In this episode of the Where Parents Talk podcast, host Lianne Castelino speaks to Ted Dintersmith, education disruptor, former venture capitalist, and author of Aftermath: The Math You Wish You Took. The discussion explores the gap between traditional math education and the real-world skills students actually need to succeed.

Dintersmith distills the status quo by emphasizing the importance of creativity, critical thinking, and practical application. The conversation also delves into broader parenting concerns—including emotional and mental health, social media usage, bullying, and the importance of consent—showing how these complex issues connect back to how kids learn and grow.

The discussion shares insights on how to help children build a healthier, more empowered relationship with math—and life.

Takeaways:

• Understanding the disconnect between traditional math education and real-world applications is crucial for parents.
• Parents should embrace a broader view of math, encouraging creativity and real-life relevance over rote memorization.
• The conversation around math education needs to shift from grades to fostering critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
• Incorporating math discussions into everyday life can help children develop a healthier relationship with the subject.
• The rise of AI in education highlights the need for students to understand concepts rather than just procedures.
• Parents can play a vital role in their child's learning by making math fun and engaging, rather than a chore.

This podcast is for parents, guardians, teachers and caregivers to learn proven strategies and trusted tips on raising kids, teens and young adults based on science, evidenced and lived experience.

You’ll learn the latest on topics like managing bullying, consent, fostering healthy relationships, and the interconnectedness of mental, emotional and physical health.

Links referenced in this episode:

• whereparentstalk.com

Foreign.

Welcome to the Where Parents Talk podcast. We help grow better parents through science, evidence and the lived experience of other parents. Learn how to better navigate the mental.

And physical health of your tween teen.

Or young adult through proven expert advice.

Here's your host, Lianne Castelino.

Welcome to Where Parents Talk. My name is Lianne Castelino. Our guest today is a best selling author and former venture capitalist.

Ted Dintersmith has worked in technology, public policy, business and education. He is also a documentary producer whose core interest lies at the intersection of education, innovation and the future of civil society.

Ted's latest book is called Aftermath the Math you Wish you Took. He's also a father of two and he joins us today from Jamestown, Rhode Island. Welcome and thank you for being here.

Yeah, great to be here.

I am excited about this conversation because we're not just talking about math, but math really has been a central focus of your entire life. Can you take us through when did it first manifest for you, this interest in math and why this subject matter? Why has it been so important to you?

Yeah, well, I'm old enough that grade school is a little bit hazy, so bear with me. But my early grades, I do recall never being on the honor roll because I had horrible penmanship grades back when that mattered.

When I was in, I want to say fourth grade, ish, I had a big test of an end of the year test that was basically how fast can you add, subtract, multiply, divide?

One of the things that I now write about as being not a terribly important skill, but one of the things I was good at was quick error free calculations with numbers. And so I did really well and suddenly I was viewed not as the bad penmanship student, but the really good math student.

And I think it's fair to say, I mean expectations become self fulfilling once everyone around you views you as being really good at something. It tends to fall in line.

And so from then on, math was a really signaling aspect of my performance in school and something I did really well on in terms of the the exams that came my way.

So following up on that, you've had math intense math focused roles over the years. You've got a PhD in engineering from Stanford. You've taken that concept though much further.

So what did those experiences teach you, if anything, about the impact of math on society as a whole?

Yeah, I'd say if somebody wanted to say, hey guy, you took way too many theoretical math courses in school, they would be on solid grounds. And so because I got a master's in physics. Physics, which was really lots of theoretical math and then a PhD in a math modeling program.

And so I did my share of that.

And I recall that the chairman of my applied math department at Stanford, years later, I was meeting with him and he said to me kind of, well, you know, all of the rote mechanics, all these symbols and equations and everything, none of that really matters. It's really the ideas behind this that matters.

And I was very fortunate because it was a graduate school program, very unusual even by graduate school standards, that was focused on all the topics I write about in my book. How do you estimate things? How do you predict things? What's an algorithm? What's it mean to optimize?

How do you use math and logic to make better decisions? What are creative moneyball statistics? What's probability beyond flipping a coin?

And I look back and I said, I used all of that every day, which was so interesting, right? But I use none of those almost 40 college and graduate school courses in math. None of the high school math. And you said, what a disconnect, right?

I mean, it's half the sat, it's half the nation's report card. It largely determines students prospects in life. It's kids that don't get a high school degree.

Think about what happens to a kid without a high school degree. And 80% cite algebra is the reason they didn't get their high school degree.

