Empowering Young Minds: How Rob Soul Combines Chess, Personal Growth, and AI to Shape the Future of Education

In this episode of the "Streamline Success Show" host Dagmar Schult sits down with Rob Soul, an innovative educator who blends the cognitive power of chess with personal development principles to inspire children. Rob shares his journey from personal growth enthusiast to creating a proprietary chess curriculum that not only teaches strategic thinking but also instills resilience and a growth mindset in young minds. They explore the role of AI in enhancing education, the importance of community and human connection, and what the future holds for learning in a rapidly evolving technological landscape. 

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Dagmar Schult: Welcome to today's episode. I'm your host Dagmar Schult and today I have a truly special guest with me, Rob Soul. . Rob is a visionary transforming the way kids learn and grow through the game of chess, blending strategic thinking and personal development in a unique way.

[00:00:20] Dagmar Schult: In this episode, we'll explore how Rob integrates AI into education, making learning even more effective and engaging. So get ready to be inspired by Rob. Welcome to the show, Rob. 

[00:00:34] Rob Soul: Thank you so much, Dagmar. It's my pleasure to be here. I'm looking forward to talking to you today. 

[00:00:39] Dagmar Schult: Yes, me too. First of all, can you just share a little bit about your journey and what inspired you to actually combine chess with personal growth for kids?

[00:00:52] Rob Soul: Yeah, and I really appreciate the kind intro. I don't know that I've ever been called a visionary except by myself. So that was [00:01:00] a great thing to hear. I did get involved in personal growth and personal development in college back in the 1990s. I discovered at a bookstore Anthony Robbins book Unlimited Power.

[00:01:14] Rob Soul: And I flipped through it a little bit and thought, this is interesting stuff. And I bought it that day and read it and I still own it. And it's something I've read numerous times. I've been a Tony Robbins fan ever since and done several events. And I've been I've purchased DVDs and CDs and things off of infomercials and all that over the years.

[00:01:33] Rob Soul: Personal growth has been a thing for me ever since then. And I've gotten into a lot of other authors and a lot of other parts of the genre. But it's always been something that, to me, is an important part of my life. An important part, to me, of life is growing and getting better. better as people, right?

[00:01:51] Rob Soul: And evolving. And those are tools that can help with that and accelerate the process. And that's actually one of the interesting things about [00:02:00] his teachings in particular that I picked up was the idea of modeling and finding someone who's successful already in an endeavor that you're interested in, and then figuring out what they did and doing the same things, right?

[00:02:12] Rob Soul: That's something that I've spent a lot of my life doing. And it was again, some people never get into any of that. Some people get into it at a young age, like I did, I was 19. I don't know how young that is compared to most people, but I think many people discover, the ideas and things in maybe their twenties or thirties and a lot of people out of frustration.

[00:02:33] Rob Soul: That's how I found it was. I was frustrated and I was in college and really didn't have much of a plan or direction. I didn't want to be there. I instead of going to class would spend eight hours a day in the basement of my apartment complex, practicing the guitar and getting better at playing and teaching myself the guitar.

[00:02:52] Rob Soul: And I didn't last very long in college that first time around but happy to say I went back eventually and got my [00:03:00] degree and personal growth and personal development was part of that, being able to understand that, your What you've done or what you've been for your whole life is not what you are now.

[00:03:11] Rob Soul: You can change that. You can rewrite your, the rest of your chapters of your life, so to speak. And, it was one of those things where I decided, hey, I'm gonna, I'm finally ready to go back. I finally feel some sense of direction. And so personal growth is something that helped me find that. And I thought, What a great thing to be able to teach to kids at a young age in a way that they can understand it.

[00:03:37] Dagmar Schult: So 

[00:03:37] Dagmar Schult: that, that is cool. So actually I was really late with that. So I found Tony Robbins in around 2000, 2000, I think I read the book that you talked about. And actually the first time I read it, I didn't get a lot out of it. I thought it's manipulative. And [00:04:00] then a friend of mine came and she said, Tony is coming to London.

[00:04:03] Dagmar Schult: So I'm in Munich and London is not so far away. I thought no, at first I said I will not come. Actually, that was who I was at the, at that time. And she begged me and I said, no, I don't want to. And then she said, we are going to do a fire walk. And I said, a fire walk. I have to go there.

