Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang believes today’s young people face a fundamentally different world than he did in his twenties, and not necessarily for the better.
In a conversation on A Bit Personal with Jodi Shelton, Huang made a striking declaration: if given the choice, he would relive his twenties in his own era rather than experience them today.
“I would relive it in our day,” Huang said without hesitation. “And the reason for that is because I thought that our 20s was happier than these 20s.”
According to Huang, the distinction centers on a quality that might seem counterintuitive: ignorance. In his view, the constant flood of information available to young people today has created a generation that is overly informed, cynical, and burdened before they have built the emotional reserves to handle it all.
“I think everyone deserves some time to be oblivious and not to have not to wear all of the world’s problems on their shoulder on day one,” Huang explained. “I just don’t think it’s necessary. Nobody can convince me of it otherwise. There’s some joy in ignorance and there’s a superpower in ignorance.”
Huang credits his own ignorance for making Nvidia possible. The company, which he co-founded in 1993, has become one of the most consequential technology companies in history. But he readily admits that had he known what lay ahead, he might never have started.
“Nvidia would not be possible today if not for the fact that I was ignorant to the fact that it’s impossible to build Nvidia,” he said. “In fact it’s impossible to build Nvidia. You can’t build Nvidia. You just can’t. But nobody can convince me otherwise because I didn’t know any better.”
This optimistic ignorance served as a form of armor, allowing him to approach challenges with the attitude of “how hard can it be?” The answer, he now knows, is “really hard.” But that realization came gradually, allowing him to build resilience along the way.
“If you would have known everything then that you know now and all the feelings and all the setbacks and all the disappointments and you bottle all of that up and you put it all in one place, you would never do it,” Huang reflected. “I would never do it.”
Huang argues that today’s young people lack that protective ignorance. They are exposed to too much, too soon, creating a premature cynicism that can be paralyzing.
“I feel that we’re raising generation of very cynical, too informed. They’re cynical not because they’re inherently cynical. They’re cynical because they just see so much stuff, right? It’s too much stuff,” he said. “There’s time for that. We have to build up some internal reserve of optimism. We have to build up some internal reserve of goodness that you see only the good. You have to find a way to build up that muscle.”
That muscle of optimism, he believes, was easier to develop in his generation. Without smartphones and constant connectivity, there was simply less information to process, less comparison to make, and more room for pure ambition untainted by doubt.
“We did that in our 20s. When we’re optimistic, we’re super human and everything was possible,” he said.
While young people today may have access to more information than any generation in history, Huang believes there are certain lessons that cannot be learned through screens or videos.
“You could always repeat those things by reading it. These days you could always watch YouTube and if you’re sufficiently empathetic, you could kind of feel what other people are going through,” he acknowledged. “But there’s the grit that comes along with enduring the knowledge of how to deal with pain and suffering, the feelings of it. Not the physical feelings, but the emotional toil and going through the agony part of it, the fear part of it.”
Those emotional experiences, he argues, are irreplaceable. “I don’t know how you learn those things without actually going through it,” he said.
For Huang, growing up in an earlier era meant facing challenges without the burden of knowing exactly how difficult they would be. It meant making decisions without the paralysis that comes from seeing too many potential outcomes.
“Optimistic people, you can’t convince them that they can’t make it better. They’re so ignorant. They’re so oblivious to the truth that they are optimistic. How is that a bad thing?” he asked.
The answer in his view is clear: it’s not a bad thing at all. In fact, it might be exactly what allowed his generation to build the technological world that today’s young people now inhabit, even as they struggle under the weight of knowing too much about it.
