 We're back on a Monday morning. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Think Tech. It's a 10 o'clock block. Here we are to talk about the middle way with our co-host Chang Wang and our guest, Carlos Cione, and they join us to discuss, and this is very important, the technology. Let me get this right. I'm looking at it now. Yes, yes, yes. It's expert opinions on education and technology. Carlos is an education entrepreneur. Is that a fair statement of Carlos? That is a fair statement. Yes, sir. Welcome to the show. And Chang, welcome to you to the show. As always, can you please describe the scope of our discussion and can you introduce our special guest? Absolutely. Aloha. Morning, everybody. Good morning, Jay and Carlos. It is my honor to introduce my good friend and former colleague. Carlos and I have known each other for 15 years. We used to work for the same company. He was senior executive and he is one of the hardest working person, even though the hardest working person and the smartest person ever know. He knew inside out not only how to survive and function well in corporate America, but how to, he had the terrific acid strategy of corporate America because sometimes you feel that corporate America becomes your small world and you cannot get out of it. And I have to confess, I followed Carlos, Carlos steps, step by step. Carlos exited corporate America and then shortly after, I did the same. Carlos materialized his concept and built his own company. I materialized my concept and a co-built team as well. So I learned a lot from Carlos and how to be a team worker and how to materialize a concept. He founded a company called S-Temporal. It's a language learning platform and app. It's becoming extremely popular and successful for the foreign language learning. So I'm very eager to hear the updates. I've been monitoring his development, his company development for the past few years, but I look forward to hear updates and I also have a few burning questions about the recent, from the recent news I would like to ask Carlos. Okay, we'll make it a cliffhanger. It's a cliffhanger. What are your questions are going to be? So Carlos, my question to you is why? Why S-Temporal? Yes. When people ask of entrepreneurs the why question, the answer, the temptation is always to give a lofty answer. You know, you want to just fix the problem and make everything better or whatever. I wanted to have my own company. I wanted to have something I could call mine. I've always been an entrepreneur since I was a child. I've been looking for a problem to solve for 10 years and then my wife is a professor of linguistics at a university here in Minneapolis. And you know, once you identify the problem and you identify a solution for that problem, then everything else is naturally follows, right? What qualified you to be successful? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Success in a startup is pure perseverance against a loss. You don't come pre-qualified. You just keep pushing and pushing and pushing and the things happen, right? And learn from your mistakes. I'm very impressed with that. But what you're really saying is that anyone could do it. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Anyone can do it if they stick around. You hear all these statistics, you know, nine out of 10 companies fail. Companies don't fail. People give up. Things get tough and people give up. And the ones that survive are not the smartest. They're just the ones that don't let go. So what about creativity? You know, you got to be creative. You have to have a new idea every 10 minutes. You have to, you know, do better than anybody in the competition or find a space which nobody has entered yet. What's your approach to that and why have you been successful in that? You know, another way to explain creativity, Jay, is framing us trial and error. You're not imaginative. You don't have these brilliant ideas in the middle of the night. You're just constantly trying to, you know, new things and the screwing up and then trying again and then the screwing up and then trying again. And from my distance, it looks like creativity, but it's not. It's just the end of a long string of mistakes where you end up with something that finally works, right? But there's no light bulb moment. It's a grind. It's just keep going, keep going until this process until things just click in. You're going to stick with it or sell it? For now, we're going to stick with it. You know, there's about a billion people learning a language in the world right now. And we have, you know, less than two million. So we have a long way to go still for world domination. That's what we're talking about. From a customer point of view, what's the special sauce? Why would I take X Tempor ahead of another company? And the Lord knows there are a lot of companies trying to teach you languages these days, some of them are more aggressive than others. So we, you know, what makes us, the reason why you would choose X Tempor over somebody else is because there's nobody else right now. You know, we are still in a green field space. We don't teach a language. We are a tool for language teachers. So our job is to make a language teacher's life better and easier, which inevitably results in a better outcome for the student. So ultimately what we do is we solve a logistical challenge. Teachers have too many students, you know, an average load in the U.S. for K-12 teachers, about 120 students. If I'm teaching French or English or German or Hawaiian, and I have 120 students, if I want to speak with every one of my students for five minutes a day, five minutes, so they get five minutes of speaking practice, that's 600 minutes. So I mean, that's 10 hours of my day, so that my students get 2.5 minutes of speaking practice really sticky, right? So that's what's so broken and so challenging for the language teaching is that students don't have the time. So X Tempor is a tool that allows them to ensure practice, ensure sounds in a way that's very, very convenient for both the teacher and the student. So before we