The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 451: Meredith Olson—Better Education Now

Episode Date: September 23, 2025

Meredith Olson is president of Vela, a nonprofit that funds everyday entrepreneurs who are ditching the traditional school model in favor of something a little more… flexible. Vela doesn't run schools—it supports people creating their own. From homeschool co-ops to microschools in living rooms and libraries, Vela empowers parents, students, and entrepreneurs to reimagine education outside of traditional systems. With more than 4,200 schools being supported, Vela is quietly fueling one of the most important grassroots education revolutions of our time.

Mike Roe here, it's the way I heard it, with an episode called Better Education Now. Now, Mike. Now. Come on. Now. Bring it on. How long do we have to wait for better education? I don't know, but it's already passed now and we don't have it.

But we're going to. Yes. Hey, my guest is Meredith Olson, a really interesting woman who I met years ago at Stand Together. And Stand Together, of course, is a, I guess, let's call it a celebration of bottom-up solutions. They've been sponsoring people you should know. Yes. Over on my YouTube page. Anyway, Meredith sort of morphed through that organization and wound up running an education, I guess, let's call them an educational entity. Sure. Yeah. Vela, V-E-L-A, they're only about 10 people in this nonprofit.

And they oversee 4,200 schools that are somewhere between private schools and public schools with the Dasha homeschooling thrown into it. Yeah, yeah.

That's right. So long story short, there's a video on my Facebook page right now that's generating lots of questions from people who are super interested in exploring these schools. You have to think of them

like, like community schools. Some of them are in buildings that look like it could be an elementary school building, but very rarely. Most of them look like a dentist office. Yeah. Yeah. These are intensely local schools, and they're run by founders who are also teachers and effectively

principals. And also some of them look like farms or, you know, a petting zoo. That's right. They could be anywhere in the country. They're in every state, 4,200. of these things. They've served over five million kids. Point is, I spent a day visiting a couple of these schools and was blown away. I was initially skeptical because I just didn't understand how something with so little

structure could yield such great results. But the results are in and the evidence does demand a verdict and five million satisfied learners can't be denied. So I wanted to talk to Meredith and ask her some of the questions that are popping up in the comment section of the video, which I invite you to look at over on my YouTube channel. I normally don't do this kind of thing, but it just feels like everything's kind of lining up at the same time. And I look, our education system, she's way more charitable than I am. I think our public education system is in terrible trouble.

I really do. And I'm just looking at the results as they compare to other school systems around the world. I've talked to so many school teachers who are frustrated with the mechanism that's in place right now and a lot of parents who frankly feel betrayed, you know, and after the lockdowns. Look, public education is a marvelous invention, and it certainly served us well. Yeah. But times are evolving and changing and alternative methods are beginning to rise. And VALA, V-E-L-L-A is definitely one of them. And look, I can't speak for anybody but me, but I'm pretty sure millions and millions and millions of voters and taxpayers are hoping and praying for better education. When? Now. That's what I'm saying,

Charlie. I think you're going to like Meredith. She's smart and she's on to something big. And we'll prove it right after this. Do do do do do do do do do. Dumb. I love stories like this. Seven years ago, a guy named Ben Still was a musician. He had zero interest in running a food company, but he was annoyed that so much imported meat was being deceptively marketed and labeled as domestic and decided to fix the problem. The result was a company called Good Ranchers. It's a completely honest, totally transparent meat company that deals directly with American farms and ranches and promises to deliver high-quality American-grown meat for a fair price. Today, that promise. And Ben's absolute determination to keep it has

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Free meat for life, 40 bucks off your first order. Good ranchers.com. American meat delivered. could eat a cow don't take a chance on a foreign ranch get good ranchers now so Meredith you were a what kind of engineer mechanical and where's your study Virginia tech and uh you grow up in what Richmond Virginia yeah born and raised so did you know you were going to be an engineer when you grew up when I grew up no you know I never really thought about what I wanted to be growing up I mean I think I was good at math I liked reading I loved art And at the time, so this would have been, I was a child of the 80s. And when you're trying to think about what's next in your career or college and career, you think about, how am I going to get a job?

Right. What am I going to do, right? And so at the time, this was late 80s, early 90s, there was a huge opportunity for women to go into engineering. And I thought, you know what, I love math. I love art. I love design. Did it feel like a reverse commute of sorts at that time? Like, were you going in some direction that made your family go, uh-oh, is this dangerous or something?

Yeah, no, not at all. My mom and dad were both very open-minded about whatever career I might choose. They were, I was a child of divorced parents. They were divorced when I was an infant, but they both loved me very much and supported whatever I wanted to do. So I had single parents growing up. I went to my neighborhood public school. I had great teachers. My education was good.

Like, it wasn't great, but it was good. And it wasn't the, like, highly selective best public school in town, but it was a good school. And so, you know, I thought, okay, I like math, and I enjoy design and art. And so it felt like if I studied engineering, I could design things. So I guess the point of just the personal probing is that you are the product of a fairly traditional education, a public school, and then a decent university. and then, you know, the encouragement to try new things and so forth and so on. And can somebody still do that today? Can you still get that kind of?

Yeah. No, I think you can. I think you can, but it was a little bit easier, I think, when I was a kid. And so you didn't have all of the technology influences. You didn't have an overly scheduled life. I mean, I grew up at a time where I would come home from school, and there was no one around. My parents were working.

And so the kids all ran. Would they call them Lachkey kids? Yeah, they called them that. But we never really thought about it that way. It was more, think about the movies of the time. Think about E.T. or the Goonies, right? Where were the parents? Right.

Right? Where were they? No, I mean, like the kids were getting into trouble after school. They were, this was their free time. This was their creative time. So you went to school all day and then you came home and you explored, right? And so how was the childhood that I experienced? So I love school, but then I loved being at home just exploring and like this whole thrill of discovery.

But like, is that what happens today? That's the question I was getting at. You know, it's like when I talk about the product of a traditional education, that's exactly what I meant to say. Because if you are, then you're also the product of a certain time. That's right. And that time came with a certain permission. In fact, you'll remember field trips and permission slips. That's right.

And very, you know, simple things that, you know, parents, you have to sign it and you guys are going, maybe wandering out of the safe space a little bit to see what can be learned out in the world. Yeah, so think about your time. You had your structured permission time during the day. You had compliance at school. It was like a conformity exercise. There's bells and there's class periods and you have homework assignments that are due and your parents are signing things. But then when you come home from school, nights and weekends and after school, that's your understanding. structured time.

Yeah. Right? That was your free time. The world was your canvas. And you are just like having that it. That's what I want to jump right into. This weird line between structured time and unstructured time and how once upon a time it seemed to have been drawn pretty brightly and pretty straight.

What you're doing at Veylon. In a lot of ways is just blurring that line all over the place. That's right. I think in a great way. I mentioned in the preamble there's a video up now that you and I shot back. in, was it October? So many questions. People are really super interested in what's happened here.

And I guess I should really jump in by saying that, I think the last time I saw you, you guys had 3,500 of these schools. That's right. Where are you now? So now we're at, as of today, so I have to check every day because we're adding new founders to our network. But as of today, we're at 4,276.

I mean, it's almost 700 new founders just this year in 2025. And was I correct? Also in the preamble when I talked about, the space you guys are occupying feels, to me, like somewhere between a traditional homeschooling approach and a traditional public school. They're elements of both. But, man, it seems like the headlines have caught up with your mission. And a lot of people, a lot of parents, concerned parents, who might not be comfortable assuming the burden of education.

educating their kid, hard stop, are gravitating to these non-traditional approaches? That's right. I mean, as a whole, I would say there's definitely been a paradigm shift. It's sort of a almost like a lifestyle shift where you're seeing increasingly, whether you're a family, a parent, a kid, an educator, where there's a desire to own your own education, if that makes sense. It's hard to get those words out. But like, rather than passively receiving an education that's given to you, you're owning it and driving it and you feel the right and the responsibility to go pursue the education of your dreams. And so that's a different, that's a different thing. Well, are you talking from the perspective of the student or from the parent? Both.

