318-Rethinking Higher Education with Sheldon Greaves

We dig into guerrilla scholarship with Dr. Sheldon Greaves, exploring how independent learners can recreate the best parts of academia without the bureaucracy. We share practical tools, stories of underground universities, and a sober view of AI’s promise and limits.

• defining guerrilla scholarship and why it matters now
• academia’s incentive traps and the credential vs qualification gap
• accreditation gatekeeping and absurd rejections of real expertise
• models from history: flying universities and community salons
• practical access: open courses, public libraries, government repositories
• building affiliations and “scholar in residence” pathways
• AI as automation tool vs human intuition and reasoning
• slowing the pace to fight misinformation and think clearly
• creating neighborhood learning communities and alternative libraries

Follow Sheldon Greaves at ...

Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/sheldon.greaves/

Substack

https://guerrillascholar.substack.com/

LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sheldongreaves/

Sheldon's Book: The Guerrilla Scholar

https://book.spines.com/books/the-guerrilla-scholars-handbook/

Chapters

• 0:00 Opening Banter And Guest Reveal
• 1:58 Defining Guerrilla Scholarship
• 5:06 Academia’s Stagnation And Lost Purpose
• 9:55 Credentials Versus Qualifications
• 16:30 Accreditation Absurdities And Gatekeeping
• 22:38 Can Communities Replace Failing Institutions
• 26:35 Fighting Disinformation And Public Access To Knowledge
• 31:15 DIY Learning: Libraries, Experts, And Tools
• 36:10 Building Learning Communities And Alternative Libraries
• 42:00 Social Platforms, Speech, And Moderation
• 44:20 AI’s Limits: Reason, Intuition, And Pace
• 51:10 Where AI Helps And Where It Fails
• 56:30 Practical Paths To Independent Scholarship

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:06

Welcome everyone to politically high tech with your host, Elias. Well, some of you, before you freak out, before you get upset, and before you think I'm on drugs or I'm on copium, that's fine. That's completely fine. You know, you could think that a lot of people think I'm crazy, it's fine. I think you're crazier, but you know, we could get to that fight for another day. I have a guest here, and he's interesting. You're gonna be either enlightened, outraged, or mix of the two. You make sense out of it, okay? And even though I'm baffled by one of the branding, okay? And if you could tell I'm sarcastic or not, you you know I'll let you be the judge. We're gonna keep it ambiguous here on purpose, okay? But we're gonna have a fun edutainment kind of conversation. Yes, edutainment. And I I wish I could, you know, use a patent on that word or copyright so I could sue someone who uses that word, but I can't. I'm not an authoritarian, monopolistic kind of guy, at least not yet. I don't know. Look, when you get powerful or successful, you might change. I'm gonna be honest. Look, this is coming for someone who believes in God. I mean, I'd rather be honest and give you all the horrible stuff as opposed to give you false, positive, perfect message, and a lot of people prefer to do that. I don't like that. So I have a guess here. He calls himself the gorilla scholar. All right, and we're gonna we're gonna find out what the hell does that mean? What does it mean to be a gorilla scholar? Well, the scholar's supposed to be intelligent, some pretty boring, it's supposed to enlighten us. But what do you mean by gorilla? What is it? He's trying to ambush, hijack the education system. What's this guy about? Um, Sheldon Greaves. But, you know, introduce yourself, explain yourself to my listeners of view or too who the heck you are.

SPEAKER_00: 1:58

Thank you, Elias. Yeah, my name is Dr. Sheldon Greaves. I call myself a gorilla scholar. I have a PhD in ancient Near Eastern Studies from UC Berkeley, which is about as unmarketable a degree as probably exists anywhere. But in order to do something, actually to both to finish that degree and to do something with it after I graduated, I had to get creative, which meant not taking the usual academic path. And along the way, I discovered a few things about what makes for an interesting life of the mind. And what I call that is guerrilla scholarship. Now, I'm not so much trying to ambush traditional education or academia as maybe I am trying to subvert it a little, you know. Gorilla scholarship is kind of based on the proposition that we shouldn't let have the we shouldn't let the academics have all the fun. The possibility of doing interesting and even important intellectual work, both for personal enrichment and for strength in our communities, it's open to everyone. Gorilla scholarship tends to ignore disciplinary boundaries. It doesn't like to fall into the trap of specialization. And basically the nuts and bolts side is guerrilla scholarship is creating for yourself a circumstance for learning that replicates or approximates the same tools that are available to people in academia. And you can do some really interesting stuff that way. There are some remarkable examples of that. The other interesting thing is that, quite frankly, a lot of the really interesting thinking that's going on these days is not happening on college campuses. It's happening with independent people, it's happening with folks who are just sitting down and learning stuff, doing stuff, you know, spending time in the library or at the telescope, uh, just as a crazy example. Most of the comets that have been discovered in the last hundred years have been discovered by amateurs, you know, not by professional astronomers. So, you know, I mean, that's just one of many, many examples that uh that one could give. And it also, along the way, makes for kind of an interesting life path. So I've gotten to do some pretty cool things with my with my approach that I would never have been able to do if I had stayed in academia. If I had gone to the chair and said, hey, I want to do this, which I actually ended up doing. They would have said, Are you crazy? Stay in your lane, dude. You know, don't go there. And I have prof uh I've have a couple of professors, one in particular, who wouldn't stay in his lane, and he eventually had to take early retirement because of that. But in the end, his work ended up being fantastically important. So there you go.

