How to Cultivate Curious Kids
My episode with Curious Cardinals founder Audrey Wisch (Ep. 226) is live. Here's why you should listen...
I’ve always tried to encourage curiosity in my three children and now six (!) grandchildren. My kids often reminisce about my default response to their childhood questions: pointing to the bookshelf that flanked our sofa and saying, “look it up in there!”
Luckily, natural curiosity was never lacking in our household. Over the years, however, I have become increasingly frustrated when I hear about the stultifying, rote, curiosity-killing nature of our education system.
It was a pleasure, therefore, to speak to Audrey Wisch, an impressive young founder who, after witnessing first-hand how kids’ curiosity was being crushed, decided to do something about it. She left Stanford University to build Curious Cardinals, a personalized service that matches children with university mentors. What started as a pandemic project has grown into something much bigger - Audrey and her co-founder were named to the 2022 Forbes 30 Under 30 List in education, and Curious Cardinals has now delivered over 20,000 hours of mentorship to over 2,000 kids.
As you’ll hear in our conversation, Audrey’s approach to education is a breath of fresh air, focusing on agency and empowerment, meeting kids where their interests lie, and harnessing the benefits of technology.
The episode is available for listening here. For those of you who prefer to read your podcasts, I’ve shared the full transcript below.
In the meantime, here are three takeaways from our conversation:
The best teachers meet the child where their interests lie: Would a dinosaur-mad eight-year-old rather (A) rotely memorize punctuation rules or (B) incorporate a comma, semi-colon, and brackets into a story about an encounter with a Tyrannosaurus Rex? Whether it’s video games, cosmetics, or, in one of Audrey’s examples, chicken nuggets, a great teacher builds on the subject that makes their student’s face light up.
The perks of proximity: A student is more likely to feel inspired by their mentor’s success if they are sufficiently proximate in age to feel that this success is achievable. If a 55-year-old entrepreneur tells a teenager that they could start a company while they’re in college, the teenager is probably going to dismiss them as an out-of-touch old fogey. If a 22-year-old entrepreneur told that teenager the same thing, then they may just start brainstorming that business plan…
The why is as important as the what: Outcomes-focused education leads kids to think that learning is about getting to the next stage of the treadmill. Shakespeare becomes not a timeless guide to humanity’s deepest flaws and desires, but an old bloke whose plays you’ve got to remember to pass the next exam. Kids aren’t taught why they have to learn the things they do, merely that they have to learn them to progress. You don’t need me to tell you how counterproductive this is if we want our kids to be naturally curious. Audrey suggests a Socratic solution: keep asking kids “Why?” they need to know something, and eventually they will get to a more interesting answer than “because my teacher/parent/textbook told me to.”
Check out the full transcript below, and let us know what you think in the comments!
Transcript | Audrey Wisch — How to Cultivate Curious Kids (Ep. 226)
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Well, hello everyone. It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops. I always go on and on banging on and on about how education is broken, we need to fix it, we need younger people involved and lo and behold, what did I find but my next guest. Audrey Wisch, co-founder and CEO and teacher, I love that part of that, of Curious Cardinals, an EdTech empowering K through 12 students through mentorship. Now you have all sorts of accolades. You've been Forbes under 30, you're a Stanford grad, oh my goodness. Welcome.
Audrey Wisch:
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me today.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
So I'm absolutely fascinated by what's the origin story here? Why did you figure out we need a different way of getting kids to get excited? And I think you have accomplished it.
Audrey Wisch:
Thank you. So it started, I was a history major at Stanford. I thought I was pre-law, wanted to be the next Ruth Bader Ginsburg and thought I had my 10-year life plan set. And then Stanford sent us home in my freshman year because of the pandemic, and I decided to start tutoring kids.
Audrey Wisch:
I had done some teaching at Stanford with teaching English to members of the janitorial staff. That was a highlight of my week. So I nerded out with the pedagogical aspect of it and I said, I'm home. All my extracurricular is on pause. Why don't I tutor some kids? I can make some money.
Audrey Wisch:
So I reached out to a bunch of families, sent my resume around and started in March of 2020 working with a seventh grader and ninth grader on Zoom. And working with them observed how disengaged and uninspired they were with what they were learning in school and how they were absorbing and regurgitating what they're reading in a textbook, but they didn't know why they were learning what they were learning.
Audrey Wisch:
So that inspired me to apply what they were learning in school to their interests, the world around them in hopes of making their learning feel like it actually mattered. One of them asked for math help. I was not as passionate about math, so that's where Alec, my eventual co-founder, came into the picture.
Audrey Wisch:
Alec was an aerospace engineer at Stanford and he started applying what they were learning in math to how airplanes fly. And fast-forward, they began telling all their friends and I'm a natural compulsive super connector, someone came in and said, "I love science and love soccer and struggling in math." And I said, "Oh my god, my friends, the human biology TA and he's on the soccer team. He'd be the perfect match." And so on and so forth, making these personalized connections.
Audrey Wisch:
And for me, in that gloomy, dreary time of the pandemic, it was my personal North Star that motivated me, that helped me set goals, maintain motivation, and I'd always been someone who was super goal oriented. Recently, I found my 10th grade goals I set and I was like, wow, I thought I changed a ton. I haven't changed all that much. And there's not space to identify your why to find your North Star in the classroom and that was just exacerbated in the pandemic.
Audrey Wisch:
And so it started observing firsthand this disengagement and seeing how by being someone close in age who could draw the connections between what they were learning and the world around them in their interests, how that could ignite a flame of motivation and inspiration and in tandem, enable a student to accomplish phenomenal learning results.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
There's a great quote attributed to everyone from Abraham Lincoln on up, you know how the disputed quotes go but it's, the definition of insanity is trying the same thing the same way again and again. It doesn't work, but we just keep trying it that way.
Audrey Wisch:
We thought that one was Albert Einstein.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Yeah, I don't think it is. There's a great resource on the web quote investigator, and I do a lot of quotes and so I'm always over there, who actually said this. But why do you think that is? Why do you think that we have steadfastly retained the old way of educating kids that really originated during the industrial era?
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And I think one of the sneaky motives was really the industrialists wanted their future factory workers to be able to sit quietly in a room for eight hours and have the correct answer machine installed in their head. Your way is so different.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
How did you get the kids that you were mentoring and tutoring to come alive, so to speak? Because I remember sitting in grade school and boy oh boy, they made me sit with my hand with Christmas tree like that because I was rambunctious.
Audrey Wisch:
Let me start with the big picture, which is you are a hundred percent right. Why hasn't our education system changed? Every aspect of society has changed dramatically, yet how we educate kids and the content itself has remained somewhat constant.
Audrey Wisch:
What I think was so fascinating about the pandemic, as I said, I was this girl who had my ten-year life plan set and loved school and academia more than anything. So I'd never thought I would leave Stanford early to pursue this full time. But when the pandemic year wrapped up and we saw everyone going back to school, we realized Stanford's not going anywhere, but this opportunity could.