What most informs Vela? And after you tell me that, tell me what Vela means. Okay. So what most informs Vela is this idea that good people are talented. and they should be able to have the dignity to make decisions about their own lives, right? And that includes the ability to make decisions about their own education. And so when we see people who are talented and motivated

and they're self-determined, amazing things happen. So we see them learning from each other. We see them seeing problems out in the world and then coming up with solutions to solve those problems. And before you tell me what veil is, and spoiler alert,

I know the answer and I love it. But when you talk about this kind of network and connectivity, you're talking about the relationship with your founders. And when we're talking about founders, you're basically talking about the teachers in these small micro schools, who basically function as a principal as well, right? They're this amalgam of all the authority figures I've ever known, but just weirdly without all of the weight that comes with, oh, no, I'm in the principal's office or, uh-oh, you know, the teacher wants to have a word. All of that blurred too. It does get blurred. So you have people, so many people go into teaching for all the

right reasons. They do because they love children. They love education. They care about holistic human development. They care about making sure that kids are on the right path in life, right? And so they deeply are connected to that idea. But for whatever reason, they might feel in a traditional environment that they're constrained, that they're not able to express their craft, the way that they would in an ideal setting. And so many of those teachers now are saying, you know what, I can do this. I don't need to be stuck in a big institution.

I can go and start my own thing. I can deliver education the way I think kids best learn. Wow, this is, okay, it's going to get a little personal. We'll circle back to what Vela means. Now it's become a tease. Don't let me forget to ask you. But let me talk a little bit more than about, like before we really get into,

why this thing is moving the needle. I want to better understand what's broken and how it got broken because the people you just described were my mom and dad. They both taught public school. My sister-in-law is the principal in a public school. My nieces teach in a public school. They all feel called to varying degrees to do this thing and they're all wonderful people. Now, when I look at the union that oversees public education, and when I look at local municipalities and local state governments and all of the battle for money and funding and throw in a little PTA and all of the drama and so forth,

and I mean, my God, I don't want to speak for anybody specifically, but I've seen great teachers will break. And I just wonder, how many of those people listening right now would be interested in this. Because we always kind of default to the parents and the kids, but it's the teachers themselves that I think are also grappling. Anyway, long way of asking you what's busted. Yeah, so let me ask you, do you think it's broken?

Because I'm not sure that it is. Well, I know that in Baltimore, a vast majority of high school graduates are reading at a seventh grade level. I know that in my hometown as well, math proficiencies are even worse. So if we're comparing ourselves to the rest of the world and if we're looking at, you know, that kind of data, it ain't great. Is it? Yeah, no. I mean, so here's how I think about traditional education.

I think that it's delivering exactly what it's been designed to deliver, right? And I think it does it pretty well. So traditional education is reliable, it's efficient, it's familiar. We know what it is. It's designed, if you go back to the 1890s and the committee of 10 that originally designed secondary education, their goal, and I'm going to mess up the quote. So it was a committee of university administrators, the university presidents, led by, I believe the gentleman's name from Harvard was Charles Elliott. Okay, so he convenes this committee. And at the time, consider that our society was industrializing.

And so we still had in the United States largely an agrarian economy, but it was beginning to industrialize. And so the ideal for education was a very egalitarian concept, this concept of common schooling or public schooling. The idea was every student should be taught every subject in the same way and to the same extent, regardless of their ultimate destination. So that was one of the quotes that came out of the report. Right? And so the idea was if you are destined for the farm, the factory, or for some form of higher education, you would have the same common foundation. A baseline. That would be your baseline. Right. And so the reason that we take, the scope and sequence that we take now in secondary education, the reason that you take biology and then chemistry and then physics, and in that order, dates back to the 1890s. Because they prescribe that sequence. And so I think that was well conceived. It was well planned. It had great goals, right?

What's happened over time? We then had the whole period of industrialization, scientific management, sorting and ranking and measuring everything. That led to the advent of standardized assessment, you know, the bubble test that we're all familiar with, right? And so then we started to design education and deliver it in order to identify the talented 10, the top 10%, the people who are going to be our future leaders. And society. The gifted and talented, I believe, as opposed to the cursed and backward. Right. And so you've got to design these instruments that help with talent identification.

Right. And we've all taken these tests. And so, again, I think public education does a really good service in offering education broadly that follows a common standard to as many students as possible. And I believe today, about 83% of all students in America, all school-age children, are receiving some form of public education. And so I don't know that that's a problem. I actually think public education works really, really well for a great number of people. And in fact, I would say that public education sets the standard.

What Vela partners, VALA founders that we support are doing, they're not setting the standard. They're setting you apart. So they're doing something different. So it might be better, it might be worse, but it's different and better for the students who are pursuing that path, right? Well, Todd Rose is on your board? He is. Is he? Yeah, he's been with us since the beginning.

So we first started exploring the concepts of what became Vela about a decade ago. And he was a thought partner with a small band of thinkers and intellectuals, and we were trying to think about what's next in education. Well, are you sick of it yet? Are you sick of AI hogging up all the headlines and sucking up all the bandwidth? You find yourself wishing we lived in a simpler time? Do you miss the rotary phone? Well, get over it. The genie is out of the bottle.

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I mean, you're, look, you're very nice and you're very kind. And I think everything you've said is true. But I also think that at base, when you talk about that in Dutch, time. Right. So many of the tropes and the artifacts of a factory were brought into the school, from the ringing bell to the regimentation, to the, right? I mean, these things really ran in a top-down way. So we didn't have computers back then. We didn't have all these machines. And so we had to create the human machinery. So what were we teaching kids at the time? To do automatic tasks, to do them quickly, to do them at a high quality, to do them well, right?

of the tasks that we were taught and the processes that we were taught were critically important during that time we now live in a creative economy we live in it in a different economy it's a high-tech economy right and so how are we preparing students for this current future which is changing rapidly well isn't that the thing that's broken isn't so much of the public school system clinging to an older economy and aren't we painting with a pretty broad brush, I mean, if we're trying to inspire whatever the creative synapses are that can fire any kids' brain, is that happening by and large on the public school stage?

Yeah, I mean, I would say that the public school is, again, it's reliable and it's efficient, and it's going to continue, right? It's the big cruise ship, right? The big ocean liner that's out there. Will it change course over time? Absolutely it will. Right? But it'll only change course if there are influences from the outside that come in that try new methods.

Right? Little speedboats and dinghies. Exactly. Blowing past the cruiser going in different directions in uncharted waters. That's right. I think that public education will adapt and will continue to adapt over time. But it'll do so when there are people who are working in the unstructured permissionless space who are showing the art of the possible. And so that's the good news.

But, I mean, consider, too, you know, when we talk about large institutions, think about, I like to think about analogies a lot. So what are some analogies that we could look at that help describe what's happening in education? So one might be hoteling. Okay. So you stay at a hotel. Let's say you go into a Marriott and you go into a Marriott in New York City. Am I Ambassador Gold at this point or just a guy off the street? Okay.

Okay. So I've got points. I got status. So what are some of the features of the Marriott? Oh, when I go Marriott, well, I'm going to get a free breakfast the next day. I'm going to have access to the club level where the coffee is free and they might put out a cocktail in the evening. And there might be some credit. There might be some other credit maybe for the spa.

Right. Something like that. Okay, so is there a spa? Well, I sure hope so. You hope there's a spa? I've been on the road a long time, Meredith. Okay. Is there a restaurant?

Yes, there's a restaurant. There's a restaurant. Is there a swimming pool? Yes, there's a swimming pool next to the spa. Okay, and in your room, what are some features of the room? Well, I would hope there would be an amenity waiting for me. Maybe some fruit, maybe some champagne, if they know my profile. I don't know.

