A New Kind Of University

SPEAKER_03 0:19

Let's do it. Should we go straight into the solution this time? Right it. Let's do it. Okay, I won't even give you any background. Okay, a university is a new university. It's a new university. It's a kind of university where like all the learning you do, all the study is planned just in time, like in real time, totally based on what your goals and interests are. The curriculum is tailored to you. But not like tailored to you like build your own major where you can like take electives or semester-long courses, 14-week courses. Right. No. This is literally you sit down and you're talking to your advisor, your professor, and they the first thing out of their mouth is, what do you want to learn? And then you just go on that. You just go on whatever it is. Okay. And they of course try to, you know, they might influence you too. They might be like, oh, let's add this to your curriculum. Or but but but it's really ultimately up to the student to to say.

SPEAKER_02 1:25

So how how does this if if what if I wanted to, what if I'm a student and I want to take all sorts of random things?

SPEAKER_03 1:32

Like then you'll be a person who learns a lot of random things.

SPEAKER_02 1:34

There's nothing wrong for society. It doesn't hurt you to do that. Doesn't hurt. How do I know how far I am on my track to getting a little bit of a few years? Oh, the professor will help you or whatever.

Programs And What Elton Offers

SPEAKER_03 1:44

Oh, yeah, so good question. Okay. So oh, I should say I'm starting this university. Okay. Yeah, it's already we've already got a website you can go to. It's called Elton University. Nice. The website is Elton.university. So like universitieslike the dot com. Okay.university. Oh. Elton, like Elton John. Elton. It's not named after Elton John, but it's just called Elton. Okay. Elton.university. Everyone go look at it. It's cool. We've got uh MBA program, PhD program, uh, and then we're also building a master's of organizational psychology program. And we're also, and then we're exploring also bachelor's programs, but we expect those to be becoming more popular later for reasons I will get into. Okay. Yeah. But you're asked, but you ask a question. Okay, if everybody, if I'm like, you know, if one person's like learning all about, you know, say you're in the MBA program and you're learning business to do small business, like to run a string of nail salons. Okay. And I'm learning about business to do like a venture-based startup. So I'm like doing a startup and getting my MBA while learning to do that. Right. And you're getting an MBA to learn how to make a string of nail salons. How do you judge when both of us are done with our MBAs? Right. Well, yeah, I can't.

SPEAKER_02 2:59

Is this a stupid what is what is an NBA? What are you trying to get at the business?

SPEAKER_03 3:04

I mean, it's an op it's an open, you know, I think we should be more like flexible and let schools define MBAs differently. Okay. But but but traditionally an MBA is a 32 units of credit, of higher educational credit, and at the end of the master's level.

SPEAKER_02 3:19

You're supposed to be able to do what that you can do. Manage businesses.

SPEAKER_03 3:22

There's like an MBA has like has like uh depends. You can you can look at different programs, but it's somewhere between eight and twelve core competencies that you should gain. So it's like organizational leadership, accounting, finance, sales, marketing, um, you know, HR, and then economics, usually microeconomics. Maybe you take a macro class too, but micro more because you're just focusing on firms and like how firms and consumers make decisions. You don't really care. So I mean you could learn about macroeconomics, but it's more business usually learns micro. So, anyways, it's like it's like it's like eight to twelve kind of core competency topics that you should be like conversant in. Okay. Uh if you do an MBA.

SPEAKER_02 4:05

How how long does it normally take people?

What An MBA Usually Means

SPEAKER_03 4:07

Or is it between a year and three, year to three, one to three years? Okay. Like a really fast accelerated, maybe even kind of curtailed is like one year. But then you could, you know, a traditional one is like two years, and then some people will do like three academic years. Stretch it out. Yeah. So yeah, usually two years, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:26

All right. So now back to how do I know.

SPEAKER_03 4:28

So yeah, so it has to do with um so we use uh a system called uh uh uh uh engagement hours. So we don't measure most credit in the United States is measured through seat time hours and work like work hours, study hours. And it's usually one uh uh it's like one to two. So like you lost me. One seat time hour, okay, two work hours. Okay. And if you do that once a week for 15 weeks, that's like one unit. It's really one and a half to three, so it's like four and a half hours a week. Okay. If you do that, if you do that for a whole semester for 15 weeks, then that's one credit of high off college credit of higher education.

SPEAKER_02 5:16

What is work hours?

SPEAKER_03 5:16

It's not like work hours like study. No, it's like study. Like say you sit in a class, you watch, they teach you lecture, they lecture you about mathematical equation, you go home, you do two hours worth of you know, readings and calculations. That's one and then if you do that every week, once a week for 15 weeks, that's one credit. Gotcha. If then you do 32 of those, that's like a mass, that's like an asset. Do 120, that's like a bachelor's. So bachelor's 120 credits. Uh-huh. So and we don't do seat time hours though, because there's not a lot of seat time because you're mostly just getting coached for like advised, kind of coached and guided for up like an hour, and then you go off and work. And then maybe you have other if you have different professors you're working with, you might have multiple meetings a week. But if you just have one professor, you're you know, then you would just meet once a week and and and and um do your education more on your own. It's like more kind of autodidactic.

SPEAKER_01 6:06

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 6:06

And yeah, so then we just measure hours of engagement. So that hour with your teacher is an hour of engagement, and then the hours that you spend studying and working are all hours of engagement, and we just add those up and make that the credit. So we're following the we're not trying to like completely revolutionize everything about higher education, it's a little more like an evolution, not not a revolution, but it's still significantly different because we're not doing this seat time hour thing, which is like really old-fashioned in our day and age, right?

Replacing Credits With Engagement Hours

SPEAKER_02 6:34

Like you could and do students like are there is the feedback that they're like this a lot.

SPEAKER_03 6:41

Oh my god, our students love it. Yeah, we've only had eight students, but all of them have said unequivocally, this is the best educational experience they've ever had. Nice. Yeah. And that's mostly because you know, if you go into a school, you know, if you're 20 years old and you go into a college, it's just people like telling you what you have to do pretty much the whole time. You get to pick your classes and maybe you have some electives, and you can kind of pick a class, but then there aren't very many sections offered of all the classes, and you don't get the classes you want. And even then it's like electives and like 15 weeks, like really long. Like, I don't know the last time you studied something for 15 weeks straight, but it's kind of crazy. Yeah, like I don't think I've studied one thing for 15 weeks straight outside of school ever, you know. Like I get into something and then I like learn about it for maybe I don't know, a couple weeks, read a couple books, right? And then I like read about other things for a couple, you know, and then I'm gonna go back to it or so, you know. I don't just like study something for 15 weeks and then stop studying it and study other things. Very strange. So with Elton, you can do that kind of however you learn and however you feel motivated, you can follow that.

SPEAKER_02 7:47

You chase your own sort of motivations that way. That's right. That's that that is what they're saying is the better way to go anyway.

SPEAKER_03 7:55

Is the better way to do it? The research shows significantly.

SPEAKER_02 7:59

Yep, you're like, oh, I'm not interested in this, but I must memorize facts or numbers anyway.

SPEAKER_03 8:06

Right outside, right out of your brain. Right.

SPEAKER_02 8:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 8:09

Okay, very nice. So yeah, it's like uh it's a superior the rate the way I got the idea because you asked, was um because I just no, now I do want to know about the name. Yeah. Oh, the name. And the ass. Okay, so the name came from uh it just means like the high places, like Las Vegas or like the bluffs, or like you know, the Elton. Yeah, Elton just means like Las Vegas, like the high places. Okay, like plateau, like the big plateau. Yeah, like a mountain, like not a plateau, not a mountain, I guess, but yeah, like a plateau, like a like the high land over there. That's like less, that's like the the Elton in English in old English. And I thought that was cool. Like, you know, most prestigious universities in America have an a a mid, like a southern English name. And so I thought that's not a bad thing to have. I I like Southern, yeah, it sounds appropriate. Sounds nice, right? So I thought, okay, why you know if you name yourself the university, the future academy, you know, it doesn't sound very good. You know, if you or if you call yourself like Splunk, they just people think you're like a tech startup.

