The Pomp Podcast - #635 Creating Entrepreneurs and Problem Solvers with Chrisman Frank

Episode Date: August 18, 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 Synthesis story, Elon Musk, critical thinking, independent thought, first principles, the broken education system, and why Synthesis is better than classrooms.  ======================= With over $1B AUM, Amber Group is a world-leading crypto finance platform helping institutions and individual investors to buy and sell cryptocurrency, earn yield, manage risk and access liquidity. Amber App new users only - earn 16% APR on BTC, ETH and USD stablecoins! Click on the link to sign up now: https://www.ambergroup.io/?utm_source=10508 ======================= Circle is a global financial technology firm that enables businesses of all sizes to harness the power of stablecoins and public blockchains for payments, commerce and financial applications worldwide. Circle is also a principal developer of USD Coin (USDC), the fastest growing, fully reserved and regulated dollar stablecoin in the world. The free Circle Account and suite of platform API services bridge the gap between traditional payments and crypto for trading, DeFi, and NFT marketplaces. Create seamless, user-friendly, mainstream customer experiences with crypto-native infrastructure under the hood with Circle. Learn more at circle.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. Crispin 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 Synthesis story, Elon Musk, critical thinking, independent thought, first principles, the broken education system, and why synthesis is better than classrooms. I really enjoyed this conversation with Chrisman, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors.

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out at ambergroup.io. Again, go to ambergroup.io or you can go and download the Amber app in the app store, ambergroup.io. Let me know what you think. All right, let's get in this episode with Chris Mann. I hope you guys enjoy this one. 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 Crispin here. Thanks so much for doing this, man.

Thanks for having me. Good to be here. You've been on before. We've talked a ton about synthesis. I recently heard a story, though, that you have more intel as to how the original synthesis class was created by your co-founder, josh at uh at astra which is the school that elon and josh created on the spacex campus yeah so what what is the story tell tell tell josh's story here yeah well i so i was uh you've been been trying to do more writing as part of the company you're writing up our kind of like secret master plan and i had kind of like the you know the why like our missions to accelerate human progress through education right so we had the why we kind of we know where we're going there's

like this analogy of like an enders, enders game, enders Academy, you know, for the internet enders, enders game for innovators, we call it. Right. And so we kind of, we kind of had these two pieces and I called Josh cause I was like, look, I'm trying to write this like middle ground, which is like, what is synthesis right now? Like why, why is it the way that it is this, this idea of like learning through these games and simulations. And I know, you know, I've seen the videos of Elon talking about, um, he wanted education to be problem focused rather than tool focused. Right. So I was like, what is that? Is that the, is that, is that what led to, you know, you creating synthesis for the school? And I was kind of, it kind of walked me

through that. And I never asked him that story, like from, you know, to tell me that the whole way through before. And so he was like, yeah, I was, I was at this other school, you know, teaching Elon's kids. And he would come in for like, you know, parent teacher conferences. And I was like, you know, he's, he's Elon Musk. I didn't think he would want to talk about like normal stuff. Parents wanted to talk about at conferences. And so I showed him this thing, this Goldilocks exercise I had the kids do, which was basically you give the kids a trillion dollars in hypothetical money and you give them a couple of sectors in the, in the economy or in the world to allocate it. And you just ask like, how do you want to allocate the money? Do you

want to, you know, conserve like a, you know, endangered species habitats? Do you want to invest in healthcare education? Like how do you want to invest this money? And like Elon thought it was pretty cool. And so then when Elon wanted to start the school, he's like, you know, came to me and was like, you know, remember, remembered this teacher is kind of like aligned with what I want to do. And so then now he's like reporting to Elon. He's the only teacher in the world reporting to Elon Musk. And it's pretty intense, right? Cause you want to, you want to keep your job and you're just every meeting, you're just like constantly worried that you're going to get fired. And so he knows kind of Elon's dictate is like, you know, teach kids how to solve problems,

which he takes. He's like, well, Elon's the world's best problem solver. Let me like observe him when i'm in the meetings with him and he's watching i mean the interesting thing is like he said elon has an incredible command of the details on a lot of things that have to do with the rockets material science like that the kind of stuff he knows just incredibly well but he's meeting with josh he's running the school he doesn't have the full context like josh knows the details more than he does and so josh is realizing he's coming to these meetings josh is kind of telling him what's going on with the school and he he lacks the context but he's gotten really good at auditing your reasoning, communicating what he wants and, and communicating

with you to like figure out the course corrections. So he's doing, you strip away all the context and he's still got some skill of thinking and problem solving even without the command of the details. And so Josh is observing this and he's thinking, you know, that's really interesting. How can I get kids to do this? Because the normal way in school is you'll do like a whole unit where you learn, you know, about everything. You do all this like knowledge gathering and then you'll do a project like at the end. And he's like, that's pretty like time consuming. And you can see like Elon's doing this thing where he doesn't need all that information. He can just like kind of reason from first principles. And so Josh starts giving the kids these problems where

he strips away a lot of the context. So it's like he started asking them a question SpaceX dealing with at the time, how would you move the company to Brownsville, Texas? And the kids are, they get really into that, right? They come up with all these plans and, and they get really excited by And, you know, they're really, really like learning to think and to communicate with each other to form these plans. But when you get to the end of it, it's like, cool, good plan. And then that's it. Right. You just like throw it away.

