#505 From VC to Education Disruptor: Ted Dintersmith on Fixing Math, Schools, and Our Mindset for the AI Era

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Mehmet: Hello, and we come back to a new present of the CTO Show with Mehmet today. I'm very pleased joining me from the US Ted Dintersmith. Ted is a bestseller author, he was a venture capitalist, and now he's focusing on [00:01:00] education. But as you know, audience, you know, like I like to keep people to speak about themselves because I have a theory.

No one can talk better about anyone else other than themselves. So Ted, thank you very much for being here with me today on the show. Um. A little bit about you. So for people who might not know you, your journey and what you're currently up to, and then we're gonna take the conversation from there. But I'm gonna give a teaser for the audience.

We're gonna discuss a lot of things. So we're gonna talk about math, but you're gonna understand why we're gonna talk about AI education and a little bit about startups also as well. So, Ted, without further ado, the floor is yours. 

Ted: Sure. Um, so I spent way too many years in school, uh, a lot of years in school, but I ended up with a PhD and a math modeling program at Stanford.

My first job was with a, a startup business that made, and it sounds laughable today, single purpose integrated circuits that cost $400 in 1983. And all they did was multiply two fixed point [00:02:00] numbers together quickly. But what was so interesting for me about that is that we were selling those to all the systems companies that were essentially paving the way for the digital revolution.

And so after doing that for several years, I shifted gears, went into venture capital, worked with a top firm in the, in Boston at the time, Charles River Ventures, uh, loved my time in venture capital. And then as my kids got further along in school, you know, toward middle school, I'd say I, I just looked and I said like, wait a minute, what they're being required to do, how they're being graded, what they're being assessed on, the material they're learning.

Not only is it preparing them for a world that begs for creativity and entrepreneurial mindsets, it's actually jeopardizing those mindsets and those skills. So I dropped my venture capital career and took up being kind of a, a warrior on the co cause of all aligning education priorities with what will really prepare us for life and [00:03:00] education.

Resources don't necessarily limit themselves to K through 12 or K through college. They can be community colleges, uh, boot camps. They can be a whole range of things because there're really none of us, no matter what our age they can't, there wouldn't benefit from upgrading our skills and expanding our mind, mind horizons.

Mehmet: Ted, there is something, while I was preparing for the episode today that you said, which I'm big, immediately I was hooked because, um, I felt that there's something wrong, but it's good to to hear it from, from you. So you, you studied, you said like, we are, we studied the wrong math for decades and I felt this, honestly Yeah.

For ages. But what do you think is the right math that we have missed? Like, um, and why do you think it was kept out of the classrooms? Like why did you teach us about it? 

Ted: Yeah, and I'll, I'll send you for show notes. Uh uh, this where's [00:04:00] Waldo Mosaic of all the topics that are covered in high school math, and I use that with large audiences.

And my challenge to the audience is basically find something on here you use and can explain. So it's like 75 topics, you know, Taylor series expansion, the chain rule, uh, some of angles in a Pentagon, on and on and on. No one can do it. I mean, these are hundreds, even, you know, few thousand adults and no one can find anything.

I think the key point is, you know, I graduated high school in 1970, you know, before 1970. The math we studied did make sense. You know, there really weren't readily available computational resources. There were many professions that required humans to be able to carry out rote mathematical exercises quickly by hand, error free.

So that used to be, and I emphasize, used to be an important skill. You know, now computers are at our fingertips. You know, nobody needs to, you know, factor execute [00:05:00] minus three x squared plus two x minus five or something. I mean, the, it's just a whole set of low level math esoterica. That somehow remains in the curriculum.

And the reason it sticks in our curriculum, it is the essence of our high stakes exams. So we literally hold kids accountable to hold teachers and schools accountable, to have everyone spend thousands of hours on rote math mechanics that adults don't use in your smartphone does perfectly. And it's used punitively.

It, it, it, it may be of some marginal benefit to adults that pursue math-based careers. 'cause you get fluent in symbols and abstract thinking and the logic of math. And I appreciate that, that that was definitely true for me. But that's a tiny sliver of the population. And, and for most, it just makes them hate math and they leave with no real skills to show for it.

Um, and so I, I wrote this book about the ideas of math [00:06:00] that we all need to understand. With an invitation that to, to use artificial intelligence as your thought partner to carry out the mechanics. And, you know, I, I'm very excited about the book. It's a little bit of a lift, I'll be honest. When you say to people, Hey, I've got a book that makes math exciting and interesting with concept, you're gonna understand there's a degree of skepticism.

Like a lot of, and this is the heartbreak, right? A lot of people, as soon as you say math, the blood drains out of their face. And it's just like, I don't ever want to go back to that. And how sad is that? 

Mehmet: It, it is sad. Um, you know, for me, even when I was in, in school and high school, uh, although I studied engineering, so I needed math, um, but I was always asking myself like, why, why we need to memorize all these like, old, uh, formulas.

Uh, calculators were available at least at my age. But still, no, no, no. [00:07:00] Calculator's not allowed. But I was telling, you know, I was arguing sometime. Okay, but after I finish college, I gotta use the calculator because it's faster to do it with the calculator rather than, you know, I do it myself. Now there is a camp chat that say, that used, they used to say that, yeah, we were doing this or we're still doing this because we want also the students to get their brain muscles working and they need to do this.

Do you agree with that, or that's a complete mess? 

Ted: Yeah, I, it's certainly the defense, right? When I, when I say to people, just look, these are all the things that are covered in high school math. No one adult, you know, and peop it's not just me. I mean, other people have looked into it and it's a tiny proportion of people that use any high school math beyond fractions and ratios.

You know that the line of defense is often yes, but this is teaching kids how to think. This is, this is, uh, the magic of problem solving. And two points on [00:08:00] that. I mean, there's almost no evidence for that. The one organization that squirreled together the funds to look at it was the Rand Corporation. And I quote the results of their study in my book, but they looked at the high stakes, the math that populates the high stakes high school exams and concluded there was.

0% of it, 0% of it was related to deeper learning. The second thing that I'd say is that, that anything can be a vehicle for teaching us how to think. You know, playing the piano, cooking, you know, needle point, rote math mechanics. And if you visit schools in a place like Finland, where it's very different from the United States and each nation has its different set of priorities and mix, but in Finland, they'll often put a really interesting problem on the board and then encourage the students to come up with as many different ways to solve it.

And there's clearly benefit from that. E even factoring polynomials, I think there'd be a very interesting challenge for kids to say, why was this important? How did this used to be used [00:09:00] before? It was all integrated into software. Um, but that's not what we do in the United States. These test scores are such high stakes.

