Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / James W. Keyes - Author, Global Executive, Philanthropist | Education Is Freedom

Transcript

James W. Keyes - Author, Global Executive, Philanthropist | Education Is Freedom · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  You said that education is the antidote for fear.
• 0:03
  You've also said that education is freedom,
• 0:05
  but I'm very curious as to why education is the antidote for fear.
• 0:09
  Well, I think the difference between just raw knowledge and wisdom
• 0:12
  to behave in a civil society, which is IQ.
• 0:16
  In my book, I try to set that out as an objective.
• 0:19
  It's why learning is so important.
• 0:20
  It's why education is so important.
• 0:22
  Let me try to explain the research that I did
• 0:25
  as it relates to education and why I discovered that fear
• 0:29
  is the culprit behind people not being able to succeed,
• 0:33
  or as individuals who are as society,
• 0:35
  and to think about entire societies.
• 0:38
  So how did you solve for that in your life?
• 0:39
  Now, reality is today, we don't really have that much to fear.
• 0:43
  How do you get rid of this cycle of fear,
• 0:45
  leading the anger, leading the hate, leading the violence?
• 0:48
  How do you reverse that cycle as an individual or as people?
• 0:52
  We don't have any natural predators out there.
• 0:55
  So what do we afraid of?
• 0:56
  Welcome to success story.
• 0:59
  I'm your host, Scott Clary.
• 1:00
  The success story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network.
• 1:04
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• 1:06
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• 2:13
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  HubSpot.com
• 2:23
  Jim, thank you for coming on.
• 2:25
  I appreciate you a lot for spending some time.
• 2:28
  We're going to have a good time today.
• 2:29
  I wanted to kick it off with something that you said
• 2:33
  on previous podcasts.
• 2:35
  You said that education is the antidote for fear.
• 2:39
  You've also said that education is freedom,
• 2:41
  but I'm very curious as to why education
• 2:44
  is the antidote for fear.
• 2:46
  Sure, let's just start it off with something light,
• 2:48
  light, fear.
• 2:51
  Well, listen, I dive in and we'll get light.
• 2:53
  Don't worry, we'll get light.
• 2:54
  But I need like that.
• 2:56
  I need that mic drop moment at the beginning
• 2:58
  so people listen to that.
• 3:02
  It's really morning.
• 3:03
  We're talking about fear.
• 3:06
  Let me try to explain the research that I did.
• 3:12
  As it relates to education and why I discovered
• 3:17
  that fear is the culprit in so many cases
• 3:21
  behind people not being able to succeed.
• 3:25
  Or as individuals or as society,
• 3:28
  I mean, think about entire societies that have crumbled.
• 3:32
  If you dig into the reasons why,
• 3:35
  fear often is the reason they just imploded from within
• 3:40
  and trying to dissect that.
• 3:43
  I started to look at fear and try to understand
• 3:47
  that I literally went into the science of the brain
• 3:50
  to understand why is it that we in this day and age
• 3:55
  are still reacting with our caveman mentality.
• 4:02
  Literally goes all the way back to the to the fight or flight
• 4:06
  on nature that we have that's in our brain that that protects us
• 4:12
  from danger so that if the lion was to approach,
• 4:15
  we would be afraid and we would either be prepared
• 4:18
  to fight that lion or we would run fast enough to get away.
• 4:23
  Well, that same human impulse we carry into the office
• 4:28
  hit a blue call in a white collar world
• 4:31
  will carry that same fight or flight instinct
• 4:34
  in the office and if something makes us afraid,
• 4:39
  we react.
• 4:41
  And that reaction maybe we don't fight,
• 4:43
  maybe don't run away,
• 4:45
  but it's a variation of that same impulse
• 4:49
  to react to that fear and protect ourselves.
• 4:53
  Now, the reality is today,
• 4:56
  we don't really have that much to fear.
• 4:58
  Well, we don't have any natural predators out there
• 5:01
  that are going to kill us.
• 5:02
  Nothing in the work environment is going to do something
• 5:07
  of that much harm to us.
• 5:09
  So what are we afraid of?
• 5:11
  So I try to dig into that cause of fear
• 5:15
  and I have this way of trying to simplify things.
• 5:21
  And so by the way, that's very important.
• 5:24
  Like that skills it in and of itself
• 5:26
  because I think about what you just said about fear
• 5:29
  and that has side that sideline my career multiple times
• 5:33
  and you don't know why you're making the moves
• 5:36
  or not making the moves that you should be,
• 5:38
  especially in entrepreneurship
• 5:40
  in taking that next role.
• 5:42
  And that's why I love by the way,
• 5:43
  that is why I love that one liner.
• 5:45
  Like the antidote to fear is education
• 5:48
  because you're solving that problem
• 5:50
  that a lot of us can't even articulate.
• 5:52
  Exactly, exactly.
• 5:54
  It happens to every single one of us.
• 5:56
  Every single day,
• 5:57
  we have something in our life that triggers a reaction
• 6:02
  and that reaction is that portion of the brain.
• 6:05
  I think it's being big or something in your brain.
• 6:08
  That portion of your brain that is programmed
• 6:13
  to protect yourself.
• 6:14
  But there's so little to protect ourselves from.
• 6:17
  And yet it triggers an overreaction
• 6:21
  and it comes out in behavioral ways
• 6:24
  that are generally not good for us
• 6:26
  because that reaction then triggers a reaction
• 6:30
  with another person or another person
• 6:32
  or an entire group of people.
• 6:35
  And we end up in a very bad situation.
• 6:38
  We sometimes derail our career.
• 6:40
  Or as I said, societies can be real.
• 6:42
  There will society.
• 6:44
  A democracy can implode as a result of fear.
• 6:49
  If you go back to FDR's inauguration speech,
• 6:53
  the only thing we have to fear is fear itself
• 6:56
  at a very important time in American history.
• 6:59
  He called out the importance of people
• 7:03
  being victims of their own fear
• 7:06
  and not just individuals,
• 7:08
  but society being a victim of its own fear.
• 7:11
  So yeah, it's that portion of our brain that triggers it.
• 7:14
  So as you mentioned, simplicity is so important.
• 7:18
  So I try to break things down in the super simple term
• 7:21
  so I can understand this.
• 7:22
  Then the course of writing the book,
• 7:24
  I was puzzling over why do I react like that?
• 7:27
  Why do people around me react like that?
• 7:32
  And I remembered going back as a kid,
• 7:35
  you were afraid of all kinds of things.
• 7:37
  And what would you do?
• 7:38
  You'd call mom and mom would come in
• 7:40
  and mom would turn on the light.
• 7:43
  And when the light came on,
• 7:45
  you discovered there's nothing to be afraid of.
• 7:48
  There isn't a monster in the closet.
• 7:50
  There's no boogie man under the bed.
