 Okay. So, you know, it's really kind of exciting to have everybody here. The reason we're having the conference is there's just a palpable sense over the past 12 months that technology is shifting underneath us in a good way that awareness of the opportunities of digital education is growing and it's breaking into new areas, new institutions are embracing some of these ideas. Traditional conservative businessmen and conservative politicians who would have dismissed it or not give it a second thought are now starting to think about their digital education strategy and all these ideas that seemed, they seemed a bit too forward thinking five years ago or 10 years ago, now are looking to be, I wouldn't say mainstream, but they're looking to be mainstream interesting to the innovators in the society. So, if you're an innovator in this culture, you have to be considering digital learning and you have to be considering how you're going to take advantage of digital technologies to change the way that people learn. And at the same time, it's not like there's any institution that seems to have cracked the code. I don't see a state or a federal government or a corporation or an institution that's put together all the right pieces, the educational assets and the brand and the methodology and the vision such that they could go out and educate millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people using digital technology. So, it seems like an ideal time to have a convocation because we're hoping to bring together people and we said this in our conference header. We said, you know, we're looking for people that have the content and people have the financing, people have the distribution, people that are looking for the idea, people have the idea, people want some support for the idea and my agenda for this conference is really just to bring all of you together because I figure someone needs a job and someone needs to hire somebody and somebody needs some money and someone else would like to make an investment in order to get a return and someone's got some content, they'd like to get distributed and someone else probably has a distribution channel they like some content for and maybe someone has a problem they like solved and someone has a solution and they wish somebody would listen to them and that's a good time and a good space to be in the marketplace and that's a time to call a conference. I was saying to some of the employees of the Sailor Foundation just earlier today at the lunch, there's not much point in going to a conference on oil exploration today, you know, at our age because for 50 years everybody's decided what they think about that unless you have billions of dollars to bring to bear on the problem then no one really cares what your opinion is and there are a lot of other mature industries where conferences aren't going to have that much meaningful effect but we're on the cusp of an industry where even one person, even like any two of you that might get together and have a conversation might actually change the world. You might create a company, you might create a new methodology, something might break here, so this seems like an opportunity worth pursuing and it's a reason to have a conference. I'm like you looking forward to seeing what comes out of this but I've got my eyes open and I don't have any other particular agenda. I thought I'd share with you just a few general thoughts, motivations and also expectations and opportunities that I see on the horizon and then I'll give the floor to people that actually have a lot more focus on this and information on this topic than I do. My own background story which you just heard a little bit of is I grew up in a middle class having actually a lower middle class family. My father was enlisted man in the Air Force and I was really the first person in my family probably for many generations actually go to a four-year college and when I was a senior in high school I think my family's net assets were approximately $3,000. We didn't own a house, we probably didn't own a car for you now, right? We had about enough money that after every Christmas vacation which generally consisted of driving a car stopping at a holiday end and trying to get to wherever our relatives were in 16 hours of driving on highway after each one of those vacations I remember seeing my father he would sit and balance the checkbook and shake his head and sometimes snap it my mother because we stopped and ate at a restaurant twice and we were supposed to eat once and then complain about how long it was going to take to pay off the vacation which literally consisted of driving to a national park and walking around and looking at the trees so it's not like there's any extra money rolling around and I know for sure you know I had this aspiration I read all these science fiction novels and MIT was always prominently figured in it as a place where people win if they want to design spaceships and go to Mars and things like that so I thought I wanted to go to MIT but MIT cost enough that I would have burned through my entire family's life savings in about the first four weeks so that wasn't going to happen and it wasn't like it was a student loan burden there was zero chance in my mind that it was going to give me a loan to go to MIT and if anybody did give me a loan sufficient to cover the cost then I knew there was zero chance I would ever ask my father to cosign that loan and if I had got to the point where I was presumptuous enough to ask my father to cosign the loan I don't think he would have done it or a guy that doesn't feel comfortable paying for holiday ends and driving through Gatlinburg, Tennessee on holiday probably isn't going to pay for the most expensive institution in the country at the time and so I wouldn't have gone I might have scraped my way through community college but I wasn't going to go to MIT unless somebody helped me and I got some help and it was actually the Reagan Cold War buildup Ronald Reagan started building the military back in 80 I graduated in 83 it was the height of that buildup the number of ROTC scholarships was probably at an all-time high I basically agreed to indenture myself to the military in return for a free education they paid my tuition they gave me a stipend so it was a lot of money in today's terms they'd be about it'd be $250,000 I suppose and the return was or the agreement was I'd say they're for about four years as an engineer after the second year I decided I want to be a pilot and then the agreement was I'd be a pilot and they're forced for 10 years so I was basically ready to like work off an education for a decade and then as a fluke the Cold War ended and I graduated 87 and there's just one year one year that I know of in the history of ROTC where all the ROTC graduates on full-ride scholarships were offered the chance to leave the military and go into the reserve and none of us served the day of active duty. The year before if you tried to do that you would have got court-martialed and gone to jail we all lived in fear and the year after that they fixed all the