← Leaders with Francine Lacqua
Leaders with Francine Lacqua
Davos Bonus: Jonathan Haidt on The Anxious Generation and How It’s Shaping Our Workforce
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Francine Lacroix
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Francine Lacroix
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Francine Lacroix
It's Francine recording this, frankly, from a closet on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos. Now I'm here all week interviewing global leaders, chief executives, and interesting voices for my TV show and for this very podcast. Now we're bringing you one of those conversations. In today's episode, I sat down with Jonathan Haydes at Bloomberg House in Davos in front of an audience who, as you might be able to hear, were eating lunch. Ignore the clinking because my conversation with John was really interesting and really important. He's a social psychologist and ethics professor at NYU Stern School of Business. He's written four books, most recently the Anxious Generation how the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Now we talk about the themes he addresses in that book, mainly how the spread of smartphones and social media have led to rewiring of child and what kind of workforce that gives you later on in life.
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Jonathan Haidt
Welcome to the City of London the City of the City, the City of.
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Francine Lacroix
London the next Station is bank. Please mind the gap between the trains and the platform.
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Jonathan Haidt
The financial heart of the country.
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Commercial Narrator
The city. The city.
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Jonathan Haidt
Welcome to in the City.
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Francine Lacroix
Stand clear of the doors, please. Thank you. Thank you everyone. I hope you all had fun because I feel like this next conversation is will be fun, but actually also a little bit worried, a little bit scary. John, thank you so much for joining us. John Haid, social psychologist and really the man about town that everyone wants to understand on how to keep their kids off social media and what that means for the workforce that these chief executives have to manage. So, John, I mean, you basically wrote this book that's really, everyone's trying to read the Anxious Generation, how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Then that translates into life for the people that become. Of course, the workforce of the chief executives are tomorrow. I mean, how bad is it?
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Jonathan Haidt
So first, I just, I just sort of understood 10, 10 minutes or 8 minutes ago that this was a live talk in front of all of you. So actually this is like, wow. And it's pretty cool. I'm very glad to be able to talk to you directly. I thought we were just doing a podcast. And second, how many of you raise your hand in this room if you have any children under the age of 10, raise your hand. Okay, you guys are going to love this talk. This is just what you are waiting for. How many of you have kids between 14 and 28? Raise your hand. Okay, you're going to have much more mixed feelings, but all of you have Gen Z kids. If your kids were born in 1996 or later, then your kids are Gen Z. Very different from the millennials. And when you said, just how bad is it? So the way to understand this is if you look at the graphs of teen mental health. We have very good data in the US and we've collected from many other countries. In the US at least in the UK from the late 90s through 2010, 2011, there's no sign of a trend, pretty stable. Whether you're looking at depression, anxiety, self harm, all those rates, no big change. Then all of a sudden in 2012, it's as though someone flipped on a light switch in Menlo Park, California and all of those numbers go shooting up, especially for girls. For girls, it's a very sharp elbow. For boys, it's more gradual. A quarter of American girls say that they have made a suicide plan. They've actually gotten to the point of they think about suicide often and they've actually made a plan, not that they've made an attempt. But being sad, anxious and thinking about suicide is a normal part of being an American teen. Now, it was not like this in 2010. So especially when we look at anxiety, depression, self harm and suicide, we see, I think, the greatest destruction of human capital and human potential in human history. Now, okay, leaving aside the two world wars, it's hard to compare, but the fact that this is global. Oh, and I wrote the whole book focusing on mental illness, on the mental health problems. And only since the book came out did I realize that the attention, devastation, the inability to pay attention in the long run is probably going to be even a bigger deal and more important for business. So when we look at mental health, when we look at the ability to attend, to think about something for five minutes and also the social relationships and the ability to be a reliable employee or spouse, it's going to be rough.
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Francine Lacroix
John, because this basically changes the vortex, right? If you start scrolling as a young teen, as a tween, it changes the way your brain is wired.
