The Rich Roll Podcast - Adam Braun On Lightning Moments, Reimagining Education & Blazing A Life of Purpose

Episode Date: March 27, 2017

It’s no secret that aspects of our current education system are at best antiquated, at worst broken. Whether it's quality education in the developing world, properly training people to meet our rapidly changing workforce needs or the crippling student loan debt that onerously burdens millions of young people, we're long overdue for some systemic upgrades. This week's guest has devoted his life to tackling these problems. A young man with a bright future, Adam Braun graduated from Brown and threw himself headfirst into a burgeoning career in finance when an extended backpacking trip across the developing world forever changed his perspective. Inspired by a sense of purpose and a call to service, in 2008 Adam walked away from Wall Street to launch Pencils of Promise – a for purpose philanthropic endeavor with the mission of building schools in countries across the world. A massive success, Pencils of Promise is responsible for over 400 new schools to date, distinguishing itself as one of a handful of charitable organizations that has fundamentally changed how we think about and practice philanthropy and giving. Named to Forbes' 30 Under 30 List, Business Insider's 40 Under 40 List, and Wired's Smart List of 50 People Changing the World, Adam chronicles his remarkable journey in The Promise of a Pencil*, a powerful story of awakening and action that demonstrates how one person can make a huge difference in a short period of time. Debuting at #2 on the New York Times Bestseller list and going on to becoming a #1 national bestseller, it's a favored read among business leaders and can even be found on many a college syllabus. Today finds Adam embarking a new chapter, taking on higher education with an ambitious new start up called MissionU – a for-profit for purpose, venture-backed organization that presents a compelling alternative to traditional college by sending students into the workforce debt-free. This is a great conversation about Adam’s journey to entrepreneurial success. It's about the current state of education, the business of education, and the innovative path forward. It’s a conversation about self-awareness, integrity and lightning moments. But mostly, this is a conversation about the transformative power of leading a meaningful life of service fueled by purpose. I applaud Adam's commitment to dream big and solve huge problems. A special human, I promise you will be captivated by the extraordinary story behind it all. I sincerely hope you enjoy the exchange. Peace + Plants, Rich

True self-discovery begins where your comfort zone ends. And I think that that's when you get in touch with this sense of purpose and this kind of level of self-awareness that we've been talking about is when you discover that there was something latent within you that was just rusting there that is so true and kind of core and fundamental to who you are that was completely dormant until this thing happened. And there's absolutely no way to discover that unless you get outside of your comfort zone. And so that's, you know, always the first step that I encourage people is to find ways to leave your comfort zone, to get into some area of potential discomfort, potential struggle. And that's when you'll learn, you know, not just what you are in terms of your job or your, you know, the husband or wife of person X, but really at your core, who you are. And then it's your responsibility to start to kind of peel back the layers, you know, of, of that onion and try and see what is it that actually at the root of it makes me feel so alive

or in love with this, you know, feeling that I'm experiencing in this new arena. And the more you dig, you start to find, you know, at your core kind of why you believe you're here and what your gifts are that you need to bring to the broader world. That's Adam Braun, this week on The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. It's no secret that certain aspects of our current education system are really antiquated, broken, and in desperate need of an upgrade, whether it's access to quality education in the developing world or properly training people to meet the rapidly changing workforce needs of our quickly evolving modern culture, and doing it in a way that avoids the crippling

student loan debt that onerously burdens millions of young people here in the United States. My name is Rich Roll. Welcome to my podcast, where this week I sit down with a very bright, very enterprising young guy called Adam Braun. This is a guy who has really devoted his life to solving these problems through new and highly innovative ways, both in the nonprofit sector, or as Adam likes to call it, the for-purpose sector, as well as in the for-profit technology space. His backstory is really quite amazing. This is a guy with a degree from Brown who was pursuing a bright burgeoning career in finance when an extended backpacking trip across the developing world forever changed his perspective and really inspired a call to service that motivated him to completely walk away from Wall Street in 2008

and launch something called Pencils of Promise, a for-purpose endeavor with the mission of building schools in countries across the world. And Pencils of Promise was a massive success. It's built not only 400 schools to date. It's one of a handful of modern charitable organizations that I think has fundamentally changed how we think about and practice philanthropy and giving. He wrote an amazing book about Pencils of Promise and his remarkable journey. It's called The Promise of a Pencil. And it's a really powerful story of awakening, of action, showing how one person can make a huge difference in a short period of time.

