Po Shen Loh

Episode Summary

In this engaging episode, we sit down with Po Shen Loh, a renowned mathematician, social entrepreneur, and the former national coach of the US International Math Olympiad team. Po’s dynamic career defies stereotypes—he's not just an academic, but an innovator who's making education more engaging and impactful.

Po shares the story of his groundbreaking solo math tour across the United States during the pandemic, discussing the challenges and rewards of connecting with students and families in parks, turning obstacles into new opportunities for human connection and learning.

He also dives into his entrepreneurial journey, focusing on his company, XP (expii.com). Po reveals how XP has evolved from a platform for crowd-sourced math lessons to a disruptive live learning ecosystem. His “math class of the future” brings high school math geniuses together with professional actors—who act as real-time artistic directors—to create vibrant, interactive, Twitch-style online group lessons. This unique approach not only makes learning fun for middle schoolers but also develops valuable communication and leadership skills in the high school instructors.

Po discusses the business model and social mission behind XP, emphasizing accessibility and impact. He explains how the program’s group, improv-style lessons help students build creativity, collaboration, and problem-solving skills—essential for a world being transformed by AI.

Beyond math education, Po delves into his work on Novid, an innovative network-based app designed to give users early warnings about disease outbreaks—empowering individual action with real, actionable data.

Throughout the conversation, Po is candid about the realities of modern education, the importance of inspiring joy in learning, and the growing need for young people to cultivate both technical and human-centered skills. He offers actionable advice on how to develop critical and creative thinking, and shares his philosophy of working hard with the goal of delighting others.

Whether you’re an educator, a parent, a student, or simply curious about the future of learning, this episode will leave you feeling inspired to think differently about math, motivation, and what’s possible when people come together to solve tough problems.

Transcript

Speaker A [00:00:00]:
You've been a social entrepreneur. You've given the largest solo math tour. You've won a lot of competitions.

Po Shen Lo [00:00:06]:
For 10 years, I was the national coach of the US International Math Olympiad team.

Speaker A [00:00:10]:
Talk a little bit about your first company.

Po Shen Lo [00:00:12]:
We're the first people in the history of education to put a professional actor in every single classroom.

Speaker A [00:00:16]:
How does this platform work?

Po Shen Lo [00:00:18]:
We put people who are really good at math, they're high school math geniuses, they're teaching these classes, and at the exact same time as they're teaching, there's a professional actor in that room giving real time feedback, tweaking the voice, the eyes, the expression, the hands.

Speaker A [00:00:31]:
Platforms like Khan Academy byju, we happen.

Po Shen Lo [00:00:34]:
To make the best thing out there.

Speaker A [00:00:42]:
All right, everyone, today we have Po Shen Lo on our show, and we're gonna be talking to Po about a lot of interesting subjects. I'm really excited to have you on the show. How are you doing today, Po?

Po Shen Lo [00:00:52]:
Great, great. Nice to meet you.

Speaker A [00:00:54]:
Okay, so Po is one of those rare interesting people that I always wanted to meet, because you're not just an academic person. You' a social entrepreneur. You've given the largest solo math tour, You've won a lot of competitions. But I really want to start with this solo math store that you did in 2021. Because for me, that was like one of the rarest things and coolest things you did, because it's like you're touring all across us teaching people during COVID Can you tell me about that experience?

Po Shen Lo [00:01:20]:
Sure, sure, sure. That was really fun. So I. For 10 years, I was the national coach of the US International Math Olympiad team. And during that time, I would go around, give a lot of talk because people wanted to know about methods to learn math and so on. But then during COVID I just couldn't go talks, so I got itchy. All right, so I was recording something in New York in May of 2021. The some studio had flown me out because they had this crazy idea that you could go and use professional equipment to record math lessons. I thought that was cool. They even had like hair, makeup and everything, which is totally different from usually teaching class. But when I was out there, I think it was in Brooklyn, I noticed that people were starting to get out again and the restaurants were full. And I said, you know what? Maybe I can get out and give talks again, but I have to make sure I don't make super spreader events. And then I got this idea. I said, you know what? There are parks outside. Parks have shelter. You know, in America we got parks with picnic shelters. I wonder if I can just go city to city and like a band, set up my own speakers, put them outside, and then just do talks in parks. This will be fun. I told some people, and they said, there's no way this is ever going to work. How are you going to carry all the equipment? One man solo. How are you going to go to all these places? Will anyone show up? I said, challenge accepted. If you tell me that something's not possible, I'm going to try. I went to the music stores, the pro audio shops. At that moment, they hadn't actually sold out of their pro audio, like, live music equipment yet, because no one was doing live music, right? So then I just went and bought, like, the PA speakers. In fact, right now, the car that I drove here in has PA speakers in the back. It's like. It's like a band. I got my stuff, I got mics, speakers, everything, right? So it was an awesome experience because right after Covid, all these people had been pent up at home, and I was going city to city, and I was just announcing, hey, anyone who wants to learn about what learning is, I'm happy to talk, give a talk. And this brought all these math interested and generally learning interested people out of the woodwork city by city. And it was fun because as they came out, it was clear they hadn't seen each other in a year. And so not only did they come to the talk, they were like, oh, my gosh, I haven't seen you in so long. A remarkable experience, going from park to park to park, driving off in the sunset from one city to the other, seeing all the humanity. And that's actually how I got the crux of the idea for the next big thing I did.

Speaker A [00:03:18]:
How were you spreading the word? Was it through your Instagram? How are you getting people telling people which city you were in?

Po Shen Lo [00:03:25]:
Yeah, so I have somewhere between. Not so many. I have somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 followers and people on our email list. So I just go and tell people I'm coming. And at that point, I already had a reputation for being a guy who will give you ideas that you had not thought of. Right. You don't want to go to a talk and listen to something that you already know.

Speaker A [00:03:42]:
Exactly.

Po Shen Lo [00:03:43]:
Right? So, like, even in this podcast, my goal is to go and give some ideas that people might not have thought about before so people know that if they come to one of my talks, they're gonna walk away with some new insight on what learning is. What success means. What is math even?

Speaker A [00:03:56]:
Yeah, I wanna jump into your entrepreneurial ventures. Can you talk a little bit about your first company? And how many years has that been in the making?

Po Shen Lo [00:04:04]:
Yeah, I have one company, my first and only company. It's called xpy. That's because the first website we made was something called XP.com, which still exists. And I started out with this crazy idea of, like, I wonder if you could make a website where people contribute lessons, the written lessons or whatnot, and everyone can go and look at these lessons and the best lessons are voted up. And I thought, this should be easier. I should be done in, like, three months. Well, I was wrong. This is hard. But I'm glad I started because once I start something, I don't give up. We've pivoted like crazy because at the very beginning, the idea. Yeah, okay, there's some website that people learn math lessons from. That's cool. But the impact, right, Even though we got to the point at some point that 300,000 people a month went to this website, the impact wasn't huge. Because if some. Someone's just coming there, looking at a lesson and going away. Yeah, okay. Nowadays you can just use ChatGPT for that. All right, so we pivoted. We've pivoted so many times. And actually, what we're at now is still under the same company. Right. But it's totally different. This was inspired by going on that tour and seeing all the humanity and seeing that actually what people want is to have a more human way to learn. Okay. So the main thing we do now is we make math lessons that look like Twitch gaming streams.

Speaker A [00:05:08]:
Really?

Po Shen Lo [00:05:08]:
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So. So what we have is. And the key insight. All right, the key insight, which was covered by CNN earlier this year, the key insight is we're the. In the history of education, to put a professional actor in every single classroom.

Speaker A [00:05:20]:
How did you find professional actors who were also good at math?

Po Shen Lo [00:05:24]:
So the secret is that our actors don't have to be good at math. We have the actor playing the role of an artistic director, and the people who are teaching are the ones who have the math background. But I don't know if you know, but there's some people. Yeah, there's people in the world who are good at math, but maybe they're not as well versed in acting. So what we do is we put people who are really good at math, they're teaching these classes, and at the exact same time as they're teaching, there's a Professional actor in that room giving real time feedback, tweaking. The voice, the eyes, the expression, the hands. Yeah, so this makes it so that the lessons just look interesting.

Speaker A [00:05:56]:
So is the actor the one taking the lesson?

Po Shen Lo [00:05:59]:
Oh, no, the actor is watching while the whole thing is going. So we got high school students, the people who are teaching, by the way, they're high school students. They're high school math geniuses.

Speaker A [00:06:07]:
Okay.

