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awesome okay we’re recording red welcome to the podcast thank you for having me jake good to be
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here it’s my pleasure so to to tee this conversation up for anyone that’s listening
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i came across red on nostr and i it’s like a kind of top of funnel isn’t it you see people like
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messaging about something small perhaps a comment here or something there they might reply to you
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like what is this person talking about and then you say oh maybe i should listen to a podcast of
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theirs and getting towards the end of three hours of listening to you and mr daniel prince chatting
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on your most recent episode with him and i have yet to go back to the ones before that but
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you talked in that episode about many things that resonated a lot i’m not going to dive into that
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but like the idea of um uh reincarnation like wow what a concept and something that just is so hidden
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from the average person, including myself, until now in many ways.
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But where I want to spend as much time as we can today
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is really around education and something that you reached out to me
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and said, actually, this is a place I love to spend time talking about.
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And I became a father almost six years ago.
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So my eldest is five, three and one, two boys and a girl.
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And we have been homeschooling them.
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And Red, not to talk too much, and I’ll pass it over to you in just a second,
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But like all these things I found, it’s a case of you’re learning as you go and you get to places you never expected to be.
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And first off, we actually ended up having three home births and the COVID experience was an extraordinary one.
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But ultimately, you know, you’re not allowed in the hospital with your partner for them to give birth.
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What are you talking about? That’s insane.
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This is an Australian regulation at one point. I’m originally from the UK, but they were in Australia.
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OK, well, that doesn’t make sense. And so we figured out let’s do home births.
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And then suddenly it’s like, well, hang on.
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Then in Australia, there’s a rule called no jab, no play.
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And if you do not give your child the infant vaccinations the government recommends, then you cannot access publicly funded childcare.
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Because the first thing they ask for is the child’s vaccination history.
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And if you have any questions over those vaccines and don’t give them to your child, you immediately don’t qualify.
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And so quite quickly, we’re like, well, that doesn’t make sense to us.
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And we’ve had to do things differently.
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And before you know it, it’s like, oh, my God, we’re talking about homeschooling.
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And because I’m lucky to have got into Bitcoin and regained a lot of control of my time, I’m at home to help with my wife.
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And here we are.
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So, Red, over to you.
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What is education and what does homeschooling mean to you?
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Education is making memories.
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I mean, it’s all learning is.
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It’s taking experiences and the sensory inputs that are associated with them from short-term memory into long-term memory for access and application later.
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It’s something that we begin as children, but it’s something that should not end when we graduate.
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It should become a lifelong process.
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Frankly, it’s what we’re here to do is learn.
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I mean, learning is technically a form of love, right?
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It’s when you choose to learn about something that’s an expression of passion, of interest, right?
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So it’s technically a form of love.
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And, you know, we need to be applying love universally and unconditionally, which means that there’s a target rich environment here of things for us to study.
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So as for homeschooling, I’ll say that my expertise is primarily on education and less so on homeschooling.
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However, the background that I have would be applicable to homeschoolers in what they’re doing.
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I don’t have kids. I’ve never done homeschooling myself, but I have worked with hundreds of students at a learning center about, you know, 15 years ago.
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And, you know, we ran a booklet program that we would basically track student performance using Excel data.
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We would, you know, neurologically profile our students as individuals so that we could best plan for them in a way that, you know, will help ensure their success and help clear the way.
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So that process was, I guess we would start off with a diagnostic test and give the child, as they’re being sort of brought into our learning center, we would give them an opportunity to show us what they’ve got, what they’ve learned so far.
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And even if that meant they were at the very beginning and they hadn’t begun any sort of education process at home or in any sort of institution.
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and we would break students down into different sort of categories,
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always allowing for the unknown, and we would develop a profile,
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and then based on that profile, we would work with them
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and tailor the curriculum to them in ways to help them succeed.
