The Fabulous Learning Nerds

Scott (00:03.118)
Hey everybody, welcome to another amazing episode of your Fabulous Learning Nerds. I'm Scott Schuette, your host, and with me, you love them. Dan Coonrod's in the house here, buddy.

Scott (00:16.642)
What the heck? OK. All right, we'll do it again. No, actually, I don't need to do it again. We'll just do the first.

Daniel (00:17.923)
I don't know, I hear my drop.

Daniel (00:23.761)
Close enough.

Scott (00:25.986)
Dan-o. How you doing, sir?

Daniel (00:26.395)
SCAR-

Fair to Midland, Scott, how are you, sir?

Daniel (00:35.121)
There it is. There it is. There it is!

Scott (00:36.942)
You know, you know, I've been super busy and super busy, but I had an interesting experience today. I don't even know if it's good for podcasting. It doesn't really matter because I have to chat about it. Do you ever have problems with excess of flies? It's that time of year when flies are coming out because it's spring into summer and they come on out and they, they wind up in my kitchen.

Daniel (00:40.919)
Hehehehe

Daniel (00:57.903)
No, not this year, but man, it is so weird you bring this up. So genuinely, just yesterday, Zayda and I were talking about this because around this time in our house, we'll have a day where there's just a bunch of flies and we'll be like, what is this? Is this like some sort of weird like curse? Is this some kind of craziness? What is this? And then just yesterday Zayda was like, hey, you know, that hasn't happened.

Scott (01:03.106)
Genuinely.

Scott (01:22.51)
The month.

Daniel (01:27.242)
this year. I'm like, I know, it's pretty great. So you must have gotten them, Scott. I'm sorry. I'm sorry that this year you received the curse.

Scott (01:35.224)
So I suggested that we put up a little thing in the house to kill the flies, because I'm not a fan of flies in the house, to be honest with you. no, we can't have that stuff in the house. So Home Depot makes this outdoor fly catcher. It's a little plastic bag with something in the bottom. you open up a top, right? And you put the string on it. And then you fill it up with water, about halfway through water. And the flies can get in, but they can't get out, right? So I've got one of those.

Friday I got a Friday and I put it outside, know, cuz we're you don't put it You're not supposed to put it right next to the door where they would enter in Because apparently it attracts flies and I'm like, okay great So I put it, you know on my fence in my yard on the side of the house, right? And the dogs went crazy because they're watching all these flies buzzing around and today my wife's like you have to get rid of this thing I'm like what come out here. I Swear to God It's about eight inches by eight and if full

overflowing with dead flies and it smelled like death, to be honest with you. So I guess if I wanted to kill a whole lot of flies for five bucks, it was a pretty good deal. But if I wanted to make a deposit in the emotional bank account with my wife, yeah, I failed epically. It did not work.

Daniel (02:40.269)
Daniel (02:59.449)
It's the thought that counts?

Scott (03:02.102)
Maybe.

Daniel (03:03.173)
Maybe?

Scott (03:07.638)
Yeah, yeah. Speaking of well, not speaking of flies, but I would love to get someone else's opinion on on my flight journey today and so smart smarter than a fly for sure. Zeta is in the house, everybody.

Daniel (03:15.963)
Somebody smarter than us.

Scott (03:30.744)
Sator, did you send flies to my house?

Zeta (03:33.503)
my, no, no I didn't, no I didn't.

No, for real.

Zeta (03:44.055)
my goodness. my goodness. It was so it was a fly day.

Scott (03:48.654)
Oh, no, no. Today was a Monday. Today was a power Monday for me, like total power Monday. I mean, we could certainly talk about delivery companies that don't deliver stuff. mean, we could certainly talk about that, but I don't want to because I'm too upset. So I thought I'd talk about flies instead of ... But I like that idea. It's pretty ... The fly day thing, I think that's pretty funny. You know what I'm saying?

Zeta (04:10.105)
Pretty fly, it's pretty good.

Scott (04:17.698)
Somebody got it. Somebody totally got that joke, so I think that's great. So you've been working on updating the website. That thing looks awesome. And you showed me this 3D nerd thing. Yeah.

Zeta (04:28.313)
yeah, I've been playing around with some imagery. I have some things in store. I was playing with Adobe's Project Neo today, which was pretty fun. It's in browser. You can take your SVGs, import them, and then play around with them in three dimensions and export them in so many forms. It's amazing. It's my first day. And I'm like, of course, I have to do the Learning Nerds logo.

Scott (04:47.232)
So.

Scott (04:54.39)
Yeah, for sure. And it's one of those things like, did you know how to do that at all before today?

