Episode 141 - How Edtech Investing Empowers Flourishing
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Education is a fundamental part of thriving societies, and technology has brought about more learning opportunities for all people.
That’s why Christian investors like Evan Baehr and James Tieng see the space as a way to promote human flourishing across various communities.
The two also discuss the unique opportunities available in education, their thoughts on less-traditional forms of learning, and who they listened to most on Spotify in 2022. It’s a light-hearted and insightful episode that you won’t want to miss..
All opinions expressed on this podcast, including the team and guests, are solely their opinions. Host and guests may maintain positions in the companies and securities discussed. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as specific investment advice for any individual or organization.
Episode Transcript
Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it.
John Coleman: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. This is John Coleman and I am here with my colleague Luke Roush. Luke, how are you doing today?
Luke Roush: I'm doing great. I've got a couple of great guests and fired up.
John Coleman: It is a couple of great guests today. We can say that very authentically. Always great guests on the Faith Driven Investor podcast. But particularly today, we welcome two very close friends of ours and extraordinary investors and influencers in the venture capital and growth equity space. Evan Baehr and James Tieng. Evan is the managing partner of Learn an education oriented venture capital firm. Evan has had a long and storied history, all that he and James talk about, but they actually were undergraduates at Princeton together and then graduate students at HBS together. And Evan has worked in a variety of capacities. James has been a venture investor for most of his professional career, at least recently, and has been a real leader in the education investing space across a number of different firms. I know he has a deep heart for education and then co-founded the firm Lumos with his partner Victor, just a couple of years ago. And now they're a leader in growth equity, education, investing. And so we're very excited to talk to both of them about investing in education, about venture capital and growth equity, and just about why they do what they do. James and Evan, welcome.
James Tieng: Thanks, John.
Evan Baehr: Good to be here, John.
John Coleman: Awesome. Well, I'm going to kick us off, guys, and I just want to just set the ball upfront. What does it mean to invest in education and what types of businesses are you looking at? When we talk about investing in education and maybe, James, you could kick us off.
James Tieng: Thanks, John. For us, and I think it is true for learn as well, it's really about investing in companies across the full age spectrum of learning. So that covers early education into K-12, into traditional higher education and workforce development, which touches on things like upskilling, reskilling and even corporate learning and to invest in education for us and I believe for learn as well. It's about driving outcomes from an academic standpoint for employment standpoint, broadening access and equity as it relates to everything that really is the ingredient for human flourishing through building the skills across the entire age spectrum could be a B-to-B company, a B to C company, domestic and or global. But that's the catch all across a sector for us.
Evan Baehr: Agree with everything that James laid out. One misconception we hear a lot is that when you hear education, people think that you're selling into K-12 schools. Really only about 20% of our companies, which is about 180 in total, actually directly provide services to K-12 schools. So obviously something like upskilling or corporate workforce training happens outside of the classroom. But we're really into thinking about and recognizing that a lot of education happens not inside the walls of the classroom. And it doesn't only happen when you're young, so that means you get up in different places and different ages. A phrase that our firm co-founder Rob Hutter, uses. He says that we're focused on investing in companies that innovate, in delivering payload to the brain. That's a really unique definition of education, but will use sort of the space X analogy, right? So their amazing innovation is lowering the cost, cutting payload into outer space so you can ship all kinds of new things to outer space satellites, etc.. So if you imagine whatever payload we're talking about, traditional, you might think of it as physics or math or the ability to build a welder or social emotional, whatever it is, we're really interested in the innovative approaches of how you take whatever that core subject area or area of expertise is and how do you actually impart it on the brain. And so that explains why we might be in a medical device company that puts a helmet on your brain and spins tiny magnets that recalibrate your alpha brainwaves. Because if your brainwaves are not coordinated correctly, you're not able to process information and impart it on your brain. And so when we step back and say it's basically the case with the Internet that nearly all information in the world, all skills, all facts, anything you could possibly need is on the Internet right now for free, and almost no one does anything with it. So how do you wrestle through that, that it's out there for free everywhere, but people are not soaking it up, learning it, and sort of changing their lives as a result.
