The TRICK to Empowering Children - Esther Wojcicki, Co-founder of Tract and “Godmother of Silicon Valley”

SHIV GAGLANI: Hi, I'm Shiv Gaglani. I've really been looking forward to having the opportunity to interview today's guest, Esther Wojcicki, not only because she's an influential educator who has been dubbed, "the godmother of Silicon Valley," but also because we hit it off when we met randomly and recently at the ASU+GSV Summit. I know our listeners will learn a lot from her perspectives on education and learning. 

Esther is a sought-after advisor and speaker who has led and supported a wide range of organizations involved in education, technology, and journalism. She's also a best-selling author on parenting and the co-founder of Tract, an online community for student-directed learning. But perhaps she's best known for raising three incredibly accomplished daughters: Anne, the CEO of 23andMe, who we recently had on the show, Janet, a prominent pediatrician and researcher at UCSF, and Susan, the CEO of YouTube. Esther, thanks so much for taking the time to be with us today.

ESTHER WOJCICKI: It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

GAGLANI: I'd like to first start with learning more about you and your professional journey. How did your career begin?

WOJCICKI: Well, I started as a journalist when I was 14 years old. It's kind of crazy. At the local newspaper, they needed somebody to help them out. It was kind of a Girl Friday position. It was a group of men. It was in a little town, called Sunland-Tujunga. It was called the Sunland-Tujunga Record Ledger. It turns out that they had a lot of other interests. So they were just thrilled to have this girl who wanted to help them write. They trained me to write all sorts of things, from sports, to going to city council meetings, to everything, and I had a great time. They paid me the grand total sum of three cents a word. But you can't imagine, I earned quite a bit anyway, because I wanted to earn money, and I wanted to write. It was the beginning of my journalism career. I went from there to the Los Angeles Times, where I wrote a column on what the teenagers were thinking in the valley. Then from there, I went on to Berkeley, and I have a degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley, but those are my humble beginnings.

GAGLANI: That's awesome. At three cents a word, it's incredible how you started. I remember my first official journalism job was writing for Medgadget, and I think then we were doing 25 cents a word which actually added up as a medical student. I was appreciative of it. You're also well known for running the journalism program at Palo Alto High School for I think 25 years now I think when we spoke?

WOJCICKI: Forty.

GAGLANI: Forty, oh my goodness, I'm way out of date. How did you get interested in going from journalism to education? Can you tell us a bit more about that program? I know you're very proud of it, for good reason. You've had some pretty amazing students.

WOJCICKI: Right, that's true. I actually started out being a journalist. I wanted to be a writer, and back in the days when I started, which was in the 1960s and 70s, it turns out that the newspapers had three or four different sections, and one of them was called "The Women's Section." They had news and opinion and sports, and a women's section that was targeting women. It had all kinds of information about doing your laundry, taking care of your kids and your husband, and whatever. So when I went into journalism, they only wanted me to write for the women's section, and I was like, "No, I don't want to do that. I want to write for the news section." 

It was really tough. Breaking into journalism was very hard for a woman. As a matter of fact, I was not allowed to get into the San Francisco Press Club because I was a woman. There were a lot of barriers. So I thought to myself after my kids were born, "Hey, I'll just teach journalism. If I can't be a journalist, I'll teach other kids to do it." That's how I started teaching at Palo Alto High School.

I started with a program that had 20 kids in it, and they were using a book to learn how to do it and took me just a short period of time to realize that the kids were just as bored as I was. I said, "I think I'm just gonna throw away the book and I hope they don't notice." Shockingly enough, they didn't notice. But what they did notice was that the numbers in my classes were going up like mad. I started with 20, and the next year, there were like 40 and they're like, "Oh, we've never seen anything like this." Then the year after that, there were even 60.

What I was doing was giving kids an opportunity to do real-world stuff. What I did was pick up those newspapers that they give away, you know, the ones in the little newspaper box. Well, I took 30 of them every day. The kids loved reading the newspapers. They loved doing things on their own. They love being given a lot of responsibility. So the program grew. By 1998, there were a hundred kids in the program and they were like, "We don't know what to do with you anymore. This is just too many. You can't do it.” Even though they had moved me into a lecture center because it was so big.

So I said, "Well, how about if I start another publication? Why don't we just have two instead of one?" I said, "Well, let's start a magazine.” And they were like, “Magazine? High schools don't have magazines. They just have newspapers." I was like, "Well, how about this high school having a magazine?" Anyway, they were a little skeptical. So, I had to start the magazine out of the back of the class. I divided the class and some of the kids worked on the magazine, some of them worked on the newspaper. The first year we published it, that was called Verde. The first year we published it, we won a gold crown from Columbia. Top.

