Storytelling Meets Technology: An Innovative AI Approach to EdTech

On this episode of Digital Squared, Tom is talking to Steven Walters, Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer of Breakout Learning, an educational technology company. Steven shares his fascinating journey from theater and storytelling to the world of ed-tech. He provides a unique perspective on the intersection of storytelling, technology, and education, showcasing how AI can enhance and scale certain aspects of learning while maintaining the crucial human elements of inspiration and connection.

Together they discuss how Breakout Learning uses AI-powered discussion platforms to facilitate peer-to-peer learning and critical thinking in both higher education and workforce training. Steven emphasizes the importance of discussion as "the soul of learning" and explains how their platform aims to spark meaningful conversations that continue beyond the classroom. 

Transcript

Intro  0:00  
Welcome to Digital squared, a podcast that explores the implications of living in an increasingly digital world. We're on a mission to inspire our listeners to use technology and data for good. Your host, Tom Andriola is the Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and Data and Chief Digital Officer at the University California at Irvine. Join us as Tom and fellow leaders discuss the technological, cultural and societal trends that are shaping our world.

Tom  0:29  
On this episode of Digital squared, I'm talking with Stephen Walters, the co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer of Breakout Learning, an ed tech company. Steven shares his fascinating journey from theater and storytelling to the world of educational technology. He provides a unique perspective on the intersection of storytelling, technology & education. Showcasing how AI can enhance scale and personalized learning while maintaining the crucial human elements of inspiration and connection.

Tom  1:00  
Steven, welcome to the podcast. 

Steven 1:02

Hey, Tom, thanks for having me 

Tom 1:04

Absolutely. Thank you for being here. All right, hey, we're gonna jump right in here, right? So you're the co-founder of a educational technology company now, but you have an interesting background, starting in theater and writing. Tell us about that and how this all came to be. 

Steven 1:19

It's a great question. I often tell people that I am a recovered actor. I also happen to be a recovered alcoholic, and those two things went hand in hand for me, Tom.  Yeah, I think I'm not alone there. Yeah, no, my background has always been in the creative arts. I sort of self identify as a multi hyphenate. I'm an actor, writer, director, producer, but the kind of unifying theme there is that I'm a storyteller. And I fell in love with stories as a child. I used to lock myself in my room and write for hours on end, and that love of narrative led me to the theater, where I started to write my own stories and write my own plays. And then that led to me acting in my own stories and acting in my own plays, and that sort of lit a fire under me to go and study the art form, to study theater, to study directing and acting and playwriting, where I did it, at Baylor University, where I went to undergrad. And that kind of kick started my career. I've always been an entrepreneur at heart. I've always wanted to make things and create things. And after I graduated from Baylor, I started a theater company in Dallas, Texas called Second Thought theater. The purpose of that organization, it's driving mission, it's vision, it's values. We're all centered around critical thinking, right? Like telling stories that could spark deep thoughts in the minds of the audience and then lead to a conversation between the cast and the audience that would start in the theater and go out into the community. And if you're familiar with my company, Breakout Learning, that I'm the Chief Innovation Officer of today, some of those values sound will probably sound familiar to you, because that is very much connected to what breakout learning is. It's all about sparking critical thinking and dialog and communication and starting a conversation on the platform that can then continue into the classroom. But it was a long journey from running a not for profit theater in my early 20s to getting to to Breakout Learning. 

Tom 3:07

Yeah, you and I bonded over the concept of storytelling, but I shared with you from my background that when I was early in my consulting career, I had a client he was the CEO of a small manufacturing company who was a struggling actor and basically paid the bills through being an entrepreneur. As a moldable young professional, he would talk a lot about how his performance training helped him in selling, raising money, in leading an organization. And I just I found that connection interesting at such an early point in my career. It's like, Oh, you mean not everyone just goes and gets an MBA. And so I just found it really interesting. So when you think about this journey, right for him, it was into basically a manufacturing company, or the panels that you see inside bathrooms, you went to educational technology. How would this background lead you there? And like, how does it influence the way you think about solving a problem for a customer? 