• 7:52
  Even though I thought there was,
• 7:53
  I was convinced there was a monster in the closet.
• 7:56
  But you turn on the list.
• 7:57
  The closet's no monster, right?
• 8:00
  Well, in the simplest fashion,
• 8:02
  that's what knowledge does.
• 8:04
  Knowledge is the light.
• 8:07
  You turn on the knowledge
• 8:09
  and you discover there's really nothing to be afraid of.
• 8:12
  Because now you understand.
• 8:15
  It's not really knowledge
• 8:17
  that encourages the fear.
• 8:19
  It's understanding.
• 8:21
  Well, knowledge leads to the understanding.
• 8:23
  And then understanding
• 8:25
  is what then helps you eliminate fear.
• 8:28
  You eliminate the fear.
• 8:29
  You eliminate the anger.
• 8:30
  You eliminate the anger.
• 8:31
  You eliminate the violence.
• 8:33
  I actually went back to the Greek philosophers
• 8:37
  and found a wonderful quote
• 8:41
  that I discovered Yoda used in Star Wars.
• 8:45
  I thought Yoda would relate much more to my audience
• 8:51
  than some ancient philosopher.
• 8:53
  So I've been quoting Yoda
• 8:55
  who says that fear leads to anger
• 8:59
  and anger leads to violence.
• 9:02
  So true.
• 9:04
  How do you get rid of this cycle of fear
• 9:07
  leading the anger,
• 9:08
  leading the hate, leading the violence?
• 9:10
  How do you reverse that cycle as an individual
• 9:14
  or as people?
• 9:15
  Well, you take the fear part
• 9:20
  and you obliterate with knowledge.
• 9:23
  Can I ask something in your career?
• 9:25
  Because you chose to focus on education
• 9:28
  as this thesis for solving so many problems.
• 9:31
  I think a lot of people would agree with.
• 9:34
  And we can talk about different kinds of education,
• 9:36
  formal education, non-formal education.
• 9:38
  But you make a clear distinction between education and knowledge.
• 9:42
  And I also want to go into your origin story
• 9:45
  and where you came from,
• 9:46
  because I've heard it a few times now.
• 9:49
  And why education played such a crucial point in your own life.
• 9:52
  But obviously, a lot of people, not everybody,
• 9:55
  but a lot of people do go through formal education.
• 9:58
  A lot of people still have a lot of fear.
• 10:01
  So how do you solve for that knowledge gap
• 10:03
  that eliminates the fear?
• 10:05
  Because most people that have formal education
• 10:08
  do not end up as CEOs of F 500 companies.
• 10:12
  And they don't not even, not even to that extreme.
• 10:16
  They won't even take their career to like the next role
• 10:19
  or the next level or the next company.
• 10:21
  Forget going to like the epitome of the company here,
• 10:25
  the of success, right?
• 10:27
  So how do you solve for that?
• 10:28
  How did you solve for that in your life?
• 10:30
  I wish I could say I've solved it perfectly.
• 10:34
  Perfect example of confidence
• 10:38
  and have completely obliterated fear.
• 10:40
  But I am human.
• 10:41
  And so I fall back into that same trap.
• 10:44
  But here's the way I look at it.
• 10:47
  I tried to understand this concept
• 10:51
  because you look through history.
• 10:54
  It's littered with examples of really intelligent people
• 10:57
  doing some really stupid things.
• 11:00
  And it's hard to understand.
• 11:03
  Even today, I puzzle over where we are in the world
• 11:07
  when we're still in this day and age,
• 11:09
  and this modern age of technology and reason and logic
• 11:12
  that we still are blowing each other up with eggs
• 11:15
  and rockets and bombs.
• 11:16
  It's mind-boggling to think
• 11:21
  that we as humans can't rise above that level
• 11:25
  of having to solve problems
• 11:28
  with military interaction.
• 11:30
  Now it's real, but it's kind of mind-boggling to think about it.
• 11:34
  So I've tried to understand going back through history
• 11:38
  what the difference is between intelligence
• 11:42
  and knowledge.
• 11:44
  And then what I take to another level,
• 11:46
  call it wisdom
• 11:48
  to really get beyond those things.
• 11:50
  And it's fascinating how wise
• 11:54
  some of the ancient
• 11:56
  philosophers really were
• 11:57
  because they called these same issues
• 12:00
  hundreds or thousands of years ago.
• 12:03
  And I tried to understand what their point of view was.
• 12:06
  And look at it. So look at it this way.
• 12:09
  We've got an IQ test, right?
• 12:11
  So we have a way today to measure someone's
• 12:14
  technically someone's raw intelligence.
• 12:17
  And it's called IQ.
• 12:19
  And then not long ago,
• 12:20
  somebody came up with a way to measure it.
• 12:22
  They said, wow, you know, intelligence alone isn't enough.
• 12:26
  There's something called EQ, right?
• 12:28
  An emotional quotient, emotional quotient.
• 12:31
  That measures someone's ability to
• 12:34
  perhaps moderate their reactions to some extent.
• 12:39
  And so IQ plus EQ,
• 12:43
  think of that as knowledge.
• 12:45
  Okay.
• 12:45
  I've got enough knowledge that I can survive
• 12:49
  in society without imploding
• 12:51
  and making it complete to myself.
• 12:54
  And then
• 12:56
  you still get people with IQ plus EQ still doing some things
• 13:00
  that make you pause and you say,
• 13:02
  well, I don't know why.
• 13:06
  Does this person think that way or behave that way?
• 13:10
  Well, then there's something in the in the book,
• 13:12
  I addressed this issue of why, why learning.
• 13:17
  And it's things like collaboration because we have to work with others.
• 13:20
  It's things like cultural literacy,
• 13:22
  being understand other cultures.
• 13:25
  But then the most important element of the why I think
• 13:30
  was character.
• 13:32
  So character is that
• 13:34
  integrity.
• 13:35
  Can I trust what you say to be true?
• 13:39
  It is humility.
• 13:41
  Do you, are you confident enough that you know you have more to learn?
• 13:47
  Which is my definition of humility.
• 13:50
  Compassion for other people.
• 13:52
  Yes, you want to be free.
• 13:54
  But are you, are you going to sacrifice the freedom of others for your own freedom?
• 13:59
  You're in a collective society.
• 14:01
  So those are the elements that I call character.
• 14:06
  And it's that go back to that formula IQ plus EQ.
• 14:09
  All right, if that's knowledge.
• 14:12
  Well, I think the difference between just raw knowledge
• 14:15
  and wisdom to behave in a civil society
• 14:20
  is IQ, you have to have some basic level of intelligence, EQ, you have to have some
• 14:27
  emotional quotient, some emotional capabilities to negotiate, navigate in this world.
• 14:35
  But then IQ plus EQ plus THEQ, you bring in that character quotient.
• 14:43
  Then I think we have people with true wisdom.