Po Shen Lo [00:06:07]:
And so we got these high school math geniuses. They're teaching math lessons under the tutelage and supervision of a professional actor.

Speaker A [00:06:14]:
Yeah.

Po Shen Lo [00:06:14]:
This creates a unique win win ecosystem. The high schoolers, while they teach for an hour, what they get is an hour of feedback that teaches a math person how to be like Hollywood.

Speaker A [00:06:24]:
So how does this platform work? Is this like pre recorded lessons or can anyone show up and ask a question in real time?

Po Shen Lo [00:06:30]:
I used to do something with everyone asking questions in real time. That's how I also got the idea. During the pandemic, I ran an hour a day on YouTube, just live streaming, and anyone can ask any questions, but that turns out to be too unstructured for learning. So what we do is. It's. It's sort of like. It's sort of like if Uber had a train. Okay, what does that mean? So the trains leave us specific times and they go along specific routes, Right? Sort of. They're pre scheduled.

Speaker A [00:06:52]:
Yeah.

Po Shen Lo [00:06:52]:
Uber is the concept of unscheduled. Right. So the way we work is we have classes. The classes are 20 sessions. Courses. Courses, 20 sessions, one hour each. And those are like trains. Trains with stops. Right. And as soon as we have enough demand, we can go and put the drivers on the trains. Go. And then for 20 weeks, one hour, one specific hour, you join this particular group and you have a party. Actually, it would probably help right now if I show you what this looks like. Okay. And then we'll. Then you'll know what I'm talking about, because this is not just some abstract idea, man. We made it. Let me show you what this looks like.

Speaker A [00:07:21]:
Okay. All right, let's see it. Amazing.

Po Shen Lo [00:07:22]:
I want to show you because then you can. You can see what I'm talking about. And then. Yeah, then you can. You know, you can. You can play that there too. But I mean, you can play that on the. On the actual thing. But I just want to show you this so that you have. So we're talking about the same thing. This is an online math class. This is two people. They're both high school students, they're both teaching.

Speaker A [00:07:40]:
Are they both teachers?

Po Shen Lo [00:07:41]:
They're both teaching. That's right.

Speaker A [00:07:44]:
It's cool because everyone is commenting and interacting in the real time. Is it like a group lesson?

Po Shen Lo [00:07:49]:
Yes, these are group lessons. That's the whole point. See, people used to think. So I'm just shattering a lot of conventional wisdom in education. People used to think the best thing is like one on one lessons. Just showing you how to do all the steps. That's the best way to train a robot. Okay, so what we are after is we want to teach people how to be productive in group brainstorming sessions.

Speaker A [00:08:07]:
Yeah.

Po Shen Lo [00:08:07]:
You know, like there are meetings in work. Right. You don't want to be the guy in the meeting that's just sitting there waiting. You got to be able to be saying your ideas bouncing off of other people. It's like an essential life skill. So what we have is we have group lessons. There are about 25 to 30 kids taking the class. There's these two high schoolers who, as you can see, they're like bright, shiny and they're smart. You can see they're smart. There's two of them. We've taught them improv comedy. They go off of each other like. What I realized was if you just watch one person talking, it's pretty hard to be interesting if you got two people. Energy.

Speaker A [00:08:35]:
Yeah, right.

Po Shen Lo [00:08:36]:
Like somebody say something, bounce the energy. Then the two of them take turns. Did you see the Twitch style chat running up the screen?

Speaker A [00:08:42]:
I like that. How did you do that? Is like running. That's pretty cool.

Po Shen Lo [00:08:45]:
That's our own thing. So that's software. I mean, I have a background where I also did a lot of computer programming, programming before. So I wrote a good chunk of that. We had other people help as well, but I wrote a good chunk and I designed that idea. Idea of while the class is going, stick the darn chat on the screen. Because that's what makes everyone watch Instagram Live.

Speaker A [00:09:00]:
It looks like a glass whiteboard.

Po Shen Lo [00:09:02]:
Yeah.

Speaker A [00:09:03]:
Smart. You know in movies it's like the genius is writing on.

Po Shen Lo [00:09:07]:
Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's so much fun. Oh, you mean that piece? Yeah, yeah. So that piece we use. Yeah, we use some pieces of software. It's like there are existing pieces of software, but we combine them in our own way. Right. I said if you do that, it makes it look okay. It's solving a real problem. The problem it's solving is you want to be able to see what they're doing and see their face.

Speaker A [00:09:23]:
Yeah.

Po Shen Lo [00:09:23]:
See before us the person teaching the math. Math didn't have the performance training. So maybe they didn't necessarily want you to focus on their face. My insight was online school doesn't have to suck. Everyone thought that online math class would never work. Online anything would never work because they said, come on, the kids, they can't focus on this stuff. But I said, look, I know kids can focus on YouTube for hours. And then I realized what. What makes people interested in something has absolutely nothing to do with how important it is. It's all to do with the emotions of who's presenting. So let's make those instructors, like, teach them how to be emotive and make that face big.

Speaker A [00:09:55]:
Yeah.

Po Shen Lo [00:09:56]:
Now you need to be able to see what they're writing and their face at the same time. Whereas before, a lot of people doing, like, online lessons, they were just like, look, let me give a big whiteboard. The little face is in the corner. And see the math. Pay attention to the math. The kids are like, nah. Yeah.

Speaker A [00:10:10]:
Yeah. I think the biggest issue right now with is zoom, Like, Zoom classes. I. I've been in, like, school for many, many years, and I've done, like, couple of masters. Zoom classes. Even if you don't have adhd, you're bound to zoom out, you know, because they feel like. Like very less interactive. And usually when the professor calls out your name, like, hey, you're, like, stunned. You're like, what's going on? Oh, I was not paying attention kind of thing. So how do you think we can fix that problem with Zoom?

Po Shen Lo [00:10:36]:
So we already did. You see, I thought of all this because it's not just Zoom classes that have a problem. Come on. Every single person, when they get into a Zoom meeting, if there's more than, like, two or three people on the meeting, they're just checking their email. You know that. No. No one pays attention to Zoom. You're scrolling Instagram. No one pays attention. So. So what I did is I said, tell you what, Zoom opens a. It's like. It's a portal. Yeah. I can mash anything through that portal that I want, so why not? Like, what we do is all our classes actually use Zoom. People join a Zoom Call. What I showed you is a recording of a Zoom Call. But we use software to change the way that the content is presented through that Zoom window. Right. We basically override the video feed that goes into Zoom. So we make Zoom look like Twitch. That's it.

Speaker A [00:11:18]:
Interesting. Yeah, Because Twitch. This looks very much like Twitch. And you're like, can you send emojis in the chat?

Po Shen Lo [00:11:24]:
Yes. Yes. And the kids, do you See, what my other observation. Observation was, is all right. So when I went to school back in the day, I was one of those kids who actually talks to other people in class and like, you know, pass notes. Back in the day, we passed paper notes. I'm an old guy. I went to school in the 80s and 90s.

Speaker A [00:11:38]:
I did too.

Po Shen Lo [00:11:39]:
Okay, okay, okay. Yeah. So we didn't text back then because we didn't have phones. But phones didn't really exist. Maybe they did, but they were like monsters. But anyway, so I was the kind of guy who always wants to talk. I want to hear other kids talk. And if you think about it, in a classroom, kids are forced to sit still and not say anything. And sometimes that makes them not like school. I said, you know what? I see that when kids are watching, not just kids, when anyone's watching, watching a live stream, it's going bananas. And I know they're actually paying attention. You see, the observation was in class, if you pass notes, you're looking back there, you're not paying attention. In our thing, you're front and center on this thing and everyone's on the same page. And we just made it so that the instructors are cool with the emojis and the excitement. And if someone says something that's really off topic, we have an interesting power. We can cut it out of the chat. So you see, what we did here is we have a moderated chat. In fact, if someone goes and starts swearing and saying all kinds of bad stuff stuff, no one ever sees it because there's a 10 second delay between when you write a message and when it appears.

Speaker A [00:12:32]:
So you have filter words.

Po Shen Lo [00:12:33]:
We have filter people. Actually, this is a production. Okay. So my insight was let's not make a classroom something where one solo instructor is managing the whole class. We got two high schoolers, they're going like this improv comedy. We got one actor that's like a director, and we have two teaching assistants. The two teaching assistants are controlling the chat. If someone's not talking, they send that person a message privately. Hey, how are you doing? Having a good day? Right. Like, we have a five person team managing a 25 to 30 person class.