Steven 4:03

Yeah, it's funny. The journey from second thought theater to break out is long and circuitous and too long for this podcast, probably, but it all started with my obsession with American history, oddly. Back when I was getting obsessed with narrative as a kid, I also became obsessed with reading biographies and reading about American and world history, and I became obsessed with this era of American history, the reconstruction era, the post Civil War era. And I actually wrote a play about it at Second Thought theater that centered around the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and an exploration of what led John Wilkes Booth to commit that horrific atrocity. And I wrote that play when I was 23 years old and I had applied for a couple of years later, I picked it up, I dusted it off, I applied for a grant. Second thought, received that grant to develop that play. That play became a trilogy of plays, which then became a podcast called 1865. And 1865 is an audio drama which is distributed through Wondery. That I created. I was the head writer on and directed most of the episodes. I co-created it with my partner in crime, Eric Archila, who was a member of the ensemble at second thought theater. And that podcast ended up doing pretty well. It had millions of downloads in the first couple of years, and it had a loyal fan base, and it's similarly though to Second Thought. It had this structure of stories followed by discussions. Right there was the episode where we would have these historical reenactments of the real mysterious and crazy events surrounding Lincoln's assassination, and then we would have a talk back, a mini episode, a bonus episode, where we would discuss what was fact, what was fiction, and talk about some of the themes of the story that were relevant to the news cycle of that time. And one of one of the fans of that show was a gentleman named Ramit Varma. And Ramit, if for those of you who don't know him as an ed tech entrepreneur, he founded a company called Revolution Prep with his partner, Jake Newberg. They were very early in the online tutoring space. I believe they took that company fully online, and in the early 2000 teens, I think was two. I think it was 2010-2011 that they did it, so it was very early. I didn't know ram it well, but we had mutual friends. And I was, I think I told you this story time when we first met, but I was at a party at a house in a very fancy neighborhood in Los Angeles, and I thought it was a pool party. So I was dressed for the pool. I had on some cargo swim trunks and, I think, a Hawaiian t shirt. At the time, I kind of beard. This was during my alcoholism era. I had long hair. I looked like the dude from The Big Lebowski, to be honest. And it turns out that it was, I think it was a white party. So everyone at the party was very much not dressed like me. They were dressed in all white. I realized very quickly that I had made a terrible mistake, and I was trying to get out of there as quick as I could. But on my way to the door, I overheard a voice, a loud, booming voice from the kitchen, talking about 1865 and it was Ramit Varma. And so I saddled over next to him, and he was going on and on about this podcast with effusive praise, and I was standing there waiting for the moment where he'd be like and here's the guy that created it, but he never did, because he had not put two and two together. He might not have even fully remembered who I was. We barely knew each other. We did have mutual friends, though. And so I have a little bit of social anxiety, hence the drinking. And so I slinked away, right? I went off, and I was like, Look, I'm gonna get out of here and cut my losses and quit while I'm ahead. And I did. And a couple of weeks later, I got a text on my phone from Ramit, and he said, Hey, Derek, that's our mutual friend. Derek just put two and two together for me. I realized while you were standing next to me in the kitchen, I love your podcast. We should get together and talk about it. And so that conversation led to a series of ongoing conversations with Ramit that eventually became Breakout Learning, which is our baby. It's something that me and Ramit and our third co-founder, Josh Oster-Morris, really developed over time. But again, the thing that Ramit and I bonded over was this love of stories and of using stories to spark critical thinking and spark, most importantly, discussion. We, Ramit and I, are very different people in many ways, my background is in the creative arts, and as an actor, I worked in TV shows like Friday Night Lights. I worked on theaters across the country, from Trinity rep in Providence, Rhode Island to the Alley Theater in Houston, and I was a resident company member at the Dallas Theater Center. Ramit spent 20 plus years in the trenches as an education entrepreneur in the ed tech space, right? But the thing that we had in common in the Venn diagram of our lives and our careers was this belief that discussion is the sort of soul of learning. Right? Is that discussions have this incredible power to unlock empathy, to unlock understanding, to help us empathize for those with whom we disagree. To teach foundational concepts to help us assess our understanding of the application of those concepts, all of these things. And it was a sort of mutual love of these things, stories and discussions that led ultimately to Breakout Learning. And of course, the company, as it exists today looks nothing like it did in Ramit and I's original incarnation of it, but that's how it happened. And it's interesting because I created 1865 as a vehicle for TV, right? Like in my mind, that podcast was an audition for me as a TV creator to Hollywood, and we did pretty well. Prior to my meeting Ramit, we had shopped the project around, Eric and I did with my representation in LA, we got pretty close. We pitched to Disney, we pitched to Amblin. There was real interest in the project. I think COVID really took the wind out of our sails. It's really hard to make a period drama in any time, but I think COVID really stopped that project in its tracks. So in my mind, it was going to lead down this one path, but it led me to Ramit, and then that led to this entire other experience. And I've always been a person who believes that you have to follow your passions where they lead you, and if you're brave enough, or, I don't know, some might argue, stupid enough to do it, it'll take you to places that you never thought you'd go before. And breakout is one of those places. It's definitely connected to everything that makes me who I am, and in my journey as a storyteller and an entrepreneur, but now a person and who's working heavily in the AI space, it's definitely connected to those things, but it's it's come about in an improbable way that I never could have imagined. 

