Class Disrupted is an education podcast featuring author Michael Horn and Futre's Diane Tavenner in conversation with educators, school leaders, students, and other members of school communities as they investigate the challenges facing the education system in the aftermath of the pandemic — and where we should go from here. Find every episode by bookmarking our Class Disrupted page or subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or Stitcher.
In this episode of Class Disrupted, Michael and Diane chat with Siya Raj Purohit, who works on education initiatives at OpenAI, about the transformative potential of AI in education. Siya shares her career journey and how it led her to focus on bridging the gap between education and workforce development. Highlighting the immense value of AI tools like ChatGPT, particularly in university settings, she underscores its potential to personalize learning, reduce teacher burnout, and enhance classroom interactions. Siya also addresses concerns around AI by emphasizing that, while AI can elevate thinking and productivity, the irreplaceable human element in teaching — such as mentorship and personal inspiration — remains vital.
Listen to the episode below. A full transcript follows.
Michael Horn: Hi, this is Michael Horn. What you are about to hear is a conversation that Diane and I recorded with Siya Raj Purohit from OpenAI as part of our series exploring the potential impact of AI on education, from the good to the bad.
Now, here are two things that stood out to me about this episode.
First, I was struck by how much Siya already uses ChatGPT in her daily workflow. Yes, she works at OpenAI, but it has seemingly revolutionized her life. As she said, it's a massive productivity tool. From using it as a tutor to helping her figure out what projects to prioritize, what to learn, this is just part of how she works now.
Second, I was struck by how much she's really on the ground level with universities, particularly professors, helping them figure out how to make it part of their workflow as well for teaching and learning, and how deep she is in specific use cases as a result, and how she sees this, frankly, as an essential tool to free up teacher time, elevate student thinking, and the like.
As the conversation wrapped up, I've also been reflecting on a couple of things.
First, what would it take for ChatGPT to be a massive productivity tool for me personally? And if that's the framing, what does it mean this technology can and can't be used for in education?
I was also struck by how OpenAI has decided to go deep in supporting those in college and beyond with their tool, but they haven't yet created their own products or services for students under 18. Candidly, that's not something I had really realized or reflected on before this conversation. I'm excited to reflect more with Diane after we discuss this topic with several people. But for now, we'd like to hear your thoughts about this conversation. Please share it with us over social media or through my website, michaelbhorn.com. And with that as a prelude, I hope you enjoy this conversation on Class Disrupted.
Diane Tavenner: Hey, Michael.
Michael Horn: Hey, Diane. Good to see you.
Diane Tavenner: I confess I am really excited about today's conversation because the first two we've had about AI have been super interesting and have been raising some big questions for me around the assumptions that I had coming into these conversations and AI and schools, and in particular, how we organize schools themselves around new technologies. However, it has made me even more curious to talk to other people and gain different perspectives. So I'm really, really looking forward to speaking today.
Michael Horn: As am I, Diane. And I. I agree that the first two episodes have piqued my interest in different things, and I'm looking forward to delving into more at some point. However, whereas our last episode featured someone who is, I think, largely skeptical about AI, I suspect we will get a very different take today, given that our guest actually works on Education at OpenAI, the company that, of course, developed and operates ChatGPT. Her name is Siya Raj Parohit, and she has been focused on supporting ed tech and workforce development in the startup community and at AWS over the past decade, before more recently joining OpenAI to work specifically on education. We're going to get to hear about all that up front. But first, Siya, welcome.
Michael Horn: It's great to have you.
Siya Raj Purohit: Thank you so much for having me.
Michael Horn: Yeah, you bet. Before we delve into a series of questions to dissect AI and its impact, or lack thereof, on education, I would love for you to share with the audience a little bit about how you became so deeply involved in AI around the question of education, perhaps specifically. Perhaps you'll also humor me, as you do, because I'm curious about OpenAI's interest in all this. After all, it seems like more than any product launch other than the iPad that I can remember, I can't think of any other consumer tech product or service that has made education such a cornerstone of all its announcements, promises, and potential for the new technology. Perhaps you could share a bit about your journey and OpenAI's perspective on education.
