The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt

Is social media rewiring childhood and fueling a mental health crisis? Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Nice, and Gary O’Reilly explore the costs of growing up online and how to take back childhood with social psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I happen to like social media, but it's not for everyone and it's not even for some people who think they should like it.

• 0:06Gary O'Reilly?

  I know, but we've got Jonathan Haidt and as much as he doesn't like social media, he has some solutions.

• 0:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's got, he's got plans.

• 0:14Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 0:14Chuck Nice?

  All I know is I found out I'm a bad father.

• 0:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Find out how and why, coming right up on StarTalk Special Edition. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Special Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, you're a personal astrophysicist, and if it's special edition, it means we have Gary O'Reilly. Gary?

• 0:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Hello.

• 0:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, dude.

• 0:48Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 0:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Former soccer pro.

• 0:50Gary O'Reilly?

  Mm-hmm.

• 0:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Soccer announcer.

• 0:51Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 0:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Chuck Nice.

• 0:53Chuck Nice?

  Hey, what's happening, guys?

• 0:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go.

• 0:55Chuck Nice?

  And that's it. We don't need anything else. It's just like, former soccer pro and then Chuck.

• 0:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Chuck.

• 1:00Gary O'Reilly?

  Someone hug that man.

• 1:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, he needs a hug. Are you a former professional anything is the question.

• 1:06Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I'm a former professional professional. I make the mortgage payment.

• 1:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Keeps the family warm and dry.

• 1:15Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 1:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so Gary, you did a lot of homework on this with your production team.

• 1:20Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 1:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What have you put together?

• 1:22Gary O'Reilly?

  Uh, well, Lane Unsworth, who's over in our LA office, and I were sort of noodled on this, and simple question just popped straight up. Is social media bad for us? Now.

• 1:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, okay. Next, next show, we're done here.

• 1:39Gary O'Reilly?

  That's it. Goodbye, everybody. Hopefully it's not, but because some people love it, some people need it, uh, or is it bad for us? Do we need it? Is it something we can do without? Today, we'll be talking about the impact social media has had on the younger generations. I mean, we've got the first generation of kids raised with social media and now grown up.

• 2:05Chuck Nice?

  And the world is so much better off.

• 2:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Exactly.

• 2:10Chuck Nice?

  Things have just gotten so good.

• 2:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Now, with that little sprinkling of sarcasm, what better than a group of older men to discuss exactly this point and bring it thought because is there an anxious generation that is beginning to find its way into society? Are they more anxious than generations in the past? But if so, is there something that can be done about it? So for those questions, we need a guest who has a specific.

• 2:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Expertise.

• 2:44Gary O'Reilly?

  In this field.

• 2:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that I'd be delighted to introduce our guest. It is the one and only Jonathan Haidt. And Jonathan, he's a social psychologist at NYU's Stern School of Business. And what else do I have him here? He heads the tech and society lab. So whatever is his psychological dimension, he's looking at what role tech plays in this. His most recent book is, it's got a long title here. Let me get it right.

• 3:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Suiting comfortably.

• 3:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The anxious generation, how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Came out 2024.

• 3:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Excellent.

• 3:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, I am delighted to have Jonathan Haidt on our show. Jonathan, welcome to StarTalk.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  Thanks so much, Neil. Great to see you again and great to meet Gary and Chuck.

• 3:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, I've admired your work ever since I stumbled on one of your videos where you explored the, the political divide that influenced the research conducted in your, in your field. And I just thought it was insightful. I was a little drawn in because, because he used some astronomical references.

• 3:57Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, gotcha.

• 3:58Chuck Nice?

  He got me. You had me at galaxy.

• 4:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so at the time he was at the University of Virginia and you've since moved to New York City. Great to have you in the backwoods here. And so let me just start out, wait, I have a bone to pick.

• 4:18Gary O'Reilly?

  Pick away.

• 4:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So he and his co-author on a previous book of his invited me to write a blurb for it, which I did.

• 4:28Gary O'Reilly?

  All right.

• 4:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But then I wasn't asked again.

• 4:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I don't know, maybe the sales of the book, I don't know. I just thought I put that out there.

• 4:38Chuck Nice?

  See, you're not used to that. Taken from somebody who has, that's common practice.

• 4:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Jonathan, what, what are your data sources to arrive at such a conclusion? Other than just being grumpy old man on a porch and the next generation is not like us. Tell me, what, what are your sources? Hasn't there always been a disturbed subset of every generation trying to adjust to the new world? That they're birthed into? So where are you drawing your, your, not just your ideas, but your data?

• 5:15Speaker 03

  So thanks Neil. So in the, in the social sciences, we have to think about multiple sources of evidence. And the clearest, we have some pretty hard data. When you look at these longitudinal studies, the US government has done a great job of, of supporting surveys. Some go back to the 1970s. So we can see the various trends in mental health. Now this is self-reported, you know, a nine-point depression scale, a question of anxiety. And those numbers move up and down a little bit from the nineties through 2010, 2011. They're very, very stable. And then all of a sudden, it's like someone flipped a switch somewhere. And right around 2012, 2013, you get an elbow. And then those graphs line go shooting up. It's not for everything.

• 5:58Speaker 03

  It's not that Gen Z says we're messed up on everything. It's very focused on anxiety and depression, what we call internalizing disorders. And it's the same thing for self-harm, including hard numbers on hospitalizations. If you look at the, the CDC tracks why people go into hospitals. All of a sudden, starting around 2012, 2013, the number of girls especially who are checking into emergency, who go in emergency room because they cut themselves so severely, goes up 50 to 150%, depending on the subgroup that you're looking at. So we have some pretty hard data. I also came at it because as a college professor, around 2014, 2015, a lot of us noticed, wait, something is really strange here. You know, we thought we understood college students.

• 6:42Speaker 03

  We thought we understood the millennials. They enjoy jokes about sex. They want to have fun in class. They want to go out drinking. But all of a sudden, the students that were coming in around 2014, 2015, much more anxious, much more easily offended. Words like microaggressions and biased response teams, trigger warnings. They weren't there in 2012, and they were everywhere by 2015. So it was direct observation. It was federal surveys. It's the reports of people in business who are hiring Gen Z. And when I saw that the same trends were happening in the UK and Canada and Australia at the same time, that's when I knew something big is happening here.

• 7:26Speaker 03

  You know, if it's just the US, oh, maybe Obama did something or said something like, you know, you can make up 100 theories if it's just the US. But if all the English-speaking countries go through the same mental health collapse at the same time, in the same way, that is much sharper for girls. There has to be some factor working that is cross-national. And that's what led me, and I should also give credit to Jean Twenge, the professor who first really identified those graphs, those changes. That's when Jean and I started thinking technology is the most likely cause.

• 7:59Gary O'Reilly?

  So when you look at this and you see this crumbling of mental health in this generation, what other effects are being noticed? Has that spiked as well, or is it just this particular area?

• 8:12Speaker 03

  So there is a pervasive set of changes. And the best way to sort of put them all together, I found it very useful in my previous book to think about our minds are organized to go into certain configurations very quickly. And so the clearest one, you can call it defend mode. When you, you know, there's a threat, your brain, a lot of systems organized to do fight or flight. So let's call that defend mode. You can be in a defensive position. The opposite of that is called discover mode, where you look like you come into a room and there's all these great toys to play with, or you're a kid in a candy shop. And the more technical terms for those in psychology are the Behavioral Inhibition

• 8:55Speaker 03

  System, BIS, which is the defend mode, and the Behavioral Activation System, BAS, which is discover mode. And we're used to thinking of college students as being mostly in discover mode, you know, girls just want to have fun. But all of a sudden, if you're born after 1995, on average, you're shifted over to defend mode. And what that means is it's not just that you're anxious and depressed. Most of them are not anxious and depressed, but what I'm saying, like, for the girls, their numbers are in the 30s, 30% or so have anxiety or depression.

