From Players to Creators: Matt Dalio on Game Design, Equity, and the Future of Learning

In this episode of EdTech Empowerment, host Juan Rodriguez speaks with Matt Dalio, founder and CEO of Endless, about the transformative power of technology in education. They discuss the importance of empowering students to become creators rather than consumers, the role of games in learning, and the challenges of integrating technology in classrooms. Matt shares insights on affordability, public-private partnerships, and the essential skills needed for the future workforce, particularly for underserved communities. The conversation emphasizes the need for innovative approaches to education that engage students and prepare them for a rapidly changing world.

Transcript

Purposeful EdTech and Guest Intro

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Welcome to EdTech Empowerment, Innovating Education Together, brought to you by NextGen Classrooms. I'm your host, Juan Rodriguez, and this season we're diving deep into how technology can truly transform learning when it's integrated with purpose and equity. Today we're joined by a visionary guest, Matt Dalio. Matt is the founder and CEO of Endless and co-founder of Endless Studios, an organization working to make sure that every child has the opportunity to be a creator in the digital world. From designing affordable laptops for understanding communities to building game-making studios that teach coding, design, and collaboration. Matt has dedicated his career to helping kids shape their technology instead of being shaped by it. In this conversation, we'll talk about why games are such powerful tools for learning and how to bridge the digital divide. What's the best practice that every educator should know when bringing technology into the classroom? So let's jump right into it. Hey Matt, how are you doing? Good. Thank you for having me. Thank you for being a guest, Matt. Hey Matt, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? What made you want to join us today?

Matt’s Origin: China to Mission

Smartphones, PCs, and Pay‑As‑You‑Go

From Tux Math to Hacking Games

Building Through Community, Not Just Play

Consumer to Creator: Raising the Bar

Classroom Best Practices and GitHub Mentorship

SPEAKER_01 1:15

So I'm on a mission and I just kind of wanted to spread the word for the mission. And I'll tell you a little bit about myself and kind of how I got to the mission, but maybe I'll just kind of give the two-minute version. When I was 11 years old, my parents put me on a plane and shipped me to China. And I lived with an all-Chinese family, went to an all-Chinese school, was just, I mean, complete Chinese immersion, which was the single best thing that's happened to me in my life. And that was kind of like the first domino that set you know the whole course of my life. From there, when I was 16, I spent a summer in an orphanage in a foundation and started a foundation to help orphanages and orphans in China. And that kind of at a young age, quite literally holding in my arms like kids who were dying and making like the life-saving decision to give them a surgery and like having that have to be my choice made me realize like I, as just a normal individual, could make a difference in someone's life. Um, and so I did that for about 10 years. That that became my life, that became my world. And when I graduated from college and kind of went off in the world, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, was a little bit lost. Went to Stanford Business School, it was the heart of technology. Um, and this was in 2010 when it was just kind of like smartphones were everywhere, all the cool things were happening, Instagram and Instacart and Uber and Snapchat, like it was all being founded literally around me while I was there. And then I went on a trip to India and I realized that there were no smartphones. And I had kind of two realizations at the same time. One was smartphones were about to sweep across emerging markets, that that was just kind of obvious prices would come down and all all these people would one day have them, and that that would change everything for them. And the second insight was that um because everyone was so focused on smartphones, that computers wouldn't spread across emerging markets. And computers, it it seemed obvious to me at the time, and the past decade has kind of proven to be true that um computers are still the tool that we use for work. Like if you want to have a white-collar job, you you need a computer. And therefore, if you want to study for a white-collar job, you need a computer. Um, and everyone in tech was so enamored by the smartphone that they were forgetting that, you know, even though they send their kids to school with computers, there's still five billion people in the world without them. And so the insight at the time was if you could plug a smartphone into a TV, everyone's about to have a smartphone, everyone already has a TV. They could have a, you know, add a keyboard and all of a sudden it's a computer. That was the initial insight. Um, and I'll kind of summarize 10 years of my life in a couple sentences, just saying that what we realized was that it's actually about the cost of the device monthly rather than the upfront cost. And if you use something called pay as you go financing, where basically you pay and the computer unlocks and you you don't pay, the computer locks, all of a sudden it means that you can finance to people, billions more people, people who wouldn't have had credit to be able to finance otherwise. The solar panel industry actually kind of uncovered this insight and ended up getting access to hundreds of millions of people having electricity through this little idea of pay as you go financing. The phone works this way, your electricity bill works this way, and computers can work this way. So, in the process of doing that, spending a ton of time on the front lines of these places and in India and it's across Southeast Asia and Latin America, and and like in people's homes, understanding their needs, their hopes, their fears. Um, we were also always asking ourselves, well, once they get the computer, then how do you teach them the skill to get them the job? Because the computer alone is not enough. And we had um a couple of insights, but but they really, you know, two giant insights that led me to games. The first was that we would walk into classrooms and we would walk in to like rooms full of kids shouting their multiplication tables at each other, just like delighted. Why? Because we had a little icon in this operating system called Tux Math. Now, if you know Tux Math, it's like a 2001 terrible game about math. It's just numbers fall from the sky and you have to shoot them. And the kids, even though it was a bad game, the kids were just so delighted by it. And so that was the first moment that I was like, wow, like let's use games to teach. And the second moment was at the other end of the spectrum of sophistication, we had these amazing Linux engineers, quite literally, some of the best Linux engineers in the world. And I was just curious, like, how the heck did they learn? Like, what was their journey? Uh, like, you know, what did it, what, what got them started? And so I'd ask every single one of them when I was interviewing them, how did you learn? Um, and I got the same answer almost every single time. And the answer was always, I was a kid. And it was almost always I liked games. And I discovered that I could hack my games. And that when I discovered I could hack my games, like swapping out the audio files, you know, on the 14, you know, I had the little 14 floppies that I install like Doom, and then okay, I swap out the audio files, and all of a sudden the character in the game is speaking my language. Like that was cool. And then I translated the game to Galician in my little voice, you know, like that type of hacking of a game, or like I swapped out a number. Five, I made 15, and that number was the number of lives. And now all of a sudden I had 15 lives and I could beat the game. Like those kinds of stories I just heard over and over again. And it turns out that that is the most common way that today's tech titans learned. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, like all these people learned at the very start through games. So this insight of like, well, if they all learned this way, then why aren't we teaching this way? was kind of the obvious question. And so what we started doing was exploring what would it look like to teach people to build software and not just in code, but as as designers, as artists, as storytellers, as project managers, as the marketers, like all the disciplines of entrepreneurship. How, how, what would it look like to teach those through games? And we started by the assumption that we would build a game where the whole idea was that you could hack everything. And if you make the hack an ultimate hackable game, then you can get lots of people excited about coming and hacking the game. And we missed on two counts. The first is we didn't realize how much money it would cost to build it. And so we spent, unfortunately, millions of dollars on a game that we basically couldn't ship because we couldn't build all the quest lines. We built like one quest line, but we needed thousands of hours of quest lines. So we realized that if we could invite the community to help us build the game, then they could be the ones to build the thousands of hours of quest lines. And that's when we realized the second thing that we got wrong was that it wasn't about playing, it was about building. And so if you invite kids to build, if they're building a game, they're building a piece of software. We we we we know one of the guys who helped build the Xbox, and he was describing that the game team at Microsoft, the Xbox team, was one of the most advanced engineering teams in the entirety of Microsoft. Like to build a game is one of the hardest pieces of software you could build. It's like games and operating systems. We just happen to build both. That to build a game is so robust, it's so multidisciplinary, it's left brain and right brain, it requires the artist and the engineer and the designer and the project manager and the marketer and the sound designer and the narrative. It requires all of these things and it requires them to come together. And if you double-click into any one of those disciplines, like in code, it requires renders and shade, render and shaders, and all sorts of the deep graphic stack stuff. I mean, you can get sophisticated really quickly in building a game. And so the notion of bringing youth together to build games was just kind of this almost in retrospect obvious thing that took us five years to figure out the obvious. And so that is a much longer journey, long, much longer answer than I'd intended to give. But that's basically the you know the arc of the past 20, 30 years of my life.

