Education you always make a distinction between Information Knowledge and wisdom in fact you called your own venture after the roman goddess of wisdom which leads me to conclude that you believe you provide the latter but what about the rest of the system what do you think its selling well what its selling is not necessarily what its delivering but if you go to any website of almost any university in the world certainly any university in the United States you will see claims such as that this university will he try to think critically it will solve teaches you how to solve problems that will teach you how to communicate well and work well with other people itll teach you to be global in your thinking that all sounds wonderful and in fact i think if anybody thinks about what is the role of Higher Education we all would all agree that those are things that we want universities to teach but when you actually look at the curriculum none of those things are taught. What is taught courses in departments largely around information sometimes around analysis of that information but very much in a field specific way and the reality is is that in order to teach these broader capacities you cannot deliver it in a disciplinary way you have to deliver it in a cross contextual way so essentially youre saying that the universities are not delivering what theyre promised to give you is that an unfortunate happenstance you know a good system in a bad shape or is it actually fraud claiming to provide what you know you cannot provide and charging a fortune for well i think its volved to be i dont think that was ever the intent and i dont think that it was malicious in its beginnings and in fact if you think about the of the broader concept of a classical education. The goal really was to provide you with the various disciplinary activities that you need in order to be able to think critically and 200 years ago that was possible its because humanity did didnt know much right and so in one degree you could teach science and math and philosophy and history and basically cover what most of the professors knew and you could impart that to the students and they would get a very broad and systematic education now it had flaws certainly at the beginning but certainly from what professors knew with the time it was effective as information exploded what we know about the world has become so vast universities have tried to keep up with it and theyve devolved into at least in the United States into more of this departmental approach in fact and for the rest of the world they never left the departmental approach and so the edge of. Has become spending more and more time learning less and less much Like Research has been spending more and more time trying to discover more details around specific sub areas and so what were left with today is this pursuit of the dissemination of information that is very specific as opposed to the usage of truly that you can interrogate and its not only very specific its also widely available for free. Universities particularly in the United States but also around the world are charging a lot for their services you know i i read somewhere that for example alzheimers drugs. Make about a 1000000000. 00 market in the United States even though Everybody Knows that theres no drug that works against it and that some of the madisons on the on the market actually exacerbate the condition and for what you describe it seems that. Has the same iatrogenic a fact when it promises to make peoples lives prospects better but in fact it makes them worse if not cognitively done if they financially yes and this is in this is one of the difficulties is that systems once they get into a particular position they have to find ways to defend themselves and so theyll point out things to say oh well look College Graduates make so much more than people who didnt go to college but of course this is a fallacy i have just again through a fortune but but this is a make it into if thats what the claim is of course what the actual analysis needs to have a control group which is to say lets take the same people from the so sick and i would back around from an intelligence background then lets take a group of them not have them go to college to have a Similar Group go to college and then see the income differences and it turns out that the few pieces of information that have shown elements of this for example a long running study at a very prestigious univer. A city that showed what happened to students that were accepted to that you very Prestigious University but then decided to go to a Different University including public universities are not as prestigious and it turns out that their lifetime earnings were identical and so the value of actually going to want to versus another was shown to basically not exist i mean much of the current economy is built on deputy human vanity brand names dont necessarily provide better quality products but they provide the power effect the status kristie to promise of social and valuable social connections isnt it the same in Higher Education i mean you may argue that higher harvard doesnt provide what it claims to provide but it also gives something that that a new start up cannot do right so this is a fascinating dilemma and we know i often say that minerva is based on a very controversial idea and that idea that Education Matters and so when i say that most people say well thats a controversial law everybody believes that Education Matters and then of course i give the example i say ok well lets assume that you would have a child and you were designed to figure out where your child should go to school they could go to harvard or they could go to a school that is 100 places ranked lower than harvard but where you know they would get a superior education almost any parent would say oh no no no id send them to harvard now i think thats a wrong decision absolutely because now i ask the same people i say ok now think of your job if youre an employer youre interviewing 2 candidates for this job one candidate has a degree from Harvard University some questions in your interview and they do 5 the other candidate goes to university that is ranked 100 spots lower than our vered. But boy in the interview they can take a problem that youve posed to them break it down into