 Boom, what's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sakyan, really excited to still be on site in Boston in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We are still at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and we are going to be talking about all things open learning, all things RFID, sensors, automation, the future of work, digital learning, university design, so much. We have the honor of sitting down with Dr. Sanjay Sarma. Thank you so much for coming on to the show. It's a great pleasure. It's a great pleasure. We appreciate it. A huge shout out to Woody Flowers for introducing us. Oh, he's such a wonderful man. A mentor. Yes, and mentor. Totally, totally big shout out to First Robotics. And Sanjay, your background is so interesting. Okay, so if you're Fred and Daniel Fort Flowers, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, he co-founded the Auto ID Center at MIT. He's the Vice President for Open Learning at MIT, which includes the Office of Digital Learning, MIT's Integrated Learning Initiative, and the Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab. He's on the board of EdX as well, which is a nonprofit company that delivers MOOC founded by Harvard and MIT. So, holy cow, the amount of being at the cutting edge of how people learn in the world is just, you're right there. You're right there. And you guys here, you have a 150-person open learning floor here. And how are we going to educate the next generation of kids into our world? This is what a lot of what you guys do as well as at the adult level. So, let's start with, you know, who you are and how you got here. Because I think a lot of times we don't really see the full big history picture of things. And you are right there on the Civilizational Evolution Scale of things. Because the way you speak, you speak about these architectures changing, that we had transit shifts with cars and planes and that helped with moving around. We have the internet and cell phone shift. We have this artificial intelligence shift that are coming. And I love that big history perspective. So, tell us about how you got that awareness shift for yourself and got interested in doing this. Doing the open learning stuff? Yeah. Yeah, you know, I'm an engineer. And what engineers do, we see an opportunity. We exploit it, right? And so that's what I did with RFID and other fields, Internet of Things, etc. But as a student, I always felt that my experience was very passive and I learned when I was active. I learned when I was designing things. So, if I was designing something and I needed thermodynamics, I really understood thermodynamics. But if I was sitting here passively and someone is telling me about thermodynamics, the absorption wasn't great. The mind is active. You learn. The mind is just listening mode. It fills up very quickly, you know? So, I had been my bonnet about it. And coming to MIT was great because now I was in the invention mode, research mode. And, you know, this is really great for me. So, when the opportunity came to help MIT in the setting up of a new university in Singapore, I got involved with that. And our former dean became the president. I led the MIT team. And I really got into learning that way. And then I began to see the opportunities. And that was, you know, in the 2010 timeframe. And, you know, MIT started thinking about online education using things like MITX, LX, etc., etc. And I got bitten by the bug. And there I was, you know? So, the president asked me to do take over the whole digital enterprise from a learning perspective. There was no way I could not do it. I love how you illustrate the difference between reading and learning from a textbook versus this necessity or curiosity. There's a drive to learn experientially. There's a big difference in the way that we retain and actually get our awareness expanded through that. And also, I'm glad that MIT has taken this major initiative in digital learning across the world now and that you're spearheading that. Now, how does this transition? Because you also have authored a book about this as well. We're kind of transitioning in a way of seeing things that is no longer trying to maybe do some barely incremental changes, fit a product into something that customers want. We're talking like a major shift in the way that we rebuild technologies and products and services that fill the way that civilization is sort of evolving. Tell us a bit about your framework for seeing the world in that way. Yeah, I'm writing a book. I haven't finished it yet with a colleague. But the thing about, you know, there's a very magical time in the history of humankind. Technology has become so powerful that the imagination is the limit. It's not the technology anymore, right? And if you look at, for example, something like a cell phone, a smart phone, I remember about 30 years ago, my wife and I, then girlfriend, we were trying to meet somewhere. And then we had to say, I will meet you at Trafalgar Square at 10 a.m. in London on that date. And we both had to show up. That was the only way you could meet. And if you didn't show up, there was no recourse. And now we take it for granted that we have smartphones and everything's changed. Our payments have changed. The way we order a taxi has changed. Everything's changed. So this is true of a number of things around us. It's crept up on us, but