Tom 10:08

Yeah, no one of my mentors growing up used to talk about there are no coincidences, and I've come to believe that it's like everything has a reason. In many cases, you don't always understand it at the moment in time when it happens to you, but at all, there are pieces that just come into focus over time. And certainly, Your journey has elements of that. I'm drawn to disruptors. Disruptors and disruptive ideas. Breakout to me, when you and I first got a chance to get together and talk about it and how it's being used, how we think it could be used. I'm curious, as an outsider to education, when you look in, it's like, what do we miss in education? We talked a little bit, and I love this. The discussion is the soul of learning. But what is it that we miss in education and kind of the bigger picture of the connection that happens between humans?

Steven  10:57  
So the first thing I want to say is that, you know, I approach product and the ed tech space the same way I approach the the theater space, the storytelling space, the same way I would approach my roles as an actor, which is from a place of curiosity and from a place of humility and knowing what I don't know. And like throughout my career, when you have a career in the arts, it's up and down. There's no stability, right? I joke around with people. I say I left behind the volatile, uncertain life of an actor for the much more stable life of an ed tech entrepreneur. But it is true that you know that business teaches you resilience, and it teaches you to be flexible in your thinking, and it teaches you to be humble. There's so much I don't know about how to be of service to education, but I got into this because I wanted to make an impact, right? I think what happened to me in my journey as a creative entrepreneur, as an actor, as a writer in the entertainment industry, I think what happened is that it, quite frankly, it turned into a job. And I think the minute that it turned into a job, it started to feel very myopic. It started to feel like it was very self serving. It started to feel like started to feel like it wasn't really doing much good in the world. And I've always been somebody that's motivated by making an impact. And I think what I really responded to about Ramit is that Ramit has great vision. He has big ambitions. Josh is the same way our Josh is our chief technical officer. Rama is the CEO. I'm the Chief Innovation Officer. Josh is a brilliant man, and I think I responded to these two gentlemen because I realized that together, that we could really make an impact. So I just want to say that, first and foremost, I don't know that I presume to know what people are missing in education, but I do want to find out what their problems are and see how I can help. So there's two quotes that I, that come to mind for me when I think about trying to build a product for any customer, but particularly in the education space. There's the Steve Jobs quote, where it says a lot of people think, give the customers what they want, but Jobs said, our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think my interpretation of that is that your job as an entrepreneur, as a creative, is to see around the corners that other people don't see. I do think that's part of it, but I think the bigger part of it is the Marty Kagan quote, which is, and I wrote this down, I wanted to make sure I didn't misquote him, which I always do, 'fall in love with the problem, not the solution'. And that speaks to this humility that I was talking about of knowing what you don't know. I think great product is a balance between those two things. I think it's a balance between having creative, bold, fresh, new ideas, but also dialing in ruthlessly, almost, and being obsessed with your customer's problem. And that's what me and Robin and Josh are trying to do, is strike that balance, but it always starts with asking the question and being curious. I don't know what education is missing. I don't know that I can say that, but I've experienced some things that have made me have opened up some possibilities for me. So I was at a career day at a university a couple of months ago, big state school, and I was there talking to faculty, educating them about Breakout Learning's AI power discussion platform. But I was also any, anytime I can, I'll speak to students, because I want to know what they're experiencing. And the student said, My teachers are the only he was a junior, and he said, My teachers are the only reason that I'm here. The rest of the time it feels like I'm getting my education from and he said the name of a major textbook publisher. And that really stuck with me, because I do think our current system is overly centered around this mode of instruction, which has been completely disrupted by AI, right? It's this, it's the textbook and it's the Scantron, right? Or it's cousin, the ebook and courseware, which is the way that we've been delivering instruction, primarily for the last 100 years. If you go back far enough, you'll see that that sort of broadcast form of learning wasn't the primary mode of instruction. In many cases, it was the Harkness method. It was students in small classes sitting around a table, very little Professor intervention, discussing and exchanging ideas, the Socratic method. And I think we moved away from that, because when education became a human right, and that's a wonderful thing, we lost our ability to keep up with the swelling population, and what we ended up with are the textbook, the Scantron. And it just doesn't meet our students where they are, not this generation, but I would argue, not any generation, and I so I feel like but I don't lay this at the feet of the professors, and I don't even necessarily lay this at the feet of any particular person in the hierarchy of an institution. I just think it's very difficult to change. Change is hard won. This is something that I learned as a storyteller, right? Fundamentally, you're crafting through the architecture of the narrative. You're crafting a journey of change. You're navigating a human who is in one state at the beginning of the story, and in another state at the end. And throughout that journey, they're in the process of trying to achieve something, and they succeed or they fail, but in the process of that journey, they are changed. And I think the reason that we find stories to be so endlessly fascinating is because we know that in our own lives, change is so hard to come by. So if I had to say one thing that I think the education system is missing more than anything else, is it's that the inertia that sometimes there, I think it is understandable. It's not difficult to know why it's there, but I don't think it's serving the classroom, and I don't think it's serving the students. And I think that AI it is the great disruptor. We don't really at Breakout, we don't think of ourselves as being the disruptor. We think of ourselves as being a response to the disruption and the sort of cat and mouse game of education we side with the cats, so to speak, right? We're wanting to delight students, though. We don't think of ourselves as we don't solely think of ourselves anyway, as being a bulwark to cheating, right, which we know is a major problem today in the education system. Instead, we reframe that and the story that we want to tell and what we want to talk about is delighting students, driving student engagement, giving them an experience that meets them where they are. And we believe that the peer to peer kind of small group discussion experience does that the best. But to answer your question, I think that there are some paradigms that need to shift, and there are some sort of status quo models that have been rendered obsolete. And what I hope happens is, what I'm starting to see happen at schools all around the country is that faculty are starting to adopt new modes of instruction. In many ways, they're returning to old modes of instruction. And I would argue that there's nothing older than small group discussion storytelling followed by discussions, and we've learned that way for 1000s of years as a species. So returning to it in a scalable way, where AI can be used as a companion to the experience, a complement to the experience, we think is a good way to authentically meet this moment of crisis. 