[00:04:26] Dagmar Schult: And she said, you're crazy. Tony Robbins is coming and you go because of the fire walk. I said, yes, because when I do the fire walk I'm actually be convinced that I can do what my mind is up to. So that was the reason that I was going actually, . And then the funny story I went in 2004 with her, and it was in October.

[00:04:51] Dagmar Schult: It was very cold, really icy, and it was raining. Cats and dogs, , oh, all day. And then we [00:05:00] had to put our shoes off and stay there in the freezing cold and waiting for our turn because there were 22, 000 people there. I don't know. Oh my God. I was standing there for an hour and I couldn't feel my feet anymore.

[00:05:16] Dagmar Schult: And after that, I thought, I could not burn myself because my feet were just not feeling anything . And that was what my ma mind was telling me. And so I did it again in 2005 in spring. , . That was so funny. Yeah. But then that was the first time I really learned about personal growth and I never stopped since then.

[00:05:38] Dagmar Schult: So I love that you do this with kids so that they get it a little bit earlier than me. 

[00:05:44] Rob Soul: Yeah it's a fascinating subject and it has a lot of elements to it, a lot of different little niches, I guess you could say within the overall niche. And there's a lot of different paths and a lot of different ways to go with it.

[00:05:58] Rob Soul: But again [00:06:00] I've, opened myself up to a lot of different authors and a lot of different speakers, and I've been to a lot of events since. And so being able to synthesize that information and assimilate it is what, enabled me to better present it to kids. So it's not just a one sided thing.

[00:06:16] Rob Soul: It's a sort of a, An amalgamation of a lot of different ideas that I put together. And speaking of chess, that is a game that traditionally has been something that a lot of people connect with cognitive ability and It does definitely connects well with cognitive ability, there's no doubt about it, but there's a lot of other things that you can learn through chess, and you know there's a lot of lessons within it, if you are able to stick them in there I guess for lack of a better term and so you know I have been playing chess for a long time in my life.

[00:06:55] Rob Soul: And when I decided to teach chess, I actually began teaching with a couple of other [00:07:00] companies before I formed my own. And those companies left me dissatisfied. There was one that seemed that the only thing they really felt like chess was good for was discipline. And so the room was so silent that you could hear a pin drop.

[00:07:15] Rob Soul: And if any student ever made a noise at all, they were immediately shushed and. It was, it didn't look like anybody was having any fun at all in there. And learning needs to be fun for kids, especially, and chess is a game. Let's make it fun, guys. Come on. And, then following that, I went to a different company that didn't have a whole lot of structure, and so there wasn't really a way to teach anything.

[00:07:37] Rob Soul: With any kind of coherence in any sort of way that the kids could get it, we would show up to teach our class, and five minutes before the class was supposed to start, the lead instructor would come hustling over with a stack of papers and hand them out to the different teachers, and that's what we were teaching that day.

[00:07:51] Rob Soul: So you didn't, as a stronger chess player, you can look at a sheet like that and immediately go, okay, this is what I'm teaching, and it's okay, I can do that, but I'm [00:08:00] not able to impart any additional wisdom into it. I'm not able to help the kids grow at all and compounded with the fact that the sheets didn't have anything to do with each other one week to another.

[00:08:12] Rob Soul: It was like they just took a random page out of a chess manual and photocopied it at the Kinko's and then ran down and handed it to us. So both of those situations left me leaving it left me feeling a little empty and that isn't how I thought chess should be taught. So I wanted to create a better mousetrap and that's how Kids in Chess was born.

[00:08:31] Dagmar Schult: Cool. I love that. So and how actually, can you expand a little bit how you bring these personal development lessons into the chess curriculum, so to say? 

[00:08:45] Rob Soul: Yeah, I'd be happy to. So chess is again, a game that has a lot of thinking involved, of course but the the main, tenant of I guess personal growth in general is that our thoughts are really what kind of determine [00:09:00] everything, right?

[00:09:00] Rob Soul: And our thoughts determine our behaviors and our behaviors determine our results, in a nutshell, it's the short version. And if our thoughts are the main thing, then yes, chess is a thinking game, but you can take the thinking and you can apply it to a lot of different scenarios, a lot of different situations in your life.

[00:09:18] Rob Soul:: If you are willing to do right? And kids they have this abundant desire to learn and they just love to soak things up and learn new things. And so what I did when I created my lessons is I decided that I'm going to teach this stuff as chess, of course, and as a game, but when I have little opportunities, like for instance, calculating several moves ahead.

