Greg Walton Returns to Discuss Belonging, Identity, and Civil Discourse

Welcome to The Puck, Venture Capital and Beyond, a show that examines the changing landscape of our world. Before we dive in, a quick word about who I am and why we're here. I'm Jim Bier, corporate lawyer and restructuring professional. I've spent the last two decades helping companies navigate their toughest transitions. And about eight years ago, I found myself having fascinating conversations with clients and friends about everything from venture capital to the broader shifts happening in our economy and society.

Those discussions were simply too good, so the puck was born. Now while we started on venture capital, hence the podcast name, the Puck Venture Capital and Beyond, We've naturally evolved to focus more on the and beyond portion of the title. Today, we explore how business intersects with the bigger forces shaping our world. I still run my restructuring practice by day, but now I get to host these conversations by night. It has become one of the most rewarding parts of my life.

Today's guest continues that tradition. We do need to get out of echo chambers that produce caricatures and into actual interactions and conversations that allow us to develop more complicated understandings of each other and have respect for each other's views even when we don't agree with them or they're not our own. On today's episode of the Puck, I reconnect with Greg Walton, professor of psychology at Stanford University and a Michael Forman University fellow. It's been three years since our last conversation, and in that time, the world has undergone some profound shifts, particularly in the area of societal norms and how we address the challenges people face today. We explore these changes through the lens of Greg's new book, Ordinary Magic, the science of how we can achieve big change with small acts.

We talk about how subtle shifts in perspective can foster a more civil discourse and help build momentum for meaningful transformation. It's a thought provoking conversation, so let's dive in. Greg Walton, welcome back to the puck. Hey. Thanks for having me again.

So we had you on in the summer of twenty twenty two after speaking with sir Paul Collier, and he could not have been more complimentary of the work you've been doing in the realm of social interventions. So for those listeners who haven't yet listened to your first episode, can you just take a minute and explain what those are? Yeah. So a lot of my work began in thinking specifically about students' experiences as they come to college. And that work is largely focused on students experience of belonging as they come to college.

And the idea was, partly this came from my personal experience, like I was a Stanford undergrad, when I came to Stanford, it seemed like all it was was rah rah rah Stanford, you're Stanford, it's amazing. And there was no space to contend with the normal kinds of challenges that people have when they come to college. And as I got deeper into research in psychology, I started to realize that the experiences that I was having kind of paled in comparison to the experiences that some of my classmates were having. First generation students, students of color, people who are coming into a college context in which literally their group hasn't belonged or their group has been excluded. So a lot of my, the base of my research, excluded.

So a lot of my, the base of my research is about trying to understand that experience of belonging and then trying to offer students helpful ways to understand those normal challenges of the transition to college. You're feeling homesick. You get a bad grade early on, you get excluded from a student group you'd like to be part of, maybe a professor says something that's not kind. And with that, the problem is, the particular problem is that often if students are wondering whether they belong, those experiences can seem to imply that they don't belong in general. And so we were trying to create stories that would help people see those as normal challenges that everybody experiences in one form or another that they can get through that can improve.

And what we found is that that can really change the trajectory of people's lives. So from your perspective, how's that work been going? Yeah. I mean, that work has been very successful, I think. Lots of colleges and universities have picked it up.

I've been writing this week with the president of a small college about how they message to students when they come to college. I think people are thinking much more carefully about about how to talk about the college experience. We want to honor the excitement and the pride that people have, but we also don't want to give people a fairy tale or pretend that everybody's having, you know, a simplistically positive experience to make it okay to have challenges sometimes. And, we've been able to scale that work very broadly. So we published last year, for example, a paper that looked at data from about 26,000 college students and 22 colleges and universities testing this particular intervention.

Got it. When you look at where the world is going and you look at your book that you wrote back in I think it was 2022, a Handbook of Wise Interventions, how social psychology can help people change along with I think you wrote that with Aliyah Crum, but this was not your first foray into publishing. Can you also tell us about that book you wrote, The Bobcats and the Fat Bass? So that was me in elementary school. Yeah.

Yeah. So I had the opportunity to publish as a, I think a kindergartner and then a third grader, a couple of very well reviewed books, reviewed very well in my local elementary school. One was about, the fat bat and the fat bat that is mean and very, very mean and very, very fat. That's essentially the entire story. And then the second is a long, exposition of a baseball team's journey through its season, which was my major passion in life in elementary and middle school.

Although it's interesting, the theme of kind of the outsider and this making people belong seems to trace all the way back to your early earliest experiences. Yeah. I mean, in the in the new book, Ordinary Magic, I tell a story that's even earlier about getting kicked out of preschool. And, that is a story partly about belonging. So it's a story in which my family had moved from Michigan to California.

I was in a new preschool. I had no friends in this preschool. The other kids would always run around somewhere on the on the on the grounds. I would run after them. The preschool was run by someone who did not understand children according to my parents, and they had a rule that you couldn't run inside or outside.

I got in trouble every single day. I spent the end of every day in time out with the teachers in the bleachers, and I ended up, coming to hate the school in a in a moral kind of way. So much so that I started to follow the school director around as she showed the school to new prospective parents and told them exactly what I thought about the school. I I think that's a story that reveals my willingness to buck convention, and it's also, I think, a story about belonging and feeling excluded and treated unjustly. So let's go let's stay with that.