Speaker A [00:13:00]:
So this, I mean, again, this sounds way better than the traditional experience. But again, it's. It cannot be infinitely scalable. But what. How do you. What's the business model behind it?

Po Shen Lo [00:13:10]:
So the answer is it's pretty darn scalable. Let me explain how the scalability works. Okay. And let me answer the business model too. Business model is real simple. I showed you a math class.

Speaker A [00:13:18]:
Yeah.

Po Shen Lo [00:13:18]:
We charge only $22 an hour to take this math class.

Speaker A [00:13:21]:
Okay.

Po Shen Lo [00:13:22]:
If you know how much all of the extracurricular math options out there in the entire country or world cost, we have.

Speaker A [00:13:29]:
Higher.

Po Shen Lo [00:13:29]:
Way higher. This is actually a low price in the United States. I did that because I'm a social entrepreneur. This maximizes accessibility. But usually when people look at that, they're like, wait a second. This is better. Way better than what I'm paying for, and it costs less. You know, in entrepreneurship, what you need to do is make a better, cheaper product. Right. Well, the key question is, how did I pull that off? The only way I can pull that off is by having a different business model than everyone else in the industry ever had before. Also, one thing I want to emphasize. I said their high schoolers teach teaching, but they're super good. Like the thing I just showed you, our high school students, they're the people who are in high school, but they're on the way to, like, crazy good colleges. For example, of the high schoolers, 30 of the high schoolers graduated this year. We have 100 high schoolers total, and it's just growing. Okay, but the 30 who graduated this year, six of them got into Harvard. Thirteen got into MIT. There's two going to Princeton. Somebody turned down Stanford. At least one turned down Stanford. Multiple turned down Yale. Two are going to Duke. Someone's going to Cambridge, England. I'm laying out ridiculous outcomes. And at the same time, what we just did is we made it so that if you want to learn from people who are super clever and, like, about your age. Age. We're just really good at picking people who are about to be absolute superstars. It's like buying a stock. You wanted to buy Apple before Apple was big.

Speaker A [00:14:34]:
Yeah.

Po Shen Lo [00:14:34]:
We are extremely professional at picking out rising stars before they got big. Actually, they're already pretty big.

Speaker A [00:14:40]:
Is the ideal customer for this product like someone who's preparing for sat? Like. Or is it mainly high school students getting into the next step of their life?

Po Shen Lo [00:14:48]:
The main audience for this product, for buying the classes, are actually middle school students or like, ninth graders. The ideal is not to help you prepare for the sat, because actually, GPT can do the sat. You should not be preparing yourself for that. The ideal audience for this is anyone in the entire world who wants to learn how to think creatively and solve problems they've never seen before. I've just described anyone who wants a job. Now that AI is here, the ideal audience is called everyone in the World who wants to have a job?

Speaker A [00:15:13]:
Okay, I remember, like, when I was growing up, we studied a lot of things that we never ended up using later in life, like trigonometry. And I was really good at math too, by the way. But what do you think about, like, silicon selecting the right subjects that are actually going to be useful later down the road?

Po Shen Lo [00:15:29]:
Okay, we don't teach any trigonometry. Okay. Trigonometry is cool. Okay, I should say. I'm a math. I'm a math professor. I like trigonometry, too, but what I just described is something for everyone.

Speaker A [00:15:38]:
Yeah.

Po Shen Lo [00:15:39]:
If I was describing something for civil engineers or like, people who are going to build our bridges, you better learn your trigonometry. I don't want to drive over your bridge otherwise. Right. But for, like, the average person, suppose that what you want to do is make a podcast. You know, making a podcast is hard. You got to have the artistic plan. But you probably need to know something about analytics, SEO, how to look at the stats to figure out how to actually get someone to see the darn podcast. Yeah, right. Like, hello, hopefully you see us. Hopefully there's a bunch of you. That's because you thought about the analytics. Okay, so actually, what we teach is just the raw heart of how to solve a problem you never saw before. Because. Because we have these two dynamic, super clever people. Every class structure is different from what you're used to in school. We throw a question at you which only needs middle school math to understand, but you have absolutely no idea how to do it, because even high schoolers would not know how to start the problem. It's weird.

Speaker A [00:16:25]:
Weird.

Po Shen Lo [00:16:26]:
It's like combining basic ideas in ways you'd never thought of before. Just like if you go to Legoland, beautiful things made with basic Lego brick. Okay. We teach you how to assemble the basic bricks of middle school math in ways you never thought of before. Because we'll give you a question, and suddenly, 25 to 30 kids brainstorm. We don't tell you how to do it. This is the most important part. Our teachers don't tell you what to do, but no matter what you brainstorm, they can run with it because their math is so good that they can just say, oh, you want to use this Pythagorean theorem? Yeah, let's go. Let's go. They don't need to prepare for that. Right. The high schoolers have a background in math, so they're used to just thinking on the fly. It's a wonderful experience where you don't have to worry about whether it's the teacher's way of doing it. Don't have to worry about whether it's the book's way of doing it. Whatever you come up with, just start going. We teach people that math is as creative as art. So now the idea is if you go through this thing, you learn that if you ever see something you haven't seen before, just start brainstorming, start saying your ideas. There's a group of people, you learn that you can brainstorm together. We're teaching this core skill which every single middle schooler who wants to have a role in this, in this future should take. And I just describe something that's not delivered in any of the standard education system because it doesn't match a single Common Core standard. It doesn't match it. In fact, I don't even believe in our. We don't believe in having our program teach you the standards. We're not preparing you for SAT style standard problems. We're not preparing you to get an A in your normal, normal school. Because GPT can get an A in your normal school.

Speaker A [00:17:49]:
Exactly.

Po Shen Lo [00:17:49]:
We're teaching you how to be the person of the future. And the best part is all the middle school students who happen to have that, you know, happen to have that math of middle school. Yeah, they can take it. Practically speaking, it's best suited for people who are already getting an A in middle school math class. There are products out there which are remedial. Our product is, well, there's a lot of people actually who get A's in math class in middle school. And those people are perfectly suited to learn how to be able to innovate in the future.

Speaker A [00:18:14]:
That's amazing. I, I see the future of education changing a lot in the coming years. I see us going back to physical pen and paper tests, honestly, because there's been a lot of. Recently you saw the math paper got leaked and there was a lot of news about that. So if you had to predict, like 10 years down the road, like, how would a basic classroom structure look like? I believe that people will stick to prerecorded lessons, but there's going to be a little bit of group discussion and Q and A, like, how do you predict in a decade from now, everything will change?

Po Shen Lo [00:18:44]:
That is a difficult one for me to predict because whenever we talk about the standard education system, I have huge respect for the teachers. Teachers are very innovative people with deep, deep domain expertise and just the experience of handling classrooms. They're fantastic. But somehow a lot of teachers have Their hands tied behind their back by the fact that there's a big system they're in and they're sometimes even evaluated by how did my students do on passing these standards? This forces the teacher's hand. Right? Unfortunately, those systems can be difficult to change. So I don't know. This is not an attack on teachers at all. In fact, it's a support of teachers to give teachers more autonomy. I totally believe that's what needs to be done. I do not know what's going to happen to the larger ecosystems. So that's why what we created is we made something where no matter what the powers that be are doing in that standard ecosystem, controlling the teachers, well, we have something that can drop in over the Internet and with what we do, it doesn't matter what the existing management is doing. Although I should say I talk to management too. For example, tonight I'm flying overnight to New York because tomorrow it's actually an entire school district in New York state which has invited me to give the opening keynote for their before school year massive conference for all 800 teachers, all subjects from K to 12. That's tomorrow morning, 9:00am in New York. Right. So, and that's, that's organized by the superintendent who came to two of my talks and they wanted to bring these experts ideas. So I think what I should say is I'm optimistic that some systems will want to figure out how to change. I hope that they will. Now, since now to actually answer your question, you know, what are we, what am I encouraging for that particular, that particular school district? It is exactly this thing of giving the teachers more autonomy. It is even this concept that the purpose of being in that classroom together should be to open up thought and discuss. Right. There needs to be a lot of discussion. The teacher ideally is someone who facilitates all of this discussion. And it's also something about inspiration. See, my model with what we created here is that the people who are leading the class, they're not only delivering content, they're not only moderating, moderating the discussion, they're also, they're having fun. And you know what kids want? They want to figure out how to have fun. They want to figure out how to be happy. We show them people who are just delighted, happy, passionate about what they're doing to make you say, you know what? If you're that happy from doing this, I want to figure out what you're doing. What are you on? Right. Oh, you're on math. Yeah, let's do it.

