0:02
Hi, I'm Jim O'Shaughnessy and welcome to Infinite Loops.
Search this video
0:02
Sometimes we get caught up in what feel like infinite loops when trying to figure things out.
0:11
Markets go up and down, research is presented and then refuted, and we find ourselves right back where we started.
0:17
The goal of this podcast is to learn how we can reset our thinking on issues that hopefully leaves us with a better understanding as to why we think the way we think and how we might be able to change that to avoid going in infinite loops of thought.
0:36
We hope to offer our listeners a fresh perspective on a variety of issues and look at them through a multifaceted lens — including history, philosophy, art, science, linguistics, and yes, also through quantitative analysis.
0:50
And through these discussions help you not only become a better investor, but also become a more nuanced thinker.
0:57
With each episode we hope to bring you along with us as we learn together.
1:04
Thanks for joining us, now please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops.
1:11
Disclaimer: Jim O'Shaughnessy is chairman and Co-Chief Investment Officer of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, where Jamie Catherwood is an associate.
1:17
All opinions expressed by Jim, Jamie and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.
1:26
This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
1:33
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.
1:37
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, hello, everyone, it's Jim O'Shaughnessy with another episode of Infinite Loops.
1:41
I am so excited about today's guest.
1:48
Before we started to record, I told her that she had me at, "Hello."
1:48
I think I share a great number of her ideas about what we're doing wrong in education.
2:02
But what's great about my guest is that she has a lot of suggestions for what we can do to change it and make it right. Please welcome. Ana Lorena Fabrega. Did I get that right?
2:16
Ana Lorena Fabrega: You did. Thank you, Jim.
2:18
It's a pleasure to be here.
2:18
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I am so happy to have you here.
2:20
You're a former teacher and I love the kids' nickname for you, Ms. Fab.
2:26
And you are currently the chief evangelist for synthesis school.
2:26
Tell me a bit about that.
2:33
Ana Lorena Fabrega: Yeah, so perhaps let me give you like a little background on how I ended up there.
2:34
So, I am originally from Panama but growing up, I moved around a lot, so we lived in Colombia, Venezuela, India, Mexico, Brazil, like we moved a lot.
2:43
So, by the time I was 15, I had been to 10 different schools and lived in seven different countries, so I had sort of been around the block when it comes to schools.
2:53
And I went to different kinds of schools, right?
2:53
Nondenominational, public, private, Montessori.
2:57
So I sort of saw, sort of like the inside of the system for many schools, then I decided to become a teacher.
3:02
So, I taught in New York, in Boston, in Panama, at the elementary school level for over five years.
3:07
So then I got to see also from the teachers perspective.
3:12
And we can get into this a little bit later, but it sort of gave me a really interesting insight look at what's happening inside the schools and how they're failing in many aspects, and how a lot of what we're doing is very different from what actually happens in the real world.
3:26
And so, I decided to leave in 2015 because whether you're a parent, a teacher, an administrator, it's just really hard to exact real change within the system, just because it's built in all these very solidly ingrained ideas that it's almost impossible for one person to get things moving in a different direction.
3:45
So I left in 2015, with all these ideas about what we should be doing, not really a clue who I was going to tell or who was going to talk to, but I started writing online, and just sort of voicing these things and talking about my experience in the classroom, and the things that I was seeing and how the kids were sort of reacting.
4:04
And I started to talk to different ed tech companies that were doing exciting things in the alternative education space.
4:08
And a lot of it seemed like add-ons to the system.
4:08
And sort of, I had seen as a teacher, a lot of this tech solutions that would come in every year and really, it was just more of the same.
4:18
It was tools for the teachers not really enhancing learning, not really changing the way that things had been, so.
4:23
But then I encountered this guys in California that they were trying to scale this school called Astra, which was the school that Elon Musk created with Josh Dahn, a co-founder at Synthesis at SpaceX, around seven years ago, almost seven years ago.
4:40
So Elon saw, many of us all the issues with the education system, how we're not really teaching kids how to think but rather what to think.
4:50
So, he wanted to create sort of a lab school for his kids that was more problem-based, not too focused.
4:56
Get rid of the mixed age groups, sort of have kids ages 8 through 14, all together solving real world problems and trying to figure things out when there no adult sort of intervening, learning about different frameworks and mental models.
5:08
It was a very interesting model and all through simulations, because he had this idea that school and learning has to be engaging for kids to actually want to be part of the process.
5:19
So, the school was really a magical place because they didn't have to really comply to all this standards and metrics and all this, curriculum that traditional schools have to adhere to.
5:28
They were able to really experiment with different things and there was this one course called Synthesis, which was based on conundrums, which are tough questions that they would pose kids like how to build the Tesla Supercharger Network and things like that.
5:43
And then the kids 8 to 14 would try to figure it out and built this models.
5:48
And it was a very Interesting way, because the kids were handling uncertainty.
5:48
They were sort of figuring things out and getting comfortable with failure.
5:52
And these are things that again, we can talk about more later, but we don't really see in traditional schools.
5:56
It's not really the focus or covered really at all.
6:01
So, when they showed me what they were doing and they were trying to grab that Synthesis course and put it into software with all these simulations that would teach kids how to problem solve, how to sort of deal with complexity, I was impressed.
6:13
I joined one of their beta testing sessions last year.
6:13
And it was just incredible, incredible the kinds of problems that the kids were solving, how they were so engaged, how they were communicating their ideas, how their decision making process was just incredible.
6:27
How they were thinking about things like thinking probabilistically and strategizing.
6:32
It was just something I'd never seen, not even when I see kids playing video games, which I love to do.
6:35
We can talk about that later, too.
6:35
So, they asked me if I wanted to join.
6:35
They were just building this.
6:40
They were still in stealth mode.
6:40
And they wanted, I had sort of become a voice in the education space and sort of like an independent journalist, so they were like, "Help us launch."
6:48
And we did that in November.
6:48
It's been a year now and we have over 3000 students from all over the world.
6:54
So, it's once a week simulations and we're expanding the product after year one.
6:59
But yeah, it's very wildly different from what I was doing before.
6:59
And it's just so exciting to see kids, actually in charge of their learning and excited to join everyday and contributing.
7:04
So long story short, I sort of found a group of people that aligned with me philosophically and we're testing things out.
7:16
We don't know if it's going to work or not, but trial and error and so far, the results look great.
7:20
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I mean, you are, it sounds like I'm listening to myself in a much nicer voice because I believe in all of those things very, very deeply.
7:28
I think that our current educational system, specifically on the public side, but all over quite frankly is in a really, really dangerous and bad place.
7:41
And it reminded me of this Bucky Fuller quote that I just put up on Twitter, just an hour ago.
7:46
And what Fuller had to say was, "You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
7:52
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
7:52
And it seems to me, I did that when I was going through your stuff and that made me think of this quote.
8:03
And then for a slightly more caustic quote, my favorite fictional person, Jed McKenna, who's an enlightenment writer, he wrote, "The very idea of putting our formative years to good and happy use is so radical to be practically unthinkable, to allow our young and encourage them to explore, learn and develop, instead of being herded, molded and homogenized."
8:34
He says this is almost unthinkable.
8:34
I obviously don't agree with him, but I think he's right in the fact that much of our educational system today stems from the 19th Century beginning of the industrial era where the people that own the factories told them, "We want to be able to sit quiet in a room doing what we tell them to for eight hours." That's not an education.
9:00
Another hero of mine, the physicist, Richard Feynman said, "If you're not having fun, you're not learning."
9:05
And I agree entirely with that.
9:05
Let's talk a little bit a bit about the idea of that Elon Musk said, "The more you can gamify the process of learning, the better." Tell me about that.
9:18
Ana Lorena Fabrega: Yeah, so the first thing that you notice if you go into a classroom and you actually observe kids, right?
9:24
It's funny because when you go as a student teacher, they're like, "Yeah, you're here to observe the teacher and get the best methods." And I'm like, "No, no.
9:30
Forget about the teacher.