started, I asked you, you know, what about the technology here? Is this an online play or is this a classroom system? What is it? And how do you, yeah, go ahead, tell us about that. So that's the beauty, the beauty of the cloud, right? It's some schools have it in a computer lab on campus. Some have, give the students devices, some use on the students device. It doesn't matter. You know, you have a username and password, you can log into X Tempor from the computer lab and then finish your homework at home on your mom's laptop, right? Or in the car on your phone, it doesn't really matter because it follows the student. How do you handle all those students within the course of the amount of time available? I mean, what do you give to the teacher to enable the teacher to accelerate the learning process? We do. So what we do is two things. Mainly, we facilitate the process, right? So the teacher can, instead of meeting with 120 students and asking the same question 120 times, they ask the question once on X Tempor and the students answer on their own time, right? So that's cut my time investment as a teacher dramatically. But then we also have a lot of pre-made activities and pre-made tasks that a teacher can just pull in and use with their students and then review on their own time. And then we have a lot of, you know, time saving. I complain my students' responses at double, double speed because they speak very slowly, right? So it's also a cumulative process of time savings for the teacher. But there always is a teacher. I think that's what I hear you're saying. There always is a teacher. We are not in a world where we can replace the teacher yet. The teacher is a critical part of education. Before we go to the cliffhanger question, it's a Chang is waiting so patiently to ask you. I want to ask about the languages. You know, you go to these various language learning programs, Heather and Jan, and they will offer many, many, many languages. And some of them are, you know, some of the lessons in one language are better than some of the lessons in another language. And I always wonder, you know, how it works to learn Croatian. So my question to you is, what languages do you select for this? Do you select any language particularly? Or all languages? I mean, you have, there's a demand out there. You've got to satisfy parents, want kids. You know, I know a, she's a Filipino woman. She decided her kid had to be in a Chinese immersion school. This is in Portland. So she said, well, okay, I don't know of any immersion schools for young kids. I will establish one. And she did successfully. And I guess that was extraordinary that she could do that. But that was the demand for Mandarin. How do you meet that kind of demand? So we follow more than lead in that sense, right? If I have a teacher of Hawaiian, which we do, who wants to use extemporary teach Hawaiian, the platform is there for them. The platform is in itself language agnostic. And what's interesting is we actually gravitate towards what's called less commonly taught languages. Now, if I teach Spanish, if I teach French, there's textbooks, there's websites, there's videos. If I teach Tagalog, or if I teach some African dialect, there's nothing, right? So we right now, we see about 30 students been, sorry, 30 languages being taught on extemporary. The Minnesota Department of Education, for example, uses extemporary to assess for all their less commonly taught languages. So if I, if a child in Minnesota speaks Ojibwe at home, you know, an indigenous language here, and they want to prove to the state of their bilingual and get something called the seal of biliteracy assessment stamp. So a certificate on their high school diploma that says, you know, this kid is bilingual, they will use extemporary to assess for that, for that language. And so that's the beauty of a tool that's completely language agnostic is any language will give it, will give it to you, right? You know, I have noticed Carlos that there's an increasing number of apps on telephone, on phones and on computers, which will do simultaneous translation. You can speak into it, and it will write it out in Croatian. You can speak into it in Croatian, it'll write it out in English, and you can speak to it in Croatian, it'll speak back to you in English. Now, these are not 100% effective yet, but they're going that way. They're using artificial intelligence. And if I'm, you know, in a shop in the capital of Croatia, I mean, what's the capital of Croatia? Then I will be able to talk to the shopkeeper in a fairly sophisticated linguistic exchange using my cell phone. Isn't that a serious competition for you? Isn't that the way things are going now? So you will be able to order a coffee in Croatian. You are not going to be able to crack a subtle joke in Croatian, right? You're not going to be able to make, I guess, intelligent commentary about the Croatian society using your phone. I have no doubt that technology like that will put us all out of business and include myself and the teachers 50 years from today. Learning a language is not just learning the words. Learning a language is learning a culture. Learning a language is learning the environment. Learning a language is, you know, thinking like the language you're trying to learn, right? I can make jokes with, you know, a colleague here in the U.S. that I cannot make back at home in Spain and the other way around, right? And that is what learning a language brings. It's not just a translation piece. Anybody can translate, but that's the easy part. It's navigating a culture. It's being what's called functionally bicultural, right? Moving two cultures together and navigate that. We're a long, long, long way from that still. Yes. Chang, you've been so patient. And I, for myself, you know, the other side of my brain is waiting for your cliffhanger questions. So this is a moment where you might, you might want to pose them to Carlos. Very kind of you, Jay. I've been enjoying to hear your conversation. The first of you, Jay, it's a capital of a corrosion, corrosion is Zagreb, the city of