Are the kids alright? Part 1

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Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading from TED and npr. I'm Minouche Zamorodi. Today on the show, kids, young adults, and some of the biggest pressures they're facing these days. I mean, I feel like AI explains things sometimes better, like how to use artificial intelligence.

It's really good at visualizing certain tasks and can give you a much better understanding than certain teachers explaining something to you.

These are students at Francis C. Hammond Middle School in Alexandria, Virginia, talking about the pros and cons of using chatbots to help them with their schoolwork.

Using AI doesn't help us to be.

A good writer because in essays you need to use your own ideas. But like, if you need an idea and you're gonna make the rest of the essay by yourself, but you're using the AI to get like a concept of something, it would be okay. You just heard from Amin Amde Langston Young, Adiba Sadi, and Sarah Nagus. And as a new school year starts, the hot debate going on right now is how much AI is supporting or hindering students ability to learn. As you just heard, kids have differing opinions. They're teachers, too.

Well, it depends on how you look at it.

Chris Hudson is the library media specialist at the school. He's dismayed at how quick his students are to trust the information AI spits out and outsource their own thinking.

They gravitate toward the AI overviews for pretty much everything. So anything they do a Google search for the AI overview they think is gospel. So they're taking that information and tossing it into papers, whether it's accurate or not. And in some cases, when they feel a little stressed regarding something that requires their own creativity or their their own brain power, and they don't necessarily think they'll do the best job, they'll pull something from a ChatGPT or Gemini and try to pass that off as their own work.

But Chris's colleague Dominique Jones, she admits that keeping up with growing class sizes and growing demands on her time. Well, AI can be a huge help.

One of the programs that we actually have a license for, they have AI built in to grade the students. Writing it will generate the comments, the feedback to the kids. I don't have the capacity to grade 98 papers and give you a long response to something you did well, something you need to work on, and then just the overall nice statement. So it saved me hours.

AI is just one of the forces shaping young people's lives right now. Today's kids are growing up in a world of economic upheaval, social media pressures, and a future that often feels precarious. So over the next two weeks, we are asking, are the kids alright? How are they coping? Are parents, educators and the systems around them helping or hurting? And what is coming fast around the.

Next corner, your kids. Kids may not read and write. They'll be watching and listening instead.

This is Victor Riparbelli. He's the co founder and CEO of Synthesia, a company that uses AI to create video lessons led by lifelike avatars.

Hey there, learners.

Today we're diving into the world of critical thinking.

Let's introduce you to the exciting world of neural networks.

In this quick video, you'll learn about some real life examples of Newton's third law.

These digital instructors can teach anything in any language, at any time. Rip Parbelli believes the traditional classroom and the way we've taught for centuries could soon be obsolete. Here he is on the TED stage.

Your grandchildren will be the last generation to read and write. I know that sounds strange, almost unthinkable, but today I'm going to make the case that humanity's relentless pursuit of better ways to convey ideas and preserve knowledge doesn't end with text. I think we're at the dawn of a new era of AI enabled communication. And I think that future generations will slowly replace text with more intuitive forms of communication like audio, video, and eventually immersive technologies. And one day I think we'll look back at reading and writing as historical artifacts, like we do with papyrus scrolls or hieroglyphs or cave paintings.

This is a huge claim to make that brings up a lot of feelings for people. And on the one hand I'm thinking, you know, no, I love to read. I feel connected to the words on the page. When you hear me say that, do you just hear nostalgia? Or do you hear a deeply human feeling about how we communicate?

You know, that statement, obviously, is a statement I made to provoke on purpose. I don't necessarily think that all reading will go away. I think things like fiction, for example, I think we'll enjoy that. But I think when we talk purely about teaching and education, information exchange, I do think that we as humans are better off with video and audio content. And I do think that if we look back in 50, 60, 70, 100 years time, the way we consume information will not be text driven. It'll be driven by video and audio. And maybe at that point, like VR and immersive technology technologies. What is the most effective way to teach someone something? Most people would agree that that's probably himself or herself teaching the kids something in front of a whiteboard with a computer in front of them. And why is that the best way of teaching someone something? Well, you can adjust the learning to their pace. Some may be very quick to pick up some things or maybe a little bit more time and more examples. A lot of time you probably want to show them a visual example. That's how you teach someone really well. How can you use these technologies to do the same thing? Because it's pretty hard to do this every day, right? But what if you do a lecture and it's half an hour of you teaching in the classroom, and then it's 15 minutes where every student talks to an AI agent and that agent then assesses how well the student comprehends that knowledge, it takes some notes, it shares that note with the teacher, and the teacher can then decide what the path is for that particular student. Right. It's really like sitting down with a teacher that has infinite time and responds immediately to you. And I think that is just absolutely magical.

