Pushkin.
Bosses or business owners are like, well, let's because gen Z's too sensitive these days now, Like if you were eighteen, you would not want to be talked down to either. And I don't think young people are crazy for paying attention to the subtle ways in which they're being disrespected by authority figures.
Psychology professor David Yaeger is an expert in adolescent development. He says, our cultural narrative about young people and they're developing brains is wrong, and he proposes a new framework.
You can think of the adolescent brain as like this social R and D engine of our culture. Something that looks like risky and idiotic to us is maybe their way of creatively trying to solve the problem.
On today's show, what the science actually says about the young mind and how we can help young people thrive. I'm Maya Shunker and this is a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become in the face of a big change. David Yeager teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. His latest book is called Ten to twenty five The Science of Motivating Young People. These days, there are so many tropes circulating
about young people. I wanted to talk to a scientist so we can learn the facts and together form the right cultural narrative. It turns out that we have a lot of misconceptions. It's true that young people's brains are underdeveloped, but that's not the only factor behind their decision making. It's also because they have different goals than adults. David argues that if we can better understand these goals, we
can help bridge the gap between adults and adolescents. And so, if you've ever wondered how to better support the young people in your life, or if you're a young person wondering why on earth older people just can't seem to understand you, David has answers for you today. Because David is such an advocate for young people, I started our conversation by asking what his experience was like in school when he was a little kid.
I mostly remember feeling like I was about to be in trouble because I was like super energetic and I was doing a million things. And in school, they want you to sit in a desk and turn in worksheets on time, and I wasn't that interested in.
Turning things on time.
And I was more interested in, I don't know, asking questions, but also trying to make people laugh in the class, and so it was fun for other kids in the class, but not that fun for the teachers.
I wonder whether your experience as a kid did inform the work you ultimately explored as a psychologist, which was your focus on young people ages ten to twenty five, Like, is there a connection between your personal experience and ultimately being interested in this age group?
Yeah?
So I would say that the the two weeks of the year I liked the most were my two weeks at summer camp. And it was mainly because finally adults liked me and thought I brought something to the table and I wanted to like figure out what they what did they do, like how did they treat me? And it was usually by like inspiring me and expecting me to do something that was harder than I thought I could do. And a camp, it's mundane stuff like jumping off the top of a telephone pole and grabbing rings,
you know, two stories up. So you're facing your fears and you are think you're going to die, but there's a supportive adult below you and they're cheering you on, but you're the one who has to jump. The adult does not jump for you. Like that's also a metaphor for a lot of life that you have to climb up to something like metaphorically scary and jump on your own. But you've got adults around there, and if you do it, they're stoked for you. They're like that kicked ass. That's
so awesome. And I guess if you wanted to bottle something about my program of research, it's like, how do we make more adults be that kind of person where again, you're not doing it for the kid. The kid has to jump, but you're supportive enough that they feel enough safety to take a risk that's beyond what they thought they could do.
Yeah, yeah, it's so interesting. I mean, we were all kids once and yet somehow when we become adults, we just feel this immediate disconnect with young people. Like what do you think is is it just skillful amnesia? Why is that we're forgetting as adults. We always think when we're growing up, I'll never be like my parents as a teenager, like I'll never talk to my teenage kid and the way my parents are talking to me. And then we all do the same thing, right.
I think it's a.
Really profound question, and I don't think we have an open, shut answer, but I think about it a lot. One hypothesis is that our cultural narrative about young people like selectively influences our memory of us when we were young, and our cultural narrative is you do dumb stuff that you're later embarrassed by that.
Was, you know, not wise.
So if you talk to someone about their college years and now they're thirty and forty, they're like, well, we would to this party and got super drunk, or we you know, when on this crazy road trip and that was irresponsible, or you know, people tell stories about how you're responsible they were in a given age group, as though the college years, for example, are years where you're an idiot, And then we can't access that feeling of
like indignation when you're mistreated, or humiliation if you've like bombed in front of people whose opinions you care about, or the thrill of pride for impressing someone who you cared about, and we're stuck in this older view of we were idiots when we were young.
Yeah, you talked about this cultural narrative that we have around young people. The counter to that is the biological narrative. Right, we have a pretty pervasive misconception about young people's brains. And I'm wondering if you can tell me a bit more about that.
