Building a new civilization for kids with Ben Somers from Recess

I grew up on a game called World of Warcraft and spent I don't even want to know how many hours in that game, but an insane number, and a small portion of them were outrageously useful to my life. Toby Lutke, who's the CEO of Shopify, Canada's largest tech company, he played World Warcraft a ton as an early teen and talked about how running guilds and trying to organize big groups of people to achieve big goals was the best preparation he could have for being a CEO. Elon Musk. That's how he got started as a 10, 11, 12 year old, was playing games, then trying to code games, and this pattern happens over and over again. Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, talks about dungeons and Dragons and strategy board games and how they really taught him to think probabilistically and create cohesive strategies and account for what happens if things go wrong. And so, yeah, we think that games can be exceptional instructional tools, but they can also be total time wasters.

Hello, Ben Summers.

Hello. Hello.

Welcome to the Modulo podcast.

Let's go. I'm excited to be here.

It's so good to have you here. Oh, my goodness. I am so happy to see you and excited to introduce everyone to somebody who has become one of my most beloved friends in ed tech.

Thank you for being really fun. Thank you, thank you. Thanks for having me.

All right, everyone, I'm so pleased to introduce Ben Summers from recess. Hello, Ben, can we just start off by having you tell us a little bit about what recess is?

Yeah, recess, the big ambition, is to build a civilization for kids. So to build this. Yeah, it's Lord the flies. It's like a radically different idea of what an education is. An education not being a set of curriculum, a set of things that you do, but preparation to exist in the real world and be a citizen that's able to contribute something to society and. And have a great time doing it. And we think the best preparation for that, the best preparation possible, is participating in a real civilization. And so we try and help kids actually get into the real world as often as possible. And, you know, sometimes they need scaffolding and they need practice in areas where they can't practice in the real world. Like, you know, for example, things that deal with a lot of money and economy. Kids don't have access to a lot of money, but there are tons of opportunities you can use through games and simulations and the walled garden we're building at recess, where they can be participants in a society and have currency and have ideas and recruit each other to build their ideas and build, develop skill sets and then, you know, work with each other and to build cool things. And so, yeah, that's the goal. And even, you know, democracy, like there's kids building. But yeah, that's basically the pitch for recess.

I love that. I love that pitch. And I think that people who haven't experienced recess, I've gotten to, to dive in a little bit, but not too much. And people might just be kind of curious. I mean, what, what is it actually like? When you talk about that, I think of almost kind of like Minecraft on steroids or sims. I don't know if that even still exists. So maybe can you walk us through your child and you log into recess for the first time. What happens? What do you see? What do you smell? What do you taste?

Yeah, so when you come to recess the first time, you'll join an orientation and we think we have to kind of help kids and families get prepared for what's on the other side because it is pretty different. And the big radical difference is that the kid is the main decision maker at recess. And so the thing that you taste and smell and feel in your first five minutes is freedom. And I think for a lot of kids that's kind of what I felt a lack of as like a 9 year old, 10 year old. There are all these rules and I had to go to this place every day. And so you get here and right away you can tell that here you have freedom and you get to make your own decisions. And so you'll join this orientation you'll meet for.

Online.

Online. Online, yeah.

Am I seeing other people's faces? Hearing their voices?

Okay, yeah. So you'll join a video call with four or five, six other kids and you'll go through an orientation and we'll set up your account. I can actually show you.

Oh, please.

Beautiful. The kids come in, they join orientation and they're going to meet four, five, six other kids and we'll tell them, you know, this is your space, you're free to make your own decisions here. And then they'll make their account and they'll see a huge marketplace of classes, of tools, of games that they can start working with. And so if the kid is super into and yeah, let me actually just start screen sharing. So can you see my screen?

I can indeed.

Cool. And I think sound should be on. So let's go ahead and make a new kid. And so I'm going to go in here and until you come in here and schedule an orientation. This is going to be a little bit too hard for me to actually set up. So we're going to go and we're going to use test. So test is a, is a kid that will pretend to be. And so the first thing the kid will actually see is this kind of like guidelines and orient and code of conduct. And so we'll tell them that here are the rules here, you got to be respectful, contribute to the good and you know, try and treat everyone kindly. These are our basic code conduct. And you'll hit accept and so that's kind of signing your name and you'll get. Yeah, it's. And it's nice. And we got a couple of cooler versions coming out. Then the next thing you'll do is you'll actually unlock.

I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I understand that children helped you develop this code of conduct. There was input right across.

Everything basically at recess is co developed with kids. And so every single person at recess spends time with kids every day. Even the engineers, some people have apprentices who will learn about how to actually write the code or help us do these things. And then, yeah, there's a handful of kids that are working on a recess democracy. And so they helped write that code of conduct and they're trying to figure out how do we build a basic governance system into recess so that kids can actually, you know, set their own laws and deal with interpersonal disputes on their own. So you'll click in, you'll have this kind of like great music and you'll come in here and pick your username and you know, for my username I'm going to go ahead and just pick Ben and it'll say, welcome Ben. Preparing your profile. And then you'll get dropped in and you don't have any projects yet and you don't have any friends yet on recess. So nothing doing. But you know, I, this is an old account, so I've got tons of friend requests from other people.

So popular.

So popular. But yeah, so you'll, you'll come in here and you'll make your account and then the next thing you'll do is you'll pick out courses that you want to take. And so you might say, you know, I'm really into engineering and I'm really into Minecraft and so I want to learn how to become an engineer by playing Minecraft. Yeah, you could sign up for Minecraft Logical Redstone or Minecraft Game design.

Cool.

And yeah, so you'll come in here and go, this looks really Cool. And then you have to write a message to your parents convincing them why you should take it.