Zeta (05:00.461)
I knew a little bit, like I've used Illustrator and used the Inflate, so I've done the 3D, but actually moving it around in browser was pretty novel, it pretty cool. So yeah.

Scott (05:10.06)
I just think it's so cool that now there are things that I could never thought I could do like animate pictures, which I now can do, which is so cool, right? So we'll be talking a little bit about that. Thank you so much for hanging out and not sending flies to my house. Folks, you know, we have someone that's on the show every week. You never get to hear from him, but this week you do. He's the man behind the curtain. Sam's with us today.

Zeta (05:18.595)
So cool, so cool. yeah.

Scott (05:39.084)
That's right. Sam Van Telsel, everybody. How you doing, sir?

Sam (09:56.36)
So, I heard you have like a Flypocalypse every year. Well, I also go through the same thing. It's just usually around this time. There's just one day that is just absolutely filled with flies in the house. And yeah, I'll usually get like a sticky trap for them. normally, normally I have two very cute exterminators, my cats that will help with them. But yeah, they're old and lazy now. So.

Scott (10:25.922)
Yeah, problem with having the sticky traps is I got nine Shih Tzus. And they will probably find it. And then that would be really, really, really bad. It would be bad. No, not so much.

Sam (10:26.078)
That's less and less.

Sam (10:39.57)
Those probably don't mix.

Daniel (10:41.605)
Yeah.

Zeta (10:42.669)
Yes, a month.

Scott (10:44.591)
They're stuck in the fly trap now. Mom's gonna be mad.

Zeta (10:46.676)
no.

Daniel (10:47.909)
Hahaha!

Zeta (10:51.267)
That's one sticky sticky shiitsu.

Scott (10:54.094)
They make them where they don't have them. They make them with the sticky stuff on the back behind this thing and I don't know we'll figure it out No one likes flies, but hey We got way more important things to talk about this week and we're gonna go ahead and get on to that in our topic of the week everybody

Scott (11:19.392)
All right, topic of the week is learnings. Unexpected learnings, everybody, that you've gotten throughout life and not in a classroom. Just really cool learnings that you've gotten. So we're just gonna go around the robin and talk about it. We're gonna start with Dan, because he had a great learning that he wanted to share. So I'll let you chat about that, sir.

Daniel (11:39.619)
Awesome. You know, I tell you what, I've got two and I want to jump in actually on the one today that I saw. was on my phone, I was sitting in the DMV taking care of stuff and I'm on my phone and I'm watching YouTube short and I'm watching this individual and he's talking about building.

Scott (11:44.258)
Woo!

Daniel (12:03.333)
desktop computer and I've been tinkering on desktop computers the past month just way to de-stress and be nerdy and stuff and so and in this minute and a half video he goes through the steps on how to like build a computer step by step like you start with this you start with that you'd move to this and in the minute and a half he did this he was so succinct and the editing job and the camera job was so good I was like man

Like this is such a good instructional video. Like, I don't know if this guy intended for that. Like, obviously he's like, Hey, here's how you build desktop. So obviously he intended for instruction. He intended for knowledge transfer to happen. But like, I, I remember watching this and just being like, man, like this is great. Like he shows all the parts that we're going to build that. then a quick explanation, like a one sentence, like this is this, this is Ram. This is that this is your processor.

Okay, now you've seen all of these and you know what they are. First you start with the motherboard and then you do this and then you do that. And it was great in a minute and a half. I was like, I was like, this is awesome. I'm going to save this because I'm going to show this to like anytime like my kid wants help with their computer or somebody's like, Oh, I don't know how to build up. Okay. have a quick video. It's a minute and half. Let's watch it. I'm going to send it to you. It's great. And you know, we were, it had, it hit me.

And I was just like, man, like what a great, one unexpected learning. Like that's the topic that's what we're talking about. And just like, awesome. I'm just scrolling through YouTube, just consuming content. And it made me think about like just other places where good learning happened. I've talked about it before on the show. I've alluded to it. I think I've even like been coy about it, but like the very first level.

of Super Mario Brothers on the Nintendo, which is how old I am, is this great setup that teaches you how to play the game super fast. we look to games that are great successes, we look to things that are great successes, and mean, it's Super Mario Brothers. I could say with pretty strong definitiveness,

Daniel (14:27.173)
that everybody listening knows who Super Mario Brothers are. Everybody knows who Mario is. Boom. Yes!