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and and so the word success is an interesting one to to kind of dwell on for a moment because
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what is success and i think it really ties into this idea you just mentioned that like learning
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is love i hadn’t heard that expression before actually and it it resonates very strongly um
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because we’re so i don’t know i really like talking about like us and them you know they
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you do this they do that you know what i mean but the the common or traditional process through
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government funded education in today’s era is in some ways just a massive psyop you know it’s like
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here are all the kings and queens and here are all the good guys and here are all the bad guys
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and here’s all of the like government approved science that’s correct and a lot of it as you
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get older first of all you realize that that education didn’t necessarily tee you up to be
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a problem solver it teed you up to automatically work pay tax and not really ask any questions it’s
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like well hang on a classic one being what is money i didn’t ask that question until i was over
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30 years of age i was highly trained how to make money you know two very entrepreneurial families
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with businesses and um a business management degree and never once said well hang on what is
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money and you know i had this answer it was like well the central bank does this and they can
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control interest rates and inflation is this and you know and it’s like hang on what even is that
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um so so why is learning love and what do you think success actually is in that sense
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well i mean when you want to learn i would say it’s love that if you’re stuck in a government
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school and you’re being treated in a one-sized-fits-all NPC factory kind of way where they
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teach you not how to think rather but what to think you might hate that so that that experience
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might not be an experience of love but when you learn because you want to learn that’s
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an expression of passion and interest so what was the follow-up question well red let me jump in
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there because that is that’s so relevant to those of us that have got heavily into bitcoin
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but you can’t be heavily into bitcoin without love if learning is love that they’re both combined
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because there’s no phd for bitcoin right it’s been around for such a short period of time
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there’s almost not even such thing as a bitcoin expert in some ways because it’s just so new and
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that’s a very interesting shared bond isn’t it between all of these people that are hang on
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what is money and then boom sound money becomes more relevant and then it’s cryptography and then
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it’s like oh digital scarcity and all these different things that you’re learning so
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so maybe this isn’t really a conversation so much about homeschooling but actually more about
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continuing the process of evolution for learning as an adult and so how do you tee a child up to
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be like that and if i could give actually the use case of yourself red so when i listen to you
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talking to daniel on this podcast that i’m referencing and you are piecing together parts
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of a puzzle about the history of human beings that is completely unique i’d never heard that
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before a lot of that so so maybe you could teach me about how how did you learn those things
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Do you know what I mean?
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Like, how do we even go down rabbit holes?
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I think people talk about Bitcoin as being a test.
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And typically, I hear one of a few different, you know, modifiers to describe that test.
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It’s an IQ test.
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It’s an ego test.
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It’s a humility test.
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And every act of learning is an act of humility.
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It’s an admission of ignorance and an effort to rectify that ignorance.
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So I think that, you know, in mathematics, which is my, you know, that’s the area I got my degree in. When I’m proving something, I have to be able to look over my shoulder and say, well, is there anything I missed? Because all I need is one counterexample to blow up my argument.
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And, you know, in the scientific method, the same thing sort of happens is there’s this radical honesty, this constant checking over one’s own shoulder to make sure that one has not missed anything.
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And so it’s important to be receptive and to remain open and leave room for the unknown and be willing to receive new information and, where appropriate, reassess prior assumptions in the light of that new information.
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Cool. And so where does the scientific method then – is that something that can be reapplied, do you think?
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So, of course, you’ve got the primary set of three physical sciences of physics and chemistry and biology.
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You’re talking about a scientific method that can be applied to all three.
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Is that same method applicable elsewhere in life, like as an educational process, perhaps?
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I mean, and to frame that, Red, what I’m thinking about is what does the optimal 25-year-old actually look like?
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and therefore you know if you if you’re setting goals or setting visions or setting
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whatever strategy it might be you need to like where are you trying to get to
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and what you’ve just mentioned actually strikes me as a very good almost core protocol for anyone
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to be able to use and reapply to different things yeah i would say that uh like the optimal 25 year
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old is someone who is probably generally capable in, you know, your typical subjects, your reading,
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writing, arithmetic, but mostly they are curious, diligent, inquisitive, humble, and
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And I think having a daily study habit is probably a really ideal thing to get into.
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And someone like a well-finished product in that regard has some important knowledge of the self, how they learn as an individual.
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Also, I mean, there’s what Gardner had a theory of like seven different forms of intelligence.
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I think people have expanded it out to nine different forms of intelligence.
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So we talk about being well-rounded and trying to develop in each of those areas would be appropriate.
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I think that, yeah, the idea of being an autodidact, someone who teaches themselves things, especially in the age of the Internet,
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Like we’ve got access to the world’s information.
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People used to have to travel really far distances to get a hold of information.
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Even just when I was a kid we used to have to drive to a library in order to get books We didn have Internet in my house know I was probably in like third or fourth grade And I took pretty good advantage of it I think but like I sure I
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could have done better. And I think that’s true of most people. I think also a well-developed 25
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year old would not just understand how they learn and how they process information. But when you
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think about it, education between people is really just about communication. So it would be ideal for,
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you know, a fully developed 25-year-old graduate to understand how other people learn and understand
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how to switch between different modes of operation in order to communicate most effectively
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with each individual with whom they are communicating. It’s not always possible because
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you’re going to be giving a presentation in a boardroom to, you know, a dozen people, or you’re
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going to be giving a talk at a conference hall in front of a thousand people or something. It’s not
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possible to tailor it to each individual, but you can still apply that same idea and just, you know,
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widen the circles. It’s going to get somewhat diluted, but I mean, when in Rome, right,
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preach how the Romans would like for you to preach, right? It’s basic golden rule stuff.