Maybe there would be a little mint by the pillow, perhaps. But even more basic. shampoo, conditioner, and iron. I would hope so. Indoor plumbing, all that stuff. Yeah, they got everything to Marriott. Now, imagine that you're at a Marriott in Singapore. Okay.

Are the amenities the same or are they different? Well, they're going to be different, for sure. Right. But a lot of the things that you saw in New York at the Marriott is in common with that hotel in Singapore, right? Well, sure. They have to have a standardized approach. That's right.

They have to, you know, McDonald's fries taste pretty much the same everywhere in the country, but to your point, they are different in Europe. That's right. Okay, and you know about what you're going to pay. Yes. You have a pretty good sense. Yes. Okay, now let's contrast this with, let's say you go to New York and you decide to stay at an Airbnb.

Okay. Do you have any expectation of any of those amenities? Well, I have hopes. Mm-hmm. You know, I have dreams. I have Yelp or I have whatever, you know, crowdfunded or, right? I'm going to look for the stars. I'm going to read the comments.

comments, but no, my expectations. Do you expect a spa? I do not. How about a full-service restaurant? No, I don't. Yeah. How about shampoo and conditioner? Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. But it's going to be different, right? But you're thinking, I might get some local color. I might stay in a neat neighborhood. I'm getting a different sort of like boutique experience compared to the Marriott, right? They might have a pool table. That's right. You might be in a part of town that isn't built up with a bunch of hotels. And then now how about if you stay at an Airbnb in Singapore? Well, is there such a thing? I don't know.

Well, I can't answer that with any degree of certainty. If I were in Singapore, I can tell you this. I'm relatively adventurous. I'm certainly curious. But I'd be going to the Marriott before I'd be going to the AirB. You'd be going to the Marriott. In Singapore. In Singapore.

Yeah, for sure. Okay, so which is better? Let's say you're going to New York. the Airbnb in New York or the Marriott in New York, which is better, objectively. God, that's such a good question. Well, it depends. Am I on a walkabout with some friends or am I traveling for business? Right.

If I'm traveling for business, it's the Marriott. All the way. It's just easy, right? All the way. Yep. Okay, so this is what's happening in education. So when our founders who are generally operating very bespoke, customized learning environments for the specific target market that they're serving,

they're more like these little Airbnb locations, right? these proprietors who are offering a highly customized experience. And so the question of whether or not they're better than your traditional public school is almost moot, because it's offering something completely different. So just as we wouldn't compare like a local Airbnb to a Marriott, they're both offering accommodation, but it's a completely different experience. So interesting. I thought you were going to take the bait.

I thought you were going to tell me, you know, Vela is the solution to a broken system because that's been my my experience and even going to fail I'm thinking of oh Pam you introduced me to Pam a founder teacher principal force of nature this woman is she is who's operating her school which is called the Isadora lane dean yes and folks if you were driving through this parking lot and you glanced up you'd swear it was your old dentist office. I mean, it doesn't look like a school. But to your point, you're going to make the Airbnb point. Yeah, that's right.

And so, look, sometimes I'm on the road and I'm going to stay at a Marriott. Other times, I'm going to pursue an Airbnb. So it really depends on your unique circumstance, depends on your unique family situation, what your values and priorities are, and how you can best satisfy those. So this is like a highly personal decision. So what we're finding in this world today is that families are making that decision on their own.

They're looking, let's say you've got four kids. I have four kids. Maybe one of my four kids should be in a public school setting. Maybe another one should be homeschooled, one-on-one in the home. Maybe another one should be in a small alternative environment. That's the level of variation that we're seeing. So we're seeing variation within families. We're seeing tremendous variety within cities.

And then you're seeing this happening. I mean, there's something in the water because it's happening. happening all across the country. Well, you know, we were talking about that offline. You know, anecdotally, here at MicroWorks, I haven't done anything different this year. We've been at this for 17 years now. We have 10 times the applicants today, as we did a year ago today, for these scholarships. Why?

What is happening broadly to make, maybe it's the kids themselves, but I suspect it might be parents, too, who are saying, you know something? I ought not affirmatively discourage my kid from learning a trade. Maybe we should just put all of this on the table. Is something like that happening within families? I mean, I think you just kind of answered it, but you have a front row seat to it. Yeah, I think it's definitely happening.

So I would say that families are becoming more self-reliant, more resilient, more independent, and they're looking to themselves to solve problems. So we're seeing this culturally just writ large, right? Does it surprise you that that would happen after COVID? Yeah, you know, this is really an interesting, interesting conversation. I know you mentioned that you'd been talking to Todd Rose, and this is something that Todd and I have talked about as well.

So when you have a situation like the pandemic, you could have a couple of different outcomes. So you could have almost like a flight to safety. So in scary times where people flock to the relative comfort and safety of large institutions and experts and centralized authorities, but you could also have people go the other way, where during tough times that are uncertain and scary, then you go back to the core of like,

what are your values and who is closest to you, and you go back to, I mean, it's like going home and relying on self. Well, I wonder, look, I appreciate that you don't want to just pile on to the status quo, but sure seems like a lot of parents, looking back at those mandatory closures and looking back at some of the arguments that were being made to keep those schools closed. I mean, it sure feels to me like the message being sent was there are a lot of important things here to consider, but your kid is nowhere near the top of the list. Yeah, that's right.

Right? And so that really felt like, and I don't have four. I don't have any kids, but boy, everybody I know does. and they all articulated some version of feeling like, wait a second, we can't count on some bureaucracy to make decisions that are in the best interest of Johnny or Sally. Oh, look, COVID was the moment that changed everything, right? I mean, the need for innovation and education was obvious. What we were doing was not working, and it wasn't, systems were not flexible enough to adapt on a moment's notice to the changing conditions on the ground. Yeah. Right. And so what happened in that moment? Well, again, people solve problems, good people solve problems, and they started to, they just started to solve them. And you saw this with private schools. You saw this with home education. You saw this with the emergence of a lot of new models that are out there. Right. And then some public schools adapted really, really well. So they didn't all struggle, but too many did. For sure. In the same way that your familial experience might vary from the Smiths or the Jones. is down the same street.

Florida was a very different place than New York. California was a very different place. And so, you know, it just keeps coming back to this idea that whatever it is we think we know broadly, be careful because that broad brush is going to get a lot of paint on things that really ought not be painted. And so I guess, I mean, when I left Katie's school, what was that called?

Greengate Children's School. Greengate, yeah. I said to my business partner, Mary, I said that about better than anything I've ever seen proves definitively that a cookie cutter approach is the real devil in all of this. Well, people are still raving, raving, I tell you, about my mother's performance in the latest Pure Talk commercial. And if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to get. give it a look on my Facebook page and read the comments. They're hysterical. In this commercial, you'll not only see Peggy Row gently criticizing her oldest son for his longstanding and well-established commitment issues. You'll learn about the latest offer from Pure Talk, which includes unlimited talk, text, and data for just $3499 a month with no contracts and no commitments of any kind. You can see why I love these guys. If, on the other hand, you have better things to do with your time,

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in a national advertising campaign. Do what my mom did. Get yourself unlimited high-speed data for just 3499 a month. At puretalk.com slash row. You can switch in as little as 10 minutes at puretalk.com slash row. Pure Talk. I met Katie in 2020, and we were still, I mean, this was right at the beginning of the pandemic. And she was having a tough time, and I'll tell you why.

So Katie had been a teacher. She'd also been a homeschooling mom. And she had been in a homeschooling group, right, with other families who were homeschooling. And she had decided to bite the bullet, take the leap, and start our own school. And so right before the pandemic began in March of 2020, she had signed a lease where she rented a church. And so this was a church that had expanded and had moved and they had the old building, right? And so she signed this lease. And then the other shoe dropped.

