Featured Session: Moonshots that Move the Needle

Speaker 1 00:00 And welcoming to the stage. Kumar jar, president of Renaissance philanthropy. Steve Ritter, chief scientist at Carnegie learning. Eden zanakis, Chief of Staff at the Bezos Family Foundation and Aarti Prada car, former presidential Science and Technology Advisor in the Office of Science and Technology under the Biden administration to the stage. Steve Speaker 2 00:33 Well, good morning, everybody. Here we go. Welcome, welcome. Welcome to transition day, where we get a mix of the edu audience and the south by audience. It's great to have all of you here. I think one of the things that I've been talking to the panel about before we started was just, hey, there's a lot of people here, but the topic is kind of broad, like moonshots. What does this audience actually want out of this conversation. So one of the things that I like to do when I moderate a conversation is actually try to pull the audience in the beginning right at the end. So one of the things that you all can do using your slide out technology that you have on your app is actually say, what are things you hope this panel covers, and actually put that in. And so I'll get a little screenshot of those, and then they'll be nice to actually hear, what are things that you actually want on this panel. And so I'm going to take a second for you all to sort of start to do that. And as we start to get going, I guess one, just like very basic place to start is, you know, moonshot is a word that gets thrown around a lot, you know, people say everything from, you know, President, Kennedy and, like, the moonshot, you know, and then there's, like, moonshots are just like, a way to think about ambitious thinking. How do I sort of stretch? And so I'd be curious just to first do a little bit of just safe getting on, like, you know, when you use the word, what are some of the ideas and specific examples that come to you? And maybe I'll start with Aarti, and I'll just sort of brag on Aarti a little bit. This is, like my favorite thing to do, because, you know, my background was first in the government. I worked for President Obama in the science office, and then have done a bunch of things since, but as, like, a little, you know, Junior staffer that was, you know, working on science, knowledge and government, I remember Aarti, she was director of DARPA at the time, inviting me to one of these fame things called the DARPA pizza parties. Which are these? Like all the DARPA program officers sit around and they, they kind of debate, what are the next set of crazy programs that they should come up with? And Aarti would host these. And she's like, You should come hang out, have pizza and listen to that brainstorm. And it was, like, so nerdy and so amazing. So, you know, so Artie has been at all of these really important levels. I mean, one of the things that I often say is, Aarti was in the room making the case for mRNA funding that DARPA LED. That was a big part of how we got the covid vaccine. So we are incredibly thankful for your service. But Aarti, like you've been in all these moments when the word moonshot gets put around you cringe. Or do you think about like specific ideas as to what the word means for you. Speaker 3 03:24 Well, first of all, it's great to be here Kumar, all of my colleagues, and Hey everyone, it's great to be in Austin. I well, I like the term wingshock. It's overused. But listen, at core, this is the most American idea you could possibly imagine, which is we're not okay with just making a little bit of progress. We're going to go for growth, and we've done this in so many areas, and today we're going to talk about how we bring that approach to changing outcomes for our kids and changing education. That's still a new idea, and I think we have, sometimes we have trouble imagining being able to make big steps forward imagination. But I gotta tell you, it's not that long ago that we didn't think we could really make that much progress on medicine Speaker 4 04:17 or exploring space or even the Speaker 3 04:31 taxes that consumed our world today. And so what, what's now coming in focus, I think, is the opportunity for those kinds of weeks building on all the other infrastructure, the basic research. But when you start having those pieces, then it's time to go there. Talk should all have to me and give like an example of, like, Speaker 2 04:45 if somebody would like, you know, you often have books reach out to you and say, what looks like some of the babies you don't actually, are there like examples, like, why are we working on that? You know, this could be like the way of the country or the company or the person, what sort of like? I think you're really Speaker 3 05:17 excited. Well, there are a lot right now. There's so many ways that AI is coming into education. I think a lot of the stories I hear are people reeling from dealing with it, and that's happening, but it's also a powerful thing we can seize to actually do the work that we've been wanting to do for a long time. Maybe I'll just tell a story that where we know a lot about how it turned out, and I'll tell the mRNA sir I had the privilege of serving at DARPA and the Defense Department early in my career, I went off and did other things. I came back 19 years later, everything had changed. Geopolitics had changed, and technology changed. All people have changed. One of my program managers when I came back to leave DARPA in 2012 many years before the pandemic. Managers was an epidemic and, oh, by the way, an Air Force program. And he said, Look at one day we're going to have another pandemic. Everyone in hospital, cops, because, you know, Mother Nature puts up these new bugs all the time. He knew that we had to get better at being prepared for it. And he said one of the problems is it takes years or decades or never to come up with a vaccine that really works. But he said there is this research in mRNA, and it could be the basis for a rapid response vaccine platform. Now in, you know, here, sitting here in 2026 that's obvious. Many of us have that vaccine, and we have that vaccine, but I have to tell you, in 2012 that was crazy talk. People have seen the research. They said that's cute, like, that's so far from reality that it will never get there. Or maybe, you know, it's going to take decades. And my program manager, Dan said, No, we have to do this now, because we don't know there's going to be another pandemic. We have got to get after it. And he undertook to do that. He told me he had just met a startup called moderna. They were working on mRNA for cancer. I used to be a venture capitalist. I got while they were working on cancer, you can always make money. Tragically, you can always make money solving cancer infectious disease, you cannot count on but with both a big vision and some real substantial funding, Dan was able to get moderna to start working on infectious disease, and the pivot point