How can we bring more awareness of innovative education to parents?

Christine Renaud: 00:03

Welcome to The More the Brainier, the brave space where creative minds come to share and solve their most pressing burning questions. From Montreal, I'm your host, Christine Renaud, CEO of Braindate.

Over the last decade at Braindate, I've seen firsthand how peer-led discussions can be transformative. That's why, for each one of our three guests, I'll be guiding a conversation that helps them explore their most pressing burning questions.

And here with me in the studio today is Jane Gibb, our Creative Producer.

Jane Gibb: 00:55

Thanks Christine! Today we're joined by three incredible minds who are each tackling some of the most urgent challenges of our time through impact, education and global leadership. With us is Logan McClure-Davda, Head of Impact at TED, who spends her days amplifying world-changing ideas. We also have Navid Nathoo, Founder of The Knowledge Society, pushing the boundaries of how young people learn and solve real-world problems.

And last but not least, we have Ella Robertson-McKay, Managing Director of One Young World, a global organisation shaping the next generation of changemakers. Through their burning questions, we'll explore how to paint shells guilt-free, overcome the obstacles of outreach in innovative education and reclaim the middle ground in our polarized world. Over to you, Christine!

Christine: 01:46

Thank you, Jane. Navid, Logan, Ella, rebonjour and welcome back! So Navid, as our main guest today, you are the Founder of The Knowledge Society. But I also know that you're a deep thinker. You mentioned to us that in life you're also a philosopher. So can you tell us what's one of your favorite philosophical questions and why it resonates with you?

Navid Nathoo: 02:16

I think for me, it goes back to something Aristotle talks about. So he gives us an example of what is a good circle? A good circle is perfectly round. Then he goes on to say, well, what is a good chair? a good table? a good color red? and kind of defining what is good for these types of objects.

And then he takes that thought experiment and says, well, what is a good life? And that thought experiment has led all the decisions that I make in life. Because to me, that fundamental question of asking ourselves, well, what does a good life mean to me? And then acting accordingly to the definition of that, I think puts us on a more intentional life. And to me, life's a series of moments.

And one other thought I have about time is that the concept of the past and future don't really exist. The concept of the past is really just thoughts and the future is what will happen, but you're only ever living in the present moment. And so you only ever know that this moment is real at any given time. And so how do you maximize the present moment continuously? And tying that into one of the driving kind of philosophies for me, which is just doing things that matter. And so, just being intentional about what is a good life? How can I live in the best present moments constantly while doing things that matter, has led me to, you know, eventually just build TKS and, and be pushing the growth of this organization and the impact over the last almost decade now.

Christine: 03:55

This is fascinating. I actually studied philosophy as part of my bachelor's degree in education. And to be honest, I forgot most of it. But there's a concept that really stood out to me, which is a concept from Rawls, which is the veil of ignorance. And it's the idea that if you did not know where you will be born, how would you structure society to make sure that you end up in a good position?

And I think it's fascinating how some just what you say, know, the concept of a good life, how some very specific concept can be guiding lights in the way that we think about our lives. And I was wondering if Logan and Ella, if you have such, you know, mantras or concepts that you always come back to in order to help you make decisions and lead a good life.

Ella Robertson McKay: 04:46

I create two very different sources. I very much believe in the Ray Dalio framing of meaningful work and meaningful relationships. And sometimes what I'm thinking, gosh, should I join this board or voluntary committee or am I happy in my career? Is the work meaningful? and are the relationships meaningful?

And then on the other side, harking back to the podcast that we recorded last week, there's a bit of the Bible that says love one another. And I think that like ultimately that's my family motto as well. And I don't know of a better philosophy than love, I'm sure there are more sophisticated academic ones, but that's the one that I try and live my life by.

