14133 Jill Nicolini Interviews Dr. Grant Venerable Author, Artist, Teacher and Chemical Scientist at ArtMolecular Concepts, LLC

Broadcasting from the business capital of the world, this is the Podcast Business News Network. Welcome back to the show. Dr. Graham Venerable, joining us, our professional of the year. Excited to have him, as always, talking about his life, his work, his career, his memoirs, his inspiration, and all he continues to do to contribute to society today. Thank you, Graham, for being here. How are you doing?

My pleasure. I'm fine. I'm revved up this morning.

Great, great. Say hello. What's going on? What are we going to talk about today?

We're going to talk about critical thinking.

Okay. Oh, my God, tell me.

It's been the elephant in the room ever since we've been talking. So I thought I'd just throw the covers off of it.

Oh, my gosh.

And express what that means. What does it mean in everyday life? I think that's the important part. It's not just something abstract that isolated scholars do or hermits in a cave do. It's what all citizens must do, can do. So we're going to get right to the memoir, right to the prologue, which I've touched on before. And the memoir is Footprints in the Chaotic Unknown. And the subtitle is Art, Science, Oracles, and Kinfolk. And I want to start with some of my kinfolk.

And it's the prologue of this memoir. And it's a letter based upon a letter that some of my cousins in the Central Valley of California discovered when they went back to Kansas, no, went back to Kentucky to search for ancestors and get more about their story. And the ancestors I want to talk about at the beginning are... Lucy Scott and her daughter, Ari Scott. Now Lucy was, was born back in the seventeen eighties.

And then her daughter, Ari, was born around nineteen ten in Kentucky. Uh, but that's an interesting story because there's very few families that are their heritage can tell the detailed story that I acquired here in this letter. This letter was written by Lucy to her dear daughter, Ari. Uh, really to ask Ari to mend her ways so that she can get into heaven when the time comes. Uh, so it really is about what was going on at that time in Kentucky.

The letter was written about eighteen fifty-six. Now that's, that's a while ago. In fact, it was before the Civil War. And Kentucky was a real hotspot in the nation. There was a big river on its northern boundary called the Ohio River. And in the folklore of that area, it was referred to as the River Jordan, which is a very biblical river to refer to. So the people of that day who were religious people, particularly Christian people, the River Jordan was, had an important impact on people's lives.

The, let me, let me pick up some of the, the reading here from the prologue. Uh, this prologue and what the letter describes is generalizable to the sit- so, uh, situation of innumerable American families across the southern United States. It is a time space that no longer exists.

But a moment that preceded one of the greatest migrations in American history, the Exodus of 1879. This was a migration of citizens from southern states bordering the Mississippi River into Kansas and eventually into beckoning frontiers beyond. Their westward movement was driven not by a search for jobs, as with later migrations, but by something just as basic, namely, the fervent desire to live free from bondage, to exercise free agency in a land that promised new, if uncertain, opportunities.

And that gets to Isabel Wilkerson's book that on, uh, she wrote her book on, here it is, right here. The Warmth of Other Suns, The Epic Story of America's Great Migrations. Readers who enjoyed the Pulitzer Prize-winning work will appreciate parallel migrant experiences in some ways very similar, yet in many ways different from those in Venerable's writings, my writings.

Except, Venerable includes historic photographs that bring to life his own ancestors and their momentous sojourns, especially those in the Great Migration of 1879 from Kentucky to Kansas. Taken together, both mutually, uh, both Wilkerson and Venerable's works offer important complementary, mutually reinforcing messages that beg revelation that this very problematic, if also promising moment of American history. Venerable offers insights into such recent problematic moments centered

Around fetal viability tied to fetal heartbreath, legislation in his home state of Georgia, where I was living at the time, and anti-affirmative action lawsuits from University of California Baki case in 1978 to the Harvard Asian Bias case in 2018. Now, that takes me to another article

that gets us close on this issue of critical thinking. Um, what we're going to deal with is, I'm going to do some replies to what I read. In fact, that's what my prologue has in this letter from Lucy to Ari. And I'm like the offstage voice that speculates on what's happening in the letter. What is Lucy referring to? What is Ari saying? What are the implications of what she says? Well, in critical thinking, we have to be careful to look at the right data. Some data is implied. Other data is real. And some data just doesn't exist.

