Paul Ford: [00:00:00] Hey Rich.
Rich Ziade: Hey Paul.
Paul Ford: What was your undergrad degree in?
Rich Ziade: Political science.
Paul Ford: I was english, english literature.
Rich Ziade: That makes sense, you’re a wonderful writer.
Paul Ford: That’s nice, that’s nice, thank you.
Rich Ziade: Did you learn how to write in college?
Paul Ford: I learned quite a bit, I had a creative writing minor. I was absolutely destined to be unemployable.
Rich Ziade: I was gonna say you went for it.
Paul Ford: We joked about it even then in the liberal arts and colleges. Uh, the, so, but you know, here I am, I, I got my English degree. Guess, guess what I just read in the New Yorker?
Rich Ziade: Here we go, name dro- uh, let me guess, um, the Morgan Library is going through a renovation.
Paul Ford: They’re always getting renovated.
Rich Ziade: I mean you have to.
Paul Ford: Yeah I mean-
Rich Ziade: It’s in the trust.
Paul Ford: It is.
Rich Ziade: Every five years, you gotta redo the Morgan Library [chuckles].
Paul Ford: Keep renovating. Uh, no, it turns out that it’s hard times for the English degree. The numbers are in free fall, and in fact, people are kind of done with the humanities when it comes to [00:01:00] college.
Rich Ziade: Define the humanities.
Paul Ford: Well, let’s do that. Alright, so Ziade and Ford advisors, let’s talk about this, so, humanities, uh, history, um, uh, political science might end up in there, it depends, sociology, there’s a few that are kind of on the edge, they got a little science, got a little, that might have like a science in the name, but you know, literature, history, women’s studies.
Rich Ziade: Art.
Paul Ford: Art, not art history. Not necessarily art, not like, you know, like cause I might want to go be, cause there’s also the art like at fba, where I’m gonna go be an illustrator.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Paul Ford: So that, those are doing okay. But like the, I went to college to broaden my interests and I, and to learn about how the world works in, in a very like, meta way.
Rich Ziade: Mm-hm.
Paul Ford: I took four years, I read the great books. [00:02:00] Uh, those are down, you know, they, they started to collapse, you know, a decade ago, they’ve always been up and down and now big trouble, uh, the, the numbers aren’t coming back.
Rich Ziade: People aren’t majoring in English.
Paul Ford: According to this article.
Rich Ziade: Okay.
Paul Ford: The departments are shrinking.
Rich Ziade: Mm-hm, mm-hm. Do they explain why?
Paul Ford: There isn’t like a consistent thesis in the piece where I’m like, okay, yeah, that really explains it. My take on it, you know, the one of the professors that they talked to at Harvard is like, well, you know, I got a smartphone, I, I barely read five books a year anymore. You know, or whatever, it wasn’t like he, he used to read like five books a month, and now he’s like, I, I look at my phone.
Rich Ziade: Right.
Paul Ford: Right.
Rich Ziade: Which is real.
Paul Ford: That’s real, right? And so I think, you know what, I’ll, I’ll say it is for me what I think it is, there was a sort of, and and the article hinted at this, there was a kind of post GI bill, like, everyone should go to college America, we’re gonna be that shining [00:03:00] city on the hill. Everybody should pursue their interests and we’re gonna figure it out as we go.
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: And then I think there was starting in the nineties, an absolute reassertion of like a kind of hardcore market dominance in the world.
Rich Ziade: Mm-hmm.
Paul Ford: And the idea that you could live a modest life, thinking thoughts and focusing on the things that you truly love.
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: Uh, kind of went out. It just didn’t, didn’t stick in there, wasn’t, wasn’t something that it turned out as a society that we were gonna double down on.
Rich Ziade: Right.
Paul Ford: Grants for artists, national Endowment for the Humanities, all those kind of organizations.
Rich Ziade: Gave way to like just professional ambition.
Paul Ford: Professional ambition, and you know what? We have a marketplace of ideas and we’re gonna just get out there. We’re, and, and so I think that, like, uh, I think that what’s happened is that you can still, I, you can still go get an English degree if you want one.
Rich Ziade: I, I have to be frank.