Ooh, yeah.

And so really push on. Like, the kid is. Is the main. Is the driver of kind of their own education here. And that's kind of our tagline where kids design their own education. And so you might say something like, I like building things and I can learn to code through Minecraft.

And I did my laundry.

And I did my laundry. Yeah, some kids there's. And we actually kind of coach kids talk really about what the. What they're going to learn and get from the content they're consuming or they're joining rather than something they're doing good on the other side. Because I think one of our big ideas is that kids obsessions are actually usually pretty great. And a lot of times parents have a hard time understanding, you know, what's the difference between just playing Minecraft generally and building your own game in Minecraft.

And the difference is that you're, you know, right away saying, what is the meaning for this for you? Because so often in education we tell kids to do things and we don't give them any sense of meaning or don't explain things. And here you're taking the opposite approach where you're asking the kid to reflect on what is driving them to do this and that will stick with them throughout the whole course.

Yes, they have. They have a purpose. They know it's there and they've got some idea. This is. And their parents understand it too, which I think makes those dinner table conversations easier also. And, like, the parents get invested and excited about what the kids are working on. And so, yeah, so you'll go through these and try and find something that's exciting to, you know, you might want to learn about biology, but we back.

It up a little bit, Ben, because I kind of want to understand what are these things that we're seeing? I mean, are they things that recess developed? I understand there's. It's kind of a marketplace.

What.

What is this?

Yeah, so this is. These are live, synchronous classes with other kids. So you will come in here and join Defend your factory, which is a really, really difficult engineering game. And you and 10 other kids will meet up once a week or twice a week, and you'll start taking on challenges and playing this game together. Once you meet those kids in those classes, you can add them as friends and start chatting with them and voice calling with them. And so there are a lot of online platforms where, you know, kids will take these classes and they never meet the kids again, even though they just, they just got to know a whole bunch of kids who share the same interests as them. And so the goal of these classes, they basically help you. Yeah. Find your crew. But so, and then say that they're.

Taking a synchronous class. That means all the kids are there at the same time. Do they see the other children? Does it depend on the class? Is there a guide or a teacher of some sort? Is there a schedule?

Yeah, yeah. So there's for every. So we can click into one.

The last class you said it sounds like they're almost playing a video game together.

Yeah, a lot. A lot of our classes are game based or use games really heavily. Almost everything. One of our big rules is that we only teach things that can be better taught through a computer.

I like that. And so we know how to climb a tree.

So you won't see climate change, you won't see dance classes, you may see some art classes, but they're going to be focused on how to use digital tools to really make spectacular stuff. And yeah, and so like this, for example, is a music class that teach you how to use Bandlab and synthesizers and MIDI boards. And so, yeah, there's schedules. And so for example, this class, there's only one section open with only one seat open and that. And, and so they are, they're scheduled and there is a guide. And so there will be a teacher there or a guide. And then, you know, somewhere between 4 and 10, 4 and 12 kids for most classes. And the, the, we make, you know, about 10% of this marketplace, so we develop some content mostly around coding and engineering because that's kind of like our passion. But the rest of it comes from individual teachers who do really incredible stuff from across the Internet or we go find them on Twitter because they've launched some really cool project and we think they should teach kids. Yeah.

So is it basically a lot of the classes are kind of a video game you vetted and chosen and you pair that with some guide who's there to kind of help take the children through it. So you have a really interesting process for vetting video games. Can you walk us through what you did to choose the games that you chose? And I think I'm a good interviewer because I never played a video game in my life. And I know that you are very passionate gamer.

Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, I, I grew up on a game called World of Warcraft and spent like, I don't even want to know how many hours in that game, but an insane number and a small portion of them were outrageously useful to my life. And you can go seek, you know, Toby Lutke, who's the CEO of Shopify, just like a very, very large company, kind of Canada's largest tech company, HubSpot business across the world. He played World of Warcraft a ton as a kid, as an early teen, and talked about how running guilds and trying to organize big groups of people to achieve big goals was the best preparation he could have for being a CEO. And you'll hear other, you'll hear other examples from famous engineers talking about, you know, they got their start building trying to code small games. Elon Musk, that's how he got started as a 10, 11, 12 year old is playing games, then trying to code games. And, and this pattern happens over and over again. You know, Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn and some other great companies, talks about Dungeons and Dragons and strategy board games and how they really taught him to think probabilistically and create cohesive strategies and account for what happens if things go wrong. And so yeah, we think that games can be exceptional instructional tools, but they can also be total time wasters.

Yeah, for sure. And maybe just to dig in a little bit more into because I really think your evaluation process is cool and I want to learn more about how you selected the games, I think.

Yeah. And we spent a lot of time, I spent six months before I started recessing, I was play testing a few games a week with a handful of kids and just writing like analyses of them and trying to figure out, you know, which, which of these games really helps cognitive development.

So rough, but a painful.

Yeah, so rough, but yeah, there's. We have two simple razors that you can use. So if you're a parent who's watching your kid play games, you can really quickly tell is this game a good game or is it kind of brain rot? And so the first one is that it's a skill based game. So the main differentiator of who wins is not mostly luck, it's mostly skill. That's a really big point because otherwise the games resemble kind of like a casino or a lottery. And you can figure this out because you can ask your kid, you know, does the best person at this game win a lot? Like, can you win a lot at this game? Mean, you know, start trying to ask them because you might not be able to tell right from the outside just by watching. Um, but your kids will usually know. They said just is there are, is there Like a leaderboard for this game are there are the best in the world. Now the second one is even easier to tell. And that's. So the first is, it's one based on skill. So the better player wins 70, 80% of the time if they're going head to head. And a good example is chess where if you are 100 ELO points ahead of the next person, you're going to win basically every game, but you're never going to lose. That game is very skill based. No luck. The second one is that the primary skill is not fine motor skills. So that's. And that's a big one. And so most of the games that I played as a kid, that a lot of kids play are things like first person shooters. Yeah, right. Where you have to run around, control a character. It's how well you jump, how well you run, how well you aim, how fast your fingers are moving. And if you remove that out of the game. And so the game is mostly based on skill and it's not based on fine motor skills. The only thing left is how well you think that's, that's the last thing that differentiated a good player from bad player. And I think this is where an example of chess becomes really clear.