Audrey Wisch:
And everyone had always been a little bit complacent with K-12 education because parents thought, well, we turned out okay, they must be doing it right. And then in the pandemic, they got a front row seat to their kids' education and actually started questioning, is this right? Is this working?
Audrey Wisch:
And so that's a fascinating thing we observed where we saw parents' psychology alter and realized that this was an opportunity to go further with this and really try to scale this to reach way more students. What was so effective? I think it was just this relentless commitment to getting a kid's genuine engagement.
Audrey Wisch:
I haven't told this story much, but my co-founder thought it… overheard me. I was working with one of my first students again, they told everyone we were doing the maximum number of classes you could take at Stanford online. And then we started just tutoring all these kids because they were telling all their friends.
Audrey Wisch:
I was working with the fifth grade boy in writing and I was like, "What are you interested in?" And he was like, "Nothing." And I was like, "What do you like to do in your free time?" And he was like, "Not much." And he was so COVID-frustrated and bored. And I literally go, "What are your favorite things to have for dinner?" And he said, "Chicken nuggets." And I said, "Great. We're going to write a story about chicken nuggets."
Audrey Wisch:
And my co-founder was cracking up in the background like, "Audrey will do anything to meet this kid where they're at." But I think it was that. It was this relentless commitment to meet a kid where they're at and show you that I will get to your level, whether we're talking about chicken nuggets or cosmetics or video games.
Audrey Wisch:
I will get there and I will show you how we're going to apply that to learn how to write and construct effective sentences, how to learn grammar, how to convey your ideas most effectively, how to communicate, how to write in the active not passive tense.
Audrey Wisch:
I'm going to show you how we can do all those things that's going to empower you to be an effective communicator long-term, right now, a strong humanities' student in your classes. And I'm going to do that by connecting it to the things you get excited about, you light up about.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
So I'm curious, what were the kids that you were tutoring? Was there any commonality between what they were really... Other than, "What did you do at school today?" "Nothing." "Did you have any favorite subject?" "No." Was there a group of things, chicken nuggets, video games that kids seemed to really light up when they got to it?
Audrey Wisch:
Real things. I would say how could they be focused with geometry or Shakespeare when they were scrolling through their TikTok feeds and seeing millions of people dying in the pandemic. Wildfires and all this talk about climate change in California, racial injustice and protests outside on the street literally peering outside their window.
Audrey Wisch:
They were seeing all these things that felt held enormous gravity and that drew their interest. Even if it was sports, we have so many, it happens to be more gender it's way more boys. Sports analytics and sports journalism are some of our most popular tracks because all kids love sports and you start with a thing that they watch on their TVs or they look on their phones and I think the things in the real world that have real implications are what captivated students' interests and engagement in a genuinely effective way.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
So I think you'd be the perfect person to ask this question to. There's always the moral panic about social media, especially TikTok. Have you found that kids who are on TikTok can really go deep on a subject if guided? That seems to be also maybe one of the aspects of your mentorship program where you could help them out or no, our attention span's shortening.
Audrey Wisch:
I think a hundred percent attention spans are shortening. I just read Jonathan Haidt's book, The Anxious Generation, which is getting a lot of press and it was funny, I'm K zero. I often don't like to reveal my age. I was born in 2000. I was one of those babies that did grow up on social media. I think I turned out okay.
Audrey Wisch:
Reading the book, I did see a lot of wow, that wasn't so easy to grow up and go through middle and high school on Instagram, that definitely affected my sense of self in certain ways or self-confidence when you're going through that pivotal change and transition.
Audrey Wisch:
I also think I developed some of entrepreneurial skills on social media. I built a foodie Instagram account and then I was a very competitive track runner. I made this track Instagram account that had got 12,000 followers and then one of the big ones banned us. I was super upset about that.
Audrey Wisch:
And so I was learning how to be savvy, what hook compels people, how to make content that interests a niche audience. Could I learn effectively? I don't think you can go deep enough. I think it's a little too superficial, aspirational. And I would say that I've always been someone who's hired mentors. Some of them have been people...
Audrey Wisch:
I'm still close with my seventh grade ballet teacher. We are still in touch. When I go back home to New York City, we get coffee every once in a while. My sister's high school boyfriend who's no longer her boyfriend, was my track mentor. I ran the best mile time in middle school and he signed me up for my first race. He's actually now in venture capital and we're still close friends. He's still like a mentor figure.
Audrey Wisch:
And having those real connections was so meaningful for these crucial life figures who were mentors to me. And then there were a few people who I looked to and followed on social media and looked up to as mentors and I never was able to humanize their success, humanize their story by following them on social media.
Audrey Wisch:
And I think the same translates to topics that you're learning. Don't even get me started with the news and the sound bites that kids learn about or engage with through their feeds. I think it's too superficial and I think it's too instantaneous. And real relationships and real learning necessitate your focus and your engagement and going deep.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And obviously, you're a very high agency person, what kind of tricks or methods did you develop to get the kids that you're mentoring to act with more agency? It's one of those perennial debates, right? Is agency something you can learn or is it something that you're born with? What do you think?
Audrey Wisch:
I'm constantly going back and forth myself. That spring I worked with a ton of kids, I ended up really working with one girl who I started with in March of 2020 when she was an eighth grader and she's a senior. She's graduating high school. She invited me to her graduation, I can't make it. But when I'm in New York City, we're going to have a celebratory dinner.
Audrey Wisch:
And so I've had the honor of mentoring her for four years and I've been on the lookout for my next mentee. I want to do the same thing with another student. And I was reflecting on this yesterday because we had our first session, they're very different. I've been thinking, I think part of the beauty of it and someone who's a great mentor, they love the challenge.
Audrey Wisch:
They are committed to this challenge. We could go to... We had dinner with some of our first Curious Cardinals mentors and the best mentors. It's like a craft. They take so much pride in driving results and change in their students. I think if you have that someone that dedicated to you, you can drive change.
Audrey Wisch:
But how many students have someone that dedicated to them and their betterment? Very few. Very few people come across that person. But at the same time, it's almost timeless. My grandpa, who's 90 years old recently was telling me about his fifth grade teacher that changed his trajectory.
Audrey Wisch:
He said he wasn't that good of a student once and then the teacher sat him down and said, "I'm going to give you one more chance to take this test and if you do it well, you're going to fine. You're going to not have to repeat sixth grade, but I really believe in you and I want you to put in the work."
Audrey Wisch:
And he said that changed everything for him. He realized that he liked working hard and how good it felt to be a good student. And so a lot of people that's a little bit like a universal thing, that teacher who changed your life. And so we hope to be that person for every student. Can you instill and cultivate agency in a kid? It depends. I think if you have the benefit of time, you can. But it can often take a lot of time.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
That's interesting. We called all our teachers professor at the school I went to, so mine was in seventh grade and his name was Professor Buzz Marzov, sounds like an astronaut, right? But that's a really interesting thing. I bet if you ask virtually anyone, they'll be able to say that one teacher who really changed their lives.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And that leads me to how do you go about picking mentors? I know that by reviewing all of the background on you and pick, and I know that you look for specific qualities, but share with our audience how you go about doing that and then what happens if you really take off? How do you scale something like a one-to-one mentorship program?
