TrueLife - The Game-Changer: Mathew Georghiou’s Revolution in Business Education

Episode Date: September 27, 2023

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/Business education, entrepreneurship, and leadership training are typically slow, expensive, and uninspiring.My team and I are changing that. We've invested millions of dollars and 20+ years to build, test, and refine the fastest and most inspiring business training ever invented.We've created the most advanced series of educational games and simulations in the world.This is experiential learning at its finest.Thousands of schools, universities, and educators have adopted our GoVenture programs to enhance learning for millions of students around the world. Instructors, join us at GoVenture.net and sign up for our Simulation & Game Based Learning Newsletter here on LinkedIn.Major companies use our inventions to boost customer empathy and leadership training.And now with our new businessXP curriculum, students can directly enroll in the world's first and only fully game-based experiential learning. businessXP is better, faster,more inspiring, and more affordable than business school. Learn more at business-XP.comI've spent my career helping people solve complex business and education or training perhaps I can help you too?My experience solving complex challenges comes from being an entrepreneur, engineer, inventor, writer, and designer of educational games, simulations, mobile apps, and web platforms.I have founded and manage several companies that you can view in my profile.Can I help you? Send me a message or contact request - I'm happy to explore ideas.http://www.mediaspark.com/https://www.goventure.net/https://business-xp.com/ One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Hears through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life podcast. I hope everybody's having a beautiful day. I hope the sun is shining, the birds are singing. The wind is at your back. I got an incredible show for you today.

an incredible guest. Like everyone to meet, Matthew Giorgio, a visionary entrepreneur, engineer, inventor, writer, and designer, with over 20 years of dedicated effort in revolutionizing business, education, entrepreneurship, and leadership training. Matthew's unwavering commitment to transforming these traditionally slow, expensive fields has led him and his team

to invest millions of dollars in crafting a groundbreaking approach to learning. At the intersection of gamification, and education, Matthew stands as a pioneer, having developed the world's most advanced series of educational games and simulations. His dedication to experiential learning has not only captivated the minds of students in the thousands of schools and universities worldwide, but has also been embraced by major corporations seeking to enhance customer empathy and leadership training. With Matthew's latest invention, the business XP curriculum, he has introduced the world to the first and only fully game-based experiential learning program,

shattering the boundaries of traditional education and training. His multifaceted background as an entrepreneur, engineer, inventor, writer, and game designer equips him with a unique perspective and the expertise needed to tackle complex challenges in the realms of education and business. As a testament to Matthew Giorgio's influence, millions of students, instructors, and corporate leaders have benefited from his innovative solutions, his tireless pursuit of creating engaging, thought-provoking, and philosophically rich, gamified learning experiences continues to shape the future of education and training.

If you seek to explore the intersection of gamification, education, and entrepreneurship, Matthew Giorgio is the visionary leader who can guide you on this transformative journey. Matthew, thank you for being here today, my friend. How are you? I'm great, George, and wow, you did your homework. I really appreciate the effort you put into writing that. Thank you. Well, I was blown away. by some of the things you're doing. Not only because they're on the cutting edge,

but you've been doing them for so long. Like you have been in this world of gamification and trying to change the curriculum of learning and get people up to speed before AI was like a big, you know, wedge in the community right now. Maybe you can just give us a little background story on how you got going and where you are at now. Sure.

So my background, one of the original gamers, There was, you know, that grew up in the 80s where the Atari and the VIC-20 and the Commodore 64 were first introduced at home. And I was, you know, spending a lot of my time alone playing those games. And, you know, started programming my first game, I think when I was about 12 years old with the Vig 20. I actually had to buy a memory expansion pack because I had written so much code. It couldn't fit in the memory back in the day. And so I ended up becoming an engineer, an electrical slash computer engine. and I worked with IBM as an engineer in the manufacturing,

one of their manufacturing facilities for a few years. But I decided I wanted to do something different. I ended up starting my company MediaSpark and doing some multimedia development. So at the time, this was in 1994, multimedia was just being introduced to computers. And what I mean by that is the first time computers could do animations and heavy graphics and videos.

Prior to the mid-90s, computers couldn't do that. couldn't do that. And so I thought there was some opportunity there. And I started my company, started doing some custom programming work for others, and then eventually we started growing our business, hiring some people, and we started developing our own products and launched our first business simulation back in 2000. We were developing in the late 90s, launched in 2000. And then we started selling it to schools. And, you know, back in the day, George, I couldn't use the word game to describe what we did, because if you're going to school, schools in the early 2000s and saying game, they threw you up because you're not allowed

have fun in school. You can't play games in schools. Now things are changing. It's still slow, but that's how essentially we got started. It's interesting to me. On some level when we look at education at an early level, it's through games that we learn. Like the first thing you do with a child is put a book in front of you and play this game of hide and go seek. It seems like we're wired for this gamification of learning. And it makes it fun. And it does. It doesn't take all the, you know, do you really need a ruler to the knuckles to learn how to do algebra? Exactly, exactly. Humans were wired to learn through play.

Animals are wired to learn through play. We see it in nature all the time. So at some point we kind of get away from that, you know, to industrialize thinking over the past 100 years that kind of put us in rows of desks and lectures and so on. and it's just become this huge ship that's been very difficult to change. It is changing. It's been slow. I think it's going to be more rapid. I think COVID accelerated some of that change.

But, yeah, play is really where we need to focus more of our attention on in terms of learning. Yeah, it's interesting. I'm wondering with some of the simulations and games you have, it seems to me that a large part, it seems to me that part of the problem with education, is the Pavlovian style of training, where we put kids in front of a authoritarian figure, and we bring bells and we make them ask for permission. It's almost like we're trying to streamline production

by getting rid of all their imagination. What? It's kind of sad in a way, right? Yeah, it's a very cookie cutter approach because, you know, when education became more prevalent, more public, that's what was needed in the workforce. Right. Was that cookie cutter approach, right? But things have changed so much.

But again, this legacy system has become so ingrained with so many systems and infrastructure that it's been very, very difficult to change it. So when you began taking your model to the school, maybe you could talk about what does your model do to change that behavior? Like when kids see this model that you're bringing into school, what is your, what is your curriculum offer? So to use the first simulation as an example, which is our primary one, it's a business simulation. So traditionally, the way people learn about business is an instructor lectures to them about business concepts. They have a textbook. Nowadays, they might watch a video. In most universities, you know, Harvard popularized the concept of case studies where they'll

read a case about some situation about some business and then they have to kind of give their opinions on it. But the problem is they're not actually doing business. They're just listening to somebody talk about business or they're practicing little small things. So we take the flight simulator approach, just like a pilot learns how to fly an airplane using a flight simulator. We do that with our business simulation. So in our simulation, you actually run a business. So we start you with a lemonade stand. So you can learn the basics, become comfortable, become successful early on. Then you level up, eventually to run multiple lemonade stands, or now you're dealing with employees and multiple

inventory items at different locations. And then you level up to a kiosk where you're now selling more products like jewelry or popcorn or snacks. Then you level up to another level of business, which we call a full business, where we've modeled businesses like McDonald's and Starbucks and Subway and Chipotle. We've modeled hair salon, beauty salons, cosmetic boutiques,

boutiques, micro-stay hotels, automotive repair shops. So now you're running the day-to-day, minute-by-minute aspects of a super realistic business. And you're making decisions failing, succeeding, suffering the consequences, experiencing the successes like a real entrepreneur would do. So you're not sitting, listening to someone tell you about business. You're not reading a case about some organization you've never heard of and trying to solve their problem. It's you.

It's personal. It's your decisions. You get to choose the path. You get to realize the consequences and the successes and the failures. And so it becomes a much more engaging, realistic experience for students. It's fascinating to me. My daughter has been playing some games that somewhat have a simulation model, like a pet store simulator or even some math games where it's gamified like that. with the curriculum that you've had in place for a while, what are some of the results that you've seen? So our programs are used in all sorts of environments, which is kind of interesting. So we designed one simulation, but we designed it in such a way that is so flexible and so modular that it can be used in any capacity. So we have some instructors who will say, okay, I'm going to use your simulation at the end of my course.