Then the school board and the principal said, "Wow! What a great idea. Let's do a magazine." So I was like, "Okay, I'm really glad that you like it." So that's where Verde started. Then I was able to hire another person to help. Another teacher came from Lowell High School in San Francisco, and his name's Paul Kandell. He came in as the teacher for Verde.

I can through and tell you about all the other publications that grew through the years. There are 10 of them now.

GAGLANI: Wow.

WOJCICKI: Including television, and radio, and online. The program now has 700 kids and five other journalism teachers. So this method of teaching, which is empowering the kids, giving them an opportunity to make decisions, follow this acronym that I put in my book, which is TRICK. TRICK stands for Trust, Respect, Independence, Collaboration, and Kindness. I trusted my students. I respected their ideas, no matter how crazy they were—and I can tell you, teenagers have a lot of crazy ideas. I gave them a lot of independence. I collaborated instead of dictating and I always treated them with kindness, and that's what drew hundreds of kids in the program.

I started in 1984, and then I retired in June of 2020. In that time, of course, there's these 700 kids, but they also built an incredible building for the program, a 25,000-square-foot media arts center. It's the largest one in the nation for a high school journalism program. So, that's the story in a nutshell. 

GAGLANI: That's incredible, and actually preempted a couple of questions I was going to ask,  for example, your approach to teaching, and how you grow the program from 20 students to, hundreds? Now, alumni-wise, what do you estimate? At least a couple thousand? Five, 10,000?

WOJCICKI: Thousands. Well, my Facebook is full. I've got 5,000 friends; you can't have any more. I would say thousands of them are my former students and their friends. It's just incredibly rewarding to be in touch with kids that were in my program back in the 1980s, and a lot of them are in very significant journalism roles—editors or important writers for a variety of publications. I have a lot of CEOs or people in medicine, and they keep in touch, which is one of the things that is so exciting. I know everybody is mad at Facebook for a variety of reasons, but I'm really happy because I get to keep in touch with all my former students. For me, it's great.

GAGLANI: There's a lot of threads I'd love to pull here, the first being, it's a good transition to what you're doing at Tract. Not only because last I saw, the CEO that you brought in to help you at Tract is a former student of yours, but also because this is a scalable extension of clearly what's a passion of yours, which is empowering young students to create, and to not just consume content. Can you tell us a bit more about Tract? What got you into it? What your goals are with it, etcetera?

WOJCICKI: Right. Tract is a really exciting platform for kids. I came together with this former student of mine in June of 2020. I decided to retire; of course, I was a little sad about retiring because I realized that the pandemic was not the flu and it was going to go on for a bit longer, and I just did not want to be teaching in that environment. It turns out at the same time, this former student of mine had been at Uber and he decided, “Well, the scooter division isn't going to be going anywhere at this moment. I think I'm gonna resign.“ He was the head of that division; he was in a leadership role.

I thought, this is like the heavens saying to us, "It's an opportunity for you to create an online program that is going to do the same thing”—at least I'm hoping it will do the same thing—“that my in-person program did at Palo Alto High School.” He understood everything that I did because he was in my class for two and a half years. His name is Ari Memar. We started in June 2020; we actually launched in the schools, which is where we were hoping to launch, in just March of this year, and it's growing really well. We already have thousands of kids and  hundreds of schools. We'd love to have more schools, more teachers. My goal is to help every single kid out there feel better about themselves and be able to study and engage with other kids. It's peer-to-peer, it's project-based, and it's gamified, so it's really engaging.

But it's also the goal is to help kids understand that they are smarter than they think they are. They should not worry so much about all those grades and other things that people are putting on them that make them feel somehow less empowered. If they want to, they can go to or the teachers can go to Tract, teach.tract.app. Parents can also sign up, we charge a small amount for them to have monthly access to everything. It's $20 a month for everything. But for teachers, it's free, because my goal is to empower kids and to help teachers do project-based learning in the classroom, and they don't have to do any professional development. They don't have to do anything. All they have to do is give the kid a Chromebook or a computer, say, “Go to tract.app, turn it on, and find something that you want to do. You can work with your friends, or you can work with other kids online, whatever you want to do.” The goal, as I said, is to empower kids, especially in this pandemic, where there has been an incredible absence of peer-to-peer relationships. So what can we do to help them feel more empowered and better about themselves?

