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Coast to Coast Georginry with doctor Gene Twangy as we are talking about our work generations and we were talking about the generation disease and their depression states. Do you think social media, in the bullying that sometimes associates with it, has contributed to that depression?
I do.
I don't think it's a coincidence that teen depression started to increase around twenty twelve, right at the time that most Americans had a smartphone, and when social media use among teens moved from something then maybe half our teams were doing every day to something almost all of them were doing every day. So there's so many mechanisms with social media. There's cyberbullying, like you mentioned, there's comparing yourselves to all of the glamorous folks you know on Instagram.
There's that. At the same time teams started spending more time online and on social media, they start and spending less time hanging out with each other face to face, which is much better for mental health.
It's and why are people so mean? You know in the bullying those tactics. What's wrong with people.
Well, you know, it's pretty classic that when you are face to face with someone, you're generally going to be nicer. They're right there in front of you. Expression on their faces Online it's anonymous. You're not really truly thinking of them as a fellow human being. It's not in real time, and you're not seeing the expression on that person's face. So people feel much more free to be really cruel online.
Now there's another generation we didn't talk specifically about yet. That's a Generation Alpha. Where do they stand in all this?
Yeah, so Generation Alphas is born in the twenty thirteen and later. They're the ones I call polars.
So they're the little ones right now.
They're the little ones.
And how are they developing gene.
We don't know a whole lot about them yet, but you know, they were the little kids of the pandemic. They, even more than Generation Z, have never known a world without smartphones or tablets, and they're not getting enough exercise and not running around outside like previous generations of children did, and that's a big problem going forward for them.
Now the boomers are what age bracket.
So the boomers are those born nineteen forty six to nineteen sixty.
Four, nineteen sixty four, and gen X is sixty five to what to seventy nine On the millennials eighty two, ninety four, ninety four. We've got a millennial who calls a program Coed often. He's a great caller, goody young man. If more Americans would grow up to be like him, we'd be in great shape. I hope he calls in next hour. When we take calls with you, you'll get a chance to hear him. You'll know what I'm saying. But is any of this concerning to you? And as an expert, you.
Know every time. Every era has its advantages and disadvantages. And there are some really good things about living right now and all the conveniences that we enjoy, but there's some big downsides too. We have a lot of disconnection, we have a lot of polarization, and we have technologies that help us out, but they can also feel addictive
and could feel like we can't put them down. And I think that's an especially big problem for teens and young adults, where they're spending so much time on social media that they're not interacting with each other face to face.
Interesting, now, this also seems to be a period. Well, we have more generations grouped together than ever before, it is, and.
That's for two reasons. It's because people are living longer, but also they change the tech. Technological change has sped up, it's accelerating, so generations are getting shorter. You know, it's not a coincidence that those younger generations we've been speaking about are shorter in terms of years and more like fourteen or fifteen years when the silent generation Bloomers is more like twenty years. Because things change more quickly and so generations turn over more quickly. So it means we
have a bigger generation gap, especially around technology. I think we have a bigger generation gap right now. Did say in the late nineteen sixties with the boomers feeling like their parents' generation didn't understand them. There it was a gap of values. Now we have a gap just around completely around communication where the two generations almost seem to speak different languages.
Companies are starting to talk about how artificial intelligence may reduce the amount of workforce members at various companies, and it's kind of jarring to me to hear some of those numbers. Gene, what happens to some of these younger generations gen Z's the generation Alphas, when they grow up to be in the workforce and there's no jobs for these people.
Yes, you know, there's some challenges here because at the moment we still have a labor shortage and as more Baby Bloomers continued to retire, there should be more opportunities in at least in some areas for these younger generations. So that's where we are now. It just depends on what direction the AI goes, like can't it how much can it really replace people or will it just supplement them?
And I think the biggest challenge is this. Then, due to technology, we have a situation where especially a lot of young people have not had has been much experience in real life situations dealing with you know, whether it's friends or co workers face to face, so they haven't developed the social skills that they need to relate to other people, which is a really essential skill in the workplace.
And guess what, AI doesn't always do that great at you know, really relating to other human beings because because AI is a human doesn't have compassion, right, you know, and it can kind of fake it, but it doesn't do that great of a job in the long run, we really really need to think about what we're teaching young people and in schools at every level, that we're going to have to place more emphasis on social skills.
We're going to have to get phones out of school, bell to bell, so then they'll park to each other at lunch because it's those social skills we really need kids to develop. Now, that's what's going to be in demand.
If I were a teacher in the school right now, I would have every kid put their phones in this big box as class started, and then they could retrieve their phone and when the bell rings.
