Dr. David Yeager: How to Master Growth Mindset to Improve Performance

27:24And first of all, a surprising number about cats. I don't know why people think cat pictures are like the way to convey complex scientific ideas. is, like, it'll be like a cat with like a cookie jar, and it'll be like, growth mindset. I don't understand what that, what the point of that is. But, you know, page two or three after all the cats, then you get to a lot of things that are, you'll see a person with a battery that's empty, and it's like, they didn't de -stress, or 10 tips for de -stressing, and it'll be like, go on a walk, drink Camamil tea. Like, in the underlying implications that if you're stressed, then you need to distract yourself, you need to get rid of that stress.

28:03But alternative explanation in the growth mindset world is, well, maybe you have something that's very important to you, and you've pushed yourself to embrace some challenge in a really admirable way, and that has filled your plate in some way. Like, if I was about to give a presentation to a senior vice president at work, and I'm stressed about it, I should not like go take a bubble bath and like go for a walk. I should get ready to kick ass at the presentation. And so I think what Ali Kram and others have identified is that you can think differently about that stress. You can say, this is actually a sign that I'm preparing to optimize my performance.

28:45And maybe the heart racing isn't my body being afraid of damage. Maybe it's my body getting more oxygenated blood to my brain and my muscles to help me do really well. And that's called a stress can be enhancing belief. And what's so interesting, I think, about this work, and I wanna give credit to lots of other people, is that if you're in the stress as debilitating mindset, you don't realize that there's an alternative. You just think that that's the way it is. So it never occurs to you to say, oh, this stress is helping me, right? But once you tell people this, what happens is in our studies, we actually see a change in stress physiology.

29:29Changing your mindset about stress in turn changes how your body reacts, which then becomes a different stressor that you can interpret. And so the big insight was pairing the V's ideas about reframing stress as an inevitable force that's going to destroy your goal pursuit into a resource to be cultivated and pairing that together with the first step, which is the growth mindset that causes you to be open to the challenge in the first place. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens, now called AG1, is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that covers all of your foundational nutritional needs.

30:11I've been taking Athletic Greens since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. The reason I started taking Athletic Greens and the reason I still take athletic greens once or usually twice a day is that it gets to be the probiotics that I need for gut health. Our gut is very important. It's populated by gut microbiota that communicate with the brain, the immune system, and basically all the biological systems of our body to strongly impact our immediate and long -term health. And those probiotics in athletic greens are optimal and vital for microbiotic health. In addition, athletic greens contains a number of adaptogens, vitamins and minerals that make sure that all of my foundational nutritional needs are met.

30:50And it tastes great. If you'd like to try athletic greens, you can go to athleticgreens .com slash huberman. And they'll give you five free travel packs that make it really easy to mix up athletic greens while you're on the road and the car on the plane, et cetera. And they'll give you a year supply of vitamin D3 K2. Again, that's athleticgreens .com slash huberman to get the five free travel packs and the year supply of vitamin D3 K2. I feel like so much of what human being struggle with such as learning and performance, our relationship to stress, etc. Could be resolved if we could overcome the deficit and language.

31:29Here's what I'm thinking. We're talking about reframing stress to make it performance enhancing as opposed to performance diminishing. I wonder if we replace the word stress with just like levels of arousal. But then people hear arousal and they think certain kinds of arousal. So what you want to do is, you know, the way I think about is like a continuum of readiness. But then that doesn't work because readiness can be readiness for sleep, which is a low level of arousal. You don't want to be highly alert. And then you're not ready for sleep, right? Yeah. So there's a real deficit of language where I think if there was some other word, I don't, I can't come up with it on the fly where, you know, one's internal level of readiness as opposed to stress.

32:12And maybe it looks a lot like autonomic or arousal where heart rate is increased and blood pressure is increased. And people would say, oh, yeah, that's my body being ready for something as opposed to stressed about doing it. Yeah. And it's kind of a trivial, you know, recasting of stress on the one hand, but in terms of, you know, kids learning about life and stress and arousal and these internal signals and and adults learning about those and incorporating those into their life goals, I think it would be pretty meaningful. And again, I don't have a solution to this, but I feel like everyone here stresses bad.

32:46You hear stress is enhancing, okay, great. But I think it's really about developing a language that lets us interpret what's going on in our bodies and compare that to what we are facing in the moment and just decide is this well matched or poorly matched to what we need to do. Is it great for going to sleep? Is it great for learning? Is it great for catching that train that's, you know, soon to leave the station. And I just wonder why the deficit in language. Yeah, I think it's a profound question because small changes in language perpetuate problematic lay theories because they have the baggage on them.

33:24And I think that let's think this through. So what the psychophysiologist like to point out is that there's a distinction between the stressor, which is the, let's call it the internally or externally imposed demand, could be something that's thwarting your goals or the exam, the difficult conversation, the going to, for some people going to the doctor or the dentist, the hard conversation with, you know, with somebody you care about, it could be, or a physical stressor, right, like a football game or, you know, running a marathon, right? So, anything that imposes demands on your body and mind and therefore will require resources whether like metabolic resources to do well.

34:09That's a stressor, okay. Then there's your appraisal of it. That's what you name it, how you interpret it, how you frame it in your mind. And then there's your response. People in general conflate the stressor with a stress response when they say stress. They're like, I'm really stressed right now. Well, really what you mean is that there were stressors, you appraise them as more than you can handle, and then you had a threat type stress response, which means that your body is preparing for damage and defeat. And that is like an inheritance of how the sympathetic nervous system evolved, which was to keep us alive from mainly physical threats.

34:51And so if you have a stressor, some demand, prays is something you cannot handle, and then your threat type response. Your body's basically assuming you're going to lose whatever physical fight you're in, like the bear is going to, you know, tear you apart. And then your main goal at that point is to stay alive and like bleed out more slowly, right? So you end up with more blood kept centrally in the body cavity, less in the extremities, right? The body releases cortisol because it's an anti -inflammatory. it's going to help with tissue repair 45 minutes down the road. So there's a whole cascade of physiological responses that come in part from the mental appraisal that this stressor is more than you can handle.

35:34Now, we're very rarely confronted with those kinds of physical stressors these days. It's often social stressors, but a lot of the social stressors are the threat of social death, right? Like a ninth grader coming into high school, getting bullied by all their friends and are excluded because the friends in eighth grade now treat you like you don't exist. Right? The threat of social death is pretty bad. Right? Or you're a new legal associate and you've filed your first brief and all the partners are like this is garbage. We're not going to send it to the client. Right? Like all of a sudden you're on trial socially in front of these people who could you lose at any time.

36:12That's a very vibrant social stressor that evokes the same kind of physiological response as we suppose a physical one would. And so we're very careful to distinguish in our studies a stressor from the stress response because often the stressor isn't really a bad thing. Getting critical feedback on your first legal brief as a junior associate, well that could be awesome. It could be like, oh great, I have these awesome partners that my great law firm are now giving me personalized feedback. That's useful. Or I'm an ninth grader and I have to make new friends, but I don't know. That's maybe a new friends.

36:50That could be a good thing. Right? And same with the tests, same with, you know, presentations, a senior vice president, whatever it is. Stressors often in our daily lives are not good or bad. Of course, there's traumatic stressors that are really bad for people. But then the appraisal is really where there's a lot of leverage. And if you think that the stressor is inevitably bad and that your response to it is always harmful, then it's really hard for you to think that you have the resources to meet the demand that you're facing. And you end up in this threat cycle. So in a lot of our research, what we try to do is give people a different story to tell themselves about a stressor and about their response.

37:37So that way they end up in a better place. I don't know what that better language is, but I will say I once gave a talk at a middle school in a high school and I used slides that Jeremy Jamison, who was my collaborator, had sent me that had the word arousal on it on every single slide. And that was a big mistake in a room of like middle school kids. I strongly recommend different terminology. And I was a middle school teacher. I should have known that you can't say that word in a high school. Right. Yeah, I think that there needs to be a better language. I think if people of all ages understood the autonomic nervous system, this aspect of our nervous system that is on a continuum that leads us to either be, I guess, at the extremes, you would say, a coma would be the deepest state of person, non -arousal, then ascending from very, deeply asleep, lightly asleep, groggy awake, awake in alert to the point of being highly alert, and then you get into kind of low level panic and then all out panic attack, right?

38:49And this kind of the continuum, the autonomic continuum. I feel like if people understood that and they could simply ask, okay, where is my body in mind along that continuum and then compare it to whatever it is they face, then we'd have a better sense of whether or not we were in the correct, maybe even optimal state for dealing with challenge or not. And along those lines, what is the optimal internal state for dealing with challenge that is just outside our ability? You know, maybe in an exam where I can naturally get 85 % of the answers correct, but maybe 15%. I think this is what the machine learning in AI tells us is probably the appropriate level of difficulty for something in order to best learn.

39:32I know that's probably broad to be able to do it. Yeah, depends on if you're motivated and if you know, a lot of things like that. But yeah, I mean, I think if you think of the autonomic arousal on just one axis,

39:45where you start running into problems we find is that I think you're right that there's like, you know, coma to like some arousal or meaningful arousal. But it's the middle to the end part where there's two different tracks. And one track is very high arousal, but you're terrified of the damage and defeat and the humiliation and the failure. And so So that's, that's, um, demanding all your attention. That's what we call a threat type stress. There's another version that is, again, very high arousal, but that's like your stoked and you feel confident. You're gonna do well. And that's also very high arousal.

40:26And if you just look at arousal measures like pre -adjection period, right? Could you explain pre -adjection period? It's just a, it's a simple measure of just the sympathetic nervous system that we use in all of our studies. So sympathetic, just to remind folks, is one aspect of the autonomic nervous system has nothing to do with sympathy. It's just the more alert, means more contribution of the sympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system, sorry it's a mouthful, and then less alert would be more contribution of the parasympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system. And PEP is just a measure that we use in our laboratory studies.

41:06And another could have been skin conductance, which is about the sweat coming out of your skin. And then we use an electrode to figure out how much is there. That those kinds of measures can't distinguish what we call a challenge type state. That's almost like people have heard of flow where you're optimally balanced between important challenge you care about and resources and ability to, you know, overcome or at least deal with that challenge on the positive side, and the other higher rousal state, which is threat. And that's, again, everything's highly engaged, your whole stress system, but you don't think you can deal with it.

