Inflection Point with Lauren Schiller; #30; Nicky Jackson Colaco of Instagram & Parisa Rouhani of The Center for Individual Opportunity

the pope welcome to inflection point conversations of women changing the status quo i learned show where today an inflection point thrive if they have privacy rights when you create a lot of privacy should work a certain way there could be a lot of unintended consequences factories mines that have to do with our education system you would never actually about putting people making sure that the average smart guns that today an inflection point three there's an old saying when in rome do as the romans do but if your company is also in paris shanghai and peoria you need someone to balance the culture and laws of all your users

one of those people is nikki jackson caso the director of public policy at instagram thanks for coming in to nikki thank you for i mean this is so exciting i think first things first hand they're definitely listeners are still trying to understand what instagram is could you explain what it is and how one would use it yet more that some crazy there are a lot of apps people have trouble keeping up with apps and instagram is at its core a photo sharing app so basically you can take a photo on your camera or even take a photo in iraq you can apply different effects if you want to see put out what's called a filter to give it like a cool retro lover to make a buck and why and the new sheraton you share it with people that follow you and you can also follow other people also if you're really into art you can find all sorts of artists on instagram easing the actor to share what they're creating or you could follow celebrities are lots of different people still exists it's a social network but it's

really focused around imagery arm in helping people sort of get a visual place so when you're growing at social media was a really a thing computers are at a meeting in a rather typewriters a little digital tiny later faces yeah so what did you imagine you'd be doing for work i definitely never thought i would be in technology and and you and i were chatting a little bit before this and the funny thing is they do you think for women in particular but for lots of young people when they think about working in technology they're really thinking about coding or they're thinking about you working as an engineer and there are lots of different ways to work in technology and so sit my job which is more on the town the non profit non technical side of things that is something i probably could've imagined you know because my job is a little bit like a puzzle return for putting all these things together to think about what the right solution as for the company and that is something i think probably would've always appealed to me right now if it if you'd asked

me what i'd be working in tech i would say now but interestingly i i did go to film school as an undergrad so film has always been a huge part of my life so what would you do to do think you may work until i thought i wanted to get like my mfa and teaches film history and i love the thirties and forties black and white film that is like my passion and i think i thought it probably would have love to teach and then i realize i really didn't want to teach later but i think that's where i thought i was going to when i first heard her study film and you try and hit i did i did teach and i don't know if it was a solid have heard i'm only because i i moved to japan right after i finished my my undergraduate degree and i was teaching english in a fishing village in japan in a really remote part of japan and i just got so much pleasure from the carrots and i loved man and we had so much fun to get air but it's a little bit of a different scenario because the media bear you have his english are more japanese in my case that we never even got to some of the really

rich sort of like a linguistic interactions but there was a lot of other cool stuff they came out of that experience that becoming a teacher was not what i think i knew i think i knew that i like a lot of kids i love playing with kids i didn't i do love the idea like standing inside of speaking and talking at people i really liked the interaction and so i'm probably better inserted a team environment that i am i would have been as a professor but who knows i mean who knows and then pay and who knows what that i'm sure was delighted you have the attack i ended up in tech that almost by happenstance i had come back so finish my undergraduate degree and i was living in japan i moved to san francisco because a lot of my friends were here and it weighs in the early two thousands it was right after the past there were no jobs army was really really hard time the economy was bad i initially started tending bar on haight street which was just an

interesting experience i am coming back from japan and then i applied to a blind posting for a position with a company that was looking for people to serve foreign help with their budding advertising system and typewriter the posting and then later much later found out that that was google and i was on the end of two thousand to early two thousand race into was about five years old at that point and i got that job and then started a cool as a temp i mean really worked there for seven weeks before they hired me for time and so it really was complete don't walk so it what did that job to return until so that's job turned into google had just started supporting the website with advertisements and was looking at those the advertisements that were coming in it was it is a song called out words which still exists today and see if that's complied with the policies that that google is setting so for example google did not want to be advertising guns and so we would check to make sure the advertisements you met the policies that they have it's just so funny because this was all being done by