Audrey Wisch:
Yeah, so starting with how we pick mentors. Tactically, we have a very thorough, rigorous interview process that we've been iterating upon since the beginning. It once was me doing all the interviews. I'm grateful to now have an awesome team doing it. It's a three-part interview process.
Audrey Wisch:
In the past year, we've had 1,957 people apply to be mentors. 67% of which go to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, Duke. We don't do any recruiting. It's all organic, it's all word of mouth referrals. So what does that mean? That means that it's a little bias to who's applying.
Audrey Wisch:
What typically happens is a mentor is working with their kid and they're obsessed with their kid. They love it. They go to the Harvard cafeteria after their mentorship session with their friend group and they're like, "Oh my God, I'm teaching this kid coding. He's like a mini me. It's so fun."
Audrey Wisch:
They talk about it, all their friends hear about it, and then the whole friend group applies. So we have friend groups, we have couples, we have siblings. And that's great because it attracts a person who wants that, who hears how much this mentor takes pride in being a mentor, how much they love it, how much they light up with this relationship.
Audrey Wisch:
And so we're really lucky that we are attracting the right type of person to apply, generally speaking. What does it mean to be a good mentor? Being a great mentor is like being a great leader. We are honestly betting for future fantastic managers, a great mentor. We want every Curious Cardinal session to have a uniform structure.
Audrey Wisch:
So we recommend mentors start with rose, bud, thorn. Often that's more for the student than for them. Mentors or tutors don't typically tell a kid about their week or their life. And the kids love that these mentors are aspirational. So here they're rose, bud thorn. On the final, they had the party they went to, it is cool, it makes it exciting for the kids.
Audrey Wisch:
So they start with rose, bud, thorn and then the mentor says, here's our goal today. Here's what we're setting out to accomplish in today's session. So they align on a goal and they basically set an agenda. So kids learn how to follow an agenda, what it means to set an agenda.
Audrey Wisch:
And then the last five minutes of the session they say, okay, this was our goal. Did we accomplish it? Great. Here's what I need you to do for next time. We didn't accomplish it. Why didn't we? What went wrong? What set us off track? And then the mentor's supposed to say, okay, to stay on track, here's what I want you to do for next session.
Audrey Wisch:
They're essentially learning to be a manager with a direct report and build not just that accountability relationship but that friendship and connection. And so I would say that one of the things we observe in a lot of our mentors is they've either been mentored, they have a real profound story of someone who's believed in them, taken a chance on them, changed their life trajectory forever, whether it was that soccer coach or that teacher or they have some experience mentoring themselves. They were one of the high school students tutoring to make money on the side or they are a TA at school or they're in a leadership position.
Audrey Wisch:
So I think having that experience of guiding and mentoring or having been led in some shape or form, it doesn't have to be super formal, is somewhat of a commonality across the board with many of our mentors. And then people who take pride in the relationship, people who are really committed to bringing something out in a kid or helping a kid develop a sense of confidence in themselves. And again, I think that comes from people who someone has done that to them before, they've done it before and it's been so rewarding.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Rose, bud, thorn is interesting because we didn't have that when I was a kid. My grandchildren absolutely love that. Every time I'm over at my son's house for dinner, as I'm driving over there, I'm like, okay, I got to think about this. What are the thorns? Do I have any thorns today?
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And I'm amazed by how much the kids just absolutely love it. You also talk about a near peer relationship. Explain that a little bit, and why do you think that works better? Is it just because it's easier to relate to somebody who's closer to you in age? Or you tell me.
Audrey Wisch:
So near peer mentorship, learning from a college or recent grad student who's not too much older in age than yourself. Why? So they can set out the path to where they got to and make it feel attainable. As much as I looked up to Ruth Bader Ginsburg's journey, I could barely reverse engineer her path. It was daunting looking at the decades of, oh my God, how would I get there?
Audrey Wisch:
And one of the things, I had a light bulb moment when I was working with one of my first students. She read my research paper that was published in the Stanford Historical Journal and came to the session and was like, "Oh my God, Audrey, how did you even write that?" She was like, "It was 30 pages. It sounded professional." And I looked at her and I said, "Jane, you are so much further ahead of where I was when I was your age. Imagine where you're going to be when you're my age."
Audrey Wisch:
And she literally jaw dropped. She was like. I then that was this light bulb moment for me of, oh my God, this is really empowering. This is really motivating because I'm not only shedding light upon how I got to where I am today, I'm making it feel attainable and I'm telling her I believe in her to get to where I am or surpass that.
Audrey Wisch:
And so I think it's the proximity, the closeness to the experience. I was there, I remember high school, I remember middle school. And so I can relate to her experience. And then I think the other element of that is the classic parent says something to their kid and they say, "You don't get it." Or, "You're not in my situation."
Audrey Wisch:
And our mentors also grew up on social media. They also had their education halted by the pandemic. They get it. They speak the same language. And so I think that sense of relatability is key, especially when it comes to such remarkably accomplished mentors they're learning from, it humanizes that success.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
During the pandemic, one of my hypotheses is that a lot of trends that were nascent got really sped up by the pandemic, Zoom being one of them. And the kind of interaction becoming normalized, what we're doing right now, right? This is a Zoom.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And I wonder, did you think when you were doing it, if only traditional education could do X, Y or Z, what would your prescription be for the traditional educational method that most say let's just keep it general. Most public schools in America follow a curriculum. What would you change in addition, of course, to getting kids mentors about the nuts and bolts of what they're doing right now?
Audrey Wisch:
Love that you're asking that. And let me also acknowledge that I was someone who wanted to go into the public sector and was always driven by social impact. And so when I started Curious Cardinals, I a little bit was having a identity crisis. I'm supposed to be pre-law, what am I doing?
Audrey Wisch:
And in high school, I was always talking between do I want to be a Supreme Court justice and affect millions of people, but in a potentially itty bitty way, or do I want to be a teacher and have 20 kids in my class and have a real deep impact on them?
Audrey Wisch:
So I was always thinking about the two. And I thought, I want to be a Supreme Court justice because I can represent an individual and I love people and building relationships, but we can have an impact that can result in a systemic change that impacts millions of people's lives.
Audrey Wisch:
And so working, starting Curious Cardinals, I realized at its core this is the same. Never in a million years would I have thought of technology as the vehicle to enact that systemic impact. But this is all about championing individuality and enabling one-to-one human connection and personalized learning. And we're using technology as the vehicle to do so at scale.
