How This Entrepreneur Is Teaching Math Through Actors | Carnegie Mellon University Po-Shen Loh

you've been a social entrepreneur you've given the largest solo math tour you've won a lot of competitions for 10 years I was the national coach of the US International math Olympia team talk a little bit about your first company we're the first people in the history of education to put a professional actor in every single classroom how does this platform work we put people who are really good at math they're high school math geniuses they're teaching these classes and at the exact same time as they're teaching there's a professional actor in that room giving realtime feedback tweaking The Voice the ey the expression the hands platforms like KH Academy BYU we happen to make the best thing out [Music] there all right everyone today we have po Shen L on our show and we're going to be talking to PO about a lot of interesting subjects I'm really excited to have you on the show how are you doing today po great great nice to meet you okay so PO is one of those rare interesting people that I always wanted to meet because you're not just an academic person you you've been a social entrepreneur you've given the largest solo math tour you've won a lot of competitions but I really want to start with this solo math tour that you did in 2021 because for me that was like one of the rarest things and coolest things you did because it's like you're touring all across us teaching people during Co can you tell me about that experience sure sure sure that was really fun so for 10 years I was the national coach of the US International math Olympia team and during that time I would go around give a lot of talk because people wanted to know about math to learn math and so on but then during Co I just couldn't go around and give talks so I got itchy all right so I was recording something in New York in May of 2021 some studio had flown me out because they had this crazy idea that you could go and use professional equipment to record math lessons I thought that was cool but when I was out there I noticed that people were starting to get out again and the restaurants were full and I said you know what maybe I can get out and give talks again but I have to make sure I don't make super spreader events then I got this idea I said you know what there are parks outside parks have shelters you know in America we got parks with picnic shelters I wonder if I can just go City to city and like a band set up my own speakers put them outside and then just do talks in Parks this would be fun I told some people and they said there's no way this is ever going to work how are you going to carry all the equipment One Man solo how are you going to go to all these places well anyone show up I said challenge accept it if you tell me that something's not possible I'm going to try I went to the music the music stores the pro audio shops so then I just went and bought like the PA speakers it was an awesome experience because right after Co all these people have been pent up at home and I was going sitting the city and I was just announcing hey anyone who wants to learn about what learning is I'm happy to give a talk and this brought all these math interested and generally learning interested people out of the woodwork City by City it was a it was a remarkable experience going from park to park to park driving off in the sunset from one city to the other seeing all the humanity and that's actually how I got the Crux of the idea for the next big thing I did can you talk a little bit about your first company and how many years has that been in the making yeah I have one company my first and only company it's called XP and I started up with this crazy idea of like I wonder if you could make a website where people contribute lessons and everyone can go and look at these lessons and the best lessons are voted up and I thought this should be easy I should be done in like 3 months well I was wrong this is hard but I'm glad I started because once I start something I don't give up we've pivoted like crazy because at the very beginning the idea yeah okay there's some website that people learn math lessons from that's cool but the impact right even though we got to the point at some point that 300,000 people a month went to this website the impact wasn't huge because if someone's just coming there looking at a lesson and going away yeah okay nowadays you can just use chat GPT for that all right so we pivoted we pivoted so many times and actually what we're at now it's still under the same company right but it's totally different this was inspired by going on that tour and seeing all the humanity and seeing that actually what people want is to have a more human way to learn okay so the main thing we do now is we make math lessons that look like twitch gaming streams really oh yeah oh yeah so so what we have is and and the the key Insight all right the key Insight which was covered by CNN earlier this year the Insight is every single classroom how did you find professional actors who were also good at math so the secret is that our actors don't have to be good at math we have the actor playing the role of a artistic director and the people who are teaching are the ones who have the math background the people who are teaching by the way they're high school students they're high school math geniuses so what we do is we put people who are really good at math they're teaching these classes and at the exact same time as they're teaching there's a professional actor in in that room giving real time feedback tweaking The Voice the eyes the expression the hands yeah so this makes it so that the lessons just look interesting so how does this platform work is this like pre-recorded lessons or can anyone show up and ask a question in real time I used to do something with everyone asking questions in real time that's how I also got the idea during the pandemic I ran an hour a day on YouTube just live streaming and anyone can ask any questions but that turns out to be too unstructured for learning so what we do it's sort of like if Uber had a train okay what does that so the trains leave at specific times and they go along specific routes right they're prescheduled Uber is the concept of un unscheduled so the way we work is we have classes the classes are 20 sessions 1 hour each and those are like trains with stops right and as soon as we have enough demand we can go and put the drivers on the trains go and then for 20 week one specific hour you join this particular group and you have a party actually it would probably help right now if I show you what this looks like all right let's see it this is an online math class this is two people they're both high school students they're both teaching it's cool because it's everyone is commenting and interacting in the real time is it like a group lesson yes these are group lessons that's the whole point people used to think the best thing is like one-on-one lessons just showing you how to do all the steps that's the best way to train a robot okay so what we are after is we want to teach people how to be productive in group brainstorming sessions