2023-03-02. Majors and Minors

Hey Rich.

Hey Paul.

What was your undergrad degree in?

Political science.

I was English. English literature.

That makes sense. You're a wonderful writer.

That's nice. That's, thank you.

Did you learn how to write in college?

I learned quite a bit. I had a creative writing minor. I was absolutely destined to be unemployable.

I was gonna say you went for

we joked about it even then in the liberal arts and colleges. Uh, the, so, but you know, here I am. I, I got my English degree. Guess, guess what? I just read in the New Yorker.

Here we go. Name Dr. Uh, let me guess. Um, the Morgan Library is going through a renovation.

They're always getting renovated. have to. Yeah. I mean,

it's, it, it's in the

It

is every five years. You gotta redo the Morgan.

renovating. Uh, and no, it turns out that it's hard times for the English degree. The numbers are in free fall, and in fact, people are kind of done with the humanities when it comes to the college.

to find the humanities.

Well, let's do. All right, so Yadi and Ford advisors, let's talk about this. So, humanities, uh, history, um, uh, political science might end up in there. It depends. Sociology, there's a few that are kind of on the edge. They got a little science, got a little, that might have like a science in the name, but you know, literature, history, women's studies. Art, not art history.

Yeah. yeah,

So that, those are doing okay. But like the. I went to college to broaden my interests and I, and to learn about how the world works in, in a very like, meta way. I took four years. I read the great books. Uh, those are down. You know, they, they started to collapse, you know, a decade ago. They've always been up and down and now big trouble. Uh, the, the numbers aren't coming.

People aren't majoring in English.

according to this article.

Okay.

The departments are shrinking

Mm mm Do they explain why?

There isn't like a consistent thesis in the piece where I'm like, okay, yeah, that really explains it. My take on it, you know, the one of the professors that they talked to at Harvard is like, well, you know, I got a smartphone. I, I barely read five books a year anymore. You know, or whatever. It wasn't like he, he used to read like five books a month, and now he's like, I, I look at my phone.

Right, right. Which is real.

That's real. Right? And so I think, you know what, I'll, I'll say it is for me what I think it is. There was a sort of, and and the article hinted this. There was a kind of post GI bill, like, everyone should go to college America. We're gonna be that shining city on the hill. Everybody should pursue their interests and we're gonna figure it out as we go. And then I think there was starting in the nineties, an absolute reassertion of like a kind of hardcore market dominance in the.

Mm-hmm.

and the idea that you could live a modest life, thinking thoughts and focusing on the things that you truly love.

Yeah.

Uh, kind of went out. It just didn't, didn't stick in. There wasn't, wasn't something that it turned out as a society that we were gonna double down on.

Right.

Grants for artists, national Endowment for the Humanities, all those kind of

Gave way to like just professional ambition.

professional ambition. And you know what? We have a marketplace of ideas and we're gonna just get out there. We're, and, and so I think that, like, uh, I think that what's happened is that you can still, I, you can still go get an English degree if you want one.

I, I have to be frank.

this is, I would hope

Yeah. I mean, whenever I see. Like someone that is majoring in the humanities, I assume their parents are wealthy.

Not always a case, but there's, it's not a bananas assumption and I, I think you can almost take the negative, which is. whenever you see the child of a recent, a family that maybe a first GR generation immigrant

Yeah. Go be a doctor, a lawyer

They're not being pressured to get a poetry

degree. No. Get a job

there. It just, that is the, there is, and you have that American narrative. Your dad was like, go be a lawyer. You seem smart.

He was telling me to be a lawyer from the time I was 10 years old because they see it as a, as a, an escape hatch out of the circumstance.

Right. And the circumstances is kind of like I'm working at a bodega, or I own a little store, but I'm kind of making a lawyer, somebody who has a house, they have a savings

My dad was a craftsman who refused to teach me his trade.

Interesting. Right. He just, he wanted it to stop there.

Yeah. He's like, you could do better than this. Like this is, you know, I'm using my hands. You're a smart guy. Go get a law degree. And he know he'd watch Matt.

Yeah.

Perry Mason, he's like, you're, you're a very convincing face. I, what he didn't know is that 99% of lawyers are in the library and writing

or, or just like corporate contract

not trial lawyers. But that's not the point. The point is, yeah, education was about social and economic mobility.