• 14:46
  And so in my book, I try to set that out as an objective.
• 14:50
  It's why learning is so important.
• 14:52
  It's why education is so important.
• 14:54
  Because it's not just about learning science or math.
• 14:59
  It's all about also learning how to navigate in this world with other people.
• 15:05
  So I think that what you're unlocking is the need for this lifelong attitude towards learning.
• 15:14
  And I think that what a lot of people end up fumbling is they stop learning
• 15:21
  after they finish high school college university, grad school, whatever, even PhD.
• 15:26
  But then like, there's like this mark between I've finished my education.
• 15:31
  And now I'm going to go into the workforce or do my thing.
• 15:35
  And I'm going to basically shift how I view the world.
• 15:41
  Now I'm just operating in the world.
• 15:43
  I'm no longer consuming as much at the frequency that I was.
• 15:46
  And I don't have I don't I'm not doing it purposefully.
• 15:49
  And this is not this is not a hard and fast rule.
• 15:53
  I mean, I think a lot of people do try and continue to learn.
• 15:55
  And those are probably the ones that end up building companies end up
• 15:59
  being CEO of X fortune 500 fortune 1000 anything.
• 16:04
  You're the ones who like rise to the top.
• 16:08
  When you look at like even your own career,
• 16:12
  how is education ongoing learning really changed like the trajectory of what you've been able to do?
• 16:19
  Oh, I've got a great analogy for you.
• 16:22
  Yes, I love it now it has changed that it has changed that trajectory.
• 16:27
  I credit virtually everything in my career trajectory to my lifelong learning.
• 16:35
  My continued willingness to learn and adapt and learn more.
• 16:40
  But here's my favorite analogy.
• 16:42
  As you can see in my background, I'm a aviation nut.
• 16:46
  I'm a pilot. I love to fly and learn to fly.
• 16:50
  You have a nice hanger too.
• 16:51
  I saw I saw the video.
• 16:52
  You have a hanger.
• 16:53
  You have a couple toys there.
• 16:54
  That's good.
• 16:55
  Yeah, it's a lot of fun.
• 16:56
  It's a you know, some
• 16:59
  some people like some kind of toys.
• 17:01
  I don't like your play.
• 17:04
  Different kinds of airplanes.
• 17:05
  Other old bush plane.
• 17:07
  Very war war two aviation trainers.
• 17:11
  Fabulous fabulous privilege to be able to do that.
• 17:14
  But there's what I learned really early when I learned to fly.
• 17:19
  Excuse me, you train for 40 hours basically to get a pilot's license.
• 17:25
  And at about 20 or 30 hours, your instructor will say, okay,
• 17:29
  now it's time to solo and they turn you loose in this aircraft.
• 17:33
  You're terrified because you have no idea what you're doing yet.
• 17:37
  And yet you have to learn.
• 17:39
  And so they turn you loose to solo and you lie a couple of times around the patch.
• 17:44
  And then you land it.
• 17:45
  Oh my goodness.
• 17:46
  I lived.
• 17:47
  It's amazing.
• 17:48
  And then you continue on.
• 17:50
  You practice more solo by yourself.
• 17:53
  You then take a test and they grant you with a pilot's license.
• 17:57
  Here you go.
• 17:58
  Congratulations.
• 17:59
  The FAA sends you a nice little letter and you get this little thing
• 18:02
  with a pilot's license with your picture on it.
• 18:04
  And you're so proud of yourself.
• 18:07
  All you have at that point is a licensed word.
• 18:11
  Because if you just jump in that aircraft and don't keep learning,
• 18:15
  you're probably not going to live.
• 18:18
  And that's what weeds out bad pilots and they cut.
• 18:21
  There's an expression they say there are old pilots and there are bold pilots.
• 18:25
  But there are no old bold pilots.
• 18:29
  And if you take that same lesson that to fly,
• 18:35
  you must keep learning.
• 18:37
  Not just about lying the airplane.
• 18:39
  You have to know meteorology.
• 18:41
  Because you're right into weather and if you bumble in with stop thunderstorm,
• 18:46
  you're likely to kill yourself and your passengers.
• 18:49
  You have to understand mechanics because a airplane breaks in mid-flight and something goes wrong.
• 18:57
  You have to understand the nature of that mechanical law to be able to land safely.
• 19:03
  Correct it in mid-flight or be able to land the aircraft even with something wrong with it.
• 19:08
  Perhaps you hit a bird, whatever the circumstance.
• 19:12
  So that idea that to survive as an aviator, you must learn constantly.
• 19:20
  Today I train once a year with the professionals on a place called Flight Safety and they throw all
• 19:26
  kinds of things at me that I'd never seen before to teach me how to respond.
• 19:33
  There's two things I'm learning.
• 19:34
  I'm learning the technique of responding, but I'm also learning to overcome that portion of my
• 19:42
  brain that causes me to freeze or flee or or want to fight resist.
• 19:50
  It's what I call the difference between a caveman brain and the aviator brain.
• 19:55
  On Apollo 13, I used the example in the book, if they wereverted to their caveman brain,
• 20:01
  they would have been fighting each other because they wouldn't have
• 20:06
  actively worked even with mission control to solve the problem and to return to Earth safe.
• 20:15
  So they had to block out that natural instinct of fear and overcome it with reason and lodge it.
• 20:24
  And that's that aviator brain working.
• 20:27
  It's the frontal lobe versus the amygdala that causes you to react and overreact and pit it.
• 20:34
  So think that same analogy now and apply it to business. It's the same thing.
• 20:39
  You know what I was going to say.
• 20:40
  I was going to say candidly you've gone through some like some stressful shit in your career.
• 20:45
  Like exactly.
• 20:48
  I would say it's the same blockbuster was the same level as Apollo 13.
• 20:52
  It wasn't exactly life threatening, but it was pretty scary.
• 20:55
  It was I think at one point you said you were a billion dollars in debt.
• 21:01
  Well, when I arrived at the company, they had a billion dollars debt.
• 21:04
  And it really wasn't that big a problem because a lot of cluster was like for a company that's that.
• 21:10
  Yeah, for a company that size was a cash flow machine.
• 21:12
  It had very good credit terms with the studios.
• 21:15
  So it was it was a great business model.
• 21:17
  But in I arrived in 2007 by September of 2008, barely a year after I got there,
• 21:24
  Alayman Brothers collapses.
• 21:27
  All financial market implodes.
• 21:29
  The world thinks it's going to act and I'm trying to refinance a third of a billion dollars of
• 21:37
  debt and the and the banks are looking at me like a crazy.
• 21:41
  Nobody's getting refinanced.
• 21:42
  Never mind somebody need blockbuster.
• 21:45
  So yeah, challenging times.
• 21:51
  I want to I want to learn just like a little bit more.
• 21:53
  And we'll go back to this.
