Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Steneveek on Bloomberg Radio.
Carol, we got our report card and it's not good.
All right.
Us fourth and eighth grade students are struggling with reading comprehension, with last year's nationwide testing showing the worst results in more than two decades.
It kind of blows my mind because I know how much money is spent on education.
Yeah. So this is the congressionally mandated assessment in twenty twenty four. The results were released yesterday by the National Assessment of Educational Progress na EP. Curious what sal Con has to say about this. He's the founder and CEO of con Academy. It's the nonprofit that provides free lessons in math and history, economics, computer programming, and more. He's back with us from Mountain View, California. So always good to chat with you. How are you.
I'm doing well, Thanks for having me.
Did this reading score surprise you?
Unfortunate? Unfortunately not. You know, we've and the Nate folks made this clear also in their report. I think we still have the effects of the pandemic nationwide, The scores nationally, both in math and reading, both in fourth and eighth grade, still haven't recovered from the twenty nineteen level. This is true in almost every state as well. And it's you know, we had big gaps then a lot of kids kind of fell off the rails then and haven't fully gotten
back on. And then there's just a lot of you know, complexity in serving different groups of students and demographic mix etc. That probably has made it even harder. You know.
What's worrying too is that I think some would say it's the pandemic, yes, but we've had problems with our education system right across the country for a while here, and it feels like the gaps are widening. I mean, I want to ask you, I am curious, sal because you've been in you know, this world for a long time. What's happening with American education?
You know?
Unfortunately it's kind of a tale of two cities is the right metaphor here? And the NAPE scores validated that the higher performing students actually started to pull further and further ahead. And a lot of times when you look at some of these PISA rankings, when we compare ourselves to other countries, et cetera. If you were to separate some of the higher performing, wealthier schools and the suburbs, et cetera, they actually can compete with anyone in the world,
actually do better than anyone in the world. But I think you have other large chunks of America where they're really really lagging. And these NAPE scores only only validated you had a third of eighth graders didn't even have
basic reading comprehension. I just visited a school yesterday out here in northern California, and I met two English language learners who, you know, not only are they, you know, obviously can't speak English, but they haven't gone to school before, they haven't read before, or they can't read it all, even in their native language. So I think when you, I think those types of difficulties are some of what you're seeing here on top of on top of the pandemic.
And unfortunately I don't I don't think just doing more of the same is actually the solution here. This is something that we've always talked about at Kin Academy, is how do we personalize education more? You know? And I saw that teacher that that same teacher that had these two students who couldn't read, who are fifth graders, also had some students who are ready for ninth grade math. So they had a huge spread in that same classroom, and you can't just do one thing for all of
those thirty students. And that's where we think technology can help that teacher address the needs of each each individual student.
You know, the President has has cited how the US lags behind other Western nations despite federal spending on students, and you know, he is looking to potentially dismantle the Department of Education. Do you think that would be helpful?
You know, we'll need to see how it all evolves. A lot of folks have been asking me this, even in our own team. We work obviously with a lot of school districts. The Department of Education does a lot of things, but they aren't a major major funder of schools. Depending on what year you look at and what schools, anywhere between three and ten percent of funding in a given year comes from the federal Department of Education, and it tends to be tied to certain programs, so some
of those might suffer. Some of those are there by law.
One of our board members is a former Under Secretary of Education, and he was explaining to me yesterday a day before yesterday at our board meeting, that there are certain things in there that are just part of law that even if the Department of Education were dismantled, someone else would have to take it over the Department of the Treasury, Department or Health and Human Services, etc. So it's too early to tell exactly what the implications are,
but most of education spending and policy actually does happen at the state and local level.
Yeah, so this is where you think about like state taxes, right, or city taxes and so on and so forth that really are the determining factor. How can AI help with all of this? This is something you guys are certainly in the middle of and improve the gaps that we see within education across the United States.
Yeah, this is something that we're definitely leaning into. And it's very easy to get enamored with technology, but I remind everyone this isn't about the technology. It's about the core problem you're trying to solve. And the problem we're trying to solve is the one we started talking about. Is you have a teacher in a classroom before the pandemic, Your average teacher had three grade levels in the same classroom. They're all fifth graders, but some are operating in a
second or third grade level. Some of them are ready to operate at a sixth or seventh grade level. It's gotten worse since the pandemic, as we just talked about. So if you're a teacher, how do you address all of those needs? How do you make sure some of the kids aren't bored and all some of the kids aren't lost. And so the opportunity is, well, what if you could personalize? In world class education has always looked like one to one. I always point out Alexander the
Great had Aristotle as his personal tutor. We couldn't afford to give every student that. But what kind academy has been trying to do over the last fifteen twenty years is well, maybe we could approximate elements of that with on demand video, with software and now generative AI. I write a lot about it in my book Brave New Words.