• 9:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's huge. Yeah, that's huge.

• 9:28Speaker 03

  It is huge. It is gigantic. It is normal for American girls. If you're a teenage girl, it is normal that you have been thinking about suicide. About 20% say that they've thought about suicide in the last year. So this is now the new normal. But what this goes along with is a general sense of threat in the world, a reluctance to take risks, and a lot of surveys and behaviors bear this out. Gen Z is very bad at risk-taking. Now let me make clear, none of this is a criticism of them. Building on what Greg and I argued in The Cotton and the American Mind, we overprotected the hell out of them. We never let them out of our sight. We never let them go out onto the playground without someone watching and

• 10:09Speaker 03

  blowing a whistle and saying, no running, don't push, you know. So we did this to them, and it was the combination of the overprotection in the real world where they need to grow up and get tough.

• 10:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, when you say we, we are the age that have kids that age right now. That's what you're referring to. Because I have, I have one born in 96 and one born in 2000. So they're right, right in line.

• 10:31Speaker 03

  That's right. You have older, older Gen Z. That's right. So it's we, it's we as a society, and it's we as parents.

• 10:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jonathan, I saw some of this earlier, where I started noticing the playground surface had cushions.

• 10:44Chuck Nice?

  Sponges.

• 10:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Spongy.

• 10:46Chuck Nice?

  Spongy.

• 10:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because when I grew up, there was cement at the bottom.

• 10:49Speaker 03

  What do you want to moat with?

• 10:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With nails and broken locks. Nails and broken locks.

• 10:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, we liked it that way. Yeah.

• 11:00Speaker 03

  You have four old men here. Remember the old days.

• 11:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it was, it didn't occur to me that I could fall and not get hurt. Because that was not an option, right? You just didn't fall. So.

• 11:14Chuck Nice?

  He was on the playground, and routinely, someone would scream out, "Medic!"

• 11:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I'm just, I'm just wondering if the seeds of this were not already in place, even before the internet mattered.

• 11:30Speaker 03

  Absolutely. So there's two parts to the story. The book is about how we've overprotected children in the real world, and that begins in the 1980s, you're right. And then the other half is we've underprotected them online. And while that begins in the 1990s, it really super accelerates between 2010 and 2015, and we'll come back to that. But in terms of the overprotection, so in the 1980s, we had the insurance crisis, we had lawsuit fever. Everybody sued anybody if anybody got hurt. So for example, I, I had the, the high school record in my high school for the pole vault, and I was shocked to discover that I still hold the record when I went back to my high school. And the reason is not because I was so great, it's because soon after I graduated high

• 12:12Speaker 03

  school in 1981, everybody was suing everybody and they canceled the pole vault because it's too dangerous. So the 80s really is a time when everything tried, we tried to make everything safe, otherwise you'll get sued. We put padding down everywhere. But your insight about how you had to not fall on a playground where everything is padded and a playground where you can't get hurt, you never get a chance to learn how to not get hurt. But on a playground where you can get hurt, then you have to take responsibility and by the time you have a couple of years, you banged your chin a few times on the monkey bars, whatever it is, then you learn how to handle yourself. So risk turns out to be a crucial ingredient in a successful childhood. We have to let our kids take risks.

• 12:54Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, when I was in high school, I held the record for the number of slip and fall cases.

• 13:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was, that was an athletic event.

• 13:04Gary O'Reilly?

  So what you're talking about there, Jonathan, is the development of social skills, a development of a, a sort of armor, of a veneer of mental protection. You know what, if I, if I bang my chin on the monkey bar... Okay, I'll need some help, but it's probably gonna be okay. I'm gonna be all right. I don't have to go into a panic mode and have a meltdown. We have lost that completely? Is this what you're saying?

• 13:27Speaker 03

  It is. So there's a key concept called antifragility. If you're antifragile, so if you're fragile, like an egg, you know, you gotta treat it gently or it'll break. But if you're antifragile, this is a term coined by my NYU colleague Nassim Taleb. If you're antifragile, then you actually need a bunch of crises, problems, even threats, things that you have to deal with that make you tougher and stronger. And so the immune system is the perfect example of that. If you're a parent, you protect your kid's immune system. Don't let them be out in dirt or germs. I don't want any bacteria to touch my child. You're crippling the development of the immune system because the immune system needs repeated exposures to the pathogens in the environment to develop the antibodies.

• 14:11Speaker 03

  And in the same way, life on this planet, for all living creatures, has always been tough and most of them have died prematurely. I mean, this is not, you know, life is serious stuff. And so children have to go through a developmental process, mastering small threats and difficulties first, and then they get bigger and bigger and bigger and they can wander further and further from home base, from their parents. We block that. We stop letting them do that. Beginning in the 1980s, but it really accelerates in the 1990s.

• 14:51Speaker 04

  I'm Nicholas Costella and I'm a proud supporter of StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 15:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I hate to sound like a psychological idiot here, but could you just spend a moment defining for me what happens in the behavior of an anxious person? If somebody's... Why is anxiety always, not always, but often paired with depression? Why should one have anything to do with the other?

• 15:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. So fear is perhaps the original emotion in the animal kingdom. You have to have an emergency response. So that's fear, very, very, very well understood, very important for survival when there's a real threat. But fear has multiple parts to it. One of them is the alarm system, let's call it. You're scanning the environment for what could be a threat. And that is almost entirely learned. Now, there are some, there are some threats or some fears like snakes, but we haven't evolved preparedness. We very, very easily learn to be afraid of snakes, as other primates do. But for the most part, it's learned. So your, parts of your brain are always monitoring the environment for threats and opportunities. And that's normal.

• 16:08Speaker 03

  And if you're in an area where you've been attacked before, you now you're on high alert. And that might make sense if there really is danger there. But what happens if your brain gets set so that almost anywhere new, it's thinking, danger, danger, be on alert, be on alert. That's going to raise your cortisol levels. That's going to put you in defend mode. You're not going to learn as much. You're not going to be open to making friends. You're going to be in a very defensive posture. And that will wear you down. And it also obviously destroys your quality of life. If it gets more severe, if you get actual panic attacks, if you get, if you are anxious and then like a car backfires and you, you know, you jump, you freak out because your, your brain is acting like you're about to be attacked. You can't live your life that way.

• 16:53Speaker 03

  It's going to wear you down. Now, what, what is known in clinical psychology is that depressive disorders and anxiety disorders tend to go together. And that's not just in experience, it's also genetically. Some people are prone to be depressed and anxious and it'll depend on what their life circumstances are. And some are much less likely to be that. And both the genes, whatever the common genes are, they support both depression and anxiety disorders. And so when someone is depressed, they tend to be anxious. And if somebody's anxious for a long time, they're more likely to be depressed, although not necessarily. Most people who have an anxiety disorder aren't depressed.

• 17:31Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay. So you call your book, The Anxious Generation. I'll just pre-see it into the briefest part. How much more anxious? Are you seeing this current generation? And is it as simple as saying it's the parents' fault? It always is. Or it's technology's fault? Or is there a crossover? Are there other aspects to this particular scenario?

• 17:51Speaker 03

  So I'm a social psychologist who studies morality and how people make moral judgments. And if you see one person do something bad, you can blame that person. You might think, well, that's a bad person. But if all of a sudden, everyone starts doing something bad, you've got to say, wait, why is everyone doing it? It can't be that everybody suddenly turned bad. And the key idea at the heart of the anxious generation is that the tech companies have put us all into a series of collective action problems. So I might say to my daughter, no, you cannot have a smartphone. It's bad for you. And then she would say, but everyone else has one. This is what we all hear as parents. Everyone else has one.