SPEAKER_00 9:38

Yeah, thank you for sharing that, man. That's a that's an awesome story. Um, but let's backtrack a little. Let's let's take it back to when you were 16. Uh, you mentioned that you were in China at the time. Matt, you've been building initiatives for children since you were that age, since you were 16 years old with the China Care Foundation. What inspired you, your what inspired your shift into education technology with Endless and Endless Studios?

Why Games Supercharge Learning

Equity, Open Tools, and New Models

SPEAKER_01 10:03

So what got me started was wanting to get into college, is the honest answer. You know, you got to volunteer to get into a good school. Um, and and I wanted to go back to China. And I met a family friend that that had adopted a girl, and I was like, this is a great opportunity. I'm gonna go spend a summer in an orphanage. And then I held a dying child. And then I realized I could do something about it. And then that changed the entire trajectory of my life. Um, when I fast forward 15 years, I guess, you know, from that point, uh, maybe not quite, but about that, it for me it wasn't enough to change 500 or 5,000. We ended up changing thousands of lives. But um, and there's something so powerful about that. Like there's the wonderful story of the kid on the beach with the an old man that walks up and he sees there are thousands of starfish strewn across this beach and they're all going to dry up and die. And the kid's throwing one starfish at a you know in the water at a time. And the old man comes and says, But you can't save them all. And the kid picks up the starfish and throws one into the water and says, But for that one, I changed, I saved the world. And so like that was my experience as a child. For that one, I I changed the world. Um, but the way I look at the world today is that like if you invite invent the right thing, you know, the bulldozer that can just go up the beach and push them all in the water, then you can save them all. And I'm an inventor type, personality-wise, archetype-wise. Like, I just like inventing things. I like coming up with things and solving problems, and I love technology solutions. And like, that's my happy place, is like the creative making. I'm a maker. My like my happy place is when I'm making games, ironically, doing the very thing we teach. But my happiest place is when I'm inventing the system that then makes it so that I can make it so that other students get to invent games and then learn skills that then allow them to invent lots of things and then change their lives. And so that was how the journey really got started. But the the the notion of like, how do I go from throwing one starfish in the water at a time to how do I uh educate the billions of kids? Because that's the challenge that humanity's got like got in front of it. There are billions of kids, three billion kids under the age of 25. And there will on today's trajectory all not be educated, all minus a tiny little fraction, all not be educated in the skills of the modern world. And with AI coming, AI is already going to destroy half the jobs, you know, depending on who you ask, white-collar jobs. Like, what do you do for the billions of kids to have a hope for a good job? And and when you have uh uh that sort of decimation of the workforce, you have angry people, right? I mean, you someone was just describing, Saul Khan actually was was I was just in a meeting with him, and he was describing that I think it's like 7% of the of the male workforce is our drivers. And whether that's the Uber driver or the truck driver or the delivery driver. And when you have automated driving, what happens in a world where your male unemployment goes up 7%? You you have angry men. What do you have when you have angry men? You have revolution. And so it's not just that the individual has a bad life, it's that like society tips. And so that that's possibly in front of us, unless we as society figure out how to educate three billion people to have jobs in a workforce with AI. And then on the other side, like if you imagine for a minute a world where like imagine every kid, snap a finger, magic wand, we're in Harry Potter land and we could say magic. Every kid in the world had the same skills that like, I don't know, Mark Zuckerberg is spending$100 million a year for. Like, imagine everyone were superhumans with AI and could use this amazing intelligence at their behest, you know, right at the tip of their keyboards, like, you know, like magical spells coming out of their hands. That's what AI unlocks today. Imagine every kid in the world had that skill. How different the world would be. Not only would they all be employed, but imagine what they'd build. They'd they'd improve everything healthcare, construction, I mean, you know, everything. Um, and so the notion of how we teach those three billion is not just a humanitarian effort. I believe the future of civilization depends on us as society solving that problem. So it's a big problem. And the challenge, the bigger problem, is the institutions that are supposed to teach those skills, i.e., schools, they know how to teach the skills of the old workforce, not the new workforce. And, you know, I I often say, like, our job at Endless, and our job as society is not to replace the institution. The institution is very good at what it teaches, but it is to, you know, there's an ingredient that needs to be taught. There, there's a skill that needs to be taught, and it's the skill of Silicon Valley. It's the the same you know, set of ingredients that make Silicon Valley so vibrant and so amazing and so so innovative. It's like, well, how do you take that, bottle it up, and spread that ingredient everywhere? And that's that's what we're trying to do.