staffing and so everybody went into the military just this one year it's like the cracking of a whip all these people basically got pushed through the educational establishment and then we got released so I was released with a pretty good education I mean a better education than any of my family had ever had and a world-class education for that time period and I had no debt and so as a result a two years later when I was a when I was about to start my company and I started I had basically I secured a $250,000 contract with the DuPont Corporation and I went and I was so nervous about finances I barred $5,000 from the bank and later that's because I had zero dollars right so at age 24 you have nothing so I barred $5,000 and you can't bar it against a house I didn't have a house I told them I was going to buy furniture from my apartment and I got an unsecured furniture loan and then I didn't buy the furniture which I I haven't really thought about whether that technically is loan fraud or not loan fraud because I don't it was unsecured I don't think they required that I give them a vehicle ID or some kind of leasehold so I guess it's probably legal but I ended up with I had $5,000 in debt and I remember that was still kind of burdening on me and then but but I I modified myself by thinking you know I got this $250,000 contract I got a hundred thousand cash upfront well at my current rate of cost that'll last me seven years so I said I can go ahead and start this company because I can probably live in a $1,000 a month apartment share with another guy I had milk crates for bookshelves and I'll just scrimp my way through and if I don't like make it in the first year or two years I can squeeze the year three or year four and I got myself all worked up thinking that I could probably make it almost for seven years on that cash before I then had to declare defeat and so you could call me like a risk-taking entrepreneur but the truth of the matter is I got incredibly lucky on two fronts one front I just got a gift from the United States military and even there it was like a flu it wasn't even a gift right if I'd done what everybody else in the military had done I wouldn't have been able to start a company I'd be flying you know for Delta Airlines or something right now and the second gift was I just happened to be in the right place at the right time doing a project a system dynamics computer simulation project and I was a specialist and I just happened to have learned that skill at MIT from guys in the Sun School of Management who would not would not have taught it to me if I was community college student back in Ohio and I couldn't learn any other way so I got just that there's very lucky access to a skill and I showed up with no debt and the combination of having a skill and having no debt you know emboldened me to take a risk and the result is today we have whatever thirty five hundred employees and and it's a real business and we do business everywhere on earth and generate 700 million in revenue and I am by far not the most successful entrepreneur of my generation but but the most important point is that building none of those jobs nothing we do would exist had I either not gotten extremely lucky or been in debt when I graduated from high school or from college and it didn't matter how motivated I was or how smart I was I look at to I look at stories today I just I just read a story on Bloomberg coming here I read it on my I read it on my iPad and the story on Bloomberg was about the exploding cost of medical school debt and they make a note they say Ben Bernanke's son I think is going to graduate med school with four hundred thousand dollars in debt they had a story about another guy he's got a hundred eighty thousand dollars in debt the third year in a medical school he's got fifty thousand more to go they said the interest rate on this stuff is six point eight percent to seven point nine percent on a government student loan they have to pay the interest on the debt for three to seven years of residency by the way the United States government bars money at one point seven percent and so and so we charge people four times the US government rate for education that they that's going to be essential for them to make a contribution you know and I looked at that night and I thought well see what everybody thinks right that ain't right I mean how what's the odds that you're going to go to medical school walk out with three hundred fifty thousand dollars in loans and then start a company right I was afraid to start a company with zero debt right three hundred fifty thousand dollars in debt it's the very the very people right the responsible individuals that the society wants to carry their burden and they and we expect these people to contribute anybody that's got all of those societal virtues with that much debt is not going to quit their job take a massive massive risk and try to go do something and you you would think what if you had a wife or children or a husband or other obligations and you quit your job to go try something random you would say you know that's totally irresponsible and by the way the other dirty secret I'll tell you which everybody probably knows is is is not just as risky as this it's very unlikely to succeed you start a company one in a hundred times as a workout the way you want it and I I went public our company went public in 1998 I rang the opening bell of Nasdaq ten years later and I got beat up a lot the company got beat up a lot we went back and forth up and down but but we we fought away through and ten years later we're like three four times bigger and one of the investment bankers that took us public he looks at me to go so might you've been a public company CEO for ten years what you learn I said I scratched my head and I thought about I said you know it occurs to me there were 100 companies I was competing against a 1998 and I'm the only CEO that still has his job 99% mortality rate and that and generally when you get public people consider that to be like success but the point really is there's a very high mortality rate when it comes to pursuing a new idea in science or in business or in politics and the thing that one of the things that holds us back is is that debt and the inability to fail it's one thing to fail and have to live in an apartment for three years and nothing to fail and not be able to pay for health care for your kids or not be able to pay for you know fill in the blank right there's a lot of things that that are a lot more emotionally trying than than living in a one-bedroom apartment or splitting it with another 20 something guy so I you know I look at that I read that article and I said well that's a data point there's something wrong with that I read another article is posted on the Sailor Foundation blog the California Assembly has taken up a bill to set up a division that would grant you accreditation or credit by simply by taking a test I thought maybe I rooting for California hopefully there'll be a bellwether state but if California actually allowed you to walk into a room take a test and