You don't need college to learn stuff, okay? Everything is available basically for free. You can learn anything you want for free. It's not a question of learning, um, there there is a value that colleges have which is like, you know, seeing whether somebody's, is can somebody work hard at something

including a bunch of sort of annoying homework assignments and still do their homework assignments, uh, and and kind of soldier through and and get it done, you know? That's that's like the main value of college. And then also you, you know, if you, you if you probably want

to hang around with a bunch of people your own age for a while instead of going right into the workforce, um, so I think colleges are basically for fun and to prove you can do your chores, but they're not for learning. But there is a requirement of evidence

of exceptional ability. Like, you just can't if you're trying to do something exceptional, they must have evidence of exceptional ability. I don't consider going to college evidence of exceptional ability. In fact, ideally you dropped out and did something. I mean obviously, you know,

you look at like, you know, Gates is a pretty smart guy, he dropped out. Uh, Jobs was pretty smart, he dropped out. You know, Larry Ellison, smart guy, he dropped out. Like obviously not needed. Generally, you want education to be like as close to a video game as possible.

Like a good video game. Like, you do not need to tell your kid to play video games. They will play video games on autopilot all day. So if you can make it interactive and engaging, then then you can make education far more compelling and far easier to do.

So you really want to disconnect the whole grade level three thing from the subjects, allow people to progress at the fastest pace that they can or are interested in in each subject. It seems like a really obvious thing. I mean, I think like most teaching today is, is a lot like vaudeville.

Where, um, and it's, and as a result, it's just not, not that compelling. It's like somebody's standing up there and lecturing to you and they've done the same lecture several years in a row, they're not necessarily all that engaged or

in doing it. Do you agree with Peter Thiel about the unnecessariness of university, higher education? A university education is often unnecessary. That's not to say it's unnecessary for all people, but I, I think you probably learn about as much or the

vast majority of what you're going to learn there in the first two years, and most of it is from your classmates. Now, for a lot of companies, they, they do want to see the completion of the degree because they're looking for someone who's going to persevere and see

it through to the end, and that's actually what, what's important to them. So it really depends on what somebody's goal is. If the goal is to start a company, I would say no point in finishing, uh, college. Um, so I think that's how it should be and it

shouldn't be that you've got like these grades where people move in lockstep, and so everyone goes through, you know, goes like normally, you know, we'll go through English, math, uh, science and so forth from like fifth grade to sixth grade to seventh grade.

like it's an assembly line, uh, but but people are not objects on an assembly line. That's a ridiculous notion. So how would you educate your five boys? Actually, I created a little school. Yeah, what kind of school? Could you subscribe to us? Sure, it's I mean it's

small, it's only got 14 kids now, and it'll have 20 kids in in September. Um, it's called Ad Astra, which means "to the stars." That's maybe a bit different from from most other schools is that there aren't any grades. There's no there's no

like not grade one, grade two, grade three type of thing, and making all the children go and in the same grade at the same time, like an assembly line. I know, um, you know, because some people love English or languages, some people love math, some people love music

and and different abilities, different times. It makes more sense to to cater the education to match their aptitudes and abilities. I think that's one principle. Another is that it's important to teach teach problem solving or teach to the problem, not to the tools.

So this would be like, let's say um, you're trying to teach people about uh, how engines work, or you know, you could start by a more a more traditional approach would be to say, "We're going to teach you all about screwdrivers and

wrenches and and you're going to have a course on screwdrivers or caution wrenches and all these things." And it's this is a very difficult way to do it. A much better way would be like, "Here's the engine. Now let's take it apart. How we're"

going to take it apart oh you need a screwdriver that's what the screwdriver is for you need a wrench that's what the wrench is for um and then a very important thing happens which is that the relevance of the tools because it seems to be going

pretty well I mean the kids really love going to school I think that's a a good sign you know I mean I hated going to school when I was a kid it was torture um so the fact that they like they actually think vacations are too long

like they want to go back to school wow yeah exactly weird I know if you think you're like what is education like you're basically downloading data and algorithms into your brain and it's it's actually amazingly bad in conventional education because like it shouldn't be like this huge tour

like the more you can gamify the uh the process of learning the better like and I think unfortunately like a lot of education is very boring um you've got uh someone standing up there kind of lecturing at people um and they've done the same lecture 20

years in a row and they're not very excited about it and that lack of enthusiasm you know is conveyed to the students that they're not very excited about it they don't know why they're there like why are we learning this stuff we don't even know why um in fact

I think a lot of things people learn probably there's no point in learning them because they never use them in the future you

Elon Musk learning method

Elon Musk learning method

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