How to Make Better Decisions Using Math (with Ted Dintersmith) SB1715

High school math left most of us staring blankly at the board, convinced compound interest was just a fancy way to say “confusing.” But what if math could be fun, relevant, and—dare we say—life-changing?

In this episode of The Stacking Benjamins Show, Joe Saul-Sehy, OG, and Neighbor Doug welcome economist, education reformer, and documentary filmmaker Ted Dintersmith to the basement for a conversation that makes math feel less like a chore and more like a cheat code for life.

Dintersmith, best known for his education advocacy and the acclaimed documentary Most Likely to Succeed, joins us fresh off the release of his latest book, Aftermath—a compelling look at how we rethink learning in a world that’s evolving faster than ever. With over a decade visiting 500+ schools and a deep passion for practical math, Ted shares how skills like estimation, probability, and prediction can help you make smarter decisions—especially when it comes to your money.

• Why Prediction Beats Perfection Ted explains why being roughly right about your spending, investing, and life planning is more powerful than being precisely wrong.
• Consumer Math is the Real MVP From family budgets to grocery store run-throughs, Dintersmith makes a case for math that actually applies to your everyday decisions—and shows how parents and educators can teach it at home.
• A Fourth-Grade Science Test Gone Wrong An unforgettable story about how one exam nearly crushed a curious kid’s confidence… and what it says about how we measure learning.
• The Financial Advisor Dilemma Solved Joe Saul-Sehy and OG unpack the key differences between bank advisors and independents, including fee structures, fiduciary responsibilities, and what really matters when choosing your financial guide.
• Lights, Camera, Reform Dintersmith shares the powerful stories behind his documentaries—including Most Likely to Succeed and the upcoming Multiple Choice—and why his new book Aftermath is a must-read for anyone who believes education should prepare us for real life.
• The Psychology of Math Anxiety and Money Mistakes We explore how bad math experiences lead to financial decision paralysis, and how to rebuild confidence one calculation at a time.
• Neighbor Doug’s Trivia Takes the Stage Whether it connects to math or not, Neighbor Doug delivers his signature trivia moment with flair—and possibly a tangent or two.

Math shouldn’t be a barrier to better money decisions. This episode arms you with a fresh mindset for yourself, your kids, and maybe even your school board. If you’re a math teacher, financial coach, or just someone who once cried over fractions, we want to hear from you.

Join the conversation in our Facebook group, The Basement, and tell us: How are you making math practical—or how do you wish you’d learned it?

Need a conversation starter or social media teaser for this one? I’ve got you covered.

Beyond the Numbers: Making Math Matter in Your Wallet and the WorldWhat You’ll Learn in Today’s Class (No TI-83 Required)Inspired? You’re Not Alone.

Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at https://www.stackingbenjamins.com/201

Enjoy!

---

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

---

---

Doug’s Trivia

• What’s the definition of the Prime Rate?

---

Better call Saul…Sehy & OG

• A Stacker called in and wanted to get clarification on the difference between an independent financial advisor and a bank financial advisor.

---

---

Want more than just the show notes? How about our newsletter with STACKS of related, deeper links?

• Check out The 201, our email that comes with every Monday and Wednesday episode, PLUS a list of more than 19 of the top money lessons Joe’s learned over his own life about money. From credit to cash reserves, and insurance to investing, we’ll tackle all of these. Head to StackingBenjamins.com/the201 to sign up (it’s free and we will never give away your email to others).

---

Other Mentions

• Free access to the film Most Likely to Succeed
• What School Could Be: Insights and Inspiration from Teachers Across America
• DraftAftermath: The Math You Wish You Took

---

Join Us Friday!

Tune in on Friday when our panel discusses what they’d do if they inherited $50,000.

---

Written by: Kevin Bailey

Miss our last show? Listen here: How to Turn 2025’s New Tax Rules Into Big Savings (SB1714)

Episode transcript

STACK 07-30 Ted Dintersmith -steve

[00:00:00] caller: Where’s the kaboom? There was supposed to be an earth shattering, Kaboom.

[00:00:11] Doug: Live from Joe’s mom’s basement. It’s the Stacking Benjamin Show.

[00:00:25] Doug: Am Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and ever been at a party and had someone tell you their high school math class was lit? No, not unless your teacher was smoking hot. We’re gonna help you change your tune stackers with a, with, I mean, that would change things a little bit, wouldn’t it? We’re gonna help you change your tune with a guy who will teach us what math you need in your life.

[00:00:47] Doug: It’s economist Ted Denter Smith, and will also answer a question from a stacker who wonders about the differences between independent and bank financial advisors. Ever wonder what’s going on across the desk? OG will share details from the advisor’s point of view. I know, I know I’m getting to it. Relax, of course, I’ll share some incredible trivia as well.

[00:01:12] Doug: And now two guys who know that in personal finance, compound interest beats compound fractures every time. It’s Joe and o. Ju ju GI can’t think of much that doesn’t beat a compound fracture. Not just compound interest. Yeah, it’s replaced root canals as the suckiest 

[00:01:35] Doug: thing. 

[00:01:37] Joe: The new root canal is a compound fracture.

[00:01:39] Joe: Hey, everybody. Happy Wednesday. Welcome to the show that helps you control the controllable with your money and roll your eyes or maybe laugh a little about what you can’t. It’s the Stacky Benjamin Show. Super happy you’re here. And that noise is the man stretching out. Mr. OG is, uh, all limbered up and ready to roll.

[00:01:58] OG: Ready to go? Yep. Yeah, let’s kinda roll it out. Roll. Unique New York. 

[00:02:04] Joe: Unique New York. The reason OGs gotta be on his best behavior is because the Ted Denter Smith is here today. And by the way, while you might not know Ted’s name, first of all, the fact that it’s somebody who thinks that we need to make math more fun, not, not that it can be more fun, or ha ha, let’s make it before, and he’s like, no, no, no, no, no.

[00:02:27] Joe: We can truly have better outcomes if you just approach math in place where it doesn’t seem like this. Doom and gloom. Math is fun. Twice everybody knows 

[00:02:37] OG: that. 

[00:02:38] Doug: Or Sydnee Sweeney could be your math teacher. I mean, you could go either way to get it to be fun. What’s up with Doug today? Okay. And 

[00:02:45] Joe: by the way, I know and it’s canceled.

[00:02:46] Joe: Yes. And I know we’ve got some great math teachers in the audience, and I would love, by the way, to do a follow up episode to this episode. Let’s talk about this duck on the back porch a little bit. Shout out to our math teachers who I’d love to hear from about people making math fun, and some of the things that you do so that our stackers can design a curriculum for themself around better math, which is what we’re doing today.

[00:03:09] Joe: And that’s all led by our Wednesday mentor this week is Ted Ter Smith. While you might not know that name, you’re gonna find out here in a few minutes that Ted Tinsmith is beyond passionate, maybe well about everything, but let’s do a little name dropping. In 2018, he partnered with this guy named Sir Ken Robinson.

[00:03:28] Joe: And if you’re like, oh. Sir, that name sounds familiar, but I can’t place it. Uh, Doug, do you know who Sir Ken Robinson is? Well, I think that’s the full name of Ken from Barbie. And Ken, it, it swinging a mist, but very close. Oh, just a bit outside as, uh, Bob, er, er, Bob, er, er Effer was 

[00:03:48] Doug: the great Michigan announcer from the seventies and eighties.

[00:03:51] Doug: Bob er was the great baseball announcer. Bob er said that. 

[00:03:54] Joe: Yes. Uh, but it’s because Sir Ken, who sadly passed away in 2020, has the most watched Ted Talk of all time. Ted and Ken partnered to make schools better. Uh, Ken’s Ted Talk, which has over 23 million views, was, do schools kill creativity? And Ted di Smith is on this crusade.

[00:04:15] Joe: With Sir Ken at the time and now by himself to finally and hopefully revolutionize education programs. And to our delight, he’s focused his energy now on math and he is bringing that energy to the basement. I can’t wait. As a guy who is an economist and a guy who’s also worked in venture capital, his career was in both.

[00:04:37] Joe: He is a strong believer that if we just change the way we teach math and we teach ourselves math, so here to help us create a curriculum for ourself to focus on math that matters. Here comes Ted d Smith, this week’s basement mentor, right after we hear from a couple of sponsors to make sure we can keep on keeping on, and you don’t pay a dime for any of this.

[00:05:01] Joe: Goodness, we’re gonna hear from them. And then the Ted Denter Smith joins us.

[00:05:13] Joe: And I am super happy. This gentleman is coming down the stairs to mom’s basement. Have a seat. Ted. Ted, tender Smith is here. How are you man? I’m great. I love being in your 

[00:05:22] Ted: basement. You know. No better place. 

[00:05:25] Joe: And you know, every guest that comes down here, after they say that, they think about how creepy that sounds.

[00:05:30] Joe: And yet, 

[00:05:31] Ted: here we are. Well, I’m not creeped out yet. 

[00:05:35] Joe: Well, let’s see if we can change that. No, that’s a, that’s a scary thing. All right, I wanna start here. Uh, let’s use a parable. One of us created, and for all the stackers out there, it wasn’t me who created this parable, but let’s say that you stacker, you’re the US representative to the un.

[00:05:53] Joe: And people ask, obviously the US representative, Ted for help all the time, but in this case, lead us on this story. Somebody comes up and asks. Stacker who’s the UN rep for help? 

[00:06:06] Ted: What are they asking? You know, having been in that position, I, I have some sense and they, they’re often interested in what were the keys to success for America.

[00:06:15] Ted: I think most other nations, at least historically, have looked up to us and they look up mainly to our entrepreneurial spirit. You know, we’re an incredibly inventive creative culture and they wanna know like, how do we unlock that potential in our populace in ways that you’ve done so successfully? 

[00:06:34] Joe: So you then, as the representative, and I’m thinking about this parable at the beginning of aftermath.

[00:06:40] Joe: And I believe this represents from the country of Stadia, which gets you an idea of what type of country this is. And so they want you to come and take a look. So you go and you look at, they have a driver education program. You remember the story, the driver education program that’s in trouble. 