9:30
Let's look at the students and see what's happening."
9:34
I always say that a big problem that we have, I mean, we have a lot, but in the education system, it's an engagement crisis, right?
9:37
The kids, they're not engaged because well, first, you can't force kids to learn, right?
9:42
You can only sort of inspire them and get them excited and that's what gets them, "Okay, now, I'm ready to absorb and do what you're asking me to do."
9:50
But also in order for something to be engaging and we've noticed this through the school at Astra and at Synthesis, it's not that, "Oh, it's because it's fun games that the kids are engaged."
10:00
Of course, that has something to do with it, but the fact that the kids have agency and they have a voice, so they get to actually make decisions over the things that they're learning, the way that they're learning them, tweaks or ask questions.
10:10
In school, you can't really do that.
10:15
You can't ask a teacher, "Why am I learning this?"
10:15
Because you'll get in trouble.
10:15
But here in this sort of environments, you're encouraged to question things and to figure things out.
10:19
And once kids realize, "Well, this makes sense to me.
10:24
I understand why they're asking me to learn this, or I see why I need to learn this in order to do the fun thing," then they're engaged, then they want to do it.
10:33
So that's the first thing.
10:33
The other thing is that unlike what we sort of see in schools, in schools, we pretty much watered down the content and we over engineer the lesson plan, so the kids are sort of following instructions, and they don't get lost in the process and things are not too complicated.
10:49
There's always a right answer that the teacher knows, that's not exciting.
10:53
That just removes the element of, "What's surprising there?
10:58
Why would you want to go?"
10:58
The kids actually crave complexity, and they want to sort of figure things out.
11:02
They're not used to doing it, because again, we're for so many years, we train them to do the opposite, to depend on adults to know what to learn or what they need to do, when in reality, they actually are drawn to the challenge into complexity into things that are difficult.
11:17
And they only start to realize this when you put them in these environments, and you actually give them this agency.
11:21
So, it's not only about the engagement part and the excitement, but it's about the ownership about the things that they're doing and the relevance and understanding, the purpose behind it.
11:29
But it's so interesting, because, for example, when you see kids playing in these simulations or when you see them in video games, there's a lot of learning going on, kids always want to keep coming back.
11:37
And it's so interesting, because they fail often and they're constantly failing and they're not demotivated.
11:43
In school, once they fail, they don't want to come back to that, they're like, "Well, let me stay away from that."
11:50
But there's something about when it's a game and when it's fun and when it's engaging that they want to keep doing it, right?
11:54
It's sort of the way that it's framed.
11:57
So, it's just so interesting that we continue to enforce compliance and obedience and sort of this authoritative approach to learning.
12:03
It doesn't work and what's interesting is, I guess that many people have a hard time seeing this.
12:09
Sometimes I talk to parents, and they're like, "Well, what do you mean?"
12:12
I'm like, "Well, it looks the kids are learning, right?
12:12
But in reality, they figured out sort of the game of school."
12:17
They know what they need to say, how they need to behave, what they need to tell the teacher, how many times they need to raise their hand, in order to appear as if they're learning, but they're really gaining the system.
12:24
There's not a lot of learning.
12:29
They're just trying to get really quickly through all the school stuff, so that they can leave school and then do the things that are actually exciting and fun to them.
12:37
So, if we're able to combine those two things and make it not only relevant to them, but also exciting, then that should be sort of the goal, right?
12:42
I often talk about how teachers are not really there to be the authoritative figure, but they're really entertainers, right?
12:47
And sort of like, they need to inspire you and make things fun, and just convince you that you want to keep doing this.
12:56
So, that's sort of what we try to do with this gamified approach and we need to be careful with that term.
13:00
But yeah, that's sort of like the whole purpose behind gamified education to make things exciting for the kids. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
13:07
Yeah. And it seems to me that the most creativity that a normal school kid exhibits is that creativity of figuring out the game with the teacher and playing that game and that is such a waste of such a wonderful period in a human's development and instead of
13:27
crushing their creativity and breaking their spirits, we could be doing exactly the opposite and harnessing them and and letting sort of sort of the Daoist concept of wu wei, letting things transpire as they're meant to transpire. And instead of like Robert Anton
13:40
And instead of like Robert Anton Wilson, a favorite writer of mine, he says that when he was educated in the 30s, they installed what he called "a correct answer machine," which didn't many times give the correct answer.
13:49
In fact, it gave the one that was expected, but usually quite wrong.
13:57
And it actually retarded people's ability to be creative.
14:04
To think from first principles to understand that failure is actually a huge opportunity as opposed to something that should be punished.
14:16
And so, when I was going through your stuff, I was incredibly excited because the whole idea, I think, we are going, I call it "the great reshuffle," others call it a "phase change."
14:27
Packy calls it "The great online game."
14:27
I know that Anthony has a term for it, too, but it's happening.
14:32
And this whole idea of the ability I believe, the ability to synthesize information into new knowledge is the new high IQ, so to speak.
14:45
In the old days, if you could recall a bunch of facts on the spot, you look smart, right?
14:49
But if you couldn't put those facts together or in a cohesive way that added to the knowledge base, it was, "You weren't doing much of anything really."
14:56
Now, this is what is going to not be suggested of kids when they enter the workforce, I don't know, 15, 20 years from now.
15:08
It will be required and anyone who is left behind and I just think that is one of the greatest sort of travesties here. We understand this.
15:13
Your school is demonstrating the success in this.
15:19
But we have this kind of timidity about trying the newer, bolder approach and then looking at the results, right?
15:27
I'm sure that just like your lessons for your kids, things are chaotic, and you're learning, too.
15:32
And as you look at something, you're like, "Hmm, maybe we better augment that or change that."
15:35
And I love this idea of dual learning - the teacher learning with the students as opposed to as some authoritative figure.
15:48
You mentioned Montessori.
15:48
I was in the first Montessori class.
15:48
I grew up in the Midwest in Minnesota and my father was very much in favor of Montessori.
15:53
And they do a little bit of that, the mixed age groups, for example, where the older child can help the younger.
15:59
And Montessori's results, her results in Italy are indisputable.
16:05
She went to the Italian educational authorities and asked for the ability to take over their poorest school districts, which always came in with the worst scores on everything and she absolutely amazed them all by turning it around.
16:23
I like the idea that you used reframing, because a lot of the times people, you hit a hot button and you mentioned it really, gamifying, right?
16:29
"Game, learning isn't a game," a traditional person might say.
16:35
Well, if you're really learning, yes, it is.
16:35
And you also touched on the idea of the teacher being a facilitator as opposed to an authority that says, "Yes, no, right, wrong."
16:48
That's another one of my soap boxes that we are deterministic thinkers living in a probabilistic world and hilarity or tragedy often ensue and so, you're teaching that.
17:00
And it's funny, all of the synchronicities here because I just published an interview with the foremost expert on genetic behaviorism.
17:04
His name's Robert Plomin and he was talking about parents, not teachers.
17:11
But he was saying, "The best thing a parent can do for their child is to facilitate what they show that they like.
17:18
Let them take their natural course."
17:25
Now, let's talk a little bit about the idea of no grades.
17:25
I am all in favor of no grades, but I'm I have a friend who said, "Put you into any sample and you ruin the sample."
17:32
Because I tend to have maybe different ideas about these things.
17:37
How do you like with a reticent parent, what do you say to get them to be comfortable with no grades and learning at their own pace and things like that?
17:46
Ana Lorena Fabrega: Yeah.
17:47
Well, that's, it's a big challenge, right?
17:47
So, it's very interesting, because you need to unlearn a lot of the things that you've learned about teaching, about learning in order to really understand all these ideas. But we've...
17:56
when I say we, I mean, the education system, especially in America has resorted to a lot of nonsense when it comes to accountability and to grading and standards and it's become really the center of what happens in schools.
18:04
And again, I'm speaking from an insider.
18:09
And I would see how every year we have this mandated state tests that the students have to perform really well because that's what you use to measure and compare the school with other schools in these states and this and that.
