10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People by David Yeager | One Episode Special!

Welcome to Readers, the podcast for the lifelong learner.

Join us on our weekly dose of wisdom where we talk about the real-life lessons and applications of books. Enjoy! Welcome back to Readers, everyone. Today we're gonna be doing something just a little bit different. We're gonna do a one-episode special covering an entire book in one conversation. You know, I want to set expectations right away. Today we're gonna be reviewing 10 to 25 by Dr. Yeager, and this is not just another parenting tips book. It's not a lecture about how kids these days Are Broken. And in fact, the whole point of this book is that the way most adults try to motivate young people— the telling, the shaming, the threatening, or on the flip side, the coddling and lowering of standards— doesn't just fail to work, it actually backfires, right? And the science explains why. Today our guest is Dr. David Yeager. He's one of the world's leading researchers on adolescent motivation and development. He's a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. He also holds the Raymond Dixon Centennial Professorship, and his research focuses on motivation, adolescence, aggression, social cognitive development, and psychological interventions. He's been recognized as one of the top 0.1% most cited psychologists in the world over the past decade. He's been named one of Education Week's top 10 education scholars in America for 2 consecutive years, received the American Psychological Award's Distinguished Contribution Award in 2020, along with over 20 other career awards since 2012. That would take way too much time for me to all repeat today. So with that lengthy, uh, introduction, It's an absolute pleasure to have you on today, David. Thanks for hopping on.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

I'd love to, you know, just to kind of start here, I'd love to hear a little bit about you, your work. Obviously, you've been very well recognized for this, and I'm sure a lot of our listeners have probably heard of you or your work as well. Right. But we'd just love to hear about, you know, how you kind of started off in this space, you know, why you wrote the book, what it's all about. And yeah, just a quick intro from you as well.

For sure.

Yeah.

Like, my, my journey to this work was kind of interesting. I didn't start out wanting to be an academic. Or even a scholar. Um, I was kind of more interested in like big philosophical questions about meaning and purpose and like society and things like that. Um, and I ended up, uh, I, I did what's called a Great Books major in college. So, um, it— you kind of read the canon of the Western tradition, you know, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, all the way up to contemporary writers. And, and there's no lectures. You just, uh, debate, uh, with your peers, and a professor is like a guide in your conversations. And I love that, enjoyed it, and that kind of got me into thinking about education as a field in general. And so rather than, um, go into more of like a corporate job or law school, I decided to go become a middle school teacher and try to do service. And so I went and worked in a low-income middle school and, and served kids. It was in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I had a great time. I enjoyed it, but it was very hard. Working like 100-hour weeks, made $12,000 a year. Uh, it was very exhausting. And although I did like it, I ultimately decided to go back to graduate school mainly because I felt like I had gathered some ideas about what might work better to motivate young people. And I wanted to study them in our research. And that really propelled me forward. I ended up at Stanford and then, then got my first job at UT Austin where I've been ever since then. And it's been a lot of fun, but the book came from 15 years of research on those topics of how to motivate and engage young people, drawing on my own experience in the classroom. And I just felt like it was time to wrap it all up into one digestible idea. And so, that's where the book idea came from.

Yeah, I love it. And you know, this book, 10 to 25, right? The Science of Motivating Young People. This is, I mean, I think you underplay it, man. Like, this is an incredible, it's a national bestseller. It's a USA Today bestseller. It's become a major book you know, for parents, educators, coaches, mentors, and managers just trying to better understand people in the pivotal ages of 10 to 25, right? This book's obviously received plenty of recognition— the Eleanor Maccoby Book Award in Developmental Psychology from the American Psychological Association. It was named one of the best parenting books of the year, you know, by UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center. And, you know, today we're going to be moving through pretty much the whole book and just covering main concepts, right? Why, you know, the incompetence model is wrong, why the what the 3 mindsets that adults fall into, 5 concrete practices that actually work, and what it looks like when someone actually is able to build an entire culture around getting this right, right? From a physics classroom in El Paso to a NASA lab at Vanderbilt to a summer camp in, you know, Texas Hill Country. So without further ado, let's dive right in.

Great.

Awesome. You know, so David, before we get into any of the science here, right? I want to start with you, right? Like you mentioned, before you became a researcher, you lived and worked in an orphanage in Chile called the Hogar de Niños San Jose, right? And later you taught middle school English in Tulsa, Oklahoma, like you mentioned. You describe yourself as having almost a deficit view of the children at the orphanage, right? Thinking mainly about what they lacked. And there was a woman there, Tía Carmen, who took you aside one day, you know, did a karate chop on her hand to show you the straight and narrow and said, "But I love them. I want to have high standards and support." Talk to us about those two experiences. You know, what were you getting wrong? How did Tía Carmen first show you what you'd later go on to call the mentor mindset.

Yeah, it's, it's super interesting. That story stuck with me. I, um, so I went to University of Notre Dame and they have a summer service program called ISSLP. And they, um, it's like, at the time it was like competitive, it was an honor. And you, you get picked and then they send you to a foreign country to go work in service. And you do it not really as a resume builder. You do it because you, you want to learn more about changing the world. And the internal logic of it is, if you go and live with people experiencing poverty, experiencing suffering, etc., and you're able to work with people, then in the future, if you ever became a leader and actually had access to resources and infrastructure, then you would come up with much more compassionate ideas. But also hopefully during the time while you're in service, you're also directly influencing and benefiting the people you're working with, which all sounds fine. But the, but the, the challenge— this is anyone who's done service would have this challenge— is if you're like fine and comfortable and have all kinds of opportunity and you go work in an area that's, that's destitute in many ways, then it's, it's hard to not have a deficit model about the people you're serving because they're defined to you in part by the role you're taking on in terms of what they lack.

