(audience applauding) So, one of the things about our community is once you get it, once you're enlightened, you have your aha moment, however you like to put it, your epiphany about what this is all about. The way we grow this community is by helping each other. It's a grassroots community.

So, we go out and we tell other people about it, maybe family members, maybe friends. However, wherever you see a need, you sort of step up and say, "Hey, I've got an idea for you here. "Go to bogleheads.org, go to bogelcenter.net, "get one of Jack Bogle's books." And we become ambassadors for this philosophy of investing and saving and financial well-being that we have.

And with that, we need to have an understanding when we do that of what works and maybe what doesn't work, right? We all have approached people and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't work. So, we thought that today we would have a little bit of insight into training the trainers.

So, you are, if you consider yourself teachers, you are all, once you get enlightened to become bogelheads and call yourself bogelheads, you are actually crossed over to become ambassadors and teachers. And so, how do we do that? So today, we have Tim Ranzetta with us, who's a bogelhead, bonafide bogelhead.

He graduated from the University of Virginia in 1989 with a bachelor degree in commerce and received his MBA in 1996 from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He then became a consultant for Bain & Company and later became a successful entrepreneur. He co-founded several companies and decided to begin giving back.

So, he started teaching a class in 2014 in Palo Alto, California, and eventually now has morphed into a program, a nonprofit organization that teaches teachers how to teach this. And so, I'll let Tim talk about the program, and, but here he is, Tim Ranzetta. (audience applauding) - See how this mic works.

I'm Italian, so I like to use my hands. Mics don't work. What an amazing community. So, I fit in the category of long-time lurker on the bogelheads forum. Long-time Vanguard investor, but first-time attendee. And I think I've been on the ground about 24 hours now coming in from California, and I feel like I found my tribe.

Just what an amazing, amazing conversations at lunch. Just an amazing group. So, I wanna ask you a question before we get started, 'cause we're talking about financial education here. I want you to move a little bit, too. Stand up if you think personal finance should be taught in every high school in America.

Please stay standing. (audience laughing) Okay, you just made the headline. Bogelheads stand for financial education. So, I wanna introduce some folks here, some really special folks here who are delivering financial education in local high schools in Virginia and Maryland. So, I'm gonna ask them to stand. Don't get embarrassed now.

So, we have Angela, we have Starlene, Julius, Alice, Loretta, Nicole, and Lori is somewhere, I believe. Hey, these are the folks who are-- (audience applauding) Please stay standing, I gotta finish. This is just an amazing community of educators that make a difference in their communities. In their schools. During the pandemic, we did a lot of Zoom professional development.

And I gotta tell you, I smiled every time I saw them on Zoom because the energy enthusiasm that they bring to this. There's a movement happening across the US, folks, and it's happening in classrooms because of educators like yours. So, thank you. (audience applauding) But I also know there's other teachers in the room.

If you have ever taught anybody personal finance, family member, maybe in the school community, maybe a non-profit. I ran into somebody earlier from Kansas who teaches med school students. Stand up. Educators. (audience applauding) Thank you. So, I really shouldn't be teaching this. You all should be. So, I talked about the teachers.

Next thing I wanna do is have you hear from the students. So, there's a two and a half minute video that we're gonna cue up here to hear what is the impact of this course to them. - With personal finance, you take everything that happens in the real world and you bring it into the classroom.

- It's important to learn about it while you're in high school, instead of graduating out of college and having no idea. - You don't wanna leave college and then be in debt. And sometimes that debt can follow you for the rest of your adult life. - When my mom was in high school, she didn't have a class like this.

- I couldn't just ask my parents questions about like banking or finances because my parents hadn't gone through any of that. - Since my family didn't talk much about money, I actually didn't know anything at all. I didn't even know investing was a thing. I didn't even know financial literacy was a thing at all either.

- This is really the only class that we're given that's this applicable to real life. - I've learned how to calculate a mortgage. I've learned what ways credit card companies try to trap you. - These little skills right now that don't seem like they're so fundamental in the long run will really help you out and allow you to live your life the way that you wanna live it.

- I 100% think that all high school students should take this course. I don't know how someone could be successful without knowing how to manage their money. - If you want kids who know how to not be in debt, what a credit score is, what kind of credit card options there are out there, if you want them to be more knowledgeable, safer with their money, as well as be better spenders, then personal finance is a must.

