That's right.

A, a good example, there, there was a story in the paper this past week in the news about the irony that the unemployment rate in the United States was reduced, got lower, because lots of people stopped looking for jobs, had given up looking for jobs.

And in my book, anticipating this, I have a discussion of the U-3 measure of unemployment, yet you don't find any of the stories reporting on unemployment that ever take time to say, "By the way, this is how we measure it.

These are the problems with the way we measure it, and this is why it could be misleading." You know, because when you look at U-3, you count as employed if you had just one hour of work in the past month.

One hour, count as employed.

You count as unemployed only if you went to one or more job interviews in the past month.

Like, you know, you think about that and then try to estimate that across a broad, sprawling economy like the United States' economy, and you realize it's a very imperfect, I think actually skewed and flawed measure with wide error bars.

And bias

You know, a

lot of it is, and I think we should spend a bit of time talking about the holy grail of math education, which is calculus, right? And so any kid who aspires to go to college, and my personal view is that too many do.

But anyway, we have held out there that the success path in America is getting that college degree.

And we also know, and this is true, that to get into a selective college, it's almost mandatory that you have taken calculus.

That then backward math from calculus, at least as a senior, to a whole series of math you've got to take to get to calculus.

And that's sort of the marching orders that pertain to almost every kid coming through school.

And some don't Make that path some fall off of that path.

I think teachers are fucking angels, right?

But it's not really set up for the children.

Yeah, no.

And particularly teenagers, right? I mean, teenagers – and this is not a guess.

I mean, when people look at sleep demands for kids, they need a lot of sleep.

And teenagers in particular, it's – quite detrimental to have them up at six 15 in the morning, often driven by the way, by the bus schedule, you know, like, like more than anything, bus schedules tell us what we've got to do.

So the older kids, we got to get the buses to them first above, you know, it's like, it's crazy that the bus schedules determine whether our kids have healthy, you know, childhoods or whether they're sleep deprived, but that really is how it works out.

We, with my two kids, we're much older now they're, they're in their late twenties, but, um, We homeschooled from maybe three out of their grades K through eight.

Or then you're just going to perpetuate the status quo instead of actually inventing and creating and innovating.

It's true a calculator can calculate it, but if you do it on paper don't you get more of the sense ab- of how this really works?

I'm doubtful actually.

You know, because we spend a lot of time doing it by paper and then adults don't understand it.

You know, I, I'll give you a different example, but I think it makes the point, is that the cheerleader for rote math data is the National Center for Education Statistics.

And so they are the ones that do the nation's report card and put front and center the math scores and will take a tiny drop and equate it to national catastrophe.

Their own study says 82% of adults can't compute the cost of a carpet given length, width, and cost per, you know, per square yard.

And so that's, that's where we are today is all these hours of math and 82% can't compute the cost of a carpet.

Yeah.

I, I guess the question is, how do you institutionalize and scale this ability to unlock the creative beast in our educational institutions?

You know, too, and that study was, was verified, and, and, and I have to say, as a venture guy for years, I loved to back people who had gone rogue on school.

You know, I, I avoided...

You know, like, somebody said to me, "Exeter, Princeton, Harvard Business School," I'd say like, "Go get a job at McKinsey." A- you know, bec- because again, it's, it's not that they're not talented, it's not that they're not hardworking, they are, but, but going through that process and jumping through the hoops put in front of you isn't conducive to a mindset that says, "I'm gonna go rogue and change the world." So how do you do it? I'd say three things.

One is you don't have to change...

I mean, I've spent fifteen years hoping that schools would be very innovative, and it's, it's proven to be difficult.But I say you don't have to change everything, but what if we said each kid coming through school by the end of their school year would create a capstone project that shows them at their best? You know, something that they viewed that would be an important problem to solve or opportunity to create where they would be learning important skills in the process, trying it, failing, trying it, failing, trying it, failing, but by May, damn it all, they have something they could display, and the school does an entire display.

And we show that in our, in my first film, Most Likely to Succeed, where these kids are bursting with pride, and the adults are coming and saying like, "Wow, you did that." Like, if we did that, we'd start to at least nourish the entrepreneurial aspect of all of our kids.

He's done well.