Well, and into, solidly into the middle class, maybe with a little opportunity to

That was his, that was his hope that, you know, you could, you could do well there.

Look, I, I think what's difficult is, so first of all, if you're very successful in the humanities, there are not solid, well understood career paths for you. So there is, I wanna be a writer, right? I always wanted to be a. I never assumed I could be, so I always had like a couple plan Bs going. I was good at computers and so on and so

Yeah. And, and you wanted to be a writer because you love to write.

loved to write,

Not, oh, I can make a good living doing this. Never

assumed I could make a living ever as a writer. No, no. Terrible job. Terrible job.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I

I think like this is, there's a, there, there's sort of avocation and vocation. My father used to say this to me and my father was an English professor. yeah. Uh, he came of our age in an era where, Went to the Korean War.

Yeah. Came back,

back, had the GI bill. Ended up with like a grad degree in fiction cuz why not? You're smart. Yeah. And then without getting a PhD teaches you can just go get a job at like a good state

Yep.

Yep. And, and be in the union and teach for your life.

that path is no longer

available. Well, that's the thing, all that infrastructure I just described and the full professorship and, sorry, it's just gone. It's adjuncts. There are, there's an

Yeah. I didn't know that university was about creating a well-rounded individual till I got to univer to got till I got to college. I didn't know that was a thing.

did you think college was?

I, I, I grew, I, we grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Um, not the most stable circumstances. Um, all I saw, uh, around college was that you built better skills to get a better job. That was my whole understanding of college. I was also a mess. Uh, I was a little bit of a mess in high school. I got left back. I, I just had an authority problem. I still have that authority problem, but now I'm older so I don't have to worry about it as.

now you're the authority.

I'm the authority a little bit. Um, and you know, guidance counselor wrote me in, I think I was like profiled as like, you know, drugs or troubled youth or whatever, and they're like, sign this piece of paper and you start Brooklyn College in three days. I was like, really? That's all I have to do.

bless Brooklyn

cuny uh, city University of New York, it was like $300 a semester.

I will always be a fan.

let me tell you the best part of Brooklyn College. frankly, Cooney, uh, CUNY because, um, uh, which is what something called the core curriculum. 10 classes that you had to take no matter what your major was. Okay. And they included things like geology, philosophy, um, uh, it just ran the gamut.

Okay. So you're not gonna be reading poetry the whole four years you're here, but you're damn well gonna read a poem or two.

you're gonna read a poem or two. And the core curriculum, which just, you know, was like half your credits almost. It was. It was actually, as far as community college and state colleges go, it was very well regarded and I found it annoying at first. Because it felt like I was back in high school and I had to go to chemistry. Yeah. But two years in, I was like, I see what this is and I understand what this is and this isn't about me getting a job only. Um, it was about me being someone that.

They're literally saying to you, okay, you live in a society even though you may not even be aware that you do, so I need to show you this society. And then a year two, you went, oh

yeah,

is why you, you wanted me to see this.

I, I started to enjoy it.

of course,

Because I was, I was, I was so wrapped up in myself and home during high school that I, all my learning happened in, in, in undergrad, in college. I excelled. I, I won awards. I was like top of my class in, in political science, even though I wasn't gonna tell you how ignorant I was. Political science. I thought was a good stepping stone for law school,

Well, you, that was the, that was the path in front of you. Were told go be a lawyer.

a lot of people say English, major

English majors often make really good lawyers.

make really good

There's actually a lot of English majors all through the, uh, computer industry cuz it's communication ends up being a huge part of it.

Let me ask you something. Does this decline happen without the internet?

Look, there's a few things. First of all, it's always up and down. I remember getting my English degree in, there were conversations about how English degrees were in decline. Uh, it is, no, look it. The science is, you know, poetry is, is a lot of things. It doesn't cure cancer. It doesn't, uh, it doesn't get shoes made more cheaply. Yeah. Uh, the things that incentivize human beings. Human beings want a nice house and they, they like a, a piece of meat,

but they always liked that. Why wasn't there a decline in the sixties? You're saying? Because there was infrastructure, because the GI bill was around, there was support systems in place to let you go. Go and meander

far the way that society sees the humanities Yeah. Is as luxury, It

it luxury? What is it? It's necessity is what you're saying.

