The Pomp Podcast - #1355 Hannah Maruyama | Bitcoin Is Destroying Colleges

Episode Date: May 2, 2024

Hannah Maruyama is the Founder of Degree Free. In this conversation, we talk about the data as to why college may not be as lucrative as people think, examples that include an 18-year-old bitcoin developer, why proof-of-work is so important, role of the parents, and a brand new launch program working one-on-one with teenagers.  ======================= Book - degreefree.co/otheroptionsPodcast - degreefree.co/podcastLaunch Program - degreefree.co/launch ======================= In this podcast, we dive into the revolutionary concept of PropyKeys, an application that allows anyone to mint home addresses all over the world on blockchain. PropyKeys.com is a part of the Propy ecosystem, that has a grand mission to make homeownership more affordable and user friendly. We will explore the journey of Propy’s founder and how this innovative technology provides benefits for homeowners, and for the real estate industry. Join us as we discuss the Propy’s latest collaborations, including Coinbase, and its new fun project PropyKeys. X (Twitter): @PropyKeys Website: Mint an address at propykeys.com. dApp: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dapp.propy.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ======================= Get the freshest price feeds free for 12 months. Join Supra’s early integration program for zero-cost access to the fastest oracles and dVRF across 50+ blockchains: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://supra.com/pomp⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Earn $1,500 by referring Web3 projects to use Supra services. The projects get the fastest services for free, and you earn $1,500 for every referral. Learn more at the link above. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Today's episode is with Hannah Maruyama. She is the founder of Degree Free. In this conversation, we talk about the data as to why college may not be as lucrative as people think,

what some of the stories are, including an 18-year-old Bitcoin developer who is riding a tractor and is now contributing code to the Bitcoin system, why proof of work is so important, how parents play into all of this, and a brand new launch program where Hannah and Ryan are working one-on-one with teenagers to figure out what jobs meet their life goals and how they can go ahead and actually put together a curriculum to get to that role. I really enjoy talking with Hannah and this episode is packed with insights and should make you think more deeply about college, its role in American society, and whether your kids, your friends' kids, or people you know should go to college or if there's another path that they can pursue. Here is my conversation

with Hannah Maruyama. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment

or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Today's episode is brought to you by Propy. Imagine a world where you could buy and sell your home, wallet to wallet. With Prop Keys, you can mint your home address and upgrade it to a real-world asset. This not only protects your home's title from fraud, but when you are ready to move, you can sell it through an NFT auction as well as through the traditional way.

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All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Hannah here with me. Hannah, you have spent a ton of time with people who do not go on to get college degrees and instead get amazing jobs. And one of the things in the Bitcoin world that I find really fascinating is all about merit. It's not about credentialism.

the blockchain doesn't ask you, you know, Hey, what, where'd you get your degree? It didn't ask you what your GPA was. Um, and some of these people that you've worked with in the past or Bitcoin developers, et cetera. And so tell us a story of this 18 year old Bitcoin developer with no college degree, completely self-taught that seems to just be taking over the world now. So I am, I'm really stoked to talk about this. So Ryan and I have been running the degree free podcast for almost three years now, which seems crazy to me, but we've been able to interview some just unbelievable degree free people, they just come out of the woodwork. And most of the people that come out of the woodwork are tech people for whatever reason. But that makes a lot

of sense. There's a big rash of self taught tech people, the skills are very accessible, which is part of the reason that college is dying. Because the accessibility of the internet and ability to learn skills is kind of taking over. And a great example of that story, probably one of my favorites is actually Damien Goodenough. And yes, that really is his name. He is unbelievable, super smart, this kid. And he actually heard me talking on the Best Business Show. This was a couple years ago. And he was out on a tractor in a field. He was working. And he heard... He was listening to this podcast. He has earbuds in. He was listening to the podcast. He was listening to your show. And then he heard me just saying, you don't have to buy a college degree to learn these skills.

And then he just said, okay. And then he went out and he taught himself how to code. And then he went and he went to physically networking events. And he just asked people for jobs until somebody finally gave him one. And then he started building projects and started building portfolio. And it was so amazing. And so he has such a... Obviously, he's a maxi, but he has such a good frame for this because he just very simply in the way that only skill and youth can just said, Bitcoin is about proof of work. Why do I have to buy something from an institution in order to show that I can do work? And the answer is you do not.

