s02 e12 Kurt Beer – AI and Education

Guest Kurt Beer

Welcome to the big cheese AI podcast. I'm your host, Sean Heis. I'm here today as usual with Jacob. Why is actually not as usual. He's back. Come back. You're back. Um, in our new studio. It's the first time you've seen it. Yeah, it's awesome. Uh, it's awesome. Uh, we got our producer sitting like he's like Dave Letterman over there. Yeah, it is. I kind of want to turn the camera back on him. Hi, Dylan. Uh, we have also, um, the, the king of fuckery himself Brandon Corbin. Hello, everybody. All right. And we also have a special guest today, Kurt Beer. Welcome to the podcast.

• You're here, thank you.
• Yes, absolutely, and thank you for watching. We got some discussion of the show and your perception of it. So hopefully we put it on a good show today. Today we've got an interesting topic that we're all very prepared for. And I think it's something everyone always seems to have an opinion on.
• Yes.
• Right? It's like, it's one of those things, especially, you know, I don't know, as you get into your 20s or 30s, you start to have opinions on it. It's education and AI. So let's just get right to it. I mean, I think my first question is like, let's start with you, Kurt, is like how do you see AI playing into the future of education? Maybe what are some of the ethical considerations or the, you know, if, you know, what do you fear or what are you excited for your children? You know, when it comes to a world when now your kids are growing up and not a post-internet era, But a post AI era.
• Yeah, I mean, I'm actually, I'm actually at your thoughts on this too, but I mean, when you think about like just AI and education, the big holy grail has been the Bloom's Sigma II problem. So Benjamin Bloom, he's the kind of researcher that talked about Bloom's Bloom philosophy around education. He in 1984 did some research talking about this Sigma II problem, which basically identified that students that had a tutor performed at two signals, two deviations better than other students in a traditional setting. So that's kind of been the dream for a long time that hey, if we can have an AI assistant or some kind of tutor supporting every single student, then there we go. That's where a lot of outcomes can be improved for students. It hasn't been viable. In any kind of education setting, there's the mix of yes, we wanna do everything we can for students, but there's cost. There's limitations from that side of things, availability of teachers to support them. So that's been the dream, but not viable. Now with AI, there's the conversation there where, okay, this is opening up to maybe a possibility where we can give a student their own individualized tutors. That's the dream. The downside, we can, that's a much, much bigger conversation we'll get into, but I mean, have you seen that yourself in your own education, kids' education?
• Well, I think to the other point, is the ratio issue, right? So every school has, I mean, public schools keep their, their, their applications to enroll open, even sometimes the day of the first day of school, right? And they said, the kids go home the last day of school in the summer and they're like, we're enrolling, enrolling, enrolling, but people forget and they, and you know, the population density increases in the amount of schools and the, and the amount of teachers. So that there's this ratio issue where, you know, you have kindergarten classes with 36 kids in them.
• Right.
• And so yeah, providing that, providing the amount of attention that a tutor would provide to a student is tough in a situation where you're one at 28.
• I agree. My mom ran a program at my middle school where she would stay after school and help tutor and she facilitated it and that got volunteers to come in and it was great. Kids would go and set up the lunch tables and then tutors would walk around and help them as they had questions on their homework. Now where I could see AI helping there is These tutors can now be experts in any subject and help these kids navigate things even faster and with a little bit more in-depth information, right? So.
• There was, and I don't remember which Star Trek it was. It was one of the more modern Star Trek movies that came out and they were basically a school on Live Long and Prosper, what's the school, or the planet?
• Volcan?
• Volcan.
• Thank you.
• Thank you.
• Every Star Trek fan just totally lost credibility with them. Congratulations.
• Right.
• Shout out to Ken, by the way.
• But all the kids, they're like in these divots in the ground and they're standing there and they each have like their own personalized teacher and it's all AI generated that is teaching them very specifically to their learning style. For me, as someone who's struggle growing up, like again, I was early, ADHD was just starting to kind of get identified when I was a spastic kid in school. And they just had no idea how to deal with it, right? But if I had a few teachers who funny enough now that I've been connected with them later on, they've all been identified as ADHD later on in their lives. But every single one of them kind of understood how I worked and were able to set up things with me that were very much specialized to how I worked and I fucking crushed it, right? No other classes, I was a failure in pretty much every other class, but those teachers. So I think when we get to this point where we do have this highly personalized education platforms that could be powered by technology, we're going to see a whole change in kids. So that's kind of like the dream, but the one issue, and I think you guys mentioned that in a past podcast, you know, how data is the new oil, right? The problem in a Q12 setting, at least hired a little bit different. Well, it's different in K12. The difference is that that data is very sensitive. Yes. It's very protected. you're talking about young students, defenseless students basically, that all their information, you've got learning disability information, intelligence disabilities, emotional disabilities, you have a lot of data about these students that would be great if you could bake it into the model or personalize it with the appropriate prompts. But do you want to do that? Is that the appropriate thing to do?
• So Aaron, if you happen to be listening to this podcast from Prom Privacy, that is exactly what it needs to be, right? That AI system that these kids are working from needs to be running within their own network, right? It has to be the AI's responding there, 'cause you can do that now. Yeah, now if you're just gonna go and consume the chat, GBTA, PI, and you're sending all that PII over, but we're now to a point where you can have the hardware set up in your own networks to have enough horsepower to be able to do a lot of things.
• And that's just not gonna happen. It's just not gonna happen. (laughing) No, I mean, I'm just knowing how education tech has actually deployed at these schools.
• Thanks, Sean. You just ruined all of them.
