speaker-0: Bro, am I look this slide. Am I mogging right now?

speaker-1: Ha ha ha.

speaker-0: Shall I shall we do an intro? I've got an intro for us. I think might be it might be cool to do an intro. Welcome to the Based Academy. We are your hosts, Sylvan Franklin. It's supposed to be like colour. The speak machine. That's me. Hello.

speaker-1: Man, that was so surreal. That was like a real podcast intro. What am I turning into?

speaker-0: I know, we're selling out, bro. We were talking about what we're gonna what we're gonna do a minute ago. We're not gonna say what we were talking about. We were talking about selling out like literally two minutes ago. It's gonna be great.

speaker-1: We're gonna sell out so fast. ⁓ We're gonna have to do that in such a we'll have to do a whole like meta episode about selling out and like how we're not gonna lose our morals. Like we're gonna have to find God or something, bro.

speaker-0: ⁓ my god. Yeah. We have all these like fake sponsorships planned to trick people into thinking that we're not going to sponsorships. And then one day they're expecting this they're expecting the fake sponsorship, but boom, it's a real sponsorship. ⁓ it's coming. Don't worry. ⁓ sh should we do the learning topic?

speaker-1: What are we talking about today? Yeah, we could hmm we could cut this little transitional phase out as well. It's awesome. The power of editing is awesome. Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Learning learning seems like very solid topic. Like I have a lot to say on learning.

speaker-0: So I don't know if if you can relate to this, but when I was in school, when I was a wee lad, about a hundred years ago when I was in school, I had a very easy time with my schoolwork to the point where I barely I barely did any homework ever because I would just be in class and I would just listen to what the teacher said. And they could never really catch me out because I would just remember like all the stuff. So I never did homework and I got away with it by by doing this. Did you have a similar experience or or were you actually like ⁓ learning what you were told in ⁓ school? How to do homework and stuff?

speaker-1: ⁓ I had to do a good amount of homework. Yeah. I think like the early years of school I was kind of a slacker. I did not like have ⁓ like the organizational skills down, but then like once I started taking classes that were interesting to me, like that problem really went away.

speaker-0: Well, that was the thing, right? 'Cause I most of school was kinda boring 'cause it was, it was just never it was always just nonsense. That was 'cause like I was I remember being nine years old and thinking, these people are trying to waste my time. What am I d what what am I doing here? Why am I wearing a why am I learning about different types of soil in Uganda? How is this gonna how is this gonna ever be useful to me? ⁓

speaker-1: Dude, this topic is is so based. I have so many things to say about that.

speaker-0: Okay, go for it, go for it. Sho share share some of your thoughts.

speaker-1: Yeah, that's so that's a huge thing I had for a very long time is the school system teaches you things and I kind of just listened to a lot of the things that they said, ⁓ because of social ⁓ like like group consensus. You know, like if everyone's like, Yeah, it's worth it to learn this random obscure piece of information, yeah, I'm gonna do it, you know. But like now it's like, well, there's so much stuff you get taught in school that's like, what are you ever gonna do with it? I mean, like It's cool trivia to know, but it seems like there's so much information now in the world and s so many things to y you need to know and not very much time in the day. It's like, why does school teach you a bunch of history trivia, for instance? You know, like that that's a really cool topic for you to go down and not knocking history at all. Like they're that's a an important area of study, but it's like, why does the general population all have to be historians? There's a lot that we learn in school, yeah, that's just like it doesn't keep up with the modern world. So we're gonna need some kind of educational reform at some point.

speaker-0: I think history is important. For for context, my father used to be a used to be a history teacher, so maybe that makes me a bit biased. But I I think that in history they've they always focused on the least important stuff. So they would tell us this year there was a battle, ten thousand people but died, blah, blah, blah, right? But they never discussed the the undercurrents of history. So for example, in in Britain, where I'm currently not right now, I'm in France, just just flexing a little bit. I'm looking over on the on the French countryside right now. It's actually very beautiful. ⁓ there's

speaker-1: Fire truck goes by. If as if on cue.

speaker-0: ⁓

speaker-1: That was not edited in by the way. That was an authentic French prayer truck.

speaker-0: there's this meme in in the UK and I've only ever really it's more of a Western meme and it's like if you could go back in history, would you delete baby Hitler, right? People people always ask this question. And I think that this portrays ignorance of the undercurrents of history, the idea that the things that happened didn't happen because of him specifically. He was just he was just the embodiment of a bunch of frustration that existed prior to him getting getting to power. And so go going back and deleting him as a baby would not have achieved anything. Everything would have still happened pretty much how it did. So that's the frustration that I have with learning. But what I was always interested in is how do you actually learn, right? And I don't mean I don't know about the US education system, but in the Romanian in the R Romanian education system, what they made us do is they made us memorize a bunch of poems all the time. You would literally be given a poem, memorize it and you have to recite it in class. Assuming you're picked. You never knew you you could you could risk not learning it, but if you got picked and you had to stand up and recite it, if you didn't know it, you'd get an F or whatever. And that made me have a very poor relationship with learning. I just happened to naturally be really good at it. And that got me through through school and high school. But as I got older and as I decided to get really into computers and into computer science, I realized that that in itself isn't sufficient. And for a while now I've been thinking about studying and learning methods and how do I ⁓ how do I actually improve my learning ability beyond just my natural ability to do so. And so for example, I noticed that you were talking about flashcards a little while ago. what is your experience with flashcards? Do they do they work for you?

