Dr. Caroline Levander - How to Reform Our Universities (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_934)
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Summary
In this episode, Dr. Carolyn Levander joins Dr. Kelly to talk about her new position as Director of the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi, and her new book, InventED, which explores how an American tradition of innovation can transform college today.
Transcript
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I'm delighted to report that I have joined, as a scholar, the Declaration of Independence Center
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for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi.
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The center offers educational opportunities, speakers, internship, and reading groups for
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the University of Mississippi community. It is named in honor of the United States founding
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document, which constitutes the nation as a political community and expresses fundamental
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principles of American freedom, including in the recognition of the importance of Judeo-Christian
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values in shaping American exceptionalism. Dedicated to the academic and open-minded exploration of
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these principles, the center exists to encourage exploration into the many facets of freedom.
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It will sponsor a speaker series and an interdisciplinary faculty research team.
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If you'd like to learn more about the center, please visit Ole Miss, that's O-L-E-M-I-S-S dot
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Hi, everybody. Start of the new week with another fantastic guest. Today, I've got Carolyn
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Levander. I'll mention who she is in a second. How are you doing?
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I'm doing well and really happy to be here. Thanks so much.
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Likewise. Okay, so let me just read very quickly who you are. You're a professor of English at
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Rice University and the Carlson Professor in the Humanities. You're the Vice President for Global
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Strategy, responsible, I took this from your website, responsible for expanding Rice's global
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impact through the development of new international campuses, academic programs, partnership, and
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research collaborations. Your latest book with MIT Press, which we're going to talk about today,
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Invent ED, How an American Tradition of Innovation Can Transform College Today. I've spent 32 years as a
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professor. I can talk a lot about that. But let me mention some of your other books.
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Hotel Life, The Story of a Place Where Anything Can Happen, co-authored book. Where is American
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Literature? Cradle of Liberty and Voice of the Nation. I didn't read the subtitles. Anything else you want
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Okay, well, by the way, you know, in soccer, when you talk about a one club player, that's someone who
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spent their entire career wedded to one club. You're a one club academic, all your degrees at Rice,
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your academic positions at Rice, boy, you're a loyal gal.
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You know, it's partly, I've just had so many wonderful opportunities here that I've had chances
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to leave, and it just never quite made enough sense.
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Right. Well, I've been once to Houston. I've been many times to Texas. I went once to Houston,
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I gave a talk at the University of Houston, I think in 2004. And I remember that the host who took,
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you know, was taking me around to show me Houston, took me to, I'm sure you'll know the area,
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I don't remember what it is, took me to an area of really astounding wealth, where every home
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looked like a small private college. Do you know what I'm talking about?
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I know exactly what you're talking about. That would probably be River Oaks.
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Yeah, no, or Memorial. Those are two very affluent areas in Houston.
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Can Rice University professors in the business school buy a house there?
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All right. So let's start with your current book. It's not out yet. It's coming out?
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Okay. So tell us all about InventED. Take it away.
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Yeah. And so this is a book that is really about the history of creativity and discovery in the United
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States. So it starts back with the founding fathers. And it explores how that history and tradition
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of creative discovery can be optimized on university campuses today to ensure that,
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you know, everyone who attends college gets the most out of the experience and develops the kind
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of educational tools that will help them make the most important discoveries yet to be made in our
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country. So now, is it that we adhere to this ethos, you know, 30, 40, 50 years ago, and we've somehow
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veered off that train? Or is it something that we've yet to do in our university ecosystems?
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You know, what I what I show is that our wonderful universities in the United States have been places
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where ideas get developed and thrashed around, but we have not intentionally developed an undergraduate
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education that optimizes for creativity building in our students. It has tended to be more as it should
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be, you know, the, the learning of a particular discipline, that's very important. InventED argues,
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in addition to that, every undergraduate student needs to come out of college with an ability to think
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creatively, to problem solve creatively, and that we can do that on our campuses.
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So as a as an evolutionary psychologist, the frequent sort of dichotomy that you hear of is nature versus
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nurture, right? How much of a particular phenomenon is due to my innate disposition versus, you know, I learned it.
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So does what you just said, inherently imply that much of our creativity could be foster rather than
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some humans, human beings are, you know, Elon Musk is innately creative, whereas Joe Smith is not?
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Absolutely. What I show in InventED is that, you know, what you're talking about is the difference
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between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. And in a fixed mindset world, you say, wow, I'm just not
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good at math, or I just can't write. In a growth mindset, you approach it as a muscle you can build
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and develop. And I argue and really show that creative capability is something we can build.
