Jim Genandt

Native of South Dakota
Leader in higher education since 1983

[Jim Genandt @genandt]

Manhattan Tech (KS) and the other KS 2-year colleges know how to provide effective workforce education!

[Holden Culotta @Holden_Culotta]

“Most people don’t realize how bad this is … ”

Shawn Ryan just had a “holy shit” moment.

Mike Rowe dropped stats that expose a massive ticking time bomb.

“There’s 7.5 million open jobs.”

“Most don’t require a 4-year degree.”

But “student debt is $1.7 trillion.”

“We’re lending money we don’t have to these same kids who are never going to be able to pay it back to train them for a bunch of jobs that don’t exist anymore.”

“It’s stupid.”

“You’ve got 6.9 million able-bodied men who are not only not working, they’re not looking for work.”

“That’s never happened.”

“We have a colossal imbalance in the workforce.”

“Not a week goes by, I’m not even exaggerating, that mikeroweWORKS doesn’t hear from the leader of some consequential industry or the CEO of a big company or some elected official who is really ringing the alarm bell.”

“Blue Forge Alliance, the company that oversees the maritime industrial base … they’re 15,000 companies who are collectively charged with delivering our nuclear-powered subs.”

“They called, they’re like: we’re having a hell of a time finding welders and electricians, can you help?”

“I said: maybe, how many you need?”

“400,000.”

@mikeroweworks @ShawnRyan762

[tobi lutke @tobi]

This David Brooks thought in the Atlantic is very insightful.

[Jim Genandt @genandt]

Forgive me for bragging, but WalletHub's annual rankings of best 2-yr colleges is out. Manhattan Tech is #2 in the nation (again). The last 5 years we have been #s 4, 2, 1, 2, 2. In 2020 we were #129!. We provide HIRE education with IMPACT. #GetAfterIt

[Jim Genandt @genandt]

Sounds like technical education for careers to me!

[Peter H. Diamandis, MD @PeterDiamandis]

I do not believe that college itself is dead, instead I believe the four-year curriculum that has remained frozen in time while the world reinvents itself every six months or less is dead. Education will always matter, but adaptability will be more valuable. The winning institutions will stop treating graduation as the end of learning and will instead help people return through life, challenging them with projects that produce evidence based capability.

[Jim Genandt @genandt]

Absolutely! Can you see what others do not see or imagine?

[The Scientific Lens @LensScientific]

"The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination."

— Albert Einstein

[Jim Genandt @genandt]

Whoa!

[Merlow @exeMerlow]

A Harvard physicist brought a light pulse to a complete stop, stored it inside atoms, then let it go again.

This is Lene Hau, filmed by Harvard. Light moves at 300,000 kilometres per second in vacuum and cannot be slowed by any ordinary means. She parked it.

The method uses a cloud of atoms cooled to almost absolute zero. The pulse enters, the information it carries is written into matter, and the light itself ceases to exist for a moment.

Then it comes back out, carrying what it went in with.

Watch the board behind her while she talks. The whole apparatus is sketched there in chalk, no rendering, no animation.

An optics engineer I know sent it to his team with 1 line: this is 20 years old.

Free on YouTube from Harvard, subtitles on.

Impossible was a statement about the equipment, not the light.

[Jim Genandt @genandt]

Love the insights!

[ooaes @21xooaes]

A NASA fellow claims 5 equations explain 99 percent of the physics that actually runs your world. Understand them deeply and you are set for life. His words.

And the way he does it is what makes the video worth it.

He does not teach the five as a list. He tells them as one story, where each equation is born from the one before it. F equals ma leads into gravity. Gravity rhymes with the law of electric charge, the exact same shape. That connects to magnetism. Magnetism folds into the wave. And the wave quietly opens the door to relativity and quantum physics.

By the end, all of physics feels like a single sentence written by one hand, not a pile of formulas you were forced to memorize.

The move that stays with you comes first. He says F equals ma is written the wrong way around, and rewrites it. One tiny flip, and the most famous equation on Earth suddenly means something school never told you.

His point for why this matters now: in the age of AI, the people who understand reality itself stay in demand. Everyone else is just memorizing.

Five equations. One thread. It is in the video.

[Dominique @0xDominiqq]

Somebody uploaded a phone recording of a Harvard algebra class from 2003, and it teaches one idea better than any polished course I've paid for.

The camera barely moves. A chalkboard, bad lighting, an instructor who clearly isn't performing for a camera. It's Benedict Gross, a real Harvard math professor, opening a course called Abstract Algebra. The kind of title that makes most people click away.