speaker-1: They do work for me. Funnily enough, like I haven't been really using them recently just because life got so busy, but that's a reminder to go back to that hobby. Cause I looked into it. It's a very legit thing that is done by there are a couple people that are like really pushing the scientific basis of it and that are like there's one quantum engineer I think who's pretty famous who does use Anki flashcards. ⁓ and it's essentially just like to keep things in your working memory for a really long time. Like There's so many pieces of information that we pick up and that we can like quickly pick up again if we forget, but kind of in that interim, we don't really hold them in memory. You know, like if you've ever done trigonometry, like do you know the law of cosines, for instance? Like, yeah, I could look at the formula sheet for that and understand what it does, but I'm not holding that in memory. And so what the Anki cards do is they allow you to hold more of these like. pieces of information in memory and access them more easily. So it kind of strengthens your cognition. It like gives you blocks of like fact that you can grab onto much more easily. Because a lot of the time humans, we just kind of vibe out things without really thinking about them. And people I know that are really smart, like they have very strong principles about things that have to be like it have to be verified correct pieces of advice. There's a The little thing I like that's like, is this a fact you you know, a fact you heard, or a fact you made up? And I tend to talk a lot in facts that ⁓ that I've heard. ⁓ but the the what you should be doing is talking in facts that you know.

speaker-0: Okay. Well, this is interesting because you see, I kind of view to use the the phrase that you just used, talking about fr ⁓ about facts that you know versus facts that you've heard about. I kind of I view r ⁓ what I think to be real learning. I view it as facts that I know, and I view ⁓ flashcards kind of as fac initially as facts that I hear about. I I for example, I've I've kind of struggled with flashcards. I find them very useful in some cases. So if I if I need to learn something that is kind of disconnected or disjointed or just not in my web of knowledge, I think that they're quite useful. Almost like I almost keep them as like a way to quickly reference quickly reference information as opposed to, you know, like if I need to refresh something, I can just quickly search for my database of flashcards and I can go, ⁓ yeah, that's what that thing is. But I find that for learning, for deeply learning, for actively learning things, I don't find them very useful. I I find that The only way that I can truly learn something. Is that peeping going from your end?

speaker-1: ⁓

speaker-0: Beast it stopped, but there was some beep. ⁓ no it's back. Is your fire alarm going off?

speaker-1: They have fire alarms. This house is too old. I can listen ⁓

speaker-0: Silver's on the move.

speaker-1: What is this?

speaker-0: This is not a bit by the way, this is actually happening. Okay.

speaker-1: Yeah, y you guys get the real life podcast experience. We don't we're not in any fancy studio. Bro, we're just two guys in houses.

speaker-0: Yeah, we haven't sold out yet. We don't have the proper yet.

speaker-1: Dude, shit's shit happens in real life. We live in the real world. Nothing goes down. You have to deal with it.

speaker-0: You're you're you're a bit too far for the for the microphone, by the way, you're kinda cutting out. Like I I don't know if you can still hear

speaker-1: Yeah, I can hear it.

speaker-0: Okay, perfect.

speaker-1: Alright.

speaker-0: Okay. Yeah. I'm leaving the entire thing in, I'm not I'm not I'm not gonna remove that. So like I find them that for ⁓ for app ⁓ yes. Should we just give them like five seconds of dead air? 'Cause we value we value their time a lot.

speaker-1: Leave that in, leave that in. That's in the Yes. No, I don't think we should.

speaker-0: So ⁓ my god. So for for active learning, I find that if I wanna take something from a fact that I've heard and convert it into a fact that I know, I need to think about it. I need to like I'll I'll put something in my working memory and I'll I'll kind of shuffle it around and I'll think about it from various angles. Sometimes I have to just leave it to my subconscious mind to to deal with it for a while. And At some point that knowledge becomes internalized and it becomes something that I a fact that I that I know as opposed to a fact that I've that I've heard.