SPEAKER_00 15:32

I love that. I love that. And I think one of the things that stood out the most to me was how you described your student, right? You mentioned that you don't want students or our child to become consumer of these technologies, but rather you said that every kid should be a creator. What does that mean to you in practice?

Public–Private Paths and Teacher Empowerment

SPEAKER_01 15:51

Every kid actually is a creator, right? Like I've got young kids, and from the moment they could pick up a block, they were stacking a block on top of another block. And from the moment they could scoop a thing of sand into a little bucket and turn it upside down to build a sandcastle, they were doing that. And and you see it in the instinct of kids in Minecraft or in Fortnite Creative or in Roblox, like the most popular games in the world right now are have all converged on user-generated content engines. In other words, basically, you're the creator is the player is the commute, you know, the consumer in creation, the blend. And today, I'm a creator, you're a creator, we love creating our institutions and our organizations. Like the creative instinct is from Legos all the way to companies all the way back to blocks, is such a human impulse. So we all are creators, but we live in a society where we tap on glass, we go to Instagram and we tap on glass, we go to TikTok or we go to play video games and we're taught to consume by people who are really good creators who have gotten us into kind of these pathways where they tell us what to click on. But like, if we can bring everyone behind the scenes and go back to the fact that we're all creators by instinct and that the most successful games in history are all actually creation games at their core, right? UGC. Like if you go back to the fact that we're all creators already, and you just teach kids how to go up the curve so that we can teach them that they actually have it in them to be power users of creative tools, in other words, to go from Minecraft to like Unity. Like the interesting thing about going from Minecraft to Unity is that when you teach a kid how to use Unity, they are terrified, rightfully so, because it's an incredibly complicated piece of software. And when you put a kid in Unity and you actually teach them unity and you say, which one do you like better, Minecraft or Unity, their answer is Unity. Why? Because I can build anything I want. As much as placing blocks, I do anything I can imagine I could I could do. So when you get kids up that little curve, it's like a J curve. It's like once they get through that little hard part, boom, they're off and running. So our goal is to make it so that every kid realizes yes, you can be a digital creator. This is not, you know, for the elites. This is not some hidden magical tool that, like, you know, only Mark Zuckerberg knows how to use and the people that he pays lots of money. This is something that everyone can do. And it's not just about code, it's about, you know, I imagining something and turning your digital art into something that comes alive.

21st‑Century and Silicon Valley Skills

SPEAKER_00 18:36

Yeah, and that's awesome. Because I think once kids hit that curve, once they hit that little peak, they're like a rocket, they shoot up into the sky because that's when they start building that curiosity. But I also think that in addition to making students or making a child a content creator, right? One of the biggest challenges in the school is not only teaching the students the technology, but it's also integrating the technology into the classroom, right? So many schools struggle with integrating technology in a meaningful way. What are some of the best practices you've seen in ensuring technology is a tool for creation and not just for consumption?

