April 1, 2025 • 18 mins
THOMAS FREY POPS IN AT 1 To talk about all things future. Find Thomas and his blog by clicking here. We may be talking about revolutionizing higher ed like this column lays out. Or maybe not.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Thomas Fry.
Speaker 2 (00:00):
All he does is mull things over about how great
things are going to be in the future and listen
to my paranoia about robots. That's what this entire segment
is about. Good to see you again, Thomas.
Speaker 3 (00:11):
Yeah, great to see you, Mandy uh let's talk.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
I was sharing with my friend Ross who does the
show right before me. And you know, I dabble in economics, right,
that's fun for me on occasion, but he is a
hardcore economics nerd.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
And when I sort.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Of laid out a super brief explanation of your idea
that we're going to flesh out here on the show
about how to fundamentally change the deep teaching of ECON
one oh one.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
He was intrigued.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
He was He was like, oh, but this is more
than about teaching economics. This is really about the future
of education. So let's start with where did this thought
come from that we need to reimagine how we are
teaching people in the twenty first century.
Speaker 4 (01:00):
So I first got the idea when I was playing
around with well, if you handed ECON one oh one
to a filmmaker, a filmmaker would look at it and say, ah,
you know, we can put some storylines. We can make
this add some drama to it, we can make much
more interesting and much more memorable at the same time,
(01:20):
and then people would retain it.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
And I thought, I.
Speaker 4 (01:25):
Think we could actually get people to compress the amount
of time it takes as well. And so then we
started thinking through it, like what if somebody was a
game designer, then you get people to come in and
just game their way through it, to play this whole
game and learn the economics as they're playing the game.
(01:45):
I thought, Wow, everybody'd want to take that course because
it'd be so simple. And then I started thinking about
it from lots of different angles too. But if we
had a comedian that was trying to teach economics and
he turned every one of the principles into a punchline,
so uh.
Speaker 3 (02:05):
That that seemed like seemed like a lot of fun.
Speaker 4 (02:07):
So then then I put together this whole idea, this
this whole uh competition if you will, for econ one
oh one called the Intellectual Olympiad, And I thought, well,
what if we put a million dollar prize on this
and see if we can compress everything into two hours?
Speaker 3 (02:30):
What would that look like?
Speaker 4 (02:32):
And so it's it's kind of has a few untested
ideas in this, but I think it has the makings
of something that has interesting potential.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Well, I agree with.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
You on that front. And this isn't just about economics,
but you chose economics because essentially economics one oh one
is teaching the same thirteen principles as part of economics
one on one, so those are pretty standards. So this
is a very standardized course. Is that why you started
with economics or is it because traditional econ one on
one courses are so boring that people check out mentally
(03:07):
even though this is an incredibly important topic that we
should be discussing.
Speaker 4 (03:11):
Well, I don't know about the boring part of it.
I think that depends on the instructor. But as far
as this is something that's a stable piece of education
that's taught in virtually every college around the world, it's
the same as biology want to one, chemistry one to one,
world history one on one, things like that. But I
(03:32):
thought economics is one that had the potential to do
something that was real interesting. And then I thought, well,
if we take this and we offer a million dollar
price to the person who wins it each year, and
something substantial to each of the.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
Runners up too.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
Then every year, then the winners would become the baseline
for the next year, so we would build on what
we're doing. One year we accomplish it and get it
done in two hours, and the next year we do
it in much more interesting fashion.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
And maybe at the end of seven or.
Speaker 4 (04:09):
Eight years we would decide to drop it to ninety
minutes or drop it down to one hour, even to
see if we can do it in that fast. But
I think this has the potential if we do this
for ten years in a row.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
We can't even imagine what's going to come out of
the back end.
Speaker 4 (04:26):
So this is a process to get to an unknown outcome,
and I find that just fascinating.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Why are you even looking at shortening the time of
a sixteen week course to two hours?
Speaker 1 (04:41):
What is the benefit here?
Speaker 4 (04:44):
Well, what's growing up is the college system has become
very bloated, and it seems like most college courses, the
instructors are figuring, well, what else can I add to
this course to make it equal the three hours that
they're going to be in class this week? And so
(05:05):
we're paying for all the time we spend in class,
and we're paying so much.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
We're paying very dearly for everything we learned.
Speaker 4 (05:12):
In college, which is way more expensive than everything else
we could learn free off the internet. So this just
seemed like a much a very interesting approach. And as
a result of this, I'm not sure how this changes
the systems.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
It may change it, it may not change it.
