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Born & Kepler is named after the mathematician and scientists Max Born and Johannes Kepler. This bilingual podcast, offered in both German and English, dives into the expansive world of Artificial Intelligence (AI), exploring its foundations, evolving technology trends, academic search, and its impact on businesses and society.
Born & Kepler will feature a diverse lineup of experts from academia, venture capital, private equity, journalism, entrepreneurship, CTOs, and policymakers. Each guest offers unique insights into how AI is reshaping their sectors and what we might expect in the future.
Our goal is to provide a deep understanding of the core principles and breakthroughs in AI, enabling you to stay updated with the latest advancements in AI technologies and how they are transforming industries. During our episodes, we will explore how AI is influencing business strategies, optimizing operations, and driving innovation. We will also explore the ethical, social, and regulatory aspects of AI in everyday life.
I had breakfast with my daughter Clara on Sunday morning.
No rush.
No school bells.
Just coffee, bread, and that slower weekend rhythm.
At some point, she pulled out her phone and showed me a video on an app called Zoomerang.
Clara is in fifth grade now.
New school.
New social dynamics.
And suddenly, this small device isn’t just entertainment anymore.
It’s infrastructure.
What stuck with me wasn’t the app.
It was what she said next.
Almost everyone in her class has a smartphone.
Only one or two kids don’t.
That’s the moment where parenting stops being theoretical.
Because as parents, we’re stuck between two bad options.
No phone means exclusion.
No WhatsApp groups.
Missed birthday invites.
Being slightly outside the social loop.
But yes to a phone means something else.
Unrestricted access to systems that were never designed for children. Systems optimized for engagement — not development.
Somewhere in that tension, something from my own childhood came back to me. I was bullied in school. Enough to remember the knot in your stomach. Back then, bullying had limits.
It happened at school.
It ended when you got home.
There were boundaries.
You could shut the door.
You could disappear for the afternoon.
What hit me as a parent is this:
Bullying didn’t go away.
It just moved.
Today, it follows kids home.
It lives in their pockets.
It doesn’t stop at three o’clock.
A comment doesn’t fade.
A screenshot doesn’t forget.
A video can be replayed forever.
That changes the psychological weight completely.
This is where my position hardened.
I don’t think social media is just another challenge for kids.
I believe unfettered social media access is uniquely harmful and uniquely addictive for developing brains.
Scott Galloway calls it a bottomless dopa bag.
An endless stream of dopamine.
Engineered to keep you scrolling.
And the exposure is massive.
This isn’t just an American problem.
German data shows the same pattern.
A representative survey by the Vodafone Foundation and Infratest Dimap looked at how much time 14- to 20-year-olds in Germany actually spend on social media each day.
Here’s what they found.
42 percent spend three to four hours a day.
19 percent spend five to seven hours.
And 8 percent spend more than seven hours — every single day.
Let that land.
That’s not casual use.
That’s not “just checking messages.”
That’s a job.
A part-time job for many.
A full-time job for some.
And that time doesn’t come from nowhere.
It comes out of sleep.
Out of boredom.
Out of conversation.
Out of learning how to sit with yourself.
Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation puts hard numbers behind what many parents feel intuitively.
After decades of stability, rates of adolescent depression and anxiety more than doubled in the early 2010s.
Exactly when smartphones and social media became ubiquitous.
Emergency room visits for self-harm tell the same story.
Among teenage girls, they rose by 188 percent.
Among boys, by 48 percent.
Suicide rates among young adolescents rose sharply as well.
More than 160 percent for girls.
Nearly 100 percent for boys.
At the same time, something else collapsed.
Time spent with friends — in person — dropped by 60 to 65 percent.
Screens didn’t add something new.
They replaced something essential.
And underlying all of this is sleep.
A growing share of teens now gets less than seven hours per night.
Not enough for emotional regulation.
Not enough for memory.
Not enough for resilience.
This isn’t moral panic.
It’s public health.
And addiction isn’t a metaphor here.
About one in four teens now meets criteria for social media addiction.
For comparison, teen addiction rates for alcohol or narcotics are closer to one in twelve.
Because the companies running these platforms are not neutral actors.
They are among the most powerful businesses ever created.
Meta — the company behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — made 18.3 billion dollars in profit in a single quarter.
Ninety days.
Adidas — one of the most iconic brands in the world — made 26.4 billion dollars in revenue over an entire year.
That’s the asymmetry.
And with that scale come incentives.
Big Tech companies actively throw sand in the gears of any serious attempt to protect kids.
When they say age verification is too hard I wonder why can we do the same thing when opening a online bank account? Technology is not the issue.
What the real issue is incentives.
Strict age limits mean fewer users.
Fewer ads.
Less money.
As long as there are no penalties, shareholder value will beat child safety.
One country decided to change that.
Australia.
Since December 2025, Australia has introduced a legal minimum age of 16 for social media.
Not guidance.
Not recommendations.
Law.
And the design matters.
Children aren’t punished.
Parents aren’t fined.
Responsibility sits with the platforms.
If a 13-year-old is on Instagram or TikTok, the company is legally at fault.
Platforms are required to take reasonable steps to prevent under-16s from having accounts.
Age-assurance systems.
Behavioral signals.
Technical checks.
And there are serious financial penalties for non-compliance.
What’s working?
It resets the default.
The question is no longer “why won’t parents control their kids?”
It’s “why are platforms allowing this at all?”
It creates real incentives.
And it gives parents leverage.
“It’s not just my rule.
It’s the law.”
That matters.
But this isn’t a clean success story.
Enforcement is uneven.
Teens adapt quickly.
And the hardest part happens after school.
At night.
In bedrooms.
Australia shows government action is possible.
But incomplete.
Back at home, we’re navigating this imperfectly too.
We drove back from a ski holiday.
Long drive.
Tired kids.
And let’s be honest.
Phones are incredible babysitters.
Every parent knows this moment.
The silence.
The peace.
The relief.
We use screens too.
So the question isn’t: are screens useful?
Of course they are.
The real question is:
What muscle are we not training when we use them?
Short-term peace often trades off against long-term skills.
Boredom tolerance.
Conversation.
Self-regulation.
When every quiet moment is filled, kids never have to sit with themselves.
And that worries me more than any single app.
At home, we use a parental-control app called Qustodio.
There are others like Bark.
We’re not affiliated.
These tools don’t solve the problem.
What they give us is early visibility.
A chance to spot bullying early.
A chance to intervene before things escalate.
And part of me thinks:
Thank God these tools exist.
Because bullying destroys kids.
What still bothers me is that third-party tools are necessary at all.
Given the resources of the platform providers, protection should be the default.
Not an aftermarket add-on parents have to assemble themselves.
We are exposing developing brains to industrial-scale persuasion systems built for adults.
While also using those systems as babysitters when we’re exhausted.
If Australia is only the first draft, then the real question is:
What should the second draft look like?
What should the European Union do?
What should the United States do?
And when we look back on this decade — in full hindsight —
Will we be proud of how long it took us to act?