you know like there meetings in work right you don't want to be the guy in the meeting that's just sitting there waiting you got to be able to be saying your ideas bouncing off of other people it's like an essential life skill so what we have is we have group lessons like there are about 25 to 30 kids taking the class there's these two high schoolers we've taught them improv comedy they go off of each other like what I realized was if you just watch one person talking pretty hard to be interesting if you got two people energy right like somebody say something balance the energy then the two of them take turns did you see the twitch style chat running up the screen this looks very much like twitch can you send emojis in the chat yes yes yes and the kids do and we just made it so that the instructors are cool with the Emojis and the excitement and if someone says something that's really off topic we have an interesting power we can cut it out of the chat so you see what we did here is we have a moderated chat in fact if someone goes and starts swearing and saying all kinds of bad stuff no one ever sees it because there's a 10-second delay between when you write a message and when it appears so you have filter words we have filter people actually this this is a production okay we got two high schoolers they're going like this inov comedy we got one actor that's like a director and we have two teaching assistants the two teaching assistants are controlling the chat if someone's not talking they send that person a m message privately hey how are you doing having a good day right like we have a 5 person team managing a 25 to 30 person class again this sounds way better than the traditional experience but again it's it cannot be infinitely scalable what's the business model behind it so the answer is it's pretty darn scalable let me explain how the scalability works okay and let me answer the business model too business model is real simple I showed you a math class we charge only $22 an hour to take this math class okay if you know how much all of the extracurricular math options out there in the entire country or World cost way higher way higher this is actually a low price in the United States I said they're high schoolers teaching but they're super good like the thing I just showed you our high school students they're the people who are in high school but they're on the way to like crazy good colleges for example of the high schoolers 30 of the high schoolers graduated this year we have 100 high schoolers total but the 30 who graduated this year six of them got into Harvard 13 got into MIT there's two going to Princeton at least one turned down Stanford multiple turned down Yale two are going to Duke someone's going to Cambridge England here's how the business model works it's super simple while those high schoolers are teaching there's an actor in that Zoom room the actor has one job keep giving feedback to the high schoolers what that means is while the high schooler talk they're getting realtime feedback on eyes voice everything okay turns it into if you teach 1 hour you get 1 hour of real time guidance to help you be more compelling that's the exchange suddenly we have lots of high schoolers who realize if you do this not only do you pass every College interview not only do you get every job you can get in relationships easier too you know life is just awesome you'll get promoted fast we're making it so that IQ and EQ come together Suddenly It's a giant win for the facilitator so the scalability of this is any middle schooler who wants to learn how to invent new ideas of thinking to survive in this post AI world that's the customer that's an enormous pool the facilitators any high school student who's really good at math already like easily at least 1% of high schoolers are in this category that's 100,000 people in the US alone so I have a a supply demand match in the sense that at the facilitator level the high schoolers well there's enough people with the skill and enough people who want to do this because then they can learn how to be really expressive suddenly this means that we could run at the scale relatively easily of at least 100,000 high schoolers teaching about a million middle schoolers to power this I just need to have enough actors our ratio is every actor can support 20 high schoolers if I want 100,000 high schoolers I just need 5,000 actors look we're in LA right now yeah I'm full of actors full of actors we want the people who are also just they're really good but maybe they aren't already busy with a with a Blockbuster movie and there's lots and lots of people like this like the latest guy we just hired on as an actor he's awesome he previously was in cirule wow yeah he worked for Steven Spielberg Spielberg EV we even made a retirement plan for actors really well because you see actors with experience they're awesome we're just really good at picking people who are about to be absolute Superstars what do you think about like selecting the right subjects that are actually going to be useful later down the road okay what I just described is something for everyone so actually what we teach is just a raw heart of how to solve a problem never saw before because we have these two Dynamic super clever people every class structure is different from what you're used to in school we throw a question at you which only needs middle school math to understand but you have absolutely no idea how to do it because even high schoolers would not know how to start the problem it's weird it's like combining basic ideas in ways you'd never thought of before because we'll give you a question and suddenly 25 to 30 kids brainstorm we don't tell you how to do it this is the most important part our teachers don't tell you what to do it's a wonderful experience where you don't have to worry about whether whether it's the teacher way of doing it don't have to worry about whether it's the book's way of doing it whatever you come up with just start going we're teaching this core skill which every single middle schooler who wants to have a a role in this in this future should take and I just described something that's not delivered in any of the standard education system we're not preparing you for sat style standard problems we're not preparing you to get an A in your normal normal school because GPT can get an A in your normal school exactly we're teaching you how to be the person of the future that's amazing there's been this argument that AI makes people lazy a bit I think of this analogy as calculator right when I was going to like giving math test when I was in high school we were not allowed to use calculator and suddenly changed like you know then people were allowed to use a calculator so how do we fix this problem of stopping people to make lazy thinking and just jumping to chpd finding the solution really fast instead of critical thinking I love this question because actually it gets at the heart of the big mission that we're working on and the big mission is to counteract the root cause of what you call laziness I'm looking at the world I travel a lot I give like a 200 talks a year in like 100 cities I