SPEAKER_01 0:38

Welcome back to Speak Out Standout. I'm Elizabeth Green, and today's guest is Wynne Shortow. Wynne is a renowned cybersecurity expert, best-selling author, and futurist who has spent more than four decades helping individuals, organizations, and governments understand emerging threats in the digital age. Wynn, you have been studying this since like the very beginning, right? I mean, when we think about Google, Google's less than 40 years old, right?

SPEAKER_04 1:03

I I still have the screenshot that says Google on Google's homepage, we will never advertise or something.

SPEAKER_01 1:11

That's funny. Well, we're so glad to have you here. Thanks for taking the time to chat with us. So,

Meet The Cybersecurity Futurist

SPEAKER_01 1:16

when, you know, our goal here is to give parents practical skills and strategies to build confident, communicative, creative, kind people, right? That's what we want as parents to be able to raise people like that. And we are oftentimes, I feel like, figuring things out as we go, especially when it comes to the digital world. Because even though now it has been around for four decades, it is ever evolving. And the access that our kids have to it now and what they have access to on the internet is growing so quickly that it's hard to um plan ahead as parents of what we want for our kids, what we want to allow, what we want to strict. And then how do we even begin to do that? So lots of things that I would like to talk about with you today. But I I think that the one of the number one questions that um parents have is how can I and I know this is like a little offshoot from what we're planning to talk about, but I think one of the number one questions parents has is how can I protect my kids online?

SPEAKER_04 2:13

You can't.

SPEAKER_01 2:15

No, just we can't. No, that's it.

SPEAKER_04 2:18

No, people peep in in the security world for the last something decades have been doing this. A similar question that an organization, a CEO, how how can we protect our networks? You can't. You can do the best you can. You have tools, you have to be involved. The same type of

Why You Cannot Fully Protect Kids

SPEAKER_04 2:37

answer that goes through for protecting a military, a private sector, your bank, or your kids. The rules are fundamentally the same. You got to do the best you can. And the best you can means learn the available tools, have open communications with what parents should be doing anyway. And then in cybersecurity, we call it Detect and React. And that is a monitoring system. Depending upon the age of the kids, depending upon your relationship with the children, there are tools by which you can monitor certain types of activity. And whether that is, did they go to a bad website? Okay. Um, are they spending too much time gaming? Okay. There is no one universal rule. Uh, you're gonna have uh a set of hopes and desires for the proper digital behavior in your home. Somebody else is gonna have something that's slightly different. We're all maybe gonna kind of come close, but uh the biggest single thing to do, limit screen time.

SPEAKER_01 3:51

Okay. And you're when you say screen time, just so we're clarifying, are we talking devices? We're talking TV, gaming, all of it, right? Any kind of screen interface, right?

SPEAKER_04 4:01

With the exception of oddly enough, Kindle.

SPEAKER_01 4:05

Okay. I think most parents will get behind you on that one.

SPEAKER_04 4:08

And Kindle is and it's there's different models of Kindles. The ones that I recommend are not the full color, what do they call them, fires or something?

SPEAKER_02 4:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 4:18

It's um the the paper whites, that's what I've been using forever. Because they don't affect your eyes, you can go to sleep with them, they don't give you that chemical boost of

Screen Time Rules And The Kindle Exception

SPEAKER_04 4:29

I'm gonna be awake, I'm gonna be awake. And and the interactivity is only between you, your brain, and next page.

SPEAKER_00 4:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 4:38

So I strongly recommend that. Um too much time on tech is also bad for your physical health.

SPEAKER_01 4:47

Right, right. Well, and I and obviously mental health, we we've seen the trends, you know, absolutely, especially in teenagers. Um, if you were, if you've never heard this before, Wynn, I'm sure you have, but lit those listening, if you've never heard this before, um, the there is a direct correlation in like if you look at the graphs of the rise of social media and the rise of teen suicide, they both rise at the same exact pace. So we know that they're you know physical, emotional, social, but they are a huge part of our lives. And as a parent, even now, it's a lot of parents say, well, you know, my k I'm my kids aren't doing screens, and that's all well and good, but there is come going to become a point where they are going to be exposed. If you are like our no-screen family, when your kid is 13 or 14 years old and they're at a friend's house, they're you know possibly going to be exposed to screens. So it's not like we can just shut it out and pretend like they don't exist.

