The Future of AI and Education (with Reed Hastings)

**Ravi Gupta** (0:00)
Welcome to the Lost Debate, a show for political eclectics. I'm Ravi Gupta, and in this episode, I'm gonna share a debate slash discussion between Reed Hastings, the former CEO, founder of Netflix, and Mike Goldstein, who I think has been on this podcast before, but he founded a charter school organization called Match. And Match was this high-powered charter school network that actually had live-in tutors above their charter school network. It's almost like real-world style for education, and had this incredible tutor-to-student ratio, and got really good results there. So Mike Goldstein is kind of pro-people-driven tutoring and skeptical of the AI-driven tutoring, and Reed Hastings is more bullish on the AI-driven technological tutoring. And this is, I think, a really big, important area of education policy and practice that isn't getting enough attention. And shout out to Andy Rotherham from Bellwether, who hosted that discussion. So I'm actually not in that discussion at all, but it was one of those rare things I was listening to that I was like, whoa, they did it on LinkedIn Live. I was like, our audience really needs to hear this. So we're going to play that in a second. But in the meantime, I've got a couple of things in my notebook. Number one, we have book events now for The Invisible List which comes out on September 22nd. You could pre-order it wherever you get your books. We have an event in New York City on September 22nd, Chattanooga, Tennessee, September 27th, Kansas City, Missouri, September 28th, and Nashville, October 6th. We're looking to add more cities to that. Obviously, if you want us to come to your city and you've got a relationship with a bookstore or just like a big enough circle, or if you have like a company or organization you want me to come talk to about the book, et cetera, you could reach out to us. You could email lexis at orangeboatmedia.com.
That's a lexis at orangeboatmedia.com. Also, if you pre-order the book, you could send her your pre-order receipt and we'll invite you to this thing called The Invisible Posse, which is a group of people who are all pursuing their passions for the year. And there are all kinds of things that come along with being at that posse. I just built a leaderboard for all of them so that people can kind of track their progress against their new hobbies or passions for the year. And it's been super fun and inspirational to see what people have been doing there. And for this podcast, moving forward, we're getting closer to the midterm elections. So that kind of discussion is going to dominate more in what I talk about at least between now and November. And I want to start by giving a couple sort of takeaways from things that have happened over the past week and beyond. The Atlantic ran an article about discussions within Trump world. So as background, Trump has a lot of money locked up in political action committees that he controls. And so much of the money that the Republican Party has is actually in their sort of national committees as opposed to their candidate committees, right? So you have the campaigns themselves with the candidates who raise money under their name and spend their money on what they call direct, right? Democrats are actually doing fairly well in the head to head on direct size raising, which means they're going to be doing more direct size spending. I'll talk more about this in a second. But the Republicans have been raising tons of money into these larger committees, whether it's the RNC or the MAGA PACs that are affiliated with Trump and his campaign.
Trump controls most of those. So there was this Atlantic article about well, what is Trump going to do about this? And it talks about internal discussions where Trump is pushing his people and or directing them to spend it on, like pushing his positives. And a lot of people were passing this around saying, go for it, Democrats being like, yes, please do that.
Spend this money on rehabilitating your image. And it is kind of funny in a certain way that Trump wants to spend this money instead of pulling up his candidates by name or attacking Democrats. He wants to rehabilitate his image. It is a little funny. It probably isn't the right strategy. This is what we in politics would call sort of optics spending. And it's called, another term they use for this is environmental lift, which means like, hey, whether Trump is popular or not actually determines a lot for how his candidates are going to do. So if you lift the environment, meaning lifting his positives, that will help his candidates. In a narrow sense, that's true. So I'm not on that sort of mocking the strategy corner. But I do think the history tells you that if the national climate is bad for your candidate, for your president, you want to localize each race. So instead of reminding them about the unpopular president or trying to improve the standing of the unpopular president, you want to go really hard on who is the specific candidate in the Senate race, why are they good, and then why is their opponent bad? And that's how you overperform relative to the national ticket, right? You think about historically for Democrats, for example, which kinds of candidates overperformed the tickets? Jason Kander in 2016, my good friend in Missouri, for example, is all about him, all about what made him different. And then you look at on the Republican side, Susan Collins, for example, right? She's always trying to, including this race, she's trying to separate herself from Trump and talk about what makes her uniquely beneficial to her state and including her role on the Appropriations Committee.