Audrey Wisch:
And so I bring that up because one of the challenges of our model is there's no, or please tell me if you know of any, there's no direct-to-consumer education companies I've heard of that have prioritized and enabled equity and access as well as true systemic impact reaching all sorts of students.
Audrey Wisch:
And so a lot of my personal philosophy is we're a little bit taking Ruth Bader Ginsburg approach, which she asked, how am I going to appeal to a court of nine male justices? I'm going to start with cases that are sexist, that hurt men.
Audrey Wisch:
So her first case was a case in Ohio. If you were 18 and a woman, you could buy beer. You had to be 21 to be a man. And that's inherently sexist, but it affects men more than women. And so she was like, "I'm going to start with the cases that affect men more than women." A little bit out there, philosophical, extrapolation I don't tell people often, but I think about the same thing that we have to work within the system in order to disrupt the system basically.
Audrey Wisch:
And so we're working within the system where our mentors represent who parents want their kids to be. They go to these amazing schools, they're aspirational in every way. But do I think that navigating that system and the tensions of doing this to get into college or all the things within our current system are right or working? Absolutely not.
Audrey Wisch:
I'm hoping that we can build a trust and credibility and foot-holding to do something much more disruptive. And I say that because it's so hard. We've worked with schools, we work with schools in some capacities. I think we have to start from zero. There's little baby reformations happening.
Audrey Wisch:
Even when you look at the history of EdTech, Quizlets, the Epitome, Innovation where let's take flashcards, which we all know it's not actually changing how we learn, but it's digitizing inefficiency. And it is time, I believe, for us to really think how do we learn and let's have the innovation start there.
Audrey Wisch:
So what would I say? I hope that we can really start from zero and rethink this whole system. It will be really difficult to do, especially it's so entrenched with government and bureaucracy, but why it's so arbitrary that we learn from eight to 18 years old and then the learning ends. Anyone who's an entrepreneur knows that learning is a lifelong journey. It never stops.
Audrey Wisch:
And so I would really rethink education as it is today on its head. To start, you got to start small. I think one of the biggest things is AI is a real call to action that we have to change how we educate and inform kids. And so I think I really hope we can change the curriculum. We can change the learning delivery.
Audrey Wisch:
But I have a million and 10 ideas for the changes we could make. And I think that what I'm excited about is the emergence of innovation happening, and I hope it can coincide and supercharge one another's efforts to enact the necessary change.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
So, part of O'Shaughnessy Ventures is a seed stage and early stage investment fund, and we've invested in AI companies, Stability AI, others. We've also invested in EdTech using AI Synthesis School. And I'm a big believer in what they call the centaur model of AI, human plus AI.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
I think that AI alone is not going to solve any of our problems, but humans using AI can do miraculous things, seemingly miraculous things. One of the things that we found when we review Synthesis in particular is that AI tutors that learn on the student that they are tutoring are incredibly effective.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Because much like your mentors and when you started mentoring, what are you interested in? Whereas the AI simply just constantly learns what they're interested in. So marrying that to a human mentorship program sounds like a brilliant way to get kids fired up. What drawbacks do you see from the increased use of AI, specifically educationally and specifically with younger kids?
Audrey Wisch:
So many things. What drawbacks do I see? Look, I've been teaching AI workshops to parents in the past year. I've now taught nearly 40 workshops and my whole AI journey is another story in itself. But I'm incredibly passionate about teaching parents and educators about AI because the social media era, we're talking about the ramifications now, part of the issue is that adults in the room said, "I'm a tech dinosaur. I don't need to understand this."
Audrey Wisch:
And now they're looking at the data and they're seeing how the onslaught of mental health crisis that kids have undergone and they're realizing, oh, shoot, maybe we should have known. Maybe we should have been a little bit more informed. And look, AI is such a massively different technology, but as it pertains to kids and equipping the future generation, I've been saying there's no excuse.
Audrey Wisch:
The adults in the room need to understand this, need to engage with it and need to best support kids to navigate this future because it's going to change everything and it's going to permeate every aspect of society. So I would say some of the risks are adults not being aware and adults not being informed, such that, one, I hope that educators are going to fundamentally change how they teach and raise the bar.
Audrey Wisch:
Cheating. Kids have always been cheating. There's always been Shag or SparkNotes or different capacities to cheat. Kara Swisher said this, she was like, "What's with all the headlines on AI and cheating? They've all been cheating always. This is nothing new. It's not the story, guys." And I agree it's not the story.
Audrey Wisch:
But I think that if adults are not informed, they're not going to be able to help kids navigate it in a thoughtful way. What I would say is in order to use AI most effectively, you have to know how to ask the right questions. I say that I arguably can use generative AI, whether it's ChatGPT or Claw more effectively than any of our very accomplished, very smart software engineers can.
Audrey Wisch:
And I can't do a line of code because I'm really good at asking the right questions. I was the president of the debate team in high school. I got my research published in the Stanford Historical Journal. I'm great at asking the right questions and it requires problem solving, critical thinking, researching, and questioning to use AI really effectively.
Audrey Wisch:
And those are sophisticated skills that kids don't always get to in middle or high school. So typically, teachers can see this is a very unsophisticated use of AI, I can tell you use ChatGPT to write the answers. So I think there's a lot of fear that kids are not going to have to learn how to write. They're not going to know the foundational elements of writing or communication or arithmetic. And I think it's that foundation that's going to be the unlock to leveraging AI so effectively.
Audrey Wisch:
So the drawbacks are the people who are actually teaching them, whether it's your parents at the dinner table or you're teaching in the classroom, not being able to articulate the dos and don'ts or the whys or why nots of AI. And I think that some kids are going to exploit it. I've had parents in these workshops I teach before being like, "My kid's a little cheater. I do not want them doing anything at this." I'm like, "Great." Their maturity level, you put whatever boundaries in place. Awesome.
Audrey Wisch:
Other kids know their kids are rule followers, would not want to do anything cheating. And this could be a massive unlock for them. And so I think to each their own and that's the whole thing with education. Every kid is different. Every kid needs something different. And so we can't take a one-size-fits-all solution for empowering kids to learn how to leverage AI.
Audrey Wisch:
And similarly, Khan Academy is amazing, such an awesome tool, but it's best for the autodidact. It's best for the kid who's already motivated enough to look at the resource on their own. And I think AI will be the same where if you know how to ask the right questions, if you have the motivation to keep going, awesome, you can keep going through it.