[00:09:42] Rob Soul: Then that gives me an opportunity to talk about how in life you can choose from two or three different paths by projecting yourself forward and figuring out which is this path likely to get me where I want to go? Or is this one? Or is this other one here? And then of course, [00:10:00] when you calculate in chess, a lot of times you'll go three or four moves deep and the opponent will make a different move that you weren't expecting on move two.

[00:10:08] Rob Soul: So now everything you just calculated is out the window and you have to recalculate. And of course that's part of life too, right? As we get down a road that we think is going to be the right one and something happens and we have to change course a little, right? So these are little ways that I incorporate these these kinds of lessons, but the biggest kind of overarching thing that I do is each day when we sit down in class, before we start class, we read aloud what I call the kids in chess decree which is seven pillars of my program that I created and put on a laminated card.

[00:10:42] Rob Soul:: Every student gets one, we all read along. And those things are, for instance, things like believing in yourself. I believe in myself, is the very first statement on it. I always try my hardest. I never give up. I always play fair. Things that are, important to think [00:11:00] of really whenever we do anything.

[00:11:02] Rob Soul: And so that's what I'm getting at when we do it. And then we'll talk in depth about one or the other every once in a while as well. I'll talk for a couple of minutes or I'll ask somebody, what does that mean to you? And we'll take that and talk about it in chess terms.

[00:11:16] Rob Soul: And then also in a broader sense, in terms of, using those kinds of thought processes and those kinds of concepts in life as well. 

[00:11:24] Dagmar Schult: I love that. Oh, that's so cool. Coming back to our topic is a little bit about AI. And of course chess computers are AI computers. That's what we're talking about.

[00:11:38] Dagmar Schult: So What or how does AI contribute to the other part? So to the strategic of thinking, to the cognitive mind, how does it contribute? 

[00:11:52] Rob Soul: Yeah, and you mentioned it, AI and chess are very closely linked. In fact, the first real strides that were made [00:12:00] in AI, came through the world of chess. In the in 1996, there was a very famous match between the world champion at the time, Garry Kasparov, and an IBM supercomputer that was called Deep Blue.

[00:12:13] Rob Soul: And never before had a chess computer beaten a human being, at least the top human beings, something, somebody who's the world champion, for instance, or a grandmaster. And so they set up this six game match, and the computer actually won the first game against Kasparov. And that was the first time under tournament conditions that a computer AI machine had beaten a human.

[00:12:37] Rob Soul: Again, a strong, a super strong human, a grandmaster, or in this case the world champion. So that was historic in itself. But then Kasparov went back To the war room and came back and won against that machine in 1996. He won the match pretty clear four to two and in the six games. And so that's a pretty clear score when you're having a one on one match.

[00:12:59] Rob Soul: And so [00:13:00] the IBM team then went back to their war room and challenged him to a rematch a year later in 1997. And they had really made it into a dynamite opponent by then, and so it actually won the rematch in 1997. And the final game, very interestingly, the match was tied at two and a half each going into the final game.

[00:13:26] Rob Soul: And Kasparov played a particular opening that's pretty well known as a solid opening. And the computer actually sacrificed a piece to destroy his defense. And he wasn't expecting that. And the game was the shortest of all of the whole match. It only went 19 moves and Kasparov resigned. And the computer won the match, three and a half to two and a half.

[00:13:47] Rob Soul: And that advent that, the reason Kasparov said after the match that he didn't Expect that sacrifice. He knew it was part of the possibilities in the opening, of course, that he was playing, [00:14:00] but he didn't expect that sacrifice because it's not something a computer would do. A computer typically only sacrifices for a very tangible game.

[00:14:08] Rob Soul: This was more of an abstract. It was to destroy the defense and then, 15, 20 moves down the line, be able to come in and make up for it. And that's not something a computer had ever done before. And so he was surprised by it and realized he was in trouble and resigned. And that was a big turning point in the world of AI was, whoa, now we've developed AI to the point that in a, supremely intellectual task like chess, it now has the ability to think like a human player and to defeat one of the strongest human players really in history.

[00:14:42] Rob Soul: A lot of chess aficionados consider Kasparov to be one of the best players ever, if not the best, the goat, as they say. And so that was a very interesting turning point when it comes to AI. And then of course, the applications of AI since have just mushroomed [00:15:00] into all kinds of things. And now we have AI accessible to everybody in the last few years here with things like chat GPT.

