The Pomp Podcast - #552: Chrisman Frank on Teaching Critical Thinking & Problem Solving

Episode Date: May 11, 2021

Chrisman Frank is the co-founder and CEO of Synthesis, a new educational experience for children aged 8-14 that focuses on teaching problem solving and critical thinking skills.  In this conversation, we discuss the industrial education system, why students are suffering, how teachers fit into the system, why the old model doesn’t work, how Synthesis works, the current traction of the business, and what parents are saying. ======================= BlockFi provides financial products for crypto investors. Products include high-yield interest accounts, USD loans, and no fee trading. To start earning today visit: http://www.blockfi.com/Pomp ======================= Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp ======================= Gemini is a regulated cryptocurrency exchange, wallet, and custodian that makes it simple and secure to buy bitcoin, ether, and other cryptocurrencies: https://www.gemini.com/ =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now, let's kick this thing off. Chrisman Frank is the co-founder and CEO of Synthesis, a new educational experience for children aged 8 to 14 that focuses on teaching problem-solving and critical thinking skills. In this conversation, we discuss the industrial education system, Why students are suffering How teachers fit into the system Why the old model doesn't work

How synthesis works The current traction of the business And what parents are saying I really enjoyed this conversation with Crispin And I'm a proud investor in synthesis So I hope you really enjoy this one Before we get into this episode though I want to quickly talk about our sponsors

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opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Chrisman here. Today, we are going to tell you about the future of education. How are you? Doing well. How are you? I'm doing great. Let's first start with the problem in the education system, which I think is plentiful. There's two ways that we can do this. We can either say the politically correct stuff and explain how the school system does a great job educating students, or we can go down the truthful path, which is they actually might be doing more damage than good.

Which path do you want to go down? i think it's uh you know it's important to state that you have basically like a bad system here that systems are separate from people that a lot of people you know i met a ton of people working in the system i don't actually know anybody who defends the system people who work in it don't like it uh they're as much trapped as anybody else um but i do agree it's maybe less politically correct to say but this this uh what i call the industrial education complex what a system that we have now that's that's the system that looks like you know it's set up like a factory right it's it's set up to many people say this like meet the needs of the industrial age so you get kids in

there you teach them to follow rules and procedures most people say that's uh that that is to train them to work in factories and that's only half the truth actually part of it is to get kids to be ready to work in factories and learn to obey the rules and operate by a bell so you can keep the machines running and the other part is to teach them to operate large bureaucracies before digital age like bureaucracies are essentially distributed computers every person in that bureaucracy is like like a chip they have no agency they're just meant to follow out follow instructions follow procedures obey the rules obey the rules is the number one number one kind of raison d'etre of that system and now we're transitioning into the the information age

and we just we need a new system the old one is not going to adapt I mean I think it's people been talking about changing it for a hundred years now it's maybe you know been a little bit off but it needs to change and it needs to change quickly I have kids you know I as soon as they were born it was like I started kind of scheming on like how am I going to keep them out of this system and uh and what does a new system look like when we have you know unlimited access to information and so before we talk before we talk more about the education system you've been working on this stuff for a while explain kind of your background and some of the work that you've done so that people don't think that there's just two dudes up here sitting you know bashing a system

that we don't understand yeah yeah so i um you know before before synthesis i started uh i started an online tutoring company um this is about about like eight eight years ago or so so it's a little bit uh world world's not not quite ready for that yet you had to most of the work was just like convincing people that you could learn online once they did that it worked um but it was just it was this big you know mental hurdle which which covid has kind of wiped that out now so now the timing is is much better to do something in online learning um but i had uh after starting that that really wasn't going anywhere i met uh i met the guys at class dojo the founders of that company which is now you know like a couple thousand users at the time and it's since grown to like 51 million

it's an app for uh teachers to communicate with parents and so through doing that you know you're working on basically like you know plugging into the existing system and and trying to make it a little better and and you know it does that right like teachers can communicate with with parents Like that makes the kids and the families like more individuals to the teacher and not just like, you know, cogs in this giant machine. So I think that was, you know, that's like an important step. And, you know, through doing that, I got to talk with probably thousands of teachers, principals, administrators, parents, and really kind of, you know, wrap my head around the problems with the system and, you know, the opportunities. And, you know, eventually kind of came to the conclusion that I would be just didn't didn't really fit my personality. right like i i'm more like let's blow things up and start over let's rethink this from from first

principles uh so i spent about eight years there and uh ended up meeting josh my co-founder when i went down to uh visit at astra school which is the school that he built with elon musk on the spacex campus and uh that kind of started the process of you know getting my mind rolling on the next thing so class dojo is in a generalized way an evolutionary approach to improving education what you're doing now is much more revolutionary right it's much more disruptive and kind of changing of a paradigm versus just simply improving in small steps the existing system inside these schools it's pretty insane like i don't think people realize again like what happens on a day-to-day basis and um you know when you and i first started talking like the first thing

that hit me in the head was i always joked that like i don't know first grade through like maybe they still get you to do it in like eighth grade is literally you put a finger over your mouth and you put a finger in the air and you walk down the hallway right uh and it's just like this weird thing of like be quiet sit still do what we tell you uh and the entire purpose of you being here is so that at the end of the year you pass a end of your test and if we do that that's successful uh it doesn't matter if you actually learned anything doesn't matter if you had fun nothing like why is that the model it's it's the logic of the industrial era right where human beings are are just kind of like items to be processed right and it and it's it's uh it's dehumanizing to

everybody involved like but particularly i think the real damage is done to the kids because you're just you're essentially like trying to grind down their humanity so they can operate within this larger industrial system and you know now the world the world's changing like that that old that path might have actually worked for people like it it did work for people if you put your head down and you follow that path and you went to a good college and you get a good job at a consulting firm or on wall street or as a lawyer or something like that you know it's not not a bad way to go you could get uh you could do well like that you could buy a home you could raise a family and you know maybe it's not that bad but it's it's the world's not that way anymore it's

actually you take you what you're doing you're you're an individual no one can do exactly what you do you do this weird mix of things that like nobody predicted and there's more and more that is the way that's the direction of the economy it feels like the old system is built to teach people what to think not how to think is that a fair kind of framing of it yeah i think i think it's it's uh you know it really you're trying to get you to rely on on authority right like there is some authority and they're going to be able to give you the truth and you know independent thinking is uh is not something that's valued because that that blow up the industrial economy you need people to kind of buy into this this thing where you're like a cog that's going to go work in a factory or

