Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome, everyone Welcome. This is Solutions from the.

Speaker 2: 0:03

Multiverse Welcome. We have to banter first. Oh, unless you wanted to go straight in with music. Did I jump banter? We haven't identified ourselves in a few episodes.

Speaker 1: 0:14

I know a few episodes. Nobody's going to know who we are. This is Solutions from the Multiverse.

Speaker 2: 0:17

It's a podcast. I'm Adam Brous.

Speaker 1: 0:19

I'm Scott Moppin. We every week will share with you a totally new idea, a totally new solution to the world's problems.

Speaker 2: 0:27

Straight from. I mean the idea is you open up portals into other universes.

Speaker 1: 0:31

Yes, go into those universes. Get these ideas from other atoms or other universes and sometimes those atoms come through and just are the atom for the podcast. There you go.

Speaker 2: 0:39

Yeah, and then we share it, and the idea is it's going to be a new thing, a new way to solve a problem that we all or, you know, we don't all have but the thing to solve makes society better at the end of the day.

Speaker 1: 0:51

Yeah, yeah, the idea is that other universes have solved the problems in different ways, so we can borrow those.

Speaker 2: 0:59

And so those worlds have their own problems. But the reality is, these are coming from your mind. You come up with these and you still, you have a list of things you want to.

Speaker 1: 1:09

You're chewing on and how to think about it.

Speaker 2: 1:11

I'm a professor and I'm a podcast maker, yeah, and comedian. I think I would say oh, thank you very much. I don't until I get paid for that. That's right, you have to get paid for it to be able to call yourself it.

Speaker 1: 1:22

Yeah, it feels very pretentious so. I'm also like an idea person, so like I've put on TEDx three times Wow.

Speaker 2: 1:28

The TEDx Madison we talked about earlier.

Speaker 1: 1:30

Yeah, so you know, so I'm kind of a connoisseur and sort of excited about new ideas.

Speaker 2: 1:35

I meant zero TEDx's. You've planned zero TEDx's so far? Yeah, but is that what they're called? Zero TEDx?

Speaker 1: 1:41

or TEDx zero.

Speaker 2: 1:42

It's TEDx. Zero it's a zero calorie.

Speaker 1: 1:46

No calorie, tedx, you go out there.

Speaker 2: 1:49

That's awesome yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:50

These ideas are very low calorie.

Speaker 2: 2:02

Very thinning. Usually they're super health. I mean you would classify them as healthy, right, Very healthy. Well some of them are Do you have an unhealthy?

Speaker 1: 2:08

idea today. What do you got today? No, I got a healthy idea. Ok, solution today is something very cool has happened. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.

Speaker 2: 2:17

I've got a new book.

Speaker 1: 2:19

Hey, yeah, All right, new book.

Speaker 2: 2:21

So I thought I'd share a solution from a book, new book, or just author Adam Brouse. What's the?

Speaker 1: 2:25

title. I'll share the solution, that is, the book.

Speaker 2: 2:28

So the title is called.

Speaker 1: 2:30

The title is the Caging of the American Mind. The Caging of the American Mind by Adam Brouse yes. And the subtitle is how we Broke Higher Education and how to Fix it, so it's like that's what it's about.

Speaker 2: 2:41

How we broke higher education and how to fix it. You're not just throwing problem. Of course you're throwing solutions to Solutions.

Speaker 1: 2:48

Of course you are the last five chapters are solution one, solution two, solution three, solution four, solution five. Ok, so you have a bunch of options, but I have one that I think is the actual solution that we should do, but then yeah, throw me the title again. It's called the Caging of the American Mind. So there's already two other books. There's one called the Closing of the American Mind and there's another one called the Coddling of the American Mind.

Speaker 1: 3:09

I'm kind of rounding out the hat trick. I actually think those books are kind of misguided. One says the Closing of the American Mind.

Speaker 2: 3:17

These aren't other books. You wrote no, no, no, these are just other books.

Speaker 1: 3:20

So Alan Bloom wrote the Closing of the American Mind in the 80s and he was like he's very kind of right wing. Both of these books are going to right wing. My book is not. My book is not really partisan either way.

Speaker 2: 3:32

But it's just a solution.

Speaker 1: 3:34

But anyways, the Closing of the American Mind said that the problem with higher education is like multiculturalism. He literally was like that's the problem. He was like multiculturalism is going to destroy the basis of democracy in.

Speaker 2: 3:45

America Can't have more than one culture.

Speaker 1: 3:47

That's what he said in 1989 or 1990 or something, and lo and behold, he was not right. I mean, democracy continues to be destroyed, mostly by money and politics not by multiculturalism, I agree, I agree. And by crappy media, broadcast media being owned by three conglomers.

Speaker 2: 4:05

So goodbye, mr Bloom.

Speaker 1: 4:07

Your closing of the mind is not, he's a genius when it comes to ancient philosophy and I respect his work on ancient philosophy, but he's an idiot when it comes to modern social, whatever analysis systems.

Speaker 2: 4:19

So what was the second one? You said, so the?

Speaker 1: 4:20

other one is more contemporary. It was made by Jonathan Haight and another guy I can't remember the other guy's name and it's called the Coddling of the American Mind. And they say political correctness is ruining the American University. Oh, oh universities are destroyed by trigger warnings and safe spaces and pronouns that's what's destroying America's universities.

Speaker 2: 4:45

It's pronouns, it's pronouns, it's got to be pronouns. That's the problem.

Speaker 1: 4:47

Not that university costs $250,000 a year Related.

Speaker 2: 4:51

Don't think about that.

Speaker 1: 4:52

It takes you five years to do and you don't get a job.

Speaker 2: 4:55

And that's not the problem. No, no, no, no, it's definitely pronouns and social you know Money, predatory money practices. What are you talking about? Absolutely not a problem.

Speaker 1: 5:03

Right, so I take a more realistic perspective.

Speaker 2: 5:07

So that guy you're saying you hate on Haight, I do, Haight is one of my. I mean I would love to talk to Jonathan Haight.

Speaker 1: 5:14

Someday I want to speak to him in person or like on mic, because I literally, like most of the things I write turn out to be just like refuting what he has said that's like what I. So you're a hater I mean no, I mean he's a man, he's a gent, I mean, I think he seems like a very nice man too.

Speaker 2: 5:35

But I just think his judgment is wrong. I even think his intentions are good.

Speaker 1: 5:39

He has, I think, very good intentions to sort of say hard truths and discover realities about science and human nature and stuff, but unfortunately I think he's just off. His judgment is often. His data is often so anyways, yeah, so a lot of things I write are sort of anti-hate.

Speaker 2: 5:56

All right. So we've got the coddling, we've got the closing, and now we have the caging. We have the caging.

Speaker 1: 6:02

And the caging takes a much more realistic critique of Haight. Obviously, the cost and the quality are the problems with higher education.

Speaker 2: 6:10

It's too expensive and isn't good enough. All three are about the problems with higher education. They're all about the problems with higher education, gotcha.

Speaker 1: 6:18

And mine is basically a sequel to those that is like a worthwhile read to actually read.

Speaker 2: 6:24

There's are not actually worthwhile reading. I just told you their books Like that's all, there it is, and you can make up the arguments and you're probably going to just repeat the arguments they came up with Because it's so obvious Like oh coddling, oh, you know, political correctness is bad, you know it cuts it at the basis of democracy. Those are the people we talked about, who are like you should let your child cry because that's healthy for them. You should ferberize them.