It's just a fabrication. But we're going to talk about that as I read a few lines out of this recent article. Um, I want to talk about truth versus sometimes purported truth, which we call propaganda. Propaganda is based more on the subjective domain of thinking. What do people, what is their opinion? And truth is supposed to be objective, something that can be validated among many people looking at the same reality. And so this article, I like the way it starts. It's a good article.

But I'm gonna be the backstage voice, the offstage voice. It starts with the title. Yeah, let me get to the title. Why the Case for College Isn't Cutting It? The Sales Pitch Higher Ed Has Used for Decades Is Unraveling. So, right now, critical thinking wakes up and says, wait a minute. What did you just say? So that's what I'm gonna do here as we go into this reading. For years, there's been a dominant narrative about college. Earning a degree is the surest pathway to the American dream.

Critical thinking requires that one ask before you go any further, what do you mean for years? What does that mean? Do you mean five years? Fifty years? Five hundred years? And then a dominant narrative about college. Dominant with whom? That's the way we should be doing all of our readings, is to come back in our own voice and ask, what do you mean? Then it says, earning a degree is the surest pathway to the American dream. What's the American dream? Are we talking about the same thing? There's 300 million Americans. 200 million of them are adults, are practically adults, and they all have a different vision of the American dream.

So what good is this sentence? So we go on. It's the story higher education told about itself. That's what the article is about. And it's the story others told. Eight in 10 college freshmen said getting a better job was a primary reason for enrolling. Nearly as many said they were there for training for a specific career. So the little icon that sits on your shoulder is waving its arms. Wait, wait, wait, hold, fold the bell here. What do you mean? How do you know? It's the story told. And then it says, eight in 10 colleges. Where do you get this data?

Is that implied data? Is it real data? Is it objective? Does it have a statistical analysis behind it? Now we get at some of the... Even in higher education, how people write papers, particularly around people and groups of people. We're not always that careful in being as strict as, say, people in the physical sciences, which is what I was trained in at UCLA and the University of Chicago. So we get down further. So lawmakers, employers, and college rankers

all leaned on postgraduate outcomes as a measure of quality. Well, yeah, I can say, I guess that's true, but what is the measure? The argument had the virtue of being true, or seemed true. Last week, we talked about, what is the, it pissed, what is, what's the ontological, not ontological? What is the origin linguistically of truth? And, and we talked about a tree last week. If you look in the etymology of truth,

it comes from proto-indo-centric European languages. And it turns out that truth and tree are come, come from the same root word in those languages, which basically, it's not specific or direct, but it gives us an idea that by truth, we mean something that's really substantial. It's, it doesn't move like a tree. It's stable. It's sturdy. So that, that's the whole idea behind truth. So interesting study of etymology.

College graduates have historically made better starting salaries and higher lifetime earnings. Okay. I'll wait. I want to see the data. Show me the data about that. But right there, that's an interpretation of the data. Jobless rates were lower. Applicants with, without a degree on their resume were often winnowed out of the hiring pool. Lately, though, how lately? That story has begun to unravel. Recent college graduates are struggling to find work with an unemployment rate of 5.6%. Significantly higher than for older graduates or for all workers.

I see the point, but here, here's this little, this little being on my shoulder saying, waving his arms, wait, wait, wait, wait. 5.6%? That's pretty specific. Where does it come from? How do you get it? What does it mean? How do you know it? It means all these things. Many are in jobs that don't match their education levels. Most of my good jobs did not match my education level as such. In other words, for 15 years, I was a vice president. I didn't go into school to learn how to be a vice president. I was at three different universities with the title of vice president.

But I was vice president for all of the academic activities of those universities. In other words, I was the principal, like at a high school. The principal runs the academics. The school superintendent is like the, the president of the school. And he has many schools that he's president for. So that gets us warmed up for our subject. Lately, though, that storyline has begun to unravel. And we need to know more about that. What do we mean by unraveling? Well, what was the storyline? How did it unravel? So, and then this unemployment rate, the college going premium, that word premium,

the wage differential between degree holders and those with less formal education is four percentage points lower today than it was a century ago.

