Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - The MASSIVE STEM Graduate Exodus - What’s Going Wrong? | John Skrentny

Episode Date: August 4, 2024

Did you know that most STEM graduates don't end up working in STEM fields? This surprising fact isn’t due to a lack of demand—tech companies dominate our landscape, from AI to smartphones, yet up to 70% of STEM graduates choose different paths. Why is that? Are we failing our STEM graduates? I sat down with John Skrentny, a renowned sociologist and professor at UCSD. John recently explored this issue in his thought-provoking book Wasted Education. We unpack why many STEM graduates feel undervalued and unfulfilled in their jobs, leading them to leave the field entirely. John shares his thoughts on the cultural and systemic problems within the tech industry that contribute to this attrition. From poor employer treatment to the toxic work culture, we discuss what needs to change to retain our brightest minds in STEM. How can we better support them? Tune in to this thought-provoking episode to find out. —  Key Takeaways:   00:00 Intro 01:07 Realities of STEM education and employment 12:18 The leaky pipeline in STEM education  17:35 Job satisfaction of STEM grads 18:36 Wasted Education Book Review 23:32 The ambiguity in the categorization of STEM 41:35 AI and the Future of STEM 51:12 Importance of science communication 58:04 STEM skills treadmill and constant retraining —   Additional resources:  ➡️ Connect with John Skrentny: Website: https://quote.ucsd.edu/jskrentny/ X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/johnskrentny Wasted Education Book: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/W/bo206855230.html Other books: https://quote.ucsd.edu/jskrentny/books/ —- ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms:  ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast    —   Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known.   Make sure to follow/subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Did you know that most STEM graduates don't end up working in STEM fields? It's true. And it's not due to a lack of demand. Tech companies dominate our landscape, ranging from everything from artificial intelligence to smartphones, searching the web, blockchain, and beyond. And despite the fact that these tech companies dominate the environment, the economy and the looming global cries for scientific solutions from STEM fields, they're not losing STEM graduates due to a lack of funding. We've, in fact, poured billions into STEM programs.

Yet, despite this, up to 70% of STEM graduates choose not to pursue careers in their fields. So why is that? I had the incredible opportunity to communicate to share these ideas with my UCSD colleague, who's a world-renowned sociologist, John Scrantney, who recently explored these issues in his wonderful new book, Wasted Education. And I know it's not going to be a waste for you to tune in. So let's go into The Impossible, John Screamt. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Open the pod bay doors, pal. Welcome to the Into the Impossible podcast, where we feature for the very first time a sociologist who is joining us all the way from the other side of campus. John Scrantney, did I pronounce it correctly, John, close enough. It's good enough, it's good enough. And that was a long walk. It was, yeah. And I'm proud to introduce you this building.

We've never had, we've had some socialist on it. We've never had a sociologist on the podcast. And so I want to start with a semi-provocative question, which is you make the case in the, the in this wonderful book, wasted education. We'll describe the cover art and the book title and the subtitle and just a bit. But you make the convincing case that, you know, we kind of have this very ambivalent, very ambiguous message that we send to STEM. I'm a STEM graduate.

And yet, I claim that, you know, STEM is sort of our best hope. And I think you agree with it. Do we need more STEM graduates? Or do we have enough and we need more sociologists graduates? I mean, where is the lacuna? Where is the gap in what America? is churning out versus what we actually need. Is it in the soft sciences, humanities, or really in the step sciences? That's a great question. And I would say we need more educated people across the

board. But I'm with you. We need more scientists and engineers. But the book is about how we need to treat them better. And too many are getting this great education and they're leaving and they're going to do other things. And so the book is really, it's kind of a mystery book, really. It starts with a puzzle, why is it that the majority of STEM grads don't work in STEM jobs when we hear constantly about the burning hair on fire crisis level shortage of STEM grads? So that's the puzzle, more than two-thirds leave, depends on the data, but it's always a majority leave. And I wanted to figure out why. And the big story is they are just not treated that well. And I do think, And I'm with you, even though I'm a sociologist, it's the scientists and engineers who are going to save the world.

And it's the policymakers who have to develop the right policies to allow them to do that. So that's why I say across the board, social scientists, humanities, anyone who can communicate well will help develop the policies to, you know, unchane the scientists and engineers or keep them using their skills so that they can save us. How do you react to this statement? I've noticed, and actually tonight, I'm going to see the world famous San Diego Padres play at the stadium down a Peco Parkway and watch them, you know, flail and struggle to beat the Milwaukee Brewers. Odds are under 50%. I can't wait for this question because this was quite a segue. I claim we are doing the following. We in academia have set up a system where to get from graduate student to postdoc is easier than, you know,

me getting on a pee-wee football team or a pee-wee baseball team. We continue the analogy. It's actually very easy to even get a postdoc. There's such a dirt. There's such a hot market. And then immediately it flips around to go from postdoc, which I'm going to use in the analogy of this into the baseball of AAA baseball. So imagine like you could get into play AAA, which is almost literally, it's almost a major

league level caliber. In fact, a lot of major league players get bumped down to get rehabbed and work off their drug addict habits or whatever. I don't know what they do, but up in Escondido, they have a team up there. But to get from postdoc to faculty, we had a job search not long ago, 400 applicants, one position. Are we not doing a tremendous disservice just within academia by setting up this false narrative that it's just going to be the same as making a jump from AAA to the majors, when in fact, it's more like making the jump from peewee to the majors.

It's almost impossible. Yeah, that's a great question. So just to be clear, the book is mostly about the private sector. And you're talking about academia, which I've researched. Yeah, I still researched that, and that's an important part of the story here. I've heard debates about this and that there's some folks who say we should get everyone, give everyone a chance. Everyone who loves science has a passion for it, has the skill set, give them a chance. But as you point out, that chance is minuscule.

And just this weekend, I met a PhD in Life Sciences who was a postdoc, saw the writing on the wall. and moved to industry, even though this person had a great passion for a scientific research and the kind that you do. And so it's a tricky situation and part of it is the story of funding and how expensive it is to hire a ladder-ranked faculty member. So I don't know what it, you don't have to talk about it, but when UCSD or any major research university hires a new professor, especially in the sciences and engineering, they get this massive startup package.

They're going to get a lab. They're going to get all this stuff. And that stuff is expensive. And most of the grants are grants to do specific research projects. You have a deliverable at the end. It's not just grants to keep the lights on and keep the buildings going. So you've got this situation where all these labs need worker bees. They need grad students.