When I visit and I visit a lot of schools, the the basic. Mandate there is, you know, we're gonna teach you one way to do it and we will actually mark you down if you don't do it the way we taught you. And the reason for that is it's speed, efficiency, and accuracy. Right? And, and so when you see a kid that is marked wrong for doing, getting a really interesting answer because they didn't do it how they're taught, I mean, that's heartbreaking.

But the book goes right at a lot of math concepts that beg for creativity and, and I think your audience, no matter what walk they're in, can relate, you know, in my business career I used. Estimation all the time. How do I estimate a market size prediction? What do I predict future revenues will be? Uh, how do I optimize an allocation of resources across our fund or within a, a [00:10:00] portfolio company?

Uh, what algorithms are behind the work of these companies? Uh, how do you make important math based, but creativity and logic-based decisions, you know, these things are all very interesting, right? But they're not one right answer things. They're, they're creative and expansive challenges. And, and just to stick with that example, I mean, how do you estimate market size?

You know, like there can be really great approaches to that. There are important trade-offs between the cost. And the accuracy there. It begs for precise definitions. Companies, I've seen many startups go way wrong on poor estimates of market size. I've seen companies nail it because they had a clue. You know, they're really important skills, but because there's not one right answer, they don't fit into high stake standardized exams.

And because they're not on the high stakes exams, they're not in the classroom. 

Mehmet: Ted, the, did the, your career as a venture capitalist [00:11:00] also like, you know, expose some of these things for you? Just because, you know, you were mentioning about the valuation of the companies because, you know, I, I mentor sometimes entrepreneurs part of a program and you know, every time we reach the financial modeling and we reach, you know, the parent kind of a, uh, ask for investors.

I would say 95% of the, of the people freaks out because they said, oh, it's math. You know, we are afraid of it. We don't, we don't want to do it. Or we want to get someone expert in math. Yeah. And then I go back to that and said, Hey, like, it's not the, it's not the case, but you know, like how this also affected maybe even sometimes startups and, you know, uh, entrepreneurs who are looking for raising funds in freaking out because, oh, it's math, it's complex.

We don't know how to do it. So either they go and do it wrong, or maybe, I don't know, maybe of course [00:12:00] you have more experience what, what went wrong with them? Like how this affected negatively on startups and businesses in general. 

Ted: Yeah. You, you know, and you're right about people often freaking out and, and I think a lot of people just get lost in a blur of symbols and abstraction that it shouldn't necessarily be the case.

And in my book, I start each of these chapters. Intentionally was something I've participated in or observed with kids in sort of grades three through eight, just to make the point that you don't need an advanced degree to come up with creative ways to estimate how many jelly beans are in a jar. But what I observed, and I, I, you know, was in venture for a long time and so I easily been in, in a thousand board meetings is all the time kind of on the fly.

We, we'd say, well, what if we change this? You know, like, how would that play out for revenue streams and costs over the next, you know, three to eight quarters? And, and you know that [00:13:00] there's sort of that ballpark estimates based on a clear understanding of what you want to accomplish based on almost like back of the envelope calculations where you understand the ideas.

And now with ai, you know, when I started writing the book. Chat, GPT often couldn't add numbers together. I mean, it was quite primitive when it came to math capability and you probably read many of your, your listeners will have seen the, the recent results where chat GPT was in the top 10% of the international Math Olympiad.

So these are the very best high schools kids, generally seniors globally taking on very difficult math-based problems and without even reformatting them for the LLM chat GPT top 10% today or a couple months ago. And you know that in a year or two it'll be the top 1% and then it will be better than any human could ever do.

You know the point there is AI can do the rope mechanics, what humans need to understand. Are the [00:14:00] core ideas which are relevant, what questions to ask, what things to push on, and how to connect them to what's going on in their life. And, and you'll see it, you know, like we wanna do, put in a new data center.

Great example. Um, you know, I was talking to somebody yesterday who, whose job was to raise funds for these cavernous data centers. And, you know, we were talking, I said like, what kind of math do you use for that? Well, we've gotta estimate the overall budget. We've gotta predict the cost over time of energy for this facility.

We've gotta predict the demand. We've got to understand how we can optimize around most recent advances in chip technology. It's replete with interesting math ideas and, and you know, it sort of as a joke said, and how often did you use arc sequence? And, you know, people just look at you like you've lost your mind.

I mean, of course nobody uses arc sequences or, and even no one does. I mean, even scientists and engineers aren't doing complex closed form integrals by hand, yet we continue to make calculus, which is [00:15:00] exactly that in high schools, the high watermark for, for math education, and often forsake by the way, statistics in the process, which is essential for career, for citizenship and life.

I. 

Mehmet: Yeah, like, it's, it's unfortunate, like we force people, I mean students mainly to take things that they don't, they don't like. Um, I decided to take, you know, an approach with my daughter. Honestly. She, she doesn't like math, right? She, she's in high school. She doesn't like math. Like every parent I know in my place, oh, no, math is important.

We need to get another tutor at home to make you stronger at math. I said, look fine. Like, if you don't like math, it's not, it's not the end of the world. Like, uh, but you need to know if you need to have something to calculate how to use tools to get the answer that you want. And guess what? She gets better grades in math because I did that.

No, no. 

Ted: Yeah. I mean, once they see the relevance, once they feel like this could actually make a difference in [00:16:00] my life. There's more motivation and, and yet we, the way we approach it right, is we show them no relevance in life. And you know, would I love to change everything about the math curriculum? I would.

But I, that said, I think if a kid can see ways that math is relevant, they will take the math they're assigned more seriously. 

Mehmet: Yeah. Abs absolutely. Because once they see the practical side of it, actually they enjoyed it. If you ask them, they would enjoy if I am, if they feel they are doing something practical with it.

Like not just the theory. Um, I always remember myself, like of course, high school, university, we studied a lot about differential equations, integrals, and I don't remember any of this now. Of course, now. But the other thing, Chad, which is regulatory education is, and you touched base a little bit on it, but how we can change that, which is we put the students in, let's say one hour, two hours timeframe and we expect from them [00:17:00] to.

Answer an exam and then we measure them if they are successful or not. How do you think, how, what do you think we should do to change this? Also as well, still today, I'm sure in the us in other parts of the world, you need to go and do A-S-A-T-A exam or whatever is called now. And actually every single place in the world, they followed almost the same concept.

And I think it's not fair because we can't just test someone knowledge in a timeframe of two hours. What should we do to change that time? 

Ted: Yeah, there there's a real trade off between. Content and tests that make it easy to rank someone in Dubai against someone in Istanbul versus somebody in Boston, you know?

