#094 - Dr. Mark Williams | The Hidden Factor Neuroscience Says We’re Missing in Education

Dr. Mark Williams is a Professor of Neuroscience and is the author of The Connected Species: How Understanding The Evolution of the Brain Can Help You Reconnect With The World. In this episode, Mark and I dive deep into the science of human connection and its profound impact on education. Drawing from his personal journey and groundbreaking research, Dr. Williams explores why connection—not just engagement—is the key to effective teaching and lifelong learning.

He discusses how teacher-student relationships, physical touch, and eye contact play a crucial role in learning by building trust and motivation in the classroom—sometimes more powerfully than verbal praise. You'll learn why understanding the neuroscience of learning can transform how we teach, and how substances, social cues, and even racial perception shape our behavior and face recognition.

Dr. Williams also breaks down the effects of in-group and out-group dynamics, showing how a student’s sense of belonging directly affects their ability to learn. He highlights the rise of tribalism and how it negatively impacts social connection, especially in diverse educational settings. The conversation extends to the role of technology and social media, examining how they influence children’s ability to read facial expressions, contribute to increased loneliness among teenagers, and normalize harmful content like internet pornography, distorting perceptions of healthy relationships.

Connect with Mark here: https://www.drmarkwilliams.com/

Download the Luxy App: https://www.onluxy.com/?srsltid=AfmBOoqTNbyn-jjHs7e_i30XoKL8TjYHwsNZf3mszmFzGiR7IyEUU0FD

Chapters

02:53 The Impact of Substances on Perception
06:01 Understanding Connection vs. Engagement in Education
09:00 Building Teacher-Student Relationships
12:08 The Neuroscience of Learning and Connection
14:56 Strategies for Enhancing Classroom Connection
18:09 The Role of Touch and Eye Contact in Connection
21:06 The Negative Aspects of Tribalism and Connection
34:27 Understanding Face Recognition and Racial Perception
38:01 In-Group and Out-Group Dynamics in Education
41:24 Expanding Community and Classroom Connections
44:25 The Impact of Social Media on Loneliness
53:30 Reassessing Technology's Role in Education
59:16 The Dangers of Internet Pornography and Its Effects
01:02:42 Building Community in Schools
01:04:29 The Importance of Lifelong Learning

Thoughts shared on the podcast are purely our own and do not represent the views of the Anglophone South School District or the relevant jurisdictions associated with my guests.

Transcript

Lucas Clarke (00:00.482)
All right, Dr. Mark Williams, thank you so much for coming on today,

Mark (00:04.749)
Thanks for having me.

Lucas Clarke (00:06.92)
Of course. So pretty extensive background in neuroscience. And for myself, I would say myself and most educators are pretty much, I wouldn't even say armchair psychologists in a sense, because it's kind of what we're dealing with on a daily basis is looking at the kids trying to find connection. But I would say definitely always watching from afar, kind of being more a bit.

maybe attuned to the way that students are interacting, the way that we're interacting with our colleagues, because that's just, everyone says that relationships are the core of education and kind of the recent movements. I guess to kind of start us off to maybe add some factual basis to my armchair psychology claims, maybe just tell me a little bit about like,

When why pursue neuroscience when it seems to be such a pervasive field, maybe even perhaps a maybe potentially oversaturated field. And I guess when do you go from a pursuance of neuroscience as an area of study and then into connection?

Mark (01:16.973)
That's about five questions in once. Okay, we'll start from the start. Why did get into neuroscience? Yeah, I actually wasn't very academic as a kid, or I wasn't at all. I grew up in a small country town. My mother had mental health issues. I was a truant from about grade five onwards.

Lucas Clarke (01:18.252)
I know a lot there. I don't I don't mean to pour too much on the I do that all the time. We'll go slow. We'll go slow. Yeah.

Mark (01:45.741)
So I didn't go to school most of the time. My principal actually told me when I was 15 that I'd be dead or in prison by the time I was 25. So I hated school and wasn't very good at it and didn't think I was very intelligent at all. And it wasn't until I was 25 that I actually, I had two friends who had drug overdoses and so I decided I needed to do something else. So I went back to school to get my.

know, HSC or leaving certificate or whatever you want to call it, depending on where you are, my final year. Sorry.

Lucas Clarke (02:15.714)
So what were you doing at that time? Were you in university? Were you in university kind of maybe potentially thinking about it or what was kind of like between 18 and 25?

Mark (02:23.294)
No, no, no. So between 18 and 25, I was working mainly as a labourer or I was doing the night shift at service stations, petrol stations, because it was really good money to do the night shift and you didn't need any qualifications. And then I was travelling through Asia, surfing a lot and taking a lot of drugs and having a good time and trying to work out who I was. So not much at all. Experimenting. Yeah.

Lucas Clarke (02:38.51)
Yeah.

Lucas Clarke (02:46.145)
Okay. All right. Experimenting with neuroscience before you go into it, right? Get some life experience first.

Mark (02:53.1)
Yeah, absolutely. So when I was 25, I went back to went back to tape. We call it tape here. I think it's more like a community college over there. And I just wanted to change. I got frustrated with where I was. So I went back to community college or tape, as we call it here, to make a change. And there was a physics teacher there that actually saw something in me. And we were both into

records, I don't know if you remember, they had vinyl records and we used to run it and they had a needle on them. We both collected records and we sort of we talked around the records but then he sort of started convincing me that I was smart enough to actually apply to go to university. So I did and I wanted to work out why I was as messed up as I was and why my family was as messed up as they were. So I actually started doing a double degree in psychology and

Lucas Clarke (03:26.52)
Yeah.

Mark (03:52.237)
in biology and from there I got really fascinated with the physiology side of things, so neuroscience side of things. And so I was really at the start of what we call cognitive neuroscience, which is actually looking at live human brains in fMRI and in the new scanners that we have these days, we're actually able to see what a human brain is doing. Because before that, before 20, 30 years ago,

Most of the research in neuroscience was done with animals or it was done on people once they died and we cut up the brains to see what they were doing. And so it was a really fascinating time to be in neuroscience because all of sudden we had access to live human brains, right? To look inside them and see what was actually going on. So I got fascinated by that and I was lucky enough that I did well and then I did a PhD. Yeah, it was, it was amazing. I was lucky enough to get a...

Lucas Clarke (04:24.686)
Yeah

Lucas Clarke (04:35.778)
Mm-hmm.

Lucas Clarke (04:42.766)
It would be a cool time to start getting into like that field.

Mark (04:49.312)
fellowship to go to MIT and I went and worked at MIT and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research with one of the leaders, Professor Nancy Kamwisher. In that area, she's absolutely amazing cognitive neuroscientist. And she discovered a lot of areas like the fusiform face area and stuff, which is involved in our ability to recognize faces and communicate. So that's how I really got into the social side of it and how our brains, most of our brains are actually evolved for us to communicate and to connect with each other.

So that's sort of how I got into the whole neuroscience thing. was, yeah, it wasn't something that I wanted to do from a young age or anything like that. Most people are like, oh, you must have been, you know, why did you get into it such a young, didn't at all. I was quite the opposite.

Lucas Clarke (05:22.626)
No, beautiful.

Lucas Clarke (05:35.286)
No, I love that because I also, I think when I first started going into education in this kind of field, I was like, I want to teach history and biology. That was kind of my initial stick, kind of a weird split. And then first year biology absolutely kicked my ass in university. I remember I had, I did really good in high school bio, like eighties, nineties, once I upgraded because I wasn't a very good student either before that. But then.