Tom 17:39

Yeah, I think it's really interesting right there. There are times, if you look across the time that any individuals had, right, there's a lot of sometimes incremental improvements, right where, yeah, you've made, you made it a little bit better. I looked at what you did, I made it a little bit better. And then there are these, we can use the word disruption. It's kind of disruption is the introduction of something that really you know, whether it's an external force or the capability of a tool like AI, because that's what I like to say. Let's get rid of the hype word, and let's talk about if someone just gave you a new tool, right? But if someone walked out and said, here's this thing I call a wheelbarrow, and here's this thing I call a shovel. Now, build a wall, the Great Wall of China, right? It's like, also, it's like, wow, look what I could do so much better than me carrying each block up the hill. You know, I mean, all of a sudden, I just got a new tool. If you think of AI that way, it's the transformation of I can do things differently. Can I step back and go back to almost first principles and redesign it? What I see with you all doing it's, we know, going back to the beginning of time that storytelling and learning, the teaching the next generation is ultimately a one to one or one to very small number game. That's what's most effective. But what as we've tried to educate entire populations, we've had to move to models of kind of production, manufacturing in the education context to try to do mass education, and we've moved away from the intimacy of what used to happen around, just around a fire between the elders and the youngins in the tribe. And how do you, as you go back to trying to recreate that in the modern context? What is Breakout doing that is going to recreate that so that there really is this one to one, personalized journey of learning to what I actually wanted to learn, not necessarily what the syllabus says I needed to learn. Like, how is Breakout helping that? 

Steven 19:38

So number one by not disinter-mediating professors, right? Like it was that student said they're the reason I'm here. I think students come to these universities for a couple of reasons, right? I think a sense of community is one. I think that experience of being on campus is something that students crave and something that is really impactful, and I think it always will be, even as higher ed faces some of the existential challenges that that that we're up against. I think another reason is access to the faculty. And I think that human and student interaction, that spark, that's what we call it at Breakout, right? That spark of inspiration, that's what they're there chasing, and AI can't give you that, right, those two things that I just described to you, AI, is never going to replace those things. It's never going to replace the sense of community that you feel, and it's never going to replace that moment of inspiration that you get from a great teacher. It may help you learn. It may give you personalized feedback. It may be able to do things that a single teacher can't do relative to the number of students they're teaching, right? It may give you some scalability of some certain aspects of pedagogy, but I don't think it'll ever replace those things. So for us, our goal is to think about how to support those things, right, how to facilitate those moments of inspiration between professor and student. Most of us are either former faculty ourselves, former teachers at the K 12 Level, or we're lovers of learning, or we're children of teachers. Some of us were in the classroom as recently as just a couple of years ago. Me, it's been about 10 years. I taught introduction to screenwriting, and I taught Aristotelian structure in cinema. And I miss those days. Those days were also really challenging. I have not forgotten how hard it is to do what a professor does. So for us, in order to facilitate that interaction and to not disinter-mediate professors, we have to be dialed in on what their problems are, right. We have to be humble enough to listen, and we have to plug in the voice of our customer into our product roadmap. And it can be tricky with faculty, because, in the spirit of academic freedom, which we support, sometimes it can be difficult to find generalizable solutions for these faculty who I've heard people describe them as rogue actors. I think every professor is a unique individual, and every there is no one other than