It debuted at number two on the New York Times bestseller list and went on to become a number one national bestseller. It's even found its way into college curriculums and it's a favored book by many a business leader. I strongly recommend you guys check it out. Really wonderful book. And now Adam has shifted his focus to higher education with a brand new and quite ambitious startup

called Mission U. It's a for-profit, for-purpose, venture-backed organization founded to become a college alternative that sends students into the workforce debt-free. It's really cool. It's super exciting. It's innovative. It's disruptive. So how does it all work?

Well, I'm going to let Adam tell you all about it. But first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since,

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need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay. This is a great conversation about so many things. Adam's story, of course, and the entrepreneurial origins and success of Pencils of Promise, the current state of education, as well as the business of education, the pros and cons, the blind spots, and how Adam envisions innovation through his new company, Mission U. It's a conversation about self-awareness, integrity, and finding purpose. But mostly, it's about the transformative power of heeding the call to service. I'm very impressed by Adam. He's an amazing human being. I applaud his devotion, his commitment to dream big, solve huge problems in new and

innovative ways. And I think you guys are going to be really captivated by the extraordinary story behind it all. He's a special human for sure. So this is me and Adam Braun. Cool, man. Let's rock it. Yeah, for sure.

Super nice to reconnect with you we met briefly at lewis houses apartment when you had that little book event there when your book came out so i don't expect that you would remember me a lot but it was really cool and i was very um i was very impacted by uh not just your presentation but your book and and all the amazing things that you do and are doing. So it's an honor and a privilege to get a chance to talk to you. Likewise. Thank you. Cool.

You know, I was thinking as I was driving over here, like wrapping my head around how to approach talking to you, and I was thinking about the Emanuel brothers, and I was thinking about the Wojcicki sisters, and I was like, and then there's the Brawns, right? So what is, I mean, I think a good place to kind of launch into this is to talk about how you were brought up. I think that you must have been parented incredibly well for you and your brother. And you have a sister, and you have two adopted brothers as well, right? To be so self-directed and purposeful in the work that you do yeah i mean i'm happy to speak about my upbringing i'm a new dad you know my wife gave birth to um our twins just over three

months ago and so now i've never appreciated my parents more i think part of that is just to have extra hands around when you have twins. The forgiveness of all the mistakes. Oh, man, it's amazing how unwise your parents seem to you in your teenage years. And somehow they get so smart once you have your own kids and you can learn from them. But my upbringing, I think, was a unique one for sure in probably a couple different ways. I think was a unique one for sure. Um, and, and probably a couple of different ways. Part of it was just that, uh, you know, we were really fortunate that my parents both came from essentially nothing. You know, my dad was an immigrant, came to this country news three,

uh, really on a boat, I think 14 or 15 days across the Atlantic escaping, uh, war after, you know, both of his parents were Holocaust survivors and lost their whole families in the war. And so, you know, that had a really meaningful impact on the upbringing that he had as an immigrant to this country, you know, growing up in Queens. And my mom lost her dad when she was about 11 or so years old. And that also had a really big impact on her because, you know, her mother had to raise three kids, you know, when she didn't expect to have to face those challenges. And so both of them are kind of self-made individuals who grew up in really, really strong households with a lot of focus, I think, on virtues and values.

And so they looked for the best public education system they could outside of New York. When my brother and I were born about two and a half years apart. And that was in Greenwich, Connecticut. And so we grew up in this really affluent town. But the part of town we first moved to, Cos Cobb, is kind of one of the more working class parts of town historically. It's where a lot of the people that were building the mansions in backcountry Greenwich were living at the time the backbone of Greenwich yeah um and you know we we had a great upbringing that our dad was very intense very you know much disciplinarian in ways that a lot of my friend's parents were not um you know he let you know when he was unhappy

with you he also coached a lot of the teams that you know myself my siblings played on and he was known as like the scary crazy dad who's cursing people out and you know you didn't want to cross ways with him but um he's still around yeah oh yeah yeah my dad's a beast i mean he's he's 64 now but you know he's ripped he does like six sports a day he's the most physically active person you'll ever meet um and you know you counter that with my mom who also you know kind of blazed her own trail she was one of the first female orthodontist in this country when every woman was kind of told you're going to be a dental hygienist and you're going to help out the man who's the dentist she carved this career as an orthodontist uh you know which was a field that not a lot of women were building their own practices in but she always made time to be a mom uh so she at the most i think worked you know four or so

days a week, she had this own independent practice, but she was still really present for us. Um, and I think her grounding and like doing what's right. And, you know, her favorite word is integrity. And my dad is, is kind of the epitome of ambition. And I think when you mix those two things together, you end up with, uh, with the family that we now have. Yeah.

