Latest / I Don't Know You / How a Kid Humming in Class Led Matt Smith to Rethink College

Transcript

How a Kid Humming in Class Led Matt Smith to Rethink College · I Don't Know You

0:04
SPEAKER_00: Hi, I'm Matt,
0:05
SPEAKER_00: and welcome to my recorded conversations for I Don't Know You,
0:08
SPEAKER_00: my search in learning from leaders about their stories and applying their lessons
0:12
SPEAKER_00: to my own journey as I seek to better understand myself.
0:15
SPEAKER_00: If you enjoy what you hear or have a guest you'd like me to ask on, I'd love to hear from you.
0:19
SPEAKER_00: You can shoot me a DM,
0:21
SPEAKER_00: subscribe wherever you listen to this,
0:23
SPEAKER_00: share it with a friend, and follow me for more of this kind of content.
0:26
SPEAKER_00: Hey, today I'm joined by my friend,
0:28
SPEAKER_00: Dr. Matt Smith, co-founder and president of Hildegard College.
0:33
SPEAKER_00: A new and different kind of college, and we'll talk about that in our conversation.
0:38
SPEAKER_00: Matt has spent decades in institutional education and now is using that experience
0:43
SPEAKER_00: to shape this new entrepreneurial venture.
0:47
SPEAKER_00: And this conversation is really about formation,
0:50
SPEAKER_00: how he was formed,
0:52
SPEAKER_00: what he thinks about college, and what it's actually for in this new age of AI.
0:57
SPEAKER_00: And one of the oldest teaching techniques that we have,
1:00
SPEAKER_00: the Socratic method,
1:02
SPEAKER_00: And how that might actually be how the modern world is missing education in general
1:11
SPEAKER_00: and bringing that back in and revitalizing that in different ways.
1:14
SPEAKER_00: So there's a ton to learn from this conversation.
1:16
SPEAKER_00: I always learn something when I'm talking to Matt and I'm sure you will too.
1:19
SPEAKER_01: Enjoy.
1:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I don't know.
1:22
SPEAKER_00: I think in the short life that I've lived and the short experiences that I've had,
1:28
SPEAKER_00: I feel like the And this is so much of like what I want to talk to you today about,
1:32
SPEAKER_00: so I feel like we've already started,
1:35
SPEAKER_00: is like humanities and deep thinking and critical thinking like lead into
1:45
SPEAKER_00: life
1:45
SPEAKER_00: of like holistically in some pretty unique and special ways where it's like, oh,
1:53
SPEAKER_00: if I'm going to be good at science or whatever,
1:55
SPEAKER_00: then you just Like you should only be doing science.
1:58
SPEAKER_00: And it's like, well,
1:59
SPEAKER_00: actually,
1:59
SPEAKER_00: I think in my experience,
2:01
SPEAKER_00: I'm not very good at science,
2:02
SPEAKER_00: but the people that I've been around that are savant level science people,
2:08
SPEAKER_00: like they also had a lot of the same education that I did.
2:12
SPEAKER_00: And it was really beneficial for them in the way of like,
2:15
SPEAKER_00: the science is just like problem solving and thinking through things and using
2:18
SPEAKER_00: the scientific method,
2:19
SPEAKER_00: which is basically just like asking questions,
2:22
SPEAKER_00: which is basically like a version of the Socratic method.
2:26
SPEAKER_00: So it's like it all feels combined.
2:29
SPEAKER_01: And understanding what kind of knowledge you're aiming at when you adhere to
2:36
SPEAKER_01: a particular method over a different one.
2:39
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
2:41
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm excited.
2:42
SPEAKER_01: Is this, by the way, so you had me push that button.
2:44
SPEAKER_00: Does that mean it's on?
2:45
SPEAKER_00: It's on.
2:46
SPEAKER_00: We're recording.
2:47
SPEAKER_01: So it's good to go.
2:48
SPEAKER_00: Yes, we're good to go.
2:49
SPEAKER_00: You just want to jump in?
2:51
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's normally how I start these.
2:53
SPEAKER_00: It's like I want it to feel as organic as possible.
2:56
SPEAKER_00: Oh, so we already started?
2:58
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
2:58
SPEAKER_00: Oh, great.
3:01
SPEAKER_00: So, yeah,
3:02
SPEAKER_00: my goal with these conversations is to mostly listen because I'm always,
3:08
SPEAKER_00: like, Wanting to learn from people like you.
3:12
SPEAKER_00: And that's why I'm very grateful that you're taking the time.
3:14
SPEAKER_00: And I know you're busy with being,
3:16
SPEAKER_00: I think this is one of the exciting reasons that like you're even willing
3:23
SPEAKER_00: to have this conversation because like life seems like a lot probably right now
3:27
SPEAKER_00: where you're like, you're leading a school.
3:30
SPEAKER_00: You've been an educator forever.
3:31
SPEAKER_00: You're also like an entrepreneur.
3:33
SPEAKER_00: You're also like having your hands in a bunch of different pies.
3:36
SPEAKER_00: You're also like A dad of three kids.
3:40
SPEAKER_00: You're also in a successful marriage.
3:42
SPEAKER_00: All these things that I'm like, man, how does this guy do all that he does?
3:47
SPEAKER_00: Oh, man.
3:48
SPEAKER_00: So I'm very gracious,
3:51
SPEAKER_00: very grateful for your generosity and even taking a morning
3:56
SPEAKER_00: to have this conversation.
3:58
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm happy to.
3:59
SPEAKER_01: I don't know that I have good answers to how to hold things together or
4:05
SPEAKER_01: whether I do hold things together well.
4:08
SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm sure you're doing the best that you can.
4:10
SPEAKER_00: And in that there's this like flux of things that are handled better or worse.
4:20
SPEAKER_00: And it's just like that's life, right?
4:22
SPEAKER_00: There's this constant tension of what do I hold?
4:27
SPEAKER_00: What do I prioritize?
4:28
SPEAKER_00: How do I prioritize?
4:29
SPEAKER_00: And I think like a lot of the way that we've had conversations like your education
4:35
SPEAKER_00: and background And the way that you think about education
4:38
SPEAKER_00: and background has helped you in the problem solving that you're doing day to day.
4:44
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's one of the many reasons I'm excited to have this conversation.
4:50
SPEAKER_00: But I'm curious,
4:51
SPEAKER_00: before we get into the present day,
4:54
SPEAKER_00: I'd love a tiny bit of background about the past,
4:57
SPEAKER_00: where you grew up,
4:59
SPEAKER_00: what was your house like,
5:00
SPEAKER_00: what books were you reading,
5:02
SPEAKER_00: what conversations were you having around the table that kind of shaped a little bit
5:06
SPEAKER_00: of who you are.
5:07
SPEAKER_00: I mean, obviously foundation stuff is important.
5:12
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so yeah, solidly suburban upbringing here in Orange County.
5:22
SPEAKER_01: I grew up in Yorba Linda, which is North Orange County.
5:25
SPEAKER_01: So for people listening to this who think of Laguna Beach when they think
5:30
SPEAKER_01: of Orange County, that's not where I grew up.
5:33
SPEAKER_01: My parents, neither of them attended college.
5:38
SPEAKER_01: Well, sorry, I think they maybe took some community college classes.
5:41
SPEAKER_01: Neither of them Completed college and
5:42
SPEAKER_01: so I have one brother who's two years older who's a veterinarian now and so we were
5:48
SPEAKER_01: the first members even kind of our of our extended family to go to college.
5:53
SPEAKER_01: My parents were really encouraging of reading and academics.
5:58
SPEAKER_01: I didn't find school particularly challenging not because I was some brilliant kid
6:04
SPEAKER_01: but because it just wasn't quite challenging that and I don't know.
6:11
SPEAKER_01: I think about my kids now,
6:13
SPEAKER_01: two of my children in high school,
6:16
SPEAKER_01: and the hours every night they're spending on homework,
6:18
SPEAKER_01: sometimes deep into the night.
6:21
SPEAKER_01: And I just don't remember...
6:24
SPEAKER_01: This is going to sound so weird.
6:25
SPEAKER_01: I just don't remember spending any time doing homework.
6:29
SPEAKER_00: That's like one of the things that you've kind of either forgotten about
6:34
SPEAKER_00: or like you genuinely were like, I don't think I did any homework.
6:38
SPEAKER_00: I think that I...
6:41
SPEAKER_01: I'll say this,
6:43
SPEAKER_01: there's a kind of,
6:45
SPEAKER_01: I could talk a little bit more about this in a minute,
6:46
SPEAKER_01: but I'll loop back to this,
6:48
SPEAKER_01: but there's a, I found education to be something like a game.
6:54
SPEAKER_01: And if you could figure out how to play the game well, you'll do fine.
6:58
SPEAKER_01: And that is a poor way to think about education, but that's how I thought about it.
7:05
SPEAKER_01: I did not grow up reading.
7:07
SPEAKER_01: The occasional,
7:08
SPEAKER_01: outside of what's assigned at school,
7:10
SPEAKER_01: the occasional Like sports autobiography
7:15
SPEAKER_01: or young adult like quasi horror fiction novel or something.
7:21
SPEAKER_01: But hardly anything.
7:22
SPEAKER_01: You know, I didn't even know about good literature until two things happened.
7:30
SPEAKER_01: One was I had a soccer coach named Joe.
7:33
SPEAKER_01: I wasn't like a great soccer player,
7:35
SPEAKER_01: but I grew up and this gentleman who was when he started coaching us
7:39
SPEAKER_01: when it was my brother and I's team's In his late 60s,
7:43
SPEAKER_01: came from the East Coast, this kind of older Italian gentleman.
7:47
SPEAKER_01: He coached us for several years.
7:50
SPEAKER_01: And so we became a family friend because my dad was the sort of assistant coach.
7:54
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
7:55
SPEAKER_01: He would always drop off these VHS tapes of Italian soccer games from like the 70s and 80s.
8:02
SPEAKER_00: Cool.
8:03
SPEAKER_01: I would watch these and I wouldn't understand what they were saying, but it was hypnotic.
8:07
SPEAKER_01: It was like...
8:08
SPEAKER_01: So you were deep into soccer?
8:10
SPEAKER_01: No, I wasn't.
8:11
SPEAKER_01: I wasn't, but I am now.
8:13
SPEAKER_01: I love soccer now, and I think this is the root of it.
8:17
SPEAKER_01: I would watch these games.
8:18
SPEAKER_01: Anybody that knows that every country's national league,
8:23
SPEAKER_01: professional league, has a distinct style.
8:26
SPEAKER_01: So in England, the English Premier League, it's physical and fast-paced.
8:32
SPEAKER_01: The Italian League is very defensive and calculated,
8:36
SPEAKER_01: and when they attack,
8:37
SPEAKER_01: It's quick and incisive,
8:39
SPEAKER_01: but there's a lot of moving the ball patiently around the back of the field.
8:45
SPEAKER_01: And yet the fans and the players and commentators are so passionate.
8:52
SPEAKER_01: And I found it kind of hypnotic.
8:53
SPEAKER_01: Anyway, this is just to say that I would watch these tapes.
8:55
SPEAKER_01: He would drop them off and I would watch them.
8:59
SPEAKER_00: Would he do this for all of the players?
9:01
SPEAKER_00: No, no, just kind of for my family.
9:02
SPEAKER_00: Oh, okay.
9:03
SPEAKER_00: Because of the relationship he had with your dad.
9:06
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and with our family in general,
9:08
SPEAKER_01: I don't really remember anybody else watching these, but I did.
9:12
SPEAKER_01: And then one day he comes by and he says he has a box for me to get it out of
9:18
SPEAKER_01: the trunk of his car, probably in seventh grade, sixth grade or something.
9:21
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
9:21
SPEAKER_01: Seventh grade maybe.
9:24
SPEAKER_01: I figured it's these tapes, but instead of these VHS tapes, it was...
9:30
SPEAKER_01: It was two boxes, almost too heavy for me to carry at that age.
9:34
SPEAKER_01: And it was the University of Chicago Great Books of the Western World complete set.
9:39
SPEAKER_01: If anybody's seen these,
9:41
SPEAKER_01: they're this kind of aged patina tan color, thin,
9:46
SPEAKER_01: tall books with like vintage colors like forest green,
9:50
SPEAKER_01: mint green, taupe, kind of maroon labels on the side.
9:56
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I do.
9:56
SPEAKER_01: Epic.
9:57
SPEAKER_01: And they just sat there,
9:58
SPEAKER_01: but they sat,
10:00
SPEAKER_01: you know,
10:01
SPEAKER_01: I wasn't a reader and I thought it was strange that he was giving me these books,
10:04
SPEAKER_01: but it was cool.
10:06
SPEAKER_01: And I was polite enough to be grateful,
10:07
SPEAKER_01: so we put them up on the shelf in our family room and didn't touch them.
10:14
SPEAKER_01: Until, you know,
10:15
SPEAKER_01: my freshman year of high school,
10:17
SPEAKER_01: I'm in an English class and I'm I don't know what English class was like for you,
10:25
SPEAKER_01: but every day in English there was something called sustained silent reading.
10:29
SPEAKER_01: Are you familiar with this practice?
10:31
SPEAKER_00: Well, I was homeschooled, so I had a very different upbringing.
10:34
SPEAKER_00: Everything was sustained silent reading.
10:36
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
10:38
SPEAKER_00: I would sit on my bed or on my table.
10:40
SPEAKER_00: I would sit on my table.
10:42
SPEAKER_00: I didn't like sitting in chairs for some reason.
10:45
SPEAKER_00: And yes, it was always to stay in silence.
10:48
SPEAKER_00: So yes, I am familiar with it.
10:49
SPEAKER_01: This was like kids bring a book from home and they're sitting there and they're reading.
10:54
SPEAKER_01: And I don't know what I was reading.
10:55
SPEAKER_01: And I was humming a song unaware that I was doing that.
11:00
SPEAKER_01: And this kid in front of me,
11:02
SPEAKER_01: I don't remember his last name, named Eric, who I kind of knew I was friendly with.
11:07
SPEAKER_01: He sort of like turns around and looks at me and goes,
11:11
SPEAKER_00: I know that song.
11:12
SPEAKER_01: And I said, okay.
11:14
SPEAKER_01: Sorry, I'm telling you to hum, sorry.
11:16
SPEAKER_01: And he turns back around and a couple seconds later,
11:19
SPEAKER_01: he like reaches into his backpack and he's shuffling around and he's digging around
11:22
SPEAKER_01: and he pulls out this completely tattered mass market paperback
11:29
SPEAKER_01: that looks like it had been read 20 times and hands it to me,
11:32
SPEAKER_01: turns around and goes, here, read this, you'll like it.
11:35
SPEAKER_01: And it was, I looked at it, I didn't recognize the author's name of the title, but it was J.R.R.
11:41
SPEAKER_01: Tolkien's The Hobbit.
11:43
SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, all right.
11:45
SPEAKER_01: So I just like shoved my book in my backpack and started reading it and was just hooked.
11:49
SPEAKER_01: And over the next couple of months,
11:50
SPEAKER_01: read The Hobbit and all three books of Lord of the Rings and thought for
11:54
SPEAKER_01: the first time, reading is not just enjoyable, but this had become meaningful.
12:01
SPEAKER_01: It was changing the way That I thought about my interactions with people,
12:05
SPEAKER_01: my moral and spiritual life in like ninth grade appropriate kind of ways.
12:10
SPEAKER_01: And so I took a stab at trying to read one of the books thinking that,
12:14
SPEAKER_01: okay, maybe I can be a reader now.
12:16
SPEAKER_01: That Coach Joe dropped off for us and made the mistake of
12:21
SPEAKER_01: at random choosing Sir Isaac Newton's Treatise on Optics.