That's what I'm doing with Tract, and we'd love to have as many kids as possible. There are no requirements for setting it up. Somebody said, "Well, don't they need any training?" I was like, "Well, do they need any training to go onto YouTube?” That's about the same amount of training you need to go on to Tract, none. That's the goal, is helping kids be the best they can be.

GAGLANI: Yes, and when we were speaking about it, I remember kind of your vision for it and where it's been going. There are some students who are learning by teaching, right? That's the theme of becoming a journalist: to write something, to create something, you have to know what you're talking about. You're starting to pull on these threads, and ask more questions, and answer these questions, which is where a good product comes from—whether it's a video you create, or a subscription newsletter if students are using Substack. You said also that you're very interested in getting some of these students to create health and wellness content. Can you talk a bit more about that? A lot of our learners are in those professions.

WOJCICKI: Thanks for reminding me about that. That is absolutely one of the most important things. Because this is learning. It's peer-to-peer, online learning. So, the learning is created by kids 15 and above—fifteen to 25 or whatever—for kids 8 to 14. We're taking upper elementary, middle-school kids and helping them learn about whatever it is they're interested in. But we're taking the above 15-year-olds and helping them be creators. 

When you are a creator, when you learn how to teach something to someone else, you're also learning leadership skills, and this is probably the most effective way to learn to be a leader, online. Actually, I don't know of any other way, because what I did in my classes is give kids the opportunity to be a leader. The whole program was led by students, for students. The editors, there were five of them, led the publications. One of them for example, had 70 kids, 28 pages, full-size newspaper every three weeks, all done by kids. Why didn't I do it? Because I know how to do it, but by giving them the responsibility and the opportunity, they're developing their leadership skills. 

The same thing is happening on Tract, giving these young people an opportunity to teach. They start off as beginners, then intermediate, then advanced. Once they reached an advanced level of teaching, we pay them, actually. We want to compensate them. Maybe not the three cents that I earned, but we pay them enough so that they can say that they're earning something. We'd love, absolutely love to have creators on any kind of scientific issue—biology, physics, chemistry—anything that people want to do on there. The kids love doing it, and they love doing it because they get to pick it. There's nothing like having agency to make you want to do something. You know, if you're told to do something, even if it's fun, like, "Eat that chocolate chip cookie." You know? You won't want to do it. It's like, "No, I'm not going to eat that cookie."

GAGLANI: Totally relatable.

WOJCICKI: But if you're given an option: Would you like a cookie, or would you like ice cream, then of course you want to eat not only one, but ten. So, yes, you want to give kids an opportunity to be in the driver's seat. To be in control. So yes, I'd love to have creators from this community, and they can go actually easily online, create.tract.app. The more we have, the better we are, and the more opportunity the users have to learn things that are important. Important to them. Some of the things that kids have come up with are just mind-blowing.

I must say, the cutest one that we have is a kid from New Zealand who did a learning path on how to take care of your lamb. He has a whole bunch of lambs; he takes care of a whole flock. Then he showed pictures of a baby lamb and how to take care of it; that was incredible. He's 10 years old as a creator. So, that is the kind of thing that we'd like to encourage all kids. Anything they're interested in, we'll take.

GAGLANI: I love that. Yes, not just to consume, but to create, and in the process, become teachers. That's very near and dear to my heart, and our heart at Osmosis. The reason we called it Osmosis—the actual company is called Knowledge Diffusion—is because we realized, as med students, we were learning as much from our classmates as we were from our professors. Peer-to-peer teaching is really important. We encourage our audience, and we'll put this in the show notes. We have a lot of students in that age range who come to Osmosis who are interested in clinical careers or science careers, who can use Osmosis, or use their own resources, to then become teachers on Tract or creators on Tract. We'd highly encourage that.

WOJCICKI: Right. We'd love to include them. Then also the by-product is, they learn to be leaders. It's so important, being a good teacher, being able to explain things to people, being able to empower others. Those are the characteristics of really good leaders. One of my statements or one of the things that I agree with, is that good leaders for the 21st century are those that empower the best in others. If you surround yourself with other people who feel empowered and who are on the same trajectory as you are, helping with whatever goal you have, you're going to do a much better job—whether it's a product, or a service, or just education, whatever it is.

GAGLANI: Totally, I can't agree with you more. Speaking of problems or opportunities for the 21st century, the other thread I want to pull on with your unique background, both as a journalist, and then an educator, is, obviously, we have a crisis of misinformation in the 21st century with regards to COVID and health information but all sorts of information, fake news. You have a personal interest in helping promote literacy and journalistic integrity, and then also given your family—the great stance it seems YouTube took just  in the last two weeks about banning misinformation around the vaccines on their site—I can't imagine what dinners at your household are like, talking about journalistic integrity, and battling fake news, especially given Janet's connection as a clinician herself.