Like first semester uni, I had one bio course, studied my ass off for a week for the midterm and got a 29%. And I was like, you know what, maybe this isn't for me. I'll go the full history social studies route instead. I withdrew from the course rather than fail it. So that was, that was good for the GPA. But it's interesting that you're saying like kind of two key things about it's kind of falling a bit to the cliche of.

Mark (06:11.542)
street.

Mark (06:17.58)
Yeah.

Lucas Clarke (06:26.636)
like research is me search in a sense like you saw things in your family that you were trying to potentially figure out for yourself. Kind of embodying a bit of that black sheep like you know what maybe there is an answer around this rather than just taking it on and continuing it. And then. If you have a history of what sounds to be somewhat like mental health struggles potentially in that realm and then from 18 to 25 you've taken a lot of drugs which is like whatever that's cool but I guess.

One thing I'm interested in is like, how did your experience with substances influence, like what was arguably like a very obviously anti consumption of any sort of drugs like field? Like how did like, were there any kind of contentious arguments of, like, I guess, for example, right now, in my listening, like I'll listen to kind of the major podcasts out there and talking about like,

ketamine and ibogaine and even psilocybin as we used to treat PTSD. And that's kind of a bit more of the cultural norm of discussion now. But I guess what would you have maybe first to say on the substances and then maybe after we'll go to the family.

Mark (07:35.115)
Yeah, I think it made me realize how much we're influenced by the substances we take. mean, even I'm still addicted to caffeine, to be honest. I still drink a lot of caffeine. But even caffeine can get the heart racing, make you feel a little bit anxious and all those things, right? And I think it really made me realize how much we are our brains and how much drugs and all those other things can affect.

Lucas Clarke (07:47.136)
absolutely. Yeah, it's... yep.

Mark (08:04.744)
our brains and how we actually perceive the world and where we go from there. so, yeah, and we're all, we've all, we all take drugs in different ways and a lot of animals, right, take drugs as well. You get monkeys that search out for fruits that have over ripened because they're slightly alcoholic and all these sorts of things, right? They're like bizarre.

Lucas Clarke (08:29.134)
You

Mark (08:32.348)
examples in the natural world where we're looking for it. And we've been producing alcohol and stuff for thousands and thousands of years. And so, yeah, I think it's fascinating because it does our brain. We are our brains, right? And our perception of the world is based on how our brains work and what our brains are doing. And then by taking drugs, you're actually changing that and changing your personality, right? People's personalities change when they're on these drugs.

Lucas Clarke (08:38.286)
Mm-hmm.

Mark (09:00.662)
their perception of the world changes, their decisions change. We do things, even on alcohol, right? You do things that you wouldn't normally do when you've had too much alcohol. So I think I found it really fascinating that, yeah, that our brain is almost mechanical in a way that we can change it so easily by just sticking a different drug in there. Yeah, similar to a car, right? You put good petrol in it, or one better.

Lucas Clarke (09:09.005)
Yep.

Lucas Clarke (09:24.75)
Well, it's almost like.

Yeah, it's it's like scarily predictable. Like I know it's almost kind of sad in a sense. I like know how I'm going to feel at different parts of the day all the time because of caffeine. Like I've been I've probably been about like 11 or 12 years probably consuming one form of another caffeine, like taking pre-workout in a stupid way in high school, probably just completely ruining my recept my tolerance for it. But pretty much

Mark (09:39.084)
Thank

Lucas Clarke (09:59.522)
like morning time, okay, I'll wait an hour. Cause I, I'll hear things about like a denticine and cortisol. You got to let your body naturally, I guess, do its thing with those. Again, I'm not going to pretend that I know what it is. Um, then then like, okay, then I feel good for a bit. Then 10 AM, I'm a little sluggish down another cup feeling good for a few hours. Afternoon, I'm zonked to have another cup. And then I get home at four and I'm like, you kind of feel the withdrawal on the drive home. It's like the end of the school day.

and the caffeine crash at the same time. and again, my level of chattiness is very different depending on whether or not I'm in the midst of my, like students will always joke like, Mr. Clark, you always have your mug with you. It's like, I'm just trying to bring the energy. Okay. And if this is what I need to do to do that, then that's what we're doing.

Mark (10:42.54)
This is what I meant. Yeah. Yeah, it's important to know what works and what doesn't work, right? And to use it when you can, so you can. absolutely.

Lucas Clarke (10:51.958)
Yeah. Yeah, and caffeine is definitely one I abuse. so I think for something I was thinking about on my walk here today was first off, guess, how would you how would you define connection? What's your first? How would you go about defining that?

Mark (11:12.426)
Yeah, great question. I think there's a big challenge in schools in that we seem to mix up or get confused between engagement and connection. And there's a big difference between engagement and connection. Engagement is temporary. So engagement can occur at any time with anybody.

you do something that all of a sudden attracts the student. So you put a video on that they want to watch, they're to be all of sudden engaged in that. And doesn't matter whether or not it's teacher, they like or they dislike, right? If they put a video on, then they're going to be engaged in that. But it's only temporary. And it's not something that really, that helps a huge amount in learning, helps somewhat in learning, but not a huge amount in learning. Whereas connection,

is how you relate to another individual, another person, and it's much more permanent. So it takes a long time to establish good connection. And then it can be broken down if the person does something really bad, but they have to do something really bad to break down that connection. And when you actually have connection, it's usually connection between people rather than with an actual task. So engagement happens with the task, whereas connection happens with another individual.

and you become connected to that individual. It's the way I would put the difference.

Lucas Clarke (12:38.593)
Mm-hmm.

Okay. Yeah, I love that. I think too, because that's probably one of the most dominant discussions that I kind of didn't really realize was even potentially like improper or potentially controversial wording is that everything revolves around student engagement. But maybe that's not necessarily the right way we should go be going about that. So I guess

Tell me more about your work within school specifically, maybe to potentially improve like specific teacher-student relationships, classroom relationships, and even like analyzing and improving the culture of a school to become more socially connected.

Mark (13:27.318)
Yeah, great question. obviously it always depends on the school that I'm going into and it really depends on where their culture actually is. I work.

Lucas Clarke (13:36.032)
And so, sorry, I'm gonna interrupt you there. So I guess like, maybe how are some schools different that you go into and you're like, okay, there's things I'm seeing with this one and this one that are different. Like what are those differences potentially?

Mark (13:49.003)
Yeah, well, it's the community, right? Some communities, I work in a lot of rural areas and areas with low socioeconomic status, so very depressed areas where there's high unemployment and those sort of, and in those communities, in some of those schools, the whole community is broken down. And so therefore within the school system as well, it's broken down. And so you need to build that back up again. And you need to create a community where everyone feels that they're part of it.

Lucas Clarke (14:01.39)
Mm-hmm.

Lucas Clarke (14:12.536)
Mm-hmm.

Mark (14:18.252)
Whereas I work in other schools, usually in wealthy areas, where they have really good connection and community around the school, because parents are paying a lot of money to send their kids there, or it's a wealthy area, where you do have much more connection within the school, but then you have groups that don't feel as though they're part of that connection. so there's overall 80 % of the...

students feel connected, but then you've got about 20 % who don't and feel very isolated in that situation. So those are two extremes of course that I'm talking about there. And so those are the different things I'm usually looking at. But most of the time, what I do is I first talk about the neuroscience of learning and what we now know about how the brain actually learns, right? And there's really five keys to learning.

Lucas Clarke (14:56.205)
Mm-hmm.

Mark (15:15.148)
And number one is connection. You've got to be connected with somebody before they can actually learn from you. And then you have intention, engagement, consolidation and feedback. Those four things all come from the connection, but you've got to have the connection with the student first. And this amazing study came out, what, two years ago now, where they actually put EEG headsets on all the students and the teacher in a classroom. And they did it in multiple classrooms.