• I mean, these guys can barely, I mean, first of all, you've got an army Chromebooks that these are true IT guys, but they're just trying to keep the printers going and the devices on my device won't charge. My device won't connect to the internet. My device is broken. I didn't bring my charger. Will you come and help me fix this? Are vendors having an outage? I mean, they've got the kids go to school these days and they're literally they're on a whole like canvas level app system, basically, where they log in and they have 60 60 different, disapperate SaaS applications that they're interacting with. Well, but that's major. Tricid 100. I mean, there's literally like hundreds, thousands of different. The amount. I'm going to come to the defense of my boys, the tech directors, boys and girls are doing that. They literally have a thousand different technologies they have to manage. It's insane. It's insane what they have to do. I mean, if you think about like a school district, a university, they are their own cities. I mean, the whole, all the problems that a city planner has, that the governor, the mayor has, same deal, different scale probably, although some of these districts are monstrous and they're dealing with those at the same scale, but there's a lot on their plates.
• I mean, they have to feed them, they have to transport them to and from, they have to take care of them after it's over, they have to feed them again, they have to make sure that they're getting enough exercise, they have to constantly be teaching and managing to the standards of the state. So I learn, I read all these different things. And that's, there's just this constant pull of data in different directions.
• And that's why I think like a company like Blackboard came out and was able to just spread because it came in and says, "We're gonna solve this huge problem for you. "You no longer need to worry about it. "All you have to do is install it "and get all of your users on, "or all of your students on our system."
• That's what they all say to them.
• Right, no, no, that's right. But that's what I mean is that I think the next play is for somebody to basically be able to do the same thing and say, "Oh, by the way, we're also condensing 600 of these different services that you guys are currently using into a single unified experience. And it's all going to be AI powered. It's going to be highly targeted and highly personalized to each of your students. It's going to be private. And none of that data is going to be leaking out anywhere. And we're going to be able to track them from first till 12th grade, their whole progress. And it's going to be this beautiful, uh, uh, uh, uh, topic. It's a utopia. Yeah, utopia. There are there. There's elements of that providers jumped on this. I mean, I mean, as soon as Chet GPT rolled out November 22, they jumped on this and it really wasn't the big players. I mean, we're still seeing them evolve their product strategies, their game plans, but-
• When you say big players are retailing-
• The Gen2BT and Google and Microsoft.
• Opening eye, yeah, opening eye. They have their own kind of education team now that's trying to get their services in place. Their whole API model is really where they're winning. The whole platform players is what's working for them. But yeah.
• Even today, we're talking to a company that's a nonprofit that works with students and teachers. And they're all these different like nonprofit organizations are coming up with their own app. And they're like, okay, for it's gonna be AI, it's gonna be in the classroom, AI. And I mean, bless our hearts, they're trying to advance their mission, but like the tough conversation to have with a lot of these companies is like, okay, do you understand what you're undertaking from a security privacy on? Like, do you understand how much tech these schools are already drowning in? So to your point, I do think it would be nice to have a more holistic solution in place. I don't necessarily think though, that it's gonna be driven from, you know, like the, it's gonna have to be driven from a, like such a usability perspective, like it's just so easy to adopt, it's so easy to get installed, it's so private.
• Well, I'm not curious though, how did Blackboard do it? Because Blackboard's not a useful--
• I don't even know what you're talking, I don't know what that is.
• Okay, so Blackboard was dog shit from a usability standpoint, but they managed to get into virtually every school system. It seems like, and it's just a school management, homework, you know, here's your stuff, here's or whatever. But that thing went hyperbolic. And then I think they ended up getting bought recent, or a few years back.
• I mean, Blackboard, they were kind of a big player in the space long time. Actually, here in Indianapolis, Angel learning. My boy's like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah."
• We talked about this in another podcast.
• We do Blackboard, yeah.
• Come on.
• So Angel, I mean, Angel was one of the big LMS systems that kind of came out, was eating into their market share quite a bit. Blackboard bought them and then kind of the Moodle open source. And their systems kind of took off. Blackboard bought the main hosting providers of that open source platform. So they were, and I was at those different companies when Blackboard bought them. And so then came along in structure, which is key to switch a lot of the- Yeah, that's what that's what it is. Which I worked there too. And so we saw like, that was like the right place, the right time. The two founders there kind of saw the big picture that you need to build a platform that integrates with all these other different providers. And so those big players are definitely keeping close eye on it. It's been interesting because they're looking at more ways to integrate AI into certain functionalities versus like a big platform to kind of solve all those problems. Yeah. There has been new players trying to do that. Our company, Skillstruck that I'm at, we do that to some degree. There's some other players, but those early companies that came in to try to solve that problem, they, I think maybe you, you know about this kind of overestimated the cost of open AI. Yeah. And they were drowning in just the fees. The token fees were just so much that they had to pull the plug on it. I know one provider, it was like $45,000 a month. And they know this is a freemium model. And this is before schools, schools are late adopters with technologies in general. Not all. I mean, there's some really innovative tech directors, curriculum directors they're out there, but they're pretty late adopters. And so, but when there's a free tool for teachers to jump on, and there's teacher TikTok where once you just spreads like crazy.