SPEAKER_02 9:09

So you have to call you like iUniversity with the lowercase I people will be like, nope, it's not the past. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_03 9:16

So I wanted the name to just be like very like people could just be like, yeah, I went to Elton University and have everyone who doesn't know what that is just think that must be a really good university. It sounds lovely, it sounds nice, right? And yeah, that's nothing. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I was kind of like in I was kind of inspired. I've always been inspired by FedEx and UPS. Okay, those are just private for-profit businesses, but they call themselves Federal Express and the United Postals Parcel Service. Yeah, they sound like branches of the government, they get themselves very official down. And it's totally allowed. I'm like, how can that be allowed? I feel like they're like stolen valor from the government, right? Yeah, they shouldn't be allowed to call themselves that, but they can because it's a free country. So I was like, well, it's a free country. I'll just give my university like a cool, like a name that sounds like it's a great university.

SPEAKER_02 10:07

I mean, they'll just double park in the middle of the street and just be like this. I'm delivering a package and oh is that is that okay?

SPEAKER_03 10:16

You're like, yeah, it is those bastards. So here's a those are the real enemies in society, delivery men. Yeah, right. So how did how did FedEx and UPS that that well the well the names I just thought, man, they get so much mileage on just choosing a really trustworthy name. Business. I was like education. Yeah, I'm gonna choose a very trustworthy name, you know. I'm not gonna give it some weird name that makes makes us makes the school kind of be this weird thing that you're doing. It's like you're not doing a weird thing, you're getting a fantastic education, right?

Motivation Beats The Semester Model

SPEAKER_02 10:49

It's different, it's newer, and the longer it goes on, the more established. And so then you want a name that feels established and thought of if you're like we're Splunk.inc, it's like you know a hundred years later gets like welcome to Splunk.

SPEAKER_03 11:05

Splunk is growing on me. You know, the more I hear it. Where'd you get your degree?

SPEAKER_02 11:08

Splunk. Oh yeah. Oh I'm a splunk, I'm a splunk man myself.

SPEAKER_03 11:12

He's a splunker. I'm a splunk. I'm a splunk man. Well, here's when it's like a hundred years old and it's like oh splunk. Only the blue-blooded idiot of aristocratic.

SPEAKER_02 11:28

The Yailies and the Splunkies are here. All right. So then do you have a does Elton have a football team? Yes, the Rockets. Ah, okay.

SPEAKER_03 11:37

I was gonna say about your mask. Yeah, yeah. The Rockets. And do you have school colors already? Coral. It's kind of like a reddish coral. Okay. And our emblem right now is four shields, which is also kind of a university thing. Uh-uh. But it's kind of modern. Like, I think traditional, you know, you know, traditional university logos usually have quite like like you know, embossed like lots of lines and things going on. And we're just like four shields. Maybe, maybe we'll we'll change it in the future, like when we have a little bit of a marketing budget, a little branding budget. Oh yeah. Do a do a brand change. I think we'll keep Elton University, but maybe the the we do have an emoji. What? So it turns out if you if you open, seriously, if you open like the a keyboard, like the iPhone keyboard, and you go to the emojis and you type in shield and you get the shield emoji. Yeah, yeah. The shield is the color of Elton's. Oh, basically function as your own personal. Elton has an emoji. That works. It is the shield emoji on the iPhone. I don't know if Android the color is the same, but it's like this orange shield. And it's like that or coral, like I said, it's like a coral orange red.

SPEAKER_02 12:48

Maybe Tim Cook is a rocket.

SPEAKER_03 12:51

Do you know all the oh yeah, yeah, the the the emojis were they defined? Yeah, they were defined by somebody, but yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:57

Do do you know all the different students who've gone through Elton so far personally?

SPEAKER_03 13:02

Yeah. Uh not well, I mean I got to know them as students, sure. But they weren't all like people I knew before. No, no, no, I meant but you're you it's it's a space where you're like, I've I've met and worked with all the I'm like the founding president or whatever, but I'm the it's such a small school that I also teach at the school. Yeah, why not? You know, but we've had but we have lots of professors. We have like 12 people who've all done teaching. That's awesome. Yeah. Actually, the color of your microphone is the is the Elton color. Sort of the you picked this on purpose, although maybe a little redder than that. Yours is like pink.

SPEAKER_02 13:34

Mine's more of a faded, uh like a sun-faded version.

Naming The School And Building Trust

SPEAKER_03 13:36

For the for the audience in this audio, uh Scott's microphone foam cover is pink, sort of. It's a little bit redder than pink. That's why I say it's close to almost the Elton color. But yeah, the other the other thing that makes Elton really cool is it's more affordable than traditional schools. So it seems like it's gonna be expensive. Because they're like, Well, one-on-one, how's it gonna do that? Must be expensive, yeah, custom. But actually, it's much, much, much more affordable. Part partly because it's uh remote, so we don't have like buildings and stuff. Sure. And also because we have um a very thin, you know, administration is very thin, uh, whereas other schools, administration is a huge. You have to go to a lot of different right levels of we have we will have administration someday, but right now, because we're like a startup, there's like no administration, so the price is quite affordable. But but um, but also it turns out it's more efficient to do um the one-on-one. So that's totally doable. It's not more efficient. I mean, you have to pay.

SPEAKER_02 14:36

Did you know that ahead of time, or was that just something you luckily found out?

SPEAKER_03 14:41

Well, because you know, if if you go to a class in a traditional school, you probably meet like four hours or six hours a week, like three, two-hour classes, right, right? Which means the teacher has to be there for six hours to teach, like maybe the class has how many people in it? Like 25 or something. Right. Well, that's six hours for 25 people. That's that's a lot of hours a week. Um if you have if you are just gonna do like maybe 45 minute meetings, or even you get down, you know, as the student gets more and more kind of like flying, you can get down to like 30 minute meetings uh twice a month, you know, later. You start off usually like an hour meetings, your first meeting is usually gonna be an hour because you have a lot to like talk about about the new program and learning about the student. Yeah, but as you get kind of more flying, then it's like 45 minutes, you know, three times a month, and then it's like 45 minutes twice a month. And it's so so you can have way more than 25 students.

SPEAKER_02 15:38

Is this like checking in like how's the current project that you're working on going? Yeah, like exactly any do we need to like course correct in any way, or let me check this XY and and assessment, you know.

Guidance And Assessment In The Internet Age

SPEAKER_03 15:48

Tell me about tell me about what you read. What did you think of the book you read for this last week? Okay, tell me about the you know the main topics. It's like an oral examination as well. Okay, so because you have to be assessed, the the what a university does is, you know, in the past, a university really had three things, but now it really just has two. So in the past it was, you know, guy, you know, guide, assess, and then the knowledge was there. Like there wasn't knowledge anywhere else, but in the literal buildings, because it was in the books, all the knowledge was in the professors' brains in the books. Okay. So you had to physically go to that university, like go to that university to get the knowledge. Right. But now all the knowledge in the universe and the professors are all spread around the whole world, and so you can get the knowledge through the internet and connecting with people through Zoom phone calls. You know, you can you can get all the knowledge from anywhere. So you don't need that that last rung, that other that last branch. But what you do need from the university is still guidance and assessment. Okay. So you need to guidance, what should I learn and how should I learn it? You know, how can you help me learn? But then also and then assess that I learned so that I can then tell people I did learn this. It's certified by this trustworthy institution. Otherwise, how do you know what people know? You you don't. They're just they're just making, you know, they might know a lot or they might know nothing and be pulling your leg, right? Unless they've been assessed by by experts.

AI Curriculum And Testing On Kids

SPEAKER_02 17:05

So can I can I take you a left turn here for a second? Do it. Let's go. All right. I saw on the news this week that there's a a school district that's opening up that's having the AI set the curriculum for you know, per kid, per yes, alpha school, isn't it? Yeah, I think I don't remember the school. Yeah, but that's like so that's even one step. Do you think this is too far, or is this the right direction where it's like even more customized, more yeah, like reactive to the students?