that professor who knows what's better for that professor's classroom, that includes us. I believe that. But by talking to professors, there is a lot in that Venn diagram, and that's where we're building towards. We're building towards creating a generalizable solution that helps professors facilitate student engagement through these peer to peer discussions, and then provides and services AI powered insights into where their students are in their learning journey, so that what happens in the classroom can actually have more meaning and more impact and more relevance to the students. Too often, you hear this story of faculty that are still using these old textbooks right? Say they're teaching brand identity and brand value in an introduction to marketing class. They're still assigning a 20 page chapter of a textbook that the students aren't reading, then they're following it on with a written assignment that the students aren't writing. But those professors or their TAs are still grading those papers as if they're authentic assessments of critical thinking when we know that they're not. So, at Breakout our perspective on this is, listen, let's take an open educational resource version of an intro to marketing textbook. Let's adapt it into a more engaging form of content that's more specific and relevant to that professor's classroom and to their course level learning objectives. Let's design it in a way that it has more relevance to the students in terms of its immediacy and with being very of the moment and not a fifth edition of where Twitter was back in 2005. These textbooks fall out of date so quickly. And then we say, instead of doing the write up, have the students meet on our platform for a discussion, either peer to peer, one student, one AI learning companion, and then the AI is listening, it's evaluating and moderating that discussion, and it's surfacing that information to the professor. So now you know what they were doing is spending their entire lecture, in many cases, rehashing the content of that textbook chapter because they know that the students were reading it. But now, hopefully, the idea is they don't have to do that. They can have some assurances, because there's accountability there through these peer to peer interactions, so that they can actually spend their class time pushing the students towards higher order thinking. That's what we're aiming for. We're aiming to start a discussion on the platform that's relevant to the students, that then continues into the classroom. And I think that we're on our way to delivering on the promise of that premise. But the only way that we're really going to get there, the only way that we're going to deliver the kind of next level impact that we want to deliver, is to continue to listen, to do what Marty Kagan said, to be obsessed with their problems. And also this is another thing, Tom, to know that we're not a panacea, right? There's always going to be cheating, and the pace of technology to facilitate cheating is always going to go faster than the pace of the technology that's meant to proctor it or stop it, right? If we play, if we only play the cat and mouse game, we lose the larger problem, which is actually an engagement problem. That's where the paradigm shift, I think, has to occur, is that we have to meet these students, where they are in a world where all human knowledge is at their fingertips, and in a world where they can, with a very sloppily written, half baked prompt, they can generate this beautiful, well organized output. How do we teach critical thinking? How do we assess critical thinking, and how do we give these students experiences that matter to them? I would argue that the way to do that is through teaching them the kind of, the workforce skills that they're going to need, the knowledge capital the future, which, from our perspective, in, you know, the perspective of our academic advisory board is this critical thinking, the ability to work collaboratively with their peers, and the ability to communicate that thinking. So it's as much about behavioral assessment and the way a student comports themselves in the context of these student interactions as it is about their critical thinking and their understanding of the key concepts and breakout is building in both directions, both into the sort of assessment of understanding direction, but also into the behavioral landscape, where we're looking at things like leadership assessment and soft skills. 