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It's not innate. It's not like you were born with the color of your eyes or your height.
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It's something that we can teach students. And if we teach this to students really well,
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they're more high value in the marketplace, particularly in an era of AI, which is so transforming
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how people work. We need to be more creative in the workplace. It is a clear signal we're getting
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from World Economic Forum, from Harvard Business Review, from all of the important kind of monitors
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of what the workplace needs in the United States.
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So can I offer, so, you know, I've been railing against some of, you know, the lacuna in academia,
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and I think it might serve as a nice bridge to what you're talking about in terms of fostering
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creativity. So first point, there is this idea that academic, well, not just academic students,
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as you mentioned at the start, should be hyper-specialized. I'm a history major specializing
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in American history, right? And of course, certainly as you go up in your university education,
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there is an expectation that you're hyper-specialized because for you to be able to make some relevant
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contribution, you certainly need to know this area well. Whereas I have argued, I think reasonably
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convincingly, that you also need to be a generalist because some of the biggest thinkers
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are those who have a synthetic mind. So for example, my academic career, not to imply that I'm a great
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thinker, but my academic career has been very much shaped by the fact that I don't care about
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interdisciplinary boundaries. So many people told me, warned me, don't only, don't publish in medicine
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and politics and economics and psychology, because that makes you look like you're a frazzled person,
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whereas you should publish only in consumer psychology or evolutionary psychology. And I said,
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no way, life is too short. So interdisciplinarity, a generalist synthetic mindset, a sense of consilience,
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unity of knowledge. How would those terms fit within your rubric of creative inducing pursuits?
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You know, I think you and I speak the same language here, 100%. So I'm thinking, and this is the history
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of our country, right? Samuel Morse, right? You know, the inventor of the telegraph. We don't really
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remember he was an artist first and foremost. And, you know, it was his inability to support himself
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with his painting that caused him to go into scientific discovery. And in fact, he mocked up
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the telegraph on his easel in his studio. And so that's what you're talking about. You're talking
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about the ability to move between disciplines to see new things, right? And that it is that act,
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that method, that inventive method that makes your contributions higher impact. That principle
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is visible in the historical record. And, you know, I would never want to say that the United States
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is better than other countries. Every country has got its wonderful history and contribution.
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That said, there was just the reality of building a nation out of a huge wilderness that was very
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conducive to our earliest inventors using that method. Because they didn't have universities that
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they could go to and take deep lessons in, you know, this field and that field. They had to kind of do it
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themselves. Right? You know, I, so many of the people that I gravitate toward in terms of,
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you know, former intellectuals or current intellectuals that I admire, seem to all possess
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many of those traits. So, for example, I was just reading about, I don't know if you know, the,
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the, some argue he's the sort of the father of the scientific method, Francis Bacon. And I'm currently
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reading an intellectual biography on him. And as I read some of his positions, I said, boy,
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that could literally be my own biography in that, you know, he was both a statesman and a lawyer and
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a philosopher. And he's just, he doesn't care. Do you think that 500 years ago, it was inherently
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easier to be this kind of synthetic thinker, and that the universities have kind of browbeaten us
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into being the sort of stay in your lane folks? Well, yeah, I mean, that is something that Event
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Ed really shows is, you know, this was not intentional. It's an unintended consequence
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of disciplinary rigor. And we all know over the last 150 years, you know, universities have
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transformed. There are more departments now. There are more subfields. As knowledge has become
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ever more complex and intricate, you know, we moved away from thinking we could know it all.
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And so we, you know, we let some people have this shop, piece of the shop, some people this piece.
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From the beginning, though, you know, our leaders worried about that. You know, Vannevere Bush,
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who was the founder of the National Science Foundation, worried in his, you know, presidential
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letter justifying the NSF, he worried that the focus on too narrow fields of work would
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make our scientists too narrow. And so that concern, I think, has been with the research
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university in the United States from the start. So you're absolutely right. It's not been malice
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of forethought. It's been the unintended consequence of, you know, being research engines creating new
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industries. My contribution is to say, how can we get some of that wonderful inventive spirit back in
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our undergraduate education? Because that's really where it's important to know physics,
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absolutely, if you're a physics major. And you need to be able to think across disciplines the way
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What, maybe you could give us a bit of a sense of the genesis of why this program and this ethos
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developed at Rice University. Is it largely because you're there? Or is there something in the water
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that, you know, everybody agrees yet? That's what's the mechanism by which you said, this is what we
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must do next as part of our strategic mission? Well, you know, look, my book in Ben Ed is not in
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any way a university mandate. I certainly see on Rice campus, some wonderful instances of this kind of
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creativity capability building in place. I think here of our Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen,
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which was literally a formal, former central kitchen on the campus that got sort of appropriated by the
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engineering school. And now undergraduate students, you know, are given real world problems and to
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design solutions for using what they know of engineering. And so that's an instance for sure,
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but every university has a distance to go in really committing that every undergraduate student
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will come in and leave with the, you know, the creative capability building as a North Star.