Siya Raj Purohit: Absolutely. So I've spent my career at the intersection of education, technology, and workforce development. This all started when I was 18. During college, I published a book about America's job skills gap, discussing how American universities weren't teaching the skills that students needed to secure jobs in industry. This stemmed from my own experiences and the fear that I might not be able to secure the jobs I aspire to. And that's something that I think a lot of young adults relate to. But I've spent the next 10 years since then trying to help bridge that gap. I have worked at early-stage startups, venture capital funds, and, most recently, Amazon, trying to bridge the gap between learning and opportunity, and helping make economic mobility more possible for different types of learners.
Siya Raj Purohit: I joined OpenAI about 8 months ago to help build up our education vertical. As you all might remember. In November 2022, ChatGPT launched and suddenly became a widely used product around the world. What was interesting for OpenAI was that learning and teaching were among the most common use cases for why people were engaging with ChatGPT. This year, we launched a product called ChatGPT EDU, designed for universities and school districts to use an enterprise-grade version of ChatGPT. With that, it offers a range of different benefits. Various network effects can exist on a campus once all students, faculty, and staff have licenses.
Siya Raj Purohit: I will share a couple of examples of what that looks like. However, a significant part of my job is to help education leaders, educators, and students utilize AI more effectively across various types of campuses.
Michael Horn: Perfect. Perfect. Go ahead, Diane.
Diane Tavenner: Yeah, I mean, I think it sounds like rightfully so. Michael and I are both operating under the assumption that you're probably biased towards seeing AI as something that offers real opportunity to improve and transform education. And clearly, your personal pathway and journey are leading you to that impact. One of the things we're interested in is having you make the best case for how AI can positively impact education. We have a lot of things on our minds that we've thought about, but we're really curious to expand our thinking and have you make the very best case for us.
ChatGPT: Revolutionizing Personalized Learning
Siya Raj Purohit: So I believe for education as a sector, personalized learning was always the holy grail. We always said that if we achieve that, we have made it, as we have accomplished many educational goals with that. And I think that with ChatGPT, it exists. I have a personalized tutor that I talk to every day. It is aware of my projects, the skills I'm developing, and my aspirations. And it helps me become a better knowledge worker every day. I believe that in education, high-quality tutoring should be available to anyone with an Internet connection and that supporting educators by automating many time-consuming tasks allows them to focus on what matters most to them, including mentoring and inspiring students.
Diane Tavenner: That's interesting. Let's stick on that one for a moment because. We'll address this a little later. Still, I wonder, does that mean that Taife Schomeans actually end up changing very much because the tutor and the sort of automated tool allow students and teachers to do things the way they have been, just better and more efficiently? I'm curious what you think about that.
Siya Raj Purohit: So, right now, the most interesting examples we're seeing are that educators are accrediting ChatGPT for reducing teacher burnout, which, as you both know, is a big problem in America. Teachers who used to spend a lot of time on lesson planning, quiz grading, and other preparation for classroom activities are now able to outsource a significant amount of that work or utilize tools like ChatGPT to automate many of these tasks. And so, they can then focus on those classroom interactions and the engagement with different peers in the classroom, which I think is much more valuable. As far as classroom dynamics go, I think it is a big compliment in the way it provides personalized support and tutoring to individuals. However, at the same time, I do believe that there's still value in students being grouped with others of the same age as them, because this allows them to develop a range of social skills and learn how to interact more effectively. I disagree that people should attend online school and use ChatGPT, because I believe the social component is becoming increasingly important.
Diane Tavenner: Got it. I'm thinking back to your 18-year-old self, who wrote a book. We could spend a lot of time just talking about that, but since we've both written books, we know what it takes. We weren't writing them at age 18, I don't think. And your whole premise is that I'm not learning the skills I need to be successful in the jobs I want to have or the careers I want to have. How do you see AI and what you're doing with ChatGPT contributions to make something not accurate or improve it? That. What is the intersection of your personal sort of passion?