Can you tell us a bit more about how we can get out of this morass of misinformation? What are your suggestions for that? Anything you want to comment about social media as well?

WOJCICKI: I think one thing that all the listeners should understand that I think everybody does is that the most powerful influencers today are on social media. They're more powerful than any other people in the past 50 years. Social media influences the way we think and the way we live our lives. So I personally think that social media and media literacy is probably one of the most important things that can be taught in schools. I would like to suggest and I work with a group called the National Association of Media Literacy and they are trying to implement media literacy in all schools.

How is media created? Kids don't know and it's kind of like at the beginning of the 19th or 20th century, how would it have been if we just gave people cars and just said, "Hey guys, just go drive." There should be some education. We have driver's ed, we have all these-, how to do it intelligently. How about doing something for media literacy? How are stories written? What are sources? What are good sources? How the whole thing is put together? Most people don't know. The number one thing people don't know, which is kind of mind-boggling, is what is the difference between fact and opinion? How could you not know? But a lot of people don't know. So, can we teach this? It's kind of like civics. It should be taught in all schools. Everybody should know what media literacy is, how to protect yourself online, and so forth. 

With regard to today, I would say the main way to distinguish a fake news source from a real news source is the media outlets. The ones that are the big ones, those are most likely the places you're going to find the real news: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The LA Times, your local newspaper that is actually dedicated to providing news. They are going to check and recheck all their sources. I am on the advisory board for The Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and this is one of the things that we are trying to do, to make sure that everybody knows that the legitimate sources of news are governed by a philosophy of making sure the news is checked. 

You should stop believing all these outlets that name themselves. Crazy things. There was one that was called USA Today but it didn't have “com” at the end. It was USA Today and they changed the ending to "world" or something. People don't pick that up and they think, "Oh, it's USA Today,” but it's not USA Today. So you have to be really careful where you're getting your news.

There are some right-wing sources that are doing things that I would say are objectionable. I don't want to get political here, but I would say that you definitely need to check and make sure that they're using appropriate sources. One of the things that some right-wing groups are doing is, they have a little phrase. You should look for this phrase: "Some people say..." and then they go into, "Some people say [whatever].” If they start with that phrase "Some people say," you should be suspicious right away that it's not news. It is something they have conjured up, something that is fake.

It's very important for people to be suspicious online, because without that little suspicion, you might believe something like, “They've discovered a cure for cancer and just click here and you'll get it.” So be careful.

GAGLANI: Absolutely. That translates not just to whether or not people, for example, get a vaccine or wear masks, or what they believe, but also, what we're seeing in Silicon Valley right now, a case I'm sure you're very familiar with because of a journalist at The Washington Post, John Kerry, who helped bust it open, the Elizabeth Holmes trial and what's fake there. It's really an interesting time to be alive, because anyone can claim different things. It's up to the journalist, really, to help trace what's real, but then to people to then be literate enough to know what to trust, as you just indicated.

WOJCICKI: That is so important. Journalists play the most critical role today. I mean, they should be considered heroes instead of what's going on, because Thomas Jefferson—years, of course, centuries ago—said that the most important part of a democracy are the journalists, the people who can inform you, and help you make intelligent decisions. Without journalists, you cannot make decisions, and you will not have the information that you need. That's why it's so important. I mean, thank heavens the Nobel committee recognized those two journalists for the Peace Prize. I think you've seen that? Or did you not see that?

GAGLANI: Was it just announced this week? I haven't kept up to date.

WOJCICKI: It was just announced this week. They were recognized with the Nobel Peace Prize. I think it represents journalists everywhere because these people are busy trying to tell you what is really going on and to treat them so poorly, it is awful. It really needs to be rethought. They are trying to help you make intelligent decisions and intelligent choices about the world that you live in.

Please go to the legitimate news sources. Don't go to the ones that have really unusual URLs, because they're not legitimate, sorry to say. Don't get your news on Facebook. Don't get your news on Twitter. Oh, my God.

GAGLANI: It's amazing we have to say this! I want to be respectful of your time because I know we're coming up on it. But I have two final questions for you if you're okay with that.

WOJCICKI: Yes, I'm fine.