And so it's elevated to the highest level of importance, but it's something adults don't use. And I well, isn't that interesting? Holy moly. And that just got. I've been itching to write this book for quite some time.

And then, you know, after Covid, the nation's report card came out and you had all these newspaper headlines and media stories about the catastrophic results and the disaster and the, you know, people would write apparently with some degree of thought that our 9 and 13 year olds have lost 20 years of progress. Which, yeah, I sort of thought like it really is taking it back to minus 11 and minus 7 years old. I mean, I don't think so.

So I said I'm going to write this book. And I have. So there it is.

So, so what was your impetus for that? Because obviously it's a large question.

You know, we're talking about math scores and the way mat taught not just being an issue in North America, but globally. This has been a topic for, you know, several years now. So what was your the catalyst for writing Aftermath?

And what is the question that you're trying to answer as a result of this book?

Yeah, I think if you had to summarize it, I would say the story of education certainly in America, and I think it ripples throughout the world, is we teach kids what's easy to test, not what's important to learn the rote math esoterics that we quiz kids on. Can you invert a trig equation or can you do a closed form integral by hand or can you factor a polynomial?

Those are ideal 30 to 60 second questions that you can pack a standardized distribution, high stakes exam with. That's what we do.

It's baked into lesson plans, it's baked into the test, but it's also baked into the narrative that this is actually testing something that matters and it doesn't. You know, and I feel like this will sound immodest, but I felt like I was in a good position to make this point.

You know, I'm not carrying a grudge against math because I did well in it. You know, I go back to the slag rule days. I had published papers where I had to do closed form integrals by hand. So I know what used to be important.

And I've been side by side with technology that's made all the rote aspects of math irrelevant because the computer that, you know, you're looking at and I'm looking at does all of this perfectly. And yet as I visit schools, and I visited, I have to say, in the last decade, 500 schools and talked to thousands and thousands of kids and teachers.

When I ask about the core ideas of math blanks, people, people like, well, we never got to that. And. And yet we dwell in the world of arc secants and piecewise linear functions in the absolute value of negative 27.

And I just say, do you ever use that? No, I never use that. What about distinguishing between causation and correlation? What about revising your probability estimate based on new data?

What about algorithms that control your life? Do you understand those? What never came up and just say like, whoa, this is not a little gap. This is a gap the size of the Grand Canyon.

This is a gap from Rhode island to Toronto, Canada. And I feel like, man, somebody needs to write a book to explain and show this unbelievably interesting math that we can.

Each of my chapters starts with something that I either did or observed with K through 8 kids. It's not graduate school math estimation. I talk about kids estimating the number of jelly beans in a jar.

It's interesting and it's relevant in so many ways. In Life, but it's not taught. And the reason this is, I think, the critical point. Why isn't estimation taught in schools?

It's not taught because there's not one right answer. If we were to, say, estimate the number of trees within 10 miles of where you live in Toronto, that's an incredibly interesting challenge.

But there's not a right answer. Right? You could come up with 5, 10 different interesting approaches to it. It's creative, it's logic based, it requires rigorous thinking.

But you can't put it into a 45 second multiple choice question on a standardized exam.

We skip over estimating, we skip over all the stuff that matters that any of us can grasp because we want to focus on what can be boiled down to standardized tests that we administer in the United States. On a scale of tens of millions. A.

So you allude to the gap, let's call it a chasm between where we are and where we need to be. What is it going to take at a very base level?

So what needs to be done to get to where we need to be or at least on the course to where we need to be?

Yeah, it's a great question.

And you know, I've been doing this now, probably when you really looked at doing it in earnest, working on fostering innovation in schools, probably 13, 14 years into it with, you know, a lot of my time and a fair amount of my, my financial stuff. And I think if you went back and said to me how hard it would be to change schools, I, I would have, I said, it can't be that hard. Right.

You know, like, if you make your points and people believe them, which happens, right. You know, I give talks and I have films and I write books and I don't have anybody, no, no one ever challenged me and says, you're all wrong.

They're not that obvious. You know, they're not that subtle of points. I mean, you know, just, I just say give all the credit to Maria Montessori.

You know, like, go deep, explore, create, invent. My, my nonprofit partner for several years before he passed away was Sir Ken Robinson. You know, most watched TED Talk of all time.

Do schools kill creativity? Nobody throw, nobody threw tomatoes at Ken Robinson. People gave him standing ovations. Of course schools kill creativity.

