The LA Kings Holiday Pack is back! The perfect gift for the hockey fan in your life. A three-game pack starts at just $159 and includes a holiday blanket. Buy today and you'll receive an additional game for free. Don't miss out. Visit lakings.com/holiday today. How important to you is the topic of education, your own education?

How possible is it to achieve great success in life without a great education? In my mind, education is huge, hugely important. And so today we're going to explore that subject with Scott Young. He's most well known for essentially hacking an MIT computer science degree. This is known as the MIT challenge, in which he put four years of MIT-level learning into one year for $0 out of his pocket.

Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets and today is Tuesday, December 16, 2014. Today on the show, we're going to talk about education, not schooling, education. And we're going to explore some ways for you to become more highly educated so that you can move your success forward more effectively.

My guest today is Scott Young and he's most well known, I think for his TED Talk was where he achieved some wider internet fame. But I know that, as I found out in the course of this interview, he's been around for a while, he's been doing things for a while.

I think you'll really enjoy today's show because we bring together many themes, both education and financial independence. But through entrepreneurship, Scott has been earning his living through online writing for a very long time. And even just the topic of education, however, is very pertinent to your own personal financial planning.

If you're going to set out to improve anything in life, you're going to need to become educated about it. And so one of the most important skills that I believe that we can focus on and develop, which can help us in every area of life, is the ability to learn.

Here's Scott. So Scott, welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. I appreciate you being with me today. Yeah, thanks for having me. So I brought you on, I've mentioned your story a couple of times on the show myself. But then I thought, well, I need to go ahead and reach out to you.

And I did, and you agreed to come on. So I'd love for you to start by sharing with us the story of the MIT challenge, as you called it. What is the MIT challenge? Right. So I was trying to come up with a name for this, because I'm pretty sure, to this date, I'm not sure anybody else has done it before.

And at the time I'd done it, nobody else had done anything like this before. But basically, I graduated from business school, and I wanted to learn more about computer science. Now, the option to me, the sort of traditional option would be, well, if you want to get an education in computer science, you've got to go back to school, got to enroll, you got to spend a bunch more money on tuition, got to wait at least maybe two years if you're doing a matrician.

Sometimes you can skip some of the prerequisites. If you're doing the full curriculum, then again, that's another whole four years of your life. And that didn't appeal to me at all. But I still wanted to get the knowledge, I still wanted to have that, those skills and that knowledge.

And so around that time, I was playing with some of MIT's OpenCourseWare courses. So this is basically MIT, and other universities do this too, but MIT is one of the big ones, would take materials from their actual courses. So these aren't courses that were prepared for the internet, these were actual MIT classes.

And they would record the lectures for some of them, they would, for some of them, they wouldn't record the lectures, but they would tell you what textbook they used, which readings they did, and they'd have photocopies of the assignments and the solutions, and the exams and the solutions. And I had done one or two of these courses before.

And I was thinking about it, and I was like, well, you know, I think these courses are really good, I think they're quite useful. Would it be possible to not just do one or two courses, but to do the entire degree that MIT teaches for computer science? And because these exams that they cover, these assignments, these programming projects, they weren't designed for an online course, they were just literally stripped from whatever class was actually being taught.

You could say that there is some relevancy there, there's some connection to what an MIT student would actually learn. And so I was thinking about this for about a year, just would this be possible to do? And I did the research, and there were some modifications I had to make, I wasn't able to perfectly replicate the curriculum.

But at least with the core computer science classes, I could do all the classes, I could at least go through and do all of the final exams for the classes, which is a major part of any sort of heavy math and science-based curriculum. And so I set that up.

And then I sort of tried to make it a little bit more interesting, to discuss sort of the ramifications. I gave it a name, and I had this goal of trying to complete it in one year. And I did that, and I finished it on time with maybe a week to spare.

I was documenting it for the year. And I think it's not something that's for everyone. But I think it is an outlier example that can maybe show you, you know, you want to learn something in depth, it's no longer the case that you have to go to school to do it.

Was the MIT computer science curriculum, was it 100% focused on computer science? Did you just not worry about anything? I don't know, if there was any, are there any readings in the humanities that you ignored those classes? Or was this the full degree program? No. So I did the full degree program because I felt it was very important for me to at the very least match the volume of something an MIT student would learn.

Because of course, I'm making kind of a bold statement saying I'm learning in a year. So it's a heck of a caveat to say, yeah, but I only did half the classes. Like, I don't think that's really fair. So what I did do was I made sure that the number of credit hours were exactly the same.

Basically, my program is exactly the same as an MIT student would do. But there were a couple exceptions. Like, there were some laboratory classes, which I couldn't do in there. So I just switched those for more theory classes. And there were some, actually some humanities and arts classes, which I wasn't able to find the material online for.

So I substituted those for economics classes. So it wasn't necessarily like every single class was exactly what you do if you were at MIT. But the volume was the same in terms of the amount of information you would be learning was the same. And the computer science component of it was basically exactly how it was taught.

They have a lot of material for computer science online. So I was lucky there. When do you have a did you track how many hours per day it took you to do the reading and the homework and the projects? Right. So I was working pretty intensely. I also write about learning more quickly and sort of efficient studying techniques.

So there's sort of a dual purpose in doing this. And I would say in the beginning, I was probably putting in about eight to 10 hours a day, five days a week. And then near to the end, it was probably more like six to eight hours a day. And I in the beginning, I did a couple classes over about like a week to 10 days per class.

But once I finished the first few classes, once I sort of established that, okay, I figured out the procedure for doing the classes, then I switched to doing three to four at a time. So I would do about a month or so with maybe four classes. So I'd be like January and I'd have four classes and it would be January and the first week of February would be those four classes.

And that there's a lot of research that shows that, you know, spacing and interleaving the practice you're having is better for long term memory outcomes, especially considering I was learning it under such short time constraints that became more important. So it's shown that it's probably superior to be taking multiple classes at once instead of one at a time?

That seems to be the research that I've found is that, well, the spacing effect, which is the idea that if you do not mass your practice, so the opposite of cramming, if you spend five hours, but you spend one hour a week versus five hours in one sitting, that's robustly shown to have a better long term memory performance.