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So it's work that we all can do. And InventEd shows very simple ways that universities can help
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solve for this challenge without spending huge amounts of money. Because as you know, universities
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in these days and times don't have huge amounts of money to, you know, build new buildings and do all
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this important, you know, infrastructure building, that does not let us off the hook of really thinking
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how can every aspect of our campus experience be more about fomenting creative expression.
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Is the idea to pedagogically ensure that irrespective of which field you're teaching,
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there's some sort of creative inducing element? Or can I do a creativity major as my undergraduate?
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You know, I think regardless of what you major in, you know, we're faculty, we know when we go into
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a classroom, and I teach in the humanities, so we use the Socratic, you know, it's very much dialogue
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driven, even in a pedagogy or a teaching style that seems to be about conversation. It's very easy to
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reward the fast, smart answer, the student who is there fast, right, with the right answer and rely
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too much on that student. That is tacitly reinforcing a fixed mindset in students because
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they think, okay, you know, Joe is the smart guy. I'm not, you know, I'm not the smart, so I'm going
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to be more on the sidelines. And so even in those classrooms that we think are more about developing,
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you know, ideas over a long time, we all as faculty take shortcuts, understandably. If we
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actually are mindful of that, and we understand that doing that short circuits, the building of
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a growth mindset, sort of learning over time, slow learning, trial and error, being important to
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developing strength, you know, if we really come into our classrooms sensitized to that, we can change
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some of the implicit messages we're sending. Right. Earlier, I was talking about sort of
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interdisciplinary bridges and conciliance and so on. May I take an attempt at linking my work in
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evolutionary psychology to your work in literature? Are you ready? I'm ready. Okay. So usually in,
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from what I know of literary criticism, we're going to do an analysis using Foucault or postmodernism or
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feminist or Marxist or whatever, there is a field called Darwinian literary criticism, Carolyn, whereby
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the idea of the discipline is that the reason why literature moves us is because it is a window to our
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innate human nature, right? So that I can listen to a Greek tragedy from 2,500 years ago, where the person
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who wrote it may not know what an iPhone is and may not know what a car or X is, the platform,
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but the software running his mind is exactly the same software as yours and mine. Therefore,
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the reason why I could connect with what was written 2,500 years ago is because there's a few
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underlying fundamental evolutionary drivers, paternity uncertainty, sexual longing, sibling rivalry,
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parent-offspring conflict, and these few blueprints is what drives much of literature. So I can take
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an evolutionary analysis to study literature. This is what I mean by synthetic thinking,
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linking fields that heretofore had been completely unconnected. What do you think of that?
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It makes total sense to me. And I think I would add to it, dear colleague, that I think one of the
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great pleasures that comes from reading Cicero or Plato or Socrates is that recognition,
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that you are part of a longer arc of human history at a time when, you know, AI is threatening all kinds of
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our, you know, workplace comforts and securities. It's very, I think, comforting and also courage building
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to realize that the long march of human history has some constants in it and that we all desire to be
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loved. We all want to be the most cherished, you know, in somebody's eyes. We all want to succeed.
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We're all scared of death. You know, there's some real human feelings that are what it means to be human.
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Yeah. So it's interesting that you said, I think you call it the long arc. I recently had separately
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two co-authors that, two historians, one from Harvard, one from Princeton. They wrote this
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massive compendium called The Golden Thread. And so it starts, so it's kind of the golden thread of
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civilization beginning in ancient Greece, you know, going on to, you know, the Renaissance. I mean,
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the usual sort of thread. And so you're exactly right. But interesting, I mean, you were mentioning
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that there's comfort to know that, you know, you're thinking along the lines of Cicero and Socrates.
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I mean, yes, that's true. I actually felt at one point frustrated by it. And let me explain to you
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why. So as I was writing my previous book, it was a book on happiness. And I had no intention on
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actually writing a book on happiness. But people would keep writing to me saying, what's your secret?