Yeah, I mean I think that's really interesting and I wonder if we can even take it outside the context of winning and losing or playing better and worse. I mean, have you thought, are you familiar with the idea of like a sandbox game versus an addictive game? Maybe you could walk people a little bit through that?

Yeah, yeah. So if you're not familiar with sandbox games, these are games that are open ended and they're really more like tools than they are like games. And so Minecraft Creative is an example of a sandbox game where there's no pressure, you can't die, you just basically have to place blocks around. It's kind of like Legos. And a sandbox game is basically a digital version of Legos and there are a lot of really, really great ones. Rooms XYZ Sandbox Actual Sandbox VR Minecraft Creative, CubeZH. I think scratch is a good example of a sandbox game. Even though it's actually a game builder. It's a coding language. It works a lot like a sandbox game. And yeah, so these are sandbox games are games where there's not actually a point. The point is just to create.

Wow. You know, that really brings up kind of a question I've been, I'm struggling with recently, which is maybe you can Weigh in and give me some founder to founder advice. But we had a Scratch club on Modulo that was so fantastic. And basically the model is, I think, pretty similar to recess. I mean people, but very different, I'm sure. But people come together and they play Scratch and there's a nice older person there who has more experience with Scratch, who helps the kids with their projects. So we did that for a really long time. And then after a few years of this infinitely recurring club, the parents said, you know, I think my kids are ready for Python. Yeah, I said, great, let's replicate this wonderful experiment at a wonderful tutor who knows Python. And we got an app, I won't say the name of it, and tried to do this club and it has just not been working very well. And, and we tried a couple different apps. Now we've kind of gone on to YouTube and I'm just kind of trying to understand because I don't know how to code, you know, why we haven't been able to find a good tool like Scratch or Python. And maybe you might be able to recommend a curriculum for.

Yeah, I think. Kids don't want to code. Nobody wants to code. Very few people want to code. I mean, coding is really solving logic puzzles, but like kind of arcane versions of them in verbose language. But you want to make something that code makes possible. You might have an idea for a really fun game that you're very excited about building, or an app for you and your friends to track leaderboards in something or a way to share your books or your videos. You know, you might have an idea for something that you want to build and then you have to code to build it. And so Scratch is really great for this one because they've got a big library of games that you can click on and remix, as they call it. And so you can say, okay, I want to play with this and I'm going to copy it. And then I can kind of like X ray to the guts on the inside and see how it's actually made. And I can make a couple changes here and there. And the language is not. Is really easy for kids to understand. You kind of move blocks around. And so the gap between having an idea and building is not so big. Once you graduate to Python, all of a sudden you have to learn a fairly complex language and a bunch of vocabulary that you've never understood before. And it doesn't read just like English. And then. And most of the ways that you'll use the apps, like if you'll use code Academy or some of these other apps, they take you through kind of lesson by lesson, the way that you might take someone through like a math curriculum in school.

Yes.

And you, you run into the same, same problems as math, which is. The kid goes, why do I need to know this?

Everyone is replicating school, even though they don't even realize they're replicating school because that's how everything was delivered to them. And they think that's good pedagogy.

Yeah. And they want to build, I get, you know, the allure is they've broken down for some complex topic. How do we break down all the skills you'll need for this topic and then put them in order so that you can get through them as efficiently as possible?

Like, I need this block to move.

On to the next, to move on to that block. But that, you know, unless you build some really exceptional gamification system, the kids don't care about moving from this block to that block. They just want to make their game right. And so, so the way that we do it is pretty different, I think, for this is I would actually recommend pulling up like Replit, or we made one of our. A version of our own called gpd. And these things use AI to help the kids build whatever they want. And so. And they can do it in Python, they can do it in anything. And so they actually start building their ideas. And then once their ideas exist, inevitably they're going to want to change the idea and mess with it and it's not going to work exactly the way they want and to try and bridge that gap, they're probably going to open up the code and they're going to look at it and feel overwhelmed at not knowing how any of it works. And then they'll say, man, I really need to learn, you know, how this part works. And, and then you can direct them to a lesson and use one of those tools.

And I've seen so many, so much great feedback about Gibbe on homeschooling forums as well. So that's, that's super actionable. All right. I want to shift gears a little bit and then we're going to come back to recess.

Cool.

You are incredible at raising funding for your startup. I mean, you have a. I know it's hard and you put a lot of work into it and you face a lot of rejection, but you've gotten really good at it. And one, something we've both encountered in our efforts to fundraise is that it seems like as of late, there is a lot of Bias against education. And I would like to understand and to hear from your perspective why you think education is a good investment and how, and maybe even you can touch upon some of the biases you're encountering and, and how you're addressing them.

Yeah. So why is education a good investment? I mean, from a societal value perspective that's actually immediately clear to everyone, including the investors. Yes. You know, if you speak to them.

And say any political spectrum.

No one, any, any political spectrum, any background, any cultural values, no matter who they are. If you say, you know, it's, it's, it's really valuable to humanity if we can educate our, the young better and they can be better prepared to build things, to create things. They understand how to break down complex problems. Everyone says, yes, that's, that's maybe the most valuable thing in the world, right, Is human capital. It gets reset every generation.