41:48So that becomes really important because, here's a very practical example. If you look at devices is people are wearing to detect their stress. That might say higher low arousal, but it can't distinguish between super good positive challenge type stress and really negative threat type stress. One of the examples that psychophysiologists like to say a lot, I got this from Jeremy Jamison, is imagine you're at the top of a double black diamond about to ski down. If you You are a good skier. Your heart rate isn't probably low. You're probably amped up. You're stoked. This is awesome. I can't wait to do this.

42:27If you're fully confident, you're going to make all the turns and have a blast. If you're a terrible skier, you're just imagining the yard sale that's about to happen. You're about to crash. You're going to fall down the mountain. You might die. Also, high arousal. If you're wearing like the regular watch that will just detect sympathetic nervous system activation, it wouldn't be able to tell the difference between really stoked to do something positive and terrified of crashing and dying. And so we, I like that example because often in social situations or performance situations, you want to be higher ralzo to perform your best, but you want your perception of that demand, the demand that's requiring your body to respond to be matched with an equal belief or what we call a praise of your resources to meet that demand.

43:14So I think my answer to the question is, well, I think it's not so much about what's the optimal amount of demand, right? So that the 85 % likelihood of success rate problems or that's titrating demand. I think it's how do you pair a necessary level of demand for whatever goal you have with the perceptions of the resources. And sometimes those resources are your internal, like just confidence, you know, or sometimes it's your ability to re -apprise. And other times it's material resources. Like, do you have a, it could be in real life? Do you have a friend that you could turn to? Or it might be, have you been trained in a way where you're able to overcome this?

43:59Do you have enough time? So resources can be a big bucket. And that's kind of the magic, is because resources are appraised by the mind. In our interventions, we can give you a different way of viewing your resources so that we people feel like they can meet the demand and that pushes them from a threat type response into a more challenged type response. It makes sense if I think that the stress for lack of a better term and the effort is going to get me where I need to go eventually, I'm going to be far more willing to invest the effort. Yeah, especially if I'm motivated. I want the thing that lies at the finish line.

44:38You basically take the demand, which was your intense stress and worry, and turn it into a resource in your own mind. And it turns out that that actually helps people cope at a physiological level. Got it. Got it. We've been talking a lot about kind of the nuts and bolts of growth mindset and stress is performance enhancing mindset. Maybe we could shift a little bit to the discussion about what you call the mentor mindset. And as we do that, maybe we'll weave back in some of these concepts. Your book, 10 to 25, focuses heavily on social appraisal, self appraisal. Basically, the idea that we want to be liked and we don't want to be disliked, and it hurts when people say mean things about us or when we hear negative feedback, especially if it's provided publicly.

45:30But ultimately, what we do with that information is what determines whether or not we grow and move forward. Everyone loves a great report card. Nobody likes a poor report card. So tell us about Mentor mindset and both for folks in the 10 to 25 age range, but also for everybody, you know, because it's clear that this impacts us throughout our lifespan. Yeah, so the work I write about comes out of a dissertation led by Jeff Cohen at Stanford in the 90s with Claude Steele. And they coined a term that they call the Mentors Delema. And the Mentors Delema is the idea that if you're a leader, a manager, a coach, teacher, whatever it is, parent, It's very hard to simultaneously criticize somebody's work and Motivate them to overcome and embrace that criticism and the reason it's a dilemma is because The leader on the one hand wants to maintain high standards by being critical maybe in order to help the person grow But that could crush the person's motivation The alternative is withhold your criticism.

46:43Don't say the truth hide all the critical feedback and be nice and super supportive. But, and that meets your goal of being friendly and caring, but it doesn't help the person grow. So it feels like we have to walk through the world with stock between two bad choices. Either you're a demanding autocratic, you know, dictator who doesn't care about human feelings, or you are a, like, low standards whimp pushover that's giving in to the wimpy demands of the week next generation. And neither of those have uniformly positive connotations. And the classic example in Jeff's work was student at Stanford who writes a first draft of an essay and then gets really harsh critical feedback from a professor.

47:32Are they willing to revise their work? Or do they say, this teacher hates me, they're biased. I dislike them and leave the comments unaddressed. So the solution to that in that research on the mentors dilemma has been to say two things. One is appealed to the very high standard you have for someone's work, but also always a company that appealed to the high standard with an assurance that if they implement the feedback and use the support, that they're capable of meeting the high standard. I like to think of it as, like, if you go to the roller coaster and they say you have to be this tall to ride, right?

48:17So just saying you have to be this tall and you're not see later isn't reassuring to somebody, right? But if you can say, here's the standard and I believe you can meet it, but it's going to be hard. That means a lot. It means I'm taking you seriously. It means I believe in your growth. And it's a kind of leadership practice that makes growth mindset be something that comes to life and feel true. It's not just an idea in your head that you're growing. It's like I live in a social world where people are going to push me to grow and not leave me alone. Are you familiar with the book of the late, I think the pronunciation is Randy Pousch for the last lecture?

48:56No. He was a computer scientist. He developed a lot of early online portals for kids in particular. A young woman to learn programming. I think it was called Alice. And he is known for what's called the last lecture. He was diagnosed with cancer eventually passed away. But he talked about in his book lessons that were important for life. And one of the things that he said was the thing to worry about is not when your mentors and coaches are pushing you. It's when they stop pushing you that you should really worry because that means they've basically given up on you. So that always, that always rung in my mind.

49:34Yeah. What I call the person who is no longer maintaining high standards for you, I call that a protector mindset. That it's almost like it's going to be too much trouble to see you dealing with stress from being pushed that I am going to protect you from that stress. I maybe I care about you, but I'm not going to, not going to hold you to a high standard. And I see that a lot in coaches. I see it in teacher, I see it in parents. For me, the opposite problematic version is what I call an enforcer mindset. This is like, here's the standard. And I'm going to hold you to it and then step to you to meet it or not.

50:16right? That's kind of like the college professor that says, look to your left, look to your right, half of you, you know, are going to be gone by the end of this. For me, the solution is to think about taking the best parts of both of those two. What's the high standards high support? So enforcer, great, you've got the standards. Let's add your support. Protector, you care a lot. Great. Let's add the standards. And what Jeff Cohen and Claude Seal found in their initial study is that students were far more likely to view negative criticism as a sign that the teacher cared for them. If it was accompanied by a transparent and clear communication of these two elements of high standards and high support.

51:00If it was just the critical feedback, the professor could have meant the same positive thing. I'm caring about you, but they didn't make it clear to the person. then participants were less likely to think that the professor was on their side. In our work in some small studies, we showed that even seventh graders, when they get critical feedback on their essays, are about twice as likely to implement the teacher's critical feedback, with even a very short invocation of the high standards and the high support. So to get to your question about Mint or Mindset, at some point, I got worried that our experiment on high standards high support messages, which we called wise feedback on those studies, would be viewed as, I don't know, like a magic phrase.

51:50Like, my joke, my laugh line, this isn't lame laugh line, but I'm a professor, so that's the best I can do. My laugh line was always, I just live in fear that Pearson and other textbook companies are going to sell wise feedback posted notes so they can magically erase the achievement gap. And I always said that as a joke, and then two things happen. One is a popular author, like I named Dan Coil, literally called it magic feedback in his book, didn't cite us, but like, you didn't cite us? No. Dan. But also like magic feedback. I'll say it so you don't have to. Not cool. Attribution is important.

52:22It's just not magic at all. The magic of of high standards and high support is not the 18 words. It's, I'm taking you seriously, when a moment when you're vulnerable and I have power over you. That is just so deeply human and so powerful. But there's nothing about the magic words. It's the experience of dignity and respect when you are questioning whether you're either worthy of it or are going to be given it by authorities. It's interesting we had Dr. Becky Kennedy on here to talk about parenting and she said many important things But among them was the fact that Children perhaps all people want to feel real Yeah, and they want to feel safe.

53:10Yeah an important concept that I think many people heard and are really internalizing I know I am For sure and this idea of feeling real has to do with not just feeling seen, but that people believe us, even if they disagree with us. Yeah, like they believe us. She has another thing that's super profound is the kind of two things argument that I can both have high expectations for my kids and love my kids. And I think that's a very good version of wise feedback mentor mindset. That as parents, it either feels like I can expect a lot of my kids, but then I'm a monster they're going to yell at me or I'm going to be a pushover and then they're going to be unruly.

53:56And I think part of her was then this to help explain to parents how you can do both of those things. And indeed one can, right? I think it requires having a kind of dynamic stance or dynamic mindset as the teacher, the leader, the coach, the parent. I want to get back to some of the mechanics I've had to go about that. But why do you think this stuff is so hard? Like And if we think about, I don't know, kind of a curbside evolutionary theory, meaning, I don't have any formal training in evolutionary psychology, you can step back and say, like, I don't know, maybe we just used to be so busy from morning to sleep that we didn't really have time to do anything except the stuff we needed to complete in order to feed our families and take care of our communities, et cetera.

54:45And now a number of things are outsourced. And so here we have this notion of strivings. But then again, we went from hunter -gather cultures to writing war and peace and everything else, technologies of all kinds. So there must be something in the human brain that causes us to strive. And what we really talk about here is striving and our relationship with striving. So if we were to step back and just say, okay, what do you think determines whether or not someone feels they can do better? Is it early success? They tried it something. Most everyone I assume who tries to learn to walk walks, learns to speak, speaks, they're rare exceptions.

55:33But what do you think this whole thing about strivings is about? And when we talk about growth mindset, stress is enhancing mindset, the mentor mindset, I mean, are we trying to get back to activating systems that are hardwired within us, and that have been kind of masked by daily life, or are we trying to kind of better ourselves in our species through, you know, like really trying to do something that's never been done in human history before? Right. It's a big, it's a I mean, I think that all I can do is conjecture, you know, as a scientist, but the, I'm often reminded of something I heard from Ron Doll, as a neuroscientist at Berkeley.

56:17Not Ronald Doll, the children's. Not Ronald Doll. No, Ron Doll. Although, Ron is just so, this is an awesome guy. It's like, it's just polymath. He could do everything and just so curious and generous. He, what he always says to me is like, look, it's like, David, what do you think the human brain wants to do? Like, I don't know. feel good. He's like, no, it wasn't feel better. And I think what he was trying to get me to see is that it's the kind of pursuit of some kind of delta and change. Yeah, a change from the state. And I think the argument is that even if you are, if what you thought was your biggest need, if that was satisfied, then there's always like another thing.