So the book Ordinary Magic, the science of how we can achieve big change with small acts, What prompted you to write that book, especially after the other works that you published? Yeah. So for me as a psychologist, you know, I was approached by people interested in me writing a book about what we have called in psychology wise interventions for a number of years. And I, held them off for a while and I slowed that process down because I wanted to have time for myself to really think deeply about the broad swath of space that I was interested in about how psychological processes like questions like do I belong, how they come up for people And how, we can develop ways to help people to answer those questions that unleash their potential. So, I did a lot of things that were, you know, writing more just for my colleagues in psychology.

The handbook that you're describing is also much more kind of in the weeds. But that gave me the foundation then to start to think about how do I talk about this to everybody. I mean, everybody is trying to traveling life. Everybody has experiences where for whatever reason, they might not feel like they belong in a space that's important to them. You're trying to learn a new skill.

You struggle with learning that skill. You feel like maybe I can't do this or you're in a relationship. You have a conflict in the relationship. Maybe the thought crosses your mind. Does my partner disrespect me?

Am I loved here? And these are the questions that ultimately come to define our lives. That is, they define the kinds of spaces you'll be able to be in, the kinds of abilities that you will develop, the kinds of relationships that you'll have, what you'll be able to do and be in life. And for me, this is a science that's been extraordinary extraordinarily fascinating just as an intellectual enterprise, but also very useful for myself. And I wanted to share it more broadly.

And what what is the research in science and method methodology behind it? Yeah. So one way to think about it is that it's has the kind of psychological depth that we commonly associate with something like clinical therapy. But in the clinical therapy context, you begin by, like, you know, sometimes clinical therapy is defined as abnormal psychology. Like, you begin by defining people as having something wrong with them, something kind of distinctly wrong with them.

And that's not the case here. So here, the idea is that people are all the time walking into situations that pose questions to them. So you're in the first generation in your family to go to college, you go to college, like, literally, the situation is giving you a question like, can someone like me belong here? Your family has not belonged there before. It's not unreasonable.

It's not irrational. It's normal. It's predictable. It's relatable. You know, it's what you should be asking in that situation.

So it has the kind of psychological depth of that clinical psychology, but it's really understanding people as normal, reasonable people who are making sense of normal and reasonable situations that happen to pose to them questions like that that can be profoundly important. In that sense, it has another cousin of this is the nudge world. So in the nudge world, you're also thinking about people in non pejorative ways. Like you're asking, how can we rearrange the cafeteria so more people get healthy options? How can we rearrange this website so people can flow through it faster?

But that's a world that doesn't have a lot of psychological depth. You're not thinking deeply about how people are thinking or feeling or making sense of themselves or other people. Like literally, you can nudge an object. I can take this and I can I can nudge it? You wouldn't nudge somebody's marriage.

You know, if you were a student who is struggling with a, like, a math assignment, and with whether you're good at math, you wouldn't nudge that student, you would contend with a question that they're facing. And this is the science of that, of how we can contend with these questions that come up in life in a real and deep and authentic and human way with grace and with dignity and help ourselves and others to answer them in ways that unleash that potential. So for those of us that are interested in helping this regard or or just to bring this research and methodology down from 30,000 feet, Can you give me a practical application of of how this would actually work? Yeah. I'll give you one that comes just from my own experience, parenting.

So when I was a new parent and our kids were in preschool, we would bike to preschool, a campus preschool and back. And the kids are, you know, they first were in a burly and then they got a little bit bigger and they were in, they were on these little 12 inches wheel bikes, you know. There's this little blue bike that we had and sometimes they would stop a couple blocks from home in fifteen minutes past dinner time and they would sit on the curb and like literally they would wail, I'm so tired. I'm too tired. And I was at the time, we had a postdoc here in the department who's a good friend of mine.

Her name is Veronica Yaw. She's a researcher now at the University of Vienna. And she was doing research on people's lay theories of willpower. And the basic idea was that some people can have the view that willpower is something that's highly limited and easily depleted. And if you have that view, then little feelings of tiredness are become a reason to stop.

It becomes a cue that you're running out, like, as if you have range anxiety. And so I was thinking about that. And so then I said to the kids, I said, it's when you're tired and you keep going that your muscles get stronger. So I was trying to reframe exactly what the meaning of that feeling of tiredness was. And then, some weeks later, we were at this particular stretch on our home where there's a steep hill and it was very windy.

And our daughter who was about three, I was trying to go up the hill as far as she could. And we brought chalk each time to mark how far she'd gotten. And one time she not just beat her previous record. She crushed it. She got all the way to the top and our son, Oliver and I are standing there cheering.

We're saying, yay. Yay. And Lucy, our daughter says, know how I did it. I said, no. And she said, when I wanted to stop, I just kept going.

It's like that question no longer needed to hold her back. Does this tiredness mean I have to stop? She could disregard it, and then she could climb the hill. So I'm starting to understand what you're saying. So let let me give you another hypothetical just to better understand it.

