Podcast Business News Network
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Broadcasting from the business capital of the world, this is the Podcast Business News Network.
Nothing better than signing on to the computer and seeing your friend Dr. Grant Menel will here on a Monday afternoon or morning, depending where you're located. So excited to have him here to talk more and we're always grateful that he's our professional of the year and owner of Art Molecular Concepts. I mean, he has an amazing memoirs that he's been writing. If you've heard of him or haven't, boy, oh, boy, the amount of lectures and books he's published and articles. He is someone you need to know and I'm gonna relate him to like an Albert Einstein type of genius, which he is. Always good to see you and thank you for being here today, looking all dapper. And I know you have some great stuff for us planned.
What's happening?
I'm thinking about education this morning because there's no other topic really in a civilization. That's the only issue that there is to talk about. And if we don't have an educational enterprise, we're dead in the water as a civilization. Nothing happens anywhere in our lives without education. I'm noticing that the, I think, the educational, the people that are in education today, whether it's pre-kindergarten or up to through college, through graduate school,
I think there's a little bit of discouragement out there. And I'd like to reframe what is obviously to me causing the discouragement. And I was fortunate enough to get my latest edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education, which came out on Friday. So I'm gonna read a couple of sentences out of that. Uh, so I'm putting on my glasses so I can read. Um, but I, I think first, I need to just say some words. Um, I saw 16 minutes last night.
Oh, what was on?
Very relevant to what I'm talking about, to what I'm always talking about. It's called, uh, chameleon carriers. It's about truck enterprises that change their identities every three weeks to stay ahead of the authorities that regulate trucking. And so they change their names, their identities, so that they can escape, uh, being regulated. Uh, this is more of a issue today in, in all fields. But it also has to do with what persuades us as the public is a story we need to be paying attention with.
Obviously, CBS thought that was an important story, and I did too. When I saw it, it really gripped me. Um, because the, the current administration wants less administration. I mean, the current administration wants less and less regulation. So that people can make more money without having to spend it on being aware of environmental impacts, human impacts, impacts to the economy. But, uh, let, let me get here to the, the nitty gritty.
Sure.
It all has to do with what I call, what's the story? What's my story? What's your story? That really is the basis of our human communication in all societies across the world. And I've been to European, South American, African societies. That still is the bottom line is what's your story? Part of my purpose in going to West Africa and Ghana was to...
Tell the story of African history that's been, some of it has been lost in the African countries because of European domination over the last few hundred years, back to 1492, actually.
I'm not being so vainful as to say I know all the stories, but I know some of the stories that are missing. The story has to do with what I call responsibility, namely, what is my responsibility as a living being on this planet, in this solar system, inside of the Oort belt?
What's everybody's story? Well, it's obvious that there needs to be a group story for every group, because that's how people can relate to one another, is through their group's story. We have a group's story that has many names. One name is "The American Dream", and it's based upon, well, that is the mythology of America. So quickly, I'm reviewing what a mythology, what mythology is about. And Professor,
the professor at University of Chicago, who was professor of religion and then mythology, really cleared us up on that. It's a, it really is a construction of meaning. Now, that takes it out of the realm of fairy tales. But we do choose the fairy tales that we want our children and their children and our progeny to remember and incorporate, because that's what holds the whole civilization together. There's been a lot of talk about civilization, modern civilization, like, do we want to vomit into the Dark Ages, the Stone Age? And that doesn't sound like a very good idea.
We don't want our civilization, but our civilization is a part of all of the Earth's civilizations. The one responsibility everyone has that I think comes to people like me...
As we put on rings, like a tree, a tree ring, we put on more years of life. And so we keep asking ourselves, well, I've been here for a few decades. Been here for a few minutes. What does it all mean at this stage? I'm realizing for me, it means I have a life and I've been in it for all of my life. And my life is my responsibility.
Yeah.
So my question is, do I have the right? With this God-given life, if I could put it like that.