prove that you actually are as smart as a person that spent $250,000 why wouldn't you why wouldn't they right I mean it's good for the state right that's and that's kind of exciting thing I hope that passes and then I read the third thing this is in the articles David Geffen gives a hundred million dollar scholarship to the UCLA medical school to endow 33 scholarships 33 people get to go to school if you have a hundred million dollars and that that's pretty expensive way to buy education right and you see both things right you see massive wealth trying to solve this problem in a conventional way and then you see people dabbling with the unconventional way and then you see the the consequences of our current extremely expensive system which is 130,000 physician shortage and and and a bunch of impoverished students and this is just one but but just about everybody I talked to that's been you know in college or going to college has the same fear and loathing and so what do I think of it all you know I I've always had the opinion I mean had it back 13 years ago had the opinion education should be free and the opinion is based upon the fact that I sat in this lecture hall lecture all three times as big as this was paying the highest tuition of any institution on earth MIT was the most expensive institution on earth in the mid 80s I don't know what it is now but it was then and I watched some guy down here scribble on a white board and I didn't get to answer any questions and I could hardly see and I thought this is kind of silly right you're gonna impoverish your family and spend everything you made for the past hundred years to squint at a black board it turns out the guys the guy scribbling on the blackboard was Walter Lewin he's one of the greatest physics teachers you know ever I think he's a brilliant guy in 1983 he taught me physics and 1999 he gave the same lecture the same lecture hall and it got recorded by someone uploaded to YouTube today in the year 2013 if you go to like physics 101 on the sailor.org website you'll see Walter Lewin given those lectures and a part of me takes a little bit of a glee in the observation that today for free you could have what was the most expensive thing on earth when I was going to school and the other part you know sardonically notes that you know not much has changed in physics in a long long time right Isaac Newton wrote it all down right so it's not like the program goes out of date apple still fall from the tree the way they fall from the tree and electromagnetic works the way it works in a fair day cage is a fair day cage and that just leads me to my next set of points more technical points the exciting things I wrote a book called the mobile wave and the mobile wave was really about about the conversion of the world from a world that revolves around software running on PCs to software running on mobile devices and I think the last time we had had an exciting technology development in this world was you know 96 to 2000 you had the internet wave and you had about 350 million white collar 20 to 40 year old fairly well to two Western workers sitting behind their computers and offices in cubicles working on software that ran that interconnected over the web protocol and ran on PCs and now 10 years later 13 years later we're moving toward a world with 5 billion people they're going to have software running on Android devices and iOS devices and perhaps perhaps a Microsoft operating system device but probably it'd be Google and Apple slogging it out and it'll be running on smartphones we'll be running on watches it'll be running on televisions on high definition displays it'll be running on tablet computers it will it will be running it'll be integrated into desktops but but the significance of this this mobile wave is it's really creating a global wave of innovation right and this is a geopolitical impact at the point that there's there's seven billion people on the planet one billion of them can hardly read right three or four billion of them are substantially impoverished there's 1 billion maybe 2 billion that have a decent amount of wealth well the the global wave and the expansion of these mobile devices is bringing extremely rich powerful software to the fingertips of everybody on earth and you know it's up your chances of mastering anything from a PC or next to zero if you can't read on the other hand a three-year-old can master all sorts of skills on a tablet computer two-year-olds four-year-olds you know the economist will read itself on a tablet computer the tablet computer is the best and the smartphone right this phone can teach you to read right this by the way this phone I whip it out of my pocket in an airplay environment I throw the image up on the screen and it'll give you a high definition image and it'll talk to you so so we're going to see a world with hundred and two hundred dollar devices from your pocket that are going to teach you to read they'll also teach you anatomy they'll probably teach you a how many of you ever like decipher you know dissected a cadaver right I never dissected a cadaver right normally that's a med school thing it's pretty expensive to dissect cadavers but on the other hand when you see these these Apple commercials and six-year-olds or eight-year-olds are sitting in a classroom watching the human cadaver get get bisected or rotated or or or enhanced on a three-dimensional display it really is eye-opening to you what happens to a world where you could actually get all the courses of medical school before you're 14 years old for free I might be a different world that we live in I think the consequences of the mobile wave is this global wave the global wave is a wave of mobile technology primarily Western technology American technology rolling out of Silicon Valley that technology on mobile devices over networks and it's carrying a bunch of interesting things one thing it's carrying is Western values right it's the Arab Spring on the autumn rage you know a girl in Pakistan who's eight years old whose parents told her she's not allowed to go to college when she goes to Wikipedia Wikipedia doesn't tell her the same thing YouTube might she might see girls that are actually educated on the web even though no one in her in her village or in her family has got that education so so this global wave is a global wave of Western values it's a global wave of Western language one thing you would see if you start to do it short it's one of the most interesting trends is the trend of English speakers on the planet I would predict in our lifetime we're going to see five billion people speak English China China English is a virus spreading through China it's spreading through all of the world because if you speak English everything is cheaper everything you sell you sell more of you can get a higher price if you can sell in English you can get a better job if you're a programmer you speak English you get paid four times as much in China as if you don't speak English right one thing that I remember from MIT and it's indelibly inscribed on my mind is right around the time you're