And increasingly, we see that because there's such a rash of down-credentialing across all industries right now. The MC Burning Glass Institute has been tracking this since 2014. And it's funny, a lot of people will say now that they think that job listings and job postings actually ask for more degrees than they used to,

but that's just not the case. The numbers do not reflect that at all. There's been a steady trend of down-credentialing across 51 million jobs posted in the last 10 years, specifically across finance, tech, medicine, and education, which historically are very much locked up, papered positions, and they're not. And the truth is, too, that they actually weren't. Companies don't hire people that look like their job listings. And so they actually weren't hiring that way. It just looks like they were because they were posting degree requirements in the job listings. And so people just have that impression.

So that's interesting where people are actually hiring individuals for open roles that don't match the job description. It's almost kind of like, you know, whenever somebody has an open role, they're like, OK, well, I want five years of experience. They need to have two degrees and we want them to have worked in this specific industry. But if a good person comes along, they're going to hire the good person, it seems like. Every single time. There's a really interesting study called Dismissed by Degrees that the Harvard Business Review did. I think it was about I think it's about five years old at this time. But they found that across mid and high scale jobs, which is that's a tough, that's a tough thing to pin down. But across mid and high scale jobs, according to them, they found that 67% of people employed in those jobs actually do not degrees, even if the position supposedly requires a degree. This is something that I explain a lot on I talked about this a lot on degree free, I talked about this a lot to the kids in my launch program. But basically, a degree requirement is different from a degree requirement. So what a lot of these companies have up is they have a degree request. A degree requirement is something that is legally required.

If a job does not legally require you to have a degree in order to do that job or get a license to do that job. So think actual physicians, CPAs, FBI agents, because at the federal level, you have to have a college degree in order to become an FBI agent. But the actual percentage of jobs that require degrees, not request degrees, is actually very, very small. it's hard to run into that wall talk a little bit about this idea of like the proof of work right so if you don't have the degree you have to have something to show and in the example of

the 18 year old bitcoin developer you were talking about like building a portfolio and you know the paper is almost proof of work it's like hey you went you suffered through four years of school and like did everything they needed to give you this piece of paper so like you passed the test like here you go now you get a job um proof of work though as this core concept inside of the bitcoin industry um how do you think about that for people who don't go and get a college degree So for degree-free people, and this is such a dynamic topic, because if you don't buy a degree, you have to show your work. And therefore, you're almost held to a higher standard because you have to show that you were able to do whatever it is. And so that's why a lot of people who are

degree-free actually have outstanding portfolios. They have a lot of experience. They have a lot of skills to show. Because in order to compensate for the paper bias that does exist, we have to go out and we have to learn and we have to show that we're able to do these things. And so the way that we teach ourselves is probably a lot more aggressive and a lot more practical than a lot of college graduates because college graduates graduate and they think that, oh, hey, if I just buy this piece of paper from a college, then that'll show that I can do insert skill here or insert job here. But the problem, and this is why enrollment I think is dropping and colleges as a whole

are dying is because there actually is really no standard and there's no real proof. You may come out of an art school with a portfolio because that's fundamentally a visual medium and they have to be able to show whatever they can do. Sometimes you're going to see that in industrial design. You may have some engineers that have really hands-on things. Sometimes computer science majors have it. But really, it's just a crapshoot as to whether or not you come out of college with the ability to show an employer that you know how to do whatever the job is. And so yeah, it's just kind of an interesting thing. But I have noticed that degree-free people will more aggressively build portfolios and more aggressively show their work because we have to. And yeah, I've seen that across... Like I said, we interviewed a bunch of people from different big companies. We've had engineers from AWS, product managers from Meta. We have a UX UI designer from Microsoft coming on, marketing managers from Dell North America. just very, very much like big job titles, big jobs, and all of them, the thing that's consistent

across all of them is showing that they knew how to do whatever that job was. And they had to show it in a way that was really consumable. And that was really, really good so that it got the attention of recruiters over other candidates. There's a problem there too. I don't know if you've seen, but because of all of this down credentialing that's happening, IBM, Accenture, Walmart, Bank of America, Tesla, AWS, like all these big companies are removing degree requirements really aggressively. And one of the things that I have noticed is that in recent weeks, there's been, oh, this isn't working, this isn't working, this isn't working. And what's funny about that is one, they only started doing these official removals and press