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You deal with all of these difficult subjects. You tackle some very thorny issues. You know, you get
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death threats for criticizing this or that. Yet you always seem to be happy and joyful. What's your secret,
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professor? And so I thought, okay, well, let me see if I have the temerity to actually put it down
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into a book. And of course, you can't write about the good life and happiness without going back to
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the ancient Greeks who've written a lot about it. And every time I thought that I had this unique
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insight, and you know, I'm starting to tap myself on the back, then I'd say, oh, goddammit, Epictetus said
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this 2,500 years ago. So in some sense, it's beautiful to know that you're standing on the
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shoulders of giants. But on the other hand, there's always one upping me.
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Well, that's true. But let's face it, the definition of discovery is putting existing
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pieces in new combinations, right? That's the creative practice. And so you just did that linking,
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right, Darwinian theory with literature. And so I would say that, in fact, it is, getting back to
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your comment about interdisciplinarity, it is that practice that is playful, right? There's play involved
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in that. And happily, U.S. universities have got so many wonderful tools. They've got all of our
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disciplines, all of our subfields. I mean, it's a playground with every fun toy out there for students
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to go exploring. And so this is why, you know, often, right, we hear about universities closing
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departments or reducing, you know, Greek classics faculty. And, you know, my response is, boy, that is
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really cutting off our nose to spite our face. Because just as biodiversity, you know, reflects the
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diverse physical, biological health of our planet, and we want all that diversity as a sign of health,
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so too is disciplinary diversity a sign of the collected wisdom of the, you know, human history.
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And important to have that visible and alive on our campuses, so that students can play with it.
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So that, you know, in high school, guess what, they probably didn't, you know, have a, I don't know,
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an anthropology class. You know, and so being able to discover those new ways of thinking and then put them
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into new combinations. That's where discovery lies. And I'm thinking here of, I don't know if you're familiar
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with the, there's this pioneer investor, this guy, Bill Miller. And he, he was sitting, he, Johns Hopkins
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student, sitting in advanced philosophy class, an entire semester devoted to John Searle. And he's sitting in
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this class, and you might say, well, this class is the most esoteric, and how can there be a whole class devoted
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to one philosopher? And it, but it was in this class, that he suddenly had a eureka moment, where he
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realized the full potential of Bitcoin. And so he was one of the pioneer investors, he saw that potential
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in the most unlikely place, right? But he made that radical connection from advanced philosophy
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to monetary systems. And so, yeah, and so that's, that's what we have in our campus to offer our
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As you were speaking, you mentioned two words that made my ears rise up. You said, children,
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not children, students have toys to play with. And you said, play. Now, that's very interesting,
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because one of the chapters in my happiness book is titled, Life as a Playground. And I basically argue
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that the highest form of play is intellectual play, right? Like, I'm literally akin to a child,
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but instead of putting together a puzzle, I'm putting together the puzzles of life, right? There's a
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million variables floating around in nature, and I need to find a way to make it all make sense by
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linking in a meaningful way, variable A with variable Z. Therefore, I am engaged in puzzle
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making. And so I love the fact that you use those words, because that very much resonates with me.
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One other point, and then we can head off to some other areas to go. I want to talk about literature,
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because I've got a literature expert, and my fiction writing is lacking. My nonfiction,
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you'd be hard pressed to find someone who reads more voraciously than me, but my fiction,
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I need your sage advice. Well, one part of, I think, creativity is what's called analogical reasoning.
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And so actually, not to forgive me, I'm not trying to plug the happiness book, but in the happiness book,
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where I talk about variety seeking, intellectual variety seeking, food variety seeking, I talk about
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that one of the elements that allows for interdisciplinarity is if you're able to create
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a cognitive process of analogical reasoning. For example, Kepler, the astronomer, used to do that
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a lot, right? By demonstrating that there's an analogy between this phenomenon and that phenomenon.
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Is this something that you talk about and invent, Ed?
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Absolutely. And a number of examples of, you know, mathematicians, you know,
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moving to poetry writing, that there's a deep logic that undergirds those two very different
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disciplines, right, that encourages discovery in each. And it's no accident, you know, Edgar Allan Poe,
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right, one of our great American writers of, you know, the mystery was an advanced cryptographer.
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And so the movement between creative writing and thinking and mathematical logic and systems
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is, it's not just something of last week. This has been alive and with us for a very long time.