Speaker 1: 6:48

Yeah, ferberize them, ferberization I don't know if Jonathan Haight supports ferberization.

Speaker 2: 6:52

I've never heard him say that.

Speaker 1: 6:54

Oh, that's true, the word coddling right.

Speaker 2: 6:56

Yeah, spare the rod, spoil the child. They're like. Let the child grow strong on his own, stiff up her lip. That's right. I don't know if it act.

Speaker 1: 7:03

I think they're doing it metaphorically, but yeah, technically that would be sort of saying don't coddle yeah.

Speaker 2: 7:08

Big fan of each other's work.

Speaker 1: 7:11

Yeah, they're trying to act like oh, you're coddling. I do think that college students are kind of run amuck in a way right now, because there's like a litigiousness and the law protects very strange things.

Speaker 2: 7:26

And anyways, from my experience, College is always a weird time, yeah, but I think there should be.

Speaker 1: 7:33

I do agree. I mean, I don't agree with the premise of the coddling of the American mind. The problem with our universities is the cost and the quality, and I'll share with you the solution to that. But there is some truth, just like closing the American mind. There is some truth to the fact that we should study the cultures of Northern European countries because, for better or worse, that's the cradle of modern democracy and science. It's like, for better or worse, we should study like dead white men and blah blah blah.

Speaker 1: 8:04

You should actually know about that stuff. It's really important. So they're not wrong. But that's the problem with BS. Bs, bullshit always has a kernel of corn in the bullshit. That is true. And then there's all the bullshit around it that's not true and all the bad things that come of it that are not right.

Speaker 2: 8:22

I mean, that's the thing about well rounding. Rounding something out means adding more data points, not like just shifting?

Speaker 1: 8:29

Yeah, you don't want to shift the shape of the lopsided thing. But anyways, let me tell you about the solution. So the higher ed is screwed up. Everyone knows that I hope we have really bad metrics in higher education the cost, but also just from a quality side really bad. And then recently, especially post COVID, we're seeing people get wise to how bad it is. The enrollments are dropping even more than demographically, like we expect a big drop demographically because the birth rate has fallen.

Speaker 2: 9:01

I hear people talk about an enrollment cliff. I do podcasts for higher ed related things and they talk about an enrollment cliff coming, so the enrollment cliff is demographic.

Speaker 1: 9:10

But, even before this demographic enrollment cliff, we're already seeing enrollments go way down because people are like people went to college.

Speaker 1: 9:20

This looks like a real waste of money in time, everyone went to college on Zoom for like two and a half years and then they were like wait a minute let me reevaluate my whole impression of this system Now there's chatGPT, which is only gonna fuel that more, because you can go on chatGPT today the free version and you can say give me a curriculum for learning how to do this, and it will just give you it. You don't have like, the universities have no competitive advantage anymore because they're not gatekeepers for the data anymore.

Speaker 2: 9:50

That person is not. I mean, everybody could do that. But that's the same as like everyone could get a. It's like the Goodwill Hunting thing they could get an amazing college.

Speaker 1: 10:00

They could get a library card.

Speaker 2: 10:01

Yeah, you're gonna be thinking that until next semester when you start reading this guy. Then you're gonna start thinking that's the thing he's like I got the whole thing in a library for like 250 lathe fees. Like you could get all the information from a library.

Speaker 1: 10:12

It's just the college direction, but I think there's something about curriculum though. Like when you go to a library you don't know what order to read things in. It's there ordering that help is what you're getting, and then also the paper at the end. You know the paper at the end is huge.

Speaker 2: 10:28

That's a reason that people who even might be able to be the rare people who could go and self-direct at the library and get an entire college education for free would maybe choose not to.

Speaker 1: 10:40

This is exactly right. So I did a ton of research. I did original quantitative research and I did where I produced original. I pulled data and showed data that has never been shown.

Speaker 1: 10:51

That's the part I can tell and I interviewed a whole bunch of people stakeholders in higher education, especially new college founders, so the founders of new colleges and people who want to found new colleges but who have been stopped. Why did you pick new college founders? Because my research, so what I was really interested in was I discovered, by pulling this original data, that they're actually we're living in like an ice age of new colleges. There are no new colleges, basically no new colleges. There's as many new colleges made in the decade from 2010 to 2020 as the number of new colleges made in the decade 1840 to 1850.

Speaker 1: 11:35

So the population of the United States in 1840 was three million people, so there's 100 times more people and 50 times more go to college, or not 50 times more? Like, like, like you. It was only like less than 1% and now it's like 12%, so it's like almost yeah, 10 times more people go to college. So the population is going up by 100 and the number of people who go to college has gone up by 10. So it's like a thousand percent, like a thousand times more people are going to college.

Speaker 1: 12:02

Right the same number of new colleges are being created, interesting in between. There were years where there was more so during the land grant times in the late 18th, word of like a slow period now we are in an absolute drop-off cliff down to almost zero, and it began in the 70s and then it's.

Speaker 1: 12:22

It's only accelerated into the 90s and then, from the 90s on, it's like nothing. It's like 10 new colleges every decade. It's like one new college a year on average, when there's millions of people want to go to college and and because of globalization, there are Hundreds of millions of people in other countries who want to go to college in America right so the demand has gone up by thousands of times and the number of new colleges has dropped to.

Speaker 1: 12:50

This is basically zero, flatline. So this was my question. My question was okay, I pulled that data, yeah, and I was like this is crazy, what's going on. So that was my question why? Are there no new colleges. So I went to talk to new colleges and asked them got you okay?

Speaker 2: 13:03

Tell me about your story.

Speaker 1: 13:04

You started a new college. Tell me about what's going on. Yeah and these people are fast. I only talked to. I talked to some for-profits but I didn't include them in the book because actually I I think this the track record For for-profit colleges is not good and so I put them in a separate category. I don't, I'm not trying to defend for-profits.

Speaker 1: 13:22

Okay my premise is new non-profit colleges is all I'm talking about. Okay, so I went and talked to these new non-profit college founders and they were awesome. They were, you know, amazingly qualified. You know, they'd all worked in universities for decades and they all had PhDs.

Speaker 1: 13:39

They all were like these amazing people. They'd been on the boards of other universities, they've done all these amazing things. And then they said you know, I realized that what we really needed was a new college that made you know some concrete innovations to differentiate, and so I started them. And then the creditors told them to. They just slammed the door in their faces the?

Speaker 2: 14:02

Are these insurance people?

Speaker 1: 14:03

No creditors. So in the United States we have, we have, we have private Non-profit accreditors. So we have these private regional organizations that are not governmental.

Speaker 2: 14:15

Okay, I was gonna be like is this Department of Education? But no, sounds like yeah.

Speaker 1: 14:19

So in America, to be a fully recognized, fully legitimate college, you need to have state licensing, which these new colleges were able to get. You need to be registered with the Department of Education, which these new colleges were not able to get, because the Department of Education Requires you to be Accredited by these private accreditors in order to be registered with the Department of Education.

Speaker 1: 14:41

So these these colleges stay in this like twilight zone of being like licensed but not accredited. Oh and so they can offer degrees, but the degrees aren't recognized by anyone else. So you can't transfer credits, you can't go to grad school. You know anything with it and people could even say you're not really a degree because not fully recognized. Yeah like on par with other things.