SPEAKER_01: 4:57

You know? All right, so I'm not gonna be as hostile. It's actually pretty good stuff now. Right year stuff. I say, yeah, this is good because I do believe academia's gotten so stale, and I don't gonna sign a right winger in this stuff, but I don't see a lot of college students being so promising with their yelling and activism and some call indoctrination. I'm gonna agree with that to some degree. Not all students are doctrine, but I'll say a chunk is for sure. And I do agree. I can mean this is where I got out of the academic field on kind of quickly. Oh, this is this is the first time we're revealing this people. I was interested in academia and being involved, being a history teacher, professor, but I realized how dull it was, and you gotta stick to the script and not ruffle any feathers and really not increase this curious forge in your own path kind of learning. You know, you gotta comply with academia politics, if you will. I was like, ah, this is not for me. I thought we were supposed to grow and be curious and all that, but we have to be a gorilla scholar to kind of do that, that, that, that is shameful.

SPEAKER_00: 6:02

Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, another problem too is that academia, I think, has kind of lost its way generally. I mean, do you remember there used to be this old phrase, wonderful old phrase that described the college experience? Preparation for life. You know, and it wasn't just what you were gonna do from nine to five, it was about how you're gonna approach the world and developing your personal philosophy of life and all that kind of stuff. That's gone. You never hear about that anymore. Nobody talks about that in terms of academia. It's all about how are you gonna what what are you gonna do? What's your career gonna consist of, and is it gonna pay you enough that you can pay off those massive student loans that you had to take out in order to get your degree in marketing or whatever.

SPEAKER_01: 6:48

So being constant GPA maintenance too. I I will add that in there. We've got to maintain that 4.0, that four point oh for those overachievers. That's a lesson.

SPEAKER_00: 6:59

Yeah, yeah. And I discovered a long time ago, grades have little to do with learning anyway. So, you know.

SPEAKER_01: 7:04

Yeah, no, exactly. You know, I thought I was dumb when I was filmed, but you know, I said, no, wait a minute. I took a deep look, I started thinking critically, I said, wait a minute, maybe it's just the ways being taught. I learned differently. You know, you you gotta really learn about yourself, right? And how you learn and all that. I realized I didn't learn the same way this professor expected me to learn. I said, No, I gotta approach it very differently. So that's a more mild example. I'm sure some of you, you know, those who went to college in the past, and those of you who currently go into college, you have experienced that one way or or another. Yeah. Yeah, I I agree. We need, I'll say either restore it or heck, have more independent people or amateurs discover new things. If the academia, if these institutions cannot do what it's originally intended to do, then I don't know. It does it and um some articles have said that uh the those degrees are losing value, generally speaking. Even some of those STEM ones, so much less a degree, of course, but definitely like the you know, like the humanities, like political science, history.

SPEAKER_00: 8:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 8:12

Yeah, they they lose value. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_00: 8:14

Yeah, which I think is a mistake because you know, we need people that have that kind of intuition that you know there's in in these positions. But you know, another another thing that doesn't get talked about nearly enough is the pressure that that faculty members are under. You gotta bring in that grant money, you know, you gotta publish those papers, you've got to do this. And what's happened is that people have learned how to game the system, you know. So you have academics who are publishing papers, or no, let me rephrase that. They're they're proposing projects that are safe, that'll get the funding, that will extend the funding, but they're not really trying anything risky that's potentially groundbreaking. The other problem is that the more papers you publish, the more prestige you have, the better your position is in the university. So they've kind of learned how to just basically create crap and get it published. Now, there was an article just recently in the uh journal Nature, which is like one of the most prestigious academic journals out there, and it was talking about how in 2023 some 10,000 academic papers were retracted because they were crap. A lot of them came out of you know, you know, were like AI generated. You know, they sound fine on the surface, but if you actually sit down and start reading them, you go, this is nonsense, you know. And people would take these papers and they would, you know, use them to pad their resume. And and I had one professor who described it as how do you put it, marshalling an ever-lengthening array of titles just so one day they could stand at attention at the foot of an obituary. You know. That was that was his take on it. But you know, he was near retirement, so he could say pretty much whatever the hell he wanted, you know.

SPEAKER_01: 10:08

Oh, yeah, no risk for him for sure.

SPEAKER_00: 10:10

Yeah. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_01: 10:12

10, 20 years like that.

SPEAKER_00: 10:17

Yeah, he was already past retirement age. It was like he just one of these people who never stops. But the other problem, too, is administration. You've got colleges being run now by administrators who have never stood in front of a class and given a lecture. They've never prepared a lesson plan, let alone put together a course. They've never had to grade papers or explain something to a student who doesn't get it. You know, and and the crazy thing is they have special degree programs now for people in this kind of administration. You don't need any real teaching or classroom experience to get one of these degrees. But if you're, say, a professor who's been in the system for like 10 years or whatever, and you don't have one of those degrees, if you went and applied for an administrative position at another college, you'd never get past HR because you don't have that administration education, whatever degree. And I can I can attest to this from personal experience. Uh so I one of the things that I ended up doing as a result of my guerrilla scholar career is I was one of three co-founders of Henley Putnam University, which was the first university that was offering programs specifically for people in the intelligence, counterterrorism, and executive protection fields. And, you know, along with these other three, we basically built a university from scratch. So I know how a university works. I know what goes into one and where all the moving parts are. Now later I got laid off from that university after the stock market crashed and our institutional investors had to make some cuts. But when I reapplied to other universities for administrative positions there, even though I had actually fucking built a university, I wasn't qualified because I didn't have that piece of paper that says, you know, you've got that administrative, you know, degree or whatever. So this is another problem is that the paper, people who are qualified don't get in because they are not credentialed. They don't have the piece of paper. There's a difference between being credentialed and being qualified, and the two are not always the same.