They need postdocs. And they need folks to make the lucky folks who got a ladder-ranked faculty job. make their research happen. And it's exploitative. There's no doubt about it. It's a rough situation. And so a lot of people, after their second or third postdoc, they realize their life is slipping away.

They're getting in their 30s or early 40s. They still have a grant. Right. And luckily, they can typically move into industry. Then might not be what they want to do. But it's a system that's, I think it's kind of unsustainable and a little bit exploitative. But the research universities, it's just expensive to run these things. And science, you know, I think is getting more expensive.

You know, when you have to a quantum computer, that's a hell of a lot more expensive than computers were 20 years ago. The bookstore. Yeah. Yeah. And so anyway. Yeah, no, that's definitely true. I feel like we're creating what our legal friends would call like an attractive nuisance, basically. It's making it seem as if, oh, you're just going to fall along this track.

And you're eventually going to get the job of your dreams because you are going to be. become me and therefore what could be better than being a professor just like me. I just had two students graduate last week, got their PhDs rather, and one's leaving, you know, academia forever. The other one may or may not remain for a long time, short time. She has a postdoc set up. But it's become, it's become, you know, almost impossible to say with a straight face that this is the same kind of job that it was when you and I started. I started 20 years ago. You probably started around the same time or maybe maybe slightly before or after but it's changed a lot dramatically i don't think it's changed for the better i think we've had a lot of bureaucratic overlays and a lot of this apparatus that's set

up is not to support the mission of the university's education research and so forth it's it's you know checking diversity boxes and doing all sorts of other stuff but since you do focus on industry i can't resist again being slightly provocative before we're going to get into the cover don't worry i know people love the judging books we have to judge the book i mean it's it's too beautiful a cover not to judge but before we get there I'm there's a trend on TikTok which I'm sure you don't watch but I know you're on Twitter and I will put your handle underneath because everyone should follow you but the the quiet quitting or you know in my life at at Google you know we start off I I drop off

my laundry I get my my get my espresso and then I get my oat milk soy and anyway it's this whole thing and it's and it's so it's so you know it's such a trope but but it really has gotten kind of out of control especially in in Bay Area companies and they're cutting back. So who is to blame? Is it the faculty for turning out the students? Is it the government agencies that have fellowships and programs and so forth? Or is that the companies that offer these seemingly extravagant perks? You know, but then ultimately, job satisfaction doesn't correlate with the fact that you can get your laundry done in the first floor, you know, laundromat. Right. So I just want to go back to the Padres thing. You threw me there for a

second, but it works well. Come on back. It works well. But my my favorite analogy, though maybe I'll use yours in the future, is Hollywood. There's so many people who want to make it big in Hollywood. And they all go there and they put up with all kinds of exploitative jobs and jobs that aren't that great in the hopes that they'll make it big. And similarly, sort of like the postdocs, I have a few friends who've gone into acting and they kind of bubble around, you know, they'll have a bit part in Gray's Anatomy or something like that. They'll kind of bubble around. and it looks like things might be happening. But they don't have health insurance.

Yeah, they don't have health insurance. And there's enough hints that they might make it. But then how long do you do that? Right. Just like these postdocs. But so this other question, there might be a few jobs like this where you hang out in a meditation pod on Google's dime. But people leave those jobs.

It's a young person's game. There's so much to say about this. I'm kind of tripping over my words here a little bit. But one of the stories is there's a great book. by a sociologist named Ofer Sharon, I drop his name because I teach it in my intro to sociology class. The question is, why are these tech workers for a big company? He had to keep it anonymous, but it's a big one that everyone knows. Why do they work 60 to 70 hour weeks? And on average, this is across the year. And their work level, there's like an early part of the year,

and then there's kind of trying to make the deliverable. Then there's crunch time. Yeah. And that's when they're working every day of the week. And Sharon has a nice description of these offices where there is, and this is before work from home is a big thing, but there's a foosball table and, you know, there's a pogo stick in the corner and there's all this silly stuff. And no one's using it. It's there. No one's using it.

And they're in their offices sending each other emails to each other down the hall. To work in their, you know, no one had time for that stuff. That was stuff used to kind of lure people and make it look glamorous. It's also very gendered stuff, by the way. We can talk about that later. So that stuff is there. But the reality of the work schedule is it could be brutal. And if you're a father, if you have a family, you have different kinds of obligations,

that work schedule makes it really hard. And so it's a young person's game. I'm sure these TikTok videos aren't by people in their 50s. That's true. Hey there, students of the impossible. your fearless host, Professor Brian Keating. Hope you're enjoying this conversation with my fellow professor at UCSD, John Scretting. And I wanted to make a small request, which is for you to make sure that I'm not wasting

my education, wasting my time with these wonderful videos that I know you're enjoying, but I found out only 50% of you are subscribed or following the podcast on audio or video for me. So please make sure to subscribe and share it with your friends, leave a comment, subscribe, like, do all those things that really helps me out and makes me sure, makes me convince that I'm not wasting my time. You know, I get so little feedback. This is one of the ways that you can give me some free feedback. It doesn't cost you anything. And I hope it's part of your continuing education. Now back to the podcast. That is true. And so when we look at the, you know,

so-called leaky pipeline, I was always told the leaky pipeline, leak starts in eighth grade, seventh grade, sixth grade, et cetera. You're making the case, it starts basically, you know, I call, I went to 22nd grade, you know, four years of undergrad, six years of PhD. Where should, if you have a limited amount of duct tape, which is how we experimental physicists fix everything. Where do you apply it? You're in charge of the NSF or whatever NIH budget for stopping the leak in the pipeline. Where do you apply it? That is, it's a great question. And what I wanted to do is I kind of play dumb in the book. And I'm like, all right, people. Let's see what's going on. Clay. Yeah, you say there's a shortage. And let's see if you're acting like there is a shortage. Let's see if you're saying these

STEM grads are so valuable and they're there to be prized and coveted and polished and put in the meditation pod and given a catered lunch. And let's see if in aggregate, you're actually acting like you value them. And there's almost no evidence. I mean, there's going to be some sectors that get hot. AI, generative AI, super hot right now. When the price of oil is really high. Oil and gas. RNA research. Right. Yeah. Some of these things will be, yeah, Yeah, RNA research will be really hot. And so you're going to get these spikes and you're going to hear about, oh, this guy retired in his 30s and all this kind of stuff.