So if you learn something over a week, you're much more likely to forget it than if you learn it over a year, even if you spend the same amount of hours studying it. So that's true. And also there is some research showing that interleaving, which is switching the actual tasks that you're learning, has some benefit for memory because possibly you have to sort of unload whatever you were learning out of your working memory and reload it.

And that sort of reloading it into your memory seems to make it better. That's another theory. So obviously doing it in one year in that compressed time frame probably hurt me a little bit in terms of long term comprehension over someone doing it in four years. But I think this was also mitigated a bit by these kinds of techniques as well.

And you got a lot more publicity doing it in one year than anything else. Well, there's constraints, right? Is my memory correct that you were actually offered a job after completing this by a computer firm of some kind? Right. So I'm not going to name the firm because the person who was working for there didn't want it to be public.

But he found me that there's a link to some Reddit post. And it was very interesting to me because the Reddit post got some popularity of me saying I finished it. And there were lots of comments of people saying, well, but he didn't get a degree. He didn't get an actual piece of paper.

So therefore, no employer would take him seriously. It was accomplished. It would be meaningless. And that is a fair critique. I would say that having official paperwork is better than not having paperwork. But what was interesting to me is that in the follow up comments, that in the comments as replies to those original comments, there were people, there were HR managers from tech companies that were saying, no, I don't know what you're talking about.

This is exactly the kind of person we want to hire. Someone who has sort of the initiative and intelligence to put together a computer science curriculum and finish it in a year. This is exactly who we want to hire. And I actually got a private email from someone who found that and he worked for a large tech firm, which I won't name.

And he was sort of feeling whether I'd be interested in interviewing to get a job opportunity. And, you know, I'm a writer. That's what I do for a living. And learning is sort of the vehicle by which I write about things. So computer science for me has always been something that informs my writing and also helps me run my business, but not necessarily something that I would work another full time job at.

So I did turn that offer for an interview down. But I thought it was interesting because it seemed to break the assumption everybody had that it would be impossible for people to take you seriously if you had this kind of experience. Did you blog your way through the project?

I did. So I not only was writing during the project, probably with a little less frequency than I'd like, but I also maintained a video journal, which every week or two I would make an update, sort of sometimes giving studying tips and sometimes talking about sort of the progress and the challenge.

And so anybody who wants can see that. And those were all done throughout the actual project because I felt like this kind of project is something that I wanted to show how I was thinking about and doing it while it was happening rather than just in retrospect, oh, yes, it went really well or it didn't go well.

So I felt definitely there was some pressure because, you know, I was saying I'm going to do this in one year and I hadn't done it yet. So there's obviously a lot of negative feedback for people who are waiting for you to fail. So I definitely felt some pressure to keep up with it.

Right. To me, that was what was the most interesting about it, because as I've thought about higher, so-called higher education, college, there are various reasons and uses of college throughout history, just like there's various reasons and uses of primary school and secondary school. But one of the, at least in our modern society, it seems to me like college is much more of a social sorting mechanism than anything else.

It's not necessarily based upon how much you learn, although this would vary in my mind, it would vary greatly from field of study to field of study. But it's largely a sorting mechanism. And essentially, especially in the world of employment as an employer, if you're looking for an employee, you're essentially transferring some of the work to a college administration process and passing process.

So you're saying that by the time, if you say, if you require a college degree for your job, you're essentially saying, I'm going to weed out all the people who just did the minimum of going to high school and graduating from high school. I'm going to take those people who are at least achievers enough to apply to a school, go through that process, get out of that school.

They learned something at that school because often it's not relevant how much what you actually learned is applied to your job. This would vary, I think, in things like mathematics, engineering, architecture. I mean, there are exceptions. But at least my observation, many times it doesn't matter what the field of study was.

So the employer is essentially just saying, we're going to let the college do this vetting process. And then if the prospective employee has gotten through it and has graduated, now we know it's at least this type of person who's able to go and get a college degree. The so the problem is how do you demonstrate knowledge?

And some fields, I think this comes easily. I would imagine that in let's say you had a field of video production, or you wanted to be like a director of movies or audio production or something like that, in the or drawing or architectural work in many in those types of scenarios, you can look at your portfolio can say, look, here's my portfolio.

In programming, I would imagine that if you can say, here's the portfolio of projects I've done, that's much more important than is the college degree. And kind of what I see is what's unique about what you've done. Self study has always been possible and probably more important than formalized study.

But now with the ability to quickly and easily communicate your progress, you can create a portfolio of work. And you can demonstrate with diary entries, video journals, screen flows, screen captures, projects, things like that, you can show the process of learning. And you can show the final product for an expert to review your computer program and say, is this well written?

Is this creatively expressed? It really allows people to manage their own image and to demonstrate that look, yes, I can, I don't have the certification from the provost of the university. But I can demonstrate to you that I have a comprehensive understanding of the issues involved. I think I think you've, you've brought up a really important issue.

Because I feel like in the current climate, like this is very new technology. And the job market, especially with respect to education, is very conservative, where we're still teaching people largely the way that Aristotle taught people, we sit in big classes and listen to lectures. And I don't think it's fair to say, well, right now is what I did the equivalent, is it a substitute for having a degree from MIT?

And I would say no, it's not. I don't think I don't think a reasonable person could say that. However, I don't think it needs to be I don't think that that needs to be the benchmark, it must succeed that if, if you were to do this, instead of going to college, and now you're worse off, therefore, you know, this the project's meaningless.

That's not really the point I'd like to make. Because I have another degree, I have a degree in business, that's the background that I have. And if I were to do this, this is something that supplements that official process. So I have this official degree from official institution that says that I'm at the very least college graduate material.

But then I have this other project, which is, which showcases different things, it signals different things about me, it shows that I have initiative, it shows that, you know, I'm good at learning things. And it shows whatever content was in the knowledge of whatever I learned from those computer science things.

And I think that what you're going to see is a lot more people who are not the people who are, I would say, the best market for the MIT challenge is not 18 year old high school graduates that don't want to go to college. I think the best market is 35 year olds that already have a degree in x, and they want to learn why but they can't quit their job, they don't have time to go back to school.

They can't do the things that they would want to do for that. But they learn that new subject. And these new tools are coming out that allows them to document it and keep track of it in this sort of portfolio way. And that is something that shows the person, okay, I'm applying for a new job in maybe a slightly different field that yeah, my formal education is this, my work experience is here.