[00:15:07] Rob Soul: And AI has come a long way since the middle 1990s there, and really since the 70s when they started working on ideas like that and possibly even as far back as the 60s there were probably computer scientists working on things like that. So it's they're very closely connected and the way I can be used in my personal use with my chess company itself is, I can use it to enhance my lessons and find little areas that could use improvement in terms of what I'm teaching and how I'm teaching Of course, it is able to analyze very quickly.

[00:15:46] Rob Soul: moves and games and things so that, when a couple of students play a game in my class and I can quickly enter that into an AI machine and it can recommend immediately, hey, here's where you went wrong and this is what you should have done [00:16:00] differently. And then we can talk about that and we can.

[00:16:02] Rob Soul: Start to understand that we can discuss it, as a as a group and figure out. Okay. Why do you think this is the right move? Why do you think the computers recommended this in this case, which is just a fascinating use of it to be able to do that right in real time there with the kids in the class.

[00:16:20] Dagmar Schult: Yeah, that, that is really amazing. Yeah. You couldn't do that before. 

[00:16:25] Rob Soul: No, definitely not. Chess analysis would take hours. You'd go home and you'd look over the game and then maybe you don't even find the best move. You try the computer can in seconds just come right up with it.

[00:16:37] Rob Soul: And then a full on analysis of all the moves that would follow as the reason why it's the best move. So yeah, it's a, it's really interesting. 

[00:16:47] Dagmar Schult: Yeah, and I remember last time you talked, you told me how the possibilities of moves grow exponentially. And that really impressed me. [00:17:00] Can you tell that to my audience because I think that's very interesting.

[00:17:04] Rob Soul: Absolutely. Yeah. That the possibilities really mushroom quickly. And that was one of the flaws with AI chess machines for a long time. And what really turned the corner with them is what a chess machine used to have to do is analyze a move in terms of every single possibility. So for instance, if there were 38 moves that the machine had to choose from, it would have to examine all 38 of those as far as it possibly could within a reasonable amount of time.

[00:17:37] Rob Soul: And of course, each of those 38 choices then, let's say after it makes this one here now the human opponent that it's playing against has 42 choices. Those all have to be analyzed one by one. And then the next move the computer would consider, maybe that one results in 27 choices by the human.

[00:17:55] Rob Soul: So there's just these massive amounts of Tree [00:18:00] branches, I guess you'd call them That just come from trying to analyze one move and so what computers used to have to do was just shuffle through all that stuff And cycle through it all and try and process all of it. They have since trained computers to be able to Like humans do pare it down very quickly to a few reasonable moves and it'll still put on the back burner some of those moves that don't look reasonable because that's how it can surprise you.

[00:18:27] Rob Soul: Eventually it might find out that one of those is a good idea, but the main moves, just like a human being, a grandmaster, his strength is in his pattern recognition, right? And in his ability to recognize quickly that, of those 38 moves. 33 of them are garbage, and I don't even need to consider those right away.

[00:18:46] Rob Soul: So now I'm down to five moves. Yeah. And so this is what they've trained computers to be able to do now. But the fascinating thing that a lot of people are blown away by, and I was blown away by this number of the first time I saw it too in [00:19:00] just the first 10 moves of a chess game. And most of them go 30, 40, even 50 moves.

[00:19:05] Rob Soul: Some of them go close to a hundred or even more. In just the first 10 moves, there are 159 quintillion possible positions. Between the crazy number it is. It's a, and if you look at it, it's 159 and I think it's 18 zeros. And I put it up on the board for my students, when I, when we talk about this too, so they can see the enormity of the number because quintillion doesn't mean a lot to your average eight year old.

[00:19:33] Rob Soul: But when they see it, a number with a whole bunch of zeros on the end, and they see how big a number it is. And then I point out, okay, this is where a million. would be, and we're way over here and then all these zeros so it really gets the impression, gets the point across, but yeah, 159 quintillion possibilities in just the first 10 moves between the two players.

[00:19:54] Rob Soul: And, clearly there isn't any way that a human being could possibly memorize all of that information. [00:20:00] You can't even look at that much in your lifetime. So yeah, it's it's nearly an infinite game. Which is why, even the best human chess players, nobody's ever known everything there is to know about chess the best players in the world, the current world champion and every one of them before him they don't know everything there is to know about chess, but they know a lot, they know a whole lot about it. And it's just such a vastly complex game. 