Speaker 2: 15:03

So, these schools are like put in like kind of black Blacklets, without really officially blacklisting. They can be like no, we don't know what you're talking about exactly, but meanwhile there's no way to actually get the thing exactly.

Speaker 1: 15:14

So it's this unfair thing and it was the accreditors the license. The states would license you, you could get students, you could open campuses, you could do everything, you can make websites, but you couldn't get that accreditation. And because you can't get the accreditation, you know don't get the full legitimacy, you don't get federal financial aid and you can't get things like a dot edu Domain. A lot of grants are blocked. You're blocked from because the grants only can go to accredited Colleges, universities.

Speaker 1: 15:40

So, you can't get all this like millions and millions of dollars of grants that every year go to universities. So there's this whole, basically like a bulwark, like a, like a wall, yeah, or a cage.

Speaker 2: 15:53

That is. That's the title.

Speaker 1: 15:57

Hold on to that cage the American mind, and so the solution to our higher educational woes cost quality. Even the speed I mean, I think it's really long. No one should. People don't need to go to college for five years to get an undergraduate degree. Three years probably plenty.

Speaker 2: 16:13

I mean depends on the right pace, sure moving at the right pace.

Speaker 1: 16:17

Yeah and so if we wanted to solve all these problems, we could solve it very Rapidly, like like within two years. We would solve all these problems if we just let People, qualified people, start nude nonprofit colleges. And what that means is the solution that I recommend is you said nude nonprofit? No, did nonprofit colleges. Yes, no pants. Oh yeah, I have to be naked. That's the key thing. Sure, you learn. It turns out you learn a lot faster.

Speaker 2: 16:47

I can see. I think I know why these aren't getting accredited. Yeah, I don't understand I have a feeling going on now that you tell me a little bit, one, actually one more detail actually Makes the whole thing clear, nude nonprofit colleges and we can't understand why they're not gaining legitimacy. We don't understand our, our graduates are so smart they don't have any clothes on. But they're so smart, let this they put clothes on, they lose.

Speaker 1: 17:13

It's like Samson they lose their superpowers.

Speaker 2: 17:16

Yeah, let's just take a guy, come in their near your rock, dang they are naked.

Speaker 1: 17:20

It's impractical because you know you can't have rocket machinery moving too quickly around them. You know I don't want to hurt them. Well, yeah, but yeah so yeah, these nude nonprofit colleges are important.

Speaker 2: 17:31

No, but that's so new nonprofit. So the, the accreditor, the credit credit.

Speaker 1: 17:38

I keep saying that I'm so worried about AI. I am the accredited.

Speaker 2: 17:44

You got to be aware of them the army of accredited.

Speaker 1: 17:46

Yeah, I'm a robot. Accreditors.

Speaker 2: 17:48

Yeah no, but the accreditors are Getting in the way.

Speaker 1: 17:53

They're not just getting in the way, they are deliberately Operating cartel, they're Cartel monopoly or whatever.

Speaker 2: 18:01

Yeah, I'm not a monopoly, but they're keeping a cartel where you go to the old boys club, old boys, and they're like nobody knew we're done. You know, we pulled up the ladder after us. No more exactly.

Speaker 1: 18:11

I've got mine, jack. And then they, and then they do this. They do this really horrible, like Moralizing, like like glare at you, like you're trying to ruin American universities, that's a big email, yeah, just like through any. They just kind of glare and they attack your reputation. That's their main playbook. Oh sure so they attack your reputation and say oh, they don't like. I think if this book gains any like notoriety, there will be media articles about how I am some kind of cancel.

Speaker 2: 18:41

because I'm associated with you, you will also get canceled. Oh, I gotta change. I'll change. I'll get one of those, yeah no, they will.

Speaker 1: 18:47

They will attack my reputation. They fake those must they'll say did you know that in 2020? He worked for a for-profit university, because I used to work for make school, which was for-profit, and then it became a nonprofit and people can't switch their opinions or grow and learn it, yeah, over the course of years, and they'll say that he is just a tech bro.

Speaker 1: 19:11

He's a tech bro, you know, because I teach people how to code and I've done tech software for-profit tech software companies, mostly in healthcare and environmentalism. They won't say that they'll, they, they won't yeah, so they'll, so they'll, they'll do whatever they can.

Speaker 2: 19:26

You'd be like I'm not a tech bro, I'm a podcast. Wait, actually, oh, just call me a tech bro, actually, or?

Speaker 1: 19:31

they'll. I don't think they'd probably go in the political. You know they won't be political because they don't want to, like you know. Or they won't be racial like. They won't say, oh, he's a white guy, they won't do that stuff, but they will try because they don't. You know that and that can rebound back on them. Okay, but they will do things like his judgment is bad because, look, he worked for a for-profit college. He's trying to just carry water for for-profit colleges because he knows. You know, I'm connected to some people who are.

Speaker 2: 19:57

But your, your whole thing was focused on nonprofit.

Speaker 1: 19:59

Well, the research was, but they'll just say he's only doing that as a Smoke screen and just cares about it. It's, it's, it's all a bunch of trash. That, what, what they will, what I promise you, if this, if the book gets any notoriety, this is what, well, that they will say and and this is garbage because, because I I don't care about for-profits and I and I'm not caring water for them and and my work in business has always been Humanitarian.

Speaker 1: 20:22

I just use free markets and business to do to achieve humanitarian ends, you know.

Speaker 2: 20:27

So we're talking directly to audience right now. We can get past those people what they're saying. But, yeah, what? The thing that solves the yes, the cage around the new colleges, yeah, is the accreditation. Accreditation process, yes, and the fix is bureaucracy.

Speaker 1: 20:43

So the fix is for the federal government to write, essentially, a one-page law, a very simple law, yeah, that just instruct, instructs the Department of Education To just ignore accreditation, the we don't need accreditation Don't factor that just ignore it All the all the Department of Education should do is say Do you have a state licensing, which is already there, which is a system of accreditation?

Speaker 2: 21:11

that sounds like it would be the same thing. Yes, I know it's what it should be, and so what is state licensing is?

Speaker 1: 21:18

exactly the same as accreditation.

Speaker 2: 21:20

Yeah, except by their fare, and they will actually do it at state governments do it Okay.

Speaker 1: 21:25

So if you could, you can apply to the New Hampshire and I know a university that applied to the Washington DC and got licensing Right. I know a university that a new college that applied to Oregon State got licensing. Both Washington DC and Oregon State are two states where it is, without a doubt, their licensing. Is many times more difficult and stringent than the accreditors, than any of the accreditors.

Speaker 1: 21:51

And so the colleges have gotten this licensing and yet they're shunted out because they can't get accreditation. But the only reason they can't is because the creditors are unfair. It's not because they somehow don't meet quality standards.

Speaker 2: 22:04

They've already exceeded, far exceeded multiple times what the creditors would require.

Speaker 1: 22:09

Hit all the points of the leader, yeah you know, do your professors have this level of training? Are there quote you know curricula?

Speaker 2: 22:15

And then after that, as some people love to say, is free market right? Let the free market decide. I mean it's a regulated market with licenses that can be revoked or let the capitalism reflection of like if we have a bad product, then people will stop getting it. Like people will stop coming here if we have a terrible education. So we need to keep a good education. That's how we keep students. That's why we keep you know it's exciting.