John Coleman: That's awesome, guys. And maybe just to dig into that really quickly. One step further, Evan, you mentioned a couple of specific applications there. We'd love to hear from both of you. Just examples. So give us a deeper understanding of this space. What are examples of a couple of the innovative companies you're investing with or that you've seen in what they do so that listeners can kind of understand the breadth of that innovation more deeply?
Evan Baehr: So we're invested and really involved in a company called Sharpen. They have secured the patent on a genetic test for dyslexia. So to a three year old child, you can do a mouth swab combined with family history and have a 90% accuracy of predicting if they will have developed dyslexia. So if they test positive at the age of three, the second half of what the company does is they acquired the most successful and largest off line reading intervention program and built an app to be able to deliver it digitally. So a trial that is screening to be likely dyslexic is essentially taught to read in a different way. And so you can imagine that from sort of a public health perspective, our society wide perspective, if you can screen and understand, I think early major driver of kids finding it difficult to read and to learn generally and then do the intervention, the intervention is far less expensive and far more effective when done at an earlier level. So, you know, when you think about genetic testing, you don't normally think of, you know, an education company. But for us, it sort of helps stitch some of those concepts together.
James Tieng: One example I would have for you, John, is Transfer VR company that some of your investors have seen through some of the videos we've done with you. But it's company that provides simulations delivered currently through VR headsets and related accessories that allows for a few different things. One is career discovery. So for kids and learners and aspiring workers to really touch and feel and experience, what is it like to work in the automotive plants, an aerospace manufacturing facility, even in a health care setting, etc. and to then to bring to bear real skills building and proficiencies that are demonstrable, that are accessible, such that when somebody gets through a program and realizes they have the interest in that specific field, they also have competencies that allow them to be more hirable once they step foot in that setting. And so an example would be working with an automotive manufacturer in Huntsville, Alabama, connecting the dots between K-12 community college and also workforce development boards to bring that talent to an employer.
Luke Roush: Those are great examples. You know, and I think actually some of our work around diagnosis, being able to diagnose either vision disorders or hearing disorders or dyslexia and then being able to intervene early allows people to become learners where they otherwise might be misdiagnosed as slow or some other form of special needs. I want to go back to just Simon Sinek and start with the why. Why did each of you guys wade into this space? Why is innovation in education important as you kind of vision here? What the next 20 or 30 years looks like? Maybe just speak a little bit about the impact that you believe educational innovation can have.
James Tieng: For me, it's an accumulation or it's an evolution that goes back prior to even attending business school, sitting down, you know, 15 plus years ago, thinking about life, think about which sectors gave me excitement and mission around where I can spend my time as an investor. And this was a bit more of a hypothesis, but this was what I articulated going into business school. And I remember having one transformative experience in business school, taking a course at HBC, taught by a woman named Stacy Childress around innovation in the sector. But this is going back many years ago. And so what is innovation, what does innovation look like? Back then it meant a palm pilot to assess literacy competencies. So innovation was very different, but that wasn't lost on me in terms of the opportunity being just massive, in terms of the pain points that exist and had existed across every part of that learning spectrum that I mentioned and wanting to be a part of something that could really start to move the needle. And I know it's hard work, but that also ties in eventually to why we're all here today, which is our faith intersects so much with our work and our professional calling. And over time it just kept and pull me forward and forward up to the point of actually co-founding Lumos with another Faith Driven Investor. And so it's really this evolution that has spanned nearly two decades now.
