Ben Nelson on the future of higher education

What if every student had access to the same high-quality educational tools? This week, Reid and Aria are joined by Ben Nelson to discuss higher education. Ben is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of the Minerva Project, a for-profit educational organization that created the non-profit Minerva University with the mission of reforming global education through an interdisciplinary curriculum and fully active learning pedagogy. Ben talks about how we can increase people’s access to an elite education that prepares them for success as both professionals and citizens. Also, Ben responds to GPT-4 stories that reimagine what a “classroom” really can be. Read the AI-generated stories for this episode here. Read the transcript of this episode here. For more info on the podcast and transcripts of all of the episodes, visit www.possible.fm/podcast. Topics: 4:54 - Hellos and intros 6:54 - Ben’s elevator description of Minerva University 11:11 - How we absorb information and the concept of transfer in education 16:01 - The ways technology can deepen learning and remove biases 19:57 - ChatGPT in schools 25:37 - Responding to GPT-4’s story about immersive learning using AR/VR 32:37 - How to push past typical higher education talking points 37:40 - Rapidfire questions, including a take on higher ed and public policy 45:06 - Debrief with Reid and Aria Possible is a new podcast that sketches out the brightest version of the future—and what it will take to get there. Most of all, it asks: what if, in the future, everything breaks humanity's way? Hosted by Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger, each episode features an interview with a visionary from a different field: climate science, media, criminal justice, and more. The conversation also features another kind of guest: GPT-4, OpenAI’s latest and most powerful language model to date. Each episode has a companion story, generated by GPT-4, which will serve as a jumping-off point for a hopeful, speculative discussion about what humanity could possibly get right if we leverage technology—and our collective effort—effectively. Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network and hosted by Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger. Our showrunner is Shaun Young. Possible is produced by Edie Allard and Sara Schleede. Jenny Kaplan is our Executive Producer and Editor. Special thanks to Diana El Azar, Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sapieva, Ian Alas, Greg Beato, Ben Relles, and the team at LinkedIn Media Productions, including Justin Blumenthal, Hasan Ahmed, Keith Cheng, Eric Carlos, and Gabe Lomeli Jr. for video production on this episode.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Reid Hoffman?

  And I had to explain, though you don't understand. An education without data, which means an education without technology, doesn't work. It is inferior to have a learning environment offline versus online if you design the digital learning environment correctly.

• 0:25Reid Hoffman?

  Hi, I'm Reid Hoffman.

• 0:27Aria Finger?

  And I'm Aria Finger.

• 0:28Reid Hoffman?

  We want to know what happens if, in the future, everything breaks humanity's way.

• 0:33Aria Finger?

  We're speaking with visionaries in every field, from climate science to criminal justice and from entertainment to education.

• 0:41Reid Hoffman?

  These conversations also feature another kind of guest, GPT-4, OpenAI's latest and most powerful language model to date. Each episode will have a companion story, which we've generated with GPT-4 to spark discussion. You can find these stories down in the show notes.

• 0:58Aria Finger?

  In each episode, we seek out the brightest version of the future and learn what it'll take to get there.

• 1:06Reid Hoffman?

  This is Possible.

• 1:12Reid Hoffman?

  You know, part of the awesome thing about doing this Possible podcast together is that when we address these really central topics, like take education, we bring multiple perspectives to it. Each of us brings multiple perspectives. Say a little bit about when we're reinventing education. What are the questions that you're thinking about that is important for us to address?

• 1:36Aria Finger?

  I'm obsessed with education. It's one of the causes I'm most passionate about. When we're thinking about education, it's how can we serve everyone? Because we're not going to lift up our society if we can't serve every child, every student, every person. And so a lot of people talk about the United States having the best colleges and universities in the world, but I would argue that the average student doesn't get a great higher education in the United States. And I would argue further that I think we know that on the K through 12 level, like we're just not teaching young people for the careers of the future. I was actually really excited. So as you know, I went to Wash U in St. Louis, and the chancellor sent out a note and said, hey, ChatGPT is here. Everyone's talking

• 2:21Aria Finger?

  about people cheating and how terrible it is, but it is the future. And so we need to embrace it, and here's how we can use it. And I think on the flip side, what no one talks about is how can teachers use it? And how can professors use it? And how like, we haven't, we haven't changed the, the teaching pedagogy in 50 years. And we have all of these teachers who have just been through the pandemic and so exhausting. I can't imagine what they've been through. We need to give them more tools so that they can teach the children of our future, the students of our future. And so I think the combination of technology and then empathy and compassion, both for students and teachers is, is awesome. It's a really cool, really cool combination.

• 3:02Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah. And it's a hundred percent of kind of, and it's part of what we're doing here on Impossible is like, not to look at the technology as something that is, is, is kind of just trying to outmode teachers, but to enable them.

• 3:13Aria Finger?

  Yes.

• 3:13Reid Hoffman?

  To, because there are tons of these dedicated, sweat, blood and tears teachers who are trying to help kids get into their future. How do we help them? And that's why we're talking to Ben Nelson, right? The founder, the CEO of the Maneuver Project, the founder and chancellor of Maneuver University. Ben combines a classic technology Silicon Valley entrepreneurial mindset with the dedication of how do we take a first principle approach, revise what we're doing in education?

• 3:46Aria Finger?

  Yeah.

• 3:47Reid Hoffman?

