Good Life Project - She Saw Her Dream Job in a Movie, Then Made It Her Reality

Episode Date: August 4, 2015

Today's guest, Dr. Alice Wilder, is one of the creative geniuses behind some of the biggest kids' "edutainment" juggernauts in history, from Blues Clues to Speakaboos and the recent Emmy Award-winning Amazon Kids program, Tumble Leaf.Her entire journey, though, might never have happened but for the fact that one person, in her case a teacher, noticed something special and "sparked" her curiosity and, in turn, her life.In this week's conversation, we talk about her fantastic adventure. We discover how "being Josh" in the famed Tom Hanks movie, Big, fueled a dream that then turned into a profoundly rewarding living and life. We dive into what the word "sparking" is all about, how a single person or moment can change everything and how you can be that catalyst both for others and for yourself.And, we talk about the power of curiosity, of reconnecting with your inner kid, a willingness to try and fail and just move on. We explore the joy and illumination that comes along with learning from and working with kids and the absolute egoless honesty they bring with them. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mayday, mayday, we've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die.

Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-nest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Kids are active participants of media. It might look like in some cases they're sitting back, but they're still taking meaning away. So what meaning are they taking away? What are you going to give them through the gift of whatever this content is? So you may not know Dr. Alice Wilder's name, but you absolutely know her work if you've been a parent or you've been around kids in any way, shape, or form. She's the Emmy award-winning co-creator and producer of some of the huge kids' educational programs, things like Blue's Clues, Super Why, and the thing that she

actually just won the Emmy for, Tumble Leaf. The beautiful thing is that she's this incredible blend of deep, deep curiosity about children, about learning, and about how to blend together media and entertainment and powerful, powerful education to light up kids. And the conversation talks about her beautiful journey, but also it applies a lot of these same ideas to how we as adults can tap into a vein of curiosity, really reconnect with the burning questions in our lives to build extraordinary careers, relationships, and lives. I'm Jonathan Fields. This is Good Life Project. Today's episode is brought to you by Camp Good Life Project. Now you guys have probably heard me jamming about this for a couple of months now. We literally take over a kid's sleepaway camp about 90 minutes outside

of New York City for three and a half days at the end of August. And if you're listening to this in real time, that's just about a month from now. So it's coming up really soon. And we bring together an amazing group of entrepreneurs, makers, movers, and shakers, people who are really just inspired by a shared set of values and beliefs and aspirations. You can work in a huge corporation. You can be a solo artist. It's really about this beautiful community and shared values to create three and a half days of what can only be described as pure magic and intense learning. So if that sounds interesting to you, if you feel like the end of August, that would be a great place for you to be. And you could really use

those three and a half days as a complete mind-body-business-life-perspective reset. Go check out the details at goodlifeproject.com slash camp. How did we first connect? Did I reach out to you? Did you reach out to me? I can't remember. I listened to one of your podcasts, The Creative Live Woman. Oh, yeah, Anne Rae. Anne Rae. Right, yeah, I was a guest on her Creative Live thing. And you were both talking about curiosity and engaging children in curiosity and whether it could be taught.

Yeah, that's right. And I knew of you before. I've been to World Dom domination summit okay and a friend of mine had told me about your podcast and i'm a huge fan and i just wanted to let you know that this is my arena and right what you both were talking about was really powerful and also could actually be taught yeah which i love this sort of an enduring question of mine because it's interesting because it came up in another podcast

we did maybe a month or two ago. It was a format we called Nine Things where the three of us were kind of spinning around and we were talking about what's the opposite of depression. And one of the things that Chip Connolly said to me a couple of years back is like, he thinks the opposite of depression is curiosity.

And it just really made me think because I'm like, huh, I never really, I never would have framed it that way. But it actually makes a lot of sense. It's like, you know, when you become curious in the world, it becomes more difficult to stay in a state of where just like everything where you're not feeling. Right. You know, because the curiosity lights something up inside of you. It does. And what I love about it and kind of what I wanted to portray to you is that kids are naturally curious. And they kind of sometimes can lose that curiosity

if it's not encouraged or practiced. In some ways, curiosity is a muscle. And it also comes from being around other people that are curious. And kids, young children, especially early childhood, they are naturally curious. Everything is new to them. It's exciting. They can't wait to jump in. They try things.

They're not afraid to fail. They're pretty fearless about almost everything. Is that pretty much across the board? It is pretty much across the board. Okay, so what happens to us? Because, I mean, I remember as a kid, it's like every part of your body becomes a learning organism. And I didn't know whether it was just me, but it seems like that would be normal. But what happens along the way that kind of makes that go away?

Well, I don't want to play the blame game at all because it's like what happens along the way that kind of makes that go away yeah well i don't want to play the blame game at all because it's not fair and every person's experience is really different once you get to a certain age certainly formal schooling has not helped a ton because it was designed as you know many many many years ago to create different types of workers and thinkers for a time that is no longer. And so with sort of this place and space that you have to go to where there's 20 to 30 learners in one space, 20 to 30 very unique individual learners, you need order. And I think what happens is you need order. Everyone kind of has to sit still a bit. There are certain things that need to be learned in order to pass tests and in order for people to do their jobs really well. And in doing so, you lose that curious learner. You lose a little bit of that spark for learning.

Because if you could, learners would be hands-on. They'd be active. They'd be doing. They'd be answering their own questions. They'd be thinking about things that are of interest to them. It's interesting, too, because it's sort of like the evolution of industry has determined. It's like reverse engineered how we work with our learners, you know, like from the youngest ages. But it feels like the industry has evolved massively now.