Do I have the right to let someone else be responsible for my life? For my choices? For my decisions? For how I want to live? What do I want to achieve? So that is the background of really what I want to get into. I touch on that every time we talk anyway. But it has to do with, who is the author of your life? Like every book has an author. The background of my podcast is my book called "The Modern War." Four volumes of eBooks. You can find them on Apple, Barnes & Noble, Amazon.
And the title is, "Footprints in the Chaotic Unknown."
Alright.
Art, Science, Kinfolk and Oracles. And that really is not just my story, but how my story relates to and evolved from the stories of ancestors. And there's more ancestors that we all have that we don't even imagine or know about. So I sit here and my audience, you look at me and I represent millions of ancestors. But we all, each of us tends to draw more from certain ancestors than others. In how we look? How we behave? What interests us? What makes us fear?
Everything comes down to that ancestral timeline.
Um, so the book, uh, Footprints, I, I didn't have that title when I started it. It didn't come out until the last year or so before I, I published volume one, separate from the others as a hard copy book. Well, this, in the meantime, this article comes out in The Chronicle of Higher Education and the, the front article really got me going. It really got my juices stirred up.
Uh huh.
Because it touched on everything I have ever dealt with in my life. Um, let's see, I'm looking for the, here it is, the start of it. The title, uh, by the author who, who works for The Chronicle of Higher Education, uh, Karen Fisher, the, it's called Why the Case for College?
Okay.
Isn't Cutting It? Isn't that an interesting title? And, and it implies a lot of things. Uh, wha- what are we trying to cut? What is college trying to cut anyway? So the sub-subtitle is the sales pitch higher it has used for decades is unraveling. Oh, that's an interesting start. So I get into the first paragraph or two. And it says, this is reading circle time. For years, there's been a dominant narrative about college.
Earning a degree is the surest pathway to the American dream. So the question is, what's that?
Then the next paragraph, it's the story higher education told about itself.
And it's the story others told. Eight in ten college freshmen said getting a better job was a primary reason for enrolling in college. Nearly as many said they were there for training for a specific career. Great. Lawmakers, employers, and college rankers all leaned on postgraduate outcomes as a measure of quality. The argument had the virtue of being true. Okay. Red bell, red flag. What does that mean? Being true? What is truth?
So that's what I decided to look up online just before airtime. To look up the etymology and the linguistic origin of truth. And it goes back to a definition I saw like forty or fifty years ago. When I was teaching chemistry at Cal Poly on the central coast of California. And I looked up the proto Indo-European root of true and truth. And it has to do with the same root as the word tree. Okay. Everybody's seen a tree.
Well, the word for truth comes from that part of the European language structure that is the word tree. Okay. Why? It makes sense. Well, a tree seems to be very sturdy. It's very stable. And so it's only right that truth should really be related to a tree. Particularly, I think of a redwood tree. Can get to be thousands of years old. Yeah, right. Hundreds of feet tall and grows up along the coast of California and in the Sierra Nevadas, the sequoia trees. So that's, that's the background here. So.
Argument had the virtue of being true that going to college is the gate to the American dream. Red flags. Now, that would not have passed muster with the rabbinical councils, whose job is to reinterpret scripture every 100 years or 50 years to test whether or not the interpretations are still true. So they developed a methodology that comes right from the Talmud, and that methodology is critical thinking writ large. Critical thinking isn't just any old thinking style where you just sit down and you're critical of something. That's not what it means.
It means you are measuring the interpretation of text, scripture, based upon our most stringent ways of ascertaining truth. And, and that's what's going on here is how do we interpret an article, any article that we read? So that's what went to work. My critical thinking came out here. Oh, uh, the argument had the virtue of being true that, um, anyway, postgraduate outcomes measure quality.
All right.
Uh, college graduates have historically made better starting salaries and higher lifetime earnings than those who with just a high school diploma. Jobless rates were lower. Applicants without a degree on their resume often are winnowed out of the hiring pool. There's a lot of claiming right there, but it hasn't been critically analyzed. It gives the appearance, I'll say the verisimilitude, the appearance of truth, because it cites a few pieces of data. But how do we know the data?