Audrey Wisch:
But a lot of people need human, a lot of people need accountability and a more dynamic or relationship-based way to engage or affect them. And I think, again, the drawbacks are going to be taking a one-size-fits-all solution to a technology that can radically improve all of our lives, but in very unique ways.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And as you were speaking, I was just thinking about how it seems almost every innovation is, in some sense, hated by the elders. I mean, go back to the Greek philosophers, and they thought writing was a very bad idea. And if you check out pessimist archives, every major innovation had people just bringing out the pitchforks and saying, this is awful.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
My own experience was, calculators were relatively new. I'm 64, so calculators were relatively new, and that's all I wanted for a birthday. And back then a simple calculator was really expensive. And then I remember bringing it in and the teacher, not the one who changed my life, not Professor Marzov, but another teacher scowled at me like, "You can't bring that in here. Where's your slide rule?" And I said something really smart-ass to him and got sent to the principal's office…
Audrey Wisch:
I was just reading, I saw Galileo the musical, and it's all about Galileo's amazing innovation and the church's massive discomfort and condemnation of his innovation. And I could not stop thinking about these AI workshops I have for teaching and how this discomfort with new knowledge that radically changes professions and how we view the world and how we view relationships and our own skills and craftsmanship has been, it's timeless. There's this discomfort and this resistance has been timeless. So a hundred percent, I've been thinking about that a lot in this past week as well.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Do you think that the younger generation, it's just like digital natives, right? I have a lot of young people who are team members here at O'Shaughnessy Ventures, and one of the things that I absolutely find fascinating is they can do things in five minutes on an iPhone that an old me would be going, ah.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
So do you think that this will evolve the way a lot of the adoption of technologies evolved with the younger generation becoming native in it and using it. And then maybe a couple of the more switched on olds figure out, Ooh, I should be using this and doing this. And my next question there too is do you have a lot of parents who are skeptical or don't want AI to be involved?
Audrey Wisch:
So Jim, I've now taught AI workshops to parents for the past nine months. I've probably taught to 400 parents. So I've had very front and center view to this. There's such a range. Some parents are very uncomfortable and some are very excited and curious. I a hundred percent am seeing way more than I realized that a lot of parents struggle with technology more than I realized.
Audrey Wisch:
And I would say that part of why my workshops are so effective is because I was not a STEM person myself. I am vulnerable. I'm wearing bright colors, and I feel like I make it relatable. And perhaps if I was a little bit more serious or a little less able to make the information intelligible in a super accessible way, these workshops would not be effective.
Audrey Wisch:
And that goes to show, I think, a lot of the discomfort is people are uncomfortable with things they don't know and don't understand because it takes time and time requires patience, which requires resilience. And I think that's not intuitive to most people. So a lot of the discomfort is just not knowing.
Audrey Wisch:
But I think that one of the interesting things about young people, will this become more, will all the Gen Z be AI savvy? I've been shocked. So we've released some AI product features with our mentors, and I've thought all the mentors are going to be mass adopters and it will be great. And a lot of the mentors who are college students have come with their own resistance and fears.
Audrey Wisch:
And it brings back, I would say, what are the skills that matter most in an era of AI, critical thinking and problem-solving, research and questioning, the social and emotional skills, leadership, collaboration, communication, emotional intelligence. That's going to be so much of what differentiates you.
Audrey Wisch:
And then fourth is adaptability and lifelong learning. Curiosity is crucial. We all know the person in any workplace who's uncomfortable with change or you come in with a new idea and they roll their eyes or they get a little frustrated. I actually think that's more of a nurture versus nature. That's usually more of an inequality someone has, being curious, being open to change.
Audrey Wisch:
I think we really need to prioritize teaching the next generation how to be okay with change and how to embrace change and be adaptable and lifelong learners, or they will not be able to thrive in the society that once AI is truly infused in every aspect of our society is going to change more exponentially than ever before.
Audrey Wisch:
And so I think that I'm optimistic that the younger generation will be AI native and AI savvy, but I think I've seen a lot of people uncomfortable with change, more so than I've anticipated. And I think we need to place more emphasis on lifelong learning and questioning and curiosity and openness rather than this rigidity and resistance to change.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Yeah, curiosity. I think it was Brené Brown who said “curiosity is a shit starter.” And I always love that quote because it's true. You mentioned nature versus nurture, I often wondered whether you can teach somebody to be curious. Can you?
Audrey Wisch:
You can, but it's not easy. One of the things we try to empower all mentors to do is lead with Socratic method. And I think that when you ask a kid a ton of questions and you get them to get to the answer finally, that's one little way to spark curiosity. I also think our school system often eliminates it.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Yeah. Yeah. It sometimes seems like our school system was designed to crush creativity.
Audrey Wisch:
Yeah. It's like a nine to five job. You clock in, you clock out, go through the motions. I think a fascinating... So I was working with my initial mentee and helping her. We usually worked on her blog, but sometimes I would help her with preparing her first resume or some school things. And she was super stocked, she had a Shakespeare essay she had to write, which was rewrite this scene from The Tempest and make it a contemporary version.
Audrey Wisch:
And so we were brainstorming, okay, it was a courting each other scene, what is courting each other in a contemporary version look like? Okay, they court each other on Snapchat, so it's going to be a Snapchat dialogue. We're going to use emojis. And we got that. We were excited. And then she got quiet. She withdrew for a second. She used to be more shy. She's come out of her shell in our four years working together.
Audrey Wisch:
And I said, "What? Do you not like that idea?" And she said, "Isn't my teacher going to think that I'm a bad writer if I'm using a Snapchat dialogue?" And I said, "Whoa. Why do you think your teacher's giving you this assignment?" She said, "I don't know." I said, "What was your last assignment?" "Analytical." "The assignment before?" "Analytical." "What do you think your teacher's trying to evaluate?"
Audrey Wisch:
Again, I didn't tell her, I asked the questions and asked the questions until finally she goes, "Oh, she wants us to show that we know that the themes of Shakespeare are timeless. And so if I do this contemporary version as a Snapchat dialogue, that's probably going to be super creative and original. Yes." She didn't even know why the teacher was assigning what they were assigning.
Audrey Wisch:
Most kids have no idea what teachers are evaluating them, why they're assigning what they're assigning. And so that inherently epitomizes, curiosity has been killed that kids are not even asking, why am I learning what I'm learning or what's my teacher hoping for me to prove or demonstrate to them about my understanding, my knowledge?
Audrey Wisch:
And so I would say that that act of questioning and helping a kid asking all the questions to get them to the answer is one way to invoke curiosity, at least from what I have seen. But it takes time and it takes patience.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
You mentioned Shakespeare and I was a nerd. And so I hear Shakespeare and I immediately think, “let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Love is not love, which alters when it alteration finds, nor bends with the remover to remove. O no, love is never fixed mark, which looks upon tempest and is never shaken. It is the star to every wandering bark, whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.”
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
What do you think about memory? What do you think about... One of the reasons why, I'll be brutally honest, I memorized all these poems basically to try to get dates with girls. But there is an aspect where when you have it in your own hard drive, so to speak, in your own mind, you can immediately draw up that particular sonnet by Shakespeare and it leads to a bunch of other connections. Do you think that that's in danger with it all being at our fingertips?
Audrey Wisch:
Yes, I do. And I think I'm constantly torn between this. Albert Einstein in a pre-digital age said, never memorize what you can already look up. And we are in a post-Google era. We're in an AI era. It has never been so easy to access any piece of information at your fingertips.