[00:06:59] Ted: I definitely remember this story.

[00:07:03] Ted: I, I wrote a book a few years ago with Tony Wagner and we opened it with What If Schools Taught Kids How to Ride Bicycles? And we had kids studying things like, how do you spell Derailer? And taking an SAT bicycle test and it just took off. You know, people were doing videos, showing schools, teaching kids how to ride a bike and the key point was they never get on a bike and learn to ride it.

[00:07:25] Ted: They’re studying all this stuff that’s peripherally involved with bike riding. You know, the ratio of gears, you know, a whole set of esoterica that has nothing to do with riding a bike. And so for this, having been at the UN representing the us, I thought it would be interesting to talk about a nation, a fictitious nation, obviously, that had developed a really thoughtful driver curriculum program 80, 90, a hundred years ago.

[00:07:48] Ted: Back when, you know, cars were primitive and if you broke down your miles from anywhere you might die. And so there are a whole set of things that you had to learn, like how do you clean a carburetor? How do you send smoke signals to say you’re in trouble? You know, a bunch of things that back then were essential.

[00:08:05] Ted: But today they’re laughable. Cars don’t even have carburetors anymore. So of course we don’t need. To being able to take apart and repair a carburetor in 2025. And so I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting? And so this fictitious country is sort of complaining because they say many of our young adults don’t learn how to drive.

[00:08:24] Ted: If they can’t drive, they’re economically impaired. They hate being in driver training schools. Come over, take a look, make some recommendations and tell us what you think. And so I lay out the, their obsolete driver training of curriculum and there are studies that back it up. 

[00:08:39] Joe: You, you do a couple things really well with this analogy.

[00:08:42] Joe: One of the pieces I like about this parable, Ted, is that they have professors teaching about obsolete equipment that nobody uses anymore. As you mentioned earlier, they have basically PhD programs in obsolete stuff around driver’s education. The smoke signals, I think you mentioned earlier, is a great, is a great analogy.

[00:09:05] Joe: They also are funding tons of scientific research to show how our test scores and obsolete activities that kids could participate in can become higher. They’re worried about these test scores. 

[00:09:20] Ted: Exactly, and so the metaphor here is the kids drill and drill and drill to take this multiple choice driving exam that requires them to answer crazy questions about a carburetor, and then their statisticians and their PhDs and ivory tower institutions come back and say, aha, there’s a correlation between driver training scores.

[00:09:40] Ted: And those who do actually get a driver’s license and how safe and responsible a driver they are. And I make the point, and it wasn’t an an accidental number, that their correlation number was 0.31. And the book gets into the 0.31 number later in the context of SAT scores and success later in life. But what I explain is that, or I observe in that parable is that there is a correlation, modest, actually in some ways discrediting.

[00:10:06] Ted: But if you are a diligent student, you’re probably gonna pay more attention to traffic safety rules. And so yes, somebody who’s more diligently pursuing a curriculum probably is a more diligent driver. It’s not learning the constituent elements of a carburetor that leads to safe driving. They both can be attributed to an underlying cause and that it turns out, you know, irrelevant and stagnation and nobody cares about that ’cause it’s fictitious.

[00:10:32] Ted: But over and over we get studies that will assert, ah, here’s the key to success in some way, shape, or form. We’ve done the analysis, there’s this correlation, and I find few adults know what a correlation is. Almost no one knows how to interpret the number, and often they just say, oh, there’s statistics behind it.

[00:10:51] Ted: It must be true. And what I do in the book, or at least try to do in the book, is to draw people out to start thinking critically about that. Is this really causal? Is it just a flute correlation? Is there a shared underlying cause? And when somebody tosses a number out, what does that mean? Does it actually affirm their assertion?

[00:11:08] Ted: Or could it be discrediting? But they’re, they’re using that number to convince you. It’s actually a affirming, 

[00:11:14] Joe: what I love to end this story to kick off our discussion is that your character in the book makes a bunch of recommendations to stagnation about, listen, we need to revamp the way that we teach this.

[00:11:25] Joe: It doesn’t make sense. You’re teaching us obsolete stuff. And of course stagnation comes back with No, no, no, no, no. We’re gonna get more. We’re, we’re, I think it’s something like we’re gonna get more professionals and more data, more statistics to keep going down this road. That is, we trust our study is not you.

[00:11:44] Ted: Right. 

[00:11:45] Joe: And what’s funny is stackers is really what Ted’s getting at here is how we teach math and about how we are teaching all of these things in high schools across America and schools across America. That we truly don’t use and we’re teaching it in this rote way. In fact, Ted, you had this problem with, I believe with your son, right?

[00:12:06] Joe: In some classes with your son. 

[00:12:08] Ted: Yeah. I start with an example and it’s bordering on math that has math in it, but it’s a true story, which is he was in fourth grade and came home one day and said, we’re studying simple machines. So we made this dash out to Home Depot and for 20 bucks you can buy everything you need to play around with simple machines.

[00:12:24] Ted: So we set up our own jury rig, simple Machines lab and did, we had a lot of fun with that. Him, our son and his younger sister. And one of the things we did as a challenge is we said, could we design something so we can lift a cinder block with our little finger and tried a bunch of different things and eventually came up with a multi pulley system where you could lift it.

[00:12:44] Ted: And I got done with that as we were going upstairs and I said to them, you know, with this you could lift your school’s basketball coach, who’s a very large guy. And we just laughed. And about a week later, he came home from school and he was, he’s a very even keeled kid, even as adult. Same thing. And he looked really down and I said, Hey, what’s wrong?

[00:13:03] Ted: Why, why so down today? And he said, and I, this was exactly what he said. He said, I guess I’m no good at science. I failed my exam on simple machines. So I said, Hey, can I take a look? And I, I had no idea this would happen, right? But one of the questions was multiple choice. What simple machine would you use to lift a grown man?

[00:13:24] Ted: And at A, B, C, and D, and he had circled pulley and actually sketched out a design and that he had a big red X on it, minus 17 with an emphatic arrow pointing to lever. I said, well, whoa, you know, like I wasn’t even gonna bicker about the fact that you also need a stepladder for a 50 pound kid to lift a 250 pound man with a lever.

[00:13:44] Ted: But I asked the teacher, would you mind meeting, I’d love to talk to you about this. And, and I said to her. Wouldn’t it have been more interesting to challenge these kids with something more like, what simple machine or simple machines could you use to lift a grown man, come up with as many designs as you possibly can, which is what engineers do in the real world.

[00:14:04] Ted: I said, that’s expansive, that’s creative. That would really show if they understand simple machines. And she had the best of intentions. I love teachers, but they’re sort of tied into curriculum. And she said, no, we taught this in class. We told kids what the right answer was. That’s what they need to do on their test.

[00:14:20] Ted: They need to produce the answer. They were taught. The wheels started turning in my brain. Right? You like, if that’s what we do to kids year in and year out over the 12, 14, 16, 18 years they spend in school, what kind of adult do you produce? And that gets at the core mission I’ve had for the last dozen years, which is.

[00:14:39] Ted: Aligning priorities in school to the requirements for fulfilling careers and informed responsible citizenship. And my conclusion is that school not only is, is not only doing good things, it’s actually doing damaging things. And I think math in many ways is a poster child for failed priorities because we teach a body of obsolete math that was useful before computers.

[00:15:02] Ted: People did pursue interesting careers because they could do these rote procedures by hand without error quickly. That’s not true anymore. Yet it stays in place. And for every kid that comes out of it thinking they’re a great math kid, 10 kids come out thinking they’re in some ways deficient and they spend thousands of hours on math that no adult uses, that computers do perfectly.

[00:15:24] Ted: And, and I think it’s not just a mistake, I think it’s borderline criminal. So I said, darn, I’m writing a book about this. 

[00:15:30] Joe: I love that story only because your son learns all the wrong things. I guess I’m bad at science. When he’s got this graphic of a simple machine that you and him created together and all this joy is immediately erased like a balloon, like a balloon being popped.

[00:15:48] Ted: You know, I’m sure somebody listening has been to more schools in the last 10 years than I have, maybe several, but I’ve been to close to 500 schools over the last 10 years. I’ve been to a lot of schools and I’ve observed a lot of classrooms that I’ve talked to a lot of kids and teachers. It’s not a narrow isolated example.

[00:16:05] Ted: This is what we do in school. We teach kids what’s going to be on the test, not what’s important to learn. I 

[00:16:12] Joe: can’t fix schools in one episode of Stacking Benjamins. I can vote, I can show the world your documentary. I can participate in the process of changing schools, but we can create a curriculum of better math at home right now.

[00:16:29] Joe: Let’s do that a little bit. If I’m teaching myself or I’m teaching my friends, or I’m teaching kids math and I am a money nerd, let’s start Ted, if you don’t mind, with maybe some consumer math like grocery store and family budget math. What are some of the key concepts that maybe I need to know that 

[00:16:48] Ted: aren’t taught enough at home?

[00:16:50] Ted: Yeah, I could have picked any of my chapters at random and run with that on this question ’cause it’s a great way to start. So I’ll pick my second real chapter, which is on prediction. Everybody needs to be able to predict things in a relatively informed way, whether you’re planning your own personal budget or your family’s budget.

[00:17:09] Ted: Whether you are in a small business and your assignment is to figure out what next year’s revenue looks like, what next year’s costs look like, whether you’re making investments, prediction runs everywhere, medical diagnoses, I’ve gotta predict under different options, I might pursue what the outcomes will be.

[00:17:24] Ted: So it’s not a little thing. It’s a great big thing, comma, never taught in school. You know, these are important things that define your life, yet you never got to them in school. And the reason is that prediction’s ambiguous. It’s creative. It’s interesting. There are a lot of ways to predict things. If you don’t mind, let me elaborate.

[00:17:42] Ted: The, the chapter starts with something that’s been done by middle school or elementary school kids. And I do that intentionally to make the point, if the reader takes the book seriously and middle school kids can do it, you can do it right. You can learn how to predict in a more informed, interesting way, in a way that sheds insight a perspective on what your own situation is.

