The Pomp Podcast - #1233 Ana Lorena Fabrega on Artificial Intelligence Fixing Our Broken Schools

Episode Date: August 14, 2023

Ana Lorena Fabrega is an entrepreneur, writer, and the Chief Evangelist at Synthesis. In this conversation, we talk about the state of the education & schools, critical thinking, independent thought, what parents can do, what they are doing at Synthesis, and her new book 'The Learning Game.' ======================= Backed by world-class investors, including Google's AI Fund, Range has redesigned wealth management from the ground up. Range delivers a tech-first experience that provides fast, high-quality, transparent wealth management services making it simple to optimize and grow your wealth.With Range, you get comprehensive services like tax optimization, investment management, and estate planning with no hidden fees. That means no AUM fees.Get started today with code POMP15 for 15% off any quarterly plan for your first year at ⁠⁠⁠⁠range.com/pomp⁠⁠⁠⁠ ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 250,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Ana Lorena Fabrega is an entrepreneur, a writer, and the chief evangelist at Synthesis. In this conversation, we talk about the state of the education and schools. We talk about critical

thinking, independent thought, what you as a parent can do to better help your kid become intelligent and become a problem solver, and then what they're doing at Synthesis and how they're leading a revolution for the education industry with artificial intelligence and a personalized tutor. I really enjoyed this conversation with Ana, and I hope that you enjoyed as well. Once you get done listening, go and check out her new book called The Learning Game, teaching kids to think for themselves, embrace challenge, and love learning. Here is my conversation with Ana Lorena Fabrega. This episode is brought to you by Range. Are you day trading, a crypto enthusiast, or a tech worker? Or are you just an overall investing enthusiast? Listen up, you need Range.

Backed by some of the world-class investors, including Google's AI fund, Range has redesigned wealth management from the ground up specifically for us. They deliver an all-in-one, tech-first experience that provides fast, data-driven, high-quality services to anyone looking to manage their money in a modern world. Get all your stuff done in one single place. Tax optimization, investment management, equity compensation planning, and small business support. They handle it all. And the best part is you ain't going to be asked to pay 1% because they don't have any assets under management fees you're not also going to be asked to do quarterly meetings in a stuffy office with a dude with bad cologne and a tie because you can message them whenever

you want you won't be asked to walk in the door with hundreds of thousands of dollars to get started either they don't have minimums the bottom line is this range offers incredible optionality when it comes to managing your money the founders built range for themselves to solve all these old school problems. And now it's available to all of us. Use code POMP15 for 15% off any quarterly plan for your first year at range.com slash POMP. Again, use code POMP15 for 15% off at range.com slash POMP. Anthony Pompliano runs POMP Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a

specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Ana here with me. I thought a great place to start is you've got this new book coming out. It's all about the learning game. But school is a horrible way for people to actually learn. It's more of something that people just do to try to get past the game of school. What's the problem in school? You're a teacher, you've seen inside the belly of the beast, like, what are the problems? And how do we fix it? Yeah, so in my book, The Learning Game, I talk about the difference between the game of school and the game of learning. So the game of

school is what most kids learn to master, right, which is this idea of raising your hand before, you know, so you get that participation grade, you pretend like you're paying attention, you find the shortcut so that you can get the boring stuff out of the way, you do the assignments, You don't question your teacher. So it's all these things that kids pick up quickly in order to appear as if they're learning. And so that doesn't really transfer to real learning, which is why a bunch of kids graduate from high school with a bunch of academic junk that they don't know how to apply in the real world and with no idea of what they're good at, what they want to do, how they want to spend the rest of their lives. And so the learning game, and this is what I talk about in the book, is how do you opt out of that and actually do the things that will prepare kids for the real world? And so in the book, I present sort of what the future of education would look like or what real learning would look like if we built a system that was for how the world is today. And so I go over the way that kids are being taught in school right now and then contrast it to how kids really learn. How do they really learn, though? What is the actual way that they learn?

So they learn when they know how to apply what they're learning to the real world. So if you think about all the things that they're learning in the curriculum, they often ask why. Like, what is this going to serve me for? And often teachers don't have an answer. The reality is that two-thirds of the kids going through grade school right now will end up doing jobs that haven't been invented yet. And so all this time that they're spending in school learning and that we're teaching them is really not that important because that's constantly and quickly changing. It's way more important to teach them how to teach themselves, how to pick up the things and the skills that they need when they need it.