That's powerful. I mean, I know you have this sort of refrain you talk about that your dad used to, this mantra that your dad used to instill in you guys, that the bronze are different. And so as a child, how do you interpret that? Because that's sort of a way of separating you, right? And you're in this town where there's tremendous dichotomy between the haves and the have-nots. Yeah, I would say at first it was really frustrating because, you know, when you're a little kid, you kind of want what everybody else has, or you at least assume in your five-year-old mind that if Jimmy gets this for that, then I should be able to receive the same thing if I replicate that act. And that's just not how my

parents operated at all. And the kind of usage of this phrase is often thrown out in those situations. You know, my friends all played video games. We were not allowed to play video games. We didn't have Nintendo as a kid. And I would say, why don't we have a Nintendo? All my friends have Nintendo. And my dad would say, well, bronze are different. And, you know, then when I could have instilled a new rebellion, though.

Yeah. Yeah. than um when i could have instilled a new rebellion though yeah yeah i i think i think you know there was certain moments where it was frustration um because we weren't able to you know see the same experiences that maybe our friends were um and there was just this hardline justification like you couldn't debate it right and that's what part of i think in retrospect was so powerful you just couldn't debate it was just. And that's what part of I think in retrospect was so powerful. You just couldn't debate. It was just we are different. And there's no us versus them. It's just we are different. But then it would start to manifest in a lot of really powerful ways in that, you know, if if a kid was bullied in school or someone said, you know, a racial slur and, you know, we didn't act up on behalf of that kid who was bullied or we didn't call out the person who made that racial slur. And, you know, we didn't act up on behalf of that kid who was bullied, or we didn't call out the person who, you know, made that racial slur. And my parents found out they were really, really upset about it. And we were told, you have to go do that. You have to stand up for the kid

who's bullied. You are not allowed to use that language. In fact, anyone who uses that language at you, you better fight. You know, those are the things we're told. And we were like, well, why? And they would say, well, bronze are different. And so eventually it started to, you know those are the things we're told and we were like well why and they would say well bronze are different and so eventually it started to you know kind of become this mark of of almost internal pride that we're just held by a different set of norms and expectations and everybody else around us and increasingly it wasn't say you're better or you're superior but we're just going to hold you higher you know accountable to a higher standard And instilling in you like a sort of, I guess, a sense of exceptionalism as a driving, as a kind of driving, propelling force forward. I think to some degree with certainly my dad, I mean, I pretty recently, probably six months

ago or so, I read Carol Dweck's book, Mindset, you know, and as somebody who works in education, it's certainly a really, you know, monumental book in the field. And I start, I literally called my mom and I was like like mom what the hell i i i was raised with a fixed mindset like dad always convinced us that we were so great and that we could go and achieve anything because we had these inherent gifts and abilities and like this is exactly what you shouldn't have been doing and i feel like you mom you know were more growth mindset but dad dad instilled fixed mindset in us and you know that's not a good thing as i'm reading this book and my mom was like no no no what what your father instilled was a belief that you had talents and abilities because you demonstrated them but that you could turn those

into things that were really exceptional through hard work and and she was really hard with me in response and and normally i would have thought that she'd been like yeah you're kind of right she was like no absolutely not we do not inst normally I would have thought that she would have been like, yeah, you're kind of right. She was like, no, absolutely not. We did not instill the fixed mindset in you. I think there were elements that we said, look, you're special in ways X, Y, and Z that we were noticing. But the one thing that we really, really tried to communicate to you was that none of these things could become a reality, whatever aspirations you had, unless it was grounded in really, really hard work. And when I looked at my peers as a kid, when I look at, you know, the work ethic of most people that I know as adults, it doesn't honestly hold a candle to what I think my brother and my sister and I almost expect of ourselves because of the way in which we were raised.