Speaker 4 (05:33):
After three years, it might throw into toll and say
this is totally broke, let's not do this anymore.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
But I think it's worth trying.
Speaker 4 (05:41):
One of the.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Reasons I really like this is because we have we
have shifted our and I'm talking about K through twelve,
So let's go back away from college for a moment, but.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
We've now shifted the focus.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
You hear teachers and administrators and people in education say
this all the time. We don't want to teach kids
what to think. We want to teach them how to think.
But if they do not have a good foundational knowledge
about about something a topic like economics, how are they
supposed to be able to critically think about something when
they don't have that foundation of knowledge in the first place.
(06:16):
So in my mind, when I'm thinking about this, imagine
being able to cram all of the concepts in an
engaging way of Economics one oh one into a two
hour presentation, right, or a two hour board game or
a two hour video game or whatever, and you play
that day one in your Economics one oh one class
if you want to keep the same structure that already exists.
(06:38):
Now you've imparted that knowledge base with that two hour thing,
and then the rest of the course is taking that
knowledge base and expanding on those concepts. So I see
this being like a complementary part of the current educational system,
because I believe that the university system is so intractable
that they don't want to change. This is the way
(07:00):
they do it, This is the way it's always been done.
They still have plenty of demand. People are still willing
to pay the money.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
But we could totally use.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
This to create that foundational bit of knowledge and then
allow for longer, bigger discussions when you're coming from a
place of knowledge instead of a place of stupidity.
Speaker 3 (07:20):
Well, that's that's certainly one approach.
Speaker 4 (07:21):
There's lots of I think this opens the doors for
lots of possibilities.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
And.
Speaker 4 (07:28):
If nothing else, I think it kind of u turns
things up. It just tries you're trying something new and
that's going to make a bunch of people uncomfortable in
the process.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
Oh yeah, for sure. But I'm already when I read this.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
I read this column and I linked to Thomas's column
on this on the blog today at mandy'sblog dot com
look for the latest posts, and the headline today is
four to one twenty five blog Our futurist pops in
and helps some kids compete.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
It's in there.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
I read it this morning and immediately my wheels started turning.
Because there are there are very simple books economics. In
one lesson, there's also the Pencil by Lawrence Reid, where
he just uses a single lead pencil to explain economies
of scale and all of these other economic principles. But
I think this stuff is super cool, and I think
(08:17):
that this has a lot of applications in terms of
allowing teachers to then teach and expand on a subject
without having to get bobbed down in figuring out how
to impart this initial thirteen principles in the first place.
So I think this is revolutionary Thomas. But this text
asks a good question, who puts up the million dollars?
Who would invest in this? Do we need to do
(08:38):
a GoFundMe.
Speaker 4 (08:42):
I actually think if there's a legitimate group that wanted
to run with this, that the funding would be a
no brainer for a lot of companies, whether it's Toyota
or Coca Cola or or whoever it might be, They're
going to get a lot of press. And I think
that that's that's a small piece of the equation, and
(09:05):
it could probably be much more than a million dollars
each year. It could probably even be five or ten
million dollars. That might be doable. And then once once
you open the door on economics, then maybe you have
the opportunity to open the door on what does calculus
one on one look like?
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Running it through something like this.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
I just when you heard the word calculus on.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
World history look like?
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Yeah, imagine I mean, right now, my daughter's in APUs
history and our teacher gets up there and lectures about
a thing and then they have a conversation about it.
But imagine if we were able to impart these nuggets
of information of knowledge and then allow teachers to just
lead the discussions about those nuggets of knowledge in a
way that's engaging for people. I'm not kidding Thomas, I
(09:53):
already started making a board game in my mind about
the thirteen principles of economics. I'm thinking, you know, I've
thought about the games that we've played in the past. Life,
the game of life should be an economics lesson, but
it's not. And then there's another game, an old game
called Payday. And I don't know if you ever played
pay Day, but Payday was set up like a month, right,
(10:14):
and you get you have to pay taxes on this day,
and you've got to you get paid on this day,
and you got a bill unexpectedly on this day. And
when my my daughter was really little, we would play
that with her and she would be like, well, amount
of money, and I'm like, welcome to life.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
This is a great way to do this. So I
think stuff like this.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Is uh is the wave of the future, especially as
attention spans get shorter and shorter and shorter because of
social media, and we're seeing that that's not made up,
that's a real thing.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
So I love this idea. I we just got to
make it happen.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Maybe we should write a grant proposal, Thomas, do you
know how to do that?
