#635 Creating Entrepreneurs and Problem Solvers with Chrisman Frank

Chrisman Frank is the co-founder and CEO of Synthesis, a new educational experience for children aged 8-14 that focuses on teaching problem solving and critical thinking skills. In this conversation, we discuss the Synthesis story, Elon Musk, critical thinking, independent thought, first principles, the broken education system, and why Synthesis is better than classrooms. ======================= With over $1B AUM, Amber Group is a world-leading crypto finance platform helping institutions and individual investors to buy and sell cryptocurrency, earn yield, manage risk and access liquidity. Amber App new users only - earn 16% APR on BTC, ETH and USD stablecoins! Click on the link to sign up now: https://www.ambergroup.io/?utm_source=10508 ======================= Circle is a global financial technology firm that enables businesses of all sizes to harness the power of stablecoins and public blockchains for payments, commerce and financial applications worldwide. Circle is also a principal developer of USD Coin (USDC), the fastest growing, fully reserved and regulated dollar stablecoin in the world. The free Circle Account and suite of platform API services bridge the gap between traditional payments and crypto for trading, DeFi, and NFT marketplaces. Create seamless, user-friendly, mainstream customer experiences with crypto-native infrastructure under the hood with Circle. Learn more at circle.com =======================

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Chrisman Frank is the co-founder and CEO of Synthesis, a new educational experience for children aged eight to 14 that focuses on teaching problem-solving and critical thinking skills. In this conversation, we discuss the Synthesis story, Elon Musk, critical thinking, independent thought, first principles, the broken education system, and why Synthesis is better than classrooms. I really enjoyed this conversation with Chrisman, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors.

• 0:43Anthony Pompliano?

  First up is Circle. Circle is a global financial technology firm that enables businesses of all sizes to harness the power of stable coins and public blockchains for payments, commerce, and financial applications worldwide. Circle is also the principal developer of USD Coin, USDC, which is the fastest-growing, regulated, fully-reserved dollar stablecoin in the world. It's now more than $25 billion in market cap, and they're adding nearly $300 million of net new digital dollars in circulation every single week. The free Circle account and suite of platform API services bridge the gap between traditional payments and crypto for trading DeFi and NFT marketplaces. I've had Jeremy, the CEO, on the podcast before. I'm a really big fan of what USDC is and how Circle is building

• 1:28Anthony Pompliano?

  out the ecosystem. Make sure you go to circle.com today to learn more. Again, circle.com. Next up is Amber Group. With low yields and looming risk of inflation around the world, it's no question crypto is the alternative. With Amber App, you can easily earn high yields on your crypto assets. Amber App is an all-in-one crypto finance app designed to help you earn, swap, trade, and invest in crypto. You can earn interest instantly by simply depositing assets to your wallet, and you receive daily interest payouts. This means earning interest 24/7 with no lockup. You can also customize fixed-term investments between 1 and 360 days to enjoy higher yields with flexible redemptions. Right now, go

• 2:09Anthony Pompliano?

  check them out at ambergroup.io. Again, go to ambergroup.io, or you can go and download the Amber App in the App Store. Ambergroup.io. Let me know what you think. All right, let's get in this episode with Chrisman. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 2:47Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Chris here. Thanks so much for doing this, man.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me. Good to be here.

• 2:55Anthony Pompliano?

  You've been on before. We've talked a ton about synthesis. I recently heard a story, though, that you have more intel as to how the original synthesis class was created by your co-founder Josh at Astra, which is the school that Elon and Josh created on SpaceX campus.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:17Anthony Pompliano?

  So what is the story?

• 3:19Speaker 02

  Tell Josh's story here. Yeah. Well, I was, you've been trying to do more writing as part of the company, writing up our kind of like secret master plan. And I had kind of like the, you know, the why, like our mission is to accelerate human progress through education. Right? So we had the why, we kind of, we know where we're going. There's like this analogy of like an enders, enders game, enders academy, you know, for the internet, enders, enders game for innovators, we call it, right? And so we kind of, we kind of had these two pieces. And I called Josh because I was like, look, I'm trying to write this like middle ground, which like, what is synthesis right now? Like, why, why is it the way that it is? This, this idea of like learning through these games and simulations?

• 3:59Speaker 02

  And I know, you know, I've seen the videos of Elon talking about, um, he wanted education to be problem focused rather than tool focused, right? So I was like, what is that? Is that the, is that, is that what led to, you know, you creating synthesis for the school? And I was kind of, you kind of walked me through that. And I never asked him that story, like from, you know, to tell me that the whole way through before. And so he was like, yeah, I was, I was at this other school, you know, teaching Elon's kids. And he would come in for like, you know, parent teacher conferences. And it's like, you know, he's, he's Elon Musk. I didn't think he would want to talk about like normal stuff. wanted to talk about at conferences. And so I showed him this thing, this Goldilocks exercise I had the kids do, which was basically you give the kids a trillion dollars in hypothetical

• 4:44Speaker 02

  money. And you give them a couple of sectors in the in the economy or in the world to allocate it. And you just ask like, how do you want to allocate the money? Do you want to, you know, conserve like, you know, endangered species habitats? Do you want to invest in healthcare, education? Like, how do you want to invest this money? And like Elon thought it was pretty cool. And so then when Elon wanted to start the school, he's like, you know, came to me and was like, you know, remember, remember, this teacher is kind of like aligned with what I want to do. And so then, now he's like, reporting to Elon. He's the only teacher in the world reporting to Elon Musk. And it's pretty intense, right? Because you want to, you want to keep your job. And you're just every meeting, you're just like constantly worried that you're going to get fired. And so he knows kind of Elon's dictate is like, you teach kids how to solve problems, which he takes,

• 5:26Speaker 02

  he's like, well, Elon's the world's best problem solver. Let me like, observe him when I'm in the meetings with him. And he's watching. And interesting thing is like, he said Elon has incredible command of the details on a lot of things that have to do with the rockets material science, like that kind of stuff. He knows just incredibly well. But he's meeting with Josh, he's running the school, doesn't have the full context, like Josh knows the details more than he does. And so Josh is realizing he's coming to these meetings, Josh is kind of telling him what's going on with the school. And he, he lacks the context, but he's gotten really good at auditing your reasoning, communicating what he wants, and and communicating with you to like, figure out the course correction. So he's doing, you strip away all the context, and he's still got