So, you know, the way schools were probably really good for a certain time and a certain job or type of job that most people graduated into. But something happened where something fell apart, where industry continued to evolve. So now we're in this place where who knows what's going to happen tomorrow. Technology is just profoundly changing the next move. But it feels like education is caught where it still was. And there's a lot of machinery, I guess, just invested in, um, in where it is. And, um, so, uh, shaking it up, I think is, uh, but I think, you know, and we could go down the whole, the whole tangent of the system and the educational system,

but I think it's more, a more interesting conversation to sort of, at least for, for now, focus on what about the kid, you know like how can we individually light that spark like what is it that makes come alive because i'm now our initial conversation is coming back to me now really no it is teachable and you can like you know reclaim it in kids and and i guess my question is twofold you know if once a kid gets to a point where if they start to lose that, how do you reacquaint them with it? And then once you're in your 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and you've had a lifetime where you've kind of had a level of curiosity drummed out of you for any wide number of reasons, how do you get it back? How do you reclaim that? Well, it's interesting because I think I told you when we first talked that I was a really uninspired learner.

I was somebody that struggled a lot in school, and I was not interested in what I was learning or really much of anything. And so what ended up happening to me was I met a professor my sophomore year in college who sparked me. So here I was, somebody who really probably started out as a curious learner, five and under. Then, you know, went to school and I probably had moments of excitement and curiosity and around learning but it wasn't until Marianne Foley my advisor at Skidmore College found me and she said I really like the questions you ask and I was like you do like nobody had ever said to me that they liked something about the way that I thought or the way that I learned or the way that I put information together. And it was in that moment, honestly, that I feel like I became a lifelong learner,

that I got excited about learning, that I found a passion, that I understood myself enough to know what that passion was. So she had a memory and cognition lab, and she brought me into elementary schools. What were you actually studying at the time? Psychology. At the time, I went in to get an undergrad in business. Oh, no kidding. Because my dad and my mom both worked in retail,

ran a retail business, and so I thought I would be in business. Then when she found me and she asked me to be in her psychology lab, I said, okay, I'll try it. Again, feeling very complimented and empowered by this person who saw something in me that was interesting to her on a learning level. Right. that was interesting to her on a learning level. And so one of the first things she did was she brought me into elementary schools and taught me how to interview children, how to ask questions, how to understand what they're thinking, why they're thinking, how they're thinking what they're thinking. Did you have any interest in that before?

Could you have projected when you went into college, I'm going to be in L.A. like in interviewing, learning how to interview young children. I loved kids. I liked to babysit. And I worked at a local daycare center. I think kids' spirits light me up. And I love to play. So in that way, I was always interested in children. But I had no idea. No. Again, going in as a business major. But two things happened. One was she really taught me how to listen and ask the right questions. And then at the same time, I saw the movie Big. Do you remember that movie? Of course. It's a ride play land.

She's been in the news anywhere. You know, we're in New York, so we know that place. Exactly. So when I watched that movie, I wanted to play the part of Josh in real life. My favorite scene was the boardroom where Tom Hanks is sitting there and that executive passes around what he says is going to be the next hot toy. And Tom Hanks, as Josh picks it up, starts to try to play with it and says, what's so fun about that? And I was like, that's what I want to do for a living. I wanted to talk to kids, be the voice of children in a room full of adults

that are making things for kids. Because it's very challenging for us as adults to think back to what it's like to be a child. But not only sort of be their voice, not from an adult perspective even of my own, but actually talk to kids, test content and things with them, and bring their words back to people who are making it. Right. So I'm curious, the first time you get down on the ground and you're like, okay, Susie,

I'm here to interview you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's going through your head? I get into a zone. Yeah. I just feel like I become like them. And I got my doctorate in educational psychology from Teachers College. I learned a lot there about child development, observing and assessing preschool children in particular,

although I do work with older children to research methods, but also instructional systems design. So when I'm making a product, I kind of have bunches of perspectives. I'm thinking about the kid's point of view, but I'm also thinking about the end goal of that product from an educational and an entertainment perspective. So I pretty much usually already designed a curriculum where we know what our vision and mission is, and we know what we want the impact of that either episode or app or game to be before I bring it in to them. So in that way, I've got all of those perspectives in my mind when I'm talking to them. So I know then how to analyze what they're thinking and also ask better questions. Yeah. Was there a time where you're hanging out at school, your mentor finds you,

she's like, I like your questions, brings you into schools, and you're on the floor. Was there a moment where you just kind of, you're like, oh my God, I'm Joshua Big. Yes. Where you're like, oh, this is actually happening. This is real. Yeah. It happened after my first year at Blue's Clues. I remember it really clearly. All right. So let's fill that in for those who don't know your history. You have been behind the scenes at some astonishingly huge media slash education projects for kids. So how do you go from your studying and talk me into you landing at Blue's Clues?

So Marianne impacts my life, ignites a spark for learning. Then I see the movie Big. And now I have my mission statement. Which is? It was at the time to play the role of Josh in the movie Big in real life. That became my mission statement. I just started working towards it. I moved to Boston, even applied to toy companies knowing that they had play labs where they did just that. Put my resume on the back of a Monopoly board, you know, whatever I could do creatively to bring my name to the top. Ended up at a children's retail store, then went to PBS in Alexandria, Virginia. I was interested in children's media. I grew up on Sesame Street Electric Company, Mr. Rogers.