Other people being educated is going to benefit me. Even the worst racist in the world is going to support education. I don't know why I thought of that as an example, but. Sorry, but it's true. Even like so universal, like the most biased, hateful person is going to support universal access to education for themselves. Purely selfish. Right?

It, it, it has, it's. Everything in the entire world is downstream of education. Right. Every generation, we get reset with a new set of humans and they're, they inherit the world and they have to be able to build it. And so everyone agrees that that value for society is really obvious. What they don't agree with is the ability to capture some of it, create an economic product that people actually pay for that. Consumers want that product. I think there's a few. And so why is education a good investment? I think there's a couple things. One, Elon Musk has this quote where he says you get paid in proportion to the size of the problems that you solve. And so if you solve really big problems, you get paid very well, and if you solve very small problems, you get paid not so well. And so he went and tried to solve climate change and space exploration. Those are big, big problems. So you get paid really well for solving those problems. I think education is another example. And the issue is that it's a really big problem that no one's figured out how to solve. And so if you don't solve the problem, you don't get paid anything. But if you do solve it, you get paid, you know, a lot. And how much? Globally, education accounts for almost 10% of GDP. We're talking trillions of dollars a year. Like one of the world's largest market punching right up there with housing, health care, debt, it's, it's ginormous, but it's really, really decentralized. Right. And so the spend is very localized to individual communities, to individual schools. The funding also is mostly comes from federal and state budgets, like government budgets, not from consumer budgets. And so it's pretty hard to access those funds traditionally. There are a few things changing in the world right now that I think make education a much better investment than it has been in the past. First, we have algorithmic feeds that help put content in front of us that we care about seeing. What this means is if you make a piece of content, it can scale around the entire world in 24 hours. That's very interesting. And so you have people like Mark Rober who are kind of starting to evangelize science and physics and engineering through the Internet. Two, you've got this concept of artificial intelligence which is letting us create tutors for specific topics. Recess, you know, resource guides is like Google, but a thousand times more important, probably for personal education, because it actually scaffolds you as you're going. And the combination of those two things, media can scale around the entire world instantaneously. And AI tutors that can personalize education to every person means that you actually can build something that doesn't get stuck in that local setting. You can build a product that scales to millions of people. It's certainly possible now. That's the first big change. Second big change is traditionally education was bought entirely by bureaucrats. Right. And so if you want to make, if you have an idea for some exciting new products to teach math, you will try to go to a school system and meet with their administrator during the two different times a year they buy products and you'll talk to them about how it's going to help them with standards and how it rolls out and this and that. And you know, they might buy it, but they really are very far mover from the end user. And basically, I'll say bureaucracies get bad products. You go to any bureaucracy and try and use a government website. It's terrible. Yeah, consumers get spectacular products. And so the second big change is. So first big change is as well as technology that's making it possible to scale educational technology to the whole world. The second big change is that today they're 1 in 16 families. 1 in 17 families in the US are homeschooled. 3.7 million kids are now homeschooled. And that's creating a really Large direct to consumer market where these families are buying products and educating their kids and making those purchase decisions themselves. And I think that's a really big departure from the kind of like the bureaucracy based options. And then the third big change which is supporting that growth in a consumer market is federal funding and state funding. There are now these laws, school choice, both the state and federal level, that are supporting families making their own decisions about how to educate their kid, which means there's just more dollars available for education than there ever have been.

So well put. So when you look at, I guess what is, I think Duolingo is the number one biggest education company in the world. And there are a couple really big online schools like Pearson and Stride that are these big conglomerates of rather standardized education. And I'm curious, kind of, and we've talked before, it's like, is there a real kind of breakout company in the education space? For me it would be more, I would say YouTube is the really big breakout in the education space. And I wonder, you know, I mean, you've been, you've been talking to hundreds of people telling them why recess is going to be that company. So I'd love to just hear more about that. Not, you know, I think people are curious.

Yeah. You know, one is have having an aspiration to build something that's cohesive and complete and much better than anything out there. Just even say, putting a flag in the ground and saying that's your goal. I think gets a lot of people riled up because they're excited about the idea of something new, existing. And then the question of kind of why do we think recess would be the company that does it? My main, I have one principle that's way bigger than everything else. And the education that we all dream of is one that kids are excited about, that you don't have to drag them to right where they're actually dragging you. And they're saying, mom, look, I built this new thing. Isn't it so cool? Mom, look, I did this. And mom, dad, look I look how far I got in math and all this kind of stuff.

Right?

That's what you dream of and what you despise is dropping your kid off at school and they're crying on the way out there.

Absolutely. I mean, how do you reconcile that challenge of, I mean, even though you're a consumer driven product, I mean you're still, the person paying is still one step away from the person using it.

So this is, this is our whole point.

Yeah, that's one of the reasons I am drawn to you as a founder is because you do take a child centered approach. And there are sadly very few ed tech companies that are just sitting 247 observing children using their product. They're thinking about parents sometimes, but it's usually schools or districts or superintendents. And then by the time it gets back to the kid, it's just this boring mush or something that can't be used at all. I mean, I sit with kids and I use these apps and there's a bug and they can't get to the next level of the game. I think, is anybody watching behind that screen? Where's your full story? You know, where's your crazy egg? I don't understand what's happening here.