Of course, when machines do, all the rote humans need to be creative, they aren't controversial points, but there's this baked in inertia to the school system that makes it very hard to affect change.

And so I think one thing that I have no say in but that's happening, I think, is AI eliminates millions of jobs, which it will, and particularly eliminates the jobs fresh college grads used to roll into. I think that's going to impart urgency and change mindsets, particularly parents.

I wish it weren't under such dire circumstances because there's nothing worse than pushing your kid for 16 years to do everything right and then having them say, you know, nobody wants to even interview me. That's not a great outcome for any concern, but that's going to happen.

But I also felt like if I could write a book in an approachable style that was interesting and fun, which I've tried to do, and make the math ideas so powerfully evocative and just say, here's what estimation is, and start with talking about estimating things like jelly beans in a jar or know I something I did with my kids for years, still do it every year, is that during the holidays, the local diner puts all these Christmas tree ornament balls on the ceiling. They put thousands of balls on the ceiling and we'll go and try to estimate how many are there.

And I use that to say, hey, I did this when my kids were like 6 and 8 years old. You know, this isn't graduate school math. This is really interesting.

And then use that to show not the details, equations, but to show the core ideas and then bring those ideas to light. In the context of how do you estimate Covid cases and deaths? How do you do a census? How do you estimate unemployment?

How do you estimate the number of bald eagle species in the lower four? You know, like all these areas in life that beg for estimation skills.

Then you read each of these examples or case studies and they're all short, they're all a page or so. I've worked really hard. I hope people will say that was really interesting.

I didn't realize that the numbers I see in my life all have a story behind them. They were all produced by teams of people trying to make an estimate.

Each estimate has its error bars, has its issues, has its definitions that you're assuming that may not be appropriate. Wow. When you have that math mindset, when you're equipped with that, it completely changes the way you view your world. And. And I hope that.

I hope I can do that to some extent. For those willing to read a book about math, which by the way, is my biggest challenge.

You know, you say to somebody, hey, you want to read a book about math? And most people say, oh, you're kidding.

Like, I never want to go.

I never want to return to that topic. I'm still bearing the scars of it.

Well, you know what? I think your book is very fascinatingly named, by the way. Aftermath is just a really smart, smart title when we talk about.

You alluded this group in what you just said. Parents. What would you say is a common misconception among parents about math and how it's being taught that you'd like to clear up?

Because that is a really important place to start is with that group of parents.

Yeah, no, it's a great question. And I love, by the way, the work you're doing on this podcast is terribly, terribly important.

You know, most parents I talk to, I mean, first parents always have the best of intentions, you know, and they'll often tell me, I just want my child to be happy. And, and then they'll go about it all wrong.

And so what I'd hope a parent will realize is first of all that by showcasing math, I'm highlighting fundamental misallocations of time and effort in education. And so I hope people will say and say, wait a minute, why would we hold schools and teachers and kids accountable to math?

They won't remember, won't use as adults, that machines do handle perfectly. So that's the first thing.

But I also think they're sort of baked into this view of the world that kids are either math people or you're not a math person. You're either a math person or you're not a math person.

And what I found is when you invite people to think about creative, interesting, open field math, a lot of the people that think they weren't math people are really good at it. And a lot of people who have been told you're a great math person by their grades and scores sort of struggle, right?

And, and it's, it's as though we're having everybody play one niche sport in Olympics when there are 50 other great sports you could play. And somebody who's not good at weightlifting might be really good at, you know, high, high, you know, diving or something, you know, who knows what.

And, and so curling with a Canada specialty. Yes. Yeah. You know, and so I, and then what I, what I really hope with parents, right?

And it's why I intentionally start each chapter with something that K through 8 kids can do is that it becomes part of dinner time or car drives and that's what I do with my kids. You know, I, I do, I do look at the world through the lens of math.

And I have found over and over again on any walk or car drive or dinnertime conversation, there are a million things that come up in life. You can turn it into an interesting math related challenge.

And that may sound like, wait a minute, you're going to have kids eat lima beans during dessert?

But it doesn't have to be that way because you know, parents out there, trust me, if you make it interesting, kids dive in, you know, and, and they will get really interested.

And when they start to think about the world in the context of math related ideas, suddenly, even though I would dispose of most of the math that's taught, particularly 8th grade through 12th grade, the math becomes at least tolerable or more interesting. And you can turn it around.