But in that first level, you pick up the controller, that little painful, sharp-cornered rectangle with two buttons and the little plus symbol and then the start and select in the middle, and it says, hey, you you start, you have your little character, first things first, you can't go back. So if you run the wrong way, the screen just stops and you're like, well, I can't go. Even...

somebody who's never played a video game pretty quickly figures out, can't go back. Well, which means I have to go forward. And you go forward, one of first things you hit are these blocks. And you can't get to them unless you jump. And so you're gonna start pressing buttons. And pretty quickly, you've figured out how to jump. In jumping to hit those blocks, you're gonna hit a mushroom. It's gonna pop out of the box. And chances are,

you are enticed to go get it. It begins to move away from the player. Players have already figured out how to move. So they're going to chase it to see what is this mushroom. And they get it and it makes them big. And it's like, this is this great step-by-step learning that teaches you all the things you need to know to play this game. Right after that is another jump where you have to leap over, I think they're called Goombas. In fact, I know they're called Goombas.

Scott (15:55.853)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel (15:57.723)
But you have to leap over this little, little dude on the screen. Again, another thing that makes you want to hit the blocks because you're jumping over this guy. And chances are because you're going to hit the block, you're going to bounce down and you're going to squish him. The game designers had to think about this as they built this first level, as they built the first 20 seconds of this game. All of these moments are timed and purposely set up to teach you what you need to know.

Jump to hit blocks, collect mushrooms, jump over bad guys, jump on bad guys, move towards the right, collect coins. The sound that the game gives you when you hit a coin, you just played it, it's great. It's ingrained into all of our brains. It's the good noise. I can't think of a better tutorial level in a video game. I think there's maybe...

different and maybe more interesting in some places, but just as a, in the shortest amount of time, in the most efficient way possible, here's how you play the game, go. And as we build learnings, and I think the thing that we're thinking about today, that we're talking about unexpected learnings, as learning developers, as facilitators, as learning leaders, the lesson we can take away from Super Mario Brothers is...

How quickly can I transfer vital knowledge, give real world hands-on experience, and teach lessons to get somebody up to speed as quickly as possible? And I think Mario Brothers takes the cake.

Scott (17:36.696)
There you go. Hey, one of the things that you've hit on that I want to make sure that everybody understands, because I think you're right, and that's really cool. And they weren't, you you didn't have a level that you had to go play through to teach you stuff. I think about Spider-Man, you know, and Sam, not Sam Raimi, who's the guy, Ash from Eagle Dad, I can't remember his name, Bruce Campbell. Bruce Campbell's teaching me how to play this game, right? Which is really cool and neat and fun, because I love Bruce Campbell.

Daniel (17:37.263)
Ha! Ha ha ha!

Sam (17:37.448)
Ha ha ha ha.

Daniel (17:56.827)
Boom. Groovy.

Scott (18:03.02)
But you're right, and Super Mario Brothers just kind of happens and you learn and you're good to go. And it used to be that you used to get the big instruction books that came with games back in the 80s, right? And then they got away from that because they just put gameplay in that would teach you how to play versus you reading all this stuff, which is kind of neat. That being said, none of this works unless there are objectives in the game itself, right? So there needs to be like, what's going to be again? Thank you, Lisa Wallace.

Daniel (18:11.952)
Yeah.

Scott (18:30.414)
What's going to be new, better, or different when we're done? What's the goal? What are we trying to get people to learn? What's the behavior that needs to be different when we're done, right? And so that's really, really important. And a lot of people will go ahead and they'll create games without thinking about what the objectives are. And they'll put games in for game's sake. So I was talking with a peer of mine today, oh, we want to do a family feud in this game I'm putting together. OK, great. So what is family feud?

Teach you.

how to guess at something, that's basically what it does. You're just pulling from prior knowledge. Or if it's a big group activity, really what you're all trying to do is just get people to play together and kind of work as a team. That's great. But if you're putting it into an e-learning, that's terrible. Like that's just not gonna work, right? Same thing with what does Wheel of Fortune teach you?

Daniel (19:20.336)
Yeah.

Daniel (19:24.857)
Yeah, exactly. We're the fortunate...

Scott (19:25.602)
how to spell maybe, right? But a lot of how many people put that in? Same thing with Hangman, we're gonna put these games and it'd be great. It's far better for you to go ahead and think about what the objectives are and then create game design that leads to change in behavior. Or in this case for Mario Brothers, like, you know, how they can get through the game and have a really good time at it. So anyway, that's just my two thoughts around game design. I think game design is really, really hard.

Zeta (19:28.173)
How to buy a vowel.

Daniel (19:30.608)
Yeah.

Scott (19:54.2)
It's so cool when you nail it. Like when you nail it, like Super Mario Brothers, it's great. Order up.