So that's one. The other thing is civilization advances only to the extent that people can think critically and solve problems together. And so the lack of an education system that cultivates the skills is therefore our primary bottleneck. In school, kids are learning how to parrot back answers, how to mimic their teachers, how to do what everyone else is doing, how to learn to pass a test and then after the test they forget I mean think about the things

that you learned in school how much of it actually stuck over the years or how much are you actually using nowadays you know it's it's very rare and one of the big things that research shows that knowledge decays really quickly so unless you are using productively what you learn you know in the next 14 days you forget about it and so what I would see a lot as a teacher and was very frustrating was that we would spend all these hours going through these units and curriculum and tests and all this. And then after the test, that kids usually got good grades, then they had no idea how to apply that to an open-ended problem. And so this was very concerning. I ended up leaving the system trying to find alternative learning experiences. And I came

across these guys that were working at Synthesis, which we've talked about in the past. And what we're doing there is actually remarkable work and what i think will be the future of education and we can talk about that innovative view so my experience in uh middle school and in high school really high school probably was there was two different types of education happening there was the classroom education and then there was the hallway education and i got way more out of the hallway education than i did in the classroom and i remember things that they would teach us like um dissecting the frog right you got to cut up the frog or whatever like you know kids were first of all, we're doing crazy stuff. And so it like took away from the lesson. But secondly,

I remember thinking to myself, like, what am I really going to need this? The other thing I always laugh about is the Pythagorean theorem, right? It's like, who has used the Pythagorean theorem at any point in their life, unless you're an engineer. And so how much of it is like being exposed to that stuff helps you understand like, ah, cool, I get the frogs, but like biology is not my thing. Oh, I get, you know, this, you know, very kind of complex math equation, but you know what? I don't want to be a mathematician. I don't want to go into that type of field in engineering. And so exposure leads you to kind of hone in on what you actually want to do. Like, how do you balance? I couldn't tell you what the Pythagorean theorem is today,

but I could tell you, I knew that after going and studying some of that stuff, I was like, this isn't for me. And so like, I did get value, but maybe not in the way that the school intended. Yeah. Well, here's the thing. The way that school exposes you to the different topics, which of course you should get exposed to them, does not match the way that we learn. And so, for example, this idea of isolating topics by subject and then, you know, every 45 minutes we ring the bell and you need to close whatever you were learning in math and then open up the science and then close science and then open every 45 minutes, that really affects the way that you're consuming this content. The way our brains work is that learning is interconnected. So you

need to be able to synthesize ideas from different fields and understand how math fits with science and literacy and so a way better way to do it is through projects or when you have common like a common theme and then you start to say okay what do i need in order to solve you give kids a problem a real challenging problem and then they're going to need different tools and different things in order to solve that problem and that's the moment where you start introducing them so kids actually understand why they're learning these different subjects and i think that that would actually change the way you think about you know becoming a scientist or becoming you know or wanting to pursue a career in that field. And so that's one thing. And then the fact that we, you know, we

learning is very grounded on curiosity. So you need to be very excited about something in order to learn about it. You can't force kids to learn, which is usually what happens in school. Like you were saying, now we're going to learn about this, but maybe Anthony wasn't ready to learn about that at that particular moment because you were not interested in it. Once you develop an interest in something, that's the moment where you, you know, that's sort of like your gate. And that's when you take advantage of that and you teach kids whatever it is that you want to teach them. And so if we actually, and this is something complicated to do in school

when you have 30 kids and you have a curriculum to do, but if you actually start by where kids are interested in, things are very, very different. Like the results are, and it's something as simple as that. Like the results are very different. They actually absorb the content. They want to keep going because humans, and you know, especially kids are hardwired to learn.

Like we want to learn. We want to understand things. We want to deconstruct things. The problem is that kids enter then into a system where suddenly, you know, they have no choice over the subjects that they're learning, the way they're learning, the way they have to showcase what they're learning. And then they start to associate learning with something negative and then they don't want to do it anymore. And this is really concerning, right? Like we need to cultivate lifelong learners. That should be the whole point of education.

And that's really not what's happening, which is one of the reasons why I left. So it seems to me my experience with school is like very similar to a lot of people who end up going into certain types of fields. Right. If you want to be a doctor, I've got a brother who's a doctor. Like you got to go through the system. You got to get the licenses. You got to go get the education, pass the test. And like there's a whole system that I think a lot of people would say we actually want our doctors to have a traditional education and like kind of get all these kind of pass all these filters that we know that they're high quality. For me, I hated regular school. Like I would spend more time trying not to do the homework than if I had just done the homework.

But if you sat me down in a class that I was interested in, I get A's. And teachers are always like, I don't understand. Like, you get like a C or a D in this class, but you get an A in this class. Like, how is that possible? It's like, because I don't care about that class, right? But this one I actually do. So how does a school kind of morph itself or evolve itself, in your opinion, to actually almost like fit the content and the topics to kids?