(soft music) (audience applauding) - So I travel a lot around the country when people find out what I do, they usually say one or sometimes, always say one thing, sometimes two. First thing they say, it's the class I wish I had. The second question, the second thing they say is, can you teach my kids?

So that's kind of what is my passion now. How do we ensure that every high school student, so gets a personal finance course. I just want you to blurt out a guess. What percent of kids today do you think take a personal finance, are required? It's part of the graduation requirements.

What percent of kids in America currently are required to take a personal finance course? 5%, 20, 60? Zero, okay, so here's what we're gonna do. I'm gonna give you a number. You're gonna stand up if you think it's over this number. 15%. Stand up if you think more than 15% of high schoolers.

Okay, I'm not gonna tell you the answer till later. Thank you. Most of you think it's less than 15%. I'm gonna keep that in mind. So here's what we're gonna go over today. I'm gonna give you a quick background on me, who I am, what motivates me. Gonna give you a high-level view of what's happening in America when it comes to financial education.

And then I wanna spend a lot of time thinking about this group. How do we mobilize Bogleheads who are so passionate and wanna give back? So I'm gonna give you a broad range of options in terms of how you can help. And then, obviously, there'll be resources available for you.

This slide looks different than it was originally. Oh, here we go. Starts lower left-hand corner. I'm seven years old. I'm the fifth child of six. Our neighbor, Mrs. Madison, breaks her hip. She needs somebody to walk her dog. I'm the second youngest, but my younger brother can't walk 'cause he's only two, or he's only one.

So I get to walk Mrs. Madison's dog. I walk three times a day. I'm in New Jersey, so we get the change of seasons. Took a year for her hip to recover. But every Friday, after I dropped her Jack Russell Terrier off, she would hand me a crisp $5 bill.

And I would walk a third of a mile to the United Jersey Bank on Hardinburg Avenue. I would deposit that $5. They'd stamp my passbook. And at the dinner table, my dad would ask to see my passbook. We talked about money a lot, and you'll find out why very shortly.

But that's a savings habit. And thank God I got it at the age of seven because I had four older brothers and sisters. And I saw very early on, if I wanted to go to college, I was gonna have to basically pay my way 'cause we were middle class.

Six kids, too many to pay for us to go to school, but not enough to get financial aid. So it was very early on. So when I hear people say, "Save 10%, save 20%," I'm convinced my savings rate was about 98%. The reason being, my friends really started to wonder, how come Tim always forgets his wallet?

(audience laughs) I'm paying them back now, so don't worry. So that was the dog walking job. There's a picture of my parents up there. It couldn't have been better role models. My father gave me work ethic. No college degree, grew up in London during the Blitz. Got sent to the countryside.

Very self-sufficient, Depression-era kid. Rose up from bank teller to senior vice president of Barclays Bank in New York. He also taught me how to ladder CDs 'cause I had newspaper routes. I was a golf caddy. Five-year CDs, I still remember, thinking it was illegal. (audience laughs) 15% interest, double your money in five years.

It was like crazy. But again, all the adults are dealing with inflation. I'm dealing with great interest rates. So that really helped me get through college, too. My mom, she taught me to give back. Six kids weren't enough for her. She was a Girl Scout troop leader. She wrote the newsletter for the parish.

She visited soup kitchens, and she taught. She must have had a 30- to 40-year career doing Story Hour. When she passed, we went through her desk and we saw stacks of those. You know those marble composition? My mom did lesson plans for Story Hour. And she put, and it was kind of funny to read because it would be like, little Johnny's acting up.

I don't know how to exactly get Johnny's attention. But this emphasis on what went well, what didn't go well. And so I think she gave me the teaching gene because that was something that really mattered to her, the idea of giving back. So I had an opportunity to give back.

East Side College Prep is in East Palo Alto, and it's a school serving first in their family, kids who want to be first in their family to go to college, first-gen kids. So I visit the campus, totally inspired by the founder because they send 100% of their kids to college.

These are kids first in their family to go, primarily lower income, primarily black and brown students. And I was so inspired. How can I help? He said, "Well, you know something about finance, right?" I was like, "Yeah, sure, I'll do it." But I didn't know I was signing up for 25 hours of lessons with three sections of students, and I didn't have a curriculum.

