Titan of Commodities, Margarita Louis-Dreyfus on Investing in Our Future | Lunches with Legends #46

Thank you very much, Mo, for presenting me, for inviting me. It's a big honor for me and pleasure to speak to you, to speak to your audience. Honestly, I don't do very much, but speaking with you, I said to myself, okay, the topic for me is very interesting. I'm speaking right now about children, our future, and what is going on today with them. I have five children myself, and so it gives me some perspective on personal family life with five children, and of course also on the company, because our company is a family company which is 175 years old, started by the grandfather of my late husband, Robert Louis-Dreyfus.

Yeah, I was born in the other world, I have to say. It's like another planet, but I still remember well what my experiences were. As a child, I had to support my family from the age of seven. On weekends I was working... My older children were born before the time of social media and digital childhood. They learned how to manage their lives through real-life experiences. They were not emotionally isolated from me and their father, which is very important, as I know now. But I still made the same mistake like a lot of parents around me. I tried to protect my children from all worries and problems. I wanted to give them a perfect childhood where there was only sunny weather all the time. This was my big mistake. Now with my little daughters, I'm trying not to repeat this mistake by sharing with them my worries and guiding them how to support me and our family. My childhood, where support of my family was probably the most important thing for me, made me really strong for the rest of my life.

Yeah, I understand what you mean. It is a big challenge to wish to grow our children as grounded and caring humans. It was always on my mind, and of course on the mind of my late husband Robert. We wanted our sons not to be spoiled by luxury. Robert was a famous businessman and had not only financial privileges but he was also a celebrity—not only as a businessman but also through our participation in the soccer club Marseille in Europe. It is pretty famous, and everywhere we went, people recognized him. The status of celebrity creates even stronger challenges to remain a decent man, a decent human. Robert and I discussed this challenge for our children often but could not find a clear educational strategy for the situation. Luckily, Robert by himself was not only a very intelligent man but also very humble. He showed his sons by his example how to deal with power over people—that power is not a privilege but a responsibility. Luckily, at that time Robert and I were not competing with social media in explaining what the values of life are. Additionally, to our family atmosphere, I brought my sons from the age of 15 every summer to educational projects—like building houses in Armenia after an earthquake, or teaching English to children in an orphanage in Mongolia. Later they started to work during summer vacations in our family company, but not in the offices. They were working in the fields to learn the hard work of farmers, in order to think about it later when they would take responsibility for farmers. So with all these projects, I was trying to show them what real life is. But of course, the wealth was a shadow over their childhood all the time.

Maybe because I was speaking with them about challenges in life since they were really small, through fairy tales and stories, they kind of expected that life is not everywhere so sunny. But there was, for example, a funny situation. One time—they were like 13—they went to Thailand, to the forest. There was a village in Thailand that had no electricity, and my sons were participating in a program to build small electrical power plants in each village. They were building a dam, together with the children, with the whole community—small river, small village. Part of this, they had to bring sacks full of sand to the river. My sons were pretty big boys by then, and the children of the same age in Thailand were much smaller. My son told me afterward, 'Mama, I don't know—these boys, they just took one bag of sand and were running to the river and back. And I took the bags of sand and it was so difficult. Probably they're eating something very special, that they are so strong.' He didn't realize that these children were strong because their life was different. He thought it was a special food. For me, it was one of the funny moments showing how still my children were so far from reality. But of course, with each project, they were growing. I always said to them, 'You are so privileged. Later, one day, you will take care of these people. Through our company, you will care for them. So you have to remember how it was to be in their place.'

It was very difficult to teach my sons the value of money, because they knew that their parents could buy almost anything for them. We could not hide this. With all the projects I mentioned, we were trying to teach our sons that money can be made and lost, but that human relationships and self-esteem are what make life worth living and getting up every morning. The biggest power in humans can be born mainly out of life purpose. If people have a purpose, they feel fulfillment whether having a lot of money or having no money. Today, so many privileged teens are in depression because they have so much more than previous generations. But it happens because these children are emotionally isolated from their parents and feel no purpose to support their family or anybody else—no commitments. I was trying to switch attention from money to purpose. But we had our challenges, and with the age of 15 and 16, some situations were very difficult for me. Now, looking back, I have to say we parents need a lot of patience and trust in our children. Everything I gave them before the age of the challenging age of 14 helped very much. I could still feel the emotional connection to them built in the years before. But between 14 and maybe 17, there were many challenges, and they were also connected to money. It took me a lot of strength not to lose my faith.