• That's one thing that's been cool is always watching that. I will say, I haven't said this yet, my wife has a school, has a principle of an elementary school. But if it's seeing that, I have that on my algorithm somehow, just through, it's probably listening to us. but all the teachers are, they kind of pride themselves in innovating like in the classroom. And they really, it's kind of that same concept that we talked about with, was it with, it was with Hickel at the rally yesterday. They were like the adoption of AIs at the leafs of the organization, not the trunk and the stem. It's because they can go out and just go use those tools. Like the CIO is not gonna be like, yeah sure, just go copy and paste that email into chat GBT and create your homework from there. not going to tell you that, but no harm no foul if you do it on your own. Right. That's totally the case. I mean, you have a lot of different tools out there and you put tools like that and a teacher's hanging a teacher who's dealing with, you know, they've got 90, 100 different students a day that they have to manage and nurture and teach along the along the same way. I mean, they come up with great ideas, brilliant ideas. There was one teacher. So we were talking about a RAI platform where basically we're helping students and staff learn. learn about AI as well as use it to totally different topics there. And this teacher saw some of our AI tutoring capability and how you can kind of configure it. You can give it a personality. And he's like, you know what, I'm teaching middle school English. I wonder if I could set up a peer tutor that middle school students can learn from and interact with. And what would be better is if they, this AI tutor uses kind of that brain rot. I don't know if this is something you guys know about. I'm learning about too. this brain rot jargon that young kids use, like cap no cap.
• Yeah.
• All this.
• Yeah, yeah.
• And he just thought that was brilliant. That was perfect for him.
• They're calling me, wait, wait, wait, wait. Let's touch on that a little bit. We'll double click on that.
• We have to.
• I don't know.
• So they're saying that brain rot is the terminology for when we're using cap no cap or all these new terminologies. That is an old fucking person being like, "I don't like these new terms, man." It's like, fuck you, like new terms are constantly invented. By the way, every word that we are uttering right now at some point, somebody made up. There's no intrinsic words that exist in reality. So the fact that new generations are creating these terms and you have some old guys that's like, yeah, brain rot, okay.
• It's funny to me to watch the kids that are using those terms and then the kids that aren't. The kids that are heavily influenced by their parents and hang out with adults. like in a lot of the, and honestly a lot of the private school kids I know aren't using all that.
• Excuse me, Jimmy, I see you're in the cause.
• It's the adoption of that language I don't think is consistent. I don't think it's as consistent as you think it is. Just like not every school has what, furries.
• They all have litter boxes.
• Wait a minute, are we talking about people that dress up like animals?
• Just up like cats to be fair.
• So there was this thing.
• So the, so the, so the, well, so that there's a whole thing where they're like, they've got kitty litter or kitty, or kitty litter.
• No, they just, they just purr and wear little ears. You know about this.
• I do, no, no, no, but literally the alt-right was out there saying that they have, that schools have to install like litter boxes for these kids who identify as cats. And everybody was like, that's totally true. And everybody just wanted it.
• No, what's totally true is that people wear cat ears and purrs.
• No, no, people kind of identify as a cat, but they still go to the bathroom as a regular human being.
• I'm sure they do. One technical thing I'd like to touch on, and I don't have a lot of experience with this, but a little bit. But so with a large-scale LMS system, so let me just say a bunch of things and see if any of them are actually true. But I think like the goal of these LMSs or the vision that they created is, let's say I have this screen. And on this screen, I have a row of apps. I have five apps, five apps. So I have 25 apps on my screen, right? And I am, and I, and this screen is aware that I am Sean Heis and I am a student. And I go interact with each of these apps. There's a language that's supposed to be sending back all of those activities to like a ledger in a specific communications format, right?
• The logging is there, yeah. Let me try and solve that.
• Yeah, and there's actually a, like a, it's almost like an API syntax. And so technically like a lot of these LMSs are registering data in a consistent way. So you could build app one, I build app two, and you build app three, and technically it's sending back data to this larger brain about what I'm doing.
• Yeah, there are some standards like LTI, learning to get your ability. If you're a provider of an assessment tool or some kind of activity tool, you will create an LTI, basically the integration with these different learning major systems. - What's LTI stand for?
• Learning tools interoperability. I think one edtech is the name of the standardization model.
• And it's just a standard. So if I'm gonna go build anything from a technology standpoint that could be integrated with education, I should probably integrate it with the IT.
• The LTI.
• Think about it like the same sort of standard that an ATM machine uses for EDI.
• Right, right.
• Or like the Fire 8 standard for healthcare transfer that Obama made or even HIPAA 5010. Right. There's supposedly there's a transaction format to sit. So the idea is that some of these platforms are probably really AI ready if they're built right because they're getting all this data and that data could be used to build that profile. Right. And really, really, you know, So really any of those companies that currently have been running for the last five, six years are probably going to be the ones who are the most primed for being able to build a truly personalized AI experience because they have the historical data. The schools invest in those learning management systems. They're LMS and their student information system, which is like the master record system. The grades have to reside and connects with HR systems as well. Those are the main systems and schools invest a lot into those systems. How much do they invest, Ruffin? I would imagine it's been a little while since I've been in that space, but you're talking anywhere from probably two to six dollars per student per year for these systems. It's when you count number of students, we have IPS schools here with like 19,000 students. I mean, that can add up pretty quick. And that's just for cooking. You're looking at 100 grand a year per Wow. Yeah. And then you have the state, which we know has its own issues. I mean, they're constantly reinventing their testing procedures and investing in the assessment side of things. The amount of technology, the amount of money that's spent on technology and education is staggering. It's a large amount. I'd love to know what the numbers are. I mean, it's large amount, especially when you have like these, again, the tech directors of the schools, they have the key to so many different technologies. I mean, not just the learning systems, but also the operational technologies like the security systems. I mean, the physical security. I mean, there's a lot that they manage. The printers add that in to the mix. I would be curious to know what percentage of technical budget is for an entire school system. So I worked at Gartner for a while, IT research advisory company. I know 4% was the IT budget, typically like an average IT budget. That was more higher ed. K12 might be a little bit different, but 4% was usually the number that they would use. Geez. It's incredible. And what's funny is that we've been poking around the state government's website where they have a bunch of different contracts