00:20:21 · Jamie Beaton
[00:20:21] S1: So Crimson doesn't exist necessarily to help anyone with any ambition go down any path. What we've identified is a really high probability swim lane for success. So if a student is interested in academics and they wanna be wildly successful, this is a pathway that, with almost certainty, will deliver them that objective if they put in the work and put in the process. So is there ways to be successful in other ways? Could you do a trade apprentice? Could you skip university as a whole and be an entrepreneur? Without that, absolutely. Crimson's built to give you that high probability pathway to these careers that are usually very hard to unlock. Let's take an example of a student who wants to work at Blackstone. If you wanna go to a top private equity fund like Blackstone and you grew up in New Zealand, almost the only way to get there is through one of these top universities. Now is that good? It's probably not good. It's probably bad. Mhmm. But as a Kiwi, if you wanna make that career path happen, then you need the support. And your high school's not gonna train you on all the steps. They don't know how recruiting works at these firms. And so, you know, what you'll find is the kids getting those roles are often from very privileged families that have great networks and get all the information, and they know what they need to do. But for the most people in the world, especially outside of America, they have no idea. And if they don't have that support, they're not gonna be able to, you know, even compete in the arena. They're gonna have no shot. So I would say Crimson isn't the magic solution for everyone, but it's a very systematic way for most of the world's talent to at least have a very fair shot at competing, you know, in these opportunities. Mhmm. Now as far as the... I think... Is is it William Deresiewicz? It's the Yale professor. That's a great book. I think it's, like, Intelligent Sheep or something like that.
00:21:51 · David Booth
[00:21:51] S0: It's... Yeah. It's exactly. Solitude and leadership is the is the piece. Yeah. It's fantastic.
00:21:56 · Jamie Beaton
[00:21:56] S1: I I... Yeah. It's a great piece and also a great book. So I guess how I think about the admissions process is in some countries like China and India, getting into top universities is based on a single exam. So you just grind for basically fifteen years, thirteen years, set an exam very stressful. That's it. What I like about US admissions is there's lot of creativity in in what you wanna focus on. If you wanna focus on art history, if you wanna wanna focus on art history... On entrepreneurship, if you wanna focus on, for example, you know, building a Minecraft server and making revenue for your Minecraft server, all those things can be put on the application. It's a very broad canvas. Now there are some fundamentals you can't skip, academics. Right? So, you know, I would argue for most high schoolers, focusing on academics is is a good and worthwhile thing. And I would say if you think about New Zealand, the admissions process is very easy to get into local universities, and it doesn't it doesn't incentivize a kid to try that hard in high school. So most high school kids cruise in the last couple of years. And I would say a reality where everyone's hustling hard in high school, they're doing sports, community service, leadership, They're running campaigns. They're trying academics. That's a better reality than people just chilling in those formative years. Mhmm. Because you go into your early twenties without what... Without feeling that burn that, you know, a lot of folks have to figure out later on in life. So long story short, do I think that admissions process is perfect? No. Do I think it's better than most other countries? Yes. And this is a good pathway for most students to go down? Yes as well. But it isn't the only way to be successful. And, you know, most folks that become wildly successful probably didn't do this. But if you're a single individual, this is still your best probability shot, in my opinion.
00:23:22 · David Booth, Jamie Beaton
[00:23:22] S0: Yep. A couple of really good insights there with the the idea that in those four hundred years, having something that's aspirational, that's motivating, that's that's ambitious, that would really drive you down any path. Yeah. And that path could be, yeah, elite sports. It could be elite education, it could [00:23:36] S1: be Momentum. [00:23:36] S0: Burning passion you have for a bit. But in the absence of having the capacity for elite sports or or sort of the spark for a single thing you wanna be curious about and pursue, I think you're right to say, like, is a path. And I've often found that, you know, the things that I've achieved that have worked have, you know, come across while pursuing or aspiring to something else. It's the feeling of drive the or the feeling of motivation I have that will sort of open your mind or prepare you to be open to opportunities [00:24:04] S1: Yeah.
00:24:04 · Jamie Beaton, David Booth
[00:24:04] S1: Yeah. [00:24:04] S0: That are adjacent to that. So I really like that. When I think about the admissions process itself, I mean, there's lot of work that goes into it. There's 30 something essays. There's all all sort of that preparation. One I'd be really curious about the way that this has evolved, particularly in the last couple of years. Now when ChatGPT launched end of two thousand twenty two, there was a lot of sort of combination of doom and gloom, and this is the end of ways. This is all of the students starting to generate their essays, starting to use tooling to to, you know, supplement their work. There was... On one side of it, the college is crying afoul and saying they're cheating. On the other side of it, saying, well, actually, no. They're using technology creatively. This is like the calculator all over again. I'm curious about how AI is changing this application landscape, specifically preparation when you think about tutoring, when you think about the possibilities of being opening up through having a, you know, private Albert Einstein on your shoulder teaching you physics must have influenced how you think about revision. What's changed in the past year or two in particular that makes you more excited about the future or has changed the way that you're building your So if
00:25:12 · Jamie Beaton
[00:25:12] S1: you think about teaching a while ago, you might go to a physical high school and you see your teachers for for certain hours in the day or even, you know, one or two hours a day. When you're stuck after school with a problem, you've gotta wait to maybe the next school day or even two days later to ask your question. Very slow feedback. The next iteration is, okay, you've you've got a one on one tutor. Maybe they come to your house, maybe you go to theirs, but it takes a bit of time to go there. Next up, you've got online tutoring, one on one online tutoring. Suddenly, same day, I can speak to someone online who's an expert in any field that I I want and get an answer quickly, but it still takes a bit of time, bit of admin, etcetera. They don't know you. They don't know the context. Now with GPT tools, most questions, I'd say more than 95% of high school students' questions, can be answered instantly by a GPT, which means that the feedback loop gets cut down by at least 10x on even one on one tutoring, which is pretty amazing. So think about essay writing. A lot of the time I tell students that the thing that differentiates a great English writer and an average one is just how many essays they wrote and how much feedback they got on the essays. In many high schools, it takes a month to get feedback back from your English teacher. But with GPT, you can get feedback on your essay in seconds. It's actually probably better than your average English teacher. So I think it is revolutionary. Recently, when I was at Princeton, when I was stuck in these quant finance math classes, I would use GPT as my tutor for a lot of different questions. Ask it, and I would learn all kinds of things, you know, when I'd, say, miss a lecture or, you know, had a challenging problem to work through. So So it's certainly a game changer. As far as the the downsides though, I do think we're seeing a wave of kids across the world using GPT to write their English essays and, you know, not as a learning supplement, but as the producer of work. And I think that's obviously dangerous because you basically could have high school students that go through all of high school. And if they're just submitting work online, they're not actually doing any actual work themselves. And, of course, that's a huge miss.