humans i'm here with that degree eason and who were people who were so hungry for jobs that they were willing to do it and now of course a much of it is automated and it's done more rhythmically but it was fascinating and it really gave me an exposure to how you create policies that work for lots of different people on any it really is like a puzzle you know there isn't one answer and it's are you find the best answer for for the company for the people that are using your service and that really interested me about that puzzle that was ultimately i think what started fostering an interest in public policy fairly early in your career you met sheryl sandberg of lean in in the end and facebook fame thursday fame at this point i would agree it doesn't degrade and so she's been a bit of a mentor to yale at the time but had to do it to me so i started googling two thousand trees cheryl was running but we called online

sales and operations at that point and it hadn't even met her but it i knew all about her she just had this amazing backgrounds on leadership style and everybody just gravitated to her because she was so inspirational and she was really paving the way for google to supported service with advertisements which was huge at that point rule wasn't the moneymaker that it is now that was all just beginning and she was really helping to lead that and then when i finally met her i was really i was really young and didn't the thing about cheryl what was that it was really clear that i wanted to take the work i was doing with fuel and really doing and other offices and wanted to be an international offices and wanted to work with international teams and i had expressed interest in moving to india to start an operation in india and to start google india at that point i think most people have said no we mean she's twenty four she's twenty five an insurance and yes yes she can go and she should do this and and then i did live in india for your at that office and she would

come to carry out a claim that was how i got to know her better mom but they had the idea that you can give people a chance and allow them to take a rescue really believe a man it doesn't work out you have the hard conversations which is an end to this workout or not that she was willing to sort of take that chance and almond i really appreciated at the time so what'd you do with that indian it was up he was really a startups even though it was google and we didn't have any operations in india at that point and so we were setting up an office so that we could provide more global support to people on the not run everything out of the united states to hire people we had an office space and we didn't even have any signage for the door there's no toilet paper in the bathrooms i mean the whole thing was it was do every need to do to get this thing off the ground to get people hired in to help the business grow but i my real job was helping to train people on what our policies were around advertising so that they can start taking over some of that work

to support the international consumers so when this interview with every year that you came back to the states and did you stay with people at that time the ritual yeah i was there for your estate withdrew for another two and a half years after that and i knew when i was like two old i wanted to get to school i wanted to do a graduate degree and i wanted it to be and technology policy arm and international affairs it's i started applying for graduate program so as digital till two thousand seven and then left to do a degree at columbia on for two years in tech policy so and then you use her as m berger stay in touch throughout that time because did you end up going back to beloit agenda that is that where she then once i have a tentative agreement that i could go back to do off i wanted to but i knew that i didn't i didn't think i wanted to i thought i wanted to try something new so it lasts it really lets give all i do edit my two years a man i didn't keep in close touch with her by did bump into her

arms i guess the summer between my two years of school and she said oh what you doing nice and in school i have no plans and so will you know on this block which a nail and she was like you know the chicago should come in and check out and see if you won our care and there was in between life my two years of school and then i saw her in june and then an n honest i started interviewing and by the time i went back for my second year of my graduate program i had the job as facebook's i knew when i graduated i was going to face so well i'm just curious having a relationship like that with someone who has so much power and an influence and so i'm clearly is an advantage in helping move a career for it and and it's not because they like you write you've earned a country estate did have you ever sent any kind of reason men are you know like i know you know why she says the solomon any of your peers as a result i don't think so to be honest very little of my interactions at google

and at facebook were directly with charlotte was more subdued somebody who is in the background that i really respected and who knew me from working with me somewhat tangentially and the more of my work life has been about tom work ethic and pursue my career a lot of stuff so hopefully that is what people see and i don't think most people even know that and that that relationship exists a department until now you know but i also think that most people have somebody that has helped them get to a different position or to help them get some yards allowed them to take a rescue and hopefully hopefully people have adequate especially women and women in technology who really wanted to push themselves aman so that's something that i focus a lot now is like how do we allow more women to do that at instagram and there are lots of women of instagram who take on i think similar mentorship roles so yeah my work life