[00:20:27] Dagmar Schult: It is so crazy. So what do you think, how will AI evolve in the future and make an impact on education for example? 

[00:20:40] Rob Soul: Yeah, as accessible as it's becoming, obviously there, there are pluses and minuses to that or advantages and drawbacks, I guess you could say.

[00:20:50] Rob Soul: Yeah. One of the major advantages of it is that not only are we in the information and internet age now, where, even [00:21:00] as 20 years ago or so, things like Google and Bing and, you have a lot of information at your fingertips, right? 

[00:21:08] And 

[00:21:08] Rob Soul: A lot of I guess what you'd say is common knowledge.

[00:21:11] Rob Soul: has been on the internet for many years. AI can be used to synthesize some of that information and put it together into a way that makes it a lot more understandable and a lot easier to find what you're looking for. And I don't mean in the sense of searching for what you're looking for, but let's say you put in a search term, And there's, 157, 000 results that come back.

[00:21:33] Rob Soul: Now you've got to suss out which is the information that I really want. And you're scrolling through and you're trying to figure, and you may never find the article. You may lose patience, before you get to where you want to go. Sometimes you get right to it. But AI can help with different taking different sources and putting the information together in a way that makes it more easily recognizable and understandable to the average person and especially to the average kid, right?

[00:21:58] Rob Soul: Because if a kid [00:22:00] is looking for something and trying to search on Google, not only can they get very overwhelmed by the results, but then there's some results that you probably don't even want them seeing. There's Those elements of it too. And of course that's where parental guidance comes in and things like that.

[00:22:13] Rob Soul: We're not going to get into all that here, but the point being that AI can be used to hone in and target certain aspects and certain things to show us what we're really looking for and to try and distill the information into what's really necessary. And, Coupled with that is the fact that education in general is of course moving in a technological way and advancing more and more technologically.

[00:22:42] Rob Soul: And when we hit the pandemic there in, in 2020, there was a lot of at home classes and a lot of at home, kids sitting at home and their teachers on Zoom and everybody's in a Zoom meeting. And I would got some mixed results. Okay. There were some students who were into that. There was quite a few who weren't and it was a struggle, [00:23:00] right?

[00:23:00] Rob Soul: And now that AI has come along, there would be, I'm quite certain, heaven forbid we have another incident like that in this world. We're better prepared for it this time, not only by the experience, but also something like AI can help to, again get the lesson material structured in a way that can benefit kids a lot quicker, I think.

[00:23:24] Rob Soul: And it's a great tool, that's the important thing I think to remember also is that AI is simply a tool, right? It's something that we can use as human beings to To help and to educate ourselves and to enhance our lives, but it isn't something that we should put all our eggs in that basket and just decide to go with whatever AI says, 

[00:23:48] Rob Soul: there's got to be, there's got to be discretion, right? And that's really what I believe. That's one of the reasons that AI is never really going to take over. I know there are people who fear that AI is going to take over the [00:24:00] world. I think there's a couple of things that that kind of stand in the way of that is number one is human reasoning.

[00:24:05] Rob Soul: And again discretion but the biggest thing is people are drawn to each other. We want to be part of something bigger. We are we like community we like human interaction. And so there's always going to be that need. That's human nature. We are, ever since the beginning of time we've been tribal, right?

[00:24:26] Rob Soul: We've been people who we get together and we share experiences with each other. And that's a limitation there that AI At least at this point that we know it is not able to make up for it can do a lot, but it can't replace people in the sense of the human connection, and in the sense of the togetherness that human beings crave and again that being part of the human nature.

[00:24:52] Rob Soul: AI and maybe someday in the future, long after our lifetimes, it'll get to that point that it can simulate or replicate that [00:25:00] but, chatting with an AI chat bot and having it speak to you in a human sort of way, it's a lot different than getting together with your friends at the dinner table and sharing a few hours together talking and laughing and enjoying each other's company.

[00:25:13] Dagmar Schult: So 

[00:25:15] Dagmar Schult: definitely. Yeah, so I feel you said something really right. So communities are getting more and more important right now, because of COVID because people were really some people at least were really lonely, and they are craving community. And this is why communities grow so much right now. I think we need.

