The Shocking TRUTH About AI in Education

[0:00]  what does it mean to be a truly great thinker especially in the world of chat GPT and everything being a fingers snap away well today I sit down with David Adams now David is the CEO of an amazing organization called the urban assembly which is challenging the way that we push out thinkers into this new everchanging landscape of society we're going to hear about David's philosophy on social emotional learning we're going to talk about the role of artificial intelligence in the education experience we're going to talk talk about creative thinking problem solving in a growth mindset plus so much more you guys are absolutely going to love this episode let's get after it with David our job is to show what right looks like to inspire others to adopt new ways of thinking in order to produce young people who can solve problems for themselves and problems for the world um the extent

[0:47]  that we got on top of the AI work is for the same reasons that we got on top of our social emotion learning work and our post-secondary Readiness work uh because it works uh this is the work that's going to help change and transform what it means to be educated in 2024 and Beyond and we're just very proud to help schools see what that looks like in their own institutions David in our previous conversation you said there's a huge difference between how the schools are organized and what the labor market expects what's going on there well the schools are organized around really discret academic content uh tasks

[1:36]  uh we're talking about um things like how well students engage in discourse or uh how will they kind of work around content oriented things how fast they can solve equations in math or uh maybe even their persistence if you're getting up to some of the performance task when we go out to the industry we're really talking about integrated knowledge um how students take information from different disciplines and content areas and apply those to problem solving usually in a group or Community right uh and so they're going to be pulling from different kinds of skills they're looking at communication skills how well do you communicate your point of view um in a group who may have different or diverse points of view to you than you uh we're also looking at your ability to deal with difference uh and diversity in order to get the best final product so

[2:23]  essentially we're looking at the difference between discrete bodies of knowledge that students are tested on that demon their Mastery of content and the application of that content through processes like communication and collaboration and problem solving in order to solve for what we call nebulous problem sets in schools I I was talking to one of our students the other day and I said what kind of problems do you solve and it said math problems and I was like any other kind of problems they're like No And I was like you never have problems with people like oh yeah all the time but our students are so oriented to this notion that problems have equal signs attached to them that they forget that most of the things that they struggle with often times in schools are not the ones that are equation based but the ones that are People based um over in the real world we got a lot of people pce problems we have problems around uh how to work with

[3:11]  people how to take in uh a an operational environment that's constantly changing and how to solve against uh solutions that don't have really clear discret solutions to them but are the the the result of people working together in order to come up with new ways to to solve problems and mve US forward man it sounds like this is exactly the type of innovation we need at the foundational level to be able to prepare people to go into the next phase of life which is beyond school I can't tell you how many people I've had in my personal life and people I've come across in my time who have been so frustrated where they've been incredibly good at applying themselves to doing well on the test but as soon as they graduate and get into the real world there's no more tests and they don't really know how to quantify their ability to navigate different problems why do we keep seeing this in education

[3:59]  or at least how we've known it for so long well you just said it so well Kenan uh we have a school system that is preparing students for a life of test rather than the test of life um and that's a quote taken from Dr Maurice Elias and uh we're talking about things that are discreet um and easily measurable as opposed to the actual challenges that we have in the real world um we are a large system in public education and we are accountable to our taxpayers um and to the tax base and to the government uh and so there are questions around how do you address that accountability and the current solution is around mostly standardized testing and there are strengths of standardized testing right uh you can do it at a large scale um the results are discret and they're they're clear you can get a number that demonstrates how well a

[4:47]  student is doing a certain thing um but some of the challenges are also as clear um the the way that standardized tests tend to um evaluate young people is based on what they know and uh most of what they can demonstrate in terms of what they do um is application of what they know to really discrete problem sets that are organized on that test right a reading comprehension you have a short P passage and then you take in and you ask questions around that that passage to demonstrate your ability to comprehend knowledge now in in in the real world we have multivariable challenges um that are not so discret um and are not so focused on what you know but are much more focused on how operate under conditions of stress and emotionality uh the difference between studying out of a a textbook around