And, and that means you really want the same content, the same curriculum that students study in anticipation of the same exam. So those scores are comparable and, well, that hasn't really been done globally. I actually have a high opinion of [00:18:00] OECD and their P of test, which because curriculums are quite different, tend to get at more thought provoking questions.

And they do them on a sampled and audited basis so that it, they can actually have skilled evaluators look at solutions. But in the US we drive it all with these very dumbed down high stakes exams, the SAT math being a perfect example, or AP calculus or the Nation's report card. And you just look at the questions.

I mean, I, I do know a a bit about math and I look at the questions and many are poorly formed, most have nothing to do with, with life as an adult. And, you know, but you realize it's there because in our country you can compare a kid in North Dakota to a kid in North Carolina, to a kid in Nevada, and, and it's, do we care more about ranking and sorting kids or do we care more about giving kids a sense that math can help them in life?

Opening up their eyes to the beauty and power of math and making sure they come out of that experience, [00:19:00] understanding the ideas. And we do a lot of the former and essentially none of the latter. And, and you know, to to your, specifically to your point, if you, if you gave kids a challenge, let's go back to the jelly beans in a jar.

And you said to kids, and I've done this with schools, you know, like, challenge your kids to come up with as many different interesting ways to estimate how many jelly beans in the jar. E even fourth graders can blow you away with approaches. Adults, you know, I had never thought of. I just said like, wow, that's so interesting.

And, and you know, you realize, man, that's expansive, that draws on creativity. Now there's, at the end of the day logic and math behind it. But it shows that math is really the, the language of ideas, not a sea of rote. And, and I think that's where. An informed adult can look at those creative approaches and have an opinion on this is really well thought out and could be quite effective.

And this one makes not that much sense, [00:20:00] but you can't do that challenge and rank a kid from state to state or from country to country. And so, so it's that trade off. Do we standardize so we can rank or do we align with real world needs so we can empower? And I'm clearly in the latter camp. 

Mehmet: Yeah, same, same, same from my side.

Now the other thing, and I know maybe we are kind of repeating ourselves and but, but this is touches, is, you know, the future of, of humankind, in my opinion. So two things. First, now in the age of ai, everything is changing, yet we go to schools, and this is global because I spoke on the podcast to different people in the education, uh, technology sector.

Um, so we still kind of use the inherited system from the 19th century, which is called, like, it's the kind of a put the children in a factory setup and then, you know, they go from rank to rank. And then the other thing, which is, um, the curriculum itself now in [00:21:00] the age of ai, and just so I was telling someone, you know, before this, uh, this, uh, this interview that I never seen a fast paced development in technology similar to what we are seeing now in the ai.

So yeah, we've seen like different waves. So the first one was the transistor back in the fifties, and then we in the 20th century and then we start to see the microchip, microprocessors, phones, mobile phones, smartphone, you know, but it was like waves that it used to take at least 10 years to see, you know, the impact.

Now in the age of AI we're talking about months, so. What fundamentally have to change that what, what, how we, we could get rid of this very old system to prepare the, the next generation. 

Ted: Yeah. Well, I wanna follow up. That's a great, great question and the, and the, one of the concepts that recurs in my book is exponential growth, you know, our compound, right?

You know, interest growth. [00:22:00] And it's a very difficult concept for humans to understand because we tend to focus on the immediacy. So most phenomenal, look pretty steady as she goes, or in math terms, linear when we look a few months back and a few months forward. But as you know, technology has advanced for six decades exponentially, you know, the chip processing capability is doubled more or less every two years.

And that means that the amount of change in the next 10 years is more than the, the amount of change in the last 50, which is ought to be an enormous wake up call for us. If you look at how fast AI is sprinting ahead. Uh, none of us can predict where it will be in 10 years, but, but almost every expert w is on record is saying in 10 years, machines will be smarter than any human.

And to me, like, okay, we're heading into a world where machines will be smarter than any person. That ought to have profound ramifications for, for what it means to be human and how [00:23:00] humans can kind of have the upper hand in this world. And so what can be done? I've spent maybe 15 years sort of sounding alarm bells in schools.

It's very difficult, you know, I mean, it's, there's sort of this, this locked in sense of inertia. You know, you've got lesson plans, you've got teacher training programs, standardized tests, college admissions, you know, parent expectations, you know, a whole set of things. Block the change. And I'd say the, the thing that's likely to break that down, which is a very unfortunate thing, is that I think we're heading into a world where almost all college graduates will face limited to no prospects for employment.

And, and why? Well, you know, if you've spent 16 years in school being on the receiving side of here's your assignment, do it. And by the way, don't use chat GBT or you know, Claude or some other [00:24:00] AI engine, but don't use that because that will do a better job than you can do. But we want you for 16 years to do by hand assignments knowing that chat, EPT will produce something superior.

How hireable are you? Right? I mean, why, why would I wanna hire somebody for a large salary who demands an office? Who wants to know what title will be on their business card? When I can get it for free or $20 a month or even 200 bucks a month, you know, that's just it. And so training, we, we've largely in education said we are gonna run education according to the scores on these high stakes exams, exams that are explicitly designed to be graded by a computer.

If it can be graded by a computer, it can be done by a computer. So we will produce generations of adults with skill sets that are aligned with but inferior to what machines can do. That to me seems like a recipe for disaster. And so, so I feel like as people get [00:25:00] that there's likely to be real push.

We're already seeing that where parents are more concerned, people are really beginning to deeply question the priorities and purpose of school. And my hope is that we make the changes fast enough and in a constructive enough way, then most people will end up on the right side of this. 

Mehmet: Uh, this reminded me also of something happened, I think last year.

I had a friend who's looking for a, a college for his son, and he was saying, me, you know, like, I really like this college, that they are banning the use of AI tools. That's fantastic. I said, you know what, like, you are sending your son to learn something that's gonna be obsolete for sure. Because if they are not allowing them to use ai, they have something wrong.

And after, you know, giving a little bit time to think about, he said, you know what? Yeah, you're right. Like if, if they're gonna teach them something there that AI can do, so he's unemployable after three years or four years in college, like, right. I [00:26:00] said, yeah. Like, okay, I'm not saying to do everything with ai, but at least, you know, learn and, and choose something that.

Be useful in the future. You wanna say something then? 

Ted: Yeah, no, I think one of the focal points is, you know, like what, and we see it like kids just hand in an essay and it's, it seems clearly to have been written almost with no personal intervention by an AI engine. And, and my advice on that, which I think is reasonable, is to say if you have an assignment and you're worried about somebody cheating with chat, GPT, put the assignment in front of the students, dump it into your prompt engine for chat, GPT, show them the essay that comes back and say, if, if your essay is about that quality, you're gonna get a C.