So it's saying something isn't working right in going to college. "The rapid pace of technological change, in particular advancements in artificial intelligence, and a mismatch between what students study and what employers are looking for are among the causes," economists said. "It's hard to imagine a worse time for higher education. Higher education's most potent and durable argument: to lose credibility. Public opinion is at near lows, while political attacks on colleges have intensified." And so it all comes down, okay, here's this little icon on my shoulders waving his arms

again, it's saying, "Hold up, what do you mean here?" Okay, I want to get further down to, "What do we mean?" "Our value proposition that has worked for decades isn't cutting it anymore," said this professor in faculty affairs at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. He says, "No longer meets the moment." Well, I could say very little of my higher education met the moment because frankly, I did not go to college to get a job. And I think on one of my first podcasts, that's what I said.

"I went to college to develop my learning in something I enjoy doing. I wanted to learn as much as I could about science, chemical science, physics, physical science, mathematics." So still, it can be difficult to conceive of an alternative case, one that would be widely convincing the students, parents, and politicians alike. For many Americans, the idea that a degree and beyond that, a good job, is the return

you are owed for your investment, you are owed for your investment of time and money in your studies is as much as accepted truth as Earth's orbit around the sun.

So I'm saying, wow, that's a bold statement and conclusion. Um, I did learn a lot about Earth's orbit around the sun. Cause I took an elective course in physics, but I didn't go to college. I, I, I took the course when I, I said, oh, this looks fun. I think I'll take it. But that course helped me immensely by the time I got to graduate school. And really how to think through complex systems, problems. So we come to something and, and another statement here. Right now, uh, an associate professor of education, public policy at the University of Delaware

said, almost all debates about college begin and end with ROI. Return on investment.

Yep.

Well, of course he's talking about the money, the money, honey. And what is that about?

Yep.

Well, I wasn't thinking like that. So maybe I was all wet, didn't understand. I should have been looking for a major that was going to make me some money. I wasn't interested in those majors. I actually was raised in a household where we children had freedom of choice. Why? Because my parents wanted us to have freedom of choice with how we lived our lives. Now that gets me to a real, uh, turn point at my time in graduate school. Talking about return on investment.

I had a little comeuppance in my first year of graduate school sometime around 1965, 1966. And it was a different school from what I was used to. Plus it was a private school. So it had different customs from University of California where I did my undergrad. But I was being shown why my professors at UCLA did not counsel

Mm hmm.

UCLA students to stay at UCLA.

Yeah.

For a graduate education because it needed to broaden your experience from another school's view of the subject, how they teach the subject. Well, It just so happens that the Chicago professors on the whole were just not as exciting in their presentations as the UCLA professors as a whole. And I got used to the UCLA presentation and did very well. And so I kinda was in a state of, oh, dismay about that.

I went to see my professor that I was learning quantum physics from. It was a young man, was very brilliant, very sensible. And he had been particularly helpful in walking me through some of the homework problems that we did in his class. And I confessed to him, now if I had known then what I know now, I would have kept my mouth shut, but I didn't. But I'm glad I did not, because it led to something important. When I expressed my frustration, he just looked at me with great compassion and sympathy. He says, "Well, Grant, I've got to tell you something.

You're in graduate school now. The purpose here is different from undergraduate school." And even if I were in graduate school at UCLA, I would have been told the same thing if I had a professor like that. He said, "The lecturing, the course lectures are not designed for you to be entertained or for you to even like them. They are there because you have chosen this university because of the achievements of this faculty, and you want to know what they regard as important

in that universe, we call chemistry and physics and mathematics, for your own well-being as you go through life. So, guess what, Grant? It's time for you to not rely so heavily on an entertaining lecture. All you need to do is be in that lecture to see what topics that teacher is teaching and what textbooks you can read to read more about those topics." And I said, "Oh, thank you, professor. I appreciate that."