[00:18:03] Ted: I’ll give you an example. The kids are grappling with how to predict the world’s population and to be brief on it, they start by doing something simple. They just take a ruler and they take some recent data points. So they take the clear ruler and sort of fiddle around till it looks like it covers the data points, and they just use that edge of the ruler to predict out decades into the future.

[00:18:22] Ted: That’s a good interesting way to predict, and that’s sort of a steady as she goes prediction. But then some of these kids are, I’m not making this up, this isn’t me, this is seventh and eighth grade kids. They said, well, let’s test that. Let’s go back to data around 1900 and around 1800. And what they found is that ruler, when you looked at data points a century ago or two centuries ago.

[00:18:44] Ted: Way undershot where population is, which led them to think are there other curves or forms that might be better at predicting? And they noodle around and noodle around and said, what if a compound growth curve is a better fit? We all know compound interest or we should. Yeah. Which is exponential growth, a different fancy math term for it.

[00:19:03] Ted: As they play around with that, they were very resourceful with a little bit of prompting from their teacher and went to Excel. So they put in a whole bunch of data points. They tried it with a line or steady as she goes. That was underestimating by a lot. They then tried with a curve, which is actually quite accurate, and it gave them the annual or decade long growth rates of the world’s population.

[00:19:24] Ted: Well, let’s turn that into a person’s or a family’s home situation. If, if you were trying to project what you need for retirement or what your financial situation looked next year look like next year or five years from now, you’d wanna look back at your data and start predicting. Well, some of your expenses, like let’s say how much you spend annually on food, that might well go forward on a steady as she goes basis.

[00:19:48] Ted: So let’s say, I’ll just make up some numbers. You know, it was 25, 30, 35. Over the last five, three years. It might be 40, 45. You know, like, like that just might be linear or steady as she goes. Yeah. Where it gets really interesting, right, is if your financial situation today includes a significant amount of debt, or if your financial situation includes a significant investment portfolio.

[00:20:13] Ted: Well, debt and portfolios, investment portfolios generally grow exponentially not linear. And so you might be really fooled, for instance, if you just took the last few data points and extrapolated with a line, if you were actually sitting on $5,000 of credit card debt, ’cause that $5,000 of credit card debt won’t be 5,500 and that 6,060 500 that will grow exponentially, that will compound and that can sink.

[00:20:38] Ted: And then when you start to think about prediction, you are able to play around with things, which I think is where the ultimate power comes from in understanding the ideas. And you might say, Hmm, okay, I looked at my food budget. Maybe I should look at how many times a week I’m eating out at a restaurant versus eating at home.

[00:20:55] Ted: But what those cost differences are, okay, I’ve been eating out on average twice a week, maybe using Postmates or GrubHub or something one day a week or post, you know, what if I shifted that and and went to the grocery store and ate food, I prepared at home once or twice a week, incremental shift. What would that do if I used that savings to pay off my credit card debt?

[00:21:18] Ted: How would that play out over a five year period? And you know, well, that’s what a really informed financial planner would do. But today, the power, I think is if you know the ideas, if you know what questions to ask, and you’re willing to wade in on using ai. I mean, AI is incredibly good in getting better by the day at the math mechanics.

[00:21:37] Ted: It depends on you to know the ideas and to know which things to push and prod and poke on and what questions to ask. It’s up to you to say, Hmm, what if I shifted away from eating out more to eating home, could save $40 a week and put that toward paying down my credit card debt? How would that play out over a five year period?

[00:21:58] Ted: Well, that’s, that’s real insight, right? That’s total perspective on your financial situation. And the same thing holds for a business, small business, larger business, whole range of things. But it all boils down to having a good handle, uh, what it means to predict the future based on past data, but interpreting that data in a nuanced way, 

[00:22:18] Joe: it’s fabulous.

[00:22:18] Joe: Uh, just you have your hands so much more on the trigger with what seemed like short-term decisions. That have this long-term impact just because you understand prediction, I’m even thinking about on a daily basis. I mean, one of my favorite texts Ted, is, uh, son Sue the Art of War. And I’m thinking that armed with prediction and a chapter you before that I’m probability when I go into a negotiation or a discussion, if I’ve done a little bit of back of the envelope because I’m conversant with the concepts, the mathematical concepts of both prediction and probability, and, and I go in as an example with a boss and I’m trying to get them to give me a raise or I’m trying to get them to change a project that I’m working on.

[00:23:06] Joe: If I know a prediction and probability, those two things, I’m much more likely to put together a logical argument that’s gonna make a huge difference in my life and maybe the life of the company I work with. 

[00:23:17] Ted: Absolutely. And, and those two concepts go hand in hand. And it turns out that people’s instincts on probability are often very far afield from what really deserves to be put front and center.

[00:23:30] Ted: And so, for instance, you see all sorts of things. We’ll, overweight, sensational results. You know, one of my examples is what happened after nine 11 when literally hundreds of thousands of families decided not to fly, but to drive, because that would be quote unquote, safer, because right in front of them was a, a tragic accident involving airplanes.

[00:23:49] Ted: Well, it turns out that code Red Security dealers, that was probably the safest time in, in history to fly on a plane. And your risk profile when you drive instead of fly is way higher. Well, we overweight those sensationalized. How many people will say, well, I don’t wanna Dr. I don’t wanna go in a driverless car because I read this story about this accident in San Francisco.

[00:24:10] Ted: So I perceive that my likelihood of dying in a driverless car is much higher than if I’m driving myself. Well, that’s not true, right? You look at the track record, the safety record already today on driverless cars, and they’re five or six times safer than human-driven cars, and they get better by the day.

[00:24:27] Ted: That’s an issue with probability. The other thing is that we often are too confident. We, we often zero in with narrow bounds on what’s likely to happen instead of stepping back and saying, what’s the, a broader perspective on the full range of things that could happen. I was really fortunate because I was eventually in school.

[00:24:44] Ted: I spent way too many years in school, but found my way to a graduate program in applied math and, and so a lot of my worldview comes out of getting a PhD in applied math from a top program that immersed me in these concepts and, and it’s worth noting that the chair of the department years later, I said to him, you know, I never use any of the math mechanics.

[00:25:05] Ted: I spent years on that I had to master to get my PhD. And he sort of laughed and said, you know, we kind of know all along that the mechanics don’t matter. It’s really the ideas that are important. ’cause they help you. Oh, formulate ideas, structure problems, understand the interrelationships. It’s the ideas that matter, not the mechanics.

[00:25:23] Ted: So this book is about those ideas. You know, you look at that, you say, oh my gosh, you know, oftentimes we we’re way more confident. We know than we really should be. So I have this list of, you know, 20 items that are, in some ways that might look like a trivia test. It’s not. And there are things that nobody should know.

[00:25:41] Ted: You know, like how many lakes of two acres or more are there in Canada? Good example. I don’t expect anyone to know that, you know? And if they did, who cares, right? What we ask people to do is put your bounds, what’s your 80% confidence range so that you think an upper and lower limit is 80% likely. To include the actual number of two acre plus lakes in Canada.

[00:26:03] Ted: We have 20 of those all different. And then at the end, if you’re relatively calibrated in your outlook, if your probability, judgment and instincts are more or less in accord with what’s going on in the real world, out of those 2016 ought to fall within your 80% bounds and four more or less ought to be outside.

[00:26:22] Ted: Well, for most people, five are in their bounds and 15 are outside. You know, we’re way too confident that we know where things will be in the face of really serious uncertainty. I use that and, and funny, I did that exercise, gosh, over 50 years ago, a graduate school. I still remember some of the items. Some of the items are on what I challenge readers to do.

[00:26:44] Ted: ’cause it was so eye-opening, right? When, when you start to say, oh my gosh, am I over and over in my life imputing more knowledge and understanding about things where I really ought to be more humble, where I really ought to look more broadly at what could happen? Back to your team. This up is if you go in to somebody, you’re working with your boss or colleagues or whatever, and you could say, well, we think next year’s revenue will look like this because that’s how it, you know, projecting forward.

[00:27:14] Ted: But we should think about scenarios A, B, C, and D that could create very different revenue paths for us and and begin to put our own judgment, our own probability on those different paths and start to think through, if that were to emerge, what could we do now to mitigate or capitalize on it? That’s unbelievably powerful and as I say it, and I think as people hear it, I hope any way people’s reaction is, of course we should do that.

[00:27:41] Ted: My bet is that almost never happens in your work environment or around the dinner table at home. It’s a math mindset. What I hope readers will take away from this book. It’s very light on, uh, there are occasional symbols and equations just to sort of illustrate this is how a math gee would translate the idea I just told you about into math.

[00:28:00] Ted: You don’t need to know this, but just take a look. But if they immerse themselves in this book and it’s a few hours of reading, I hope and believe they will come out with a math mindset. They’ll start to look at the world differently. They’ll question the numbers they get. They’ll know what questions to ask.

[00:28:15] Ted: They’ll take issue or critically analyze the studies that come across their table and they’ll have these skills and perspectives that help them, that family members, their organizations make better decisions and chart a better future. 

[00:28:29] Joe: Yeah, Ted, not math is an equation that we think that doesn’t have anything to do with our daily life, but math is a language as a way of speaking back and forth when we talk about estimation probability.

[00:28:42] Joe: All of these ways to better analyze if this is even worth it. I mean, you and I were talking before. We’re chatting here and um, you know, you have a background in venture capital. What strikes me is just the number of times when I was a financial planner, I would just question whether the thing my client even wanted to explore was worth the time.

[00:29:09] Joe: And that’s a mathematical equation. Yeah. I mean, if you’re at X amount of income per year and your goals are X, Y, and Z and you’re gonna head off to explore this investment in this thing that has almost no revenue in a very small chance of, of success, why do we do that? Unless you’re in love with the idea and it just sounds fun, which I love the idea of just grabbing it because it’s fun.

[00:29:38] Joe: But I think also having this math mindset helps you make better investment decisions, I would imagine. 