We're talking aggregate, on average. We're trying to understand why 60% or so of STEM grads do something else. And I'm getting excited and forgetting what the question was. Oh, where would you apply the duct tape? Oh, the duct tape. Yeah. So you've got to look at the employers. And research shows from economists and sociologists and other social scientists, students pay attention to the market

signals. And if the employers are not hiring, they move and do something else. The tricky thing with STEM is often they'll hire young people, certainly in software developing in areas like that, but then these workers will burn out and they'll go do something else. So my argument is, yes, there is a leaky pipeline at eighth grade. Fractions is a big one. A lot of kids have trouble with fractions. And, you know, that's like third grade or fourth grade. So there's all these fourths of people know that. So there's all these little points where you might lose some folks. But then you've got these people who actually graduated from college with a STEM degree. They represent the greatest investment, both personal, their family, and the government.

And then when they go do something else, that I think is the urgent thing. And I argue the employers have to be held accountable. And really, it's, I sort of make the case that the employers, they have a lot of self-inflicted wounds if they really believe there's a a shortage. I have no lie detector, but they act like they believe there's a shortage. The investors also kind of drive their behavior. So it's a complicated, this is one of the reasons I love sociology. You've got all these complicated systems sort of working together. And, you know, you've got to draw all these connections out and to understand this outcome. And investors drive this behavior that encourages them to treat workers like they're expendable. Stock prices go up

when a firm announces layoffs. Elon Musk went into Twitter and said, hardcore people let's get rid of all these engineers all these other CEOs applauded yeah heads are rolling stock prices triple and the stock price money people love it so take the multiple and then you just subtract off that you know this cost and you multiply now by this huge number on a formerly even larger number and they get yeah stock price go up right so so there it's a complicated system there but but my argument is if we just keep investing in stem education and do not pay attention to what the employers do i'm trying to maybe Maybe you can help me.

I'm trying to think of the right metaphor. I took my kids to a petting zoo over the weekend. Oh, nice. And I imagined moving more animals into a petting zoo, but there's a back gate open and they're walking out. Mm-hmm. Maybe that's not too flattering for a STEM grad, but when you're filling it in with more and more folks and then huge numbers are leaving.

Right. Some of them, some studies show about 50% of engineering grads leave before they even got in their first job. They go through the whole gauntlet. and then they say, nah, I'm going to go do something else. Not a lot. And it made me think of, well, here's another alternative. So I had last year this gentleman, he's got a name.

I'll let you guess what you do if you had a name Hazard. What kind of profession would you take on, you know, would it be poetry laureate or he's a fighter pilot, okay? So he flies for the Air Force. I would have thought risk management or insurance. Well, this is a book about risk management. But in here, he goes through the training program that he went through from the Air Force Academy all the way up to. And they force you after graduation. You don't have a choice.

It's not like they invest something like $5 to $10 million per pilot. And these are the best pilots on earth and so forth. They can't, they don't have the option. It's a legal contract. And I'm wondering, you know, just to be provocative again before we get to judging the book. I've shown another book before I show this one. Yeah. But what about like some, you know, you get this fellowship.

You're, you know, we, you know, sponsored by the National Science Foundation for six years to get a PhD. and then you decide you want to open a coffee shop, you know, and Soma up and San Francisco? Yeah. Is that really fair? I mean, have you betrayed some part of the social contract? One of them were interesting findings that I did during the research for this with a colleague is we looked at job satisfaction and we looked at job satisfaction of STEM grads who moved to non-STEM jobs. And it was they were statistically significantly less likely to say they were satisfied.

And the thing that stood out was they asked different things about pay and promotion and stuff, the intellectual challenge of the job. That was the one. They were bored. Yeah. And they were trained to love STEM. And now they're doing non-Sem. Right. Probably for the money.

One of the arguments I make is you can make a lot more money with STEM skills in a non-STEM job. My students I went on to work for Amazon and eBay, they make twice what you and I make. Right, right. Don't remind me. but so you've you've got this yeah you've got this situation where um where they'll go they'll go and chase the money and do something else and you know that that explains part of this story yeah okay so let's do the the judging this book by its covers so take us through john take us through if you would the title wasted education and the subtitle and then this uh magnificent cover art i

I want to commend you for, you know, it's the first sociology book I probably ever read my life. It's really very interesting. I mean, I had so much fun reading it. And there's a lot of hard data in it and hundreds of references at the end of very scholastic. But it's written from the perspective of kind of, you know, a travel log. Marco Polo is exploring this question that we all take for grant. Oh, we need more STEM. I've had on Michael Saylor, who's, you know, probably the foremost Bitcoin advocate in the world, micro strategy.

And, you know, he started a whole university, online university, just for STEM. It only does STEM called Sailor Academy, and he says we need a million STEM graduates, and I'm like thinking of forwarding in this book. So take us through the book, the cover title, subtitle, and art, please. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost.

Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or The Hilton app. and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay.

Hilton, for the stay. Yeah, okay. So the title actually comes from a title that was suggested to me by Sean Carroll, who you might know in the podcast. Past guests, many time ask you. Yeah, and so. He's one of my official first guests during COVID. So Sean and I've known, he said there since graduate school.

And I wanted to write a book a little bit more accessible. and to a mainstream audience because I know a lot of students, parents, a lot of folks interested in this, wanted to reach the policymakers. And so, and Sean's great at writing books that reach a mass audience, as is yourself. And so I asked for a suggestion,

I told him what the book is about, and he suggested wasted brains. And the publisher, I ended up going with an academic publisher in the end, but University of Chicago Press is one of the best ones for my field. They thought that was, I think, what was the word? I think they said too visceral or something.

Or they didn't want people to think of like a brain and a vat or something. Or like the brain right there. That's right. And it actually made sense to make it about education because that's where the government's investing its money. This new Chips and Science Act, hundreds of millions of dollars invested in education. So it made sense to make it to switch it to wasted education. And then the subtitle, how we fail.

I wanted to, I had a big debate about whether to use STEM in the title. I talked to some friends of mine. Some of them had PhDs. They didn't know what they hadn't heard that acronym. It's only since 2001. I never did that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought it was for a long time.

Me too. Me too. They used to be smet. Oh, right. Isn't that hilarious? Yeah, you in there like for undergraduate. And I used to do historical. There was set, which were they dropped out the T entirely.