Daniel (19:54.662)
yeah.

Daniel (19:59.365)
You want to know one of my favorite opposite examples?

Scott (20:03.51)
not Wheel of Fortune? Okay, what? Okay.

Daniel (20:05.091)
Not Wheel of Fortune. Another Nintendo game. Because again, I grew up in the Nintendo age. in Castlevania 2, right? That's Simon Belmont. man, I feel so nerdy. I feel so nerdy and old. What a combo. There's this infamous part where you get to this town and the town's people start telling you to do stuff. And you would go and do these things and nothing would happen. And people would get so frustrated. would try. I mean, there's tales of people trying for years.

Scott (20:16.148)
Uh-huh, yeah. He's great. That's all right.

Daniel (20:34.607)
basically to go stand in front of this wall with this item and do this thing and wait for something to happen. The problem is, is in the game, you meet all these people and because video games have told us that the people we meet have important things to tell us, which I think is probably a good life lesson in general, but in video games, it's more apt. We think that the things that people tell us are important, that they're being truthful. The game designers decided

No, the people in this town might lie to the character. And so they lie. They tell you things that aren't true. They tell you rumors and things. But because even by the time that Castlevania 2 had come out, we had been taught by all the previous video games to trust what people have to say in the game. It led people on wild goose chases that would really be until the age of the internet, you know, 20 years later when people would be like,

Well, that was never true to begin with. that was a lie. Why would they do that? And so like, there's an example where the intention was to upend convention to, you know, do something that would make players go, but because they didn't telegraph it, right? Didn't set up right. It wasn't a learning moment. It was a frustration moment. Again, I think that's another super important lesson for us takeaways. We're building learnings is if we're not telegraphing, if we're not setting up, if we're not setting expectations,

Scott (21:51.799)
No.

Daniel (22:00.619)
Using your objectives, which you just said, we're building frustration moments, not learning moments.

Scott (22:07.654)
100%. Yeah. That's a very, you know, at the end, you know, a lot of the things that I try to do when I create learning, want to create, because I do a lot of sales training. And so in order to do that, I've got to create an army of advocates, right? So ultimately at the end of the day, I really want to have people that believe in what I need them to do or need them to talk about and to move everybody forward, right? So that's part of what we do. But if you're frustrating them and you make it hard and you just make it, you've defeat the purpose.

Right? So you sales trainers out there, making sure that it's easy. People get it. You're making their lives easier. If you're making them frustrated and it's too complicated, then forget it. by the way, there's a simple way around that nowadays. that's any these AI tools, whether it's Claude or ChatGTP or whatever, without, you know, don't give away the secrets of the ranch, but just say, hey, explain this to me like I was six.

Just type it in there. You'll get great ideas on how you can explain something complicated and make it really nice and simple, which is also very, very hard. Like, I'm sorry, but taking something complicated and making it simple is hard. A lot of us are really good at that. If you aren't so good at that, there's help today that can help you with that. And it's non-judgmental. It's not going to say, you're an idiot. You should be able to do this. No, no, no. It's just going to give you an answer, which is great.

Daniel (23:18.041)
It is, it really is.

Daniel (23:29.071)
Heheheheh.

Scott (23:33.774)
How about you, Zeta?

Zeta (23:35.917)
think he's made a really excellent point of if you're trying to get somebody on on-ramp, like to get them onto the highway of learning, don't put speed bumps in the way, right? Don't make it harder, make it easier, make it effortless, just like the tutorial with Mario. So.

Scott (23:45.219)
Yeah.

Scott (23:56.824)
Okay, I won't play anymore Mario and Jobs, I'm sorry.

Zeta (23:57.465)
No, please do. I love it. I love it. But I had a moment just last week of having too much coming at me and then I didn't know where to go. I don't know if you've ever been to a hot pot place, like a Korean hot pot place where you have the menu and there's so many different things to choose from. Has anybody gone through that? It's first time.

Daniel (23:58.875)
Ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Sam (24:00.944)
Ha

Scott (24:21.742)
Mm-hmm.

Daniel (24:23.784)
yeah, yeah.

Zeta (24:26.081)
I went, was like, this is going to be great. This is going be great. And I sat down and I saw like a wall of stuff and I'm like, no, how do I do this? And I'm sitting with everybody and they're like, you just pick one of the protein, one of the vegetable, one of this. And I was like, bite size. And so when you have something that's really big and overwhelming, from that I just pulled from, well, when I have everything, don't do that to a learner. Don't do that when you're first sitting down. Pick one thing at a time.

and then start with that. Start with your starters. You know, don't start eating dinner with the main course. You start with your appetizers.