Rethinking Systems for Underserved Learners

99U and Free‑to‑Play Education Economics

One Tip for Educators: Let Kids Build

Rapid Fire and Closing Links

SPEAKER_01 19:13

I think the key to from our perspective and the way our very specific implementation for how we think about it in the classroom is that teachers should be able to teach what they want to teach without necessarily, there are a few things I want to say. One is they should be able to teach the thing that they that they want to teach without necessarily even having to know it themselves. So what comes to mind is actually in Silicon Valley, a school where the geometry teacher was like, I need my kids to learn how to code, but I don't know how to code, and it's not in the classroom in the curriculum, so I'm gonna bring them into, and then she had a curriculum with like Scratch and a couple of other tools. And she's like, I don't know how code, but I know that if I put my kid in front of a tool like Scratch, that the tool will help them, because the tool is designed to teach them how to learn the skills. I I want to answer that question by talking about the second big insight that we had, um, which was that when I follow the journey of all these Linux engineers who became like gurus, like one of them was like the equivalent of the Ranger Navy SEAL engineering team at Apple, like that they send into the hardest problems. And like I follow those learning journeys. The thing that got them hooked so often was the games. But the thing that taught them over the course of years was a thing called GitHub. And most people don't know what GitHub is, but GitHub is basically the online community where you contribute and coordinate code as engineers. And there are a hundred million people in GitHub. Basically, like almost all software is built in GitHub. Like there are half a billion repositories or projects in GitHub. And it's this amazing, vibrant community where people build software. And the amazing thing about that is that especially when you go to open source projects like Linux, is that everything's in the open. And so what that means is that, first of all, you as a first-time contributor can see what the leaders of the project, what Linus Torvalds is doing. Every comment, every commit, everything he's doing, you can actually see. What it also means is that in the Linux kernel, there are a hundred levels of what they call maintainership. Think of it as like a hundred levels of management infrastructure. And down at the bottom, I, as a first-time contributor, when I contribute something, I can have it contributed to the Linux kernel. Imagine that. I find a bug, I fix the bug, it'll get merged. But usually, when I fix a bug as the first-time person, I don't fix it correctly. And so what happens is the maintainer, that manager, their responsibility is to tell me how to change it so that it actually can be merged. And that interaction between them telling me how to fix something and me then fixing it, sometimes many times until it's ready to actually be merged, that little interaction is called mentorship. It's called learning. And so the beauty of this structure is that it's actually incredibly scalable. Because you can have lots of people contributing to lots of projects, and they're all learning. And on the other side are people who want contributions to their projects. They want bug fixes, they want features, they have task lists, and you can come and you can take a task and contribute a task. And what that all means is that you have this kind of self-perpetuating, growing system where the community does the heavy lifting of the teaching in an organic, authentic context on a real project. And so when you take these gurus of the Linux community, they did not start gurus, they became gurus because they were mentored by gurus. And so that little insight of building games in a community like an open source community, or sometimes quite literally an open source community, suddenly means that lots of people can go through a system where they're all building together and they're all getting better together. And the beauty of that is that you don't need a teacher sitting, you know, as your sage on the stage lecturing, because what you have is just a lot of people making together. So that experience, um, I believe, when we look at like what does it look like to educate a billion kids, to do that, you have to have something called a network effect. A network effect is the core of technology. Every product that is successful in the internet, every single one has what they call network effects. And it's a very simple concept, which is that if every new user makes the system better for all the users. So, like Uber, the more drivers there are, the better it is for the passengers. The more passengers there are, then the more drivers want to come. So the more drive, the better it is for both sides. Every marketplace is a network effect. Amazon, the more buyers there are, the better it is for the sellers. The more sellers there are, the better it is for the buyers. And so social networks are a classic, you know, if all your friends are there, it's better for the for for you. Education is typically the anti-network effect. In other words, if I take a 20-kid classroom and I make it 80 kids, I don't want to send my kid to that school. If I make it 80,000 kids, I'm sure as heck not sending my kid to that classroom. So when you think about educating a billion kids or a million kids, an entire country's worth of kids, or a school district's worth of kids, you have to make it a network effect. You have to make it something that gets better because there are more people in it. And the beauty of a community like GitHub is that GitHub is precisely if the reason it is so powerful is because there are a hundred million people in it. So when you make education literally GitHub, when you make education literally enter the place where the work takes place, even if it's a safe, isolated, you can make your little safe, isolated kind of world within it. But when you make it that people are entering a community that is vibrant with all these amazing projects happening, with people with similar interests and different interests and different skill levels, and you can join and build with them. That is that's what makes Minecraft so vibrant. That's what makes your Roblox with its 50 million games and a third of a billion players so so compelling. That's what makes Fortnite so compelling. Basically, everything that's successful is a network effect, and we don't think about education as building network effects. So, back to your question, the classroom. The core of what we do is take the engagement of games, it's like catnip for kids. We create tools that make it really easy to scaffold kids in, so they don't like have to jump straight to Unity because Unity is hard and scary. So there are tools that make it easier to step in. So at every level, like to like a tutorialization process in a game, at every level you know what to do. We have curriculum that can be run by teachers so that they can take it and they can be like, here are the PowerPoints and here are the projects and here's what you're supposed to do. And then the core of it is that once you've scaffolded those kids into those tools and a community, it's almost like the rest is history. They're off and running in a community and they could live forever. And like, like in GitHub, literally, people spend their entire careers in GitHub, learning every step of the way. So that is a long answer to your question, but it's actually the full answer to your question.

SPEAKER_00 26:52

Yeah, I love that. And I think what's what's great about it is that once you have everyone on a common goal, um, they all work together to support each other through that. And you had mentioned Endless Studio using games um as a powerful tool, right? Just gaming um or gamifying lessons is a powerful way to teach. Endless Studio uses games as an entry point for learning 21st lesson skills, 21st century skills, I'm sorry. And why do you why are games as such powerful mediums for teaching?

