Personalized Education and Parenting

0:00 Welcome and what this show is

NickHello and welcome to Not Replaced Yet. My name is Nick Bushkar and I'm here with my brother Jesse. Say hello, Jesse.

JesseWhat's going on?

NickNot Replaced Yet is the show where Jesse and I explore and explain how we work day to day in the age of agents and AI. We run an agency, we are learning and building relentlessly, and we are sharing what works for us. Today we are talking about the intersection of personalized education and parenting. Jesse just so happens to be the father of my nieces and nephew, so this one hits close to home.

Jesse, over the past several years, but more specifically months, you have worked with your kids on what it means to have this new tech at their fingertips. You, more than most, of course, are poised to help them in the best way. So how are you thinking about all of this?

0:50 Three kids at three learning stages

JesseGood question. And I spend a lot of time thinking about it. As we've said in the last few episodes, the kind of token use that is aimed at our professional goals, it's hard to turn those off. Nights, weekends, family time, et cetera. So I'm kind of always switching between how can I provide value at work versus home.

And the personal education stuff. We have three kids that are sixteen, fourteen, and ten. And so, very different learning stages. Of course, any parent out there knows all kids learn differently, regardless of age. So we've applied a lot of different tactics and techniques to try to help them over the different grade levels.

And recently we had the biggest, at least for me, aha light bulb moment.

1:52 Lydia, ninth grade, AP World History

JesseLydia, our middle daughter, your niece, as you said, really got over a hump. So she's a ninth grader, she's first year of high school, and she's taking AP classes. AP World History. It's a tough class. Her sister took it, she knows how tough it is. And she's coming from a Montessori background as well. So if anybody knows education systems, going from Montessori to traditional school can be a little jarring.

And so she was really floored by the complexity of the notes and the studying. She didn't have any good study habits and techniques built up to prepare herself for AP World.

2:30 Ten reads of the same page of notes

JesseAnd so we were talking about it and she was just beside herself on, I don't know, a Thursday evening or something right at the beginning of school. She had a page full of notes front and back and said, you know, Dad, I've read this over and over and over again. I've read it ten times and I'm not understanding any of it. I don't think I'm gonna be able to do this.

And so we're talking, we're going through, well, what do you mean? And how do you have context? And I'm usually the one that tries to tell a story out of it or make it relevant. And I'm no history buff. I know enough to talk at entry level.

3:05 Trying ChatGPT live voice mode instead

JesseBut we got to the end of that and I was like, you know what you should do is just try talking to ChatGPT. Just the simple live voice mode.

And I showed her and I did a few prompts. And really the live voice mode, the latency they've achieved, or the lack thereof, is so impressive. It kind of crosses this threshold to where you can interrupt and you can really be stream of consciousness present with a conversation, I find. And that's what she found. And she wound up walking out of the room talking about the Mongolian Empire in the twelve hundreds or something, because she was like, well, wait, what's this? What's this?

And I'll do a demo here in a minute. But yeah, it kind of won. It just in that moment really achieved what she was going for.

3:38 Friday to Sunday, then the test result

JesseAnd on Sunday she comes back and I'm like, all right, how'd you study? And do you want any more help studying? And she was like, no, I think I'm good. I understand it really great now. And I was like, that's from Friday to Sunday. And then she went in to class and got like one of the highest grades on the test.

So I don't know, just that arc of completely beside yourself, helpless, to confidence, just through the medium of live voice. And there's some other things based on the AP test I think helped that, but it was just such a win. And that's why I think it's exciting to share it with an audience. If anybody's trying to figure out their parenting overlap with AI, I feel ya. So anyway, that's the intro.

NickThis was the story that piqued my interest specifically for this episode that we're doing right now. And we're gonna talk through a few other things, but it was the mixture of the simplicity of the usage, right?

You and I, in our last episode we showed off Ada. In the previous episode, we showed off a 3D modeling of your house. And what you told me was she just used ChatGPT voice mode. And so there's something really interesting there to me. That's one. And then two, it was exactly what you just said. How not only quickly it worked for her, but how well it worked for her. It was a true win. And eventually we're gonna get into sort of the pros and cons, the downsides, the upsides, whatever, of this space.