  Yes, use technology for it, but not just like, you know, only technology, also like, what's the point of education? How do we bring people into it? Who, what kind of students you try to attract? How do you teach them? What does the in-person experience look like? What are the? Goals and outcomes look like and to rethink all of that from a first principle from modern society. So as opposed to taking kind of just the canon of everyone should just have a liberal arts education and that is just the human right and dignity, which of course he values, right? But it's like, no, no, but let's, let's, as opposed to thinking, well, is the same education that was valuable in 1940s, the one that should be being done today? Let's think about how we change that at all levels and, and that combination of,

• 4:31Reid Hoffman?

  of kind of Silicon Valley, creative disruption, reinvention, technology, together with valuing this essential human institution, kind of thing that we hope for every human being in the world.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:45Reid Hoffman?

  Which is education is elevation.

• 4:54Reid Hoffman?

  Ben, welcome to Possible. We thought we'd kick off, because he's a close friend of all of ours, with the investment from Reed Hastings. Yeah. And Reed and I occasionally get mail for each other. So each of us is like, oh, no, no, you met the other Reed. Right. But talk a little bit about that. That was awesome.

• 5:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know. It was very, very exciting. I mean, Reed has supported Minerva University students for, this is his third year of supporting Minerva University students. And every year he has stepped up his commitment. And it's just a remarkable level of support. I'm always stunned when people out of, with no quid pro quo, no, nothing back. No, there's no selfishness in it. It is merely an acknowledgement that he wants to see more students benefit from this ability to have this new kind of education and apply it and experience it all over the world. And I, you know, it's, in many ways, it leaves me speechless, right?

• 5:59Speaker 02

  But it is necessary because if you want to create an institution.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  That really isn't there to just continue society as it is, but is all about social mobility and is about taking students that have, you know, that come from very challenging socioeconomic backgrounds and giving them an opportunity. Right, to give you some perspective, a typical incoming class in the Ivy League will have about 13% of the students coming from households making less than $50,000 a year. At Minerva, it's 60.

• 6:36Aria Finger?

  Amazing.

• 6:36Speaker 02

  And the outcomes that we have for those students exceed the outcomes of Ivy League graduates. Right, so, you know, but, but somebody needs to support that and some buddies, right? And so, and so that's just been, it's just been amazing to see people come together and Reed being, of course, leading among them.

• 6:54Reid Hoffman?

  What's the elevator description of Minerva?

• 6:57Speaker 02

  Depends how tall the building is, but the, the very quick version of, of, of Minerva is, Minerva is built as a university should be, focused strictly on human development and learning. And so there's no artifice, right? There's no sports teams, there's no campus, right? We select students from all over the world and share a common growth mindset. They're talented, but they're humble. They want to become better, right? We bring them from all over the world to live in San Francisco. We train them in 80 habits of mind and foundational concepts that form the underpinning of their entire education and really life skills. And then we have them live as adults in a residence hall in San Francisco for a year,

• 7:40Speaker 02

  after which they will travel and live in six other countries over the next three years before coming back to San Francisco to graduate. And we've proven that this approach yields the best educational outcomes in the world, not just in theory, but in practice when applied to work, entrepreneurship, even graduate school placement, which is shocking, but, but true.

• 8:02Aria Finger?

  And so can I ask, like, how do you do that? Like, I've studied higher education a lot, and I think a lot of people know now that it's not the Ivy League that is the mobility, you know, it's the Coonies in New York or the UT system, but 60% of your students being below $50,000 a year, like, that's huge. Like, how? Are you just cherry picking the 20 best? Or is there an ocean of other students that could be learning in Minerva?

• 8:27Speaker 02

  Look, there's a vast ocean. I mean, the reality is that, you know, if you were to go to any high school graduating class, not just, you know, in the United States, anywhere in the world, and ask them, okay, who here has heard of Minerva? You know, I mean, many schools will have no hands risen. And then some will have a couple who may have heard of it, et cetera. We're still a tiny, tiny, tiny dot in the ocean of capacity. Every student that applies to Minerva, the exact same standard is applied to them. And it doesn't matter what background they're from, doesn't matter where they come from, what country, what background, what ethnicity, what household income. We just assess their merit. And that process yields kind of diversity for free.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  But then the real question is, what do we do with them? Right? Because, and that really is the core problem of education. And it really is at the heart of what a Minerva education is. And I think the easiest way to describe it is, if you were to think of traditional education, it really is linear in its perspective, right? You have an A minus or a B plus, right? You have a 92 or an 87. You know, the advanced ones, you have competence, you don't have competency. But, you know, we all know from data, this is completely meaningless. Right? I mean, it doesn't mean anything, right? What does it mean to be an A minus, you know, skill level or B plus? The real concept is acquiring some piece of knowledge isn't the end of education. It's the beginning.

• 9:57Speaker 02

  Real education is now that you know something, what do you do with it? How broadly can you apply it? Right? And so I use this example, where if you have two students, let's say you're assessing them on a particular competency. And one student has a 92 average in a competency assessment, and another one has an 87 average. But if the 92 average is derived from applying that competency in three contexts, and the 87 average is derived from applying in 48 different contexts.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  Clearly, the eighty-seven average is better. And the education system not only doesn't have a way to measure that, it doesn't even acknowledge that is the goal of education. And when you create an educational system as Minerva has, that creates that as the only focus of the education, that's why you get better outcomes. Because you actually train people to be wise, to be able to apply what they've learned in whatever situation they encounter.

• 10:49Reid Hoffman?

