Davos Bonus: Jonathan Haidt on The Anxious Generation and How It’s Shaping Our Workforce

be able to hear, we're 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 for 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 childhood and what kind of workforce that gives you later on in life.

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?

between fourteen and twenty eight raise your hand. Okay, you're gonna have much more mixed feelings. But all of you have gen Z kids. If your kids were born after nine in nineteen ninety six or later, then your kids are gen Z, very different from the millennials. And when you say, 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 nineties through twenty ten to twenty eleven, there's no sign of a trend, pretty stable, whether you're looking at depression, anxiety, self harm, all those rates, no big change, and then all of a sudden in twenty twelve, 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 twenty ten. So, especially when we look at anxiety, depression and 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, it's 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 tend 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.

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've basically blocked human development by putting kids on screens. In America, fifty percent 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.

big issue. That so it just 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 don't do 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. It 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. You know, there are some conservatives, but they're in the closet. So we did not have the moral resources to say, now, wait a second, you know, is this really true, the thing you're saying. We had to 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 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 once, especially once George. So, when when The College American Mind came out twenty eighteen, a lot of people said, oh, come on, this is just college kids being college and think we're not able to do

this at Goldman Sachs. I'm not able to do this, you know at Google. Well, actually they did, and the progressive industries, especially knowledge work industries, really accommoded. Manufacturing didn't. But I think if you're hiring from elite universities, and especially if you're in media, entertainment, advertising, they did accommodate. And so 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 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 respecting twenty fifteen. 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 one hundred 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 anti fragility 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, 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 NBA students at at y U Stern. What I find I give them that question, which one would you want one hundred percent every year, say give

me the hard feedback. But if you don't preface it, if it's just you 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, you know, 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 as arguments themselves. And this is the result. But especially in their early twenties, there's a lot they can still grow a lot. Late twenties is a little harder because the brain is kind of locked down by then, But early twenties there's still a lot of room for growth.

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.

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 in 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 a week or two. So all of our suppositions about democratic discussion are out the window now that everything's on Twitter and 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 in 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 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 the theory could give us the best democracies ever, and so there's a real possibility that we go through ten to fifty years of chaos and disruption as when the printing press came in, and then fifty years from now we have the most amazing societies ever. Is that's my hope. But we're not going to get It's not going to come in five or ten 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.

complete corruption, This should be completely illegal. And 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 government one oh one 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.

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. Douyenne 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, okay, John.

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 am I just saying, oh my god, look at all the problems and 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 fourteen, let's say, no smartphone before age fourteen. Let them have a flip phone. You can text with them.

You can't be on a flip phone twelve hours a day, but a smartphone. Half of your kids will be on smartphone fourteen hours a day. So no smart before fourteen, no social media before sixteen. What age should kids be when they start talking to sextortionists and child molesters around the world. I think sixteen is probably, you know, maybe higher, but at least sixteen. 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 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 if 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. So many of us grew up in America during a crime wave. So 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.