releases about removals a couple months ago. But the people largely who are in charge of hiring tend to be women that skew in a certain age range who all have one or multiple college degrees. And they tend to believe that a college degree is the measurement of success. And because of that, all of these degree requirements being rolled back are only going to be effective when they retrain the bias out of all of their HR and hiring staff, which is going to be a difficult thing to So how do you think about the people who don't have these college degrees kind of merit, not credentialism and doing that proof of work, getting the attention of the recruiter? Right. If you don't have the resume, is it like you kind of have to network your way in or what is the thing that you see people be most successful with? So that is... So network always wins. Being in the room or knowing somebody that's in the room

is always the way in because being a known entity always will give you an advantage over somebody who no one knows their name. But I think for people who are trying to break into jobs where they do not know anybody... So I had this experience when I first got into tech. This was 2020. There was a lot of people that got into different tech jobs and different higher paying jobs in 2020 because COVID forced us out of our other jobs and we had to learn different skills. What I did was one, I was really strategic with my application. So I was really strategic with the companies, what they needed, and going out and learning that specific skill set, but ignoring degree requirements completely. So what I'm looking for is the specific tools,

the specific methods. So being really good at Excel is still one of the top skills because Excel runs everything. And anyone who works for any sort of tech company knows that Excel still the king of everything and so even having a decent excel portfolio and understanding how to use it um and i've we've had uh we've had we have really good friends that work at again large companies who will say yeah these college graduates are coming out and engineering college graduates and they don't know how to use excel and that's all of their jobs like process engineers that don't know how to use excel and i'm sorry but somebody who does is always going to get oh it's always going to get work over somebody who doesn't you know that makes a that makes a

kind of sense. Talk to me about some of the other data, like how popular is this path becoming? So there is, colleges are experiencing what I am really excited to call a catastrophic drop in enrollment, which they richly deserve because colleges are just, it's wild how they can, they can have put most of the popular, a large percentage of the American population into $1.7 trillion dollars of student debt, while simultaneously building up their endowments to $848 billion. And you'll have these college graduates screaming, eat the rich. I'm like, how about you eat the endowments? Because look at them, they're $848 billion. A lot of these Ivy League colleges don't even need to charge tuition, they just do. And so what I'm seeing

is parents, because who I'm working with is 16 to 20 year olds. So there's two different age groups that are really benefiting from the launch program, which is how I'm helping families create curriculum so they can learn skills so their kids can get jobs without having to buy degrees. So the 16 to 17-year-olds are looking for a plan pre-graduation, pre-high school graduation. And then I get another age bracket, which is 19 to 20, who typically has gone to college and it has already failed them. And so I think what's happening is there's two different types of people right now who are just, one, pulling their kids out of college or their kids are breaking out of college because it's just failing them. It's not helping them get to their

goals. And the other group, which is just looking at the staggering costs, because the NCES data from last year said that the cost of a four-year bachelor's degree is $104,000, which is deceptive because no one graduates in four years. Most college graduates take at least five and a half years. And the total cost for that is $156,000 all in. Over a lifetime, when they lose out on wages, when they are paying interest, and they're also paying the cost of tuition, the NCES and BLS data reflects that the average cost for a bachelor's degree right now over the lifetime is $500,000. And there's no way that you're going to get that amount of value out of a piece of paper from a college when the colleges cannot keep up with the speed of actual education.

And I say that because college is not education. Those are not synonyms. College is a form of education, but no one owns education. No one can pay while education. And so I just feel like it's really important to just distinguish between those two things. Cause people will just say, oh, you know, education needs to be accessible. And I just say, well, education is accessible. College is inaccessible. Those are not the same things even at all. So. What are the curriculum in this launch program that you have, like talk through some of the curriculum that people are pursuing if they're not going to college, like what are those things? Oh man. So this is the thing I keep hearing from parents is that I'm the only one doing

anything like this and they've never seen anything like this. So it's really cool. But what I'm doing is I'm taking these kids one-on-one through a very intensive analysis process. And then I'm doing about 35 to 40 hours of research on the back end. So what I'm doing is breaking down their goals. So I'm figuring out where they want to live, how much income they want to make in order to pay their bills, what kind of schedule they want to have, what sort of work environment they want, as opposed to just asking these young adults and just saying, what do you

want to do? Because they have no idea. And I'll get to that in a second. But what I'm doing is breaking that down. And then we narrow the list several times. And then I get them to a list of 3 to 5 jobs that they want. And so it completely depends on their goals. So a good example is I have one girl right now who on the top of her list is actually horology, which is watchmaking. And so Rolex has actually a watch. They just opened a watch school in Dallas. It's tuition-free for 18 months. So my main goal is to break every single

job that they want. So we narrow the list to 3 to 5 jobs. Of those jobs, I give them 3 options to learn every single type of job that's on their list. So for example, the girl that's interested in horology, that made it to her end list. So for her, she has the Rolex school as her middle tier option. Her entry tier option is actually like a local apprenticeship at a watchmaker's shop. and the last one is a really intensive actual college because that for her is the goal that she was trying to get to. So I don't eliminate college degrees.