So there was all these different things. But then STEM just took off. We decided to just spell it all out. there and and then there was a debate with my editor Elizabeth Branch Dyson who's awesome I wanted to make it how employers fail the graduates in science technology engineering and math and and she thought that sounded too narrow it's to sound a little too technical and and let's let's think of it as a collective problem you know because everyone's kind of involved in this and so so we went with that the cover was

the second choice the first cover had a stem degree going through a paper shredder and I thought that was a little too strong. And I do think move away from my degrees. Right. I didn't bring my paper trash. But I thought that that was too strong. And I think STEM education is great. I think the people who move out of STEM and do something else,

it's still valuable to have these STEM skills. So I didn't want to, that was too strong. And I didn't really like the art. So I said, we can have these sort of generic symbols of science and engineering. Yeah, tools of the trade. But let's go with something like that. And I thought, as you can see, from my t-shirt and your shirt black made it look kind of cool yeah usually black is reserved

as shown carrolls pointed out for astronomy books for some reason oh really they sell better when they're darker so a lot of my books they're like they're trying to break the trade um question for you maybe uh slightly tongue-in-cheek but like it is part of the problem the fact that we have a name for stem like we're defining it's like atheism it's like defining you by what you're not right so it what do you call like you don't think of yourself as a non-stem person and then the second part would be, you know, a second follow-up to that would be, you know, what do people that leak out of the pipeline of non-stem? What do they do? I mean, they're going to politics? Hey, what's their wasted education version for the non-stem? Right. That could be a project,

actually, in how putting a name on something catalyzes thinking about it and policymaking about it. So I had a research assistant Natalie Novick who looked at bills in Congress and she traced how all these bills started to have STEM in the title. And to do it well, you'd have to have a comparison of ones with science and engineering and this sort of thing. But it really did seem to catalyze and kind of crystallize a category of what we're talking about here. And so I think there's a, there's something to be said. Maybe another astrophysicist is still inspiring a book for you. Yeah, there's something to be said for that. I wanted to emphasize that the category of STEM is ambiguous to say the least.

And, you know, readers will see this book and it's like 200 pages or so. I had to take out tens of thousands of words where I did a deep dive on what the hell is STEM. Can I say hell? Yeah, of course. And it's super complicated. So you said that I'm not STEM. Right. The NSF says I am.

Really? So how about that? You have NSF Grandson. In fact, yes, yes. And they, I think idiosyncratically include the social sciences in STEM. So, but I think that when most people are talking about why we need STEM, the book starts with this discussion of these rationales for more investments in STEM. The shortage rationale, they're not talking about a shortage of sociologists or economists or anthropologists.

They're talking, they're not actually talking about cosmologists and astronomers either. I'm sorry. Right, they're talking about. But, you know, there's, yeah, yeah. So that's, I call that the 800-pound gorilla in STEM. 50% of STEM workers are in computers in some way. So there's that. And then there's the question of medicine. I don't consider. and the NSF doesn't consider medicine, practicing medicine to be STEM. And you might think that's odd because how could you practice medicine without having STEM knowledge? But that fits this idea of the shortage rationale. There's a shortage of physicians and, you know, the AMA has, the American Medical Association has more to answer for there than the education system.

There's this kind of complicated story there. And then you have, there's this thing called optional practice. practical training. And all the international students listening to this in America will know what that is. That means that if you get a degree in the United States and you're foreign, you can work in the United States for a year if your job is somehow related to your degree. That's kind of vague as well. But if you're in STEM, you can work for three years. And that's because Bill Gates and some other folks lobbied for what's called the STEM extension. So basically what they did was, was created an incentive for international students to major in STEM. And then that created an incentive for universities to lobby to have different fields categorize this STEM. So they would get more good international students.

And also the international students pay twice the freight of a local California state. Exactly. So you've got, then you had first economy, the economics department sort of saying, hey, the NSF says we're STEM and we want to say we're STEM. And the Department of Homeland Security didn't have initially include economics. kinds of fields. I discuss some of them in my books get classified as stems. Classics. I mean, is there anything in NYU, you did a great job lobbying there. If there's any more like the paradigmatic humanities field, anything more humanities-ish than classics. Yeah, it's going to. So they've got, you know, so we created all these incentives to expand the thing. So the definition of what is STEM could be, we could talk about that. We could do a whole podcast on that.

And I do use a question. There's this great survey called the National Survey of College graduates, which says, are you in a STEM occupation, basically? And that's the one that shows that about two-thirds of STEM grads are not, about 60% or not, according to my analysis of the data, are not in STEM jobs. But then they can say, does your job require a bachelor's level of STEM expertise? And then you've got a lot more folks. So then you get physicians saying, well, heck, yeah, I'm using science all the time.

and you might get some of those folks going in there. So some of the people who leave STEM are going into medicine. Okay. And then others go into management. If you're managing a bunch of software developers, it makes sense that you have some software backgrounds or maybe using some stuff there. I talk about some of my neighbors in the book.

This is a big life sciences hub, San Diego. And they get PhDs in the life sciences, and they end up doing stuff helping firms manage FDA approval or clinical trials, but they're not actually doing bench science. Right. So are they STEM? And so it gets a little bit tricky. So that's why I keep focusing on this shortage rationale. But I should emphasize the other three rationales for more STEM education in the book are national competitiveness, which we heard a lot about with the Chips and Science Act, trying to develop a semiconductor industry in the United States, just trying to

develop more folks to innovate and develop more jobs and, you know, grow the economy. for all Americans. Another rationale is diversity. If these are great middle class jobs or roads to middle class incomes, then we should open them up to more women and historically underrepresented minorities. And we should utilize all the STEM talent available.

You know, we shouldn't make some folks feel unwelcome in science. And then the fourth rationale is the one that I think you and I might share the most, which is save the planet. You know, we're in trouble. All the data indicates climate change, pollution, there's microplastics coursing through our bloodstreams right now. We need scientists to come up with better plastics, cleaner energy, better battery storage, better vaccines, all this kind of stuff.

So there's a lot of folks, but the shortage one I focus on the most because they're the ones who do the most lobbying to get more of the investments in education. Hey there, if you're watching this, you might be a STEM student yourself. And if so, you're guaranteed to win one of these beauties, a real-life meteorite, a fragment, the 4.3 billion-year-old early solar system. You can get one at briankeying.com slash list. But if you have a dot edu email address, go to briancairn.com slash edu, and you're guaranteed to win one of these beauties if you live in the United States. So please do. Go over there, sign up, and I'll share with you some of the most incredible science findings every single week

for free in your inbox, unsubscribe at any time, although I hope you won't. And now back to the episode. You quote from past guest and friend, um, Antonio Garcia, Martinez who wrote Chaos Monkeys and was a friend of mine. You say the culture is what kept, the 23-year-old who were making half million dollars a year in a city where there are lots of fun to offer if you had the cash tethered to corporate campuses for 14-hour days. They ate three meals a day there. Sometimes they slept there.