There was that whole chain of shows at the time. I loved them. Then I read an article while I was at PBS called Research Need Not Stifle. And it was written by Barbara Flagg, who wrote a book about formative research. She was actually a professor at Harvard at the time. And she had done a lot of the formative research on sesame. What's really interesting was I followed that vein. I set as my mission to figure out how to become that. I wrote her a letter. Naive, just, I got to figure this out. She wrote me back and she said,

you need to go to graduate school. So she set me on the path of, okay, I have to study more. Didn't really want to. Being a student was not my thing so much. Like, I want to get out into the world and on the floor with kids. I want to do it, exactly.

But I followed her advice and I applied to get out into the world and on the floor with kids. I want to do it. Exactly. But I followed her advice, and I applied to graduate school and got into the master's program in educational psychology at Teachers College. And while I was there, another professor found me, Joanna Williams, who was a reading and language specialist. And she asked me to work in her reading and language lab. And I had had experience with that, and I loved the fact that we were going to be able to go out and talk with kids again. So I said yes. And I was interested in working at Sesame and Nickelodeon at the time, but she really hooked me in. So I ended up starting to study students with learning disabilities and reading comprehension. I'd ended up starting to study students with learning disabilities and reading comprehension. I'd go into junior high school students. So now I was working with 12 to 14

year old non-readers. And I learned a ton about the strategies for reading, but also for learning in general. A lot of those that are applied to, say, students with learning disabilities or anybody or all of us, even as adults, are things that you can also apply with preschoolers. So from there, I found a woman by the name of Angela Santomero was in one of my classes, and she told me that she was working in the Nickelodeon Research Department. And so I attacked her after class one day. And I said, I actually was standing at my lab door at Teachers College, and I pretended like I couldn't get in until she walked behind me.

And then I tried to— Two hours later with the keys in the door. She needs to be here already. My hand's getting tired. and then two hours later i think he's in the dark she needs to be here already my hands getting tired and so um i said i'd really that's you know nickelodeon research is whatever i'd like to be i'd really like to explore that further so anyway long story short we ended up working together for a while and then we both left Nickelodeon at the same time. She finished her master's up at Teachers College,

and I was doing my doctorate at the time. Right after she finished, Nickelodeon, Nick Jr. evolved, and they were looking for what would a game show for preschoolers be. And Angela had an idea, and she pitched it. And so during the testing process of the series, she called me and she said, I think they might pick up my show. Would you come and help me with this? And at first I said, well, I'll try to find you somebody. I was in the middle of my doctorate. I didn't want to stop. But then I saw the show and I literally cried. I saw all the learning theory, all the child development stuff, all the things about who children really are at their core in this 10 minute pilot.

And before I knew it, I was in there interviewing for my Tom Hanks role. And that show ends up being Blue's Clues. Yeah. So it was Blueprints at the time. It was named by children as Blue's Clues in formative testing. And so she brought me on to create with her a formative research team, research and development. Help me test every episode of the show multiple times while we're making it so that once we put it out there, we know kids are going to love it and learn from it. Which is kind of mind-blowing because from where I sit, you know, of course,

when my kid was younger, you know, like I'd spend a lot of hours in front of the screen with her and Blue's Clues, and from the outside looking in, you have no concept the level of instructional design and testing. It's just like, oh, it's a show that my kid seems to want to watch every day and sometimes all day every day. And you kind of feel as a parent, well, I hear it's educational, so I'm cool with that. Having no clue the extensive level of research and design and development that goes on behind that. I mean, it's kind of mind boggling. Yeah. Yeah.

And we stayed so hyper focused on the kids. For us, it was all about the kids. So we literally, Malcolm Gladwell writes about this in The Tipping Point, right? We literally tested every episode three times during the production of each one. What are you looking for when you're testing that? And I'm assuming you're testing it with kids. Yeah. So what are you actually looking for?

Three to five, six-year-olds. And it evolved, right? Nobody had done this intensity of formative research before. So it evolved into, well, it's funny. As an academic, I thought, oh, I can't change things. When I'm with the kids, I can't change what I'm testing because then I won't know what is it that actually changed. I was coming from a really academic. But what was important about this kind of formative research was bridging the gap between the academic world and the practical world. So what we look for depends on the content we're making completely. For Blue's Clues, it was attention, appeal, comprehension, interactivity, and then learning or impact. And I find not huge iterations, depending on what I'm working on, but definitely iterations. It depends what the end goal is, what you're looking for.

Right. So, and did you ever hit it right, like out of the first time out? Oh, with like a script that went in and there were no changes? Yeah. No. Never, right? No. first time out oh with um like a script that went in and there were no changes yeah never right the interesting thing though is at the same time as we never had one of those we also never had like a complete redo so we tried to always go in we went in on a second draft of a script so we've been through a number of iterations prior to getting there.

Outlines, goal sheets, first draft, second draft. Then we take it into kids and we get consultant notes at the same time. I love the consultant notes come from like four-year-olds. Yes. It's so cool. It's true. I need to go see my client. Yeah, I wish you could see their faces. They're just amazing. So that's a really interesting question, though. How much of the

feedback that you're looking for is the feel it like is there it's what you read on their faces that would seem to be like, just really hard to quantify, but is probably critically important in you understanding whether this is actually working or not. Yeah. I mean, a lot of what I do is in the interpretation, which keeps me with the job, I think. Everything is a factor. And that's the beauty of it.