From Personal Struggle to System Change
Siya Raj Purohit: The reason I wrote that book, and I felt so passionately about that, and I guess that passion still, like it's so deep in me, is because at first I thought it was a Siya problem. Siya was unable to acquire the necessary engineering skills to secure the job she wanted. And then, after conducting enough research by speaking with some highly accomplished individuals, I realized this was actually a systemic problem. The book was like my attempt to capture the scale of this problem and also prove to myself that this is not just something I'm struggling with. And then I think the next part of that was like, how can I free other people from the struggle? And that's when this journey to make economic mobility more accessible became my life's passion. So, I think that one thing ChatGPT does really phenomenally, which I hope students will take advantage of, is that it helps elevate our thinking. Often, I share my thoughts on a project and think, ‘How can I elevate my thinking?' How would a COO of a rocket ship company approach this? It also helps to expand my thought process significantly.
Siya Raj Purohit: And I think while doing that, it helps us feel less alone in a lot of these things that we encounter a lot of the problems because we can find the right examples, we can think bigger about this, we can see our own gaps. And I think these things are mighty.
Diane Tavenner: Yeah. One of the things that's interesting about talking to you is that I'm observing that when we ask other people to envision the best-case scenario for AI, it's a little bit detached from them. But what I hear in you is literally this is what you're doing. This is how you're working every day. It sounds like you are a true believer. Am I missing anything, or is that right?
Siya Raj Purohit: I used to work really hard at AWS, but I accomplish about three times more every day at OpenAI just because I have AI now. I use it a lot to level up myself, but also to improve the project outcomes I provide.
Diane Tavenner: Interesting. Awesome. This next question may be more challenging for you.
Michael Horn: It's a massive productivity tool for you. And I'm interested in your book. There's this common theme. You used “me search”, as we would say, not just research around your book. And then you were doing the same thing with this tool because you're living it in terms of your massive productivity boost. But I guess I'm curious, like the flip side of some of these things, because I, you know, there's a lot of skeptics, as you know, about, oh, AI might not even have these transformational impacts, but also might undermine certain things. And so somewhat curious where to stand out on some of this stuff. And I'll name two. And then you can go wherever you want on it.
Michael Horn: Which is one, you said, in some ways, it actually makes you feel like you have a companion alongside you to elevate your thinking. Some people said it could actually be dangerous because you might be in isolation. Right. And not feel like you have to connect with others. And then you talked about elevating thinking. And I think that's the other big worry people have: that it will actually be for you. Right. And we won't do the difficult, effortful work to learn about how to construct an argument and, you know, critical thinking, and build knowledge so that we can analyze it and so forth and so on.
Michael Horn: And I'm too curious, like I kind of want you to steel man the argument and make the skeptics take, but I almost more want you just to start to dig into these different use cases, you've heard the ones that I just named and others, and sort of talk us through how you think about them.
Human Connection in Education
Siya Raj Purohit: Yeah. Let's first discuss the human connection aspect. It's exciting because many educators come to talk to me about their own doubts and concerns about the future of their profession. Will I enjoy being a teacher or educator, given that ChatGPT exists and is becoming increasingly proficient? And this question honestly surprises me a lot because the reason I remember the educators who have influenced my journey is that I remember who they were, how they made me feel, and who they told me I could become. Right. These are things that ChatGPT doesn't do, because ChatGPT and AI know what I mean, however. But great mentors can see things about me that I'm not aware of about myself. And I think that's a crucial distinction. And I believe that educators have a unique opportunity in this era to double down on those things; they entered teaching to mentor and inspire, and to find these connections.
Siya Raj Purohit: And now they have the opportunity to do more of that because if they can help increase the potential or vision for more people, that's the true power of education. I'm really excited about that. And I don't think that ChatGPT will replace human relationships. I think it's just gonna become like a support system. So, the reason I use ChatGPT on my personal career front is that I tell it about the things I might want to become. For example, this is my 5-year goal, and this is my 10-year goal. Can you create a comprehensive roadmap outlining the steps I need to take to get there? It provides me with exact instructions as I join these types of organizations, publish this type of content, and consider taking on similar projects at work. It's really detailed.