Logan: 05:21

Love feels like a real central theme here. Mine are not philosophical or I can't quote a philosopher, but I guess my guiding principles are: people are good. It's finding joy in the little things. My family always says it's the little things in life. You joked I'm a professional hype woman. I become obsessed with just random things that bring me a lot of joy like my favorite chapstick: I will send it to all of you! You have to buy it in bulk now! You know, or paying with exact change. I get so much joy out of that where there's this one part of the freeway that where I'm from that at nighttime if you're rounding the bend you can't see any car lights in front of you or behind you and it feels like you're just driving in total darkness on the 280 between San Francisco and Menlo Park. And I think if you live your life really finding joy in those things that helps other people enjoy life in the world around them too.

Christine: 06:16

I love how you see magic everywhere, Logan. This is like, this is so inspiring and refreshing. And back to you, Navid. So when you're not philosophising, you're busy building a knowledge society. So would you tell us a bit more about what that is and what kind of impact it's having?

Navid: 06:34

My brother and I started TKS in 2016. And that was shortly after my first company was acquired. and I was actually living in the Bay area in Mountain View. And then the company moved to Redwood city, Box.com if you've heard of it, my brother was at McKinsey and we kind of came together and said, okay, well, what do we want to do now? And we were in my, we were in my hot tub and you know, that's where the best, you know,

That's where the best philosophical conversations happen in the hot tubs. And so he asked me, if we had $10 billion in the bank, what would we do? And when you're thinking 10 billion, like it's very difficult to spend 10 billion. Like, let's think about it. You buy the cars, you buy the houses, you buy the clothes, the technology, you've maybe spent a hundred million. You have 9.9 billion left, right? And so at that number, it's how do you want to spend your time?

And so for me, it was, I wanted to solve the world's biggest problems. Like that's how I would spend the rest of my life. And there's really two ways to do it. The first way is to invest capital. And the second way is to actually solve it yourself. And so when we thought about capital investment, you look at cancer, for example, you look at poverty, malnutrition, maternal mortality, energy storage, energy distribution, climate. We're pushing a lot of money into these areas, but there's not a lot of impact. There's not a lot of outcomes that are coming into it.

impact billions. So that was: 2016

The first bucket is, our alumni that have gone on to start companies. so the, you know, some of these people are like Ben Nashman who started Senex Medical. They figured out non-invasive glucose detection. So non-invasively detecting glucose without like puncturing your skin, uh, which is nuts. So they just recently raised a hundred million dollars around and they're, they're doing really well. And our oldest alumni is 25. So I think Ben is probably 25 now. Jay Parthasarathy, he's at Atomic Semi. They're building, um, small semiconductor fabrication. Samarth, he's building Axiom. It's a biosensor company. Jake, he's building Pilgrim, which is a biotechnology company. Ananya, she's building a company called Quandr, which is an AI video generation company. All these alumni have raised venture capital, right? They're in their early 20s, some of them late teens. Valkyrie, Fora, which is doing wildfire, InsureTech. Ayan and Rishi is building elderly tech called Phallix. Adam, ThirdWeb, which is a Web3 company. Luke, RunPod, which is cloud GPUs. So a lot of these like hundred million dollar slash multimillion dollar companies have been founded by TKS alumni.

And then there's the second category, which is some of the youngest employees at the most recognisable companies you can think of are TKS alumni, SpaceX, Tesla, DeepMind, Figure, Apple, LatchBio. They're all TKS alumni. For example, Bonnie's at DeepMind, Arian's at Figure, ShugN was working at the star link, you know, the machine that beams internet to the world. So she was working on the battery technology at star link and she actually started learning about batteries and TKS. was like her year end project at TKS and her partner for that project, Alishpa. She was at Tesla working on the batteries there on cell modeling. And so it's really cool to see how the alumni go and take what they learned in TKS and apply it to the real world. Cobal is doing machine learning at Apple. She was learning about machine learning when she was in TKS and then.

The third bucket is deep tech and deep research. So a lot of alumni are working at places at labs like in Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Oxford, you kind of name it, they're probably there, working to solve some sort of important problem with scientific research. And so the outcomes are pretty amazing. I'm really, really proud of the alumni and what we've built. And so that's kind of what I focus on heads down every single day. And I love it.

Christine: 12:08

That's amazing. And did any of the alumni did a talk at TED?

