The Vision for a Metaverse in Education

Welcome to Media Minds with your host, David Wolf.

And welcome to Media Minds. I'm your host, David Wolf. Today, I'm thrilled to have Dr. Rich Melheim. He's a true Renaissance man and visionary leader whose groundbreaking work spans neuroeducation, publishing, comedy, and international nonprofit innovation. He's been dubbed the next Da Vinci by Dr. Jim Hoon Ahn and described as Mr. Rogers meets Dr. Seuss by Sarah Ide. Dr. Rich's extraordinary career includes founding multiple global initiatives, creating innovative educational systems, and producing thousands of creative works. Joining us to inspire us with his own unique blend of creativity, passion, and transformative ideas, Dr. Rich Melheim. Welcome to the program.

Great to be with you.

Great to be with you. And we've spent a whole lot of time off the air as well as I've learned more about you and the work you're doing globally. It's quite extraordinary. So let's dive in. Neuroeducation and the arts. What led you into this world?

I was born a slightly dyslexic but very curious kid. I had a dad who told stories and a mom who read and sang to us every night. I didn't know I was dyslexic until I was in my 50s when I started a neuroeducation and the arts preschool project, and I went to Tufts University to the author of the book Proust and the Squid, Maryanne Wolfe, Dr. Maryanne Wolfe, who does brain scans of dyslexic kids. And I was very interested in short-circuiting the short circuit of learning disabilities, ADD, ADHD, dyslexia, and wondering if the arts, music, dance, comedy, drama, theater, if they would be a way to short-circuit and bypass what wasn't working, uh, in a, in a powerful way. So I got into neuroeducation as a, as a side hobby, wondering if we could create a richer learning environment.

Wow.

And really it, you had, um, struggled, I suppose, with the process of learning yourself, which is part of this equation, no doubt.

To learn anything, I'd have to turn it into a song, a poem, a rap, a chant, a cheer, a beat, a dance, a cartoon. I was still drawing obnoxious cartoons of my professors during my doctoral studies just to remember anything. I had to have more input in order to have attention and retention. Um, and so that once you understand the neurology from a molecular to a cellular to a structural to a bodily to an environmental basis. You can pour kerosene on the learning fire if you have more input into multiple senses, including the sense of humor, at the same time than just sitting in a classroom listening.

Brilliant. Yeah, yeah. A much more active kind of engagement. And this, I, now I understand knowing the work you're doing and now we'll dive in. So, So there's this metaverse and education and this intersection that you've identified in your own unique creative way. Talk to us about the projects that relate to all of this that you're working on now. Just kind of tick through them the way you have with me offline. It'd be wonderful for our audience to know.

We started an early learning project. I hired 38 musicians. We wrote 500 songs, 30 math songs, 30 science songs, 30 health songs, 30 Virtue Songs. We created the songs and the motion. So music, motion, and emotion. Whatever the notion is that you're trying to embed in a kid's head, if you use music, motion, and emotion, uh, you can get attention, retention, competence, confidence, curiosity, collaboration. You get so many more things. We did the project the first summer under the theory that more rich, active input would create better connections and better output and better results. I became a preschool teacher that summer. I lost 15 pounds jumping and dancing and singing all summer long. We cleaned up the, the, uh, the, the content and we went to India. We brought in teachers from 11 cities. Um, we gave them 2 weeks of training and then we jumped and dance and ran and sang and created art out of rocks and sticks and twigs. I lost another 15 pounds in India. If I do this 5 more times, I will be Gandhi, as they say in India. We cleaned up the results and we went to Ethiopia. And instead of hiring teachers this time, all we hired was musicians and artists and dancers and theater people under the assumption that it would be easier to turn a great singer into a great teacher than to teach a great teacher to be a great singer and dancer and all that. I didn't lose quite as much weight in Ethiopia, but the science minister, who's now the prime minister, was one of our biggest fans and supporters there. We brought the project from, so the suburbs of Minneapolis to India to Ethiopia. And then I was speaking at an event in South Carolina and a tall, lanky philanthropist who started Longhorn Steakhouse, Bill Dukes, came up and said, Rich, what are you doing? You got, you're taking third world, you're taking these wonderful concepts across the globe, but we got third world conditions here in South Carolina. Why don't you drive with me down Highway 95? And, um, it used to be the Carolinas were a conduit of You know, people vacationing in Florida from New York. And when the interstate went through, all these little towns just dried up and businesses closed, shops closed, restaurants closed, hotels closed. And some of the towns that were left behind, including the town of Allendale, South Carolina, um, the school systems are in really rough, rough shape. And, um, He said, why don't you try one here in Allendale? So we did one summer in Allendale. We just had amazing results. We did 7 weeks, amazing results with these kids. And he said, well, one test doesn't give you any results. Why don't you do it one more year? And Bill helped fund us for another year. And he brought in the, both the Democrats and the Republicans, both Clayborne's people and Tim Scott's people. He brought in the Department of Education. He brought in the the dean of the College of Education. We did it a second summer. We had amazing results. So right up until COVID, we did a third summer and kids in third, fourth, fifth, sixth grade were coming, many of whom couldn't read, by the way. And we just had these great results right up until COVID. And we knew that there's a richer way of teaching. And by the way, it doesn't cost a nickel to sing. It doesn't cost a nickel to dance. We made, you know, art out of rocks and sticks and twigs. It doesn't cost a nickel to do theater. It doesn't cost a nickel to do comedy. And what, you know, comedy does a crazy amount of work in the brain. Um, and, and, um, then COVID hit and I couldn't hire teachers anymore. Most of our teachers were college students that we'd hire for the summer and we'd have to hire them in January, February, because the best people would have their summers already planned.