Evan Baehr: I am tiny in the relative scheme of giants on this call. Also, James has been doing this for decades. I'm newer directly into the education space. Joining this firm, we're in capital. It ties in to a lot of the themes that I've been really interested in, which are both around venture building, but specifically around building venture backed tech enabled businesses that solve big public problems that tie in to really critical global macro issues. There's a wonderful chart, I think Marc Andreessen called it the chart of the century, and it looks at essentially inflation across different bundles of goods over the last 20 years. And his great line is essentially the three components of the American dream are essentially up 100 to 200% in terms of inflation and the growth of the prices. The number one is hospital services, which is up 220%. But the two just below that are college tuition and fees and college textbooks. And so if you were to really ask the question, on one hand, there's this sort of political economic side, which is like, what is the greatest existential threat to the United States as a nation state or Western nations in general to continue to drive their competition? Certainly our ability to educate not just higher ed, but K-12 would certainly be a huge one. So I find it very interesting from a geopolitical component, if we do not figure out how to und bankrupt, how we fund education and how we improve our education. We will absolutely no longer be a leading nation. We need to spend on the education side. The United States is number four in the world behind Luxembourg, Austria and Norway, and we're ranked number 31. So something is really broken with how we spend money and how we produce results on more personal and sort of spiritual level. Rob as well, these great lines. And he said the following. You said, Why is it that we know more about the minerals under the ground of a tiny town in West Texas than we do about an African-American boy on the south side of Chicago in second grade. And it was this really cool tape to just say, gosh, the human person is this amazing, beautiful creature that has all this potential. But many of them, especially low income ones, the United States, we know so little about. And so that contrast of how we put all this brainpower or anything of stewarding a resource of crude oil into the ground relative to how we think about the children, you know, in our own family or in our own backyards was a really powerful one for me.
James Tieng: I'll just add on to that. I mean, I mean, I think that's a great example because it just showcases, you know, we're all children of God and the often said talent being evenly distributed, but opportunity not. I think that is common amongst all of us, right. And to really just driving us forward to solve these very pressing issues you mentioned Evan.
John Coleman: Yeah. Let's continue to dig into that because you touched on a couple of really important topics. I think there one is the power of the private sector to really solve public policy problems or social problems. And then secondly is a component of that impact. You know, and that dovetails with what we're hearing a lot in the news today about ESG investing and values based investing, impact investing. What I hear you all talking about is not what I consider standard ESG principles, but rather aligned with your Christian faith, human flourishing, and really investing in people and the impact that you can have on those individual lives in the way in which they can further impact the world. Talk to me about how you think about impact in the context of your portfolio. And James, I know you have a formal screen on this or way of looking at this, so I'd love maybe to start with you, but how do you think about impact and how does that fit with the way that Christian investors should think about the impact of their capital?
James Tieng: It's a great question, John. It is something that we thought about from the beginning and still think about regularly in terms of refining. What is the approach and sort of what is the level of accountability and reporting and where is this all going. But fundamentally, it started with three pillars that Victor and the whole team aligned with, which is each and every one of our companies, we want to really align with at least one, if not two. And all three would be kind of magical. But number one, again, I said outcomes. So do we have sufficiency of proof that whatever company we're backing really does improve the status quo as it relates to academic and or employment outcomes? You can measure that with tests, grades, progression up to competencies, completion, graduation, employment rates, etc.. Number two, are we doing something about access that allows more people to capture those opportunities to get the skills they need to be successful during K-12 and higher ed, but more importantly to the ultimate job as well? And that's not just about costs bringing down the cost for all the reasons Evan has just mentioned, but also the modality, because we all sit in different parts of the world. And this pandemic taught us very clearly that you don't have to be somewhere necessarily to be productive and get to where you need to get to. And so allowing people from all different sort of walks of life wherever they are to get access to high quality education, and then somebody really think about equity from a couple of different lenses. But it really just. Is there a gap that systemically just exists today that need to be addressed and broken and reimagined? And are our companies really in service of that as well, whether it's target populations or how we build out of those organizations to serve more and more people? So those are the three dimensions that we then had to create frameworks around, then create sort of systems internally and externally to allow us to do that. But it really comes down to those three pillars.
Evan Baehr: Yeah, just to pick up on the ESG frame. So we are very much in the conversation. A number of our LPs are coming from an impact perspective, and we have had a dedicated impact partner who only works on these topics from screening to supporting to reporting. So we take it really seriously and talk to LP prospects a lot about this attention that I've found in the sort of global conversation on ESG, maybe, I may, illustrated in the following example. So let's say that a standard approach from a capital allocator to drive an ESG agenda would involve a survey asking about various factors of one of the companies we invest in. And those kinds of questions would be things like, you know, number or percentage of representatives of members of you know how many women, how many racial minorities, how many members of [....]. They would ask about the carbon production of the company itself. Does this startup of 12 people have solar panels on the roof? And I think there's a little bit of something lost in translation here where if you're coming at ESG from a sort of Fortune 1000 perspective, where the agent of attack is really changing the operating business, to say to Ford, you've got to put up solar panels like that, moves the needle to say to a startup, you've got to put up solar panels. It really annoys the founder and they probably go out of business. And so the way I like to think about it is let's get to some of the underlying fundamental areas of human languishing, the opposite of human flourishing. Let's expose what those are and let's invite our best and brightest founders to build venture backed tech enabled companies to run after those problems. And so if your concern is carbon, your attack vector is not, does the company at all have solar panels? It is. Are they building a startup, which is this engine that combines a culture with talent, with risk capital, with a set of advisers around it that has the ability to scale solutions and deliver results like no corporate entity has ever in history. So we have opinions on it, and we get a lot of these survey questions and where we can try to nudge people to say, Hey, let's start from first principles here. What are areas of human languishing and are we organizing the brightest minds and the best capital like a laser beam on those problems we all agree we want to solve?
