How To Launch A Startup! Feat. Sam Manez @samreidmanez #Podcast #Startup #Business

🤯 In this episode, John and La'Fayette are joined by special guest Samreid Manez, CEO & founder of Valearnis App and ManezCo. Samreid joins us all the way from Perth, Western Australia to have a conversation about how to launch a startup. Seeing the need for a better education system in Australia , Samreid decided to reinvent education by designing an educational platform that is fully designed around a student -centric ecosystem that provides students with mastery-learning, gameful learning, iterative lessons, on-demand reporting, and team based competition. Find out how Samreid turned an idea into a startup that has had a global impact! To hear more you'll have to hit that PLAY & DOWNLOAD button!

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Transcript

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Welcome to the unscripted Authentic Leadership Podcast. A podcast we are seeking to lead change while also seeking to understand. We're also here as a platform for leaders to come together, to unite, to develop and empower other leaders in the areas of business, family, faith and community. I'm your host, Lafayette Lane, joined by my co-host, John LeBrun. And today, we are joined by our special guest, Sam Menez, all the way from the land down under Australia. You already know what time it is. Make Sam feel real comfortable, real good as he's decided to join us 12 hour difference time. So we got to add some extra claps in the comments section for him. He's join us today to have a conversation about how to start a lunch up. He is a educator. He's a scientist. He's a CEO. And he's also a founder. Very interesting young man. And I'm saying that as if I'm not young. But Sam is 25, so he's the youngest on the screen today. So selv, let's get right into the conversation as we just opened up and said, you're all the way joining us from Australia. Tell our audience a little bit more about who you are and what you do, man. Sure. Thank you guys so much for having me. Yeah, it's it's primarily for me. It's about it started off at six forty five then. And that's been that's been fun. But thank you guys for having me on the show. I'm really excited to see what we can come up with. Yes. So I grew up over here in Western Australia, probably one of our, I guess, smaller parts of the country. So by population, very small by size, very large. So almost like a Texas of Australia in a sense. But yes, that's that's where I grew up. My parents are from Malaysia. So they migrated over here in the nineties and they had me so first generation migrant. And yeah, I I've had a pretty long, varied journey. Should I actually start, I guess, with the education side of things? Yeah, man. Life wherever you want to start, man. Yeah, start. So I guess I'll give you guys the whole story. I grew up in a suburban city area for the first half of my life until about the age of 11. That's what my parents both became educators initially as they were migrants. They kind of had to start from scratch, and a lot of the things didn't translate over. My dad was actually a fighter pilot in the Malaysian Air Force, but when he came over here, that defense from one country doesn't translate to defense in another country. It actually probably makes it harder for anything else. So he had to be a taxi driver for many years, but then they got into university and became teachers, which is again, quite a bit different tangent. And they got out. Teaching are beginning works is because it's a government network, you can kind of get placed into different areas, maybe similar to how the police system works there, I'm not sure. But you can get posters, parts of the country, and if you go to rural areas, you get benefits, you might get a bit better pay, you'll get better housing, that sort of thing. So we could post it to a small country town. And I moved over there at the age of 11. We were the first nonwhite family in the town, which is interesting. So here we go. Everyone was loving the town that they're really nice. They're just they had a lot of questions. They didn't know a lot of things. So it was fun to share that with with them. And I grew up in this tiny country town, a small school. We had about 100 people in the whole school from. Yeah, from K to 12. So definitely had a smaller classroom. And I managed to finish the last year of schooling here, even even though we didn't have all of the subjects available in school. They had a service called Side, which is like an online learning service where teachers in in in the city connect with you once we give you content. And that was probably the first time I had my experience of online learning. And I realized how terrible it is, because it just it wasn't it wasn't connecting with me at all. I wasn't actually learning anything. I was just lucky that I had the independence to go there and then on my own. And what I would do is I would go on Wikipedia and YouTube and I would learn pretty much everything from that. And then I would touch base with the teacher once a week and pretend that I was learning from that class, but I really wasn't. So I've already identified a problem back then that, OK, if a kid can't learn in class for whatever reason, I need to supplement their learning online. What's available right now is just not doing it. So I already knew that was a problem. But after that, I got into uni and what I really wanted to do was just learn as much as possible, especially about the world around me. And I thought, okay, what what can I do here? What sort of degree could I do like that? So I decided to. About geology, a lot of people assume it's the odds, these rocks gradually from the rocks science, but actually it's hard science. We learn about literally everything that happens on Earth. So we do chemistry, physics, mathematics, you know, mineralogy, everything to do with that. Okay, great. This is a good place to start, at least. So I got a good geology background. We did some awesome research field trips. We we did all sorts of cool things. And the final year, you basically choose what stream you want to go into. So if you want to go into petroleum mining or be just pure academic stream petroleum wasn't too