Zagreb, the capital of the chief city. That'll be on the final exam, everybody, right? Which we can do an extemporary convenience. Right? I have a couple of questions, but for two questions for Carlos are related. They are related to each other. So I'm proud to say that I found a Chinese name for Carlos Song. He has a beautiful boy and a beautiful girl, and he sent both of them to Chinese immersion schools. And so my first question is why? I normally directly ask you this. Why did you think the Chinese immersion school is better than French immersion school and or Spanish immersion school? But probably you can do that at home. And then the second question related is considering the recent divorce of these two countries and in the foreseeable future will be more and more separation. And do you regret the decision to send you kids to Chinese immersion school? That's a loaded question, but I'll do my best to answer it. No, I do not regret sending our kids to Chinese immersion school. When people ask why did you send them to Chinese immersion school, my answer is why not? The fact that my kids who are six and eight right now can sit on the little butts at a school and essentially absorb Chinese and speak Chinese fluently in a few years at zero effort is magic to me. And we got to a charter school here in Minneapolis called Yinghua Academy. It's a fantastic school public. It doesn't cost me any money. And every year, this time of the year, I think that the fact that I can take my kids to bilingual school, make my kids triangle at zero effort with fantastic teachers in small classrooms is magic to me. And it's a testament of how far we've come as a society, right? As to, you know, the specific why, there's a lot of reasons, a lot of cognitive advantages to speak in multiple languages, as you know, and the more apart those languages, the better. You know, I think it's not, you know, my kids speak Spanish at home, English, everywhere, and Chinese in school. Those are three separate ways of thinking and three separate ways of operating. That's good for their brains, right? That's build a set of connections in their brains that they wouldn't otherwise. There is also a, to be careful here, a slightly political consideration for me. I am an optimist, so I don't think the countries have divorced. I think China is rising and, you know, good for them as they should. I come from a former empire, so I know everything about rising and falling again. So, you know, on a political sense, it's not bad for my kids to also speak Chinese. You know, if mom and dad divorce, you want to spend some time in each house, right? So if you're right, it's not a bad thing. But I do think China is a future. For good or bad, I think China is the future. And I want my kids to be able to navigate three cultures. And if you add the amount of people that speak Chinese in the world, plus English, plus Spanish, my children will be able to communicate with about 90% of the world's population in their own language. That is, that that will just open the world like nothing else. Can you ask the second question now? Yeah, allow me a quick comment before I ask another question. It's last time Carlos and his family came to my house for a dinner party. And his son and daughter speak perfect Chinese Mandarin without any accent to us and to our Chinese dogs. And because our dogs are very talkative, and his son just look at my elder dog and speak in perfect, perfect Mandarin, shut up and say the dog's name. Both my wife and I were totally overwhelmed by it and were stunned by such a perfect, you know, pronunciation that is extremely rare for the non-Chinese speakers. And as you can hear, I speak English with heavy accent even after 20 years in the United States. But a quick question for you, Carlos, and in what language do you think your children are dreaming right now? We often wonder, they, you know, so first of all, a six-year-old's brain and a 40-year-old's brain are not the same, right? My daughter who seeks to just absorb everything instantly, perfectly. There's nothing to confuse her, right? There's nothing there yet. They are at a really fascinating stage where they will use the first language that comes to them. So they are very happy to mix languages in the same sentence. You know, they will start a sentence in Spanish, continue in English, and if the only word they know is in Chinese, then they'll finish in Chinese. Because if you think about it, you know, their world is very segmented, right? The way we speak to them at home, the vocabulary we use as parents at home in Spanish is very different than the vocabulary they use in school and very different than the vocabulary they use on the street with their friends, right? So it's not, there's much less overlap that you would think. So if they're speaking in English and the only word they know is in Chinese, they'll just learn it only in Chinese and hope for the best, right? Because in their mind, everybody should speak Chinese like they do because it's just so easy. Okay, my second question is, recently, Chinese government have this policy change. So after school, private tutoring, including language learning, has been banned. So in the past few decades, Chinese parents after the school as for curriculum activities have been for Chinese children. So they go to piano classes, they go to English learning, French learning, they go to calligraphy, and particularly, but most importantly, they go to exam preparation training courses. Now the Chinese government banned all of them overnight. So obviously, many people will lose their job, but some parents are happy, some parents are unhappy. The happy parents said, okay, before that policy change, we cannot afford eyeing these private tutoring classes. And we cannot afford pay for educational apps. So we know everybody on the eco footing. And so we have to, our children will just start it hard in school. There's no after school, the mean, nice snacks for the rich kids. Some parents are very unhappy. They said, we want our children to be fully educated, we want to provide the best of