You know that, that is now your floor and your, your challenge is to do something far better than that. I also think, you know, it's so interesting, right? Is that, think about the workplace environment, right? We'll write an email, people will read it, they'll say, man, that's worth a, [00:27:00] a discussion. Let's get together and talk it through.

And, and you know, so if you're at work and you send an email written by ai, but you know nothing about it, and then somebody says, let's meet about it, and they say, could you elaborate? And you say, uh, uh, hold on. You know, let me just ask chat. GPTI mean, you're like, you're given your walking papers. Right?

And, and education used to be much more about in-person discussion and, and to me it just begs for write something to make a point powerfully, effectively communicate clearly, but then engage in personal interaction. And so it could be small clusters of kids that read each other's essays and then debate and the teacher can sort of pop around from group to group to group and observe and then let the kids self-assess.

How do you think you did? How do you think your peers did? Get good at constructive feedback. It's really goes, it goes back to Socrates, right? I mean, it's not like I'm advancing some radical new idea. This has been around for ages, but, [00:28:00] but when did we decide in school that in-person engagement doesn't matter and, and yet, you know, I visited a ton of schools in the US and abroad.

I tell you, by the time you get to high school, there's almost no question. You know, like I'll sit there and the kids will be taking notes, colleges as well in a lot of those classes. And when there is a question or when somebody comes to office hours, the question is almost always, will this be on the test or help me figure out how to do this for the test.

You know, it's like that's not core intrinsic curiosity that's gaming the system. And you know, so maybe, you know, if in a fortunate set of developments this will return us to what makes this human, which is having a conversation like we're having, having talking to somebody who asks great questions, who pushes back on things, you say, who tell me more.

And, and that you can't cheat with AI on that, you know, even if it's on your glasses. Right. You know, people know. It's like, oh, like, you know, and [00:29:00] you know, like that's the ultimate way to assess whether somebody knows what they're talking about. 

Mehmet: Absolutely. Yeah. Like, uh, there's nothing that is better than human conversation to learn.

And what I've seen, like I think in, in Scandinavian countries, they took this approach. So, you know, especially, you know, they, they, to enhance STEM education, you know, they decided to go with like. Like kind of round tables where students, they talk to each other. So this is what, what worked for them in some of the countries, and I think in Denmark, I'm not sure, or Finland, they don't have something called tests anymore.

They, they removed it and actually, you know, it went up. I mean the, the students performance went, but like exponentially because of this. Now, you know, I, I just, 

Ted: if I, if I could add about Finland, 'cause a friend of mine is Posse Solberg and he architected the changes in Finland and wrote finished lessons and finished lessons 2.0 a a fantastic person.

But when you [00:30:00] talk to him about what enabled all the progress and the rethink in Finland, stay tuned. It was a budget crisis. And people say to do this, it's gonna cost way more money, a budget crisis, and force them to choose, do we want more data or do we want better teacher training? And they looked hard at that and they said, we're throwing the data overboard.

We're gonna trust and train our teachers. So it's a very respected profession. In Finland, there's a joke about three fins walk into a bar, a lawyer, a doctor, and a teacher. And the bartender asks a lawyer, why are you a lawyer? And they say, oh, I applied to education school. I didn't get in. So I decided to be a lawyer.

And the doctor says a thing, you know, it's like, you know, it's very hard. You know, it's a, it's a, it's really does elevate, respect, trust, and compensate the profession. And you know, when I traveled in the US I was in Wyoming and one of the people said, well, you know, when a cow is starving, we feed it. We don't weigh it.

And, and in the US we weigh, [00:31:00] we don't feed. You know, we gathered, we spend billions gathering data. And yet we never step back to say, does this really reflect real learning? And over and over again, the education stories will cite reading and math scores as a proxy for education quality. And that's one of the points I go after in the book is when you see a number, you can't accept it at face value.

You've gotta understand there's a story behind every important number coming our way, whether it's a medical diagnosis or a business metric, or a, an education metric or a civics. Me, you know, they, we live in a world awash with numbers, but if you just take it at face value, if you just, in our country, if, if somebody says unemployment is 2.9% and you just say, oh, 2.9%, that's fantastic economy.

You know, I, I, I push people and I show them. That's an incredibly narrow definition of unemployment, subject to [00:32:00] massive error bars in a far more authentic measure. Is also collected by our Bureau of Labor Statistics, the true TRU unemployment measure. That's not 2.9%, that's 23, 20 4%. And it's a more authentic measure.

But, but if you, you know, and, and I think that's one of the, the ramifications of a math curriculum that says, do it the way you're taught, put your nose down to the grindstone drill and get good at whatever's put in front of you without really ever thinking about it, is the end. You come out and as an adult and you say, oh, there's a number I, it's gotta be true.

And th this is a study that says X causes YII never really spend any time on causation versus correlation. So that must be true. And, and, and, you know, it's like you need to understand those ideas because if you're not, you're gonna be grossly manipulated. 

Mehmet: Right? Absolutely. Yeah, a hundred percent. Now I know in the book also you have something where you cover about, um.[00:33:00] 

Our approach to, you know, risks and uncertainty. Right. So I'm interested in knowing about that, especially with the ai, right? Because now we have the ai and by the way, like it's controversial. I know, but even people sometime they, they, they, they get afraid from the ai. They think the AI is like, you know, take their jobs.

Sometimes they say they will not be able to help them. And back to, you know, the, the dilemma of the math and memorizing equations. Uh, so I want you to, to, you know, shed some light on this about risks and, you know, uncertainty. Because people always, you know, they, they don't like changes. They don't like, you know, things to, 

Ted: yeah.

Mehmet: To, to, to be out of their comfort zone. I'll put it this way. 

Ted: Yeah. You know, I was very lucky 'cause when I, as I wound my way through graduate school, I started in physics for a year and I just, I realized that I didn't love physics. And there were other people that were. You know, more, [00:34:00] you know, Richard Feinman level physicists than I was ever gonna be.

And I found this program in the school of engineering that was applied math, uh, at the time it was called Engineering Economic Systems. That's basically professors that were double E professors in a prior life that felt like you could use math modeling tools more broadly. And my thesis advisor was a guy he passed away recently named Ron Howard, who along with Howard Rafa, they were the two pioneers of decision analysis.

And I have a chapter on decisions. And so I try to explain to the lay person the essentials of decision analysis, but it's eye-opening and it, and you would think that, that this would be an important thing in everybody's high school education. I mean, like our lives depend on the quality of the decisions.