bureaucracy and so it's uh that you know they're there it's going to be hard to uh kind of unwind that set of ideas within the existing system i think we need to just rethink it based on what does the world look like now that the internet is kind of coming into its own so in a normal day for i don't know i think the average age of a kid in synthesis is like 10 years old like third fourth grade uh when you think about their day the kids are free to do whatever they want for 30 minutes a day an hour a day yeah this is crazy because i'll tweet stuff about the the existing system and like my kind of problems with it i think that you're way too nice by the way you should dial up the tweets a little bit it does seem like the more what you call controversial ones seem seem to do

better people you know there's at least some people that resonate with that but the comments i get is is crazy which is like uh kids need school to be socialized and i just it hit me the other day because my son because we we moved during covid so we didn't have a lot of friends in the area we moved in so we put him in a school like a you know normal normal kind of school it's a private school but even private schools go by the same kind of logic and he's in there and he just like you know he he hates it he like fakes a stomach ache to like get out of going to school at least initially and then then he starts kind of he starts being a little more eager to go and i'm like well what's your why do you want to go to school now and he's like you know today's

a pe day so we get pe today for 30 minutes or i want to go you know i've lunched with my friends and there's like 30 minutes where i can like talk to my friends and so it just occurred to me like this we're doing this horribly evil trick on kids where the thing that they crave most is like that social development social interaction and we gate it we give them 30 minutes a day and then we gate it behind like sit in a chair for another seven hours and just kind of listen to someone talk at you and do this work that you're not interested in and you don't want to do but we entice them with like this is the only way that you can be around other kids and it's horrible and i think we will look back you know once when we when we blow that system up and we'll be like i cannot

believe that we institutionalized our children like that i can't believe we did it that's the way i feel i'm gonna say this and people are gonna get mad but that's okay uh because i think it to be true schools are essentially acting as uh the same way that a prison would act for a non-violent offender right meaning that there is uh segregation of them from people that they want to talk to hang out with uh they are allowed to interact with each other for certain periods of time but other than that it's basically what the top-down kind of hierarchical structure uh wants them to spend their time doing so uh in a prison go to recess or go to the yard go eat go here in the classroom like you follow this very regimented process and it's desire to engineer an outcome

One is a control-based outcome. The other is a, hopefully, rehabilitation outcome. It almost feels like in some weird way what we're doing is putting kids into the summer-regimated environment, and we're trying to engineer a rehabilitation of them from a normal human, a normal child, and get them to conform to what we want them to do at the end. Is that crazy to think of it that way? I think, I think that's, I think that's right. I mean, it's important to, you know, realize that there's, there's this continuum, right. Between individual freedom and liberty and kind of a conformity and we, and we need, there's some degree of conformity that's good. Right. And I would just say it's a, you know, prison is kind of the extreme end of the spectrum where you're trying to control someone's every movement. And, and, you know, you have like kind of anarchy on the other side, which is, you know, that's not great either. you need some kind of like rules and norms to get, uh, to get things done in the world. Uh, there's, there's incredible benefits to coordination. Um, but you know, my view, the schools, uh, you, maybe you needed to do with that, like to get this industrial economy that we have that produces goods, you know, incredibly cheaply and has raised the standard of living globally. Um, but now I'm not, I'm not sure we need that. Right. I think computers have kind of taken on a lot of like the rote repetitive work and, uh, and you know, there's, there are

fewer jobs where you can go be told what to do and do it and, and like be considered to be doing a good job. And so we need to rethink that approach. Like it is, it is like a prison in some sense. And, and we need to, you know, I think we just need to like push it a little bit far in the other direction. So one thing you keep bringing up that I think is important is it's not so much that, uh, this is broken because it's always been broken. It's almost like the goalposts moved, right in terms of the skill set that's needed the um the way that people needed to think like all of that has changed and therefore you can't use the system that got us here to get us where we need to go right yeah i think that's right and i think also also i i do think it has gotten worse like

all the teachers i talked to they're like this has gotten worse it wasn't it wasn't like this like 10 years ago so you had these things where the system starts to break down a little bit and you'll be kind of familiar with this with the financial system and like Bitcoin and everything. It breaks down a little bit. The authorities respond by trying to control things even more. And so that's where you get these, you know, these in, in the U S you have programs that come from the department of education and they're Republican,

they're pushed by Republicans and Democrats and they're like raise standards. Let's have a common core. Like let's, let's, let's do what we've been doing, but let's do it better and faster. And that's made things much worse. the testing has gotten much worse and i think that is that's a sign that that that this this kind of facade is starting to crumble right it's like people are aware of it the teachers are aware of it they don't want to be doing what they're forced to do the kids realize it because i think kids are pretty smart they can see they they could see that this is not going to get them where they want to be in life even from a young age i really believe that they're just like why

why am i doing this the the world looks nothing like what i'm doing here even from like a really young age i think they can tell that what's the analogy of like sand in someone's hand and as they go to like grab the sand it actually pushes it out and so you start squeezing it more and more right the sand i haven't heard that yep um and so i think it's important to separate like you said the system from the people the teachers for the most part from what i understand and the administrators they want to do the best they can for the kids right they're not doing it for the money everybody knows like it's it doesn't pay a lot of money to be a teacher right so they're not doing it for the money i mean you meet some people who are just like you know they're just phoning it

in and they're just like this is you know this is like a job where i get summers off or something like that right i mean there are those people it's just it's there's three million teachers in the u.s right some of them are going to be bad people but for me like the vast majority i met like they want to do this because they want to have an impact on kids they care about kids and they basically just don't let them do what what they want to do like you instead it's like you're forcing these kids to learn math you're grading them you're not really you don't have the time to treat them as individuals or see them as individuals so would the teachers change the system if they could for the most part absolutely yeah it's it's a really funny thing there's just

i think the biggest enemy i wrote an essay about this like what comes after the industrial education complex. I think the biggest enemy is just inertia. I think no matter how high you go up the chain, you know, you, you find very few people who believe what we're doing now is a good idea and that we should keep doing it at any level. What about like the actual education? So we've talked a lot about like structure and regimen and, uh, essentially making kids not be kids by telling them to shut up and sit down and, you know, don't move and all that stuff. Uh, are they actually learning important information like two plus two still equals four and i think that'll happen for a long time uh so kids need to know that right so like math and science to me feels

