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Tomorrow, Today
The Radical Reboot Education Needs | Richard Gerver x Shekhar Natarajan
02:23:13
What if the biggest challenge facing education isn't funding—but mindset? In this deeply moving episode of Tomorrow, Today, host Shekhar Natarajan sits down with internationally acclaimed educator, bestselling author, and leadership expert Richard Gerver to explore why today's education system is preparing students for a world that no longer exists. Richard opens up like never before about the childhood trauma that shaped him, the life-changing teacher who believed in him when no one else did, and how one unexpected opportunity transformed his confidence forever. Together, they discuss curiosity, resilience, innovation, leadership, and why our schools—and workplaces—must shift from rewarding certainty to embracing lifelong learning. Whether you're an educator, parent, entrepreneur, leader, or simply someone passionate about the future, this conversation offers powerful insights into unlocking human potential in an ever-changing world.
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- [00:00]
Richard Gerver
In order to feel in control of your life, you have to be capable and prepared to learn.
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Shekhar Natarajan
In the future. You should demonstrate intelligence with inner skill.
- [00:18]
Richard Gerver
You learn nothing new by getting something right.
- [00:26]
Shekhar Natarajan
The single most important change in any school could make tomorrow with no extra funding.
- [00:35]
Richard Gerver
If we don't change the education system, we will elegantly continue to prepare people for a world that no longer exists.
- [01:10]
Shekhar Natarajan
Welcome to another episode of Tomorrow Today with Shekhar Natarajan. It's. It's my incredible honor to have, like, the guy that I really like, admire the most. He's, like, phenomenal, and his name is Richard Gerver. You cannot describe Richard in, like, one single sentence. He's an author, he's an educator, he's an intellectual advisor to Dalai Lama, Obama, Eric Schmidt, you name it. Like Wozniak, he's won, like, UNESCO Award, Global Gurus 30 Award. I don't know. Like, it seems very interesting, but it's, like, fascinating. But the most important contribution that I personally like and that we were actually recognized for is the National Teacher Achievement Award. I think that's where your journey started in life. Amazing, amazing individual. Like, he's like what I call an embodiment of what human potential is. And his story is going to unravel as we talk today. So it's my incredible honor to have you here, and I'm sure the guests are going to really love the conversation. I love your energy, I love the way you talk. It's fascinating. And I think your fifth book is coming out, right?
- [02:40]
Richard Gerver
Yep.
- [02:40]
Shekhar Natarajan
Yeah.
- [02:41]
Richard Gerver
Yeah. So I think I said to you before we started, I never thought I'd write one book. Then when I wrote one book, I thought I'd never write another book. And now I'm just finishing off my fifth book, which is all about curiosity and how I believe human curiosity, if we reignite it, can be a profound difference to the way human beings view the world of today and tomorrow, interact with it and feel more constructive and positive about it. So, yeah, I can't wait for that to birth into the world. Yeah. In the next few months.
- [03:18]
Shekhar Natarajan
Very good, Very good. Like, so I look forward to it and I'll be cheering for you and I'll be rooting for you and I'll be posting about your book all.
- [03:25]
Richard Gerver
I love you so much.
- [03:27]
Shekhar Natarajan
So let's get, like, to the beginnings of the story, right? A lot of people don't know, like, you know, you're a very confident talker right now, like, you know, but not so much the case. So, like, take me back to the early days of your life, the trauma that like actually that you went through, you know, the challenges you had with stammer, how you overcame that. And we, I want to unpack it like, you know, in great detail before we actually get into like how we got into education.
- [04:02]
Richard Gerver
Sure. And I think by the way, those things are linked. So, you know, I grew up in what people on the surface would consider to be a very middle class English, middle class family of immigrant descent from Eastern Europe.
- [04:21]
Shekhar Natarajan
Where are your parents from?
- [04:23]
Richard Gerver
So my great great grandparents were from Poland and Russia. You can trace my family all the way back actually to various parts of Europe, but also to Portugal and Spain. And you know, I come from a Jewish background, so of course that Jewish journey comes from all over the world actually. And so fascinating. I've traced relatives back to Portugal in the 1600s. But yeah, so by the time I came along it was kind of the, you know, the dream. You're an immigrant family who have made it into the middle classes. A profound thing for my grandfather in particular, and I think this speaks often true of immigrant families into other countries, is you want to become, become part of the society in which you've chosen as your home. And in England, one of the ways you would do that and kind of demark that you'd become successful would be to be able to afford a private education. And so not because they were wealthy, but they sacrificed everything. They sent me to a private school. So there I am, a middle class child in a relatively affluent English home, going to a private school in the UK and around the time of my 9th birthday, disaster hit if you like. Although I think the rumblings have been there. But as a young child you don't detect them until that last minute. My parents went through a horrifically messy, traumatic breakup and consequently divorce. And to think back. So this is in the mid to late 70s, 1970s and of course, although tragically today family breakdown is much more of a common occurrence and socially more acceptable in the 70s in English Middle class society, the idea that your parents would separate and divorce was still a powerful taboo. But as a result of all of that, I went from being, I suppose, a shy, ish but perfectly put together kid and experienced that trauma and my mother fought so hard to try and protect my brother and I from it that you can't help what you go through. I ended up with two traits for a nine year old child which were mortifying. One was a nervous stammer, as you mentioned, and the other was I started wetting the bed, which for you can imagine a nine year old boy is traumatic. And so those things both started to happen to me.
- [07:06]
Shekhar Natarajan
How did that trauma come about? What was the reason for the.
- [07:09]
Richard Gerver
I think from my point of view there were so many conflicting things going on at home. Again, my mother tried so hard to protect us from what was happening, but the stress, the anger, the rouse, my parents, my father in particular, projecting some of that anger and frustration onto me as his firstborn child, those things all paid a part in, in that trauma evolving and also as I said, violence
- [07:39]
Shekhar Natarajan
or there was just like a, there
- [07:41]
Richard Gerver
were, there was more abuse, there was, there were moments of violence, but I wouldn't describe it as a violent,
- [07:49]
Shekhar Natarajan
you
- [07:49]
Richard Gerver
know, it wasn't dominated by violence, but there was certainly abuse, emotional abuse of quite a high level. And also then of course you're in an environment which is quite status minded. You know, private schools in the UK are quite status minded places. And the trauma of having to go through that with your friends and your friends, parents seeing this thing as a taboo. As I say, people forget that today family trauma breakdown is kind of relatively common.
- [08:17]
Shekhar Natarajan
Right.
- [08:17]
Richard Gerver
But in those days it wasn't. So all of that as a nine year old child living with what was going on at home, seeing the emotional devastation, particularly to my mother, the aggression in our household and the emotional trauma of all of that together with, I think I also grew up very short sighted. Now this may seem unrelated, but I think it is related. So I had very thick glasses again before the technology that now is out there for me, either contact lenses or to thin the lenses on glasses. I had very thick glasses, like we describe them as milk bottle glasses. Right, milk bottle glasses. And so I was already a kid that was very self conscious because I marked myself out as different from a lot of my friends. And I think this layer of trauma just added to that anxiety at a time, you know, 9, 10, 11, you're just beginning, the hormones are just starting to play a part in your existence. And I think all of those things profoundly came together and my response was to become so incredibly uncertain of myself. And I'm sure that that was where the stammer that the speech impediment came from and the bedwetting and all of those things. I was always a kid that was desperate to please. I always wanted to be that child that made everybody else happy. And I think that part of the trauma for me came in the powerlessness, which I think has become a theme of what I've tried to fight against, not just my life, but for other people's. Lives as that sense of disenfranchisement, of powerlessness as a child, not being able to make things okay, not being able to make life happy. All of that added to the complexity of my personal sense of value and purpose as a young child, which led to those things. And it was in that period of time, without realizing that my path would take me to education, I realized the power and potency of an extraordinary educator, an extraordinary teacher, because amidst all of this, there was one teacher, one educator who really took an interest in me at a time where I was being seen as the pariah to most, you know, other kids didn't really want to play with me because I just wasn't cool at the time. And I was, you know, and their parents clearly were having issues like in those days, that societal perception, oh, my God, if her husband's walked out on her, she'll be after our husband. So, you know, all that sort of nonsense. So this teacher took a real interest in me and was very supportive to my mother, actually, in terms of just trying to be there as a person who could shine light. And he was a drama and English teacher, and so drama was his passion. And he was putting on this. He was putting on the school play. And he did something which you would say was. Was completely counterintuitive because he take a
- [11:35]
Shekhar Natarajan
guy, take a guy over with the new speech impediment.
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Richard Gerver
And he took me aside and he
- [11:39]
Shekhar Natarajan
said, get on the stage.
- [11:40]
Richard Gerver
I think you should take a part in the play. And I was like, are you mad? And he went, no, because. And his belief was. And again, in those days, we knew a lot less about psychology and mental behaviors than we do today. And he said, I think that if you were to speak somebody else's lines, I think you might be okay. And it was an extraordinary thing because there was this shy boy with a speech impediment. And I will never forget getting up on the stage, being in a play that he wrote himself.
- [12:16]
Shekhar Natarajan
What age was this?
- [12:17]
Richard Gerver
So this was 9, 10 years old.
- [12:20]
Shekhar Natarajan
So right when you had the trauma.
- [12:22]
Richard Gerver
Yeah, it was just during that period because he felt that was how he could help me. Because what he could see see was a kid that had really low self esteem, really low sense of value and purpose. And I think he felt very passionately that maybe he could see something in me anyway. But he also felt very passionately that if I could learn to inhabit somebody else's character, that if I could speak somebody else's lines, it might be a route back both for me in Terms of raising my self esteem, because I think at that point I wasn't particularly sporty. I wasn't academic, really. I was just Mr. Average. You know, tragically, like 90% of the kids in our education system globally are made to feel most of the time Mr. And Mrs. Average. We're just average. Right. And that's where I was in the lower end of the kind of average gray mass. Anyway, I got up on stage, I did the play. I loved it, like, it was like a cathartic moment. It was like an epiphany. It was like, oh, my, how did I not know? This is, you know, it was that free song of fear and nervousness and excitement and seeing a group of people.
- [13:34]
Shekhar Natarajan
Look at how many people are sitting in the.
- [13:37]
Richard Gerver
I suppose we did the play for three nights and maybe there were 100, 150 people, parents and children and staff and families over. Over three nights. And I loved it. And it really had a significant impact on my recovery. Clumsy word, but that, that route back, it gave me a sense of purpose. Suddenly other children were coming up to me going, oh, you were amazing. You were really good in. And of course, I'd not heard that forever, probably. And certainly it was the kind of reinforcement I needed at the time. I didn't stutter and stammer on stage because I wasn't me, I was playing. Exactly. And so that had a profound, profound impact on me. And I'm sure all of that experience as we talk through it has had a profound impact on my life story since. Yeah.
- [14:33]
Shekhar Natarajan
So what did. What did stammer take away from you? And what did. What did that. Memorizing someone else's line, give it. Give back to you.
- [14:46]
Richard Gerver
I think what the stammer did, which is interesting, I don't know if I would describe it as take it away from me. I think it almost gave me an excuse not to have to communicate with other people at a time where I wanted to shrink into my shell and be invisible. And I think that's an experience that so many of us feel in our lives at any age, actually, when we're going through trauma or difficulty or challenge or depression. Yeah, exactly. Which we now see in a much more sophisticated way is that idea that actually if I shrink away and become invisible, the world. I can leave the world out here somewhere. And I was increasingly in that space. So whether the stammer was the reason or whether it was almost the symptom, and it was a great way to be able to withdraw and not to suddenly be asked a question in class or not to. So I think that certainly was that. The speaking the other lines on a stage. I think I had become so vulnerable in terms of. All I saw were my weaknesses. My thick glasses. I had big curly hair which was like all over the place, which my grandma loved. But she was the only human being on the planet that loved my curly hair. Cause I just was thin and gangly and awkward. And then I had the emotional trauma which had been amplified by what was happening at home and the fact that I was almost undermined deliberately by my father. So, for example, all the photos of me with my father taken before the breakup of their marriage, I don't have my glasses on now when I say I'm severely short sighted, I can't see further than there without it going profoundly blurry. Right. So can you imagine as a child being told to take your glasses off every time you're in a picture and what that does to you psychologically? So all of those things had happened, but then suddenly I'm on a stage and I'm playing a character in another costum, my hair's worn differently and I'm using other lines. First of all, it was great not to be in my skin and to be in somebody else's skin. And secondly, that immediacy of realizing I was good at this, you know. And again, I think one of the great tragedies for so many.
- [17:02]
Shekhar Natarajan
So you did not want to play your character, but you wanted to play someone else.
- [17:06]
Richard Gerver
Exactly. And I. But I think, you know, in. In some ways, when I look back on that, again, I think it's had a profound impact on my life because I think that tragedy for so many of. And I'm using the term to be deliberately provocative. The average kids, right. The gray mass is that very rarely do you get the luck or opportunity to find at a young age, particularly something that just makes your heart beat faster and that you connect to and you feel has raised your sense of value and purpose. A theme through so many things. I think that I'm sure you do. You've experienced, we all talk about is that moment in your life where you find a value that you feel of value to something or somebody. That you find a sense of purpose where you connect something in you that says, actually my heart's beating faster now. I can see what I want to do, what I want to be, what I want to become. Well, I hadn't had that and probably would never have had that until that teacher identified drama as a possible route through phenomenal story.