is about results and work ethic and things like that we've adopted the splintering mentality yeah yeah and i don't even know if it was like why must mentor others it was more i get a lot of personal fulfillment out of working with the teams really being results driven pushing each other because my mom works it's just they're so much reward for everybody involved and so when you see people you think are just great and you really wanted help anyone a perch you know i think that happens somewhat naturally but i do feel really committed to it also because tack benefits from diversity i think women are a really big piece of that we're talking with nikki jackson cost them she's the director of public policy for instagram later in the show we'll talk with a priest there were honey the cofounder of the center for individual opportunity she's studying issues at the intersection of nurse science design and technology at the harvard graduate school of education

ms booth welcome back to inflection point conversations with women changing the status quo and lauren shuler i guess is nikki jackson caso the director of public policy for instagram sue tell us a bit about your job as the director of public policy and instagram so public policy has a lot of different components and especially for me every covers a lot of different things to one thing it covers is how we built in the right safeguards into the instagram experience around things like privacy or if teams are using instagram do they understand how to share responsibly that kind of stuff so that's one piece of it which is the the

product itself and then there are campaigns that we ran in which are really about showing how photography unites people and helps overcome stereotype and that kind of thing and i would come through social campaigns that we do that is violating its transfer it to people but also helps people understand what we're about is a company or not something that i i definitely focus a lot of my time on so good but there's a pretty broad range of things that fall under public policy and luckily i work with a lot of people who all different areas and really all forward so you're working with different regions across the world trade is not just about privacy in the us it's about what is and brazil consider friday and are encrypted year out so is it are you influencing how they're thinking about it or the influencing how you're thinking about it in terms of what they want for their citizens in terms of a government that i think a little bit of both i think if we just

instituted privacy infrastructures that we felt like were reasonable you would miss all of this like rich international perspective on how people feel about privacy in a country like france with a history of of war or how they feel about it and germany are other places you need to understand what that historical context as for privacy and why that matters to people in the same token i think it helps policymakers to understand that when you create a a rule that privacy should work a certain way there could be lots of unintended consequences there could be things that maybe people don't think about it and so we can play a part in helping bring the perspective to the table but at the end of the day it has to work the focus is and should be on the people are using services like instagram it has to be otherwise a lot gets lost was an example as some of the nuances that you found in working with friends or for germany in terms of privacy policy are they looking at tracy's really interesting ever live there are lots of great examples i would

say that but broadly when you think about something like privacy in europe they're only like you know seventy years post world war two post holocaust when people's personal information was literally used to persecute now we don't have that cultural context here ours is actually quite different where they're sort of like a standard your freedom of speech freedom of expression i should be able to serve say and do within reason what i want and so if you just create a policy taking into account how americans think about it as you would that wouldn't be the right standard for europe and a tragedy but a very specific that a good example of this is in the us because of our standard of free speech it's okay from a speech perspective even say you don't think the holocaust happened right you have the freedom to say that whether or not you and i think that's awful is a difference or do you have the right to say that our mind in france it's actually evil evil to deny the holocaust existed and so that it's at war when you did what is the right answer from a policy perspective in and to me that is the

puzzle and in a way what how you create a standard that both worked for americans in and also works for people in france in germany in other places where holocaust denial is illegal just one example for that example there are lots of other ones they're really complex and i find it fascinating because there are just so many different viewpoints on these things and so that's the sort of the question of is that the company's responsibility to report that statement or to delete that statement that are those the kinds of issues that year the company's responsibility and what do you what do people who use services like instagram and facebook reasonably expect to happen and if you're someone in france you probably expect that that facebook or instagram park is not to allow the kind of speech right that's just not part of what you're seeing around huge in the us well almost everyone i know would hate the idea of denying the holocaust but but from a civil liberties perspective from the perspective of can i do i have the right to communicate this underly people who very very strongly that you should have the right to say if you want to win so it's our