Paul Ford: This is, I would hope so.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, I [00:04:00] mean, whenever I see, like someone that is majoring in the humanities, I assume their parents are wealthy.
Paul Ford: Not always a case, but there’s, it’s not a bananas assumption and I, I think you can almost take the negative, which is whenever you see the child of a recent, a family that maybe a first gr, generation immigrant.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, go be a doctor, a lawyer.
Paul Ford: They’re not being pressured to get a poetry degree.
Rich Ziade: No, get a job.
Paul Ford: It just, that is the, there is, and you have that American narrative, your dad was like, go be a lawyer, you seem smart.
Rich Ziade: He was telling me to be a lawyer from the time I was 10 years old because they see it as a, as a, an escape hatch out of the circumstance.
Paul Ford: Right, and the circumstances is kind of like I’m working at a bodega, or I own a little store, but I’m kind of making a lawyer, somebody who has a house, they have a savings account.
Rich Ziade: My dad was a craftsman who refused to teach me his trade.
Paul Ford: [00:05:00] Interesting, right?
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: He just, he wanted it to stop there.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, he’s like, you could do better than this. Like this is, you know, I’m using my hands. You’re a smart guy, go get a law degree. And he know he’d watch Matt Locke.
Paul Ford: Yeah.
Rich Ziade: Perry Mason, he’s like, you’re, you’re a very convincing face. I, what he didn’t know is that 99% of lawyers are in the library and writing briefs.
Paul Ford: Or, or just like corporate contract law.
Rich Ziade: They’re not trial lawyers.
Paul ForD: Yeah [laughter].
Rich Ziade: But that’s not the point, the point is, yeah, education was about social and economic mobility.
Paul Ford: Well, and into, solidly into the middle class, maybe with a little opportunity to-
Rich Ziade: That was his, that was his hope that, you know, you could, you could do well there.
Paul Ford: Look, I, I think what’s difficult is, so first of all, if you’re very successful in the humanities, there are not solid, well understood career paths for you. So there is, I wanna be a writer, right? I always wanted to be a writer, I never assumed I could be, so I always had like a couple plan Bs going, I was good at computers and so on and so forth.
Rich Ziade: [00:06:00] Yeah. And, and you wanted to be a writer because you love to write.
Paul Ford: Love to write.
Rich Ziade: Not, oh, I can make a good living doing this.
Paul Ford: Never assumed I could make a living ever as a writer.
Rich Ziade: Ever?
Paul Ford: No, no.
Rich Ziade: Interesting.
Paul Ford:Terrible job, terrible job.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, yeah. Okay.
Paul Ford: I think like this is, there’s a, there, there’s sort of avocation and vocation, my father used to say this to me and my father was an English professor.
Rich Ziade: Ohh okayy.
Paul Ford: Yeah, uh, he came of our age in an era where you went to the Korean War.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, came back.
Paul Ford: Had the GI bill.
Rich Ziade: Right.
Paul Ford: Ended up with like a grad degree in fiction cause why not? You’re smart.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, yeah.
Paul Ford: And then without getting a PhD teaches you can just go get a job at like a good state college.
Rich Ziade: Yep.
Paul Ford: And, and be in the union and teach for your life.
Rich Ziade: Sure, yeah. That path is no longer available.
Paul Ford: Well, that’s the thing, all that infrastructure I just described and the full professorship and, it’s just gone, it’s just adjuncts, there are, [00:07:00] there’s an oversupply.
Rich Ziade: Yeah. I didn’t know that university was about creating a well-rounded individual till I got to university, till I got to college. I didn’t know that was a thing.
Paul Ford: What did you think college was?
Rich Ziade: I, I, I grew, I, we grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Um, not the most stable circumstances. Um, all I saw, uh, around college was that you built better skills to get a better job. That was my whole understanding of college. I was also a mess, uh, I was a little bit of a mess in high school, I got left back. I, I just had an authority problem, I still have that authority problem, but now I’m older so I don’t have to worry about it as much.
Paul Ford: Now you’re the authority.
