#24 - Tommy Collison: Liberal Arts, Lambda School, and The Great Books Project

My guest today is Tommy Collison. Tommy grew up in Ireland, attended college at NYU, and now works at Lambda School in communication strategy and business development. In this episode, we discussed Tommy's childhood in Ireland, the liberal arts, The Great Book Project, and much more.

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My guest today is Tommy Collison. Tommy grew up in Ireland, attended college at NYU, and now works at Lambda School in communication strategy and business development.

In this episode, we talked about Tommy's childhood in Ireland and how that impacted his worldview. We went deep on the liberal arts, specifically Tommy's recent undertaking of The Great Books Project where he's reading 150 classic works over the next four years. Finally, Tommy shared the ins and outs of Lambda School, which is an online vocational school that teaches web development and data science. Lambda School is one of my favorite young companies to follow, and I wish I could buy stock in them. Tommy is a deep thinker, and this conversation has a lot of good nuggets to take away and mull over.

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Selected links from the show:

• Tommy on Twitter and The Great Books Project

• What If You Could Do It All Over by Joshua Rothman (The New Yorker)

• Why the U.S. President Needs a Council of Historians by Graham Allison and Niall Ferguson (The Atlantic)

• We Need a New Science of Progress by Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen (The Atlantic)

• Mortality Chrome Extension

• The Tail End by Tim Urban

• Lambda School

• Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck

• Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl

• Strange Rites by Tara Isabella Burton

• Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg on Twitter

• Devon Zuegel on Twitter

• The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life by Zena Hitz

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Show notes:

01:43 - What it was like growing up in Ireland

07:00 - The benefit of having good parents

10:10 - Tommy's experience moving to the United States

11:35 - What surprised Tommy about the United States

"What you study in college does not bind you to a career."

14:35 - Musings on counterfactuals 

20:25 - Reading hard copies vs. on screens

21:44 - What is The Great Books Project?

28:13 - What is applied history?

36:20 - Nobody is exceptional, they just have more discipline

47:38 - What is Lambda School and what does Tommy do there?

56:15 - Job placement rates and average incomes for Lambda School grads

1:04:50 - Do any high school grads go directly to Lambda School?

1:11:37 - Tommy's favorite mental models 

1:12:58 - The best books Tommy read in 2020

1:17:49 - Tommy's advice to a recent college grad 

1:19:35 - Tommy's favorite Twitter follows

1:21:00 - The kindest thing anyone has done for Tommy