job to figure out what the right mix is for the people who are wanting to do these things who let the sunlight friday heavy duty as jeff yeah i am or what we think the responsibility is for instagram in terms of teams like in terms of keeping teens safe you know and i'm just wondering if there's any analogy from a policy standpoint around that having a certain nerve fire exits or even wearing seatbelts in your car when it comes to teens it's something that i think about a time before i was at instagram are my focused on child safety and teens at a face park service something that i don't feel very strongly about i think as a company you have to make safety like the number one thing you think about not just because it's the right thing to do because you wanna keep teens safe but also because it makes it makes no sense for the business not to keep people say just let it makes no sense people are not going to use any product or service if they can reasonably expect to have a good experience and they're going to feel

safe so in always creating these environments for teens where they feel safe and that we are providing these fire exits or whatever we want to call them for them he's super super important the flip side or the idea that the other piece that i think it's important for members that there are things that many of us think that teams be needed and in reality it gets their needs maybe difference a good example is om a lot of people say well teams shouldn't be able to share publicly on the internet they shouldn't be able to go on and ce i think it's really reasonable that you know you would want to give a tina microphone to up to a planet of people with etcetera lot of teams young teens or social activists who are doing really amazing things that i think is most teens who are using online sources don't wanna share with the world they really want to make it with the people closest to them and they want to do it in small groups are messengers and so i think it's really important to understand

what they're doing and how we can support them in a way that makes sense for them that keeps them safe but that doesn't sort of take a blunt instrument to their rights to express themselves and their rights to communicate with other people and that and that really is a balance because i think safety always wins out that it's something that you really wanted to right in terms of your your work life and your personal life sounds like this is a big job it's probably not a nine to five job that aria night owl to get to early had even and all of that i do have kids i have two young kids at what's funny is that my actual time in the office is roughly nine to five like it it is roughly nine to five and i believe every i'm home by six o'clock every day with my carrots i'm pretty open about the fact i don't check my phone between five and it thirty or nine o'clock the termite we get them down we have done or we my husband and i can talk for like you know five minutes every move on to the

next thing and that's just and they are established i do work most nights i am somewhat lee and there are a lot of times we're end up in the morning working early air that to me as long as my kids are happy and secure and getting that time with them and get in a time of my husband i really do enjoy the job they do i really love the problem is that we work on it doesn't feel like us log every day and night it doesn't feel like a grind i think it's more how you create balance just to take walks her workout or to be part of a book club or read a book or whatever that thing is for yale how do you get the time to do that and as a child i don't know any woman i stay home part time or working who does not need an extra hour to just unwind you know i think its heart no matter what you do there's a plane in your career when you're your kids are younger that you needed to take some time off to link a bit of time off how did you navigate getting believe that you needed to do that

yeah when are what our younger son was eight we sold our older sign trouble do some developmental aid we couldn't really figure out was going on he had some trouble talking army didn't see much he understood words because you always this testing to try to figure out what was going on with them and so it there is no question to me that i needed to go through a whole process with ham and be home and talking to doctors and talking to everyone in his life about how we can best support and i went to facebook and it said i know i need to take a leave and the question for me it was you know they might give me like two or three mansour performance event is so generous because the community is not enough time in this boy's life to really get inside up and i didn't think that it was i ended up taking nine months and i was lucky on that the entire time they were just like you use less know how much i mean even i came back to the same job and so i'm kind of mean there's no doubt in my mind how lucky i am to be the case that's just not the case for a lot of people even when they work

for great companies but i think if push come to shove for me there was no question that he was he was the priority so i did get really lucky i i would like to think that it's because they were invested in me in the long term and not fundamentally made it worth their while to pay a short term tax on a long term gain back our male something that facebook you know feels i was at facebook at the time they feel really strongly about allowing some amount of flexibility particularly like if you're a woman and you wanna stay in the workforce you have something going on at home like you know they want to try to make that work for you and i do think that part of that comes from sheryl in her leadership and his understanding that you know if you wanna work let's make a tragic let's try to make it easy for you to work and to be attentive parent you want to be well nikki have to ask you an advice question what is the best advice you've ever gotten about getting the maximum number of likes on instagram and now when i publish photos of my children and a good day for me is like fourteen like