Navid: 12:13

Multiple alumni have done TED Talks and multiple have also done it at C2, which is where we initially connected our organisations. And so really grateful for that.

Christine: 12:24

Yeah, and for sure I wanted to mention that I think that something that really stands out when you meet a TKS student or alumni is the confidence that they have, even if they're 13 years old. There's a saying that I really love that actually guides my work as an educator, which is that children are not the citizens of the future, they're the citizens of today. Like this idea that you you're preparing somebody to eventually be a citizen is not something I believe in. And I think TKS and the students and the alumni is such a great example of that.

I would love, Navid, if you shared with us your burning question and add any context you might feel is relevant for us to understand.

Navid: 13:13

Yeah, so I am not a marketer. I love building the infrastructure, the curriculum, the programs, working with the students. And after almost a decade, I don't think the world knows about TKS, the results it's getting, the effectiveness of the program, and the value to young, driven, curious students. So how do we expose TKS to more parents around the world? That's my burning question.

Christine: 13:40

Thank you, Navid.

Before we dig in with some thoughts, I would love if Logan and Ella, you could share any clarifying questions you might have. Just as a reminder, it's not a time yet to share insights or thoughts. Just really just asking Navid some context that might be helpful for us to provide some of that guidance.

Ella: 14:10

I would just love to understand a bit about what your current strategies are to connect with people, how you see TKS showing up in the world and kind of what you have coming down the tracks as well because I'm sure you guys are innovating and doing really creative and exciting things and there's nothing worse than someone saying, have you tried this? And you're like, yeah, yeah, yes, we did try that very obvious thing, thank you. So save me and Logan from teaching you how to suck eggs.

Navid: 14:37

Yeah, there's a few different channels that we focus on. The first one is obviously our existing network. So our existing students, our existing parents, our alumni and the mentors in the program. And so the word of mouthpiece is the biggest pipeline of the curious driven students that come in every year. So that's been great. The kids, the alumni love the program, the students love the program. And so that helps a lot, of course.

The second channel is schools and youth organisations. That's a hit or miss. And the reason it's a hit or miss is two things. Number one, a lot of schools have got back to us and say, you know, our students don't have time for this because TKS runs during the school year. And so unfortunately, they don't even share with their students because they want to keep them focused on school, which is the whole reason why we built TKS because school is not enough, especially for these driven, young, ambitious kids.

The second thing is the program costs money. And even though we've offered two and a half million dollars in financial aid just this year alone to students, because it's needs-blind when students apply. If they're accepted, they're granted financial aid if they need it. The fact that there's a price tag is something that schools and organizations are really allergic to. And it's really tough for me because we all know as an organization, you have to pay employees and where does that money come from?

You know, it's not like we're a huge margin business. We're not making a ton of money and scaling and all this stuff. And so of course we have to charge some level of tuition. And when we did try to raise money from corporates, a few of them have supported, which is great, Shell, Microsoft, IKEA, Interact. You know, there's a bunch of them that we really love and support, Walmart.

However, the amounts are not enough and there's no strong incentive to give more because we deal with high school students. And what I've learned is that companies care about talent, but high school is just way too young. And because we focus on that, it doesn't really fit into any bucket and CSR is not a great bucket to be in for long-term sustainability of a program like this. Ella, I could see you cueing that, yeah. So that's the second, schools and orgs.

And then the third one is probably social media. Our Instagram is something that we focus on, our YouTube. so our Instagram is TKS world HQ and, we have some really great content on there, cause that's where kids are. And so we're focusing on creating great content, but if we want to focus on parents, I don't think that's what parents are looking at. You know, we have close to 20,000 followers on Instagram. They're all kids. So the, the parent networks are a little bit harder for us to tap into.

And that's where my, kind of thoughts are going right now, is how do we get more exposure to parents, especially parents of driven young people? MENSA is a really great example of an organization that we had some collaboration with, and those parents seem to really love TKS. But it's not just for the MENSA kids. TKS is not for crazy, crazy high-IQ kids, and that's all. It is just for driven, curious, ambitious kids, regardless of their IQ levels or EQ levels or whatever. It's the mindset that we really look for.

