Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News. Hey in the city, listeners,
Speaker 1: it's fran Scene recording this Frankly from a closet on
Speaker 1: the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos. Now,
Speaker 1: I'm here all week interviewing global leaders, chief executives and
Speaker 1: interesting voices for my TV show and for this very podcast.
Speaker 1: Now we're bringing you one of those conversations. In today's episode,
Speaker 1: I sat down with Jonathan Hades at Bloomberg House and
Speaker 1: Davos in front of an audience who, as you might
Speaker 1: be able to hear, we're eating lunch. Ignore the clinking,
Speaker 1: because my conversation with John was really interesting and really important.
Speaker 1: He's a social psychologist and ethics professor at NYU Stern
Speaker 1: School of Business. He's written for books, most recently The
Speaker 1: Anxious Generation, How the Great rewiring of childhood is causing
Speaker 1: an epidemic of mental illness. Now we talk about the
Speaker 1: themes he addresses in that book, mainly how the spread
Speaker 1: of smartphones and social media have led to rewiring of
Speaker 1: childhood and what kind of workforce that gives you later
Speaker 1: on in life.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the City of London, The City of the City,
Speaker 2: the City of London Bank.
Speaker 1: Please mind the gap between the tree and the platform.
Speaker 2: The financial hearts of the country, the city, the city.
Speaker 2: Welcome in the city, stand clear of the door.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Thank you everyone. I hope you all had fun,
Speaker 1: because I feel like this next conversation is will be fun,
Speaker 1: but actually you'll also look at work a little bit scary. John,
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for joining us. John Aid social
Speaker 1: psychologists and really the man about town that everyone wants
Speaker 1: to understand, and how to keep their kids off social
Speaker 1: media and what that means for the workforce that these
Speaker 1: chief executives have to manage. So John, I mean you
Speaker 1: basically wrote this book that's really everyone's trying to read,
Speaker 1: The Anxious Generation, how the great rewiring of childhood is
Speaker 1: causing an epidemic of mental illness. Then that translates into
Speaker 1: life for the people that become of course, the workforce
Speaker 1: of the chief executives are tomorrow. I mean, how bad
Speaker 1: is it?
Speaker 2: So first, I just sort of understood ten minutes of
Speaker 2: eight minutes ago that this was a live talk in
Speaker 2: front of all of you, So actually this is like, wow,
Speaker 2: it it's pretty cool. I'm very glad to be able
Speaker 2: to talk to you directly. I thought we were just
Speaker 2: doing a podcast. And second, how many of you raise
Speaker 2: your hand in this room? If you have any children
Speaker 2: under the age of ten, raise your hand. Okay, you
Speaker 2: guys are gonna love this talk. This is just what
Speaker 2: you are waiting for. How many of you have kids
Speaker 2: between fourteen and twenty eight raise your hand. Okay, you're
Speaker 2: gonna have much more mixed feelings. But all of you
Speaker 2: have gen Z kids. If your kids were born after
Speaker 2: nine in nineteen ninety six or later, then your kids
Speaker 2: are gen Z, very different from the millennials. And when
Speaker 2: you say, just how bad is it? So, the way
Speaker 2: to understand this is if you look at the graphs
Speaker 2: of teen mental health. We have very good data in
Speaker 2: the US, and we've collected from many other countries in
Speaker 2: the US, at least in the UK. From the late
Speaker 2: nineties through twenty ten to twenty eleven, there's no sign
Speaker 2: of a trend, pretty stable, whether you're looking at depression, anxiety,
Speaker 2: self harm, all those rates, no big change, and then
Speaker 2: all of a sudden in twenty twelve, it's as though
Speaker 2: someone flipped on a light switch in Menlo Park, California,
Speaker 2: and all of those numbers go shooting up. Especially for girls.
Speaker 2: For girls, it's a very sharp elbow. For boys, it's
Speaker 2: more gradual. A quarter of American girls say that they
Speaker 2: have made a suicide plan. They've actually gotten to the
Speaker 2: point of they think about suicide often, and they've actually
Speaker 2: made a plan. Not that they've made an attempt, but
Speaker 2: being sad, anxious, and thinking about suicide is a normal
Speaker 2: part of being an American teen. Now. It was not
Speaker 2: like this in twenty ten. So, especially when we look
Speaker 2: at anxiety, depression and self harm and suicide, we see,
Speaker 2: I think, the greatest destruction of human capital and human
Speaker 2: potential in human history. Now, okay, leaving aside the two
Speaker 2: World wars, it's hard to compare, but the fact that
Speaker 2: this is global. Oh and I wrote the whole book
Speaker 2: focusing on mental illness, on the mental health problems, and
Speaker 2: only since the book came out did I realize that
Speaker 2: the attention devastation, the inability to pay attention. In the
Speaker 2: long run, it's probably going to be even a bigger
Speaker 2: deal and more important for business. So when we look
Speaker 2: at mental health, when we look at the ability to
Speaker 2: tend to think about something for five minutes, and also
Speaker 2: the social relationships and the ability to be a reliable
Speaker 2: employee or spouse. It's going to be rough.