Speaker A [00:20:54]:
I'm sorry to Say all teachers don't come with your energy, okay?

Po Shen Lo [00:20:58]:
But this can be done. You know, one of the things I'm going to be advising. You see our secret weapon? We brought the actors.

Speaker A [00:21:04]:
Yeah.

Po Shen Lo [00:21:04]:
You see, this is not. This is not impossible. What I realized is there's a massive win win. You asked about the business model, right? Here's how the business model works. It's super simple. While those high schoolers are teaching, there's an actor in that zoom room. The actor has one job. Keep giving feedback to the high schoolers. Practically speaking, since we're online, the way we do it is that every high schooler has two screens. One is the Zoom call. In that one, the actor's there, but their camera is off and the microphone is off. The high schoolers have a second monitor with a second call. It's on Discord. It's just on some other platform with a video. Video chat, okay? And on that one they can see and hear the. And they can see everything. The actor type. Okay? What that means is while the high schooler talk, they're getting real time feedback on eyes, voice, everything. Okay? Turns it into. If you teach one hour, you get one hour of real time guidance to help you be more compelling. That's the exchange. Suddenly we have lots of high schoolers who realize if you do this, not only do you pass every college interview, not only do you get every job, you can get in relationships easier too. You know, life is just awesome. You'll get promoted super fast. We're making it so that IQ and EQ come together. Suddenly it's a giant win for the facilitator. So the scalability of. Okay, I just told you. Any middle schooler who wants to learn how to invent new ideas of thinking to survive in this post AI world, that's the customer. That's an enormous pool. The facilitators. Any high school student who's really good at math already, like Easily at least 1% of high schoolers are in this category. That's 100,000 people in the US alone. Okay? At least 1% are in this category. If you are already really good at math to the degree that you'd have no Trouble coaching an 11 year old old kid, okay? And if you want to have a life someday where you can steer your life instead of just having to do what the boss tells you, guess what? You need communication skills. So I have a supply demand match in the sense that at the facilitator level, the high schoolers, well, there's enough people with the Skill. And enough people who want to do this because then they can learn how to be really expressive. Suddenly, this means that we could run at the scale relatively easily of at least a hundred thousand high schoolers teaching about a million middle schoolers. That's larger than any state in the United States. United States in terms of education delivery. This is huge. Like, the point is, I'm talking about percents now. I'm saying with even just 1% of the high schoolers, we could cover more than 10% of the middle schoolers. And that should be reachable even today. Give me 5, 10 years, it'll be 2% of high schoolers who are qualified. Then we can hit 20%. Oh, give me five more years. We'll have 4% of high schoolers because you're training up people. You know what I mean? We're teaching people how to think. So the idea is it's just changed the entire value traffic trade off in education, where our instructors are not just doing a service, they're getting a service to power this. I just need to have enough actors. Our ratio is for every high, every, every actor, every actor can support 20 high schoolers. This is just. This is just how we're doing it.

Speaker A [00:23:40]:
One actor with 21.

Po Shen Lo [00:23:41]:
One actor. Because the high schoolers don't teach 40 hours a week.

Speaker A [00:23:44]:
That shouldn't be that hard because every university has theater people and, like, actors.

Po Shen Lo [00:23:50]:
Yeah.

Speaker A [00:23:50]:
You know?

Po Shen Lo [00:23:51]:
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A [00:23:51]:
It shouldn't be that hard.

Po Shen Lo [00:23:53]:
No. And if you divide, it's like if I need 100,000. If I want 100,000 high schoolers, I just need 5,000 actors. Look, we're in LA right now.

Speaker A [00:23:59]:
Yeah, I'm full of actors.

Po Shen Lo [00:24:00]:
Full of actors. I don't want Brad Pitt. Nothing against Brad Pitt, he's a good guy. But, like, maybe Brad Pitt is too big for what we want. Right? We want the people who are also just. They're really good. Right. But maybe they aren't already busy with a blockbuster movie. And there's lots and lots of people like this. And actually, I like this because by doing this, I got to get a huge appreciation for the performing arts community. I love the performing arts community. I was really ignorant before. I used to be like, math, math, math, math, math people, math people. Now I'm like, all the people around here in performing arts, you guys have emotional intelligence up the wazoo, okay? And now we get to work with you. Like the latest guy we just hired on as an actor, he's awesome. He previously was in Cirque du Soleil. Wow. Yeah, he worked for Steven Spielberg event.

Speaker A [00:24:40]:
Yeah.

Po Shen Lo [00:24:41]:
Right. So this is a guy who has, I mean, he's obviously those two are different things. Cirque du Soleil and Steven Spielberg, these are different things. But he happens to be in his, in his 60s and in your 60s, you don't really perform in Cirque du Soleil. You know what I mean? We even made a retirement plan for, for actors. Really well, because you see actors with experience, they're awesome. And what they're telling all these, all these high schoolers are things which to the actors are like table stakes. Okay, it's pretty obvious. Pretty obvious stuff. But for the high schoolers who did math might not be so obvious. Okay. But there are also high schoolers for whom they've been in our program for hundreds of hours, for 100 hours. At that point, they really value learning from a Cirque du Soleil guy because now it's not that they're learning obvious stuff, now they learn, you know, advanced stuff.

Speaker A [00:25:17]:
Yeah, that's amazing. I want to quickly jump about AI because of course. So there's been this argument that AI makes people lazy a bit. I think of this analogy as calculator, right? When I was going to like giving math tests when I was in high school, we didn't, we were not allowed to use calculator and suddenly changed like, you know, and then people were allowed to use a calculator. So how do we fix this problem of stopping people to make lazy thinking and just jumping to chatgpt finding the solution really fast instead of critical thinking?

Po Shen Lo [00:25:46]:
I love this question because actually it gets at the heart of the big mission that we're working on. We, we've been talking, so the thing that drives financially drives the ability for us to do this at massive scale. But we're trying to achieve a big mission. And the big mission is to counteract the root cause of what you call laziness. Okay, see, I'm looking at the world. I travel a lot. I give like a 200 talks a year in like 100 cities. I see all this humanity. I love humanity. And by seeing all this, I see, wow, we're living in a world where if everyone is every person for themselves, we're all going to lose to AI. It's not just that AI will make us lazy. AI is going to make it so that the divisions between people, the individualistic, it makes it so easy to take advantage of and actually, actually suppress the humanity as everyone just does everything for themselves. So what we're actually trying to do Is I'm leading a movement. It's a philosophy where we're trying to make a whole lot of people enjoy two principles.

Speaker A [00:26:33]:
Okay?

Po Shen Lo [00:26:34]:
And actually, this whole math class that we do also channels these two principles. I'll tell you what they are. First one, the way to be happy is to delight as many other people as you can. The second one is hard work is actually fun. I call it a philosophy, not a religion, because we can actually back up why this makes sense. And this is a good idea for you, even if all you care about is yourself. Okay, so these two principles, I'll explain why it's justifiable. Like, why. I can explain to anyone on why you should do this in a moment. But let me first explain why I care about these two principles. It's because if you actually live by these two principles, well, lazy gets cut out of it. I said the hard work is actually fun on something meaningful. I mean, you got up really early in this morning, I bet, to go and set up this whole thing. Why? Is it because you were like, oh, man, I got to get to work? No, it's because you were like, this is fun.

Speaker A [00:27:14]:
This is fun.

Po Shen Lo [00:27:15]:
Okay. It's like, life is more fun if you're not just vegging out on a couch. But you see, what makes life more fun is because you probably are inspired by the impact you're about to have. You're recording a product podcast. You want more than one viewer. You want as many as you can. Yeah, thanks for viewing. Right. You want as many as you can, but the idea is that's because your idea of what makes you you is the impact on other people. This, by the way, is actually fun. It's addictive. The more other people you crack, you get to crack a smile, the better you feel.

Speaker A [00:27:41]:
Yeah.