There's no there's no action. There's no feedback. And so from that, he started making these, you know, turning these kind of questions into simulations where you're competing with the other teams. And now there's a reality. Now you can do the iterative feedback loops. Now there's like there's emotional stakes. Right. So before, when it's just a question, it's like cognitively interesting, but you know,

in the real world, you need to actually make decisions. You need to see how things turn out. You need to course correct. And, uh, that's how, that's how we arrived at, you know, the full suite that is synthesis. This is fascinating because, uh, when I was at Facebook, uh, at one point, uh, the interview process would essentially allow for, uh, product managers to interview potential product managers that were coming into the business. And the way that we did it was uh they would go through some screening and filtering but then there was three people uh that were current product managers that would each take a specific track so you're going to focus on like product uh development i'm going to focus on like execution and teamwork and somebody

else may focus on like cultural fit or something right and you go into the interview and it's just one-on-one with the individual uh but you know i'm here to specifically get at this angle for right for the interview process and the one that i uh spent the most time learning about uh and eventually ended up doing you know over 100 interviews at the company with candidates around was giving them a hypothetical situation and then basically continuously feeding them more and more information to see how they thought through the problem so i have no clue that any of this is going on the first time uh that i'm hearing some of these details uh and i learned this from some of the product managers at facebook who are very good at interviewing people and the example i

would always use is like hey you come into work on friday everything's fine you have a great day of work you go home friday night you come back monday morning and 50 of the traffic to your product has disappeared what do you do and it's fascinating because what it got at was i always remember the best answer i ever had was uh somebody who had been doing this for 15 years first thing they said was i would immediately alert everyone on the team that we have a problem everyone would just jump to solve the problem but somebody who had done it before it's like communicate more brains on the problem exactly so like little things like that you pick up on like okay this person knows what they're doing versus somebody who just tries to to jump at it and as

you would work through the problem you basically tell them more okay uh they would say hey i would go and i would check the dashboards fine when you check the dashboard you see that uh no traffic has dropped off from these three platforms and you just kind of keep giving them more and more information and eventually like it would end up with like uh we would get on the phone with google and ask them why our links are broken or you know whatever yeah and you really really got a good sense for how somebody thought what they would do in that situation even though it's just two people sitting in a room talking about a hypothetical yeah it sounds like that's really similar actually to what elon and josh figured out with the school and synthesis as a class specifically was just

doing that but doing it for kids rather than waiting until you're you know 20 30s 40 years old to try to put you in that situation. Yeah. Yeah, completely. I think it's really strange. Like I know people who've been to been to law school, people who worked at McKinsey, it's like consulting firm where they, they're really like, I mean, kind of teach you this rigorous thought process, you know, obviously, uh, and then a computer programmers, I feel like computer programming is where I learned to think and reason properly because you're just, you just come face to face with the results of your sloppy thinking. Right. And that's, uh, that's what synthesis does for kids. Like it's, you know, if you, if you do this thing in school, like the, the kind of like the

previous, you know, the iteration, the step, like right before we got to synthesis is like, you know, plan something out, like make a plan, do, do what you're doing in like the Facebook interviews. But it's just kind of like sterile to do that. Right. Because you need that feedback from the environment. So when you're learning to like program, you know, you get that feedback and it's like, it's brutal, like shows you how sloppy your thinking is. If you're in law school, You know, you've got to argue with other people. And so you'll get eviscerated if you don't do it properly in school. Like, I'm not sure where kids ever get that experience. And the test that you come up against in school is just like, did you spit the information back? Or, you know, did you kind of repeat the teacher's opinions back to them? And what's nice about the way we do it in synthesis, it's kind of it's like it's combat for your for your mind. And, you know, it's a team sports, it's team combat, which is the way that the world actually works. And, you know, it just takes the teacher out of it. It's not like if we're saying this is bad work, it's like it's not our opinion. Like you just you just got destroyed in this game. And that's just really cool to see that. Like the kids that come in who are the smart kids, like the gifted kids, you know, they get smashed that first time and they always come in. They're super, super confident. like we're going to crush everybody. Cause I always get the, you know, the best grades on

the tests in school. And so they got this plan and they go into battle and they get crushed and, you know, they'll start crying a lot of times, but then, you know, they'll come back and be, cause it's that, you know, it's that ego, you know, just like just, just humbling yourself. And I think it's really good to get that experience early because then you just kind of, you shut off the part of you that's like, I just need, I need approval. I'm just going to get like the grades and the gold stars and everything. And you start worrying about like how to actually improve yourself and improve your thinking. Is intellectual humility, like a key foundational component of being able to think clearly, like do the kid have to get to that point? And it's

almost like, it's kind of like military bootcamp, like get to break them down before you build them back up to some degree. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's right. I think it's always like one of the things that most admired about Elon is the way he talked about his projects like early on. It's like, I don't, I don't really think these things are necessarily going to work, but they're worth trying. And I think that's, it's just really important to keep that mindset. And if you read a lot of history, you know, and people who get killed are often like the most arrogant about their prospects. The generals that, that survive and keep winning are the ones who are always worried about losing. And so, yeah, you want to get that. I, I know I, I like graduated from school and like went out and like started businesses and just got killed. Like I just did not realize what an idiot I was. And I had to learn the hard way and like cost a lot of money and just made a lot of longterm, you know, a lot of mistakes. And I think, you know, the hope with synthesis is that you can, you know, I really think the problem is in school, you just don't get to act right. like you're not a you're not an agent you're like a passive kind of receptacle of information and there's some value of that like we all need to learn arithmetic and you know we all learn how to read and there's some basic information we need to know but yeah i think we kind of stretch