Scott (25:05.486)
Very, very true. Now, Gordon Ramsay would have went crazy on a restaurant like that. So how many times you watch Hell's Kitchen, not Hell's Kitchen, but the ones where he tries to rescue the diners. I can't remember any of that.

Zeta (25:06.681)
Yeah.

Zeta (25:20.249)
I've seen clips of it. actually haven't. Yeah, I've seen where.

Scott (25:23.214)
me you know i'm

Zeta (25:27.883)
It's the one where he puts the bread on the sides of her face and says, what are you? And she says, I'm an idiot sandwich. Yeah, yeah.

Scott (25:32.982)
an idiot sandwich. I love Gordon Ramsay, by the way. I think he's great. I just think he's awesome because he has a standard of excellence. And if you don't meet that standard of excellence, you will hear about it. And I love people like that. love people like, this is where it's at. This is what I think. And if you don't like Gordon Ramsay, because that's great. That's fine, buddy. I have to appreciate where he's coming from, an excellent standpoint. So how was the food otherwise?

Zeta (26:00.971)
The food was excellent. It was excellent. because we were sitting with a whole bunch of people, everybody picked a little bit of something. So we all got to try something different. We tried something safe starting out and then, hey, there's lotus root or, hey, was, what was it? It grilled Korean ribs and they were amazing. It was amazing. So excellent experience. But yeah, definitely when you are creating training, don't go all in at the same time.

little bit of bites, bite size your training, just like when you chunk your training into sections. Yeah, make it easier to understand rather than all at once.

Scott (26:36.536)
Chunk it out.

Scott (26:44.418)
Yeah, think chunking is really, really hard. quite frankly, I think it's the way to go, especially if you think about how we're all learning today. before the show, Dan, you talked about the DMV in the little video that you watched,

How long was that video?

Daniel (27:01.241)
A minute and half, easy.

Scott (27:02.318)
Yeah. you have bailed on it if it was 10 minutes?

Daniel (27:08.165)
Yes, yes, yes, 100%. Listen, I, this is, this is something I, man, I don't know. I don't don't know if you have room for a rant. I'm going to, I'm going to jump in on it. I can't tell you how often. Like somebody will be like, Hey, can we get some videos in this? I think we need videos. I think we need videos. I think we need videos, videos, videos, videos.

Scott (27:10.807)
Like.

Scott (27:21.954)
rant.

Daniel (27:39.068)
And videos are cool. Videos are especially cool for Scott people in our generation and even maybe the generation just after us and definitely the generations before us because they were like the ultimate form of like media, right? Like, oh, they've got a video. Oh, that means they put a lot of time and effort into this and this is great. And even as the video wasn't good, which a lot of learning videos are not very good.

It was better to have the video to say, at all the time and effort we put in. But man, too often, like somebody would like, yeah, let's do like a 10 minute video here. And I'll be like, no, stop. Like, why would you put a 10 minute video? Well, because there's a lot to cover here. I'm like, okay, but why wouldn't we build like a course? Well, because like people like videos more. Who, who says, well, everybody's on YouTube. Like, yeah, yeah, you're right. Everybody's on YouTube. Everybody's used to videos now. So like,

How long are those videos? Well, like I watched a video just the other week that was like on the history of this or on that. was like, you went out, you saw a video on a topic you were interested in. That's great. And there was a lot of good information there. Yeah. Yeah. And like you enjoyed watching that whole video. Yes. Yeah. It was great. That was great. Okay. How many other people watch that video? How many people sought out that video? Maybe they found it in their feed. Learning, corporate learning, educational learning.

It's different. People can be interested in a topic and if they're interested in a topic, they'll probably go and Google search and find out more stuff. But chances are people probably aren't super interested in how your customer management tool software works or, you know, they're super interested in your corporate structure. I don't want to be mean. You know, I'm sure it's important and it is important, but it's

maybe something that's better served with like a course or a short brief video. I saw a video not too long ago that somebody was laying out, hey, hey, this is our company and this is what we do and this is why it's so important. And it was a video and it was almost 10 minutes long. And it was, they had just taken a slide deck and turned it into a video. And when I was like, hey, you know, like we're talking about their learnings, we're talking about like,

Daniel (30:05.649)
how this came to be. I'm like, hey, I'm looking at this. And you know, I was 30 seconds in when I said, hey, let's pause. Let's talk about this. And I was like, why is this a video? Oh, well, you know, it used to be a course. used to have somebody train it. And it's just, it's just better this way. Like it's this video that people can just sit down and watch. And I'll be like, how many people do you think are watching this? Well, everybody has to watch it. Okay. But like, if you

tested people on the information. What do you think the knowledge transfer? Like, what do you think? How much do you think they're getting out of this? I mean, you know, it's important, but it's not that important. then what are we doing? Why did we turn this into a video? Well, we didn't want to have a trainer do it. And it became like this circular loop where I was talking with this person and I was like, hey, you know, let's think through this. And I realized now I've been rambling for too long, but nonetheless, I think too often

You brought this up or you said video games. Somebody's like, let's put Wheel of Fortune in here. I think too often the idea is cool, but the learning isn't happening.