Luke Roush: And so, I mean, one of the things you're getting at is just this risk of scope creep where you start to the end. And and I think it's layered on early stage companies in a way that may be distracting from their core primary mission. One of the things that I want to touch on, because both of you guys have been hinting around and we talked about primary education, secondary education, higher ed, skilled trades. I want to dig in on that last bucket of like skilled trades just sort of where we are. When you think about trying to correlate outcomes in preparing people for jobs, good paying jobs that also maybe circumvent the student debt trap that a lot of students find themselves in in higher ed. How are you guys thinking about skilled trades as investors in that space, whether it's skilling or reskilling?
James Tieng: I would say we think a lot about sort of what is the ROI of education. And I think when you just look at the data, it's clear that ROI is lacking in many of the traditional pathways. And so the opportunity for data and technology and innovation to drive forward to have a better matching system, you know, has been true for many years and sits in front of us right now. Still, the massive opportunity, right? You look at student loan debt as one indicator of the problems of how most people have kind of gone through called this the traditional pathways or you look at the for profit post-secondary world that crashed a bit when it got overextended in terms of what it looked like. But ultimately, what are we all trying to do? We're trying to find the right pathways for the right people to embark on that career journey that does create that sustainable life ahead. Right? Because we all know that, you know, depending where you sit in the US right now, being a lineman might be a transformative career for you relative to where you are now. You have kind of direct exposure to that and we respect that work deeply. But that is true in so many different professions that, you know, blue collar, white collar, whatever it is. So you got to guide people the right way. And that does start in K-12, right? It starts because you need exposure to these professions that you're not entering that decision point of, do I go to college or not? You know, not understanding what you're actually trying to get to, Right. And then once you get to college, you need further guidance to get to the right place so that it is a fulfilling career, but also a sustainable one where you can meet all the ambitions you might have in terms of raising a family and providing for a family and whatnot. And there are so many complexities of what that looks like. And I think that is something that we all have to be aware of as investors and backing these entrepreneurs, because it can't be a concentrated bet on something that only serves the person that will ultimately be a web developer, for example. That is certainly a need that has been felt over the years. But many of these other professions have been under med health care, included blue collar jobs that touch on electrician work. In fact, all these things that we've seen this part of the country. So I think you just need to have that broader lens of what that all means.
Evan Baehr: My friend Wyatt Smith has built a business called up Smith right in this space has taught me a lot about this. And just a glaring stat that he points out is that for every one skilled tradesman that enters the workforce in the United States, four are retiring. And the way he phrases that I think is really amazing. He thinks that the United States, when you think about higher ed in STEM, remains definitely in the top five of producing credentials to preserve the United States as a designer nation. We are able to design things. We can generate intellectual property. We are already falling behind and are at risk of losing our ability to be a maker nation and especially set against a backdrop of repatriation of whether it's ingredients for pharmaceuticals or semiconductors or other things that we now see greater geopolitical realm. That is a huge challenge. And the stats, as I dug more into it, NCIS did a survey and suggest that 23% of American adults, about one in four, are functionally illiterate. So the state of education among America's workforce is pretty appalling. So when you think our scores on a PISA, for example, have us at 37, that's been around for 20, 30 years, meaning 30 years, a 50 year old who graduated ranked number 37 is functioning, literate, is not able to contribute to workforce in a practical way that generates economic outcome, in a way that produces a work and an income that gives them dignity. So there's a lot to be figured out here.