like that's like the most objective thing in terms of uh people think that there's certain topics within those disciplines that should be taught and it's pretty easy to know hey you either know two plus two equals four you don't but then there's a whole bunch of other stuff that goes into an education where um do we feel like they're actually learning the information or is it simply just rote memorization get to that final test at the end of the year basically regurgitate it all on the test and then like literally come back a month after the test and they don't know any of it yeah i think paul graham just i think he pretty recently wrote an essay about this like that you you know people aren't learning because you study for tests you don't need to test to just be like

okay what did you learn over over this course right the fact that you're studying for it means like you don't you don't really know it well enough in in that form and so it's like if your mind is like a sieve like all this information that's not relevant just just wash it just goes right through right and uh yeah so that's that is going to be very difficult to fix in the existing system uh one of the things i could say is we the world's like evolving you since we've gotten to the information age evolution evolution of our ideas evolution of like what's important is taking place much faster than it ever has and so you know you'll see it with like the bitcoin community these institutions that are kind of there they you could start an institution and

run it kind of more or less the same way for for you know a couple decades or like a century and it would be all right now things are changing much too quickly in this this like giant system that we have it's just not going to be able to change quickly enough just never going to happen So we need like an internet native education system, something that can change as quickly as the world changes, something that can evolve as quickly as the world is evolving now. So somebody else who realized this was Elon Musk. Yeah. Walk me through the story of what was his realizations or your understanding of his realizations and like what did he do to build this school on SpaceX's campus? is i think it just started with like uh you know i don't want to i don't know his kids do well

personally but i think they're you know you might be able to infer that they're uh they're quite intelligent right and uh so so what would give you that idea so so i think that's that's not like revealing too much to say and uh you know he had them in this school which was uh which was this in a gifted school in los angeles and was just i think started with like an intuition like well this just isn't working like i don't know exactly you know what what to do but like this isn't working and so josh our you know co-founder of synthesis was a was a teacher at that school and if you can imagine this like your teacher you know elon walks in like parent teacher conference night and it's like hey i really don't like this school i don't think it's doing a good job you're

like sorry elon musk and uh but elon follows us up with like let's just do our own thing like what would you do if you if you know we just gave you the resources and you could just create it from scratch because you know my kids like you like what you're doing like what would you do you know let's and josh like that you know that sounds amazing a billionaire just walked in my classroom and said that i could start a new school yeah and do it and you know josh has the same point of view right he's like this system even when you're at this you know you can imagine elon's got all the resources in the world he's got access to any school that he wants la is one of the biggest cities in america right and he just can't find what he's looking for uh because

these you know it's all kind of like the same system they're just doing what the public schools are doing doing it faster and you know calling that innovative and so he gave an interview with um with chinese television vision station you know i think it was like seven or eight years ago now before they started the school and uh two two main you know elon's famous for this first principles approach right so those first principles in education are just stop doing the industrial system thing stop treating the kids like everybody's going to learn the same thing at the same time stop segregating them by age and enforcing them through this like linear curriculum so that was number one and number two was make it problem focused rather than tool focused so

school tends to divide things up into subjects and they're teaching you like a different tool in each subject so his analogy is if school is going to teach you to be a mechanic or an engineer they'd say here's a course on wrenches here's your course on screwdrivers and the way that you should do it is here's an engine to take apart all right so there's a problem how are you going to solve it well you need to learn how to use this tool you need to learn how to use a screwdriver and a wrench and that is much more meaningful and engaging to kids but to everybody like we're engaged in problems uh the analogy i was used like i don't like accounting accounting is not really attractive to me but like i i know a lot i actually actually kind of do like it because you

need to do accounting to you need to know a little bit to solve this problem of like how do you build a company how do you bring your ideas out into the world and so i think you know people are the same way if you try to teach these things in isolation just much harder to learn it just it doesn't stick with us and so josh took that idea of being problem focused and started creating these games and simulations because like okay what what are kids going to be engaged with you say engagement is the most important thing they're going to like they like games you know they like simulates things they can play with things that are like interactive and so he starts creating these uh for the school and uh and he adds this element of like team sports to it right so it's

like you collaborate on a team and then you're competing with the other teams and uh you started operating the school like that i think i went down in year year three or four to visit and um you know it's like i turned a little tour of the school and it's lunchtime we're sitting outside uh you know it's california it's warm the kids are playing like dodgeball outside and then there's a group of kids that's inside gathered around a table like standing up the computers in front of them and just shouting these really complex arguments at each other and i turned to the teacher i was eating with i was like what what's going on here and she's like oh i'm sorry that's that's synthesis you know the kids get a little bit obsessed with it i was like this is a school

thing they've never seen kids act like this and then what they're saying it just sounds like really complex they're like 10 11 12 and i'm like they're the way they're speaking with each other the quality of their analysis is you know it's equivalent to what we're seeing in the office like building this tech company which is like scaling remarkably and i and i just had this feeling like this is this is the future like i'm seeing the future of education i've been to all these schools like as part of my work at at dojo and you know i wasn't even excited to go down to ad astra because i was like i just i feel like i've seen it all right but this this thing this synthesis like stuck with me and you know my son was two at the time and so when the initial kind

of shock of it wore off my stomach just like sank because i'm like i can't get this for him right if you're not if you're not a billionaire with your own rocket company or you're not like a rocket engineer there's no way to get your kids in there and even if you were an engineer at spacex it was like a 1 in 25 chance right because everybody wanted to go there and so i got like a little bit depressed because i've like seen the the promised land of education there's like no way to get to it so i started uh i started you know josh and i kept up like a conversation friendship we connected over this idea that kids crave complexity right that what you do in school is try to remove that complexity make everything rules-based break it down into tiny chunks

and he was like you give them more complexity they crave it like they want it they can they can feel their minds like leveling up through that and so we kind of built a friendship and would talk about like you know what the future should look like tried to get him to move to the bay area where i live to start a school and uh you know you're working for elon you can't take on side projects for the most part um so right when the pandemic hit actually that kind of you know there's this wave of like online learning people are open to it because they you know they're familiar with doing it you know zoom classes at their school and so it wasn't a thing you had to sell people on anymore they believe that you could learn that way even if the schools