It's the feeling in the room. It's what they say back. It's when they start looking away. It's what they say back. It's when they start looking away. It's if they run off. It's when they ask me if they can go outside again. That's a bad sign, I'm assuming. I know I'm in trouble. Do you have any blocks?

I know I'm in trouble. They're not that polite about it, but yes. I tell this story. I brought a head writer in with me, and I was reading the story to a kid. She was four. And at one point in the story, she smacks her head in her hand, and she says, You're making me a headache. And the head writer, who was not used to going into schools and talking directly to kids,

looks at me and he says, we need to change the script. I think what's really beautiful about my work and my job is that it's somewhat egoless. As I said, with Blue's Clues and we intend with all my projects to really, it's about the kids. We know that we're making something for them, for them for now and for them for their future. Yeah. So you show up in Blue's Clues and you just dive right in and you've got that job that you love. And the show, I mean, I don't know what the numbers are, but it seemed for quite a long time that the show absolutely exploded.

Were you expecting that? Was anyone expecting it or hoping for it? Hoping for it, I guess. We didn't really, we were really young. Nick Jr. was a really new, creative place to be. It was such an exciting time because the naivete of not really knowing and just loving what we did and being there with the kids and bringing them into every aspect of the production process, whether it be through me or my research team or I brought people

– the writers almost always came into research with us. Not all the animators and designers could come, but we'd video kids. And before we gave any of our recommendations, we would always show people how kids were responding to their work. So it wasn't us saying, you know, make this change. It was really coming from the children. Right, it's like, look at them. Yeah.

We knew we were doing something good. We had the knowledge. We knew what we were doing and why we were doing it, and we stayed hyper-focused on that. And the results of that sort of just came. And we did, we broke a lot of rules i mean one thing that i have really grasped onto as i've learned more about myself is i want to be a rule breaker i want to ask questions i want to people call me a troublemaker not in a negative way but in a positive way i hope

that's like seth godin's ruckus maker. Yeah. It's like you agitate. Yes. But not for the purpose of destruction, for the purpose of elevation. Pushing it a little bit further. And we all did that together. We kind of didn't settle. We knew what we wanted to do

and almost every aspect of Blue's Clues at the time brought something new to the children's TV media. And like you said, Nick Jr. was brand spanking new at the time, right? So you weren't just pioneering a show. You were sort of pioneering a new network and a new medium to a certain extent, which then launched a huge global brand and all sorts of other stuff. And also we learned a lot. Like Dan Anderson at UMass, we were such a combination of producers, creatives,

incredible talent, and then researchers and kid people. There was something about the blend and the way that we all worked together versus there were no silos in our work world. And the way that we were able to blend that was working with people like Dan, who taught us that kids are active participants of media. It might look like in some cases they're sitting back, but they're still taking meaning away. So what meaning are they taking away? What are you going to give them through the gift of whatever this content is? And that's, you know, the interactivity and pausing and

listening to kids. You know, I had one of my favorite moments was I went into a school and they were watching Blue's Clues and this little four-year-old again just turned to me and said, Does he hear me? And I said, wanting to be honest, Well, he doesn't hear you, but he knows what you're going to say. Because that was my job. It was my job and my team's job to make sure that we knew the audience as well as we could and brought that back to the production team. You know, it's funny, because when I look at what you were doing,

were you in entertainment, were you in media, were you in education, or this kind of crazy new evolving hybrid? Like you said, there were shows before this. I mean, Sesame Street was around forever and Electric Company, which I guess we both grew up on to a certain extent also. But it was really different. But it's interesting, too, that you said that it's not passive media, especially at that age. Because the rap on TV, just across the board, has always been it's passive media.

It's there in the background. It adds nothing. It adds no value. And to a certain extent, I guess your job was to do the research to show that we're doing something where we can show you that this is actually doing something and doing something real, which has got to give you just this profound sense of not just, yeah, this is cool, but this matters. Yeah. I think it's part of our DNA. I mean, I think Angela and I would both, in the creation of all of our shows and media that we work on, starting with what we want the impact to be, you know, going back to that instructional systems design. So tell me more about that. Well, designing content that's going to have a positive

effect should be designed prior to making the content so you know what you're shooting for. So, for example, one of the projects I work on, Cha-Ching, Money Smart Kids, it's a financial literacy series. It's the Schoolhouse Rock of financial literacy, and it's produced in Asia by Prudential, and it's on Cartoon Network in Asia and in schools and online.

When Sean Rock first came to me, he said, I want to make the Schoolhouse Rock of Financial Literacy. We have 10 episodes we want to start with. Cartoon Network has done the creative. Here's what we have. Will you look at this? And I looked at them and I said, wait, what are you going for? What's the why? And I don't like to use the curriculum. I don't love the word curriculum, but what are your goals?

What do you want kids to walk away from this series knowing? They had been working on it for six months-ish. He let me take a step back. He gave me a month or two to say, okay, think about what do we want kids to walk away with? And so I researched, studied. I talked to kids. What are your questions around financial literacy?

This is for 7- to 12-year-olds, so it was really fun. So 7- to 12-year-olds and financial literacy. This is for seven to 12 year olds. So it was really fun. So seven to 12 year olds in financial literacy. Yeah. So their questions were like, okay, I know this isn't true, but does money grow on trees? You know, like, how does that work? The ATM, where does the money come from? Is it printed right in there? I heard questions from kids about like, or statements like, press the biggest number because then you'll get all this money. Not understanding the link between this machine and a bank account. How would they know? It's invisible. So I sort of took this all back and I said, all right, here's what we want kids to walk away with.