• 6:10Speaker 02

  some skill of thinking and problem solving, even without the command of the details. And so Josh is observing this, and he's thinking, you know, that's really interesting. How can I get kids to do this? The normal way in school is you'll do like, a whole unit where you learn, you know, about everything, you do all this like, knowledge gathering, and then you'll do a project like at the end. And he's like, that's pretty like, time consuming. And you can see like, Elon's doing this thing where he doesn't need all that information. He can just like, kind of reason from first principles. And so Josh starts giving the kids these problems where he strips away a lot of the context. So it's like, he started asking them a deep a question SpaceX is dealing with at the time, how would you move the company to Brownsville, Texas? And the kids are, they get

• 6:52Speaker 02

  really into that, right? They come up with all these plans, and and they get really excited by it. And you know, they're really, really like, learning to think and to communicate with each other to form these plans. But when you get to the end of it, It's like, cool, good plan. And then that's it, right? You just like throw it away. There's no, there's no action, there's no feedback. And so from that, he started making these, you know, turning these kind of questions into simulations where you're competing with the other teams. And now there's a reality. Now you can do the iterative feedback loops. Now there's like, there's emotional stakes, right? So before, when it's just a question, it's like cognitively interesting. But you know, in the real world, you need to actually make decisions. You need to see how things turn out.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  You need to course correct. And that's how, that's how we arrived at, you know, the full suite that is Synthesis.

• 7:38Anthony Pompliano?

  This is fascinating because when I was at Facebook, at one point, the interview process would essentially allow for product managers to interview potential product managers that were coming into the business. And the way that we did it was they would go through some screening and filtering, but then there was three people that were current product managers that would each take a specific track. So you're going to focus on like product development. I'm going to focus on like execution and teamwork. And somebody else may focus on like cultural fit or something, right? And you go into the interview and it's just one-on-one with the individual. But you know, I'm here to specifically get at this angle for, for the interview process.

• 8:20Anthony Pompliano?

  And the one that I spent the most time learning about and eventually ended up doing, you know, over 100 interviews at the company with candidates around was giving them a hypothetical situation. And then basically continuously feeding them more and more information to see how they thought through the problem. So I have no clue that any of this is going on. It's the first time that I'm hearing some of these details. And I learned this from some of the product managers at Facebook who are very good at interviewing people. And the example I would always use is like, hey, you come into work on Friday, everything's fine. You have a great day of work. You go home Friday night, you come back Monday morning and 50% of the traffic to your product has disappeared. What do you do? And it's fascinating because what it got at was, I always remember the best answer I ever

• 9:03Anthony Pompliano?

  had was somebody who had been doing this for 15 years. First thing they said was, I would immediately alert everyone on the team that we have a problem. Everyone would just jump to solve the problem. But somebody who had done it before, it's like communicate, right?

• 9:16Speaker 02

  More, more brains on the problem.

• 9:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Exactly. So like little things like that you pick up on like, okay, this person knows what they're doing versus somebody who just tries to jump at it. And as you would work through the problem, you basically tell them more. Okay. They would say, I would go and I would check the dashboards. Fine. When you check the dashboard, you see that no traffic has dropped off from these three platforms. And you just kind of keep giving them more and more information. And eventually like it would end up with like, we would get on the phone with Google and ask them why our links are broken or, you know, whatever.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:45Anthony Pompliano?

  And you really, really got a good sense for how somebody thought, what they would do in that situation, even though it's just two people sitting in a room talking about a hypothetical.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:52Anthony Pompliano?

  It sounds like that's really similar actually to what Elon and Josh figured out with the school and synthesis as a class specifically was just doing that, but doing it for kids rather than waiting until you're 20, 30, 40 years old to try to put you in that situation.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, completely. I think it's really strange. Like, I know people who've been to, been to law school, people who've worked at McKinsey, it's like consulting firm where they, they're really like, kind of teach you this rigorous thought process, you know, obviously, and then computer programmers. I feel like computer programming is where I learned to think and reason properly because you're just, you just come face to face with the results of your sloppy thinking, right? And that's, that's what synthesis does for kids. Like it's, you know, if you, if you do this thing in school, like the, the kind of like the previous, you know, the iteration, the step like right before we got to synthesis is like, you know, plan something out, like make a plan, do, do what you're doing in like the Facebook interviews, but it's, it's just kind of like sterile to do that, right?

• 10:52Speaker 02

  Because you, you need that feedback from the environment. So when you're learning to like program, you know, you get that feedback and it's like, it's brutal, like shows you how sloppy your thinking is. If you're in law school, you know, you've got to argue with other people. And so you'll get eviscerated if you don't do it properly. Like I'm not sure where kids ever get that experience and the test that you come up against in school is just like, did you spit the information back or, you know, did, did you kind of repeat the teacher's opinions back to them? And what's nice about the way you do it in synthesis, it's kind of, it's like, it's combat for your, for your mind. And, you know, it's a team sports, it's team combat, which is the way that the world actually works. And, you know, it just takes the teacher out of it. It's not like if we're saying this is bad work,

• 11:37Speaker 02

  it's like, it's not our opinion. Like you just, you just got destroyed in this game. And that's, it's really cool to see that. Like the kids that come in who are the smart kids, like the gifted kids, you know, they get smashed that first time. And they always come in, they're super, super confident. Like, we're going to crush everybody because I always get the, you know, the best grades on the tests in school. And so they got this plan and they go into battle and they get crushed. And, you know, they'll start crying a lot of times, but then, you know, they'll come back and be, because it's that, you know, it's that ego, you know, just like, just, just humbling yourself. And I think it's really good to get that experience early, because then you just kind of, you shut off the part of you that's like, I just need, I need approval. I'm just going to get like the, the grades and the gold stars and everything. And you start worrying

• 12:20Speaker 02

  about like, how to actually improve yourself and improve your thinking.

• 12:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Is intellectual humility like a key foundational component of being able to think clearly? Like, do the kid have to get to that point? And it's almost like, it's kind of like military bootcamp. Like, you got to break them down before you build them back up to some degree?