But so starting here with Lydia, you said you have a demo. Do you wanna just show us what you have or just talk through it? It's gonna be pretty straightforward I think, but you could share your screen out.

JesseYeah, I can. It is pretty straightforward.

5:27 The live voice mode demo, on a phone

JesseI am happy to do the demo. I'm just gonna do it on my phone because it's super simple. So it's the ChatGPT app, and the little blue icon is live mode. There's a microphone mode which gets you the full intelligence. There's the live mode, which does downgrade it, but it's a really useful thing in different scenarios. So this is how I showed Lydia to use it. I just hit live mode. I was asked if it can hear me first. Can you hear me?

**ChatGPT (live voice mode, through the phone speaker):** Go ahead.

JesseYeah, I am kind of recreating Lydia's journey with the AP exam studying. The AP exam is a well documented curriculum in the state of Georgia, I think. It might be federal now, I don't know. But I need you to give me an explanation of the beginning, the global tapestry of this curriculum. AP World History eludes me, so help me out.

ChatGPTSure, just a sec. Got it. Yes, and I think I see what you're asking. In AP World, global tapestry is that opening snapshot. It's like who's who in the world around 1200 CE. Song China, the Islamic Caliphate.

JesseIs it CE? Isn't that AD?

ChatGPTCE is, yes, it's sort of what used to be called AD, but now more commonly called CE. Same timeline, different label. So the idea is at that moment, what did the world look like? So we had Song China, big in East Asia. Islamic Caliphate.

JesseWhat part of China? I didn't understand that.

ChatGPTSong China. Song China, maybe the most advanced society at the time. Big cities.

JesseYeah. I don't know. You can keep going, right? But you see the naturalness of just exploration of the subject, like you're speaking to someone. And no question is dumb. And there's no judgment being thrown at the end user, which I think is a really interesting rabbit hole for AI in general. But yeah, so just exploring that and referencing back to the notes gave her

7:38 Retention: exploring, not cramming

Jesseor removed the friction for her to assimilate that information. And truthfully, I think there's a question of retention, of course, like study material and retaining the information. I actually think it's gonna be great because what she's actually doing is learning it. It's not cramming. It's not memorizing a list that then evaporates. She's actually exploring it. So it's very exciting for us on that weekend.

NickI completely agree. And I've had this experience myself. I have pulled up live mode and asked about different things that I want to learn about. And I love it. It seems so simple. It's almost so simple that it seems unimpressive in a way, but it's actually so useful. It is the ability to interrupt at any moment and say, what did you mean by that? What, define that word. I don't understand this, or I thought it meant this, or whatever.

It's just that path of being able to wind back and forth between all of the pieces, as opposed to reading a book or some PDF or something, where then if you don't understand it you have to go off and Google it and you don't get the exact right answer and all those things. So it makes so much sense to me. I really love this example.

JesseYeah, learning right when you need to learn it, when you're at the height of your interest in it, and then you can just go. That's a game changer.

NickAnd I think something that's interesting here is sort of the intersection where I know that you haven't worked with any tutors or anything in this way, but I don't know if it disrupts the tutor industry. It might a little bit. It gives kids who otherwise wouldn't have the opportunity to have a personalized tutor something close to that. But then I could also see it being very additive for a tutoring session. And so I think there's something interesting there as well.

9:34 What the school and the teachers say

JesseWell, certainly. And I mean this is a deeper episode than we're gonna make time for today, but my kids are all told that AI is bad and that it's wrong to use at school. And I get it. I get teacher perspectives on it's difficult to curb cheating and all the things.

NickCan you actually hone in on that for one second? Is there something specific that they said? Was it an example? You're just saying it said it's bad. Is it a specific teacher? Is it the school's position? What specifically is the position?

JesseI think it's multiple tiers that I hear. The school's position is like, don't use ChatGPT for homework. It's a very blunt object, like these tools are cheating, kind of, is what I've heard. And then each teacher has their own flavor, and of course they all sprinkle their worldview into that flavor. Like not only is it cheating, it's ruining the world. Not only is it cheating, it's killing the, you know, water treatment arguments, all of the things.