[00:29:44] Ted: Yeah, I hope so. I mean, I held my own when it came to my career in venture capital and I give a lot of credit to having a perspective that was more challenging and critiquing instead of accepting and following.

[00:29:56] Ted: And I think that’s one of the hidden damages of math in school is it is do it the way you’re taught it is, there is one right answer. It is a world of arc secants and peace wise, linear, fun, a whole bunch of things. You just say like, why do I even need to know this? But it’s, school sort of tells you that the most important thing you can do in your life is to buckle down on stuff you’re never gonna use and get good at skills that AI does perfectly to post a GPA or an AP score or an SAT score that might in some increasingly likely way lead to a better life.

[00:30:32] Ted: And it was interesting when I look back on my career. I use math ideas all the time in, in business, you know, how do you estimate market size? How do you predict future revenue? What are interesting outta the box statistics to track the progress of a company or your portfolio? How do you use probability in a way that goes beyond heads and tails?

[00:30:52] Ted: You know, optimization is fascinating and powerful. How, how am I optimizing my own activities, my own investments, and how is the company I’m involved with optimizing this activities? You know, like it would just ran through everything. It was never, oh, let me prove cosine square plus nine squared equals one.

[00:31:11] Ted: I, I never, you know, like, that’s just the folly. The, the, the misguided priority of math is that kids spend endless amounts of time, thousands of hours. A math they’ll never use and they don’t get to, they don’t understand the fascinating, quite understandable ideas that matter, the doors that it opens up.

[00:31:28] Ted: Yeah, sure. Yeah. And just having that and sharing it with the co, you know, like I would say to companies, let’s look at the bigger picture. We were talking just a few minutes ago about, okay, you’re projection for revenue is X. Well, what if this were to happen, which could be quite devastating. Or if this happened, which could suddenly put you on a whole different trajectory that’s much more successful.

[00:31:50] Ted: Let’s think through those potential scenarios that’s creative, but it’s also logic based and math-based. I think that’s one of the tragedies of the way we approach math in our schools is we, we believe math and creativity have nothing to do with each other. And the interesting math, the ideas that are important are laden with creativity.

[00:32:10] Ted: They beg for creativity. But when your entirety is around low level math mechanics. You know one of the things that’s heartbreaking, right, is that when I interview test tutors, they’re often very expensive and they’re often hired by the rich families to help their kid. On the SAT, they tell me the single best point of advice they can give a student is if you get to a problem that’s hard, if you hit a problem, that’s gonna take you several minutes to figure out, skip it.

[00:32:37] Ted: Because if you spend five minutes on one problem, you’ll miss the last 10 problems on that section. And it’s like, what a dispiriting life lesson. You know, if it’s interesting, if it begs for multiple creative approaches, if it’s something that’s gonna cause you to sexually have to struggle and wrestle and fumble around to you, come up with an interesting answer, skip it.

[00:32:57] Ted: Well, you know, like if it’s, why do we continue to prioritize the math that kids don’t use, adults don’t use that AI does perfectly. When there’s this whole body of interesting ideas that I think people will dive into and say, oh my gosh, that’s so interesting. And it shows up everywhere in my life. It surrounds me.

[00:33:15] Ted: It could define me or it could empower me. 

[00:33:17] Joe: It’s multifaceted. You’re learning so many different lessons and maybe you’re never coming up with the right answer, but you’re still learning a ton. 

[00:33:25] Ted: Yeah, and I, I think that whole right answer phrase is important here because when it comes to, you know, my first chapter is on how do you estimate things?

[00:33:33] Ted: And I start with a simple example, which every kid, you know, like kids have done that. Everybody listening has probably done this. You know, you’ve got a glass phase or jar, it’s full of gummy bears or jelly beans or pennies. Estimate how many are in the jar. Well, you know, there are better, more informed, more interesting ways to estimate it.

[00:33:50] Ted: There are particularly bad ways to estimate it, but there really isn’t a right way to estimate it. There’s not one right way to do it in five, four, multiple choice wrong ways to do it. It’s why it’s not on our standardized tests. And if it’s not on our standardized tests, it’s not in our curriculum. But when you invite kids to think about different ways to estimate jelly beans in a jar, which I’ve done with schools, oh my gosh, kids in third, fourth, fifth grade blow you away with different approaches and, and it’s like, wouldn’t that be an interesting thing to put front and center in math for our kids and for our adults?

[00:34:23] Ted: What are the creative interesting ways that you can go about using math to empower your life, to elevate your future, uplift those around you and gain real perspective into things that matter? 

[00:34:36] Joe: It can be so fun. Speaking of fun, let’s talk statistics for a second because I think that. You know, from where I sit, Ted Statistics is a part of this home curriculum for ourself.

[00:34:48] Joe: A couple interesting uses of statistics that you talk about. Number one is the, uh, misery index and about how it was used in Moneyball. One of my favorite, uh, statistics examples you use in the book is these walk score statistics of cities. As a guy who’s passionate about walking trails in my little hometown of Texarkana and about what makes this fabric of life, what makes the heck, you and I right now, talking about what makes life more interesting, it’s phenomenal.

[00:35:20] Joe: You would think that a city that’s laid out on a grid would be more interesting. Yet when we look at walk stores or statistics of cities, a city like San Francisco with these monster hills that a lot of people don’t even wanna climb comes out at the top. And, uh, this little beautiful city near me, shockingly, I was this many years old and I read Ted’s book and I found out that Eureka Springs was number one on the walk score.

[00:35:45] Joe: Statistics. Uh, by the way, if you’ve never been to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, what a wonderful little town. I think 25,000 people, just a tiny, tiny town out in the mountains. But understanding these statistics allows people to succeed Ted, where other people don’t succeed because they don’t understand stats.

[00:36:03] Joe: I mean, Moneyball, the New York Yankees versus the Oakland A’s the, the Oakland a’s competitive in a lot of seasons where they shouldn’t have been just because Billy Bean knew statistics. 

[00:36:15] Ted: Yeah, absolutely. I start that chapter intentionally with the incredible jolt that Moneyball gave us. All in rethinking statistics.

[00:36:23] Ted: And it’s interesting, right, that people often say, well, why is it on balance? Boys do better at math than girls? I think it’s because a lot of boys are baseball kids, and baseball is replete with statistics. And what we saw with Moneyball, with Billy Bean and Bill James is they said, look, the standard statistics are not that helpful.

[00:36:41] Ted: You know, so instead of batting average, let’s look at on-base percentage. They began to really rethink and look at what statistics are revealing, what statistics are powerful. And I include this guy in Kansas named Charles Castens, who teaches kids in Title one schools, elementary school kids, to bring math to life.

[00:36:59] Ted: For them to get them interested in math, to see its power. He’s created this whole set of fantasy sports. And fantasy sports actually gives you a budget and you’ve gotta allocate that budget based on your best take on the statistics that will help you put together the best team. I mean, it’s unbelievably interesting math by and large.

[00:37:18] Ted: When you look at the middle and high school math that does touch on statistics, it’s usually like attacked on section of a science report or you know, media and media and mo mean and mode or plot, some standardized, you know, it’s like it sucks all the life and energy and creativity outta statistics instead of encourages us to say what creative statistics might shed light on this might help us make better decisions, might help us allocate our budgets more appropriately.

[00:37:46] Ted: I try to explain the core concept in the context of something middle and and elementary school kids have done so understandable, approachable, not simple and equation laden, but ideal, you know, intensive. And then show how it connects with your everyday life. You look at, you know, that was a good walkability.

[00:38:02] Ted: It’s a very interesting statistic, you know, infrastructure. How do nations, how would you go about calibrating and quantifying the infrastructure of a town or a state or a nation defense spending? I, I love what I found and, and try to bring to readers, which is, interestingly, the US is ranked number one on defense, and, and we spend more than the next eight nations combined.

[00:38:25] Ted: So we’re not just number one, we’re way ahead of number one. I, I note, you know, like, and it is not playful because it’s tragic, so I wanna make sure that, that, I have the right tone on this, but that a Iraq and Afghanistan are not even ranked. And yet, number one, US invades Iraq. That didn’t go well. Number one, US invades Afghanistan.

[00:38:44] Ted: Well that went really poorly. Number two, Russia invades Afghanistan. That’s going poorly. Number two, Russia invades unranked Ukraine. That’s, you know, you realize these statistics the way they are captured. Reflects obsolete priorities. And so when you start to look beyond the measures and say, what’s really going on?

[00:39:03] Ted: How much are we investing in drone technology for a military? We’re actually way behind on drone technology, but we’re still pouring massive amounts of money into sitting ducks. That would’ve been good in fighting 20th Century Wars. Every statistic tells a story and it’s intensely involving assumptions and, and when you start to say, oh my gosh, here’s somebody’s statistic.

[00:39:26] Ted: Let me look hard at that. You know, that’s where you develop critical thinking skills. That’s where you, you invite the reader and the reviewer to be creative and say, that’s one way. Take on this. Here’s a different take. I think this would be a better measure. 

[00:39:40] Joe: Statistics, Ted, combined with what you said earlier about asking why I think is a great at-home curriculum, this statistic, you know, and, and, and it’s funny, back to baseball for just a second.

[00:39:50] Joe: I was at my Detroit Tigers, played the Texas Rangers, so I drive to Dallas. And I didn’t realize until I was prepping for this discussion, how much of this baseball ballpark is just stories, presents statistics. I mean, the big screens they have in center field are literally a spreadsheet with pictures, right?

[00:40:11] Joe: Yeah. That tell all of these, all these different stories. But to your point, when you combine that with y. I wanna end our discussion together with one statistic that you glaringly point to going families chase this statistic. They’re all about getting into these, uh, these higher ranked places in the statistic for their kids.

[00:40:33] Joe: They focus their children’s curriculum around this statistic, and that is the US News and World Report College rankings. And for people not watching the video, Ted just rolled his eyes. Yeah. 

[00:40:48] Ted: What’s wrong with these statistics, Ted? Well, I mean, for starters, we rank colleges and not one of the dimensions of that statistic has to do with what’s really learned.