Yeah.

And that's like front of mind. So then I was assigned to work at an orphanage in Chile and I went and worked on basically youth programming. So I would run programs all day for them. I had to make stuff up and think on the fly and it was a lot of fun. But you're also thinking in your head, yeah, this is a program for orphans, you know, and like and, and orphans are defined primarily by what they lack, which is parents. Yeah. And so you're kind of on eggshells, like, I don't want to distress them because what if it triggers them to think, you know, I'm alone. And so I would end up, uh, basically letting kids run the show. I was like, I'm not here to just discipline everybody and put them in timeout. Like, I don't want to be this disciplinarian. I want to give the kids a moment of joy. And then they just would walk all over me. And I would end the day thinking, I don't think I helped these kids because they, it was chaos. Yeah. And there was another, and we all were called tíos and tías. And so there was an older woman, she was, she was probably forties at the time. And she would just laugh at me, just like, just like, just look like such a stupid gringo who didn't know what he was doing. And she was like, David, yo soy así. And she puts her hand like on her hand. And, and so, which meant like, I'm firm. Like, you're not going to mess around with me. And it's true, the kids did not break the rules around her, but they loved her and they would like flock around her leg and hug her. And she was this mix of like super lovable and super firm. And she ended up treating me that way. Like, she was like, dude, you're not doing it right. But she wasn't mad at me. She wasn't disappointed. She was like, you're kind of a dumbass, you know? And I just always remembered that if you start from a deficit view when you're working with somebody else, then you end up either having standards that are too low or trying to fix what's broken about them, and that's just the wrong approach.

Yeah, I love, I love that personal story, and obviously that journey eventually leads to kind of your central argument of the book here, right? And kind of to open with that, right, chapter 1 opens with the story of a woman named Terry Hall, right? She's a woman dying of cancer from smoking, and, you know, in the story she's recording her final messages for the CDC, but use this story to introduce what you call the neurobiological incompetence model, right? And The example in this story that kind of was just crazy to me was the Stanford Kidney Transplant Center, right? Where surgeons with near-perfect survival rates couldn't even get a teenager to swallow a pill, right? And these are like the people at the top of their craft. And then, you know, obviously you bring up the example of the Truth anti-smoking campaign, right? Something we even discussed in class. And this is where like an ad man named Alex Bogusky figured out that teens don't smoke because they're stupid about cancer. They smoke 'cause cigarettes meet a deep adolescent need to declare this sort of adult status, right? I'd love for you to kind of break down the incompetence model for us and also tell us about how Bogusky's insight led to one of the most successful public health campaigns in American history, right? And even beyond that, what's the broader lesson for any of our listeners, any parents out there, any coaches, mentors, trying to reach or teach a younger person?

Yeah, I'll give you the kind of historical narrative, which is that, you know, basically throughout all of recorded human history, if you look at writers talking about what it means to be a teenager or an adolescent, right, they have a very negative view that they're basically a broken or ill-formed adult, that their brains aren't thinking about the future, their passions are taking over. And you can see this in metaphors and philosophical tracts how education systems were designed. And what I wanted to call out was that, look, we can have all the pragmatic debates you want about how to deal with young people, but if you don't address your overall belief system, you're never going to do the good stuff, even if I told you it works, because you're going to think it's ridiculous. So for instance, turns out that a great way to motivate young people is to help them internalize the desire to make the healthy choice that helps them in the long run by reframing the healthy choice as consistent with their short-term goals. So in general, it's easier to, to change behavior by convincing someone that it's aligned with what they care about than it is to change behavior by changing what they care about. But like, I could tell you that, and if you just believe fundamentally teenagers make bad choices because their brains are idiotic and their hormones are out of control, you're never going to go above and beyond to reframe like healthy eating or smoking or drug use or whatever it is, right? And so similarly, um, I, I kind of needed an example building on this. And so like a, a related one came from my wife when she was a pediatric nurse at the nephrology clinic at Stanford, and she had to call teenagers who— their, their labs would come in and they would have their Tacro levels at zero. So that means they weren't taking their anti-rejection meds after they'd received a kidney in a transplant surgery. And just think about all the medical miracles that have to happen to get a kidney, right? It's like unbelievable. But 50% of the time, kids weren't taking their meds.

Yeah.

And I was like, it's not a technical problem, actually, it's a behavioral problem. So how could it be the case that in a world in which we're— especially medicine, you're so science-based, you're so focused on like the technical aspects of it that we're this bad at the communication parts. And the only thing that made sense to me is if we just collectively deceive ourselves in our beliefs about what's going to work for young people because we have this belief that I call the neurobiological incompetence model. And that's very simply the idea that teenagers lack a prefrontal cortex, they can't plan ahead, they can't reason logically, in part because their hormones are going nuts.

Yeah.

And that VIEW has, uh, had some utility. It helped— it's helped to reduce lifetime sentences without parole for teenagers, which I think is probably a good development because kids do grow out of things. But it's also been used to say you can't trust any judgment or decision-making among teenagers. And so that— I think this came to the foreground when you look at the Truth campaign, which was the anti-smoking advertisements created in the late 1990s, early 2000s, in response to the tobacco company settlement with the states in the US.