We, and what could be more, I mean, what could be more important than equipping a high school kid with the skills to make. Decisions clearly. Understanding the risks, understanding the exposure, understanding the upside, understanding their core [00:35:00] values and how that relates to it. You know? But is it taught in high school?

I mean, there's a great program with, with people I work with called Decision Education Foundation. That's, that gets that to some high schools, but it's, you know, you know, we need it in every high school globally, and it, it really was an eye-opener for me back then. You know, when you start to think about what does risk really mean and what does uncertainty and, and just how poor humans are at gauging probability.

You know, I'll g I'll give you a good example is most of the people I talked to were scared to death to get in a driverless car, you know, because there was an accident in the US a couple years ago in San Francisco. Where the video got. Mm-hmm. It was gory and you know, they're not safe. You know, like, I don't want to be in a driverless car until it's completely, totally safe.

And then you say, well, do you know how many people die a day in the United States in human driven accidents? You know, it's over a hundred die daily. [00:36:00] And to date, there have been two fatalities involving driverless cars that arguably weren't the driverless car's fault. You know, one was somebody wheeling a shopping cart across a four lane highway.

That's weird. And then the one that got all the attention was a human driven car, hit a pedestrian who then rolled in front of a driverless car. And what got gruesome is that the driverless car, you know, just the footage was gruesome. And, and so you realize like, no, those, that you're not calibrating your probabilities correctly.

And, and one sensational anecdote shouldn't. Overwhelm a whole body of data. And so you, you know, I have several examples that I think are approach, you know, you're thinking about changing jobs and, and what a new career path might look like and how you weigh the uncertainties and why, what class of decisions ought to be just the expected value and what need to pay a lot more attention to the, the swings in financial circumstances that really [00:37:00] make a difference.

You know, so an example is you might get an online offer and it costs you 12 bucks to ensure a hotel night. Well, you know, like there's are very low stakes. So you just should take the probabilities, look at the range of outcomes, and if it's a win, which it never is, do it. And when it's a modest loss and you're just being scammed, avoid it easy.

But then if you think about health insurance, you know, uh, life insurance, you know, there are some really high stakes things where the swings might be hundreds of thousands of dollars and it's no longer symmetric. You know, if I, if somebody says, would you take a 50 50 bet? You know, if it's heads, you get another $250,000 and if it's tails you lose the same amount.

You'd have to be foolish, I think, to take that 50 50 bet unless you were Bill Gates or somebody. And so I sort of draw those out. And they're really in, you know, like decision education focused. They do things with middle school kids. These are not elusive. I, I got to it [00:38:00] in graduate school, but we're not talking about graduate school concepts.

We're talking about things that, that at a very young age we can understand and they're powerful. Illuminating interesting concepts. And, and that's sort of the basic point of aftermath, is should we focus on the ideas that change your life trajectory or should we dwell in the world of roadmap mechanics, your phone does perfectly, you will never use, but it makes it convenient for admissions officers and education bureaucrats and legislators to rank you.

To me it's clear, but, but, but schools go the opposite direction. It's not teacher's fault. They don't wanna do this, but it's, it's a set of high stakes policies that vary by nation. And so, you know, I, I'm often most excited by smaller countries, you know, like in Estonia that's thinking boldly about education priorities, uh, and small agile na.

I work with some of the educators in Ukraine and, and saying like, don't, don't [00:39:00] rebuild in the model of the, uh, of traditional education. Here's your chance to really rethink it. And the upside. So back to risk, right? The upside's enormous. You know, we, we have a lot more control over the path than I think we often think people will perceive hard constraints, like, well, the curriculum is this, so we can't do anything.

But you say like, is that a hard constraint or is that a perceived constraint even for a family? You know, it's like, school says X, but you've got a lot of time at home, right? And so you can either tell your kid to spend six hours this week on Khan Academy, on arc sequence, could do that, get a slightly higher math score.

Fine. Or you could say, let's spend six hours this week applying math, the things that come up in your world. You know, like, and, and my book's full of that. It's got all these real world examples where there's a math concept. It's relevant and important. I do my best to explain it in simple terms, and then I invite the reader to apply it to other things coming their way.[00:40:00] 

Um, 

Mehmet: I always, uh, tell people, you know, one of the things that I wish they taught us in school, which has led to math actually is the way how, again, 'cause you come from that background and you did it for a long time, that the math, that venture capitalists, they use, you know, to, to build Right. Their, uh, their projections Yeah.

For their LPs. And said, you know what? Like, and this is again, it relates to an entrepreneur also as well, because you need to take multiple beds. You need to, you know, you need to learn how to do multiple things. Uh, and again, it's math, but not the math that, that they teach us in school. And I said, if I had this knowledge, I would say maybe at the age of 18, you know, maybe I would have been in completely different place today.

But okay, I learned it late. It's good. It's better than, than never. But again, you know, uh, this why I am. You know, uh, I would [00:41:00] say, uh, fan of everything that changed the current status quo in education. Uh, math is the majority of part of it. But again, like I was asking someone why they don't teach them economics, why they don't teach them about, you know, how banks work.

Like why they don't teach them about, I don't know, like, you know, there's plenty of things why they teach them about history of geography. Of course it's good knowledge, but you know, there's plenty of current, I would say, present, um, things that they need to learn about. And I figured out, no, they have no clue.

And you just mentioned at the beginning, Ted, something that today we are more in a age where we have, you know, companies doing less with more, uh, sorry. More with less. 

Yeah. 

Mehmet: And you know. I'm sure like you've seen what, what's happening now with some companies, maybe 20 or 30 employees getting $200 million a RR with just like few number of people.

[00:42:00] Uh, so the question is how we can take this and apply to have also like more entrepreneurs, more people who are really eager to go and do a, you know, leave good impact on, on their cities, countries. 

Ted: Yeah. Right. Yeah. You know, it, it's, I find it so interesting, you know, you read all the stories in, there are many these days about the looming impact of ai and you'll see some that say it's going to wipe out lots of jobs and others that say it's actually gonna create lots of jobs.

But they're all based on this assumption that AI is like. The weather. Right. You know, will it rain tomorrow or will it be sunny? You know, and like, and like we can forecast it, but we can't control it. Well, well mm-hmm. We can control the impact of ai. We have agency in that and, and if we equip generations of America, you know, of adults globally in, in any given country, if the more adults that are equipped to take advantage and [00:43:00] use AI productively, they can lift up their organizations.

Right. And so in my dream world, we would be producing wave after wave after wave of young adults and some older adults to plug in. But wave after wave of adults really informed at taking advantage and using AI to lift up the organization they join or, or to create something new. And, and you know what I think is unequivocally true?