Christine: 17:57

Logan.

Logan: 17:58

I have the same question as Ella, but with that additional context, Navid, I'm curious, can you share a little bit more about how your financial aid works right now? You mentioned the needs blind piece, but where is that funding coming from?

Navid: 18:14

About half of the financial aid comes from TKS as an organisation. Two thirds comes from partner organisations and one third directly comes from my brother and I. So we offer something called the NN Full-Ride Scholarship and we gave about $300,000 last year, I think a little bit more actually. And so those are kind of the three areas that financial aid comes from.

Logan: 18:37

You mentioned the like needs blind process. Is that the same for all access to those three buckets of financial aid? So people are applying and if they need financial aid, they'll get it. Or is there an opportunity to kind of apply? Yeah, I guess maybe I'll stop the question there.

Navid: 18:55

So how the application process works is they fill out a written application, they get selected for an interview, they do the interview, and then they get accepted to the program. Once they're accepted to the program, it asks them if they need financial aid. So we don't know if they need financial aid when they're applying. Then when they're accepted, they indicate they need financial aid. Then that gets sent to our financial services team where they provide certain documentation, some reasoning, and then they're provided support financially.

And then there's actually a more one-on-one discussion with those people. So we actually have like a team of people internally to support financial aid, which is another cost that we build. Because again, my mission is how do we create these unicorn people? And unicorn people don't just come from affluent families. We have kids from around the world. We have kids from villages in India and places in Nigeria, Brazil. And so it's really important that when we think about financial aid, it is creating accessibility to these people because the next kind of people who cure cancer can be from Bangladesh or Singapore or South America.

Logan: 19:57

Can I ask one more clarifying question, Christine? You mentioned the program running primarily through the school year. Are there any programs that don't run through the school year?

Christine: 20:07

That's a great question.

Navid: 20:10

This year, we just launched a summer program with UCLA. So that's our first summer program that we're launching. Really excited about that. A lot of our alumni was like, that's a no brainer. You should have did that like five years ago. We're excited to launch it now. So we have now one, I guess, like offering that is during summer.

Logan

Awesome.

Christine: 20:31

And Navid, would you tell me who currently registers? Where do they come from in terms of where did they hear about you? What's their profile? So basically, like, who is your marketing already working with?

Navid: 20:44

It's usually the students that are driving their applications and process. And the parents kind of learn about TKS once the student gets accepted, which is like a whole other issue, because then we have to educate the parents and they have calls with us and they're like, what is this organisation? What did my kid get accepted to? You know?

And so we want to bring the parent in earlier because what we found is that when we started TKS, it was actually very uncool for a parent to tell their kid to join TKS. Now it's actually not you know, parents, kids are getting excited about TKS, even if their parents or teachers are telling them about it, which is great. They are applying directly. The channels they're applying from is kind of what I said earlier. The biggest buckets are referrals from existing students and alumni, as well as hearing about it from schools and organisations.

Christine: 21:30

And what would you like, you would like to grow in terms of the growth you would like to have? What would it look like?

Navid: 21:37

We offer programs in person and virtually. So we operate in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, New York. We're launching San Francisco in Seattle this year, and we have a program in Dubai. Then we have a virtual program from kids from over 500 cities around the world. Right now there's over thousand active students in TKS. The strategies of attracting students, we have both in-person strategies as well as global virtual strategies.

And so when we, for example, in San Francisco, how do we specifically focus on parents in San Francisco who have kids that could be a great fit for TKS? And then when we think globally, how do we make sure that just people in general know about TKS because anyone anywhere is able to access this program as long as they have an internet connection and a laptop.

Christine: 22:25

Thank you, Navid.

It's time for you Navid to sit back take it all in while Ella and Logan work their magic. So ladies any thoughts ideas for Navid?

Ella: 22:44

Well, first of all, I just want to say what a brilliant job you and your brother have done, Navid. And as someone who also leads a youth leadership organisation, it's just so great to see people also taking, you when you and your brother clearly could have done a million and one things with your life, picking the potential of young people and young leaders as being the thing you wanted to pour your heart and soul into is just so wonderful. And we just need so much more of that. So thank you for what you are doing for young people.