its Component Parts they can put those Component Parts back together in interesting ways and provide Novel Solutions to the problem you posed they then think about what happens when you implement the solution in the unexpected outcomes and 2nd order effects of that solution then modify it accordingly and they can explain to you clearly what that solution is and how that would work with a team to implement it who would you hire and every parent that said oh yeah its a make at harvard with immediately says id hire the 2nd person and so you have this bizarre dichotomy which is when we make decisions for our children we optimize those decisions knowing what we know as people in the real world where education and your ability to think systematically is vastly more important than the brands on your residency you say that because i think its a recurring theme thats been voiced by people as different as say the dalai lama and Jordan Peterson and young people today are taught a lot about the world but not how to be in that wild and that seems to be your niece to teach them how to be how to operate in various circumstances thats right and circumstances include in different cultures and context but also include across Different Levels of analysis and in different fields of analysis wisdom is the application of Practical Knowledge in appropriate ways in novel contexts but if you learn a particular scenario could be in a class could be your experience and you encounter that exact same scenario knowing what to do is just memory thats out wisdom thats not learning its just memorizing something. Wisdom comes when you are facing a brand new context and you can draw upon tools youve learned in other contexts systematically to know what to do and i know that its a fact at your School Students dedicate our 1st year exclusively to learning about critical and creative thinking as well as Effective Communication and that looks to me more coaching didnt teaching and i wonder how do you source your educators because this is not what your Typical University professor is trying to do and no the certainly not but its not something that is hard to train the professors to do if you provide them a highly structured curricular d approach. When you think about Critical Thinking or creative thinking facts of Communications Effective interactions with others those are catch all phrases but they themselves dont mean much they really are a combination of a whole bunch of other things so for example you talked about different being claim in effect distinguishing between those 2 things is a form of Critical Thinking but another form of Critical Thinking is making a decision trade off to take path water path to the techniques you need to do where to deploy in order to decide what path to take in a Decision Matrix or it whether or not something is a crime or fact are completely different one has nothing to do with the other and there are subcomponents of each of those and so if you actually provide students a taxonomy for the habits of mind that they need for the foundational concepts that they can deploy to bring to bear Critical Thinking with large creative problem solving writ large and you do that in many different context you have a chance to actually provide students with a systematic thinking and what we have done is created a system that increases those chances. Dramatically in fact that we ensure that our students learn how to deploy more than 80 of these Component Parts 2 scenarios that are as far flung as thinking about how you analyze problems all the way to how you actually have nuance in the way you communicate with others and your approach to them now i mention jordan he is a. Famous or infamous canadian psychologist a you tube sensation who also set his sights on revolutionizing Higher Education and hes made before that is not only the cost but also what he sees as ideological indoctrination at the expanse of Critical Thinking i wonder whats minervas relationship with Political Correctness because this is a pretty hot subject when it comes to american Higher Education it is and i think its not just american our education by the way polygamy. In order to marry. All over the world actually if you look actually if you look at russia its also neck and academia another where is that and why is that it is because academy has grown up in context but if you look at pretty much every course at a University Almost every course not everybody almost every course the context is central you will study south Asian Studies youll study russian history this is a context based perspective and when you take that approach somebody has to provide you an interpretation of the context and so over time that interpretation can become biased if your educational process is cross can text sure will. Cross contacts show indies case means having 7 facilities around the world that he didnt have through the course of that so it has means culturally cross contextual both in where the students learn but also in the student body it means cost contextual in the sense that when you do your studies you learn these pieces of Practical Knowledge not within a field but apply to many different fields right but the subject matter isnt the field of study it is the tool that you use to analyze it all of a sudden your approach to Political Correctness is very different because you no longer are teaching a can textual interpretation youre teaching tools one of the problems that frankly Jordan Peterson and other have is that they dont like the bias that is being taught they want to different bias right and they will claim that that is Critical Thinking even though they may also have their own bias we are above that fray we dont pass judgment on whether or not a student should say this economic model right the keynesian model is superior to the Chicago School or vice versa however what we try to demonstrate to students is that when everyone actually has you dan alison west that you can do the analysis yourself and there are legitimately a variety of perspectives that could be correct even though theres a much larger variety of of perspectives that is certainly incorrect and that really distinguish between those is important i have to stop you here because we have to take a very short break but we will be back in just a few moments stay