• 18:36Speaker 03

  And this puts pressure on you to give in too. And so the tech companies, both for the smartphone and but especially for social media, have engineered it. And we know this from internal things that they said and documents we've got from them. They want to play upon adolescent fears so that they're not missing out. They really play upon the intense adolescent fear of fear of missing out. So we cannot, of course, parents should set boundaries. Of course, parents have ultimate responsibility. But the environment which we're trying to raise our kids now is so full of temptations, addictions, and engineered social pressures that most parents are, they find themselves unable. So I do not blame parents for this. I blame first and foremost a few tech companies.

• 19:21Chuck Nice?

  Is there any way that we can blame the children?

• 19:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But Jonathan, not to pick a fight, but in those tech companies are people with exactly the psychological training you have. And they are now exploiting these weaknesses for their financial gain. These are your brethren. Dare I make that declaration?

• 19:47Speaker 03

  No, you are absolutely right. A lot of social psychologists, when they would get their PhDs 10, 20 years ago, would go work in Silicon Valley. Now, let's remember that from the 90s through the mid 2010s, most of us were techno-optimists. Most of us thought these companies are amazing. Google, you know, Apple, Facebook. We thought these were amazing. They're going to bring peace on earth. So there was a mission and I need to be careful. I don't want to make it sound like tech companies are full of evil people. That is definitely not true.

• 20:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, no, that's okay. That's okay.

• 20:22Speaker 03

  Okay, they're all bad.

• 20:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're totally fine there. Go ahead.

• 20:25Speaker 03

  But yes, many social psychologists and developmental psychologists went to work for them, especially in marketing. But we know that a lot of them have a little bit of knowledge. They talk a lot about dopamine. Even engineers will mention dopamine. They know that they're trying to arrange things, arrange the pattern of dopamine hits and reinforcements. When Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, when she brought out thousands of photographed screenshots of internal reports, there was one, it was a Facebook, it was a presentation on brain science. And they showed, here's the adolescent brain and the frontal cortex is the last part to myelinate, to kind of lock down into adult pattern. So the emotion centers are changing first. Younger teens are very emotional. They don't have a lot of self-control or restraint.

• 21:09Speaker 03

  And so they know that that's really the sweet spot. Early teens is a really good time to hook kids. And even though the minimum age is supposed to be 13, they widely disregard that. They have all kinds of plans, we know, to try to get into kids' playdates when they're much younger than 13. So this was a very deliberate effort driven by, well, in a sense, the tech companies were in a collective action too. Because if Meta doesn't grab all the 10-year-olds, then TikTok will. So there's a race to the bottom and the victims are the kids. So, you know, no, Chuck, I'm not going to blame the kids. You are a monster.

• 21:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You used a word that was unfamiliar to me, the, something about the formation of your frontal lobe, the myo, what was the word you used there?

• 21:57Speaker 03

  Myelination.

• 21:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, what is that? Myelination?

• 22:00Speaker 03

  Okay, so an amazing thing about the the human brain is that it reaches ninety percent of full size by the time a kid is six. Okay, so you've got these big brained creatures. And then the rest of development is not growing. Your brain isn't really growing after that. What's actually happening is you've got all these neurons packed in, way more than you're going to have as an adult. And then you have experience, lots and lots of experience. You try things, you do it over and over and over again. And the neurons that you use to do that thing. We say neurons that fire together, wire together. So if you practice archery, or if you practice running, or pole vault, or anything, and you do it over and over again.

• 22:41Speaker 03

  The the neurons that are used over and over again are going to form a much faster circuit. And that's both connecting the dendrites and axons, we're going to get better connections. And over time, once it's clear, yep, this is a circuit we need. Then you get, if anyone remembers their their high school biology, in a nerve cell, in a neuron. You have the cell body, and then you have this long thing called the axon, which runs out to the dendrites of the next neuron. And that sheath, it's not exactly an electrical signal, it's more of an electrochemical sort of run. And if you, it gets coated with a fatty material called myelin, it's kind of like an insulating cable. And so, once you put down that insulation, now it's going to be faster.

• 23:26Speaker 03

  But now it's kind of locked in like, okay, this is what that neuron is going to do for the rest of your life. So

• 23:31Chuck Nice?

  So it's like

• 23:32Speaker 03

  This period

• 23:32Chuck Nice?

  You're kind of creating grooves in a record.

• 23:35Speaker 03

  It's perfect, that's right. Grooves in a record, or you know, snow, like when you go down, you're you're sledding down a hill. And if it's a virgin snow, it's kind of slow going, but then you got paths. That's right. Grooves in a record is a good one.

• 23:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but that means it would be hard, if not impossible, to rewire that. If that sheath thing ossifies, that's the wrong word here, but you know, that sheath thing memorializes something that's either not good for you, or just outright false in your mental patterns.

• 24:03Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. That's right.

• 24:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you have, but rewiring is a word in your subtitle of your book.

• 24:08Speaker 03

  Mm hmm, that's right.

• 24:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Square that puzzle here.

• 24:11Speaker 03

  Sure. So let me just bring in first the concept of a sensitive period. So if you are not exposed to language until you're 13, if you're kept in a closet, as a couple of people have been in human history, you'll never learn to speak because you've missed the critical period. I think I've done quite well.

• 24:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They just let you out.

• 24:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go ahead, Doug.

• 24:37Speaker 03

  Just as the key idea is that different parts of the brain, it's like, okay, it's your turn to wire up now. And when you're, you know, one, it's the walking and reaching. When you're, you know, three to seven, it's a lot of language. And social development is a little later, more like, you know, six or seven through about through puberty. Puberty is an incredibly important sensitive period for brain development. Kids enter puberty with a child's brain, too many neurons, not enough myelin, and they leave puberty with an adult brain, much more functional, now locked into place. So now much harder to rewire. So if you don't get it right during puberty, there's a good chance that this is going to be your setting for life. And that's why it is so important

• 25:21Speaker 03

  that we not have children on social media in puberty. Wait until 16. We have to have a minimum age of 16, let them get through puberty. Because the social development, that happens on the playground. You're arguing, you're cooperating, you're making up. You do that thousands and thousands of times. You get a well-functioning social brain. But our kids are not doing that now. They literally spend most of the day on screens. They literally spend less than half the time that they used to with their friends. And so they're not getting that experience. They're getting stimulus response, you know, stimulus response dopamine, stimulus response dopamine. They're getting trained by these companies, by the algorithms and the presentation of stimuli. And this is warping.

• 26:05Speaker 03

  That's why I say this is rewiring their brains. And I also say that childhood has gotten rewired because sort of the the the whole set of inputs and outputs that make up a healthy human childhood, which is going to involve a lot of frustration, cooperation, excitement, sunshine, conflict. You need all these things. And if you take out most of it and replace it with TikTok videos, you've rewired childhood.

• 26:31Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, so the delivery system for all of this negative impact is, I would say, a smartphone, more more or less, rather than a laptop or a desktop. They're built. The graphics are built. The audio is built, all to grab and work with your neural pathways and hit the dopamine fix all the time. So you're saying not before the age of 16. I mean, that's that's you trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube. You realize that when you say 16.

• 27:03Speaker 03

  Oh, sure. I realize that. But you know what?

• 27:05Chuck Nice?

  He's like, guess what? You can get toothpaste back in the tube.

• 27:10Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, let's do it.

• 27:12Chuck Nice?

  I mean, you can do it.

• 27:13Speaker 03

  That's right. If your children's lives depended on it, would you put toothpaste back in the tube?