John Coleman: Yeah. And I love that you tied in the global perspective, too. And James touched on this. I do love the phrase talent is universal, opportunity is not. And a lot of this discussion is, you know, the college market or the four year college market is such an incredibly small portion of the global education framework. Right. And whether in the U.S. or abroad, the opportunity to reach people for the critical needs in their communities around the world with differentiated learning programs that can be lower cost, that are lower time intensity, I think is just a remarkable way to move the needle on giving more people opportunity globally and also meeting the critical infrastructure needs from a public policy perspective. Evan as you mentioned of countries around the world. I might pivot just a moment here. So both of you are in venture and in growth equity right now. Obviously, it's a relatively tumultuous time in markets. We've seen changes in valuation in that space. We've seen some concerns about the space, the potential that we're headed into a recessionary period here in 2023. How do you think about the reset that you've seen in venture and growth equity this year? And why do you think this is still an important place to play?
James Tieng: I think even a more holistic approach, by the way. And so, you know, we set out as a private equity firm that would invest at the growth stage. And that one distinction allows us to have the flexibility to do growth recapitalizations, if not buyouts as well. And so I do think that as the world normalizes for all the reasons that you described in terms of the stock market valuations and also just what's happening on a lagged basis with many of the venture back in growth backed businesses as well. There's going to be ripeness for doing very interesting deals at valuations that frankly will feel more sane versus the froth of several years ago. And so as an entry point sort of time period, this should be quite good. And you can look at obviously every sort of recessionary period that we've seen in decades, and there's always been good vintages of private equity and other investing that emerge. And so I think that is one thing that's going to happen or has been happening through this year and certainly into next year that will benefit LPs. It'll benefit us in terms of be able to create value over time. But you do need a long term mindset in that right there. Think about one, two, three year windows. It's hard to time the market, but I think all of us here, we have a long term mindset. We have a capital base that allows us to kind of spread across different cycles. And so we are seeing that correction and believe that there will be a net benefit in this kind of coming few years.
Evan Baehr: And look, times of recession, capital scarcity, having to trim and think about capital efficiency, there's history for really amazing companies emerging out of downturns in the 2008 nine recession at WhatsApp, Instagram, Groupon, Uber, Slack, Square, Venmo like pretty epic market capital by companies that were developed during that time. They're probably the most extreme example is obviously the massive firings, layoffs, resignations, whatever you want to say at Twitter. And it's like, wow, they seem to be shipping more product improvements more quickly than they did before with five times the people. So might be a little extreme, but there are ways to do heroic things in times of cuts.
John Coleman: Well, and you know, I used to work with a great venture investor named Evan Dar and Evan pointed out on the ground what happens during periods like this where valuations come down and where there are layoffs at tech companies, etc., is that creates the framework for people to leave and start companies? Because the problem, when values are rising and you've got options is you got golden handcuffs at the big tech companies, right? In a period where the stock prices have collapsed and those options are no longer valuable or they're indeed doing layoffs, a number of really good people then have the freedom to leave and go start their own thing with less risk or leaving less money on the table. And so it does enable this cycle where in periods like the late nineties, early 2000, during the great financial crisis and potentially now you see this burst of innovation of new company founding, a really intelligent people, leaving big corporate jobs to go do something interesting. And I'm interested to see if all these waves of people leaving Meta or Twitter or others or the folks who are leaving voluntarily because their options aren't worth something are going to spur a similar wave of innovation now.
James Tieng: And I will say, I mean, it may not be as quite epic as the floods and, you know, Noah's Ark and whatnot, but I mean, there is kind of back to faith for a moment. I mean, God humbling all of our hearts at this moment. Right. Is an important correction that just everybody needs more and more. And it just you know, you look around sort of the past few years and there was just such unbridled behavior, unconstrained behaviors that, you know, when it's too good, you lose sight of certain things, whether it's like cash flow management or sustainable business building or whatnot. But I think having that humility, reintroducing the system, at least for those of us that are accepting of it, I think that is a critical time to. Really just reflect and retool and continue in this kind of path forward.