What I treat them as is a last resort. So the way I explain education to people is that if you're trying to learn something, you can pay in two different ways. You can pay with time or you can pay with money. So if you're paying with time, what you're going to do is you're either going to do an apprenticeship where you're paying with your time.

Ideally, when I'm finding these options for these young adults, I'm trying to find something that will pay them because there's actually a lot of... There's a lot of apprenticeships. And that's for craft work, for trade work, for tech work. But we're breaking it down and trying to give them different options that do not cost what a college degree costs. And with how much colleges are charging, that's really not a difficult thing to do. It's cheaper to go to flight school than it is to buy the average bachelor's degree. It's really... So there's a lot of room for me to work with.

And a lot of these parents are looking... The most common reaction I get is in that end call when I review it with both the student and the parent, the parents laugh because they just didn't realize, they didn't realize what's out there. And it's really difficult because right now there's no good resource for finding these things. It just takes me hours of local research and calling and emailing and double-checking pricing

and double-checking all of these things. So this is something we're trying to build right now, but a way to make that more available to more people. Because right now it's just me and Ryan doing it and just doing all this research, but the results are just so cool. So, you know, I have like IT automation specialists and finding courses for them and boot camps for them and then software developers, which I give them an option. Here's how you can teach yourself and I'll do a full open source curriculum for them with a current skill stack for the industry that they want to go into.

So I had one kid that he was super interested in the wearables, like health, you know, healthcare tech wearables. And so I built him an open source curriculum for the most in-demand skills that I saw showing up on listings for those types of jobs. but it's just very custom. It's super custom, but it's really, really cool, you know? And so it's trades to tech to anything in between. College, let's say takes four years, maybe a little bit longer, depending on if they complete it in four years or not. How long do these kind of self-paced, you know, study or apprenticeships, et cetera, how long does that usually take? So the type of things that I'm looking to do, so my criteria for success for the launch program

is the families that come through my program, their students will save at least two years and ideally $50,000 at minimum. If I can save them more than that, then fantastic. So for a lot of the kids, what they end up doing is, it depends on your definition of employment. So if I find them in apprenticeship,

technically they're cashflow positive immediately, right? But if they're gonna pay to learn a skill or do something else, then it may take them one to two years. But my goal is to get them to the point where they can earn the median college graduate salary within one to three years of coming out of the launch program with plan. And then what are the downsides to not going to college? Like, how do you think about like the risks that people are taking by not pursuing that path? Oh, that's a good question. So I think that and this gets into this gets into some interesting

stuff that I'd love to I know, there's there's so much here. So the risks of not going to college would be it's going to take you longer if the end result for you is... The end result for the student in the program is to be whatever that job is. So if you want to be a veterinarian and you do not go to college, obviously, one, you can't do that job. But two, if you later decide that you're sure that that's the path you want to take, it's going to take you longer than if you just go to college immediately after high school. However, right now, there's a lot that parents need to know about this, which is one, college graduates, only 25% of them end up working in their field of study. It's not a lot. It's terrible. One in four of them is making less

than 32K a year. So that's not... The more you shave this down, the worse the picture gets. And I think that there's just so many layers of data here that it's difficult for people to separate this out. But I think your risk, your big risk really is if you come from a higher income... Um, truthfully, if you come from a higher income family, because one of the things it's like a social, it's a lot of people view it as like a social status purchase. And so your risk would be that possibly some people would perceive your child as not being part of the same social class if you don't buy a college degree. But I find that that's more of an antiquated and outdated, more of an antiquated and outdated

thing. Um, so when, um, when you view this, what is the long-term income expectations of someone who went to college versus not? Like I've seen data that says, oh, if you go to college, you're supposed to make more money over the long run. Uh, then I've seen other people who say, no, that's actually not true. And it's the opposite is true. How do you look at what the long-term data shows?

