Tales from the Departure Lounge

#9 Alex Beard (Natural Born Learners)

• Andy Plant & Nick Cuthbert • Season 1 • Episode 9

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How does education differ around the world? BBC Radio 4 presenter and author of Natural Born Learners - Alex Beard joins the TFTDL flight crew to talk about his adventures as an educational explorer. In 2016, the former teacher used an advance on a book to tour the planet and study cutting-edge schools, teaching styles and technology in an attempt to glimpse the future of education. 

From the world's hardest exam to robot teachers, tune into more classic Tales from the Departure Lounge including pit stops in California, South Korea, Finland and China. Is a fourth revolution in education possible and is our most valuable life lesson learning to fail? 

Final boarding call: Silicon Valley, California

This is episode is sponsored by The PIE Live - interactive, two day events that build knowledge and networks in international education - check out dates and venues at www.thepielive.com

Tales from the Departure Lounge is a Type Nine production for The PIE www.thepienews.com

Nick:

No, you have to do the start. We can't start swapping rolls. It'll sound weird.

Andy:

Okay. Um, what am I saying?

Nick:

Welcome to Tales from the Departure Lounge. This is a podcast about travel for business, for pleasure, or for study. My name's Nick and I'm joined by my co-pilot, Andy. And together we're gonna be talking to some amazing guests about how travel has transformed their. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the journey. Welcome to the podcast.

Andy:

So today we spoke to Alex Beard. He's a BBC, radio four presenter, and an education explorer. He's written the book, natural Born Learners.

Nick:

He got an advance and used it to tour the world and explore different learning and teaching styles in different countries.

Andy:

He took us to Finland, to South Korea and to Los Angeles explaining how. Very different education systems are impacting on children, and now that he's had kids of his own twins, he's thinking about the best way that he can implement those

Nick:

we often think, of education as quite archaic. We tend to be quite nostalgic about it and how we were taught and how our parents were taught and so on. So it was really interesting to think about ai, technology and for what purpose.

Andy:

He's met actual robot. Let's get some tells from the Departure Lounge with Alex Beard.

Alex:

He grabbed my foot and lifted it up in the air and they both broke out in peels of laughter. That led me on this. Around the world journey that I took over the course of two years that took me across 60 continents to meet with trailblazing teachers It's really important that kids can make mistakes and learn from them and not feel like it's the end of the world. So halfway through he had gone to the bathroom and removed his underpants.

Nick:

so before we get into the episode, I wanna quickly tell you about the pie live events that are happening around the world after a sold out European conference in London. The next dates will be the 24th and the 25th of July on the Gold Coast Australia, followed by the 13th to the 14th of November in Boston in the United States. These are short, sharp, two-day in-person events where we bring together the best of the sector to discuss global trends in international education, but crucially through a regional. The feedback we always get is about the value in networking and public private connections that are made. So if you are an aspiring leader looking for professional development, or a CEO or director looking to expand your network, check out the pi live.com. Come with us, come and meet us. We're so excited to be taking these events on tour, and I look forward to meeting you all soon. We've also left some links in the episode notes, so let's get on with the podcast.

Andy:

alex, welcome to Tales from the Departure Lounge.

Alex:

I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Andy:

Let's get right into it. If you could take our listeners anywhere today, where would it be?

Alex:

We're heading to Silicon Valley, in California, to explore the future of education and learning with a visit to a place called Singularity University, which shares its campus with Google, there's a place there that uses an old McDonald's building, where they're creating a map, of the moon using satellite imagery. There's an enormous aircraft hanger, where Google is experimenting with autonomous flying vehicles. And in amidst this all, there's an old naval building, which looks a little bit like a college, and that's where this organization called Singularity University is based, sitting there under the hot California sun and the blue skies, with miles of tarmac all around. And this sense of excitement. I'd been drawn there by these stories that I'd heard that education was gonna be revolutionized by ai, that it was gonna be transformed, by new technologies, virtual reality, augmented reality. and so I went there full of. Hope and excitement that I was gonna glimpse the future of education. No. Um, you know, I think, the thing with all of this new tech is that it's never as good as the cheerleaders say, and it's never as bad as the doongs say. That's my opinion. Singularity University be set up by a guy called Peter Dia, who's like this huge tech evangelist. And one of the things that he said, and lots of people in Silicon Valley were saying at the time is, what if you could make human learning a bit like angry? So that it was just as addictive. kids would be stuck on their devices, but actually learning. So they had these cool robots, they had the NOW robot, they had VR headsets. I kind of got into trying all of this stuff, I sort of realized across the course of a day that none of it was actually that impressive, In Silicon Valley, I did meet my first robot teacher, but it wasn't an Android, uh, with a human face. It was a bit of intelligent, software and that was at a place called Rocket Ship Schools in San Jose, and at this school something called the learning lab, and in it were about 105 and six year old kids sitting in long roads in front of laptops, tapping away with their little fingers on keys. And the kids had headphones on and they were working on, either a mass program, or an English program and. That program was adapting the experience to them to say they could build on their individual strengths or tackle their individual weaknesses. and it was impressive. Those kids learn more on average in those topics and other kids from similar backgrounds In California, it was great, but it was also a bit eerie cuz it seemed like the computers were teaching the kids things that the computers could already do a lot better, than human children.