SPEAKER_04 5:40

I don't re I don't recommend that at all. I mean, that that's like the having a kid who's never had a drink in his entire life, and suddenly he hits 21 or he goes to Europe and he's 18, and the wall just collapses.

SPEAKER_03 5:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 5:55

I'm not suggesting that at all. Um my grandson has been on tablets um since he's roughly three. But his uh my daughter and I, and we've all been geeks a long time, is like, what is it that he is doing? Is it productive? Does it help the mental development of and there's plenty of things out there? One of the big problems that you have, and you mentioned teenagers, and that is the focus, is ask your teenager how many friends do they have on their social media? They're gonna come up with some number and it's gonna be 500, 800, I don't know. I have, I think, 60. Man, humans, we cannot maintain a good, healthy contact and in a relationship with other humans at that level of scale. We're just incapable of it. And to think that you need 500 friends to give you that chemical boost, that chemical feel good every time you get a like button, that's addiction.

unknown 7:06

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 7:07

And so parents need to be highly aware that this stuff becomes addictive with the like button alone. So it's not so much only screen time, it's what kind of screen time.

unknown 7:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:20

Well, let's talk just for a brief minute about that. You you brought up something that I was just having a conversation about with my mom the other day, and how it seems like connection, human connection is so different now. I'm 43. So I was in high school, I think, when Google came out, and like we uh, you know, we or we started using it, you know. And but social media obviously was not a thing. I wasn't on that until like my mid to late 20s. But so we've talked about how human connection just in that time has seemed to change so much to really superficial relationships. And I I part of it because it's easy,

Social Media Friends And Teen Addiction

SPEAKER_01 7:57

right? It's much easier just to be Facebook friends with somebody and keep tabs on their life as opposed to calling them, right? But it it takes work to have real meaningful communication and and uh relationships. And I feel like um that it that has to be doing something to us mentally and emotionally, too. Like you said, 500 superficial friends as opposed to like three really good friends, I feel it would be a lot better for us.

SPEAKER_04 8:23

I hate the word friends that they use in social media because they're not really friends. They are people who you are looking for their approval because you're a teenager and you're going through the teenage angst issues of growth and acceptance and identity development. And by having all of these randos over there going, I like that, I like that, I like that, is just feeding into those levels of teenage insecurity and don't provide any substantive growth at all. So the the human on human, um, an awful lot of I and my colleagues and friends, we end up meeting like this, but we also uh make sure that at least we're on the road a lot for conferences. We get to see each other and hang out and uh that and have that personal beer so we can fight about something that we want to fight about. If you look at some recent studies that have come out, and I wish I could tell you exactly from where, uh, because it's just been in the last couple months. Uh, fMRIs, the way that they look into your brain, the kids that are raised on digital technology, their brains are wired different. Period. End of story. What we don't know is the long-term effect of it. We don't know what it means, but their neural patterns are different than kids who are not as exposed to technology and certainly deaf different than the generations like ours when technology meant holding on to the aerial to get a fuzzy black and white TV picture working. Most of you are too young to even know what that means.

SPEAKER_01 10:12

Well, so I and I think that's a great point. I mean, we, you know, we've had the privilege of teaching thousands of kids speech and debate, and it's all virtual. And I feel like there are so many benefits to virtual education and uh, you know, and connection if used in the right way. So we we know that it's not all bad and it is part of life and it's not going anywhere. So, how do we help our kids and ourselves have healthier digital habits? Because I I want to tie this in. I know we're talking about kids and teens specifically, but what you said about teens going after justification and validation, I feel like that doesn't change. I feel like that I do that online. I see other moms doing this all the time and saying, um, you know, I what I'm not sure what to do about my kid. What do you think about this? And like, you know, wanting validation that we're doing things right. And oftentimes from total strangers, like you mentioned.