about to graduate everybody starts talking about which jobs going to pay you the most and the freshmen are sitting and listening to the seniors talking and when the seniors say well I'm going to go off to investment banking because it pays me an extra eight thousand dollars a year everybody decides investment banking is the coolest thing in the world right and if computer science degrees get paid three thousand dollars more than the other one then computer science becomes the coolest subject so people get excited about what they get paid for so the world right now is creating a market for people that can speak English they can tap into this mobile wave and as they speak English all of a sudden they slip the bounds or the boundaries that are created by their local cultural and political institutions I mean maybe maybe the opinions of your local minister about whether or not you can and cannot do something matter less than the opinions that Google or YouTube or Wikipedia have about whether you can do it or Facebook or Twitter and so I I think there's a there's a breakdown of local local commerce and local cultural affiliations the local textbook manufacture and in Turkey it's going away why would you ever manufacture a textbook in Turkish to teach physics physics works the same in Turkey as it works in the United States right whoever wins the western market the western block with regard to software is going to win the rest of the world so what we have is is we've got the EU that's come together with America with Canada with Australia with the English speaking South Africans with all the English speaking Indians and with all the global multinationals all of which we've adopted English as a language that creates a billion person plus trading block of middle-class consumers that billion person middle-class trading block they have all the money they probably have 75 to 80 percent of the money to buy any software or to acquire any services nobody else is close I mean the next best might be something in Chinese language for the Chinese middle class which maybe it amounts to 200 million but but creating software for 200 million Chinese is not going to help you win over the billion people that want to learn in English and that being the case it's inevitable that that networks of intelligence coming out of the western block are going to spill over to the entire world and you're going to see networks that first hit critical mass of a billion people and then they'll go to five billion people because the variable cost to do whatever they do for the next four to five billion people is just the cost of electricity and the servers and where do we see that now we see that with Facebook that's a billion person social network we see that with Google another billion person intelligence network we're seeing networks like LinkedIn Twitter YouTube right all these things are forming they're all forming in the US you're not seeing Chinese and Japanese networks that are leaping here to invade the turf of the west I mean how many of you really want to go to a Japanese website to get an answer to a question right not likely in in fact most other cultures are a bit handicapped just because of of all the cultural conventions of the students you know as they're coming up through the educational system so what does that mean well I mean at you know if I look at it commercially what I'm expecting is I'm expecting more Googles and more Facebooks but I expect global health networks right what happens when someone can monitor your heartbeat and monitor monitor your your oxygen level in your blood and use it to predict an incoming heart attack and they can do it off of a $20 device that wraps around your arm that links into an Android and iPhone when there's five billion smartphones on the planet for an extra $20 you're going to get health care of course you're going to take that someone's going to run that network it's not going to be a Japanese company right it's it's probably not going to be a Chinese company likely it's not going to be any company that that isn't full of executives marketers and engineers that are fluent in English those companies are going to have a massive crushing advantage in selling the rest of the world you're not going to you're not going to compete successfully with a company like that if you're coming out of Argentina or Turkey or Pakistan it's going to be very very challenging on the other hand you're going to want to buy that stuff or you're going to want to access it somehow so I think we'll see we'll see many many of these networks that form as part of the global wave and and we're going to and and we're going to see an unprecedented era of global trade because all this is trade by another word at the point that that someone in China is going online to Wikipedia to get an answer that's that's a trade of one sort the other at the point that anybody puts an ad on a Facebook page that gets accessed by someone outside the US there's another form of trade so I think we'll see that continue and what does that mean education I think we're going to see the formation of global education networks right and in a manner of speaking right you could say that iTunes University and YouTube are Google and Apple's you know half completed global education network right there they're amorphous in and many ways and they're they're not very precise but I think I think there'll be more until somebody cracks that code but and I don't know if it's a single company to become the network or I don't know if it's many many different organizations that they create global networks but it seems to me that that there's a billion people on the planet can't read and we can't afford it we have not figured out how to be able to afford to teach them to read in 10,000 years so digital has got to be the answer and probably and and putting a piece of software onto a smartphone or a tablet computer that gets down to the hundred dollar price point is probably going to be the answer and once you teach them to read then you can teach them k through 12 and then you can teach them college degree and then you can teach them a phd and I've said I've said before to other people I mean I think we don't need another hundred thousand algebra teachers right algebra Euclidean algebra is 2,500 years old we you know the definition of insanity is you just continue to do the same thing over and over again without ever getting any better without ever achieving any result you know the guy that taught algebra in the year 400 BC worked about as hard as the person that taught me algebra you know geometry these things are they're they're stuck in a rut we're much better off to have a piece of software that runs a billion times a day to do that and I think I think that's where we get the digital technology it seems pretty clear to me that there are going to be breakthroughs in the next 10 years and there are breakthroughs even now and and software technology for education for authentication and for certification and and for those in the industry I think they get this for those not in the industry I think the