Like, should we have people go in and say, you have to do four years of science. You have to do four years of math. You got to do four years of this. Or is it more so like, let's figure out what you're interested in and then just help you go become more like that or learn more of that information? And maybe you'll pick up some science along the way or some math along the way, but it's less of a rigid kind of requirement. And it's more so outcome based almost than it is like the input based system that we have today. Yeah. So a few things here. First, I think that having been in the system for a long time and trying to do things differently,

it's very clear that um the system's broken and it cannot be fixed and it cannot be reformed it's always going to be there i really believe it's going to be hard to get rid of it because parents need a place to send their kids to school you know when they have to work it's a babysitting center essentially and so that's one of the main reasons why i don't think it's going to go away but that being said you know we need to create an alternative system like i'm i'm really convinced at the beginning you know i've spoken to a lot of people that are trying to reform and add things But the outcomes are pretty much the same. The system was created a long time ago for very different purposes. And we can talk about that later. But what I've noticed is that kids, like in school, we spend teachers most of our time trying to remediate kids' weaknesses. And so we determine, okay, Anthony's not good at this and not good at this. And so we torment you and we put you in support groups. And we try to really, instead of doubling down on the things that you on your strengths and the things that you already have a natural talent for and a desire to do, usually people like what they're good at. And so imagine if schools actually focused on making you better at the thing that you're already good at. And then obviously get, you know, they give you exposure to like a general contents in a more effective way. And we can talk about that later to how to do that. But the outcomes would be vastly different.

You know, kids would be graduating from school knowing what they're good at, knowing, you know, having years of practice getting even better at that and so that they can come to the world, be productive and actually be passionate about doing something that's relevant. And so that's one of the big things. Like, I was very frustrated how it was always about remediating kids' weaknesses. It's like, no, like everyone's going to be good at one thing and not so good at another thing. So instead of trying to make everyone great at everything, let's just figure out what they're already good at and make them better at that. So that's one thing. And then the other thing is the way that you expose kids to different. So we've known for the longest time that the best way to learn, you know, hardcore academics is through one on one tutoring. And, you know, we've known this for many, many years. You know, that's why Alexander the Great had Aristotle as his tutor. Now, of course, it's not viable for every kid in the world to have a private tutor. Why not? Well, a one on one human tutor because of resources, because, you know, like it's very expensive to get that. So a lot of people wouldn't be able to. However, the holy grail of education is how do we use is to figure out how we use technology to create a superhuman tutor that can then teach you all these things that you learn in school in hours and, you know, so many years and that you don't really learn effectively and you forget.

And so at Synthesis, you know, we've actually, this is part of what we're doing this year, we launched a tutor, it's called a Synthesis tutor, that is based on groundbreaking research funded by DARPA, you know, the R&D department of the Department of Defense in America, that they're in charge of coming up with all the emerging technologies to use by the military. So they came up with like the early GPS, the internet, early self-driving cars. And so we actually built upon their discoveries with modern AI tools. And we came up with a really interesting solution to this problem of how do we teach kids hardcore academics. And so the Synthesis Tutor, the way it works is we've built upon the best teachers out there, the best tutors out there. So we record these teachers for hours and hours and hours, and we capture their mannerisms, we capture their examples, we capture their stories, because we know that very different from the apps or GPT or all those things that are very generic, the Synthesis Tutor is actually capturing all the human elements that make tutors amazing, and we're putting this and making it available to everyone. So what DARPA discovered a few years ago, and they spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to create this technology, was that, you know, students that used the digital tutor for 16 weeks to learn IT outperformed Navy technicians that had been in the field for 10 years. So this is remarkable results, right? And we're building upon that to teach kids. We started with math this year, but we plan to use it to teach all STEM subjects.

So when you look at other tutors out there, like the reason why tutors are so good is because they take you from the middle of the pack to the top 1%. So that's like, you know, the difference between going to community college and going to an Ivy League. Pretty remarkable. Our tutor is way better than that. It will take you from the 50th percentile to the 99.99999 percentile. And so these are the results that they got back then with the students. And we're seeing sort of the same results right now. And we're very optimistic that if we use this technology to teach all subjects, we are going to have, you know, this is the kind of thing that pushes civilization forward. This is the kind of thing that's really changing the way that we teach and learn. And so what would happen is that your kids would be learning in an hour a day from the best, you know, technology out there, this core academics, and then they would have the rest of the day to actually be kids.

a lot of what's happened with the traditional school system is that we've robbed kids from their childhood. It's the most important and formative years of their lives that they're spending, you know, five days a week for seven hours a day for 12 years stuck in this places where they can barely move. They can't talk. They can't do the things that we know that kids need to do in order to develop as healthy and happy individuals. It's a legal prison. It's a legal prison. There you go. Yes. I can say that you probably can't say that. Yes. Yes. There you go. I do agree with you, though. And so imagine if we're able to do that and and we can talk about, you know, how like I've after I saw the way that the tutor, the digital tutor teaches kids, I was really amazed because in school we teach for the test. And so our whole focus is to get kids to memorize things and then give us back the right answer.