educational opportunities, and the best technology we can afford. And if they need, we will buy them an iPad pro, we will buy them pay for the apps, and we will pay for any private tutoring classes online or in person. And so these policies change is, is fear of societal level, but it's unfair for our children. And the second part of the question is already related, because now the English learning is optional for Chinese children, for elementary school children. It used to be for my generation, in the 1980s, when we go to, went to elementary school, English learning was optional. And then the government made it mandatory for all elementary school children for the past few decades. And by the recently, they changed it back to optional. So I want to hear Carlos comments on all these new recent developments, because you think China is rising, but look at those policy changes. What's your comments and the gut feeling about this? So I have a lot of thoughts about that, as a matter of fact. It seems to me that China is struggling, trying to decide who they want to be, removing English classes from an elementary classroom, makes them sound like the US, right? It's almost as mindset that we're already empire, so we don't need it, we don't need to learn another language, right? If you want to talk to me speak Chinese, there's a bit of that arrogance, you know, you think about the US, the US language teaching is compared to Europe, for example, is minimal, you know, Europe, every student speaks, learns a second or third language in the US, only a percentage of them, right? And that's the empire mindset that, you know, talked to me in my language, because I'm the boss, right? I grew up in Spain, Spain still has that legacy thinking where, you know, if you want to talk to me, you should learn Spanish, right? We're not empire anymore, but they still think they are sometimes. So it seems to me on one side that China is starting to think as a big boy now, and, you know, they don't see a need to communicate other languages, which is maybe that's just the way we evolve as humans. The whole crackdown on tutoring, you know, it's almost the other side of it, I mean, it's made on the grounds of equity or stated to be on the grounds of equity. I'm not sure if it is, or that's just an excuse for a bigger picture of a crackdown on technology and, you know, too much power from technology companies, which is the same debate we're having in this country with Twitter and Facebook and so on, right? But it seems to me that the Chinese, you know, it's a fast evolving country that's trying to decide who they are. As a technology educational technology executive, I don't think it's a good idea to crack down on technology companies. I have to say that. I would rather we avoid that at all costs. You know, it definitely doesn't sound to be good policy to just, you know, punch the table and get half a million people out of a job overnight. That's not the way it should be done. But yeah, it's interesting to watch China. As the father of two Chinese speakers, it's funny to watch, you know, it's interesting to watch the evolution as well. See what China will be 20 years from today when my kids are out in the job market, right? It won't be what it is today. My reaction, Chang and Carlos, is that that's a move calculated to control the message. They can control the schools, you know, what the teachers say in the schools, but they can't control the tutors very well. And so you cut the tutors out. So now you use the schools as a way to control the message. And so there's no, there's no contamination of foreign ideas, what have you into that. It's really, and it's really too bad. It reflects not only arrogance, but this kind of special aggressive, what did you call it before, Chang? Divorce mentality is what it is. And this is really problematic because on the one hand, Carlos, as you have mentioned, to learn a language well is to learn the culture of the other place. And if you have more people in more places learning the cultures of more other places, you have a better world because you understand how it is across the border. You understand what it's like to live in the other country. And, you know, the good, the bad, what have you, but it enables you to understand that therefore it brings the world together. And if we don't do that on the other side of it, a lotricoté, right? The other side of it is if we don't do that, then we don't understand. And it brings the world further apart. Yeah, not only that, on a selfish standpoint, it gives you the upper hand, right? If I'm trying to sell you something, I'll be much more effective selling it to you in English than if I try to force you to learn Spanish to buy it from me, right? So as a country that is able to understand and interact with other countries in their own languages, to me, that's a huge advantage, right? They can't force the world to learn Chinese, but they are, I think they're losing out if they don't understand the American culture. That's a net loss for them and for the world, as you said. I want to go back to the Filipino girl who established the immersion school in Portland for Mandarin. And for that matter, your kids in a Mandarin immersion school, it's very impressive what happened there. You know, what really is the future on this? If the relationship between China and the US is declining, degrading, you know, getting more contentious than as a parent or as a person, do I want to know Mandarin? You know, in 20 years ago, Cheng, it was all the rage. A lot of people, they wanted to learn Mandarin because they thought the future was bright and cohesive and, you know, tolerant and there would be a huge connection between the US and China. A lot of people don't feel that way anymore. And it's on both sides. Both sides are the issue. But, but query, you know, where are we going with this? Is it important? Is it still important? What would you advocate to a parent now, given the fact that two countries are moving apart? There's no, there is no downside as far as I can tell, right? There's never a downside. You have to