How do we best prepare our children for a life of flourishing? How can our education system better foster those ideals, inspire a motivated life-long love of learning, and independence? These are some of the big ideas that propel Ray Girn’s mission at Higher Ground Education, which is working to mainstream and modernize the international Montessori movement. On this episode of Venture to Flourish, we’ll talk to Ray about the pedagogical battle that’s been waging in education for centuries, and how Higher Ground is building an educational program designed to foster flourishing. From the roles of technology and innovation to principles of motivation and purpose, we’ll look at how education and learning are changing today, and where it’s headed in the future.
Ray on the purpose of education and its challenges:
I think that the story of the last couple of hundred years has been the story of a lack of insight and a lack of awareness of how we accomplish the purpose of education, which in my view is imparting a definite set of content and skills that adult human life requires, that a human success in adulthood requires while respecting the individuality and the agency and the self-creation of each human being.
Ray on what is education:
Education is neither indoctrination nor creation nor opinion. It is discovery. It is discovery, it is truth seeking, it's discovery about an independent world out there, how it works. The world of nature, the world of human beings, the world of industry and technology.
Ray on the distinctions between education and learning:
I think that there's a distinction between education and learning that is not well understood. Education is the attempt to systematize the process of human development, of growing up from a child into an adult. So a lot of people, first of all, do not even believe that we should be systematizing it. They don't believe in a system of learning. And so there's a lot of skepticism from the best people that learning can be systematized. I think it has to be.
Ray on what is human flourishing:
So the simplest way that I would put it is making the most out of your life. You have this one life to live, view it as something precious and make the most out of it. And the kind of bedrock principle, even underneath our values, is that the individual human life fully lived is an end in itself, is its own reward. That process of life, that joy of life is the end, at least for us. That doesn't mean an individual can't decide that they want to, the form in which way they want to accomplish that. That's really up to them. But what we are trying to do is give every child the tools, the skills, the knowledge, the inspiration, the environment that he or she needs to make the most of our life.
Ray on his three underlying pedagogical principles:
One is, we call it a culture of knowledge. So truth seeking, a respect and reverence for the role of knowledge in life. A desire to get to the bottom of things, to understand, to discover, to know. Having that internalized is really important to the good life. The second is a culture of work, which means a love of activity, a love of the doing, a capacity to pursue goal-directed action, to choose goals and to pursue them. A life of purpose, a life in which motion and activity is the core. And then the third we call it is a culture of humanism. A love of the good, a love of the beautiful, a love of humanity.
Keep Going:
Read: How these schools create problem-solving optimists
Watch: Ray Girn’s HGE 2019 Leadership Summit Keynote address
Evan Baehr 00:02
Each year, the United States Government provides more than $15,000 per student to fund K 12. Education. In the last two years, parents have certainly taken a much more active role in their own kids education. Jimmy is that Zoom classroom still on. And after the COVID driven lockdowns of many of our schools, which disproportionately affected low income and racial minorities, education has truly become a central civil rights issue of our time. But what if we're doing it all wrong? That's the big idea of our guest today. I'm Evan Baehr. And this is venture to flourish, a podcast from learn capital for founders, investors and leaders who are working to build ventures that drive what we call human flourishing. Our guest today is Ray Girn, founder and CEO of higher ground, a network of Montessori schools, Ray has devoted his life to building an education program that's uplifting generations worldwide, with an experience from birth to adulthood. Ray and his team just opened their 100 school, so they must be doing something right. Join us as we discuss Ray's work, his philosophy, and why he thinks YouTube is the most innovative and impactful, edtech company in the world. Ray, it is awesome to be in conversation with you, thank you for joining me over this cup of coffee. You're not a guy that needs caffeine, you have a ton of stuff in your brain and in your vocation. And the topic for today is a little bit about your company, I ground education, which we'll dive into. But gosh, your work in this space has given you so much context for the stuff that we're trying to explore on this show. So at the highest level, the quandary that so many people are trying to understand is that we keep spending more and more money on educating our kids. And the results, in many cases are actually getting worse outcomes seem to be getting worse. Openness up there? How do you make sense of that quandary? That as we put more and more money into educating our kids, the outcomes don't seem to be improving?
Ray Girn 02:06
Well, I think the first question is, what outcomes are we after? And education? Education, research, education spending, on education initiatives can't really be evaluated or measured, unless you have a view on what is the purpose of education? You know, what is the outcome that we're after? And, and? And how do we deal with the fact that different people have, you know, different conceptions of that? You know, there are education is philosophy, education is applied philosophy. And so you you, you can't really measure success of what you're doing unless you have an underlying conception of what is the good life? What does it mean to live? Well? What does it mean to flourish? What does it mean to achieve things? If your outcome is something that is compliance centric, you know, people get in their lane and do as they're told, actually, the money is being spent, that's being spent is, is being spent quite well, right. Because we are seeing people increasingly unable to think through life and looking for someone to tell them what to do. So I would say if that's the goal, we're spending quite well. Now, if your goal is people that can live independently that can judge the world around them that can kind of act with conviction can pursue their values, yeah, then then no, the money is not being spent? Well, right. So I would say that the fundamental issue is that we don't have dialogue happening about what is the purpose of education, what is the point of education,
Evan Baehr 03:44
you have talked, you've covered a lot of the history you study that closely, of how we got here, give us a little bit of that historical development of the purpose of education and how that shifted over time.
Ray Girn 03:59
So if we just look, you know, you can go all the way back to antiquity. But if we just think about the last couple, 100 years, there's there's been this tension between whether the purpose of education is to help people develop character to help kids become good adults, to live well, you know, in a kind of full sense, or whether the purpose is to prepare for some end to, you know, some some measure, write some tests or some some proxy outcome that's supposed to kind of prepare you for a career or for a job or for, you know, life as a citizen. And, and I think that I think that that tension actually has been at play for a long, long time. So there is this conception, this idea that we used to just care about, you know, preparing kids to be factory workers, and all of a sudden now today, we're questioning that. It's just not true, you know, in the late 1800s Read, I believe the president of Harvard said, it's time to move away from one, you know, one rod one catechism, and one approach for every child. And so even back then there, there was a struggle, like how do we meet the needs of particular individual children or prepare them for living? Well. And I think that I think that the story of the last couple of 100 years has been the story of a lack of insight and a lack of awareness of how we accomplish the purpose of education, which in my view, is imparting a definite set of content and skills that adult human life requires that human success in adulthood requires, while respecting the visuality. And the agency, and the self creation of each human being. Anyone can do one side or the other. And my thesis is that we've been in this 200 year old, you know, grip of a false alternative between, on the one hand, those that recognize the importance of content of skill, development of knowledge in human life. And on the other hand, those that recognize that we're all unique, we're all different, we're all pursuing our own paths, and you can connect the dots and another human mind, you know, and that all learning all learning is autodidactic in a very deep kind of metaphysical sense that all learning, but is inherently self directed. And so, you know, that's the question, how do you do that? And I think the story the last 200 years has been a story of trying out different ways to figure out how to do that. And everyone has failed. Like, we haven't solved that yet. So
Evan Baehr 06:37
if you took us, take us into a traditional elementary school that you might find in a suburban American neighborhood today, what would you see happen in that classroom? And how would you think about how effective that class is being?