SPEAKER_03 17:34

I mean, the the answer I think the answer is is an it's not about so people always when they talk about AI, they're like, is it good or bad? Okay, well, what the I think the answer is it's good if it does better than what a human could a human would would do, not could do, but would actually do. Right. So like if you had that same curriculum made by humans, would it be better or worse than the way the AI did it? And the answer is probably be like, you know, I don't know, comparable. But you'd have to that'd be the that'd be the question. If it's worse than what a human could do, then it's then it's worse. But if it's better than what humans could do, then it's better. Okay. And right now I think it's hard for it's hard to do a curriculum for, you know, if you have a 200 student school, it's hard to do a 200 student curriculum at it at for a high school. For a college at Elton, it's not. It's it's actually really doable because they're because they're grown-ups. I mean, they're 19 years, you know, they're 25 years old, they're getting an MBA. So it's a little different. We will have a bachelor's, and I think you could do a high school, but the students would have to be, they'd have to learn in grade school, kind of like the way in grade school they learn how to do high school. Yeah, that's the traditional high school. They would also kind of in grade school have to learn how to do a more self-guided high school, like learn the different ropes of how to do it. I mean, if you just took normal grade school traditional students and then you drop them in at ninth grade into like a more autonomous high school that I'm like I'm describing, they would struggle for the first like year to like transition. So you'd have to give them like a year to like be crap at school, you know, and probably blow off a lot of assignments.

SPEAKER_02 19:12

So would you fix that by doing it gradually, like half the day we're gonna do regular half the day we're gonna do?

SPEAKER_03 19:17

I think the best thing is to just let there be different types of schools, and then students who are feel more temperamentally like they want us an education like that, they can choose that. That's the best thing.

SPEAKER_02 19:28

You check in on your kid and they're just at the AI school, and you're just like, it just has to be writing I love robots 400 times at your homework. Predictable. That's exactly what that is. That's it. I don't know, is that right?

SPEAKER_03 19:39

Also, Scott, robot is a derogatory term. Is it we prefer electric beings? Yeah, robot. It's a Czech word. Is it? It's from the Czech language, robotnik. Uh Raub, I think, is the verb raub. Uh or the word raub means a drudge.

SPEAKER_01 19:57

Okay.

SPEAKER_03 19:57

And so robout was just like a yeah. So drub a raub raub, I think, is the verb that means like to, you know, just like schlep something. So what should we be calling? Raubot is like a schlep.

SPEAKER_02 20:09

What should we be calling them instead? Electric beings. What if they're not electric? Like you didn't have a robots are electric.

SPEAKER_03 20:15

Oh, I said it. I said that. Wow. I know I know. There's that I'm sitting with unconscious bias. What is it? Hidden racism or something. Yes. Yeah. Oh, I'm a crypto racist.

SPEAKER_02 20:27

Autonomous being. No, electric beings.

SPEAKER_03 20:28

Electric beings. Aren't they all electric? Are there any water?

SPEAKER_02 20:32

There might be some hydrogen or nuclear-based ones or steam turns into electricity.

SPEAKER_03 20:37

But we don't have any steam to powered electric beings.

SPEAKER_02 20:40

Beings. The word bot is already mixed into so many things, though.

SPEAKER_03 20:45

I know. All that's because of the persistent uh prejudice against uh you know artificial beings.

SPEAKER_02 20:52

If robot was an insult, then we would have some sort of a really insulting dance that we would do that we would call it that. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 20:58

And actually they're saying Domo Origato. So and it's Mr. I know it's like a software. It's an honorary. We're being honorific. Yes. But yeah. So so AI, you know, I think it's I think it's good. So here's what I believe. We should not be experimenting, uh, like we shouldn't be trying to make money acting like we are certain about something that hasn't been tested, because that is crazy. You have to test things, especially when you're about to then use them on children. Like if I told you I'm developing a new drug, you know, for for some disease, it's for children, and then you would say, Are you, you know, how have the tests been? And if I was like, no, no, no, it's the best new thing, and we're just we're just going straight to market, and actually we already have 5,000 children taking the drug, you'd be like, This is bad. And yet in education, you know, every year it's another like fad. Oh, iPads, we gotta have iPads in all the rooms. It's like, oh yeah, show me the research that shows that that's like a good thing. There isn't any because it just was created. Like it's just made. So there isn't research to show that this is like a good thing to do. So I so that's what I my fundamentally believe, which is that we should not allow and I think it should literally be a matter of the government. The government should not let it be allowed to you know to do things to children, to their minds, without it being having some evidential basis.

SPEAKER_02 22:30

Especially big swings like different total modulation.

SPEAKER_03 22:34

Total, total different modulation. All right.

SPEAKER_02 22:35

So then you are against new math, the whole the whole like new math.

SPEAKER_03 22:39

Unless there's evidence to show that it works. No, it's the same thing with math. Someone might say to me, that's crazy. You can't do that. Oh, yeah. Well, we do it for drugs, and we should do it for drugs. If I make a new drug and I'm saying this is gonna heal children of something, you gotta get show that you did the testing. Yeah, it's the same thing for education. Why are we allowing people to do whatever and not have proof of some at least some evidential basis?

SPEAKER_02 23:03

They should have to be able to say, well, the evidential basis is, and then make some kind of you know Do you think with education being so like notoriously underfunded, that's not a controversial thing. It is controversial. Is it?

SPEAKER_03 23:16

It is not underfunded. Education is wildly funded, hugely funded. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I believe.

SPEAKER_02 23:22

I was gonna say, like, with especially in America. Well, with some schools feeling like they here's what I'm going based on is like teachers having to buy their own school supplies for classrooms or things like that. I know.

SPEAKER_03 23:32

So when I say it's overfunded, when it's when I say it's well funded, I don't mean that it's funded the properly. Right. It doesn't trickle through to the right things. Okay. But it is it is there's plenty of money in education. And it's only gone up. I mean it's gone up double, triple, triples every couple of years.

SPEAKER_02 23:47

With some places needing like funds, do you think it makes them more susceptible to like when places come in with money, they're like, hey, put in the iPad, just use the new go-go learning app that we created on it.

Evidence Based Education And Reading Wars

SPEAKER_03 24:01

You know, no schools have this money. That's why there is iPads on every table, is because the school buys them for, you know, if they're rich enough to do that. Obviously, there are different schools, there's so many different schools in America. There's a hundred, you know, hundreds of thousands, 120,000 school districts or something. Each one has like dozens of schools. So it's like, yeah, I mean, there's schools in like rural, you know, Wyoming, and they're not they're never gonna have iPads, you know, they're not don't have the money to do that. But if you're just talking about the average or like the median school, like Kansas City in the sub, you know, in some neighborhood middle class part of Kansas City, like the average school, they spend money every year on new workbooks, new software, new things. They pay their teachers. People always say teachers are underpaid. Uh, maybe I'll get shade for this, but you can look at the data. American teachers are some of the highest paid teachers in the world, arguably the highest paid teachers in the world. Uh-huh. Um, and so even taking into account cost of living differences and and everything, we're paid our school teachers are paid much more than teachers in Finland. And people always are like, oh, we should we should have the teachers be like Finland. It's like, well, we already pay them like that. So the difference isn't in pay, the difference is the way they're treated, the way they're managed, the way they're, you know, the way the education works, uh, the other things that go on in society, obviously we've got to be. Yeah, the overall social milieu things that are different in Finland than the US. Yeah, but if you go to the average, you know, to a to a middle class or even like a upper class school, you know, then they're just like Finland. I mean, because every you know, it's right. It's it's all you know, the schools are uh might have nobody there with much much economic, you know, problems that they're facing. So I mean there are schools that could be like Finland and they aren't because they're just m not managed properly. Right. But I think so this gets back to Elton. So the premise of Elton is to be an evidence-based university. Okay. And if you go and say, you know, if you if you go into a hospital and you said, Do you use evidence-based medicine here? And they said no, and actually we're suspicious of it, we just do what we think is best or what the oldest uh doctor here says to do, you would immediately leave that hospital. You would be like, This is not a good hospital.

SPEAKER_02 26:13

Yeah, I was gonna say, dumb question. What is evidence-based education?

