Welcome And The Genius Shortage

SPEAKER_01 0:24

Hey everyone, I'm Adam Brows. And I'm Scott Moffin. And we are Solutions from the Multiverse where we bring you solutions. Unheard of new solutions to the world's problems.

SPEAKER_00 0:35

We got a new episode for you today. So what is our solution, Adam?

SPEAKER_01 0:39

Scott, there are not enough geniuses. That's right. We have a shortage. Oh, two is not enough for seven billion people. Not enough geniuses. That's right. So today's solution is going to be a solution to make more geniuses. Okay. Have you ever heard of blue zones? Blue zones? Blue zones, no. Like where people live for a long time.

SPEAKER_00 1:03

Have you heard of I've heard of the blue man group? Did they come out of blue zones?

SPEAKER_01 1:06

They were they were from a blue zone, yeah. Where everyone's just blue and hairless. No, I haven't heard of blue zones. I've what's what is a blue zone? You're

Blue Zones To Genius Hotspots

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deeply behind the the curve. It's okay. I usually am. So blue the reason why you're behind the curve is not just because you don't know blue zones, but actually since blue zones came out like a few decades ago, then recently there's been some ideas that maybe blue zones were a scam. Like, anyways, my point is there are these zones in history. So blue zones are where people live like past a hundred. Like people lived very longevity, very long longevity in these areas, like uh Okinawa, Japan. Uh-huh. Um, there were these parts of uh Italy, there were these parts of America, like with Seventh-day Adventists that would be very long. And so this guy wrote this book called the Blue Zone book, and it's all about these blue zones. Anyways, it turns out maybe those parts of those parts of the world were just getting they were doing social security fraud. Like the Okinawans were like, My grandpa's still alive, he's 112. We'll keep collecting that check every month for social security. Anyway, so it's maybe the data is a little bit screwed over, but anyways, what a I'm I'm talking about zones where throughout history there were these places where there were tons of geniuses per capita, and this is like very easy to confirm based on the data. Some of these would be Athens in the fourth and fifth century. Okay. You had Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Sophocles, Euripides, Phidias, Hippocrates, all within a hundred like a hundred years, within a city of like 30,000 people. Like 30,000

Athens Florence Scotland Vienna Explained

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people.

SPEAKER_00 2:46

Like just kind of modern philosophy, everything, all thought, and literature, and you know, drama, and like a bunch of things, right?

SPEAKER_01 2:55

Hippocrates was medicine, right? Okay, we also have Florence from the 1400s and 1500s, so 15th century, 16th century Florence. You had Leonardo, Michelangelo, Botticelli, Machiavelli, Brunelleschi, Alberti, Galileo. Better than I would. So amazing, like just amazing, just genius upon genius upon genius for only about 60,000 people. So it's just like the per capita genius level was like one in 10,000. It's like incredible, right? If if you had that today, we have 7 billion people on the planet. In America, we have 330 million people. If there was one Leonardo or Galileo level genius for every 10,000 people, we would be like it would be like we'd be a wash in geniuses. It'd be like insane, right?

SPEAKER_00 3:41

So what happened? I mean, did we get dumber or did but I mean what there's something in things everything get discovered already? I mean, they they were doing easy stuff maybe before.

SPEAKER_01 3:51

Well, let's let's talk about one, let's talk about one more, which is Scott. Let's talk about two more. Then there's Scotland in 1740 to 1800. Braveheart. This is probably yeah, Braveheart. It was all about William Wall. So this is probably the most dense per capita genius ever. So you have Adam Smith, David Hume, James Watt, like electricity, uh, Joseph Black, James Hutton, Adam Ferguson, James Rye, Reed, John Play. Is this all from Scotland? These are all the from what's called what was called the Scottish Enlightenment. Whoa. Which was just before the European Enlightenment. Like whenabouts was this?

SPEAKER_00 4:26

I made a joke over when you were telling me it was actually what what time period? What time period was this?

SPEAKER_01 4:32

This was 1740 to 1800, so it's like the late 17th, late 18th century. So that was a country of 1.5 million people, but it had they literally in like just 50 years produced the foundations of economics, geology, thermodynamics, philosophy of minds, psychosociology, all simultaneously. So it was like tremendous like density of geniuses.

SPEAKER_00 4:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:56

Vienna, 1880 to 1920. You had Freud, Wittgenstein, Mahler, Klimt, Schoenberg, Ernest Mach, Otto Wagner, just like an incredible, and that was like another couple, just a couple million people. You had like dozens of major geniuses at once. So you have like one in every 50,000, right? So what the hell happened? Where where are these geniuses? Like, why I mean you could so you could argue so the solution for today is that we should take the education. So all of these places had very similar educational systems that are not in almost in any way like our educational

Build Schools That Manufacture Genius

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systems. And actually, people today in education would consider their educational systems like bad but or different. They would be like people would be suspect of them, I think. We can get into it. So, but the solution for today is what if we took the commonalities of these tiny little pockets of incredibly high per capita genius, and we said, we're gonna build a school or a school system that was mirrored that that took the key aspects of these school systems and applied them. People might be sort of suspect or might doubt or say, well, that's unconventional. But what we're drawing from is the historical record across multiple continents and multiple countries over thousands of years where the most geniuses were produced.

SPEAKER_00 6:23

Okay. I mean, that seems like solid logic. I'm assuming it involves lots of worksheets, lots of Xerox worksheets. Mostly Xerox worksheets doing it. That was what really backed the Scottish Enlightenment. Preparing for they did this by preparing for standardized tests, like overhead projectors with dry erase markers. Socrates was, you know, that was his famous teaching tool, was the overhead projector.

SPEAKER_01 6:47

Plato's Academy, yes. Oh, yes, the famous Platonic overhead projectors. Right. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 6:53

I don't love it, all right? It's just we're friends, all right? It's just my projector. You're you're projecting, actually. You're projecting that onto me.