Okay. Purpose for me—at the beginning it's a wish, but in reality it's really a commitment to help somebody, not yourself. And for children, that somebody is their family. It is natural. They want to be loved by their family and to love their parents and their family. It is a natural wish, and we as parents can build on it. I cannot expect my children to have a purpose to help African people—they can do it by their brain, but not yet by their hearts, because they don't know them. But they can love their grandparents, their parents, and care for them. But if we don't support this care, this natural purpose disappears pretty quickly and becomes just a feeling of 'I'm supposed to be surrounded by love,' but it doesn't create the sense that I give my love and I give my care. If you ask children, 'Do you love your parents?' all of them will say yes. But what do you do exactly to support your parents? At the age of two, five, ten years old, many children have nothing to answer. They don't do anything to support their parents. I think we parents have to give them the first opportunity when they're two years old, but with the wish that by eight or ten years old, children already feel it as a duty to support. They feel it inside—they cannot avoid it. It is inside them, like it was for me as a child. It was so normal to put myself on the side and know that supporting my family is the main priority of today. So the purpose for children is to support their family—whoever is in the family, grandparents or parents, it doesn't matter—but the people who are very special to them. They are born with a special link to the family. Later, this link will go to society and to the group, but while children are still small, the purpose is the family.

In conversations with my sons, I tried always to align our plans for today with a family vision for the long term. Of course, we are speaking about the company—I was always about the company, what it is doing and how we can support it. At every decision, as future shareholders or company managers, we should remember the family vision and care for it. So family legacy is for me not a shadow over individual identity, but a supporting compass not to forget what is really important in life: personal care, a commitment to other people, and most of the time, the family. With my little daughters, I have experience now. I started speaking with them about purpose—I don't use the word 'purpose' with them. When they were three or four years old, everything I said was, 'What you are doing, it should be for somebody.' So they are doing a painting, and before, with my son, like many parents, I would say, 'Oh my God, how beautiful.' Now I say, 'It is beautiful, but for whom did you do it? For your grandfather who has a headache—he's 90 years old and has a headache, and looking at your painting, he will forget about his headache for five minutes.' And now they are so used to it that when they do their paintings, they tell me, 'Mama, I'm doing this for my grandfather, for my sister, for my little baby.' Everything they do, I ask them, 'For whom?' Even in school, when they're learning to calculate, to write—I say, 'You learn to do it for somebody. Somebody who cannot write, you are going to read for them. Somebody who cannot swim, you are going to save his life, because this is why you take swimming lessons. You learn piano because music is medicine for people, and listening to it, people forget their worries or their pain.' And even in our school, I speak to the teachers. So many children have lost not only purpose but emotional connection to the family. I tell the teachers: ask the children questions. For example, 'What is the favorite song of your father?' Do the children know it? Most of them do not. They would know their own favorite song, but not their father's or mother's. The children should go home and ask their parents about this song. Then the children should learn about their parents to create an interest in them. Through this interest, emotional connection will grow. The next stage—the teachers ask, 'What is your project for this weekend? How can you make joy to your mom or to your father?' But most children today don't even know what they can do for their parents. It is us parents who have to think about it and ask them for help. My girls see me writing emails on my computer, and sometimes they ask, 'Mom, can we help you?' I give them short text to write for me. I say, 'I have a headache, can you write this for me?'—and I don't have any headache. Right now, at their age, they are very happy to do it. As I read in a children's psychology book, after age 10 or 12, if they never helped you as parents, they will lose the joy to do it. Every time you ask them, it will be a fight. We have to get them used to helping us, but we have to use our fantasy to find ways to get this help. Today our children are completely isolated. They have no duties at home—only maybe to bring good grades from school. Nothing else. And this creates isolation, and out of isolation comes loneliness.

Okay. Our children are privileged. During the last 15 years, I met many families where parents were thinking about how to pass their companies or wealth to their children. It became much more complicated because a lot of children just don't care for family companies or parents' values. These children were brought up in wealth and learned that they are born to fulfill all their own dreams. Sometimes these dreams are aligned with taking care of the family business, and sometimes not. There are no real commitments to family vision. Such attitude is the result of education where parents, like I did with my sons, isolated children from any responsibility, from appreciation of the efforts and dreams of previous generations. This was my big mistake. In reality, all children need to feel connected—to be connected and committed to at least some family values. It makes them stronger. Now I know how important it is to speak with children from the very early age about the grandparents who created and cared for family businesses, or why they did so. I explain to my little daughters that they are a small part of a long family chain, and they all are responsible for this chain—for the past and for the future. My girls like very much to be part of a chain like this. I hope that my daughters will never feel alone. They are surrounded by dreams and sacrifices which many generations made for them to be able to live today. I speak with them a lot about sacrifices—what our grandparents did for us. The dream and vision of grandchildren like us today gave them so much strength to overcome amazing challenges where there was no medicine, or there were wars and hunger. This gives them a feeling of appreciation, gratitude towards previous generations, and also responsibility. I say to my children, because they hear from other children, 'I'm here only for myself, to enjoy life'—I tell them, 'Do you want to live forever? Because there is only one way to live forever: through your own children, through the generation to come.' And they want to live forever. Luckily for me, they are already dreaming of giving our vision, our care, to their children.