his moonshot was to show immune response in human beings in a clinical trial, and he got only as far as a phase one clinical trial, which was a safety trial. It proved that that the vaccine is way before covid. It proved that that particular mRNA vaccine, I think it was for a disease called schizophrenia, that it was safe, but it also showed immune response in the patients who had gotten it in the clinical trial. That's when all the skeptics started saying, wait a minute, maybe we should be paying attention. And fortunately, that happened in 2017 now, took a lot of miracles for the world's fastest safe and effective vaccine development to happen in the pandemic that we're just coming through now. But the part that we contributed was the fact that moderna was able to ship doses for clinical trials, doses of that covid 19 vaccine 42 days after they knew what the sequence was like, 14 needed to look like. So that's a good shot, because we should ultimately, it's fun to do cool and sexy things. What I really care about is, does it change the world? Future unfolds, and those kinds of opportunities are now everywhere in Speaker 2 08:55 front of us. I mean, I think it's an incredible story, like it's ambitious thinking. It's picking something really hard that's important in the world. It's taking risk. It's the role of government, role of companies, role, you know, a bunch of different players. So I think there's powerful sort of reluctance there. Eden, why don't we keep going down the initial conceit of, like, the word we check you mean many things, and and just sort of continue to kind of build out the work. What, what does it mean to you? How do you bring it to the way you think of a ambitious plan to be or, you know, personal life and and introduce yourself? Speaker 5 09:32 Well, I don't have any fabulous stories about DARPA and saving the world with vaccines, but Hello everybody. It's really, really awesome to be here with incredible people. My name is Stevenson, not just at the Chief of Staff the Bezos Family Foundation. Our work focuses on young people learning and thriving from birth to adolescence. We've been around for about 25 years. We understand that learning doesn't happen in the moment during a single day, so we really consider every single day, so the community, the educators, the families and all of the systems that work together to help help people thrive. Fun fact, I'm from Austin. This is where I went to Calvin High School, not too far from here, and my mom, who I think is somewhere in the audience, if she made it through security, Oh, you made it through security, but she was someone that was deeply engaged in civic participation, showing up, pitching in. And what that meant for me was tagging along with her to campaign phone banks with my bag of snacks while she sat at the voter list, dialing number after number, calling voters to remind them to vote. At one point, I even had a campaign job. I was paid a penny for every envelope I left at a campaign mailer. And Daniel gave me that. That was pretty confusing. I mean, 100 envelopes per dollar can get you and back, then I get you far. But it really shifted the way I started thinking about it for a couple reasons. One, young people can do something larger than them. It's not just the adults in the room. And that was that was really eye opening for me then, and even as I reflect back, and just from a moonshot perspective, like civic engagement is a moonshot, it might be the ultimate moonshot, because if you think about, you know, convincing millions and millions of people to participate and make change and use their voice, and, you know, vote on issues that matter to them with the confidence that they can change their their the world around them. I mean, that's a pretty amazing feat and and that's what we try to do at the foundation. We really, we really focus on helping people learn and thrive and know that they, too, can change their community, their world. Things bigger than that. Speaker 2 12:03 Yeah, what I like about that is like, you know, if you think about Kevin Kennedy, you think about all there is a story coming on. There's also like that have, what is the work of the many? You know, how do we try to inspire others, both around what they want to do, but also on the goal itself? So, I think there's, like an interesting thread to pull on. So Steve, I feel like, the way, I'd be curious what the word means to you, but you know, you sit in this, like, very interesting world. Carnegie Mellon, in part, it's a university. I think that, like I feel like every faculty member, every student is, like, dreaming up, like, here's the thing I'm going to do to solve things. You know, you were part of a spin out of somebody that was thinking about, like, the world technology going to do on learning long before. I mean, you guys were talking about AI education before. You know, AI but, but I talk a little bit about, like when you were when you spun out and started building part of the learning, what was the moonshot? What was the Word and idea that drove that creation of the company? And then when you now internally, are sitting around and saying, oh, what's the big goal? What's the moonshot? How do you sort of think about it in like a, you know, or does that word not make friends. Speaker 6 13:21 Yeah, it totally makes it. I mean, I feel like we're we're always thinking about different moonshots. But forming the company was a big one, because we can't my background was in cognitive psychology. We were a group that was in the psychology department at Carnegie Mellon, working with computer science and different public schools. So that was the partnership we started working in in mathematics. And I think our original view was, well, we know how people think and learn and perform, and so if we know how people think learn and perform, we should be able to use that knowledge to help them learn better. And we went out to the schools, and we discovered that the schools were not really focused on how people learn. They were much more focused on how we should teach and institutionally, like, how do we structure schools, right? What's the schedule? Where do the teachers come from? How do we train the teachers? What materials do we give to students? And all that stuff is important, but if it doesn't change the student's brain, it's all focused, right? And so what we started with was was this view of, let's first focus on the student, look at the impact of whatever the students being asked to do or listen to or perform on what the student goes and is able to do, and think about it from that perspective. And what was just stunning to me was how different perspective that was that what most people in education think about. So my moonshot really is focusing on that. And I'll say like, you know, we've been doing AI since the beginning. It was, you know, part of the knowledge, everything was computer focused, right? So when I say like building