Ray Girn 06:53
So the first thing that jumped out to me is that we're segregating children by age. And I would argue that that is so primitive, and so barbaric. And contrary to everything we know about the way that human beings developed, not even trees grow in lockstep, let alone human children. And yet in the, you know, in today's day and age, you know, we're still doing that. And if I'm successful, my hope is that, you know, 20 years, 30 years from now will marvel at the fact that in 2022, we were still segregating children by age, it just it, it punishes those that want to move ahead, and, you know, be on an accelerated pace, it wastes their life, and it punishes those that are artificially pushed to meet a standard that they can't meet. It just we don't do that anywhere else in life, right. So now, that's not that's just one thing. But for me, mixed age classrooms is a proxy for everything else. Because why do we not have mixed age classrooms because you'd have to redo how you train teachers, you'd have to redo curriculum, you'd have to redo physical layout of buildings. So in that one change, you would change everything. And so you know, my personal mission in life, as again, as a proxy is 3040 years from now, can more than 50% of the schools in the world be mixed age, because I regarded that as such a fundamental issue. So that's one thing that would jump out. The second thing I would jump out in an elementary environment is, and this is not controversial, I think everyone would agree with this, it's just that the quality of the learning has diminished. So much the quality of the thinking, the content, the level of engagement. I think second, third graders are doing math that three or four year old should be doing I think that, you know, fifth sixth graders are doing math that they could be doing, you know, in second third grade. I think that there is a there is a a paradox, where the more information the more kind of abundance of information access to resources we have, the less we are able to consume that information, the less can we're developing the capacity and the thinking skills and the trunk of the tree that allows us to actually communities consuming and so you know,
Evan Baehr 09:12
it reminds me of a book. I think it's Nicholas Carr, the shallows. And he talks about how through the internet's explosion of obviously making nearly an infinite amount of information available, it's actually led the human person to have far less need to remember anything. And he has a really interesting passage and they're talking about, I think, when Cicero was an instructor, there was something that his students had that was called the common place. And it was a journal I maybe imagine on a papyrus stitched with leather or something. And over a student's sort of decade plus being educated. They would actually write out the key things that they wanted to remember in this journal that at the end of 10, or 15 years of education was only like 20 pages long. So the contrast is like Hear you can have an iPhone in your pocket, access to the world's information. But you remember nothing. Under Cicero, you had 15 pages of handwritten stuff that was the most important wisdom that you collected over those years. How does that How do you think about that?
Ray Girn 10:15
Yeah, memorization is one of the kind of most assaulted and least understood kind of values. In, in, in education and in development. Now, you can have this empty rote memorization, which is not that useful. But then, you know, the, the, the only alternative is not like, don't memorize anything just engaged in thinking. So there isn't, there's like, I have my children, you know, memorize poetry, and they love it. And it gives them a sense of efficacy, and they carry that with them. And I think we have to figure out in a kind of digital age where knowledge is available, how, how we transpose kind of this, this wisdom of the ages in terms of the importance of memorization, because it will look different. But for example, I remember having a professor and you know, you just have Cicero, I don't remember having a professor at the University of Toronto who said, memorize, you know, first, on the first class, he said, If you really want to understand Roman history, memorize the Table of Contents, memorize the table of contents of your textbook, because it'll be it'll give you a hook to hang everything on.
Evan Baehr 11:17
So if a common suggestion when we're looking at America's sort of elementary situation, is, gosh, we just need more money, because we can have better teacher training, we can have better teacher to student ratio, we can have more iPads in the classroom, we can have better apps for them better buildings. If that's the common sense response to how to improve elementary school, your rejoinder to that is what
Ray Girn 11:45
I would, I would reply by means of an analogy, I would say, imagine you're in the 16th century. Imagine you're in the 16th century, and you're in the Kings court. And you care about people and you say, our goal is to bring the health care that this king has to the masses. Now, why does this king has it has? Why does he have this amazing health care? And how do we bring it to the people of the world? And from our perspective today, you'd say, well, that kings healthcare like that it's a joke, he doesn't there's no antibiotics, there's no, you know, there's nothing, there's no modern certain, you know, surgical tools. I mean, he doesn't have anything that we would consider. so valuable that the goal is only access to, you know, to that, we would say he's impoverished relative to the average person today in terms of the health care that's available to him. That's the state that we're in education, today, we are in the earth, air, fire, water stage of development and education is, you know, it is it is early times, and the best education that money can buy is not that good. And so the primary focus should not be trying to spread that to the world, that's important to to give access, but the primary focus has to be innovation, it is not true that those that have a means middle class, upper middle class and kind of wealthier families. They're getting an amazing education, and these kids are flourishing, they're dying inside, they're miserable. So yes, it's true that we want to spread what we know works, you know, to as many children as possible, I was very contrary, and someone that's a very fierce critic of the traditional education system. I wrote an essay after COVID, called in defensive School, which was not certainly the position I usually take, but that why schools need to be open and why these are important places for children to form friendships and to discover knowledge and even such as it is. And so I definitely think we should be spreading the best of what we know. But I think that the important and more fundamental perspective is we need we need to get going in terms of figuring out how to get education, right, because we haven't figured it out yet.
Evan Baehr 13:57
That is a really interesting analogy. We and our own kids education, decided to leave a public school. And they were kind of sitting the kids on what felt like pretty lame apps to learn different things, too much screentime, bad ratios, whatever. And so we're going around looking at private schools, and we go to her one of the most successful allotted private schools. There was supposed to be this really innovative model here in Austin, Texas. And we go, and we learn, we're sort of asking questions, you know, how do you teach math? How do you teach literacy, etc. And they were very technology driven. And essentially, all the apps that they used, were the same apps that the kids at the public schools use. And I was like, Wait, where's the innovation here? Where's the amazing new product that you were just talking about? I think about the health care as an example. I love following the space around them, continuous glucose monitors. And so you're using these sensors, you're getting this real time insight into your glucose. It's connected to your app, your doctor has access to it. And just think about the innovation that we've seen in healthcare around what the actual product is. There was so much innovation on the product side, it wasn't about accessibility. To the old product, it was about innovating new products, which then you need to help accessibility for. But why is why is there no CGM equivalent in the space of education? Why aren't there cooler, more dramatically innovative solutions out there?