Nick:

In the time you spent in Silicon Valley, how did you find the people there?

Alex:

You have a lot of people who believe their own hype riding around on electric scooters, living it up in those open plan offices, you know, beautifully sunaned in their, Patagonia hiking gear and, their, trail running shoes, like, it is, like you would imagine. I went to this one school called Out School and essentially it's like a little, shopfront school and behind it. is all of the tech developers. And it was founded by this guy called Max Van Tiller. And he used to be head of personalization at Google and he raised 150 million to launch this new techie school. And the teachers didn't call it the school, they called it the company. all of the kids look like characters in the Goonies or something, like everyone's looking very cool. And then you had all of these tech people in the background and they looked very Silicon Valley with their like, all birds running shoes and like kind of a bit schlubby in their clothing, with their their coffees and like their big water bottles, just like you would imagine sitting in front of a bunch of computer screens. and they really believe they're hype. We are gonna transform education. In the end kind of bombed, like they were, had all this hype, like big long reads in the New Yorker, like on tv. Three years later, they don't exist.

Nick:

Alex, this is a good juncture. People listening to this so far would be saying, you're, a tech reporter, but actually you're a former teacher and. Educational explorer. Now,

Alex:

absolutely. My journey to Silicon Valley was really just the first step in a, around the world journey that I took. I'd started my career as a teacher in a secondary school, just off the Woolworth Road in South London, near Elephant and Castle. And the kids I was teaching seemed like they lived in the future. So they were using their devices, they were staying up all night, playing Call of Duty online. And yet I felt the methods I was using as a teacher were super old-fashioned. They might have been familiar to Socrates two and a half thousand years ago. And I just wondered that with all the things that weren't happening in the world, cause I was reading quite widely, staying the best of the latest ideas in neuroscience, in ai, in human performance, And I thought, shouldn't we be harnessing these things in the classroom to serve education? Should not education systems be brought up to date for the 21st century? And that then led me on this. Around the world journey that I took over the course of two years that took me across 60 continents to meet with trailblazing teachers, to visit cutting edge schools, to meet with scientists and technologists, to hear from them. and it left me really sure of one thing above all, that if we are gonna transform education, it's not gonna be about the tech, it's gonna be about how we get the most out of our own human capabilities. From Silicon Valley, I journeyed on to Shanghai and China to, South Korea., I went to Finland, spent time in,, Paris, uh, futuristic university. India, Nepal, Columbia, Peru, and Estonia. And it's always been with this thing in mind, what is there out there that shows us a glimpse of what that future might be.

Nick:

so tell us how, the teaching style differs, from country to country.

Alex:

If you zoom over to South Korea, you get a very, very different experience. So South Korea, I found myself there on a Thursday morning hundreds of thousands. South Korean, teenagers. Were sitting down to the sun, which is this exam that takes place on a single day each year, and it's considered the world's, toughest exam. and it decides everything for these kids. It decides what university they go to, what job they can do, like who they can marry, whether they'll be healthy, happy,, stable kids in the future. Uh, and the whole country goes exam crazy for it. So that morning I saw as I went to this, this, exam hall, police on motorbikes waiting on the street, and they're waiting to accompany anybody that happens to be running late to get to the exam hall on time,, during the listening exam that takes place in the day for 45 minutes. All flights in the country are grounded completely in case the sound of a plane flying overhead distracts students from their English listening exam. Um, and so that they take it super seriously and the country, Goes into this, this incredible, like these weeks of stress, like leading up the exam, the newspapers run stories about what clothes you should wear, what food you should eat, what even what offerings you should leave at the temple for the best luck. It's this huge cultural moment for the country., and I was there to hear the story of this boy called sh Bin Lee. Um, who'd, who had got in touch with, a few months earlier and on that Thursday morning, he was sitting in the exam hall, like ready to get started, his hands shaking. He told me afterwards waiting for this momentous moment in his life. And then he told me that during the exam he had become, Worried that he was overheating and that his overheating might affect his performance on the sun young. Uh, and so halfway through he had gone to the bathroom and removed his underpants. Uh, imagine doing that halfway through the most important day of your life. I didn't ask him what he did his underpants for the rest of the exam, but I don't think I would've been able to think about anything else. But he said, look, to do one in the Sunon, you have to basically become an instrument of pure exam taking technique. It was better, he said not to think. you just had to know how the exam worked and just get into the zone, and that it all flow over you. And he, he actually ended up doing quite well in his exams. And this kind of crazy, uh, education culture has actually been part of this amazing education miracle in South Korea. So 70 years ago,, four in five Koreans were illiterate., the country was basically broke coming out of the Korean War. and things didn't look good., fast forward to now, it's a high tech economy, has the highest proportion of, graduates from universities, has the high one of highest literacy rates in the whole, world., but there are a couple of things that, that Koreans are worried about and, and rightly so. one is that this is causing a huge mental health crisis amongst its young people. soon been prepared for the igraph, completely unprompted that showed the suicide rates of Korean teenagers compared to other countries. and it's also the country already with the highest proportion of robots to human workers of anywhere in the world. And I wonder if the way that they set up their education system to be so formulaic and so focused on this kind of problem solving or this test preparation might be contributing to that.

Andy:

I spent a lot of time in South Korea, mostly for student recruitment and partnership purposes for universities. And, got to know a lot of Koreans and our Korean alumni from the university I was working for. and they have incredible work ethic and a, an incredible pressure on them to do well, but also incredibly high rates of students going to university, I think possibly the highest in the world.

Alex:

One of the things they definitely do is work very extreme hours. Um, so I was looked after while I was there by this education ngo and they had their office weirdly up near the border with North Korea. So I traveled there one day at a sort of business park that had been made to look like, the town of Oxford. So everything was in this sort of like weird, you know, that kind of Oxford stone, this sort of yellowish, is it limestone? Like you see that all the old Oxford buildings are made in, it had like cobbled streets and all the street signs were in English and they had made it as a kind of English immersion center. So you could kind of go to this fake Oxford, near the North Korean border. You could see North Korea, um, from this hill. But also all of them seemed to work, you know, every hour that God sent, we'd like go out for dinner, then they'd be going off to work on a Friday night to do more work. And it was this strange culture of being completely committed to, um, to, to your purpose, to your thing to get ahead.

Nick:

I wrote a piece written recently on aging populations. And South Korea was one of those because culturally, young people wanted to feel like they were secure and that they had prospects for the future before starting a family,

Alex:

It made me think of that thing that they've done in Singapore. Have you heard about that? The, the cruises for high achieving singletons. They're worried, you know, similarly worried about the birth rate in, uh, in Singapore because everybody's working too hard, um, and too focused on their careers, and they don't have time to go on dates and have partners and, and have kids. So the government has started laying on, cruises for kind of high achieving singletons, uh, to go and meet a potential partner to get their Singaporean birthday up a little higher, but it's something that's affecting, Countries everywhere, isn't it?

Nick:

It sounds like a new reality TV show, Hello, sailor.

Andy:

So where next?