So maybe they're teaching a business course, accounting course, marketing course. We have other subjects that we cover as well beyond business, but just use business as an example. So at the end of my course, in the last few weeks, we're going to play your simulation so that my students can apply everything they've learned in my class to actually running a business and see how they do. In other situations, we have instructors that look at a curriculum and they see how comprehensive it is and see how it completely flips the learning that they say, you know what, I'm going to stop doing what I'm doing because it's not working. And I'm going to use the simulation experience as the core experience wrote our time. And what instructors discover is a couple things. Number one is they get to teach less while their students learn more. Okay.

So let me say that again. You can teach less while your students actually learn more. And the reason for that is that you as the instructor are now not the holder of knowledge, the purveyor of knowledge. you're now become a coach. The simulation handles the experience for students because the students are walking through that experience, making the decisions.

Now, all you have to do is guide them and help them overcome challenges and obstacles and so on, as opposed, again, spending your time regurgitating the same information over and again. Think about for a moment, George. Think how many business courses are being taught right now around the world where it's thousands and thousands of teachers teaching the exact same concept

in a lecture. format or a video format. And we know they're not all going to do a good job at it. So why are we recreating the wheel constantly, put students in a realistic experience and let them apply what they're learning? And so what ends up happening is that, again, the teacher teaches less, but the students are now learning more. The other thing that instructors discover is that the conversations in the classroom change. Okay, so typical conversation in classroom, why do I need to know this? I'm never going to use this in the real. the world, right? Why am I wasting my time? I'm never going to do that. I'm never going to do that.

This is boring and so on. All of a sudden, when you put students in a realistic simulation, they now become entrepreneurs. They now become business owners. Or you could do the same thing with financial literacy or health or other models. And now they're not asking those questions because they're experiencing exactly those issues and why they're important and what they need to learn. And you're also flipping the idea of just in time learning. So there's this concept of what we call just in case learning versus just in time learning. So traditional learning is just in case learning. We're going to teach you all this stuff just in case you might need it.

Of course, you're never going to remember it anyway, but that's what we're going to do. Whereas simulation is just in time learning, we're going to put you in a realistic simulation, a problem solving, problem-based learning experience. And when you run into a problem, you're now going to be engaged. and motivated to solve that problem. And we're going to give you the resources to solve it. For example, you hire an employee. You don't spend any time reviewing the employee.

The employee is not performing well. Your business is not doing well. And now you've got a problem. You look at your classmate next to you who actually took time to hire the best employee and they're doing really well. You're like, wait a minute. George, what did you do? What happened?

You say, well, Matthew, if you looked at the resume and you read this and this and that, you would know this is how you, this is how you should work with your employee to improve their productivity. And all of a sudden now we're talking and conversing like real entrepreneurs. So the conversations completely change, the mindset changes. And those are the kinds of things that we see in the classroom. It's so brilliant. And it's, it does seem like an uphill battle, though, to try and transform such a large monolith of education into something. Have, is it, Have you found certain entry points into private schools or homeschools or are there some particular charter schools or is education in general kind of open to this? Yeah, education is so broad.

Like when the cool things about our simulation, the same simulation, in this case, the business simulation has been used in elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, universities, MBA programs, Fortune 500 companies in prison systems. because it's a realistic experience. And I haven't necessarily seen a pattern emerge as to, you know, who's most ready for this type of learning because the way education is, particularly in North America, it's driven by individual instructors. So even though there is a curriculum, it's up to the instructor to determine and choose how they want to deliver that curriculum. So a lot of cases, you have to go to individual instructors and pitch them on this idea

of adjusting what they're doing and adopt a game or something. simulation, either as part of what they're doing or to replace what they're doing. You kind of have to leave it up to them. In some instances, there are some institutions where they have instructional designers who will pre-develop the curriculum and require their instructors to use something. And the challenge with those is that we find they're always cost cutting, right? And you see this in universities a lot. I see those in the university a lot because I tend to work with the most forward-thinking

educators, right, because they're adopting innovations. And a lot of times what happens is they'll tell me, look, I want to adopt this, but I can't get any support from my administration. Yet their administration just spent $20 million building a building that is not helping their academics in any way, but they have this thought process that bricks and mortar is something where

is more tangible for them. So I'm not seeing a pattern other than hopefully more and more people, individual instructors themselves, are opening their minds of doing something new. Yeah, you know, I, on some level, if we can find a way to adopt this technology and get more forward people thinking about it, there's really no reason why a kid in couldn't graduate high school with a residual income. If they began learning these particular ideas, there's no reason why school couldn't be a startup accelerator program. You could learn all the things you needed to, and you could also have a cohort, multi-cohorts of kids doing. startups and leaving school with an income. The school could even be partners with them.

It just seems like so much great things are on the cost if we're willing to embrace them. There is a lot of opportunity there. I also see the flip side of it. I see how difficult it is for schools to change because there have so much demand on them to do all sorts of things. And they can't possibly do everything. I see it from both ends. So I'm definitely trying not to be critical of the whole system because it's difficult for people to change. But, you know, the way I look at it is I described it as the entrepreneurial mindset. So it's not always about running a business, even though running a business can be part of that. The entrepreneurial mindset is what I feel is one of the most meaningful gifts we can give to kids and the world in general because it's a way of thinking.

It's a way of taking control of your own destiny. It's a way of solving problems and, you know, not necessarily expecting others to solve them for you. But also helping others and supporting others, you know, who want to achieve something and maybe can't on their own in some way. So it's a mindset that once you have this mindset, you can apply it to any aspect of your life, whether or not you're going to run a business yourself. Because running a business is difficult. And there's a lot of failure.

So I'm a big promoter of the mindset, but I'm always cautious to push too many people to starting a business because it's not for everyone. There's so much stress and so much failure. And people lose not only money, but they lose marriages and health because of entrepreneurship. So I'm very careful to not push it too much. But the mindset, whether you work in government or nonprofit or charities, if you have that mindset, you can help succeed at everything that you do. Yeah, it's a, there's a component of critical thinking that seems to be.

lacking. And those people who find themselves on the path of entrepreneurship have in some way embraced that sort of nonlinear way of thinking, this idea that I can get to the destination, not from A to B, but I'm going to take A to D and then jump over to C and then I'll get there. It's interesting. You're right. I think it's because, you know, a lot of people who don't know entrepreneurship, they think that entrepreneurs have all the answers. Oh, he's starting a business. because he knows what to do. He has our answer. It's nothing.

The truth is completely different than that, right? Most entrepreneurs start a business either because they kind of fell into it. You know, I had a skill. Somebody paid me for that skill. And then somebody else paid me for that skill. And now a sudden I'm running a business. Or they lost their job and decided, you know, starting a business might be a thing to do. Or even if they, you know, their entire lives, they wanted to start a business.

Because they're not necessarily prepared for it because our education system doesn't prepare you for this. They're still going to go in, not knowing, what they need to know, I'm going to fail and fail and fail, which is the other challenge in the education system, which we talk a little bit about, which is the idea of failure. You know, school does not prepare us to deal with failure. School is all about avoiding failure. You better do your work.

Otherwise, you're going to fail that test. You're going to fail this. You're going to fail that. And that's going to follow you here and there and there. Whereas real life is all about failure. We fail constantly, whether it's in business or life or whatever it is. And it's really how we prepare for that failure, manage that failure, learn from that failure to ultimately succeed. And I think that's a big lesson that simulation is helpful with in games.

And that's one of the things we all learn in games is games are all about fail, fail, fail, succeed. Then you level up and then you fail, fail, fail, succeed. And you kind of keep going from there. Yeah. Can you imagine if people said, well, my kid's been trying to walk for like six months. He just can't do it. He can't walk. I can't tie his shoe.

I guess I guess he just can't ever do it. That's it. They're done. Dang it. Didn't do it. You know, what ethical considerations should be taken into account when designing educational games that influence decision making? Yeah, that's a good one because, you know, if you look around the world at, you know,

questionable regimes around the world, you can see. them. I've seen examples of television shows, children's television shows where they're indoctrinating kids to hate other cultures or people or ethnicities or religions and it's crazy. So as educators and designers of educational experiences, we have to be careful that we're not injecting our own biases into those experiences, which some people would argue is impossible that you're always going to inject some biases because you're injecting your world. view of things. We try to take the approach when we design our products where we're trying to create what we believe is a, is a, you know, predictable real world experiences where, you know,

you can, if you increase the price for something, less people, fewer people can afford it, so less people are going to buy it. So we try to use real world economic, real world, you know, supply and demand and elasticity and so on so that we're not injecting our biases. And basically trying to allow the player, the learner, the student to make decisions, review the consequences, and then pivot and adjust however they want to adjust without us telling them, you know, this is the right path. This is what you should do. And we do get that question a lot of times, even in our business simulation from educators who tell us, okay, well, what's the right path to success? We said, well, we didn't build a path to success in it. We built the simulation to respond just like the real world would respond.