Let me just come into this anecdotally. So my wife is a pediatric nurse and at some point she moved over to the neuphrology clinic and it's wonderful clinic. They're the best at kidney transplants for kids. And I talked to the one of the doctors and he's like, look, these kids are not taking their meds, and it's a problem because if you don't take the anti rejection matter more medicines like that, then your body rejects the kidney
in like two days. And so it's a huge problem because then you go on dialysis and no one wants that, and it's miserable. But also you've wasted a kidney and it's so rare and hard to get a kidney, and it's a huge issue. And the doctor I talked to, who was a wonderful person, said, I cannot fathom what they're thinking. It's like they just don't have a prefernal cortex. They just cannot think about the consequences of their actions.
We can't trust them or rely on them. And then he concludes by saying, asking a teenager to remember to take their medicine when they lack a prefernal cortex is like asking someone with no biceps or triceps to do push ups.
And I fully see where this.
Is coming from. And he had seen a talk on the latest supposed neuroscience of adolescence and it's making its way out there and lots of important settings where the punchline is teenagers lack of prefernal cortex and therefore we can't trust them to do anything. I call that the
neurobiological incompetence model. That the main contribution of it is, to say, teenagers' brains because of a combination of the explosion of hormones combined with under development of the prefrontal regions, leads to this all gas, no breaks mentality that they're just impulsively following whatever desire they want and not thinking about the future. And that idea is out there now and it's kind of been codified in neuroscience and there's a reason why they did that, and the reason was
around criminal justice. Teenagers who committed serious crimes like violent crimes, were being sentenced to life without parole or the death penalty, because the argument went, if they were so evil that they could commit these heinous crimes even while fourteen fifteen sixteen, then they would only get worse, or they certainly wouldn't get better, so better to not have them in our society. These are like the bad apples. Let's get rid of them.
And what the neuroscientists argued is that actually you're still changing. We don't know that you're stuck being an evil, heinous monster for life at fourteen fifteen sixteen because you're highly sensitive to impulses because your brain is incompetent, basically, and they successfully argue to the Supreme Court in a very important way that at huge justice consequences and I would no way diminish the contribution.
Of that work.
But very soon that argument is used to say, well, teenagers shouldn't have control over their sex lives or their contraception, or they shouldn't be asked, you know, to think about politics or to lobby against the gun policies. You're just an idiotic teenager who doesn't understand the future and what I'd want to argue is that if we start from that incompetence model, then so many other problematic ways of interacting with young people make sense to us, and we
do them almost by default. For instance, if we view young people as a problem that's about to get out of control, then we need to use very strong punishments or rewards to control their behavior and kind of save them from themselves. And also if we view them as incompetent and therefore incapable of doing anything impressive, then we shouldn't ask them to do anything. We need to protect them, in fact, from the stresses of the world until their
brains are fully cooked. And I think when adults behave in those ways, though young people rebel, They field looked down on. They feel like I felt as a kid. And I want to argue that the incompetence model is not fixed reality, that the science is a little more complicated, and that there's a different way to look at it. And if you look at it that different way, then a different set of behaviors for the adults make sense.
And those behaviors I think can lead us to engage young people more effectively.
And what is that different way so help us update our mental models like, how should we think about the young adult brain?
Yeah, so the brain is continuing to develop in many
cases until the mid to late twenties. So Audrona Galvaan who's at UCLA, is a well known neuroscientist, and she describes the changes as basically sensitizing the brain to social experiences and emotions like shame, pride, humiliation, earning, prestige, things like that, and Aedrona's catchphrases like the prefrontal region is for goal directed behavior, and teenagers are great at goal directed behavior, it's just not the goals that adults often
want them to be doing. So adults want them to factor endless worksheets of trino meals and stead quietly in their desks, right, But kids are like, I want to
look awesome. Yeah, And so the adults are saying, you're not thinking about the future in your income, but it's because they're saying factor trino meals now, so that next year you can get into geometry, and eventually you'll get into calculus, so you could get into a good college, and then you can get a good job so that by your thirties you can barely afford a mortgage and it's like, that's not a compelling argument for a lot of young people. But it doesn't mean that they're incapable
of thinking about the future or planning ahead. They're great at planning ahead. For instance, just look at any kid who wants to sneak out of the house to go to a party.
They're like, who do I have to lie to?
Like?
Who do I like?
What? They're laying traps weeks in advance. They've got like a map of the sewers, like they're they thought.
Their siblings into it. They're bartering like I'll keep your secret if you keep my secret.
It's elaborate.