Po Shen Lo [00:27:42]:
See, but there's sometimes when people go through life, if it's too much of, like, all right, I got to get these grades. I got to get through whatever to get a good job. So I'm at the top of the pile. You look at other people as an opportunity, obstacle. Does that make sense? I'm like, no, no, no. Other people are not obstacles. Every single person you meet on the street, whatever their background is, they have a life, okay? Humanity is beautiful. And so I'm trying to rejigger a lot of kids. Let's just say value to be like, you know what? Joy. Getting joy in other people. It's fun. Okay, Once you have this. Are you going to cheat on an assignment? Well, what was the assignment for? Is to teach you something. Okay, like what did you cheat? You only cheated yourself, right? If what you do is you just go through life trying to figure out, how do I satisfy myself? Honestly, that's what. That's what drugs do. You know, why, why don't we. Why don't we think everyone should take drugs? Drugs technically make really good, right? But basically it's something which only makes you delight yourself and has no impact, no positive impact on others. My philosophy is, let's go bigger than this. Let's not just think, don't take drugs. Let's think, how do we build a whole society where people actually delight in making other people happy? That's why our classes all face middle school students. That age range, in my analysis, is the age range where people start thinking for themselves, what am I? Who am I? Are my parents right about everything? Actually, my parents not right about everything. What, what should I be? So guess what I'm doing. I'm finding high school school students. We're teaching them how to be charismatic and look, you know, really, really like they're having a good time. Because they are having a good time.

Speaker A [00:29:01]:
Which is a great skill, by the way. Yeah, for life.

Po Shen Lo [00:29:03]:
For life. It's to be able to be enthusiastic, energetic, and magnetic. Right. We're teaching them that skill. And then we've actually, for all the high schoolers, we've pre screened them because we have so many high schoolers who want to join our program. In order to join, you got to pass interviews. We make sure that every single person teaching is someone who loves humanity. Like, not just on paper. It's like you saw them, you saw them on camera. They're like excited, happy, happy. They like people, right? We want to show people that you can like people. You can be super smart, you can know how to talk, you can look put together and you could be having a ball. And guess what? These people are just a few years older than you. You can be her, right? And so what we're trying to do is we're trying to cause all these middle school students to say, I want to be him. I want to be her. They like people. All right, how do I join this club? Oh, you got to like people. Well, let me try. Let me try to do something for people. And anyone who starts doing things for people and getting other people to smile, you get addicted.

Speaker A [00:29:54]:
I want to quickly talk about, like, how do you spreading the word about XP, like how you're driving traffic? Is it through your YouTube channel? I know you have a YouTube channel where you do daily challenges I want you to talk a little bit about that as well. But how are you, like, spreading the word and telling people to sign up?

Po Shen Lo [00:30:09]:
We're trying to figure that out right now. Okay. So I've been traveling around the entire country, and so everywhere I go, the people who happen to come to the talks now, they know. The good news is once they join, a few months later, they start telling other people that these are the best things they've ever seen. Like, this is actually what we've got. As you know, in entrepreneurship, you don't get anywhere just by making like an okay thing, what we've made. We get feedback. Like some. A student who took this said something like, every single time I take this class, I feel like I've had a spiritual awakening in the domain of algebra. Like, we get this kind of feedback from a zoom class. Okay. So like, we got people telling everyone, but at the same time, that's not growing fast enough. So the kinds of things we're doing right now, yeah, we do have a YouTube channel. We do do live streams during the school year that's helping us grow somewhat. We have like 50,000 subscribers. Is pretty small. But other things that are happening, well, there are people who actually advise educators and people who advise students. Some of these people will meet with me, start to get to know what this is, and start to recommend it into their groups. I don't do any paid promo. I want to emphasize that, like, if you had said I have to pay to get on this podcast, I'd be like, nope, nope, nope. The only thing I do is I talk to people who want to be genuine and authentic and don't do pay for play. Pay for play to me is a great way to spread misinformation information because then it's just who paid to get featured on this or that, right? So my style is real simple. I talk to people who just want to get to the honest truth. What is the best thing out there? We happen to make the best thing out there.

Speaker A [00:31:27]:
At that point, they tell what about the partnership model? Like where you go to universities and talk to them about, like, having this platform? Because I think that's. That would be a great fit.

Po Shen Lo [00:31:36]:
I think that that could do. If I was interested in different things with my life goal, I would probably do that. My life goal, by the way, is not to be an entrepreneur.

Speaker A [00:31:44]:
Okay.

Po Shen Lo [00:31:44]:
So I happen to be a social entrepreneur. So what drives me is the impact you see. Actually, my long term goal with all of this is not to make a huge pile of money in Fact, right now, we don't even make money because all of the money we're making, we're pouring back in to teach underprivileged kids. We have a huge number of classes which we are giving away completely for free to highly motivated sixth graders in Miami, Baltimore, Harlem, Brooklyn, New Jersey, Boston. We're expanding. We're going to expand across the i10 corridor. Also, like, we expect to be opening all of of these classes where we're finding highly motivated kids who are in underprivileged schools where they don't normally have a way to super excel in math. Okay. So I'm just explaining my goal is not actually to make a ton of money. In fact, long term, as this gets really big, I personally am going to get involved with helping this alumni base to create as much positive impact on the world as possible, not find new ways to make more money by selling a platform. Right. Like some people have told me, this platform we've built, we could scale this horizontally. We could teach chemistry. We could teach universal university classes. I could become rich. I'm not interested. Right. Like, I'm interested. What I'm doing here is I just want to touch every middle schooler in the entire world and insert this seed of people are awesome. You see, like, this is different from the usual entrepreneur. I don't want to have from each person we make the most money. No. I want as much churn as possible. I want people. So what we do. Yeah, we're just going in right smack into this middle school. It's not university because not everyone goes to college, but everyone goes to middle school.

Speaker A [00:33:07]:
It's funny you said that because I. Whenever I think, like, what makes me the happy, when am I, like, happiest for a long time, it's like gratitude when you do something like, good instead of buying, like something nice. That usually fades so fast. It usually comes from gratitude. And like, making these people teach other people early on in their life teaches them such good values. It's amazing. I would love to, like, use the product myself and see how the user experience feels, because I think the overall all is how you have designed a very good user experience.

Po Shen Lo [00:33:35]:
That's right, yeah.

Speaker A [00:33:35]:
Which is more adaptable than the zoom experience that we have right now.

Po Shen Lo [00:33:39]:
Absolutely. But you see, that's also because I took an approach to this which was also human. Right. I didn't just go and say, you need to learn math. I was like, why do you do what you do? The way I work with anything, if you can see every single participant in this Ecosystem, whether it is the middle school kid or their parent or the high school person or the actor, every single person wins. Because I don't want anything that exploits anyone. I want to be something where it's like, of course I to want, want to do this. Right. Of course I'm willing to join this thing and teach this thing because then I'm going to learn how to talk. Of course I'm willing to coach these high schoolers because then I have. I'm able to support my life, my dream. Right. And the parents we answer the pain point called man, I wish my kid would like to learn. We just made you like learning by fitting into what the kid wanted. The kid wanted to be able to watch something that has an emotional connection to them. They want to see another kid. So what I did here is the reason the user experience works so well is the fundamental question at every single stage was how do I make this a master massive win for the person involved. It did take me 11 years to come up with this. It did take me touring around the entire country. I see about 20 or 30,000 people a year. Through all these talks, I'm not talking at them, I'm watching their eyes. In these talks, I try to figure out what makes people delighted. And so what we do here is we just, we just delight as many people as we can.

Speaker A [00:34:49]:
Yeah. My math is a sixth sense that everyone should have because that's right. It is helpful. Like I think I tell everyone that you should play like poker or you should play play chess because it really translates to future. When you start a business or like you're doing construction or whatever you do, it will translate and those math skills also will translate. So I think that's something everyone should do. I really want to quickly touch on your next venture was Novid. So what was like the underlying technology behind that app?

Po Shen Lo [00:35:16]:
Oh, that's fun. Okay, so novid is something I did during the pandemic. It is actually what caused me to come up with this idea. It's some sense. Okay. So the, the history, the timeline is that I was doing various things that weren't working super well in education. Then the pandemic struck. And when the pandemic struck, I started thinking, how do I help the people? Right. How do we help control the spread of disease? And that's when I really learned the idea of thinking. With game theory or the idea of thinking, how do I make sure incentives line up?

Speaker A [00:35:42]:
Can you explain game theory?

Po Shen Lo [00:35:43]:
Sure.

Speaker A [00:35:43]:
In a very simple way.