Luke Roush: I want to hear just each of you is really serious about your Christian faith, and I'm sure that is reflected in how you shepherd capital. Love to just understand kind of why that is important to you and how that influences and shapes your role as a capital allocator and ultimately as a counselor to many of the companies that you're investing.
Evan Baehr: There's a line from a mentor across Praxis, which many of us are tied into, and they do really great work helping me and others think more deeply about this. And this investor likes to ask the question, Will your business exist in heaven? Now, that's probably not a question that most investors should ask. It's not when I ask. There's all sorts of reasons you may not want to do that, but it's an interesting thought exercise to think about if a version of heaven is heaven on earth. It is people with work and in marriages and going places and doing stuff and making stuff. What would this company look like in an Edenic state if heaven came back to earth? How would this company exist? I don't use that as an investment criteria, but I do like that. It draws us to what are the garden look like? What were the conditions of it? How did humanity flourish when it was in the garden? And I want to believe that when you find a company that truly in the long term drives the human flourishing of its employees, its investors and its users, probably the largest base. I believe that in a long arc of capitalism will reward that company in market cap. The short term it may not, but in long term I think it will. So I think even as an investment criteria, does this company drive the flourishing of the users? Are they operating and living in a way that they were intended to live? If there were a handbook, a playbook, a user's manual for the human person? Does this help them live more as they were made? Tim Keller line of work is definition of work is following, he says quotation definition of work is rearranging the raw material of God's creation in such a way that it helps the world in general and people in particular thrive and flourish. So our work as investors rearranging the raw material God, we're taking various forms of capital, financial capital, human capital, spiritual capital, rearranging them in ways and kneedings and encouragement and high fives. And I can't believe your company died. Hey, I kill your company soul so that they flourish. Gives me excited to bring these conversations into the context of how we allocate capital.
John Coleman: man Evan Baehr dropping some deeply philosophic truth bombs here on the FDI podcast.
Evan Baehr: John on that one. Question would the FDI podcast exist in heaven?
John Coleman: I think the FDI podcast would exist, but it probably wouldn't be hosted by me. Would that be? I think they could do better. I have a feeling there are some great people up there. So we're going to close in just a debt asking you guys what you're learning through scripture. Before we do that, we're going to do something fun we call Lightning Round, and we're going to ask you guys simple questions and look for kind of short answers in 60 seconds or less. Some of these may be serious, some of them maybe less serious. I'll start us on a semi-serious one, which is, as you look around education right now, what is the innovation you're most excited about over the next 2 to 3 years? James, we'll start with you.
James Tieng: It's a really tough question. I am excited by apprenticeships applied more broadly than they have been globally, but certainly in the US, and that's not a bleeding edge sort of, you know, metaverse type thing. It's really just the idea that we have so much more to do to my earlier points around bridging education to employment and so practical skills training and even on a paid basis, allowing people to really get their hands on the meat and substance of work will just be transformative. And we can embrace that globally, but certainly just in the US right now. And so I realize that's not really a tech forward. I mean, there's a lot of tech ways to bring that to bear, but that's a simple concept that I think is very disruptive still.
Evan Baehr: We are at the beginning of a massive change of public opinion and public policy in the United States that will radically change to make it so that money follows child. When that happened to the form of charter voucher [...] Or other policy instruments, it invites entrepreneurs to create all kinds of solutions that we can't even imagine today. And what used to be more of a partizan issue is in really amazing ways, because we know when parents have more control and educators have to compete. Results dramatically grow. So that's sort of the meta issue I'm really excited about. I think invites more founders into the space on the backside of massive [...] voucher, charter, etc.. I think we need a whole new generation of entrepreneurs who want to build schools. There's a challenge of people that come in to build schools. They're often from a nonprofit background that are often teachers. If you're a teacher, it doesn't mean you can't be an entrepreneur. It's just very different skill sets. And so we learn, spend a lot of time thinking about on the back end of a massive wave of millions of parents getting to choose where the kids go to school. How are we going to build the supply chain to generate all kinds of new school concepts that are scalable and kept most aggressive year? They built three schools. One of our companies, New Globe, which powers of micro schools across Africa, has a contract provider for the government. So Kip's biggest year of preschool last year, new globe built 3800 schools for profit venture backed companies have the ability to scale. And that's really what we need to talk about mass education, especially of low income people, obviously in their states, but certainly 10-20 x that around the world.