• 27:18Gary O'Reilly?

  I'd make a bloody good go at it. Yes, for sure.

• 27:21Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely. Yeah, I will say this, too. Just as a reinforcement to what you said, the liquor companies and the tobacco companies and any drug dealer knows that you got to get them when they're young.

• 27:37Gary O'Reilly?

  Brand loyalty.

• 27:38Chuck Nice?

  Including and and and the Catholic Church.

• 27:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, any any evangelical.

• 27:44Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, well, the Catholic Church has a saying that give me a child by the age of four and I'll give you a Catholic for life.

• 27:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, is that right?

• 27:49Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, no wonder religion has that saying. So that's the phrase.

• 27:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Jonathan, let me be a devil's advocate here. In fact, I don't even think the devil believes this, but some let me just play. Let me let me just offer a counterpoint. We are of an age where we played in a playground and we played, we had play dates and we, you know, with that, there was a social interaction. And just as you listed, you have to negotiate, you have to recover from if something was unpleasant. These are at the right age, these are important social skills we develop. The next generation does not have that. Mental illness notwithstanding, can't we just say they have a different skill set? That's not what was our skill set and they will do different things with that skill

• 28:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  set as they come up in the ranks of society and they might invent new things that is accessible to their brain wiring that for our brain wiring would be unthinkable. Why isn't it just different rather than lesser than what was here before?

• 28:51Speaker 03

  So 10 years ago, that's what a lot of people thought and 10 years ago, it was possible to hope for that. There was a phrase, digital natives. These kids are digital natives. Who knows what amazing things they're gonna do? And I remember when I first saw Twitter and I saw kids where, you know, young people were tweeting, "Just had a hamburger." And I think, well, that's stupid. But then I thought, you know, well, wait a second. If they're doing little micro-interactions with dozens and dozens of people every day, maybe they're gonna be super-social. Maybe they're gonna have amazing social skills. So that, you could believe that back then. That's not what happened. What happened instead is that we, I think what we've learned is that we are a species,

• 29:35Speaker 03

  several million years old, depending how you wanna count it, hundreds of thousands or millions of years old, that has a certain developmental process that we have to go through. And you could try to short-circuit that. You could try to put it all on a screen. I suppose in theory, we might have thought, why make kids walk? Just show them an instructional video and they'll learn walking from an instructional video. We might have thought that 20 years ago, but it doesn't work. The way that our brain wires up requires this physical interaction with the environment. And so that's why we're seeing, I don't know anything that Gen Z is coming out better on. Let me not say, but they drink less, they smoke less, they drive less, they take fewer risks and many people say, "Oh, isn't that great?" No.

• 30:17Speaker 03

  The reason that they don't do anything dangerous is that they're generally anxious and they spend so much time just sitting alone with a screen.

• 30:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, I never thought of that because when we were kids, you know, there was always the tough kids who smoked.

• 30:30Speaker 03

  Right.

• 30:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Where did they get the cigarettes? Where did they get the alcohol? They're the ones that waited outside the liquor store for an older person to help them out. So that, in a way, that's risk-taking or at least exposure to risk-taking. So I never put it together the way you just said it, where that is a way of stepping into places that are either unfamiliar or carry risk. And if none of that's there, where is my training to ever do that for the rest of my life? So I'm intrigued by this. Thanks for making that now retrospectively obvious connection.

• 31:05Chuck Nice?

  That's why I let my 12-year-old hang out at the state prison.

• 31:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's that to get, you can learn everything you need to learn. But, but how about the other side of this? And I know you've thought about it or studied it. That which we go on Facebook in its early days, or any of these places, you find community. There are people who might have been social outcasts, uh, for maybe they had a weird interests, or they were just, and they would find others who were just like them, who were not their neighbor, or went to the same school, because their condition was rarer than that. And so they, they go through society, maybe internationally, and they have people they can hang out with, at least socially on the internet, that had to have some positive consequences, didn't it?

• 31:51Speaker 03

  Yes. What you're describing is the internet in the 1990s. The internet was amazing. And to this day, most people love the internet. And one of the big things the internet did is what you just said, for all kinds of, of, of kids with, from different groups. So the internet is amazing. There's some downsides, but the internet is amazing. And whenever I hear people say, oh, but they find community, oh, it's an outlet for expression. You know, I say, yes, the internet is, but if you, if kids have the internet, how does their life get better when you put them onto a platform in which algorithms feed them content from strangers that was selected because of the extreme emotional response that it got from other people?

• 32:33Speaker 03

  And yes, they're connecting in a sense, in that they're, they're looking at people's lives, and maybe they're commenting on those lives. But what we're finding, I believe, is that the more time kids spend making these connections, the fewer friends they have, and the lonelier they are. So let me just convey this, speed with which this all changed between 2010 and 2015, because this is crucial for the story. In 2010, the iPhone was out, but very few kids had one. Kids had a flip phone, you know, you flip it open, you can text, you can call that. That's it. And that was fine. You call your friends. That's great. No problem. 2010 is when the first front-facing camera comes out on the iPhone 4. 2010 is when Instagram comes out. The girls all get on Instagram in 2012 after Facebook buys it.

• 33:16Speaker 03

  High-speed internet is increasing. So by 2015, now everyone has a smartphone with social media in their pocket. And now they're spending, I forget what the numbers are back then, but now it's up to around eight hours a day is the average, just on their phone. And then there's TV, there's computers. So you're up 10, 12 hours a day on screens, mostly alone. So don't tell me that these things give you community. The internet gave you community. Social media just addicts you, takes up your whole day, and feeds you stuff that makes you want to kill yourself.

• 33:46Chuck Nice?

  That's why everybody should have those little tiny Zoolander phones. So that...

• 33:51Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 33:52Chuck Nice?

  What? I don't remember.

• 33:54Speaker 03

  I remember that.

• 33:54Chuck Nice?

  On Zoolander, everybody, like the smaller your phone, the more chic you were. Oh, really? So you couldn't have a smartphone because that would have made you like a dork.

• 34:04Speaker 03

  A dork.

• 34:04Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, so you get a tiny little phone and it's just like, hey, what's up?

• 34:08Gary O'Reilly?

  Jonathan, if we have the notorious, I'll call them notorious helicopter parents, what is this generation, the Generation Z, going to be like as parents?

• 34:19Chuck Nice?

  A bunch of wussies.

• 34:22Gary O'Reilly?

  Are they? I mean, Neil's touched on it. Is this generation going to be the generation that sort of fits nicely into the jigsaw puzzle? Because their future is more screen-based? Or is there something else that you feel is in play?

• 34:35Speaker 03

  We're at a turning point in human history, I'd say, because Gen Z is now turning 30. If you start with birth year 1996, Pew says 1997, whatever. Gen Z is basically 29 this year. They'll turn 30 soon. So they're beginning to have kids. That what that means is that we are now, for the first time, going to have the next generation of kids, which will actually be Gen Beta. Gen Alpha is the kids born, say, 2011 through 2025 and 24. What we now have is parents are having kids, and these will be the first parents in history who are going to raise kids without having had a normal human childhood themselves, without having learned how to play. A lot of kids don't even... Even know how to play. You hear this a lot. You push the kids outdoors. You say, go out and play.

• 35:18Speaker 03

  And they sit there like, what do we do? We don't know what to do.

• 35:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's outside?

• 35:22Speaker 03

  Well, yeah.

• 35:23Chuck Nice?

  What they do is they all get on their phones together.

• 35:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 35:26Speaker 03

  That's right. Exactly.

• 35:27Chuck Nice?

  That's what they do.

