Ben Nelson, founder of the Minerva Project, talks to Aldo about the meaning of innovation and the importance of purpose-driven reform in education. He emphasizes the need for institutions to have a clear mission and values that guide decision-making. Nelson explains the selectivity of Minerva University and its focus on nurturing critical wisdom for the sake of the world. He highlights the interconnectedness of society and the need for leaders with integrity to make responsible decisions in the age of AI. Nelson calls for a denouncement of the current educational system and a shift towards systematic thinking and ethical frameworks.<br /> <br /> Takeaways <ul> <li>Innovation should be driven by purpose and outcome, not just for the sake of being innovative.</li> <li>Reform can be more effective than disruption when it comes to improving institutions.</li> <li>Education should focus on nurturing critical wisdom and preparing individuals to make decisions of consequence.</li> <li>The current educational system needs to be denounced and replaced with a value system that prioritizes systematic thinking and ethical frameworks.</li> </ul> You can find more about the Minerva Project here: <a href="https://www.minervaproject.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://www.minervaproject.com</a><br /> Read more about Minerva University here: <a href="https://www.minerva.edu/">https://www.minerva.edu/</a> Big thank you to our sponsors: <ul> <li>The Code Zone: <a href="https://bit.ly/3UlspmU" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://bit.ly/3UlspmU</a></li> <li>Cold Case Inc (use the code MESSY and get an exclusive 15% discount): <a href="https://bit.ly/3HN75PD" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://bit.ly/3HN75PD</a></li> <li>Riverside (get a 20% discount by signing up via this link): <a href="https://bit.ly/3HCU4IC" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://bit.ly/3HCU4IC</a></li> </ul>
Ben Nelson, founder of the Minerva Project, talks to Aldo about the meaning of innovation and the importance of purpose-driven reform in education. He emphasizes the need for institutions to have a clear mission and values that guide decision-making. Nelson explains the selectivity of Minerva University and its focus on nurturing critical wisdom for the sake of the world. He highlights the interconnectedness of society and the need for leaders with integrity to make responsible decisions in the age of AI. Nelson calls for a denouncement of the current educational system and a shift towards systematic thinking and ethical frameworks. Takeaways
Aldo de Pape (00:04.142)
Yes, and we are here at the World Innovation Summit for Education in Qatar, in Doha, in a very exciting building. And we've just had... We started with the event. There was a beautiful plenary, as well as great speakers, a great line -up, and I have the great privilege of sitting across from a great speaker, also a recurring guest to the World Innovation Summit for Education.
Ben Nelson, very warm welcome to you. Thank you for having me. Ben, you have a very intriguing profile because you started your journey as a tech founder, I believe, of a company called Snapfish, if I have it correctly, and then you went into education, but not a little, majorly, majorly, with the Minerva project. That in and of itself should be two interviews, I think, that specific journey. But one of the first questions I had when I kind of...
was thinking about you, I wanted to ask you, and I hope you don't mind that I start there, but what does innovation mean for you? Oh, that's a good question. We actually have one of our core values at Minerva is around meaningful innovation. And innovation is a word that's thrown around all too often. In fact, Philippin, who is a venture capitalist, he was the CEO, founder of Evernote.
You used to say that innovation in an organization is inversely proportional to how much the organization uses the word. And that the more you talk about innovation, the less innovative you are. Innovation to me actually means where an individual organization look at a problem or situation and think about not what they can do with whatever they have available to them.
to address it or to participate in the conversation. But instead, think about an ideal state and then figure out what are the components that are necessary to get to that ideal state. And so innovation is really driven by purpose and outcome. And to me, that's where at least meaningful innovation comes from, as opposed to, oh, I do something.
Aldo de Pape (02:29.198)
offline I will do the same thing online. I don't find that particularly annoying. Yeah, I agree with you that it's often used as a placeholder almost, like, oh it's innovative and then you can ask why. Right, exactly. Does it always have to be disruptive? No, in fact when I was starting Minerva, of course people thought, oh you're going to start the world's greatest university, disruptive, disruptive. I said no, I'm not a disruptor, I'm a reformer.
The theory of disruption means that the destructor wants the status quo to be obliterated. The destructor says the status quo is not working and it needs to be swept aside, it needs to be disrupted, and a new category has to come in and replace it. A reformer says...
wait, there's some value in the existing infrastructure. There's a lot of wrong things in the existing infrastructure. But the key is to actually reform the institutions that are participating as opposed to abandon them and replace them. And so you don't have to be disruptive to the individual. It's an interesting one because, you know,
when you said reform, and for some reason I went to politics, which I shouldn't do, because that's a snake pit in and of itself. But it's a good analogy. Religion is another good analogy. But I think often in politics people say either we accept it as it is and we try to do the work to make it better. Everyone's acknowledging the situation is not ideal, but people want to reform it. And then there are those in politics who say, well, we're going to throw it all out.
and start again, which is often the populist discourse. Exactly. And that to me, in many ways, the disruption crowd is all too quick to throw out the good with the bad. And there are not a lot of institutions in this world that are purely evil. Certainly very few that have mal intent. Sometimes they do some very bad things, but usually it's not because they want to.