12:27
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
12:28
SPEAKER_01: On the way light works and how we see it, and it was incomprehensible to me.
12:35
SPEAKER_01: So it really wasn't until later in high school,
12:38
SPEAKER_01: I think I had read,
12:39
SPEAKER_01: someone introduced me to Dante's Divine Comedy,
12:41
SPEAKER_01: and I'd made some friends that were homeschooled,
12:46
SPEAKER_01: including the woman who is now my wife,
12:49
SPEAKER_01: and just admired the way that they spoke and thought.
12:54
SPEAKER_00: I didn't realize you guys had met that young.
12:56
SPEAKER_01: We met when I was in ninth grade.
12:58
SPEAKER_01: We weren't friends then, but we met then.
13:01
SPEAKER_01: We met at church.
13:01
SPEAKER_01: She was homeschooled, so she didn't go to my school.
13:04
SPEAKER_01: She went to college early, and she was already in this great books program in college.
13:10
SPEAKER_01: I recognized that the way that she and some other folks I knew were able to Perceive
13:17
SPEAKER_01: the world and describe it, it was admirable to me.
13:20
SPEAKER_01: I wanted that and I could see that it came from their experience with books.
13:27
SPEAKER_01: And I wasn't as fast of a reader as they are or they were or even are now.
13:34
SPEAKER_01: Didn't come as easily to me,
13:35
SPEAKER_01: but I thought, well,
13:37
SPEAKER_01: that's a good way to spend my time in college since I don't know what I want
13:42
SPEAKER_01: at 17 years old to do for the rest of my life.
13:45
SPEAKER_00: And having the awareness to know that, that's something.
13:49
SPEAKER_01: That you didn't know what you wanted to do?
13:51
SPEAKER_01: Oh, right.
13:52
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
13:52
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I had some flitting ideas for a while.
13:55
SPEAKER_01: I thought I wanted to be a musical composer and I took a music composition class
13:59
SPEAKER_01: in college and my professor was like, you should not do this.
14:02
SPEAKER_00: You should maybe go back to reading.
14:05
SPEAKER_00: You shouldn't do this.
14:07
SPEAKER_01: I was a math major for a bit.
14:08
SPEAKER_01: I switched to English.
14:09
SPEAKER_01: So I went to college.
14:10
SPEAKER_01: I studied a lot of literature across the humanities.
14:14
SPEAKER_01: In an interdisciplinary way,
14:16
SPEAKER_01: I went to graduate school, not because I really cared about the research.
14:23
SPEAKER_01: And this is something that influences how we do things at Hildegard College these days.
14:28
SPEAKER_01: But the way that professors are trained in graduate school is really so specialized.
14:36
SPEAKER_01: I mean, people know this, but so specialized and unique.
14:40
SPEAKER_01: And frankly, irrelevant to most of the students they teach.
14:43
SPEAKER_01: And so I knew that what I wanted to do was help young adults have
14:49
SPEAKER_01: a transformative experience, their own version of what I experienced in college.
14:55
SPEAKER_01: Not knowing anything about education,
14:58
SPEAKER_01: going in there,
14:58
SPEAKER_01: having my mind blown by the experience,
15:02
SPEAKER_01: awakening me, making me feel like I had power to...
15:06
SPEAKER_01: Do good, to build good friendships and relationships.
15:09
SPEAKER_01: I had power to think about my work and vocation with meaning.
15:14
SPEAKER_01: I had an idea about who I was as an individual and what society could be,
15:21
SPEAKER_01: a just society could be, and how they fit together.
15:24
SPEAKER_01: And I thought, well,
15:26
SPEAKER_01: this is valuable,
15:27
SPEAKER_01: but there's no particular discipline that I'm super passionate about.
15:32
SPEAKER_01: Philosophy, history, political science, economics, literature, the arts, whatever, musicology.
15:38
SPEAKER_01: And even more,
15:40
SPEAKER_01: there's no one sub-discipline within one of those that I was really passionate
15:45
SPEAKER_01: about.
15:45
SPEAKER_01: And that's what people do.
15:46
SPEAKER_01: You go to graduate school, you choose some super myopic topic.
15:51
SPEAKER_00: Well, that's your thesis, right?
15:52
SPEAKER_00: And you research the hell out of it.
15:53
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
15:53
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and that becomes your dissertation.
15:55
SPEAKER_01: So I remember being in my dorm my junior year of college and looking up at my bookshelf and...
16:03
SPEAKER_01: How to choose something.
16:03
SPEAKER_01: And I would pull a book down and kind of look at my notes,
16:06
SPEAKER_01: flip through it and see all my written notes in it and be like,
16:09
SPEAKER_01: is this doing
16:11
SPEAKER_00: it for me?
16:12
SPEAKER_00: Pull the next, no, no, no, no, no.
16:15
SPEAKER_01: So I landed on something and I ended up studying Renaissance literature and drama and poetry.
16:21
SPEAKER_01: So this is, for me, the 1400s through the 1600s, particularly in English, French a little bit.
16:31
SPEAKER_01: Really specialized in that,
16:33
SPEAKER_01: but coming back to the kind of game thing,
16:35
SPEAKER_01: graduate school for me was a game that I figured out how to play well.
16:41
SPEAKER_01: I really tragically do not remember growing as an intellectual and in particular not
16:49
SPEAKER_01: as a teacher in graduate school, almost at all.
16:54
SPEAKER_01: I just remember playing the game.
16:56
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, were you teaching in grad school?
16:58
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, about like 21, 22.
17:01
SPEAKER_01: I graduated college a bit early.
17:02
SPEAKER_01: So in the early 20s,
17:06
SPEAKER_01: I did a master's degree first at the University of Connecticut
17:08
SPEAKER_01: and was teaching sections of freshman writing,
17:10
SPEAKER_01: which was an English graduate student student.
17:12
SPEAKER_01: They just throw you in there.
17:13
SPEAKER_01: Maybe there's like a little week-long boot camp beforehand.
17:18
SPEAKER_01: And then I did my doctorate at USC and I was teaching like a writing and sociology program.
17:26
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that sounds awesome.
17:28
SPEAKER_01: Teaching writing,
17:28
SPEAKER_01: probably like writing is the thing I was best suited to teach at the time
17:32
SPEAKER_01: because you just had to do a whole bunch of that in graduate school anyway
17:34
SPEAKER_01: and you're teaching 18 year olds who usually have very little experience in writing.
17:42
SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
17:43
SPEAKER_01: but it really doesn't teach you to teach and it doesn't teach you what I think the
17:53
SPEAKER_01: The kind of knowledge is that defines the liberal arts.
17:58
SPEAKER_01: So whatever art or knowledge set or craft designates the study of humanism,
18:05
SPEAKER_01: of not humanism as a historical period,
18:09
SPEAKER_01: but of philosophy and literature and economics and mathematics,
18:12
SPEAKER_01: the natural sciences and natural philosophy,
18:15
SPEAKER_01: history, theology,
18:17
SPEAKER_01: whatever kind of knowledge Whatever it means to have knowledge of those subjects,
18:21
SPEAKER_01: that's not what graduate school gave me.
18:24
SPEAKER_01: I remember,
18:25
SPEAKER_01: for instance,
18:28
SPEAKER_01: I studied literature,
18:29
SPEAKER_01: but as a graduate student,
18:30
SPEAKER_01: sometimes you take classes in other departments,
18:31
SPEAKER_01: and I took a couple classes in the Graduate School of History,
18:36
SPEAKER_01: Department of History at USC,
18:38
SPEAKER_01: and I had some really wonderful professors over there, but I was so confused.
18:43
SPEAKER_01: I sat down the first day to the first one.
18:44
SPEAKER_01: It was a class on the history of literature and religion.
18:50
SPEAKER_01: Especially in the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe.
18:54
SPEAKER_01: And I'm looking at the reading list.
18:55
SPEAKER_01: And all the reading lists are there.
18:57
SPEAKER_01: It just consists of a book a week written in the last, most of them, seven or eight years.
19:04
SPEAKER_01: Huge tomes of academic scholarship.
19:09
SPEAKER_01: 50% of which are comprised of elaborate footnotes.
19:14
SPEAKER_01: And looking at this list and thinking, well,
19:16
SPEAKER_01: these are all These are essentially,
19:19
SPEAKER_01: they're not all this,
19:20
SPEAKER_01: but they're like, it's like reading over 16 weeks, 16 different dissertations.
19:25
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
19:26
SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
19:28
SPEAKER_01: got into the first week and what we're discussing is what's called historiography.
19:34
SPEAKER_01: So what it means to study history.
19:36
SPEAKER_01: So we're studying how this person went about presenting information about
19:43
SPEAKER_01: a very specific subject, you know.
19:46
SPEAKER_01: The domestic space intersecting with disability in 16th century Cheshire County.
19:55
SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
19:56
SPEAKER_00: So it's the equivalent of like a guy that is like designing,
20:03
SPEAKER_00: he's drawing a car, like all the internals for a car, but he's like a designer.
20:09
SPEAKER_00: He's not a mechanic,
20:11
SPEAKER_00: he's never worked on a car,
20:12
SPEAKER_00: he's like essentially just Drawing the designs for like what
20:18
SPEAKER_00: the engine block looks like when it's like blown up.
20:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
20:21
SPEAKER_01: Getting, you know, you want to study how to build a car.
20:25
SPEAKER_01: So you go take a car building course and what you're studying is,
20:30
SPEAKER_01: it's a comparative study of 16 different spark plug designs.
20:36
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
20:37
SPEAKER_01: And you're thinking, well, I'm going to learn That sounds utterly abysmal.
20:40
SPEAKER_01: I didn't enjoy it.
20:42
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'm saying this...
20:59
SPEAKER_01: On the public record now, I used to get so bored in classes.
21:02
SPEAKER_01: I was not a good student in some ways.
21:04
SPEAKER_01: I would watch like Laker games on my computer during a class.
21:08
SPEAKER_01: Everybody has those stories.
21:09
SPEAKER_01: Don't tell my undergraduates.
21:12
SPEAKER_00: They're doing some version of that probably on
21:16
SPEAKER_01: some level.
21:17
SPEAKER_01: But I loved a lot of my professors who became mentors of mine.
21:22
SPEAKER_01: And the goal of graduate school,
21:23
SPEAKER_01: especially in 2012 when I finished,
21:26
SPEAKER_01: was simply to get a job because the job market was so tight in academics.
21:30
SPEAKER_01: So I did and I taught for just fast forwarding.
21:34
SPEAKER_01: I taught for 10 years at Azusa Pacific University here in Los Angeles before leaving
21:38
SPEAKER_01: to found Hildegard.
21:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well,
21:41
SPEAKER_00: that's a great summation of your background,
21:46
SPEAKER_00: and I feel like I already learned more about you.
21:50
SPEAKER_00: You already anticipated some of my questions within that, so it's great.
21:53
SPEAKER_00: I don't have to ask them anymore.
21:56
SPEAKER_00: Around that pivotal figure of Coach Joe or whatever,
22:01
SPEAKER_00: where it's this random guy that decided to pour into you and care about you Then
22:07
SPEAKER_00: through the years,
22:09
SPEAKER_00: you kept coming back to that idea more and then other random people like Eric
22:13
SPEAKER_00: where it's like, oh yeah, you'll like that.
22:16
SPEAKER_00: It was not even an afterthought for him.
22:18
SPEAKER_00: It was just whatever humming you were doing resonated with him.
22:23
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, some song.
22:24
SPEAKER_00: Which is crazy to think about,
22:25
SPEAKER_00: the path that we're set on with those types of little tiny insignificant choices.
22:30
SPEAKER_00: But as you went through your tenure of Teaching
22:37
SPEAKER_00: and like eventually you founded like this kind of like co-founded this thing, found,
22:45
SPEAKER_00: I forget what the name of it was,
22:47
SPEAKER_00: but you sort of,
22:49
SPEAKER_00: it seems like you ventured into,
22:51
SPEAKER_00: you were in academics and you ventured into like the entrepreneurial side.
22:56
SPEAKER_00: Being around like those types of people maybe.
23:00
SPEAKER_00: And then like eventually started Hildegard.
23:03
SPEAKER_00: That's like 2023 ish.
23:04
SPEAKER_00: And then for students.
23:06
SPEAKER_00: Sorry, in 2023.
23:07
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
23:08
SPEAKER_01: We started as an organization in 2022.
23:13
SPEAKER_01: Started kind of building in earnest in 2020 or 2021.
23:15
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
23:18
SPEAKER_00: And like as a piece of that,
23:19
SPEAKER_00: like there's the,
23:21
SPEAKER_00: was that like a yearning or desire that you had for like many years leading up to
23:26
SPEAKER_00: that?
23:26
SPEAKER_00: And like, what were those like not yet years like?
23:29
SPEAKER_00: Where was this patience or maybe this frustration of like,
23:33
SPEAKER_00: man, I have this really interesting idea And maybe I'm putting words in your mouth.
23:37
SPEAKER_00: I'd love to hear your thoughts.
23:39
SPEAKER_00: But yeah,
23:41
SPEAKER_00: like your thoughts around like how do you get from working at like
23:45
SPEAKER_00: a pretty established university to like, oh,
23:49
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to like build this entirely new because this like idea is you're on
23:54
SPEAKER_00: the bleeding edge, I think, in a lot of ways of education now.
23:59
SPEAKER_01: It's not.
23:59
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's not an easy question for me to answer because I think.
24:06
SPEAKER_01: I think my time as a tenured professor teaching in a traditional English department
24:12
SPEAKER_01: and I taught in like a Great Books Honors College was really rewarding and rich,
24:17
SPEAKER_01: especially my interactions with students,
24:18
SPEAKER_01: friendships with colleagues,
24:20
SPEAKER_01: but it was also punctuated with a consistent pattern of moments of frustration.
24:29
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
24:34
SPEAKER_01: And I'm intrigued by a word you used, like the idea that you had.
24:40
SPEAKER_01: I don't really think about it like, oh, I have an idea for a new kind of college.
24:46
SPEAKER_01: As much as I have an idea, let me put it this way.
24:52
SPEAKER_01: I was not willing to concede that we couldn't give students a much better experience
25:03
SPEAKER_01: of education.
25:05
SPEAKER_01: Into adulthood
25:08
SPEAKER_01: for a lot less money and in a much more personable way.
25:15
SPEAKER_01: So here's one way to think about it.
25:18
SPEAKER_01: I remember
25:22
SPEAKER_01: learning from some more senior colleagues of mine at
25:27
SPEAKER_01: a couple different universities that I taught at,
25:29
SPEAKER_01: but especially my time at APU,
25:32
SPEAKER_01: what made What they thought made their best classes meaningful for students.
25:40
SPEAKER_01: And I began to take notice over time and still take notice of
25:46
SPEAKER_01: the fact that
25:49
SPEAKER_01: the most important experiences,
25:51
SPEAKER_01: learning experiences that young adults have in college are often marginal
25:57
SPEAKER_01: to their university experience.
25:59
SPEAKER_01: So I'll give you a couple of examples.
26:01
SPEAKER_01: And by university experience you mean academics.
26:05
SPEAKER_01: Well, that's part of the problem is,
26:08
SPEAKER_01: I don't know,
26:08
SPEAKER_01: however we want to divide it up,
26:10
SPEAKER_01: but so much of the university experience is not academics.
26:13
SPEAKER_01: Nor do I think it all ought to be academics.
26:18
SPEAKER_01: But I'll describe a couple of them, right?
26:20
SPEAKER_01: So, you know,
26:20
SPEAKER_01: one would be these aha,
26:26
SPEAKER_01: mind-blown moments that students have in class that I had when I was in college
26:30
SPEAKER_01: that many students have had Where they're synthesizing ideas in a deep way
26:37
SPEAKER_01: and thinking for themselves for the first time.