SPEAKER_01 7:02

Stop projecting. Stop projecting onto me. Socrates was all about the you got, you know, people today. If you're a millennial, you remember the overhead projector with the whiteboard marker. Did you have that with the transparent worksheets that the teacher lectured while doing that? That was pretty awesome, actually. You could really you could really watch that and like pay attention. I should say that part of this idea is related to the university that I'm starting, which is Elton University, which uses almost all of these. So it's it's meant to be a good idea.

SPEAKER_00 7:32

I was gonna say, I would imagine you're using the stuff that you've discovered is the good stuff.

SPEAKER_01 7:37

So if people want to come to the genius machine university, I can't promise you'll be a genius, but we are basing the instruction exactly on these things. And not because they come from, I mean, not because of this idea, but because uh research, evidence-based education shows that this is also the best way to learn. So it's not it's not meant to be uh just some historical museum piece. It's it's based on contemporary scholar uh science. But it's also interesting that it fits with this sort of historical case. So some of the things, some of the characteristics of these schools, like the way learning worked, was people engaged in serious study before like 18 years old. Like they would enroll in serious study between 14 and 16. Serious study being what? Like

Start Serious Study At 14

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they would be like, I'm going to study political philosophy. Like they specialize. I'm 16 years old. Yeah, I'm 15 years old. I'm already going to start my kind of career in political science. So the idea of being like well-rounded is nowhere here. There's no like well-rounded. That's not a thing in these cases.

SPEAKER_00 8:46

Is that related at all to people living shorter lifespan? You know, like if you die at 45, maybe 15 seems like our 30, you know. Yeah, maybe it's I don't I mean, yeah, I guess relatively.

SPEAKER_01 9:01

I mean, there's yeah, there's no evidence of people saying you just die sooner. Yeah, if you die sooner, maybe being a little it's like dog years or something.

SPEAKER_00 9:10

I mean, they expect it, they heap more responsibility on you, but I I remember being 15. You're not like mature and ready for all the you know wilds of the world at that point, but you're choosing your stuff.

SPEAKER_01 9:22

I think our society infantilizes the youth. Yeah. And if you look at historically, like a bot like a bar mitzvah or a bot mitzvah, I think is 13 years old. You know, and you were considered like an adult in you know traditional Jewish, Jewish, like ancient Jewish culture. So I think, and if you look at other societies even today, like I had a busser, I was a waiter and I had a colleague who was like the busser of the restaurant, and he was from El Salvador, and he had a a child who was 14, and they were his child was starting a family and running his family farm. And he was very like proud of his son, who was like a man who was starting a family and running a farm at 14. So I think people generally throughout history, 14 years old pretty much meant that you were an adult. And so our culture pushes it to 18 for good reason, I think. You know, I think there's good reason to do it the way we do it. But you know, throughout history, it would have been more like there would have been more responsibility given at 14.

SPEAKER_00 10:29

Well, I think you're right that our society definitely infantilizes children, but also I think we're afraid of empowering children. It's a self-serving interest too. It's keeping them down so that we don't have to answer for the state of the education system or the state of the environment or the thing, you know, child the people who had the most at stake were just like, no, no, no, you can't talk. You this is the room of grown-ups. Also the room of the people who have failed to fix any of the problems and probably increased that we caused the problems. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:04

And we'll and we'll be dead before the people who were telling to we have to watch out here though, Scott, because you know, when we did that, when we did an episode where we talked about lowering the voting age to 14 as a solution. And and then, you know, you and I think about this as you know, kind of advocating for and kind of liberating the young. When I talked to people about that immediately, it was it was very, it was actually kind of weird because I was like, why does their minds go there? They were people I took a lot of the people I talked to about that were like, Oh, that's like you you shouldn't do that because people want to lower the age of consent to 14. So it becomes this like sex thing. Yeah, and I was like, No, that wasn't in the like that's not what we're talking about at all.

SPEAKER_00 11:47

I think people do when you start talking about people, ages, and children being more capable at younger ages, people all all start getting side-eyed and go like what are you doing?

SPEAKER_01 11:59

What's going on in your mind that you go there?

SPEAKER_00 12:02

Because I'm not going there. Is it a wild idea to think of empowering people and still protecting them? And then it's we can protect people, you don't have to open floodgates all or nothing. You can exactly choose them, you have a little bit of risk.

SPEAKER_01 12:17

And then there are there are like people, I mean awful people who do want to like lower the age of consent. And then with that, they don't say, you know, give them the right to vote. So I mean it's like it's like it's like the the risk is not that they get the right to vote. Actually, if they had the right to vote, they could probably vote for greater protections for them against like you know, gross, lecherous men who want to like have sex with 14-year-olds, you know. Certainly, yes, it would certainly take. So I think it would empower them more and strengthen their ability to protect themselves because they would be a constituency you'd probably protect themselves, you know, more because they'd be like, I can vote for those, you know, protections. But, anyways, we just have to be careful with that because I was I didn't realize because I didn't that's not the way my mind works, right? But a bunch of people I talked to were like, Oh, uh, you know, that's just you're just pushing down the age of consent if you do that for sex. I was like, Jesus Christ.

SPEAKER_00 13:11

Anyway, but yeah, so that's one characteristic children advanced like knowledge centers and let them have like creative ideas, and they're like, Oh, really? So you want to like hook up with kids? You're like, no.

SPEAKER_01 13:25

Epstein Island over here, you know? Yeah. So, anyways, it's a weird, it's a anyways. Unfortunately, that people that's what people think about, but yeah, so in these characters, in these situations, people 14 to 16 were already going really deep into a specific field. The idea of being like well-rounded was not a thing. You didn't there were like, you know, people say, Well, what about Renaissance Man? Like, you know, the Renaissance band. You're talking about the Renaissance, wouldn't wouldn't they be like Renaissance men? Yeah, but there wasn't that wasn't their educational system to force being well-rounded upon them. They just they just were interested in a lot of things and did a lot of things. Like Leonardo da Vinci just did a lot of things. He was interested in a lot of things, but his focus in school was art, you know, and mechan and mechanical, you know, mechanical stuff that he would because art back then was very technical. It wasn't just like this sort of everything you didn't just buy art supplies from the art store and then go make, you had to like make all your art supplies, which was very complex and technical, you know.