A lot of passion, but no curriculum. Well, that experience, I saw two things. I saw the eagerness that kids wanted to learn this. Just incredible. And then I think the secondary effect, and anybody who's taught young people know this. They went home and told their parents. So I went to a Schwab office to help open an IRA for one of the parents.

I got calls from, they wanted to discuss their budget. I had a parent who called me like five years after I taught her son to say how proud she was that she knew what a target date fund was on a 401(k) list. So I'm hooked. I'm like, I did that for eight summers, about halfway through teaching that, I said, "I gotta do something about this." And that's when I started NextGen Personal Finance.

(audience member speaking faintly) So every startup has to have a BHAG, a big, hairy, audacious goal. So in 2021, we got together as a team. And frankly, the teachers were the ones, we were just at lunch earlier today talking about how are we gonna get Maryland to require a personal finance.

When we hear enough teachers say, we love this course, the students are benefiting, but not enough of them are. So we set mission 2030. And my thinking behind this is every high school student, by the time they cross that graduation stage in 2030, will have a one-semester personal finance course.

We did it in 2021. So I did a little bit of research. From the time Kennedy said, "Let's go to the moon," to the time we did was about eight years. We did it in 2021. I'm thinking nine years. Folks, this isn't rocket science. This isn't rocket science, right?

We know the curriculum. We know teachers are eager to teach it. Let's kind of make it happen. Quickly, what we do. Three legs of the stool. I want it to be the one-stop shop for teachers. So if you need a lesson, it's there. If you want activities, it's there.

If you want games, it's there. I wanted it to be kind of that one stop where teachers would go. We have an arcade. Games really matter, but games have to teach also. So every one of those games has a reflection sheet. They were played 10 million times last year.

The thing I'm most proud of is the teacher professional development. So on the curriculum side, 90,000 teachers have signed up on our website. I would say 2/3 of them come from word of mouth. When something works in the classroom, teachers tell others. The teacher professional development, in the last three, four years, 17,000 teachers have spent on average 24 hours with us.

And so we have certification courses. If you want to go deep and talk about investing or you want to go banking and budgeting or I teach a course in psychology of money, we offer 12 of those courses. And then we also have on-demands for people who want to be able to do things on their own time, their own pace.

And I'm gonna spend more time talking about advocacy. So you see the bottom there, free and always will be. So I created an endowment to fund our operation 'cause frankly, I can't imagine a better investment to make than in the next generation and giving them the financial skills that they need.

So you all are welcome to go to the website to the extent that you're looking for resources to go out and teach, it's there. So funny story, I'm in Salt Lake City, probably the second year of our company. So we're still trying to figure things out. How should we teach investing?

Should we go and the whole, I think teachers will tell you investing is the most challenging subject for them to teach. So gosh, if you could mentor teachers in your community to help them understand investing better, that would be awesome. So anyway, I'm in a room full of teachers.

I'm doing a presentation about investing 100 teachers. And I start by asking, how many of you teach your students about index funds? If you look closely, there's one hand raised. I think there were two others in the room. There were about three out of 100. And I said, okay, this is my mission.

Is every student, because guess what the most popular game in high schools is when it comes to investing? The stock market game. Go ahead and Google how to win the stock market game and tell me that has anything to do with sound investing principles, right? High beta stocks, right around earnings, biotech's better.

And it's a short timeframe, right? And so if you go to our curriculum, you'll see we spend a lot of time talking about index funds. We talk about target date funds and really, because even if they're playing the stock market game, I want educators to feel like, okay, I can also teach a different approach because kids are naturally interested in stocks.

So you do have to spend a little bit of time talking about it, but clearly, 'cause they'll often, that will be the first thing. They know a company, right? Know what you're investing in, which probably can be a dangerous strategy. My son loved Roblox. So okay, how much do you love it?

Why don't we put $50 in and buy some Roblox? Yeah, he now understands volatility. Which kind of gets to the point here. Those of you who have children or grandchildren, like how do I talk about investing with young people? And so the strategy I've used with my son is basically the 50/50 method.

You know what? Pick companies you're interested in. So let him, 'cause he's gonna be naturally, he's gonna care about that, right? And then I'm gonna take the other half and we're gonna put it in an index fund. And we're gonna look at it every quarter to get him understand.