• 21:54
  First of all, this is a great.
• 21:55
  This is a great little spiel and education.
• 21:58
  And we're going to get back there in a second.
• 22:00
  As I think, obviously, this is where you focus most of your work.
• 22:03
  But I just want to understand a little bit of your origin story.
• 22:06
  And maybe some of the maybe some of the things that sort of formulated
• 22:11
  or formed how you think, how you work, how you operate.
• 22:15
  You don't have to go into the whole thing.
• 22:17
  But some major parts of your of your childhood, of your early career,
• 22:22
  they really sort of set you up or teach you up to who you are today.
• 22:26
  Yeah, sure.
• 22:27
  Well, I was really, really fortunate growing up because I was dirt poor.
• 22:33
  That's a little bit.
• 22:35
  But yeah, and I had a whole host of horrible things happen.
• 22:40
  You know, family breaks up, mother leads,
• 22:44
  mother gets sick, ends up passing away.
• 22:47
  Yeah, all that stuff was great.
• 22:50
  And I'm just I'm kind of being facetious,
• 22:53
  but I'm serious in a way because I've all that
• 22:58
  crop that I had to face as a kid and adversity
• 23:01
  built into me a resilience that made me realize, okay,
• 23:08
  all this bad stuff's happening.
• 23:10
  It's nothing I can do about it.
• 23:13
  I might as well figure it out myself because nobody's here to,
• 23:17
  I don't have a safety net anymore.
• 23:19
  Nobody's here to catch me.
• 23:20
  And my my course of action was for whatever reason,
• 23:26
  I felt that inside of books would be the answer.
• 23:31
  That I would, if I could just learn as much as I could possibly learn,
• 23:37
  I'll figure out how to survive this world.
• 23:41
  And it worked.
• 23:42
  And the more I learned, the more I figured out I could do,
• 23:46
  whether it was just in school or in sport or in work.
• 23:53
  When I first started working, my very first job at McDonald's,
• 23:57
  flipping burgers, I worked, I think harder than anybody around me on purpose
• 24:04
  and learned more than I ever thought I would want to know about hamburgers.
• 24:10
  And I ended up being made a shift manager at like 60 and a half years old.
• 24:15
  It worked.
• 24:16
  So this positive reinforcement of adversity can actually be turned into advantage
• 24:24
  if you respond in a certain way.
• 24:28
  So when you look at how you turn adversity into advantage,
• 24:36
  I think there's a term that you coined.
• 24:38
  It is, where is it?
• 24:40
  It's CEO.
• 24:41
  What's the change equals opportunity?
• 24:43
  I love that.
• 24:43
  Very, very clever turn.
• 24:47
  Very clever turn.
• 24:48
  So what's the framework for change equals opportunity?
• 24:53
  Yes, okay.
• 24:53
  That sounds great.
• 24:54
  It sounds nice.
• 24:56
  I think a lot of people would say,
• 24:57
  oh, that's a nice little acronym.
• 25:00
  But when it changes, it doesn't always work out so well.
• 25:04
  So we're talking about new technologies that are coming into the workplace.
• 25:08
  We're talking about new problems that that exactly is people are trying to deal with.
• 25:14
  How does change equal opportunity?
• 25:15
  Because like for you, even rock bottom created opportunity through the mindset
• 25:20
  that it instilled in you, but change is different than rock bottom.
• 25:25
  Because change means things were kind of going okay.
• 25:29
  And then it took a hard left.
• 25:32
  Rock bottom makes sense because there's nowhere else to go.
• 25:36
  But change is like we had it figured out for the past five,
• 25:39
  ten years.
• 25:40
  And then all of a sudden we don't have it figured out anymore.
• 25:43
  And I think that screws up a lot of people.
• 25:45
  So how does change equal opportunity?
• 25:49
  It screws up a lot of people.
• 25:50
  But if you think about what change represents the core of all commerce,
• 25:56
  all commerce starts with change.
• 26:00
  Somebody needed something.
• 26:03
  And it was a change that occurred in some way.
• 26:05
  It may have been somebody invented fire or the wheel.
• 26:09
  And somebody else said, oh, that's bad.
• 26:13
  And I imagine the first guy out there,
• 26:15
  the first caveman that they invented fire.
• 26:18
  And somebody else's wife probably said, what are you crazy?
• 26:21
  You're going to burn our little hut down.
• 26:24
  Yeah, but look what I can do with this fire.
• 26:27
  I can create something.
• 26:29
  And it may be that maybe fire came from a lightning bolt that hit their house
• 26:33
  and burned it down.
• 26:35
  And they said, oh, look at that.
• 26:38
  We can actually cook this buffalo on fire now.
• 26:42
  And it tastes better.
• 26:44
  I'm being facetious, but I say,
• 26:49
  but the origin of all commerce is someone responding to a change that someone else thought was bad
• 26:58
  or didn't respond to and turned it into an opportunity.
• 27:03
  They made money off of that opportunity or were compensated in some fashion or that opportunity.
• 27:10
  And this continues today.
• 27:13
  So someone will create a new technology and it terrifies people right now.
• 27:19
  People are afraid of AI.
• 27:21
  Someone is going to harness AI and turn it into something miraculous here for some
• 27:28
  incurable disease and ability to light up the world with clean energy or an ability to teach
• 27:36
  people who couldn't otherwise learn because you can
• 27:40
  modulate the curriculum and the learning style to the way someone or the teaching style to the
• 27:45
  way someone learns.
• 27:47
  So it is even the worst possible change and sometimes be for a reason.
• 27:58
  Let me give you another example.
• 28:00
  A forest fire sounds like it's a devastating thing.
• 28:02
  This is a natural occurrence when forests become overgrown sometimes, they will
• 28:12
  hatch on fire, burn to the ground and the rebirth of that forest if left alone may take many many
• 28:20
  years, but then it grows back stronger and healthier. Humans are the same.
• 28:27
  We have changed that happens to us.
• 28:29
  It feels devastating. It hurts.
• 28:32
  Maybe a lost love one, whatever, but somewhere in there could be a learning that makes us
• 28:38
  better on the other side. We can power through.
• 28:42
  Do you think that now just to apply that sort of thesis to education, how do you feel that
• 28:48
  education has changed? Because I have opinions about
• 28:53
  university and higher education and the value that it provides.
• 29:00
  And I know that a lot of people, I mean, I went to university, I got my MBA, so I'm not really
• 29:05
  one to talk. So I've never dropped out and built something like a lot of the Stanford
• 29:10
  graphs or whatever or the Stanford dropouts. But how do you think education has changed?
• 29:16
  When you say education, what version of it are you referring to as it?
• 29:21
  Self-education, auto-died act where you're going on YouTube, is it going to formal school?
• 29:26
  Like just talk to me about what education should be from your perspective for somebody who is
• 29:31
  in high school right now.