26:40
SPEAKER_01: So where my students would experience this is where we would,
26:46
SPEAKER_01: I'm looking at these books here,
26:48
SPEAKER_01: we would be reading some dense tome like Plato's Complete Works
26:56
SPEAKER_01: and we'd be reading Plato's Republic or something.
26:59
SPEAKER_00: And you'd have a week to do it.
27:01
SPEAKER_01: Well, no, we would be more patient.
27:02
SPEAKER_01: I'm kidding.
27:03
SPEAKER_01: We would be slow with it.
27:05
SPEAKER_01: But this is, you know, for an 18-year-old, most of whom haven't read Plato.
27:10
SPEAKER_01: Some now, fortunately, are reading the classics in high school more.
27:14
SPEAKER_01: But it's intimidating.
27:16
SPEAKER_01: Here's this book.
27:16
SPEAKER_01: It's written, what, 2,500 years ago.
27:20
SPEAKER_01: It's written in this philosophical dialogue style with this character named Socrates
27:25
SPEAKER_01: and this author named Plato and what's their relationship.
27:27
SPEAKER_01: Is it the same person or the different people?
27:30
SPEAKER_01: They're talking about They're doing these circuitous conversations about justice
27:37
SPEAKER_01: and virtue and piety and love and order and beauty and it's intimidating.
27:46
SPEAKER_01: And yet a student would do it because we would make them do it.
27:50
SPEAKER_01: And then they'd be sitting around a classroom with 12 other students
27:54
SPEAKER_01: and asking questions and reading the book together.
27:56
SPEAKER_01: All of them would kind of be going through the motions until...
27:59
SPEAKER_01: Almost inevitably,
28:00
SPEAKER_01: one by one,
28:00
SPEAKER_01: sometime throughout the term,
28:03
SPEAKER_01: the light bulb would go off and students would realize, oh, this makes sense.
28:10
SPEAKER_01: It might be the second year and we're reading Dante
28:14
SPEAKER_01: and they see Beatrice pass Dante off to St.
28:17
SPEAKER_01: Bernard as Dante sees the beatific vision and the celestial rose and
28:21
SPEAKER_01: the divine comedy, this vision of heaven.
28:24
SPEAKER_01: And you're wondering why Bernard and then you read this language and it reminds you
28:27
SPEAKER_01: of what Plato...
28:29
SPEAKER_01: Plato's Socrates said about the nature of beauty and the ascent of the soul
28:33
SPEAKER_01: in his dialogue, the Phaedrus.
28:34
SPEAKER_01: I know this sounds all like esoteric stuff out loud,
28:38
SPEAKER_01: but a student who's wrestled through these historical primary sources
28:43
SPEAKER_01: and is making these connections thinks, wait a minute, that's from that.
28:50
SPEAKER_01: And it's not just connecting one book to another across a thousand years in
28:56
SPEAKER_01: that case,
28:56
SPEAKER_01: it's It's the sense-making that they're able to do and how
29:01
SPEAKER_01: that knowledge becomes their own and they're thinking for themselves.
29:04
SPEAKER_01: So this is the sort of thing that typically doesn't happen in humanities classes.
29:11
SPEAKER_01: Typically it's, well,
29:12
SPEAKER_01: let's teach you the discipline of philosophy or the discipline of literary studies.
29:19
SPEAKER_01: And you're treating students as if they're all going
29:21
SPEAKER_01: to become graduate students one day in that discipline
29:25
SPEAKER_01: because that's how professors are trained.
29:27
SPEAKER_01: So a second,
29:28
SPEAKER_01: like that's one,
29:30
SPEAKER_01: these are all snapshots of learning experiences that I thought we could do better
29:35
SPEAKER_01: by making those central.
29:36
SPEAKER_01: Another example would be in terms of venture building,
29:43
SPEAKER_01: business or practical education,
29:44
SPEAKER_01: what I've come to think of as entrepreneurial education.
29:48
SPEAKER_01: A lot of schools have,
29:50
SPEAKER_01: there are opportunities at universities for students to design something,
29:54
SPEAKER_01: to prototype something.
29:55
SPEAKER_01: Maybe even to launch something that's real,
29:57
SPEAKER_01: an organization,
29:59
SPEAKER_01: a product, a program, some kind of service they've created to pitch it to people.
30:05
SPEAKER_01: These are such powerful experiences for students because they're moving up the kind
30:11
SPEAKER_01: of,
30:13
SPEAKER_01: up the hierarchy of Deeper and deeper learning experiences to actual creation,
30:19
SPEAKER_01: the highest form of learning.
30:20
SPEAKER_01: When you can take what you've been taught and make something new with it
30:23
SPEAKER_01: on your own,
30:24
SPEAKER_01: that demonstrates that you truly have integrated knowledge of that subject.
30:29
SPEAKER_01: And it only happens in creative acts.
30:30
SPEAKER_01: And those creative acts, although they occur at universities, they're usually marginal.
30:36
SPEAKER_01: They're often extracurricular.
30:38
SPEAKER_01: I remember talking with the dean of one business school at a university around here recently.
30:44
SPEAKER_01: Who was justifiably bragging about these couple students who were using
30:52
SPEAKER_01: to build cool things.
30:53
SPEAKER_01: They were winning regional hackathons.
30:56
SPEAKER_01: They were doing some really cool work with AI.
31:00
SPEAKER_01: And he was really proud of them.
31:01
SPEAKER_01: So he was describing them to me.
31:02
SPEAKER_01: He introduced me to one of them and she seemed brilliant.
31:05
SPEAKER_01: And then I asked, well, what course is this for?
31:07
SPEAKER_01: And his answer was for it's not part of the course.
31:09
SPEAKER_01: No, we can't,
31:10
SPEAKER_01: you know,
31:11
SPEAKER_01: because of this rule and this compliance issue and the catalog issue and
31:14
SPEAKER_01: the slow way that universities tend to move and make changes.
31:18
SPEAKER_01: It's just that's extracurricular.
31:20
SPEAKER_01: They're free time.
31:20
SPEAKER_01: And I thought, well,
31:21
SPEAKER_01: this is kind of like that experience of wrestling with big ideas
31:27
SPEAKER_01: through historical primary sources just in the opposite side of the university.
31:32
SPEAKER_01: Why can't that be what the university is about?
31:34
SPEAKER_01: And then the third kind of scene to describe is just The actual time
31:41
SPEAKER_01: that students get being mentored by faculty,
31:44
SPEAKER_01: it happens at every school,
31:46
SPEAKER_01: but I'll tell you as someone who taught four courses a semester at a university
31:51
SPEAKER_01: for 10 years,
31:53
SPEAKER_01: I really only had time in any semester to actually get to know 5% or so
31:58
SPEAKER_00: of my students.
32:00
SPEAKER_00: Totally.
32:00
SPEAKER_00: Well, because over the course of those classes you're probably It's hundreds
32:04
SPEAKER_00: of students probably, right?
32:06
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, depending on the size of the class.
32:07
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, 100, 200 students.
32:09
SPEAKER_01: And some of them are overlapping.
32:11
SPEAKER_01: And it was the ones who sought me out that I got to know.
32:16
SPEAKER_01: I had like a little espresso machine in my office and they would use that.
32:20
SPEAKER_01: Professor Smith, can I have some espresso?
32:22
SPEAKER_01: These as an excuse, but they really just want to chat.
32:24
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the office hours or whatever.
32:25
SPEAKER_01: Let me chat about my interest.
32:26
SPEAKER_01: Can you look at my paper with me?
32:27
SPEAKER_01: Hey, I read this other book that we didn't discuss in class.
32:29
SPEAKER_01: Have you ever read it?
32:30
SPEAKER_01: Sure, let's talk about it.
32:32
SPEAKER_01: I'm thinking about going to graduate school.
32:34
SPEAKER_01: Can you help me think through that?
32:35
SPEAKER_01: For me as a college student, those were impactful.
32:38
SPEAKER_01: And empirically speaking,
32:41
SPEAKER_01: those relationships,
32:42
SPEAKER_01: students' relationships with faculty are what graduates of colleges self-report
32:48
SPEAKER_01: to be what made the investment in college most worth it consistently.
32:52
SPEAKER_00: And that's what you're defining as like marginal and traditional.
32:56
SPEAKER_00: And it's marginal.
32:57
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
32:57
SPEAKER_01: Because it's not curricular.
32:59
SPEAKER_01: It's not...
33:01
SPEAKER_01: Even though students like to say,
33:02
SPEAKER_01: or universities like to kind of market around, oh,
33:04
SPEAKER_01: you'll have dinner at a faculty member's house and you'll be mentored
33:09
SPEAKER_01: and things like that.
33:09
SPEAKER_01: It's really not what makes the business model work for them.
33:15
SPEAKER_01: So long story short,
33:18
SPEAKER_01: I thought in the late 20 teens,
33:23
SPEAKER_01: experiences like those three and others,
33:25
SPEAKER_01: mentorship, actual creative work, Deep thinking through historical primary texts.
33:32
SPEAKER_01: What's to keep us from building a college program fully around these?
33:38
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so it was less of what I'm hearing you saying,
33:41
SPEAKER_00: correct me if I'm wrong, Like it was less of a man.
33:45
SPEAKER_00: I have this deep yearning to like this has been on my heart or however you want
33:49
SPEAKER_00: to say that for a long time.
33:50
SPEAKER_00: And it was more of like I'm observing these things in kind of the historical college experience.
33:58
SPEAKER_00: And it's frustrating to me that like these marginal things
34:02
SPEAKER_00: that actually like people say are really valuable.
34:06
SPEAKER_00: And the main reason that they like go to These schools,
34:11
SPEAKER_00: they're not pursuing these wholeheartedly.
34:13
SPEAKER_00: And what does it look like?
34:14
SPEAKER_00: It almost feels like there's a necessity for some version of this.
34:18
SPEAKER_00: So it sounds like you became an entrepreneur out of necessity rather than like,
34:24
SPEAKER_00: oh yeah, I
34:25
SPEAKER_01: really want it.
34:26
SPEAKER_01: And there are other things to say about the kind
34:29
SPEAKER_01: of industrialized commercial mainstream higher education complex.
34:34
SPEAKER_01: And I think even the language I'm using there betrays some of My deeper opinions,
34:39
SPEAKER_01: but universities are largely what they're selling are just degrees.
34:44
SPEAKER_01: And then they're trying to justify the value of those degrees
34:47
SPEAKER_01: when employers are saying, well, I don't actually care about the degree.
34:50
SPEAKER_01: I care about what you can do and what kind of person you are.
34:52
SPEAKER_01: But all of that to say, yeah, you're exactly right.
34:55
SPEAKER_01: And I think that I've become aware that there was this emerging trend
35:03
SPEAKER_01: of new colleges being formed.
35:06
SPEAKER_01: Startup colleges,
35:07
SPEAKER_01: which just didn't seem like a category in the public imagination,
35:11
SPEAKER_01: but they were real.
35:12
SPEAKER_01: And I got to know what they were like and I got to meet some of the founders
35:17
SPEAKER_01: and I got to visit them and thought, well, these are remarkable places.
35:23
SPEAKER_01: These are very small institutions.
35:26
SPEAKER_01: They're really accessible financially for students.
35:29
SPEAKER_01: They're not going into debt to go here.
35:31
SPEAKER_01: Their students are getting what seemed to me to be a Remarkable education compared
35:39
SPEAKER_01: to extraordinarily strong education compared to what was out there.
35:44
SPEAKER_01: Mostly in the liberal arts is what these places focused on,
35:47
SPEAKER_01: on the kind of historical study of the liberal arts,
35:51
SPEAKER_01: which has all kinds of value for the professions,
35:54
SPEAKER_01: but of course is kind of humanities driven at its core.
35:58
SPEAKER_01: And what people call classical education,
36:02
SPEAKER_01: have called classical education for the last 50 or 60 years or so.
36:07
SPEAKER_01: But I knew that there was a model out there.
36:09
SPEAKER_01: I knew that there was like a business model, organizational model that was viable.
36:15
SPEAKER_01: And so eventually,
36:17
SPEAKER_01: partly out of frustration,
36:18
SPEAKER_01: partly out of inspiration,
36:19
SPEAKER_01: I thought I'm either going to leave academia or I'm going
36:25
SPEAKER_01: to explore what it would be like to start a new college,
36:30
SPEAKER_01: a new kind of college,
36:30
SPEAKER_01: not just a new college, a new kind of college here in Southern California that
36:37
SPEAKER_01: Put at the center of the student experience,
36:40
SPEAKER_01: those things that I knew demonstrably to be the most impactful for them.
36:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
36:48
SPEAKER_00: Well, taking like, was it a leap or was it like a kind of a slower transition?
36:53
SPEAKER_00: Because like, at that point, were you a dad of two or three?
37:00
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
37:01
SPEAKER_00: And like,
37:02
SPEAKER_00: that seems like a big transition for the family where it's like, hey, like,
37:06
SPEAKER_00: actually,
37:06
SPEAKER_00: this thing that I've been doing for a My whole career,
37:10
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to make this
37:12
SPEAKER_01: big pivot.
37:14
SPEAKER_01: Spouses know what's up.
37:16
SPEAKER_01: We know.
37:16
SPEAKER_01: Spouses know each other.
37:18
SPEAKER_01: And I think my wife had seen for a couple years me just
37:27
SPEAKER_01: Not just low, but kind of an experience of highs and lows.
37:30
SPEAKER_01: I would get excited about something,
37:32
SPEAKER_01: some opportunity in my teaching,
37:34
SPEAKER_01: something with students,
37:36
SPEAKER_01: and then that would be quashed by something completely unnecessary.
37:39
SPEAKER_00: That was probably around the thesis that you were building for
37:43
SPEAKER_00: that eventually became Hildegard.
37:45
SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
37:46
SPEAKER_01: Yes, exactly.
37:47
SPEAKER_01: But I'm...
37:53
SPEAKER_01: I'm a believer in this term from the world of redemptive entrepreneurship
37:59
SPEAKER_01: that I hear in the circles of Praxis.
38:02
SPEAKER_01: The organization Praxis uses this term of re-risking.
38:07
SPEAKER_01: And it could be in the financial sense in which you have gotten something
38:12
SPEAKER_01: that you're building funding, funded,
38:14
SPEAKER_01: and you've built it,
38:16
SPEAKER_01: but then you feel deeply that it really needs to reach this demographic too,
38:20
SPEAKER_01: and it's not, and so you You re-risk, you reinvest again.
38:25
SPEAKER_01: You double down on it.
38:26
SPEAKER_01: And I thought,
38:27
SPEAKER_01: in a sense,
38:28
SPEAKER_01: as my wife and I were kind of talking about it at the time,
38:31
SPEAKER_01: at first it was a sort of an idea that I was entertaining,
38:37
SPEAKER_01: keeping to myself,
38:39
SPEAKER_01: and then started talking to my wife and some friends and colleagues about it.
38:44
SPEAKER_01: And I really thought vocationally it was time for me to re-risk, that I believed in education.
38:54
SPEAKER_01: As all societies should.
38:56
SPEAKER_01: And think of them as one of the four or five pillars of what makes
39:04
SPEAKER_01: a society hospitable to flourishing life, to flourishing living within it.
39:12
SPEAKER_01: And so because I believed in education,
39:14
SPEAKER_01: had seen its influence throughout history,
39:16
SPEAKER_01: thought,
39:17
SPEAKER_01: well, there are a thousand directions that a kind of new kind of college could take.
39:21
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
39:22
SPEAKER_01: I have an idea for one direction, one of those thousand that I think would work.
39:29
SPEAKER_01: And so kind of re-risked career-wise.