True.
Did the reader collect the data? Did the author of the article collect the data? Well, obviously, the author collected, looked at some data and drew some conclusions about the data. That takes me to the, my next big point is about information.
Which we categorize using laundry labels, different categories of information about nature, about ourselves, about society. There's two main variables in information. There's information that we call data-driven and information that we could call intuitive or information that we can adduce or induce from data, maybe, but certainly from experience. And that really is what we need to grapple with because the, the news media has been
through, uh, changes in curriculum over the last eighty-something years since World War II. After World War II, college education began to get greater stress in American society because we had, we had a couple of million, uh, troops over in Europe, uh, fighting for our lives. Yeah. In America, we had, uh, hundreds of thousands in the Asian theater trying to save our lives as a nation. Those people, those mainly men, came back, but they had to get jobs. They'd been away for several months or
Oh, yeah. Three years somewhere else. So, women stayed to take over many of the jobs, certainly the industrial positions, the manufacturing positions. And then the women stepped aside to go back home to take care of the children when the men, men got back. That's when the GI Bill came about to encourage the returning GIs to go complete a college education. Well, nobody asked.
For a degree to be the main qualification for a job.
That kind of came about, and I don't think anyone really knows how it came about. But applying some critical thinking, it affected how we did business, how we educated in America after that. So I think that's what we really want to look at for the last oh, ten or fifteen minutes or so. Um, and it revolves around what I just said. There's this duality between data and intuition. And they're always resonating with one another. But how do we know how to distinguish data from intuition?
And induced knowledge and reasoning? That must be a central teaching of an education. How we do that? And I think last week I mentioned, we have to be able to put learning in terms of our physical senses and our intuitive sense to make it really powerful and give us understanding. And avoid mistakes like going to war when the technology is so advanced that every nation on earth can damage every other nation on earth.
You don't need an atomic bomb to go damage another nation. All you need is a good ship ticket or an airplane ticket to get around anywhere and pour the wrong stuff in the wrong place in a certain country that you want to destabilize and you can wipe out millions of people in an instant. Such is the power of chemistry, my friends.
To do good as well as to do evil. Such is my responsibility as a chemist.
To guide the conversation about that. But we're also saved by something in physics called the uncertainty principle, which was developed by people like uh, uh, Heisenberg in Germany, uh, uh, before World War II. And the uncertainty principle says, when you have a dual system like intuition and data, you have to be aware of the amount of uncertainty in each hole of that duality. Because that's what enables you to utilize intuition and data properly.
Well, it was originally applied in physics to the momentum of an elementary particle in connection with its, I think, uh, velocity. I think it's mass. Let me start.
I have, I have to reach that, but these
position, that's what it is. You can have a particle like an electron that has a position. And so you can say, oh, it's sitting right there. Using your instrumentation. And it's traveling at a certain velocity in that direction. And you can measure the velocity. But the uncertainty principle says you cannot know the position of that particle exactly if you try to know the velocity. You can't know both at the same time with equal certainty. Now, we do that every day in our lives, but we don't realize we may be doing that. And we're doing that in our conversations about
everything important for a society to survive. And we're there today. We're not looking at the impact of our politics. That we, the people, have created. And when the politics goes sour, it's not doing what it's supposed to do. Representatives in Congress are not even in office today. They're off somewhere, lollagagging around because their, their speaker of the House is off, says, "Don't come on, we don't want you here." They're doing that for a reason, they think, to hold on to power, to something like that. But these two variables are out. For what it is for political power and
maybe it's money.
Budget. That you, you can't do both at the same time. It's like what President Lyndon Johnson used to say, "You gotta be able to walk and chew gum at the same time to make your life work the way it's supposed to work." Well, the government is not walking and chewing gum at the same time anymore. That is a direct consequence of the uncertainty principle. The other part of the uncertainty principle in physics is the time that an elementary particle exists and the energy state that it's in.