Speaker 1: John, because this basically changes the vortex. Right, if you
Speaker 1: start scrolling as a young team as a tweet, and
Speaker 1: it changes the way your brain is wine.
Speaker 2: That's right, right, Because so the human brain is at
Speaker 2: ninety percent of its full size when you're six years old,
Speaker 2: and everything beyond that is like, you know, some stuff
Speaker 2: goes away, some stuff tunes up based on practice. Neurons
Speaker 2: that fire together wire together, and so if you're practicing skills,
Speaker 2: if you're playing, if you're doing chores, your brain develops
Speaker 2: in a normal way. But if instead we say have
Speaker 2: that instead of attending to the adults around you and
Speaker 2: the older kids that you're copying. Instead of that, how
Speaker 2: about you just do this all day long and you
Speaker 2: are socialized and your brain the transition is managed by
Speaker 2: weirdos on the internet who were selected by other people
Speaker 2: for their emotional extremity, and then the algorithm fed them
Speaker 2: to your child. And so this is completely insane what
Speaker 2: we've done. We've basically blocked human development by putting kids
Speaker 2: on screens. In America, fifty percent of our kids say
Speaker 2: that they are online almost constantly. The phone is always
Speaker 2: in their hand. If they're waiting for an elevator, the
Speaker 2: phone comes out. If they're in the bathroom, the phone
Speaker 2: comes out. The iPhone is now waterproof. Some take it
Speaker 2: into the shower. If there's a lull in conversation, the
Speaker 2: phone comes out. It's very difficult for them to deal
Speaker 2: with anything that's a little bit boring.
Speaker 1: So what does the you know, what do colleges, what
Speaker 1: do achieve executives? What do recruitment agencies need to do
Speaker 1: to either communicate differently or train them differently once they
Speaker 1: come of age?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so okay, so here, what I'd like to do
Speaker 2: is give you I can give you advice based on
Speaker 2: what I saw in university campuses, because they hit us
Speaker 2: first in twenty fifteen. That's in twenty thirteen, there was
Speaker 2: no sign of this, or twenty twelve, no sign of it.
Speaker 2: And by twenty fifteen, some of you might remember, because
Speaker 2: it happened all over the English speaking world, huge protests
Speaker 2: over microaggressions. Someone said something and it becomes a whole
Speaker 2: big issue. That so it just what we saw on
Speaker 2: campus is students getting very upset about what seemed to
Speaker 2: be small things that previous generations would just sort of
Speaker 2: say like, oh, he's stupid or whatever. And the way
Speaker 2: we managed on campus was exactly wrong, and you should
Speaker 2: don't do You should learn from our mistakes and don't
Speaker 2: do what we did. What we did was we completely
Speaker 2: accommodated them. And it's in part because these were a
Speaker 2: lot of them. It was about identity issues, race, LGBTQ, gender,
Speaker 2: So we don't have the moral on campus. We're all
Speaker 2: on the left. Everyone's on the left. You know, there
Speaker 2: are some conservatives, but they're in the closet. So we
Speaker 2: did not have the moral resources to say, now, wait
Speaker 2: a second, you know, is this really true, the thing
Speaker 2: you're saying. We had to completely validate everything, accommodate to it.
Speaker 2: We put in biased response lines. There are signs in
Speaker 2: the bathrooms at my university for how to report me
Speaker 2: if they if they think anything I've said is biased,
Speaker 2: and so encouraging a culture of snitching and reporting is
Speaker 2: a terrible thing to do. So don't do what we did. Now.
Speaker 2: What happened is once, especially once George. So, when when
Speaker 2: The College American Mind came out twenty eighteen, a lot
Speaker 2: of people said, oh, come on, this is just college
Speaker 2: kids being college and think we're not able to do
Speaker 2: this at Goldman Sachs. I'm not able to do this,
Speaker 2: you know at Google. Well, actually they did, and the
Speaker 2: progressive industries, especially knowledge work industries, really accommoded. Manufacturing didn't.