Okay. So that's a really good question. A lot of, and I have, I actually wrote this down cause I knew this was going to, I was sure this was going to come up. It always does. So what you're referring to is the million dollar earnings myth. And I'm referring to it as a million dollar earnings myth because it's bullshit. So the reason that it's bullshit is because one, all of that is based on a study from 2011 from Georgetown University, which obviously an unbiased source to tell you whether or not it's worth it to buy a college degree. So let's start there. The second thing is that there are two fallacies that I see commonly. I just saw Destiny recently talking. He's been on the rounds recently telling everybody to go

to college, which is ridiculous because he conflates earnings and then he conflates household wealth, which are two. So there's two separate problems here. So let's do income first. Income first is that Georgetown study is measuring the earnings of people who started going to college in 1965. So you can't assess... And this is just bad data because all of the data is in the past because the only way they can get that data is in the past. And yes, obviously, if you're a baby boomer, or if you're Gen X, like older Gen X, and you went to college, then there's a completely different profile for earnings. Because at the time that they started measuring this data, only 8% of the population had college degrees. And they were

only buying college degrees in the fields where you actually need them, like engineering and medicine. And I don't say medicine. I mean, medicine where it's legally required for you to get a license. So the other thing is they don't break that out by earnings. So they lump in bachelor's degree holders and graduate degree holders, which are obviously going to have very different outcomes because a lawyer is not going to make the same that a sociology major is going to make. But most people are not buying law degrees. So there's a big problem there. The other problem is that there's a bias in who is going to college. So that's the other thing that I've always found so ridiculous is that breaking down the US population earnings and income brackets by degree is ridiculous. what you should be breaking them down by is the income of their parents. That's the way that you

should separate it out. Because if you look at who colleges accept, 75%, almost 80... It's actually 77%. Almost 80% of bachelor's degree holders come from the top 50% of earners. It's not the college that's making a kid successful. It's the socioeconomic status that they're coming from prior. And that's why when people from the lower 50%, which I fall into, buy college degrees, we get terrible results. Because it's not about the socioeconomics. It's not about the degree. The degree is not what makes you successful. What that is, is that people that come from that earnings market, their children tend to purchase this thing or they tend to purchase it for their children. It's like saying, oh, well, people... If you have a Tesla,

you're going to be successful. And it's like, no, you just tend to buy Teslas because you're in a certain earnings bracket. Anyway, so there's that. The second thing, and this is something that we're actually working on right now. I'm not a data analyst. Ryan's not a data analyst, but we're working on a white paper with this right now. This is like big, short level crazy, what I'm about to tell you. Because when we were looking into the actual data, we're looking into the BLS data for this, what we realized was that the way that household wealth information, the breakdowns are done is by census data. And what's the problem with census data? It's done by household. So currently,

the way it is right now, and this is the craziest thing when I realized that this is what it looks very much like this is what's going on, is that if one of the people in the household has bought a college degree and the other person in the household is degree-free, they will attribute the household wealth to the degree holder. So for example, Joe Rogan, $100 million. How much is his net worth? I have no idea. It's a lot. His wife has a bachelor's degree. Joe Rogan is degree-free. They're going to attribute Joe Rogan's earnings and his household wealth to a college degree because his wife has a bachelor's degree. That's crazy. But that's how they're breaking it down. So both the earnings picture and the wealth picture are obscured because of the type of data,

the way they're pulling it, and also the type of people that tend to have their kids buy college degrees. I think a lot of this is societal. And so it's coming from back in the day, back in the 1960s, let's go to college. Why? Because back then, those were all professions that were higher earning because they required degrees for legal licensure, like law and medicine, right? And so it's kind of this spillover where in 1965, the government started subsidizing student loans. And when they started doing that, there was a steep increase in purchase, which makes sense because anytime, but also anytime the government subsidize anything, it turns into a shit show. And so immediately, as soon as they started doing that in, it was 19, I always say, I always say