[00:40:58] Ted: Which would seem like that might be relevant when you talk about which colleges are doing a great job on behalf of their kids. And so it’s all these loose proxies, you know, it’s how much, uh, you know, student satisfaction, you know, retention rates, which means colleges are motivated to make school fun and easy, a size of endowment, you know, like a bunch of things that I think, and college presidents will tell you this, they’ll readily admit that this distorts their priorities.

[00:41:23] Ted: This causes them to do things that they don’t think are the right thing for their institution or their kids, because they’re chasing those rankings. Because adults, families put a lot of weight on really nefarious rankings. And so I lay out what is involved, what they do, rank, and then I give all these examples of people who’ve gained the system.

[00:41:44] Ted: And I include, I love it, these back-to-back quotes from a dean at Columbia who one year when they’re ranked number two says, these rankings are unbelievably great. And then the next year when they says, so the totally different thing, it’s like these rankings, you know, like are unfairly punitive to, you know, like, and it’s interesting because Columbia was called out and this is sort of where things come full circle by a math professor at Columbia who looked at the data, Columbia was presenting, giving to US News and World Report and used the estimation that to say, is this data relatively accurate or has it been ginned up to Goose, our US News and World Report rankings?

[00:42:23] Ted: And he’s a whistleblower. He says Columbia is falsifying the data and that’s why they’re number two in the US News and World Report ranking. And that gets a big play. And suddenly US News World, world Report lowers a bit, lowers the boom, and Columbia goes from number two to number 18 in a year. And if you know how slowly institutions change.

[00:42:43] Ted: Nobody shifts that goes for two to 18. Yeah. You know, and then a couple years later us, when that came out and when people realized, hey, if we’re falsifying our data, we might get called out for it. Schools started to shift and be a little bit more accurate. And so suddenly everybody was shifting massively and US News and report had to delay their rankings release because like how, how is it that a bunch of schools drop 30 or 40 places at a year?

[00:43:11] Ted: And you just realize every statistic has a story behind it. And before you just accept that statistic, you need to dig in and understand what assumptions are being made to produce that number. And if they’re really valid and interesting assumptions, fantastic. And if they’re shallow or even misleading, beware.

[00:43:30] Ted: And I think that’s why the baseball metaphor is great. When I grew up, I was a baseball kid growing up. Nobody had heard of wind above replacement. Right. Right. And now that’s a central statistic, but it’s an evolving statistic. It’s not locked in time. I mean, there, there are better and more interesting ways to compute it, and so this year’s WAR might be quite different from three years ago and three years from now.

[00:43:53] Ted: The WAR may be quite different, but it’s a better way to look at the value of a player than just batting average or win-loss record for a pitcher. That’s the power of statistics and I think it’s interesting and it’s creative and it’s joyful and it’s exciting. We can all understand that if we just step back and say, Hmm, statistics isn’t flipping a coin in a classroom, or understanding the, the math behind a binomial table.

[00:44:20] Ted: It’s real and affects our lives and it’s so fascinating. 

[00:44:24] Joe: I think that just being able, again, Ted, to speak the language. As wind ball replacement changes, I mean, on a bigger level and for our non-baseball fans, I mean, just being able to understand more quickly how AI works and how it might be wrong is really based in math and the math that AI’s doing and that it’s not doing.

[00:44:46] Joe: In fact, you know, you and I, Ted, see people misunderstand AI all the time because they wonder why it gives you the wrong information. Well, it’s just a process of the math and the way they’re looking at the math, which makes it, by the way more fascinating and it makes it so that when you use AI, you can ask it better questions because you understand at least a little bit of the math behind what it’s doing and what it’s not doing.

[00:45:10] Joe: Yeah. An expert at Google once in a masterclass I was taking, was talking about the jagged edge of ai, and it’s easier to, and everything, not just AI has a jagged edge to understand the jagged edges of life, understanding the math and what a, what a wonderful curriculum to create for yourself.

[00:45:26] Joe: Understanding the real math that we need to use versus, um, versus some of the things that we spend a lot of time on in school. The a hundred years ago math, 

[00:45:35] Ted: it’s interesting. When I started writing the book chat, GPT couldn’t add numbers. I mean, it was very behind in terms of math capability. Recently open AI and Google’s deep mind competed in the international math Olympian, finished in the top 10% on very nuanced, difficult problems.

[00:45:52] Ted: Top 10% of the best high school math kids globally. If that’s where it is today, in a year or two, it’ll be the top 1% sure. And in another year or two, it’ll be way better than, and you realize, my gosh, it’s getting better and better and better. But it’s, people are the ones who need to ask it to do things.

[00:46:10] Ted: And I always go a bit nuts when people say, well, it makes mistakes because if chat GPT tells me something and it’s important, I’ll take what chat GPT tells me, and I’ll put it in Claude. And say, critique this fact. Check it, it, is there anything wrong or controversial about that? It’ll tell me something.

[00:46:26] Ted: Then I take that and put it back in chat, GPT. I mean, it makes mistakes, but it’s also quite good at fact checking. Sure. And it’s just that, that important message that it’s up to you. You know, these are tools and if you’re worried about it being wrong. Take that into your own hands and figure out how to make sure you fact check it.

[00:46:43] Joe: Yeah. Understanding the language of the math behind it, I think is so important. Believe it or not, as we mentioned a couple times so far today, Ted’s written a book on this topic called Aftermath, and this is the curriculum book stackers to teach yourself, teach your family the math that truly you’re going to use every day, and you do use every day to make better decisions, to make better investments, and to manage your family financial picture.

[00:47:11] Joe: You’ve also, Ted. Well, you know what? Let’s tell people if they want to get the book where they can find aftermath. 

[00:47:18] Ted: Yeah. Right now go to www aftermath of book.com. I was on a path and I may still be on a path to strictly self-publish it. But I’ve gotten some overtures from publishers who are telling me they could act really quickly.

[00:47:32] Ted: I, I, I’ll give you a good example of really subtle estimation math. On my last two books, the publishers did almost nothing, and when the book was released, I spent all the money to promote it, and then they took 92 cents on the dollar of revenue. So with really difficult probing math analysis, you might come to the conclusion that that’s not a great deal.

[00:47:54] Ted: Here’s where some math worked in Ted’s favor. Yeah, yeah. It really, it took a PhD in math modeling to get there. So finally on book three, I said like, I don’t think that’s a particularly good thing, and so it’ll be out in the next month or so, and I donate a lot of copies. I probably shouldn’t say this on a show, but I mean, if somebody gets excited about the book and there’s a way to help.

[00:48:13] Ted: Bring math ideas to their community or to their school, and budget’s an issue, ping me and, and I’m quite open and generous. I at least, I hope I’m being generous in terms of, of helping people out because I think, I think this is really important, my goal, and I think I’m getting some feedback from early readers.

[00:48:31] Ted: I mean, I’m hoping to do for math what the amazing authors of Freakonomics did for economics. I mean, if somebody reads this book and that’s what they say, mission accomplished. But I think that if we have a math literate population, a population that does have these ideas and can engage in challenging, constructive discussion with each other about important personal or community priorities, we will have a much better nation.

[00:48:55] Ted: And to me, if this book is at all helpful toward that goal, I will feel quite gratified.

[00:49:07] Doug: Hey there, stackers. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and wasn’t that great. I’d estimate and predict that that was probably the best use of your time today. See Ted, I was listening. Let’s take Ted’s lesson and throw in a definition for today’s trivia. One you hear on the news a bunch when you hear about interest rates.

[00:49:26] Doug: What’s the definition of the prime rate? That reminds me, I’ll be back right after I go cancel Amazon Prime. Maybe that’ll help Joe’s mom stop doom scrolling. Self-help books for me. I’m fine, ma, worry about your own complexes. Wait, was that a spider? Oh my god, it was a spider. Gotta be a spider.

[00:49:53] Doug: Hey there, stackers. I’m insect lover and the guy primed to deliver a great trivia answer. Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. Yeah. Oh, I see what you did there. That’s how I do it. Ah, the prime rate. And here you thought it was like beef. The best cut of the interest rate litter served up steaming hot. And actually that ain’t a bad way to think about it.

[00:50:13] Doug: It’s the best rate that commercial banks charge their most credit worthy corporate customers. It’s usually directly tied to the federal funds rate that the Federal Reserve charges. So when you hear that the Fed is raising interest rates, you know the prime rate will increase and all of these companies will pass all of that increase on Yeah, that’s right.

[00:50:34] Doug: They pass it on to you. And here’s something you never want to pass on another segment with Joe and og. 

[00:50:42] Joe: Doug’s never wanted to pass on that. I wanna pass out big thanks to Ted and hopefully OG stackers all over the world. Now working on let’s introduce a little math to our life and have some better outcomes.

[00:50:57] Joe: I mean, thi just thinking about the probability of, will I get a raise if I go in and I ask today, what’s the probability and how do I increase those odds? Right? Listen to all the math and just those statements. It’s not necessarily an equation, it’s just a way to think about redefining the battlefield. I love sun Sue.

[00:51:17] Joe: Defining the battlefield so that your outcome is gonna be better. 

[00:51:21] OG: Yeah, I think about car shopping. We’re kind of elbow deep in that right now. I guess I don’t like the word probability because I got like a barely a c plus in statistics and I could never figure that part of it out. So I use the word likelihood and maybe, I 

[00:51:36] Joe: think Ted would say based on what we just talked about, og that was your teachers.

[00:51:40] Joe: That wasn’t you. That was, but maybe more. Absolutely. 

[00:51:43] OG: It was my teacher. Of course. It had nothing to do with the work I didn’t put in or the homework I didn’t do. I had a high probability of not doing any work and, uh, that turned into a high probability of getting up and barely passing grade. I guess my way of thinking about this is like the choose your own adventure books.

[00:52:00] OG: If you cheated like I did and did both of them so that you could like, figure out which ending you wanted to have. If you guys remember those from being a kid. 

[00:52:09] Joe: This is just basic, basic stuff. We didn’t, what we always talk about, begin with the end of mind. Og. 