out school and make what could be learned in you know one or two hours a week we just we just stretch it out you know for eight hours a day just because we have to fill the time and uh you know what synthesis does is gives kids a chance to be be an agent it's like you know mental combat it's fun it's like a team sport for sharpening your thinking and sharpening your communications so i think that part of this is like you have to get to intellectual humility in order to be able to learn be able to think correctly and kind of go from there uh there's a quote that uh we were talking about before it is uh christopher nolan from uh the dark night rises and he says oh you think darkness darkness is your ally but you merely adopted the dark i was

born in it molded by it i didn't see the light until i was already a man by then it was nothing to me but blinding the shadows betray you because they belong to me and we were talking about this quote in the context of a kid who goes through synthesis who has this kind of foundational um uh structure and training in how to think not what to think but how to think they are the one that is molded by the darkness they're they're comfortable in chaos versus you take the kid who read this book do the book report get an a read this book do a book report get an a when you put those two kids meet you know we i think we think it was like mental combat right but when they meet in competition usually it's the one molded by the darkness the

one who's comfortable in chaos who ends up kind of you know uh prevailing yeah i think that i think that's that's right that's kind of the key skill is like the adaptability and if you're you know what what school does really you know with the thing that's really bad for like the top kids it just convinces you that you're really smart and it's uh i think there's this quote by warren buffett as well like it's better it's better to have a uh a 130 iq and think it's 120 then then to have it be 160 and think it's 180 right it just not there's no advantage into being arrogant like overly confident in your understanding of reality and so i think it's that's one of the coolest things you see at Synthesis. Kids just, they get that experience

early. And you know, when you're, if this happens to you when you're like 25, like, man, it's brutal and it's tough. And it's like, it's, it shakes up your whole world maybe for years. When it happens to you when you're like eight, it's like no big deal. Like you, you bounce back and like, you know, a day and a half and then you're, you know, you could change your direction in life. And so there's this other thing I talk about, which is like the, the best musicians, like they never, they don't start training in their 20s like you you get introduced to it when you're young when your mind is flexible and more elastic and you know my hope through synthesis you get the kids into this way of thinking early which is just a physics like computer programming like like law

school type of thinking where it's really just like checking yourself on what you think you know and being rigorous which you know anyone who spends any time on the internet can see we have a major problem with people not being rigorous in their thinking and you know my hope is you get kids through this kind of program early. And it's fun because it just feels like, you know, playing video games with your friends to the kids. But, you know, it really is about questioning your thinking, questioning your assumptions, figuring out how to course correct when you're wrong. If we do that early, then, you know, who knows what things look like a generation from now? Yeah. There's another quote that Buffett uses around IQ, where he says,

investing is not a game where you put the guy with the, where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with the 130 iq once you have ordinary intelligence these kind of just like some basic level of intelligence what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing and i think that when you watch the synthesis um uh kind of you know cohort or the game get played it's the smartest kid actually can have the achilles heel of they lose their temper they don't know how to communicate they have no ability to participate and the team like like there's all these things that translate to the workforce right if you're the smartest person but you're an asshole like you're not going to be very effective for the

most part yeah yeah exactly i mean i one of the i love that josh came up with his name synthesis and i just i think this is so brilliant the the conceit of school the way we do education now is you divide it by subjects elon kind of alluded to this and you know when he was starting the school Like they, they're teaching you tools. Right. And the problem is that in life there are no math problems. There are no engineering problems. There's no such thing as like a pure engineering problem. It's always wrapped up in a people problem or like a product problem. And so, you know, the, the way that we teach, you know, it teaches us kind of separations of, of domain knowledge. And then the world just never works like that. like Elon could not get done what he needs to get done without the knowledge of how to work with people, how the wider systems work, how to get media attention, like all these things are bound up together. And I think it's not just like he's this great engineer. He knows how to deal with everything that's around engineering, but he's able to apply that sort of the discipline of

physics and like rigorous thinking and really breaking things down into all these different areas. And that's really what we hope for. Like, I'm not sure every kid who goes through synthesis won't be, uh, you know, necessarily working on getting us to Mars or, or, you know, hardcore like technology projects, but that type of thinking can benefit you anywhere. And like, as far as I can tell, I just don't see that kids are picking this up at all in the current school system. If they do, it's maybe, maybe in college, if you take some engineering classes or programming classes, but otherwise, you know, you just don't see it. How do you think about the difference between like what we'll call like the development of the tools uh so learning math learning reading

learning you know some of these more kind of uh traditional education building blocks with synthesis is it something where you need both at a young age so you need to learn uh in the traditional school system kind of the root memorization and the skill sets and then you apply them in synthesis or do you think there's eventually a world where uh synthesis could be the totality of early education where we just give you the problems and you'll end up picking up the kind of building blocks or skills along the way as you're solving the problems yeah that's that's an interesting question i i think our sort of key insight is you know what would what would the education system look like if you built it after the internet existed like how would you

think about it right it seems to me like you would start with the kind of games simulations like action like because that's what happens in the world is you you have some problem you have something that you want to get done. And then, you know, like you, for example, if just you acquire a lot of knowledge, we're sitting in the studio here, like you, but you didn't like take a class on how to create studios, like, you know, in college or whatever. Uh, you just, you learn how to do that to like solve a problem. And so I think it's, you know, the, the kind of vision is that you, you just start a new education, education system with the simulations and games at the core and you kind of expand and concentric rings for everything outside of that. So as far as what