Speaker 1: 22:40

I would even say the licensing system is functional. It keeps bad colleges from starting. The point is that we just don't need an additional private system called accreditation, that is complete extra fluff.

Speaker 2: 22:55

And here's the other thing, I mean the boards of all the accreditors. Have you seen our healthcare industry?

Speaker 1: 22:59

We love sticking an extra middleman right in the middle that makes things oh so much cheaper and easier. Here's the thing, though those middlemen in healthcare go and give like $100 million donations to the Democratic or Republican parties, like every year.

Speaker 2: 23:15

The accreditors. They don't have to they don't have any money.

Speaker 1: 23:19

The accreditors don't have any money. The accreditors are just these non-profit organizations.

Speaker 2: 23:21

It's just an empty mafia. They're just a paper mafia.

Speaker 1: 23:25

Their presidents, or sorry, their boards are all the presidents of existing colleges. So if you went and said I'm gonna do this thing to ignore accreditation, oh so it's like the NFL team coaches.

Speaker 2: 23:36

It's like the NFL and they're like I'm gonna start my own football team. And they're like, strangely, we have this board who votes on whether or not, we let football teams in. It's all the people who profit now and we decide not to share our money. It's exactly how that works. Thank you very much for your curiosity.

Speaker 1: 23:52

I should have put that in the book, because that's a great analogy for what it is.

Speaker 2: 23:56

Yeah, so the accreditors. It's like a cartel.

Speaker 1: 23:59

It's an exact cartel. It's an exact cartel and they got put in power by the government. So in 1952, after the government created GI Bill money for soldiers to go to college and then after the Korean War, they reinstated it, they re-upped it. Yeah, they re-upped it and when they re-upped it, there was this sort of like outcry between World War II and the Korean War. There was this sort of outcry by like journalists I say with finger quotes, cause it turns out that they were wrong.

Speaker 2: 24:29

People can't hear the finger quotes, so glad you said that that's the finger quotes. That's the new finger quote noise. So they said Nothing weird about that, nothing weird at all.

Speaker 1: 24:39

But so basically what they did is these journalists were like oh, there's like grifters who are starting like mail order for-profit colleges for like bartender training and ballroom dance training.

Speaker 2: 24:53

That's all grift.

Speaker 1: 24:54

That's all bad, that's all inefficient use of these funds.

Speaker 2: 24:58

You have to mix those two. You have to be a ballroom dance bartender, and therefore we need some means testing.

Speaker 1: 25:03

So then the federal government was like, okay, there was these. So accreditors at that time weren't called accreditors, they were all called associations, which were just, like you know, like a conference, like the way that if you were a dentist, you could just sign up and go to like your regional dental association.

Speaker 2: 25:20

We're the better business bureau. We approve this business and anybody, but even better bureau.

Speaker 1: 25:25

it wasn't even like better bureau, cause they weren't an accreditor, they weren't in any way a quality metric. They were just a conference that you could go to and rub shoulders with peers. Okay, so they were just these associations. And so, as a fig leaf, as a fig leaf to try to kind of give a nod to this sort of public outcry that the money might be misused which, by the way, it wasn't misused. Less than 1% of the money was used for any of that stuff, any kind of like ballroom dance, I don't know.

Speaker 2: 25:53

Even as if there's something wrong with ballroom dance?

Speaker 1: 25:55

What's wrong with learning to ballroom dance Like?

Speaker 2: 25:58

No, but you're acting as though everyone, if they get that option, is like oh. I'll just do that for an easy college. That's not. I would rather do many things. I'd rather do an engineering degree. Yeah, that sounds very scary.

Speaker 1: 26:09

Also, if you went and did a four year college, that was like legitimate, you play on the football team, you do ballroom dance, you go to dance Like there's all kinds of things that go into a four year school.

Speaker 2: 26:19

Well, that's what you were like.

Speaker 1: 26:21

Why can't the poor rural people get a mail order? Ballroom dance lesson.

Speaker 2: 26:25

I was gonna say when you were like, yeah, you could do a college degree in three years, and I'm like, well, yeah, but I mean kind of doing it a little bit longer is what gets you into those weird classes that you would have never. You know, like I was in Chinese history classes, because I'm like I gotta do something.

Speaker 1: 26:40

This looks fun, let's throw it on, yeah well, there is I mean I think there is an argument about how to be well-rounded. I find that the students, when I give students the choice to pick what they wanna learn, they then focus on what they wanna learn for like a few months really intensively, and then they get bored and curious about other things. And then they go and find other things and they want to learn it. So they learn way faster Self-driven. So I don't say, well, I'm gonna force you by mandate to be well-rounded, because what I find is when I just give them the choice to learn what they want, they end up being better, more well-rounded than if I would have forced it on them.

Speaker 1: 27:19

Gotcha and you see this with people when they get out of college. You know you get someone who's out of college who has a good job. You know they start learning all kinds of things. They all start reading books and like researching or learning new sports or learning you know they and human beings are naturally sort of curious and naturally sort of get bored with something they've been focusing on for too long and do other things, so there's no need to force people to be well-rounded, and then the few people who do decide to literally never do anything else.

Speaker 1: 27:47

You better stay the hell out of their way too, because they're doing important work. You know like, don't try to get Einstein to, like, learn Chinese history, he's busy doing physics. Let the man focus, right, you know so there's never a time when you should anyway, this is just sort of sidebar but there's never a time when you should force well-roundedness onto people.

Speaker 2: 28:07

So would you want these creditors to go back to the association level, or do you just want them out of there completely?

Speaker 1: 28:14

I don't care what they do. The creditors can just do whatever they want.

Speaker 2: 28:17

The point is the federal government Stop caring about it.

Speaker 1: 28:19

The federal government needs to just say you guys do whatever you want.

Speaker 2: 28:22

You have no real power.

Speaker 1: 28:23

But we just are gonna read, we're just gonna treat colleges as fully fledged, fully accepted, fully real American colleges and universities if they get state licensing. And then they apply and get registered with the department of education, which is like a 10 page form, it's like not hard. But it would say where did you get licensed? I got licensed in Oregon. Here's my, you know, here's their thing they gave me and then you would send that into the department of education and in like two weeks they'd be like. You're recognized about the department of education.

Speaker 2: 28:54

Now you your degree, can you can get federal financial aid and you can get you know these things and everything, and then they'd have to recheck it like a driver's license every so often, which they do, which they do, yeah, they come and say actually they're way better than the accreditors, the federal government is has driven quality.

Speaker 1: 29:09

This is what a big part of the book is about. The big part of the book goes through the history of showing that accreditors have never driven quality in higher education never. It's always been new colleges or the federal government. That's the only two groups that actually have assured or improved quality in higher education, and you can look at a million examples, but I mean one example would be segregation. Right, the accreditors were around since the 50s and guess what?

Speaker 2: 29:41

There was segregation. They weren't leading the charge on that one.

Speaker 1: 29:45

Well, they were leading the charge on keeping schools segregated if they wanted to be segregated.

Speaker 2: 29:49

No, they seem like a force of status quo. Not a force of iterating a new things. It seems like they would default to the way things we do the thing we do the thing, the way we do the thing, because we've always done the thing that way.