[5:35]  anatomy and doing surgery is a big difference one is what you know and the other is how do you apply that knowledge under conditions of stress and emotionality in order to stop problems now in 2024 2025 and 2030 2035 we're going to continually put on our young people the ability to demonstrate perform tasks in order to take what they know and show what what that means in terms of uh task performance that that that's not the same as how we measure in education uh so that's why we need to think about it that way so the work that you guys are doing at the urban assembly you've been a part of the organization for 10 plus years now and you said you got into the organization we identified as being a problem solver and that's why you've been able to ascend a CEO so huge

[6:22]  congratulations on your amazing work in the organization thank you but what are what are the big problems that David has been set out to solve for the assembly as a whole what kind of challenges are we tackling out here well we look at uh four different areas when we think about um scalable Solutions here at the urban assembly um our work has been focusing on identifying generalizable problems from R22 Urban assembly design schools and then scaling solutions from our schools to all schools uh so the first area that we look to do that in is social and emotional learning and the question is how to ensure that schools are organized around the principles of Social and emotional development um in so solutions that we've organized around there have been focusing on a program called the resilience Scholars Program um which allows us to scan for social emotional outcomes against uh instructional practices and behavioral

[7:10]  supports social emotional supports extracurricular activities so schools have a really cohesive sense of where they can support students social emotional development and the capacity of their system to do that the other thing that we're looking at is postsecondary Readiness um and so we have a new tool called counselor GPT and the problem with solving there is how to ensure that students have enough information about their postsecondary outcomes that allow them to make good decisions so we're doing everything from looking at labor market analysis to looking at return of investment and then we're building a chat bot that would allow students to have these conversations on a consistent basis so we're no longer constrained by the number and the ratio of College counselors or postsecondary counselors in a school the last thing we're doing is uh we're looking at uh this question of how to support instructional quality at scale and our solution there is called project Cafe the classroom

[7:57]  automated feedback environment uh where uh teachers are getting consistent feedback around highquality interactions thereby allowing them to get more frequent feedback more effectively and improve their practice when we put all those things together um we think about continuous Improvement how do we ensure that schools have access to continu Improvement continuous Improvement and that means removing constraints around labor by using utilizing technology removing constraints around knowledge by bringing artificial intelligence to Bear directly to students and removing constraints about resources by ensuring that the price point for all these Solutions are things that schools can pay for we got to dive into this um because through my experience and talking to leaders in you know higher education education in general there's two sides of the camp one is artificial intelligence no place for that in our

[8:45]  education system because it's going to be used and abused and people are just going to cheat the other side is through a lens of curiosity and saying how do we leverage this technology to help us be more effective why did you guys come out on the latter side of the coin rather than saying absolutely not not happening here well I bet you you are on the latter side of that same coin just by having our little bit of a conversation um but sensibly you we have a uh an opportunity here to scale Solutions um and oftentimes in in the UA we really think about four constraints that really uh make it hard to scale Solutions and um or actually to to improve outcomes in schools and we think about knowledge constraints and we think about resource constraints we think about incentive constraints um and then we think about like how do we take these ideas and these straints um and then solve for them so at the artificial intelligence

[9:34]  Bas we have the ability to solve for a number of these constraints um we can work with students to individualize the quality of their tasks we can work uh with teachers to focus on lesson planning um at scale uh we can focus on teachers in terms of giving them feedback uh we can think about how to increase the interactions between students and college and post-secondary knowledge so if you abstract these Notions um a a little bit beyond the the the current state around teacher SL educator student exchanging information in a learning environment uh then you have this whole new set of options with AI because who and where the student is interacting with in order to develop their sense of the concept that we're trying to teach can be everything from a teacher a peer a machine learning

[10:22]  algorithm AI tutor an encyclopedia um all these things open the realm of possibilities in terms of what students can succeed at and so uh we need to move from this notion that the constraint of time or the constraint of knowledge or the constraint of incentives are going to stop us from innovating it's going to stop us from solving problems uh we're looking for Solutions and AI is just one of those tools that we're looking to allow us to make that work how do you get a I'm going to say this with all due respect but like a legacy system like education to be on the bleeding edge of how we can implement this technology because we're barely 2 years in now with the of open Ai and gpts and all these things so how did you guys move so quickly in this direction well first uh the good news is that education is actually the fourth highest adopter of AI technology across Industries um and so we're seeing some

