Chrisman Frank and Ana Lorena Fabrega: How Childhood Education Will Change

title: Chrisman Frank and Ana Lorena Fabrega: How Childhood Education Will Change
author: North Star Podcast
contenttype: podcast
publication: North Star Podcast
published: 2021-05-17T11:00:00
sourceurl: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/TFTEE9271435033.mp3?updated=1713204239

word_count: 15268

Hello and welcome to the Norstar, I'm your host David Perrell and this is the Norstar podcast. In each episode we explore the intersection between different ideas, cultures and life philosophies. The guests are diverse but they share profound similarities. They're guided by purpose driven by curiosity and see the world with unique lens. And in each episode we get to dive into their hard-earned wisdom and apply it to our lives. When I'm not recording podcasts, I write essays on my website Perrell.com, send a weekly email newsletter called Monday Musings and run an online writing school called Right of Passage. I hope you enjoy the show. This week I have two guests and both are affiliated with Synthesis, a new kind of online school where kids learn through games and simulations. One guest is Chris McFrancoos, the CEO of Synthesis and the other is Ana Lorena Farrega, who is their chief evangelist. So here's the backstory of Synthesis and I'm an investor in full transparency. I really believe in this company. So a few years ago Elon Musk asked the co-founder to start an experimental school with him at SpaceX and the goal was to develop students who are enthralled by complexity and problem solving for the unknown. And Synthesis was the most innovative learning experience to come from that Elon Musk founded school and then it spun off into its own company. And so this episode focuses all on Synthesis and it presents a new vision for the future of childhood education enabled by the internet. So please enjoy my conversation with Ana Lorena Farrega and Chris McFrancoos. Ana and Chris McFrancoos, welcome to the podcast I want to start off talking about video games in particular. My parents always said video games are bad and they're a waste of time. And what are we missing about the nature of video games and how they help to facilitate student learning? Here's what's really interesting. So when kids play video games, they really get like the experience of having to teach themselves something new. So they have to figure out how to win, they have to pick up on new skills and use all the available resources that they have in order to reach their goals. And what we've seen is that this provokes a positive feeling about themselves and about their abilities to learn on their own, which is what schools are pretty much like training kids in that sense. So in this sense, Jane McGonagall, who's a PhD designer in video games, she was talking about that that's one of the main reasons why games are sort of like the ultimate learning simulator because kids really get to teach themselves something new. They feel like they can teach themselves anything. So they feel empowered to learn and to improve on their own. So that's something that synthesis, we use this game based approach and we can talk about that in a little. But it's not again because of the fun of it or because of the engagement is because this are sort of like the features that lead to the ultimate end, which is learning. But then all the implicit novelty and the difficulty of the actual games and the simulations is with leads to the satisfying experiences and together with the engagement and the fun, then that's what allows us to teach kids problem solving and decision making. So I would say that perhaps that's the most powerful thing about video games that relates to learning nowadays. How about that fun point, specifically in regards to the way that you used to teach kids to read when you were in school, like you allowed them to read standing up, you allowed them to read sitting down, but then the only rule was that they actually understood what they were saying. So I'm really curious to hear about your experience in school and how that informs how you think about why synthesis works as a way to teach kids. A lot of what happens in school is that the kids don't really have a chance to practice making real decisions or solving real problems. If you look at the textbook math problems or when you teach kids how to read systematically with like the stories that we give them with the curriculums in school, it's really hard to make the connection to the real world. It feels very much prefabricated because that's how it is. Like the kids know that the teacher knows the outcome and that there is this one right or wrong answer. So that really we're sort of like removing learning out of context. But when you look at something like synthesis, we don't design the simulations for content, the way that we did in school, like every time I was planning a lesson plan, it was all about the content. At synthesis, like we designed for the experience. So the simulations are built from scratch to not only being gauging, but really deep. And the idea of the simulations is to change the way that kids approach real life problems and to prepare them to navigate all the complexity and chaos that comes with life. Our simulations at synthesis is very different from school. Push kids to actually take a stance and make decisions that have consequences in meaning. So they actually have to understand trade-offs and they have to analyze choices in a world where there are no right answers, just like in real life. And kids are very confused at first because they're used to everyone knowing what the answer is or at least knowing that the teacher has the answer. So here it's very, very different. So the simulations also allow students to understand that there's a purpose behind the learning and to see the relevance to the real world. So they're designed to put the kids sort of like in this spot and to push them to be vulnerable. Very different from school. In school, we're trying to do the opposite when a one kids to feel vulnerable. We want for them to figure things out quickly and if not, the teacher sort of like runs and gives the answers. And at synthesis, because we purposely do this, kids sort of leave their comfort zones and this not only enables them to make new friends, but also it taps into the emotional rewards that we've noticed that the kids crave the most. So they want to keep coming back and they start to get comfortable with all the uncertainty and all the chaos and they feel like we trust them and that's why we're giving them those challenges. And I've written and talked about this before how we really make sure that we continue to add complexity to everything that we do because kids not only can handle that, unlike why they teach you in school, they can't handle it, but they actually crave it. So we've seen that this works really well in terms of like not only the learning loops, but also the engagement. That's great. The simplest way to put it is like video games are learning by doing and that's natural to humans. It's actually really historically anomalous and strange that we have this idea to sit you in a desk for how long is it? If you start at age five, you finish at age 21 or 22. So about 17 years, 17 years of like just, I mean, if you think about like the learned helplessness this creates in this sort of reliance on authority, it's sort of crazy. It's never been like this in human history, apart from like the last hundred years. And I think in another hundred years, we will just definitely not be doing things this way. I think video games are more natural way to learn because you're learning by actually doing something. The consequences actually matter. It's not like you're putting something forward for a teacher to judge you. There's sort of like a quote unquote reality with a video game. When we see this all the time in synthesis, the kids will get together that make a plan to make a strategy and they're like, we are going to crush everybody like this is going to be awful. We're just going to smash them and then they get killed and they're like, oh man, now they have to check their thinking. And it's not like, oh, a teacher gave me a bad grade that teacher doesn't know what they're talking about. It's like, no, we got outplayed here. Like let's reflect on this experience. And that's just a much more natural way to learn than sitting in a desk. Yeah, when I was a kid, one time we had this make believe game where there were like six different continents and six different teams in the class of 20. And then the game went for like a month. And the whole job of the game was for everyone in the class to compete to conquer the world. And we got so into it, we got so competitive that we were talking about it outside of the actual class. We're like teaming up at lunch. We started changing where we were sitting at the lunch table and we got obsessed with the game. Dude, that is exactly when I first saw synthesis. It was, I went down the tour at Astra, which is school, Josh and Elon created. And yeah, I actually wasn't expecting much because I thought I'd kind of seen everything in education and been to so many different schools that were new and doing things a different way. And nothing really lived up the hype. And I had that moment at Astra where it was lunch slash recess. It's outside because it's California. And then inside, there's these kids gathered around the table just shouting these really complex arguments at each other. And I was like, what is this? One of the teachers like, oh, sorry, it's synthesis. The kids get kind of obsessed. And I was like, this is an educational thing that they're talking, like I hardly ever see kids this animated period, regardless, especially not anything school related. So it's kind of like what you're talking about. I saw that and I was like, whoa, number one, these kids were clearly, they're making very sophisticated, complex arguments and their communication skills were really advanced for just like 11, 12, 13 year old kids. I was working on building tech companies at the time and I was like, these kids would just fit right into our meetings. They'd be better problem solvers than a lot of people I work with and they're 12. Something's