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and it’s very interesting that you bring up the romans actually because something that i really
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stopped and stopped me in my tracks maybe think twice about it was like i touched the very start
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this idea of reincarnation that you were speaking of and the the romans and their quest for for power
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and control this very centralized system that they were building across the roman empire
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did a very good job of squashing the concept of reincarnation,
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specifically because what’s easy to control?
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Someone that knows that they’re going to reappear in another life
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with another body or someone that’s scared of death.
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And I was like, oh my God, that wasn’t obvious to me.
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And I was someone who was, I suppose, scared of death.
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You know, you’re like, hang on a second,
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what would it look like or feel like if you were to shift that?
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And the same can be true for education. So where did I suddenly get that idea from? Well, I got that idea from listening to a podcast. Okay, well, AI is moving so fast. You know, the idea of a web search is almost obsolete. Like, isn’t that extraordinary to think that Google search got into such a massive business because people couldn’t find anything online, it’s all hidden on websites. And now it’s like, nah, you just have an AI, thanks very much.
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so from from your perspective i’d love to know red so do you have a daily learning habit
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and and like how have you got to this position you’re in today in terms of your study
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and your curiosity um because obviously everyone’s going to be different but what works for you
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i mean my i’ve generally been curious my whole life i’ve always loved learning i was reading
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when I was four. I was doing multiplication problems when I was seven. Certainly, there are
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kids out there way more advanced than me, but just to demonstrate my interest in these things,
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at this point, my current research vendor is three plus years old. It started off when I was
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given my name by a Native American medicine man who unfortunately is no longer with us as of
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September 2025. But boy, did he impact my life. As far as daily study habit goes, I try to do
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something that is related to my life goals every day. And I developed these goals when I was
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working at this learning center, you know, 15, 20 years ago. And they are in order to understand,
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to be understood and to have a positive impact on the world.
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So if I’m not learning myself, it’s because I’m, you know, trying to be understood that day.
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It’s, you know, one of those days as opposed.
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And just because I’m being understood on a given day, just because I’m doing a study group episode or something
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where I’m talking about stuff and offering people insights from my research related to whatever it was that we were reading through,
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that doesn’t mean that I’m also not going to do some of my own research that day, I guess. It’s
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just, I try to at least do something towards those goals every day. One of my favorite ways to learn
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is to leverage the existence of multiple forms of books. Also, like other people’s sort of book
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reports, right, on YouTube or Rumble or whatever. So like, if I want to learn about Giordano Bruno,
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I’m going to queue up half a dozen videos about him and his life and his philosophy and his teachings on YouTube.
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And I’m going to listen through that. And it’s going to be a lot like, you know, pinging cell phone towers, trying to triangulate the location.
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And I can get a good sense of who Bruno was, what he was about.
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You know, this video picks up what these didn’t and these all pick up things that the other ones didn’t.
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So I get a good mixing of that.
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And then oftentimes what I’ll do is I’ll buy the physical book.
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So I have something to mark and underline.
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I will look for a searchable e-book, like a PDF or something.
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And then I’ll listen to the audio book because that allows me to get other things done.
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Just like listening to the radio, right?
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In the old time mechanic shops or whatever, you got the radio playing.
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And people are able to function stack through their ears while they’re getting other stuff done more often than not.
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And that’s a good way to at least put that sensory input mechanism to work when it might otherwise not be at work.
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So I’ll listen to the audio book.
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When I hear something notable, I will pause it.
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I will go to the e-book and search for what it was that I heard, that exact quote.
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and that’ll help anchor me. Where am I in the book? Am I in chapter 13, you know, four,
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four paragraphs deep into it or something. All right, now let me go to chapter 14,
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four paragraphs deep in my physical book and mark it for future ease of reference.
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So that’s a good way to work my way through material without necessarily costing myself
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much in the way of time. Because when I’m sitting there reading something,
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I’m locked in place. There’s nothing else I’m going to be doing for that period of time. And
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it’s a necessary thing. There’s some stuff out there that I can’t find audiobooks for or ebooks
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for, and I really need to read through it because based on my initial previewing, my initial
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canvassing, I guess is the right word. This is a book of interest and I just, I need to look through
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it. Well, so be it. But I try to streamline the process and make it as efficient as possible.
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And so Red, I mentioned already the kind of rise of AI. Do you use AI in any way to assist with this
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kind of intellectual quest? Almost inescapably because it’s become attached to the search engines,
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but I actually don’t have any AI subscriptions and I have never used any free AIs with very few
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exceptions. I tried my hand at throwing together some AI images, I don’t know, a year, two years
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to go whenever it was.
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But no, I haven’t really used it much at all.
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I’ve got probably 200 plus pages
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in my sort of research presentation notes
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that will be feeding my book.
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And almost none of that is AI generated content.
