ASU+GSV 2026 Summit | Tuesday, April 14, 2026, 11:00 am-11:20 am | Sponsored Partner Programming
Speakers
- Po-Shen Loh, Carnegie Mellon, Expii
Key Takeaways
- Po-Shen Loh, Carnegie Mellon professor and former national coach of the U.S.
- Olympic math team, presents his unconventional approach to scaling math education through live-streamed classes that pair high school students with professional actors.
- The model turns online math class into a Twitch-style gaming stream, where two high schoolers teach 30 middle schoolers while receiving real-time performance coaching from a hidden actor on a parallel Discord channel.
- Loh argues the key innovation is not the technology but the incentive alignment: math-talented high schoolers gain communication skills (and charisma), actors get paid remote work, and middle schoolers get engaging instruction.
- His deeper philosophy is building "thoughtful" people -- those who both care about others and can think independently -- which he sees as the essential human quality that will matter in the age of AI.
Notable Quotes
"We're the first people in the history of education to put a professional actor in every single classroom, and you can't see the actor."
ā Po-Shen Loh
"All you have to do is live stream about the Pythagorean theorem, and we will teach you how to get a date."
ā Po-Shen Loh
"A thoughtful person is somebody who actually derives great joy both from delighting other people and achieving understanding through their own thought."
ā Po-Shen Loh
"You know how many people tell their kids, study hard, because then you can get a good job... Do you know what word is in all of that? You. That's the problem."
ā Po-Shen Loh
Full Transcript
Well, hello, guys. How are you? Raise your hand if you're asleep. Do you see how hard it is to get through to people who are asleep?
Actually, as an educator, that's sort of the way I think about it. If my students are asleep, it's not working. Okay? Another thing.
How many of you had a teacher that you really liked in school or as a professor or something like that? Teacher that you just really looked up to? Okay. Keep your hands up if that made you actually like that subject.
Yeah. Okay. As you can tell, this talk is already going to be a little bit different because I can't talk at people. So, last night I was up until something.
Let's see if it works. If you want to join the chat, if you scan that QR code, you should be able to chat with me on stage because I'm a live streamer. If you can't scan it because you're too far away, the website is psloh.com. And it should actually have something which lets you put your fake name in.
This is the same website we use to teach kids so we say fake name because we don't want private information. But if you want to send some messages or feedback or thoughts as this whole talk is going along, please feel free to play with it. I actually have a team back home which is helping to moderate the messages. They might reply to things.
Hey, it works. All right. So, this will be a lot more fun. Because this talk is actually for you guys.
It's not just for YouTube. You guys are here. So, as things come along, yep, sounds good. And as you can see, some of our people are helping to reply to some of these messages as well.
I put this here because one of the things I find beautiful about bringing together large groups of people is that all of you have ideas. Obviously not just me. So, as this is all going along, feel free to just dive in and interact with other people. I don't know if you're like me, but when I was in school, I was that kid who liked to pass notes.
I was. I'm sorry. I was that kid. When I was in the classroom, I wanted to be able to let my voice be out there.
I actually have a theory which is that a lot of kids like this. And so, if you give them something, it works. So, this actually works. So, the vibe coding apparently works.
Thank goodness. I wasn't sure if it would fail. I actually do have a background in computer stuff as well, but I actually don't write lines of code anymore. But anyway, let's continue on with the talk.
So, the first thing we discovered, you know, you got to get people. Funny thing is I discovered that if kids are interacting with you, they're not asleep. Not that you guys are kids. But I can see that there's some people playing inside this now.
Yeah, how will I moderate this chat? We actually have people distributed across the world right now who work with us who are actually helping to reply. You might even notice. I'm sorry.
We didn't invite Donald Trump. But actually, he's welcome to come. If anyone can tweet real Donald Trump, he's welcome to join, too. Anyway, whatever.
So, let me continue with another point, right? So, why did I think about all this stuff? It's because when I was a kid, I watched PBS. Did anyone else watch PBS?
There was this documentary I saw recently. It was called Butterfly in the Sky. Can anyone guess what TV show that was? Reading Rainbow.
That documentary is beautiful. And inside that documentary, the founders of that show made some comment, which was that I think it was in the 80s or something, which was that people weren't reading anymore. And they came up with this crazy idea to fight fire with fire and to go and use TV to teach people reading. I thought that was really neat.