SPEAKER_04 11:04

So what Yeah, when you go to Reddit, you're gonna get that.

unknown 11:07

Right.

SPEAKER_01 11:08

Right. And any Facebook mom group, it would be the same, too. It's it's they're they're crazy. Um, not the not the moms, but the groups are crazy, you know.

SPEAKER_04 11:16

Like you, you some of the moms are, yeah. I mean it it's still a bell curve. I mean, you've got the outliers on either side.

SPEAKER_01 11:24

That's true. That's true. Well, so what do you what are your like very basic starter suggestions to making sure that we have healthy digital habits because we know it's part of our lives, it's not going anywhere.

SPEAKER_04 11:34

One of the things that has become very popular in the last, and I'm gonna use the word 10 years, and I was very fortunate to be brought up by two engineers who taught me it very early. And uh it's too much information. We're trying to absorb too much information. Uh, you have too many friends, you're listening to too many randos, you're listening to people's opinions, you're absorbing them through all of your senses, and that unbeknownst to you is what is creating your identity. You don't even know it. And it's just the constant exposure to this group of kids, uh, this particular digital echo chamber on whether it's Facebook, LinkedIn, Insta, it doesn't matter. Too much information is the

Critical Ignoring To Beat Information Overload

SPEAKER_04 12:25

equivalent of what we call in cyber DDoS, the overload of the network, the overload of the brain. And uh my new book that's coming out is called Critical Ignoring. What the hell is wrong with everyone? And one of the big things that is wrong is too much information. And it's we we see it, we all ask it, it's like people are crazy. What is and we all have various forms of saying this to our friends, to our families, to the kids, and the kids are not exactly aware of it yet that it is too much information. What we as a species were never made to do was to survive information. We were designed, our bodies, our physiologies were designed to uh survive dirty water, smells bad, don't drink, tastes bad, don't eat. Wild lion, run like hell. We were not trained, and our bodies are not attuned to too much information. We we it was survival, hum human survival. But today, when you look at the curves of the amount of information from 50,000 years ago that's put out every day, you're looking at, and I think it's 10 with 36 zeros, if I'm correct on my numbers. More information is produced today, every day, than in all of history. Now, how do we deal with that? What I am offering, and I'm not saying this is the answer, but I hang out with a lot of really smart academics, and they're interested in doing some studies on it, is called critical ignoring. Teachers teach, parents teach, critical thinking. Before you accept it, you gotta go through and where's the source from, and does it make all of these things that's critical thinking. What I am suggesting is that we have in order to prevent the DDoS of the brain, TMI, is to begin with critical ignoring. Begin with critical ignoring. And uh there's I I've broken it down to six areas, and from an adult standpoint, it's somewhat easier to do. And if people could go through this exercise, and the new book's got them all in it, of course. I'm not trying to plug it, but it's I it spent a lot of time with my academic friends figuring this out. How many times when you are you know thing and you're on and whatever, TV doesn't matter, and you go, I just don't care. Say I don't care more. How many things are you faced with every day that come informationally to you that are designed to grab your attention and pull you down their attention rabbit hole? I don't care. Um, another one is I just don't have time. Understand we have limits. As humans, we have limits. We cannot do it our all. Your boss should not be making you do everything and overload and overload and overload because it only makes your performance worse. Um that's just an AI trying to fool me. Do you know how to recognize that instantly?

SPEAKER_01 15:46

Yeah, and that's getting harder and harder.

SPEAKER_04 15:48

But that is part of critical ignoring. Before you get to the critical thinking where you would have to go through a technical analysis, which is really difficult, critical ignoring, because is the source of that information even worth me considering right now? Or does the type, does the time it takes to validate it, is it worth it? Is it worth my time? And ultimately it goes back, do I really care? Uh which technologies are you comfortable with that uh are overloading you, that are eating up all of your time so that at the end of the day, whether it's kids or adults, feel I don't feel like I got anything done, and I still got this stack of crap over here to do. We're doing it to ourselves. Management is doing it to us, society is doing it to us, ad tech is doing it to us, and critical ignoring to recognize when you're being advertised to, when people are using biases, when they're trying to influence your brain to do something that is not part of your everyday experience. Critical ignoring, and if you play with that and just think about it on a regular basis, suddenly things dissipate, and the two biggies are I don't care, and I don't have time. You start there, the other stuff starts to fall into place.

