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.
00:26:59 · Jamie Beaton, David Booth
So I think in the future, there'll be a lot more live assessment in high school. There'll be more live assessment. You know, recently, I began a program in The UK, and they've moved the exams to pen and paper in person, which I think is pretty cool. But they're doing that in response to AI, messing with their ability to do online proctored exams or even online exams in general. So I think it's an amazing tool when used well, but currently, we're in this tipping point where most high schools have got no plagiarism tools, most universities have no plagiarism tools off scale, and they need to fix that quickly because it hurts the students and also, of course, the university's credibility to have these guys going through their degrees and and high school without that support. But I'd say net net, I mean, it's an incredible force. And the cost of private tutoring one zero one across every subject could be 40,000 a year in some countries. But with GPT, that comes way down, which is obviously a game changer. Yeah. [00:27:46] S0: Yeah. It's a technology tool, ultimately. It's like fire. You can use it to cook your food or burn things down. [00:27:51] S1: And some Will be an arsonist. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.