Audrey Wisch:
And so that's where my whole, with the emergence of AI, it's a catalyst. It's an impetus. We must make change. We must change how we educate the next generation because we're still asking them to absorb and regurgitate what they learned in a textbook.
Audrey Wisch:
But does that mean that memorization in its entirety is not a noble thing, is not helpful in certain ways? No. I think that another interesting aspect of memory is it's often a lot easier to memorize things when you care about them. I might've struggled to memorize whatever formula or equation for math or science. But when I was track-obsessed in high school, I knew everyone's personal record times.
Audrey Wisch:
Every famous runner I knew their 800 time, their mile time, maybe sometimes they even memorized over the years how it progressed, I couldn't help myself. It was ingrained in my head. And now I memorize our mentor database. I can't help myself.
Audrey Wisch:
I was in San Francisco at the farmer's market, someone comes up to me and they say, "Audrey, hi." I was like, "I'm so sorry. Who are you?" She was like, "I'm a mentor, Emma." I was like, "What's your last name?" I go, "I know who you are. You ran the mental health club in high school. You're an earth systems major at Stanford. You're mentoring this girl and this girl." And she was like, "How do you know that?" I can't help it. I look through, I get excited seeing our new mentors, and I memorize that.
Audrey Wisch:
And so I would say, and you clearly memorize Sonnet 116 because you cared about impressing girls with your Shakespeare knowledge. So it's tricky. I think memory, and I also love the state song. I remember the state song, the state and capital song, and I'm grateful I memorized those songs. I'm grateful I memorized those maps.
Audrey Wisch:
And so I would say I toggle between Albert Einstein's quote and the value of people memorizing things. I think that's so much of what makes us human, especially in a learning sense.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And part of that leads us back to you saying that really the ability to ask good and better questions, to structure them better is going to be a big part, I think, of getting the most out of AI.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
So if you don't mind, walk us through how you would structure a question. Instead of, let's just off the top of my head, tell me why Shakespeare was such a great poet. That's the simple prompt that you put into one of the large language models.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
How would you change that? I don't mean to put you on the spot here, but how would you change that to get a much more compelling, a much richer answer from the large language model than that simple query?
Audrey Wisch:
So I would ask you the follow-up question. Tell me why Shakespeare was such a great poet. To who? Is it in the Great Canon and societally, worldwide? Is it to English teachers? I would ask whose definition of great, that's the first thing I would ask. So if we're doing prompt engineering, what would your answer be in that case?
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
My answer would be why was Shakespeare seemingly so gifted in the analysis of humanity in terms not just of love or jealousy or envy or bravery, but that he also managed, in addition to these deep insights, to put them into killer couplets and plays.
Audrey Wisch:
So that was a much better question. Why was Shakespeare seemingly so gifted at capturing not just love, envy jealousy, but also in addition to these deep insights, putting them into killer couplets and plays. And then the follow-up I would ask is, why do you care? Are you curious about his personal history?
Audrey Wisch:
Are you curious about his craft? Are you trying to understand why he was so talented personally as a human, what his history and track record was? Or what about his ability to capture these human sentiments, love, envy, jealousy so effectively and convey them so beautifully in his couplets and plays? What about his craft made it so powerful?
Audrey Wisch:
So I would ask those follow-up questions and really try to get at what are you trying to answer? Because that's a much more specific question, but it is still quite broad.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
I like it. You use a Socratic method of iteration to get closer and closer to what they're really looking for.
Audrey Wisch:
And what I find fascinating is when playing around with AI, I am often confronted by my uncertainty or my lack of knowledge. I get a response that I'm dissatisfied with, and I realize that I don't actually know what I'm trying to ask. And that forces me to be a lot more specific that with what I'm trying to get at, and the more specific I am with the input, typically the more satisfied I am with the output.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
One of the other ways that I've actually, I experiment with a bunch of different ways to prompt large language models. And one of the interesting ways is to ask the model itself, is to say, hey, I am trying to figure out, let's stick with Shakespeare, I am trying to figure out why this Willy Shakespeare guy is held in such high esteem and I'm interested in this poem or that poem, and how could I make this question better?
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And then depending on the large language model, it does a pretty good job of prompting in a very similar manner, by the way, well, why do you want to learn about Shakespeare? What specific aspect? That's very helpful as well. That gets back to curiosity in a way though, doesn't it? Because you've got to have that innate or initial, let's not call it innate. You have to have that initial curiosity to even go and ask a large language model about Shakespeare.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And so it would seem to me, and correct me if I'm wrong here, and I'm just inferring this from our conversation, it would seem to me that you and your mentors would, rather than do that, would first try to figure out what animates this child? What is this child passionate about?
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Because then it makes it a lot easier if it's baseball or whatever, music or TikTok or anything, really. I bet you could turn those into a series of questions that ultimately become prompts to get the child to get revved up. Wait a minute, what? This is so cool. Do you find that?
Audrey Wisch:
Yeah. Yeah. And I would say what's interesting about our model is there's two, sometimes we hit them all, and that's home run amazing. But there's two nodes of connectivity for sparking interest. There's one is the actual interest. They love sports, they love cosmetics. And starting with that.
Audrey Wisch:
The other is the connection with the mentor. Someone, a parent can come to Curious Cardinals and say, "I want a mentor to help my kid in school who also has ADHD, who's a guy. He only has female teachers. He just got diagnosed with ADHD. He thinks that he's not going to be a good student now. And I want him to work with someone who also has ADHD, is thriving, and help him realize he's going to be okay and help them mystify what tips and tricks this person developed to thrive as the young adult they are."
Audrey Wisch:
And so that's the other thing. It's not just the interest, it's also the identity. Seeing is believing. You are who you can see, seeing someone you connect to or relate to. That's also, I think it all, the common denominator is tapping into kids' why, tapping into what they care about and what they value. And part of what they value is themselves, who they are.
Audrey Wisch:
And so when they can work with someone who shares a lot of who they are, what they care about, what's unique to their experience or viewpoint, it makes them more motivated. It makes them feel like, okay, well this person's like me in a few years, I should care. I should try a bit harder. So I think that's the other interesting part, is AI can really help with the topical interest level part. Can it help with the seeing is believing? I'm not sure.
Audrey Wisch:
And that's arguably where Curious Cardinals wins is we acknowledge that our mentors may not be the best at breaking down the Pythagorean theorem to a seventh grader because maybe they've done it with a few other students, but AI has done it hundreds of times in millions of different ways and we can say, this is their learning style, this is what their interest is.
Audrey Wisch:
AI, you help with the Pythagorean theorem, but ultimately, if this kid's going to do the extra work, put in the extra time, they need to believe in themselves. They need a North Star, they need motivation. And that's the role the mentor human figure can play.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Yeah, the human makes it relatable in a way that the pure tech just simply doesn't, I think. I guess we have mirror neurons for a reason and being able to have a mimetic role model, so to speak, is going to be very, very helpful.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Do you think that when you first came... You said you have an interesting story about how you yourself got involved and interested in AI. Would you mind sharing that?