Yeah.

And the tobacco companies had to pay for anti-smoking ads. And the first ideas they came up with were like, think, don't smoke, which is like such an insulting thing to say. Because if I say to you, think, I'm implying that you're not thinking.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

And so that's an insult to your competence. And it's an insult to your autonomy, because it implies that I think I have the right to tell you how and whether to think. So it means I'm positioning myself as in charge of you. And so now you've offended the sensibilities of every teenager. You've called them an idiot and you said they have no choice. And so they, uh, Bogusky was this super interesting guy that I interviewed for my book. He came up with this alternative called the Truth Campaign where they reframed smoking as a way to rebel against adult authority, that you're fighting against the tobacco companies that are treating you like you're dumb, and in fact you're smart and you know that they can't control you, they can't get you hooked. Um, and so you're standing together with your peers and the teenagers, the only ones that have the moral clarity and the, and the competence to point out how wrong the tobacco company's behavior is. And so now that non-smoking is reframed as the healthier choice, but also the smarter choice and specifically the socially approved choice among your peers. Then now adolescents all of a sudden became more interested in being non-smokers. And that, that ad campaign, the Truth Campaign, drove smoking down from about 30% of youth in America to about 6 or 5%.

Oh my goodness.

And like nothing else worked for a long time. They tried like taxes and they tried messages and magazine ads and Just Say No t-shirts, and they tried all this stuff. Nothing worked. It just stayed at 30%. The only thing that worked was something that never said smoking's bad for you and never said not to do it.

Yeah, that's interesting.

It showed you that socially it was more approved.

Yeah.

And I think that's a— there's a lesson. There's two lessons there. One is if you want to change behavior, you have to reframe the behavior in line with values people already have. We call that values alignment. But the second is the adults looked at Think, Don't Smoke and thought it was totally fine. Right. They're like, yeah, this is great. Teenagers aren't thinking, they're idiots. That's why we need to tell them to think. And that didn't help at all. But the thing every adult thought you should do, which is tell them that smoking is bad and they should not do it. If you didn't do that, then that's actually where they got the bigger effects. And so that's, there's a meta lesson there, which is that we have this incompetence belief about adolescents in general, and that negatively affects us in our strategies.

Yeah, I think this brings us to two big ideas that are almost like the conceptual heart of this book, right? And the first here is the adolescent predicament, right? The mismatch between young people's, you know, neurobiological need for status, respect, um, and the level of status their current circumstances can actually afford them, right? And you point out that this doesn't end at 18, right? It applies anytime someone enters a new role where their standing is uncertain. And the second is the three mindsets, right? The enforcer, the protector, and the mentor. And you illustrate these with Kurt Lewin's 1939 Boys Club experiment, Diana Brom Ryan's parenting research, and a physics teacher named Sergio Estrada at Riverside High in El Paso, right? And so I'd love to, you know, I'd love for you to walk us through this mentor mindset, right? Obviously you illustrated that with Tía Carmen at the beginning, but what makes it different from being just tough but fair or nice but demanding? And for the listener thinking that, hey, you know, I kind of recognize myself in you know, I don't know, the enforcer, the protector. Why do you say that this is kind of a belief system that anyone could learn as opposed to a personality trait?

Yeah, I mean, I think what I realize is if you look at the state of affairs, which is, um, A, that what we try with adolescents isn't working, whether it's medication adherence or anti-smoking or even just getting kids to do their homework on time, and societally we have this negative belief system Then I started thinking, well, maybe those two things are linked, that we're doing dumb stuff because we believe wrong stuff. And then I thought, okay, well, what's the logical conclusion? Like, suppose I have a sentence that's like, given that young people are blank, the best way to motivate them is to blank. Like, if I fill out that first blank with, given that young people are hopeless idiots, the best way to motivate them is to I'm not going to say guide them and allow their, their underlying nature to take control while they make great choices. Like, you would never do that. It would be like, these kids are about to hurt themselves or society, I need to use the tools of control to contain them. And so the— there's a whole leadership style that I call the enforcer mindset, which is all about enforcing rules and strict discipline to try to cause a sense of fear of consequences in young people. So they, quote, learn to fear bad things that could happen. And that derives in part from the belief that young people are the worst and are out of control and are dangers, right?

Yeah.

There's another kind of error, which is that young people are stressed out, traumatized, anxious, broken, that basically young people are wet tissue paper, that if you touch them, they're going to fall apart. And if you believe that, then again, if that's your first blank, and young people are, then the way you motivate them is to remove demands, reduce expectations, ask less of them, you know, don't expect so much because they're going to fall apart and be sad if you, if you expect too much. And so I call that the protector mindset. It comes from a belief about young people that they're fragile. And then it comes with an associated set of strategies. And what often happens is people argue over, well, this threat of discipline doesn't work, or you're challenging them too much, you need to reduce demands. They— we argue over the pragmatics, but, but my argument is that the pragmatics are just a derivative of the belief system, and what you really need to do is address the belief system. And the belief system that I think is most aligned with what the science is saying is something I call the mentor mindset. And that's, I believe that young people are capable of good decisions, of being healthy, of getting ahead, of, of doing impressive stuff if they're successfully supported and guided and mentored and they have opportunities to learn from mistakes, etc. And if that's your belief, then you would take a very different approach, whether you're a teacher, you know, trying to get kids to do their homework, or a coach trying to get kids to change their athletic skill. Right. And so, um, that mentor mindset is a combo of high standards and high support. And I argue that it comes from a more accurate belief about young people, which focuses on their potential, not just on their limitations.