Aldo de Pape (04:53.134)
It's rarely because the individuals within that organization have bad intent. Especially when you look at education. Most people in education have very noble goals. Now, the fact that the sector is ineffective, the fact that it causes a lot of harm, that it causes a lot of societal stagnation as opposed to mobility. These are all real problems. But it's rarely because of the intent of the players. It's more because...
because the system is sclerotic and doesn't work well. That also brings me, we learn so much from execution, right? So we start somewhere, we have the intent, as you say, and then once we start doing it, when we start building, we discover certain things that we weren't aware of when we set out our mission statement, so to say. I call that life, but it happens often in entrepreneurship.
Well, and it's also because people rarely enter an enterprise thinking about it systematically. They come at things with very simplistic perspectives. And one of the unique things about Minerva is if you were to talk to me about Minerva 12 years ago, I didn't have a single employee, I didn't have a dime of funding, I had nothing. It was a figment of my imagination.
I can describe to you Minerva as it is today with 90 % accuracy. We had, or I had developed an extremely detailed thought through plan and then executed to that plan. That's extremely bizarre when it comes because most entrepreneurs, in fact most institutions that already exist, they don't understand purpose. They don't really have a mission that inspires them and gets them to do what they do every day.
almost no university president that I've ever met.
Aldo de Pape (06:51.566)
thinks about every decision that he or she has to make using the university's mission as the litmus test. In fact, I've never encountered a university president who says, oh, our mission is X. Oh boy, I'm about to make a decision that's contrary to the mission. We're not going to do that. That thinking is absent in higher education. It's also absent in a lot of entrepreneurs, where mission statements, values, there things that are put on a wall, kind of ignored.
Checking a box. And I find that when you actually live with purpose and when you design an organization with purpose, you refer back to that, those guiding principles, that core North Star over and over again. And it actually enables you to, you know, whether for good or bad, but it enables you to stick to a plan, right? And to execute on that.
And it's incredibly liberating in the sense that it's effective. One of the things that I looked at when I was doing a little research on you is of course your university and kind of how everything is going and growing. And then one of the things that I read is like if you were to Google, it talks right away about the acceptance rate.
Yeah. And it basically says that Minerva University is a very hard university to get into. And I just wanted to talk about, because for obvious reasons, I think you want to work with people whose intentions are good and all of that. What's the idea behind that? Going also back to the mission statement. Absolutely. So there are a couple of elements to that. Element number one is...
And if you think about what Minerva's mission is, our mission is to nurture critical wisdom for the sake of the world. So that's very important because we don't nurture critical wisdom for the sake of individuals. We're not in the job of picking winners and losers. We're in the job of amplification. When somebody is fortified with wisdom, and they're going to make, and they have high potential,
Aldo de Pape (09:16.238)
they're going to make decisions of consequence. The decision of consequence is a decision that impacts the lives of others more than it impacts your own life. So if you think about people, for example, CEOs, politicians, people that have the lives of others that are dependent on their decisions, if they make great decisions or terrible decisions, for them it's actually irrelevant.
A CEO that makes a series of terrible decisions, gets a giant golden parachute, makes a ton of money, and then goes and runs some other company. A politician that makes a ton of mistakes gets maybe elected out of office and then goes consulting and makes a hundred times what he made as a politician. So the incentive structures that we have in society are massively unaccountable. And so you have to fortify...
these individuals with the ability to think systematically. Now that's not an easy process. That's incredibly difficult, right, to actually rewire the way that your neurons are firing, to have you understand how to think systematically, to have you be able to be tested through extraordinarily difficult times, such that when you're called upon to make a decision of consequence, to make a decision that has real world vast implications,
you're going to be able to have the presence of mind, the ability to think about it with wisdom as opposed to via emotion. There are not that many people in the world that are ready for that kind of thing. And if you design a program correctly for those individuals, you're going to design a program that will strain them, that will stress them, that will help them grow.
at extraordinarily high speeds. And so part of selectivity is making sure that an individual that comes into the program is ready for this program, will thrive in this program, not for their sake, but for the sake of the people who will be impacted by their decisions. So that's aspect number one. Aspect number two, Minerva University was built and is now a beacon.