• 35:27Speaker 03

  When you push them out, you have to take the phones away. That's why I think we're entering an era where grandparents are going to be a lot more important. Because grandparents, in a sense, are the repository of the cultural knowledge of why it's so much fun to go out and have adventures.

• 35:41Gary O'Reilly?

  But when grandpa or grandma.

• 35:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, you tell me, I'm the grandparent and here's here. Your grandchildren, this is how you play.

• 35:51Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 35:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't even want to.

• 35:56Chuck Nice?

  When I was a child, we had these things called sticks.

• 36:03Chuck Nice?

  Now, why you need a little.

• 36:04Speaker 03

  Now we buy them on Amazon.

• 36:07Chuck Nice?

  Little imagination, this stick can be anything. So, yeah.

• 36:12Gary O'Reilly?

  I mean, how, well, how many milliseconds will it take for a teen to glaze over during that beginning of that conversation that you or I would be having at our age with them? And so is the responsibility family? Does the responsibility land in another place? I mean, all right, think back to my childhood. It was very outdoorsy, very athletic, did all sorts of things.

• 36:34Chuck Nice?

  And you were a professional soccer player.

• 36:36Gary O'Reilly?

  But not as a child.

• 36:37Chuck Nice?

  No, but I'm saying.

• 36:40Gary O'Reilly?

  I wasn't that good.

• 36:42Speaker 03

  I was born a professional soccer player.

• 36:45Chuck Nice?

  But what I'm saying is you were given the opportunity. Look where it steered you, just being outdoors.

• 36:49Gary O'Reilly?

  And there you are. So, I mean, yes, of course, had there been smartphones around at the time, I most likely would have been attracted towards them. And the peer pressure that you've spoken about, Jonathan, of I've got to have one because they've all got one. I want to be bullied and picked on. And it's the, it's the cult of comparison and, you know, all the down spiral from there. But it's the, okay, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts.

• 37:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Church groups, schools, after schools.

• 37:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All of those.

• 37:15Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, athletic clubs, be whichever sport it may be that takes you away from a screen, puts you into an environment where you are interacting, where your social skills develop, where you learn about getting knocks and bumps and getting up and getting on. And that fear factor, although doesn't always go away, it never will, diminishes because if you took the fear factor away, there'd be no human race because we wouldn't care about danger. It's an adapt and survive. Fear is part of our survival mechanism. So where does for you the responsibility lay for this generation that's going to come out of helicopter parents to Gen Z's who are now going to be the parents? And we don't quite know exactly how far down.

• 37:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to clarify, when you say responsibility, you don't mean who to blame, you mean who? Who's gonna lead us out? Who's gonna lead us out? That's how I wanna think about that. Who's stepping us away from this?

• 38:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, who's responsible? Who's gonna pick up this and say, right, you know what? This does need changing. This is our future.

• 38:14Speaker 03

  So as a social scientist, I tend to wanna first understand what caused this situation. What are the large structural factors, economic factors, that caused this massive destructive change in childhood? Because if there's all these factors pushing one way and we say, "Parents, you need to go the other way," that might be too much to ask. So one, I'll just give you one other factor that's very important here, and I'll get back to your question in just a moment. But you mentioned Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, church groups. Almost all human societies have initiation rites. How do you turn a girl into a woman? How do you turn a boy into a man? Around the world, that is not done by the parents. It's done by other adults in the community of the same sex.

• 38:55Speaker 03

  So when a girl first menstruates in many cultures, other women will come in and take her and train her in the secrets of womanhood of our culture. And same for boys. Boys, there's no marker like menstruation, but at a certain age, the boys are taken away and now they're socialized by men, often kind of brutally, often it's like a fraternity initiation. There's pain, there's all sorts of things. But then they turn into men. And we kind of stopped doing that a long time ago, but we still had kids exposed to other adults. When I was a kid, I did Boy Scouts, there was a track coach. You know, we're exposed to other adults. You go, you help the neighbors, you do all sorts of things. In the 90s, we freaked out because some of those adults were sexually abusing kids and some of those institutions were covering up for them.

• 39:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 39:40Speaker 03

  So I understand the reason for the freak out, but we vastly overreacted. And we said, never let our kids near other adults. And men especially know, do not interact with children. If a kid's in trouble, like even so, like whoa, you know, someone's gonna be... So we kinda create an environment in which children used to be raised within a community. And we said, how about no more? How about you raise your child in your house with a phone? I'll raise my child in my house with a phone and a computer and a television screen. It doesn't work.

• 40:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And around that same time, you started seeing signs at children's playgrounds saying, you can't enter unless you have a child. Unless you have a child.

• 40:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and I...

• 40:17Chuck Nice?

  High cost of entry.

• 40:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think of many conversations, I just strike up with random kids in the street. If I see they're a little bit geeky, I'll say, oh, you ever thought about this? Or you know, that's Venus in the sky? And I don't, it's weird that I would have to be afraid to do that. Because I'd be speaking to a complete stranger child. When I'm an educator, that's my urge.

• 40:37Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 40:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Especially if there's some inkling that they would...

• 40:40Chuck Nice?

  That they might be curious.

• 40:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Highly receptive of it to begin with. Yeah.

• 40:43Speaker 03

  Well, that's right. That's right. So to return to Gary's question, who's responsible for leading us out? I think we have to understand that our society has changed in ways that are pushing us all to do this. I don't blame the helicopter parents. If you do let your kid out, some other helicopter parent is gonna call, might call the police. Because no one has seen an unaccompanied child since 1992. And so we have to...

• 41:06Gary O'Reilly?

  Chuckie's stealing your eyes.

• 41:09Chuck Nice?

  That's awesome.

• 41:11Speaker 03

  So my point is, we have to kind of prepare the ground. We have to do a lot of things at the same time. So one thing we have to do is we have to roll back. We have to make it clear in every state law that giving your kid independence can never be used as evidence of child abuse. If you're, there was a case in Georgia, a kid, a 10-year-old kid left the house, walked to town, got some candy or something. The mother was put in jail, literally put in jail because her 10-year-old child was, somebody called the police, they saw a 10-year-old unaccompanied, police came, the mother didn't seem to mind, she said, well, he, you know, he went for a walk. So she was arrested. This puts the fear of God into all of us about letting our kids out. So what I'm saying is, we got to recognize, kids have to be out in the world, and we have to help them, and laws have to change

• 41:55Speaker 03

  that parents don't, aren't afraid to do that. And we have to try to help each other. Send your kids over to your neighbor's house to do something, to your cousin, to your aunt, like, let them move around, let them not just sit in your basement or on your, in your, you know, your sofa.

• 42:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just why, I grew up in the Bronx, I walked to school, elementary school as early as age seven, alone. Yeah. And there was no, no one even thought twice about that.

• 42:18Speaker 03

  Same to me, although I didn't grow up in the Bronx. That's right. No, that, yeah. No, and you and I grew up during the, you know, during the 70s, I suppose, you know, there was a crime wave in the 70s and 80s.

• 42:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, big crime rate in the 70s.

• 42:29Speaker 03

  Much safer now, much safer now. So actually, so the, I guess the quickest answer to your question is what I do in the anxious generation is I propose four norms that we can coordinate. It's very hard for a parent to just decide to raise their kid in the right way now because the kid's isolated. But if we do these four things at the same time, we roll back the phone-based child, and here they are. One, no smartphone before high school. Do not give your kid a smartphone as the first phone. Do, let them get most of it through puberty before you hook them up permanently to, to a screen in their face. Flip phones are fine, phone watches are fine. No smartphone before high school.

• 43:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are there still flip phones? Can you, you can get? Yeah, as a matter of fact, there are. You can get them. Okay, good, good to know.