Yeah. And I think this is so this question of, like, why, what do we understand that kind of. Nobody else does. Everyone else, why, why will we be the education company that's able to go build, you know, this very exciting future? One is the evidence of what the kids are doing on the platform today and being able to see that and go look at it and imagine, okay, I could imagine they do this 10 times bigger. They continue to get better. But fundamentally, most education companies treat the kid like a product. And the product has to meet certain thresholds and qualities to pass through our quality assurance check. They have to be at this grade level here and this grade level there. And, you know, we make processes. We make things, curriculum processes, tools, call it what you will, and then have those act on the kid and then we see if they succeeded in reaching certain thresholds. Right. And what do administrators look at at a school? They look at a big spreadsheet of rows of data with certain variables attached to them. Recess takes the opposite approach, which is rather than thinking about the kid as a product, we think about, we, we. The kid is the consumer. And we do everything we can to make the kid the consumer, not the parent. The parent gets updates about what the kid is doing, but the kid makes their own decisions. This is like really, really, really critical. And to build that future where the kid is coming up to you and tugging on your pants saying, mom, look what I did, or dad, look what I did, you need the right feedback system. And the feedback system has to be around the kid wanting to do it. And as soon as you take that out, you're going to build stuff kids don't want to do. And as soon as the kid no longer chooses what they do, your incentive pressure is going to be to convince the parents that it's a good buy and so you'll build things like. Which we've almost done 10 times. You'll build things like standardized reporting of what happened like this. And, and those things are important. I think it's really good to make sure that what you're doing is working. But. Yeah. So what's, what's our big philosophy difference? Why we figured out we really, really, really obsess over the kid being the customer. We're really principled about who our right customers are. It's these ambitious homeschoolers. On Twitter, there's this term called elite homeschoolers that's trending. It's. It's parents who. Not that spend a lot of money necessarily, but who care a lot about their kid and their kids intellectual progress and their kids, you know, development of independence and all of these things and are putting a lot of time and effort into curating that for their kid and helping their kid navigate that. And so we're really principled out who our customer is. The customer is the kid, not the parent. Even the parent pays us. And, and working on the right subset of users that I think give us the right feedback and then we hire really great talent and build really cool stuff and have fun.

That's amazing. So you simply trust that when the kids love it, the right parents are gonna buy it.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think we really try and sell parents on this being the right model. And I wrote this essay called Purpose is Practice or Obsession is Practiced. And that like one of the most valuable things in life is to learn how to be obsessed.

Yeah.

And you can get obsessed. You know, for me, I got obsessed with a pointless video game that really was not that it was not an intelligently chosen video game the way that we choose them at recess. And still I look back at it and think it was one of the best learning experiences I ever had. Kaylin, my co founder, at 12 years old, started making games and Roblox and got obsessed with it. And his parents wanted him to do more math and do this. But today he's one of the best engineers I've ever met. And it's. I think it's really closely and I think, yeah, you hear the story over and over again. So anyways, we try and sell parents on this is the right way to, to work with your kid. And then, and then we try and work with them and, and demonstrate. You do have to demonstrate progress.

Yes.

Right. Along clearer ways.

You know, you can. I mean, I think it's kind of like you have this product that's user Centered, that's wrapped in an envelope that makes it understandable for the parent what benefits getting out of it. And there has to be a little bit of unconventional thinking that goes into that leap. I mean, for me, I mean, I think you saw my expression when I heard the word like elite homeschool. I wanted to like, throw up a little bit in my mouth.

Yeah, me too, me too.

To me, that word is we're better than. And it kind of connotes the Ivy League, which is a real issue. I mean, we both were tutors for really wealthy families and went to private schools and, you know, private schools answered to their board and the board was trying to get up the numbers to get into elite universities and, and then public schools and they're trying to get the best standardized test scores. And in there, no one is really focused on the child's experience and how much they're learning and how much they're equipped to contribute to society and have the skills they need to thrive. And so, and that's just fact. That is not an exaggeration. You tutor one child one time at one of those private schools and you will see this in action. It's not dramatic, it is not an exaggeration. That is the way things work. And, you know, so I think, you know, I mean, you, you are there with me, but I just, I hope that homeschool, you know, elite homeschoolers. I feel like there's, it's like a fear based thing, right? Like there's a fear like when you start homeschooling because you're afraid the traditional system won't prepare your kid for Stanford and to be rich, you know, as opposed to homeschooling, because, you know, you're really centered in this more holistic approach that's going to allow your child to reach their full potential holistically. And, you know, I was just listening to a really cool, I think, Sahil Bloom, he was talking about, you know, for, for a lot of people, like, what do you want in this life? Like, he doesn't want to be a billionaire. He doesn't want to start a massive company. And he's happy there are people who are, because he benefits from that company, but he wants to have enough income and then he's done. He doesn't need to have more than that level of income. And so it's, you know, people who are conscientious about what they need, what their families need, what their kids need, without going into that fear based approach. Yeah, it's tough for sure.

Yeah. And I think it's. Yeah, no, we got a little bit.

Of a tangent there.

No, I think, I think it's right. Yeah, I think it's cracked it.

It's, it's, it's a challenge for us as, as entrepreneurs, you know, because we run into parents who are really controlling their kids and, and I don't like to judge, you know, it's their child, they do what they want. You know, I'm not in their shoes but it concerns me sometimes to see that.

Totally. And I've, I've. Yeah, across, you know, I've been working with yeah, really wealthy families who are super invested in their kids education for a long time and poor families who are super invested in their kids education and we've, you know, for the last bunch of years have done stuff across many countries and what there's been one consistent. I spent a lot of time trying to break out for, for when I have kids what really produces well adjusted, intelligent, kind, you know, obsession oriented kids.

I love that.

And it's not spending ten grand a month on tutors and it's not forcing your kid to sit at Kumon for 10 hours a week or make sure that they have 98 on every test. It is actually that that last one is close. That last one is close. It's, it's, it's been really clear to me. It's giving your kid unconditional love and simultaneously having high expectations, which is a very hard thing to do both at one time.