So I did what the other my classmates did. If we didn't understand something in the lecture, we went into the closest bookstore to look for textbooks that reinforced clarity in that part of the subject matter. And that was my ticket to being well educated. It was saying to me, Grant, it's graduate school time, and you got to learn how to learn on your own and learn how to dig the information out of books by talking to your classmates and talking to your professors outside of class, by getting good books,

watching programs on the TV, things like that. That relates to this article. Did I know I was going to college for that? That was one of the most important things I went to college for. And I said to myself, well, guess what? Now that I've been through all of my years of career, oh, nearly 60 years in a career, I understand. I paid my money, even though I didn't have this idea that it's supposed to be served up to me on a nice platter. It's supposed to be a way pointer to say, now you go get the knowledge yourself. And that's exactly what I did ever since then,

which paid off big time in getting a career. Well, when I graduated, even a year before I graduated with a PhD, I was beginning to look at and interview with corporations and professors in other universities about what kind of job would come next. And those were the jobs the college was getting me ready for. Once I got into those jobs, they were preparations for the big jobs of becoming a professor myself. So that was my return on investment. The college jobs didn't pay as much as corporate jobs, but my goodness, were they satisfying?

Were they intellectually stimulating? Was I learning? Was I learning about life? Yes, because I was applying.

My chemistry, my physics, my mathematics, actual the stuff of life that may not have even had anything to do directly with chemistry that had to do with solving problems in life. Maybe on a job. Well, my first job was teaching high school. I didn't want a high school job. I wanted an assistant professor job. But no, the universe said, you are going to teach at a high school. And I said, okay. And then when I interviewed with the principal of that school and he told me exactly why he wanted someone of my

University of Chicago background and my obvious ability to talk to him. That he needed someone of that talent teaching his 15, 16, 17, 18 year old kids at this high school. Not too far from where my father went to college at Caltech. Just a few miles to the town of Duarte. The town of Duarte is famous because that's where the City of Hope Medical Center is located. That became one of the earliest medical centers in the United States that was equipped to work with, treat and cure cancer.

And then I began to think as I was getting ready for this morning's talk. Namely, that what did my father think? Well, I know what he thought. He didn't have to even tell us. He wanted to get the best education he could and maybe even get a job in a mathematically related discipline like engineering. He wasn't really as interested in science as such that I was. But he gave me a, an atmosphere, an environment in the home in which he and my mother raised me that I was able to reach for.

This encyclopedia set that was like the Britannica was called the Book of Knowledge, twenty volumes, so that I didn't have to ask him all of my questions about science and math. I just went over to the bookshelves that flanked our big fireplace and pulled out the volume that had the subject I wanted to understand more about. So that's really why I went to college. So it really says, this kind of article that I was reading from is important, maybe not for even what it was talking about.

Is college cutting the mustard for what it's supposed to do? But there's a much bigger purpose to college, which is what, I mean, I was already awake to that, as we used to say in the seventies. Yeah, I'm hip to that. And I, I got it big time. College is where I went to interact with the great controversies and the big issues facing the country. And I tell you, the big issues we have now, like the Straits of Hormuz, whatever it is in between Iran and the mainland of Saudi Arabia.

I mean, we had to face some real losers of issues.

Yeah.

And today is no different from that. So it's like now I'm talking to the youth of the country compared to me. I'm talking about those youths who are under sixty years of age, but especially those youths who are under thirty years of age.

Yeah.

But that's one thing college is supposed to prepare you for, no matter what the cost is. But I know. How I paid the cost. Everyone I was classmates with at the University of Chicago had a full ride. That's shorthand for meaning you get your tuition paid and you get your room and board paid. You may not get as much as you'd be getting on a regular job. If you've gone on a forty hour a week job, is that forty, yeah, for a week, uh, uh, right out of college.

I, I, so I was losing money by not having a, a, an industrial job or a government job. But I was learning, I was getting a different kind of return on my investment that was far bigger than about money and wages. I should say, stop there and say, end of story. Because that's exactly what I really wanted to get across in being able to use the critical thinking that one begins to learn big time at the undergraduate college level. Where you began to evaluate everything that you confront.