Yeah, I love it. I think this chapter 3 here, right, tackles what you call this generational divide. And, you know, you talk about the war over meaning, right? Uh, Aristotle trashed the youth in the 4th century BCE, right? Anna Freud Freud called adolescents excessively egoistic in 1937. Every ruling generation looks down on the next, right? And you call it a cognitive illusion of moral decline, but you describe a real mechanism under it, right? Where young people aren't just hearing— it's fine for me to say young people aren't hearing our words, but, you know, us young people aren't just hearing, you know, our parents' words. They're reading between the lines for whether they're being respected or disrespected, right? And when, you know, a teenager's mom says, did you brush your teeth? The kid hears, I think you're so incompetent that you can't even remember something that simple. And like, yeah, you know, to a lot of people listening out there, they may be thinking like, oh, maybe that's just blowing it out of proportion. I tell my kid to brush every night, you know, but how does the war over meaning make this sort of generational divide feel so much worse than it even has to be? You know, and I'd love to also hear about your perspective, not just as a psychologist, as a scientist, but also as a parent here, right? And how do the stories of Steph Okamoto and Sergio Estrada in Chapter 4 show us kind of a better way out.

Yeah, I mean, I wanted to write that chapter mainly because I got so much interest from business leaders who were like, I got all these young employees, they look entitled, they look lazy. I don't know what to do because in the old days I would just tell them how much money they're going to make and then they would work hard. And now that's not enough. So what do I do? And that just kind of comes across as entitled. Uh, and, and then, and then I simultaneously realized that like the best way to get my mom's generation to click on ads or news stories is to tell them that your generation is the worst. Sure. There's something broken about your generation because you're on your phones or your screens or whatever it is. And it's just, they're— it's an intentional media strategy to create a sense of crisis about the next generation, because the generations that have lots of disposable, you know, funds and nothing to do, and they're just sitting at home all day spending money, like, they realize those are the people we want to sell ads to. Yeah. And their main fear is that their grandkids are set up for failure. And so there's a financial strategy that I don't think is that secret to tell the narrative that Gen Z is broken, feeble, and the worst. And, um, on top of that, there are a subset of like psychologists and pseudo experts who want to sell books, and that's the narrative that they tell. Yeah. And like, I mean, I, I get that like different age groups have different cultural narratives. And that's— it's fine to acknowledge that, you know, if my generation sends a text message but your generation uses Snapchat, like, that's a difference. Like, okay, fine, but that doesn't mean your brain's any different. Like, it doesn't mean like that you're— what drives you is different, right? That your deeper motivations. So I wanted to focus on what is held in common across adolescents, uh, from different generations. But then you still have to explain why it really seems like things are different. And so there's some really interesting work out of, out of Harvard from Dan Gilbert and his graduate student, uh, where they looked at every survey that asked adult generations about the younger generation. And it turns out that older generations basically always think that the next generation is terrible and broken.

Yeah.

And then that generation that formerly was terrible and broken grows up they think the same thing about the next generation.

Sure.

And it's so— it's this cognitive illusion of moral decline. And the reason I think it's an illusion is because when we're teenagers, everything we do feels justified. We're like, well, of course I didn't listen to my parents. They didn't know what they were talking about, and I did.

Yeah.

Then when we grow up, we're like, well, I was successful, and therefore everything I say must be smart. My kids don't listen to me. What's wrong with them?

Yeah.

Like, that just happens to every generation. It's not nothing in particular. Particularly broken about the current generation of young people, it's that the evaluators just got older. That's why I call it an illusion.

Yeah, I think the way chapter 6 kind of shifts from this, uh, sense of transparency to questioning, right, is really cool. Because here you introduce a woman named Lorena Seidel, um, and I think you also introduced two stories here that I think a lot of our parents will maybe not particularly enjoy listening to, but I think they're, they're really interesting stories, right? You talk about Kate who finds her sophomore Jared drunk and high and kind of launches into this spiel of, "What were you thinking?" and "What are you doing?" And then, you know, a story about Gary whose daughter is spending all her time with an older boyfriend in Canada and who just responds by doing nothing, right? Opposite reactions, the same kind of broken outcome. And you give us this concept from the linguist Dora Dembski, you know, the authentic question with uptake. And this was really, really interesting to me because I was wondering, right, what does Lorena mean when she says the problem is never the problem? And what turns an ordinary question into an authentic question with uptake? What does that mean?