We want them to understand that they have choices around money. Those choices are earn, save, spend, and donate. Once you know those choices and you know your goals in life, now you have some financial literacy. With that as our simple, it's not that easy, but our simple target. Now we can design content that matches that. So now we did two episodes on earn, two episodes on save, two episodes on spend, one episode on donate. I can't remember exactly. One intro, does money grow on trees, to answer that kid's question. One celebration of mastery, this is what we've learned. So now, with those core concepts as our takeaway for kids, we can design content that allows kids

to walk away with those messages. It's kind of funny because I'm thinking about that core curriculum and the content, and if you just shifted it for an adult audience, I don't think many adults would sort of look at it, okay, there are these four ways and this create, and you're like, okay, what do I want out of life? Which the curriculum and content sounds like you could change a bunch of things that would be largely transferable. And I'm thinking also, I'm juxtaposing in my head that versus what we see on sort of financial news TV as sort of like the financial media,

which is almost entirely just pure entertainment for ratings purposes. And again, not to bash anyone, like it's whatever the business model is, it is. But what I love about this and about sort of like one of the through lines for you is that you found this way to tap into the stuff that lights you up and continue to do it in a way where there's this sense of not only like, am I in the moment really enjoying myself? Like, you know, from a process and tasks, everyday thing process. Yeah, this is really cool. Like I'm Josh know, from a process and task to everyday thing process, yeah, this is really cool. Like, I'm Josh from Big and this, and I'm getting somebody,

who knows how, somebody's actually, like, paying me to do this, which is pretty awesome. But then you zoom the lens out and you're like, you know, and this is actually going to matter beyond entertainment. You know, and that's big. Do you ever just kind of sit and think about that? Not too much because times are changing so much that I feel like I continuously have to reinvent myself. Talk to me about that.

Which I love. I mean, it's part of what we were talking about curiosity and why I'm so honored to be here with you, talking to somebody who's so curious and lit up by wanting to know more, right? But I realized, especially as times were changing, how important it is for us all to have the mindset of reinventing ourselves. Times are changing. Technology is changing. For me, this is a peak of learning in our ethos. This is as good as it gets for me, thinking about learning theory and what we need to know and getting kids to learn by doing. And so I am constantly

challenged by all the new research about what's important for kids. How are the jobs of tomorrow or today changing? What do we need to do to prepare kids? So when we were on Blue's Clues, you know, it was very much about thinking skills and kindergarten readiness. And that was right for the time. That was like 95 to 2005-ish, right? We started in 95. We aired in fall of 96.

Got it. Yeah. And now things are different. Technology has brought new ways of learning for kids, new excitement and motivation around learning for kids in ways where they can learn without adults, which is awesome, in ways that we can capitalize on them being lifelong learners. There was a time not so long ago around the recession

where I really struggled work-wise. I wasn't sure what my next steps were. It was after we finished Super Why, at least season two of Super Why for PBS Kids, and I was in a shift for my mission statement. You know, I had become Tom Hanks. I never want to stop talking to the kids. And to your point, there is something about being in the room that makes me understand

them from a real, even bodily perspective that I can't by listening to somebody else tell me what happened. But that aside, I struggled for a while. I ended up doing about eight jobs because I needed to pay my bills. Yeah, sure. And what I learned in that time was that doing those eight jobs in such different arenas made me a better thinker, stretched my knowledge and understanding of so many things that actually prepared me for my next step, which is working with Amazon Kids original programming. So what were some of those eight different things that you did

that sort of like gave me new pieces of the puzzle? So many. So the ones that I remember, so I worked at the Pittsburgh Children's Museum. They were looking to make a make shop show, which was for, again, sort of 7 to 12-year-olds, a show with kids about making, because they have a make shop in their museum. It's very successful, but how do we scale that? Right.

And one of the ways would be- And make using is becoming this huge thing these days. Which I'm a huge fan of. Which we can talk about. And then I was working for Go Go Squeeze, because a friend of mine was running the U.S. division, and Go-Go Squeeze was very interested in, do you know the applesauce? Oh, yeah. Their pouches. Okay.

But one of the things that's really interesting about Go-Go Squeeze is that they're on the go. And they were really interested in helping parents and kids think about play and the importance of play. And so they brought me in to talk more about why is play so important for kids and what do kids get from it? At the same time, I was consulting sort of a scout for Pittsburgh kids and creativity movement. They are creating a learning environment around formal and informal learning. So that school is not the only place for learning, but to create a community of learning such that a kid could get their interests fostered

almost anywhere they went, and it can be very individualized as long as people know what their resources are. And they're still growing. It's an incredible community. I was working with National Geographic on a preschool show that we were pitching with National Science Foundation

to make preschoolers stewards of the environment. And that series actually did not get picked up, but I met Tara Sorensen, who then went on to become the head of Amazon Kids Original Programming. And she was given somewhat of a blank slate in a work environment that's incredibly innovative, where they push people to think big and innovate and try to accomplish some of the hardest challenges of time. And I think that time where I was working on all those different projects

introduced me to people like Dan Pink or Tony Wagner or Ellen Galinsky, all these amazing thinkers that are talking about what's needed for today differently than where we were at not that long ago. Yeah. I love the fact also that you were in a career for a long time. You have a PhD, not a PhD, I guess what it's called, EDD, right? Doctor of Education. So, I mean, you're fiercely committed to this space, but over time, and this is something that so many people got hit by, you know, the end of 2008, 2009. There were a lot of people that, you know, millions of people got knocked out of jobs and entire career paths that were the entire career or company just didn't exist anymore. So there was nothing to go back to.