SPEAKER_01 27:23

For two main reasons. There are a lot of reasons. But um, the first is that they engage. The the challenge number one in education is engagement. Why? Because engagement equals learning. If someone's willing to do something for thousands of hours, they're gonna get good at it. It's it's the 10,000 hour rule. Well, by coincidence, the average kid spends 20 hours a week playing games, and over the course of their childhood, that becomes that literally is 10,000 hours. So if you can take the engagement of games, I don't think they should be playing 10,000 hours of games, but if you take that engagement and you turn it into like they're in Unity and they're in GitHub and they're in Blender and they're in code, and they're in, you know, thinking about what the narrative is and they're still doing the sound design and like they're in prof literally professional tools doing the very same thing that they would do in a software economy job, or they're figuring out a market their game because that's their project, that's their role in the job in the project, and we're collaborating with peers. When you take that level of engagement, you get learning. So, an example, just because you know we we throw a lot of game jams, and the last game jam I was at was a three-day game jam. And on day three, I asked these students, these are mostly college students, asked them how how much did you sleep last night? One of them was like 30 minutes. The most I found was four hours. There was no test associated with this, there was no reason for them to do that other than sheer passion. And like, when was the last time you saw that for, you know, an algebra exam, like that passion? Right? And when was the time the last time you saw that for almost anything? And so the first reason games are so darn good is because there is basically nothing other than social media that is that engaging. And even social media, most kids won't spend, you know, 30 hours sleeping, 30 minutes sleeping because they're so passionate about it. The second reason that games are so good is because there is not a more multidisciplinary piece of software that you can build that represents more disciplines. Like if you take this kind of metaphor of like the black box where you throw all the ingredients that you'd want in a project-based learning experience and you shake it up, and out the other end, like what do you get? Well, what let's look at the ingredients. You want something that's right brain and left brain that teaches you both the artistic side as well as the you know hard sciences side, like how you code something. Okay, well, it's got those two things. You'd want something that you could ship to the world so that you can experience what it's like to take a product to market. Now I've got a Market it. Okay, well, a SaaS product built by a couple students over a weekend. You're not shipping a SAS product, even if they wanted to get excited about it, that anyone's going to actually want to use. But games, like get them in Roblox, get them building a game, and they can go that you maybe they get 50 users tomorrow, maybe they get 500 users, maybe they get 50,000 users, right? But they can very quickly get users. You'd want a product that allows you to make something really easily, which you can do in the right game making tools, and also something that pushes the bounds of like the extreme top of the market where I'm in shaders. You'd want you know complexity and simplicity. It's got that too. So it's got all these ingredients because it is so multidisciplinary and multifaceted. So you could teach everything with it. Today I was just, you know, just out of curiosity, being like, AI, ChatGPT, find the intersection of trigonometry, um, landscape architecture, AI, and game design, and come up with a project that teaches all four of those things. And AI came up with the coolest project where you're using trigonometry to be able to calculate the math of the sunlight that would come down, which would then cause with certain rain on the, like also trigonometry calculating the slope of the park that you design, that then calculates how much water there is and the drainage and how much rain it can handle. And all of that can be systemized. Literally, you write the code to understand trigonometry in a real world context for the person who's excited about landscape architecture. It can be applied to basically anything because game engines are really just giant simulation engines. They simulate the real world and in a more powerful way than basically anything. And so when you point the power of these skills and tools at basically any problem, I won't say any problem, but a heck of a lot of problems, there are actually really exciting solutions to it that teach you these skills in a very substantial way. And you know, I flip it around and I say, what else does it that so effectively?

SPEAKER_00 32:10

Nice. And I think that's what's great about it is that there's a potential to unlock to unlock a student's uh best potential through all that. Um and we talked about how integrating technology can be a challenge, right? Even having students students learn these different technologies. Um, but also one of the one of the biggest challenges is affordability, right? When it comes to having equity to these different technologies, making sure that all students can afford or have access to this. What would you suggest, or how can school leaders and policymakers think differently about the affordability and accessibility of these tools?

SPEAKER_01 32:49

Yeah, it's a great, great question. And I think the answer comes down to a combination of business model and then the actual cost of delivery. If it costs a lot to deliver, you can't you can't make it cheap. Um, and if your business model requires you to charge school districts, for example, then it's harder to make it cheap. We are a weird endless is kind of a weird beast because we aren't one company doing one thing. We we have a collection, we have a company, we have a foundation, they um you know, we we support other foundations, we do some investing, we so we kind of look at it and have multiple answers to ultimately business models, et cetera. But I'll say um one core thing about affordability, and um, and then give a couple other thoughts from sure. But the one core thing about affordability is that when you have community, you have something that can be free to join. So, like GitHub, that that case I made, you know, with a lot of passion about how good of a learning environment GitHub is. By the way, I forgot to say something about GitHub. GitHub is also where Silicon Valley engineers go to see when they're hiring whether someone's a good engineer. So they don't care about your GPA or transcript or what school you went to, they care about your GitHub profile. So it's also a portfolio to get hired with. So all of the amazing things in GitHub. And the amazing, the most amazing thing about GitHub is that it is free to join. I can go and contribute and I can build and I can go through a multi-year long journey, and I can't, I don't have to spend a penny. So when you have community in peer-to-peer learning and nearer peer learning, all of that is free. The same thing is true for software tools. There's software, I could ship, you know, one piece of software, a million pieces of software, it costs the same amount. So the, and by the way, open source tools are great also for that reason, is that then you get lots of people contributing. Like we use, we use Godot a lot, Godot is free and open source. We use Blender a lot, Blender is free and open source. So the the community and open tools are fundamental to the actual cost of delivering the experience. The second thing is around that business model that I was talking about. How does an entity pay for ever-growing contributions to be able to build the systems? And again, that comes down to kind of our wacky structure, but we have a company whose job is basically go make as much money as possible. And often ironically, that means we'll then go charge for the premium, then buy the Mercedes-Benz type type of experience. And we have a foundation whose job is to make it as cheap as possible. That goal, team's goal is to make it free. And because ultimately our collective goal is to make it all free. Our long-term business model, um, as we think about this, is that if you have a bunch of students who are learning, uh, we think of it as like a supply of talent in a marketplace, and you have real studios that are building games and can use and work with that talent on the other side to build their games, to build levels, contribute art assets, do play testing, get user feedback, all sorts of things like that. Those studios can make money from the games. And what that means is that those studios can also pay the students for the contributions. And those students can then use those payments to pay for their education. And so you can have educational institutions training people to do this, and you can have game studios creating practice opportunities in real-world contexts on real-world games, and they can go and build these games and monetize these games. And so it's almost, you know, we think of it as creating a marketplace between two business models: those who want to educate, those who want to build games, the people who want to learn are excited to work on the games, and the people who are building games are excited to have, you know, a swarm of talent that wants to work on their games. And again, both sides monetize, and the studios are able to pay the students so that the students can ultimately make money from their education. That's the kind of you know, the the master plan. That's the secret master plan.

