[00:00:00] Eytan Wurman: Biggest myth in the world is that athletics can pay for college. It can for 0.1% of athletes who get a D1 or D2 scholarship. But in most cases, it's just an opportunity for colleges to market to potential students.
And we're piggybacking off of that exact idea. If you are already going to give a kid $5,000 a year to play in the marching band, tell them that when they're 15 and they'll sign a piece of paper that guarantees their enrollment in your school.
[00:00:34] Jeff Dillon: Welcome to another episode of the Signal. Today I am bringing back a guest whose mission stuck with me the first time we talked and who's built a lot since then. Eitan Wurman is the founder and CEO of Common Time Pathways, the recruiting platform built on a simple, disruptive idea. Creatives deserve the same recruiting pipelines athletes get. When Ayton and I first sat down about a year ago, Common Time Pathways was just getting off the ground. Since then, the company raised a million dollars from Yamaha and Reach Capital to build what they're calling the first collegiate scouting infrastructure for artistic intelligence and took the platform onto the international stage at the ISME where World Conference. Eitan is a classically trained musician, a former music director in the greater Boston area, and a graduate of Boston University and Gordon College. With degrees spanning music and educational leadership. He spent his career pushing higher ed to rethink how it finds and values student artists. And Common Time Pathways is his answer, connecting student artists with scholarships and the colleges that need them for the next evolution of higher education.
I've been looking forward to this catch up for a while.
Eitan, it is great to have you back. Thanks for joining.
[00:01:58] Eytan Wurman: Great to see you, Jeff.
[00:01:59] Jeff Dillon: When we last talked, Common Time Pathways was still, it was a company, but it was a very early company. It was this emerging, this idea very focused on musicians. Now you've raised capital, you've expanded the platform, you, you're taking the concept to a bigger stage. So I want to hear about what's changed and what's gone on in last year since we talked and recorded our last episode last July.
[00:02:23] Eytan Wurman: So you probably know that starting a company is just absolutely bonkers. And I do not recommend it to anyone who's not absolutely committed to the idea, especially in the tech world. But it's been a great journey because we've grown in how we're serving people. And so that's always been the kind of mission critical. How do we stay attached to what our values and mission are? And so we thought that we were really Just supporting music kids to connect with college scholarships and this and that. There were a lot of people who were interested in recruiting music majors, kind of like the D1 athletics recruiting model, but for conservatory kids. And we realized really quickly that our impact was actually 20 times bigger than that. And so over the last year, the conversation around Common Time has strictly become how do we reposition the artist, the creative human, as the center of an AI enabled future we want to live in.
And that's a crazy concept to think we can impact, but what we're ultimately doing is taking everybody with a supplementary materials section in their app for college and telling them to put it on Common Time early so that they can get recruited for it when they're 13 and 14 and 15. And this is super cool because now we're not just talking about music, we're also talking about non majors musicians who want to major in engineering and the psychology major who wants to play the cello in the orchestra and the kid who wants to be in the color guard and marching band, you know, just be a part of that community and find their core in college there. It's just become tremendous because now we're also exploring theater and dance for this school year. Like we, the people who are working with us on Common time are like, when can I do this for my theater kids? When can I do this for the dance kids? And it's just awesome to see how successful our relationships have been because our hearts are in the right place. Just helping kids be at the center of their own future because God knows, I mean, I have a five month old and I have no idea what they're going to be growing up into. So the idea that if they're artists, they could potentially find their way, I mean, that's everything to me as a parent and as a music teacher and as an entrepreneur.
[00:04:38] Jeff Dillon: Well, congratulations on the newborn. I had no idea.
[00:04:41] Eytan Wurman: So that's, that's really exciting. Yeah, A baby and a startup all at once.
[00:04:46] Jeff Dillon: I know you were very focused on musicians, you know, a year or so ago, and now this creative, broader focus is out there. I think you said something like, if I remember right, you know, you wish it was more from 50,000 music students a year to a half a million. I wish it was that big. For when students are choosing to make this part of their life after they graduate. How big do you think that number could be now that you're kind of opening this up even bigger?