speaker-1: Right. Yeah, that that's a great distinction. And it's kind of weird. I don't really understand very well the the area Anki fits in between those two things. I I guess it might rest above facts that you know. Like there are many things that I know, but I just maybe aren't I'm not like applying them actively, if that makes sense. Like I I I don't remember that such and such a fact exists, but if I knew ⁓ if I if I had it in my memory, I'd be using that more. And I think you can kinda see this in like when you talk to people and when you read a book, there's this immediacy bias you get where things that are kind of in your infosphere are going to be regurgitated. So it's it's really interesting. If you've ever noticed like you have kind of a mix of the personalities of like the five people around you. Or at least you kind of you use their their their ⁓ language and their habits and like you probably have similar hobbies to them. And then same thing goes for like books that you read. You'll read a book about something and you'll start seeing that everywhere. It's the like, if you have a hammer, everything is a nail problem. So the the real utility with these Anki cards, right, is maybe you want to be thinking in a very engineering mindset, a very mathematical mindset. You could have all these different kind of useful math principles and facts that you would otherwise forget pulled into your infosphere and regulating constantly. And I've seen this done for cooking as well, where people will ⁓ like memorize like why you do certain steps in cooking and memorize why ⁓ you know you you should use certain vegetables together because of food chemistry or whatever. And that's like if you go to cook, you're gonna constantly kind of be checking a little recipe. But if all that information is just like facts that you know, like bouncing into your head, you can be a very effective cook without slowing down to check anything.

speaker-0: I find this to be very interesting because I was thinking about this the other day, right? The the value of of ⁓ whether you want to call it memorizing or like internalizing information. Like people people keep saying things like, Bro, I don't need to learn anything, I can just look it up. And ⁓ a a an extension of this argument is bro, I don't need to know anything, I can just use AI. I just think that if you if you bother to learn things, you're just so much faster. Imagine. Trying to do basic math without memorizing the multiplication table. Like you would what was four times five again? Let me ask let me ask Gemini, maybe it will tell me. Like there there has to be obviously you can't learn everything. You can't keep everything.

speaker-1: Dude, can we pause to appreciate the fact that it used to be if you had four times five you would shift some bits around and now we send it to a data center where like billions of dollars of linear algebra will run on it so it can send you back like four row. What weird times.

speaker-0: I mean if you if you wanted to do it with bit shifting, you'd have to do like you'd have to shift it twice to the left, right? 'Cause that would that's five if you ⁓ if you shift it to the left once it's times two. And if you shift it to the left a second time, ⁓ it's times two again. So you're actually ⁓ I guess that's how you do five times four in with ⁓ bit shifting.

speaker-1: And see I don't I don't know that. I don't have like the bit facts in my head. But I know those bit facts. Like I've I've been there before. I've seen that material, but it's just like if I onky'd that I could have that information floating around.

speaker-0: Well, there you go. Well like well, that's the thing, right? Like like for example, you may not need to know this information, but maybe you do, right? Like it depending on who you are. And so there must be some sort of some sort of b ⁓ balance between, okay, you don't have to know every fact in the universe, but ⁓ you know, maybe 'cause I I really like low level pro programming and so that's why I'm more interested in in bitwise operations. Cause the reason why the reason why you want to know about bitwise if you want to do low level stuff Is because it's actually far more efficient to do bitwise operations than to do normal operations. ⁓ so for example, if you want to do a division for a CPU, that's actually a bunch of of of things that need to happen. It's a very expensive ⁓ operation to perform. However, if you can turn it into multiplication and division by two, all you do is you convert the number into binary and then you shift. You shift the you shift the number around. And by doing so, you're actually easily like for example, zero is zero and one is one in binary, right? One zero is two. So if you think about it, all you did is you took the one and you shifted it to the left by adding a zero, and you multiplied you you multiplied one by two and now you have two. And if you have one zero, which is two, if you shift it to the right, so you remove the zero and you just have a one. You've divided by two. And so if you do it this way, this is actually a much more effective way to do multiplication and division than it would be to do actual multiplication and division. Damn. Yeah. So if you bother to learn a binary, f for for example, if you if you if you know that the ⁓ sixty nine and binary is one zero zero zero one zero one, then that's the actual binary for for sixty nine, by the way.

speaker-1: Yeah.

speaker-0: then you can actually start thinking about a lot more low level stuff and you become a lot more efficient. And I don't think every programmer needs to know this stuff necessarily. But I'm always concerned about what do I what what should I put in my long term memory so that I can be a lot more efficient with this kind of stuff. It's something that I think about a lot. Of course I'm doing the queue now where I drink water, which means it's time for you to talk 'cause that's what we've been doing this entire time.

