A sharp look at how precision data is currently breaking our standard model of the universe. Itβs a humbling reminder that even our best science is often just one measurement away from a total rethink.
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[ep 52] StarTalk Podcast: Crisis in Cosmology and Hubble Constant Mystery πAdded:
Star Talk, Neil Degrass Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. Today I've got as my co-host, Matt Kersian. Matt, welcome back.
>> Thank you, Neil. It's nice to be back.
>> We caught up with you. You're on a cruise. Man, you comedians go every You got the cushiest jobs.
>> I don't I don't know if it's cushy. It's cushy to be on a cruise. I think telling jokes on a cruise, that's a little more work. But uh yeah, we were chatting about this last time. I'm I'm I'm on a boat right now and then I'm on a big land tour. I'm touring with Sarah Milikin, who's a great UK comic. And then off the back of that, I'm doing some headline shows of my own in clubs.
So mattression.com, you can stalk me. If you go to mattcushion.com, you can find >> We'll stalk you there. All right. Well, take us on a boat next time.
>> Absolutely. Absolutely. There's space in this tiny cabin.
>> And you're also a host of probably science. Did I finally get that right?
>> You did. You did. I I feel like you've always known the title. I feel like I >> I haven't been on in like eight years, so I'm waiting for my call. We are we are we are talking to your people right now cuz let's get >> Explain. Well, today we're going back into the universe, deep into the universe.
And you know, there are theorists who run around think they know what's going on, but they have to ultimately answer to the observer who's getting the actual data. And we have someone back on Star Talk who was here just two years ago.
That's how fast this field is moving.
Wendy Freeman. Wendy, welcome back to Star Talk.
>> Thanks very much. Yes, data is the ultimate arbiter.
We have lots of ideas, but if it if it doesn't if they don't fit the universe, we throw them out.
>> You are the judge, the jury, and the executioner of theorists.
>> Is that how much power you wield, Wendy?
>> We need them both. The data without theory is not very useful. So, it's when you have an interplay between the two that it becomes interesting.
She's being nice now cuz she's got to meet theistorist later at the conference. I think >> you don't have the theorists ever going like, "No, no, no. I think the stars are wrong. I think uh her equations are right."
>> Yeah. I I spent some time at Princeton which has a very strong history of theorists. And there's a there's a motto there. Never trust an observation unless it's confirmed by a good theory.
>> And that's their mindset. They know they're like full of [Β __Β ] but they want to say it.
So Wendy, you a professor of astronomy, University of Chicago in an an endowed chair. Let me get that right. The John and Marian Sullivan University professor. That's a whole other level of professorship. Uh and in astronomy and astrophysics at Chicago. And now since we last had you on, you've been busy. Oh my gosh. You got the >> That's true. That is very true.
>> The National Medal of Science. Oh my gosh. Uh, this is the highest award the country gives, the United States gives to scientists. There's also a national medal of engineering and so this is >> medicine.
>> And medicine. Yes. Thanks for reminding me of that. And I was once on a committee to select the National Medal of Science that goes through the National Science Foundation. Does it still do that?
>> Yes, it does.
>> Okay, cool. So that was so it it it depoliticizes it enough so that you know you can really trust that who's in there for that award um earned it in all the ways one would expect for a >> science is not political. It has no political affiliation. That's one of the beauties of science. It really >> distinguishing it from basically everything. Yes.
>> And uh you were cited for your pioneering work in measuring the expansion rate of the universe. Is that all?
Yeah, you were. I remember you were right out of the box with the Hubble telescope. Hubble that telescope was in part named after Edwin Hubble on the expectation it would do exactly what you did with it was to settle the arguments, right? Could you remind us what that was?
>> Yeah. So when I started in pre Hubble the argument at the time there the big debate about the size and the age of the universe and people were arguing about whether the universe was 10 or 20 billion years old which is a big difference and uh and so Hubble was built in fact the size of the primary mirror of the telescope was set to allow they didn't let it go any smaller because they wanted to be able to have Hubble measure sephiids the stars that we used to measure distances um with that telescope. And so there was an effort of course because you could save cost to cut the size of the primary mirror even further and uh and it was set by that to resolve this debate between a Hubble constant of 50 and 100 at that time.
>> Yeah. And all we came up at the same time and I I just remember that being you know the biggest argument anyone would ever have in the coffee lounge.
You know, people would they'd split in the coffee lounge who was the old old universe camp and who was the young universe camp. And of course, the actual answer landed nicely in between those two numbers as one might have predicted with high.
>> So, they had to split the bet. Whatever they were betting against each other with, they had to >> Yeah. It didn't land in either camp. It was like >> it was it was it was uh Yeah. Like right in the middle, right? I mean >> it's interesting because you know there were two groups competing groups that you know Sandage and Tommon and Devocalure who were making these measurements and so the arguments between 50 and 100 centered on their argument but if you look at the published values at the time there were plenty in the middle.
>> Yeah. I would have never known that cuz while that was going on I was at the University of Texas which was home base for Gerard Devokur. He was Mr. Young Universe right? And so uh did I get that right? He had the Hubble constant of 100 Hubble. Yeah. So it was so I would I we had no we were not allowed to think outside of his box there.
>> That's okay. I was at the Carnegie Institution with Alan Santing time. He he um he kind of disagreed.
>> Yeah. Yeah. So thanks for solving that.
and also just this year named Time magazine's hundred most influential people in the world. Congratulations on that. When was that announced?
>> Oh, I'm trying to think of when it was announced as a >> So, it's already happened. You already have the celebration.
>> Oh, yes. Yes, we did. We had a nice >> So, you came through New York and you didn't you you came through you >> came through New York. In fact, your people check with me. Was there a date where I could do this? My people were on the case. Okay.
>> Yes. Um but it didn't work out.
>> All right.
>> Yes. It was a lovely event. Not what your usual scientific conferences are like.
>> No. Yeah. It's a celebration. Yeah.
Yeah. It's good. And uh this paper that you hinted at when I had you in New York for the Azimov uh panel debate. Uh your paper solved what? So, I think you you're going to give me details here, but you know, if if you just believed the newspaper headlines or the clickbait in news websites, you would think that all of cosmology was in crisis and were all ready to just cry in our, you know, cry in each other's laps about how to solve this. And you landed at a place that seemed like, yeah, we got this and we don't have to give up the big bang to do it. So the Hubble T remind us what people are calling Hubble tension. Just tell me about that.
>> The Hubble tension is what's arisen in the last decade or so. We make measurements of the Hubble constant, the current expansion rate locally using stars like Sephiids. We also use red giant branch stars and and other ways of doing these measurements tied into type 1A supernovi. is bright.