• 12:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. I think it's always like, one of the things I most admired about Elon is the way he talked about his projects, like early on. It's like, I don't, don't really think these things are necessarily going to work, but they're worth trying. And I think that's, it's just really important to keep that mindset. And if you read a lot of history, you know, and people who get killed are often like the most arrogant about their prospects. You know, the generals that, that survive and keep winning are the ones who are always worried about losing. And so, yeah, you want to get that. I, I know, I like graduated from school and like went out and like started businesses and just got killed. Like, I just did not realize what an idiot I was. And I had to learn the hard way and like cost a lot of money and just made a lot of long-term, you know, a lot of mistakes. And I think, you know, the

• 13:24Speaker 02

  hope with synthesis is that you can You know, I really think the problem is in school, you just don't get to act, right? Like, you're not a, you're not an agent, you're like a passive kind of receptacle of information. And there's some value of that, like, we all need to learn arithmetic and we all learn how to read. And there's some basic information we need to know. But, you know, I think we kind of stretch out school and make what could be learned in, you know, one or two hours a week, we just, we just stretch it out, you know, for eight hours a day just because we have to fill the time. And, uh, you know, what synthesis does is it gives kids a chance to be, be an agent. It's like, you know, mental combat, it's fun. It's like a team sport for sharpening your thinking and sharpening your communications.

• 14:03Anthony Pompliano?

  So I think that part of this is like, you have to get to intellectual humility in order to be able to learn, be able to think correctly and kind of go from there. Uh, there's a quote that, uh, we were talking about before. It is, uh, Christopher Nolan from, uh, The Dark Knight Rises. And he says, "Oh, you think darkness is your ally, but you merely adopted the dark. I was born in it, molded by it. I didn't see the light until I was already a man. By then it was nothing to me but blinding. The shadows betray you because they belong to me." And we were talking about this quote in the context of a kid who goes through synthesis, who has this kind of foundational, um, uh, structure and training in how to think, not what to think, but how to think.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 14:50Anthony Pompliano?

  They are the one that is molded by the darkness. They're, they're comfortable in chaos versus you take the kid who, "Read this book, do the book report, get an A. Read this book, do a book report, get an A." When you put those two kids meet, you know, we, I think we think of it as like mental combat, right? But when they meet in competition, usually it's the one molded by the darkness, the one who's comfortable in chaos, who ends up kind of, you know, uh, prevailing.

• 15:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that, I think that's, that's right. That's kind of the key skill is like the adaptability. And if you're, you know, what, what school does really... You know, the thing that's really bad for like the top kids, it just convinces you that you're really smart. And it's, I like, there's this quote by Warren Buffett as well, like, it's better, it's better to have a 130 IQ and think it's 120 than, than to have it be 160 and think it's 180. Right? There's just not, there's no advantage into being arrogant and like overly confident in your understanding of reality. And so I think it's, that's one of the coolest things you see at synthesis. Kids just, they get that experience early. And you know, when you're, if this happens to you when you're like 25, like, man, it's

• 15:57Speaker 02

  brutal and it's tough. And it's like, it's, it shakes up your whole world, maybe for years. When it happens to you when you're like eight, it's like, no big deal. Like, you bounce back in like, you know, a day and a half, and then you're, you know, you can change your direction in life. And so there's this other thing to talk about, which is like, the, the best musicians, like, they never, they don't start training in their twenties. Like, you, you get introduced to it when you're young, when your mind is flexible and more elastic. And, you know, my hope through synthesis, you get the kids into this way of thinking early, which is just a physics, like, computer programming, like, like, law school type of thinking, where it's really just like, checking yourself on what you think you know, and being rigorous, which, you know, anyone who spends any time on the internet can see, we have a major problem with people not being rigorous in

• 16:41Speaker 02

  their thinking. And, you know, my hope is, you get kids through this kind of program early, and it's fun, because it just feels like, you know, playing video games with your friends to the kids. But, you know, it really is about questioning your thinking, questioning your assumptions, figuring out how to course correct when you're wrong. If we do that early, then, you know, who knows what things look like a generation from now.

• 17:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, there's another quote that Buffett uses around IQ, where he says, investing is not a game where you put the guy with the, where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with the 130 IQ. Once you have ordinary intelligence, he's kind of just like some basic level of intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing. And I think that when you watch the synthesis, kind of, you know, cohort, or the game get played, it's the smartest kid actually can have the Achilles heel of they lose their temper. They don't know how to communicate.

• 17:35Speaker 02

  Hundred percent.

• 17:35Anthony Pompliano?

  They have no ability to participate in the team. Like, like, there's all these things that translate to the workforce, right?

• 17:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:41Anthony Pompliano?

  If you're the smartest person, but you're an asshole, like, you're not gonna be very effective for the most part.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, I, one of the, I love that Josh came up with this name synthesis and I just, I think this is so brilliant. The, the conceit of school, the way we do education now is you divide it by subjects. Elon kind of alluded to this and, you know, when he was starting the school, like, they, they're teaching you tools, right? And the problem is that in life, there are no math problems. There are no engineering problems. There's not such a thing as like a pure engineering problem. It's always wrapped up in a people problem or like a product problem. And so, you know, the, the way that we teach, you know, it teaches this kind of separations of, of domain knowledge and then the world just never works like that.

• 18:28Speaker 02

  Like Elon could not get done what he needs to get done without the knowledge of how to work with people, how the wider systems work, how to get media attention. Like, all these things are bound up together. And, you know, I think it's not just like he's this great engineer. He knows how to deal with everything that's around engineering, but he's able to apply that sort of, the discipline of physics and like rigorous thinking and really breaking things down into all these different areas. And that's really what we hope for. Like, I'm not sure every kid who goes to synthesis won't be, uh, you know, necessarily working on getting us to Mars or, or, you know, hardcore like technology projects, but that type of thinking can benefit you anywhere. And like, as far as I can tell, I just don't see that kids are picking this up at all in the current school system.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  If they do, it's maybe, maybe in college, if you take some engineering classes or programming classes, but otherwise, you know, you just don't see it.

• 19:19Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you think about the difference between like what we'll call like the development of the tools? Uh, so learning math, learning reading, learning, you know, some of these more kind of traditional education building blocks with synthesis? Is it something where you need both at a young age? So you need to learn, uh, in the traditional school system, kind of the rote memorization and, and the skill sets? And then you apply them in synthesis? Or do you think there's eventually a world where, uh, synthesis could be the totality of early education where we just give you the problems and you'll end up picking up the kind of building blocks or skills along the way as you're solving the problems?