So a couple things are happening there. So one is, um, I interviewed this great parenting coach, Lorena Seidel, and I still think she's incredible. Um, and, and I interviewed her clients and got these stories of real conflict that they had to deal with. And, um, a lot of them were stories about how, like, before they started working with Lorena, their instinct was to be very much enforcer or protector, right? And often in a parenting relationship, one parent would just yell, tell, blame, and shame and say— and maybe resent the other parent to say, I have to be this disciplinarian because you don't have any standards and you never hold our kid accountable, and so you just forced me to be this monster. Okay. And the other parent's like, someone's got to protect this child from that lunatic. And so then they're a pushover, and then they're mad at each other because they're both forced to be the parent they don't want to be. Yeah. Okay, so I heard this again and again and again, and I felt like I needed to write something about it. And so I found these stories of real conflict scenarios where parents went one way or the other. Um, it turns out that one great way to resolve a parenting conflict with your kids um, using the mentor mindset is what— to use what's called authentic questions, and specific authentic questions that build on what the other person said. So that's with uptake. So, um, and I saw this with great mentors, I saw it with good NBA coaches, and I definitely saw it with Lorena, is like you make an observation such as, I notice you're really upset right now, it seems like you're really mad at me because I'm making you do this thing you don't want to do. Just tell me a little bit more about why this is hard for you to do right now. I wanna, I'm curious because I wanna know how to help you. If you actually get curious and they say something that is something you didn't anticipate, and then you build on what they said and follow that thread, that's an authentic question with uptake. And I wanna distinguish that from a, like a, just a bad question, which is, what were you thinking? And you see your parents a lot, right? Like a kid comes home late from a party and they're like, I can't believe you were thinking this way. How did this ever make sense to you in your head? And they're not actually curious how it made sense to the kid. They just want to accuse the kid of being an idiot. Right. And so I think, and look, I sympathize with those parents. It makes total sense to me. And yet it's just not effective. Yeah. So I think that the, the approach to mentor mindset is to ask questions with real curiosity but then actually build on what they say. That you can almost define curiosity or being a good listener as that you're open to being changed by what you hear. And I think that's a good philosophy to think about here.

Yeah, I love that. I think that the curiosity aspect of this, like genuine questioning as opposed to just these rhetorical questions that are just meant for you to, you know, I think a lot of parents almost think these rhetorical questions are good because it's like, oh, you know, the kids reflecting on their actions, but in reality, essentially, you're giving them the answer of just, you did something wrong and you need to figure it out, right? Yeah. I think that's awesome. I'd love to kind of switch gears here a little bit, moving on to chapter 7, right? Obviously, this one was, it hit pretty hard, right? You open with this story of Howie, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right, but your former student, right, who emails her professor to say that her mother has just passed away of cancer, right? That she can't attend class. And she hopes, obviously, it won't affect her grade. You describe surveying a room full of these PhD-level psychologists, and every single one gave the protector mindset idea, right? Don't worry about the class, just take it and complete. And I think a lot of people would sympathize with that. But you argue here that that's actually the wrong answer. And that gets us into, you know, Ali Akram's work on stress can be enhancing, and then your own synergistic mindsets intervention, right? Can you talk to us a little bit about why don't worry about the class was the wrong thing to say To Howie, and how does this synergistic mindsets intervention and this kind of growth mindset plus the stress can be enhancing mindset, how can that change what's actually happening inside someone's body during a stressful moment?

Yeah, totally. And this, I mean, who knows, maybe you know this student, she, she was a Plan II student of Texas. She just like an awesome student, and her, her mom had terminal cancer throughout her senior year, and she needed to complete my class as a, as a requisite for getting her Plan II degree. Um, and, uh, if I would have just said don't worry about it, then she wouldn't have completed her diploma and her credential on time. And, but she was already interviewing for jobs and she had this like amazing job pretty much lined up where she was going to travel the world and then be trained on different roles within this like major international company and be 6 months in different spots over 2, you know, over 2 years. And then you're being groomed to be an executive at this major company.

Hmm.

So like her. Her parents, like, were super proud of her, you know? Yeah. I think, I think her dad had already passed away, so her mom was the last remaining person.

Yeah.

But her family, of course, was really proud of her. And then halfway through spring semester, mom passes away. She has to go back home and plan the funeral, pack up all the stuff, like, deal with estate, everything. It's just total pain to be a kid as the main person dealing with your mom's estate.

Absolutely.

And so like, I was like, that's not the time for me to tell her to obsess over daily grades. Like if she didn't do the reading, uh, this is the end of the semester, senior year. I'm like, I was like, just do your project.

Yeah.

Like, and if I didn't say that, then she wouldn't have finished and wouldn't have been able to go on to her job and it might've had to take a whole other semester, which would set her back. You know? Yeah. And then I was like, and on top of that, the final project in my class is designed to be really meaningful and something you're proud of. At least that's my intention. And I was like, do the kind of project that you would have been excited to call your mom about and say, thank you for all the sacrifices you made to get me into college and to help me get here. Because they immigrated from Africa, you know, like, and then moved to Texas and then you know, got to— and then her daughter got into UT, which is unbelievable, in the top honors program. I was like, your mom clearly made a ton of sacrifices to get you here.

Yeah.

Well, do the kind of project you would have been excited about to call her about.

Absolutely.

And the reality is that's going to be a stressful thing. She's going to be like at the lawyer's office talking to a lawyer about contracts and then needing to meet with her small group to finish her project. And I was like, that stress is your way of honoring your mother and her memory. It's not something that's overwhelming you and crushing you. It's, it's what she wanted you to do to kind of continue forward. And that was a little presumptuous to me. It was a little risky thing to say, but I, I don't know, I talked to enough young students to expect that that was probably the case. And ultimately, I sent her an email on graduation day. I was like, I assume your family was here. Hopefully it was a glorious celebration. And she was like, it was a celebration my mom would have loved. I'm so glad I graduated. My whole family's here and she would have been really proud of the way that I persevered.

Wow.

But she did that without needing to do a bunch of busy work.

Yeah.

And absolutely. So I, I knew how that story ended, but then for years I would give talks in social psychology areas and I would put up the email I got from this student. Asking for an extension on her assignments and the room was split. Half the people were like, how dare she ask to not have to do some of the work for your class? And the other half was like, she's going through so much, just don't expect anything.