And the good news is I got him hooked on stocks in 2021. Wasn't that great timing? He learned a great lesson about how those high-flying, pandemic-driven stocks that did really well didn't perform so well. So I think he's an index fund now guy too. So here's the progress that's been happening.

This is what you're seeing here is the number of states that either through their legislature or through their State Department of Education require every high school student in the state to take a personal finance course. So the shorthand here is in a little over two and a half, three years, we've gone from eight to 23 states.

So tripling. The next state, which is just waiting for the Wisconsin governor's signature, will put us over 50% mark. So more than one out of every two students will take a personal finance course just with the states on the board. Now it takes time for them to implement, usually three, four year implementation period.

We're working with them on curriculum and professional development. But yeah, the world has changed pretty rapidly. How many people, not many people thought it was 15% or higher now you're hearing it's 50%. I think there's, it's happened so quickly. So you're probably interested in what's happening in my state, what's happening in your state.

So the dark blue are states, those are like the original eight, they've had it in place the longest. The lighter shade are states where they're in the process of implementing. And so again, if you're in any of those states that are in the process of implementing, they're probably very interested in talking to people who might be able to assist kind of at the school level.

And then I'll talk about ways to get engaged for the states that don't have any boxes around them. So maybe you're curious, not about your state, but you're curious about your school community. Every year we hire Montana State University, they go through 12,000 high school course catalogs to identify what is happening in the school around personal finance.

If it's gold, 'cause this happens at the grassroots level. Great story out of Massachusetts, Sue Camperotto who teaches at Swampscott High School, 16 year odyssey, got personal finance to be a graduation requirement. That's the passion that educators have to make this happen. So if you wanna go figure out what's happening in your school, if you Google got finance, how many of you remember the Got Milk campaign?

I gotta tell you, I'm the oldest person at our company and I said got finance and nobody really got it. So that's just Google got finance question mark and it'll take you to that map. So let's talk about the role that you can play. And I've kind of given you a continuum of options here from on the left hand side, go in and teach a lesson.

And I'll tell you the best network is the school your child goes to, 'cause that's gonna, a school where you know who the economics teacher is or even the personal finance, you're gonna know what's being taught in your school. Obviously, if you have a student there, but if you're going into a school cold, you'll have the information from the website.

On the far end, I'd say the most dramatic role I've seen an individual play, this was a financial planner out of Minnesota, Steve Lear. He said, I really want this to happen in Minnesota, so I'm gonna go out and pay for a lobbyist to make it happen. And you know what?

It happened in Minnesota this year. So that's on the far end on the advocacy front. So really important point for those of you who haven't been into a classroom, attention spans are short. So 10 years ago, I'm in front of, it was probably 12 years ago, I'm in front of these ninth graders and I'm like, I cannot wait to tell them everything in my brain and just distill it to them and share all my wisdom with them.

And about five minutes in, I'm like, I lost them. It's over. You gotta come with an activity. You gotta come with something to do. And I'm happy to share these resources with you. And I've given you both no tech options as well as tech options. So just real quickly, the bean game, really simple game.

You have 20 beans, or they can be pennies or any manipulative. And you got two sheets of paper with things that you would expect to see in a budget. And you gotta allocate the 20 beans, needs versus wants, resource constraints. And then you throw the wild card in that, oh, guess what, your pay got cut from 20 to 13.

Go pull seven beans off the, then you really understand wants versus needs. The bean game, extremely popular. Another one, let's make a mutual fund. Kids do not understand what a mutual fund is. It's not kind of this natural thing that they've ever experienced. So we have a get out of the seat game.

Every student is given a ticker symbol. And then we ask them to form special groups. Go find somebody else with a similar ticket. And we have the returns on the flip side. Pair up, there's two of them. Go find two other pairs. Now there's six of them. And then it ends up, it works well with a group of 30, because guess what happens when they all get together?

What index are they? The Dow Jones. Now we obviously make the point that very few people invest in the Dow Jones index, but it gives them idea of what diversification looks like. So that's, let's make a mutual fund. On the tech side, one of my favorite interactives, because index funds, I think mutual funds are hard.