And there's a lot of pain, but looking back on it now, and I would never discount the pain that anybody went through. And it was horrible for a lot of people and a lot of families, but there was this weird window where those who seemed willing to say, let me kind of take this time as a moment to do things that I might not have done before, to just dip my toe in a whole bunch of different pools to just wait it out to hope and pray that they're, you know, that thing that they left behind will resurrect itself and go back to it, that there's this immense sense of newness and excitement and freedom. And there were people that would normally have judged them for doing that for decades before. And they stopped judging them because there was nothing to go back to. So there was this fascinating window, I think, where people had this almost like judgment-free zone to go and try all sorts of different things. And I saw an interesting mix of people doing exactly that.

And then there was also a healthy mix of people who were really just wounded and retreating and trying to wait it out and hoping and praying that it was wait-outable. There was a lot of opportunity that came out of the darkness that was 2008, 2009, 2010, and there's some amazing stuff that I've seen happen from people who really, really took it as this moment to let go of a chunk of the story that got them there and start to write, you know, a new one, not completely abandoning the past, but saying, okay, what if I'm not bound to it? What if I don't know, you know, all the data points in the road ahead?

Let me just play. I think I was somewhere in between. Yeah, it sounds like it. I wasn't, I didn't fully embrace it even at the time i mean luckily i my attitude is such that i continue to remind myself that i just had to work hard and stay passionate and stay learning right and now looking back i can say gosh i didn't realize i think that's part of reinventing myself in some ways like or understanding what it means to reinvent yourself is that in retrospect now i understand because now i'm working in at amazon kids we're really

interested in creating lifelong creative learners, right? So now I understand lifelong learning, the importance of creativity, where creativity comes from, the importance of curiosity, to our point, I think this is why I was so passionate and wanted to reach out to you, is instilling that in kids and understanding its importance and realizing that you get it from a multidisciplinary perspective. I would have never, I just wouldn't have known or understood any of that without having gone through it. So I didn't see it as an opportunity to play. And I don't think many people did when you're going through it,

sort of like you said, but looking back, you're like, huh. Yeah. And I guess I was going to say I'm not sure I would do it again, but maybe I would. Yeah, I mean, but that's always the interesting question, right? You know, it's funny. I remember a couple of years ago reading, there was a survey where they posed a question to entrepreneurs down the road, successful entrepreneurs down the road, after they become successful, saying something like, if you had known what it was going to take before, would you have done it? If somebody sat you down and said, this is what's going to happen to you along the way, would you have done it? And a huge percentage said no.

Yeah. You know? I would say yes to that right now, but I think it's also because, I will say, after Blue's Clues, I never thought anything could be as inspiring as that. I work in some pretty amazing, I love my projects. I love Cha-Ching. I love Speakaboos, building a digital publishing library

and thinking about publishing in new digital ways, troublemaking in the publishing space. I love that. But I've never been as inspired as I am innovating in the space that we're doing it at Amazon Kids and how we're integrating thought leaders into our work and what's important for today and the future and not held by the rules of traditional broadcasting.

So I would say I would go through it again because I can't believe where I am today. I can't believe that I feel more passionate about this work than I did then. That's pretty good. Tell me about your work with Amazon Kids and anyone interesting? I am. When Tara started at Amazon Kids, she wanted to bring in thought leaders in the industry. We really want to create a learning revolution. We want to create a movement around what learning could be and should be today and for kids' futures. Thinking about what Sir Ken has talked about, about the importance of creativity so much that it should be a literacy. Thinking about what Tony Wagner has said about innovation. Thinking about what Dan Pink has said about our industrial revolution

and how we've changed from agriculture to one of needing creators and empathizers. And so we pulled together a group of people to say, we all sort of think the same way, but you have so much knowledge in this area. So we're talking, our thought leader board is made up of Dale Doherty from the maker media space, Ellen Golinski, who wrote Mind in the Making, Some Essential Skills for Success in Life, Scott Osterweil, the MIT Education Arcade. Do you know Mitch Resnick from MIT Media Lab?

No. We were talking with him, too. He's just brilliant in this space. And Jarrett Krosowska, who's an author and illustrator whose life was changed by an author and illustrator who came in to his school and told him that his doodles were really interesting and that there was a business in being an illustrator and an author. and supporting each other's ideas around what's important, knowing that play is an essential life skill, knowing that Dale's interest and passion around creating spaces in which kids can find objects that then they can make with and they can use their imaginations,

and thinking of making as active learning, which is one of the best types of learning. Thinking about Jarrett, whose life was changed by an author-illustrator and really validating him as an artist and creative in a time when those things are maybe given a little bit less emphasis than some of the more hardcore. We know how essential that is. And then somebody like Ellen Galinsky, who's studying the top researchers in the field of executive functioning skills. So talking about the importance of things like perspective taking, or focus and self-control or making connections or communication as the foundational skills with which to learn and do anything else in life. So I've learned so much from them and then also the ability to now have shows that really reflect their philosophies and approach and what we know

about learning theory and child development. Our first show is out of the block with Amazon Kids. The first was Tumble Leaf, where we emphasize the importance of learning through play. It's this adorable show about a fox and his best friend Stick, who's a caterpillar. And through experimentation and playing out in nature, they learn and go on these adventures. So we sort of worked off of Scott's approach to the importance of play and how internal motivation is around play and how it's really what we play as a kid is often who we become as an adult and the importance of parents really tapping into what is your child like to play and how

is that going to motivate and be something that sparks. Okay, so here's my question. Yeah. Is that still true? What we play as a kid is who we become as adults? Or is that, really? I don't believe it. No, I'm thinking about it.