Tom 25:53

I was just gonna, I was gonna ask, is one thing I thought was really cool on the platform, I'd love for you to just talk about it for a minute with our audience, which is the moment detector. I thought that was really cool and a very out of the box way of thinking about just tell the audience a little bit about moment detector. 

Steven 26:06

Yeah. So it's something that's it's in a proof of concept phase right now. It's, Ramit coined the phrase the moment detector. The idea is, is that breakouts tool is has application in both higher education settings, executive education settings, but also workforce learning. And our perspective and workforce learning is the same as our perspective is in higher ed, which is that peer to peer interactions are stickier. They drive better outcomes. The learners appreciate them more. They get more out of it. So we wanted to design these experiences that happened on our platform where, say, a company could have their employees come onto the platform and engage with these scenarios that our instructional design team crafts and creates based on their own course materials, frankly, and the students have a discussion or two, and maybe there's a series of modules that stretch out over a couple of weeks, and the company is able to get real time insights into what's happening in these discussions, what their students are learning. But the learners themselves are actually going to be able to get some feedback around their soft skills, because, let's say they're a middle manager who might be wanting to try to move to the C suite, they probably have received some feedback about what they need to do to accomplish that. That learner will be able to self assess. And what the moment detector, as we call it, does, is it actually, it actually evaluates that student's behavior, and it surfaces moments so that the student is alerted to when they did something really well, or perhaps when they did something that they could work on. And they get to actually revisit those real moments and play back the video. You see this a lot in negotiations classes in higher ed. Where professors will have their students do negotiations on Zoom. They'll record them, and then they'll pour over them and dig through them, looking for these moments that exhibit either the technique that they want them to practice or moment of great collaboration or how effective they were at making the first offer. What the moment detector will do is it will allow those very faculty to, just with a click of a button, surface those moments and display them for the students in the classroom to provide greater learning. Similarly, learners in the workforce environment, will be able to self assess their own soft skills and look at moments like they're looking at playback in a sports game and say, hey, here's how I did, either I succeeded or I failed, but here's how I did. And then it will also provide some contextual feedback for them about what they might do better or how they could continue the trend. So that's the kind of thinking about the moment detector. The other thing about it that is really cool is that it actually leaves Breakout's platform and it can follow them around into their work lives, so that if they do a couple of experiences on the breakout platform, but they want to keep assessing themselves, they want to keep getting better, it will plug in and go wherever they need to go, whether that's Google Meets or Teams or Zoom. 