models of how people think and learn, those were AI models that tried to duplicate how people learn. And we embedded that in the software that students use so they could understand what the students were thinking about, how they were thinking about problem solving and supporting that and that. I'm sure we'll talk quite a bit about AI. But to me, I'm an AI optimist, because I see AI as not a way to replace thinking, but a way to understand Speaker 2 15:38 and how does it like, what's the limit of that? Like, I feel like you still need to make money. You still need to build products that work. So when you're the chief rd officer and thinking about, how do we stretch, what is the shape of what, how this translates into, like, an actual goal statement where, like, we want to get to this capability and why time? And here's how we spend our new dollars. Speaker 6 16:04 Yeah, it's interesting. So, so I come from a background in cognition, but motivation is equally as important. And I think, like in the age of AI, it's especially important to think about motivation Given the broad sense of students thinking like, why am I here? What does my future look like? Right? And we don't have good answers for that, but I'll say, like, what's really optimistic when you get into schools, kids really do well, they'll say sometimes they don't, especially the older kids, but they really do. If you give them things that are worthwhile learning, when we give students tools, AI, tools that give them the answer, if it's a task that they don't care about, they're very happy to take the answer. If it's something that they're that they care about, if you give them active Unknown Speaker 17:02 part, we're living in a technical age. I think it's like Speaker 2 17:17 useful to unpack what technical moment we're in, right? So you could have had this moonshot conversation 40 years ago, 30 years ago, 10 years ago today. And there's a lot of like, everything is different. It'd be useful to sort of unpack, you know, for living in this fur of improving computational capability. Where is it making things easier? Is it increasing the chance that we can set more ambitious goals and on what and then, what are the limits of the moment we're sort of living through? You know? I'll just say at Renaissance, we, you know, along with harmony learning, have a program that we created called the learning engineering virtual Institute. The goal of that program was, can we basically replicate this 2012 J pal result that showed that you could do a mix of high grade switch tutoring, double rate of middle school math learning for well known kids. The problem with that 2012 study was, it was $4,000 per kid. So school system said that is a very high price point. Even if the result is amazing, we can get the goal. Program was, can you replicate that result? Can you do it at scale? And can you do it at under $1,000 per kid, if not under 500 multiple teams in that program, multiple teams on capturing, achieving the goal we're in year four. But what's been interesting for us has been that, you know, living through this AI improvement curve can make everyone's job easier. That doesn't mean that, like, there's like, lots of failure under the hood, but suddenly, like, you know, certain types of strategies that the teams had became, like, way easier to implement. And the number of experiments, like, I get these reports from all these experiments the teams are doing, and like, the rate of productivity is shut up. So Steve, you want to just, like, say a little bit about just kind of like a practitioner level, where is the fact that you know, you know what used to be like, Oh, $1,000 buy me this many tokens that give me this. And now we have a, you know, Moore's law. These things double every 18 months, I think, like one for anything about the AI law is token costs are dropping 100x during 18 months. So something that costs you $100,000 to do cost you $1,000 to do in that same 18 month period. So then you do that twice, and now you're going from million to 1000 so that doesn't that's not magic, but it does. You know, when those capabilities happen, something becomes easier. So just give it like some examples of where, where it's happening and what the limitations are, yeah. Speaker 6 20:06 So, so one of the things we know about what helps students learn, it's active learning, right? Give them problems to solve. Give them good feedback as we solve those problems, right? And that's sort of the essence of what we've been doing for many years. But the feedback has always been text based, because we want to give personalized, specific feedback to students, we can generate a sentence and give that sentence in text. And what we proposed for the levy program was sort of crazy at the idea at the time, because it was before GPT 3.5 came out, which is kind of the first version of chat GPT that most people saw, and we said, well, what if that feedback could be a video or could be a custom diagram or animation to help explain a concept to a student? And it came from sort of thinking about like, well, we can identify sort of common misconceptions that students have, and we can create video animations and responses to that, but when you think about the scale of what you would need to create, it's enormous, because, you know, we went through our math year program and found over 3 million different personalized messages that we gave to students, right? So you couldn't anticipate building free from the videos. But now you can, right? You can have animations and and video and other diagrams and other multimodal feedback for students that we just couldn't have thought of before. Speaker 2 21:31 So Arby, you know, I'd be curious how you're sort of processing the AI moment, both on here things you know, whether in education or more broadly, that suddenly seem more possible. So we should be increasing our ambition on them. And then I mean the other part also, which is, you know, where, where are we more in forecasting and saying like this, actually, you know, you know, as like a serious technologist who had to, like, when you're, you know, DARPA program officers came and pitched and you had to poke and say you're enthusiastic. But I don't think this is gonna net it. That was the fun part, you know. So, like, if you, if you were doing the equivalent of product review for a moonshine what, where? Where's AI as a capability, and what are institutions? Speaker 3 22:21 Well, let me start in this AI moment. First of all, I feel like we're talking about AI as if it is a monolithic thing. The people who are building the biggest models have that, that vision, and I think we've all just sort of blindly started talking about AI the way they talk about it, that it will be loving model, it will do everything that's not actually what's going on. And the moment we're in remind remember a number of years ago where every product had an E before it like it was E, commerce, it was