COVID happens, shelter in place, you know, how is she going to pay the rent? She has families who, you know, what's going to happen? Their kids aren't going to come to school, right? And so she was, she was terrified about what was going to happen. So we met her at Vela. Vela gave her a grant, and the grant enabled her to expand the outdoor play area. So there was a small fence around that outdoor play area, but the grant enabled her to build a bigger fence to increase the size of that outdoor play area, which meant that she could open her doors during COVID, during shelter in place, because the kids were outside. Right? And so that enabled her to actually grow her enrollment so that she could continue to survive during COVID. So she not only did her, you know, she was worried that her

business would go under and it grew and it thrived and it continues to thrive. And she's, I think you saw when you were there, she's now building additional buildings to satisfy all the additional demand from families. So we were all told, you know, when we first started this thing called Vela, and I'll get back to your question in a minute about what the name means, but we faced all kinds of questions from people. The critics basically said this wasn't going to work. I've spent so much time working with education reformers and people in the education establishment, and we would share ideas. I would share ideas about what could be possible if you allowed for more entrepreneurship and education, and I generally receive responses where they said, look, that's a fool's air in marriage,

with what are you doing? Don't go here. Like these operators are not legitimate. This isn't going to work. It's not going to last. It's going to go south. And so the critics came to us and they asked a bunch of different questions, right? First they said, well, are you going to, how are you going to find these people? So we knew that creative types like Katie existed, but we had no idea how to find them. And so they said, you know what? This critic said, this is never going to amount to anything other than a small niche market for the wealthiest families. And it won't be sustainable over time. Well, here's what we found. We found people like Katie out there. We've had more than 9,000 applications for support from founders of these new models. It's not stopping, right? And then,

well, are these kids going to be wealthy kids only? Is it a small niche market? Well, we found that about 93% of all the founders we support are serving low and middle income families. So this is remarkable, right? People are investing their own time and their own money, and these are not wealthy people, in order to offer something better for their kids. Well, I know there can't be a pat answer for this, but what does it cost to get your kid in a Vela school? It's got to vary wildly. It varies wildly. I would say, so some numbers.

So here's some fast facts. So the median learning environment in our network is charging about $450 per month per learner. And so if you think about being in school for 10 months out of the year, it's about 4,500 a year per learner, which is a lot of money. It's a lot less than your typical public school or typical private school, right? So this is low-cost private education. So that's normal. In our network also, we've tried to get a better handle on how large are these learning environments.

The typical one, the median size, is about 55 students in one of these learning environments. That gives you kind of a ballpark of what this looks like. Are there larger ones, for sure? Are there smaller ones? Yes. More expensive ones, cheaper ones. I mean, there's a wide degree of variation. So is there protocol?

Like, I mean, Pam and Katie, as I recall, were very different people in very different neighborhoods. Is there any kind of top-down thing involved here? Or is it all bottom-up? Right. Good question. I would say that what's animating this movement is a bottom-up. approach, right? And so people are, you know, they're basically posting a shingle, they're advertising

themselves for business, they're attracting customers, they're growing through word of mouth, and then they are delivering on the academic and personal growth goals that are demanded by families, right? And to the extent that they're satisfying those families, they come back, they earn their trust, they earn their business. And I mean, this is truly the power of the private sector at work. We're just seeing it in education in a way that we're not used to. I love it, but what are you hearing from local school boards and where does the criticism come from? And how do you comply with a world that is still besotted and enthralled by standardized tests? How do you, I mean, how do your graduates fit into that machine?

Yeah, great question. And so the way we think about accountability, we do think accountability is critically important. We think that the nexus of accountability happens between the families and the founders. So let's say you're Katie and you're leading one of these school environments, those families are holding her accountable for education delivery, right? And it's up to her to come up with measures of assessment and then performance that satisfies their needs. Now, how do they do that?

And we would say that there's a range of different ways. So the way that you're going to assess performance at a Montessori school or like a Waldorf school or another sort of like self-directed learning community is going to look different than it would at a classical school or at a project-based learning school. But every single one of these methods, these educational methodologies, has a way to assess student progress. And so those practitioners, like those founders, are delivering on those models for their families, right? Okay, so now how do they do it? You ask that question, we've asked our community, we want to know, how are you thinking about learner outcomes?

And we ask questions like, do you have the students sit for the state assessment, the standardized test? What, you know, how are you doing this? What we found is more than a third, it's about 36% of our operators are using some form of standardized assessment. Now, this is really interesting because consider that they're not required to generally by state law. And so they're voluntarily doing this. These tests are not cheap.

They're expensive. So they see value in purchasing the test in order to communicate those results to the families of the kids. Importantly, they're administering the test not to comply. with a bureaucratic requirement or a government requirement, but they're doing it in order to better communicate with families. So to the tune of more than a third of them. Okay, so that's one category.

Then there's another category of what I'll call education technology that has embedded assessment. So there's this whole category, whether you think about Khan Academy or Zern or I-Excel, like all of these different software packages that are out there that offer embedded, they're adaptive technologies that offer embedded assessment. And so more than two-thirds of our operators use some form of adaptive ed tech that has ongoing assessment of student performance.

So they're utilizing methods. They just, and they're actually, in many cases, they're utilizing the same methods that traditional public schools are using. But does the outside world understand what success looks like vis-a-vis these, accreditations, if that's even the right word to use. How do we know that a graduate from a Vela school?

Oh, Vela. Oh, right? Like, I mean, and again, I'm only asking for, as an outsider looking in, but if, in fact, your whole network of 4200 schools is as bespoke as a bed and breakfast model, then what's your brand? like what brand emanates from that bullia base of unpredictability. How do you say that? A bully base?

A bully base. I believe it's French for, look at all the interesting things on my plate. That's right. So that's what this is. There's all these interesting things. So you asked, how does a kid take the next step? Right? Okay, well, they have a high school transcript.

They fill it out and complete it just like kids in a traditional school would. There's tools for doing this for alternative. education. They take, they sit for and take the SAT or the ACT or the CLT, I think that's the classical literacy exam, and they score. They get benchmark scores. Classical, the CLT is a thing? I think that's what it's called. Mm-hmm. Did you take that? I did not take that. Did you? I did not. Yeah. But you know, my brother did? My brother dropped out of college because he was bored to death. And then he realized he, like you, wanted to be an engineer. And he learned that you can actually sit for, what do you call it, the board, the test, the...

Well, they have those Klep exams as well. Yeah. Yeah. He didn't go back to school. He went to the library. And in about two months, read 2,000 pages on all of it and just smoked it. So all of these things are possible, right? And so consider, I know you work all the time in, it's not called vocational education anymore, but, you know.

Right, exactly. The trades and career and technical education, there are dual enrollment programs all across this country. Here's a little secret. Homestchooling kids take those programs all the time, right? So you might be having part of your studies at home or in a homeschooling group or in a hybrid homeschooling environment, and part of your high school studies are taken at the local trade school down the street or at the local community college down the street. You know, to circle back, part of what I think was a,

I can't think of a more hair-brained decision in the history of modern education than taking shop class out of high school along with Homek. And whatever passes for financial literacy these days. Like those basic things seem to have been deliberately and systematically removed in the 70s for the most part, early 80s, you know, when I was in high school. And so that broad-based benchmark of all these different things that that really became diminished. And it happened so fast that people kind of forgot about it. That's right.

So where do the trades, for lack of a better word, fall into the potential of Vela curriculum? Oh, there's huge potential here, right? So at Vela, we don't have a standard curriculum. We just have a collection of founders who are all doing things their own way. And what we are seeing is a renewed emphasis on hands-on experiential learning activity, on practical arts. Oh, gosh, we have a founder we support that has what they call a common arts curriculum. They learn how to blacksmith horses. Ferries.