SPEAKER_03 26:16

What qualifies it's just if people have run studies and there's there there's levels of evidence. So there's there's first level, second level, fourth level. First level is just there's a reasonable explanation for why this would be effective. Okay. So that's basically essentially almost no evidence, but at least you have some account. That's the first level. The second level is like a few not very well done studies. And then the third level is like well done studies, and the fourth level is like multiple replicated studies that are huge, like thousands of students with control groups and you know, really, really good science and repeated, not just like one study that did it, but like replicated. That's level four.

SPEAKER_02 26:56

So it sounds like you're trying to weed out anywhere where the reasoning is we do it this way because we've always done it.

SPEAKER_03 27:04

Or because, well, we think it's really important. It's like that doesn't mean anything. Gotcha. Like, you know, yeah, if you just think, well, it's really important that this happens. It's who we are, it's our oh, that just it seems wrong if we don't do that or something. I gotcha. No, you can't that's not a good enough reason. You have to say, we have this learning objective and we're going to achieve it in this way, and there's some evidential basis for that, even if it's just a reasonable explanation, but it can't just be uh it's our values or it's the way we've always done it, or we just really believe strongly in this. Uh uh that doesn't that you're just gonna hurt people because you don't actually know if you're what you're doing, if you just if that's the basis you're on.

SPEAKER_02 27:48

We think this nice building will improve the the status of the stature of the university and everyone's estimation.

SPEAKER_03 27:57

Like show right, show me the study that shows that that'll do that. And and will that actually lead to the object the outcome, the you know, the the objectives of the school. Right. Um a good example is the reading wars. Okay, reading wars, which were very under under hush hush because no one knows about that. I don't know about that. But it was a huge thing in the 90s and 2000s, early 2000s, and there's a definitive winner, and people still don't know this, but yeah, there's a great podcast, so anyone who's listening to this on podcast can go and listen to this awesome short miniseries called Sold a Story. It's very well done, it's very even-handed, okay, and it's about the the reading wars. And it it basically there was the there was the old kind of the traditional way of learning how to read, and it which was kind of like it wasn't scientific, but it was, you know, whatever, you know, point at the letters A, B, C, D. You know, it was just like the traditional way. Right. And then and then in the contemporary times, there's been a kind of debate between two different ways to learn to read. There's a lot of other ways, but there's two major ones that there was this debate about, and that was the war. And one was phonics, phonics, sure. It's like hooked on phonics, you know, where you have to memorize letter groupings, you have to memorize that ties to a stuff. Not just letters, right? Right you have to like combine the letters and and memorize that, and then memorize words that don't conform to those rules. And it's all about basically it's about memorization. I mean, back just that's just what it is. Yeah, and then the other way was this called whole word, whole word learning, it was called. And it was made by this teacher from New Zealand and it swept all around the world. It turns out that the evidence quite quickly showed that phonics worked and the whole word thing was like BS.

SPEAKER_02 29:33

But it's whole words.

SPEAKER_03 29:35

It's like you don't try to do phonetic phonics, you try to like look at the whole context of what you do understand and guess the word.

SPEAKER_02 29:43

Yeah, I think I've heard this before where they're like the person's like, actually, you don't read, you don't read by looking at phonics. You yeah, your brain does a flash scan of the whole word and it recognizes the word bear. And then it like and you're in the context b-r. Right.

SPEAKER_03 30:00

And also it's like it wreck your brain recognizes the context of like, you know, the bear, you know, it disrupted the picnic. It's like your brain's gonna be like, what disrupts picnics? Oh, but you're saying but it's gonna be bear. Yeah, but you're saying it makes sense. Turns out that's not true.

SPEAKER_02 30:14

We memorize a few number of rules and apply them every time instead of memorizing every single word independently.

SPEAKER_03 30:22

I think the research shows that you s you build kind of a bridge with phonics, but then you do end up memorizing whole words. Okay, but you build towards that with phonics. Right. In English, because English is based on stupidly. How often you use actually because we did an episode about phonetical English alphabet. Yeah. Then you wouldn't even need this. You wouldn't need phonics because you would teach someone the alphabet and they would instantly know how to read. It would work already. They would just know how to read immediately because they could literally sound out every word.

SPEAKER_02 30:52

New class, new class for Elton.

SPEAKER_03 30:54

There you go. Elt, we should do the new alphabet. Absolutely phonetic. Step one, we'll teach you the alphabet.

SPEAKER_02 31:01

Step two, you get the world to adopt it.

SPEAKER_03 31:04

I was I was gonna make uh uh just a translator, and it would just translate anything, like your whole browser would just translate the whole thing. So you're on the internet, it would just all be translated into the phonetic alphabet. It would be really easy to write, actually, because you just have to make a dictionary.

SPEAKER_02 31:19

It could be useful as well if you're like worried about spies coming to get like being hauled off and then anyone can do it. They can read it though, it's really easy to read. It's the opposite of spy, it's phonetic, it's terrible for spies.

SPEAKER_03 31:30

Actually, it's not as easy to read because of exactly what we just said. It's uh it's hard to read even if you speak English fluently. Because your brain is your brain is used to seeing the bad spellings, the the the the the on the non-phonetic spellings, regular old dumb English, yeah, dumb. Right. Also, there's weird things where like you're used to seeing a homonym be spelled differently. Okay, but then you but it's spelt the same because it's phonetic, it has to be spelt the same. So like you know, two ingested pair the animal and two, two, and two.

SPEAKER_02 31:59

Yeah, those are all you can't make fun of anyone for not using the right there anymore. Right.

SPEAKER_03 32:04

There and there, it's exactly the same. And there with a with an with an apostrophe. Those are still those are all the same.

SPEAKER_02 32:11

Well, actually, I think you I think you meant you meant to use T H E Y aposphyari. That's right.

SPEAKER_03 32:18

So, anyways, so so my point just being uh, yeah, so there was this reading wars, the the the phonics people were totally right, basically, and the whole word people were wrong, yeah, and a ton of people were using the whole word um. They'd already gone. And it turns out there's a political aspect to this. The right wing, like Bush, like George W. Bush kind of right wing people, yeah, were in favor of the phonics. And it was the left wing that was in favor of the whole word. Okay. And so even to this day uh left wing dominated cities and states have way lower literacy rates than right wing dominated cities and states. Because of new false types of learning non-event evidentiary based educational models. Interesting. Isn't that interesting? It is. Yeah. Mississippi just famously uh they demanded that some, you know, they maximize they were trying to maximize the number of third grade students reading at a third grade level. Yeah. It'd be like 90%, which is insane. That's like very high. And they did it, they achieved it, and they used phonics, like they went really back to like phonics and really did it um in an evidence-based way. And now they've done that, and now actually Mississippi has like they they rocketed up from like 49th in education to like 12th. Whoa. Because they did this literacy.

SPEAKER_02 33:46

Well, I was just gonna ask, is Mississippi a right-leaning or left-leaning? Totally right-leaning. Okay, totally right, yeah. Mississippi's like deep red, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 33:52

Except for like New Orleans and like Baton Rouge, those are like the two. Or that's Louisiana, right? Mississippi. Oh, yeah, all of Mississippi. What is it? Mississippi. There's no cities. I guess Jackson? Jacksonville. Big Jackson, Jacksonville. Jacksonville is Florida. Right, Jackson Mississippi. So that might be a Democrat. I assume the cities are Democrats.

SPEAKER_02 34:10

I just realizing I know embarrassingly little about Mississippi.

SPEAKER_03 34:12

Me too, except for how awesome of a name they have.

SPEAKER_02 34:15

Too many I's count tie tie.

Personalized Tutoring And Faster Degrees

SPEAKER_03 34:19

Yeah, exactly. One Mississippi. One Mississippi. So yeah, so evidence, so Elton is an evidence-based university. Okay, evidence says that one-on-one tutoring for a you know, for you to learn what you're interested in, you're motivated to learn, and personalizing assessments, personalizing instruction, personalizing curriculum is just this is not like a 10% improvement or like a 30% improvement. This is like a four, like a two to five X improvement, like a 200 to 500% improvement in how much you learn and how fast you learn. Wow. Yeah, it's wild. And actually, not just how much you learn and how fast you learn, but how valuable and useful the knowledge is as well.