Rich Ziade: Now I’m the authority a little bit. Um, and you know, guidance counselor wrote me in, I think I was like profiled as like, you know, drugs or troubled youth or whatever, and they’re like, sign this piece of paper and you start Brooklyn College in three days. I was like, really? That’s all I have [00:08:00] to do?
Paul Ford: God bless Brooklyn
Rich Ziade: CUNY uh, City University of New York, it was like $300 a semester.
Paul Ford: Yeah. I will always be a fan.
Rich Ziade: Let me tell you the best part of Brooklyn College.
Paul Ford: Okay.
Rich Ziade: And frankly, CUNY, uh, CUNY because, um, uh, which is what something called the core curriculum, 10 classes that you had to take no matter what your major was. \
Paul Ford: Okay.
Rich Ziade: And they included things like geology, philosophy.
Paul Ford: Sure.
Rich Ziade: Um, uh, it just ran the gamut.
Paul Ford: Okay, so you’re not gonna be reading poetry the whole four years you’re here, but you’re damn well gonna read a poem or two.
Rich Ziade: You’re gonna read a poem or two.
Paul Ford: Okay.
Rich Ziade: And the core curriculum, which just, you know, was like half your credits almost, it was, it was actually, as far as community college and state colleges go, it was very well regarded and I found it annoying at first. Because it felt like I was back in high school and I had to go to chemistry.
Paul Ford: Yeah.
Rich Ziade: But two years in, I was like, I see what this is and I [00:09:00] understand what this is and this isn’t about me getting a job only, um, it was about me being someone that saw the world a certain way and with wider eyes than just going and working, buying groceries and going home.
Paul Ford: They’re literally saying to you, “okay, you live in a society even though you may not even be aware that you do, so I need to show you this society”, and then a year two, you went, oh.
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: This is why you, you wanted me to see this.
Rich Ziade: I, I started to enjoy it.
Paul Ford: Of course.
Rich Ziade: Because I was, I was, I was so wrapped up in myself and home during high school that I, all my learning happened in, in, in undergrad, in college. I excelled, I, I won awards. I was like top of my class in, in political science, even though I wasn’t gonna– tell you how ignorant I was, political science, I thought was a good stepping stone for law school.
Paul Ford: Well, you, that was the, that was the path in front of you, you were told go be a [00:10:00] lawyer.
Rich Ziade: A lot of people say English major-
Paul Ford: English majors often make really good lawyers.
Rich Ziade: They make really good lawyers.
Paul Ford: There’s actually a lot of English majors all through the, uh, computer industry cause it’s, communication ends up being a huge part of it.
Rich Ziade: Let me ask you something.
Paul Ford: Okay.
Rich Ziade: Does this decline happen without the internet?
Paul Ford: Look, there’s a few things, first of all, it’s always up and down. I remember getting my English degree in, there were conversations about how English degrees were in decline.
Rich Ziade: [laughter].
Paul Ford: Uh, it is, no, look it, the sciences, you know, poetry is, is a lot of things it doesn’t cure cancer. It doesn’t, uh, it doesn’t get shoes made more cheaply.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, yeah.
Paul Ford: Uh, the things that incentivize human beings, human beings want a nice house and they, they like a, a piece of meat.
Rich Ziade: But they always liked that, why wasn’t there a decline in the sixties? You’re saying because there was infrastructure, because the GI bill was around, there was support systems in place to let you go, go and meander into the humanities.
Paul Ford: As far, the way that society sees the [00:11:00] humanities. Is as luxury.
Rich Ziade: Is it luxury?
Paul Ford : No.
Rich Ziade: What is it? It’s necessity is what you’re saying.
Paul Ford: What it, it’s– you need perspective in all things. And you need different perspectives and you need a toolkit that will allow you to have those different perspectives. I would say one of the things that makes me an extraordinarily good entrepreneur in partnership with you is that I bring 20 different perspectives.
Rich Ziade: Yes.
Paul Ford: To the conversations we have.
Rich Ziade: Yes, yes.
Paul Ford: Is that part of me of necessity? Sure, that’s part of who I am. Is that absolutely enhanced and was that affirmed by my career in the arts? Absolutely.
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: I learned that people see things lots of different ways, and then there was one point where I went, you know what if I take this part of my brain and I apply it to business over here where people are making money, that’s gonna be really interesting. And that’s as far as I could take it.