Siya Raj Purohit: But what it misses out on is, like, when my manager comes in and goes like, hey, this is your superpower. You should double down on this. You know, like, forget, like these types of strategic projects. They hone in on what makes Siya, Siya. Right. And that's what we need more people to do for other people.
Michael Horn: Super interesting talk about the other part of this. The one you mentioned, elevating thinking, gives you a personal roadmap. It's amazing. Again, another fear I often hear is that people say, ‘Well, it's actually going to cause people not to put in the effort to learn or even ask the questions that you're able to ask of it.' How do you think about that concern?
Siya Raj Purohit: I think educators need to show more about what an extraordinary outcome looks like. We need to be able to showcase the amazing end products in various verticals and domains. And the reason for that is that if you give a generic input to ChatGPT, you'll get a very generic output, which a lot of students are realizing, because they're just like, okay, I'm going to plug in my homework, get a very generic output, submit that. And that's not what professors are looking for. So I think one of the most creative use cases I've seen is a professor at the Wharton School. He always had an essay as a final submission for his MBA class. And he says, he's like, What is the value of an essay? The value of an essay is not necessarily in its output, but in the conversational skills and critical thinking skills that go into getting to that output. So now he requires the students to use ChatGPT.
Siya Raj Purohit: He says, ‘They're going to use it anyway, might as well make it a requirement.' And now he measures the number of prompts they use to get to an essay that delights me. Students are so good at prompt engineering that they take two or three prompts and write an excellent essay. Some students go back as many as 18 or 19 times to craft a good essay. And he uses that as their ability to clearly articulate what they're looking for, which he thinks is an essential skill. So, suppose he can teach students how to communicate those skills, such as conveying the desired outcomes that we see, and enabling them to visualize truly extraordinary outcomes. In that case, they will be able to utilize AI to achieve their goals there.
Michael Horn: So maybe this is the last question in this section that I have, because building off that, I think it's almost an implied set of knowledge and awareness, right, that students need to have as a baseline to be able to have those expectations or hopes for outcomes and things of that nature. I'm curious, you also mentioned that the purpose of an essay is implicit in all of that, that some of the artifacts we have used historically to gauge thinking processes and argumentation, and so on, might change in the future. Right. The example we've used a few times at this point is Brorr Saxberg, one of our friends, who likes to say Aristotle worried deeply that the written word would mean people didn't memorize Homer-length poems anymore. And he was absolutely true.
Michael Horn: And I don't think any of us regret that. And so I'm sort of your take on, like, you know, some kind of how we do work or the artifacts of what we think of as representing learning, how might those change even in the future? And perhaps some of these concerns may not be entirely relevant, as we can demonstrate our knowledge and skill development through other means.
Siya Raj Purohit: So I think a lot of like basic calculations, basic strategic work, all of that is going to become much less critical. Many listeners would probably relate to the experience of when their teacher told them they wouldn't always have a calculator available, so they needed to learn basic math early. And now we do. So it's just like these kinds of, the basic elements of strategic thinking, I think, are gonna be less critical than they used to be. But the things that are going to be more important are like critical thinking, but also emotional reasoning, and the ability, like emotional intelligence, to be able to produce these outputs and make sure that they match the type of Persona that you're serving. So right now in my current role, I do a lot of like, I guess, partnerships and BD work and those kinds of things. And, yes, I use AI to create various types of documents, slides, and other assets that we share. However, the way I communicate them to the end user, to inspire confidence or interest, is the unique ingredient here.
Siya Raj Purohit: And we need to be able to teach that. So, when the strategic work is done, as our reasoning models become smarter and take on more of that strategic work, the human element helps people distinguish their work and stand out.
Diane Tavenner: Interesting, I'm so curious because I think you, maybe more than other people, have started to see some changes happening in schools because of AI personally, and like how it looks different and how it feels different, and/or I bet you can imagine them a little bit better than a lot of people. And one of the things that I think we suffer from is just imagination in this space, right? As we all know, school is a familiar setting, and we often have a tough time breaking out and imagining something different. Could you please take us there? What could look or feel different for a teacher or a student in a school? What are you seeing? What are you predicting?