But I've just done this, you know, this new learning experience learning this in this slightly different area. So I'm well equipped to, you know, navigate that change or navigate whatever promotion that I want to get. And so I think that really what we're looking at is seeing this is one of the tools in a whole sort of array of educational and training options you have for improving your job market opportunities or your career opportunities.

And so I don't really like to think of it as you know, if an 18 year old who skips out on college does this, and they have a harder time getting a job that it fails. I think that's the wrong way to look at it. Do you think I don't disagree with you?

Because sure, there, I can still see many. I think we're in a process of evolution as far as the college environment, and it's going to change, at least just my guess from observing it. I think it's going to change. And instead of being so generalized, it's once again going to be more specialized.

And instead of learning being gathered around a specific institution, learning is going to be gathered around those institutions who have a high concentration of experts in their field for the synergy of connection, or learning is going to be, you know, concentrated around a world class expert. When I think of something like I have an interest in the humanities, so I want to spend more time reading in myself in classic literature.

But when I think about, okay, I can just read it, but I need a group of people with which to engage with it, just because I can sit and read it and journal my thoughts, that doesn't replace gaining the experience from a world class master of classical literature who can teach me and who can ask me questions and cause me to think more deeply about what I'm reading.

But that interest of mine is not necessarily connected to anything economic, and I can see a way where that world class master can create around themselves a, essentially a school. And you mentioned Aristotle, almost in the way that they did, that you go and you seek out and say, I have an interest in this very niche topic, and so therefore I'm going to go and find, whether that's virtually or virtually and in person, or kind of a combination of the two, for actual learning, I don't think you can replace the in-person environment.

But so much of college is not based upon actual learning. It's about getting the degree, and it's about kind of getting this wide array of knowledge. And it seems to me, I guess the trend that I see is more of a customization. Instead of this idea of, if I just simply go to school and punch the ticket and get the degree, then everything's taken care of, there's more of a customization where more options are becoming available for people to explore.

So I want to push you on that point you made earlier about requiring interaction with a teacher or an expert or a master to facilitate learning. Because that to me seems, it seems like grad school often works that way, that you work with an expert, you're not just learning what's in the classes, you're sort of absorbing their worldview of how to think about scholarship and research and whatever the focus of your study is in grad school.

Now, I've heard this often applied as sort of a seemingly valid critique of what I was doing at the MIT Challenge, being that like, well, but you're learning on your own, right? You know, maybe that works for you, but a lot of people don't need that. I don't know what undergrad programs these people are going to, because I had very little interaction with any professors.

And I was in there for four years, and I feel like I went to a good school that had decent classroom sizes. So I don't know what fantasy these people are living in where you're getting hand coached by professors. I would be lucky if they would reply to an email briefly, when I was doing that and give two sentences of critique to a project that I worked on for two weeks.

So we're not talking about, if we're talking about grad school, or we're talking where you're working in a department where there's like six of you in a graduate program, yeah, I think you're probably right. There is a great deal of apprenticeship there. But if we're talking about replacing Calculus 1, there honestly, I don't think that there's any difference between doing it through watching the lectures, self-study.

Some of the new courses, these MOOCs now, have forums with TAs in them and other classmates. So I just think it's disingenuous to draw the distinction between what that's the fundamental distinction, because I've done a lot of these MIT classes and I can say, doing them, even though they were presumably "on my own", I thought that they were much better in terms of facilitating my education than a lot of classes that I went to in person when I was in university.

So I think that mastery and apprenticeship is very important. But I think that we are setting ourselves a little bit of an illusion if we think that that plays a really large factor in the typical undergraduate education, at least in North America. I 100% agree with you. Because that's exactly, if I had a son, I have a one-year-old son at the moment, if I had an 18-year-old son or an 18-year-old daughter, at the moment, based upon what I see, who knows where the world will be in 18 years.

But I would tell them, "Listen, you need to punch this college degree ticket as quickly and as cheaply as you possibly can. And that means do a ton of AP classes, do a ton of CLEP classes, do the rest of it online, total cost is going to be $4,000 or $5,000.

Punch a general studies college degree from an accredited university so that you just simply can check the box for all the things that require the college degree that, yes, this is done." Then, in concurrent with that or in addition to that, probably for a reasonably bright, I know lots of home-educated, bright young kids who have been able to finish that by the age of 18.

So maybe that's a year or two-year project, depends on how rigorous their preparation at an earlier age was. Then, set out the course of study for yourself in the same way that you've done and figure out what do you want to really focus on and master and design the education plan.

The problem I was trying to solve, that I'm trying to solve, is not throwing away the idea of having physical interaction. I'll give you an example from one of my self-learning projects. I'm interested in a subject called permaculture, which is essentially the idea of holistic ecological design for the needs of human living.

That includes a lot of agricultural work, a lot of ecological agriculture, a lot of sustainable design, certain things like that. So this is an interest of mine. I think I get more value from watching lectures. There's a man in this field who's one of the world leaders named Jeff Lawton.

He has a course that I've taken, which is, I don't know how many hours, it's hundreds of hours of video instruction, of video lecturing. I've gained a ton from that. But what I've recognized is that I reach a certain point at which I don't know what I don't know.

I need a master to understand what I don't know and to instruct me in what I actually need to focus on next. Also, with that specific topic, it's such a hands-on topic. It's different than maybe something like writing a piece of software. It's such a hands-on topic that I've recognized that if I were truly to become a master in this area, what I would need to do is to build this solid foundation through self-study, distance learning, video instruction, and book instruction, and then apprentice for specific periods of time, hopefully with other students, with one week, two weeks at a time with other students.

Then the masters in the field could say, and hopefully with different masters, those masters in the field can say, "Here's where you will really have a solid understanding, but you've kind of missed some basic concepts over here, or here's where you need to guide your perspective." And that's the role I see for a teacher in person, is to get that feedback about where you're strong and where you're weak.

What do you think? Oh, absolutely. I meant to say in my previous comment, I wasn't meaning to disparage actual apprenticeship master relationships. I think that those are very important. I think for the things that matter to me in my career, a lot of knowledge is network-based. I've learned, I would say, maybe more than half of the things that are important for my current career, I never learned it from reading something.

It was someone having a conversation with someone who knows more than me, who they can see the errors in my thinking, or they can see how my approach is not leading me on the right path. And they don't even need to tell me, just having that conversation allows me to discover it for myself.