Audrey Wisch:
Yeah, yeah. So as I said, I was a history major humanities' gal. My co-founder has always been the one pushing me to embrace technology more enthusiastically. And I've come a long way. I think that if anything, I was resistant because I thought the two were contradictory to one another, the human connectivity aspect of it and what technology would do.
Audrey Wisch:
And I realized that was wrong. And through being open-minded and ever curious, my perspective evolved dramatically. But I still was someone who lacked confidence in STEM, did not consider myself a STEM person, and felt that feeling of Audrey, the only girl in her honors math class who everything else came so much more easily and math was a little harder, and these negative voices would seep into my head.
Audrey Wisch:
I felt that when I was hearing all the hype around crypto, I was like, I don't understand this. I don't get it. And I really force myself with that. You cannot just feel uncomfortable and keep that discomfort. You have to learn and be curious and overcome that discomfort. You are not going to repeat the same patterns of your high school self that you're teaching all these younger girls to not be susceptible to as well.
Audrey Wisch:
And so when AI launched in October 2022, I probably went to ChatGPT, I played around for a second, and then probably was frustrated with an answer and axed out and didn't get that excited. Of course, the fact that it got to a million users in five days, which is unprecedented. Caught my attention, I found fascinating, but I wasn't doing the learning. I wasn't like, I got to learn this. I got to figure this out.
Audrey Wisch:
In January of 2023, no, 2020, yeah, 2023, a Curious Cardinals' mom who became a mentor, called me and was like, "Audrey, you want to change the future of K-12 education? You have got to hop on the AI bandwagon." And that was my, you know what? Okay, no questions asked. I don't understand this right now, how it works, how to use it, how I can leverage it for my benefit. But that's not okay. That's not an acceptable answer. I've got to overcome that discomfort and I'm going to commit to becoming an expert here.
Audrey Wisch:
So, busy with work still. I said I'm going to spend 15 minutes every day playing around with ChatGPT. That was the first month in January, 15 minutes turned to I'm a scrappy startup founder. I worked 12 to 16 hour days using it in every single hour of my working day. It changed my life, it changed my output, my productivity. I was so excited. I wanted to teach our whole team how to leverage it to our advantage.
Audrey Wisch:
And then we've always had this starry-eyed vision for personalizing learning at scale. And so that was the playing around one night, oh my God, the technology is here to actualize this vision. This is amazing. And so I would say my journey was one of not being comfortable, not being savvy or native at first, but really knowing that this is an exciting, amazing innovation.
Audrey Wisch:
And I got to be curious and figure out why I should care and learn by doing, figured out not only will this save me personal time and value as an operator and a builder, but this is going to change the trajectory of the company we're trying to build. And so that was my journey.
Audrey Wisch:
And now I have literally taught 40 AI workshops to parents all over the country, and I'm really passionate about demystifying it and powering others with its superpowers and really passionate about how we can leverage it in our product to scale this human model effectively, as well as how it's going to completely revolutionize the education system as we know it.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
I tend to agree, and one thing that I use large language models for a lot is I put in an essay I've written about something or whatever, and then I ask it to play devil's advocate and show me or steel man the opposing argument to the one I have put forth here. That's really, really useful.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And then another more fun way of doing it that I've gotten a lot of older people interested in AI in is I would just sit with them and they would poo poo it. I don't need that. And I'd say, "Hey, what are your favorite books?" If they were readers. "What are your favorite TV shows?" If they're music people, "Who are your favorite bands?" If you're classical, "Do you like Bach or do you like Beethoven? Do you love both?" Et cetera. And I would elicit from them. Here's what I like. I like these shows, I like these books. I like this.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And I said, "Come here." And we'd put them all into a large language model and say recommend some stories, books, TV shows, music that someone who loves all of these might really, really like, and it is almost magical as I watch them look at the screen, their eyes widen and they're like, "Oh, I didn't mention that one, but I do love that one." And then, "Oh my God, I've never heard." And then they'll do a piece of paper and they'll start writing down everything.
Audrey Wisch:
Jim, I now get DMs from parents every day. I would love to give to one of my AI workshops so we can invite all your AI skeptic friends, because that is the exact same thing that happens. They get so excited realizing how you can tailor it to your interest to save time and add value in your life.
Audrey Wisch:
One of the things I like to say to people is, you can think of AI in two buckets. AI for idea generation or AI for idea refinement and polishing. I am an ideas gal. I have no shortage of ideas. If anything, maybe you've been able to tell, I'm working more on brevity, so I'll more use AI to polish and refine my ideas.
Audrey Wisch:
It takes me a nanosecond to jot out all my thoughts and ideas. What really takes the time is the process of editing and refining and polishing because people have a short attention span and less is often more. And so I think that's also what I've noticed and found really awesome is the frameworks to educate people on AI that people find very empowering and illuminating.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Do you think that there will come a time where the classic K-12 system that we have right now is just totally revamped around things like AI that we've been discussing? Or do you think maybe modified would be a better way of thinking about it?
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Do you think that the standard K-12 education could begin to morph into something that does all of those human centered things that AI is never going to really be able to, as you've mentioned with your mentors? Could your type of system actually become a replacement for traditional K-12?
Audrey Wisch:
I hope so. I'm optimistic that one day, yes. School does so much and school is the epicenter of so much. School is off to childcare and plays so many other... Wears all the hats. So that's a really challenging and unique dynamic of it in it all. I would also say that it's going to take time. There's so much discomfort and resistance right now that I'm observing on the ground.
Audrey Wisch:
What I think is also one of the obstacles in making change in K through 12 education is college. And so long as success in America, sending your kid to college and college is the key to unlock many future career opportunities, it's harder to change K-12. And so that's another interesting trend is sentiments around college and the university system changing sentiments around whether college is necessary to have a great career. And I think the tides are turning.
Audrey Wisch:
We have so many influencers who've never even gone to college who have millions of followers and have so much influence. And so people are turning on its head what it means to have influence, to have credibility. And there's a lot of protests on college campuses right now and a lot of talk about whether these are truly institutions cultivating different perspectives and curiosity and openness.
Audrey Wisch:
And we don't have to go into the politics of it all, but I think there's a lot of conversations and a lot of questioning coming out of the pandemic about the systems we have in place right now and questioning if they're right and if they're working. And so I think true systemic change in K-12 education is going to require change in college and the system there in secondary learning as well.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
There's a good book called Paper Belt on Fire that talks about what's going on with universities and the changing ideas about... It's written by a fellow who ran Peter Thiel's fellowship program. And I'm really interested in the... I had one friend who joked to me that the ultimate flex was... Well, actually you've made the ultimate flex.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
The ultimate flex is somebody who gets into an Ivy but then leaves to do something else. You're demonstrating, hey, I could get Yale, Harvard, Stanford, but now I've really got to go do this. I wonder, do they go hand in hand or are they independent variables? Does what needs to happen on the change in college, is that uniquely separate from K-12 or are they intermingled?