Lucas Clarke (15:20.803)
Mm-hmm.

Mark (15:44.533)
And they just looked at which students actually felt as though they liked the teacher, they were connected with the teacher, and which students didn't feel as though they were connected with the teacher. And our brains oscillate at different frequencies all the time. And there's about six different frequencies that they oscillate at, depending on what you're actually doing and whether you're concentrating, whether you're resting or whether you're learning and so on. And what happened was as soon as the teacher stood up and started teaching, the students who were connected with the teacher

and the teacher, their brains actually synchronized. They started oscillating at the same frequency, which is amazing, right? They actually synced up straight away. Yeah. And the students were delayed by about 140 milliseconds, which is enough time for the information to leave the teacher's mouth and travel through the air and go into the cochlear and into the brain and for them to actually perceive it. So they were just behind them enough that they were actually receiving the information, which is in

Lucas Clarke (16:21.751)
That isn't, yeah.

Mark (16:42.26)
insane, right? And it really blew a lot of people's minds. They're really, really cool. And then, and the kids who weren't connected to the teacher, they never actually synced up, they never got, they never started isolating together. But also, they then looked at when the kids who were connected with the teacher, when they became asynchronous, which happens occasionally when all of sudden the kid beside them disrupts them, they get, you know, the kid talks to them, or someone else talks to them, or someone walks into the room or aces.

Lucas Clarke (16:42.946)
That is really cool. That is really cool.

Mark (17:10.176)
which actually captures their attention and so their brain stops oscillating with the teacher. They then looked at whether or not they actually learned anything during those periods by actually giving them a whole bunch of questions. And they found that as soon as they were asynchronous, as soon as they weren't actually synchronized, the kids didn't actually remember what they were being taught. Whereas when they were synchronized, the kids remembered what they actually being taught. So you've actually got to connect with the kids so that your brain starts synchronizing when you start teaching.

so that they'll actually remember the information that you're actually teaching them, which is insane, but it's what the research is now showing.

Lucas Clarke (17:42.286)
Yeah. Well, and especially for like myself, like last year, I was in a pretty like I taught grade 11 and 12 social studies and it was pretty like, like high like older kids and if I had a day that I had to like not even lecture but maybe go through a bit more extensive direct instruction for a while there, I got to have no problem like keeping silence in the room if you know what I mean. So now I can't

promise that they were all paying attention because maybe they weren't all the time. now being in a middle school, it's a little bit different in terms of the behaviors that you see. It's not uncommon to go through a 60-minute block and have 30 interruptions in the class. And that's not people standing up and yelling. It's just little things where the students are commenting and they're...

looking at their friend and they're dropping their water bottle. It's just all these different things happening at the same time. So, and I guess that's kind of more so on the learning experience front, but I guess like what potentially causes the students and teachers not to connect even after potentially being together for a long period of time? Like what is it that, I guess in my experience, the more like

the most shy and disengaged students that I've had in my rooms that Like it's gonna be it's gonna sound bad to say but it's the students you kind of forget their names first a little bit like you see them in the high and you're like I know I've marked your essay I've seen your tests and we've you've asked me to go to the washroom a few times and No matter how many times you check and you say hello, like they're just not really giving you anything And I think it's the not giving you anything part that I'm really trying to potentially

get your perspective on like, how do you get more out of the students or potentially, how do you change your approach to potentially talking with that student who's self isolating?

Mark (19:44.629)
Yeah, I think we need to spend a lot more time connecting with the students to begin with when we first start classes. When I work with schools, I'm always very keen for schools to spend at least the first week of the year where the teachers just connect with the students. There's no curriculum. You don't do anything else but just try and connect with the students because they need to know who you are to connect with you.

And so if you're up the front and you're just teaching and they see you as the teacher and nothing more than that, then they're not going to connect with you because they don't see any value in that. Whereas if they see you as more than that, which we all are, right? We've all got lives and we've all had lives and we've all gone to school and we've all been in their position before. Right. If they understand that that's all occurred before and that you can relate to them, that you're part of their in-group.

Lucas Clarke (20:32.622)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mark (20:41.448)
Because you've to become part of their in-group or they've got to become part of your in-group for them to actually learn from you. Because if you're not, don't. Because we learn extremely, extremely well from people who are part of our in-group, but we don't learn from people who are not part of our in-group. And so we need those students to become part of our in-group. And we do that by showing who we are, right? So that they actually want to become a part of our in-group and then also showing them

Lucas Clarke (21:06.094)
Mm-hmm.

Mark (21:09.782)
But there's some really easy tricks you can do. One of the easiest tricks is just to shake hands with every student when they actually walk in the door. If you shake hands, if we have in our skin as humans, have what we call C fibers and C fibers only activate to touch. And when they activate to touch, actually release oxytocin in our brain, which makes us more open to becoming connected with the person who just touched us. And so I often, when I talk to

teachers, usually the principal falls off the seat when I say this, but I say teachers have to touch their students more often, which of course gets a laugh. Appropriately and with consent. No, but you do, because in all societies we have some way of touching each other when we first meet. So in stoic societies like ours, we shake hands and

Lucas Clarke (21:46.286)
I'll need some context there. Don't isolate that clip anyone.

Lucas Clarke (22:03.054)
Mm-hmm.

Mark (22:07.308)
In Europe, they'll kiss each other on the cheeks. Even the Inuits who are fully covered because of the cold, they'll rub noses because the only part of their skin that's actually open to actually rubbing against every society. have some way of rubbing skin against each other when we actually greet. And yet in schools, we've been told by we've been telling teachers, don't touch students, right? Which gets rid of that ability to actually release the oxytocin.

Lucas Clarke (22:19.532)
Interesting.

Lucas Clarke (22:27.16)
Mm-hmm.

Mark (22:36.364)
and you get close to them. When you do shake their hands, and I have teachers who do crazy things, especially in primary schools where they'll have a different shake for each kid that walks to the door, So they get that kind of, yeah, it made me wonder. But I mean, I worked in a school where truancy rate, it was a primary school in a very rough area. And they were struggling to get 40 % of their kids at school every day, like in the school.

Lucas Clarke (22:45.836)
Yeah, I've never gotten to that level yet, but maybe one day.

Mark (23:04.908)
struggling to get 40%. So it was pretty bad. One of the teachers there had amazing outcomes and his class, he used to get about 70 to 80 % of his kids would come to school every day. And the one thing that he did was that he'd come out the front, he'd get on his knees. I always say, I'd say you can tell the best primary school teachers because they have dirty knees, right? Because they were always on their knees. Because you've to get the same, you've got to get to the same head space, yeah, the same size as them. But he used to get on his knees.

Lucas Clarke (23:25.774)
Yeah.

Lucas Clarke (23:32.366)
Mm-hmm.

Mark (23:33.055)
And he'd have a different shake for every kid as they arrived. And he said, how are doing? You're doing, you know, and he said, one of the things I can tell is I can tell if they smell, right? Because a lot of these kids were in foster homes or they didn't have a parent at home. So he said, you know, could tell. And if there was one that smelled bad and obviously hadn't showered for a couple of days, then I could organize for them to go to the sick room and actually have a shower or things like that. Right. So, I mean, this is an extreme version.

But it meant that his kids all wanted to come in, right? And they wanted to be part of it because they felt really connected to him and they felt safe there. Yeah, yeah, they were being taken care of. So I think we teachers need to touch their students. You need to somehow get close to them, eyeball them, which is a problem these days, right? Most teenagers won't actually look in their eyes, right? Because they actually haven't learned how to look you in the eyes, right? So if you walk up to someone and shake their hand, even a teenager, they will then look up at you.