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Jonathan Haidt
That's right. Right. Because the human brain is at 90% of its full size when you're six years old and everything beyond that is like some stuff goes away, some stuff tunes up based on practice. Neurons that fire together, wire together. And so if you're practicing skills, if you're playing, if you're doing chores, your brain develops in a normal way. But if instead we say, how about instead of attending to the adults around you and the older kids that you're copying, instead of that, how about you just do this all day long and you are socialized and your brain, the transition is managed by weirdos on the Internet who were selected by other people for their emotional extremity and then the algorithm fed them to your child. And so this is completely insane what we've done. We basically blocked human development by putting kids on screens in America, 50% of our kids say that they are online almost constantly. The phone is always in their hand. If they're waiting for an elevator, the phone comes out. If they're in the bathroom, the phone comes out. The iPhone is now waterproof. Some take it into the shower. If there's a lull in conversation, the phone comes out. It's very difficult for them to deal with anything that's a little bit boring.
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Francine Lacroix
So what does the, you know, what do colleges, what do chief executives, what do recruitment agencies need to do to either communicate differently or train them differently once they come of age?
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Jonathan Haidt
Yeah. So, okay, so here, what I'd like to do is Give you, I can give you advice based on what I saw on university campuses because it hit US first in 2015, that's in 2013, there was no sign of this or 2012, no sign of it. And by 2015, some of you might remember because it happened all over the English speaking world. Huge protests over microaggression. Someone said something and it becomes a whole big issue. So what we saw on campus is students getting very upset about what seemed to be small things that previous generations would just sort of say, like, oh, he's stupid or whatever. And the way we managed on campus was exactly wrong. And you should, you should learn from our mistakes and don't do what we did. What we did was we completely accommodated them. And it's in part because these were, a lot of them was about identity issues, race, lgbtq, gender. So we don't have the moral on campus. We're all on the left. Everyone's on the left. There are some conservatives, but they're in the closet. So we did not have the moral resources to say, now wait a second, is this really true, the thing you're saying? We had a completely validate everything, accommodate to it. We put in biased response lines. There are signs in the bathrooms at my university for how to report me if they think anything I've said is biased. And so encouraging a culture of snitching and reporting is a terrible thing to do. So don't do what we did. Now, what happened is, especially once George. So when the carling American mind came out in 2018, a lot of people said, oh, come on, this is just college kids being college kids. They're not going to do this at Goldman Sachs. They're not able to do this at Google. Well, actually they did. And progressive industries, especially knowledge work industries, really accommodated manufacturing didn't. But if you're hiring from elite universities, and especially if you're in media, entertainment, advertising, they did accommodate. And so I'm sorry for this long explanation, but to get back to practical lessons, leadership always requires you to define the culture. And what social media has done is it has shredded any common understanding and it has allowed everyone to make a bid to control the culture. And at universities, we allowed the students to set the culture. And that's why American universities have committed the greatest act of brand destruction in American history. We used to be so respect in 2015. Now our brand is in the toilet because of the stupid things that we did. And so you have to set the culture, which means don't give in, don't accommodate. Now do listen to them. Every generation brings complaints and some of them are right. Like, for example, why should bankers work 100 hours a week? Gen Z is saying, we don't want to do that. And I think they're probably right. So listen to them, talk to them, but don't be very wary of accommodating. And you have to define the culture. And the keyword you need is anti fragility. So antifragility refers to the fact that humans are not actually fragile, that especially young people, we need setbacks and challenges and problems, and then we grow by overcoming them. And so if you say, I want you to succeed in this job, I want you to grow, so I'll give you a choice. I can either give you feedback the way many do, where we're afraid of hurting your feelings and we're afraid you'll freak out and I'll be very gentle, but I don't think that's really what you want. The other way we can do this is I'm going to give you tough feedback. I'm going to tell you everything that I think you did wrong because I want to help you, I want you to succeed. And what I find is I teach undergrads and MBA students at NYU Stern what I find. I give them that question, which one would you want? 100% every year say, give me the hard feedback. But if you don't preface it, if it's just you just give hard feedback, a lot of them are going to feel very hurt and many of them will ghost you. They will leave without even saying goodbye. So you have to understand this is not their fault at all. No blame. Don't make fun of them, as we often do behind the scenes, both in the academy and in business, understand that we blocked their childhood. We kept them on screens, we didn't let them go out and play and get in arguments and settle those arguments themselves. And this is the result. But especially from their early 20s, there's a lot. They can still grow a lot. Late 20s is a little harder because the brain is kind of locked down by then. But early 20s, there's still a lot of room for growth.