But watch what he actually does. He draws a little box of four numbers, a and b on top, c and d underneath. A two by two matrix. Nothing scary. Just four numbers in a square. Then he asks one question: can you undo it? Can you run this thing backwards and land exactly where you started?

Instead of hand-waving, he gives you a single test. Multiply a by d. Multiply b by c. Subtract. If that number, ad minus bc, is anything other than zero, the box can be reversed. If it comes out to zero, it can't. The whole thing collapses, folds the plane onto a line, and you can never get back what you started with. One subtraction decides everything.

Then the quiet payoff. He points out that all the boxes that pass this test fit together. Combine two of them, you get another one. Every one has a partner that undoes it. That neat little club has a name, a group, and the whole rest of the course grows out of that one word.

Four numbers in a square quietly became the reason your phone can rotate a photo and rotate it back. No music, no thumbnail bait. Just the moment where a box of numbers turns into something you can actually point at.

The math is free and public. So is the lecture. What nobody can hand you in one video is the feel for when a system is about to quietly break, right before the numbers blow up. That feel is the real edge, and it's built over a semester of doing it by hand, not one clip.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk and Peter Diamandis just described the end of the economic model every civilization in history was built on.

Not a recession. Not a depression. The end of scarcity itself.

Musk: “I call AI and robotics the supersonic tsunami.”

Not a wave you see coming. A wave that arrives before the sound does.

Diamandis: “Labor becomes the cost of capex and electricity. AI is basically intelligence available at a de minimis price.”

When intelligence costs almost nothing, the labor inside every product turns into an electricity bill.

Diamandis: “You’re able to produce almost anything. Things get down to basic costs of materials and electricity.”

Not cheaper production. Nearly free production.

Every price you have ever paid was mostly labor.

The labor to design it. To build it. To move it. To sell it.

Take labor out and the price of almost everything falls toward the cost of the atoms it’s made of.

Diamandis: “People can have whatever stuff they want, whatever services they need.”

That sentence isn’t utopian. It’s a description of what stops being necessary.

Every economic system in history was designed to solve one problem.

Allocation under scarcity. Who gets what when there isn’t enough for everyone.

Markets. Currencies. Taxation. Wages. Supply chains. Trade policy.

All of it. Machinery for rationing.

They’re describing a world where that problem stops existing.

Musk: “If your output of goods and services increases faster than the money supply, you will have deflation.”

Not the deflation economists fear. Not collapsing demand.

Supply going infinite while demand stays human.

Musk: “Governments will actually be pushing to increase money supply.”

Printing at full speed and still losing to how fast AI drives the cost of everything down.

Musk: “They won’t be able to waste the money fast enough. Which is saying something for government.”

That’s not an economy in crisis. That’s an economy outrunning the instruments built to read it.

Musk: “Productivity is going to improve dramatically. I think we may see high double-digit output of goods and services.”

Double-digit productivity growth, sustained indefinitely.

Numbers that break every economic model we have.

Musk: “We have to be a little careful about how economists measure things.”

Not because the numbers are wrong. Because the measurements were designed for a world that’s ending.

Almost every economic crisis in history came from not having enough.

The crisis nobody has a framework for is having too much.

Every empire, every currency, every power structure ran on the same assumption.

That there would never be enough to go around.

That wasn’t a policy. That was the ground everything else stood on.

Two men just described what happens when the ground gives way and nothing has been built to replace it.

Every definition of value we have ever used was a measure of scarcity.

We’re about to need one that isn’t.

We spent ten thousand years fighting over a pie we assumed was fixed.

We’re about to find out what happens when the pie has no edge.

[Nav Toor @heynavtoor]

https://t.co/VloDpAi6vy

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

Underrated life advice: A good life is built by simply doing uncomfortable things sooner. The delayed conversation gets harder. The ignored problem gets bigger. The small repair gets more expensive. Peace is never found through avoidance. It’s found through direct early action.

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

Steve Jobs literally gave a 10-minute masterclass on building a company (better than $100K MBA):

1. Someone has to be the keeper of the vision. There is a staggering amount of work in building anything, and when you have to walk a thousand miles, the first step looks impossibly far. Jobs saw his job as the person who constantly reminds everyone that the goal is real, not a mirage, and that each step gets you closer. In a thousand small and occasionally large ways, the vision has to be repeated, or people lose faith it exists.

2. The honeymoon ends fast, and then the world only cares what you produce. After six months, Jobs told his team that all the goodwill they got just for existing was old news. You can point to the lawsuit, the setbacks, the this and that, but the bottom line is the world does not care. It cares about what you ship and how timely you bring it to market. From here on out you get judged like every other startup, by your product, not your story.