Aldo de Pape (11:42.766)
It is the first university launched since the 19th century to have garnered a number one global ranking ever. And we've done that now two years in a row. It's amazing. It is an institution that other institutions look up to that is there to begin a reform movement, to reform the curricular approaches, the pedagogical approaches, the assessment approaches.
that will enable other institutions to teach their students to be wise in maybe not as high stakes as mid -ever university, but some will. Some will be every bit as selective, every bit as rigorous as mid -ever university. Others will serve different populations with different goals, but with the same goal of being able to graduate systematic thinkers. In a higher education, people only follow leaders, whether we like it or not.
You can build an amazing community college which has great outcomes for its students. The community college next door will not care. They will not do. But if Harvard or Stanford decide to open a Leprechaun studies department, every university on the planet is going to study Leprechauns. For no reason except that the leaders are doing. Is that in every culture? It's global. It's absolutely global. And sadly.
It's global and focused on elite Anglo institutions. It's what Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, Stanford, Yale do that every university on the planet follows like, you know, as if they were trying to play the same game. Well, guess what? You're never going to beat those institutions at their own game. They have hundreds of years built brands, research infrastructure, giant endowments. You cannot.
play that game and win. What you can do is leapfrog. And that's what we did at Minerva and this is what we're enabling other institutions to do. Institutions should follow leaders. They should follow quality. But the kind of quality that elite institutions produce is not educational quality. It's quality of research, it's quality of wealth and prestige and things like that. Actually the academic programs of these institutions is quite bad. And so what we've done...
Aldo de Pape (14:07.214)
we've established a branded institution that is branded in many of the same ways, highly selective, great outcomes, et cetera, but where the value is attributed to the actual curriculum, the actual pedagogy, the value added in the educational process. That is a leader that is worth following. It sounds, I have too many questions, which we're not going to be able to get into this half hour. Again, you know.
two more interviews to get it all out. But you're describing integrity. Is that correct? You harness integrity to a certain level. Is that something? Absolutely. It's not just integrity. It's being true to a set of first principles. Okay. Yeah. Because... Continuously. That's right. Whatever test comes in. Exactly. For us, you know, one of my favorite studies...
did a survey of library books in American universities that are overdue. So the person who checked out the books was late in bringing them back. The category with the most overdue books in university library were ethics books.
And so students and professors of ethics are the least ethical people on a university campus. At least by this measure. Now why is that? It is because our educational system confuses information with education. When you study ethics, you don't learn how to be a more ethical person. You study some system and maybe you remember it enough for a test, you probably forget it a few months after you took the test.
We don't actually practice it, right? And an ethical system that somebody else constructed is very hard to impose on somebody that doesn't come from the same context, etc. We believe that if you actually present individuals with empirically proven mechanics that govern our society, that shows interconnectivity of our life, our world, that...
Aldo de Pape (16:31.694)
A logical, ethical framework will naturally flow from that. If you teach a student, for example, that in order to be a more effective person, they have to understand how what they say impacts another person. If you want to be effective in delivering a message, and you strew your message with words that are offensive to people or that won't allow you to be listened to,
You're not going to be able to get your message across. Right? Now, how much more easy is it to explain that to a student and teach them how to be effective in getting the message across as opposed to saying, oh, it's not ethical to use those words. Don't you dare. Right? And then you rile them up. It makes sense to actually be a person that is aware of other people's feelings because you want to be effective.
Right? We, it's happily obvious that we live in an interconnected world. There are no more scenarios of winners and losers. Right? This is a fallacy. Right? The global pandemic, wars, right? One country invades another, the entire world goes into inflation. Right? Supply chains break down. They're all in the same boat. There's nowhere to hide. Right? And so again, if you...
trying to say, oh, well, you know, ethical system, you're such that, oh, you know, you should always think of the other. Yeah. Okay. Maybe some will learn that and some will not. Yeah. Other way of saying it is look, there's nowhere to hide. What you do is going to impact you. It'll impact your loved ones, right? You have to think about the implications. Yeah. Right. So I just find that to be a much more sustainable way.
not only have educated the students, but also have operated the institution.
Aldo de Pape (18:30.766)
You said something like delivering a message, right? People who have a certain integrity, they're required to deliver a message. We're here at a conference which is about human flourishing in the age of AI. AI is kind of coming at us at lightning speed. And it might distort the messages that will be delivered. It might? It might, yeah, that's a good point.
It may also amplify the distortions that people would like it to amplify. And there, it's not necessarily the AI is the issue, it is the decision makers that are wielding the power.