18:22
So, there's a lot of stress and anxiety in the schools for a period of three months when you're doing what they call Test Prep.
18:28
And it's so interesting because we stop everything we're doing and even if they say, "No, we're still teaching," not really.
18:34
Everyone, the teachers are stressed out, students are stressed out, the parents are stressed out, everyone's stressed out, because we need to make sure that the kids do really well in this test.
18:42
And the test is basically measuring what the kids learned the entire year.
18:46
My question was always, "Well, why are we going so crazy with all this testing and prepping and this and that?"
18:51
If it's about what they've learned, if we've done a good job throughout the year, with this curriculum set or not then we shouldn't really do test prep.
18:59
They should just be able to go and perform, and we see how much they learned.
19:03
That's really not what happens because the tests don't really, it's really hard to measure genuine learning, right?
19:08
We all know the students that aced the test and then the next day, don't remember at all the content, or you give them an open-ended problem.
19:15
And then you ask them to apply.
19:15
And they have no idea because they're not seeing it in the same context as they saw it in the test.
19:19
So, it's like this whole notion, and I know, I'm mixing tests and grades, but I'm going from here.
19:23
And I'll end up in grades.
19:23
So it's, first this notion of having to teaching for the test, that's not real learning.
19:27
There's not real learning happening, right?
19:30
And then what happens is, the kids get just completely focused and obsessed with the grades.
19:35
That's sort of the incentives, that sort of the outcome that they forget why they're learning in the first place.
19:39
So I often say like, "Learning doesn't end once they hand you a diploma."
19:44
It sounds obvious for people like you and me, but then you ask kids, and they're like, "No, no.
19:48
I'm learning because I'm in school.
19:48
I need to pass to the next grade level.
19:51
I need to get good grades, but then after that, I'm done." And it's like, "No, no. We have it all wrong."
19:55
And then it's because, again, the incentives have all been around grading.
19:55
And what ends up happening, and I've noticed this, when you don't, when there's no penalty for revision, for example, kids have no problem doing it again.
20:05
But the moment you give them a bad grade like an F and then you ask them to revise their work, they're like, "No, why?
20:09
I mean, they're not going to change my grade.
20:13
Why would I go and check what I did wrong and learn from my mistakes? No."
20:17
So, that's often what ends up happening when you give somebody a grade.
20:17
So, it's not like I'm very against that, but I thought that a good way if you want to use grade so that you can actually have some way to measure what's happening and there are other things like rubrics that are more effective in this, but you can maybe give kids the chance to fail and make their mistakes and correct their mistakes.
20:34
And once they've gotten to a point where they've learned and they've correct them, then you give them a grade for all the progress and for trying and for all these.
20:41
And again, it doesn't have to be a number, it can be a rubric, it can be a scale, but the idea should be feedback, right?
20:44
That's what I keep thinking, in the real world, there are no grades, right?
20:48
You keep getting feedback from different things and that encourages you to fix your mistakes and keep going, so I often think we should move from this, all standards and grades and this, to something more feedback loops and learning from each other.
21:00
And having a little group where you're bouncing off the ideas and catching each other's mistakes, that would be more real world way of approaching the learning process, right?
21:10
So, at Synthesis, for example, we don't have grades, we aren't working on a way to sort of measure certain skills that we're teaching them throughout the simulations, but we often get from parents like, "How do I know what they're learning?"
21:19
And I'm like, "Well, have a conversation with them and sort of look at where they are today and then in two weeks, these are the sorts of things that you can look for in your child having conversations that night, et cetera and then ask them the same question, but in different scenarios.
21:31
If they're able to apply that, then they are learning," right?
21:36
That's sort of when you don't have the formula, when you don't, you give them a real problem, and they're able to apply what they learn then they're learning. Forget about the grades.
21:44
It's challenging, because we, for so many years, parents have been conditioned to think about those numbers in the report card, and that's what gets you to college, so.
21:52
But it's try to just, try to understand the underlying reason why we're doing that, and then you start to be like, "Maybe it doesn't make that much sense," right?
21:56
And if it's removing from the learning, then it's sort of, "You're missing the point."
22:00
So yeah, it's an interesting dilemma that we're dealing with. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
22:05
And if you study history you'd know that this isn't the first time that a way of teaching things became so ossified that they had to essentially just knock it down, and start all over again.
22:19
And that sounds radical and it sounds, it's scary to many people, because people prefer the tried and what they view as the tried and true, which, of course, isn't the tried and true?
22:33
I mean, that's the other thing that annoys me.
22:33
It's like we have this incredible opportunity during a time when if you look at through Neurology, through any sort of the number of brain cells available to a kid, much higher than you and me, and if we could take that and shape it for the positive, I mean, honestly, who knows how much better educated this group will be going into that kind of environment.
22:59
It does seem to me that that even people who had good intentions are so programmed by society and their own experience and everything else, that they have closed their own minds towards this type of thing.
23:14
How do you overcome that?
23:14
Do you ever let the parents play the games?
23:20
Ana Lorena Fabrega: Well, yeah.
23:22
So, actually, we have and we actually have a special link for any parent that's listening to this podcast, and who's interested in trying out one of our games, so that you get a sense of what it's like.
23:29
Very chaotic, very stressful.
23:29
We won't give you instructions.
23:33
But if you want to try it out, just to get a sense of what the Synthesis experience is like, you can go to synthesis. is/oshag.
23:37
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Wow, that's fantastic.
23:41
Ana Lorena Fabrega: Yeah and you can try it out, too, Jim, just so that you sort of get a sense.
23:44
But the best way to convince parents about this new approach is to have them play, because you start to, it's really hard to describe in words everything that's happening just because it's so much.
23:56
But there's a lot of switching back and forth decision, everything's fast paced.
23:59
Again, you fail every minute and you need to pick up, switch strategy, make another decision, validate your decision.
24:05
There's a lot going on, but then you start to understand how, what you're learning.
24:08
Throughout the simulations, kids learn different mental models and how they apply to other contexts and to other scenarios.
24:17
And that's just so interesting.
24:17
And again, it hard to put into words, but as you experience it, you get to really see it.
24:22
But we do get a lot of pushback from parents who...
24:22
I recently wrote about this.
24:28
I wrote an article called, "Skin in the game," related to parents, where a lot of parents just drop their kids out of school and sort of hope for the best, right?
24:32
Because they're like, "I'm sending them to school, that's where learning happens, that's."
24:35
But in reality, again, I've seen a lot and the kids are not really learning.
24:39
And you mentioned at the beginning, how we're still in a system using outdated curriculums from 100 years ago and ideas.
24:49
And two-thirds of the kids that are going through grade school right now will end up doing jobs that haven't been invented yet.
24:53
So really, what we teach them matters less than how they learn to teach themselves and how they learn to learn.
24:59
And if there's something we've noticed this past year, with all this uncertainty, our world is always changing, very chaotic, few things are certain.
25:08
So if anything, we need to teach them how to thrive in uncertainty, how to get comfortable with uncertainty in schools.
25:12
And this, I talk to parents a lot, we're doing the opposite.
25:17
Everything is very much, there's schedule, everyone knows what's happening at all times.
25:20
There's not a lot of uncertainty.
25:20
We're just sort of training them for something very different than in the real world, right?
25:26
We give them so many instructions.
25:26
I talk about this a lot, because it drives me crazy.
25:30
It's like, "Let kids figure it out."
25:30
In the real world, it doesn't come with a manual, right?
25:34
And then it's, I think that the idea that really gets parents sort of thinking, schools are really not doing everything they can.
25:37
But parents and you don't have to homeschool, you don't have to go to that extreme, but you can get more involved.
25:45
You can sort of the instinct is, "Oh, something's happening.
25:45
Let me run and complain to the teacher."
25:49
The teacher has another 24 students that they're trying to accommodate for and differentiate for, there's a lot going on.
25:53
Just get a little bit more involved and understand what really is happening?
25:58
What are the subjects that your kids are struggling with?