We think generative AI. It's it's not going to do everything, it's not on a silver bullet, but over time it's going to get better and better at being able to provide even more personalized support, not just for students, but also also for teachers with things like lesson plans and grading papers and writing progress reports.
Sally had you on back in May when Brave New Words came out how AI will revolutionize education and why that's a good thing. I spoke to someone yesterday who talked about the pace of development when it comes to AI is just unbelievable. Like he says, the world changes every few months as a result of this technology. How much has it changed since he wrote the book.
Yeah, it was actually one of my fears when I was writing the book, write a book by AI will to be outdated of the day it comes out. Luckily, I still think it's pretty you know. I tried to make it pretty general, and even a year ago when when you know, I was finishing up the writing, it was pretty clear how fast this was moving, so I tried to make a little bit more evergreen. But yeah, it's been mind blowingly fast. Not even every few months,
I would say, sometimes on a daily basis. Things are things are evolving a lot of what I challenge the con Academy team is what can we uniquely do as a nonprofit that other people aren't going to have the horizon or the motivation to work on and what are we going to do that's really AI proof And we think a lot of it is how do we connect humans together? Maybe using AI, but how do we for
more human connections? Maybe? How do how do people create proof that they know something credentially once again, how do you how do you make sure it's pedagogically sound as opposed to just you know, throwing an AI in front of people. But yes, it is definitely something my head haspens almost on a daily basis. But you know, everyone feels that way.
You know, it's funny. Forgive me for doing this, but I guess because it's been front and center. You know, we're talking AI, and we've been watching what's been going on in the US government, and The Washington Post had said today reported representatives from Elon Musk's Dose service have fed sensitive data from across the Education Department into AI software to look into the agency's programs and spending. According to people familiar, AI being used to investigate where there's
personal data possibly accessed. You are in this world? Is that something we should be concerned about, whether it's Department of Education or the Treasury department.
Well, you know, I don't I'm not an expert on exactly what has happened. But yes, anytime we're talking about data, data related to education in particular, you have to be super cautious about how it's being used, especially if it's potentially student data. This is something where as we take this very seriously as a nonprofit, and when we go work with school districts we point out like not every for profit company has the same incentives that we do. You have to be very cautious here on how you
use it. Now if it's all on the up and up, and I don't know, I don't know what the fine print is on this data. You know, there could be uses of AI where you can use it to make sense of large amounts of information that otherwise, of you know, an individual human being would never be able to sift through. But yeah, I don't know the details of how they're using it.
No, that's fair.
Hey.
One other news thing that obviously we've been obsessed about the last couple of weeks Deep Seek, you know, and the prospect of AI maybe being less expensive to do and the models to be able to do. When I think about education, might that make it even more accessible for students around the globe.
Yeah, I mean I thought it was great news from our point of view. The costs have already come down even before deep Seek by a factor of ten, and so I expected that to continue. And then deep Seek and some of their techniques I think is only going to accelerate it. But you know, I also point out there's an unending amount of things that we can use AI for. You know, basic chat bots are going to
become close to free, very cheap. But now if the compute or if the if the applications use less compute and the compute gets cheaper, we're going to be able to do more real time, more audio, more visual things. And yes, in education in other places, I think that's that's only a win for the application developers.
What's the balance of technology in the classroom. It's a discussion that we had with you last time, but it seems like it's only becoming more and more of a thing. How do you use technology as a tool but not as a distraction.
Yeah, and we have a school out here in Northern California's where my kids go to school, con Lab School. And you know, if you were to visit the school. People say, oh, so sociocon Academy must be technology all the time. No, you'd actually see more human to human interaction than you would see I think at almost any other school. And I think it's all about I would say maybe depending on the age as you get older, middle school, high school, college, you could get up to
thirty forty fifty percent leveraging technology. You're going to code, you're going to write a paper, you're going to edit video, you're going to do personalized practice on con academy to fill in your gaps. And then what that does is that liberates the class time so that you don't have to give the lectures anymore. You don't have a bunch of kids with their fingers on their lips just passively listening.
You can have the kids work on harder problems. Can they could do simulations, they can do games, and that's what we try to do. And you know, I always point out even without technology, you can have very dehumanizing classrooms, but if you use technology, well you could have very humanizing classrooms.
Yeah.
Right.
You just think about kind of where it could go, and especially the idea of personalization in terms of teaching could be really a cool thing, so com Thank you so much. I always appreciate the time you give us. He is founder and chief executive officer of con Academy,
joining us from Mountain View, California. You know the other thing I think about with teaching and AI is I just think about if you're I was a pretty shy kid and hard to believe, but like might be afraid to like offer up an answer or something because you think it's silly. But maybe if you're working with an AI teacher or ta oh, like just think about what you can maybe get out of that.