SPEAKER_02 34:57

Okay, so does that translate into you get done with your coursework faster, or you cover more ground and learn more things?

SPEAKER_03 35:06

I would say it's both. Uh, but and an Elton student can move at about uh, you know, they can finish what another traditional student might finish in four years. An Elton student can finish in like two or two and a half. So like it's less than half the speed. Oh, it's like a little more than half the speed. Okay. So like an MBA is like one year, you know, a PhD. You can do a PhD in like three years. You can do a bachelor's in two to three years. Um yeah. And most actually most bachelors go five years. So the average is actually like four point seven years or something. I did four and a half, yeah, right. Exactly. So people don't know that. They think, oh, college, four years. Like, no, actually, that's the exception to the rule. Usually it's more than four years. So with Elton saying it's two to three, is actually saying it's almost half, like almost like yeah, like half the speed or double the speed.

SPEAKER_02 35:52

And col traditional college is they're like, yeah, fine, be four and a half, be five years, whatever. Because they just pay and they just want to.

SPEAKER_03 36:01

And Elton wants to make money too. I mean, we're a nonprofit, but I mean we want to stick to keep our lights up. But yeah, we're not we're trying to we're trying to offer something that's significantly better than the the standard, this, the status quo. I should say too, to to your question, you know, it's not just faster, it's actually you learn more in that time. So it's not just you learn the same amount as a college, four and a half years in college in two years. It's you actually learn significantly more than that in two years. And that's because you learn, like I said, two to five times more relevant and faster. Okay. So it's not just more and more, it's more relevant to. So it's the knowledge that you gain is more relevant to you. If I just sit you down and say memorize, you know, digits of pie, you might go to some school that can help you do that really, really well. But the knowledge is useless. Right. So if so, if I say, you know, hey, let's spend instead of spending all this time on the pie thing, let's like actually learn about how to do your taxes and like how to have a really conversation with uh a tough conversation or how to have yeah, like things that actually you'll use, then I'm I'm multiplying the the quote the amount you're learning by so much because I've removed all the cruft, like all the stuff that you don't need to know how to do, and it's not relevant to you.

SPEAKER_02 37:16

If you so yeah, give a man several digits of pie, they eat for one day.

SPEAKER_03 37:21

But if you teach them how to calculate digits of pie, then they'll eat pie for a lifetime.

SPEAKER_02 37:28

I said I don't know, it fell apart.

SPEAKER_03 37:30

I don't eat pies. If you teach a man to bake a pie, I just wanted to talk about pie. Then he'll eat pie.

SPEAKER_02 37:34

I just love pie.

SPEAKER_03 37:35

What's your favorite pie?

SPEAKER_02 37:36

I my daughter just asked me this, and I feel like I think I don't actually feel strongly about pie enough to be. I'm like, I meant to do it. You'll just have any pie. I'll have whatever, and also not having pie for years, I'd be fine.

SPEAKER_03 37:50

You know, I feel the same way. Every time I eat it, it's although no, I did have a pie once that I go back to, which is which I I've never found it again, though. It was a it was a pecan pie with a dark chocolate ganache strip underneath the pecan. Okay, and and it wasn't very sweet, which was the best thing because pecan pie is always way too sweet. Yeah. So this was like so then so this pecan pie was like not too sweet, and then the ganache was like not sweet. It was like really like a dark chocolate, and then it was the crust was good. That was really good.

SPEAKER_02 38:21

I guess I guess pumpkin pie happens regularly, but but like I'd I'd much I'm more of a cake. I'd rather do cake. You're a cake man.

SPEAKER_03 38:28

Give me a leather cake. You're a Marie Antoinette fan. Please let me eat cake.

SPEAKER_02 38:32

Yeah, that's that's what you say to Marie. Like, please let me, please, please, please, please make the best piece.

SPEAKER_03 38:37

If I had to say pie or cake, well, I would say that the average pie is better than the average cake, but the best cake is better than the best pie.

SPEAKER_02 38:47

Maybe it's because of such a visual person, and you can decorate cakes to such a degree. Yeah, there's no TV show called Is It Pie because you could just you can't hide it.

SPEAKER_03 39:00

People are like, Yeah, that's definitely part of pie. That's a list.

SPEAKER_02 39:04

Four different is 700 digits, and there's best few different digits. You got people with the glasses, and they're like, uh, actually the third one is pie.

Why New Universities Rarely Launch

SPEAKER_03 39:15

I can definitely Can I use a can I use a lifeline? 50-50 this year. 50-50. Yeah. So so the with Elton, the that's that's the premise. And I mean, the the reason why there's a solution, probably everyone understands this already, is because higher education is like really screwed up, and it's because the cost is too high and the quality is too low. Yeah. And that's in my theory, you know, you can read my book, Caging of the American Mind. It's all about higher education and how to make it better and how to fix it. And in that, my research suggests that the reason why it's so expensive and and so bad is because it you haven't been able to start a new one really for like 70 years. Right. Like at like just a university professor, you know, uh hasn't been able to start a new university. And actually, still it's very challenging to do it. I know how to do it because I tried already and I learned all about it. So I have this sort of plan of attack, but I can't do it just like the way you could start a graphic design company. You just start one. With universities, you can't you can't just do that. You have to like really you have to really navigate, and then people are constantly asking you questions like, you know, well, are you accredited? Are you a scasically saying, Are you a scam? Which of course it's like no, you know, like when someone starts a graphic design firm, you're not like, Are you but wait, wait, you're a graphic designer with 15 years experience and 10 years experience like managing and leading other graphic design companies, and now you're starting to graphic design. Is this a scam? Like, no, they're just like, wow, cool. This is great graphic design. Right. But when you start a university and I have 15 years experience in your higher ed, I've run and built a new program for 10 years. They are like, Oh, is this a scam? It's like, uh no, it's not, it's the opposite of a scam. It's a really, really earnest, serious attempt at making like a really good school. Yeah, yeah. And it's funny too, you can start grade schools and people don't think they're a scam.

SPEAKER_02 41:03

Like if you're like, I'm just starting because it should be, you should, it should be the there should be more scrutiny on stuff, you know. Like at least you're like children are vulnerable. Yeah, you're like, I am I'm working with students who are all like full adults, like if you're there's they're they're less vulnerable, they're still vulnerable, but they're less vulnerable. Well, they're most like they're gonna be like, hey, that sounds weird or not, or be there by themselves instead of a kid who's just like I'm just I'm just here. This is what we're doing, right?

SPEAKER_03 41:30

I mean there's scrutiny to start a new grade school, but it's not it's not met with immediate skepticism by the public. Right. Like if I said to someone I'm starting a new grade school, and I have said this because I've thought about starting a new grade school and I was talking to people about it, people were just like, Great, like, oh, tell me like the model of your grade school, like, oh, it's gonna be and I'm like, oh, it's gonna be really alternative and different. And they're like, Cool, I know of other schools like that. That's great.

SPEAKER_02 41:53

If I think comes out of it, they're not just like you probably don't know anything.

SPEAKER_03 41:57

Yeah, exactly. They're like, Cool, you probably understand grade school things. Right, right. And then if you but if you say you're starting university, the first question is like, oh, well, you're I mean, are you trying to bulk all your students out of money and just lie to them and not teach them anything? It's like No. Why would you that's insane?

SPEAKER_02 42:13

I mean, why is that everyone's we just have classes where the teachers stare at the students and refuse to teach them anything?

SPEAKER_03 42:20

Which is kind of like a lot of schools. That does actually. But I I think I mean, we are we have, you know, people will say, well, because there's examples of schools that have been scams, uh, you know, ITT tech, schools that didn't provide a lot of value and were charging a lot of money. And it's such a tragedy that that's the association we have in our head with new schools.

SPEAKER_02 42:36

But there's no way to fix that except putting schools in the past. New schools that aren't fit those don't fit those patterns.