John Coleman: An extraordinary answer in greater than 60 seconds. So I'm giving that round to James over to you Luke.
Evan Baehr: Hey, your podcast will not exist in heaven. John will never.
Luke Roush: Be so one example in 30 seconds or less for each of a benefit in a risk of remote or virtual education.
James Tieng: Benefits clearly is just you can be anywhere at any time. Risk is that people element. I mean in K 12, we understand to be like that high quality teacher that transforms lives and I guess just gets played out across all of education. So losing that in-person element is the biggest risk for my perspective.
Evan Baehr: I just air on the risk side, McKinsey report out suggests that the extended COVID school lockdowns and alleged Zoom classroom from home has an estimated about an additional 1.6 million students dropping out from high school because of learning loss.
John Coleman: Unreal.
Evan Baehr: Take that one John.
Luke Roush: Man you made up for the long answer the first time Evan, I've got one more.
John Coleman: It is very concise. Go ahead, Luke.
Luke Roush: So about this time of the year, every year Spotify comes out with kind of the rap. It's sort of like your year rap. Who showed up more in your playlist, Justin Bieber or Taylor Swift, please. James, to you first.
James Tieng: Neither because my top ten were all Lauren Daigle songs. So you could go, Oh.
Luke Roush: Okay.
Evan Baehr: Lauren Daigle. Really? That's right. Well, all of my top ones were Michael W Smith and just kidding just kidding. Okay. Mine's definitely. Taylor Swift. My son is a big Taylor Swift fan. I spend about 6 hours during the great Ticketmaster controversy waiting in the ticketmaster line to get the tickets. And we did secure tickets. We're going in a few months. And I only had to sell my third child to afford them.
John Coleman: And Luke, this is a fundamentally silly question. I mean, in a year when Taylor Swift releases a banger like Midnight 3 a.m. Edition, I think there's only one appropriate response to that. Question. I know you've been doing your Turnstyle with the Bee Gees on repeat for the entire holiday. Well, we are going to wrap up now. That was great Lightning round. Before we leave, we like to ask every guest just to share with listeners something that they're learning through Scripture right now in their faith that they'd like to share with others. And Evan, maybe we'll start with you and end with James.
Evan Baehr: I'll just offer this contrast to a good friend of mine. Joel Bryce has been preaching and thinking a lot about human flourishing and the nature of work and where those concepts emerge in Scripture. And he taught me the following two definitions, which I'll just leave with you guys. And so there's two notions of work translated versus agathos. And this version of work is that many people sort of set our hearts to this. It is good work, it is good natured, is well-intentioned, and even can do good in the world, is a different kind of work from the word kalos, and that is work only possible after the gospel message has transformed the human heart. And this kind of good work it is a beautiful work. It's work that creates beauty on the outside after a transformation has happened to make the inside beautiful as well.
James Tieng: Mm hmm. For me, you know, it's been a year where I think my heart has been closer to Scripture than many years. I lost a parent this year, and that kind of put a lot of weight to sort through kind of of those questions of aging and end of life. This one isn't specifically about that. But as I shift through kind of many of the different passages I reflect on this year, one is from the Billy Graham Center on that hike that I think I saw you jogging on John back in February, but it's from Psalm 145. The Lord is near to all who call on him to all that call on him in truth. And this year has been just complex because of all that going on. And I've had to distill it into the simplest way to pray when it's the hardest to pray. Right? And it's simple for me because I boil it down to simple statements that I can say both in my heart and out loud. I am listening. I surrender to you, Lord, and I need you. And I boil it down to that because we need to call on God to be present our lives. You know, we can sit back and be passive Christians or we can actually call on him. And that is such a powerful way to approach prayer.
Luke Roush: On that note, we are grateful, Evan and James, for you being able to participate with us on this podcast. You know, our view is that almost any business can be creative or redemptive or restorative, but there are certain types of businesses that have unique potential to really impact the world and humanity and what human flourishing looks like. And certainly businesses in the educational sector fall in that category. So we're grateful for you and appreciate you taking the time to be with us.
James Tieng: Thank you both.
Evan Baehr: Thanks, guys.