SPEAKER_01: 12:37

Oh, I absolutely agree with that. I mean, if I'm going to look at my former day job, there are people who are bosses and whatever just because they got the right credentials and the right people, they got the job, while there's people who are far more qualified to lead. But they don't, but they ruffle feathers, they did this, and they don't got the right papers or the precise demanded credentials, which I personally I agree with you. It is completely ridiculous. I think that's why I think university all that's falling apart. Yeah, you get into like big issues that politics won't even dare touch. It's a blind spot. Just, oh, it's indoctrination, oh, these students are not politically correct enough. That's where their political fight is at. It's not, they're not even touching what you're saying. You build a freaking university, they couldn't even give you a job. That's that's just wow. I that is just so it's stupid to the 20th power.

SPEAKER_00: 13:27

Oh, do you do you want to hear something that's even worse? Okay. So one of the other founders, he had a he had a doctorate in behavioral science. And he was the president of the university. I was the chief academic officer, and I was also on the faculty. And we were going for, we had national accreditation, we were going for regional accreditation, which is like national accreditation, but with a lot more stupidity and attitude. And at one point they were saying, okay, we need to see everybody's resume, CV, just to see if you know people are qualified to be where they they want to be. And our president submitted his CV and they looked at it and they decided they didn't like where he had gotten his doctorate, and said, He he can't he can't be there, he can't be president, uh, you need to fire him like immediately. And also they decided that he was not qualified to, and those are the words they used, not qualified to teach his class on introduction to executive protection, leaving aside the fact that this guy was a 23-year veteran of the Secret Service and had protected four presidents, but he was not qualified to teach an introductory class in executive protection. So this this is the kind of nonsense that that that uh uh is happening, you know, uh at certain levels of of the university. The other problem with accreditation is that they insist on there being certain people in certain positions, whether you actually need them there or not. So I've seen universities there they're about to get a site visit from the accreditors just to see how they're doing. Site visit comes, they have hired a few people, put them in these positions, there's the site visit two weeks later, they lay them off. You know, I mean that's that's the kind of silliness that that is that's going on. And you know, it actually kind of raises an interest interesting question. Is there a way that we ordinary folks can kind of take up some of the slack for higher education? Because, you know, uh President Eisenhower told us in his farewell address that the main defense against the military-industrial complex that he he warned us against was an alert and knowledgeable citizenry. So how how do we do that? And that's that's another one of the reasons why I've become so interested in this whole Gorilla Scholar thing and why I've written a book about it, which is called the Gorilla Scholars Handbook, and it's kind of a how-to, and it's a partly a memoir, and it's also kind of a manifesto to get people to be thinking about these things and maybe, you know, going out and doing things. I learned from all this was that there's just there's just a need for another way of thinking about education and higher education and and the intellectual life in general, and that's kind of what prompted me to write a book about it, which is called The Gorilla Scholars Handbook. It's part how-to guide, it's part memoir about my own experiences, and it's also something of a manifesto that explains how people can sort of take back the educational space and also, you know, frankly, improve their communities by creating some, you know, some yeastiness, some some frisson of of what learning is about. Because my approach, my original intent in writing this book was to celebrate learning as joy, you know, as just a fun thing. I mean, when you get something, it really goes in, there's just this little buzz that you just don't get anywhere else. But now I'm I'm seeing that education is it you know, it's kind of under attack in many respects, partly from external and partly from self-inflicted problems. And it just seems to me that we need to kind of take matters into our own hands. And I give a number of examples of people who have done just that. So, for instance, in Poland back in the late 19th, early 20th century, they were under the rule of Prussia, and Prussia basically closed all the universities. Well, they didn't close them, they just restricted access to people they liked who were men. And what happened was the Poles developed their own underground universities. They called them flying universities because they had to keep moving around, you know, to stay away from the authorities. But one of the they also took the radical step of admitting women. And one of the women who received her undergraduate training at one of these flying universities grew up to be Marie Curie. She was educated in one of these things. Then when the communists took over, the flying universities came back, and one of the young men who received his undergraduate education there grew up to be Pope John Paul II. So it can be done. You know, you can train first-rate minds, you know, without a football team and you know, giant buildings that are made more to impress donors than to really help students. And uh too many universities today, I basically describe them as hedge funds with regional accreditation, you know. So, you know, we when we talk about, you know, we talk about this. And you can also do it on a you know small scale, you know, salons, book clubs, learning societies. We used to have them all over the place, but it's kind of fallen out of favor along with a lot of other social things that we used to do in groups, but we kind of don't do anymore. So so there it is. That's my book plug. It's on Amazon.