>> Right. So all of these in this list that you mentioned, these are um yard sticks, standard candles, right? So because not every object serves as a way to know how far away it is, right?
>> So there's only a handful and they're cherished, right? These >> they're rare stars. They're, for example, sephiids. When we go and try and discover them, like we did with Hubble, maybe one in a thousand stars that we measure turns out to be a sephiid. So they're rare but they also have a signature and in the case of Sephi it's discovered by Henry at Levit uh that the brightness of the star correlates with how fast it's varying in its brightness so-called period luminosity relation and we can use that relationship to determine the distance.
>> So how many lever that was a full hundred years ago or more right?
>> That's right. Everything that we have done since then rests on her work. And >> and and what's what's kind of cool is she gets to make those discoveries because the men wouldn't allow the women to do any to work. You know, where's the what's the most tedious work that is possible in my in the field and it's like classifying stars and measuring their brightness and their spectra and that's where all the discoveries happen.
So >> that's right. And she was, you know, astute enough to notice, you know, not only were these stars varying that she was finding in the large melanic cloud and the small melanic cloud, but there was this correlation. The brighter stars were taking longer to go through their cycle of variation. And this is the basis of what Hubble's discovery that there are other galaxies outside the Milky Way, that the universe is expanding. We use it for the key project. We use it today. And she fell into obscurity. She was kind of lost in the dust bins of history for a long time, but we're we're recognizing her now. And I think that's do, you know, the New York Times actually wrote an obituary about her in 2024.
>> I think in 2021, >> a ketchup obituary, right? Ketchup obituary.
>> Did they write it fresh or did they just find it in an old drawer from >> No, no, they wrote it. They're making an effort to try and they're recognizing that it wasn't just men who did things in those days in particular.
>> Yeah.
>> Reconciliation project. Yeah.
>> Yeah. Yeah.
>> Very good. And and I'm happy to report that at least in our era uh Wendy, the textbooks that we taught from and and learn from uh there was good mention of the women of Harvard at the time. Um and we now refer to the Levit law and and that there was a meeting at Harvard in 2008 which was the centennial of public her first publication on the PL relation and we decided that it would be appropriate to rename it the Levit law.
I had actually been doing >> the period luminosity relation right >> yeah there's a Hubble law there's a Hubble constant there are Hubble galaxies and different topologies in classification and so on and everything rests on the on the PL relation >> I'm all in. take us back to the Hubble tension and how much of a t how how tense was it in the room or how were you in the room when it happened? Uh how what is I I I don't like that word tension. I mean in science if things don't agree that's kind of fun you know I just got a sense that it was a it was more a marketing ploy to get clicks on a website and but maybe you have a different view as one who's in the middle of fixing the tension. uh what where did you come from there?
>> So sorry just to be clear just to for me to so it is actually meaning tension in the common English sense. It's not using tension in some kind of physics sense.
You're actually using it like awkwardness or discomfort like >> well it's signaling a discrepancy between what we're measuring locally when we use these stars like seafiids or red giant branch stars and supernovi to to measure the Hubble constant the current expansion rate today. And when we compare that method with what you infer from the cosmic microwave background, the background radiation from the big bang, uh you can measure these very small fluctuations in the temperature and also the polarization of the background radiation and fit those with the the spectrum with what we call the standard cosmological model. And that's been now in place for a quarter of a century. And when you do that, this is a predictive model. It tells you how the universe will evolve. And it tells you that the expansion rate today would have a value of 67 with a very small uncertainty of less than 1%.
And when we use sephiids with HST, we get values more like 73.
And so that's a rather small difference compared to 50 and 100 where we started off when >> Yeah. What? What? I I would have been just I said, "Let's go have a beer.
We're good here." That's what I would have said.
>> I think it would have been appropriate to to relax a little bit and have at least a day to celebrate things closer.
And it, you know, there are always crises in cosmology. And I think uh it was a very rare time around 2001 2003.
So our HST key project results came out in 2001. We got a value of 72 with an uncertainty of 10%. And then W map the Wilkinson microwave anisotropy probe first measurements of all sky uh in space uh for the microwave background got a value of 71. So it looked pretty good and the acceleration of the universe had been discovered. The age was something like 13.7 or 13.8 billion years. And wow, here you are measuring locally using stars and you're using the, you know, a red shift of,00 380,000 years after the big bang. You're making these tiny measurements of the temperature differences and uh and away they agree pretty well.
>> So the two puzzle pieces fit by making local measurements and distant measurements. So that pretty much tells you you you're on to something. When if you can remind people when you just say the number 73 or 67 or 70 or 50 or 100 that is a measurement of precisely what >> that is a measurement of how fast the universe is expanding at the current time. It has units of inverse time.
So it is also a way of getting at the age of the universe. it in detail is kilometers/s per mega parc. So when we talk about a Hubble constant of 70 we mean 70 kilometers per second per mega par.
>> So for every mega parseek an object is away from earth from from our galaxy it'll have a recession velocity of 70 kilometers per second.
>> Yes. And so you know >> you had another mega parseek of millions of parexs then there's another 70 and this just keeps adding >> that makes it so the further away you are the quicker it's moving away from you. Exactly.
That was Edwin Hubble's original discovery. What he showed is the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it's moving away from us.
>> And so those units he first plotted that and so we named the unit of that. So it's basically the slope of that line, I think, right?
>> That's exactly what it is.
>> Yeah. Yeah.
>> That correlation is the Hubble constant.
>> Okay, cool.
>> That is the expansion rate at time t equals z. Now, >> okay, we're fitting these measurements into a base model of the universe, right? I mean, right now we say, well, the universe had a beginning. It was long ago. It was hot. It was going to have a future and it's expansion. Could there be some is is this like epicycles?
Could it be like epicycles where oh, the planets they they're on these epicycles and they do this and now we can explain everything. Could could we be missing something so fundamental that it's hidden in plain sight?
>> We could be missing things. I think that's what is exciting about these particular or you know the time at which we're making these measurements is that we're pushing the boundaries of what is possible to to do with these measurements and to test the the framework. So we talk about a standard model of cosmology. That's a model that has uh it's a universe expanding. It has uh dark matter where you have the ordinary matter that we're made out of is only about 16th of the total matter in the universe.
>> So we don't matter is what you're saying.
>> We do matter.
>> A sixth of you matters. A sixth of you matters.
>> And the other part not telling us what we're about. But anyway, we do matter.
We're the luminous stuff.
>> Oh yeah, there you go. The luminous stuff shines uh a light on the dark stuff. That's how we learn about it.
>> You don't just matter, you glow.
>> Oh, very nice, Matt. I like that.