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So we started to wonder, what can we do to reach more kids? And at the same time, at the beginning of COVID AR, VR, AI, 5G, Starlink download, help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope. FaceTime turns to Meta. And it became clear, abundantly clear to me that there would be a day where instead of maybe teaching 100, 200, or 1,000, 10,000, that we could reach and teach and enrich Millions. There's, you know, 675 million preschoolers in the world, but, you know, the growing countries in the world and in Sub-Saharan Africa and in Asia and India, very young populations. And with Starlink, we could reach every corner of the world. We could reach hundreds of millions. Billions of kids with enriched education. So we start, we designed a metaverse space station and we said, what if you could float away to a space station with 6 towers? And by the way, there's a, there's a rocket below it. That's music that's propelling it all. And what if you could have goofy alien cartoon virtual avatars who can recognize your face and with a large language model speak to you? How you doing, Dave? We're having so much fun. What if you could, you know, strap on the goggles and here's your professor today and maybe your professor's got a goofy voice and we're going to teach you all the most important ways to hack math. We're going to go, we're going to teach you how to hack English. We're going to teach you how, you know, what if you could have some of your friends with you in a learning cohort and make it a game. And say you have a friend in Mumbai and Dubai and Shanghai and your cousin from Cincinnati, and you go on learning quests. And I, I like 6 weeks of a learning quest and a 7th week of a test. And the test is a game and you get your points, you get your gems or your digital currency, and you buy a virtual dog or a virtual spaceship and It's too expensive to get your own asteroid, but maybe you could have, you know, 5 of your friends go in and you learn fintech and you, you know, you'll learn about how to build stuff together. And what if learning was not a class? And by the way, there will be a day in the not so distant future where brick and mortar schools will only be for poor kids. Where, um, sitting in one place listening to somebody talk It'll be a thing of the past for anybody with music. Kids are going to learn what they want, when they want, how they want, where they want, with whom they want. And the difference is going to be the people who can afford it will live in worlds beyond their imagination. There'll be haptic gloves where you can feel the basketball bouncing if you want to play basketball with Shaquille when he was 14. You will fly away to all these enriched places. And yet kids without money will still be sitting in schools and desks. And that's where our nonprofit comes in. And we don't want that to happen. We want to build great worlds, beautiful worlds, imaginative worlds, fun worlds. But for every kid who can afford it, we want to give it away to a kid who can't.

What an amazing vision you have laid out here. Oh my gosh. So this whole centralized in a brick and mortar building goes away. I get it. I get it. And by the way, as a guy that sat in classes in first, second, and third grade staring out the window and doodling, I'm right with you, Rich. No, this is absolutely brilliant and so needed now. And wow, bravo.

Wow.