Did nothing but write a coat. So that seems like a hellscape. It seems like you're earning all this money and what could really be done to differentiate yourself. Antonio actually has a degree in physics from Berkeley or studied physics at Berkeley. So he had true STEM degree. He kept going with it. Now he's not in and he's writing a newsletter, doing a podcast or whatever he's doing, and writing books. But the question of like purpose, I mean, a lot of what you and I do is, you know, we get rewarded not only, you know, in terms of monetary compensation. It's, it's camaraderie. It's feeling like we're making a difference. But are those things like incentives lacking from the

classic corporate, you know, environment where a STEM, you know, professional or STEM graduate might enter the workforce. Yeah. So I, I didn't finish my thought, which is typical, on the O for Sharon thing. So he did that. It's so rare for sociologists to get access to, you know, a big corporation like that. Even to get interview rich people, investors, almost impossible. That's why we study so many poor people. It's easier to get access to them. They're happy to tell their story. But he got access to this big company. And one of the things that he found was that the workers are managed in a way, Brian, that keeps them excited and working so hard.

So the management technique that was described in that study, it's called forced ranking or some called rank and yank. But basically twice a year, these workers are ranked on a bell curve. And there's no ties. Everyone is ranked on the bell curve. And there's going to be some exceptional folks, some middle of the past. folks and then some folks who were going to be sent packing. And I was pleased with that middle of the pack and I like that.

You could saw my amusement. But what he found when he interviewed, he said, he basically, I love it when sociologists do this. Why do you do what you do? And they have to explain it to what's basically like an extraterrestrial, someone who's a total outsider. And these were mainly people in computers that he was talking to, they had trouble explaining why they worked so hard.

But basically what was teased out was that they wanted to. to be in the top ranking. I mean, through their whole lives, they wanted to be in the top ranking. Creating. Helicopter parent. Yes. And now they still want to be in the top ranking. It's not just humiliating. It's intolerable even to be mediocre. So you're going to be working hard. You're going to have a lot of anxiety. The more you can be ranked in that top 20 percent or so, the more likely it is that your manager is going to give you interesting work to do. And so you want to impress your managers. And the other interesting was these workers had they didn't they weren't forced to be in there for that time but they wanted to impress their managers and so they wanted to impress their managers not just with being there

a long time but when the manager comes and says hey brian we need this software to do this kind of thing it's got to have this functionality um how soon could you get that done you'd be like oh two months three months three months tops wow that sounds great because you know tim down the hall he said a year. So we're going to give you that interesting project. And then you're going to think, oh, man, how am I going to do that in three months? You're going to do it by working every day for a year weeks. Yeah. And so, but it's kind of being manipulated, really. So I have a good, I use that reading in my intro to sociology class. I talk to the students, which has a lot of intro, so it's got a lot of STEM majors in there. And we talk about, is this really autonomy? Are they really choosing to work that

hard when the manager's kind of arguably manipulating them. That's where it gets a little tricky to think like that. So there's different ways of doing this now. And some, a lot of firms are moving away from this forced ranking. But there's other ways of coaxing this, what looks like passion. They hire on passion. You know, are you passionate about that? And if you're not, we're going to manage you so you look to be passionate. There's other ways of kind of doing this. And so it keeps them working so hard and I was kind of built into the culture. Do you remember it came out of Silicon Valley some entrepreneur came up with some kind of protein vitamin fiber drink called Soilent? Yeah. That was because you're too busy to eat. Right. You need a complete meal replacement. Right. Just drink

that stuff. Just taken from Soilent Green. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. A little tongue and cheek comedy. Spoil a 50 year old movie. And so the whole premise of that is it's kind of built into the culture now. Right. To work like crazy. And that all. also attracts more men, I think, to the workforce and then the machismo culture, who can sleep under their desk longer. Right. It makes it harder for if you have a family, if you have other obligations to stick with that stuff. I'm thinking about the chapter on training and the STEM skills treadmill, what you call it.

The notion of science to me is one of what's called an infinite game by, you know, game theorist sociologists as well. It's something that you know, the object is to keep playing not to necessarily to win it, unlike chess or, you know, battleship, which I always lose that somehow to my kids. But the point is, at least I don't lose in solitaire that often. But, but, you know, but I would say science is true. It's an infant. You can't win science. Like there's no, like, oh, you got to the end of science. Congratulations. Even you win a Nobel Prize. A little 20 of my guests have been Nobel Prize winner. They're all to a person, man and one,

uh, working continuously on their craft of science. They never are satisfied with it. So what, to what extent does the treadmill kind of, you know, when you go to the gym sometimes in that you pull the emergency I have to do it probably more than you know pull the emergency stop the treadmill just stops right and I feel like you know you get these kids who are interested in science and I call them kids but you know some of their 20s or whatever but they love science they're passionate about mother nature and understanding the world around in the natural world and then they they graduate from that environment where they don't really have access to the life of the intellectual the scholar it's a very abrupt transition right you're going from the life of the

mind and like studying classics, the sociology, to astrophysics. Every day is a new adventure. You're looking up to your professors. So wise, the sages. And then you're slammed it to a, you know, where it's like just you're learning from a project managers two years old than you. We went to this. Or younger. Yeah. Or younger. Yeah. And maybe from another country. And can't relate to this person. And you're not going to learn from you might learn to teach the test of, you know, passing your next, you know, six month annual review or whatever. Talk about that. Is there kind of a dissatisfaction for the intellectuals that come out? And I've graduated, all my students are brilliant and they're super curious.

And, you know, and the ones that go and work for Amazon or eBay or whatever, they're just a smart, curious and interest in nature. Now they hit this wall where it's just like, okay, so I've got to prepare a five-page document on why I'm having this meeting. It has nothing to do with the life of the mind. Isn't that transition abrupt and sort of unfair? And might that explain why there's some leakage? Yeah, that's a great question.

I ended up cutting this out of the book, but to me it was such an interesting and kind of poignant story. So basically, there was a profile in one of these business magazines like Fast Company or something like that. And it was a company that was trying to sell you fashion and trying to get you to buy more clothes, basically, from this website. So they needed scientists to develop algorithms to figure out what you, Brian Keating, are interested in. and like, oh, you don't want that shirt. How about this one? And keep you on the app and hopefully opening up your wallet or tapping on your credit card. They hired a PhD in astrophysics.