SPEAKER_00 14:27

I hear you saying that it's kind of like your theory is that you could pretty much bring up a genius out of a lot of people that aren't currently, it's not unlocked and not open. It's just the the process, like how if you if you were great at hockey, but you started at 20, you're never going to be good enough to get into the NHL. You you have to start that at like age five to get on the right track. Right. And maybe that's the genius to get that level of genius, right? You have to put them in a funnel like this.

SPEAKER_01 14:57

Yeah. The fact that we're limiting people so that they have to learn, you know, history, English, math, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all the way until they're 18 is just it doesn't seem like the right choice to do, given this ex, you know, this, the, these examples. So the other thing that was interesting was that a single professor would teach a student for multiple years, building more of a kind of mentorship relationship than like a sort of transactional. Oh, you know, I have first periods with my math teacher, second period

Long-Term Mentorship Over Periods

SPEAKER_01 15:30

for one semester, you know, and then second period is with my English professor for one semester, and then they're gone. And I maybe I see them later if I have a course with them later when I'm a senior. And right. And then those teachers are just kind of floating around the school and they're in the teacher's lounge, and you you know who they are, and they kind of know who you are, but it's all just classroom interactions, and there's no like actual mentorship, right? So these this was the exact opposite. This was like, you know, 14, 15-year-old starting, and then all the way through, you know, to your early 20s, you would be like, I go work with you know, Professor, you know, Bob, and he's like a master painter or a master astronomer or master political philosopher. And he just tells me what to do all day. Like I'm his apprentice, basically. Like he tells me to read stuff, I have to read it. He tells me to write stuff, I have to write it. Like I'm his sort of apprentice. And I and there's a bunch of other apprentices here, and we all just do whatever he says. We're like his assistants, his TAs, his, you know. So it's almost like a what we today do only at the most advanced graduate level was happening, you know, maybe not right from 14. You probably would have had some sort of initial readings and stuffs you had to do, but all of that even would have been monitored by just one person who was like, Did you read this and this and this? Like, go read these 10 books, come back, you know. So it's not like transactional one-off classes with one teacher that then you never meet again. That's definitely not the way it was. So this is how Elton is too. Elton is one-on-one instruction where there's like a mentorship that develops between the faculty and the students.

SPEAKER_00 17:07

What I like about the idea in modern times is that it feels more available because it feels I was gonna ask about in Greece or in 1700 Scotland or you know, uh in Venice and Italy, the people that get into that channel, into that funnel, are is that like a select few people? And then other people go into the funnel for like shepherding, and other people go into the funnel for like uh blacksmithing, and other people go into the you know, like different funnels and then so but the tricky part is that now at least we can switch around and you can choose what you want to do. But if you had been like, oh, we're all farmers, you're gonna be a farmer at 14, and you never have a chance to become one of the genius, or you know, like how many people never got a chance to move outside of their outside of their station.

SPEAKER_01 17:58

I mean, I think I think it cuts both ways, you know, because some people, some people are like, oh, it's all nature, it's not nurture, so like it's all just gonna be based on sort of innate IQ. But you have to understand that at this time in history, it's not like they were like going out to the farms and doing IQ tests and pulling the high IQ farmers. It was not like there was no like selection like that, you know. It was like if you were a bourgeoisie merchant or an aristocrat, you would be educated in this way. That was it. Like, there was no like selection like the people who were gonna get educated. This is how yeah, the people who were getting educated were the people getting educated. So there's no like so the number of geniuses was not because they were like sourcing all the hinterland high IQ geniuses into the into the this system, right? This was like, no, there was just a set population of people who genetically were probably equivalent to the farmers. I mean, that genetically there's gonna be no difference because there's no genetic difference between human beings. So no, that you can't explain the number of geniuses from some kind of selection or kind of aggregation of like high IQ natural intelligences. And actually, I think that's like BS. Like I'm an evidence-based educator. I've looked at the data on this question of like natural intelligence and like natural IQ and stuff, and it's mostly garbage. And that's not to say that there aren't differences in natural intelligence. There are, they're slight and there are, but what's true, what the data shows again and again and again, and is like I would say is ironclad, is someone who's like an over, like totally crazy, like natural genius in the 0.99, you know, 99.99% natural genius. If they're not given a good education, they are like an idiot. Like they won't be able to achieve anything in mathematics or chemistry or philosophy, right? But someone who has like a 50% IQ, but then gets a really, really good education will be able to make contributions, meaningful, valuable contributions to whatever fields, you know, medicine, science, whatever. So yeah, it's kind of a paradox that people, I think people have a hard time getting their mind around. There is such a thing as natural intelligence, it virtually does not matter at all because it it gets blown away by the quality of the education that they get. I was hanging around with a bunch of like techie, weirdo, like wealthy people in San Francisco a couple months ago or a couple weeks ago. And everyone there, I was talking to them, and then I realized that underneath everyone's like what they were saying was this complete allegiance to this idea of like a natural aristocracy who were like cognitively elite and therefore deserved like more money, more power, more status. Like, and I was like, Weird. Ooh, yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck.

SPEAKER_00 20:48

I don't like this at all. No, yeah, that's that's weird talk when you're like, oh, the us is and the thems, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 20:56

They would never come out and say it. They were too, you know, too well comported, you know, to like ever be as gauche as to come out and be like, yeah, we're just better and smarter, so we deserve more money and more power and influence in our society. They would never say that, but everything they were saying, we go back to, well, you know, oh, you know, yes, the cognitive elite, you know, oh yes, there's a cognitive difference, you know, which is bullshit. Uh, if you read if you look at the actual data that because they're getting stuck in that paradox, because they're saying, oh, look, the science says there's natural intelligence. They're right. But what they're not looking at is the science that then shows it doesn't matter, it gets wiped away by the quality of the education. The other difference is the curriculum was explicitly interdisciplinary.