>> 23 a form we call dark energy which is causing the universe to accelerate. So, there's plenty of room to get back to your question for things that that we don't yet understand because we don't yet know what the dark matter is despite decades of trying to detect it. We know it's it what it does to the luminous matter. We know that it's there because of its effects on the luminous matter, but we don't know what it is. It's it's most probably a particle left over from the big bang. And there are lots of efforts to try and discover it, but that has not occurred. And the dark energy, we have no physical, there's no physical theory that can explain what the dark energy is. So yes, there's lots of room for us understanding this standard model. So there could be cracks in the model and maybe the this discrepancy is one of the things that's pointing to something missing from the standard model.
>> And let me emphasize something that you just briefly mentioned. So we started our our careers with a Hubble constant ranging from 50 to 100 and we resolved that we sort of and we met somewhere in the middle and we knew that was a problem but the uncertainties were pretty high back then. So might one might even say the uncertainty bars overlapped so that you say if there's the answer is anywhere it's going to be somewhere in the middle. Now you're saying we have two results that are much closer to each other yet the uncertainties are so small there is no chance of them overlapping. So something has to give.
>> So either this is really interesting and we're learning about some fundamental problem fundamental property of the universe or we've underestimated our uncertainties.
>> Okay. I'm going to be on that. So that could mean that we'll learn something about astrophysics about the properties of stars different. We're going to learn something about supernovi or sephiids or something interesting astrophysically but not necessarily telling us about cosmology.
>> Would you have used the word crisis?
>> Would I have used the word crisis? No, I don't believe it's a a crisis. Not in my opinion.
>> That's my opinion as well. But your opinion is way more valid than mine in this space. So we're going with your opinion uh on this for sure.
>> I I would have used crisis for that if anyone wants to survey me. I'm I'm >> you a crisis camp.
>> Yeah. If my is my opinion valid. Where's my opinion rank amongst >> Yeah, that's fortunately we don't vote on these things.
>> Empirical advocate the data thing again.
>> It's important. Why doesn't someone with almost no science training weigh as much in this as a leading scientist? It's just not fair. It's >> Yeah, it's not a democracy. That's that's the problem. It's not a democracy. Uh so so then Wendy, you step in once again and come up with some sensible understanding of what's going on. Could you update us on that recent uh research paper of yours and who are who are some of your colleagues on that?
>> Yeah, so we have a small group which a really nice group. Um it's small and and efficient.
>> Excellent. As they >> that that means you get more more done.
And uh correct me if I'm wrong any good collaboration everyone on the team brings their own special awareness and understanding and specialty to it.
>> Otherwise you just have redundancies and there's no point for that.
>> Yeah. And everybody is working really hard. It's um our proposal the the proposal that we put into James Websp space telescope. So this is where we're focused now was to use three different distance indicators. The sephiids that we know and love, the tip of the red giant branch, which is a method that um Barry and I and collaborators have been working on for many years and in the last decade or so have really refined it in terms of improving its precision. So this is a section on the Herzbrun Russell diagram which which which doesn't really clarify if you say the tip of the red giant branch is a special place on the Herzbrung Russell diagram. Now we're all clear. So what you're saying is as as stars age, they change in properties, but there's a certain property that they uh take on that has a a good that an ensemble of them will have a consistency that you can rely on that you can see at great distances. Is that a fair way to characterize?
>> Yeah, that's fair. These stars, so our sun, our own sun will become a red giant uh later in its evolution. And so these are stars that have masses comparable.
>> Matt, it's in five billion years, so don't worry about this one.
>> Don't worry. Yeah, >> I'm busy that day.
>> You got a gig that day. All right. Well, we'll delay it.
>> I can move it. If it's important, I can move it, but like I'd rather not.
>> These stars have degenerate core uh which so packed very very densely and they've exhausted all the hydrogen in the core. So that most of the of a star's lifetime is spent burning hydrogen into helium in its in its core, fusing hydrogen into helium. And then when the star contracts, it's not hot enough to start burning helium. And that would happen in a more massive star. So it it's burning hydrogen in a shell and and putting more helium onto the surface of this core. And when the core reaches a certain mass, a certain temperature, then there's a a thermonuclear runaway.
So suddenly you can start helium burning and uh it releases a lot of energy very very quickly and then the star settles down onto another obscure term in the Herzbr Russell diagram what we call the horizontal branch but the point is that these are now fainter stars and the position at which this what's called core helium flash occurs occurs at a very well-known luminosity and so what that means is we can use uh we will observe stars in different galaxies see how >> another standard candle for you.
>> It's another standard candle uh calibrate them locally and then use the inverse square law to get the distance.
So there is a very clean method >> and allow me to offer an apologia to our fellow chemists. When astro folk say things burn, we don't mean what you mean. Okay. By that Yeah. Yeah. Hydrogen burning. You said it. You said it briefly in there, but then you went back to burning. Uh, yeah, it's hydrogen fusion. Fusion, >> but we just we're very sloppy there, and I apologize to chemists. It's your word.
>> You need to put that out. Do you think Sorry, Daniel.
>> Bigger insult is that we consider pretty much everything heavier than hydrogen and helium to be a metal.
>> Oh, yeah. We call them metals. Yeah, we're we're bad with our chemistry, but we're sticking with it. Uh, we're stubborn in this regard. If you've got the hydrogen burning in a star, do you like if you need to put that out, do you do you is it a water hose or do you use a blanket or foam? Which of the three extinguishers are we talking about?
>> Don't do this at home. Don't get close to this.
>> Walk go the other way.
>> All right. So, so you're working on I I interrupted you uh quite on purpose, but you you were working on several methods of distance determination. Yes. So we're using the James Webb Space Telescope to measure distances to galaxies using these three different methods, the carbon stars, the red giant stars, and sephiids. And that will allow us ultimately and and we're partway through this project to determine how well we've we've measured the distances, right? Do all three methods agree really well? Is there a large uh spread in the values? Do two agree, one's an outlier? This will give us a chance to say what are the overall uncertainties.
>> Got it.
>> And and those nearby galaxies that we're observing with JWST, those galaxies then tie into the distant universe where we can see type 1A supernovi well out into what we call the Hubble flow. So you're the base of that pyramid that they're I mean they don't know the distance to the supernova any better than you would know what its foundation is. Is that >> that's right? We can measure the relative distances of supernovi. We can see which ones are farther away but we don't know what the absolute distance >> to calibrate them. Okay. So you uh not to put words in your mouth, but you think in the results of your work, you will show perhaps that people were overzealous in their in their small uncertainties that they were reporting and maybe the uncertainties are a little wider where they would then overlap and then it's not attention and there's not a Hubble crisis and a cosmological crisis and we can all go out and have a beer.
>> Yeah. I I think you know to quote the late Carl Sean extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and I'm not yet seeing extraordinary evidence.