Do you mind walking me through exactly how this transition, you picture this transition going for the next 10, 20 years.

It is very obvious that especially the young generation today, they prefer to consume their content by watching and listening videos, podcasts, et cetera, than reading long books. If I want to learn something now, I go on YouTube and I'll watch a 30 minute video. And most of the time, depending on what you learn. But I'd say it's very few topics that you read. You learn better through pure text. Most of the time you learn something better by watching videos, seeing diagrams, animations. It stimulates more of your brain. It feels more like how we consume information in the real world. And that is going to be a big threat in society. Do you want to learn music theory from a long book or from a video on YouTube that has audio? Do you want to listen to the news on a podcast on the way to work or fold out this physical piece of paper somewhere? Most people feel like this, but we all have this guilt. I feel guilty when I watch videos instead of picking up a good old fashioned book. You hear the commentary on this. Young people are unable to focus anymore. They need constant dopamine hits from cheap content that they scroll through on their social media apps. They don't get outside their room anymore. I have a prerogative idea. What if we're all just tired of overly dense, slow information? Books with too many pages, newspaper articles with filler. What if we become much more sensitive to the quality and the conciseness of the content that we consume because we now have infinite choice? What if the current generation of kids are able to learn and absorb information much faster because of technology, not despite it? Is the problem us or is the problem text? With AI we can get both speed, scale, accuracy and engagement. AI can create highly photorealistic content digitally. Computers can learn what the world looks like and they can replicate it and remix it in amazing details. This is going to usher a new wave of creativity and it's not going to be driven by Hollywood. It's going to be driven by YouTubers and young people with great ideas who take these tools and tell amazing stories.

So I'm trying to picture this. Do you see like a kid instead of writing a short story, maybe they would use software that creates an entire video of a short story that looks real. Like instead of writing there was once a family, you would literally see a family that looks completely realistic coming together in a living room as the opening scene that they would have written previously. Like that.

Exactly like that. With AI, the kind of last frontiers of content creation, the things that have been really difficult to put into software, is happening. Right? And so I think the best analogy to this really is music. With the advent of samplers, right? You could take pieces of things from the real world and you could combine them together to create music. When I was 14 years old, I could sit in my room at home and I could make any song I could think of. The only limit was my imagination and putting enough hours into understanding how all these pieces of software work together for me to be to bring that vision to life. Right? And that's why what we've seen in the music industry over the last 20 years is a campion explosion of new genres, talent from anywhere. But if you look at filmmaking, for example, you probably have to go study film first. You have to get millions of dollars if you want to create anything, you have to know all the right people. Where you are in the world matters a lot. And essentially what AI is going to do now is like that last frontier of working with video and audio. And a lot of these disciplines will become kind of a fully digital workflow. And not just that, but it also becomes so easy that anyone can do it. Right.

Okay, so I have questions. How does a kid get to the point where they can imagine this whole world brought together by video if they haven't done the work of learning how to put together ideas? We're seeing that now with AI and large language models. Professors are saying that kids are handing in papers written by these chatbots, that the kids don't even know how bad they are because they haven't developed the critical skills.

Well, I think that's all part of society developing around these technologies. And I think the jury will be out whether those kids today who have access to GPT will do better or worse than the pre Internet generation in terms of overall intelligence and knowledge of the world. And I mean, none of us know this right, but my guess would be that the generation that grows up today will be much more informed and much smarter than the generation that grew up 50 years ago. I think we always worry about these things being the end of education, the end of critical thought, and I think there's always a kernel of truth in them. But I think kids are smarter than we think they are. And I'm not saying that we shouldn't think twice about how we do these things, but I think if you look historically at how technology has impacted learning and education all across the world, I think it's very difficult to make an argument that it's not going one direction, which is that we become smarter and smarter and we know more and more. And I think as much as some of these problems are caused by LLMs, I think a lot of them can also be solved with AI. And on the thing of how people get the imagination to make a story, I think, do you need that to make a story? Can't you just make 100 stories? You'll slowly figure out what you like and what you don't like.

When we come back, more from Victor RIP Barbelli on AI in education and a middle school teacher's thoughts on AI companies edging their way into the classroom.

Students are very dependent on human interaction, so it will become a very disengaged environment.