25:58
Maybe they're being presented in a way that doesn't make a lot of sense.
26:02
Ask them questions about, "Well, do they understand why they're learning this?"
26:06
Try to find out a bit more before just jumping up and just assuming that because they're going to school, they're learning, so I often talk about that.
26:14
And that sort of get parents a little bit more.
26:14
And I write a lot about this, so I invite them to my writing and to sort of raise a lot of questions.
26:18
So the more you question, the way things have been, you start to realize that a lot of the things that we're doing no longer makes sense.
26:26
And you start to realize that kids have this innate desire to learn from everything.
26:32
They're very curious by nature. They want to learn. That's just in them.
26:36
The problem is that we put them in these institutions where suddenly they have no choice over the subjects they're learning.
26:39
The way they're learning it, the way they're being assessed.
26:42
It's sort of like everything is mandated from the top. I often talk about this.
26:45
I'm like, "Imagine if kids actually realized that education was for them.
26:50
For them to do whatever they want to do in the real world," right?
26:50
Maybe they would stand up and demand for it to be more engaging and more relevant, but they can't even ask questions.
26:58
And so, it's a very, messed up sort of cycle in the schools.
27:04
So, if parents get more involved, they start to see this and then they may be a little bit less hard on their kids when they don't get a good grade.
27:08
They can sort of, there are ways to assess if you could actually understood the concept.
27:11
And yeah, just find things that work better for them, but again, it's a lot of unlearning the things that we used to and rethinking the approaches.
27:23
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So, the concept of unlearning is one that I banged on a bit about as well, because it is, in my opinion, as important, maybe even more important these days than learning because so much of what used to work isn't working anymore.
27:42
And so, rather than continue and persist to do it the way that doesn't work, in probably one of the most famous misattributions they say that Einstein said that, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing the same way and expecting a different result."
27:56
And him and maybe Mark Twain get the most attributed quotes that they never said.
28:02
But it's a great quote the matter who said it, because it's true.
28:07
And another thing is when measurements, like you're talking about the grading and learning, teaching, the test, and things.
28:13
When measurements become targets, they cease to be useful, right?
28:18
Because they're going to, it's like the famous story of when the British were in India, ruling India, there was a real big rat problem and so, they offered a bounty for anyone who brought in rats tails, indicating that they'd kill the rat.
28:35
Well, they quickly noticed that far from being fewer rats, there seemed to be, rat population seemed to double or quadruple.
28:40
Well, of course, that's because very clever Indian people were raising rats, cutting their tails off getting paid for it and the problem did not get corrected.
28:53
And so, it's funny, but when you go through those kinds of stories, there is an underlying consistency and the underlying consistency is it doesn't work that way.
29:06
Stop trying to do it that way.
29:06
And the only way you can get even an adult, it seems this would be a great way to help adults understand that they need to relearn and unlearn to get into where they need to get for the new kind of economy and everything else that is emerging.
29:22
You wrote a bunch of things that I will link to in the episode page, but one that really caught my attention was something you'd written called, "10 Steps To Be Able To Create."
29:32
This isn't the actual title, but it's along the lines of, "If you really want to crush your kids creativity, do these 10 things."
29:40
Ana Lorena Fabrega: It worked, it worked.
29:44
Parents were clicking on it, "Let me see."
29:44
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Let's talk about a few of those things that now, let's be very clear listeners, these are things to avoid doing.
29:51
If you don't want to crush your child's creativity.
29:57
Why don't you walk me through a couple?
29:57
Ana Lorena Fabrega: Yeah, so I was sort of inspired by the way that I thought we were crushing creativity in school.
29:59
So, I sort of came up with this list to show because I know that there's a lot of resemblance with the activities that parents do at home.
30:06
But in essence, I talk about first, when we give an activity filled with instructions and I use Lego as an analogy for what's going on in the education system today.
30:17
And I got a lot of people that were like, "What's wrong with Legos? Don't mess up."
30:21
And I'm like, "Not Legos.
30:21
I'm using it as an analogy."
30:21
Because Legos very interestingly used to come, you probably remember it, in a box, no instructions.
30:27
You'd throw them in the floor, and then you would build whatever your imagination would take you.
30:31
And then that approach, wasn't doing really well.
30:35
And Lego was about to go bankrupt.
30:35
And they were like, "Oh, what do we do?"
30:39
So then they came out with the LEGO sets, right?
30:39
That came with all this detailed instructions and a picture in the box that shows you what the final product should look like.
30:43
And then, but it got to the point where now, and of course, you can still get the other Legos and play on your own.
30:47
But people are encouraged to buy the sets and the kids are really just going through the instructions and that's it, that's sort of the skill that they're learning.
30:56
We're removing all the creativity.
31:01
The people that are being creative are the ones creating the Legos in the studio, right?
31:01
That's where the creativity comes from, so it's like we are surgically removing that creative element.
31:10
And I used that because it's really what's happening in schools as well.
31:13
We're over engineering lesson plans and with all these instructions and again, there's a right answer that the teacher know.
31:16
And then it's like the kids are like, "Well, what am I doing here?
31:19
I don't really have space to interpret this into, again, how am I going to come up with a new solution like everyone, of course, comes up with the same stuff.
31:23
And it's like," and that's what we encourage. That's very messed up.
31:27
Again, the ability to be creative and innovative today is more useful and needed than ever.
31:31
So, if we give activities all the time like Legos that come with instructions and/or paint by the numbers and things like that, then kids are really not practicing their creativity.
31:40
So, that's one that I mentioned.
31:45
But then I mentioned another one that's just lots of instructions for creativity, but so do blank canvases, right?
31:49
So you also need certain constraints, so that their parameters and that helps you come up with new ideas, right?
31:53
Because otherwise, it's like kids will maybe draw the first thing that comes to mind and sort of leave it there.
31:57
But if there's some constraints and some obstacles, then they have to keep fighting until they find a better idea or a more innovative idea or a novel idea.
32:06
So, also having certain activities with certain constraints is really good for creativity.
32:11
Then I talked about having, so kids usually get creative when they're around other people that are also doing interesting things.
32:17
So, having your kids go and play dates or you can be involved as well, but having them be sort of listening to other people's things, surprising things or doing surprising things will help them also come up with things that are creative. Then we mix a lot.
32:30
We think that creativity is usually, "Oh, it's painting in the arts and this and that," but really, there are many, many ways that kids are being creative nowadays.
32:39
Parents complain a lot about kids doing this TikTok and this and that.
32:43
And I'm not on TikTok, but I do see the creativity that kids spend hours and hours coming up with the steps and things that are going to go viral and this and that.
32:51
They're actually doing something that's exciting to them.
32:51
And of course, you can put parameters, so that they don't spend their entire day.
32:55
But they are, these are new ways that they're learning to be creative and it's just super interesting to see that.
32:59
So, giving them this space to choose an activity that's actually interesting to them, and that they want to explore a bit further, and then support that and sort of be there for them.
33:08
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, yeah and you actually have a pretty good one, which is challenge them and I think that's great.
33:15
So many parents are in this frame of mind that, "Oh, I have to praise your creativity and oh, this is so great."
33:21
And if it's not great, you shouldn't say that, right?
33:27
You should say something like "Wow, good first effort. Let's keep going."
33:32
Ana Lorena Fabrega: Exactly. Yeah.
33:32
And if you haven't seen this, I highly recommend watching that video.
33:34
It's called the Austin Butterfly.
33:34
And I love it, because it's a first grader that did this first butterfly and then the teacher was like, "Well, quick start," right?
33:42
Usually, parents are excited to be like, "Great job. That's great. Beautiful."
33:47
And then that's it, the kid will leave it there.
33:47
But if you look at all the different drafts, I think, the kid had six different draft and you look at the last butterfly, you're like, "Wow."
33:55
Imagine if the teacher or the friend had said like, "Great job."
33:55
Then that would have been it.
33:59
And it goes back to that idea.
33:59
And the whole idea of being a facilitator, your job is not to deliver information.