So our result we're getting a value of about 70 and that agrees very well with what we got from Hubble using these red giant branch stars and um and I think the uncertainties still they're they're they're not at the level that that come out of the cosmic microwave background measurements. The the cosmic microwave background measurements have a precision of better than 1%.
So they've really set the bar very very high and that's just not possible yet to make measurements at that level of accuracy when you're trying to use stars that are millions out to hundreds of millions of light years away. That's >> so I didn't I didn't appreciate that. So you're saying the the cosmic microwave background measurement determination of the Hubble constant is the gold standard against which other measurements have to match. No one thinks that there's a problem with those measurements at all.
Is that correct?
>> So far there is no indication that the measurements themselves are an issue. So there the measurements from the plank satellite, this European satellite uh which is still the gold standard in the field. It's all sky and there are two groups on the ground, one in the Atakama desert and one at the South Pole that in fact came out with very recent measurements and they're very much in agreement. The issue is in order to get the Hubble constant from those measurements, you have to have a model to fit the data. So this is the beauty of this. Given the model, you predict what the Hubble constant today should be. How do you test the model? You measure the Hubble constant today.
>> So if you can measure it with enough accuracy, not just precision, but accuracy.
>> Tell us the difference between those two.
So, you know, if you have a coin and you flip it, um, you know, if you do it a few times, you might get more heads than tails. If you do it enough times and your coin isn't weighted in some funny way, it's going to come out 50/50. And the more times you make the measurement, the more accurate um, your your measurement is going to be. But then there are other kinds of errors that no matter how many times you make your measurement, you're still going to have what we call systematic errors. And an example of a systematic error would be we know that stars like sephiids form in the disk of galaxies where there's astrophysical dust. So dust just like here you're looking at a mountain far away and a dust storm blows up. You look at the sun or you look at the mountain that the sun's going to get redder and fainter. You know same thing happens if you're if there's a a fire, right? If you've seen a red sun, that's what happens when we're looking at these sephiids through the dust. They get redder and dimmer. And so if they they look dimmer, you're going to say, "Oh, this is farther away." If you haven't corrected for it, no matter how many times you make the measurement, you're still going to have an error. So there there's this distinction between precision and accuracy. And if you only use one method, if you're only using the sephiids, you're not going to be able to tell what the systematics are.
So you have to use, you know, that that's my strong feeling. That's what drives my research is you have to do this in more than one way.
>> So Wendy, you're thinking that systematic errors are prevalent within these uh measurements because they they sound all precise and everything, but they could be they're precise yet wrong.
>> That's exactly right.
>> Yes. And and I think certainly historically that's what we've seen in these measurements. It's always the systematics that come back to bite you and often they're unknown systematics we know about the dust now we can correct for it but what are the things that we don't yet know about and could there be errors in the calibration and in the calibration of the dust laws there there are lots of potential gotchas >> and you've got an advantage there because people who come to this as cosmologists they don't know anything about stars as far as I can tell you have a huge background in sort of traditional astronomy where stars in a galaxy the dust the reening the magnitude all of this and so that makes you particularly potent on that frontier >> well I think you know astronomy is different than physics astrophysics is different than physics we don't have a laboratory where we can go in and we can work with the equipment and we understand the equipment and do tests that we set we're working with these stars that are far away that have metals in their atmospheres, pulsating stars, exploding stars. If we look at the supernovi, we don't understand uh yet.
Although there's some interesting hints that maybe we understand one of the mechanisms for exploding supernovi, but there's scatter in the relation for supernovi. And you know that the supernova magnitude, supernova luminosity depends on the color of the star, how fast it the supernova, how fast it's declining, um the mass of the galaxy, which you know surely has nothing to do with the supernova itself.
It's a proxy for something else. And then there's additional leftover scatter. And different groups have different calibrations of the supernovi.
And so when we're comparing our local observations with the cosmic microwave background where it's clean and what is referred to as linear physics um and there are different groups that are getting the same answers.
and with a precision again of better than 1%. The onus is on us I believe locally to really show that we have overcome the systematics in using these these stars.
>> You kept referring to today's value of the Hubble constant. That implies Hubble constant had a different value in the past. So then why are you calling it a constant? The Hubble constant refers to a Hubble parameter at the current time t equals 0 H0 and actually the Hubble parameter the the parameter that describes governs the evolution of the universe changes with red shift or with time. So >> it's a little bit of a misnomer to call it a Hubble constant.
>> Yeah, it's it's confusing. It is the value of the Hubble parameter at the current time. So you're messing with people again just like when you talk about hydrogen burning and all the metals on the periodic table. So Wendy, if people are looking at different parts of the universe at different objects and getting different Hubble constants, why can't the universe just be different in these different sections? Why must the whole universe be giving you the same answer to that question?
>> So there's several different things to unpack in your question. You you could ask, you know, is there a concentration of mass locally so that or maybe we live in a giant bubble, say, and that >> Matt lives in a bubble. I'm trying to get him out of the bubble.
>> So maybe the expansion rate locally is higher because they were being pulled to this mass concentration.
And um and that was talked about a lot at the time when we were arguing about 50 and 100. Maybe the mass distribution wasn't well mapped out. But now there are literally thousands of supernovi that have been measured. You can measure, you know, really well across the sky and there's no evidence that it is varying locally um from region to region to, you know, to to the percent level. Um, as I said, the the universe does evolve with time and we don't know you as I said also we don't understand what the dark matter is yet. We don't uh know what the dark energy is. So that so there's lots of I think the tension is a tantalizing idea that maybe this is additional physics because we don't yet understand the the nature of the dark energy. But it's it's very interesting because in the last decade there have been uh probably 1,500 papers that have been written and posted to the astronomical archive that have tried to explain the Hubble tension. And none of them has succeeded. And and the reason is in large part because there's so many other observations that can constrain what a model can do and and the effect that it would have that we would be able to measure local with measurements today or with the microwave background or so on and so on. So um this is where we are at the forefront. We're trying to push the limits. We're trying to understand what what is governing you know what is the what are the constituents of the universe how is it evolving um but we don't yet have all the answers and we need really accurate data to do that and so I would say it's not that this is is completely solved I I I think you know we need to do a better job showing that there is a a significant tension um and and as the data improve in future this is going to go one way or the other right either the signal is going to improve or it's gonna fade away. And one of the examples is recently with measurements of the of the microwave background. There was a tiny little hint in the measurements from the Adakama Desert, the cosmology telescope. Uh in an early release of theirs that maybe in the polarization, there was a hint of what might be due to evolving dark energy that could explain the Hubble tension. But they just come out with a release with much more data and the signal just disappeared. It was noise.
