Joe Liemandt says middle school is where girls decide they're "not math people." But there isn't one study that backs that up. Peter Attia: "Think of all the kids that are in sixth, seventh and eighth grade who are good students in other domains. They're doing well in English, they're doing well in history, they're conscientious, they work hard, but they've created a narrative that says I can't do math." Joe Liemandt: "It's an epidemic of kids who come into middle school, predominantly girls. I have two daughters. Who come in and they're like, I'm not a math science girl. And there's just, like, society's accepting it. Okay, let's go read all the learning science papers about how middle school girls can't do math science. Okay, there are none. That doesn't exist. But it's this total meme that they believe. "There's this concept of, oh, I'm an art girl or I'm an English girl. Girl, boy, there's just no difference. We have some seniors this year. The first one, she is doing the first all-teen produced, created musical for Broadway. So she'd be, I'm an arts theater girl. 790 math SAT. Another girl is trying out to be Miss Teen USA. 790 math SAT. Third girl, this is my daughter, she's got millions of likes on TikTok. Top 1% in teen math. "There's this concept that these people can't learn it. They all can. Now, what do you have to do when they come into middle school? They don't know the multiplication tables. They don't know the prereqs. They are going to struggle in algebra. So you're like, okay, let's go back, let's fill them up. And all of a sudden, once you fill the holes, they can do it." Hi! If you're new here, I'm Toan. I homeschooled at 15, graduated at 16, and got my bachelor's at 18. Now I write about education, learning science, and psychology. Also building @GeniusGTX. Follow me at @LearningToan if that interests you. And if you're building something in EdTech or education, I'd love to catch up and hear what you're working on. Joe Liemandt, founder of Alpha School, on The Peter Attia Drive

Jordan Peterson says creativity and conscientiousness have no correlation. That's why someone like Elon Musk is one in 100 million Jordan Peterson: "He also appears to me to be hyper conscientious, and I know people who've worked with him. Musk isn't just a creative genius, he's also an extremely conscientious engineer. And really conscientious engineers, they have very interesting minds. When my brother-in-law understands something, he understands how to build it out of atoms. He understands it at every single level. "Musk appears to me to be someone who's this rare combination of hyper creative but also hyper conscientious, and I know that he works all the time." Chris Williamson: "Does that hypertrophied executive function help to wrangle some of the diffuse creative energy?" Jordan Peterson: "Yes, definitely. Eric Weinstein's a good example. I hope Eric isn't annoyed by this, but Eric is unbelievably creative, but he's not particularly conscientious. And I think he found an occupation where that works extremely well, because he worked with Peter Thiel for quite a long time as his idea man. "Musk is hyper creative and, as far as I can tell, hyper conscientious, and the conscientiousness does focus. Lots of people who are creative aren't conscientious. Well, it's rare. There's no correlation between creativity and conscientiousness. So if you're the most creative person in a thousand and you're the most conscientious person in a thousand, you're one person in a million. And Musk is probably more like one person in a 100 million, something like that, maybe more." Hi! If you're new here, I'm Toan. I homeschooled at 15, graduated at 16, and got my bachelor's at 18. Now I write about education, learning science, and psychology. Also building @GeniusGTX. Follow me at @LearningToan if that interests you. And if you're building something in EdTech or education, I'd love to catch up and hear what you're working on. Jordan Peterson, clinical psychologist, on Chris Williamson's Modern Wisdom

Ezra Klein says even Ivy League professors can't assign the books they've taught for decades anymore. Their students just can't do it. "Here's a statistic I've been thinking about recently. In 1976, about 40% of high school seniors had read six books or more for fun. Only about 11% hadn't read a single book for fun. Today, those numbers are basically reversed. About 40% haven't read a single book for fun. "If you are looking for this, you see it everywhere right now. There are all these headlines about how kids are not reading the way they once did. There are all these stories quoting professors even at Ivy League universities about the way in which when they try to assign the reading that they've been assigning their entire careers, their students, they just can't do it anymore. "We're losing something. We can see it on test scores that over the last decade we just see the number of kids reading at grade level slipping. Then of course the pandemic accelerated that. So if you were simply asking how are the kids doing on some of these intellectual faculties that we once thought were the core of what education was trying to promote, they're not doing well. "And then as if we summoned it, as if we wrote it into the script, here comes this technology, generative AI, that can do it for them." Hi! If you're new here, I'm Toan. I homeschooled at 15, graduated at 16, and got my bachelor's at 18. Now I write about education, learning science, and psychology. Also building @GeniusGTX. Follow me at @LearningToan if that interests you. And if you're building something in EdTech or education, I'd love to catch up and hear what you're working on. Ezra Klein, journalist, on The Ezra Klein Show