39:33
SPEAKER_01: Of course, you know, family of five and my wife also has a career.
39:40
SPEAKER_01: She's in marketing.
39:40
SPEAKER_01: And so we just looked, kind of forecasted together, what would this look like?
39:46
SPEAKER_01: And then took the leap.
39:48
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
39:49
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
39:49
SPEAKER_00: That's huge.
39:50
SPEAKER_00: Well, so for the people that don't know what Hildegard is,
39:55
SPEAKER_00: explain the model,
39:57
SPEAKER_00: like if you were talking to me at like a party or something,
40:01
SPEAKER_00: like what is
40:01
SPEAKER_01: Hildegard, what are you guys doing?
40:04
SPEAKER_01: Hildegard is a micro college,
40:06
SPEAKER_01: by which I mean an intentionally small,
40:09
SPEAKER_01: mentor driven,
40:10
SPEAKER_01: bachelor's degree granting institution that combines the two things I described,
40:16
SPEAKER_01: the deep study of Primary texts across the humanities and liberal sciences with
40:25
SPEAKER_01: a creation-driven entrepreneurship lab that we call the Redemptive Entrepreneur Lab.
40:34
SPEAKER_01: So we're a tight-knit community that includes a number of kinds of students
40:43
SPEAKER_01: or creators, including people like yourself and our creators' cohorts, and
40:50
SPEAKER_01: We are thinking through not just how to make a business or an organization,
40:58
SPEAKER_01: but rather we are deeply invested in understanding the problems that need
41:02
SPEAKER_01: to be solved and where those problems come from at their roots.
41:07
SPEAKER_01: So our student experience is spending roughly half their time doing one of
41:14
SPEAKER_01: the most old fashioned things you could imagine, sitting around a common table.
41:18
SPEAKER_01: This is one of them.
41:20
SPEAKER_01: Cracking open an old book,
41:25
SPEAKER_01: not always pre-modern,
41:26
SPEAKER_01: but often old,
41:27
SPEAKER_01: Aristotle, Plato,
41:28
SPEAKER_01: the Bible,
41:30
SPEAKER_01: Euclid's Elements of Geometry,
41:32
SPEAKER_01: Copernicus,
41:34
SPEAKER_01: Shakespeare,
41:35
SPEAKER_01: whatever it is,
41:38
SPEAKER_01: reading it and discussing it together for the sake of understanding one
41:42
SPEAKER_01: of six core themes we worked through.
41:44
SPEAKER_01: It could be justice,
41:46
SPEAKER_01: goodness, it could be beauty, Nature, that is human nature and also external nature.
41:53
SPEAKER_01: Faith, trying to get to the bottom of history's greatest answers to the question,
41:58
SPEAKER_01: what is goodness?
41:59
SPEAKER_01: What makes a society just?
42:00
SPEAKER_01: What does it mean to be free?
42:03
SPEAKER_01: As old school as it comes, there's no phones out, there are no computers out.
42:05
SPEAKER_01: We're reading and discussing for long periods of time, you know, two and a half, three hours.
42:10
SPEAKER_01: Meanwhile, students are also studying entrepreneurship.
42:14
SPEAKER_01: In a venture forward way,
42:15
SPEAKER_01: all students,
42:16
SPEAKER_01: we kind of lead them in a process of exploring what they're interested in doing,
42:21
SPEAKER_01: what kind of value they can bring to the world,
42:23
SPEAKER_01: their talents are, and then what problems need to be solved.
42:25
SPEAKER_01: And then they practice initially designing,
42:29
SPEAKER_01: building,
42:29
SPEAKER_01: and testing real products,
42:31
SPEAKER_01: programs,
42:32
SPEAKER_01: or services in those areas,
42:34
SPEAKER_01: whatever they're interested in,
42:36
SPEAKER_01: and eventually actually launching them and testing them in the market.
42:39
SPEAKER_01: So our students,
42:41
SPEAKER_01: while the What we call foundations of thought,
42:44
SPEAKER_01: the liberal arts side is an education entirely in common.
42:48
SPEAKER_01: In the entrepreneur lab,
42:49
SPEAKER_01: it's very individualized,
42:51
SPEAKER_01: and we might have a student working in behavioral health care,
42:55
SPEAKER_01: another working in sustainable agriculture,
42:58
SPEAKER_01: another working in finance,
42:59
SPEAKER_01: another working in nonprofit youth programs, whatever it might be.
43:07
SPEAKER_01: But they're all learning the same basic principles, startup principles of entrepreneurship.
43:12
SPEAKER_01: Fundamentals of business,
43:14
SPEAKER_01: marketing, org design, AI integration, business model design, financial planning.
43:20
SPEAKER_01: But they're doing it through application to the things that they're building
43:24
SPEAKER_01: because those are the things that they're passionate about.
43:26
SPEAKER_01: Those are the things that are motivating them.
43:28
SPEAKER_01: Meanwhile,
43:29
SPEAKER_01: always bringing into those conversations,
43:33
SPEAKER_01: imagine a student's working on something that has to do with finance.
43:40
SPEAKER_01: Well, they might bring in what we read from David Hume in The Nature of Commerce and Money.
43:45
SPEAKER_01: They might bring in Aristotle's discussion of currency,
43:49
SPEAKER_01: whatever it is that's informing their venture building.
43:52
SPEAKER_01: So that's the unique blend that we do at Hildegard is a really tight-knit, small school.
43:59
SPEAKER_01: Students don't experience this like they would another university.
44:02
SPEAKER_01: What they experience is coming into a small community
44:06
SPEAKER_01: Reading great books about big ideas and building things with friends.
44:12
SPEAKER_01: That's what they're doing.
44:12
SPEAKER_01: So by the time they finish, they've had this super active experience.
44:20
SPEAKER_01: They're graduating with no debt because we're committed to being affordable.
44:25
SPEAKER_01: And then they have this kind of list of artifacts that they built.
44:28
SPEAKER_01: Well, I actually built this marketing plan, launched it, generated this many leads.
44:33
SPEAKER_01: I really did do a kind of financial pro forma analysis for this real company.
44:39
SPEAKER_01: Students are always working with organizations, companies outside of the college.
44:45
SPEAKER_01: And this is the feedback I got from them.
44:47
SPEAKER_01: Or I actually prototyped this thing.
44:51
SPEAKER_01: Using this AI stack,
44:54
SPEAKER_01: and now this is being used by these four barbershops that I sold it to,
44:58
SPEAKER_01: or something like that.
44:59
SPEAKER_00: That seems too specific to be fake.
45:02
SPEAKER_00: It is fake.
45:03
SPEAKER_00: No one's done that.
45:05
SPEAKER_00: I was having a harder time thinking of something they haven't done.
45:08
SPEAKER_00: Now I'm really curious.
45:09
SPEAKER_00: What is this AI stack that barbershops are using?
45:13
SPEAKER_00: I want to wrestle with that.
45:16
SPEAKER_00: Well, that was one of my questions.
45:17
SPEAKER_00: I feel like you answered it a little bit, but I'm sure there's more to it.
45:20
SPEAKER_00: It's like this marriage of seemingly contradictory opposites where it's like,
45:26
SPEAKER_00: oh, great books and the Socratic method and jumping into question asking.
45:32
SPEAKER_00: And then when I think of modern entrepreneurship,
45:35
SPEAKER_00: when I actually dig down,
45:37
SPEAKER_00: I think it's like a lot of just really good asking questions and being like,
45:42
SPEAKER_00: Where is there a need that needs to be met and how do we provide value within that?
45:46
SPEAKER_00: But like on the surface level to me, it's like, oh, those seem different.
45:50
SPEAKER_00: Like one is thinking about the past, one is thinking about the future.
45:54
SPEAKER_00: And I think like at least
45:57
SPEAKER_00: the conversation these days feels like entrepreneurship is like,
46:01
SPEAKER_00: what are you doing in AI?
46:03
SPEAKER_00: Like, how are you on the bleeding edge of everything?
46:06
SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't seem like a lot of people are looking at the past.
46:10
SPEAKER_00: So like, can you go a little more in depth on like, how do those things come together?
46:15
SPEAKER_00: Because I think you touched on it a little bit,
46:17
SPEAKER_00: which is like,
46:18
SPEAKER_00: at least from what I'm understanding,
46:20
SPEAKER_00: like, yeah, everything, our past informs our present and future.
46:25
SPEAKER_00: So like, how do we really understand what these amazing, great thinkers were working through?
46:31
SPEAKER_00: Like, there's a reason that they're great books, right?
46:34
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, anyway, I'll shut up.
46:37
SPEAKER_01: I think you described it well.
46:39
SPEAKER_01: There is this popular perception of entrepreneurship as cutthroat hustle culture
46:49
SPEAKER_01: where the goal is to build something that is profitable,
46:55
SPEAKER_01: sell it, get rich, rinse and repeat.
47:00
SPEAKER_01: That's the idea.
47:01
SPEAKER_01: That's not what we do here.
47:04
SPEAKER_01: We practice redemptive entrepreneurship and we define that by,
47:10
SPEAKER_01: through our study of the liberal arts and the history of thought,
47:13
SPEAKER_01: we define that as moving past just exploitative business practice,
47:20
SPEAKER_01: even moving past merely ethical business practice
47:22
SPEAKER_01: where you can do whatever is profitable so long as you don't harm another person.
47:29
SPEAKER_01: And thinking about what is redemptive business practice?
47:33
SPEAKER_01: What does it mean to create culture with the highest aim of doing good,
47:41
SPEAKER_01: of loving your neighbor,
47:43
SPEAKER_01: of creating a more just society,
47:48
SPEAKER_01: enabling people to be more free,
47:51
SPEAKER_01: enabling people, especially the most vulnerable, to flourish more in their lives?
47:55
SPEAKER_01: What if those were your highest aims,
47:57
SPEAKER_01: not just as the The copy that's hidden somewhere on your website
48:04
SPEAKER_01: of your organization.
48:05
SPEAKER_01: But what if that's really your aim?
48:08
SPEAKER_01: What would that do?
48:09
SPEAKER_01: How would that prompt you to work and create sacrificially?
48:15
SPEAKER_01: How would it change the way that you define the goals of your organization
48:20
SPEAKER_01: or your product or your service?
48:21
SPEAKER_01: And we're not talking about like compromising the necessity to have a profitable
48:28
SPEAKER_01: and sustainable business here.
48:30
SPEAKER_01: What we are talking about is understanding the world perspectives
48:37
SPEAKER_01: that inform different ways of creating culture.
48:42
SPEAKER_01: The economy is not simply this neutral field of battle.
48:47
SPEAKER_01: It is something that,
48:48
SPEAKER_01: as our students think about it,
48:53
SPEAKER_01: is fungible, can be influenced, but has great influence over us.
48:56
SPEAKER_01: So one of the things we're discussing this semester, I'll give you an example.
49:01
SPEAKER_01: Every semester in Foundations of Thought, we are studying great books around a central theme.
49:06
SPEAKER_01: This semester, the theme is what makes a society just.
49:10
SPEAKER_01: So students just a couple weeks ago finished reading Aristotle's Treaties on Politics.
49:15
SPEAKER_01: And Aristotle's Treaties on Politics is ground zero for the way that we think about
49:21
SPEAKER_01: the relationship between an individual and society.
49:24
SPEAKER_01: Politics for him is not the art of...
49:30
SPEAKER_01: Beating your political opponent like we think about it today.
49:33
SPEAKER_01: Politics, he defines as the art of happiness.
49:37
SPEAKER_01: So he's already described in other works what it means to be happy.
49:41
SPEAKER_01: You need to be virtuous to be happy.
49:43
SPEAKER_01: And in the Treatise on Politics,
49:45
SPEAKER_01: he says,
49:46
SPEAKER_01: in order to be truly virtuous and truly happy,
49:49
SPEAKER_01: you have to live in a happy or just society.
49:53
SPEAKER_01: And there are these incredible passages where Aristotle's
49:58
SPEAKER_01: Flipping on its head the way that we today tend to think about the relationship
50:03
SPEAKER_01: between the individual and the society where we think, well,
50:05
SPEAKER_01: the best thing that society can do is leave me alone so I can try to be happy
50:10
SPEAKER_01: on my own or in my own domain with my family.
50:13
SPEAKER_01: But in the ancient world,
50:14
SPEAKER_01: and I would argue this still ought to largely be the case in modern consciousness,
50:20
SPEAKER_01: the opposite was the case,
50:21
SPEAKER_01: which is not just that society enables you to be happy,
50:25
SPEAKER_01: but a happy society is Actually elevates our individual capacity for
50:31
SPEAKER_01: a flourishing life.
50:33
SPEAKER_01: Our investment in society is not just instrumental.
50:36
SPEAKER_01: Society is comprised of our lives.
50:39
SPEAKER_01: That's what culture is.
50:41
SPEAKER_01: This is the kind of thinking that students will bring into the Entrepreneur Lab.
50:45
SPEAKER_01: So we're wrestling with these ideas.
50:48
SPEAKER_01: It's rewiring some misconceptions based in modern individualism and consumerism
50:55
SPEAKER_01: and industrialism.
50:58
SPEAKER_01: That we're still wrestling with,
50:59
SPEAKER_01: we're still burdened by the vestiges of,
51:02
SPEAKER_01: rewiring that to something that we think is true and good,
51:08
SPEAKER_01: but also that we actually understand.
51:10
SPEAKER_01: The fact is that people don't understand.
51:13
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes we'll get a student who applies or comes for a bit to Hildegard College
51:19
SPEAKER_01: who just wants to get at it.
51:20
SPEAKER_01: They just want to hustle.
51:22
SPEAKER_01: They just want to build a business.
51:24
SPEAKER_01: Well...
51:25
SPEAKER_01: Well, I don't want to spend my time discussing this treaties on physics
51:29
SPEAKER_01: or Euclid's elements of geometry or Augustine's confessions.
51:32
SPEAKER_01: What are we doing?
51:33
SPEAKER_01: I don't need to talk about that.
51:34
SPEAKER_01: I just want to help me build my little firm that I started.
51:39
SPEAKER_01: That is a bad fit for Hildegard College.
51:43
SPEAKER_01: We are pushing them to create more ambitiously than most universities do,
51:47
SPEAKER_01: but we're also pushing them to take the time to be formed intellectually,
51:52
SPEAKER_01: morally, and spiritually.
51:53
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
51:55
SPEAKER_00: Well, what I'm hearing you say is the great books inform the process
52:02
SPEAKER_00: that will allow greater capacity in their entrepreneurship.
52:06
SPEAKER_00: Like you were just describing,
52:09
SPEAKER_00: someone who's not a great fit is someone that's like, well,
52:12
SPEAKER_00: I have this AI stack and I want to be with these 17 barbers and they already want
52:19
SPEAKER_00: to work with me and I need to scale that up and I just need to go as quickly
52:22
SPEAKER_00: as possible.
52:24
SPEAKER_00: And your approach is like, well,
52:25
SPEAKER_00: actually,
52:26
SPEAKER_00: maybe we should ask a couple questions before you start that
52:29
SPEAKER_00: and really understand what is the purpose of this thing.
52:34
SPEAKER_00: And then even beyond making your pockets very large with cash, Is this good for society?
52:43
SPEAKER_00: Is this good for you?
52:44
SPEAKER_00: Is it good for the barber?
52:45
SPEAKER_00: All of these different questions that if you're not taking the time to do those,
52:51
SPEAKER_00: then this isn't a good fit for you.
52:54
SPEAKER_00: Best of luck.
52:56
SPEAKER_00: Have fun.
52:57
SPEAKER_00: Maybe it'll be really awesome.
52:58
SPEAKER_00: But we actually believe it's going to be way more awesome if you do it this way.