Rich Ziade: I mean, that was your instinct, not mine.
Paul Ford: Yes.
Rich Ziade: Which was [00:12:00] you looked at me and you said you are an operator.
Paul Ford: I knew that you understood money and you were smart, and I liked you. I knew a lot of people who understood money who were either dumb or mean.
Rich Ziade: Right [chuckles].
Paul Ford: And you were smart and nice.
Rich Ziade: Yeah [laughter].
Paul Ford: And I was like okay, you know what? I’m gonna go over here and I’m gonna look into the fricking game. There is a wonderful short story writer, his name is George Saunders, he writes, uh, these, okay.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, yeah.
Paul Ford: And so these very sort of ironic, uh, hilarious stories and, and the stories are all, capitalism just sort of like, and it’s, he nails aspects of just the bleakness, like a very funny way.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, yeah.
Paul Ford: And there’s this point where he describes, um, having jobs and like, I think he’s raising his kids, it’s in the New York Times article profile of him and he’s like, I had stared in the gaping mall capitalism, and I said to myself, sir, I want no truck with you.[00:13:00]
Rich Ziade: I don’t want what?
Paul Ford: Truck with you, I’m gonna just, I’m gonna go, I’m gonna get the hell out of this.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, yeah.
Paul Ford: Whatever this is, right? And, and my reaction was different, I was like, I wanna understand what that mall is all about, what’s-
Rich Ziade: I, I think you came at it like, like a bit like an anthropologist.
Paul Ford: I did.
Rich Ziade: Uh, you’re like, let me see what’s happening inside here, right? Like, I think there was part of it.
Paul Ford: Here is my, so my great betrayal in the humanity. So I’m a natural humanist, my dad was a professor, now my, my family kind of fell apart, I didn’t have a lot of money, but I definitely had an understanding that if one wanted to just focus on texts, that was okay. I wasn’t letting anybody down. It wasn’t like I was letting my parents down, they just kind of weren’t paying attention.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, I mean, your parents didn’t say go be a doctor.
Paul Ford: No, nobody said anything, they’re like, you’ll figure it out.
Rich Ziade: You, you, you didn’t speak to them about this?
Paul Ford: Yeah, no, no, no. I was like, I think I’ll be an English major, they were like “Oh, cool”.
Rich Ziade: That was the extent of it.
Paul Ford: They were both experimental poets, it wasn’t a stable childhood, but it was, you know, I was-
Rich Ziade: Interesting. Very, very [00:14:00] different than mine.
Paul Ford: Anything that I wanted to pursue seemed fine. You know, it wasn’t like there wasn’t a path towards happiness or stability, but you could certainly go and figure it out yourself.
Rich Ziade: I wanna over-index on, on something you said, um, because it sounds like we’re just talking about our lives, but I think you’re touching on something pretty important here. Uh, a little while ago you said that I wanted to understand all the other perspectives.
Paul Ford: Yes.
Rich Ziade: And I, I think what, what we have right now are experiences and tools and technologies that make it very difficult to pause and understand other perspectives.
Paul Ford: It’s actually seen as a sin.
Rich Ziade: Right.
Paul Ford: So you basically, I, you know, let’s take a look at, Twitter is always the canonical example, but Twitter is like the giant text box that everybody falls into, right?
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: And there’s kind of two camps [00:15:00] on, on Twitter, and you don’t even know what they are, you know them by what the other people call them. One, one camp has the, the, the woke mind virus okay. that’s the, you know, that’s the sort of like lefty group. I tend to fall more on that side.
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford:The other camp is MAGA.
Rich Ziade: Yeah.
Paul Ford: And that’s-
Rich Ziade: That is extreme stereotyping of both sides.
Paul Ford: And you kind of pick one side and then there’s a constant set of rules that are always being evolved on both sides.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, yeah.
Paul Ford: You know, Marjorie Taylor Green is calling for a national divorce of red states and blue states right now. And on the, on the other side, there’s always some special refinement of, of what it means to be progressive and how you should apologize, right? And so it’s infinite, and that’s humans, that’s just how we are, like I, I’m making fun of it, but that’s who we are.