I think it's, I never see this in schools, but let me take a good example is kids are drilling and drilling and drilling Khan Academy lectures or videos on factoring polynomials, as though any adult in America ever has to factor x cubed minus 3x squared plus 2x minus 5. It's just like, wait a minute, no one does this, but you're going to spend hours of your life trying to figure out how to do it.

And not in all likelihood remembering it beyond the test, but you can turn that into an interesting lesson. Why did people at some point need to know that? How did this ever come up as a thing? What role did it play before we had computers?

That becomes really interesting. Even the vast wasteland of high school math. And I feel bad describing it that way, but I believe that's true.

You can turn that into something interesting if you start to look beyond it and figure out why it was used and why it was, who invented it, why did they invent it, what was it good for and why it's no longer important today.

So picking up on that, I mean, we are here because circumstances led us to be teaching math the way it is currently being taught and has not changed in many, many, many decades.

So with, you know, the Internet, which has now been around for a while, and technology and everything else, not, not the least of which is the emergence of AI. Like, where should this be in schools? And by this, I mean the way math is taught versus where we are.

And the fact of the matter is, is it should have been changed quite some time ago if you only factor in the Internet. Right. So how do we get to where we need to be going?

Yeah, I would love to be enthusiastic about the fact that schools will change quickly. You know, I'm skeptical, I think I should be skeptical, but I. Family time can change quickly, right? And so to parents out there, I would say this.

I'd say you could either push your kid to develop a strong academic track record to get into college where they'll spend four years and perhaps leave and not get a job.

That's option one, or you can help your kid understand ideas that are interesting and understand how to leverage AI, how to leverage machine intelligence to bring that to life and to have it have impact. I'll just give you an example.

I mean, a kid that's gotten perfect grades in high school, goes to college, graduates magna cum laude, but is only trained to carry out assignments, that kid will not be employable. It's harsh, but I mean the fact is AI is unbelievably powerful at carrying out assignments.

And so if you spent 16 years trained to carry out an assignment that AI does in 12 seconds for free or 20 bucks a month or something, why would somebody hire you? Right? And that's already playing out. We're already seeing that.

But if you, if, and I have a number of times in the book where I talk about here's the idea and here's how it enters the real world and here's how you can use AI to do all those mechanics. And if suddenly you are certainly 22, 18, 16, 12, and you're good at that, you can go to local businesses and help them.

Okay, let's take a look at what are the last 36 months of sales data. I know now there are different ways to go about predicting the future based on that.

I can do a little bit of a systems model because I know how to identify factors that might influence this.

I can ask AI to crank out a systems dynamic model for this and then play around and vary those parameters and develop a great analysis of likely future demand for our product. Well, you know, you don't need high school math. Like read my book. And you can do that, right? And practice and get good at it.

Do it on your own with some things that you care about.

Look at how many points the player on your local basketball team scored in the last 12 games and then try to predict, well, maybe they'll score in the next three. That's a really interesting prediction problem. I mean, very interesting.

And I think that's the role parents can play is to start to think about the world. What's a hook here that plays to my kids interests? You know, one kid might Love basketball, but another kid might hate it.

You know, that basketball example will not be good for a kid who's totally into, you know, some, some particular form of music or following an Internet influencer. And so let's look at the number of followers this influencer had over the last three years.

And you know, these are all really interesting challenges if you understand the ideas at play and get some practice prompting ChatGPT or I use Claude and chat, I use a lot of them because I use them to fact check each other. They're actually really good now at mathematical reasoning and getting better by the day.

But it's up to the human to know what the ideas are and know how they relate to what's going on in the world and to get good at leveraging AI.

And if schools won't do that or help kid get good at that, which they in all likelihood, and it breaks my heart to say it, but they probably won't, a family can. And a kid that's really good at that, they can write their own ticket. Right.

So you don't have to worry about whether they got into Waterloo or not or you know, some Ivy League college or not. Like everybody's going to want to hire them. You know, like it's not such a bad thing.

So when you talk about being good at math, you know, the way you talk about it versus what we understand today, what is it that parents, that you think parents need to understand about? What does it mean? What should being good at math actually look like for a young person today?

Yeah, I would say we'll talk about parents, but we could actually take one hop over for state legislators or you know, ministers of education or premiers or, or presidents or secretaries of education. You know, I think we need to understand that what we hold kids accountable is what teachers will teach and what the test will do.

And so if we say the standard of academic achievement is how many low level math problems you can get right in 45 minutes without wasting time. Right. You know, like what's, what's the advice that an SAT tutor gives a kid? That's the most, most high leverage advice they can give.