SPEAKER_01: 19:44

Anyway, this is a pro plug-in podcast. I urge it all the time. All the time. Look, you call me a scummy capitalist all you want, I don't care. I gotta keep doing it that way. This is look, I love this work. I love the buttons work at the end of the day. I love this work, okay? I got my own plugins too. That'll be much later on. So, those of you who know me already, you know I'm all about the plugins. Shameless, especially when it's timely and relevant. I'm all in for it. So never feel ashamed. And if anything, be more proud of doing plugins. This is this is like your free ad in a way. You want me to do annoying ads? I might do annoying ads in the future. You might not like them. Oh, you can get 50% off in this cologne or perfume or whatever. You want to get that? Okay. I mean, you might get to that point if you don't want to chip in money. You know, this is working. I love it. I love it, but I'll just give you the reality of it, um, people. So, you know, let me talk about and feel free to correct me here. Because I always told there was always politicking with money and grants. I feel like that was one thing that was kind of eroding that. Even when I was in college, I noticed that they always apply money for just to get this grant, and you and you already said it for me. I always had that suspicion, though. They used to do these safe, non-groundbreaking, stagnant content. Well, content that's more for the cool kids. Papers, publishing for the more established generations. Just to get on grant money. And I think even some business, I mean, businesses are in run like that too. They don't some don't try to be innovative or do something groundbreaking, which is we both know, are risky, but I think it's worth it. Yeah, I personally think so. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_00: 21:20

You know, and you're you're right. There is kind of this crossover, and I think a lot of it is that you have a lot of universities that are being run more and more as though they were businesses, and then the graduates of those universities go out into the business world, and then you know, it kind of keeps you you get this cycle going. And I'm I'm really not sure what to do about that because you know the purpose of a business is to make money, but that's not the purpose of a university. The university is to graduate students. So if you've got a product, the university will tell you that its courses and its curricula are its product, but it really should be the graduates, you know, the the kids that they're sending out into the world with, you know, a head full of hopefully useful knowledge and you know, going out there and and you know, inflict some goodness on the world, you know, or or whatever. So yeah, I think that's a problem too.

SPEAKER_01: 22:16

One more thing I will add was you pointed out, and I see this not just in universities, they tend to appoint people that they like rather than those who are qualified, the ones that they feel comfortable with. That's why I put these unqualified people. Oh, if the establishment or the powers that be like them, they're gonna stay there. Even they're doing a yeah, so-so job, this would be nice. So, you know, 50-50 job.

SPEAKER_00: 22:42

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 22:42

And sad, I I think that's embedded with human nature, unfortunately.

SPEAKER_00: 22:47

It is, it is. And you know, the funny thing is that you go back to, well, gosh, up until, man, I would say the late 1800s, universities didn't have administrations. Usually, you know, there'd be like a rector or a major dean or something, and it was just they'd just pick them from one of the faculty at random, you know, and they just kind of go in there and they'd serve for a year or two, and then they'd swap someone else in. And in, you know, the very first universities, the medieval universities, it was even more like that. I mean, at most, they might hire a scribe to help with the record keeping, and that's it, you know, and as a result, these earlier universities had a tremendous amount of academic freedom. And when Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia, he structured it in such a way to preserve just that kind of environment. He gave faculty members a huge amount of latitude for doing things however they wanted. And back in medieval times, even under the Catholic Church, the Pope said, yeah, you can teach whatever you want, however you want. The only area where we want to have some input is, you know, in your theology degree, which makes sense, of course. Yeah, you know. But apart from that, I mean it was just, it was, they had frankly a lot more freedom then than they do now, for reasons that you've you've stated.

SPEAKER_01: 24:16

I know those of you who just came in in the beginning, you know, my pseudo has hostile act, you know. Look, I do look, at the end of the day, it's just for fun for those of you who can't tell. Those of you who could tell, congratulations. You get a visible approval of intellect and you're not sure.

SPEAKER_00: 24:36

Star on your forehead. You know.

SPEAKER_01: 24:38

Oh, yeah. Oh, star on the forehead. Might be culturally offensive to some people, but hey, you know, it's ambiguous enough. If you interpret it the wrong way, that's on you from there, okay? Oh, yeah. You know, he didn't say like the red dot on the forehead. That's Hinduism, and I can understand the offense there. But even though I would allow it anyways, I say, well, you can try to make fun of him back. There's a comment section for that, okay? Especially on Rumble, where there's more 1A protections compared to YouTube. Okay, which you gotta wait like a few days to a week, depending how I feel about that. So it's gonna get on YouTube first because that's a much larger platform, more established platform. Then it goes to Rumble. That's where the wild bad kids are at. That's the more the gorilla, you know, that that's that's that's where it goes to someone.

SPEAKER_00: 25:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 25:27

Yeah, so I'm trying to make it a little better, but uh we all do our part. Yeah, I don't even could do so much. So let's keep it like that for for for the radical rumble people. And not all of them are right leaning either, um, even though some a lot of them tend to be. It does favor the right. And it's like I think the YouTube's well, I don't know, you to your YouTube is weird now. Before you used to favor more of the the center left, but hey, yeah, you know, to be talking about censorship and all of that. Uh look, I'm jell, I'm I'm generally against censorship. Let's just be clear. Except if you make death threats or things like that, then uh you know, I think we should document it for the police and let the police and law enforcement just deal with that and that's it. You know, crazy recent since we're already bombarded with enough negative crap. Oh thinking about that. Let's see, what do I want to get into? There's two ways I can get into it. I I could tie in this information. I think with the actually let's stick to that, because I think the pushes that you talk about, that's decaying universities and publishing crap. How do they contribute anyway to disinformation? I think that's the only way I could just ask it for now.