57:00I think it's part of the argument. And so, but it's also this idea that if you think of the human brain as trying to learn at all times, like what is it trying to learn? And the at least in the animal studies, you know, often it's like how do I either feel better or avoid, you know, feeling worse in a lot of ways. And I think that as I think about adolescence, that's a period where your theory of how to feel better is dramatically changing because you're no longer fully cared for by adults. All of a sudden, your criteria for feeling good about yourself is your social standing, not just in your parent's eyes, but in the eyes of the community and the milieu you're a part of.

57:45And that comes a lot from your contribution value. If you think in our evolutionary history, like being ostracized and alone is certain death in ancient human cultures. right? I mean, you can't, the tribes wandering around in the Savannah, you're alone. At a minimum, you have no one to watch out for you when you fall asleep. And so, and humans can't sleep in trees because our muscles don't contract when we're asleep on like animals. And so, you're just exposed on the ground. If you're alone, eventually, you're gonna die, right? So, the fear of moving from a parent's taking care of your safety all night to now, you have to trust peers to take care of you and watch over you, that comes to the forefront of young people's minds, the kind of the minute puberty strikes.

58:32And so what it means to feel better often is that I'm socially valued by the group. There's something they're going to keep me around for some reason. Now they don't often keep score in an explicit way. I mean, now things are in social media, maybe they're kind of keeping score, but like the rules of how you're doing socially are so implicit, you have to read between the lines, they're inferred, social hierarchy is very complex for adolescents. And so they overdo it thinking through like, how am I standing? Like, where am I relative to others? Now that process is started by puberty and we know from lots of species work that it then leads to changes in the brain.

59:13So the dopadinergic system, of course, it's like driven in part by changes in the gonadol maturation. Ron likes to talk about these great studies of songbirds, of how do they learn the mating calls. And if songbirds don't have testosterone when they are learning the mating calls, they don't do the like over the top obsessive practice so they don't master them. And then they don't make it in the dialogue. Interesting. Yeah, I'm familiar with that. Yeah. With that literature, there's a great Unfortunately, now passed away biologist who was first in the UK and then was up at UC Davis, Peter Marler, and who studied the bird song learning.

59:54Yeah. And it's amazing work. Yeah, it's amazing work and it mimics a lot of the development of human speech, although not exactly like there's this babbling phase where babies and birds experiment with different tones and their learning to use the pharynx and larynx or, you know, in birds. It's a slightly a different system. And some birds are seasonal singers, but I wasn't familiar with this result that the testosterone drives a kind of obsessive practice. Yeah, it's a obsessive practice in order to demonstrate a little status, but really your value, I mean, there it's made value, right? But I think the same thing is true for lots of things that teenagers could be playing guitar, you know, could be gymnastics.

1:00:34I mean, think about how many of their Olympic athletes are like 14, right? and they're waking up at 4 in the morning, they're practicing obsessively. How many like pro social hackers who take down evil foreign governments, right? Our teenagers, right? There are things that take so much practice and so much learning happen at the exact same age as adults are saying these kids little lazy and don't wanna work, right? So I tend to focus on, just give you a question about why do people strive to get better? I think in adolescence, you look around in your social milieu and see what counts for status.

1:01:11Not in a superficial way, sometimes happen, but often in a deeply meaningful way. What am I gonna bring to the table? One would hope. And then, I remember junior high school, even far more superficial, but I'm 48, so I remember it in the kind of the John Hughes film era where people were very divided in terms of jocks and skateboarders and rockers and nerds. Now it seems a little bit more mishmashed. But I think also people will, in adolescence, I feel like kids find their niche and then try and excel within that niche. You know, as opposed to high school or junior high school being one huge hierarchy.

1:01:46Yeah. Yeah, there's kind of these sub -hierkes. Yeah, Dan McFarland is a sociologist at Sanford. Did this really interesting study with the ad health data? And it turns out you could characterize the social hierarchies in different high schools by kind of single pyramid, high schools versus multi -paramid high schools. and there's way better adjustment in the multi -parameter high schools because there's many roots to status. The evolutionary psychologist Bruce Ellis talks about having many roles. And I like that because in the old model, if there's one pyramid and you're kind of near the top but not at the top, you've got a lot of incentive to destroy reputations, be the mean girls type of behavior.

1:02:27Bob Ferris, sociologist at Davis, finds that the most bullying in high school is the people that are like the 60th, the 85th percentile on popularity. It's like you're near the top, but not all the way at the top. Yeah, these maps very well to Robert Sapolsky's work on primate troops. Yeah. Yeah, the alphas are stressed, but the sub -alphas are, they have options. Yeah. And this is true for female and male animals. Just as it's true, we were talking about testosterone a few minutes ago in obsessive practice. I'll remind people that in women, they actually have adult women have more testosterone than they do estrogen.

1:03:04If you look at a pure nanogram, predestine, or comparison, it's just that overall it tends to be on average less than in men. So the statement about testosterone and obsessive learning or efforts to learn, I have to imagine is not restricted to males or females. Yeah, and I think I understand as a man praising testosterone that I could come across, but I so I always need to remember That the research is very interesting on tea Evelyn Crohn's lab Did these great studies where they had kids starting age 10 to like 25 And they had them come in the lab twice and they took testosterone levels But also had them do a bunch of tasks in the scanner and you can look at nucleus acumbens prefrontal cortex etc areas associated with reward.

1:03:48Yeah, and pursuit motivation. Yeah. And they also have them do wrist -taking tasks. And what they find is that in both boys and girls, testosterone goes up over time. Starts a little earlier in girls because Goneadarkey's one or two years before boys. But the change score from one point to the next was equally predictive of neural reactivity during wrist -taking tasks for both boys and girls. So although boys end up with higher T throughout adolescence, the increase is equally predictive, which is another way of saying it's just as important for these social learning things and girls. And T, by the way, is just a really good proxie.

1:04:30Testosterone's a really good proxy. Other hormones are involved too. They're just more complicated. Like DHEA, you could study as well, but that's part of the same metabolic pathway of cortisol all in testosterone, so it's just messier and harder to interpret. So we're not making claims specifically about testosterone. It's just like a really good proxy for where you are in gonadol maturation. And both boys and girls, gonadol maturation really matters for this kind of status, social seeking part of your brain. Yeah, so if I understand correctly, the slope of the line of one's testosterone increase for both boys and girls is predictive of striving.

1:05:07If it's a steep upward line, then that's associated with more striving and a given practice. To the extent that neural activation during a social reward task or a risk -taking task is a proxy for striving. And that's what a lot of people have argued. Do you think that striving reflects the action of a basic neural circuit that then can be applied to other things? or lots of different things. The reason I ask is that, you know, the notion of growth mindset is so attractive. It's such a sticky idea because, or I think because one imagines, okay, if I can get really good at one thing, chess, then I can apply the same kind of relationship to the internal state of stress or arousal, or what have you, when trying to navigate a new environment of another kind, a physical practice, or a relationship challenge, or something of that or that you know what we're really talking about here is an algorithm that can be directed at different pursuits.

1:06:10As opposed to growth mindset is applied in one context and not another. So what of that? People who are incredibly good at accessing growth mindset in one domain of life, does that mean that they'll be good at accessing growth mindset in another domain of life? What's the the carryover or the fallover. It's a great question. It comes up a lot. The Michigan State Psychologist Jason Moser studied this, and they measured growth mindset about your intelligence, the classic one, your personality, your morality, your social relationships, your emotions, et cetera. And the question is, is there kind of like one growth mindset that applies in all the different ways?

1:06:55or are there totally narrow mindsets that have nothing to do with each other, or is it something in between? And the finding was that there is an overall association. If you think one trait can change and be developed, you tend to think another trait can be changed and developed. And just empirically, it's hard to separate that from people's general tendency to disagree or agree with items that could be what the common factor is. But it kind of makes sense. However, there's also very domain specific mindsets. So there are people who think, yeah, I can get smarter, but I can't change my shyness.

1:07:35And other people who think my relationships are never going to get better, but I can learn to play the shallow, you know, and vice versa. And when you want to predict behavior, turns out that the closer you are to that domain, the better the prediction is going to be. So if I want to know if you're going to quit playing the cello or not, I'm going to ask you your cello mindset That's going to do way better than in general, can human qualities change But if I'm going to intervene At what levels do the intervention happen if I only change your cello mindset Well, you're right like what if cello isn't your thinking life now?

1:08:09Are you going to be fixed mindset for your relationships in school and that it not really help you? so um the The kind of the empirical answer currently is if it's a domain that someone could be really defensive about, it's better to be a little vager about it. Classic example is around how parents work on the Israel -Palestine conflict, which is obviously a big issue right now. Their science paper in 2011 changed mindsets about group conflict in general, can an ethnic a group or a national group ever change. They didn't go to people in Israel and say Palestinians can change because they're like, no, they can't.

1:08:54That's not possible. But if they said, you know, sometimes leaders change and when leaders change, the groups priorities change and they become more amenable to negotiation. And when that happens, things can change. If that was done at a more general level, then both Israelis and Palestinians were more open to a peace process. So I think if it's something you're very defensive about, I tend to think back up and do the more abstract mindset. Another example is I remember I was in graduate school at Stanford and one of my RAs was so excited about our work and he went to a party and talked about it.

1:09:30It's like that very Stanford thing to do is talk about research at a party and he's like, oh yeah, math ability can change. You don't have to be dumb and math forever. And the person he talked to was so offended. She was like, are you telling me I could have done better in high school math and I just didn't try hard enough? And my life could be different. I could be an engineer right now. Like I like my life. Why are you telling? It went down this road of like how dare you tell me it could have been different. And who knows? Maybe he had bad delivery and had 14 margaritas and that's who knows what happened.

1:10:02But I think the idea is like, if someone's got a reason to think about that fixed mindset as comforting in some way that they don't have to feel bad about something that could have been different. It's probably not smart to go after that in a very specific way. But if someone's not defensive, generally the closer to the domain, the better because they're gonna see the application. Otherwise, that's used by analogy and we know And the only analogy reasoning is tough because it's hit or miss. We love stories of people that have come from a place of being really back on their heels or even just dissolved into a puddle of their own tears too.

1:10:45Doing well again, maybe even soaring again. Sort of the common thing is that this is the classic American story, although it's true of people all over the world, I imagine. Right. It's not always true in America either, but yeah. Right. Some people love the story. Yeah, some people crash and burn but it seems like everybody loves a comeback story. Right. I don't know something about that. The hero's journey, the hero of a thousand faces is that the Joseph Campbell. And it's written into so many movies and books and real life stories. I can't help but superimpose today's discussion on to something like that, right?