E, everything. And then there was a way for everything. Had a.com on the name. I think we're in that moment with AI, where it's the thing. So everything we talked about this AI, the shift that we need to make, and I think we need to get going, because there are real consequences, is, instead of thinking about AI as the thing, if you think about it as a tool that enables many, many, many things, that's I think that's just a much more constructive way to go at it. For a lot of people today, when you say AI, they are picturing the interaction that they have with the Chatbot, often on a daily basis, that may have almost nothing to do with an image generator that allows for personalized animation that responds to a specific issue that students have, but they both have AI. So I think we need to be a lot clearer in our conversations. Look the potential here. This is like every other powerful technology in all human history. All human history tells us that we human beings are going to use this technology for good and for ill. The entire ballgame is, how do we seize those benefits and manage the risks? When and what, you know, listen, the reason I'm a science of technology person is I know that all of human history tells me that it takes sometimes we screw it up, and we do have real problems, but eventually we figure out how to use this powerful new advances in technology in ways where they really do take us forward and that minimize and manage and curtail the risks. That is the whole ballgame today on AI and I, you know, in education, I'm watching students and teachers and administrators in every school I know are grappling with the fact that it's a tsunami, that students are students have very easy access to it, and everyone's confused, and there's a lot of anxiety about how to use it wisely. Then there are specific applications. These dreams we have of personalized tutoring. We know that this is the one thing talking about move the needle. This moves the needle for students. We've done that for a long time, but we've also know that if it's $4,000 a student, it's just it's just a dream. It's not going to be real. So finding ways to turn to take this powerful technology, use it safely, responsibly, in very directed, targeted ways that is that's such a huge opportunity. And you two have talked about the technology. Part of what I remember about what you're doing, that I think is so important is that it's not just setting, you know, giving a kid an AI tool and letting them go, go figure it out. There's a human, a tutor, that's curating. You should talk about this part, because, again, look, we have all the technology in the world, but we know that these processes, how children learn and grow and mature, is such a deeply human process. And I think the fact that you've been very clear about that being integral, you're taking advantage of how sexy the technology is, but it's still, I think, a really Speaker 2 25:58 human process. Yeah, I mean, just on that. I mean, one of the things that we've sort of seen inside this program is that it's not like a clean dichotomy between teachers and human instructors and digital tutors. It's actually lots of blended approaches where you're using a mix of those approaches to do different things. So for example, there's another part of the melon team that's in the program, and what they do is, they call it dynamic dosing. So you you have one tutor, human tutor. They have four students. Two of the students are put on a digital tutor. Two of the students are getting direct instruction as a student gets stuck on the work, the tutor kind of moves around and sort of focuses on them while the other ones do it on the general tutor. And then all of it is then getting input back to the teacher to inform classroom practice. You get these huge affordances because some of those students, for sections of the work are running ahead, but when they get stuck, they get stuck for lots of random reasons. You don't get just stuck because you don't understand the concept. It's like, the technology stops working. It's like, I don't understand why this is happening. Oh, the kid next to me is distracting me all these things which, like, it's way easier for the tutor there to sort of figure out, why did you get stuck? And then what are the concepts that they're struggling with that you can inform the teacher with. So that actual cost model of a tutor plus digital tutor caring of the classroom, that whole cost model, you know, is a lot cheaper, but it's not, oh, we're just going to switch, flip the switch between the digital tutor and classroom instruction. So one of the things that I think, the reason why I think these are applied problems is we are building powerful new tools. But how those tools actually make us be able to like do stuff is an open question. So I mean, easy, you, you know, you you all fund early education. You all fund education more generally, used in lots of ways. Short, AI comes up as a you know, both on like as a tool, but also, just like you know, children are having to navigate now, this technology showing up in their lives. Talk a little bit about how it's showing up in your strategy, at least with open question as both an opportunity and a possible liability. Speaker 5 28:26 Yeah, we talked about AI constantly at the foundation, and like I said earlier, you know, we really are looking at the entire ecosystem of the learners. And so in the area that we're really exploring right now is human connection. In the age of AI, we know that there people's loneliness and really less opportunities for human connection for them, which we also know is really important part of healthy development. So so I think that this is a really important moment to bring together the technologists, the educators, the families, the young people themselves to start looking at what's what's happening here, and our job as a philanthropist is to come in and knit those communities and those people in those sectors together help them get moving in the right direction, turn instinct and impact. Yeah, so that's really where we're focused right now. I mean, there right now. I mean, there's we, you guys, are doing a good job talking about the technical aspects and all the learning tools. I feel like this is an area that's also really important to keep in mind. Speaker 2 29:33 Yeah, I guess, just to sort of dig in, I guess one because, you know, what you can have these sort of more technically ambitious moonshot goals. But I think, like an emergence of technology and how it actually integrates into our lives can end up being like a huge gap as to whether it actually happens or not, right? So we started with vaccines as like a huge technical win. We are living to an age where the social dimensions of vaccines are falling apart all around us. And like, the net effect is, like, we're having huge technology wins, while we're actually taking huge step back from the public health side. So like, how do