• 19:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's an interesting question. I think our sort of key insight is, you know, what would the education system look like if you built it after the internet existed? Like, how would you think about it, right? And it seems to me like you would start with the kind of games, simulations, like action, like, because that's what happens in the world is you have some problem, you have something that you want to get done. And then, you know, like you, for example, just you acquire a lot of knowledge. We're sitting in the studio here, like, but you didn't like, take a class on how to create studios, like, you know, in college or whatever. You just, you learn how to do that to like, solve a problem. And so I think it's, you

• 20:33Speaker 02

  know, the kind of vision is that you, you just start a new education system with the simulations and games at the core, and you kind of expand in concentric rings for everything outside of that. So as far as what that looks like, you know, I don't know exactly. I think there's, there's a path where the simulations require you to learn more, you know, real knowledge. Like, I love the idea of the simulation where you're only going to win if you really have a strong knowledge of physics. And then we might not necessarily teach you that through the games, but you'll have to go, you know, read stuff that's outside the games in order to apply it and in order to win. So it's like the same way in life where, yeah, I always give this example, like, I'm, I kind of have a decent knowledge of accounting, but not because I'm interested in accounting at all. It's just because if

• 21:16Speaker 02

  I don't know accounting, like, company probably dies. I need to know a little bit at least, right? But I go acquire that information somewhere else, and then I apply it to the game of building the company. And so I think that's more, more and more where we want to go. Like, you need knowledge to succeed in life. I think we should get to the point where in the simulations, you need knowledge to succeed. But right now, it's pretty early days, and we're just focused on the, you know, what you call like, critical thinking, communication, like rigorous thinking. So we'll see where it goes.

• 21:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Have you been doing this long enough now where you've got insights on certain types of kids are more likely to succeed? Or is it pretty much any kid can get put into the program? And maybe they go from, you know, level one to level three, but the level three kid goes from level three to level five? Like, is it just everyone can improve? Or does there have to be a certain type of kids, certain type of previous experience?

• 22:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, it seems, you know, it's like life. There's, there are, it's one of the really interesting things is that there are places for different personalities and different ways of thinking and synthesis. I think the one thing is it's not going to be enjoyable if you don't, if you, if you don't like thinking and you know, I, kids generally do, but you know, some kids don't like the challenge. And so they, they'll, you know, they'll just not have fun with it. But if you like the challenge and you like kind of testing yourself, it's sort of like, like team sports, like some people are really, really into that and really enjoy that. And you know, some people, some people don't. And so it's, you know, I'm not going to say

• 22:51Speaker 02

  it's necessarily for everybody. I think it's every kid would benefit from doing it. But it's not necessarily like every kid's not gonna, you know, rise to the top levels in synthesis. But you know, our, our approach is we have kind of like this, this, you know, bottom level or like outer ring that anybody can join and then we'll let you decide how high you want to rise, right? So kind of like martial arts, like anybody can go take a jujitsu class and sign up and, you know, start working toward a, toward a blue belt. But not everybody is gonna have the dedication to rise and get the black belt. But we want to at least create the system where, you know, if you go through that and you get like the black belt at synthesis, that it, it really means something. That it's not just like a, you know, participation ribbon. But we also think it's very hard to predict

• 23:34Speaker 02

  who's going to succeed. And a lot of it just comes down to how hard people are going to work. So we want to make it open to as many people as possible.

• 23:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Shopify has this mantra of arming the rebels and they're specifically talking about, you know, Amazon's the big bad, kind of online retailer. We're gonna give the small businesses the tools necessary to compete. It feels a lot like what you're essentially doing is you're arming the rebels, but it's the future thinkers, problem solvers, innovators, entrepreneurs, that the world ultimately is going to need. And really, it's coming at it from, and this is kind of my interpretation. I don't care if you go into engineering. I don't care if you go into computer science. I don't care if you go into business or any other, you know, multitude of kind of avenues in your professional career. I just want you to be a clear thinker and if we can teach you to be a clear and kind of effective thinker,

• 24:24Anthony Pompliano?

  you should be successful at whatever you choose to do in the future.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  More successful at least, for sure. There's, yeah, it's interesting because one of the cool things about synthesis, you have to take action. It's just, it's just like life. There's a lot of information coming at you. You cannot wait for perfect information and you just have to act and get the feedback from the environment. And so I think there's some element of like training, like you can, for every trait, you know, whether it's IQ or temperament, whatever it is, there's sort of like a, there's like a Goldilocks, right? Like you could be too far out to the right on IQ and you can just be completely ineffective because you just, you fall in love with your mental creations and you don't take action. And so it's like trying to create this, uh, this just right environment where, you know, the skills that you kind of in life, you need to balance your thinking and your action in order to succeed.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  You can't wait until you have it all figured out. So it's trying to create an environment where kids can actually get the feeling of doing that. Because, you know, the world's just changed a lot. It used to be that you could, you could go join. I remember when I was about to graduate college, I had an offer from GE and my parents like, that's amazing. Like you should take that offer from GE. That's an incredible company. And I just saw it's like, I don't wanna, I, I, I'm not going to be able to do this thing where I like move up through the ranks. I'm not going to be like really well adapted to go up through this bureaucracy. But that was like really for my parents' generation, that was like the best thing that you could do is you get in one of these big bureaucracies, a big institution and, you know, kind of try to move up through the ranks.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  And I think now we're going through, you know, in American society at least, is there's sort of a falling trust in institutions. And I think our, you know, that's probably going to continue and our kids are going to have to be really adaptable. They're going to have to be really able to, uh, you know, embrace the chaos, as we say at synthesis and figure out, you know, figure out their own path through that. And that's, uh, that's different, right? That's different in like all of human history. You used to have a lot more kind of stability and, you know, you could pay attention to people a little bit older than you and your parents and kind of do what they do and succeed. And now it's, uh, things seem to be changing very quickly. It seems like the core skill is just adapting to changing information landscape.

• 26:34Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the things we've talked about in the past is there's obviously Elon, the way he thinks and kind of the success he's had. Another, when you speak of kind of chaos, there's a kind of a label of masters of chaos around the special forces in the military.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:49Anthony Pompliano?

  And those two things seem very different, but when you actually break down, what are they doing? They're having to make high impact decisions in super multivariate environments with a lack of information and zero, almost zero ability to predict what the outcome's going to be. Is it fair to think about the kids are really being taught the same thing, right? You know, just like we teach the special forces soldiers, kind of building blocks of skills and then, hey, here's how to be successful. By the way, we're just going to drop you in a country, you know, four or eight of you and like go figure it out.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:24Anthony Pompliano?