SPEAKER_00 21:42

So, you know, meaning that your one teacher is gonna teach you a lot of different subjects, or how does that work?

SPEAKER_01 21:48

Yeah, it just meant like when you went and talked to the teacher and went

Interdisciplinary Learning And Montessori Model

SPEAKER_01 21:52

and kind of were doing your studies, if you were doing like natural philosophy, which was what science was called back then. So you're doing natural philosophy, so you're looking at like flowers, you know, and then somebody else is like looking at, you know, you might be like, Oh, well, how does like musical harmonics tie into like flowers? I'm gonna like play music to the flowers, like I'm gonna do the math of the mathematics of music. I'm gonna To like apply that to flowers and like look at it. And your teacher would be like, Great, cool. Like the teacher wouldn't be like, no, that's music. It's not biology. It's not plants. Stop. You know, there was just this like total openness to like pulling in mathematics, pulling in science, natural philosophy, you know, pulling in uh, you know, ethical, you know, other philosophy into whatever you are doing. That's the exact opposite of our certainly our universities, but also even our secondary primary schools, you know, like, well, this is history class, so we're gonna talk about history, and then all that's biology class. We're talking about biology. Uh, and you, you know, the idea that you could just sort of be in this milieu where you can pull in anything and start learning about anything that's related wasn't is not allowed.

SPEAKER_00 22:58

Now, is this similar to something like a Montessori school or one of those like self-directed schools where they let kids kind of just explore the room and do whatever?

SPEAKER_01 23:09

That's right. So, yes. So, you know, actually Elton is becoming and and really is from the beginning, but we're trying to really live up to being the first Montessori university. Nice. So the Elton University, yeah. So, no, yeah, a more self-directed sort of schooling would be more like this, and Montessori is like that to some extent. I mean, different schools, Montessor, they all just say they're Montessori, you know, but some, yeah, a really authentic Montessori school will be more student, the student-led. Um, but the problem is not very many schools are like that, even ones that list themselves as Montessori, and very few Montessori schools go after fifth grade. So that's only 10 years old, right? So as soon as they get into a high school, there's a few Montessori high schools, there's no Montessori universities except for Elton. Elton's the first in the history, as far as I can tell, is the history of the world. I just met with the American Montessori Society, two leaders of the American Montessori Society. They confirmed, they were like, Yeah, there's no, there's never been a Montessori university. And they were curious about what we're doing and they wanted to kind of provide guidance, which is what I approached them for. And um, so yeah, we're kind of trying to live up to that idea.

SPEAKER_00 24:14

Well, it feels like it switches in junior high and high school or middle school and high school because of universities, because they start teaching to get people into what the current university system is. So we can't really upend it from that grassroots side because they're like, no, no, no, our job is to get kids into higher education, prepare them for universities, and this is what universities are like. So I think you're right. Restructuring what the university is is the way to then affect high school, junior high school.

SPEAKER_01 24:44

Oh, I see, because it would create like a downward pressure to like like a channel into Elton would be like the high school student trying to get into Elton would be like, I'm gonna have a try to have a different high school experience to fit in with this more student center.

SPEAKER_00 24:58

If you're trying to get a Montessori high school to someone who's like, wait, though, I need to have my GPA look like a certain way, and I have to have my extracurriculars look a certain way so that I can apply to these schools the way that they, you know, filter and select students. I don't have a lot of variation in that. You know, I have a very specific menu I have to fulfill. But if more and more schools, like you're saying, are switching up how they do universities or how they how they want students to kind of come in prepared, that triggers high schools and opens up those channels to be like, hey, this is my goal school. This is how I would prepare for it. Right, right, right.

SPEAKER_01 25:37

Because otherwise, they're all just preparing for the standard schools. They're all just preparing for everyone's trying to get the SATACT. Yeah. So if you're saying we want to make geniuses, we got to start at the university to in order to unlock the men, maybe like genius high schools that could start afterwards.

SPEAKER_00 25:54

Well, I mean, I was gonna say there was a movie about this a while back called Baby Geniuses, where they tried to create babies. I thought maybe you were starting to propose a new baby geniuses. And I that turned out kind of like Jurassic Park, but with babies. It was not, it turns out not to be good to eat the law. That's with genetics. So I think the university level is correct. That's that's where it deals.

SPEAKER_01 26:20

Don't start with I noticed I noticed that the baby geniuses are all wearing diapers, which means they're geniuses, but they shit their pants. They're not that smart. I don't know how big a geniuses they are. You know what?

SPEAKER_00 26:33

Maybe that's the height of intelligence. If you can make someone else deal with your waist, then you're like, look who oh, really? I'm not that smart. Who's dealing with all the last time we all worked? I have like grown-up slaves just I'm just laying here going cuckoo, and you're doing everything else. You're calling me not a genius?

SPEAKER_01 26:49

All right, maybe I'll tell you another difference here. One thing is the professors were paid by student fees, so they weren't paid by like a university system, like through the tuition to the university and then divvied up to the to the professors. The students came and said, like, I want to work with you, I'll pay you to

Incentives Clubs And Public Debate

SPEAKER_01 27:09

be your student. So that means the teacher had to like serve the students' interests. It wasn't like, well, you failed my class, and the students like, I don't like this professor, they're not very good. Well, it doesn't matter, they're your professor, you know, you have to do whatever they say. It wasn't like that. The the students could just leave. They could be like, No, this is crap.

SPEAKER_00 27:29

Well, I was wondering how much, like, how many, how much of a chunk are we talking about? Are they paying for a month at a time or a week, or is it just going like, teacher, if you want today's coin, you better say something. I better learn something today, or you're not getting this the shiny drachma that I have in my hand.