Today on the show Kids the future and whether it's gonna be all right. It's NPR's TED Radio Hour. I'm Minouche Zamorodi and we'll be right back.

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It'S the TED Radio Hour from npr. I'm Minouche Zamorodi. Today on the show, we're looking at the pressures that kids and teens are facing, whether it's navigating mental health tech in the classroom or the rise of AI. We were just hearing from technologist Victor Ritparbelli about how AI and video technology are making it possible to create avatars that te and train humans in new ways.

Today, our avatars already interact with millions of people every single day. They teach school subjects, they onboard restaurant workers, provide health guidance and sell products in more than 130 different languages. And they're getting really good. Very soon. They'll be very difficult to distinguish from reality. So with these technologies, we can Create anything without the need for cameras. We can bring our imaginations to life without the traditional barriers of skill and cost. With AI, everyone is going to be able to be a director producing Hollywood grade video without needing any training at all. Once we combine AI video with reasoning systems like language models, we're going to unlock an entirely new type of media that's going to be interactive and personalized. It's going to be able to think and narrate and personalize content for us. If you're learning music theory, you'll have an assistant that knows your skill level, knows your taste in music, and build a curriculum around that. All of your kids maybe will have their favorite celebrities teaching them math in school and they'll do it in a context that's interesting for your kid. Maybe that's soccer or sci fi or whatever. Education is going to be triple charged with these new AI systems.

I've been playing around a lot with Claude and ChatGPT and other AI and I'm noticing that it'll come up with something so quickly. And at first I'm like, this is amazing. This is. This paragraph is quality. And then I'll sit down and like get through the sentences and realize it's just a load of nonsense and incredibly simplistic and basic. So how do we begin to make sure that kids don't just think this is magic and assume it's correct? We need to have some sort of barometer of what is quality, what is vetted.

I mean, obviously we should teach kid about critical thinking and evaluating media content and all these things. I'm not at all saying we shouldn't do that. Right? I think that's probably more important than ever. But I think, you know, in the big picture, this is probably the most amazing technology we've ever invented. They will equalize the world of education. Everyone will get their own private tutor, no matter if you're rich or poor. But there's so much upside in how we do education and training with these technologies. Again, of course we have to be aware of the pitfalls. I just find it so difficult to not be extremely optimistic when you see how these technologies will impact the future of learning. How it. I think one of the greatest equalizers we've ever seen.

There'S no video AI robot, not even the videos we use to teach in class that can replace a teacher. Students are very dependent on human interaction and even if we try to give them videos to preview a topic or to introduce them to something, they will still reach out to us for support.

Dominique Jones teaches language arts at Francis C. Hammond Middle School in Virginia.

Teaching during COVID was a disaster. Everything was using a video. That was the first idea I had to get engagement. And did it work? I had never had so many Fs in my gradebook in all of my career. I could give students a video to watch for the lesson and say, okay, this is the topic. This is what we're learning. And they would often come back and say, I don't know what the video was talking about. Can you explain it to me? That's when I got the idea of what school really meant for kids. It was about the human interaction. So I imagine if we had an AI teacher that was their favorite athlete. You know, if I had LeBron teaching me how to write my essay, that's cool and all, but what happens when I don't understand? I 100% think that kids would lose all ability to analyze anything. They're looking for fast, quick answers to everything. Because now I can just go online and say, hey, tell me what this means. It will become a very disengaged environment, and that becomes stressful for the teacher. We've gone through all these years of school, got master's degrees and all the things for what to watch kids sit on a computer. That's not cool.

Back in the classroom, we asked 8th grader Noah Janda, as well as his classmates Sarah and Langston, what they think it would be like to be taught by the avatar of a movie star or professional athlete.

I think I'd find it, like, very weird to be taught by, like, a famous person.

A lot of people, like, they get bored easily in class and they don't, like, pay attention. But if they see, like, somebody they look up to teaching them, I feel.

Like it would help them pay attention more.

For me, personally, I don't think that worked well for me because I do like seeing how other teachers teach and just exploring what. How they think of a subject and stuff like that.

I want to go back to the kid question. Victor, do you have any kids in your life? Are you an uncle?

Do you.

Are you a parent?

I'm an uncle.

You're an uncle. So if you showed those your nieces and nephews what your technology can do, how do you explain it to them now, and what would you encourage them to do or caution them to do?