that looks like. You know, I don't know exactly. I think there's, there's a path where the simulations require you to learn more, you know, real knowledge. Like I love the idea of the simulation where you're only going to win if you really have a strong knowledge of physics. And then we might not necessarily teach you that through the games, but you'll have to go, you know, read stuff that's outside the games in order to apply it in an order to win. So it's like the same way in life where, yeah, I always give this example. Like I'm, I kind of have a decent knowledge of accounting, but not because I'm interested in accounting at all. It's just because if I don't know accounting, like the company probably dies. I need to know a little

bit at least. Right. But I go acquire that information somewhere else and then I apply it to the game of building the company. And so I think that's more, more and more where we want to go. Like you need knowledge to succeed in life. I think we should get to the point where in the simulations you need knowledge to succeed. But right now it's pretty early days and we're just focused on the, you know, what you call like critical thinking, communication, like rigorous thinking um so we'll see where it goes have you been doing this long enough now where you've got insights on certain types of kids are more likely to succeed or is it pretty much any kid can get put into the program and maybe they go from you know level one to level three but the level three

kid goes from level three to level five like is it just everyone can improve or does there have to be a certain type of kid, certain type of previous experience. Yeah. It seems, you know, it's a, it's like life there's, there are, it's one of the really interesting things is that there are places for different personalities and different ways of thinking and synthesis. I think the one thing is it's not going to be enjoyable if you don't, uh, if you, if you don't like thinking and you know, I get kids generally do, but, uh, you know, some kids don't like the challenge. And so they, they'll, you know, they'll just not have fun with it. But if you like the challenge and you like kind of testing yourself, it's sort of like, like team sports. Like some

people are really, really into that and really enjoy that. And, you know, some people, some people don't. And so it's, you know, I'm not going to say it's necessarily for everybody. I think it's every kid would benefit from doing it. But it's not necessarily like every kid's not going to, you know, rise to the top levels in synthesis. But, you know, our, our approach is we have kind of like this, this, you know, bottom level or like outer ring that anybody can join. And then we'll let you decide how high you want to rise, right? So kind of like martial arts, like anybody can go take a jujitsu class and sign up and, you know, start working toward a, toward a blue belt, but not everybody is going to have the dedication to rise and get the black belt, but we want to at

least create the system where, you know, if you go through that and you get like the black belt at synthesis, that it, it really means something that it's not just like a, you know, participation ribbon. Um, but we also think it's very hard to predict who's going to succeed. And a lot of it just comes down to how hard people are going to work. So we want to make it open to as many people as possible. Yeah. Uh, Shopify has this, uh, mantra of arming the rebels and they're specifically talking about, you know, Amazon's the big, bad, uh, kind of online retailer. We're going to give the small businesses the tools necessary to compete. It feels a lot like what you're essentially doing is you're arming the rebels, but it's the future thinkers, problem solvers, innovators,

entrepreneurs um that the world ultimately is going to need and really it's coming at it from uh and this is kind of my interpretation i don't care if you go into engineering i don't care if you go into computer science i don't care if you go into business or any other you know uh multitude of kind of avenues in your professional career i just want you to be a clear thinker and if we can teach you to be a clear and kind of effective thinker you should be successful at whatever you choose to do in the future more successful at least yeah for sure there's yeah it's interesting because one of the cool things about synthesis you have to take action it's just it's just like life there's a lot of information coming at you you cannot wait for perfect information and you

just have to act and get the feedback from the environment and so i think there's some element of like training like you can for every trait you know whether it's iq or or temperament whatever it is there's sort of like a there's like a goldilocks right like you you could be too far out to the right on IQ and you can just be completely ineffective because you just, you fall in love with your mental creations and you don't take action. And so it's like trying to create this, uh, this just right environment where, you know, the skills that you kind of in life, you need to balance your thinking and your action in order to succeed. You can't wait until you have it all figured out. So it's trying to create an environment where kids can actually get the

feeling of doing that. Um, because you know, the world's just changed a lot. It used to be that you could, you could go join. I remember when I was about to graduate college, I had an offer from GE and my parents like, that's amazing. Like you should take that offer from GE. That's an incredible company. And I just saw, it's like, I don't want to, I, I, I'm not going to be able to do this thing where I like move up through the ranks. I'm not going to be like really well adapted to, to go up through this bureaucracy. And, but that was like really for my parents' generation, that was like the best thing that you could do is get in one of these big bureaucracies, a big institution and, you know, kind of try to move up through the ranks. And I think now we're

going through, you know, in American society, at least as there's sort of a falling trust in institutions. And I think our, you know, that's probably going to continue and our kids are going to have to be really adaptable. They're going to have to be really able to, uh, you know, embrace the chaos as we say at synthesis and figure out, you know, figure out their own path through that. And that's, uh, that's different, right? That's different in like all of human history. You used to have a lot more kind of stability and, you know, you could pay attention to people a little bit older than you and your parents and kind of do what they do and succeed. And now it's, uh, things seem to be changing very quickly. It seems like the core skill is just

adapting to changing information landscape. Yeah. One of the things we've talked about in the past is, uh, there's obviously Elon, the way he thinks and kind of the success he's had. Uh, another, when you speak of kind of chaos, uh, there's a, um, kind of a label of masters of chaos around the special forces in the military. Um, and those two things seem very different, but when you actually break down, what are they doing? Uh, they're having to make high impact decisions in super multivariate environments with a lack of information and zero, almost zero ability to predict what the outcome is going to be. Is it fair to think about the kids are really being taught the same thing, right? You know, just like we teach the special forces soldiers kind of