Let's say somebody is experiencing bullying in college, or they're politically a Republican, and they start telling their friends that they love Trump. Mhmm. And a bunch of people start to shame them Mhmm. And ostracize them. How would you respond to a person in that situation?

You mean the person who is feeling bullied for their for their political views? Who is feeling who's being attacked for for their political views that they love Trump? How would you how would you make them feel better? Yeah. I mean, this is very hard.

Right? I mean, this is a a world and we've seen this on campus here at Stanford and elsewhere where people have mutually incompatible narratives about themselves and the world. I think that it that the that the there's a a scholar in Israel who's done work on, what she calls getting perspective. And so this is, work that is fundamentally about the power of listening and the importance of listening. So she shows in about 20 different experiments.

Her name is Tal Eyal. She shows in about 20 different experiments that if you ask people to take somebody else's perspective, they become no everybody thinks that that's gonna make somebody more accurate in understanding the other person, whether that's a stranger or a significant relationship partner. But it actually, if anything, makes people less accurate. Instead, what she shows does help is what she calls getting perspective. And that's actually just asking a person to talk a little bit more and listening to them and understanding where it is that they're coming from.

So, you know, I think in general, what we need to do is to find the spaces where people can have space to say who they are and what they believe, and we can listen, and then other people can do that as well. And we can put those experiences together and try to understand them together. One of the, you know, there's this idea of protest as the voice of the, the the voiceless. And there's a really incredible story from Martin Luther King, who describes going to Watts following the riots. And he comes to Watts and he surveys a neighborhood that has been decimated, businesses destroyed, lives lost, mostly black owned businesses, mostly black people died.

And a young man comes up to him, and the young man says, Doctor. King, Doctor. King, we won. And and Martin Luther King says, what do you mean we won? Like, look around you.

And the young man says, people paid attention. The world listened. And, you know, sometimes in protest situations, people do really crazy things, like irrational things. Like, you know, they they invade an office and spray paint offensive graffiti on the walls. They put glue on somebody's keyboard.

They they do some they blow up Teslas, for example. Right? This is not rational behavior. Right? And when people do that, that's because they are not feeling heard.

They haven't had, they haven't had space to feel heard. And ultimately, we need to create more spaces, more platforms for people to be heard, including views that are intentioned with each other. But to hear both of them together and then to think together, how do we contend with that that complexity together? That's not easy. That's very hard.

Well, and and one of the goals of the puck lately has been really to get thought leaders together to create a safe place where we could talk about, again, two sides of an issue because we're in these echo chambers. And it's interesting because I went to college, my children went to college, and I am one of those elites now who the people on the right are often making fun of. And and even in the research you're doing, as I understand the new statistics, sixty percent of Americans don't go to college. And so we've got these spaces, right, where if you are not feeling heard and you're upset with Meg and you burned down a bunch of Tesla dealerships, we, the elite, we we are very aware that these people need to be heard and what what is their issues and so forth. But using the example of a Republican on a college campus or a Republican professor on a college campus, they're the minorities there.

Right? For years, they weren't the minorities there. We were dealing with whether or not it was African Americans or women or gays. It it doesn't it there were there's always been these different minority groups. And what's interesting to me in these in these echo chambers we're in, I I hear a lot about, again, feeling the pain and how we should feel the pain of people, but I'm I'm looking for practical examples of where those of us in college that are or in that world dealing with people that feel like an outsider because of their views, how do we deal with them and have conversations similar to what you creatively had with your kids?

Yeah. Where you encourage them to kind of toughen up and be able to go further. How can for instance, there are a lot of my friends that will not have a conversation with somebody that's on the other side politically. And creatively, how do you encourage people to have those difficult conversations? Yeah.

I mean, I think one of the issues that's at play here, there's a couple of issues that are at play that are important. One is that often power and voice go together. So people who have power have voice, People who don't have power don't have voice. People who do have power don't listen very well. Right?

So then people who don't have power get defined. And they often get defined in ways that are pejorative to them or not fitting for them or not accurate or simplistic. And so one of the values of listening is to be able to start to begin to understand the complexity of of the people that you're talking to, to get beyond an initial representation or a stereotype or a caricature. So, you know, this can happen in very small ways. That same friend who I mentioned earlier, Veronica, she, after Stanford moved to Dresden and she was a professor in Dresden and she her husband was commuting to their home in Switzerland.

And so she was during the week, she was parenting two elementary school age children alone. And they lived in this apartment building in the central area of Dresden. And they sometimes the wood in the door would expand. And then the kids would come home from school in the afternoon, and they wouldn't be able to open the door on a hot day. And she's at her office in meetings.

So she had a neighbor, an older retired woman who she asked this woman if she would help the kids out and open the door if this ever happened. And so one day that fall that she moved there, this happened, it was a hot day, the kids couldn't open the door, they knocked at the neighbor's door, the neighbor let them in. And then that night, the neighbor came over and said to my friend, please never do that again. Never do that again. And Veronica was angry.

You know, she like she thought I'm a working, you know, woman here. Like, I don't have I can't just leave. I'm teaching like, I can't leave. I can't get home at this time. Like, she's there.