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All right. So now, as promised, I need your sage advice. Well, first,
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do you find that people tend to specialize in terms of being fiction readers or nonfiction readers? Or,
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for example, are you omnivorous in your reading diet and that you can go? Because I have a very
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hard time, given whatever limited time I have to read, I'm always going to tend towards reading,
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you know, a biography on Francis Bacon. But I know for a fact that I'm losing out greatly and not
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reading all of these great classics. I mean, I've read more than the average person, but I still think
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that I'm lacking. Whip me into shape, Professor. You know, there are too many books, and life is too
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short. And so I would say, you know, follow where your curiosity leads you. There's nothing worse
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than reading a book and not, you know, after 100 pages, sort of still not liking it and feel you
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have to chug through it. That said, I often move between, you know, different kinds of reading,
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just to keep my world as full and vast as possible. And so certainly history, certainly, you know,
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fiction writing. Let's remember, I mean, history is inevitably fiction, and fiction inevitably is
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connected to history, too. So sometimes these distinctions we draw may not be as complete as
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we think they are. Well, to my earlier point about linking evolutionary theory to literature,
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I recently just had a paper accepted in an academic journal where I was saying that,
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you know, Dostoevsky is Dostoevsky, because whether he called himself an evolutionary psychologist or
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not, he was an evolutionary psychologist, because he has to write certain prose that resonates with
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people. I've had that moral angst. I understand what's happening, and I mean, not that most people
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kill the way it happened in crime and punishment, but you know what I'm saying? I can see what he's
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writing here. And so I can understand how we can still learn a lot by reading literature. If I asked
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you, since you are an American literature expert, all right, God, here are the five guys I need you
00:27:17.340
or gals or books I need you to read, what would they be? You know, that's an impossible question.
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That I can't answer that question until I really know who you are.
00:27:29.300
Because for me, the reading is not just the words on a page in a book, it's who you are when you open
00:27:37.560
that book, and what you might need that you don't even know you need. And so I don't think it's a one
00:27:43.860
answer for all. I mean, yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah, like people will say, I'll go read Moby Dick.
00:27:48.640
You know, maybe so, maybe no. It really, it really does depend on the reader, because it's a
00:27:55.080
collaboration between the author and the reader. There's no one Moby Dick for everybody. You would
00:28:03.940
read Moby Dick differently than I would read Moby Dick. We would have two very different experiences.
00:28:08.960
Right. No, that's fair. And that's a great question, that sort of the matching process.
00:28:12.400
That the same book is going to be consumed in completely different ways as a function of the
00:28:19.900
reader coming into that process. The book didn't change, but the individuals reading it have
00:28:24.200
changed. So I get that. So a book that I recently for, I don't know why it is the old man in the sea
00:28:32.560
or end the sea? Old man in the sea, yes. For whatever reason, it's somehow, you know, the guy goes out,
00:28:39.400
I don't know if he's thinking or whatever. I thought, oh, maybe I should get this. And I
00:28:42.660
actually, I'm also an anti, I mean, I'm a huge book collector, but now a lot more antiquarian.
00:28:47.980
So I went to check antiquarian first edition, $3,000. I'm not sure that I'm paid enough as a
00:28:54.460
professor to afford those books. But would this be, I mean, again, I understand, notwithstanding
00:29:00.480
the point that you made, you don't know enough about me. Does this seem like it makes sense that I
00:29:05.120
should be attracted to this book and take a shot at it?
00:29:07.280
You know, what's funny about that? That is a book that is often required reading in high school.
00:29:14.800
And because it's short, because it's perceived to be straightforward, you know, placing less demands
00:29:20.960
on young readers. Most of the time, you know, a 16 year old reading this book won't get it quite in
00:29:30.860
the way that you or I would get it after we are more seasoned in life.
00:29:35.140
Well, I like seasoned rather than old. Although you're not old, but maybe I am.