AI Revolutionizing University Experience
Siya Raj Purohit: For this one, I'm going to actually focus more on the university setting because that's where we're seeing the fastest changes happen. Our current thinking on what an AI-native university looks like is that every campus will have multiple AI touchpoints that help enhance the student/faculty/staff experience on campus. Essentially, the idea is to leverage the campus's knowledge, make it conversational, and more accessible to these users. So when students come on campus, they'll be able to have this orientation, where they can ask questions, like, ‘Where's the best pizza place in town?' Or how do I change my roommate? Or any of these kinds of preterm questions that they have. Then they will come into classrooms where professors have designed custom GPTs that have essentially learned from the professor's material and help answer questions. A professor at HBS, Jeffrey Buskyang, told me that most of his class uses custom GPTs between 12am and 3am when a human tutor is not available. And they can ask questions, such as which CEOs handle layoffs well, and get the exact examples to help them understand these kinds of concepts. Classroom conversations will become much more in-depth because of this.
Siya Raj Purohit: But also, students will be able to do things like I have a statistics exam coming up, can you give me some practice quiz questions that relate to the same level as my professor provides, and just be able to go back and forth in classroom content that way. They'll go to career services, where they'll be able to use the university's proprietary data to practice interviewing with a McKinsey partner and a McKinsey recruiter, all with AI. So, just like all these experiences will happen —student clubs, career services, and classrooms —it's going to happen seamlessly for students. So they'll be able to navigate between this very easily as they try to grow as students and professionals.
Diane Tavenner: Super helpful. I want to dig a little bit more, and this might be surprising to you, but I actually think a number of people who listen to our podcast, maybe fewer who listen to our podcast, but those in education, have literally never even used ChatGPT yet. They haven't logged into it. So, let's take just a moment to help them picture what it means to have a GPT. Is it on their phone? Is it on a computer? Is it on a kiosk? What does it literally look like if I'm a student when I'm engaging? And what makes it seamless?
Siya Raj Purohit: I saw a meme recently that I thought was really funny, referencing Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Harry starts writing in this diary, and it's like Tom Riddle responding on the other side. But I really liked that example because your first experience of ChatGPT feels similar to that. You start writing. It's a blank screen, and you have a conversation, and it converses back with you. And it's actually a very magical feeling because you're able to have conversations with the superintelligence that exists outside of our brains, which is very powerful. So I think it's essential to start having this conversation. You can use chat.com, your mobile app, or start on WhatsApp now, or even call in.
Siya Raj Purohit: There's a 1-800 number for ChatGPT. If any of these media options make sense for you, start by asking basic questions. What we see most people do is start with fundamental questions and build up as they gain more confidence through back-and-forth interactions, which then enables them to take on increasingly more complicated jobs. So, how we think about transformation for organizations is the very first step, at an individual level. So, when individuals start writing emails more effectively, they tend to do better in areas like project planning or activity building. Then it shifts up to the department level. That's when people start collaborating on different projects. One of the best examples I saw of this is that a school district told me it takes 40 people several weeks to assign which class goes into which room on campus.
Siya Raj Purohit: And now ChatGPT can do that in a few minutes. So hugely empowering at the department level. And then finally get to that organization-wide level, which is when you'll have so many different AI touch points and make that experience much easier as you navigate various levels of knowledge on campuses.
Diane Tavenner: I think the other thing that you're saying that I'm not sure everyone will pick up unless we call it out. So I'm going to ask you to call it out. This will not be a generic GPT. The intersection with the campus is that you're actually taking the data, information, and expertise of the campus and, well, you'll tell me the right words, but essentially mixing it with the power of GPT to create a customer-customized experience. Did I get that right? What does that look like? What's going on there?
Siya Raj Purohit: So, basically, there's ChatGPT, which is accessible to everyone. Everyone will have a slightly different experience as they go through it, but essentially, it is a knowledge base and a conversational platform. Custom GPTs are specific instances of ChatGPT that are trained to perform particular tasks. So, a professor can say, ‘This is my six-month curriculum.' This is all the case studies I provide. Just reference these when answering all student questions. So now that super intelligence is focused. So, it doesn't just look at the web; it doesn't research answers. Instead, it focuses on the six-month curriculum, delving very profoundly, and helps students learn from it more effectively.