And yet it's the same thing because you, if you love your child unconditionally, you accept them as you are, as they are and you see their potential. Like you and I are friends. You have every expectation that I'm going to raise millions of dollars for modulo because you love me. You know, like love. It's not, you know, telling people that they're not capable of doing things. And you know, and I think that that's really special. Let's kind of play a little bit in that area because when you and I met, it's very sweet story, you reached out to me a couple times to say he wanted to chat. And I kind of am a bit of a curmudgeon when I get these vague intro emails like. And so finally I, I was in a very, very busy period so I put you off and then I said okay Ben, I'm ready to meet, I have time. And it was like hello, what do you want from me? I mean I just didn't understand like what do you want? And you're you kind of was like, well, I just want other intellectual, educational friends. And I think I had a really hard time adjusting to this idea. And then I discovered that you are just one of the most collaborative people that I've ever connected with in tech. And it's changed my whole ideas around competition and collaboration and maybe is that just something. Yeah, I don't know exactly what my question is, but I just kind of love to hear more about that approach. You just, you know, everyone, you talk to everyone, you uplift everyone and you just kind of know that that's going to benefit you.

That makes, I, I had, I had. That makes me feel really warm and good inside. So I'm, I'm glad that, that it had that effect. But. Yeah. Where's my, where does this come from? I think it's because I'm crazy competitive. I don't know. Like, like you're, you're a shark. I'm, I'm, yeah, I'm really like, I like, you know, if we play sports or games or whatever, I'm, I'm super, super competitive. And so I think it's interesting like why in this field of work do I feel so uncompetitive? Like when I was going for an.

Investor, it's part of the competition is.

You know, it's part of the competition. Maybe it's partially that I want the competition that I think, I think it's.

Kind of, you know, you're making the market competitive by.

You want to make the market. Yeah, I think what's the goal really. Is. Yeah, I feel like I was wronged as a kid, I think, and not by anybody in particular. Like all the teachers were great, my parents are great, but the system itself I think just like didn't understand how to deal with me as a child and I was like two ADHD and rambunctious and wanted to do my own things and, and did have a pretty strong rebellious streak and so didn't really like do my work as it was told me to do. And now I look back as a 28 year old and I can imagine this version of myself that is so spectacularly competent and has, and I had to do a lot of work to build empathy and collaboration. Like I think school trained me to be hyper competitive with my peers and for us to really like fight with each other and kind of like hide our grades and then show them if we did better than the other person. Right. And so there were, there were all these. And so I feel, and I, I want to make the education Space. Yeah. I think there's an opportunity to build something that's, that's magical instead of terrible. And I think that it's a ginormous market of trillions of dollars a year and none of us are fighting against each other. Like we are all battling the same status quo inertia. And if we fail, it is not going to be because modulo beat recess. It's going to be because we couldn't figure out how to upend the status quo and we couldn't figure out how to demonstrate what a child forward education looks like with really, really great media and them having true decision making power and how great the outcomes are if we can go demonstrate the promise of that. There's, there's so much market for everyone. Like I'm just not worried about it.

Yes. And we are lucky to share many students across our platform. Such a treat. Watch them grow and kind of talk about them sometimes. There's always good things. Yeah. So let's kind of dive into a little bit of, you know, I mean, what is this new world paradigm we're moving towards look like? I mean recess. You talk about how, you know, everything. So everything on recess is something a computer can do better. So I do think you're gonna have dance classes eventually. But you know, in terms of kind of a forest school where children are playing outside, climbing a tree, soccer match and you know, I don't want to go too much into screen time. You can do a whole other episode on that. And screen time is this blob word. It, it encompasses so much good screen time and bad screen time and how to keep, use this as a tool. But so we're not going to really dive into there. But I would like to see kind of what, what does a day look like for a student? I mean, you know, are they in an ideal scenario, how are they using recess and how are they complementing that with other activities?

Yeah. Right now or in the future?

Gosh, you know, I don't really know where to start. Let's, we'll start with now.

Now and future is not crazy far off.

Okay. Let's. Yeah. Talk about your own child. How you envision their, their homeschooling day or their modular learning day. Because they could be. Recess could be a school. You know, you could have, I think I.

Or I think, I think reasonably the product that we're building will have lots of schools in it. And I think actually the idea of school is maybe antiquated. Yeah. And I think if we have a, if we have schools they're going to look a lot more like the schools that we had in Greco Roman times and older, where it's really about, you know, you know, the school of Confucius, the school of Aristotle. You'll have these ideas of like, people who have particular opinions on how to on. On what a good education looks like and match values. Right. And so I think there will be. But the idea that there's like one organization that manages and decides what your kid will be doing is kind of like outdated.

Yeah. Like one place, one time, one set of resources.

Yeah.

I mean, you can go to school and that can be playing in your house, then climbing a tree, then playing a video game, then running off to Bali for a month. It doesn't have to be in a building. Okay, so back to the ideal question of what.

Yeah. What will my Ben Junior Ben Junior's.

Day in the life.