Alex:

We can go to Finland. I was excited to go to Finland because it's the place that everybody talks about as being at the forefront of, quality education for everybody. And I went to Helsinki. my most interesting thing I did was to visit the, the country's most famous teacher who was a guy called, uh, Uh, and he teaches high school maths and physics. I went to his class and. Sat in the back and watched on as he put a question up on the interactive whiteboard. and then he asked the kids to use their devices to beam in an answer, uh, a, B, C, do e He then displayed that in a bar chart on the board and he then didn't give them the answer, but instead he said, okay, talk to each other, explain why you gave, what answer you gave, and so on. And a few minutes later got them to beam in their answers for a second time. And the second time around this bar chart had shifted quite dramatically because the kids had basically taught, each other. And I spoke to him afterwards and said, tell me a bit about your practice. And he said, look, the thing, um, that I wanna do in my classroom is to. Kids, not the knowledge, but the tools they need to learn things for themselves. And he actually gave those students everything they needed at the start of the year. He gave them, all of the textbooks, the tests, the answers to the tests, and he said his job as a teacher was to coach them on things like perseverance, creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, teamwork. And there were some things that were like different to me coming from the uk. Fin and they're very committed to this, comprehensive, uh, education model. And it really works for them. Actually, you know, on average finished kids learn a lot, um, during their schooling compared to others around the world accepting maybe some of the highest performing, nations in, the, the far east. I was like, don't some of these kids fail? What happens when it comes to the exam and all this stuff? He said, look, actually, I think in education we need to delete this idea, of failure. It's really important that kids can make mistakes and learn from them and not feel like it's the end of the world. He even allowed the kids at the end of the term to choose their own grades to go into the national monitoring system. And I think it was exciting, they have this deep belief in, taking responsibility that you can trust kids. You know, DT lesson in a finished school doesn't look much like a DT lesson. Here's like, kids five and six year olds holding saws and hammers if it was in an English setting, people would be like stressing out, there would be like a safety briefing for two hours before a kid could hold a hammer. And I was like, oh, what happens if a kid, uh, cuts themself with a, so it's like, well, they'll learn not to do it again.

Andy:

I've been thinking about this and about, resilience with my own kids, um, but also more generally and how we approach it as a society. And I think it's, It's interesting when you hear entrepreneurs that have done very well, that have a voice. They all say it's not about the great idea that I had. It's the thousand great ideas that I had that didn't work in Finland, teachers are very highly paid, and it almost the level of doctors, et cetera, very high professional level salaries.

Alex:

If you ask, a finished man what the ideal profession of his wife would be. The top profession that comes out is primary school teacher. And if you ask, a finished woman what the ideal profession of their husband would be, actually the top profession comes out as doctor. But number two is primary school teacher., and so that in the country there's this. This, this kind of, incredible pedestal on which primary school teaching is put. It's the hardest degree program to get into in a Finnish university. They still have these things in, Scandinavia today, for teenagers called the after school, where it's like a sort of six month boarding school experience you can do to meet other kids across the country. Um, but I think that was part of it. So like Finon had, this mission to make teaching, one of the most important pillars of its culture.

Nick:

when I went to Norway, they. What translates to folk schools, which is this two year hiatus where the students can really study whatever they want to do funded by the government, that could be performing arts and it could be computer science, but it can also be things like cosplay or outdoor studies or some really kind of bizarre things where in the UK we think about, what's the career pathway here? I equated it to an Australian aboriginal walk about it was go off, explore, find yourselves because we know in the long run that will make you better people.

Alex:

my wife has. Danish cousins. So we spent some time in, in, in Denmark, and one of those, folk schools there, is an all, year round LA school. So live action, role play. And every week there's a different la so, you know, it might be a Viking la a World War I spies la uh, like, you know, let's try different genders, la uh, and it sounds really magic I mean, maybe not for me. I don't know if I would've gone there as a student, but I'm so happy that something like that exists, in the world. And I think that we have lost a lot of the playfulness of childhood and education, across our society here in the uk., and, we should get some of it back.

Andy:

This section of the podcast is called any laptops, liquids, or sharp objects. As a traveler, what do you have to take with you? What's essential for you to, travel?

Alex:

I always take, a big scarf, high quality, earplugs, and my Kindle. And that is to make the long haul flying experience, which is always an economy. And I'm six foot four, more manageable. so what I like, when you're traveling for work alone, then there's a lot of time where you're standing in queues, like sitting in taxis And that's why I have my Kindle. The Jack Reacher book is perfect for the travel experience, and then the earplugs are for sleeping. They're called bio ears. They're the kind of ones which are a bit squidgy., they're really good for blocking out all sound. And then the scarf is from wrapping around my head. So what I do on a long haul flight when I'm intending to sleep is as soon as I get on before the meal comes around, before they're saying anything about,, what to do with the seatbelt or, what to do in case in an emergency, I've put my earplugs in, wrapped my head in a scarf. and they basically just sit there trying to go into kind of as stasis for the next 12 hours. And I would say that if you want to get through, a long haul flight as a six foot, four inch person, in economy, then you wanna get the window seat so you don't have to keep getting. Don't drink too much beforehand, so you don't have to get up, for a pee. Definitely don't wait around for the, the meal on the plane., and definitely don't drink a beer or anything., just go into, a self, uh, imposed cocoon, for that period in time. And whether you're actually asleep or not really asleep, you feel much better if you've sat like that for 12 hours., rather than, watching a whole night have movies and drinking a couple of beers and then eating the crappy breakfast when they wake you up, 19 minutes before you land when you could have been sleeping. Um, so those are the things that, that I always do when I'm traveling solo for work,

Nick:

So hang on this cocoon. You are, you are binding your whole face, in a scarf.

Alex:

whole face in a scarf. Yeah, no, I think it's basically as a signal to other passengers and to the air steward, s's and stewards. I do not want to be disturbed, and it's quite a powerful signal. I've never been disturbed with my head wrapped in my scoff, um, by either my neighbor or by the steward stewards and stewardesses. I think they get that you don't want, the evening meal or the breakfast if you're just ahead, kind of wrapped up like a mummy.

Nick:

it's either that or you've got leprosy or something, you know.

Alex:

Oh yeah. Well, I would also, I definitely vouch for a good neck pillow That long haul fight, especially overnight, you gotta get asleep cuz then first thing in the morning going to a meeting or whatever, wanna make the most of that day. And especially now that I've got baby twins, I wanna minimize the time that I'm away from home for,, and so I need to, fly overnight, get to work the, as soon as I get there in the morning,, leave as soon as I can. The days of going to, what my friend calls worker pko are over, and it's all business. Uh, when I'm on a work trip.

Andy:

I like. Um, I was gonna change subjects. Is there, any one moment you can think of that was particularly bizarre?

Alex:

My work once took me to Unan Province in China, which is in far southwest corner of China, near the border with Burma. We arrived, via Kunming and then to, uh, han, like via a couple of plane. Me and a colleague we kind of met at Buchan airport. Neither of us had anything except. Work Amex cards. And suddenly we were in rural China where none of the, there was no, we basically didn't have any, uh, any money or access to funds. And I think it was because ING airport, for some reason, all of the cash points had been broken. And so suddenly we're like in rural China with no funds. We managed to persuade a taxi driver using mine to take us to a hotel. And like we had a little, like a few bits of change to give to him. We couldn't pay the hotel, but we managed to convince him somehow to give us a room for the night, and in the morning we managed to get some money wire to us We had like half a day to spare before we flew out and we'd heard, they had good massage policy, we're gonna go for a massage, named my colleague, and so we hopped on, uh, A moped. We managed like mine that we wanted massage and we're using our hands like crab claws. And this woman was like, yeah, yeah, I'll take you to a place. And she took us across town, like we're driving through this town. Like we didn't really know where we were. We couldn't speak to anybody. No one spoke English, but we did get to massage parlor. And it was, it was, um, it was run by a blind man and a woman with, uh, teacherism, like they were the twos. And so we lay down to get our massages. I was being, given a massage by the blind man and my colleague by the woman with teacherism and halfway. This like big, uh, blind Chinese guy. He grabbed my foot and lifted it up in the air and started like saying something to his colleague and they both broke out in peels of laughter. And then he got my arm, he rested it on top of his arm, kinda like comparing the lengths. And again, he was like talking to his friend. They, again, they were both capping away at the, at the length of my arm. And I think I must have been like the longest person or the biggest footed person that he had ever a massage to. Uh, and he was finding it all hilarious, as were we, uh, traveling around town. But I love that, that was one of my favorite, favorite ever worked trip. The same colleague that I was there with, she actually went on an another trip to a different part of rural China where she was so unable to communicate that for two days. She couldn't get any food and she ended up eating, the boxes of chocolates that she had brought as gifts for like the people we were visiting as the only food she ate for two days.

Andy:

Wow. They now refer to it as the day that Bigfoot came to town.

Alex:

It's good.

Nick:

It's like a surreal dream.

Andy:

The next section is called, what is the purpose of Your Visit? Why do you Do what you do, Alex?