it's transformational. And education has to go through that. And sometimes I will make the argument, it is easier to make a bigger change than a smaller change. Interesting. Right? So it's almost easier to just rethink it and do it change completely than to go halfway because you're neither here nor there. You want to be beyond the tipping point. Kind of like as we see technology sometimes being leapfrogged. Yeah. Like we don't need a home phone network anymore in developing place. That's right. We jump straight to the cell phone. I grew up in India and it was very hard to get a land telephone line. And now everyone has a smartphone. A lot of people never had a land line. Their families never had a land line. And they went straight to smartphones. So it's almost like you need to sort of see a vision and just go there. And not even care about the waypoints in between. So what's happening is that because of all the tectonic changes in our society, right? The gig economy. It's people freelancing, people working remotely, people working multiple jobs, people having to transition from one job to another. Technologies half-lives have changed. If you know technology today, for example the technology you're using to shoot the video here, in three years it's going to be completely different. We have to constantly learn. Learning isn't something you do for four years and you're out. You are going to be in a learning state of mind forever. It's like you're in a treadmill. The treadmill is moving backwards. So if you're not running forward, you're going to fall off. That means, and that can't happen on campus. It's going to happen online. It's going to happen with video and audio and podcasts and maybe virtual reality. Who knows? But that's how it's going to happen. As well as embrace the future. Go there and have the rest follow. This way of seeing lifelong learning being on a treadmill is so good because we see so often that the more that we invest our time into the cutting edge of knowledge over and over again, we have the conscious choice every day when we come home. Am I going to watch something that's just going to distract me or am I going to watch one of the world leaders in their field give a talk? Yup. And if we continue down that path, we keep educating ourselves at the edge and that just takes us to a newer level of abstract thinking and creativity around where things are going and how we can stay at the front. I like that a lot. Now, I really appreciate your big picture understanding of the evolution of technology in the world. Okay, so now tell us about the radio frequency identification, RFID. This is super interesting how you had a way of pioneering that technology and now that's exploding into IoT. So yeah, tell us about this. You know, about 20 years ago a group of us, me, a gentleman by the name of Kevin Ashton, David Brock, there were a whole bunch of us, we started this thing called the Auto ID Center and we had the crazy idea of replacing barcodes effectively with radio frequency ID. You know, you've all seen RFID. RFID used it at Tollpass, there's RFID. And the problem is RFID tags at that time used to cost like 20, and still do. If you buy Tollpass, you know, those plastic little rectangular boxes, they cost about 20 bucks, 15 bucks, I mean that. But if we rethought it fundamentally, they would become a few cents. And that's what's come to pass now. And so to do that, we had to pull together a technology roadmap, rethink the way the technology worked. We had to anticipate the cloud, the cloud didn't exist then. So we had to anticipate the cloud. I would point at the sky, and I didn't have the word clouds, I'd say the sky, the internet, you know. And we put together a bunch of protocols with about 100 really amazing companies, like Walmart, and J&J, and Tesco, and Procter & Gamble, and tiny companies. Some of them didn't survive, but many of them are successful startups and successful big companies now, right? And we put together a movement. It became a new standard. There were prototypes, there were industry adoption sort of efforts, pilots, and now, you know, if you go to a lot of tailors, a Macy's, a Decathlon, a Zara, you want to see these RFID tags being used everywhere. It's called the electronic product code. And what it did was very simple. The fact of the matter is the supply changed, you know, whether it's manufacturing in a faraway country or sales in a retail store. Today, or before RFID, you had very little idea of the inventory. Where are those clothes? Do I have the right size of jeans out there? And suddenly now, those things could tell you. And now your inventory is automated. And that changes the effectiveness of the supply chain. And that's how it took off. And there were probably about 10 billion RFID tags last year. Whoa. How did you guys get the cost down from 15 or 20 bucks, though, a couple of cents? It's very interesting. This is, again, one of those tipping point things. RFID was caught in a sort of a paradigm lock, which was they were doing too much. So RFID tags, they would write data into the tag. And so you needed memory. Right. If you needed to write data into the tag, it needed more power. Regular RFID, the stuff we do is passive. It has no battery. So it actually scavengers power from the reader. Right? But then if it needs a lot of power, you can't go very far. So what we said was, listen, the