  So talk a little bit about that kind of first principles reinvention with thinking about the kind of the context of how do I apply that education in my life, my work, etc. What were some of the first principles that went into it early? What have you learned along that path that you've gone? Here are key things that we've been learning that we hope spread widely.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. So there are really kind of two elements to it. The first is just how people absorb information. In education, and even in our own personal biases, we believe we learn when we hear or when we're exposed. We do not, right? So, so, and you know, it's like,

• 11:27Reid Hoffman?

  Except if you're listening to a podcast.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  Of course, of course. It retains everything. We'll, we'll add techniques so people who are listening can actually figure out how they, how they absorb this information. But the real, the real trick is you have to process. Yeah. Right? You have to think deeply. You have to think it through. You have to actually connect what you hear to other things that you know. Right? And if you do those two things broadly, think it through and then make and use associations of, of particular pieces of knowledge to others, now all of a sudden you can retain what it is that you've absorbed or heard or absorbed or come across. And by and large, universities don't do that. Right? By and large, you know, you sit in the lecture and you listen and then a test comes and you cram for it,

• 12:12Speaker 02

  which is why you always forget what you passed on the test just, you know, a week or two later. So what is a pedagogical approach? Which we have, by the way, there are forty years worth of research on this. We just compiled it and applied it. But the second part, which is, which is much different, I think, much more important and profound, is this concept of transfer. It's the ability to learn something in context one and apply it in context two, which does not come naturally to most humans. The example I like to, to give on this is, you know, imagine you, you don't feel well, you go to a doctor. The doctor would never prescribe medication and they say, okay, let's figure out what's wrong with you. Right? Obviously, right? Doctor would diagnose you, you should figure out, okay, what's the matter? What's the root cause?

• 12:57Speaker 02

  And she'd say, okay, now let's like prescribe medication. Right? But that same doctor or the same patient that understands everything about, you know, oh yeah, I have to treat medicine. You don't want to just treat the symptom, you want to treat the disease, et cetera. You know, they could go, go home after, after a long day and they see the garbage isn't taken out and they get into a big argument with their spouse over the garbage. And how many people would say, you know what? Let's, let's just stop for a second. Why are we fighting over garbage? What's at the root cause of the tension in our relationship? And let's address that.

• 13:30Speaker 02

  Same exact concept. Right? But, but the, the, the principle has never been taught in a cross contextual way. And that's really the core of a manner of education. You highlight the tool, the cognitive tool, make sure the student absorbs it. And then you allow the student to apply it over and over again. And you draw those connections such that they start to think that way as they go through life. So they think about when somebody makes a claim, how do I validate that claim? Is it a claim or is it a fact? Right? When they propose a solution to something, you say, well, is this a logical solution? Is it rational? When, you know, they, they say, oh, let's, uh, let's solve a problem in some way. You say, well, what is unintended consequence, right?

• 14:14Speaker 02

  Or second or third or effects? I mean, these are all things that you can train the mind to do. But if you don't train the mind to do it. It's not gonna happen.

• 14:23Aria Finger?

  One of the things I thought was interesting as I read about Minerva, and this is directly related to that, is employers are looking for people who have more social skills, interpersonal skills, can work on teams, can solve problems. Colleges and universities don't offer that in any way. And it's something that you all focus on. And it actually reminds me of opportunity at work, which Byron Aguest is a good friend of all of us. And he's talking about how we don't necessarily need college degrees. We need skills. Like, what would you say about that? The interplay between skills, college degrees, and the fact that universities aren't preparing people for, you know, the future that we have now?

• 15:01Speaker 02

  You have to really reform the concept of university education. And you do have to connect what you learn in the classroom into real-world environments. Work is an important element. Culture is an important element. Background. One of the great benefits we have at Minerva is that we bring students from all over the world. It's this wildly diverse student body. And then they live all over the world. They live in seven different countries during their four years. And so they're constantly recontextualizing what they learn, not just from course to course, but as they deal with their roommate versus they deal with a person around across the hall with totally different approaches to dealing with issues or thinking through life. And then as they think about, well, how do I solve problems

• 15:46Speaker 02

  in a context of a startup city in San Francisco versus in Seoul versus in Hyderabad?

• 15:51Reid Hoffman?

  The different life circumstances and the different communities obviously also helps teach the kind of multi-context problem solving, the things that are important for entrepreneurship. Where is the drumbeat of technology in this? Just because it's also an important part of how you change. Like, what are the things you've gone, this has really worked? This was a little bit of a chimera. Thought would work, didn't work. What were some of the technology elements?

• 16:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so. The reality is when you dig under the hood, I mean, it's really easy to say, okay, so we're just gonna measure all of these things across context and all the rest. When you, when you think about it in a traditional university setting, it's science fiction. Right? I mean, how, how can you actually track a student across thirty courses that they will pick at random, right? I mean, they're, they have multiple options, different majors, different electives, et cetera, and assess how they apply eighty different learning objectives across every one of those courses on four years and understand exactly what context they're asked so that you know when you provide an assessment, you provide feedback, how

• 16:54Speaker 02

  it's connected to an overall learning map. Obviously, you have to do that in technology. And, you know, when, when we started Minerva in 2014 and said, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're, we're bringing, we're going through the great expense of bringing all of our students to live in the same building, and we're gonna teach them all online.

• 17:11Aria Finger?

  It sounds crazy.

• 17:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, it sounds totally crazy, right? It's like, what, what are you, I mean, it was, it was, it just didn't compute for people.

• 17:19Aria Finger?

