Jan. 24, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
17:17
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| Hey everybody! I'm back for a special Coffee with Scott Adams in which I'm going to talk about the future of online education. | |
| Way more interesting than you think it's going to be. | |
| So, reserve your judgment. | |
| This is going to be a little more interesting than you think. | |
| Alright. First thing I want to say is I've been saying for a long time that I'm left of Bernie. | |
| And people say, I don't believe that. | |
| How could you be for all those socialist things? | |
| And the trick is that, like most people, I don't know how to pay for those things, but at least I admit. | |
| I'd love to have universal health care. | |
| I don't really know how to pay for it. | |
| I'd love to have free universal education, including college, and any kind of vocational training, but it's hard to pay for. | |
| So what I'm going to talk about is how to get to a world where we all have free, far better, way better training and at a cost that's essentially free or approaches free. | |
| And I'm going to tell you some trends that you're going to see coming that That will drive this. | |
| The first thing I'm going to talk about is my own company's app called Interface by Wenhub. | |
| You see it written right here if you wanted to search for it in the app stores. | |
| And with it you can talk to any kind of expert and you could take a class. | |
| So if you could find an expert who wanted to train you one-on-one or tutor you, etc., you could do it through the app. | |
| So I wanted to test Online learning myself, and so I've been taking drum lessons for the last few months, trying to figure out what I can learn about the whole concept of online learning. | |
| Can you learn from talking to somebody on a screen? | |
| Here's what I learned. It works really, really well. | |
| And here's why. | |
| Because I'm paying by the hour, and because I can pick the instructor I want, and I can schedule it whenever I want, and I can cancel it, you know, as long as I give some notice, I can cancel it if something comes up. | |
| I've completely solved the when-do-you-do-it problem. | |
| By making it happen when I want it. | |
| Secondly, because it's a one-on-one thing, I don't follow the script of an instructor. | |
| I found a drum instructor who would answer my questions and go through things in roughly the order that my brain needs to process it. | |
| So I took something that would have been impossible for me to learn in a standard The instructor shows up at your house, and then you've got somebody in your house, and it takes a little extra time, and there's a little extra work, and you can't really cancel it because they're traveling over there. | |
| And then they don't teach you the way you want. | |
| So being able to get it exactly the way you want is huge. | |
| And so I've had a good experience with that. | |
| But let me tell you some other things which are happening in the world of online learning. | |
| Training. One of the things that's wrong with online training the way it is at the moment is that it's usually just filming an instructor teaching just as if you were in the class. | |
| That's the worst way to use online training because you don't get the benefit of the human interaction and it's just as boring. | |
| But inevitably, people are going to start forming teams where instead of just filming an instructor, maybe somebody creates the content, perhaps someone else does the visuals, the CGI, the graphics that go with it. | |
| Perhaps they hire an actor to be the teacher because the actor is just real good on screen. | |
| Somebody you don't mind watching for a long time. | |
| You might prefer seeing a female. | |
| I might prefer seeing the male. | |
| You might prefer seeing somebody a different age, different ethnicity. | |
| You could pick the type of instructor you wanted and the content would be created by a team like Hollywood. | |
| Can you imagine, for example, if movies were made by one person? | |
| Suppose the only way a movie ever got made was one person. | |
| They would all be terrible movies. | |
| It's because of the team, and certainly education will move in this direction, inevitably. | |
| It's a guarantee. The other thing you don't have in regular education is the addiction technology. | |
| So you know that social media is addicting, you know that online gaming is addictive. | |
| Part of the reason they're addictive is that you do them on your own pace, in your own time, and then they reward you with a variety of rewards which we understand very well. | |
| What if you could learn at any rate you wanted and you could pick a style of learning that worked for you, And you could build the addiction into it. | |
| So you could do it slowly, quickly, any rate that was right for you, because it's online, and they build the addiction into it. | |
| So let's say you're trying to solve a game by learning enough Spanish language, say, to solve some puzzles. | |
| You would probably learn them quicker if you were getting immediate rewards within the game context. | |