building blocks of skills and then, Hey, here's how to be successful. By the way, we're just going to drop you in a country, you know, four or eight of you and like, go figure it out. It seems like you're doing this in a virtual environment and it may be around something that's obviously much less dangerous, you know, and kind of more kid friendly, but it's a lot of the same, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's the training environment. Right. So there's in the training environment, there's, you know, you get to practice ideally the same set of skills, but there's no, no consequence to failure. That's, that's the idea. Right. And, you know, the special forces, they do the same thing. I read in that book, you recommended Masters of Chaos. And I'd always been into like the military training. Right. Because you, especially special forces, because you're, you know, how, how do people act? How do they prepare when, if they get it wrong, their brothers and sisters are going to die? Well, like they're going to take it seriously. And so we should pay attention to that. That's a it's like a harsh training environment. Unlike, you know, actually, this is a really good point because you brought up Elon again. And I think there's a you know, there's always a question of like, what is at the top of this system? Right. I think if you look at the existing education system, what's at the pinnacle? It's getting like a Ph.D. Right. Which is like, you know, in some sciences like Ph.D. is like move the world forward for sure. but in a lot of fields, it's you write papers for other PhDs and you have very few people read the papers. And it just kind of like this endless argument. Like what if there's a system for

actors, like people who are like actually agents, people who are changing in the world? Like what does the system look like when your goal is to make more Elon's right. And that's the, let's say every kid's, you know, most kids are not going to be Elon. Like hardly anybody is going to be like that, but like at least let's have some heroes. Like who, who are our heroes? Are they people who sit around writing papers? Are they people who take action in the world and change the world? I think there should be some system where, you know, for the people, parents who want their kids to take action in the world and don't necessarily think the PhD is going to be, you know, is the be all end all of existence. There should be something like that.

It reminds me, uh, on Instagram, you see all these like memes or like motivational things. And, uh, one of them is always like, I didn't go to Harvard, but everyone who works for me did it kind of feels a little bit like that. Um, where if you think Elon, like, as far as I understand, he doesn't have a PhD in rockets. He doesn't have a PhD in engineering. He doesn't have kind of all of the traditional academic milestones, but he's in the room with the people and helping them make decisions on how do we create a reusable rocket that we can land again on a drone ship in the ocean. Yeah. Right. And it's the practical uses of the knowledge versus the academic. And sometimes people can marry those two things for sure. So it's not kind of

a black and white world. But I do think that ultimately, if you look at synthesis and that style of learning, what are you optimizing for? Are you optimizing for the academic accolades or are you optimizing for becoming a problem solver? And I feel like that's the big difference here. Yeah. And there's a lot in education that's just purely about status signaling. A lot of people who really, they want their kids to go to Harvard or Princeton or Stanford, it's, it's primarily like a class and like a status game. And, you know, that's, people are always going to do that. That's, that's, uh, we're not going to solve that. But I think for a certain set of people, you know, it's, it's really, it's more interesting to them to have their kids grow up

and be able to exert their will in the world as much as possible and independent of like fitting into some, uh, you know, status hierarchy, it's more important to be able to think effectively and do effectively. At least that's the way I feel. It's a way a lot of entrepreneurs, uh, feel about raising their kids. And that's, you know, our early customers tend to be more entrepreneurial, um, in their background, because if, you know, if you, the current system's fine, if, you know, you're going to go to Harvard and you're going to, you know, wear the work at investment bank and wear the Harvard sweatshirt like 20 years later, if that's going to be like the, the pinnacle and you're trying to fit into this, uh, you know, social environment, like,

you know, fine, people are going to do that. And that's no problem, but that's just, we just have a system with just a different goal. Right. And I think, uh, you know, I think there's been some sense over the last, like, um, you know, year and a half or so that there's this, this, uh, sort of strange, um, you know, blip that we're living in with the, with the pandemic. And I think there was a sense that things were going to go back to normal and it's starting to feel like maybe things aren't going to go back to normal now. And, and one of the things I think is probably not going to go back to normal is the trust that the, that the school system had. Like we talked about this last time, there's great people working in the school system. All

of them generally care about kids and are, you know, most of them are doing it for the right reasons, but that system is just a, it's just too big and unwieldy to change. And so I think you're going to see parents opting out and choosing, choosing other avenues that align with their values because i think there's going to be more and more sense that the traditional systems don't align with our values yeah well the existing system too feels very hierarchical and it feels very kind of factory based in terms of like okay you go to first grade you learn this stamp of approval okay go to second grade you learn this and i kind of move you through these 12 stages of the factory and we're going to kick you out at the end and voila you're a genius right

And you can go on to college, which, you know, you said in the past, like if we were optimizing for factory jobs, that would make a ton of sense, right? Like literally, you know, turn, grab this, put it here, press it, you know, move it, do it again, and we'll teach you these skills and whatever. But now when we start to move into these more digital environments, the locations are different, the job skills are different, the companies are different, the products are different. where you started thinking about this and i recently uh what was uh looking at a company um and uh this specific company is interesting because it is uh it's called a spot i think and what it allows you to do is uh do walking meetings over the phone okay and so i was thinking to myself is it a phone call it's a phone call okay but basically they've got an entire piece of software that helps uh for like note-taking and sharing screens and like it's