we actually navigate some of this is politics, and some of this is lots of other things. But how do we actually navigate the social damage into the technology, and sometimes this really outside impact as to whether we get the upside? So, I mean, I don't think this is, like, an idle point, right? This is like, if we don't get this right, like, what's going to be the response? Like, let's ban all the technology. Let's ban all the phones. Let's, you know what I mean, like, where do we end up? So, like, argue this. What's your advice around you? Mean, you sat working directly for a president. All these questions are questions or trade offs. How do we build? You know, the word responsible innovation sounds kind of vague, right? So it's like, how do we actually build trust, but also get to actually get the good stuff? You know? Because it's like we have to manage between a feeling of like we can't get the next thing, and like we're actually being thoughtful in how it plays out. So how do these conversations sort of play out in ways that you think are important for when, when we're designing a new show, so that we're thinking about the social dimension of achieving goal, but then getting what comes on the other side? Speaker 3 31:37 Yeah, I would say about the moment as a country. Our country is in a crisis today, and we are here because of the divisions across our land. The anti vaccine movement is just one manifestation of it. I think it's very visible to everyone that we have a lot of issues that we're dealing with as a country. And, you know, and the vaccine one, of course, is particularly troubling to me, because I think about the fact that millions of lives were saved through the covid vaccines, not just the environment vaccines, but all of them together. And I look at what is happening into my I grew up in Lubbock, Texas, next door by Texas standards, and it was in Lubbock that we started for singing the first time in so many decades in this country. So we have a lot of work to do. When I think about what it's going to take to knit us back together across the considerable lives that we have in our country today, I can't think of anything better than finding places where we have enough common ground that we can build again. And it doesn't mean we're going to agree on everything out of the gate, but I think one thing everyone I know in this country can agree on is we want everything up to be able to eliminate and as we show ways to take the successes that are happening in individual classrooms and in individual districts, and we find ways to start scaling them across the state and ultimately across the country, that, to be one of the most healing things that we can do as a nation. I actually want to key off of one of the questions. Key off one of the questions that came up on this monitor was about how, when you're trying to do a moonshot, how do you get everyone on board? And I want to tell you a story about people not being on board. Because, actually, I think part of the part of the point of being able to do moonshots, we have to create room to try things before everyone agrees. I told you this mRNA story, let me tell you a very different story. When a number of years ago, there was a new DARPA program with the objective of having a ship that was that was that had no sailors on board, but had enough smarts and capability on board that it could leave the pier, navigate across open oceans for months at a time, not without a single sailor on board, with just sparse supervisory control so someone was paying attention, but the ship was highly, highly autonomous. When the DARPA program manager started this program, the Navy that was the obvious user of such a unmanned ship, the Navy thought about it, and the Navy decided that the Navy did not like this idea. They tried to get DARPA to stop the program that started under my predecessor. She was smart enough to know that DARPA doesn't listen to other people. DARPA's job is to do the things that seem crazy to other people. And so we got the program. She got the program started. By the time I came on board the Navy, had gone from outright hostility to mere skepticism. And let me tell you, skepticism is unbelievably valuable. We ended up in a meeting with the Vice Chief of Naval Operations at Michelle Howard, in which she was no longer saying, this is stupid, darker shit. Stop it. She was now saying, Well, I think that's just way too hard. She said, like, how is it going to navigate through the Strait of Malacca? Now, when Admiral Howard asked you how you're going to navigate through the Strait of Malacca, you need to pay attention to Admiral Howard, because she was the rear admiral who was in command in the mission of say to Captain Phillips if you saw the Tom Hanks movie. And so this woman knows what she's talking about. And when you hear that kind of skepticism from a really knowledgeable individual who's going to have to take take this thing forward, you can actually prove the basic capability. Then you know what you have to do to prove it. And that is so very, very valuable. So that story continues. And by before I left my time as darker director, I got to prison, the first ever self driving ship that can make the pier and navigate across open oceans for months at a time when we did that, we did it jointly with the Navy, and they then picked it up and ran with it. And so number one, I think we have to have room to do things before everyone agrees, because by the time everyone agrees, it's going to be pretty incremental, and that's good for getting the incremental things done. But you can't do big, bold things if everyone has to agree up front. Number one, but number two, it just doesn't change the world unless you get the technology or the capability or the new method to the point that people do agree, and that broad agreement is, is what success looks like for these moonshots. Speaker 2 36:51 Yeah, and as RT just did, if folks want to keep adding their questions on the slido, we can see them, and then we can keep pulling in some of the themes that we're seeing. So I really like that. I mean, I think there's something powerful about you have to treat your skeptics, not with derision or their bottom. You know, they're people you have to sort of work around. But actually, like, the thing they're bringing to that conversation is actually, like, a deeper thing. They're actually doing you a favor. It's a clearing of, like, what is the thing that itself should be up later. So Steve, I remember having a conversation with you where you said, one of the, you know, you're an education researcher. You said, one of the problems with being an education researcher is, you know, what is research? You run experiments. And what is the thing that parents always say, I don't want you experimenting on my tip, and it's like, well, what do you want? How do you expect this to figure out which things work or not? You know, it's like, just like, where we