And I thought, oh, man, just like you were thinking, like the life of the mind, there was much more magisterial than thinking about the cosmos. And now you're trying to get people to buy clothes. And this guy, he, I admired this to some extent. He thought it was like a cool game. Like, how do we develop this? this like it was a it was a scientific puzzle to figure out how to keep people on this website and buying stuff and guessing what they like and all that sort of stuff based on their past their

past clicks and and he even used the analogy he said just like cosmology this is something I'll think about while taking his shower and I thought that was sad that was where it's pointing to me that like he's spending his time off hours thinking about how to get people to buy stuff that they don't need that tells you the story or one one thing that's going on here is some people do make this transition. Some people say, hey, I'm still using my mind. I'm still using computational skills. It's just different subject matter.

Other folks, they have trouble with that. And I included in the book some folks who wrote on Reddit or some of these other sorts of websites where people kind of post their thoughts and questions where they move from real, I call it real science, but you know what I mean, to this data analytics kind of stuff. And they felt a little sad about it. And one of them, I thought this was a really another poignant way of thinking about it.

He said, I used to do physics or astronomy. And at a dinner party, I was really proud to say what I did. And now I'm not anymore. And there's a kind of, there was a sadness. And then people comment and said, I feel the same way and this sort of thing. Right. Right. So some people do make that transition.

I admire them who can see the puzzle. Other people can't. And then another theme in the book is that some people feel the moral, I call it STEM education for what? What are we using these talents for? And investors love, there's a whole section in here. Investors love software. They love things that can make a lot of money with no factory. You've got, you can show the product works.

So you don't have product uncertainty. You have market uncertainty. And you can do some research. figure out the market, but you don't have to worry about the product that, oh, man, this battery doesn't actually store energy the way we thought it did. Oh, man, we've got to find a factory. We've got to redo this whole setup. Yeah.

One solder joint. They call that the valley of death in investing where it takes years to make money, where you're not making money and you're bleeding money. But software doesn't really have a value of death. And so they love to put money in that. And so that's why so much money goes into stuff that is arguably not helpful or even pernicious. So I talk a lot about social media.

I'm very skeptical of social media. And I talk about workers at Facebook who resigned. One of them memorably said she had blood on her hands because they were using algorithms that increased conflict and polarization in society. Anti- Depression. Yeah. Yeah, someone else said, we're harming people at scale. And so, you know, there's some problematic things there that some folks with great skills

might not feel comfortable doing. Yeah, I remember, you know, just in terms of, you know, like odd applications. I mean, Antonio told me that, you know, one of the projects he worked on involved, like, looking at different types of glass for fiber optics, such that you can shave off a microsecond from the digital fetch times that they preload the advertisers bid to this bidding you wore on an advertiser. So if you could save a millisecond or whatever, that's a huge amount. But even microseconds, so he's applying like optics and laws.

And it seemed like he was really interested in that. And then they just got them, you know, literally like how many lines of code can you, you know, generate to do this other, you know, grading him on these objective metrics rather than creative, you know, generative new ideas. Right. And speaking of, you know, of, you know, kind of software eating the world, as Andreessen would say. Although I point out most of the biggest top five companies in the world right now, you know, Nvidia now, Apple, even Microsoft, they're all hardware companies, right? So the software has been eaten. Yes, it's easy, it's cheap. I make fun of my theorist friends.

I'm going to say, like, theorists are like software. It's easy to make thousands of lines of code or come up with ideas that it could never be tested. But building an experiment, the web telescope, you know, $10 billion, you know, thousands of human lifetimes to build it. Sorry, we're going to say. Yeah, I would say Microsoft is a software company. And Nvidia, I think, I saw those same headlines as you. I think just it's because of the money going into generative AI. Yeah. Like that is just massive now. And they make the chip that makes that possible.

So there's a ton of other generative AI companies that are sucking in huge amounts of investment dollars. While clean energy companies and stuff that I argue that we badly need are losing money right now. Do we really need like a STEM graduate to do a lot? I mean, the core of these things is called large language models, right? So to what extent do we really need, you know, computer scientists to development or to what extent are we, fairly excluding people from the workspace that could actually bring some novel new approaches to a longstanding and financially lucrative problem like a genera of AI. That's a great question. And I ended up taking this another thing that ended up on the cutting room floor of the book

was some research I did on folks who did not have STEM degrees, who ended up in STEM jobs. And computers and software specifically really is a, I use the word porous. It's unlike engineering and life sciences, people can enter that field without a formally technical background, a formal technical background, I should say. And certainly in the early days of the development of the software technology, there's a lot of folks who don't know how to do it and smart people who sometimes I think even having an education in a different field can be helpful.

You think differently than other folks. You can enter that field. And so there's different estimates of this. But in computers and software, some people say anywhere from 10 to 20% of their workers don't have computer science or computer engineering degrees, and they can be successful. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless.

My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now that's a deal that doesn't stay. GoogleFi wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. So I don't know enough about generative AI and how that actually is done, but there's enough

going on that your hypothesis is a good one. Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking about it. Like, you know, I got this new advertisement on Facebook, you know, probably from Antonio's, you know, our old team. And it was all, you know, like something like AI. We use AI, you know, to fit to your needs. And then at the bottom, it's like, Nespresso. I'm like, what?

Like, you know exactly like the coffee pod that we know, I'm out of it. And I mean, certainly there's a lot of shenanigans that go on behind the phone of these, you know, I had a spy, famous spy, Andrew Bustamante here last week. And, yeah, this stuff that they do and that's totally legal and Apple, you know, sells your data to all these places and they claim privacy is a human right. But, I mean, they're spending all their time to get these incremental advantages and they're having some of the most brilliant, hardworking people that are working on it. But staying on the theme of AI, I mean, will this lead to more or fewer STEM graduates and the necessity for them

in the workplace? I mean, is this going to be the axe that opens up the flood, you know, the pipeline forever? Yeah. You know, there's the software rights itself. I mean, it can be used to write itself. Right. So it seems that people keep predicting that technology is going to eliminate jobs. And there's all these case studies where it does not. And one of the more famous ones was on ATMs, that they thought ATM was going to kill the bank teller. And one of the things that they found was that banks kept bank tellers. They just had them do other things. So they had them selling other kinds of services.