I think a couple of strategies, some of which may be relevant to you and some of which may not be. I'm conscious that like in the international market, there are a lot of different kind of intervention points that parents, where parents will seek advice and guidance on their children's education. So forgive me, because I'm based in the UK and I appreciate that all your programs are state side.

Although one of my best friends has recently moved to New York and she said, everyone warned me about crazy New York parents. So she was really nervous about “crazy” New York parents. And she said, compared to London, these guys are so laid back. you know, we have our own breed of crazy over here. I think that you're right on word of mouth and referral and within parenting, because it's such an intimate kind of thing, that is really important. And it's about trying to identify places of intervention where parents are.

I would say that actually, like, I mean, the UK, we have Mumsnet, but even like, this is one of the few areas in the world where Facebook as in the original Facebook still seems to really like carry a lot of weight is neighbourhood Facebook groups, neighbourhood parenting groups, and using those as like quite, it seems quite old fashioned, but like moments of intervention.

The reason why I think of those is because at One Young World, we have to do a lot of good app, like a lot of direct outreach on recruitment. So whilst we do get a vast number of applications coming from young leaders all around the world, we do talent scout as well. And we do reach out to young people who we think are going to be great for our programs. Clearly dealing with minors, like it's about trying to find parents where they are, but they are in Facebook groups and they are discussing, does anyone have a Latin tutor? Does anyone know a flute teacher? Those kinds of things. And those are actually quite rich picking grounds for referrals. I wondered, and that's just like a kind of tactical thing.

The second one might be parenting champions. And those could be people who are either parenting coaches or college coaches, people who do SAT prep, people who run college preparation courses and so on, and identifying essentially a network of people who are influencers in that space, know, those ideally that come from a range of different backgrounds, but essentially like picking 10 people who each could reach a couple thousand parents through the networks that they have. And that might be, you know, even children's authors or someone who has like influence in that demographic and asking them to be champions or ambassadors for TKS. And that could look like a bunch of different things, but I think they could be useful.

And then finally, and this may be something that you're familiar with already, but like college recruitment, college recruit affairs and the kind of industry association events for college recruiters, because it's the kind of thing that if college recruiters are saying, yeah, we love kids who've done TKS, that is quite a close knit group of people who are then speaking to other people of influence.

And it's the kind of thing that like, when people knew that Peace Corps looked good or Habitat for Humanity or whatever, once those things kind of pick up a buzz, you know, there is a sense of it being a prestige thing. These may well all be strategies that you're well into, so apologies if so. But I think then finally, I would say on word of mouth, and I would say with One Young World, you know, we still would love to go so much further, but this was the first year that I spoke to some of our applicants when I was like...and how do you know about One Young World? And they were like, well, everyone knows about One Young World in our circles. Like lots of people like said to us, you've got to do it. Like I heard from a number of people, I admire. And that was really the first time for me in 15 years that that had been the case. So I would say like it's, it will be a tipping point and that will come and you're clearly getting great applications and doing a great job.

But I'm sure that by tapping into a couple of key networks and those being your focal grounds that you can help build up some momentum on what sounds like a program that like every… can you imagine if we had this kind of stuff when we were growing up? Like, there was nothing like this. You know, there was like the national debating team was like the one thing I knew that would like help me get into university. Like someone told me that, so then I just spent my whole time going to debating competitions. How uncool. This sounds like a much cooler opportunity.

Christine: 27:12

Thank you, Ella. Logan?

Logan: 27:14

My gosh, Ella, I did the same thing. And they were really just like an excuse to be in a hotel with like high schoolers you didn't know. You know, I went to an all-girls school too. They were not groovy. Let's, let's be honest.