If we are speaking about our family company, yes. With my boys, we spoke a lot about family history—not only business but family history. Who were these grandfathers? How did they start? How did they do it? Speaking about it, I was trying to give them the feeling of pride. That is the first feeling. And then, of course, the feeling of responsibility. And especially my late husband—he was an amazing family man for family values. His responsibility to his family heritage was very strong and visible for our children. But we did make a mistake. They saw how he cared for family responsibilities towards the company, and at the same time we said to our children, 'You are born free. Just be a good citizen, do everything you want, but do good.' We spoke about the family company, but we didn't make this connection to them as they were small—you have to take care of the company. We never said this. And this was a mistake, now I know. Luckily, due to all the other projects we did, and that I sent them to the companies to work when they were young, they still developed it by themselves. But now I know we have to speak about it. We cannot let them free out of it. It doesn't matter that they should go and work in the company, but they should care—as shareholders or as managers. They should feel the care of the grandparents or the parents who started the company. We were lucky that the care for the company got in their blood. Right now, only one of them is in the company. This one who is in the company, he's like his father—very humble. I have no fear that he would abuse his name. He's been two years in the company, and it's confirmed that he is humble by nature, and the responsibility inside him is so strong. He is a little afraid to make a mistake with his family company, so he's ready to learn a lot and not to take unnecessary risks. He also has his own small investments where he takes risks, but he doesn't take risks with the company. He's not in a managing position—he doesn't want it. He wants to learn. He stays very close to key people and has his own project inside the company. His main thing is to learn, and before he takes a decision for his project, he speaks with many people inside the company. They appreciate that he shows them respect and appreciates the mentorship from each side. Altogether, it's team membership that he is enjoying. I'm very happy that the feeling of responsibility—he's not free, yes, he's bound, but at the same time, it's his strength. In a crisis or something, this same feeling of responsibility will guide him out of it and give him strength.

Do you mean in the shadow of the father, or in the shadow—what shadow?

From everything I said before—to involve children in our worries, to share with them. We are not geniuses. My oldest son had a very clear sign of being overshadowed. Children's psychologists told me—and this is why my oldest son said he would never go into the business when he was six years old—because the powerful image of the father, where everybody said, 'What a genius businessman he is,' was killing my boy's wish to become a businessman. This was a mistake. The solution is to involve the children from a very young age, to share with them in conversations. 'My son, my daughter, I had a difficult day today. This is a challenge, but I have to deal with it.' Share not only success but also challenges. Not ask for advice, but let them be part of the conversation. This way, I think the risk of the shadow will be less. For my son who is now in the company, the shadow of his ancestors is there. He should be very strong to overcome it. One of my personal ways to help him is to give him practice—he has to learn from his own mistakes. This is why he has his own project now. He didn't come to the company to become straight away a manager of something big. He needs to have his own decisions, his own mistakes, and his own success to realize his strengths. I know he is very intelligent, but he doesn't know it. He has to build his own experience. Children in such situations need personal projects from around the age of 12—not necessarily connected to the company, but it should be their personal. In my childhood, my personal project was to care for the family. I remember going shopping and a couple of times losing the money and having to come home without money and without shopping. I had to overcome this feeling and find solutions. There were many situations where I had to find solutions, and it made me strong every time. This is what our children are generally missing today, and especially the children who have a powerful parent. They especially need this personal experience.