Po Shen Lo [00:35:44]:
In a very simple way. It's Called don't play a zero sum game, Try to find win wins situations. This is super simplified. Of course. Game theory is far more sophisticated and I'm not even a professional game theorist. I use that word in a way where I want the average person to understand. Don't play zero sum games where somebody wins and somebody loses and the total that they have is the same. What's an example of a zero sum game? A casino. Yeah, sure, the casino wins and you lose. Yeah, yeah, that's right. The casino wins and you lose. Right. But generally speaking, like if someone's competing for something, if you got two people who are competing, not just two, a whole bunch of people competing for something, and you've got like some company which is helping to train a person how to beat the other one. That company's main success is like, well, I got this person up, but there's still one person who got through anyway, so you didn't make anything. Right. That's why our style is we don't teach you how to beat someone else on some metrics. We teach you some fundamental thing that's actually useful. I wanted to make sure everything we do is delivering fundamental value. Then it becomes a win, win situation where somehow, yeah, sure, you gain more skills, but we'll teach both of the people, right? We'll teach both the people, sure, only one of them will get the final result, only one will anyway. But now both of them have both more skills to succeed in life. Something like that. And I wanted, I wanted, I said it this way because there's a difference between just teaching to a test and teaching things which are fundamentally useful. Everything we teach, we first pass through the filter. Is this fundamentally useful? And then we have parents telling us things like, wait, but this doesn't match the test. I want the high test scores. And we tell them, no, no, no, no, you want the fundamentally useful in that sense. We don't listen directly to the market. I'll tell you, the market in education is all after. Not all after, but a lot of it is after test prep of just like teaching the test. And we're just like, no, guys, that's not it.

Speaker A [00:37:18]:
It's memorization. I think I gave the gmat.

Po Shen Lo [00:37:21]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker A [00:37:22]:
And it was honestly one of the most difficult exams I've ever given. It was hard, but the hard part was they actually gave you such a limited time in the exam to actually answer each question that you have to like, really turn the gears in your head.

Po Shen Lo [00:37:35]:
That's right. So then it became just a game of like, are you good at doing this test? And afterwards like how much of that do you need to use in the real life?

Speaker A [00:37:41]:
Nothing.

Po Shen Lo [00:37:42]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So to me that's an example of something where you're doing like a zero sum game, helping these people just to pass to beat other people and it doesn't necessarily give them a fundamental value later. I say that because that's why it's so important that we're a social enterprise, not a regular just make tons of money thing. Regular make tons of money thing. You got to listen to the market and give them the nonsense that they want.

Speaker A [00:38:01]:
I think another thing that was helpful was in my mba, in our final project, we had to work with a company that was doing desalination in the central valley in California. And we had to really figure out the business model and like, yeah, how he's gonna accube, like buy the supplies and everything. And that was in my opinion way better way to learn about accounting.

Po Shen Lo [00:38:19]:
Yeah.

Speaker A [00:38:19]:
Than just actually watching like managerial accounting classes. Because those concepts you just forget.

Po Shen Lo [00:38:26]:
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A [00:38:27]:
Because you're memorizing them.

Po Shen Lo [00:38:28]:
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. So the whole point of this game theory I'm using, I'm using the word in a colloquial way, which is just to say, hey, go through life, try to figure out how to make everyone win and then that way you can do something large scale social. So about Novid, it was because for pandemic for public health, the only way to control a disease is to do something large scale society wide. And before people were telling people, please do this to help other people do this, to do your part. But unfortunately if the incentives don't all line up, it doesn't work that well. The inspiration for a lot of the work we did was there were apps made. See, I'm actually a math background. My math was network theory. That's what my research was.

Speaker A [00:39:03]:
I love network effects, by the way.

Po Shen Lo [00:39:05]:
Network effects. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well that's what you're trying to do. That's what I'm trying to do. Right. That's why I'm happy he didn't know you. Right. So networks are powerful. Now the network theory mindset made me think, I wonder if there's a way to use smartphones to anonymously, very important. Anonymously. Have a network structure among all the people in the world of who's spending a lot of time with who without knowing who they are. I don't want to be creepy. Okay. But then to make it so that whenever anyone gets sick, you can use the network to save everyone else. That was the general idea. But what I saw people doing is people made apps. Everyone else's apps, they didn't work. But, but the apps that people were making were, they would tell you, oh, last week you were around someone, today that person is sick. Since you were around them last week, well, you might be dangerous to people. So please stay home and don't go out, don't work. You might need to earn money. Sorry, don't earn money. Sacrifice yourself for the good of the others. In some countries, which is the countries that made these first, they also said, and we know where you live and we know who you are. The first countries to make these apps had that. Okay, so guess what, you guys, no choice. You're going to stay home.

Speaker A [00:40:02]:
You got to quarantine.

Po Shen Lo [00:40:03]:
You got to quarantine. Well, in the rest of the world, we actually don't like that. I mean, I don't want, I don't want a situation where the government knows everything about me. I think the beautiful thing about America is, you know, we don't have that right. So then people tried to make these apps for the general world and they said, and we asked you to do all these things, but there's no consequences at all. Guess what happens? We just talked about cheating on homework. By golly, if you tell someone, don't go and work and they actually have to go to work, that's a non starter, you know what I mean?

Speaker A [00:40:29]:
All the high school students would be like, oh, we all sick.

Po Shen Lo [00:40:32]:
Like, yeah, yeah, so the high schoolers for sure, but I'm talking about the adults too. It's like if you are actually a danger to society, but you can't tell yet and no one knows for sure. Sorry, I shouldn't say. You're actually a danger. You've already been exposed, right? You might be a danger. You're not exhibiting any symptoms. A lot of the adults would think, well, I gotta, I gotta make my day's paycheck, I'm just gonna go out. Yeah, so what we, what we did is we said, we gotta address this issue. So I invented a different way. What happens is that the app doesn't tell you, it doesn't tell you that the, that you have already been exposed. We will tell you something like ping three, someone just got sick. That person frequently spends time with someone who frequently spends time with someone else who frequently spends time with you. The distance has struck three away from you. And every time someone gets sick. We'll give you this info. Now let's think, just like let's do a thought experiment. Imagine there's a new disease, okay? This is designed not to protect just against some Covid, but against some new, new horrible disease. Suppose there's new horrible disease which you don't want to get, because if you get it, you will actually potentially die. Suppose you found out, hey, it just struck someone, that's 12 people away from it. You'll be like, okay, cool, it exists. But what if over a few weeks, you keep getting notifications. Now someone got sick, they're eight people away. Now someone got sick, they're six people away. Now someone got sick, they're four people away. Hey, someone just got sick. They frequently spend time with someone who frequently spends time with someone else who frequently spends time with you. That's called three. And then somehow a few days later, two, someone just, just got sick. They frequently spend time with someone. That person frequently spends time with you. What will you do?

Speaker A [00:41:53]:
It reminds me of LinkedIn connections.

Po Shen Lo [00:41:55]:
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A [00:41:56]:
Connection one.

Po Shen Lo [00:41:56]:
Connection one. That's exactly the concept, except that LinkedIn is just that you happen to know the person. This is something where you frequently are in the same place together. How would you react if there's some new horrible disease spreading around the world and it went from 12 86432, what would you do?

Speaker A [00:42:11]:
So in order for this to work, everyone has to download this app.

Po Shen Lo [00:42:14]:
Basically, a lot of people. Doesn't have to be everyone, because the way this works is the people who happen to be in the same community. If they happen to use it, great. If some community doesn't want to use it, they just don't survive with it, it's fine.

Speaker A [00:42:24]:
So it should be basically recommended by the county itself.

Po Shen Lo [00:42:27]:
Like, no, no, this is not required. See, that's, that's actually why this is so important in the other things. So that. Actually, I'm glad what you said, because what you just said indicates how everyone who was making these before was trying to push things that don't directly help you. So they had to recommend that county had to say, please, everyone, use this. Think through this thing. Suppose you have this tool. Suppose you get to know it's 12-86432. What would you actually do if you found out this is striking closer and closer and closer to you? What would you actually do?

Speaker A [00:42:54]:
Not go out. Why I would be scared.

Po Shen Lo [00:42:56]:
Look, you didn't say because I want to help people. Do you see what I just said? The whole point of this is this makes you want to stay home because you just don't want to die. The previous version of the apps made by Apple. Everyone else told you you might die already. Don't take anyone else with you. Do you see what I mean?

Speaker A [00:43:13]:
Yeah.