What it, it's, you need perspective in all things. And you need different perspectives and you need a toolkit that will allow you to have those different perspectives. I would say one of the things that makes me an extraordinarily good entrepreneur in partnership with you is that I bring 20 different perspectives Yes. To the conversations we

yes. Yes.

Is that part of me of necessity? Sure. That's part of who I am. Is that absolutely enhanced and was that affirmed by my career in the arts? Absolutely. Yeah. I learned that people see things lots of different ways, and then there was one point where I went, you know what if I take this part of my brain and I apply it to business over here where people are making money, that's gonna be really interesting. And that's as far as I could take it.

I mean, that was your instinct, not mine, which was you looked at me and you said you are an operator.

I knew that you understood money and you were smart, and I liked you. I knew a lot of people who understood money who were either dumb or mean. And you were smart and

Yeah. okay, you know what?

I'm gonna go over here and I'm gonna look into the fricking game. There is a wonderful short story writer. His name is George Saunders. He writes, uh, these, okay. Yeah. And so these very sort of ironic, uh, hilarious stories and, and the stories are all. Capitalism just sort of like, and it's, he nails aspects of just the bleakness, like a very funny way. And there's this point where he describes, um, having jobs and like, I think he's raising his kids.

I, I think you came at it like, like a bit like an anthropologist. I

I did.

Uh, you're like, let me see what's happening inside here. Right. Like, I think there was part of it.

is my, so my great betrayal in the humanity. So I'm a natural humanist. My dad was a professor. Now my, my family kind of fell apart. I didn't have a lot of money, but I definitely had an understanding that if one wanted to just focus on texts, that was okay. I wasn't letting anybody down. It wasn't like I was letting my parents down. They just kind of weren't paying a.

Yeah. I mean, your parents didn't say Go be a doctor.

No, nobody said anything. They're like, you'll figure it

out. You, you, you didn't speak to them about this?

No, no, no. I was like, I think I'll be an English major. Like Oh, cool. they were both experimental poets. It wasn't a stable childhood, but it was, you know, I was

Very, very different than mine.

anything that I wanted to pursue seemed fine. You know, it wasn't like there wasn't a path towards happiness or stability, but you could certainly go and figure it out yourself.

I wanna over-index on, on something you said. Um, Because it sounds like we're just talking about our lives, but I think you're touching on something pretty important here. Uh, a little while ago you said that I wanted to understand all the other perspectives.

Yes.

And I, I think what, what we have right now are experiences and tools and technologies that. make it very difficult to pause and understand other

perspectives. It's actually seen as a sin. So you basically, I, you know, let's take a look at, Twitter is always the canonical example, but Twitter is like the giant text box that everybody falls into, right? And there's kind of two camps on, on Twitter, and you don't even know what they are. You know them by what the other people call them. One, one camp has the, the, the woke mind virus. Okay. That's the, you know, that's the sort of like lefty group. I tend to fall more on that side.

this extreme stereotyping of both sides.

you kind of pick one side and then there's a constant set of rules that are always being evolved on both sides. You know, Marjorie Taylor Green is calling for a national divorce of red states and blue states right now. And on the, on the other side, there's always some special refinement of, of what it means to be progressive and how you should apologize. Right. And so it's infinite. And that's humans. That's just how we are. Like I, I'm making fun of it, but that's who we are.

No, but there is a, go ahead. Finish your thought.

It's dumb. It's dumb.

It, I mean, it's, it's dumb. And, and it's funny, I, I know some people on both sides.

Sure.

And they often, Share links to things and stuff that all it does is just throwing another piece of wood on the fire for them to just kinda keep it going. And the thing that they can't hear, nobody seems to be able to hear. And by the way, I don't think it's only dumb people. I think this system of polarization is incredibly compelling and incredibly deceptive.

no, I, let me be really clear. I don't mean that the people are dumb. The world is like, when there's, there's a joke I made that, that whenever you add anybody to a group, you can subtract one IQ point. So when you have a national election in the United States, it's a negative 150 million IQ event,

about

right? Like, it, it's just people together tend to just become more and more this blobby mob.

I think, I think the way to put it, And, and this can land, this can bristle people on all sides equally. Is that what has taken hold today is an intolerance. The word is intolerance. And you a progressive can't tell me. Well, I'm val. Well, I'm very tolerant because the venom is equally poisonous in either direction coming out. And that I think is what for me. College was about, was gaining that perspective and gaining that understanding.

literally communists, likely like, like world experts in Marks inside of Cooney.