Lucas Clarke (24:06.83)
It's also they knew they were taken care of.

Lucas Clarke (24:23.406)
Yeah, that's true. Yeah.

Mark (24:31.084)
Usually because they're surprised to be human, right? They're like, what the hell's going on here? Right? Yeah, but they look in the eyes and then all of sudden we have that, we have the connection because the eyes do connect us. There's a whole area of frontal eye fields which are about eye contact and understanding eye contact. And then also when we teach, we look at things when we're actually referring to them. So you need to teach the kids to be looking at you when you're teaching because then they can see where your eyes are actually gazing so that they can actually tell what you're actually

Lucas Clarke (24:34.114)
Yeah.

Lucas Clarke (24:46.67)
Mm-hmm.

Mark (25:00.972)
teaching or what you're referring to and if they're not looking at you if they're looking down because that's what most of them do these days or they have the hair over the top of it or whatever then they're not whereas if you shake hands with them they'll look you in the eyes and then they're more comfortable looking you in your eyes during the class which is really important as well plus you get close enough to them you can see what they look like so you might remember their name

Lucas Clarke (25:22.786)
Now it's true. It's funny you say that too, because I had, I think it was Jessica Hawk on before and she said, like, okay, yes, we can get into curriculum point 1.3 today. But like she said that when she would meet her students, she said, okay, no, come back. And she'd be like, you, grab the hand like this and shake it and don't give me a dead fish. Like when I actually came to shaking hands and like, so I guess

Eye contact is something, even for myself, I've never, I find when I tell stories that you've probably even noticed too, it's not that I'm not trying to not look you or anyone in the eye, I'm just thinking and I'm my head and I do that all the time. Apparently I move my head back a lot when I laugh too, that's a different thing, but I do find I do have lot of head movement when I'm talking and a lot of hand movement too. But how do you teach someone about what proper,

eye contact is. So that's obviously going to vary from like culture to culture in terms of like what that means or like intent with that. But I guess like before I even go any further, like what are your thoughts on that?

Mark (26:34.634)
Yeah, I contact a really interesting thing because you learn it just through doing it, right? You actually learn it via the other people around you and how other people are actually doing it. And that's why teenagers don't do it much anymore because nobody does it, right? Everyone's looking at their phones and nobody's actually looking at anybody else. And so they're not actually learning it in a normal way. But the way eye contact usually works is when we first greet someone, we

Lucas Clarke (26:43.533)
Mm-hmm.

Mark (27:03.026)
say our name and say hi and then listen to their name is we look each other in the eye and then we usually look away because then we'll start talking about something that we'll refer to by looking at it and so we don't we don't like staring at each other because that's weird which is why zoom yeah and that again that's a feel thing right and some people you some people you don't like just because they stare at you too much right some people get and some people get too close and some people

Lucas Clarke (27:16.876)
Yeah. Yeah. I guess like when does it get weird?

Lucas Clarke (27:28.428)
Hahaha

Mark (27:31.243)
know, talk too soft and there's all these nuances about, but it's all through trial and error, right? And you've got to be doing it a lot to actually learn what works and what doesn't work, which is one of the big problems with childhood these days is that they don't learn all those things. Now we've got this awful thing called the still face effect now in society where kids whose parents use mobile phones end up having still face because they never learn what facial expressions.

Lucas Clarke (27:31.68)
Yeah. Yeah.

Mark (27:58.093)
Because as a toddler you learn what a facial expression means because you for example you you do something funny in the playground And you feel good and you look up to your parent and your parent or carer is smiling because they just saw you do something funny or you fall over and hurt yourself and you feel shit and then you look up to your parent or carer and they look sad because they just saw their kids just fall over and hurt themselves and that's how we learn how facial expressions mean but because a lot of parents are now on their phones and they're not actually reacting to the kids

Lucas Clarke (28:27.373)
Hmm.

Mark (28:27.414)
both when they take them out to dinner and when they're at playgrounds and so on, they don't learn how. And so there's a lot of clinics now opening up to teach kids how to use their faces and how to smile and how to be sad and all those sorts of things because of the fact that we're not actually learning those things. But they would normally be learned just through that, through trial and error, actually just experiencing it. And again, eye gaze and all those things is all just learned through experience. But we've got to be doing it.

And that's the role of parents, right? We need parents to actually step up and actually be interacting with their kids from a very young age, to be reading to their kids and to be actually playing with their kids and allowing the kids to play a lot more than what they do.

Lucas Clarke (28:59.395)
Yeah.

Lucas Clarke (29:10.99)
I feel like three or four seconds is usually enough time to like glance away and like you don't want to start counting in your head because you won't hear what they're saying. But I've even noticed for myself like doing podcasts, especially like having it's a bit different like doing virtual ones. I think that obviously doing it in person, I find like in person, like I'm staring at you pretty much the whole time because we're having a very not like an intimate conversation, but that's like for the proper use of the word and that

context, like, like, it's just you and I having a conversation. So I might be staring at you directly, but I'm not like, looking like that. Like, you know what I mean? I'm looking and I'm engaged and I'm like, you're almost giving feedback with your eyes. That's the kind of way that I would kind of conceptualize it. But, and so like, yeah, eye contact, hand shake, that's the whole thing. I feel like I remember hearing that.

The reason that we do handshakes is that's like your sword wielding hand or whatever. And that that meant that you weren't going to pull your sword. I don't know. That could just be some old like cliche that I heard. But it does make a lot more sense that you've added some science onto my claims here that like every culture has some form of touch to initiate connection and comfort. But yeah.

Mark (30:32.808)
Yeah, the oxytocin is awesome because it's a big neurotransmitter so it lasts for much longer. So it's something that'll actually last for a long period of time and gives you all those good feelings about this person's someone I like, this is someone who I want to connect with, and this is someone I can trust. And it is about the trust, right, because you're getting close to each other.

Lucas Clarke (30:39.022)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Lucas Clarke (30:48.802)
Yeah.

Yeah, and I do find like when it comes to again, like initiating, that's probably the wrong word, like touch with students. think like a hand on the back of the shoulder goes a long way. That's pretty safe. again, like a a pat on the back or something like again, it's not like you're going to just like point and touch their forehead or something. That would be weird, but there's ways to kind of get around that. But.

Mark (31:15.404)
Yeah, it's been shown that like the best way that they've done multiple studies now where they've had a group of students and they've given them a really difficult task to do. And then they've got teachers either to give them really open ended compliments. Oh, you it looks like, yeah, you're doing really well, good work, you know, keep going, blah, blah, blah, blah. Or they're giving them specific comments about them. So, well, you're you are really smart and da da da da. Or they've walked around and just given them high fives.

and said nothing. And they found the best way to motivate them, yeah, is just high fives. High fives works way better than any compliment you can actually give a student. so that's what we should, yeah, teachers should just high five or fist bump, whatever you want to do, whatever it is. Because again, you're getting close to the student rather than standing behind a desk and calling out to them. So there's this trust thing about getting close to them.

Lucas Clarke (31:45.742)
high fives. It's a fist bump, yeah.

Lucas Clarke (31:56.59)
Hmm.

Mark (32:11.062)
But also it's that touch that you're doing, right? Because you're actually walking up and touching them and the oxytocins release, which makes them feel really good about themselves and feel really good about what they're actually doing.

Lucas Clarke (32:21.92)
It's almost like a positive reinforcement to stay in the in group in a sense, kind of what you're saying. Like, you know what? This is this is what our community does. And you did it. So now you get this like kind of re or affirmation that you an offer an affirmative reward. And so.

Mark (32:26.592)
Yeah.