elephant in the room that the people don't really want to come to grips with is we've reached an inflection point where there's a whole set of skills where where you can probably prove scientifically that software running on a a smartphone or software running on a tablet does a better job than a human being dedicated to your child right especially in areas of science and technology and engineering so the irony is there's all these people talk about STEM we need more science technology and engineering students and things like teachers etc they're totally missing the boat we don't really need to to create more science technology and engineering teachers what we need to do is create programs that run on on computing devices that do all those tasks if there's anything that you ought to be able to teach with a computer program it ought to be math right there's there's there's no subjectivity to math there's a right answer there's a wrong answer I mean you might be able to convince me that that whether or not I dance the ballet well is a subjective thing and maybe synchronized swimming might be subjective and maybe even composing a symphony or playing the saxophone or even maybe surgery might be subjective a bit but there's nothing subject about geometry and calculus you know and and differential equations there's just a there's a better way to teach it maybe in a worse way to teach it but in the day the the proof is in is in the certification if the student can spend 37 minutes and master all of the techniques using my computer program and it takes them 37 days with the teacher then I can prove that my computer program worked better and of course my computer program worked for zero I think I think many people's eyes are going to open as they start to see some of the more creative things you can do with a smartphone I mean for example right I can give you a test where I ask you things about art history and with the goal of determining whether or not you've gone and looked at every single piece of art in Europe with your own eyes but I could tell you take the smartphone and go look at every single piece of art in Europe with your own eyes and snap a photo of it and geotag it and then you could prove it right if I can tie you to the phone if I can I can give you a test to see whether or not you have mastered certain physical skills I could also put a piece of software on a phone that could monitor your heart rate every minute of the day for the for the last eight years and I can see whether or not you know how to drive your heart rate to 70 percent of max 80 percent of max 90 percent of max 95 percent of max exactly right people are using these things to look at people's golf swings right at the point that you can take a photo you how do you know whether someone knows how to sail a boat right if I if I actually took a mobile device out and it was keeping track of of elevations and wind and temperature and sunlight and and trajectory and course over ground and the speed right it's a very it's a very interesting opportunity to certify that you actually can do something or certify that you did something or right now I can authenticate that you showed up right if you take a test an sat test the joke is I have some rich friends you know and some of them are rich uh new yorkers and they kind of laugh about the sat because they joke well if you end up money you just go hire someone to take it for you it never occurred to me to hire someone to take it for me of course I never have money to hire anybody to take it for me but there's a whole generation of people that grew up rich kids and they just hired someone to go take the test for them now if you put someone's student ID on their phone you could walk into the to the testing center take a photo of your test and seal it digitally and then it's not possible for someone to actually go take that test for you there's a so there's um a lot of new opportunities to prove that you did what you were supposed to do there's you ever you guys ever use cut the rope anybody you know I studied mechanical engineering at MIT cut the rope as it has rotational physics in it and it's got tension and torque and and it's got energy exchange and it teaches you a lot of mechanical engineering and physics concepts six year old start playing with this game on the iPad and they make you go through different levels and by the time you get through the 197th level right you understand all those mechanical engineering concepts better than any professor at MIT could certify you understand them there's no written test I could give you that would certify you understand those concepts as well as an interactive test that forces you to do this and this and this and this with a 300 millisecond delay just like how do you give someone a written test to see if they can play the saxophone right there's no way to do that right I mean you've got to play the saxophone well computers are allowing us to to play things and to draw things and as the computers get smarter I think they get smarter at certifying so I I think at some point we'll see we'll see a number of tipping points or inflection points where the general public and the general politician and the general adult and general parent says this is not like a fattish goofy interesting thing to do for my kid it turns out the digital software running on mobile devices may in fact or probably teaches better and if it doesn't I can create a piece of software that'll do a better job of teaching you than the teacher given a choice between Aristotle dedicated to my kid for 18 years or a tablet computer dedicated to uh dedicated to uh my child I think that sometime in the next decade we'll get to the point where the tablet computer would do a better job than the smartest man in the world did for Alexander the Great right that's an inflection point so software is going to teach better and it's going to certify better there when when you have to prove that you know something you could certify that someone can program a computer using a piece of software to get you give them a task to program they have to program and it works or doesn't work now what gets interesting is okay so you're the top one of 50 people in your class who cares you're you're maybe top 2% you know we all know if you want to actually make a meaningful contribution at uh at google or at apple or at microsoft you got to be better than the top 2% you're probably going to be the top 0.02% and there's a point you know if you look at some of these things right like uh look at apple maps and google earth right that the two best programs are so much better than every other thing ever created in the history of man that you're just not going to bother with programs 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 it's it's really a winner take on thing the guy that figures out the best is going to get 987 million users at which point the guy that figures out the second best or the third best probably isn't in business so we don't really need people just to be top 2% we need to be ultra ultra ultra skilled at what they do and here's where the