internet's taken off. So just put a unique number on the tag, and put all the data on the network. And people thought we were crazy, because they didn't believe the internet was taking off. 1998, people didn't even know what the internet was. But we made that bet. And then we just focused on simplifying the tag and the protocol, making the protocol really efficient. Again, there were lots of companies involved, lots of amazing capital from amazing people from all these companies. And of course, the MIT crew, University of Cambridge in the UK, University of Adelaide, Fudan University in China, and ETH Zurich. So the universities we brought into the loop. And we all worked together. And once we went to this new world, where the data would be in the sky, because I couldn't say cloud, because I didn't know the word didn't exist. And you could make the tags cheap, very tiny, and low power, it just took off. And then once the paradigm set in, the industry took off. Interesting. And they could be that small because they would scavenge the power from the source that's aiming to scan it. Well, the tag consists of a chip and an antenna. The antenna is bigger, but you can put it in the packaging, for example. The chip itself is about one-third of a millimeter. And because the chip is small, it needs very little power. It turns out, not to get too technical, that if you put a lot of functionality on the chip and the chip becomes big, it needs more power. So 10 billion RFI's at least. And it's everywhere in the supply chain because it makes inventory so much easier. And this is actually a big deal with the way that we're advancing blockchain protocols as we care a lot about making sure that it's a trust-based thing as well. We want to make sure that the right item is being processed and we're following it along the track. But also, by the way, Tollpass is those irritating, big rectangular plastic boxes. They're going to be replaced with our standard cell. Okay, now the AutoID Lab is exploding into IoT as well. So teach us about what's going on with the AutoID Lab size, what kind of composition of engineer scientists are there and then what's going on with IoT transition. So the term IoT was actually coined by one of the co-founders of the AutoID Lab, Kevin Ashton. And what he said was, you know, what we were all saying at that time was everything's going to be connected to the Internet. I would point at a clock and say someday that'll be connected to the Internet. People thought that was crazy. But that's basically what my Apple Watch is, right? And so that term, IoT, which Kevin came up with, really captured the zeitgeist. In 2005 timeframe, it started taking off. We wrote a paper in the late 1990s, early 2000s called the Networked Physical World which sort of talked about it. Now, IoT is very interesting. So why do we connect things to the Internet? Because you can do amazing things with it. So for example, if I have a camera outside my home and my lock is on, is connected to the Internet, I can see if the nanny has shown up and unlock the door if she couldn't get in. Right? So if my car is connected to the Internet, which it is, I can take delivery of the package into the trunk. Very interesting. So I mean, it's game changing. If I have a factory in some faraway country and I want to see what the quality situation is, I can monitor it remotely. Interesting. If there's a fire in the building, I can remotely activate the fire fighting equipment in a way that optimizes the fire fighting as opposed to today, which is, you know, it's not really planned, right? I can have robots going. So it is a game changer. So what we do in the AutoID lab is we do, of course, RFID research, but we have, it's an amazing group of PhDs, PhD students, master students, undergrads and a whole bunch of companies. It's about 15 people in the lab and, you know, 50 people that we work with, maybe 100, you know, they're on the world. And then that's just my lab, AutoID lab. But then there's another AutoID lab from the AutoID center days in Etihad, Etihad Zurich, there's one in East New Cambridge, and so on. So if you add it all up, it's probably about 100 people. Nice. And together, we take on these big problems of what is the future of the Internet of Things? How do autonomous cars, how will they talk to stop signs? Right? That's IoT. And questions emerge like security. What if someone hacks the... It's likely that we'll have an IoT device inside the stop sign rather than rely on the camera of the vehicle. Look how crazy it is, right? It's a higher efficacy to have the IoT sensor. And it's safer. Look, think about it. In the 21st century, I have a self-driving Tesla. I come up to a traffic light. The Tesla looks at three circles and says, one of them I think is red, I want to stop. Is that how it should work? Or should the light say, dude, you better stop because I'm red right now? Yes. And even worse, you can spoof the light. So there's a cybersecurity problem. You need to put cryptography in. So IoT is going to pervade everything with you. Everything. Whoa. Yeah, you're thinking about these things well in advance. That's so interesting. So IoT inside every stop light and also a cryptographic secure signal that occurs between them to prevent cyber attacks. Very interesting. It's inevitable. We have to do this. And this is what my lab does. Among other things. And then in order to power all of these, how are we going to have everything in a factory, all the IoT sensors in a factory, all the IoT sensors on the traffic lights, et cetera? How does that all get powered? Is that part of the 5G network? That's a great question. The two aspects to it. One is how do you network and that's where 5G comes in. Okay. And one of the aspects of 5G is low latency. Why? Because if I'm coming up to a traffic sign I need to know instantaneously I need to stop. It can sort of have the hourglass and I'm waiting because the car is going to drive through the traffic crossing, right? So that's why latency is very important. 