 I wrote this book, The Smartest Kids in the World, and how they got that way, because I was really curious to understand how it was that some countries were managing to educate virtually all their kids to really high levels. And it didn't make sense the fluctuations that you could see around the world. And what I wanted to do, though, to really find out what it was like to be a kid in these countries was to tell the story from the perspective of actual students. And not just any students, but students who have had the unique advantage of living and going to school in the U.S., and living and going to school in countries with high performing education systems, because they can see things that none of the rest of us can. What I would tell kids at my high school and what my roommate really taught me was that you think the bar is here, it's actually here, or like maybe here. I think it can be hard for people to move from abstract international comparisons to, like, real life. And what Elizabeth is able to do is to tell us from her dorm room at Stanford that this is who she is competing with. She came face to face with globalization, with a world in which the U.S. is no longer a leader in education. And she realized that she'd underestimated what she could do. I started out talking to these kids because I honestly just needed the book to be more interesting. I needed characters, right? And I've always found that kids can tell you a lot about school in a way that adults cannot. What I found, though, was that they were experts. They were, like, amateur anthropologists who had spent literally hundreds of hours thinking about their school and their homes and education in the U.S. and thinking and comparing it to their schools and homes and educations in Finland or Korea or Poland. They have a lot of time. You forget how much time kids have to contemplate their situation and to think about what could be different, what is different, and what could be better.