are not doing it well and also elon's kids finished and they graduated the school and so josh became like a free agent and i was like hey like why don't we why don't we put this online let's see if it works online and let's see if it works with the kids of people who are not rocket engineers and uh yeah so when a kid goes in here and i've seen it and uh i invested in the last round today we're going to announce a new round uh some big believer in this but what exactly do the kids do they come in and is it on zoom like how does the product work and what are they doing when they're quote-unquote in class yeah yeah it's it's uh it's a little different uh one of our our kind of slogans is embrace the chaos and kids sign up we're like you know get ready here's

the zoom link just get ready get ready for chaos right so they come in and a lot of them are used to the existing system there's you know where there's rules there's instructions you're kind of told what to do and we have a facilitator there would be about 15 to 20 kids on a on a zoom call and the facilitator is like welcome we got a prop we're here to learn to solve complex problems together that's the critical skill that's what we're going to teach you guys so you can build the future whatever it looks like and we're going to put you in breakout rooms on teams and you're going to have a problem to solve figure it out and then every hand goes up and they're like what what's the problem like what what do we what do we do exactly what are the rules am i not

allowed to do we're going to give you the problem it's going to be chaos and you're going to figure it out so you put them in the breakout rooms there's a there's a game like uh or simulation that kind of comes up on the screen and they've got to figure it out and it's uh and it's crazy it's chaotic our first couple sessions we had kids uh some of the kids would like be in tears because it was so frustrating um but then they they get through it and they figure it out and it builds this confidence where like you took on the unknown you took on the chaotic and you made sense of it and you figured it out and now you just want more and so those are the parents that write to us the kids that were like the most upset the parents that write to us and be like

this has changed her mentality now like she's now when she sees problems she's like she's attacking them she's on offense like she's not afraid anymore like it's pretty incredible that you can do this just through these like simulations on zoom but it's uh you know it mirrors life right the legacy system that we talked about in the beginning is all about root memorization no critical thinking no problem solving like literally sit down shut up don't move two plus two equals four okay end of the year what's two plus two equal four great job go to the next grade like you know what's crazy by the way is that when i visited so many classrooms and uh my realization was that i think kids are learning about 30 minutes a week if you go to school for

you know like 35 hours or so i think they learn what they could learn in 30 minutes i think it takes really a week to give them 30 minutes yeah i know that sounds extreme but you know if you're if you have kids and they're doing like zoom calls just go listen in on the zoom calls or go see if they'll let you visit the classroom and look at what they're doing and i that's like my i've been to a ton of class i'm talking not talking about like only like really you know kind of underfunded public schools i'm talking about like private schools like top-notch public schools the kids learn very very very little in school anyway i wanted to interject that but that's good carry on because the exact opposite of that is what synthesis is doing which is saying

it's the idea we don't care if you know what two plus two equals four is in terms of like the memorization what we want to do is give you a problem and by the way if at any point you have to do math you're going to figure it out because you need the math to solve the problem right and it's much more focused on this like problem solving critical thinking independent thought leadership communication uh teamwork like you know i could go on and on and on and this litany of uh different skill sets that i'm going to describe sound a whole hell of a lot like what anybody who runs a business wants to hire for right it's somebody who's got problem solving complex uh thinking skills you know first principles leadership teamwork communication

etc and so just on the face of like the structure it's complexity right it's that industrial systems You're trying to simplify things so that humans can act as parts in this bigger machine. The machine itself is complex, though. And now, you know, where the world is going is like the more you're able to handle complexity, to manage complexity, to make sense out of chaos, to synthesize, you know, those are the valuable jobs. That's the valuable skill. It's humanity's most valuable skill, working together to solve complex problems. That's Elon's canonical example, right? he's and it's good at individual level and good for the civilization elon you know arguably he's

done more for to move civilization forward than anybody alive and and he's also you know the richest man like kind of incidentally right so it's a it's the most valuable skill i would argue that you can give to your kids and and if enough people do this it will actually move the civilization forward like we will be able to accelerate human progress so what i think has blown me away is you can design all the best games you can get kids to sign up you can build a great business whatever it's hearing the kids talk these kids talk better than literally people i worked with at facebook 100 right and when i first started talking to you you said something to me and i didn't believe you you said that you took some kids from synthesis who had played these complex games and you put

them in competition with i think it was berkeley computer science kids uh engineering engineering graduate students okay oh engineering graduates and so even better than like mechanical engineering something like that yeah and they played these games and it was a slaughter yeah this was a massacre but it wasn't in favor of the engineering graduate students it was in favor of 10 12 you know 13 year old kids yeah why is that why is it that somebody who has reached the pinnacle of the traditional education system and you know by all uh kind of traditional metrics has you know achieved everything because what are you good at right if you're if you're if you've done really well in that system what are you good at it's not necessarily solving complex problems in chaotic

environments quite the opposite you're really good at following the rules and solving these problems that are scoped for you and so they have the same problem that kids have you know when they're transitioning into synthesis for the first time is they're used to the way things working being like let's be told what to do you know get the right answer on this and with the chaotic environment with no one which is the way life works right no one can really tell you precisely the rules or precisely like how to win the game of life like you need to figure that out for yourself and so the kids who've gone through synthesis they're they're used to that and these you know people who are the pinnacle of the existing system are kind of you know they're

they're the opposite it almost is exactly what paul graham's talking about with like learning to unlearn right and his whole thing i think is uh i think he's the example of why combinator when people show up who are really good at school they say to paul like hey what do i do to fundraise right and what they're expecting him to say is okay send 100 emails have 20 meetings say you know this script and then you get a million dollar investment and say okay thank you paul right and they go and they 100 meeting or 100 emails whatever and they go through the system instead what he says is like, no, like dummy, right? Like that's not the way to do it. Instead, the way to do it is like build a product that works, right? And like that people want,

and then like every investor will come to you and they'll be knocking on your door to give you money. And so it's very much like a prescriptive type, you know, again, just rote memorization, here's what to do, go follow the rules and do it versus actually getting at from a first principle standpoint, what is the goal of the investors and what is going to elicit their interest and so he says that a lot of times people who are good at school have to unlearn what they've learned over the last however many years it feels like you guys are almost getting to the kids before they actually learn some of that stuff right like you're almost like cutting them off and saying hey before you go down this path and get you know uh kind of indoctrinated