  It seems like you're doing this in a virtual environment and it may be around something that's obviously much less dangerous, you know, and kind of more kid friendly, but a lot of the same, right?

• 27:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. It's the training environment, right? So there's in the training environment, there's, you know, you get to practice ideally the same set of skills, but there's no, no consequence to failure. That's, that's the idea, right? And, you know, the special forces, they do the same thing. I read in the book you recommended, Masters of Chaos, and I'd always been into like the military training, right? Because you, especially special forces, because you're, you know, how, how do people act? How do they prepare when if they get it wrong, their brothers and sisters are going to die? Well, like they're going to take it seriously. And so we should pay attention to that. That's a, it's like a harsh training environment. Unlike, you know, actually, this is a really good point because you brought up Elon again. And I think there's a, you know, there's always a question of like, what

• 28:14Speaker 02

  is at the top of this system, right? I think if you look at the existing education system, what's at the pinnacle? It's getting like a PhD, right? Which is like, you know, and then some sciences like PhDs like move the world forward for sure. But in a lot of fields, it's you write papers for other PhDs. You know, very few people read the papers and it's just kind of like this endless argument. Like what if there's a system for actors, like people who are like actually agents, people who are changing in the world? Like what does the system look like when your goal is to make? More Elons, right? And that's the, you know, say every kids, you know, most kids are not going to be Elon, like hardly anybody is going to be like that. But like, at least, let's have some heroes. Like, who, who are our heroes? Are they people who sit around writing papers? Are they

• 28:56Speaker 02

  people who take action in the world and change the world? And I think there should be some system where, you know, for the people, parents who want their kids to take action in the world and don't necessarily think the PhD is going to be, you know, is the be all, end all of existence. There should be something like that.

• 29:12Anthony Pompliano?

  It reminds me, on Instagram, you see all these like memes or like motivational things. And one of them is always like, I didn't go to Harvard, but everyone who works for me did.

• 29:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Kind of feels a little bit like that. Where if you think Elon, like, as far as I understand, he doesn't have a PhD in rockets. He doesn't have a PhD in engineering. He doesn't have kind of all of the traditional academic milestones. But he's in the room with the people and helping them make decisions on how do we create a reusable rocket that we can land again on a drone ship in the ocean?

• 29:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And it's the practical uses of the knowledge versus the academic. And sometimes people can marry those two things for sure. So it's not kind of a black and white world. But I do think that ultimately, if you look at synthesis and that style of learning, what are you optimizing for? Are you optimizing for the academic accolades? Or are you optimizing for becoming a problem solver? And I feel like that's the big difference here.

• 30:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. And there's a lot in education that's just purely about status signaling. A lot of people who really, they want their kids to go to Harvard or Princeton or Stanford. It's primarily like a class and like a status game. And, you know, that's, people are always going to do that. That's, that's, we're not going to solve that. But I think for a certain set of people, you know, it's, it's really, it's more interesting to them to have their kids grow up and be able to exert their will in the world as much as possible, independent of like fitting into some, you know, status hierarchy. It's more important to be able to think effectively and do effectively. At least, that's the way I feel. It's the way a lot of entrepreneurs feel about raising their kids. And that's, you know, our early customers tend to be more entrepreneurial.

• 30:54Speaker 02

  Their background because if you know, if you the current system's fine. If you know, you're gonna go to Harvard and you're gonna, you know, where the work at investment bank and where the Harvard sweatshirt like 20 years later, if that's gonna be like the the pinnacle and you're trying to fit into this, you know, social environment like, you know, fine, people are gonna do that. And that's no problem. But that's just, we just have a system with just a different goal. Right. And I think, you know, I think there's been some sense over the last, like, you know, year and a half or so, there's this, this sort of strange, you know, blip that we're living in with the with the pandemic. And I think there was a sense that things were going to go back to normal.

• 31:31Speaker 02

  And it's starting to feel like maybe things aren't going to go back to normal now. And and one of the things I think is probably not going to go back to normal is the trust that the that the school system had, like we talked about this last time, there's great people working in the school system, all of them generally care about kids and are, you know, most of them are doing it for the right reasons. But that system is just, it's just too big and unwieldy to change. And so I think you're going to see parents opting out and choosing, choosing other avenues that align with their values, because I think there's going to be more and more sense that the traditional systems don't align with our values.

• 32:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Well, the existing system too feels very hierarchical and it feels very kind of factory based in terms of like, okay, you go to first grade, you learn this stamp of approval. Okay, go to second grade, you learn this. And we're gonna kind of move you through these 12 stages of the factory and we're going to kick you out at the end and voila, you're a genius, right? And you can go on to to college, which, you know, you said in the past, like, if we were optimizing for factory jobs, that'd make a ton of sense. Right? You're like, literally, you know, turn, grab this, put it here, press it, you know, move it, do it again, and we'll teach you these skills and whatever. But now when we start to move into these more digital environments, the locations are different, the job skills are different, the companies are different, the products are different. We started to think about this.

• 32:51Anthony Pompliano?

  And I recently was looking at a company and this specific company is interesting because.

• 33:00Anthony Pompliano?

  It is, uh, it's called a spot, I think. And what it allows you to do is, uh, do walking meetings over the phone.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 33:08Anthony Pompliano?

  And so I was thinking to myself-

• 33:10Speaker 02

  Is it a phone call?

• 33:11Anthony Pompliano?

  It's a phone call.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 33:12Anthony Pompliano?

  But basically they've got an entire piece of software that helps, uh, for like note taking and sharing screens and like-

• 33:17Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 33:18Anthony Pompliano?

  It's, okay. Imagine, hey, if I wanted to optimize a phone call for a meeting versus a regular phone call-

• 33:24Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 33:24Anthony Pompliano?

  It would be different, right? It wouldn't just be a Zoom link for example.

• 33:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:28Anthony Pompliano?

  And, uh, whether they're successful or not is completely, uh, still to be determined. But all I could keep thinking to myself is imagine 15 years ago saying to somebody, I'm building a company for walking virtual meetings.

• 33:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:42Anthony Pompliano?

  They would have like smacked you.

• 33:43Speaker 02

  Terrible, terrible idea, yeah. Now I'm kinda like, oh, okay, I need that, like, give me the link.

• 33:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? So you, so you think of something like that and then you start thinking about the fact that like, imagine if you had told kids 15 years ago, "Hey, you're gonna sit at home and you're gonna look through a portal and that portal's gonna get you into this like metaverse", which seems to be the, the, you know, popular term today. And you're gonna play games in the virtual world with other kids and then you're gonna like it and you're gonna leave and have fun. Them in like, it's like video game, like Sega Genesis, right? You know, or like whatever?