  Yeah.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  And I had to explain, no, you don't understand. An education without data, which means an education without technology, doesn't work. It is inferior to have a learning environment offline versus online if you design the digital learning environment correctly. And it was, it was bananas. It didn't make sense to anybody until COVID hit. Because as soon as COVID hit, all of a sudden, people realized, wait a second, the education I've had offline, I've just been delivered via Zoom. It is the same education, it's just that when I'm in campus, I don't bother showing up to class. And when I'm home and I have to show up to class, I realize how useless it is. Right? And so the problem isn't the technology, the

• 18:03Speaker 02

  problem is the, the nature of the product itself, right? The educational product. And what you can do in a appropriately constructed digital learning environment is first and foremost, create mechanisms that ensure that people are engaged in their learning, right? So as an example, Part of Forum, which is the technology we built, is that we track the number of seconds that every student speaks in every class session. And we can color code their video that only the professor sees. It's just to say, hey, you know, this student hasn't been involved yet in class, or this student is speaking too much.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  And it, and what they do is they then ride the average and they make sure everybody is involved. Right? And so that way, that's something you just cannot do without the aid of technology. I'll give you another, this is perhaps my favorite example. In our very first pilot that we did back in 2014, one of our professors, one of our founding deans was Diane Halpern, who was, you know, a very eminent psychologist, a former president of the American Psychological Association. She decided to run a small experiment. So she asked every one of the professors teaching the students to write down at the end of every class session, who was the best student in class? And then she went back and they did, and they just assessed using rubrics what the student said.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  Right? Everything they said, they just gave rubric scores. You want to know what was common about every single student that was marked as at the end of class? Oh, this was the best student. Talked the most. Talked the most and male. Every single student that both male and female professors said was the best student in class was a male. Every single student with the highest vote, with the highest scores was a female. Every single one.

• 19:54Aria Finger?

  Wow. So this is a way we can remove bias.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 19:57Reid Hoffman?

  Let's start with something that's already been part of the media discussion. And we'll get to some of the GPT four stuff. But with ChatGPT, which is roughly 3.5, most of it is, oh my God, college essays, college applications, going down in flames. Stop it, ban it, stop the future. There's a little bit, which I'm anticipating where you guys are, it's like, oh my God, how do we use this? How do we amplify it? How do we, we're going to this future, what do we do? So what is your guys' reaction and your personal reaction been to ChatGPT? And what would you kind of offer to people to say, look at what you could do? Look at how you can change things.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So first, Why did it take so long? Because seriously, when I was starting working on Minerva in 2010, I was assuming, you know, that by the time we launched, this would all be there, right? I mean, because because we kept saying, oh, yeah, it would all all happen. We designed the program with that in mind, right? So as an example, we don't offer any 101 or 102 level courses. They just don't exist. We don't issue credit for them. We don't acknowledge them as university level courses. Because the assumption is you can use some engine to get you whatever information you need. And you need to have a basic understanding of things in order to apply it effectively later on. And to me, that is really the superpower of ChatGPT.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Which is that, you know, it it was kind of an interesting paradigm that I I forget who who told me this. He said, look, when you do a Google search, it sends you on a research project. When you use ChatGPT, it gives you an answer. And that's just a fundamental paradigm shift. You you need to be able to understand the difference between a fact and a claim. ChatGPT gives you a claim, right? And it gives you a very, um, well phrased claim. Let's put it that way, right?

• 21:51Aria Finger?

  It sounds authoritative.

• 21:52Speaker 02

  It sounds authoritative. It sounds authoritative, feels authoritative, and it uses a data set of what is in the air, right? And so it gives you a popular claim. And what is more important than being able to train our students to both learn the authoritative way of presenting their claims, but also to be able to take apart those claims and see, not that the the the true or false stuff, the true or false stuff is easy, right? It's the nuance, right? It's then that's the Minerva assessment model. It isn't about black and white, it's black and gray, right? There are certainly wrong answers in the world for any question and you have to be able to discern what they are.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  But the real art is to see in the spectrum of potentially correct answer based on context, based on situation. Right? Where are you going to go to? And and my hope is that, you know, at some point you see this, of course, in the science fiction movies. A chat GPT will say, oh, there's a 27% probability, right, that, you know, taking this path. Right? But that is what the world is. The world is full of that path is 27% probability of success. This is 24%, that's 19%. That doesn't tell you what path to take, not even close. Right? And that's the art of a real education. Right? It's to assume that you're going to have that data and you focus effort and mind around that nuance.

• 23:16Speaker 02

  It also means that all of a sudden, all of the rote work that our students have to spend on compiling the information, I'm starting off with with answers. Will start on, they'll save all that time and now they can devote that time and I can now I can make the curriculum even harder. Right? And so I can now graduate them even better because they're not spending all of that time that they did otherwise. Right? I mean, I think about when I was in college and I was writing essays, what would I do? I would go on, I would just highlight all of the quotes I liked in papers. I would copy and paste the quotes and I would write my paper around them. And I would say, how do I connect this quote to that quote? And that was my chat GPT version, right?

• 24:00Speaker 02

  I mean, but if I could just, you know, ask the, you know, chat GPT to do that and then figure out, oh, well, you know, the quote you got wasn't as salient what I need, you know, find me something different, you know, learn to hone that. Well, that is what we're going to do in real life. Right? So so embracing it and and then elevating standards. And this is really the the core problem.

• 24:21Reid Hoffman?

  How can you now make it better?