00:29:46.400
Yeah. Let's talk about, so your position has global reach as part of it. So I, as I was sort of doing
00:29:54.280
a bit of background, you know, in preparation for our chat, you know, you opened up, you meaning Rice
00:29:59.940
University opened up in Paris, in, with India sources, in Venice. Wow. Gorgeous place. Tell us
00:30:09.000
about that. And then I'd like to later talk about some of the ways that I've been able to fortunately
00:30:16.800
So I think it's very important for students today to have some kind of international experience as part of
00:30:25.140
their education. And that's, you know, something that is not, it's not, you know, a nice to have, I think
00:30:35.080
it's really a got to have. Because let's face it, students are going to go into the world and businesses
00:30:42.200
they enter, more often than not, will have global headquarters. Or if they're in the medical field,
00:30:50.340
they will be working with patients from around the world, colleagues from around the world. So,
00:30:54.900
so it's very important, practically, of course, for students to have an experience beyond what they
00:31:02.700
already know. But also, even more fundamentally, I think, for us to really understand how the world
00:31:08.680
works we have to be in the world, rather than, you know, sequestered on a beautiful university
00:31:14.300
campus island. And so that was one of the reasons that it has been the priority of the university,
00:31:21.240
and certainly my job, to really make the university more global in its reach. And so we opened this
00:31:30.260
beautiful little campus in the center of Paris, students are there, faculty are there. It's been,
00:31:38.680
a very important experience for our students and faculty in terms of just thinking about
00:31:44.340
education anew and differently. Because, you know, universities in Europe function very differently,
00:31:51.820
and students are very different in Europe than they are in the US. And so it's important for us to be
00:31:58.040
aware of that. So there is the institutional attempts at global reach, as you're doing,
00:32:05.220
but at the individual level, at the individual faculty level. And so this is where I'm going to
00:32:10.820
bring in my experience. Maybe I'll start with the following. So this is actually I discussed this in
00:32:17.680
chapter one of my 2020 book, The Parasitic Mind. So I had been invited to speak at the Stanford Business
00:32:24.560
School, about my, you know, evolutionary psychology stuff, and how I apply it to consumer behavior, and so on.
00:32:30.040
And the gentleman who had taken me out to dinner, who's who's a faculty member at the Stanford Business
00:32:36.120
School, as we went out to dinner, he, this was 2017, I think. He looks at me and says, Oh, I didn't know
00:32:44.480
that, you know, I was doing some background on your bio. I didn't know that, you know, you're good
00:32:49.160
friends with Joe Rogan. I said, Yeah. He goes, Oh, and you know, you've been often on a show. I said, Yes.
00:32:55.060
He said, Yeah, well, and now I'm going to try to put the orgiastically smug face that he had on.
00:33:01.600
He goes, Yeah, well, you know, we don't condone that at Stanford. I said, You don't condone what
00:33:05.400
at Stanford? He said, Well, you know, we don't do our research so that it could be sexy enough so that
00:33:11.220
we could appear on Joe Rogan. I said, Well, I don't do my research, I can appear on Joe Rogan. But
00:33:15.540
and this is this has become now famous in the lore of Gadsad. I said, But is it not better to
00:33:22.160
be able to excite people about your research in front of 15 or 20 million people, then write publish
00:33:28.440
a paper that will be read by you, your mom, the editor and two reviewers. And of course, that took
00:33:34.720
him aback. But that the reason why I've often mentioned that story, because it perfectly captures
00:33:40.260
to borrow a term from Thomas Sowell, the wonderful economist who's still alive today, who should be
00:33:46.760
receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in my view, he called them the anointed ones, right?
00:33:53.120
So academics look down upon the plebs, the great unwashed, the rubes, and we only communicate with
00:33:59.660
each other. We don't communicate with the lowly trucker. We don't communicate with the corrections
00:34:04.420
officers. That's why we became academics so that we could speak with our, you know, progressive
00:34:09.800
affectation. Nothing angers me more than this kind of attitude, because ultimately, my responsibility,
00:34:16.980
at least in the way that I define myself is I create knowledge. But then I wish to disseminate
00:34:22.200
that knowledge as far and wide as possible. And I hate to say this, Carolyn, but very few professors
00:34:29.000
share that reflex. How can we get them out of their obnoxious stupor?
00:34:33.420
Well, I agree 100%. And I think, you know, look, on the one hand, it's understandable, because
00:34:40.120
in order to be promoted, in academia, you have to speak to your colleagues, and you have to impress
00:34:48.660
your colleagues with new discoveries you make in your field, right? So that is one conversation.