SPEAKER_00: 26:36

Yeah. You know, right now there's there's a struggle going on in a lot of universities, and I think many of them are really honestly trying to keep the disinformation to a minimum. There's a lot of disinformation that's being spread about universities from all quarters. And I think you know, you you have to be you have to be cagey and look at who is going after the universities and why they're going after them. And that right there can tell you an awful lot. Now, the larger problem of disinformation, actually, you know, when I started writing the book, it I've been working on this book for a very long time. It never occurred to me when I started that I would have to address disinformation and misinformation, but now there's a whole chapter in there about how to recognize it, how to deal with it, how it works. You know, you look behind the curtain, you see how the trick is done. That makes it a lot easier to spot it and deal with it. The problem right now with universities is that I think there's still too much focused inwards. What happens on campus stays on campus. You know, there needs to be more needs to be more outreach, more people working to get the advantages of university info system out to ordinary people. Now, there are a few really cool steps that have been done. For instance, MIT has now made a whole bunch of their courses available online for free. So if you want to take a class on constitutional law or the American Revolution or epidemiology or whatever, it's it's out there. And a lot of other universities have followed suit. Yale has done this, I think Harvard has done this. Harvard just recently announced, in fact, that they have this wonderful course on the Constitution, that they're that you can take it for free now. The other thing, though, is that there are more places to get information than people realize, not just the university. For example, you can contact every every congressional district by law has to have at least one government documents repository where the government, which publishes like thousands of titles every month, makes these available. Now, one of the things you can do is you can contact these libraries and say, I am interested in salmon populations in Oregon or copyright law in France or pineapple farming in the Bahamas, and they can put you in touch with a government expert who has forgotten more about that topic than most of us will ever know. And it's free. You can contact these people, you can get the straight scoop, the most up to date information, and you know, your tax dollars at work. Now, a lot of those experts are probably looking for jobs now, you know, because of all the layoffs and and all that sort of thing, but there's still quite a few left. That's a service most people don't even know exists, you know. The other thing, too, is, you know, damn it, your local public library. Go there, get to know the reference librarian. Those people, those things, those people are fucking magicians. I mean, you think you know what's in the library, you don't. You know, there are just so many resources out there that most people are completely unaware of, but the you know, your reference librarian can put you in touch with them. They're they're amazing, they're brilliant. And so, you know, the means, the tools are there. It's just a matter of finding them and making use of them. And that's that's a big part of what the book is about, frankly.

SPEAKER_01: 30:42

People, have you been listening? And only I could claim ADHD. You can't. I want you claiming ADHD right now, okay? I want you doing that. No, not this one. He's giving you this is I will call it education unleashed at this point, you know, and because look, this is I didn't even know about this. This is I'm just listening and wow, this is enlightening. Oh, you're learning this. Look, if you're older though, you can still learn this and transfer this to your children or your nieces and nephews or someone you know. This is um, this is valuable stuff. I'm look, I'm sure most of you didn't even know about this. I didn't know about this. And are we really listening here? Because this is some valuable stuff. Look, I know I gotta end by being a gorilla scholar, but you know he needs to be because the universities I'm gonna say are corrupt. There you go. They got a problem.

SPEAKER_00: 31:36

Well, you know, and here's the other thing, too. And I chose the name that the term gorilla deliberately because just like the gorilla fighter needs the goodwill of the community around them in order to do their thing, it's the same with a gorilla scholar. You know, it's not just individual stuff. You used to hear about independent scholars, you know, and you know, a guy over here and a guy over there and a woman over there, and and I talk about people like that. But you need to develop groups, you need to find community, even if it's just a loose network of people that you get together and have coffee with or whatever, you know, it it's got to, if you really want this to be effective, it needs to enhance the quality of life in your community. So, for example, there was a back in the late 60s and early 70s, there were some people who got together and just started doing classes in various things, you know, they used to call them teach-ins, but this was more formal. And eventually what came out of this was something called the Mid-Peninsula Free University. And you had people teaching classes on every imaginable subject under the sun, and it was pretty much free. Basically, I think eventually they had to break down and charge everybody$10 a year, you know. But they also supported all this by they had like a vegetarian restaurant and a print shop and a thrift store, and that's kind of how they supported all this. And this went on for, I don't know, about four or five years, and then it uh it stopped. There's another great example in San Francisco. There's this place called the Prelinger Library, and it started with these two undergraduates in historiography. They met online, a man and a woman, they got together. One interesting thing about the two of them is that they both had a shit ton of books. And what they ended up doing was taking their collections, putting them together, and they formed their own public library. They got a good deal on some warehouse space in San Francisco during a slump in the real estate market. So they got this stuff and they put a library up together. And what they also did was they went to other libraries that were getting rid of things because they had to make room like for computers and whatnot. And they said, look, we'll we'll take it. They sort of became like a no-kill shelter for books, you know. And now they have this amazing collection that just has all this stuff that you're not going to find anywhere else. And they've been doing this for like 17, 18 years now. And it's become this remarkable institution that doesn't really quite fit into the usual category of a library. In fact, it doesn't meet the definition of a regular library, which has been a funding problem for them because when they go after funding for libraries, they say, well, you're not really a library. Well, we are, but you know, you you know where I'm going with that. Anyway, it strikes me that that's something that people could do. I mean, we've got a little free library out in front of our house because we have we have so damn many books that, you know, I mean, my my wife and I are not good for each other that way. We sort of reinforce each other's bad habits, you know. It's it's not entirely true that I married her for her library. And, you know, I'm of the persuasion you you'll get my books when you pry them from my cold dead hands, you know. So but what these kids did was something truly remarkable. And I would love to see more of that. I would love to see more people kind of taking the initiative and creating spaces and places and and more to the point, communities of people who are into learning and growing and discovering, and then taking that knowledge and doing something with it. So, you know, rant off.