Right? Yes, exactly. But they're learning. You find that many of these locations have a heavy emphasis on agriculture, on farming, on horticulture, on permaculture, right? And so they're learning how things grow. If you think about a typical education, you're spending, kids generally spend, you know,

two to three hours a day in focused core academic instruction. Now it's spaced all throughout the day with other, you know, like passing periods, enrichment classes, lunchtime, right, home room. And so you're two and a half to three hours of really intense quarantine. instruction is spaced during the day. Well, what if you reimagine the day? So what if you focused on core in the morning and then in the afternoon, you had time to go on nature treks every day? Or you had

time to, you know, like engage in animal husbandry, right? We are seeing this happening all over the place. We're seeing an emphasis on more nature-based learning, on more athletic activity, getting outside, going on a hike every day for three miles. Is it weird to love people but despise human resources? If so, well, color me weird. It's not to say I don't respect the millions of people who work in HR departments and companies all over the country. I do.

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ZipRecruiter.com slash row. ZipRecruiter.com slash row. The smartest way to hire. Well, one of the first things that struck me just at a glance was the relationship with risk. Mm-hmm. Climbing trees. This fascinates me.

Those kids weren't just climbing trees. They were 25 feet in the air in trees. They were, we've got footage of these girls doing these crazy somersaults off of the swing set. And it felt like when we first sat down and started talking, we were talking about that time in our youth. So we had this unstructured playtime, right? Yeah. What if education could be like that all day long? That's what we saw at Greengate.

with the somersaults on the swings. But it was more than that. It wasn't just like, you know, recess at the next level. There was a geography class going on while it looked like some sort of art class was happening. The kids were drawing and at the same time they were technically, I guess, in a geography space. And then over there, the same thing was sort of happening with math. But it was kinetic. It was, I mean, there was activity.

It was cerebral and kinetic at the same time. That's right. So it turns out you can learn, you can make academic progress and acquire knowledge, even as you're building skills of independence and resilience. Wow. Okay. If I could just bring this back to me for a moment. Sometimes, Meredith, in the course of my work, I'm called upon to memorize large chunks of material.

I'm good at it, or facile anyway. if I can move. Right? So if you tell me to memorize three stances of a Robert Frost poem, I can do it pretty quick if I'm walking while I'm doing it. And if I have to deliver it to a camera, then I need to be able to block it out. And so what happens for me,

especially with memory exercises, is that the recall is linked really, really closely to the action. And I know the same is true of actors. You see them blocking a play, you know, and sometimes if you change the blocking, they'll just go blank. So why in the world would we fill a classroom full of chairs and make everybody sit absolutely still as they attempt to somehow process massive amounts of information that are just being thrown at them? It should not be a surprise that many young people struggle with this.

We see this frequently with young boys. Like they need to be rambunctious. They need to get out. They need to play. Right? But they also need to learn. And so I think you can accomplish both. So the compliance environment of schools can and should change.

There's a young woman. I can remember going to a location. It was called Acton Buckhead. It's located in a beautiful botanical garden outside of Atlanta. Sounds like a great name for an action hero too, by the way. Oh, no, totally. Acton Buckhead. And the beauty of Acton schools, every student is on their own hero's journey.

It's a self-directed learning facility. This is like Lord Acton? That guy? Yes. And these environments are really interesting. I love all learning environments. I love classical learning environments. I love self-directed learning environments.

I think every single one of these is beautiful in its own way and can work for the right child. In this particular learning environment, when we went to visit, we had a chance to interview the kids. And as we were interviewing the kids, there was a question that we raised to this young woman who, I want to say she was 12 or 13, middle school age girl, right? And we said, okay, if you were to meet the principal of a local high school, what would you ask the principal? And she said, I would ask, and I was just floored by her answer. She said, I would ask, why is it that when you turn 18 and you're a senior in high school,

you have to ask permission to go to the bathroom? And then the next day you're expected to be in a young. adult, sign a lease, and pay all your own bills. Why does that make any sense? There was so much wisdom in what this young woman shared, and I thought, well, gosh, why do we do that? Because, why? Well, maybe because we're just trying to boil the ocean. While you're trying to teach basic algebra, you're also trying to teach obedience or manners or permissions. I mean, it's an awful lot to do at the same time, but I don't know. I mean, like the basic dignity of being able to use the can

when you need to use the can should preclude that level of permission, it seems. And I think that this works for a great number of kids. What about the kids that want something different? What if high school looked completely different? I'd like to be told to go to the bathroom. You do? No matter what I have.

No matter what? What if high school looked more like college? What if you went three days a week and the other two days you are at home working on your studies. Well, I mean. And you had more control over your time. But with that kind of independence comes responsibility, right? Of course.

Because you've got to deliver. And assumptions. Let's assume you have a home where your studies are encouraged, right? And now certain people in a top-down world are going to look around and say, because that environment doesn't exist, we can't do that. And because it would be unfair to only encourage that for the people who do have access to a home environment that would encourage studies. because that would be unfair, well, then no.

We're all going to come back and we're all going to do it this way. And so we're in a very Temple Grandin way, shoveled into the chutes. I love Temple Grandin. I mean, well, to your point, you know, I mean, yes, she was a different learner. That's right. For sure. Yeah, and so she was able to become a different inventor because her perspective was completely different. She saw the world in a different way.

Here's why I believe you, and here's why I like you. I've always liked you. And I want to talk about from whence you came, because, you know, Charles Koch, it's not a secret. He was really helpful for MicroWorks. And I met you through Stand Together, which evolved somewhat organically out of the seminar network program. You were there early, early on, and now you're running, Vela. You're running 4,200 schools with how many students would you? you guess? So VALA founders, so we don't actually run anything. We have 10 employees at VALA,

but what we do is we create a network and we offer funding. We offer a little bit of funding that helps build confidence in founders. We connect them to knowledge, to tools, to resources, and to each other. It's all self-service on demand. We believe very strongly in voluntary exchange. And so what we found is that by inviting founders to participate in opportunities to get better, to learn from each other, to come together live, virtual, you name it, they're more likely to participate, more likely to engage. And they actually go further faster as a result. And so how many, you asked, how many do we have right now? So we have 4,276 founders collectively. They've benefited more than 5,000 people in some way, kids, families, adults.

In actual learning environments, there are about 350,000 students who are in an environment led by a Vela founder. It's remarkable. Well, when do you become an existential threat to whatever the status quo is? Yeah. Well, you know, that's an interesting point. I want to see more low-cost private education solutions. Everything that sort of sits between home education and private education, because I I think that's the engine of innovation.

But are you in a zero-sum game? And again, I'm not asking you to beat up on the status quo. But there's a finite number of kids who need to be educated. That's right. They're either going to go here or there or there or there or there or there. So when you get into this quasi-semi-private world, how competitive is it? Because you don't want to get into the whole varsity blue madness. Like how do you think about that?

I think it's a good question. So what's interesting is that our founders aren't, they don't feel very competitive with the public system. In fact, about half are former public school educators, right? And so they love public education. They just want to do something different, right? And so it's, I think you're right, there's a finite number of kids out there. And realistically, we're seeing a shift away from public education. Since the pandemic, more than a million students, we've seen a decline in public.

enrollment by about a million students since the pandemic where are the kids? Where are they going? Well, sounds like 355,000 of them are available. Okay. Well, about half of the shift is that these kids are receiving some form of private or home education and they weren't before. Then there's demographic decline. So there's just there's fewer kids coming into the system than there are graduating. And that's just the demographic reality of birth rates and people waiting longer to have kids and having fewer of them. Right? Parents are older when they have their first child now,

and so they don't have as many children. And so we're seeing a reduction, a decline in the number of kids. We're also seeing this big shift where kids are moving increasingly into some form of private or home education. And these are a low-cost alternative. So these are not like your traditional elite private schools.

Yeah. The compliment that I was meaning to pay you a minute ago was that during the lockdown, It was important to me to get dirty jobs back on the air because you know a big essential working show and a lot of people were asking Why don't you get out there and shoot it in the thick of this thing and I didn't have a good reason not to So one of the first places we went was South Dakota and there we are at crazy horse and talk about risk These guys they let me repel off the front of crazy horse's face and do some work on his nose, you know and then I've got these giant drills and I'm working on his, if you haven't, folks, if you haven't seen what's being built, it's going to take

another 50 years to finish. But not far from Mount Rushmore is a monument, it's a crazy horse. It's probably four times the size. And it's a private undertaking. And it's a single family. It's a single family. Right. So wild.