Rich Ziade: No, but there is a– go ahead, finish your thought.
Paul Ford: It’s dumb.
Rich Ziade: It’s dumb.
Paul Ford: It’s dumb.
Rich Ziade: It, I mean, it’s, it’s dumb, and, and it’s funny, I, I know some people on both sides.
Paul Ford: Sure.
Rich Ziade: And they often, [00:16:00] share links to things and stuff that all it does is just throwing another piece of wood on the fire for them to just kinda keep it going. And the thing that they can’t hear, nobody seems to be able to hear, and by the way, I don’t think it’s only dumb people, I think this system of polarization is incredibly compelling and incredibly deceptive.
Paul Ford: No, I, let me be really clear, I don’t mean that the people are dumb, the world is. Like, when there’s, there’s a joke I made that, that whenever you add anybody to a group, you can subtract one IQ point. So when you have a national election in the United States, it’s a negative 150 million IQ events.
Rich Ziade: That sounds about right.
Paul Ford: Right? Like, it, it’s just people together tend to just become more and more this blobby mob.
Rich Ziade: I think, I think the way to put it, and, and this can land, this can bristle people on all sides equally, is that what has taken hold today is an intolerance.
Paul Ford: Yes.
Rich Ziade: The [00:17:00] word is intolerance. And you a progressive can’t tell me, well, I’m val– well, I’m very tolerant because the venom is equally poisonous in either direction coming out. And that I think is what for me, college was about, was gaining that perspective and gaining that understanding.
Paul Ford: That’s right.
Rich Ziade: Look, the political science department at Brooklyn College was about as left leaning as you’re gonna go.
Paul Ford: No no, like literally communists.
Rich Ziade: Literally communists.
Paul Ford: Like, like world experts in Marx inside of CUNY.
Rich Ziade: One of my classes had us reading the Port Huron statement, which is literally like Constitution 2.0
Paul Ford: Yeah.
Rich Ziade: From like Connecticut in the sixties.
Paul Ford: Sure, sure.
Rich Ziade: Like it was, it was, uh, Tom Hagan and like very progressive stuff.
Paul Ford: Oh yeah, not just, not just progressive, like Overthrow America Revolution.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like everything is wrong.
Paul Ford: Yeah.
Rich Ziade: And I, uh, but I, I [00:18:00] have to say, some of the most valuable conversations I had were pushing back because I couldn’t believe I was in America.
Paul Ford: Right.
Rich Ziade: I couldn’t believe, hold on. They’re telling me everything is wrong, and my semester at university was $300.
Paul Ford: Yes.
Rich Ziade: I couldn’t believe I was where I was. And so I get into these debates with them and they liked me and I won the political science award for my class that year, like look, a lot of it, my dad had a saying, he’s like, if you’re upset with someone and you really, you really need to give them a talking to, never do it in front of other people.
Paul Ford: Yeah, that’s right.
Rich Ziade: Like because when you do it in front of other people, you’re shaming them in front of others and they’re gonna lash back out at you.
Paul Ford: It’s real, if you take someone aside and you say, I think this needs to change, they’re like, yeah, you’re probably right. If you do it in front of someone else, they’re like, let me tell you the 25 things about you.
Rich Ziade: Exactly, and what the internet [00:19:00] is is 500 million people.
Paul Ford: It is 500, it is, and that’s the whole point of it.
Rich Ziade: You got it wrong [laughter], me saying to you, you got it wrong in front of 500 million other people.
Paul Ford: Let me take this in a funny direction, then I’ll tell you why an English degree is worthwhile and why, why? And then we should talk about why-
Rich Ziade: Sorry Paul, we seem to have run out of time.
Paul Ford: Yeah, exactly. . . [chuckles].
Rich Ziade: [laughter].
Paul Ford: So Rich, I’m on the train there’s posters, uh, all over for shen yun know what shen yun is?
Rich Ziade: It’s a dance performance.
Paul Ford: It’s advertised everywhere in New York City, it’s called China before Communism shen yun 2023. It’s like the same people who are behind falun gong.
Rich Ziade: I don’t know what that is.