We don't really focus on understanding. And again, really hard to do when you have 30 kids to stay with them and be infinitely patient and stay with the kid that doesn't quite get it until he or she gets it. It's really hard to do that. But with the tutor, what we've noticed is when a kid gets something wrong, the tutor's thinking about, you know, all the possible and diving into all the possible misconceptions that you have. And then it will help you get to the right answer and discover the right answer on your own. So kids are walking away with the depth of understanding that they wouldn't get anywhere else. That's why it's so remarkable. And this is what real tutors do. And the tutor that we created, you know, it's meant to imitate the best tutors out there.

And so what I often, you know, we started with math this year and our curriculum architect is called Dr. James Tanton. So he has a Ph.D. from Princeton in mathematics. So he's obviously an expert in his field. He is the ambassador of the Mathematical Association in America. He's written 25 textbooks in math. He has won 10 awards of teaching excellence internationally. So he's like the real deal. And when you meet him and you hear him talk and the stories and he makes you fall in love with math. This is like the teacher that every parent would want for their kids. And so now we've able to capture Dr. Tanton through this digital device. And he even says it himself. It's incredible how the digital tutor ends up being even better than me because it progresses over time. It captures all your stories, all your example, your mistake, and it becomes even better than the actual human itself. And so imagine if you can give this kind of education to your kids, how much more effective would it be, the learning process, and then all the options that they would have after school to actually work on the things that they're interested in.

Working projects, if they want to start a business, they can go ahead and do that. If they want to play sports, if they want to just be kids and have free play, whatever it is that they want. So it's really promising, and I'm very excited about that. So when you have this individual tutor, this kind of one-on-one tutor, it's a machine. It's not a person, right? The kid knows it's a machine. Do they, are they more like sympathetic? Do they change their behavior

because it's a machine versus a human? Like what are some of the things you all are seeing there? So it's incredible because the kids forget that it's like a digital tutor. And you can all, you know, you don't have to hear it from me. You can try it for free on synthesis.com slash tutor. It will blow your mind.

Like it throws you memes. It says, be right back. I need to use the restroom really quickly. It has like sounds, it's talking to you. It gives you a workspace where you get to like try things and it doesn't work. It talks to you. It gives you stories. It remembers the things that you guys talk about.

And it's like personal things about your brother, about, you know, this trip that you had. It will remember and bring it back to you to the point where kids actually feel that it's a real teacher. And I'll give you an example. At the early days when we first launched the tutor, we received an email from a really angry parent saying, you know, there's a bug. and the bug is really affecting my daughter because she's actually come to believe that the tutor is the real teacher. And so when the bug is saying something nonsensical,

my daughter is freaking out because she thinks that the teacher is having a psychotic breakdown. And we're like, whoa, okay, first, of course, we need to be careful about the bugs and we need to work on this. We can't go too fast that we break things. But second and most importantly, whoa,

like she actually thinks that this is a real human. And so that to us is the most important element, because again, there has to be a relationship. You need to care about whoever's teaching you something in order for learning to actually happen. And so it's really remarkable. Like you actually feel like you're learning in this case from Dr. Tanton. And so another example is one of the kids was going through the orientation and was clicking on the things. It's actually for the parent and the parent was behind him. And the parents like, yeah, just click yes, just because I want to hear. And one of the questions was, parent, like, do you feel like your child sometimes struggles to pick up on math concepts, you know, right away? And the parent was like, tells the son like, well, you don't, but say yes, just because I want to see the answer. And the son turns around and he's like, Mom, why would I lie to the tutor? I can't lie to the tutor. So they actually feel like there's a real human there. And you can, again, try it yourself so that you experience. I've never seen anything like that. Like one of the things that I was most hesitant about AI was like, I was like, a computer can never replace a human. Like that cannot happen.

Like for me, when I was a teacher, one of my biggest qualities was that I was able to foster this really deep relationships with my students. They knew that I cared and that incentivized them to learn. So I was like, how can we possibly replace that with AI? But after trying it and realizing how we've really captured the essence of a human, it's just remarkable. What are teachers saying about this? Are they scared by it? Do they hate it? Do they like it?

So it's obviously a thread for many teachers because that's where we're heading. And it's going to eventually replace a lot of the teachers. I haven't particularly spoken to teachers about it. Are you not popular in the schools anymore? Well, no. No, I actually wouldn't say that because I really always talk about the hard effort that teachers like. Teachers are not the problem. The problem is that teachers are stuck in this traditional school system that won't let them do the things that they naturally want to do to help kids learn. And so I really don't think it's, I actually think the teachers are working really hard to try to do the right thing. But then, you know, we get burned out by all the things. Yeah. But I think that, you know, eventually this technology will be available for schools that are, you know, willing to change their ways and try something different. It will be available to parents.

