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May 25, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
16:28
Episode 995 Scott Adams: Psssst. I Think We Won The War. Take a Look at the #GoldenAge of Education That is Coming
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Hey everybody!
As we bring the curtain down on another day in the era of coronavirus, I have nothing but good news for you today.
Lots. Lots of good news.
Way too much light.
Let's get rid of some of that.
Hold on. Oh yeah.
That's way better. So I take it as my solemn responsibility to make you all happier.
We don't have Snickers in the chair.
Boo on the ground.
Boo? Say hi to the audience.
Not interested? Okay.
Fine, fine, fine. Well...
Apparently she wants to be on camera here, so you'll be seeing her do a walk by.
There we go. Here's what I wanted to tell you tonight.
I feel like we won.
And I'm talking about the virus.
Have you been watching the pictures of people going out and just having a good time outside?
It feels like we won.
And here's what I mean.
In two weeks, if our hospitals are not crashed, we won.
Meaning that nothing's going to stop us from reopening.
Because if what we did this weekend doesn't cause a massive spike that crashes our hospitals, I mean, it might cause a little spike in some places, but if it doesn't crash the hospitals, we're back.
We're back.
And... I don't want to get ahead of it because, of course, there will still be lots of people dying.
There's plenty of tragedies, lots of work, a lot of people have been financially devastated, and there's going to be a lot to do to clean this mess up.
But it's starting to look like 2021 is going to be like the best year of all time.
And some of the things that are going to happen are directly because of the coronavirus.
There are things that it shook up that just needed to be shook up.
For example, I would be amazed if healthcare costs don't plummet now that we can have doctors and telehealth across state lines.
I mean, that little bit of change probably is going to open up competition like crazy.
So healthcare will clearly change to a more digital model.
I don't think there's any way that we're going to go back to full commuting.
So traffic might become less of a problem.
People will be spending less to commute, so that'll be less of an expense.
Quality of life will go up.
I honestly think also that the lifestyle changes that people took Just to boost their immune system.
I asked that this morning.
Turns out almost every one of you did something to boost your immunity.
There's no way that doesn't pay dividends because a lot of this becomes habit over time.
So we'll be healthier.
We'll probably pay less for it.
We'll be driving less.
We'll be less stressed about all that.
And the home delivery business will be better than ever.
Stock market's looking strong and Weirdly, even property values didn't seem to change too much.
So, I want to tell you one specific piece of good news that I see coming, which is the future of education.
And a few people asked me to map out what I think is going to happen, and because of the coronavirus and everybody rethinking the whole idea of, do I need to be on campus?
Do I need to be in a classroom?
Is there a better way?
And here's where I think it needs to go.
Now, will it go this way?
I would say the biggest wildcard, and I'll tell you what I'm talking about in a minute, but the biggest wildcard is probably the big tech companies.
Because if they decide to try to control education the way, let's say, Apple tries to control iTunes, that sort of thing, if it becomes sort of walled off in somebody's product, well, it might not be so cheap in the future.
But in a perfect world, it'd be more open and competitive.
I saw an interview with Scott Galloway, Professor Galloway, who wrote this book, The Four.
And he's a really good interviewer.
If you get a chance to Google it, Google Scott Galloway and Anderson Cooper.
He did his interview on CNN. And it was excellent.
He was really good on TV, but he also had some good thoughts.
So I'm going to tell you the thought that I thought was really insightful.
It goes like this. The big tech companies are so large that for somebody like Apple or Google to have, let's say, a 10% growth, they would have to eat entire industries.
They can't just launch a new product and grow 10% because they're already so big.
They need to devour industries.
But not every industry is ripe for devouring.
Some of them have low margins.
Some of them, they're already in, and lots of people are in, like healthcare.
And what Scott pointed out is that education is a super high-margin business.
And when I thought about that, I thought, well, that can't be right, because colleges don't make that much money, right?
They're always fundraising. They're barely making ends meet.
Isn't college sort of the opposite of a high-margin business?
And then this little thing clicked in my brain, which was, oh, not if you do it the old way.
If you do it the new way, digitally, you could drive out, what, 98% of the cost?
Think of another industry where you could take out 98% of the cost.
Now, I don't know if that's possible, but I would say easily 90%.
Because you're going to get rid of some room and board and the classrooms and most of the professors, the administration.
I think 90%.
So if you've got an enormous industry, the education industry, it's also a mess.
I mean, there's nobody who thinks it's good the way it is, right?
So it's a mess.
It's enormous. There are only a few big opportunities that have high margins to disrupt.
And the tech companies are going to come for it.
That was Scott Galloway's insight, is that there's no way they're going to be able to stay away from it.
It's too big and it's too juicy.
And especially now that everything got disrupted, the way we're thinking about college has changed, and that's probably the key.
Because until people started really thinking about it differently, it was just too easy to do it the old way.
Let's do it the way we did it before.
So, let me tell you, and once the big companies get in here and the innovation starts, it's going to happen really fast, and then we're going to be on the way to the golden age.
Let me tell you what I think it should look like.
In a perfect world, if I could design the future of it, it would look like this.
The first thing you would need is, I would start with some kind of a comprehensive major, a college major, They would teach you all the things that are useful and none of the things that are not.
If you take a regular college major today, you're going to get some useful stuff, but you're going to get a lot of stuff that's not that useful.
Why not have a college major that's just a uniform major for the digital world, Let's call it life strategy.
And it's only the good stuff.
It will teach you persuasion, selling.