interesting for me, mainly because we learned a lot about climate change throughout the degree. So it didn't really make sense to go into that field. Mining as well wasn't really pulling me in so much pain was good, but I wasn't I wouldn't have felt a lot of, I guess, connection with my role as a miner again, because the way I got into it was to learn about things instead of the economic side of things. I wasn't really thinking about that. And so I decided to use the academic stream to just gain as much knowledge as I could, and then I would figure it out from there. So that's that's what I did. And I finished off the degree. And in my you know, my final holidays of the degree I was looking for work, I was I was thinking what I want to do, I need to do something with this degree now. And in that, in the meantime, I was volunteering in the high schools that my parents teach at. And I came across a few high school kids that were interested in doing some extra learning. So I would come into the school once a week with my little kids on a piece of paper, give them an assignment for the week. They would all give it a shot. I would bring in prizes. And I was like, wow, this is fun. Like, you know, I'm teaching these kids is fun. Do I want to be a teacher? Maybe that could that could be something that's interesting for me. But I was like, okay, what if I start giving them these quizzes online? Because I've got two schools that I'm I'm working with now and one's an hour away. Instead of me driving there, why don't I just make like a little bulletin board for them? And they could do things online. And I did that and it got even more kids on board. And I was like, oh, okay, this is fun doing online learning with these kids. There's something here. They're gaining something out of it. So that's great. And whenever I would go into these classrooms, whenever teachers would tell the kids, OK, now's the time to go on whatever online learning platform they were using. There was like a collective groan from the kids when they would like, oh, OK, right. We have to go do that. And I was like, oh, all right. You guys feel the same way about these programs that I felt when I was in high school. Not not too long or so. Obviously, nothing has changed in those few years. Maybe I can just I can do something. Yeah. So I teamed up with a whole bunch of teachers and we just made heaps of learning content. We made all sorts of lessons. We made about like forty thousand words worth of content. And I was like, OK, I can easily take this idea of creating a Eco-System, a learning environment. And I can show this to an investor. And they're going to pay for us to get developers and they're going to make it because I don't know how to code or anything like that. And that was probably one of the most naive moments of my life, because obviously it does not work like that. You can't just throw content, other words at someone and say, hey, I've got an idea. Please fund it. I don't know how to do it, but I've got the blocks as you helped me build it. Unfortunately, that doesn't work that way. So I we went back to the drawing board and I was like, OK, the issue is they don't have anything to play around with. Right. I say I want to make a learning environment or an application, but I have no way of demoing it. I have no way of really showing them a simple idea here. So I was like, OK, thanks for the content. Guys will sit on this for a while. I'm going to go online coding, so I'd sign up online and a bunch of coding languages. The main one I learned was Ruby on Rails. It's really it's a really good framework, which is building applications as fast as possible, especially if you aren't the most experienced coder, which I definitely wasn't. So it was really quick to just set up a very, you know, basic made up version of the application, a prototype. And then I finally had something I could show people and they were like, oh, OK, this is what you want to do. And there was time to get an idea of what we were trying to get done. And that's when I got into a pre accelerator program. I'm not sure they have they have accelerator programs on. Getting a greens in the US incubators and whatnot. Yep, yep, yep, apprec exhilarate program is basically between an incubator and an accelerator. So it's where you're a bit too advanced or an incubator, but you're not right at the exploration stage either. So we went through that program last year because I had a prototype, something to show them. And at the end of that, there's a pitch night and we ended up winning the pitch night, which was really cool. So we got a bit of traction there and people were understanding my idea. And from there, where it was basically just at that point, just me at the end of the pitch night to now there's 11 people at the company. So we definitely ramped up in the end of last year and all of this year. And you had a lot of people hopped on board because they were interested in what we were doing. And now I have amazing developers that are a million million times better than me, a coding, working on the proper version of the app instead of doing the the beta version that I initially made. So, yeah, it just came out, which is really exciting. So people can play with the the demo version of it, but now it's completely redone from the ground up with with much better art and much better background. So that that's what we we focused on that. But what I realized is that we need to there's a lot of things people learn in academia that don't translate over to the field for a long time, especially with with education, with cognitive neuroscience and all those sort of things. What people learn at the PhD and research level will only trickle into classrooms maybe after 10, 15, 20 years. And I'm not too happy with that, where we know people learn a certain way already. But we can't implement those things in classrooms now because change takes time. So I thought, okay, I need to go out and learn about these sort of things. I need to learn instructional design. I need to learn cognitive neuroscience. You learn how people think and how people learn. And I did that online, had a few American universities have just been really cool. So like University of Michigan, it's been really good for that university