speaker-1: That's actually really that's a good rhythm to have. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't even notice that. I guess what jumps to mind is like then you need kind of a scheme or schedule of what things you you know, you have to solve a couple problems, right? What things do you want in memory? How many of them do you want in memory? And then you need a system where it's like, okay, how do I actually how do I do that in an effective way? And a lot of people have looked into that question before. I think the big one is that quantum engineer. He did like a bunch of research into ⁓ like the forgetting curve, which is like kind of gives you time at which things decay. So using that, we can kind of construct a schedule that's like maximally effective for the time you put in. Because a lot of people, ⁓ their experience with flashcards is I'll cram right before my history exam or right before whatever. you need to like get a bunch into your head and then like get it out of your head, right? You don't really remember it. And they take a different approach where they're like, Okay, we we need to remind you every three months or something about like a very specific thing. That's enough. ⁓ and so you have kind of a schedule of car like score in ⁓ in each Anki card. So you'll answer it, and then if you get it right, ⁓ its cool down will back off by like a doubling amount. So if you get a question right, you're not gonna get it until two days and then four days and then eight days and then sixteen days. And it goes just infinitely well, I think they cap it at a certain Our memory doesn't get that good. So then it's like ⁓ 120 days, 120 days, 120 basically like ⁓ lots of lots of space. And yeah, that kind of gets you best of both worlds because the cards you get wrong keep coming back over and over again until you're like, okay, I get this concept, and then you kind of shoot it out for the long term. And then long term you can see kind of all the areas you know. Some obsidian people do this. ⁓ and they'll like kind of understand, okay. I have knowledge over here or I've I have explored over here. I can't keep it in memory, but I I know of all those math facts. Right. And then you can have all your flashcards ready and be like, all right, I'm gonna go in math world, just pull out that info into my infosphere, and you can start doing math more effectively. And I mean, personally for me, this is eventually gonna be a necessity because I'm gonna be like wanting to dual wield like skill. skill sets, like I need to be able to both program and kind of do leadership stuff. So I'm gonna have kind of a human behavior and leadership information and then like a technical information sphere. Cause right now, like I've I've done a lot of programming. I've programmed in like OpenGL, but I haven't really used those skills for a long time and they will atrophy if I don't use them. So Anki could be very useful for keeping like random areas of skill you want to return to.

speaker-0: I'm very familiar with the with the learning curve. It's a fascinating concept. And obviously software makes it a lot easier to deal with it 'cause you don't have to also can you hear the someone banging outside, like doing construction outside?

speaker-1: Yeah, that's authentic.

speaker-0: Yeah, yeah, that's what it is. Yeah. ⁓ I wonder I wonder if they speak English. That'd be funny. They just say hello. Yeah, we can hear you. I I wonder about because I mean first of all, software is really good at a sorting at dealing with the whole learning curve thing because you don't have to keep track of which cars you did when. But ⁓ what I'm more preoccupied with is this concept of wrapping learning around emotions. So something that I think a lot of people don't know about is that ⁓ we're gonna get a bit brosciencey here, but I think the d gener the general spirit of what I'm gonna say is pretty evident. Your brain doesn't prioritize you retaining information, it prioritizes your survival. ⁓ what it actually wants to do is it it's actually expensive to hold on to a bunch of knowledge. So it tries to prune and remove anything that you don't need. So if you walk through a forest and you encounter a bear, you're not gonna remember the thousands of trees you walk past, but you're gonna remember where that bear was. ⁓ Alternatively, w if you find honey, you're gonna remember where that honey was because you're gonna try and see if you can find some more. Both these events trigger a strong emotional emotional reaction. And that's what seems to make learning very very efficient, very effective. Like your most your most positive and your most negative feelings that you've ever had are d are some of the most vivid memories that you have. When you felt a lot of pain or when you're very when you were very, very happy. you never really forget those things. And so I'm interested in using ⁓ in using this to learn things in a way where it's kind of difficult to ever forget them. I made a video about this talking about how I d I don't think learning with AI is a good idea, primarily because it strips it strips you of that joy of figuring stuff out for yourself, of waiting for complexity. ⁓ Like when I wrote my when I when I worked on my spell checker in C, the code is actually out on my GitHub link down below, wink wink. I haven't made a video about it yet. I know. But ⁓ when I was working on this program, there were multiple points within it where I felt intense joy because I'd figured something out that I was struggling with for some amount of time. ⁓ sometimes and People like pe people who get it, they get it. Like what if you ever experienced that, it's such a beautiful feeling. When I when I was stuck on something with the like I was trying to make it faster, because it was relatively relatively slow. And I thought, okay, I'm gonna read a book on C specifically to try and figure out how to make this program faster. And I came across static storage duration, which is when like if you have a function and you call this function, and in this function, let's say you assign a bunch of like a string to a variable. Every time you call this function, those variables pop into existence, their values are assigned, operations are performed, and then they all disappear once the once the function returns. Now what if you have a function that you that you call hundreds of thousands of times during the runtime of the program? Well you can actually put the word static before the declaration of that variable. So what you're doing is you're saying, hey, keep this in memory. Once this function returns, keep that in memory. Don't don't ⁓ don't remove it. And so if you end up calling a function hundreds of thousands of times, it's actually a lot faster. And so when I ran the program with this change, it was twelve times faster. It just for this from this one small change. And I'll never forget about static storage duration ever. It was such a beautiful feeling. And I'm trying to wrap my learning around this, which is why I'm making my my learning more difficult, more frustrating, which seems counterintuitive. Because people keep telling me, No, bro, AI is so much easier, I can ask you questions. Sure, but being exposed to information does not equal learning that information.