34:04
Kids can find that in Google.
34:04
They can find that in books.
34:04
Your job is to really be aspirational and race there.
34:08
They think they can do this when you push that bar, right?
34:12
And then you sort of give them the resources and sort of create the environment for them to get there, right? You're inspiring them.
34:16
A lot of what happens in school is we're bringing kids down, right?
34:20
We were so focused on remediating their mistakes and the things that they do wrong, that we sort of forget to , focus on their strengths and push them up.
34:29
So that's also something that I think that parents, just that framing makes a very, very big difference. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
34:34
And you also have something else that that I go on all about in terms of investing.
34:34
And that is, "Don't emphasize results, emphasize the process."
34:40
In investing, all too often, and it's because of our human OS and there's going to be no escaping it, so we try to take advantage of it in the way we manage money.
34:52
But everyone will look at, let's say, somebody buys a stock and it soars, but he or she had, they just bought it.
34:59
They didn't know what it did and they bought it because they read about it on a chat room.
35:03
And then they think, "Oh, I'm the greatest investor in the world,| right? Well, no, you're not. You're lucky probably. Mr.
35:12
Market will teach you that that is wrong, but if you understand the underlying process then you can play infinite games, positive-sum games and you can use aggregate result base rates.
35:27
You point out a couple of other things that are also a bit of a hot button for me, which is, don't bribe your children.
35:32
In many respects, it's the easier way, right?
35:32
"Okay, if you do this, this then I'll give you X," right?
35:38
Well, okay, but then you're making things are conditional and you're training the child to work for that specific set of instructions rather than being incredibly creative.
35:48
And another one you have, which I totally agree with is overscheduling. Don't overschedule kids.
35:54
Even if you'd love to read, and you read all day, which is one of the kind of luxuries that I have, when I'm not doing other things, you got to take a break.
36:05
Because you have to let some slack into the system, as my friend Tom Morgan says.
36:10
And that seems to be things that we really, really need to do with our kids.
36:16
And then I think you also were writing about, if we do, and this one, this one's going to be a doozy, I think.
36:20
Okay, so you did a deep dive on the current educational system and without letting you give me the answer everything, what are some of the biggest problems with our traditional educational system?
36:32
And let's stick to North America for right now.
36:38
Ana Lorena Fabrega: Yeah, so I mean, there's this big idea that I talk a lot about that it's like, "We learn by doing."
36:39
We need to be involved in the process.
36:43
And if you look at, again, if you look at a picture and I've actually shared a few of these have kids in the classroom 100 years ago, and then today, it's pretty much the same.
36:48
I mean, maybe you'll see a few screens here and there, and nicer furniture, but it's basically the same.
36:57
You still have kids sitting down in front.
36:57
Everyone is in row with facing a teacher.
37:00
There are some progressive schools where it's a little bit different.
37:00
But in a sense, in essence, the teacher is speaking is most of the time, the kids are sort of facing.
37:06
Kids are not meant to be sitting down, especially for that amount of time.
37:06
That's why they start daydreaming, that's why they get angsty.
37:11
They start to misbehave, because that's not our nature.
37:14
They have to be moving, they have to be trying things out.
37:14
So, it's sort of that, the approaches that we're still using are so outdated.
37:18
The fact that we think that we need to convey information, and the kids are sort of magically going to absorb it, again, that's not how it works.
37:26
And they talk a lot about how we're still making kids memorize information that they can Google, right?
37:31
Instead, we should be teaching them how to interpret that information or interpret search results, or curate all the information abundance that's coming out right now.
37:40
That's sort of like the skill that we should learn or how to assess the validity and the veracity of information.
37:44
How to make ethical judgments about how to use that information.
37:44
These are all skills that kids need now, but instead, in school, they're sitting, listening and sort of expected to memorize and then take a test.
37:52
So, the approaches that we're using, very, very outdated.
37:52
The curriculums that we're using, also very outdated.
37:58
Again, you look at the content and the things I remember looking at all the units, and I was like, "When are my kids ever going to use this?
38:06
I still haven't use this."
38:06
Instead, "Why aren't we teaching them about mental models?
38:06
Why is mental models something that's not universally covered in schools." It blows my mind.
38:11
I only came to learn about this as an adult on my own reading.
38:15
And I'm just upset that my thinking would be very different.
38:21
So, it's just a lot of the things that we continue to teach, very outdated.
38:26
Then again, the incentives, right?
38:26
The incentives are grades.
38:26
They are the carrots and sticks like, "I'll punish you for doing this and that."
38:31
There's a lack of purpose.
38:31
Kids really don't understand why they're doing most of the things that they're doing.
38:36
You very well said, kids are in school for way too long from 7:00 AM till 3:00 PM, five days a week and then they have after schools and this and that and homework.
38:45
And it's like kids never have time to actually be kids or to explore their interests or to dive deep into a book that's not school-related or to just, like you said, sit down, daydream, come up with ideas.
38:56
It's like that's very rare nowadays and it's just, it's insane, right?
39:00
The fact that we've sort of flipped this and this happens for 12 plus years, then they go to college that sort of continues, so it's like.
39:04
And then the biggest thing for me and very frustrating is the way that we handled the whole topic around failure.
39:12
And this is something I talk a lot about to the point where it sometimes sounds even cheesy.
39:16
But if you really think about it, failure should be something that we encourage, not punish.
39:19
And the way that we approach failure in school, it's like we make kids fear failure, so what happens is they don't want to take risks, right?
39:25
Because there's a consequence for taking risks.
39:29
They don't want to try out new ideas and they're not very certain.
39:34
There's not this notion of, "Let me try something. I failed. Let me try again. Let me get better."
39:38
You don't go through that process in school.
39:38
And this is very detrimental because in the real world, that's how you come up with crazy new ideas, that's how you innovate by getting comfortable with failure.
39:47
And I often think if kids don't have a chance to fail, often as kids, when they really don't have big responsibilities or life changing consequences, then when are they going to practice this skill, right?
39:57
Same with like we make kids very dependent of adults.
40:01
We're always there feeding them, doing this, the instruction.
40:01
Kids sort of learn to depend on adults, and it's like then they turn 18 and we magically expect, boom, independence.
40:09
No, that's not how it works, right?
40:09
These are skills that you actually have to teach in school if you have them for this long.
40:14
How to embrace failure, how to get comfortable with it, how to learn from your mistakes, how to use that as feedback and as part of the learning process.
40:22
And then how to make your own decisions and then sort of analyze and pivot.
40:22
And these are all things that I just, it blows my mind that we're not teaching, right?
40:26
Because they're really necessary in the real world.
40:30
So, those are some of the things that come to mind.
40:34
The notion of mixed age groups to me is psychotic, because to be honest, in the real world, when do you only interact with people your age?
40:40
That's just a very limiting factor.
40:40
I knew I worked in schools that they had mixed age groups and I was like, "This makes the teacher's job way easier."
40:51
The teacher could step out of the room, nobody would even notice, because you have the older kids, it's so exciting to teach.
40:54
And that's, by the way, one of the best ways to learn when you actually have to teach it to somebody else, so it's like a win-win all over the place.
41:02
The older kids are so excited, because they're the mature ones that they get to teach the little ones, so they're engaged, they're bored.
41:06
They're engaged because they get to teach.
41:06
The little ones look up to the older ones, so they mature faster.
41:10
There's not this like your age doesn't really tell what you're capable of doing, so we have that notion that that's not true.
41:15
And I see it all the time in Synthesis.
41:18
You have eight-year-olds that are acting and leading the groups as if they were the 14-year-olds because they're mixed with the older kids.
41:26
And because they actually have that ability, so instead of stopping them because you are eight, you need to be in this grade, no.
41:31
It's like if you're able to take on the challenge and you want to go for it you. You'll go faster, right?
41:35
So, again, it makes the teacher's job way easier.
41:39
There's so much richness in teaching and learning when you have mixed age groups.
41:39
I don't understand why we continue to segregate kids by age.
41:44
It just doesn't make any sense.