One of my classes had us reading the Port Huron statement, which is literally like Constitution 2.0

Yeah.

from like Connecticut in the sixties. Sure. Like it was, it was, uh, Tom Hagan and like very progressive stuff

Not just, not just progressive, like Overthrow America.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like everything is wrong. Yeah. And I. Uh, but I, I have to say, some of the most valuable conversations I had were pushing back because I couldn't believe I was in America, I couldn't believe, hold on. They're telling me everything is wrong, and my semester at university was $300.

Yes.

I couldn't believe I was where I was. And so I get into these debates with them and they liked me and I won the political science award for my class that year, like look, a lot of it, my dad had a saying, he's like, if you're upset with someone and you really, you really need to give them a talking to. Never do it in front of other people.

Yeah, that's right.

Like because when you do it in front of other people, you're shaming them in front of others and they're gonna lash

It's real. If you take someone aside and you say, I think this needs to change, they're like, yeah, you're probably right. If you do it in front of someone else, they're like, let me tell you the 25 things about you.

Exactly. And what the internet is is 500 million

is 500. It is. And that's the whole point of

You got it wrong. Me saying to you, you got it wrong in front of 500 million other

Let me take this in a funny direction, then I'll tell you why an English degree is worthwhile and why, why? And then we should talk about why

Sorry Paul. We seem to have run out of time.

Yeah, exactly. So Rich. I'm on the train. There's posters, uh, all over for You know what Shun is?

It's a dance performance. It's

advertised everywhere in New York City. It's called China before Communism Shun 2023. It's like the same people who are behind Fallon. is, that's it's, they're anti the current government of China in the us and so they, they fund these kind of cultural

I, I think it should be something that is, Prioritized because I think it is an antidote to a lot of the mechanism, the polarizing mechanisms that we live with today. I think that's real. And how do you do it? How are you gonna do it? I think it starts, frankly, in high school.

See, the problem is we have a, the way that we fund education, the way that we operate culturally, nobody wants to do this. They want to keep, they wanna keep it polarized.

I get it. I totally get it and I understand it. Um,

but you're saying there's a moral imperative.

you said it before and it sounded loftier than you probably meant it, but, um, we can all pursue our ambitions, but also be decent people who can empathize with other people. I think the humanities is grounded in that in a lot of

Well, empathy is, is core, right? Like that you're gonna read and, and participate in things and connect to them even though the people who created them are imperfect or even sometimes awful. But you're gonna figure something out about being a human this way.

we are staring at the other side through the same lens 24 hours a day. Yeah. And that you can't dislodge. Families have been torn apart,

It's real. Your brain just gets smaller and smaller. You start to just, you become a set of rules and, and routines.

You can't stomach another perspective. You get, you get vis, like viscerally nauseous at the idea of another i of something else that's contrary to how you see the world. It's kind of insane. I know really, really smart people who lose their minds when you give 'em an opinion.

I went to a holiday event once with a. With a family and, uh, I, I named the magazine that I worked for and a guy like turned his

turned.

Like, and you're just like, uh, I don't know man. I'm just, I'm just here to have some

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

but okay. Okay. Right.

Um, I think we gave advice on this episode to the world.

would you say if your, if, uh, your son and daughter is like, I think I'm gonna give an English degree, Yeah, I know. Me fine. We'll figure it, we'll figure it out. No

with that last thought, just to kind of, uh, Punctuate everything we've been saying. You wanna look at the other extreme of like extremely controlled education and information that's given to people. Just go look at some of the worst countries in the world. That's exactly what they, it's state censored, controlled information and people are just hungry for anything else.

is, you know, what happens is you say that and then like a million people are immediately, like America does its own propaganda, but it's nothing like Putin on the, when they do like celebrations In Russia,

we're, we all have our flaws, right? But if, if I want another perspective, I can go get one pretty easily. can.

You are one web search away from a totally different perspective. At any

time. People are seeking it out less and less. And that's why I think we have to embed it in education,

Yeah, Well, all right. Well, we, we solved it and we solved the American education crisis. Uh, good for us.

I mean, this was a doozy Play this one back over

again. Woo.

it to, I don't know who education is

Oh, I don't want to go deal with a bunch of academics. That's exhausting. Okay, if you have any questions, [email protected],

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