1:11:25that life is a series of efforts to apply growth mindset from learning how to walk. Presumably as part of that, I don't know any child that just stands up and walks early on to the things that we really think we can perform well at to finding ourselves like really back on our heels. And so are there any data or theories even that point to the use of growth mindset and stress is enhancing mindset in coming from a real place of deficit. Not just from trying to do better and learn new things, but from a real place of deficit, a real place of challenge. I think it's important for our audience to hear because I think a number of people do feel back on their heels in one or more domains of life.

1:12:11Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think that the data suggests that growth mindset becomes most relevant to your your next behavior, the more challenging face. And so for a long time, what that meant is if you maybe were a low achieving student, and we're going to evaluate growth mindset by looking at your grades, you should see bigger gains for low achieving students compared to high achieving students. Part of that could be an artifact. If you already have straight A's, we can't give you more A's. It's impossible, right? but in general, psychological treatments like a growth mindset tend to work better for people who counterfactually wouldn't have them and could positively benefit from them.

1:12:53Where the story becomes more interesting is that often your own individual difficulties are associated with your environment. And the environment is really what allows you to apply your growth mindset over time. So it might make you right now need a growth mindset more, but it might make it harder for you to act on it. And so for people who like complex three -way interactions, the idea is that a treatment for growth mindset should work best for individuals who face the most challenges but are in the most supportive environments. And one is like baseline, why do you need it? And the other is over time, what's going to help you keep using it?

1:13:34So to be very concrete about this, in one paper we published in 2019, the National Study of Learning Mindsets, it was published in Nature. We evaluated growth mindset in this large national sample and the question wasn't, does it work on average? The question was, where does it work in for whom? There were lots of applications already and sometimes people tried it and like, well, it didn't work here. Okay, well, that's a puzzle. How do we figure that out? And the finding was low achieving students in high schools that had more supportive classroom culture where you got the long run effects. And in the four year results, it's low achieving students in high schools that offered more advanced courses.

1:14:21So if you're a low achieving student, you get with mindset, it's like, great, give me pre -calculus. Oh, we don't offer that here, right? Or it's a toxic environment in some way. their teachers are untrained, their first year teachers. There's lots of poverty in the school. If you don't have the structure to support the striving, you don't get the long run effects, especially if the effect you're looking at are increases in equality of opportunity. So for me, the message is, like, think about growth mindset and psychology interventions as one tool in a tool cut to help people achieve their goals.

1:14:55But we can't forget about the entire field of sociology that tells us a lot about the allocation of resources through which people can even be afforded the chance to pursue their goals. And so what I like about that finding, which by the way came from a collaboration with sociologists who thought, you psychologists are absurd. They're like, you think your little mindset is gonna change inequality, like you're gonna make an argument to 15 year olds and that's your plan for improving the American economy. That's absurd. I was like, well, I don't know, might as you could do something. And psychologists are skeptical sociologists.

1:15:31They're like, look, how often do we have huge changes in law and policy, but people don't take advantage of the resources that are available to them. Those change the behavior so they take advantage. We kind of came together and said, what does it look like to consider both the structure and the internal psychology? And I think this was a very important point because people tend to choose one or the other. Either we're going to lobby for new laws to reallocate resources or we're going to optimize the psychology of the individual. And I think our perspective is to find ways to bring those two together and kind of do both.

1:16:09And ultimately, it's not a deficit -based perspective of you have a deficit and we're fixing that. Growth mindset is more like, well, it's an asset -based perspective. What I mean by that is we're not giving someone motivation in growth mindset. that we're presuming people already kind of want to do well. They want to impress others, they want to be meaningful, they want to contribute, but there's a barrier. The barrier is when you strive and then inevitably struggle, if you're pushing yourself beyond your abilities, people make you feel dumb for that struggle. So we are trying to remove that cultural and social barrier that's preventing people from their natural goal pursuit.

1:16:54And that comes deeply from Carol Dweck's original work at the intersection of developmental and social psychology. The basic claim in developmental psychology is the human being is an active learner who's trying to figure out the world. This is classic Alison Gapneck, Susan Gellman, infants or meaning makers trying to interpret the world and wanting to do well. And eventually they're socialized into beliefs that prevent them from acting on that basic neural desire to learn, grow, develop, et cetera. And growth mindset is really, it's not trying to be a magic pill to give an unmotivated, disaffected kid a shot in the arm of adrenaline so they go out and learn.

1:17:36No, it presumes agency and love of learning. And kind of, like I said, presumes the goodness in kids and tries to remove whatever kind of garbage beliefs they've learned from social context. And then our long term studies then show how once you do that, if you're also in a context where you can act on that level of learning, then you can see long run effects that are far more than what a lot of people have said you could get even in a disadvantaged context. It's so interesting because what we're talking about here is psychological theory, you playing out in the real world, but also kind of like deep notions of the human spirit.

1:18:17We are a species that seems to organize our experience in terms of stories of ourselves and others, but that when it comes to things like strivings and learning, I'm really always in a constant state of either being more to borrow the words of a friend of mine, either back on our heels, flat footed or forward center of mass. right? And what we're talking about today is being forward center of mass at least in certain areas of life. I mean that the fact that the reward systems of the brain, where you mentioned them earlier, these mesolimic reward pathways that basically deploy dopamine and other things, of course, are so associated with striving and achieving, striving and achieving and presumably underlie much if not all of our human evolution, assuming we're still evolving lately as sometimes I wonder, but some would argue were devolving, but I would argue we're still evolving, especially with this new burst in AI.

1:19:18It's all about math nowadays folks. A few years ago it was all about neuroscience, and neuroscience is still really important on the two share, but it's all about math lately. So I like to just think of the human animal as so different than the other animals of the planet, like we're the curators of the planet. The house cats might be striving, but they're clearly not doing as well as we are in terms of managing the way the world goes. So what do you think that this is like a basic algorithm within human beings to Look at ourselves look at the environment see challenges overcome challenges develop technologies.

1:19:50It's just kind of like a It's like the same way my bulldog used to like to know all and things You know you like to chew and pull we just want to learn and grow Do you think it's inherent to who we are as a species maybe even what sets our species apart from all the others? I mean, that's a profound question I think that's a good one to debate. What I've been really taken by recently is Carol Duac's secret life as a neuroscientist. She has this great psych review paper that contradicts a lot of received wisdom about prefrontal planning regions of the brain and the kind of amygdala in the hippocampus, the affective regions in the memory creation regions.

1:20:34And the classic argument and going back to Plato and the Fadres is that the rational acting part of the brain plans out what it wants makes all these calculations and then has to tame the emotional part in order to make those goals into a reality. And so the emotion, the amygdala, the mesolumbic, that's this unruly horse that the charioteer has to harness, you know. And I think that Carol argued and I think other people have argued too, I've seen Adriana Galvan and Randall and others argue this that the affective reasons are often the teacher and the pre funnel is the student. And that makes sense if you think about how humans are goal directed.

1:21:23Think about how a kid learns to walk. They don't do that for theoretical reasons. They don't just like look at people walking you make. I want to learn how to do that. It's, I fork it. It's usually because there's a toy at the other side of the room that they really, really want, that I don't want them to have, and the only way for them to go get it, because I won't get it for them, is for them to learn how to walk. So the motor learning is the effect of the desire in the goal pursuit. And what, what Carol argued is that, Fadr is totally wrong. It's not that the prefrontal chariots here is taming the emotional.

1:21:59It's really that the the affective part is training the prefrontal to be better at pursuing the goals that matter and the social milieu that you have. And a lot of people like Adriana Galvan and Jen Pfeiffer and Nim Tottenham and the adolescent space have shown this. And I don't understand all the details fully, but the argument that I've heard is that once the scanning studies were able to switch from FMRI focused on simple activation to studies looking at connectivity. Then they were and where you could get temporal ordering, then you could start seeing actually that, especially in adolescence, it's the affective regions are training or teaching or telling the prefrontal regions what to do.

1:22:45So I guess the, that's a long way of answering the question of, I think that, I think goal pursuit is fundamental to human nature. And I think that the brain in our adaptation is designed to help us learn how to be a lot better at pursuing whatever goals will help us survive in our environment. And the brain has to be adaptive to that environmental input because the environment's always changing. If it had only one way of pursuing its goals, then we would never survive. So it has to be the case that the planning, rational, observing part of the brain is actually responsive to what works in your context for goal pursuit.

1:23:22So again, I'm summarizing other people's work here, but that's how I see it. Yeah. I completely agree that emotions drive the more, it's called, tactical circuitry of the prefrontal cortex. Of course, we should be fair to the neuroscience. The prefrontal cortex is part of the limbic system. people often think because it's in the cortex, it's higher order, and that's simply not true. But, well, if we both agree and it sounds like we do, that emotions drive tactical decisions that derive action and learning. Maybe we could talk about the two major types of emotions one could imagine. One is I really want the toy, I really want the piece of food, I really need something for survival or for well -being and so I'm going to be motivated and then the prefrontal cortex will work out the strategies and balance out the relationship to stress, et cetera, and remind ourselves that stress can be performance enhancing and eventually we get the thing or the skill or the whatever.

1:24:25The other would be fear, fear of social shame, fear of staying in a place that's not good for us financially, emotionally, socially, etc. Is there any work that identifies whether or not that the core emotion driving motivation is relevant and is there a role for growth mindset there? That's interesting. I guess it puts simply, take it down out of the ivory tower a little bit, which is what we're doing here anyway. You can do things out love. You can do things out of fear. You do for both reasons too. You do things to please yourself. you can do things to please others, you can do things to avoid others being disappointed in you, you being disappointed in yourself.

1:25:08Presumably it's both. But is there any, I'm dying for you to tell me that when we do things out of love, we learn faster, but maybe that's not the case. Well, I don't know. I mean, so two thoughts. One is just, you know, honoring Danny Conneman who just passed away. His work with Amos Tversky took on a version of this question in prospect theory, And the idea of does the fear of a loss motivate us more than the prospect of a gain, right? And their argument is that both can be motivating as well as the possibility of a loss, but that loss is loom larger. That people are more willing to take a risky gamble to prevent a loss than they are to to get numerically equal, like a mathematically equal gain.