going on here that we need to pay attention to. I'm just sort of amazed at how much of just my own education was just like being fascinated by things and then following those rabbit holes of fascination. What's crazy to me about a syllabus, a syllabus basically implies do things at a normal speed and don't spend any too much time on one thing. And if you get obsessed with something, well, it's time to move on. And if you don't get obsessed with something, then keep going. Whereas what life is is like an exploit strategy where you just sort of look at things, but then you find your thing and you just go ham on that. And I remember my senior year of college, I got a C in my entertainment media class, which is basically what my job is, thinking through the future of how media is interacting with the world and business models and my teacher was like, how did you get a C? You're obsessed with this stuff. And I was like, well, I didn't like this class because I was so obsessed with it, but you didn't actually let me follow my trails of obsession and I was really frustrated with that. Yeah, that's so interesting. I suppose there are things where you need that syllabus, the founder of Lambda Schools and investor and synthesis and I think they've got to have a syllabus, they've got to prepare people and train them for this specific job. But yeah, there's also this other component to learning where like you said, it's like following the obsessions. And what's interesting about that is if you let kids do it that way, there's sort of infinite occupations in the world. There's infinite niche. I mean, both of you guys, you have jobs that I don't think anyone really thought were jobs before you started doing it. And that's just a product of your obsession and your passions and this idea of like a skill stack, you're not the absolute best podcast interviewer or something like that, but you're the best across a couple different things, maybe talking about writing and creating media and applying this to business. And that's all these things combined to make this unique niche that just didn't exist before. And what's really exciting about this point in human history is there's going to be infinite more niches like that. And so we've got to prepare kids now not to just fit into something that already exists, but to find that's not been true actually. It wasn't true in the 1950s, this would not have been good advice in the 1950s. The best advice would have been do good in school if you're going for economic success, do well in school and join a big company and move up the ranks. And that's just not true anymore. That's when you need to think about what's the purpose of any learning experience because we're talking about synthesis, but really any learning experience should be for you to come out really excited and curious and inspired and wanting to learn more, knowing what you're uniquely good at or David, what we were talking about the other day, what you're irrationally passionate about. But how often do you have a chance in school to really explore that or talk about that? Not really. We need to cover a curriculum that's very extensive, so there is no time. We don't prioritize that in school as much as teachers would want to. So we really try to keep that in mind and synthesis, like we want to teach kids new ways of thinking with new mental tools to make better decisions and solve problems, but really give them like plenty of experience to try new things and fail and try again, because that's what gives you the sense of possibility and connects you to this larger purpose of learning in life. We've also talked about before how we kids go through all these years of schooling and we teach them and know this mechanical ways, only to leave school and they don't really want to learn under own anymore, they don't want to read for fun anymore, they don't want to write for fun anymore, so then what's the purpose of having them in school for so many years during their most crucial years during their childhood and they're not going to come out excited and wanting to do more of that on their own. So really keeping that in mind for any learning experience that you're creating is crucial and it's what we're doing at synthesis. What are the components of a game that facilitates learning? So the way that we design simulations is we have like this six components of the synthesis experience, which are simulation mechanics, simulation concepts, mental models, team reflection, simulation analysis and personal reflection and I'll kind of like go into those. But when we design a simulation, the first thing that we do is we put ourselves in students shoes to sort of like visualize how they're going to interact with the information. So visualizing simulation mechanic involves picturing how the kids are going to act within complete information and then sort of like how are they going to be working with teammates to bring a sense of order into the game. And again, we have a lot of chaos in our game, so this is pretty challenging. So this includes figuring the basic rules, having them identify the different scoring variables that are always changing, determining how to best adjust their strategy depending on what's happening in that specific moment and then managing all the inherent disorder that occurs when you're working with a team. Sounds very chaotic and that's because it is. We try to really make it like real life. The second ingredient of the synthesis experience is called simulation concepts. So I mean, as you know by now because we've talked about this a lot, like we really want to equip kids to solve hard problems. So to do this, we need to elevate the standards for the concepts that we're teaching them. So at a first glance, especially for parents who come from a traditional background, they may be like, wait, you're teaching kids about harmony and about profit and these are eight-year-olds. This concepts may seem a bit hard to digest for kids, but we really believe that synthesis and we don't get tired of saying this, that kids are really capable of understanding much more than we think. So our simulations really try to expose kids to this adult concept, like I was saying, like revenue, profit, Dutch, auctions, warm halls, headquarters, and we do it in a way where they start to improve their vocabulary and talk about these things like adults will be talking about them. And the third component of the simulation is mental models. And this one is like a big one, sort of like at the heart of what students learn at synthesis. So mental models represent all these tools and concepts that the kids are kind of experiencing and maybe Chris, when you can talk a little bit about this later, because we don't teach mental models explicitly, like, oh, we're going to teach you about this one, no, we sort of let them experience them. And then we have them tie it through the reflection to the other simulations that they're playing. So we have like a few videos where you see how we do that. The mental models are for people unfamiliar with that concept. They are sort of patterns that come up repeatedly and no matter kind of what domain you're in. One mental model in the first game is this idea of networks. There are communication networks, distribution networks. This comes up when you're looking at any company or any industry, the network idea comes up a lot. We don't necessarily build the games with these things in mind, but because they're broadly applicable, they arise in the games and the kids will sort of start to notice these patterns and then start to talk about them. And that's when we're like, okay, so what you're looking at here is a network. And now we can talk about networks and they're going to be actually interested in learning that because it's going to help them win the game. So if we went and we're like, okay, kids, today we're going to do a course on networks that'd be a snooze fest, but when you're playing the game and you're losing to a team because they understand networks better than you do, then the kids get really excited about learning those things. It's already cut in. You learn to know that's a perfect interruption, and David, I don't know if you remember we talked about this in one of our show and tell episodes. The difference between learning on demand and learning just in case. When in school, we teach from a curriculum, all these concepts and all these subjects, just in case kids are ever going to use them in the real world. We've talked about also how we know that knowledge decays really quickly. So this approach is not really effective because unless kids are using that knowledge in the next 14 days in the real world, that knowledge is going to decay even if it was theoretically interesting to them. So a better approach is to teach on demand, which is what Chris meant was just saying. When the kids find themselves in a situation where they need to learn this mental hackler, this mental model in order to advance or win the game or get unstuck, then the relevance of that mental model comes to play and they're like, oh, I need this. It makes sense why I would want to learn this. They put it into practice, boom, they learned it. So that's sort of like also the approach that Elon had when he was coming up with like how he wanted this school to work. He was like, don't teach to the tool, teach to the problem. When they need it and when the relevance comes, then you use that. Well, within that, the thing about just in case versus just in time is I feel like there's a third category that I just realized is left out of the conversation a lot. And these are things that are like foundational ways of looking at the world. And this is something like mathematics or the laws of physics or something like that, whereas just in case is like learning marketing and your sophomore year of college, it's like, oh, you're going to need to do this after you graduate, young child, and that's just sort of ridiculous. And I think sort of what we're getting at, like we actually waste a lot of time thinking about that. But the thing that I wish I knew better was basically math and physics. And I feel like you could call that just in case because it's like, oh, you might need to use this someday. But more foundationally, I think