Index funds are pretty difficult too. There's a website called finviz.com, F-I-N-V-I-Z.com. It's a market map of the S&P 500. So I think a lot of teachers will put it up on the board when they're teaching investing. And you see, how did those 500 stocks perform? The size of the box is the market cap of the company.

Gives you red versus green, what's up, what's down. And then it has a toggle on the left-hand side. So this was a terrible day in the market, but when we look three, six, 12 months out, it's a very different picture. Very easy to talk about short versus long-term. So that's finviz.com.

We also have a game called Stacks. We needed to do the impossible. We needed to create an exciting game about index funds. It's like watching paint dry, right? So what we do is we give them seven different asset classes and they're trading like crazy. And in the background, they're competing against the computer.

Guess what the computer's doing? Dollar cost averaging in the index funds. They lose about 90% of the time. It's a perfect lead-in to say, how stressed do you feel after 20 years of investing in 20 minutes? So that's our game, Stacks. Our most popular game in the arcade. The next thing you do is you could start an investment club.

So I'm gonna ask, actually, one of our educators, Julius Przewski, and he's gonna talk about an investment club he runs at his high school in Baltimore. (audience applauding) (audience member speaking indistinctly) - Here, let me give you this. - Okay. - Okay. - Kind of attached here. So I teach personal finance in a private high school in Baltimore.

It started about eight years ago. We started with an elective. Within two years, we had seven sections, and then at that point, they were like, well, we just should make it mandatory 'cause almost everybody takes it. So we are mandatory. It's a one-semester course. As Tid said, we teach investing, but in a one-semester course, you don't have a lot of time to teach about stocks.

So I decided that I would do an investment club. So we have an activity period, and once a week, we meet, and we have about 65 boys in the group, and we come in, and I've used MarketWatch for the investment game, and I just set the criteria at about $100,000 that each kid could invest, and then we just make 'em go long.

I don't let 'em do shorts or anything like that. We don't let 'em buy on margin or anything like that, and then I try to just teach 'em with just different short PowerPoints on why do you invest in certain stocks, when would you sell those stocks, because what we find is that, like as Tim said, mutual funds can be very boring, obviously, and an index fund is not exciting, but Tim, you gave me a good idea.

I let the boys go for three months, and then we have the winners get some free lunches, but now I'm gonna make 'em pick an index fund on the other side of it, and then kinda go, well, can we beat the index fund in a set period of time?

But the kids, I think, need to learn that investing short-term is a little bit like gambling, 'cause a lot of our kids today have the gambling accounts with sports, and I see that on their phone all the time, and I'm like, okay, well, we need to learn the good and the bad, and I think sometimes losing is a great way to learn about investing, and I tell 'em, hey, guys, I've lost money in investing, I've made money in investing, but now I don't pick Singleton stocks anymore.

I'm a Boglehead, I'm in Vanguard, so I kinda think that's the best way to go about it, is to get them involved and do it with fictitious money, but show 'em that most of these kids don't make money at the end of the three- to four-month period, and they're like, yeah, this is a lot harder than I thought.

Awesome, thanks. (audience applauds) - Thanks, Julius. All right, if you wanna go a little bit further, you teach a course, and I would recommend, and we have free, I told you everything we do is free. Come to our professional development and collaborate with other educators and figure out what's working in the class, but we have scope and sequence, which means we lay out our lessons and how to teach them, and they're very interactive.

I think a lot of people get intimidated because like, oh, I gotta be the sage on stage. What if they start asking me all these questions? And the thing I learned very early on as an educator, which I think was the most powerful thing I learned, was when they asked a question I didn't know, I'd say, let's figure this out together, right?

'Cause we've never had better tools to go out and find information, because they need to understand also that, I guess the other thing I would say, which I should have mentioned earlier, is there's a heavy emphasis. Our first unit in our course is behavioral economics. Let's let students grapple with their relationship with money before we dive into all of the details.

Let's talk about all the cognitive biases we have, which make it difficult for us to do the thing we should do. Let's also develop a level of empathy, because you might decide you wanna buy lottery tickets, and if I come in as the educator and say, that's dumb, let's, why don't you invest that in an index fund?

I think it's Morgan Housel's book, which I can't recommend enough, "Psychology of Money." I think it's his first or second chapter. He says, put yourself in somebody else's shoes. I'm working three jobs, minimum wage. That $2 ticket I buy is called hope. So be careful about judging. Not a lot of shoulds.