[00:25:39] Dagmar Schult: A balance there and maybe AI can help here help us here because we can outsource specific things to AI and we don't have to worry about it anymore. So we can focus on connection and interpersonal connection. Yeah, I think I don't know. How do [00:26:00] you see the future of education and ai? 

[00:26:05] Rob Soul: Yeah.

[00:26:05] Rob Soul: I think you made a great point there about AI being able to take on some tasks that then free us up to, whether it's time freedom or whether it's mental freedom or whatever it might be. Free us up to, to connect and to, and to build communities and to spend time with each other.

[00:26:23] Rob Soul: I think that education, to be honest, really needs a reform. And I've been saying this for years now. And finally, the movement seems to be gaining some steam generally. And that is because, if you look at the educational system, at least here in America, and I'm pretty sure worldwide, it's more or less a an arena where we learn skills that are meant for the industrial age.

[00:26:49] Rob Soul: That's when it was created. And we're so far gone from the industrial age now. It used to be that you would get into school and you would learn some skills so that you could go work within your local [00:27:00] community as a teacher or a firefighter or whatever it may be or a banker. Nowadays, yes, there are still, there's still a need for teachers and firefighters and bankers, don't get me wrong.

[00:27:10] Rob Soul: But the world is so much more interconnected now where in the industrial age, somebody in in New York and somebody in Paris there was quite a chasm between them in terms of being able to communicate, right? There still is physically. But those barriers have been broken down by the advent of technology and by something like Zoom for instance, which is a great example of this is our conversation right here.

[00:27:37] Rob Soul: We're on two different continents and we're able to communicate in real time and the telephone was part of that. As a first sort of step in that direction. But, now we're able to it's almost like the science fiction shows, in the 50s and 60s, where a little screen pops up and you can see the other person's face, that's what we're living in now.

[00:27:55] Rob Soul: So education as a result is fairly [00:28:00] outdated. The world is so connected now and you have for instance, money money is something that literally used to just exist in terms of coins and then bills were created and that now money is Pretty much numbers on the screen. And computers are transferring money all the time amongst each other and it's called money, but it's a bunch of numbers, so things like that.

[00:28:22] Rob Soul: And that's one example, but things like that have just changed so much in our world has evolved so much. That now we need to be teaching different skills in school. We need to be some of the same skills are still necessary. Of course, you don't want to produce a society of people who can't add three plus three but at the same time, we can't write a sentence at the same time, however a lot of the things that we're being trained to do in school and a lot of the The training that's being done and the teaching that's being done is is outdated.

[00:28:54] Rob Soul: And that's not the teacher's fault. That's the the result of a system that was [00:29:00] created hundreds of years ago. And so we just, I think need a reform in the sense that an update, I guess you'd say. And I think that AI can be very useful in helping us number one, find the right direction.

[00:29:15] Dag Rob Soul: mar Schult: Right and determine what kinds of things might be more important now and give us some assistance in that regard. But then also, again, going back to my chess lessons, and the way that I teach it is, I use AI pretty much every day because I'm always looking for, little fine tunes, little things that I can tweak, little things I can do to teach this or that differently.

[00:29:37] Rob Soul: And then of course, the chess computer itself, that's AI in action. And I'm using that every day. And these things help to enhance what I'm doing. I feel like they could be used to enhance What education in general is doing. And so I think that the future of education, hopefully, is that we do see [00:30:00] some of these changes being made and that we do see an update in the school systems so that the students are learning skills that are going to apply to our futures.

[00:30:11] Rob Soul: Into the, not just the 21st century, which we're in, but the 22nd century as well, and future generations we need to start moving in that direction sooner rather than later, before we wind up being caught so far behind. That that, catching up is even more difficult.

[00:30:28] Rob Soul: I'm looking forward to the future of education. And I think that we can really make some strides in that area. And I think that AI can be a huge help. 

[00:30:37] Dagmar Schult: I don't know how AI will help us with that. But what I, actually see too is that we need to change the the topics that we teach.

[00:30:48] Dagmar Schult: So in school, there is nothing taught about finances how we manage our money, nothing about communication, how to communicate in the right way. Not [00:31:00] about relationships. It's all about facts and figures. And we all have Facts and figures at our fingertips on the internet. We don't need to learn by heart some dates in history.