I would love to believe it's true. I wonder if that gets repressed a lot these days by sort of a societal ethos that says there's a certain path that you're destined to follow, unless I'm kind of misunderstanding. I don't know about a path, but I think it's also, again, just going back to your question to me about how do you spark somebody, right? Is it you spark somebody or you watch somebody being sparked?

So oftentimes what a child plays, you can tell there's something of interest to them. Otherwise they wouldn't be playing it unless you're forcing them to do something, right? Like there's the joke about a parent taking a kid to one of the gym classes, and the kid is walking along the sidewalk and balancing on the sidewalk

and jumping and counting the lines and all that sort of stuff and say, hurry up, we've got to go play, you know, versus sort of like just letting them be and watching what is of interest to them. I love the idea of just really being in tune with somebody else's excitement rather than trying to enforce something on someone. As do I. I think we've lost some of that, though.

We've lost a lot of the pause in general for kids. I mean, for adults, it's almost entirely gone. For kids, just the space to just enough space to actually be able to gravitate towards something rather than 100% scheduled 100% of the time, which sometimes the scheduled stuff is the activity that sparks the kid. But if it's not, then we've lost that window for them to just explore and experiment and stumble upon it. Maybe not entirely, but I think

it's a lot less than when I was a kid where, you know, I would come home and just do my homework. I'd roll out the door, you know, and everyone would wait to, you know, hear moms yell for dinner, you know, which is like a very different world. Yeah, that was my world too. But I have to say, hopefully they become, at some point, they find a mentor or somebody like I did that sparks that or helps them understand something about themselves. Like, I wouldn't have known that I asked good questions. Yeah, I think that's so huge. And, you know, that's come up so many times in so many of these conversations that I had.

You know, Milton Glaser, everyone's telling him to go to Bronx Science, you know, but he decides to not take the test for it. And he goes into his guidance counselor's office and, you know, covertly, he basically like slides him over a little set of, you know, like artist crayons or something and says like, be good or something. I can't remember exactly what the line was or they're just, there's so many conversations where I've had where there was one person who the younger person perceived as in some way having some level of wisdom who gave a thumbs up. And sometimes it wasn't much.

It was just a nod that, yeah, you're onto something. And there's a grown-up in the room who's saying that, yeah, you should keep exploring it. And it's funny. I sometimes wonder whether I'd still be a lawyer if I had found one person in the law who just kind of said, like, you're good at this. Yeah. You know, like who sparked me there because there were parts that I liked. You know, it wasn't that I just hated the whole thing. But I so agree. I think, you know, it's difficult to sort of give recommendations about, okay, go find the person that's going to spark you on that level. But if you can turn it around and say, you know, how can I be that person for someone else?

Yeah. You know, that's an enabler of whatever that energy is that lights up when you say there's something there. You know, don't just walk away. I think both ways, right? Being an enabler and then also consistently asking yourself what lights you up. Absolutely. When I did find that I had met my goal of being this Tom Hanks character, I had to keep, I still do, keep asking myself, what continues to be your passion

in this area? And what's going to drive you to want to know more and rewrite my mission statement so that I can keep finding that thing for me? Because I'm a better worker that way. Yeah. And I think, you know, anytime you answer that question, it's a snapshot in time. Yeah. You know, and it's going to change as you grow and change. And I think with just going back to the tongue belief thing, like, one of the things that in my media world, how we do that is trying to validate the things that we know about kids, right? So we know that kids are natural born scientists. They experiment, they try things, they're not afraid to fail. That's just who they are. And so this show just happens to be placed

out in nature. So the hope is to sort of encourage parents to understand this as, okay, he doesn't always get it right the first time, but he plays and he discovers and then he figures things out so the hope is to portray that the bigger picture so we'll work with scott to say what is it you know how how can we best overlay what you know from the research into this or working with dale from the maker media it's like we know that kids learn best by doing so we have the show androids where it's a girl scientist and it's set in a junkyard and she just has stuff available to her and she is an experimenter and she makes things and her best friends are droids and robots and so you know integrating like dale's philosophies and approaches about the importance of space and the importance of active learning and experimenting and those sorts of things and really combining the science with the art. In Creative Galaxy, we're working with Jarrett.

It's a show about the importance of art and how art pervades our world. Everything is art. And so in this world, this little alien kid has a problem, a typical preschool-type problem, and he goes into the creative galaxy to fix it with art. And that's the message of each one. And we work with somebody like Jarrett, who is an artist as well and can give us different styles and approaches. So everyone's unique.