So whatever decisions you make, there's going to be a consequence. Just like in the real world, you make a decision. There's a consequence. In fact, even if you don't make a decision, there's still a consequence because no decision is a decision to take no action. And there's a consequence to that. So we try to put you in this realistic situation, let you realize those consequences, and then let you decide which path you want to take.

And then the system adjusts based on that. Yeah. that it's earlier we spoke about the failure of education to teach about failure, which is kind of weird to say. However, isn't there a relationship between uncertainty and fear? And does the gaming model work with that? Well, for sure. I think uncertainty leads to fear, leads to anxiety, leads to stress.

I know that's probably one of my big stress inducers because, you know, I have this responsibility for employees and payroll and my customers and my shareholders and my creditors. And that's a funny thing about entrepreneurship too, is you think you're your own boss, but you're not your own boss. Everybody else is your boss. And so that's one of the biggest anxieties I have is I feel like I have this responsibility to succeed and be able to, you know, meet my obligations. And uncertainty makes that difficult for me because I don't know what's going to happen. You know, we had COVID, right? COVID changed a whole bunch of stuff for my business and all sorts.

Other businesses some ways good and some ways bad. And so that uncertainty, I think, does that. But here's the cool thing is the more life experience we have, the better we are able to cope with uncertainty because we realize that, hey, I can create a plan B. Plan A doesn't work. I got a plan B or I got a plan C or I got a plan D. Or if this doesn't, you know, my business doesn't work out here, that's okay.

I still got skills and I can apply my skills over here. So I'm going to be fine. And I do see that resistance. You know, when I was trying to analyze, I see a lot of like, for example, unions. We see a lot of things with unions and people kind of resisting change in unions, for often for good reasons, of course. But sometimes it's not good reasons. And I tried to understand that over the years.

And the conclusion I came to is a lot of people have a certain skill. they're feeding their family with that skill, and they're worried that this is the only thing they can do. So if their livelihood gets cut off, they don't feel like they have any other options. And I think that's, again, because of the way we're brought up to kind of take a certain path without being taught properly how to address the world,

how to assess the world, how to solve problems. Because if we're learning how to solve problems better, then we can realize, well, if this doesn't work, oh, that's okay, because I got a plan B. I got a plan C. I got a skill I can move here. And I think, you know, you're on, you're on to something important there is that uncertainty, you know, we can mitigate the problems that come with that by just teaching people better. Yeah. Yeah. So often the debate in our, in our country is this division of labor. And I don't know that anybody has a good solution for that. You know, I don't know that anybody does. But one good solution is to, understand that you as an individual have authentic skills and you as an individual you can succeed if you're willing to do the hard work to find out what's good about you and what you're excited

about and you will see the future unfold in front of you if you're willing to take a chance and work really hard at it i think that that is something that is the antidote to this giant colossal you know us versus them ridge versus poor is like okay you can't fix that but as an individual you can work on yourself and you can become the best version of yourself. And that's what's going to lead to prosperity, not necessarily monetary, but prosperity in your relationships. And I think what you're doing with the gamification is teaching people to deal with uncertainty, teaching people to believe in themselves by building on their past experiences.

You're exactly right. And back to what we were talking about earlier about people thinking entrepreneurs know all the answers. They don't know the answer. They just have gained a confidence that they can find the answer. answer, right? So I'm going to do this. I don't have all the answers. It may not work out, but I've got the confidence that once I get the feedback, the results, I can adjust, I can pivot, I can find somebody who has the answer, whatever it is. I can learn the skill I need to learn.

That confidence is what's missing in our education system, not because teachers don't want to give it to their students. You know, teachers, you know, I'm on the side of teachers. I know they want to do well for their students. It's the system itself that they've been placed in those structures. do not give them that freedom, do not give them the curriculum that can actually facilitate this type of thinking and this type of learning. And I think that's what we're trying to do with our simulations, it change how people learn in a way that facilitates those things. So our entrepreneur simulation, even though it's entrepreneurship and business, you don't

have to care anything about business and entrepreneurship. Just by playing it, you're going to gain those skills of dealing with failure, dealing with uncertainty, evidence-based decision-making. and confidence in yourself and self-esteem. We have one student who gave us feedback that, you know, they love the simulation because they could fail without judgment, right? They could fail without judgment. No one was over their shoulder saying, you know, you fail this, you fail.

I can fail without judgment, and then I can succeed, and I did it. Those are the types of experiences we need to push into the educational system. I love it. There's an interesting parallel here. Lydia says this could be a game. for supporting those who suffer from mental health. And while I'm not a therapist, it seems to me that a lot of people struggle, a lot of people struggle with anxiety or depression based upon who they are or these epistemological

questions of what am I doing in life? And in today's world, we look, a lot of social media is like, hey, too much social media is bad for you. Too much of this stuff is bad for you. But perhaps the right form of training, the right form of simulation is actually good for you. That must be a wedge you come up against two when you're trying to bring simulations and games into the world. People are like, hey, this is bad. They're consuming too much. Do you run up against that? Yes, for sure. For sure. You know, the one is, you know, one is, oh, too much

screen time. Yeah, probably too much screen time. But it's about selecting what you want to do, right? There's some things you can't do in the real world and you can do in a computer and a simulation. So it's about choosing the right tool for the job in moderation, everything in moderation, everything, the right tool for the right job. And so we do run into that. And, you know, the other one is, you know, how can you learn in games? Can you really learn in games? Isn't it just a guilty pleasure, you know, because you're not putting your game on your resume, if it's, you know, you're playing World Warcraft or FIFA or whatever. You're not putting that on your resume.

And so my response to that is that the reality is that all games. are educational. I'll say that again. All games are educational. It doesn't matter whether you're flinging angry birds or, you know, leading a guild into battle or shooting aliens. Our brains are wired to learn. We're constantly learning. So it doesn't matter what you're playing, what you're doing, you're learning.

The only question becomes is what I'm learning in that game, the knowledge I'm gaining, the skills that I'm gaining, is that knowledge and skills transferable to real world to help me in my life. And in a lot of entertainment games, there's not so much. Yeah, and there's maybe some, you know, hand-eye coordination, there's some attention and so on, things, little things like that that get a little bit help, but not that much. But as you get into deeper games, particularly games that are designed for education, now all of a sudden the skills you're learning are completely transferable to the real world and you can't apply them to succeeding. For example, World of Warcraft, a hugely successful game for many, many years, online massively multi-

player game. And people have these characters, fantasy science fiction characters, and they lead them into battle against other characters, who are run by humans around the world. Well, there are guild leaders who assemble other players, and they go into battle. And the guild leader is actually communicating and directing the battle. And to be a guild leader, you have to understand the skills of all the players that are on your team, their weapons, their health, and who you're competing with and how to send those skills in the battle. And you're basically doing what a Fortune 500 manager does. You're just doing it in a game.

But the skills you're learning can be completely translated to the real world. So, you know, there's a lot of, there's, there is that resistance. Can you're learning games, too much green time. But if they just take a moment to, you know, ask the right question and listen to the answer, they can realize, oh, you know, this can't work. And to Lydia's point earlier about mental health, I'm a big believer in games helping mental health. In fact, I believe that virtual reality,

and there's already people working on this, virtual reality is going to be the holy grail for helping people with mental health issues without necessarily requiring medication. Because you're providing people with very tactile, visual interactive experiences that to the brain feel real and you can rewire the brain with those experiences. So I think there's huge opportunities in virtual reality

and augmented reality for mental health. That's fascinating to think about. Often when I think about gaming or when I think about virtual reality or augmented reality, I feel as if we are on the cusp of like a sense ratio change. You know what I mean by that for so long typography has been, the format with which we've learned. And it gave us these ideas like exact repeatability.

It gave us these ideas of being able to be taught by someone who's never have the lived experience where it used to be a storyteller would come and talk to us. But now with the invention of social media, it's almost like we are using language, our linguistic ability, as a building block. And on top of that or connecting to it is this world of visual imagery. And when we stack those together, you're much more able to get across a better meaning. If I can combine those two, like words in a sentence, now I can give to you something that you can make much more sense of than if it was just me trying to convey my heartfelt emotions to you. You kind of see that thing happening as well?