1970, but it was 1976. They then had to make a law against defaults on student loans. So actually, my theory is that the ROI, that's when it stopped. That's when it started to get crisis level. But the colleges at that point were so excited to have a blank check that they just kept doing it. And instead, they went to the government and they used the government as a tool to keep people from being able to write off their student loans and bankruptcy. So anyway, there's a lot there. There's a lot that they're working on, but it's just a crazy, once we realized that that's how they were doing the household wealth was a pretty shocking. A lot of people don't know that. And it's difficult to break down that whole million dollar earnings thing. that um that makes me think about um software is obviously a huge part people say hey go learn to code there's coding boot camps and all that kind of stuff what are the other sectors where you see this really being uh kind of most valuable where people can actually skip college are there like trends or patterns that you're uh now starting to see yeah so tech is obviously the easiest one because it's all online and so therefore it's really accessible to people so you're for sure

you've written that one off. One of the... ZipRecruiter actually did a study earlier this year on which industries were down credentialing at the most rapid rate. And another one that's really interesting is actually the financial sector. There was a brain drain because of all the money in tech. And because of that, a lot of the financial institutions are bending over backwards to get anybody to come into them. So financial sales is actually a huge one. So FINRA licenses, if you can get a couple... I just had a gal go through the program and she ended up studying for a couple of FINRA licenses. But she got her FINRA licenses and then they will sponsor the final one that they need. So Vanguard is actually doing this really aggressively right

now too. So that pulls us back into Bitcoin and into our territory, which is Bitcoiners and Bitcoin companies really need to pay attention to this because it is crazy. And they should not be... One of the things that's always bothered me about... Because obviously, I'm a Bitcoiner. Ryan's a Bitcoiner. We're a Bitcoin family. And so it's always bothered me that what we're looking for is something that's sound. And currently, those companies are trying to mirror the broken part of the economy, the broken part of money, the broken companies. And they're going, yeah, we're just going to repost these degrees. It's so ridiculous. It's so ridiculous. Why are you filtering people like that? Because a lot of the people that gravitate towards Bitcoin are

people who are educated. And when I say educated, I do not mean they have college degrees. I mean, we will go out and we will read the white paper. We will go out and we will learn and we will read and we will find things. And they're eliminating people who really are aggressively self-teaching, who really care, who are very passionate, who would be very devoted to a company. And that's the main reason I think all these companies are down credentialing is because the turnover is actually way less for people who are degree-free, especially if they train them at their company. And so that's an aside. But Bitcoin companies are missing this. And when I see degree requirements, I just cringe because it's embarrassing. The industry should not be

doing that. You are using paper when you are trying to build an entire system that is not based on paper where the value fluctuates. Anyway, so that one gets me. It makes sense though, right? From the perspective that you're presenting here. Talk a little bit about the launch program before I let you go and how the program works. if people are interested in going and checking it out. Yeah, sure. So, and then also we're about to have a book come out as well. And so that's going to be degreefree.co forward slash other options.

But the goal of that is to guide people through figuring out what options are going to work for their children, figuring out what they should do after high school, figuring out whether or not those things legally require a college degree, because that's the first level of checking. But if people are interested in the launch program, I take rolling applications. And so the way that works is you can go to degreefree.co forward slash launch. And then that's where you can apply for the program. But the way it works is it's

four one hour sessions. And what I do is I take I work one on one with your child and I generate reports and analysis for parents and children the entire way through. And what I do is I take their goals where they're trying to get in life. So we base work on the type of life they want to live, not pull your work out of a hat and then structure your whole life around and hope that that's going to be effective because goals matter a lot. And then if you don't optimize and you don't set goals, you're going to end up who knows where, which is the problem for a lot of college graduates. And so we end up, what we end up with is a very fine-tuned list of three to five jobs that will help your child live the type of life they want to live in income and location, ideally

in schedule and sometimes even in industry, right? So in specific industries that they want to work in. But that's the last factor, not the first one. Because right now people are picking that first. And that's the wrong way to go about picking work. And then from there, outlining options where they can learn those things, learn those skills for much, much less and much quicker usually than buying a college degree, aside from flight schools or apprenticeships that take four to five years to become a journeyman for trades.

And then if people want to listen to the podcast, where can we send them? So it's degreefree.co forward slash podcast. If you want to watch the video, we tend to be a lot more fun. And that's actually on YouTube. So it'd be degree free on YouTube. Awesome. Hannah, you're doing an amazing job. I think that people are incredibly, their eyes are opened when they hear kind of the

data, they see what you're doing. And the thing I love maybe more than anything is you have the stories, you have the anecdotes, you have the things that back up and watching this happen. So I appreciate the work that you're doing and hope that you continue. Please, please don't get burnt out. There's still a lot of work to do. So much. But no, thank you so much. Hopefully this was valuable to people and kind of seeing this other path.

And, you know, it goes back to kind of the Bitcoin ethos of proof of work and being able to actually show that is quite important as well. So thank you. And we'll definitely do this again in the future. Cool. Thank you.