[00:05:13] Eytan Wurman: So that's crazy. I love that you're asking me that question right out of the Gate. It's fun because the. Okay, I just have to talk about this. So Forbes published an article with LinkedIn data. Not long ago, I wrote an article about this on LinkedIn, ultimately stating the versatility of college degrees. And this is kind of the opposite of technical education, right? Vocational education. What is the monetary value of the degree you're getting in the sense of, if I study biology, am I going to be a biologist? If I study English, am I going to be a journalist? If I study marketing, am I going to be a marketer? If I study finance, am I going to work in business? Like all of these things that the federal government is imposing on colleges is to say, how do you prove your worth? Especially now that AI can do all of this stuff. And the article that Forbes published on the versatility of college degrees is something you can't ignore. This is data that compares what a student studied in college and what they're working in as an adult. And the most versatile degrees are, number one, the funny thing that we've made fun of for the last 30 years, an English major. Yay. Because they're good communities, communicators, and they know how to write and they know how to express ideas in ways that others who aren't English majors just don't have exposure to. And the next one, number two, is another language. It's fine. And performing arts, it's the ability to process material and then curate an experience for people. I mean, heck, that's the economy.
This is the experience economy that we're living in. And so I think. You asked me a question. Instead of having 23,000 music majors every year, can we have 500,000 music majors?
I think the conversation has shifted completely. Even the New England Conservatory, which is one of the top seven conservatories in the United States, which trains the highest level of musician, is now advertising to its students, not only if you get a music degree at nec, are you going to be able to play on stage at Carnegie hall, but if you get a music degree at NEC, you can do one of a hundred different things, 100 different careers, through your ability to perform and present something to an audience that is looking to receive something that you have to offer. What an amazing message. The idea that the versatility of a music degree, even from a top conservatory, can prepare you for a degree in aerospace engineering, that's huge.
[00:07:38] Jeff Dillon: I love that we jumped in really quickly here. Why don't we back up?
[00:07:42] Eytan Wurman: Yeah, that's the deep end. We went right into the deep end.
[00:07:44] Jeff Dillon: I like it. We're going to get back there. But why don't you explain to the audience what the nuts and bolts and the basics of what Common Time pathways do does like what is the software? What is the idea?
[00:07:55] Eytan Wurman: Yeah. So Common Time is quite literally an athletics style recruiting platform for colleges applied to creative humans right now musicians. But we're expanding very quickly to other art forms as well because of the demand for it. But the idea is that if you can recruit a 13 year old kid when they are a soccer player or a football player, you can now start finding 13 year old kids who are violists and oboe players and tenors in the choir, kids who dance on the dance team and the lead actor in a play in school. Those kinds of kids colleges are figuring out really quickly are the kids who retain better, perform better, have better mental health, better physical wellness, better graduation rates, better alumni engagement, better success in the workplace post graduation no matter what degree they get. I mean these are the kids who are the center of the AI enabled economy in 2050. And so that's Common Time's model is connecting artists with colleges the way that we can currently already connect athletes with colleges from a very young age.
[00:08:59] Jeff Dillon: So tell me if I'm on track. My son played trumpet, a high school trumpet player who's pretty good.
[00:09:04] Eytan Wurman: Yeah.
[00:09:05] Jeff Dillon: Often doesn't know or doesn't even think about taking that to college that they could get a scholarship or something like that. Right. You help them know it and apply for those opportunities. Right?
[00:09:16] Eytan Wurman: Absolutely. Just the same way that a lacrosse kid can get contacted by a coach. Now it's the same thing for a kid who plays the trumpet.
[00:09:22] Jeff Dillon: So let's go to what's happened in the last year. You've raised some money.
This is this great milestone. What caught my attention was really the language you're using around what we're building. Scouting infrastructure for our artistic intelligence. I love that.