Yeah, we see, you know, there's this theory of learning styles that has been going around for 25 years where, you know, do you learn visually, auditory, experiential, and so on kinesthetically? And it's actually proven to be what's called a neuro myth based on the research that I've looked at. A neuromith means something that is widely believed to be true, but it's not necessarily supported by the research. And so this idea of learning styles is not actually accurate. It's been misinterpreted. And what the more hardcore research, I believe, is finding is that presenting information in mixed media formats, So not just text, not just audio, not just video, not just game, but mixing it all together

is what provides us the most effective way of communicating and learning. So it's not that you're an auditory learner and I'm a visual learner. It's really about mixing all those together and it will help us all learn better. I'm not sure if that's kind of what you're thinking about or is there something different? No, I think it comes to perspective. Like if you only get one perspective, you only see one piece of the puzzle. but if you see four different perspectives, you get an overall view, and it's much more able to comprehend the picture.

If I can see it from over here, over here, and above it, there's a great book called Flatland. I was written by Edward Abbott, like in the late 1800s, and it's a book that's about geometry, but it's also a science fiction book, and he talks about the beginning as a person, he's like a line, excuse me, and they can only see linear.

And they talk about like different shapes that come into the mix. It's a fascinating book. It blows my mind it was written in the 1800s. But yeah, it's about perspective. And the more modalities with which we can consume, the better we are to thoroughly understand the world we live and be a tactile, visual, all of these things. You know, as an inventor of educational games,

do you believe that gamification can make learning addictive? And if so, is that a good or a bad thing? Yeah, that's interesting question. So, you know, addiction, addiction. Of course, like anything else, has its strength and weaknesses. Some of the greatest inventions and art in the world was because the creator had an addictive personality in some way, right? So it's really about harnessing, harnessing that power,

allowing someone to choose. That's the path they want to do. You know, like when I was in high school, a lot of my friends used to go out and partying and so on. And eventually I did some of that too. But I like playing basketball. Right. So on Friday nights, I was closing down the YMCA playing basketball. And somebody might look at that. So you must be addicted to basketball because, you know, all your friends are all having fun doing all these other things. But you're playing back. I was like, yeah. And but I knew that. I had a choice. I, you know, I chose that. I knew I would get a little bit of, you know, a little bit of push back from, you know, from my friends and stuff by not joining them. But I didn't care because I wanted to play basketball. You know, in the business I'm in, I can make.

a lot more money using my skills on wall street or somewhere else where i develop simulations and other things like that but i'm choosing to kill myself in the education business because i feel it's more fulfilling for me and in some ways somebody might say that you know that's an obsessive personality because you're obsessed with being successful in an industry that doesn't want you to be successful um so so i think you know it's all it's all about uh giving somebody the choice if jem you choose chooses to be addictive and it's not harmful to them, then let them make that choice, let them realize that, you know, they're making that choice and what the consequences are. But I don't think you'll see it as addictive as some entertainment games. One of the things about developing educational games, and I often have to make this point is they're not designed to compete with entertainment games. And so if you took one of my games and you compared it to a really great entertainment game and you gave somebody the choice,

do you want to play Matthew's game or this entertainment game? A lot of people are going to choose the entertainment game because I can't compete with that. Because as soon as you try to teach someone anything or you have any objective other than entertainment in the experience that you're building, you're watering it down. You're watering down the experience and you just can't compete with entertainment. So on the entertainment side, I'm more worried about addictive issues there. Same with like gambling, for example, because the person who's designing the entertainment game, they tend to be designing it so that you do play it as much as possible.

Because the more you play it, the more money they're going to make in some way, whether it's through advertising or sales and so on. In my business, when I'm designing something for education, I'm actually trying to do the opposite. I'm trying to get you to learn as much as possible in a short way. as time as possible so you can move on to something else. And I have to do that for two reasons. Reason number one is people don't want to, you know, take forever to learn something. They want to learn things quicker. And that's more true today than ever. Reason number two, because I work with a lot of educational institutions and teachers and so on, they have very limited time with their students.

You know, a course is an average course in a high school or university is 35 to 60 hours. And they have to teach a whole bunch of stuff in that time. So I've got to compress what I can teach you in a very short period time. So the addictive side of things from learning is really the opposite of what you're trying to do. You're trying to teach someone something as quickly as possible and then allow them to move on to something else. I hope that kind of makes sense. Yeah, it does. The question was purposely interesting with addictive and learning. I like to think that if someone can be a life learner, you become comfortable with the idea of looking back on who you were two years ago and being okay about being embarrassed. You know what I mean by that? Like you should be.

You should be looking back on your life. Be like, oh, God, I can't if I did that. But I'm glad I'm here now. You know, but that that seems to be in some ways, hopefully as abstract as that is, I'm hopeful that can become addicted because there's something powerful about looking back and seeing where you were and now seeing where you are. And that's a sign of growth. And we should all be trying to move forward and grow to the best role we can. I'm a big fan of storytelling, and I love books and reading, telling stories, and trying to understand why stories are so meaningful. So what role does storytelling play in the success of educational games?

How can it be leveraged to create more meaningful learning experiences? Right. So a couple cool things about stories and games and simulation. So story is a methodology. that sometimes we choose to apply and sometimes we don't. And I'll give you two examples when we do and when we don't. So in our business simulation, and we do this with our personal finance simulation,

we don't create a story because it's you. You're the story. So we put you in the role of the entrepreneur, starting and running a business. We put you in the role of someone trying to live their life and make financial decisions and realize you're live over 20 years the future. So you are the story, which is a super powerful thing because when you're talking

about personalizing education, nothing personalizes it more than making you the center of the attention, making you the one that making, doing the decision. So that's an example of where we don't use a narrative story in the experience because you are, you are the story. Another example is recently designed a digital marketing simulation where I wanted to teach someone digital marketing. And digital marketing is so broad, it's got so many pieces to it. And I want to teach that high-level concepts of developing a marketing strategy. So to help with that, I did create a narrative story where I put you in the role of an inventor of a new product, a fictitious new product. And I have some virtual characters where your advisors, like a business advisor, a content advisor, and so on.

So these are virtual characters that kind of inform you and give you knowledge about digital marketing. then you're actually making decisions in the simulation. So the simulation is a linear experience where you walk through and it says, okay, now I'm going to teach you about this, watch this video, do this, now make a decision, make some choices, see the consequences. Now this virtual character is going to teach you something else, do that. So we use a story in those types of examples where I feel I need to put you on a linear path because of what it is I'm trying to teach you. So when we design something, we look at what are the instructional What is the behavioral change we want to create?

And then we look at what's the best way to do. And sometimes it is a narrative story. And sometimes it's not because you're the story. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally makes sense. It kind of reminds me of when I was a kid, I used to read these choose your own adventure books. And they were so fun to me because you got to make some, even though the story was already laid out, you got to make some of the decisions and the consequences that came with them.

So the best story is the story you're telling yourself. And isn't it interesting that the story you tell yourself is a way in which you model reality, which is sort of game-based anyway. You know, it's true. Actually, given the broad nature of your podcast, I'll tell you, I was just reading a story about a chaplain who is often sitting with people at hospitals at the end of their lives. Okay. And one of the comments that stuck out at me was he said, you know, when people in those last breaths, they're no longer telling themselves their own story, you know, because we often disguise our own lives with our own story.

You know, we may be doing bad things, but we're telling ourselves that we're doing the good reasons or, and it says in those last hours, that veils it goes away and you see yourself for who you are. and all of a sudden now you're reflecting back on the good things and the bad things you do in your life. Anyway, I thought that was an interesting connection to what you said there. It is. It's one that's near and dear to my heart. I see so much of what's happening right now in our world is this, you know, as part of us dying. Like if we look at all of us, and by that I mean human beings, like this giant class, this generation that came before us are about to have the full,

breadth of the mortality experience. And a lot of them have a lot of unrealized dreams and hopes. And a lot of the things they've accomplished are getting to a point where they're like, what's the point of having all this and being completely alone having no one to take care of me? We're beginning to look upon our system and understand that the dissolution of the family may not have been a very good idea, but it's too late for some people. And so, you know, maybe there's some way, maybe there's a, I'm hopeful that there's a way in which the people today. And maybe it's maybe it's our generation's job to be a bridge to the younger people to say, look, you got to start living now. If you wait until you're 60, if you, and maybe this speaks to

entrepreneurship, at least it did to me. Maybe this means you should quit your job. Maybe you should, okay, maybe not just quit, but you should maybe start working towards something that you want to do. If you're at a place right now, people listen to this, please take heed. If you're at a place and you're not fulfilled, if you're doing something in your life and it's not mean, meaningful to you, begin looking elsewhere. Because if you stay there, you're going to sow the seeds of resentment. And those seeds will one day grow into the bitter fruit of disgust. And you will not like your life.