I think d Lingo said that they have these AI educators rather than live people because they find that people who are learning languages want to interact with that tech.
Yeah, that makes complete sat on because you feel embarrassed about like your pronunciations or something. All right, everybody, we are continuing here on Bloomberg. This is Business.
Week, Carol. The White House received more than seventy four hundred requests for credentials one day after saying it would open press briefings for content creators, influencers, and podcasters.
A lot.
Social media influencers are becoming a primary source of news for many Americans. Nearly forty percent of young adults under thirty rely on influencers to stay updated on current events and politics. This is according to the Pew Research Center. Opening its press conferences to non traditional news sources allows influencers to directly question administration officials.
Yeah, it's really kind of interesting these development. Emily Ward and Jess Hunishen are the co founders of the influencer talent management and brand partnerships agencies called Shine Ventures. Emily joining us from Toronto, Jess joins us from La. Great to be talking with both of you again before we get going, though, Jess, I do want to reach out to you. You're in LA. We spent several weeks continue to cover the fires.
How are you.
I hope you were okay those around you, your community.
Yeah, so I'm just in West Hollywood, so no immediate damage here. But it certainly is true what they say that everyone knows someone who.
Was very, very personally affected.
So we have a lot of those people kind of just like in our Shine work network in my personal network. And yeah, it's been a tough start to the year here, that's for sure. But I think the best thing that can ever come out of this is you know, it shows how much community can can come together in a time of crisis.
So yeah, yeah, it is nice to see all the rallying and you're so right about so much coming at everybody across the nation. We obviously have been following so much coming out of DC, and we kind of want to start there. Tim was mentioning about social media influencers becoming a primary source of news for so many Americans and how the White House press room and has opened
it up to non traditional news sources. What does that mean from yoursfective, You guys understand the influencer community and economy, and let me start with you in terms of what that means coming from the White House and just you know how influential they are on maybe softer topics, but also more important topics as well.
I think it's incredibly interesting and it reminds me of, you know, ten years ago when we started Shine Talent Group out of Canada, and at that time there was really a big shift within the media marketplace. A lot of lifestyle publications had shut down and pr agencies were looking for other sources to kind of get the news out, so they started to lean on bloggers, bloggers who weren't hired by my media houses, and everybody had to figure out this exchange of how these people be compensated for
their time. But it reminds me of that moment because at that time bloggers started to be taken very seriously in terms of how they could be communicating to consumers, and where they used to be more of like a B list kind of invite to PR events, brand events, they started to become quite primary at that time. So it's very similar.
Do you just advise your clients to stay away from politics, not way in on these issues, or do you tell them to be themselves?
Definitely don't advise to stay away from it. I think it's really important for influences and brands alike to kind of show like, this is what my morals are, this is what I'm aligned with, this is potentially who I'm voting for.
We saw a lot of that.
Around the election, and we certainly certainly didn't ask our talent to shy away from it.
I got to tell you, I'm surprised Jess to hear that about brands, because it seems like we saw a lot of that back in twenty twenty and now they want to they want nothing to do with politics because of so much pushback.
Yeah, I think.
There's been a bit of a mixed result on that. I've seen a lot of friends that I see online who have you know, kind of made their stances very well known and what they believe in and what they support, especially when it comes to maybe it's not party specific, but it is very strong on certain subject matter, which you know, climate change, reproductive rights, things like that that brands are like, this is where we stand and we're not going to shy away from that.
One of the things we want to ask too is you guys have been you know, expanding and you acquired Spark Talent Group, and so you have some great a great vantage point in terms of what you are seeing in terms of the influencers and the growth of it. So let me maybe ask both of you, and just let me start with you. I mean, what is it that's going on? How much growth are you seeing and more and more people come into the influencer space, and
how is it evolving? It's not new, right, It's now been around for a little while, but how is it evolving as kind of something that either you know works for a company or mission or so on.
Well, I think, you know, we're seeing just more and more brands lean heavily and kind of expand their marketing budget to have influencer marketing be a.
Larger piece of the pie.
We keep hearing that this is going to be a five million, sorry, five hundred billion dollar industry by I think it's the end of next year, which is which is wild. I feel like this industry kind of had a very grassroots movement about it, So it's it's very cool to see how much it's grown.
Emily come on in on it too, in your perspective, as you guys have been in it, you know now for several years. You said, you started your firm ten years ago. You know how the how influencers as you know, a medium a mean, you know, is evolving and growing.