I don't think a lot of shoulds should be part of personal finance, because you're gonna turn, I think this was mentioned earlier, if you're too sanctimonious, you're gonna turn people off, right? So understand, somebody said this, I forget who, but I think it rings really true. Every decision, every decision makes sense, right?

When you look at somebody else's decision, say, how could you make that? Every decision makes sense with enough information. I had a conversation with a teacher. She said, I always lease cars, what do you do? I told her, I buy cars, and I run 'em into the ground 20 years later.

You dig a little bit deeper into somebody who leases cars, she says, oh, I was traveling five, six years ago, and car broke down, we had to get a tow truck to bring us back to where we need. I mean, she had a traumatic experience with an older car.

So she vowed in her head, three to four years is all I wanna run a car for. And I could say, well, but the economics say this. And so I think this empathy is incredibly important when you're teaching this class. Don't reinvent the wheel. There's a lot of high-quality curricula out there.

Ours is customizable, too. So we do it in Google Docs. You file, make a copy, you can change it as you like. Expect the unexpected. And I think any long-term educator will tell you, embrace continuous improvement. It doesn't always go well. But I always thought, I was teaching three sections in a row, and I was a lot better with the third section than I was with the first.

Those reps, just thinking, okay, how do I make this a little bit better, a little bit better? You do that over a career, and you're a rockstar teacher, right? Continuous improvement. Just like my mom taking notes in about 100 different Marble notebooks. Men are a teacher. They tell us investing is the most challenging subject for them to teach, right?

And maybe we can help facilitate that. Again, this is the problem with an entrepreneur. They just immediately like, what if we created a list of bogleheads who want a men are a teacher? We match with our 90,000 teacher account base, and try and make some of those matches. 'Cause it can be difficult if you're not, you know, if your kids aren't in the school system, or you're further away.

So maybe that's an idea we'll explore. But I know they would, I'll turn to my teachers. What do you think? All right, you know where they're sitting. And the last is advocacy. So I remember in 2021 thinking this was the craziest thing. I just got tired of people saying, everybody should be taught personal finance, but nobody was really, had figured out a strategy as to how to go ahead and do it.

And I love this Margaret Mead quote, because it really is a small group of committed people that are in this community, this personal finance education community. And there's a small group of people on a relative basis that are bogleheads. But together, the power is just intense. So I'll give you two choices here.

Anybody ever attend, anybody school board members here? All right, thank you for your service. So it often starts at the school board level. You wanna, you gotta build a coalition though, folks. You can't just show up and will something to happen. Find the teacher in the school who's really passionate about it.

Find students, do a student survey. One of the reasons this thing is happening at such a rapid pace is when you survey, it's 80% approval. 80% approval. Tell me another subject in this polarized world we live in that 80% of people agree on. It's not bipartisan, it's nonpartisan and it's common sense.

So we've got resources available in terms of the research that says it works, the PowerPoints that make the convincing points. And also how do you overcome objections? 'Cause there are a lot of them. And then on the state legislature front, again, you're kind of upping your game even more.

We track every year legislation. I think in the past year, there were about 30 states that had 70 or 80 bills around financial literacy. Some of them are window dressing because the politicians know this is popular. They'll get a press release out that they introduced this bill. But some of them are serious.

And if the legislators, you've got state senators and you've got state representatives, the action here is at the state, not at the federal level. But smaller states, you probably know your representative really well. We've got model legislation. We have kind of best practices in terms of how you think about.

And I think the power of us, next gen personal finance advocating is not only are we looking for legislative solutions, but we're there to support them for implementation. 'Cause that's always the hangup. New graduation requirements don't come along very often. So they're looking for a partner who can do it at no cost, which we offer.

So get to know your legislator, let them know this is important. And then you have opportunities. Usually the first stop in the legislature is the education committee. They'll hold a hearing. And that's when parents, teachers, and students steal the show. Because these students have so much gravitas and they're so passionate about making this happen.

I can point to Wisconsin, Florida, no, it wasn't Florida. Three or four states where kids just lined up, two hours of kids talking about why this is so important. It leaves an impression on politicians. And then the last is you can be like Steve and hire a lobbyist. So to get from eight to 23, what we realized, we had a grassroots effort.