I mean, I echo Ella's gratitude and enthusiasm for the work, Navid, because this is so cool. And actually, as I was preparing for our conversation today, some of our friends have 11 year olds. And I literally sent, because I hadn't heard of TKS and I sent it to them and be like, when Lulu's 13, we've got to get her into this. So I am a champion, although I don't know that many 13 year olds yet.

of, y

So the first thing that came to mind was summer camps, just thinking, and it sounds like that's already on your roadmap. I mean, that is the conversation in all parent circles is, especially for working parents, is kind of what are really meaningful, interesting things that our young people can do during the summer that feel exciting and quite honestly different than school? So that feels like kind of not low-hanging fruit, but probably a really valuable place to be.

The next is, was the kind of school strategy. I hear you that probably working with schools is hit or miss, but I wonder if there's a way to transition the thinking from working directly with schools to actually thinking about the school strategy ou know, once you get one to two participants from a school community, then it starts to kick off that kind of word of mouth piece. So I wonder if the strategy as an example in New York, it's like, okay, we want to make sure there is conversation about TKS in these 10 schools. So let's do kind of targeted outreach to young people at those schools to kind of flip them such that they then the community there is talking about this.

So less of direct relationship with the school and more actually targeted outreach to young people at those schools such that, you know, then XYZ school becomes a community that you regularly draw from. And I'd be curious to hear, you know, is it one student that's sufficient? Is it two, you know, and working to kind of flip those communities such that they then are talking about this work.

I also was thinking about the parent champions or just kind of champions piece, how I'd imagine that there's kind of the old school, you know, host like a Tupperware party. to, you know, for young people and parents to learn about TKS from other young people who participated in this, you know, once you start to have champions in those schools, because I think it is about selling the parent almost more so than the young people to your point. And that's a testament to the great program that you guys have created.

The next idea was around philanthropy. So there's kind of two buckets here and this may be difficult to do because you want real buy-in from the young people. You want them to apply into this, but is there a way to get significant philanthropic dollars either regionally or focused on a specific community of young people to underwrite seats for participation, which then you know, removes the barrier to entry to apply, just kind of seeing that there is a price and not knowing if you're going to get financial aid is enough of a barrier for some people.

So thinking about philanthropy that focuses on the Bay Area, for example, Crank Start, huge, incredible foundation focused on young people, what's focused on the improvement of the wider Bay Area. And they do a lot of stuff on education. You could think about I'm making this up, but holding X number of seats for young people who wouldn't otherwise be able to participate in your programs, they still apply into it, but as a way to bring in kind of funding and to bring it to new communities and schools. And you could do the kind of philanthropy, either regionally focused philanthropy or a subset of young people. And presumably you guys actually do this, but thinking about the collaborations with other leadership or youth organisations and groups feels interesting and valuable and ways to share. What are the ways that you can kind of welcome participants from one community organization into TKS and vice versa?

Christine: 31:35

Thank you, Logan, that was extremely rich and helpful. I wanted to really go back to the basics and talk about target market. I'm really wondering about if, Navid, you've ever thought about homeschoolers. I'm sure that many of your participants are homeschoolers. Like, they have the time. They're always looking for programs. I've been a homeschooling mom for four years, and this is like, you want that curriculum. Like, it helps you to structure the unstructured learning that's going on in your family. Because now that I am a schooling mom, I can tell you that I'm completely overwhelmed with existing school and homeworks and I could not imagine putting anything on top of it. So I wonder for your year-long programs if homeschooling could be a good community. And then I'm listening and I'm really thinking about, again, like back to basics, like what's the target market? How many people in which city? Which cities you want to focus on? Which segment of the youth population do you want to focus on? Do you want to have a cohort where you have 10 members per countries or per cities that you targeted? It reminds me of a program I did when I was younger called The Ship for World Youth by the Government of Japan. And it was 10 people from 12 countries plus 150 Japanese youth. And that was easy to target. And you can build the networks. You can build a partnership so you know exactly what you're looking for. Because for me, just thinking to offer TKS to all children, all youth everywhere over the world. That's a 10-year goal, that's a 20-year goal, but what is your next year's goal? Where are you focusing? And that will obviously really help, I think, to focus on the right partnerships and growth that can be measured and makes you feel that you're accomplishing the type of initiative that you want to accomplish.