Speaker 2: But I think if you're hiring from elite universities, and
Speaker 2: especially if you're in media, entertainment, advertising, they did accommodate.
Speaker 2: And so sorry for this long explanation, but to get
Speaker 2: back to practical lessons, leadership always requires you to define
Speaker 2: the culture. And what social media has done is it
Speaker 2: has shredded any common understanding and it has allowed everyone
Speaker 2: to make a bid to control the culture. And universities
Speaker 2: we allowed the students to set the culture. And that's
Speaker 2: why American universities have committed the greatest act of brand
Speaker 2: destruction in American history. We used to be so respecting
Speaker 2: twenty fifteen. Now our brand is in the toilet because
Speaker 2: of the stupid things that we did. And so you
Speaker 2: have to set the culture, which means don't give in,
Speaker 2: don't accommodate. Now do listen to them. Every generation brings complaints,
Speaker 2: and some of them are right, like, for example, why
Speaker 2: should bankers work one hundred hours a week, gen Z
Speaker 2: is saying, we don't want to do that, and I
Speaker 2: think they're probably right. So listen to them, talk to them,
Speaker 2: but don't be very wary of accommodating. And you have
Speaker 2: to define the culture. And the keyword you need is
Speaker 2: anti fragility. So anti fragility refers to the fact that
Speaker 2: humans are not actually fragile, that, especially young people, we
Speaker 2: need setbacks and challenges and problems and then we grow
Speaker 2: by overcoming them. And so if you say, if you
Speaker 2: say I want you to succeed in this job, I
Speaker 2: want you to grow. So I'll give you a choice.
Speaker 2: I can either give you feedback the way many do,
Speaker 2: where we're afraid of hurting your feelings and we're afraid
Speaker 2: you'll freak out and I'll be very gentle, but I
Speaker 2: don't think that's really what you want. The other way
Speaker 2: we can do this is I'm going to give you
Speaker 2: tough feedback. I'm going to tell you everything that I
Speaker 2: think you did wrong because I want to help you.
Speaker 2: I want you to succeed. And what I find is
Speaker 2: I teach undergrads and NBA students at at y U Stern.
Speaker 2: What I find I give them that question, which one
Speaker 2: would you want one hundred percent every year, say give
Speaker 2: me the hard feedback. But if you don't preface it,
Speaker 2: if it's just you give hard feedback, a lot of
Speaker 2: them are going to feel very hurt, and many of
Speaker 2: them will ghost you. They will leave without even saying goodbye.
Speaker 2: So you have to understand this is not their fault
Speaker 2: at all, no blame. Don't make fun of them as
Speaker 2: we often do, you know, behind the scenes, both in
Speaker 2: the academy and in business. Understand that we blocked their childhood.
Speaker 2: We kept them on screens. We didn't let them go
Speaker 2: out and play and get in arguments and settle as
Speaker 2: arguments themselves. And this is the result. But especially in
Speaker 2: their early twenties, there's a lot they can still grow
Speaker 2: a lot. Late twenties is a little harder because the
Speaker 2: brain is kind of locked down by then, But early
Speaker 2: twenties there's still a lot of room for growth.
Speaker 1: John is the third party fact checking the fact that
Speaker 1: that's being removed in a lot of platforms.
Speaker 2: What does that? What are the implications of that? Yeah,
Speaker 2: so you know, just approaching it from the outside, you think, oh,
Speaker 2: well that's terrible. Now it's just going to be you know,
Speaker 2: random and that was my first reaction. But I spoke
Speaker 2: to a couple of people who know a lot about
Speaker 2: about meta and this area, and what one of my
Speaker 2: friends said is, actually the fact checking wasn't working very
Speaker 2: well because it tends to be as it always it
Speaker 2: tends to be just progressive progressives saying that's false, but
Speaker 2: things on our side are true. And of course that
Speaker 2: was part of the big complaint during COVID that the
Speaker 2: Biden administration was working with the social media companies to
Speaker 2: suppress right wing ideas, and it's true that actually happened,
Speaker 2: and so the right completely does not trust the left,
Speaker 2: and the left over and over again does what it
Speaker 2: can to betray the trust.
Speaker 1: But how do you see the visions? I mean, societies
Speaker 1: are pretty divided. Do you see that divide being better?