Like, why is she so selfish? Right? And this kind of caricature developed in her mind. But then she was able to stop herself. And she made a small gift.

I think she she cooked a baked good or something. And she brought it to her neighbor. And she gave the gift. And she said, Can we talk about it? Can you tell me can you tell me what's happening here?

And it turned out that the neighbor was essentially articulating a very strong value on the privacy of the home, a particular value that was had, you know, for historical reasons was of particular importance in this area, Eastern Germany. And she felt that it was invasive. It was very invasive to open the door to a neighbor's house. And when the the neighbor had said this, my friend Veronica was able to understand her better to, assuage this concern. And in fact, they actually became very good friends.

So like, we need to have spaces where we can see each other in more complicated ways. So somebody's, articulating political views that that you don't agree with, you do need to be able to stop and listen to the the truth of what they have to say. You also may need to understand that their truth is not the whole truth. They're not the only truth. That there may be other truths that are important too, including maybe the truth that you have experienced.

And you need them to be able to listen to you as they listen as you listen to them. But we knew do need to get out of echo chambers that produce caricatures and into actual interactions and conversations that allow us to develop more complicated understandings of each other and and have respect for each other's views even when we don't agree with them or they're not our own. Well and if I'm bringing this back to the bicycle example, what you're really saying if we're trying to kind of talk ourselves into this is I mean, I'm hearing these points of view that make my blood boil, but this is gonna make me a better, wiser, more evolved person if I tolerate this discomfort, and I actually really enter into this other person's reality, and I and I make room for it, and I really, really listen to it and take it in, and and and allow that space for something miraculous to happen. Yeah. I mean, in yeah.

So in the in the bicycle example, the question was, does feeling tired mean you have to stop? And in a lot of these contexts, the question is, okay, yes, I feel uncomfortable. What do I do with that discomfort? What does that mean? And often people can when we don't see the discomfort as a normal thing, and we don't think about it directly, we can end up with a variety of, kind of knee jerk reactions to the discomfort.

We can we can, we can hold we can pull back from the conversation. I don't feel comfortable. So I'm leaving. Right? Another one of my collaborators, Kiara Sanchez is a professor at Dartmouth now.

And she was interested in how friends, black white friends talk about personal experiences with race. And what she did was she during COVID, she had young adults who were black and white have in existing friendships have a conversation together. And in all of the cases, the conversation was about a personal experience from the black friend's life. In some of the cases, it was also a conversation about a race related experience from the black friends race. And in some of those conversations before the two friends had that conversation, both of those friends did a little bit of, work reflecting on the discomfort that can come up when people talk about race, especially including when friends talk about race.

And also why that discomfort could reflect their mutual commitment to each other, their caring for each other. You might feel uncomfortable talking about race with a friend of a different racial background because you care maybe about that friendship and about your friend. And you might be a little nervous about how that goes, but it's because you care. And as you work through that, maybe that could get better with time. And what Kiara found tracking friends two to eight months later was that in that third condition in particular, at that distal time point, black friends reported sustained quality of the friendship.

That is the friendships were closer, they felt more comfortable sharing aspects of their race with their white friend. In the other cases, those friendships declined over time. If a black friend feels like they can't share that part of themselves, then that's a friendship that's important part of important part of who they are, then that friendship might wither with time. So how does this figure into that whole discussion that people have been talking about, the good and the bad, depending on your perspective, This notion of kind of that speech can become violence. So these were not conversations like that.

Right? So these were conversations that were like, here's an experience of pride with my racial identity. Maybe here's an experience of discrimination that was hurtful or painful for me. Here's an experience that I don't quite understand that I'm trying to work through an understanding of. They were not violent acts like that.

I mean, certainly speech can be very painful for people and it can be hard and very hard sometimes to listen, especially if you feel like your side of the story is not getting heard. But ultimately, like, that's the work that a diverse society needs to do. Right? Like, you actually need to talk about the things that are difficult and the things that are points of conflict, and you need to do so in a way that don't define other people simplistic negative ways. Because when everybody does that, you're just cycling.

In the book, I use the word spiral. You're just gonna spiral downward. So, you know, if you're having that conversation with the MAGA Republican and the like a liberal person just says, Oh, you're like a racist fascist. Like you're defining that person. And then that MAGA Republican says you're like a sanctimonious like idiot liberal.

Like those two people have been defined and there's no there's no ability to have a conversation in which the two people can learn or at least have a complicated representation of each other as maybe having views that they disagree with, but also views that they could at least respect the other person for having. But those conversations are not taking place. Right? I mean, nearly enough. That's exactly right.

Yeah. Right. And so it sounds like, you know, we're we're trying to move people into that direction. And I guess one of my questions is, it's interesting because you talked about a lot of the work on college campuses, but most of that work is actually based on the understanding, and please correct me if I'm wrong, it's still like using the political as an example. It's people that are politically somewhat aligned.

And and and and to the extent you can get those people to see each other and hear each other and make them comfortable, I think that's amazing. But it it seems like even a a bridge too far to then say, okay. We're gonna take a college kid and a high school kid, one that's a Democrat, one's a Republican, and in a sense, try to do what Charlie Kirk is doing on college campuses. But he's he's doing it on college campuses. Yeah.