- [18:21]
Shekhar Natarajan
Phenomenal Story. It's public knowledge. And I talk a lot about this, Richard, that, like, my mother stood in front of the head minister's office for 365 days because I. Both my brothers went to a Jesuit school, right? Like, you know, obviously, like, we were colonized. All the top schools were Jesuit schools. And so my mother used to work in a newspaper company, just rolling up papers, right? Like, so the. The guy in the morning can go deliver the papers every day on a cycle. Like, she should, like, she'd go in the evening, sit there, like, you know, till midnight, wrap them, and then let it go. So, because she worked there, like one of the reporters who used to come, because all the reporters actually get the journalism done, like, in, like, you know, during the day and then they write reports in the night. So she knew a reporter, and the reporter's uncle was a head minister, okay? So both my brothers, like, got in because they knew the reporter, okay? Then when I showed up, they said, oh, like, you know, like, they asked me first, what is this color? I said, like, it's blue. It was gray, actually. And. And I flunked. That's number one. But number two, like, you know, they. They wanted, like, us to change religion before we got admitted because, like, I come from slums, you know, like, we are easy targets. Yeah. And my mother said, no, no, no. Like, I believe in God. I, like, I also go to the church. I go to, like, you know, I go to a temple. Like, you know, like, I'm not going to change my faith to admit my son. But, like, I think it's. It's not fair for you to say that. So she stood for a year and she fought, and she finally got me in, okay? And I was a very playful kid. Like, till a. Probably my sixth grade. I would run around. I would, like, I would do all kinds of, like, you know, I would, like, never, like, very serious about studies, never. And then I flunked English those days. Like, you get like, 35. You're. You know, you're fast. If you get anything less than 35 on 100, like, you failed. And then you have, like, the gradients. Like, you know, you. If you. If you're like 90 plus, you're a. Like, and so on and so forth. Okay? So my mother walks in, okay? Like, she goes to the parent teacher meeting. She brings the. The report card, throws it at me. And she said, like, you know, this is what I get for standing in front of the head minister's office for a year. And, like, you embarrassed the Hell out. And that's it. So I got the message. And since then I, I like, you know, there are some of these incidents in your life which transformed. So then I became who I didn't know who I was till then. Like, you know, I was, I always thought like, why studies? Who cares what happens? I'll play, right? Like, you know, I was, I was a kid in Islam. Like, you know, like I wanted to be another kid in Islam. Like, I never understood the sacrifice of my mom. And that was also the first time I knew about the sacrifice of my mom. Till then I didn't even know. Like, you know, I was a kid like 5 years old. They're trying to send me off to school because like a kid in the slum would pick up the wrong things. So my, my parents thought like, you know, we should never sit in the house, we should always go to the school. Like, that's the place where you can develop intellectually. So some of these incidents in life are so profound. We like, it changes, it's very subtle, right? This, this guy showing up in the teacher, showing up in your life and like, you know, making, making you do something that like, you know, you thought was not so great, but like, you know, it completely transformed your life. And I, we're all like, we as humans, we all experience some of these things in our lives. And what is remarkable about your story is, you know, it takes a lot of courage for what you have done as well. You could have simply said, no, I cannot do that, right? But like, somehow you saw the good in what was getting presented and you took the opportunity to do that.
- [22:41]
Richard Gerver
Do you think also though that sometimes, because listening to your story, which is profound too, right? And the background you came from, which was different from mine, but in some ways similar. This is the thing, right?
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Shekhar Natarajan
Trauma is like everyone.
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Richard Gerver
And here's the thing. When that teacher suggested go on stage, right? I had nothing to lose because I had no self esteem, I had no sense of external value. My family was falling apart. I was seeing as seeing myself as a victim, right? So actually taking that risk, it's a bit like being a gambler, right? When you start with $1, right? You can put the dollar on a bet because the worst that is going to happen, you're going to lose a dollar, right? Then you have, let's say you've built, you've got $100,000. That suddenly becomes significant, right? When you start a business, the innovation flows because there's only one way to go, right? When you've got a Successful business, and you've got stakeholders and investors and employees, and that whole litany of responsibility, the taking a risk becomes much more challenging. And I wonder whether actually I look back on my life and one of the things I often used to say to students was, don't ever see a moment of adversity as a bad thing. Because if you learn from it, respond from it, and it changes you for the better, having that moment of adversity in your life, you will look back on and realize was a profound moment of positivity.
- [24:11]
Shekhar Natarajan
Absolutely.
- [24:12]
Richard Gerver
And I wonder whether in both of our cases, for different reasons, you know, if I'd been the popular kid in school that all the other kids thought was the coolest, I would never have taken the risk. I would never have done it because I wouldn't have wanted to look bad. And I just wonder sometimes whether actually adversity early on in our lives.
- [24:31]
Shekhar Natarajan
Lives.
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Richard Gerver
Helps to mold us into more entrepreneurial, more adventurous, more creative, more curious people than the lives we perversely look at and go, oh, look at how lucky they are. And whether actually we need to recast that narrative for people, particularly young people, and say, actually, you know, those moments where it didn't go the way you thought that, where the sliding door went the wrong way for you, Actually, if we can coach people in that moment, if we can help them understand that that is a moment of profound opportunity instead of just the immediate emotional reflex of, oh, my God, this is a bad thing, then actually I wonder whether we can transform or help people transform themselves more than they do. And in a culture where so many people now feel like victims of circumstance, victims of situation, victims of somebody else's making victims of a disaster faster. And I'm not diminishing some of that stuff. I do wonder whether. Whether we need to teach adversity as a constructive part of human narrative.
- [25:40]
Shekhar Natarajan
Absolutely, absolutely. Like, you know, like, there's so many times in my life, like, I went to United States with 34 in my pocket, and I had the same attitude. I said, like, you know, what do I have to lose then? Like, you know, I, like, my father died in 2005. Like, I had to go back and, you know, very painful story of unplugging them and other things. And then I came back to United States with $50. I said, like, oh, great. Like, you know, and I did not have a house to live. I did not have a place to live because I was gone for two months. And I came back, all my stuff was, like, lying in the garage. I had to Pick all of that up, put it in the car. I was driving and I, like, I, I did not break down as much after my dad passed away because I was trying to be strong for my mom, but I did like, you know, break down completely when I sat in the car and I was driving and I didn't know where I was going. And, and then like, you know, I, I woke up in a rest area. I said, this is great. I'll sleep in my car. I'll, I'll figure out, like, for the next two weeks, like, you know, because I had a job, it was not that I didn't have a job. So I had to go, come back from the family, leave and then get reinstated and then start working and then start making money. So it was a two. Like, I knew, like, the, the suffering is going to be two weeks. Yeah, right. But it's going to be hell. But I said, you know what? Like, I've lived in 34, I can live in 50, so what do I have to lose?
- [26:59]
Richard Gerver
Yeah.
- [27:00]
Shekhar Natarajan
Yeah. So I always, I always take that. Like, I use this phrase all the time with my team. Yeah, that's, that's the, that's the common phrase. Like, if you went and asked my team, every company I worked, what do you have to lose? Yeah, let's go try it. And so I think that, and that sense of false comfort that we like, you know, inculcate in ourselves, if you take that out, if you become insecure and if you say like, you know, like, there's nothing that we're going to lose by trying something new.
- [27:28]
Richard Gerver
And, and I think, you know, that is partly the challenge and problem of our society. Right. Going back all the way to our education. Because what we tend to do for the best kind of reasons is we teach young people, very young, that if they get their head down and do what they're told in the way they're
- [27:46]
Shekhar Natarajan
told to do, they're going to be extremely successful.
- [27:48]
Richard Gerver
But no, their reward will be certainty.
- [27:50]
Shekhar Natarajan
Yeah.
- [27:51]
Richard Gerver
What we do is promise certainty. And that can be at every level. It's not a socioeconomic, high level thing. It's to everyone. At every level, every academic and intellectual level. If you get your head down and make yourself indispensable, if you become as productive and efficient as possible, your reward will be certainty you'll get a salary. You might be able to contribute to a pension and a health care plan. You may be able to afford a car loan and a home. But what it'll give you is certainty. And we kind of promise that if you keep pedaling as hard as you can pedal, we promise you, your reward will be certainty forever. And of course, what we've seen over the last 30, 40, 50 years, it is the breakdown of the certainty promise. And people are still peddling, thinking, but you promised me. You promised me certainty. And I wonder whether in the workplace we see that because people come in to work for a guy like you, who's incredibly entrepreneurial, and, come on, let's push the boundaries. And they're thinking, no, no, no, I went to college. What I went to college for was to get to work for a company like yours. But now what I want you to do is promise me that I've got a safe job, a safe salary, and so what I'll do is do how to do. Thank you very much. And actually, that challenge is trying to break that in people and saying to trust me, trust it. And it's really hard because, trust me, for some, for most of us, when it's ingrained in us, to just seek out certainty is an incredibly challenging thing in itself.
- [29:27]
Shekhar Natarajan
Wow, that's like, such a profound thought. Like, I've never thought about it that way, but, like, makes a lot of sense. Yeah, like, it makes a ton of sense. Fantastic, Fantastic. So you were an actor, a bad one, but, like, that gave you the confidence back, like, you know, that, like, you know, resurrected you from where you were, and then you turned a teacher. How did that happen?
- [29:52]
Richard Gerver
Okay, so there are moments in my life that were defined by love, irrational love. And so I wanted to be an actor and actually got into a small repertory theater company in London and thought I was going to be the next great Olivier or, you know, great British actor. But the flaw to my plan was essentially, I was really bad. I was good as a schoolboy actor, but, like. But eventually I went back to college thinking. It's interesting because when I left school, and of course, the natural pattern for people when you leave school at 18, and remember my parents and grand. My mother and my grandparents had invested heavily in giving me the best education they could afford, is that you go to University at 18. I already realized I was like a fish out of water because I wasn't, as I said before, academic, but I was very creative. And I remember saying to my mum, I think having that conversation when I was about 14, and she asked me, so, what do you think you want to do with your life? And she reminded me of this, actually, years ago. And my response was, if I could spend my life writing and performing, that would be perfect. That Would be the happy moment for me, right? So I Left school at 18 but didn't want to go to college because I hadn't enjoyed the last two years of my studies, particularly that really rigorous academic part where you have to get the qualifications to get you a place at college. University, University. And so I wanted to act. And so I, I mean the talk about courage of a parent, right, to let you go down your own path, which is another whole story because most parents would go, no, you, you do what we just talked about, safe option, you go for certainty, right? You go to college. And I said, I'm going to go and try and be an actor. Got into a small theater company in London and the courage of my mother to say, well, if that's the path you've chosen, she said, there's a roof over your head but I'm not going to pay your rent and I'm not going to pay. You know, you are going to have to learn that you've got to make a living, but go follow your dream. Incredible courage for a woman with her 18 year old son shirking. Luckily for her, I was really bad at it and actually came to the conclusion after about a year, year and a half that maybe I should go back to college and study the arts, right? I wanted to study writing and I wanted to study performance and so I eventually went back to college. Now this is a very long winded way round of answering your question because in my first year of my degree at college, you can imagine, there I AM Now, I'm 20 years old, so young, full of hormones and testosterone and I meet, and this is really important because I meet a young woman in the student bar who, you know those moments in those really corny films where the music plays and soft focus and there she was, right, and the zoom happens and I'm like, oh my God. So I sit down and I buy her a drink and I'm doing the vacuous thing.
- [32:59]
Shekhar Natarajan
Did you have your glasses then?
- [33:00]
Richard Gerver
No, I had contact lenses then. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I had contact lenses. I had contact lenses and I had hair gel. So I got rid of the, I got rid of the curly hair. By now you can picture the hair gel was in. And by the way, hair gel and contact lenses don't go very well because by the end of the evening the hair gel's melted into your eyes and your eyes are stinging and they're red. So this is before the red eye. So I'm sat there talking to this young woman. Anyway, I find out she's training to be a teacher, right? And she's. Because she went straight to college at 18, she's literally coming to the end of her degree and I'm sat there and I'm saying to her, oh, you want to be a teacher? Oh, that's the best job. Oh, what an amazing. I would have said anything to get a second date, right? It could have been anything. If she'd said she was training to be a computer programmer, I would have gone, right? I was just being shallow. Anyway, we went on a date and built a relationship to the point where just if people want to know, we're about to celebrate. That same young woman and I are about to celebrate our 34th wedding anniversary. So God knows what she saw in me to stay that long.
- [34:07]
Shekhar Natarajan
But anyway, she.
- [34:10]
Richard Gerver
Because I was still at college and she'd gone and got a. Luckily for me, she'd got a job teaching in a local school near the college so we could be together. And she used to say to me, come and teach my kids drama. Which you can imagine. Go back to my story as a child and the profound axis swing. When that teacher saw that in me, she said, come and do some drama with my kids. She said, I think you'd love it. They would definitely love it. You've got the kind of personality. And so I did. And for the second time in my life, the first time, the first epiphany was being on stage as a nine year old child. The second epiphany was being in her classroom working with her students and thinking to myself, genuinely, how did I not know this is where I belong? And so I finished my first degree, did a postgraduate qualification to qualify as a teacher and that's how I became a teacher. And love was involved in the early stages. But profoundly and weirdly, that moment in that student union bar not only changed the course of my personal life, but it changed the course of my professional life. Because of her, I discovered an absolute passion for women.
- [35:27]
Shekhar Natarajan
Do you believe that everything in this world is like pre ordained and pre.
- [35:32]
Richard Gerver
No, no, no, I don't. I absolutely believe that what we need to be as human beings, as people who are mindful of potential moments. Right.
- [35:43]
Shekhar Natarajan
How do you know that?
- [35:44]
Richard Gerver
You don't, but your instinct maybe says to you, this is interesting, but who's
- [35:48]
Shekhar Natarajan
saying that within you?
- [35:49]
Richard Gerver
I don't know, but there's an instinct in me that will occasionally go, that's interesting, give that a go, talk to that person, try that. And I think instinct is a really important characteristic often of people who are Entrepreneurial, who are adventurers, let's call people
- [36:08]
Shekhar Natarajan
like, where does that instrument come from?