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I mean, occasionally I’ll look something up
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because I know that there’s information out there
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and it’s a search engine.
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So that’s where you go to look for stuff, I guess.
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And it gives me good enough information where it’s like, well, actually, I don’t know that I could phrase that much better.
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So I’m going to copy and paste that in.
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But like, I would say that’s well less than 1% of any content I’ve generated so far.
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Because one of the things that concerns me is essentially truth.
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Like, what’s real?
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and you know in some ways that the experience of let’s say like a grok or something you type in
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your question and it gives you an answer claude will give you a different answer chat gpt gives
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you a different answer venice gives you a different answer maple gives you a different answer
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they’re all pumping out a different response to the same prompt which is in itself interesting and
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like all tools it’s up to the user to decipher what the tool is telling them or how to use the
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tool um but from this perspective of education um what would it mean if if people were so
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intellectually lazy that they would just type something into one thing and just like accept
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that as the answer like how do you know that’s real so you’re getting into the study called
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epistemology, which is like the study of knowledge and how do we know that something is knowledge.
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It’s a good area of study. In fact, that epistemological solipsism was one of the
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first philosophies that I encountered in philosophy 101 in college that like really shook me and shook
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the foundations of my sort of understanding of reality because I had been raised in one specific
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religious tradition, all the way up until that point, all the schools that I’d gone to were
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from that religious tradition. And so all of a sudden here I was being exposed to epistemological
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solipsism and I’m like, I got nothing. I don’t know how to refute this as an idea. I got to
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sort of step back and be honest and be like, all right, I guess I don’t know what I thought I knew.
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And there’s all these other ideas out here. Yeah, I think that that’s an important thought.
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I think this gets back to the homeschooling versus institutional or state schooling issue.
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They’re teaching us what to learn, not how to learn.
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I know that in the U.S., the Prussian schooling model, Prussia with a P, was brought back over to the U.S. by a guy named Horace Mann.
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And the Prussian model was designed to create products, graduates, that were ideal candidates for military service, government clerkship, or factory work.
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And furthermore, this gets right into the NPC factory part.
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All graduates were meant to have similar opinions on all major subjects of import of that day and age.
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It would be debated or discussed in parlors, etc.
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So it reminds me of a book that I’ve read called Free to Learn by someone called Peter Gray.
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I believe that’s the right title and author’s name.
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and it’s it’s probably the best book i’ve read that gives a uh he himself is an academic so he
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brings a tough research lens to like what the hell is this thing and one of the one of the
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rabbit holes i hadn’t been down before was the the use of education in combination with religion
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to basically condition people to a way that a certain subset of a society wanted.
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It’s like, who’s in charge and what do they want?
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And, oh, look, maybe we can use this whole, like, oh, let’s give them free schools.
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And it seems so stupid in hindsight.
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But that was very interesting, in particular,
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how different religious groups in Europe have then moved to different parts of the world
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and it’s affected the educations in colonies, so to speak.
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And the other was the concept of a hunter gatherer tribe.
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And when you think about this very simple first principles process you got a tribe that largely mobile and the children from what this guy studied in what is as close a representation of that in modern life
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you know, an African tribe that he went to go and see,
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the 10-year-olds helping the five-year-olds
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that’s helping the one-year-old.
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And they’re all hanging out with each other.
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They’re completely left to their own devices
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with no rules whatsoever.
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and it’s what he ultimately describes as kind of self-directed learning and you’re like oh my gosh
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that’s nature right there you know you you get it wrong you hurt yourself well you don’t do it again
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you get it really wrong well you can’t repeat the same mistakes you’re you’re dead you know that’s it
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um and so just just really interesting thinking about the the the way that things evolved to bring
0:27:07
us to the present day like how did that even come about you know yeah um i mean the the idea of
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if you can teach it then you know it rings true and that’s uh something that we used to do
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at our learning center when our classroom was perhaps experiencing peak student flows
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we would be open after school or on weekends for some number of hours and students would sign up
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for hour-long time slots. So it was never really a perfect distribution and we had times of high
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volume and times of low volume. And in times of high volume, if my section was a little bit
0:27:53
over flooded with students, I would do that. I would sort of kill two birds with one stone,
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so to speak, and have a higher level student who I knew had already mastered a certain discipline or subject or what have you,
0:28:08
work with a student who needed help with that, that gave the older student the opportunity to sort of more precisely formalize their understanding.
0:28:20
Because, you know, there’s there’s passive learning and there’s active learning. Right.
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And when you are working with your youngest kids on left versus right, because, you know, that’s a necessary thing for writing letters and it’s a necessary thing for understanding place value in numbers.
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And you’re driving down the road and, you know, a yellow car is passing you on the left and you say, oh, the yellow car is passing on the left.