I mean, it's not that long ago, right, that we had, like, you know, like, very significant protests around the, October seventh attacks at Stanford and at every other campus. So I I I wouldn't underestimate the amount of conflict that has existed within political conflict in college campuses. It's been about the the Israeli, in Hamas situation. Yeah. So I so that's a beautiful point.

So so using that as an example and the work you're doing, you know, are the colleges making progress in in bringing those two disparate groups together? I think that's very, very hard. I just think that that's the work to be done. And I think that, you know, different people like, you know, in a I teach classes, right? So we will talk about these issues.

I'll teach research that's relevant to the Israeli Palestinian conflict. And we will have conversations and classes and small group conversations and larger lecture conversations. I have a neighbor who is, you know, in the leadership at Stanford in the communities of faith. And they try to have these conversations with communities of different faiths, you know, in companies and in neighborhoods and in civic organizations and in social media platforms, like, this is the kind of work that people need to do and that we in high schools that needs to be done. I don't think it helps to shut down conversation.

I think it helps to think about the right ways to structure that conversation to support people in being able to see each other more deeply and to understand each other more deeply. It goes back to that getting perspective idea. And it's also not it's one thing one of the things that I would emphasize is that this is not like charity work. Like, this is not like for the benefit of other people. You know, like, this is the for the benefit of, like, you and us as a healthy community at the end of the day.

As I'm hearing you say this, what's fascinating to me is that I had Frank Bruni on, and we talked about critical thinking and his discussions with his college students. And and I I think about as an older person who's had a lot of chance to read about both sides and understanding nuance, it must be I mean, I wonder what it's like when, again, somebody says, you know, Israel's doing this to the Palestinians, and then the Palestinians are just to the Israelis. And and again, unless you're willing to go back and really look at 3,000 years of history and really understand the nuance, you're just gonna be yelling each other because it's it's these are really complicated issues. Yeah. I mean, I don't think you're gonna find the solution in three thousand years of history.

Right? And I think that the hard truth is that there's multiple truths and multiple narratives. And one side's truth doesn't like the pain and the suffering and the injustice that one side has experienced, coexists with the pain and the injustice that the other side has experienced. And there's a need to be able to see both of those things at once. So do you find that this work helps people in a sense hold two truths that are contradictory in their head at the same time?

Yeah. I mean, I think that's hard. Right. I think that's hard. But as we're talking this through, it really is necessary because we are so convinced that our perspective is the right perspective.

And I I I try this all the time, and it's really where I've been frustrated. Because I I was talking to some people the other day that were adamant that their political view was the right one, and I said, but some of my closest friends that are as smart as I am and as smart as you are feel exactly the opposite. How do we reconcile that? And you know what they said? They had no answer.

And and to me, it was that they both can be true at the same time, but I can't seem to get anybody to understand that. Yeah. I think overlapping with that challenge is this, question of identity and the way that beliefs become symbols of who a person is. And this was implied in your characterization of the MAGA student earlier. And it's implied also in the way that I'm talking about the simplicity with which we see each other, the caricature.

And it also helps us, I think, understand why these dynamics I mean, they can be very, very powerful and fraught for all of us, but they cannot also have a particular power among younger people. So, you know, developmental psychologists understand adolescence is basically a period in which people are trying out identities. They're trying to figure out who's the adult self, who I might become, who I might be. And so, adolescents are exquisitely sensitive. I mean, all of us, if you're in a crowded room, this is the old cocktail party effect.

All of us, if you're in a crowded room, and you hear your noise across the room, you'll perk up and wonder what it is that they're saying about you and how they're talking about you. And are they saying something good, or they say something bad, or they saying something that's fitting or ill fitting. But if you're an adolescent, and you're trying to develop that sense of self and you're not there yet, you're not really secure in that complexity of your self understanding and, and how that understanding is accepted in in the world, then issues like being caricatured by a political belief or things like being, you know, misgendered if you're a trans person. Like these feel existential, like in a literal sense, like they are they are defining of you in a way that is not apt or appropriate or positive for who you want to be. And so they these these dynamics can have particular power then, I think, for people who are doing that kind of identity work in the in adolescence and and young adulthood.

I don't I don't believe in coincidences. And someone literally yesterday said to me something very similar to what you're saying about that people that are experimenting, for instance, with their sexuality in their adolescence, that when old people are quick to put them in a box Mhmm. They're robbing them from the perspective ability to essentially work through their issues, and we're forcing them to choose when they're not ready to choose. Mhmm. And and and that it's almost as if what I'm what I'm hearing you say this is that the boomers, the the elders, so to speak, really have to be comfortable with understanding that there is this period in life when you are forming your identity, and it it and you really do see these things as an existential issue, and that as an older person, you somehow have been able to make this transition to understanding that you're right, you're right, well, you both can't be right, you're right too, And that somehow by having conversations intergenerationally, maybe we can both start to understand the fears that each side has.

Yeah. I mean, I our son has, lately gotten into the, Moana soundtrack. And if you go listen to the Moana soundtrack or you go watch that film again, like, it's literally all about identity. Like, the the climax of the ultimate song is I am Moana. Right?