Siya Raj Purohit: And you can use these custom GPT instances for any knowledge base. One of my favorite examples of this is that a professor at the University of Maryland told me that they created a custom GPT of themselves. They uploaded approximately 24 to 25 pieces of research work that they've done. Similarly, there are different pieces of writing, and now they discuss what they call Virtual Dave, which provides good ideas for their next research project. So, it's like having a thought partner, which is limited only to a finite amount of information that you share, but it's brilliant in its own right.
Diane Tavenner: Interesting. And just stay here for one more quick beat because you're leading us into what, maybe, the work looks like for the teacher or the professor, but just get a little bit more concrete. So that professor literally copied and pasted his stuff into GPT? Can you tell us a little bit about what his work is now? What's he doing?
Siya Raj Purohit: Yeah, so it takes about 15 minutes to build a custom GPT. You upload PDFs or documents, so you don't need to copy/paste, and you give them instructions. Again, this is where the assistant piece comes in. You explain to the customer what GPT is and what its job is. In this case, the professor is essentially saying, ‘You will be my virtual thought partner.' As I think about my future research papers. As I think about my next book or my LinkedIn posts, I need you to sound the same as I have in my career so far. So, maintain the same tone and professionalism, but help me ideate on what the subsequent iterations of these projects can look like and give me honest feedback.
Siya Raj Purohit: So these are the instructions it gave, and then the professor has conversations with it. It's just like, could I go in this direction? And custom GPT is like, ‘No, it's a little bit overdone.' Why don't we explore this path and make it a valuable research assistant for you?
Diane Tavenner: Awesome. Michael, here are the jobs to be done at the moment, I think.
Michael Horn: Seriously, right. What we're going to flag that for coming back to Diane?
Diane Tavenner: For sure. So let's now bring in. I promise we will stop soon; we're nearing the end here. However, I know that OpenAI is something you think a lot about, discuss a lot, focus a lot on policy, and engage with the policy field and related matters. You know, what are you learning about the intersection of education policy and policy around AI? Like what, what should we be looking at, looking for, watching out for, paying attention to from your perspective as educators, as people who are leading schools and school systems and universities, you know, what, what do you see coming? What's important? What should we be thinking about?
Siya Raj Purohit: So right now, universities are in a couple of different groups when they're thinking about AI policy. Some have well-established guidelines and clarity regarding where AI plays a role in their student journey. I think some of the most forward-thinking education leaders I'm working with are saying, ‘Okay, AI is accessible.' The cat is out of the bag; it's going to happen. Now I need to consider how to adapt my university curriculum to incorporate AI and help students prepare for the future. The best examples of this are Harvard Business School. There's a professor named Jake Cook who teaches a digital marketing course. He has mapped out what a digital marketer's journey looks like in the profession, including the seven different jobs that a digital marketer does, and where AI enables each of those jobs. And he's turned all of his projects,
AI Integration in Education Evolution
Siya Raj Purohit: So now you use AI to do competitive research, AI to create marketing assets and images, AI to help you with the copy and website and all of these kind of elements of what he thinks the students will graduate into the workforce and need to know, and like policies that enable this kind of forward thinking nature are really helpful for students because then they go into Enterprise and have ChatGPT Enterprise and actually can use that effectively. And then there are other institutions that I think are still trying to figure it out. They're concerned about how it might change their former assignments, how they can't use the same kind of syllabus they might have used in the past years. And a big part of our job right now is to help showcase these examples of forward-thinking institutions and help other universities learn, grow their own thought process. At the end of the day, universities are the ones best suited to make these decisions for their students because they understand them the best. And it's so interesting because when you speak with a state school, you realize they care a lot about navigating tools and being able to help students find the correct information on a campus of 50,000-60,000 students.
In contrast, a small liberal arts school is like, how can I help the student voice their opinion more effectively? And all of these things have AI solutions. However, it's universities that need to figure out what they want to become and how AI can help them achieve that.