• 34:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:20Anthony Pompliano?

  But actually that's basically what you guys have backed into or built here is you can use it with all the academic terminology of, you know, virtual reality and metaverse, like all these things like make people sound smart. Or you can just say, no, we bring together kids anywhere in the world and help them solve problems and they learn how to do that. And it feels like the, the more that you approach this from like, uh, these are directly actionable skills that you can take into the real world, the more that you're seeing kids get those skills. Like it's against, what are you optimizing for as a school versus we want you to leave and, you know, be able to say two plus two is four? Cause the final test at the end of the year-

• 34:57Speaker 02

  Schools are very low ambiguity environment. And like, if you look at, you know, you're talking about the, the company you were just mentioning, like you've had to be able to respond to a changing world very quickly, right? And like the, the world is just a, it's a high ambiguity environment. Synthesis, high ambiguity environment. And then back to the masters of chaos thing, like I believe it is a skill. To embrace the chaos, like there's a reason, you know, there's special forces, folks that go through all this training, right? Because you just get thrown into an unfamiliar environment enough times and you start to, your kind of emotional response sort of dampens. And you start to learn how to, you know, look around and like, keep your cool in those situations. And that's just like a critically important skill in today's world.

• 35:41Speaker 02

  And there's also, there's, there's a skill that is, uh, you know, back to how Josh kind of came up with this by watching Elon. Like there are pure reasoning skills that are independent of context. And you can, you can learn those things and you know, now with everything the kids can, they can just go research and get all the factual knowledge they need. On, on YouTube, you know, all the, anything that's like specific to their field, like you can go research that. And so what do we focus on? It's kind of this like mental agility, right? It's, it's the building, the abilities to be adaptive to whatever situation. And that's what we're trying to do. I don't know if this is going to be the right approach, if this is going to work exactly. It seems to be working so far, uh, but you know, it's still early, but that's at least, that's the attempt.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  And I like, I always tell the team, like if we, if we make this work, it's going to be very obvious. Everyone's just going to say, well, that was obvious, of course, in the internet age, like you're going to learn to think through like, you know, playing video games and simulations. But like, of course, that's how it had to work. If we fail, everyone's going to be like, of course that failed, you're a bunch of idiots. You tried to make a school around video games, of course. So it's a, you know, I think that, that intellectual humility is, is good. And, uh, you know, we'll, we'll see where it goes so far. You know, kids seem to love it. They seem to be building the skills, but, uh, you know, it's early days.

• 36:57Anthony Pompliano?

  The, the intellectual humility, uh, reminds me of, um, I had this life experience one time, uh, and I haven't thought about this in years. It was during a training exercise in the military and we were at a, uh, I think it was a leadership school or something. And, uh, I was one of the lowest ranking people there. And so basically my job was like, get through the school. The people who are higher ranking are actually the ones that are like getting all the training and like.

• 37:20Speaker 02

  You're just there to be.

• 37:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Osmosis.

• 37:22Speaker 02

  To train the other guy.

• 37:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, like I'm kind of just like a body, right? So like, whatever. And, uh, and we kept doing this. Drill where uh yeah, basically there was a enemy that was uh far away and we had to navigate our way there. And then basically uh attack them or take them out or whatever. And so I'd gone through it two, three, four times uh as kind of again, just like a body who was taking orders from the tires. And the guy who was running the drill at some point were grabbing water. He's like, you want to be the leader in the next like iteration of it? And I was like, no. Like I'm not about to go tell, you know, a sergeant first class what to do, like the whole thing. And he's like, no, I think you should do it.

• 38:01Anthony Pompliano?

  And so we basically uh started and we go and uh there's kind of like a point that you got to where you like reassess like, okay, where, where is, where are we? Where is the enemy, etc. And I don't know why I thought of it the way that I did, but I basically said to him, I said, listen, we're here, we can identify where the enemy is. Can I just call it an airstrike? And the guy was like, I don't see why not. And so literally he gets over the radio and he basically is like, all right, you know, enemy group or whatever to the train goes, you guys are all dead. He's called it an airstrike. And of course you can hear in the background, they're like all screaming, that's cheating. That's like, you know, all this stuff or whatever. And I remember we got back and we did this whole kind of like uh after action review in in the military.

• 38:46Anthony Pompliano?

  And the thing that the uh guy asked me was he goes, why did you do that? And I was like, honestly, I didn't want to have to go trek through the woods, right? Like, like it was a very like selfish, kind of like smart ass reason for doing it. But it it made me think and I've thought about it a lot through life is like, you don't have to just do the thing that is the most egotistical thing, because what did everybody else do? That was like the the high ranking leader. They basically just went in and they wanted to like full on one on one combat of like your team, my team, let's shoot at each other. Let's see who wins.

• 39:18Speaker 02

  What's you trained for?

• 39:20Anthony Pompliano?

  To some degree, right? It's like the machoism of it. And so I think a lot of like, from a problem standpoint, Elon with the reusable rockets, it's like, oh, the rockets are expensive. Like, why don't we just reuse them? And that's almost like a such a ridiculous idea, if you come from that world, that you need an outsider to be able to do it, but you need somebody who has a skill set. And so is your thought process that you're essentially teaching these kids how to think differently? Or think outside the box, if you will? And so naturally, majority of them will go on to be entrepreneurs and kind of pursue that lifestyle? Or is it just, no, this is as effective inside of a corporation as a mid-level manager as it is as, you know, the founder of a business?

