Episode 389 Scott Adams - The Future of Online Education with VR, Apps and Hollywood Teams

hey everybody I'm back for a 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 all right 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 healthc care I don't really know how to pay for it I'd love to have free Universal U 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 all right and I'm going to tell you some trends that you're going to see coming that um that will drive this the first thing I'm going to talk about is my own company's app called interface by whenhub 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 in one or two to you Etc you could do it through the app so I wanted to test online learning myself and so I've been uh taking drum lessons for the last few uh last few months trying to figure out what I could learn about the whole concept of online learning can you learn from talking to somebody on the screen here's what I learned it works really really well and here's why because I'm paying for 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 solve the when do you do it Problem by making it happen when I want it secondly because it's a one-on-one thing um I don't follow the script of a 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 your house and you know then you've you know you've got somebody in your house and it takes a little extra time there's a lot extra work and you you can't really cancel 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 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 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 you know the CGI the 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 a 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 there would all be terrible movies it's because of the team and certainly education will move in this direction inevitably it's it's a guarantee the other thing you don't have in regular education is the addiction um technology so you know that social media is addicting you know that online gaming uh is addictive part of the reason they're addictive is that you do them on your own pace and your own time and then they reward you with a a variety of rewards which we understand very well what if you could learn that 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 they build the addiction into it so let's say you're trying to solve a game by learning enough enough Spanish language say to solve some puzzles you would probably learn them quicker if you were getting immediate rewards within the the game context all right um I also have a VR a VR system if I was doing this without my microphone on uh 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 renderings you know they're not real but it's so uh impactful on your mind that you actually act as though they're real U I went to the edge of a Ledge in a VR thing with you know VR goggles on and I couldn't make myself walk over the edge of the ledge even though I could take my 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 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 uh I did a a program within VR in which I did a tour inside the Hindenburg the famous Airship that that burned up so you can actually go inside it and walk around in all the the places that don't the crew could go and you could actually experience exactly what it would feel like to be on the actual Hindenberg and looking through the crew quarters and the and where the pilot does the work you can look on the table and see what's on the table unbelievable all right so imagine that technology except you're learning history they 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 you know they could plop you in different civiliz Iz ation all over the world incredible all right so as soon as this stuff reaches reaches another level you know the learning will be fun and easy um smartphones of course makes everybody have access to it so the the how much does a 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 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 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 uh 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 you know maybe we should have a relationship so you could actually be doing your 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 um 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 is the real one I think you're going to see people like Warren Buffett I just use him as an example name to say if you took this following group of classes and you did did well in it I would definitely hire you and so you uh somebody saying Udacity does it I think what you need are almost celebrity endorsements to to give them some value and I 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 I would certainly think about getting the Bill Gates you know MBA or whatever it's going to be called all right um 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 how long it will take but if you imagine that the government without without building a new department or anything simply got behind this concept and just started pushing uh maybe putting a little uh 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 can just pick up the same course just with a different teacher and without even getting out of the 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 um I think we're going to get to the point where uh online learning is now worse than in-person learning but I think it's guaranteed it's going to cross it guaranted and when it crosses it it almost it might also start approaching zero cost because whoever is the best team to put together let's say the very best lesson in you know 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 you know it might be a dollar per class because they have a 100 billion customers per class it would be the most profitable thing anybody ever did but this this Market needs to develop and it will so um this this uh little prediction is brought to you by my company's app interface by whenhub you can sign on to be a an expert or a teacher on anything right now the app is one:1 it's a video call for any expert to talk to any 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 um one way you could do it is by going to interface.

hub.com where you can buy the when 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 um both options so I'll get rid of the troll and uh so those of you who were unhappy with patreon and how they were treating some of their uh their talent in my case if you want to encourage the app to work if you want to encourage in in a very small way any of this to work and you want to move this this world forward of of being able to get your education online in a variety of forums um owning some of these tokens would do it now I want to be very careful in in telling you these are not Investments and you do not have a an equity position in a company when you own these cryptocurrencies but nonetheless it is true that if the if the app is successful the value of the tokens goes up so this is one of the very very few cases where donating to an artist has has at least some chance that you end up getting your money back and more so uh Peterson was asking for competitor name of patreon so this would only work for people who sign up to be experts on the app and then then people could contact them uh 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 to tokens and you can buy them for any amount it's whatever you want um any amount you feel comfortable with um and they change they're they're being traded on a couple of exchanges right now um coin pulse.

and La token.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 um 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 will pass in-person education in terms of effectivess and it's going to pass it hard you know at some point it won't even be close that at some point the idea of standing in front of a human in a in a classroom while that one human drones on in the average way that is is the most average to get the most people but doesn't work for anybody in particular exactly you know it doesn't work at least in their ideal way the 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 some something like this in the in the field of uh medical cost 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 you know they'll they'll their backgrounds will be checked so you don't have to worry about that and there will be licensed for specific states in the United States and if you don't have Healthcare 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 they'll 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 unfed bettered 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 and you know at least approaching free and that we have uh essentially Universal education for everybody uh and there's almost nobody who can't be helped by Universal education so that's the uh lesson if anybody wants to get some when tokens which would help a lot for my startup and you know maybe they would go up in value but they're not an investment um go to interface.