Alex:

I come from a family of people that were frustrated in their education. So all of my grandparents, left school early and I think frustrated that they'd have to do so whether to go and get a job or because of the war or whatever it might have been. But they were of of that, uh, I guess at the time. This kind of working class intellectual culture where it was really important to still keep on reading and to study history. My granny used to recite, tenon poems to me. I mean, she lived this tiny house in, uh, Huntington. It's like slowly smoking herself to, to death in this one chair, watching the History channel on the biography channel. and 15 to one on every quiz show, uh, imaginable as like the walls of her room sort of turned yellow. But she was like, she would quote tennis and poems. She would like tell historical stories. She was so into all that stuff. And so, I had this really strong sense, of like frustrated education, in my family, and the importance of equity. But, you know, fast forward to my own upbringing was like a lovely middle class upbringing in the countryside, uh, in Warwickshire in a little village called, uh, Saham. And then I got a scholarship to go to this, uh, private school, which even had a pack of beagles. It had like an altarpiece that was worth millions of pounds. It was radical. We wore gowns all of the time. It looked like Hogwarts in Harry Potter. So I had this real center, like these different., worlds that existed. Um, and I, and a sense, a real sense of the injustice of it and, how lucky I had been in my own experience. And so that really motivated me, this sense of, of injustice. of fairness. And I took that into the classroom with me. So I joined this program called the Teach First Program, where, people coming out of good universities get put into schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods. And so I was teaching these kids, from all parts of the world. So like the, the community where I was teaching in, in Elephant and Castle was a kind of a first stop on many, migrants journeys, into the uk. So they would be housed in these two big housing estates called the Heygate and the Ailsbury that have since been knocked down. but at the time were just like pretty horrible, like known for high levels of crime. they were a no-go zone for police after dark. Like it wasn't a happy place, to be a child, but. These kids were ambitious, they were witty, they were entrepreneurial. They came from these mainly first generation migrant families, but the setting they were in was just really holding them back. Um, and I think it was that mismatch between their dreams and the reality of the context they found themselves in that inequity. That really has given me my sense of purpose. And so in education, I'm really, really interested in two ideas. One, how do we transform education so that every child has a chance to be a leader within society, has a chance to fulfill their own dreams, but also the other purpose being how do we. Transform what we understand education to before and how it looks for the 21st century. cause it feels so old-fashioned at the moment. And so focused on the working world and like doing well in exams. And, and I just think that that shouldn't be the purpose. It, it can't be we need something bigger, more motivating, wider, uh, dreamier and more exciting. So that's my purpose.

Andy:

So in that vein, what is the future for us humans teaching and technology hand in hand.

Alex:

Great question. I think that revolution in education might be possible. And there have been three revolutions in education before, so the first revolution. Was 150,000 years ago where something changed in the minds of our ancestors and language emerged for the first time amongst humans. That allowed us to give voice to thoughts and share thoughts with one another. Construct knowledge, pass it between communities. Between generations for the first time. Then there was a revolution, um, about 10,000 years ago the schooling revolution. And that was because reading and writing had been invented and these institutions were created, to teach this new technology, reading and writing. and then the, the third big revolution was a mass education revolution that happened about 500 years ago, and that was care about for two reasons. One, the invention of the printing press and two changes to how we related to religion., like the big kind of reformation. Like no longer did the church hold onto religious doctrine, but each person could have their own relationship, with the Bible and with God. And that led to this explosion of literacy around the world that we're still benefiting from today. So my hope is that a further revolution is possible, and that revolution, it will use some of our new technologies., the internet, computers, maybe AI at some point, but like this access to knowledge is really unparalleled, even if we are using it mainly for sharing cat photos at the moment. But if you combine that with, a new story about teaching new investments in teaching as a profession, more investment in education and research And combine that with this latest science and this latest technology, I'm hopeful that we can bring about, a further fourth learning revolution, in education.