But my niece is not even a month old, so I think I'll probably start. I would probably wait a few years, but I think advice is always the same. I think you want to get Kids and everyone else for that matter, also adults. But you want to get them to use these technologies. What are they good at? What are they bad at? I would give the same advice that I give to CEOs. I would say buy ChatGPT for your company. Let people play around with it. Let them tell you what they do with it. What does it work for? What does it not work for? We don't learn that from reading books about how AI could go wrong or articles that talk about how GPT technology works. We learn by doing.

That was Victor Ripparbelli, CEO of Synthesia. You can see his full talk@ted.com thank you so much to the students and staff at Francis C. Hammond Middle School in Alexandria, Virginia. As the technology advances, of course, so will the debate over its effects on kids, their brains and how they learn. And meanwhile, we are already seeing that AI companies are responding to those concerns. ChatGPT, for example, recently rolled out Study Mode, a chatbot that doesn't give kids answers outright, but acts more like a tutor. We'll be watching this space. Today on the show. We're talking about kids and young adults and asking if they're all right. The U.S. has long pitched itself as the land of opportunity, a place where if you worked hard, sacrificed, you could build a better life for yourself and for your children and your children's children.

I think that's right. I don't even think he thought about it. It was just a given.

This is Scott Galloway.

When my parents came to the US on a steamship, 150 quid each. And it was just a natural assumption that given the opportunity that America offered, that you would just inevitably end up doing better than your parents. That was just part of the American compact.

It was definitely the case for Scott. He's now a professor at New York University, a popular podcaster and best selling author. Author. And he's written a lot about the success of America's brand of capitalism. The rise of the middle class through the last century, the spread of wealth and financial stability to more people. But now, Scott says, that American compact, that each generation will prosper more than the previous one. It is broken.

At the end Of World War II, about 92% of children did better than their parents by the time they were 30. Economically, for the first time, it dipped to 50%. 50%. So now it's a coin flip. So for the first time in our nation's history, it's no longer a given that your kids will be better off than you at the same age or at the age of 30, the latest.

Generation of young adults, Gen Z, have come of age with crushing student debt, unattainable housing, and stagnant wages.

And my thesis is that these have been purposeful decisions, that the economy has actually been incredibly robust the last 30 or 40 years. Our growth has been consistent, if not remarkable. And every year we figure out a way for the markets to go up in value. But we have purposely transferred wealth and opportunity from young people to old people. So who owns stocks and houses? People my age? Who makes their money from current income or working at a job and rents? Young people. That's nothing but a naked transfer of wealth and prosperity from young to old.

You're constantly working, and for what? You can hear this situation playing out all over social media. I cannot envision ever owning a home between random cute dog videos. Thousand dollars. There are clips of young people who are deeply distressed. I can't even afford, like the chicken angry struggle to survive that so much of the economy seems stacked against them.

Every day for the past eight years has been nothing but an absolute living nightmare.

And recent budget and policy changes may make that reality even worse. There have been cuts to higher education grants, less loan forgiveness, new Medicaid cuts and restrictions, and an increasing federal debt which could make tax and interest rates go even higher. To Scott, this means an absolute lack of compassion for our youngest generations.

Okay, I start us with a question. Do we love our children?

Here he is on the TED stage.

Sounds like an illegitimate question, right? Well, I'm going to try and convince you otherwise. Essentially, as we go down generations, we're seeing that for the last two generations, people are making less money on an inflation adjusted basis. In addition, the cost of buying a home, the cost of pursuing education continues to skyrocket. So the purchasing power, the prosperity, is inversely correlated to age. Simply put, as we get younger, we're taking away opportunity and prosperity from our youngest. A decent proxy for how much we value youth labor is minimum wage, and we've kept it purposely pretty low. If it had just kept pace of productivity, It'd be about 23 bucks a share. But we've decided to purposely keep it low, out of reach. Median home price has skyrocketed relative to median household income. As a result, pre pandemic, the average mortgage payment was $1,100. It's now $2,300 because of an acceleration in interest rates and the fact that the average home has gone from $290,000 to $420,000. Why? Because guess what? The incumbents that own assets have weaponized government to make it very difficult for new entrants to ever get their own assets, thereby elevating their own net worth. This has resulted in an enormous transfer of wealth. Where people over the age of 70 used to control 19% of household income versus people under the age of 40 used to control 12. Their wealth has been cut in half. This isn't by accident. It's purposeful.

Consciously purposeful. Or how did this happen?