• 29:32
  Well, first of all, the accumulation of knowledge is the most important thing.
• 29:36
  So for yet, how you get it and some of us need a more formalized structure, others don't.
• 29:44
  And they're self-starters and they can learn, they can become a genius without.
• 29:49
  Let's face it, David, she'd have a formal school, right?
• 29:53
  That's very true. She didn't get his undergrad.
• 29:55
  She didn't get his undergrad or is engineering degree, but it was able to accomplish, right?
• 30:04
  And so learning is the first most important thing.
• 30:09
  But there is a really, really dangerous narrative that's going on right now because
• 30:14
  we are a lobby, education is a lobby, technology will transform education over time
• 30:21
  in the same way it's transformed retail or the automobile industry or anything else.
• 30:26
  Technology will be a huge, huge boon to society all over the world,
• 30:33
  lighting up bark corners of the world where they couldn't get learning in traditional fashion.
• 30:38
  They will with technology now. Here's the problem, we're in this evolutionary phase.
• 30:47
  So if someone leaps too quickly and believe me, I'm one of those guys that tends to be a
• 30:51
  head of friends. I was a little early, perhaps, with Blockbuster,
• 30:57
  bought a streaming video company before Wi-Fi was able to stream. We were ready to go, but we were
• 31:03
  early. I've had a lot of those circumstances. The same applies to someone who says,
• 31:10
  I don't need to go to college. I can learn everything I need to learn from YouTube. Well,
• 31:15
  maybe that's true. But until technology comes up with a credentialing system and a measurement
• 31:23
  system for how much knowledge one is able to accumulate without the formalized structure,
• 31:29
  that entrepreneur that drops out of school has to raise money when they sit in front of a banker
• 31:36
  or an investor. The first thing the investor is going to look at is their resume.
• 31:40
  And if the resume says, I learned early, I needed to know from YouTube and I stated a holiday in.
• 31:47
  The investor may say, you know what, I'm going to give my money to this other person
• 31:54
  who excelled in the formalized structure, got an MBA and is an entrepreneur.
• 32:01
  So at the end of the day, it comes down to differentiation. We are all like products.
• 32:06
  We compete for opportunity with others and how we brand ourselves.
• 32:14
  Back to that character quotient, that's a factor certainly in our personalized branding.
• 32:20
  But our credentials where we went to school, how we get into school, those things are also not
• 32:27
  critically important. But in today's practical, practical reality of today's world,
• 32:34
  they're still pretty important. I just want to take a second and thank the HubSpot podcast
• 32:38
  network for supporting success story for part of the network. If you love podcasts, the HubSpot
• 32:42
  podcast network has other incredible podcasts like entrepreneurs on fire hosted by John Lee Doomass,
• 32:48
  entrepreneurs on fire is one of the OG entrepreneur podcasts. It really stokes inspiration, share
• 32:54
  strategies to fire up your entrepreneurial journey to create the life you've always dreamed of.
• 32:59
  It has unlimited energy, value and consistency. The podcast is truly for anyone who wants to learn
• 33:04
  more about entrepreneurship. If you like fast paced, packed with value stories as shows for you,
• 33:09
  John brings on great guests. He speaks about failures, aha moments, what's working for them currently.
• 33:15
  If you love podcasts, go listen to entrepreneurs on fire wherever you get your podcasts.
• 33:21
  You know what I think we're doing? I think that we have like we we put these people that
• 33:29
  this one entrepreneur that dropped out of school or university or college. We put that person
• 33:34
  on a pedestal and then we're like, you know what? That's going that's going to be us.
• 33:41
  And chances are like no offense, chances are that's not going to be most people.
• 33:48
  Now I think that there's still because there's I also believe that some school is overpriced.
• 33:53
  I believe that some school creates massive amounts of debt. I think formalized education
• 33:58
  is good for the right reasons, but I don't think that $100,000 per year is required. So you see
• 34:05
  what I mean? Like it's like it's good if it could be a little bit I'm Canadian. So I never paid
• 34:09
  $100,000 per year for college. That to me is that is like post graduate stuff. If you wanted to go
• 34:16
  to law school or med school, fine, but for undergraduate, like sort of like getting like the basics down,
• 34:22
  it shouldn't be that expensive. So it's it's a tough it's a tough balance. You have to strike because
• 34:28
  some people I don't think it's smart to go into massive amounts of debt. But then what do you do?
• 34:34
  Because are they going to respect a degree from like a second to your second rate college that
• 34:39
  isn't 100 that I have no idea. I'm not American. So I've never played this game or the system before.
• 34:45
  But I'm curious like if you were going to give advice to say your your son or your daughter,
• 34:49
  what what career path and assuming that they don't have scholarships, where would you say they
• 34:55
  should go? What's like the best outcome for debt versus network versus actual education and all
• 35:04
  the other in silvery benefits that you do get when you're in like a formalized educational setting?
• 35:09
  Simple answer. Achieve all you can achieve. Attend the finest school. You can get into work your
• 35:20
  butt off to get into the best school that you can get and then go. I don't care what it cost,
• 35:27
  go to be finest education institution you can or as long as you can. Because what that will do
• 35:36
  for you is generate and then it will be an investment. We're going to talk about that investment.
• 35:44
  I'm going to talk to you about it from a businessman's perspective, which very few people are
• 35:49
  looking at. But it is an investment that will pay dividends for the rest of your life.
• 35:54
  Now let's talk about the cost. There's a lot of misinformation and it's dangerous misinformation
• 36:02
  because a kid like me would have listened to this and said, well, get it. I can't afford it. And
• 36:07
  besides Peter feels tell me I don't need to anyway. I can just go be an entrepreneur and
• 36:13
  here's the analogy. It's like Michael Jordan saying, you don't need to go to college. I didn't
• 36:19
  just go go be a basketball player. Look how much money you'll make and some people will look at
• 36:24
  that and they'll strive for that. But 0.1% will succeed and somebody on and Silicon Valley can say
• 36:32
  the same thing. You don't need to just drop on the school. Just go be an entrepreneur. But do you
• 36:37
  have what it takes to be an entrepreneur? And if you don't have that base knowledge and you fail
• 36:44
  as an entrepreneur or just as you may try to be a basketball player or you fail, what do you have
• 36:49
  to fall back on? Then what? And that's then what that people are taking into consideration that
• 36:55
  I worry about so much. So my advice is work as hard as you can and get into the best school you
• 37:03
  possibly can. Okay, let's talk about the price. I'm going to get you some math. I just read an
• 37:09
  article in Forbes and they talked about the exorbitant price of college education today. It's just
• 37:14
  grown crazy with inflation. Yeah. Well, in 1980 dollars and they use this example in 1980,
• 37:26
  it only cost $10,000 room board and tuition. Just do the math. Get on your on your iPhone
• 37:32
  and run. I don't know what is $10,000 in 2023. It's just straight value of the dollar. It's $55,
• 37:43
  $60,000. Okay, wait, that's what college costs today. So you're telling me it's not any more
• 37:50
  expense than it was in 1980. Yeah. What do we remember when I talked about fear and people are
• 38:00
  scaring people to death. They're throwing all this 100% because I'm not even American and I hear
• 38:08
  I hear enough of this about college debt and tuition for me to have an opinion about it,
• 38:14
  even though I never went through the system, which actually when you say it out loud, it kind of
• 38:17
  sounds a little bit nuts, but you get the second hand information. It's so exactly and it is
• 38:26
  somebody is afraid of something and they're stirring up all this stuff. You know, maybe somebody
• 38:31
  had a lot of debt and they're mad about there and they don't have a good job in that. I'm going to say
• 38:36
  that that doesn't happen. It's not everybody shouldn't isn't cut out for school and not everybody who
• 38:41
  takes on that debt will be able to pay for it. But here's the way I look at it as an investment.