[00:52:14] OG: Yeah. 

[00:52:14] Joe: If you do the choose your own adventure from the end, you want you work backward, 

[00:52:17] OG: just think about like the dominoes that are going and, and where you’re headed on this.

[00:52:22] OG: You know, you start going down the, you know, if you’re going down the path of payment, they can structure a payment for anything that you want. If I wanna pay $400 a month, it’s like, cool, $400 a month for the next 120 months, this car’s yours. You’re like 120 months. That sounds reasonable. You know, it’s, it’s not.

[00:52:39] OG: And so I think if you approach any situation from the perspective of what’s their angle and what, you know, angle sounds bad, but like their perspective of this conversation. 

[00:52:51] Ted: Yeah, 

[00:52:52] OG: yeah. And how do I want this outcome to look? I think you get the right focus. I don’t know. 

[00:52:56] Joe: Well, well no. And think about all the things that you’re going to put into your curriculum that are gonna be usable immediately.

[00:53:01] Joe: And if you use it immediately, you’re much more likely to internalize it. So I walk in and I think, what is the probability he’s gonna steer me toward just a more expensive car of the two cars? Well, then I start thinking about his side of an argument when we talk to Maury Tepo about negotiation, right?

[00:53:18] Joe: There’s a cube, your side and their side. So I start thinking about probability. Well, it’s a very high probability that that’s going to happen. And then I start thinking about why that is and what is the differences in these two vehicles, and is the price difference worth it? So then I start thinking about price versus my emotions.

[00:53:37] Joe: And then I think if I’m gonna take out a loan, back to what you’re talking about, if you’re gonna do that, then maybe I need to bone up a little bit on interest rates and what acceptable payment terms are and what’s kind of the going rate for this stuff. And I start learning a little bit about, you know, 1000 month payment of payments 

[00:53:56] OG: on this vehicle, but it’s interest deductible, so, 

[00:53:58] Joe: yeah.

[00:53:58] Joe: Yeah. ’cause they’re gonna throw some terminology at you very quickly. And for you to know a little bit about that. It’s fantastic. Love that. And we’ll link, as I mentioned earlier, to everything that Ted has going on in our show notes page. Hey, let’s get to a stacker who said, you know what a better call Saul.

[00:54:14] Joe: See Hi N og. This is where we shine the light on a stacker with an issue. And today we have a stacker OG who’s asking about the different types of financial advisors.

[00:54:28] caller: Hi Joe OG and Doug, I have a quick question and I was wondering if you guys could just discuss the differences between a independent financial advisor and a bank financial advisor. I’ve had friends that have used both and have advocated for both, but I would love to hear you guys compare the two.

[00:54:45] caller: Thanks. 

[00:54:46] Joe: It’s interesting. Independent financial advisor and a bank financial advisor, og. Generally what are the, the. What are the differences? 

[00:54:55] OG: Well, I would also, I would want to know the terminology of the word independent. Like what does that mean to that person? Because like the word fiduciary, it means almost absolutely nothing because everybody says it.

[00:55:09] OG: Half the people know what it means. Half the people think they know what it means. Everybody uses it, and it has no value in the marketplace. So the word independent also, I think has no value in the marketplace because the person who works at Edward Jones might say, I’m independent. You know, I kinda have my own office.

[00:55:29] OG: You know, I’m independent. The guy who works at Ameriprise might say I’m independent. I say, we’re independent. The guy at Schwab says, Hey, we’re independent. I don’t know. So I would say that that has almost a useless wor, it’s a almost a useless word in our industry at this point. Maybe let’s talk about people that are affiliated with big companies.

[00:55:49] OG: Versus not big companies. How about that instead, and big companies will include the banks. Absolutely. Yeah. In this case, bank brokerage, Morgan Merrill, Ameriprise, you know, whatever’s on the business card versus, I’ll just use us as an example. We don’t have anybody else on our business card. Just me, and there’s good things and not so good things about that.

[00:56:09] OG: The biggest piece with the large organization is there’s likely to be a little bit more oversight from a compliance standpoint. That could be a really good thing, or it could be a really not so good thing. Meaning the structures around compliance are gonna be likely tied to the lowest common denominator, like one guy at the bank.

[00:56:34] OG: 22 years ago did this one thing, and so now we can make it so nobody can do that one thing because that one guy abused it. The one person at Merrill Lynch did that one thing and screwed it up. So now they make it so nobody at Merrill can do that one thing because it just makes it easier to supervise.

[00:56:51] OG: And some of it’s legitimate. Some of it’s really arcane and stupid. But again, when you’ve got a employee size of 20,000 people, you know you gotta have rules that you can apply to all 20,000 people. So I think there’s a good thing about that from a compliance perspective. There’s a onerous of heavy operations, you know, that makes that maybe not so great.

[00:57:12] OG: Paperwork is a great example there. One of the not so great things about being affiliated with a big company is sometimes the structure of the compensation for that group can change from time to time. It’s pretty well known in our industry that the big players, you know, and I say big players, I mean the mayors, the Morgans, the Ameriprises, the Edward Jones of the world.

[00:57:34] OG: They’re a big organization. They have to report to shareholders and they have to create compensation structures that align with their business goals. And so over different periods of time, those structures and incentive programs may change. And to say that that doesn’t affect advisor outcome is foolish.

[00:57:53] OG: You know, we’ve talked about it many times. When you eliminate the commissions on annuities, nobody sells annuities. And you go, why is that? I thought they’re so amazing. Oh yeah. They’re really amazing. When I get 6% cash up front, they’re not so amazing. When I get 1% over time, you know, it’s like you’re talking about the advisor by the way.

[00:58:10] OG: Get 6% right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of 

[00:58:13] Joe: whatever the person buys. Yeah. 

[00:58:14] OG: If you took whole life insurance or variable life insurance or so, you know, like these products are just like heavy with commissions on. Why is that the case? Why does there have to be so much incentive? To sell a REIT because it’s dog crap, and so they gotta like wrap it up nice and pretty so the advisor gets to pay.

[00:58:33] OG: I’m not saying that they’re all bad, I’m just saying like when you eliminate those, you or you, you straight line that or flatline that compared to other things. There’s a shift in the sales, those things. So you may not know what that incentive structure looks like and that may affect the opinion of the advisor.

[00:58:51] Joe: I like where you’re taking this discussion, og, because when you talk about the good and the bad of the big organization, it’s because they have these two pieces. The compliance piece, which you explained can be. Uh, really a good thing it could protect the consumer. Mm-hmm. So, you know that this is a mass market thing.

[00:59:07] Joe: You’re not gonna blow up your plan because somebody, Billy had a great idea at launch and decided to experiment on you. That’s not gonna happen. But there’s also another organization inside of these big machines, and you and I have been a part of this before, and that is there’s a sales organization Yeah.

[00:59:23] Joe: Where you have these organized classes where they are telling, they are teaching you words and phrases and how to get people to eat stuff that they might not necessarily want to eat, 

[00:59:36] OG: be hungry for. Yeah. Look, I’m so grateful for the time that I spent at American Express and Ameriprise because it taught me how to be a good salesperson.

[00:59:44] OG: And we’ve talked about this on the show a bunch with people that wanna be advisors and they’re like, well, you know, I’m really good at finance. Does that make me a good advisor? It’s like, no, you have to be a good communicator with people. Also the threshold competency is you better know a bunch of stuff about finance, but you, you know, you can be the smartest guy in the universe, but if you can’t communicate that well to a person who has no desire to do that, who really wants to just spend all their money right now, you know, you have to motivate them to like save for the future.

[01:00:10] OG: Like you have to be able to do that. Well, the biggest difference between large organizations and small, especially on the name brand finance places, is the delineation between being a broker and being an advisor. I’m not throwing shade on anybody here because like our caller said, she’s had referrals to both of those places for people that have been equally successful or happy with those experiences.

[01:00:35] OG: So there’s nothing wrong with being a broker. There’s nothing wrong with being an advisor. There’s nothing better about being an advisor versus a broker. I can make a case for it, but that doesn’t change the personality or the person. Right. And so much of financial planning, I think from a. Advisor client relationship perspective is about relationship.

[01:00:54] OG: And then there’s some, again, threshold competencies, right? You gotta know what you’re talking about and be able to deliver good service. But so much of it is just me and you. You know, talking that you can get that experience by working with the gal at the bank. If that person cares about you and and does a good job, that’s awesome because that they’re a good person.

[01:01:14] OG: If you read LinkedIn, there’s so much stuff about like, this advisor sucks and this that’s not true. You know, it’s like the vast majority of people in this business, like the vast majority of doctors, like the vast majority of teachers, care about the people that they’re working with. Are there teachers out there that are like, this sucks and I hate students and I don’t wanna do this anymore?

[01:01:33] OG: Yeah, of course there are. Yes, there are. There’s doctors out there that say the same thing. There’s financial planners who say the same thing. There’s painters who say the same thing, but there’s also people who are like, I really love being a physician. And I love the fact that I get to help people and they’re like, yeah, but don’t you hate all the Medicaid and all the paperwork and all the stuff you, yeah, that’s a sucky part of the business, but I love this part.

[01:01:54] OG: I’m gonna do the best I can for my patients. So the same thing is true at the finance space. I think we spend so much energy on the nitpicking of like, well that person is not a fiduciary. It’s like, okay, but I know people who are fiduciaries who do the wrong thing does that, what does that mean? What does that get you?

[01:02:14] OG: It doesn’t get you anything. There’s no jail, there’s no penalty box. You don’t have to fly a black flag in front of your office ’cause you violated the fiduciary standard one time. You know? I just find somebody that cares about you and that you care about and be a good partnership. 

[01:02:30] Joe: Yeah. 

[01:02:31] OG: Trust but verify you get, you put the layers of protection in in place because it gives you the opportunity to release from the day-to-day stress about money.

[01:02:42] OG: If you use a third party custodian, you don’t have to worry about Bernie Madoff. If you get your statements emailed to you, you don’t have to worry about that. You know, you pay commission, you pay a fee. Who gives a crap? It’s the same thing. 