Thank you, Ella and Logan. Navid, you are now allowed to speak, and I would love to hear your main takeaways from our discussion.

Navid: 33:38

I think just a lot of good insights. The WhatsApp groups, Facebook groups, those kind of parent groups, that's something that I'm going to go deeper into and see, you know, what have we missed, what's out there, especially in other major cities. I want to check in on a lot of the existing partners we have and see how we can deepen the collaborations a little bit more. It's interesting because some student organisations I find think like we're competitive.

And I think it's because there are some student groups that are doing it as a business and then some student groups are doing it out of passion. And obviously I'm doing it purely out of passion. So I don't even think about the word competition when it comes to education, but trying to figure out who are those ones that are more collaborative and doing it for the kids. The parent coaches and influencers one's really interesting. I want to do a deep dive in that and see who are these like parent influencers and then digging into the college and SAT prep part that you mentioned.

It's interesting because we did talk to the SAT and college prep side of things, but they're actually very focused on just selling their services. It is a massive multi-million dollar business, if not billion dollar business. I mean, without saying too much, because I could, I get really negative on this, but it is, it is about money. Like it's, we will get your kids into these universities if you give us money. And it is very much transactional. Your kids are not getting smarter by doing SAT prep or college prep. They are just, you're just paying for that.

And I think most people know that, unfortunately it's education and they don't really care about education. They just care about the transaction. Not trying to be negative. It's just what we're seeing what it is. College recruiting events is really interesting. Cause I think colleges are looking for a top tier talent and high quality talent. And it's just what, what scale, you know, do we matter? You know, do we matter at the thousand active students or are we like inconsequential at that number? You know, that'd be interesting to kind of learn more. So I'm going to dig deep into that.

Logan, you said about summer camps being something that parents are talking a lot about, that's good to hear. And even though it's like small data points hearing this, I'm hearing it more in every conversation I'm in when I mention it. So it's good to know that. And I think we will double down on the summer camps and the partnerships with different universities and scale that out. Hopefully this year shows to be a good success. It's interesting because the programmes that we're using for summer camps is not the TKS programme.

It's actually part of the TKS programme. So we have a specific AI programme and we have a specific pre MBA programme. So once more business and once more technology, whereas TKS is like across the whole spectrum. Like you get, you get exposure to a lot of different things in the 10 months. Then yeah, homeschool network, Christine, like that, we, did do that. And I need to check with my team if they are focused on that this year, cause it did slip my mind. So really good reminder to look into that.

ts attend, filtered from like: 2000

That's actually what we're doing with Dubai. One of our great champions and partners is the Dubai Future Foundation. That's the organisation behind the Museum of the Future. And so they actually brought TKS to Dubai, which is why I'm also in Dubai right now. And so how do we find more forward thinking organisations like that? Interestingly enough, the government in the Middle East is extremely supportive, extremely strong, extremely forward thinking. Whereas I find companies in North America are more supportive and forward thinking. And so just kind of building out the strategies on those pieces. So those are a lot of the takeaways I got. I wrote down more here, but that's all to say, really appreciate kind of the thoughts and advice. And if other things kind of spark as you guys are thinking about this, you know, if you do think about this, just shoot me an email. I would really appreciate kind of any and everything that you think of.

Christine: 38:13

Thank you, Navid. And the call out goes also to our listeners. If anybody has thoughts and ideas for Navid, we will be happy to relay the information. Ella and Logan, thank you so much for your contributions. Again, so helpful and relevant. And thank you so much also to Jane Gibb, our Creative Producer here at The More the Brainier, and to Jenya Sverlov, our delightful sound engineer.

Jane: 38:43

Thanks Christine. If today's conversation with Navid has sparked ideas of your own about bringing innovative education to more parents, we'd love to hear from you! Please share your thoughts on Braindate's LinkedIn page where we'll be posting this episode.

Next Tuesday, we'll hear more from Ella Robertson-McKay from One Young World. She'll share her burning question about finding common ground in our divided world. And we'll take a closer look at her work bringing young leaders together and how we might build bridges instead of walls. We hope you can join us!

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