41:44
And so yeah, so these are some of the ideas that come to mind.
41:48
There's a lot of, but maybe as we continue to talk, I'll come up with more and I'll keep talking about it.
41:53
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Though, there's a lot there.
41:54
Do you see Synthesis and these types of schools being able to fully replace the existing system?
42:01
Ana Lorena Fabrega: So, the way that it's set up now, and again, I'm affiliated with Synthesis, but I've seen and I've spoken to a lot of people that are doing really interesting things in this space.
42:08
I think that right now I can't find one that I tell you, this teaches absolutely everything you need.
42:16
I think its diversity of approaches, right?
42:16
I think that, so again, Synthesis is very much focused on teaching kids how to problem solve when they're in this complex scenarios, how to deal with uncertainty, and how to leverage the power of group work like these.
42:25
And sort of how to think from first principles.
42:28
That's what Synthesis is teaching.
42:31
But of course, kids also need the other element. They need sports. They need music.
42:31
They need the arts, whatever they're interested in doing.
42:36
They need to learn how to read, they need to learn.
42:36
So, I think that it's sort of grabbing from the future, the way that I envisioned the future of education is going to be sort of like a menu, right?
42:45
And you get to depending on your situation and your family and your kids and the needs, you're going to be able to grapple them.
42:50
I'm going to put this in their schedule, then my kids are going to go to a forest school three times a week, where they get to actually be with other kids in person and learn by doing.
42:56
And on demand as they encounter things of nature, then there are micro schools, which I'm a big fan of.
43:06
I don't know if you're familiar, they're called Learning Pots, now with the pandemic, but smaller groups of kids, and it's very project based.
43:08
So I think you can sort of incorporate a little bit and then you can make your own sort of curriculum or the way the week will look.
43:18
I can't tell you that one of this specifically will replace the entire thing.
43:23
And then I also don't think that schools are going to go away, traditional schools, at least not in our lifetime, but I'm very excited.
43:27
I'm very excited that more approaches keep coming out and more people doing things that complement each other.
43:32
So hopefully, that's going to be a bit more flexible in that sense.
43:37
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So, the way I look at it would be that if this is going to catch on and get gain a lot of momentum and support, it's probably going to have to start as a private school where you're not trying to deal with the red tape of the entrenched educational bureaucracy.
43:52
Here in New York, I have friends who say that even charter schools are seen by the traditional educators as dangerous, or the way I read that is i. e.
44:06
, yeah, they're going to teach the kids so much better that you might have to change what you're doing.
44:12
But if you put that to the side, and just say, "You know what?
44:17
Maybe that problem is just too big to try to tackle right now."
44:22
Could you now or could you in the next, I don't know, five years, do you think that if, let's say, I came to you and I said, "You know what?
44:27
I think it's going to be great to do as a charter trial.
44:32
What I'd like from you is I would the ability to offer people with young kids, the ability to give them a complete education," as you mentioned.
44:37
The current one is learning from first principles, very learning to deal with chaotic complexity, et cetera, but kids also need sports.
44:49
They also need those things.
44:49
Are there enough other alternate types, methods in place right now that you could say, "Yep, Jim, I can give you this menu and your grandchildren," in my case, "would be absolutely delighted." Does that exist?
45:07
Ana Lorena Fabrega: Yeah.
45:07
Well, I mean, yes, and no, because, again, it's going to vary depending on the kid, right?
45:09
So for example, traditional school, it's not terrible for absolutely everyone.
45:14
For example, if you talk to my husband, this is an everyday dinner debate for him.
45:19
He's like, "I did great in traditional school. I loved it."
45:19
And he was top student and that was his path and it was just perfect.
45:23
He loved his teachers, and everything was great.
45:27
So, of course, there's certain kids that do thrive in that environment.
45:32
The problem is that it's a one-size fits all.
45:32
So there are, what about the rest of the kids that are not that sort of like.
45:36
So, I don't think that I can tell you like, "Yes, I'm going to tell you right now this," and then your grandkids are going to be super thrilled. It depends, right.
45:39
But I can tell you that, definitely, for parents, there are a lot of parents that have pulled their kids out of school, and they're not necessarily 100% homeschooling in terms of following the curriculum at home.
45:52
No, they're just grabbing from different alternatives.
45:55
Now, a lot of the hardcore academics can now be covered through software.
45:55
And when I say that, some parents are like, "Ah. What?"
46:00
But the reality is that things like for example, Math, there's a lot of context that needs to be provided and I love this approach of teaching on demand.
46:09
These kids are trying to do different things and they ask you questions.
46:09
Math comes up and use that opportunity that they're excited because they need it for something to teach them a concept.
46:17
However, the more drills and formulas and things that you actually do need to know in order to be able to do higher level thinking concepts and problems, you can cover it through apps.
46:27
Similar with reading, similar with writing.
46:27
There are many different ways nowadays that you can actually write for authentic audiences and publisher stuff and get feedback from community, online community members, but definitely a lot can be covered by technology.
46:35
And once you do that, it removes, again, kids who are in school seven hours a day, why?
46:41
I don't know, because I definitely did not teach seven hours every day.
46:45
I probably direct instruction, maybe three.
46:50
The rest of the day goes, taking kids here and there or not.
46:50
So once you use technology, it concise of the time, that kids are actually receiving that direct instruction opens up a lot of room.
47:01
Then for the rest of the day, kids can again pursue interests, they can go to sports, they can then join an online program Synthesis.
47:06
They are this wonderful online communities now where kids they're interest base that kids can join and connect with other kids and learn about things that they're interested at the moment.
47:16
So yes, there are a lot of things nowadays that you can if you want to go that route, that's definitely an option.
47:20
And in general, kids are way more empowered, way more excited, right?
47:25
They're finally doing something that's more aligned to their needs, right?
47:28
So yes, the answer is yes, but again, it depends.
47:33
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So, one aspect that we see over and over and over again, the so-called Pareto effect where it's the 80/20 rule, right?
47:37
Where 20% of X is accounting for 80% of the net results.
47:46
Are you seeing anything that kind of power law distribution in Synthesis school right now?
47:51
Or is this a methodology, I guess what I'm asking is, is this a methodology that can be applicable to children of all dispositions?
47:57
From the Lisa Simpson, "I want an A," to the kid who's maybe very shy, maybe even on the spectrum, can both of them prosper and do very well in this system?
48:14
Ana Lorena Fabrega: Yeah.
48:18
So we get this question a lot.
48:18
And I love the way Josh, one of our co-founder, talks about it.
48:22
He says, "Well, kids want to be different things," right?
48:22
Sometimes, they say they're interested in poetry, some are really interested in science, but regardless of whatever they want to do and whatever future they envisioned for themselves, and that the parents envision for them, we want to make sure that they learn how to make ethical judgments.
48:39
How to make sense of this complex world that we live in, and how to collaborate to solve complex problems, right?
48:46
Those are three things that regardless of if you're a writer, regardless of whatever you want to do, these are sort of, this standout as things that every kid needs to learn in order to thrive in this kind of world that we live in and to live a happy life, right?
48:58
So, how do you create a learning experience where you're teaching kids how to collaborate to solve complex problems, how to make sense of this chaotic world and how to make ethical judgments?
49:07
Well, kids need practice, right?
49:07
And the problem about this is that as a kid, you rarely get practice doing this kinds of things, right?
49:12
You get practice when you play sports or music, but even then, the focus tends to be more on the execution and sort of like the actual discipline of whatever it is that they're doing.
49:22
But if kids really get to practice, agency, it often happens by accident.
49:26
What we've done at Synthesis is we've designed these spaces where mistakes are seen as opportunities, so kids get to be wrong a lot before they get to experience what it's to be right.
49:37
And they get to collaborate again, to figure out things that are way out of their comfort zone.
49:43
They come in and the first, you know this, we see this a lot.
49:47
The kids come from traditional backgrounds and from school.
49:50
And the first thing is well give me the instructions.