• 24:22Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 24:23Reid Hoffman?

  Because like, oh, that's a good argument about Plato. But who would be a better argument?

• 24:27Speaker 02

  That's right. That's right. And how do you increase rigor? And in higher ed, we've had 50 years of decreasing rigor, not just in higher ed, in in high schools, right? The education model has gone the exact opposite direction. Again, this is a problem of treating symptom versus root cause, right? People think, oh, we've got a root cause, uh, we got an educational problem. We have varying outcomes, right? Outcome loves all the rest. What's the solution? Lower standards, right? You lower standards, then it's easy for everybody to go to college, easy for everybody to graduate. As opposed to saying, no, no, no, no, no. The issue is poor pedagogy, poor inclusion, you know, all of the things that don't work. Rather than doing the hard work of addressing them, increasing demands on students

• 25:11Speaker 02

  and giving them the tools to be successful, we say, no, no, no, let's just make it easier. And that's my big worry, that that chat GPT, you know, the devil's bargain between student and professor, which is the less both of them work, the happier they both are. Chat GPT is going to enable that in a big way, right? So there's one thing to try and resist, which is futile and silly. The other way is to say, great, now I don't have, I can do even less.

• 25:37Aria Finger?

  So it sounds like one of the things that's so magical about Minerva is the studying in seven different cities. I mean, I studied abroad, everyone like has the best time, but you know, it's both fun and it's like amazing for learning. Obviously, not every student around the world can study in different cities. So we use GPT-4 and asked GPT-4 about what are the different ways that the future of education could be impacted and improved through technology like AI? And one of the stories was about a young kid named Malik, who was able to use AR VR to visit these different places to sort of get the Minerva experience, you know, um, without having to travel.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  Malik decided to use his VR contact lenses to do a virtual field trip to the Amazon rainforest. He had learned about the rainforest in his geography class, but he wanted to see it for himself and learn more about its animals. He logged into his school's VR platform and entered the rainforest simulation. He was greeted by the avatar of his AI teaching assistant, who spoke to him in Arabic, Malik's first language, and what he spoke at home with his parents. The AI assistant told him that he had joined a group of his classmates, who were also doing their book reports on the rainforest, and that they had a special guide from an indigenous tribe who lived there.

• 26:58Aria Finger?

  How do we recreate that amazing Minerva experience? Can technology help us? Can AI help us? Like, how do we do that for everyone who can't travel?

• 27:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, so I'll say two things about that. I think first and foremost, we have to be both sober about the opportunity and the costs of, of real live experiences compared to virtual ones, where obviously, you know, there's just a

• 27:25Aria Finger?

  Everything's a trade-off.

• 27:26Speaker 02

  There is a trade-off. But we also have to understand, well, what is the, the delta, right? I was given, I don't know how many millions of VR in education presentations, and you know, one of my friends was like, "Oh, look, you know, on the computer, you can like see the pyramids and you can like go through them." And I was like, "Whoa." I don't think it's like being at the pyramids. And maybe you get there at some point, but I think there is a real tangible value in the unexpected, right? In, in the struggle of, "Huh, I thought I would be able to go into a cafe and use Wi-Fi because I have an important meeting or a class at this time, and I showed up and it doesn't work." Right?

• 28:08Speaker 02

  There is, you know, there's, you know, a cow that's crossing the street, now I cannot. Right? I mean, like, there's just basic things that you can experience that are important. So, so to me, I would actually change the framing on that, which is, what is it that you get by this travel experience? And if you cannot change your context of city, how do you wind up changing your context where you are? So, I think that you can have

• 28:39Speaker 02

  Seven different, radically different experiences in San Francisco. Think about what you could do, and in fact, even in a metropolitan area, right? What does it look like to actually be immersed in a very, very economically stricken, poverty-stricken neighborhood versus what does it look like to be in an immigrant enclave? Versus what is it like to be in the middle of the financial district, right? And then to actually live in that context and all of a sudden, your cost is a bus fare.

• 29:11Aria Finger?

  Right.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  Right? And there's something about that experience that can be replicated. You can also think about it not just from a cultural immersion. You can think about, well, how can I experience different workplaces? And here is an enormous advantage of technology and of the COVID awakening, right? I will say that before the pandemic, it wasn't easy for us to convince employers to take Minerva students as interns, right? While they were studying halfway around the world. Now it's a given, right? And the ability for you to be in one place and work for multiple different companies, have different contexts and work on projects, right?

• 29:57Speaker 02

  The barrier of place is evaporated, right? So there are so many ways in which we can leverage technology and leverage opportunity of context if we think about what is the ultimate goal? Because the ultimate goal is transfer. It is context change, right? And anything we can do to create authentic context change, I think, is crucial.

• 30:20Reid Hoffman?

  How did that GPT-4 story stimulate your thinking on the possibilities for what we can shape in the future?

• 30:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, to me, you know, it's, here's what's remarkable the most about, you know, the whole GPT and AI thing. It is, it has passed the Turing test. Like, you cannot tell that someone didn't write that story. And it is clearly been trained by what is out there, right? And so even the scenarios of what happens to these students, what their assignments are, they're pre-GPT assignments, right? And so it's like, how do I use this incredible tool to do the same thing I did in a world before this tool existed?