Really brilliant insight. And it worked because as a kid growing up, my parents weren't always free to play with me. So, there was good old PBS. Although, I will tell you my favorite show was not that one.
I was fascinated by this show called Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? And we're in San Diego right now. So, I feel very good being in that city, which I did not know was a city until I watched that show. I thought it was the name of a criminal.
But anyway. So, it was fun. And you know, when you go and watch TV shows or you think about things as a kid, it really influences your dreams. So, one of my dreams was someday to go and see the world.
Actually, because I was growing up in Wisconsin. So, my dream was to someday see the world. I was in this town, Madison, Wisconsin. My parents, we were on the edge of town.
If you walked past our property line, you were out of town. One and a half miles away, cornfields, right? So, I was always interested in what was the rest of this world. So, I made kind of a goal for myself to somehow see the world.
If you see the other part of the screen, you see that that's sort of what I do now. Because for 10 years, I was the national coach of the U.S. Olympic math team. And I started traveling all around trying to find out how to build math excellence.
But actually, after some point, I will tell you, I got more interested in trying to build great people, which is not actually the same as building people who are the top 1% or the top .1%. So, in this talk, I'll talk a bit about education. I want you guys to know my main goal is not to build elite in the sense of top whatever percent, but to build lots of great. But great.
We'll get to that soon, too. Okay. So, as I was traveling around all over the world, I was going into classrooms. I was observing how people were doing education.
I was observing also that there's obviously lots of different access to different kinds of education all around. Right? Oh, Mr. Rogers, by the way, I live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania now.
WQED is right there. So, all of these I'm very inspired by all of these TV shows and different ways to get through to the general public. But as I was traveling around, I saw, you know, it would be really great to make it so that everyone can get opportunities. And then in some sense, that was supposed to be the promise of online.
Right? Actually, when I was a kid growing up, my dad, he's a professor at University of Wisconsin, Madison. He was one of these people experimenting with online education on the dial-up modem. He was teaching classes.
I don't know how he did it, actually, but somehow he was doing this. The only problem is any of us who experienced Zoom class looking over the shoulders of our kids or any of us who were teaching on Zoom class know that it was a little bit painful. There are definitely people here who are pioneers in distance learning. So, congratulations to all of you for what you do.
But I decided to take a note from Reading Rainbow. And I decided, I wonder if there's some way to go and make online education something that kids would actually watch. What do kids watch nowadays? YouTube, Instagram Live, Twitch, TikTok.
So, I'm going to talk through a few things today. First, I'll talk through something we actually did in terms of making something. That's just like the technology itself. Then I'll talk through ecosystem, which is how you take technology and you make it interact with lots of people.
And the last thing I'll close with is philosophy, which is what we're actually after, okay? So, I want to show you what we actually turned online math class into. We teach lots of middle school kids. And you'll know why when I talk about the philosophy.
We love teaching middle school kids. And the way we do it is we find pairs of high schoolers to livestream together. I'll show you what it looks like first. And then I'll talk through and I'll geek out over what we actually did to make this happen.
So, I'm going to show you a highlights reel, which is about 45 seconds long, which has lots of pairs of high schoolers teaching together, livestreaming over the internet in small Zoom rooms with about 30 kids in them at a time. Normally, you learn from the same two people for an entire hour. But this is just to give you a feel for it. We turned online math class into this.
I pressed the wrong button. Here we go. Which means we're not playing videos. Same thing as just adding one to n and then multiplying by three.
The absolute differences will change. Like, boom. Equality between those two facts. We do count as two separate things in the end.
Like, at least understand. We approve that. Hi, boy. And then we look, we say, okay.
You will get triple stars for that. A really special thing about your city. You use the exact same logic from over here. Wait a second.
Or 1001. You can check it and let us know. And I liked seeing that you guys were using your critical thinking. So, we actually turned math class into a Twitch gaming stream.
If you know what that is, if you've got kids at this age, this is exactly what they're watching. The only way we were able to do that is I asked high school students what do people actually like. You think I know. I'm 40 something.
Okay. So, I asked the high school kids, we want the lights. We want this stuff. We want that stuff.
I was like, okay, cool. Let me go find lights. Where do you buy them? Amazon.com.