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Francine Lacroix
John, the third party fact checking, the fact that that's being removed in a lot of platforms, what does that. What are the implications of that?
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Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, so, you know, just approaching it from the outside, you think, oh, well, that's terrible. Now it's just going to be, you know, random. And that was my first reaction. But I spoke to a couple of people who know a lot about meta and this area and what one of my friends said is actually the fact checking wasn't working very well because it tends to be as it always is. It tends to be just progressives saying that's false, but things on our side are true. And of course, that was part of the big complaint during COVID that the Biden administration was working with the social media companies to suppress right wing ideas. And it's true, that actually happened. And so the right completely does not trust the left, and the left over and over again does what it can to betray the trust.
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Francine Lacroix
But how do you see the visions? I mean, societies are pretty divided. Do you see that divide being better?
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Jonathan Haidt
No, it's going to get worse and worse forever, I think.
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Francine Lacroix
Forever, or is there a point?
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Jonathan Haidt
I can't say forever what I can say. So in general, my suspicion, my suspicion is that this year is the calmest, most sane and normal year that we'll ever have. And that'll be true every year going forward because. So I began to think this before we were all thinking about AI. I'm a social psychologist and looking at the conditions for democracy. The founding fathers of the United States knew that democracy always blows up. You don't want the people and their passions to be swayed by demagogues. And so in America, we don't have a democracy by design. We have a republic with democratic elements. And that was predicated on the idea that information moves slowly. And if something terrible happens in Boston, it's going to take weeks for it to reach Washington or, you know, a week or two. So all of our suppositions about democratic discussion are out the window now that everything's on Twitter and other X and other forms of social media. So I think especially the American form is going to be sorely tested. And I don't know that it's going to hold. I think we might have to have major change and reinvention. I don't know that the American project is going to. The American experiment is going to continue in its present form. There are other forms, other countries I don't know enough about. There may be much more stability elsewhere. But my point is, if you think about a community that is trying imperfectly to get at truth or public opinion, we're not going to get that again for a long time. Now. The digital technology in theory could give us the best democracies ever. And so there's a real possibility that, that we go through 10 to 50 years of chaos and disruption, as when the printing press came in, and then 50 years from now, we have the most amazing societies ever. That's my hope. But we're not going to get. It's not going to come in five or 10 years. It's going to take a lot longer than that, is my prediction. Nobody knows. I don't want to be too confident here, but as a social psychologist, I think the conditions for the liberal democracies of the Gutenberg era, based on text, are now not holding.
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Francine Lacroix
I did warn everyone it was going to be a depressing conversation, but exciting, I hope, right?
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Jonathan Haidt
This is all about the future.
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Francine Lacroix
Depressing. John, when you see how close Elon Musk is to President Trump, how Mark Zuckerberg is close to President Trump, what does that mean for regulation?
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Jonathan Haidt
Oh, my God. I mean, in America, we've always had the problem that you can buy influence so cheap. It's so cheap to give money to a campaign. And we have, you know, we have all these problems about money and politics. Those have been there for my whole life. And now suddenly it's like exponentially worse. And the fact that the President of the United States launched his own cryptocurrency the day. I mean, this is completely insane. This is complete corruption. This should be completely illegal. But so much stuff is going on that, like, you know, we don't even know what to object to. So the fact that the richest and one of the most powerful men in the world is now such a powerful man in terms of policies that will affect his own company. I greatly admire the man. He is a benefactor of humanity for the major things he's doing. But, my God, I mean, it's just, you know, Democracy or Government101 is, you know, you don't just, like, let the major people who run industries write their own laws with the backing of the executive. I mean, so it's. We're in for a wild ride. That's what I'm telling you. It's going to get a lot weirder.