Is genius genetic or practiced? Take chess for example, Magnus Carlsen says plenty of couples are both chess grandmasters, but he can't think of one whose kid became a grandmaster Joe Rogan: "We still don't exactly know how much information is transferred between parents to children, and it seems like there's a lot of talents, whether it's singing talent or sports talent, that you have to wonder, is that coming from genes or is that coming from the environment the child grows up in, or is it a combination of all those factors?" Magnus Carlsen: "The reaction in the chess community, at least with certain people, was more along the lines of: how could such a lousy player have such a good son at chess? With my dad. "And the fact is as well that there are many couples where both mother and father are Grandmasters in chess, but I don't think any of them have had sons or daughters that are Grandmasters. Whereas you see, like in the NBA or the NHL or in football or wherever, it happens all the time. I cannot say exactly why that is, but it does suggest that it's not a given, at least with genetics." Hi! If you're new here, I'm Toan. I homeschooled at 15, graduated at 16, and got my bachelor's at 18. Now I write about education, learning science, and psychology. Also building @GeniusGTX. Follow me at @LearningToan if that interests you. And if you're building something in EdTech or education, I'd love to catch up and hear what you're working on. Magnus Carlsen, world chess champion, on The Joe Rogan Experience

Joe Liemandt says a kid can finish any full grade of math in 26 hours. School spends 180 days on it. Here's the trick: "A teacher in the front of a classroom, it's not their fault. I'm an eighth grade teacher. What do you teach? Eighth grade material. And I have kids who don't know some third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh material. What do I do? "This is why so many people hire tutors after school at private schools. It's crazy. We have all these people go to private schools and hire after school tutors because the school doesn't teach them. And the tutor's just like, okay, I'm going to go give you the earlier grade level material. That's it. "All these hundreds of kids coming in who are 3 years behind, seven years behind. What I tell the parents is, that's freaking you out cuz nobody wants their kid this far behind, but it's so easy to fix. The remediation on this stuff is no time at all. When you use these learning science-based AI tutors and the apps that we have, kids can learn 10 times faster. 10 times faster. "There's 180 school days, an hour a day plus homework, so a couple hundred hours, most of grade one subject. It takes our Alpha kids between 20 and 30 hours to finish an entire grade level to mastery. So you can take fourth grade math and be like, you got 26 hours, kid. You do an hour a day of homework. You're 26 days away." Hi! If you're new here, I'm Toan. I homeschooled at 15, graduated at 16, and got my bachelor's at 18. Now I write about education, learning science, and psychology. Also building @GeniusGTX. Follow me at @LearningToan if that interests you. And if you're building something in EdTech or education, I'd love to catch up and hear what you're working on. Joe Liemandt, founder of Alpha School, on The Peter Attia Drive

Angela Duckworth on how talent is just how fast you improve. And in her data, the most talented people often don't keep showing up: ↓ "Here's my definition of talent: talent is the rate at which you increase in your skill with effort. Some people are going to increase their skills faster than others, and I think it's legitimate to say those are the quick studies, those are the talented people. "But in my data I find two things. One is that more talented individuals don't always keep showing up. Woody Allen famously once said 80% of success in life is just showing up. There are many people who could write a great book, or who are talented in the sense that when they write they get better faster, but they'd never finish what they begin. So what I find in my data is that talent is no guarantee of actually showing up and finishing the things that you start. "The second thing characteristic of high achievers in any domain is this kind of daily discipline of trying to get better, sometimes in microscopic, infinitesimally trivial ways. All those little details add up to excellence. And it's not always the people who are the quick studies who are willing to put in those hours and hours of behind-the-scenes, unglamorous work." Hi! If you're new here, I'm Toan. I homeschooled at 15, graduated at 16, and got my bachelor's at 18. Now I write about education, learning science, and psychology. Also building @GeniusGTX. Follow me at @LearningToan if that interests you. And if you're building something in EdTech or education, I'd love to catch up and hear what you're working on. Angela Duckworth, psychologist and author of Grit, on Talks at Google

7. Explain it simply, or you don't know it Recognizing an idea feels like understanding it, but familiarity is cheap. Explaining/ teaching forces your brain to rebuild the idea step by step in novel way that exposes your knowledge gaps. Feynman technique is a good start:

6. The Spoon Nap Einstein, Edison, and Dalí all used this to break through difficult creative bottlenecks. By waking up at the exact edge of hypnagogia (N1 sleep), you bypassed the prefrontal cortex’s logic filter to access raw, visual ideas, without brain fog: ↓

5. Keep a notebook Working memory holds only a handful of things at once, and anything you don't rehearse fades. Great ideas rarely arrive completed, a notebook is a playground for fragments during the incubation phase of creativity. Altman explains:

Your brain views being wrong as an attack to the identity (ego), which makes it dangerous and uncomfortable. That's why most are overshadowed in fear of being wrong over the desire to progress. True learning is an endless cycle of upgrading outdated mental model.

3. Take more walks a without phone Walking raises blood flow to the brain. And with no new input coming in, the brain's wandering mode switches on. That mode links distant memories, which is where unexpected ideas come from.