Speaker 1: 30:04

Yeah, and if you try to say otherwise, then we'll attack your reputation or send you fine. They always like to find people, find you.

Speaker 2: 30:13

The experience I had in my world is comic book world and it's like after some in the 60s and 70s they started showing like drug use and like more hardcore things. And they were like these comic code had to come in and start approving things and decide to not approve certain books, that they contain certain things to. It had a chilling effect on the writer, whatever.

Speaker 2: 30:37

It didn't help, but it was supposed to there make it better, but it's just long-term notorious, like until they got away from it and been like this one non-con. There's not writers, there's not artists. This weird band of people have way too much power and influence over the entire medium and what's happening.

Speaker 1: 30:55

This is great examples yeah, comic books and NFL. You should have written this book. No, it's way more understandable than the crap I wrote I have no idea.

Speaker 2: 31:05

I mean, I try to tell exciting stories.

Speaker 1: 31:07

I tell exciting stories.

Speaker 2: 31:08

You interviewed people who are like real education people. Yeah, I know, but you're gonna make people understand it through analogies.

Speaker 1: 31:14

Analogies are so important.

Speaker 2: 31:16

So caging of the American mind.

Speaker 1: 31:18

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 31:19

You're telling me it's out right now. People can Google it. It's on Amazon. Yeah, find it on Amazon, order it. We've got the Kindle, we've got the Kindle.

Speaker 1: 31:25

By the time this comes out, the paperback will be. I just need to upload the paperback file, but the Kindle file is already there. You can always. You can get the Kindle already. And the paperback will be available.

Speaker 2: 31:35

The paperback by the time anyone's hearing. This paperback is out. Paperback is out, it's on.

Speaker 1: 31:39

Amazon caging the American mind. It's got American flag that's turned into a cage on the front cover.

Speaker 2: 31:45

Okay.

Speaker 1: 31:46

So it's like a flag, but it's a cage flag. It's cool. I gotta see this.

Speaker 2: 31:49

It's cool. Yeah, it's cool, very nice, but yeah, so what this does is basically Pull it up right now. What it does is this.

Speaker 1: 31:55

This basically there are. I know personally. Personally I know and I could list the names of a dozen people who wanna start new colleges in the United States today, nonprofit colleges. These people are highly qualified, phd, they've started other college, they've started university programs inside of existing universities, so they know how to build new programs. They've educated thousands, tens of thousands of students. They're highly ethically, you know, very reputable ethically and with integrity, and they all wanna start new nonprofit colleges.

Speaker 1: 32:32

And all of them have been told go f yourself by the accreditors, and many of them have gotten licensing from the state, which is often more rigorous than the accreditation's requirements, and still they are left out in the cold. Their colleges are considered fake.

Speaker 1: 32:50

They're not allowed to haveedu domains, they're not allowed to tell people that their degree is accredited because it's not. They're forced to live in this twilight outside in the cold when they should absolutely be the vanguard of like a new generation of colleges. And this is just the 12 people I know. If tomorrow you actually said new nonprofit colleges don't need accreditation, they can just like get licensed and register with the private education, there would be easily 100 to 1,000 new colleges would start next year. That would be amazing. Everyone would be like different and interesting and cool and they'd all be nonprofit. And you know cause? I'm not saying change the rules for for profits. I think for profits should have a stiffer. You know more of a rigorous.

Speaker 1: 33:38

Different set of rules, yeah, just the same way that if you had a donkey and a tiger, the donkey could be in like a you know just a field Built, a different enclosure, yeah, but you'd have a you know, the tiger has different, you know incentives.

Speaker 2: 33:49

So it's not that they're bad.

Speaker 1: 33:51

Tigers are great too.

Speaker 2: 33:52

But a predator and a grazing animal, exactly. Okay, I'm looking at your and also.

Speaker 1: 33:57

Also, nonprofits are not all good. The donkey can still, you know, kick your car and bite kids and you know but, but, but it just needs a different set of rules.

Speaker 2: 34:07

Different oversight, all right. So I'm looking at the book. I found it on here and you're right. You have a flag that you've turned the stars and bars into sort of like a prison cell. The bars are bars.

Speaker 1: 34:19

The bars are really the stars are like a door.

Speaker 2: 34:21

Caging the American mind. It's right there.

Speaker 1: 34:22

That's excellent, all right.

Speaker 2: 34:23

Well, putting this right on my I don't have a candle, I'll go to have to wait for the.

Speaker 1: 34:26

You just wait for the paperback. I'm going to do it, though.

Speaker 2: 34:29

I'm going to pre buy that thing.

Speaker 1: 34:30

But but if you are listening to this now, it'll be too soon.

Speaker 2: 34:32

It'll be there, so the paperback will be there. I just confirmed it's already. There's a spot right there on Amazon Go. Get it right now. That's excellent.

Speaker 1: 34:38

Yeah, it's a really good book. It's fun to read too. I like to write like like welcome Gladwell. It's always like stories and like did you know, and you know interesting stuff.

Speaker 2: 34:46

Now are you already like three steps into your next book as well, or like you're just always writing, or are you taking a?

Speaker 1: 34:53

pause, I'm planning, I'm just. I'm working on the PhD, which is back, looking back to my ethics, gotcha, and I'm working on those papers.

Speaker 2: 35:02

Okay, and I'm working on a logic paper, but I'm planning two books.

Speaker 1: 35:05

I don't know which one I'm going to do.

Speaker 2: 35:06

But I think each of your book, if you like, get more of your kind of unified theory of what higher education should do to fix itself.

Speaker 1: 35:14

Yeah, and this is the latest, yeah, this, that book is the fix, yeah, what really led me to this book is I learned from my from what previous book called Motivate, which is all evidence-based methodologies for improving student and learner motivation. Yeah, I read, I read all this research. That's amazing. There's just like dozens of amazing research that's out there. That's proven or not proven, but it's really interesting research that's really credible and it's like why is none of this being applied?

Speaker 2: 35:48

Right.

Speaker 1: 35:48

Because it's like as if you literally were like hey, we found research that reduced the you know cancer mortality by 50% and no hospitals were using it. Yeah, that would be like really strange, like why? And so when I started to research that I was like, oh, because current universities basically can't change. And the reason why they can't change is because these accreditors don't allow them to change Right, they don't allow them to do things differently.

Speaker 2: 36:16

You can't reach out because, they're trying to maintain the.

Speaker 1: 36:19

They're just trying to keep the status quo going.

Speaker 2: 36:21

Yeah, keep going this direction. We got the same heading.

Speaker 1: 36:23

And there aren't new colleges to threaten with competition the old colleges, which then would force them to change and grow. And so basically, we're not just it's not just cost which is a big problem, it's quality Education. If we saw tomorrow the ability for people to start new nonprofit colleges, we would see a leap forward in the amount people can learn and the import like the quality of education would ratchet up many times higher than it is today.

Speaker 2: 36:58

What iPhone is Apple on now?

Speaker 1: 36:59

What are they on iPhone 15.

Speaker 2: 37:01

Yeah. So imagine if they got to the iPhone 4 and they were like we're good, and then it's like the next year it's the new, this year's version of the iPhone 4.

Speaker 1: 37:11

And then it keeps going. The iPhone 4, though, is pretty good Imagine if they did it for 50 years. Yeah, they just kept it For 70 years. We've had accreditors since 1952.