Paul Ford: It’s they’re anti the current government of China in the US.
Rich Ziade: Got it.
Paul Ford: And so they, they fund these kind of cultural exhibits.
Rich Ziade: I, I think it should be something that is, prioritized because I think it is an antidote to a lot of the mechanism, the [00:20:00] polarizing mechanisms that we live with today. I think that’s real. And how do you do it? How are you gonna do it? I think it starts, frankly, in high school.
Paul Ford: See, the problem is we have a, the way that we fund education, the way that we operate culturally, nobody wants to do this.
Rich Ziade: Of course.
Paul Ford: They want to keep, they wanna keep it polarized.
Rich Ziade: I get it, I totally get it and I understand it. Um-
Paul Ford: But you’re saying there’s a moral imperative here.
Rich Ziade: I mean you said it before and it sounded loftier than you probably meant it, but, um, we can all pursue our ambitions, but also be decent people who can empathize with other people. I think the humanities is grounded in that in a lot of ways.
Paul Ford: Well, empathy is, is core, right? Like that you’re gonna read and, and participate in things and connect to them even though the people who created them are imperfect or even sometimes awful. But you’re gonna figure something out about being a human this way.
Rich Ziade: We are staring at the other side through the same lens 24 hours a day.
Paul Ford: Yeah.
Rich Ziade: And that you can’t dislodge, families have been torn apart.
Paul Ford: It’s real, your [00:21:00] brain just gets smaller and smaller, you start to just, you become a set of rules and, and routines.
Rich Ziade: You can’t stomach another perspective, you get, you get vis, like viscerally nauseous at the idea of another of something else that’s contrary to how you see the world. It’s kind of insane.
Paul Ford: That’s true.
Rich Ziade: I know really, really smart people who lose their minds when you give ’em an opinion.
Paul Ford: I went to a holiday event once with a, with a family and, uh, I, I named the magazine that I worked for and a guy like turned his back.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, yeah.
Paul Ford: Like, and you’re just like, uh, I don’t know man, I’m just, I’m just here to have some fruit cake.
Rich Ziade: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Paul Ford: But okay, okay, ight?
Rich Ziade: Um, I think we gave advice on this episode to the world.
Paul Ford: What would you say if your, if, uh, your son and daughter is like, I think I’m gonna give an English degree?
Rich Ziade: That’s fine.
Paul Ford: Yeah, I know, me too.
Rich Ziade: It’s fine, I won’t have a problem with that.
Paul Ford: We’ll figure it, we’ll figure it out.
Rich Ziade: Last thought, just to kind of, uh, punctuate everything we’ve been saying, you wanna look [00:22:00] at the other extreme of like extremely controlled education and information that’s given to people, just go look at some of the worst countries in the world. That’s exactly what they, it’s state censored, controlled information and people are just hungry for anything else.
Paul Ford: This is, you know, what happens is you say that and then like a million people are immediately, like America does its own propaganda, but it’s nothing like Putin on the, when they do like celebrations In Russia.
Rich Ziade: We’re, we all have our flaws, right?
Paul Ford: Yeah.
Rich Ziade: But if, if I want another perspective, I can go get one pretty easily.
Paul Ford: You can, you are one web search away from a totally different perspective, at any given time.
Rich Ziade: People are seeking it out less and less, and that’s why I think we have to embed it in education.
Paul Ford: Yeah. Well, alright, well, we, we solved it and we solved the American education crisis. Uh, good for us.
Rich Ziade: I mean, this was a doozy.
Paul Ford: [laughter].
Rich Ziade: Play this one back over again.
Paul Ford: [00:23:00] Woo.
Rich Ziade: Send it to, I don’t know who the head of education is…
Paul Ford: Oh, I don’t want to go deal with a bunch of academics. That’s exhausting.
Rich Ziade: Fine [chuckles].
Paul Ford: Okay, if you have any questions, hello@ziadeford.com.
Rich Ziade: Follow us on @Ziadeford on Twitter and give us five stars wherever you listen to podcasts.
Paul Ford: Alright friends, we’ll talk to you soon.
Rich Ziade: Have a lovely day.
Paul Ford: Bye.