If you come across a problem that's hard, you're going to have to spend several minutes figuring out skip it. I mean like that's heartbreaking advice, but that's the advice I give.

And so to, to look at math more in a more nuanced way and to realize that the, this whole body of arc secants and cotangents and who the heck knows what else you Know the sum of angles in a hexa, hexagon or something is just there as this at best distraction and that if we can actually talk through and start to understand the ideas, it will be really fun and interesting conversation. It will be something Even at age 10 my kid can dive into. And that's what's going to serve them well.

That's what's going to give them a career advantage. That's what's going to help them be an informed, responsible citizen. So it's going to matter.

And it's like it's this great alignment between what's interesting and what matters. And it's just in that Venn diagram, interesting. And what matters overlap. But there's almost no overlap with that and the math of school.

So if you were given the opportunity to design a one hour math class, pick your age group, what would that look like? What would it entail?

I probably put in front of kids a handful of recent stories in the news and invited discussion of. And it would depend. You tell me the age group, I probably skew it, right? But in the United States we're a bit.

The interest is tapering down over the years but it's a baseball loving country and you've got the Blue Jays there in Toronto. Well, what are interesting statistics to tell you how valuable a player is and how would those statistics evolve? Let's talk that through.

And you realize that where our thinking used to be is totally different from where it is today. And there's this thing called wins above replacement. And how is that defined?

And what are three other ways you could define it that might make more sense to you? It's like these, every number has a story. And so finding I'd probably have four 15 minute sessions.

Try to pick a range of things that appeal to people. So might be one in sports, one in arts, one in civics and one in science business.

I mean I play around with those topics and then pick an example and say let's dive in. What do you think is going on with this?

And it's like all those things are unbelievably fascinating discussions and you realize, my gosh, it doesn't have to be multiple choice questions and worksheets and sweating it out for whether I can get three more questions right than the person next to me in the proctored test area so that I'm now in the top 8% instead of the top 13%. We put the highest of stakes on the most irrelevant of priorities.

How do you then see unseen mathematical forces like credit scores and you know, social media algorithms and data collection, et cetera, et cetera, shaping our decisions without us even realizing it.

Yeah. You know, not that these are deep, dark secrets.

I have discussions in my book about, you know, the Facebook engagement algorithm, you know, and they just realize that the way to keep, in an ad driven model, which it is then revenue depends on length of user engagement per session and what sparks longer sessions with more engaged community members are things that are outrageous. And so I talk through the algorithm, which is not a math based, it's not like 12 pages of equations, it's just what it means.

How do you go about identifying content that is relevant to a person that pushes them one step beyond where they are today and then talk about what Francis Hagen said, the whistleblower, and how they knew. I'm a tech person by background. I backed a lot of these companies.

Excuse me, I didn't back Facebook, but I backed a bunch of early pioneers in the Internet infrastructure area. But some of them are just irresponsible at best.

And I think you could probably go further than that and say they know what they're doing, they know how toxic it is, but at the end of the day, the choices between revenue versus toxicity, they're choosing revenue. And, and I think people need to understand that.

But, but all of these things, you know, like what we watch on Netflix, algorithms, our credit scores, algorithms. And for every algorithm there's a counter approach, right? So if you know the algorithm for your credit score, you know how to counter that.

You know that never shut down an existing account. You know that every n months, open up a new credit card and pay off the bill promptly.

You know, if you're buying a car, borrow some modest amount of money and then pay it off promptly. All of these things play into an algorithm that determines whether you're credit worthy.

You know, it's a bit of a game you're playing, but if the, if the world around you is playing that game, I don't think it serves you well to be oblivious to that game. And so the best defense is a good offense. What is an algorithm? How does it shape your life?

And I offer examples where you might create your own algorithm to improve your own quality of life. If I can say one more thing about algorithms, right? Algorithms are incredibly creative. We don't teach it because they're not one right algorithm.

There are several interesting creative ways with different trade offs for speed versus accuracy versus, you know, the different dimensions you're trying to optimize. And when you get into that, you just say oh, that's so cool. Oh, no. Now Facebook's trying to optimize ad revenue. Okay?

So that dictates a certain algorithm for what your content feed looks like. Got it. This is the basic idea behind how they decide what content priorities belong in your inbox, you know, or your newsfeed.

And, you know, I think that at least I'm hopeful, but, you know, the.

My early readers, I hope they're right in that it is interesting and it is fun and it is relevant, and I've done at least a decent job of bringing it to life in understandable ways.