that they put out that people bid on and pay for. And it is really kind of staggering the amount of money that people are ultimately paying for a lot of these things. So 4%. And we're dealing with it. It could be 100,000 more. I mean, it's just like, this is incredible. Yeah. And so let's get beyond this, the IT director persona and more into the student. Like if you're a student right now, and I've seen it with my kids and their friends, like it was, they kind of, in my opinion, kind of went on the same journey as we did when we first started using chat GPT. They're like, oh, this is cool. Let me generate some images. But then they're like, eh, you know, like I'm not doing it every day, you know, and I don't see my kids going, hey, can you open up chat GPT for me? But like, I'm wondering like, is it something to where, since it's not necessarily being offered them, it's not, and they don't have that one-on-one tutor experience. Like, do we get to the point where the kids are like, "I could just do this with AI in two seconds," or do you think that they're going to really have that attitude that's more kind of, let's say, driven into them by their parents and their teachers, it's like, "I need to learn this stuff." Well, that's the big question. AI is such a valuable thing. I mean, I ask you guys, Would you like your children or Nieces nephews to learn AI, the technology? Yeah. So I've got an answer for this is that so in my son, which I've talked about now multiple times on the podcast, he's, he's, I think it was 30 year of college. Every time that there was a big project, he's going to come to me and he's going to ask for my two factor authentication password to get into Chad GBT. And he's going to go in there and he's going to basically break it down. But the fact of the matter is, and I've said this every single time that I would much rather have my son be using chat GPT to basically come up with some bullshit answer for why the Inquisition was important because he's having to go through and really think about how do I get chat GPT to give me the kinds of answers that I want. And so I do I go into since since I have the pro account, he'll use mine for these bigger, these bigger ones will run out of context on the free and I can just go in and watch him and I and I do and I watch how he interacts with it. I ask how we ask the questions. I ask and there's things that I've stolen from him that he's come up with. And I mean, he like thinks it. He's like, all right, so here's what we're gonna do. He holds it with these kid gloves. It's hilarious. And so for me, a thousand percent, I want him knowing how to interact with that and how to get those types of answers. Well, I'm basically teaching them how to use a computer at this point, right? Versus knowing what the real benefit of this inquisition that happened that he had to write about.
• Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think yes, but similar to how we rolled out in our company for a junior developers versus senior developers, senior developers are gonna know better questions to ask, why they're asking the questions, getting more value out of the system, whereas the juniors will ask more open ended questions that don't make a ton of sense. Same thing with kids who don't understand, that doesn't mean they shouldn't, 'cause I do think you have to start somewhere, but I do hesitate to say full yes, 'cause I would want the kids who don't have--
• The foundational understanding of it.
• Yeah, so I would agree with that, I understand.
• But I still don't think that's a reason to knee jerk and say, oh no, no,
• But there's also an understanding of the foundational of the AI, right?
• Yeah, yeah.
• But nevertheless, I do think that we do have this risk of where everybody just relies on the AI, that we lose this mental model around it.
• We also will probably need to adjust how we assess students, because if it's just getting an answer on a test and a kid is going and getting the answer from the LLM and putting it on, that's not very useful.
• Right.
• But it's hard, like how do you gauge, like, so they truly understand this topic. And if we can gauge that, tests kind of suck anyway, right? Let's be honest, like, there's not--
• And there's probably an AI play here to be able to interview the kid to see do they actually understand what they're talking about and it could be a very natural conversation.
• It's more important that they have at bats and they're getting exposure and trying and learning and not getting unstuck than it is like how they got to the destination I feel like. But yeah, what do you think?
• I totally agree. I think that's what, there's some different states like here in Indiana Bright Education has done some really cool stuff to fund some pilots so schools can get their hands on these technologies and figure out how it's working and how it's not. And that's one of the main things we're trying to do is, okay, if we do set up some kind of chat or a tutor environment's a little more structured, how will students interact with it? Will they learn from it? But let's be able to visualize what their learning journey was. What questions were they asking? What was the result? Always have that discerning eye that this is a great source of information, not necessarily a source of truth. So thinking about that as you're going in and asking those follow up questions. But 100% agree. I mean, it's that critical thinking, that computational thinking where you have to think about, well, how do I even structure this next prompt? How do I think about what questions to ask it? It's so critical. It's part of the learning process. It's got to happen in their head. Yes, they're using this tool to get the information out, but they have to do the right thing to get the right information out. So, yeah, there's a lot of experiments. I mean, kind of going back to we were talking about all the different companies that were kind of jumping in and kind of testing the waters here, we have seen a lot kind of come and go as they went down this kind of, let's just build it. You know, technologists is like, hey, I've got this hammer, let's go find that nail and build it and then don't have any kind of insight of how the schools work with their procurement policies are like, which is a whole other--
• This is a nightmare.
• That's a whole other like podcast if you want to do that. But yeah, it's a huge struggle. So you saw a lot of them just kind of come and go very quickly. But there's been some that are more AI platform plays. Well, let's just stop right there. That is a really good point that I think that we've seen and that we need to harp on this season, which is everyone's like, "Oh, it's an all or nothing." Like we've talked about the AI tool that's like, "Oh, another email personalization tool." and all these like quick hitter chat GPT API add-ons. But, but there's companies that are like literally those scrappy startups that, or they make it right funding, right? Engineer, right? Found product market fit. There's companies that are like seeing it through that are getting there, that are doing a lot of this stuff. And they're gonna be big players. And so it's like that's like where the slack or the sales force to a certain extent back in the day or whatever, like there's these companies that come out and they end up becoming juggernauts because they're like, you know what, we were there at the beginning, but we actually got through to the end. See, and I think what's funny about a lot of those companies, I think those, where those companies succeed is probably less on the technical quality and more that they figured out the end, how to work with the procurement side of working with the school. And then they iterated and then they, yeah. that they just know how to work the business side of it. 'Cause we all come from a technical side. We like, this is by far superior technology. It's the greatest thing ever. We're just gonna go out there and we're gonna pitch it and everybody's gonna love it. It's like that's fine in Danny, but there's a game that goes on with every single business.