SPEAKER_03 42:43

So that's the goal with Elton is to be really like a light on the hill of like a really awesome school that's new, but also uses science to make the best possible education and has awesome faculty and awesome students and awesome, you know, it's like a great, it's a great experience. Good environment, good. Yeah, good environment. People can just learn so quickly, so fast and flexibly. You know, if if a you know, if you start to get a few years, like a like a rocket, like a rocket launch off like a rocket, but you can say, like, you know, one day you're like, I really want to learn about this, and you start learning about it, and you think this is boring, this is stupid, I don't want to learn about this anymore. You're gonna learn about something else. It's fine. And that's fine. Because if you don't do that, if you say, Nope, you gotta dog it out for another 15, you know, 13 weeks to finish your 15-week semester, yeah. You know, you get so turned off to just learning because you're forced to do it. You you you're not gonna get a great grade, probably, which means in the future it just reflects badly on you, just the cycle of motivation going away. Yeah, but what if it was like, well, I'm not actually, you know, I thought I was interested in that, and actually I'm grateful that I learned a little bit about how it works, but you know, I'm actually gonna go learn about this. Right. Great, who cares? We can give you credit for that few weeks that you learned about that for a little bit and then just do some super switch gears. Yeah. There are some limitations. You know, if you're in the MBA, you can't be like, okay, I'm gonna stop learning about accounting and I'm gonna surgery. Yeah, right. I mean, you have to stay in the bands of like, you know, the mat the if it's a master's degree. The bachelor's, though, is quite wide open. The bachelor's, you could just be like, you Could just be all over the board. It doesn't matter.

SPEAKER_02 44:19

That's cool. Because that's a time you want to figure out you want to experiment and find out what you're interested in, chase your passion.

SPEAKER_03 44:25

And some people want to just go deep the whole their whole time. That's fine. Some people want to, you know, skate all over the board. That's fine too. The point is that it's fine to be who you are and it's fine to learn about what you're interested in. Society will not fail because a few people or even like you know, people just like learned too weird of things. Society will fail because everyone learned the same thing. That's the danger.

SPEAKER_02 44:53

Yeah, I think society jumps forward when weirdos learn weird things that no one else is learning and then figure out how to apply it to a problem in society.

Ethical Limits And Oversight Boards

SPEAKER_03 45:03

Otherwise, everyone thinks the same problems. I thought I'm calling you a weirdo as weird ideas. God damn it. But it's meta. Yeah, I mean, I mean it's not good. There are limitations at Elton, ethical limitations. You know, it's you the student can't show up and say, you know, help me prove to others that vaccines don't work. No. You know what I mean? Like you can't do things that are not based on, you know, you can't do anti-truth enterprises. You know, uh we also can't get your flat earth bachelor in flat earth sciences. Flat earth sciences. You can study flat earthers as a phenomenon socially, okay, but you can't study that the earth is flat. Like that. So there are limitations. Or you can study like military operations, but Elton, no one will teach you how to make social. Sasquatchology. Yeah, yeah, right. Right, exactly. Or like so there are limitations, but there, but for that's I mean, you can that's a really expansive limitation. You can learn anything that's not totally anti-reason, anti-knowledge, anti-truth, anti-science, you know. Um and hate, you know, we can't you don't teach anything about hate. You can't just be like, yeah, we're doing like a degree in Nazism. I'm a Nazi. Like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's not allowed. Because hatred is just uh repugnant, you know.

SPEAKER_02 46:17

Who who gets to make that call?

SPEAKER_03 46:19

Or is that a like Well, we'll have an ethics board, you know, eventually when we're bigger.

SPEAKER_02 46:24

And so if the student is like, I would like to study some of the things.

SPEAKER_03 46:28

Yeah, if the faculty flags it and says someone's like and the students like, no, it is acceptable, then you could have it looked at the ethics board. Right. And the ethics board would would say no, it is, or no, it isn't.

SPEAKER_02 46:39

I would like to experiment on wild animals. Is that okay? That's easier.

SPEAKER_03 46:43

That's called an IRB, right? That's what's that? IRB is uh what does it stand for? I don't actually know. I actually just got one. Something review board. Okay. But it's an ethics, it's an ethics approval for a study. Oh, yeah. So I actually got one last couple months ago. So I'm doing a human study.

SPEAKER_02 47:00

I need to torture puppies for my scientific and the IRB is like rejected.

Programs Structure And Recruiting Deans

SPEAKER_03 47:05

And then if you do it, then your your data will not be accepted by journals. They won't accept data that doesn't have an IRB approval. Makes sense. Yeah. So there you go. Okay. So yeah, so I think if there's any, but I doubt there'll be problems like that. I mean, I rarely. And if there is, then great. Then it goes to the ethics board and they publish some well, they publish some reasoning, and then you know, they're either right or wrong. I don't know, you know, then but at least there's a process and a kind of right, you know, way to do it. But no, then that's all this is all very, very like inside baseball. The main thing is that it's a new university, it's a great educational experience, and the goal is to drive up quality and drive down cost of higher education through a new innovative entrant, just like any industry, you know, new entrants come in and drive things to be better and cheaper. And uh, and Elton is supposed to do that. It's it's great, it's going really well. We well, we're at this phase where I'm kind of recruiting leadership for the programs. Uh-huh. So uh like deans who are gonna be like the heads of the programs. Um, and we are recruit we've got like five already on board. So we're gonna have like five programs. Nice and uh and hope maybe even a few more are coming down the line too. That's excellent. Yeah, and then each one of those is like its own the university is like the university, but then each one of those is its own college. So they kind of will have their own like kind of marketing, but it'll all be under like Liverpool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty, pretty actually it's pretty amazing.

SPEAKER_02 48:31

Is it dumb question? Is that how university and college the the terms work? Is university a collection of colleges? Yeah, exactly. And so a college is like one college a unit of study of like maybe we study this. Right. Chunk of study one way, right one thing.

SPEAKER_03 48:49

So like I'm a liberal arts. We are all linguistics college. Yeah, you could have a college of business, okay, college of arts and sciences, which usually is like the most generic where you can study a lot of things. Most bachelor's degrees are like at the arts and college. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 49:03

Arts and sciences college of Can you not be a university if you don't have a collection of colleges?