Ray Girn 15:16
It's, it's the question. It's the question. And the, you know, my best hypothesis right now is that the schools of education and the intellectuals of education, haven't given operators and entrepreneurs, updated frameworks, you know, the frameworks that that apply the knowledge of cognitive science of psychology, that that green light kind of practical innovations. So as a simple example, take take, take the idea of intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivation. So that whole paradigm, in my view is incoherent. Like, you know, as a good Canadian look, what are you trying to What are you trying to do when you're winning, trying to win the Stanley Cup, right? What are you trying to do when you're trying to win NBA championships, I mean, we think of an athlete and that passion, that's what is intrinsic as it gets, and yet, it's on paper, they're there after a certain price. And so like, if we want to solve for education, we have to think about the nature of motivation. And we have to think about like, Well, what happens cause what happens cognitively, that's different in cases where the motivation is different. And then we'll develop all these interesting tools and all these interesting techniques. But we're still subjected to these old frameworks, right. And because we're subjected to these old intellectual frameworks, I think that we don't see the type of practical innovations that would result from different frameworks. So that's, that's so that's the kind of that's the intellectual hypothesis, if you want to call it that the hypothesis that we don't have the right theory, in order to allow for innovations in practice, it feels
Evan Baehr 16:53
like somewhat of an abstract point, like let's pick up in healthcare, for example. So we have known about diabetes and things related to glucose for a long time. And so mobile developers, entrepreneurs are thinking about, if we could find ways for patients to access this information more real time and create behavior change apps, it kind of just seemed like you unleash entrepreneurs, innovators, developers into an ecosystem, and they just explore product market fit. And that's what entrepreneurship is they find amazing solutions. It sounds like you're saying like, because we don't have the right framework, we're like, playing on the wrong field, or help me understand that analogy. Yeah.
Ray Girn 17:41
I think that you have in medicine, if you look, again, over two 300 years. And even before that, I think you have basically the right account. The role and the purpose and the nature of medicine, like there has been a there has been a lot of really high quality, kind of theoretical advances. And there's generally, I think, alignment around the goal, which is to advance human life, right? People live longer and live better and fuller lives. In a way that I don't I don't think that that level of clarity exists in education. So I think even at the level of like, are we trying to make good citizens? Or are we trying to make independent thinker? Are we trying to, like what are we trying to do? Right? I mean, so that's, that's one point. But let me just add, that's one hypothesis. So there is a there is also kind of a practical challenge. If you look at healthcare, let's just make an analogy or a kind of a contrast between healthcare and education. The sources of funding that are available for innovation in healthcare, like where do they go to in education? So in health in health care? I think something like 15% of government dollars are spent on basic r&d And education is less than 1%. Right? You'd have to check these numbers, but it's that's the right order of magnitude. And, you know, leaving aside whether they would be well spent or not, the difference is dramatic. Philanthropy, in health care how much of it goes to finding the cure for Alzheimer's, the cure for cancer, in education, it's all going towards access, right? It's all going to let's take the current system and get it to more people, it's very much a relatively much smaller fraction is going towards innovation, private equity, and just kind of, you know, standard capital, if you will. In healthcare, there are models, there's pharma and other models that are proven. And an education is just doubling again, doubling down on the current system. And then venture capital I think, in healthcare, has backed big ideas. And then education, it's largely been ad tech. So something like pedagogical innovation going back to our earlier example of mixed age classrooms. It's very hard to secure a pool of capital let's say develop a you know program with mixed age classrooms or Problem with a different pedagogy, unless there's a kind of technology angle. So it is, you know, there is a kind of practical challenge. And there are exceptions, you know, you know, we're both, you know, learning capitalism exception, we're an exception. There are people have found a way. But it's it's really difficult to do innovation in education that is primarily pedagogical rather than technological in a way that I do not think that the parallel is true in healthcare.
Evan Baehr 20:29
Let's unpack both of those. The first point is really interesting. Let me try to paraphrase it back to unexplored a little bit. So the first is, in healthcare, we sort of know what we're optimizing for some version of lifespan. So how long we live, and maybe some version of healthspan? What's the quality of your life? You're saying? We actually don't really even agree on what we're trying to do with education itself? What are the competing parts of that? And what's your position on what we should be focusing?
Ray Girn 21:01
Yeah, so I'll give you an example. I remember when I was a middle school teacher, teaching history, and I had a student come to me, after a class wanting to deep dive into what we're talking about, had some follow up questions. Ken was interested. And I just like, fed his motivation. And I we talked, he was late for his next class, but I wanted to really kind of continue the engagement he was, there was his passion for for this kind of history, American history developing. And then there were there was another student. And a similar thing happened. But this student, my intuition was that the student doesn't really care about the history just wants a relationship with me. And so what I said to that student was, you know, write down your questions, let's talk about them after school. And then I made sure at lunch, to go out and play basketball with him and to develop my relationship with him. I didn't want a subordinate. What I was trying to do, which is develop a deep love of history to a desire to have a relationship with me, like it felt off to me, it felt like if he pursues the history for that reason, the way that he's going to hold it and think about it, is not actually going to accomplish the goal, which is understanding this kind of historical event. And we then over the years have unpacked that type of motivational difference and said, How could we actually build a system and a teacher training and a whole program to address that type of distinction? Greek as the reasons matter, why you're trying to understand and learn something, right? That like that. That's just another another example of this point that like, like, motivation is not an independent process from cognition, like the tie between them is really tight. And so in education, if somebody is trying to learn something for the wrong reasons, what's happening in their brain, and their mind is different. And so you have to have an account of that if you're developing. So if you know, if your dog died, and you come to school, and you're going, and you're just trying to get your work done, and you're not allowed to go to the library and sit because your dog died, it's not human. It's not like it's not, that's not the way that human beings operate. You have this need to process this thing that happened, but instead, you're just going through the motions of school. And so our our view is that like, it's not just a question of, oh, let's give this child a break, because their dog died. It's the question of like, their whole value set, and their whole motivational set is different. And so what what that child should be doing in terms of his or her development ought to look different.
Evan Baehr 23:41
That makes sense. I want to push on this a little bit. That story makes sense. I'm trying to understand there's an excellent tweet, thread tweet essay, if you will, that you wrote. And what you just laid out to me feels like you're saying you actually understand the right pedagogy, or at least a pedagogy that is better than the current pedagogy, one of your tweets you say this, which I hope you'll explain, why isn't software eating education? And all these ways? The answer the structural block preventing progress is that we don't know how to do it in quote. So is it that we actually don't know the right pedagogy to be building into or that like, you have a good one and a few people have a good one, just a lot of people are wrong.