[11:11]  really high adoption rates in the educational space here at the urban assembly we're specifically designed to be an innovation lab to get ahead of the adoption curve um make sure that we understand the use cases um know what challenges are facing our schools um and then expose our schools to solutions that can help them be successful um our job is to show what right looks like to inspire others to adopt new ways of thinking in order to produce young people who can solve problems for themselves and problems for the world um to the extent that we got on top of the AI work is for the same reasons that we got on top of our social emotion learning work and our post-secondary Readiness work because it works uh this is the work that's going to help change and transform what it means to be educated in 2024 and Beyond and we're just very proud to help schools see what that looks like in their own institutions I want to talk a little bit about social emotional learning and I

[11:58]  want you kind of to level set and educate the audience on why this is something that is important I want to start with a little example I had the privilege of interviewing a brain surgeon with a PhD in neuroscience and I asked him the one question which was what is the most important skill set a human can develop he said emotional regulation now coming from his highly specified skill set you would have think he would have been like how to operate on somebody you know break open the spine be able to do surgery and get highly compensated for it but he said emotional regulation why did he say that well I mean emotional regulation uh and self-management in particular has a lot of predictors in terms of Life uh effects and life satisfaction um one of your most uh famous studies here is going to be Walter Michelle uh it's called a marshmallow test um where he gave uh young people marshmallows um and

[12:48]  and um saw how long they were able to resist those marshmallows and looked at a lot of predictions uh based on um how well they were able to resist the marshmallow and eat it um but this is a really robust finding everything from your kindergarten self-regulation uh strategies predicting your 12th grade SS um to more recent work around uh go directed Behavior which is a subset of self-regulation and emotional regulation um and looking at students academic outcomes the other thing to think about uh if you're thinking about life satisfaction is a lot of what we call mood disorders uh on the diagnostic and statistical manual DSM um are looking at challenges of emotional uppr regulation or down regulation right so uh in depression or anxiety or depression in particular

[13:35]  that's an upregulation challenge we are challenging upregulating emotions for anxiety down regul emotions against a task or a goal uh so our goal or job here as human beings is to problem solve through all the challenges that we have in our internal State being one of them so I assume your neuroscientist friend is identifying that the most successful people are the most successful at up regulating or downregulating their emotional state in order to achieve a goal or a task um and be successful at that space and so everything from academic outcomes to uh relationship skills uh to your job satisfaction are related to your ability to regulate your emotions effectively uh now let me just say one more thing on this sometimes folks think that managing your emotions is all about downregulating and just not expressing your emotions and the analogy

[14:24]  that I use uh is a well-managed store so when you come to well-managed store um Let me let me take a step back when you come into an unmanaged store uh it usually means that things are out of place uh people are not helping you when you're supposed to help you you can't find things right uh you don't have an effective experience in that store when you come to a well-managed St uh you know where things are you can find them easily uh your checkout experience is well placed and your emotional space is the same way a well-managed emotional experience is when you're able to do the things that you want to do given the tasks that you're trying to accomplish and the emotional state that you're trying to achieve amazing analogy um my brain naturally went to the place of why this work is so important today so I uh bring up this book every once in a while

[15:13]  on the podcast called indistractable now this individual wrote a book and in this um book he talks about one of the biggest threats that we have to our society today is to not is the inability for us to be able to regulate our emotions and he talks about the role that this little device is playing in this grand scheme of deregulating emotions he says you know every single time if you got out into society today even anybody who's listening to this podcast next time you're in a social setting the store the gym wherever it is whenever somebody feels uncomfortable the natural reaction that we've built through habit is pulling out our device and looking for a sense of escapism the inability to regulate our emotions that feeling of uncomfortableness in the moment and escape from it how do you kind of think about the swirling impact of these behaviors that have been

[15:59]  ingrained into our society by incredibly smart well-funded companies to keep us going back to their device instead of dealing with the emotions in the moment and what is the big tale of that man that's a great question um so there's there's a couple of different parts that I want to untangle the the first is dealing with uncomfortability um now Jonathan ha just put out a book obviously the coddling of the American mind right which talks about smartphones and its impact on Mental Health um and some of the ideas here is this notion of being uncomfortable and how do we teach young people how to manage through that sense of uncomfortableness because it's in that space of uncomfortableness that we grow um in education we have this notion called productive struggle it's based on um voty who was a researcher or a psychologist uh in the 1900s and he talks about the zone of proximal