Okay. Imagine, Hey, if I wanted to optimize a phone call for a meeting versus a regular phone call, it would be different, right? It wouldn't just be a zoom link for example. And, uh, whether they're successful or not is completely, uh, still to be determined. But all I could keep thinking to myself is imagine 15 years ago saying to somebody, I'm building a company for walking virtual meetings. Yeah. Yeah. They would have like smashed you. Terrible idea. Yeah. Now I'm kind of like oh okay i need that like give me the link right yeah so you think of something like that and then you start thinking about the fact that like imagine if you had told kids 15 years ago hey you're gonna sit at home and you're gonna look through a portal and that portal is gonna get

you into this like metaverse which seems to be the the you know popular term today and you're gonna play games in the virtual world with other kids and then you're gonna like it and you're going to leave and have fun they've been like it's like video game like sega genesis right you know or like whatever yeah but actually that's basically what you guys have backed into or built here is you can use it with all the academic terminology of you know virtual reality and metaverse like all these things like make people sound smart or you can just say no we bring together kids anywhere in the world and help them solve problems and they learn how to do that And it feels like the, the more that you approach this from like a, these are directly actionable skills that you can take into the real world. The more that you're seeing kids get those skills, like it's against, what are you optimizing for as a school versus we want you to leave and, you know, be able to say two plus two is four because the final test at the end of the year.

school is a very low ambiguity environment. And like, if you look at, you know, you're talking about the company you were just mentioning, like you've had to be able to respond to a changing world very quickly. Right. And like the world is just a, it's a high ambiguity environment, synthesis, high ambiguity environment. And then back to the masters of chaos thing, like, I believe it is a skill to, to embrace the chaos. Like there's a reason, you know, there's special forces folks that go through all this training, right. Because you just get thrown into an unfamiliar environment enough times and you start to, you, your kind of emotional response sort of dampens and you start to learn how to, you know, look around and like, keep your cool

in those situations. And that's just like a critically important skill in today's world. And there's also, there's, there's a skill that is, uh, you know, back to how Josh kind of came up with this by watching Elon. Like there are pure reasoning skills that are independent of context and you can, you can learn those things. And, you know, now with everything, the kids can, they can just go research and get all the factual knowledge they need on, on YouTube, you know, all the, anything that's like specific to their field, like you can go research that. And so what do we focus on? It's kind of this like mental agility, right? It's, it's the building the abilities to be adaptive to whatever situation. And that's what we're trying to do. I don't know

if this is going to be the right approach. If this is going to work exactly, it seems to be working so far uh but you know it's still early but that's at least that's the attempt and i like i always tell the team like if we if we make this work it's going to be very odd everyone's just going to say well that was obvious of course in the internet age like you're going to learn to think through like you know playing video games and simulations but like of course that's how it had to work if we fail everyone's gonna be like of course that failed you're a bunch of idiots you try to make a school around video games of course so it's uh you know i think that that intellectual humility is, is good. And, uh, you know, we'll, we'll see where it goes so far. You

know, kids seem to love it. They seem to be building the skills, but, uh, you know, it's early days. The, the intellectual humility, uh, reminds me of, um, I had this life experience one time, uh, and I haven't thought about this in years. Uh, it was during a training exercise in the military and we were at a, uh, I think it was a leadership school or something. And, uh, I was one of the lowest ranking people there. And so basically my job was like, get through the school, the people who are higher ranking are actually the ones that are like getting all the training and you're just there to be osmosis train the other guy yeah like i'm kind of just like a body right so like whatever and uh and we kept doing this drill where uh yeah basically there was a

enemy that was uh far away and we had to navigate our way there and then basically uh attack them or take them out or whatever and so i'd gone through it two three four times uh as kind of again just like a body who was taking orders from the dyers and the guy who was running the drill at some point we're grabbing water he's like you want to be the leader in the next like iteration of it and i was like no right like i'm not prepared i'm not about to go tell you know a sergeant first class what to do like the whole thing and he's like no i think you should do it and so we basically uh start it and and we go and uh there's kind of like a point that you got to where you like reassess like okay where where is where are we where is the enemy etc and i don't know why i

thought of it the way that i did but i basically said to him i said listen we're here we can identify where the enemy is can i just call it an airstrike and the guy was like i don't see why not and so literally he gets over the radio and he basically is like all right you know enemy group or whatever together trying to go you guys are all dead he's called it an airstrike and of course you can hear me in the back i'm like all screaming that's cheating that's like you know all this stuff or whatever and i remember we got back and we did this whole kind of like uh after action review in in the military and the thing that the uh guy asked me was he goes why did you do that and i was like honestly i didn't want to have to go trek through the woods right like it was

very like selfish kind of like smart ass reason for doing it but it made me think and i've thought about it a lot through life is like you don't have to just do the thing that is the most egotistical thing because what did everybody else do that was like the the high ranking leader they basically just went in and they wanted the like full-on one-on-one combat of like your team my team let's shoot at each other let's see what you train for it to some degree right it's like the the machoism of it and so i think a lot of like from a problem standpoint elon with the reusable rockets it's like oh the rockets are expensive like why don't we just reuse them yeah and that's almost like a such a ridiculous idea if you come from that world that you need an

outsider to be able to do it but you need somebody who has a skill set and so is your thought process that you're essentially teaching these kids how to think differently or think outside the box if you will and so naturally majority of them will go on to be entrepreneurs and and kind of pursue that lifestyle or is it just, no, this is as effective inside of a corporation as a mid-level manager as it is as, you know, the founder of a business? I think so. I think it's a second one. I mean, I don't, I don't think, uh, you know, being, being an entrepreneur is, uh, is a crazy thing to do. I don't think most, most people are going to really want to do that and deal with the kind of lifestyle and all that. But, you know, we've, we've, we've got to hire a lot of people.

