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People used to go to school to learn how
to do the homework and do the exams.
00:00:06
Today, everyone needs to learn
how to grade the homework.
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This is the huge difference
because someday if you want to do anything
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in the world, the first thing
you will do is you will ask ChatGPT.
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The role of a person in the world
is going to be to solve problems.
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So that's why what the world needs now
is a large scale way for everyone to learn
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how to come up with their own way of
thinking, not just how to do the problems.
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Hi, I'm Po-shen Loh. I'm a mathematician.
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I'm a math professor
at Carnegie Mellon University.
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I'm a social entrepreneur,
and I'm also the national coach of the US
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International Math Olympiad team.
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If you have six match sticks, how can you
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put them so that they make four triangles?
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Four triangles
where the side of the triangle
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is the same length as the matchstick.
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So if you have six of them,
you might start putting
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three of them like this okay.
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But then you only have three more.
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Now what? Okay.
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It turns out that the answer is that you
take the three matchsticks like this,
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and then you use one more up here,
and you put it down like a pyramid.
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That's thinking outside the box.
If you if you can call it that.
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Because this is not just on a piece of
paper anymore, it's still six matchsticks
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or six toothpicks,
but it's not what you were thinking of.
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I've done lots
of different kinds of teaching.
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I teach people all the way from
the International Math Olympiad team.
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I will also go to schools and teach sixth
grade in schools, where unfortunately,
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there might not even be any math teacher
for the whole seventh grade.
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So I go and cover
the entire range of education.
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I find this to be very interesting
because that helps me to learn
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what the challenges are.
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The whole point of a school math test
is to see whether or not you listened
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and you practiced.
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In fact, all the math competition problems
in the US and also in many parts
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of the world are of this type.
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Which is why today, the way
that I approach education and training
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is to try to help as many people as
possible learn how to do those questions,
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which they won't have seen before.
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But I want to emphasize the reason I've
been doing a lot of work on this nowadays
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is because when I was doing
math competitions in the 1980s,
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the way you got good at it was by thinking
every problem which was new was a chance
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to practice mental flexibility.
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Today, unfortunately,
there's a huge industry around test
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preparation and cramming where people try
to help students get high scores
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on these strange math questions by showing
you all of the strange math questions
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that you might possibly see.
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And that involves studying
for many, many, many, many hours,
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so that the hope of the parents is that
when the students see the test questions,
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they are never surprised that they have
done everything many, many, many times.
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By the way, as you may know, this causes
students to have to go to school
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and after school and so many others.
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It's actually very bad for the student,
but even worse, it takes away
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the student's chance to invent.
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Money doesn't buy you happiness, but money
is important for impact and influence.
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So in fact, it's very important
that the things that we build
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are capable of generating enough money
to create the impact.
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This just happens to be what drives me.
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Ten years ago, I had this crazy idea
that maybe if we made a website that would
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collect people's ways of explaining math
and science topics, then maybe people
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would explain the math and science topics
and it would be free, and everyone
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would be able to learn math and science.
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And I remember thinking,
oh, that can't be very hard.
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We'll be done with that in a few months.
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I'm glad I thought that
because I'm still working.
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So I had this whole thing called XP.
We were making a website
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with free explanations, but that didn't
actually have a business model of its own.
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It wasn't generating money, so I had
to find some way to support all of that.
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In 2019 and April, we started creating
our own version of that in the United
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States of America, where we took charge
of filming me teaching, and then we
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had a product which consisted of me
teaching math that people could watch
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recordings of, and they would pay for it.
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And this, this made some amount of money.
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But then this one,
we still found there were pain points.
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And finally, about two years ago,
I realized, you know what?
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What people really want
is to have a live human experience
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with somebody else who is an expert.
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The only problem is that's
quite rare and hard to find.
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And there's also another challenge,
which is that ideally that person
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you're talking to is friendly.
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If the person knows a lot
but is not friendly,
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that's actually not useful either, right?
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This is the hardest thing to deliver in
education because it's the least scalable.
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Of course, in entrepreneurship world
we always think about scalability.
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And yes, you can find one brilliant coach
who teaches ten students or maybe even 20,
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or maybe even even 100.
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That's a small scale
compared to the size of the world.
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And then that's when I suddenly realized
I can make a giant win, win win situation.
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So the main thing
that I do now is an ecosystem.
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It's actually an ecosystem that I
invented, which unites many different
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types of people to all contribute in ways
where everyone is winning.