SPEAKER_00 37:12

I like that because that's a I think that's a great way um for you to think about how public and private partnerships can play a role in bridging that digital divide, which was my next question. But do you have any other suggestions? Um, you had mentioned what you just said right now, but what other ways or what other yeah, like what other ways um do you think public and private partnerships can play a role in bridging that divide? Um, I like the concept that you mentioned how the student can become the content creator and make money. Um, but is there any other way that you think we can make this happen?

SPEAKER_01 37:47

It's a great question. So we unfortunately don't do too much in America. Um and in part, it's because the the systems are so hard to work with, as we've heard. We haven't done much ourselves in the in the in the public school system. We want to make it available. We're right now working with donors choose to be able to kind of spread it to any teacher who wants it. And in fact, we'll we'll through the foundation pay teachers to be able to take it and run it. Because we just you know, we want them to be teaching these kids um these skills. And so, you know, we think about um on the company side, our business model as like we don't want to make money from the schools. There is no money to be made there, quite frankly. But the the challenge of working school district by school district is just so hard. So, you know, our our philosophy, you know, generally on public partner private partnerships has been with ministries of education globally, because a ministry of education can kind of say, you know, cast it out to an entire country worth of kids. So I wish the US would work that way. I mean, you know, it has its pros and cons, but I wish the US we had that we could show up and be like, let's do this for every kid in the country. You know, we're we're looking at some states like Vermont to say, let's do this for every kid in Vermont. But even Vermont, like there are 5,000 kids per grade level. And as up until recently, there were 72 districts. So you had to go and sell 72 superintendents and all the political kind of navigation of that for 72 districts for 5,000 kids only. So, you know, in the US, we think about it much more as kind of let's let's prove it in other environments and then let's let it seep into schools. Um, also, if you make it so darn exciting that kids want to do this stuff independent of school, then it starts showing up in school. Like Minecraft is a great example of that. When a quarter billion kids are in this amazing creation environment called Minecraft, you know, schools can't ignore it. Um and then all of a sudden you start having individual teachers adopt it. So, you know, we believe so much in the power of the teacher. And so we want to empower teachers to be able to bring these things into their classrooms. And so anyway, that's a a little bit of a ramble, but uh something.

SPEAKER_00 40:16

It's so good. It's all good. Um Matt, what do you think? What do you believe are some important skills to learn in the classroom, right? Aside from the the skills that they're learning to use this technology, we want to talk about 21st century skills. In your experience, how does building a game teach collaboration, problem solving, creativity in ways that the traditional classroom method doesn't.