that these are ways that everyone should be able to look at the world. And to the extent that we can facilitate these ways of thinking through games, then that's a good thing. And to return to the networks idea, networks and sort of complexity thinking, thinking of ideas like emergence and morality and how different ideas scale, how an idea can actually spread through a society. These are foundational. These are almost like the laws of social physics or the laws of how society functions. And to the extent that we can train that, then I feel like it's this third category that I think synthesis is really beginning to hit upon. I think that's right. I think in one sense, education is always just arming the next generation with the tools that have come before. The two most prominent are literacy and numeracy. You can call that just in case, but it's really just in case you do anything in life at all. You're going to use those tools. I think computation is quickly becoming one of those things. And I do think a lot of these mental models sort of fall into that category. They are tools for thinking. They're software upgrades that you may not use every day. But a lot of what we're teaching is stuff that we use every day. We're teaching the kids concepts and mental models that we use to run the company and that we're talking about all the time. And I think you're on to something there that there's probably a broad or set of tools. If you look to the future of humanity, we will have more in our toolkit that's developed through school than just the literacy and numeracy piece. And then just to end up what we were talking about, the question that David asked of how do we design our simulations? So we already spoke about those first three. And then the second component of the synthesis experience is what we call the sense-making of the experience. And then here is where you have the difference between playing a video game for entertainment and then playing synthesis. When you play a video game, there are opportunities for you to reflect, but it's really not mandatory. You usually don't have a parent sitting afterwards and saying like, well, what did you play? Like let's talk about it. And there's a lot of research done on video games saying that the way that kids really transfer the benefits of the game to the real life is when they're able to really reflect on the experience and see what elements can transfer to the real world. Again, that doesn't really happen when you're playing for fun because you're not actively going through this, but we make a big deal out of this at synthesis. So the next three components, which are team reflection, simulation analysis, and personal reflection, they're all about helping kids make sense of their interactions with all our competitive simulations. So after each game, the students engage in team reflection where they start to talk about how they operate it, the personality of their team, and sort of like how they make their decisions and the roles played by all the members. And then these dip conversations and the reflections that we lead is really what drive the learning and all these conclusions. Similar with the simulation analysis, which is like where you sort of discuss the decisions and weigh their efficiency. And it's really interesting to see how the kids, depending on what team they are, they will act differently. They definitely not always win. They win. They lose. So they really have to reflect on this. And then our facilitators play a big role in that one. And then the last one is the personal reflection, which is not only like how your team operated, but how did you as an individual operate and how did you contribute to the team dynamic? Like how could you improve what role should you play next time? So we have like a video that helps them reflect on this. And really that's the most important part of the simulation and what makes this different from any other video game. It's really interesting because you guys have me think about what I guess I could call the bias of education. So I think that we're moving from books and lectures to software and games. And so with books and lectures, the thing that is communicated well in that style of media is letters and numbers. So words and math basically. But the thing is traditional forms of education. They're very low on video and interactive software. And so I feel like these are methods of teaching and ways of being that school isn't really hitting at. And for example, with video, there was a great story in the Wall Street Journal a couple of years ago about a player on the Boston Celtics. His name is Jason Tatum. And his coach looked at him and he was 21 years old when he got to the NBA. And his coach went up to him and he was like, how is your footwork so good? I can't believe it. And what happened was he was one of the first players to grow up in the YouTube generation. And so what he did was he would watch videos of Kobe Bryant of LeBron James, the crossover of Alan Iverson, and then he would go to the gym with YouTube and he would go copy the footwork of those moves. That's exactly the kind of thing you can't learn about in a textbook. The subtleties, the rhythm, the flow, too complicated. But now you can bring that in with video and all of a sudden you've actually unlocked a new passageway of learning. And I feel like that's what we're getting at here with video and interactive software. There's new ways of actually delivering information that it's almost like seeing new colors on the color wheel in terms of now what we're able to teach students. There's two things there. The video you have the Namedic piece of it, which is that we like to copy. I think very little of the thinking we do, or what we do, the learning we do is sort of learning from first principles in a conceptual way. It's much more common that we sort of copy people who are further on the path than us. I took business classes in college, but I definitely learn way more just reading biographies of people who I wanted to emulate. I think probably the reason students take your course is because, oh, this guy's going to teach me how to be successful by writing. He's very successful through writing. I'll pay attention. And so I think that YouTube piece definitely unlocks that. I think that's way underestimated just how anyone who has kids will know this. If you want to get kids to do something, you find them a role model who's a little bit older, who likes to read books, and then now your kid's going to be reading books. That's the way it works. That's very powerful. And then the other piece is the interactive, is it's Seymour Pepeer, the inventor of Mindstorms, which is written. I think at the 80s, and it's about how the interactive elements of software and computers are going to change education. He's not been right so far. I think that's more to the challenges of getting schools, existing school system to do things in new ways. But that's very much, like synthesis, you can read that book. We're going to bring that vision to life. I think learning is going to go exactly like you said, more video and more interactive. Those are going to be the two really big trends. I think that are going to sort of push out almost everything else. I want to hear you guys talk about the ideas of winning and losing because a lot of the best moments that I got in terms of learning as a kid was just epically failing in sports in some way and being like, you know what, this part of life. You've got to work harder. You've got to get over it and stop being a sort of loser kid. What's really remarkable about synthesis is I worried more initially that the kids would lose and that it would be demoralizing because you see that happen in schools a lot of the time. People who they do poorly in school than they get like a learned helplessness and stop trying. What's weird is it's the opposite in synthesis. I've been trying to kind of like put my finger on why that is. I think part of it at least is it's something that you're interested in so you're trying to get better on your own and it might just be that these kids they react differently than I would expect most adults. I think adults would kind of check out if they try this and we've seen it because we tried synthesis games with adults and they'll kind of check out if they're like, oh, it's too complex. It's too hard. I don't get it. They'll kind of stop. I'm wondering if school just, I wonder if the kids are just naturally the way they are in synthesis, which is they bounce right back from failure and just want to try hard and they want to learn from whoever beat them. They want to learn their secrets so they can improve. I wonder how much of the attitude that adults have is sort of driven into us by this model of school that we have where you're submitting to the judgment of an authority figure and it's a zero sum game class rank because probably just one of the most destructive ideas ever that you have a single variable continuum where you're going to rank everybody. I don't exactly know what's going on there, but I do notice that the kids, they bounce back from failure much more quickly than adults. It almost seems to energize them. I don't know if that's because of the way that our facilitators are running things or what exactly, but it's sort of remarkable how quickly they will move onto the next thing. To me, this is one of the most fascinating things about video games and I actually did a whole write-up about this a while ago because as a teacher, I would often see kids whenever they would get something wrong or we would get them to reflect and to learn about their mistakes. It was really challenging because we were always penalizing them with a grade or they knew that there was something else and nobody likes to fail. But when it comes to video games, you notice that kids can spend most of their time failing and they still love planes. So I was very curious about this and I was like, well, what is it about video games that keeps kids optimistic in the face of failure? And if you think about it, I mean, and there's this whole experiment done by Mark Robert, this former NASA engineer, I mean, what he discovered was that when mistakes are not penalized, people, and this sounds straightforward, but we don't