We learn better together. And at the edges of knowledge where we innovate and invent, we learn best when we have resources and mentors who guide us.
Connecting people, ideas, and experiences is essential to our individual growth and our growth as a society. Together we can accomplish things that we can’t by ourselves. (Like making functional stuff we use every day around the house, or the stuff we use to build the house, or replacing leaders who want to break away from international agreements and punish each other with leaders who want to cooperate for the benefit of us all.)
The inverse is also true. Every effective marketer knows you have to remind your audience what will happen if they don’t follow your advice, so consider the old Flemish proverb that is usually (and inaccurately) attributed to Ben Franklin: “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we will all hang separately.”
The first time I visited Boston to give a talk about Open-Source Learning, I was a total tourist. I went to Paul Revere’s House. I bent an elbow with my nth generation Boston buddy and champion teacher Rocco at the Warren Tavern. I followed the historical red brick trail all around the city and I read every plaque.
What struck me most was all of the public firsts: the first public library, the first public school, the first public commons, the first public transportation system.
Building this country’s infrastructure started at the Boston Harbor. The colonists rebelled against taxation without representation and their tax money started funding and building things that none of them could’ve paid for or administered on their own. When I got back home from that first visit, I was struck by the ignorant irony of Ron Paul’s Tea Party advocating for less taxes and government spending.
Today, America's economic policy doesn't support collaboration. We’ve come a long way down a road that we can no longer afford to fix because many of us voted for a guy who ignores the rules, lowers taxes on the rich, raises prices through tariffs, profits on his office, fuels culture wars, and spends $200M on a White House ballroom that you’re never going to visit. The government spends $75B for ICE to harass, kidnap, and deport your neighbors and the people who work in the fields and restaurants that no longer feed you. Meanwhile, our roads and bridges are falling apart. Many of our libraries have been reduced to little more than free internet cafes or air conditioned shelters from heat domes.
I pay my taxes and I love my country, but I am not represented by my government. This isn't a party thing. This is an American thing. Read your Niemöller – you may think this doesn't apply to you, but it will soon enough.
I'm writing about this because the cruelly selfish billionaires and non-billionaire morons who support Donald Trump at their own peril are now endorsing his practice of shaking down universities to pay ransoms for previously committed research grant money.
The Trump administration has frozen nearly $600 million in medical and science research grants to UCLA, my alma mater, and is attempting to extort $1 BILLION to restore it. Apart from the predatory math, their argument is based on worse than nothing.
"Our investigation into the University of California system has found concerning evidence of systemic anti Semitism at UCLA that demands severe accountability from the institution," U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement. "This disgusting breach of civil rights against students will not stand: DOJ will force UCLA to pay a heavy price for putting Jewish Americans at risk and continue our ongoing investigations into other campuses in the UC system."
Bondi and the administration are full of crap. Not only is the charge untrue, but it puts Judaism back in the headlines right next to conflict. I’m a three-time graduate of UCLA. I taught there for more than a decade. I’m also a Jew. UCLA is one of the safest, most diverse, most inclusive places to attend school for anyone who identifies as human, however they identify with any other identifier, which is why it is also the most recognizable brand in higher education around the world.
And as for the value of the research conducted at UCLA?
I couldn't send this message and you couldn’t read it (or anything else on a screen) without the federal grant-funded research done at UCLA.
There is a very ordinary-looking computer lab that you can visit on UCLA’s campus at 3420 Boelter Hall.
In 3420 Boelter Hall, on October 29, 1969, Professor Leonard Kleinrock and his students sent the first message over the Arpanet – the precursor to the internet – to a lab at Stanford. They meant to send “LOGIN” but the connection cut out after the first two letters, so the first message was “LO” as in, “Lo and behold.” Accidentally kind of cool.
Their work was funded by the United States Department of Defense. A federal grant.
That’s right. Every tech bro, every influencer, every app, every digital convenience and entertainment you’ve ever loved, and everything else in today’s culture that owes its existence and its identity to the internet... has a government grant and a public university to thank.
Somehow, we must find a way back to protecting the financial support for mentorship, cooperation, and collaboration. That means fighting fascism and extortion. Because there is no more neutral and no one is ever going to do anything like this by themselves. And if we don’t hang together…
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What public utilities, facilities, or services are you willing to support with your tax dollars? And what are you doing today to preserve the America that got you this far? Drop me a line – I’m curious!