in Minnesota as well. This has been a lot of tough stuff over there. So I've I've managed to learn about, OK, what makes people tick and what makes people learn the best ways. And something we, I guess, found immediately obvious is the more free rein you give people, the better they learn. The more self-determination you give someone, the more they'll take charge of their their education, of their life, and that they'll direct their own learning. So the current classroom model we have now is the Victorian model. It literally hasn't changed since the Victorian era of a head teacher at the front of the classroom and all of the kids surrounding them. And it's one directional learning. There's no feedback loop there. There's there's no equal participation or anything like that. But that sort of methodology doesn't really translate to what works for the brain. Well, OK, so the brain is more of the ancient Greek style of learning where you all equally debate things. You all equally come to the table. You all have have a say in what you're trying to talk about, but you try to share with each other. So I thought, OK, giving kids the power to choose what they want to choose is important. Giving them the power to learn on their own, to learn at their own pace, to choose what they want to learn is important, because the more power you give people, the further they'll take that. So we implemented that into our application. And then something else we found is that people need to personify something in these things that they use. They need to feel a connection to them. So they need a avatar to to possess the character, to feel progression before. And we're implementing that as well, because they can feel a connection to the characters. That's good. But customization, all of those things are really important to this sort of to this journey. But what we also found is that the traditional school method is a it's a negative feedback loop. So you start off semester technically at 100. Right. And you start up at 100 percent and you go down from there. It is only going down, really. And if you're really, really smart, you starting off at 100, by the end of semester, you end up with your 60 percent or your 70 percent. Whatever you get, every test you do is bringing your average down. I don't know if you guys have ever gotten like a 40 percent in a test before in your life. Do you have a planning plan? Right. Maybe I'm being really honest. I was a test taker. So when when you got that Dimmock, when you got that 40 percent or whatever it was, do you did you feel like you meant something? Feel like you gained something from getting that market now. My thing is, is I always I always didn't want I probably could study harder, but I was that student there as we were going through the curriculum that says math. It didn't ever make sense, but it seemed like when we got to the next step, the old stuff made sense. And I was like, oh, now if I could only take the test now, I'd be fine. That was me calling, basically trying to figure out how do I hide this test from my parents? That was that was that perfect? You're you're you're the perfect student, because that point is exactly the right point to make you. You got the 40 percent, but you eventually understood the concept enough where you could apply it to the to the more complex method later on. So you still not the thing. It just took you a little bit longer. And when you would test on, it wasn't the right time to be tested on it. It just you had that aha moment a little bit later. That's the thing. So that 40 percent didn't do much in terms of your learning. It was only a negative thing to get. So how we've done ours is you only make progress upwards. You start off at zero and you only can go upwards from there. If you don't do too well in a in a lesson, you might not get the highest amount of experience points compared to what you could have gotten. But you're still gaining progression, is still increasing your level no matter what. So if you did okay in a test, your level goes up a little bit. So you're moving onwards and upwards a little bit. If you did really well, you move onwards and upwards a lot. So there's still incentive to do well. But even if you don't get there, you know, realizing that you're actually doing something, you're 40 percent still matters. You still went upwards in that direction. You still on your way to learning what you need to learn. So that's what we thought is really important, because even in university, it's still works on that one hundred downwith method where getting low marks doesn't do anything for you. The whole reason we have exams is not because exams are conducive for learning exams or only conducive for us as a society to understand if someone knows something, that it's perfect science. If if we once we can implement the technology to aggregate assignments and group work and then all those sort of things, that's a much better way of telling how much someone actually knows the content. It's it's a long form thing. It's not a two hour exam. So that's my I guess that's my Flexbox done on what I've been up to. I had this physics teacher, his name is Mr. Engelbrecht, and I always thought he was crazy. He would be like it was a hard topic, physics my senior year and he go class. I do things a certain way because I understand the human brain and hold up the brain. And here's what he would do. We would go through the curriculum. We would take a a test closed book. Small, small tests, not one giant one, they're always small each week. We will take it on, let's say, a Thursday or Friday. We the class would grade each other's stuff. We give each give the paper right back. And then he'd say, here's your quiz. Tomorrow we're going to have another quiz. And then we caught on after a few weeks. The next one was it was closed book, but it was identical to the first one. We thought, that's weird. But then every time we took it, I got a really good grade of a golf course. I got one. It's the same quiz. Well, here's the thing. I remember more from that physics class about anything in high school, because this crazy old man realizes that I was going to go back, study what I didn't know, learn it for the next day, because I thought, oh, I'm just going to