Is that if you look at existing jobs, the majority are on their way out. It, you know, it just, you know, you travel around Asia, right? You know, the, the factories don't even have people in them. And restaurants are largely automated. You know, the, the number of lawyer jobs are going way down. Amazon says it's gonna double revenues over five years, but have fewer employees.

Existing jobs are going down, many categories are going away, but there's no limit to how many jobs and paths we can create. [00:44:00] And so what I find so shocking, right, is when I visit schools, the, the, the idea that you could actually create your own path is largely driven out of kids' minds By the time they're, they're in 12th grade, I, I, I guess, teach a class at a, at a well-known university here.

And each year I asked the mostly seniors at this college, if, if schools shut down tomorrow, not just your school, but every school, there was not going to be one more education opportunity for you. And with that, when all the career services offices. How many of you are already good at something today that you enjoy and you could support yourself doing Out of a hundred, there might be two or three each year, two or three.

And I say like, all this is what you're needing to do again and again and again. But I think it's, we reap what we sow, right? If you spend 12, 14, 16, 18 years in school being conditioned to here's your assignment, do it without giving [00:45:00] kids any agency to create what they wanna do. By the time you're 22, you're sort of beaten down.

And that's a very, it's very hard to remediate that. And it's like, why would we do that? Right? I mean, you know, if we were back in the industrial area, we, we had a reason to do that in the industrial era. You know, if 99% of the jobs in the economy were rote factory line jobs or paperwork jobs, and you expected somebody to do it for 45 years.

Good. Get rid of their creativity. Get rid of their curiosity. Get rid of their audacity. You know, because you don't want a challenging critiquing out of the box thinker on an assembly line or shuffling paper. Those jobs are all automated, right? You, those are exactly what you want. But school by design crushes that out of kids.

And, and, you know, I worked for, for several years, tragically died of pancreatic cancer in 2020, but my partner for several years was Sir Ken Robinson. [00:46:00] And any listener that has not watched his TED Talk, he gave a TED Talk in 2005 that put the TED organization on the map. And to this day, is the most watched TED talk of all time, not the most watched education TED Talk.

The most watched Ted Talk of all time, sir Ken Robinson, do schools kill creativity? He's funny, he's perceptive. And I always say to Ken, you, you put a knife in the back of traditional education. And everybody's laughing, but he makes the point. Schools by design crush creativity out of young adults at the exact time when that's the sickle most important character trait you can have.

Mehmet: Yeah, this is the sad truth, I would say. Uh, let's say sad truth. Ted, I know also you produced some, some films and you are working on one. Right? So tell me more. [00:47:00] 

Ted: Well, I started, I did my first foray. When I got interested in this, I sort of thought about strategy and optimization. What could, where could I spend my time and money to have the most impact?

And I narrowed it down to do organizing and funding a film. And so, uh, 10 and a half years ago, it premiered at Sundance. That film, and we'll put it in your show notes, was called Most Likely to Succeed. And mm-hmm. There'll be a free link for any of your listeners, but I would urge them to watch the first 15 minutes because we sort of tee up the technology trends and what that means for education.

It's brilliant. And, and the credit goes to the director who was amazing, but, but we show, you know, computers beating Casper and chess, and then we show Watson beating Ken Jennings in jeopardy, and we show technology writing better prose than most journalists. On a film done put in the can 11 years ago before Open AI was even formed.

And we are showing computers writing better prose than the best journalists. And we just sort of [00:48:00] lay out, this has profound consequences for what skills and mindsets adults are gonna need. And I, it sort of puts some money into a bunch of films along the way. After that, the first film, I was the only funder and dove into full force.

And probably despite my involvement, it was really good not because of, um, and then I sort of was participant in others. They were okay. I sort of decided, ah, I'm not gonna do any more films. And then I visited this district in Virginia where they just, you know, in our nation, and I suspect it's, it's broadly applicable.

There's this mindset of either or either career mm-hmm. Send you off to some, you know. Career shop, you know, career academy with an autobody shop and whatever. And you kind of part ways with school and it's kinda like viewed with stigma as kinda like the last chance option for the kids who can't cut it.

But over here is what really is important, which is the academic either or stigmatized [00:49:00] overweighted and glorified. And this district just rebalanced, right? They just said we're gonna have every kid, whether they intend to go to college or more likely want to go directly to career. We'll spend about a third of their time in high school on career-based learning and two thirds on more traditional academics.

And we connect the two and, and you're just like, whoa. You know, like so many kids that otherwise will be lost, find their lane, you know, the kids are energized, you know, kids that you know in, in a lot of high schools you've got like the AP track and then the mainstream track and then the last chance kids that get on the bus and go over there.

Here they're all in this pool working together. And the kid that might do really well in a math class is suddenly having true for me. By the way, you know, someone who does really well in math class is side by side in woodworking, and I'm like, even though my dad was a carpenter and my brother builds all the cabinets for his house and does a lot of work for his church, I'm a disaster.

But I, [00:50:00] there's a humility that comes from that because if I'm next to somebody who's great at woodworking, I no longer think that they're the dummy and I'm the genius and they suddenly have the same view. They said like, that guy's really good at math, but boy, he's hopeless with this. And it, it's just reinforcing that respect all paths.

And some kids will find carpentry a great path forward and we show kids like that. Some kids will decide university is the right thing and pursue a medical degree, you know, but why not? When it's free, when it's early, don't do what Germany does and say at age 14, here is your path. We're telling you what you can do.

But ages 14 through 18 exposing you rich, interesting ops, you know, experiences you can sample and, and decide whether you like it or not, whether you're good at it or not. Internships and apprenticeships. And we call the film multiple choice because instead of training kids for multiple choice exams, they equip kids with the skills and mindsets to give them [00:51:00] multiple interesting options in life.

And it's like, why wouldn't we do that for all kids? What a gift. What a gift. And, and it's not in the film, but I and my talks, I often refer and even show I would, I would, and I'll send you this link for show notes as well, but sure, there, there's a short video. It's two, there's a two minute version and a three minute version.

And if you Google MIT graduation day light bulb wire battery, there was a 45 year tenured professor at MIT. I have to say this slowly 'cause people don't believe me. Who concluded that MIT graduates, were learning very little real science and engineering. Think about that. You're an MIT graduate and you haven't learned much science or engineering.

And so to make his point, they go on graduation day, you know, you have the student speaker, we're now proud graduates of the most respected engineering institution in the world. And they give each of them a light bulb, a wire battery, and say, can you light this up? And the kids are [00:52:00] indignant, right? Like, why are you bothering me with such a pedestrian challenge?