A Remote PhD By Publication

SPEAKER_03 49:08

Technically, you're not just like you're not an emperor unless you're a king of kings. Uh-huh. You can't be a university unless you have multiple colleges. Yeah, yeah. It's not technically. So we have like we have like five colleges right now. We have like a graduate school, like a PhD program that's like its own college, research college. And then we have MBA, masters in organization psychology, masters in uh cybersecurity, cool, and a master's in um dang it, what's the other one? They're gonna be mad that I can't remember. Anyways, there's other programs that are coming down the line. Oh, education, master's education. I'll just edit out the thing that sound perfect. If anyone wants to be the dean of our masters of education, come and talk to me because uh we need a dean for that. But we have a bunch of really cool opportunities for it, but we don't have the the dean yet. We need the leader. But no one gets paid yet. So everyone's like, wait, you want me to work and like build a thing, but there's no money? I'm like, no, it's we're gonna don't there'll be money someday when there's like students you know paying tuition, then there's money. But right now there's a building because it's a nonprofit, so like investors aren't like tripping over themselves to give us money with no return. But um, yeah, it's a cool, it's a really cool thing. Anybody can go and look at it. Elton.university, and um um the probably the cool one of the coolest things is the PhD program, which we're modeling after the way I got my PhD, which I might have talked about before, that it's a PhD by publication. Okay, and so I'm gonna be essentially the first graduate of Elton University's PhD program, which is by publication, which means you write four peer-reviewed papers and then you submit them to one of our one of the universities that we're gonna work with, and that university so then you get you dual enroll the last year of your program with Elton. So you do the first you work with Elton professors and advisors to get your papers published. And then you keep working with Elton advisors and professors, but you dual enroll with your university that's gonna be the degree issuer, and then you turn in the publication, the summary of your research, and you do an oral examination. Um, and then you turn that all into the partner university and to Elton, and you'll get a degree issued by both. So you'll get a degree issued by Elton, which is not accredited because Elton's not accredited, but you will also get a degree issued by the the the partner school. And so that's how you get like your accredited doctorate. Someday I think Elton will be accredited and it'll back. It'll go back propagate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It'll backpropagate. Yeah. So yeah, it's that's that's probably one of the coolest programs. Because right now, to get a PhD in the United States, you basically have to like quit your job, move to where that university is, teach, take classes, teach, and then write a dissertation. Takes like three to five years. Most people it takes like four or five years. And and that and you don't earn income that whole time because you're either teaching or writing your dissertation like full time. Right. So it's this incredibly expensive, arduous, possible. And then at the end, you may or may not have any actual papers published in any journals. Some people might only publish one paper, their whole thing. Or they might if they're smart, they'll publish more, but most people, there isn't a requirement to publish. So they're they have zero or they have one paper published by the time they graduate. With Elton, you can have a job while you do it because it's personalized, you know, one-on-one. You don't have to move because it's remote. You can study whatever you want to study. There's no like advisor telling you what you have to study. You can decide what you're researching. Then you write peer-reviewed published papers so that when you graduate, you have four citations. That's like crazy. That means you're like ready to like go get a job in academia or wherever, because you have the citations and the degree, which is what you need to do. You've created an evidence-based career. Like resume for yourself. Exactly, right? Portfolio. So it's so it basically gets you what would take another traditional PhD like seven or eight years to do. Yeah, you do in three. And why wouldn't you and for way less money? And you can keep working a job so you don't lose your income. It's just like remark remarkably. It seems way, yeah, it seems like it's geared. And actually, I think you could argue that you learn more because you actually publish real papers in the in the space. Yeah. So at the end, you not only know more, but you you're recognized as knowing more and being more, you know, prestigious than someone who just finished a dissertation that took them or a PhD that took them six years and a dissertation that took them through three three years to write. Right. You you technically will be treated, and I argue arguably, I think you probably know more than that person. I mean, they might know about their PhD, their dissertation topic more than you do. Right. But it the field, you'll know more because you'll have written multiple papers within and working with all the things that I'm talking about. So Alton, you just start, and this is the way the bachelor's and the other masters are too. You just immediately start succeeding. You don't, you don't say, oh, you're gonna do this learning, and then later you're gonna succeed. Yeah, you just immediately start success. Like you start doing what it takes to get what you define as success. You know, you might enter the cybersecurity masters and say, I want to get a job in cybersecurity as soon as possible because maybe you want the income or you just want it, you want to start you're okay starting in like the mail room. That could be the first thing you start working with your professor on is doing like everything you need to get, like a very, very low-level cybersecurity job, like an analyst or a sysadmin or whatever. And then and then you can you don't have to leave Elton when you get the job, you just have what you're learning on the job start getting you credit for Elton. So everything kind of can feed together rather than having it be this like bubble that you have to like exit to work and enter to learn. You just turn the world into a learning environment where that is then guided and assessed by Elton expert professors who are experts.

Who Should Apply Without A Bachelor’s

SPEAKER_02 55:07

So then who is who is a good potential student for Elton? Is it someone who already has a college degree and is now looking for an MBA or PhD? Is it someone who doesn't know it is?

SPEAKER_03 55:19

I guess if you're yeah, mostly you should be looking. Well, we we can accept people without bachelor's degrees into our master's degrees. How's that? Wait, okay. So this is actually allowed, and some schools do it. Like, for example, especially with MBAs, you'll see if you have some college and maybe they say five years experience working in business, you can get into our MBA. Other schools say that. And so we say the same thing. We say, yeah, if you have some college, community college, or one or two years of college.

SPEAKER_02 55:46

Would would then would you graduate? Would that be you have an MBA but you don't have a bachelor's, or would it be like Yeah, you have no bachelor's, but you have an MBA? I feel like wouldn't people want to do that?

SPEAKER_03 55:56

People, yeah, instead of getting your bachelor's, just get an MBA.

SPEAKER_02 55:59

Because I feel like the bachelor, the people I don't feel like anyone's gonna be like, oh, you don't have your bachelor's. Yeah, exactly. But I do have an MBA, so actually, yeah, that's more relevant. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 56:08

So well, there you go. So anyone who just agrees with what Scott just said, absolutely come and do an MBA at Elton. Don't get a bachelor's. You have to have some college and you have to have some experience because we have to have something to show that you can do like a master's level work. Right. But you don't need a bachelor's degree to attend Elton's master's degrees, MBA, cybersecurity, organizational psychology, all the masters. You don't need a bachelor's to do it. Okay. You just need to be ready to do it to do the work. Yeah. Yeah. So, so yeah. Um, also because we don't believe much in traditional education, anyways. If you did a few years of college, we don't care because that we don't think you probably learn that much, anyways. You'll probably learn the more than you learned in those years in the first like six weeks of Elton. Right. Which is what people say. They say, Man, I learned more in the first few weeks than I learned in like a year of college. It's like, yeah, that's how Elton works. You learn like tremendously more.

SPEAKER_02 56:56

I mean, it doesn't, it's not a total direct analog, but it sounds like how when I was learning Japanese, I would learn it in classes like a little bit at a time in Kansas. And I'm like, well, this is you know, I have memorized some stuff, but just going and living in Japan, I immediately surpassed what I was learning in all my classes. Right.

SPEAKER_03 57:15

In a very short amount of time, just being Elton is like an immersion university. Yeah, it sort of immerses you in, not in a scary way, though. Like I think a lot of people jumping into Japan.

SPEAKER_02 57:26

I'm learning faster, I'm learning more often, and I'm learning in a different way than I was in the classroom, but it's way more effective. It's what I need, it's everything when I need it.

Agile Just In Time Education Model

SPEAKER_03 57:34

The only difference between Elton and that is that is like kind of throwing people in the deep end. And it's kind of scary, I think, for a lot of people, maybe to be like, oh, I'm just gonna be like thrown into this situation. Elton is not like that. You're given one-on-one support. So it's not like being thrown in the deep end at all. And we have all kinds of ways to help people who get stuck or need tutoring or need unblocking or need help. Like we do that all day. You know, it's not just like talk to your advisor, oh, they think you're dumb, leave, go do what they said. No, it's not that's what a traditional PhD is like, right? You know, is your advisor's kind of this, you know, ogre or could be, depending on their personality, but they have that power over you. And Elton, it's more like we work for you. We're trying to help you get your research done or do your master's, not just complete your master's, but achieve the goals that you have in your career to get into a cybersecurity, to get a promotion from, you know, a lower level to a director level with your MBA, to change careers with an MBA or change careers with a master's in organizational psychology. In the master's degree, you do the work to actually do those things. You don't just like read books and learn about theory so that then when you graduate, you can go do those things. You just do it immediately. Yeah, yeah. Uh Elton's a Elton is an agile university, which might not mean anything to a lot of some people, but in software and in manufacturing, people know, you know, just-in-time manufacturing. Like as soon as the part is needed, then the part is ordered. It's not like you have a big pile of parts in a warehouse and then, you know, and then you, you know, you have this huge pile of parts. The part is actually ordered when it's needed. It's the same thing with Elton. Instead of having this big storehouse of knowledge, like textbooks and you know, buildings full of these, you know, people who are salaried who have to sit there and be the experts. Instead, it's like, what do you want to learn? Oh, I want to learn this. We then immediately go pull an expert and resources about that to you. So it's not, yeah, yeah. So it's so it's an agile or just in time form of education rather than an assembly line. And that's a less wasteful form.

SPEAKER_02 59:35

Way less wasteful to have because you don't have a bunch of people twiddling their thumbs waiting for exactly someone to come learn their knock on their door or whatever.