SPEAKER_01 17:20

I think that that makes a lot of sense, and I know I have had many days where I'm like, I feel like I got nothing done today, or I just feel like like blood. You know what I mean? Like I'm not I I feel like kind of defeated because spent too much time online on things that don't matter, you know, or you know, things like that. But one I think challenge that we have now is social media used to be about connecting us with people we knew, right? The whole thing with Facebook, right? It was like meeting other people you go to college with, getting to know people like in your actual bubble. And now, if I went to Facebook right now, I would maybe see it in in five minutes of scrolling, maybe four posts from people I know, and then a bunch of other stuff, you know, the pages and the political stuff and all of that, you know.

SPEAKER_04 18:06

I'll save it for you. Facebook is a weapon, nothing more. What do you mean by it the five or ten people you care about aren't what creates the noise, it's all that other crap. And that you can do an awful lot of that with your privacy settings. I want to curate my 50 friends, and that is it. And I'm only gonna let somebody else in if I really vet them and I know that I want them to be part of because relationships take time, and this is all about time. Time is the only asset that humans

Curate Feeds And Take Back Time

SPEAKER_04 18:44

have. Are we spending it wisely? So critical ignoring returns time to us.

SPEAKER_01 18:55

Well, I think that this speaks to me, especially as an adult. I think this it would be a lot harder for a teen to understand, right? So how do we how do we help our teens avoid from going down to the path where they have to teach themselves how to fix it through critical ignoring?

SPEAKER_04 19:13

If I had that answer, uh this is an a very, very serious topic of study that is um unfortunately being used and understood in Europe far more than here. The majority of the cognitive defense technologies and approaches and academic studies have been um canceled due to uh anti-woke movements. So to find to find good academic research in anything that's either government funded or government adjacent uh is more and more difficult. The uh in Europe, they have uh dedicated, at the last count, about 150 billion euros to teach their entire citizenry cognitive immunity and cognitive strength in order to be able to avoid TMI and ultimately the BS. How good is your BS detector is a huge amount of this. And there are techniques that exist that touch on it. Um, if you've got uh the book Meta War there, there's 700 references in it, and there's 50 games out there that have been developed to work on cognitive strengthening and to be able to show you yourself where your biases are. Where you you you mentioned that you talk about uh a debate. Well, one of the big things in debates that occurs, um in fact it's uh one of all right, when you're in a debate, and we've seen this politically, and it's one of the signs I use, and it's somebody will say to you, do your own research, you'll find out. And my answer to that is do your own research is show is shorthand for there is no evidence, and I have no freaking clue what I'm talking about.

SPEAKER_01 21:17

I 100% agree.

SPEAKER_04 21:20

And so there are, and then the nature of the odd hominem attacks that occur, especially in politics, and all of the others, there's you could depending upon your uh how you granularize it, sometimes sometimes between 17 and 50 kinds of um logical inconsistencies that people use in debates, and I'm sure you teach that in debate class, how to tangle up your opposition. We don't teach enough of that. We don't teach how to think anymore.

SPEAKER_00 21:51

Right. Right.

SPEAKER_04 21:52

So I would now if you take a case of how to think, um, I have incredible respect for the Scandinavian countries. Absolutely. So we got the three Scandinavians, you got Denmark, you got then uh Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, that region. They focus on teaching critical thinking starting in preschool. How do they do it? Again, if you go to YouTube, look up Norwegian Preschool Critical Thinking. There's some great work that they've done, and what some

Teaching Thinking From Preschool Up

SPEAKER_04 22:30

of them are doing are using conventional fairy tales, the same teaching materials that they would use normally in basic reading. And all of that and storytelling was to teach them how to figure out what is real, what is not real, and that fantasy is okay, but understanding the difference. And they're beginning that in preschool. So if you begin that in preschool, then you can get more sophisticated higher and higher. But what we also need, certainly as a nation, uh we we need adults to be able to do some an awful lot of critical ignoring to get out of the rabbit holes and to help the kids because so many of the kids today parents will go, this happened to me yesterday with somebody that came by. How do we do all this? I go, I can show you, but I can't understand it for you. And it's they had done nothing on their phones, they're nothing on uh protecting for the kids, absolutely nothing, because they felt that the kids knew more than them.

