Rob Henderson: An Internet Academic
North Star Podcast
Rob Henderson is one of my favorite up-and-coming writers. I like him because he's one of those people who doesn't fit into a category. He's a Ph.D. candidate in psychology, but I met him in a book club about technological stagnation. He's spent years in the academy, first at Yale and now at Cambridge, but most of his influence comes from his online writing. Most of all, he's interested in human nature. In particular, psychology, status, and social class.
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Chrisman Frank and Ana Lorena Fabrega: How Childhood Education Will Change
North Star Podcast
This week, I have two guests. Both are affiliated with Synthesis, a new kind of online school where kids learn through games and simulations. One is Chrisman Frank, the CEO of Synthesis. The other is Ana Lorena Fabrega, who is their Chief Evangelist.
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Ash Fontana: Building Artificial Intelligence
North Star Podcast
Ash Fontana is an entrepreneur, investor, and author. As an entrepreneur, he was only of the early employees at an online investing platform called AngelList. From there, he became the Managing Director at Zetta, the first investment fund focused on artificial intelligence. Now, he's the author of the AI-First Company.
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Li Jin: Creating the Creator Economy
North Star Podcast
My guest today is Li Jin, the founder and managing partner at an early-stage venture capital firm called Atelier.
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Zena Hitz: Liberal Arts Thinking
North Star Podcast
My guest today is Zena Hitz, a tutor at St John’s and the author of an excellent book called Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. Her book explores the meaning and the value of learning for its own sake, through images and stories of bookworms, philosophers, scientists, and other learners, both fictional and historical.
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Tiago Forte and Will Mannon: Building Cohort-Based Courses
North Star Podcast
I have two guests today: Tiago Forte and Will Mannon.
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Gagan Biyani: Building Silicon Valley Startups
North Star Podcast
My guest today is Gagan Biyani, the current CEO of an education startup that helps teachers run Cohort-Based Courses on the Internet and has students from around the world. Gagan also founded a multi-billion dollar online education platform called Udemy. Afterward, he founded Sprig, a food delivery platform that grew to a nine-digit valuation but eventually failed. So today, he has the distinct pleasure of being both the founder of a unicorn and the founder of a massive failure.
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Trevor Bauer: Playing Professional Baseball
North Star Podcast
My guest today is Trevor Bauer, who is arguably the very best pitcher in Major League Baseball. I wanted to interview Trevor not only because he's an excellent pitcher, but because he takes a radical approach to the game. He's a physicist and a scientist. A scholar and an entrepreneur. And you don't find that combination very often.
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Nik Sharma: Building DTC Companies
North Star Podcast
My guest today is Nik Sharma, the founder of Sharma Brands and an advisor to companies like Judy and Cha Cha Matcha. Nik is one of my very best friends, and my go-to person for all things commerce. Since we first met, we've spent hours exploring the future of marketing and commerce together, and recorded this podcast to give you a window into what our conversations are like.
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Kevin Kelly: Seeing the Future
North Star Podcast
My guest today is Kevin Kelly, who co-founded Wired Magazine in 1993 and served as its Executive Editor for the first seven years. As one of the most important futurists of our generation, he's published a number of books including The Inevitable, What Technology Wants, and New Rules for the New Economy which is my favorite one. Coolest of all, he's also a founding member of the board of the Long Now Foundation, a non-profit devoted to encouraging long-term thinking.
info_outlineMy guest today is Zena Hitz, a tutor at St John’s and the author of an excellent book called Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. Her book explores the meaning and the value of learning for its own sake, through images and stories of bookworms, philosophers, scientists, and other learners, both fictional and historical.
That’s the jumping-off point for this episode. We also talked about the relationship between religion and the Liberal Arts, why studying the Liberal Arts has become so unfashionable among average people, and how an essay about Oedipus Rex inspired her to become an intellectual.
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Show Notes
1:37 - What about Oedipus Rex grabbed Zena's attention and inspired her to pursue intellectualism.
7:05 - What Zena sees as a "good" question in an intellectual frame, and why good materials can get you to them more easily.
9:55 - Why the most profound questions won't show up at the beginning of your inquiry, and how the common person's depth of inquiry has seemed to dwindle since the past.
13:19 - How Zena maintains her attention reading books when it is so easy to be distracted.
17:00 - Why it is decadent, complacent, and undermining to ourselves and our community to pursue education only in what will get us work.
23:53 - How people pursued lifelong learning in the past and why it's even more viable of an option today.
28:07 - What Zena hopes to give to the world at large through her work.
33:51 - How the monumental shifts in wealth and inequality have hindered people's ability to contemplate ideas they deem important.
36:20 - The differences in solitary and communal efforts to contemplate intellectual topics.
39:40 - Why we shouldn't be consuming books, but rather engaging directly with them.
44:03 - Why Zena believes that the idea of a patriarchal or caucasian canon is a myth.
49:02 - How education is a means of training your mind while simultaneously freeing it.
53:04 - The affinity between the liberal arts and religion.
55:11 - Where Zena learned how to write and why she has trouble writing if she doesn't have an audience.
58:42 - How to use writing to improve your thinking.
1:01:30 - Why St. John's has deliberately set itself apart from research universities.
1:05:33 - The crisis in Zena's life that kicked off her political thinking and essays, and why she believes that our current institutions are becoming increasingly disconnected from our humanity.
1:13:23 - What brought Zena to religion when there is a historic amount of people leaving it.