| All right. I also have a VR system. | |
| If I was doing this without my microphone on. | |
| I also have a VR system that I've been testing to see what is the experience of using VR. And what I found was, oh my god! | |
| When you're using VR, you actually have the experience of being there in person, even though it's obvious that you're not there in person. | |
| So you can look at things that are really just renderings, and you know they're renderings, you know they're not real, but it's so impactful on your mind That you actually act as though they're real. | |
| I went to the edge of a ledge in a VR thing with VR goggles on and I couldn't make myself walk over the edge of the ledge even though I could take my goggles off and see that I'm on my own floor and that there's no danger. | |
| And I put the goggles back on and I couldn't even force my leg to go forward because my brain was still saying, no, that's a ledge. | |
| That's a ledge. I'm looking right at it. | |
| So the experience of being in a VR immersive environment is completely transformative to how you learn. | |
| I did a program within VR in which I did a tour inside the Hindenburg, the famous airship that burned up. | |
| So you can actually go inside it and walk around in all the places that only the crew could go, and you can actually experience Exactly what it would feel like to be on the actual Hindenburg and looking through the crew quarters and where the pilot doesn't work. | |
| You can look at the table and see what's on the table. | |
| Unbelievable. So imagine that technology except you're learning history. | |
| You could be plopped right in the middle of the history. | |
| You could be in the middle of a war. | |
| You could be put in a village. | |
| They could plop you in different civilizations all over the world. | |
| Incredible. So as soon as this stuff reaches another level, the learning will be fun and easy. | |
| Smartphones, of course, makes everybody have access to it, so the how much does it cost part and how do you get there will largely be solved by technology. | |
| The other advantage you have of online learning is that you can sample it very quickly, and if you're not getting what you want, you just stop and find another source. | |
| So as long as there's enough competition, you can sample in and say, that's not for me, and get out. | |
| That's harder to do if you sign up for a class in college. | |
| The other thing you could see is that if you have AI and lots of data mining, you can imagine that as you're taking tests and as you're working through your online courses, that employers perhaps could find out that you're good at whatever it is that they need. | |
| And they might find that out just by your test scores and how you're developing. | |
| Online. And then they could approach you and say, I know you're only in your second year of what might take three or four years, but wow, you're killing it. | |
| Maybe we should have a relationship. | |
| So you could actually be doing your job search simultaneous with your classes without any extra effort because you're creating data by taking tests, etc. | |
| that will tell employers if you're the kind of person that they might someday want. | |
| I think we'll see certification degrees for online classes that are different from just, oh, this college put some classes on there and now you got a degree from this college, but it's not as good as the real one. | |
| I think you're going to see people like Warren Buffett, I just used him as an example name, to say, if you took this following group of classes and you did well in it, I would definitely hire you. | |
| And so somebody's saying Udacity does it. | |
| I think what you need are almost celebrity endorsements to give them some value. | |
| And when I say celebrity, I mean successful business people, billionaire type endorsements, the kind that people would take seriously. | |
| You know, if Bill Gates said taking this set of courses made you valuable, I would certainly think about getting the Bill Gates, you know, MBA or whatever it's going to be called. | |
| All right. So, with these changes, which I think you would agree are pretty much guaranteed to happen, I don't know how quickly, I don't know how long it will take, but if you imagine that the government, without building a new department or anything, | |
| simply got behind this concept, And just started pushing, maybe putting a little attention on VR companies, maybe encouraging some kind of standardization if that's useful. | |
| It would be great to have all of these courses built in small modules so that you could take a module and if you don't like that teacher, you could just pick up the same course just with a different teacher. | |
| Without even getting out of the larger class, you can just switch teachers in the middle because all the modules fit together in some kind of standardized way, depending on the course. | |
| So, I think we're going to get to the point where online learning is now worse than in-person learning, but I think it's guaranteed it's going to cross it. | |
| Guaranteed. And when it crosses it, it might also start approaching zero cost. | |