Speaker 2: No, it's going to get worse and worse forever, I
Speaker 2: think forever, or is there I can't say forever? What
Speaker 2: I can say so in general, my suspicion, my suspicion
Speaker 2: is that this year is the calmest, most sane and
Speaker 2: normal year that will ever have and that will be
Speaker 2: true ever you're going forward, because so I began to
Speaker 2: think this before we were all thinking about AI. I'm
Speaker 2: a social psychologist and looking at the conditions for democracy.
Speaker 2: Founding fathers of the United States knew that democracy always
Speaker 2: blows up. You don't want the people and their passions
Speaker 2: to be swayed by demagogues, and so in America we
Speaker 2: don't have a democracy by design. We have a republic
Speaker 2: with democratic elements. And that was predicated in the idea
Speaker 2: that information moves slowly, and if something terrible happens in Boston,
Speaker 2: it's going to take weeks for it to reach Washington,
Speaker 2: or a week or two. So all of our suppositions
Speaker 2: about democratic discussion are out the window now that everything's
Speaker 2: on Twitter and x and other forms of social media.
Speaker 2: So I think, especially the American form is going to
Speaker 2: be sorely tested, and I don't know that it's going
Speaker 2: to hold. I think we might have to have major
Speaker 2: change in reinvention. I don't know that the American project
Speaker 2: is going to the American experiment is going to continue
Speaker 2: in its present form. There are other countries I don't
Speaker 2: know enough about. There may be much more stability elsewhere.
Speaker 2: But my point is, if you think about a community
Speaker 2: that is trying imperfectly to get at truth, or public opinion.
Speaker 2: We're not going to get that again for a long time. Now.
Speaker 2: The digital technology in the theory could give us the
Speaker 2: best democracies ever, and so there's a real possibility that
Speaker 2: we go through ten to fifty years of chaos and
Speaker 2: disruption as when the printing press came in, and then
Speaker 2: fifty years from now we have the most amazing societies ever.
Speaker 2: Is that's my hope. But we're not going to get
Speaker 2: It's not going to come in five or ten years.
Speaker 2: It's going to take a lot longer than that, is
Speaker 2: my prediction. Nobody knows. I don't want to be too
Speaker 2: confident here, but as a social psychologist, I think the
Speaker 2: conditions for the liberal democracies of the Gutenberg era based
Speaker 2: on text are now not holding.
Speaker 1: I did warn everyone it was going to be a
Speaker 1: depressing conversation.
Speaker 2: It's exciting, I hope, right. This is all about the future.
Speaker 2: Pressing John.
Speaker 1: When you see how close Elon Musk is to President Trump,
Speaker 1: how Mark Zuckerberg is close to President Trump, what does
Speaker 1: that mean for regulation?
Speaker 2: Oh my god? I mean in America, we've always had
Speaker 2: the problem that you can buy influence so cheap. It's
Speaker 2: so cheap to give money to a campaign, and we
Speaker 2: have you know, we have all these problems about money
Speaker 2: and politics. Those have been there my whole life, and
Speaker 2: now suddenly it's like exponentially worse. And the fact that
Speaker 2: the President of the United States launched his own cryptocurrency,
Speaker 2: the Dave. I mean, this is completely insane. This is
Speaker 2: complete corruption, This should be completely illegal. And but so
Speaker 2: much stuff is going on that, like, you know, we
Speaker 2: don't even know what to object to. So the fact
Speaker 2: that the richest and one of the most powerful men
Speaker 2: in the world is now such a powerful man in
Speaker 2: terms of policies that will affect his own company. I
Speaker 2: greatly admire the man. He is a benefactor of humanity
Speaker 2: for the major things he's doing. But my god, I
Speaker 2: mean it's just you know, democracy or government one oh
Speaker 2: one is you know, you don't just like let the
Speaker 2: major people who run industries write their own laws with
Speaker 2: the backing of the executive I mean, so it's we're
Speaker 2: in for a wild ride, That's what I'm telling you.
Speaker 2: It's going to get a lot weirder.
Speaker 1: What's TikTok? Is TikTok a test on what happens to TikTok?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Absolutely, I mean TikTok is such a national security threat,
Speaker 2: and it's not just because of the privacy and the data.
Speaker 2: That's what the court case focused on. I have an
Speaker 2: essay up on my substack go to afterbabtle dot com
Speaker 2: titled TikTok is harming kids at an industrial scale. We
Speaker 2: just took quotes from company employees, just their own words
Speaker 2: that came out in legal briefs because they're being sued
Speaker 2: by a lot of states, just their own words. They
Speaker 2: know they are addicting kids, they're exposing them to sexual predation.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's horrible what this company is doing to
Speaker 2: American kids, not to Chinese kids. Douyenne is much more healthy,
Speaker 2: but the version they give us is by design addictive
Speaker 2: and stupefying. And this is a national security threat. So
Speaker 2: I cannot believe that Trump is going to reverse this.