5G will play a big part. But the other is where does the actual power come from? And that'll be a combination. If you can wire it, it'll be wired. But for backup and for places that you can't wire it'll be scavenging. It'll be RF scavenging. It'll be solar scavenging. There might be a little battery, but to store only between scavenging events. So one of the things we're working on, for example, is building photovoltaics and IoT. Some people are working on vibrational scavenging. Others are working on RF scavenging. So this essentially would work as a massive network of like the way that trees share resources all underground is that if the ground battery if the normal grounded battery fails then you can rely on a photovoltaic and if that one has a lot of energy and that one doesn't they can potentially pass along that energy. Wow. We will end up having to spend more time talking about auto ID because this is a cool industry. But I do want to also of course get to all of the cool open learning stuff that's going on. So let's jump over to that. This was actually really cool walking down the hall and seeing that MIT open courseware which was started in 2001. 18 years of it. You know 1.8 million subscribers. You have 2,500 courses. This is all free and this isn't like MITx edX which has deadlines and what not. This is totally open flows of watching videos, looking at PDF notes etc. So teach us about MIT open courseware MITx and how that's like edX and then yeah teach us about that. So you know I don't realize that the open source movement for software MIT is probably one of the places that started and it's an ethos at MIT which is let's when we do stuff let's make it open. Let's give knowledge away for free. You're raising the baseline around the world for access to these really awareness expanding fields of just access to them. Yeah, it's our mission to give knowledge and to give access. There's ours too which is none of our content has ever pay walled. That's amazing. That's the best way to do it and find other ways to. And you're monetizing other ways right? I mean you don't have to monetize everything. Just give stuff for free the title lifts everyone and it's vice versa. We learn from others too. It's not like MIT is giving knowledge to the world. The world gives us knowledge. We learn from other universities. We learn from unknown inventors in a part of the world we never thought of doing so creatively. It's a very mutual thing. Humanity is a beautiful thing. So in 2001 MIT started looking at online education for the first time and we said you know what? We aren't going to make money with this. We will take our content professor by professor course by course with their permission and we'll just make it available to the world for free. And that was called MIT OpenCourseWare. And so now they're actually way more than 2,500 courses. Many have been archived. But 2,500 courses today you can go to ocw.mit.edu and you can read about quantum mechanics or linguistics or mathematics or cryptography or chemistry. It's a dazzling cabinet of beautiful curiosities in the space of knowledge. And I'm so proud of MIT for having done that. So that was almost 20 years ago. This reminds me so much of our content as our content also features these diverse leaders across fields and then it gives you this multidisciplinary lens of seeing the world if you go and take these different courses, watch these different videos. Open learning. I think it's sort of a funny thing. I was actually on OpenCourseWare this morning. I was trying to help my daughter out with something and I had searched. And of course I went to OpenCourseWare. And once you get in, it's like you're stuck. It's beautiful. I read about this. I read about that. I moved on to something in math and then I did some physics and I forgot about what I was going to help my daughter with. So it's great stuff. So that's how OpenCourseWare is created. The OpenCourseWare is somewhat more static. It started getting dynamic. But in 2011, December, MIT announced to the world that it would launch MOOCs. And so that was the creation of this thing called MITx and edX. I'll explain the two. Effectively what happened was in spring of 2012, Anant Agarwal a professor at MIT a really amazing guy he launched MIT's first MOOC. It was one of the first MOOCs in the world actually after a couple of other universities at the Baskar University and there was a MOOC from Stanford. We did the MOOCs all at the same time and we ended up with well in excess of 100,000 students in the MOOC. And with the dig. Whoa. That many people at the same time. Taking the course, yeah. And so we knew we were on to something. So MIT and Harvard created a new nonprofit entity called edX. edX is a edX.org. It's