You will not like your relationships. And you will find yourself as one of these people with their last thoughts wishing they would have been a better father, a better mother, a better brother, a better husband. And so I think there's a real chance for all of us to learn today that we create the world that we want. You can take chances. If you're not fulfilled, you must take the bull by the horns and start something now. Begin becoming a more authentic version of yourself.

And I think that that's what your games are teaching kids at a younger age is this, look, take control of your life. You can do it. I promise you. It won't be easy, but it'll be fun. It'll be hard. But what else do you want to do? Do you want to sit back and let someone else tell you what to do forever?

That is a horrible life. I've lived it for 26 years. Stop it. Just knock it off. Go find something you're passionate about and live it. Be it. The world will unfold in front of you, I believe. And I think that's what you're teaching.

That's why I'm so stoked to have you on today. Thank you for teaching that. Well, I think for saying what you just said. I mean, that's very well said. In fact, I often like to say that the fear of uncertainty or the fear of failure are not as bad as the fear of regret. You know, the fear of regret hurts more than the fear of failure. and the fear of uncertainty. And so I think the message you're just described is a very important one.

And I think you're right. I think games simulations, you know, movies kind of did this to some extent. Movies would tell us a story that shows a story to say, you know, feel this story, come along on the journey, feel this. And maybe you'll learn something from it. You'll learn that you don't want to, you know, you don't want to go down that path. That's not the path you want to go down. But, you know, we watch a movie and we might impact us for a couple of days and then we forget about it because we're back to our busy lives.

Whereas with games, simulations, virtual reality, we can put you in an experience that's much more emotionally engaging, much more likely to stick with you and encourage that behavioral change. So, you know, I'm a big believer in that most people don't know what they want to do with their lives, just like we're talking to. And I just had a, you know, my daughter just went to college for the first time. Congratulations. Thank you. And we, you know, have this discussion the last few years about what people want to do. I think it's crazy that we expect 18-year-olds to know what they want to do their lives and spend, you know, $100,000 in university trying to figure it out.

It's ridiculous. But I think the way we can help them is by giving them more experiences. We're all experiences of our lives. That's what we're made toward experiences of our lives. You know, we learn things we don't like. We learn things that we like. and eventually we maybe we figure out the path if it's not too late, just like you preached a moment ago saying, you know,

sometimes you might feel it's too late because you've kind of gone on this path for a long time. But through games and simulations and virtual role-playing experience and virtual reality, I think we let people experience things they couldn't experience before, but do it in such an emotionally engaging way that it's going to stick with them much more so than a movie might have in the past decades that we've watched movies or, you know, somebody was just preaching to us or whatever. I think that's what we can do. And I think through those experiences, they're going to discover exactly what you've been suggesting is take action now to be your authentic self and realize what your dreams are.

And if you don't know what those dreams are yet, that's okay. Have more experiences to discover where you want to go. Yeah. In some ways, it sounds like we're defining a dreamscape. Is there a way to build a simulator where someone could live a life? and then they could feel that regret, they could feel that longing. You know, maybe in my mind, I could have vision of virtual reality or something like that, where you could have kids, you could have a life, and then you could work for 40 years,

and then hurt your back and get a paycheck and sit at home and be resentful. You know what I mean? Yes. Yeah, I think, you know, there are, we're already there in a lot of ways. Like there's games like the Sims where you kind of live the life. There's games in VR. We have a product called Go Venture Life and Money. It is a realistic life and money simulation where you can live your life for 20 years,

making financial decisions, buying houses and cars and choosing whether to go to college and getting student loans. So you actually get to experience your financial life for up to 20 years and what kind of doors are open or closed for you. So I think we're trying to do that already with our simulation, although it's not necessarily going to be as emotionally engaging as a VR experience, potentially doing the same thing. So I think there's going to be a merger of those types of things as we go forward that not only gives you the cognitive understanding of the choices you're making, but also that emotional reaction and consequence.

You know, that's the Holy Grail at some point. Yeah. Even a step in that direction, though, though you may not be able to put some, you know, have someone get the dopamine rush of having a stock portfolio that brings in an additional $100,000 or buying up in a piece of Times Square a thousand years ago, 100 years ago. You might not be able to get that dopamine rush, but you can begin to present imagery backed by consequences on some level.

You can begin showing people. And that's enough on some level for people to have the perception of it. That can be enough to influence their decision later on. It's a huge step. I think so for sure. You know, the more you can help someone see the future, however you're going to do it, is going to help them alter their current reality in some way. And it can't just be someone telling someone, hey, you should make a better decision.

You shouldn't spend so much money on your credit card. So in our simulations, what we try to do, you know, as I was saying earlier, or we don't try to influence the outcome, go ahead and make that bad decision. Go ahead, do it. And then you're going to suffer the consequences of that bad decision. And you may be okay with those consequences. That's not for us to choose, right? That's one of the other cool things about, you know, when we're designing a simulation,

like a personal finance one is, you know, one of the challenges we had to overcome was, well, how do we define success? Right? Because if I'm designing a personal finance simulation for education, I have to be able to assess you. The teacher that's using my product has to be able to assess you. So how do we assess someone on their chosen lifestyle? If someone wants to compromise family and health to be financially successful, that's their choice. I can't say they're right or wrong versus someone else who wants a very modest lifestyle and wants to spend more time with family and so on.

That's their choice. None of us can say that's right or wrong. So what we decided, what we determined was that, well, let's set goals in the simulation. Very realistic goals. Like a goal would be have an emergency fund for $500. So you always had that because that's helpful for everyone, right, to have that emergency fund. Have a goal of going to college for students who maybe want to go to college. And another goal where you don't have to go to college. So we have these customizable goals that the instructor, can choose from, and they can actually set up different experiences for different students. So your college-bound students can have the goal where they have to go to college and have to finance college in the simulation, whereas your non-college-bound students won't have that goal

to have different goals, like maintaining jobs and so on. And that way you're letting students have those experiences, and you're not assessing them on their personal choice of lifestyle. You're assessing them on their ability to achieve goals. Yeah. It's philosophical in a way because I think it speaks to the ideas of our very limiting language of good and bad. Who are we to decide what's good and bad? In some ways, it makes me enthusiastic for the future and that we're outgrowing some of these paradigms. For so long, we have had this constrictive nature, good, bad, binary. But what does that mean? What is the kid supposed to think? And when we start imposing good and bad on them,

aren't we in some level limiting their imagination? Like, why is it bad? What does bad mean? Bad for who? Bad for me or bad for society? You know, it's in simulations really allow you to explore this landscape of, well, it's different. It's not bad.

It's just different. Most people wouldn't do that because of these 10 things. Maybe you will, you know. But it's, it's an interesting concept to see. imagination grow and might that be some of the unintended consequences of the simulation or might there be others yeah it's it's it's it's hard to know um one of the challenges we have is we we work through instructors and trainers so we don't know we don't interact with the students unless they don't need some technical help from us or something like that so I don't know

where those students go next year or the year after and And so I always love to know how our experiences affected their choices in life, but I can't, I can't follow them. And obviously there's privacy issues as well that we want to make sure that we maintain. But I think that would be a, you know, a great research opportunity for people to kind of follow that, that path. A lot of the research I see has been done on educational games and simulations tends to be very superficial and, you know, do badges work and achievements work, intrinsic extradict motivation,

but not so much are people changing their lives and how is it changing their lives, you know, later on. It's a tougher, tougher piece of research to do. I think we'll see more of that as we go. Yeah, it would be interesting to see how a child scores on a written test versus a computer test. You know, I don't know if there's been any stats done on that. Yeah, there's been, like even in the simulation, probably 15 years ago, there was an instructor at, I think it was actually DeVry University. And he was actually a former military pilot, a fighter pilot.