And a lot of teachers do that, and some school principals are starting to come around to, you know, even that. Then the individual teachers have to enforce it, and the kids grab the phone, you know, during lunchtime and when there are changing classes, so it's still there, and then bullying and distractions are still there. So even better have that been happened at the beginning of school and they
pick them up at the end. There's some kind of solution where the phone is not interfering with learning and it's not interfering with that social interaction at launch and other social times.
Is there a generation gene that just gets it and they understands things well.
I do think that both gen xers and millennials have a little bit of a foot in the analog world and the digital world. So I'm a little bit biased. I am a gen Xer myself, but we were the last generation to have a truly analog childhood and the first to have an Internet adulthood, So you know, I think we have always taken that position as being the middle child of generations. The middle child and the family is the one who mediates between the younger and the older,
So we have that role to play. But I think a lot of millennials, especially older millennials is born in the nineteen eighties, can play that role as well.
But you missed some dramatic things that happened in society, assassinations, landings, things like that. Does that Does that bother you that you may have missed some great news events?
Well?
I think it. I mean, certainly, I think a lot of gen x are still that way, that they missed out on some pretty interesting history. But I think there's also a little bit of odd pride among gen xers, and that in feeling like that, the generation often gets forgotten and flies under the radar. I think there's a lot of gen xers are kind of proud of that, of course.
And you're you were you were about what three or four years old when we landed on the moon. Silently you probably on the moon we weren't even born. Then, Wow, that's that's crazy times. How would you fix this? And is it fixable?
You know, I actually do have a lot of hope around some of these issues of the problems with technology. To take what we are discussing about the Team mental health crisis, well, if social media and technology really is the cause of the team mental health crisis, then we know how to solve it. That's actually changeable. You can't change a lot of the other problems that tend to cause depression. You can't change your genetics, you can't change the bad stuff that happened in the past. Be awfully
hard to change discrimination and poverty overnight. But we can put common sense regulations on social media. We can raise the minimum age for social media to sixteen and actually verify age. That's one thing that we could do would probably make an enormous difference for mental health among children and young teens.
Some people would argue that that's too restrictive and we're taking away freedoms. But on the other hand, that may work very well.
Don't you think we have laws that have age restrictions on drinking alcohol, on driving a car, on buying cigarette, when you can vote, when you can vote, why not have it for social media?
How would they track that?
Though?
You know, there's an increasing number of companies that can do age verification and do third party verification of everything. There's so there's so many companies. They actually have their own trade association. If you've flown on an airplane and seen clear, that's what they do. They do biometrics and store identity and so then it's with a third party. There's not as many privacy and concerns. There's ways to do it, and there's they're going to figure it out.
I mean, that's the other viewpoint on it, is that this is the problem for the social media companies to solve, and fortunately they make billions, so I think they can probably figure it out.
Yeah, it's truly remarkable stuff. Hey, yeah, we might have to have retina scans in your in your computer.
Or at the very least some way to make sure that we don't have ten year olds on Instagram.
How much of this is parental responsibility?
You know, this is a difficulty. You do not need parental permission to get a social media account, so parents can try to try to keep their kids off social media. But it's really really difficult, and that's because it's so unregulated.
At what age do you think most parents have purchased smartphones for their kids.
The average age to get a smarttone these days is ten, ten years old, and that that day is a couple of years old. So I spec and.
They know how to and they know how to use these phones too, better than we do.
Yeah, and you know, the good news is you can put parental controls on the phones. The bad news is a lot of parents don't do that or don't know how to do that right. So, to my mind, the solution of that is the flip phone, you know, or more restricted phones. I mean, there's no reason to my mind to give a nine or ten year old child a full blown smartphone. They don't need it. What you want is for them to be able to call you and maybe text a few friends. So give them a phone that can only do that.
It's not it, though.
Gine it's becoming hip. It's kind of cool. You know. There's apparently a lot of gen Zers are now going back to slip phones. Some of them have two phones. They have the flip phone when they go out because they want to be able to concentrate on their friends. And then there are other phones. So there's one called the gab phone that's for kids that you can text and call and take pictures and that's it, and it looks like a regular smartphone.
I think some gen Z came up to me when I had my flip phone years ago and a dinosaur, Well.
Now they want them. Everything that was out is now back in. That's that's how it works.
Who's moving back in with family and parents? Is that the Generation Z.
For the most part. I mean, you know gen Z, they're oldest members by the cutoffs that I use are twenty eight. So yeah, especially during the pandemic, a lot of them came back home. But you know that's changing now. A lot of job opportunities out there for young people from labor shortages and so on. We'll see if that continues. But it's a better economic picture than it was, say for millennials. When millennials were the younger adults because a
lot of them graduated into the Great Recession. A lot of millennials doing very well economically now, but they had a hard time of it early on into more.
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