SPEAKER_01: 35:43

No, no, no. I love it. This the acopactor is one thing. This is community engagement at large here. And you know, it's it's actually such a beautiful thing. I just think my advice to them is that I don't know, put it on paper that you're a library and maybe you can operate like something else.

SPEAKER_00: 36:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 36:01

You know, I hate to say because no, I do get what you mean. That the grant they reject things because of technicality. Oh, you're technically not a library, even though they are a library, because of paper, it looks like it's something else. Or you just got you're gonna you're gonna have to, it comes to the paperwork, be is traditional, and if it comes to your real life, be is as unorthodox. That's all I'm gonna say. You can do that.

SPEAKER_00: 36:25

Yeah, well, you know, that's that's the cool thing, is that a lot of these kinds of institutions. One of the things I discovered in building Henley Putnam University is that if you are smart and you do it carefully and you keep yourself small scale, it is literally possible in most states to run a completely legitimate university out of a spare bedroom. Think about that. It it can be done. Now, you mentioned libraries and paper. You remind me of something else, too, that that independent and and guerrilla scholars sometimes have a problem with. And that is if you want to go to a conference or participate in something, you need to have some kind of an affiliation, right? You need to be connected to somebody. Well, if you're not part of a university, what do you do? So there was this one guy that I knew. He had this problem. He wanted to go to a conference, but he needed an affiliation. So he went to the local public library. There's that public library again, and he talked to the head librarian and says, you know, do you have any ideas? What can I do? And the guy says, Hold on, I got this. He took a piece of stationery and he printed out a letter declaring this guy to be a scholar in residence at the such and such public library. And that was enough. That got him past the gatekeepers. So this idea of creating these kinds of titles is kind of a fun thing. My spouse and I, for instance, we are scholars in residence at the Episcopal Church of the Good Samaritan in Corvallis. And it's not just a title. We do stuff, we conduct seminars, we, you know, how on all kinds of stuff from the Old Testament to cybersecurity, you know. And it's it's a wonderful thing because that's a ready-made community that you can then plug into. And and what's also very cool is that when you do something like this, you suddenly find that the people that are in there have backgrounds and skills and knowledge that you never expected. You know, suddenly that guy sitting next to you turns out to be an expert on Shakespeare. And the guy over there, oh, he was a, you know, he's a retired chemist, but he did something amazing. You know, oh, your rector used to code or something like that. So I don't know. This is another this is another of my things about gorilla scholarship, is that I believe that there is here's my kitty. All right.

SPEAKER_01: 38:59

All right.

SPEAKER_00: 39:00

She had to make an appearance.

SPEAKER_01: 39:02

There is the second guest right there, the little cat.

SPEAKER_00: 39:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 39:07

Well, I think it's gonna seem anonymous.

SPEAKER_00: 39:09

Yeah. You know, normally I would, you know, I could close the door, you know, to my office, but then she would sit outside and sing the song of her people, you know, and we wouldn't get anything done.

SPEAKER_01: 39:20

Oh, no, no, you do whatever you do whatever with that. I welcome cats. I'm pro I'm a cat person.

SPEAKER_00: 39:25

Oh yeah. I I love them. But this idea that there's this vast reservoir of untapped talent and knowledge out there that, you know, I think I think it it's great if you can find a home for that, find something for that, for the for those people to do, and they appreciate it. You know, I mean, how many people majored in something, got a degree in something, and then ended up doing something completely different from what they studied and maybe are passionate about. You know. Wouldn't that be nice if they had a way to, you know, exercise, dust off that that interest of theirs. So yeah, there's just there's just an awful lot of of things that we could be doing that I think would really make life a lot more interesting and a lot more fun, frankly. Learning is fun. You know, there are a few phrases that baffle me more than makes learning fun. You know, that to me, that's like saying makes breathing fun. You know, it's just something we do naturally. It's it's part of who we are. It's it's it's humanity. We are curious creatures.

SPEAKER_01: 40:40

Yep, and without breathing, you're dead. Yeah, that's just as simple as that. There's no debate around it. It's just pure fact. Unless you're rejoiner, dude.

SPEAKER_00: 40:50

That was good.

SPEAKER_01: 40:51

No, look. Let's let's say if you want to you want to debate about you can live without breathing, go right ahead. There's a comment section to express your stupidity. Like I said, I support your freedom of speech, even if it's stupid. I support it. Okay. Um just remember you YouTube. If you say something too spicy, we'll take you out. YouTube will not agree with me on that. All right. But Rumble will make your fault. Spoil sports.

SPEAKER_00: 41:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 41:20

I know, right? Yeah. What happened to my 1A? Well, it's been it's been taken away by companies. What can I say? Even more than your government, I will say that. That's a spicy take, but it's the truth. There you go. At least there's some legal protections against the government doing that. But companies, not so much.

SPEAKER_00: 41:37

No, sadly.

SPEAKER_01: 41:39

Let's talk, you know, uh, let's talk about the AI thing real quick. Especially going to your, I think just your latest article about how it's declining the individual, because it's doing our thinking for us, and we relied even for therapy or just even general socializing, which it's a little disturbing to say the least. Yeah. And look, I love the fact that it could be used to, you know, automate you. Well, you know, I I might call bullshit jobs it can, but I was I'm gonna go even a little lower. Bullshit task. Okay, if you know we can use AI for that, uh, an even boring task. I'm fine with that. Or for me, it's just I suck at art, I'll use AI for it because you'll do a better job than me. When it comes to thinking and politics, I've caught it spreading misinformation, I had to correct it, and then I said, no, no, no, you contradicting, not making sense there. You're saying it's just like saying I could swim underwater perfectly, but yet I still drown on the water. Great. And make that make sense. This is for the cool kids. You know, make sense out of that nonsense, people. So what's your take on that?