Speaker 2: 37:19

But they're like why won't you do a new version? I don't know, there's no other competitors, no other competitors, no reason. It's good enough, yeah, good enough.

Speaker 1: 37:27

Or like Google was like that for a long time. They're basically a monopoly. And then ChatGbt came out of nowhere and scared the bejesus out of them, and now, overnight, google is like doing way more with. Ai and improving their search, and yeah because ChatGbt threat, which was a nonprofit originally, now it's.

Speaker 2: 37:44

And it's now become the like, the Q-tip version of like. When people say I did a AI thing, they're talking like oh, I talked to ChatGbt.

Speaker 1: 37:53

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 37:53

Even though it may be some other version of AI ChatGbt is the kind of default, yeah, and Google is like we have barred or whatever.

Speaker 1: 38:00

I get emails, but they do other things too. They have the company deep mind and anyways, the point is just competition is good.

Speaker 2: 38:11

And I'm not some kind of virulent libertarian.

Speaker 1: 38:13

I'm not saying make some Wild West, oh risk caveat emptor thing. I'm saying I went to the college of Scott Moppin.

Speaker 2: 38:20

Yeah, right, and I'm the PhD of Scott Moppin University.

Speaker 1: 38:24

Exactly, I'm saying state licensing, which is more demanding than accreditation in most cases and is fair and fast. You can get it in about six months, whereas accreditation you can just never get. But maybe you can get it in, like they say on their documentation, like four to five years.

Speaker 2: 38:42

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 38:42

But then I've talked to people who have done it, who have tried for eight years and they still don't have it and they've been told you know they've been rejected at multiple points and stuff. So yeah, the state licensing is rigorous. So I'm not saying like, oh, let's have some libertarian, you know wet dream about colleges being this sort of anyone could start a car. I'm saying you have to do the state licensing and that's a good barrier, I think. And you would create this interesting phenomenon where different states could actually change their licensing to be like more maybe more forgiving, more kind of open, and other states could be like more sort of whatever. And that would be good Because, again, states kind of control the flow of it and it's democratically set up by laws and by.

Speaker 2: 39:27

And if you have an influx of a bunch, maybe you chill out for a minute.

Speaker 1: 39:32

Or if you get a bunch of bad, somehow bad actors get through in Florida or something, then Florida might be like we're really hurting Florida's brand.

Speaker 1: 39:40

We should like actually tighten up our licensing in Florida and kind of make it more, whatever, and other states might be like really progressive and be like you know what we're going to like, prevent fraud, but otherwise let people kind of let a thousand flowers bloom and guess what? Colleges and universities are huge economic, I mean they're boom town Like if you get a major university to start in your state. That's like billions of dollars of money from students and tuition professors and real estate development and research money.

Speaker 2: 40:12

People love to complain about all the students and stuff. But it's like, hey, these are all humans who need to buy clothing and food and like use and their professors make money and buy houses and you build the university builds things and then bars open and the bar you know, go out and do the thing Open and it's. There's some nightlife happening, yeah, and research grants come in Culture, guess what?

Speaker 1: 40:33

those students do? They're hireable. They can work in your businesses. Guess what they do? They live in your city. They start their own businesses. Those businesses are now headquartered in your city.

Speaker 2: 40:42

I mean, it's wild to me that people would rather that they would care more about, like bringing a sports team in a giant stadium.

Speaker 1: 40:50

Exactly yes, In a university like the college tier Right.

Speaker 2: 40:54

It's like one of them feels like it drains a lot of money and costs a lot to build this thing. That's only very limitedly, and the other one is brings you know, just evergreen, evergreen completely continually renewing dividends.

Speaker 1: 41:07

Yeah, there's also a political aspect of this. I don't want to get too political, but I do think that democracy itself is threatened by people like Donald Trump, maga, sort of anti-democratic forces. And do you know the demographically the biggest difference between a person who voted for Trump and a person who didn't vote for Trump? Is a college education. That's not age, it's not wealth, it's not.

Speaker 2: 41:34

That's the biggest delineator.

Speaker 1: 41:35

It's just the. I mean there's all those things too, but the main it's not rural, urban, it's not black, white because a lot of people of color voted for Trump. It's not, it's it's. Did you get a college education or not? If you're educated, then you can see through that. He's a demagogue, that he's a liar, that he's a, that he's a scheister, that even if he promises change or something, he's not going to deliver it. He's just going to deliver more of shit. You know status quo which get richer, poor get poorer.

Speaker 1: 42:02

But if you're not educated, then you're like, you know, maybe he's going to pull it off, like, yeah, maybe he's saying it's going to be changed. You know, you kind of believe it. So I think it's, I think the college, you know we don't just need better and more affordable education, education, so that kind of you know white, white bread, you know cake eating Americans can like go have college, be better and afford more affordable. It's because more people in the United States need higher education and better education.

Speaker 1: 42:30

It also would cause an improvement of quality at that level, would drive an improvement of quality at all levels.

Speaker 2: 42:38

So because, if you're when you explain that well, when you're.

Speaker 1: 42:40

well, when you're in high school, all the professors, all the, all the teachers and all the principals and all the college counselors and everybody there is like gearing what you're doing towards college and then, when you're in grade school, they're gearing it to get you into the good high school and to be successful in high school. So if you wildly ratchet up and improve the quality of higher education and open up what different college you know different colleges.

Speaker 1: 43:09

The prep to get ready for that then the preparation for it becomes wider and higher quality, and then the preparation for high school becomes wider and higher quality and more evidence based and more you know, trickle down in a true trickle down.

Speaker 2: 43:25

That's usually used as an ineffective thing, but that would actually.

Speaker 1: 43:29

This is a true, because it wouldn't be of.

Speaker 2: 43:30

You're not saying money, you're saying well you know it would just a chain reaction. Yeah, it's just leadership.

Speaker 1: 43:35

Yeah, Just the colleges provide educational leadership. That's huge. And then secondary schools follow the colleges, and then primary schools follow the secondary schools. So this this is like allowing people to start new colleges is I mean, I think it would make it so Donald Trump could never become president again. It would make it so people understood that the climate crisis was happening. It would make it so that college cost about $40,000 for the whole degree and most people would graduate in three to four years, because that's the huge thing.

Speaker 2: 44:10

Two people wind up with tons of debt and they go. Now my options are limited.

Speaker 1: 44:15

Right.

Speaker 2: 44:16

Right, when you graduate college, you want your options to be the least You're like theoretically that's the least limited you're ever going to have Right. Is that you don't have to switch momentum anywhere.

Speaker 1: 44:27

So the most expensive tuition of all these new colleges that I interviewed, the highest tuition was a school that charged $15,000 a year.

Speaker 2: 44:36

Which is still remarkably, and it was a three-year degree Affordable.

Speaker 1: 44:40

That was the most expensive. Most affordable was a school called Mount Liberty College in Utah. They charged $4,500 a year. And when I asked them you know why do you guys keep your tuition so low? They said we don't believe in indentured servitude. Nice, they were hardcore. Yeah, man, I got out.

Speaker 2: 45:03

I mean I got my degree when that was not the policy, and so I don't have. I'm not saddled with an oppressive student debt, Like a lot of people younger than me are, but I feel for it man, the school that charges $15,000 a year is called New U University.