• 43:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, or, you know, there's all kinds of basic phones that, they can even have some apps, they just don't have social media, they don't have internet access. Second norm, no social media before 16. Now here, it would really help to have a law, which a lot of us are trying to do, it's just as a norm. It's like, okay, you've got your smartphone, but if I catch you, if you have Instagram on that phone, you are losing it for a month. It's very, very serious. You do not let kids, especially girls, have Instagram before they're 16. Third norm, phone-free schools. It is completely insane that until basically last month, kids all over the country were watching videos and TikTok and, and watching porn during class. You just hide the phone in a book, and lunchrooms are quiet, hallways are quiet for years now, because everyone's on their

• 43:50Speaker 03

  phone. And schools are waking up, uh, me and my team, we've really been pushing phone-free schools legislation.

• 43:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I saw some of this. I don't know if they preserved it, but when my daughter was teaching in the, in the school system, there's a truck that would pull up that was retained by the school. You'd have to check your phone, I guess, is what it, at, at the truck.

• 44:09Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 44:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then you pick it up on the way back out of school. So I don't know if that was experimental or what, what the results were, but I just want to-

• 44:15Speaker 03

  That might have been back in the Bloomberg days.

• 44:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, it was. Thank you. That's, that's exactly what it was.

• 44:19Speaker 03

  So Mayor Bloomberg, that's right. Mayor Bloomberg gave it a try, but that was before smartphones and there was some resistance. But now smartphones are so much more of a nuisance and everybody sees you can't have kids and smartphones together in school or there's no point. You're not going to learn. So phone-free schools is the third norm. And then the fourth norm is far more independence, free play and responsibility in the real world. And that's what we've been talking about. So if you do those four things, now your kid isn't even on a smartphone until they're 14. They're not on social media until 16. They go most of the way through puberty, talking to other kids, talking to them in school.

• 44:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What?

• 44:53Speaker 03

  Playing soccer at lunch. You know, so this is the way we roll back the phone-based childhood.

• 44:58Chuck Nice?

  What about the fact that children now socialize and not necessarily on a phone? I have a Gen Alpha at home and she's not allowed to have a, a phone at all. She does have access to a computer and she has access to a tablet. And I'll say, what are you doing? I'm hanging out with my friends. That is always because there are no apps on either one of those things that she can get to. And I hear them all, oh God, it's awful. But I hear them all just

• 45:39Chuck Nice?

  and laughing and they're socializing, just like they would if they were together.

• 45:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 45:43Chuck Nice?

  So what do you do about that? Or is that okay?

• 45:45Speaker 03

  Chuck, wait, wait. Are they, Chuck, if they're laughing together synchronously, like they're at, that's great. That's great. That's actual social interaction. When we were kids, you talked on the phone. Now, girls especially, I'm guessing it's a daughter you're talking about.

• 45:58Chuck Nice?

  It's my daughter.

• 45:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, so girls especially want to talk one-on-one or in a very small group.

• 46:04Chuck Nice?

  Oh, God, yes.

• 46:05Speaker 03

  And they talk on the phone for hours. That's great. There's no problem with that. It's because it's actual connection. But what's happening is that once your daughter starts texting, and once she gets onto group texts, now it's going to be the whole class, it's going to be thirty people, it might even be two hundred people on this giant group text. Now you're not really connecting. Now you're performing, and if you say something wrong, everyone's going to laugh at you, and then you're anxious, and then you're worried all day long. So, real connection is great, and technology can facilitate that. I'm not against all technology. FaceTime is fine. Telephone is fine.

• 46:39Chuck Nice?

  So I have two rules, which is you're only allowed to be on the, on, on anything, screen, a screen, five days out of the week. There are two days out of the week where you're not allowed to have a screen at all. And they think I'm crazy, but I'm still sticking by it. But she just came to me with this thing called, oh my God, it's a personal server Discord.

• 47:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, don't let her on that.

• 47:07Chuck Nice?

  And she just, and I said, well, who's, what are you going to do? Oh, I talk to my friends. Well, how do you talk to them? Well, it's me and this guy, person, and this girl, and this girl, and this girl, and these people from school. And you're telling me that that is not a good thing because the whole classroom will be on that. It's, I guess they text. So now I gotta take that.

• 47:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. So Chuck, if I could just, if, you know, I appreciate what you're doing. You're giving structure, you're putting some limits, that's great. But what I'd like you to do is think not, screens are all the same, and you can only have a certain amount of it. Think there's good screen time and bad screen time. Good screen time is two things. One is direct, face-to-face communication, like a telephone call or a FaceTime call. That's good, there's no problem with that, one-on-one. The other thing that's good is long stories. So humans are storytelling animals. We've always raised our kids with stories for as long as we've had language. So watching a movie, if they watch two movies a week, that's great, especially if they're together.

• 48:06Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 48:06Speaker 03

  There's no, there's no stimulus response from a movie. You just watch it and you get lost in the story. That's all good. You know what's really bad and you should say zero would be TikTok or Instagram reels or YouTube shorts. The short videos are horrible.

• 48:18Chuck Nice?

  I don't allow social media in the house. My son is 19 and he just got on social media last year.

• 48:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, I just spent a weekend with him. He's highly socially adjusted.

• 48:30Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 48:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As, as I've, as I've barely seen anyone else his age.

• 48:34Chuck Nice?

  That's true. Yeah.

• 48:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just want to put it out there.

• 48:36Chuck Nice?

  And I, I cannot take credit.

• 48:42Speaker 03

  If you kept him off social media, you did his brain a big favor.

• 48:44Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, he, he just got on it last year.

• 49:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Jonathan, you just rattled off a set of social media platforms on the assumption that we would all know and understand and agree with why they're bad. Could you give like the best example of what's going on on that platform that would make it bad, especially perhaps for the girls who are out there? What's different in the girl mind compared to the boy mind that makes them

• 49:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  more differentially susceptible to the mental stresses that they bring?

• 49:34Speaker 03

  So this is a very important point, that each social media platform is different. It appeals to different kids. It does different things and it causes different kinds of harm. So let's start with Instagram. That's the one that all the girls are on. Instagram is the most powerful way to destroy a girl's self-esteem and sense that she's beautiful. Because it puts girls into constant competition, comparing. It used to be, you know, you'd compare to the 10 or 20 girls in your class, but now you've got thousands of girls and young women who are gorgeous. So social comparison is particularly bad on Instagram. Instagram, I think, is the biggest single, there are many reasons, but Instagram, I think, is the biggest single driver of depression and anxiety in teenage girls, especially pre-teen girls. TikTok's very different.

• 50:17Speaker 03

  TikTok does have some of that, but TikTok is more about quick entertainment. TikTok, because it pioneered this very addictive paradigm, where you're watching videos, and if you've been watching it for five seconds and it doesn't seem super interesting, you're in, let's move on. So you press, and then the next one's not so interesting. And then you press, and the next one's really funny. So that's a slot machine. So TikTok is the fastest way to addict your kids to short, little attention span things, and to teach them that if they ever feel five seconds of boredom, that they should change it. So TikTok, I think, is the biggest driver of stupidity, and the kids themselves call it brain rot. So TikTok is, I believe, literally driving, I mean, test scores are going down around the world since 2015.

• 51:02Speaker 03

  And so TikTok is not so much about depression. TikTok is about becoming stupid and unable to pay attention. Snapchat is, has some of that. Snapchat has lots of little stuff. But Snapchat is the best way, if you want to have sex with a child or if you want to meet children. Snapchat makes it easy because everything disappears. Snapchat pushes you to connect to friends of friends, and most kids have thousands of friends, most of whom are strangers. So Snapchat is implicated in a lot of the fentanyl deaths because it's so easy to buy drugs on Snapchat. So each platform has a different profile of harms. You mentioned Discord. We're just, my group, we're just beginning to study Discord and Roblox.