• 38:47
  You don't buy a business as an entrepreneur. You would never ever buy a business based on today's
• 38:52
  dollars. What we do as business people is we have an opportunity. Here's a company. I'm going to buy
• 38:58
  instead of $10,000. I'm going to spend $10,000,000 by this business. What is the first thing we do?
• 39:05
  We run a net present value of future income streams that will come from that business,
• 39:11
  so we discount it back to today's dollars. So why don't we do that when we look at a college
• 39:18
  education? No, no. It's just fear. I don't know why we don't do that. I don't know. I've never heard
• 39:24
  that analogy before, but it's very correct. It's a business decision. It's a personal investment
• 39:30
  that you're making in yourself. You're turning yourself into a corporation, if you will,
• 39:35
  that will have earnings streams into the future at future dollar values. Not at today. So
• 39:41
  somebody looks at it and they say, I can't pay $8,000 a year. I'm going to get out of that. I'm
• 39:45
  going to make $50,000 a year. Well, yeah, but that $50,000 in today's dollars 20 years from now will
• 39:53
  be $250,000 a year because you had that college education. So it's like buying a business. It's
• 40:02
  no different. We would never buy a business, any business. If we measured the value, the way we
• 40:08
  measure the value of a college education, that's so interesting. But it's very, it's very correct.
• 40:14
  It's very correct. It's simple. You have to sense it. You have to. Yeah, no, I'm just,
• 40:22
  now you got me thinking now, but I never thought about it that way. Yeah, because all you hear
• 40:30
  are these conversations about student loan forgiveness. And when you hear so many conversations about
• 40:35
  student loan forgiveness, then you start to think, well, wow, that must be like a serious issue.
• 40:39
  Like that must seriously be impacting people because that's all I keep hearing about. So
• 40:44
  if there's such coverage fear, news coverage equals fear in most circumstances, if there's such
• 40:50
  coverage about this and that must be something that's really weighing heavily on the recently
• 40:56
  graduated, you know, US student, American student. But I guess, yeah, that's a very smart way to
• 41:05
  think about it. You're just like that. We had heavily on me. I thought I'm never going to step back.
• 41:10
  Man, but I had confidence that if I keep learning and I keep excelling in my job,
• 41:17
  I'm going to keep getting raises over time. And that that went away. It was shocking
• 41:24
  at ultimately what an investment that was, what a good investment. Now, I was arguably,
• 41:33
  probably an outlier in that I leveraged my degree into much greater opportunity,
• 41:40
  leading to five or 500 companies. So I'm in some ways, I'm as much an outlier as an outlier
• 41:48
  into that. And that, yeah, yeah. But I mean, okay, so let's be candid. You didn't need the salary
• 41:53
  of CEO Fortune 500 to pay off the debt. It's not like that's when you paid it off when you are
• 41:59
  making that much money. Like you can pay it off at a much earlier stage too, right? So,
• 42:04
  I don't want somebody to think like, well, I'm not going to be see yelling. It's not the point
• 42:08
  we're having. It's not that. What are some other things that you think we have to unlearn about
• 42:15
  education? Oh, so there's so much to unlearn in today's narrative because there's so much
• 42:23
  bashing of education. I know there's there's a lot of noise now about what what teachers are
• 42:32
  teaching, what schools are doing. Again, it I encourage everyone to separate the fear factor
• 42:40
  because some of this is motivated by fear. I may not like the teachers union. So I'm going to
• 42:47
  bash the teachers union. I'm I mean, not like what's being taught. So I'm going to bash the
• 42:54
  teachers for teaching the wrong things. At the end of the day, I do a lot of work with public
• 43:01
  school systems. I do a lot of work with post secondary schools. I set a board of two colleges.
• 43:07
  These are some of the most conservative people I know that said on these boards. And the idea
• 43:13
  that they would foster an environment, not just not just condone, but foster it to try to
• 43:24
  change the minds of the young people is mind boggly. I look at it and I say, what are we afraid of?
• 43:30
  I think we're teaching people how to think. And that's the idea that is the idea in teaching them
• 43:36
  how to think we're going to cause them to question certain things yet when they question them,
• 43:42
  then we recoil from that and are afraid of what they're being taught. But that is the way that
• 43:48
  you should that is the most useful thing. In my opinion, that I actually got from from my
• 43:53
  formal education, it was critical thinking. Exactly. That's what I got from it. Yeah. Thank you.
• 43:58
  There's a whole chapter in my book. But if you think of where we are as a polarized society,
• 44:04
  we're encouraging critical thinking, right? In school. That's the idea. So the think of this is a
• 44:09
  bell curve and you've got the extremes on both ends of the bell curve and both of those extremes
• 44:17
  when you have true critical thinking are going to recoil at what the response might be.
• 44:25
  It could be from the left or the right, they'll recoil from it and say, oh my gosh, what in the
• 44:31
  world we're teaching them? Well, we're teaching them to think. And and that's what's often missing in
• 44:39
  this equation. So again, it just, you know, comes back to this idea of what in the world we
• 44:47
  afraid of. You know, it's very interesting because I've noticed a trend with even young families
• 44:53
  because I'm at that stage in my life where we have friends with kids and growing up, homeschooling
• 45:00
  was like never even a thought. That wasn't a thing. But now I hear that more and more and more
• 45:06
  the people want a homeschool because they're so scared of the education system. And when I was a kid,
• 45:12
  I mean, my mom would look at me like I had three heads if I said I want to be homeschooled. Like,
• 45:18
  she'd be like, what are you talking about? Like shut up and get on the bus. And I'd go and act like,
• 45:23
  exactly. So it's definitely, it's definitely, I understand where you're coming from. I understand
• 45:30
  I understand why you want to sort of fight back and why you focus on education now because you see
• 45:34
  a world fit like filled with fear. It's filled with fear. I mean, your example is a great one. I had
• 45:41
  an assistant I was interviewing and we were talking about the book and I said a big part of your
• 45:46
  job is going to be this book called education is freedom. And she said, well, I hope it's okay. I
• 45:53
  didn't go to school. Yeah, it's everyone has a choice as long as you're learning and able to do
• 45:59
  the job. I'm happy. But I hope you'll continue learning. And she said, oh, no, I believe in
• 46:04
  education. I believe in it so much that I pulled my son out of high school. And I said, what?