a destination. As you know true to form edX is open source. All the edX software is open source. It's been downloaded and used thousands of times by people around the world who run their own sort of MOOC-y things. And edX now has more than 130 universities from around the world Caltech, Dartmouth, it's McGill, I think the University of Toronto, IIT and India, Chingwa and China. So this really amazing set of universities, Etihad and my friends Etihad in Switzerland, Etihad, Zurich they're all members and each of them has a production unit. So MIT has MITX, Harvard has HarvardX, Caltech has CaltechX they produce courses. And edX is the platform on which these courses run. So students go to edX.org and they can see this. All the courses run by all the universities and they can take them. And more recently, edX launched, should be launched and edX took over something called the MicroMasters which is a new credential that we've invented and most recently, edX also now offers full masters. Full masters digitally free. So the edX model is not free, it's freemium. So in other words, you can get the content for free you pay for the certificates and the content if you're doing assessments and you're getting a certificate, you pay for it. But if you just want to watch the videos, that's free. Interesting. Just democratizing our ability to learn and then also even to get a certificate a granted certificate. And the certificates, we're talking about tens of dollars, 100 dollars, 200 dollars, something like that. It's not like... It's very cheap. As you're speaking about the complexity from 2012 until now these last seven years of putting together the different you listed like India and China and Switzerland and then of course Harvard and MIT and Dartmouth and stuff how they are all able to how you guys all work together in creating your own mooks that go up into the edX this seems like a very complex endeavor as in like, is Harvard HarvardX's economics course slightly different than MITX's economics course. How does it work? The best way to build complex things is to build simple things. So we don't talk to each other. We produce an economics course, Harvard produces economics course. Our faculty are different, their perspectives are different. So the courses have different DNA, just like people are similar but different, we're similar in many respects. In many respects it's fine and students sometimes will take I've had students take the same course from two different universities and say they're different in the following ways and I learned something then, I learned something here different perspectives, it's great, it's diversity. That's also a good way to potentially figure out what you can learn, the different teaching styles at different parts of the world, especially if you go across the world to the western half versus eastern hemisphere and just see how it's differently being taught. As we're talking about the complexity I want you to teach us about this. There's this big air traffic control, big bulletin in the open learnings floor here and you have a list of courses that you are updating or you're publishing out into the MITx part of edX and it must be obviously very difficult to be able to you're trying to parse the world's knowledge to find what can best fit into your MITx course and then you're trying to parse again to fit into this other subject matter and then actually develop out what the best educational curriculum would be in that field so tell us about how crazy this is Yeah, it's a lot of fun. It's a little bit it's something between wonderfully chaotic and somewhat organized right? So what we do is we have the Dean for Digital Learning who Professor Krishnan Rajakopal, former chair of the faculty his role within our organization is to go to faculty and say why don't you propose courses? And they propose courses and then the courses come to, we have a review panel and we say we'll produce this course we'll produce that course in 10, 15 and then we produce them. Now what we do with that is you may get at the same time a linguistics course being produced an engineering course on IOT or something and a course on drama It's fascinating so for us it's an extraordinary learning experience and we meet these amazing colleagues talking about their stuff So that's the sort of the organized chaos part but then the the more organized part comes because sometimes departments will come to us and say I want to produce a micro masters in for example economics or in manufacturing and then you get a sequence of courses on the same topic but they're sort of more progressive but to date we've produced so many courses that there are lots of nice patterns you can take a pathway in physics and take the four key courses in physics or in math or in philosophy So it's sort of like look at this way imagine if I had a jigsaw puzzle of the Mona Lisa right? and I randomly go and put the picture of the pieces up initially I'd be like well what is that if I see the Mona Lisa smile the rest of the picture is in there but I get what this is so that's what's happened we're building an online curriculum one jigsaw piece at a time and this is also that you're a non-profit are the other Harvard X and across the world these X's that go into the edX they're all non-profits? Well the way I'll say it to you is edX for sure is a non-profit so edX is also an open