Thank you. How is the digitalization of childhood changing children, and what kind of adults will they be after this digital childhood? The answer is very important for our society. In order to find it, I created the Human Change Campaign, which is a coalition of parents, educators, psychologists, pediatricians, and clinicians. Our goal is to collect relevant information based on scientific research and together search for solutions. Today we are experiencing a unique digital transformation of our world and enjoying many wonderful technical innovations. These transformations bring great opportunities, but they bring great risks too. More and more experts speak about how digital addiction is changing our society. Adults have better chances to deal with this because we grew up before the creation of such addictive digital programs and could develop life skills needed to resist addictions. Today, most children are growing surrounded by new addictive technologies all the time. In pre-digital time, children's development happened mainly in personal interactions with family members, free play, and daily opportunities with their peers. Now too many children prefer to live in virtual reality. They don't have enough time to develop the social, intellectual, and even physical skills needed to become resilient and successful. This process is not yet obvious to our society because children are drifting into the digital world silently. In the Western world, we are now 11 years into the largest epidemic of adolescent mental illness ever recorded. Many researchers show that a lot of adolescents spend an average of eight hours a day online. Kids are getting digital devices at younger and younger ages. By 2015, when gaming became even more sophisticated, a staggering number of boys said they were lonely and had no close friends, and that there was no meaning or direction in their lives. Even in schools, digital education replaces more and more in-person communications with teachers. As a result, the trend to purchase a digital partner is growing, especially for young men, because real relationships become too complicated for them. Families with family businesses are experiencing the same challenges because the connection between family members is getting looser and looser. The price of losing contact with reality is high. In just five years, between 2010 and 2015, across the UK, the US, Canada, and Australia, the number of children with anxiety, depression, and even suicidal tendencies increased roughly by 150%. The rate of self-harm by young teen girls nearly tripled from 2010 to 2020. The suicide rate for young adolescents in the US increased by 67% from 2010 to 2021. Researchers in Europe confirm the same trends. In Switzerland, there are so many children who need psychological support that the waiting list for treatment became longer than a year—an unprecedented situation for Switzerland, where we have the most doctors per capita in Europe. Just as we don't allow children to drive cars or gamble in casinos until they're old enough to understand the risks, we should similarly protect them from digital addiction. A digital-free childhood is crucial because it provides children with enough occasions to develop the needed skills to successfully manage their lives as adults. This is even more important now in a digital society with AI. AI is going to change everything, and our children are fully in this big experiment, and nobody knows how it will impact them. The dangers are very big. This digital childhood—I call it everything included: social media, gaming, digital education. More and more teens, even 20-year-olds, don't know how to speak with each other. We in our company are now speaking about a new generation—the unproductive generation. Twenty-five years old, they cannot concentrate, they cannot work under stress, they cannot support criticism. They fall into a mental crisis at every moment. I checked the numbers in Canada today—the mental health of the workforce—and it's growing. But everything is ahead of us, because the 10-year-old children of today are fully in this digital childhood. How they're going to manage human life—that is a big question.

Hope dies last, as we know. During the last 12 months, many things happened positively. In the US, there are many new initiatives. In Canada, I know one guy we're working with—he's responsible for about 45 teachers and is trying to free children, at least during school time, from digital devices, which is already great. In Switzerland, I go to pick up my children at school, and in the breaks after school, every child has their device and they are not speaking with each other. It's amazing how our society in Switzerland is letting our children down. But luckily, there is an initiative called 'Mama' against digital addiction for children. And now in the UK, just three months ago, the 'Smartphone-Free Childhood' platform started. I spoke with the founder—it's spreading amazingly, only two and a half months in. What these people are doing is promising each other, as parents, not to give their children a smartphone, at least until the age of 12. By doing this, they created a new part of society where children of the age of 10 can visit each other without having a smartphone in hand. Children go to birthday parties—ages 10, 14—and everybody is on their devices, even at the party. If parents promise each other this, they help their children overcome addiction. These projects give all of us hope. These people from the UK told me they had a webinar for people around the globe who want to do the same in their country. They had 30 countries signed up, and luckily for me, two from Switzerland. A little hope for Switzerland. We can do things. But it's not enough to just free children from smartphones. It could have been enough 20 years ago, but not anymore. If we take away this digital world from children who are already so immersed in it, there will be emptiness. How do we fill this emptiness? Here we need the purpose of the family. My girls don't have smartphones and won't until 14, maybe 16. But I hear from many parents about 'digital detox' for their children—it's very dangerous, because there's really nothing inside the child. If you take it away, he has no life—the whole life is digital. These children need very strong support. We parents have to give a lot of effort to replace this digital world inside children. Children are suffering from all this competition, the daily life of likes, appearance, what you ate. It's all growing inside our children—negative feelings, no values, no purpose—just to sell themselves for any price. And it's destroying them as human beings. If we compare it to the tobacco industry—when a child started smoking at 12 and stopped one day, maybe he could still have a healthy life. But if children are destroyed by digital addiction and erasing values until age 18, for most children it's late. They can never recover. Can you imagine what it means not to be able to create relationships—the most important thing in our life? They're not able. They have 'situationships'—that's the maximum—or digital partners. What does this mean for our society and for these young people in 20 years?