| Because whoever is the best team to put together, let's say, the very best Lesson in geometry or whatever it is. | |
| Or let's say repairing engines. | |
| Whoever is the best team that does that, they're going to be able to sell their course all over the entire world. | |
| So it might be a dollar per class because they have 100 billion customers per class. | |
| It would be the most profitable thing anybody ever did. | |
| But this market needs to develop and it will. | |
| So, this little prediction is brought to you by my company's app, Interface by WenHub. | |
| You can sign on to be an expert or a teacher. | |
| On anything. Right now, the app is one-to-one. | |
| It's a video call for any expert to talk to anybody who wants to talk to them. | |
| And the expert sets the price, any price they want. | |
| If you would like to support this kind of thing, and if you'd like to support these periscopes, one way you could do it is by going to interface.wenhub.com where you can buy the WEN tokens. | |
| That's a cryptocurrency that we created to work within the app. | |
| So you can pay your experts in crypto, if they accept that, or regular credit card cash. | |
| So we have both options. | |
| So I'll get rid of the troll. | |
| And so those of you who are unhappy with Patreon... | |
| And how they were treating some of their talent. | |
| In my case, if you want to encourage the app to work, if you want to encourage, in a very small way, any of this to work, and you want to move this world forward of being able to get your education online in a variety of forms, Owning some of these tokens would do it. | |
| Now, I want to be very careful in telling you these are not investments and you do not have an equity position in a company when you own these cryptocurrencies. | |
| But nonetheless, it is true that if the app is successful, the value of the tokens goes up. | |
| So this is one of the very few cases. | |
| Where donating to an artist has at least some chance that you end up getting your money back and more. | |
| Peterson was asking for a competitor name of Patreon. | |
| So this would only work for people who sign up to be experts on the app, and then people could contact them. | |
| And in my case, because I'm a co-founder of the company, it helps me a great deal to help fund the company forward if people buy the tokens. | |
| And you can buy them for any amount. | |
| It's whatever you want. Any amount you feel comfortable with. | |
| And they're being traded on a couple of exchanges right now, coinpulse.io and latoken.com. | |
| Two places you can trade them now, and we're adding other exchanges as we go. | |
| All right, so... That's the future of education. | |
| I think it is completely realistic to have what I would call a socialist vision of education that doesn't require your taxes to go up. | |
| Meaning that technology, if it's fostered in the right way and we don't have any unnecessary regulation stopping it, the inevitable direction is that online will pass in-person education in terms of effectiveness, and it's going to pass it hard. | |
| At some point, it won't even be close. | |
| At some point, the idea of standing in front of a human In a classroom, while that one human drones on in the average way that is the most average to get the most people, but doesn't work for anybody in particular exactly, you know, doesn't work at least in their ideal way, the in-person method is definitely going to go away. | |
| So we can get to almost free education and universal. | |
| That's very doable. | |
| There may be something like this in the field of medical costs as well. | |
| And I'll talk about that separately. | |
| I will give you a little hint that we're bringing on a number of doctors who will be vetted and their backgrounds will be checked so you don't have to worry about that. | |
| And they will be licensed for specific states in the United States. | |
| And if you don't have health care, And you need a doctor, you'll be able to pick up the Interface app. | |
| I'll tell you more about this in the next week or so. | |
| And have a live conversation with the doctor and just pay as you go. | |
| So it will be much cheaper than having insurance and it would be one of the many ways in which the cost of health care could go down. | |
| So I say again, I'm left of Bernie because I want universal health care and I want free education. | |
| But I think the way you get there is by making sure that your technology is unfettered and that you understand that there's somewhere to get. | |
| And now I think we all understand that and maybe we can get out of our own way and let the technology bring us to that point where we do have much cheaper health care, at least approaching free, and that we have essentially universal education for everybody. | |
| And there's almost nobody who can't be helped by universal education. | |
| That's the lesson. | |
| If anybody wants to get some WEN tokens, which would help a lot for my startup, and maybe they would go up in value, but they're not an investment, go to interface.wenhub.com, and I hope you do. |
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