[16:47]  development which is the space um where you are uncomfortable uh with the the the task but can access a trusted peer and adult to help you move through and grow in terms of your cognitive and and social emotional space and that's where learning happens if you're too low below the Z zone of proximal development you're you're not learning you're bored if you're too high you're frustrated right and so a lot of teaching is around organizing tasks and supports so that students are right in that zone of proximal development uh so that they're engaged in a task but not overwhelmed by by the rigor of it um so our social lives are the same way all things being equal um folks want to be comfor all things being equal folks prefer people who remind them of themselves um all things being equal uh we like things

[17:37]  that make us feel comfortable and remind us of what we already know and if we stay in that space then not only are we're not creating connections and growing socially um but we are kind of like limiting and narrowing our experience emotionally as well uh and cognitively and so to the extent that we are reorganizing our attention to inanimate objects like phones rather than adate objects like our relationships our partners um like opportunities to grow like books and literature that are different from us and move us into a different way of thinking and being um then we are limiting who we are and who will we become so um I think that the the point that you made is really well taken with regards to to social media and cell phones um there's pretty good evidence that uh we continue to narrow our our Locus and our aperture towards things

[18:26]  that reflect us back to ourselves and that's never the way to grow we need to be at our zone of proximal development we need to be growing we need to be seeing people who are different from us having perspectives that are different from us that's going to challenge us social emotionally and academically to be the best versions of ourselves there's an interesting way in which these algorithms work today as well where they keep us in the same sense of cognitive bundles right the more we look out into the world especially the mirror of social media the more we'll see where our attention flows and I do worry about the long-term impacts of those type of macro behaviors only showing us and reinforcing exactly what we're looking for instead of those different perspectives that you're talking about in the curriculum of conflict and healthy I would say you know the acceptance of different ideas it seems like we are from a monetization

[19:14]  perspective in society today enabling us with tools that push us in a very narrow sided direction that is not going to be beneficial when we get onto the world as adults but also have to navigate the changing landscape of how everything's changing so quick yeah I mean you said it perfectly um look there's a reason why cities tend to be more Innovative than Inland areas and it's not because uh the coastal Waters make uh make folks any smarter but it's the influx of of diversity different ideas um being exposed to each other uh that's what really drives Innovation and um the difference between cities and areas that are that are more uh isolated is that there's less access to those ideas um you have more of the same people around um and so there's less diversity of thought and so the Innovation is happen um we need our people our young people

[20:02]  we need our adults we need our citizenry uh to be exposed to different idea so they're used to reasoning through the quality of those ideas and then coming on with the ones that they think best suits the the solution that they're trying to develop um we feel comfortable our default is to feel uh or is to hear things that make us feel good about ourselves that's that's great right like yeah I thank you I appreciate that I love that yeah wow yes thank you algorithm right um but it's like it's like sugar and sweets uh but for your social emotional cognitive development right uh sugar tastes good salt tastes good right um and in small pieces it's good for you but in fact like you want to have a high quality nutritious diet in your in your your body and you want to have a high quality nutritious social

[20:48]  emotional um and cognitive landscape in order to develop who you are as a person and who we are as a society when it comes to how you guys are influencing the next generation of thinkers I want to ask you a question earlier in our conversation you had mentioned that often the education system from where we've come from taught us to solve problems that were tied to an equation the variables were set but now we're seeing the world as it's progressing as it's changing so many things are in flux we're often having to I would say solve complex problems how are you helping the students understand what a complex problem is compared to where we came from in education with solving those single variable outcomes and problems that we were trying to solve well here at an assembly uh we've been investing in thinking through the kind of learning tasks that really move young people to think very hard about Solutions um and