• 31:09Reid Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 31:10Speaker 02

  Right? And, and I think to me, all of the, uh, these stories, right, that were generated, highlights how crucial it is to envision a different baseline. And again, to start from the ground up, to start from first principles and understand, look, now that you have enormous increased productivity, right? The ability to really process things, how do we redefine what it is that, that you expect from students, even at young ages, right? How do you expect them to actually demonstrate that they're using these tools, not in, to achieve the, again, the, the old goals and, you know, faster ways, but to actually create new goals?

• 31:53Speaker 02

  And to me, that was the overarching theme of, of all of this. And, and I think that that's really the big opportunity for educational institutions. It's to up their game. And, you know, that, that will scare a lot of, of institutions, but I think that's, that's really, to me, the, the big takeaway.

• 32:11Reid Hoffman?

  Completely agree with the upping the game. And it's go to the opportunity, go to what could be so much better versus fearing the change.

• 32:20Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 32:20Reid Hoffman?

  Right? I mean, that's why we have this phrase, "Lutidism." It's like, no, no, actually, a steam engine and a loom is a good thing. Like, yes, people can still hand weave, but we all get much better clothed across the entire world if we have a steam engine together with loom. Same thing in education. Now, one of the comments that I think that you made when we were chatting a little bit before, I think is very important to share with folks, which is the other reflection when we were asking GPT-4 about a bunch of questions about how to improve education. You're like, "Well, those are the classic higher ed education points because it's trained on the current stuff that's in the internet." Say a little bit about that, as it were, blind spot in the lens of the training because that

• 33:00Reid Hoffman?

  was part of the judgment about how to use these tools well and how to not be misled by them.

• 33:06Speaker 02

  Right. I mean, one of these stories, which was one of my favorites, is, you know, talks about, you know, how a girl that comes from a far rural areas of Canada winds up getting her master's in linguistics, right? What is a better talking point for a university and for nobody else? I couldn't imagine, right? I mean, you know, it is one of these, you know, absurd lenses where rather than talking about, "Here are her capabilities. Here is what she was able to do, how she was able to contribute to society," right? The endpoint was, "Boy, she got that master's degree," right? And I think that that's really the shift, right?

• 33:48Speaker 02

  It's, you know, we're working on, one of the things that Minerva does is that we help establish new universities around the world. We help establish new university programs, even within existing universities. One, actually, one I'm going to later today, I'm heading down to Mexico, was being established in Mexico. And, you know, as we were talking to the folks who were starting it, they were very blunt about, "Look, we want to," they do want to create entrepreneurs and, right, and people who will start new businesses. And they said, "You know, look, we want our students to come and, you know, and go through the entire process, but if they get, you know, 80% of the benefit halfway through..."

• 34:30Speaker 02

  Okay, right, and they're ready to go?

• 34:33Reid Hoffman?

  Go on.

• 34:33Speaker 02

  Go, right? And because it's the end, it's the goal, right? And if somebody can do it faster and they can achieve that, you don't need the stamp. Right? And for an institution to have that kind of thinking, right? That's the thing which is going to move us forward, right? That is the thing that is going to get us to understand. And by the way, when we understand that our collective responsibility is to have an enfranchised citizenry that understands the difference between a fact and a claim, right? That knows how to have correct expectations of what can be done as opposed to be fed fantastical concepts and ideas.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  We are going to be a much better society, right? But, but we, we, you know, we, we don't think about it in those terms. We generally say, oh, you know, we need people to think this way versus that way. You can't win that argument, right? Because not everybody thinks in a particular way. But no one would say, no, no, no, nobody should have, people shouldn't have those tools.

• 35:40Reid Hoffman?

  So one of the things, of course, about the whole AI as amplification intelligence or augmentation intelligence is, of course, it writes out a first story about what, what a outcome could be.

• 35:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:51Reid Hoffman?

  You look at this and you say, actually, in fact, this outcome story could be so much better.

• 35:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:56Reid Hoffman?

  What would you do adding to a changing it, modifying it, looking at it with the judgment to, to say, no, if it changes, it changes, it changes. This is the society we are trying to move towards. This is what's possible.

• 36:11Speaker 02

  Well, first I'd, I'd take two steps back. I'd ask ChatGPT to figure out what's her purpose, right? Not what's her goal. What is her purpose? What's her motivation? Why is she enamored with language? Why is it that she wants to be able to communicate in different ways? Why is she attracted by the world beyond, you know, her, the circumstance in which she was, uh, uh, which she found herself born? And then I would try to navigate and shows my relative amateur way of programming ChatGPT, but I would try to navigate it towards going back to how that purpose is fulfilled.

• 36:52Speaker 02

  Less so about the milestones and more about the capacities that she would need in order to fulfill that purpose, right? And the more that you think and guide, you know, whether it be the AI or even, you know, the learner towards that framing, why is it that you want to do what it is? Now, what is the core problem you're trying to solve in order to get there? What's the gap between what the current state is and what the various solutions are that that get there? And then you go through it systematically. Now you get into the gray zone. Now you get into the world where, huh, I now have a plausible path to maybe solve a problem.

• 37:36Speaker 02

  And now let's compare that to other plausible paths and see what's best.

• 37:45Aria Finger?

  So at the end of every podcast, we're going to ask a few rapid fire questions. So could you tell us a movie, a song, or book, some piece of culture that fills you with optimism?

• 37:55Speaker 02

  This is going to be a very strange response, but it is The Life of Brian by Monty Python. We're all individuals. Yeah, we're all individuals, that's right. And what I love about The Life of Brian is here's a movie that was made 50 years ago. And every scene in that movie was relevant then, it's relevant today, and it was relevant 2,000 years ago, right? And why does that feel? Most people look at that in despair, right? We're dealing with the same thing. It fills me with optimism because overall, humanity does progress.