remember that. I just learned and I still remember all these dumb physics concepts, because this crazy man had a new way of doing things instead of getting a bad grade. We just got the new grade. But for some reason, I can remember the way he had us go back and just fix what we messed up. We just set it in our minds what we are learning. So so giving us a bad grade. Right now, we're worried about how are we going to pass the next one and get our grades up. It was always just going to go learn what I didn't know and then I'll do better tomorrow. Exactly. Exactly. And you probably thought you were tricking the system by being really sneaky about that. Oh, yeah, I thought he is crazy. And he didn't know what he's talking about. But yeah, I mean, you land and that's that's all their job is. That's all the whole point of schooling is just to learn as much as you can. So. Yeah, that's the thing. That's a great point. Yeah. I want to make sure that the audience knows because you have an amazing concept that you've come up with. But I want to make sure that they know what you're talking about, the name of your app, the name of your company in specifics. So they can be a part of what you're doing, this educational innovation concept that you've come up with, because especially at the time that we're in. Some kids are doing in-person, some kids are doing online. And there's mixed emotions from the children of how they're learning. Being an African-American, the study is showing that we struggle with the online learning more than any other race because we need more of that, I guess, in-person teacher experience. But I think what you have created will help even the playing field for all. And I love how you talked about it's not about the teacher coming back, but a whole bunch of red marks on your paper. You know, I can always remember in class, everybody's looking around to see who has the most red marks, see what that number is within that circle, you know, and it doesn't teach the kid anything but makes don't feel bad about themselves. And it creates a culture of comparison instead of learning. Right. And so what you have created, I want you to give the audience the exact name of what you have created, the concept. And because you have I don't think what you have I don't think we have here in the United States. We have online learning and things of that nature. But the way the concept that you are teaching it from is a different angle that I think that we need implemented in every classroom. And what you have is not just in the classroom, in the school, but the classroom that can be brought to the house. So take our audience. Tell us what the name of your company is and how do you see education continuing to evolve in the future? Sure. One of our first for all, thank you so much. That is that is really, really kind of you to say. And it's really exciting to say to hear that from from your point of view, there might not be something like this over there, because I've done as much research as I could over here and we couldn't find anything. But if there's also not something over in the States, that's probably good news for us. That's that's great to hear. Our app called Villainies v a l e, a R and I. So it's just Vuh. And that learn is V'Landys. It's meant to be a learning ecosystem, a world of knowledge. So you're entering V'Landys when you come in. The company is called Miniskirt, and there is a differentiation between the company and the products. Romanesco is just my my last name. I started the company I attended many years ago because I jumped the gun. And I've been paying company fees for years just because I wanted to have the company name. But that's that's how that started off. So, yeah, Villainies is our app. You can you can just Google it. You don't even have to do the WW dot because there's nothing else called that, which is which is quite lucky for us. Again, what you said about people of color having having issue with these online things is also an issue with the characterization. Right. With a lot of these games that people play a character or have the character to personify is not normally a character that looks like you. I've played a million games where I haven't had the opportunity to play something that looks like me playing. I'll play something that I can identify with, and that's something that we've implemented into our application. It's important to have a diverse set of characters to choose from because kids need to feel that, oh, cool, that guy looks like me or that girl looks like me. And I know that seems like a like a trivial thing to some people, but something that some people take for granted. But it matters because if you can see that up on the on the screen, on the big screen or in the in the game or whatever you're looking at, you feel more empowered. So that's something that we're really trying to do. But you also touched on the comparisons, right? The comparisons of the red marks and all that. So we wanted to put competition into our application. But how do you put competition into something that's healthy? How do you entice that? Little bit of competitive drive without that, the unhealthiness that comes with it. So initially I thought, OK, well, a leaderboards is a straightforward way of doing competition, but then I was like, maybe I should actually do the research on how leaderboards work in terms of what they actually produce cognitively. And I found out that classrooms that use, you know, leaderboard methods where it's literally like the top five kids get to have their name on something. The issue with that is the top three percent of the classroom engages with that. The bottom ninety seven percent completely disengages from that entire framework because it means nothing to them. The second they find out that they can't be in that top ladder and that they assume they won't ever be, they stop trying altogether and they actually actively disengage more than they would have without this method. So this method doesn't really help anyone besides the top real cream of the crop. So that's not what I wanted to do at all. So then I thought, OK, how do we put competition in here? That's healthy. That's when you have teams, right? That's when you have houses, when you have factions, when