see all this Humanity I love humanity and by seeing all this I see wow we're living in a world where if everyone is every person forsel we're all going to lose to AI it's not just that AI will make us lazy AI is going to make it so that the divisions between people the individualistic it makes it so easy to take advantage of and actually suppress the humanity as everyone just does everything for themselves so what we're actually trying to do is I'm leading a movement where we're trying to make a whole whole lot of people enjoy two principles first one the way to be happy is to Delight as many other people as you can the second one is hard work is actually fun let me first explain why I care about these two principles it's because if you actually live by these two principles well lazy gets cut out of it I said hard work is actually fun on something meaningful I mean you got up really early in this morning I bet to go and set up this whole thing why is it because you were like a man I got to get to work no it's because you were like this is fun this is fun okay it's like life is more fun if you're not just vegging out on a couch but you see what makes life more fun is because you probably are inspired by the impact you're you're about to have that's because your idea of what makes you you is the impact on other people this by the way is actually fun it's addictive and so I'm trying to rejigger a lot of kids value to be like you know what getting enjoying other people it's fun once you have this are you going to cheat on an assignment well what was the assignment for is to teach you something okay like what did you cheat you only cheated yourself My Philosophy is let's think how do we build a whole society where people actually Delight in making other people happy right we're teaching them that skill and then we've actually for all the high schoolers we've prescreened them because we have so many high schoolers who want to join our progam in order to join you got to pass interviews we make sure that every single person teaching is someone who loves humanity and so what we're trying to do is we're trying to cause all these middle school students to say I want to be him I want to be her they like people all right how do I join this club oh you got to like people well let me try let me try to do something for people and anyone who starts doing things for people and getting other people to smile you get addicted I want to quickly talk about how are you like spreading the word and telling people to sign up I've been traveling around the entire country and so everywhere I go the people who happened to come to the talks now they know the good news is once they join a few months later they start telling other people that these are the best things they've ever seen we get feedback like some a student who took this said every single time I take this class I feel like I've had a spiritual awakening in the domain of algebra like we get this kind of feedback so like we got people telling everyone I don't do any paid promo I want to emphasize that like if you had said I have to paid G on this podcast I'll be like nope nope nope so my style is real simple I talk to people who just want to get to the honest truth what is the best thing out there we happen to make the best thing out there I quickly also want to talk about platforms like KH Academy BYU like what do you think about those and how useful they are for people I think that all of those people are doing a service to humankind I'm not here to go criticize right Khan Academy I mean he makes free stuff I mean it's it's fantastic my Approach was I think that inspiration and lighting that fire are how you win so if you look at the way I teach if you ever watch the way I teach sure there's content delivery but what I'm really trying to teach is this is fun and not just is it fun in some shallow way you can use this to get a wonderful life I can help guide you to that too so KH Academy fantastic if you want to go and brush up on some skill he's got that he's got a video he's made usually the student doesn't look at that as like a now this is how I want to be cuz you can't see you know what I mean he's not in it oh there's another big difference he covers huge variety of Concepts we cover only this critical 120 hours as a middle school student to teach you how to be inspired light that fire ignite and also learn how to learn and learn how to think 120 hours later you are equipped to use the entire internet's resources whether they are baiju Salan or goodness knows whatever you see what I mean so I see them not as a competitor but as an orthogonality they were perpendicular there are all these people who are making educational resources to teach you individual things we're trying to light the fire to make you want to use them the last question I want to ask you is like for people who want to like really level up their skills what kind of resources should they go after like what kind of books you were reading what kind of YouTube channels you were watching like it doesn't have to be a high school student it could be someone like me who's already done Ma like master degree or but I still want to upgrade my skill set so what would you recommend two different sides one is how to upgrade the technical skill set one is how to upgrade the emotional skill set the emotional meaning understanding of people these are two separate things for the technical skill set the first thing is to get yourself to the point where you are literally never scared of any technical explanation there's a certain thing where sometimes when people look and they're like oh my gosh this is going to be too technical right it's like do I understand how everything fits together what's this cable diagram what's a impedance on a microphone like what's a phantom power I'm just I'm naming all kinds of different concepts sometimes people look at it and they're like there's too much going on the way to learn how to never be scared of that is to learn how to solve problems you haven't seen before actually our classes that we teach I said middle schoolers actually everyone should take them most adults have never learned this ever okay that's how you build a technical to build a non-technical like the human part my observation is just talk to people actually get out there and look at people like when I'm on the street I'll often be looking around being like I wonder what made this person TI I wonder what their problem what their pain point is right and if you if you also talk to people so you don't just wonder after a while you can use your technical skill to solve the non-technical human problem where do people find you the easiest way to find me is to just search for math actors and look for the CNN article and that's me it's like the why this math professor is putting actors in every classroom my name is poan lo if you search for p o- s h n l o you find me you can see there's all these different things we have this YouTube channel I have the main website and the whole big program I'm running right now is called live l i v actually if you search Google for live math classes we're usually the top non- advertisement hit