into the industrial education system yeah we're going to teach you a different way and kids really gravitate towards that yeah i think that's right i think we're i think it it's a little bit of like dose of freedom and the kind of confidence you get from like whoa no one told me the answer i just figured that out that out and then you get the meta lesson oh i can just figure things out on my own that's crazy school basically just grinds that idea out of us and it takes a long time because it's really counter to human nature and you give kids a little bit of dose of like how things could be and and that that sticks that i think i think even just a little bit might be enough inoculation against the kind of indoctrination that you'll get in school

to keep your mind open and just internalize the idea that you can solve problems. And this is what innovative people do. They figure things out for themselves. They figure out how the game works on their own and they figure out how to break the rules in a way that benefits other people. And that's what we want more of. That's what society needs more of. So this works. And as the founder you can't say that i can say that as an investor and we can just use metrics to prove it right so you have the idea once the pandemic kind of hits you guys do a little testing you really launched the subscription-based product that we know today in november of 2020 yep yep first week in november yeah okay so november 2020 how long does it take you from november

to a million dollars in annualized revenue i think it's i think we hit it uh you know like december 31st so like about two months okay so two months from zero to a million dollars in arr if we then look and uh you raised a seed round yeah right and uh it was myself others i don't know who wants to be said who not pomp and friends yeah let's say some some friends some of you will know uh but all individual checks yeah and then we announce it we did in a very specific way we'll talk about that in a second you now fast forward to uh may are now doing over three million dollars in annualized revenue that's right so when you do that you've raised five million dollars series a 50 million dollar post-money valuation yeah and

when we look at this why is it that you're able to go from zero to millions of dollars of annual recurring revenue in such a short period of time when it seems like every other business in the world struggles to find product market fit and scale revenue like that all happened in six months and you're very quickly continuing to scale and sign up more people like why is it working well on the product market fit side i mean you have to remember josh has been a teacher for 10 years it's actually kind of rare for an ed tech startup to have a an experienced teacher and like a founder role from from the outset and what was he doing he's he's inventing new things for elon school so for seven of those years you know he's working for elon which is pretty uh

pretty hardcore job right like you're you're you know you get a lot of anxiety and you're just trying to you make sure that you keep that job and like and do a great job with it so for seven years he's running these like experiments with the kids there and refining the ideas and he's got this you know intuition about about what kids need and and want and so it's uh we did not we didn't not exactly start you know just just six months ago we had all that background knowledge and the challenge is like translating that to an online environment right taking it from in person kind of like uh on on paper you may be using excel spreadsheets to keep score to like put it put it online into software um so that's the first part of that and then second you know i think we go back

before november we um anna anna fabrega um joined us she's uh she's our chief evangelist and she's got this you know i think the world's biggest twitter following may be focused on new ways to to educate kids so she was a teacher as well like spent four years as a teacher you have to face face with kids every day you get that intuition for what works when you do that and when she we met on twitter brought her in to check out some of the sessions and she was like wow like this is this is it so she wrote like a thread about the company announcing it on twitter that brought this influx of customers that's how we got from zero to to a million in the first two months and also you know connected with with you which is uh which was which is you know just just kind of move

access to more of these like networks people on twitter so i think it's like if you were going to do this and you're going to go sell it to schools and sell it to the existing system one of the problems is you know the the as much as the administrators like district administrators would want to do the right thing for kids you know it's they don't have the same kind of anxiety that a parent has right like if you're sending your kids to school and you feel like this is not the right way to educate your kids you're looking for something else and you're eager for solutions for that and so when we tap into these networks on twitter it's you know people who follow you or people who follow anna they're looking for new ways to do things they're used to turning to the

internet to solve their problems and just get the right thing out in front of them they're like it clicks and uh off to the races i want to talk about fundraising strategy um as far as i know you have zero institutional venture investors in the company we have a little um we have uh sam teller who's elon's former chief of staff during during like the model three days which had to be one of the craziest jobs in the world um so he's he's a venture partner in their val he works at valor and it's a valor venture partners are in but like as not as part of the fund right it's like seed and you know angels effectively so yeah apart from that all angels okay and the reason why i think you and i kind of saw eye to eye almost immediately i think we

literally have like a five minute conversation we're like yeah we shouldn't take any venture money we should just go take it from you you just ruin you ruin us on traditional vcs right because they're like call you and you're like all right like how much how much you need i'm like well you know we're looking to do x and you're like okay done like send me the paperwork i'll sign i'll give you the money and it's like all right and also by the way here's a bunch of my friends who are going to invest too and are going to help you with the narrative so it's uh it'll be tough to go back so we essentially have prioritized people with i would categorize it as three things people who co-invested in this round are folks with large online audiences yep have very specific

companies that they have built and run that have very large distribution or are very well versed, usually as founders, in things that you as a CEO, as you continue to build the business, are going to go through. And so it feels like distribution was never a thing that investors brought to the table. Now they do. Advice usually was, but it usually wasn't directly from the investor in many cases. A lot of times it was them just connecting you to these people yeah and then when it came to hiring and these other things it was just a numbers game like hey how do we get you in front of enough candidates and you find the best one and you hire it and so it almost feels like in some weird way because now all of these people either have

personal capital or they have their own like angel funds or whatever uh we've been able to assemble how many investors on this last round oh i think it's something something like 45 all right so 45 people, give or take, plus or minus 10 or 15, not either side, 45 people that, as we announced it today, are likely to drive way more impact than what a traditional investor could do. Is this going to just be the norm, or is it specific to companies like yours that are consumer-focused, that have a very kind of outlier-type story where it's when people hear it, they're just like, oh, of course, that's a thing.

