Today's guest is a tough, tough badass — in the realest definition of the word.

She was the first American to win the Judo world championship (1984) — which involved coming out on top over her Japanese, Korean, and Eastern European counterparts, who trained full-time as professional athletes — while she had a full-time job as an industrial engineer, a baby daughter, and... get this... a non-functional leg that had been operated upon.

Fast forward to today, she's on a crusade to improve the way math and sciences are taught to kids in the USA (and beyond).

Only 25% of people who graduate from high school in the USA are considered "proficient" in math — a surprisingly large number have trouble even doing basic multiplication and division. And the standards are still going down — the average kid would have easily flunked 10 years ago for what they get As and Bs today.

But as it turns out, the American schooling system is quite complicated. Every state has their own rules, and so does every district.

So how do you build a profitable, mission-driven company in a highly regulated, chaotic industry (filled with bureaucrats on top) where every penny is hard to squeeze, and kids are involved?

And how do you do it while making it "harder" (devoting a significant amount of resources on reforming low-income districts who need it the most — but which most ed-tech companies ignore)?

Well, I guess you just go ahead and do it.

Dr. De Mars is the Founder and President of 7 Generation Games, which has solved a multitude of problems one at a time:

1. First, building a smashing product that kids, teachers, and parents unanimously love. Her company makes interactive video games that use real-world, culturally rich problem examples (from the life of an Aztec diplomat, or a Sioux hunter, or fisherman, etc) to teach math — raising average grades by a 30%.
2. Second, they solved distribution — taking the games both directly to consumers, as well as building a partnership/B2B channel such that schools can deploy them for every student en mass, and using an innovative mix of private and public funding to finance it.
3. Third, they also built the software platforms needed to churn out high-quality educational games in quick succession, in any language — enabling them to both move faster and scale at the same time.

In this episode, we discuss:

• There's a Judoka who's never been injured??!
• The REAL problem with math education in the USA, and how to fix it
• Why focusing on affluent kids is, counter-intuitively, a bad business decision
• Competing with the Microsofts and Pearsons of the education industry
• Where does most ed-tech funding go?
• Why most "math games" don't actually teach you math
• Their big fight with Apple about... the Aztec smallpox pandemic?
• Building the "Wordpress for educational games"

I seem to have a weird fascination with Japan. But not in a "weird" way of course. (I've been around weebs and realized I'm not one of them.)

I find Japan especially interesting from a business person's perspective. They were the biggest success story after WW2 — not only the second biggest economy in the world after the USA, but also the most technologically advanced, having had bullet trains since the freaking 60s. And all this despite having no natural resources to speak of.

But recently, Japan's competitiveness has shown signs of wavering, with an aging population, abysmal birth rates, and a general lack of technology proliferation.

To understand what it means for international entrepreneurs, I invited Terrie Lloyd, CEO of Japan Travel (and founder of several other companies), a rare serial entrepreneur based in Japan for over 35 years. Terrie is probably the foremost authority in the world for any foreigner thinking about Japan as a business location.

We cover:

01:30 – Why Terrie is the #1 voice among all foreign entrepreneurs in Japan

04:17 – A secret office romance, translation company, and selling submarine parts

8:00 – How the US' jealous move overturned Japanese currency overnight

10:36 – Why Japanese banks can be hard to deal with

14:50 – Hiring foreigners in Japan: then and now

16:39 – The sad state of English teaching in Japan

18:15 – How Tokyo's skies turned from grey to blue

22:00 – Step one in hiring network engineers: bail your recruiter out of prison?!

27:00 – The bubble pops

34:12 – Why are Japanese business valuations so low?

45:11 – The roots of Masayoshi Son's "street fighter" mentality

52:00 – Why Japan has so few unicorns

57:00 – The PLUS points of starting a business in Japan

62:00 – The annoying problem of IP theft in China

65:00 – Terrie's M&A business

There's a fast-food "apocalypse" going on. The average fast-food franchise owner 20 years ago made more money with fewer locations than they do today.

How did this happen, how can operators avoid the "culling," and how is this landscape changing with new technologies? That's the focus of this episode.

My guest was Steve Bigari, who is a longtime pioneer in the fast food industry in the USA, and the first person to introduce digital order-taking at McDonalds' drive-thrus back in 2002, which he was featured in the New York Times for. Today he's the CEO of Synq3 Solutions which provides digital customer service and AI tools to restaurant brands:

9:55 - What is "drive-thru 1.0"?
15:00 - The economics of fast food drive-thrus
20:30 - Why fast food profits have DECLINED dramatically over the years
29:30 - Robots that run commercial kitchens and REPAIR themselves
40:35 - The simplest way to improve restaurant profitability
45:00 - Why Steve still believes in independent restaurant operators, not just big chains
50:00 - Why convenience and value for money trumps every other thing
1:01:55 - How Synq3 helps restaurants digitize customer service

"Tech Fluent CEO": https://aman-agarwal.com/tfc