Like, who am I? And there's this question, does she is she just an island bound person like her father wants her to be? Or will she travel forth? Will she be a traveler? Will she be a navigator?

And in Moana, the character who gives Moana the space to become who she wants to be is her grandmother, a non parent adult. And that grandmother is not disrespectful to her father. She tells her, there's this lyric where she tells her, you know, to respect your father, to listen to your father, but if the sea calls to you, then you also need to listen to that. And that gives Moana the space, it creates space that allows Moana to develop as she is want to. I I wanna give you a second example from our research that is also very much about non parent adults and creating that space.

This is work that we've done with kids coming back to school from juvenile detention. And so these are kids, this was work that began in Oakland. These are kids who are almost all, students of color, almost all boys, all convicted of a crime coming back into middle school and high school after a period of time in the detention system. And that's the intersection of race and gender and incarceration status that is like, I think it's like almost physical in America. Like, there's a very powerful stereotype there.

And the intervention that we developed is essentially a platform for young people in this circumstance to begin to reclaim who they are to an adult in school who could be important to them. So we ask kids, what are values that are important to you in school? Like being a good role model for a younger brother or sister, making your parents proud. We give them stories from older students who've gone through this transition, who talk about developing relationships with adults in school that made a difference for them. And then at the end, we give them space to say, who's an adult in school who isn't yet but could be an important source of support for you?

And what would you like that person to know about who you are as a person? Your values, the goals that you have in school, and the challenges you face that that adult could help with. What kids write in these circumstances is just overwhelmingly powerful. They say essentially, you know, I'd like my English teacher, miss Sanchez, to know that I'm a good kid and I'm working hard to learn, but I've been I haven't been in school so much, so I'm behind and I also need help wearing my uniform or paying attention in class. And then we take that content and we play a kind of brokering role.

So we put it into a letter, a form letter, and we deliver it to that teacher. So we say, Miss Sanchez, all kids need strong relationships with adults to succeed, but especially when kids are facing difficult circumstances, this child has chosen you to be that adult for them. Please help them in their transition, in their relationships with others in school. Here's what this child would like you to know about who he is as a person. And we pipe in that content from the student.

When we deliver this to teachers, we usually hand deliver it. We find maybe about half the time the teachers cry when they receive that letter. We had a partner in Chicago a couple of weeks ago deliver a letter and the teacher said, I think you made my week. And then the teacher said, no, I think you made my year. Like, there's like nothing more important and powerful.

Like, that's the reason why people go into teaching is to be that adult for a young person. And now they're getting that space to, you know, execute that professional role. And it's all because we gave kids a platform to say who they are and what they need and how they're trying to develop to a person who would be in a position to support them in that becoming. In the original work in Oakland where we did this as a re as an RCT, we found that that reduced the rate at which students recidivated back to juvenile detention by 40 percentage points, from sixty nine percent without the letter to 29 with it. I think we need far more letters like that.

We need far more spaces to create the right kinds of communications and platforms so that we can begin to have the kinds of interactions with each other that can breed trust and support and growth rather than caricature and conflict. What you just said is beautiful, and and very consistent with my own experience with mentorship, and the whole and and the critical importance that an uncle or a mentor or a teacher can play in a child's life. But in these echo chambers we're involved in right now, there's this huge fight going on between the left and the right on these laws being passed where, you know, teachers can't be fired. And there was this whole interview recently with Gavin Newsom and, I think it was, Charlie Kirk, and they were talking about the the bill in California that and and they were literally these two adults arguing with each other in terms of what the bill provided and what it didn't. And there was nothing about the importance of relationships and buildings with it was all fear based, and it was all in this crazy echo chamber.

And and it's like your message is completely drowned out by all this other noise. I mean, you're you're focused on, like, the political context, which is obviously incredibly important. But, like, the context of, like, a teacher teaching tenth grade English is a different kind of context. Like, this is a person who's gone into teaching, who wants to be a good teacher, and maybe they're struggling with that. Right?

And their first thought often when they have a kid in the who's coming back to their classroom from justice system is often gonna be something like, oh, no. What problems is he gonna cause to me? Like, what conflicts am I gonna have? He's probably gonna make my class be off track. He's probably not gonna care.

Like, there's all sorts of things that very reasonably they're terrible thoughts, but they're very reasonable thoughts that come in to a person's head in our society. And that's the kind of space where I think we can work productively. We can build, you know, we have professional communities, we have education communities, we have healthcare communities, we have faith communities, like we have communities where we can start to see the kinds of dynamics that that cause us problems, and we can make progress on them. And I think that's productive. Absolutely.

But how does the public policy and this private work you're talking about, how do they come together? Where do you see that? So well, one answer, right, is so earlier, I was talking about clinical psychology and social psychology. So in social psychology, we're thinking about normal questions that reasonable people might ask given a given circumstance. And so it's not the fault of the teacher that she has that that thought, what problems is this kid gonna cause to me?

That's in fact a predictable thought that she might have, that any teacher might have. And if a school district can see that, and they can recognize that that's really the dynamic that's gonna be really problematic. Like, if if a kid comes back to school and every teacher is having that thought about them, like, of course, they're gonna think school is not for me. Like, of course, they're gonna wanna drop out. Like, school is a shitty place at that at that point.