Yeah. I think it's that, you know, I'll wake up and say good morning to Rachel and then roll out of bed very slowly and make a coffee. And then the autonomous driving vehicle will show up and I'll say goodbye to my kid and they'll walk on them on their own to go park themselves in the little car and the car will drive off and drop them off at this forest school, this cool campus in the woods that's near a creek with a bunch of basketball courts and a pottery section and a cool art studio. Right. And there'll be a big campus for these kids to go run around with caring, empathetic adults who like to hang out. The kid probably a little bit younger, maybe even these are like more. Looks a little more like camp. Right. The way that camp is structured and the kids run around, they have a great time and come up with their weird obsessions and then they sit down and do rigorous intellectual work on the computer for a few hours a day. The same way that I pop over to my office and open my computer and want to build an exciting new AI skill tree tool for kids. And I'll obsess over it. They'll do the same thing. They'll sit down and decide, today I'm going to build the world's largest Minecraft tower. And they're going to go ham on doing it. And they'll watch YouTube videos on figuring out what's going, how to do it. And then they'll ask the AI, well, how do I make the server bigger so I don't run into this limits? And it'll teach it to code. And then the kid will code something and they'll build the world. Then they'll, you know, try and work on their achievement, and then they'll get bored or they will get stuck, and they won't know what to do. And so they'll go outside and play in the creek with their friend. Then they'll come back and do it again, and then they'll pop in their car and show up at home later that day. Or I'll come by and hang out with them and do a pottery class, and that'll be the day. I love it.

I. I just love it. It just. I can feel it. I can touch it and taste it. So luscious. Delicious. That's what education should be. Is delicious. So good. All right, so this is what I want to know, because, you know, I think we just have so much we can talk about, but I would really like to, for people listening right now, you know, who would you describe as kind of your ideal student? Who are the kids who just get into recess and they love it so much, and maybe you might not be such a fit right now. Both of those.

Yeah. Okay. So kids who love it. Are. Perfect fit. Are kids who have an obsession. There's. There's. I would say, the perfect fit. The kids who get into recess the easiest right now are kids who already have some obsession. And that obsession could be pretty random. Like, it could be crocheting, it could be coding, it could be building games, it could be making music. It could be build. Making YouTube videos. Whatever it is. They've got something that they work on on their own, kind of like a personal, you know, project category of projects, and they want more help or they don't even know if they want help. They want community. They've just got something they're excited about and they. Something in their head, in their heart, they want to put out into the world. And they just, like, need somewhere to put it and find other people to help them make it and take it to the next level. Those kids fit in right away, and they find their crowd. Like, recently, I already know a kid.

In my mind I'm gonna send you to. He's obsessed with making videos, but he never edits.

Oh, perfect.

He just wants to record them all the time. And I just want to pop a Teresa.

Yeah. And so one of the big things we're doing is building this job board where kids post jobs for each other. And so this will be a thing where he makes this video and doesn't edit them, and he might post a job saying, looking for an editor and other Kids will pop in and they'll. And they'll be able to find each other so that those kids kind of.

Can I recruit tutors on recess?

Yeah, they fall in, like, right away. And the second thing and then I would say in that sphere, the best is if they're into engineering stuff that's really a really strong foothold in recession is kids who like to build and tinker, which I think is hard to find people near you sometimes that do that then. And then I would say the next set is. Out. Yeah, kids out. I mean, I'm so. I've been surprised at how. Well, recess takes kids of different personality types now and kind of like different archetypes. I would say the kids who have the hardest time in recess but maybe have the most. Get the most value out of it are the ones who are a little bit shy, don't know what they want to do yet, don't really have any specific things they're working on. And those. Those are both the hardest kids to get into recess. But the ones I think who get the most value out of it, when we can help them.

Okay.

And when.

Yeah, yeah.

And I think it's really about, like.

How if I'm a parent with a kind of a more shy kid who has a trouble taking first step, how can I guide them?

How does a kid who's a little bit shy or who doesn't have kind of an obsession get into recess? How do we. How does recess help them become more confident, more extroverted, more excited about something that, you know, ready to sink their teeth into something? Yeah. That answer is, you have to help your kid overcome that initial inertia. And so some kids who come in with all who are super extroverted and have something they want to do, you don't have to sign them up for any classes. You can just pay the monthly membership. And they're just going to find other kids who like to do what they want to do. If your kid is not like that yet, which I think is a yet is an important point, would recommend budgeting more money when they join for the first time. And so you should expect to try. If I was really doing, I would try like three classes in your first month. Okay. And then. And that'll probably run you a couple hundred dollars in your first month. And then. And then you can wean off. As soon as your kid kind of like finds their crowd and does and. And meets people and starts to get really excited about things, you can wean off and then purchase kind of like Tutoring sessions or particular classes as they're really helpful to your kid. But I think if your kid is more shy, doesn't have something they're excited about, you have to help them meet lots of other kids and get exposed to new ideas and. And right when they join. And that. That's kind of like the critical part. And so if they're not gonna. And a lot of recess relies on them doing that for themselves. If. Unless you buy classes.

And I kind of imagine it. Well, I mean, part of homeschooling is participating with your child in their education. So I was just saying, if it were me, I would probably. You know, you have that great orientation where kids get to meet each other and I might just sit with my child silently, not be an annoying parent.

No, I would actually not. Unless they're really, really shy and really not computer friendly. I would actually leave them alone. I would leave the room, close the door.

All right. I agree with you on that one to some extent. Except for certain children. But I say yeah, but maybe you can kind of be there a little bit as a navigator helping them. Well, then we'll already become friends with the people in that intro session, and then you can help guide them to kind of select friend somebody or just take a group class.

I think it's. Take. Take the group class. Yeah. So the way it'll work is you'll. Your kid will join orientation. They'll meet a few friendly faces, and we'll play some nice icebreaker games and kind of get them to loosen up a little bit. And we'll help them go and choose classes so we can start to learn about what they're interested in. At the end, we'll ask for all the parents to come in, and all the parents will come in and you'll get a chance to meet them. And you can exchange emails through our platform or on your own if you want. And start. If you. If you want to interact those orientation families. I love that.

That's great.

And we bring. And so. And during that moment, we. We try and help you build a bridge between. You're in your kid. But yeah, I would go ahead.

