The Anxious Generation with Jonathan Haidt

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.

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

He’s got plans.

Yeah.

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

Find out how and why, coming right up on Star Talk 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.

Hi Neil.

All right, dude.

Yeah.

Former soccer pro, soccer announcer.

Yes.

And Chuck Nice.

Hey, what’s happening, guys?

There you go.

And that’s it.

We don’t need anything else.

This is like former soccer pro and then Chuck.

And Chuck.

And Chuck.

Someone hug that man.

Yeah, he needs a hug.

Are you a former professional anything is the question.

Yeah, I’m a former professional professional.

Listen, I make the mortgage payment.

Keep the family warm and dry.

Exactly.

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

Yeah.

What have you put together?

Well, Laine Unsworth, who’s over in our LA office, and I sort of noodled on this.

And simple question just popped straight up.

Is social media bad for us?

Now.

Yes.

Okay.

Next show.

We’re done here.

That’s it.

Goodbye, everybody.

Hopefully, it’s not, but because some people love it, some people need it.

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.

And the world is so much better off.

Exactly.

Things have just gotten so good.

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?

If so, is there something that can be done about it?

So, for those questions, we need a guest who has a specific expertise in this field.

And 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 in 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.

The Anxious Generation, How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, came out 2024.

Excellent.

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

Jonathan, welcome to StarTalk.

Thanks so much, Neil.

Great to see you again and great to meet Gary and Chuck.

Yes, I’ve admired your work ever since I stumbled on one of your videos where you explored the political divide that influenced the research conducted in your field.

And I just thought it was insightful.

I was a little drawn in because he used some astronomical references.

Oh, gotcha.

He gotcha.

He got me.

You had me at Galaxy.

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.

Pick away.

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

Which I did.

All right.

But then I wasn’t asked again.

So I don’t know, maybe the sales of the book?

I don’t know.

I just thought I put that out there.

See, you’re not used to that.

Oh, take it from somebody who has that’s common practice.

So Jonathan, 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 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, not just your ideas, but your data?

So thanks, Neil.

So 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 supporting surveys.

Some go back to the 1970s.

So we can see the various trends in mental health.

Now, this is self-reported, a nine-point depression scale, a question about anxiety.

And those numbers move up and down a little bit.

From the 90s through 2010, 2011, they’re very, very stable.

And then all of a sudden, it’s like someone slipped 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.

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 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 room because they cut themselves so severely goes up 50 to 150 percent, 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.

We thought we understood college students.

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 bias response teams, and 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.

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.

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.

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?

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 organize 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 system, BIS, which is the defend mode, and the behavioral activation system, VAS, 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, the numbers are in the 30s, 30% or so have anxiety or depression.

That’s huge.

Yeah, that’s huge.

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 Codling of 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 blowing a whistle and saying, no running, don’t push.

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.

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 one born in 96 and one born in 2000.

So they’re right in line.

You have older Gen Z.

That’s right.

So it’s we as a society and it’s we as parents.

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

Sponges.

Spongy.

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

What do you want to mope with crocodiles and broken glass?

Nails and broken glass.

Yeah.

I mean, we liked it that way.

Yeah.

That’s how we-

You have four old men here.

Remember the old days.

But it didn’t occur to me that I could fall and not get hurt.

Because that was not an option.

You just didn’t fall.

Right.

He was on the playground.

And routinely, someone would scream out, Medic!

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

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 had 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 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 you’re inside 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 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.

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

That was an athletic event.

So what you’re talking about there, Jonathan, is the development of social skills, a development of a sort of armor of a veneer of mental protection.

You know what, if I bang my chin on the monkey bar, okay, I’ll need some help, but it’s probably going to be okay.

I’m going to 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?

It is.

So there’s a key concept called anti-fragility.

If you’re anti-fragile.

So if you’re fragile, like an egg, you know, you got to treat it gently or it will break.

But if you’re anti-fragile, this is a term coined by my NYU colleague, Nassim Taleb.

If you’re anti-fragile, 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.

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.

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?

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 well understood, but 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 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 parts of your brain are always monitoring the environment for threats and opportunities.

And that’s normal.

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 jump, you freak out because your brain is acting like you’re about to be attacked, you can’t live your life that way.

It’s going to wear you down.

Now, 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 will 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 is 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.

So you call your book The Anxious Generation.