3. The most important job of a leader is recruiting. Jobs says it plainly: hiring is the thing he considers most important about a role like his. He didn't want seasoned professionals so much as people who were insanely great at what they did, who had the latest understanding of the technology at their fingertips and the passion to bring it to millions.

4. A great team becomes self-policing about who it lets in. Once you assemble a core group of ten genuinely great people, something powerful happens: they start guarding the bar themselves. They will not tolerate letting mediocre people into the group. The quality defends itself, which is why getting those first ten right matters more than almost anything.

5. Start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. This is the mistake Jobs says he made more than anyone in the room, and he has the scar tissue to prove it. You cannot start with a piece of awesome technology and then hunt for where to sell it. You start with what incredible benefit you can give the customer and where you can take them, and only then figure out the technology to get there.

6. You have to find what you love, and not settle. Your work fills a huge part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it, keep looking, and don't settle. Like any matter of the heart, you'll know when you find it, and it only gets better over the years.

7. They didn't set out to start a company. They just wanted the thing to exist. There was no personal computer in 1975, so Jobs and Wozniak built one because they wanted one and none existed. They made it for themselves, showed it to friends, and the friends all wanted one. They started building by hand until it consumed all their spare time, so they decided to manufacture a hundred just to stop. That is how Apple began. Not a plan to start a company, a circle that kept getting bigger.

8. "I want to make lots of money" is not a good enough reason. When people tell Jobs they want to start a company, he asks why. If the answer is to make lots of money, he tells them to forget it. He has barely seen anyone succeed that way. The ones who succeed often didn't even want to start a company. They just had an idea they needed to get out into the world, and had to build a company because no one else would listen.

9. You lead by example, because everyone is watching. You can say anything you want, but people watch extremely carefully what senior management actually does. When something isn't quite good enough, do you stop and make it great, or do you just ship it? Everyone sees which choice you make in the hard moments, what decisions you make and what values you hold, and that, not your speeches, is what permeates a company of thousands.

10. Focus doesn't mean saying yes. It means saying no. Jobs kept the organization simple and did very few things well. And focusing is hard precisely because it means deciding not to do a huge number of things so you can pour everything into a handful. Most people think focus is about what you take on. He understood it's about what you refuse.

11. Let people do the best work of their lives. Everyone wants to do something great, to be excited about what they're building, and to be recognized when they nail it. So Jobs tried to build a place where people could do their best work and then get it in front of 25 million customers. Knowing millions of people will use the thing you're making, and that the whole industry will copy it if it works, is enormously motivating.

12. Don't lose the war because you won a few battles. Late in the clip Jobs gets blunt about a danger he sees creeping in: losing the startup hustle. If you zoom out, it would be a shame to lose the war because you were busy winning small battles. He felt people were concentrating too hard on minor fights and losing perspective on the real one. And the war, he says, is survival, not running out of money before you get your product to market.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Jeff Bezos built a trillion dollar company on infrastructure paid for by people who went bankrupt.

And he just explained why it’s about to happen again with AI.

In the 1990s, companies poured billions into laying fiber optic cable across the planet. Every one of them went broke.

Bezos: “All of that fiber optic cable that got laid, and by the way, the companies who laid all that cable went out of business.”

They died. The cable stayed. And it became the foundation of everything that followed.

Now it’s happening again.

Six people. No product. They started yesterday. $20 billion valuation.

Bezos: “Investors don’t usually give a team of 6 people a couple of billion dollars with no product. It’s rare. And that’s happening today.”

Everyone sees this and screams bubble.

Bezos sees the same thing and recognizes something older.

There are two kinds of bubbles.

A financial bubble, like 2008, is pure destruction. Capital vanishes. Society inherits the crater.

An industrial bubble runs on entirely different logic.

Bezos: “This is a kind of industrial bubble, as opposed to financial bubbles.”

The 90s biotech boom burned through billions. Stocks collapsed. Companies disappeared.

The drugs they created are still saving lives today.

Bezos: “As a group, they all lost money. But we did get a couple of life saving drugs.”

The investors lose. The inventions remain. Every single time.

Most AI companies being funded right now won’t exist in five years. The people writing the checks already know it.

They are not confused. They are not reckless.

They are financing infrastructure the entire world will inherit.

Bezos: “The benefits to society from AI are going to be gigantic.”

25 years ago, no one could have predicted what the internet would become. Least of all the people who laid the cable.

They went broke before the world they built ever switched on.

The AI bubble is not a sign that something has gone wrong.

It is how civilization has always financed things too large for any rational person to justify.

Every piece of technology you use without thinking was once someone’s life savings disappearing in real time.