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One pain point,
which was for the people learning math.
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Then the second pain point
was from the people who are very,
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very strong at math already, from which
building the EC would be even better.
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Although I do want to emphasize
this is helping them finish up
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to become extraordinary.
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And the thing that made me realize
the key that made me realize I could put
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everything together, was an experience
that I had about five, six years ago,
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which is that I also took improvizational
comedy classes myself, improvizational
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comedy classes, our acting classes.
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And I was doing that because I was trying
to learn how to communicate better,
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to get more people interested in math.
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But I realized that even a math nerd
like me can take those classes and then
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become able to talk to a few more people.
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So then I realized, let me add that.
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And then I walked over to our drama
department, and I found out that actually,
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there are lots of people
who have extraordinary drama skills
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who are actually, indeed very interested
in paid part time jobs
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to help to coach the high school students.
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So that's the third pain point.
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The third pain point is there are people
who absolutely love what they're
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they're passionate about what they're
doing in the acting and drama world.
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But there's a practical need,
which is, well, how to find a stable,
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part time job, flexible hours
that they can use to support their
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passions so suddenly win, win, win.
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We have all three lined up.
And that's why this thing scales.
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Actually, the everyone winning
is very important
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because I work with high school students.
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And so in our in our company, any time
anyone wants to ask high school students
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to do anything, my answer to my employees
is always that thing you want to ask
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that high schooler to do.
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Can we explain to their parent why?
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For a very busy high school student,
that thing is the best thing
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they can do with their time.
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If I cannot explain that,
they're not doing it.
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So this is the discipline
that we run it to.
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This is this is how strongly
we make it a win win situation.
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We will never have a high school
student doing something unless I
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could explain myself to their parent.
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We suggested for your daughter to do this
because it's
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really good for her to do this.
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The thing is, beforehand it was hard to
imagine there would be a way to do that
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until the answer became oh yeah,
because while doing this, they will get to
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learn from a Broadway or Hollywood quality
actor or actress that's going to help them
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become extraordinarily successful now.
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But you see, this took eight years
to come up with, two more years to scale.
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The speed at which we grow is purely
just based on how long it takes for people
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who have middle school children to realize
that, oh, there are these classes here
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where the class looks as good as
a Twitch gaming stream, and it's taught
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by math geniuses who are smiling.
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You know, these are things
that people could not imagine that you
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would put all together at the same time.
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And as people discover this,
they actually switch over.
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They start joining our classes.
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Then we can bring
more high school students.
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And the scaling power
this can go to is we.
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I estimate that this easily could grow
to 100,000 high school students
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in the US. That's 1% of the US
high school students teaching
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about a million middle school students.
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If you look at our live program,
it looks a little strange because you'll
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see that the only subjects that we teach
is a pretty small number algebra,
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geometry, combinatorics, number theory.
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Why do we cover these?
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We cover these
because these are a curriculum
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that teaches you how to think the.
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Only way to do that is by giving
them questions that they have never seen
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in school before.
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So I need to find a source of problems
that you will not see in school.
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Actually, that turns out to be the middle
school math competition curriculum,
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because the people making those problems
were trying to make problems
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that you don't see in school.
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But the difference between the way we do
it and the way that lots of the training
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centers do it, is that we are trying
to use those as opportunities
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to make you able to practice the thinking,
instead of just showing you doing
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the question that way enough times.
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So the answer is the topics
that we cover specifically chosen,
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because that will be enough to teach
a student how to generate their own idea.
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Our philosophy is if you finish
all of that, you will discover
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that you can learn anything.
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Our goal is not to make it
so that we have classes for you
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for every year of your life.
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Our goal is to make it so that as fast
as possible, you don't need any classes
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from anyone ever again.
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Today.
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Everyone needs to learn
how to grade the homework.
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This is the huge difference
because someday if you want to do anything
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in the world, the first thing
you will do is you will ask ChatGPT.
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Let me make this analogy stronger.
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If we look at any good software engineer,
most good software engineers,
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if they're given a task that they have
never done before, the first thing they do
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is to think about some similar problems
and search on StackOverflow to see
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examples they don't expect that will give
them the whole code they need to write,
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but they use this to research what kinds
of technologies might be useful.
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But as ChatGPT suggests, the solutions
they need to be quick thinkers and
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analytical thinkers to understand whether
or not what ChatGPT said is correct.