And he retired and became a business teacher. And he went like to Walmart or whatever and bought some business games. And he split his class into two and had some of the students just do the conventional curriculum that he normally did and many others play these entertainment games, you know, not designed for education, just entertainment games. And he actually did the data and he showed a significant improvement in results from the students who played the simulation. So some of that's already being done. It has been done over the years.

Do you think the gamification can be applied effectively to areas of education and training that traditionally resist change, such as leadership development in established corporate environments? Yeah, that's one of the things that we've launched with our business. business XP training where we're helping people starting businesses and so on. But we also positioning it as leadership training. So I've consulted with some very large companies, financial institutions, and so on, on their leadership training. What these companies do is they invest in a lot of money, developing some curriculum. They identify top performers in the organization, and then they put them through their leadership

training. And often the leadership training is very conventional. They'll have lectures and workshops and seminars and so on. They're fine. But what I noticed the pattern that was repeating is all of those experiences weren't actually making them better leaders, making them make better decisions. Because, you know, if you do a Google, if you Google leadership on LinkedIn or somewhere, you're going to get like 50 different things about empathy and critical thinking and, you know, diversity and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. all these things, which are all important to know and apply in leadership, but none of them actually make you make better decisions. And in my opinion, if you boil down leadership, a good leader makes

good decisions. A bad leader makes bad decisions. Forget about all this other stuff. Yes, that's important. Yes, it should influence us. Yes. But at the end of the day, you could be the most empathetic person in the world and make terrible decisions and drive your business, drive your company out of business, right? Or your nonprofit or your charity. You never heard that you never heard somebody say, you know, that our CEO made such terrible decisions. We went out of business, but man, there were a great listener. There were a great listener. So I think that's what's been missing in leadership training is helping people become better decision makers. Yes, influenced by all these other things like diversity and critical thinking and and so on. But

make better, how do I make better decision? Well, the only way you can make better decisions as a leader is to do two things. Number one is you have to be put in the position of leadership. Because if you're not in a position of leadership and I'm telling you how to make better decisions, it's all going to be like, what? Like, what do you mean? I need to be in a position of leadership to become a better leader. And if I'm not already in a position of leadership, then the only the only other way I can be put in a position leadership is through a game or simulation, where I'm role playing that I'm in that position. The second thing that has to be done is that you have to let someone practice making decisions

and not a couple of decisions, but literally hundreds or thousands of decisions in a short period of time and see those consequences of those decisions. Because in business and in life, a decision impacts multiple things. There's always benefits and there's always consequences. And it's up to you to decide whether those are balanced to achieve your objectives. Sometimes you're perfectly fine with the consequences because they don't matter in terms of achieving your objective. Other times, those consequences are deal breakers. And the context in which you apply them, you know, we were talking earlier about perspective.

Right. You know, the perspective that you apply, the context in which you apply is incredibly important. And so the only way you can become a better leader is we need to put you in a position of leadership, even if it's simulated, often better if it's simulated. And then let you make hundreds or thousands of decisions and see the consequences of those decisions. Role playing. You sometimes hear companies do role playing and businesses and so on do role playing.

Role playing is great for this, but there's a big problem with role playing, live role playing, is in an hour or two hours, you're only going to do a couple of role plays. It's not enough. I call it building the muscle memory of the brain, just like athletes, build the muscle memory. You know, I play basketball. You know, I'm playing basketball for 40 years. and I still haven't perfected my shot because it's impossible. It's like a golf swing.

But you're constantly trying to improve that muscle memory. I see the same thing with our brains and decision making. The way we improve that decision making is by allowing us to make hundreds and thousands of decisions constantly. Constable decisions. And the only way we can do that is through a simulation. Yeah, repetition is the mother of skill. 100%. 100%.

And it's gotten a bad rap. You know, Roet Learning has gotten a bad rap. For good reasons in some ways, right? Right. But it's a tool. And sometimes that tool is incredibly powerful and reliable and necessary to learn certain things. Do you want a pilot who's landed the plane once or landed a plane 100 times? I want the pilot or land a plane 100 times because exactly like you said, repetition means skill.

Yeah, it's fascinating to think about the way, not only the way, we make decisions, but the way we try to teach people to make decisions, the best way is to let them learn on their own. But like you said, sometimes situations don't allow for that. And I guess that's what the systems you're providing does, is it takes the transition. It allows for a transition period. Instead of just putting someone in a spot when it comes to being a leader, you know, hoping for the best and planning for the worst, now you can have someone that's actually been up against some decisions, you know, like I've made thousands of these and they may not be exact, but he's got that muscle memory. He understands the technique it takes in order to do it and that

there will be consequences and benefits. That's right. And you have the opportunity to put them in a position to see all the perspectives that you were talking about earlier. So like when you, when you play our business simulation, you're the entrepreneur and you're responsible for everything. You have to price your products. You have to order your inventory. You have to manage your finances. to manage your employees, keep them happy, keep your customers happy. So unlike a real world job where you might be the customer service person, and that's all you care about because that's your role and that's what you're measured on. And you don't see all the other nine of the ten things that your company has to deal with.

Now when you're the entrepreneur and you have to make all decisions, you see all the perspectives. So now when you're put in the position of real world leadership, yes, you see your role. yes, you see what you're being measured by, but you also see every other aspect, all the other perspectives and what the consequences are. So when you're making a decision, you're not only making good decision that's good for you and your team and your department and your responsibilities, but you're also making the best decision for the overall organization, again, whether that's a business or government agency or charity or nonprofit. Yeah, it's fascinating to me to think about. What challenges do you face in ensuring that educational games are effective tools for learning rather than, I think we kind of covered that part.

I was going to ask, are there distractions in there, but we've already covered that one. What about the, how do you measure the long-term impact of gamified learning experiences on students, real-world skills and knowledge? Yeah, and we touched that a little bit where it's hard to do if you don't have, you know, access to those learners. over a long period of time. But, you know, we see examples from our own experiences where we get some feedback from students who are willing to give us that feedback. For example, we had one student who, you know,

wrote this big, long letter to their instructor about how they had worked in the restaurant business for many years. And they thought they knew everything about the restaurant business. And then they ran our simulation and went bankrupt twice. And then eventually they became successful. and his letter to his instructor was how amazing the experience was where he didn't know what he didn't know until he was put in that situation

and now it's changed, you know, it's changed his whole outlook on that. We've also had other students who would say, actually a great example is when our simulation was used in a prison system. And the facilitator told us this story that one of the inmates who was using our business simulation said to him, that, you know, he wasn't going to rob small businesses anymore because now he realizes how hard they work for their money. Where, you know, we see people who own businesses and we think they're all wealthy

until we put in their shoes and realize, oh, my gosh, the sacrifices, the compromises, the stresses, and I'm still not making as much money as my employees are. You know, you get that instant empathy. And earlier we were talking about how conversations change. you know, with students who are playing a simulation. It's that instant empathy. Like when I go to a meeting with other entrepreneurs and we start sharing our challenges, immediate empathy, instant.

There's no explanation of this or that. And we just all get it. And we all get it because we're all experienced entrepreneurs. We've been through it all ourselves. And we're so anxious to help our fellow entrepreneurs and say, well, you know, here's what I tried. And it worked. here's where I try and it didn't work.

But the only way you can get empathy, you know, by putting yourself in someone's shoes, is through experience. You know, you can watch a video and feel bad about the people you see on the video or you can go and visit that location and see for yourself. And if you can't do that,

then you can do a VR experience. You can do a simulation. It's the next best thing. How do you envision the future of experiential learning through gamification? especially in a world where technology continues to evolve so rapidly. Yeah, I think more and more education is going to be flipped. Right.