And I think that's incredibly important, and that's important regardless of what your career is. So I think that it is very important to cultivate those relationships with people that you respect their thinking, and you can learn from them. I don't doubt that at all. I just maybe question whether the current undergraduate college environment does actually provide that.

It doesn't. It doesn't. For the vast majority of people, it doesn't. When you look at the reasons that people go to school and they send their kids to school, learning is in there, but it's often, I didn't go to college because I wanted to learn something. I went to college because I knew that I "needed a college degree," and I wanted the college experience, and I felt like it was what society expected of me.

And I didn't have the courage to go a different way, nor did I have the vision to go a different way. But that's changing in our society. People are waking up to it. I've always been weird. For a long time, I was in the minority about talking about, "Look, college is not the thing it was in our parents' generation." But now what I've been shocked at is just how widespread this thought and belief has come of the criticism that mainstream college has undergone.

And so I'm fascinated at how widespread it is and how quickly things are changing in the industry. Definitely. And I think you brought up a point earlier, which I think is very important, the signaling value of a college education, that often what employers are looking for is they're not really looking for anything particular that you learned in school, but they are looking for the category of people that could graduate from college, which is different, perhaps, than the category of people that were too lazy or unintelligent or for whatever reason they didn't do it.

And so that does mean that people who, maybe they could have done college, but they did something else, sometimes they get miscategorized, and that's unfortunate. But I do think that part of the difficulty, part of the thing that people don't realize when they're seeing it is that the more ubiquitous college education becomes, the more everybody gets a college degree, and especially with how expensive it is, the less meaningful it is.

And I think that means that doing things like radical self-education, doing these kinds of projects which distinguish you, particularly if you're like myself, if you already have some formal credentials in X, which maybe aren't extremely impressive on their own, but then you add to that this other thing that you've done, and that's unique, and that showcases, that puts you in a smaller category of people, then that's how you get ahead of the competition.

And I think that there is definitely an element of that. There's an element of people getting more and more college degrees, and the people that they want to have college degrees haven't changed, so it just means that you're having more and more competition. So let me ask you a question about how to actually design, what you learned from doing this and from talking and writing about how to design a program of personal study.

And I'll give you some areas of interest of mine that I've struggled to figure out how to design a system for myself, because I haven't been able to find the guide, and I haven't been able to find the resources yet that would help me to understand. I have an interest in, I'll give three things I have an interest in.

I have an interest in classical literature, theology, and law. And each of those things I would like to become more knowledgeable about the subject. I don't have any interest in working in any of those fields. It has nothing to do with economic motivation of trying to get a job, so I don't need to prove anything.

I just want to learn to try to make the world fit together, and I want to become a more well-rounded individual. But I don't know enough about any of those areas to actually design for myself the project and source the resources. So how would you advise somebody like me if I'm trying to put together a self-learning program in one of those areas?

How would I go about it? So I'll tell you what I did for the MIT challenge, because I think it's very relevant. And I want to stress that I believe that my task was harder than your task, because for me it wasn't enough to be, "Well, I want to learn a lot about computer science." It was, "No, I want to try to get this sort of almost unreasonable facsimile of the MIT education so that I can tell people that I'm making this facsimile of it." Whereas if I were just interested in computer science, it would have been a lot easier, because if I can't learn this specific class X, I could find a book about that and read that.

So what I would recommend, because this is how I started, is I would first find a university that you respect that teaches that topic. So if you've sort of come up in your research that, let's say, Cambridge does really good scholarship for theology, or Harvard, their classics program is really good, or something like that, then what I would do is I would try to figure out what is their undergraduate program look like for someone who majors in that?

What do they have to study? What are the things that are on that list? And some of those things are going to be general requirements, which you can eliminate, but you should have a core list of about maybe a dozen courses. And I think what you'll find is it depends on the specificity of the topic, but a lot of courses are the same in every program.

Like if you're doing engineering, you will always take calculus, you will always take differential equations, you will always take linear algebra, you will always take mechanics. Like there are certain courses that it doesn't matter which university you cover, they will teach that course. And that to me is a good key that, okay, this is a topic that's not a detail.

This is a core thing that anybody who is working in this field would have to have this knowledge. Whereas perhaps there's some electives, some sort of fancier classes, which someone who studied this may not have actually studied. So I would try to figure out, okay, what is in the curriculum and then what of that is core?

What is that, what is sort of the core mental disciplines that you need to have in order to sort of be equals with someone who studied that? And then what I would do is I would try to look online and there's a lot of resources, I actually even have a video explaining how to find some additional resources through MIT's OpenCourseWare, Harvard, Yale, these websites have not only courses online, but they have these semi-public course websites, which lists the textbooks they use and the reading lists and all of that material.

And I would go through and I would try to find those courses and I would figure out which book should I be reading, all of this material, because that will give you the skeleton of the actual curriculum you need. And I think that's part of the real difficulty in making a curriculum with this kind of breadth is that, like you said, you don't know when you're reading classics, whether you're reading to the depth that you need to be reading to be equal to someone who studied it.

You don't know whether, oh, I'm just reading the light sort of superficial stuff, I'm not reading the actual detailed pieces, or I'm not learning the particular kinds of mental tools that someone has learned in that discipline. And you can skip that problem by researching the curriculums online, figuring out what courses an actual student would take, trying to find those courses.

And even if it doesn't have full lectures, exams, assignments, whatever, you can at least look at what textbook they use and what readings they had, and then you just have to go to your library and look for an intro library alone if they don't have that particular book, or a university library if it's some specific documents, and just go through it and read it yourself.

And then at least you're going to be doing a first approximation covering what an actual student who studied classics in Cambridge actually was reading. In many fields, I know there are different schools of thought. So in economics, the question would be, am I going to study Chicago School of Economics or focus on Austrian economics?

Or if in the classics, I'm sure there's its own debate. Or maybe I think from reading your website, I think you're an atheist, I come from a Christian theistic perspective. So obviously, if we look at certain big questions, whether I'm going to study ethics or whether I'm going to study some aspects of life, there's going to be a different perspective depending on who the teachers are.

Do you have any thoughts around how, if you're a novice in a field of study, to actually sit down and understand which school you should focus on? So for example, if I take Chicago School of Economics, I'm going to have a very different perspective of life than if I study with the Mises Institute from their perspective of economics.