that i think a great day for me is out on monday is ruining my street cred with anybody listening to this and the one thing i will say eight is authenticity is really the key to instagram you can tell when somebody is publishing their own staffer are sharing their own stuff and it's funny sometimes the photos are in perfect even celebrities that even jealous lover is really take mayor on instagram photos and they're sharing them in this authentic really conversational direct way versus their publicist or somebody else is doing and they're referring to the celebrity in the third person and you know that that's not the person just not as great of an engagement with the photo on sunni authenticity i think is key but i have to say you're asking the wrong person that you know you have a guess i would love that the acute i think they're cuter about fifty people are live another tournament for the year's to ensure a indiana it's actually not even not by mounting anti potential vicki thank you so much or joining me today thank you for having me those nikki jackson co also the director of public policy for instagram coming up after the break we'll talk with a priest there were

honey the cofounder of the center for individual opportunity it's b it's been i'm lauren

shuler and you're listening to inflection point the average american gets six point eight hours of sleep is nato or working class and drives twenty five minutes to get to work and we've heard she has an average of somewhere between one twenty and two point five kids and that statistic has ever bothered you know it has two point five kids and you might be raising an even deeper question why do we rely so much on average it is our guest presenter honey is the cofounder of the center for individual opportunity while countries that are having me tell us about the center for individual opportunity way egypt's into it we have to be thick a function that people are similar and when the matter and get in they can be understood and appetite or rank or with some kind of discourse believe we label people into of earth or off the tiger for them by an iq number though that people that really need to know about them and that leads us to think that we

can understand people by comparing them to thumb average the average employee your average gingerly average mother info what we need to understand that there is no average person we have to find that out that have shown that the average actually a meth and that when we compare ourselves to average only compare people to be average or actually making their youthful information about that so what we're doing at the federal bureaucracy is trying to mortgage rate aware and convinced people think differently about that idea of average i'm going to replace that with an idea of individuality and thinking about people in an entirely different way and what are some examples of the ways that you think about people in an entirely different way though they're printable to find there's this three different principle of the day you can you think about people there's a third of it a jacket where right now where we call out people into a category we think that there's some trait about the descending hear about them like they're introverts in a

helicopter them into finger worth dimension as though they're always this way all the time you even know how to write about and one thing that everyone had a different thing where they are maybe above average below average and those can be called latch into a thing of color and so if you can be a person with more time viewpoint then you can leave what would be useful for a ban on any rift very beneficial for thinking about how to nurture a person or to teach a person or to help with accomplish anything really unique understand their strengths and their weaknesses in with what's unique about that letter where the other two principals contact and there's pathways though contacted the idea that we're not the same in every situation and i think everybody you know like you know that about yourself so i've heard talk about myself if perhaps like an alpha

professor the wealthy put me in the room with a bunch of ralph a personality not everyone is going to behave the way or if you think about this actually studied by and she showed up and they showed for example aggressiveness we think of people at the paragraph that were not aggressive but in fact when he did this that he videotaped it in her i can reach a hundred and something hours and he's watched afterwards like analyze the footage of the student and he came to find that people are different in different contexts so somebody who might be aggressive in the hallway may be very calm dot fi on the cafeteria or in a classroom i mean it really depends on the context of this situation for two people with immigration for might be very aggressive in different context than actually matters where they are and what's going on in that context that make them he hated for the way you know you kind of you find them think measured about people that allow you to do something

with it and for that assuming the kind of progress that we're not aggressive they give more youthful information about what you can do with your contact omar what kind of interventions you can perform that that would help her develop strategies or or help a first in any kind of meaningful way and then that that servants places pathways to stop that but the idea of family is always more than one way to get to a good outcome and right now we think i think that there is one and that's the way that works for everybody but there was actually research that showed for example even with reading there's you know three different pathway that people can use to learn to read two of them are successful where you can you start a different way than you know integrating the different time that you get it successfully and one of the fact that if you think that there's only one progression one way that you can learn to read then if somebody is going about it a different way you think that they need an intervention when in fact