00:34:56.200
There is another conversation that you and I are privileged to be able to have, because we have
00:35:01.580
gone through the academic ranks now. And Invent Ed is meant for the trucker, for the, someone who knows
00:35:09.820
nothing about colleges. It's meant for curious reading public, a general public. And so I think
00:35:18.160
that commitment to impact is really crucial in our times, for many reasons. One is, we have a long
00:35:27.600
history in this country of the American public being really interested in ideas. Why we wouldn't
00:35:33.400
share our ideas easily with, you know, broad reading publics is mysterious. You know, the second reason is
00:35:43.420
we need to make more clear what we do inside of these buildings on these campuses. And for a lot of folks,
00:35:51.600
it's a black box, absolutely no understanding of what happens of the research that, you know, creates
00:36:00.140
important medical discoveries that increase the chance of recovering from cancer and dementia. And,
00:36:06.840
you know, like, there's really important work that we're doing. I don't think the average person
00:36:12.680
really understands that too much. And so that lack of understanding makes us vulnerable as an industry
00:36:19.980
to the kind of disruptions that we are seeing today, when in fact, the work we do generates,
00:36:28.000
you know, new industries, drives our economy and our national wealth, create safety and stability in
00:36:34.220
our communities. We're not telling that story. And we need to be telling that story.
00:36:39.760
So do you think so that I think there are potentially two impediments as to why there isn't more of that from
00:36:45.580
professors? Number one, to your first point about, you know, you need to impress your colleagues and so
00:36:50.700
on, there needs to be institutional mechanisms by which that globe that that outreach to the general
00:36:59.860
public is rewarded, right? I mean, I'd like to think that I'm a purist and that I would have done it no
00:37:06.200
matter what. But if you also were to tell me that it goes into my academic dossier as part of, you know,
00:37:15.440
you have one person who's published five papers that have been cited 500 times, but nobody's ever
00:37:20.360
heard of them outside of that. You have another person that might have slightly lesser academic
00:37:24.580
metrics, but has managed to, you know, motivate millions of people to take English literature and
00:37:32.400
go back to school. How do we measure that? So one, one would be to incorporate public outreach as a
00:37:41.860
fundamental feature of your academic dossier that you submit, number one. Number two, I think the
00:37:48.340
second reason why most academics are hesitant is because frankly, they don't have the skills necessary
00:37:54.680
to succeed in the global arena, right? So I'm, I'm a geeky guy who knows organic chemistry. And if you
00:38:02.760
ask me to move one millimeter outside of my stay in your lane, organic chemistry, God forbid, I should
00:38:09.320
do that because I'm very comfortable with the familiar. I have mastered that area and I am the king of that
00:38:15.960
fiefdom. But you asked me to go out and have 17 million people judge whether I am charismatic and
00:38:22.960
intelligent and I could, now that's out of, and that's why the Stanford professor had to engage in a
00:38:28.440
ego defensive strategy because he can't do well in front of Joe Rogan. Then I need to denigrate others
00:38:34.980
who could do well on Joe Rogan. What do you think of those two points? So I, you know, I think that there
00:38:41.740
are very few, what I would call all rounders who enter the academic ranks. And, and that's, I think,
00:38:51.000
really evident, you know, in your career, my career, I think we've seen a lot of evidence of
00:38:56.900
that. And I don't think our institutions are unusual in that way. So you attract a lot of
00:39:01.720
super specialists and look, the work that super specialists are doing is really important. We need
00:39:06.700
them to be doing that work. So not everyone is going to be able to breach the chasm to the, to the
00:39:12.420
public. For those of us who can, who want to, who have, you know, moved up the ranks so that we don't
00:39:20.320
worry anymore about, you know, the next book for promotion. We have a real responsibility,
00:39:27.020
I think, to speak for those who, you know, just aren't going to be able to do the work we do.
00:39:32.880
I also think it's very important for universities, and I'm starting to see this at my university,
00:39:37.860
to, you know, provide translation help. So, you know, at my university, now we've got these people,
00:39:48.840
these, you know, communication folks, and it's their job, literally, think about it, you're speaking
00:39:53.740
one language, and the public is speaking another language, you need someone who can actually translate
00:40:00.840
complicated ideas into simple, digestible, memorable narrative. And that's the responsibility
00:40:11.160
of the university. I don't think it's fair to expect every faculty to have that skill, because I don't
00:40:15.980
think we're going to get there. Fair enough. Boy, you are a model of diplomacy. That's why you're a
00:40:22.260
senior administrator, and I'm not. How is that diplomatic? Well, you know, you always give the
00:40:27.620
positive of those people that I'm criticizing. It's, no, it's a beautiful, it's a wonderful skill.
00:40:33.080
It's not their fault. I mean, that's the thing. Like, I think we spend so much time criticizing
00:40:37.160
people, and actually, it's just, maybe even at the time of my life, where it's, look, it is what it is.
00:40:42.400
And, and, you know, certain kinds of people are attracted to certain kinds of industries,
00:40:48.040
and we're not going to change that. Right? Right.