It will be available to kids, even to adults. Like it's just, you know, we're trying right now a curriculum on complexity science, which, you know, usually don't learn until, if anything, until like college. And we're teaching it to eight-year-olds and they're grasping the content. So really this technology can be used for anyone to learn more effectively and in a more entertaining way. When you see these kids coming out of these sessions, how much of it is I learned two plus two equals four, right, from a math perspective, versus they can go and now they're doing something in their day and they can recall it, they can apply it, all that kind of stuff. Like, is it possible to, in these sessions, also teach them the real world application like you were talking about earlier, the schools don't have, where now you can almost like model out different scenarios, play different games, those types of things? So everything we're teaching them, like if you look at the way that Dr. Tanton has structured the math curriculum, and again, this is available on our website, you can see the breakdown of what we're teaching and when he it's very, very different from any math curriculum that I've used in all the schools that I've been to, because it's actually grounded on, okay, let's start with the history of math, like, where do numbers come from? So it's, it's kind of crafted in a way that it builds your understanding. So we don't teach you like two plus two equals four, we go more into the general concepts, and you end up learning that. But we actually focus on the deep understanding, because kids have to build a number sense in order to be able to execute all this like formulas that then, you know, maybe a little bit boring. But if you understand math, well, then you're able to do all that. So that's what we're focusing on. So for example, the lesson that's available online for anyone to try for free is how to learn binary numbers. So it's like how computers work. Again, you sometimes don't learn this until college.

And so the way, I mean, I taught binary numbers in one of my schools and it's so different from this lesson. Like I didn't even understand it. And then I didn't realize that until I tried the digital tutor and I was like, oh my God, this makes so much sense. And so the way that it works, kids don't really realize that they're learning math. It's more like we're learning something that we can immediately use to understand something better in the real world. Does that make sense? And again, you need to try to kind of see that. But everything is relatable. Everything is relevant. There's an explanation, unlike in school, for everything we do. And the interesting thing is that that's one of our products, that's a digital tutor. But for both the digital tutor and the simulations, the complex team simulations, that was our first product where kids learned the soft skills that they don't learn in school that

they're going to need in the future, like how to communicate, how to problem solve, how to work in teams, how to react when something, you know, under pressure, how to make trade doves, how to engage in conjecture and criticism, how to fail and pick yourself up and pivot, like all these things, and how to figure things out when you don't have instructions. All these things are fundamental for you to do whatever it is that you're going to do in the future. It doesn't matter. And we're not teaching it in school. And so both of our products are grounded on this counterintuitive insights that kids want to learn and kids want to be challenged. And so in school, they give you a speed limit, right? They put you by grades. You learn up to

here according to the curriculum. Kids are bored. Some kids don't get it. At Synthesis, we have no spit limits. So we will push you as fast and as far as you're willing to go. And this is very, very different. And so everything we do is based on real challenges that kids have to solve real problems. And when you think about it, what do we know about the world that our kids are going to inherit that's constantly changing and chaotic, right? What do we know? We know that kids are going to have to work in groups and collaboratively with people from different backgrounds, different cultures, different ways of thinking. We know that kids are going to have to grapple with complexity that doesn't come with instructions, and that's hard to figure out real problems. And we know

that they're going to do both of these things on their own. They're not going to have an adult or a teacher or a parent telling them what to do or instructions. And so how do we prepare kids for that kind of future? We need to give them practice working in teams, working with different groups, and we need to give them practice grappling with complexity. If you think about what most of the innovative companies do, they all tend to do the same thing. They align teams on a mission that everyone understands, and then they hire the kinds of people that are going to make the team better. Few things in the world are achieved alone, right? Like if you think about our biggest problems, the way that we achieve things and we find answers to our complex problems is by working

collaboratively and being aligned on a shared mission. Think of SpaceX, think of NASA, think of Apple, right? So we often talk about the remarkable people that are changing the world, but it's really the hard work of dedicated teams of people that are making a difference in the world. So how do we give kids practice, constant practice, working in teams to solve society's greatest problems? And that's what we're doing at Synthesis. And I think that that's the kind of education that we should be focusing on. I mean, I believe I've invested in the company multiple times uh and think that you guys are on the right path here one of the things with the tutor that's really interesting to me is the ability to change teachers how many schools did

you go to so i went to 10 schools growing up okay so i went to six over 12 years and i always in hindsight looked at it as you kind of are in the lottery like what school did you end up in who the teacher was and if you're in fifth grade math there's no changing the fifth grade math teacher like that's who you got and if they're great awesome if they're not great that's just the luck of the draw but also uh they could be good for one student and not good for another and so it's a matchmaking almost to some degree with this it seems like what you could basically do is if a student is using a tutor and for whatever reason they're not really kind of compatible or they don't feel like they're learning you eventually over time could have multiple tutors you just

swap it out with the press of a button and there's a different tutor with a different style or or different, you know, kind of humor or whatever to really engage the kid, right? Yeah. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together

to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most.

Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. We actually have different voices, different accents. And, you know, if you prefer a female teacher or a male teacher, like we actually have that. The basics of it, it's still Dr. Tanton and his ideas and the way that he teaches. But the other thing that's amazing is that the tutor is adaptive. And so it will catch on the way that you think

and how long you take to solve a problem and where you're stuck. And it will, over time, obviously you can't see this after one session. Your kid has to go through it multiple, you know, through multiple sessions for it to start mapping out, you know, how does Anthony learn? And then it will teach two years style. It's really personalized. And I mean this. Like when I worked in schools, we would often get like, oh, this is the new app and it's personalized learning and it will pick up on you. No, it will track how many right answers you got and it will, you know, but it's not like what we're talking about, like real adaptive learning.

so eventually what we want to do is spot this incredible teachers you know in physics in math we would have the math one in science and all these subjects and capture everything that and it could be multiple teachers right like you were saying and capture the way what makes them so remarkable and so great because remember that in order to be a good teacher it's not only being an expert in your field you also need to understand the art of teaching and so finding that person is difficult but once we find them and we're able to capture their essence it can be multiple again um that's really where the magic happens right and then with this adaptive programs and again we're just getting started this is just going to get better and better over time um but we really

think that we're going to get the results that the DARPA team got with this you know when they first tried out this technology and it would be you know we're solving the biggest problem in education right now and so it's really remarkable where can people go try the tutor if they want to try it? Synthesis.com slash tutor. And you can try, again, the binary lesson is available for free. And you can also look at the content that we're coming up for next year with all the different topics. All right. Now I want to talk about this book, The Learning Game, Teaching Kids to Think for Themselves, Embrace Challenge, and Love Learning. One of the things schools do a really good job of, or at least they try to, is teaching you what to think. It sounds like this

book is much more focused on how to think. And as I've read it, I think the critical thinking, the independent thought, all of these pieces of thinking that people understand are important, right? If you ask someone like, hey, is critical thinking good? They're like, yes. If it's independent thought, good. They're like, yes. But no one ever teaches you how to do it. And so what do you think is kind of the path to being able to teach that critical thinking and independent thought, whether somebody is a kindergartner, they're a high schooler, or even an adult in many cases still needs to learn how to do that. Oh, absolutely. So again, you said it right. Schools are not teaching you how to think they're teaching you what to think. That's why we're so

focused on this one size fits all curriculum. That's why we're focused on, you know, assessing everyone the same way and teaching the same subjects to everyone. But actually, in order to teach kids how to think you have to do things, you know, the opposite of what we're doing in school so you need to give kids opportunities to question things and you need to teach them what's the right way to question things and you know schools have sort of this aversion when kids question the teacher because it's like it's considered disrespectful or like a threat to authority and the reality is that oftentimes we don't have the answers they're like well why are we learning this we don't even know because we look at the content and we're like i don't know

when you're ever going to use this in your life and so the way to sort of like react to that is like don't question things but really when kids question when we question things we innovate like that is how we get to, you know, different answers to different problems. And so teaching your child how to be a skeptic, and really engaging, you know, that's one of the main things, like letting your kid question everything and teaching them how to question things. Also surrounding them, unfortunately, school is filled with conventionally minded people. Again, because we train them that way, everyone's doing the same thing at the same time. And so trying to find alternatives outside of school where your kid is exposed to and with the internet this is really easy right there are

a bunch of learning communities with kids from all over the world so you're not just stuck with the kids in school and you know that are very similar to you but you expose them to kids that will challenge their thinking or adults you know that will challenge their thinking that will you know that have different biases that you have to detect and you again one of the best ways to do this is to engage them in solving problems because that's where you know you hear this kids talking and communicating and all these things will come up and you let them you don't intervene so a lot of what happens in school is that we're trying to um script everything and give them instructions for everything and make sure that they are on the right but really one of the main things is just

letting your kid you know struggle letting your kid get confused letting your kid and then that is where he starts or she starts learning really what you know how to do it on their own when you don't intervene when you don't give them instructions and so a lot of it is you know when you think two very important skills that kids will need in order to learn how to think for themselves is how to figure things out for themselves and how to fail and pick themselves up and keep going. Like these are two things that you're going to keep doing for the rest of your life. We in school learn not to fail because, you know, you make a mistake and you get that bad grade that it's in your report card and then it haunts you for the rest of your life.

But if you think about it, failure is going to be part of your life forever. And when is a time where you should be able to learn how to fail? When you're a kid, when the stakes are low, right like when it doesn't mean like you know if you start to practice how to fail when you're an adult you can mean a failed marriage a failed business like that's catastrophic failure how do we avoid that by giving them practice over and over and over again a great way to do it and people are against this but video games if you look at video games kids are constantly failing and they pick themselves up and they're like okay what did i learn what do i need to do next time to get better and so they keep going and they keep going and they're getting that exposure to failure video

games are not the only way, but it's one way. So you expose kids to failure at an early age and you walk them through how to react when they don't get things right. And what do they learn about it? So you kind of like reshape the way that we think about failure and then figuring things out. Like something that we do really well at Synthesis is we throw kids in these simulations and we don't tell them what to do. And the kids are so frustrated because they don't know what to do when you don't give them instructions. It's incredible. Like they get super frustrated and we're like, you're going to have to figure it out because in the real world, nobody wants to hire somebody that they need to tell you what to do all the time. They want people that are proactive,