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Open-Source Learning is yours. Free. Get the white paper here. Use what works and customize whatever you need, however you want. I’m here to help.
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Curiosity is worth practicing. That’s how we get better at it. When it’s done particularly well, curiosity can be elevated to an art form. Curiosity makes life worth living. I am literally Curious AF. And now you can be too! Click HERE to unlock your free membership subscription.
Here is a taste of what I’m doing, reading, watching, and thinking about.
What I’m Arting –
The concept of art is an ongoing fascination to me. Not just the conversations about what qualifies as art, or what is aesthetically pleasing or shocking or technical or primitive, or even what collides at the intersection of art and commerce. What makes art eternally interesting is how it engages us. A creator and viewer – or an observer who notices something in the world and writes a description or takes a photograph – to make an object or a moment or a perspective meaningful. Art can’t exist without people, and people can make the most seemingly incidental, random things appear artful. We create casual art all day. When you tell a friend about a conversation after the fact, the words become dialogue between characters in your story. Art connects people with ideas and things in the world to create interactions, relationships, concepts, and even identities.
Every once in a while, art does something new and unexpected or presents a familiar idea in a novel way. Here are examples of both from last week.
I had a few hours in Downtown Los Angeles so I wandered over to the galleries in the Arts District.
Just inside the front door at Hauser & Wirth there was an exhibit featuring students’ projects with images and messages that featured their experience of mentorship:
But it wasn’t until I made my way into the larger gallery at the back of the courtyard that I understood the theme. Painter Henry Taylor honored his mentor James Jarvaise with an exhibition that features 70 years of painting and sculptures by both masters: Sometimes a straight line has to be crooked.
Taylor's work is well-known, but I didn't realize that his mentor was a master in his own right. And that's the whole point. If Jarvaise hadn't guided Taylor, neither would've become the artist or the mentor whose work and insight inspired thousands. And I wouldn't have wandered into an unexpected artistic meditation on mentorship or written this newsletter.
Art – and mentorship, and federally funded research – is also about expanding the boundaries of what we know. Which is why I was excited to read about an artist using technology in an unexpected way to create meaning. From the New York Times: “As I stared, I realized that the dots and blobs were fading and shifting in almost imperceptible ways. My vision had to adjust before it could begin to register what I was seeing. And then, once it did, I let out an audible ‘whoa.’
“At its best, Kurant’s art inspires this type of reaction. The Polish-born conceptual artist, who lives in New York, creates works that feel like propositions. For example, “Semiotic Life” (2022/2025), another piece in this exhibition, features a living bonsai tree intertwined with a bright blue, 3-D-printed resin rendering of what the news release calls “its algorithmically predicted, optimized future form.” Kurant is asking how the technology we’re all increasingly subject to quite literally shapes us.
“In the case of ‘Conversions 5,’ the painting is made from liquid crystals that shift in response to heat signals generated by an algorithm, which tracks the emotions in social media posts by participants in global protest movements.”
What I’m Listening To –
Just outside the gallery with the Henry Taylor exhibition is the Hauser & Wirth bookstore, where I always like to linger because they have fun, well-designed books and they play great music. This time, it was Joe Strummer and Johnny Cash. Together. I stopped reading, asked the clerk to turn it up, closed my eyes, and listened to their version of “Redemption Song.” Bob Marley’s original is one of my favorites and I’d heard this version before but never really listened – better late than never.
What I Saw But Didn't Quite Believe –
Looking out over Hermosa Beach, I realized that people can mess around on their phones while doing just about anything, including TRAINING A FALCON TO PLAY BEACH VOLLEYBALL. (I'm actually not sure about the beach volleyball part. But next to the bird responding to a whistle and swooping down toward its food once in a while, the most amazing thing about this from a distance was that it seemed like no one on the beach even noticed. The crows and gulls did, though – you should've heard the crows freak out when they tried to land in their usual palm tree and discovered they had predatory company.)
Quote I’m pondering –
When we sent that first message, there weren't any reporters, cameras, tape recorders or scribes to document that major event. We knew we were creating an important new technology that we expected would be of use to a segment of the population, but we had no idea how truly momentous an event it was.
What I missed was that my 97-year old mother would be using the Internet today, and she is.
– Leonard Kleinrock, UCLA Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Computer Science
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David Preston
Educator & Author
Latest book: ACADEMY OF ONE
Header image: Display of student artwork at Hauser & Wirth front gallery on August 7, 2025. Photo: David Preston.
David Preston