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That allows them to look both directions and be like, oh, oh, that way is left.
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right that that would be a passive execution if you had said which side of the car is the yellow
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car on then they have to first identify where the yellow car is and then remember and apply
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their knowledge of left versus right so passive versus active execution i think is at play there
0:29:14
um yeah yeah interesting red and it’s yeah a game we’ve been playing recently is rhyming words
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together so you know what sounds like box or what sounds like dad or whatever might be the case and
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you can play it in the car and it doesn’t take long as a game you know in a few minutes everyone’s
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bored and we’re doing something else but it’s amazing how the the what they get so good at it
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right boom all these words you’re not even thinking of are coming back at you like wow
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okay cool and and that in some ways i think is what we’re learning we’re capable of as parents
0:29:53
like taking them and and not it’s basically not outsourcing the education of our child
0:30:00
it’s like we reckon we can do it and we think that the decision to do that is the optimal thing for
0:30:06
that child in their life and that’s ultimately a decision that a parent has to make and many
0:30:11
parents will say well i think actually they better socialize in a school and they’re better off going
0:30:15
to do that and that’s you know that’s totally fair enough um the there’s so much i still need
0:30:21
to learn but i think one of the key points that we’ve come across that would resonate with you
0:30:25
probably read is that it’s about as much primary caregiver exposure as possible before the age of
0:30:31
seven and that comes up in different areas whether you’re looking back in kind of ancient
0:30:38
tribes and how they would manage their children like seven seems to be a very important period
0:30:45
in a child’s life essentially and that’s really our aim is if we can keep them at home as much
0:30:50
as possible in and around us for the first seven years then we’ll see what the next step looks like
0:30:56
after that but it’s it’s yeah that made me think of sitting in the car and playing the the word
0:31:00
rhyming game so i can do that next time it’s like the the yellow car is passing us now what side is
0:31:06
on would be active um whereas if i said the yellow car is passing along the left now they
0:31:13
would have to look and say oh that’s left yeah okay i can play that what other games can you
0:31:18
think of that would be useful uh so for example with your when you want to try to establish a
0:31:27
daily study habit you want the when you get the study habit established there’s going to be a
0:31:35
governing factor in terms of what limits the length of the session. Because, you know, you don’t cook
0:31:43
food for three hours just because you can. You cook it for the right amount of time every time,
0:31:47
right, as ideally as you can. So there’s two ways that a session can be sort of limited by the
0:31:55
child’s feedback, and that can be physical exhaustion or mental exhaustion with the topic.
0:32:00
And so when we’re talking about physical exhaustion with something like paperwork, that’s going to mean handwriting muscles.
0:32:08
So as a sort of preparatory game to get the child’s handwriting muscles up to speed, you could use like graph paper and do circle races where you’re just drawing circles inside of the squares.
0:32:21
And that’s going to you think about especially the English lowercase letters, how many curved lines there are.
0:32:29
That’s going to begin to develop the handwriting muscles before, you know, written work is part of sort of the daily task.
0:32:39
So that’s a fun game to play, especially for like younger kids who you’re trying to develop towards the point where it’s not that physical exhaustion that’s governing the end of the study session.
0:32:52
It’s the mental exhaustion. And that’s a key component as well.
0:32:56
You mentioned that your family gets bored after so many minutes of playing that game.
0:33:03
That’s a sign of exhaustion with the subject or what we would call saturation.
0:33:10
We called it the window of absorption at the learning center I worked at.
0:33:14
And in general, the neurological average amount of time that a person can focus on, say, an average task is 19 minutes before they desire a switch task.
0:33:26
or at least it was before TikTok culture became a thing and everybody got the attention span of a
0:33:31
hummingbird drunk on Mountain Dew. But the 19 minute window is a good sort of starting target.
0:33:39
And then you can adjust it from there based on observations or, you know, known information,
0:33:46
like smaller kids are going to have perhaps less of an attention span, but that’s not necessarily
0:33:51
the case. I’ve seen, you know, four-year-olds, five-year-olds that have 45-minute long absorb
0:33:57
windows on things. And, you know, they’re happy to sit there the whole time. They don’t have any
0:34:04
silly mistakes that start to creep in after a half hour. They don’t start to get antsy,
0:34:08
you know, where they want to move around and get up and go look out the window and what’s going on
0:34:13
over there. And so that’s something that has to be individually gauged and not only per person,
0:34:22
but per person, per task. Like I said, for me, I despise maintenance and cleaning, but I love
0:34:29
building. So, you know, I can sit there all day with my power tools and go try and build something
0:34:35
in the backyard. But like when it comes to cleaning up, I don’t enjoy that. And so in order to
0:34:42
prevent it from becoming an issue, I try to just force myself to do at least five minutes of
0:34:49
cleaning every day kind of a thing. And that limits the, you know, it splits it up and spreads
0:34:54
it out and makes it tolerable, which is also a way of dealing with various, you know, education
0:35:01
subjects. Some certain things need to be learned. For example, long division is pretty dry. And,
0:35:08
And, you know, like three digit by two digit multiplication is pretty dry.