they could be another completely a valid pathway and could be getting toward you know successful reading but now we've intervened in a situation that would have otherwise been finding kind of creating some kind of a problem when there wasn't one before and if we don't know the difference and we don't realize that there's more than one pathway to get forgiven outcome then you're kind of creating problems with or otherwise would be sue i'm so curious how the research gets done because typically the outcome of research is that you find something on average where not a certain way so are you the research that you're doing showing on average that using averages is the problem how do you get around that and our world right now the way we do it we grabbed up everyone we do a study to grab every won the aggregate all of thirteen adults and then we think what we find on average out with nothing to do with it and i believe that with alcohol a convention

that took about fifteen and i ask them through the questions about alcohol like alcohol conviction and found that on average how early you take your first sip of alcohol what are the problematic indicator as you get older it's like they're healthy when you take your first book about a ha but then when they looked at the different with all independently and have figured out a different way that the death of manifesting in a survey they found it wasn't how do you talk your first book of alcohol it wide how much you took early on i believe thoroughly like when you when you look at the research differently instead of doing an aggregate and then analyze approach if you first analyze the difference yale and then you aggregate it based on sort of these clusters are the meaningful patterns that are emerging you'll actually get more useful information at first club everyone together and then you know you do that character tell you something meaningful so this notion that the average person come from that's a really although from the early

eighteen hundred fisherman adolf cat lady came up with the idea of the average person he was an astronomer and he actually used the method of astronomy and then applied back to thinking about people and so on back in the ag hundred he had actually convincing people that the averages were useful way of thinking about groups but it was valid at the time because that's when third hour they were starting to get out of thinking about groups of people in my defense of taking in and looking at first it had a hole in filling you think about average in terms of like when you groups that when you get a group of people together and then what that group is going to do it was useful or so it seemed to be very valid at the time for what it was doing and i kind of permeated with id wherein than a kind of took off like wildfire because he was able to tell about groups of people but then the attention level because you can tell us about a group of people you're able to tell us about the individual that make

up that group and that's where it falls apart but nobody really picking that apart it was kind of the functions that if you can understand a group you can understand the people within the group that's not actually true and now is really the time that we had and was there any relationship between this increase in the stadium averages and their rise out of the factory worker an assembly lines and things like that is there any connection between what was happening from industrialization stamp line and just thinking oh actually fell from like the early eighteen hundred and one they came up with that the average man idea that i can't lay thought that the average man with a sort of radio it would make me a perfect cd take everyone knew you come up with the average person that is like the perfect perth in front of god took that same idea of average in that ok now we can kind of rank people your average of the mill and what you really want to strive for it like eminent you wanna be a better than average and then frederick schiller came along and sort of the top that idea

and applied it to scientific management arm into factories and how do we you know like ok so if we take the average people like what we want the average worker to having that at the time because they were there african that your idea what we do what we didn't want people to think for themselves and people to be creative and innovative we wanted factory workers people the fed very specific provision they didn't require much thought because you just want them to keep it kind of plug in the job and to be replaceable it really took off in this sort of industrialization that way and then edward thorndyke came along and he applied that they might be a good education info it was never about nurturing potential without putting people making sure that the average humans do to have a fair amount of time in the idea that that if marx what we've done so if you take all of the fugitive caught up in huge of the film that the facts are one of the smarter ones floor winter is never gonna get it from oman of time to help them i mean you couldn't help prevent it

you get the average of that and then you know that's probably the best for the crack the code most of the students will get a conflict around that amount of time anyone who dared to quickly great anyone who take longer is probably not understand it and that's kind of how we got the education system that we have right now it feel it that way we still have the victim or by the idea that approaches her for howard good at giving them how much time we get students to learn and if the way that we had that the performance that kind of it entirely based on that idea but it is around that industrial model they no longer apply and yet we are using and so we've really have entered a new age so has that been the impetus for why you and the center for a new job he feel like we need to be moving away from the everglades absolutely because right now back then everyone at your factory workers he wanted people to fill jobs right now what we needed innovation we need people to be thinking in new wave we