you have something to support larger than yourself. So now, instead of having people up there, it's just three different houses, three different factions to choose from that. A student chooses three like a personality quiz to see what they identify with more. And those houses get points every time students within the house are doing and doing the work. So instead of feeling okay, this top guy is getting his name up there. It's that house is is doing well. I want my house to do well. So I'm going to engage more with the application. I'm going to work harder. And even though I know I might not be the strongest learner, I might not be able to do as many quizzes or whatever. That doesn't matter, because every tiny bit I do is adding to the pot. It doesn't matter that I'm not getting the highest marks, that that's not part of it at all. I'm constantly adding on to the increase that. So that's what we try to implement as well, because it really is. Are you familiar? Do you guys have as a sound random as a point, why do you guys have a ninja warrior things? In Australia, we have this thing called American Ninja Warrior. We were saying that the American one. My family is a huge American Ninja Warrior fan. My son did a couple of local competitions, stuff like that. We're not deep into it. We just love it. And here's the thing you talk about healthy competition is the only thing I've seen that a sport where. Everybody roots for the other person, even though there's definitely a winner and somebody who lost. But there's not really a loser in the fact that the environment of the competition is that you're actually only competing to do better to to outdo your past self. Yes. And if you don't win, it's not because, you know, somebody was dependent on you whether you have won or lost. It's not like somebody pulled you down or had a disadvantage or anything like that. And it's created this healthy competition that as I watched it, that is really hard to do. I know it's hard to duplicate, but it would probably bode really well even within education, because the students aren't they're not getting penalized because they're not as good. But instead, they're rooting the other competitors to just outdo their last run, to outdo the last obstacles. Or if they couldn't do one and somebody else learn from it, then they can go in further succeed because somebody else has showed them half the path. Or once somebody has figured out the path, they get to go again and they can now figure out how to get through there because somebody helped pave the way or walk the minefield. So sounds I know it sounded random, but I know that they created in this sport is a healthy competition where you are championed to do well, but you're not. Brought down if you have a bad day. Exactly, exactly that that's that's exactly what we're trying to embody. I guess a core philosophy is we want to build something that we want to have used when we were in school. That's a pure core philosophy that we want to build something that we love and that we really cherish and that we want to use is that we were a student. So that's what we're trying to go for that. Another important thing that we've implemented is cumulative assessment instead of some summative assessment. So that that might sound like an educational jargon might. I'll dove into that now. How school works, how university works is you get a grade at the end of the semester and Appam, whatever it is, at the end of your learning period. Right. So what does that grade mean? So when you get your B mark that you get end of semester, you go away for your school holidays. Right. When you come back in the next semester to start learning. Did that bee do anything for you? Do you do you think about it? Does it does it play around in your head or do you just get the report card? Should your parents and you forget about it for the rest of your life? Right. You basically just you just move on. It means nothing at that point in time. It would have been like, wouldn't it be nice to know that you were on a be halfway through semester, halfway through, you get to realize, oh, okay, I'm sitting on a B, maybe if I want to do a bit better, I can improve it now or I can I can stay here from comfortable with that. But knowing where you're at in real time is so important. And we haven't been able to do that in the past because we've relied on teachers to to report on on on these sort of things and reporting. Well, as I know from my parents is a pretty taxing is probably the most taxing part of an educated work. It's that's the most intense session for them where they have to do a lot of work and they can only do that twice a year. So it's been hard to ask them, you know, constantly give me an update on how my students are doing, A, for a student to be hey, I want to constantly know exactly how well I'm doing, exactly what I'm not learning, exactly what I'm learning. Well, every single day I want to know. But we can't do that with with people. We can do that with technology. But when you use an application like odds and you completing work on us any day, any second, whenever you want, you go and check out your your report and you can see exactly how well you're doing it. Every single not even every single subject, every single topic you can see. Okay, in physics, you know, something I'm really good at is the vectors and things like that. But what I'm really not good at is understanding the different equations around gravity. So I can see an obvious way of improving. I mean, I'm not good at something. I'm really good at mathematics. Same thing. I'm really good at the space measurement stuff. So I get shapes. Shapes are great for me. But when it comes to no and algebra, I'm just I'm not getting it. My my my scores there aren't too good. I wanted to bring them up. I've identified in real time where I'm having issues with instead of getting a B at the end of my learning period, I'm understanding in real time what I'm not doing well with and what I am doing well with. And I can change it and I can have full control over it right then and there. Adobe is obviously handy for parents as well, because instead of waiting for the end of the learning period to find out how well the kids are done, they can learn every single week, every