So, as a parent, and for parents who listen to or watch this interview, taking in everything you've talked about, because we've talked about a lot, how math is taught versus what we really need to know about math, you know, innovation in education, you know, life skills, etc. Etc.

How can parents, at a very basic level, help their kids develop a more healthy relationship with math and, you know, a relevant relationship with math when they're faced with how it's being taught?

And at the same time, as you just outlined all the examples every single day of how math is in use, what is a baseline starting point for that parent?

Yeah, this is a gross oversimplifications, but. But I think parent. And I talk to a lot of parents, but I think they fall into three categories.

One is the overwhelming majority, which is parents who didn't do well in high school math, who don't think they're math people that sort of throw up their hands.

You know, maybe they don't throw up their hands in grade one through four or five, but once we start getting to, you know, certainly algebra, they just say, like, you know, I'm. I'm counting on the teacher, you know, like. Or I'll find a tutor if you've got the resources. Right.

I think those parents actually have far more math potential than they realize. So I hope they read the book and say, oh, my gosh, I can have great discussions with my kid about math.

That may not be the math they're studying in school, but could be an important path to helping them love math themselves and begin to develop a field for its relevance. So that that class, they're the ones that did do really well in school.

And I was probably guilty of this early with my kids of saying, I got this right. Oh, yeah, yeah, I know. I know how to.

I know how to invert, you know, like, fractions, and I know how to solve, you know, ratios of polynomials and things like that. So let me Just show you. Let me just show you.

Or, you know, and I think those parents need to, to back off a bit, right, and to say, yeah, okay, you're playing this game in school, I can help you play this game in school, but it's irresponsible, right, not to show the kid the broader picture. And so the parents that believe that they are great math people and some of them are, I think, have the opportunity to broaden the playing field.

And then there are the parents. That just was like kind of a given, you know, it's just like, I don't know, you know, like I don't, you know, I'm just at a loss, right?

And what I would love to say to those parents is, right, I don't care what your. Who your kid is. Every kid's got their talents and strengths.

You know, it's just that, as Sir Ken explained so powerfully, you know, and tragically, school largely crushes that out of kids. You know, it's a 130-year-old model that was expressly designed to prepare people for 45 years of career doing work.

That was a school model, the model we use today and in the United States. And I suspect it's true around the world as well, in most places, maybe not Finland, but. But we've decided to double down on rote.

We know that things aren't quite working. So let's just put higher stakes on these exams.

Let's just panic when kids miss one extra multiple choice math question after being out of school for two years because of COVID I mean, no, no, no, no, no.

And so for all parents, I hope they just sort of step back and say, whoa, there's a side of life that's really important and engaging and relevant and the fact that it has no overlap with school, so be it. I have discretion over what we do in our free time. And let's have some fun with this.

And I know that, I know I say that, and I know many people hearing will say, well, he says you can have fun with it, but I could never. I mean, I couldn't do that with my kid. And I just say, spend it.

I think you read this book in four or five hours, put in four or five hours, and you could have four or five years of great math discussions with your kid. Seems like a good trade off.

It does. We're almost out of time, but I did want to ask you one insight that you want readers of Aftermath to leave with.

Yeah. If you've got a kid, particularly for parents, if you've got a kid struggling with math. The problem is almost certainly not the kid.

It's probably the math and the way it's tested and so religious relax about that and, and look for things they're good at because the world's going to reward them for greatness. And increasingly, whether they got an A plus or a D minus on, you know, pre calculus, nobody's going to care. Right.

That's the good, bad and indifferent news.

But the powerful news about what's going on in the world is employers will be far more likely to hire a kid who understands important ideas and knows how to leverage machine intelligence to hire a kid who was magna cum laude through college. And that's already today happening. So you think about for kindergarten kids that that will be their world.

So I think it gives parents a chance to just sort of take a chill pill, you know, because most kids at some point come home and say, I hate math and I don't know why I'm having to study it. And I think if you're going to be honest with your kid, you should say there's really no reason you should study it. But you don't have to hate math.

Math is actually fascinating.

There's this entire body of modern era math ideas and let's start going through them and see what we can get out of it because it could be really fantastic interaction between a parent and child.

So much enlightening information and food for thought. Ted Dintersmith, author of Aftermath. Really appreciate your time and your insight today.

Thank you. Yeah, this was great conversation. Thanks.

Thank you. To learn more about today's podcast, guest and topic, as well as other parenting themes, visit whereparentstalk.com.