00:40:52.260
So why fight it? Why fight it? That makes sense. What, of all of the different hats that you wear,
00:40:59.820
I mean, I'm sure you find pleasure in all of them, and there are elements that you don't like
00:41:04.480
in all of them. But is there one unique one at the current stage that you're at in your career,
00:41:10.040
where you say, that's the one that makes me sort of rub my hands the most in the morning?
00:41:13.940
You know, I love to write. I absolutely love to write. And it's such a deep pleasure. And what I,
00:41:21.560
in particular, the Invent Ed book, some with Hotel Life, but even more with Invent Ed,
00:41:26.940
because I was writing to everyone listening right now to us, and people beyond, I had a real sense
00:41:37.080
of purpose and responsibility in crafting those, those chapters. And I think it's that same
00:41:44.620
excitement I get when I'm making change at, you know, at my university that impacts thousands of
00:41:51.780
people. So whether I, you know, stay at this university or leave tomorrow, I now have established
00:41:58.080
an international environment for all of our faculty and students to use, and that'll be a legacy that
00:42:05.060
I leave. I think that's really important, right? That'll change people's lives. When I,
00:42:09.800
I mean, the reason I'm doing what I'm doing is, I went outside the United States when I was in college,
00:42:14.880
and it changed my world. Absolutely changed my world.
00:42:20.500
You know, I didn't go all that far away. But for me, it was huge. I went to England. And,
00:42:25.340
and, you know, so I did it for a year. And I did it because I thought, well, I really want to be an
00:42:31.660
English major. I might want to be a professor. But I don't know if I really do. And so I went and
00:42:37.420
in the British system, you just you take your discipline all year. That's all you take.
00:42:42.880
And so it's much more like graduate school. And I loved it. But then I got the travel bug. And so
00:42:49.540
right after I graduated, I worked in Japan for a couple of years. And, and, and it was seeing the
00:42:57.180
US from the outside, you know, and from a radically culturally different vantage point that I think
00:43:03.020
really structured my, my research interests. So I think that those experiences, particularly early
00:43:09.260
in life, really can have a lasting impact. And so for me, that's, I get a lot of meaning out of
00:43:16.280
thinking that I'm creating that environment for people I've never met and will never meet.
00:43:21.040
Wonderful. Could you remind our folks? So the book comes out next Tuesday, tell us anything more
00:43:28.180
that you want about it. Tell us about any other projects you're working on before we wrap this.
00:43:32.340
So we've spent, thank you, we spent a lot of time talking about, you know, building creativity,
00:43:37.940
how universities can do it. This book is also a guidebook for anyone thinking of sending any family
00:43:45.920
member to university. And so in particular, the last section is kind of a how to manual.
00:43:53.840
Because it's not only our responsibility as faculty members, or our university leaders, every student
00:44:00.400
who comes into university needs to be responsible for their own outcomes, right? I mean, it's a huge
00:44:06.720
investment of time and money. And it's remarkable to me, how emotional people are in making the decision
00:44:15.120
about where to go to college, how they don't even read the owner's manual, they go on a campus tour,
00:44:19.600
and think they know the place. I mean, it's, it's terrifying to me, the kind of blissful ignorance
00:44:25.240
in which people launch into four years or more of, you know, a hugely important thing for their life.
00:44:32.720
And so, you know, it's up to every, every parent, if you're, if you have the kind of traditional
00:44:38.800
family where, you know, 18 year olds go on to college, but anytime you enter college,
00:44:43.280
you need to know what you don't know. And what I see is that probably 99.9% of all students,
00:44:51.400
I don't care what kind of school they're going to, community college, fancy school, doesn't matter.
00:44:56.960
They come in ignorant, they come in passive, and they think the only thing that matters
00:45:03.120
are the grades on their transcript. And that is, I mean, there you are, you have just gained entrance
00:45:11.700
to an all you can eat buffet, a beautiful food you have never dreamed was even out there. And all
00:45:18.780
you're worried about is eating the stuff, you know, already, because you know, you like it. And, you know,
00:45:25.000
kind of getting through without a stomachache. And that's just not a setup for success in life.
00:45:30.060
It's just not. So I would say, please pick up, if you're not going to read anything else in event
00:45:36.460
ed, read that last section. If, if, if you're even thinking you might want to go to college.
00:45:42.320
Best of luck with the book. What a great send off. Such a pleasure to meet you. Stay on the line
00:45:46.480
so we could say goodbye offline. And come back anytime. Cheers. Take care.