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Francine Lacroix
What's TikTok? Is TikTok a test on what happens to TikTok?
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Jonathan Haidt
Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, TikTok is such a national security threat. And it's not just because of the privacy and the data. That's what the court case focused on. I have an essay up on my substack. Go to afterbabble.com titled TikTok is Harming Kids at an Industrial Scale. We just took quotes from company employees. Just their own words. That came out in legal briefs because they're being sued by a lot of states. Just their own words. They know they are addicting kids they're exposing them to sexual predation. I mean, it's horrible what this company is doing to American kids, not to Chinese kids. Douyin is much more healthy, but the version they give us is by design addictive and stupefying. And this is a national security threat. So I cannot believe that Trump is going to reverse this. Oh, wait a second. Policy doesn't matter. Money talks.
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Francine Lacroix
Okay, John, we also have actually our very own well thing that we're putting out by Olivia Carville. And this is something that we want to alert you to. It's a documentary called you can't look Away. And it talks about the transformative effects of social media on mental health. So what would you do for your own kids? Depending on how old they are, no social media until.
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Jonathan Haidt
Yeah, right. So let me sort of, let me give you the four norms. The reason that we're so lost in this is because each of us as individual parents try to do something and then our kid says the magic phrase, what is it? Please, Mom, I'm the only. No mom, I'm the only one. I'm the only one who doesn't have a smartphone. Only the kids are making fun of me. I'm excluded. So we're caught in a collective action trap. We each give in, which makes it harder for everybody else to do the right thing. So the way out is collective action. That's what my book is about. And that's, I think, why the book is doing so well is I'm not just saying, oh, my God, look at all the problems. I'm saying, actually, once we understand how we got here, we can get out. If many or most of us do four things here it is no smartphone until high school in the US or 14. Let's say no smartphone before age 14. Let them have a flip phone. You can text with them. You can't be on a flip phone 12 hours a day, but a smartphone. Half of your kids will be on a smartphone 14 hours a day. So no smartphone before 14, no social media before 16. What age should kids be when they start talking to sextortionists and child molesters around the world? I think 16 is probably, maybe higher, but at least 16. The third norm is phone free schools. And this one is happening all over the world really rapidly. Brazil just announced they're going to do it. So if your kids go to school where the kids can have access to their phones during the day and you can text them, your kid is not getting a good education. Your kid is getting a much worse education because they can't pay attention to, even to their friends. And then the fourth norm is far more free play, independence and responsibility. In the real world, all of us almost. Let me just ask you, how old were you when you could go out on your bicycle and go see your friends? Just yell it out. Around what age did you get independence? Just yell it out. Yeah. Six to eight is five, six, eight. That's when we all got it. The world is so much safer now than it was when we were growing up. Many of us grew up in America during a crime wave. The world's gotten much safer, but we don't trust our neighbors again, not in all European countries, but in the Anglo countries. We don't trust our neighbors. We don't trust our kids to go out. And that's part of why they spend their whole lives on screens. We've got to give them back an exciting, fun, in person childhood. And that's the hardest one because that's the one. We have to give up something and we have to be a little afraid. And then after a few times you realize, wait, my kid can ride his bicycle to a friend's house and come back.
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Francine Lacroix
John, thank you so much for joining us. John Haidt there, joining us on the Anxious Generation.
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Jonathan Haidt
Thank you everyone.
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Francine Lacroix
Thanks for listening to this episode of in the City from Bloomberg. It was hosted by me, Francine Lacroix, produced by Samar Saadi and Moses Andam Sound designed by Blake Maples. Brendan Francis Newman is our executive producer. Special thanks to Jonathan Haidt. Please subscribe, rate and review wherever you listen to podcasts.
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Jonathan Haidt
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