Well, the demo in democracy is working really well. And that is old people vote for even older people who vote themselves more money. So we now spend about 40% of our total government spending on programs for seniors. That's the greatest it's been in history. But wait, it gets worse. In 10 years at the current rate, it's going to be over 50%, meaning the majority of our government spending and tax revenues will go to programs supporting seniors. And this crowds out investments in technology and in education. And things that are a little bit more forward leaning show a greater return on investment and quite frankly benefit younger people. Our democracy, if you will, is working well, but it's a series of older people voting themselves more money. Old people vote.

I guess what I find confusing about this is I recently read in the New Yorker that since 2020, U.S. growth per person has been more than 2% and that actually people in their 20s are richer than prior U.S. generations were at their age. So, so why doesn't it feel that way for younger people?

So I think the study you're referring to is the following. There's some nuance here, and that is we have basically kind of the zeitgeist and this goes to cultural mores. We have decided to embrace a winners and losers economy or a Hunger Games like economy. The good news is, if you think it's good news, is that there are now millionaires in their 30s. When I was growing up, and I imagine when you were growing up, you didn't really hear about that. So the actual number of people in the top 10%, that number's gotten much higher. But if you look at the quote unquote, bottom 90, the vast majority of these individuals, two things have happened. Their purchasing power has gone down. Inflation and housing. Inflation and education. Two things that young people save for and need to get ahead have skyrocketed and their wages on an inflation adjusted basis have consistently gone down. I used to make, on an inflation adjusted basis, people in my generation made 85,000, then 20 years ago 65,000. This is at the age of 25. Now it's about $55,000. And so you have a lot of young people who've essentially given up on buying a home. The travel industry is booming, and my thesis is that people have just given up on saving for a house. And so they pick up and head to Thailand for a month or they go to Coachella. So live events and travel have never been stronger, but people are struggling to kind of COVID I think, the basics or the essentials. Whether it's getting a college degree, paying off their student debt, saving for a home, or deciding to have a child.

The great intergenerational theft took place under the auspices of a virus. I know. Let's use the greatest health crisis in the century to really speedball the transfer. This is the NASDAQ from 2008 to 2012. We let the markets crash. And by the way, you need churn, you need disruption, because it seeds and recalibrates advantage and wealth from the incumbents to the entrance. It's a natural part of the cycle. But wait, lately, no, a million people dying would be bad. But what would be tragic is if we let the NASDAQ go down and guys like me lost wealth. So we pumped the economy, which again increased the massive transfer of wealth. The best two years of my life Covid more time with my kids, more time with Netflix, and my value of my stocks absolutely exploded. And who has to pay for my prosperity? Not me. Future generations who will have to deal with an unprecedented level of debt.

Key to getting wealthy or establishing some wealth as a younger person is that in 2008, as an example, we allowed the markets to fall, we bailed out banks, but we didn't bail out the economy. And guys like me who were coming into the prime income earning years got to buy Netflix at $12, got to buy Amazon at $8. So when you bail out the boomer owner of a restaurant, all you're doing is robbing opportunity from the 26 year old recent graduate of a culinary academy who wants her shot to buy a restaurant on the cheap. Disruption is a cycle and a churn that seeds advantage from incumbents to entrance. And so I think politics have become very much I need to get mine. This happens across the entire ecosystem. In my industry, every year we take pride in rejecting more and more applicants, meaning that the incumbents who already have degrees see the value of their degrees go up. When I applied to UCLA, it was a 76% admissions rate. This year it'll be 9. When you own a home, you get very concerned with traffic and you show up to the local review board and make sure no new housing permits are approved. We have one and a half million fewer homes than we need for household formation, which again, has taken the value of homes way up. So we have embraced this rejectionist, exclusionary culture that crowds out the opportunity for entrance.

But at some point, all the old rich people are going to die. Is there going to be a redistribution of wealth happening then?

So a lot of people will say, but, Scott, you're about to see the most massive transfer back to young people in the form of inheritance. I would argue that's a really unhealthy way to live life and build a society. What you're talking about is Downton Abbey that, oh, you don't need to work or worry because you're going to inherit this estate. Waiting around for your mother and father to die so you can buy a home and have a family is just not a way to live a life, does not build a healthy society and quite frankly doesn't work and just results in dynastic dynamics that the American culture has tried to avoid.

When we come back, more with Scott Galloway and what you what he says is the link between economic uncertainty and Gen Z's politics. On the show today, are the kids all right? I'm Minouche Zamorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from npr. Stay with us.