• 46:12
  She said, yeah, I didn't like what they were teaching him. It was scaring me. They were teaching him
• 46:16
  crazy things. And I was felt that he was being indoctrinated and, uh, et cetera, et cetera. And so
• 46:26
  I said, well, what's going to happen? And she said, well, I'm homeschooling him. I said, okay,
• 46:32
  but is he going to be able to get into college? And she said, no, he didn't really care about college.
• 46:39
  Okay. Is he getting to play sports? Um, homeschooling, he's getting him this out of football
• 46:45
  and baseball and things like that. And she's, well, you know, yeah, but there's a trade off.
• 46:50
  And it was, for me, really hard to hear because I think about that young person and what they'll miss,
• 46:59
  what the opportunity they'll miss, because they lack that, uh, the collaboration that don't get,
• 47:07
  the community that they'll, they'll get in that school environment. And it was triggered purely
• 47:13
  out of fear, sadly. It's sad because I was going to say it's sad because the people,
• 47:19
  this is very interesting because the people that are pulling their kids out of school or,
• 47:25
  or saying that colleges are too woke and I don't want to send my kid to this college, whatever,
• 47:30
  all of these decisions and ideas are, are technically being pushed by people who probably went to
• 47:37
  college and went to high school. And I don't think anybody, regardless of, of what you believe,
• 47:43
  really can say with complete certainty that you know the end result of a child that did not have
• 47:49
  that exposure. Like that's an experiment. It's basically an experiment and you just hope for the
• 47:55
  best because nobody's ever really gone through this to any degree. I mean, again, those Stanford
• 48:01
  dropouts, those are not the norm. Those are really in people that had the intersection of
• 48:08
  smarts plus timing plus luck. And yeah, fine. They built a billion dollar company. You know,
• 48:15
  many graduate, you know, many dropouts did not build a billion dollar company. I would say like 99.999
• 48:23
  percent of dropouts did not build a billion dollar, billion dollar plus company. So,
• 48:28
  it's a whole experiment. I mean, life is always, you know, this is the first time anyone's ever
• 48:33
  really done life. They don't really know. But I don't think we really understand the repercussions
• 48:37
  of completely uprooting a formal system that's been entrenched in society for so long. And what the
• 48:43
  end result of that person's going to be. Yeah. So it's it's back to that practical bit, be practical.
• 48:50
  In today's environment, we need that credentialing. We need that
• 48:55
  formal structure to some extent. Home schooling is great. But my encouragement to friends is
• 49:02
  use home schooling to supplement the formalized education, not to replace it, at least for now,
• 49:08
  until we have better technology solutions. And we will down the road. There will be ways that you
• 49:14
  can measure your credential, et cetera, with technology that we don't have today. But I want to
• 49:19
  go back to your point, because I think this is the ultimate irony of all. Remember, I am a child
• 49:26
  of the Vietnam era. I grew up in a world where people were protesting. They were burning flags
• 49:36
  that were doing all of this stuff. And I was I was scallion doing any of that stuff. I was
• 49:41
  afraid. I was scared to death. I'd get in trouble for it. I couldn't afford to be one of those
• 49:46
  protesters or do all those things. But I saw it and I lived it. And and half of it was
• 49:53
  silliness. I remember moratorium day, everybody walked out of school. Well, none of these kids
• 49:58
  really cared about the Vietnam war. They were kids. They were high school kids. I mean, not none of
• 50:02
  them. Some of them did. But everybody walked out of school. Most of them just walked out of school
• 50:07
  because they got a day off. Yeah. And now dial forward. Oh, wait. And the adults, the adults,
• 50:14
  back then, this generations just fallen apart. Their drugs, their, their, their pot smoking hippie
• 50:22
  freak, you know, long hair near the wells. Their, this generation is just a mess. Now those same
• 50:32
  kids that were, that were long hair, pot smokey hippie freaks are now the conservatives screaming
• 50:39
  in fact, in fact, your nation in the school and all the terrible things that students are doing
• 50:45
  today. They're same kids. They grew up. They got money. They became conservative in there. Now
• 50:51
  Paul that what's going on with young people. So we have to take a little bit of this with a
• 50:56
  grain of salt. It's fear. It is fear. Um, what other, what other strong beliefs, opinions about
• 51:06
  education, education as a tool or education from a formal context. You just want to like leave
• 51:14
  the audience with things that like you feel need to be changed in how people approach education
• 51:20
  or need to be changed in the education system. Either, either, either end of the spectrum. You tell
• 51:25
  me, but what are some, what are some sort of closing ideas? Yeah. I'll give you, I'll give you three
• 51:30
  things. I end the book with an analogy. Um, it's, it's one I had for a long time ago. It's a story
• 51:38
  and a story about a young boy and a wise man and the young boy is going to, he's sick of this
• 51:47
  wise man being the wise man, the elder of the community, you know, and he's got to show him. So
• 51:52
  the young boy says, um, we don't, he comes down the hill because I'm going to trick him. I'm going
• 51:58
  to hold this little butterfly in my head and I'm going to ask him, wise man, is this butterfly alive?
• 52:04
  Or is it dead? And the wise man's got to look at me and he's going to pick one. And if he says
• 52:10
  it's alive, I'm going to crush that butterfly and say, see your wrong wise man. And it's the
• 52:15
  butterfly is, and if he says it's dead, I'm going to let my hands go and the butterfly will fly away.
• 52:22
  I'll prove him wrong. So little kids are going to show this wise man. What the world is all about.
• 52:29
  Wise man comes down to the little kids there and he says, well, what's in my hand wise man? And
• 52:35
  the wise man looks at him and he said, well, from the butterfly net in your pocket, I think you've
• 52:40
  got a butterfly in your hand. And he said, okay, well, is it alive or is it dead? And the wise man
• 52:48
  looks at the young boy and he says, son, the answer is in your hands. I end the book with that.