Sure.

And I was like, those are both the wrong answers, guys. And that just showed me that like even social psychologists are supposed to know everything about stress, don't really understand it when it comes to these kinds of dilemmas sometimes.

Absolutely. I think that section of just purpose, belonging, as well as almost just like making schoolwork relevant and kind of giving people like a purpose through the work that they do is so important, right? I think earlier, actually today, I interviewed Michael Gibson, right? Who's the founder of a VC fund in SF, right? And I think his whole kind of thesis is like these young people are building these great companies, they're building the future, right? And we should not be the ones trying to intervene and tell them what to do, but instead, kind of give him this sort of launchpad to exceed, right?

And I think— although I do think a lot of VCs become protectors because they're just—

of course. And that's why they are not all very good.

And then they don't actually design ethical businesses that are actually going to stand the test of time. Yeah. And they don't have to care because they just need one to turn into Facebook. Yeah, fair enough. And then you have all this other junk out there. So I actually think that both venture funds and private equity, especially private equity, should take much more of a mentor mindset approach.

Gotcha. Gotcha. I think these chapters 8 and 9 close the practices section here, right, with a lot of purpose and belonging, right? For purpose, you contrast Perla, right, the 8th grade algebra teacher in Northeast Texas, with Ron Berger and EL education, the schools where middle schoolers are calculating the carbon footprint of their building, surveying voters about about this $198 million bond issue and presenting findings to the mayor, which is incredible stuff, right? And for Belonging, right, you walk us through the—

Yeah, that was in the class you took. Yeah.

Yeah, and you walk us through the Greg Walton 4-part story structure, right? That struggle is normal, change is possible, action steps, and the snowball effect. That years later was still showing up in graduates' job satisfaction and wellbeing. I'm curious, what is the difference, you know, when it comes to being an educator, right? Between trying to make schoolwork relevant and giving people a real kind of beyond-the-self purpose, right? And if a parent or a manager has a young person who's struggling with this sort of belonging, how do they tell a story like Walton's this week, right, without making the well-meaning "it gets better" mistake?

Yeah, I mean, purpose and relevance don't have to be at odds. Like, ideally they feed into each other. But the, the argument I was making is that on the ground in schools Teachers, of course, know that it's supposed to be, quote, relevant. Yeah. In order to engage students. But then they come up with pretty superficial ways of making the assignment be relevant. Like, they'll be like, who here likes baseball? And like, kids like, I like baseball. And like, okay, well, two-way tables will help you do statistics to understand baseball. I think it's like, I like watching and playing baseball. I don't like doing math about baseball. Yeah. Like, this doesn't actually solve the problem that I have and doesn't feel relevant to me. And so they have this kind of almost relevance by osmosis kind of approach. You just think if you just talk about some application that's slightly relevant, that somehow people will care about it. And maybe that works for a subset of students, but I don't think that's, that's the big difference maker. Whereas everybody cares about being a person whose life matters. And if the content you're learning in school is related in any way to how you perceive your life mattering to others, Well, now that's motivating. Now I'm like, okay, it's, I'm gonna get meaning, purpose, and significance out of this. So that's, that's gonna got my attention now.

Yeah.

Um, and so I think people get that wrong and, and like the very simple kind of litmus test is, is the assignment that you're giving, if I'm a teacher, whether it's a midterm or final project, is that a microscale, like microcosm of something that a real person would do? With in the, in the field that you're describing? And if the answer is no, then I'm like, why are you doing it? Or you better have a very clear theory of how this abstract exercise is relating to something people would want to use. So for example, um, so many classes just assign the 10-page essay in college. Sure. Like, I haven't written a 10-page essay since I left college. Like the only time I've ever done it in my entire life. Yeah. And, um, why did I spend all that time perfecting that format when the only audience for those essays was my professor?

Hmm.

Right? Like I very rarely am writing something and I'm just trying to impress one very specific person. I mean, maybe if it's like a funder, but it's not an essay, you know, I'm like, I'm writing a different format of document. Often what you're writing is for a broad audience. Like a journalist would. So why isn't the standard for your writing that it's a, like, a proxy for writing a New York Times Magazine long-form article or an op-ed to The Atlantic or something else that's prestigious and real? And I think it— then now imagine a student who previously thought my work is meaningless, and now I've written an article that could be published in The New York Times. Well, that's pretty motivating.

Sure.

You know, so I think it's, it's about helping students tell the story to themselves that their purpose is being pursued, at least if not fulfilled, with the hard work that they're doing in school.

Absolutely. I think a lot of probably the educators, managers, people who work with groups of these young people are probably wondering on, you know, of course this is great, right? But how do you build a culture like this, right? I think it's important to obviously be the one to kind of be able to make make that impact, but also a culture where that then compounds and people are, you know, you have peer-to-peer collaboration that then helps both of them grow, right? Where the sum of the total is greater than its parts. And I think this chapter 10 opens up with like a very memorable scene and you kind of talk a lot about culture here, right? Where the scene opens with a postdoc telling his professor, Keyvan, that Dan is going to need another laptop, right? Dan, who's a brilliant master's student, who's also autistic, has just smashed his third one against a hard metal table during a, you know, a coding frustration. And most labs would have just shown him the door, you know, but Stassen's lab brought him a hardened construction site laptop, which I thought was really cool, right? So Dan's software ended up, you know, in Nature and was licensed to NASA and just incredible things, right? Then you bring up the story of Laura Vega, who's a little girl in San Antonio who used to, you know, look up at the stars from a gas station in the desert. Near the Mexican border whose school, you know, her high school didn't even offer AP Physics. And now she has a PhD in astrophysics and works at NASA Goddard. So I'd love to hear about this concept that you bring up in the book during this part about inclusive excellence, which I think is so important for elite institutions and credentialing systems and things like that to think about, right? And how the Fisk Vanderbilt Bridge Program and Stassen's mantra about earn prestige turn kids like, you know, like Laura Vega into scientists who can stand in a room of these, you know, big-time NASA researchers without even flinching.