I shipped $300 of lights to some kid's house in Ohio. He's awesome. His name is Eddie. Anyway, a week later, he figured out which small subset of them to use.
Bingo, we got this. This is a standard kit. But let me tell you more. Did you notice the people who are live streaming look excited?
We have a secret weapon. We're the first people in the history of education to put a professional actor in every single classroom, and you can't see the actor. Here's what happens. The high school students who are doing this, they each get the equipment we send them, which is two screens.
One screen for the Zoom call with 30 kids in it who are taking a class. Inside that Zoom call, we have the two high schoolers. We also have a professional actor. If any of you guys are running acting schools, we hire.
Okay. We have a professional actor. The actor is camera off, mic off, paying attention to everything. On the second screen, the high schoolers, each high schooler has two screens.
On their second screen, they have a separate simultaneous video call. It's using Discord, which is what these kids like to use anyway, okay? And it's a Discord video call which has the actor, camera on, mic on, and the two high schoolers, and they can all see and hear each other. So here's what happens.
While they live stream this math class, they're getting real-time feedback on the other channel on how to be more interesting. Okay? This, by the way, not only makes the class interesting, it solves a fundamental incentive alignment problem. I created this thing because I wanted to scale the opportunity for interesting problem-solving, challenging education all over the world.
You know what's the limiting factor? We need people to teach. How do you motivate people to teach? Pay high schoolers?
That's child labor. Right? No! No, absolutely not.
Actually, I'll tell you, the very first high schooler, and this was my oldest daughter, she's now 19. Actually, she's somehow somewhere in Bordeaux or something right now in France. I don't know what she's up to. But anyway, so in any case, when I started this, the observation I made was, did you know that there's all these high schoolers who are actually really good at math and science, but the thing that they really could use is communication skills?
Have you ever met a math science person for whom their life would be made much better if they learn how to interact with everyone else? Yes! So this is now a win-win. The way we explain it to the high schoolers, all you have to do is live stream about the Pythagorean theorem, and we will teach you how to get a date.
Now you know, if it's a high school student, that's real currency right there, okay? Because actually, as they're going, the people who are giving them feedback, we've got people who are singers, we've got people who are dancers, we've got people who are actors, you know? This is a win-win. It turns out there's a lot of high schoolers out there who want to do this.
We do pay them too, but they're not doing it for the cash. They're doing it because this increases their chance to pass every interview of their life. It increases their ability to pitch venture capitalists. It increases their ability to lead an organization.
These are people who can think, okay? So that solves that supply problem, and I was able to do this because the university I teach at, Carnegie Mellon, happens to be one of the top drama schools in the country. So I walked over to the drama department, and that's how we've got our first batch of actors, and it turns out that in America, we can solve their problem too. There's a lot of performing arts folks looking for part-time paid remote work jobs.
This all works. Actually, let's now talk about the ecosystem side, because I just talked about the technology side. To be honest, the technology is not the hard part. The hard part was observing what people actually want, okay?
And then, like, even last night, I vibe coded this thing, right? So the way we do that, the way we calibrate to the real world is I do travel all around. I'll be in Scottsbluff, Nebraska on Thursday. Wait, that's two days from now.
Anyway, okay, so that's two days from now, and I'll be going in the classrooms. What I always do in those places is I go in, and the teacher introduces me as, hey, kids, you guys got a sub for today. His name is Mr. Poe.
That's it. That's the intro. I do that in Baltimore. I do that in inner-city Los Angeles.
I do that in rural Montana. Mr. Poe, undercover sub, drops in for a visit, okay? In every single classroom, what I do is I go and find out, hey, what are you guys learning right now?
And I'll go and teach you something harder than what you're usually learning. I found out that so many kids rise to that challenge, okay? So when we talk about ecosystem creation, the observation was there's a need. Turns out there's all these people who actually want to learn how to think.
Well, we don't just teach standard concepts, by the way. We even have ideas that we want to change. Well, not ideas. We do.
We get to set our curriculum, because we have a scalable force of people who can do all of this. That's the first thing, because there's all these kids who want to teach. And also, then we can decide what we want to teach, because what we always talk about in these education conferences is, let's make change. But what kind of change?
You need to be able to get people to do it, right? So now we have this group of people who actually are really good at problem solving, and so we lead classes that are just problem solving. We say, here, here's a problem. What do you think?