Daniel (31:17.393)
I don't know if that's unexpected learning, but we're here now and I'm running with it.

Scott (31:19.758)
No, no, no, no, I think it's fine because I think it's really important too because I used to produce videos back in the day, 10 to 12 minutes of a video. People would love that. Great. But not today. Not today. mean, everybody is time starved and they're used to short form videos and that's great. Quite frankly, it really forces us to get better and honing down in what we do, which is great. Just today. Here's our learning library. And there was a 45 minute webinar on that. I'm never going to watch that. I'm sorry. I'm never going to watch it.

Daniel (31:30.437)
No.

Daniel (31:39.717)
Yes.

Scott (31:47.694)
I'm just not, if you make me watch it, I'll watch it. And even the things that I go to where I know that I might wanna get additional information, at least for me, least there are plenty of different ways to get that information, but I wanna make sure that it's relevant and I get what I need in a timely manner in a way that I wanna get it. And so I think that's one of the things that you have to think about, learning is a buffet. We've talked a little bit about this whole idea of different.

Daniel (31:48.465)
That's tough. That's tough, man.

Scott (32:15.798)
learning styles and that's a myth. And I truly believe that that's, that is true. You know, the kinesthetic audio visual, whatever is a myth. That being said, being honest about who your audience is and how they want to learn and what time out of time that they got and what, know, what makes them tick is super important and making sure you have a learning that addresses those needs. And, you know, a lot of that isn't a 80 page slide deck that they got to go through or 45 minute webinar that they want to go through. Right. So I think that that's super.

Sam, how about you? Unexpected learnings.

Sam (32:52.192)
so this past weekend, I unexpectedly found myself running a D &D game. The normal person that runs on the weekend had to call out, and I figured, hey, I could probably do something.

Scott (33:05.334)
I'm going to pause you for a second. Could you please tell our non nerd audience what D and D stands for?

Sam (33:10.878)
that's fair. Dungeons and Dragons. Turntable... It's such a part of my vocabulary at this point. I forgot that there are people in the world who don't know what that is.

Scott (33:13.57)
Thank you very much, Yep, nerd. There it is, right, okay.

Daniel (33:14.384)
Nerd.

Scott (33:24.982)
I just want to make sure everyone's tracking with you. the hell are you talking about, Sam? Continue.

Sam (33:28.402)
That's fair. That's fair. So this weekend I ran a Dungeons and Dragons game and someone gave some feedback. They wanted to do a dungeon crawl. Well, I didn't have one prepared at the time. So I had an idea. I had everyone kind of get together and think of a room that they would like to see in the dungeon. And each player got together, wrote down some things on paper, picked out some tiles.

And then me, as the game master, kind of put them all together into a dungeon. And something I noticed is that before we even got to the dungeon, before dice hit the table, they were excited to see it. And as someone who likes to engaging training, engaging material, I love the idea of people being excited for the material.

before the material even begins. So it had me thinking along the lines of using forms of what's in it for me or what we'll be learning today to try to look into ways of building either maybe not anticipation but excitement for what you're about to learn and ways for you to get engaged and invested for what you're about to do because you had a hand in it.

And I'm still playing around with some ideas about how I could weave that into training. But that's been a little bit of a worm in my brain since that happened. And I've been thinking about ways to expand that both in running Dungeons and Dragons and ways I could utilize that in the learning and development field.

Daniel (35:21.105)
Man, I just want to say first off, giant nerd and I love it because, you know, me too. I told a director one time that the best learning and development tool I was aware of was Dungeons and Dragons. And they looked at me like I grew three heads and they're like, you got to explain that. And I'm like, listen, like when I was a quiet, know, introspective, you know, kid growing up,

D &D gave me the chance to like practice saying and doing dumb things in safe places. So I could be like, nope, everybody hated that better not do that again. I was like, you know, and it helped give me enough confidence to like organize things. It helps me keep structured. There's a lot to do there. There's a lot of things if you want to say, I'm like to be the dungeon master to run the game, to, to weave a story that brings people back to teach, you know, moments and

I just, can't think of a better tool. I can't think of a better tool.