[00:09:35] Eytan Wurman: Yeah.
[00:09:35] Jeff Dillon: And the best we immediately we understand what scouting means in athletics and there are systems for identifying talent and evaluating it and connecting athletes with colleges. That infrastructure really hasn't existed for creatives.
[00:09:49] Eytan Wurman: The funny thing is is that it has. The expectation has existed, but the infrastructure has not. And this is where it's awesome. Think about the music professors and faculty at colleges. They are the most visible faculty outside of athletics recruiting in the entire campus. Think about it. Every athletics coach on the off season recruits full time. The music faculty at a college are also visiting high schools, adjudicating festivals, giving lessons at summer camps and continuing their work in the community, developing their network, their own pipelines. But they're only doing it for music majors because those are the kids that they need to fill their rosters. Common time fills the gap of making that music professor 20 times more effective in recruiting non majors for central admissions and the VP of enrollment. That's where this is really cool. That already happens. This is the only faculty that does that. The English department doesn't recruit. The biology department doesn't go out and do college fairs. They just don't. But the music faculty do it all the time. And they do it because that's the expectation in the music world. And it's specifically because not all music majors are made equal.
You're a trumpet player or you're an oboe player, or you're a singer in the choir, or you're a drum major or you're a conductor.
You can't have a football team with 45 tight ends. You just can't do it. Right. It would be fun to watch, but you can't do it.
And so that's the same thing. You can't have an orchestra with 700 violins and one cello. So not all music majors are created equal. And so it's been the expectation in this industry that college professors recruit and it's there.
[00:11:27] Jeff Dillon: So not really a question, but a comment here. And I'm just really excited at the time in your bringing this to universities because music is one of those things that makes us fundamentally human or the creative arts in general. Yep. You know, my son was a data science major and I'm like, you're going to have a great job.
Data science and you know, computer science. That's really hard now. Like that's not the.
So people are striving to become, like what. What defines me. I love that whole idea. We spend so much time talking about how to identify academic or athletic potential, but artistic ability, is this another form of the human potential? I think it's really valuable and it makes sense.
[00:12:10] Eytan Wurman: Thank you for that. That's wonderful.
[00:12:12] Jeff Dillon: I think more people are understanding that now. It's almost. I talk about this idea that when people use AI to program something and code something, they're very proud of it. Like, look what I did really quickly. I coded this. But if you use it to create music or to write something, it's almost more of a taboo. Like I don't want people to know I used AI to do this. It's just this very interesting. Like it's been accepted for these black and white type of tasks, you know. But even if like a musician wanted to use AI tools. A musician is going to be much better using the tools than a non musician. So I think that's going to help everybody.
[00:12:47] Eytan Wurman: Well, content generation is a really tough subject right now, so if you want to go deep into that, we can make some sound bites and we can probably get on the news.
[00:12:57] Jeff Dillon: I'm curious, because everyone's wanting to. You did something that a lot of startups really want to do. What did the fundraising process teach you about how investors think about creative talent compared to athletic talent?
[00:13:10] Eytan Wurman: Oh, boy. So I happen to be one of the luckiest founders in the world in that I found a VC like Reach Capital where they understood that human potential is the only thing truly worth investing in.
And they, honest to God, the fundraising journey is complicated and difficult for everyone in different ways. But I was lucky also at the same time to be introduced to the people at Yamaha who don't typically do things like B2B SaaS, higher education software companies. But the kicker here is really that we're centering the young artist in the middle of what our mission is and what our value system is based around. It's that kid. Our value system is based in that kid. And so I've had people who, you know, advisors who have told me, eitan, don't quit your job to do this unless you're ready to be starving and poor and broke and hungry for six months and your wife might divorce you and you might have to mortgage your house and all these things. And I'm like, you know, I understand the entrepreneurial mindset enough to respect that. A lot of people have sacrificed incredibly hard things to become entrepreneurs.