um and so you kind of need almost like a company's product market fit here you almost need like investor product fit and so your company is specifically aligned with this type of strategy whereas others might not be yeah i think i think that that's right i mean it's of course the story the backstory is is helpful for attracting attention um but we were inspired by um by primarily mateo at eight sleep and what they'd done on on twitter to promote the product and then austin all red at lambda school and they're both investors in this round now um so you could you could see what they'd done you could see that it worked it's it's uh you know you're effectively uh we we cannot always as humans just like think through everything from principles ourselves we

have to rely on people that we trust and so you can think of the kind of shorthand for the round is like who has trust at scale like it's not it's not that you have an audience that's so valuable it's that you have an audience who trusts you so and you you have skin in the game you cannot mislead them you'll lose your audience they're not going to follow you anywhere so you have the skin in the game and all the other investors who have audience they have the skin in the game where like if they're recommending something to you right it's it's something that they actually believe in because the incentives are aligned there and it's you know i just think it's the most obvious thing in the world these vcs are essentially selling cash which is a commodity

and it's not scarce the scarce thing is that trust at scale and so vcs are sort of getting unbundled the same way the education system is going to get unbundled and uh you know it's a it's an interesting kind of new world i don't think we're going to be the last company to uh to do it this way i think this is going to be the norm uh i'm betting my career that you're not going to be um i think another interesting part of this and i want to say any names uh they can say if they want uh is we've got some very very helpful venture capital investors they just did it personally rather than through their funds and that was kind of the thought process right was they individually could be very helpful let's get them in the fund itself is almost added

bureaucracy that's unnecessary yeah i i think that's right i mean i just think increasingly people don't know who the who the vc funds those those names don't matter as much as the individuals or the individuals if you look at people who have companies and then in like the founders are on twitter or you know the principals are on twitter uh it's the person that gets most of the attention right people want to connect with people not institutions and so that's uh you know i to me it doesn't seem like particularly insightful you can just look at twitter and like see what's going on it just feels like the most obvious thing in the world to me um there's another factor with us specifically where we've been cash flow positive like pretty much since

the beginning like i started off i wasn't sure if it was going to be because we didn't know like it's only like rocket engineers kids doing this in the in the whole world like 30 hand-picked like rocket engineers kids and so i'm like i just have no idea if this is going to be like a venture business like is this going to is this something that's for everybody we had no clue so i kind of like funded it myself initially and wasn't didn't want to raise the money because didn't want that pressure before we kind of figured out the shape of this thing and so that helped because we were cash flow positive so when we go to raise money it's not about the money like we we would have gotten you on the cap table for free you only told me that after i had signed i mean the money's nice

but it's it's you know it's basically so the seat around a set in the bank and like we've you know we just got a little bit more money than uh than we originally raised because it wasn't about the money like you cannot buy the kind of like the kind of trust like the kind of audience um that you have and that some of our other investors have right it's it's much more like a world based on trust and i think it's a that's more honest like truthful world to live in and yeah i'm excited about it i think either the first or second call we ever had you literally told me you're never going to raise money and i was like all right i'm gonna have to convince this guy to raise any money like that like usually founders are like begging for money right they're like you know i'm gonna

a ton of money. And you were just like, yeah, we don't need the money. We're profitable. This thing's just going to go. And so I think that it's very obvious. Look, the product, the way that you're approaching the education, everything is very different. The fundraising strategy has been very different. We can layer in one other aspect that's very different, which is the way that we've announced this stuff. So in the seed round, did you talk to any reporters? Or was it just the investor base and podcasts essentially that did all the distribution yeah i didn't even consider it that's kind of i think you you brought it up one time or maybe maybe a little bit after the seed round like all right we'll get some mainstream press i think i was like why why is

it and you can see right like because i don't we should share this chart right i've texted to you and texted some of the other investors there's like there's the pomp effect right where i show people the graph and i'm like tell me where pomp made his announcement it's like the most obvious It's just this massive spike that's like, you know, it spikes and then it comes down, but it's at a permanent higher level, right? And it's completely insane. Whenever I show it to people, they're like, yeah, wow. Okay, like traditional VCs.

There's no one that's going to be able to do this for you. It's Austin Reif, who is an investor, texted me. I guess you had sent him the chart. And all he responded, I think, was, he said, saw the chart, LOL. Right? It is crazy. just like okay like yeah this works and i think part of it also you go back to like this trust aspect is when you lose control of the narrative you actually can lose control of the trust with

the audience or with the potential customer base as well right because to me it's uh you get one shot in hey here's what it is here's how it works here's why you should care and actually that's not what the goal of traditional press is traditional press is you're trying to get legitimacy right the distribution comes with the legitimacy but you're trying to get validation and legitimacy and hey we were featured in x or y publication yeah but i think you're right in that like on the internet would you rather get featured in a mainstream press or mentioned by the person in your industry who's got the largest audience and the most trust with that it's actually almost like that individual now is the same thing as like the trade publication used to be right like they have the audience and

they have the trust and the engagement and therefore if you look at it almost like rather than just general distribution but targeted distribution yep they have more targeted distribution than the mainstream or yeah the mainstream is like i mean i don't i don't think i read i don't read anything in the mainstream except like people post on twitter to like dunk on it and show you show you how they're lying or like misinformed right so there's this uh audience because it's kind of like a psychological alignment with the audience which i i i wasn't sure when we when we brought you on as a seed investor like i knew anna's audience like it's okay people who are interested in the future of education like i think that's going to work pretty

well to drive in customers but what about an audience is primarily like investors like bitcoiners but i i had the hypothesis that you know bitcoin is like there's just energy behind disrupting this legacy financial system so you kind of have to be you know a free thinker to uh to consider you know if you don't trust the banks you definitely don't trust the schools exactly that's the most succinct way to put it right so so i thought there might be some psychological alignment with the audience there and that's uh you know that that's proven right and those are the people we want like we don't want the people who are like uh you know wins the test can give my kid a grade on this can you you know can you make it basically more like this

the principles of this existing system like we don't we're not going to do that and josh been really helpful there because he's used to dealing with like people who who want that like like very wealthy people who are like you know wanting to do things a certain way and he's just used to being like it's not the place for you right like you you can join or you cannot join i don't care but like we're going to do it this way and by this is the way elon wants it done so like if you don't want it that way, then you go do your own thing. That's fine. When you think about where this is going, uh, right now, most of the students, not all of them, but most of them are between the ages of let's call it eight and 14 based in the United States or North America. Is that fair to

categorize at all? Most. Okay. Yeah. The students from all over the world. I was going to say there are students though. Uh, when I made the seed investment announcement, I literally had a dad who messaged me from india and said my kid is in the course and uh i love it this is amazing right and i remember thinking to myself based on when i know the courses are run that's not a normal time that a kid is awake in india right no yeah yeah that's right and and so like it's just a date it's just one piece of data out of a whole plethora of them but this idea that wait a second, this is so important that kids are staying up or waking up earlier or whatever to go do this in other parts of the world. Makes me think that actually, if you can figure out