source or an open source funnily all the great universities in the world most of them I think pretty much all of them are non-profits MIT is a non-profit Harvard is a non-profit you're all non-profits so this is a non-profit there's a great non-profit university from around the world working with a non-profit platform called edX and as long as you have an internet connection boom go and start learning and the difference with the Coursera type Coursera is for profit Khan Academy is doing more high school level work now and I should say we're very proud of Sal Khan because he has a couple degrees from MIT he's done his extraordinary my 16 year old learned a lot of stuff from Sal Khan so that's high school he does stuff that sort of bumps into college AP things like that but he's really more school oriented man the baseline is going up it's so cool to have the digital learning be free online it's enabling the degrees of freedom for people to explore what they find most interesting more easily at a high level from around the world or you could say the freedom of degrees the freedom of degrees too that's good yeah okay teach us about the Jamil World Education Lab so we at MIT spend a lot of time thinking about the future of education at MIT one of the things we do with our MIT excourses is we deploy them on campus we flip the classroom professors then have the opportunity to spend more time coaching their students rather than one way lecturing because the lecture is now online and the student might have watched the lecture on the subway before coming into class or the previous evening and so the actual classroom becomes much more active and fun and engaging and much more one on one so that's why we do this and MIT is pretty cutting edge our faculty are very forward looking so we are transforming ourselves very well so there's been a great deal of interest from universities around the world but also even companies governments like national governments and also schools like high schools elementary schools middle schools saying how do we upgrade ourselves to the new pedagogy that our students want and their parents want because they are taking courses on Khan Academy and they don't want to come sit in a class passively while the teacher just talks how do we change it so due to a generous gift from one of our wonderful alumni Mohammad Jamil we founded the Jamil World Education Lab and the J-WELL as we call it and what it is an academy for academies that's the way to think about it a university for universities and so what we have is a consortium of folks interested in pre-kindergarten through grade 12 education the pre-kindergarten is important by the way because kids start learning a lot the moment they're born and you've got to even forget that out and then higher ed which is colleges and then also workforce education which is an entire country is grappling with how will people be employed in the 21st century how will they learn and as I said earlier all the time and that's going to be online so how do you rethink workforce education the Germans have an apprenticeship system yes the Swiss have an apprenticeship system how do they fit into all this so to examine all that we have this collaborative it's got three consortia in the pre-kindergarten through grade 12 higher ed and workforce training and that's what the Jamil World Education Lab is or as we call it affectionately J-WELL yeah having the discussions about what is the best practices across all the different ages like you were describing with apprenticeships all that stuff because mentoring is one of the best ways to be able to learn that one on one absolutely that's how we we're evolved to learn by mentorship because we were all children and many of us were parents it's a wonderful form of mentorship and even what we can't get from our family and relatives we can get from mentors in industry and other places so what about the MIT integrated learning initiative we have spent a lot of time thinking about learning imagine, think of it this way imagine medicine before we had x-rays and biochemistry and genetics right before World War even before World War II we didn't have antibiotics I forgot when Fleming discovered penicillin but it was I think around World War II time a little bit after after yeah so now what we have is a very fascinating thing that we're understanding how the brain learns we're understanding where dyslexia and ADHD come from we're understanding how we forget and how important forgetting is to learning neuroplasticity throughout that's right and this is leading to other breakthroughs not just in learning it's leading to things like Alzheimer's epilepsy etc Parkinson's disease neurodegeneration and MIT has an extraordinary bunch of brain scientists literally brain scientists we're also learning about the economics of learning so all these emotional debates today in politics about are charter schools good or not how about we burden the emotional debates with actual facts and data and there's amazing amounts of data there's a lottery system work what's the best transportation type system how should you incentivize teachers so it's a very MIT approach and so the MIT integrated learning initiative uses science numbers, data economic thinking, economics econometrics to figure out how to reinvent education based on these fundamental discoveries about how we learn interesting