We gave Sue Camperotto a grant because she made it a requirement in her school. And we probably gave 150 of those grants. But we discovered two and a half years ago, when companies want to affect policy, what do they do? They hire lobbyists. So in the last two years, we hired 25 lobbyists and about half have gotten over the finish line.

'Cause we realized this is how you create change. And it's the lobbyists and the combination of the educators and the students who make a difference. - So we have some questions for you. - Sure. - You ready? - Yep. - Okay. Okay. So a lot of the material, it seems, that is used in financial education in schools is sponsored product-driven propaganda.

- Yeah, no, that's-- - Can you tell me, first of all, is that true? And if so, how do you stop that? - Yeah, I would just say we're winning that battle. So we hired an independent third party to go out and ask teachers what curriculum they use. And the good news is I think our share was over 80, 85%.

So our best, I guess our best weapon against that is providing great curriculum that's not sponsored. Again, we're fully endowed, so we're not raising money from financial institutions either. Because frankly, that's one of the challenges in the space. And I think if you give teachers a non-commercial option that doesn't have Big Bank emblazoned on it, I think they'll choose ours.

- Another question about investing. So you're talking about investing today generally, but how about budgeting, emergency fund, is all that part of the curriculum also? - So we have 10 units in our semester course. So it's all the managing credit, types of credit, budgeting, psychology of money, consumer skills, like there's this thing called dark patterns, right?

Like websites that get you to do things that you really shouldn't do. But so there's the full gamut. The other thing is we supplement with current events. So when GameStop took off, we've got a phenomenal teammate who you saw in the video very briefly, Yaneli Espinel, she creates a weekly current events video with a quiz.

So we can also fill in the gaps when the world changes, whether it's Silicon Valley Bank imploding or all banks at risk to GameStop, to crypto. So the other thing we're really attuned to, you gotta be current. And again, we have this great feedback loop here of these educators coming in and telling us, here's what kids are talking about.

And it would blow your mind. For X trading, are you kidding me? Well, guess what? 76% of kids are getting financial advice from social media. So that's the other reason I think we have a lot of momentum behind this, is if we don't provide a foundational course, they're being fed to the wolves, right?

Get rich quick. - So there's something called just-in-time education. And there are studies that show just-in-time education works better than teaching them in a class. Can you comment on that? - Yeah, I think when you stop and think about high school, and actually it's on my last slide. When you think about the decisions young persons making in high school, there is a lot of just-in-time.

Your parents hand you the keys to the car, better understand auto insurance. You may have gotten your first part-time job. Gotta learn how to read a pay stub. Why didn't I get 3.25 per hour? That was my first job. I remember the sense of revulsion I had. Like, what do you mean I'm not getting 3.25 an hour?

So that's part of it. Paying taxes is another. And probably the most important decision kids are gonna make is staring them right in the face. What am I gonna do after high school? And so we've got an entire unit on paying for college, but also alternatives to college to provide the full view.

So I would argue, I agree with just-in-time. And I think you gotta create a curriculum. Our high school curriculum is just-in-time in terms of all these decisions. - Okay, last question we have time for, and this is a good one. What if you're not in one of those 23 states and you have a student or know someone who would like to take this class?

Can you do it online even though you're not in one of the states? - Yeah, so I think it's, we really focus on teacher-led. And so find a teacher in the high school. And again, when you come to them and say, hey, there's a curriculum and there's folks who will help train you around professional development, that's available, 'cause that's kind of our focus.

So this isn't student-facing per se. Our distribution channel is really educators 'cause the scale that you get, every educator teaches on average 100 kids. And so that was kind of the path we chose. How many Californians in the room? Okay, you're gonna have a chance in November of 2024, we're working to get a personal finance education requirement on the ballot because the California legislature has spent two decades dithering and there's a 450,000 kids who graduate every year from California high schools that deserve this.

So the states that aren't up there, there's about 10 of them we're lobbying in for the next year. And so you can expect, look for the bill tracker. That'll tell you when the bill gets introduced and then reach out to me, tim@ngpf.org and we'll get you involved. - Tim, we're grateful for you to come in today and tell us what you're doing.

I think you're a fantastic job. I'm so glad we, the Vogelhead community, can be part of this. Thank you very much. - Thank you.