where does knowledge come from, if not, like, Where does medicine come from? So that, I think there's been this tension for when people build an education, where we want, we want knowledge building. We want to try things, you want to do research process and others. But then there's action around well, like, what are you doing? And I actually think, like, whether you know the phone line you guys created, and others like you guys have done a lot of things that are very practical level on the RC point about, how do you build trust, even as you're pushing ahead? Do you want to talk a little about that? Like, we're just like, we're just like, this is a hard thing, because you have to bring people along. Speaker 6 38:26 Yeah, we talk a lot about the product like, for as much a service company as a product company, we work a lot with teachers and administrators in schools, because really, what we're trying to do is to change the way you're teaching at the traditional mode of teaching has always been a teacher sort of lectures, the students take notes, the students may be doing problems for homework, and that's it. We're trying to really reverse that most of the students mind is actually solving problems, so it requires a change in mindset, right? And when we get to experimentation, which sometimes we'll call field trials, or other other things, to sort of get away from that, but part of the process of getting on board, and I love that comment about skepticism, our biggest skeptics often become our biggest champions, right? Because they're the ones who are actually thinking through what's going on, and so we engage them and helping to design what we're doing. The wrong way to do it is to sort of come in and say, well, we want to do this experiment that has this condition, and that condition you're going to go follow. It's much better if you're working with them that are helping to co design that experiment, because the way we frame it with them is they're going to learn for themselves what works teachers and administrators are experimenting all the time because they're not satisfied with the results that they get. But what they're not doing is measuring the results of what they're doing to see whether when something changes, when kids get test scores go up or down. Is that due to something they did, or is it due to some other factor in the economy or something else, right? You know? And and so they understand, when you frame it that way, that we're going to help you understand what's really working for you in your school. That's when you can really get it on board. And I think for education more broadly as a community. Speaker 2 40:19 Do you want to mention the hotline. Though, I love this idea that, like, if a teacher has a question about some field trial you're doing, they can just call and you will like, Yeah, well, let's talk through what we're Speaker 6 40:32 actually asking. We give them up front, like, exactly what the experiment is going to going to be if there are differences in what students are going to be seeing or doing depending on their condition in the experiment, yeah, and then they can email us or call us if they have any questions. We prepare our support staff to be able to sort of answer questions that they might have. It turns out like we don't get a lot of calls now, right? Because, mostly, like, you know, they said they may be happy or unhappy with with what they're seeing, but they sort of understand it, Unknown Speaker 41:10 and you don't like them. Unknown Speaker 41:13 No, they actually talk. They talk to real people. Speaker 2 41:18 So I guess one, I think one, thread I also want to pull on is I often think, you know, I had this experience when I was working in government, where there, there are topics where people think ambitious thinking, neutral thinking is like kind of hard political, you know. So, like, you know, in darker world, it's like, oh, take these darker heart problems, you know, people saying, oh, human biology or something else. And I remember when I was in the government, one of the first things that really jumped out to me was, you know, they the government will publish this at the Science office with the budget office, like a, like a chart, which is like, R D spending for the government. And, you know, I was, like, working in the science office, or one of my one of my briefs, one of my portfolios, was education. So very excitedly. Was like, oh, there's gonna be education line in the R D spend. What wasn't there. That's why I called up the budget office, and I was like, why? And they were like, Oh, it's so small that, like, we don't list it because, like, it was just like, people would be like, what you spend this much on defense R D, this much on health R D, this much on energy R D, then a little bit on space R and D, and then like education R and D, like is, like, 1/10 of 1% of all education spending is, like, below this number. So we don't even write it down. I was like, well, so it's like, how do you expect, you know, these sort of breakthroughs if you're not even taking any shots on goal. So I do think that one of the challenges always in education is, at some level, there's always like, what's the silver bullet that we're teaching the actual amount of real quantity investment, the actual amount of, you know, people's ambition in the field. So I you know, our youth now set across all these different fields, seeing them. And I'd be curious if, like, you know, just your sort of, like, outside the lens on education, and whether, you know, if we we can take it, if you're like, oh, actually, education doesn't actually have enough going on to sort of get above the line for whether the community actually should be engaging in much more ambitious risk taking and goal setting that has Moon thing. Because, you know, the thing I perceive is, like, the number of ideas I get that are in the biospace daily, for, like, we can make this breakthrough if we try, versus how much of it happens in education or some of the other social sciences, which is a lot low. Speaker 3 44:07 Yeah, let me say a couple of things. First of all, federally funded RMD is one of the many democratic institutions that we built up since the end of the Second World War, very much to our benefit. That is now in crisis today because of the actions of the current administration, and there is so much work to do to limit the damage, to protect the data the researchers, the whole system that has brought us huge parts of our economy, the entire information evolution came out of that. Cures for diseases came out of that. Adversaries have been deterred. Their behaviors have been shaped because of the technology for national security. So that list of what we got from it is long. It's it's a tragedy that is at risk today. We've got a lot of work to do. The fact that we are in this crisis tells them two things. First of all, crisis don't last forever, and the day they come when we are no longer