Banks started to expand more into credit cards, do other sorts of stuff. And so these predictions of cataclysmic declines of certain job sectors have been. have not happened. Brian, I got to tell you 20 years ago when the MOOC was coming, that maybe that was a little bit less than 20, that was more like 10 years ago. When the MOOC was coming, I thought, I'm going to be selling used cars here in a little bit. And here we are. And so, you know, like, you're only, massive, massive open online course. So online education, basically. So, but who knows? I mean, this seems to be a bit of a game changer. I'm watching this really with great interest. I did see a study that showed that AI can now write code,

but it seems to be more of a tool that helps people. And it helps especially the mediocre coders, the really excellent coders. It's not really helping that much. So who knows? I've been reading these stories about is AI overhyped and is the innovation kind of tapering off? And, you know, I don't know. I keep, I keep waiting for the whole world to completely change. And, and it's just not happening yet. It certainly changed the way I teach. Yeah. Hey, there's a good chance you might be a scientist or an engineer aspiring to be, maybe going to school, graduate school, or after school, or maybe you're a professor like me. If you're wanting to learn the greatest tips and ways to become your best scientist,

you might want to get my book into the impossible. Think like a Nobel Prize winner with a forward by my friend, Nobel laureate Barry Barish. In it, we describe an incredible series of tips on how to collaborate better, unlock your creative genius, and get over common pitfalls like the imposter syndrome. I hope you'll take a deep dive into it, and I know you'll enjoy it. You can read a free chapter at my website, briankeating.com slash books, and you can buy it at amazon.com, an ebook, audiobook, or in physical hard copy or paperback form. Thanks a lot. How do you use it? So I, well, I used to do. some, you know, take-home exams. And now what is the point? A friend of mine said, you should have

AI grade the students, AI-generated exams, and you all go out for a beer. And I go to the beach in San Diego. And so I go back to the way I did exams, which is the Blue Book exam, where you wrote with a pen in this thing called a Blue Book. They still sell them on campus. They look exactly like they did when I was in college decades ago. And but I have to say, I wonder like what what should people know when you have access to so much information so easily? What should people know? And I've kind of gone to the idea that you need to know a lot in order to ask the right questions. So I do think that people taking my courses should know a lot about society and how it works.

And I also think that part of our job is to generate, I call them foundational skills. I hate the term soft skills. It seems pejorative. or kind of insulting, foundational skills, critical thinking, communication. That's usually a soft skill. You're not going to survive long in the work world if you can't communicate well, writing well, teamwork, collaboration. I'm building a little more of that into my teaching so that students can have long careers relearning. Everyone's going to be on a STEM skills treadmill or at least the skills treadmill and it's going to go faster and faster and you're going to need to

reboot and people are going to need that kind of be able to pivot and learn things quickly on a foundation of solid skills that I hope they pick up in college. So yeah, it's hard to say what's going to happen with the idea to bring back to your original question, but I think we need to prepare people for a world of constant change and more rapid change. If you could go back in time and change from your STEM profession, which I now know as a STEM profession. I would never, I presented and I kind of roll my eyes as I say that. What would you do differently? Would you, would you still want to, you know, be an academic? Would you have things, you know, align more with what your core, you know, desires and competency are?

Or have they changed maybe for the worse? And your tenure so you can speak freely. We have great jobs. You know that. I've heard you say that. We have great jobs. It's the hardest three hour week job in the world. It's great to be able to learn about the world.

I often think of it as like exploring where I'm planting. There's an area I don't know. And now I'm going to learn about it. And then I'm planting a flag. And now I know this area. That's what this book is. It's just travel on. Yeah.

Honestly, one of my favorite parts was learning investing. I'm not here to give investment advice, but learning how investors think. And I'm kind of a cultural sociologist. And economists hate culture that you can't study it. It's so vague. Quantify. Yeah. You want quantifiable stuff.

Measure what you can manage. Culture matters massively. And I highlight in the book when these management professors talk about the norms of investing. It's kind of governed by norms of different kinds. And so I love what I do. And so it's hard to tell people not to try to do this. I have students come to me just like they come to you. Should I try to be a professor?

I say, you know, shoot for the stars, but have an exit plan is basically what I say. So, yeah, it's fun to be able to do this. It's fun to be able to talk to you about this and try to share these ideas. And hopefully these ideas get out there. And students who are STEM majors, I'm not saying don't be a STEM major. I'm saying have an exit strategy. Pick up these other skills. Learn to learn to write, learn to think critically, learn to communicate to people outside

of your technical field. That is going to serve you well for a long-term career. Yeah, I mean, there are very few actual, honest to goodness, real professors that have podcasts. And sometimes I'm, you know, kind of asked, well, you know, UCSD must give you a lot of resources and money. And I'm like, no, actually, I bought all this stuff. front of my own dime and they said they wouldn't, you know, can me for doing it, but they're not going to like support, even for my books. In physics, it wasn't like it's part of an academic

discipline that we're supposed to write a book. So I was told, I asked for a sabbatical and they said, no, we won't deny you, you know, promotion. That's as good as it's going to get. So it's different in your field. I know it's very important to write in your field to write academic, but not academic. This is what I mean by culture. Like, your field can't exist without donors and taxpayers. That's right. And if there aren't people communicating why what you're doing is significant, it's going to dry up. It's like, why should we let these people gaze at their navels on our dime? Screw that.

Let's put their money. Oh, you know, big NASA's got all this money. And then, oh, I see Nildegrass Tyson. He's very popular. He's very rich. You know, it must be that your guys are pretty well funded. And I say, no, actually, I believe, and I say this and I get a lot of grief online. But I think it's our moral obligation of scientists to explain to the public in terms they can understand

what it is that we do. I mean, imagine we work for, you know, the chancellor or whatever, and they say, hey, John, what are you working on T? Oh, what I'm doing is very specialized. You can't possibly understand it. And there's no way because I'm using equipment that, no, you'd be gone. Well, I mean, in our field, you would be gone. But if you work for Google and you try to do that, oh, what are you working on this, you know, the recent Slack sprint that I said, no, you can't understand. You'd be gone, right? Exactly. It's part of its communication. But that's also the resistance that I get is, no, actually stem people shouldn't be doing that because they should be doing the stuff that

uniquely the only they can do it just stem stuff in the lab or and i say also well why is that well why is it well it's also hard for me to learn the soft skills like i'm not good at it and i say well yeah i know you know quantum mechanics you were born learning it out of the womb like it's so easy for you you got in third grade no you had to study things that were valuable to you and that were meaningful to you that you derive value from so why is it different with presentation i don't think everyone should do it but but the The point is we should teach it. It should be part of our discipline, at least, that these are critical skills. They're not even like, you know, soft or unimportant. They're critical for everything that's meaningful and important. You know, it's vastly important. I think it's underrated.

I agree 100%. A lot of what you say translates to the social sciences as well. You could be a, you could be a social scientist where your whole life is consumed with arguing with other people about which theory is better to explain something. And what is the point? Yeah. And I mean, I agree with you 100%. We do have a moral obligation to use this knowledge to, in your case, I think advanced civilization. I think you and Sean do stuff to advance civilization or understanding of the cosmos.