Speaker 2: Oh wait, a second policy doesn't matter. Money talks, okay, John.
Speaker 1: We also have actually our very own well thing that
Speaker 1: we're putting out by Olivia Carville, and this is something
Speaker 1: that we're want to alert it to. It's called It's
Speaker 1: a documentary You Can't Look Away, and it talks about
Speaker 1: the transformative effects of social media on mental health. So
Speaker 1: what would you do for your own kids, depending on
Speaker 1: how old they are? No social media.
Speaker 2: Unto Yeah, right, So let me give you the four norms.
Speaker 2: The reason that we're so lost in this is because
Speaker 2: each of us, as individual parents, try to do something
Speaker 2: and then our kids says the magic phrase, what is it? Please? Mom?
Speaker 2: I'm the own No, mom, I'm the only one. I'm
Speaker 2: the only one who doesn't have a smartphone only with
Speaker 2: the kids are making fun of me. I'm excluded. So
Speaker 2: we're caught in a collective action trap. We each give in,
Speaker 2: which makes it harder for everybody else to do the
Speaker 2: right thing. So the way out is collective action. That's
Speaker 2: what my book is about. And that's I think why
Speaker 2: the book is doing so well. Is am I just saying,
Speaker 2: oh my god, look at all the problems and saying, actually,
Speaker 2: once we understand how we got here, we can get
Speaker 2: out if many or most of us do four things here.
Speaker 2: It is no smartphone until high school in the US
Speaker 2: or fourteen, let's say, no smartphone before age fourteen. Let
Speaker 2: them have a flip phone. You can text with them.
Speaker 2: You can't be on a flip phone twelve hours a day,
Speaker 2: but a smartphone. Half of your kids will be on
Speaker 2: smartphone fourteen hours a day. So no smart before fourteen,
Speaker 2: no social media before sixteen. What age should kids be
Speaker 2: when they start talking to sextortionists and child molesters around
Speaker 2: the world. I think sixteen is probably, you know, maybe higher,
Speaker 2: but at least sixteen. The third norm is phone free schools,
Speaker 2: and this one is happening all over the world really rapidly.
Speaker 2: Brazil just announced they're going to do it. So if
Speaker 2: your kids go to school where the kids can have
Speaker 2: access to their phones during the day and you can
Speaker 2: text them, your kid is not getting a good education.
Speaker 2: Your kid is getting much worse education because they can't
Speaker 2: pay attention to even to their friends. And then the
Speaker 2: fourth norm is far more free play, independence and responsibility
Speaker 2: in the real world. All of us almost let me
Speaker 2: just ask you, how old were you when you could
Speaker 2: go out on your bicycle and go see your friends
Speaker 2: just yell it out? Around What age did you get independence?
Speaker 2: Just yell it out? Yeah, six to eight is if
Speaker 2: five six eight, that's when we all got it. The
Speaker 2: world is so much safer now than it was when
Speaker 2: we were growing up. So many of us grew up
Speaker 2: in America during a crime wave. So the world's gotten
Speaker 2: much safer, but we don't trust our neighbors. Again, not
Speaker 2: in all European countries, but in the Anglo countries. We
Speaker 2: don't trust our neighbors. We don't trust our kids to
Speaker 2: go out, and that's part of why they spend their
Speaker 2: whole lives on screens. We've got to give them back
Speaker 2: an exciting, fun in person childhood. And that's the hardest
Speaker 2: one because that's the one we have to give up
Speaker 2: something and we have to be a little afraid. And
Speaker 2: then after a few times, you realize, wait, my kid
Speaker 2: can ride his bicycle to a friend's house and come back.
Speaker 1: John, thanks you so much for joining us. John Hayde
Speaker 1: there joining us on the Anxious Generation.
Speaker 2: Thank you, USA.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to this episode In the City from Bloomberg.
Speaker 1: It was hosted by Me from sin Laqua was produced
Speaker 1: by Summer Saudi and Moses and Dam. Sound designed by
Speaker 1: Blake Maples. Brendan frances Human is our executive producer. Special
Speaker 1: thanks to Jonathan Hayde. Please subscribe, rate, and review wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to podcasts.