Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive July 10, 2026
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The other thing you don't have in regular education is the addiction technology. 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 and 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…

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All right, 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 the crew could go and you could actually experience exactly what it would feel like to be on the actual Hindenburg and looking through the crew quarters 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. 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.

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All right, so as soon as this stuff reaches another level, the learning will be fun and easy. Smartphones of course make 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 fin…

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