[01:02:53] Joe: I think A couple things to summarize, uh, a stacker, and she didn’t leave us her name, so I hope we can send her some swag.

[01:03:00] Joe: Write me, make sure that you, that you give me your name ’cause this is a fantastic topic. But to summarize, j just a couple things. Number one, if you look at their business card or the website where you find them, if it’s a name of a big company or on the business card, there’s some fine print that says the name of a big company that you’ve heard of underneath their name.

[01:03:18] Joe: That’s one side of the equation. If there’s not, that is truly what we would call independent, but I like where you’re going with the way people are paid. The way to think about it isn’t so much to start with the advisor, og, it’s to start with you. And let me give, give everyone an an example. I can buy shoes online.

[01:03:38] Joe: I could buy shoes online all day, and I could avoid a commission to a person. There is a guy in Texarkana who, when I talk to him about shoes, I always pick good shoes. I pick great shoes with this guy. So even though I know that he gets a commission and I know that I could do it myself, I always go back to this guy at this door to buy my shoes.

[01:03:59] Joe: And by the way, if he’s not working, OG, I’m gone. I’m, I’m out the door because this guy is so good at finding this shoe, and, and sometimes I have no idea how he picks the shoe because he brings it outta the back. He’s like, oh, I think you’d like this one. And every time I do, so if I’m starting with, I want a shoe and I need an expert in the shoe, I think that finding one of these commission-based people is perfectly fine and I can have a great relationship with them, but I know what I’m looking for a little bit, but I’m not, I don’t have any expertise in that area.

[01:04:31] OG: But by the same token. It’s a little bit of no thyself, right? You are a runner who has to have some specialty stuff, right? I’m not a runner. I get Nike Pegasus, 40 ones every time. Like literally I go, my shoes are worn out and I go on the Nike app and it goes, you probably like this color. And I go, sure do send.

[01:04:54] OG: Like it’s the same size, it’s the same shoe, it’s just a different color. Like, and they’re like, Hey, we, by the way, we have Nike Pegasus 40 twos now. I’m like, well, nope. Well, I mean, no, I’ll take ’em. They’re the same ones. They’re just a new, you know, it’s the same line. I’m keeping that platform in business if it worked in the past.

[01:05:11] OG: Yeah, and to your point, I think with this, the reality is, is that where you are in your life is going to matter what sort of shoe service you need, I think is what you’re getting at. And there’s plenty of people who. Need to have somebody do, you know, a one-off thing and there’s some people that need a big, long relationship and N none of this is right or wrong.

[01:05:32] OG: What I try to do when we talk to, we talk to people all the time about this and my phrase that I say is Right fit, right time. I really try to make sure that what we do is in alignment with what that person needs. And if it’s not, I also am very okay with going, I think there’s a better path for you. You should do this one off thing or you should keep on what you’re do.

[01:05:58] OG: You should DIY, that like, you’re great. Like what do you, you don’t need to pay anybody. You don’t need to pay me or anybody, you know? 

[01:06:03] Joe: Well, that’s why I think in this case, og, I think there’s, for her, if she’s had a people advocate for both, I would go interview both. 

[01:06:10] OG: If you’re wanting to hire somebody. Yeah, just ’cause your friends have financial planners doesn’t mean you need to have one.

[01:06:16] Joe: Yeah. I would go interview them both and then look at what am I actually looking for? What do I need? And see if either one of these people actually fit 

[01:06:23] OG: and it’s personality based. I mean, it really is. This is the person that you need in the trenches with you when this isn’t like, what kind of asset allocation are you gonna give me?

[01:06:32] OG: Because newsflash, a lot of, you know, most everybody uses a computer program to solve this. We’re not, we’re not hand matting out efficient frontiers anymore. We use a software. This is the person you want in the trenches when like something goes majorly wrong or something goes majorly, right? And you need some big time advice.

[01:06:50] OG: Somebody with you to like guide you along the way. And if you don’t love that person and that person doesn’t love on you, then you’re not gonna follow the advice. You’re not gonna lean on ’em. 

[01:07:00] Joe: It’s gonna suck either way. 

[01:07:01] OG: Yeah. What’s the point? I can go on for hours on this Joe. Hours. 

[01:07:05] Joe: Well I think that’s enough on this one though, right?

[01:07:08] Joe: Uh, thank you so much for the call. And by the way, please, uh, write me and let me know who the heck you were. So that we can send you some swag for being a show contributor. We pay our contributors, Doug. We pay ’em. Aren’t I a contributor? That’s why you got the mug. That’s why, that’s why we gave you the mug.

[01:07:25] Joe: That’s right. I 

[01:07:25] Doug: forgot. I’m good for the year. 

[01:07:27] Joe: Yes. And by the way, have I made any headway for the people? I, I’ve had five emails from people that have said I wanna test this new mug. So, Ooh. Have I made any headway on that? No, I haven’t. But by next week will I have, yes, I would have but to finish out this segment before we, I, I feel it’s meandering onto the back porch.

[01:07:46] Joe: But before we get there, Stacking Benjamins dot com slash voicemail if you’d like og to answer your question as well. Alright, Doug, what’s going on on the back porch 

[01:07:56] Doug: today? Well, I mean, you were just burning the oil. The candle, the, all of the, the whole time leading up to this, our listeners were losing the opportunity to get our guides because they’re down to like hours until the prices go up, it’s about to happen.

[01:08:13] Doug: You are on the precipice of a price. So get it now. 

[01:08:17] Joe: If you’re not familiar with our guides, we have a tax guide. Go back to Monday show, you’ll hear all the tax changes. Those are all coming to the guides. If you didn’t hear Monday show, you didn’t hear. Some of these are now, some of these are 20, 26 different times.

[01:08:29] Joe: They will enter the guide when you need them. We update them every month, but you buy once. And so we’re raising the price for new people. But if you already bought it, you’re giggling right now ’cause you’re like, Nope, I already got it. Price going up, who cares? ’cause I’m still getting the same updates.

[01:08:41] Joe: Suckers Stacking Benjamins dot com slash guides. We have two HR open enrollment for most of the world coming soon, right? The fall for most companies. Not for all, but for most. So if you’ve got that coming up, we can definitely help you with that. And then of course the tax planning guide in fall and uh, the end of the year is the time when you can.

[01:09:02] Joe: Really do all the heavy lifting on making your taxes better. We also include, by the way, tax prep, which will be important after the first of the year, so stacky Benjamins dot com slash guides for those. We’re also introducing at the beginning of August, our college guide, but that’ll come out at the new, at the new price.

[01:09:19] Joe: So we’ll be up to three guides now, but the biggest guide you have at the end of every show is Doug. Did I say that out loud? That was pretty. Is that really a thing? I can’t believe I said that. That’s scary. It’ll be your best segue ever, Doug. What are the three things we should have in our to-do list after today’s show?

[01:09:35] Doug: Well, Joe, first take some advice from Ted Denter Smith. While changing schools takes time changing your own math curriculum, you can, and you should start today, explore ideas like estimation, prediction and statistics with yourself or your family and friends, and you’ll see better outcomes across the spectrum.

[01:09:54] Doug: Second, financial advisors at the bank, they’re gonna focus on products because that’s how they’re paid. While those products might be helpful and there are some good people working in banks, know ahead of time that the person across the desk from you is incentivized for you to buy, not necessarily for you to succeed, but the big lesson I predict, statistics will show that math is more fun if it involves counting fat stacks of cash.

[01:10:20] Doug: Am I right? Thanks to Ted Denter Smith for joining us today. Want more of Ted? Check him [email protected]. We’ll also include links in our show notes at Stacking Benjamins dot com. This show is the property of S SP podcasts, LLC, copyright 2025, and is created by Joe Saul-Sehy. Joe gets help from a few of our neighborhood friends.

[01:10:46] Doug: You’ll find out about our awesome team at Stacking Benjamins dot com, along with the show notes and how you can find us on YouTube and all the usual social media spots. Come say hello. Oh yeah, and before I go, not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don’t take advice from people you don’t know.

[01:11:05] Doug: This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any financial decisions, speak with a real financial advisor. I’m Joe’s Mom’s neighbor, Duggan. We’ll see you next time back here at the Stacking Benjamin Show.

[01:12:09] Joe: Ted, as, uh, you all heard, is truly a remarkable guy. Welcome to the after show. By the way, generally here, we don’t talk more about finance or math, but Ted has a lot to say and it has been just gold. Those of you who know me know that I love films, and I also spoke with him about his documentaries. He’s got a new one coming out on changing education.

[01:12:35] Joe: I wanted to play his discussion on making these documentaries as our after show, especially if you’re interested in higher education. Ted and I continued our discussion talking about most Likely to Succeed, which is a feature length documentary and education. It was directed by this remarkable multiple Emmy award-winning director, Greg Whitley, which if you look at Greg’s holy cow, the stuff Greg’s been involved with is amazing.

[01:13:02] Joe: Film’s been an official selection of 30 major film festivals, including Sundance. More than 10,000 communities in over 35 countries around the globe of screen the film to spark discussions and inspire change. That’s the type of stuff Ted does. So let’s go back to my discussion on changing education with uh, Ted Denter Smith.

[01:13:21] Joe: And by the way, before we get there, I mentioned Doug, we were gonna do this in the back porch, and we totally, we didn’t. But if you’re an educator and especially a math teacher. I would love to continue this discussion with you about how you’re making math fun and exciting. Yeah. Like Ted is alluding to, because I know some of our math teachers out there might go, but wait, hold on ho Hold on.

[01:13:42] Joe: I’m doing this. I am doing this. And it’s easy to paint as you know, Doug. Broad brush strokes going, nobody’s teaching math. Right? Nobody’s, and if I’m a math teacher driving down the road, that might be offensive. And I know we’ve got some great math teachers, so 

[01:13:55] Doug: I would love to hear the cool things that teachers of any subject, but especially math.

[01:14:00] Doug: ’cause it’s the one we often think about as the most grueling from our childhood. Uh, the most confounding. ’cause our brains just aren’t wired like that. Most of our brains aren’t wired like that except for the, the freaks. 