How would a beginner figure out what school to align themselves with? Well, it's an interesting question. I think a lot of these schools of thought, at least in—let me preface this—in a discipline that I would say is mature, that has some body of actual knowledge, which is more or less uncontroversial.

There are definitely fields where, you know, maybe literary critique or something like that, where there's no real resting point. Well, everybody agrees on this at least. Whereas economics, you know, there is a difference in the Austrian School of Thought or Keynesian or Chicago School, or these different figures and philosophies.

But if you do an intro economics class, that's going to be the same, regardless. It's probably even maybe until your fourth year of economics undergrad that now you're starting to get to a point where you're seeing a real clash of worldviews. And I would say any respectable institution would, to a certain extent, teach the controversy.

So if there is, you know, people who think macronomics is, you know, mostly monetary policy or mostly fiscal policy, that if you read an honest textbook, even if it is written by someone in that school of thought, they will present both viewpoints. And it will only be really until you're getting into a quite advanced area where you're kind of developing a paradigm that's around, this is the right way of thinking of it, and those other ways are wrong.

And so I think that probably viewpoint or school of thought is less important than most people think, at least if we're talking about a domain of interest where there is kind of some foundation for the scholarship. There is some kind of, okay, well, we do agree, we have a consensus on this, and then we're arguing about some higher level detail.

So, you know, Keynes, Hayek, and Friedman, they all agree that like supply and demand exists. Like, that's not into question. That's not something that we're, you know, it's not like there's some other school of economics that doesn't use supply and demand, but they use some other concept or some other model.

So if you're learning it, I think that you can go a long way before you're into the zone where schools of thought really are very important. And by then, you should have enough sophistication within the topic that you would at least understand what the schools of thought are. So if I'm studying philosophy, then it's going to be a while before I'm really pushed into, okay, should I be studying analytic philosophy or continental philosophy or something like that, right?

Right. You recently gave yourself another learning project, which you titled "The Year Without English." What was that, and what did you learn from that experience? Right, so year after the MIT challenge, I started this new project with actually a friend of mine. So this was a partner project. It wasn't me doing it alone.

And this friend of mine, we had talked a long time about traveling. He was going to go off and do his master's, and it was a good opportunity for that. And somehow the idea of us traveling and learning languages came up, because I'd learned French before I lived in France, and I really found living in France through French, through the language, being just such a completely different experience.

And this idea came up of, well, what if you went to four different countries side by side, three months each, and the goal would be to, as much as possible, not speak in English. So we wouldn't speak in English to each other. We wouldn't speak in English to anybody we met.

We would just be speaking in this language that we're learning. How would that change the experience of travel? How would that change our ability to understand these cultures and these very different worldviews? And that's what we did. So we went to Spain for three months, then Brazil, China, and then finally Korea.

And China and Korea were a little bit harder to maintain the no English rule. I did pretty good in China. My friends struggled more than I did. And in Korea, we both struggled with not speaking English. We definitely had some moments where we spoke some English. But for the most part, it was basically a year without English.

And it was through this lens of every place that we go to, we're trying to interact just in that language of the country. And I think it gives a very unique perspective on travel that maybe you wouldn't get if you were just hanging out with other tourists or other people who speak English.

Did you take any kind of external tests or exams in order to kind of get a gauge of your proficiency after three months in each place? Right. Well, originally, the plan was not to do tests. Originally, I discussed it with my friend. Because doing a test, it is very different, in my opinion, than social immersion.

Because writing a written paper test requires different skills. And we didn't want it to morph into a studying activity where now we're not trying to interact with the local culture and experience it that way. We're trying to pass an exam. So I originally, I was not going to do it.

But then when I was in China, I felt confident enough that no, you know, I put in a lot of effort here, I do want to know sort of where my place is on sort of a more formal scale. So for Chinese, which would be, I would say, given the difficulty of the language and the time constraints, the one that I put the most effort into, I did write an exam.

The Chinese exams for foreigners are divided into six levels. And so I wrote and passed level four, which would be, according to them, an upper intermediate. That's great. I think that in some ways, it's funny, I'm pretty much passionately anti-tests as far as the way that they're often done in our society.

But they are useful for, I think, for a mature learner who understands what they're trying to do to gauge their progress. I remember years ago when I took a Spanish exam, and they, I don't remember the level now, but they gave me an advanced fluency level. And I thought, oh, wow.

Okay. So now when people ask me, are you fluent? I can say, yes, indeed, I am. I passed this external measuring benchmark that shows me that at least I can answer that in an honest way. Because I know how much I don't know and how much I don't understand and how much work I need to do.

But at least it gives me a little bit of confidence that at least by somebody's external standard, I have a way of measuring my progress. Oh, I completely agree. And if I had gone back, I probably would have done another one for Spanish, because I probably, I don't know exactly what my level would be for Spanish, but it would be, in terms of actual proficiency, my Spanish is better than my Chinese, but Chinese is a lot more difficult.

But I feel like part of the reason, it was maybe a little bit of an error not to do the exam for Spanish, but Portuguese and Korean, I wasn't studying as intensely. But the thing is, another advantage is that if you have a test, then for someone who doesn't actually speak that language, they can get a reasonable assessment of what you're doing.

Because the other way we were documenting it was through making a lot of video and a lot of recordings. But the problem is that if you don't actually speak that language, pretty much anything sounds fluent. Whereas you hear someone speaking English and their English is not very good, you know immediately because you speak English well.

Whereas if you didn't speak English, then just listening to someone seem to speak English is almost the same thing, right? Yeah, absolutely. Right. How do you make a living? So, after I graduated from business school, at that point, the income from my blog and my website was enough to go full-time.

And I've been full-time-ish ever since, although I've had these sort of projects that become my full-time work while I'm running the business. And basically, the business I have is that I sell eBooks and courses, mostly related to personal productivity and teaching people how to learn better. So, after I did the MIT challenge, I have a program called Learn More, Study Less, which is a condensed version of a lot of studying tactics that I've learned for how to learn things better, how to remember things better, how to take notes better, that kind of thing.

And I offer those to the people who read my blog, and that's enough to support me. But you were actually able to set that up while you were in college? Yeah. I was always, when I was starting, I was always very interested in business and especially this sort of new online entrepreneurship.