do this in school, when mistakes are not penalized, people are more likely to just keep trying. And if you keep trying, then naturally you have more chances of eventually succeeding. And that's what happens at synthesis, that's what happens at video games that people are sort of focused on the end goal and you lose, but you know, you have a second chance and you may die in the game, but then you can bounce back and do it right again. Our kids at synthesis, they play so many times because the games are really short and they fail, but they know that they have a second chance right away. They're going to play again and next time they're going to try something different. So when you frame sort of like the learning challenges in this way that you're not going to be penalized, then kids just want to engage and it's natural for them to sort of like ignore that and just get up and try again. And that's the attitude that we want to teach kids to have. And I haven't seen anything better for this in video games, like it helps them normalize making mistakes and learning from them. So I think that that's where it comes from. I feel like one of the things that you are really hitting on too is this idea of open ended problem solving. A lot of times what we learn at school is there's very set problems, there are ways to do it right, there's ways to do it wrong. And for me, I'm terrible at following directions. So a lot of the points that I lost in school was just a trotious student, my goodness. We're just because I didn't do what the teacher said, but I, for whatever reason, I'm good and open ended problem solving. And just because that's not taught in school, that's one reason I feel like there's just not a lot of people who are as good at that, even though oddly that seems to be what more and more is economically rewarded. Seth Godin has this idea called the law of the mechanical Turk, where he basically says anything that can be segmented, made clear with repeatable steps that are easy and simple to follow, that work will be driven lower and lower, first it will be minimum wage work, then it will be outsourced, and then it will be done by software. So you basically have to take all of those variables and do the opposite in order to get to a point of high economic leverage in your personal career. Speaking of Seth Godin, I remember reading by him that he argues that the jobs in the future are going to fall into different categories. The downtrodden like assemblers of cheap mass goods, and then you have like the respected creators of the unexpected, and these can even be people, even if you're not working for yourself, but you're still going to have to sort of be there. And I agree with that, and that's why there's this new list of survival skills in the new marketplace that are really nothing prioritized by schools. So what we're starting to notice is that parents who really care, they're starting to look at initiatives outside the system that are actually meeting that new way of thinking and those new skills, and that's sort of what synthesis is doing. I think that's right. I've been thinking about this lately. I think it's just very interesting. I guess it's been having a lot of conversations with people about the current education system and how it's designed to produce factory workers, which I think just misses something, which is it's designed to produce factory workers and bureaucrats. So even for white collar people, it's designed to produce people who follow the rules. One way to think of it as a paper driven bureaucracy is sort of like a massive computer made out of humans. And so what computers do really well is just copy instructions, just follow instructions precisely. And so there's a reason we have this system that's built to get you to follow instructions precisely. And like you said, it's just not a thing anymore. So I think it's important to look at how the world has changed, whether it was right or wrong to build an education system to support industrialization. Maybe that was the right move for humanity at the time. We have very inexpensive cars and inexpensive goods, material goods. The price has just fall every year and continue to fall. So maybe that was a good thing. But anymore, the computers do a lot of what we're training kids to do in school. And so it's exactly what you said. The most highly rewarded skill is to add to human knowledge. There's a book I've been rereading recently called The Beginning of Infinity by the Physicist of David Deutsch. And the title is The Beginning of Infinity because there is an infinite future of knowledge that can be created. Because whenever we create new knowledge, we have new problems. We're always a little bit wrong. And we can keep on improving that into infinity. Which I think is just really exciting because it means for the kids today, if they're trained in this kind of way of learning to solve unbounded, complex problems, there's an infinite amount of cool things that can be created. The world can be so much better than we can even imagine right now. And the way to get there is by training this next generation in these skills to create knowledge, just to find and solve problems not to precisely follow instructions. One of the things about synthesis that I think is really interesting is the way that kids have different ages are intermingled. Like Anna, when you taught, you taught third graders. And they were a very specific age, but most maybe 18 months apart. And something about that seems misguided. And I'm curious to hear your take on that. Christmas and I have spoken about this a few times. This is perhaps one of the most ridiculous ideas that we continue to embrace nowadays. Because if you think about it again, education we're trying to prepare for the real world. In the real world, when do you only interact with people your own age? I really can't think of one scenario where I'm stuck in a room with only people my own age. Like that doesn't really happen. So, it doesn't really make sense why we keep kids for 12 years only with kids their age. And not only that, but when you think about the most organic way to learn is from people that are older than you and younger than you. And it works really well. I gave this example in a clubhouse a few weeks ago where I was student teaching in this school in New York that was mixed age groups. And that was the moment where I really saw that the teacher could step out of the room and learning would continue to happen. Because you have the older kids teaching the younger kids the things that they already knew. You have the younger kids emulating the older kids and doing things that you wouldn't think that a four year old would be able to do. But just because you put them in a situation where there were older kids, our human instinct is to imitate and to want to emulate what other people are doing, especially the older kids. So, it worked really well. And it sort of like takes a lot of toll on the teacher from having to teach the kids. That's the second thing. And then the third thing is that we know that one of the best ways to learn something is to teach that. So when you have mixed age groups, you have the older kids that have learned a concept teaching it to the younger kids. So they crystallize that learning and that's the best way to learn it when they actually teach it to somebody else. And then you have the younger kids go to the other, like the little ones and teach it. And so it becomes a very beautiful cycle of teaching and learning done by the kids. So to me, it's the best way to do it. It's the best way to teach and learn. And it's just really surprising that that's something that we've kind of like dragged along for the past 100 years and we continue to do. I think it's a completely psychotic idea to do the age segregation thing. It's the number one thing that I would change if I could snap my fingers, both the education dictator, I would say no more age segregation, particularly for the younger kids. It makes the teacher's job so much harder and this is the funniest thing. If I tweet anything negative about school, then I get all these comments that are like kids need school to be socialized, which one, I'm not saying lock them in a closet at home instead of sending them to school. Presumably there are other ways that you can be around kids that don't involve sitting in desks and rows. But two, it's a very weird socialization. I know you guys have written about the Lindi effect, the idea that ideas that are kind of new are more likely to die off. This is a really weird and historically anomalous idea that you should be age segregated. It's never been like this in human history and only really been like this since about 1890 when we adopted the Prussian system. And I'd sad that it's lasted this long, but it's based on just a flawed manufacturing model of the world that doesn't really work with complex things like humans. So if I get snapped my fingers and change that, just have every school adopt the mixed-age model and deal with the chaos that comes from that, I think would be a lot better off. Talk about the socialization issue. So you could say, hey, we do need to be socialized and I don't want my kids spending more time on the computer. And so what do we say to that? What I'm doing for my kids, not going to prescribe anything for anyone, but what Josh and I are both doing. And I've actually been speaking with a bunch of people who have unlimited means over the last couple of weeks and are asking about how should they educate their kids. Not to be prescriptive, but what I'm doing is we're doing a forest slash beach school. So my kids are seven and five or the two older ones and they're joining with a couple of their families who have a teacher that will go outside and basically play, explore the woods, explore the beach because we live in California, which is nice. But basically just be outside and be a kid for most of the day and it's mixed age. You get with other kids, they make up little games. My main goal is just get them socializing, but outside of that weird school environment. And so it's this terrible trick we play on kids where what they crave most is to be around other kids to have that social development. And then we gate that behind seven hours of sitting