Of course, I mean, I'm an MIT grad, of course I can light up a light bulb and then they can't. And wow. And the point is, if had they along the way shattered a master electrician, that master electrician would light up the light bulb like that. Right? Now, that Master Electrician might not be facile with KO's Law or Ham's Law.

They might not do as well on the AP physics exam, but they know how electricity works. Wouldn't that be a great world where kids coming through high school had the option to become an electrician, had the option to go to engineering college, but actually we're a better student, or we're just a plain adult and when the fuse bot goes out and knows what to do about it.

Right. And I think there's power in that of, of, instead of falsely separating applied versus theory, integrating them instead of falsely separating career [00:53:00] versus college, integrating them. And, you know, it's, it's powerful and you see it in these student stories. So that film will be out in a couple months.

We've got a film premiere in mid-September, and then we, I i, I don't sell my films to anybody, so it will not be on a streamer. We do community screening initiatives, so we will make this available to anyone who wants to screen it, because the whole point of these films is to bring communities of people together back to what we talked about 30 minutes ago, people in person discussing constructively interesting, bold ideas.

And we hope, deciding we could do this, let's work together to reach a bold, aspiring goal that will elevate the future of our kids and our community. I think that's worth doing these days. 

Mehmet: Very, very inspiring. Just one thing on, um, on that, uh, is, uh, I think also the, the expectation from, from parents, I mean, you know, like what society, um, [00:54:00] have put the pressure on us.

Because I know a lot of people. Yeah. You have to go and become an engineer. I talked to the guy, you know, after 20 years he say, you know what I hated, I wish I was a cook. I, I want to cook food. You know, I want, I want to be the chef at the restaurant. 

Yeah. Yeah. I 

Mehmet: was forced to do that. Happens a lot, you know, like, um, but because they were not exposed, little bit pressure from, from parents society, oh no, this is not a good career path.

But I like to be optimistic and I'm starting to see some changes. Yeah. At least, you know, in Dubai, in Turkey, you know, across like multiple countries, people started to understand that there are like some other options, other choices, and it's not a shame to go and work for something that can earn you money.

And you like, you know, there's no harm in this. Yeah. So, uh, you know, 

Ted: it's, it's a, a personal anecdote. We, a couple years ago I was at a, a friend's son got married and he had graduated from [00:55:00] arguably the most prestigious law school in America. So he was getting married and the reception included lots of classmates from the, from Harvard Law School.

And so I talked to a bunch and I said, so, uh, what are you doing now? Uh, you know, well I'm, I'm working for a sports team. Uh, I'm writing fiction. I'm right. I mean, I couldn't find anybody that was in law and they all say, I tried it for a year, how I hated it. Right. And you think about four years of undergraduate, three years of law school, seven years, probably 500,000 bucks.

A year into it, you pull the ripcord and they said the only classmates that were still in these grinding professions where, you know, like you're kind of do estate plans over and over or look at corporate m and a documents over and over. It's like, or you know, it, it, it just wears you out. It's, it's sort of soul sucking in many ways.

And AI will do a lot of that. And they said the only ones who are still in those jobs are the ones that were over their head in student loan debt and just had to keep working 90 hours a week with billable hours [00:56:00] to try to dig out of that debt. And I'm not saying that every lawyer hates their job. I'm sure some love it, but, but, but oftentimes, right, you make that bet before you have information.

You know, you go to four years of undergraduate, four years of medical school, school, two years of an insane residency. And you're a radiologist and suddenly AI is better than you at diagnosing screens. And it is like those are high stakes bets where the information and insight comes late. And I think the decision chapter I have sort of explains the value of gaining information early in the process to redirect your priorities so that you have a more sensible allocation of time, effort, and money.

And, and that's what, you know, this film shows. And I think that's what the point, the book underscores is thinking clearly about how do we afford people with the right resources and the right perspective to move forward in life in a way that they find fulfilling. [00:57:00] 

Mehmet: Right Ted, you know, as you are almost coming close to end, I want to ask you something.

If you put again, your VC hat and at the same time what you uncovered about of course math and you know, the other topics in education and you want to advise, you know, the new generation of entrepreneurs on what they should persuade and how to choose. I would say innovation to go after what you would tell them.

Ted: Well, you know, when, when I was active in venture, I had a pretty good roadmap on, on particular interesting emerging sectors. And, and what helped me a lot, right, was in, in early in the 1990s, I was onto the internet. And so, you know, that was a good time to understand just how big a deal the internet would be and to understand what exponential growth means to know that it was going to be an enormous opportunity.

So I'm not, today, I'm so far removed that I'm not in a particularly good position to [00:58:00] say Aha, you know, like, you know, this niche of data security or this issue, you know, aspect of Salesforce management or whatever. But, but I would say this, I'd say oftentimes that this was interesting, right? We, we, my venture firm started in 1970, you know, portfolio of over a thousand companies.

And a few years ago we went through this exercise of. Looking at past investments and as best we could recreate the partnership sentiment before we made the investment. And so we knew did it do really well? Pretty well. So-so failure and what degree of uniform enthusiasm or skepticism was in our partnership and our preconceived notion was that our very best companies would've been universally endorsed.

And the worse the performance, the more skepticism there would be. It was the opposite. The, the companies that everybody thought were good ideas [00:59:00] did anywhere from okay to badly there. There was no controversial edge to it. They, it was not challenging anything. The companies that did really well often had a partner who came very close to saying, I would.

Uh, throw my body across the tracks to block this investment. A partner who would say, I'm going to be embarrassed if our partnership backs such a terrible idea, because the best ideas go directly in the face of conventional thinking. And so if this will resonate, if, if you are an entrepreneur listening to this, you will say, you just told me something obvious.

Or, yes, that actually is my life mission. You know, like I, I am the contrarian. I, I love situations where 99% of the people are wrong because I can see something that I think is right and important. But I'd say that, you know, many of the listeners are, have young kids of their own, or grandkids or relatives or kids in the neighborhood, whatever, [01:00:00] empowering kids to have that mindset despite the school they're in, sometimes because of the school they're in.

But by and large, despite. School, despite curriculum, despite high stakes test to come through intact with that basic thing that makes us human to want to create something from scratch that makes the world better, that will serve these kids well and they will be joyful. They will have real purpose in life.

And it doesn't solve all the mental health issues we're seeing with young kids. But, but it gets to important aspects of that, right? Because if, if a kid is told year in and year out, I know you don't see any point in this, but do it because some anonymous college admissions officer wants you to do it because it's on the test.

Do it because some education policy maker that couldn't tell an arc secant from a Taylor series expansion says You've gotta understand arc secum and Taylor series expansion. That sucks the purpose outta [01:01:00] kids. It sucks the audacity out of kids, and I think as stewards of the next generation. Those are the values we need to stand for.