Yeah.

With your life, that may not have anything to do with the major field you studied. Now, if I don't say anything else, that's the message today.

Yeah.

And it's the message that, uh, young people don't need to put themselves under the gun of the pressure that they're facing from propaganda, from perfectly meaningful peo- well-meaning people. Whether they're, they sit on the liberal side or the conservative side, or the middle side. Isn't that, isn't that a stranger, the middle side? What's that about? It's about making your brain stretch to say, what is venerable talking about? And then when you reflect on it, you start to get, oh, yeah, if there's a left side and a right side, there's obviously a middle side. Now, I've got to figure out what that means for me in my life.

Cause we go through life with a middle side and this is a side that's neither this nor that, but it's both together. So now we're starting to take off. So anyone that wants to call in. And deal with that. They may.

Yep, six three one three oh seven four zero one zero. Lines are open, six three one three zero seven four zero one zero at any time.

Now, one of the, my main achievements in graduate school was learning about where I put my investment of time and energy. And because I was already a trained musician and an artist who attended the Los Angeles Art Institute, the Otis Institute, while I was a teenager in junior high school, I had talents in oil painting and in, in music and keyboards, the piano. And while I was at UCLA, I started learning how to play the pipe organ.

Because UCLA had one of the best pipe organs in, in the country. And it sat right in this big auditorium called Royce Hall on the UCLA campus. Well, that was one of the greatest things to ever happen to me, was to learn how to play symphonic classical music and how to paint paintings of flowers or mountains or rivers and oceans. So it was my openness to combining two different kinds of talents, to join them together in

the service of understanding what many of the so-called expert people in the country thought, that you have to keep these things separate and focused and specialized in one or the other. And so a few of my Chicago professors, the youngest, the younger ones in particular, they didn't appreciate the fact that I had a reputation of doing oil paintings for, first of all, professors who taught me at UCLA and some that didn't teach me. But some of the greatest organic chemists in the world were teaching at UCLA. And I did a.

A painting for one of those professors named Saul Winstein. Now, that name isn't known by many today because Saul was, he passed away back in the late 1960s from an ailment. But his work was known, not just around the nation, but the entire world where organic chemistry was practiced. So I did a painting that very, in very colorful, beautiful artistic ways, illustrated what his research was about, that brought him to that level of respect by the scientific

world. But there were others. The, the, uh, the man that, uh, studied, uh, energy, uh, conversion in the body from food, who, how you think, how you, how you move your arms, how you run and all that. He, a, a, a professor named Smith, Robert Smith, he commissioned me to do a painting on ATP, one of these little molecules that enable our organic bodies to make that energy conversion so we could move and have our beings. And other professors and their works.

So I wound up with the time I was an assistant professor at UCLA. I'd done about 40 oil paintings and, you know, people were serious. They paid me good money to paint their research. Well, I utilized that ability to envision my topic, my molecules, how they acted together by doing paintings of them and attaching the painting to the meaning of how they operated in knowledge of quantum physics and chemical kinetics, things like that.

Which I then applied to life, social issues, issues in my own life. So that's, that's really what, what it's coming down to here. Um, so, well Jill, how does, does, does that raise anything?

Yeah.

For you?

And, well, what I always, you know, like to hear from you, I love hearing your stories, your philosophies. But what I wonder is, um, the people that you're reaching here in your audience and your memoirs again, if someone wants to call in, they can. Uh, but have you actually spoken to anyone that has read any of the memoirs? That had any questions about the memoirs? Um, what is their most favorite part of the memoirs? And if you don't know what we're talking about, um, you gotta check out his website and Google him. Six, three, one, three, oh, seven, four, zero, one, zero. What seems to be, what seems to be one of the stories that really stands out and sticks out about your life that you've included in this?

I, I think for people who are close to their education, their higher education, volume two would really stand out. But volume one would also, but volume one is more about my undergraduate education and some of the astonishing, unexpected victories and fun and games that, that occurred there. And I mean, not just always in the classroom, but, I mean, I was a senior at UCLA, meaning nineteen sixty-four, sixty-five, when I-ten was just being compete, completed from downtown into Santa Monica Beach.