[00:31:13] Dagmar Schult: We need to understand what happened and maybe be prepared to have some things not happen again, for example. So that is. What we need to teach and 

[00:31:26] Rob Soul: interpreting the facts, and being able to take advantage of using that information. And that is something that I think AI can be useful for, is again to help us assimilate and make sense of some things.

[00:31:39] Rob Soul: And but you're right. Yeah, the subjects, and this would probably be a very fascinating thing to, to look at in terms of AI is to ask it, Hey, name. I don't know you could When I say name i'm talking about us now but you know name some of the most successful people you can think of right and Put some of those names into ai and say hey Take a look at these people these [00:32:00] personalities that are well known successful people Help me figure out what are the things that these people have in common?

[00:32:07] Rob Soul: What are their philosophies? What are the their world views? What do they do that separates them from other people? And, a I may be able to help us synthesize that information. I don't know. I've never tried that experiment, but it just came to mind. So I figured I'd mention it. But something like that some way that now, we have the ability to not just make it up in our own mind and decide what we think and then try and teach that to people as if it were I hate to use the word fact, but as if it were reality but we have a tool now that can help point us in a, in maybe a right direction and then talk about it with some other people and get a collaborative effort going to distill that information.

[00:32:52] Rob Soul: And that's just one idea again off the top of my head here, but I think that there are uses like that where we can take [00:33:00] and look at, okay if these things are important, and we can get some people to agree that yes, the AI machine is right about this, and this, maybe this not so much, maybe this other one.

[00:33:10] Rob Soul: But these three things here now we can take these three things and we can go, okay, how do we get. That knowledge to kids. How do we change schools so that is the knowledge that we're imparting? And how can we dive deeper into these three things to figure out, what needs to be taught in order to get there, and work backwards and reverse engineer it?

[00:33:30] Rob Soul: Again, ideas, right? I'm just sprouting ideas here. But I'm not recommending or advocating anybody do this. Okay. Just to be clear, disclaimer, but but I do think that they're that's a useful starting point, perhaps, and maybe something, somebody else listening to this right now might have a better idea or an improvement or a tweak on it that would be a, make it more useful again, though, this takes a Human collaboration, right?

[00:33:59] Rob Soul: It takes [00:34:00] people, and it takes reasoning and logic, and it takes critical thinking, and it takes discussion and it takes growth mindsets, right? Being open minded and not being dogmatic about what you think and understanding that there are different viewpoints and that it's okay to be wrong, one of the things you touched on is that education is all about facts, right? And so we grow up, and what do we do from the time we're 5, years old until the time we're 18. And then if we go on to college, it's 22, 23. So we're talking, at least 12 to 15 years of our lives, where pretty much every single day of our life, the goal and the focus is to be right.

[00:34:42] Rob Soul: And there are consequences to being wrong and not the kind of consequences like, hey, I learned something, which is a consequence of being wrong. If you are willing to look at what you did and examine it and figure out, okay, that's okay that I did this. And here's what I'm going to do differently next time.

[00:34:59] Rob Soul: But [00:35:00] consequences like, you get lower grades and your teachers now want to put you on academic probation and all these things because you weren't right often enough. And so what that produces then is people who come out of college and get into their 20s and into their 30s and they just need to be right all the time.

[00:35:20] Rob Soul: And the need to be right trumps everything else because that's what was pounded in and ingrained into them for so many years. And working out that idea that it's okay to be wrong. And, we don't have to be right all the time, and it's okay to not only be wrong or however you want to, whatever terminology you want to use, I'm saying right and wrong because again, that's what we talked about when it comes to education.

[00:35:42] Rob Soul: But again, this is something people carry with them for many years after a lot of people and I did too. Yeah, of course. I think it's natural again, because I don't know, it's natural, but it's ingrained in us, right? It's taught that whole time, but getting to that point and realizing that, you don't have to be right [00:36:00] all the time, and there are as many different viewpoints and angles as there are people.

[00:36:05] Rob Soul: And being willing to accept that maybe your view and maybe your ideas aren't the only way. And there are possibilities outside of what you currently perceive and outside of what you currently believe. And I think that's a huge step that That we can take as people that again, AI is very limited to so it's going to take people working together and collaborating and understanding this idea that, it isn't, it doesn't necessarily have to be this way because it's always been that way.

[00:36:41] Rob Soul: We can change things and we can work together to do that. 