in the crisis. And I want to make sure that when that day comes, we are ready to build a better system. Because the publicly funded, you know, look, this is R and D that we all funded. We the People funded these investments in universities and in government labs and companies that allow for these enormous advances that shaped our lives. So the day will come when we get to go back and figure out how we want that to move forward. I just told you how great it is. It's also completely inadequate, because we're not doing the work that we need to make sure that every person, every part, regardless of your zip code, regardless of your background, you should be able to have access to enormous opportunities. Here in the richest country in the world, our public our health outcomes are not acceptable for the richest country in the world. So we've got the best r&d system the world has ever seen, literally within all of human history, and it's also inadequate for our future. So when the moment comes that we can build again, we need to look not just to the past, which was glorious, but we need to figure out what the investments are that we that people want to make for the decades ahead. Now we've come to education, the need for innovation and advances in K 12 education has been apparent for a very, very, very long time. I can't remember a time in my adult life when we weren't concerned and we are more and more and more concerned about the fact that we're not able to allow our kids to learn to their fullest potential. So there's no question about the problem. What is different today is now there are real opportunities to do something about it. When we started worrying about this, we didn't really feel like we had much many tools for innovation. And you know, if you think we're talking about how medicine used to feel impossible until we started figuring out biology and using it, if you think biology is complicated, why do you try to figure out human beings and students? Right this we are the most complex, most unpredictable, most hard to understand, area of scientific research that you could possibly imagine. So we are finally at the moment when we are starting to have the capacity to do something about this problem. And the reason we have that is because of basic research on neuroscience that we talked about. So talked about. It's because the philanthropic community has taken some bold bets and has tried different ways of doing doing R D and doing experiments applied R D of the sort that Kumar and Steve were talking about, where you try to come up with practical solutions, and you put them in classrooms to see how it really works. We have real examples of successes. If you look at, look at what's happened in Mississippi. When I first heard that Mississippi had been 49th on reading scores, 49th in the country, I thought, Okay, well, unfortunately, that's what we've come to expect from Mississippi when I learned that they were now ninth in the country on reading scores, I was gobsmacked. That's what happens when you can scale the results of research across an entire state. So now I think we are at a junction where we actually can we've proven that innovation can do real good in education and change outcomes, not just teach us new things, not just write research papers, but actually change outcomes for our kids and changing at scale. Now I am feeling impatient. I want to get going. I want to make sure we're putting enough resources in so that at the national level, we're fueling these experiments, and we're able to do this in a way that reaches every kid. And I do not want to wait an entire generation. I want us to get after it now. I think that is one of the big opportunities, as when we do start working again on how we rebuild in our country, and how we rebuild our public investment and RMD, and this is a premier opportunity going forward. Speaker 2 49:29 Yeah, and I think the science, the science of reading, is a huge success story for the field. We did the decades of investment now getting applied at scale, and for the states that are really stepping up and those leaders, you're seeing these huge results. So like a real example in talking about whether you think education or civic engagement is, kind of is having its moment, should be getting this ambitious push, or where it sort of fits within, you know, because we're obviously living through complicated times, and, yeah, how do you sort of when you're sort of like pushing your own team on, what does ambitious giving look like? Where the opportunity? Where do you, what do you sort of rank education? Speaker 5 50:09 Yeah, well, if it's okay, I want to just follow up with something Arthur just said about neuroscience and investing in big, big money, big, taking, big bets. And what you were saying, triggered, triggered memory, my one of our big bets is with the Institute of learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington. The researchers there really wanted to peer inside the baby's brain and look at how it's developing in real time. And so, so the researchers that are connected with Jackie Bezos, our co founder, very early on, and they thought bigger. They, you know, they got together and thought bigger. And they, they pulled all their resources. They they were able to buy something called a mag machine, which was like one of its kind from Denmark at the time. Shifted in. In fact, I was just talking to one of the researchers yesterday, and she said, I watched watch this huge med machine come off the crates of the airplane. Jackie was just mesmerized by the technology. But they did it. They, you know, they they put the baby the first time the babies had ever been in this med machine, and they were watching the babies ready work in real time, like, what happens when they hear their mom's voice? What happens when they interact? What happens when language starts to develop? And it was literally lighting up in, you know, the various regions of her brain, which blew us away. But it wasn't just to, you know, for demonstration purposes, or so often research sits on the shelves and doesn't get put into practice. And so that was really important part of this, which was they were able to take these lessons of the research and apply them to policy changes, to programs, to families in their houses. that's just an example of where philanthropy could really step in. We are not inventing the shots. We're just getting all of the network of people together and helping them move in the same direction, and now they're using that same technology to apply to adolescent brain development, which is, you know, a whole new, interesting can of worms. Just wanted to put that example out there. Speaker 2 52:27 I mean, I think the neuroscience side is super interesting, partly, just because, when you talk to folks in the neuroscience community, you know, they feel like they're at the top of the second inning of, like, a very long game, because, you