1:25:59And so a lot of people have used that information in various ways. And I think that that has led people to conclude that the prospect of a gain doesn't mean anything. But that really wasn't ever the point in prospect theory. It's just that it's a little more powerful to avoid a, to be afraid of a loss. I don't see a problem with thinking like, yeah, losses are a little worse. If I already had $1 ,000 and you took it away, it feels a little worse than the chance to win 1 ,000, I didn't win, mathematically it's the same delta. But I think that the way that behavioral economic work gets applied is to appeal to people's kind of basis in most fearful responses to things.

1:26:46And if you think about what drives a lot of excellence in moral exemplars too, it's this chance to feel like you've made a big contribution to others. And I don't think people are afraid that they didn't help as many people as they could have. Maybe that drives some people. But I think just the the effective forecasting of one day I'll feel good because of the meaningful work I did for others that was high integrity when no one else would have seen it. You know, that, I think that's really motivating for a lot of people. And I think we under appreciate that. And therefore, we appeal to very narrow self -interest.

1:27:31And my favorite theorist on this is Dale Miller is at the Stanford Business School. And he calls it the norm of self -interest. That if you look around, it looks like everyone's behaving for only very narrow short -term self -interested reasons and because you think that's the norm, then you yourself kind of respond to those incentives and then you then in turn create that norm even more than other people see. But it's not a state of affairs that anybody really likes. Everybody kinds of prefers a pro -social world where people are helping others. But if you think that's just a really weird thing to do and not normal, then people conform to the wrong norm.

1:28:09So in my work, what I try to emphasize is not Not that we're not afraid of losses and the narrow short -term gain that we're avoiding, or the short -term loss we're avoiding. But I really do think that people are capable of far more beautiful contributions to the world when we assume that that's what they want and we create opportunities for them to do that. I've seen that so much. If you look at some of the best managers, it's not just if you screw up, you're going to lose your bonus, like that's not what the best managers in the world are doing, right? They're like, let's do something no one's ever done before.

1:28:51Let me support you to do it. And then let me make sure that you look awesome in front of all the senior vice presidents because you do that. Like, that's what the best managers do. And coach is too. This, uh, from my book I interviewed the NBA's best shooting coach. This basketball player named Shane Baddie, who played college pro basketball, told me about him. And I interviewed Chip England, this is name. And he was at the San Antonio Spurs, which they had a 17 year run of being a perennial contender for the NBA championship. It constantly drafted players who were talented, but had a bad jump shot.

1:29:30So, Kwaey Leonard is an example where he fell late in the first round because people thought it couldn't shoot. Tony Parker is another example. When Tony Parker used to shoot, Greg Popovich would say, that's a turnover every time. Chip England is the, a great shooting coach worked with them. There's lots of Bill Barnwell had a great story about him, called him a shot doctor. And I interviewed Chip and I was like, Chip, how do you sell the vision to these players who are 18 to 21, are newfound millionaires, Everyone's saying you're the best, you're a first rounder, and they don't want to change their shot because if they do they could mess it up, make it worse.

1:30:10It's like a golfer, superstitious about their shot. He's like, you know, the number one thing I have to do is build trust because I can't critique a player shot and make them change it if they think they're gonna sacrifice more. So he's like, they have the first thing you have to do is sell your vision. I was like, well, what's your vision? He's like He doesn't say, if you don't change your shot, you are going to lose millions of dollars and be out of the league. So he doesn't motivate with a fear of loss. He says, the average time in the league is two and a half years. If you develop a great, reliable jump shot where even as your athletic talents decline, you're still reliable.

1:30:51You're talking about a 10 -year career. And then you're not just helping you. You're going to just helping your family. you're helping your family's family. So even in the like money obsessed through world or professional sports, the single best coach working with the top players appeals to the prospect of what you could do for others, not the fear of loss. And to me that's really telling, like if it works to just motivate with the fear of loss, that's what he would do, because they would do whatever's effective. It's like at some level an efficient market, but that's not what Chippingla does.

1:31:25And I think the same is true for a lot of other great mentors and leaders. So Pynor Shane correctly, when we find ourselves back on our heels or flat footed, we want to focus on the prospect of what we can do for others. Like ultimately that's going to be the best or the world or the world. Yeah. I guess yeah, pick your scope of... Yeah, it could be for art, for intellectual history. It's a classic Victor Frankl argument of man search for meaning, right? As Victor Frankl is leaving the concentration camps, what helps him survive? And it's the debt that he owes to the future work that he wants to write to share with the world.

1:32:12And it's not the fear of death. It's the the meaning of the work he could do for the world if he survives Yeah, I think I'd like to hover on this room and er, too Because I think it's really important. I realize we're getting more philosophical than operational But we've data on this it's yeah, yeah I would love to hear it There's one one thing some really enjoying about this conversation the moment I think it's gonna be abstract or I forgot that you've got you got it all there in in that brain Yeah, let's talk about that when we feel back on our heels or we're flatfooted, meaning we're not doing well, maybe hard things have happened, focusing on the prospect of what we can do for others, not just trying to avoid loss or further shame or just diminishment is going to be the best thing.

1:33:00So what are the data on this? Yeah, so we'll first just look at correlational studies in these global surveys of happiness And almost anyone you can think of, the best predictor of life satisfaction and well -being is going to be the meaning of your life in particular, the feeling like you're connected to others, you've contributed to others. That your life mattered. That your life, there was something of value in your life to others or to the world, right? And so the, just anecdotally, the advice I always give to people like going through depression or the risk of that is to focus on what you can do for others or what you have done.

1:33:43So that's just correlational. Now experimentally, what we did in some work, this was started with my first advisor at Stanford Bill Damon, who studies purpose in life, is we asked the question of when you're going through something tedious, boring, frustrating, what motivates you to keep going? and there are many possible answers to that, but we'd compared two different ones. One is the potential benefit you get out of that striving. So for a student in school, it's like the money you would get one day from working hard and doing well. An alternative though is what you could do with the knowledge that you gained by going through the hard learning.

1:34:32How could you contribute to others make a difference, et cetera, with the knowledge and skills? We call that our purpose condition. A couple of things make that different from the standard narrative, but I think ultimately intuitive. One is that the standard narrative is if you try hard in school or at work or whatever it is, and suffer now, then one day there will be a kind of financial compensation. So you're suffering now in a way that will bring material reward in the future. That, the brain's not really designed to make that kind of calculation, right? It's like, well, how certain is the reward in the future?

1:35:09How far into the future and how bad is the punishment right now? So there's all kinds of affective trade -offs that are hard for anyone or especially hard for 13 -year -olds, right? So what a lot of school comes down to is an adult saying, you need to suffer through 40 minutes it's per day of factoring trinomials because I said so, that, and I said it's good for your long term future, so that one day in your 30s, you can barely afford a mortgage, right? This is not a compelling argument from most of America's youth, my opinion. The purpose condition though, is not about the exchange value of credential, some long time in the future.

1:35:45It's more like, right now, you're getting a hard and kind of admirable skill that not everyone's gonna get. and you're gonna then be prepared when the moment arises to do something of significance for others. Now that also is uncertain and in the future, but for things that are contributions, you kind of get to feel like a good person right now. Analgyophon uses, if I'm gonna like make lunch for that homeless, I don't have to wait until they actually eat the food to feel like a good person. I feel like a good person when I'm putting it in the bag, you know, or even when I'm driving to the homeless shelter, right?

1:36:19And I think our idea was you can move up the reward by making it a social reward right now, rather than a material reward years into the future. Because then the pursuit itself becomes the reward. Right now, and actually the more frustrating it is right now, the more I'm being a good person. Because it means it was a hard skill to acquire that will prepare me to make a difference later. And so we framed super tedious math. This is with Angela Duckworth in City, Domello. and Dave Panesco and others as Marlon Henderson, as a chance to gain a skill that helps you contribute versus a chance to learn how to get an A and make money in the future versus a control.

1:37:04And what we found was that the contribute to others' version led to deeper learning, greater persistence, higher grades over time. And one of our experiments, we gave them a choice of either doing super boring math or goofing off on the internet. And we were secretly tracking what the websites they were going to. And we found that teenagers did more very boring math and watched fewer videos and played less tetris when they were given this purpose message before the task. Instead of our 2014 paper. And what I often always think about that's the kind of paper I wanted to go to graduate school to work on, but I think about it because if you think about Dale Miller's normal self -interest, nobody thinks to do the purpose argument.

1:37:57They're like, of course teenagers are shortsighted and think about material rewards and all they want to do is either look cool or make money or whatever. But no, like in our studies, if you appeal to the chance to make a contribution right now, then they do it. did the behaviors that adults want them to do. They didn't goof off online and instead chose boring math. And adults think the only way you could ever get that is by imposing our will and was this kind of authoritarian set of rules. But if you instead just appeal to the level of learning for the sake of others, then they're willing to kind of go through the suffering.

1:38:38And in the paper, we cite Victor Franco, where the person who knows the why for their existence is able to bear anyhow. And I think about that a lot that we underestimate how willing young people are, really anyone is, to bear through things that are hard and difficult if they have a strong why. I think this is one of the most important concepts frankly ever discussed on this podcast. If I'm really honest, I think that we've parsed dopamine circuits and we've talked about motivation and reward, we've talked a little bit about growth mindset in a solo episode, but never before have I really understood the Y component, the meaning component.

1:39:20And I love how it marries so much of what we hear in kind of like pop culture or psychology with real data. Like we're finally thanks to you being here, meaning we're finally in the guts of it. Because we hear this, like, oh, it feels so good to make a contribution. But you know, People are also self -interested. People want money, then people say, well, pass a certain amount of money, you don't get any happier, and I would argue that it's true money can't buy happiness, but it can definitely buffer stress. Not all forms of stress, and money itself can get people into more stress. But anyone that says, past blank number of dollars, there's no incremental increase in happiness.

1:40:01I just don't see how that could be given inflation. That treats humans like linear functions. I think that's the simplification. Right. If higher purpose is best to find is making a meaningful contribution to the world to a community or maybe at the scale of the world, maybe at the scale of a family or what have you, a classroom. And the thing that you said before that seems so important is that the moment that you attach your goal to something that's for others, it makes the effort involved it's own form of reward. That to me is so important. Yeah. So, so important. I kind of want to highlight bold, underlying, and, you know, put a big exclamation mark after it, because that's so different than like, oh, you know, I want to be the top player on the team.