SPEAKER_00: 42:49

Yeah, well, here's the thing. You know, AI is supremely rational, but it's not necessarily reasonable. Now, here's what I mean by that. So I have I have a friend who had a kid, a young boy, a child who was kind of on the autistic spectrum, and they were walking through the park one day, and the little boy sees a garbage can, and perched on top of the garbage can is a bird. And the boy started to cry. And he goes, What's wrong? Why are you crying? And the boy said, Why would someone throw away a bird? Now you can see how he got there, right? Garbage can is for throwing things away. There's a bird on the garbage can, ergo, someone threw away a bird. So is it is is his uh conclusion rational? Yeah. Is it reasonable? No. And the the reason why we look at that and say, well, of course not, it's because we have this thing called experience, which manifests itself as intuition. And AI is really good at like statistical prediction, you know. If you say peanut butter and it knows there's a good chance you're gonna say jelly, you know, after that, it it's it's good at at guessing those sorts of things. But taking experience and processing it into something that you can then take and apply to a number of different things, it can't do that yet. And I don't know that it ever will be able to do that. So for instance, if it would be like if I say decided to learn to play the guitar, I learn what a fingerboard is, I learn how to read notes, and I learn where everything is on the guitar. Okay, now I want to switch to the banjo. If I go to the banjo, if I'm an AI, I have to relearn what a fingerboard is. I have to learn how to read music again. I can't take what I learned as a guitar player and transfer it to a banjo player. So the other result of this is that you, as you pointed out, AI can can say stupid stuff, it can say absurd things, but it doesn't know that it's saying absurd things. It can't detect that. So that's one side. The other side is that AI is basically a form of automation. And the tasks that are best performed through automation are tasks that are simple, they're kind of boring, and you have to do a lot of them. They're time consuming, you know. So that's great. That that saves a lot of time. I love turning over stupid repetitive tasks to AI or things that are just, you know, that are tedious. But what that does is the work that's left over after the automation has its does its thing, the stuff that's left over tends to be harder. You know, and that's the stuff where you know the old human noggin is is sort of necessary. So if I need, you know, and I gotta say, there are times when I just I just love being able to say to some stuff, here's the title of a book and an author, give me a bibliographic reference in Chicago style. Boom. No, I'm sorry, make that MLA a boom. You know, I don't have to look anything up. It's it's brilliant. I love it. Take this data, turn it into a table. Now make a graph, you know. No, make a different kind of graph. No, make it sorry, make it a pie chart, you know, and it just dog, you know, that's that's wonderful. But getting into something that requires a little more thought, a little more intuition, not so good. And I guess the last thing that bothers me about AI is that it has it has amped up the tempo of how we we work with information. And the problem I see there is that there are some things that you just have to sit and think about for a while. You have to sit there by yourself in a room or on a park bench with nothing else going on and just ruminate, chew on it until something makes sense, and it's usually going to be something better than what the AI is gonna come up with. We don't I mean, AI's uh there are a lot of other things that are that are preventing us from taking our time with stuff like the 24-hour news cycle and and all that, and and that's nothing new. That's been around for a long time, but but AI is kind of contributing to this faster, faster pace. And the other problem with things going faster and faster is there's less and less time to catch the absurdities. You know. So here we are.

SPEAKER_01: 47:37

I mean, yeah, but surgery is one way, lies, deceptions. What's the other thing I would add that AI is not that great with? Well, I would say socializing, I think that's a bit disturbing. Oh, man. Oh, a customer service. AI can only do basic customer service that could be you know clickable and worse. If it's like bill payments, I'm sure it could solve that. Yeah. But if the bill payment's not working and the AI keeps referring to it, well, you're gonna need human intervention. You know, that's a more simpler example. Uh AI is not there, yeah. I'll say that's one of the areas where AI is still very um primitive. Art, amazing. Field creation, I would still say pretty amazing. You know, and you know, organizing data, you know, massive amounts of information, yeah, amazing. And I agree. But when it comes to some things, like socializing something and something that we look that relies on critical, I mean, advanced critical thinking, AI is not there.

SPEAKER_00: 48:38

Yeah. But yeah, there's there's some other couple things that I do like about AI. It's getting better at translating. It's still not perfect, but it can do some pretty cool stuff. The other thing I like about it is like, okay, one of the one of the problems that another problem with academia is that a lot of academic papers, most academic papers, are behind paywalls. Very expensive paywalls. So I can say to the AI, I need to find a copy of this paper. You know, where can I find one that isn't behind a paywall? And usually say, well, there's a database over here that you can find it and access it. Okay, now talk me through getting into the database, and it can do that. That's pretty cool. That that I like. I I love that. So, you know, certain kinds of step-by-step things, or if there's a software issue that I'm going through, some kind of troubleshooting, not always, but very often, you know, do this, do this, stuff I never would have thought of. Okay, you know, and it fixes the problem. You know, when it's good, it's really good. When it's not, it's really not.