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This message comes from NPR sponsor Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort. Journey through the heart of Europe on an elegant Viking longship with thoughtful service, destination focused dining and cultural enrichment on board and onshore. And every Viking voyage is all inclusive with no children and no casinos. Discover more at Viking. It's the TED Radio Hour from npr. I'm Anoush Zamorodi. Today on the show, we are asking, are the kids all right? And we were just talking to NYU Professor Scott Galloway. Scott says that today younger generations cannot afford to pay off their debt, buy a home or invest in their retirement. And he blames older generations for withholding financial opportunities from them. The effects, he says, are more than just economic.

Well, the repercussions are at a very basic level, disappointment and rage. A lot of these folks are living at home. A lot of them have been told their whole life they can do anything. And then that 210 times a day they get a reminder of their failure on their phones with a series of notifications where people vomit their personal possessions and amazing lives that they're supposedly leading. And they're reminded every day that they're not doing well. And also, there's a false impression out there that everyone is vacationing at the Almond Hotel and owns a Ferrari. And if you don't have all of those things that you're somehow failing, it creates incendiary that is poured over every issue. And I think it just creates a general level of rage.

I'm curious, you know, what young people think when you link their dissatisfaction with life and what feels like really big gaps between the generations. How do they respond when they hear these things?

I think that sometimes that feels like I'm infantilizing or patronizing them. But what I've generally, the feedback is, you know, thank you, you said the quiet part out loud. And who I really hear from is parents. If you're a boomer or if you're, say, not even boomer, but you're Gen X and you've done well and you see your kids, your kid's a good kid she's worked hard, she's graduated from the right schools, and her and her fiance have been saving for a house for 10 years. And they just have given up. They can't buy a house. They're thinking about not having kids. It's just not viable for them. I mean, this is what you want. The whole point of an economy is to create a middle class. The whole point of a middle class is to create a thriving society, a democratic society that's prosperous. But the reason we all want prosperity at the end of the day, when we get a little bit older, is we want our kids to do well.

This is my last slide. It is an emotionally manipulative slide to try and get you to like me more.

There's a moment in your TED Talk when you put up a slide of yourself and one of your boys at a sporting event.

But it does have a message. This is the whole shooting match. Anybody here without kids, ask someone with kids. Your whole world shrinks to this.

And you got pretty emotional up on stage and you laid a lot of guilt on the people in the theater. You asked them, you know, do we love our children? Implying that if we do, they need to make changes.

Well, Minouche, do you have children?

I do.

So without knowing you or your children, I'm fairly confident that you love your children.

Children.

I bet you are fairly confident. I love mine. The question I ask is, do we love our children? And that is, have we entered an economy where it's sort of a winner take most attitude and everyone's grabbing for their own. We ignore because we all believe we're going to be in the top 10%. That's never done better than previous top deciles, that we'll be in that top 10%. And we're not willing to make the sacrifices and the hard decisions such that other people's children who might be in the bottom 90 do better. I think that America has kind of lost the script. And that is, what is the point of any of this? On your radio hour, you're going to talk about AI, you're going to talk about the environment, you're going to talk about the climate. Anyone who has kids, something comes off the tracks with one of your kids. You're not thinking about the climate, you're not thinking about AI, you're thinking about that kid. And economic anxiety is someone who went through economic anxiety as a kid. I can tell view we aren't treating our children well. We aren't treating other kids well. The resting blood pressure of kids in low income homes is tangibly higher than kids in middle and upper income homes. There are more kids depressed, more admissions of self harm, more anxiety. So the question is, what is the point of any of this if your kid is anxious or depressed and people have this feeling, well, I'm gonna be successful, I can take care of my kids. Okay, I know you love your kids, but do we love our kids?

That was Scott Galloway. He's a marketing professor at NYU and hosts of the podcasts Pivot and the Professor G Pod. We spoke in 2024. Scott's latest book is called the Algebra of A Simple Formula for Financial Security. You can see his TED talk at ted. So despite what some technologists may be predicting, kids are still being taught to read in the U.S. however, a third of eighth grade students don't meet national standards for reading comprehension.

This is the largest slice of pizza in the entire world.

The average teen spends nearly five hours a day on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. And so many suspects that books are taking a backseat to what's on their phones.

Oh, you don't compete with that. That's where we lose, right? You work with it, you work with it. And the truth is there's no reason to fight against it. My job is to fight alongside it.

This is children's author Jason Reynolds.