1:40:47Yeah. Which means that every bit of effort you put in, you're like thinking, I'm going to be the best. I'm going to be the best. I'm going to be the best. But, um, and one perhaps can then feel that progress. One and one is making it and feel like they're ascending that staircase. case, but something additional must come about when we're invoking this feeling of contribution. And I think this is central to our evolution as a species because we didn't develop an isolation. Yeah, I mean, we had to show our value to the group or else they would get rid of us, right? I mean, that's what it meant to go from being a child to being an adult.

1:41:23And the, think about what it, let's take basketball or whatever, right? If I'm trying super, super hard and it feels impossible to me and I'm not getting better, and it's purely for me, then I feel like a failure. It feels like my goals are not being met and then never will be met. The effort feels terrible because it means something really bad about me. Now imagine you're putting an effort for others. The harder it is, the more awesome it is because it's more noble. right? You've done something that's super impressive and sacrifice your own happiness for others, right? The social status of trying hard and failing for yourself is net negative because it's about shame, humiliation, I'm not good enough.

1:42:14The status of trying hard and failing and keeping going for others is like super net positive, right? And I think that's what people fail to appreciate is especially someone young or even just early in a career, right? Starting out, if you can reframe difficulty and failure as part of the process of doing something with high integrity for others, like it changes the meaning of effort totally. And once you have a different meaning, then something that previously felt bad can instead be motivating, whether it's the stress, like in our stress enhancing work or the boredom you're undergoing, it's doing something super tedious, or anything like that.

1:42:56I remember when I was at Stanford as a graduate student, I worked in the lab of John Crosnick, who was famously detailed oriented. Whenever we wanna go and really deepen to something and go beyond what any other scientist would do, our joke name for that is giving it the full Crosnick, because in his communications, political science, and there was one project I was supervising where this is sound ridiculous, but it was, what is the best adjective to use in a survey item? So, say you want to go like, how hungry are you? Not at all, very extremely. Like, what adjectives should you pick to label those in a survey item?

1:43:39And so the task was to find every time that human beings have rated adjectives on a zero to 100 scale in the history of science, and then average across all those to choose optimally spaced adjectives, like not at all, a lot, little. So we had a lab full of undergraduates at Stanford who are used to creating startups and running nonprofits, and this is very tedious work for them. So how do you get them to super pay attention to all the details and not get it wrong where we really gonna trust their work? It's not by saying, you know, you're gonna get into law school if you do this because it's not really true.

1:44:17And they'd be like, there's a lot of other ways for me to get into law school that don't involve going to journals from the 1920s to rate agitives, right? Instead What I started doing was give them what I called the Save the World Speech, which is like look we're gonna write this paper and it's gonna be the kind of paper that No one would have done because it's so tedious, but if it's trustworthy Thousands of people would know how to have more accurate measurement and they're gonna be so grateful for that But not only that, there will be skeptics. And the skeptics are going to look in our supplement.

1:44:51They're going to find mistakes. And then they're going to email the editor. And they're going to say, why did you let the sloppy work into the journal? And that happens all the time. I mean, no, no, no, no. Which you follow with happening behavioral scientists, behavioral scientists these days. But like, if you have an influential finding, that's the norm. As people should scrutinize it, they should kick the tires. And they're going to find it. And they're going to out you. And they're doing more of that now, like with pup here. Yeah, I think it's great. Pub here is awesome. Pub here folks is where papers are evaluated online.

1:45:23People find sometimes outright errors. And sure there are those like slew thing for like, you find fraud for fraud. But most of what's put there is stuff like, you know, differences in interpretation or somebody will suggest that, you know, the authors could have done a better analysis or that maybe their conclusions were a little too far reaching based on a particular set of methods. And I think it's good for science. I mean, there's a lot of bad intentioned slew thing that is trying to find circumstantial evidence to make someone look bad. Is that true? But yeah. Really? Yeah. That's a shame because the whole purpose of it is to better the work, not to...

1:46:00Yeah. I'm assuming the whole purpose of Pup here is to better the work. And of course, point out where there are real errors in the historical literature. Right. Well, I think that the, yes, there's a new way to become famous in science, which is to like, you know, find errors, which, again, is really valuable if you successfully do it. But there's enough room for interpretation that someone can, with circumstantial evidence, only make it look like something's really bad and then cause an alarm and it causes all kinds of problems. However, for me, at least in our lab, if you always assume that someone will look at your work with the worst possible intentions and will ask for every file, how did it get from Qualtrics into your paper, just assume that all the time.

1:46:52Then that means you need to pay as much attention to the file that was downloaded and how it was processed in every part of the pipeline has to be documented. You just have to do that. And so that working with CrossEx Lab, that's the process that we adopted. And there's all kinds of people email, like, wait, show me this finding. Like, okay, here's the link to the server, here's the syntax, you can go find it, et cetera, et cetera. So, good scientists should do that. And so the possibility of scrutiny and catching fraud should motivate everyone to treat it as though it's an inevitability and therefore be careful in your process.

1:47:31Convincing 19 -year -old Stanford undergraduates that that is likely to happen, you know, and that therefore you need to pay super close attention to the details, that was my task as a lab manager. And so there it was a mix of the fear of shame and emiliation, but also ideally the contribution that our work will make. And we had the hardest working arrays we've ever had, that summer. And that's on an empirical claim that's, you know, I say that, not, I didn't randomize the undergrad, but that experience kind of gave me the idea for the purpose studies, was, you know, assume people want to do good work, but all else equal, they might find an easier way to do it, and then motivate with an appeal to how this work could make a difference, how other people could be influenced by it, and also if you don't take it seriously, it'd be a really big deal, it'd be really bad.

1:48:21And I think about that a lot because we don't often appeal to the contribution value of the work, we appeal to this, you know, getting a good grade and impressing people. And that's less important for me than did I get a skill and did I do high quality, high integrity work. So what you're basically saying is that if we attach our motivation to the give, to the contribution that we're going to make, it actually makes the process much easier or at least more rewarding along the way, as well as by definition, contributing more positively to society. It's causing me to reflect on what we normally perceive as like high achieving individuals.

1:49:08So often it seems like we hear the stories of like the Steve Jobs and I really enjoyed that book by Walter Isaacson and that story of very, you know, impressed by his contributions, always complicated person as is often the case with people that make big contributions it seems. Or people in the political sphere or people in the academic sphere or the sports sphere, you know, most often we think of them as striving for themselves, maybe for themselves and their family. And then there are these people that really stand out as these shining examples like Martin Luther King and others where we just start kind of an awe of how mission driven they were for the greater good.

1:49:50What sort of work is being done to encourage that kind of mindset, the contribution mindset, growth mindset through contribution mindset. I'm just coined that contribution mindset. That's more words in there. Exactly. That's all it needs. More mindsets. But the contribution mindset, because I think at least in this country, we are often raised to revere people that make big contributions, but then we get really absorbed into that person's story. Right? It's like the story of the person and what made them take. And then there's a lot of ego in it, you know, and they, or they have a kind of obsessive nature to them.

1:50:26And we, we know know what goes on in other people's minds. You know, we're so, I must say there's a certain arrogance in our, in all of our perceptions of others like that we know what they're, why they're doing what they're doing. Right. Half the time we don't even know why we're doing what we're doing. Yeah. But I think you get the idea here. What I'm imagining is a more benevolent world where people also enjoy striving more and this driving process itself while hard has meaning and people are not egoless but where there's a bit more balance. Are we getting a little bit like we kind of looking at this through rose colored glasses?

1:51:03I think it's possible. I like to think it's possible. Yeah, I mean, I think that the version that in which people are purely prosocial, self -transcendent and have no self -interest, you know, is not super realistic. And that's not actually what our data are finding. So what we find is that adding this prosocial contribution argument has a big effect. But if you do it absent any plausible benefit the person would get, it tends to not be motivating. So it's the combination of of let's just take the school case, I'm gonna learn something, gain a new skill, I'm gonna get a job that I enjoy and that gives me freedom and make a contribution to others.

1:51:46We found it was the addition of the pro social part to the self -interested part. Now, if it was, do X, Y, Z, and make lots of money far in the future, and then give that money away, that didn't work. Cause that's still the same logic of sacrifice now for later financial reward, which then has an exchange value of some ambiguous amount in the future. That one didn't motivate kids or students to want to tell the philanthropy. You learn that. The university is depending heavily on philanthropy, especially nowadays. We're grateful to them that they support so much good work. So you're saying that it makes sense that there needs to be some component of self -interest.

1:52:25Like jobs loved design, presumably folks like Elon and others, love the mechanics of what they do, building rockets, building electric cars and things like that. But then there's this prosocial thing, the idea that the world could be better and different with these things in them. Yeah, if you did the work right. I mean, a good example is my friend Daniel Cretek, who ran empathy lab at Google for a while, and before that worked at Apple and other places. You know, you could think that designing products at a large tech company is purely about is that product can sell a lot, make a lot of money, et cetera.

1:53:05And that's obviously part of the value for the shareholders and so on. But in her philosophy was always, okay, well, what is, what's going to happen with the user? What does the user need? Is there a life going to be better with this product? And that often led to design choices that made the product even better and more profitable. And I think there are a lot of examples of that where, you know, when, And when the team is trying to create something that is high quality, but with integrity and ethics that are going to benefit people, people are willing to put in extra hours. They're willing to solve a puzzle, do better work.

1:53:42I think there are a lot of examples of that. That's on the product design side. I also want to talk about the management side. So one of the people I followed from my book is a manager at the company. She wasn't Microsoft. Now she's at a place called ServiceNow. And I just studied how she mentored young employees. Her name is Steph Acha -Moto. And she has this great story about a really awesome 25 -ish employee 25 -year -old -ish employees showed up and had come from teaching and teach for America and now as an HR at Microsoft. And Steph could immediately tell her name is Saloney, she's going to be bored by her regular job.

1:54:22She's going to be able to do more than and what she had to do. But as a manager, you can't say as the first thing, you need to do twice your job for the same amount of pay. That's like not a good management philosophy. So instead it was a conversation. All right, what's a contribution you wanna make to the company where in making that above and beyond, you're gonna learn a new skill that's gonna help you move up the ladder, right? So that in your next performance review, you're gonna look like a superstar, like a total over performer. And so at the time they were running global manager development.