• 38:33Speaker 02

  And we progress with all of our insanity and all of our flaws as humans, right? And we do get better, right? And technology is, whether we like to admit it or not, the fuel, right, that enables us to get better despite all of our, our issues. So the life of Brian, you know, it's always look on the bright side of life.

• 38:58Reid Hoffman?

  So on a different vector, where do you see progress or momentum outside of your industry? That gives you optimism about what's possible?

• 39:09Speaker 02

  So I'm a big, big believer, strangely enough, in augmented reality. I think we are very far away from cracking it. But right now, our augmented reality is the iPhone. You know, we always think about how much the world progresses. And I like the fact that we're in, uh, let's, let's assume that progress, uh, we just measure this century, right? So far, you know, 2000 to 2023. And now let's think about the most recent benchmark, 1900 to 1923. Think about those 23 year spans.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  What happened to humanity between 1900 to 1923? My grandmother was born in 1900. My grandfather was born in 1890. I remember my grandmother telling me the first time she saw a carriage that was not drawn by a horse. And she didn't know what was going on, right? Flight, right? Of course, the World War I, the pandemic, the collapse of monarchies, the introductions of representative governments, right? Which in 1900 was almost unheard of, right? In 1923 was commonplace. I mean, the, we were, you know, a little bit away from discovering penicillin. I mean, just the rapid change in, in that 23 years. Now, fast forward.

• 40:35Speaker 02

  To just go back, right? Imagine somebody in 1933 going back to 1900, right? Or vice versa. How radically different of a world it would be. What is different about today versus 2000? The difference is the internet comes with us. The internet existed in 2000. I was there. It did a lot of the things that we do now. You know, like we had food delivery to the home. That existed, right? But now we have an augmented reality. And frankly, you know, AI is finally becoming real, starting to. But we haven't seen the applications yet, right?

• 41:18Speaker 02

  And so to me, the big bet is that AR is going to be the vehicle that is going to enable all of this change, right? I just don't know how. I don't know if it'll be a glass display. I don't know if it'll be a contact lens. I don't know if it'll be auditory. I don't know if it'll be some other thing, an implant. But I fundamentally believe that if we can effectively augment our reality with AI-inspired information, right? The superpower will be with us everywhere. And that is an opportunity that I don't think anybody has started to fathom what it could mean for humanity.

• 42:03Reid Hoffman?

  Other than a few science fiction.

• 42:04Speaker 02

  Perhaps.

• 42:06Reid Hoffman?

  So can you leave us with a final thought on if everything were to break in the right direction for education in humanity's futures over the next 15 years? What would that future look like? And then what are the steps that we need to be taking in order to get there?

• 42:25Speaker 02

  I think it comes down to the what, the who and the how. Right? The what is that education will embrace a completely redefined centering around the ability to teach people how to apply broadly what they learn versus demonstrate recall. Right? Without that shift, nothing else happens. The who will, again, if everything breaks the right way, all of a sudden will reverse a 50-year decline in education mobility, in at least from a cognitive and American perspective,

• 43:08Speaker 02

  and reverse it dramatically and fast. And just to give you some perspective, in 50 years, the top quintile of socioeconomic distribution doubled its college completion rate or college attainment rate. The bottom quintile increased by only 50%. And it increased from an extraordinarily low base. Right? And so you would see a dramatic shift in who gets educated in this way. The how, unfortunately, I think, requires public policy. And to me, the easiest way of doing it is very simple, which, by the way, I think is a policy

• 43:50Speaker 02

  that people on the right and the left would gravitate towards, which is the government should declare that any university can educate whoever they want, but any university that doesn't have at least a proportional representation of the socioeconomic distribution of a country among its undergraduate student body loses all nonprofit status, loses all tax benefits, has no access to research dollars, has no access to NIH or any other government funding of any kind. And I guarantee you, every research university in the country, the next year only enrolls students from the bottom 50% of the socioeconomic distribution. We'll never take that.

• 44:33Speaker 02

  Maybe they'll have a few people right from the top to, you know, pay for the buildings. That's it. And it'll be a dramatic shift in social mobility in this country.

• 44:43Reid Hoffman?

  Wow.

• 44:44Aria Finger?

  I love that.

• 44:45Reid Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 44:46Aria Finger?

  Ben, thank you so much for being here.

• 44:50Reid Hoffman?

  My pleasure.

• 44:51Aria Finger?

  So wonderful to hear about Minerva and everything else that's going on. Really appreciate it.

• 44:54Reid Hoffman?

  Thank you. Always amazing. Thanks, Ben. Good to be here. That was awesome.

• 45:07Aria Finger?

  So amazing. What I found so interesting, and I have known Ben for like 10 years, and you read all the articles about a Minerva that's about, you know, we're out eluding Harvard and we're the most elite college in the world, but there's no one who came off as more concerned about equity and lifting everyone up and how can we radically change society so that we can increase social mobility? And I thought that was awesome because there's just such this rhetoric, and I even fell into it. Well, like, oh, aren't these students, they won't be ready for Minerva, or they're not? And he was like, no, you just need to raise expectations. And all of us were benefit. The kids at the top will benefit, the kids at the bottom will benefit. And so just that idea of raising expectations across the board was just a real takeaway for me.

• 45:51Reid Hoffman?