• To rub your back real quick though, we were at this conference yesterday and I went to a session. (laughing)
• We're in my back, not being fun.
• Come on, baby! So we were at this conference yesterday and was my friend speaking, he's a CFO type. but he works at a VC and he's really, really smart about cap tables and the talk was about cap tables. Well, they had these two lawyers from New York there and they were like, they only worked with startups. You saw them with this. And they had this really, really smart woman speaking. She just was like, one of those people just knows that just like literally, Elizabeth could just be like, every single thing coming out of my head is 20 years of experience. And it was talking about, you know, it was talking about like safes and what was the other type of funding that you use convertible notes, all that kind of stuff, right? And they were just talking about all the benefits. And I raised my hand and was like, "What would you say to a tech co-founder?" And she was just like, "Oh, if you have a tech co-founder, great." She's like, "All the companies that I see that actually have exits are all engineering-driven companies." (laughs) And she was like, "Basically, if you have good engineers, usually you're gonna be successful." And I do think, I do think, for us engineers, we're always looking to the sales team and we're always looking to the go-to market people are like, "Oh, I can't do that. You're so good at this. Like I could never be good at that." And then the salespeople are always looking at the engineers and like, "I could never do that." Right? And so, you know. But one thing I wanted to touch on with the AI and for the students perspective is, and I have seen this and maybe as the school I grew up going to, but back in the day, it was a lot of sit and take from the teacher, right? And now kids are at group, they're all sitting at group tables.
• Now they're beating up teachers.
• And they're, they're, they're.
• And they are, I've seen it, I'm one TikTok.
• Yeah, they're probably, they, if it's on TikTok, it's all, it's pervasive.
• No, it's actually chaos.
• We want to even.
• But anyways, they work on more group projects. So like during the day, like there's, you mentioned that the tutor concept, but like, you know, I remember getting to college and thinking, man, I don't think I've ever actually worked on, on a group project like this before.
• So they are doing more group projects They're doing tons of, yeah, project based learning. They bring the students together with the projects.
• Okay, I dig that because like I always thrive.
• They do that all the time and they have the same team dynamic issues that you have when you get to college. 'Cause what are they doing when you get to college? They put you in a team and somebody's good, somebody's bad, somebody's loud, somebody's quiet, and they do all these things.
• You have to figure out how to work with them and understand the different levels.
• Yeah, and-
• What was your role on the team in that dynamic?
• I'm a jerk to everybody off.
• Yeah.
• I rubbed back. (laughing)
• I just wanna, yeah.
• That all go first. I was, so, I was like--
• He's mad at me.
• I was always surrounded by like really, really smart people.
• Oh, it like grows and all.
• And then one really big slacker. So I was like, okay, I just gotta be more valuable than that slacker. So I would always, I would always run like point of like leadership and like try to coordinate all the smarty pants to be like, okay, you're really good at this. You take this, you know, and coordinate all the stuff. And then I said back and be like, Hopefully they think I've done enough. You just outran the slowest guy getting chased by the hair. Yeah. I was always very, very pissed off because no one-- Nothing's trained. That tracks. No one that-- I remember getting to IU and I remember-- there was this group of kids and my teacher actually took us aside and she was like, this is a-- this class is a little bit of an issue. Like, there were kids that were writing it like a-- I would say like a sixth or fifth grade level, like in college. And they were all from the region. Just kidding. So learn Indiana. But like it was like one of those things where in a group project, a lot of times you have to write. And like so for me and these group projects, I mean, anytime any would write anything, I would just be like, Oh, no, no, this is so bad. And so like, you know, the right, I would always latch on to whatever the deliverables were.
• Right.
• And then I would be, I might not be the most vocal in the meeting, but like when everyone would submit their stuff, I would be like the one that was trying to put it all together. That was my role.
• So that's crazy. So where did you go to school?
• What was the high school at North Bay IU?
• Okay.
• So you guys, I went to Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio, right? So this is like pure art school. There was not one team project that we ever had to do, because you'd never get into those wild cats to be able to work together.
• Yeah, that was a while to hire you. I mean, the business school, that's all they do.
• That's crazy if you're at MBA and undergrad.
• Yeah, I did the MSIS program. So that I was in informatics undergrad and then I did MSIS, which is a, you take some MBA classes and then you take information. But it's all through their graduate program.
• Yeah, so that's crazy.
• I mean, I remember, I was a slacker. I mean, I ended up with like a decent GPA, but like, I kind of got around, like I remember skipping public speaking class. I remember getting really nervous. Like I was an extrovert, but when it came to like doing presentations, I remember having a full on panic attack before MSIS class started or school started. It was like two week, it was like a week before, I think it was, we started Thursday, we had our first thing and it was a case competition. So class started on Monday. We had a case competition all weekend and I'd never done anything like that. And there was all these new people and everything was going on. And I remember just like sitting in on the couch going, I'm going to, I can't believe I'm doing this. I'm, I have to talk in front of people. I have to work in front of a group in a group like this. 'Cause Kelly, they really put you through the wringer with iCore and all that stuff.
• How old were you?
• Uh...
• I was 2022.
• Okay.
• So what guy you over the hump? You talked in the past podcast talking about like how you learned to cope. You were frustrated, you weren't learning it, you just had to go to your garage, your basement and just start to look at the--
• So it's the same thing that happened when, I wanted to get on stage for the first time and sing a song, which was you just have to prepare to the point where you feel, I mean, usually anxiety is based off some perception of you're not prepared.
• Right.
• Right?