Yeah, I mean, I think that, um, the, uh, Kavon is just a legend. I mean, I, I wrote about a lot of people, but he's one that I'm like, that guy is epic. Uh, he won the MacArthur Genius Award pretty soon after my book came out, um, and it's totally well deserved and everything. Um, yeah, I mean, the, the whole thing there is that people look at like elite institutions and elite programs primarily for their indications of your like merit and talent. And, um, and so then they put up all these roadblocks that are mainly designed to sort people on the basis of merit and talent. And a lot of them have nothing to do with merit and talent, those, those sorting mechanisms, because they're just reproducing how good was your high school. And how good was your high school is almost entirely a function of how much money your parents have in the United States. Like, and that sounds ridiculous to say, but the correlation of family income and quality of high school is about 0.8, right? So it's basically, family income and high school quality is correlated as strongly or stronger than two IQ tests are correlated with each other. Two different ways of measuring the exact same thing, which is another way of saying they're basically the same thing in the United States. So like, given that, then how in the world would you ever have more talent from a broader group ever come into a selective thing like physics? And some people could say, well, we don't need more people, we got plenty, you know. But like, if you look at just the intersection of super bright and super rich, yeah, almost all those people go into investment banking and management consulting. So they're not going into physics. So just from like a pure pragmatic perspective alone of we need more physicists. And you might say, well, why do we need more physicists? Well, like here's a real project they work on is shooting rockets at asteroids to blow them up so that the Earth isn't destroyed. Like that's not just a movie plot. That's a real project of NASA that Kevon's team works on. And like, I kind of want more people working on that, a human being on Earth. Right. So again, like, I think there's a lot of reasons for us to care that we have more people who are available to do really high-end physics. And if you have to select from that tiny group of both brilliant and rich, you've got a limited number, and B, they're not going into professional physics. Okay, so it's like you need bright people who maybe their families weren't already rich, maybe they're from different backgrounds, maybe they were a late bloomer or whatever. And that's kind of Kevon's thing, is that he's not saying let's get unqualified people into physics. Like, you don't want to shoot the rocket and miss, you know, like you need qualified people. But his argument is there's far more people who could be qualified than are currently included in our system, and therefore you need to stop filtering everything based on arbitrary indicators that are just reproducing social class and instead look at actual talent and merit.

Sure.

And so he started that thinking about socioeconomic status, family income, race, ethnicity, and then he's more recently gone into autism and neurodiversity. And that's been a really, like, exciting and fruitful area because there are all kinds of brilliant people that are— that might not be great around the water cooler of the lab, right? But they're going to do great science. And so how do you have an inclusive space where everyone can still be excellent? Yeah, and so that term inclusive excellence for me is very important in this current era where it feels like it's all push and pull between either there's merit and rigor or you're inclusive and friendly. And my argument is include more people in the really high legitimate standard where you require merit and rigor, but then support more people so they can meet that standard and go on and to excel in that field.

Yeah, absolutely. I love it. I love it. And, you know, kind of to finish out here, one last question. The book, you know, the final arc here of this book centers around someone named Uri Treisman. And I think, you know, just by reading, it seems like you spent a lot of time with him, right? And this is the guy who took Black student pass rates in calculus at Berkeley from, you know, a 33% failure rate to a 97% passing in 5 years, which is insane, right? His philosophy comes from two very unlikely places, honestly, right? A kosher butcher in Brooklyn who taught him quote, "Justice, justice you shall pursue." And a landscape architect whose three principles, watch where people walk, pay attention to entrances, and plan for future growth, became the design of his whole program, right? And then you and Steve Baskin then take those principles to Camp Champions, you run a study on these KIPP campers, and you also follow them 8 years later, right? Finding them in universities. Unfortunately, one of them ended up at A&M, but the other one was heading to law school. The other one was becoming the first college graduate family. How did Triesman's 3 principles actually become the design specs for the Camp Champions experiment? For, you know, kind of as a final question, for the listener finishing this episode out today, right, an educator, teacher, a manager, a parent, I don't know, someone running a youth program, what's one thing from this whole book, and obviously it's dense, right, but what's one thing from this whole book that you would hand them as a place to begin starting tomorrow morning?

Yeah, so Uri Triesman again, also MacArthur Genius winner, um, they had these amazing impacts on, uh, success rates for students from different groups, especially Black and Hispanic students at Berkeley. Um, you know, he's coming up in the post-civil rights movement where a lot of this civil rights reform was about inclusion without excellence. So it's like, let's let everybody into this thing but then expect less of them. And that first of all, just yielded low expectations for underrepresented students, but also just pissed everybody off. Sure, right. And like, a lot of the backlash to affirmative action, etc., is, is not about the inclusion, it's about the perceived lowering of standards for different groups. Um, and his philosophy was like, no one has ever truly promoted equity in a lasting way by lowering standards.