Speaker 1 (10:51):
Because I don't know how to do it.
Speaker 4 (10:55):
I think we could figure that out. Yeah, I think
this has great buttial. I would love to somehow be
involved in making it all happen.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (11:06):
I had a group last year in Poland I thought
was going to run with this, but they had a
lot of changes and so probably from the Ukraine War.
But it seemed like they were all set to run
with it and then everything changed at the last minute.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
Poland has done some really amazing things as of late
when it comes to free market economics. I mean they've
really sort of embraced the Austrian school of economics and
their economy is responding in kind.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
So Mandy, this texter said, it already exists.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
It's called monopoly. We raised our kids playing by the
rules and it gets pretty cutthroat. Now our eight grandsons
fifteen and twenty two all play. Granddad and Grandma usually
make it sweeter with twenty to forty bucks going to
the winner. A monopoly, though, is a real estate game.
The laws of economics go well beyond real estate, and
I think Thomas, the really important part here that we're
(12:01):
kind of glossing over is that out of all of
the classes that we take and that we teach our
kids as they're growing up. Economics really is the one
that impacts every single aspect of our lives.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
It really does. So this is a great place to start.
Speaker 3 (12:18):
Yeah, I mean there's lots of other games.
Speaker 4 (12:20):
I mean, if you're playing scrabble, scrabble is all about
accumulating points which could be translated into two money. That
even playing cards, there's lots of card games that have
some similarities to some of these principles and economics. But
it's it's much more than playing games. Is there just
(12:46):
another way of impartying this knowledge, way of making it
so it's easy for people to absorb this making And
I think that's what we what education should all be about,
is giving us the easiest possible way.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
Of learning these subject matters.
Speaker 4 (13:03):
And now, when I when I went to college long
time ago, it always seemed like we had these weeding
out classes that they purposely made more difficult than they
had to because they wanted to weed out the people
that they didn't think should be there. And U and
I think that's the wrong approach. I think we need
to make all this stuff easy to learn.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
The sad fact of the matter is that when I
went to college, which was maybe a little bit after you,
but not much.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Maybe at the same time that weed them out tech.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
You know, attitude was very prevalent, but now colleges are
having to remediate students who were coming out of high
school completely ill prepared for college. So talk about the
shoe being on the other foot. I would argue that
schools are making it too easy for students who are
not college material to stay in college and continue to
spend money taking remedial classes, and they're never going to
(13:54):
finish and get their degree. They're just going to end
up with a lot of debt. That's a whole other
conversation that we could go on about quite a bit there.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
Thomas, let me ask you this. I'm going to ask if.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
You've given any thought to something that I think is
critically important in education, and that is basic literacy. I
saw a horrifying statistic in Chicago. There are like forty
five schools in the Chicago public school system where zero
percent of the children can read on grade level zero,
(14:24):
not a single child. This is becoming an epidemic because
if we have a population that can't read or write,
holy cow, who's going to work in our nursing homes?
Speaker 4 (14:34):
Thomas so years ago this is the late nineties. I
had a good friend, William Crossman, who wrote a book
called Vivo Voice In and Voice Out, and he was
talking about us soon being able to talk to our
computers and the computers would talk back, and then he
(14:57):
drew the conclusion that by two thousand in fifty that
literacy would be dead. He says that we've become a
verbal society and we just talked back and forth to
all of our machines and we don't have to learn
standard literacy. And the audiences that he gave that talk
to would become violent. I want to throw them off
(15:20):
the stage because there's hardcore literacy advocates they're around. But
he brought up a lot of interesting points. I kept
asking him, how do you do math problems if you
can't write him down? Yes, I have to look at
things before I can actually make sense out of them.
And he says, well, I don't know, but somebody will
(15:41):
figure it out, and he might be right. He might
be right, but I know that if we're a total
verbal society, that's very disruptive in places where there's lots
of people around. And also know that doesn't give us
room to think through things quite the same way, and
(16:04):
it just changes kind of the way we know how
to do things.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
I would take it one step further.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
I would say that that assumes that there will be
no disruption in electronics, in the ability to tap into
the machines and the machine learning. But this feels very
much like the old olden times where the historical tradition
was the only tradition. And we know what happens when
stories get passed verbally from person to person, they get
(16:31):
distorted in incredible ways.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
So my concern would.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Be a we would lose the ability to even interact
with our history.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
Right.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
This is one of my beefs about cursive writing. Kids
today that can't read cursive can't read the founding documents,
so then they have to rely on someone else to
tell them what's in it. I feel the same way
about this, And if there was you know, if people
were essentially functionally illiterate and had to rely on a
computer and that computer goes away, what happens.