mooks come in right i mean if you can train a million people in a course and a million people take a test you can actually select out the one in a million with a computer no human being can do that there's no institution on earth that knows how to pick the one out of a million but a computer can find the one out of a million and i think that creates a new type of credential right if if you could actually show that you were the smartest person in all of china this year in a given area that'd be an interesting credential you could monetize that right and that's why i think i think education really is destined to be free it ought to be free the only real debate here is and by the way the reason it ought to be free from a philosophical underpinning is is education is only a benefit to the rest of the society right if you're educated and you can make a contribution to civilization that's good for everybody so it's foolish for us to deprive the people that are growing up of education because they're going to become a liability if they're not educated what we need is a hundred thousand people with a hundred thousand different phd's hopefully each one of them an expert in solving a disease that might kill me that's what i want i don't want a hundred thousand algebra teachers i want a hundred thousand people to solve a hundred thousand diseases each one of which is vying to kill me that's how i'm going to live forever i need to solve the hundred thousand health care problems algebra is not going to kill me and algebra is not going to save me either when i'm 72 years old and i have the brain tumor algebra is not going to save me it's not helpful that's not what i need that's not what anybody needs so it comes back it comes back to this primary point education is destined to be free it ought to be free you can give it away and you can the government could finance it and that's one reasonable approach the chinese and the indian governments have have you know every reason to want to finance it you look at this thing so david geffin gives a hundred million dollars for 33 people to go to medical school well why not the state of california give a hundred million dollars to give everybody that wants to go to medical school a free medical school education seems like a much better idea that hundred million dollars will buy you a lot more software than it will buy you conventional medical education so if not california giving away for free then china or india the indians have one billion people 982 million people with a mobile phone you got a billion people out there needing education you got 800 million of them that are not in the middle class and they have no hope of getting in the middle class without an education it needs to be a specialized one so it could be it could be a government it may not be lord knows the government spends enough money on education but it's all it's all pretty much a jobs program being funneled to expensive institutions expensive teachers expensive conventional techniques some of which by the way is valuable i'm not disputing the value of of a conventional education i had a conventional education but but the real point is the great majority of it somewhere between 90 and 95 of all this money the government spending is being poured down a drain because it's being inefficiently used and we're at the beginning of a new west curve where you can make a difference um and the other possibility is is advertising i think i think google or apple or facebook any of those are in a perfect situation why not just give away complete free education on every subject to anybody and just add finance it what's what's the cost to hire 400 professors put everything they have or they know into software and give it away to a billion people i mean if you if you spend a billion dollars a year on it well billion dollars is what apple makes every like week or something right if apple diverted two weeks worth of earnings they could spend a billion dollars and they could provide a comprehensive focused education to everybody on the planet how about with every single iphone you get a free college degree and a phd or how about with every android device we also give you a phd that's a pretty good business model right i mean if you want to give away other things why not give away that so that's another possibility i met with mcashan bonnie's rolling out reliance industries tech a reliance network you could bottle it into the telephone network right and that's an idea he had and uh and then finally you could you could justify and run the entire thing just as a recruiting network right if if you actually gave away education who wants it the seven billion people on the planet between the ages of zero and 18 0 and 22 they want education if the average person lives to age 75 that means any given time two billion people want education right so that so there's an obvious built-in demand for a network that runs for two billion people simultaneously um so in that case what if you actually were able to certify and rank sort all two billion people across a thousand different disciplines you know let people opt into what they want to be certified for their golf sport spring or their golf swing their English skills their whatever skills their heart rate skills their physical fitness their math skills their programming skills their medical skills there's a lot of things you could certify if you actually ran that network and just kept that database if you could authenticate the people then uh you could make the money back just on headhunter fees i i'd this week i spent $150,000 this week in the last seven days on headhunter fees me running small little company i have 3,500 employees i spent $100,000 a week on headhunter fees we hire someone we pay $25,000 to a headhunter you know what you know what i paid the guy for he gave me an uncertified resume and i gave him $25,000 and and you know statistically 20% of stuff on the resumes all lie anyway so so how do you think i'd feel if somebody showed up and they said like i got a list of like 800,000 computer scientists from india and i can give you the top 1% the top 0.1% or the top 0.01% now you could securitize that market in a different way i mean really literally securitize the market at the point that you can certify someone can speak english and program and then the top 0.1% and by the way if they can if they can go through a course of 537 difficult business problems and complete that in one hour 37 minutes and you can certify that for me then i would pay for that i'd pay money for that and by the time you calculate the amount of money people spend on headhunter fees i bet the revenues of the headhunting industry would would probably pay the cost of providing a free digital education for everybody on the planet i bet so i don't say all the stuff to criticize anybody because the truth of the matter is we're all in this together i mean i don't know whether i'm supposed to blame the state or the college or the city or the government or myself or the non-profit establishment or google or apple or facebook or the headhunters or the