Unlocking the capacity of human minds with Duncan Anderson, co-founder of Edrolo

✅Why unlocking the capacity of students could fundamentally change humanity

✅The cycle of learning: thinking, building, observing & synthesising

✅How Edrolo are building “content technology”

✅Becoming “artist-scientists” and creating repeatable beauty

✅How to help kids discover a “love of learning” 

Edrolo’s mission is to improve education and the future lives of learners. 

Find Edrolo's website here: https://edrolo.com.au/

Roughly one third of people in the developed world reach the point of being able to teach themselves new things. Duncan believes that with Edrolo, it will be possible to increase that number to 80 or 90%, which would fundamentally change humanity.

Episode Highlights from Duncan:

“To me, the next great problem to solve is unlocking the capacity of human minds. And to me, we don’t need any more time, or money, or new curriculums to do it. I’m not saying those things wouldn’t help. But I don’t think they are precluding us from getting there.”

“There are still some jobs that are very physical, but they are slowly going away. If your job is knowledge work, which is the increasing percentage of jobs, and if your job is non-repetitive, the machines are replacing all the repetitive ones... then I’m going to argue that the most important skill is thinking.”

“If you’re not helping the world be better, people aren’t on board. Your goal has to be to make the world better, and you have to be making progress towards it. Then they have to see how they’re able to contribute to that. Those are the foundational elements. Upon that foundation, you can build a positive sum ecosystem where people like working etc, but if you don’t have those foundational elements, I don’t think anything else really matters.”

“In the developed world roughly one third of people get to the point where they can teach themselves new things. I think one definition of what we’re trying to do is get as many people to this point as possible… I would hope that we could take this from roughly a third, to 80 or 90% by the end of year 10, and if that’s the case, we have fundamentally changed all of humanity.”

“A unit of thinking, a unit of building products, a unit of observing, a unit of synthesising, and round and round. That’s what I would call a cycle of learning. You need to get externally validated units of learning, and that can only happen by going outside.”

“To me, there’s often an overly simplistic idea of what culture (in a company) should be, and it often comes out as monoculture… to me, the only constant is change, and you’re trying to set up the entire business to be able to shift, and for people to be part of what that is, and for different types of cultures to sit in different places. So, effectively a mess, but a beautiful mess, hopefully.”