And, and because it we're heading into a world where someone with an entrepreneurial mindset, particularly someone who knows how to leverage AI, has unlimited amounts of interesting opportunities. But if those are missing, take my word for it. They're going to be in for a world of hurt. 

Mehmet: Yeah. And I think the same applies also on the other side of the table.

So this is why, uh, I'm, I'm, you know, in the states, you know, you have a lot of VCs, you have a lot of, uh, um, you know, it's been like a, for a while over there, but at least in, in, in this part of the world where I live, I'm telling people we need more people also who believe in these like young generation.

Uh, although like to your point, I'm kind of similar to you here, Ted. Like many times people told me and even happened in my [01:02:00] career. Like you are choosing their own company to work for. I'm saying No, I'm seeing something. I, I think you're not seeing, um, spotting the signals. And of course, this is my mission.

Maybe I'm, first time I'm, I'm revealing this. Uh, so my mission is to change the mindset of people, at least in this part that what we call the emerging markets that you need to, you know, encourage people to go and take the risk. Like there is nothing perfect from the first time. You need to keep trying, and this is why, you know, I'm telling people go and read about venture capitalists.

Like, read how these guys, they think the VC mindset, the famous book, you know, like. Keep, keep trying to, to put your bets on multiple things, and one of them would definitely succeed. It'll return all, you know, your investments of course, but in a human perspective, not only like from a, I would say, money perspective.

So definitely to your point that, that finally, you know, I really enjoyed the conversation where people can get in touch and when the book is [01:03:00] expected to be, to be out. 

Ted: So the, the book will be out in the next couple months for sure. It's, um, uh, to be, you know, and by the time people listen to it, it may, may, I may have resolved this.

I, I've been on a path to self-publish, you know, my first two books were name brand publishers. Uh, if you wanna talk about an industry averse to innovation, it's the publishing industry. And, and so. Mm-hmm. Yeah. You know, so like, like the basic deal is deliver me a manuscript. Great. Tell me what you're gonna do to sell the book.

Great. We'll print it. I can find somebody who can types that and lay it out and print it, we'll ship it to bookstores. Nobody buys books in bookstores anymore basically, unfortunately. But, but, and, you know, and then when you generate sales, which I've been able to do, we'll take over 90% of the profits. You know, it doesn't take advanced math to look at that and say, that's not a terribly good deal.

And I think I've got enough of a reputation that people will take it seriously. I, I, in real time, I [01:04:00] mean, we, we got approached by a publisher who says, I can move, move really quickly, and here's how I think I can really help. And so I'm kind of evaluating that. So I'd say somewhere between the next month, the next two and a half months, it'll be out.

And, uh, I'll put in the show notes how you can get notified of what we do. But, um, it's, I, I'm, it's the most important book I'll ever write. I'm not sure how many I do run into the challenge when I say to people, I've got a book that'll make you really love math and see the power of its ideas as soon as you say math.

People say, oh, you know, like, got somebody else I gotta talk to. And so I gotta get over that hurdle. It's so my, my, uh, that's my challenge. But I do think that, that, I hope when people are, have an open mind to say that, let me take a look. They'll say, oh my gosh. I mean, you know, I'll give you a very specific example.

One of the profs in my department pioneered the whole area of evidence-based medicine. And, and I talk about conditional proba. This will sound esoteric for ending the, the conversation, but bear with [01:05:00] me. You know, I talk about conditional probability, right? And so the number of medical doctors that understand conditional probability is less than 5%.

And, and to make it very explicit, if you have a certain disease, the probability that the test gives you an accurate answer is quite high. So if I have x, the probability of a positive test indicating X is 90%. 

The 

Ted: reverse is not, those numbers don't flip, right? If the test says, I've got X, the probability I actually have X can be off by, over and order of magnitude.

And so we walk through this for a particular form of cancer and we show that the test, when you take it one direction, have the disease accuracy of the test, it's about 80%. 80 to 90% test is positive. The probability you actually have that disease is 2%. And yet this isn't covered even in, you know, four years of undergrad, four years of high school [01:06:00] math, four years of undergrad, four years of medical school, two years of residency.

And doctors get that wrong again and again and again. And so they'll tell a patient this very accurate test means J almost certainly got this horrible disease. And people panic and people rush and they make bad decisions. And if they understood conditional probability, which is really important. They say, well wait, you don't have this quite right.

And they know what questions to ask, and you can inquire with chat GPT here with the test. Here's what it said. Now let me ask you this. What if I turn it around? What's the likely that I really have this disease? It will tell you, but you need to know how to ask that question. And your life may well depend on it.

So this isn't rounding error stuff. This isn't a point or two or three points or 10 points on an SAT or whatever, or a 10th of a point on your GPA. This could make or break your life. And so is it important to, to help people understand these ideas? I think it is. Uh, you can tell I'm passionate about this.[01:07:00] 

Mehmet: A hundred percent. So, Ted, I gotta wait the show notes to gonna be, of course, in the, uh, in the links to put them in the show notes so people can, can get notified about the book. But by the way, if you go to the website, I checked it myself. So you find all the work that Ted have done before, you know, uh, plenty of things, especially the, the, the films you mentioned, like highly recommended for people to go and check that out.

And all the references also we made during the day, the TED Talk and others. So everything, it'll be available in the show notes. If you're listening on any of your favorite, uh, podcasting apps or if you're watching this on YouTube, you'll find a description. Ted, I can't thank you enough. Very engaging, very eye-opening, I would say discussion with you today, and again to what you mentioned at the beginning of the, um, of the episode about having the conversation.

This is why I love, and I'm passionate about doing this podcast because it opens also. My own, [01:08:00] you know, horizons to few things. Talking to people like yourself who've been in the industry for a long time, and of course hoping that we can together inspire other people. So thank you again for being here with me today.

And this is for the audience. You guys, you know, if you just discovered this for the first time, thank you for passing by. I hope you enjoyed Small favor, subscribe and share it with your friends and colleagues. We're trying to make an impact so the more we reach to people, the better it becomes. And for the people who keeps coming again and again, thank you very much for your support and all what you're doing for the podcast this year.

You push us high in the top 200 charts on the Apple platform. So we are in multiple countries in the entrepreneurship sector section. Thank you for that. And uh, I'm trying to break a record. We are on eight countries at the same time, countries, so trying to reach more countries very soon. So. Again, can't do this without you audience, and of course my guests including you, Ted.

So thank you very [01:09:00] much, and as I say, always stay tuned for a new episode of the CT O Show with Mehmet very soon. Thank you. Bye-bye. 

Ted: Yeah, thank you.