single day exactly how well the kids are doing. So that's why our app is is in homes as much as it is in schools. You talk about the importance of technology in education, from what I'm hearing, it is not optional at this point. It is it is absolutely vital and necessary to the success of the education of our up and coming generation. We talk about, you know, we always say, are you here? Are the older people say the next generation? Well, the next generation is this generation. You know, they're here. It is now. Right. And so even all us on this screen, we're all millennials. But, you know, we have families. We have mortgages. You know, we have kids. Right. And so the kids that we have are coming up in that educational arena. Morsell speaking to them. What can we do as parents to employ? Of course, we're going to get your act. But what can we do on a on a day to day basis to create a culture of education within our home? Right. Yeah. Can speak to that. I can get yeah. Culture of education is the most important thing. People people tend to think that education comes from the school. It doesn't. Historically, it never has. School is a relatively new thing. Education has been a parent's job from, you know, from prehistory. That that's how that's how it works. You you make a kid, you educate it through life. You're not only teaching it how to walk, you're teaching it how to talk, how to learn, how to behave, how to understand the world around it. A parent is to say to a parent is an educator. And more parents need to realize that. And they need to fully grasp that. Now, I'm not sure how it is over in the US at the moment, but unfortunately in Australia, we have had a really long distancing from education. A lot of families here haven't been valuing education much at all, and they haven't been putting much emphasis on it. And that has led to a huge skills shortage. So we rely on a lot of our really highly skilled jobs, like our epidemiologists and those sort of like neuroscientists and the sort of jobs from outsourced labor workers that they migrate over here on on migrant visas from from Asia, where they tend to have a better track record with their cultural value on education. Over here. We don't value it as much. We've had a lot of mining and mineral and resource booms over here, meaning that people don't actually for the longest time, they didn't have to go and get these these high level educations to to make a living for themselves. There was one point in time when the resource boom was so crazy that in America you have the guys that do the stop in. Stop and slow down that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're getting a hundred grand there. We're getting a hundred grand a year at the at the peak of the, you know, things got crazy. Things are paying like 20 bucks an hour kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we had kids in school telling teachers, hey, I don't want to learn this, I don't need to learn this. I'm going to finish school and get. We got a year 12. I'm going to finish school year 10, and I'm just going to go and do that because I can earn more than what you're earning, doing whatever I want for the kids already. We're already hearing that and we're hearing that from the home. So the issue is the issue isn't that, you know, labor is an important labor is super important and people need to grow and do exactly what they are meant to do. That's fine. But we had a huge skewing the opposite way where we had so many people moving away from academia that now in a time like Covid, where we're pretty screwed, right, where we don't have we don't have those those skilled people anymore, and we can't rely on bringing them in because our country is pretty much shut at the moment. So what do we do? It would be great if we had a highly educated workforce here, but at the moment we don't. So that's something people have moved away from. But what parents can do, literally more understanding, I think, is important. Understanding of your role as a parent is predominately a role of an educator. You're not you're not a career first and foremost. You're an educator first and foremost. And taking full control of that is is important, doing as much research as you can and finding out as much as you can. Being proactive about your child's learning is really important. And I do think we need to live in a world where the only parents that are doing the right by their kids in terms of education are the ones that are sending them to private school. I'm not a fan of that world. I, I went to public school every year, and I think it's nothing short of unacceptable for the public school education to not be the best education you can get. I don't like the idea of you having to send your kid to. And thousand dollar school of forty thousand dollar school to get a good education, because that just means that 90 percent of kids are not getting that good education and that's not fair. And you won't have people leaving their socio economic statuses with these sort of systems where the only way of educating yourself well is a private school . So then kids born in areas that aren't too well off are never going to leave because they can never advance themselves. That's not great either. So with technology, we can finally bridge that gap. We finally have the resources now to convince those good education and all those good things into cheap, usable programs, programs that any school in the world can use, any parent can use for for, you know, reasonable prices because of technology. We now have the power to do that instead of relying on on spending ridiculous amounts of money on private schools. We can you know, we can we can put this in every home. We can put this in every classroom. And that's something that's really important. Yeah, so there is two very data driven public education, so that's my wife is an educator. She just retired from that to stay home and in homeschool. My children and I can tell you for a fact that it's very data driven because the government wants to know what's works and what doesn't. And the only way they can know apparently, allegedly, is by testing and testing and testing, which runs into the problem of allowing kids to explore and to learn and give them that chance to