  Yeah, and by the way, that ties very much to the kind of area that I was thinking of, which is, I, you know, all the way back to a decade plus ago, I wrote about how technology is going to reinvent the diploma, and that it isn't just going to be a degree, but a set of skills and competencies. But it made, and I'd already reflected on a lot of the places where our educational system is a mismatch for life, because, you know, work is mostly a team sport. How do you work together? You know, the educational system, which overly emphasizes your individual achievement, sitting and taking an exam by yourself versus the how are you collaborating and working together? And when he was working through what were the key things, like, no, no, you can get that from Wikipedia, you can get that from GPT-4, you can get that from ChatGPT, then

• 46:35Reid Hoffman?

  come into the social work circumstance, work on its context application, how you do it together. That's the thing that you're going to amplify? And so the education thing isn't the, are you? Really, really good at reproducing a compare and contrast essay.

• 46:52Aria Finger?

  Totally.

• 46:52Reid Hoffman?

  It's a, is that contextual of life and work going to be? And so, like, I hadn't realized how much the minerva, sure, you start in San Francisco, you end in San Francisco, but you go to these other places and that the other places are part of that context shift.

• 47:09Aria Finger?

  Totally.

• 47:09Reid Hoffman?

  Part of that, we're treating you like adults. You're being amplified into adulthood for this, not kind of the delayed, we're all partying at university, but as ways of doing that. And that obviously ties directly to that. No, no, using these kinds of patterns, we can take the very broad brush of talented folks who haven't been trained on the, oh yes, I've been learning to do a compare and contrast essay since I was nine with my private tutor. But like, everyone, in order to learn those, those right outcomes and that, that the outcome is navigating a good life.

• 47:48Aria Finger?

  I mean, obviously, a lot of our discussion was about equity and ensuring that everyone has access to it. And I know you've thought a lot about the digital divide. And so, how do you think, like, the digital divide with AI will affect the future?

• 48:02Reid Hoffman?

  Well, this is one of the questions I want to want to come back to you on too, because this is like what I was kind of thinking about. It's like, you know, in the, the future of education, one of the things that Ben pointed out, which is a fundamental truth in all societies, which is that the, the structure of whatever the elite class is generally has more money, more, kind of operates to try to capture opportunity for the children. That restricts social mobility. But that question about how do we enable as much of the great talent as we can to express themselves and contribute to our society is part of what I love about the aspirations, the American dream, always and always be building towards it. Part of what I, why I ended up in entrepreneurship as, as a way of doing this. How did you reflect on it?

• 48:46Reid Hoffman?

  What was you, what was your, like, ah, and here is something to really grab or double down on or imagine the possibility of?

• 48:52Aria Finger?

  Well, I loved both Ben's radical proposal of making the elite universities reflect society in their student body. I also thought it was really interesting. So we had three AI stories that we looked at, and we actually, we didn't talk about it, but we had the story of Wes Moore, the current governor of Maryland, who has an extraordinary story, you know, grew up in poverty in the Bronx. And he was lucky enough that he had this mom and these grandparents who sort of like pulled him, scraped together all their money so he could go to private school and then military school. In the three AI stories, it was all about young people who got super lucky and got a scholarship, and super lucky and got this. And it's just, what I liked about Ben's answer is we need a systems change.

• 49:35Aria Finger?

  This like idea that you're only if you get lucky, or if you happen to be low income, and only if you are plucked out and get this amazing, it's like, no, that has to be wrong, and the system has to change. And so, when I think about AI, it's like, how can we use AI to stop people from being lucky? How do we give the same opportunities to everyone? Part of it's personalized education, part of it's the changing of the schools, part of it's the teachers being better, like, all of those things. We just need to stop this being lucky.

• 50:07Reid Hoffman?

  Well, I don't think you can stop luck. I think luck is the, but the question would be is, how do you not make it is that the only exceptions from the less economically advantaged people, classes and people, is only luck? Right? How do you get as much of that? Or how do you get as much broader base for, as opposed to narrow luck? Like, as opposed, like, you roll a six-sided die, and it's only when you get a six that it works. How do we move that to like, three to six?

• 50:37Aria Finger?

  Right, how do you expand luck?

• 50:39Reid Hoffman?

  Yes, because that, because there's always some fortune.

• 50:42Aria Finger?

  Of course.

• 50:43Reid Hoffman?

  Like, you're born in the US versus you're born in, born in a war country, or something else, there's ways to do that. There's always some of it. But I think part of human progress is how do you broaden it? It's one of the reasons I like, you know, Bob Wright's non-zero book so much, is how do we make more of our systems non, you know, positive sum, where we're creating a better and better future? Part of the reason why we're doing possible, right? And that's in a very important constituency, because by the way, it's many more people. So if you can actually, in fact, make it so that, because talent... Across a million people is distributed across a million people. So if you go, well, we only got a million here and we got 100 million here. Well, how do we take the 100 million?

• 51:27Reid Hoffman?

  And how do we enable much more of that talent to the benefit of everyone, to themselves too, but the benefit of everyone?

• 51:33Aria Finger?

  Absolutely. No, couldn't agree more.

• 51:42Reid Hoffman?

  Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network, hosted by me, Reid Hoffman, and R.A. Finger. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Edie Allard and Sarah Shleid. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor. Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Saidi Sapieva, Ian Alice, Greg Beato, Ben Relis, and the team at LinkedIn Media Productions, including Justin Blumenthal, Hasan Ahmed, Heath Cheng, Eric Carlos, and Gabe Lomeli Jr. for video production on this episode.