- [36:10]
Richard Gerver
I think it comes back from those moments in your life where I think if when you're very young you experience that sense of powerlessness, I've got nothing to lose here. I think that adversity in early life makes you more open to risk and opportunity. You tend to see more when I look at the young people I worked with as a teacher, often the kids that came from the most secure homes, perversely with the most risk averse and the ones who were most blinkered about their life. I often say to people now, when was the last time you sat on a train and rather than have your face in your phone or your laptop, you actually just looked out of the window? Because when you look out the window, that's where opportunity is. The problem is metaphorically, if you spend all your time on your screen, you'll never spot got that potential opportunity. And so I've always trusted my instinct, which is interesting because I think as we get older, it's another part of the curiosity thing for me. We tend to trust our instinct less and less and less. We tend to think instinct is an immature quality, is slapdash, kind of off the spur, it's irresponsible. And actually I think what we need to do is realize that our instinct is born out of our life experience. You know, our instinctive reflex comes from all of the things that we've experienced and seen in our lives. So it isn't a flight of fancy, it isn't irresponsibility. It's actually an extraordinary reflex somewhere in our brain. And I'm not a neuroscientist or a neurologist or even a psychologist, but my belief is that life adventurers see, trust their instincts more and they go, no. You know, when people say I feel it in my water, I just feel it, I just kind of know. And then. So the first is to have the ability to spot it, but the second then is not to damp it down and go, no, that's stupid, that's illogical, that doesn't make sense. You know, we're brilliant as human beings at coming up with a hundred reasons why we talk ourselves out of doing most of the stuff. Because the but is always the biggest thing in the room for most people.
- [38:23]
Shekhar Natarajan
Right?
- [38:24]
Richard Gerver
So yeah, I'd love to, but we could, but. And now I can see what you're saying, but. And I think what we do is we talk ourselves out of our instinct because we think instinct is immature. And irresponsible. And I think that what we've got to start to do is help people reconfigure the perception of what instinct actually is. Because I think instinct plays a really important part in our ability to be curious, to be more entrepreneurial, to be more opportunistic and to be more of a life adventurer. And so we need to recast that in people. With me, I came from that background where I had nothing but my instinct. In a way, the instinct I trusted, the teacher, went on stage, changed everything, went through adversity early on in my life and therefore thought, well, you have a context, well, how bad can it be? What's the worst thing that can happen if I try this and it goes wrong? And also as I evolved then into an educator, that absolute belief, as I said to you before, of adversity is a good thing. If you learn from it right any moment where, and we all make mistakes, you, as a really successful entrepreneur, I'm sure will be the first person. And to say, I've been down more dead alleys than I have open ones, but the dead alleys are where I've learned how to evolve, develop and make sure I spot the next opportunity and enhance it. And I think the problem for too many of us is we look at a dark alley and go, I'm not even going to get down there, not even going to give it a go. But I think if you've been through adversity in your life and overcome that adversity, you tend to be more courageous about seizing opportunity and trusting your instinct.
- [39:59]
Shekhar Natarajan
So what is that one face, person, child, whatever. Like when you went back into the school that you remember the most, Is there a person or child?
- [40:08]
Richard Gerver
Yeah. Oh God, yeah. So there was one child in my first ever class and I've written about it and talked about it on many occasions. Actually, there was a. When I started teaching, it was in an age before we really understood special educational needs. So kids were usually cast as naughty, badly behaved. And that was like a label you just put on a kid. Not clever, you know, you just put labels on. But very superficial, very lazy labels. Luckily, of course, now we understand far more about human ability, the way we behave, special needs, all of those things. Emotional, physical, all of those things. But in those days, I remember having my first class of kids and going through the list of children I was taking on from the previous teacher. She was a lovely lady towards the end of her career, very old fashioned. I don't blame her because why would she know any different? And she'd say things like, oh, she's a lovely girl, very clever. He's average, but she's a nuisance, you know, he's naughty. And then we got down to this one child and she said, oh, he's a lovely boy. His name was Gary. And she said, gary, he's a lovely boy. He'll make you smile, he's very happy, but he's really stupid. He'll never achieve anything, right? So I went in, in my naivety, in my first class and I thought, okay, I got my picture for all these kids and Gary was there and I thought, okay, he's a nice boy. Anyway, within my first week of meeting Gary, I realized he was probably the most profoundly inspirational human being I'd ever met in my life.
- [41:44]
Shekhar Natarajan
What was Gary's age?
- [41:45]
Richard Gerver
So he was nine. So the same age I was when I discovered, if you like, the evolution of my story. So in the first week of the school year, the school principal used to run charity week because his belief was the children in this community. And it was a very tough working class community in the uk.
- [42:04]
Shekhar Natarajan
What is the school name of the school?
- [42:05]
Richard Gerver
It doesn't exist now, but it was called Chatterston Park Junior School and it was in a tough part of Derby, which is the city in the middle of England where I live. Live very tough, working class, white, working class community. And the school principal always used to start the school year with a charity week because his belief was these kids have been fragmented, they've not seen much of each other. Before we start learning, we need to bind our community back together again. So he used to put the charity week at the start of the year. And this particular year we had a charity come in who were raising money for an orphanage in Romania. And the whole week would be filled with fundraising activities and the kids would do all sorts of things like bake cakes and jobs and all sorts of things. And on the final day of the week, and this is really not a peculiarity of, but very much part of English school culture because as some of the people viewing will know, in English schools, uniform is a school uniform. Every child has to wear the same is a profound mainstream thing. But on the Friday of this week for charity, the children would be able to pay to wear their own jeans and trainers and sweats and whatever they wanted to wear. And they put money in the tin for the charity. So Friday comes along, I'm doing registration for the children, all the kids are coming up, putting some money in a tin. I get to Gary's name, I call Gary's name. There's no little coins put in a tin. There's a thud on my desk, right? And I look up and he's put his whole money box, his whole savings box on my table. Because again, different place and time right now, kids will probably swipe with their phones. It was coins, right? So, thud on my desk and I look up and he's put his whole money box on my table. And I said to him, no, no, just a few coins. And he said, no, no, you have to take, Take all of it now. I didn't want to have an argument with him in front of the class. And I thought, okay, what I'll do when I find the time is, I'll go and phone your mother because I understand you've got Academic Challenge. I'll talk to Mum. Because what we realized was, and this is back in 1993, in an area of social deprivation in the UK, there was the equivalent in today's money of probably 200, 250 US dollars in that tin from a kid from a tough background. So I phoned Mum, and the minute she picked up the phone and knew it was me, she said, this is about the money, isn't it? I said, yeah, it is. She said, you have to trust me, Mr. Gerver, you have to take the money. I said, but she said, trust me, he knows. He came home Monday after the presentation from the charity and he already started to build the plan, that this was what he wanted to do do. And she said, I need to explain the situation. She said, I've taught my children. And by the way, I wish now more parents would talk to their children this way, right? She said, I've always taught my two children, single mother with an older daughter and Gary the younger boy. I've always taught my children that if they want something in life, they have to earn it. And she said, gary has grown out of his bicycle and he needs a new bicycle. So he's been saving his money for over a year now, his Christmas money, birthday money. He's been doing odd jobs for the neighbors, weeding their garden, cleaning their cars, and he's been saving his money for a new bicycle. He came home after the assembly on Monday and said, mum, I want to give my money to this charity. What I've seen, these children are far more needy than me. And she said, all week we've been discussing it and talking about it. Last night, after, just as he was about to go up to bed, I said, gary, are you absolute sure you know how much you Want that bicycle? And he turned to his mother. This is a nine year old boy with profound special needs in an area of social deprivation. And he turned round to his mother and he said, mom, please don't make me buy that bicycle. I would never enjoy riding it knowing where the money could have gone.
- [46:21]
Shekhar Natarajan
Wow, right.
- [46:22]
Richard Gerver
So from that moment I knew I was in the presence of somebody whose level of emotional intelligence, whose natural instinct, instinct in adversity to make other people's lives better was one of those. You know, every so often in your life you have humbling experiences when you meet someone, you think, I am genuinely not worthy to share the same air as you. And I looked at that child and I thought the system has labeled you, has in effect written you off. But actually, potentially you could be a human being that makes a profound impact on the future.
- [46:59]
Shekhar Natarajan
What does he do today?
- [47:01]
Richard Gerver
So I met Gary a number of years later. I wrote my first book which was called Creating Tomorrow's Schools Today, which was my story in education. And there was a little paragraph where I talked about that story I've just shared about Gary. And an amazing thing happened. So my wife, the young girl I met at college, had gone on in her career and had become a school principal. She was at a school principals meeting and she bumped into another principal from the area who said no, who just said, not quite. And this other principal said, I've just read Richard's book and there's a paragraph in the book about this boy, Gary, and this is like 20 years earlier. She said, is that story true? And my wife went, absolutely, it is. She said, I thought so because I think I know Gary now. Now she said, do you think Richard would like to meet up with him? So a couple of weeks later we met in a coffee shop. And of course the curse of a teacher of elementary school kids is your kids are frozen in time. So I'm expecting a nine year old child, suddenly this 30 year old man who's over six foot walks through the door. And anyway, we got talking and it turns out we had this conversation. So here's what he does, does. He realized as a 14 year old boy when he was doing in the UK, I don't know if it's the same in other parts of the world. You get to 14, 15, you go on a work placement, so you get to go and try a job or a career for a couple of days or a week. Anyway, he'd worked in a local leisure center and loved it because for all his disability he loved sports. And he said, I Saw a gap in the market. I saw a business that I wanted to create when I got older. So he started, studied and went to college and did various things and eventually created his own business which was the business he was still running when I met him. I said, what is it? He said, I realized that there was no provision for personal fitness training for people with physical and mental disability. So I set up a business to work with people on personal health, physical health development who had profound physical and mental disability. I was like, like, oh my God. I said what do you do in your spare time? And he said to me, I don't really have spare time. He said, but nobody wants to get fit in December. So he said I shut the business in December and what I do is use the profits from my little business. He's a one man business, so what I do is I use the profits. He said, through my church I've got to know a community in West Africa. He said, and in December I go out to West Africa, I use my profits, profit to pay. I'd go out and just give my advice and support on physical health and development to this developing community in West Africa. So you can imagine I'm looking at this now, 30 year old man thinking as a 9 year old boy you had been written off, labeled and all of those things and look at what you've achieved.
- [49:57]
Shekhar Natarajan
Fantastic.
- [49:59]
Richard Gerver
So yeah, he was the one.
- [50:02]
Shekhar Natarajan
Fantastic, fantastic. So Greens Primary School. So tell me more about that.
- [50:07]
Richard Gerver
Okay, so how did you get there? Another story of love. Right, So I had been teaching for a while by then, not that long actually. Had just been given a job out of school because I'd got to a position of deputy principal very young and was offered a position by the government to work with schools all over the region to develop or to take boys who had lost interest in reading and writing in particular and try and reinvigorate a love and passion for reading and writing. As part of that process there were schools that were identified to me as schools that I should try and get involved in the program. And one of them was Grange Primary School in Long Eaton, which for those that know their English geography is on the cusp of two small cities in England, Nottingham and Derby. And it's right in the middle, very white working class town, right in the middle of two cities. And I went into this school, Grange, which was identified to me and fell in love. All I can tell you, Shikha, and we've all had these experiences in our lives in one way or another. Sometimes it can be when you're house hunting and you see 10, 10 houses that on plan look exactly the same, but you walk into one and there's something spiritual about the place that just. You imagine yourself living there, right? So I walked into this school as one of many and fell in love. I fell in, I can't tell you why, because it was a school in profound difficulty. It had had nearly a decade of decline. A series of school principals, none of whom had hung around very long, a fragmented community, lots of members of staff on Longhurst, long term sickness. So all these alarm bells, you know, behavioral problems from the students. But I fell in love. I just can't tell you why. There was something deep in me, instinctual, that went, this place is calling you, is calling me. So I went away, went back to the director of education at the local government level and I said, because I found out that there was no school principal, permanent school principal. I said, when the job comes up, I need to apply for the job. That. And I thought that he'd talked me out of it and he went, no, go for it. And I was 30, 31, I think, so very young. Anyway, I applied for the job and got it. And I thought I was a superstar because at 31 I'd become the school principal of this large urban elementary school. What I found out after I signed my contract was the reason I got the job is because I had been the only applicant, because it's a true story, because. Because everyone else in the community knew this school's situation, right?
- [52:49]
Shekhar Natarajan
They didn't want to take that, they
- [52:50]
Richard Gerver
didn't want to, because also there was a rumor going round that under the then government's plan, it was so bad they were going to shut the school down, fire everybody, get rid of everyone on the board, the staff, everybody, hire a whole new team, give the school a new name, new identity, new school uniform and hopefully set up, launch it as a new school, kind of a phoenix, a fresh start. So everyone knew that apart from me, which is why I was the only applicant.
- [53:19]
Shekhar Natarajan
But anyway, why did you not know?
- [53:22]
Richard Gerver
I just, at the time, I hadn't done the research, right? I just, I just been into this school and loved it and thought, oh God, I can see it's in.
- [53:30]
Shekhar Natarajan
Would you have taken it if you're known?
- [53:31]
Richard Gerver
Yeah, yeah. It's funny, it's a great question and I think I would have done. I mean, hindsight's a difficult thing because you've got. Got the biases that come with the lived experience afterwards. But that instinct in me, the day I Walked in there, which was one of profound love. Similar to the first time I met my wife. Similar to the first time I walked into her classroom, it was that same. The first time I walked on stage as a nine year old child, it was that same something electricity. So I think I would have done because I think I went into that job as a young school leader with two very important, important qualities that I think unfortunately, often we grow out of. I have, I went in with the qualities of ignorance and arrogance.
- [54:15]
Shekhar Natarajan
Right.