Speaker 4 (16:58):
Then Well, one of the things I've been talking about
is that within ten years, we're going to be wearing
smart glasses that will actually see everything that we see
and hear everything that we hear, and it will with
a few censors added to it, it will actually be
(17:19):
able to record all the things that we touch, we feel,
we taste, and spell, and so the whole human experience,
the whole life experience, will be recorded and stored on
our personal cloud. And so this idea of having a
personal cloud there, Like eight years down the road, you
remember something on page two hundred and sixteen of the
(17:42):
book Catcher and the Rye, You want to go back
and read that section again. You can recite it verbatim
because you've had that recorded.
Speaker 3 (17:52):
Now.
Speaker 4 (17:52):
Are we going to have that ability moving into the future.
I'm not sure, but that's what it looks like to
me at this point. So that's that throws out all
the traditional education.
Speaker 3 (18:06):
Out the window.
Speaker 4 (18:08):
But I'm somethingly going to have this massive information that
we have stored out there, that we could draw in
any moment.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
And in a post apocalyptic world, none of that matters, Thomas.
When the robots take over and they take away all
of our computers, we've got nothing anyway, Thomas Frye an
interesting conversation. As always, I'm always interested in any ways
that we can make learning more accessible and more fun,
and I'm genuinely going to look around to see what
foundations we can do a grant proposal to to create
(18:38):
this prize. So this is going to be the Thomas
Frye Prize for Education Revolution. That's we're going to call it.
We just have to get a couple million bucks to
make it happen. So you leave that to me and
we'll make this happen.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Thomas. Good to see you again, my friend.
Speaker 3 (18:51):
Hey up to work with you on that.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
Thanks, I love the idea. I'll see you next month. Thomas,
Thomas Fry.
Speaker 2 (00:00):
All he does is mull things over about how great
things are going to be in the future and listen
to my paranoia about robots. That's what this entire segment
is about. Good to see you again, Thomas.
Speaker 3 (00:11):
Yeah, great to see you, Mandy uh let's talk.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
I was sharing with my friend Ross who does the
show right before me. And you know, I dabble in economics, right,
that's fun for me on occasion, but he is a
hardcore economics nerd.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
And when I sort.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Of laid out a super brief explanation of your idea
that we're going to flesh out here on the show
about how to fundamentally change the deep teaching of ECON
one oh one.
Speaker 1 (00:42):
He was intrigued.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
He was He was like, oh, but this is more
than about teaching economics. This is really about the future
of education. So let's start with where did this thought
come from that we need to reimagine how we are
teaching people in the twenty first century.
Speaker 4 (01:00):
So I first got the idea when I was playing
around with well, if you handed ECON one oh one
to a filmmaker, a filmmaker would look at it and say, ah,
you know, we can put some storylines. We can make
this add some drama to it, we can make much
more interesting and much more memorable at the same time,
(01:20):
and then people would retain it.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
And I thought, I.
Speaker 4 (01:25):
Think we could actually get people to compress the amount
of time it takes as well. And so then we
started thinking through it, like what if somebody was a
game designer, then you get people to come in and
just game their way through it, to play this whole
game and learn the economics as they're playing the game.
(01:45):
I thought, Wow, everybody'd want to take that course because
it'd be so simple. And then I started thinking about
it from lots of different angles too. But if we
had a comedian that was trying to teach economics and
he turned every one of the principles into a punchline,
so uh.
Speaker 3 (02:05):
That that seemed like seemed like a lot of fun.
Speaker 4 (02:07):
So then then I put together this whole idea, this
this whole uh competition if you will, for econ one
oh one called the Intellectual Olympiad, And I thought, well,
what if we put a million dollar prize on this
and see if we can compress everything into two hours?
Speaker 3 (02:30):
What would that look like?