And so there's a very negative perception inside the schools, and then the friend groups as well. This is not what we're planning to talk about, friend groups, but there's a lot of misinformation that they hear. And me being the nerd dad, I get it coming home. It's like, we were talking about ChatGPT at lunch today. And that doesn't happen very often. My kids are not as nerdy as I am generally.

So I think it's just a multi-layer against it. Whereas it is like the most effective learning tool possible. And if you're a tutor and your goal is to improve the outcomes and things for your clients, customers, whatever, I don't know. We paid for Mathnasium for several years, and I'm not hating on Mathnasium, but they traded Tootsie Rolls for worksheets. It was not a ten out of ten learning environment compared to what's possible, especially as an interested parent designing tools for their own kid. The value of what I'm gonna put in for my kids is not gonna be matched by a third party. At least on that axis.

So I did a few visuals I was gonna show too, because I can talk in circles here, but it's something worth sharing.

NickYeah, please.

11:54 AP classes are documented: the curriculum map

JesseI know the last share experience didn't work all that well. One of the cool things with AP, and this is where the idea came from in this instance, was AP classes are documented. And so something else that's a little more curriculum oriented or teacher oriented, it's not going to be as well understood by an LLM, right? The training data has to be there. So the training data, and then the lookup is present for agents.

So this is just, I made this, it was a one-shot prompt. We didn't use this to study. I'm just making sure I'm not taking credit for something here. But I said, let's take the AP exam for AP World and let's build an interactive map of that. And so it did that. Took it 800 years, nine units, weighted. It has all of the timeline of what that is. You can click in. And again, because it's well documented, you have these things. And I will say also, there's some tracking stuff. You can track your time. This was a Claude building extra that I didn't ask for.

But I will say, it is pretty shocking coming from the education system you and I came from, where there were textbooks. We're both old enough to be textbook kids, and the kids aren't, schools aren't textbooks anymore. And oftentimes it's poorly photocopied printouts of internet resources that they bring home. So shout out to our public school system, but something like this that organizes it is, I don't know, they rarely come home with this for their subjects. And so there's some interactive things like that.

And then I was like, okay, well just for fun, what are visualizations we could make of the curriculum? Because this is the type of nerdy stuff I do. So here's one. This is the AP exam broken out into, I think they called it a loom graph. And so your units and the tie back, and these are the kind of six overarching threads that are pulled through the entire curriculum. I did a constellation to look at the node, the map. This is the AP exam in this particular visualization. And then the strata was really cool, like the idea that there's certain moments and timelines that kind of coexist and coalesce and ebb and flow. So I don't know. The net net of these visualizations are

14:28 Eye candy or real utility

NickI guess I'm slightly lost here about you showing these off. Is this just a fun visualization? Or did you, is there utility in this, like actual utility, not hypothesized?

JesseNo, yeah. That's why I wanted to be clear. These are things I built after the fact as interesting interpretations, because the data structure is known, the curriculum exists. And so once the curriculum exists, I can build anything at all that I want with that. And so I'm trying to show the kids, you wish it was a certain way, you can have it a certain way, right? An AP history class is about exploration and really understanding what was going on in history.

So anyway, these are just more eye candy of what's possible. I did wanna jump to a couple other ones, but go ahead.

NickWell, please. What I was gonna say is that what this makes me think of is having a structured system for the type of thing that you're trying to help your one daughter learn. You then built an app, or you helped her build an app, I forget, you'll tell us exactly what. You helped your other daughter with an app that also had structured information that you then tried to help her learn something. So do you wanna jump into that?

15:46 The Ableton tutorial built from the docs

JesseYes. This is a little asynchronous, because we did this before the AP work. But Juliet, my oldest daughter, she just turned 16. She has a music technology class that is in her future where she's going to be learning Ableton. Ableton Live is best in class music production software. I've done a small amount of hobbyist music production. Nick, you were working on learning Ableton a while ago and spent time getting familiar with the software.

And she's got that class coming up. And so I said, I'm going to make something that can help her with that, because it's pretty daunting. And in fact, we got the software over the summer, so she had time. She started learning without a learning aid, and then she really hit a wall.