SPEAKER_00 23:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 23:43

And is that true? Yeah, the kids will figure out how to get around like they have for thousands of years. How can I not do what my parents want me to do?

SPEAKER_00 23:52

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 23:53

So, parents, um, a lot of this you brought on yourselves by refusing to get involved in the technology or thinking that you can't understand the technology because it sounds foreign. And in many cases, that's true. We often talk that way. But there are tremendous tools, uh, dummies books for uh moms who want to protect their kids, and that is not an offensive term in my world, by the way.

SPEAKER_03 24:21

I know what you mean.

SPEAKER_04 24:23

Um there are tools out there, but you have to care enough. Parents, you need to care enough to dedicate some of the energy. You need to get rid of 950 of the idiot randos who follow you on Facebook who you really don't know, and start focusing and using your own attention time for something valuable.

SPEAKER_00 24:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:49

I I would be willing to bet that everybody, even those who uh love social media, agree with that statement. Uh, because they're so often at the end of the day, you think, man, wasted a lot of time on what the what, you know, arguing with strangers online. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_04 25:07

Did this go because a lot of us travel, right? A great deal, and you end up in between flights somewhere, and you and you end up at a bar and you have a glass of beer or whatever, and somebody wants to start this argument with you next to you. It's like, no, do not engage. No. What is because then the other thing, and kids can learn this. There are so many kinds of questions you can ask them. What's the upside? What's the upside? Yeah. You're gonna go get into an argument with a rando. And the other thing that they need to learn is that when you're arguing with somebody who has a hard, built in, non-changeable belief system, an argument's not gonna do anything. It's only gonna frustrate you and piss you off even more. That's true. So that's another thing. Critically ignore that stuff. There is no upside. You're uh you should be making choices that are good for you, that help you.

unknown 26:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 26:11

And that requires back to the communication between generations, between sociologists, between us geeks, between so many of us that know pieces of this puzzle, but the whole puzzle answer is not together yet.

unknown 26:27

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:29

Well, I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_04 26:30

Sorry to be a downer on all that.

SPEAKER_01 26:32

No, no, it's you're directly. You're speaking directly um to me. And obviously, with you know, with a focus on teaching debate, I I get very frustrated when I see people sharing things, especially people I do know, sharing things that I know are not accurate. And so I feel like if I just explain this to them, then maybe they'll understand. And that that's that's hardly ever the case.

SPEAKER_04 26:55

I'm a I'm a director at the Cognitive Security Institute, and one of the mantras is trust nothing, verify twice. Because the inaccuracies have all have hit, and I'm gonna guess 15 years ago it began. Even uh legitimate uh academic journals are being victimized by this because they instituted a pay-for-play model. Oh, you'll publish my shitty paper. I'm sorry, you'll publish my shitty paper, and if I give you $10,000,

Trust Nothing Verify Twice

SPEAKER_04 27:33

which then gives it legitimacy because it appears to be a primary source.

SPEAKER_00 27:37

Right.

SPEAKER_04 27:38

You still have more research to do. And one of the again, I'm gonna go back to as humans we do have a degree of BS detection that's pretty good. We do, but we have not tuned it. We've kind of accept humans want to accept what somebody else says. It makes us feel good. It's another one of those feel-good chemicals. And to try to analyze, to critically ignore it, takes a little bit more mental energy, which can be tiring. Again, less information, less CPU processing, which causes heat in the brain and makes you uncomfortable.