Like who are we looking to hire? Like it's, it's often, you know, it's really almost like being a good student is sort of inversely correlated with success and like a startup environment or trying to do something new. It almost, it just seems like it doesn't, you know, it doesn't matter at all. It's just like completely irrelevant. Maybe some people who do really well in school are, are, you know, able to adapt and think for themselves, but it doesn't, it just seems to be kind of like random. Doesn't seem to be much, much correlation there. so yeah we're i i'm i'm excited about the hiring we're doing like we get you know we have one one guy who's 19 and like dropped out of college he was homeschooled and like went to college for like a year dropped out he's like this too slow we hired him you know he's amazing he's able able to you know really like uh you just think creatively and think independently so like we're you know if you can learn to think like that and just solve problems like you know we're hiring people, we're not hiring them to like go do the, the infantry combat, right. We're like hiring them to solve the problem. And so if you have those skills, it doesn't, you know, whether you're

starting your own company or, you know, starting your own thing, or you're going to go work at another company, um, those skills are, those are in short supply. You're like, Elon's going to need a lot of people who could think creatively to colonize Mars. Right. And so whether you start your own thing or not these are the skills you're going to need to succeed in life how important in the environment is it for the kids to have different experiences going into it like in terms of um okay go back to the special forces one of the things that they really optimize for is you don't want everyone that comes from the same world that you went to the same school to go stuff they actually want who's a kid who grew up in kentucky right and literally could shoot blindfold and be

great uh and then who's the person actually has an engineering background and like yeah you want to put those people on a team together and teach each other etc how important is it for the actual environment for these kids to um you know have somebody who's interested in math have somebody who's interested in non-mathematical subjects and like bring them together to solve yeah that's really interesting i mean that that's really helpful that's something it took me a really long time to realize was like when you're building teams you know at the company you know you're you're it, the idea like of like well-rounded people is, is not that, not that great of an idea really. Like if, cause if you, I have like just these extreme weaknesses that like I've,

I've come to, I used to like deny that this is how the world worked and I, I'm just like strong at everything, but like, I've got these like incredible weaknesses and like strengths that offset them somewhat. So I'm like looking for the person who's like the, the puzzle piece or like the team to go around me, like fill in the skills that I'm missing. And that's, that's how synthesis works as well. Like you can do, you can have like the division of labor in the synthesis simulation. So if you're, you know, if someone's like really great at like analytical, like pattern matching type of thinking, you can apply them in one area of someone else, like a better leader, communicator, like consensus builder, they have like a different role to

play. And so I think there's like a lot more we can do to explore that. That's just something that's kind of emerged from the simulations that kids like divide up these roles with each other's like, like based on their skillset. But I think again, like that's school is individual, it's individual and it's in low ambiguity, like well-defined problem environments, life, always a team sport when you're doing anything interesting and always a high ambiguity environment. If you're going to do anything interesting and there's probably always going to be jobs where you just kind of get told what to do and execute it faithfully and do well, but those are not going to, uh, not going to pay very well. What age are the kids that, uh,

right now can get into synthesis? The youngest are six, but that's kind of like a special case. They're like very, very, very precocious six and seven year olds. Um, and then, you know, eight year olds is normally we wear, uh, you know, that most, most of the cohort starts at eight to about 13 or 14. Got it. And do you put eight year olds with 12 year olds and kind of mix and match the ages or how do you break that down to some extent? Yeah. So there's, that was said hesitantly. What's that? You said that hesitantly. The thing, if you're, if you're a 12 year old and you know, you're really, you're really, really, really bright, uh, then, you know, it's fine to be with like eight, nine year olds once in a while where you're kind of the leader

and you're trying to kind of pull them up to your level is really valuable for the younger kids. It's really valuable for the 12 year old. But you also, when you're at that age, you really want to be expanding your, you want, they want to be, you know, we have this concept like no speed limit, right? You want to be pushed kind of as hard as you can go. That's especially true for like a lot of the really bright kids that are in synthesis. They're not challenged at all in their school environment. And so they're looking for something that's just really like hardcore, complex and challenging. And so they don't want to be with like nine and 10 year olds. They want to be with other kids that are super advanced. So we try to mix it up basically. Cause I think this is one of

the most sociopathic things about the way we've designed the school system. And you know, it's not, not the people's fault who are in the system now. It's just been going this way for a long time. Age segregation is sociopathic idea, right? You don't ever get to be a mentor to anybody and you don't have you don't have uh mentors yourself who are just you know the way we learn humans you know we're made for tribes we go from infant all the way up to elder and the all the people at all these levels around us you know this this is like our biological environment and then school when you break that apart and you're like you're going to be only with seven-year-olds right now it's it's you're just kind of lost in time you're disconnected from the past and disconnected from

the future. I think it causes a lot of anxiety and stress. There's a lot of animal studies where you see this. If you, if you separate the animals, they don't have, you know, a stronger role model to look up to. They just, they just fall apart, right? We're made to live in these sort of like hierarchical, uh, you know, somewhat hierarchical communities. And so that's part of what, what synthesis, what we aim to do is like give you, if you're in the young end, we want to get you around people who are like two years old or cause they're going to be the ones that you're going to look up to and try to emulate and they're going to get those kids with people who are like two years older and just create this kind of chain rather than isolate everybody and be like you're

only with people your own level because that's not life right it feels like i'm not having a child this is going to be a wild statement but uh a six and a twelve year old everybody has opinions about raising kids before they have kids no it's not even but like a six year old and a twelve year old from what i would imagine is like very different right in terms of the cognitive development yeah and all of that uh so two years sounds a lot more reasonable than like let me put my six-year-old a 12-year-old and like have them have mental combat that seems like it probably wouldn't be so competitive yeah yeah and i i even hesitate to say that we accept six-year-olds because it is sort of like a rare i didn't put my own son in until he's seven so i don't think