Well, what I think it's standing truely for me right now is the fact that it doesn't seem to be platform specific, and that kind of brings you know, thenversation around the TikTok ban and what kind of impact that was going to be having, like on the industry as a whole, and where I think back, you know, ten years ago, five years ago, it was very reliant on certain platforms that existed, and I feel like now like
the influencers, the creators themselves have diversified across like multiple platforms. We've seen the ones who have invested in this in terms of, you know, a career and it doesn't matter so much in terms of what platform it is that they have this they have this followership that would move along with them. So that's that's a really big change.
So a ban of TikTok then, Emily wouldn't necessarily be, you know, the end for these influencers. They'll just move to a different platform.
It certainly would would would cause impact. It's not to say that it wouldn't have any impact, but I think the truth is is that there would be another platform that ether pops up or content would go back to
another primary platform. So in terms of advice that we gave our talent during this time was to make sure that they were diversifying their content amongst many platforms that they had both social platforms and owned platforms as well, like newsletters, their own websites that they could invest time and invest distribution in.
And like we.
Saw with the rise of Tiktokic over over covid. When a new platform comes out and it catches speed, the consumers you know, move there, the talent moved there, and then the brands move there as well.
Just speaking of brands, are brands still getting an ROI on paying influencers?
Oh my gosh, there's no question that they are. And I think the only the only proof point you need to look at that to look towards that is that they just keep coming back, right, they keep coming back to this as a marketing tactic. It's only we've only seen growth across the category. So yeah, and it's you we have the availability of just so much data now, which is I feel like sometimes a blessing and a curse.
But it means that.
For every single piece of content, we're able to see exactly how many link clicks, exactly how many purchases were potentially made there. So yeah, I think brands are absolutely seeing an ROI. And if they're not, you know, it's still like any marketing initiative, it is a trial and error and sometimes you know, maybe that's not the right talent, maybe the messaging wasn't perfectly aligned, and you need to kind of switch it up and keep trying different ideas.
But yeah, we're.
Definitely seeing brands return because they are getting such good ROI when.
It comes to influencers, is there certain though, part of the pack that is growing more emily? You know, beauty is a big thing. We all see it certainly online. I feel like baking, cooking like that's a big one. Exercises a big one. But I am curious in terms of new folks coming that, like the talent group that you just acquired with their space. She'll tes tell us little bit about it.
In terms of the roster that we just acquired from Spark, it was very much like in the lifestyle space, so you know we have a beauty creators lifestyle creators or
as a baking creator like as well. In terms of concentration of where we're seeing more brand interests right now, there seems to be a bit of a spike coming from more like experts in experts in their field, so maybe like a registered dictionist or you know, somebody who has like credentials beyond just like their community as well, which is quite interesting.
So as far as prices go, Jess, I'm there's this idea that you know, the influencer community, it's the barrier to entry is not huge. All you need is a smartphone and a following. And I'm not by any means saying that's an easy thing to do, but truly and truly anybody can do it.
Tim Watson, Now, can he be an influencer?
Well, no, you make a good point.
Kids.
I mean you look at survey after survey. I don't know it's still like this, but in previous years it's like kids, they just want to be influencers.
Yeah, totally.
I mean, oh yeah, is it saturated.
I don't think it ever will be saturated because audiences can be fickle, you know what I mean, Like they'll happily kind of blow with the wind to the next person that they find interesting. We see a lot of that on TikTok as we kind of just spoke about with different kind of demographics and different subsets of people having a rise there.
I really love seeing.
I think we're seeing a huge rise in like an older female demo who and especially as these are people who have grown up with like so much of their life has been online and now they're getting to different like life stages. Maybe they're hitting menopause where this was like not talked about before. People want to have these conversations on which I think is amazing. It takes these these subjects away from being scary and shameful and.
And I think that that's really interesting. Well so I think.
As sorry, no, I was gonna say, I just you know, was reading a story that Bloomberg Business Week did about life coaching, and like that has gone from kind of bigger, broader strokes to very specific things like should I not have kids? You know, how do I get my mojo back? You know, like all these very very niche things. Just real quickly, Emily and jess are Emily, let me throw this to you. Just got about twenty thirty seconds. I know everybody's gonna want it, like we're going to get
off air, and like, did you ask them? So, how much does an average influencer actually make?
It?
Only got about thirty seconds.
I know there's a range, but I know people know you know, what I can say is that there's some people who have made this their full time career. Yeah, and there's other people part time. So I think that can give you like a range, and then there's people who have you know, have reached like that. Start on with it. As well, who are quite like asked for I.
Want dollar figures, Give me some numbers here.
Come on, it's it's reasonable to say that you can make upwards of a million dollars doing this, Like that's not a crazy thing in this industry. So I'll leave you with that one.
Okay, listen, it's like those YouTubers, you know, the sailing videos that always talk about those guys have lots of followers.
You're one of those followers.
Yeah, I am one of those followers.
All right.
Emily Ward, thank you so much. And Jess Hunison, co founders of Shine Ventures, joining us