- [54:15]
Richard Gerver
I was arrogant enough to believe I could change the system in that school and I was ignorant enough not to know what could happen to me if I got it wrong. And I think so even if I'd known that the school was on slated for closure, I think my arrogant side would have gone wrong. I'm sure I can go fix it. Yeah, yeah. So I don't know. That's what I tell myself. I might have run a million miles, but you never know. I think I would have gone in.
- [54:42]
Shekhar Natarajan
Yeah.
- [54:43]
Richard Gerver
What has transformed me so what we did, what I went in and found. And I think this is an experience that since I've realized talks to far more profoundly than just the school system. But this organization had been habitually failing and people had come in from outside telling the staff and the community what to do to make it better. So here's the system, here's the structure, here's the policy, here's the way you have to teach English, here's the way you have to teach math, here's the way you have to teach. So do it exactly as we tell you. And now this had been happening over 10 years and each time it hadn't worked, somebody else had come in with another system. Right. That wasn't owned by the community. Now what, of course you found in that school was a community of highly trained, highly qualified people, all of whom that were trained to at least bachelor's level and had all got a degree, at least many of whom, because it was a community school, had an emotional vested interest in the school because a lot of them lived within the community. So there were teachers there that had taught there for 30, 30 plus years. There were teachers there whose own children had gone to the school. There were teachers there who had been children at the school. Right. So they clearly cared about the community. And I think that was what I'd fallen in love with that first visit. Right. I could feel something in the place that was deeply emotionally connected. And for me, I've always believed that if a group of people have a deep emotional Connection to something, something you can find a way you can energize that community. But what I also found, of course, was that every time somebody had come in and said, here's the system, here's the way you do it, this is what I want you to do, there was a layer of concrete poured on those people emotionally. So their emotional connection to their professional behavior had been drowned, submerged under layers and layers and layers and layers of concrete. So their perception of what they were doing was so far removed from what they passionately wanted to do or felt was right, because the control had been taken from them year after year after year. So what they were doing was passionless. They were just delivering, like robots, what they were told to deliver in order to survive. Because of course, when you're under that much pressure, survival mode clicks in. So now these people are all in survival mode. And the children were almost the last things as human beings to be considered. So what was of course interesting about children is children are not stupid, particularly emotionally, and if they look at an adult in a room with them and they sense the adult doesn't care, then they're not going to care. So the learning had become so completely disconnected from, from the teachers, the kids, the culture. Everybody felt disenfranchised, everybody felt that they were having stuff done to them. So my first job in a very non technical way was to drill through the layers of concrete. I had to find the passion, I had to find the heartbeat, I had to reconnect the community with what they wanted for their kids in their community as professionals, what they personally felt, felt should happen. I wanted to reignite their instincts. So that was the first job that was how do we reconnect this entire community to its emotional sense of place and purpose? And when I think back to that, what's really interesting is that's what my teacher did with me when I was nine years old. He drilled through the layers of concrete, tried to find what would make my heart beat faster, to give me a sense of passion and purpose. And all those years later, without realizing it, almost subliminally, I think that was the approach that I took when we started to reignite that school's potential that's transformed mil.
- [58:48]
Shekhar Natarajan
Was there resistance to that?
- [58:52]
Richard Gerver
There were a couple of people who were exhausted. There was no resistance. And I think that was partly because they knew their fate. And again, I think it goes back to that thing people have often asked me, do you, would you have achieved the same innovation in a succeeding. And the answer is, I don't know. But it would have been much harder because to innovate in an organization that's functionally really struggling, and everyone in that organization knows they're struggling. It goes back to what we said before. There's a lot less to lose, so they're far more open. But also, I didn't go in with a plan or a new system or structure. I went in there and asked them questions. I wanted to spark their curiosity, right? Tell me about this community. Tell me about your community. Tell me about our kids in this community. Tell me about your hopes and dreams for them. Tell me about what kind of human beings do we want these kids to look like when they leave our school. So rather than going in as another faceless bureaucrat with a list of this is what you need to do, I went in there with a series of questions. So it's very difficult for somebody to be resistant to a question. It's much easier for somebody to be resistant to an enforced system or structure. Right? So, no, there was very little. Also, what was really important, important to me was that I didn't just include the staff, I included the parents, too. I wanted, because it was their kids and their community, right? This was a place where sense of community was profound. So I wanted to ask them, what are your hopes and dreams and aspirations for your kids? Tell me about how they feel now. How do you feel about the school now? You know, how can we make you feel more connected to it? What do you want us to do for your children so that as we then evolve the processes and systems and structures we put in place, nobody felt like they were implementing something somebody else had created. They felt like co creators, co designers in the process. And what was really interesting, one or two people were exhausted, and one or two, actually I helped exit from the school in terms of getting them early retirement or moving them into something else, because they themselves would come to me very honestly and say, richard, I can see what we're trying to achieve here. I just don't have the energy anymore. You know, these people had been fighting in a failing organization for three decades. And they were like, I just. I can see, you know, be like somebody turning around to me now going, richard, we think you should do the London Marathon. And I'd go, listen, I love the idea, but thought of training at the age of 60, frankly, is not going to happen. So I'm out. I'll race.
- [61:27]
Shekhar Natarajan
And you let them go. Or did you basically decide you, like, sometimes, like, you know, like, people get exhausted and they want to leave.
- [61:34]
Richard Gerver
Yeah.
- [61:36]
Shekhar Natarajan
Because they don't trust the system.
- [61:37]
Richard Gerver
Yeah, that's a great.
- [61:39]
Shekhar Natarajan
But that's not, that's not the. The right reason.
- [61:42]
Richard Gerver
One left because she was genuinely exhausted.
- [61:44]
Shekhar Natarajan
Exhausted.
- [61:46]
Richard Gerver
We kept the majority of the others. Let me give you one example. I had one male member of staff and every organization, by the way, every team has these people. I call them Alpha.
- [61:56]
Shekhar Natarajan
Alphas.
- [61:56]
Richard Gerver
I call them alphas, right? In that it can be a male or a female. But on every team there is always one person that has no hierarchical power but thinks they're in control. They think they're in charge. Right. They govern the mood of the team. And I had one, his name was John, who was definitely an Alpha. I remember the first time I met him. So I was new in the job and I was in listening mode. I really wanted to understand the culture. I remember walking into the staff room one day to go and make myself
- [62:27]
Shekhar Natarajan
a cup of coffee.
- [62:27]
Richard Gerver
Coffee. And John was in there, as alphas do, with his little minions, like his group of people that he gathered to give him power and strength. And he saw me walk in. So what he did next was very deliberate. Right top of his voice, he went, of course, I never wanted to be a teacher in the first place. Gives the performative. He said, I blame my father. He said, my father ran the local convenience store. He said, I had such a hopes and dreams and ideas for that business. He said, I blame my father. He was such a lousy business person that the business went bust before I was old enough to take on a senior role in the business. He said, So I had no other choice. I trained to be a teacher, right? Anyway, it was performative. I ignored him. I pretended I wasn't listening, made my coffee, left the room. Couple of days later I went back to. I asked him to come to my office and he came in and of course, course, it's like adults are no different to children. He's summoned to the school principal's office. His first thing was, what have I done now? That was his first response. I said, you haven't done anything. I said, what I want to. I said, do you remember the other day I came into the staff room and I couldn't help but overhear you talking about your father. Yeah, my father never wanted to be. I said, well, funnily enough, one of the things I'm thinking of us doing in this school now, remember, this is elementary. So in the UK that's 3 to 11 year olds. So one of the things I'm thinking of doing here, because I really want our kids to Understand the power and importance of math and its connection to business. I said, I'd like to set up a retail business here which the children run themselves and manage. I said, but I couldn't help overhearing, it was luck. I said that you clearly have a passion for retail. And he said, oh, yeah, that. I said, well, I found a couple course at the local superstore and they run retail management courses at their store and I've managed to get you a place on the course and it's a week long. If I fund that, will you go on the course and then will you come back and set up the retail business with the children? And his eyes were like. It was interesting. You talked about trust, right? He was like, what? What's his game? I said, no, really, that's all I want. I said, when you come back, back feedback to me, tell me what you've learned. Tell me, because the whole week I want you to be thinking about how our business, how we might set that up, come back, put the proposal to me and I will give you a budget to do that. So he went as skeptic, thoroughly enjoyed his week, came back and I gave him the reins and said, this is your. I'm not going to oversee you. I'm not going to tell you what it looks like. You've told me, go make it happen now. That experience, which then took him maybe six months, months to generate and build, became a profoundly important part of the school. And my great pride is that John went from being the Alpha Disruptor in the staff room. By the time I left, he was an assistant school principal.
- [65:27]
Shekhar Natarajan
Wow.
- [65:28]
Richard Gerver
And I think that was about tapping into an individual's sense of purpose, whether they know it's there or not, finding a way to make their heart beat faster, trying to make them connected to the actual deliveries. They feel enfranchised and empowered, giving them faith and trust, letting them go and do that stuff, which of course I see much more often now in really dynamic businesses, where that entrepreneurial street, the opportunity to go and try a project, build a project, set a project up, play with it, is far more acceptable in really dynamic businesses. That's what we did with John. And of course, what it did was reignite his passion. But. But at the same time, what was really important, which speaks to your point, is it reignited his sense of trust in me and mine. For him, he saw the authenticity of our relationship, which then meant I was much more able to challenge him moving forwards than he was able to challenge me. And our dialogue was much More constructive and developmental. And he became a huge champion of what we were endeavoring to do.
- [66:37]
Shekhar Natarajan
Superb. So what did Tony Blair and UNESCO see in you? What happened? Tell me, how did that happen?
- [66:46]
Richard Gerver
So it all began with the school. It was all really around the school. So the school went from being this basket case, right, that the government, led by Blair was going to shut down. And within 18 months, we'd been identified by UNESCO as being an extraordinary innovation story in education. And we won. We were invited to Lisbon, actually, where they were having a big event, education event. We were invited to Lisbon to present what we were doing and as a result, we won an award at that event for innovation in education. Love now. Because, of course, again, this is before the days of YouTube and social media, which make it much more easy these days for people to broadcast all kinds of stuff, good, bad and indifferent. But these days, if you were doing something innovative, it would be much easier to get that out to the world than it would have been in those days. But we started to get some local media interest, inevitably, because these stories were going round the community about this school that was doing amazing things, where the academic results inside 18 months had doubled, right? And we hadn't just focused on exams and academic results, but our academic outcomes had doubled. The number of parents wanting to get their kids into the school had increased dramatically. Local real estate agents were like, thanking me because suddenly the value of houses was going up in our community because parents would, desperate to get there, get into the school. So there was a buzz and that inevitably led to local government and then our member for Parliament going, wow, this is a success story in my constituency. And she was a brilliant friend to the school. Her name was Liz Blackman. She's long retired now, but she then must have been to. She was from the governing party, the Labour Party, under Tony Blair. So that message must have got to them. And I was then invited to Downing street to tell my story to the Prime Minister and to his team and the senior education team. And that's how I got involved in working with them on helping them to develop education policy.
- [69:07]
Shekhar Natarajan
Wow.
- [69:08]
Richard Gerver
Yeah.
- [69:09]
Shekhar Natarajan
So what was different about the education policy that, like, was not previously conceived?
- [69:13]
Richard Gerver
I think what we evidenced and proved proved was that if a school had a real clarity around its context, its community, its strengths, weaknesses and the strengths and weaknesses of its community, rather than just having one curriculum, like a one size fits all. This is the syllabus, this is the content, this is what you must teach. What we'd started to evidence was if you came from the Point of what is the context for my school community? What do they need? Rather than we'll tell you what they need need, and then co designing that way that was still accountable, that was still rigorous. Because nothing we did was just careless. It was, you know, I passionately have always believed children only have one chance and therefore to play with children's futures is a grossly irresponsible thing to do. So everything we did was deeply rigorous. In fact, towards the end of my tenure, Cambridge University even came in and did a research project on the validity of what we were doing and found nothing but strengths and exciting things. But we started to help the government see curriculum differently and we started to help them to develop a strategy where schools, if they could build a framework of understanding of their community, could start to take a greater responsibility for developing their own curriculum. Obviously with basics, things that all kids need to be literate and numerate, they need to have certain knowledge bases and what have you. But actually that each school community could then design a curriculum that was fit for purpose for their school and their community. And under that Blair government, we really started to build some momentum. Not just me, there were a lot of much cleverer people than me involved in that process, but we were part of the catalyst.
- [70:57]
Shekhar Natarajan
But why would you build a school system which only caters to the community and not to the global community?
- [71:02]
Richard Gerver
Well, because you have to start from the point of connection, right? You realize that what you want to do is create global citizens. But if you turn around to kids in an area of social deprivation and you say even something as simple as of course you'll be going to university, those kids whose parents, grandparents, great, grand, none of them are dead, have been anywhere near a university would go. Why would I go to a university? Why would I want to become a doctor? Why would I want to work in computer science? Why would I want to be a lawyer? Why? Those things are so divorced from me. Right. Even saying to some of those kids whose parents and grandparents may have been historically functionally illiterate and innumerate. That being.
- [71:43]
Shekhar Natarajan
But you're not saying that you don't want to create global citizens, but you want to just say that you want to be. The rooting of the system should be still local.
- [71:54]
Richard Gerver
Yeah. Because you have to give people a local context and then you broaden their horizons. Horizons. What you have to do is connect them to the value of.
- [72:01]
Shekhar Natarajan
But usually people do the opposite. They bring the global context.
- [72:04]
Richard Gerver
Exactly. I think we need to do it the other way. You need to help people understand Their. It's like a tree, right? You don't start by building the leaves. A tree's successful because you build its roots. And when it's got strong and powerful roots, it grows that way. And I think all too often we forget about putting the roots.