For other folks to improve society, to make society function better, to work better, that's what we should be doing. But yeah, you could you could spend your time just arguing with like 10 other people about some very narrow thing. That's what send people care about. Exactly. And sometimes, you know, my paper, my median paper cited 12 times, you know, maybe 20 people have read it. You know, books 15,000 people allegedly bought it, right? So it's, you know, it's decent kind of leverage.

And then in these YouTube videos, I mean, 10 to, you know, 1,000 people might watch this video. Right. As we wrap up, I want to ask you about your other research. So you conduct something called the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, and you're the director, you're the co-director of that, and you're the director of the Yankalovic Center for Social Science Research. What are these things on? I know about them.

You said you've never been to this building. Well, I've never been to or heard of these institutions. It's funny. So there's these, the university tries to create interdisciplinary work. The disciplines are still these siloed powerhouses that really kind of run the show, but the university knows that, and not just ours, but a lot of others, know that a lot of the more interesting work it's done when you bring people across fields. And so these research centers, they're called organized research units. And I actually, when I was, I'm no longer directing these

things. But when I was directing the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, I would meet with the folks who run, most of them are in the hard sciences and engineering. Yeah, it's a department. Yeah. So there was someone I remember it because we would come together and we'd ask each other questions. I asked why they're still building these land-based telescopes when you have these ones in outer space. And they told me, and maybe you can confirm this, that now the computers can correct for all the distortions that the atmosphere creates. Not just the computer, but yeah, it's critical. You build basically these wobbly mirrors that do what's called adaptive optics. So you correct for the fact that we look through this dirty window called the atmosphere and it's

turbulent and fluctuating. And you basically make a mirror that compensates for that exact equal and opposite fluctuations. Yeah. It was invented by Claire Max, who's a professor up at UC Santa Cruz, where she was, yeah. So the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies was the Center created years ago,

and it was designed basically to look at how immigration works in different places, and it does work very differently. And one of the things that interested me, this is one of these puzzles that I had to know the answer to, we always hear about how great immigration is and how immigrants are necessary to build the economy and all this.

The jobs we don't want to do. Yeah, and I was interested in, how Japan, which up until recently was the second largest economy in the world, had the second largest economy in the world with a third as many people as us and almost no immigrants. And so I got some money from the Japan Foundation. They had this thing called the Center for Global Partnership to do a conference where we asked that question. Is immigration necessary? And we compared Japan and the U.S.

And that's what got me on the road to wasted education because we invited some scholars in to talk about low skilled immigration and high-skilled immigration. And some of the folks talking about the U.S. blew my mind with this statistic that only a third of STEM grads worked in STEM jobs. And I was like, what? You know, I'm scribbling down. I'm like, what? And I, and that was years ago, and I got to find the answer to that. So, and then the Yankovych Center, there was a donor who lived in San Diego, Dan Yankalovich, wonderful guy. I had the pleasure of knowing him, who basically gave some money to UCSD. to catalyze research to make the world better in any kind of area,

not hard sciences, sorry, we're star for money. You guys are swimming in money to red us. So different kinds of social science projects to improve education, to improve employment outcomes and all sorts of stuff like that. So that's kind of a job that eats your whole life though, and it takes away from writing books like this. And so I'm not doing that anymore. I'm working on this and I'm doing another project.

I'm really interested in this idea of the STEM skills treadmill and the way that these workers have to constantly rebuild and a lot of folks leave because of that, by the way. The whole chapter on training is about how a lot of the workers, they get tired of having to be on this treadmill, just moving to keep in place to keep their job. And a lot of the better ones leave. They say, screw this. I can make more money doing something where I'm not constantly having to learn the next software that comes down the pike. So I'm really interested in how adults, mid-career adults, retool and rebuild their university,

or rebuild their sort of skill portfolio and how research universities like ours can help them. And so do you teach undergrads? Yeah. Yeah. So teaching undergrads, there's a lot of folks, a lot of Republicans especially want these kind of work-ready, you know, bachelor.

They've got a bachelor's and you're ready to plug and play and go into the workforce. I think if you do that, the skills are going to change. and then they're lost. They're very fragile. And so if we focus on what we're doing with the undergraduate stuff is prepare them for a lifetime of skills changes.

And then mid-career, you can come back. You don't need a whole degree. You can just get a certificate of some kind in generative AI kinds of things. Some kind of software language that becomes hot. Cybersecurity, huge one. And so I'm working on a book on that on how these different kind of regionally focused universities,

I was talking with the University of Texas. They do a lot of stuff on oil and gas and data analytics and that and clean energy over there. University of Michigan, they have a whole segment on mobility and electric cars, self-driving cars, battery storage for cars, for mid-career engineers to learn about these new technologies, right? So that's what I'm trying. That's the book I'm working on now. I'm super excited. As you can see.

Well, you are the epitome, as I used to, the epitome of a scholar. In my opinion, you're doing research, cross-disciplinary, interdisciplinary, following you where your curiosity leads. And it's actually incredibly valuable work. I mean, just as you're saying it, we hear a lot about like, oh, we need all these STEM skills. But also we need tradesmen and women and doing stuff, you know, plumbing. I ever try to get your faucet fixed?

There's a joke that my late great mentor, Jim Simons, used to say he was a hedge fund manager, billionaire, you know, and he said once he hired somebody came over a plumber in the middle of the night to fix something. And in the plumber said, after 10 seconds, that'll be, you know, that'll be $600. Right. And Jim said, what are you talking about? I don't even make $600. And the plumber per per second or whatever you make. And the plumber said, well, I'm a hedge fund manager. I manage Renaissance technologies. And the plumber said, oh, well, yeah, I guess I used to make that when I was a hedge fund manager, too, which is one of the professions that STEM graduates leak out of. And I even know some professors that have left our field of astronomy and gone to work for. So we have to STEM. the stem flow but but it's thanks to nice you were saving this book I love it yeah I didn't bring up steam oh yeah artist friends always wanted to throw on an A there now you got your own things yeah yeah let let let let lead us alone with your I applaud their effort but

but the investment is yeah I think that actually helps a lot but yeah Congress isn't like trying to put a future book maybe yeah other than astrophysicist can inspire it John Scrant me thank you so much for the wonderful conversation This incredibly enthralling book. Everyone should go out and get a copy. People can find you on Twitter at... At John Scretney. Yeah, at John Scretney.

But I don't tweet that often. I know. But yeah, stop by. It's great to have you on this campus. Thanks so much, Brian. This is fun. I really enjoyed it. Thanks.

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