Nick:

This must be on your mind at the moment with baby twins. Where you start to think about how you wanna raise and how you wanna educate your own children

Alex:

yeah, the thing, the thing that going back to your point about, um,, exploration, the, the Norwegian folk schools, one of the things I think I didn't get in my education, which was a great education on many measures, was a sense of my own purpose. Like a sense of like, you know, what I wanted to do or be within society. Like what I, what I got outta my education was, I'm really good at doing exams, good at reading, good at writing, good at those kinds of, narrow analytical skills. I definitely didn't get that sense that it was okay to fail, I don't feel very okay with, with failure still, and I think that holds, holds me back in lots of ways. Um, you know, I don't think I take big risks, in a way that I would like to, I think that would be valuable to me. And so for my kids, I think two things I would really like them to have, but I've seen happening in other places. One. I really wanna give them a chance to find what it is that they love. Help them to cultivate interests, to land on a thing that's their passion at some point. And that means giving them a variety of experiences, but also talking to them about that, like helping them to understand what it is that they might really be into and they can change that. They don't have to get it fixed early on. but then the second thing is this thing of feeling okay with failing. I think just wanted to nurture that in them as well. Like how in this education system we have where it's so focused on, doing well to get through to the next stage so you can get through to the next stage, you can get through to the next stage and end up as a lawyer. And, you know, I've. Like how to, how to disrupt that for them to make them feel it's okay to fail or to change their mind or do something different or to feel good about it, like they're gonna learn from it. And I think that's gonna be really important for them, you know, with this future. They face with climate change, growing social divisions. So like, like, uh, yeah, passion, their passion, the ability to fail, and then this, this, this feeling of being part of things with other people.

Andy:

Sounds easy.

Alex:

I dunno how to do it, but that's,

Nick:

just get pepper pig on a screen. Don't worry about it,

Alex:

and that's the other thing. As soon as, they're awake all night and you are tired, all of that stuff goes out the window, I've discovered in these six months.

Andy:

It's just survival. Right. The final section is called Anything to Declare, and this is a space for you, for a sales pitch or to leave some travelers.

Alex:

Well, I would highly recommend that everybody, reads my book, natural Born Learners, which tells the story of my travels around the world from Silicon Valley to Finland, to, Hong Kong, to Shanghai, to South Korea, to Paris and beyond.

Nick:

Who funded this project, who funded you travel?

Alex:

Well, I, yeah, yeah, good question. I, I basically, I self-funded my trip to Silicon Valley and I used to write the first chapter of my book, and I wrote the first chapter and an introduction to the book, and then I used that to get. A literary agent. And then sent the proposal around, it was like 20,000 words long. Then we had four I think that wanted to publish it. So then we were able to get people to make their best offers. And so I got on advance for the book and I basically spent that advance on the traveling. Uh, but also I did it on a shoesree. I used the cheapest Airbnbs, the cheapest flights, and it worked out okay. I wrote the book in a 10 week sprint. So I got two months off work and I just wrote the whole thing like, a bad draft of a book, but I was doing like 1500 words a day. I like, got super disciplined, so that's how I managed to do that stuff alongside work. And then once I had my book, then I got, you know, I was able to do a couple of long reads on the back of it. Did my radio show on the back of it.

Nick:

I love it. Prove the concept. Take the money, and then you've gotta write it

Alex:

Exactly. Then you have a deadline. It's like, okay, so you're gonna give us in a year your book. So then like I knew what had to be done. I think I shared my best thing about wrapping up, uh, your head in a towel. Okay. Here's a tip. If you ever get the chance, go to Columbia. that's, my favorite place I've ever visited, as a tourist. Go to Medellin to Ka Hena. Go to Choco, go to Uruba, explore. Like, it's the one country for me that has everything. It's got tropical rainforest, it's got snowcap mountains, it's got, beautiful beaches. It's got, brilliant food, amazing wildlife. I just think if you're going to, if you're gonna make a trip of a lifetime, consider making it to Columbia.

Nick:

It's got drug cartel hippos, hasn't it?

Alex:

It has got drug cartel hippos and zebras. Yeah, It's great. And it's just got energy. It's got such good energy and culture. Feels young and vibrant and exciting. Yeah, it's awesome.

Andy:

Awesome. Alex, thanks so much for coming onto the podcast. It's been great having you.

Alex:

Thank you.

Nick:

Hello everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you wanna listen to more episodes, you can find them at Tales from the departure lounge.com.

If you want to sponsor an episode, that's now possible as well. We're also having lots of fun with the frequent flyers club. Where we hear your stories, that you can send into sick bag@talesfromthedeparturelounge.com.

Nick:

Tales from the Departure Lounge is a type nine production for the pie.

People on this episode

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Andy Plant

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Nick Cuthbert

Host