If it had been real, it would have been really apparent, but it went away. So that's what happens. You you see things at a level of significance that you know we call two or three sigma. Five sigma is supposed to be the gold standard. It would be a one in 1.7 million chance that it that isn't correct. I just don't think we're at that level yet. We have more work to do. So this this bit about the change in the in the dark energy uh properties that that made serious headlines when that came out.
>> Well, this is different. This is this is an early dark energy that would have explained the Hubble tension.
>> Early >> evolving dark energy. It still could be evolving and and again this is early data. There's going to be a lot more coming um in the next >> and just to to to recast something you said a moment ago, but tell me if I haven't oversimplified it. The these this this these 1,500 papers of people trying to explain the Hubble tension.
They'll come up with an accounting for it, but then it breaks something else that we know very well would not uh be the way it is. That's right.
>> If their idea were correct. So it's so it's quite the Rubik cube. Uh you can't just explain one thing without affecting a hundred other things that we know very well.
>> Yeah.
>> As it fun. So this is this is part of what gives us confidence in the overall big bang scenario for the origin of the universe because it's supported in so many ways with so many different branches of astrophysics. Um and so yeah this is actually a cosmic queries.
You know, Matt, you didn't tell me this was a cosmic queries. Why? Why didn't you tell me that?
>> Oh, because I I don't feel like I have any seniority on this show.
>> Okay. I grant thee astrophysics powers in in the flow of content.
>> I'm honored to be your your nave. Does this make me a nave? I don't know. Um I'm not >> squire. Your squire. Yeah, >> squire. Squire. I'll I'll take that. I have to put your your mortar board and your gown on you and just send you off to battle. So yeah, there's some great questions as always sent in by your Patreon subscribers. So Hannah Kantley from the City of Roses, Portland, Oregon says, "Could the effects of dark energy on space-time geometry potentially arising from entropic forces complicate our ability to measure distances to distant galaxies? especially considering that their apparent recession speeds may exceed the speed of light due to the expansion of space and this might necessitate new models and techniques to account for these influences.
>> Yeah, Wendy is Wendy is dark energy messing with you. Could it be messing with you? If if you don't know what it is, you can't say that it's not messing with you. How about that?
>> Well, I think that's fair. I think we we know very little about what the future evolution of the universe is going to be. You know, will dark energy decrease with time? um is it constant is it Einstein's cosmological constant and I think these are empirical questions right now because we don't have a good theory and ultimately uh we we do hope that there will be a fundamental theory but right now we're being guided by observations and and the observations that it's decreasing with time evolving with time and and getting um less um there's less of it now uh that that's new and um there are many more experiments on the drawing board that will that will test that and we'll see how it how it lands.
>> Now, uh isn't there a dark matter telescope coming online that >> that's the Vera Rubin telescope?
>> Oh, wait. What's the what's the Nancy Grace Roman telescope? What's that one?
>> That's a survey telescope. It's a NASA telescope in space. Um >> but is that that's that's didn't they call that the dark matter telescope or not?
>> Originally the Ver Rubin telescope. It started out probably 30 years ago almost.
>> Oh yeah. Okay. We just did two shows on the Reuben telescope, so we're we're up on that. Matt, what do you got next?
>> Lissa says, "There is still a gap between how fast the universe is expanding based on nearby measurements versus predictions from the early universe. Based on your work, do you think this means we're missing something in how we measure it, or could it mean our current model of the universe needs to change?" And Alyssa also says, "Thank you for being a badass woman of science."
>> I think that's precisely the question we want to answer. And I think you know I I personally am open to it uh coming out either way but I have to be convinced by the data and at the moment I am not convinced by the data that there is this crisis and that there's something broken in our standard model. So time will tell.
>> Yeah. And if I can add to that, I think most occasions in the history of science where there's been some discrepancy, just a better data, better or more data resolved it. And every now and then it requires new physics. So I see what you did there, Wendy. You're saying you you're not you're not ready to have to require new physics because the the data to be obtained still needs to be refined. So one day there's great precedent for people such as yourself to take that view of the world. But you don't want to miss new physics in >> that would be very exciting. I would love to see it, but I want to be convinced and I'm just not at a point where I could be convinced.
>> Good. Good. All right, Matt. What's next?
>> All right. Jamie and Sabrina from Transylvania ask, "Uh, in the future when we all zipping around the universe on starships, how will we keep track of the expansion of the universe? How will we find our way home when home isn't where we left it?
>> Oh, I love it. You got a coordinate system for us in the future? A GPS for the cosmos, Wendy?
>> I don't think I'm going to be around that time.
We can do that. But I think um you know the what what we're measuring in our own Milky Way galaxy if we were go to Andromeda or other galaxies in our local group or beyond we would be measuring the same thing. I think the frightening thing to think about is in 60 billion years if you're worried about future the acceleration of the universe if it continues if it doesn't the dark energy doesn't uh decay >> then we won't see other galaxies and we won't have the chance to make the measurements that we're making today. So I think that uh we're living in an interesting time but we don't have to worry in the same way Matt doesn't have to worry about the sun. It's going to be a lot in the future. Or or if I could add a sort of more obscure but possibly relevant example in the old days when they had their first generation of seaorthy chronometers uh very important in navigation and finding your longitude around the world >> uh Davis Soel's famous book longitude uh really blew open that field for the public >> and and she is one of our she I think she was the very first star talk interview >> oh my gosh deep in our archives find Davisel the author of that bestselling book. Anyhow, I what I understood they did, they would make these chronometers and finally close the back and all the springs and the thing, they all be in there and then they check it and it would either gain time or lose time to the standard. Rather than reopening the clock to try to quote fix it, they accurately measured the rate at which it was increasing time or decreasing time.
And that became an equation to correct during to correct the time they read during their voyage. So something similar to the the question is if you know the expansion rate and you know how long you've been gone then you can back extrapolate through what where you know we should have been and then you still can find there's no place like home. So bring an equation with you for the expansion of the universe and then go backwards along that path and you should be able to get home. That's what I'm think. Well, while we are talking about distances, I think we have time to squeeze in this question hopefully. From Chris from Malbra, New Jersey says, "Dearest Dr. Tyson, Dr. Freriedman, and any esteemed guests." I'm going to count myself as esteemed in that case.
Chris asks, "Would the way you conduct your work change if we found out definitively our universe is infinite or finite in size? Also, which option do you find more plausible?" Thank you very much, both of you, for your stewardship of cosmic curiosity. Oh, I love that sentence. Beautiful. I >> I'll say it wouldn't change how we would do our work. I think um we would continue to observe the universe, measure it, and see what's out there.
So, that that would not change. You can answer the the other part, Neil.
>> No. How would you feel emotionally if the universe were finite versus infinite? How about that?
>> And which do you believe is true?