Speaker 4 (02:32):
And so it's it's kind of has a few untested
ideas in this, but I think it has the makings
of something that has interesting potential.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
Well, I agree with.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
You on that front. And this isn't just about economics,
but you chose economics because essentially economics one oh one
is teaching the same thirteen principles as part of economics
one on one, so those are pretty standards. So this
is a very standardized course. Is that why you started
with economics or is it because traditional econ one on
one courses are so boring that people check out mentally
(03:07):
even though this is an incredibly important topic that we
should be discussing.
Speaker 4 (03:11):
Well, I don't know about the boring part of it.
I think that depends on the instructor. But as far
as this is something that's a stable piece of education
that's taught in virtually every college around the world, it's
the same as biology want to one, chemistry one to one,
world history one on one, things like that. But I
(03:32):
thought economics is one that had the potential to do
something that was real interesting. And then I thought, well,
if we take this and we offer a million dollar
price to the person who wins it each year, and
something substantial to each of the.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
Runners up too.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
Then every year, then the winners would become the baseline
for the next year, so we would build on what
we're doing. One year we accomplish it and get it
done in two hours, and the next year we do
it in much more interesting fashion.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
And maybe at the end of seven or.
Speaker 4 (04:09):
Eight years we would decide to drop it to ninety
minutes or drop it down to one hour, even to
see if we can do it in that fast. But
I think this has the potential if we do this
for ten years in a row.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
We can't even imagine what's going to come out of
the back end.
Speaker 4 (04:26):
So this is a process to get to an unknown outcome,
and I find that just fascinating.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Why are you even looking at shortening the time of
a sixteen week course to two hours?
Speaker 1 (04:41):
What is the benefit here?
Speaker 4 (04:44):
Well, what's growing up is the college system has become
very bloated, and it seems like most college courses, the
instructors are figuring, well, what else can I add to
this course to make it equal the three hours that
they're going to be in class this week? And so
(05:05):
we're paying for all the time we spend in class,
and we're paying so much.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
We're paying very dearly for everything we learned.
Speaker 4 (05:12):
In college, which is way more expensive than everything else
we could learn free off the internet. So this just
seemed like a much a very interesting approach. And as
a result of this, I'm not sure how this changes
the systems.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
It may change it, it may not change it.
Speaker 4 (05:33):
After three years, it might throw into toll and say
this is totally broke, let's not do this anymore.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
But I think it's worth trying.
Speaker 4 (05:41):
One of the.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Reasons I really like this is because we have we
have shifted our and I'm talking about K through twelve,
So let's go back away from college for a moment, but.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
We've now shifted the focus.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
You hear teachers and administrators and people in education say
this all the time. We don't want to teach kids
what to think. We want to teach them how to think.
But if they do not have a good foundational knowledge
about about something a topic like economics, how are they
supposed to be able to critically think about something when
they don't have that foundation of knowledge in the first place.
(06:16):
So in my mind, when I'm thinking about this, imagine
being able to cram all of the concepts in an
engaging way of Economics one oh one into a two
hour presentation, right, or a two hour board game or
a two hour video game or whatever, and you play
that day one in your Economics one oh one class
if you want to keep the same structure that already exists.
(06:38):
Now you've imparted that knowledge base with that two hour thing,
and then the rest of the course is taking that
knowledge base and expanding on those concepts. So I see
this being like a complementary part of the current educational system,
because I believe that the university system is so intractable
that they don't want to change. This is the way
(07:00):
they do it, This is the way it's always been done.
They still have plenty of demand. People are still willing
to pay the money.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
But we could totally use.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
This to create that foundational bit of knowledge and then
allow for longer, bigger discussions when you're coming from a
place of knowledge instead of a place of stupidity.
Speaker 3 (07:20):
Well, that's that's certainly one approach.
Speaker 4 (07:21):
There's lots of I think this opens the doors for
lots of possibilities.
Speaker 3 (07:26):
And.
Speaker 4 (07:28):
If nothing else, I think it kind of u turns
things up. It just tries you're trying something new and
that's going to make a bunch of people uncomfortable in
the process.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
Oh yeah, for sure. But I'm already when I read this.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
I read this column and I linked to Thomas's column
on this on the blog today at mandy'sblog dot com
look for the latest posts, and the headline today is
four to one twenty five blog Our futurist pops in
and helps some kids compete.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
It's in there.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
I read it this morning and immediately my wheels started turning.