And but that's the negative example or just the po this summer was the Olympics and how many of our heroes were like fifteen year olds that clearly displayed tons of self control and strategic behavior over time in order to develop valued skills that would be useful in the future. So once you realize what Audrina and the rest of the Center on the Developing Adolescent has been arguing, then you realize the real task is to figure out what do they want to direct their attention to? What are
those sets of goals that will capture their attention. It's the experiences of status and respect. But it's not just like frivolous stuff. It's the deep, meaningful sense that you can make a contribution and that other people who are judging you and who you care, that they're judging you, that they think you have value. That's what status and respect is. And you don't just get that by virtue
of the days going by. It's something you have to earn in front of others, and so often that means doing something that's a little bold and a little risky and a little hard.
So given this, David, take me back to that scenario involving the teenagers with kidney transplants who weren't taking their medications. What were their doctors getting wrong?
There are two social things that they've generally failed to consider.
I learned.
One is why the young person would not want to take their meds. And the adults think, if only we explain the consequences of your behavior more clearly, then you would come around. Adults are almost like if an American doesn't speak a foreign language, goes overseas and then they can't talk to someone in like Italian or whatever, and then they just yell English louder.
Yeah, at that.
Person slower, as though that will make a difference.
Yeah, Like that's that's most doctors, nurses, parents approach to teenagers when they don't their medical advice. And that is a social experience because it is disrespectful. You're talking down to them. It humiliating for the young person, and that that means they're not being afforded respect as an adult like person who's contributing. The second thing, though, is that
I heard this from a lot of kids. Before you have your kidney, you feel very different and weird because you have to go to dialysis all the time, and so you're like, I mean it's like biblical, you know, kind of like you're out in the desert alone, you know, a day of the week, two days out of the week where you're just ostracized from your community. And once they get the kidney, they don't have to do that anymore, and so they're like making up for lost time of
feeling like a normal person around their friends. And so if they go like to the beach and bring enough meds for one day, but all the other friends are like, we're going to stay at extra night and say some kids are like Okay, I'm not driving back to Oakland to go get my other dose. These are like real stories from Stanford patients, and.
Like you get it.
I mean like they have to choose between listening to the grown ups who talked down to them and yelled at them and treated them like a child and think that they have no proofernal cortex, or hang out with the cool people who are treating them like a normal kid for the first time in their lives. Or a related thing is especially if kids have steroids that they
have to take. The pills are huge, so the kids would have like two fistfuls of steroid pills bulging in their pockets, and you're at a party with your friends, and if you take those, first of all that you can't drink, you also get bad breath, you get like
a rectile problems. So like you already feel weird that you have two pocketfuls of steroid pills, but then you're basically like taking away a lot of stuff you want to do at a party, which is like talk closely to someone with the opposite sex and make out and all these other things. And so again you have to choose between listening to grown ups. But with social death or threat of physical death, but social life. And so you can think of the adolescent brain as like this
social R and D engine of our culture. Something that looks like risky and idiotic to us is maybe their way of creatively trying to solve the problem of having more of the thing that brings you social success and fewer of the things that bring you social failure. But because every generation has its own microculture of what counts for status, you don't want a brain that decides too early to only do one kind of behavior to gain status.
Because in our culture, things are changing so fast, right, professionally, socially in terms of big ideas or crises that we're facing. So it's not underdeveloped, it's that it's still adapting to the complex and ambiguous and ever changing environment that we're in.
That it is underdeveloped, right some dimensions.
You're right, There are some areas in which just basic, exactly basic decision making stuff is less developed.
The reason, sorry, the reason I'm pushing on this is I don't want listeners to leave this conversation thinking, Ah, their prefunal courteses are basically the same as ours in terms of what they're capable of and so we can entirely ascribe differences to what their goals are, because I think that would almost create unfairly high standards for the young adult brain.
Right.
The bad version of that is young people are as capable of great decision making as every adult, and so if they make a bad decision, it's because they didn't want to and therefore they are bad people.
Yeah, or they don't care.
Or they had, you know, goals that we would see deemed superficial or whatever.
Right, You're absolutely right that the meta narrative of they're just as smart as every other adult and therefore they're to blame if they make a dumb decision is problematic because then we would end up condemning lots of kids, which is what we're trying to avoid.
You know, the premise of your book, David, is if we can better empathize with what's going on in the young mind, then we can also understand how to better engage with that young mind, right in ways that just lead to better outcomes. Right, This is not just a principled stance. This is about trying to just get better outcomes for all parties involved.