53:03
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
53:04
SPEAKER_00: That's what I'm hearing in the marriage of, oh, the great books and the entrepreneurship.
53:10
SPEAKER_00: These actually are beautiful marriage.
53:13
SPEAKER_00: They're not these two divorced ideas that need to stay separate.
53:18
SPEAKER_01: And it's funny if you talk to,
53:22
SPEAKER_01: you're in circles with all kinds of successful people all the time in business.
53:30
SPEAKER_01: They're usually pretty quick to say, oh, I wish I would have read this stuff in college.
53:37
SPEAKER_01: One of
53:37
SPEAKER_01: the more challenging thought conversions is getting somebody who's robustly educated
53:43
SPEAKER_01: in the liberal arts.
53:45
SPEAKER_01: A lot of people who study the classics or who follow
53:49
SPEAKER_01: a classical education curriculum in high school or college,
53:52
SPEAKER_01: where all they're really doing is studying Traditional logic,
53:56
SPEAKER_01: ancient languages, literature, philosophy, theology.
53:59
SPEAKER_01: That's really where their mind is.
54:02
SPEAKER_01: There's this,
54:03
SPEAKER_01: I think,
54:03
SPEAKER_01: inaccurate view that based on principle,
54:07
SPEAKER_01: we ought to protect the study of liberal arts from what's called the common arts
54:12
SPEAKER_01: or anything practical.
54:14
SPEAKER_01: And that just does not hold up historically.
54:18
SPEAKER_01: The figures that we often elevate as
54:22
SPEAKER_01: the exemplars of Liberal education,
54:25
SPEAKER_01: an education for freedom,
54:27
SPEAKER_01: as the term translates,
54:30
SPEAKER_01: a Boethius or an Augustan or an Erasmus or whoever it might be,
54:36
SPEAKER_01: these are people who believed that the education for which they advocated was for
54:43
SPEAKER_01: the sake of the good life.
54:45
SPEAKER_00: Practical aptitude, like actually going and doing something and knowing
54:52
SPEAKER_01: how to do it.
54:52
SPEAKER_01: Leadership, civics...
54:55
SPEAKER_01: Creating institutions of all kinds,
54:58
SPEAKER_01: whether that be civic institutions,
55:00
SPEAKER_01: governmental institutions,
55:02
SPEAKER_01: business institutions,
55:03
SPEAKER_01: religious institutions,
55:05
SPEAKER_01: upon which a well-ordered society relies,
55:10
SPEAKER_01: that's what liberal education is for.
55:13
SPEAKER_01: It's also true that knowledge is a good in and of itself,
55:16
SPEAKER_01: that our minds have the capacity to hold their own ends,
55:20
SPEAKER_01: that we can have intellectual virtue But a liberal education doesn't end there.
55:28
SPEAKER_01: It ends with productive action for the sake of others.
55:33
SPEAKER_01: And I think even in religious and Christian circles,
55:38
SPEAKER_01: for example,
55:39
SPEAKER_01: there's sometimes this kind of secularizing of the business part of your work.
55:45
SPEAKER_01: And then once you've made it and you're successful,
55:49
SPEAKER_01: now you can think about how to give back for what people kind of call kingdom work
55:52
SPEAKER_01: or something like that.
55:54
SPEAKER_01: That's another version of what I would call the secularization of education,
55:59
SPEAKER_01: or in that case of business.
56:01
SPEAKER_01: That need not be the case.
56:04
SPEAKER_01: We should be submitting everything that we do to what we think are the higher goods
56:09
SPEAKER_01: for which we do it.
56:11
SPEAKER_01: It sounds abstruse,
56:12
SPEAKER_01: but it's the perennial question that we are working with our students through here
56:17
SPEAKER_00: in that regard.
56:19
SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
56:19
SPEAKER_00: one of the other things that I've been intrigued by with the work that you're doing
56:25
SPEAKER_00: in the conversations we've had is this idea of failure resistance.
56:31
SPEAKER_00: And I'm curious if you can define what that means in the context of the education
56:36
SPEAKER_00: that you're giving the students and then how you guys came about with that idea.
56:42
SPEAKER_00: Because I think there's a lot of terms for it in The world out there,
56:47
SPEAKER_00: but why that term and how does that apply to the work that you guys are doing?
56:56
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'll answer,
56:57
SPEAKER_01: but I'm curious,
57:02
SPEAKER_01: what made you gravitate towards this idea of failure resistance?
57:06
SPEAKER_01: Why does that come to mind when you think about education, entrepreneurial education?
57:09
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, when I think about kind of modern-day entrepreneurship,
57:16
SPEAKER_00: The key terms that kind of pop up and light up in my head immediately are like lean,
57:21
SPEAKER_00: lean startup.
57:23
SPEAKER_00: And the framework with those terms is really around like, how do you fail fast?
57:31
SPEAKER_00: And it's not this idea of like, oh, how do you fail fast?
57:33
SPEAKER_00: So you can like move on and go get a normal real job.
57:38
SPEAKER_00: The framework in my mind has always been like, oh, how do you fail quickly?
57:42
SPEAKER_00: And then Iterate on that failure.
57:46
SPEAKER_00: Failure is like a learning process.
57:48
SPEAKER_00: It's a way to grow.
57:50
SPEAKER_00: And I see what you're doing here.
57:51
SPEAKER_00: You're basically doing the professor thing to me.
57:58
SPEAKER_01: I know that as an entrepreneur yourself, failure resistance is something just essential.
58:07
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
58:09
SPEAKER_01: For us, it's not only in the entrepreneurial education,
58:12
SPEAKER_01: it's also in the liberal arts education where one of the themes of critique
58:20
SPEAKER_01: of higher education in our country over the past 10 years has been
58:23
SPEAKER_01: that we coddle students.
58:25
SPEAKER_01: We are anti-coddling here.
58:29
SPEAKER_01: We have a point of view as an institution that we're clear about,
58:35
SPEAKER_01: but we invite students to ask whatever questions or raise whatever objections
58:39
SPEAKER_01: That earnestly come to mind.
58:40
SPEAKER_01: We only ask that they be honest.
58:43
SPEAKER_01: And we'll argue about anything.
58:45
SPEAKER_01: This isn't like a classroom where we're just like hotly debating people,
58:49
SPEAKER_01: you know, each other all the time.
58:51
SPEAKER_01: But there are disagreements occasionally.
58:53
SPEAKER_01: And coddling students,
58:55
SPEAKER_01: keeping them from diverging points of view,
58:59
SPEAKER_01: is fights against intellectual failure resistance.
59:03
SPEAKER_01: Or what we call, you know, people use fortitude or resilience or grit.
59:12
SPEAKER_01: We don't want to coddle students.
59:13
SPEAKER_01: We want them to have an intellectual confidence paired with humility that gives them
59:19
SPEAKER_01: the confidence to go into—I mean,
59:21
SPEAKER_01: after having read however many old intimidating books from other cultures and times,
59:28
SPEAKER_01: you're not really phased when someone presents you with a new document or a new idea
59:33
SPEAKER_01: or a new form of media.
59:36
SPEAKER_01: You think, well, I have the muscle memory.
59:39
SPEAKER_01: So similarly in entrepreneurship,
59:41
SPEAKER_01: resilience, grit,
59:42
SPEAKER_01: fortitude,
59:43
SPEAKER_01: failure resistance,
59:45
SPEAKER_01: we want,
59:46
SPEAKER_01: I mean we certainly give our students the platform to fail,
59:51
SPEAKER_01: and not always fail miserably, sometimes fail well.
59:53
SPEAKER_01: I mean one of our,
59:54
SPEAKER_01: I'll give you an example,
59:55
SPEAKER_01: one of our students in his freshman year,
59:57
SPEAKER_01: our students are always trying out different things,
59:59
SPEAKER_01: so it's not like they're sticking with one venture or idea for four years.
1:00:03
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes they're hopping around.
1:00:04
SPEAKER_01: So this student had,
1:00:06
SPEAKER_01: he was really motivated by what he saw as an endemic of loneliness in our society.
1:00:12
SPEAKER_01: And as a young adult who kind of grew up in high school through COVID,
1:00:16
SPEAKER_01: he noticed that other young adults really aren't hanging out in person very much.
1:00:21
SPEAKER_01: And when they do, there is a kind of standoffishness to it.
1:00:28
SPEAKER_01: And he saw as a solution, physical play.
1:00:32
SPEAKER_01: Meaning like quasi-competitive physical athletic sports between young adults.
1:00:39
SPEAKER_01: So he created this cool little organization that ran social events for different communities.
1:00:49
SPEAKER_01: It could be a run club,
1:00:50
SPEAKER_01: it could be a church college group or something around pit games like Gaga Ball
1:00:55
SPEAKER_01: or Spike Ball.
1:00:56
SPEAKER_01: People might not know what those are.
1:00:59
SPEAKER_01: They're just like fun,
1:01:01
SPEAKER_01: you could do it on the spot, ball-oriented games within like a little bit.
1:01:04
SPEAKER_01: Beach games, like park games.
1:01:06
SPEAKER_01: Exactly, that kind of stuff.
1:01:07
SPEAKER_01: And so he decided to kind of formalize this and was running some of these successes.
1:01:14
SPEAKER_01: He got sponsors,
1:01:15
SPEAKER_01: he got people to donate food,
1:01:18
SPEAKER_01: he had people show up, you know, the marketing was working.
1:01:21
SPEAKER_01: Kind of created the whole plan for it.
1:01:23
SPEAKER_01: This is a perfect example of the kind of thing that you might think, well,
1:01:28
SPEAKER_01: That's not going to be like the next SpaceX to go public and make people,
1:01:34
SPEAKER_01: you know, a thousand people millionaires overnight.
1:01:37
SPEAKER_01: But this is both a really good program,
1:01:43
SPEAKER_01: good for the world, and a really good learning experience.
1:01:46
SPEAKER_01: But this student, he experienced kind of scope creep at one point.
1:01:51
SPEAKER_01: And so there was a school that he was kind of marketing to that wanted him to build
1:01:58
SPEAKER_01: A gaga ball pit,
1:01:59
SPEAKER_01: which is like, I don't know what it is, like seven yards in diameter or something.
1:02:04
SPEAKER_01: It's octagonal in shape and it's maybe three feet high and you like,
1:02:09
SPEAKER_01: you know, gaga ball, you like hit the ball off the walls of this.
1:02:12
SPEAKER_01: And this wasn't really his business model, but he went into it and he did it.
1:02:18
SPEAKER_01: He built this thing for them and he built it in a way that reflected the beauty of
1:02:24
SPEAKER_01: the experience of play.
1:02:25
SPEAKER_01: So it was made out of wood.
1:02:27
SPEAKER_01: It was nice.
1:02:28
SPEAKER_01: It was sturdy.
1:02:29
SPEAKER_01: It was also mobile and it was expensive.
1:02:33
SPEAKER_01: And I remember him calling me up and he's like, well,
1:02:35
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:02:35
SPEAKER_01: I think I'm like breaking even essentially,
1:02:38
SPEAKER_01: but that I didn't really calculate like my time and labor into this.
1:02:41
SPEAKER_01: And so he ended up,
1:02:43
SPEAKER_01: and it's still there,
1:02:44
SPEAKER_01: building this beautiful goggle ball court that this school uses.
1:02:48
SPEAKER_00: And it was a loss,
1:02:50
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:02:50
SPEAKER_01: and, uh, Failure resistance there is obviously learning from that experience.
1:02:57
SPEAKER_01: He learned a very acute lesson,
1:03:01
SPEAKER_01: something that he'll never forget again,
1:03:03
SPEAKER_01: which is, in my financial pro forma, I need to account for time and labor.
1:03:07
SPEAKER_01: But he also learned,
1:03:10
SPEAKER_01: just like you do reading difficult books, he gained the kind of muscle memory of...
1:03:16
SPEAKER_01: Okay, if I'm in an organization,
1:03:18
SPEAKER_01: I need to be clear about what my product is, the product market fit.
1:03:21
SPEAKER_01: I need to know what my value proposition is.
1:03:24
SPEAKER_01: And if there's any ask or if there's any opportunity that falls outside of
1:03:28
SPEAKER_01: that value proposition,
1:03:29
SPEAKER_01: I need to interrogate that opportunity really closely and probably not do it.
1:03:36
SPEAKER_01: So failure resistance,
1:03:37
SPEAKER_01: this is,
1:03:37
SPEAKER_01: think about it,
1:03:38
SPEAKER_01: we call it the Redemptive Entrepreneur Lab because it is a lab
1:03:41
SPEAKER_01: where Some students are practicing and some students are actually launching
1:03:46
SPEAKER_01: and building at different stages in their work here.
1:03:49
SPEAKER_01: And they're both great and they're both really important.
1:03:51
SPEAKER_01: And obviously you have to go through the one before you can get to the other.
1:03:54
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, that's really good.
1:03:56
SPEAKER_00: And it's cool to see, like,
1:03:59
SPEAKER_00: I'm sure there's a lot of different examples of,
1:04:01
SPEAKER_00: like, where it's not just the one student.
1:04:04
SPEAKER_00: It's like, oh, well,
1:04:05
SPEAKER_00: we're doing that multiple times every single semester and working through those.
1:04:12
SPEAKER_00: And there's, like, a period of reflection, too.
1:04:15
SPEAKER_00: At least for me,
1:04:16
SPEAKER_00: in the way that I learn, like,
1:04:18
SPEAKER_00: sitting in a classroom most of the time doesn't give me the, like,
1:04:23
SPEAKER_00: Skills I need to actually do the thing,
1:04:25
SPEAKER_00: like going and doing the thing and then like sitting in the classroom and having
1:04:29
SPEAKER_00: the discussion and conversation around it.
1:04:32
SPEAKER_00: That's where like...
1:04:33
SPEAKER_00: So let me just ask you a follow up question.
1:04:35
SPEAKER_00: So let's say you're sitting in a classroom
1:04:37
SPEAKER_01: learning about,
1:04:38
SPEAKER_01: I don't know, business model design or something like that.
1:04:42
SPEAKER_01: You say that doesn't give you the skills to actually go do it.
1:04:45
SPEAKER_01: What are those skills that help you to convert that?
1:04:50
SPEAKER_01: Call it book knowledge or classroom knowledge to actually the ability to do something.
1:04:55
SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
1:04:55
SPEAKER_00: well I think that's like a big question that I've been wrestling with and my answer
1:04:59
SPEAKER_00: to that is like go and fail.
1:05:07
SPEAKER_00: Which is like not fun.
1:05:08
SPEAKER_00: Nobody enjoys.
1:05:09
SPEAKER_00: I think there are certain levels of guardrails that are like helpful.
1:05:14
SPEAKER_00: So for instance,
1:05:16
SPEAKER_00: just my understanding of how this school is built is like as you go out
1:05:22
SPEAKER_00: and you try new things like you guys have a lot of connections.
1:05:25
SPEAKER_00: And so it's like Oh, well, you should talk to this guy.
1:05:29
SPEAKER_00: He's an entrepreneur.
1:05:30
SPEAKER_00: He's done this thing before.
1:05:31
SPEAKER_00: He scaled this business.
1:05:32
SPEAKER_00: He's run these social programs before.
1:05:34
SPEAKER_00: He can probably give you the highs and the lows.
1:05:36
SPEAKER_00: And if he were going to do it again, what would he say?
1:05:39
SPEAKER_00: Like there's like the interview.
1:05:41
SPEAKER_00: I kind of abstract that to like the informational interview of like,
1:05:45
SPEAKER_00: okay, you've done this before.
1:05:47
SPEAKER_00: I haven't.
1:05:48
SPEAKER_00: How do I learn from you?