[00:36:45] Rob Soul: So that is important. So that is another thing that school doesn't teach us. So getting feedback and learning from it is one that you just mentioned. And then that we can work together in school, [00:37:00] it's always against. So we want to be better than the other person and at least better seen better if we are or not.

[00:37:08] Rob Soul: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'll never forget speaking of that in college. I was a computer science major for a while and I had a basic computer science course, but I had been programming as a hobby since I was in like fourth grade. I was a kid, nine, 10 years old. I was writing programs in basic. And so here we are fast forward to 2000.

[00:37:28] Rob Soul: I think it was 2002 or so that I was in a computer science class and we were learning it was Java programming. And I already knew that, too. Programming was a hobby for me. So it was a very easy class for me, but it was something I had to take for part of my degree, right? There was a student in the class who kind of was struggling, and I offered to help.

[00:37:47] Rob Soul: I said, hey, I can help you understand this. So we worked together. So that I could help them understand what was going on. And then we got our papers back from the professor in that following week, and we [00:38:00] both got Fs because we copied each other. And I said, this is so backwards.

[00:38:06] Rob Soul: I taught this person how to do this, and it came out the same or very similar because we worked on it together. But you're to your point, like it's very individual. You're not supposed to work together in school, right? And it's frowned upon by some professors. That kind of blew me away.

[00:38:24] Rob Soul: But that's again, to your point, exactly what we're talking about here is it's not a collaborative effort in a lot of cases, in most schools, it's a competitive environment instead of instead of cohesive and collaborative. 

[00:38:37] Dagmar Schult: so I could talk about this forever, I think, obviously, favorite topics.

[00:38:46] Dagmar Schult: Anything that you want to share with my audience before we close that we haven't touched on, 

[00:38:55] Rob Soul: I think just to say that Again, I guess we touched on a little bit ago, [00:39:00] but to close with just the idea that that AI is nothing to be afraid of. All right. It is something that is a tool that we can use to enhance what we do.

[00:39:11] Rob Soul: And it's just that it's a tool. So it's not to be trusted. As we know, AI can fabricate things and can make things up. And sometimes when I work with it, it gets really off track. And I have to, I just close it and restart and I need to be trained. And there's a lot of, there's still a lot of limitations with AI.

[00:39:32] Rob Soul: It is a tool and it is something that you can use, but it is not something to just be trusted. As the end all be all, and it certainly is not anything that in our lifetimes is going to take over the world. There are human beings standing in the way of that. And again, humans humans crave connection.

[00:39:50] Rob Soul: And so I just would encourage anybody and everybody listening to, make connections with people, build relationships. That's the essence of life. And that's [00:40:00] really as far as I'm concerned the key elements to humanity is having those connections and and finding people that that you can build relationships with.

[00:40:08] Rob Soul: And AI is just never going to be able to do that. 

[00:40:12] Dagmar Schult: Okay. Rob, where can my audience get in touch with you? Where can we find more about you? 

[00:40:20] Rob Soul: Yeah, that's the website that I have is my company is called Kids in Chess, and I specifically say it with the end instead of and I don't say kids and chess because that's not really what it's called.

[00:40:33] Rob Soul: It's kids in chess, and it's I use the little ampersand in my logo as the and the website is K ID s. N C H E S, so Kids 'n Chess again in line with how I say it. So www.kidsnchess.com/ and my email address there is learn at kidsnchess.com/, so L E A R N, the word learn. So you can find out more there about what I do.

[00:40:59] Rob Soul: You can [00:41:00] inquire about chess lessons. I've just launched a new online academy. It's called Chess Quest Academy. I'm very excited for that. And it's a large interactive bit of videos and live lessons. And I do one on one coaching through that program as well. There's a lot to there's a lot to take in with regards to that and people can find out more information through me or through the website.

[00:41:22] Dagmar Schult: Wow, that's a congratulation. That's huge. So thank you. And thank you for being on my show. I really enjoyed this session again, and I hope to see you soon again on my show. 

[00:41:36] Rob Soul: I hope so too Dagmar. Thank you so much. It's a real pleasure speaking with you and being here, and I'm really happy we could make this happen.

[00:41:42] Rob Soul: So 

[00:41:43] thank you. Dagmar Schult Thanks. 

[00:41:45] Dagmar Schult: Bye. Rob Soul: Bye bye.