Mark (32:33.43)
good for your board. Yeah, coaches, think we sports coaches, we should have sports coaches teaching teachers, motivate kids, right? Because that's what they do. all high fives, Although some of it's not appropriate. The whacking on the bum is probably not appropriate.

Lucas Clarke (32:43.982)
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I feel like that's kind of kind of gone away with the wind as well. so a couple of things I wanted to talk to you about here today as well is you talked a lot about the negative side of connection, which I had never really quite considered again. We talked about us being tribal human beings, but then

pretty much whenever we're referring to things as being tribal, they're typically negative, like racism or sexism. And like, we're kind of putting ourselves in these groups as a potential negative way to connect. I guess just like, tell me more about like, maybe how you kind of discovered that lane of thinking and what you learned through going through that.

Mark (33:30.956)
Yeah, so some great research done where we've shown that there's an area of a brain called the fusiform face area. I mentioned before Nancy Kamen, she worked at MIT, who I was lucky enough to work with for a number of years. And she's great mentor of mine. She discovered this area of the brain, which is there just for us to perceive faces. Because faces are really hard to perceive because all our faces are actually very similar to each other. You two eyes and nose and mouth.

Lucas Clarke (33:54.542)
Mm-hmm.

Mark (33:59.255)
hair on top, sometimes not always. But we're amazing at recognising, The thousands and thousands of faces we recognise and over many, many years. And we can also recognise people within families. You can often meet someone and you're like, you look like so-and-so. happens to be their brother or their sister or whatever, right? It's amazing, this ability that we have. And you can run into someone after 10 years and still recognise them, even though...

Lucas Clarke (34:01.998)
Thanks.

Mark (34:27.244)
you know, they put on weight or lost weight and they've got more wrinkles and their hairs disappeared and all these things have happened, but you can still recognise. And the way we do that is via this template matching system. So in our FFA, we have what's called the average face, which is the average of all the faces that we've seen. And then we compare each face to that. And so all the faces that we have, you know, the eyes are a little bit wider and the nose a little bit down. And that's John or the eyes are a bit...

Lucas Clarke (34:46.83)
Mm-hmm.

Mark (34:57.356)
closer together and the nose is a little larger. that's, yeah. So it's all based just on these ratios that we have. Yeah. And that face changes. The template face is the average of all the faces we've seen. So we've ended up with what we call a race effect, which is that usually we see people from our own race a lot. And so the average face is the average of our race. So people from other races have a bigger deviation from that.

Lucas Clarke (34:58.986)
Okay.

Lucas Clarke (35:03.373)
Interesting.

Lucas Clarke (35:19.437)
Mm-hmm.

Lucas Clarke (35:27.214)
Hmm.

Mark (35:27.296)
that average face. And so they're seen as out of the group because they're not close to the average. And that sets off our flight or flight response, which makes us feel anxious and yeah, and negative about it. And we know that people within your race, we recognise people within our race better than people from out of our race. We're more likely to see people from in our race as being positive rather than negative. And we're more likely to...

Lucas Clarke (35:38.752)
Interesting.

Mark (35:55.639)
perceived danger from people who are outside of our race versus somebody from inside our race. And they've shown that in more heterogeneous societies, people's template is much broader. So they don't do that as much as compared to people who have very come from very homogeneous countries. So Japan, for example, according to the

the UNESCO, Japan's the most racist country in the world because it's very homogeneous, right? All Japanese people on the media, it's all Japanese and so on. And so they have a very, very narrow template and they don't recognize people outside of Japanese face very well and they have a negative response to it and so on. Whereas if you go to other countries where it's more homogeneous, then you don't have that. And lots of countries where there's a mixture of people, you'll get it for, you won't get

Lucas Clarke (36:23.982)
Mmm.

Mark (36:46.56)
the other race effect for the people who are within the group, but not across the group. And of course, the media also has an impact on that as well, because we're seeing those faces.

Lucas Clarke (36:56.27)
Well, it's almost kind of the well, it's obviously it is like it makes sense as to why potentially that origin of that fear reaction comes from like you are more accustomed to seeing those, guess, of your quote unquote, your own skin color. And so obviously any sort of difference potentially is going to cause a segment of fear in some sense. And so I guess like the connection.

no pun intended, that I was kind of looking at is, like is that different from peer pressure? Is it the same thing? Are they similar? Like when it comes to, like students are kind of learning certain habits from their in-group that they create. So I guess, how do you, maybe as a teacher, how do you potentially break up the negative in-groups that are kind of causing havoc within your school? And not in a sense to make them disconnected, but I guess to,

connect with better serving, I guess, habits, et cetera.

Mark (38:00.94)
So yeah, so we also have an in-group out-group detection system. So that's who's part of our in-group and who's not part of our in-group. And that's more what you're talking about there where people create their own groups and they hold onto those groups. And we know that if you feel as though you're part of a group, you learn from that group much more quickly. And people try to create groups that they can identify. Yeah, and so that's why...

Lucas Clarke (38:22.744)
Mm-hmm.

Mark (38:28.256)
you'll get within a school, for example, you you'll get all the jocks and they'll all wear, you know, stuff associated with being a jock. And then you'll get the, the, well, back in my day, there was punks. And so you'd get people who would dress like punks because they wanted to associate with those. There's all these different ones these days. So yeah, you know what I mean? Yeah. And there's all these different groups within it. And especially during teen years, when you're trying to create, you're trying to work out who your group is then, and they'll all walk differently and they'll all.

Lucas Clarke (38:41.165)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Mark (38:57.546)
do things differently. And those are all the things because I learned really quickly from people who are in your in-group. Now, the cool thing about in-groups is that they can change very easily. They can become bigger or smaller really easily. And there's great study done in the UK where they had football, soccer, or football, whatever you want to call it. They had fans of Liverpool, for example, come in.

And Liverpool and Manchester are really rival, two hugely rival teams. And they'd have Liverpool fans come in and they'd talk to the Liverpool fans about how Liverpool doesn't get as much funding as some of the other clubs because they're an old team and they're not being supported in the same way and da da. So they'd focus on Liverpool. And then they'd get the Liverpool fans to leave. And when the Liverpool fan left, they'd get someone who was wearing a Manchester jersey to walk across the road the other way and drop something in front of them.

And if they'd just been talking about how Liverpool's not looked after and everything else, then the people from would just walk straight past them, wouldn't even look, right? They wouldn't put their head up. just boom, straight past them and not even help them. However, if they bought them in and they talked about the English league and how the English league is not being funded like the European league and that the English league needs to be get more funding and it's really important and then do the same thing, the Liverpool fans would stop and help the Manchester person pick up the stuff and give it to them.

Lucas Clarke (40:03.502)
You

Mark (40:24.864)
and then start chatting to them about the fact that they don't get enough support and all the rest of it and how we all need to band together and da da. Right? They change their in-group just by talking to them about what, yeah, which is amazing, right? And that's what we, yeah. And so what we need to do within a classroom is create that this is our classroom and we're all part of this classroom and it's important for us all to work together so we can all get smarter. And then within the school, we need to work on this is our school.

Lucas Clarke (40:29.198)
You

Lucas Clarke (40:37.09)
Yeah, that is hilarious.

Mark (40:53.994)
and it's our community and it's part of our wider community and we all need to make this school better so that we can all flourish in this society. And across countries we need to be going, this is our country and we need to do better. And then across the world we need to be going, this is our world and we're all affected when things go bad and climate change or everything else. So we all need to be working on. And those boundaries can be easily increased or decreased.

Lucas Clarke (41:17.411)
Yeah.

Mark (41:24.032)
based on what we're focusing on. And so we need to, yeah, to do that, which is great.