1:05:50
SPEAKER_00: Again, I'm the youngest of
1:05:53
SPEAKER_00: And so the way that I learned things was like I saw my older brothers mess up
1:05:57
SPEAKER_00: and I was like, oh, I'm going to observe that.
1:06:00
SPEAKER_00: And I don't have to experience the pain that you went through.
1:06:03
SPEAKER_00: I went through plenty of other experiences
1:06:05
SPEAKER_01: of pain in my own life.
1:06:08
SPEAKER_00: But I'm gonna learn from the thing that mom and dad didn't like
1:06:11
SPEAKER_00: about what you just did and not do that.
1:06:15
SPEAKER_00: So I feel like that's kind of the informational interview idea.
1:06:19
SPEAKER_00: And then the other piece is just like, okay,
1:06:21
SPEAKER_00: there's only so much of that that you can do,
1:06:24
SPEAKER_00: which I think is the other piece of what is very intriguing to me
1:06:28
SPEAKER_00: about this business model of education is like,
1:06:32
SPEAKER_00: okay, cool, we've taught you these things, now you're like, Go practice it.
1:06:38
SPEAKER_00: And I think one of the beauties and pitfalls for me of wrestling with ideas
1:06:46
SPEAKER_00: within either those informational interviews or bouncing an idea and working
1:06:51
SPEAKER_00: through it with AI or whatever is that you can just keep refining forever
1:06:57
SPEAKER_00: without actually doing any work.
1:07:00
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's a very dangerous thing.
1:07:03
SPEAKER_00: Place to live where it's just like, oh, it seems too hard.
1:07:06
SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to.
1:07:06
SPEAKER_00: And it's like, well, but did you, you didn't actually do anything.
1:07:10
SPEAKER_00: You didn't actually like go out and build the Gaga ball pit and realize like,
1:07:14
SPEAKER_00: oh, actually like, yeah, I'm not accounting for this thing.
1:07:19
SPEAKER_00: And yes, theory can teach you some version of that.
1:07:21
SPEAKER_00: But yeah,
1:07:23
SPEAKER_00: I think it's like,
1:07:24
SPEAKER_00: how do you get wisdom from people and then like apply that as quickly as possible
1:07:31
SPEAKER_00: and then like Reflect on that with those people or with other people and
1:07:36
SPEAKER_00: then continue that.
1:07:38
SPEAKER_00: I feel like it's part of that lean framework.
1:07:41
SPEAKER_00: It's part of that failure resistance framework.
1:07:45
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if that answers your question.
1:07:48
SPEAKER_01: I'm grateful to hear about your experience with that because this very question,
1:07:55
SPEAKER_01: how do you get, as you just put it, from theory to practice,
1:08:00
SPEAKER_01: Is the question that we just obsess over and that any good teacher obsesses over
1:08:06
SPEAKER_01: and it's applicable to everything.
1:08:09
SPEAKER_01: So you might be reading moral philosophy and studying what is the good in the work
1:08:18
SPEAKER_01: of Thomas Aquinas or Immanuel Kant or Aristotle's Ethics or whatever it is.
1:08:24
SPEAKER_00: That's not the purpose of studying
1:08:25
SPEAKER_01: moral philosophy.
1:08:26
SPEAKER_01: The purpose of studying moral philosophy is to be good.
1:08:29
SPEAKER_01: To be good, you have to choose the good in actual life.
1:08:34
SPEAKER_01: But how do you cross that chasm from knowledge of the good to actually choosing good?
1:08:41
SPEAKER_01: To do that is not something a teacher can do for you.
1:08:45
SPEAKER_01: It's only something that somebody can do for themselves.
1:08:48
SPEAKER_01: Learning, in fact, is only something somebody can do for themselves.
1:08:52
SPEAKER_01: Tell a class of 250 students in a lecture hall to memorize everything I say.
1:08:58
SPEAKER_01: That doesn't mean they learn it.
1:08:59
SPEAKER_01: That means they can say it back to me.
1:09:01
SPEAKER_01: Learning is actually only something that somebody can do for themselves.
1:09:04
SPEAKER_01: So is practical application,
1:09:07
SPEAKER_01: which is why this is,
1:09:10
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:09:11
SPEAKER_01: if you look at the empirical studies of return on investment for any kind
1:09:15
SPEAKER_01: of education,
1:09:17
SPEAKER_01: and you look at the things that employers want the most,
1:09:21
SPEAKER_01: It's what makes people successful in the world of careers.
1:09:26
SPEAKER_01: It's qualities like teachability,
1:09:28
SPEAKER_01: perseverance,
1:09:30
SPEAKER_01: adaptability, and maybe more than anything else,
1:09:35
SPEAKER_00: initiative, self-initiative.
1:09:36
SPEAKER_00: The soft skills that happen in the margins of big higher ed is what I'm hearing you say.
1:09:43
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
1:09:44
SPEAKER_00: The same thing, right?
1:09:45
SPEAKER_00: The same thing.
1:09:46
SPEAKER_01: And so a teacher of entrepreneurship,
1:09:48
SPEAKER_01: for instance,
1:09:50
SPEAKER_01: Needs to obsess over how do I get a student
1:09:56
SPEAKER_01: to convert them from hearing me
1:09:59
SPEAKER_01: and seeming to understand how to do it to actually doing it.
1:10:02
SPEAKER_01: And I like the language of the metaphor of guardrails you use.
1:10:07
SPEAKER_01: It's essentially a dialectic or a dialogue.
1:10:09
SPEAKER_01: It's a kind of choreography between leading a student and then pulling back artfully.
1:10:15
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:10:18
SPEAKER_01: So as to allow them to go,
1:10:20
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:10:20
SPEAKER_01: imagine you're like walking alongside of them into some unknown territory
1:10:27
SPEAKER_01: that they're a little bit freaked out by.
1:10:29
SPEAKER_01: And you're like, no, I'll go with you.
1:10:30
SPEAKER_01: And then as they're like chatting,
1:10:32
SPEAKER_01: like you kind of stop for a minute and see how far they'll walk forward
1:10:35
SPEAKER_01: as themselves.
1:10:35
SPEAKER_01: So like a practical example of this would be we might have
1:10:38
SPEAKER_01: a student who's Study marketing and is trying to build a marketing plan,
1:10:42
SPEAKER_01: is trying to figure out if the thing that they're designing will actually sell,
1:10:44
SPEAKER_01: if it's actually going to appeal to people if it's something they want.
1:10:49
SPEAKER_01: Does it address a pain they have?
1:10:50
SPEAKER_01: Does it provide a gain that they need?
1:10:54
SPEAKER_01: Is the value proposition good?
1:10:55
SPEAKER_01: And they'll say, well, I don't know how to find out.
1:10:58
SPEAKER_01: So we'll say, oh, well,
1:10:59
SPEAKER_01: what you need to do is define your value proposition and then ask people if
1:11:06
SPEAKER_01: If they want it.
1:11:07
SPEAKER_01: And then they'll define their value proposition because we've taught them how to do it.
1:11:10
SPEAKER_01: And then they'll come back to us and say, well, what do you mean ask people?
1:11:13
SPEAKER_01: Just like randoms?
1:11:14
SPEAKER_01: And we'll say, okay, well, here's a method for doing it.
1:11:17
SPEAKER_01: It's a customer discovery interview.
1:11:19
SPEAKER_01: And here are some templates for it.
1:11:21
SPEAKER_01: And here's how you record the information.
1:11:23
SPEAKER_01: And you should think about demographics.
1:11:25
SPEAKER_01: And then they'll say, oh, great.
1:11:27
SPEAKER_01: And so they'll fill out the templates and get ready for it.
1:11:29
SPEAKER_01: And then come back to us and be like, well, I don't really know who to ask.
1:11:32
SPEAKER_01: At which point we'll then intentionally and artfully decide Tell them just figure it out.
1:11:40
SPEAKER_01: At this point, you need to figure it out.
1:11:43
SPEAKER_01: And it's that,
1:11:44
SPEAKER_01: depending on what stage someone,
1:11:45
SPEAKER_01: that's that kind of choreography between walking with them and then stopping
1:11:48
SPEAKER_01: and encouraging them to move forward.
1:11:51
SPEAKER_01: That's all teaching is.
1:11:53
SPEAKER_01: If we define teaching not just as the delivery of content,
1:11:56
SPEAKER_01: knowledge content,
1:11:57
SPEAKER_01: but helping people convert from that kind of passive learning to active doing stage
1:12:03
SPEAKER_01: in whatever subject it is, that's what teaching is the art of.
1:12:07
SPEAKER_01: And I think that's Largely why we're teaching here entrepreneurship instead of just business.
1:12:13
SPEAKER_01: We don't want people to imagine sitting in business classes,
1:12:16
SPEAKER_01: reading textbooks,
1:12:18
SPEAKER_01: doing artificial assignments that they're getting an artificial grade on.
1:12:22
SPEAKER_01: Instead, we want them to imagine learning by doing and building.
1:12:27
SPEAKER_00: Well, you're answering one of my questions in a roundabout way.
1:12:30
SPEAKER_00: It was just like, what's the definition of teaching?
1:12:32
SPEAKER_00: Because as a young parent,
1:12:35
SPEAKER_00: I'm always thinking about like, well,
1:12:36
SPEAKER_00: how am I like educating my kids in the way that like I'm convicted
1:12:42
SPEAKER_00: that they should be learning?
1:12:45
SPEAKER_00: And that dance and that like push and pull that you're talking about.
1:12:49
SPEAKER_00: I think that applies to parents.
1:12:51
SPEAKER_00: Parents are just teachers, I think, in many ways, like messy.
1:12:56
SPEAKER_00: In-process teachers.
1:12:59
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's part of the beauty
1:13:03
SPEAKER_00: of what I've seen around this entrepreneurial venture that you guys are building
1:13:11
SPEAKER_00: and have built.
1:13:12
SPEAKER_00: And there's a ton of expertise behind.
1:13:14
SPEAKER_00: But also, these same lessons apply to you guys as well.
1:13:19
SPEAKER_00: Because you're practicing what you preach, essentially.
1:13:22
SPEAKER_00: You're not like...
1:13:23
SPEAKER_00: It's not a class in an older institution that's been around forever,
1:13:27
SPEAKER_00: and I think that's a really cool idea of having those types of courses
1:13:31
SPEAKER_00: in those institutions,
1:13:32
SPEAKER_00: but it's also The teachers that I've resonated the most with have always been people
1:13:37
SPEAKER_00: that have done stuff, not the theoretical teachers.
1:13:42
SPEAKER_00: I had plenty of film professors at Biola that were awesome dudes and gals,
1:13:49
SPEAKER_00: but the people,
1:13:52
SPEAKER_00: one particular professor I resonated with the most was like,
1:13:57
SPEAKER_00: The professor that had been on the most film sets and had the most experience
1:14:03
SPEAKER_00: in producing when she was teaching a producing class,
1:14:06
SPEAKER_00: not the professor that had like studied a ton of theory and like done a couple
1:14:10
SPEAKER_00: of tiny documentaries or whatever.
1:14:12
SPEAKER_00: And there's nothing wrong with that.
1:14:14
SPEAKER_00: Well, I guess I am saying there is something wrong with it.
1:14:16
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:14:18
SPEAKER_00: They both have their own value.
1:14:20
SPEAKER_00: And the theory guy, he resonated with some people more.
1:14:24
SPEAKER_00: And that's great.
1:14:26
SPEAKER_00: But at least for me,
1:14:27
SPEAKER_00: if you're practicing what you preach and you're working through it,
1:14:29
SPEAKER_00: it's like,
1:14:29
SPEAKER_00: oh, well, I see the living, breathing example of the process that is happening here.
1:14:37
SPEAKER_00: And it's easier for me to buy into that, I guess, is what I'm trying to say.
1:14:42
SPEAKER_00: So I don't need to ask that question anymore because
1:14:45
SPEAKER_01: you already answered it for me.
1:14:47
SPEAKER_00: I feel like I'd be remiss in not asking an AI question
1:14:50
SPEAKER_00: because I feel like those are always a question that gets asked about.
1:14:53
SPEAKER_00: Everybody's asking.
1:14:55
SPEAKER_00: Well, you guys are on the bleeding edge of education.
1:14:58
SPEAKER_00: And so I was looking through as I was researching this.
1:15:03
SPEAKER_00: And I don't know if it was in a blog or something you were talking about.
1:15:06
SPEAKER_00: But you were talking about either you or your colleague.
1:15:09
SPEAKER_00: You can correct me if I'm wrong.
1:15:11
SPEAKER_00: But the difference between like AI ordering and AI ordering.
1:15:15
SPEAKER_00: Integration within education.
1:15:19
SPEAKER_00: And I would love to hear your explanation of that and the definition
1:15:25
SPEAKER_00: of how you're thinking about that.
1:15:27
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think that was from a,
1:15:28
SPEAKER_01: and I encourage people,
1:15:30
SPEAKER_01: anyone that hears this to go look this up on our website, Hildegard.college.
1:15:35
SPEAKER_01: We have a blog and we have a guest post from a board member named Dustin Stevie
1:15:39
SPEAKER_01: who wrote this kind of wonderful reflection on AI use and AI education.
1:15:46
SPEAKER_01: As it happens,
1:15:47
SPEAKER_01: we are teaching,
1:15:48
SPEAKER_01: so every semester in the Entrepreneur Lab, we focus on a different theme.
1:15:52
SPEAKER_01: Last semester was marketing, influence, and growth.
1:15:55
SPEAKER_01: This semester is business model design.
1:15:58
SPEAKER_01: Next semester is AI, design thinking, and culture creation.
1:16:02
SPEAKER_01: So it's this semester on AI,
1:16:06
SPEAKER_01: and we have a working group of AI experts,
1:16:11
SPEAKER_01: to use a sloppy phrase,
1:16:14
SPEAKER_01: That we've been convening and talking about it, even these past couple weeks.
1:16:18
SPEAKER_01: And
1:16:20
SPEAKER_01: AI education...
1:16:24
SPEAKER_01: AI is one of these things where there are so many voices.
1:16:28
SPEAKER_01: There are so many perspectives.
1:16:30
SPEAKER_01: It doesn't matter what you're pairing AI with,
1:16:33
SPEAKER_01: whatever other topic it is,
1:16:35
SPEAKER_01: AI is going to be the companion topic that shows up in the media more
1:16:39
SPEAKER_01: than anything else.
1:16:40
SPEAKER_01: So if you search recent stories in education,
1:16:43
SPEAKER_01: You're likely to see education and AI as a pairing more than any other pairing.
1:16:49
SPEAKER_01: Education and policy, education and religion, education and whatever, childhood or something.
1:16:55
SPEAKER_01: It's going to be education and AI.
1:16:58
SPEAKER_01: But despite the fact that there are just so many voices and perspectives,
1:17:02
SPEAKER_01: people are still just as anxious as ever.
1:17:07
SPEAKER_01: And in education,
1:17:08
SPEAKER_01: it's interesting because the real basis of the anxiety is Isn't around how
1:17:13
SPEAKER_01: to teach AI,
1:17:14
SPEAKER_01: it's around how AI is preventing people from learning,
1:17:18
SPEAKER_01: which is, I won't go, that's a whole nother topic.
1:17:22
SPEAKER_01: But what we're doing is thinking about, well,
1:17:25
SPEAKER_01: what does it mean to integrate AI into an educational program that is rooted in
1:17:34
SPEAKER_01: the great texts,
1:17:35
SPEAKER_01: is deeply humanistic,
1:17:38
SPEAKER_01: but is also entrepreneurial,
1:17:39
SPEAKER_01: venture forward,
1:17:40
SPEAKER_01: and creative, Pedagogically as a goal of its or as a method of teaching.
1:17:48
SPEAKER_01: So this is something that we're just in the weeds with in the moment.