0:35:12
So but it needs to be done.
0:35:14
It doesn’t mean it needs to be the only thing that’s done during a given work session.
0:35:19
We would oftentimes take a booklet of long division and assign one page of that to the student per day, along with something else to occupy most of the time.
0:35:29
or we would mix it up with something that was more critical thinking oriented,
0:35:35
like pattern recognition or, you know, some form of problem solving.
0:35:40
So it’s, do you remember that P90X workout series from like 10, 15 years ago?
0:35:47
No.
0:35:48
They would preach working out a muscle group until that particular group reaches muscle fatigue.
0:35:55
But then they would say, you don’t need to end your workout then.
0:35:58
because you have other muscle groups that you can work out.
0:36:03
So we would have students come to our center for an hour
0:36:05
and we would break it up into three 20-minute sections.
0:36:09
The first 20 minutes was spent on corrections of previous work
0:36:13
because it’s important that we learn from our mistakes
0:36:16
and nobody likes to be confronted with their mistakes.
0:36:19
So let’s get that out of the way first, right?
0:36:22
Then after they’d reached sort of a saturation point
0:36:24
with their corrections work,
0:36:26
They would do something like a puzzle or a game, something that they would encode as play.
0:36:33
But, you know, you’ve probably played with a Rubik’s Cube or some logic puzzles, some manipulatives.
0:36:38
These things very much cause us to think and cause us to sort of calibrate our visual spatial intelligence,
0:36:47
which is good for IQ test type stuff.
0:36:50
You know, Legos, Kinex, all those types of things are good.
0:36:52
And then the third 20 minutes would be whatever we deemed each student required during their classwork time.
0:37:04
And that could be anything from a presentation of a new topic that they’ve never seen before.
0:37:10
It could be like doing exercises, doing repetitions of something that they’ve already acquired, but are still working through the consolidation process.
0:37:23
Or it could be a decay check, checking to see, you know, a subject that they mastered, according to our assessments, maybe three, six months ago.
0:37:37
But as you know, if you don’t use it, you lose it.
0:37:40
And so the concept might decay some, and we want to check and see if they’ve retained, you know, the mastery that they displayed three or six months ago.
0:37:51
Speaking of decay, this is one of the reasons why daily study is so important.
0:37:58
If you search for a guy named Ebbinghaus, E-B-B-I-N-G-H-A-U-S, you’ll find in the images of the search engine a forgetting curve.
0:38:09
what happens is you start up here at 100% concept retention, and then you just start decaying.
0:38:18
And by the time 20 minutes have gone by, you’re down to like 70% or 60% concept retention.
0:38:25
After just 24 hours, you’re down to like 30% concept retention.
0:38:30
So you really want to get that refresh spike back up to 100%.
0:38:34
And then what happens is the decay slope becomes less steep.
0:38:39
And so the next 24-hour period, you see maybe only a 50% loss of concept.
0:38:47
And then you hit it the next day.
0:38:48
And the next day, you only see a 25% concept loss type of thing.
0:38:54
And eventually, you get it to the point where you’re in the high 90s, and you’re probably not going to decay too far out of that range.
0:39:01
You might wind up with a little bit of rust, but you’ll, for the most part, have that concept locked in your long-term memory storage, which gets to one other timing aspect that’s probably important is time of day and daily review at the end of the day.
0:39:19
So some people are night owls.
0:39:21
Some people are morning larks So that a way to profile your kids and try and work with them at times that are going to be best for them when they going to be at their sharpest at their freshest their most capable
0:39:34
because that’s going to reduce frustration.
0:39:36
That’s going to reduce committing silly mistakes because they’re tired and it’s not a good time of day for them.
0:39:43
As for end-of-day review, or honestly, if they’re young enough and they’re taking naps,
0:39:50
trying to schedule things such that there’s not too much time between when they’re going to have
0:39:58
a sleep cycle and when they’re learning. That’s ideal because the way it works is when you learn
0:40:04
something, it’s like putting it into this short-term memory scoop. And then when you go
0:40:10
through a sleep cycle at night, that scoop turns around and dumps what you’ve learned into long-term
0:40:15
memory storage. So thinking about that Ebbinghaus curve, after just 20 minutes, you’ve lost 30 to 40
0:40:22
percent of the concept. Ideally, you want the concepts that you’re dumping from your short-term
0:40:29
memory into your long-term memory storage to have the highest level of fidelity possible.