I think the sacrifices are a lot easier when the thing that you're trying to create in the world puts something valuable at the heart of it. It's not, I'm going to start an insurance business and make it a little bit better than some other guy because my customer service is better. No, it's just keeping something very important at the center of your life's mission means that the sacrifices don't feel like sacrifices. And the people who resonate with you, like you and me, the people who resonate with you will want you to succeed. And that kind of goodwill goes very far as an entrepreneur. And so keeping young, artistic, creative students at the center of common time has made our journey a joy, not necessarily a sacrifice.
And we're so lucky to have backing from Yamaha and Reach because they understand that our value system will lead us to where we want to be as a company, not the other way around.
[00:15:27] Jeff Dillon: I think you know you're doing the right thing when you're working. You may be working all the time, but it doesn't really feel like it. You're like, I want to be doing this.
You know, it's a lot.
[00:15:35] Eytan Wurman: It does feel like it. I, I am tired.
Maybe that's the five month old, not the company.
[00:15:42] Jeff Dillon: Yeah. Your spouse will give you the reality check of like you need to check out here.
[00:15:46] Eytan Wurman: Very much so.
[00:15:46] Jeff Dillon: And this idea, it gets much bigger than just recruiting students. For US Colleges, music is universal. And the way talent gets discovered and these opportunities for young musicians can look very different depending on where they live. Taking Common Time to a international community gives you a chance to see whether the problem is really as universal as the art form itself.
[00:16:09] Eytan Wurman: Yeah.
[00:16:09] Jeff Dillon: You recently had a presence at the ISME World Conference. What does it mean to take this idea to an international stage?
[00:16:17] Eytan Wurman: It was extraordinarily eye opening to talk to people from Australia, Japan, India, parts of the eu, the uk, parts of Central Africa, and Western and Eastern Africa as well, parts of Latin America. It's really the whole globe was present.
And the trick was my audience there. Of course, ISME is the international society for Music Education.
My audience was music teachers and music researchers from all over the world, many of them working at colleges, but also many K12 programs. Actually, this was great. It was the first time that the conference happened in North America in 2016 years. And so we were lucky enough to have a lot of US Canada, teachers and colleges present, which was a very interesting place to talk. And Common Time's presence there was spectacular. I got to open the what they have a new thing called the Creator Space. And it's all about innovation and collaboration and music education and learning what the new things are. And there were a lot of companies there, Music first and Jim Frankel were there, good friends of mine with his friend Lee Whitmore also, you know, Suno was there, which is a very interesting thing to talk about these days in terms of content generation, in terms of AI machines and models. And it's just people were having conversations about how we can and here's the best part, best serve the students in front of us the whole time. And so the value system was aligned. And so we weren't going to sell anything at this conference. This was what we call an internal championship conference. We want people in the world to know that Common Time has the same value systems that they have as musicians, as educators of the future music generation.
And to us, it was great. And when I got to give a keynote you can check it out on our YouTube channel. But I got to give a keynote which opened the creator space. It was wonderful.
And my call to action for researchers was to do a lot of the research that wasn't about what's the best methodology or pedagogy to use in the classroom or how do we elevate the voices of our students. Yes, these are all important topics, but funding for music education is dependent on workforce development and economic mobility metrics.
And so when I use those words, all the politicians ears go, oh, I'm sorry, was he speaking in my language for a moment? And that's where the funding for music comes from. And so I got to charge the educators not just with identifying music as the strategic subject, not the soft one for the economy of 2050, but I also got to charge the researchers in the room with the mission of measuring empirically, somehow the long term impact of music in a person's life and on a person's career trajectory and what it means to have music in schools. I think K12, every time there's a budget cut, they look right at the music room.
But every time they need somebody creative, every time they need somebody empathetic, it's the first place they go. Those are not the things that we measure in school assessments, but we need to start measuring them in terms of their impact on the lives of the children we're raising. And that was my charge. To researchers.