need people to be inventing and creating a map what we do that you know what do you read about the great force co founded the education system to completely doesn't align know what it is that we're hoping that the alpine these creative innovative thinker of what we needed to nurture the potential of sudan and in order to do that we need to be thinking about the student in a different way we need to be looking at them not compared with an average a ranking member sporting them but really to see what we can do that would help them based on their jacket profiles are based on their sword frankly week that an area that do we would better understand if we look at benefit of the unit dimensional ranking the person who needs to be convinced and he has this message and to get into we have a very big mission which is to change the way that off with it think about that though that the solutions that are built on nbc because right now there's a lot of people even if they were doing things that

kind of line with the client but there's been an odd one off or there's a midnight the hat and that if something that we absolutely need and until we can get everyone they're not just a quarter of an education but really every one of the things fifty people in a different way when i could be able to embrace or adopt or really demanded the kind of tool and be developed and reagan and not back to the fifteen way because it's so embedded in our society in a kind of deep rooted idea and made it hard to get away from because we hi hi robot clothes so much a business an identifying market opportunities and an and institutions rely on average is they rely and demographics you know average age of the average income average education so are you getting pushback worked before for this thinking are you finding acceptance well so far the people that we've

encountered have really love that idea and the only pushback that we get in meeting not a complete understanding of it became very reverse and backed away to take it but the average does work i mean you can use the average it for fun they and you for something you can't if you try to think about groups that if you're trying to ban apply to an individual that's where there's sort of that that friction different idea it sometimes takes a little while to really understand how badly it failing at that and actually bought it why my colleague co founder todd rohde wrote an entire book on that because it's kind of a complex idea to understand that if you're very simple anything very intuitive but if you think about what it actually means they have a really big implications were stuck in the trees or honey the cofounder of the center for individual opportunity we'll continue our conversation right after this

col ball all this is inflection point i'm lauren shuler were talking with pre cereal honey the cofounder of the center for individual opportunity to present why is this important to you personally i went to seven different told before i went in high school dr james told many times my family moved around a lot the difference between how it to hear how a teacher's leave me when they think about me from this other perspective good there's you know there's some good teachers pocket the people where it likely could kind of intuitive thing in from wave in the bayview student a little bit differently and so for

me i could feel a difference in school growing up between a school that i went to repeated i hate who viewed fitted from this non standard idea of you know what should be are comparing to fit into an average person i am a teacher who kind of understood they comparing it again for average corey baghdad and i have a good life actually effective and understanding and i think that and vote for me like knowing the difference between big period of that if students was very valuable for me and that i got older i became increasingly interested in learning and so when i got to graduate school i was looking at the research about engagement for example and in working memory and the more i looked at the literature the more i realize that not telling me about any student it's not going to get any one person and if that he actually telling me about the average of the group and even in the scientific literature and education if you're not giving me very useful information i

have to kind of figure out from a foul if i want you that i have to think about how this applies to individual and what i'm able to get from the literature and reuniting not only how important it is how it feel different from the students perspective to be in one way and then realizing in the literature they we're not actually understanding as much as we think we're understanding because we're looking at group i realize that they're evicted disconnect between what we wanted with it and what we're actually doing it with it to get there and that's why i felt like getting that idea out and making it broad reaching where everyone should be you know kind of hearing understanding come around to it would it would have the kind of impact that i think would be really meaningful and useful we you mention that you moved around to different schools a lot and i am and i know that your family left iran when you were two i mean what what was going on in the country at the time and why did you

leave i have there is a lot of religious persecution and out my family in the high end up over there right now even we're at the ohio were not allowed to go to school though they even bring out there for the underground universities where the heist trying get together just to get educated to have somebody come and teach you know other behind without critical engineering and thank you ever end date get imprisoned for even things like that because they're actively trying to deprive education to the high in iran and fell education for me of a very important thing and not just important guy it's something that i wouldn't get if my family hadn't fled the country the idea that we have in the united states so on if you project important thing to have that at the compulsory you know we we expect all food and thirty our children to go to school and it required about it it's a shame that