49:50
And by the way, not only kids, the adults that played the games are the same thing like, "What do I do?
49:53
How do you play the game?"
49:56
The facilitators, again, facilitators, not teachers will tell you, "Well, figure it out.
50:01
We're not here to tell you anything."
50:01
And kids get, and parents, especially parents, actually, parents get even more frustrated that kids, adults, including myself, you're like, "Well, we know, but I need to understand how are you not going to.
50:10
I need to figure this out.
50:12
Time is running, I just failed."
50:12
And we're, "Okay, in two seconds, the next game is starting, go."
50:12
So it's like at the beginning, it's chaotic.
50:17
Parents will email us like, "My kid was frustrated.
50:17
He was crying, or she was crying."
50:21
I'm like, "Give them a few sessions, and then they're going to start to pick up on the way that we do it."
50:25
So, at the first stance, we'll get emails, "My kid is very shy, they don't, there's a lot of talking and a lot of communication going on, so that they can strategize in the teams."
50:32
And I'm like, "That's fine.
50:32
They're going to start to find their voice in these spaces."
50:36
At first, definitely, they're going to be uncomfortable, that's good, that's what we're looking for.
50:40
We want for them to feel uncomfortable.
50:40
We want for them to feel overwhelmed as ironic as it sounds, we want for them.
50:45
Because we really believe that, that's when they sort of their boundaries there, they become a bit vulnerable, so they put their barriers down.
50:54
And they're all going through this kids from different ages, different countries, but they're all experiencing this same vulnerability.
50:58
And that's when first connections start to happen, so kids start to really, form friendships, right?
51:03
Because again, they're all going through this really confusing and challenging and stressful thing.
51:07
Then they start to realize, "Wait, I can actually approach something that I know nothing about. And I can figure it out.
51:11
Maybe not in the first time, maybe not in the second, maybe it's going to take me three sessions.
51:19
But eventually I will figure it out."
51:19
Again, this is something that a lot of kids haven't experienced, right?
51:24
Because this is not very common in schools.
51:27
And so, what we start to notice is we then have kids that are fairly extroverted and they're the leaders and they want to take over and this and that.
51:32
That also doesn't work, right?
51:32
You quickly realize that maybe their thought process is wrong, so you want to be the leader but you're not thinking, right?
51:39
So, the decisions you're making are not being effective, so then we're switching.
51:43
And so, a lot of things happen.
51:43
Maybe the really talkative kid suddenly becomes more passive and reflective and now they're sort of, they take up another role in the team.
51:48
Then the really quiet kid suddenly start to find their voice and realize, "Well, I don't have to be the one that talks the most, but I'm really effective doing this particular job to help my team."
52:00
So, it's very interesting how there's a role for every kind of kid.
52:00
And again, there is a lot of frustration going on, but it's sort of like an overall theme for anyone who plays this games and eventually they get over that.
52:11
And then it just becomes really exciting and we believe that that's sort of what keeps bringing kids back.
52:15
They become obsessed with the simulations, because it's very challenging.
52:18
And going back to what I said at the beginning, kids crave complexity.
52:23
They want the challenge, they want to be trusted that they can do the hard thing, right?
52:27
So, that's sort of my answer when parents are, and again, it's sort of, it feels sort of like a video game, so maybe there are some kids that are not into this sort of space and that's fine.
52:33
They can try it out and then if they don't want to continue, that's fine.
52:36
But I think that in general, you notice that it's very fitting for kids, especially kids nowadays.
52:42
This is sort of they're in their element.
52:42
When you see adults playing, it's very funny.
52:42
We're the most frustrated out of all when we play the game.
52:45
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I'm certain of that.
52:50
One of the videos that I watched showed the kids physically together.
52:54
Is this something that, maybe that got shot just as a promo for it.
52:54
But there were kids looking at a screen and they were all together physically and saying, "Oh, maybe this maybe that?"
53:03
Is this something that could ever be done in real, in physical space, in the analog world?
53:09
Ana Lorena Fabrega: Yeah, so actually, at the beginning, I was like, "Wait, what?"
53:10
And I remember that's actually a video from a shot from Ad Astra, the actual physical school, so again- Jim O'Shaughnessy: I see.
53:17
Ana Lorena Fabrega: Yeah, so the simulation scheme, they were playing the simulations first in-person.
53:18
The problem is that that was not scalable, right?
53:18
It was only for the 48 kids that were in that pool.
53:22
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Sure, yeah, sure.
53:24
Ana Lorena Fabrega: So, now, it's actually, but now the quality, you talked to Josh, who was the one who designed all the simulations.
53:26
And he says then he likes the online version than the software way better, because now you can, now the problem solving comes from kids.
53:30
Again, a kid from India, a kid from Australia, one from Panama, one from Mexico, so they all come from different background, so they all bring in something very different to the table.
53:38
The school at As Astra was mostly kids from the same demographic.
53:43
So again, great ideas, but it was sort of a little bit, so now it's even more interesting online.
53:44
But yeah, we've been thinking a lot because we want to keep it online to make it more accessible to kids.
53:48
And so, that it's something that you plug in your day, because we believe that every kid needs to learn.
53:52
Decision-making should be part of every kid's education, right?
53:55
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes, absolutely.
53:56
Ana Lorena Fabrega: And the complex problem solving.
53:56
So, that's sort of our goal now.
53:56
But we do want, we're sort of creating, Synthesis is shaping up as a network.
53:59
So, we are thinking about having certain events a few times a year, where kids from the net would come and they join in-person, and we sort of have the simulations in-persons and challenges in-person.
54:09
So sort of like, we're inspired by the model of YC, but for kids, so that's sort of like maybe year two, year three of Synthesis.
54:18
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That's very cool.
54:18
What else is on the horizon for you that you're very excited by that isn't here right now, but it's going to be coming in the next couple of years?
54:26
Ana Lorena Fabrega: Let's see, so I'm very excited for sort of school to become more decentralized, right?
54:27
Right now, again, we're sending all our eggs in that basket.
54:32
But I really think that this whole notion of waiting until you are 21 to be a productive person in the real world and get a job and do things that are, I think that doesn't make a lot of sense.
54:42
Again, after seeing this eight-year-old solving the kind of problems and doing it, I'm like, "They could easily be starting a company when they're 12.
54:52
I would not be surprised."
54:52
So I'm very excited to sort of, and again, I'm not against college. I went to college. I'm not against that.
54:55
But I do think that the right now there's this one path and of course, there's some alternatives, but there's this one path that we think that everyone has to go through the years of great school, then go to college, and then you get a job.
55:09
But really, for many kids, college can be a very expensive waste of time, if it's not aligned to the things that they're really interested in or if they're only there to get a piece of paper that says, "You graduated."
55:20
And to make sort of the connections to land a high paying job, I think that nowadays and especially if you haven't thought through the kind of job and you're just doing it through the motions, I think that nowadays, kids are going to be more in tune with the things that they're good at, and that they're excited about.
55:34
And they're going to be working on those side projects and side passion projects and finding their, what I call, [inaudible] calls and I've written about this a specific knowledge from an earlier age.
55:42
So, they're going to probably be doing things differently by the time they're 12, 13, 14, 16.
55:47
Maybe not go to college but start a business.
55:47
So I'm sort of excited for them to start taking charge of their education, again, right?
55:53
So yeah, that's one thing.
55:53
And then yeah, that's going to be possible because we're going to be reducing with all the technology, the time that kids need to be in school, right?
56:00
And opening up so that they can do other stuff, so I'm very excited about that.
56:04
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, I think that it's all part of what I'm calling the great reshuffle.
56:06
And this is really wonderful, because this address is something that as far as I was concerned, was sort of a gaping hole in this whole educational piece, I thought I was thinking actually more about high school and college, but the elementary school is equally, if not almost, listening to you, almost more important, because that's where you learn those skills like learning to not be afraid to fail.
56:31
I mean, if you could come on here and tell me, "You know what, Jim, if the kids who go through our thing, I can pretty much guarantee you that none of those kids are going to come out, being afraid to fail?"