[21:38]  that means everything from Cooperative learning and project-based learning uh to more specific kind of opportunities of group work uh that allow students to really think through a solution to something that's not obvious uh we're really very focused on student discourse with the idea that students talking to each other drives understanding and drives learning and also drives the type of collaboration skills that don't lead not only in work but in life in terms of Civic development um and lastly we've been really thinking about how to give teachers the kinds of feedback at at a rate of frequency that can help them see how much time students are talking versus how much time teachers are talking so that they can think about what kind of tasks what kind of questions can I organize for students so this is a high quality learning experience uh we're not there yet we're going to continue to move there um we're

[22:26]  very excited about New York State's Blue Ribbon commission and how they are reenvisioning what it means to be educated in New York state and moving a little bit away hopefully from standardized test as the only outcome of high quality education uh to looking at things like portfolios and looking at things like interviews um but at the end of the day uh when we're working with our staff and we're working with our principles our goal is to help create learning experiences for young people where they're talking to each other talking to their teacher and talking to the text in a way that really promotes high quality thinking you know in our in our previous conversation you had mentioned um a very interesting experiment or maybe there was something that happened where somebody unfortunately had a a traumatic brain injury and they no longer had the ability to access their emotions now earlier in our conversation we talked

[23:14]  about emotional regulation the misconception is diminish your right your emotions submit them to the point where they don't really impact you but is there a negative side in being able to not make decisions when we don't have our emotions what's that look like well you just said it uh so there is a uh a group of folks who had a specific brain injury um and this was most recently covered um I think it's called in the moral mind I have to check that out right but um and uh so what happens is that uh decision- making is a lot worse right um because emotions are information they they give you information about the environment and yourself um and they they they they show you what you should be attending to they identify danger in the space um and so when folks actually don't have any access to the emotional uh Center of their brain um they make really poor

[24:03]  decisions um and some of that is because they don't know how to start things they don't know how to stop things uh they don't know what to attend to what not to attend to um emotional intelligence is not about suppressing emotions it's about channeling emotions effectively towards a goal taking the information from your emotions that you're supposed to and then using that to accomplish a goal or a task and so if you suppress your emotional response uh then you're losing all the information that emotions are telling you about yourself and the world um but if you are not aware of your emotional response and you let your emotional response overwhelm your ability uh to reason through situations um then you may not be responding in in line with what you're trying to accomplish so uh that balance is about um being aware understanding and labeling and expressing and regulating

[24:50]  the ruler model coming at a Yale uh so that folks can act with intention um and accomplish the goals that they're trying to accomplish this the ability to understand our emotions I feel like for Generations especially from a masculine perspective has always been looked at as a vulnerability instead of a skill set that we can develop so how much of responsibility is put on education systems like you guys to help us be able to identify label and understand our emotions compared to the conversations that maybe our students are having at home because it seems like you guys can talk about this all the time but if these things aren't reinforced in the home isn't it difficult to get across some of these I would say applications in real life if Mom and Dad or people around us don't have the same type of understanding of our emotions yes yes it

[25:38]  is it is challenging um what I'd say here is that the ability to problem solve and the ability to take in emotional information and act upon it are intimately relined right um I'm sure you know folks growing up uh who were Reckless uh who who just felt something and did it right and I can imagine uh the implications of of that I know I have folks growing up doing the same so I I you know I do agree with you that I think that there is a a version of masculinity that says emotions are always to be suppressed never to be understood um but I think that if you take it seriously um we're talking about a version of masculinity who are able uh that incorporates this notion that I will communicate well that I will act with an intention um that I can

[26:26]  understand the intention of others right against a a a situation even conditions of stress and emotionality um and so I'm more effective at my goal look I have 21 years in the Army Reserve um and I will tell you as a civil Affairs officer one of the things that we were we were trained upon was how to listen well we were actually sat down uh and given a test on how well we can uh take an information and reflect that information around our constituency because our job is to build rapport and to build trust right so I think if we look at these things as they are which your skills to be developed um then they they are raised uh in importance not that we need to indulge in emotional states for the sake of just indulging in them but that we take in information and folks who do that better are better able to problem solve folks who do that

[27:13]  better are better able to communicate and I don't think there's anything more masculine than communicating well and problem solving in order to achieve the goals that we're trying to achieve I mean I couldn't agree with you more it's uh it's the skill set is going that is going to be so much more valuable here in the future I was list list to a conversation on The Joe Rogan podcast where um this guy named chamath can't I'm not going to be able to say his last name unfortunately without it in front of me he was talking about in the future with the prevailance of artificial intelligence and everything else that's going to come into our lives we're going to see a huge demand for the ability to think appropriately because if you have ai and everything all these different agents who can handle all of the Redundant work that is not high leverage then how are we going to be able to position our students but more more importantly our teachers as people that