SPEAKER_01 40:42

So the act of building a game collaboratively as a team, but by definition, you have to work across the disciplines. One person's the engineer, another person's the artist, another person is the storyteller, another person's the designer, another person says, I gotta be a project manager because there's a whole lot of stuff going on here. Then you build the game, you have to take it to market. So then you figure, okay, how do I market it? You know, what's our social media strategy? And you know, how do I iterate the product to get product market fit? Like that whole experience by definition is is is that. Um there's a great teacher in in um in Palo Alto that was actually Steve Jobs' daughter's teacher. Steve Jobs' favorite teacher was um Esther Wojski. And she runs this amazing media program. And in this media program, it has nothing to do with technology. It's been around for decades, and and it started out of a trailer, literally a trailer in the back of the school. And basically what she did was she said, you are going to be the entire newspaper production team. You're gonna be there, there's a newspaper team, there's a magazine team, there's a TV team, there's a radio team, there's a podcast team, there's an entire media school, basically, inside of this trailer. And that experience was so engaging and so successful that it became so popular that it is now the largest media school or media program in the entire country. 700 kids take part in it. They've now built a 25,000 square foot campus building just for this program that the town voted to build. Um, and and the idea of that is exactly how we think about teaching what we're teaching, which is just doing that within the context of digital skills. In other words, we're you are you're the studio, endless studios. These are, you know, what we aspire to have is millions of studios with millions of kids, with tens of millions of kids. Um, and that experience, like those are the 21st century skills. I also, you know, 21st century skills is a more confined term because we often think of like, you know, collaboration or creativity, which are are implicit. Of course, you need those. And by the way, building a grain, highly creative, right? You have to problem solve. You get stuck, you have to find your way around it, right? All of that. But but it misses also 21st, sorry, Silicon Valley skills, in other words, the digital skills. In other words, how do I actually do those quote unquote 21st century skills like collaboration and communication and creativity? But how do I do that in the context of I actually have a piece of software that I have to build and take to market? Like, like, like that's where so much of today's value comes from. Sacha Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, described that today, every company is a software company. So every employee needs to know how to work at and for a software company and be an innovator and a creative and a collaborator and a communicator in a software company. So then those projects and those skills need to be done in the context of software. And that means that you have to learn also the skills of software. Like what's a Kanban board? How do I actually manage software with with you know in a complex project, right? And how do I, you know, take a task and then do the task and make sure that I could, you know, deliver on the task that I did? You know, how what is it, what is GitHub? How do I use GitHub? How do I issue a pull request? How do I like these are in some sense basic things, in some sense very complicated things. And you have to get kids from a place where it feels scary to a place where it's just first, you know, first nature. And the beautiful thing about kids is that they are so, and when I say kids, I really mean, you know, everything all the way from like we work with college, you know, youth, college students, high school students, all the way down to younger kids. But but it is that they learn and intuit technology so easily. And so what may be scary for the teacher is so intuitive for this young human. And so it's no coincidence that like startups are so often built by youth. You know, Mark Zuckerberg in his college dorm with his hoodie starts Facebook. Bill Gates, you know, he didn't have a hoodie, but he started, you know, drops out of college and starts Microsoft. So youth are good at this software thing if you just give them the forum and the scaffolding and the peer-to-peer, you know, collaboration and they learn from each other. Like by the way, just you know, a uh one thing you mentioned before about the power of teams and learning from each other. Like I'm remembering me being in the Bronx and inner city, and I go and I ask this question like I they were using our game making tool that's built on top of Unity to teach how to use Unity, and they were doing stuff I did not know the tool could do. And I was like, how the heck did you learn that? And the answer was, well, that kid over there taught me. And it wasn't a kid on the same team, or they were on the other side of the classroom. But because that one kid figured it out, the entire classroom had now figured out how to do this thing that when I showed the engineers who built it, they didn't even know it could do. The tool that they built could do this thing that a kid in the Bronx had taught it his entire class. And so, like those, those skills, that that form of collaboration, that form of communication, those are the things that our kids today need to learn how to do.

SPEAKER_00 45:56

And you had mentioned it before, right? It's taking, stepping away from the traditional classroom and modernizing it, right? What can we do to modernize it? And I think that's what it is right there is teaching skills, teaching the 21st century skills, the communication, the collaboration, um, but adding that extra C, which probably is coding, or the tech skills, um, which is essential for the students today, um, especially with the careers that are coming into the future. Um, I I love that you touched upon that. So let's talk about the future, like looking ahead of tech.

SPEAKER_01 46:30

I'm gonna our our head of learning was just describing these four C's, and so I'm gonna uh uh try to remember the ones that he was talking about because I'm gonna be able to do it. Collaboration, communication. It was a different one. It was from consumer to creator to contributor, to I I forget what the fourth one was, but where you get paid. In other words, the notion of I consume, I create, like a, you know, I'm a Roblox creator, to I'm a contributor to something larger than my own little piece, to one day I am a professional. And it's that four C's that we care more about than like implicit in it. You need to learn the other four C's, you need to learn how to collaborate and communicate and do all those things. But it's the flow from I'm a consumer to at the end of the day, I know how to have a job in the knowledge economy and the software economy. That like that pathway is a pathway that I think the traditional education system has kind of given up hope of ever being able to teach because they they didn't, they don't see a path to do it. Because if the school doesn't know how to do it or the teacher doesn't know how to do it, then how do you do it? And so the way we look at it is it's it's actually less about reinventing the classroom because like uh the classroom does a lot well, and and and changing a system to try to do something it's not built to do is is hard, if not impossible. All we're doing is saying, what works already to do this? Okay, number one thing you have to do is engage. Great, games are good at that. Number two thing is like you have to then teach these skills in highly scalable, systematic ways that teach them how to be part of a community like GitHub. Well, great, let's get them into GitHub. Let's just do what GitHub does for games. And so we've kind of you know thought about it totally orthogonally. I'll I'll I'll I'll say that I think one of the blessings that we've had is the is the blessing of being in environments and designing for environments where we knew that there wouldn't there wouldn't be teachers, there wouldn't be schools. Like in Guatemala, where I've spent a lot of my life, the math teachers there, 70 to 90 percent of the math teachers cannot pass the math exam that they are supposed to teach to. So, how are they going to teach the next generation to teach math if they can't pass the math exam themselves? So if you're designing a system to teach those kids incredibly sophisticated coding skills to one day become digital citizens, like you know, by definition, you have to think about it totally differently than renovating the existing educational system. You have to think about it in an online, native, you know, you know, I'll use the word first principles way, but really it's just kind of a native online solution. What worked online? What taught Mark Zuckerberg? What taught Elon Musk? What taught these amazing engineers? Let's go do that. Like one of the best engineers we ever hired, who in the Linux world, you could see the rankings of how much of by many measures, how high quality someone is in the Linux world, the GNOME desktop stack, there was one person who was far above and beyond everyone else. And we hired him. We hired the head of the Red Hat desktop team, which is the best operating system team. He came over and I said, hire anyone you want. And we hired this guy. And the interesting thing about this guy, this amazing engineer, was that he didn't have a high school diploma, let alone a college degree. And yet he was objectively the number one Linux contributor. And so this is a reflection of the fact that, like, traditional education and this ingredient, it's not that they compete with each other. It's not that we're trying to change traditional education. We can take that and infuse that into traditional contexts, we can run that outside of traditional contexts, but it's that it is a native system that is built for the way the internet works by just simply copying what already works, by copying what that young kid's experience was that made him the incredible professional that he is today.