>> I find this interesting, these kinds of conversations. So I I think I'm not emotionally attached to one kind of universe or another. I I really have no emotional >> That's a healthy posture in science for sure.
>> And I and so I don't have a feeling about it, >> but I but I I remain intensely curious about what it is. And I love the process of science that allows us to ask these questions and then go out and and make measurements and and try and answer some of these questions. But I but I have no particular favorite child of a universe.
>> Okay. Yeah, I'm leaning infinite. I'm all in just because that's more fun.
That's got to be more fun in an infinite universe. Yeah.
>> And Wendy, do you remember there's a scene in the film 2001 of Space Odyssey where towards the end where it gets kind of psychedelic. Uh, one of the one of the captions of the scene is uh to Jupiter and beyond the infinite or something. There's they get infinity in there and I >> was a bell. Yeah.
>> Yeah. I forgot the exact quote and just I think it's fun to get people thinking about infinity because we know we can't wrap our head around it >> and so it keeps you nimble.
>> Yeah. You know, real time in these things answering things like this. So I just don't want to get tangled up in Yeah.
>> But it is fun when you first learn calculus, you know, you have to really cozy up to the concept of infinity and infinite decimals, like the opposite of infinity.
>> So you where they're going in these questions. Yeah. I just never >> I'm still on Zeno's side and I refuse to believe motion is possible.
>> Oh, Zeno's paradox. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
>> I'm firmly >> You do get to where you're going.
>> Yeah.
>> You do get to where you're going.
So, all right, Wendy, this has been a delight to have you back. Oh my gosh.
Congratulations on the National Medal of Science and I think I get to tell people it comes with no money. It's just a >> That's correct.
>> But another visit to the White House.
We've met there a couple of times.
>> And it's always good to bring some science into the White House. Uh the country's better off anytime that happens. Uh so our health, our wealth, and our security are enhanced.
>> All of the above. Yeah. All of the above. All right. And Matt, good to have you on again.
>> Thank you.
>> Enjoy your cruise.
>> I will. I will. It's so far so good.
We've We're getting away with it so far.
>> Okay. And we'll find you online at probably science. Once again, this has been Starlook, a cosmic queries edition, but filled with updates on observational cosmology, uh, giving us our understanding of the universe that we so desperately seek. I'm Neil Degrass Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. As always, bidding you to keep looking up.
>> Talk special edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. And if it's special edition, it means we have Gary O'Reilly.
Gary, >> 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.
>> Chuck.
>> Someone hug that man. Yeah. Yeah. He needs a hug.
>> Are you a former professional? Anything is the question.
>> Yeah. 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? Uh well, Lane Unsworth, who's over in our LA office, uh and I would sort of noodled on this and simple question just popped straight up. Is social media bad for us >> now?
>> Yes. Okay, next next show. We're done here.
>> That's it. Goodbye everybody. Um 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.
>> Mhm.
>> And the world is so much better off.
>> Exactly.
>> So, >> 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 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.
>> I'd be delighted to introduce our guest.
It is the one and only Jonathan height.
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. Oh. Uh, his most recent book is, it's got a long title here. Let me get it right. Sitting comfortably. 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 Height on our show. Jonathan, welcome to Star Talk.
>> Thanks so much, Neil. Great to see you again and great to meet Gary and Chuck.
>> Yes, I've 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 cuz cuz he used some astronomical references. So I thought you got >> he got me he got >> you had me at galaxy.
And so at the time he was uh at was at the University of Virginia and you've since moved to New York City. Great to have you in the back woods here. And so let me just start out. Wait for I have a bone to pick.
>> Okay.
>> So uh 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 for this.
So, so I don't know, maybe the sales of the book. I don't know. I just thought I'd put that out there.
>> See, you're not used to that.
>> You take it from somebody who has That's common practice.
>> 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 your not just your ideas but your data?
>> So thanks Neil. So in 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 um 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 9-point depression scale, a question about anxiety. And those numbers move up and down a little bit from the '9s 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.
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 e or go 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. We thought we understood uh 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. Um, it's the reports of people in uh business who are hiring Gen Z. Um, 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, you know, Obama did something or said something like, you know, you can make up a hundred theories if it's just the US. But if all the English-sp speakaking countries go through the same mental health collapse at the same time in the same way that is it's much sharper for girls, there has to be some factor working that is crossnational.
And that's what led me and I should also give credit to Gene Twangi, uh, the professor who first really identified the those graphs, those changes. That's when Gian and I started thinking technology is the most likely cause.
>> So when you look at this and you you see this crumbling of mental health in this 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. Um I found it very useful in my previous book to think about our minds are organized to to go into uh certain configurations very quickly. And so the clearest one we can call it defend mode. When you you know there's a threat your brain a lot of systems organized to 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 uh discover mode where you look like you come into a room and there's all these great toys to play with or you're you're a kid in a candy shop. And the tech more technical terms for those in psychology are the behavioral inhibition system BIS, which is the defend mode, and the behavioral activation system, BASS, which is discover mode. And we 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, Jen's if you're born after uh 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. AC most of them are not anxious and depressed. But what I'm saying like for the girls 30, the numbers are in the 30s. 30% or so have an anxiety depression.
>> That's huge. 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 a reluctance to take risks. And a lot of 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 American mind, we overprotected the hell out of them. We never let him 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." You know, so we did this to them. And it was the combination of the overp protection 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. That's right. And because I have I have one born in 96 and one born in 2000. So they're they're right right in line.
>> 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.
>> Jonathan, I saw some of this earlier where I started noticing the playground surface had cushions.
>> Sponges.
>> Spongy.
>> Spongy.
>> Cuz when I grew up, there was cement at the bottom of >> What do you What do you want to mote with nails and broken glass?
>> Nails and broken glass.
>> Yeah. I mean, we liked it that way.
>> Yeah. That That's how we >> Poor old men here. Remember the old days.
But it was it didn't occur to me that I could fall and not get hurt that because that was not an option, right? You just didn't fall. So >> he was on the playground and uh routinely the uh someone would scream out medic.
>> So I I'm just 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. Uh 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 overp protection, so in the 1980s um we had um 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 school in 1981, everybody was suing everybody and they canceled the bowl because it's too dangerous. So, the '8s really is a time when everything tried they 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 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 uh ingredient in a successful childhood. We have to let our kids take risks.
>> Yeah. When I was in high school, uh I held the record for the number of slip and fall cases that >> that was a that was an athletic event.
Right.
>> So what you're talking about there, Jonathan, is a development of social skills, a development of a a sort of armor, 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 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 antifragility.
U if you're antifragile. So if you're fragile like an egg, >> you know, you got to treat it gently or it'll break. But if you're antifragile, this is a term coined by my NYU colleague Nasim 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 kids'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 uh uh 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. And we block that. We stopped letting them do that beginning in the 1980s, but it really accelerates in the 1990s.