- [72:22]
Shekhar Natarajan
But sometimes when you're. When you're building that, right, like, you know, like, you have to have so many success stories of people becoming global citizens for them to notice. Like, that's possible. Otherwise, you're only creating local context.
- [72:38]
Richard Gerver
No, I disagree. I think what you're doing is you're broadening people's horizons, but also what you're doing is building the talent pool and you're building the opportunity. So, for example, you know, when do
- [72:49]
Shekhar Natarajan
you get the escape velocity? So, like, like for a school system, as an example, right, like the model that you're talking about, let's say, like, you know, you're deeply rooted to the community till, like, some of those kids become extremely successful. You don't have a success story to point to the global citizenship.
- [73:05]
Richard Gerver
You don't, but that's chicken and egg, right? You've got to start somewhere. And so, you know, from my perspective, one of the other things we did in our school community was we built our own television station and radio station in a school in an area of social depth, right? And we trained our kids to run their own TV station and radio station. These were kids under 11 years of age. Now, in that community, traditionally, the aspiration for those kids was to work in the local superstore on the checkout, because that was a safe job. Their parents had it, they could probably get a job, but that was the limit to their aspiration, Right? What I wanted to do do was actually to take that sense, they understood of their roots, of their local community protecting one another, working for one another, doing stuff for one another. But I wanted to turn their heads outwards. So I wanted to say, and by the way, right, radio, tv, these are things you can do. So, for example, if you want to work in the television station, you've got to learn science because you've got to learn about lighting and sound, and therefore, you can see the connection to science. So what you're then doing is using learning itself and knowledge and skills as the catalyst for those children to go, so if I learn this stuff, not only can I support and help my local community, but I'm going to start to see opportunity outwards.
- [74:25]
Shekhar Natarajan
Fantastic. That's a great example. Ken Robinson.
- [74:31]
Richard Gerver
Oh, wow. Yeah.
- [74:33]
Shekhar Natarajan
So how did he change your life?
- [74:36]
Richard Gerver
What a remarkable man, there are times I still check myself even now, to think, how did I build a relationship with him? So, quite early on, when I was at Grange, the message had started to, you know, the drums had started to beat around what we were doing. And so I was invited to go and speak at a school leaders conference in the north of England, up in the Lake District, at a beautiful hotel. Actually, I'd never done. Done anything quite like it. And I was asked to do a little workshop, like a breakout, to tell people about what we were doing. And again, in those days, this was before Ken Robinson became the TED megastar, that Ken became. He was already very well known in the uk, particularly for his work around the arts and creativity. He'd just moved to Los Angeles to work, I think, as education director at the Getty, but had come back to the UK and was off to often the superstar speaker at an education event in the uk, and at this particular event, Ken was the superstar speaker. He was the big podium keynote. Now, I would never have known what he looked like because, again, this was before the age where social media would make people's faces and stories and videos. This was before that, right? So I knew of his work, but I wouldn't have walked past him in the street, street and gone, you're Ken Robinson. So I had never heard him speak, right? And he was still quite early on in his not speaking career because of course, he'd worked for 40 years in education and research, but he stood at the front of the room. I went and prepared my workshop, which was after the Keener came back into the main room to listen to the big Keener. And he blew me away. My God. I mean, people, since, through his TED talks, through hearing him in person before he so sadly and tragically left practice, will know what an extraordinary communicator and brain he was. And I just sat there at the back of the room. Now, as somebody about to deliver a breakout workshop, there is nothing worse than hearing a sensational keynote because you're just thinking, like, oh, no. Anyway, I went off and maybe 12, 10, 12 people came into my room and just as I'm about to start feeling even more nervous because of what I'd just seen and like. Like, really, because the thing was, as a school leader, I didn't think anything we'd done was particularly spectacular. It was just what we were doing for our community. Right, so, of course, that imposter syndrome always lives with you. It lived with me today when I met you and came in here and thought, what have I Got to talk about. Anyway, so I'm about to start this workshop, right? And in walks. Can you imagine? In walks Sir Ken Robinson. And he says, I've seen this on the list. I've got nothing to do for a couple of hours. Do you mind if I sit at the back and listen? Well, I don't know about you, I was nervous already. In walks the guy who's just blown the audience away and delivered the best keynote speech I've ever seen in my life, right? And he sat at the back of my little workshop. Anyway, the workshop went okay. People seemed to really enjoy what we were doing. And everybody left except for Ken. And he sat at the back of the room, and I did that thing, you know, I just described, okay, what have I done wrong? My first thing in my head was, what have I done wrong? And he came up to me, he said, do you mind if I give you a hug? And I said, no. He said, I just want to let you know that everything you've just described you're doing in your school is everything I've passionately believed should happen in education for 40 years. Can I buy you lunch? That's how our friendship began. And on that day, he wanted more information and more detail. And then as he was leaving, he said, look, I've got to go back to America in the next couple of days because he moved to la. So I'm going back to la. If I give you my email address, can you send me everything you've got on your school? I want to see the whole thing. I want to see everything you've got. So I did. And then a couple of weeks later, he called me and he said, I'm going to be back in London in a month or so. I'm going to stay at this hotel. Can we meet? And so that's when he. The first time he said to me, he said, what you're doing is remarkable. He said, and you are the first tangible case of real pragmatism that I've seen happen in the English school system. That evidences what I've been saying for 40 years. You have a really important role to play, and I want to help you play it. And he said, by the way, I also think that as our relationship progressed, he used to say to me, you've got really profound things to say, not just about education, but about human leadership. And he said, I don't even think you know how profound what some of what you've achieved on a human level around change and leadership is. And so over that Time, he became a professional friend, he was a mentor. And I'll tell you about the greatest act of love and mentorship he showed me in a minute. And over time, he started to help me draw out of myself what was instinctual, what we'd been doing in this little school community, and trying to get me to understand the broader generic concepts of what we were doing. And so eventually he and my wife said, it's time to leave the school. You need to have a broader audience, you need to share more with the world and I'm going to help you do it. And so, after much procrastination, because you can remember, I mean, there I was, trained, like most people, certainty, I'd become a school principal of what by now was a really successful school with a global reputation, connected to the English government, all the rest of it. And he's going, you need to leave and become a freelance, right? You need to become a writer and a speaker and I'll help you. And of course, in my head I'm thinking, but I've got a mortgage and two children and a wife and a great job and a pension and all these things. My wife turned around to me at dinner. I will never forget it. We're sat there with Ken and he's going, come on, what more do you think? Unique? And she turned around to me and she's from. For those that don't know the geography of the uk, she's from the north of England. So basically she's a Viking, right? She's a shield maiden. In other words, terrifying. She turned around to me over dinner, she said, richard, you have spent nearly two decades teaching children to spot opportunity, seize it, take a risk. Are you going to be a hypocrite and stick with the safe option, or are you now going to go and live what you've been preaching? Coaching boy. What an act of love and trust. So between them, that's how that stage of my career began. But I want to go back just quickly because a lot of people talk about mentorship and mentoring and often what we do is we just choose people who reinforce our like, oh, you know, you're wonderful. No, you're. Oh, you're fabulous. I will never forget the moment I truly trusted Ken as my mentor because along this journey he said, I want you to write a book about your education, experiences, philosophy and Grange, which was that first book I described to you. And he said, I'll write the forward, I'll introduce you to a publisher so you can get it published. Because I was a nobody. And he was already by now a significant figure. And I will write the forward for the book so that it gives it credibility. So he said, when you finish the first draft, send it to me. So I did, did and I heard nothing for a few weeks. And then I got an email. And the email said, I'm going to be honest with you, Richard, because you'd want me to be. What you've sent me is not good enough and I cannot put my name to this, but I am really happy to work with you on this, to turn it into something you can be proud of and that I'm prepared to put my name to now. Human instinct is such, right? I read the email. I was actually in the car at the time. I was about to go and deliver a speech and I'm like, what does he know? What does Ken Roberts. That's rubbish. Doesn't know what he's talking about. The ego clicks in self defense. And for about an hour my ego was ranting. And so I slept on it. But the next morning, of course I woke up and realized he was absolutely right. Emailed him back saying, yes, please. And of course that was the moment I realized he was a real mentor.
- [82:48]
Shekhar Natarajan
Mentor.
- [82:48]
Richard Gerver
He was honest, he challenged me, he supported me, he believed in me. He knew what I was capable of more than I did myself, but wasn't he had the courage to push that and challenge it. And of course, as a result, my first book came out and it was a really good book, but it would never have been a really good book if it hadn't have been for his direct intervention, feedback and challenge.
- [83:14]
Shekhar Natarajan
Yeah, very similar experience, very similar experience in my life. So when my dad passed away in 2005, like, you know, I. Something in me like changed my psyche like till then, like, you know, I was. I went to United States because of my brother and all those things. Then like, you know, I. I felt so bad that like, you know, every time we are caught in this cycle of poverty and other things, so I wanted to break that like something like took over me that time. So I used to, every weekend I used to go to Atlanta and I was in Charlotte, which is like four and a half, five hours. So I would leave 5, 5:30 in the evening, drive to my friend's house. Like I went to school in Atlanta, so, so I would go like sleep in his, in his room and his mother used to, like we have shared room and accommodation. So I used to go sleep in his house and then wake up next day morning. I would go sit with my Mentor who I found during my Georgia Tech days. And I used to write a book with him. And so, so I did that for almost two years. Okay. Then it was the. So this was all of five, all the way leading into the end of six. And in 2006 it was the, the 50th year of Richard Muther and Associates. This guy, Richard Muther is the founding father of industrial engineering, right? And like, so he, like a lot of people don't know him, but he is actually credited to be the guy who created the People Republic of China's industrialization movement.
- [84:58]
Richard Gerver
Wow.
- [84:58]
Shekhar Natarajan
Like when they opened the world, they said like, you know, we got to set up like all of our manufacturing, warehousing, distribution because we want to become like a product economy. And so they, they used to fly him and have him there for like three, four, five months in, in prc and he would train all the engineers on how to think about everything, about flow of products, setting up facilities. That was his thing, that was his jam. And he did like Sir Richard Muther did like 2,300 projects odd in his life. So like 92 years of age. So I walk in and we were like, we were so happy because we had promoted the book and like, you know, we were like talking like, so Lee and I was excited and we were like showing it off. And so he's sitting in the back of the room visit Mutter and he goes through this and then he sets the book aside like this and then
- [85:55]
Richard Gerver
like,
- [85:59]
Shekhar Natarajan
and then like, and then like, you know, like we, we were all like so excited and it's like the International Richard Muther association. Right? Like in the sense 50 years, like, and he's developed like this like fan following like crazy. Like, you know, literally thousands of people coming to like he's like, like Pope.
- [86:16]
Richard Gerver
Yeah.
- [86:16]
Shekhar Natarajan
To most of these guys, right? So, so they're all like, you know, excited and like, you know, he's, and then he, he walks up to the stage like 92 year old man. And he said like, you know, like, you know, here are my, here's my mentor and here, this is my mentor's like, you know, this is my mentee and this is my mentee's mentee. And they have written this book and they want me to like endorse that book. Not in a thousand years I would endorse this book in front of like thousand people.
- [86:51]
Richard Gerver
At least when it happened to me, it was private.
- [86:57]
Shekhar Natarajan
He said like, these guys should know better because like, you know, I am a purist. I would never sign off on this. And I was like, I was like so freaking, I was so freaking embarrassed. And like, you know, you, my, he, My ego got like hit so bad.
- [87:12]
Richard Gerver
Yeah, yeah.
- [87:13]
Shekhar Natarajan
And. But like, same thing. Like, so I woke up the next day, morning, I said like, like. And he used to go by Dick Luther. He said, Dick. Like, you know, I understand. Like, you know, you, you know, we did not do a good job, but you didn't have to publicly shame us. So. And these are all like very intellectual people. Like, you know, there's who's. Who actually. Like, you know, and, and then he said like, okay. So I said, how do I fix this? He said, it's very simple. I live in Kansas City. I give you my address, you come to my house, you and I sit, we'll talk. And till I fix it, you shouldn't release it.
- [87:55]
Richard Gerver
Wow.
- [87:56]
Shekhar Natarajan
So I said, okay, got it. And then, since then, then for eight years, I used to travel every other weekend to his house. I finished a book, we released it. It was like a mega blockbuster because like, you know, even in universities they use that book now. Wow. And translated in like some 40 odd languages and all that stuff, all thanks to him. And then like, you know, for the next seven years, like after I had released this book. Book, I just sat down with him every weekend, every other weekend. And I used to learn the craft. Wow. Yeah. Like, so people like Ken, people like Richard Muther always show up in your life. Yeah. But it's your ability to spot them and embrace them.
- [88:44]
Richard Gerver
Yeah, absolutely.
- [88:45]
Shekhar Natarajan
Because sometimes they come and go. You don't even know they came and went. And sometimes you're not thankful that they came and went.
- [88:52]
Richard Gerver
But also it's about, I mean, you mentioned it when we were talking about you can. It's about being able to lay your own ego aside. Right. It's. It's being open enough.
- [89:00]
Shekhar Natarajan
Imagine. Right. Like in front of thousands of people.
- [89:03]
Richard Gerver
That's way worse than it was for me. But, but the courage then for you to lay your ego aside and not just respond, as so many of us do, to criticism of, well, I hate you. And what I'm going to do is spend my life now undermining you. You to make me feel better. And in a way, way, I, you know, it's, it's interesting. We're not going to get into. It's not what we're going to talk about today, but in a way, politically, that's kind of where we are in the world right now, where the, the kind of the, the, the mentality and the culture is I'm never going to challenge myself. I'm just going to spend my energy undermining you. And what really worries me about that, as somebody passionate about learning and development, because you clearly learn from, from Dick Muta. I learned from Ken profound amounts, is if we allow ourselves to become entrenched in our own egos and spend our lives just undermining the people and things that make us feel uncomfortable, our human progress is going to stall just at the time where the opportunity is immense.