That is what a successful bubble looks like from the other side. You stop seeing it. It just becomes the world.

The system only works because the builders believe they will be the exception. If they ever saw the pattern clearly, they would stop. And the future would stop arriving.

Progress does not run on genius. It runs on brilliant people being catastrophically, necessarily wrong.

The people who build the future have never been the ones who get to live in it.

That is not a flaw in the system. That is the system.

[Peter H. Diamandis, MD @PeterDiamandis]

The world has had many terrible pandemics, but the one I worry about the most is the pandemic of fear. It spreads faster than any technology and makes people take drastic and irrational decisions.

[Merlow @exeMerlow]

Richard Feynman stood at a Cornell blackboard in 1964 and explained the problem every AI lab is fighting in 2026. The BBC filmed it. Almost nobody watches it.

The lecture is about why nature only answers in mathematics. Every team forcing language models to reason is hitting the wall he mapped 62 years ago.

He was 46. The Nobel Prize came 11 months later. The footage survived on film reels and now sits free on YouTube with fewer views than a keyboard unboxing.

Watch the blackboard section near the middle. He takes 1 of Kepler's laws and rebuilds it from nothing, with notation a 12-year-old can follow.

No slides. No jargon. 1 piece of chalk.

An ML engineer I know paused it 4 times and made his whole team watch it before standup.

You're 62 years late. The lecture is still free.

[Camus @newstart_2024]

Divorce attorney James Sexton said something that hit hard: our society distracts us from the fact that we’re all going to die, because if we really internalized it, we’d stop chasing a lot of the meaningless stuff that keeps the machine running.

After spending time in hospice, he realized the dying don’t talk about their stuff. They talk about the people they loved, the connections, the beautiful and painful moments. Everything else falls away.

There’s a finite number of times you’ll kiss your wife, hug your kids, or tell someone you love them. You don’t know the number, until it’s passed.

That finiteness is what makes it so precious.

[Jon Hernandez @JonhernandezIA]

“AI will force us to redesign school.”

Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, says AI should teach knowledge while classrooms develop human skills.

Education shifts from standardized instruction to personalized learning, creativity, judgment, and collaboration.

AI does not replace school. It changes what school is for.

[Jim Genandt @genandt]

Agree!

[Teddy - PolyBackTest.com @Bitcoin_Teddy]

Elon Musk thinks the entire education system is built on a broken assumption.

That every student should learn the same thing. At the same speed. In the same order. At the same time.

Musk: “Everyone goes through from like 5th grade to 6th grade to 7th grade like it’s an assembly line. But people are not objects on an assembly line.”

The model was designed for a factory economy. Standardized inputs. Predictable outputs.

That economy is gone. The assembly line is gone.

But the education system still runs on its logic.

A student who masters algebra in two weeks sits through eight more weeks because the calendar says so. A student who struggles gets dragged forward because the schedule doesn’t wait.

Neither is being served. Both are being processed.

Musk: “Allow people to progress at the fastest pace that they can or are interested in, in each subject.”

AI doesn’t teach a classroom. It teaches a student.

One at a time. Every time.

It skips what a student already knows. It finds where they’re stuck and approaches it from a different angle.

It adjusts in real time. Not at the end of a semester when the damage is already done.

A student obsessed with basketball learns fractions through shooting percentages. A student who builds in Minecraft learns geometry through architecture.

The subject doesn’t change. The entry point does.

No teacher with thirty students can do this. Not because they lack skill.

Because the math doesn’t work.

AI doesn’t have that constraint.

Musk: “You do not need to tell your kid to play video games. They will play video games on autopilot all day. So if you can make it interactive and engaging, then you can make education far more compelling.”

The brain isn’t broken. The format is.

Kids learn complex systems and strategic thinking for hours voluntarily. Then walk into a classroom and can’t focus for twenty minutes.

That’s not a discipline problem. That’s a design problem.

Musk: “A university education is often unnecessary. You probably learn the vast majority of what you’re going to learn there in the first two years. And most of it is from your classmates.”

Four years. Six figures of debt.

And the real value comes from the people sitting next to you. Not the institution charging you.

The degree doesn’t certify knowledge. It certifies endurance.

Musk: “If the goal is to start a company, I would say no point in finishing college.”

The system was built to train employees. If you’re not trying to be one, it has nothing left to offer you.

Every lecture. Every textbook. Every curriculum. Now available instantly. Personalized to any learner. Adapted to any pace.

The question isn’t whether the old model survives.

It’s how long we keep forcing students through it while the replacement already exists.

[Curious Minds @CuriousMindsHub]

Keep your problems smaller than your life!!