, make it analog. Buy a printer, get it out. That's very do. Do you want that? Printed out is a very doable strategy. Yeah. Yeah. I would say beyond that to just start with a tech audit and totally non-judgmental for all the entertainment-based tech, just spend one or two weeks with you and your kid. They do it. You do it. How often do you use it? What are you using it for? And as a parent, does my kid see me use it? What message is that sending? Look at a sense of the lay of the lance, what's going on, and then make small changes as you see fit. If you try and change everything at once, it's always going to bomb. It's like trying to change your workout regime in one minute, done work. Just change one thing. Say maybe next week, let's see if we can't shoot for an evening where the family watches a movie together instead of does tech, something like that. And then you just build your own values. That's my last question, Jared. One of the things I love about America, if you live in a locality, you can actually have immense impact in your school system. Like Crystal was telling you, they parents band it together. They were like, hey, we want our kids off machines, the school board actually did it. So my daughter's going to be in school in a few years. I'm going to start going to the school board meetings. What should I start demanding of my school board around this conversation about technology? What kind of guidelines? If you were to design it from scratch, what should I push for? Go in first, get a coalition. One parent talking is always going to be viewed as a nuisance. Ten parents talking. Now we're going to start paying attention at schools. That just seems to be how it is. Don't go on the attack, go with the level of curiosity. If you go there saying you're doing it wrong, they're going to push back nothing happens. Say, look, do you guys know how much and what type of tech is being used in schools? And what you'll find is 90% of the time the answer is no. No one tracks this data. So say, cool, let's just do a tech audit. For the next month, can you just track what programs are kids using at what year level and for how long? And maybe we can even just if they have their own iPads that they've been given, we can just plug in a program that'll do that for us. Then we can say, okay, where's the data? So once we know where kids are using it and they say, maybe they use this program but not that one, we can say, okay, do we have data that that is an effective way of learning? And what you'll see is 99% of ed tech tools have no data with them. Ed tech was the one field that was never regulated at any level. Your toaster has gone through more clearances than the programs we put in front of our kids tomorrow for at school. So we can just say, cool, what's the data? And then we can make it clear that, okay, if there is no data, then either we've got to collect it, in which case, don't give it to every kid, do a small experiment, or be, we wait till they collect the data and prove it to us. If the focus of school is learning, then at the end of the day, every decision we make has to hinge on, does this improve learning? And if there is no evidence that it is doing that, and if there is evidence that it's harming on the other side, then by all means, we're in a good spot to say, maybe we pull that back, divest a bit until we have better data to say this is something for our kids. >> I think it's a very smart approach that you just laid out. I hope everybody goes and buys the book, engages with the work. Thank you very much, Jared. We really appreciate your time. >> Thank you, Jared. >> Oh, thank you both. >> Thank you guys so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed it. AI, block. We just went too long today. We're talking with Jared quite a bit. So Crystal and Emily will be doing that tomorrow, so you get a special treat then. And we're about to do the AMA, so we'll see you on a bit. >> I survived nine months in captivity, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. Listen to the survivor files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're a bookshelf and you're a for-you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. >> Yeah, I'm sad, so I'm sad. Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. >> I'm Hoda Kotby, host of the podcast Joy 101 with Hoda Kotby. And one of my friend Henry Winkler offered advice to aspiring actors and really anybody hoping to stand out. >> You're not hired just to fill time and space you're hired to fill the space with you. Listen to Joy 101 with HotaCott be on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.