And so, even when I was getting into blogging, I was leaning in that direction. I wasn't one of these people that was just writing and then, "Oh, I just accidentally made a business out of it." That definitely didn't happen that way. But I did, when I was in university, I was writing and I was experimenting with different models for how I could get paid for that.

And I don't really like ads. I don't really like making money as commission off of products that maybe aren't my own because it just depends on how much I want to recommend them. And those were sort of the dominant strategies when I got started. And then more recently, people have been offering their own courses.

And I really, that resonates with me because I feel like that's the purest expression of what I'm doing. So, if you like the blog, then you'll probably like what I have to say in more detail and with more sophistication on those topics. That's neat. I wish, one of the things that I, I don't want to say regret because that implies, I don't really regret it.

But looking back now, it seems like I wish I'd had the foresight. I spent a lot of time in working to pay, excuse me, in college to pay for college. And looking back on it now, I wish I'd used that time where instead of working so that I could pay for classes, I wish I'd spent more of that time investing into my own business.

And I always had ideas about business, but I was so busy working jobs to earn money to pay for school so that I could go and get a job. I feel like I wound up, you know, six, five, six, seven years behind what I could have done if I'd had a different vision at the time.

And it sounds like, I think it's neat that you came out with an ability to at least make a starting income off of your online activities. I don't, I don't deny that in any of my ratings because when I look at the sort of, you know, there's the prior probability when you're going into something like this.

And, and I remember looking at, you know, okay, what is the amount of blogs that are out there? And then like how many of those have this sort of threshold audience to be making an income? And at least when I was getting started with this, which was eight years ago, that was a vanishingly small number.

So I don't think that what I did was necessarily the most financially prudent thing, but I do think that it did work out in my case. And I do have to say this because I know a lot of people that, you know, especially people I know personally, because when you know someone personally, the example's a little more salient, who see what I'm doing with blogging and stuff online and they're like, yeah, I should be doing that too.

And I say, well, that's great. But from the moment I had the idea to the moment I was doing it full time was eight years. So if you're not willing to put in eight years, it's maybe not something you should even really think about too much because freelance income, for example, is not nearly as glamorous, but you can, you know, get a decent income doing freelance work.

Maybe not writing, writing is a little bit harder to do freelance right now, but for a lot of skills you can do go from zero to decent freelance income in, you know, six months to a year, depending on the skill that you have. So certainly not eight and certainly not eight with a vanishingly small probability of success.

Right. One benefit, I think there are other benefits in addition to income though, one of which is especially salient to me now. I started this show full time about four months ago. And so prior to, thank you. And the growth has been great, but, but switching to this side of the, instead of being a consumer to actually being a producer of, of online content.

One thing I've learned is the VAT that I never appreciated before is the value of an online presence. And I always knew it intellectually, but because I previously worked behind the rules of the financial services industry where I wasn't able to freely publish and publicize my ideas and thoughts, I didn't, I just kind of ignored it and figured, well, I'll get to it when I can.

But now in the process of finding and vetting guests, if you don't have an online presence, you don't have an ability to reach a much greater, broader exposure than you're hurting yourself if you don't have an online presence. Oh, I completely agree. So I want to add to that because I mentioned with you right now, my business model, which is that doing this, these courses and eBooks, which is very good because I have a lot of control.

But the interesting thing is that I think, which is worth stating is that if you have an online presence, particularly if you have a larger online presence, so if your readership for, if you have a particularly niche topic that is relevant to your professional ambitions, then, you know, in the thousands, or if you have a more broad, sort of less professionally oriented website, like my own, maybe in the tens of thousands, the amount of opportunities that people will send in your inbox every single day is just astounding.

And I'm, I think about, you know, when I was getting started with this, that I often don't even read emails that would have been like the highlight of my week eight years ago. So I know that having an online presence, especially having a blog where you are publishing your thinking on something, how you think about the world and your worldview is very powerful because first of all, most people are too lazy to do that, or they're not, they don't have enough interesting ideas to do that.

But if you are someone that is, if you do have a lot of interesting ideas, you do read a lot of books, you do want to share that with people, how you think about things, and you do have the discipline to actually execute that on a regular basis, then not only are you in a minority there, but you're also, it's also functions as a resume.

So anybody who comes and sees your website, will know whether they resonate with what you're talking about. And if they do resonate with what you're talking about, it's so much more powerful, I think, than, you know, just whatever your cover letter is. And we were talking about the MIT challenge.

And someone said, well, yes, but you like have a large blog. And so that's also part of the reason that you were going to get exposure on Reddit. And also, you know, people might offer you a job opportunity. And I say, yes, that's, that's exactly the case that, you know, me blogging about it and building an audience around what I was doing was huge for, for increasing exposure to the ideas, but also to put me in contact with people that could facilitate those goals.

I've received more business opportunities in the last four months than I could have believed. And it's amazing to me how many opportunities and you don't need the idea that everyone is going to go out and create a blog with 400,000 readers and sit back and make money just from their writing, I think it's silly.

Some people can't, and that's great for those, but just, but, but having one person, the right person read and notice your work is so valuable. And the compound effect over time, when I think of the writers and podcasters, because I'm in the audio space, but when I think of the people whose ideas and thoughts I've consumed over the years, how those ideas and thoughts have stayed with me for years, and now I'm in a situation where I'm public, you know, I'm publicizing their ideas and I always give them credit.

Well, I know for a fact people go, because I mentioned their work, people go and check them out. People go and buy their books and people go and consume their content. And there is a compound effect that from every success, like you said, eight years for you, I've not found a successful content publisher who hasn't had that same growth curve.

Definitely. There's a huge amount of exponential, like there's an exponential factor to the growth there that the thing is about having an online presence where you are producing content. So as opposed to having like a social media profile where I guess Twitter and Facebook, you can be writing status updates, which can be perceived as content, although it's a little bit lower entry barrier.

But if you have a blog or a podcast or a YouTube channel, you know, something that requires a little bit of effort to maintain regularly. One of the advantages is that it extends your networking power so greatly because it is always in the background networking on behalf of you.