there's any you know there's not this incredible value from getting in younger uh everybody develops like the conceptual faculty at a different age. It's usually like somewhere between six and eight, six, if you're on like the really, you know, if you're, if you're really like develop that early. But as far as I can tell, there's no advantage to developing it early. It's just synthesis is going to be most effective once you can start to think abstractly and conceptually. And for my seven year old, it was just like shortly after he turned seven, our conversations, we talk about evolution. I always talk about evolution with him. And about after he turned seven, he started to be able to kind of make sense of it. And, and so that's when

since this is going to be helpful because you know, what we're looking to do is I think that's education is just really is learning to think conceptually, to think in terms of patterns, not in, in terms of always the specifics. And so what we do is you're trying to play these game simulations. You're building your reasoning skills. You're building your communication with the other kids. We're also trying to layer on concepts on top of that. So we want you to learn how the world works. And we make these series of videos for kids to explore that, like learn about network effects, learn about game theory, learn about these big concepts that are going to affect everything that you look at in the world. And you really, you just can't

every, all I get all these emails from parents and DMS that are like my five-year-old or my four-year-old, I want to get them in. I'm like, just take it easy. Like, don't just give your kids lots of love and let them play outside and hang out with other kids at that age. When they get to be the age, you know, for synthesis, then, then you can put them in and you don't have to be like in a huge rush for it how does a parent know that their kid's ready like are is there a question a magic question they can ask and it's like oh okay my kid is like now cognitively ready for this i don't know that's a good question actually we should we should try to get more uh um more resolution on this because it'd help us for our for our admissions

um we're actually going to be putting out an an application that's kind of like one of the games that you can play and that's a really good that that'll be sort of a really good test so it's going to be like a single player game um where you're playing you're just playing against a bot and you can see like i had my five-year-old and seven-year-old play it and the five-year-old kind of plays it and just just like just plays it right and he figure out how to win you know after a while but he's not he has no understanding he cannot explain why he's able to win the seven-year-old will look at it just in a completely different way and like it start he'll be able to identify the pattern and explain it to somebody else and so that that's kind of this will be like a good

yeah sort of uh uh you know test for uh for for kids if you if you you know want to find that out yeah parents are going back to school now well i guess parents are sending their kids back to some of them um how should they think about synthesis in terms of this is supplemental to the school environment and what's kind of the pitch as to like why they would want to put their kid into this? Uh, I think the really the, just the simple version is you learn how to think, right? I don't think schools do a good job teaching us how to think at least, you know, none of my schools did. And I didn't know the worst part about not knowing how to think is you, you don't know that you don't know how to think, right? You think you feel something and you're

like, this is thinking and you know, it's, it's, that's not the way it works, but you don't really know that until you go through it. So if you are satisfied and you think the current, you know, your current schools are uh are doing a good job um teaching your kids to think then then i think that's fine um if you think that's a gap that's missing like we do like elon thought that um then check out synthesis it's uh it's enrichment so you can do it uh we have now we're expanding to be like we have a part like a full stack school it's very limited right now but you can you can do synthesis for your uh all your education um or you can come and do like an hour a week so kind of whatever you uh you have time for and whatever your kids are interested

in doing got it what's been the most fun part about this for you the most fun um and just uh i have something fundamentally human about just imagining something so it's it's our year anniversary since we did our first. So the first person paid for synthesis, which, you know, I think we, we took, we, we asked people to pay before we really had anything. So we like people paid and then we like scrambled to put something together. Um, but it was just, just about a year ago. Um, and what's crazy is reflecting on that and seeing like just the, what you, what we imagined, just having that come to be in the world, seeing that interact with people, just seeing so many families, like just, just be fully bought in and get behind this vision and just, just tell us

these like life-changing stories. Like that's, it's the most meaningful thing that you could do, right? Like just pass down, uh, you know, what we, what we think works, what's going to work for our kids, like this, the next generation, that's going to build the civilization, being able to work on something that meaningful and being able to just kind of imagine, you know, how we think it should work and put that out into the world and see it take root is I mean, that's incredible. It feels like if this works, everyone will be excited. It'll have a big impact. If it doesn't work,

everyone will be excited that you tried. Right. So it's kind of goes back to the Elon idea. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, but it's worth trying. It's contributing to human knowledge either way, as long as we don't totally screw it up. Like at least, you know, you can, we can find out that this won't work. And you know, that's valuable on its own. Someone else, the next person to come along and try something different. Um, so we'll see. I have my kids in it. Uh, you know, Elon had his kids go through something like this. So, you know, we'll see

if I think it's, uh, people ask how we're going to measure it. And like, we're going to, we're going to get to that. But right now it's like, does this explanation make sense to you? Like, are you, are your kids really not learning how to think, you know, is it valuable to, you know combine like the ability to take action and work with others with these uh you know kind of problem solving skills if that explanation makes sense and you think that's missing in school and you believe these things can be built you know in a different way than our education system then i think that's you know if that speaks to you then then put your kids in and if it doesn't then you know it's fine you don't have you may be right yeah you don't have to do it that's the

beauty of choice uh where can we send people to uh to enroll their kids if they want uh synthesis synthesis.is is the website synthesis.is is all right man well listen thank you so much for doing this what's your twitter by the way at chrisman chrisman frank all right easy easy breezy i guess so all right we'll do this again go sign your kids up synthesis.is if your kids are going back to school and you want them actually to learn something and learn how to think i can say that he can't but if you actually want your kids to learn something go to synthesis.is yeah all right Do it again in the future, man. Thank you.