You like two minute videos and two minute videos is what's holding your attention. Cool, I get it. I'm going to write a book of short stories. I'm going to write a book that's in verse. I'm going to figure out how to use the thing that you already are interested in so I can literally operate and live alongside.

Reynolds has made it his business to meet kids, especially middle schoolers, where they are in his books and when he talks to them in person. For three years, Jason served as the ambassador for young People's literature through the US Library of Congress.

And there's so many not so young people here and I'm trying to figure out how to best serve everybody.

We asked him to kick off our conversation by reading us the first page from Look Both Ways, a tale told in 10 blocks. Stories from the perspective of 10 different kids as they walk home from school.

This story was going to begin, like all the best stories, with a school bus falling from the sky. But no one saw it happen. No one heard anything. So instead this story will begin like all the good ones with boogers. If you don't get all them nasty half baked goblins out your nose, I promise I'm not walking home with you. I'm not playing. Jasmine Jordan said this like she said most things with her whole body. Like the words weren't just coming out of her mouth but were also rolling down her spine. She said it like she meant said it with the same don't play with me tone her mother used whenever she was trying to talk to Jasmine about something important for her real life. And Jasmine turned the music up in her ears real loud to drown her mother out. And scroll on, scroll on. If you don't take them ear pods, earbuds, earphones or whatever they called out your coconut head, it's gonna be me turning up the volume and the bass and I ain't talking about no music that tone.

Jason Reynolds, how many award winning books do you think start with a description of bookers?

One for sure. I got one for sure, one for certain.

That's the one that was from your book look both Ways. What was it that you wanted your readers to know about you, about this book, about the characters that they're going to meet right from the start, that.

They are just like them. You know, I'm constantly thinking about how we can explore the everydayness of childhood, the mundane idiosyncrasies that it is to be a young person no matter where you are in the world.

I thought it was so interesting though, because you're having this light, it's this lighthearted conversation between two friends walking home from school who are in middle school. And then you kind of sneak it in that. Well, the reason why one of the girl's backpack was so heavy, why she had so many books and extra homework in there was because she'd been hospitalized with sickle cell anemia. You kind of sneak it in there that there's something very serious going on.

I do. And I think to sneak it in there is the best way to do it. I think I'm always curious about the way that we portray young people and portray tough stuff for young people because I think, I think we sometimes lay the burden on the back of the child when really things happen in our lives. But children always find time to laugh, right? Children always find time to talk about boogers or to talk about potato chips, or to crack jokes or to tease each other. Despite some of the heavy things happening in their lives, I think they have a resilience that actually shines brighter sometimes than we give credit to. And, and I think I'm always curious and I think this is the reason why I write for kids so much, is because I think as adults what happens is when we go through tough times. We'll be bummed about it, and we'll let it drag on for a moment, and we'll use the excuse of, like, responsibility as the thing that forces us to move forward. Young people don't always have the excuse of responsibility. They just have the excuse of life. And there's something about that that I find absolutely profound. That the reason that they continue moving forward is not because they gotta go to work or take care of their kids or pay their bills. It's because they recognize that life is a thing that belongs to them. And every day is a day that is new. That's a special thing.

Can we talk about the kids, the people who you wrote the books for?

Yeah.

What do they tell you? Because, correct me if I'm wrong, you have spent the last several years touring around the country, whether it's in real life or virtually talking to them. What do they say that they like about you? And do they ever tell you things they don't like?

Oh, of course. What they say they like. I think first and foremost, when I walk into the building, when I walk into the room, especially at the beginning of my career, they were always so surprised by what I looked like. Hello. Hello, everybody. All right, y'.

All.

Good.

I am a big guy, right? Six three, you know, a big man. I've got long hair, very long dreadlocks, and I have tattoos everywhere. I always have on T shirt, jeans, and sneakers.

Right?

I mean, this is it. I look like they're older brothers. I look like they're uncles and they're older brothers. And that's just who I am, right? I can't pretend to be anything that I'm not. I just go into the school as me. We're gonna talk about something else. We're not gonna talk about books for a second. And then when we talk and when I give my lecture, when I give my speech, when we do my presentation, it's like talking to your big cousin.

What's your favorite sport?

What's my favorite sport? I grew up playing basketball. And I was lucky to grow up in a time of Georgia. I'm not a formal person. I don't find value informality, especially as it pertains to those I refer to as family, don't make sense to be formal around family. And for me, these young people are my family.

What's your favorite thing that you like to do with your mom?