that figure things out. How can we expect for kids to know how to do that if we don't give them practice? So that's another thing that you do to teach kids how to think for themselves. What can parents do to make their kids smarter, right? Like you're talking about making them anti-fragile. I know there's a whole chapter in the book and kind of having skin in the game and things like that. But what could a parent do that increases the probability of their kid being a problem solver, being intelligent, all of those things? Like obviously go sign up for synthesis, right would be one thing but like what else can they be doing uh kind of in their home or when they're interacting with their children yeah so first find out if because the system does work

for some people so if your kid is thriving in the school system then great you know that works for them but the first thing is figuring out if if that's the right way of learning if you don't see them excited to or wanting to keep learning or being challenged in the appropriate way then you need to find alternatives you need to find and nowadays there are a bunch of things that people are coming up with in the alternative education space that are really appealing and that could work for your family and so it's a matter of having the courage to venture out and try something different and if it doesn't work you try something else but for example um you have a lot of forest schools nowadays where kids are actually learning in nature and learning about

things that they come up with so they're not excuse me what is that they're called forest schools like like go into the woods well yeah but also it could be the beach like they're called forest schools but it could mean like you know wherever you are but outdoors and instead of kids learning from a curriculum they're learning from things that they encounter in nature or things and so it's it's immediately relevant to whatever it is that the kids are learning so it's like a persistent field trip it's like a persistent field trip and believe it or not damn my parents were screwing up why they sent us that exactly and you can imagine kids are active kids are moving around they're socializing they're actually learning from real things and so there's no

textbook or curriculum or no it's like it's you know it's very unstructured and some people are like oh whoa like no but do they learn math or they just learn like how to like start fires Well, no, they do. They do learn the subjects, you know, through what they're encountering. And then they go and they meet and they have like a circle and they actually go over and there is some direct teaching that happens, but it's like based on whatever it is that they are encountering. So that's an example of something very extreme. to do when a bear comes right right um it's it's it's more relevant than that but but anyway what i'm trying to say is when people um look at the you know they're like oh now okay i understand the system's broken i know that it doesn't work but i can't homeschool my kid and and i'm like well you need to think about education as a spectrum on the far left you have you know the traditional school system and on the far right you have homeschooling or world schooling which

are the parents that travel with their kids which i think is fantastic or unschooling where parents actually don't do anything about it and they just expect their kids to learn on their own so and you have you don't have to go you know all the way to that extreme there are a bunch of options in the middle that you can actually choose from and and you know find an alternative that's better for your family and so what i talk about in my book i give parents alternatives i give parents options but then i don't necessarily try to convince them you know you have to take your your kid out of school tomorrow i mean although some of them may but i i kind of paint a picture of why our current school system

is no longer meeting the needs of our kids today and why it's so important that we course correct this now and why we need more people working on this now so that more alternatives can be available. And now with all like the school choice and all these things, it's really giving parents the possibility to engage their kids in different learning alternatives.

And so I would say, yeah, like having the, like a lot of parents are scared that they will make a mistake and they're like, oh, this is my one chance. But the reality, no. And, you know, and I've been through this system when people ask me, what am I going to do with my kids? I'm like, I'm not concerned about because I already know what happens in school and there's very little learning. So whatever happens outside of school is going to be more productive. I was going to say every parent does homeschool, right? When your kid gets off school at whatever three o'clock, four o'clock, four thirty, whatever time school gets out these days

and they go home, even if you work three jobs and you see your kid for 10 minutes a day, you're teaching them something. They're going to emulate you. They're going to mimic you. They're going to do something. They're going to extract some sort of information from you. And unfortunately, sometimes it's bad information. Sometimes it's good information. But I think that everyone homeschools their kid to some degree is an idea that most people don't think of it that way because like, no, I send my kid to school. But if we could switch that thought process, it probably would have a bigger impact on them, right? Absolutely. And I think that one of the first steps to do that is to think about, well,

where did this system come from? Because a lot of people are like, oh, I went through the system and I turned out fine. But if you really stop and you think about deep, you know, deep thoughts of your school experience and you realize how many hours were wasted, how much more productive your time could have been spent as a kid if we did something different. And when you stop and think about, well, where did education come from? Like, does it make sense for our needs today? I think that's when parents start to be like, oh, because education used to be the job of parents and teachers and like one-on-one tutors and the church. But this started to change about 200 years ago in a region of Germany called Prussia. So at the time, you know, they had been defeated terribly