SPEAKER_01: 49:50

So it's no middle ground. No middle ground. Sounds like no, no. It's either really good or really bad out there. Yeah. What is that? Yeah, that's dying off. Gee. Which I think we need some, we need it in some cases. But I'm not gonna be overly political. You ready to provide a lot of good education, valuable stuff, and trust me, I could do that, and my solo episode provide a lot of valuable political stuff. Other than that, and uh look, this has been great. I hope you learned a lot. I hope you've been paying attention. Remember, only I could claim unofficial ADHD. You can't. Because it that's my way to say I'm bored, I'm tired of your crap right now. Um that's that that's what really means for, but uh no, but you, I'll just really hope you're listening here because this is some good stuff. I have learned something. I hope you learned something. This is a real now. I'm not gonna be a grown-up here. This is a real comment um activity if you want to do this. Comment what you have learned. You know, our libraries are the secret heroes. I guess I think so. Yeah. Or if you want to disagree and make it challenging. You know, Sheldon and Liza are crazy and how? How are we crazy? All right, or or you wanna or you want to divide us with your commentary. Well, you could try that. Um, I think we're both our IQ is too advanced for you. I just come with something super convincing, and I will know if it's AI generated. I was gonna throw it to AI detectors. Oh, this is AI generated, this bull crap then. Okay, so no, but all seriousness, I really hope you learned something because I had a great time and I've definitely learned something. I'll start using my library a lot more often. So if I don't want to get to these conferences or, you know, give me credentials, um and actually, and I like the fact that you know you're not just usually get credentials and you're also doing the work that supports that credential organically, you know, so just saying, I'm the president of this universe while it's in a freaking bedroom just talking to some girl. Well, well, you're the president of University of Romance for yourself. That's you know, just just uh you know, do that. But you know, but that's good, you know, because you got to practice what you preach, right? I mean, you you know, there's credibility on the end of the day, that's very important. Even though I know people are not following it, I get it, I get it, but that's their problem. Let them continue, they're gonna get busted and they're gonna fall eventually. Right? I know it's slow, and I know I get impatient when justice is too damn slow, but it it'll get it'll get there, okay? It will get there. Um so anything else you want to add before I start doing the plugins and the wrap up?

SPEAKER_00: 52:30

Uh no, uh, it's been a pleasure. Uh really enjoyed the conversation. And yeah, just once again, if you want to learn more about this kind of stuff, check out my book, The Gorilla Scholars Handbook. It is available on Amazon, in hardcopy, and electronic ebook. And uh also there's an audiobook version out there somewhere. And you can also read what I've been up to on Substack, Gorilla Scholar on Substack. And yeah, just appreciate uh having the opportunity to uh to talk with you and your uh your viewers and listeners.

SPEAKER_01: 53:06

Uh, I'm happy he was able to come because I was so curious about ooh, what the hell do you mean by a gorilla scholar? Oh, that was that was the hook right there. Yeah, use that hook more often. People be curious about that one. Oh, that's for sure. It got me curious right away before I even start being critical. I said, wait a minute, I don't fall for the hype. I say he's almost passing. So yeah, okay, he got it. But uh look, the for the book and his sub stack, that'll be in the link in the description, okay? Now for my shameless plugins, it's gonna be a heck of a lot longer. Like, comment, subscribe, share this with someone who you believe could benefit tremendously, okay? And for the audio listeners, bus, bus sprout, or even Apple, I don't care about you, Spotify. You can do whatever you want on Spotify. You you can say I'm the devil himself, I'm not gonna comment because I don't care. That's your little corner if you can hate me and I won't do anything because I don't care about Spotify that much. I I just use as a personal um music player. However, when it comes to reviews, leave an honest review, leave why this episode is good or why this episode is not so good. Leave an honest star review, and that's for both Apple Podcasts, and another thing, and now I'm gonna go for my real capitalistic shameless plugins. Let's get ready from free to cheap. The new paper. New paper is the free one. You just click on the link below, join there. It is straight factual news about politics, international news, national news, stock market, sports, whatever. And the longest read is about five minutes because they are short, straight to the point. They did not put any slant or flavor into it. That's new paper and it's completely free. And now for the free website, guys, it's mostly free if you pick all the cheapest options. It can be free, okay. If it did this for you that need that wants a website, or you or you won't you really need a website, okay? I'll be podcasters, business, whatever you are. If you want that, and you'll be helping me without ever giving me a dime. So that will be greatly appreciated. If you want to donate, that's your alternative. And then, of course, there's a donate three dollars a month. Um and you get shout-outs, and you're gonna get exclusive episodes where I really go ballistic. This is like 10% of ballistic that we went through here with you know attacking the established education university system, okay? And join PodMatch. That's another one. Podmatch is such a great system. Look, I don't know why guests don't want to use it. I don't I have a few guests that don't. There, y'all behind, okay? I'm tired of going through email threads and waiting for your PDFs and asking you a bunch of questions. I'm a busy guy. You're busy to value my time like you value your own. Join Popmatch. You can make changes on the fly, and it's organized one page, one page as well, okay? And you can communicate and it's a giving and generous community. Join it. Forget the others like that matchmaker. Matchmaker just cares about your money. And it sounds like a flirtatious failed date app, anyways. Uh let me attack that. Some of you got both. That's fine. I can't tell you what to do, but I'm never going back to matchmaker. Matchmaker sucks. So join Pop Match is a much better, and you get a lot more bang for your buck. That's all I can say about that. And then that is it finally. Yes, I stopped being a capitalistic scum to some of you that love to hate me. So, whenever you complete this audio or visual journey, you have a blessed day, afternoon, or night.