Diane Tavenner: Interesting. I could ask 27 more questions, but I'm going to tell Michael to rein me in and either wrap up with something, something, or
Michael Horn: No, I think this is super helpful, Siya. I guess my last question is, are you clearly spending a lot of time with colleges and universities? Are there others in the OpenAI team? Are you spending similar amounts of time in K-12h K12 institutions, or how do you think that will evolve? It seems that colleges and universities are not all, as you just said, but many of them are wrestling with this issue. Are you seeing similar movement among K12 schools and districts or not? In which case, that also tells us something.
Siya Raj Purohit: They have a growing number of K12 customers. However, the big caveat is that we don't currently have an under-18 product. So, it's not for students; it's for teachers and staff members in K-12.
Michael Horn: Gotcha. Okay, super helpful. Alright, well, let's wrap up there. Something we love to do, Siya, though, before we let our guests go, is to wonder what else you're reading, watching, or listening to outside of your day jobs. And so, maybe ChatGPT has recommended reading lists or watching lists for you. But I'm just curious, is there one thing outside that perhaps you could point us to?
Siya Raj Purohit: It's interesting to say that I've actually been asking ChatGPT a lot for book recommendations because I think it's very magical when you find the right book at the right stage of your life. I want to explore whether ChatGPT can facilitate this more frequently. It's mixed results so far.
Michael Horn: Okay.
Siya Raj Purohit: One book that I'm reading right now which is super fascinating, it's called Say It Well, it's written by one of President Obama's former speechwriters, and he intertwines, like, how to be a good public speaker with stories from President Obama. It's also fascinating to read about, for instance, the things that President Obama slipped in during his speeches, which make him much more relatable and accessible, as well as the fact that he thought about crafting great speeches and connecting with audiences around the world. So I'm finding the book really interesting so far.
Michael Horn: Very cool. What about you, Diane?
Diane Tavenner: Awesome, thanks for sharing. Okay. Well, I am going to turn to TV because we've been talking so often. I've exhausted all the books I'm reading right now, and I'm a little slow on this one, about a year behind. But we just watched the series on FX, Shogun, and I was. I must say, I was a little skeptical going in. I was a young kid when the book came out, and then the miniseries on TV, and I thought, ‘There's no possible way this could be done well or without some real issues.'
Diane Tavenner: And you all may know it's won 18 Emmy awards, the most ever for a single season. It's truly extraordinary and really thought-provoking. Yeah. Highly recommend.
Michael Horn: So I was gonna say, you could imagine it winning awards, but someone who'd read the books being like, it still didn't quite deliver, but it delivered for you, it sounds like.
Diane Tavenner: Well. And I never read the books or watched the original series.
Michael Horn: Okay. Okay. Okay. So.
Diane Tavenner: But I just had this image in my head, and as I understand it, the current version is very different from the old ones, but it's. It's great.
Michael Horn: Very cool. It's been teasing me for a while, so that is a good endorsement. For mine. I. I want to mention something like the NFL football playoffs or the Australian Open, but I feel that gives away when we're recording, and it's too late; I've already given it away. But I'll give you one other. I've actually really enjoyed it, or I enjoyed it because I finished it in a day – a book recommendation that one of my daughters gave me, or she actually ordered me to read it.
Michael Horn: She had finished, it's called The Girl with the Secret Name by Yael Zoldon. And I'll apologize if I've mispronounced her name. However, it's a historical fiction novel that takes place during the Spanish Inquisition, and it was fascinating. It was a history that I knew at a high level, but not with any depth at all, I will say, like literally zero. And so my daughter was teaching me quite a bit. It was fun. So, that's mine.
Diane Tavenner: I love when that happens.
Michael Horn: Yeah, I know you've had that experience with Rhett giving you many recommendations. So now maybe this is the first of many for me. But I'll let's wrap up there, Siya. A huge thank you for joining us and shedding light on this topic, for sharing frankly how you are using it in your daily life, both on your learning journey and in your work itself, on a day-to-day basis. We really appreciate it, and we hope you'll keep staying in touch so we can stay ahead of the curve alongside you. But a huge thank you. And for all of you tuning in, we will see you next time on Class Disrupted.