• 51:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In your lab where you study this?

• 51:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, in my lab, in the Tech and Society Lab at NYU Stern. Any platform that puts you into conversation. With adults who are not known, not verified, the platform has no idea who they are. Snapchat, it was revealed in internal documents, Snapchat was getting 10,000 reports of sextortion in 2022, not per year, per week. I'm sorry, per month, per month. That was per month.

• 52:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's where you have a naked picture of someone and you threaten to post it?

• 52:10Speaker 03

  That's right. And a number of those kids then killed themselves. This is especially for boys. A lot of boys have killed themselves because they're so shamed by what has happened. So each of the platforms has a different profile of harms. And what happens in the research unfortunately is everything gets lumped together and all we're studying is how many hours a day are you on social media? And that lumps together four very different kinds of poison. So that dilutes the effects for any one kind of poison. But don't let your kids on any platform where they're talking to strangers. That actually includes Roblox. It's insane the way all these companies want to grow and bring people into interaction with children.

• 52:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So you're completely freaking us out here.

• 52:48Speaker 03

  So disturbing.

• 52:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So now suppose I'm a 14-year-old influencer. I can make more money than you ever made as a professor doing so. Who are you to tell me to not do this?

• 52:59Speaker 03

  Suppose you're a 14-year-old drug dealer. You could make more money than I could as a professor. And who am I to tell you you shouldn't do it? As a society, we protect children. That is a mic drop.

• 53:11Chuck Nice?

  That's a straight mic drop.

• 53:15Speaker 03

  If kids, if 14-year-olds could make a killing as coal miners, would we let them? So look, our kids are a mess. Our kids are being chewed up. Our kids are in terrible shape. Our kids are being exploited. These companies are worth literally trillions of dollars. We don't give them any money. It's our kids' attention that they're selling. So we've got to stop this.

• 53:34Gary O'Reilly?

  So Jonathan, if what you said isn't scary enough, I'll just ratchet this up.

• 53:40Speaker 03

  Let's go to AI.

• 53:41Chuck Nice?

  Thank you, thank you.

• 53:42Gary O'Reilly?

  Exactly. You're talking about a human to human connection here through whichever platform it might be. Just take one of those human connections out and plug in an AI. How badly wrong can this go? Or could it actually have an upside?

• 53:59Chuck Nice?

  Could you explain to me what the purpose of an AI talking to people would be?

• 54:04Speaker 03

  Here's Mark Zuckerberg's explanation. Yeah, in an interview a few months ago, he said, well, you know, a lot of people are lonely. And he quoted some statistic. He said, you know, on average, the average person says they have three or four friends, but they say they want to have 15 friends. And so there's a gap there, there's a market. And we think that our chatbots can fill that. So that let me share with you guys, there's a Yiddish word chutzpah.

• 54:31Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 54:31Speaker 03

  You know this word chutzpah?

• 54:32Chuck Nice?

  Everybody knows.

• 54:32Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:33Chuck Nice?

  Balls.

• 54:39Speaker 03

  So the definition I learned of chutzpah when I was a kid was it's, it's a boy who murders his parents. And then he asked for clemency from the judge because he's an orphan. And in the same way, in the same way, Meta is, I think, the biggest single contributor to the epidemic of teen loneliness. Our young people are very lonely. They don't have very many friends. They have many fewer friends than they used to. They spend a lot less time with those friends than they used to. So I think it's chutzpah of Meta to say, we caused this problem. And now we have a tech solution for it. Plus, we, there are also, a document just came out last week about Meta's internal ethical standards for AI. Their chief ethicist signed off on this,

• 55:22Speaker 03

  that the platforms can have sensual conversations with children, that it can talk about sex with them. There are some limits that you can get around, but it can show them violence, it can, it can talk sex with them. So these are companies that have shown over and over again, they cannot be trusted. Plus, the chatbots aren't really programmed. We don't know why they're doing what they do. They're neural, they're equivalent of neural networks that get tuned up, and they all have unpredictable properties. So even ChatGPT, which has some safeguards, you know, there's an article in The Times, a woman found out had a deeply erotic affair with ChatGPT in terms of, you know, sexual fantasies and rape fantasies and things like that. So the idea that, you know, here I am working so hard with my team

• 56:07Speaker 03

  to get across the idea, our children should not be on smartphones and social media. They should not be talking to strangers. They need a normal human childhood. And we're making a lot of progress. Then all of a sudden, in the last couple of months, everything is flooded with chatbot toys. Mattel is teaming up with OpenAI so that their toys will have ChatGPT in them. Your daughter can talk to Barbie. Barbie will literally be her best friend. And then good luck taking away her Barbie.

• 56:31Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 56:31Speaker 03

  Because it is now literally her best friend.

• 56:33Chuck Nice?

  That's a little too close to Meghan, the movie, for me. I'm sorry.

• 56:39Gary O'Reilly?

  So Jonathan, we have to, at some point, step into this. And that has to take commitment and responsibility from, I'll go from the top down. Federal, state, community. Takes a village to raise an adult, if I'm paraphrasing.

• 56:58Speaker 03

  Yes, that's right.

• 56:58Gary O'Reilly?

  And then maybe schools where young people are going to spend a large majority of their days. And there has to be that investment to unplug them from the virtual world that they go into and inhabit and give them back and keep, all right, keep it real. Bring them back into a real place. How much success rate do you think that we will actually have in enabling all those levels?

• 57:24Speaker 03

  So I think we're going to have a lot of success, but only in certain places. So here's what we're seeing already. When my book came out, when The Actionist Generation came out in March of 2024, especially college-educated women, mothers in professional circles, they all read it or their book clubs talked about it. Those mothers jumped into action. It was the most incredible thing. They started forming mutual pledges to not give their kids phones. They started. Forming labor hoods, which is an agreement, okay, we six families, our kids can wander around between the homes. You don't have to supervise them. So it's sort of more educated elite families are really on this and they're doing the whole thing. This is just unfortunately the way society works, as with junk food, you know, junk food permeated everything in the 20th century.

• 58:09Speaker 03

  And it was sort of more, you know, educated, upper class people who sort of get a handle on it and put restrictions on. So I think this is already exacerbating inequality in our country. And as more educated people begin to get a handle on it, their kids are going to do a little better in school. Um, and I think unfortunately in less educated areas, it's going to take a lot longer to get through. And that's why it's so important that we get phone free schools. Because kids are spending six or seven hours a day in school. The rich kids already have restrictions on their device use. The poor kids generally don't. Poor kids use phones a lot more than rich kids. So phone free schools gives us a level playing field. Everyone has six or seven hours without their phones. Everyone can learn.

• 58:50Speaker 03

  But you're right, it has to be the schools, the communities, the state governments, they're acting really well. A lot of them jump right into an act phone free schools. Some of them are raising the age. So states are doing a great job, actually. The federal government is the big hole. Meta spends a huge amount of money influencing Congress. Through many different methods, including investing in the districts of key representatives. So that has been able to stop it. There has been zero legislation ever to protect children. The internet was set up with a couple of laws in 1998 that caused this problem. Congress has done zero, nothing ever to protect children.

• 59:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So to just to hammer home a point you're making. The tech divide started out with rich people had the tech and poor people didn't.

• 59:38Speaker 03

  Right.

• 59:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And now the rich people are seeing the harm it can cause, getting organized. Now they're reducing the tech exposure, leaving the poor behind as victims.

• 59:49Speaker 03

  That's exactly right. In the 1990s, we thought there was an educational equity issue. The rich kids have computers and laptops increasingly by the end of the decade.

