If you're a regular listener to this podcast, then you probably know that I'm deeply frustrated by our current educational system, especially when it comes to mathematics. So I'm very

excited about today's conversation with Conrad Wolfram, a mathematician

entrepreneur who have anyone I've ever met has the greatest insight into rethinking the way we should teach math

and other subjects as well. We're trying to mimic real life because part of what I think is really important in education

is get experience,

accelerated experience for what you're going to face in real life.

Welcome to people I mostly admire with Steve Levitt.

Conrad Wolfram isn't just a complainer, he's a door.

He's built a radical new math curriculum that bears almost no resemblance to what you and I experienced in high school.

And amazingly, he actually convinced the country of Estonia to adopt major pieces of his curriculum.

So I have to laugh when I think back to the first time that we met Conrad.

He was at a conference devoted to the teaching of math.

Right. And it was my first conference on the topic and I was quite surprised by

how emotional people were about math, how it was taught. The question of whether students should be, say, put into

different tracks according to their current level of math understanding, that would lead to heated debates.

And everyone was suggesting their own favorite tweak to the current way that we treat math,

mostly quite incremental, and everyone else would complain, no no that's a terrible change to make

then it's your time to present your ideas. You don't look like a revolutionary and with your British accent you don't really sound like a revolutionary but would you agree with my

characterization that you are roughly the most radical person talking about the teaching of math today?

Yes, and it's quite shocking to me actually that it's so shocking.

Basically in the end I'm saying new machinery came along and the real world fundamentally changed for this reason

but we forgot to change the subject that's mainstream to get people educated for this which

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