Tom 28:38

Yeah, and I think this is super powerful, whether we're talking about the classroom setting or back into the how do I? How do I, how do I perform at my top level, right? Medicine, they call it, how do I practice top of, top of my license? But it really, I think we all have this kind of like, how could I be that one percenter? And having been a fortunate enough in my professional career to have been identified as a high potential individual and got all that investment in terms of developing my toolkit, right, both the hard skills and the soft skills. It wasn't a scalable model. It was a lot of people watching me, people talking to me, giving me verbal feedback, but it was but then that was it. That was the end of the process. There was no follow on. And the only way it was measured whether I really got better at it was an annual performance conversation, which maybe wasn't even connected to that development center experience that I was given. And it was like, we need to one, not only build a continuum, but also make it available to the other 99% of employees, right? Or anybody who really has that true desire for self improvement. And it's not just about I took a class on Coursera, it's about, did I really do it better when I was working with my team? Did I really catch myself and not dominate the conversation? But did I really ask for others perspective before I spoke? Right? Because that's the feedback that was given to me through the moment detector. So I just think there's an incredible opportunity for the self improvement minded person to get better at their that's their craft, whatever that craft may be, and then to be able to provide that always their feedback. It's kind of having that batting coach. When you're a baseball player, it's like, now drop that elbow a little bit, not get out in your front foot. It's always there with every pitch they could give you that feedback. Wouldn't be great if, as a what, as a kind of knowledge worker, whether you had that type of feedback there, that you can take it if you want, or you can ignore it, but it's just it's there for you. I think it's a very powerful concept. 

Steven 30:29

How many times have I've been on so many calls where you know, over the years, where some feedback will make its way to me about the way that I comported myself, and I will have no concept of that feedback. It will not make sense to me when I see it on its face. But after you reflect on it, and after you spend the time and you speak to the person who's on the call with you, you find out what happened. You discover that sometimes the words that you say, the way that you carry yourself, how you comport yourself, can be very disconnected from your intentions, even. And I think that as managers and as leaders, this is something that we have to navigate, because there's intention and there's impact, and they're not always aligned, right? And both matter. It's almost similar to my comment about Steve Jobs and Marty Kagan. There has to be a balance in organizations, in my opinion, between intention and impact, right? You can't go around being mean to everybody and claiming good intentions all the time. Just you can't go around saying, hey, I didn't hurt anybody. Nobody's impacted by this, right? There has to be a care and a thoughtfulness that's given to both sides of it. I think it's hard for us sometimes to see that in ourselves. And I think that the key thing about this tool is it really is intended to be a self assessment tool. It's attended, as you said, somebody who's interested in self improvement, or at least self awareness, it will give them insights that are actionable and useful, and will let them reflect and actually watch themselves as they reflect on those moments and on those interactions that may or may not be desirable to them. And of course, they can configure those things in ways that are relevant to their employers. And there's there's feedback and things that can be surfaced to employers from the employees, but it's a really exciting tool. It's one that we're really excited to start using out of the world, and it's coming any day now. I think we get it June 14 is when we have our next version of the prototype. But we've also uncovered a couple can't say too much about it on this podcast, but in the process of making the moment detector, we've also uncovered some things accidentally, which are also opening up new product lines for us, and that's on the Steve Jobs of it. We're uncovering new possibilities and coming up with new ideas. My job really at Breakout, my title, Chief Innovation Officer, is almost misleading, because my job is really to talk to customers. It's to find out how we can take our great ideas and plug them into a context that has usefulness. Because oftentimes you're just wrong. Your intuition is, it betrays you. So I think that the most exciting thing about the moment detector is that we have a hypothesis. We have an idea about how it's going to work, but I think we're going to find out in real time, and I think that's going to be a really exciting journey. 

Tom 32:55

Yeah, that's awesome. All right, we are at our last question, which every guest gets the last question, because we live, we are living in this unique period of time where, you know, these new, very powerful tools that we just call aI have hit our world and are giving us an opportunity to step back and rethink the way the world works, the way we interact with each other. I like to ask this question, Steven, what's the coolest or weirdest thing that you've seen AI tools used for in the last 90 days. I got to put a really tight window on this, because any longer than that, this has become normal. Now our world's moving so fast, but what's the coolest or weirdest thing you've seen people using this with these tools? 