[28:00]  are in high I would say Authority in our society because they're helping our children learn how to think not just memorize and regurgitate and that's kind of where I feel like the beautiful intersection of artificial intelligence and education's going to come together is our teachers are now going to be responsible to helping our students think about how they solve problems rather than just solving the problem yeah I can say it better um we are already at that place if you look at how uh education has changed I think in the last 20 years or so there's been a stronger emphasis on thinking processes uh there's a perennial uh argument in education around content and skills in terms of do you need to learn things or do you need to know processes and the answer is both right because we've reason we learn how to think with content and through content um to the

[28:48]  extent that you have a strong vocabulary vocabulary has been and parentally is a a great predictor for IQ uh just because from my perspective the the larger of a uh tapestry you have to describe the world the easier it is to create insights around it right the the easier it is to actually understand it and make decisions around it and and uh process information quickly um so the the the future of education is going to be one in which we continue to help young people um reason and discern about themselves in the world and I just want to throw one more idea at you Ken and this is like not just about the educational process if you look at the disinformation uh approaches from different countries uh trying to

[29:34]  influence our election they are often emotionally based right they they target folks emotions in order to create a response um that may or may not be in tune or in line with uh the intent of the person so when we're thinking about what kind of person is educated in 2024 and Beyond and what does it mean to be educated we're talking about a person who uh can understand truth from fiction regardless of the actor who is giving it to us who can discern patterns right across a range of different content and domains um a person who can collaborate effectively in order to put in information to an ecosystem and get something bigger than what they put in individually um and a person who is able to really like see Beauty in the world and see Beauty in themselves right because they have a sense of what what

[30:21]  beauty looks like and feels like um and this is not unrelated to your times table uh but it's not limited to your times table is not unrelated to your reading fluency but but it's bigger than that uh we're talking about a whole person going out into the world participating in self-governance solving problems on behalf of our community having great relationships going to work providing value coming home being a great father son brother sister Etc um and over overwhelmingly just living a good life I mean this is the skill set of the future you know as I'm sitting here thinking to you I think we've had the the fortune of looking at the last we'll call it decade of time as it moved so quickly that we didn't have the skill sets to truly understand what was happening around us even today as I

[31:09]  think about being a critical thinker and being able to discern if information is valid or trustworthy you have that little intuition that goes off in your head even when you see political campaigns today it's like I understand why you did that and I understand the emotional like string that you're pulling on to get the reaction out of me and it's that critical thinking skill of the world and as information is constantly being bombarded towards you that I feel like is going to be the next skill set that is worth developing rather than just coming from this place of all consumption and trusting everything that comes at you because we don't live in that world anymore I mean that's bottom line that's the bottom line um we have the ability to reproduce faces and reproduce voices we have the ability to certainly uh Place pictures of trusted uh officials in different places that they may or may

[31:57]  not ask been in um and so like this idea of perspective taking like what is it that people want me to feel in this situation and why would somebody want me to feel that way um being able to identify appeal to emotion versus appeal to rationality knowing that our our emotions and our rationality are interconnected right that we have a thing called motivated reasoning um where we tend to reason towards a predetermined end State uh that is emotionally satisfying and we're using our really cognitive capacity not really to identify all the possible Alternatives of of of why information is but mostly to push our thinking to make us feel good about a thing that we want already to occur and so these are all the biases and the challenges that we have uh around reasoning that are moving

[32:45]  us against critical thinking right that that constrain our ability to to see and discern effectively and so part of the um the purpose of education is to reduce our error in that thinking process and to increase our accuracy so that we're able to see cause and effect effectively in order to better understand ourselves in the world and that's why when we talk about an emotional education and a social and emotional education um folks who have that apparatus who have those assets will be able to better understand themselves in the world as compared to folks who haven't had that opportunity to develop those skills how do you look at this responsibility that's in front of you right now with how quickly the world is changing and how quickly Society is changing around you you have a fundamental place in the lives of