>> 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 paired 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. Uh you have to have an emergency response. M 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 where we haven't evolved preparedness we very very easily learn to be afraid of snakes um as as other primates do but for the most part it's learned So your your 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 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. It's going to wear you down. Now what what is known in clinical psychology is that depressive disorders um and anxiety disorders tend to go together and that's not just uh in experience, it's also genetically. Uh 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 the genes uh 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.
>> 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 technologies fault. Or is there a crossover? Are there other aspects to this particular scenario?
>> So, I'm a social psychologist who studies morality and 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? They can't be that everybody suddenly turned bad. And the the 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 the tech companies uh 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 of miss 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 a few tech companies.
>> Is there any way that we can blame the children?
But 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 these are your brethren.
Dare I make that declaration?
>> No, you you're absolutely right. A lot of social psychologists um when they would get their PhDs 10 20 years ago would go work in Silicon Valley. Now, let's remember that from the '9s through the mid2010s, 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 moral mission. And I I 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 >> Oh, no. That's okay. That's okay.
>> Okay. They're all bad.
>> 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. 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 Francis Hogan, the Facebook whistleblower, when she brought out thousands of photograph screenshots of internal reports, there was one, it was a Facebook, it was a presentation on brain science and they showed here's, you know, here's the adolescent brain and the frontal cortex is the last part to myelinate to 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 um is a really good time to hook kids and uh 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. Collective because if Meta doesn't grab all the 10year-olds then Tik Tok will. So there's a race to the bottom and the victims are the kids. So uh so you know no Chuck I'm not going to blame the kids. You are a monster.
>> But you used a word that was unfamiliar to me. The something about the the the formation of your frontal lobe. the the myel what was the word you use there >> myelination >> yeah what is that myelination >> okay so an amazing thing about the the human brain is that it reaches 90% of full size by the time a kid is six okay so you got these bigrained 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 experience lots and lots of experience You try things and 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 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 um it's not exactly an electrical signal. It's more of an electrochemical sort of run. And it um 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, 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 >> So it's like you're kind of creating grooves in a record.
>> Ex. 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 virgin snow, it's kind of slow going, but then you got paths.
That's right. Grooves and record is a good one.
>> Yeah. But that means it would be hard if not impossible to rewire that if that sheathing oifies that's the wrong word here but you know that sheathing um memorializes something that's either not good for you or just outright false in your mental patterns.
>> Mhm. That's right.
>> But you have but rewiring is a word in your subtitle of your book.
>> So square that puzzle here.
>> Sure. So for 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 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.
>> Yeah.
>> Go ahead.
>> Just 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, 3 to seven, it's a lot of language. Um, 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 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 a 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 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 Tik Tok videos, you've rewired childhood.
>> 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. Um 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 tube toothpaste back in the tube. You realize that when you say 16?
>> Oh, sure. I realize that. But you know what?
>> He's But he's like, "Guess what? You can get toothpaste back in a tooth."
>> Well, let's do it.
>> I mean, you can do it.
>> That's right. If your children's life depended on it, would you put toothpaste back in the tooth?
>> I'd make a bloody good go at it. Yes, for sure. Absolutely. Yeah. I 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 in and the Catholic Church.
>> Well, any any any evangel 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.
So, That's the phrase.
>> 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 the playground and we played we had playdates 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 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 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 going to do? And I remember when I first saw Twitter and I saw kids where, you know, young people were, you know, tweeting just had a hamburger. Uh and I think, well, that's stupid. But then I thought, you know what? 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 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 a species uh 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. 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 a vid 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. I I let me not say about 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 a screen.
>> You know, I never thought of that because when we were kids, you know, there was always the the the the tough kids who smoked. Right.
>> Right. Yeah. 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 takingaking. 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 that. Thanks for making that >> now retrospectively obvious connection.
>> That's why I let my 12-year-old hang out at the state prison to get he can learn everything he needs to learn.
But but how about the other side of this and I know you've thought about it or studied it that which if you 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 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 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 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.
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 the speed with which this all changed between 2010 and 2015. 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. Uh highspeed 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 cuz that would have made you like a dork.
>> Yeah. So you 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 screenbased or is there something else that you feel is in play?
>> We're at a turning point in human history, I'd say, because um 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. Genfa 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. Uh 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?
>> What they do is they all get on their phones together.
>> Yes.
>> That's right. Exactly. That's why 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.
>> But when when grandpa grand I'm the grandparent and here's here >> your grandchildren. This is how you play, >> right? I mean that's I can't I don't even want to look the thing is when I was a child we had these things called sticks down now why you need a little >> buy them on Amazon >> right little imagination this stick can be anything so yeah >> I mean how 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.
>> And you were a professional soccer player, >> but not as a child.
>> No, but I'm saying I wasn't that good.
>> No, 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.
>> I know you are. So, I mean, yes, of course, the 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 it's the cult of comparison and, you know, all the the down spiral from there. But it's the the okay, boy scouts, girl scouts, church groups, schools, after schools, >> all of those.
>> 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 it's an adapt and survive. It's 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 >> just to clarify when you say responsibility you don't mean who to blame you mean who >> who's going to lead us out who's going to lead us out us away from this who's responsible who's got to pick up this and say right you know what this does need changing This is our future.
>> So as a social scientist, I I tend to want to first understand what caused a situation. What are the large structural factors, economic factors that caused this massive destructive change in childhood because it's 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 uh one one other factor that's very important here and you 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 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 that, you know, there 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.
>> Yeah.
>> 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 so we kind of create an environment in which children used to be raised within a community and we say 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 that 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 and and I think 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 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, right?
Especially if there's some inkling that they would they might be highly receptive of it to begin with. Yeah.
>> 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 going to call might call the police because no one has seen an unaccompanied child since 1992. And so you have to steal your ass.
>> 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's 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 did, well, he, you know, he went for a walk. So, she was arrested.
This puts the fear of God into all of us not letting our kids out. So, 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 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.
>> And just by 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. That was >> although I didn't grow up in the Bronx.
That's right. No.
>> Yeah. No. And and you and I grew up during the you know during the 70s I suppose. You know there was a crime wave in the 60s7s and ' 80s. Big crime. 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 kids'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 the way 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.
>> Are there still flip phones? Can you can get, as a matter of fact, there are you can get them. Okay, good. Good. Good to know.
>> 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 social media before 16 now here it would really help to have a law but a lot of us are trying to do it just as a norm like okay you got your smartphone but if I catch you if you have Instagram on that phone you are losing it for a month um 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 and Tik Tok and and watching porn during class. You just hide the phone in a book and lunchrooms are quiet, hallways are quiet for years now cuz everyone's on their phone. And schools are waking up. Uh 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 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 at 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 what the results were, but >> it might have been back in the Bloomberg days. Thank you. That's exactly right.