It's always making new connections, making new friends that you don't have to even interact with directly. And so I think that's really powerful. And for a lot of people, I think especially if you are wanting to go for superstar status in your career, that you're not just wanting to go for, you know, an okay job at a middle level tier, you want to be in the elite, then I think having a blog where you publish your thoughts is really powerful, even if it's just once a week, a short post once a week is really powerful because it just networks for you behalf in the background at all times.

And I think that's, you know, it doesn't happen in one year. It takes about maybe, probably if you're not taking it super seriously, maybe a decade. But that's a decade where this sort of vehicle is just working for you in the background, generating opportunities. The last question I want to ask you is about reading.

I would love to ask you about learning, but you have an entire book on it. I don't know how you would summarize a book into a few minutes. I think I'm going to buy your book and read it because at least from the table of contents, it looks very interesting to me.

But I want to ask you about rapid reading. I think I read pretty quickly, but I've never formally, I mean, I read a lot and I read quickly. I haven't tested it to see how fast I can comprehend, but I've never formally studied speed reading. And I think that you have.

Do you have some lessons, experiences, learnings and thoughts that you could share on the topic of reading more quickly? So you've caught me at an interesting time, actually, because I'm just in the process of doing a major research piece, updating my thoughts on speed reading and gathering the relevant sort of science and that kind of thing.

And I feel like there is some benefit in what I'll call intelligent skimming and scanning. So being able to know what you're looking for in a target document, approach it in a focused way and not necessarily just read everything at the same speed because you have to just get every single piece of information.

So I do think that there's some benefit of that. And that's largely how I've been from the perspective that I've been teaching speed reading methods in my courses. But my original work on speed reading, I think there is a sort of idea that everybody wants to read faster. And I think most of my research has turned up the idea that you can make some speed gains, but certainly not when people say things like 20,000 words a minute or you can flip through it like a phone book.

That just doesn't square up with the scientific understanding of how people read and how we actually process things on a physical level. But I do think that there's a lot of gains that can be made by increasing fluency. So fluency means your ability to quickly understand sort of the basic concepts in a document.

So if you're reading a journal article in psychology and they're using a lot of jargon words that you don't understand, that's going to slow you down. Not only is it going to slow you down, it's going to make it harder for you to skim. It's going to make it harder for you to detect, is this something worth reading or not worth reading?

And I've recently been shifting a lot more to what I call active reading, which is this idea of improving fluency, improving the ability to detect what's important in a document and what's not important and always be focused on that. And I think that if you're good at that, that can be a good substitute to speed reading.

If you're good at the ability to sort of understand the basic concepts in your field, and if you don't understand them, have a systematic process for learning them quickly. And that allows you to process a lot more information. And when I look at people who process just huge amounts of information, this seems to be the way that they're doing it.

Speed reading techniques are less popular amongst the sort of elite rank of information processors. It seems to be more a case where people have really high degrees of fluency, so they can take a book, understand where it's coming from, either read what's important for them in a short period of time, or if they do go through and read everything, they're not getting slowed down by some of the ideas.

They're able to quickly process it and put it in the right framework. That's super helpful to me, because I've never, I haven't taken tests, but from, so I can't say I read at such and such rate, but I feel like my reading rate changes depending on the material. I can read an 800 or 1000 page Tom Clancy novel in a day on vacation, a day or two, just because it's just pure fluff.

I'm just absorbing the story, and I can go through that very quickly. I'm very fluent with financial concepts, so I can read a mainstream personal finance book, and by read I mean figure out what the book is about and what it's saying. I can read a mainstream personal finance book in 15 minutes at Barnes & Noble, because I just look at it and say, "Okay, this, got it, yeah, skim, it's heading, okay, I see the point, got it, I figured out what he's saying." But if I sit down with a financial journal article, or if I sit down with something that's meaty, I do it with a highlighter and a pen, and I re-read, and I go through, and if I sit down with something in a new field, and I have to figure out like, "What's this?

I don't know this word. What is this word?" and I'm trying to figure out, and what's the context here? And so I often look at the, never having formally studied, I look at the books, and I was like, "I don't need to know how to put a pen on a paper and read fast, because I can do that." But sometimes if the information is incredibly dense, I don't want to read fast.

I need to highlight and underline and do a calculation and challenge something. So it helps me feel better about myself and my learning ability, if you're saying that's what other people have found. Well, I think so. And I think, like my sort of analogy to draw is that even though English is more or less one language, there's a relationship between how you would learn to read a foreign language.

So you mentioned that you have a decent Spanish ability, but I imagine your Spanish ability is less than your English ability. And so if I were to give you a Spanish text, now you said you were at NAD's Flitzy, so I don't really know whether reading Spanish is also a breeze for you, but if I were to give you a book in Spanish, it would probably take you longer.

Maybe you'd understand it, but it would take you longer because you'd pause more at some words familiar to you. You'd be like, "Oh yeah, what does that mean again?" And I do this too, so I'm saying the same thing. And use that analogy within English. So use that to, "Okay, I'm reading these financial documents." It's a little bit like reading Spanish, that they're using words, they're using sentence structures, they're using patterns of dialogue and argument that are not familiar with you.

And so it requires more of your working memory to process. You're more likely to go into dead ends of thinking, thinking that they were talking about this, but they're actually talking about that. Or you're unable to get a sufficiently vivid mental picture, so they'll be talking about some concept and you are on some level understanding everything, but not vividly.

They're just talking about abstractions. And the more fluency you gain with that, so the more you break those concepts down and you understand it, the faster you can read those documents, just like you can read the personal finance books. Has anybody talked about the connection between memorizing information versus not?

Because I know for me, I made a decision. I don't have to try to memorize stuff because oftentimes I would slow down to try to memorize stuff and I realized, "This is hurting me. I'm an adult. I don't need to regurgitate something on a stupid test to show that I memorized this number.

All I need to know is where to find the information." And so I just completely quit memorizing information and just focused on, "Okay, here I recognize this is... So I look, here's the chart. I know what the chart's saying. I don't need to try to memorize anything. I just need to remember, oh, if I ever need that chart and I ever, ever need that information, there's a quick search function." And I feel like this is a skill, to me, that was helpful.

And in a world where you have the almighty Google at your arm's length at all times, I feel like this is a skill that we need to learn and teach, that it's not about the recall of information. Information is immediately accessible to all of us, but it's about the organization and the synthesis and the conceptual framework of information.