Where, you know, instead of I'm going to lecture you, I'm going to get a textbook and go get you watch a video and learn a bunch of stuff, instead we're going to be put into an experience. And everything else we're going to teach us are going to come off that experience. So I have one, you know, because I'm a big believer of the entrepreneurial mindset, and it's a big social. cause for us as well. I have a global business game called Go Venture World, which is free to play. So we designed it so that anyone, anywhere in the world can gain the entrepreneurial mindset and gain business experience and business skills without paying any money, without going to school,

they can just play our game. And it's an incredibly complex economy where you can IPO your business, you could buy shares in other people's businesses, you can invest. It's got everything in there. So I think that's an example of where learning is going to go where instead of, you know, you're going to sign up for a business course, you're going to sign up for a business experience. And you're going to be put into a game or simulation. You're going to have to solve problems, do things. And then you're going to realize, oh, I don't know how to solve this problem. So now I'm going to go watch some videos. Now I'm going to go read a book. Now I'm going to get some coaching advice. So it's flipping that methodology where now we, you know, we get. books like text books, textbooks, lectures, videos to teach us stuff before we do something. Instead, we're going to be put into a situation. Then we're going to use those other resources. They're not going to go away. Videos, lecture books, you know, they're still valuable. They're just used improperly. They've been used improperly for many years. They're going to be used for what they're really good for, which is as reference materials, information when I'm having trouble.

Another example is negotiation. You want to be a better negotiator. You're not going to sign up for negotiation course, you're going to shine up for a negotiation experience. You're going to put your VR helmet or your AR goggles on, and you're going to get a phone call from an artificial intelligent character who's going to try to sell you something or get you to sell them something, and you're actually going to learn negotiation by doing negotiation in an experience. I think that's where things are going to go. And I think credentialing is going to change, you know, the value of degrees and diplomas. that's all up for disruption right now.

Right. A lot of that's going to change. Anyway, we could talk quite a bit about this. Yeah, it makes sense. You know, in some ways where we look at, you know, the large textbook industries who are sometimes funded by certain special interest to teach a certain thing, that's all, that's all going to be hooey. You know, if you're in this business experience and then you on yourself go look for the

answers, you're not, you don't care about Hartman, Cortman, or you don't care one bit about these silly people that may think that they know something that knew a guy who had a friend whose dad's uncle was on the board of directors who did something. You know, you're going to go to a video about some guy like, oh, this guy's got great advice. And that guy's going to become somewhat of an authority. Hey, when I was in this business simulation, I found this guy's video. Oh, really was that guy's video? And all of a sudden, education is going to be from the bottom up in some ways, just disrupting all the way up. Like that's a real, for me, for someone in the creator economy, That's incredible news.

And once you've said it, I can almost see it. It's pretty profound. It is. Why is one instructor teaching me everything about accounting? Yeah. And maybe they haven't actually been out in the real world of accounting for 10 years. Well, why is that? Whereas put me in a situation where I have to apply accounting.

And then when I got to learn tax accounting, I'm finding the tax expert in my state or province or country. and I'm watching their videos or maybe I'm even enrolling in their $10 a month coaching program to get that tax advice. So as you said, you're going to find the experts

that are either the best at what they do or deliver the content in a way that resonates best with you. That's the way I want to learn. Well, this person is doing it all in animations and I love watching animations. Or this person is doing it all through live coaching. That's how I want to do it.

So you get to do it. So you get to kind of pick and choose your own way of learning. In fact, we're seeing some of that happen now in schools. Ever since COVID happened, schools are now, you know, now the schools had to offer online. And schools are feeling the pressure now to offer both options for students. So you can either come to class, a live class, or you could choose the online version that you don't have to come to class.

And people were trying to predict how students were going to choose which option they wanted. And I predicted that they would choose. the option that fits their schedule. So it's not about, oh, there's an amazing instructor and blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm going to choose that one. Now they're going to say, oh, 8.30 a.m. I'm not getting up at 8.30 am for a class. So I'm going to choose the 11 o'clock one or I'm going to do the online one. So we're already seeing it with students choosing their courses, not based on the instructor, not based on the curriculum, but based on their own personal schedules and how they want to learn and when they want to learn. Wow.

Yeah, modern education is going to change by hook or by crook. It's coming and it's happening. And if schools aren't ready for this change and I don't know how they can be. I think on some level, you need a child to go to school to learn some social skills. Maybe first through fifth or something along those lines. I'm not a child psychologist, but it seems to me that, yeah, what do you think? I believe that most students who choose to go to university other than trying to get the job, they go for the social experience.

Yeah. That's it. And in fact, in my opinion, that's the most valuable part of the experience is the social experience. Because the academics haven't changed in 50 years, 100 years. In most cases, the academics, you know, what other industry has the price gone up 20 times, like 20X? Whereas the quality has actually stayed the same or degraded. Like, it's even worse than healthcare in terms of the cost. and the social experience has improved, right?

You've got all these amazing buildings, landscape campuses, you've got amazing sporting facilities and so on. And I do think that a lot of students, they choose university because of the social experience. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's just it costs way too much. I was on another podcast, Janide, you know, Janide. Yeah, I love that guy.

What's up, Janai? Janide gave a great suggestion. well, you know, you could just show up on campus and get the social experience without paying without paying for, or just, you know, audit a course for $100 or whatever it is. And you get access to all the facilities and most of the facilities. And you can still have that experience yourself. But yeah, the social aspect, I think, is an important one. But it's so expensive that you've got to balance that ROI, you know, whether it makes sense or not.

So on some level, I think the speech. to networking and the idea of entrepreneurship in some ways. And what I mean is that it seems that people that go to like an Ivy League school, what they're really paying for is to be plugged into a network of people that will forever backstop up. But the same is happening online. Like if you and I build a relationship or you go take a class online, you're building a network with maybe someone on a different part of the planet or a different

state. And there's no reason those same relationships that develop. about a four-year university. Couldn't happen between you and I or me and you and three other people in another class somewhere. But now the bridge is much longer. And that might also mean that the opportunities are greater. Like, oh, you're over in this country?

Oh, I have this. We're both doing this business. So that's another way we're seeing the landscape change. What do you think about networking and online and that sort of relationship building? So I totally agree with you that the reason you're paying for an Ivy League education is not the quality of the education is the quality of the education. the quality of the network. Sure.

You're paying to be in a club. Yeah. And sometimes it's worth the price of admission, right? Sometimes it's worth the price of admission. And I often, I've written about this well before COVID, where I would try to advise universities and say, look, you know, when everybody's moving online at some point, again, this was pre-COVID, everybody's moving online at some point. And when your business course or your accounting course, whatever course is online, it's

going to look like every single other course that's online. And unless you're in that top 1% of the branded schools, if you're in that 99%, no one's going to care about your brand. So what are they going to choose? Why are they going to choose you if it's going to be online? They're going to choose you because of your price. Do you want to be the lowest price? You want to race to the bottom on price?

The only other way you're going to improve that is by the quality of a curriculum. So you have to differentiate yourself by the quality of the experience. the academic experience you're providing to students, and as you're suggesting, the social experience on an online basis, which schools I don't believe are doing, because I see it in their courses, where they're delivering courses and they're, you know, worried about do I put students in teams?

I want them to experience teams, but they're at a distance. And in some cases, some institutions are telling their instructors, you have to do it completely asynchronously. You're not allowed to do anything live. So you're handcuffing the instructor by saying, look, we want you to prepare your students for the real world of collaborative work and so on, but you're not allowed to do anything live at any time. And so they're thinking, okay, well, I can't do anything live. And they're not given a solution to do exactly what you're describing is, okay, if we can't do stuff live, how do we build our network? Yeah.

How do we build our network? That's one of the great things about games, by the way, is because they can play the games together. and that forces them in a fun way to actually collaborate. But yeah, networking, but if you're going to be an institution, you need to put a structure in place to make it possible for your students to build those networks online and not face-to-face. What about cross-culturally? It seems that the systems that you're building would work anywhere.

Do you ever come up against the different ideas of cultural boundaries? Like, for example, in the Eastern tradition, it seems there's a lot more emphasis put on tradition and family. We're in the western side of the world. We seem to be more disruptive and individualistic. We don't run into it. I mean, it's an issue, yes. We don't run into it because the way we design our simulations, we're not making those choices for us. So in our life and money simulation, we're not telling you you have to sacrifice family for something else.

In our business simulation, it's generic business concepts. that apply everywhere. Now, what might change, for example, is the currency. We don't want dollars, we want pesos or yen. And some of our simulations, we do allow you to kind of customize those things. Some we don't. But yeah, once you get into more of the human interaction,

that's where you get into some of the social cues and social issues. And with our global business game, you are interacting with other players and that way you're sending messages to each other. you're negotiating deals together. And we're kind of letting you have that experience yourself and suffer the consequences and realize the challenges.