Well, what did I do, being the curious person that I've always been? Uh, the, the freeway was not open for traffic yet. And I said, oh, look at that freeway. I walked the bike up there, up the, the on-ramp, somewhere around La Brea Boulevard.

And looked at this great freeway and I said, oh, I see the lanes are, they're all paved now. Wouldn't it be great fun to just ride my bicycle on the lanes? So I got myself in the, the slow lane on the right and pedaled out and by the time I got to, I don't know, Los Anacar Boulevard,

a highway patrol car drove up behind me and that's one of my greatest stories uh, in volume one. While I was in college, I was pedaling for my summer research to get there. That, that was summer sixty-five. And the gentleman was very nice. He did not get mad and he recognized, here's a young guy who's full of curiosity. He's, he's on a ten-speed racing bike like the college students, the, the college guys did that a lot. And I'm hunched over the handlebars and wheeling along and he says, well,

it's not a good idea to ride here on the freeway, even though it's not open for traffic, but I think it would be safer for you if you just pedaled off, you know, and, and ride on the surface streets. Uh, you might argue, well, you know, what, what good is that kind of a story? It's good because it, it talks about the life of a real human being, a real young man who's trying to find his way into adulthood and his curiosity really is what drew him into college in the first place.

Curiosity about how does the physical world of molecules work? How do they react together? So, but that was to help my common sense wisdom about life, that you have to constantly watch out for the consequences of things you might be attracted to do, no matter what it is. And I, yeah, I saw the, the logic of what the highway patrolman was saying and, and I thanked him and got myself off of the road bed up there. Um, but there were many things.

Outside the classroom as well as inside, but what was inside is getting to know classmates better, people that you didn't grow up with, but you got to know them. You got to know them better than if you had not gone to a college education. So, uh, volume three was my whole experience of graduate school, which began in, uh, nineteen sixty-five, and it lasted until, uh, spring of nineteen seventy.

And that's where I talked about these very powerful, achieved professors at Chicago. A number of them in the, in physical chemistry were developers of the atomic bomb. I'm not saying that to brag about the atomic bomb, but I am saying it led to a lot of conversations between me and my classmates around the lunch table, the dinner table, that were, we needed to have to argue about because that bomb was so destructive. I think it frightened its developers more than anything else because all of them were

holding their breath that this thing would not get out of control if the head guy, Enrico Fermi, who was a professor of physics at Chicago, always had the concern in the back of his mind, we hope this thing, once we hit the self-sustaining reaction, chain reaction that we're hoping to produce, that it won't keep going and start reacting with all of the molecules on planet Earth and incinerate the planet. They really did not know what would come of setting off either the test, the atomic bomb test, or the even more sad thing that it was actually, uh...

That detonated over Hiroshima and Nagasaki and took away so many human lives. At the same time, that so the world that remembers that has never gotten over it. Those are all important things that you get out of a good college education. Whatever has been an issue in the country to begin to talk about it, not just go in a lecture and leave and go back home and nothing ever comes up later about it.

But in 1967, that was the 25th anniversary year of when that self-sustaining reaction was successfully achieved at the University of Chicago, under the bleachers of the athletic field, the Alonso Stag Field. So we had a lot to talk about, but all of the still living professors on in the United States were there, present to celebrate the beginning of the nuclear age.

And and they also looked at the unnerving consequences of that, but also at the peaceful uses of atomic energy is what my PhD dissertation represented because I used the one of the after effects of the radiation.

And I apologize, but we're out of time. I'm so sorry. I know there's still more to talk about. So I apologize for today, but you have to finish your thought. Thank you.

Yes, thank you, Jill.

How can we contact you?

Grant Venerable, I think, or Grant D. Venerable.

Yep.

PHD, all lowercase, dot com. And that's my website, which leads you to everything else, including my uh, email, V E N T E W O at A O L dot com. And in the message line, put podcast question.

Aw, thank you so much. We'll be in touch. We'll hopefully see you next week again, right here, same time, same slot. Always a pleasure, Dr. Venerable, and see you next week. Bye bye.

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