in a desk and listening and then half an hour of recess. That's absolutely a horrible thing to be doing at the scale. So I think a lot of the problems go away if you just do mixed age classrooms and that entails a lot of other changes. Immediately you can't do the thing where you expect people to all learn the same thing at the same pace as much as that doesn't work now, definitely not going to work with like a five and a seven year old or a 10 year old and the seven year old in the same classroom. That's what I'm doing. My kids a couple hours a day on the forest school. And we're going to do a full stack synthesis school, which is going to be two hours a day, five days a week and just pretty intense accelerated technology and science and engineering and then just reading books for the rest of the time. That's what I'm doing. Not to say what other people should or shouldn't do, but that's at least a solution I've kind of hit on after thinking about it for a while. On a talk about the virtues of talking in school, like I feel like one of the biggest issues and you in particular, just needing to talk and this sort of idea, like I'm going to say, Anna doesn't really know anything about that. So someone else take that. Anna has a thing where she'll call me and she just goes off on an arrest. But I mean, I think that a lot of kids need that this sort of desire to process information and then synthesize it through speaking. And I feel like the words that I hear the most in school are be quiet. It's really interesting because every time I hear people say, like, well, no, I would love to homeschool, but what about the social aspect? Like homeschool kids are not socialized or they need to go to school in order to learn and socialize with peers. And I'm like, no, I've taught for five years. I went to 10 different schools, ranging from all types of schools. And the reality is that out of those seven hours that kids are in school, they are chatting and you can ask them. They'll tell you, yes, I get to socialize in the bus in my 20 to 30 minutes of recess. And before they would say lunchtime, unfortunately, when you started to ask around a lot of schools are starting to do quiet lunches and the school that I worked at just because you had all these kids in the cafeteria and the cafeteria monitors could not handle all the noise in this net. The kids would come back and they're like, Ms. Fab, we had a quiet lunch again. So those 30 minutes that they had to chat, quiet. So when kids are in class, the teacher has to cover all these materials. So the reality is that we're like in a monologue, we're like talking, covering this and that the kids barely have time to chat. Doing group work, they may chat, but group work is very rare. Like it's not the norm. It's not what kids are doing all the time. So it's just really ironic when I hear this from parents, like, no, they need to go to school to socialize. I'm like, I'm sorry to break it to you, but kids are not really socializing in school. It's not happening. So when you look at people like what Chris is doing or people that are homeschooling, like homeschoolers that have actually plenty of opportunities to interact and with actually members of the communities are in more real and authentic ways. They're not limited to kids or own age. They go to meet up with friends. They can go to the playground, they go to community events, they participate in sports in art lessons. So they really have a chance to interact and communicate way more than in school. So to me, that's like a no brainer. And then I was also reflecting like two of the hardest things that I've had to do, at least in the past 10 years, was trying to keep a group of 20 plus kids quiet, sitting down and paying attention. And the reason for that is because it's so unnatural. Human being, especially kids, are not meant to be sitting down, especially for that amount of time. They're not meant to be quiet. They're meant to be talking and socializing. So we've really taken learning and what being a human is out of context by putting it in this institutions that we call schools. And then we're like, oh, why aren't kids learning or why is this not working? I'm like, if you reflect in it, it doesn't make sense. That's definitely a big concern. And here's something that's really interesting. When I first joined the synthesis simulations, something that called my attention because, of course, with COVID and everything and everything going online, a lot of what parents experienced was a very passive online experience for their kids. That's because that was not online learning. That was remote learning where teachers quickly had to grab everything and put it in the online space and then sort of like replicate the classroom online as we've talked about. This doesn't work. But at synthesis, there are actually more opportunities for kids to talk and socialize that you would see in the real classroom. It's incredible. Like out of the hour to 75 minutes, kids are doing most of the talking. They're actually like screaming and talking over each other. And like at the edge of their seats, they're really active, although they're in front of a computer. And they go into breakout groups, they're talking. They come back from the breakout groups, they're the ones leading the discussion. So really, even though it's the online space, there's more talking and more socializing than you see in the actual classroom, which is like mind blowing, something that people unless you witness it, you don't really notice. But that's the reality. It's happening. That's why I can take a couple of sessions for kids to get into synthesis because they show up. Maybe their parents are like, oh, we're doing this new online class or like learning thing and then they show up, expecting it to be kind of passive and be docile and just follow instructions and listen quietly. And so that it takes three or four weeks to like break that. Then that kind of carries over to the rest of their life. In school, they're like asking, what exactly do I do? So they show up at synthesis and they have all these questions like, what exactly do we do? And we're just like, you're going to figure it out. That's how it's going to work. You're going to figure this out. That's why you're here to learn to figure things out, not for us to tell you. And luckily kids are pretty resilient. So even though they've been trained that way in school, they quickly figure out there's another way of being and that they can just sort of attack problems. They don't have to be passive or hapless. And to me, the best feedback we get from students and from their parents is that that attitude is carrying into other things in their life. The parents are like, hey, here's a situation where they normally would have asked me to do it for them and said they're like, no, no, no, I got this mom. Let me figure it out. It's like the reverse of learned helplessness. One of my big ideas is like, school is this sort of industrial scale system for producing learned helplessness, like learned intellectual helplessness. Don't think about anything. You can't solve problems on your own. Just stay within these bounds and repeat what you're told. And I think that's one potential way since this can be transformative is to reverse that. The reverse of learned helplessness, learned efficaciousness, something like that. One of the things that I think about when I think of synthesis is that it's so radically different and the thing is, I think it's easy to hear synthesis and say, oh, that's not for my kid and stuff like that. But I tend to think, like, first of all, that's totally fine. But I think that the biggest problem with the education system isn't the system. It's that we have one system. And it's crazy. It'd be like only having one kind of job. We have so many different kinds of jobs. And a lot of what it takes to build a career is matching your personality to your job. And it's just wild to me. And this is what the future is going to look like. There's going to be all different kinds of educational systems where you maybe could get a personality test or your parents can begin to observe how you behave as a kid. Because for me, I was needed to be outside, I had tons of energy and I was really creative. But then wasn't great at following directions and within bounded sort of ideas, I did very poorly. And so the fact that I was in the traditional school system for 18 years just felt criminal to me the entire time. And so I needed some different kind of system. But I think that we should also have the exact opposite of synthesis exists too. And my point is we should just have all these different kinds of educational systems. Whenever people ask me what works, what works is diversity of approaches. There's not one thing, like I don't think synthesis is for everyone. Just like I don't think that the school system is for everyone. Like we need diversity of approaches and then you sort of like they can choose what fits with your needs, with your situation, with your means and everything. I love how Christmas and Josh are doing their kids' education. Because you're sort of like putting together a very personalized educational experience for your kids, grabbing from different places. So the more alternatives we have out there, then the easier it's going to be for parents to do this. So for sure, I agree with you, David. I think that's really the problem with the massive system. The common core standards may have had like a noble kind of idea behind them. But what we need is just a system that evolves. And to evolve, you need, it's basically Darwin's theory, but applied to human ideas. So you need variation and selection. And synthesis is a new variation, a new variant, we'll see how it goes, see if that becomes part of the education ecosystem in the long term, but we don't really know. But at least there's an honest selection mechanism. If it's not working, then parents aren't going to pay for it and we'll go out of business. And if it is working, then people will pay for it, promote it, and get it more widely into the world. And so I think that idea of error correction, but it's not so important that we get everything right, but that we can course correct. That's what we tell the students and synthesis. Get it