Scott (36:25.368)
Zeta, what do you think?

Zeta (36:28.633)
think if more people play D &D, I think we would get along a lot better and there'd be less office speak, just honestly.

Scott (36:36.11)
The world would be a better place if we all played more Genesis and Dragons.

Zeta (36:37.561)
It would, it would. I think so.

Scott (36:43.598)
One of the things that, direct tie into what you're talking about, which I think is really important and just sort of general rule. I had this conversation with somebody last week is that never, the cool thing is that you're actually allowing your participants to enter into the learning with everything they have and then offer themselves into that experience in a way that enlightens and embellishes the entire experience for everybody else. mean, that's ultimately what we're supposed to do.

So if I'm teaching a class, I am not responsible for being the sage on the stage, right? And being everybody look at me, that's not my job. My job is to ensure I've got a really safe and fun environment for everybody to participate in. And I encourage and make it safe and fun for everybody to do exactly that because of the more my audience participates and adds into the learning, the chances that everybody, myself included,

Daniel (37:19.675)
Right?

Scott (37:39.88)
learns is super, super important. So I think that's number one. Number two, another adage is never, and I mean never, never do anything that your audience couldn't do for themselves. So somebody that I was working with last week was griping about, well, I gotta do this and I gotta do that. And I'm like, well, why? Why don't you have your audience do it? Put together a template, have them do it. Like as simple as handing out a participant guide,

Johnny up in the front row, could you hand out these participant guides while I go ahead and, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. And by the way, people, I hate to say it, they love it. They love it. I get to participate. This is great. There was one time back in the days when, my goodness, before PowerPoint. Yes, I taught before PowerPoint. And we actually had to run a slideshow on like this little digital projector to look like a fricking CD player. It was weird. And so I'm doing that, right?

And well, I can't do that myself. I had somebody do it and I said that, you're, you're kind of like the monkey that trying, you know, they turns the crank and I'm to pay you for this. gave him a big bag of peanuts, which I thought was great. He loved it. He thought it was great. It worked out great. It was awesome.

Daniel (38:51.757)
my god. my god.

Zeta (38:56.247)
He was working for peanuts.

Scott (38:58.222)
He was working for Peanuts and loved it. So that's really awesome. I think that's great. No, you know, there's learnings all around. And I feel like one of the things that's cool about the unexpected learnings that we have is there are opportunities then that you can share. Like that conversation I had with somebody who just overwhelmed. like, I'm gonna have somebody help you.

have your audience help you. It's totally, it totally makes sense. My big learning, mean, unexpected learning, but Dan and I were talking, I have to talk about this. It may or may not be relevant for our topic overall, but it's so important because it was just eye-opening to me. So we've talked about AI a little bit. There's not going to be a show that we're not going to talk about AI moving forward, just going to have to do it. And, you know, I have ChatGTP and I pay the $20. I know that there's another service like

Sam (39:49.512)
Mm-hmm.

Scott (39:55.842)
Dan, you're paying what, 200?

Daniel (39:58.863)
Yeah, I'm paying for the big boy plan for ChatGPT.

Scott (40:00.962)
The big boy plan, yeah, big boy plan for all of that. And so ChatGTP, the free one, will give you OK advice. I have found that I get better advice, better results because I'm paying it. So if you're not paying for it, you want better results to do it. If you really want awesome advice, you should do the 200. But there's a little thing on there called deep research. And Dan and I were having a conversation. He said,

deep research is like magic. And I was like, no, no, can't, because I got really good results from chat, GTP on some stuff. And people asked me to use it all the time because they're too cheap to pay for it. Can you research this for me? Yeah, not a problem. Give me what you need, half hour later, you get what you know. So I had this really important topic for myself that it was not an expert on. I normally, when I asked it just simple questions, I got very simple answers. I got really frustrated with it.

Daniel (40:33.029)
Deep research is pretty good.

Daniel (40:37.327)
It's pretty good. It's pretty good.

Daniel (40:42.054)
Yeah.

Scott (40:59.266)
The answers were not bad answers. The answers were just not enough for me. And so I took a page out of Dan's playbook and I said, here's this, this is who you are. This is what I need to get. And these are the objections for this question. And I hit the little button, said, deep research. I hit go. And that deep research took about 35 minutes. It sat and it thought for 35 minutes. And you know, here's my thing.