Tell me where you are in terms of the development of the vision. Developmentally, you're in a fundraising cycle. Give us a sense of where you are and we'll be sure to give the website so that folks can learn more about the work you're doing.

Right. Well, our model was Jim Henson and the Muppets, who created a for-profit that did great. I mean, was a great investment for investors, but they created a parallel nonprofit and groups like Ford Foundation gave millions of dollars for 60 years so that, uh, the Sesame Street was invented by somebody who said, well, look at the delivery system is televisions and You know, by then, 85% of the— 60 years ago, houses had a TV, but who can afford a quality early learning environment? That was our, that was our model. So we set up a for-profit and we have an amazing executive team. We have one of the most brilliant people in Singapore as our CTO, and Janakin has done early days of apps for hundreds of millions of kids. We have an amazing finance guy in London, and Ken built and sold 3 chemical materials companies and was the head of the biggest of the most popular education platform in the Middle East. David has been in Mumbai and Dubai and is now in Calgary, and he's the COO Jana used to run School of Rock and Huntington Learning Centers and Future Kids. And we just brought on the president of Mythical Games. And Aaron is— everything we do is going to be a game. Even Elon a year ago said, if I were to reinvent all of education, I'd make it a game. So we've got a great team and we built the plan, we built the architecture, and the first core pieces and the fables. Whatever online games are the most popular, they always have a backstory. So Prisoner of Zelda or Call of Duty or any of those have a great backstory, kind of Dungeons Dragons kind of worlds. We've created an ensemble cast of goofy cartoon characters. We've got the voicing ready. We've got the first 12 of the first 36 scripts for the Tower of Language ready to go. And we need to build a demo. And the demo that, and then 3 testable lessons. Our goal is to have kids in Ethiopia, India, South Carolina, maybe Pine Ridge, Singapore, Korea. My doctoral advisor's from Korea and he's connected to the education world there. And Dubai. So we'll, we'll pick, um, 3 highly wealthy kids who've got all the advantages in the world countries and 3 countries where kids don't have stuff and maybe 2 or 3 sites in the US. We need to test those lessons and within 6 months we'll be ready to launch the Tower of Language. And the Tower of Language will be a large language model, AI, uh, virtual tutor cartoon based where some of the kids you play with will be cartoons. Some of your, all your profs will be cartoons. And then the nonprofit, Dr. William C. Nelson is the chair of our nonprofit. He built Scholarship America, which is the largest private scholarship fund in, in American history. And an amazing board on the nonprofit side. So we're ready to go. We need to raise some funds to do the demo. We need to raise about half a million for the demo. Again, we've put about $1.2 million into the design and the R&D, and that's the Rich and Arlis Mellheim Retirement Fund that got put into that, basically. So it's time to spend some other people's money on something.

Well, yeah, de-risk yourself a little bit, but still it shows the depth of which you are invested into this, which is evident in this conversation. But You know, the money speaks as well.

Well, if I die tomorrow, I can live with that. We just have to get it launched and start reaching kids who can't.

That's right. Well, the architecture's all there. The structure's in place. This is so beautiful. The website, www.richlearning.com, rich learning, just like it sounds, r-i-c-h-learning.com for more information. And folks, if they're interested in learning more about how they might invest or participate in some way, they can contact you through the website.

Absolutely. And then the nonprofit, we have a separate site with videos kind of explaining some other things, and that's richlearninginternational.org.

All right. Terrific. richlearninginternational.org. Dr. Rich, thanks so much for sharing this vision. Unbelievable. So needed on the planet. Thank you for the work you're doing and thanks for joining us on the program.

And David, we're going to need all kinds of audio. Do you know anybody who can handle that?

I have no clue how you're going to get that done. Yes, we need to continue to talk. In fact, Sean, who is engineering today and joining us in the back room, in the background here, is one of our key players on our team. So yeah, now he has an ear on it.

All right. All right.

That's good stuff. All right. We'll let it go for there. Thanks again for joining us, Rich. Appreciate it.

All right.

You've been listening to Media Minds with your host, David Wolf. Media Minds is produced by Audivita Studios, a premier production company producing audiobooks and podcasts for clients worldwide. Be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. To learn more about the team at Audivita Studios, visit audivita.com.