• Well, yeah, you're right. You have to convince the voice in your head that you're good enough, that you can do it. And that's where I do think AI can actually help. It's like, you know, cool.
• AI, I know.
• That you get more.
• Not weed.
• Yeah.
• No, no.
• So, yeah. I couldn't figure out authentication and authorization early on in my programming career. I just watched like a thousand tutorials on it. It probably would have been better to spend like a tenth of that time with chat JBT and just ask a bunch of questions. But I do think to your point, like to get over the hum sometimes those mental blogs, it's all about just at bats and feeling internally confident about it.
• So, Sean, you were bringing up the question around as students and maybe I'll take this into a different direction.
• Sure.
• And like just perceptions from students. You know, there are a lot of students. I think there was some research done by 4H, believe it or not, that they were serving all these different students. And it was like 68% have used some kind of generative AI tool, but a lot of concerns around using it. There's a lot of stories, if you Google or maybe go on chat to your team and find out there's a lot of students that are getting caught, or at least allegedly using, you know, plagiarizing some text from any kind of generative AI tool.
• And getting in trouble.
• And getting in trouble. I mean, the school's variance, it's wide in terms of what they do with that kind of information, but that's causing a lot of students like my daughters who are very reluctant to use it.
• Well, it's probably hard for chat GPT to generate like an at grade level or even have the context of what was going on in the book that they read or what the teacher said during class.
• How are you talking about?
• Unless they're feeding the notes.
• So this is where teachers--
• And the FYI, every child who's potentially listening to this which would be none of you.
• Think about every high school English teacher. I mean, they were concerned overnight, they're like, okay, how are we gonna do this? because students are submitting these different assignments. Doesn't sound like them, but I can't really prove that it's not them. So there was a rush of different tools that were basically plagiarism detectors. And there's one player in the space and they're a great company. They've done amazing things. But they had a tool where teachers could run the documents through this plagiarism detector and give kind of a percent of plagiarism that was found. But even though, like say on their website, do not use it for disciplinary purposes. We have a two to 4% false positive rate. So think about a teacher teaching 100 students a day. You've got to talk to two sets, two to four sets of parents and guardians about a cheating situation that didn't happen. So it's a very hot button topic right now. And I mean, you think about it also, you have a lot of students that they know that, but there's a lot of tools that will scramble. I forget what they're called, but they're--
• Yeah, they're saying it's a--
• It's a pin-pong paddle.
• No, I would do it. I would go have to have it generated. I would go then take the generated code to Grammarly. Grammarly is now funny enough, Grammarly is released a new detector for AI generators. But yeah, I would end up going from chat to GRAAMmarly and have Grammarly repurpose it and it had no detection for many of the AI.
• Himmingly app is another good one. So yeah, it helps simplify the verb original.
• The one issue that's happening right now is you have the students using Grammarly, which could just be spelled check, it could be grammar, it could be, so authorship is the new tool from Grammarly that has like color coding of where the content of the document originated from. How much was written by you versus Google versus AI versus something else. So it has that. The problem is that a lot of students will use that, but the other tool that the university's purchase to check if there's any kind of plagiarism doesn't agree with that. And so you have a lot of situations. There's a school in Maryland where there's a 10th grade student that got a zero on assignment. She swears. She did not cheat. But the detection tool that the school has purchased said, no, you have. And that school is very draconian about how they're using that. And so that student got a zero. And based on their acceptable use policy or their agreement for students on how they use these different technologies that the schools provide, that's to go under permanent records.
• See, and that's horseshit, because what should have happened here is that they should have said, okay, you're gonna stand up now and you're gonna tell us a five minute dissertation about the content.
• Right. - That's it. It's pretty easy to-- - It's pretty easy to--
• Tell us, exactly. Tell us what you do, what do you know? And if she comes and she tells us a very compelling story about whatever the hell she was just doing, congratulations, you won. Did you get it from chat, GPD? I don't care. - Yeah.
• I do not care where you get the knowledge. Can you consume the knowledge? can you apply it to your real world life?
• I would have failed. (laughing) I used to do this thing, I have a really good short term memory. I would read, as I get right about China economics, I would read a six page thing about it and then immediately write that page that I had to write on it. And I couldn't tell you the day later.
• What do you think the most important, like maybe they're just going back to your, I know my answer, that's why I'm asking the question. and I won't go first. But what do you think is like the most important deliverable for like a student? Like what is the most important thing that they, that you produce without AI? Like throughout your 12 years, all the way through high school even. Like what was the most impactful thing that helped you learn? Like was it a specific test you took or a specific deliverable they made you create? Or was it was like a book report? Like what was it for you? I'm going to jump in before he does just because I think he's got a good thought on this. But for me, it's learning how to learn. You have to learn. That's what school is, is learning how to learn because once you learn how to learn and you can apply that then for the rest of your life, that's it. Learn how to learn. And how do you learn it? That's very much subjective to the individual. That person, like I learn very visually, I need ways that I can kind of interact with stuff, I need a bunch of different things. But once I can do that in a place that works for me, I will remember it forever.
• And so learning to you, learning how to learn means, I consume a bunch of information so that I fully understand it and am capable of producing the verifiable work product that independently that demonstrates my knowledge of that topic. - Sure, yeah, yeah. Or I can get paid for it.
• Yeah, I'm very proud. - Yeah, how about you?