And they've been at it now for half a century, and it's going to take another 50 years to finish it. Didn't they have more kids so that they would have more people to carry on the project? 13 kids. Yeah. They basically sired his own workforce. And when you read about the work ethic, and when you read about the passion and the determination

and the full-on hard-headed stubbornness that it took Gustav, unpronounceable last name. Taylor, you remember his last name? Chuck, if only we had a small handheld device tapped into a large compendium of shared knowledge in some kind of cloud situation. We'll get his last name because it's important. I'd like to get it right.

Because the point is, in the midst of filming Dirty Jobs, during a lockdown, at a fairly risky way, I looked up and saw you and your family. It was so jarring for me because I've only ever seen you in like hotel ballrooms. Right. Right? In these like these like these stand together functions, like that looks so much, no, it can't be. But it's like you were literally there with your family on a kind of field trip. We were.

We were on the Great American Road trip. Yes. Yeah. And we were there wearing, you know, like sweatshirts and jeans. jeans with like our masks on because you had to do that. I know. Right. I know. And I was doing this. I was wearing a mask because I was like drilling into granite. And the whole thing was dirty and dangerous and beautiful and interesting as hell. There you were. There were some other people there too who had ventured out. Yeah. So they at the end of every day after the park closes,

they take a small group on a tour. And so in exchange for a donation to, the Crazy Horse Foundation. So we thought our family was there. When are we ever going to see Crazy Horse again? So we made a donation to the foundation and we got on a van and did like a little van tour after the park closed. And so we get to the top and they said, oh, by the way, Mike Roe is here filming. I'm going, how is this happening? He owes me money. And I told the, I told the gentleman who had was conducting the tour for us. I said, wait a minute. And I went over. And I went over and said, Mike, what are you doing? And honestly, my brain shut down for about five seconds.

I was just like, Han, what is going on? What are you doing here? Chuck, can you also find a picture of crazy horse just so people can see what we're talking about? We were right by the face. I believe I can. His name is Korshak Zolkowski. Zolkowski, yeah.

Yeah, I met one of his daughters, who was technically, I think, in charge of the memorial at that point. But it is his, his family. family tree looks like a wall of I think about, okay, so like bringing it full circle. Think about what it means to be an American in the American dream. Yep. And that gentleman and his wife and their family, they had a vision of what that giant rock formation could be. Yeah. Right? And then they just got after it. Look at that. Look at that. Yeah. That's the vision of what it could be. And that's where we are today. They had a vision of what was possible and the future that they're imagining. So all we're doing at Vela

is investing in founders who are doing the very same thing in their own small way in their community. I like analogies too and metaphors. You're chipping away. You're chipping away at the rock waiting to see what's going to come out of it.

And it's not perfect. You know how many, I mean, driving up to Crazy Horse, they had all that equipment that had failed on the side of the road, right? And they had war stories that they were telling. just like that every single one of these founders has those war stories.

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Get 20% off your order at American-giant.com slash Mike. American Giant American Made. American Giant American Made. Well, in just further testaments, the way every single thing is connected, whether we know it or not, look at that thing. That's exactly where I was. It's unbelievable. Well, they made a lot of progress since then. Huge progress.

Yeah. Don't let me forget, Chuck. We need to invite one of the Zorkowski's on here. Oh, yeah, yeah, great idea. They would lie. I know they would come, and I just think this is, I mean, Meredith is right. This is a great American story. It's a family story.

And it's an educational story, too. I mean, what is the purpose of a monument really but for to remember, stimulate, curiosity, right? Satisfy wonder, all of that stuff. I mean, that's about the biggest statue you're going to find that does that. And think about how much they've learned. The technology they're using today. I mean, they showed you about the diamond blades.

Today, but they were using like precision dynamite. I mean, the most targeted sort of blasting. And those guys are like billy goats. They just up and down thousands of stairs a day carrying. buckets filled with rock. I mean, it was so Sisyphian. Quixotic even.

I mean, who today would take on a project whose completion was 100% guaranteed if it happens to happen long after your dead? That's right. Who's got that kind of vision anymore? It's tough, right?

Only somebody who loves to attack big, hairy, audacious problems. They see complex. city and they think, rather than saying, I can't do this, nobody could do this, they think, how do I break it into pieces and then start to attack it one bite at a time? Right? That's a talent. What does Vela stand for? What's it mean? So Vela, the etymology of the word, it means different things in different languages. But generally it means, so in many of the Latin languages, it means a candle or a light or a constellation. There's actually a constellation in the Southern

Hemisphere that's named Vela. And so often it's used in saline, saline languages, right? So saline, saline. Oh, saline. Sailing. Yes. Saling. Yes. Saline. So like journey. D5W. Like a drip. Yeah. So oftentimes like nautical companies are named Vela, right? So it's like a journey. And it's a light. It's a beacon. And then in some languages in Africa, it means to appear.

Right? And so it's to make known, to make aware. So we selected the name Vela very intentionally because the idea was that we knew that these creative, innovative people are sailing to the frontier of education. And our job at Vela was to help light the path and make this appear and known to the world. This, according to your website, it's more than 355,000 learners. in total? You're looking at 5.3 million.

Yes. So we have two types of founders we support. So we have those who are operating what we call learning environments. So that's a place where children learn, right? And it could be one day a week, two days a week, three, four, five days a week. Could be part-time, could be full-time. There are about 350,000 who are in these physical learning environments. Then we have another class of founder who are providing all of the tools, the support,

and the resources that make that kind of alternative education possible. So they offer content, academic content and tools, curricular resources. They might offer back-end operating tools and resources. So it's now easier than ever to get access to the business tools, the information tools, and the academic tools to start your own learning environment. So these things are very sort of, they go together, right? So think about, like if you're operating, a hair salon. So you have all the implements in the hair salon. You've got the chairs, you've

got the scissors, you've got the shampoo and the conditioner, and then you've got the hair salon itself, and you have the people and the relationships. So for me, when I pick a hair salon, I've been going to the same stylist now forever. Well, clearly. Right. You're quaffed and it's amazing. As many people do, because I want that relationship experience that's bespoke. I like my stylist. I know all about her life, she knows about my life, right? But the tools that she uses, well, hell, I mean, they're in salons all across the country, right? And so we're investing in both the people who are delivering something unique and highly customized, as well as the tools and resources that make this whole movement possible to scale. I went to a salon in Zurich about 15 months ago.

What was it called? Sammy's finest barbers, right, Taylor? Finest barbers. Finest barbers. Yeah. I had a big meeting in Liechtenstein, and I got a glimpse of myself in a plate glass window. And I thought, man, I need a haircut. You need a haircut. So I went in, and I talked to the guy who ran the place.

And just such a great entrepreneurial story. He's got like six or seven shops all throughout Switzerland. He speaks half a dozen languages. Now, this is a guy at a glance you might dismiss as a haircutter. But he had a trade. right and he was really good at it and he had an entrepreneurial spirit which was terrific and um so i was a little uncomfortable because like you i i go to the same person all the time just because we need certainty in our lives right and while i was getting my my haircut in the mirror i noticed a guy who finished up his

thing and then he went over and he sat in a special chair and uh sammy was it sammy who actually ran the joint. Ingles. Ingles. He goes over to this pot and he takes off a lid and the steam comes out and he takes two Q-tips and he sticks it in and he pulls it out and the ends of the Q-tips are covered with black wax. It's hot and steam coming off of it.

And he kind of twirls it around and he walks over and the guy leans his head back. And this Ingalls guy sticks the toothpicks or the Q-tips. into his nostrils, right? All the way in. And then he pinches him and holds it there for about 30 seconds. And then he yanks him out. And the amount of hair stuck onto this wax, Meredith, right? Now, I'd never seen anything like this because I'd never been to Zurich before.