make the argument of relevance. Yeah, no, no, I understood that what I'm saying is there's no, there is no argument to knowing too much. Whether, you know, if things stay friendly, and I hope, and I pray that they will, then I think my kids, any child that speaks Chinese will have an advantage in the job market. If things were to stay unfriendly, my kids are American first, right? It's not bad for the US to have people that speak the other side's language fluently and understand that culture, right? So to me, relevant or not, there's absolutely no downside to learning another language and understanding another culture if you don't want to say and brag about it and don't. But that's something nobody can take away from you. Yeah. One last thing I'd like to get into is the linguistic approach. You spoke of your wife as a linguistics professor and so forth. And you also spoke Carlos of this that really fabulous kind of expression to start a sentence in one language and then end it in another. That means a lot. It means a lot psychologically. It means a lot in terms of a worldview, of a view of humanity. There's a lot to say for doing that. And Chang, I'm sure you'd do it. And I would guess five bucks that your kids do it, too. I would even guess that your dog does it. My dogs are bilingual, by the way. Of course they are. They were born in China and immigrant to the United States. And they're absolutely loving it. But I really appreciate our conversation today because as a bilingual speaker and who has been spending a lot of time in the education sector also in the technology sector of the corporate America, I just feel a strong echo of everything you have said so far. So the language, particularly the language learning is so vitally important for the 21st century. And on the larger scale, you speak a foreign language. And you not only begin to understand the culture and history behind the language, but most importantly, you begin to develop empathy for the people. So you know, statistically, there are very strong social statistics, you know, show that the more foreign language speakers you'll have, the more peaceful your state and country will be because you don't automatically label the other side other people as enemy or even animal or non-human. So that if you don't understand the language, you hear on the TV, you see that people blah, blah, blah, blah, or whatever they're talking about, they're just, you know, it's not us, it's there are others. So we should definitely encourage language learning at all cost. It's really a shame that we don't have a lot of mandatory foreign language learning courses in most major countries as well. And the technology definitely aids to achieve this goal. Well, that's a problem, Carlos. How do you must think about that? How do you do that? We live in a time of isolation. I would benefit if you went to the American Congress and asked them to speak in another language, they wouldn't find a lot of response. If you asked them whether they had passports to visit other countries, you probably wouldn't find a lot of response. We're in isolation mode. How do you change the direction of that? I think for every action, there's a reaction, Jay. I think we were in isolation mode until Trump. I think that the pendulum is swinging in the other direction now. There is a big bill in Congress with bipartisan support that adds a very significant amount of funding for language teaching in the K-12 and the higher ed. There are two Americas. I think we saw that. We've seen that in the last four years. There's an America that wants to isolate, that wants to know less. And there's a very open, very smart, very educated America out there as well. And I do want to think that that second is the majority. Again, I am an optimist. You don't start a company. You're not any rational optimist. So I do believe in the future of this country. And I do think there's a lot of very, very smart people that want to do the right thing. So we'll counter some of that temptation. At the risk of having you say something you said before, let me offer you the opportunity to leave your message with our viewing audience. What would you want them to remember? I think that the takeaway is that language teaching, I think, is important. That language teaching is more than language teaching. Language teaching is culture. It's empathy. It's been able to relate to others. It's been able to understand the world in a very, very different way. And you can achieve that with technology. You can achieve that with funding. You can achieve that. But it all goes to the same place, which is knowledge and education. That's what's changing the world. That's what's always changed the world. And playing a small part of that, I think it's an honor for me. That strikes me that it's really a strategic resource for the country, as a country, to be able to speak multiple languages. They keep talking about all these people that the government, the military wants to save in Afghanistan and a good number of people that they want to save are, quote, interpreters. I think that tells us we don't have a lot of interpreters in this country trained by the military to be interpreters. And my reaction is we would have been better off. And we would be better off now if we had our own interpreters who understood multiple languages around the world. Chang, I want to offer you the opportunity to close. Can you do that? Thank you so much, Jay. Thank you, Carlos, coming on the show, that I cannot agree with you more with what you just used your closing remarks. But I want to close my part with a quote from one of our former presidents that which I call in Carlos optimism, nothing wrong about America cannot be cured by what's wrong, what's right about America. And I also want to twist this quote a little bit, that no biases or prejudice cannot be cured by foreign language learning. I like that, Chang. I like that, too. That's very good. Thank you, Chang Wang. Thank you, Carlos. Really appreciate you coming around this morning. Thank you for the video, Jay. Thank you, Chang. Aloha and namaste.