Because there are there are very simple books economics. In
one lesson, there's also the Pencil by Lawrence Reid, where
he just uses a single lead pencil to explain economies
of scale and all of these other economic principles. But
I think this stuff is super cool, and I think
(08:17):
that this has a lot of applications in terms of
allowing teachers to then teach and expand on a subject
without having to get bobbed down in figuring out how
to impart this initial thirteen principles in the first place.
So I think this is revolutionary Thomas. But this text
asks a good question, who puts up the million dollars?
Who would invest in this? Do we need to do
(08:38):
a GoFundMe.
Speaker 4 (08:42):
I actually think if there's a legitimate group that wanted
to run with this, that the funding would be a
no brainer for a lot of companies, whether it's Toyota
or Coca Cola or or whoever it might be, They're
going to get a lot of press. And I think
that that's that's a small piece of the equation, and
(09:05):
it could probably be much more than a million dollars
each year. It could probably even be five or ten
million dollars. That might be doable. And then once once
you open the door on economics, then maybe you have
the opportunity to open the door on what does calculus
one on one look like?
Speaker 3 (09:24):
Running it through something like this.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
I just when you heard the word calculus on.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
World history look like?
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Yeah, imagine I mean, right now, my daughter's in APUs
history and our teacher gets up there and lectures about
a thing and then they have a conversation about it.
But imagine if we were able to impart these nuggets
of information of knowledge and then allow teachers to just
lead the discussions about those nuggets of knowledge in a
way that's engaging for people. I'm not kidding Thomas, I
(09:53):
already started making a board game in my mind about
the thirteen principles of economics. I'm thinking, you know, I've
thought about the games that we've played in the past. Life,
the game of life should be an economics lesson, but
it's not. And then there's another game, an old game
called Payday. And I don't know if you ever played
pay Day, but Payday was set up like a month, right,
(10:14):
and you get you have to pay taxes on this day,
and you've got to you get paid on this day,
and you got a bill unexpectedly on this day. And
when my my daughter was really little, we would play
that with her and she would be like, well, amount
of money, and I'm like, welcome to life.
Speaker 1 (10:28):
This is a great way to do this. So I
think stuff like this.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Is uh is the wave of the future, especially as
attention spans get shorter and shorter and shorter because of
social media, and we're seeing that that's not made up,
that's a real thing.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
So I love this idea. I we just got to
make it happen.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Maybe we should write a grant proposal, Thomas, do you
know how to do that?
Speaker 1 (10:51):
Because I don't know how to do it.
Speaker 4 (10:55):
I think we could figure that out. Yeah, I think
this has great buttial. I would love to somehow be
involved in making it all happen.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (11:06):
I had a group last year in Poland I thought
was going to run with this, but they had a
lot of changes and so probably from the Ukraine War.
But it seemed like they were all set to run
with it and then everything changed at the last minute.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
Poland has done some really amazing things as of late
when it comes to free market economics. I mean they've
really sort of embraced the Austrian school of economics and
their economy is responding in kind.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
So Mandy, this texter said, it already exists.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
It's called monopoly. We raised our kids playing by the
rules and it gets pretty cutthroat. Now our eight grandsons
fifteen and twenty two all play. Granddad and Grandma usually
make it sweeter with twenty to forty bucks going to
the winner. A monopoly, though, is a real estate game.
The laws of economics go well beyond real estate, and
I think Thomas, the really important part here that we're
(12:01):
kind of glossing over is that out of all of
the classes that we take and that we teach our
kids as they're growing up. Economics really is the one
that impacts every single aspect of our lives.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
It really does. So this is a great place to start.
Speaker 3 (12:18):
Yeah, I mean there's lots of other games.
Speaker 4 (12:20):
I mean, if you're playing scrabble, scrabble is all about
accumulating points which could be translated into two money. That
even playing cards, there's lots of card games that have
some similarities to some of these principles and economics. But
it's it's much more than playing games. Is there just
(12:46):
another way of impartying this knowledge, way of making it
so it's easy for people to absorb this making And
I think that's what we what education should all be about,
is giving us the easiest possible way.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
Of learning these subject matters.
Speaker 4 (13:03):
And now, when I when I went to college long
time ago, it always seemed like we had these weeding
out classes that they purposely made more difficult than they
had to because they wanted to weed out the people
that they didn't think should be there. And U and
I think that's the wrong approach. I think we need
to make all this stuff easy to learn.
Speaker 2 (13:24):
The sad fact of the matter is that when I
went to college, which was maybe a little bit after you,
but not much.