Right, Yeah, make your life easier, that's totally fine with me.
Fewer fights with your kid actually get to do their homework. Whatever, the thing is, right, So tell me about what you consider to be a good way and a bad way to deliver feedback to a kid.
Yeah, so there's We wanted to do a study where in one condition, you talk to a young adult in a way that's disrespectful, and in another condition, talk to them in a way that's respectful, and see if their rates of taking their medicine are higher in the respectful group. And we pick medicine apart because of the adherence issues I described, but also because I think it's a good stand in for a lot of other things where adult, you know, asking you to do your homework is more
or less like saying take your medicine. But the thing is, you can't do a study with actual kidney transplant patients, and so we had to make up a medicine that's plausibly useful but not actually harmful if you don't take it, but needs to be inconvenient and unpleasant. And so the medicine we use in our study was a spoonful of vegemite, which is the Australian supplement. It's like if you brewed a barrel of beer and there was a bunch of yeast at the bottom and then you put that on toast.
So that's vegemite.
And just to clarify, is the vegemite being framed as something that is healthy, like it's going to help their nutrition.
Yeah, we didn't tell what was VEGEMI.
We were like, this is a new nutritional supplement that could be healthy for you, but also as a part of an experiment, we're studying it.
Yeah, so what was respectful versus non respectful language?
So people try the vegemite, they realized the don't like it, and then and then they watch a video and in the disrespectful condition, which we wrote with real doctors, we're like, what do you guys say to people? And it's things like I'm a doctor, so I know what's good for you, and if you want to do the right thing, then you'll listen to me and you'll take this medicine. They'd say things like it has an unpleasant taste, try to
ignore that. Thank you in advance for your cooperation. In general, it diminishes the young person, treats them as though they don't have agency, Like it doesn't like respect their thinking or decision making, and then in the respectful condition, we tell them I think you're gonna understand the real reason why we want you to do this. Let me explain it to you. So they explain the real rationale. We
say things like it's got an unpleasant taste. Try to think of that as you doing your part to help others and yourself for the future can help science, and then once we have science, then science will help the world. So kind of framing the unpleasantness as a sign of respect and contribution. And then we grant agencies so like, I hope you might consider this rather than you should do this, and we say, you know, thanks for considering it.
Stuff like that, And we find pretty important differences in the rates at which young people in our experiment took the vega might if they were asked respectfully, depending on the analysis, up to twice as likely. Often people think it doesn't matter how I ask a young person, It just matters that I asked them. And if I asked you in whatever way I considered was good and they didn't do what I said, then they're rere calcil trant,
they're rebellious, they're short sighted, they're a problem. But the view I'm trying to argue is that young people, when their status is in question, they're they're reading between the lines. They're not just listening to what said, They're listening to the unsaid parts. And that makes a big difference in terms of whether they presume that the adults or the
mentor has their best interests at heart. And because so many young people are treated poorly and they're treated as though they're incompetent, then their default presumption will be that this is yet another adult telling me what to do, and you gonna yell at me and blame.
Me if I don't do it.
And so you have to be extra transparent, like clearer than you think you need to be, which often I say that, and then bosses or you know, business owners are like, well, let's because gen Z's too sensitive these days, And I think no, Like, if you were eighteen, you would not want to be talked down to either, and you would have complained if people were disrespectful to you.
And I don't think young people are crazy for paying attention to the subtle ways in which they're being disrespected by authority.
Figures.
We'll be back in a moment with a slight change of plans, the more respectful feedback approach that you just articulated as part of what you call a mentor mindset. Talk to me a bit more about the tenants of this mindset. So you alluded to transparency, what are other core features?
Yeah, I write about this concept of a mentor mindset, which I define simply as someone having very high standards slash expectations, but also being supportive enough so that the young person can meet those like legitimately high expectations. So you kind of first need to have this belief that young people could be properly motivated under the right conditions, with the right environmental supports.
And if you believe that, then it's like, Okay, I can.
Push them and challenge them, but I need to figure out the way to support them so that they're open to that challenge and can succeed through it. So in the book, I found examples of mentor mindset leaders and a bunch of different disciplines coaching, management, teaching, etc. And
there's a handful of practices that they all do. So one is questioning and I was struck by this, like you'd think that a great tutor, for example, would just be awesome at explaining physics, that they have the best metaphor and the right way of clarifying and misunderstanding, and they're just a very good explainer. But Mark Lepper is the Stanford Social Psychologists spent years watching expert tutors and found that ninety percent or more of what they say.