wrong, you're not getting what you want. Then that's fine, that's natural, that's always going to happen. And more important to make quick course corrections than to get everything right, the first try. As I'm thinking about where synthesis fits in, because you could just say, oh, that's great for you guys, because you literally run an educational company and you have the means to sort of create your own system. But I think that that just entirely misses the point about where the world is going. And I'll tell you why, because the internet is fundamentally changing the access to be able to create your own education piecemeal. And I think that there's a couple of ways to think about this. The first being we're going from centralized to decentralized. So what we had was a very centralized generally government run system where there's the same system. And because success needs to be measured at scale from sort of top down very bureaucratic way, we need even geographical constraints are often eliminated. And also school is very geographically local. And so I always make the case that with, I mean, I teach people how to write online. The number of people who are in Austin, Texas who would want to take this class, I could not run a business off of that. No way. But once I start using the internet, now I can go way more niche and reach a global audience and all of a sudden, I have a good business. And then what we can do is through the internet, we can sort of break free of the centralization. We can basically have this sort of Darwinian competition for ideas where the best ones tend to do better. We differentiate, we select, and then we amplify the experiments that are doing the best. And the point isn't that this system is the best. The point is we want a system, I think, that has some of these evolutionary methods baked into it so that we're testing all over the place. And then that combined with the internet and the sort of the global scale, which allows for the nitchification of education, then now you fundamentally change the playing field so that it can be both cheaper and just as accessible for people to create their own styles of education. And it's not like parents have to stay home, like traditional homeschooling, which is why people are sort of red with rage when they think, oh, homeschooling is the future. So this is a fundamentally different thing that actually needs a new word to describe it. That's right. One of the insights I had was working at Class Dojo was that education on the internet would evolve at internet speed. And so one thing I think very few people agree with me on, but I'm pretty sure I'm right is that intelligent parents, it's going to seem foolish to leave your child's cognitive development up to whoever happens to be around locally. Like the internet options are going to, you basically have like all these local monopolies. If you have like a good private school, there's a couple of them in the Bay Area, but it's like four or five and they're all trying to get the kids into the same prep schools in the same college. So they all basically do the same approach, even though in theory, they could do something different. They largely don't. And what's going to happen though is local is going to be daycare and socialization. If you want to teach your kids to think or teach them to acquire knowledge, it's going to be on the internet because it's going to evolve so much faster. There's basically no way like these local schools, I feel they're like zoo animals. And then now that people are moving on the internet, it's like you're released into the wild and you have to compete with all these things that there's just a Cambrian explosion of internet education options right now. And I'm just really excited for that future and I think if I was running a local school, I would try to figure out how to plug into the internet and let the internet do what it does best. And I would focus more on that like daycare or socialization that things that can only be done hands on in person. And I think that could be like a really beautiful vision for the future actually because you can bring back childhood. My son, he's in a school right now because we moved to California in the middle of the pandemic and it's kind of the only way to make friends. So he's there, but it's like it's seven hours of just sitting and then half an hour of that social time. Like what if it could be four or five hours of social time and then do his learning on the internet? I think that'd be a much more humane way to do things. So I'm incredibly excited about that future. Anna, you said something really interesting earlier that I want to come back to and just get you to expand on, which is that we've taken what it means to be human out of context. As you guys were talking about all this, all I kept thinking was my favorite thing about synthesis is how we're not looking at what other people have been doing or the way that teaching has been done and looking at best practices. And we're really just looking at kids and thinking, okay, what are we seeing? What do we know about how kids learned and what are the things that call their attention? And then sort of looking at the things that we think that they're going to need in the future and then going by that. In school, it's the opposite of that. That's why I say that we take what it means to be human or a learner out of context because we're not following based on the kids. We're not making it about the kids. We're making it about these curriculums that we have in the system that we've had in place for so long and adding more things and all these bureaucracies. And we're forgetting about the most important thing, which is like kids and it only takes to look at the kids to realize how we're doing things very wrong. So I love how it synthesis like we try things out. We run it by the kids. We design the simulations based on the challenges that our kids are taking. We debug in front of them so that they realize that we don't have all the answers. I love that we don't have everything figured out, but that we're just taking into account what we see and the needs of today and trying to come up with something incredible, really based on the kids and we're making it about the kids. And to me, even though we don't know if this is going to work out or not, that's the best approach we're having the kids in mind and their needs in mind and seeing what they're doing. So that's sort of like what I was thinking about when I set that comment, but also I'm very bullish on this idea of self-directed learning. Maybe not like we're going to have all this education systems out there, but really what the internet has done for kids. And I think Neval talks a lot about this, how with the internet, information abundances everywhere, what's lacking is that desire to learn. And that's really what any good learning experience should be focusing on as well. Like more than the content, more than the experiences, are you getting kids excited to use the internet and all the things that they have out there in order to produce content and in order to learn on their own and in order to expand their interests. Like to me, that is really like that magic moment that we have and what I'm really excited to do with synthesis as well. Use that toward leverage and cultivate that desire to learn in the kids because ultimately it's going to be up to them when they grow up if they continue to learn or not. So those are sort of like the things that are going through my mind when I set that comment. What are some of the things that when you were a teacher, you saw where like these deep seeded misconceptions about what kids need, how to build relationships with kids because you had some of your students at your wedding. Most teachers aren't like that. So you very clearly understood something about what it means to be a teacher that the educational system itself, not specific teachers, are blind to. Yeah. So we came back to what you guys were saying earlier. I love to talk and I remember growing up and very upset with the fact that I couldn't talk in school. I love to move around and I was also very upset that in school, I didn't get to move around. So I would keep these things in mind. And every time I'm with kids, when I was teaching them or now that I'm working with them, I always try to go back and put myself in their shoes. And I feel like the best educators are the ones that do that, that remain that they stay with that element of the child like and can put themselves in their shoes and be like, what would I have wanted when I was a kid, like what was I lacking? So I would let my kids move around if they didn't want to be sitting down. They didn't have to be sitting down. If I opened a lesson and they raised their hand and they're like, why are we learning this? And I had no idea when they were going to use that, I would be like, hey, maybe we'll skip this lesson. We'll do something else. Or they would be like, why are we learning parameters by measuring this with a ruler in the notebook? Like, why don't we measure the classroom? I'm like, you guys are right. Let's go ahead and do that. So I think that I would just be very real with them and acknowledge that a lot of the things that we do don't make sense. And I was afraid to say that in front of them. I wasn't afraid to be like, I actually don't know. This doesn't make sense. Let's figure it out. And the other thing, I would always encourage them to, even though it's on the textbook, even though I'm saying this and it's in the lesson blend, it doesn't mean it's true. So when you give them that, they're used to thinking, oh, the teacher said it, or if it's in the test, or if it's in the textbook, it must be true. And it's not common when they hear from a teacher, like, actually, not really, like, maybe not. Like, why don't we find out? We have some computers in the back. Like, let's go and check it out. And that just really motivates them because you're sort of empowering them and letting them know a lot of what happens in schools that we treat kids like kids, and they're like sort of inferior. But when you turn it around and you're like, you can figure it out. You actually know more than you think. Let me give you this complex problem that empowers them