Ray Girn 24:26
I think we actually don't know. I mean, we have leads. I think, you know, you know, from my position, I think, you know, we have the one true faith, we were figuring it out. But you know, if I step back from that we as a species don't know. So take a simple example. In nutrition, you think of yourself as a parent in nutrition, you neither want to force your kids to eat, you know, certain food every day, nor do you want nor is it like, Go Go be yourself, figure it out. Go to McDonald's every day. I'm just gonna get out of the way. Right. There's this sense that there's like an answer in the back of the book, there's a healthy way to live. And yet, but but you can't force that you have to help develop the habits and the self directed desire and like that's your goal as a parent. Now, contrast that with education and the content of the mind. Like there, if you don't, you know, that's what we're struggling with. We don't have a similar instinct. Like, there's people who are like you can google facts like, why do you need to memorize any facts? I don't want my kids to learn facts, I want them learn critical thinking, right? Or you can, on the other hand, say like, this is the answer, right? here's the, here's the politics, you should support her, here's the view of, you know, the role of carbs and diet that you should support. And let's just give the answer to the child right, like, and so there is not an intuitive sense of what we're trying to do is, on the one hand, develop, help children become like independent thinkers that can live but on the other hand, we have a view as to what that should lead to, if they become independent thinkers, and they decide that, you know, people are inherently corrupt, or they decide that you know, America was built on the backs of slaves, or whatever it is, like, we have views on whether those are those are appropriate conclusions or not. And so, I don't think that I don't think that most people have clarity. So and I'm going to put it in a very stark way. I think most people view education as propaganda. And it's just about to make sure we get our propaganda in, you know, let's make sure that we get our views in because at least we know, those are right, but they they view education is primarily about indoctrination, and not about discovery. And then what happens is, if you don't view education as indoctrination, the only alternative out there is education. His opinion, as education is creation, you know, you hear talk people talk about we're gonna, you know, co create with our students and like they're gonna create the world, right? There's, and they're epistemological reasons why I think people are stuck on creation. Education is neither indoctrination nor creation or opinion, it is discovery, it is discovery, it is truth seeking its discovery about an independent world out there, how it works, the world, the nature, the world of human beings, the world of industry, and technology.
Evan Baehr 27:20
One last one here, that just feels like I can't wrap my head around the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the US and beyond. That is great engineering schools, that is accelerators, programs like Y Combinator, that is all a venture capital that is private equity there. And in many cases, there's massive government subsidies as we had with silicon, etc, has enabled the development of innovative solutions and creation of trillion dollar businesses that civilization has never seen. This is a pretty recent thing, maybe since the 1950s. And so you see this and stripe with payments in Amazon, with hosting with Uber and transportation. And so I was really struck as I learned more about education, that education as an industry is it's massive at the top line is $7 trillion. Tam, it's at the level of energy, but it's a huge deal. So it's not like a cottage industry so that great people don't want to go into it. But put a fine point, what are some reasons that we don't have the creation of the unicorns in education, when so much money is being spent? what's broken?
Ray Girn 28:31
Well, I think that the there's a distinction between education and learning, that is not well understood. Education is the attempt to systematize the process of human development of growing up from a child into an adult. So a lot of people first of all, do not even believe that we should be systematizing. And they don't believe in a system of learning. And so, you know, there's a lot of skepticism from the best people that learning can be systematized. I think it has to be I don't think that it I think there is an underlying process of maturation. It's, it's the, it's the experiences you need to prepare for mature life, right. And if you step back, and don't get hung up on the distinction between education and learning and realize it's really about learning and growth. You we are seeing that innovation, but I think that YouTube is far and away the most influential and impactful ad tech company in the world. And it's not even close. It's transformed the way I parent. It's like, Oh, you don't know what a porcupine quills are, let me just pull up my phone. Like, it is so transformative. And it is so impactful in such an undebatable good in our lives. And yet we don't see that as an education innovation. because we don't have the right conception of the relationship between education and learning. So would
Evan Baehr 30:03
you put in that same list? Game of Thrones, Grand Theft Auto? Like what are some other things that you think of as learning related? Or that we should be learning from that most people would not?
Ray Girn 30:15
So I think that there's really I would not, I don't think we want to not everything is education, right? Art is not education, even though they're connected. I think that I think there's really three threads that we can pull on. So the first is the first is just like machine learning recommendation engines, everything that tick tock or YouTube does in terms of recommending and, and curating and sterilizing content? And what is the implication for education? What if we took that power, that algorithmic power, and we optimized it for learning rather than just purely instrument? Now all of a sudden, if you optimize it for learning, it's not going to be as engaging, right? Because you're not optimizing it just for pure Self perpetuation. But is there some way to optimize it for learning that still, you know, you know, addresses the motivational questions. So that's one second, the second thread is, is the design thinking that we see coming out of Hollywood? Like, you know, if you think of Pixar, and you think about, say, Toy Story, you can be a five year old, you can be a 15 year old, it'd be a 50 year old, and you're all watching it at your level, and all fully engaged in the five year old doesn't really even realize what he or she is missing, right? And why we've been making movies since the 1920s. Right? But why hasn't that touched education at all? It really hasn't. Like, you know, if you think of like the level and this is one of my, one of the critiques I offer to any kind of newfangled or modern ideas, like look at the film industry, it hasn't transformed education. So really, will VR transform education is something else has to happen, right? So, you know, point A is the recommendation engine, point B is the type of sophisticated design thinking that you see coming out of Hollywood. And then point three is I do think in gaming, we see this integration between the knowing and the doing between thought and action. This this kind of, you know, what Maria Montessori talks about this, this kind of like tight kind of reciprocity between motion and activity on the one hand, and like thought on the other, there's something to learn there. And and what I would say is that if you pull on these three threads, threads, and you can kind of integrate them into a cohesive vision, like you have solved the cure for cancer and education, you've found something. And I think in the next 20 years, we're going to see a lot of that, I think, I mean, I would not trade living today, for anything if I was an education entrepreneur, or a parent, because the amount of stuff that is exists at the at the periphery already and the amount of stuff that's coming, it's just gonna be mind blown.
Evan Baehr 32:56
Just to pick up on the first of those points. So much product design, especially in mobile is around engagement, in part because of the monetization strategy, usually, which is advertising. But even it's not advertising, still time in app is a massive driver of how we think about successful products, give us a little glimpse, what does it mean to optimize for learning versus engagement.