Steven 33:32

So as a storyteller, I'm always dialed in on this sort of content generation side of the house, right? That's where I'm always paying the most attention, although I follow the news cycle pretty religiously, and I use AI to help me do it. This is a trick I tell everybody, if they haven't unlocked it yet, but make yourself a Chatgpt daily task that summarizes all of the major innovations in each aspect of AI that's relevant to your business or to your vocation. Ask it to send you a daily morning update. I read it every day with my coffee. I have two that come in, one that is content specific and one that is more generalizable. But of course, I was blown away when I saw Google deep minds vo three, which lets you add sound effects and ambient noise and dialog to your creations. Of course, it's all over LinkedIn. We're recording this. I think sometime at the end of May, it's everywhere this week. Another one, though, is Stitch, which generates UIs. It's another Google product that's in beta. It generates UIs for mobile and web applications. It's basically what the kids call vibe coding. Which I've played with Lovable, which is another great resource for that type of vibe coding. But it's absolutely astounding what you can do and how quickly you can do it. And it this, what stitch does that lovable does not is it gives you the sort of it gives you greater configurability. So once the AI generates the user interface based on your prompt, you actually can very quickly play with like swapping out colors and doing some of the detailed design work that previously was not possible with this type of vibe coating. I use it my work, though, to build prototypes. We were hearing from a lot of customers that they wanted a solo experience, right? They didn't just want peer to peer for a lot of reasons, variety of reasons. And so we started to develop a solo experience. And I built my first version of the prototype of the AI learning companion, which we call Sophia, which is Greek for wisdom. I built that using vibe coding. And that really helped illustrate to the engineering team and to the product team what was in my mind. And they were able to take my idea and 10x it, of course, because they're geniuses. But it helped really move the needle. It skipped a lot of that kind of R and D part of the process, because you got to see a proof of concept, and then bam, there it was. That was pretty amazing. But the actual coolest thing that I've seen, and probably the actual word is scariest thing that I've seen, was open AI's operator, which is this autonomous AI agent, right, that can navigate and basically make its way through anything that's living in an online space. And I saw a video, I think it was within the 90 day window, Tom, I may be barely outside of it, but it was a video of one of these open AI operators navigating and completing and perfecting an entire online course on Moodle. And if you're in the business of online education right now, you got to be thinking, okay, what do I do? And again, I'm not saying this, bringing up this scary point, because I'm trying to sell Breakout learning to your listeners. I'm bringing it up because it is, it does feel existential. We're not a panacea to that problem. We are meaningfully addressing it. There are others that are too, but it is, it's, there are some people who believe that AI is going to revolutionize education, because it's going to give personalized learning on a level that it's never been able to do before. And that may be true, but it is absolutely upending the incumbents. It's absolutely upending the business model. And you have to ask yourself, if an AI agent can entirely complete your course, then does your course have any relevance at that point? Is it doing what it's supposed to do? And maybe the transactional nature of that will cause those systems to subsist for a time, but I think eventually that will catch up. And so I think folks, there's a real incentive, and I would say a necessity, for folks to break that inertia and to evolve and to use this crisis as an opportunity. I love to read the stoics. I love to read pop stoicism. I love to read the Ryan Holiday books. There's one that he wrote that's called the obstacle is the way. And I think that's my advice to faculty that might be listening to this right now. It might feel like AI is the obstacle, but it's the way. Lean into it, run in that direction. And I think what you'll find is that it can unlock new possibilities for your classrooms and new possibilities for your students. 

Tom 37:48

That's awesome. Awesome. Thank you. I'm gonna look, I'm gonna look that one up myself. Fantastic, Steven as always, fantastic to talk to you. Thank you for coming on the podcast, sharing a little bit about your journey, what breakout is doing today, and a little bit about the world around us. So thank you so much for joining us. 

Steven 38:00

Thank you for having me, Tom.