I’ll just trace 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?

So I’m a social psychologist who studies morality and how people make moral judgements.

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?

They 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.

And this puts pressure on you to give in too.

And so the tech companies both for the smartphone 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 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 in 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.

Is there any way that we can blame the children?

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?

No, you’re 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, Apple, Facebook, we thought these were amazing.

They’re going to bring peace on earth.

So there was a more mission.

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.

Oh, no, that’s okay.

That’s okay.

Okay, they’re all bastards.

You’re totally fine there.

Go ahead.

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.

Sometimes 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, kind of lock down into the 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.

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’ play dates 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 tip-top 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.

You used a word that was unfamiliar to me.

Something about the formation of your frontal lobe, the myo, what was the word you used there?

Myelination.

Yeah, what is that?

Myelination.

Okay, so an amazing thing about the human brain is that it reaches 90% of full size by the time a kid is six.

Okay, so you 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 got all these neurons packed in way more than you’re going to have as an adult.

And then you have experienced 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, you do it over and over again, 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 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 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, 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 this period…

You’re kind of creating grooves in a record.

Perfect, that’s right.

Grooves in a record or, you know, snow, like when you go down, 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 record is a good one.

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

That’s right.

But rewiring is a word in the subtitle of your book.

So square that puzzle here.

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.

They just let you out.

Go ahead, Doug.

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 one, it’s the walking and reaching.

When you’re three to seven, it’s a lot of language.

And social development is a little later, more like six or seven 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 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.

That’s why I say this is rewiring their brains.

And I also say that childhood has gotten rewired because sort of the whole set of inputs and outputs that make up a healthy human childhood, which is going to evolve 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.

Okay, so the delivery system for all of this negative impact is, I would say, a smartphone, 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 you trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

You realize that when you say 16.

Oh, sure.

I realize that.

But you know what?

He’s like, guess what?

You can get toothpaste back in the tube.

Well, let’s do it.

I mean, you can do it.

That’s right.

If your children’s lives depended on it, would you put toothpaste back in the tube?

I’d make a bloody good go at it.

Yes, for sure.

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.

Brand loyalty.

Including, and the Catholic Church.

Any evangelical.

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.

Oh, is that right?

Yeah, no other religion has that saying.

That’s a phrase.

So, Jonathan, let me be a devil’s advocate here.

In fact, I don’t even think the devil believes this, but let me just play.

Okay, let me just offer a counterpoint.

We are of an age where we played in a playground and we had play dates and 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 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?

So ten years ago, that’s what a lot of people thought and ten years ago, it was possible to hope for that.

It was a phrase, digital natives.

These kids are digital natives.

Who knows what amazing things they’re going to do?

I remember when I first saw Twitter and I saw kids where young people were tweeting, just had a hamburger.

I think, well, that’s stupid.

But then I thought, wait a second, if they’re doing little micro-interactions with dozens and dozens of people every day, maybe they’re going to be super social.

Maybe they’re going to have amazing social skills.

So 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 several million years old, depending on how you want to count it, hundreds of thousands or millions of years old, that has a certain developmental process that we have to go through.

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, well, they drink less, they smoke less, they drive less, they take fewer risks.

And many people say, oh, isn’t that great?

No.

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 the screen.

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

Right.

Right.

Where do they get the cigarettes?

Where do they get the alcohol?

They’re the ones that waited outside the liquor store for an older person to help them out.

So 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.

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

That’s a good…

He can learn everything he needs to learn.

But how about the other side of this?

Listen, 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 for…

Maybe they had a weird interest 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 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?

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 kids 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 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.

And yes, they’re connecting in a sense in that 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 flip it open, you can text, you can call, 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.

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.

That’s why everybody should have those little tiny Zoolander phones.

So that…

That’s right.

I don’t remember.

I remember that.

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.

A dork.

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

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?

A bunch of wussies.

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?

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.

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 know how to play.

You hear this a lot.

You push the kids outdoors, you say, go out and play, and they sit there like, what do we do?

We don’t know what to do.

What’s outside?

So, what they do is they all get on their phones, together.

Yes!

That’s right, exactly.

That’s what they do.

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 gonna 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.

But when grandpa or grandma…

Well, you tell me, I’m the grandparent, and here’s, here’s…

You’re grandchildren.

This is how you play.

Right.