• 52:58
  And I do it on purpose because the title of the book, the subtype futures in your hands,
• 53:06
  I'm going to give you the answer from an individual's perspective. With the power of technology
• 53:12
  today, there is absolutely no excuse for anyone to not excel in an academic and an academic
• 53:21
  environment because you can take that formalized training and supplement it, Khan Academy with all
• 53:28
  kinds of free online tools. So the future is in your hands as an individual in school or even as an
• 53:37
  adult if you want to learn more and keep learning. The future is also in our hands as a society as
• 53:44
  a people. And that's why it was a double meaning in that title because if we don't pay attention to
• 53:52
  the future of education, then we're not going to be as a country competitive globally. And our very
• 54:01
  democracy that we hold so dear can't be sustained without an educated populace going all the way
• 54:10
  back to Jefferson or Alexis de Toteville people like that are founding fathers like Jefferson
• 54:17
  recognize the importance of an educated populace to democracy. So my call to action to individuals
• 54:25
  is take the power in your own hands. My call to action to society is let's stop the fear. Let's get
• 54:33
  reverse that cycle of ignorance, fear, anger, and violence and replace it with a cycle of knowledge,
• 54:41
  hope, understanding, and peace. Can I ask you something? I guess I guess we're on a podcast
• 54:49
  like it probably that's the question. I think that's all you're yeah.
• 54:54
  You see like very, very toxic news cycles and you see social media and I'm sure that you are
• 55:02
  obviously you're right because while you wrote the book you're worried about the decline of
• 55:06
  the institution of education and learning in in the US. Do you have an idea as to how to solve
• 55:14
  for people getting information from Twitter and TikTok and news propagating fear?
• 55:21
  Like it's a good message but very tactically what do you do maybe you do it in your own household
• 55:29
  maybe you have an idea for society because without going down the rabbit hole and spending as
• 55:35
  much time as you did putting this work together it seems like almost a lost cause like I don't know
• 55:40
  how parents even influence their kids more than social media know. It's very scary. What is that?
• 55:50
  I just happened as funny I just I've been using these when I do talk so I don't know if it'll
• 55:55
  love that. Yeah I see it I see it so wait so if you're listening it says the C-suite learnings
• 56:01
  there's a what how and why and actually I'll put this information in the show notes too wherever
• 56:06
  you send people so they can go check this out. Yeah if everyone would do this I put this is the
• 56:12
  foundation of the book if everyone would do this in other words understand what to learn how to
• 56:18
  learn and why to change is going to happen deal with it have confidence to be able to power through
• 56:26
  the change and have clarity of listening listening is so critically important and speaking
• 56:33
  communicating so being able to break things down into simple terms once you know those
• 56:39
  things you're able to deal with change you have confidence and you've got clarity mastered then you
• 56:45
  can really better under-address the how of learning which is critical thinking this is what's
• 56:51
  missing with social media we're taking face value something that's someone with zero credentials
• 56:58
  zero authority is telling us and we're listening to it as opposed to asking I wonder why that
• 57:04
  news source reported the news that way maybe they're making money off of an audience that wants to hear
• 57:10
  that yeah it's it's basic stuff and curiosity is what drives critical thinking and finally creativity
• 57:18
  Einstein called it intelligence having fun if you have fun with this thought process of challenging
• 57:24
  asking questions then it's not like you know it's not hard it's actually fun and then finally
• 57:31
  to your point earlier the why of learning the ability to collaborate and work with others
• 57:37
  there's just cultural literacy there's all this noise about diversity you talked about
• 57:43
  woke and anti-woke and all this kind of stuff and it's such beer driven noise
• 57:50
  the sense of cultural literacy is I will learn more from someone that's not like me than someone
• 57:58
  who is like me it's just that simple but surround myself with all my buddies we're gonna we're
• 58:03
  gonna keep being the same surround myself with people that are different I'm gonna be different
• 58:08
  I'm gonna I'm gonna take on the best of what they have that I don't and then finally character
• 58:15
  so I I've laid these things out as a roadmap that I hope people will take seriously because
• 58:22
  in my simple mind I do believe that the answer to the answer to a better world is a world that
• 58:31
  eliminates fear and the best way to eliminate fear is through those steps to improve our collective
• 58:39
  knowledge I love it okay where should people I'll do there's two more rapid fire to close this
• 58:45
  up but where should people go if they want to get the book learn more about you I think if I'm
• 58:50
  not mistaken I have your website up here somewhere it is jameswkeys.com okay perfect and then
• 59:00
  title on the book jameswkeys.com and then I'm sure on the social is social is at jkeys author
• 59:08
  so it's first initial name at jkeys author on tiktok instagram I've been having a lot of fun
• 59:14
  with social media getting a lot of friends out there I've made doing some fun little vignettes
• 59:21
  to help promote the book and just talk about these principles by the way you're doing very well
• 59:27
  on tiktok I'm very impressed I'm very very impressed with your tiktok doing very well very good
• 59:34
  I have my own little tiktok Yoda she's 22 years old and she's a genius she's amazing yeah no it's
• 59:41
  good I mean you're also instagram is awesome as well but a lot of people miss the mark on tiktok
• 59:48
  because it's very hard to figure out so you're doing very well it's not that I've been having fun
• 59:53
  without learning you know yeah exactly that's the thing that the thing that people don't get right like
• 59:58
  it's this is like this is like a forever principle right you did it with the book you're doing it
• 1:00:03
  with your social you've moved on to like the next season of your life and it's like you dive in
• 1:00:09
  like it's day zero again in whatever you're trying to figure out and it's fun and it's for
• 1:00:13
  a lot of fun that's the thing okay last two to close this out what would you tell what would be
• 1:00:19
  one less than that you would tell your 20-year-old self I would simplify it because my 20-year-old
• 1:00:26
  self wouldn't be listening I would take it right down to what are you afraid of stop
• 1:00:36
  being afraid replace fear with understanding and knowledge and you will replace fear with
• 1:00:46
  oh if you can do that um and the sky is the limit you can accomplish
• 1:00:53
  anything you want to do it's just a matter of time and effort putting in the time and learning
• 1:01:00
  at this age in your career had massive career success personal success um what does success mean
• 1:01:07
  for you freedom I answered a tick-tock question a friend named Gabe who was doing a little vignette
• 1:01:18
  with me and he said they started out with how much money do you make and I said I make a million
• 1:01:23
  dollars worth of freedom and I got all kinds of comments but I'm not go ahead what does that mean
• 1:01:29
  million dollars worth freedom it's very subtle point but the subtle point is not about the money
• 1:01:35
  money is an enabler it's yeah money is great it's wonderful um but really what matters most
• 1:01:43
  is the ability to to do anything you want to do be with who you want to be with and that comes from
• 1:01:50
  knowledge I I could be dirt or but I could mix with people from all over the world now because of
• 1:01:58
  the knowledge I've accumulated and probably if you've ever seen that show um undercover billionaire
• 1:02:06
  they throw these people back out on the street with like a hundred bucks and make them survive
• 1:02:12
  and I think that's the difference I've got the tools now I know how to learn I and that knowledge
• 1:02:19
  will help me survive under any circumstances so freedom really is the game that's not about
• 1:02:26
  I'm gonna stay on the hamster wheel and make more money I want to know as much as I can know
• 1:02:32
  be as free as I can be