Lucas Clarke (41:27.118)
It's hilarious. It's like it's like you're a Manchester fan. I'm a Liverpool fan, but we're both football fans. Like that's what comes first. And then we're football fans of this league.

Mark (41:34.508)
Exactly, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So we just need to expand that. And again, within schools, right? Yeah, you can expand those groups if you want to.

Lucas Clarke (41:41.262)
Okay, so find a way to... So turn the kids against each other. That's what you're telling me? That sounds good. I'll definitely try to do that. No, I'm just kidding. Yes, just find a way to make them compete.

Mark (41:51.245)
Your classes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, if you got two classes, they're both doing science. Yeah, turn them both into, yeah, we're gonna do better than that class, right?

Lucas Clarke (41:58.606)
I know I briefly, I probably shouldn't even share this, but I wanted my social studies class to, one of my best friends that was teaching another social studies class, they're both grade 12, I wanted to do a propaganda campaign against the other class, then out of nowhere, I wanted to talk about,

Mark (42:20.172)
Ha

Lucas Clarke (42:26.35)
like in the Soviet Union and then not to Germany. They would just like round people up without notice, like not having the right to a trial, et cetera. And like I was gonna do this campaign out of nowhere. wanted like our students to like abduct members of that group. Now, yeah, I was like, wait, I didn't get approval from the principal for that one. But again, trying to like show like how quickly those groups can be like created and how they can form. Yes, so.

yeah, so I love that.

Mark (42:55.372)
I mean, Oprah, Oprah, yeah. Oprah Winfrey did a great one many years ago, which is still in this area, still talked about a lot, which is a brown eyed versus blue eyed people. I don't know if you've seen this episode on Oprah Winfrey. I think it was 92, I think she did something like that. Where, yeah, they just, they got all blue eyed people and separated from the brown eyed people in the audience as they were coming in. And then they gave the brown eyed people.

snacks and stuff as they were coming in, but they didn't give them to the blue-eyed people. And then they made the blue-eyed people sit at the back and the brown-eyed people sit at the front. And then a psychologist, sociologist came out, I think she was, and she talked about the fact that brown-eyed people are much nicer people, they're more intelligent people, they're more likely to help out and do all these, and blue-eyed people are less intelligent, which was all false, of course.

Lucas Clarke (43:50.445)
Yeah.

Mark (43:50.477)
But very quickly it got very heated between the two groups and the brown-eyed people were putting up their hand and saying, yeah, I've got this friend who's blue-eyed person and she's really, really, you know, does all this da-da-da. And they actually had to shut it down because it got so aggressive between the two groups. And they were just, it's random, right? Blue-eyed brown-eyes is random. Yeah, yeah. And of course, huge problem. It's a good one to look at. It's a great one to show in classes, I think, because it really does show how easily...

Lucas Clarke (43:54.247)
What?

Lucas Clarke (44:07.466)
Interesting. Yeah, it's so random. Hmm.

Lucas Clarke (44:17.054)
Yeah, you could do like blonde haired people and black haired people to like you could just find these arbitrary markers and say like, why does this color matter? Hmm. I'll have to look into that for sure. And I guess to kind of keep going through this thread here, maybe not even in group or out group. I know that in your writing, you talk a bit about like, it's hard not to talk about social media, social media use phone consumption, it seems to be like

Mark (44:20.746)
Yeah.

Mark (44:25.974)
Yeah.

Lucas Clarke (44:46.026)
It sounds like the scary normal. We're like, yeah, I know I spend seven hours a day. What of it? And then if we're not on our phones, we're using educational technology, which is just more screens. And now you and I. again, the flip side, you and I wouldn't have been able to connect if not for these screens. So obviously, hopefully a positive for both of us in that regard. But I saw there was a stat yesterday. And I think you might have shared it. I can't remember for sure. But it's like.

People are now spending almost two and a half months a year on their phones. That was the graph that I saw and that like, guess if you're thinking like eight hours a day times 365, like that's going to add up into full 24 hour days very quickly. And that's just phone time. That's not video game time. That's not everything else like that. So why is it, I guess maybe to kind of throw the biggest question that you hear that maybe even exists right now is

Mark (45:19.2)
wouldn't be surprised.

Lucas Clarke (45:43.495)
Why are we kind of?

So guess a difference I've noticed is that from the ages of like, I was very fortunate, like age 10 to 20, like my, I did was hanging out with my friends. Like we didn't really have, like we had phones, Snapchat, whatever. We were together all the time, playing sports, going out, trying to, getting rejected by women all the time. It was just great. But like that's, that was our, like we were always hanging out. We were always together. Age 20, like I move away, go to university.

I hadn't really connected with my university and the student population that much because I lived like 45 minutes away. So it's kind hard to stick around for a lot longer when you're kind of doing that drive and all that thing. And my now wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, she lived a few hours away so I would go see her on the weekends. So it just wasn't the same. But I never felt lonely at any time at any of these things. But now it seems like loneliness is arguably the most pervasive condition.

I feel like it's always been the case for like I'm 27 now, but like people between 25 and 35, that would be kind of an understandable part of life where you might be a bit lonelier. Because I mean, like, again, like I told you, I'm having my first kid here in the summer. And like, it makes sense that you're a bit more confined to yourself because you have different things going on that require your attention more of the time. I guess where I'm what I'm building towards is that

It seems like that's kind of creeped from 25 to 35 to like 10 to 35. Like, I guess what do you kind of make of this transition? I know schools are kind of going like cold turkey or cold techie about trying to get rid of cell phones for the most part. So I guess, is that the answer? Am I even asking you a question here? I guess kind of what do you make of that?

Mark (47:40.14)
Yeah, I think it's really sad. present a lot of schools. Yeah, I present a lot of schools and I talk a lot about the connection bit, right? And the fact that, you know, according to the Harvard study which came out recently, it's been going for 75 years and they release data every five years and a huge cohort of people that they collect all this data on. And a bunch of other studies now, we know that...

Lucas Clarke (47:42.348)
Yeah, it is sad.

Lucas Clarke (47:48.398)
Mm-hmm.

Mark (48:06.688)
You know, to increase your lifespan by 10 to 15 years and to decrease the likelihood of having Alzheimer's disease and decrease the likelihood of mental health issues, decrease the likelihood of cardiovascular problems as well and to improve your cardiovascular system, so make you fitter and actually improve your IQ. All you have to do is sit down and chat to someone you like and trust on a regular basis. Right. I mean, it's amazing that because so much of our brain is dedicated to that. And it's a really complex thing to do.

To actually sit down and talk to someone that you trust and be honest with them is really, really complex thing to do because you've got, you're reading the eyes, gazes, as I was talking about before, you're reading facial expressions, you're reading body language, which is complicated. You're reading the prosody of the voice and the intonation of the voice, as well as actually understanding what they're actually saying. And our brains haven't evolved for us to be able to communicate in the way that we do verbally because

We've only been doing that for about 150, 160,000 years, whereas our brain actually hasn't changed in the last 25,000 years or so. So it's actually a really complicated thing to do. And it takes a lot of practice to do it well. And it takes a lot of mistakes and a lot of learning. And it's so much easier not to do it. But back in the day, when I was younger and when you were younger, you had to do it. Yeah, you really had to do it.

Lucas Clarke (49:29.71)
I think that's the key. I think that's the key right there. Yep. You couldn't text anyone. Yep.

Mark (49:35.149)
Whereas now kids can just, no, you just stay on your phone, right? You sit in your room, you stay on your phone. And it's ironic because pregnancy and drug taking in teenagers has gone down dramatically over the last 10 years, which is great. They shouldn't be taking drugs and they shouldn't be getting pregnant. But loneliness has gone through the roof because what they're doing is they're sitting in their rooms on their phones, not with anybody else. And that's really, really sad and really, really lonely because they're not going to learn how to do those things.