know, they're like, Well, you don't understand, like, all the advances we've made so far, basically either boil down to research on single neurons or couple neurons, or, like, full on brain scans, fMRI, and they're like everything in between is kind of like a hazy understanding, and so much of learning and everything else would sit in deeper understandings of all of you know, all that middle of neuroscience and the technology is getting stronger, but our ability to like actually connect, you know What Steve is talking about, core ideas we have around learning science. When a student gazes up and is like, looking confused what's happening, like, we're just using like, very basic proxies, like, you look frustrated what's happening, but like, that's it, right, where we don't have any deeper understanding that could actually tap in, you know, like neuroscientists has like so there are other fields that sit right next to education that could potentially start to contribute a lot. And I'd be just curious Steve, like, you know you're sitting next to CMU campus. What are the sciences that are happening on campus where you're like, that is going to become a big deal for us Speaker 6 53:56 at some point. Yeah, there's a couple of things I can talk about, but with the neuroscience angle, I'll talk about one product we've been working with called Fast Forward, which is based on the neuroscience of how we acoustically hear the differences in speech. So sounds like but and pub like acoustically are very similar, but the brain sort of makes them sound maximally different. But some students' brains aren't able to do that. They're not able to sort of perceive the acoustic differences, and that all comes from you see that in neuroscience research, and then we're able to create a program where students by listening and responding to sound. So we actually take speech sounds and magnify that transition period so that it's sort of easier to make a transition. It sounds weird for an adult, protective part, but it makes it easier to tell the difference between a job, right? And then you sort and you train it and narrow it down, and then students, it's almost like pre phonemic awareness, which is sort of the first step in the science of reading that people use, but you have to understand, like, if you're not even ready for that phonemic awareness, we need to train the brain and the other Another thing I'll mention with with Carnegie Mellon that we're doing, it's a different sort of way of getting insights with the students brains. Is, or at least the way students are thinking, is, we've been working on augmented reality applications. So for many years, we had students use our software in the classroom with the teacher kind of rotating around. And when students raise their hand, they would go over to the student who had their hands raised. And we started talking to students. And we found a whole bunch of students who said, I wouldn't raise my hand if my hair was like fire, like I don't do that, right? And then there's other students who are like, Yeah, I call the teacher over every day, all the time. I just love having having a teacher over, so we sort of reversed that and said, Well, what if we take data from the software in real time identify which students are called unproductively struggling. Struggling is sometimes good, sometimes like so that kid is always calling teacher over. It's just because you're a little bit confused. No, work it out for yourself. But there are other kids who are making mistakes. They're unproductive, not improving from their mistakes. That's where the teacher can be most effective. And so what we've done is given this is with Vincent Levi and others are finding melon. We've given the teachers these augmented reality classes so they can look out of the classroom and over the kids heads. They see indicators of who's struggling, and then they see the data that they need to know and the recommendation, so that as I walk over to that student desk, they know exactly what's going on with that, right? And they say, like, it's a way of, sort of sneaking into my students, understanding their way of thinking, yeah. Speaker 2 56:53 So I just think there's, there's so much that that, like, we don't know, it creates lots of opportunities. Just as we're closing out, I'd be curious. I mean, one of the kinds of questions we've gotten is just like, how should I bring this to my own life? You know, what's my personal moon shot? How does one bring it? You know, we just, I Renaissance philanthropy, just, just today, actually launched a self staff where the first posted by Tom on like, how does moonshot thinking a way that one can actually be bringing to their own work? So I just as a quick rapid fire, what's like a thing you want someone to walk out of the room and just like how this can be practical ways just organize one's life market, Speaker 3 57:35 moonshot has two parts. One is knowing where that you want to go, being very, very clear about that. And then I think one of the most powerful questions when you're trying to do hard things is, what does it take to get there? So I like both of us being clear about what the goal is and what does it take to get there. Speaker 5 57:52 Awesome. There's so much I can say. Well, our North Star is, you know, helping everybody live to their full potential and meaningfully contribute to their communities. And so our mission is our moonshot. I don't know how we get there yet, but we're Speaker 6 58:11 working on it well, all together. And Steve, I'll say one of the things we find is that every student can learn if you give them the opportunity, if you motivate them properly, and you also take them seriously, right? Understand like if they're making mistakes, don't give up on them. Understand where those mistakes are and get into it. It's it's amazing how much difference that makes in teachers Unknown Speaker 58:37 and parents and how do you sort of carry Speaker 6 58:40 that to, like, your team? Yeah, it's about again, like trying to understand student thinking, convey that to the teacher and to the student, so that, like, the worst thing for a student, to me is, if you're in class, you say, Hey, this is the way I'm thinking about solving this problem? The teacher says, Well, this is out in class. We don't do it that way. Speaker 7 59:01 Do it this way, right? Like, it's just a direct statement, like, you don't belong here. How? Don't give Speaker 6 59:07 the answer. So think about like, Yeah, take that and figure out, like, Okay, is it correct? Correct? It? If it's correct, there's a lot of good ways of solving problems that we need to acknowledge. Speaker 2 59:21 Well, I want to thank all of you. Your questions were incredibly helpful. We sort of kept pulling them in. And I want to thank this incredible panel, and thank you for joining us Today. Speaker 7 59:38 You I think, yeah, probably this, it does it. They're like you. Transcribed by https://otter.ai