1:17:52
SPEAKER_01: And one of the observations I was making as I was talking with our kind
1:17:57
SPEAKER_01: of working group of AI folks is that, like, what is an AI expert these days anyway?
1:18:04
SPEAKER_01: What does it mean for someone to be really proficient in AI?
1:18:08
SPEAKER_01: Requires defining what AI is, but it requires also defining proficiency.
1:18:11
SPEAKER_01: And unless you're somebody who's taking hours a day to try to keep up
1:18:16
SPEAKER_01: with what's next in AI technologies, you're always going to feel behind.
1:18:28
SPEAKER_01: Every day I'm using several different AI tools and I have agents running
1:18:35
SPEAKER_01: and I'm Probably more AI proficient.
1:18:37
SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm certainly more AI proficient than your average Joe and probably more
1:18:42
SPEAKER_01: than your average academic.
1:18:44
SPEAKER_01: And yet I feel so insufficient and underprepared.
1:18:49
SPEAKER_01: But what we've been asking the question, what can you do with this?
1:18:54
SPEAKER_01: Now, of course,
1:18:54
SPEAKER_01: students are using AI every semester in all courses in directed
1:18:59
SPEAKER_01: and intentional ways here.
1:19:01
SPEAKER_01: But what do you do with a semester really focusing on AI?
1:19:06
SPEAKER_01: For us, the approach that we're going to take,
1:19:08
SPEAKER_01: and this is where people interested can look into this course
1:19:12
SPEAKER_01: and our website will be published within the next week or two,
1:19:17
SPEAKER_01: is to emphasize what AI is doing and what it's not doing.
1:19:25
SPEAKER_01: So our course is going to be totally full of actual AI building and applications
1:19:34
SPEAKER_01: And we're going to help students build proficiencies in prompt engineering and
1:19:41
SPEAKER_01: in agency and agent creation and stacking AI applications.
1:19:47
SPEAKER_01: But a large emphasis of the class is going to be on understanding where AI fits in,
1:19:54
SPEAKER_01: not just philosophically, but even practically.
1:19:58
SPEAKER_01: So one of our advisory board members has this,
1:20:01
SPEAKER_01: I think,
1:20:01
SPEAKER_01: apt analogy of,
1:20:03
SPEAKER_01: The genie in the bottle that,
1:20:05
SPEAKER_01: you know,
1:20:05
SPEAKER_01: imagine that you found a genie in a bottle and you rub the bottle and
1:20:09
SPEAKER_01: the genie pops out.
1:20:11
SPEAKER_01: But it tells you, listen, you have one wish.
1:20:15
SPEAKER_01: You can wish for anything that will help you get what you want.
1:20:21
SPEAKER_01: What you can't do is to wish for what you want.
1:20:25
SPEAKER_01: You can only ask for what will help you get to what you want.
1:20:29
SPEAKER_01: And that's the analogy for AI.
1:20:32
SPEAKER_01: And so Through design thinking as a framework,
1:20:36
SPEAKER_01: and again, there are a number of frameworks you can use.
1:20:38
SPEAKER_01: We're also using some sort of systems thinking and things like that.
1:20:42
SPEAKER_01: The focus will be on helping students to identify problems that need to be solved.
1:20:48
SPEAKER_01: Using system thinking to decompose the project into pieces so
1:20:52
SPEAKER_01: that you can better see where AI efficiencies and applications will fit in.
1:20:57
SPEAKER_01: But ultimately,
1:20:58
SPEAKER_01: the AI literacy or AI fluency is Is not measured by the
1:21:10
SPEAKER_01: aptitude
1:21:10
SPEAKER_01: of one's technical use of AI instruments as much as it is the outcome,
1:21:17
SPEAKER_01: the thing that the genie is actually helping you to ultimately get.
1:21:21
SPEAKER_01: What is the quality of that in terms of its sustainability,
1:21:24
SPEAKER_01: profitability,
1:21:25
SPEAKER_01: in terms of the good that it's doing in the world,
1:21:27
SPEAKER_01: in terms of how well it actually solves the problem you're seeking to solve?
1:21:32
SPEAKER_01: Your AI fluency should be measured by that goal.
1:21:37
SPEAKER_01: And that required is understanding what is a large language model,
1:21:41
SPEAKER_01: therefore what makes a good prompt and how to best use all these technologies,
1:21:48
SPEAKER_01: but through the design of an entire project plan that begins with deep thinking in
1:21:51
SPEAKER_01: the first place.
1:21:51
SPEAKER_01: So I don't know if this answers your question, but this is how we're thinking about it.
1:21:57
SPEAKER_01: It's on my mind and it's...
1:22:00
SPEAKER_01: In every facet of education, there's an AI-related question.
1:22:03
SPEAKER_01: How do you prevent students from cheating?
1:22:06
SPEAKER_01: Which isn't a problem here just because of our size and the course doing so well.
1:22:10
SPEAKER_01: But where do you encourage students to use AI, where not to?
1:22:14
SPEAKER_01: We tend to require them to use AI tools for many exercises.
1:22:21
SPEAKER_01: Which in some ways is like a release valve.
1:22:23
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
1:22:25
SPEAKER_01: Releases the pressure and then it liberates them not to use it.
1:22:29
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
1:22:30
SPEAKER_00: Well, and thinking about how to use it correctly.
1:22:34
SPEAKER_00: So what I'm hearing is like the difference between ordering
1:22:36
SPEAKER_00: and integration is like ordering would be like, well,
1:22:40
SPEAKER_00: let's just like kind of throw everything at the wall and like,
1:22:44
SPEAKER_00: oh, but we need to be using this AI.
1:22:46
SPEAKER_00: And so like, oh,
1:22:47
SPEAKER_00: let's just kind of like It almost feels like you're going down a hill on a bike
1:22:52
SPEAKER_00: and you're in too low a gear.
1:22:54
SPEAKER_00: So you're just constantly pedaling and you're not able to keep up with what's happening.
1:22:59
SPEAKER_00: Whereas integration,
1:23:00
SPEAKER_00: I think it seems like the reflection of the work
1:23:04
SPEAKER_00: that you guys are already doing around great books
1:23:06
SPEAKER_00: and entrepreneurship married together.
1:23:11
SPEAKER_00: Dive into these deep questions that like so much of
1:23:14
SPEAKER_00: the news now is like finally maybe sort of catching up to the idea of like, whoa,
1:23:19
SPEAKER_00: whoa,
1:23:19
SPEAKER_00: like maybe we should slow down a little bit and ask some of these bigger questions.
1:23:26
SPEAKER_00: Most of the time,
1:23:27
SPEAKER_00: these big tech companies are just like, well,
1:23:29
SPEAKER_00: our competition is outcompeting us, so we need to just go as quickly as possible.
1:23:34
SPEAKER_00: Whether that's a real question that they're asking or an optics question,
1:23:39
SPEAKER_00: hard to parse through that.
1:23:40
SPEAKER_00: But the integration of that,
1:23:43
SPEAKER_00: at least what I'm hearing you say,
1:23:44
SPEAKER_00: is let's actually slow down for the right reasons and Understand where do these,
1:23:49
SPEAKER_00: because they're really powerful tools.
1:23:51
SPEAKER_00: How do they fit into the pieces of whatever we're working on and do that in a redemptive way?
1:24:02
SPEAKER_01: Yeah,
1:24:03
SPEAKER_01: and I think a student's,
1:24:06
SPEAKER_01: there's some research out there on what students already know about AI
1:24:09
SPEAKER_01: and what their proficiency is coming into college.
1:24:12
SPEAKER_01: And I think this is not just true of students, it's true of many people.
1:24:16
SPEAKER_01: And it's just kind of a one shot.
1:24:17
SPEAKER_01: It's like shooting from the hip.
1:24:20
SPEAKER_01: And the worst uses of it are ones that use AI to define the problem,
1:24:25
SPEAKER_01: define the goal, and define the means to the end.
1:24:28
SPEAKER_00: So students will be given an assignment.
1:24:30
SPEAKER_01: Offloading thinking.
1:24:32
SPEAKER_01: They'll be like,
1:24:32
SPEAKER_01: I need to write an essay on Shakespeare's Henry V.
1:24:36
SPEAKER_01: Okay, here are some ideas, blah, blah, blah.
1:24:40
SPEAKER_01: It's just defining the whole thing.
1:24:42
SPEAKER_01: Of course, that's terrible for learning.
1:24:43
SPEAKER_01: You're literally not learning anything.
1:24:45
SPEAKER_01: But it's totally non-transferable to the quote-unquote real world.
1:24:55
SPEAKER_01: There's all kinds of AI education startups happening right now.
1:25:00
SPEAKER_01: AI native schools and course providers and universities.
1:25:04
SPEAKER_01: And if you look at A lot of the material they're putting out in terms
1:25:08
SPEAKER_01: of how they're describing their organization,
1:25:09
SPEAKER_01: their integration of AI,
1:25:10
SPEAKER_01: it might be a completely teacherless school program, which freaks me out.
1:25:16
SPEAKER_01: But still, if you read what they're doing, the thing isn't defined by AI.
1:25:23
SPEAKER_01: The goals of the thing,
1:25:26
SPEAKER_01: the vision for it,
1:25:26
SPEAKER_01: the problem that it's solving,
1:25:28
SPEAKER_01: the gains it's addressing, sorry,
1:25:30
SPEAKER_01: the pains it's addressing,
1:25:31
SPEAKER_01: the gains it's providing,
1:25:32
SPEAKER_01: Those are defined by humans and maybe AI has a place in even helping
1:25:36
SPEAKER_01: to define those things, to research them, stuff like that.
1:25:40
SPEAKER_01: But some of the,
1:25:43
SPEAKER_01: I know this might be controversial,
1:25:45
SPEAKER_01: but some of the most humanistically oriented Startup founders I've talked
1:25:51
SPEAKER_01: to have been people working in the AI education space,
1:25:55
SPEAKER_01: people that are creating AI-native schools.
1:25:57
SPEAKER_01: That's encouraging to hear.
1:25:59
SPEAKER_01: I mean, there are so many questions to ask, but they
1:26:07
SPEAKER_01: know AI.
1:26:10
SPEAKER_01: They've had this trial and error,
1:26:12
SPEAKER_01: these failure experiences with AI and education enough to know,
1:26:15
SPEAKER_01: the ones that I'm thinking of at least,
1:26:17
SPEAKER_01: to know where it fits in and where it doesn't.
1:26:20
SPEAKER_01: So you might,
1:26:20
SPEAKER_01: for instance,
1:26:22
SPEAKER_01: use AI to build a repository of philosophies of education,
1:26:29
SPEAKER_01: of subject-specific pedagogies, of ways to address things.
1:26:34
SPEAKER_01: And you might use AI to organize that data and to use predictive models
1:26:39
SPEAKER_01: to recommend things for certain courses that AI then teaches as the teacher.
1:26:44
SPEAKER_01: But the fact is that that...
1:26:47
SPEAKER_01: Those predictive models have to be oriented towards a goal that you set for it,
1:26:52
SPEAKER_01: requiring deep understanding of the problem.
1:26:54
SPEAKER_01: So this is the theme.
1:26:55
SPEAKER_01: I know that this conversation goes on and on and on.
1:26:57
SPEAKER_01: The theme is a deep understanding of the problems that we're seeking out
1:27:03
SPEAKER_01: to solve vis-a-vis what we believe are goods,
1:27:09
SPEAKER_01: what we believe lead people towards the good life.
1:27:13
SPEAKER_01: That's rooted in quality of thought and the inputs that you have into your life.
1:27:20
SPEAKER_00: And you doing that thinking.
1:27:23
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:27:23
SPEAKER_01: Not offloading
1:27:24
SPEAKER_00: that thinking.
1:27:26
SPEAKER_01: And that's not to say I can't help you with that thinking,
1:27:28
SPEAKER_01: but if thinking is only something one does for oneself,
1:27:33
SPEAKER_01: just like learning is only something one does for oneself,
1:27:36
SPEAKER_01: you have to ask, well, how is AI helping me do that?
1:27:38
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:27:39
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:27:40
SPEAKER_01: Education is really like an interesting...
1:27:43
SPEAKER_01: As an industry or kind of sector and as an art,
1:27:47
SPEAKER_01: education is,
1:27:49
SPEAKER_01: I think,
1:27:49
SPEAKER_01: a really interesting kind of trial ground for technology because it tends
1:27:55
SPEAKER_01: to reveal
1:27:58
SPEAKER_01: not just cracks and chasms that technology can't fill,
1:28:04
SPEAKER_01: but also I think it helps to kind of orient us or
1:28:07
SPEAKER_01: at least You'll fail really quickly in education if you use a technology in
1:28:12
SPEAKER_01: the wrong way.
1:28:13
SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
1:28:15
SPEAKER_00: It's like a nice mirror.
1:28:18
SPEAKER_01: I think it's fragile because you're working with people
1:28:21
SPEAKER_01: and there are certain principles that never go away.
1:28:23
SPEAKER_01: Education is about relationships.
1:28:25
SPEAKER_01: People need to love what they're doing if they're going to learn.
1:28:29
SPEAKER_01: Learning is something that one can only do for themselves.
1:28:32
SPEAKER_01: These are not just adages.
1:28:33
SPEAKER_01: These are centuries and millennia old.
1:28:37
SPEAKER_01: You know,
1:28:38
SPEAKER_01: learned opinions that have been borne out and so it's a kind of house of cards and
1:28:43
SPEAKER_01: if you apply a technology in the wrong way,
1:28:46
SPEAKER_01: the whole thing is going to collapse pretty quickly,
1:28:48
SPEAKER_01: which we have seen all over university systems with Student AI adoption,
1:28:53
SPEAKER_01: and they're just not learning anything.
1:28:54
SPEAKER_01: The teacher's like, I don't know what to do.
1:28:56
SPEAKER_01: What do I do?
1:28:56
SPEAKER_01: Do I have them write all their essays in class?
1:28:58
SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah, where's the education for the teachers, too?
1:29:02
SPEAKER_00: I think that was an interesting thing with COVID,
1:29:04
SPEAKER_00: is what was the educational process for having this huge,
1:29:09
SPEAKER_00: massive transition to online learning and technology being an integral part of
1:29:14
SPEAKER_00: the classroom in different ways?
1:29:16
SPEAKER_00: And yeah, I'm sure that opened up All kinds of crazy.
1:29:21
SPEAKER_01: What a time we live in, man.
1:29:22
SPEAKER_01: We went from COVID,
1:29:23
SPEAKER_01: universities going online overnight to the advent of large language models
1:29:29
SPEAKER_01: and incredibly fast adoption of them.
1:29:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:29:35
SPEAKER_00: Well, if there was one educator or person of inspiration that you have drawn from
1:29:44
SPEAKER_00: that you could grab lunch with, who would that person be?
1:29:48
SPEAKER_00: Dead or alive?
1:29:49
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:29:50
SPEAKER_00: And what would you want to talk to them about?
1:29:52
SPEAKER_00: One educator?
1:29:54
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, however you define it.
1:29:55
SPEAKER_00: I know I'm going to regret whatever
1:29:56
SPEAKER_01: I say,
1:29:57
SPEAKER_01: so I'm going to give myself the freedom to say what is one of
1:30:02
SPEAKER_01: the educators I regret.
1:30:03
SPEAKER_01: Yes, yes.
1:30:03
SPEAKER_00: That's a better question.
1:30:06
SPEAKER_01: Oh, man.
1:30:12
SPEAKER_01: Wow, that is such a hard question.
1:30:15
SPEAKER_01: I'm just going to go for it.
1:30:18
SPEAKER_01: I am going to say,
1:30:26
SPEAKER_01: well, this is a selfish answer.