logistically, you can go serve a very high percentage of children in the world with this type of education. And you don't have to replace school. It can just be supplemental for a very long period of time. But from a pure ROI, you're going to get way more out of this than you are traditional education system is that fair to categorize how you think about it yeah i think you know josh one of his principles is like you you kids have a limited amount of time just like anybody else if you're going to you know if you're going to do something for their education you're the best possible use of their time right if you if you do that um throughout their kind of childhood they're just going to be in a much better position compared if you do something

where it's like sitting in a desk and you're you're wasting hours and you're not learning anything useful like it's it's criminal when you if you really think about it i really do think this is you know you might disagree you might say it's the financial system but i think this industrial education system is the single largest bottleneck holding back human progress i think people in the future are going to look back and be like i cannot believe we institutionalized kids this way and as you said it's it's it's global right different places they have different school systems but they're all for the most part kind of built on this industrial model and your audience is from all over the world and and our customers are from all over the world and i don't know if

we're talking about the same guy but that's there's at least one parent in india that's like yeah the kid is this kid wakes up at 4 30 a.m and i'm not forcing him to do it he's just like i really want to be in synthesis i'll get up at 4 30 a.m before school and and take the synthesis courses so that's it's pretty amazing for people to have that kind of excitement about it there are two problems in the world today that every other problem can be drawn back to and it's money and education and that's it and the people who control or influence the money system are super bureaucratic frankly they are full of shit as a system and their internet has exposed them yep the system that teaches education is super bureaucratic they're full of shit right

and the internet has exposed them and what i think we're getting is we're essentially getting disruption in a very unique way because i think that what's really made me be you know kind of so positive on this and just like yes this is a a solution doesn't have to be the solution but a solution yeah is you can look at the school system and you can be like this is broken and you can do one of two things you can be the victim or you can be the person on offense trying to fix something right and a lot of parents i think actually like just go search it on twitter like i literally did it i went and i searched and like school sucks right and i typed that in twitter you will find a bunch of parents being like school sucks right my kid doesn't learn

anything or like you know you just go use these phrases and then you're like okay well what are you doing about it and to me it's almost worse like they know that it doesn't work but they're not doing anything and some of them just don't have another option right like literally that's what they have to do that's good work they don't have any other options in their hometown whatever it's hard i mean even even for me like we've we were you know we're doing fine financially my wife you know is a stay-at-home mother and so we've got the time and the resource to figure this out and it's hard it's still hard completely agree but you josh others are choosing to go do something about it right and i think that like that's where you actually get solutions the other thing

actually almost makes it um more bureaucratic in a way because now a school spends you know what used to be one percent of their time dealing with like customer complaints right like parent complaints now it's three percent of their time five percent like at some point it's actually twenty percent of the school administrator's time is spent with like parents complaining that it doesn't work and it redirects energy from actually like teaching the kids whereas with this you basically just say hey we have a different option like you know don't complain like vote with your feet and vote with your dollars as bellagio says i think yeah apologies like concept of of exit is like something i think about a lot i'm calling this like the there's sort of like a soft exit

from the system right now where you know there's myself included for this year like we have our have our one child in a traditional school um but you know i i tell them just like don't you know bring a book and like read when they're doing the lessons like so you can get something out of it and then we'll do synthesis and we'll learn. There's no way I'm leaving your learning, your cognitive development up to just who happened, the people who happened to live within a 30 mile radius of our home.

The best is gonna be on the internet and that's what I want you doing. So I do think that that's kind of like how things are gonna evolve. There's obviously, it's important to get kids together in person. But what's really exciting is if you unbundle these things you can get them together in person to be kids like school could

just be recess like four or five hours a day i think that'd be fine if you then spend some time reading some time doing things like synthesis that are really kind of compressing your the time that you're spending like focused on learning specifically just just compress that time and uh and then you've got time to be a kid time to explore like all the things that we want our our kids to do um so yeah it's crazy to think about how different the world would look if everyone was able to learn independent thinking problem solving critical thinking skills early rather than 90 plus percent of society literally just being told what to do and what to think and not how to think it's impossible to imagine i mean literally impossible to imagine right because

all these kids like some people their psyche kind of survives the existing system like you you survive with some innovative ability intact and like obviously people do right but it's it was a nightmare for the teachers that dealt with me while i was in school yeah yeah me too and i i feel bad for uh for a lot of the trouble i caused in school but uh but but yeah you know some people kind of you know they're able to maintain that kind of spirit of like human ingenuity in spite of the system like what if you have a system that encourages that well you literally can't imagine when you start getting you know a million kids a year like educated in this way or 10 million 100 million the things that they will create to improve the society literally unimaginable

yeah incredibly exciting time to be alive you have three children that's right what age there's seven almost five and almost two all right two older ones are boys and then are you going to take them out of traditional education and put them in synthesis exclusively is that a possibility in the future that synthesis is a replacement or does it stay supplemental like how do you just think about the evolution of this yeah we're exploring it so i like i announced this on twitter that my oldest who's uh who's seven is going we we you know canceled the uh tuition for the following year and he's doing synthesis with uh we call it synthesis junior so that's like six and seven year olds it's traditionally been you know only only up you know age eight so we're

we're experimenting with doing a little bit younger um we had i think 1300 applications for for about 15 spots um when we put this out on twitter and i just kind of told everybody like all right you know look skin in the game like i'm burning the boats behind us like this is this is how i'm going to educate my kids so you can at least know if you enroll your kids like it's i'm not selling you something that uh i don't believe in myself like this is my kids are going to be in this so i'm paying attention to it right i'm paying attention to the experience and uh and yeah it's uh we don't have it figured out yet but it's uh but it's thrilling and i think there will be there will be at least some part of synthesis like anybody can do for like an hour or two a week

and then there'll be some part of it that's like uh more like a full stack online school you're not going to want to answer this but uh would we be better off like does school do more damage than it does good the traditional like industrial education system is it a net positive or net negative for students okay compared to what right i mean like there's i think maybe you just uh you know you just let kids roam free on the streets is that going to be better like probably in some places that'd be better and probably in some places that's going to be worse so i you know you're always trying to compare these things the real question is like can can we do better is there going to be progress or is this just the way things are