1:54:53And so what they decided was don't just deliver the programs well, which Steph thought she could do well, but also create a dashboard to track everyone's progress. So every new hire, they would know where they are in the management process and it was global during the pandemic, so kind of a complicated time. Anyway, she did her regular job really well and created this whole dashboard, which brought value to the company, big contribution, but then when it came time for performance evaluations, she could say, like, you're already performing at a level two levels up. That gave her promotional velocity.

1:55:29She moved up. She left the company for a while now as the chief of staff at HR at Microsoft, right? Kind of in line to lead Microsoft. And then what about staff? Well, Steph's team over performed, so which is incentivized. But then she gets to go home saying, like, I use my time as a manager to change someone's life. And that brings her so much joy. And it's just so much fun, you know, as a teacher, to have some of our time with young people lead them to unapathy, wouldn't have been unotherwise. It is a total blast to mentor someone and change their lives. So I think that's a good example of it's in everyone's long -term self -interest to contribute to both the company and the people around you.

1:56:13But no one's being a martyr. They're not really like, it's all sort of one's compensated. So you need to think about of course, is the company going to pay you if you help others improve and there's important questions that we ask there. But I think that's a good example where we have a false dichotomy of it's either good for me or I'm a martyr helping others. But like the best work is both and then it feels awesome because you both change people's lives and you're compensated for it. And that's great. Certainly, it's been my experience that doing things that I love, like learning and organizing and distributing information with the specific intention of people benefiting from it should they choose to use it or apply it or think about it is the best of both worlds.

1:57:03Yeah. Certainly. Let's talk about this other phenotype. the people that, and they do serve a role in the world, folks that, who sole purpose seems to be to critique, to identify errors. And I think in the case of catching like real, like fundamental flaws and stuff play a key role. We need those, right? And it's kind of unfair, we, that as a scientific field, we force a small group of people to have to police everybody else's work, ideally, they wouldn't have to do that job. And so there's a lot of value in the people who have developed very honest and high integrity tools to find mistakes. Yeah, I think some of the AI tools for finding errors at least in, you know, in data sets.

1:57:48Right. Like the images in a neuroscience study where you can tell that the images have been altered in their plots. Or plots. Yeah. Like I remember a few years back, the Reinhart shown cases of that he was like this wonder kind of who published. I was still like crazy numbers like eight or ten papers in science and nature per year. And then I think it was actually similarities in the noise the random quote in quotes noise plots that eventually led to the like the understanding that like There was data duplication or something anyway. I don't remember how it went Yeah, it's important to correct the literature that way, right?

1:58:23But then there seems to be at least online There's in and on social media there seems to be a kind of a short term incentive I have to imagine there's some incentive for people just being really critical Like I was thinking about this the other day, what kind of mindset would what have to just randomly go put an nasty comment on social media? Like if you just think about it, not about an issue you're particularly vexed by or somebody stands on, like that makes sense, right? People get aggravated and though. Yeah, they do. But just think about the mindset there. Like, oh, you've got your life, you have time, and you're gonna go like, say mean things, right?

1:59:01Like, to me, I think it's inconceivable to do that online, like to go and just post that stuff. But clearly, there's something, there's some incentive built there. And I don't think this is a new thing. I'm guessing that before we had online culture within medieval societies, and that these elements exist within us, and that there must be some reward, they must feel some reward. But it's not generative, it's not building society. when appropriately placed, I guess we're saying, it provides a corrective mechanism. But what do you think that's about? And is there any literature on this kind of thing?

1:59:42Yeah, well, not the exact example of being a total jerk on online. I mean, I can't imagine doing that because who has the time? I mean, I, for a very little, I'm like, coach baseball, I don't know how I'm gonna like police other people. Unless it's relevant to my work. And I think someone's like not having integrity and what they're doing. And like you guys are being sloppy and I might say that. But what I find compelling is a beautiful new book by Mary Murphy called Cultures of Growth who was trained at Stanford under Claude Steel. It was also trained by Carol Deweck. Just came out a week ago and it's getting tons of great press.

2:00:25And in her work, what she finds is that fixed mindset can be a cultural variable, like a more leadership variable, not just in the mind of the individual. And when that's the culture, then she finds people are more willing to try to make everyone else look like an idiot so that you don't get attacked. That's the summary finding. And there's a kind of deflection strategy that if I trash other people for being idiots, then it'll make other people think twice before they mess with me. But it creates the very toxic culture that they're trying to escape, which is the threat of their own intelligence being attacked.

2:01:10So it's totally counterproductive. And she uses the example of Microsoft under the bomber era where you'd go into meetings and you'd get yelled at if you made any mistake and you weren't allowed to talk and they would like literally flip over a table and yell at you and people would leave the room crying and this is a lot of accounts of this is a very public information and one of the things Satya Nadella did when he came in was to change what he said. He said, we have a culture of know -it -alls and we need a culture of learn -it -alls and has the virtue of ending in the same word. So it's pithy, but I kind of like that idea.

2:01:51And so Mary describes how in this culture of genius she calls it, you don't just get the hypercriticism, you then the the consequence of that is unethical behavior where you hide mistakes or lie about things because you're worried about being outed as not a genius. So the culture of fearing the stakes gives rise to the unethical hiding type of culture. Now, the layperson could draw a line between that and the zoom in Bing and other failed products. I'll leave that to organizational scholars to decide if that's the story. But at least the cautionary tale is Boeing is another example where Calhoun, when he came in as a CEO, changed the incentive scheme at Boeing to be something called stack ranking, which is where you fire the bottom 10 % every six months or a year.

2:02:44Within your group. So if your group might be higher performing on average than some other group, but the bottom 10 % of your group are getting fired. And this goes back to GE, it's a Jack Welch policy. Anyway, so that happened two years ago, and liquid was happened in the last two years. Now he's out, right? You have all these mistakes where people aren't going and finding the problems. Now, again, I'm not going. I can't, you know, as a scientist, I can't say that that is the cause. But the argument in Mary's book is that when you have organizations like that culture of genius, you hide mistakes and then you have unethical behavior in order to conceal those and then you don't fix them.

2:03:28But in what she calls a culture of growth, you're like willing, to examine mistakes because they're not indicative of a sign that they're not indicative of your overall inability to do well. They're like part of the process of growing as a group. Super interesting. You said Mary Murphy Cultures of Growth. Yeah. Interesting. It seems to everybody worked with Carol Dweck. You caught steel Mary Murphy. I have a small friendship group. It's an amazing group. By that I mean I have no friends except people play work with. You've clearly landed in a great group nonetheless. This is very interesting. So people who are hyper critical or spend an enormous amount of time being critical just for being critical, say, are masking.

2:04:12They're cloaking themselves. This is a form of self protection. Yeah. I think that's their answer. That's the claim. And I think there's some pretty good suggestive evidence of that. Yeah, be interesting if online, like everyone had to put some of their CV and their Masthead. You know, it's like, what is sort of like what have you done as you're attacking? Because that would differentiate the people like Elizabeth Bick, for instance, who I think that's her name, who's a, what considered one of the best data evaluation people, right? She runs her Twitter account. And so they essentially, she shows errors in papers.

2:04:46And I think the goal there is to offer people the opportunity to not necessarily retract, although in some cases are retract, but to all the papers right or route and addendums and things that to say it would. Right. Yeah, so that's like the appropriate use of critique, right? She's not doing it to cloak anything else, presumably. Yeah. As opposed to people that just run around trying to poke holes in everything that they see, it's cynicism, really. It's kind of an online cynicism. Well, I think it's easier to be skeptical than it is to eventually believe in something after being convinced. And so I think there's a there's a default to where I don't believe that and We get that sometimes with growth mindset.

2:05:27They're like, well, what do you mean 50 minute intervention has a fit? Well, okay, but all the things you're compiling about are things that we addressed in the study so At some point you have to just say you believe in the process of science or you don't and I understand if there were Additional studies that didn't follow the process of science or left big holes to be addressed But at some point it's like, well, we did what you asked for. So I don't know what's tell you. I'm sorry. Yeah, I know the growth mindset field has come under a bit of, of an attack, but critique. I know this because in researching the solo episode, and this one, you know, it's when it always has to be careful about relying on Wikipedia too much because it's the use of editors, legacy editors, and I'll go on record saying that there's a ton of bias and even within the legacy editors.

2:06:10I just, by the way, I'm not, just got my page vandalized even more, but I've sort of given up at this point because things are clued together out of context. And so if I look at growth mindset on Wikipedia, there's a lot of supportive evidence, and then you can get like two paragraphs of critique, right? And so for the uninformed, they don't know how to weigh that, which is why we basically need a new system. Well, they kind of want to say on one hand, on the other hand, you know? Right. Yeah, and there's no real waiting. We don't know the expertise of these people, where they're gleaning from blogs or whatnot.

2:06:40And look, I think it's a great concept. I think that it's just, to me, at least seems that there's an overwhelming amount of evidence that growth mindset and related mindsets that we've talked about today have immense value. I think it's also good to have competing opinions in any field. But I think as we're kind of parsing motivation for people that really want to make a, I don't know, feel their best, do their best, make a contribution to the world. It seems like the default state, the fast food, the junk food, the solar, the solar speed, the twizzlers and the, and the Snickers bar there. I just got myself in more trouble by naming name brands.

2:07:21The junk food is, is in hiding by critiquing. There's I think maybe there's the man in the arena thing, you know, that it's easy to be a spectator. It's hard, it's hard to try and do something real. Yeah, I think that going back to this question of like, are you willing to reveal your mistakes or not? The Mary writes a lot about great exemplars in her book, Jennifer Dudenna, who's you know, developed CRISPR, famously has a lab that's hypercritical in the lab, but then the work stands, you know, well in public. And it's someone who could have every incentive to just turn out as many papers as possible and you know for profit, etc.

2:08:05but instead, and I've actually interviewed one of the postdocs from my lab, and it's just like an amazing scientific enterprise. I write about this astrophysics lab at Vanderbilt with a guy named Kaplan Stassen who is just a legend. He as you know a lot of people would be thrilled to have one nature paper in their lives like he had five last year, right? but what he does is is mentor probably the most diverse group of physicists in all of America. And he developed what are called bridge programs where students often graduate students of color or students who had low GRE scores, low socioeconomic status, they're pre -admitted to a master's program in physics at a local HBCU, Sorkley -Platte College University.