And the most important ability in any job really, I don't know many jobs where you don't need the ability to communicate with other people, right? All jobs you need to actually be able to talk to someone else. You know, it's actually no matter what you got to interview for a job, right? And you've got to interact with people and you've got to, you know, collaborate with people and you've, and you want to become a leader so you can get paid more, right? And to become a leader, you've got to be really good at interacting.

Lucas Clarke (50:18.338)
You have to interview for a job no matter what. So yeah.

Mark (50:34.156)
So, you know, the thing that we need most, we're not teaching kids because we're allowing them to avoid it because they find it difficult and they need to be actually doing it. And so we need to be getting rid of the devices so that they go and do that. And I think what's sad is that the devices that there's great potential in the devices could if they were designed to benefit us as people, but they're not they're designed to benefit tech.

gurus so they can make a lot of money. Right? They're designed so that we stay on them. Yeah, yeah. They're designed for us to stay on them so they can sell advertising. And that's what they're really all about. But we could make them really beneficial to us if we focused on the stuff that we actually need rather than focusing on distracting us so that they can make a lot of money. I think that's really sad.

Lucas Clarke (51:06.36)
Yeah, watch time is the gold.

Lucas Clarke (51:28.878)
Well, yeah, I've I know, because I've even said to my wife and she calls me an old man for saying this, like if I could if I could give away my phone tomorrow and get a flip phone instead and just call like I I hate scrolling on my phone and I turn actually it's probably a bad thing. I turned off my like screen time that tracks it because I'm like, I know I use it. And I had no social media for a full year.

Before I started my podcast, I deleted everything and I loved it. I was teaching, was coaching, I was helping out, I was having fun and I was like, okay, because I like talking to people, I wanted to start a podcast. But I feel like in order to have a podcast, you gotta be posting and interacting with people. Because again, you're not trying to grow an audience. me, it's obviously if a million people watch this,

I'll be all, I'll be over the moon, but it is more of a sense. Like I'm just enjoying this conversation with you. I enjoy connecting with people and hopefully potentially having some, some good ideas discussed on that front. But, I, my, my washing machine just went off not too far from me and I, I'll admit it kind of distracted my train of thought a little bit, but, I guess like what, what things can, like, what can we change? Like I, I kind of have the feeling.

where not really a whole lot is going to change in terms of how social media apps are created, how they run. I've even noticed that Instagram was kind of moving toward more of a TikTok type of software, where it's just going for reels mostly, and that's kind of the new norm. But I guess...

for building connection for these teenagers and especially potentially the adult teenager relationship. Like what do you think is missing currently? Is it getting rid of the cell phones? And I guess like what are your thoughts there?

Mark (53:30.816)
Look, as I said, I think it's an amazing technology. I just think we need to shift how we're actually using the technology. I mean, here in Australia, we're about, we're about to ban social media from, for 16 and below, right? And so nobody from 16 below is going to be able to have a social media account or access social media. And that comes in middle of next year, middle of this year. So, you know, we need governments to do things like that, right? We know.

Lucas Clarke (53:36.526)
Mm-hmm.

Mark (53:57.355)
social media is really harmful to teenagers and kids. there's nothing social about social media, right? You're not actually being social. You're advertising. And social media is about advertising. So you're either advertising a company, which is what you do, and what I do. Yeah, yeah. And so it's either advertising a business or a movement or something that you want to advertise, or you're advertising yourself, which is what teenagers are doing on social media, which is not healthy for a teenager.

Lucas Clarke (54:07.596)
Yeah. That's kind of what I was building towards as well. Like I'm almost kind of advertising as well. Right. Yeah.

Mark (54:27.136)
to grow up thinking that their worth is in how they can advertise themselves. It's a really awful way for someone. And that's why we have so many mental health issues in society now with teenagers. But anorexia and bulimia nervosa are rampant in society today. Even with boys now, we've got huge body dysmorphic issues where they're injecting themselves with all sorts of things to make themselves look abnormal, right? It's not actually normal.

Lucas Clarke (54:32.01)
Interesting. Yeah.

Lucas Clarke (54:49.176)
Yeah.

Mark (54:56.044)
We need to realise that it's not healthy for kids and it's actually causing damage. Kids are literally killing themselves because of it. So making it illegal for anyone who's below 16 when they're trying to work out who they are and what they want to actually do with their lives and everything is really important. Just like we make it illegal for them to drink alcohol or do all those other things as well. We don't give them guns at 12, you know, or...

Lucas Clarke (55:03.052)
That is so interesting.

Lucas Clarke (55:24.759)
Yeah.

Mark (55:24.874)
and let them have handguns and walk around the schools and all those things. So why do we give them something else that we know is really harmful for them? And then we also need to realize that a lot of countries have actually really good restrictions on the social media companies, right? The TikTok feed that you get in China is completely different to the TikTok feed you get everywhere else because they want their kids to be fed information which is good for them. So in the China.

Lucas Clarke (55:44.449)
Yeah.

Lucas Clarke (55:50.638)
It's like educational or something. It's like engineering and yeah. Yeah. Which is kind of hilarious on its own, right? yeah.

Mark (55:52.717)
It's educational, it's all about healthy eating and it's about respecting your parents and about being part of society and all these things. Yeah, it is, but it works, right? Because not as many kids in China are addicted to it because they're like, oh, I don't know what's that. So they don't watch it and they go out and play. Make it boring for them. Require it to be boring. Yeah, so we can actually do it. Or if you go to Indonesia, you can't get anything which is...

Lucas Clarke (56:10.646)
Yeah, that's true. It's got to I don't want to learn what the heck. Yeah.

Mark (56:22.568)
in any way sexually explicit. So there's no access to pornography. There's no access, right? I'm not saying we need to go that far. I'm just saying that if the government wanted to, they could easily make these companies do the right thing. And when we first had TV, companies started using subliminal advertising, right? They used to flash things up really quickly. And governments around the world realized that that was actually changing people's behavior. And they said, this is not right. You're changing people's behavior without them being aware of it.

and they banned it within about three months. What they're doing now in manipulating our behaviour and manipulating our thoughts and killing a lot of people, far worse than what they did back then, but governments aren't doing anything about it. And I think that's really sad, the governments aren't working for the people, they're really just working for big tech. And then we could make it great, we could make it amazing, we could make it into something which is really beneficial for all of us and teaches kids how to be good.

Lucas Clarke (56:52.77)
Yeah.

Lucas Clarke (57:14.264)
Well, and it's, yeah.

Lucas Clarke (57:20.588)
Yeah. Yeah, like if I if I had like a clean phone where I had not even like. I just call text and then something that I could post a video to all social media accounts on, but I can't see the feedback on them, maybe like see notifications and messages, but not actually have a man, that would be like the dream, I think to me, I think because I even know it's like.

Mark (57:38.336)
Yeah.

Yeah. Awesome.

Lucas Clarke (57:48.84)
I think like the social dilemma of the movie came out there and it's almost reflexive. Like you just take it out and you unlock it and you don't even realize you've unlocked it by the time you act. You're like, this is in my hand now. But I do think what you just touched on as well, like I never really thought that in the sense that we are kind of. Advertising ourselves so much more. Advertising ourselves so much more also leads to being. Rejected so much more potentially.

And it's almost interesting to me that like the rise of social media and phones is also like the rise and the uptick in the use of pornography is potentially like these like people are like young, I say mostly boys are likely being rejected so much more having by dysmorphia. And that's another outlet to kind of be accepted because that's it's easily accessible. I guess like maybe to kind of like go toward the wrapping up of our conversation here. Like what?