- [90:07]
Shekhar Natarajan
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. See, one of the things that like. No. So people ask me who I am, what do I do? Like, you know, and they, they try to box me into different things. They say, like, oh, like, you know, this guy is a supply chain guy, or this guy is like a technologist, or this guy is like innovator. This guy is this, like, end of the day, what I just think I am is I'm just a problem solver. Yeah, right. And so what he had, like, trained me on is you could throw literally anything at me. Any problem, whether it's construction, whether it's like layout, whether it's like communication, whether it's, whether it's like, you know, like AI as a field, whether it's like music, you just give me the problem, I will sit down, stare at it, and I will use the Dick Muther, like, way of thinking. And I would say these are the fundamentals. Go solve the problem. Yeah. And so that, that ability to take like any problem, distill it down into the core. The, the, the first principles of how you think about that area and how you construct it is the, is the only thing I learned from it. And that, like, is applicable anywhere. Like, you know, if you're in, if you're in like, crisis mode, if you're in like, personal trouble, if you're in depression, you like, if you're in like, you know, if you're trying to solve a problem, if you're working for a company, if know, any problem that gets thrown at you, you need to just have a way of thinking.
- [91:40]
Richard Gerver
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [91:41]
Shekhar Natarajan
You know, that's what, like, that's the, that's the education that like, I would never get anywhere in any university, not even like paying like a million dollars. So, coming to education, what is education in the first place? How do you define it?
- [91:54]
Richard Gerver
It's a, it's a really, really good question because I, I think in, in its purest form, I've always believed that it has two parts to the same purpose. The first part of education, and particularly of children is to help them to dream, right? We have to help children to dream because you can only ever dream about the things you know or the things you've experienced, right? So you have to broaden their context and set of experiences, particularly for children in challenging communities. And of course, although I describe some of the areas I taught in, in, in the UK compared to some of the areas in the world, they're not even on the same level of challenge. But we have to help kids to dream. And then the purpose of education, once you help kids to dream, to broaden their horizons is the best way I can describe it, is our job then, is to turn those dreams into aspirations. Now, that's the clever bit, because a dream is a dream, it's a fantasy. To turn it into an aspiration, what you have to do is build a ladder that allows that child to tangibly see how they could reach that dream. And the ladder is education. Because if what you're saying, if a child says, I want to be an astronaut, right after they've brought you, I want to be an astronaut, you go, okay, so here's the ladder. In order to get to being an astronaut, you need to know X, you need to have Y. You need to be able to do this, you need to be able to understand that bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. And that gives the child the tangible ladder. Now, life is such that that child may start up that ladder and go, actually, I don't want to be an astronaut anymore. You go, okay, well, let's look at what next and what you want to do next or what you want to. And then the job of education is to build the ladder. So it's to help kids to dream, and then it's to take a dream and turn it into an aspiration. And the way you turn it into an aspiration are the rungs on an education ladder matter.
- [93:52]
Shekhar Natarajan
So should education be generalized or should it be specialized?
- [93:56]
Richard Gerver
That's, again, a really interesting question, right? Because to me, what you want to do in the early phases of education is broaden kids, just broaden their horizons. And of course, what's really interesting about that is we shouldn't control what those horizons are. Because when I started teaching in 1993, the Internet wasn't something that was available to the public. There were no mobile phones, there was no social media, there was no digital technology. AI was only known to experts, certainly not to the public, which is a whole nother story, right? Because although AI's been going for decades, the first time the public really became aware of it was when things like chatgpt and CHAT programs came out. But 1993 was a very different place. Now, when I started teaching in 1993, let's say those children were 10, 10 in 1993. They're now in the prime of their working lives. And all of the things we thought we were preparing kids for in 1993 have evolved, don't exist anymore. And things are now available to them that weren't even science fiction in 1993. So we have to be very careful about saying, are we preparing people for narrow routes or for specific routes? Or we're training them and educating them to do stuff that is currently available. So what we need to do is give kids, imagine that learning, I mean, learning to me, by the way, should be lifelong. This idea that it finishes at 18, 21, or if you do a higher level degree or a master or a doctorate, it's finite, is ridiculous. In the world we live in today, the fact that education seems to be finite is absurd. Education should genuinely be lifelong. But in order to become a lifelong learner, in essence, to me, it's like being an artist, right? To be an artist wherever you go with your art, right? Picasso. When Picasso became Picasso, he didn't start by being Picasso. He learned the techniques. He learned about color mixing. He learned about a palette and what different paints could do and the mood they would convey and create. He learned that history of art, and then was able to use his own creative entrepreneurial process to invent something new. But he had to have the color palette. So at its earliest phase, we need to make sure children are the artists of learning. They have the basic palette. They need to know the colors. So they need to be literate, they need to be numerate. They need to have a basic grounding in scientific principle in the arts, in sports, physical and mental health, all of those things. Wellbeing, all of it. And then what we do is we need to make sure we keep their eyes open to what they can use those things to deploy the ladders, right? The dream, I fancy being this, I might want to be that. But actually to have the flexibility to realize they can always mix the paints in different ways. Now, eventually, those young people will get to an age where they have decided they're going to be a lawyer, right? They're going to be a surgeon. And then obviously, specialist learning and knowledge and skills click into place. But the interesting thing is, even then, we need to make sure they haven't lost the art of mixing colors in different ways. And the Reason I say that is I often think about the legal profession and you are way more of an expert than. Than I am in technology and artificial intelligence. But it strikes me that lawyers have been some of the most highly regarded professionals for generations because of the knowledge they need to have, their ability to read the nuance of a document, to find the anomalies in that document, to recraft the language of that document and do all of those things. Now it strikes me with a very amateur mind that within a decade at most, most artificial intelligence will be able to do all of that with a greater level of accuracy than a lawyer.
- [98:04]
Shekhar Natarajan
It's doing it now. The only problem is it is making up cases and case files that never exist.
- [98:10]
Richard Gerver
Right. So as it learns. My point is, over the next few years, it's going to evolve into becoming. Its level of efficiency will be so suddenly being a lawyer will no longer be a top job. And those people that have devoted all their lives and all of their experience and all of their knowledge and a considerable amount of their funds to become that job. And those young people who are starting on that route now, if we blinker them too soon, right when that becomes a job that is replaced or the vast majority. But not just are they not ready for it, they don't have the confidence and understandings of the generic skills and knowledge they have have to look around and see what else is available. So we need to help funnel people into careers and positions. Yes, but we mustn't do it at the expense of their curiosity. And that for me is the whole point of a future model of education. Rather than the acquisition of set pieces of knowledge, we need to put curiosity at the absolute heart of education. Right the way through the journey. Yes, sometimes there be will. Will be things, skills and knowledge people will need for certain careers. I don't want a surgeon stood in front of me going, funnily enough, I didn't bother with the scalpel lesson. When I did that, I went off and did something else and said, I want to know that surgeon has qualified in that technical skill as I'm about to be put under. Right. But we've got to create a broader context and we've got to. While we might need to filter certain skills and learnings, we might mustn't filter people's thinking. So we need to constantly create an environment where people feel comfortable being challenged, stepping out of their comfort zone, asking stupid questions and doing all of those things as well.
- [100:01]
Shekhar Natarajan
So. But what is the current education system optimized for?
- [100:06]
Richard Gerver
The current. When you go back to industrial thinking, right? When you think about the history of the education system, mass education system system, when it was taken out of the hands of the church and given into mass education, it was created to funnel people into very specific roles. White collar, blue collar, work on a production line, work in an office. But all of it was predicated on the industrial thinking of efficiency, right? It was going all the way back to Frederick Wilmslow Taylor. It was how do you maximize efficiency? And so what you want want are people who are trained in routine cognition, who are trained, depending on their intellectual and academic capacity, to be able to repeat a task over and over and over again with great efficiency, to be able to take on technical detail and knowledge and to put that to use. So when you think about the mass education system, it is still built on the premise that we're preparing people to live in an industrialized age. It's still predicated on prove to us how routinely cognitive you can be, how cognitively efficient you can be. We will set up tests and exams that evidence who are the most cognitively efficient. And we will filter those people into those high level cognition jobs and we will filter the rest into physical auto skilled jobs that require repetition and efficiency. And when you think that that's how the education system is predicated, it's rare to find entrepreneurs. They're still the breakout stories. What we need to do is shift because we are elegantly. I think it was Toffler who said if we don't change the education system, we will elegantly continue to prepare people for a world that no longer, longer exists. And so that I think is the greatest challenge of the education system. And by the way, I think we're seeing the root of that in human culture right now, the anger and resistance, because generations of people, and we alluded to this almost at the start of our conversation, generations of human beings have been trained to work in a factory model, in an industrial efficiency focused model, at whatever level that may be. That's what we've been trained to do. And the promise was the certainty, right? So if you go to school, get your head down, study hard, ace your tests, your reward will be to go to a higher level of education and do the same thing even more intensely. And even till you qualify through university and then you get the job at, I don't know, one of the big five or whatever else it is,
- [102:51]
Shekhar Natarajan
or
- [102:52]
Richard Gerver
if that the route is, that's where you're going to go, you will end up working in the factory, on the production line, right? But if you get your head down and you do your job and you turn the numbers and you build the thing, you put the units in as much as you need to, we'll measure you against your performance. You'll be rewarded with a job for life. So everyone has been prepared through their mentality to think that way, starting with the education, conditioning, the factory model, as the factory has exploded and in different parts of the world, particularly the developed world, which is where we're seeing so much of the rising anger and polarization in those societies like the us, the uk, Europe, certain parts of the developed world where these things have been running for generations. And these of course, are the first to go through the industrial S curve, come way out the other side with an ill prepared population to live in that world. People are getting angry and they're getting angry at authority. And the reason they're getting angry at authority is because they were told, you promised me when I was seven years old, if I got my head down and I aced my tests, this would be my narrative. I did everything you asked me to do. I went into my job, factory floor, middle worker, white collar worker, senior professional, and my world has exploded in my face. So I blame you because you broke your promise. And it's where I think, for example, they're blaming the politicians because they're so. The rise of populism, those very skilled communicators have been able to go, do you want to know who to put to blame? Because you're angry and people are angry and rightfully so, they're good people, they're just angry. Those populists are going, you see that person over there? That's authority, that is the traditional system. They're to blame because they're the ones that made you the promise and they're the ones that haven't fulfilled that promise, they're the ones that have broken it. And I think what we're going to see, unless we're very, very quick to transform the education system, is even more people coming through a traditional education system, elegantly prepared for a world that doesn't exist, who become angrier and angrier and angrier. And eventually, I mean, maybe this sounds overly dramatic, but it would cause. I'm a former actor, right. Eventually there will be a human revolution.
- [105:07]
Shekhar Natarajan
There is right coming.
- [105:09]
Richard Gerver
And it's coming faster than people think. And it's coming because people are still being churned through that same system, system and are now going, enough, enough. No.
- [105:20]
Shekhar Natarajan
But they don't know where to like guide their anger.
- [105:23]
Richard Gerver
No, exactly. And that's why the wrong people, who are very skilled populist politicians, are able to manipulate them. And that again speaks to why curiosity is so important. Because what people have lost is the ability to question, to challenge, to say, yeah, but why? Where do you come from? How can you say you're a person of the people? What do you mean by that? So by cutting that tax, that doesn't help me directly. How are you telling me it helps me what we've become. Because we feel so punched, because we feel that we've been victims for so long, both because of the industrial evolution and revolution we've witnessed in our personal working lives, because of global health pandemic, because of shifts in economics and environment, all of which are lending to that unease and uncertainty, the evolution at a ridiculous level of technological advancement. People feel more and more like victims. So go back to my foundation story. As a child, as a nine year old kid that felt life had just punched them too many times and I was going to hide or become angry, I could have hidden and become invisible or I could have lashed out, I chose the first. But both we're seeing, I think in humanity on a profound level, right? What we need are teachers like my teacher, whose name was David, right, Who actually says, let me show you another way. Have you thought about this? And try doing and building the curiosity back into us. Because if we don't, we are just setting ourselves up for a, are really, really, I think a global implosion of human talent.
- [107:06]
Shekhar Natarajan
Yeah, like, you know, but like a lot of people would say, like, you know, see, I think there are two forces at play, to be honest, right? Three forces at play, to be honest. No more than three. Never go more than trinity. So one is this whole information dis, you know, disinformation, you know, franchise I would say, right? That whole cycle is like perpetually like getting like changing our perception of what reality is and what is really fake. The second one is everywhere. See, what you talked about is a universal problem, right? The whole industrial mindset, we apply it to companies, right? Like we stick our head in the sand and we say, like this worked really great for my company and I'm going to keep churning that system till it returns like profits like all day long, right? So that whole industrial mindset we never got out of because it was efficiency focused and it was what was very successful for the 19th century. They're trying to apply it in the 21st century, right? 20th century. Like those two principles, like getting cascades so that that whole system and not Being able to question the system is the second one. The third force which is really at play, which is accelerating everything around us, is the explosion of technology, artificial intelligence, you know, because now you have two things going at the same time. You got, you got to like, you got a, you got an antiquated model, a business model model. Like whether it's education, whether it's businesses themselves, whether it's like personal life, whatever it is, the business model of how we operate and the context we live in is no longer relevant. So that is getting wiped out with like the, you know, advent of technology. Now people's livelihood is going to be gone. Like, even if you said like, you know, hey, like if my improve, if I improve my cognition, I get to like a certain state, at least some people saw that as a success story in the future that even that doesn't exist. You know, I prefer it for law school. I went to law school for 10 years. Oh shit. Like, you know, I don't need to be a lawyer anymore. So that's going to happen more with AI. So I think like we are going to get like atomized as a society. See, we were like, we were colonized. Right, Right. We're going to get algorithmized, if there's a word as such, and then we're going to get like atomized. So we, we as our, like, you know, our own identity will be so schizophrenic.