SPEAKER_01 27:47

Sorry. I it was probably, you know, it was probably like you know, weekly, month, it was probably like monthly, you know. Yeah, yeah. They had to like small pouch of or five, or if maybe it was seasonally, like, oh, this spring, I'll, you know, and then winter or fall. I mean, I imagine they didn't have really strict calendaring, right? So probably did sort of seasonal sort of work. There was also a culture of clubs and societies. And so the students would be working with their professors like one-on-one, and they'd be with their other kind of apprentices who were all kind of around that teacher, which already kind of formed a natural club. But then they would like there was a bunch of these different clubs, like these different students found following these different teachers, and then in that space, there were these like social clubs where students would come in and just like hang out, and then they'd all be like disputing with each other and talking with each other. So there was this like cross-pollination happening.

SPEAKER_00 28:46

This is the Greece that you're talking about.

SPEAKER_01 28:49

All of them, every one of these genius, what all these characteristics are the characteristics of all these zones of genius. Uh, I was like, that sounds like the French salon or whatever that's happening during the Renaissance. Did we talk about France? Oh no, we did Florence, Scotland, Vienna, Athens. But yeah, there's yeah, France, France in the in the in the 1800s also could have been. The Renaissance kind of stretched across a lot of Europe chunks. Yes, exactly. So those salons, those salons though, were usually like not necessarily students, right? They were often like there were students there, but they were also like independent sort of researchers, ideas and stuff. I'm talking about like specifically like places that had like schools, like Plato's Academy, Aristotle's Lyceum, you know, Scotland, you know, the University of Glasgow in the world.

SPEAKER_00 29:34

Would they go and like debate the other people's ideas like they're a dojo going into another one to fight them? Or would they go and like teach me what's up? That's the next characteristic.

SPEAKER_01 29:45

So the next so the next characteristic is that students were required to publicly dispute, like argue with each other, like debate, essentially. So debate was the name of the game. You know, they did have to do writing, they had to write, you know, essays and they had to write things and they had to read a lot, but really they had to argue orally, like they had to dispute one another, and with their instrument with their teacher too. The teacher would say, like, take some position, and the student would have to dispute with the position, you know, like just like the way you have a conversation about something.

SPEAKER_00 30:18

Play devil's advocate or just kind of support their idea.

SPEAKER_01 30:21

And maybe the teacher would push you, like, that's not gonna work because of this, this, this, and he says that, and then you'd have to on the spot be like, you know, here's here's the response, right? And that disputation, that live oral disputation with other students, with your teachers, with like older students, younger students, right? Like across different levels of preparation, was a key factor. And in our educational system, is absent, completely absent. I mean, almost entirely gone. You write papers, you do readings, you take tests, you have a discussion in class, and a teacher might sort of, you know, kind of, well, what about this or what about that? And the students just, I mean, maybe you have some activist sort of student who will actually engage with you with that, but most students find that very distasteful. They like don't like to do that. They don't like to be like put on the spot. Oh, you put them on the spot. That's like a criticism that teachers get from students. Oh, you put them on the spot, that's bad. Well, all these Jones of genius, all these like genius times in history and and places, the students were constantly putting themselves on the spot or getting put on the spot by teachers, by other students in uh kind of instructional environments or in these sort of social clubs, they were constantly doing disputation.

SPEAKER_00 31:36

Well, I think now teachers probably are even hesitant to create a to try and encourage passionate, like intense uh arguments with their students, you know, or that they're kind of like, no, no, no, we're supposed to shy away from creating these sort of moments and these sorts of strife, which can, you know, like hurt feelings. Exactly. We don't want to offend anyone, we don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. I don't want to get in trouble. I'd rather just keep my head down and make it to my next class or next day.

SPEAKER_01 32:07

I mean, I'm like very I don't think speech should be like intolerant. I think there's I don't think that should be allowed, but you know, disputations, I think is cool. I think it's important for people to civilly discourse and dis debate on the merits of an idea. I think at Elton, this is still not a very strong part of the education, but I I want to strengthen it. I want to make it once we have more students, it'll be easier to be like, oh, the students are gonna hang out and have a student seminar or like a student hang, you know. But right now I think most of the sort of disputation just happens because you're doing one-on-one instruction, and the instructor does like not necessarily disputation, but more like an oral examination. Like, tell me the three reasons why this is like, you know, why do you believe this? Why do you believe that this is the case? And they tell you, then you say, but what about wouldn't an educated person like dis disagree with you? Like, not I'm disagreeing with you, but wouldn't someone disagree with you and say this, this, and this? And then they have to respond in some way. So you're doing a disputation, but it's not like it's not like an actual debate. It's not like I believe this, you believe this, we're fighting. It's like, what would an educated response be? You know?

SPEAKER_00 33:15

Yeah, and you want to you're checking to make sure that it's the a well-constructed argument or a well, you know, like you're you're going around and tapping on all the pieces and knocking on the posts and being like, all right, this stands up. You you got it. You're or if it doesn't, if they don't know what they're talking about, it falls over, and you're like, that's where that's where you need more support.

SPEAKER_01 33:36

Yeah. They would have had some, they didn't have textbooks, but they did have what would be called like primers. They had these like little books, like manuals that would help them do technical things like math or whatever. But they would have also been reading a lot of original

Read Originals Not Textbook Summaries

SPEAKER_01 33:54

texts or in addition to like primers. So that that's another thing that our schools don't do. They they they do almost all textbooks, very few original texts. Maybe in literature class you get some original texts, but like in history, you're not reading like the actual original history books. You're reading like a history textbook, you know, and the same thing in science class. You're not reading the actual original science papers and books, you're reading like a textbook that are summarized them. So, you know, I think you know, if you wanted to bank a school like this, you would pull back from textbooks or you'd make new textbooks that were like all original sources, and it was more like a compilation of papers with you know extracts of major, major important extracts of books and stuff like that. But do you think that's a good idea? So that's another difference. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:37

Do you think that's a thing that's just happening more and more often in the world where like you Google something and now you see an AI overview where it's the summarized excerpt piece, and it's like they they're trying more and more levels to keep you away from the original sources or from reading like the extended, the extended data.