I mean, that’s…

I don’t even want to…

Look, this is how you…

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

Now, now, now, now, now, while you needed a little imagination…

Now we buy them on Amazon.

Little imagination.

This stick can be anything.

So, yeah.

I mean, how many milliseconds will it take for a team 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.

And you were a professional soccer player.

Well, not as a child.

No, but I’m saying that…

I wasn’t that good.

I was born a professional soccer player.

But what I’m saying is you were given the opportunity.

Look where it steered you.

Just being outdoors.

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 don’t want to be bullied and picked on.

And it’s the cult of comparison.

And, you know, all the down spiral from there.

But it’s, okay, boy scouts, girl scouts, church groups, schools, after schools.

All of those?

Yeah, athletic clubs, 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 would 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 Zs who are now going to be the parents, and we don’t quite know exactly how far down…

Just to clarify, when you say responsibility, you don’t mean who to blame.

You mean who’s going to lead us out.

Who’s going to lead us out?

That’s how I want to think about that.

Who will separate us away from this?

Who’s responsible?

Who’s going to pick up this and say, right, you know what?

This does need changing.

This is our future.

So as a social scientist, I tend to want to first understand what caused the situation.

What are the large structural factors, the 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 rights.

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.

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 more corollary 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, 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.

So I understand the reason for the freakout, but we vastly overreacted, and we said, never let our kids near other adults, and men especially, no, do not interact with children.

If a kid’s in trouble, even so, like, whoa, you know, someone’s gonna be…

So we kind of 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.

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.

That’s right.

It’s a high cost of entry.

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 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, especially if there’s some inkling that they would be highly receptive of it to begin with.

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 might call the police, because no one has seen an unaccompanied child since 1992.

And so we have to…

Chuck, he’s stealing your animals.

That’s awesome.

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 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 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, we have to help them and laws have to change that parents 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.

Let them move around, let them not just sit in your basement or on your sofa.

And just like 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.

Same with 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 70s, I suppose.

There was a crime wave in the 60s, 70s and 80s.

Big crime wave in the 70s.

It’s much safer now, much safer now.

Yeah.

So actually, so I guess the quickest answer to your question is what I do in the Anxious Generations, 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.

Let them get most of it through puberty before you hook them up permanently to a screen in their face.

Flip phones are fine, phone watchers are fine.

No smartphone before high school.

Are there still flip phones?

Can you get them?

Yeah.

As a matter of fact, there are.

You can get them.

Okay, good.

Good to know.

Yeah, or 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.

What a lot of us are trying to do is 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 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 phone.

And schools are waking up.

Me and my team, we’ve really been pushing phone-free schools legislation.

I saw some of this, I don’t know if they preserved it, but when my daughter was teaching 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, at the truck.

And then you pick it up on the way back out of school.

So I don’t know if that was experimental or what the results were.

That might be back in the Bloomberg days.

Yes, it was.

Thank you.

That’s exactly what it was.

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, playing soccer at lunch.

So this is the way we roll back the phone-based childhood.

What about the fact that children now socialize, and not necessarily on a phone.

I have a Jen Alpha at home, and she’s not allowed to have 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.

Oh, God, yes.

And when 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 text, now it’s gonna be the whole class.

It’s gonna be 30 people, might even be 200 people on this giant group text.

Now you’re not really connecting.

Now you’re performing, and if you say something wrong, everyone’s gonna 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.

So I have two rules, which is you’re only allowed to be 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.

Discord.

Yeah, no, don’t let her on that.

And she just, and I said, well, what are you gonna do?

Oh, I talk to my friends.

Well, how do you talk to them?

Well, it’s me and this guy, a 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.

Yeah, that’s right.

So, Chuck, if I could just, 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.

Okay.

There’s no stimulus response from a movie.

You just watch it and 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.

I don’t allow social media in the house.

My son is 19 and he just got on social media last year.

By the way, I just spent a weekend with him.

He’s highly socially adjusted as I’ve barely seen anyone else his age.

That’s true.

I just want to put it out there.

And I cannot take credit for that.

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

Yeah, he just got on it last year.

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 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 more differentially susceptible to the mental stresses that they bring?

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 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 preteen girls.

TikTok’s very different.

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.

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 is 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 debts 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 beginning to study Discord and Roblox.

In your lab where you study this.

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 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, that was per month.

