Episode 389 Scott Adams: The Future of Online Education with VR, Apps and Hollywood Teams
Date: 2019-01-24 | Duration: 17:22
Topics
Online learning works, the future is here (Whiteboard) A Socialist vision of education, but with decreased cost Learning can be tailored to how different people learn VR learning possibilities include historical event immersion
I fund my Periscopes and podcasts via audience micro-donations on Patreon. I prefer this method over accepting advertisements or working for a "boss" somewhere because it keeps my voice independent. No one owns me, and that is rare. I'm trying in my own way to make the world a better place, and your contributions help me stay inspired to do that.
See all of my Periscope videos here…
https://www.pscp.tv/ScottAdamsSays/1nAKERDOwylGL
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https://interface.whenhub.com
> [!note] Rough Transcript
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## Transcript
[0:04]
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
[1:06]
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
[2:08]
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
[3:10]
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
[4:12]
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
[5:12]
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
[6:14]
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
[7:16]
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
[8:17]
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
[9:17]
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
[10:19]
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
[11:21]
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
[12:21]
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
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
[13:22]
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
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
[14:26]
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
[15:27]
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
[16:29]
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