So this is the Ableton tutorial that I made her. And I made this again not as an Ableton expert. Ableton, the company, fortunately provides a ton of documentation. And so I had Claude ingest all that documentation, including screenshots of their software. So you come down here to, I think it was phase zero, step two, and it starts showing references to the actual software. And those references are versioned and everything. And so this got her from the bare minimum of, I don't even know how to make a sound in this software, to actually being able to get something going, change BPM, monitor and modify.

Now I will say she didn't go all the way through. So this is a fairly long curriculum that I came up with. And it turns out she's got music technology second semester. So the Ableton part of music and technology will be second semester. And so this moved down the priority. But I don't know, just another example, completely different. And again, parents know their kids learn differently. She's very check off the list oriented, and I think this is gonna match her needs as well when the forcing function comes back around.

NickIt's super interesting. And I completely agree. The idea, because we come from the software world, we think of documentation. And then of course Ableton is software, and so it has documentation for using it and all the different pieces. And also different companies have different levels of documentation, whether good or bad.

NickIn the first example, you talked about how Lydia had this amazing experience with it. She used it from Friday to Sunday and she was basically an expert after that. So that's amazing. Now, Juliet, she might use this. And so maybe we'll come back and check in on this and how she actually fared after second semester. That could be interesting.

But unless you have something else to say specifically about this thing that was built, I'm really interested in the final example you showed me, because it wasn't you building an app. It was something completely different. So do you wanna talk through that?

JesseYeah, very much so. The only thing that I'll say, I forgot to mention it a minute ago on this example, is all of this, because I'm prompting the creation, I took her strengths in mind in the design of this and the language. So you see language like one bar, four kicks. She knows music theory. She's very strong music theory. In fact, she passed AP music theory last year. So I was able to say, build the curriculum for someone who's not a software expert, but who does understand music theory, and pull that in.

NickRight, you could say she passed AP music theory. So to your point about AP classes, that's a structured thing, so it should understand what she should already know.

JesseThat's a great point. And I did that very generally, like she understands, she's advanced. There's overlap in probably what it pulled from what it would connect, but you're right, more specifically it could do that.

19:36 Elliot, 10, and the soccer app

JesseSo example number three was Elliot, my son, the youngest. He's ten. He's soccer obsessed, sports obsessed with whatever sport is going on, and soccer's usually first place. Gunners.

NickGo Arsenal.

JesseAnd he's also very self-motivated and he likes structure. And so I gave him a task. It was late in the summertime, so there is no structure in his life in summer vacation by week nine or week ten. And I said, all right, buddy, this week you're gonna make a game. I'm gonna have you make a game in ChatGPT. And he was like, okay, fine.

So I sat with him at the computer and just showed him how to start, how to prompt and things. And he was like, wait a minute, can I build an app? And I was like, well, what kind of app do you want to build? And he said, a soccer app. And I said, sure, you can build a soccer app instead of a game. Text that box. So this is the thread that he was building in. We're not gonna dig into that, but he wound up building an app called Next Touch.

NickAnd just to be clear, when you say he built, was it just him in ChatGPT? You weren't there working with him, or a little bit?

JesseI walked out of the room for the most part. I maybe sprinkled in some things as I walked past. But after I gave him the three-prompt training wheel example, and he knows how to talk to AI, and I remind him to use the mic so he doesn't have to struggle with the keys, then I left the room for the most part. And it's really impressive. I forgot how impressive it was until I came back to this.

And to your question on an app, this is actually using ChatGPT Sites, which is a new feature of ChatGPT that came out a few months ago. It is still a confusing set of features and naming conventions, but ChatGPT Sites does work great as advertised. And so this is the brand he came up with. Train with a real plan. It builds a planning session, and so I can build a planning session. Obviously it starts at ten because it was starting. You can choose your skill level, which he defined as advanced for his age. He wants to be an attacking midfielder, even though I am encouraging him to be a striker. I'm not gonna go through, because I don't want to create problems for his stuff. I do think it's storing things via local storage, so I think when he pulls this up on the family computer out there, it would show. And then different levels and themes, some color schemes, fun for him. I knew this would play out kind of like a game for him anyway, which is why I was like, game, app, whatever.