That’s where you have a naked picture of someone and you threaten to post it.

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 roadblocks.

It’s insane the way all these companies want to grow and bring people into interaction with children.

So you’re completely freaking us out here.

Oh, disturbing.

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?

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.

That’s a straight mic drop.

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.

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

Let’s go to AI.

Thank you.

Thank you.

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?

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

Here’s Mark Zuckerberg’s explanation.

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 chat bots can fill that.

So that, let me share with you guys.

There’s a Yiddish word, chutzpah.

Yes.

You know, this word chutzpah?

Everybody knows chutzpah.

Yeah, yeah.

Balls.

So the definition I learned of chutzpah when I was a kid was, it’s a boy who murders his parents, and then he asks for clemency from the judge because he’s an orphan.

Nice.

And 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, 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, 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 talk sex with them.

So, these are companies that have shown over and over again, they cannot be trusted.

Plus, the chat bots aren’t really programmed.

We don’t know why they’re doing what they do.

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 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 has 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, because it is now literally her best friend.

That’s a little too close to Megan the Movie for me.

I’m sorry.

So, to 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.

And there may be 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?

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 Anxious 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 laborhoods, which is an agreement.

They said, OK, we six families, our kids can wander around between the homes.

You don’t have to supervise them.

So 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.

Junk food permeated everything in the 20th century, and it was sort of more 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.

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.

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 and 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.

Metta spends a huge amount of money influencing Congress through many different methods, including investing in the districts of key representatives.

So, Metta 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.

So 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.

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.

That’s exactly right.

In the 1990s, we thought there was an educational equity-ish.

The rich kids have computers and laptops increasingly by the end of the decade.

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 multi-function 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, specifically because Waldorf schools have no computers at all in the classroom.

By design of the curriculum, there’s no technology assisting the learning, the Waldorf schools.

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.

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.

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

Never get your children high on your own supply.

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

Exactly.

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.

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 will 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 the current trajectory is so disastrous.

Apocalypse.

Just say it.

Social apocalypse.

I would say that.

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 Brazil is now the entire country is now phone-free.

Their schools are all phone-free.

And that happened because some others 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, there was a tech lash in the late 2010s when people, there was a kind of a zeitgeist, they’re kind of like, 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 clearer message.

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 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.

And we’ve got to stop that in the next two or three months.

Maya, can I ask you, since we’re running out of time, do you know exactly how much Mark Zuckerberg hates you?

Yes, in fact, I do.

Oh, sweet!

I do, I do.

I’ve spoken to him three times.

And he was gracious to me the first two times.

And then I ran into him recently at a conference where he said that my research is not scientifically rigorous.

So that doesn’t quite qualify as hate, but I think it is perhaps a new phase in the evolution of our relationship.

He asked AI what would most get under your skin to tell you, and that’s how he asked it.

Jonathan, are you describing the festive period and AI toys under the tree?

Immediately in my head pops, why don’t you put a health warning on them?

Oh, yeah, that’s a great idea.

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.

And also, so I don’t get mail.

Call it Christmas, don’t say the festive period.

Christmas.

Not everyone’s Christmas is daily.

We cannot say Christmas.

It’s American Christmas.

Yeah, health warnings.

That sounds like some intermediate step.

Well, I’m not gonna tell you something.

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.

And how long it took people to heed the warning.

Right.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, that’s right.

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

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

Okay, I have a better title for that book.

Oh, really?

You ready?

What is it?

Okay.

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

Ooh.

How’s that?

That will sell you some more books.

Subtitle, Mark Zuckerberg hates me.

Well, Jonathan, this has been a delight.

I’ve admired your work ever since I first saw anything you put on social media.

But I’m a fully mature adult, so I can handle it.

You can.

No, 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.

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.

Excellent.

I love it.

All right.

I mean, this has been so enlightening.

I mean, as a parent with a young child.

When we perfect a cloning machine, you’ll be first in line for that.

We need more of you out there protecting us all.

Neil, right back at you.

All right.

The other guys, I’m not so sure.

Neither are we.

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

Can you de-clone people?

Take someone out of the gene pool.

No, this is a project that needs to succeed simply as that.

We will do all we can to make sure of that.

So thanks again, Jonathan.

All right, Gary, good to have you here.

Pleasure.

Chuck, always good.

Always a pleasure.

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