Ray Girn 33:21
So um, so I take my eight year old, and you know, my eight year old gets to spend time on YouTube and half the time he ends up in a rabbit hole, and half the time, it's a great learning tool, and I'm watching how he engages I, I talked to him about the fact that, you know, novelty at his level, but the fact that novelty is a dangerous source of motivation, that there's some people that they need something new and different, otherwise, they get bored very quickly. And that, in that situation, you're, you're expecting the world to do the work, otherwise, you get bored, but the best people, the people that really enjoy life, the people that really do great things and have fun at it. They, they don't need things to change. They don't need new toys all the time. They don't need something, they can watch the same movie over and over because they're bringing the energy right and like, and we talked through this theme, and and we and I talk about it with our educators that like be wary of having novelty, be the source of motivation, novelty be the source of engagement. Now, how could you take that idea and build it into a technology? I mean, we see it in places like workout apps, we see it in places where you have to exert some depth discipline like I don't I don't it's not that much of a leap it what we're saying is this, this implicit thesis, this implicit hypothesis, that we're trying to escape the responsibility of effort, what if we turn that on its head? And what if we made education a tool of control a tool of exercising effort of exercising judgment? And I think we have some Yeah, we have some analogs in physical well being you know, in metal Teaching apps and all sorts of tools that try to give you agency or try to, you know, amplify your agency, rather than diminish it. I don't see why we couldn't do that and learning you'd have to get the motivational issue and in my view that part of that is even as young as an eight year old or six year old, just being explicit about it. Right. And but there's certainly more more to do there in terms of getting the motivational piece, right. But, you know, I mean, people do not human beings, I'm not a cynic about human beings, human beings do not seek the path of least resistance, they seek challenging, meaningful work, optimal work if they can enjoy it. And I don't, I don't see why that that couldn't be the premise of a technology.
Evan Baehr 35:45
What is the big idea behind higher ground?
Ray Girn 35:53
The big idea is to build an education ecosystem that unlocks human flourishing. Right? It's it's to build end to end the education of the future. And I think that the counterintuitive idea is like we're looking to the past, in order to figure out the timeline, we're looking at the timeless, we're looking at the history of education, and we're looking at most, you know, most at you know, Maria Montessori and Maria Montessori, at minimum is the Galileo of education, if not the Newton, she is the she is the figure of the Enlightenment 100 years too late. That that, that you know, the world deserved, but didn't get during the Enlightenment. And when she came to the scene, the kind of progressive movement in the early 20th century who was already taking hold, and there is a way in which like she never, she was rejected, you know, certainly in America. You know, Edison and President Woodrow Wilson's daughter, Alexander Graham Bell, there was all these great pioneers that were that were really big fans, Maria Montessori and then, and then Columbia University School of Education Professor, wrote a book called the Montessori system examined I think, in 1913. And that just shut down Montessori in America, he was a disciple of John Dewey. So so, you know, we are looking to the past to figure out the education of the future, we were saying what is what is universal? What is common to the human being over 1000s of years. And we think that, for the first time, in human history, given the state of technology, we can actually create, at the conceptual level at the abstract level, the type of education program that Maria Montessori created for younger children.
Evan Baehr 37:50
I want to get into some of the big ideas of Montessori not all listeners know what those are. First, though, you said this sort of direct objective, at least a riff on your mission statement? Was the phrase human flourishing, what does that mean?
Ray Girn 38:06
So the simplest way that I would put it is it is, is making the most out of your life, making the most of you if you have this one life to live, view it as something precious and make the most out of it. And, and, you know, the kind of bedrock principle, even underneath our values is that the individual human life fully lived, is an end in itself, is its own reward, that that process of life, that that joy of life is the end, you know, at least for us, that doesn't mean an individual can, you know, decide that they want to the form in which we they want to accomplish that that's really up to them. But what we are trying to do is give every child the tools, the skills, the knowledge, the inspiration, the environment that he or she needs to make the most of your life.
Evan Baehr 38:57
Are there components of that, that it sounds like it's a bit of a unique thing, but are there some generalizable things like being in deep relationships in a community and having access to nutritious food or meaningful big ideas to wrestle with other marks of a flourishing life?
Ray Girn 39:16
Yes, yes. And I don't think that we take a position on what those are, but obviously there is, I mean, here's the closest we come we think there's there's three underlying pedagogical principles. One is we call it a culture of knowledge. So truth seeking respect and reverence for the role of knowledge in life. A desire to get to the bottom of things to understand, to discover to know having that internalized is really important to the good life. The second is a culture of work, which means a love of activity, a love of the doing a capacity to to pursue goal directed action to choose goals and to pursue them Got a life of purpose in which motion activity is the core. And then the third, we call it as a culture of humanism, a love of the good, I love the beautiful a love of humanity, you know, Montessori talks about how before you can save the world, you have to fall in love with the world, you know, you're not trying to save a prison, you try to escape, right? If you think the world is a prison, you're not gonna try to save it. You have to fall in love with the world world. Nature, the world of human history, the world of industry, you know. And so you know, that, you know, we, we articulate in that form for a different purpose, because we're trying to identify the principles underlying our pedagogy, but I would say, you know, read recast, you know, the things that you named work at the core, in a work in a really deep sense, we think, is the essence of identity. And then human relationships, as human beings are, by far the greatest value that, you know, an individual can have human relationships. And then I think he I don't think we're, you know, I think we would agree with the ages here, art, art and commerce.
Evan Baehr 41:16
That's a beautiful idea that before we can save the world, you have to fall in love with the world, it does seem like a lot of the hot topics that are taught in K 12, certainly in higher ed, are downers. We're talking about climate change, and warfare and famine and class conflict. What do you make of where we are today in terms of what we talk about with our students? And how are we driving? Yes, awareness of key issues, but at the same time, a love for actually getting to, you know, an improved outcome in those areas.
Ray Girn 42:01
I think that I'm all all of the preoccupation kind of with with, with these downers, as you put it, in our, you know, reflect can are symptoms of a can failure of education, failure to understand history, failure to understand the role of literature and human life. I mean, of course, the world has problems, the world has always had problems, but you know, I mean, life is about solving problems, right? Life is about doing the work to solve problems coming together to solve problems. That's the story of humanity, man also rises, it doesn't just fall, right. Again, I think that that I think that there's a way in which, like, we've lost the plot. And that comes from a failure of education. And so, you know, I'm on the board of the roots of progress, right, Jason Crawford's doing great work on progress studies, and, and we've commissioned him to do some courses. And, and part of the goal of that is to say, like, all of these scientific and technological problems and challenges that emerge when you're pushing, you know, forward, how do we do more of the same? How do we do more science? How do we do more thinking? More innovation to solve them? Right. And, and I think that that's the answer. I think that like, the fears of modern technology are not that different than the fears of Frankenstein's monster, like, you know, we think that they're different, but they're not that different. And I think that concerns in 2022, about our children failing. Our are not that different than the consumers. 1920 20 Yeah, I don't know if you've seen this kind of meme on Twitter, where people are like, nobody wants to work anymore. And it goes through like this every decade until, like, 1880. And it's like the crisis, nobody wants to work anymore. And and I human life is much more enduring. You know, he the human species is much more enduring on the one hand, and even on the other, the problems are real. So we don't want to deny the problems. We just like, like, what else can we ask for, but the chance to solve really challenging important problems? That's the stuff of life. Like, I think that's the attitude that we want to impart.