But you can't know both energy and time of existence at the same instant. If you know one better, you can't know the other. That's where we are in education. And the educators, because they're not educated uniformly on the uncertainty principle, even if they're physicists, they may not think to apply that to educational curriculum. Now, that, that's where we are today. So this article is filled with claims.
Only on the data side and interpreting the data out of individual commentators.
But there's no universal understanding about the language, the story that all citizens are telling themselves. So it's good to ask ourselves, well, what's our story? What's our nation's story?
Have we got the stories together? No, not anymore. And I think that's what's frustrating everyone. We think someone else is supposed to be in charge of that. That comes to responsibility. What is my responsibility? What is Jill's responsibility? What is our listeners' responsibility? It is to ask critical questions. That give important answers to the people we have empowered to govern the society. That's practically the whole message here. Parts of the government has been saying, we cannot study any longer certain curriculum.
If we don't like it, it's never been that way. Well, it has, but not like now. And I've never been the kind of teacher that tolerates government or my school administrators for telling me how I'm supposed to teach. I went to grad school and undergrad school for 10 years. I could put some pretty good adjectives in front of for 10 years. But I also went to eighth through 12 education for like 11 or 12 years. So I know a little bit about education. So where does that put us now, Jill? I think, I think we're making a point here.
You're good and you're so good to worry about time. Yeah, yeah, we're, we're good. We're over, we got two more minutes left. We're already over by six minutes, but go ahead.
How many minutes? Three minutes, four minutes?
Go, go, go.
Persia is the nation of the day today.
Because someone in our government and many someones have said, "We think Persia, Iran should be wiped off the face of the earth."
Ah.
Now, not only is that rude.
Mm-hmm, horrible, yeah.
Done anymore, because war is not an option.
Certainly not wars that last on and on and on.
And I've been through too many of those wars. I was, I was a kid in, oh, fifth grade, fourth grade, when we were in Korea, locked up in that war. But I was born during World War II. So my whole being is pretty tired of war. So I'm pretty vocal about that. Uh, when I say Iran, I'm really talking about Persia. We know more about Persia from reading the Old Testament of the King James Bible than anything else. Because in many ways, it's the most important history of the Jewish people during one of the diasporas.
The diaspora after the upper-middle classes of Jews were captured and removed from Jerusalem and spirited away to Babylon, where they stayed for a few hundred years. But it was in that time that the, the Book of Ruth and other important books were written that talked about the dynamics of the Jewish people back then, that brought some of their main powers and capabilities to be at service to the Western civilization that we've created. And then they were allowed to go back home by King Xerxes I, one of those, and, and the Book of Daniel
was written around that time and all that. I'm saying all this is hooked up. So it doesn't serve us well when a leader suddenly starts saying, "Well, just bomb someone out of existence." Well, if that someone is Iran, you're talking about the Bible.
You're talking about something very sacred. And education is the most sacred. Gift from, if I can put it like that, the universe, the Creator, the humankind. So we have to take care that it is practiced properly and goodly to produce full human beings.
Beautifully said. We'll have to wrap it up on that note if we can. How do you want to leave off for today, darling?
I think I'm done.
I think so. Great job. How do we contact you? Thank you so much, Grant.
Okay, you're welcome, Jill, and thank you for the opportunity.
GrantVenerable.com. Look him up. Google his name. You'll find so much more on him. And thank you. Don't forget, check out the memoirs. We'll talk more about that, too, again, next time. Enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you again for being here, Grant. We'll talk soon.
Bye.
Hi, this is Terry Crews, actor, former football player, game show host, father of five, and all-around big dude. I'm also an expert on drama. I know all kinds of drama. There's the good kind that comes with having a house full of kids. There's the bad kind, like season-ending injuries. There's the necessary kind, like having an agent in Hollywood. And there's silly drama, like the drama around my percolating pectorals. And then there's the drama you can skip.
Skip the drama that comes with not having your high school diploma or equivalency. Find free adult education classes near you and finish your high school diploma. Visit finishyourdiploma.org.
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Page updated November 13, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