22:40 Camera mode and tracking a real ball

JesseBut I want to show you the coolest part, because it was really crazy. In this session, it shows three rounds of 30 seconds each, toe taps, it gives him these instructions. And then he built out camera mode. Now, if any of the audience knows DribbleUp, we use DribbleUp and it's an app that can track the ball and stuff.

Where I think this is so fascinating is Elliot at 10 years old, because he's so native to this technology, he just was like, yeah, I want camera mode. He didn't think, this is a complex, computationally rich challenge. He just said, no, I want camera mode. Just like, parents of a certain age, they know that their babies would try to tap on every screen, and we would all think it's cute because of course they think you can tap on every screen.

But this is a DribbleUp soccer ball. I'm gonna hit camera mode. Camera mode turns on the camera if I allow it in browser, which I will here. Hopefully, Nick, you're seeing that okay. And then what it does is it has image tracking built in. Now the demo I'm using is a little choppy, and it says ball found.

NickYep, all good.

JesseAnd then it gives a drill and examples of a drill, and then it actually can track the soccer ball and do a real exercise. And so you see the timer. So he's in our little computer room breaking a sweat using an app that he just built. And he's come back to it. It's week to week how much he's using it, but I feel like we got the richness out of it, you know what I mean? Very happy about it.

NickWell, there's so many points here, right? It's a mixture of him building with the tech, and that's education in and of itself. And then also the education of him learning to be better at the sport that he cares about. That's a whole other lane, and that's separate from the AP history, which is separate from music software. So I really think that's an impressive show of breadth of what's possible here, what's been done.

And I love this app. I love this little home page design. And is there any other feature or anything that's interesting, or you want to talk through Elliot's experience here? Because I do have a couple questions kind of broadly.

25:26 Young people will expect to build apps

JesseThe only thing I'll say, it's not about the app specifically, and I'll stop sharing the screen. It's more that me bearing witness to the different ages and their experience, young people will expect that they can build apps, right? It is an attainable thing for an average individual who doesn't know the underlying code. They will be able to deploy apps.

And I have a sidebar about this that I am kind of working on as a standalone episode around, don't be apologetic for building something like this. I was on a meeting with a very competent professional woman who said, and I built a website. And she almost said it apologetically, like, I'm not supposed to be building websites. Even me could build a website. And it hit me as, don't feel like it's weird that you can build something like this. And I think when I saw Elliot do this, it was like, yep, of course, this is a normal thing for the future.

NickNo, I completely agree. I saw somebody on some social feed I was looking at, a friend of mine, she did something similar where she built a website for her law firm, and then she was asking, she was like, I didn't know what I was doing but I wanted to try it. And then she was asking her friends to critique it and say, what could be better, what could be done. And it's fine. It gets to this idea, and I think we wanna dive into this in a later episode more so, but it's the idea that we are advocating for people to become creators, or I don't know if that's the right exact word, but it's not about becoming a developer, because that's still a very relevant and useful title and job in many different ways.

It's this idea that this is now foundational, fundamental technology that anyone can use. And I think of it like, you know how to use Gmail, you know how to use Excel, right? And this tech is like that. It's table stakes now. In Excel you know how to add a column or change something or do whatever. I'm actually really bad at Excel. But you diving into this world is table stakes for everyone right now, and I think just playing with it is the way that you get used to it.

And so each one of these examples is an example of that. Lydia got an example of ChatGPT voice mode. Juliet, you built the app, but she saw what was possible. And then Elliot did his own thing. So it's really fascinating to me.

27:58 Cheating versus learning

NickAnd I do wanna go back to something you said earlier, because this is something that I have been thinking about for a while, and it goes back to the idea of the school system and people, friends, teachers, whatever, thinking that AI is bad. And that's another topic we're gonna dive into eventually. But specifically here, when it comes to the school system saying don't use ChatGPT for homework, it makes so much sense, right? Because what you don't want is you don't want kids to cheat. And asking basically an all knowing oracle what the answer to your homework questions happen to be, that's kind of cheating.

And so there is this line, there's this distinction of using a tool to learn versus using a tool to get an answer without learning anything. And the struggle there, it's so understandable in my opinion, from the school's point of view, because the struggle there is that is a very self-motivated thing. That is something that the parents either have to instill in the kid, or the kid has to be self motivated themselves to actually try and learn with it, rather than just being like, give me the answers for this thing.