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 in smartphones together in school or there's no point.
They'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 till 16. They go most of the way through puberty talking to other kids, talking to them in school playing soccer at lunch, >> you know. 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 Gen Alpha at home and she's not allowed to have a 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 and laughing and they're socializing just like they would if they were together.
>> Okay.
>> So, what do you do about that? Or is that okay?
>> Chuck, wait, wait. Are they Chuck? If they are 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 to.
>> This is my daughter.
>> Yeah. So, girls especially want to talk oneon-one or in a very small group.
>> Oh, god.
>> And and they talked 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 going to be the whole class. Going to 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 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. Uh FaceTime is fine. Telephone is fine.
>> 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. Uh, 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. No, don't let her on that.
>> And she just as 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 a I guess they text. So now I got to take that.
>> 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 limit. 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-toface 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 there's no stimulus response from a movie. You just watch it. You get lost in the story. That's all good. You know what's really bad and you should say zero would be Tik Tok 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.
>> Yes.
>> As as I've as I've barely seen anyone else his age.
>> That's true. Yeah.
>> I just want to put it out there. And I I I cannot take credit for that.
>> If you kept him off social media, you did his brain a big favor.
>> Yeah, I he 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 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 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. Um, 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 pre-teen girls. Tik Tok's very different. Tik Tok does have some of that, but Tik Tok is more about quick entertainment. Tik Tok, because it pioneered this very addictive paradigm where you're watching videos, and if you've been watching it for 5 seconds and it doesn't seem super interesting, you're 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 Tik Tok is the fastest way to addict your kids to short little attention span things and to teach them that if they ever feel 5 seconds of boredom that they should change it. So Tik Tok I think is the biggest driver of stupidity of you know and the kids themselves call it brain rot. So Tik Tok is I believe literally driving I mean test scores are going down around the world since 2015. And so Tik Tok is not so much about depression. Tik Tok 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 uh meet children. Um 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 fentinel 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 uh Discord and Roblox. Any >> in your lab where you study this? Yeah.
>> Yeah. In my lab in the Tekken 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 uh it was revealed in internal documents. Snapchat was getting 10,000 reports of sex extortion uh in 2022. Not not per year, per week. I'm sorry, per month. Per month. That was per month.
>> That's where you have a naked picture of someone and you threatened to post it.
>> That's right. And a number of those kids then kill 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.
>> So I don't you're completely freaking us out.
>> So disturbing. 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?
>> 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 we protect children.
>> That is a mic drop. That's a 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, but 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 right.
You're talking about a humanto 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.
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 chat bots can fill that.
>> So, that let me share with you guys.
There's a Yiddish wordbah. Yes.
>> You know this word?
>> Everybody knows.
Everybody, everybody knows.
>> So, the definition I learned of Kutzbah when I was a kid was it's it's a a boy who murders his parents and then he asks 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 hutzbah of meta to say we caused this problem and now we have a tech solution for it. Plus we there 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 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 they're neural their equivalent of neural networks that get tuned up and they all have unpredictable properties. So even chat GPT which has some safeguards you know there's an article in the times a woman found out had a deeply erotic affair with chat GPT in terms of you know sexual fantasies and 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 months everything is flooded with chatbot toys.
Mattel is teaming up with Open AI so that their toys will have uh chat GPT in them. Your daughter can talk to Barbie.
Barbie will literally be her best friend.
>> And 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 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 vert ual world that they go into and 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 uh when my book came out when the exist generation came out in March of 2024 especially college educated women mothers in professional circles, they all read it or they 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 playhoods, which is an agreement. Okay, 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, you know, junk food permeated everything in the 20th century 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-f 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-f 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 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 um influencing Congress um through many different methods including investing in the districts of key representatives. So, Meta has been able to stop. 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 to just 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. Right.
>> 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 issue. the rich kids have computers and laptops increasingly by the end of the decade. Yeah.
>> 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 Tik Tok.
So computers on desk, the onetoone 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.
>> Y >> specifically because Waldorf schools have no computers at all in the classroom of the curriculum. There there's no technology assisting the learning. The Waldorf schools, >> that's right. There's 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, uh, in the, uh, basically what you just described, uh, 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 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 time frame 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 with 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.
>> Just say it. Okay.
>> Yeah. social. I would say that I would say, yeah, sociological apocalypse, I would say that.
>> So, we have to change and we don't have 5 years. Um, 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've ever seen in my life. Um, because everyone was ready for it. The teachers hated the phones. Everyone could see the problem. And the fact that, uh, you know, Brazil is now, the entire country is now phone free. Their schools are all phone free. uh and that happened because some mothers read 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 like 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 chat GPT and other chatbots in them those toys are going to be given to two and three year olds in at Christmas they're 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 uh we we we really have to have a clear 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 our sto the what we learned from social media is no. This is very very unlikely to be good for kids. So, that we don't have 5 years on that. We've got to stop that like in the next two or three months. Amaya, can I ask you uh just uh since we're running out of time, I just have Do you know exactly how much >> Mark Zuckerberg hates you?
Okay.
>> Yes, in fact I do.
>> I do. I do. No, I've spoken to him three times and you know, he was he was gracious to me the first two times. Um 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 um I think it is a perhaps a new phase in the evolution of our relationship.
>> What would be the what would most get under your skin to tell you that that's how Jonathan you describing was amusing.
>> You describing uh the festive period and AI toys under the tree.
Immediately my head pops, why don't you put a health warning on them?
>> Oo >> yeah. I mean if 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 >> and also so I don't get mad mentality >> call it Christmas don't say the festive period >> Christmas >> not everyone Christmas we can all say Christmas >> yeah health warnings that sounds like some intermediate step >> well let me tell you something 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.
>> Yeah. 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. You ready? What is it? Okay.
Social media is the poison and I am its antidote.
>> Oo, >> how's that?
>> That'll sell you some more books.
>> Subtitle, Mark Zuckerberg hates me.
>> Well, Jonathan, this has been a delight.
I 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. Yeah. No, you posted one of your lectures and I delighted in it and it was great to have you on Star Talk here uh 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. Um, 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 is this has been so enlightening. I mean, as a parent with a young child, when we perfect the cloning machine, you'll be first in line for that. We need more of you out there. Okay.
Protecting us all.
>> Neil right back at you.
>> This is a I'm not so sure.
>> Neither are we.
>> I was going to say something nice, but now screw it.
>> Can you declone people? Take someone out of the GM.
>> No, this is a project that needs to succeed. Yes. 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 Star Talk special edition.
Neil deGrasse Tyson bidding you to keep looking up and away from your smartphone.
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