[01:14:13] Joe: Well, but what’s funny is Ted says they can be if we just get playful and we go instead of.

[01:14:19] Joe: You know his story about the teacher and the machines. Like instead of saying, which simple machine does this, say, Hey, I’ve got this thing. Tell me all the different simple machines that could accomplish that. Like all of a sudden just by changing the phraseology of the question, you open up a kid’s curiosity.

[01:14:37] Joe: But we think because of the way we were taught math, right answer, wrong answer, W we don’t think 

[01:14:43] Doug: of it as and memorize and memorize stuff without thinking through it critically. Yeah, I agree. I would love to hear some of that. We often see, or on YouTube videos or whatever, you see cool examples of science teachers who are doing like experiments in the classroom that make something that is fairly esoteric and tough to get your brain around when you’re just reading it in black and white or maybe a static drawing, but then they do the cool physics experiment or the chemical reaction thing in the classroom and, and the kids are just super engaged.

[01:15:10] Doug: I would love to hear from our educators about times they’ve done that with math. 

[01:15:16] Joe: Let’s do that, Joe, at stacky Benjamins dot com if you have something for me on that. Alright, here is our continuing discussion about his amazing documentaries, uh, with Ted di Smith. Can we also talk about just your work in helping to create better schools?

[01:15:32] Joe: We talked about creating a curriculum today or beginning for our stackers to create a curriculum at home, but truly in education we can participate in the process of making our schools better. You did a film about a decade ago. You have another film that you’re working on now. Can you talk about these films and changing education?

[01:15:51] Ted: Yeah. I came to the realization, it took me a while, but that the priorities of school were completely mismatched with what’s important in life for kids as they become adults in a world where machine intelligence soars. And so that led me on this journey. It made me leave venture capital take up this cause as, as sort of my life’s mission.

[01:16:11] Ted: And I started with this film, most Likely to Succeed. Credit to the director, Greg Whitely. Very little credit to me, but it’s fantastic. It premiered at Sundance, 25 major film festivals. We’ve done over 10,000 community screenings with that film, and it just shows kids learning joyfully and passionately on unstructured projects that they have a voice in creating teachers trusted to teach to their interest and expertise.

[01:16:37] Ted: Kids failing and getting back up and failing and getting back up. And wow. It just sort of says, this might not look like my school. It might not look at all like my school. And we just invite the audience, take a look, what do you think? And 10,000 screenings. Nobody said, oh, that’s terrible. They all say, man, I’d love our school to be more like that and we’ll put in your show notes, a free link to the film on that because it’s, as I say, it’s timeless.

[01:17:01] Ted: We have a film coming out this fall called Multiple Choice, and I had sort of decided after most likely to succeed, I had put some money into other films. You know, most likely to succeed was a home run. The other films would’ve been pop. You strike outs or pop pop outs or something. Or routine ground balls.

[01:17:19] Ted: Stick with the baseball. Algae. Yeah. Yeah. Stick with baseball. But documentaries are dicey. Right? You know, like back to prediction, you know, you start with a story and a director and you hope, and you might predict it’s gonna be a smash success and sometimes it’s not. And I’ve been on both sides of that.

[01:17:35] Ted: But I visited the school in Winchester, Virginia, pretty convinced I’m never gonna do another documentary. And I just said, oh my gosh, this is so important. I’ve got to capture this. So I found a great director. We’ve been filming there for two years. That film will be out this fall. You can go to what school could be.org or to my website, ted denter smith.com.

[01:17:55] Ted: We’ll have details about that. But the gist of it is this was a superintendent in a mainstream public school district that basically said, I’m tired of career-based learning, being looked down on being stigmatized. He joined this district in Winchester, Virginia. Superintendent went to the local business community and said, what skills do you need created within that school?

[01:18:18] Ted: Something he didn’t call the vocational ed center, but the innovation center, and it’s a lot of traditional economy skills, carpentry, firefighting, welding, electrician, some new economy skills, digital media, cybersecurity, ai, but the skill base that the local community needs to have a thriving business initiative going forward.

[01:18:39] Ted: Then what he did that got me interested in it, it wasn’t an option for kids. Every kid through their high school years does this, and they don’t do it with a course or a few hours here and there. It’s basically one third of their time in the innovation center. Two thirds of their time in traditional academic school, which by the way is under pressure to get better.

[01:18:58] Ted: Multiple choice is what we call the film. Because instead of training kids for multiple choice exams, kids at 18 have multiple interesting life options or choices. Half their kids go directly to career. They’ve tried one, two, or three things. They know I want to be a welder. They’ve done an apprenticeship or an internship with a local welding firm.

[01:19:16] Ted: They leave high school, get these great jobs that they love. The kids that wanna go to college had they optionally picked welding instead of AP chemistry, I guarantee you college admissions officers would penalize ’em for that. Oh, you didn’t challenge yourself academically, but here it’s the expectation.

[01:19:33] Ted: So they say, well, we can’t really penalize ’em for that. And then these kids turn around and write amazing college essays about what they learned when they took on welding, even though in one of our central figures wants to be a lawyer and is at University of Virginia. But she talked about how much she learned in welding.

[01:19:49] Ted: And I also think, and this is really important, all these kids learned that their classmates have very different skills. Being a welder is a demanding, interesting profession, just as being a lawyer is. And being a welder actually is a much safer job from artificial intelligence than being a lawyer. And so we try to bring that to life for the audience.

[01:20:08] Ted: And I’m really encouraged by what our film team has produced. I think it’s a great film, and we’ll do the same thing. We’re gonna do community screenings everywhere, and it’s just, again, what we were talking about a few minutes ago. We try to do these things, create resources that bring people together locally in thoughtful discussion about how to create better futures for their kids, for themselves, and for their community.

[01:20:34] Ted: And these days in America, that seems like a really worthwhile priority. 

[01:20:38] Joe: It’s a hundred percent so, so worthwhile. And here’s something that we don’t see enough of Ted, is that I can think back to studies that were done 10 years ago, 20 years ago as our obsession with just more college curriculum and rip everything else away from college focused curriculum out of our schools.

[01:21:00] Joe: And yet, studies show that students with life experience not only end up with higher grades, which we can debate how useful grades even are, they end up with higher grades on average. They also end up with better outcomes on average because they know why they’re in the classroom in the first place.

[01:21:19] Joe: They’re at the college, they’re in the seat because they know that, oh, I need to learn these things. And their ability to communicate with the professor is better. ’cause a professor is, in a lot of cases, if they have any life experience, are teaching utility and the student understands utility because of the fact that they’ve been there, they’ve been out in in a place using these skills, and now they’re upgrading instead of just base learning.

[01:21:45] Joe: You know what I’m saying? 

[01:21:46] Ted: Absolutely. You know, when I interview people about how much did you learn in your first year on the job versus how much did you learn your last year in school, no matter when that was uniformly, I learned so much more in my first year on the job, and these kids are keen to take on internships and apprenticeships.

[01:22:04] Ted: And what I find over and over again is that local businesses, you know, businesses, nonprofits, but. Those people are not all, but many are very interested in reaching out, changing the life of a young kid, helping them understand their profession. One note that I think is in, I use this in a lot of my talks.

[01:22:23] Ted: There was a, it’s a two minute video. Anybody can just google. MIT graduation day, light bulb, wire battery, two minute video. There’s a longer version that’s three minutes. But a, a long-term tenure professor at MIT had concluded, and I’m gonna say this slowly concluded that MIT graduates had learned very little real science and engineering.

[01:22:44] Ted: I think that’s shocking. MIT graduates aren’t learning real science and engineering. And to make his point on graduation day, he goes to grad after grad and they give them a light bulb, wire and battery and says, can you light up the light bulb? And these kids are indignant. You know, like, here I am in my cap and gown.

[01:23:00] Ted: I took all these engineering courses. Of course I can light up the light bulb. And they can’t. The point I make with this is had those kids shadowed a master electrician, had they done a summer internship or apprenticeship with the local electrician, they’d have a far better understanding of the science of electricity than those kids who had drilled on Kirk Off’s law.

[01:23:23] Ted: And were really facile. It’s shoving around, you know, give them a bunch of numbers and units and come up with the unknown number, which is what the AP exam does, right? And, and so you realize that real learning, real world learning could be an amazing portal to the academic theory. And, and it’s not either or, right?

[01:23:41] Ted: What if our kids who wanted to be top engineers were actually learning hands-on things in high school when it’s free and safe, they’d be better engineering graduates. Some would go on to be great electrical engineers or electricians. Fantastic. And any adult would know, like if the fuse box goes down, they’d have a good sense of what to do.

[01:24:00] Ted: So it’s, it’s like we’d all benefit from that. The reason we don’t do that, there are really two reasons. One, those hands-on things have been stigmatized and unfortunately and offensively, but also those hands-on experiences don’t lend themselves to standardized tests. Kirkoff law does. So we teach what’s easy to test, not what’s important to learn.

[01:24:22] Ted: And I hope that’s one of the messages that comes outta the book aftermath, is that the math you took, the math that maybe you loved and did well at the math you probably struggle with, didn’t see the relevance of that. May have in some ways suggested you weren’t deficient. It’s all math that’s easy to test and essentially none of it’s important to learn.

[01:24:40] Ted: But there are powerful ideas you can master, apply and elevate your life path with. 

[01:24:47] Joe: We’ll link to all of Ted’s resources, aftermath, and both documentaries on our show notes page at stack Benjamins dot com. Ted, thank you so much for. Mentoring our stackers on not just better math, but I think a better way to think about, about our education in general and about how fun it can be to ask why, versus just, just the rote, multiple choice.

[01:25:13] Joe: Thank you so much. 

[01:25:15] Ted: Well, I, I’ll say, if you don’t mind, thank you right back because I love your work and I think you’re a great success. I mean, who would’ve guessed somebody that starts a podcast from the, their mother’s basement would become a really important podcast in the lives of so many, and your work is so full of insight and perception.

[01:25:32] Ted: I just love it. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you for all you’re doing.