I don't know how they'd do it over there. But the next thing I knew, I was there getting all the hair pulled out of my nose too. You bet I did. You signed up for it. You bet I did. Right. Absolutely. And this is a good place to land the plane, really, because to your earlier analogy, you know,

sometimes it's a Marriott, sometimes it's a B&B, sometimes it's the salon, you know, and sometimes you're flat on your back getting all your nose hair pulled out by a man who speaks six languages. And sometimes you're on the top of a giant Indian doing dangerous work, and you run into a woman who's running 4,200. not running, but overseeing 4,200 semi-private schools, how much weirder does the world get, really?

Yeah. So our goal now is just to how do we connect more families to this work? So the demand is there, the open-mindedness is there, how do we make it easier for people to find these connections so that they can go do like as you did

get this scenario, right? Get that hair pulled out of your nose. Yeah. I'll tell you, man, that Zurich air, in my newly hairless nostrils was so invigorating. How bad did it hurt? It wasn't pleasant, but it was over very quickly. He counted me down from three, of course, and pulled it on two.

So it made my eyes water. Was there like an after balm? Not really. No? I mean, there were some schnops down the road in a beer garden. A server out function. Yeah. So what do people, let's, I mean, as we wrap it up.

Right. They're probably parents listening who are really curious to know if this would be a good fit for their kids. And there are probably some teachers listening who are wondering if maybe this would make sense for them. What's the next step for both? Yeah, great question. So. By the way, it's the only kind of questions I ask, Meredith. You only ask good ones?

I've tried a lot with disappointing ones. Yeah. It impacts listenership negatively. So, okay, so to the first question, if you're a teacher and you're considering doing something new, the best thing you can do is just talk to your fellow teachers, see who is doing something unique in your neck of the woods, because this activity is happening in every community nationwide. If you want to find, I recommend someone, one of our founders, I absolutely adore her, names McKenzie Oliver. She was Missouri State Teacher of the Year.

She ended up moving to Florida where her husband's family was from. She ended up becoming a public school teacher and became Florida teacher of the year. Oh, wow. Started homeschooling her own children when they were young because she had an idea of what she wanted for her children, right? That turned into lighthouse learning. And she now has, she has 90 kids now, people who wanted her to be their teacher. Next year, she'll have 120 kids and she'll be K through 12 all the way through. This year she was K through 8.

So she's adding high school. She also, some of these people are just amazing, like supercharged entrepreneurs. She has a podcast called Teacher Let Your Light Shine. And so on this podcast, she's trying to basically make this world known to traditional teachers and tell them that they can do it. You've got it. You've got what it takes to make this happen. And McKinsey can show you how.

And so I would, I'm just shamelessly plugging McKinsey's podcast because she's so incredible. that's one place to go. For parents, again, this movement is growing through word of mouth. So talk to your friends, talk to your family members, find other people in your community who are educating their children in a different way. And then also stay tuned. So Vela, as we continue to evolve, we've been at this now. We opened our doors in 2019, but we were in the planning stage as well before that.

Just this year, we are getting ready to launch a new mobile app where for the first time, we'll be connecting parents directly to our founder community. So you'll be able to search based on where you live and find nearby founders who could be very interested in serving your children. When do you expect that'll be? So we expect by the end of the summer that will be up and running. Great. And that'll be free? Yeah, that's right. We are, Vela is a nonprofit organization and we exist to help support founders and families who want to own their education, who want to own their own path with their educational journey of their kids. So, yeah, we're, download the app.

As you know, and as I've told you before, I'm, you know, fundamentally an optimist, I think, but I'm also fundamentally skeptical. And so if this were, when did this launch? We launched in 2019. Okay. So if this were 2020, 2019, 2020, I'd probably be going, yeah. It's crazy. Sometimes a great notion, right?

Whatever. But five million students serve. Yeah. Forty-two. Are you in every state? We're in all 50 states, rural, suburban, urban, you name it. Consider this. And I know we started this conversation talking about public education.

Gallup conducts surveys on, you know, opinion surveys on the American public all the time. On a recent survey this year, they asked for American satisfaction with public education. among many other attributes of American life, there's 24% satisfaction. That was lower than almost every other attribute of American life. It was lower even than paying taxes. So consider that, right? So the reason Vela has been so successful is because there are so many good people, whether they be families, educators, kids who are craving something different.

So without bashing the status quo, can we at least agree that there's room for improvement? Right? You know, I should, I know Chuck has dined for me to shut up now, but there is this one last little topic, and it goes back to stand together. And specifically with regard to the American dream, they seem to be interested in every year in something similar, but something slightly different than the prior year. I mean, right now I know they're really focused on the 250th anniversary of our country. And right next to that was the American. dream. Is it alive? What does it mean? And they invited me to speak. And I think this was Palm Springs a year and a half ago about all of that. I was happy to, but you mentioned Gallup.

And it just made me think of a survey that I saw that I don't remember the specifics, but the percentage of Americans who believe the American dream is dead is shocking. It's very adjacent, I think, to the fact that in 1980, I think it was 80s. 80% of Americans define themselves as very or extremely patriotic. And today the number is like 38%. And those two things somehow or another felt connected to me. And education must surely be a part of that. Oh, for sure.

Absolutely. So we've seen this declining trust in institutions. We're seeing people despairing. Well, what better way to fix that than to roll up your shirt sleeves and do something about it. And so that's what we're seeing. This bottom up approach is people exercising those muscles to do something different to live that American dream, right?

People want to be empowered. And what Vela is doing, I mean, we're not the only organization doing this. Many good organizations are doing that. You mentioned Montessori. That's right. Is that similar? I mean, it feels like it. For sure.

I mean, Montessori is one of many different, you know, sort of education methodologies that exist. but it's definitely increasing in popularity now. People love the spirit of discovery. They love the self-reliance, the practical life skills that are imparted. They love their creativity. I mean, that is what is really animating, I think, so much of this activity. We're seeing the same kind of rise in classical education.

People are craving to go back to basics, right? Like what does it mean? They talk about the good, the true, and the beautiful. What does that mean in education? Think about the rise of podcasts. You know, my old boss, John Hendricks, who founded the Discovery Channel, built that whole empire on satisfying curiosity. And he did it within the limitations of broadcast and cable. Well, that ship has sailed.

We're, there is no governor left. We can talk about this as long as we want and on as many podcasts and in as many formats. And you can, I mean, look at Rogan and look at some of these other, the vast curiosity. of the human spirit is being satisfied today like never before. And that's the optimistic part of me. Absolutely, right? So I don't think there's reason to despair. I think there's reason to be hopeful.

I mean, look at podcasting. What is it? It's a bottom-up way to enable human connection. There it is. Faster, quicker, better than having some very large production. Deeper and wider, too. That's right. That's right.

So the things that we try to do are fundamental. fundamentally the same over time, but the methods that we use are constantly changing. Last thought. Are you haunted as I am by the fact that if I have one of these things, and I'm holding up an iPhone if you're just listening? You have some text messages that came in. I do. Oh, calls are coming in. Oh. Huh. No, J.D. Vance. Not now. Maybe later. Maybe later. You take care of that way you think. The idea that when you and I, when you were in school in Virginia and me back in Maryland, we did not have immediate access to 98% of all of the information in the world.

We didn't have a liberal arts degree charging on our kitchen counter or in our back pocket 24-7. We have it today. And to what extent is that kind of access going to inform the future available? Yeah, great question. It's the only kind I ask, Meredith. I know, we talked about that earlier. They just get better. They do get better.