0:40:36
So by refreshing your day, by walking through your day before you go to sleep or walking through
0:40:43
the first five hours of your day before you’re taking your nap or something is a good habit to
0:40:48
get into because it refreshes the fidelity level of the memories, including what you learned,
0:40:55
right before you dump it into long-term storage. And Red, so in an environment where,
0:41:05
and often I look at this statement I’m about to make from a kind of entrepreneurial perspective,
0:41:10
such that entrepreneur has idea.
0:41:15
It’s a digital product of some form.
0:41:17
They give half the idea to a technical co-founder.
0:41:20
So you have a CEO and a CTO with 50% each of the idea.
0:41:24
Then they need some money.
0:41:26
So they sell 30% of the idea to a venture capital business.
0:41:29
Now they have some money.
0:41:30
They can hire a team, build out idea, iterate,
0:41:34
hopefully hit product market fit,
0:41:35
and boom, you’re off to the races with the business.
0:41:37
that process is under extraordinary threat and essentially an evolving process where now the
0:41:48
person with the idea can go to ai and vibe code some kind of product such that they don’t need to
0:41:55
give half the idea to a cto and they actually don’t need to sell any of it to a venture capital
0:41:59
business and it’s about the speed of iteration of an entrepreneur and now they can have 10 hits
0:42:04
with 10 different ideas in literally a tenth of the amount of time rather than the VC having 10
0:42:11
hits with 10 different pots of money and one of them wins they don’t care what happens to the other
0:42:15
nine when it comes to ideas and learning and retention of of knowledge like how important
0:42:24
is that in an environment which we can just click a button so for example you touched on mathematics
0:42:31
and the laws of mathematics and certain types of division multiplication tables.
0:42:38
I remember them well, you know, from my days at schools.
0:42:41
And there was always one of my friends who was just unbelievably good at the memorization of them.
0:42:47
You know, what’s this number times this number? Boom.
0:42:49
What’s this number times this number? Boom.
0:42:51
Okay, but that now you can type that into a computer and you get the same answer.
0:42:55
so is is is that going to evolve like how we educate ourselves specifically like surely it
0:43:03
must right you don’t need to retain all this stuff any longer um and maybe that’s not what
0:43:07
the brain is best at it’s best at more creative things so what do you think that might have as an
0:43:13
impact yeah i mean um i know that in my classroom calculators were only allowed if you were going
0:43:20
to juggle them. We would require mental calculations or pencil and paper. And the reason for that
0:43:31
is because problem solving is something that the machines can not really replace. I mean,
0:43:42
We can, I guess, work with AI systems and try and train them, but I don’t think that AI is ever going to solve the big mysteries of life because AI does not have the human experience.
0:44:02
So it’s not contending necessarily with what we are contending with.
0:44:07
So ultimately, it’s still a good thing to try and develop the self as much as possible.
0:44:15
I agree with you that, like, you know, relating to the calculator thing, I’m sure AI is now a fight in many classrooms.
0:44:24
People are disallowing AI usage for this or that reason.
0:44:29
I think that it’s good to understand how to use the tools that are available.
0:44:35
but it’s also important not to misuse the tools.
0:44:39
And, you know, it’s like the social safety net is oftentimes used as a hammock
0:44:44
instead of a safety net, right?
0:44:47
And when that happens, we’re making ourselves weaker in certain ways.
0:44:53
To your point, it might free us up to, you know,
0:44:59
do the things that the AI cannot do, like be more creative
0:45:02
and solve things that an AI that doesn’t have the human experience is not going to be able to solve.
0:45:10
I think that would be perhaps more of an instance of understanding how to use the tool appropriately
0:45:16
to free yourself from burdensome overhead tasks and give you more discretionary time to use as you see fit.
0:45:26
I think it’s important for us to develop ourselves still simply because, you know, that’s what’s going to make us either, if not employable, it’s going to make us valuable in the markets.
0:45:41
I mean, the fact is that I doing my job engineering, if I need to do certain calculations, I do them faster in my head than I can do them with the calculator that’s on my phone.
0:45:58
So it and you know, that’s the type of thing that could make or break someone’s career.
0:46:04
You know, imagine the scenario where one of your kids has just totally aced out their mental calculation skills and they were able to land some sort of entry level position.
0:46:20
And they’re in the break room grabbing a cup of coffee at 1030 in the morning when the executive vice president of whatever comes in.
0:46:27
And he’s talking with his assistant about the most recent quarters sales numbers.
0:46:32
and your child happens to overhear the conversation
0:46:38
and extracts a math problem from what the executive VP was just saying
0:46:45
and then spits out the answer like it’s nothing.
0:46:49
And the VP goes, hold on, let me get my calculator out and types it in.
0:46:54
What’s your name?
0:46:56
Where do you work? You’re in the mailroom.