And then hopefully you can then chase down other opportunities. Like you might notice that, hey, I'm dealing with somebody who doesn't speak English well. I'm going to go using Google Translate and everything I'm going to write them. I'm going to actually pre-translate for them to make it easier for them to read. So we're hoping that by allowing people to interact this way, they'll actually use the tools that makes it easier for them to interact on a cultural level. Yeah, it makes sense. It makes a lot of sense.

It's such an exciting model. I think there's so many ways in which it can go and people can embrace it. And what about affordability? Is it something that, I mean, obviously you have one game where people can play for free to become better business people. And for you, if it was about the money, you'd be on Wall Street. If you can speak to your ideas about trying to create a great product for people so that they can learn. It seems like you have a real passion for that. Yeah, you know, the money side is always a challenge. I mean, we're a for-profit company, even though we do a lot of social stuff,

which means that we can't get money any other way other than people paying us for a product, right? So there is no other way we can get money. But at the same time, we have to make it affordable. And so I chose a long time ago to make our products lower cost than average. So at the university level, for example, our product is often called a supplement. So you buy the textbook, and this is changing, but traditionally, you know, you'd buy the textbook for 100 to 100 bucks, and an instructor is reluctant to add a supplement on top of that because the student's already paying a lot of money for his textbook. And so normally supplements cost anywhere from $20 to $50. That's an acceptable range for a supplement if they're also buying a textbook.

Now, we have so many resources, a lot of instructors are saying, well, I don't need to buy a textbook because you guys give me everything I need. So I can save my students all that money. So normally we priced ours well below the average of that supplements. So most of our products are $15 to $29 at the university level, at the high school levels are actually even less expensive.

So that price doesn't become an issue. It still sometimes does. We still run institutions who say, we're not allowed to adopt anything that costs money. It's like, okay, doesn't make, I mean, I understand you want to, but at the same time, you're spending millions and millions of dollars doing these other things that are not helping your students academically, but okay.

And then we run into K-12 schools, you know, just don't have the budget. Again, they're giving budgets for other things, but not necessarily to improve the academics. But yeah, price is an issue. So we try to have our free options, and we give a little way, a lot of free stuff. But at the same time, we can't survive unless we, you know, charge and we try to charge an affordable rate.

And this stuff is so, the stuff we build is so complex. So we're kind of crazy to do it at the level that we do it. But, but it, you know, it is what we do. Yeah. It's awesome. I'm glad you do it. Is there other avenues you're thinking about exploring? Like you have business and entrepreneurship and some life studies courses.

is what about is it is your model something that's adaptable to to other things but be it mental health or be it philosophy or is it adaptable to everything well experiential learning i believe is you can be used everywhere problem-based learning experiential learning that's the foundation of what we do we describe it as experiential social and gamified learning so it's it's based on experience it's based on social interacting competing collaborating with other people and it has gamification components to keep you engaged and do authentic assessment and so on. So I think it would apply everything. The challenge, however, is some of this stuff is so expensive to build that it's not always, doesn't always make sense to deliver something. So we still have video components. I still

have a book, like, you know, I've published a business book. I still have a book. Yeah. So we still have some of these conventional resources because it just doesn't make sense to simulate or create a problem-based experience because they take too long as well. So not only is it. it costly to build. But to do an experience, it takes a lot longer. Now, sometimes you can learn a lot more in a short period of time. I can teach you business 10 times faster, 20 times faster than conventional learning, but there's certain aspects of business.

It's just better for you just to read them or watch a video. So yes, you can apply to everything, but it doesn't always make sense because of time and cost. So you kind of have to find that balance. Yeah, it's fascinating to me. It's such an exciting time we live in. And I'm hopeful that people will embrace the change that's coming our way. You know, I know we're kind of coming up on time, but I guess one last question before I let you go is,

it seems like there's this debate with AI that people keep talking about. And, you know, it's such a phenomenal tool. On some level, I think teachers are trying to come to grips with how to use it. Should it be like the Internet? Should it be something they ban? Should it be something they embrace? Maybe I can get your take on what is this AI? model tool and what is it capable of and what do you think about it?

So the short answer is you have to embrace it. Can't run away from it. It's like the internet. Yeah. It's like the internet. You know, anybody who bet against the internet lost. And if you bet against the internet today, you're going to lose. And AI is exactly part of that.

Right. So you have to embrace it. And the way you embrace it from an educational perspective is you use it. you get your students to use it because they're going to use it anyway and if you don't if you force them not to use it they're going to be at a disadvantage because you know the saying goes you may not lose your job to AI but you're going to lose your job to someone who knows how to use AI yes right so um so you have to embrace it so a great example i saw in in uh and writing assignments or english literature and so on or even history is you instead of having students go home and do homework to write something

whatever, you tell them, go home and use AI to do X, Y, Z. And then when you come back to class and live, we're going to, you're going to, you're going to, you're going to, in my class, you're going to assess what the AI gave you, or you're going to improve on what the AI gave you. So you're getting rid of the whole cheating issue because you're telling things, I want you to use AI to do this. But then you're doing your assessments live in some way where you can't necessarily use AI to cheat on the assessment. Because you know, you're presenting something to me. You're telling me something. You're showing me something. So there's strategies.

And there's all sorts of people sharing ideas in this area. So you absolutely can't run from it. You have to adopt it. You just have to, you know, I often like to say is, you know, just look up. You know, this happened during COVID as well. During COVID, you know, a lot of, we would try to reach out to instructors to help them with our resource. And they would say, oh, no, I don't have time to look at anything new because I have to put all my curriculum online. And if, and so they just wouldn't talk to anybody.

But those instructors that did take a few minutes to talk to us realized, oh, my God, if I adopt your resource, which at the time, we were providing for free to everybody during COVID. If I adopt your resource, you mean I don't have to do all the stress-inducing stuff that I've been forced to do because your resource does it for me? And I see that happen even now after post-COVID, because everybody has post-COVID fatigue, that they're not looking up. So if you're worried about AI and you're an educator, just take a moment, look up. Just do a little bit of research.

You're going to find all the answers you want, and you're not going to have to stress about it anymore because people are sharing the solutions to the problem. Just look up. Do a little research, spend a little time. You won't regret it. Yeah. You know, there should never be another paper, boring paper ever written again. Ever.

Like, there's no need for it anymore. There's no need for it at all. It's all going to be. Like, there's so much richness that can be out there. And the imagination is endless when we can use it as a tool and then do like what you're saying with some of the students. Yeah, use it all. Now here's how we're going to make it better. Just imagine what the future holds for us if we can really use it as this giant tool that it is. It's so exciting. I'm so thankful that you got to hang out with me today. And I really appreciate your

time. I love what you're doing. And I think we only scratch the surface of some of the things you're getting into. Maybe you can, before I let you go, you can tell people where they can find you and what you have coming up and what you're excited about. Awesome. Sure. So the best way to find me is on my personal website which is georgio.com my name georgio.com but you can see it probably down there and that you know so i've actually involved in a lot of things though my main business is developing educational games and simulations but also invent some children's toys for hot wheels and so on yeah um that's that's kind of fun on the education side we're going to be launching a project management simulation because project management is one of those things you have to do to actually learn how to do it so

we're launching a simulation to do that i'm most excited by our business expi training which we alluded to a little bit, where it's an alternative to business school. So for whatever reason, college is not for you, but you want a career in business, or you want to start your business, or you want to level up your career. Our business XP is the world's first and only fully game-based training in business, where it's all based on realistic games and simulations. And we can teach you 10 times, 20 times faster, and 10 to 20 times less expensive than traditional learning. So that's what I'm most excited by because I think it's a culmination of everything that we've been building over 25 years and where I think the world is going in terms of education.

I really appreciate you having me and allowing me to share our ideas together. Yeah, man. I hope you'll come back. I think we could touch base every now and then just to check on what's going on, some of the new products, and just maybe have a panel with other people to help elevate all of our voices and try to get more information out there for people to learn. So we'll hang on brief them and talk to you afterwards. But ladies and gentlemen, I hope you were as mesmerized as I was today. The future is really bright if you know where to look. And I think there's a lot of great things on the horizon,

especially for children's education, adult education. And the world is your oyster if you're willing to take a chance. It's hard, it's scary, but that's how it should be. And you'll be rewarded if you're willing to take some chances. Obviously do them responsibly. But that's all we got for today. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you enjoyed the time. We'll see you tomorrow.

Aloha.