grow, to fail and to grow again, which is really how you learn. But that's also why families I've looked into it as you grow economically, you look for better ways to educate your children, because, you know, the public system is fine, but there's better. So there's Montessori schools and things that allow your child to explore and try and not just sit in the chair all day. And so and those those are failed. It's hard to even find room. And they cost thousands of dollars a year, sometimes tens of thousands a year. And parents are just like, yeah, do it, let's do it. And unfortunately, it definitely helps. It definitely loads up one side of the economic family because. And also, I love what you said about the parents responsibility to teach. I have been preaching that forever. My wife's a teacher and so many families assume, hey, my kids are doing well. It's your fault. But my kids, my son is an excellent student. What they don't realize is we've read with him literally every night of his life since he was by three to six months old. He was a little blob. And we would read to him in his seat. And I thought it was ridiculous. I'm like, honey, why am I reading? So he can't even talk. She's like, just do it. And I'm like, all right. So I would do it. And I'm telling you what they learn from just reading little books and how they understand their new interests. What do they want to explore? There's so much you can gain just from a little 15 minute book a night. But anyways, the problem is, though, and I don't know if you have an answer to this as the families continue to break up and it is and you have more and more single family households. It gets harder and harder for the family to find that time, because I hear families. I don't have time. I don't have time. And my I want to say, you have to make the time. But let's be honest, a single mom sometimes working two jobs, trying to get their kids into extracurriculars so they can be out and play football and do other things. And if they can even get to that, it really does make it. They're their children have to have less advantage than my children whose family we've stayed. We obviously we have a family unit that's strong. And I'm not downing the single family, family parent, the mom who's taking care of her kids. It's a local hero. But how are they supposed to compete? When I can read to my kids every night, I can put them in extra programs. I can put them in online. You know, speaking classes and all kinds of stuff. Yeah. In the past, they couldn't that for the longest time, they couldn't compete. There was literally no way, you know, if they don't have the time and they're working so much, that's understandable. You know, if you're a single parent, live life isn't easy and you're just trying to do the best by your kids. And yeah, you don't have time to to be that teacher for them as much as you'd like to be. And you can't afford to get a tutor for them because, you know, tutoring is expensive, 30 bucks an hour. And yeah, you can't afford. It's about 40 bucks an hour. Yeah. You can't afford to put them in school. You can't. I was going to some private schools into Montessori schools or whatever. So you couldn't give them a good education. Now the technology is getting there. Technology is getting there to where if you can afford Netflix, you can afford a good enough program for your kid. But the flip side of that is, even if you don't have time, fostering a culture of education at home is as simple as instilling values in your kid, that this matters, even if you not so much, you can still instill in them the idea, the you know, the drive that, hey, this matters. This is really important. You need to go out and grasp this. You know, I might not be here all the time. I might be really busy working as much as I can, but just realize that maybe they can even frame it as, hey, I have to do this. If you don't want to have a life that is busy when you grow up and when you want to be less stressed, maybe you need to, you know, engage more with education and you need to go really far. But you do tend to see that in in some families like that, where where they are struggling, they will instill those sort of values in their kids because they want them to to get out of that situation. They want to. Do as well as they can, so I think it can really be as simple as that. If you are not fostering that culture at home just by talking about it, just by emphasizing it, then you should be. And now with with technology, I mean, regardless of our app or not, is there's a lot out there that you can pay for that's around the same price as Netflix. And you can get a pretty good, you know, complement to their learning. What kind of thing is your app like lessons does your app teach if a parent wants to get on your app, which is guys, it's priced amazing. By the way, I'm on his website on my phone right now. What kind of things do they learn? Yeah. So we've got all four major subjects over here. The four major subjects of science, humanities, English and mathematics. So a lot of these learning apps either focus on just one subject or just math and English. I don't see the point to that, because in school you do a whole range of subjects, and throughout most of school, you tend to do the big four almost equally, especially like the first 10 years of school. So if if it's important to do all four equally, to get a good understanding of the world, I'm not too sure why a lot of these apps only focus on one. I don't see why it would be conducive to learning to learn math on one app and then English on another app and then humanities somewhere else and have nothing of it translate over to each other to have no progression that that translates over. So that's not what we were we were interested in. But what we were interested in is creating a full ecosystem that people can actually engage with properly, that people can actually, you know, learn the whole suite of everything they can learn in one one nice world to let it in. That was really important to us. But also seeing how you asking me about how I see technology changing education around the future and the future ideas, what changes it will have. Yeah, the fact that the fact that we're still not there is is crazy to me, because the amount