0:46:59
I think we need to have a conversation.
0:47:00
come see me in my office after lunch i think there’s probably more constructive ways for us
0:47:05
to put your abilities to work at this place that’s how quantum leaps might be made and that value
0:47:11
yeah that’s yeah it’s different it’s not about employability it’s about value
0:47:17
um red where i’d like to steer things is first just to to highlight something that we touched
0:47:23
on before that really resonated my my eldest daughter ruby and one of the one of the cool
0:47:30
things of homeschooling is like we’re not on a schedule right so you know if they wake up at
0:47:35
half past five in the morning that’s when the day starts if they wake up at half past seven in the
0:47:38
morning that’s when the day starts there’s no like alarm uniform breakfast car drop off done
0:47:46
um you know look after yourself from age two and a half or whatever people start sending their kids
0:47:51
to child care these days um it it enables them to focus on what they’re interested in at whatever
0:47:58
time of day that might be so sometimes literally quarter past seven in the morning she’ll already
0:48:04
be sat the little art and craft table that she’s got with a um like a felt tip different colors
0:48:10
and she’s already filling in colors on these different notepads she’s got and i’ve kept all
0:48:16
of them i’ve got them just over here actually and and some of it i don’t even know what advanced is
0:48:21
for a five-year-old but you’re like that’s absolutely epic and it’s not like oh five minutes
0:48:27
she can be sat there for ages and ages and ages just completely in the zone loving it and you just
0:48:33
don’t hear from her now should you try and squeeze that into like a fixed time of day
0:48:39
for a fixed period of time it it wouldn’t it wouldn’t work as well whereas like a more more
0:48:46
of a like oh she’s interested in that thing right now you just let her go and that to me is just one
0:48:51
of the beauties of being in the position that we are and i i really look forward to seeing where
0:48:55
that takes her like if that’s what you’re interested in let’s do more of that and that’s
0:48:59
the kind of self-directed almost like a it’s like a momentum thing right they just keep doing what
0:49:04
they’re good at and by the time they’re 16 they’ll be extraordinarily good at whatever field it is
0:49:09
they’re interested in and that will be the value that gives them what they need to get through
0:49:14
their life at least that’s what my bet is um does anything resonate there and then i’ve got a
0:49:21
question for you. I’m in favor of that. I’m in favor of trying to establish a consistent time of
0:49:31
day into like the circadian rhythm where, you know, a study habit is, it may be free study,
0:49:38
whatever you want to do. It may be drawing, it may be, you know, reading, it may be building Legos,
0:49:43
whatever it is, some type of study on a daily basis. And I think establishing a habit helps
0:49:50
make that something that has some sticking power to it.
0:49:56
And like I said, it’s ideal to try and find the time of day that is most conducive to the child.
0:50:04
So if you notice the pattern that your kid is doing things every day at like 1030 in the morning,
0:50:14
then that would seem to be a reasonable time to sort of just slot that in and try to try to maybe direct things in that way to the point where, oh, well, right now it’s daddy’s study time and I’m going to read a book.
0:50:27
It’s 1030 and leading by example, showing them that this is what you do is a way to, you know, foster a similar habit in them.
0:50:38
in general though I think that if you get someone who wants to do something at any given point in
0:50:48
time if it’s a constructive thing I’m all for it I mean self-directed learning is the most powerful
0:50:55
form of learning that was one of the reasons why at the learning center where I worked powerful
0:50:59
forms of love therefore red yes yes just to tie it together whoa that’s pretty powerful I just
0:51:05
thought about that? Yeah, sorry, at the learning center, you? We would use the Socratic method,
0:51:10
and we would use leading questions to ask them, you know, and lead them through the problem
0:51:17
solution process. And it’s a way of preparing them to be independent, because when they, you know,
0:51:26
fly away from the nest, and when they graduate, and they’re going off into the world on their own,
0:51:32
you’re not going to be there with them in every moment and they’re going to need to
0:51:37
have developed some kind of critical thinking skills to contend with the challenges that life
0:51:44
hits them with in any given moment so the way i like to think about it is the old looney tunes
0:51:49
cartoons where they have the devil and the angel on the shoulders it’s like except it’s not a devil
0:51:54
or an angel it’s just like a friend a mentor a guide who asks them interesting questions like
0:52:01
well, you know, you ever seen those toothpick problems or those matchstick problems where you
0:52:06
have to move two sticks in order to make three squares or whatever, like simple questions,
0:52:12
like how many sticks are there? Okay. What, what are you being asked to make? How many sticks
0:52:16
would you need to make that, that, uh, shape, right? And just start asking yourself questions
0:52:22
that give you pieces to play with that you, you can then work through the problem with.
0:52:28
It’s important for, I guess, that reason.