SPEAKER_01 34:56

Yeah, I guess it just gets worse and worse. But if we can recognize that these schools were creating, you know, a high density of geniuses, and that that's cool, that that's a desirable social outcome, but also it's just a desirable outcome. Like parents want their kids to be geniuses. Students want to be geniuses, like students are like, I want to be really good at math, I want to be really amazing at, you know, I want to make contributions to medicine, to science, etc.

SPEAKER_00 35:21

And and be ready to identify opportunities that don't even exist yet. So you can't even prepare for them because they exist as time goes on, and then you have to be you know seize them as they come out.

SPEAKER_01 35:34

I will say, so if we're talking about disputation, I will say people could fire back at this and say, we do have geniuses, they're just not recognized as geniuses because it's just so cognitively difficult to like do a bunch of things in our society. Like being a uh just

Do We Still Have Geniuses

SPEAKER_01 35:51

like a marketing person at a normal company requires you to like do really sophisticated creative work. They're not recognized as a genius, but like they are actually a genius, you know, in the sense that they invent whole new, you know, I don't know, marketing campaigns every week, and that that's actually pretty remarkable. So you could argue that like, oh, there are the same number of geniuses, it's just a historical, the historical contrast, the fact that people were first to do things puts them in the history books. I completely disagree with this. Um, if you look at the the quality of thought and work of like a Da Vinci, it is leagues ahead of anyone I've ever met. I mean, so far more uh amazing and precise and deep. Like his theories of why he was doing the things he was doing. He wasn't just the first person to do them, he was also like one of the best people to ever do some of the things he did. Like he's arguably still one of the best painters ever. He wasn't just the first painter to use perspective, which he was arguably one of the first painters to use perspective to make a three-dimensional image, but he's also like also one of the best painters ever. So it's it's not like he was just the first, but he was bad generally. It's like, no, he was the first and was amazing at everything.

SPEAKER_00 37:05

Still doing things that people are trying to figure out, you know.

SPEAKER_01 37:08

Like if you try to make a copy of a Da Vinci, you can't do it. It's he's too good. He spent too many years and was, you know, focused so much on it.

SPEAKER_00 37:19

So then if we're making more geniuses, are you worried? I mean, I grew up reading comic books. I know about Lex Luthor and Brainiac and you know, Dr. Octopus, Dr. Dupe. Are you worried about creating evil geniuses? Is what I'm asking. I mean theoretically, if you're creating more geniuses, then per by just pure numbers, we should

The Dark Side Of Genius

SPEAKER_00 37:41

also be creating some evil geniuses in that. And how are we gonna deal with this?

SPEAKER_01 37:45

I guess Machiavelli can people sometimes think he's evil. Galileo was trying to hit people with cannons. That was how he figured out parabolas. Was he that's how he that's how he figured out parabolas? He was like, they don't talk about that part of yeah, they don't talk about him as a cannon man. You talking about it figured it all out. Yeah, he figured out the sky guy, and he wanted to build um war machines, like like big towers that could wheel over and you could climb up the walls and catapults that would like throw the stones far and keeping it. Galileo? Yeah, Galileo was like a siege engine city.

SPEAKER_00 38:21

He's like a bloodthirsty warlord.

SPEAKER_01 38:23

He just tried to he worked for the warlords, he worked for the princes.

SPEAKER_00 38:27

He's like, with my advancements in science, we can crush everyone. Evil genius sounds, right? We will grind our opponents' bones.

SPEAKER_01 38:37

Even Leonardo da Vinci when he Galileo. Galileo, the evil bad guy, Galileo. When Leonardo da Vinci applied for his position with the Medici, I think it was with the Medici family. He said his whole the whole letter was like, I can build siege engines. And it was all about all the different like siege engines and like ways he can like build weapons. And then the last sentence famously was I can also paint. And we remember him as like a painter, but actually, like at the time, his ability to do engineering was the thing that he was really selling himself on. Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 39:16

Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, he was also advanced in medical. He was a freak. He would go out and get all his dead bodies and be like, just give me some of these dead bodies. I gotta learn with them. And then people are like, All right, Leonardo, go for it. Later he's like, I learned so much from these dead bodies. Are you making more plains?

SPEAKER_01 39:36

Are you making insinuations?

SPEAKER_00 39:40

I've I've learned these dead bodies as much as I can. Can I have some more, please? I need some more learning.

SPEAKER_01 39:47

The reason he did did the dead bodies in anatomy was because of art. They they weren't actually thinking about it medically so much as they wanted to draw people better. They wanted to know where the muscles were so that when they drew they could like indicate those muscles. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 40:03

And then that made the paintings look more realistic. He was frustrated with the lack of detail of like anatomy and physiology stuff.

SPEAKER_01 40:11

Yeah, he like he wanted to draw like someone's arm, and he needed to know the like all the muscles in the different sets of the arm so that he could make the bulges in the right places.

SPEAKER_00 40:21

Uh so that he's like, What, you want me to peel the skin off the arm of a living person, you weirdo? No, of course I need to. I'm gonna do it with a dead body. Well, how do you think?

SPEAKER_01 40:36

Leonardo da Vinci.

SPEAKER_00 40:39

I bet that's what his bullies said. That's what his bullies maybe like that money you're gonna pay your teacher, you're gonna give it to me now. Give me your teacher.

SPEAKER_01 40:48

Nerdo. Leonardo.

SPEAKER_00 40:50

And then oh, maybe that's where he got his dead bodies. He would take them from his bullies. Anyone who called him Leonardo was next on the list. He's like, I want to see what the inside of your leg looks like. We'll we'll we'll be back here. Gonna dexter you. Wow, this really turned away. We've turned we've turned a corner here. I don't know what kind of thing.