And so again, we have to diagnose what the root cause is. People think that AI came on the scene a year ago with ChatGPT. AI has been around for decades. Machine learning has been around for decades. But it has been impacting popular culture for well over 15 years through social media. AI generated the algorithms.
that were optimized by the people in charge to do one thing and one thing only, which is generate addictive, compulsive engagement. Now, it just so happened that the optimal way to create engaging, compulsive behavior is to tear society apart. And we're not talking about an industry that is led by thousands of people. We're talking about an industry that has...
half a dozen at most individuals that are in charge of the whole thing. If these individuals had, again, an understanding, not some made up ethical system, but had an understanding of the enormous societal damage that they are inflicting, and had the wherewithal,
Aldo de Pape (20:43.758)
to be able to intervene before it happened. And yeah, maybe they wouldn't be worth $100 billion, they'd be worth $50 billion in the process. Maybe their investor wouldn't have gotten the 10 ,000 % return, they'd have got a 5 ,000 % return. But if they would have intervened, many of the problems that we have in today's society wouldn't exist. So looking at...
at a solution whereby there are leaders in place that have the right integrity. So in Bletchley Park, I think a month ago, in October, there was this big conference in London, people like Elon Musk and the big tech giants together with President Biden and Prime Minister of the UK came together. They had a conversation around it. And funny enough, it was about integrity because they said similar to you, like, listen, it isn't about the technology.
It's about what humans will do with the technology and the fact that we can't really monitor what they will do, right? Which features they will develop that might cause loads of havoc and destruction, right? That's where the scary bit is. So what, if anything, can we do to prevent that? Like, you know, the advice of Leslie Park, what could be our responsibility here? Like, you know, is there a joint responsibility? What could we do?
Absolutely. Well, the first thing that we as a society have to do is loudly denounce the current educational system. The current educational system has produced every decision maker in the world. Every decision maker in the world has gone through our university education. Most of them have gone through our elite university education. And they have failed across the board. Across the board. And so...
The first step is to acknowledge that a degree from an elite university where you sat and passed a few exams is in no way prepared you for positions of responsibility. And once we understand that, we then get to ask questions like, what would, what are the kinds of things that people really need to know, that people have to be able to do in order to wield those types of decision -making?
Aldo de Pape (23:07.278)
And then we shift our value system to think about systematic thinking, to think about two or three steps ahead, et cetera. I think then we have a chance at not only being able to educate not only future leaders, but even the existing leaders, but also shift the societal expectation of them and in some ways inoculate society from...
less than favorable decisions.
Ben, I've taken up so much of your time and I know you need to get to your next meeting. My very last three questions, they'll go very quickly. Could you finish the following sentence for me? As a child, I wanted to become a... Journalist. A journalist. Are you... No, you're not at all a journalist. You do have the fire of a journalist, I would In some ways, yeah. I do like exposing the truth. Okay, yeah. So is there anything that made you... Do you remember consciously when you decided, no, I'm not going down that path?
I basically, as a child, realized that journalists don't make a lot of money. I said, oh, you know, maybe I should do something that pays more. And then, of course, I wound up in education. I'm not sure if that was right. Yeah, it's still in you. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Reading. I always talk to our listeners about reading. Has there been any book or any magazine, any manifesto, any article that has inspired you to...
to who you are today? To who I am today? If you go way back, at a point of enormous strain in my academic life, one of my advisors gave me the book, Zen and the Art of Archery, which was a very good centering for me at the time. Nice.
Aldo de Pape (25:11.246)
Send in the Art of Art. Beautiful. Definitely we're going to put that on our reading list. I haven't read it myself, but I've heard a lot about it. And then the very last question. Let's turn the tables. Now it's the Ben Nelson podcast or the Minerva Project podcast. Who would you like to have as your guest? You were very high on my list. Who would you like to talk to? Who would I like to have as a guest? That's a good question. Assuming they'd have to be alive.
No, they don't have to be. It's across the board. You can dream. Well, if I could really dream in that level, this may sound like a very strange pick, but I would love to interview, have a conversation with Giuseppe Verdi, the great opera composer of the 19th century.
who not only was perhaps the world's greatest opera composer, but was a humanitarian. He was a symbol of freedom in Italy. He was a symbol of reunification. But he was an extraordinarily humble person. And he lived in a world of humility and giving. And...
I am very curious to understand how a man of that level of inexplicable talent, inexplicable fame, he was the most famous man in Europe, certainly the most famous man in Italy at the time.
Aldo de Pape (26:59.662)
was able to center himself in the way that he did. Wow, that's an exceptional choice. That's very nice. And I don't know a lot about him, but what I do know is this integrity somewhere, somewhere, somehow. So that's, you know, 19th century composer. And here in 2023, we're still talking about him. Wonderful choice. Ben, thank you so much for this interview. I wish you all the best with the Minerva project and I wish you a great wise. Thank you so much for your time, Ben. Thank you. Appreciate it.