of innovations we have outside of education every day is crazy. Like everything's moving so fast, so rapid. Every year we have some sort of new new crazy increment. But education moves really, really, really slow. And it's a slow moving beast because they don't want to do something wrong. It takes them a long time to be like, OK, let's implement this thing. And it's like a really, really small shift over to it. But these kids are growing up in a world that's ever changing, like one year. The next year is almost like shorter because things just happen faster and faster. Yeah. In the classroom, things are like back to the eighteen hundreds. So that's not good enough. That needs to be improved. And unless you can really help with that now where we have things like machine learning in a classroom, then that would be really cool. So what we want to put into our app is our machine. The reason we we have Python is the back end of our app is because it's really good for machine learning. Now, what we could do with machine learning is any quizzes you do any less than you do. The questions you get, your pathway will never be the same as anyone else's. It's perfectly calibrated to you as what is challenging to you. Now, let me explain that. Let's say we both do a physics quiz. We both do the exact same quiz. Now we get the same first question as a first opening question of the quiz. But I get the question right and you get it wrong. So I get that first question right now. I know on the back end side of things with machine learning is bumped me up in terms of difficulty for the next question. You got that? Got it wrong. It's bumped slightly down on difficulty for your next question. So now we're going to go through the entire lesson, getting bumped up and down, up and down, up and down through all the different streams of difficulty throughout the lesson. Do you have a perfect experience of keeping us basically challenged the entire way through and we'll both come out of it being like, oh, OK. Yeah, that was a pretty good quiz because it was an equal amount, not an equal amount. It's easy for both of us, even though we were at different levels. It completely matches where we are to keep his challenged in that balancing act where we were challenged enough to improve, but not so much where it was just way too hard. And we've disengaged. So those are the sort of things that I'm excited about. But even when it comes to I like the they'll never be a replacement of having a human teacher in school because they do a lot more than being a educator. And they care. They teach in that social ways in social interactions. There is a human touch and they're really important for that. But having A.I. in the classroom would be so handy for understanding how each kid learns how to teach. You would have to be Superman to to understand exactly how each of the three kids in their classroom learns by having an A.I. assigned to each one of those kids, more like a companion companion. The kid has that fully understands and that knows exactly what they're good at, exactly what they struggle at. That can then be given to the teacher as data to say, hey, when you're assigning work to this kid, remember that these things are things that you really struggles with. These things are things that he's really good at. This is the best way he needs to learn. And that data can be given to every. From every kid to the teacher, so we can't do that now. You could literally to have a specific tutor for every kid working on them 24/7 to recreate that. But with with a little HeyI companion, you could do that and you would still have that that human interaction on top of it. So those are the things I'm really excited about. Absolutely, and those of you that are interested in getting your hands on this, he's even offering is even offering a two week free trial at WW w Adobe villainess dot com. That is Vaill e a R in I s dot com. We want you to stay connected to what Sam is doing. You can follow him on his personal page on Instagram and LinkedIn at Sam Reed Manasa that is Sam r e i b m a in easy on Instagram and LinkedIn. You also can connect with that educational platform two different ways villainous Instagram or LinkedIn. That's Val E a R and I just like the website on Instagram and LinkedIn and also Menez, SEO, M.A and Easy SEO, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn. Also, stay in tune to what we're doing here on Unscripted Connect with those on all our various social media platforms, unscripted, authentic leadership cars on Facebook and LinkedIn, and also our Instagram handles at unscripted leadership and at Unscripted Lead on Twitter. Those of you that are part of our listening audience that you stream your podcast, you can find it on any where podcasts are provided from Apple to Spotify, Pandora, whatever, a podcast platform you can think of. You can type in on scrypt authentic leadership podcast. You will find us there. Check us out on our website, unscripted. That's leadership dot com, where we have an amazing mastermind group that you can sign up for. Some of you were asking what is a mastermind group? You it is simply just a place to where you can have peer-to-peer interaction, you can network, you can connect with entrepreneurs, thinkers, those influencers that you are looking for. Looking for a place to put your ideas to be heard. Looking for a place to have a environment of creativity, ingenuity. Well, you will find it right there on unscripted. That's leadership dot com or our mastermind group. While you're there, sign up for our email group where you will receive a 10 percent of Mert's promo code. When you do so, that'll keep you into what we have coming down the road, what we're working on right here on Scrypt it. Agim, that has been an incredible conversation with our special guests all the way from down under Sam Reed. Behnaz, to have this incredible conversation, we say thank you about starting how to launch a startup and how you can do so. You've got a vision, you've got a dream. You want to be an entrepreneur. You can go after it. It's possible, as always, we pray that you be the leader that God has called you to be. We're here to build bridges and not walls. Bridges connect, walls divide until next time. God bless you.