Po Shen Lo [00:43:14]:
Like, this is a totally different mechanic. So that's why with the other ones, you have to tell them, please do your part. Please install this to help everyone else so that when it's too late for you, at least you don't take anyone else down with you. And this is how we all survive together. Ours was different. Ours is like, you don't want to die. It's optional. Okay, so now let me give you another analogy. Does the government need to force everyone to have cars to. When they buy cars, to have cars that have windshields that. That you can look through, as opposed to, like, driving in a metal tank where you can't see anything 100%? Well, why don't we have to force it? We don't have to force it because you just don't want to die, right? Like, if you drive a car, you want to be able to see. Darn it. The thing I just described is how you see in a pandemic. It's very simple. If you want to be able to see, see doesn't mean you can say, oh, that guy's sick. No, see means like, it's like a radar being. Like, oh, bing, bing, bing, getting closer. If you want to be able to get a signal to let you know when to hide so you don't die, it's optional. Just download the app. Does this make sense?

Speaker A [00:44:07]:
Yeah.

Po Shen Lo [00:44:07]:
Now it suddenly is a different story. Yes, the county does need to tell everyone this exists, but it's just like the education thing I told you about. I don't need to force you to take my class. You find out it exists and you're like, wait a second, I'm paying someone else more for worse stuff. The high school students, we don't have to force them to join. We're like, do you want to be able to improve your chances of getting into all these famous universities? Do you want to be able to get a job? Do you want to attract a partner? Do you want all these things? Hey, we'll pay you for it, even.

Speaker A [00:44:31]:
What is the underlying technology behind. Behind the app, though? Is it contract tracing? Is it geolocation? Or is it mainly people telling the app itself about the network?

Po Shen Lo [00:44:41]:
Oh, it's pretty simple, actually. This is the same thing that Apple and Google did. It's actually really simple stuff. The idea is to not use geolocation because we don't want to know where you Are all the time. Otherwise I know who you are. You know where you are at 3am is probably where you live. So we intentionally, to protect privacy, we don't use that. But even like Apple and Google did this, this is not rocket science. What happened was your phone can connect by Bluetooth to AirPods or whatnot. Right. So phones are able to use Bluetooth to talk to each other. And so we just had the phones contact by Bluetooth to see any other phones around here. And so the network that's built is just like, oh, interesting. I mean over, over the Bluetooth, effectively my phone would say something like, hi, I'm user number 532. Anyone else here? And your phone might be like, hi, I'm user number 60. Oh great. We were around each other.

Speaker A [00:45:25]:
Yeah.

Po Shen Lo [00:45:25]:
Who's user 60? I don't care. Who's user 532? I don't care. You know, like we just have this network and it's like you got some random usernames. User. User IDs. No names. No names, just user IDs. When you install the app, you just become the next user. Does that make sense?

Speaker A [00:45:36]:
Yeah.

Po Shen Lo [00:45:37]:
And so they're just walking around as people are walking around within Bluetooth range. It's like, oh, oh, okay. Looks like these two users, they're always around each other. Okay, now you got a network connection. That's it. Yeah, but I'm emphasizing that's not the new technology because Apple and Google did that. That stuff even existed before the contact tracing, having phones be able to, to detect like nearby things. So that's old school stuff. The new idea was simply using that technology base in a way that makes sense for society. Right. Like the work I do, like even these online math classes we run, a lot of technology exists. Zoom exists, Twitch exists, LED lights exist. But the idea of combining all of them in a human focused design did not exist.

Speaker A [00:46:14]:
Yeah, that's the beauty of it. I quickly also want to talk about other like platforms like Kong Khan Academy, Baiju. Like what do you think about those and how useful they are for existing people?

Po Shen Lo [00:46:26]:
I think that all of those people are doing a service to humankind. I'm not here to go criticize. Right. Khan Academy, I mean he makes free stuff. I mean it's fantastic. My approach was, I think that inspiration and lighting that fire are how you win. So if you look at the way I teach, if you ever watch the way I teach, sure there's content delivery. But what I'm really trying to do teach is this is fun and not just is it fun in some shallow way, you can use this to get a wonderful life. I can help guide you to that too. So for me, everything I do in education is showing examples and showing pathways to wonderful, delightful life in a very holistic way. Right. So Khan Academy. Fantastic. If you want to go and brush up on some skill, he's got that, he's got a video he's made. But usually the high school student. Oh, sorry. Usually the student doesn't look at that as like a now this is how I want to be. Because you can't see. You know what I mean? He's not in it. He's delivering great value, don't get me wrong. But it's a different approach. My approach actually in some sense is I want to inspire people to want to use this thing. Right. Like suppose we've inspired. We're not like, oh, there's another big difference. He covers huge variety of concepts. We cover only this critical 120 hours as a middle school student to teach you how to be inspired, light that fire, ignite, and also learn how to learn and learn how to think. 120 hours later. You are equipped to use the entire Internet's resources. Whether they are Baiju Salon or goodness knows whatever, you are equipped to use them. You see what I mean? So I see them not as a competitor, but as an orthogonality, perpendicular. There are all these people who are making educational resources to teach you individual things. We're trying to light the fire to make you want to use them.

Speaker A [00:47:58]:
Amazing. I also want to talk to you about, like, how do you manage your time? Like, you're traveling so much, you're universities, you're running these ventures. Like, how are you physically, like doing all this?

Po Shen Lo [00:48:10]:
Yeah, Let me, let me just walk you through like, like a week, a day in the life. Right. So let me just tell you what happened. So on Friday night last week. Yeah. Which is just a few days ago, I gave a talk in. It was an area called Dublin Pleasanton. It's outside of, outside of San.

Speaker A [00:48:22]:
I was there last week.

Po Shen Lo [00:48:23]:
Oh, okay. Yeah. So an entire middle school, like math program or whatever invited me to speak to the whole school and all the parents in the evening. So I did that. That was out in the Dublin Pleasanton. Then I drove up to Sacramento. Actually, I stayed overnight in Davis because the Saturday morning talk. Saturday, Saturday afternoon talk was in. Was in Sacramento area. Okay. So I did that immediately after that, jumped in the car, drove all the way down to Cupertino for the 7pm Talk, which was awesome. It was actually at. At a school which rented out a church building because they're next door. And the guy running the AV turned out to be the inventor of Hurl. There's a computer programming language language called Perl which underpinned a lot of the Internet in the 90s and 2000s and even today. And that guy happened to be the guy running the whole av. It was awesome. Anyway, so that's like a day in the life. I got to meet the guy who invented the language. I wrote tons of stuff. It that was cool. But that's also showing like, I interact with like all the world in all these interesting ways. That was 7pm and then what happened? Oh, then I met up with a person afterwards at around nine and we talked for about an hour and a half. It's because he actually works with various people who advise like. Well, he works with someone who's the CFO of a major drug company. Anyway, so I do these kinds of things. These are, let's just say, people who could help absolutely magnify the work we do on a different layer. Even then, the night finished. Since I was out in Sunnyvale, I made sure to get a biryani every time I go to. Biryani Every time? Yeah, Every time I go to Sunnyvale it's a biryani because, you know, there's a huge South Asian population out there and the food's good. Okay. I finished my night at around 1am because I had to catch up with some work the next morning. Drove to give talk at 10am to do that, I had to set up my AV system because the speakers weren't working in the place. I was. No problem. Take them all out of the car, set it up, do that show. There was a second show in the afternoon at 3 o' clock, finished. Then I went back to the airport, dropped off a person who I'd brought along for the whole weekend, who I'm trying to convince to join our company. Right. So I wanted to let her see this is what we do. We're crazy. And if you join this company, you're going to have to work crazy. But it's going to be awesome. You're going to change the world. I think, I think, I think she's going to join now. But after dropping her off, then I changed my flight because I wanted to see if I can get to LA earlier. I was supposed to be on the 1055 flight. Got it changed by playing the standby game. I got the last seat. Okay. As soon as I got Here I called up my father in law. My father in law lives in Torrent. So I went down, caught up with him. Then I went to the hotel, caught up on work. I finished last night at around 1:30 in the morning. Then, you know, got up, up, did this thing. We're doing this here, this is this morning, this afternoon, immediately after this actually at lunch I'm going down to Irvine to meet some community leaders. And then I've got a whole bunch of talks in Irvine, two talks, some meetings with schools, whatnot, finishing. I'll finish in Irvine by about 7pm, just in time to drive back to LA to take the red eye flight out to J, out to jfk, because tomorrow I got the thing at the school. So how to fill the time is fill the time. But you see, that's why the important thing is, is there a mission? If I was just doing this to like get comfortable. This is not how, this is not how you get comfortable. If I just wanted to, to be famous, like, I've done enough stuff. Famous is the wrong word. If I just wanted to feel accomplished, I've done enough stuff. Actually we didn't even talk about it. But like as the Math Olympiad coach of the U.S. the USA won four times under my, under my what? Number one in the world. I don't need more things, if that makes sense. But what drives me is there's all this work I have to do because I see the humanity, I see the speed at which AI is moving, I see the fragmentation of our society. And I'm like, how can we make a viral mechanism to be, build a thoughtful world where everyone likes each other? Then I fill the time this way. And yes, I am still a professor at Carnegie Mellon. So what I teach is I teach people how to solve problems that they haven't solved before. That's the main thing, right? Everything I teach is I want to make sure people have a way to go through an uncertain future and still feel confidence that they can come up with a new idea. So the class I teach this semester is the Problem Solving Seminar. We go through problems the same way that we have the high school students teaching. We put up a problem. We don't, I don't, I don't tell you how to do it. And then the students just keep coming up with their own ideas to figure out, out how to solve this problem, right? This teaches people that fundamental skill. Now in the spring I will teach a standard class, a class on like discrete mathematics, combinatorics, network theory, all of these things. And that, that's taught also in the unique way where I make sure that the students have to come up with their own ideas. But yeah, so I balance the. The work.