[00:19:39] Jeff Dillon: The obvious measure of success might be a scholarship or an acceptance letter. But as you've had more students using the platform, I imagine you've started seeing some outcomes that you didn't necessarily anticipate when maybe you first built it. Sometimes what the student gets from the process can be just as important as where they ultimately enroll. How's your definition of success for a student on the platform evolved since. Since we last spoke?
[00:20:08] Eytan Wurman: Oh, that's really interesting. I think that the definition of success for a student on Common Time has been relatively stable. Actually. It's the idea of funding your college education through music that's been at the heart of what we're doing. I think the unintended consequence is more students telling their parents they want to study music earlier.
And we're giving them the tool that helps them convince their parents that music is a viable option in higher education.
That, to me, is the most powerful situation and most of the reason that the music faculty at colleges are also behind Common Time because it gives them the excuse to talk to a 14 or 13 year old's parents and say, by the way, Your kid's a phenomenal music kid. Why are they not thinking about majoring in music? And my dad, my own father, who has passed away, had an argument with me when I was 17 when I said, I want to study music.
And I said, this is what I want to do with my life. And my dad said, I didn't move to this country so you could study a degree that will make you live in my basement until you're 45. I'm like, and there's the myth, there's the myth that common time is helping to debunk. There's so many striations of success between Taylor Swift and living out of your parents basement and eating out of a dumpster on weekends. Like there's so much economic viability for an artist who can truly perform. And again, it's not just in music. And so I think that's the unintended consequence is that parents have started talking about music the way they talk about sports. It's not just good for you, it's also something that might pay for college. And now there's family buy in we didn't have before. That's the most powerful.
[00:21:43] Jeff Dillon: This feels like a really important distinction because I think now we're not just talking about helping students get discovered. Colleges are actually able to signal that interest back to the student and remove some of the friction that might help them from applying. But for a young musician who may not have considered a certain school, that could, you know, it could completely change this conversation.
[00:22:06] Eytan Wurman: Absolutely.
[00:22:07] Jeff Dillon: Some colleges, they're offering what you call application pledges. They've waived fees and scholarships tied to a musician's profile. How did that come about? How are colleges responding?
[00:22:19] Eytan Wurman: That was what's grown out of our desire to compete with an athletics narrative in exactly that way. So a college can now on common time, actually offer a student an application fee waiver or an audition waiver or a pre assigned scholarship or sometimes even a common time scholarship. We offer our own that we can give to colleges to support their work.
And that way they actually can go out and say to a student who is 15, which is two years before an onslaught of 300 colleges is trying to talk to them all at once. Right. The early part of this is important. A 15 year old's parents can get a message from a school saying, hey, we're interested in your kid. We're willing to offer them an application fee waiver or a waiver or a scholarship of some kind if they promise to apply when that kid is 17. And now that child and that family has, in their moment, said, whoa, this is different. And so the colleges are really excited. I mean, some colleges really depend on athletics on, excuse me, application fee waivers or on application fees to make a lot of money. Some of them don't care and hand them out like candy. Some of them have fees for auditioning. Some of them don't. Some of them have scholarships they can assign once a kid's there and auditions. Some of them have scholarships they can promise to a kid two years in advance of when they show up, if they promise to show up. And all of it's exactly like what happens for athletics. And so this is the greatest thing, is that this process has illuminated for a lot of people who are not in the athletics world, all of the caveats and addendums in an athletics contract.
I mean, here's some basic things. You can't drop out. You can't get arrested. You can't get expelled. You can't have a GPA of lower than X. You must still apply.
You must complete a fafsa. You must be accepted to the university.
You must deposit at the university.
You must enroll in classes. And if you do all those things and show up for practice, we'll give you a scholarship. It's almost like you were going to do all of that anyway, because you were.
The biggest myth in the world is that athletics can pay for college. It can for 0.1% of athletes who get a D1 or D2 scholarship. But in most cases, it's just an opportunity for colleges to market to potential students.