Evan Baehr 44:14
Something I get really excited about is being super honest about the nature and state of the problems and understanding little bit of the context and what ways did government or public policy or nonprofits, maybe not create the problems but at least kind of make them bigger or harder to solve? And into that mix? I'm a, I'm a big fan of the tech enabled venture backed startup. And it does seem like an education. It's not a tool that is frequently picked up your company higher ground, which we want to hear what the actual products are in a second, obviously, is one of these learn capitals excited to be an investor in that company. At that level, though, talk about picking up the tool of this. It's obviously a for profit company, it's venture backed. Why does that feel or does it feel anomalous in this space of education? Innovation.
Ray Girn 45:02
It does feel anomalous, less. So I think over time, but we have a real fear and suspicion of the profit motive in education. And this goes back to, you know, really, you know, goes back to antiquity. So Plato and Aristotle made arguments that teachers can't be paid. If they're paid a salary that's inherently corrupting. It's inherently corrupting because you, you are now motivated by the salary. You're not motivated by Trump. None of us believes that about teachers anymore. But we still believe that about companies, right. And when I moved here from Canada, it shocked me that people still thought profit was a dirty word, like you don't make money and build something great by lying, cheating, stealing, you do it by creating enduring value. And I think that, you know, nobody on my team is there for the money. Most of them probably think that, you know, the attorneys and the architects and the marketing, probably think they're gonna end up making less than they would have if they had gotten into other fields. I don't think so. You know, I made them part of my mission not to have that outcome. And and I think it's important that if we want to attract the best minds in the world, and if we want to attract the capital, I mean, people love children. Right. I think it's important that we take head on challenge head on this premise, that the profit motive cannot be operative in education. I think it's their salvation.
Evan Baehr 46:23
If you are sitting across from someone making that case to you, how dare you be this money grubbing profiteer? raking in parents hard earned dollars about, you know, running after their kids? What is your case that like, or make a case? Why should the profit motive in the form of a venture backed startup be one of the key ways we fix education?
Ray Girn 46:45
I don't think of it as I don't think of it in the form that you just stated as the key away the key, the key need is innovation. The key need is entrepreneurialism, right? And how do you get that? How do you get that? What is the role that venture capital plays in that? So if you think Steve Jobs, innovative genius, right, but out of a lineup of 50, smelly long haired hippies, somebody kept on pointing to that one and saying that one's the winner over and over again, right, that there is a discipline in the allocation of capital to the winning ideas. But that is an important function that does not exist, is starting to exist a little bit in the nonprofit space but doesn't exist in the same way. The upside, isn't there. And so like, I think that I think that the place to start is not the capital, the place to start is the innovation. Do we need innovation in education? And then you can ask, like, why is it that innovation, not that it never happens in government or nonprofit, but it happens at the edges. And it's core to this methodology. And it's because of the discipline that's exerted by the allocation of capital.
Evan Baehr 47:49
Give us a sketch of what the offering of higher ground is. So
Ray Girn 47:53
higher ground is a platform that launches and operates schools and educational programs, really at scale. So we run schools, we launch schools, and we run schools. But you know, we have 100 brick and mortar schools. We're opening about one a week, we're trying to get up to two a week. But we do it across modalities. So we also do homeschool. I think we have the preeminent Montessori homeschool program. We support in home programs, micro schools, we have a fully virtual school. And we just want to meet parents where they are. And I think very core to our approach is that it is from birth, all the way through adulthood. So you know, our preschool started eight weeks old. And we want to combine Childcare and Education. If someone needs a nanny or an Au Pair trained, or when placed in their home and their needs their home setup, we do that as well. So we are really trying to basically across time across the ages, from birth to adulthood, across modality, offer people a different way to educate their child. What do I hope it adds up to I hope it adds up to a lifestyle brand parenting for independence, moral, spiritual, intellectual, physical, financial independence, if that's the type of parent you want to be, we want to be your go to resource. And importantly, it's a network. So my six year old, my eight year old have been to 30 cities that when we when I travel, I can take my kids with me and put them in our school in Houston or Portland or New York. And we're starting to see customers do that as well. Yeah, so there's a lot to say about the underlying platform that allows us that's the offering the the idea of like, an educational system from birth to adulthood premised on the idea of human agency.
Evan Baehr 49:41
So if a visitor came for the first time to one of these Montessori schools, what would they see what would stand out or look different than a traditional Elementary School?
Ray Girn 49:54
I mean, the mixed age classrooms would immediately pop that there's children of different ages you would see a beautifully prepared invite armament in which children are working individually or in small groups, getting lessons from a teacher or choosing materials off the shelf, you would see something that looks a lot more like a we work than a school, you would see children go into the bathroom whenever they want to having a snack whenever they want to. And importantly, and this is really important, you would see if the program is well run, and what I think ours are, you would see an inner discipline, replacing the characteristics, it is not Kumbaya, it is not do whatever you want it is you make choices within an accountability framework to replace carrots and sticks. So you may see an eight year old do grammar all day, on Tuesday and math all day on Wednesday, because she has her weekly work contract. She's knows what goals she set for the week, and will get the outcomes.
Evan Baehr 50:54
What is the weekly work contract?
Ray Girn 50:55
So there's somewhat different ways to do this. But in some form, the educator the guide in the classroom, is conferencing with students to say okay, what are your goals for this week? Okay, we're gonna have this lesson and that lesson today this listen to that lesson tomorrow. You know, your multiplication tables? Are you going to practice them this week? What are your goals? What do you want to achieve by the end of the week, and you know, this is all we're building a technology to enable this, but you you are, you know, you're as a child in the driver's seat of your own learning. And I had this experience once the child was like, you know, you your teacher, which teacher taught you math and, and he was like, nobody taught me I taught myself math, what are you talking about? Like, it seems so unnatural to him that like this kind of existing model, or someone else is in charge of your learning and your growth? premises. So our premise is that we can do this in a way that still respects the importance of core knowledge. So it is not true that the fashion of Rome and the fall of Rome are equivalent, you need to understand the fall of Rome, you do not need to understand the fashion of Rome, those are not equivalent. Yet, what if a child is interested in the fashion in Rome? What do you do? What if a child's interest? What if a child is interested in the atomic theory, but not interested in understanding basic chemistry and the fact that gases mix in definite proportions? What do you do? Right? And so what we're trying to use technology software is how do you respect the underlying architecture, the knowledge tree, while unlocking interest and letting intrinsic be the engine of learning?