Speaker 1 (13:29):
Maybe at the same time that weed them out tech.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
You know, attitude was very prevalent, but now colleges are
having to remediate students who were coming out of high
school completely ill prepared for college. So talk about the
shoe being on the other foot. I would argue that
schools are making it too easy for students who are
not college material to stay in college and continue to
spend money taking remedial classes, and they're never going to
(13:54):
finish and get their degree. They're just going to end
up with a lot of debt. That's a whole other
conversation that we could go on about quite a bit there.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
Thomas, let me ask you this. I'm going to ask if.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
You've given any thought to something that I think is
critically important in education, and that is basic literacy. I
saw a horrifying statistic in Chicago. There are like forty
five schools in the Chicago public school system where zero
percent of the children can read on grade level zero,
(14:24):
not a single child. This is becoming an epidemic because
if we have a population that can't read or write,
holy cow, who's going to work in our nursing homes?
Speaker 4 (14:34):
Thomas so years ago this is the late nineties. I
had a good friend, William Crossman, who wrote a book
called Vivo Voice In and Voice Out, and he was
talking about us soon being able to talk to our
computers and the computers would talk back, and then he
(14:57):
drew the conclusion that by two thousand in fifty that
literacy would be dead. He says that we've become a
verbal society and we just talked back and forth to
all of our machines and we don't have to learn
standard literacy. And the audiences that he gave that talk
to would become violent. I want to throw them off
(15:20):
the stage because there's hardcore literacy advocates they're around. But
he brought up a lot of interesting points. I kept
asking him, how do you do math problems if you
can't write him down? Yes, I have to look at
things before I can actually make sense out of them.
And he says, well, I don't know, but somebody will
(15:41):
figure it out, and he might be right. He might
be right, but I know that if we're a total
verbal society, that's very disruptive in places where there's lots
of people around. And also know that doesn't give us
room to think through things quite the same way, and
(16:04):
it just changes kind of the way we know how
to do things.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
I would take it one step further.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
I would say that that assumes that there will be
no disruption in electronics, in the ability to tap into
the machines and the machine learning. But this feels very
much like the old olden times where the historical tradition
was the only tradition. And we know what happens when
stories get passed verbally from person to person, they get
(16:31):
distorted in incredible ways.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
So my concern would.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Be a we would lose the ability to even interact
with our history.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
Right.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
This is one of my beefs about cursive writing. Kids
today that can't read cursive can't read the founding documents,
so then they have to rely on someone else to
tell them what's in it. I feel the same way
about this, And if there was you know, if people
were essentially functionally illiterate and had to rely on a
computer and that computer goes away, what happens.
Speaker 4 (16:58):
Then Well, one of the things I've been talking about
is that within ten years, we're going to be wearing
smart glasses that will actually see everything that we see
and hear everything that we hear, and it will with
a few censors added to it, it will actually be
(17:19):
able to record all the things that we touch, we feel,
we taste, and spell, and so the whole human experience,
the whole life experience, will be recorded and stored on
our personal cloud. And so this idea of having a
personal cloud there, Like eight years down the road, you
remember something on page two hundred and sixteen of the
(17:42):
book Catcher and the Rye, You want to go back
and read that section again. You can recite it verbatim
because you've had that recorded.
Speaker 3 (17:52):
Now.
Speaker 4 (17:52):
Are we going to have that ability moving into the future.
I'm not sure, but that's what it looks like to
me at this point. So that's that throws out all
the traditional education.
Speaker 3 (18:06):
Out the window.
Speaker 4 (18:08):
But I'm somethingly going to have this massive information that
we have stored out there, that we could draw in
any moment.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
And in a post apocalyptic world, none of that matters, Thomas.
When the robots take over and they take away all
of our computers, we've got nothing anyway, Thomas Frye an
interesting conversation. As always, I'm always interested in any ways
that we can make learning more accessible and more fun,
and I'm genuinely going to look around to see what
foundations we can do a grant proposal to to create
(18:38):
this prize. So this is going to be the Thomas
Frye Prize for Education Revolution. That's we're going to call it.
We just have to get a couple million bucks to
make it happen. So you leave that to me and
we'll make this happen.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
Thomas. Good to see you again, my friend.
Speaker 3 (18:51):
Hey up to work with you on that.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
Thanks, I love the idea. I'll see you next month. Thomas,
The Mandy Connell Podcast News
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