Kids are going to want to do what's of interest to them. And again, with Amazon being a platform rather than a programmed system, we can get some of those niche areas. Because we can pick up five shows in a year, ten shows in a year, one show in a year, whatever is actually meeting our mission and vision and encourage kids to go and view and do. And Ellen, the executive functioning skills, many people are working with those skills in media these days,

but they haven't put it necessarily in social contexts. So what she's doing is she's working with us on a new series called Wish and Poof, which will be coming out upcoming, I should say. And what we've done is infuse these executive functioning skills into this girl's everyday life. I mean, she's not an everyday type character. She has wish magic. But in the process of that, having her use a lot of focus and self-control, when she talks to her

friends, adding that little layer of not just standing up to somebody, right? Because say your friend is getting picked on, not just telling that person, stop it, but actually ask the perspective of both people. Nuanced, challenging, but if we can work with Ellen and her group to point out and help parents understand what those nuances are, I think we could move the needle. Yeah, and that's big. Hope so. That's what it's about. So we're kind of coming full circle. We started talking about curiosity,

and you've kind of shared how you're back to this place where you're going deeper into exploring that and creativity than ever before. And I wanted to circle back to that conversation again because we kind of put the conversation, okay, how do you actually create this? What can you do? What can we as parents do to help create an environment for

curiosity to bubble up for our kids? But also as adults, what can we do to reclaim it if we've lost it? One is be curious yourself. One of the things that I've learned the most is that kids do what they see, not what they're told. I know that. I think every parent knows that and learns it the hard way. Yeah. So the more curious and passionate we are, the more contagious it is, I believe. That's one way. Sparking people's interests, right? Like, again, just going back to my story i was never sparked and then once i was sparked i found this way into things that interest me differently than

anyone else not to say that there aren't people like me but i think we're all unique so tell me what you mean by sparking find things that when you see them, when you do them, when you read about them, you need to know more. You want to know more or you want to play more or you want to do that thing plus. of the things that we're working on with amazon kids and something that i've always been super passionate about is when you light someone up when you spark them when you when you allow them a window into something that they like that makes them want to either play out what they've just seen which in my geeky education world is near transfer of learning. So you learn what I put out there for you. You learn that content.

But the best, the deeper learning is the far transfer. When you take that learning and you apply it to your own life, your own something that you're interested in. So for me, the ideal spark is when you apply that to your real life. That's, in the media world, that's the ideal extended learning, and that's the most I can hope for. That's when I get those reflective moments. That's when I get, oh, my gosh, we're really doing this.

I don't think, I don't know that parents or kids know what it feels like for somebody making stuff to then have them hear those stories. And when it becomes personal, right? Like when my nephews love my stuff and can't wait to hear more stories or play it out in their real life. Yeah, that's amazing. I remember there was a time when my daughter was younger where I used to read her bedtime stories. And every night I would go in and I started noticing that pretty much all the themes of the stories were, you know, towards the end, you know, the prince comes in and saves the

princess. And I was like, oh, no no no so so i went and i wrote this um short story about a badass time traveling nine-year-old girl detective you know with like a sidekick who was like this little annoying boy from down the block and a magic cat and she had you know kind of a sarcastic mouth because i wanted that i was like i want to read that to my daughter and i remember just reading it to her i was like yeah and that was to this day she still you know comes back every once in a while she's like we should turn that into something yeah but i think there is something magical when you see something that you've had a hand in creating whether it's you as solo creator or whether you're part of a group a team that you

know co-creates it. When you actually, I mean, there's a joy that comes from creating it when just the process is really cool. And you know cognitively that it's doing something beyond just kind of like letting you have fun. But then there's that other thing where you actually see how it lands. It doesn't always land right. But when you see it and it does and it's just like i mean it's i oddly like i would occasionally get that in the past life i taught yoga i would occasionally get that feeling at the end of teaching a yoga class where you know it's 90 minutes of fierce movement and

breathing and all this stuff and and the glass in the front of the room is glazed with perspiration. And the air is thick and everyone just kind of lies down into shavasana, like final relaxation. And all the eyes close and the room goes silent. And I would just sit there. I was like, huh. Yeah, like it felt really good to play a role in just knowing that somebody came here in state A and that when they opened their eyes in a few minutes, they were going to leave in a very different place. I found that intention is such a huge part of that.

So great. And I think that's probably one of the things that makes me feel so good about creating media is knowing that the intention with which I'm going in is so kid-based and so based on these thinkers that are so much smarter than I am, that have really thought through and given us the philosophies and approaches of ways to think about what we should be trying to provide for kids. And really, I'm a content maker, right?

And I'm pretty detail-oriented, even though I kind of have a little bit of both sides. But paying such careful attention to everything that we put out there for kids and knowing that I wouldn't want to put anything out there that if a kid did it in real life, that I wouldn't be proud of what I've provided for them. Yeah. So come in totally full circle. Yeah. Since you're a part of the family now, but also part of the listening audience, you know

my last question, which is the name of this is Good Life Project. So if I offer that term out to you to live a good life, what does it mean to you? Gosh, I've thought about this so much because I love this question. And really, my answer to that is to maintain the characteristics of early childhood, to be excited about learning, to be curious, to not be afraid to fail to experiment to invent and reinvent and be imaginative and one of my favorite things about kids is how much they love to help so i'd really uh if i can maintain that for a lifetime that's a good life it sounds like you're doing a pretty good job of it thank you so much thank you

hey I really enjoyed that conversation if you found it valuable as well would so appreciate if you just head on over to iTunes take a couple of seconds and let us know share a review or rating always honest and if you found this episode the conversation

valuable and you think other people maybe maybe friends or family would enjoy and benefit from it, go ahead and share it with them as well. And as always, if you want to know what's going on with us at Good Life Project, then head over to goodlifeproject.com. Check it out. We're enrolling our annual camp GLP, Summer Camp for World Shakers, Makers, and Entrepreneurs right now. Really, really awesome stuff going on in August of this year. And that's it for this week. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

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