• 40:05Speaker 02

  I think so. I think it's the second one. I mean, I don't, I don't think, you know, being, being an entrepreneur is, is a crazy thing to do. I don't think most, most people are going to really want to do that and deal with the kind of lifestyle and all that. But, you know, we've, we've, we've got to hire a lot of people, like, who are we looking to hire? Like, it's, it's often, you know, it's really almost like being a good student is sort of inversely correlated with success in like a startup environment or trying to do something new. It almost, it just seems like it doesn't, you know, it doesn't matter at all. It's just like completely irrelevant. Maybe some people who do really well in school are, are, you know, able to adapt and think for themselves, but it doesn't, it just seems to be kind of like random.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  Doesn't seem to be much, much correlation there. So yeah, we're, I'm, I'm excited about the hiring we're doing. Like, we get, you know, we have one, one guy who's 19 and like dropped out of college. He was homeschooled and like went to college for like a year, dropped out. He's like, this is too slow. We hired him, you know, he's amazing, he's able, able to, you know, really like, you know, just think creatively and think independently. So like, we're, you know, if you can learn to think like that and just solve problems, like, you know, we're hiring people. We're not hiring them to like go. Do the infantry combat, right? We're like hiring them to solve the problem. And so if you have those skills, it doesn't, you know, whether you're starting your own company

• 41:32Speaker 02

  or you're starting your own thing, or you're going to go work at another company, those skills are, those are in short supply. Elon's going to need a lot of people who can think creatively to colonize Mars, right? And so whether you start your own thing or not, these are the skills you're going to need to succeed in life.

• 41:49Anthony Pompliano?

  How important in the environment is it for the kids to have different experiences going into it? Like in terms of, again, go back to the special forces. One of the things that they really optimize for is you don't want everyone that comes from the same world that you went to the same schools and all stuff. They actually want, who's a kid who grew up in Kentucky, right? And literally could shoot blindfold and be great. And then who's the person who actually has an engineering background? And like, you want to put those people on a team together and teach each other, et cetera. How important is it for the actual environment for these kids to, you know, have somebody who's interested in math, have somebody who's interested in non-mathematical subjects? And like bring them together to solve the problems?

• 42:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, that's really helpful. That's something that took me a really long time to realize was like when you're building teams, you know, at the company, you know, you're, you're, it, the idea like of like well-rounded people is not that, not that great of an idea really. Like if, because if you, I have like just these extreme weaknesses that like I've, I've come to, I used to like deny that this is how the world worked. And I, I'm just like strong at everything, but like I've got these like incredible weaknesses and like strengths that offset them somewhat. So I'm like looking for the person who's like the, the puzzle piece or like the team to go around me, like fill in the skills that I'm missing. And that's, that's how synthesis works as well. Like you can do, you can have like the division of labor

• 43:10Speaker 02

  in the synthesis simulation. So if you, you know, if someone's like really great at like analytical, like pattern matching type of thinking, you can apply them in one area. If someone else is like a better leader, communicator, like consensus builder, they have like a different role to play. And so I think there's like a lot more we can do to explore that. That's just something that's kind of emerged from the simulations. The kids like divide up these roles with each other's like, like based on their skillset. But I think again, like that's, school is individual. It's individual and it's in low ambiguity, like well-defined problem environments. Life? Always a team sport when you're doing anything interesting and always a high ambiguity environment if you're going to do anything interesting. And there's probably always going

• 43:55Speaker 02

  to be jobs where you just kind of get told what to do and execute it faithfully and do well, but those are not going to, not going to pay very well.

• 44:03Anthony Pompliano?

  What age are the kids that right now can get into synthesis?

• 44:06Speaker 02

  The youngest are six, but that's kind of like a special case. They're like very, very, very precocious six and seven year olds. And then, you know, eight year olds is normally, we wear, you know, that most, most of the cohort starts at eight to about 13 or 14.

• 44:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And do you put eight year olds with 12 year olds and kind of mix and match the ages? Or how do you break that down?

• 44:32Speaker 02

  To some extent. Yeah. So there's

• 44:34Anthony Pompliano?

  That was said hesitantly.

• 44:36Speaker 02

  What's that?

• 44:36Anthony Pompliano?

  You said that hesitantly.

• 44:39Speaker 02

  The thing, if you're, if you're a 12 year old and you know, you're really, you're really, really, really bright, then you know, it's fine to be with like eight and nine year olds once in a while where you're kind of the leader and you're trying to kind of pull them up to your level. It's really valuable for the younger kids. It's really valuable for the 12 year old. But you also, when you're at that age, you really want to be expanding your, you want, they want to be, you know, we have this concept like no speed limit, right? You want to be pushed kind of as hard as you can go. That's especially true for like a lot of the really bright kids that are in synthesis. They're not challenged at all in their school environment. And so they're looking for something that's just really like hardcore, complex and challenging. And so they don't want to be with like nine and 10 year olds. They want to be with other kids that are super advanced. So we try to

• 45:24Speaker 02

  mix it up basically. Cause I think this is one of the most sociopathic things about the way we design the school system. And, you know, it's not, not the people's fault who are in the system now. It's just been going this way for a long time. Age segregation is a sociopathic idea, right? You don't ever get to be a mentor to anybody and you don't have, you don't have mentors yourself who are just, you know, the way we learn, humans are, you know, were made for tribes. We go from infant all the way up to elder and the, all the people at all these levels around us, you know, this, this is like our biological environment. And then school, when you break that apart and you're like, you're going to be only with seven year olds right now, it's, it's, you're just kind of lost in time. You're disconnected

• 46:09Speaker 02

  from the past and disconnected from the future. I think it causes a lot of anxiety and stress. There's a lot of animal studies where you see this. If you, if you separate animals, they don't have, you know, a stronger role model to look up to. They just, they just fall apart, right? We're made to live in these sort of like hierarchical, somewhat hierarchical communities. And so that's part of what, what synthesis, what we aim to do is like, give you, if you're in the young end, we want to get you around people who are like two years older, because they're going to be the ones that you're going to look up to and try to emulate. And then going to get those kids of people who are like two years older and just create this kind of chain rather than isolate everybody and be like, you're only with people your own level. Cause that's not life, right?

• 46:50Anthony Pompliano?

  It feels like, not having a child, this is going to be a wild statement, but a six and a 12 year old.

• 46:57Speaker 02

  Everybody has opinions about raising kids before they have kids.

• 47:00Anthony Pompliano?

  No, it's not even reasonable, but like a six year old and a 12 year old, from what I would imagine is like very different, right? In terms of the cognitive development and all of that. So two years sounds a lot more reasonable than like, let me put my six year old and 12 year old and like have them have mental combat. That seems like it probably wouldn't be so competitive.