hub.com and I hope you do and that's all for now

hey

everybody I'm back for a 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 all

right 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 healthc care

I don't really know how to pay for it

I'd love to have free Universal U

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 all

right and I'm going to tell you some

trends that you're going to see coming

that

um that will drive this the first thing

I'm going to talk about is my own

company's app called interface by

whenhub 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 in one or two to

you Etc you could do it through the app

so I wanted to

test online learning myself and so I've

been uh taking drum lessons for the last

few uh last few months trying to figure

out what I could learn about the whole

concept of online learning can you learn

from talking to somebody on the

screen here's what I learned it works

really really well

and here's why because I'm paying for 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 solve the when do you do it

Problem by making it happen when I want

it secondly because it's a one-on-one

thing um I don't follow the script of a

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 your

house and you know then you've you know

you've got somebody in your house and it

takes a little extra time there's a lot

extra work and you you can't really

cancel 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 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 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 you know the CGI

the 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 a 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 there would all

be terrible movies it's because of the

team and certainly education will move

in this direction inevitably it's it's a

guarantee the other thing you don't have

in regular education is the addiction um

technology so you know that social media

is addicting you know that online gaming

uh is addictive part of the reason

they're addictive is that you do them on

your own pace and your own time and then

they reward you with a a variety of

rewards which we understand very well

what if you could learn that 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 they build the addiction

into it so let's say you're trying to

solve a game by learning enough enough

Spanish language say to solve some

puzzles you would probably learn them

quicker if you were getting immediate

rewards within the the game context all

right

um I also have a VR

a VR system if I was doing this without

my microphone

on uh 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 renderings you know

they're not real but it's so uh

impactful on your mind that you actually

act as though they're real U I went to

the edge of a Ledge in a VR thing with

you know VR goggles on and I couldn't

make myself walk over the edge of the

ledge even though I could take my 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 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 uh I did a a program within VR in

which I did a tour inside the Hindenburg

the famous Airship that that burned up

so you can actually go inside it and

walk around in all the the places that

don't the crew could go and you could

actually

experience exactly what it would feel

like to be on the actual Hindenberg and

looking through the crew quarters and

the and where the pilot does the work

you can look on the table and see what's

on the table unbelievable all right so

imagine that technology except you're

learning

history they 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 you know they could

plop you in different civiliz Iz ation

all over the world incredible all right

so as soon as this stuff reaches reaches

another level you know the learning will

be fun and

easy um smartphones of course makes

everybody have access to it so the the

how much does a 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 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 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 uh 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 you know maybe we

should have a relationship so you could

actually be doing your 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 um 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 is the real

one I think you're going to see people

like Warren Buffett I just use him as an

example name to say if you took this

following group of classes and you did

did well in it I would definitely hire

you and so you uh somebody saying

Udacity does it I think what you need

are almost celebrity endorsements to to

give them some value and I 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

I would certainly think about getting

the Bill Gates you know MBA or whatever

it's going to be called all

right um 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 how long it

will take but if you imagine that the

government without without building a

new department or anything simply got

behind this concept and just started

pushing uh maybe putting a little uh

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

can just pick up the same course just

with a different teacher and without

even getting out of the 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 um I

think we're going to get to the point

where uh online learning is now worse

than in-person learning but I think it's

guaranteed it's going to cross it

guaranted

and when it crosses it it almost it

might also start approaching zero cost

because whoever is the best team to put

together let's say the very best lesson

in you know 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 you know it

might be a dollar per class because they

have a 100 billion customers per class

it would be the most profitable thing

anybody ever did but this this Market

needs to develop and it will so um this

this uh little prediction is brought to

you by my company's app

interface by whenhub you can sign on to

be a an expert or a teacher on anything

right now the app is one:1 it's a video

call for any expert to talk to any

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 um one way you

could do it is by going to interface.

hub.com where you can buy the when

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 um both options so

I'll get rid of the

troll

and

uh so those of you who were unhappy with

patreon and how they were treating some

of their uh their talent in my case if

you want to encourage the app to work if

you want to encourage in in a very small

way any of this to work and you want to

move this this world forward of of being

able to get your education online in a

variety of forums um owning some of

these tokens would do it now I want to

be very careful in in telling you these

are not Investments and you do not have

a an equity position in a company when

you own these cryptocurrencies but

nonetheless it is true that if the if

the app is successful the value of the

tokens goes up so this is one of the

very very few

cases where donating to an artist has

has at least some chance that you end up

getting your money back and more

so

uh Peterson was asking for competitor

name of patreon so this would only work

for people who sign up to be experts on

the app and then then people could

contact them uh 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 to tokens and

you can buy them for any amount it's

whatever you want um any amount you feel

comfortable with um and they change

they're they're being traded on a couple

of exchanges right now um coin pulse.

and La token.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 um 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

will pass in-person education in terms

of effectivess and it's going to pass it

hard you know at some point it won't

even be close that at some point the

idea of standing in front of a human in

a in a classroom while that one human

drones on in the average way that is is

the most average to get the most people

but doesn't work for anybody in

particular exactly you know it doesn't

work at least in their ideal way the 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 some something like

this in the in the field of uh medical

cost 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 you know they'll they'll

their backgrounds will be checked so you

don't have to worry about that and there

will be licensed for specific states in

the United States and if you don't have

Healthcare 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 they'll 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 unfed bettered 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 and you know at

least approaching free and that we have

uh essentially Universal education for

everybody uh and there's almost nobody

who can't be helped by Universal

education

so that's the uh lesson if anybody wants

to get some when tokens which would help

a lot for my startup and you know maybe

they would go up in value but they're

not an

investment um go to

interface.

hub.com and I hope you do and that's all

for now