Evan Baehr 52:30
Is there sort of a core curriculum or a core set of the big ideas of Western civilization that you're going to? You're going to do make them encounter in some form?
Ray Girn 52:39
Yeah, Western civilization or the international equivalents? Yes. So we are developing something we're calling the montessorian baccalaureate. So you can think of like the IB program, it's a kind of scope and sequence from birth all the way to to through high school. That is, that is a core. Now, I think that getting this idea of right of how do you think about the core, what's interchangeable, is part of the work. So I do not think that you can have a successful marriage in principle, unless you have access to the great art of the world. Because the purpose of the great art, the timeless art of history is to teach you how to size up a situation, how not to emphasize these little petty things, and emphasize what's fundamental, and you need that for your human relationships. But then if someone came to me and said, so if you never read Shakespeare, but you watched and talked about movies, and you were a real movie fan, couldn't you get that? I think the answer is yes. But that's not the optimal way to get it, right. Like the optimal way to get it is through Shakespeare. And I think we have to be open to understanding that reality is cut at the joints, like you can pick certain things that are more optimal. And when you don't have that you do your best, right? And so this is one of the reasons why people that don't have a great formal education, find a way because we're human beings we adapt, we can find a way, but in education. So here's another example. Like, if your goal is to teach people how to observe the external world, and you could pick a unit, and you could pick rocks, or you could pick birds. Birding is better than rocks, because birds move, because birds mix sounds, they're ubiquitous rocks are also, you know, ubiquitous, but it's not true that those two are equivalent, like that one is more optimal now, but if you if someone was interested, deeply interested in rocks, you could do it with rocks, too. Like it's not like it has to be birds. And so I think what we have to kind of articulate is like, this idea of that there has to be some content within a principle, but it could be any and, you know, why does it have to be a versus than V and what situations is it optimal or not? That's the work that we're doing.
Evan Baehr 54:45
It doesn't make a lot more sense to be a birder than a rock rocker. I don't know with geologist seat, you're a lot smarter than I am. Hey, give us a sketch first. Another kind of founding moment of how you guys started the business.
Ray Girn 55:01
So, very quickly the origin story really, for me, I was at the University of Toronto, I started tutoring, to make some extra money and just got pulled into education on my own public school education, you know, was okay, I didn't really think about education, I had some transformative teachers I did most of my learning on on my own. But when I started tutoring and doing a CT prep, and you know, some substitute teaching, I really got sucked into the problem and got interested. And so then I took a job in Southern California to co found a lab school and elementary school. And that was 2003. And, and just did a deep dive into into curriculum into content. I would say like the, the defining the first defining moment in my career was I was a classical great books educator, I really took seriously the importance of knowledge. And, and the preschool is that we're feeding our elementary program, we're Montessori. And the first defining moment was this identity crisis that I had. And somewhere around 2007, or eight, where I just I didn't know what I believed, I didn't know my knowledge, Senator, my childhood, and my classical, I'm a progressive, like, I was not tempted by the kind of progressive, you know, kind of impulse to just let people do whatever they want and to glorify opinion rather than respect for fact. And yet, the whole traditional system just seems so antiquated and out of whack like this, imposing it upon children I saw, I remember this young girl, and she was a B, or C student in math from third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade, sixth grade, seventh grade, you know, but for the fact that she was born, you know, six months too early, like there was nothing wrong with her and her entire formative years were miserable, because she couldn't add up because we have arbitrary, you know, requirement and pose in terms of when she's supposed to know what and so. And so, I was lost. And I came to the view, we came to the view, the team and I that like, this is the issue of education. And this goes back on, you know, 200 goes back to Prussia and Bismarck's Germany and the kind of the, this attempt to standardize education, and the reaction to that, right. And so, that, and then, and then we, you know, we really came to the view that Montessori is, is the solution, you know, her principles, and, and that became my life's work. So that was really the first defining moment, the second defining moment, you know, then we went on, and built the largest Montessori organization in the United States, I became CEO of this little family business. The second defining moment was really in, in 2016, when when we reached basically an irreconcilable conflict with the controlling ownership, we wanted to just, we were young and brash and full of ourselves, but we were also on to something and really passionate and felt like we have this one life to live, like, let's go and make the most of it, let's build a high school, let's do something International, it's like, take the big swing. And I don't think that that there was an alignment around that. And so we ended up leaving with my second son, and just been born with nothing, you know, a group of us and starting all over, and we were at the top of the world, and we just started all over again. And I'm very proud of that. Very proud of that. Because I think that, you know, that is what I want my students and my own kids. You know, that's, that's what I want them to approach life. And my wife and I did it together. And it's the stuff of life, right, those great moral choices.
Evan Baehr 58:39
Did was there a Jerry Maguire kind of moment, like tickets to that's a really difficult decision, you're inside a company. And sometimes people think maybe we'll make the case to the CEO, we'll have a new division, we can move the product, but the decision to leave, especially when you have a wife and kids, and they're also involved in the business, there's financial risks, there's reputational risks, and take it to the moment and making that decision.
Ray Girn 59:03
I mean, the decision was really to give an ultimatum to the controlling shareholder, that I need to do this my way. Otherwise, I will, you know, respectfully leave. And I think a bunch of people will follow me. And, and I think he did that, you know, in a way that was fair. And then from that things just unraveled, and he actually made the E and the kind of leadership team. The board actually made the decision to accelerate me leaving and pushed me out. And then a bunch of people resigned and said, Okay, we're going with Ray. It was it was really, it was a really painful time, but it was also really validating time. Like, I felt like, you know, these people that were, we'd grown up together, we were kids, we've grown up together and these people who themselves had careers and incomes and families. You wouldn't believe that you know, 1212 Out of the 13 members of that main leadership team, I was CEO for six years, resigned, you know, responsibly over the course of a couple of months and joined me. And we've never looked back, we've never looked back. This is, you know, one of our core values at higher ground education as mission without martyrdom. And you think about a teacher here in this, like, you're a missionary, you're not a martyr, when we interviewed teachers, we say, this is sacrilege in education. But it's not about the kids. It's about you. What type of work do you want to do? What type of life do you want to live? What do you find, elevating and uplifting and ennobling? Because if you just get that, right, there's a million ways in which you elevate the children around you, because that is what children need more than anything, this shining example of an adult that's engaged in life? How can we say that to our teachers, and everyone else, and unless we weren't examples of that ourselves. And so this was, this was an instance of living in the world that we want to create making those hard choices, drawing on our understanding of history of literature, and our friendships, our relationships to each other. And so yeah, it was it was hard. It was scary. It was painful, but it was that which tries us also makes us.