by Napoleon. And so the government leaders were like, okay, we need to take charge of educating the younger population so that they're ready for this not to happen again, to fight war. So the goal of education was to train kids for the military so that they never got defeated again. And that was what actually started the basis of our modern school system. So this idea of specialized buildings, having a squadron, which was a teacher that would teach the subjects, extended school year, mandated attendance, a standardized curriculum, like all these ideas came from that. So again, education was used as, you know, nation building. And so that started to change with World War Two, when, you know, World War Two revealed the importance of a nation's

manufacturing capacity. And so the United States obviously dominated because their assembly line and factories could produce better and stronger tanks and bombs and guns and everything than their enemies. And so the goal shifted from training a generation of soldiers to fight war to training people to be manager, you know, to manage factories and work in the assembly line. So the United States led the next development of education, you know, in history. And so the theme was standardization and efficiency. So they would group kids by age. They would put them all through the same curriculum. They would hire specialized teachers to teach its subject. They would extend the school day so that they would maximize output. They would reduce things

like you know talking and playing and all the things that make you know socializing so that they would minimize waste and anyone who did not feel fit the mold was labeled as defective so literally the whole system was you know modeled to you know a factory and so then around 1960s we had this whole idea of like oh let's use standardized tests to sort of measure if things are working and so it would work like um kind of similar like when a manufacturer wants to see if car is working. So this assessments would use, they would use them as quality control. And so they would serve for administrators to know, you know, as reassurance that their system was working and to keep schools accountable. It's very hard to see the benefits of the modern school system

in the United States. So over, you know, in the past 50 years, standardized test scores have improved only by a small margin. You would think that a system that was designed to train factory managers would advance a nation's productivity and standard of living. But actually, since the 1970s, everything, you know, the rate of improvement has actually declined. So nowadays, half of Americans can't read beyond sixth grade level. And if you look at the confidence in public schools, it's at an all-time low, like it's even below government and big businesses. And if you look at our most famous inventors out there, like, you know, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and Oprah Winfrey and Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, they're all famous for dropping out of their

degree programs. And their stories are so powerful because they all highlight something that every student feels like, what's the point of school? Clearly, it was designed for a very, very different time for a very different purpose, yet we continue to use the same model. And if parents realize this and realize that they're not preparing kids for the kind of world that we're living in, I think that they would say, okay, this is priority. I need to find alternatives. I completely agree. Where can we send people to find this book? The Learning Game, Teaching Kids to Think for Themselves,

Embrace Challenge, and Love Learning. That's what it looks like. Where can we send people? Yeah, so you can pre-order the book on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, like anywhere, thrift books, anywhere where you order books. The book comes out September 5th, so in a month. Yeah, so you can find it.

And when people read this, and if they sign their kid up for synthesis, what is the idea? Is it that it replaces school, or it is a supplement to traditional school or whatever they're already doing. At Desjardins Insurance, we know that when you own a nail salon,

everything needs to be perfect from tip to toe. That's why our agents go the extra mile to understand your business and provide tailored solutions for all its unique needs. You put your heart into your company, so we put our heart into making sure it's protected. Get insurance that's really big on care. Find an agent today at Desjardins.com slash business coverage.

So for Synthesis, right now we're working on building that alternative model. Eventually we will have a full stack replacement for the K-12 model. Right now we have two, you know, we're trying to do that one remarkable product at a time. Right now we have two products, a digital tutor for the hardcore academics and team simulations for the soft skills. And so you can start by that as an enrichment program. eventually you can actually sign up and it will replace all of your kids education and in terms of the book well the book is for you know teachers and schools that are looking to change their ways students or kids that want to fall in love with learning again and parents that are frustrated

with the options available for their children and really anyone who wants to unlearn those unhelpful lessons taught in school so that they can make room to learn the things that will actually serve them in the real world and so my hope with the book is that whoever reads it will gain confidence to rethink education for themselves to venture out and try new methods old and new actually because a lot of them are old ideas that are still relevant today um to have the courage to unlearn the things that again are not helpful and hopefully find an alternative that works for their family so i have one last question for you i was texting with your husband before this episode. And I mean, he's an amazing guy. What is one thing that you've learned from Fernando

over the years that you will forever remember? So it's interesting. It's interesting because my husband is very, very different from me. Actually, the school system worked wonders for him. And so I'm here like the rebel educator trying to do things. And now we're trying to raise a kid. So you can imagine our conversations at home. But I think that he's taught me um, the value of balance and really finding, you know, it's not just my ideas and the way I think about things. I always have to contemplate the counter argument. And I think that, yeah, he's taught me to have a balance and to, and to see both sides of things. If he had to give you a grade on your ability to have balance today,

what do you think he would give you? I think he would give me a B plus. Okay. We'll have to ask him. All right. Thank you so much for, uh, for doing this. Where can we send people to find you on the internet um you can find me on twitter at anna fabrega 11 um you can find me on youtube also anna lorena fabrega miss fab you can find me on instagram miss fab underscore learning lab um and you can sign up for my newsletter fab fridays on sub stack awesome all right thank you so much we'll do it again thank you so much for having me