GAGLANI: The first is, obviously, you've been a journalist your whole life and then you recently wrote this book on parenting. A lot of our teammates were excited to hear that I was speaking with you because so many of them are parents, and our audience has a lot of them. I know you aren't super prescriptive with your advice, but just like you have TRICK in terms of how you teach, that acronym you shared earlier in this interview, what are some of the big takeaways you have as a mother and someone who's been very successful at raising some very impressive children?

WOJCICKI: The TRICK acronym works for parenting also. What I did with my children is, I tried to—I had just one goal when they were little, because there were no books out that I could read. It just didn't work. All the other advice. The main thing was Dr. Spock, and he told you how to take your temperature and all the other stuff. I trusted them early. Trust, respect, independence, collaboration, and kindness. I never spoke to them in baby talk. I always talked to them like they were grown up. It's kind of crazy.

I remember when I would go with them to the supermarket and I was talking to them. They used to have infant seats back then. They were parked in their little infant seats. I remember I saw all these women, they were thinking I was crazy, this woman talking to a baby. But I did, and then I did it all along as they got older, I trusted them early on to be able to do things quickly, early. I guess one of my goals was, how soon could I teach somebody something?

I always had that experimental mindset. I taught my daughters to swim very early because we had a swimming pool. I wanted to make sure they didn't have a problem. I taught them to ride a bike early. I think they were all riding bikes at the age of three. I basically taught them how to function pretty well in the house, like how to make their breakfast really early. My thinking on that was, I'm making them feel confident about the world they live in. You know, breakfasts were really simple, you know, pour your own cereal, pour your own milk and things like that but turns out an 18-month-old can do that if you believe in them.

Then I gave them a lot of early responsibilities around the house. People kept thinking that, "Oh, maybe you're forcing your kids to work." I looked at it as, "I'm giving you this opportunity to help out." So they were always cooking early, cleaning early. They were cleaning up the family room. That was not considered a punishment. It was considered just part of the team. 

I remember in this pandemic that Susan did the same thing with her kids. I thought it was pretty funny; I never said a word. Because they couldn't have any of the house help that they normally had, the kids were doing the laundry; they were doing the dishes. The five-year-old was in charge of vacuuming. She had a vacuum. It was one of those vacuums with just a battery; it had no cord. You would come in the house and she would show you where she was vacuuming. I mean, it works. The kids feel like they're part of the team instead of disempowered. 

So that's what I would suggest for all parents: Have your kids help you make dinner. Have them help you plan what you're going to be doing this weekend. Have them do things that you normally would just think, "I have to do it." They can actually do it. I took my students to New York on trips for 16 years, for a week in New York City. These were teenagers, 15 to 18. I had them plan the itinerary. It's like, "What are we doing when we were in New York?" "How do you do it?" Not only did they plan it, they were so good at it, that if I got lost, they were able to tell me, "This is the direction you're supposed to go, not there, or whatever." But yes, kids are more capable than you think they are and they believe in themselves when you believe in them.

GAGLANI: I love that. That's really empowering. Again, a theme that runs through you as a parent, you as a teacher, you as a journalist, etcetera. So again, I'm aware of your time. My last final question is, what advice would you give to our audience about meeting the challenges of the COVID pandemic and beyond? Keeping in mind that many of them are clinicians, scientists, public health professionals, etcetera.

WOJCICKI: I think the main message is that, instead of looking at the pandemic, the 18 months we've had, as a loss, the learning loss, I said, look at it as an opportunity for kids to have learned something else. To have learned how to cope in a difficult situation. Learned how to think about the world differently. Learned how to be on a Zoom call that they might not like. But this is one of the things that I think is really important for us to realize. The way we think about what happens to us, or happened to us, determines how we feel about ourselves and about the world. 

There's nothing we can do about what happened. But what we can do is adjust how we react to what happened. That's what's important, and that is our power: how we can adapt to what happened to us. So I think we need to think about that and hopefully, things will improve, but we need to take advantage of the situation as it is and see what we can say about it that is positive.

GAGLANI: Very stoic. I love that. Great concluding thoughts of wisdom. Esther, thanks so much for taking the time to be with us today and more importantly, for the work that you've done to promote literacy for your entire career, journalistic integrity, and then to make people creators, which I think is at the core of the work you do.

WOJCICKI: Well, thank you again for this wonderful interview, and I'm really happy that I ran into you by accident at the ASU+GSV Conference.

GAGLANI: Likewise. With that, I hope you have a good rest of your day. Thanks again.

WOJCICKI: Thank you, take care.

GAGLANI: I'm Shiv Gaglani. Thank you to our audience for checking out today's show, and remember to do your part to flatten the curve and raise the line. We're all in this together. Take care.