• Mine was teachers that were engaging. So like I looked back, I took programming twice, failed at the first time. My teacher was boring as shit and I was not excited to go do my homework. And the second time I took it, Stude was like super engaging. He obviously had a lot of passion for it and made me excited to go home and do the work and it still was hard. But teachers, like the thing that was most impactful for me is thinking about like all the teachers that were really, really excited and passionate and willing to like try to get me and it really came down and teaching me how to learn was ultimately was the outcome. because I went home and I was like, okay, they're excited. I'm excited. I'm going to figure this out. Dude, if Timmy got the help. Dude, if Timmy got the help. Yeah. That is exactly what you just described is exactly what I love, right? Like, is to help people get excited about what we're trying to do here and get pumped about it. Yeah. I would absolutely have been a teacher if they paid. The output is almost, it's less important, right? Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just like the process to get to there and then like, 100% in passion about, about awesome. Right. Mine would be very similar. I would say, yeah, I was a teacher that was just super engaging, but there was a project-based component to it, where we had to go out and do a video, basically create a commercial. This was for like a business, it was just business class. I don't remember what business marketing or what it was, but we had to go out and film a commercial. And this is back in the 90s, long time ago. It was a big old camera from, I bought it from her. And yeah, we made a Dunkin' Donuts commercial. In fact, my friend Nate Haw, who owns O'Hanna Donuts here in Fishers, it was he and I in the day of the Dunkin' Donuts. No way. I got you back in high school.
• Do you feel haunted? It's amazing, yeah.
• That's almost like a pretty new donut.
• I get to cheat 'cause I thought of two answers. But I would say the number one thing for me was video games.
• Really?
• Because video games taught me beating video games. Beating video games is why I became a good coder. And I've said this before. It taught me perseverance and trial and error essentially. Right, it taught me how to say, you know what, I can do this. I'm gonna keep trying over and over and over and my ADHD and my, and my,
• Just laser bulb.
• And I was just, I was good at, I realized I was good at being focused.
• What game was it?
• Star Wars Shadows of the Empire on N64. Beating Boba Fett is a 45 minute long level and it's really hard. And if you play it on a hard skill level, it was a tough level to be. And you get all, you have to get, there's no like, you know, you gotta go all the way through this thing without dying. Yeah. Right. Have you ever beat blind king on NES? I think we talked about this. It was right next to a lagging. Yeah. Oh my God. I think for me, it was Michael Jackson Moonwalker. Oh, damn. That was almost impossible. Yeah. That was awesome. Especially the orc, whatever that one was. But did you ever play Mike Tyson's Punch Out? Oh, yeah. But those progressions in the difficulty is so important. And I think a lot of video games now are the antithesis of that with children. Like Fortnite, respawning, even though, yeah, you might go down to battle royality.
• But it's all--
• It's all, like even like Roblox and some of those other things. Like I think there are some mental challenges in there.
• But also like, yeah, it's, but to get really, really good at it, you have to be so good at like multitasking, like Fortnite, you have to be able to use all those tools and build the thing.
• That's, it's true. That's, it's like a quick twitch versus like I have to really grind for 45 minutes.
• Yeah, I never had the intestinal fortitude to finish games like that.
• I think that that is a good, I think beating, and my son actually said this to me two days ago. He goes, "I'm dad, I'm really done playing easy video games."
• Wow.
• 'Cause he started Starfield the other day, and he was like, and he took him like a week to get out of the tutorial because he just couldn't figure out how to do it. And I was like, you'll figure it out, dude.
• The campaigns have all died, it's all like online play.
• Yeah.
• And those games are like, you can't-- just dopamine. Those are constantly resetting your dopamine, getting it. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I like getting down to the point where I have nothing left, right? And then, and then, and then, and then you, and then you keep trying and then, and then you get to that precipice and you go, you know what? I accomplished this thing. I just beg my grandma to buy me the guide to it. Oh my gosh. Well, the other, the other, the other thing that I would say, and I wanted to relate this back to school. And this is what I think that is very, this is completely lost in in certain cultures, especially is, do you guys ever have to write a five paragraph paper? Those things, that was what, if you can sit, and I will like literally go to the grave with this, if you can get a kid that's in high school to take a topic and write a five paragraph paper that is concise, that hits the points that delivers the message and be able to repeat that and do that over and over and over, you just created a writer, right?
• Tell them what you're gonna tell them.
• Tell them what you're gonna tell them.
• Tell him what you told him, give him some meat, give him some meat, and then get it at the end. Like the ability to write something and then rewrite it.
• Yeah.
• Right? I think it's very important. I think writing is--
• Writing is definitely like, I know J&A I, a lot of it is writing, but it's not very good, right? It's like--
• It's not.
• It's the common denominator. People have always said, oh, it's garbage. I just use it as a starting point. And I think that's how--
• And then fix it.
• Yeah.
• Put in some misspellings. (laughs)
• This is what I usually do to make it.
• But mostly, I'm getting to the point now where like, I just am like, it just really comes off as AI, most of the time. It's just--
• And these trying times.
• I know.
• Hope this email finds you well.
• I am. (laughing)
• Sure will.
• But writing, I remember, so back to grad school. We get to our, we get to our big, it's like our, it's like we're six months in and we get to a big group project. It's a case competition where you went like, come on like five grand. I remember people were submitting their parts of the paper. We had to write like a 30 page paper. It was target to target in Minneapolis. They were coming down and I remember one of the group members submitted their site and it was literally without even removing formatting or whatever, copy and pasted webpage articles. Like they had to menu from the website like pasted.
• That's what I'm in there.
• They had literally.
• At the bottom of the email, I hope this email
• And this isn't a reflection, but it was an East Asian country that the two members of this team were from, and they were just such engineers. Their entire background was math and engineering, and they had gone to the best engineering school, and they had the best, or whatever you call it, not MCAT, whatever stupid test that I failed at. Not the GMAT, the great GMAT scores, but it was like they couldn't write a sentence. They couldn't complete a thought. There was no creativity that had ever been unlocked. And that to my, I thought I was like, did you guys read books? Did you do literature? Like, and like, that's another thing that I feel like in the AI generation, kids should be like reading cool literature. That was create, you know what I mean? And fluffing those brain stems.