It will teach you a little bit about money, managing money, so you can understand that world.
And it would teach you to write, to communicate, to speak, basically all the stuff that makes anybody successful, including the strategy of how to succeed, how to build systems instead of goals, how to increase your talent stack.
So those are the types of classes.
And now, what I'm adding to this is the idea that they would be broken into chunks, and each of these chunks would be like a marketable product, just like a book would be on Amazon.
So that anybody could produce any of these chunks and just go into the marketplace.
And if these boxes from left to right represent the entire course, then each of these chunks could be parts within a class, within a topic.
But they would have to be defined by somebody so that anybody who's making content would know that this is exactly the content for this box, no more, no less.
So everybody is, it's apples and apples.
Once you have apples to apples, and all the courses are kind of lined up, and let's say a federal body or just somebody credible has created this degree, then let's say the federal government blesses it and says, yes, we can certify that if you finish these classes, you get the degree in life strategy major.
Now, if you need a skill on top of that, and it's not something like Lawyer, engineer, or doctor, you know, very specific stuff.
Your big companies will teach you the extra skills, but they want to know that they've got a good base, and that's what the life strategy major would give you.
You still need more on top of that, but that gets you started.
Now, once you've got a competitive market where anybody can have a bestseller, There are a number of things you want to make sure that you're accomplishing so that this is a good, robust market.
Number one, each of these things should have no introductions.
When you click on it, it should be a lesson, not let me tell you about how I became a teacher, not give me the history of Of people who have given classes and tell you why they used to be bad, but now they're good.
Just start teaching.
And then even within the chunks, there should be some easy indexed clicks so that you could find the places within the chunks easily identified.
Boom! Go right to it. Next, you need to be able to track performance.
You want to be able to keep track of students so you know which of the classes they took on their journey.
And then you could measure how they did on tests so that you would be able to say, oh, whoever took this class almost always did better on tests.
So that would get a higher ranking.
Maybe they could charge more in the future.
Of course, eventually there will be augmented reality and virtual reality.
This is guaranteed.
Because what would be a better way to teach history, for example, than putting you in the middle of it, having you actually there in some historical event?
You wouldn't forget that because you're a visual creature.
If they plop you right in the middle of history, you're going to remember history.
You were there. You remember your own life when you're there.
It will be just like that.
Now imagine teaching somebody to be a mechanic of some type or anything that you work with your hands.
Now, nobody needs parts.
Nobody needs an engine to work on.
Nobody needs a physical thing.
You could just manipulate them in the virtual reality world until you learn them.
And, of course, that assumes it to be sort of Hollywood models for these chunks, these classes.
That it'll be teams of people just like a Hollywood film would bring a team of people together.
You would have bestsellers, you'd have reviews, of course, so you know which ones are the good ones.
Now here's the interesting part.
These chunks, these classes, could live anywhere.
So one of them might be on the Udemy, one might be on Khan Academy, one might be on your website that you made all by yourself, one might be on YouTube.
So as long as you've got pointers to them, it doesn't matter where they live, and if you wanted the good one, let's say, well, maybe you need a subscription.
to Udemy or one of the other online sites.
You might not need to take every one of their classes, but because that one class is so highly rated and that's the chunk you want, well, you don't have to pay the premium.
You could get the less expensive version.
But if you want, you might have to go to Udemy or someplace else and sign up to get it.
But we're not talking big money.
We're still talking in the range of $100 a month to get a college education.
And of course you would need to solve for testing and grading of papers and such.
I'm pretty sure that you could find a way to distribute all that.
Maybe you can have somebody who actually watches people take a test digitally.
It'd be easy to cheat unless somebody's in the room.
But between facial recognition, monitoring what's on your keyboard, checking to see if you stole your paper from some other document because it's pretty easy to check now if you plagiarized, And some kind of monitoring while you're taking a test might be enough.
I don't know the exact system that would work, but you'd have to solve for testing.
I think we could do it, and grading.
And then I can imagine an app that would let people who are on the same path Get together locally in little pods.
Let's say a dozen people.
Doesn't matter what the number is, but let's say a dozen people.
They just look at their app and they say, yeah, I want to take chunk number three of this class, see who's taking it.
Oh, it looks like there's somebody a few miles away.
They're going to have a watching party.
I'll go meet some people who are doing the same thing I'm doing.
Get my networking in.
What's the worst thing about not going to a physical college?
You don't meet anybody.
So with this model, You're still watching it on a screen, but you have the option of a meet-up with a dozen other people who are watching it at the same time, and you can talk about it and help each other and network, so you meet people.
So, this is how I see the future.
It's got to be broken up into little competitive chunks.
And once this happens, anybody can learn anything.
And then you're going to start unlocking The potential of the people who had been underserved.
Because think about how many people in this country have not had the benefit of the right kind of education, and they're not going to get it, partly because of finance, partly because they don't know how.
It's hard. They can't find it.
They'd have to travel.
There's a lot going on in getting a college education.
Not everybody can do it.
Everybody with a phone and a TV can kind of do this.
So... That is the suggestion.
I'm going to end on this because I want you to just have a positive thought about the future.
Education is going to change, and it's going to change quickly.
I think Scott Galloway is exactly right about that, and I think the big companies are going to make a huge impact really soon.
Somebody says mentors are important, and I would agree, and it's easy to imagine that you can work that into the system.
So that you would have tutors and mentors who would be associated with each chunk of information.
Alright, that's it for today.
Somebody's asking about Snickers.
She's doing pretty well. Thanks for asking.
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