Well, it's empowerment, right? I mean, the counterpoint to Dweck's book is sort of the ethos that our mutual friend Gary Vee talks about. He always talks about how he was given this self-esteem by his mother growing up. And that is really the fuel or his pilot light. Yeah. It's funny that Carol Dweck's book just came up in a podcast I did like three days ago with this woman, Jessica Leahy. Do you know her? She's in education.

She writes for The Atlantic and The New York Times on education. You should know her with all the things you're doing. Yeah, I would love to. I'll connect you. Very cool. But kind of behind all of that, the engine was this focus on education, right? Yep. And behind that is the fulfillment of the American dream and the kind of gestalt that that has when you're somebody like yourself

who gets on this track, right? That takes you to, I would presume, the top of your class when you're in high school and gets you into Brown. And then it just becomes like a lockstep thing of what you do when you're in that position, which is something that's my own experience. I went to great colleges and grad schools and all that kind of stuff and lived that life for a very long time. It wasn't until much later that I had my sort of lightning moment, to coin your phrase. But it's almost like a, you know, how do you characterize it? Like a, you know, a prison of privilege almost because you feel like you should be doing these things because you're at Brown and you have these opportunities that most people don't. Yeah, it was something that I grappled a lot with and probably wrote, you know, pages and pages about in the journals that, you know, I kept for years,

but certainly the ones that I was writing when I was in my early 20s, like 20, 21, 22, as I was traveling was, you know, it was my first exposure to the developing world. I became obsessed with backpacking, spending as much time as I could in these communities and remote parts of the developing world, completely, you know, removed and disassociated from anything and everything that I was familiar with. And I felt, you know, tremendous personal growth, personal exploration. I loved the people that I was meeting, but I also was kind of faced with the reality that, you know, all of these destitute situations that I was sometimes seeing in some of these remote communities was not the situation I had growing up for some reason of which I had no say. I was born into a very loving family, able to get a great education in a part of the world where I had access to running water and electricity and all these other things that the people I was witnessing were not.

And it was very tough for me to not feel a lot of guilt and obligation around. But all of that, you know, really switched because of a man that I met in Guatemala who saw me, you know, like on the banks of this this lake, Lake Atitlan, and asked me to stay with him in his home. And I spent three days, you know, up in this rural village living with this guy. Right. Teaching him Teaching him how to speak English. Yeah, how to pronounce words in English, you know, reading his Bible into a cassette recorder. But my grandfather passed away when I was 12. It was like the first, you know, person that I really knew myself as, you know, someone who could understand that someone that I loved was now not in the world with me anymore.

And, you know, that had been a big kind of guiding light for me for a while. anymore. And, you know, that had been a big kind of guiding light for me for a while. And when I saw the way that this man was approaching me, not for his own betterment, but for the betterment of future generations of his family, it kind of hit me that, wow, he's just like my grandfather, my father's father, Joseph, in that, you know, he's making sacrifices for an eventuality for his family that he will never see. And my family went through the same thing this guy did. And now suddenly I'm in this position, not because of luck or circumstance. I'm in it because of effort that my grandparents put in and my great grandparents put in. And I shouldn't feel guilt about it. I should find a way to honor that commitment and that sacrifice

by paying it forward to the next person. But that's a tremendous amount of self-awareness that most young people in their early 20s don't have, right? So where does that come from? I mean, you know, it's weird to say it, but, you know, my mom has talked to me about this a lot, but I think maybe part of it is being a middle child um and especially when you are a middle child and you have an older brother like i do who in almost any social setting that we would experience as kids you know he could command the room right and he's just so socially gifted that you know it forced me to kind of get you know not only didn't force me but i became very comfortable kind of sitting back and observing social dynamics between people i mean i didn't need to but but I became very comfortable kind of sitting back and observing social dynamics between people. I mean, I didn't need to, but one of my majors in college was sociology because