Is a question.
It's not an explanation. So a student would try a problem and the tutor, and the tutor would be like.
Huh, is that right?
Like they wouldn't say it's wrong, and they wouldn't explain it. They would go say the obvious linguistic implication is not right, and the student knows that, but the tutors don't say that. But it invites the student to then think about why it might be wrong. And it's because the tutor wants the student to own the thinking after the tutoring session. You don't just want the one hour where the tutor and because then the only problem set the student can do is the ones they did in that one hour.
Which you really want is the student to be able to go out and do all their problem sets using critical thinking and open ended and self interrogation, et cetera. So in general, mentor mindset exemplars do a version of that kind of questioning, and it's everything from parents to get their kids to stop fighting with each other to how Chip England, the NBA's best shooting coach, would get Kawhi Leonard or Tony Parker to fix their shot and
go on to win championships. Now, questioning is not a universal good in the sense that not all questions are created equal. So asking a young person what were you thinking.
He has so stupid probably not a great question because the implications.
They weren't thinking. Yeah.
But what the linguists have taught us is that there's a kind of question that they call authentic questions with uptake, and authentic just means that I'm actually curious what the answer is. So if I ask you why you solve the physics problem this way, I'm actually kind of curious where your mistake came from.
And then uptake is.
That your follow up questions involve information you just got from them, And that's respectful because it means like it actually it mattered to me that you shared your true opinions. So the other big thing that all the mental mindset leaders did in the NBA shooting coach Chip England. This is the first thing he told me was he said, David, you have to sell your vision. That general idea is
something we've used a lot in our experiments with adolescence. So, for instance, in a classic set of studies, we took ninth graders who were in like an algebra class, and we didn't say, if you learn algebra, then you can get good grades. You get good grades, you get good college, good college, good job. We instead said, can you tell us about problems with the world, things that you find infuriating or unfair or unjust, And turns out kids are
great at answering that question. Adults are often surprised with the study that kids write anything, but over ninety percent of kids write honest answers on a survey about an injustice in the world, and they're talking about political instability, economic insecurity, wars like the Senate, like it's really you know, they're frustrated by a bunch of stuff. And then we say, all right, well, how could a stronger brain help you do something about these issues? And kids can answer that,
but they've never been asked that question. For the most part, they come up with things like, oh, well, if I study in English, then I can understand logic. I understand logic, then I can make arguments. If I can make arguments, then I can change policies stuff like that. And it kind of doesn't matter how accurate they are in coming up with that. It just matters that they convince themselves that a stronger brain could help them make a difference.
And then in some experiments we give them like boring math. This is a task developed by Angela Duckworth and Sydney Demelo and others, And so they have a choice. They could either do math or they could goof off on the internet like play tetrists or watch YouTube videos.
And we're secretly tracking what they're doing on the back end.
And what we find is that if we made an argument it's pure self interest. We don't see a big benefit of thinking about a reason for learning. But if it's like stronger brain helps you change the world, then we see kids doing more of the kind of tedious math and goofing off less on the internet. And the way we interpret that is that they can visual argument is do you delay gratification now to matter in some
ambiguous distant future. But I think of it like, if you were gonna volunteer to make lunch bags for the homeless, you'd feel like a good person while you're packing the lunch, But a homeless person hasn't eaten that sandwich yet, Like the impact on the person hasn't happened. But you know that your contributions right now are a part of something meaningful. This beyond the self transcendent purpose I think, becomes a powerful tool for promoting engagement and learning, but we hardly
ever tap into it. I think because we think young people just are fundamentally incapable of making contributions.
Yeah, or just inherently selfish, like that they don't care about these pro social outcomes when they do.
Yeah, what does.
This look like in practice? So imagine I'm a teacher. What are the traits that I must exhibit in order to really embrace the mentor mindset?
I'll tell them extreme example, which I'm not saying everyone needs to do this, just want to be clear, But for two years I sat in the back of Uri Triesman's calculus class. So Uri Triesman won the MacArthur for being the greatest calculus professor in America in the early nineties. When he won the MacArthur. He had been running these calculus support programs at Berkeley for fifteen twenty years, and he's very famous as a reformer. But no psychologists had
really watched what he did. And so after I got tenure, I spent two years retaking freshman calculus at the University of Texas at Austin.
Wow.
Awesome.