Excuse my my French, but I don't wanna underplay it. Like, think about that. Like, you have to go to school and every teacher thinks you're a super predator. Right. That you have to wear an ankle bracelet to show it off.

Like, come on. That's horrible. Right? And so if a district that is this is a political institution, right, and it's a public institution, it can see that. It can anticipate that.

And then it can design around that. It can say, okay. That's a problem. How do we solve that problem? What's the policy?

What's the practice that we implement so that no kid has to have that experience? Right. And that's policy. So from your perspective in in in today's world, is implementation gonna get easier, or is it getting harder? I mean, I think everything's getting harder.

Right? I mean, conflicts are getting harder. Problems are deepening. Institutions aren't functioning as well as maybe they used to. But I also think that there's a lot of room for improvement, and that's available to us.

And I think that, like, really understanding concretely, like, in a physical palpable sense, these psychological dynamics, the reasonable questions that people are facing when they're in conflict situations, either political conflicts or other kinds of conflicts, or when their school transitions, for example, about whether they you can belong. These are things that we can work on that are not costly, that are available to us. So so recently, there's been a lot of talk about keeping cell phones, for instance, out of out of schools and stuff. And my understanding is young people are getting a ton of their news from social media. Right.

And we know that there's bias whether or not it's from the one side or the other. There there's bias, and people are being made afraid and angry. As you said, things are getting harder. Do we, as as thought leaders, do we have to somehow start to limit adolescents' time on social media? I mean, do we do can we win this battle?

Yeah. I mean, I think the reason to not have cell phones in school is because, like, that's not productive for the learning environment. So I I we have a published paper looking at a introductory lecture class at Stanford and at another institution where we tried to get people we tried to do a variety of interventions to get people to stop using their laptops for off topic thing during class. And none of that everybody loved those interventions, but none of it worked. Right.

And then we said, okay, well, there's all this research that shows that that's not productive for learning, either for you or for the people physically around you. So here's our policy. We're not gonna do it. And the reason is because we're gonna commit to this space together. To this is a teaching and learning space, and that is not productive for that teaching and learning goal.

And that, solved the problem. Like, people, a, stopped using laptops for in off top abuses. B, they didn't even feel tempted by it anymore. And c, they ended up supporting the policy. They hadn't previously supported the policy, but they supported the policy because they said, it's allowing me to achieve my goals here.

Like, we create a library so that we have quiet places to focus and study. We create a gym so that you can go and work out so that the norms that are around you help you achieve the goals that you have in that setting. So I think the most straightforward, you know, reason to think about cell phone displays, this is not actually serving the goal of the school, that the goal of creating community, the goal of, of critical thinking, the goal of, of learning and development, it's not actually supported for that. So we don't need to do that. Now, the set the broader aspect of your question is, how do we think about kids development?

And how do we how do we support healthy development in the context of social media use? And that gets really complicated, and it gets to, you know, heterogeneity around different kinds of parenting circumstances. And I wouldn't be quick to support some kind of blanket rule. I will say that for our own kids, yeah, we've been pretty restrictive in the, in the kind like they're not on social media. I'm not on social media.

They're not, you know, we're we're pretty restrictive on time. We have, you know, people who ask us, why come your how come your kids don't demand the iPad every time they're on a on an airplane, for example? We say, because that was never an option. Like, that we made a decision that that wasn't what we wanted how we wanted to work as a family. Right.

That was what worked for us. It may not work for others. Right? But I do think that there's a lot of value in parent education about child development and how children learn best in ways that can help parents in the complex situations they're in, making the complex trade offs they have, do that in ways that are bet better informed. But from a place of humility, when you said, you know, you wouldn't be quick to talk about bans, for instance, and I totally get that.

It's interesting that someone like yourself, who's an expert, who is doing this work, who's writing books about this, who's got children, enlisting to you, and you said, and I'm not on social media. And so to me, what I'm hearing from there is even if you understand all this, is is there a reason you, for instance, stay away from social media? I just have never found it a particularly happy place. You know? Right.

I I mean, I have when it when social media first came out and I had friends who started to participate in it, sometimes I felt left out because I liked those friends that I didn't live in the same place as those friends and I was wanting to know what they were up to. But it always felt like a weird spectator sport and it felt more negative than positive and not deep and authentic and genuine in general terms. And I know I know it's very complicated and not everybody has that experience and people can have very, very good experiences in some cases, life saving experiences, like you imagine the classic case study of the person who's developing and discovering that they may not be straight and they live in a place where they don't know any other people who aren't straight and they can find community in that context that can be very real and very important. And so there are certainly roles and it's complicated, but that was my own experience. Yeah.

And I think you say it well, which is that their technology in itself can be neutral. It's how you use it. And so just like the printing press, we had to go through this very, very painful evolutionary process. We too, you know, have to go through that evolutionary process with social media. And I think Yeah.