SPEAKER_00 50:41

I love that because that just kind of like touched upon our next question, right? When we're looking ahead into the future and we're thinking about the future of learning, the future of education. Matt, share with us what's your vision for learning, especially when it comes to underserved communities.

SPEAKER_01 50:57

My heart is in the underserved communities. The reason I'm doing this is because of the underserved communities. So when you ask about business model, everything that we do is like, how do you make it so that you can make it affordable to everybody? Like we're we're right now tackling something that's you know very, very early stages, but our aspiration is basically what I just we kind of internally call 99U, but is basically what would it look like to be able to get a college degree for$99 a month? And how would you structure that? The way that we think, and that's what you have to do to get to underserved communities, whether that's a kid in the Bronx, a kid in rural, you know, Kentucky, or a kid in rural India. And the core of that business model actually is something that we kind of steal or stole from uh or or learned from free-to-play games. And the way that free-to-play games work is that it's free, and then there's a currency, and you can either buy that currency, like you could buy Robux, or you could earn that currency, and then you can buy things inside of the game that level you up with one of those two paths to have gotten you that currency. What that means, one of the reasons that free-to-play games are so successful, by the way, I think it's like 90% of all revenue generated from online games is through free-to-play games. All of the most high highest grossing games on the uh on the app store are free to play. So free to play is actually free as a very good business model for a couple reasons. The first is it allows for a very wide top of funnel, in other words, there's no friction for people to join, which also then has network effects because now all of a sudden it's the game that everyone's playing or sharing. And the second is that some people have a lot of money and no time, some people have a lot of time and no money, some people are price sensitive and some people are not. And so in these free-to-play games, some people won't pay you anything, some people will pay a dollar, and some people will pay$10,000. In our community and what we are building, that we have not built this yet, by the way. So I say that very you know upfront very clearly. But the the notion of you know, grinding is contributing. Grinding is learning in this world. And so the irony is the person who doesn't have the money who has to grind for the currency, it's actually the person who's learning more. It's this inverse equity. The guy who's got the money who buys their way in, doesn't learn as much. The person who doesn't have the money is the one who has to grind and therefore learns more.

SPEAKER_00 53:27

Yeah. That's a great model.

SPEAKER_01 53:30

So that's how we think about, you know, at its core, the business model. Again, there are a lot of things we're working on that all are aligning in this direction, but but that ultimately is the is the aspiration.

SPEAKER_00 53:41

Yeah, I think that I think that's awesome because it gives students um an incentive, right? An incentive to continue being curious, in a sense to like continue wanting to learn and dig for more. Uh so that's really awesome to hear, and I'm curious to see how it'll work. Um, and I definitely would consider applying it to our group of students. But let's talk about the last question that I have for you. And it goes back to integrating technology. Is the one question that I ask everyone that's featured on our podcast? If you could give one piece of advice to educators trying to integrate new technology in their classroom, what would it be?

SPEAKER_01 54:17

Let your kids build games.

SPEAKER_00 54:21

Awesome. Awesome. Let them build games and make sure that they're using Endless Studio. Matt, um, before we let you go, right? I have some fun questions I want to ask you. I'm gonna put you on the hot seat. There's three quick questions, rapid fire. You ready? Yep, let's do it. Let's go for it. So, what was your favorite class?

SPEAKER_01 54:41

Um my favorite class in school was uh actually a business school, it was a class called Touchy Feely, and it was 12 people in a circle giving each other feedback for three hours twice a week. People would come out crying from this class from the feedback they got, but it taught human dynamics um so well. It was a mirror of yourself, and you understood how like how different people think differently. It made me a better communicator. It was just like it's the core of so much of what people don't realize is that business is people, and and people problems are the hardest things, and and it was the greatest training for the single greatest, you know, most important skill of all.

SPEAKER_00 55:24

Empathy. Love that. What's one ed tech tool that you can say you cannot live without? Uh Chat GPT. ChatGPT. And if you could take a class from any teacher in history, who would it be and why? Aristotle. He did a pretty good job of teaching Alexander the Great. I want to know whatever he taught Alexander the Great. Love that. Thank you, man. That's our time with Matt. I'm gonna close it out. Hey, that wraps up today's episode of EdTech Empowerment, innovating education together. A huge thank you to Matt Dalio for joining us and sharing his insight on how we can shift students from being players to creators and build a future where every child has the tools to shape their own success. If you'd like to learn more about Matt's work, visit EndlessNetwork.com and Endless Studios.com and follow Endless Studios on social media. Thank you for tuning in to the 2025-26 season of EdTech Empowerment. Be sure to subscribe so that you never miss an episode. And if you found today's conversation inspiring, share it with a colleague or an educator in your network. Until next time, keep innovating education together. Matt, thanks again.