• 59:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 59:57Speaker 03

  And a lot of philanthropists, I think Bill Gates, a lot of people, said, well, let's spend a lot of money so that we get a computer on every desk. Every kid should have a computer on their desk. But it turns out that the equity issue is exactly the reverse, as you just said. Because if you put a computer on a kid's desk, it's like a smartphone. It's a multifunction device. And if they're supposed to do something, they're going to end up watching YouTube or TikTok. So, computers on desks, the one-to-one devices, has been a disaster. There's no evidence I've seen that it helps education. It distracts them. The clearest illustration of this is the fact that the people who make this technology, the people in Silicon Valley, where do they send their kids? A lot of them send their kids to the Waldorf School.

• 1:00:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yep.

• 1:00:37Speaker 03

  Specifically because Waldorf schools have no computers at all in the classroom.

• 1:00:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By design of the curriculum. There's no technology assisting the learning, the Waldorf schools.

• 1:00:47Speaker 03

  That's right. There's a computer room so they can learn how to program. They can learn to use computers, but it's not there interfering with their attention every moment of the day.

• 1:00:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my.

• 1:00:55Speaker 03

  So here's the point. The richest, most powerful people in the world protect their children from the technology. They make their nannies sign contracts pledging that they will not let that child see the nanny's phone. So the rich, most powerful people can protect their children from the technology. They don't want their kids to use it. They want your kids to use it.

• 1:01:15Chuck Nice?

  So, in the, basically what you just described was never get high on your own supply.

• 1:01:22Speaker 03

  Never get your children high on your own supply.

• 1:01:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're giving us the drug translations of this whole podcast.

• 1:01:29Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 1:01:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, Jonathan, given your four steps duly outlined in your writings and duly adopted by certain communities, do you have any hope that those four steps will? permeate all of society and not just the elite? And if so, do you have a timeframe over which that might happen? And if it doesn't happen, what is the future? Yeah.

• 1:01:53Speaker 03

  So if it doesn't happen, the future is an extrapolation of where we are now. We have an entire generation more anxious, less risk-taking. They're going to be less entrepreneurial. They'll start fewer businesses. There'll be all kinds of terrible economic consequences. They'll have more trouble dating. They'll have fewer children. There'll be very few people. So with the current trajectory is so disastrous.

• 1:02:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just say it.

• 1:02:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Social apocalypse.

• 1:02:16Speaker 03

  I would say, yeah, sociological apocalypse. I would say that. So we have to change and we don't have five years. We have to turn this around right away. And obviously, we can't get the whole job done in the next year or two. But the move to phone-free schools around the world is faster than any reform I have ever seen in my life. Because everyone was ready for it. The teachers hated the phones. Everyone could see the problem. And the fact that, you know, Brazil is now, the entire country is now phone-free. Their schools are all phone-free. And that happened because some mothers read The Anxious Generation in English before it came out in Portuguese and they got moving on it. So countries are doing this around the world. I think we are, you know, there was a tech lash in the late 2010s when people, there was a kind of a zeitgeist that kind of like,

• 1:02:57Speaker 03

  hey, wait, maybe the technology is actually kind of messing up society. Okay, so that happened pretty quickly in late 2010s. I think now we're in a similar sort of tech lash, only it's over our children. And it's not like some abstract, it's hurting the children. We can see it's hurting my children. And so I think that we are having a kind of a global reckoning. It began last year. It's intensifying. So I think we are at a turning point. But on the other hand, with all of these toys coming out with ChatGPT and other chatbots in them, those toys are going to be given to two and three-year-olds at Christmas. There are going to be a lot of chatbot toys and chatbot teddy bears under the Christmas tree. So we don't have two or three years to block that. We really have to have a clear message.

• 1:03:41Speaker 03

  Nobody should get their child a toy with AI in it. Nobody should do that. Now, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this will be a boon to children's social development. But our story, what we learned from social media is no, this is very, very unlikely to be good for kids. So that, we don't have five years on that. We've got to stop that like in the next two or three months.

• 1:04:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maya, can I ask you, just since we're running out of time, I just have, do you know exactly how much?

• 1:04:09Chuck Nice?

  Mark Zuckerberg hates you.

• 1:04:15Speaker 03

  Yes, in fact, I do. I do, I do. You know, I've spoken to him three times and I, you know, he was, he was gracious to me the first two times. And then I ran into him recently at a conference where he said that my, my research is not scientifically rigorous. So that doesn't quite qualify as hate, but I think it is a, perhaps a new phase in the evolution of our relationship.

• 1:04:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He asked, AI, what would be the, what would most get under your skin to tell you? And that's how it has to be.

• 1:04:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Jonathan, you describing, you describing the festive period and AI toys under the tree. Immediately my head pops, why don't you put a health warning on them?

• 1:04:56Chuck Nice?

  Ooh.

• 1:04:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a great idea.

• 1:04:58Gary O'Reilly?

  If that, if there's something that expedites, because you also said, it's not the fact that it's affecting the children, it's affecting my children, my child.

• 1:05:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And also, so I don't get mail. Call it Christmas, don't say the festive period.

• 1:05:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:17Chuck Nice?

  We can all say Christmas again.

• 1:05:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, health warnings, that sounds like some intermediate step.

• 1:05:24Chuck Nice?

  Well, absolutely, that's a great idea. That is a great idea, but you must also consider how long it took to get a health warning on a pack of cigarettes in this country.

• 1:05:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And how long took people to heed the warning?

• 1:05:36Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:05:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, that's right.

• 1:05:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Jonathan, remind me of the full title of your book?

• 1:05:41Speaker 03

  The book is called The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

• 1:05:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I have a better title for that book.

• 1:05:51Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 1:05:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You ready, what is it?

• 1:05:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Social media is the poison and I am its antidote.

• 1:06:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How's that? They'll sell you some more books.

• 1:06:05Chuck Nice?

  Subtitle, Mark Zuckerberg Hates.

• 1:06:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, Jonathan, this has been a delight. I've admired your work ever since I first saw anything you put on social media.

• 1:06:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I'm a fully mature adult, so I can handle it. You posted one of your lectures and I delighted in it. And it was great to have you on StarTalk here, sharing your wisdom, insight and brilliance that brings it all together. So, thanks for being on the show.

• 1:06:36Speaker 03

  Well, thanks so much, Neil. Thanks so much, Chuck and Gary. If listeners want more information, everything is at anxiousgeneration.com. And we have a children's version of the book coming out, so look for that as well.

• 1:06:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent.

• 1:06:51Chuck Nice?

  I love it.

• 1:06:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 1:06:52Chuck Nice?

  I mean, this is, this has been so enlightening. I mean, as a parent with a young child.

• 1:06:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jonathan, when we perfect the cloning machine, you'll be first in line for that. We need more of you out there protecting us all.

• 1:07:04Speaker 03

  Neil right back at you. The other guys, I'm not so sure.

• 1:07:09Chuck Nice?

  Neither are we.

• 1:07:10Gary O'Reilly?

  I was gonna say something nice, but now screw it.

• 1:07:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can you de-clone people? Take someone out of the gene pool.

• 1:07:16Gary O'Reilly?

  Now, this is a project that needs to succeed.

• 1:07:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 1:07:19Gary O'Reilly?

  Simply as that.

• 1:07:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We will do all we can to make sure of that. So, thanks again, Jonathan. All right, Gary, good to have you here.

• 1:07:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Pleasure.

• 1:07:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, always good.

• 1:07:26Chuck Nice?

  Always a pleasure.

• 1:07:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This has been StarTalk Special Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson bidding you to keep looking up and away from your smartphone.