You beautifully explained kind of the different ways to think it through and and to help other people think those things through. Yeah. I think the same thing applies to early media, early screen use for children. And, you know, California has put a lot of emphasis on trying to encourage parents to talk to their kids more. And I think we we it helps when parents understand, you know, one of the big lessons of developmental psychology with infants in the past thirty forty years is that, like, kids are doing far far more than they show you.

Like, they're far more sophisticated than they can reveal at every age. So there's a lot of value in, like, you know, your kid's not just a blob sitting there. There's a lot of value in talking to your child and playing with your child and being silly with your child. And just giving them a screen is not going to accomplish those goals. And so, you know, there's ongoing kind of development of that an understanding of that and a transmission of that and an appreciation of that across, you know, the many different people who live in our communities.

Totally makes sense. Greg, it's you you will you know, part of it's interesting, like, in terms of the whole role of podcast, and there's a lot of people teasing each other. The the Republicans, for instance, people are calling the the left wimps because they won't do the Joe Rogan style, let's dream and style. But there is something about being able to communicate and think things through in real time, and it's it's it's it's it's not it's awkward, but yet it I I find I don't to deal with these complex issues, if you're not able to stumble around and bump into things a little, it it it's it's hard. Yeah.

In writing the book, I I'm I'm not a a religious person. But in writing the book, I I found myself using the word faith and grace a lot. And I think I think of grace in particular when you say that. So you wanna give people the grace to make mistakes or not understand something yet. You wanna give people, you know, somebody says something that's offensive, you wanna you don't wanna pigeonhole them and define them.

Shaming, like, shaming doesn't doesn't help. It doesn't mean you don't raise an issue, but there's a value to giving people grace. And we clearly don't do that in the in the political world. And I think we are Words are imperfect. You go back to the kid example you used.

You know, there's a great book, The Body Keeps the Score. Yep. And it's really it's really helped me understand the autonomic nervous system. And I even my my cat. My cat's never been outside, but it sees a bird and it knows it wants to kill the bird.

And I realized it's I'm the same way. Our there's a famous story in the Talman that says that an ape when we're born, we we know all the wisdom of the the ages, and an angel touches our forehead and we forget it all. Mhmm. And I think our our our verbal consciousness, our words often divide us. And I'll be in a discussion with somebody and and and exactly we say, I'll offend them.

And they'll say to they'll either end the conversation or they'll say you just offended me. And and when we really talk it through, I wasn't saying what they thought I was saying. Right? Yeah. But by the same token and that happens to me all the time.

They'll say something, and I think they mean something. And I won't ask the deeper follow-up question, and I'll just go off on a tangent, and they have to interrupt me and say, no. No. No. That's not what I was trying to say.

Yeah. So does some of your work help people with that art of understanding how we do bump around? Well, I I think that that study I was describing from Kiara is really relevant. Right? So that's a study where you think through, you make it okay to feel uncomfortable.

You find a new way to understand that discomfort is potentially a reflection of your commitment to each other. And you understand it as something that can get better with time. So then you don't have to have, like, you have that feeling of awkwardness or that discomfort or that initial reaction, and you don't have to either ignore that or overreact to that. You can you can sit with that a little bit. It can be okay to have that feeling.

Just like you fail a test from a growth mindset perspective, you fail a test. Okay. You failed the test. It doesn't have to mean you never see that subject again and you run away and you're done with that thing. That's that's an overreaction.

So using your own life, you you used examples with your kids, for instance. Are there situations that you feel comfortable sharing where you had a brother, a a a a partner, a sibling, a teacher, somebody that came at you in a way where you felt attacked or otherwise, and you were able to work it through? I mean, in the in the book, I tell the story of my brother's situation in a relationship that doesn't have the solution that you're looking for, but it it reflects this kind of so, you know, that he was dating this girl, they dated for some months, they were in New York and then she breaks up with him and when she breaks up with him, she says, remember that time we went to Macy's and he's like, yeah, we went to Macy's and she says, I had to tell you to tuck your shirt in. I can't be with you. And my brother is like, What?

Like, what is my tuck shirt or lack of tuck shirt have to do with our relationship? But it had meant something to her. And it was never clear to him what it had meant, but it meant something to her about who he was and who she was and how they could never be together. And they had never had the opportunity to actually have a conversation about that. So he, you know, in a in a healthier dynamic, if that had come up earlier, he would have said something to her, like, interesting, like, tell me why, like, what did what is it that that meant to you?

Like, what is it that that symbolized? There's something behind that that I don't understand. And I need to understand if we're gonna have any kind of relationship. The proper response wouldn't have been, that's ridiculous. Like, you're so you're absurd.

That would have shut down the conversation. Like, I often feel we're having these dynamics where we I called a tidbit, a tiny fact, a big theory, where something happens and we have we treat it as this big truth. Well and and and as you're saying that story, the story of the woman that called up her neighbor needing help Yeah. And literally could have been the same thing. I knew never to call you again.

We're not gonna be friends. I'm not gonna bring you something to eat. I'm ending the relationship because, obviously, you're a crazy person because you're telling me not to call you, and your brother could have three kids with this woman. He's got another wife now. She's she's wonderful.

That's funny. Yeah. Greg, I I thoroughly enjoyed this. It was a great conversation. Thank you.

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