Evan Baehr 1:01:12
You've mentioned being all in your wife is a leader in the business, your kids go to the school. That's a lot of higher ground all the time. Do you guys create some space to pay? Honey, we're not going to talk about this at dinner tonight. How do you balance up?
Ray Girn 1:01:28
I'm already reading as a teenager, Busta Rhymes, said, he attributed his success to having no plan B. And I think there's something there's something that even back then appealed to me. It's been a lot of work, it's been a lot of work to figure out how we are going to navigate you know, different personalities and you know, in our relationship, the answer is really, it's total integration. I'm the same person. My work is my life. But you know, my kids are, obviously the most fundamental value, I have my wife and my kids. And so and so we, we have just through trial and error, found a way to balance and what I would say is like, I don't think that it's not, it's not like we just don't experience this bridge between work and the rest of life. And so it's not as though we're saying we're not going to talk about work, right? Because when we're talking about some interesting thing that's happening, we're running a big business now. And when we're talking about some interesting thing that's happening somewhere else, like the need is, I don't want to talk about the things that I'm doing all day today that I have to get done for tomorrow. But when we're talking about the expansion into Paris, like, that's a fun conversation, it's like, it doesn't feel like, you know, we're talking about quote, work, we're just talking about an aspect of work that is relaxing, and interesting. So it's more about how we talk about work. And not that we try to exclude it. Our kids are still young enough, the oldest is eight that they're not aware of, like, I mean, they're, they're aware, but they're not, it's not part of their natural context, in terms of like, you know, that I'm running this, mom and dad are running this organization, and I'm very, in the background, at my own kids school, because I do worry about them getting a little bit of a kind of like, Prince complex, and like, one of the things I watch for is like, you know, I want to make sure that everyone's harder on them. Because, you know, it'll be interesting to see what happens in their teenagers, there are
Evan Baehr 1:03:27
a lot of public policy changes happening, recent changes in Arizona, and some other school choice measures that are really opening up so that more money is able to follow child play that for a little bit, what could happen when more money is really following the child.
Ray Girn 1:03:47
I mean, it's going to be it could be one of the drivers that transforms utterly, entirely transforms education, I think a lot of it's gonna depend on the quality of the offerings. So if you had a bunch of politicians getting together saying, let's change the depth taxi cab industry, but you have no Uber and you have no lift, it doesn't get that, you know, in the end, like it doesn't get that far unless you have something that's really satisfying the consumer, in this case, the parent and the child. And so there's there's some good stuff out there, but part of I think, what's needed it, look, what we and others are trying to do is really high quality offerings at scale that show the difference. I mean, we can utterly, utterly transform the entire system. It could be the next Silicon Valley of education, not a place but ethos, right. I think that I think that what's interesting to watch in the next decade, or even two decades, is that the cultural discussion in the way that I formulated is, is education, delegated parenting, or is it a central stage function? And that is what's been culturally litigated. I think, for the first time. Remember, Jefferson wanted the University of Virginia and argument that education has to be a public function because you need an informed citizens. I mean, everyone's As time immemorial has believed that education is a proper state function. It's not like we used to believe that it wasn't right. Not not in principle. But now it's like, you know, post world war two in particular, where there's this homeschooling movement and is original reason there's this awareness, this consciousness that wait a second, like, education is philosophy, education is ideology, right? And so like, how do you deal with that? You know, how do you deal with that? And, you know, I think nobody, everyone kind of accepts that, like you shouldn't be, let's say, imposing a religion on a child at a school. But what about the carb centric food pyramid? Like, really, you're gonna tell my children a view on nutrition or my children of view on whatever topic, you know, history biology that I judge, you know, that is wrong, or we're gonna present it in a way that I just is wrong, it typical these issues are coming to a head. And I just don't know how, like, I think that you there's a there's a sense in which like, there has to be a decentralization, or there has to be a doubling down on like, kind of like Central State propaganda, like what you're seeing in China, like there's, there isn't, you know, there's compromises between the two. But there isn't really a middle ground in principle,
Evan Baehr 1:06:14
the quotation we explored earlier on before saving the world, you kind of fall in love, the world does land with me in a way that sometimes I feel like I'm sort of coasting on the fumes of my encounter with the tradition of Western civilization and college, I was able to be in a great books program, I lived in some great cities for a while and got to go to art museums, and I was sort of filled up back in my young 20s. When I thought, you know, what someone does is, you know, read Shakespeare, here we are 20 years later, and I'm like, I think I remember what that stuff was about. So I'm just exploring my own mind, like, how would I just make little efforts to sort of re fall in love with the greatness of whether it's this country or this civilization. And it's probably worth at least an hour a week, maybe a little bit more time. I
Ray Girn 1:06:59
mean, take a history of British Literature course or something like there's so much stuff available for $1.99. Like, this is where I have a little bit of skepticism towards the kind of anti technology bent, we see out there. Because if you have agency and if you exercise agency, if you take charge of your life, like so much choice is available at your fingertips. And the reason that we complain is partly because our education system hasn't trained us to have that much choice. So yeah, I have the same feeling. And I think that like one of the reasons I want my kids to memorize poetry is because the few poems that I have memorized, are I call upon them in those moments to reorient me and I do go back to the books, you know, I I even even like Mr. Green Gables, you know, like, I really, like there's something about being in that world, but I also think there's a lot of great film and a lot of the stuff that's coming out of Netflix and you know, I mean, you have to be choosy part of it is a lot of times it's cynical about the future, but it's the quality is really high. You know, there's Yeah, but art in history or in history. Those are the two places I think you have to refill. And obviously your human relationships, your friendships and family
Evan Baehr 1:08:18
rate we celebrate you and your family and your team in the innovative work. You're doing that higher ground. Thanks for being on the pod thanks for tuning in to venture to flourish. If you know someone who should be listening to the pod, would you do me a favor and just send them a link and check out the site learned out VC slash flourish there, you can subscribe to our newsletter, read transcripts, find related articles and even upcoming events. And hey, on a personal note, I'm really glad you're here. There are a lot of parts of my own life where I feel like I'm languishing. So I love your interest in the topic and look forward to figuring out what we can achieve together. Signing off is Evan Baer from venture to flourish
Transcribed by https://otter.ai