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So that's why what the world needs now
is a large scale way for everyone to learn
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how to grade homework, for everyone to
learn how to come up with their own way of
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thinking, not just how to do the problems.
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My general philosophy is when you
are learning, you should keep challenging
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and you should not be repeating.
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In the real world,
when you're doing a task.
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If it's repetitive, you should get ChatGPT
to do it, or a calculator to do it,
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or a computer to do it.
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But in order to know how to control
those well in the real world,
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you need to learn how to think.
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And that's the purpose
of the learning process.
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What I do for fun is I like to meet
and try to understand people whose
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backgrounds I don't fully understand yet.
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This is actually what I do for fun.
This is also why we're talking right now.
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I happen to be talking to you
in New York City.
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The way I got here overnight
is I took the bus, the overnight bus.
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You know, some people don't take
the overnight bus because who knows
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who you're taking the bus with.
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But for me,
I'm actually not scared by that.
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That's just called real world.
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You can't understand the real world
unless you actually start going
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into various parts of the real world.
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I think my message of how to create value
is you cannot create value
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if you don't interact with people.
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You cannot just theoretically
think about the value.
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And the more people,
the more you can understand.
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People of different backgrounds
understand means, have some idea
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of how they tick, what are their needs,
what are the limiting factors?
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What do they want to do?
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The better you are at modeling this,
the more effective you will be
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at coming up with a solution.
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I started going to city after city after
city giving math talks in public parks.
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I actually set a schedule.
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I put a schedule on my website,
and I said, I'm going to go to all these
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cities, and people could just sign up
to show up for the talks.
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And at the beginning, people were
wondering, Will anyone show up?
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But actually there would be
like 50 to 100 people
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showing up at these talks in parks.
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And by the way, that was a fun journey
because in order to do that,
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I was traveling around from park to park
with all the AV equipment, speakers
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and everything to be able to have a stage
in park shelters all around the US.
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But while doing that in a inadvertently,
that was customer discovery because I was
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able to suddenly interact with and talk
to thousands of parents and students,
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which started to make me realize
what kind of challenges people had.
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And that's why just a probably about 1
to 2 months after that,
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the big idea came the big idea of,
oh, we can actually have all these
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middle school students who I've met.
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They can all learn
how to think all at the same time.
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While these people who are brilliant
become extremely polished
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so that someday later in their careers
they can be really successful.
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So that was that was the idea.
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It was like, somehow you
cannot really find pain points
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if you're not seeing people.
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That's also why with a lot of the work
that I do, I will go into schools, right?
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I love to work on education, and I do it
in a way where even just last night,
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I was writing to somebody who is involved
with a large network of schools
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and their schools, I believe,
serve students who are also disadvantaged.
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Now, instead of just putting money
or putting resources from my side,
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what I said is I'm very interested.
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Can we arrange for me to go into some
of your schools and teach sixth grade?
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What I'm explaining is that the way I do
anything, if I want to work in a sector,
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I go and myself step in and start
doing the work and see what happens.
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And this is actually how I came up
with all these ideas, because actually
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the ideas that I'm doing are all things
I've personally experienced myself.
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I've experienced being a math person,
taking acting classes.
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I've experienced being a person,
learning how to think, taught by somebody
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who knows a lot of things and also smiles.
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So all the different parts
gave me these ideas.
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Now I can understand why you identify you
as a social entrepreneur.
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Yeah.
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We're not doing a very good job
of maximizing lifetime customer value.
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If our goal is to solve the customer's
problem as fast as possible.
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But this is what we want to do, right?
This is the social entrepreneurship.
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This is also why, if you ask me,
what is my definition of success?
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My definition of success is not just
that we make a ton of money.
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My definition of success is
if we manage to convince
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a huge number of people on this earth
to enjoy being thoughtful, then I want.
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I love the fact that entrepreneurship
is about creating new things.
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So the message that I've been sending
in my entire tour is that this new world
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of AI is going to be a Wild West.
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There will be lots and lots
of new opportunities.
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The people who will be
the most successful are the ones who are
00:14:19
very good at creating value.
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Actually, in my public talks
I tell everyone.
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Everyone should be
a bit of an entrepreneur.
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They can be an entrepreneur,
or they can even be an entrepreneur,
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which is a word in English that we
sometimes use to describe making
00:14:32
new things within an organization.
00:14:34
But the whole concept of creating value
is actually going to be central
00:14:38
in helping the society survive
and everyone flourish as we go forward
00:14:42
into this age of AI, into this new world.