were not able to get the most out of our students when we really care about that with it where you know in the title but i come from how i would actively be denied education and imprisoned for trying to get it did your parents it to get you out of there for their re i'm sure there are many reasons that are going on that was that one of the driving reasons for them but yeah for them it was bad and even if they think leaving because they were at that point i'm feeling when i was two years old and my grandfather was martyred and then my uncle at the well and they were just going through and calling in any of the high court half and then defining earth and then keeping them i think of the grandmother were there for several months until they one day might bomb grandmother the family went to go visit him in the police showed my my family out because you were there i can if they feel for my parents it was more overt we should leave or we might not be able to survive any longer sort of situation but then moving around once we

got to the us when for education with trying to find the best public school because we couldn't afford private school and we laughed so for them it when they kept trying to find whatever the public school was that for for their children and that we removed for it in time before we finally landed in one day they were happy with and comfortable within the education is a very important driver for them it's still there and as far as you were to experience as a student in public school finally landing in a situation that thought comfortable was that just bring this full circle was the way that you were recognized in class leading up to this ideal that you're trying to put out there now this idea that individual they're bigger than my back or because they came from but it really running i ended up in arizona which i feel like if they have a unique place to grow up i never felt like i fit in to begin with so i

always believed that i kind of had to find my own way because of education for them what that meant for me though i myself felt like i had to kind of work around the one feeling an experience that i'm going to read you know share with you is when he either we moved to prevail for a couple of years when i with i believe six years old something around that age we moved to louisville for a couple of years and then came back to the united states and when i came back to the us and are trying to go back to school days took me to the front office and they gave me the willingham of defying an english word meme it before that i had been living in the united states so i didn't know the english were the only refill for about two years maybe a little bit less and they showed me a bunch of flashcards and i would tell them what we what picture with on the card and i when he showed me that photo of an ambulance i couldn't remember the word for ambulance and a man recalling get medical card and then somehow i ended up in yet housing put the english of the thickening

witchcraft when he was with my absolute favorite convent school that loved poetry i live like stories and fail to take me out of english and put me any nfl because it would literally one one on that one exam because i know for sure i got everything a crack that really when i realized that this is not going to work for me i have to figure out my own way around and so understanding how i'm going to maneuver through the fifth started early on when i was in elementary school realizing this isn't going to work and my parents even if they are not familiar with the american education system but they had to work with administrative they did their best to make sure have the best education which was phenomenally embarrassing for me because the great lengths they went to so those who weren't even socially did not make me like the color getting caught but that's when i realized for me baby that different standard way that it works

that work for me and i am a unique case and you know i mean what i wanted and that she'll but like in my own head ocean thinking ok i'm not like the average student that would apply to me and i could compare myself that region are trying the average because obviously nothing about my life is like the lives of the people around me so early on i kind of had the idea that the average guy that worked for me and i think that the reason that i would be able to you know make my way around in and accomplish things that i wanted to accomplish and that have been completely held back anyone to you any great advice on how to do that on how to stand up for your own individuality your own individual path now i want to go yeah bare with anything very special and i mean i know that for myself i did journal a lot so i was able for myself to find this sort of patterns of what worked for me what kind of situation

i cried a lot when the situation warrants so great for me whatever it was that i was trying to accomplish and so i think the principle that we have in the thigh and now sort of emerge from ethan what organic weed through just my own experience the end writing on them and reflecting on them but i don't feel at a people should have a crazy life that i had an order to to find that the lake we have a fly intruded we can feed a third of ways that we could be thinking about it and maybe it didn't meet had become such a difficult sort of contacts the preset thank you so much for sharing your experiences and your work that with us today really appreciate it thank you very much for making me those priests or honey she's the cofounder of the center for individual opportunity and is studying issues at the intersection of neuroscience design and technology at the harvard graduate school of education fb

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