SPEAKER_01 28:22

Well, I this has been really, really interesting. I could ask you a bazillion more questions, but we we are out of time. But I I wanted to just touch on one thing really briefly that you just brought up. So when I was growing up, obviously, and and I'm my background's in journalism, so we were taught how to verify sources and things like that. And it was very pretty simple. If you can find two legitimate sources that say the same thing, you can usually run with that. And there were easy ways to find legitimate sources online if we look at for.org, dot gov, things like that. And now that's not necessarily the case. So if you were if you were teaching a teenager who's trying to learn how to verify sources before they determine what they believe, what's the one tip that you would give them on is is this actually accurate? Because a lot of them look like you just said, like the medical journal example. It looks official, but does that mean it's actually accurate?

SPEAKER_04 29:15

This is part of what 21st century education should be. It is unfortunately not because it takes extra effort, the political spectrum of what is truth, what is not truth, what is evidence, what is accurate, what is an alternate fact. I don't know what an alternate fact is. Um I go back to trust nothing. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. If it immediately aligns with something the how and how you feel, that is a uh psychological troll, potentially. Um, believing uh all right, one of the great examples we all watch uh CSI kind of tech TV shows, and they're doing their thing, and there's always one of them is always a hacker or some geek, right? Yeah, and they go, uh okay, I gotta get into the DHS firewall. Okay, I'm in. No, none of that is real. It is just a mental troll for the timing and drama effect. That has become life. Everybody's trying to drive a narrative at you. It's all about storytelling, whether it's getting a BOGO, whether it's your FOMO, and I don't know all the rest of the generation's words today, but they're all trying to eat up your time because your time is the commodity. That is the money. You don't have to exchange money to be able to give big tech and ad tech what they want, which is your attention and time.

SPEAKER_00 30:53

Yeah, very, very true.

SPEAKER_01 30:55

Well, when I've I've learned a lot from you and have really enjoyed this conversation. If you have a new book coming out, we'll make sure we link to that. You've talked about a little bit. If anybody's listening is interested more, we'll have a link to that so you can hop right over. Is there anything else you want to share with our audience before we could the yeah, the current book will give you a handle?

SPEAKER_04 31:13

It's called uh The Art and Science of Metawar. And it's um about the weaponization of information uh against us individually and uh us as a society, and it's is it's a little bit technical in that it shows exactly how our networks work. What is the

Meta War Books And Closing Links

SPEAKER_04 31:33

capacity? Do you know the capacity of your internal sensory network? 11.1 megabits a second. That's it. That's it.

SPEAKER_00 31:42

That doesn't sound like a lot.

SPEAKER_04 31:43

It is not because you're because your eyes receive optically over 600 million bytes a second. So part of your optical system is critical critically ignoring the vast majority of that to be able to fit in with the optical portion of our sensors. Same thing with audio, same thing with all of our sensors. We are constantly bombarded, and it's called habituation, sensory habituation. We get used to it, and that's part of untraining yourself. So, no, there is no perfect answer. There are lots of directions, there's a lot of great work on it, and uh the book Art and Science and Meta War uh would get you started into what this whole field is about, and it's on Amazon and Kindle and hard copy.

SPEAKER_01 32:33

Fantastic. Well, we will link to all of this. So if anybody's interested, you can hop right over and get it. We'll also link to your social medias and website and and all the things.

SPEAKER_04 32:41

No, I don't have much social media.

SPEAKER_01 32:44

Well, that would make sense after this conversation. Yes.

SPEAKER_04 32:48

If people would like to follow what my occasional rants, that's fine. Uh, LinkedIn and Insta. Uh I everything else is locked down. I just I don't want to engage with 5,000 people. I don't have the time or energy.

SPEAKER_01 33:03

Right. And and after this conversation, like I have a checklist of things that I am going to go do with my social media. So I very much appreciate your time and your expertise and your insight in all the studying you're doing. And again, we'll link to the books to everybody's listening. You can learn more about how, like you said from the very start, we can't protect our kids online, but we can do things to make it safer. So Lynn, thank you again for your time.

SPEAKER_04 33:27

Well, no, thank you. Great questions. Great questions.

SPEAKER_01 33:30

Well, thank you. And thanks for listening.