We're not going to teach you. You tell us. You know how many kids say that they don't like math class because they have to do it the teacher's way? The teachers don't have a way.
We're going to do it your way. We're going to go with your ideas. And that's why we got two of them, because if you stump one of them, there's still the other one. It's actually really hard for one teacher to lead a class of brainstorming.
In ours, it's even better. You stump both of them, one of them tells jokes while the other one Googles it. I'm just trying to show you how there's some things inside this creation, where we are cheating the system, darn it. Actually, also, we've solved the scaling problem, because it turns out two people can lead 30 people in a great discussion.
It turns out that the reason kids were bored wasn't because you need to be one-on-one to stare at them. It was because you needed the right format. They actually wanted to voice themselves. If you've noticed in this talk, we have multiple channels, me talking, visual, and chat.
That's super powerful. There can be a discussion during the entire thing, and we actually hire people to help manage that at the same time. Now, let me just finish up with a few more comments about how we can scale. It's actually because with that ratio, two teaching 30, think about it, that's awesome.
That also has a massive reproduction factor. That's why we're teaching middle school kids, because you know the middle school kids, who do they want to be when they grow up? The high school kids. Times 15 every time.
How many things are there that could potentially scale by a factor of times 10 or so every four years? We're just producing them, because my philosophy is actually lots of people can do this. Now, let me get to what we're going to do with all this. I'm a crazy guy.
I'm a social entrepreneur. I didn't come here for investors. If you want to invest, I'm sorry, the answer is no. We don't take it.
I don't take it. That's because we're actually quite humanitarian. A lot of stuff we do is also free that we give out afterwards. We then have a mission.
The mission is we've rethought what should education even be for? What are we trying to make anyway? People who can write code? I just five coded this last night.
People who can do math problems? Well, no, we have something else, and I've named this philosophy. We want to make people who are thoughtful. Okay, I'm a math guy, hence the plus sign.
Sorry, guys, but this is a play on words. Thoughtful, what does that mean? That means you actually care about people. That is super important to me, because I think in this world we got too many people who just want skills, who don't care about anyone, okay?
Also, though, you gotta be full of thought. If you can't think, how do you engage in discourse? We just had a talk just now. We want people who both like people and can engage in discourse, and here I've even defined it, okay?
I'm a math guy. It turns out that the most valuable part of math is defining stuff. Serious. A thoughtful person is somebody who actually derives great joy both from delighting other people and achieving understanding through their own thought.
I've been thinking about what kind of society will survive after this age of AI or whatever, when, you know, what are the opportunities? You know how many people tell their kids, or we might tell our students, study hard, because then you can get a good job, and you can have a nice house, and you can have a great career, and you'll be comfortable. Do you know what word is in all of that? You.
That's the problem. That's why they decide they'd rather play video games and get their AI girlfriend, which will be the end of society. I'm not a professional biologist, but the last I checked, if everyone gets AI girlfriends, there will be no more people. That's the easiest way for robots to take over the world, but that does scare me a lot, because every time I go into a college cafeteria, you know what I see?
What is this? I thought you're supposed to get to know people, okay? So, I'm looking at the future of humanity, and what I'm seeing is that we got a problem. There's so many people who think that the point of life is themselves.
It's not going to work. It worked for a while, got you a job. Soon, you're not needed for that job. What kind of people do you want?
Ones who actually like other people, and the second one, to be able to actually think. These two things that I wrote, unfortunately, a lot of what we see, a lot of what kids see, tells them to do the opposite of both. Life's about me and don't think. So, what we made here is an ecosystem where we're running all around.
We're getting high schoolers to spread this philosophy, being thoughtful to younger people, to incubate younger people, to go and do this, to want to be the high schoolers, to go back around and around and around. Scalability, who knows? We'll see. I'll be giving another talk this afternoon.
If you're from rural, one of the places we're going is for rural, so I'll be talking there, but ultimately, what we work on is for everyone. If you want to continue collaborating with us, that particular pslo.com has a button called Contact. We'll get in touch with you. We'd love to continue working with everyone to build a more thoughtful world.
Thank you.
This transcript was put together by our friend Philippos Savvides from Arizona State University. The original transcript and additional summit resources are available on GitHub. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.