Speaker 1: 45:19

Fantastic, awesome school. Where is that at? It's in DC, and it's very like. It's a very normal college. Like you know, I'm kind of wackadoo. I want to start a college a little crazier, you know.

Speaker 2: 45:29

Sure.

Speaker 1: 45:30

But they are just like look, there's the guy who started. His name is Kalinsky Stratzy. Kalinsky's amazing guy, bulgarian heritage and he used to be on the board or, I think, was president of, or no. He was on the board of the American University of Bulgaria, like an international university, okay, and he saw all these problems and he was a businessman. He made his money in like Tivo and like television technology, and then he got on this board and then he literally like very, in a very like self-sacrificing way, he decided that I'm going to just make my whole rest of my life about fixing higher education and what he thought was important to do was to start a new college. So he started this new university in Washington DC. They've had two cohorts already. They've had 30 students. They're not accredited because they can't get accreditation because they get turned down, but they are licensed in DC and it's an amazing school. And, yeah, $15,000 a year for three year degree. It's just amazing, it's just phenomenal. Now, now, do you think Georgetown would like there to be new university?

Speaker 2: 46:36

right in their neighborhood.

Speaker 1: 46:37

Georgetown costs probably $60,000 a year and they're cost $15,000 a year and you can. They give scholarships too. So $15,000 is the sticker price.

Speaker 2: 46:46

You can get a scholarship and it's half that I was going to say. It's very telling that, like these people who are in the middle and in power conceivably like power positions inside these major universities are like you know what it's actually. I'm looking at the writing on the wall. It's actually going to be easier for me to implement the changes I want by making a small version and hoping that it scales. Instead of thinking that I have any sort of way to turn the steering wheel on this big giant vehicle that's like no, no, no, we are chugging.

Speaker 2: 47:16

It's like trying to turn a train. You're like no, no, no, it's going on the track. We're going down the track and that's it.

Speaker 1: 47:21

There's no, absolutely, and it's just like business. You know, like there was no way for like like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were respectively at Atari and HP, they weren't going to be able to get Atari or HP to start making personal computers. They just weren't. That's crazy, yeah, so they quit their jobs to make and in their garage.

Speaker 1: 47:45

They ordered the parts and put together and soldered together Apple computers and then they started selling them and their first order was 200 computers. You know, but today, if you were a professor, even and this is just two guys from Atari and HP middle nobody's right. And today, even if you were a professor at Harvard and you partnered up with a professor at Stanford to make a new university, there would be zero chance of you succeeding. I can tell you that without any doubt, because they I have records of people trying to do this. They're creditors. Block them out. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 48:22

Back to coddling back to coddling of the American mind. Jonathan Haight and a bunch of other kind of right wing sort of anti PC people, anti kind of culture war people all have, are trying to start the University of Austin. They can't do it. The creditors shut them down, even though it's like millionaires and wealthy and powerful people all trying to start the university, they can't do it. Now do I think the University of Austin is a good thing? No because I think it's just some right wing culture war crap.

Speaker 2: 48:54

But if they should have a lot of people, could all start good stuff, right?

Speaker 1: 48:58

They would be drowned out by a bunch of other good colleges. Right, the good colleges would drown out the colleges. And there would still be diversity. Some people would start colleges that were that were already at Austin Anti woke or something that's just there's just you. You okay, huge yeah. But I mean I would start. I mean my, I want to start a college. I'd start a campus in Austin tomorrow If I get a credit issue. Yeah, it's a great place to have a camp. I bet there'd be people have a 25 new colleges the first year.

Speaker 1: 49:26

if there was possible to start new colleges in Austin, it would just be amazing. I think the University of Austin probably wouldn't like that you know, but I mean, who cares the?

Speaker 2: 49:34

public school. Hey, you have to everybody play by the same rules. That's the idea, which is what the accreditation's are preventing. They're being like we're tilting the board and you're just saying, hey, could we just all have the same rules, same chance.

Speaker 1: 49:49

Same whatever.

Speaker 2: 49:50

It's not like we're going to take 100,000 of Ohio State students on day one. That's not how be a transition. You can't do that.

Speaker 1: 49:59

So Ohio State can sell their buildings to the new colleges Like Ohio State. It doesn't matter. The administrators at Ohio State can be hired by the new like it's not like you know, nobody's losing anything here Don't be competitive.

Speaker 2: 50:12

What?

Speaker 1: 50:12

we're doing is we're growing the whole pie. The pie of higher education will grow and people who are in higher education are experts in higher education. They'll have jobs, they'll have roles that they can do. So it's not a zero sum game. It's not the pie shrinking, it's the pie growing, and I really wish these higher educational insiders were not so combative and anti-progress the way they are when they claim to be so pro-progress, like in all these other ways. They want their industry, they want their science to progress. They want so many of them are social justice, progress people. They want social justice, progress, but what they do not want progress in is their own backyard. They do not want progress in higher education. They're NIMBs, right.

Speaker 2: 50:58

They're NIMBs. Yeah, they're NIMBs, not in my backyard.

Speaker 1: 51:01

Many of them are in favor of this. If you go down the line and talk to some really good professors actually, especially the professors are totally in favor of this.

Speaker 2: 51:08

The blockers are mostly administrators. Yeah, I was going to say it doesn't matter the individual people who want to do it. The size of the thing is.

Speaker 1: 51:17

It's your parallel it's like a train. You can't stop it. Yeah, you can't stop it. It's going one direction and there's no way to stop it. You just have to introduce new little trains that go in their own direction.

Speaker 2: 51:26

You're just like we got to free up a little bit.

Speaker 1: 51:27

They're like dinosaurs, and you want little mammals running around their feet. You know you want new stuff Of course, yeah, Fuzzy things you can pet.

Speaker 2: 51:34

They're cute. Oh my gosh, I have that in my head right now because after I mean we're recording this on a Saturday, but my plan is later this Saturday I'm going to go and hopefully get.

Speaker 1: 51:43

Fuzzy Fingers.

Speaker 2: 51:44

Cross two new cats to complete the.

Speaker 1: 51:47

You have a fantastic cat tree. Thank you very much. I think I want to go on like that. I like that, huh.

Speaker 2: 51:53

I'm hoping, Fingers Cross we meet these guys and they're good. Maybe next episode I'll have some new people to talk about. People.

Speaker 1: 52:02

Cats. We really elevated them. That's okay. Are they not a people? They are a people. Here's the thing Heline people.

Speaker 2: 52:10

Humans are us, right, we are humans.

Speaker 1: 52:13

Nothing else is human. Is that your new story you're going to make Humans? Are us?

Speaker 2: 52:16

No, but you can have the people of another planet or something.

Speaker 1: 52:19

A people is just you know what I'm saying.

Speaker 2: 52:22

You can call maybe you can even call people as the populating beings of a place, or is?

Speaker 1: 52:32

it.

Speaker 2: 52:32

Are we just human, but we are also people, and cats should be people. Could cats be?

Speaker 1: 52:38

people. That's where I'm going with this, I think. Isn't people the plural?

Speaker 2: 52:42

Aren't you glad I'm putting this on the end of your serious book? No, it's good. Isn't people the plural of person Are cats, people. People is plural of person, person has a legal meaning.