• 47:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And I even hesitate to say that we accept six year olds because it is sort of like a rare, I didn't put my own son in until he was seven. So I don't think there's any, you know, there's not this incredible value from getting in younger. Everybody develops like the conceptual faculty at a different age. It's usually like somewhere between six and eight, six, if you're on like the really, you know, if you're, if you're really like developed that early, but as far as I can tell, there's no advantage to developing it early. It's just synthesis is going to be most effective. Once you can start to think abstractly and conceptually. For my seven year old, it was just like shortly after he turned seven, our conversations, we talk about evolution. I always talk about evolution with him. And about after he turned seven, he started to be able to kind of make sense

• 48:01Speaker 02

  of it. And, and so that's when synthesis is going to be helpful because you know, what we're looking to do is I think that's education is just really, is learning to think conceptually. To think in terms of patterns, not in in terms of always the specifics. And so what we do is you're trying to play these game simulations, you're building your reasoning skills, you're building your communication with the other kids. We're also trying to layer on concepts on top of that. So we want you to learn how the world works. And we make these series of videos for kids to explore that, like learn about network effects, learn about game theory, learn about these big concepts that are going to affect everything that you look at in the world and you really, you just can't. Every all I get all these emails from parents and DMs that are like my five year old or my four year old. I want to get them in.

• 48:45Speaker 02

  I'm like, just take it easy. Like, don't just give your kids lots of love and let them play outside and hang out with other kids at that age. When they get to be the age, you know, for synthesis, then then you can put them in and you don't have to be like in a huge rush for it.

• 48:59Anthony Pompliano?

  How does a parent know that their kid's ready? Like, are is there a question, a magic question they can ask? And it's like, oh, OK, my kid is like now cognitively ready for this.

• 49:08Speaker 02

  I don't know. That's a good question, actually. We should, we should try to get more.

• 49:13Speaker 02

  But they talk more resolution on this because it'll help us for our for our admissions. We're actually going to be putting out an application. It's kind of like one of the games that you can play. And that's a really good, that that'll be sort of a really good test. So it's going to be like a single player game where you're playing, you're just playing against a bot. And you can see, like I had my five year old and seven year old play it. And the five year old kind of plays it and just just like, just plays it, right? And he figured out how to win, you know, after a while, but he's not, he has no understanding. He cannot explain why he's able to win. The seven year old will look at it just in a completely different way. And like it's, he'll be able to identify the pattern and explain it to somebody else.

• 49:53Speaker 02

  And so that that's kind of, this will be like a good, yeah, sort of, you know, test for, for, for kids. If you, if you, you know, want to find that out, yeah.

• 50:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Parents are going back to school now. Well, I guess the parents are sending their kids back to school.

• 50:08Speaker 02

  Some of them are.

• 50:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Some of them.

• 50:12Anthony Pompliano?

  How should they think about synthesis in terms of this is supplemental to the school environment? And what's kind of the pitch as to like, why they would want to put their kid into this?

• 50:24Speaker 02

  I think they're really, just a simple version is you learn how to think. I don't think schools do a good job teaching us how to think, at least none of my schools did. And I didn't know. The worst part about not knowing how to think is you, you don't know that you don't know how to think, right? You think you feel something and you're like, this is thinking. And you know, it's, it's, that's not the way it works, but you don't really know that until you go through it. So if you are satisfied and you think the current, you know, your current schools are, are doing a good job, um, teaching your kids to think, then, then I think that's fine. Um, if you think that's a gap that's missing, like we do, like Elon thought that, um, then check out

• 51:07Speaker 02

  synthesis. It's, uh, it's enrichment. So you can do it. Uh, we have now we're expanding to be like, we have a part like a, a full stack school is very limited right now, but you can, you can do synthesis for your, uh, all your education. Um, or you can come and do like an hour a week. So kind of whatever you, uh, you have time for and whatever your kids are interested in doing.

• 51:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. What's been the most fun part about this for you?

• 51:34Speaker 02

  Most fun. Um, and just, uh, I guess something fundamentally human about just imagining something. So it's, it's our year anniversary since we did our first, so the first person paid for synthesis, which, you know, I think we, we took, we, we asked people to pay before we really had anything. So we like, people paid and then we like scrambled to put something together. Um, but it was just, just about a year ago. And what's crazy is reflecting on that and seeing like just the what you, what we imagined, just having that come to be in the world, seeing that interact with people, just seeing so many

• 52:15Speaker 02

  families like just, just be fully bought in and get behind this vision and just, just tell us these like life-changing stories. Like that's, it's the most meaningful thing that you could do, right? Like you just pass down, uh, you know, what we, what we think works, what's going to work for our kids, like this, the next generation that's going to build the civilization, being able to work on something that meaningful and being able to just kind of imagine, you know, how we think it should work and, and put that out into the world and see it take root is, uh, I mean, that's incredible.

• 52:47Anthony Pompliano?

  It feels like if this works, everyone will be excited. It'll have a big impact. If it doesn't work, everyone will be excited, uh, that you tried, right? So it's kind of goes back to the Elon idea of maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, but it's worth trying.

• 53:01Speaker 02

  It's contributing to human knowledge either way, as long as we don't, you know, totally screw it up. Like at least, you know, you can, we can find out that this won't work. And, you know, that's valuable on its own. Someone else, the next person to come along and try something different. Um, so we'll see. I have my kids in it. Uh, you know, Elon had his kids go through something like this. So, you know, we'll see if, I think it's, uh, people ask how we're going to measure it and like, we're gonna, we're going to get to that. But right now it's like, does this explanation make sense to you? Like, are your, are your kids really not learning how to think? Do you, you know, is it valuable to, you know, combine like the ability to take action and work with others with these, uh, you know, kind of problem

• 53:42Speaker 02

  solving skills? If that explanation makes sense and you think that's missing in school and you believe these things can be built, you know, in a different way than our education system, then I think that's, you know, if that speaks to you, then, then put your kids in it. If it doesn't, then, you know, it's fine. You may be right.

• 53:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, you don't have to do it.

• 53:59Speaker 02

  That's the beauty of choice.

• 54:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, where can we send people to, uh, to enroll their kids if they want?

• 54:05Speaker 02

  Uh, synthesis.is is the website. Synthesis.is.

• 54:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Is. All right, man. Well, listen, thank you so much for doing this. What's your Twitter, by the way? At Chrisman?

• 54:15Speaker 02

  At Chrisman Frank.

• 54:16Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Easy.

• 54:18Speaker 02

  Easy breezy, I guess so.

• 54:21Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, we'll do this again. Go sign your kids up, synthesis.is. If your kids are going back to school and you want them actually to learn something and learn how to think, I can say that he can't. But if you actually want your kids to learn something, go to synthesis.is.

• 54:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, all right.

• 54:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Do it again in the future, man.

• 54:35Speaker 02

  Thank you.