speaker-1: Yes, dude. Yeah. That's a huge realization to have. It also brings up a great point of like emotional reward to learning is essential. And I heard this before once, like, ⁓ I don't know, you can't really replicate what a teacher does. Like we we put all this like ⁓ kind of emphasis on the student usually for learning and like how they figure stuff out, but not so much emphasis on the fact that teachers are like doing things in a very precise, dedicated way. Like they are really a big part of the learning process. And we could maybe like, ⁓ the whole discussion on this, we can kick to our like mentors podcast, which is gonna be after this, ⁓ and how how those relationships work. But ⁓ I could touch on briefly the fact that, ⁓ so I programmed under I mentored under three or four different programmers in different areas just to like explore those areas. ⁓ And I could always do it for two or three weeks before like my motivation to do it just fell apart. I got burnt out because it was just too much ⁓ like hard technical stuff without enough kind of reward. Like you said, those moments where you figure stuff out is what keeps you going. It's like the joy in the process. And so this latest mentor I have like is much more steeped in learning theory. So he knows like When when someone is kind of struggling to figure something out, sometimes they need to be like lifted up a little bit and complimented or encouraged or given some more help in a certain area. And if you're doing that with AI, it's not really gonna do that for you. You're just all on yourself to figure out when when you're stuck, like what you need. And ⁓ it's really hard to know before you've learned certain things. There are certain lessons you're just gonna learn the hard way. You're gonna say like and do dumb things. ⁓ Especially when you're learning to program, it's like you're just kinda blind. But if someone has like done it before and they can help you along, that helps tremendously. it's not even close to AI. ⁓

speaker-0: Rewarding good behavior is something that a lot of teachers, teachers struggle with. I think a lot of teachers are very mediocre. I've had I've had the privilege of actually having more good teachers than a lot of people. But my for example, ⁓ it's it's it's good when that happens. It's really nice when that happens. But it doesn't happen to most people. However, I had a I didn't have a particularly good maths teacher when I was in school. And so I was under the impression that I hated math. I thought Bro, this math thing sucks, right? And the the thing that she struggled with, and the thing that a lot of teachers struggle with, and I'm not sure what the solution is given the size of a class of students, but what they struggled with was whenever you did get a win, whenever you did figure something out, you were never given the time to enjoy to savor that feeling. It was always like, you get it, cool, next, next topic. And I would always think, well, hold on a second. Wait, I just figured this stuff out. Can't I just do some more exercises? Like just so I can feel good? So like why can't I just do more exercises on this? Because I get it now. It's like, no, no, you get you have a next thing. And it's like, okay, so this entire process is just punishment. There's no the the you you never get allowed, you're never allowed to actually enjoy the feeling of getting something. I'm not sure how you solve this with.

speaker-1: Yeah.

speaker-0: 'Cause I don't know about the US. Romania is has very large classes. So, not to get too deep into this, but ⁓ when I say class I don't mean the whole year. I mean the way that it works is you have each year is divided into into class A, class B, class C, D E, whatever. And ⁓ depending on the overarching topics that you do, you get to be in a different class, right? So for example if you do ⁓ languages, philosophy, more like like Like social sciences, you get to you get to be in A, if you do biology or in B, if you do math, whatever, like this there's different cla classes, right? My class in secondary school was like 40 kids. So a teacher would have to teach to 40 different children at the same time. Which there's n like there's no way that that can end in any kind of like you can't you can't do any kind of actual teaching when that happens. I'm not sure. You just have to present material and just hope that that things work out somehow. So I don't know what the solution is, because other than just somehow shrinking the size of classes dramatically. Maybe I mean they say the AI might be the solution to this, where each kid can have their own individual individual teacher as it were. I'm not sure about that. I that sounds kind of spooky.

speaker-1: Very spooky because you could engineer anything into those kids. The the way we can do social programming and conditioning has come a long, long way. It's a scary thing. And yeah, that's a great, great point on the size of classes, for sure. I've I've always thought, well, always like six months ago, my ideas change a lot these days, but ⁓ I guess like that if instead of a single teacher for 20 kids, you had more kind of like You have a mentor and then like five or six kids, maybe, because there are just I think too few interests for just how divergent of like interests there are out there in the world. Like I I mean subjects in school. And and even from a young age, like I think it's a little weird to teach like these segmented subjects. Like I think you should pursue not what someone else is interested in, but what you're interested in. And that could be like, honestly, in my opinion, in almost anything, like If you want to learn cooking before English or whatever, go ahead. Become a great cook from a young age. And the other thing I think with with teachers and mentors, really good ones at least, is we shouldn't define them by their exact knowledge and context. Like a math teacher is not just some guy who who tells you about math. My good math teachers told me a lot of life lessons. They told me like how to balance finances. They told me like about I don't I don't know. Mentors just In a way, we're gonna get to the mentorship episode by accident every time, but they have a way of just like ⁓ telling you lots of other like important life lessons. And it's kind of like real teachers, ⁓ it's kind of like going on a journey with another person. And and you mentioned being bad at math. I think that's a really good example. ⁓ math teachers like are to blame for a lot of that because math just needs a certain It needs a certain touch when you're teaching it to people because it is really hard and you have to acknowledge that. It's it's not fun. ⁓ the rewards are like they're they're infrequent because it's so abstract. ⁓ and I had so this guy Johnny I met from he's from like a a grad program in algebraic geometry somewhere in ⁓ somewhere in Europe, and he was teaching me real analysis, which is like the the layer of math above calculus. It's brutal. It's it is really abstract. ⁓ I was really struggling with it until he came along and he just like, even though he knows ten times more math than I do, he was willing to sit down with me and like explain the math to me. And when you're doing math with another person who can kind of like reward you and say, Good job, all right, you got that. Like try a few more problems, you know, and and really like revel in that feeling of you you've achieved understanding. It's also like Someone can help enrich the experience quite a lot by pointing out things you might not have noticed. Like he'll say, like, Isn't this beautiful, the symmetry in this math? And you can look at it over here in the world. That's an example of that symmetry. Like they'll point out they'll just kind of take a a mental walk with you and point out the sites there are and the knowledge you otherwise would have missed. So I'm very pro teacher.