SPEAKER_01 41:13

Dextering people, but yes, we should like be really we shouldn't be so certain about our educational systems. Like they were developed in the last you know 50, 70 years. Most of them are based on German, Prussian, German, North, Northeastern German educational

Beyond The Factory Model School

SPEAKER_01 41:30

systems. Yeah, arguably, you know, in the 20th century, there were a lot of German geniuses, mostly Jewish people who then fled the Nazis. But there were also non-Jewish German who who were, you know, they did had sort of genius level outputs of philosophy and science and medicine and chemistry and middle metallurgy and stuff. And that came out of the German university system, which a lot of our system is is based on. But I think, you know, I think we should be a little bit, we should broaden our gaze a little bit, go back in time a little bit and say, you know, like subjects, you know, in school with subjects with like classrooms with these sort of bells ringing and like people going from period to period through a schedule, like maybe, maybe some schools should be like that, but we should open, we should be much more, I think, open to other schools being more like the schools of the past where so many geniuses were generated.

SPEAKER_00 42:27

Yeah. Imagine if you like one subject in your school day and you get to spend one hour active and engaged in learning, and then you spend the next six hours hating your time and wishing you were anywhere else except learning history or math or whatever it is that you're not feeling. Right. Imagine instead you've got a school day where you get all seven hours, eight hours doing stuff that you want to do and are engaged, and you get to be locked in the whole time. That is, even if you're like, Yeah, but we're not forcing them to learn geography by making them suffer through it at a very slow adoption rate. You know, I'm like, yeah, maybe that's okay.

SPEAKER_01 43:07

Maybe that's okay.

SPEAKER_00 43:08

Yeah, maybe that's fine, and you can let them.

SPEAKER_01 43:10

And I will say, you you do see some natural, like it's interesting when you say, let's list out some of our contemporary geniuses. You often find out that their upbringings were their parents were like crazy and

Modern Proof From Unusual Upbringings

SPEAKER_01 43:27

took them out of a traditional school and just like either homeschooled them or gave them like other educational systems that looks more like this. Like, yeah, Bill Gates didn't go to conventional schooling, his father just taught him about computers at home all the time.

SPEAKER_00 43:44

Once he latched into his area of interest and expertise, he just kind of like and then chased his chase let his interests guide his right.

SPEAKER_01 43:52

And Steve Jobs famously like just was a complete like alternative, you know, just learning his what he was interested in all the time. Um uh Michael Jackson, his dad took all his kids out of school, no traditional schooling, they just danced and sang all day long. And you know, you would say, Well, that's child abuse or something, but you know what? You get Michael Jackson, like you get Michael Jackson from it.

SPEAKER_00 44:17

I think Michael Jackson's dad did actual like classical child abuse stuff too.

SPEAKER_01 44:21

Well I mean yeah so this would be better because it'd be an actual school. So the students would be protected in this sort of school environment. Yes. But then it would be structured to provide, you know. And also, you know, you get one Michael Jackson, maybe you get a hundred not great outcomes. These schools could kind of fix it so that everyone was succeeding to a certain level and then open up the for people who are going to kind of pop up higher could have that kind of headroom, right?

SPEAKER_00 44:47

Well, and excellent, sort of like you're the average of the five friends you're surrounded with, or you know, kind of like those kind of groups, they kind of accelerate each other. The the thought, a think tank or something where each person pushes each other and then they're better as a group with that discussion, then they would just be solo trying to learn it on their own, you know, and each person pushes the others.

SPEAKER_01 45:09

And I shouldn't call this zone of genius because that's something else, but I just want to call these like per capita genius hot zones or something. I don't know what to call it, but there were these hotspots. Yeah, brain zones. Or I don't want to use the word zones. Anyways, there's these sort of hotspots, genius hotspots throughout history. And these and the school we could design, which which really is Elton already, actually. But but but then I think and then maybe high schools could kind of or Elton, it'd be great for Elton to start a high school. I'd love to do that. But you know, right now we got to focus on on Elton specifically. But you know, to have these kind of hotspot, genius hotspot schools, I think it would be really cool. And it doesn't even have to just be cog like like academic, like Michael Jackson, like dancing and singing. That's great. Like it could be the arts, it could be, you know, but it should be interdisciplinary. Like if you're, you know, just like Leonardo da Vinci was he was apprenticed to an artist, so there was sculpture and painting and drawing, but they had to do anatomy to do better at the art. And they had to do math, and you know, they had to do engineering to like build their canvases and build their sculptures and move their sculptures from place to place safely. Like they had to engineer whole systems to do that. So they had to learn a ton of engineering, they had to learn a ton of math, they had to learn a ton of um chemistry to do the to make the oil paints and make the mediums that they used and stuff. So, you know, you could learn dance and music, but then you have to learn, you know, what's the interdisciplinary uh parts of that that make you better, like poetry. You have to learn poetry to write good lyrics, and to write good poetry, you have to kind of know the history of poetry. Well, you need to know literature then, and you need to know history.

SPEAKER_00 46:47

Yeah, you're gonna need to read some classics and where that literature took place, and you know, and if you do music, you should probably have math, you know, like music is tied to math and science in different ways and harmonics, huh?

SPEAKER_01 47:00

And you know, you're also just like a citizen of a country, too. So you're gonna be curious about like how other things were, you know, but that well-roundedness. I feel like the difference is people today are like, we need to make sacrifices to get people to be well-rounded. And it's like, no, you

Let Interests Create Well-Rounded Adults

SPEAKER_01 47:17

should just focus on what people are interested in, and guess what? They will end up well-rounded if you do that. And the students who aren't well-rounded, that's fine. You can have some students just be crazy narrow experts, and some students will be jacks of all trades, they'll be like, 'All they won't have a good depth.' That's fine too, because society can survive with a diversity of people's levels of expertise, you know, across those dimensions. You know, feel like it thrives on that. Yeah, it doesn't hurt society for like one percent of people to be total jacks of all trades and another one percent to be total, you know, one Johnny One Notes. Doesn't hurt society. It actually helps society, you know.

SPEAKER_02 47:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 48:00

To make everybody forced into like the middle of that bell curve is not, I don't think that does help society really.

SPEAKER_00 48:06

No, and we there's a lot of collateral damage along the way of just kind of forcing everyone through the same shape of the cookie cutter, you know. That's right. That's right. The factory model.