newspapers whoever it is or the or the traditional institutions of higher education or community colleges any one of them right might with some inspired focus solve the problem especially the bigger ones right anyone on the top 30 countries on earth could solve the problem by themselves anyone on the top 30 companies could solve the problem right perhaps and uh you know maybe i'm being too simplistic here when i say solve the problem i don't mean solve all problems i mean get us to the point where the civilization agrees that is now technically feasible to educate someone for a variable cost of electricity that's what i mean at that point the dam will break and will move from a traditional conventional technique which is put 30 people in a room with one person and let the one person talk to 30 people and give them whatever we give them to a new technique which is let's let's give every single person on the planet a 300 dollar mobile device plugged into information which is free to them and let's let them all go as fast as they want to go as far as they want to go to achieve whatever is their intellectual potential you know it's it turned out uh you know i never got a phd and i'll never know whether i could have got a phd but i didn't have the money to get a phd i mean i could i mean i couldn't afford to get the undergraduate degree how am i going to find out whether i'm qualified to have a phd in physics right when it's there are a lot of classes at mit you know what they say they say you're not allowed to register for this class if you're an undergraduate right we live in a world of right even if the government of the united states gave infinite money to mit they were still going to ration my access to graduate classes and rightfully so because they can't have 300 people for the class where you need a pupil teacher ratio of 10 to 1 right i i couldn't walk into a medical school at harvard and cross registered to take any class just because i thought it was a good idea in the conventional regime but what might happen right what happens in a world where anybody can go as fast as they want i like i use um i use the analogy of uh you know the golden gate bridge you know how many people have been to san francisco they seen those bridges they're like are they not awesome wonders of the world you look at that you're like you couldn't make that yourself you couldn't make that with everybody in the room you couldn't make that with everybody you know in your school you look at it and and you know you think different things as you get older but here's what i think when i look at that bridge i think that was an awesome probably the most awesome undertaking you know in that city's history and an integral essential to the development of that region of the country and you couldn't do it without the right architect and they did it 100 years ago now how many people on the face of the earth were qualified to architect that bridge or or run that engineering project 100 years ago well you got to wonder what was their design selection pool how big was it i mean when they were recruiting for or selecting architects did they have five choices did they have 50 do you think there were 500 people on earth that could have done that job 100 years ago i doubt it right it's very unlikely you would have had to come from a rich family and a privileged upbringing you would have had to be sent at extreme cost but it's hard to make that bridge right most of us still can't make that bridge correct very hard to make a bridge like that you would have had to go to the best school on earth and had the best teaching and then you would have had to have incredible amounts of assets thrown at you and you would have had to been nurtured over time until you understood how this all worked and then you're probably one of seven people and they probably had seven choices or five choices and they picked one and they succeeded and you know and everywhere else on earth we didn't have those choices well they didn't get their bridge and here's what i think i think what have we actually simulated a bridge building and a program put it on an ipad and gave it away to a billion people and what if it turns out that the best designer or bridges on earth is a 11 year old girl in pakistan who it doesn't even get to go to high school who's been told by her parents she's not going to go to college right who certainly doesn't have the money to go off to mit or or stand for anywhere else and learn civil engineering what if that's the best person on earth because it's possible right i mean genetics is this role of a dice you don't know where the geniuses are they could be anywhere you know they tell stories about about the great you know what what mozart did when he was four years old and when gauss did what he was four years old right it's possible that we've actually given some genetic incredible fortune to some kid in the middle of a peasant village in china or in the middle of india or maybe they're sitting in a middle class family anywhere and they're being deprived of that opportunity i i was offered a chance to learn a language when i was 14 years old and my choice was french or german or latin those are my choices i came from probably one of the three percent most affluent places on earth so if you're the top three or four percent and you've got a choice of two languages at age 14 by the way at an age of which it made no difference which i chose because i wouldn't master either right i was going to get taught in a class of mediocre learners by a mediocre teacher no offense to them but that's just the way it is i think about that and i say what is the chance that i was going to excel in that discipline and i think uh i think digital education offers us it offers us an extraordinary extraordinary opportunity it's all coming very very fast right now and if i had to summarize it down it's it's if it doesn't exist somewhere on earth today we can create software that will educate most subjects better than the way it's being done with conventional technique we can create software to authenticate someone's identity and and to certify both their skill and their participation if we haven't done it now we will do it some things are simple and brainless and obvious like algebra and geometry and calculus some things require some thinking you know medical techniques engineering techniques but it's obvious it's clear the writing is on the wall that we should be investing in the software technology to do this and not investing in the conventional techniques that have we've been used for the past two thousand years to do these things i was in with one more observation um i went to MIT because i want to design spaceships and i was i was fasted by aerospace and the reason why is because from 1903 to 1969 you had a just incredible extreme explosion in technology capability that you know that s curve that went from not being able to fly to the right brothers flying at a few miles an hour to us walking on the moon right that's that was an incredible achievement and then you know what happened next by the right about then right