The first day of class, he says, this class will be so hard that some of you will cry and wonder why you're here. In fact, everyone here will have such a hard time that they will question themselves. It's not a question of whether that will happen, it's when it will happen. Now, that sounds like someone who's trying to get everyone to drop the class, right, Yeah, like a readout class.
I feel like I'm not even in the class anymore. I've run out. David, this is the first thing he said, Yeah, that's crazy, and he's like, I.
Mean, at the time, he's like a seventy one year old Jewish guy from the Bronx, And this is a very diverse group of students coming from you know, border areas of Texas and like good and bad high school,
all this stuff. It's the first thing he says. But then he says, and more of you will get a's in this class than any other calculus class at the university, and in fact, more of you will go on to careers in professional mathematics and do masters in PhDs in quantitative fields than any other calculus class in the entire ut system. And then he'll say things like you know, after your first all nighter, And then the students are like, wait a second, first, like there's gonna be multiple all
nighters in this class. And what he actually does is the first problem set. It's like he gives out on the second day of class. It's like proving theorems that other in other classes you memorize or that you don't even touch, because he's teaching them how to do like real analysis on the first day of calculus, and students is like, there's five problems, so they think they can start at the last second. So then no one even
opens the assignment till like midnight. And then he's told them I'll be available for office hours as long as you need me, so all night, and so he and his tas are in the math building and one by one the students trickle in like between twelve and two. They're doing calculus proofs from like two to six in the morning, and then they they all finish it and then they walk out of the class like bleary eyed
looking at the sun, you know, and pass out. And he only has to do that once for them to know he's totally serious about the standard and he's a lunatic about the support.
Yeah, totally. He's saying through that like, I believe each of you can do this.
Yeah, and he walks the walk, you know.
Yeah, And that kind of stuff is awesome to me because at his funeral there will be thousands of people who talk about how he believed in them at a time when they did not believe in themselves, but not by lowering standards.
And to me, that's the power of the mentor mindset.
Yeah. I mean when you say mentor mindset, I think it's it's not just for people who are playing the role of formal mentors, right, I think it's for anyone who interacts in any kind of coachy role. So it could be a parent, or a sports coach or just a friend.
Right.
And the other important thing is that I don't even think this just applies to young people what you're putting forth here seems so universally applicable and appealing.
Yeah, I mean I think that. So two things.
One is I did not call the book the mentor mindset. I don't think people rushing around through the airport looking at books are like, Oh, I want another book to give me more homework to do, like another role. I need to have another thing I could feel like I'm failing at. And that's how I think a lot of people look at mentoring. They think, Oh, it's a responsibility that I begrudgingly take on to have coffee with someone on Thursdays and fire hose them with career advice or
something like that. But that's not what I'm writing about. What I'm writing about is a mindset in which every interaction with someone might be that one status and respect sensitive interaction that could turn them off from your field or their future, or could be that inspirational moment. And so it's a mindset that might play out over multiple
years or in a complex relationship. But in a lot of examples I write about in the book, sometimes it's like one conversation, Yeah, and the right amount of respect and status at the right time from the right mentor can I think, in my opinion, change your life.
Yeah, I mean, I think what you're saying is we actually all have these implicit mentorship moments throughout each and every day, and we might not code them as such, but they potentially are serving that role.
You know, if we just have a life philosophy where we're just serious, we take other people seriously, and we are supportive and we're understanding. If that's our philosophy, then there will be you know, hundreds or thousands of moments where maybe they'll remember the fact that.
We influence them, or maybe they won't.
But I kind of want to live in a world where most funerals are people standing up to say this person has no idea that they changed my life.
And here's what they did.
Hey, thanks so much for listening. Join me next week when I speak to Sophia Sinclair, a writer and award winning poet who grew up in a Rastafari family. Her father was the head of the household, and he made Sophia and her siblings follow a strict interpretation of Rastafari. But as Sophia grew older, living under her father's rules became suffocating.
And I thought, no that's not the future that I want for myself, and I want to decide for myself the woman that I am going to be, and so I need to cut this future completely out of me and out of my life entirely.
That's next week on A Slight Change of Plans. I'll see you then. A Slight Change of Plans is created, written, and executive produced by me Maya Schunker. The Slight Change family includes our showrunner Tyler Green, our senior producer Kate Parkinson Morgan, our producer Brianna Garrett, and our engineer Ericawang. Louis Scara wrote our delightful theme song, and Ginger Smith
helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so a big thanks to everyone there, and of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Schunker. See you next week.