Is there anything in the research on that? So that's very interesting, too, because I have exactly the same perspective you did, both with the research I've done and without it. One of the things that was interesting to me in doing more research on how learning works is that memory is important, that when you say someone, it's just about how to be able to reason between things and not have a lot of knowledge.

They actually, if you look at experts on pretty much any topic, they have huge volumes of factual information about those topics. So memory is important, but I think that what you are saying about it is right, that it's not about shallowly memorizing lists of facts the way that we had to do in school for tests.

That's not really the way of doing it. What I like to think of it is that if you read something and you really understand it, then you're probably going to remember it a lot better. You're going to remember a lot of the details a lot better than if you didn't understand it.

And so what I try to emphasize in my courses and in my writing is performing those self-checks on your understanding, performing those self-checks so that you're not just reading something not in your head, but you wouldn't be able to explain it to another person. You wouldn't be able to follow that up and test yourself on that.

So what I recommend in my courses, so if you're going to take notes on a book, you mentioned highlighting as an example, and highlighting is probably not the most effective way to read a book because you can highlight without really understanding. Whereas if you had to read a page and you had to either out loud or on a notebook paraphrase what was the main point of this page and you had to summarize and paraphrase it, if you had to do that, then that requires a certain level of understanding.

And I think that if you are doing that, then as a result, you're going to be thinking about the material more deeply. You're going to remember it and thus you're going to have the same effect. You're going to have a lot of factual knowledge and memory to build that expertise, but you're not going to have it in a shallow, unconnected way, which is sort of how they encourage people to do it in school sometimes.

Super interesting to me. I'll look forward, if you're publishing it, I'll look forward to reading what you write when you synthesize your research on it. Yeah, yeah. Anything else that you would like to mention? Take a moment and mention anything else that you'd like to mention as we close and make sure to plug your books and mention what they're about.

So, sure, sure. Check them out. Well, yeah, if anyone wants to check out my blog, like I do have books, I do have courses, but I highly recommend that people just go to scottiech young.com/blog and I have tons of articles there. There's also a free newsletter that just basically just once every two weeks I send out some of my more recent articles.

And if you sign up for that, I also give a copy of a smaller rapid learning ebook. So this is a smaller free ebook that I give out to people who join the newsletter, which explains some of the kinds of stuff that we're talking about here, how to learn more quickly.

And I also include a list, like sort of a condensed digest, which is basically the best writing I have on various topics. So if you did enjoy this conversation, you did sit through however long this podcast was and thought it was interesting, go to scottiechyoung.com and get that because I honestly, I don't try to sell anybody anything unless they're completely convinced about all the free material I have.

And I have over a thousand articles on the website. So I really just, I want people to benefit from this kind of information. It's fantastic. Scott, thanks so much for coming on the show today. I appreciate it. No problem. Thanks for having me. Now, here's my question for you.

What is your plan for your education this next year? What is it that you would like to study? What are you going to focus on? Many times people this time of year would like to set out some resolutions for themselves for next year, and that's great. But any resolution that you set or any goal that you have personally needs to be accompanied by a few things.

One of those things is a plan of education. It also needs to be accompanied with a plan of action. But one thing is a plan of education. So I would encourage you to do something with the content of today's show. Think about what you're interested in learning and try to sketch out at least a rough outline of how you're going to approach that subject.

I've got a few areas that I'm focusing on for this next year. Some of them are business related, some of them are not. All of them, however, require me to step up my level of education. And in a world where information is increasing dramatically, exponentially every single day, we need to learn and develop and practice the skills of being able to deal with that information, pulling out what's useful to us, discarding what's not useful in order to build knowledge and wisdom over time.

So I hope the content of this show today was helpful for you. That's it for today's show. I thank you guys so much for listening. If you'd like to get in touch with me, feel free to email me joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com, twitter @radicalpf, and facebook.com/radicalpersonalfinance. Thank you for those of you who've been joining the membership program.

I appreciate each and every one of you. I am in the process of revamping that, working on some behind the scenes content, working on some technical stuff. That's my major focus. I would encourage you, I've decided, I mentioned this briefly on yesterday's show right at the end as I was running out of time.

If you're interested in joining that program, I think I'm going to be adjusting a few things. And because I have so much more behind the scenes content planned, and I'm also going to expand the ways that you can support the show, that I'm going to raise the price on that membership program.

But I am of course, assuming I can get the technology squared away, which I will, I'm going to give special attention and accommodation to my founding members. Those of you who have signed up at the beginning here with really nothing behind the paywall. So I'm going to be raising the price on the irregulars program and building out the content.

I'll be building out the content first before I raise the price to make sure it's worth it. But if you are interested in supporting the show, that is the way that I have designed for you to do so. And it may be in your best interest. If you're interested in good deals, it may be in your best interest to join now.

So thank you for considering that. I hope you all are having an awesome December here. I am going to be here for the next few days, and then I'm going to be shutting the show down for two weeks. I will be releasing some interview shows during the week of Christmas and the week of New Year's.

So I plan to do that and release some interview shows for those. Tomorrow I'll be back with a show on some end of year business and tax and investment planning ideas. Some things that you can do here at the end of the year to square away and lower your tax bill when you're doing taxes next year.

So stay tuned for that. Thursday will be an interview with Jim Rawls. Friday will be your Q&A. Call in those questions on the voicemail line. I love to get the questions on the phone. I give those priority over email questions. So if you have a question for me, go to the website.

You can pull it up on your telephone or on your computer. Leave me a voicemail, and I will do my best to answer it on a Friday Q&A show. I love doing those shows, and I know many of you really enjoy listening to them. I hope you like that kind of variety.

Thank you guys, each one of you, for listening. I really value you. Have a great day. Thank you for listening to today's show. This show is intended to provide entertainment, education, and financial enlightenment. Your situation is unique, and I cannot deliver any actionable advice without knowing anything about you.

This show is not, and is not intended, to be any form of financial advice. Please, develop a team of professional advisors who you find to be caring, competent, and trustworthy, and consult them because they are the ones who can understand your specific needs, your specific goals, and provide specific answers to your questions.

Hold them accountable for your results. I've done my absolute best to be clear and accurate in today's show, but I'm one person, and I make mistakes. If you spot a mistake in something I've said, please come by the show page and comment so we can all learn together. Until tomorrow, thanks for being here.

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