and i think what what i tend to think about there is uh there's this idea like the lindy effect right so the ideas that have been around for a while will tend to survive a little like a while longer new ideas will you know just statistically are more likely to die out quickly i think it's important people realize the system is a hundred years old that's it it's not been like this for all of human history it's a hundred years old and you know maybe i think it probably passed the midpoint of its usefulness maybe sometime in like the 1960s 1970s and i think it's like on the decline now so i i think we're we're going to see progress like and it's funny like even silicon valley like investors are supposed to be investing in the future will have this idea that

like no it just it just feels like same way the financial system feels it's like it's going to be this way forever because you grew up with it that way but if you take a longer view historically this is this is unnatural it's it's a new idea that we should you know segregate kids by age and have them learn as if they were machines and it's not going to last so i think there's going to be progress and uh yeah i just thought of this idea so i'm just going to say it we should live stream me playing against some of the kids and see who wins and i say live stream because if i lose i'll never admit it so you'll at least have it so other people know but i think like that is part of it right is that's how you teach people like this works is yeah you could literally bring

in like bring in the venture capital so things that doesn't work like cool play the 13 year old yeah right when the 13 year old smokes you you're gonna walk away with your pride kind of hurt a little bit but also like oh wait maybe my kids should be in this well it's this is why we start with younger kids right so something i think about pretty often is there aren't any there aren't world-class athletes or musicians who start like in their 20s right but that's the way all of us are when we start you know if you're starting like building companies or innovating creating things like most of us just the early part of our life is just it's just kind of wasted and then we have to pick it up later and uh you know your your brain your body just don't they

don't adjust the same way after after childhood like adolescence like there's famously like you if you don't acquire language by a certain age like you you can't do it right so your brain is more plastic so it's kind of like frightening that these kids are kind of like uh they're raised in complexity if you're going through synthesis like you're there this is just going to be the norm for them and the more complex we make it it's kind of like this in enders game like they they keep uh increasing the difficulty of the games until the kids are just like way beyond what the adults could do because they realize you know the kids brains are more plastic they can they can pick up the new ways quicker than we can so it's compounding too right like that's right i

think if you take two you know eight-year-olds and you start them out in year one and the eight-year-old that goes through synthesis is five percent better than the eight-year-old who went through the traditional system okay it's five percent some people are like who cares right but if you extrapolate that out and that continues right and you get compounding and synthesis that you don't get in the kind of traditional system by the time they're 15 that's not even close like that's the difference between harvard and community college right like i mean in the old system like that's literally the complete opposite ends of the spectrum yeah on just pure time and kind of persistence in a different system that ends

up being better yeah and i think that's this is we're gonna start sharing more of this stuff like we've brought on this new round of investors so we've got kind of like a good a good solid platform to reach people uh we've shared just like one video so far of a 10 year old called emmet right he's only he's been in synthesis for like six months right it's not not like and he sounds better than a lot of people on twitter yeah and in the comment we get a lot is like well you've just uh this is like just some some rich kid or some like this is like they picked like you cherry genius kid like like no you just you have no idea what kids are capable of and we're going to start putting more of this stuff out there from a variety of kids like we're you know

we're not cherry picking it's just that you know they they pick things up quickly and if you give them that uh that sort of like playground for the mind to to play around and they stay engaged with that the results are are shocking and that's what i saw when i was at ad astra i was seeing these kids in like year four of doing synthesis. And I was just like, what the hell is going on? Like I, I couldn't imagine it. Um, I remember sending, sending some like audio of that to my friend and him being like, these are, these are like second year law students, right? There's no way these are like 12, 13 year olds. And it just like literally just couldn't believe it. And, uh, yeah, it's that, that's that compounding effect. Right. I think that it is exactly what the world needs,

which is why i'm excited to invest and i think the craziest part for me is like forget all the company building stuff forget all of um the like excitement around uh building a team and scaling it and all that it's just like when you teach kids this like even if you said to me hey we're only going to teach 100 kids that's all we're ever going to be able to impact there's a very good probability those 100 kids go on to do some pretty crazy shit in the world that we all end up pointing at and being like you know what like that person's special and it's not because you're doing anything uh or you've got some special power you're just literally teaching them a different way of thinking that actually ends up lending itself to being very very effective in this kind

of chaotic uncertain you know problem ridden world and so in some crazy way i think most people are going to make the mistake of evaluating the value and the impact of synthesis from uh how much money do you make how many students came through the program like whatever but instead you can look at it as like what is the increase in productivity in the world from the students that went through the program and we won't know that for a long time but if it goes the right way you know if the next elon musk goes through the program and you end up you know building a very very successful business is it more important that the business was successful or the next elon musk was taught how to think the right way and do it like actually the student's impact is going to be you know it's

going to weigh out weigh anything that a business can do by itself yeah absolutely i think all of our other problems are downstream of education right so if you can fix that you can solve you know clean energy access to clean water we can get flying cars finally we can get uh we can get all all in the future can be um can be amazing and like kind of unlimited in an infinite ways and it's it's like things have gotten better in human society over the centuries since since the enlightenment began and you know we can we can improve on that though we're not we're not done like things can improve in a limitless fashion and i completely agree with what you what you say about like the the value of it is in we don't this the go back to what i said earlier

solving complex problems together that's what makes humans unique that is the most valuable skill we know there's some general component to it because people like elon or like jack dorsey can succeed in multiple domains we don't know how to confer that skill or cultivate it at scale yet and if we can figure that out it's to me it's like a game changer for human society it'll be like a before and after moment bitcoiners like to say fix the money fix the world synthesis may just start saying fix the education fix the world it's basically the same thing that's right all right where can we send people if you're if you've got a kid between the ages of what eight and fourteen uh you can so you can apply now if you're if you're six uh six or seven but there's

just know that there's like a wait list so if you want to get in that i'd recommend like going ahead and getting your application in now and we'll be accepting on a rolling basis but yeah if you're between eight and fourteen you can uh you can enroll um there's a little bit of a wait list but you'll get in fairly quickly and the website is synthesis.is synthesis.is that's right all right go sign up and when they ask you where you found it say pop just so they keep thinking that i'm smart even though they're doing all the hard work and then the big oh look at this big spike i don't think that has nothing to do with me but yeah appreciate the credit um and then where can people find you on twitter uh twitter i'm uh at chrisman frank awesome thank you

please keep going thank you thanks for the help