It's kind of the looking into pornography something you've done a lot of because I've even heard stories of like students in schools I've worked in who are like 10 and 11 telling the teachers that they're like fully addicted to it and it is a new world that we're trying to pretend doesn't exist like again You always had to use to talk to people It used to have to go in and buy the Playboy magazines from the gas station down the street like that was kind of the change and now it's We all kind of pretend it's not happening. So I guess what are you? are your thoughts there?

Mark (59:16.256)
Yeah, I mean the research shows very definitively that the more time a voice or a male spends on internet pornography, the more likely they are to be violent towards women and the more likely they are to be misogynistic towards women and the more likely they are to be arrested for sex crimes, right? So we know there's this direct link between using pornography on the internet.

Lucas Clarke (59:30.19)
Mm-hmm.

Mark (59:42.005)
And it's because of the algorithms that run in the background, right? Because they want you to stay on the site. Like I was talking about before, they want your attention. And so each, you you get a 10 year old or 12 year old who like we would have done in the day and we would have stolen dad's mag from underneath the bed to have a look at what it was all about, right? They get on there to see what normal sex is about.

Lucas Clarke (59:59.447)
Yep.

Mark (01:00:05.492)
And then they get fed something more extreme and then fed something more extreme and then fed more. And before they know it, they're down this rabbit hole that they never expected to be down. And they're normalizing something which is extremely violent towards women, right? And not natural and not what normal sex is about. And that's where they're learning about sex, right? Rather than learning it like we did in the old days, which was trial and error, right? You'd end up getting a girlfriend.

Lucas Clarke (01:00:30.924)
Yeah. Yep. Yep.

Mark (01:00:33.364)
not knowing what you were doing. You'd be fumbling around and maybe fumbling around and yeah, there'd be discussions and sometimes you'd feel like an idiot and sometimes it actually worked.

Lucas Clarke (01:00:36.3)
Yep.

Lucas Clarke (01:00:39.672)
Mm-hmm. Well, and you're also, but you're like you're learning with someone versus like you, like you almost, yeah, it's kind of this like weird assumption of competence in a sense, like relationship competence that's kind of being fed to you without you even realizing that you're not actually building any relationship competence.

Mark (01:00:45.568)
with someone.

Mark (01:00:58.88)
Yeah, and like now, you know, there's a huge problem with boys who growing up now not realizing that females have pubic hair because they've seen all this pornography and none of them have pubic hair. So they don't think girls should have pubic hair. And then they find that odd that a girl has pubic hair or they're expecting things that aren't really normal. Some people do it, but that's not what the average person does.

Lucas Clarke (01:01:25.228)
Yeah.

Yep

Mark (01:01:28.872)
I won't talk about specifics, but I get called into a lot of schools where there's been some severe issues. And it's because they've learned that this is okay, or this is what's expected, or this is what's normal through those algorithms. And we need to get rid of the algorithms, right? If it was just one thing that they looked at and then went away.

Lucas Clarke (01:01:46.274)
Yeah. I know the days that what it was just the most recent post was what you saw. Then you scroll to the bottom and it would just stop. I'm like, there's nothing I can look at anymore. It's done. Whatever. Again, like I honestly, if I could like customize your app and like disable certain parts of it, that would be cool too. But again, that's, that's a dream for another day, Mark, I think. to kind of, to kind of, to kind of wrap us up here.

Mark (01:01:57.708)
You

Mark (01:02:09.856)
That is.

Lucas Clarke (01:02:14.52)
Two final questions. one question, one quote. I promise that's not a game I play, just kind of what I have in mind here. if, let's just say I said, Mark, you know what? I feel like I got a disconnected community here in my school. Can you give a talk to them, I guess? What are kind of the main points you're trying to drive home to it? Like maybe potentially a middle school community of like 500 students. Like what is it that you're, what's the message you're trying to put out there?

Mark (01:02:42.166)
that we need to take time to create a community around the school. And it takes everybody. It's not just the teachers and it's not just up to the teachers to educate the kids. It's the whole community and it involves everybody within that community. Older people as well getting involved and actually being part of that community. There's too much of a separation now with schools. Schools have almost been removed from society. And it's somewhere you go and then you leave.

Lucas Clarke (01:03:06.742)
Yeah. Yeah. Which is weird. It kind of used to be the hub.

Mark (01:03:12.436)
It used to be the hub, yeah, and it was really important. And the teachers were known by everybody and respected by everybody because they're a real big part of students' lives. yeah, we need to create those communities again because when you do, it's so much easier for everybody, you know, the kids and the teachers have so much more time because they're not dealing with the constant problems that they're dealing with.

Lucas Clarke (01:03:37.53)
And so to finish off here, I'm a huge quote guy. I always end off with the same quote every time. There's two that are kind of sticking out. They're a little bit similar, so I'm just gonna say both of them. I think one really applies to the initial part of our conversation here is the quote is, do not let school get in the way of your education. So I guess what is it that you think has made you...

Mark (01:03:37.548)
Yeah, absolutely.

Lucas Clarke (01:04:05.108)
successful throughout your time, even though, like you said, you weren't really the most astute or potentially focused student in high school. And the other quote is, education is what remains once one forgets everything they learned in school. So I guess, what is it that you think that you think people will get from you that they won't get from anyone else? So a couple there to kind of wrap this up.

Mark (01:04:19.851)
Ha

Mark (01:04:29.302)
Yeah, think number one is easy. It's the people in my life. I've had amazing people who I've had the opportunity to work with and to meet and who have supported me in different ways, even when I wasn't absolutely red bag. And they're the ones that really, you know, really did help me along the way, always, right? Yeah, they're the people. It's the people you surround yourself with.

Lucas Clarke (01:04:48.43)
Ratbag is crazy.

Mark (01:04:58.092)
that influence you the most and they're the ones that we want to actually influence. And we know that, right? We all have teachers that we remember and we really respect it and we love those subjects and we learn a lot from them. And we probably learn more about how to be a good person rather than actual the subject they were teaching us. But that's more important than anything else you can learn, right? And what was the second one? Sorry. I think it's too much.

Lucas Clarke (01:05:03.0)
Yeah. Yeah.

Lucas Clarke (01:05:20.478)
The second one is education is what education is what remains once one forgets everything that they learned in school. So I guess what is it that you think people will take away from their time with you that they won't get anywhere else?

Mark (01:05:35.116)
One thing I talk a lot about is the fact that our brains are constantly changing. And I always focus a lot on that and the fact that everybody, IQ is not static, right? Your IQ changes constantly throughout your life. And even during your teenage years, your IQ can change up to 15 basis points. So you can go from an average to significantly above average student, or go from a significantly above average to just an average student, just during your teen years, during your kid, during, you know.

The earlier years, it's much, much more. So the fact that a kid today is not doing well doesn't mean they're not going to do well tomorrow. And we all need to realize that we all have huge potential, even into your old age, right? Even in your old age. I have a very good friend who's 74 and they're halfway through a PhD, right? It's like, and she's an amazing, amazing person who, you know, now is about to write a book that she wants to write.

because that's who she is. Our brains are constantly changing. We need to realize that. And yeah, it's not about schools. It's about educating ourselves constantly.

Lucas Clarke (01:06:36.696)
Beautiful.

Lucas Clarke (01:06:45.794)
Beautiful. I couldn't have thought of any better way to end this podcast off. Dr. Mark Williams, I don't know where this last hour went, but thank you so much for coming on today,

Mark (01:06:54.23)
Thanks Lucas, great to talk to you mate.