- [109:52]
Richard Gerver
Yeah. Wow.
- [109:53]
Shekhar Natarajan
Right. Because we don't know what is fact, fiction, distortion.
- [109:57]
Richard Gerver
Yeah.
- [109:57]
Shekhar Natarajan
Like our sense of dignity, our sense of purpose. How do you survive in this like very turbulent world? I mean, we haven't prepared as a society for this world and a lot of intellectuals thinks that, you know, like, I have hope, I have the, I have the belief that it's all going to work itself out, but at, at what cost? Right. Are we going to lose a billion people to find out? Like, you know, like, like, you know, I, I went down the wrong path or do we want to find out right now? Yeah. And so that is like what was concerning, you know, about society in general. So, you know, I love your provocation about curiosity. Tell me what curiosity is. Make it understandable. Like a five year old.
- [110:40]
Richard Gerver
Yeah, absolutely. Okay, well let's go back to a five year old.
- [110:43]
Shekhar Natarajan
Right.
- [110:43]
Richard Gerver
So there are, when I trained to be a teacher in the days when smoking was still allowed in university lecture rooms. Right. And these were the days where you'd still meet in the lecture room, let alone I. People were still smoking. And I had a very charismatic lecturer and he Would walk in to lectures, always late. But we didn't care because he was so charismatic, right? Everyone's had a teacher or a lecturer at university that they can identify with, male or female. This was a guy. And he'd walk in and he'd sit in the store and he'd load his pipe and we'd all be sat there going, he hadn't said anything yet. We'd just be like, I just want to look like him, I want to behave like him. And when I look back on it now, and I realize through my own research and work, some of what he said was dubious. And he often used to throw percentages out that frankly had no evidence. But I remember him saying something one day that has absolutely stuck true. And we'll come back. To answer your question, as you'll see the narrative from the first time it came, because I remember instinctively thinking, wow, he smoked his pipe and he sat up and we're all waiting. He said, you know, we learn. And the percentage is just. I don't. It's rubbish. But the sentiment is powerful and correct. He said, you know, we learn somewhere between 70 and 75% of everything we learn in our lifetime before we're five years old. And we all went, that's rubbish. I know so much more now than I did when I was five. And he said, yeah, but think about, about the density of what most of us learn in the first five years of our lives, right? Most of us. Most of us learn to walk and talk. We learn to understand vocal intonation, facial expression, body language. We learn to make sense of the sensory world around us. If we're born into a multilingual home, we pick up every language spoken in our domestic environment. Now, if he was talking, he'd say, if there was technology lying around the house before we're five, we have picked up and mastered every single form of technology in our. We are learning machines. And I remember thinking to myself, that has enormous power. And then through my teaching career, the most adaptive, most creative, most innovative people I ever met were in my early years, provision my kids under five. And then you start to think, okay, why now? There's neurological evolution in the brain, too. And the brain's very clever, very energy efficient. It shuts down bits we're not using. It fires neurons, we are. But actually, as we get older, our brain becomes more effective. As a young child, everything's firing. As we get older, in order to save energy, it shuts down bits. So language acquisition, for example, becomes harder the older we become, because those Parts of the brain stop being used so the brain shuts those bits down to save energy. So there's the neurology. But Also kids under 5 are never worried about turning up to a day and thinking, I've no idea what's going to happen today. I'm yet to meet an 18 month old child who's going through therapy because they can't cope with the rate of change in their lives or the uncertainty. Right. In fact, any of us that have ever been around kids under five will know to our own energy cost that if you make a kid under five do the same thing in the same way for more than two minutes, they'll drive you crazy. And so the essence for me of curiosity comes down to bank, right? There's a link here. There's a very powerful link. In order to feel in control of your life or to feel a value or purpose or excitement in uncertainty, you have to be capable and prepared to learn. If you're capable and prepared to learn, change is something that excites you. And what provokes those things? Our ability to question, which in essence is curiosity. The ability to find something of interest, not be threatened by it, not to retreat from it, not to run away from it, but to question it. That's interesting. And all of our ego under five is such that we don't feel vulnerable if we don't know something, we don't feel that it's a threat to our credibility or person or purpose or value. We don't feel that failure's a bad thing because when we're under five, most of what we do is failure. And it's learn and develop and all of those things, the things you advocate throughout your career, that idea, well, let's try it. And if we thought it's the worst that happens, we fail, we learn from that, we go again. That's how five year olds think. And that is the essence of curiosity. And so, so the work I'm doing around curiosity, if you like, is trying to find ways we can help people reverse engineer the way they think and they behave as what they think of themselves as mature, intelligent adults and actually help us to go back to that state where we find things of interest, we learn, we see changes and opportunity fired by our ability to question, question and see the world as interesting.
- [116:01]
Shekhar Natarajan
So is it fair to say, like I met this phenomenal guy while I was in Abu Dhabi, like, and I was in first, well he lives in Abu Dhabi. But like we went, we met this sultan in, in Sharjah and like you Know, we both hit off, like, instantly. Like after. After that, like, meeting. And like, we. Some. Sometimes you meet these kinds of people, right? Like, you know, you just want to hang out with that guy. And so, like, we. We wrapped up around 11:30 in the night. And then, like, you know, he was driving me back to Dubai where I was staying. And then we said, like, okay, let's like, you know, grab tea and sit and talk in the gas station. And then like, we were talking for almost like four or five hours. And so he had a very simple success mantra. He said, in the future, you should demonstrate intelligence with innocence.
- [117:01]
Richard Gerver
Wow. Love that phrase. I love that phrase.
- [117:05]
Shekhar Natarajan
Because that's what curiosity is all about. Because you're so innocent that you don't, like, have this premonition, the preconceived notion that, you know, this is right, this is wrong, someone is going to judge me like that. That intelligence that comes with innocence is going to be the secret of success. Like, you know, in our tradition, the religion of, like, you know, the faith, I come from Hinduism. So there's a trinity of God. There's a creator, there's a protector, and then there's basically a destructor, but he's transformed. Forming is a transformation God. So the creator is called Brahma, the protector is called Vishnu. And basically the guy who was destroying and recreating the transformation guy is called Shiva. And Shiva, of all the gods, is the most innocent and the most intelligent. Wow.
- [118:03]
Richard Gerver
Isn't that interesting? Wow. It's really. It's. You were speaking. It reminds me. It reminds me of a conversation and. Interesting, isn't it? Because if I'm right, Shiva is often portrayed as childlike.
- [118:14]
Shekhar Natarajan
Yes.
- [118:14]
Richard Gerver
Right now.
- [118:15]
Shekhar Natarajan
So he can give you like. Like, you know, he's. He's called. He's like. He's like an innocent version. He's called Bola Shankar. That sounds like, like his other name is Shankar. Meaning, like, you know, it's like many. One of the many names. But he's considered like, Bola, meaning, like, he's very innocent. Yeah, right. So if you go pray and, like, pray very judiciously, even if you're a deep demon, he would grant you a boon. So all these gods and demigods and like all these devils and all the. They used to pray to him. They used to get all the power, and then the goddess used to come kill those guys because they're bad.
- [118:49]
Richard Gerver
So that's the story.
- [118:50]
Shekhar Natarajan
The best, clear of the best. So, but it's interesting, like, culturally, right? Like, you know, he's considered the most intelligent.
- [118:58]
Richard Gerver
Isn't that interesting? It isn't that interesting. I mean it's fascinating because.
- [119:01]
Shekhar Natarajan
And he's also, he also represents resonance transformation.
- [119:04]
Richard Gerver
Yeah.
- [119:05]
Shekhar Natarajan
The destruction to the creation back again. The whole like kind of like let, let it die, let it reemerge. Right.
- [119:11]
Richard Gerver
But isn't, I mean, isn't that interesting? Because the philosophy often two things that strike me. The first is that, right? I and I used to go to the gym to look at me now and I know the people who are viewing this will go, you haven't been to the gym in years, Richard. And they'd be right. But I used to go to the gym and when I used to go to the gym and my pt, my personal trainer would explain to me the whole reason behind working out and lifting weights until you can't lift them anymore was the principle of you need to break down your muscle fibers in order for them to build back stronger, but you have to break them down to do it. And the second thing you were talking, which really interests me. So a few years ago I had the incredible privilege of interviewing a man called Barry Barish, who was the 2017 Nobel Prize winner for physician. And amongst other things, one of the things that fascinated me was how he went about putting together a team of people, went on research scientists that went on to win a Nobel Prize for their research into gravitational waves. Like, how do you go about building a team of people? And one of the things he said, which is the most poetic thing I've ever heard about human development, which I think resonates really powerfully with what you said. And, and actually the God Shiva, right, was he said, in essence, Richard, what I needed were people on my team who had the courage to challenge the beauty of the proof. Now that to me is another beautiful and poetic example of what curiosity means. Do you have the courage to challenge the beauty of the proof? And I kind of love there's a spiritual connection to what you were saying related to a world renowned scientist and their philosophy about what it takes to be innovative.
- [120:59]
Shekhar Natarajan
Yes. And I think like that, that I think is going to be the mantra. Like, you know, a lot of people ask me, do you like, what do you think are the skills needed in the future? Or like, you know, what education should I pursue? All I say is pursue intelligence with innocence.
- [121:16]
Richard Gerver
I love that. I so love that phrase. It's just intelligence with innocence. Because that's exactly what a pre 5.
- [121:24]
Shekhar Natarajan
Yes.
- [121:24]
Richard Gerver
A kid under 5 does exactly that. I think you've summed that up. God, it's beautiful. I'm stealing that.
- [121:35]
Shekhar Natarajan
So how do you go about, like, bringing that back to the humanity? It's such a. Like, you know, we, we are so inflexible. Like, you know, people talk about, learn, unlearn, relearn all the time. Easily said, rarely performed. And like, there are many things, which we basically do today that actually works against this very principle, I think, you
- [122:05]
Richard Gerver
know, in many ways it's. It's like a virtuous circle, right? Because what I try and do, I'm. I don't consider myself to be the world's expert because I can't tell people how to do something, stuff a bit like you, you know, what I do, what I am is the catalyst. And what I hope I do is get to a point where I will always be an educator, whoever I'm working with. And I think my job is to get people, I want to be the catalyst for them to question. So what I try and do is explain to them why their reflexes now are the way they are, why they think the way they think, why they respond to challenge, change, uncertainty, the way they do, the reason why they maybe feel disenfranchised and angry, all of which are legitimate and all of them are deeply authentic. But on a human level, to try and help them understand. On a very simple human. I'm not a psychologist, so I can't work on a scientific level. I'm a humanist. And so what I try and do is just get people to understand why maybe they're feeling frightened at the moment, because as we're recording this, no one knows what's going to happen in the Middle East. Why they feel frightened at the moment, because they know that the environmental transformation of our planet is on a massive collision course. Why they feel terrified of AI suddenly when they didn't even know about AI two or three years ago. Now, I can't explain to them the technicalities of those things to make them feel better, but what I can do is help them understand why their reflex is to feel that way and then to say, and if you use curiosity, what starts to happen is you start to feel a level of empowerment and control again. You know, the best example I can give on a personal level is when the. When Covid first struck and the world was closing itself down. I earn most of my money as a professional speaker, right?
- [124:00]
Shekhar Natarajan
So I stand on stage, all of that went away.
- [124:03]
Richard Gerver
Night, boom. I remember doing my last event in, I think it was the end of January 2020 in Australia, flying back through Dubai and seeing all the masks on people and the denial thing in my head go, that's crazy. That's an overreaction getting home. And by the time I got home, within 48 hours, the whole world was melting down, right? And I remember sitting there powerless at home. My wife, who was a school principal, was going into work every day, risking her own health in order to keep her school open so that, you know, our mainstream workers could steal our emergency services. Doctors, nurses could do their jobs. She was so. I felt for the first time in my adult life, I felt of no value, like everything. And on top of that, I thought, how am I going to earn the money to pay my mortgage? How am I going to earn the money to contribute to putting food on the table? And I remember for 48 hours, I went through that, that, you know, that grief cycle of despair. I started out by just mental paralysis. I couldn't take anything in. I just didn't really conceptualize or understand what was happening. It almost felt like it was a dream. I've heard other people say in those early days, it felt like we were watching ourselves in a drama on television, right? It was like that disconnect. Then you go through the denial. It's not that serious. They'll find a vaccine quickly. It'll be over within six weeks. It'll be far back on the road. Of course, it's an overreaction reaction that didn't happen. Then I became angry. Bloody hell's going on, all this stuff. And then the despair. And what I find now when I look at that time, I started to come through that despair when I started to become really interested, weirdly, in could I do my job digitally. I'm not a great tech expert. I really am not, right? I've only just mastered how to send a text on my phone. But what started to happen was I started to look at things like Zoom, which I'd never heard of before, and teams. But not just could I present virtually, but could I create an entertaining experience, an edutainment experience? Now, a lot of what I went and looked at never came off. But the fact that every morning I was getting up and learning something new and questioning made me feel more in control. Even though the circumstances, circumstances of my predicament hadn't changed. I still couldn't leave the house, I still couldn't stand on the stage by rights, I still couldn't earn an income. But because every day I was questioning and looking and exploring and evolving and developing, I'd go to bed at night feeling that I'd been of value that day that I'd done something of use and purpose. And because I started to get that sense that I was controlling more about my life, whether you attract the stuff or not, momentum started to gather and work started to come in in a different way. But the essence was going. From that point of feeling, I was in completely in the hands of the scientists, the politicians, and a disease that no one understood, a pandemic no one could get their heads around. I started to feel more in control again. So psychologically I felt more that I could be constructive. And I think it's that essence in people that what we've got to help them do do is start to realize that that curiosity won't solve the problem overnight. No one can pretend to help them solve their issues and the concerns and the anxieties they have overnight, but if you shift to get them into a mode where they're more curious and they're asking questions and they're exploring, the psychology immediately shifts the way those people feel about themselves, and they instantly become more proactive and therefore feel. Feel more optimistic about where their future can take them.