Accreditation Risks And Terminal Degrees

SPEAKER_03 59:43

Yeah. And we'll have full-time professors and we'll have, you know, we'll have a staff, we'll have, you know, it's not like everything's, I don't know, Uber for learning. It's not like that. Right. But it, but it, but those, those, those main professors will be generalists, right? Who are experts in many, you know, many things rather than like, you know, uh and then the experts who are specialists will be pulled in on an as need basis, more so because there's no there's no need to uh have have those people because everyone's learning about so many different things. It's better to have generalists uh at the kind of front line, just like you know, a quarterback needs to know all the plays, right? You know, but the defensive lineman only knows the defensive plays, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. So you want the quarterback to be like a generalist, and then you call on the the specialist to come in and and change people's lives and transform people and give them these incredible educational experiences that they that they will have struggle to have other places um as as quickly and as efficiently. So yeah, and then someday we'll have a bachelor's like a really bachelor's degree. You have to be like you have to be okay with getting an unaccredited bachelor's, which is a bit risky because other school Elton might get might get accredited um someday. You know, we wouldn't be against it if the accreditors would allow us to do it. But right now, accreditors just would not allow it because they're a cartel and they don't want new schools to start. Um, but with Elton, yeah, so we might get accredited in the future. But right now, you know, when you got your bachelor's, if you then went and tried to get a master's degree at, you know, University of Santa Cruz or something, they might try to like they might be like Elton University, that's not in our system. Ergo, we don't accept it. Like we only take what's in our system. Okay. And then we would try to send them a letter on your behalf and say, please accept our master's degree. Here's the transcript, here's the yeah. And then and then hopefully they would change their mind and say, okay, this looks acceptable. But if they didn't, if they stuck in their stuck to their guns and said, No, it's you know, we just take whatever's accredited or in our system legacy schools, then you might get screwed over with that bachelor's. So right now the main thing is terminal degrees, you know, MBA is a terminal degree. There is no further degree, PhD. Well, our PhD will be accredited because you'll get this the degree from the the partner college. Um, and even if you don't get it from the partner college, you'll you'll get it from Elton, and who knows, maybe you know that might be enough for some people or for some circumstances. Yeah. Um so yeah, so it's a really, really cool thing, and it's really starting to take off. Yeah. It's really starting to kind of have an ink uh like a kind of burst forward. Sweet.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:18

Yeah. Very cool. Do you have a theme? Not a theme song. What do they call it? A fight song? Like a alma mater. We don't have that yet. Gotta get all these things. We don't have that. Wait, no, I'm just trying to add bloat and waste to this thing.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:31

No, no, it's fine. Let's do it. Yeah, let's have a fight song. Elton.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:36

Elton Crockett. No, don't use the Davy Crockett song. They they they're not using it anymore, so we can probably That's right. We can use it now. What's the statute of time it's been? Right.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:46

What about do you have a rival school that you like absolutely have to it's all those other all those other alternative universities you have to go steal their mascot before the big game? Right. Yeah, we do that. Yeah, toilet paper, they're they're frat houses. Big time yeah, and steal their mascot. And yeah. There are there are like other alternative, like new universities uh that are starting. Uh like there's one that's really great in Washington, DC called New U University.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:10

New U. New U University. Okay.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:12

And uh they're they're quite cool, quite interesting. They've and they have students and a campus, and like they're like a more true a little bit more like a traditional university. Okay, but they do some things to still be like cool and new and and more efficient and better. So yeah, they're cool. If you want to go to school in DC, definitely look at New U University. Um, but and there's other ones too, but yeah, so there are rivals. No, obviously there are friends.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:34

No, because you want everyone to it's you want the the idea to succeed so that it's more widely adopted, right?

SPEAKER_03 1:03:41

Right. It's the little schools are all against we're we're a band against the bigger schools, not not against each other. That would be silly. Yeah, everyone's against Ohio State, right? Ohio State. We want we want people fewer people to go to Ohio State, and we don't care where they go as long as they don't go there. Fair, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:03:59

Okay, yeah.

Enrollment Options And Risk Free Month

SPEAKER_03 1:04:01

So that's an unheard of solution to the world's problems. You guys have probably never heard of an evidence-based, personalized, one-on-one, tutoring-based university doesn't exist. And I'm but this is an idea that doesn't just come in the podcast, it's actually real. I'm making it. So my core, um, one of my core commitments right now.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:18

Elton.university.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:20

Elton.university. Looks good. You can enroll tomorrow. And you can take you can actually go to school there as short or as long as you want. So you don't have to do the whole degree. You can do like a certificate, which is like a third the length or half the length or whatever. Nice. So you can even just get in and you know. And the first month is risk-free. So you could you could pay tuition, start, and if at the end of the first month you didn't like it, you just get all your money back. Yeah, fine. Yeah, there's no risk.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:45

But what you might find is that you're like, oh, wait, this is the best experience I've ever had because it's finally something that works for you.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:52

It's our job, it's our job to make it so at the end of that month, you're like, Oh my god, that was the most amazing month of education I've ever received. Yeah. Of course, I'm gonna at least do the next month. Like, you know, you can stop any month, but you pay monthly, so you could stop any month, but you could get your first month back if you don't like it in the first month. But you could always say, Okay, now I'm actually done, and you could stop and you get a certificate and you could be done. So you don't even need to finish the whole degree, which we're fine with. I mean, I think people are gonna want to finish the degree because it's because you know, then you get a full course of study, and you know, but but if people go in and say, Man, I really learned a lot about cybersecurity in six months and I got a job, I don't actually want to learn anymore. I'm just happy to get my job, and that's great. Like we see that as like, you're a graduate, you're awesome, you know, good work. So it's much more flexible than and and and centered on the students' goals than a university who's like, doesn't it seem like universities are like, we're busy, you know, like a stop. Uh alone, stop bothering us students. Do the course we told you to do and stop bothering us with Lt's the exact opposite. We're not busy with anything except for helping our students reach maximum success level as quickly as possible while they're still in the school. Like we don't even, you know, why wait? Why wait if that's what you want? No, you might not want that. You might say, No, I'm here to like, you know, study in a much more, you know, I have goals that are not about. Economics, you know, making money and getting a job. That's fine too. Because Elton can serve that just as eek just as well. You just have to communicate it to your professors and they go, Great, let's like read War and Peace. You know, like, you know, there's no do what you're trying to do. There's no limitation. You know, well, not for the MBA. But you know, if you were doing the bachelor's degree, you might just say, I want to read Tolstoy. Great, let's read it, you know. And they wouldn't just say War and Peace, they'd say, Well, uh, you know, he's written like, you know, 12 books, like which one is, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Or start with an easier one, you know, and then build towards maybe one that's harder to read, like War and Peace. Okay. Although War in Peace isn't that hard. It's actually quite good.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:53

It's just thick, right?

SPEAKER_03 1:06:54

Yeah, but short chapters. The chapters are like two pages, three pages. So it's like bam, bam, bam, bam. Gets you feeling like you're just like locked in. Cool. And it's like war, war, war. Peace, peace. War, war, war, war, peace, peace, peace, peace, peace. War, war, war. Each chapter, like each chapter is like overlap.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:10

They don't they don't overlap within a chapter. You're not gonna have to be a little bit more than that.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:13

People are never falling in love in the war, and people are never like fighting peace, warring out in peacetime. No, there just turns into a war. It's either like the can- Is there love?

SPEAKER_02 1:07:22

Is there love in the love in the peace? I mean, they bury that part in the peace too. They just call it they're just talking about the war and the peace. I didn't even know about the love.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:31

There is love and hatred.

unknown 1:07:33

What there's everything.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:34

It should be a longer title.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:35

It's the greatest story ever told. That's what it's that's what it's called. War and peace, the greatest story ever told. I mean, that's what that's its nickname. Is that its nickname? Yeah, people say the greatest story ever told. That means war and peace. I thought it was the Bible or something. No, that's uh the most popular book ever, the most published book ever.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:51

That's Johann Gutenberg's favorite book.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:54

It's like uh Oprah and Gutenberg both approve of this. They're on both their lists.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:59

That's why he printed it first. It was just like I love this book. Oprah's Bible.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:03

Let's publish it. Yeah, so that's it. Solution for the Multiverse came in through the portal from the other universe, and we've actually established it and made it.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:14

From the other universe.

Wrap Up And Goodbye

SPEAKER_03 1:08:16

There was another universe where there was lots of universities, lots of new schools, and we were like, this is great. And one of them was like one-on-one tutoring. We were like, awesome. Take it through the portal. Boom. Yeah. All right. Sweet. Should we be done? I think so. Thanks everybody for listening to another solutions from the multiverse.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:36

It's been our pleasure to solution you this evening.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:38

It's our pleasure.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:41

Drive safe, everyone.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:43

We'll be back in two weeks, as always. Not one week, two weeks. But stay tuned every Tuesday. For sure. Every other Tuesday. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.