Speaker A [00:52:15]:
I would love to take that class one day.

Po Shen Lo [00:52:17]:
Oh, well, you can. It's on YouTube.

Speaker A [00:52:19]:
It is?

Po Shen Lo [00:52:19]:
Well, because, you see, during the pandemic, I was using my own equipment to stream all this stuff, and I said, you know, what's the point of just teaching 80 kid? Let me put the whole darn thing on. So all the classes are I taught during the pandemic are on my YouTube channel. Free.

Speaker A [00:52:31]:
Amazing.

Po Shen Lo [00:52:31]:
It's because the main value of the experience is the interactive experience, not the prerecorded part. Right. So I can just put the recorded thing. When I say main value, what I mean is actually the recorded thing is pretty good too. But there are people who want the actual experience. So I'm happy to put the recorded one for everyone to see.

Speaker A [00:52:46]:
Amazing. Last question I want to ask you is, like, for people who want to, like, really level up their skills, what kind of resources should they go after? Like, what kind of books you were reading, what kind of YouTube channels you were watching? Like, it doesn't have to be a high school student. It could be someone like me who's already done, like, master degree. But I still want to upgrade my skill set. So what would you recommend?

Po Shen Lo [00:53:06]:
Okay, two different sides. One is how to upgrade the technical skill set. One is how to upgrade the emotional skill set. The emotional meaning understanding of people. These are two separate things for the technical skill set. The first thing is to get yourself to the point where you are literally never scared of any technical explanation. There's a certain thing with some sometimes when people look and they're like, oh, my gosh, this is going to be too technical. Right? It's like, do I understand how everything fits together? What's this cable diagram? Like, what's the. What's the impedance on a microphone? Like, what's a phantom power? I'm just. I'm. I'm naming all kinds of different concepts. Sometimes people look at it and they're like, there's too much going on. The way to learn how to never be scared of that is to learn how to solve problems you haven't seen before. Actually, our classes that we teach, I said middle schoolers, actually, everyone should take them. Most adults have never learned this ever. Or, okay, so don't have to take our classes. But if you go and look at middle school math competition problems, there's something called math counts. There's something called AMC8American Math Competitions. There are all these old problems online if you want to just try to see if you can figure out how to think through things, it will look like math, but then you'll wonder why. Why math? Well, the reason why math is because that's the. It's a playground for you to be able to go and figure out how things work. I would actually recommend everyone in the entire world to go and do that. That's why I said it's not trigonometry. No, it's like, how do you assemble concepts with, like, adding numbers? I'll give you an example. A problem with like, 1 minus 2 plus 3, minus 4 plus 5 minus 6 plus 7 minus 8, all the way to plus 99 minus 100. This is a problem where if you try to do it with brute force, it'll take you forever. But if you try to be clever and look for a pattern, one minus two plus three minus four plus five minus six. Like, each of those pairs is negative one. One minus two is negative one. Three minus four is another negative one.

Speaker A [00:54:38]:
It was just negative one times 100.

Po Shen Lo [00:54:39]:
Well, it's. Every pair is negative one.

Speaker A [00:54:41]:
Yeah.

Po Shen Lo [00:54:42]:
So if it's. How many pairs do you have? You don't have 100. 100 pairs. If it's 1 minus 2, so it's negative 100. It's how many pairs do you have? Right. Because the one minus two, that's minus one. The three minus four, it's another minus one.

Speaker A [00:54:52]:
Oh, so we have 50 pairs.

Po Shen Lo [00:54:53]:
That's exactly right. So it's minus 50. See, you got it. But the important, the important thing here is not the answer. The important thing is you just ran your brain through some kind of gymnastic. Right? And you don't want that someone tells you, here's the trick to do it. No, you want to go and fight with it and be like, can I figure out this trick? Everyone should do this because once you. You've done this, you are never scared of reading technical stuff. Because you're like, okay, if I don't get it? Well, let me read another article. Like, how does that come about? How does that work? Right? Then you can build any technical you want. If you don't have that skill, your technical knowledge is a lot of memorization of like. Well, we just usually do it this way. Why? Well, because we do. And then after a while, you can't remember everything.

Speaker A [00:55:28]:
I think someone said, like, the best way to learn something is, like, try to explain it to someone.

Po Shen Lo [00:55:33]:
Yeah, that's true too.

Speaker A [00:55:33]:
And it's like when you have to really articulate that concept, that's when the gears start turning and you're like, oh my God. Like now I really have to explain. So I actually deeply have to understand in order for me to explain.

Po Shen Lo [00:55:45]:
That's right.

Speaker A [00:55:45]:
I think that's why everyone should figure out, go teach your brother. Go teacher.

Po Shen Lo [00:55:49]:
Actually, there's an easy way to do this. You can teach a kid. You know, you can teach a kid and don't teach your own kid. That doesn't work. Teach your kid's friend. Exchange you and your friend teach each other's kids. Friend teach each other's kids. That's like, try to teach your own kid is too hard. But go this way. Right. But anyway, that's how you build a technical. To build a non technical, like the human part. My observation is just talk to people. Actually get out there and look at people. Like when I'm on the street, I'll often be looking around being like, I wonder what make this person tick. I wonder what their problem, what their pain point is. Like, this is what I do. I go around being like, I wonder what this person would want. Right. And if you, if you also talk to people so you don't just wonder, after a while, you can use your technical skill to solve the non technical human problem.

Speaker A [00:56:26]:
That's actually the reason, reason I'm only doing this podcast in person because I really believe in that human connection. When we see each other in real life, it just, there's an energy to it. And I mean, yeah, I will still do some podcasting on Zoom because it's physically impossible for me to fly to New Zealand or some other country every time. But this is just magical in my opinion.

Po Shen Lo [00:56:45]:
Yeah, then we are same. That's why when you reached out, I said, well, I'm gonna be in la, so let's do this.

Speaker A [00:56:51]:
I know. I was like, we got the day, we got all the logistics figured out. I'm really happy you said yes to this.

Po Shen Lo [00:56:57]:
Sure.

Speaker A [00:56:58]:
And turned out beautifully.

Po Shen Lo [00:56:59]:
Thank you.

Speaker A [00:56:59]:
I'm glad to know where do people find you?

Po Shen Lo [00:57:01]:
Okay, so the easiest way to find me is to just search for math actors and look for the CNN article. And that's me. It's like the widest math professor is putting actors in every classroom. My name is Po Chen Lo. If you search for P O dash S H E N L O H, you find me. If you search for United States Math Team coach, even even though I have retired, you'll find a bazillion articles that are all about me, then you'll know my name. Once you know my name, you can see there's all these different things. We have this YouTube channel, I have the main website and the whole big program I'm running right now is called Live. Actually, if you search Google for live math classes, we're usually the top non advertisement hit.

Speaker A [00:57:36]:
And what's XP's website?

Po Shen Lo [00:57:37]:
XP's website is XP.com, exp I I dot com. But we actually don't expect people to go there. That happens to be something wrong. As people are googling random math topics, it just pops up. So xp.com is not a website you intentionally go to. It's just a website that floats up on search results. But the main thing that I'm after right now is not that particular website. Instead, it's growing this ecosystem to build a more thoughtful world. And that happens to be all centered around live.

Speaker A [00:58:01]:
Amazing. Everyone go follow because you're going to be spreading a good word for this. Cause we always need more people who are really good at math. So thank you so much.

Po Shen Lo [00:58:10]:
Nice to meet you.

Speaker A [00:58:11]:
Really appreciate you.