Speaker 1: 52:51

Yeah, it's someone who can speak in court.

Speaker 2: 52:54

I mean, these cats are gonna be talkative, very talkative.

Speaker 1: 52:57

But I don't think they can represent themselves in court.

Speaker 2: 53:00

If you ask them questions where the edge is always meow yeah, then they'll say yeah, when do you wanna eat? So, meow, you have to speak in court, and then you're a people.

Speaker 1: 53:10

So yeah. So if you're a person I know, I'm saying that. So, you have to have what's called legal standing. If you don't have legal standing, then you're not a personhood.

Speaker 2: 53:21

I think this is the definition Babies can't be persons, babies aren't people. But I think they are Adam's over here saying babies aren't people, but I think babies are people because they can become, they will grow in.

Speaker 1: 53:32

if everything goes fine, they turn into people. So they're sort of people in the sense that they have the potential to become people.

Speaker 2: 53:38

So that Charleston Heston movie where he's talking about Soylent Green and then he says it's people he's talking about, the legal standing of. That's what he's commenting on, right?

Speaker 1: 53:48

Well, I guess at that point he's just saying he doesn't care that it's humans.

Speaker 2: 53:50

He's like no, these are these are beings with legal standing in the court of law. That's the problem.

Speaker 1: 53:55

Well, not in his society. In his society they get made into food, but I think that's sort of the formal definition, I think, of person, but then people just sounds like humans. But even if, okay, so you're saying, if we mixed aliens, or actually what's more likely?

Speaker 2: 54:10

if we mixed AIs together with?

Speaker 1: 54:12

humans, would you say. Look at this crowd of people, and it would include AIs and humans.

Speaker 2: 54:17

I would be quick to call cyborgs persons and people.

Speaker 1: 54:20

Or would you be like lady and gentlemen, just that we should do the same thing. We should say, ladies and gentlemen, we should say, like humans and AIs, people and AIs no, I don't want to separate them. That feels like it's getting anger. Yeah, it's not nice. Yeah, I want to.

Speaker 2: 54:31

If you don't want to anger those AIs, no, I want to be like what's the thing for everybody who's here right now?

Speaker 1: 54:38

Everybody who's here right now. I just want to be.

Speaker 2: 54:40

I don't want to have to list things out, but I would like to just be able to include everybody in an umbrella term. That's fine.

Speaker 1: 54:46

Yeah, I think that's right. People is just like.

Speaker 2: 54:49

Yeah, I'll call people people.

Speaker 1: 54:50

I'll call everybody people, everybody who's here, everybody's. It's almost like the word thing.

Speaker 2: 54:55

I can't believe you don't think babies are person. Well, they're not really. That sounds bad. It sounds like you don't think babies are people. They're the property of their parents. Do you think babies are?

Speaker 1: 55:03

property they are. They're the property of their parents.

Speaker 2: 55:06

Technically, you should be able to sell it by property. You want to sell it by babies, bro?

Speaker 1: 55:10

Well, because they're potentially people, so they have a potential personhood. We're getting into slippery slopes here. Maybe they are people, I don't know, but they can't speak in court. But you do want to buy children.

Speaker 2: 55:22

You want to buy and sell children.

Speaker 1: 55:23

Maybe babies can speak in court. Actually Not, they can't speak. But if you do a court case I'm pretty sure like a baby, represented by a lawyer, could like sue the government right or like sue a company right the baby could actually do it. If the baby was the plaintiff, the baby had been harmed.

Speaker 2: 55:37

You have a lawyer who's like I understand your honor, I understand baby, and he just said right now but I think it would still be.

Speaker 1: 55:43

The parents would be the plaintiffs.

Speaker 2: 55:45

He identified the defendant.

Speaker 1: 55:46

And he said that's the man. This is a good question. I'm sure this is all. I'm sure that, yeah, that man, I'm pretty sure this has all been solved, and so I just don't know. No, it definitely has. I just don't know.

Speaker 2: 55:56

We're two non-legal experts arguing about legal definitions of semantic words.

Speaker 1: 56:01

Anyways, we should be able to start colleges, start colleges, start colleges.

Speaker 2: 56:05

Get out of our way accreditors.

Speaker 1: 56:06

Yeah, come on, Let us get state licensing nonprofit colleges Smarter people. More degrees, Not for profit. Colleges I think should also be allowed to start, but the state licensure should make a two track system.

Speaker 2: 56:19

You were clear about that. Yeah, I mean until I edit out all the clarification, just be like I love better for profit schools better.

Speaker 1: 56:27

No, no, no, no, no, no Non-profit schools.

Speaker 2: 56:29

Now I'm gonna overlap everybody talking, so it sounds more natural. You slipped and gave me the magic beans. Now I gave you the beans. Now I know how to do.

Speaker 1: 56:37

it Should have kept the beans, all right. Well, yeah, everyone go buy the book. Tell everyone that they should buy the book. It would be so cool. The caging of the American mind If I sold. I need to sell like 2000 copies. If I sold like 2000 copies then you'd see me like on TV talking about it. Okay, but if I only sell like my other books, I've only sold like 300 or 300 copies.

Speaker 2: 56:57

Let's get Adam on TV talking about it.

Speaker 1: 56:58

It's not really good on TV, it's just gonna stay like in a niche thing. So yeah, please help me support. Let's do it. Buy some books. Five star reviews Please provide five star reviews on Amazon.

Speaker 2: 57:08

You just got a $30 check from your aunt for Christmas in a card. She didn't buy you anything. She gave you a $30 check, a personal check. Deposit it. Use part of it.

Speaker 1: 57:18

If you want to buy a caging of the American mind and if you want a coupon, or if you don't have enough money, you can just email me. I'll send you a coupon.

Speaker 2: 57:24

Don't say that, don't yeah it's fine. I don't care, but I'd prefer if you've done it. Okay. So we have to sell 2000 copies, plus however many Adam's just gonna give away. Well, I can coupon.

Speaker 1: 57:33

I can coupon and then you buy it still and then you just a coupon, so it's cheaper. I think I can make 100 coupons on.

Speaker 2: 57:38

Amazon. How do you have that kind of power over Amazon?

Speaker 1: 57:40

Just Amazon they let the author create 100 coupons.

Speaker 2: 57:42

Do you have dirt on Bezos?

Speaker 1: 57:43

Yeah, he's bald. Oh dang, I just gave it away.

Speaker 2: 57:48

You have blackmail dirt on Bezos and you only use it to get some 100 coupon off of the price of your. You're like feel like I misused that leverage.

Speaker 1: 57:58

I've done more with this. He also got me a sandwich.

Speaker 2: 58:01

He was real quick to agree, by the way. He, just he was like oh yeah, that's all you want. You wanted that compromise Sure man, you could have that.

Speaker 1: 58:11

Solving all the world's problems. Here's solution from the multiverse. One at a time, one at a time, love it All. Right, come back next week.

Speaker 2: 58:18

See you next Tuesday or another solution. Oh wait, I can't say that. How do we See you next Tuesday? Yeah, no, you're not, nevermind, if you know, you know.

Speaker 1: 58:28

See you next Tuesday. Why can't we say that?

Speaker 2: 58:30

You just it's, I'll tell you off Mike.

Speaker 1: 58:33

Okay, all right, I'll see you everyone. Bye, everyone, thanks, bye. Outro music.