You know what? So, like, my mom and I spend a lot of time together when I'm not all over the place. And you know, we live, we like to do really simple things. You know, my mom, one of these people who live in Costco, you know what I'm talking about? And we laughing because what a young person wants to know is that you are who you say you are so that I can trust you. But I can't come into a school and talk about reading some books. And they looking at me like, but who are you? Let me tell them who I am. Let me show them who I am, and then they'll show me who they are. And then we can talk about maybe reading these books.

What was your favorite book that you ever made?

What inspires you the most when you're writing? Like, where do you go for ideas?

We're currently writing our own book.

And, well, what I want to ask is, would you like to come to our book launch?

How long does it take you to write books?

And the truth is that they go and they read everything because they trust me. That's it. Simple. It was a very simple concept from the beginning.

What advice would you give to future writers?

What advice would I give to future writers? What they tell me is that they appreciate me speaking to them like humans. Understand. Whether you want to be a writer or whether you want to be anything is that excellence is a habit. Never forget this, okay? Excellence is a habit. It's not something you can turn on or turn off. You either gonna be excellent or you're not gonna be excellent. Like human beings, not as half formed things or whatever sort of pejorative coding we attach to childhood or to being a child, right? Or you're being childish, you're being kiddie, you're being. You're being a baby, you're being. Nah, I talk to them like human beings. And nine times out of ten, there's always one who says, man, I just appreciate you just giving it to us straight, just talking to us like people. We can handle it. Now. There have been moments in my career, valuable moments for me when a young person will say, you know, for instance, when I was the greatest, kid comes up to me and says, you know, I wanted to give you a note on when I was the greatest. And this is like a 12 year old, right? And this is good. And this is what I think, some of us adults, I think this is where we lose out, is that we sometimes forget to humble ourselves in the presence of children and take their critique, which is valuable. It's valuable cause they know what they feel, they know what they think, right? And this kid says, you know, I read When I was a greatest. Loved it. I wish that you would have given Needles the character who has Tourette Syndrome. I wish you would have given him more speaking lines. He has Tourette syndrome. That doesn't mean that he's mute. Right. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with his ability to speak.

Jason sounds like a good note.

It was a brilliant note, and the kid was absolutely right. And you know what I said? And they said that you do it on purpose because you're gonna write a sequel. And in that moment, I could have lied to protect my ego. I could have lied. I could have said, yeah, man, I thought, I'm gonna work on another one where it just focuses on needles. I could have lied. But that. That would have, in fact, been a lie. And I don't believe that kids. I just. The kid deserved the truth. And so I said, you know what? Honestly, it was an oversight. It was a blind spot. And thank you. And every time I get those moments where a young person calls me to the mat, I'm grateful. I'm not offended. And I'm not all broken up and sensitive. No, I'm grateful that a young person could say amen. I love you, and I know you love me. And that's why we're gonna have this conversation about what I need you to do moving forward in your work that is meant to serve me. What a gift.

Yeah.

I mean, it sounds like you're getting as many ideas and feeling energized by them as much as they are getting something out of your visiting.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I get way more. You know, it's uneven. Trust me. You know, there are occupations, but this is vocational. I actually just like to be around them. I enjoy having conversations with them. I like to be a child. I like to be childlike. I don't think we should ever lose it. I'm too old to be childish, even though I am sometimes. But you're never too old to be childlike.

No.

Right. And I think what they do is they remind me over and over again that after actually will be okay. That. That. That the only reason that one can even begin to maintain an inkling of hope is because of the possibility that reside in the youth. And so to rob yourself of that is to rob yourself of the antidote to hopelessness.

That was author and MacArthur Genius Award winner Jason Reynolds. We spoke in 2021. His latest work is an audiobook called Soundtrack. Next week, we've got the second half of our series where we're asking, are the kids all right. Psychologist Lisa Damore is a teen expert and parenting icon. She'll be here to talk us through what adolescence is really like these days. Today's teenagers are so much more aware of the world around them, what's happening politically, what's happening socially. And so if we talk about teenagers as fragile or lazy or totally at the mercy of their phones, well, then we're gonna not do them justice and we're probably gonna see more of that. That's next Friday. If you are into this episode, this series, please leave us a comment on Spotify. We would love to hear what you think. This episode was produced by Rachel Faulkner White, James Delahousy and Matthew Cloutier. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Katie Monteleone, Fiona Guerin and Harsha Nahada. Our executive producer is our audio engineer was Jimmy Keeley. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Roxanne Hylash and Daniela Bellarezzo. I'm Anoush Zamarodi, and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from npr.

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