[33:34]  helping the youth perceive View and discern how the world is coming at them how do you kind of think about this responsibility do you look at it as a challenge or do you think it's an opportunity for us to be able to get this next generation of people ready to kind of go out into the world and navigate I mean it's a challenge and an opportunity right um look I know sometimes folks are down on American education system and I understand it and we have a lot of ways to go uh but I want to remind us all that we are still the most Innovative country in the world um our economy bounced back very quickly after covid as compared to many other industrialized countries because we're flexible people uh we're a flexible country with flexible understandings of ourselves um and who we want to be uh so we're doing something right in terms of who we are as Americans and we need to capitalize on that we need to capitalize on the kinds of innovations that the

[34:22]  American political system or the American educational system or the business system or all of those system put together together kind of organize to make us who we are so the the opportunity here is to continue that tradition to continue the tradition of being flexible problem solvers uh taking our mental faculties and applying them to Solutions uh that may not be obvious if you had not uh sat down and put an equal sign in front of it um our opportunity in the educational system is not to be afraid of the new Innovations as they come um and and and really Embrace this notion of what it means to be um a people who who are self-governing in terms of what we give in terms of learning experiences and the opportunity is to look at our education system as it is today take what's working expand on that um and then move move against what's not so that our

[35:11]  young people will be the folks that you just talked about um ready to WHL Innovative problem solvers you know you said in our previous conversation if we graduate students with straight A and they collapse at the first moment of adversity we have failed and I feel like that has been a large I would say playbook for educ as we're pumping out people they perform incredibly well at all these tests you guys graduate with straight A go out into the world and now you graduate from college as an example and 54% of college graduates are working jobs with a high school degree which is necessary so why do you think it's so important to pump out resilient students even if they're not getting straight A's on their tests it seems like the the standard of ready for the world is being reallocated and re kind of shaped with the work that you guys are doing the the way to solve problems is to be persever persevering uh and persevering through

[35:59]  problem solving uh I don't know an employer who I have met who says I don't want flexible persevering problem solvers who work well with other people I'll teach them everything else right I mean obviously we have our baselines we need high quality literacy in our school so folks can take it in information and understand the world uh through the verbal and written space um we need a basic level of numeracy so they understand how to manipulate numbers and translate the world into symbols um but at the end of the day uh we need folks who can solve problems and solving problems is not easy if it was they wouldn't be called problems they' just be called play things right um so what makes to me America great is our perseverance in solving problems right I mean man not only we put a man on the moon and uh invent airplanes uh we had young people move out through the civil

[36:48]  rights movement and reimagine what our country could be uh we continue to think about like what does it mean to invent everything from generative AI uh to other areas of of our economy in terms of of tech and social media For Better or For Worse uh this takes resilience and I'm don't even talking about the mental health aspect of this right it takes resilience to solve problems you got to stick with it um so to the extent that people are like hey uh if this election doesn't go my way I'm leaving that's that's a that's a loser that's that's a failure for us that's a loss uh to the extent that people like this hurts in terms of um my ability to stick with the problem I'm not going to work on it that's a loss for us to the extent that folks spent a career thinking through how to improve our ability to uh decod to Human Genome um that can be

[37:39]  taken away from us uh I'll throw one last example to you um the the enlightenment now was a book by Stephen pinkerman and he goes through all these great examples of just human Ingenuity and um one of the things that he did he talks about was just decoding the wheat genome in order to increase the the yield of wheat um for for people to eat and and I don't remember the scientists who did this but he spent his entire life uh working on this one problem Set uh and as a result folks have much more food to eat than they they've had in in our history and so that's the kind of innovation uh it takes to move our society forward and those are the kinds of young people I'd be excited to help produce um as the CEO of urban assembly and those individuals have what we talked about in our previous conversation which is a mindset that can