Sorry. You did kind of allude to that a little bit to the pricing that, you know, a couple classes might cost a couple hundred a month. The basic pricing model. Can you maybe walk us through that a little bit?

Yeah. So whenever you join, you get grandfathered into whatever your price was, but we are kind of changing it very often. Yeah. To try and figure out what's the right way for people to join recess right now, the way it works is it's a 50amonth subscription to the platform. And that gets, you know, we spend a lot of time thinking about safety. If we're. Our goal is to build like a freedom platform for kids, then it's really, really important that, you know, every kid's a kid, that we moderate every chat, that we are checking to pay attention for any, you know, personal identify information that's available. And so 50amonth gets you access to this walled garden where there are social network for children.

That's, that's where they're protected.

Yeah. And I think social network and social media need a really big distinction between the two. And so recess is really not social media. You don't post content to each other to get liked and not liked. But it is a way to connect with our kids. And so yeah, it's a platform where so $50 a month gets you access to the platform where we host daily live events where 90 kids will show up at the same time and run around and meet each other. They'll get access to a chat service that's moderated, like really, really spectacularly moderated. And they can, you know, talk to their friends, voice, call each other, meet other homeschoolers. They can post in big chat saying anyone else play this game that I like to play? And tons of kids will respond and they can kind of get together. And so that $50 a month will get you access to that. And there'll be some free clubs that, that we run around chess or on coding or on math that your kid can get into. And then on top of that, you can purchase classes for your kid. And those will run usually about 20, 20 to 25 a week.

Fantastic. And so in general, what are the best. Kids are so different developmentally, but what's a good age to start thinking about joining?

When they can type. Okay, yeah. So when they can type is a good. Is about usually when they're ready. There's a really small number of kids who are precocious readers and typers and a little bit crazy, like still like crazier, have less of the filter. And so occasionally someone will join. We'll say, you know, let's, you should wait six months or a year or you should join this two person, three person group rather than join these big like 90 person calls. Sometimes the 90 person calls can be. And they're. The way it works is it's all subgrouped so you're never with more than four or five people at a time. But you can run around and join the different groups.

Wonderful. Okay, Ben, so much more to discuss. Any big gaps about recess or anything else we've touched upon that you want to address before we kind of wrap this call up?

No, I mean this year we're going to take math really seriously. That's the big change. So if you've been looking for a math program that your kid, that gets your kid to love math and that gets them to move, our goal is two grade levels a year, then I think there'll be some exciting new courses coming out and it's all going to tie back to their obsessions. And so we won't be able to do it for every kid, but particularly for the kids who like to make games work, participate in game economies, code things. We're going to build some really spectacular math products. Um, and so that's probably the thing that we're working on now that's didn't cover.

I, I am so happy to hear that because in all of my research and 10 years in this field, I think the biggest gap is gamified math for gifted kids. You know, there's something until eighth grade and then all the beautiful cartoon characters disappear into an abyss. And if you're a 10 year old who's doing calculus, that's a problem. So I'm glad that. I'm glad that you're solving that.

Of which there are, there are kids in recess and modular who are 10 years old doing calculus. So there's. There is a need because so many.

Kids start to homeschool and they just go from K through 8th in six months because there's not much taught during that time. All right, so I'm, we're. I'm just so grateful for your time. I know that people, I think people are going to have a lot of questions. Are. Will you be able to be in the chat answering questions?

Oh, yeah, I can. I can be in the chat. My email is like famously open. Bencess tg. I reply to every parent email and the website.

Recess.

Yeah, Recess. GG can go there, can find some information and. Yeah, you can. If you have questions, you can email me at Ben GG And I will, I'll reply and we'll take them super seriously. We have meetings where we go over them. So. Yeah, we want to hear from you.

Amazing. Yeah. So if you're a parent thinking about recess or you have questions about some of the topics we've talked about in education or something we said make made you mad and you want to have a good Dialogue about it. We always are psyched about that. And if you're an education entrepreneur who needs advice, Ben is amazing and, and.

I'd love to connect for sure. We'd love. And if you're. And if you're building something cool, we want to help distribute it to the families in recess. So we'll try and help you get to customers. Last thing.

So just last, last, last thing. Wrap it up. I would like to know if you. Not a piece of advice, but a question for exploration. If you could give parents who are considering totally rethinking the way they educate their kids, maybe pulling them out of traditional school or private school and taking a modular approach to their education using tools like recess forest schools. What would be a good question for exploration that they could all over as they think about this choice.

About whether to pull their kids out of the existing system? Yeah, yeah, I think that's a good question. What, what should they be asking to help them figure out their decision?

Should they be asking themselves?

Yeah, I think it's around. I think it just be really clear about what your goals are. And so is it to pull your kid out of a bad situation that's making them unhappy every day? Is it to accelerate their intellectual development? Is it, you know, to help them really get great at a particular skill they're excited about? There are tons of kids who get pulled out for athletics. I think you're increasingly see this for kids who are obsessed with more niche subjects also. And so I think knowing what is driving you can be really informed about what products and how you build your. The next year for your kid. And I think a lot of people go through like a decomposing phase or a decompressing phase where they just kind of like chill for a second. But yeah, I would, I would just, just try and figure out what you're looking for and what your kid's looking for and then want for your child's.

Education and open yourself possibilities and what's.

And what's driving the decision? Because I think a lot of times the decision is being driven by something that's somewhat pressing because it is a big decision.

Yeah. Oh, that's Ben. You're so wonderful. You're so generous. This has been such a great conversation.

I'm so glad that we met and that Jeremy introduced us, reintroduced us. But yeah. Okay, we'll talk soon.

All right, thanks.

Bye. All right.