Yeah.

And he's like, Okay, students are going to take calculus at Berkeley. It's going to be hard as hell. Like, how are we going to get students to succeed in it? And then he furthermore found that it wasn't their math background. Some of these students were coming from great high school programs. So it's not just whether they ever took precal, right? Um, it's something else. And so he was inspired by these metaphors of landscape architecture. And I mean, it's weird. Like, I, I wrote the chapter and I was like, I don't know if anyone's going to care about this because that's a weird analogy. Like, what does landscape architecture have to do with freshman calculus? Yeah, but Uri's kind of a weird guy. I mean, he's one of UT's most legendary professors, just retired this semester. But, um, the, uh, you know, it's, it he, he just is an analogical thinker. Like, he'll, he'll, like, a lot of great math concepts, frankly. You like look at a snail and then you see the spiral and you're like, oh, then you learn something about geometry, right? You look at the stars and then you think something else about, about, um, spheres and how they move. And, you know, it's a whole history of science of analogical reasoning. And Uri did that for the science of welcoming people into a community. And he's like, well, welcoming someone into an intellectual community like math is not that different from walking them into a physical space like a park in the middle of an urban city. And there was this guy who was the leading landscape architect in Los Angeles in like the 1920s, '30s, and '40s who, um, would create urban spaces. Like, if any— if you're ever into Beverly Hills There's one street on the border of Beverly Hills that is a, a park, and the trees that he planted are still there, and there's a sidewalk. And guess what? None of those trees' roots raised that sidewalk right now. I was there like 6 months ago.

Yeah.

Like, that's a level of foresight you have to have, is that 100 years after you plant a tree, is it gonna screw up the experience or is it still there?

Yeah.

and we rarely do that kind of planning. And Uri just found something profound in that analogy and ran with it and then designed this whole calculus program around some of these principles. And, um, I saw that live because for two different years, right after I got tenure at Texas, I went and sat in the back of his class and just watched what he did. And I hung out with the students and I watched all his lectures and I interviewed him after class. And I was very impressed by Uri and his calculus class. And then I was approached by the head of a summer camp and I was like, let's take some of these principles we have around mindset and belonging and things like that and architecture and let's try them in a camp experience. And the results were amazing. We took kids from KIPP High School in San Antonio. So it's a low-income school, mostly serving immigrant and ethnic, racial and ethnic minority children. They went for 8 days at Camp Champions, and we tracked them years later and found they were more likely to be in college. Wow. 7, 8 years later. It was unbelievable.

Yeah, that's incredible. I love it. And I mean, David, thanks so much for joining us today, man. This has been an absolute pleasure. We've moved through the entire arc of this book. Obviously can't say we've covered everything, right? There's plenty, plenty left, and I highly encourage everyone listening to kind of really check this out in detail, right? But I mean, today we've covered quite a bit, right? We've talked about the incompetence model and the adolescent predicament. We've talked about, you know, the 5 practices of transparency, questioning, stress, purpose, and belonging. You know, we talked about the long game of inclusive excellence and future growth. And I think the underlying message here the whole way is that this mentor mindset isn't just a feeling, and it's not, you know, magic. It's just a belief that young people are truly capable and impressive things with the right support, right? And it's a set of concrete practices that flow from that belief, right? And so to everyone listening today, I don't think this book's saying that you need to overhaul your personality to kind of adopt this sort of mentor mindset, right? Pick a practice, a transparency statement for your next hard conversation, right? An authentic question instead of a lecture, you know, a story that says that, okay, your struggle is normal, change is possible, here are some steps, and it can snowball, right? Just try it this week with someone in your life and see what changes, right? David, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been an absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast.

Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm really glad you asked about some of the storytelling aspects because I spent a long time on that.

And a lot of— Yes, it was one of my favorite parts to read. But I—

the reason why it took me so long to write the book is because I had to find these stories and make sure I had them right and be a journalist, really. Yeah. So I appreciate the chance to talk about them.

Yeah, and on that note, right, David, where can, where can people find your work, right? Your research, your book, anything, you know, anything you want to tease upcoming? I don't know, just, just throw it all out there.

I've got a masterclass called, it's called The Power of Mindset with Carol Dweck and then Steve Young, the NFL quarterback, uh, and it, it's great. It was the number one class last year, and, and so it's, it's, I think people like it. Um, and then we have a new lab we're calling Motivation Lab. To try to unlock the secrets of motivation. Um, and we're focusing on several things, but one is like non-traditional schooling in an era where schooling can happen more and more through AI, then we need more investment in the humans trying to help kids to stay committed and stay persistent and things like that. And so there's a bunch of projects in that space as well. Um, but yeah, I just love people to reach out, stay in touch, hit me up on LinkedIn. And I'll say hello.

Absolutely. And you know, for everyone listening, if you want to go deeper, please grab a copy of 10 to 25. This book, we weren't able to obviously cover it in our time here, but the book has a putting it into practice section with prompts, checklists, and exercises that you can just use on a Sunday afternoon, right? And if this conversation, you know, made you think a little bit differently about how you lead, parent, coach, manage, whatever, share this episode with someone who, you know, who needs to hear it. So thanks everyone for tuning in to Readers. We'll see you next time. And until then, keep on learning, keep on changing, and keep on growing. We'll see you next time. Thank you.