1:30:28
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to choose Thomas Aquinas,
1:30:33
SPEAKER_01: the doctor, so to speak, who's a medieval Christian theologian and philosopher.
1:30:40
SPEAKER_01: Who, over the course of like 15 or so years,
1:30:44
SPEAKER_01: wrote not only an enormous corpus of philosophy,
1:30:50
SPEAKER_01: largely in what's called the Summa Theologica,
1:30:53
SPEAKER_01: that integrates classical thought from Aristotle and all sorts of medieval writers,
1:31:02
SPEAKER_01: but is so systematic and precise.
1:31:04
SPEAKER_01: If anybody's read Thomas Aquinas,
1:31:07
SPEAKER_01: they know that he He puts out a statement,
1:31:10
SPEAKER_01: then he writes some objections to it,
1:31:12
SPEAKER_01: then he writes his answer, then he writes replies to the objections.
1:31:15
SPEAKER_01: And the kind of concision and elegance of this work that he did in such a short amount of time.
1:31:23
SPEAKER_01: I guess my curiosity with Thomas Aquinas is, what would this person behave like?
1:31:31
SPEAKER_01: He's writing this stuff out by hand.
1:31:33
SPEAKER_01: He's not using a typewriter or a computer or a word processor or anything.
1:31:38
SPEAKER_01: He doesn't have access to these texts outside of pulling them off the shelves
1:31:43
SPEAKER_01: or memorizing them.
1:31:47
SPEAKER_01: A true genius,
1:31:48
SPEAKER_01: another one might be Euclid,
1:31:51
SPEAKER_01: who essentially invented geometry as we know it,
1:31:54
SPEAKER_01: but thought of mathematics not as an empirical study,
1:32:00
SPEAKER_01: but as something that allows you to demonstrate the logical necessity or ability
1:32:05
SPEAKER_01: to do something.
1:32:06
SPEAKER_01: So I know that sounds...
1:32:07
SPEAKER_01: Abstract.
1:32:09
SPEAKER_00: But no book
1:32:09
SPEAKER_01: has changed.
1:32:12
SPEAKER_01: In a short amount of time,
1:32:13
SPEAKER_01: no book has changed the way that I think more than Euclid's Elements of Geometry.
1:32:19
SPEAKER_01: During COVID,
1:32:20
SPEAKER_01: I gathered with friends online and we worked through the first book of his 13 books,
1:32:26
SPEAKER_01: memorized the propositions.
1:32:28
SPEAKER_01: One person would have to reproduce it from memory and kind of draw it on this website.
1:32:32
SPEAKER_01: And it's just math as you don't know it, is what Euclid is.
1:32:37
SPEAKER_00: I've never been intrigued by it.
1:32:38
SPEAKER_00: Like, math as you don't know it sounds intriguing to me.
1:32:41
SPEAKER_00: Never been intrigued by math.
1:32:42
SPEAKER_01: Probably those two.
1:32:43
SPEAKER_01: I just don't know if they're...
1:32:46
SPEAKER_01: I don't know if they're... Personable?
1:32:48
SPEAKER_01: Teachers.
1:32:48
SPEAKER_01: I'll give one more answer.
1:32:51
SPEAKER_01: A really obvious one would be the 20th century writer C.S.
1:32:54
SPEAKER_01: Lewis, but maybe not for reasons people think.
1:32:57
SPEAKER_01: C.S.
1:32:57
SPEAKER_01: Lewis's ideas are wonderful.
1:33:00
SPEAKER_01: He was clearly a good teacher.
1:33:02
SPEAKER_01: C.S.
1:33:03
SPEAKER_01: Lewis is masterful with language,
1:33:07
SPEAKER_01: and I've been obsessed with the relationship between language and intelligence,
1:33:12
SPEAKER_01: or language and thought.
1:33:14
SPEAKER_01: We only really think through language,
1:33:18
SPEAKER_01: and if you were to just imagine and canvas all the people that you know personally,
1:33:24
SPEAKER_01: and try to think whose quality of thought,
1:33:28
SPEAKER_01: I know that sounds kind of like a weird way to put it,
1:33:30
SPEAKER_01: but whose quality of thought is the highest?
1:33:32
SPEAKER_01: Who has the greatest intelligence, ability to make sense of the world is what I mean by that.
1:33:39
SPEAKER_01: It's usually going to be the people who are most fluid and elegant with language.
1:33:45
SPEAKER_01: And one thing that C.S.
1:33:46
SPEAKER_01: Lewis did was make these complex ideas accessible with language
1:33:51
SPEAKER_01: that is not only accurate, but it's also beautiful and inspiring.
1:33:53
SPEAKER_01: And I'm drawn to people who...
1:34:01
SPEAKER_01: Are not just good with words, but seem to be creating a world of meaning with their words.
1:34:08
SPEAKER_01: Where the point isn't for them to get their thoughts on the paper.
1:34:10
SPEAKER_01: The point is for them to get their thoughts into your mind in a way that's inspiring.
1:34:15
SPEAKER_01: And the writing is a medium that they're able to craft and manipulate in this way.
1:34:19
SPEAKER_01: There's artistry there.
1:34:21
SPEAKER_01: I don't think that you can have a good teacher who is not...
1:34:27
SPEAKER_01: Excellent with their language,
1:34:29
SPEAKER_01: which is a weird thing to say, and complicated and culturally enmeshed.
1:34:33
SPEAKER_01: I understand that,
1:34:34
SPEAKER_01: but if there's one thing that I think I want our students to grow in more than,
1:34:42
SPEAKER_01: if I could like,
1:34:43
SPEAKER_01: I had all these categories of where our students at Hildegard are going to grow,
1:34:46
SPEAKER_01: and one of them was language use in general,
1:34:49
SPEAKER_01: oral, written, that would be the thing I would toggle the highest.
1:34:54
SPEAKER_01: Because I think it has an effect on everything.
1:34:56
SPEAKER_01: Not because you're able to write a good email or a good report
1:34:59
SPEAKER_00: or something like that.
1:34:59
SPEAKER_01: Because it really does
1:35:03
SPEAKER_01: activate capacities for thinking that didn't exist for you before.
1:35:07
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:35:08
SPEAKER_00: Wow, that's...
1:35:09
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, three answers.
1:35:10
SPEAKER_01: That's very thoughtful.
1:35:11
SPEAKER_01: None of them I'm super confident in.
1:35:13
SPEAKER_00: Well, it's kind of an impossible question.
1:35:15
SPEAKER_00: It's like when people ask me, like, what's your favorite movie?
1:35:17
SPEAKER_00: It's like, well, okay, that's a dumb question.
1:35:20
SPEAKER_00: So thank you for dealing with my dumb question.
1:35:22
SPEAKER_01: You're welcome.
1:35:23
SPEAKER_00: Every conversation that I have, the previous guest asks the next guest a question.
1:35:33
SPEAKER_00: And so the question that the last guest asked you,
1:35:37
SPEAKER_00: not knowing that it was going to be you,
1:35:40
SPEAKER_00: was what is a daily ritual that keeps you grounded in your life?
1:35:45
SPEAKER_00: Oh, did I know who the guest was?
1:35:49
SPEAKER_00: It's like an old painter guy, his name's Hyatt Moore.
1:35:56
SPEAKER_00: I know who Hyatt is.
1:35:59
SPEAKER_01: What's a daily ritual that keeps me grounded?
1:36:08
SPEAKER_01: Great question because it's something that I try to experiment with and
1:36:17
SPEAKER_01: I have a few candidate answers.
1:36:19
SPEAKER_01: One of them is I don't do this daily.
1:36:23
SPEAKER_01: I listen to vinyl records out of a vacuum tube amplifier.
1:36:30
SPEAKER_00: I was hoping this was going to be your answer.
1:36:32
SPEAKER_01: It's not my answer though.
1:36:33
SPEAKER_01: I don't do it daily.
1:36:36
SPEAKER_01: I try to commit time every morning to prayer.
1:36:42
SPEAKER_01: Using the Anglican Book of Calming Prayer is grounding for me.
1:36:47
SPEAKER_01: You know, I'm going to answer it this way, though.
1:36:50
SPEAKER_01: I've learned about myself that I tend to front load a lot of my work energy
1:36:59
SPEAKER_01: and productivity throughout the day where I wake up and I think I got
1:37:03
SPEAKER_01: to get this stuff done.
1:37:04
SPEAKER_01: I look at my like workflows and my different projects.
1:37:06
SPEAKER_01: I'm working on different things.
1:37:07
SPEAKER_01: And so I block my time.
1:37:10
SPEAKER_01: And I'm like a...
1:37:11
SPEAKER_01: As a friend of mine described,
1:37:13
SPEAKER_01: I'm like a rocket that's really blasting off
1:37:16
SPEAKER_01: whose destination is outer space somewhere.
1:37:21
SPEAKER_01: Rather than a rocket that's blasting off and then these boosters detach.
1:37:28
SPEAKER_01: And I want to be that booster that in a controlled way...
1:37:33
SPEAKER_01: Finds the landing pad and kind of retires at the end of the day.
1:37:36
SPEAKER_01: I want to control my days more.
1:37:37
SPEAKER_01: You want to be a SpaceX booster.
1:37:39
SPEAKER_01: Yes, a booster rather than the rocket.
1:37:41
SPEAKER_01: And what I mean by that is one thing that has become a ritual
1:37:44
SPEAKER_01: for me is I've been blocking my time for the different things I have
1:37:51
SPEAKER_01: to do every day.
1:37:52
SPEAKER_01: And one of the first things I do in the day and writing like what I want
1:37:56
SPEAKER_01: to get done is And forcing myself to do that thing patiently.
1:38:01
SPEAKER_01: So writing down less than I know I can get done and trying to work more slowly.
1:38:07
SPEAKER_01: Maybe, yeah, counterintuitive.
1:38:09
SPEAKER_01: I know at some point in the day I'm going to be like my wife and I are going
1:38:13
SPEAKER_01: to be getting the kids and we're going to have after school stuff and I'm going
1:38:16
SPEAKER_01: to make dinner and we're going to clean.
1:38:19
SPEAKER_01: And by like nine o'clock we're going to be like totally fried.
1:38:22
SPEAKER_01: And that's almost always the case.
1:38:23
SPEAKER_01: But whatever time I have,
1:38:26
SPEAKER_01: I want to,
1:38:30
SPEAKER_01: there's this Latin word, scolae,
1:38:34
SPEAKER_01: that means leisure,
1:38:35
SPEAKER_01: obviously related to the word scholar that used to describe education.
1:38:40
SPEAKER_01: And it was thought that true learning and education required a kind of leisure,
1:38:46
SPEAKER_01: not in the superficial sense that we think today, like vanity and laziness, but
1:38:54
SPEAKER_01: Really good work that is good quality work and work for the sake of the good
1:39:01
SPEAKER_01: and good things I think requires an intentional pace.
1:39:09
SPEAKER_01: So one of my rituals is to try to plan my day to have that intentional pace.
1:39:19
SPEAKER_01: And when I do it,
1:39:20
SPEAKER_01: which is not always,
1:39:21
SPEAKER_01: I always plan it, but I don't always execute it, it is grounding for me.
1:39:25
SPEAKER_01: And I find that I have more energy and I find that I'm more satisfied
1:39:29
SPEAKER_01: with what I've done and the thing for which I've done it at the end of the day.
1:39:35
SPEAKER_01: More like the booster than the bucket with the niche.
1:39:39
SPEAKER_00: Very deep level with that idea.
1:39:43
SPEAKER_00: And it's comforting to know that someone that's a little bit farther ahead
1:39:48
SPEAKER_00: than me is still wrestling with that idea.
1:39:51
SPEAKER_00: Because it feels like something that you should just be like,
1:39:53
SPEAKER_00: well, I should be disciplined enough to follow this.
1:39:58
SPEAKER_00: And just life has a way of,
1:40:01
SPEAKER_00: like you said,
1:40:01
SPEAKER_00: I think it's just like, I think things will take less time than they actually take.
1:40:07
SPEAKER_00: Like even preparing for this, I was like, oh, I scheduled 30 minutes to like do some research.
1:40:12
SPEAKER_00: Obviously like AI helped me figure out like, oh, like this is the path.
1:40:16
SPEAKER_00: I gave it like, these are the things that I want to talk to them.
1:40:19
SPEAKER_00: Here are some example questions.
1:40:21
SPEAKER_00: And then it was like, oh, well, an hour and a half has already transpired.
1:40:24
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like getting into the different like blog posts that you have on the website.
1:40:29
SPEAKER_00: And it's like, oh, well,
1:40:30
SPEAKER_00: but that was like the,
1:40:32
SPEAKER_00: What you were talking about,
1:40:33
SPEAKER_00: the leisure of like actually doing the thing that it was like, oh, this is great.
1:40:39
SPEAKER_01: It takes time.
1:40:39
SPEAKER_01: That's why our classes aren't like an hour long.
1:40:41
SPEAKER_01: Our classes are like two and a half,
1:40:43
SPEAKER_01: three hours long is that we know that for the first hour We're going to be trying
1:40:47
SPEAKER_01: to find our way.
1:40:48
SPEAKER_01: Totally.
1:40:48
SPEAKER_01: But eventually we're going to get into something.
1:40:50
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
1:40:50
SPEAKER_00: That's so good.
1:40:52
SPEAKER_00: What's your question for our next guest?
1:40:54
SPEAKER_00: Can I know who the next guest is?
1:40:57
SPEAKER_00: Do I have them booked?
1:41:00
SPEAKER_00: I think...
1:41:03
SPEAKER_00: Well, I don't know if they're going to be booked yet,
1:41:05
SPEAKER_00: but it might be this nonprofit leader who's doing some really cool work
1:41:10
SPEAKER_00: in South Orange County
1:41:13
SPEAKER_00: around kind of programming for this one community
1:41:18
SPEAKER_00: within San Juan.
1:41:21
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:41:22
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
1:41:22
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
1:41:23
SPEAKER_01: My question is going to be a little bit different.
1:41:24
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
1:41:24
SPEAKER_01: Great.
1:41:24
SPEAKER_01: It's going to be a little different.
1:41:27
SPEAKER_01: Sweet.
1:41:28
SPEAKER_01: It's a would you rather.
1:41:29
SPEAKER_00: Ooh.
1:41:30
SPEAKER_01: We've never had one of these before.
1:41:31
SPEAKER_01: Would you rather.
1:41:33
SPEAKER_01: Sing a lullaby to Michael Jackson or slow dance with Rodney Dangerfield?
1:41:41
SPEAKER_00: That's incredible.
1:41:43
SPEAKER_00: I'm very excited.
1:41:44
SPEAKER_00: I'd like to know the answer to it.
1:41:45
SPEAKER_00: I also think that if it is this guy that whatever our schedules work out to be,
1:41:52
SPEAKER_00: That's going to be an incredible, like he will be such a great answer.
1:41:57
SPEAKER_00: I'm curious.
1:41:57
SPEAKER_00: I'd like to know why.
1:41:59
SPEAKER_01: Sing a lullaby to MJ or slow dance with the great Delayway Rodney Dangerfield.
1:42:05
SPEAKER_01: No, I imagined it during your description.
1:42:08
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
1:42:09
SPEAKER_00: Awesome.
1:42:10
SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm very much looking forward to his answer or anybody's answer for that matter.
1:42:16
SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's hilarious.
1:42:18
SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm extremely grateful for your leisure and allowing me as much time
1:42:23
SPEAKER_00: as we've had this morning to kind of dig into this and answer questions about
1:42:28
SPEAKER_00: the work that you're doing and the life that you've led so far.
1:42:32
SPEAKER_00: I'm grateful to know you and I'm very grateful for this time.
1:42:35
SPEAKER_00: Likewise.
1:42:36
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.