speaker-0: I mean, I'm very pro teacher as well. It's it's just that it's hard to be a good one. And I think that the people who might be the best teachers typically choose not to be. Another role of a good teacher, something that an AI could never do, is to decide how whether to present you with something or how to present it to you. So, you know, if an AI has a directive of teaching you that X happened, that's what it's gonna do. Whereas a teacher can go, This isn't right. And so I think the human human teachers can actually be really good in that regard 'cause they can actually think for themselves as opposed to having this purely automated system of teaching that can be programmed from from one central point to tell you whatever.

speaker-1: Yeah, sorry, Palantir, you're gonna have to program us ⁓ one more generation of smart humans away first.

speaker-0: It's I I mean I I don't know what the solution is because I mean I don't want to put my my my tinfull hot hat on too hard, but ⁓ I I'm not convinced that most of the education system is actually there for your benefit anyway. ⁓ I don't think it's necessarily designed to actually make you smarter. I don't think that's the point of the education system. ⁓ and I think that you know, this the information is out there. You can spend five seconds looking into it. Yep. But at at no point at no point in school, well, with with a handful of exceptions, most topics in school never felt like they were there to make me smarter. They felt like they were there to make me more obedient, to make me like a lot of it was just a humiliation ritual, ⁓ to get you ready to just do whatever for authority. You know, like ⁓ you have these teachers, especially in middle school, many of them are just completely unimpressive people. They've never really achieved anything. But they Have an inordinate amount of power over you. And for no reason, other than the adults said that we do, so we were the adults, we say that we have power over you, so we do. ⁓ in fact, I can't believe I'm I'm gonna say this. I got into trouble in school. They had all the teachers in my secondary school held a special meeting exclusively about me. Because apparently I was such a pain. Because I was really smart, so they couldn't they couldn't fail me, but I was incredibly uncooperative because they knew that I just didn't respect most of them. And so they were in this problem of like, what do we do with him? 'Cause he keeps talking back at us. We can't fail him. We 'cause we we we ask him questions, he knows the answer. What do we do with this kid? I think they were very happy to get rid of me ⁓ by the time I graduated.

speaker-1: Dude, that y you will not be surprised to hear that that is not the first time I've heard that story from people in this audience. There are a lot of us like that. A lot of people caught on young that it was not all that.

speaker-0: Yeah. It's I mean I I often I I try not to think about it too much because it actually makes me angry when I think about the amount of time that that those ⁓ people stole from me. I know thinking like what could I have done? What could I have learned in that time? Like e even if you played video games that entire time, you would have been better off, unironically. Not that I recommend playing video games all day, but I I just like if if I if I had that time to do whatever, like hey, look, you can't look kid. You can't play video games, but you have you can do whatever you want for the next eight hours. You can read about whatever you want. You can learn about whatever you want. Have fun. Or at least even just talking to each other. Like, hey, you can talk to your to your ⁓ the kids in your class for a few hours. You can do team exercises, you can study whatever. Like there was none of that. It was just sit down for an hour and just listen to what you're told and write stuff down ⁓ verbatim. What a waste what a waste of of potential. My God. I I'd I can't I can't think about it too much 'cause it actually makes me angry.

speaker-1: Dude, you're not even wrong about the video game thing either. Like, I straight up, I I had times where I would spend most of my time playing Pocket Edition Minecraft and listening to like audiobooks. And I'd listen to audiobooks from like all walks of life, you know, about like r just random topics, true crime, like ancient history, like all kinds of podcasts and whatever. And I would do that at the same time. Like, Minecraft is like gives you It's kind of a precursor to programming, right? It introduces you to here's a system you can interact with with commands and command blocks too. Yeah. It it walks you right up until full programming. It's great. And that's honestly part of the a a lot of programmers probably got onto it because of that. Like it it's truly a great game for that. Like it's turned into a programming educational platform almost because like, yeah, you can go from, you know, I'm gonna make like a a chicken farm that's automatic. with redstone to I'm gonna make like a guardian farm. This is gonna be really complicated to like, okay, what can I do with redstone? Whoa, there are command blocks. Alright, I'm gonna start learning Java and then you're like, ⁓ I could mod this whole game. Then you're straight up programming at that point. You've been stepped up the ladder.

