 Let's say you're giving advice to the parents and grandparents in the room. You can't reshape the system You can't even control Harvard, but you can tell them what to do for their children. What's your advice given all of what you just said? Well, you should delay Specialization and as long as possible You should Because of all of those Yeah, for because prediction is poor in Burnett Burnett is another is as big an issue as poor prediction early prediction And I would avoid I think the other parallel problem which I get out in David and Goliath is I think that overly competitive environments At two early in age are really deeply problematic. So I thought about this the other day when I was I I I Live most of the time upstate New York very close to Bard and I go and I work out at the bar Jim and I was watching So Bard is God. I don't know how many students. I mean is it 2000? I don't even know it's some tiny number and I was watching the Bard lacrosse team work out and I don't know anyone. I don't want to offend anyone who went to Bard They're not allowed to say by the way That's right. I can't say they can't say they're terrible the I was just you know eyeballing the lacrosse team. I was like good Lord. I mean I off I felt that I could go down there at 52 and make this team and then that was my first thought I mean second thought was that is so fantastic Because what it means is you can be an ordinary Joe at Bard and play lacrosse right now Think about that in every different thing it so In a school that small With the exception of the things at which they are I mean there's probably two or three things at Bard at which they genuinely do excel I'm sure the the drama program or the music program is Framitable, but let's accept though. There's special any non-specialy item at Bard is going to be It's wide open. It's totally accessible You know you want to be in the physics club at Bard you can be in the physics club at Bard, right? and that is a Massively underrated thing so the in other words the there's there's a continuum here and Exclusivity is at one end an opportunity is at the other end and people constantly are confused in these two things and thinking that in in exclusivity and in in Elite status is opportunity false Eventually, that's where the opportunities lie. They don't lie there when you're 16 or 17 and you when what is next what is required of you is is experimentation if you want your 17 year old to explore the world send your 17 year old to a place where the world can be Explored the world cannot be explored at a Super elite university, right? It's impossible. I had that I talked about in David and Goliath the phenomenon of very very very very Good science and math students going to elite colleges and dropping out at enormously high rates because They're in the 99th percentile and they're in a class full of people in the 99.9th percentile And when you are in the 99th percentile and you're up against someone in the 99.99th percentile You feel stupid right even though you will never again in your life unless you Want to be an academic at MIT in physics be surrounded by people that's smart, right? It's over after that then you go back to the real world and you're smart again So why would you artificially push yourself in a situation where you feel so dumb? That you stop doing the very thing that you went to school to do that's just That is bananas. That is like and why this isn't a fact that people like when I when I was in college what I went out for the University of Toronto newspaper and they couldn't wouldn't give me a job. It was too hard to get in there with the brilliant people So what did I do? I wrote for my pathetic Joke of a we had a residential college. We put out this kind of joke thing every couple weeks and It was insanely fun. It was like but I could do whatever I wanted nobody cared We made up all kinds of crazies. I mean in the end I had a way better experience And I would have had if I had that was at the highly competitive newspaper I've never forgotten that right by virtue of being this kind of lame forgotten thing I got to do more fun stuff and I have a much better time than I would have it at the proper newspaper You know that there this this tries to be well clearly drives me crazy