and that motivates them. So I think that that was definitely something that came naturally to me because I was able to put myself in their shoes and that they really appreciated. And when you're open with them and when you open it up to them, they will surprise you. They know way more than we think they do. They really do. It's sort of like for you to give them that space and that time and the voice to talk about these things. So I think that that's definitely something that made that connection really real with them. Yeah. You've always had a big respect for children. And I think that looking back on my own childhood, I saw a lot of adults just treat me like I was dumb. Like as if I was like an inferior human being. And what you've always done is you said, well, what are kids actually capable of? And what if we started treating them like often these creative geniuses that they are? I just watched movie Parasite. And one of the fascinating story lines in Parasite is that everyone in the main family that continually gets played, they actually know so much and they're almost deceiving themselves which is why they are being manipulated. And it is like the seven-year-old kid who is using his sense, who is using his intuition. The seven-year-old is the person who first sees that there's something really fishy going on and the parents are like, no, no, no. No, totally. When you're interacting with kids, you realize like people think all the teachers, the one teaching, but really no. Like the kids are, if you really are open minded and you pay attention to others saying, they're teaching you way more than you're teaching them. Remember that they don't have, still, especially when they're younger, all these preconceived notions and they haven't learned that things have to be a certain way. So they naturally think in first principles. They're asking tons of questions. They want to know how everything works. If they don't agree with something, they'll straight up tell you and they're trying to find everything out. And that's sort of like, I admire that so much and when you start working with adults or like hanging out with adults, you notice that you sort of like lose that. And kids just really are excited about everything. And that really called my attention always. And I was always drawn to them because I felt like I was learning more from the kids and from the actual adults. And the other thing going back to what we were talking about separating kids by age, like when you do that, you sort of like put a barrier as to what they can do. But when you don't have any expectations of the kids and you just throw a hard problem at them or anything and you don't tell them like, oh, this is as much as you can do. They will surprise you. They will often do more than you thought that a third grader could do just because you're not labeling them and you're giving them the chance. And I was so fascinated by that that I was like, imagine if we could change the structure or change the way or create a learning experience is that kids not only really want to be part of what that would let them guide the experience, how much more could they learn. And that's exactly what I'm seeing at Synthesis. You have like seven year olds leading the groups, like calling the strategy, changing it. And you're like, you would never think that but because they're giving the chance, they're able to do it. So they surprise themselves, they surprise us. And that's such a beautiful thing to watch and to witness and something that I've always like to be part of. One of the things that I've been thinking a lot about is how childhood has become a full-time job. We're always on the clock. There's no freedom. There's no awe. There's no wonder. And also I consider myself very intellectually moody. And what that means is I am unable. I have no idea what I'm going to be interested in in like 90 minutes from now, let alone 90 days from now. And so what I'll just do is I'll just go and I'll just follow whatever I'm interested in at that moment. But I'm so frustrated with myself even because I'll try to do different book clubs. I'll try to do like a learning plan and I can never stick to it. I just need to do what I'm sort of in the mood for. And so I sort of have like this general principle that I always want to be learning. But on top of that, the specifics of what I'm learning about, I just follow my mood. And I'm wondering how you think about syllabuses, how you think about structure within synthesis. I think the main thing that you're kind of hinting at there is that you need to go from a push model to a pull model. So as we think about developing, do you want the games to as much as possible the simulations kind of mimic situations in life so they're usually like complex systems like managing waters for commercial fishing, being careful, trying to take as many fish as you can so you can feed as many people as you can, but also not to over fish and destroy the ecosystem. So there's some knowledge like embedded in that that we there are different mental models like tragedy of the commons that you could learn about. You could read other stories, real life examples where this has happened. But what we won't do is put that on a syllabus where it's like you need to learn this by next week or something. We'll have it there so you can pull it if you want it and if you're interested, but we won't push it on you, it's kind of up to you. And I think that's really important because I'm the same way you are and it's just taking me a while to kind of come to terms with that. Like if I start reading a book and I get 50 pages in, I'm really excited about it and then read five more pages and I feel like I get it, I'm better now just like putting that book down and being like, okay, I'll come back to it later. And I used to feel bad about that because school is like they want you to get through the book like something like that. But I think that's actually a much better way to structure learning and that's what I plan on doing with my kids. I only have a lot of time to just read whatever you want to read because you have a limited amount of time and a limited amount of energy and if you're wasting your energy and your will trying to learn things that you're not interested in, I think that's overall less effective. Like if you do that for six months versus you just kind of bounce around learning whatever you're interested in for six months, I think the person who's bouncing around is going to actually learn and retain a lot more even though it's the same amount of time. So I think you're on to something there. That's just a more natural way of doing it. It's again, you go back to the Lindy effect. We've only been having this idea that you would cram information into people's heads on a schedule for a short time and human history before that it was all more or less curiosity driven. Chris, for models in terms of inspiration as you think of actually building the company, where are you looking, who are the people who are inspiring you, the ideas that are inspiring you, that you're beginning to pull bits and pieces from and actually synthesize and to synthesis? Obviously, Josh is a big one. It's interesting to be just launched a company company. He's only like six months old, but the ideas and the approach like Josh has been developing for the better part of a decade. So a lot of it still feel like I'm learning a ton just from talking with him on a daily basis because he's got that. He's a tinkerer. He's just been in front of kids all these years and he's always trying new things. He has this sort of intuitive sense of the way that he feels things should go and then I just kind of try to process that and then put it in words and give it back to him to see if I'm getting it. That's been probably the most interesting kind of part of this and then outside of that, people always ask me about what education books I'd recommend and I have a hard time coming up with any because I think it's more interesting to me to look at sort of high stakes environments where the learning really matters. So like military, I pull a lot from there because if you look at something like Navy SEALS training, they view each other as their brothers and so when it comes to making sure that they know how to get the job done, you're looking at like if you don't get it right then your brothers die and so you kind of figure they're probably paying attention and they're probably going to do everything they can to actually get it right in a complex environment. And so if you look like what a military people do, what is the SEAL training like? Number one, it's much harder. The training is harder than the battles. So the training is so difficult that you're just ready for anything. That's one piece of it. Another piece is you have this vision of who you want to be. So if you enter SEALS training, you want to be a Navy SEAL and you're bought into that. So you'll kind of do anything along the path and you have these different models to mimic. And then the third thing that I noticed comes up a lot. I look at medical training as well like how do you train surgeons? You do kind of like war games. You practice. You want to have something that simulates the environment that you're going to be in. It's harder to measure. It's easier to measure a multiple choice test, which is why they proliferate. But it's not as good a training. If you care more about building the skill than you care about measuring it, then I think this idea of war games and simulations is quite a good one. Simulations are never perfect. So there's always a chance that someone will be great in the simulation and not great in the real thing. But it's at least much, much closer than what you would get from like a multiple choice test. Yeah. I think that the other co-founder, Josh Don, he was at a very unique and beautiful position where he was able to start a school without having to report or do anything. All these things that the schools have to do, even though you have incredible teachers, but you unfortunately have to follow a curriculum and do a bunch of things just because they come from the top. Josh didn't really have to do that. So he was really able to focus on again. What are the kids doing? What should the kids be