SPEAKER_01 48:16

I think we lose more than we gain. Right. It's also interesting that all these periods of history that we're talking about were before industrial revolution. So before a factory was even a concept in human history, they did education not using a factory model. They did it using an artisanal model with apprenticeships and you know, interdisciplinary like a guitar maker has to make the body of the guitar and the head of the guitar and the thing and the strings, and like they have to make the whole guitar. Whereas today, you know, a factory would make all the guitar, and one person might make one part of the guitar, and then it would be this factory sort of model. You just make it bad, yeah. So being interdisciplinary was inherently so yeah. I'm not, and I'm not saying be like an a Luddite or something. I I think you can use technology to enhance all these things, but let's use the recipes that that it seems like history suggests and and also evidence-based education suggests, would lead to people learning a lot, not because they have some natural intelligence. Again, I completely disbelieve the importance of that ultimately in people's outcomes. It's only because people respond to these environments so much better than they respond to these highly mechanized, kind of mechanical and sort of discombobulated educational institutions, which is what we have today, where you have this class for this semester and then this teacher that you see, but then you don't see them again ever again, and you don't really get time to actually build any kind of relationships with people. And you know, I don't know if disputation actually matters. That's one I think that's probably the weakest link here that you would need to do like disputation. I actually don't think you need to do that. Um, there's no evidence I that I know of that it matters if you do disputation like that.

SPEAKER_00 50:01

But having like a lock to

What Research Says Actually Matters

SPEAKER_00 50:03

a a person that you can always kind of an anchor you can go back to over a longer period of time than just like, all right, it I really enjoyed working with you and learning from you for nine months, you know, a little bit at a time and now it's over. Having that is huge and being able to kind of like interdisciplin, kind of weave all your disciplines together and learn as kind of a like a whole unit at the same time is also seems really useful, especially to some people who don't find that the normal ways of learning have lit them up in the way that they would like or that they feel like they get locked in that way.

SPEAKER_01 50:40

Yeah, I think also what a sad thing is a lot of people, maybe like right-wing, kind of right-wing people, they really, really like hanker for this like kind of back to that like disputation, like, oh, I want to have like arguments and have take positions that maybe aren't popular and defend them. And and so they're like, they're like kind of acting like that's the most important part of this. But actually, I think as an evidence-based educator, I would say that that's the probably the the research, the contemporary research would suggest that that's actually the weakest link of this whole system, that that's not defending when you say the disputation, you mean like the teacher pushing back on your ideas and number not the other. Well, like the teacher and the students, you know, disputing with each other, debating with each other. I actually don't think that's you know, because the research suggests that it's important to get feedback, it's important for people to give you feedback about your thoughts. Like, so if you're like saying, you know, oh, you know, I'm a big Marxist, it's important for someone to be like here, like you need to look at the arguments against Marxism, you know, but it doesn't have to be like some big emotional disputation that's oral and real time that makes emotions sort of flare. And it none of it doesn't need to be any of that. They could just read an article about the arguments against Marx, you know, that's fine. So I don't I think disputation is probably the weakest part, and and but the strongest parts are the interdisciplinary, um, the one-on-one instruction, moving at the student's pace, starting younger, like treating people more seriously as serious scholars earlier. All of that I think is and letting people focus if they want, being student-centered. The data completely like the science completely backs that up. And it's really a Montessori approach. That's the Montessori style. So yeah, I'm I'm excited. I'm excited. I think I think uh, you know, Elton's kind of got this tiger by the tail, and we're accepting students for various programs. And how would people get in touch with Elton University? Go to Elton.university. Yeah, Elton.university. So our the website is Elton.university.

SPEAKER_00 52:48

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 52:48

Yeah, they can go check it out and uh um our most popular program is a PhD

How Elton University Works

SPEAKER_01 52:53

program. So it's like a PhD program where you work one-on-one with professors and you know, you have an advisor and professors that help you, and you do original research. That's your research. And there's no coursework because there's no need to do coursework. Uh you just work on your research and that's how you learn. You learn from doing the real thing, uh, rather than sort of, oh, you have to go do this other stuff in order to someday do the thing. It's like, no, just go do the dang thing, you know. So it's an exciting uh move. It's a lot like what people do when they're not in school, right? I think that's the interesting thing, too. Like, if you're not in school, what do you do? Well, you learn about stuff, you learn about cooking. Like there's a lot of people into cooking. How do they learn about cooking? They expose themselves all kinds of different cooking, they try to make things in their kitchens, like they they don't necessarily have something. You start diving deep on it, you follow the rates. Right, they do a deep dive into something.

SPEAKER_00 53:43

You see what you're good at, what you like about it. You right chase that more, maximize that.

SPEAKER_01 53:48

Yeah, and people would probably get a lot better if they had like a chef that they could talk to once a month and like for sure. They'd probably grow a lot faster, right? So, you know, so it's it's really not that crazy. It's just saying, hey, let's structure our formal education, actually, the way most informal education is structured, and but get the benefits of both, right? Get rid of the weaknesses of both and get the benefits of both. Right, right.

SPEAKER_00 54:11

Yeah, no, I like it.

SPEAKER_01 54:12

I think that's a do we come up with a name for it?

SPEAKER_00 54:16

Hotspot, genius hotspot schools. Like what's what do they call it? Earthquake spot, the epicenter of an earthquake. We need a genius just so that we can get the right name for this. We need the perfect branding mind to I don't have it. I don't have it, I'll admit it. Back to baby geniuses. We'll have to go ask.

SPEAKER_01 54:36

We have to create more baby geniuses. Okay, this is great. Well, thanks everybody for listening and tuning in. And um, more solutions to come. I promise they won't all just be education solutions, but I've got I've got Elton on the brain, so maybe that's why I'm thinking about that.

SPEAKER_00 54:51

Hey, we'll take them as they come. I love talking through them and hearing what's in your mind each time. So thank you, Adam. Appreciate

Final Jokes And Goodbye

SPEAKER_00 54:57

it. Well, all right. Take care, everyone. Bye mic.