So think about this. What's the purpose of technology? Is it meant to control you? Or is it meant to enable you to do more and better than you ever imagined, right? Because the risk in education is that we take technology and we utilize it and tailor it in order to turn humans into better robots. Rather than enabling technology, humans, teaching humans how to enable humans how to enable, technology so that they can live far better lives. Those are two very different paths that we could go. Well, they are certainly different. It's kind of like one path would be marked efficiency

and the other would be marked effectiveness. Right. And they both want to get you to the same place, but they are different. When you conjure up robots, it's hard not to think of that famous Huxley quote. He said, the greatest threat to freedom is total anarchy, but the second greatest threat is total efficiency. So in that march toward total efficiency, vis-à-vis our relationship with technology, what will we lose in the bargain? Yeah, so think about something you've already lost because of that phone. I can tell you, I can share something I've lost.

All right. Okay, so when I was growing up, I graduated from college, and I got dropped, off in Europe. I flew over there, I went to Europe for six weeks. I had no phone. Didn't have a credit card. You've probably done this, right? I have, yeah, exactly. No phone, no credit card. I had a calling card, like an AT&T calling card, so I could call home if needed, and I had travelers checks, right? And then I had that book, let's go Europe. And you would tear off like sections. That's such a merit of this book. It is. Let's go Europe. Right. No, totally. I haven't been very animated. You know me. I'm usually very animated. I haven't been very animated on this, on this discussion today. But,

Okay, so after you finished a city, you would tear off that section of the book and throw it away so that your bag was lighter. Right? And then by the time, you know, months, two months later, you're flying home, your book's gone. Okay. We did not have a phone with Google Maps to tell us where to go. So the first thing you had to do in any city is figured out. You would get off the train and you would find a map. And then, and I mean, it wasn't a grid system for the roads in most of these cities. I mean, it was confusing as hell. You might. might not speak the language, but you had to navigate to wherever you were going. Self-sufficient, self-reliant, figure it out, right? Okay. When you go to a city, do you have any idea where you're going today? I do not. No, right.

I do not. You key it into Google Maps. Right. We've lost those neurons in our brain that were helping us figure out navigation and sense of direction. We've turned them off because our phone does it for them, for us, right? So you've got to ask yourself, ask yourself this. Well, wait, should we not be using that technology and instead training our brains? Or have we freed up more space in our brains to do other things?

I don't know. I don't know either. I don't know, but I know this. Good luck prying the calculators out of public education. I mean, nobody would stand for that. Now, has it made us more reliant on a tool and less self-sufficient? yeah, maybe, but somewhere in there is a train. So how can you accomplish both where you're increasing your self-sufficiency and your

independence and your freedom while simultaneously using these technology tools to accomplish even more? I wonder. I don't know that you can have all of that in the same space all the time. I think part of what tech does is it forces you into a new space that you have to homestead essentially and like figure out. a new area. Yeah, I joked with Chuck about this a lot. You know, the first time I came to L.A. and you were out here long before me, the Thomas Guide was the Bible. You can't make any sense of L.A. unless you have this phone book-sized pamphlet in your car and its grids and its pages. And, you know,

I don't remember cursing it. I remember being grateful for the fact that I had it. I only think back negatively now when I realize all I can I just pick up the phone and give it an address and it tells me what to do and then pretty soon I'm not even going to have to drive the car I'll just sit in the back seat and tell it where to go get in the waymo so good deal or bad deal do we become more efficient at the expense of something human is it a fair trade what do you think I don't know but I will say that that craving for meaning Then say it right on that microphone so people can hear you. Yeah.

So Man's Quest for Meaning, what does it mean? What is our purpose? You're talking Frankel? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. And I think I will say that like we are seeing this inside our community at Vela.

We're seeing a massive growth in classical education. Why? Because they're searching for meaning. We're seeing massive growth in Montessori education. Why? It's the same thing. It's the quest for meaning. It's so funny.

David Mamet just sat right there. talking about all of this through the lens of writing and the elegance and the simplicity of communicating in a way that doesn't have any fat attached to it and the talent, the skill, what you have to do as a tradesperson to become that facile with the language and what potentially happens to all that art

and all that intellect when the AI gets to the point where you can't tell the difference between American Buffalo and whatever you tell the machine to print. But this is the onward progress of technology, right? Throughout the history of mankind. Wasn't it, I might have this wrong, but didn't Plato say something like the act of writing things down makes you dumber, right? Yes, right. But actually that was the founder of Play-Doh who said that, and he was very upset about the impact of children's toys. No, look, I mean, there's a great line in Inherit the Wind at the end of the Scopes Monkey Trial when the guy who's basically playing Clarence Darrow talks about this.

I haven't thought about it in years, but he's got the science book in one hand, and he's got the Bible and the other. And he basically puts them together. But that comes at the end of a speech where he's bemoaning. the cost in the bargain we're talking about. Like with telephones, he talks about the charm of distance. And okay, now we've just made the world a lot smaller and a lot closer and a lot less interesting and a lot less wondrous.

And the same thing with jet travel. You've made it smaller. Isn't that great? You can see more. But somewhere in there we gave, we did give something up. And I'm no Luddite, but I do admit to constantly worrying that I should have taken the effective path. And somehow or another, I paid my toll for, you know, the efficiency highway. And here we go.

Yeah. So I think we all have to do what makes the most sense to find that meaning, recapture relationships and restore the wonder. I'd love to chat more, but I need to check my messages now. All right. This has really been great. Chuck, how long have we been talking? an hour 21. You were terrific.

Really. Thank you so much. You know I'm terrified. Hey, we're still recalling, so don't. That's okay. Okay. Honestly, then, but why? You are in a position right now that most people really dream of being in.

You've got five million people who have been impacted by a thing that you're running. What scares you most? I swear that's my last question. What scares me the most? about coming here and being terrified? You just said you were terrified, and I don't know why. Well, because I think, oh, we all have different talents that we bring to the table, right? And different traits.

And by nature, I'm more of an introverted person. I draw strength from within rather than from without, like from other people. So experiences like this are, I will do it, but they're taxing, right? Whereas I bet you get energized by it. Look, all I'll tell you is, if you're, have an opportunity to travel to a strange city and somebody wants to yank all their hair out of your nose. That's right. Let them do it. Do it. I will do it. Just let them do it. Yeah, I'm always up for trying new things, but things like this are scary. They're tough. I'm an engineer. We started there.

That's right. I'm an engineer. I like to solve problems. I like to take big, complex things and divide them into little pieces. That's what I do. And I like to work with amazing people who can make it all happen, right? But being on like a talk interview, that's, oh, wow, that's terrifying. Good. I'm glad. We should all do stuff that scares us. Because in the end, I swear to God, I'm done after this. That's all right. I got one little fact check after you. All right, well, go ahead and do yours first, because I'm not going to give you the last word. That's crazy. That seems fair. You're just a producer, for God's sakes. It was according to Plato's Fadris that Socrates suggested that writing could negatively impact memory.

There we go. You believe that relying on the written words might lead people to forget how to recall information from within them stills. And this is why you should be terrified because there's always a pedant in the Greek chorus ready to swoop in and tell you how you got it wrong. And correct us. That's right. There's always a teacher's pet. Always. I'm not a teacher's pet.

I may be a pet. But I'm not a teacher's pet. You are a pedd. You're a teacher's pedant. That I'll take. Finally, we have a title for this episode. No, my final, final point is that in 2019, I'd have been skeptical. I really would have been. But there's a terrific title of a book I quote a lot called The Evidence Demands a Verdict.

I love that. Well, you've got the receipts now. Vela has some evidence. And folks, if you're thinking about what's best for your kid or what's best for you or what would be good for your community, it's not an endorsement, kick the tires, but by all means, go to vela. Dot org. That's V-E-L-A.

V-E-L-A. And take a nautical journey into enlightenment. That's not bad. You can use it if you want. I love it. Yeah. You're welcome. Thanks again.

Thank you. This episode is over now. I hope it was worthwhile. Sorry it went on. long, but if it made you smile, then share your satisfaction in the way that people do. Take some time to go on and leave us a review. I hate to ask, I hate to beg, I hate to be a nudge, but in this world the advertisers really like to judge. Judge, you don't need to write a bunch, just a lighter two.

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