And so I don't see it as being simple, like just use ChatGPT for your schooling, because it's not that straightforward. So many kids, I mean, come on, kids are gonna use this for answers, right? Not everyone's gonna be like Lydia.

JesseRight. I agree. I think some of it is a little, it's not overblown, because you're right, the cheating risk is real. Give me the answer, it gives me the answer, and I didn't have to earn it and I don't retain it.

NickWell, and it's not even just cheating, it's laziness. Not, I don't want to go into a show about us calling kids lazy, but it makes sense. I know I would have done it too at a certain point. It's not even just cheating. It's like, okay, give me the answer so I can put it down on this paper or put it in this computer and submit it and get the right answer.

JesseYeah. I agree. I worked with Lydia on similar voice mode stuff for literature and it worked well as well. I don't think math would translate to that. I think there's different substrates. And so I think teachers have to change. I'm sure there are different tools for different, and again, every person's different too.

So for teachers, the very first, I mean, we have a lot of teacher friends, a lot of K through twelve teacher friends, even especially on the early childhood education side. And the first things that I saw their eyes light up about was the busy work and paperwork that they were able to offload. The public school system requires such a depth of documentation of everything, and what's your curriculum, what's your lesson plan, and it's like, now I can make perfect lesson plans in reduced time. I hope those people see the benefits when applied correctly versus how you can cheat and be lazy.

I think with students, you will have people that do themselves a disservice. And that's again coming back to the role of the parent in all this. The parent's job should be to show kids there's a way that cheats yourself in using these things, and there's a way that enriches yourself. And maybe that's oversimplification, but that's what I'm aiming for when I'm talking to them about it.

31:40 A school builds a system, AI can be personal

NickIt's a difficult position, because from the school's point of view, they have to create a system. This is showing their limitations in a way, where the AI actually has fewer limitations, where the AI can be personalized to each kid and how that kid happens to learn most optimally. Whereas the school has to create a system, especially, and maybe private schools have more leeway here, but in the public school system especially, then you're creating something for the general public. And that in and of itself is going to be more limited in that way.

And so to me it does make sense that they are more skeptical at this moment. I don't think there's an easy answer, and to your point, I think the best thing right now is that parents have to understand what's possible themselves so that they can help their kids understand what's possible and help them learn in that way. And then of course, as always, not with this new tech or anything, it's always the parents instilling good values into their children. And I say this as a childless old man.

JesseYeah. I totally agree with that. You're never gonna please everyone, and there's a lot of considerations for all levels of learners, advanced down to remedial and everything in between. So there's all of that. I don't expect the school system to be able to get it right. They're feeding and keeping kids. COVID really opened my eyes to the dual nature of schools. You have education and you have childcare bundled into one service, because the world works because the parents can go to work generally. And big broad brush strokes.

So I do think, and I'm sure we'll do more episodes on this, I do think education is wildly disrupted and is set up to be better. Downsides are real, immediate, urgent stuff is risky.

33:51 The parent's job and the close

JesseBut at the end of the day, my kids are gonna come home tonight, have challenges, and I'm gonna say, how do I use all the means I have, including the tools that I wield, to give them what they deserve, what they should get, and give them the best life. So to me it all comes back to that. It's not a macro education landscape perspective. It's just, how do I help my kids? And that's universal for all parents, I think.

NickI love it. And I think that is a great place to close things out, unless you have anything else that you want to add in.

JesseNo, excited to hear some comments on this. We got some good responses from the previous video, and I'm curious to talk to you about your next agentic layer structure for the conversation.

NickAbsolutely. We're gonna be talking about my children, and what I mean by that is all my agents, all my little agents that I

JesseHey, Casper. No way, man. Casper, you've done AI work for your dog and health reasons, and I'm excited for that episode. But yes, your agent children too.

NickThat's true. I do want to do a Casper episode eventually, because he's the greatest dog in the world.

All right. If you've made it this far, thank you so much for listening. Hit us up in the comments with questions, thoughts, anything that comes to mind watching this episode. Please like and subscribe, it helps us out a lot. And until next time, we will see you later.

JesseThere you go.