tuned. You know before george bizarros became. A Global Market manipulator and election workers he wrote a lot of interesting books and of course see. How the quantum fund which was one of the best performing hedge funds ever kind of invented the modern hedge fund and hes got a lot of things to say if you look at his old work and were going to get into it. Join me every thursday on the alex salmond show and ill be speaking to us of the world of politics sports business im show business ill see you then. Welcome back to worlds apart with ben nelson founder of the minerva project than i generally out of your students i wish i could quit my job and then ply to school but. The question is how scalable is that model because you know how many students you have a few 10600 students as undergraduates we also have a Masters Program so ok so even when you have a few 1000 theres still a drop in the ocean compared to the 99000 at penn state or even the 23000 at harvard do you think those big legacy schools can really do what you are trying to do giving this individualized attention while also dealing with such a massive number of students yes so the reality is that when you look at the underlying costs of delivering what we have provided it is a fraction of the costs of delivering what the existing American University provides and if you think about 2 the resources that harvard. Other elite universities claim to deploy they certainly have plenty of capacity to do this for example if you look at the student faculty ratios at most universities of minerva we have about one faculty member for every 10 students which is very very good but if you look at harvard or others ok and they have one faculty member every 5 or 6 students and so they have the ability to actually save a great deal of money and dramatically increase the quality of their education and the reason for that is that we focus on the Student Experience and the education and intellectual development of the student and where it matters whereas if you look at the Traditional University where they spend money is actually nothing to do with the education chairman speaking about athletics. I heard you say that it may cost around town 1000. 00 per year per student regardless of whether he or she participates in college for our what is known a Division One School and you just it dull together and one of the ways youve been able to substantially cut they titian fees but. Wanted be a shame to see. Teams like the penn quakers disappear i mean like. You know College Sport is aid is it is a good attraction i mean it das Public Service and other way and i think its a lovely thing and universities if they think its important should price that a la carte right and so if they believe that it is a good use of student donation or student tuition dollars they should spell it out and make it optional and then we will see how much the student body really cares about penicuik or basketball anything that much i mean i bet you didnt go to games where you are studying Predictive Value predict that it would not be a high take rate i think if you actually go to students and say you could save 10000. 00 and not have any professional d or profession or summer Adventure Sports programs or pay 10000 hours to have them the likelihood that students would actually pay that 10000 dollars will be low there will be some but eventually it will actually change the nature of those sports ill give you an example at Duke University the salary of the head coach of the Basketball Program costs the university 7100. 00 per student just for his salary now do basketball generates a lot of income and generates a lot of its like marketing to Marketing Tool mission for the university but what happens if that were all a cart. What happens if all of a sudden no university would really be able to pay millions and millions of dollars for well they maybe if they you know they should just ask their students whether they didnt support to pay because at the end of the day its the student. Now another way of cutting fees is not offering professors tenure and not subsidizing research with. The way its done in the United States and australia and i know you would say that that model doesnt exist anywhere in the world but i think its also fair to say that the amount of research thats don in the United States is unparalleled no other. And its very good yeah absolutely so if dad model of financial uncoupling a free search and fees is scaled dont you think that they would lose Quality Research well i think its a its a problem that the United States is going to have to face and its already started to suffer from that why do we have the situation we have now. At the time when the United States realized the value of Research Funding the government which was at the height of the cold war the government funded universities to do research and they were happy to do that there was a public conversation about the value of basic research and what it leads to in the future and then beginning towards the latter part of the 20th century when that conversation no longer was so imperative all the sudden the conversation shifted and it shifted to say oh we need to provide access to students and so government funding started to rather than being concentrated at the best Research Universities started to distribute distributed to focus on universities that educate students but the Research Universities still needed that money so what did they do this. Well ok give us more money to educate students but will just take that money and use it for research thats not good for the country and eventually it will break because at some point the government will wake up and say why are we subsidizing 100000. 