04-01-25 Interview - Our Futurist Thomas Frey

Thomas Fry.

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.

Yeah, great to see you, Mandy uh let's talk.

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.

And when I sort.

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.

He was intrigued.

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.

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, and then people would retain it.

And I thought, I.

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. I thought, Wow, everybody'd want to take that course because it'd be so simple. And then I started thinking about

That that seemed like seemed like a lot of fun.

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?

What would that look like?

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.

Well, I agree with.

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 even though this is an incredibly important topic that we should be discussing.

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 thought economics is one that had the potential to do

Runners up too.

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.

And maybe at the end of seven or.

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.

We can't even imagine what's going to come out of the back end.

So this is a process to get to an unknown outcome, and I find that just fascinating.

Why are you even looking at shortening the time of a sixteen week course to two hours?

What is the benefit here?

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 we're paying for all the time we spend in class, and we're paying so much.

We're paying very dearly for everything we learned.

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.

It may change it, it may not change it.

After three years, it might throw into toll and say this is totally broke, let's not do this anymore.

But I think it's worth trying.

One of the.

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.

We've now shifted the focus.

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.

But we could totally use.

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.

Well, that's that's certainly one approach.

There's lots of I think this opens the doors for lots of possibilities.

And.

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.

Oh yeah, for sure. But I'm already when I read this.

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.

It's in there.

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

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 it could probably be much more than a million dollars each year. It could probably even be five or ten

Running it through something like this.

I just when you heard the word calculus on.

World history look like?

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 already started making a board game in my mind about

This is a great way to do this. So I think stuff like this.

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.

So I love this idea. I we just got to make it happen.

Maybe we should write a grant proposal, Thomas, do you know how to do that?

Because I don't know how to do it.

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.

Yeah.

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.

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.

So Mandy, this texter said, it already exists.

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 kind of glossing over is that out of all of the classes that we take and that we teach our

It really does. So this is a great place to start.

Yeah, I mean there's lots of other games.

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

Of learning these subject matters.

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.

The sad fact of the matter is that when I went to college, which was maybe a little bit after you, but not much.

Maybe at the same time that weed them out tech.

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 finish and get their degree. They're just going to end

Thomas, let me ask you this. I'm going to ask if.

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, 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?

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 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

I would take it one step further.

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 distorted in incredible ways.

So my concern would.

Be a we would lose the ability to even interact with our history.

Right.

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.

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 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

Now.

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.

Out the window.

But I'm somethingly going to have this massive information that we have stored out there, that we could draw in any moment.

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 this prize. So this is going to be the Thomas

Thomas. Good to see you again, my friend.

Hey up to work with you on that.

Thanks, I love the idea. I'll see you next month. Thomas,