and what have been some of the key analyses of neuroscience as well as economics what have they taught us so far what they've taught us is surprisingly human I was worried that when the discoveries would be sort of cold clinical but actually the discoveries have been very human one of them is that humans learning patterns makes sense just as children we learn from adults even adults learn the same way by the way so coaching, interpersonal coaching works very well we know for example about the importance of things like forgetting we know for example how dyslexia occurs we now understand ADHD we understand how that happens we know how to detect dyslexia we know for example the importance of working with your hands it's fascinating if you do something in your hands you'll learn it better we know the importance of curiosity there's research that shows we learn better if we're curious so if the teacher did nothing more than make the student curious nothing more they would do a lot better sometimes than what we do today they can light their own fire under their own butt to keep learning curiosity releases dopamine neuro-transmitter just as hunger releases saliva curiosity releases dopamine once that circuit is activated you learn better so it's actually fascinating and this is very human any parent knows some of the stuff and it's sort of confirming that we also know for example that you can only learn for about 5-10 minutes before your brain sort of fills up and then you should do it, use it but all our lectures are in R okay so it's a kind of piece of learning and then hands on and then maybe piece of learning and then actually hands on or test the person test the person yet to retain to reduce the retention that's why all edX courses most edX courses we try and make our videos MITX courses 10 minutes hmm so interesting because these interviews are long form so it could be potentially interesting to occasionally pause or take notes while you're going through it and then try and review what you're learning throughout the conversations have conversations with other people about what you've been learning that's why we talk about the community below in the comment section and on the public telegram that we have going by the way one of the advantages of online is you can pause you can pause the live lecture yeah that's right imagine if you just pause the live lecture you can do that yes yes this is kind of what this is, it's pausing you as we need that's right when you're watching the content totally it was also just I was myself starting to salivate at the at the beauty of of what it feels like to see that curiosity in new minds into the world that's you can see it in the eyes of the curious ones I hope you see that at MIT in MIT I feel like you can smell and feel the curiosity totally it sort of sizzles with curiosity yeah this Cambridge area it's like the East Coast Silicon Valley definitely how it feels like do you think of Silicon Valley as the West Coast Cambridge? I'm a Berkeley graduate so I can say that I love it that's good I'll go back and tell them what I give back is that we're the West Coast Cambridge that's how yeah okay tell us about what you're seeing because you mentioned this earlier it's important to address this automations per meeting into every single industry artificial intelligences internet of things is so what's going on with the future of human capital what is it important for us to pass along to children that are being born into the world now where should they be focused their attention where should parents be helping kids focus their attention on? you know the old song whatever you can do I can do better my version of well known nerdy version of that whatever you can do I can do better okay so I think what we need to do is teach our children to become learning machines because they will learn for the rest of their lives I hope we're already teaching our children for example to exercise and stay fit for the rest of their lives don't smoke right? a similar habit is equivalent to exercises learn you will always learn you will always need to learn it's fun keeps you engaged it'll delay old age but more importantly you will be alive and employed and more prosperous if you learn all the time if there's one thing I would say it is teach them the importance of learning and how to learn that's really profound and you're so right and if we dig at different areas around the edge of knowledge and get those multidisciplinary connections around how the world works to stay employed longer people will want to surround themselves with us because they'll see the way that we meta we have an abstract perspective on how things work in the world and also if we can dig into the nuance of how things work as well but learning defined broadly which is not just listening but doing doing so I mean it's everything you have to have a growth mindset where you're learning, you're improving you're growing in some direction but you're constantly at it I love it, I love it that's such a good piece of advice and then and then give me give me your one principle for that lifelong learning what is that as people know okay I should go towards healthier eating, I should go away from smoking I should go towards exercising what would be the go towards learning where would you do it? you remember the DOS at the most interesting man in the world right, remember