Audrey Wisch:
Great question. Love that framing of it. Well, I would say that right now, whether you like it or not, a major dynamic of our education system is outcomes. Outcomes with grades, outcomes with standardized tests, outcomes that are supposed to unlock future opportunities. And so long as the outcomes are in service of what's next, which is very much the nature of K-12 and school.
Audrey Wisch:
I was talking to one of our mentors at Stanford who was saying that part of how I got here was I was always so motivated by what I'm doing today and how that's enabling me to get to the next thing, to get acceptance to Stanford, to get the job, the internship. And now I'm at Stanford and I'm almost graduating and I'm like, whoa, am I always going to be like this? When am I going to just be grateful for where I am?
Audrey Wisch:
And that's not something our school system teaches. It teaches do this to get that. It's very much a means to an end. And so I think right now it's set up such that success from K-12 is acceptance into a college and a college unlocks other opportunities.
Audrey Wisch:
If anything, I think it's the workforce that could change it. The workforce showing you don't need a four-year degree to thrive. And whether it's climb this corporate ladder or gain professional success in another medium, I think showing that there's different paths and there's variabilities that unlock against success. Everyone has a different definition of success, but I would almost place my bets on the workforce as we know it to change K-12 more so than college.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Interesting. Yeah, I think that's a good answer because you're right, the standard operating procedure today is you got to do good in K-12 because you got to get into a good college and then you got to get that certification and that imperator to prove that you know what you're talking about.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And I definitely see that it's not a momentous change, but I definitely see people much more open to, for example, I honestly very rarely even ask somebody I'm thinking about hiring where they graduated from and because our process, we like to have somebody come on as a consultant first because I think that a single interview is a snapshot and I want to watch a movie instead.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And that way, what would the crypto guys call it? Proof of work. And I think that I'm odd in that respect because my daughter who graduated from Yale, well, if she listens to this, she will really get after me. But I definitely think that on the margins you're seeing more and more of that with…
Audrey Wisch:
When you're hiring someone, do you care what they've learned or do you care what they can do?
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
They care what they can do and what they can do tends to demonstrate what they've learned.
Audrey Wisch:
I was just going to say, typically what they've learned is an input and output is what they can do with that learning.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Exactly. Yeah. I also give extra credit as it were to, I just want to see how they solve problems. Back when I was still doing asset management, I was the scourge of the people who were interviewing interns because I never used any of the classic questions. Where do you see yourself in five years or what's your greatest weakness? My greatest weakness is I just try too hard and I just give everything I have to the job I'm doing.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And so what I would do is give them things that I knew that probably weren't going to get the right answer to. So for example, remember this is asset management, so one of my classics was the Dow Jones Industrial Average is a price-weighted index of 30 companies that does not include the reinvestment of dividends. The S&P 500 is a cap-weighted index that does include the reinvestment of dividends. If we started in 1927 with both indexes, where would the Dow be today if it included the reinvestment of dividends?
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Now, clearly I was not asking for them to give me the right answer. What I wanted to watch was how are they going to tackle that. And the person who got my highest recommendation literally took 20 minutes, queried me, "Can I ask questions?" Of course, you can ask questions. What was the average dividend yield of the Dow over that period? What was its lowest? What was the highest? And then can I have a calculator?
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And literally, I watched him work out exactly what he thought it would be. He was way off. But that gave you the opportunity to talk about the magic of compounding. But yeah, I'm much more interested in how they approach problem solving, how creative they are, how open-minded they are, because those, at least in my history, have been much more indicative of the type of work that they could go on to do.
Audrey Wisch:
Yeah. Well, that's the value of showing your work on your math test, kids. Except if you got the wrong answer in a math test it ultimately negative five. Even if your work is beautiful, unless you've got a great teacher
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
That is a critical point and a really good one for you to pick up on. I did not care that they got the right answer. What I cared about was how they tried to get there.
Audrey Wisch:
And I would say, especially in entrepreneurship, it doesn't matter if you got the right or wrong answer. What matters is you have the resilience to keep at it and continue your curiosity driving you to be in the pursuit of the right answer day after day.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Exactly. Well, I can't believe that I'm already getting the hook from my producers here. Audrey, this has been really fun. I love what you're doing. What a great time to be alive with all of the innovations and people like you who are making use of them and improving, hopefully, what I think has become a kind of woefully bad way of trying to educate kids. I mean, they're our future, right?
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
And if we don't take very, very seriously all of these new ways that enhance the ability to learn and continue to learn, that's the other one I'm passionate about. Where can everybody find you and Curious Cardinals?
Audrey Wisch:
Curiouscardinals.com, check out our website. Connect, follow me on LinkedIn. I post a lot about what we're doing and my AI philosophies at Curious Cardinals on Instagram. I know you brought up Twitter. I am on Twitter, but we're not as prolific on Twitter, but Instagram, LinkedIn and go to our website, Curious Cardinals, sign up for our newsletter.
Audrey Wisch:
And I didn't even talk too about how we are using AI in our human centric AI empowered model, which is we're really trying to get at the core of mentors are best at teaching and showing up and engaging and inspiring kids. But part of being a great mentor is so much more. It's the follow-ups, it's the accountability, it's the summary of what we learned. It's the recap.
Audrey Wisch:
And so we are trying to use AI to provide lesson summaries and performance takeaways, identify and create the best educational content, hold students accountable outside of sessions, synthesize data to tailor learning, offer personalized recommendations and identify key trends highlighting student needs.
Audrey Wisch:
And so essentially, AI at every other touch point of the learning journey with this thesis that never going to tell parents that a mentor bot will engage, instill confidence or inspire their kids better than human can because I don't believe it ever will. But we can use AI every other touch point of the learning journey to deliver the most efficacious data-driven and impactful learning experience.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Perfect way to end the conversation on Curious Cardinals. We do, however, have one last question for you and we ask it of all of our guests and it is this, we are going to wave a magic wand and we are going to make you emperors of the world. And you can't put anyone in a reeducation camp and you can't kill anybody.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
But what you can do is speak into a magic microphone and say two things and the entire population of the world is going to wake up the next day and they're going to think, I've just had two of the greatest ideas ever. And unlike all those other times, I'm actually going to begin acting on them right now. What two things are you going to accept in the world's population?
Audrey Wisch:
The world's population? Be curious and be compassionate. Assume miscommunication, not malice.
Jim O'Shaughnessy:
Oh, I love both of those. Those are great. Audrey, this has been so much fun. Thank you very much for coming on. I wish you absolutely all the best and we will definitely be watching your progress.
Audrey Wisch:
Thank you. Thank you so much for the amazing conversation today, and thanks for having me on.