when i'm coming of age in the 70s everybody's like high on the euphoria of breakthroughs in aerospace technology and uh and that momentum carried over and and my thinking was formed in the 70s and i decided i had to go to i had to go to MIT i had to get an aerospace degree i had to design spaceships i had to go to mars that was my thinking you know and i went to MIT and i studied aerospace engineering and uh i went from 83 to 87 and 86 the space shuttle blew up right the entire industry stalled out but that was just uh that was just uh a symptom of the problem the big problem is we hit a technology wall in aerospace engineering around the mid 70s the space shuttle was designed in the mid and the 70s it's 70s type equipment if you look at the design of a a gulf stream five it's the same as a gulf stream four it's the same as a gulf stream three it's the same as a gulf stream two which is designed in the 70s based on the fuselage of the gulf stream one right for the most part a Boeing business yet is a 737 was designed in the 70s right that all that technology it hit a plateau in the 70s for the last 40 years or the way that airplanes work the way that rockets work the way that most of these aerospace technologies work hasn't materially changed that much you could put everyone you could put a hundred billion dollars into this problem you're not going to change the way it works you could put a trillion dollars in the problem you're not going to change the way it works until we come up with some breakthrough in propulsion something which is 10 times or a hundred times faster then there isn't there isn't any exciting future for the human race based upon an investment in aerospace and a career in aerospace and on the other hand if you look at the smartphone right this is a thousand times more compact computing power than the than the apple computer that we used 12 years ago this is a thousand times better and and we all thought the computer revolution was dead and buried and over it 12 years ago my point is this stuff this stuff is is where the opportunity is if you have to decide where you're going to spend your life energy and your capital right you put put it at a place where you've got some leverage and there's leverage right now in digital education primarily because nobody is bothered to exploit the opportunity yet with serious amounts of capital everybody's been waiting and and now you've got all these things coming together you got the fast networks you've got the light computational devices you've got mobile devices you've got you've got mobile operating systems that are that are extraordinary there are 10x better than anything we had 10 years ago the combination of all those things with with the massive networks of of content like the books that google a scan you know and and the video that's that's now stored online on youtube all those things are creating an opportunity but it really is just that it's an opportunity it's not a realized benefit to society yet not a result yet it's like we're just knocking at the door you can see you can see little little sparks little sparks of success you see the con academies you know you see the big mooks you see you see people relying upon wikipedia you see the spark that is youtube so you see where the world wants to go but no organization no institutions put it all together yet at the point that they have then i think you'll unleash a virus an education virus and and we will start to see something or some group of things that start to spin up to add to 100 000 people in the network then a million people in the network then 10 million people in the network then 100 million people in the network and then it'll become a self-sufficient living creature because it'll generate revenues from advertising or from government or from sponsorship or from usage or from commerce or something and it'll it'll start to grow the way google is grown or the way apple is grown again maybe it will be apple maybe it will be google right i don't know what it'll be at all there is no future but you know that which we make for ourself in this area right anything could happen it's possible to have the best assets on earth and screw it up right there's a there's a whole litany of companies right the most successful company in all of europe in the year 2000 was nokia and they've driven themself to zero so you can take a great set of assets and take them to zero you can take a non-set of assets i mean who would have believed that wikipedia was going to become you know the the non-fictional body of reference for the entire world right you can start with nothing and you can go to something huge and there's everything in the middle i i have a healthy respect for the complexity of the problem so i i don't think there's a simple solution i'm sure that it's not going to come about without lots of different organizations interacting and lots of sophisticated fashion and maybe there's a dozen winners or a thousand winners in this market i don't know but um what i do know what i'm quite sure of is is it's pregnant right now 12 years ago 13 years ago we were missing a lot of a lot of key technologies but right now if you look at the look at the reaction of politicians and you look at the reaction of the people that run these institutions and you look at the reaction of the people in the education establishment and if you look at the at the reaction of students you know 30 years ago students were told it's going to be expensive to go to college whatever and they put their head down and they shook it and they disagreed in a resigned fashion they just weren't going to go to college or they're going to go to community college or they were going to take eight years or they weren't going to get a medical degree or they weren't going to get a grad degree and they accepted it today there's a lot of indignation like why the hell do i have to pay that much money for that why do you charge me that much parents saying why do i got to write a 200,000 dollar check why do i have to do that students saying why do i leave school with so much debt so so i think i think you're at a point where the customer realizes there's a better a better way the industry realizes a better way politicians governors i talked to they realize there's a better way everybody can see that technology is going to change this so there's there's enough light in the tunnel for people to want to stretch and take a risk and yet everybody's still looking you know for the map through the tunnel everybody wants someone to help them through it and i think the people in this room are uniquely suited to do that you can help provide some guide path to the people with either power or need or opportunity so as to make a better world and with that i'd like to thank you for all coming i hope everybody gets what they're looking for at the conference i hope when we leave there are a lot of very constructive relationships have been formed and partnerships and and and the ideal world we're all more effective and more successful because of each other and that's what this is all about so thank you