speaker-0: I played a lot of Minecraft and it's true. It devo it develops something about something some part of your brain that makes you better at programming. It helps you think about everything as small individual pieces that you can manipulate ⁓ to create a greater thing, which is problem solving. Break everything down into small pieces, right? I think that there are a lot of games like that. ⁓ I don't recommend playing this game because it's it's a massive sinkhole, but there's this game. I used to play this this MMO a lot. It's called Anarchy Online. ⁓ it's the premise of the of this of the game is that there is this planet where this ingredient appear occur occurs and it can only be found on this desert planet and you can use it to do a whole bunch of like magic kind of nanotechnology type stuff. Completely unique original idea that doesn't bear any resemblance to any other franchise. and ⁓ fun fact that the same company has is now developing the Dune MMO, completely unrelated. so this game is it makes a lot of references to Dune of course. It makes a lot of references to mythology, ⁓ to the classics, and it's it's one of the richest, most interesting games that I've ever played. And I played it for years on and off. And it taught me ⁓ it has a very unique skill tree. So for example, depending on which race you pick and profession you pick, ⁓ like Ev every profession and race has access to the same skills. However, for example, if you pick the an atrox, which is like a very buff, big, strong race, if you invest points in intelligence that trickles down, or if it's let's say you invest points in strength, that trickles down to your skill of wielding a one-handed weapon. And if you're an atrox, it's actually cheaper for you to invest in strength, but it's more expensive for you to invest in intelligence. And th this is the same for every other race. It's all like this so different races are more ⁓ in in in the video game I mean, are more suitable for like different professions and using different items. And if you learn about these things, you can then do something called twinking, which I think I guess the term came out before the colloquial use of the term twink. I don't know. But but there was liter like you could you could do things like you could equip a ring which gives you plus ten strength and then you can you can put in an implant which gives you ten intelligence and then you can take out the ring and you can swap it with a different ring which has you to then larger up and like a a level five character could wear like level fifty ⁓ armor essentially if you understood how to solve this problem and how to move pieces around. And I've never seen that mechanism in any other video game ever. I also recommend Jonathan Blow's ⁓ puzzle games. I'm playing Braid right now. It's ⁓ have you have you played Braid?

speaker-1: Dude, we gotta get Jonathan Blow on the fuck. We need that to happen.

speaker-0: I know. It's ⁓ I'm I'm playing for b it would be so sweet if to finally get him on. That would be so nice. ⁓ we'll we'll see. Maybe maybe we get lucky. ⁓ but in in in Braid, ⁓ the whole the whole mechanism is that you can control time. And so the the puzzles revolve around that some items and some actions are independent of time. And so for example

speaker-1: I gotta talk to that guy.

speaker-0: You can do this thing where you can jump into a pit where you would die normally, where there's a key. So you have to jump into the pit to grab the key and then you reverse time and you end up back on the end of the c on the top of the cliff, but now you have the key in your hand. Because that part of it wasn't influenced by the time thing, but where you are physically is. And so as you get through this game, the puzzles become more and more abstract and more and more weird. ⁓ and Like spending hours playing braid is probably a lot more productive than doing whatever most people do, whatever most people do in school at this point.

speaker-1: Say so big time. Yeah. I wanted to quickly this is a little bit of a tangent, but you mentioned ⁓ you mentioned the Dune MMO, and it just reminded me of Dune as a as a franchise as well, because I've heard a lot of people talking, like, ⁓ no, they're turning it into the next Star Wars, you know. ⁓ but I'm actually really in favor of that because even if they they make it bad and mainstream and it turns into just an action franchise, which is kind of what they did in the movies. It'll bring more people to the underlying material, which I think is much better, more accurate description of what human social life is gonna be like. ⁓ especially I love the ⁓ the acknowledgement of the Bene Gesserit, which is Latin for she will have acted well. And those guys are they're kind of like I don't know, it it ties into mentorship and teaching theory as well, but they're like kind of just Very, very smooth with people. They can kind of convince anyone to do anything. And we're getting some pretty cool ⁓ scientific boosts in our understanding of humans and how we engage with the world. ⁓ same thing for learning theory. Like there's a lot about learning and learning to learn in Dune. Like I think the the book itself, I'm really glad it's being brought more and more mainstream. I think everyone should read Dune.

speaker-0: Well, first of all, start tr Star Wars is already Dune. It's i George Lucas borrowed f very heavily ⁓ from Dune. I mean, Tatooine is a desert plan. It's incredible. I mean, it's ⁓ it's it's it's Star Wars, I I like Star Wars, but it is a little bit like Dune for kids. It's

speaker-1: That's awesome.