And we're piggybacking off of that exact idea. If you are already going to give a kid $5,000 a year to play in the marching band, tell them that when they're 15, and they'll sign a piece of paper that guarantees their enrollment in your school.
[00:24:50] Jeff Dillon: Yeah, I love that. Colleges are now under a lot of pressure to find students they might never reach through traditional recruiting channels. And at the same time, they're looking for students who bring something meaningful to the campus. How is that pressure changing the way admissions offices think about a platform like Common Time?
[00:25:11] Eytan Wurman: Oh, gosh. The pressure to enroll kids is extraordinary. Right now, higher education is in a crisis. If you open any education publication, if you open any education section of a newspaper or a magazine, the articles are all talking about the fact that there's an enrollment cliff. And that means that over the next five years, there's going to be 3 million fewer college kids. And if colleges are already struggling to stay open, something like 40 or 50 colleges every year are closing. If that number is going to double or triple in the next couple of years because of this enrollment cliff, colleges are grasping at straws to find new people. And so the pressure has actually really opened the door for common time because now they can take this athletics recruiting model and apply it to people who aren't athletes. And there's 10 million of them out there in the US alone.
This is a huge deal. And everyone says, oh, you know, that's such a ethereal. I can't put a number on it. It's so abstract. 3 million kids won't be going to college. And then I say something like, that's $75 billion in lost tuition revenue. And everyone goes, oh dang, I see it now like 75 billion in tuition that won't flow into college. That's a lot of money that colleges are going to lose. And so they're thinking, oh well, what if we just convince more kids to go to college? Good luck. Here's my friend AI convincing everybody that they should think twice about going to college because AI can do half of the work now anyway. And here comes the federal government restricting our ability to enroll international students. And here comes the federal government with the request that we prove that all of our degrees have a direct ROI and definition of success after graduation. It's almost.
There are so many pressures on an enrollment VP and on a director of admissions right now who are all phenomenal humans who really desperately want to center the kid and the kid's journey as their story and why they're really attractive to certain families and others.
It's just really hard to keep finding new kids right now. Yeah, yeah. And if you're wondering why, it's because in 2008 the market crashed and we had 15% lower birth rates across the board for the following five or six years. Now that doesn't sound like a lot until you realize it's 3 million kids that weren't born that should have been. And I don't know if you've tried to make a 17 year old lately, but it takes a long time to get there. You can't just make them overnight.
[00:27:43] Jeff Dillon: And the timing, with private competition and federal pressures on budgets for universities and all these other things hit all at the same time.
[00:27:52] Eytan Wurman: It's crazy.
[00:27:53] Jeff Dillon: One of the things that makes this so hard is it's this two sided platform. I think you can create this great experience for students and families, but it only becomes really valuable if enough institutions are participating. Yeah, colleges are more likely to participate when they see students and families already there. So you're building this trust and momentum on both sides at the same time. What's the hardest part about scaling a platform that depends on trust from families on one side and buy in from institutions on the other?
[00:28:19] Eytan Wurman: You are going to love this piece of the interview because I've had this conversation a couple of different times, but never on the record. So this will be fun.
Starting a two sided marketplace like colleges meet kids, kids meet colleges. Or employer meet potential worker meet a potential employer. Two sided marketplaces are like middle school dances.
Everyone's on the wall, no one wants to touch each other because no one trusts what's going on yet. And so having been a middle school teacher, I can make this reference very comfortably. Common Time created the dance floor. We put up a DJ booth, we told everybody what it's going to be. And then what now, right? And so it's one thing to create a beautiful platform which is a beautiful gym or cafetorium where you have a DJ booth set up and some tiki lights. And there's some, if you were in my generation, some 80s 90s throwback hits going on in the background, but no one's going to want to come in until you invite some people in. And so what we have is students in colleges who are now not just trickling in, but coming in in droves. Right? We had a thousand students register in the last 30 days. It's just grown tremendously fast. And the colleges are coming in pretty quickly too because they see this. But the trick is to get them to dance together.