00 per year cost of education this makes no sense i think youre giving some ideas to the current president of the United States hopefully he will not why is this program just now athletes im sure many of your colleagues at traditionally universities hoping that brilliant idea will not come to his mind even though he would be very prone to act probably but we have to anticipate that Something Like this can occur and so as a sector we have to have a public august conversation about how critical basic research is and weve got to get in the United States a bipartisan consensus on that but frankly for the rest of the world there are good models that have done this i mean you look at British ResearchBritish Research is really fantastic and it is very clearly decoupled in fact in some ways Research Funding sometimes subsidize undergraduate education and thats a better model for for funding now speaking about the rest of the world correct me if im wrong but around 80 percent of your student body are International Students reaches i think roughly the inverse of the figure at traditional american schools aim for what is it like tan 15 percent of International Students why does it live to you have the United Nations in your in your classroom isnt it hugh much diversity for your American Students know and its its really fascinating 1st i dont you know when i go to china or russia or anywhere else i always get asked how are your Chinese Students how are your russian students you know this question is how much. I cannot tell you because i there is no characteristic. That is unifying for any group of students based on the country they come from it turns out that the world is the 1st and its not the 1st simply because 2 of your culture where you come from it is diverse because of who you are and what your passions and pursuits are and so we have students from the same country one of them wants to be a banker one of them wants to be an artist their relation to others who want to be bankers or artists are much closer than their relation to their own country men or women and. To to not have a university that has labels and that why do we have such International Student not because weve gone out and said oh well lets make a quota lets only let 15 percent of our students be from United States not at all we admit students based on their qualifications and that is it and we treat applicants from all over the world exactly the same and i think this new interpretation of diversity is to simply tainted by your model when students change location pretty much every semester you have facilities in berlin and then born osiris in so all and high that are bought india a couple of other locations around the world but not moscow why not how can you. Discover the World Without experiencing russia its very difficult so we only have 7 cities right sam cisco the city in london in taipei as well but there are giant chunks of the world that we simply cant cover were not in Eastern Europe or in moscow or not in central asia i know not in africa. So there are a lot of the world that we simply cannot cover the entire world when we decided where we would go this was about 7 years ago we have to look at a range of criteria cities out to be very globally prominent we try to have them as more affordable than not we have to have them be free and open access to the internet Academic Freedom etc they have to be compact enough where students can actually get around and navigate and they have to have a little certain regulatory facility for us to be able to operate in the world of 2012 must mean they can make the cut on those criteria the future of the age sure so one example is when we initially thought of where we would go istanbul was one of the cities we were considering but as we were thinking about it and as we actually selected and said oh yes lets go to istanbul. There was a point where turkey there was a suspension of Academic Freedom academics were jailed we couldnt go any more and so istanbul became taipei. And so we have a dynamic as them of what we do even though now that we have logged and actually been in these cities we dont plan to change if you had only the students but also the c. D. s at the college that need to make your cut now the final question you have kids did you would it be an absolute for you as a father if your daughters failed to qualify for minerva or even they prefer that the Old School School on their own accord well certainly the latter would be would be. Sad for me as far as qualifying for minerva qualified from a nervous hard were the most Selective University in the United States by far im sure brett keogh also invested in the year in your daughters age. But a supporter of it isnt for everybody the minerva model of education is for everyone by the time my daughters were 8 and 3 soon to be 4 will be going to university my hope is that they dont have one minerva to choose from my hope is that minerva will be coming here to moscow not so that 150 students will be able to show up here once a year but that there will be new universities or existing universities that will adopt the minerva system to educate their students and by the time my daughters have to university to choose from my hope is that theyll have 100 different minerva curricula to choose from and to find a curriculum that is right for them. Lets keep our fingers crossed for that thank you very much for coming over and do you consider moscow is your possible destination im sure your students will learn a lot and certainly they will get a big cultural shock and this contributes. Which is good if your education i guess. You can keep this conversation going in our social media pages for me and to syria again next sunday on worlds apart. By. Just one magic bullet you could actually come up with some of the top of these baby bonds talking about ways we get access to capital and capitalism couples important so we could actually have programs that actually help folks who want to do that but when you give everybody a 1000. 00 im a poor person im going to consume that and these are rich youre going to invest that equity the wealth the spirit is going to grow because youre not using your money to consume youre literally buying more crazy things and then my landlord knowing that i got a 1000. 00 and you just go raise my rent so then you get your inflation going on and there happens. To be a peace talks involving the warring sides and World Leaders have ramped up in berlin yielding a new mechanism for ensuring hostilities dont resume. Under the stories that shapes the week that wallace russia gets a new Prime Minister president who said opposes giving hanumans greater power as enemies the west sees as a power grab. But then confirms donald trump flexing tariffs on column a kiss if it didnt distances. From the Iran Nuclear Deal germany the u. K. And france this week triggered a motion that could lead to begin agreements collapse. Illusory