2:08:55And then if they do well, then they're pre -admitted to the physics PhD program. And it's a now well -known idea that the basic concept is, in the old days, you look at just your GRE scores and say, are you smart enough to be a physicist or not? And what he argued was that the coin of the realm for professional physics is publishing professional physics. And if you come into a lab and you can analyze data and write a paper and publish it in a journal, then you're a physicist. So he asked people come for two years, regardless of your GREs, but if long as you have kind of grit and resilience in a drive as you're saying, and less than work in labs.

2:09:31And it turns out about about 85 % of students end up getting admitted to the PhD program. And then they do well. So the first ever black first author on a nature paper in physics is his student, right? So like a ridiculously hyper portion of racial diversity at NASA or graduates of his program is laboratory, right? And his lab is at Vanderbilt. His lab is at Vanderbilt. It's called the Fisk. a Vanderbilt Fisk graduate program. Interesting. And any rate, for my book, I interviewed him and I was like, well, that's your admission. So what happens, there's still five years when people have to learn to be a physicist.

2:10:08And every day they have a different thing they do. So Monday's the journal club, Tuesday's a coffee. But the lifeblood of the lab is Wednesday's lab meetings where you, as a trainee, put up your figures in your paper and overleaf, which is like a wizzy wig editor for scientific papers. And everyone critiques your stats, your tables, your figures, your narrative, and everyone's just looking at your work and critiquing it. And these are all top physicists in the lab. And that sounds terrifying. And it kind of is initially. But then by the time they present at the conference, they've heard everything.

2:10:43And they're doing that far before they're spending three months doubting themselves, unable able to complete the paper, et cetera, et cetera. It's like you just have to do that. You have to face that fear. So it's very demanding, but it's super supportive. And they don't pull punches in terms of the critique of the content. But it's never in question whether the comments are coming from a place of believing your potential to be a great physicist. And what I like about that is that you're not, it doesn't feel good at that time to be critiqued publicly. But it feels necessary and you kind of know that you will measure up at the end of that process and that it's formative.

2:11:24I think that's fundamentally what a lot of people I think misunderstand about what it takes to help someone become better. They think either I have to be a monster to critique you or I just have to pull my punches But like you can be like Stassen's lab and be super demanding and super supportive and then people grow. Sounds like the key thing is to make sure that your one is gleaming critique from the correct sources. And this is one of the major issues with kind of just open online critique. Well, attractive because of the lack of barriers, it means that you have to be a selective filter, right?

2:12:02I mean, you can see this in online comments. People, some people are very impacted by them. And then other people say, oh yeah, well, that's some person in a basement or that's a, you know, like, what have they done? And, you know, but some people just have a thinner skin than others. But when you're in a community where clearly everyone cares about the mission, the outcome, the physics, etc., then you can put trust in the critique. By the way, I find it really interesting that this lab at Vanderbilt is focused mainly on motivation and drive as the key thing as opposed to some standardized score, metric, or something, or prior experience.

2:12:44When I was starting my lab as a junior professor back before being at Stanford at UCSD, UC San Diego, a senior colleague of mine said, when picking students, you have to really evaluate many things, right? Ethics, how they do the work, etc. But the main thing is just drive. Are they driven? Yeah. And yeah, that turned out to be the case. Yeah, I think it's hard. I mean, it's just a case by case decision, you know, like you don't pick that many students over your career So you don't get to really learn But I think I had a colleague when I started who was like Just told me they just sort by Jerry right away And like I always standardized by standardized test ground.

2:13:29I was like well, I would never do that. He's like How about this? How about you take all the low GRE students and I think all the high ones and students do better. Yeah, I feel like standardized tests in some cases are necessary but not sufficient. That there's this other thing, this like nuance and I mean coming up with great experimental ideas or there's just so many examples of people that just weren't good at standardized tests that just kicked ass in their various fields. But there is a correlation there typically. I mean I think my issue, in a perfect world, standardized test scores would be great for equity because there would be people who didn't get great information in high school about where to go to college or started out in the wrong major and eventually figured out don't have great GPAs or didn't go to great college but they have tremendous ability and they deserve a shot.

2:14:20And so I think that that argument for GRE is makes us on a sense. The problem is that you can just pay to have someone teach you how to take the GRE and your scores can go up a huge percentage. And so the gearies end up being a proxy either for the training you got now, or it's a proxy for how good your 10th grade math teacher was because it's mostly testing 10th grade geometry. And so again, that's going to be a function of what neighborhood you grew up in and how good your high school teachers were. So what I don't love is I would love test scores if they were about meritocracy and equality or opportunity, but they often end up being just a proxy for kind of advantages you already had.

2:15:02So ultimately, though, for K -von, setting aside the GRE in physics was like a hypothesis. Ultimately, the proof that needed to be in the pudding was, did the students admitted under an alternative means end up producing great physics? And in that case, the answer is absolutely yes. And so for me, it's like yes, consider it or not, for admissions. But what are you doing with the students when they arrive? How How are you mentoring and how are you training and how are you breaking the link between whatever advantages might have had in the past and the work that they can do in the future if they're driven?

2:15:40We've been talking a lot about data and other people. I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you a little bit about you. Sure. No pressure to share anything you don't want to share. But of all the things you could study, of all the contributions you can make you decide to focus on this notion of mindsets and essentially trying to figure out how people can be their best for the greatest good of the world. It would be the way I would describe it. Is that just inherent in your wiring or was there something about your experience coming up that makes you value that in particular or did you happen to just resonate with Carol and folks and feel like, hey, this would be a great place to place my efforts.

2:16:27Yeah. Well, that's an impossible question to answer because there's no, have no counterfactual. So a real causal inference person wouldn't allow me. What, so this is a, this is a digression, but so my only real percusious skill is that I can do the splits, which sounds like a weird thing to do, but I can, it's my party trick at weddings. You always could. Yeah. Or do gymnastics as a kid. I did. But not seriously, not for very long. And one time someone, another academic, he was like, you can do the splits, that's super weird. I'm like, yes, it is weird. And he was like, how can you do that? I was like, well, it is a kid.

2:17:04I was in gymnastics, and then I stretched all the time. And he was like, that is the dumbest causal story I've ever heard of my life. There's no way that that is the single, or even the most important cause, right? And I just thought, I think about that as like, my whole life, I've been posed with this puzzle of, why do I, why can I do this weird thing? and I told myself that and I don't think that's even remote that you're I think this for whatever reason it just kind of developed So I can't fully answer your question about why I like got super interested in in this work But I will say that out of College I thought I was gonna be a lawyer and that's because my my college major was something called the program of liberal studies Which is a great books?

2:17:45Major where you read the great works of history and philosophy and so yeah, and you read them in order and And so, and there's no lectures allowed. You can't even read the introduction to the book. So you just have to like read Hume and pretend like you can understand it and Kant and stuff like that. And you argue with other 19 year olds about what it might mean. And I loved it. It was great. I still don't know what Kant was talking about, but I'll figure that out at some point. But then, P .L. last the joke is probably law school, which is the answer to the question of what are you going to do with this liberal arts major.

2:18:20And so I thought that's what I'll do. But at the last second, I just had a change of heart. And so I went and taught in a really low income school in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And I ended up being the sixth through eight English teacher, the K through eight basketball coach. I coached K through eight PE coach and then I coach basketball and ran the book club and ran the cat five cables to fix the internet and the attic. you know, and it was great. I worked like a hundred hours a week. I made twelve thousand hours a year. It's a lot of fun. Had a great time. And at the end of it I thought, now I'm gonna go to law school.

2:18:57And when I was doing my applications, a friend of mine died of cancer. It got started home. It was real quick. It was like six months. And we all went back to college and were there for a service. And I remember being in the airport and I picked up Jeffrey Sacks end of poverty, which is a popular lubricant at the time. And just thinking like, here's a guy who like, I don't know, was doing something pretty mundane, macroeconomics, but he was spending all his time talking world leaders in other countries out of, you know, crushing death that was causing poverty. And it's like taking whatever prococious skill he had and using it for others.

2:19:41And I thought law is not my Jeff Sachs skill. But what I do know how to do is motivate teenagers. Like that's how I spend all my time. And so I thought I just want to do this science of motivating young people as much as possible. So then I went to Stanford. I'd never taken stats before, never taken psychology. But I just tried to become like a wild man, learning as much as I could. And thankfully, my third year of career I started working with me and like can we kind of have it look back since. Awesome story. So totally mission driven and post talk causal inference. So who knows if that's actually the story but those are those sequence of events did occur though.

2:20:23Post talk causal inference. I guess you can map on to that famous Steve Jobs commencement speech at Stanford where he's basically saying you can't connect the dots going forward only backwards. It all makes sense looking back. Exactly. You know, this led to that led to this led to that, but going forward, we're kind of stumbling in the dark. Well, I must say I and everyone else's are so grateful that you made that choice or those choices. Clearly the work you're doing is having a huge impact. I covered a few of your papers on the solo episode on growth mindset and you mentioned nature and And the fact that most people don't publish there at all, let alone once or twice or several times in their career, you've had an amazing run lately.

2:21:06And you've just had this incredible arc of papers in this area of which can be distilled down to, I think, forgive me if this doesn't capture it all, but figuring out how people can be the best version of themselves for their own lives and for the world, right? I mean, that's essentially what we're talking about here. And I love the way you incorporate the neuroscience and the motivation and literature and you're so good at attribution. It's something that we should all model ourselves around. It's really an incredible literature and I'm excited to read the book, 10 to 25, genuinely excited. This notion of a mentor mindset and how we can bring out the best in ourselves and others.

2:21:50It's phenomenal that you're doing this work. Please keep going. and I'm speaking on behalf of myself and everyone else. I say thanks for taking time out of your busy research schedule and teaching schedule to come here and teach millions of people about what you do and what they can do to be their best. So thank you so much. Well thanks, well we're just getting started. And it was great to be here. I did, I missed baseball practice tonight, so not for me, but for nine year olds. An apology to your nine year olds plural. Okay. Because there's more on them than many of them on the team. Yeah, yeah, okay.

2:22:24This is back in Austin. Yeah, okay. Um, when's their next game? Couple I three or four weeks. We have plenty of time. Okay. We're still learning how to throw and hit okay there Well depending on when this episode comes out you can let me know if they won or lost and and That's right. Well, I Game is important and But I can assure you that the the information that you've given us today is is sure to make a huge difference in people's lives So thank you so much. Thanks for having me Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. David Yeager. To learn more about his research, to find links to his social media accounts, and to learn more about his upcoming book, 10 -25, The Science of Motivating Young People.

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