You have to do. And I gosh, I can't believe this analogy keeps going. The snowball dance. You get one college and one kid to talk to each other and then another, and then another, and then they bring their friends and then another, and then another, and then another. The next thing you've got like 30, 40, 50, maybe 100 interactions going on. And that's when the DJ plays the cha cha slide and everybody gets on the floor because they're not the first one. There's already 50 people out there, so it's obviously easy. And then you do something like have a big bash and get a lot more people to invite their friends. And then everyone's like, hey, that was kind of cool, let's keep going. And it just starts to spiral. But the real trick is getting people in the door. And so this is where the analogy kind of breaks down. But to get music students and colleges to be in the same room together requires you to get every Single one of them to think they can benefit regardless of the other's presence.
So you asked me a question. It's easy for colleges to get on when there's already lots of students on the platform. How do you get them to come on until there's a lot of kids on the platform? Well, we already talked about how music faculty are already out there recruiting kids day in and day out. So Common Time gets colleges to show up because the music faculty can start actively recruiting non majors centrally, which is like the easiest, most obvious solution to us.
But the colleges are now going, oh, I instantly have 15 new recruiters. I'm like, no, you've already had them. You just never knew how to process the data they were collecting. And then on the other side, you ask students to come to the floor and they say, well, I don't know if I want to talk to colleges. I'm only 14, 15. I said, hey, you can win scholarship money on Common Time.
Next thing you know, oh sure, I'll give you my video and my personal statement and I'll let you share my information with colleges if I might win a couple thousand dollars. Hey, that's a great incentive. Next thing you know, kids are there, professors are there, and we play the cha cha slide and everybody starts hanging out and interacting and doing application play.
Next thing you know, you got a two sided marketplace.
[00:31:39] Jeff Dillon: I love the middle school.
I could talk another hour with you, Eitan, but I want to ask you a final question to close it out. Where do you want Common Time pathways to be the next time I sit down with you for episode three and episode two? Oh God.
[00:31:55] Eytan Wurman: Oh. If you would have me back. If you would have me back. I was asked very clearly by. I did a podcast with Dr. Tim Yance and the American association of University Administrators. Common Time is sponsoring their conference next month in October. I don't know when this will come out. October 19th and 20th in Cleveland at Cleveland State. Good people, please go if you can, if you're a higher ed administrator. I think the crux of the matter is, because I was asked on that podcast as well, what do you see as higher education in 2050 and what I see as Common Times role over the next one year, five year, 10 years, until 2050 is the central hub where humans can position themselves at the center of an AI enabled economy, where the world is full of the arts and people and community and interactions based on beauty and humanism. And I know that was a very big pedagogical kind of philosophical statement to make in a year. I want common time to be connecting people because of their humanity to college experiences and connecting colleges to real humans that can still do real thinking in a year.
[00:33:16] Jeff Dillon: Yeah, I love that.
[00:33:17] Eytan Wurman: That shorter one was a much more bite sized sound bite there.
[00:33:21] Jeff Dillon: No, no, you've obviously been asked that question before. But hey Tom, it's great having you back. I really love this mission behind what you're building.
And thanks for coming back to the Signal. I will put links to Eitan's website and his LinkedIn profile in the show notes so you can go check out his website and that keynote he mentioned and all the. Yeah, all the good stuff they're doing over there. So thanks again.
[00:33:42] Eytan Wurman: Thank you Jeff. This has been a pleasure.
[00:33:45] Jeff Dillon: That's a wrap of this episode of the Signal. If today's conversation sparked a new idea or challenged your thinking, that's exactly the point. This show is about cutting through the noise and helping you see what's actually shaping higher ed right now. Please subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you found this valuable, leave us a quick review. It helps more higher ed leaders find the signal for deeper edtech insights, news and trends delivered monthly. Subscribe to the Signal monthly
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