that guy? he says stay curious my friend it's a very profound line stay curious my friend if we can kindle curiosity make it a state of being hopefully somewhat directed towards where it'll help you with life but just generally because you can't control it that would be my first and that's the most important principle and again we make that conscious choice not only to seed that curiosity in the youth but then to also help make sure we don't build distractive systems that take them away from curiosity but that rather inspire that curiosity with that sort of a potentially an artificial intelligence that walks helps you oh you're interested in these fields here's all these interesting online courses and hands-on experiences that you can explore in that field for the next couple of months things like you know if you look at our economy one of my MIT students told me we are heading to an economy that is sort of an intentional economy where like clickbait it's trying to attract your attention and then you can read more about some Hollywood couple and their antics so we're if we can point our attention if curiosity will claim our attention but healthy curiosity as opposed to clickbait which is sort of unhealthy curiosity that's going to be our battle it's the same as junk food versus eating good food right this is our battle in the 21st century very cool there's junk food for the attention and then there's healthy food for the attention we need to have intention to point the attention in the right place and they will the systems you know whether it's an ad on a website or some clickbait as I said it's all about grabbing your attention stay curious my friends I love it and do a good job at parsing all of the information that is arising because you can find signal sometimes 80% of what you need to know is in just 20% of what's available that Pareto principle so if you can really find that 20% and not stay away from the other distractive information okay couple quick thoughts on the way out okay what would you say because you've now passed along staying curious to other people having their attention to the healthy attention for themselves for you what has been a core driving principle in your own development I think it's curiosity actually I did not articulate it earlier right I think it's curiosity and you know in this day and age you know we have all sorts of expressions inhibiting curiosity right we tell kids curiosity kill the cat right all good things come to those who wait because we couldn't deal with curiosity the curious kid became an irritant right but now the curious kid is going to win because you know there's a term in the Bible right the meek shall inherit the earth sort of my version of that is the geek shall inherit the world so curious kids I think looking back I was just curious and a lot of my the people I hang out with my friends all curious and I enjoy our shared curiosity you know and it can even be as simple as becoming a good question asker amongst other people when you are passing time is ask thought provoking questions probe reality with thought provoking questions and once you get knowledge integrated and applied connect the dots that's the second thing and the third is applied don't just be a passive consumer do something with it sounds just so good okay this wouldn't be a simulation if we didn't ask you do you think this is a simulation do you think this is a simulation you know sort of have you seen the movie matrix it's based actually on one version of Hindu mythology what strangely enough and our Hindu philosophy actually is this a simulation I don't think we'll ever know what is the Hindu well I mean the basic idea you know it's the Maya I don't know if you're really here right and that question is asked and the matrix picks up on that so is it a simulation I'm not sure it could be but hey I'm enjoying it so this is this is several thousand years then old this is not a very whoa cool it's called Maya they call it Maya which means magic Maya it's because someone has commented before oh that's that's such a recent phenomenon people talking about this that's cool that Maya has been around that long okay and last question that we like to ask our guest is what do you think is the most beautiful thing in the world I think it's human beings it's nature actually and human beings being of course we might be destroying nature but being an outcrop of nature I think that our existence is natural and there's something tremendous about nature and human beings I think that is what it is and if it's a simulation is it keep in it please yeah yeah Sanjay's done the leveling up and maxing out of his open learning attributes his auto ID attributes what's next but yeah yeah keep leveling up everyone keep leveling up Sanjay pleasure thank you so much pleasure thank you and thank you everyone for tuning in we greatly appreciate it we would love to hear from you in the comments below go and check out the links below to edx.org and also to the MIT OpenCourseWare and go and build the future as we talked about stay curious also go and build get your hands on go and play find that healthy food go and find that healthy food and support us so we can continue going to great locations like this and having these powerful conversations and sharing them with you much love to you all go and build the future talk to you soon thank you peace