When I have something really important that I need to get out

thinking about it for at least 35 minutes is probably a decent activity, right? So this thing sat and thought for 35 minutes and it came back with a thesis paper. It had to be 15 pages at the least of stuff. And it was all like organized in a way that made sense and then really helpful, like do this, this and this. And here are links that you could get to go out and get more information if I wanted to. And that was like, Dan.

was right. It was magic. my God. yeah. So I guess my learning is that in today's world, what you know or what you think you know is constantly changing. And I feel like it's really important to just put yourself out there and try new things because you're just, you never know what you're going to find out. You're to find out one of two things. Either A.

Daniel (42:03.94)
You

Scott (42:30.85)
This is really awesome and I can't live without it. Now we're going to go ahead and move forward. Or B, whoever told me that is a liar. And it's not as great as I thought it was supposed to be. And that's okay too, because just like our friend Steve Corny tells us, sometimes you got to kiss a whole lot of frogs. Because in that same week, as you told me, this was magic. saw, I'm not going to name the program, but there's a bunch of different programs. You could take an image and make a video out of it. And I saw this YouTube. These are things you need to...

be trying today and it was this product and I was like, wow, that looks like magic. I'm going to try it. And it turned out garbage. And then I tried it again and it was garbage. And I just kept changing the prompt because the way he put it, you know, it was really interesting. He had this like cute, he had this cute immovable object that had, you know, make it wave. I'm like, okay. And then it did. And I'm like, that's amazing. That's great. Looks great.

Daniel (43:08.24)
No.

Scott (43:26.638)
was a tree. Make the tree wave at you. And it did. And it looked like a Pixar cartoon. It was fantastic. And I tried something similar and it didn't work. Didn't work at all. So what does that tell me? Well, the the end result of that is kind of like those videos where the guys making the trick shot video. Right. And you think, oh, my God, the guy's really, really good or the woman's really, really good at this. They just threw it up in the tree. No, they missed it about a thousand times and then hit it once. And that's the shot that they take. Right. And so at any rate.

Zeta (43:55.004)
yeah.

Scott (43:55.948)
Is there anything wrong with that? No, there's nothing wrong with that. just saved myself a hundred bucks instead of signing up for it. What you know and what you don't know can change. And all of us have trusted partners. Man, trust your partners with all that. think that that's a groovy thing.
My biggest learning in the last six months from something that I went through is, and I'm just so blessed. I'm so blessed because it gets on the last five, six months. So like here on the show, we meet amazing people, but

I was forced to really go out and network and talk with some people. And I'm going to tell you straight up the amazing people that I've met in the last six months, or some people that I never would have met had I not gone through some changes in my life. And I'm just so blessed for that. those people know who they are. Like if you're listening, you know who you are. And I just want to let you know I love you very much. And I'm so blessed, right? Just like I'm so, so blessed that every other week I get to hang out.

with some amazing, beautiful people. challenge each other and we're doing good work and we're trying to make people better. And that's great. And I mean, it doesn't matter how crappy my day was or if my laptop is God knows where and maybe it shows up and maybe it won't for whatever reason that I ordered. Doesn't matter. Cause I'm hanging out with Dan and Zeta and Sam and,

We always make each other happy and we're always doing the right thing. So, at any rate, that's where I'm at.

Zeta (48:13.834)
Woohoo!

Scott (48:14.838)
All right, I think that's a great place for us to go ahead and wrap things up. And folks, I'm going to turn it over to Dan. I'm sure he's going to reiterate it. We would love to hear some of the learning experiences, unexpected learning experiences that you've had, and share that with us. And I'm going let Dan tell you exactly how to do it. Dan?

Daniel (48:35.633)
Scott couldn't have said it better myself. Guys, you know what's up. Do what Scott says. Email us any questions you may have. Join in on the conversation. You can email us at nerds at thelearningnerds.com. If you're on Facebook, you can find us at Learning Nerds. For all of our Instagram peeps, Fab Learning Nerds. And lastly, for more information about us, what we do and updates, www.thelearningnerds.com. Scott, back at you.

Scott (49:00.622)
Thanks Dan, everybody do me a favor. Don't try to kill a whole lot of flies because it won't necessarily be a great thing. But after that I'd certainly love you and hit that like button, hit that subscribe button, leave us a review either on iTunes, Stitcher or wherever you go ahead and get your podcasts. We'd love to know how we're doing and it really helps us get more of us out to more of you. And with that, I'm Scott.

Daniel (49:22.629)
I'm Dan.

Zeta (49:23.725)
I'm Zeta.

Sam (49:25.406)
I'm Sam.

Scott (49:26.486)
And we are Fabulous Learning Nerds and we are out.

Daniel (49:33.849)
it.