learning? What are new world demands? People who are self-learners, who are creative, resourceful, who can problem-solve and make good decisions and adjust and adapt to constant change. So based on that, he was able to create this learning experience that targeted that without having to adhere to all this fluff that we have to do in schools and all this meaningful work and the measuring and the assessment. And no, he was just like, let's get really good at this. And then he saw how the kids would respond to it. And they were just all over it because it's real learning. So synthesis is grabbing that and grabbing those principles and those ideas that Josh was able to explore with and then bringing them to life by putting them online and making it accessible to kids all over the world. So I think that that's why it's so effective because we're just doing what we see that works. And like, Chris was saying, he's tinkering. We're trying things out. Oh, this work. This isn't work. Let's change. And we're coming with a really good solid program. Yeah, the last couple of minutes actually reminded me of the story of Beethoven. So Chris, what you're saying is that you're not reading education books. Josh didn't have to follow the fluff of the school system was able to focus on students. And very famously, Beethoven lost his ability to hear music as he became older in his own career. So because of that, a lot of people theorized that he was less influenced by a lot of the fashions of the time and his early influence was his coach. And later on, he lost his ability to hear this other music. And so he began to have to turn inward and trust the musical structures in his own brain. And once he didn't have the soundtrack of society in his years, he was able to be more original and is now, of course, the father of modern classical music. And I think that there's something here about the nature of creativity. You want to be both an insider and an outsider. You want to be plugged in enough that you understand the system, the conversation that is being had, but you don't want to be such an insider that you become blind to the environment that you're inside of. I think that's right. I think education to do it from first principles, it's education is preparation. So you have to have some idea of what you're preparing for. That's quite difficult. It was easier when people were going to work in bureaucracies or factories like that. It becomes much more clear what you want to do. You see that in the schools with the bells and the rows and all that sort of thing. It's much more difficult in this sort of complex environment. I don't know exactly what we do to train people for the careers that you two have or that I have. But there's some sense that the idea that you're going to have to solve complex, unbounded problems and you're going to have to get used to this process of tinkering. It's conjecture and criticism. You come up with some idea of how you think things work or what you think might work and then you criticize it. And either you do that through conversation or you do it by colliding with reality. And that's at least as far as I can tell. So the education is exactly what you said. It gets too naval gazing. A lot of the ideas are just the same ideas that John Dewey was writing about a hundred years ago or Maria Montessori wrote about a hundred years ago and it's fine. They're fine ideas. But at some point we need to kind of move beyond that. I assume we can do better than ideas from a hundred years ago, at least in some ways. In some ways, maybe those ideals be with us forever. We have to tinker to find out. Education is not the separate thing. You're training the next generation to move civilization forward. You have to understand the world, not just the world of education. I think that's where things go bad. They're sort of crazy idea, but I don't think we should have teacher credentialing. I don't think that should be a separate enterprise. You should try and find people who are successful in life in other ways. Not to say there should be no training, but the teachers should be the ones who are successful. To go back to your example, you're a writing teacher and you're a successful writer. Maybe you're not going to be perfect at doing this, but you're going to be better than someone who studied at a writing teacher's college. I totally agree with you, Chris. I feel like one of the reasons why I was a good teacher was not because of the training that I have, the formal training. I guess I went to NYU for undergraduates. I got my degree in education, childhood education, psychology, but really, that's not where I got my skills from or what made me connect with the kids. It was that I understood kids at a deeper level and you don't need to be a teacher for that. I've met countless of parents. A lot of our facilitators actually at synthesis don't come from a teaching background, but they understand kids. And they take the time to really go down to their level and talk to them and play with them and understand. So you don't really need training for that. So I agree with you, Chris. And that's the controversial idea that not a lot of people will agree on. But it's true. A parent who takes the time can really understand a kid and can play that role. You don't need to send your kid to a teacher for them to be learning, just like you don't have to send a kid to a school for them to be learning. So I totally agree with you. Again, like Lindy effect, it's not been a specialized occupation for a very long in human history. You learn from people who are just a little bit more advanced than you on the path for most of human history. I'm thinking of sports teams and how a lot of teams keep somebody who sort of rides the bench who's older just to be a mentor to all the younger people. And it doesn't feel like mentorship has been institutionalized very well, but mentorship can even be a 12 year old mentoring and eight year old. Absolutely. And the same reason you connect with people who are close to you in time. That's exactly right. The best mentor for my five year old is like a seven year old that looks up to them. And it's like within reach, you can kind of see himself moving along that path. Back to the sports analogy, I always like to think about this. If you know Leonardo Messi, he's like the best soccer player who's ever lived. Barcelona got him at 13, like the professional team recruited him at 13 and then put him in a training program until he's term fully professional at 17. And it's just so interesting to me what we take seriously, like if you wanted to build the best and most compelling future for humanity, then you would take education, particularly innovative education, trying to cultivate the skills to build things that move the civilization forward, building human knowledge. You would take that very seriously. And we don't, but we do take developing soccer players and athletes very seriously. And what we do there is often you start at like a pretty young age and you don't just go play soccer on your own. You've got a coach and you're playing with very stiff competition. That's always something that's been very interesting to me as far as synthesis goes. We talk about this idea of being the enders game for innovators. Well, so we should do what soccer teams do, cast a very wide net and then let anybody come in and give it a shot. And then as you kind of advance through the levels, you level up in the complexity of the simulations and in terms of your competition. And that's how you'll get this just spiraling upward kind of out of control because the competition does that for you. When you're in school, the best you can do is an A or a hundred percent. When you're in synthesis, when you're doing creative endeavors, the best you can do is better than what you did yesterday and it's unlimited. It's so interesting to me. We do this for sports, but we're so lax about education when it's really the generator. All other problems are downstream of education. And yet we're just so incredibly lax about that. I know I'm weird in that way, but I always just kind of go back to what if you really take this seriously. If you develop your kids' minds because if you're kind of doing the same thing that professional athletes do, I mean, I know that analogy is not going to be perfect, but let's at least try to take this seriously. This was absolutely fantastic and how can we learn about synthesis? What are the best places to go? I mean, I think that my show and tell YouTube videos with Anna and anything else. We're open accepting students now between ages seven and 14 and there's a pilot program for kids as young as six. So if you have the six year old and you're looking for more of a full stack school online, then you can apply for that at synthesis.is is our website and we're also we're hiring facilitators, coaches, adult kind of mentors that are part of the program and the same thing the applications at our website and then follow me on Twitter. I'm Chris Menfrank on Twitter. Then you can also follow the Instagram accounts synthesis.is and our Twitter accounts synthesis school and our YouTube channel synthesis as well. We're starting to create content now for everyone to watch. So it's really interesting. And you can follow me at Anna Fabregat 11 on Twitter for more educational content and on YouTube. Ding, ding, ding. Thank you both. Thanks David. Thank you. Hey again, it's David here one more time. Before you leave, I want to share two things with you. First, if you enjoyed the podcast, please rate the show or leave a review on your favorite podcast app. It's a small thing that you can do to give back to the show and it actually makes a huge difference in terms of how many people are able to find it. And next I want to tell you about my online writing school called Red of Passage. It's made for curious people who want to write more, think better and use the internet to spark friendships. And by the end of the five week program, you'll have a personal website, a collection of published articles, and a team of people that you can write with in perpetuity. If you want to start writing online, Red of Passage is the very best place to begin. So that's all for now and thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.