• Hopefully it does. Hopefully it can make it where kids are getting exposed to more things versus just the core.
• Right.
• Right, like where they're getting exposed to.
• The core is when you're in aftercare and you're doing the AI tutor.
• Yeah.
• Right?
• But like during the day, like do the group projects, do the literature, do the stuff that's like you're demonstrating the understanding of it versus the learning part of it, which it can be like that more one-on-one experience.
• And that would be great is to start getting kids where they're actually excited about educating themselves. Like go out and educate yourselves. And that's the piece that I feel like we've lost a wee bit is that again, we just wait for teachers to tell us what we do. And it's like, man, no, teach those kids to go out and be fucking curious as hell.
• Yeah, teachers really, their job may not be to teach them the concepts. Like they can probably learn and reinforce and assess and like see how they're doing.
• And you interact and like, "Oh, you may maybe need to go over here." I have all my teachers that were impactful were like that. He's like, "Listen, I know that you don't like to read, "but he's like, I think you would like all quiet "on the Western Front." He's like, "It's bloody, it's chaotic." He's like, "I think you're gonna dig it." And sure enough, I was able to read that full book and I've never was able to read a full book.
• I think when Trey Buck was on here with you guys, he was talking about, I mean, he's been the ed tech space long time too for a long time. And he was talking about the sage on the stage, how that was kind of the traditional way, but definitely more a guide on the side. And that's kind of where we're seeing a lot, well, that's where I see a lot of the teachers where they are the contextual, they understand the context of the student. They understand what that individual needs, how to personalize that care for them. It's just hard to do when you have that many students. You know, by the way, you have your grading and PD sessions, a teacher training session you have to go to. It's a lot that they have to do.
• It's brutal. Being a teacher is absolutely brutal.
• And now they have situations where the kids that are in their classrooms are at such different levels.
• Yeah, right.
• And the state's trying to combat that by maybe starting to hold back third graders that can't read, did you see that?
• I did. Yeah, I mean, it's difficult right now because you do have a lot of teachers. It's Harvard schools to retain good teachers. any teacher really and then substitutes are hard to find. And that is where this has been interesting and coming back to AI and education. I spent a lot of time in schools doing teacher training, showing them how to use AI in safe and ethical ways. And it's pretty cool. I mean, in 20 years of helping schools out, I've never seen the kind of visceral reactions from teachers. When you show them, hey, how long does it usually take you to create a lesson plan?
• Oh, I know.
• A whole T standard, a line lesson plan. Oh, I mean, it could take a week. It could take two weeks to do that, let alone a few hours. But then they do this and try it out. And like, you know, it's not perfect, but you got me 80% of the way there, like that. That's gold. And so you start asking them, okay, what's the value there? Well, you just saved me time. Well, what do you do with that time? And that's where you kind of get the heart and soul of really what this is all about. And they usually say more time with my students.
• Teachers are incredible. My niece's teacher spends so much time with her outside of class where she runs, her and her husband run the robotics program. And like, you can see how much passion they have for like furthering education. And that's what they care about. They don't want to spend their time doing them a knot and it's like, I mean, I know that they can do that.
• Well, and they get very limited prep time.
• Yeah, yeah.
• But yeah, enabling teachers, that's a really good feeling of like giving them more time to spend on the things that they're more passionate about.
• And you know, God bless all teachers, you know, children are the, are future. And they're great. And as a coach and as a person that's been around teaching, I mean, there's nothing better than hanging around with a bunch of kids that are all aligned and engaged in learning. Like when you're that teacher and you have those, think about it. If you have 30 people that are literally like kind of following along with you, it probably feels pretty cool.
• I just talked to a guy in Massachusetts a couple of days ago and a brand new job. He's kind of moving to the director of instructional technology, like all the academic technologies. So he's in charge of all those. And he's like, I hate it. I was like, well, what were you doing before? He's like, well, I was a graphic design teacher and I loved it. Best six years of my life, just being creative all day with students and like helping them explore their own creativity, learning this awesome skill. And so he chased the money. And now he's like in the situation where he's just not happy with what he's doing. Yeah, he had the opportunity where he just loved helping the students out and seeing how they were growing.
• Yeah. Well, Sean coaches a couple things, right?
• Yeah, softball, baseball, basketball.
• Basketball, basketball, yeah. I mean, that's, and now it's just from my, from my dad, and my dad was always a coach and, and that helped him in business, right? He was always a coach to, he was a tax accountant, he was coaching his younger peers, and they loved him for it, right? 'Cause he spent the time with him.
• Yeah, yeah, well, and I was just thinking like, I've had this idea, I used to coach wrestling, and same, not to the same degree as teachers, but every single practice, I have to come up with my practice plan. And it is specific to where my kids are at, and what they're learning and what we've learned last week. But I have all that information I could easily. So can we build that this weekend?
• Oh yeah, we could.
• Let's just build like a free tool for, we'll start with wrestling 'cause I know that and I can go to basketball, but like just tell it the things that you've been working on and come up with the lesson plan. Or I mean, yeah, they can just bring it in each time. Then the next one is followed from the previous one.
• Yeah, that'd be such a cool.
• That was one of the startups that the thing yesterday was that I was a practice planner. I didn't see what they did.
• Oh, all right, let's go to the areas, but we'll be right away. (laughing)
• Well, anyways, I think this has been great. Kudos to all the teachers out there and all the students that are going through this. We haven't, no one's been through what you guys are going through on this change. And hopefully we can turn out smarter, better kids and no cap. (laughing)
• I guess what the name of tutor was, the boy tutor, brah.
• No. (laughing)
• See you guys next week.
• Oh, love it.