[38:26]  overcome ch Alles we use the example of the growth mindset from Carol D at the University of Stanford and why that's so important I gave you an example of when we have students who come through a reinforced system like education where the only objective for them is to memorize and regurgitate information on a test so they can get an A and then they get on the real world and they come across the application of this knowledge and they're not as good it's easy for these students to become incredibly discouraged and frustrated because they're not being validated at the same way I want to talk a little bit about the importance of a growth mindset especially as students get out into this world that is changing from year to year and the Playbook has to be reinvented time and time again man like you just said it really well again that that the world is changing from year to year and the Playbook has to be reinvented this is not a question of like uh how to describe the ventricles of the heart

[39:15]  right there is an answer to that um and that answer is important uh this is more like can you be on a residency as a doctor uh working off of four or five hours of sleep and then still perform the task that you were trained under uh effectively so the the challenge goes back to this idea of knowing versus doing um knowing is important uh becoming less and less important but but is still important because to the extent that you know you can refine your ability to to do right knowing is what's training your mind um but is insufficient in actually applying that knowledge in order to to solve problems most problems are not clean problems uh because if they were they were already solved right most problems are not obvious problems and if they are somebody's already solved them in order

[40:03]  to innovate in order to produce value in our society uh we need to solve new problems and some of these problems are social how to work with a multi-ethnic multi-religious uh uh democracy um and still have a coherent Society that's a big problem set in fact uh not one that has been historically done most societies were not multiethnic multi-racial uh and multi-religious they were homogeneous right relatively speaking um how to work and in in order to produce value given the relationship between generative Ai and our Legacy systems of content development and problem solving right there is not an answer to that that that like you just like calculate for X you know what I mean like you got to really figure that out so we got to

[40:53]  produce Dynamic young people who are on who are comfortable I should say with ambiguity and this is something I don't think we're doing such a good at good job at I should say um I think our young people are tending to see the world as good and bad and black and white and and easy or hard um they are struggling to really see Nuance um they're struggling to really understand how uh how to think when there is not a clear answer um and this is politically this is socially this is uh in a context of um problem solving and the feedback that I continually receive from business and industry Partners uh is that when problems come their way they are struggling to persevere through them so we got some work to do in in our educational space and I accept that challenge in producing the kinds of

[41:40]  young people who I want on my team I hire folks all the time here at the urban assembly um and I want young people who are resilient who can solve problems who are collaborative and who don't need a step-by-step instruction to getting from point A to point Z in order to add value to our organization you said it so succinctly there and I'm going to steal this from you the easy problems have already been solved the problems that we're dealing with today are complex and they take complex problem solving in order to be able to get us a solution that's going to be able to benefit everybody and that's a really interesting way to kind of think about as Society continues to progress the problems are just harder because all the easy ones have already been taken out by the people before that's an interesting perspective I haven't really thought about that's why I love when we talk about the American experiment right like talking about young it's like an American experiment we were trying to do something we are trying to do something but but it's not

[42:27]  obvious that it's going to work yeah so like between the the Revolution and today like we got to solve all these problems to maintain this question of who we want to be as a society and how we want to be as the we the people that they talk about in the Constitution David as we kind of put the landing gear down here our previous guest wanted to ask you a blind question their question was what is the best piece of advice you've ever got the all right uh the best piece of advice I've ever got is don't drink and drive um there you go let me just plug this my computer for a second uh just real talk uh like make good decisions call people up if you need them um and and and and just use what you have in front of you rather than than than

[43:13]  making poor decisions so honestly when I was in high school this is a true story I asked my high school teacher I was like can you give me some advice in terms of how to be the best version of myself and he's like you're a good guy uh don't drink a drive and that was it and you know I took that advice and I'm not saying that helped me be CEO but it didn't hurt and sometimes that's what it's as simple about right David I mean like we have to recognize that the decisions that we make as small as they may seem have the ability to change the trajectory of our life and so I love the advice that you were given I think that's an amazing place for us but you made that sound so much more profound than I did and I appreciate that K thank you that's why we're here baby well David man thank you so much for coming on the podcast brother I really appreciate the time is there anything that you want to say as a closing Mark of somebody who's leading the next generation of great thinkers into the future hey man I think we all have an

[44:00]  opportunity to to do to do the work um so whether you are in school whether you have a child in school whether you know somebody in school um just continue to put pressure in our systems to produce young people who will contribute to our societies and if we do that then we will think about what this new American experiment will be for our generation and next generation and Next Generation to come there we go guys that's a wrap