- [127:47]
Shekhar Natarajan
Yeah, I think, like, you know, your book is actually very rightly timed at this, you know, juncture in life. Right. In the sense the next, like, you know, I predict the next two to three years, like, all the way up to 20, 30, is going to be very turbulent. You know, that's my. Yeah, that's my, my. It's not my. It's my. One, it's my intuition. And two, it's like, you know, understanding the patterns of society in general. The world is going to go through a very turbulent time and they're going to seek for answers. And I think, like, seeking for answers starts with asking the questions, you know, And I think, like, it's. The framing of it is beautiful. And I think, like, I don't know how you position the book yet, but I think it's also something that, like, every tech professional, everyone in the industry should be deeply, like, watching, like, you know, like, planning their, like, mind towards, like, what is curiosity? How do I become curious? How do I become childlike? You know, how do I go about it? How do I, like, you know, not be bothered by the situations I'm in right now. What, how to look around the corner. Right. Yeah, because a child does that. Like, they. They look around the corner.
- [129:04]
Richard Gerver
Absolutely, you know.
- [129:05]
Shekhar Natarajan
Right. Absolutely. No one teaches them how to do that, but they do it intuitively. Right. Like, you know, they know, like, they'll fall. They, like, you know, they'll, they'll figure out like a way to like go around it. So I've seen my kid like, you know, just walk like, you know, just crawl and walk and do all the things. And now he talks and you talk very eloquently. And like I just like, like six years, like, you know, but.
- [129:24]
Richard Gerver
And that's, that's because he's never stopped going. What, what happens if, what happens if?
- [129:30]
Shekhar Natarajan
You would be, you'd be shocked. You'd be shocked. So this guy was probably 16 months and 7 days my son. And I left my phone on the table one day and he just kept seeing like the pattern of how I opened the phone and he just opened my freaking phone.
- [129:52]
Richard Gerver
He had your phone 16 months old.
- [129:57]
Shekhar Natarajan
Your phone 16 months and seven days. So it's like, it's, it's like, like it's so like I didn't even hold a freaking phone. Yeah. Till I was like 23 years old and it was like a brick.
- [130:12]
Richard Gerver
It's extraordinary what our kids are capable of. This is my point. We, we look at children like somehow childhood is the purgatory before becoming a real purgatory person. And the way children we behave, we dismiss as immature all of the time. We haven't stopped to question whether actually some of the behaviors and fundamental instincts of a child are exactly what we need to carry into our adult lives. And if we're serious about creating an education system that is going to help transform the way people see their futures and their present, then what we have to do is do is stop top down models of learning, saying, well, universities tell us to do this and this is what we need to do to prepare people for that. We actually should be building education systems this way, saying, how do we harness the power of what these young people demonstrate every minute of every hour of every day?
- [131:06]
Shekhar Natarajan
Very beautiful. Very beautiful. So I'm going to do like some rapid fire questions.
- [131:10]
Richard Gerver
Oh, gosh. Okay.
- [131:12]
Shekhar Natarajan
So the single most important change in any school could make tomorrow with no extra funding.
- [131:18]
Richard Gerver
Ask the first fundamental question, which is what do we want our children to look like as human beings when they leave us? And create explicitly what some people already have, but implicitly, because by making it explicit, you start to make it tangible and something you can process.
- [131:33]
Shekhar Natarajan
Fantastic. The subject should be the, the subject that should be compulsory in every school, which is not currently the case.
- [131:42]
Richard Gerver
Well being.
- [131:43]
Shekhar Natarajan
Well being.
- [131:44]
Richard Gerver
Well being should be physical, mental, spiritual. Well being should absolutely be the essence because that brings in so much about that sense of purpose, value, all of those.
- [131:52]
Shekhar Natarajan
So no One teaches that today, not explicitly.
- [131:55]
Richard Gerver
It's not explicitly part of the curriculum. It's done, but it's often done as an add on and it's not done in depth from day one.
- [132:02]
Shekhar Natarajan
Well being. Okay, great. The subject that is currently compulsory, that it should. Shouldn't be.
- [132:10]
Richard Gerver
That's a really, really interesting question. I don't think there's a subject that shouldn't be compulsory. I think the way we teach it should be changed. So for example, teaching math as a finite thing with set answers, we've got to move away from that. Teaching language is a fixed thing. When language is constantly evolving and changing the way we write, use grammar, all of those things are changing, changing. We need to make them developmental rather than finite. So it's not about removing a subject, it's about making them developmental.
- [132:41]
Shekhar Natarajan
Got it. Ken Robinson, in one sentence, what he
- [132:45]
Richard Gerver
gave you, authenticity and ambition.
- [132:48]
Shekhar Natarajan
Got it. AI in schools, the biggest opportunity, or is it the biggest threat?
- [132:53]
Richard Gerver
Incredible opportunity. But we've got to start to use what's currently happening with AI as a catalyst to question why we do what we do. So for example, we hear people say things like, oh, AI. Our students are writing their essays by AI. Fine, great. Really efficient. We shouldn't be stopping them do it. We should be teaching them how to question and challenge what AI is producing. So actually they evolve what the basis of AI gives them into something that is unique and genuinely of their perspective.
- [133:23]
Shekhar Natarajan
Got it. Screen time limit you should set for your children under the age of 10. If you were an education secretary, what would you do? Like people are like now, banning social media and usage and all that. What are the screen time?
- [133:37]
Richard Gerver
The first thing to understand is the minute you ban something, you make it taboo. If you make it taboo, particularly to a teenager or a kid, you make it sexy. Which means they're going to do it under the COVID of darkness. They will always find a way. Right? The great lesson for me, if, and I'm not advocating pornography, right? But in this country now, you do an age check to make sure you have to PROVE you're over 18 to access pornography. Well, teenagers already figured out that if you use a VPN and you put that VPN in a country where that isn't a law, I can access that stuff. So my point is by banning stuff, you're not actually helping with the issue. What we should be doing is teaching children from a very young age both the pros and cons, cons of screen time so that they can start to self police and understand we don't Ban anything. What we do is we teach responsible usage, but not just go, do this, do that, explain why. Spark the curiosity. Ask a child to ask why they're getting a headache or their eyes are hurting after an hour or why they're not sleeping better. Don't just take it away from them. Get them to ask the questions. Got it.
- [134:43]
Shekhar Natarajan
The thing about, about AI that worries you the most as an educator, that
- [134:48]
Richard Gerver
if we don't see it as a catalyst, it will become something destructive to children's development. We have to see it as a catalyst for change and point it that way. Yeah, got it.
- [135:02]
Shekhar Natarajan
Nolan Bushnell was right.
- [135:05]
Richard Gerver
Was it true or false about the AI? I think we've left it to too long. I think we've left. I think we should have been asking the question. The provocative thing I say now is suddenly, in the last 18 months, two, three years, experts in AI are everywhere. Everybody's an expert in AI. Where were they 15 years ago when AI was really important? And that's the point at which we should have been discussing its impact on the future.
- [135:34]
Shekhar Natarajan
Got it. Communication, empowerment or impact if leaders, others can only get one of them.
- [135:40]
Richard Gerver
Empowerment.
- [135:41]
Shekhar Natarajan
Empowerment. The most overused word in leadership. Oh, wow.
- [135:47]
Richard Gerver
The most overused word in leadership. I'm in control. There's three words in it, but I'm in control.
- [135:56]
Shekhar Natarajan
Obama, Blair, or Dalai Lama? Who surprised you the most?
- [136:01]
Richard Gerver
Obama was exactly what I thought he'd be, which is a good thing because people say, never make your heroes. His authenticity was superb. Tony Blair surprised me in the wrong way in that I realized he was far more of an operator, had become less about integrity, more about being a political operative. So in a way, he'd lost the authenticity that brought him to his role in the first place. The Dalai Lama was everything and more I imagined he'd be. But he had the most infectious childlike curiosity, Curiosity which I just found so incredibly engaging.
- [136:34]
Shekhar Natarajan
How did you meet him?
- [136:36]
Richard Gerver
So long. Two parts to this story. First time I met him, I was in Melbourne in Australia, staying at a hotel next to the convention center. So I was doing an event in the convention center. So was the Dalai Lama. Now, obviously, his event was way bigger than my event. I knew he was staying in the same hotel because the top, top two floors of the hotel had been sealed off for his security. I was running out of breakfast one morning to go and get ready to go to the convention that I was involved in. I ran round the corner too fast, bumped into a man mountain who was. I mean, I'm 6 foot 2 this guy was at least 7ft tall. And I looked up and it was like. Because he was clearly security and not happy. And as I'm like looking up him, terrified, this tiny figure comes round the corner, takes my hand and says, don't rush, it'll be there. And it was the Dalai Lama. And then they walked off, right? That was it. The second time was about two years later. This is the remarkable bit about his ability to be present. About two years later, I was invited to speak at an event in the Netherlands. And basically they wanted me to be the warm up man for the Dalai Lama. What they wanted, wanted was somebody who could speak for kind of any length of time. Because the Dalai Lama and his entourage are notoriously late to anything they're invited to, right? So basically they said, would you come and speak and just keep going and we'll give you the thing when the Dalai Lama arrives, right? And then what we'll do is you'll come off stage, you'll join the lineup to meet the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama will go up on stage and do a question and answer. So thankfully, he wasn't too late. I got the signal, I went off stage. Stage, join the lineup. The Dalai Lama is walking along the line saying hello to everybody. Gets to me, and without blinking, he said to me, we've met before, haven't we? And I said, yeah, we have. He said, you bumped into my security guard in Australia about two years ago. And I'm like, no. Because if you think how many millions of people that Dalai Lama meets every single year, right? And his instant recovery, recall of that moment, and then after he did his Q and A, we talked a little bit about education and education of the mind, which was fabulous. But it was that ability to instantly recall which just blew me away two years later.
- [139:02]
Shekhar Natarajan
Yeah, Scammer. Was it a gift or an obstacle?
- [139:06]
Richard Gerver
Looking back on it, a gift. Because I'm not sure the introduction to drama would have come if I hadn't have had the stammer. And today, because I do what I do, which is stand on a stage and talk to people and use my voice as a tool, I'm not sure any of that would have been realized without that moment. And as I said all the way through our podcast, those moments of adversity can become incredible moments of opportunity if you see them the right way.
- [139:31]
Shekhar Natarajan
So who's the teacher who changed your life? Like, was it Ken? Is it like David? Or like all of them, but.
- [139:39]
Richard Gerver
And I'm going to be really soft and syrupy here, and it's not even Valentine's Day. When I trace my life story. Meeting that young woman at university when I did, and her really softly steering me in certain directions when I needed it and giving me the hard message of belief when I needed the kick in the backside that I would need to make a decision or cross the line. Her.
- [140:07]
Shekhar Natarajan
A lot of people think like, like, you know, when you, when you get married or whatever it is, like it, like, you know, you. You cannot be risk. You become risk averse. Because, like, you know, the sense of responsibility. In fact, it's actually the opposite.
- [140:19]
Richard Gerver
I agree.
- [140:20]
Shekhar Natarajan
It's actually the opposite. Like if you have the most supportive wife in. In which case, like, you know, like, I'm. I'm. I'm a classic example of that. You could, you could prevail any circumstances. Circumstance.
- [140:32]
Richard Gerver
I wrote in my book on change, I put a little phrase in there, not necessarily specifically to my wife, but this idea of being rooted to something will allow you to explore. And the way I put it was people are happy to walk in space if they're tethered to the spaceship.
- [140:51]
Shekhar Natarajan
This is a controversial question for you, actor or head teacher? Which was more like a performance?
- [140:58]
Richard Gerver
That's a great headteacher because I had a more critical audience.
- [141:02]
Shekhar Natarajan
Fantastic. I like that answer. The thing I know about the children that I wish every parent understood, what
- [141:10]
Richard Gerver
is that one thing when they make a mistake? It's a really, really positive moment in their learning journey. It's not a bad thing. Around the time.
- [141:23]
Shekhar Natarajan
What is your. Your thoughts about AI and how do you see the world in the world of AI
- [141:33]
Richard Gerver
it excites me and terrifies me in equal measure. But then so many things in my life have excited me and terrified me in equal measure. My instinct is AI will help us to accomplish things as human beings we can't even imagine are possible. My hope for AI is that it allows us not to be atomized, but to reconnect with the essence and power of human behaviors, human understanding, and what makes our species unique and special. And having survived the millions of years that we have. And I hope that when we come through this initial phase of anger and fear, that we start to realize that it is something that. That doesn't threaten humanity, but can enhance it.
- [142:21]
Shekhar Natarajan
Very good. Very beautiful. So great. Any final thoughts for our audience? Anything that they need to know?
- [142:29]
Richard Gerver
The only thing I would say is my mantra. And my mantra from the time I was an educator and I ask people, if they take nothing away from our conversation, to take this, to remember that you learn nothing new by getting something right. You only ever learn something new from the point of a mistake or the realization you don't know something or you can't do something. So if people take nothing else away with them today, I want them to remember the power and wisdom of ignorance.
- [142:58]
Shekhar Natarajan
Beautiful. Beautiful. What a fantastic conversation. I really loved it. I really loved it.
- [143:03]
Richard Gerver
Thank you so much.
- [143:05]
Shekhar Natarajan
Amazing.
- [143:05]
Richard Gerver
Thank you so much.
- [143:07]
Shekhar Natarajan
It's been amazing, actually.