speaker-0: ⁓ it's ⁓ it's some of the elements of Dune, but with a lot less a lot less of the brutality that ⁓ that Dune has.

speaker-1: Yeah.

speaker-0: Dune is a lot more adult. Especially, I mean, it it gets very controversial. I've read the I've read the original.

speaker-1: Yeah, thinking about the later books.

speaker-0: Very much about it. They get very weird. I mean, to be fair, for those who really like it, you should probably only really read the first four. ⁓ I think the first four are by far the best. ⁓ especially so the fourth one is God Emperor of Dune. That's actually my favorite of this whole it's ⁓ it's my favor it's above in my mind, it's above the first one. Without sp without spoiling, I'm gonna be very vague as I don't want to spoil anything for those who haven't read them.

speaker-1: Yeah, I haven't I haven't actually read that. I'm gonna have to do a book club for the Dune series.

speaker-0: ⁓ it's worth it. It's so worth it. ⁓ but in the the the premise of the fo of the fourth book is that so obviously Paul Atreides is not the hero of Dune. You're you're supposed to you're supposed to relate to him. And I very much did as I when I first read it when I was like thirteen. Thanks Dad for buying me the first book. I very much related to to Paul. I the the the the trick is that once you f once you read the more you read until you realize, ⁓ he's actually He's actually not the hero at all, is he? He's I mean, of course, the whole premise of the whole series is about lack of choice, about lack of control. ⁓ no one because everyone in the series is kind of trapped in these scenarios that they're born into and they have to play them out. And of course, Paul doesn't actually p ⁓ play out his part entirely. ⁓ again, I'm trying to be very careful not to not to ruin anything, but ⁓ his His ⁓ well, his cowardice, his choice not to play his part entirely, actually means that someone else receives that burden. So when you hear about the God Emperor of Dune, it it doesn't refer to Paul. I'll say that. The burden of doing what you one might argue has to be done falls on someone else's shoulders. And ⁓ The whole thing is a tragedy. It's a tragedy of no one asked for any of this. Paul didn't ask to be who he is. no one asked for any of it. Everyone is just hopelessly kind of trapped in this mechanism that keeps rolling forward. And the the problem with the fifth and sixth books is that they lead to a conclusion that never happens because the author died before he could write the seventh and final book. And so if you really like the first four books, you should read the fifth and the sixth one. They get really weird. They do some they do some weird stuff that you that you that you would not be able to do in a film, let's just say that, right? And I mean it p it plays with some really interesting concepts about like ⁓ because they have they have golas, they have like clones of essentially of people, ⁓ and they can awaken memories in them. Like it's it's a whole it goes into genetic memory f for which there's more and more evidence ⁓ of but it kind of ends off ends on a on a cliffhanger. But the first four books are so cool. And I I think that it opens something in my mind that that otherwise wouldn't have been opened. That the idea that you there there are there is information out there which if you can find, can augment your mind. That it doesn't have like i it if there are techniques that you can learn that can make you smarter, they can make you faster, they can make you wiser. ⁓ and it's it's books like these that have opened me, opened my mind to this. to this world where where things you don't have to be a normie, quote unquote. You can actually learn like arcane knowledge that can actually make you a lot smarter.

speaker-1: Big time. I never really thought about that at Dune before, but you open my eyes to the fact that it really does highlight the true nature of life, which is that you have some agency of the things immediately around you. But when it comes to working in groups to do things, you are working with free agents and like all kinds of crazy stuff will happen. It's not like you are the main character who's like, all right, you're you're in charge now, like that you do everything. I love to see those actions from the other people, and that's like ⁓ it really is reflecting my own experience of becoming more competent ⁓ in general and running into ⁓ some like extremely capable mentors. and kind of like I do I make decisions? Yeah, I make some decisions, but I'm kind of riding with like a pack of other people now. Like that there are so many things that are handled in our operation ⁓ by like a few other people. And ⁓ it's kind of like It's it's really nice to show that that like you have you you work in teams and honestly, like we don't even at a certain point, like we are kind of entangled in this situation that ⁓ we were born into or the circumstances led us to, and we can't really do anything about it anymore. It's things will play out, ⁓ as they play out. And ⁓ working with people also like they'll give you certain things to do. They'll really kind of shape what you do in the world, they'll shape your behavior and ⁓ Yeah, it's I I love that about Dune, that everyone has got an agenda and they're always scheming and it shows like you have ⁓ the Bene Gesserit ⁓ scheming like behind the scenes always. Also, for this is a kind of weird, unrelated point, but I think for any of my audience that's like single guys, ⁓ you may not know this about girls, but the smart girls, like the ones that are at the top, are doing crazy schemes like this. Like all the girls that I'm friends with are manipulating well you know, quote unquote. They're they're playing little games with people, but they like are doing this at a mass scale because of social media. They are like ⁓ they are out there making some change in the world. Don't ⁓ don't discredit them ever. Like, there's some there're some powerful women out there.