56:40
Well, I mean, right there, I would give you a massive bottle of champagne and said, "You have just done one of the greatest things in the world," because that seems to be one of the most constricting, most confining fears of people.
56:56
And if you could eradicate that, oh, my God.
56:56
I mean, just the coming era would be even doubly as cool as I think it's going to be, and I think it's going to be really cool.
57:07
One of the things that you mentioned there is something I believe, in that.
57:07
So, I have a degree, too, of course.
57:12
My degree, though, only suggests competence, right?
57:12
It doesn't demonstrate competence.
57:18
I like this idea that the other thing your school sort of, allows for is kind of proof of work and it also allows for a living, breathing CV online.
57:32
And I just think that's a vastly better way for people to connect with the right people.
57:41
Because as somebody who's started four different companies and hired and fired quite a few people, you'd never want to fire somebody.
57:46
You'd never want that fit to be bad and it can often be if they in the old days look good on paper, let's say.
57:51
And then, and you don't really have any of the tools that we have now, where you can go, "Well, let's really look into this person.
58:03
And see, look at their social media.
58:03
Look at their solution, at their Substack" or whatever.
58:09
So I think that this is phenomenal for teaching some really important lessons early, and the earlier you can have that intervention, and I don't want that's a bad term.
58:16
The sooner you can say, "Hey, it's okay, to get it wrong.
58:18
In fact, if you don't, you probably won't ever, get it really, really right," right?
58:24
So, I think that and I also love the idea that kids from all over the world can be with each other and help each other.
58:28
I think that goes a long way towards ameliorating some of the problems people have of thriving up and ascribing you or the other to other people.
58:38
I think that's nonsense, and that it's very constricting in terms of where we could be.
58:49
So, final question on this topic, do you see this as also in a different format, so to speak?
58:57
Could you do kind of an Ad Astra, and I hate to use the term franchise, but could you set up a series of physical schools where parents could adopt or decide, "Yeah, this is where my child is going to go?"
59:12
Ana Lorena Fabrega: And so, actually, I'm not sure how much I can share.
59:13
But so there's this school that that's starting to franchise. It's not Ad Astra.
59:14
So again, Ad Astra, it sort of became Astra Nova once Elon's kids graduated, so I'm going to start referring to it is Astra Nova now, but Astra Nova, that's still the school.
59:22
That's the only physical school that now has actually become aligned because of the pandemic.
59:27
But what we are hearing is we're getting approached by other schools that are high tech schools and that are very much aligned with all this ideas that we've been talking about, and they want to implement.
59:35
And there's this one particular one that is, again, I'm not sure how much I can talk about this, but that's franchising and it's going to be, we're going to have many of the schools around the US and their main bit.
59:42
So, the kids learn, actually, I got to visit this corner and I was very impressed.
59:45
The kids learned the first few hours of the day through apps, the core academics, just because we do want to leave open that opportunity.
59:53
They want to take the SATs, so they can nail it if they want to go to college like you have that avenue.
59:56
But the rest of the day spent doing, they each have a little business and they're working on this business for hours every single day in this really cool spaces.
1:00:06
So, they want to incorporate Synthesis as part of their core sort of academics or what they learn, right?
1:00:11
Because again, they're covering the hardcore academics through apps, then they're working on this really cool projects and businesses.
1:00:14
And then they have Synthesis, which is the whole sense making problem solving and learning how to think, et cetera.
1:00:18
So, I think that that's going to become more common.
1:00:23
I've also been talking to other schools that have been approaching that want to incorporate synthesis as part of their curriculum.
1:00:27
So, we're going to be testing that as well.
1:00:31
But in terms of us starting physical schools, and we're not thinking about that.
1:00:35
We want to maintain, yeah, we want for this to be part of every kid's education in some way, form or shape.
1:00:38
And that's, we found that the best way to do that is through software.
1:00:43
But again, we will have those encounters where the kids meet, but it's not going to be a physical school, per se. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:00:49
Well, I think it is incredible, and that you are and your team are doing incredible things. I salute you.
1:00:53
I think that anyone who spends their time worrying about the future and the education of our children is doing the highest level of work, so they literally our future.
1:01:06
And you hear that so often it's become clichéd, but it's true.
1:01:06
And if I even look at some of the younger people I heard today that are true digital natives and I'm astounded.
1:01:15
I'm astounded by what they can do with the tools at hand.
1:01:22
Well, at the end of each of these podcasts and when you come back on, you won't have to answer this question, because you will have already answered it.
1:01:30
But so I say that we're going to pretend that you are Empress of the world for one day.
1:01:35
You can't kill anybody and you can't put anybody in a camp.
1:01:43
I've had certain people say to me, "Well, but I don't even want to play."
1:01:43
But what you can do is, you've seen the movie Inception, right?
1:01:49
Ana Lorena Fabrega: Yeah.
1:01:52
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Okay, so you can incept them, so that the entire population of the world wakes up the next day with two ideas that they think were their own, but you incepted those ideas.
1:02:06
What two things would you do?
1:02:06
Ana Lorena Fabrega: Okay, so, I think that the first one would be, and again, I'm obviously going to play.
1:02:08
I'm thinking, I live, breathe, and I'm always thinking about education and kids, so I'm sort of going to bring it down to that.
1:02:13
But the first one would be sort of getting comfortable or sort of making this approaching, having everyone approach the world with this mentality of, "I'm not sure or I don't know," right?
1:02:21
And just making this thing again, right?
1:02:21
Because I feel something I've realized as an adult is that I'm able to now venture and try new things and this and that because I unlearned this idea that you learned in school that if you say you don't know, you're incompetent, and dah, dah, dah. Oh, my gosh.
1:02:35
The biggest power is embracing this and being comfortable saying, "I don't know."
1:02:40
This means my ideas are constantly under construction, but I can figure it out.
1:02:45
And if you approach the world this way, then you're going to be learning way more.
1:02:49
You're going to be able to surround yourself with people that are smarter than you and you can keep learning.
1:02:53
But it also, I just feel like a lot of what we do is we approach it, because we don't want to seem uncertain and we don't because of that stigma, we pretend we know a lot of things that we don't and then that's a big barrier.
1:03:02
You stop learning the moment you think that way.
1:03:06
So, anyway, in terms of lifelong learning, I would love for everyone to sort of approach the world with that "I'm not sure and I'm comfortable with that and that's totally fine."
1:03:15
And the other one, I think it's probably what I mentioned earlier, when I told you that I'm very upset that I never learned mental models as a kid.
1:03:19
And that I was like, "Why would I ever need statistics?"
1:03:25
And now, I'm like, "Oh, my God."
1:03:25
So, I really, I mean, the moment, a lot of again what happens in schools that we sort of ask kids to learn things in isolated and not really putting any context to it, right?
1:03:35
And when you ask kids to do that and there's no framework of theory that applies to different things, then you have that knowledge and it's not in usable form.
1:03:40
You can't really apply that knowledge, right?
1:03:44
But when you learn them in mental models, I've come to learn on my own and then by seeing what the kids are experiencing at Synthesis, suddenly this knowledge becomes usable, and then you can apply it to different things and then suddenly, you are making decisions in a whole new different way.
1:04:01
And then you don't have to start the wheel every single time you encounter a problem, because now you have these models that help you figure things out faster.
1:04:05
So yeah, mental models, being part of every kid's education since they're very little would be my second rule.
1:04:15
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love them both.
1:04:15
One of my guests turned around and asked me and my first answer was the same as your first answer.
1:04:22
I would tell people or I would incept people to say, "I don't know."
1:04:22
And if you want to have a good laugh, ask Pomp about why he had me on his podcast many years ago and it was primarily because all of my answers were, "I don't know."
1:04:34
Ana Lorena Fabrega: I love that. I love that. I love that.
1:04:36
Well, this has been so fun. Thank you for having me.
1:04:42
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Thank you so much for your time and this will be up probably pretty soon.
1:04:42
And until next time, thank you for your time.