I've always been fascinated by how people make collective decisions and how societal movements occur. And all of these things, I think, drill back down to my fascination with like the internal psyche of how we make decisions and what motivates us. And so, you know, I've always been a writer and I started writing in a journal when I was 16 years old. And I think the journals have always been ways for me to, you know, when you study meditation, it's like there, we think of this internal monologue, but it's really a dialogue because there has to be some voice going and there has to be some listener. And for me, when I write by hand in a journal, what it's actually enabling me to achieve is I'm getting out the voice of the listener, not the speaker. And that voice carries a lot of just like deep essential truths that are tough to access unless you are writing and writing consistently and not for any external

validation. But I'm talking just writing in a journal for yourself and nobody, you know, is ever going to see that. And practicing that act for years and years and years, I think gets you to a level of self-awareness that most others just don't actually achieve. And so I credit it to just writing in journals for years. Becoming the observer. Yes. Of your own mind, right? Is that, so that's something you started very early 16 years old wow yeah uh did you did that launch off with the artist's way have you done you know you're familiar with that i am familiar with that that it's a it's a book by this woman julia cameron who it's basically a program for unlocking creativity and it's a core set of tools but one of the primary ones is the morning journaling and doing it by hand every day, stream of consciousness.

Oh, okay. I'm not as familiar with it. Just to kind of unlock your consciousness around the ideas that are swirling in your subconscious, I suppose. Yeah. But all right. So just to back it up a little bit, you're growing up in Greenwich and you're in the hedge fund capital of the world. You're on this Wall Street track. You're interning at hedge funds and working in this world and very directed into that.

So that's a leap to backpacking, right? So there's a moment where you have some self-awareness, to coin the theme of what we're talking about, where you realize you need to kind of shake things up and sort of reestablish a new paradigm for yourself or get out of your comfort zone. So what did that look like for you? Well, it started probably around my sophomore year in college. I saw a film called Baraka that was shot in 24 countries around the world. Were you super stoned when you watched that? I think half around university.

Well, it's like almost a trope, you know? Right, right, right. With that film. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I'm sure in my, I don't know what I was, 19 at the time, I feel like half the room probably was covered in secondhand smoke at that point. But, I mean, it was the first time that I had really seen, I would say, ways of life that existed so far beyond the realms of what I thought existed on the planet right now amongst the 7 billion people.

And I just remember thinking, if this is real, I need to go see these places. You know, if this is not like some scripted plot, which apparently it's not, I need to go see this, you know, before I decide what I'm going to do with my life and, you know, who and what I want to be in the world. And I had already heard about Semester at Sea. i kind of thought it was like some party boat because that's what i always thought yeah that's what i thought um because i was like when i heard your story i was like well maybe it's changed but when i was in college that was where you went to get away and and to have a good time right i mean they they made a very bad branding decision by having mtv road rules come on semester at sea and suddenly became seen as this party thing. And that was my perception. And then two friends of mine, one that I went to high school with, one that I went to childhood camp with,

came back from it and were completely changed in really, really incredible ways and had this, you know, focus on service and kind of this globalized perspective and said how life changing it was for them. And I thought, okay okay maybe this is the thing that i should go do and kind of leave my comfort zone and so i went on semester at sea and um you know there's a long story inherently in here but uh my ship in 2005 is one of the three famous semester at sea voyages because we were hit by a 60 foot rogue wave that wave you know created almost like a titanic-esque experience 800 miles from land and i had you know when you're in the north pacific right we were going from vancouver to korea in january so this is freezing cold water you know we'd cross the international

dateline that morning that's how you know at the edge of the map basically uh and so the video of that boat teetering on its side is wild harrowing. I mean, you know, I used to try and describe it as near-death experience, but I realized it was a certain death experience because there was no doubt in any of our minds. Like, we were perishing that day when the announcement came, you know, get to the fifth floor or higher or get to the muster stations, which is where you evacuate ship from, and you're not evacuating that scenario. But, you know, it's tough to describe, but I had this, you know, kind of moment as I was saying my prayers of, um but you know it's it's tough to describe but i i had this you know

kind of moment as i was saying my prayers of like you know please get me through this of just calm and and stillness and knowledge that it wasn't my day and when that happens to you at the age well hold on a second let's sort of breeze past that because that's that's that's huge yeah and so when you think about that now i mean does that crystallize as some kind of spiritual experience for you? Oh, for sure. Or can you canonize that somehow in your mind? It was the single most, you know, outside of probably meeting my wife, I mean, the most transformational moment of my life. transformational moment of my life and maybe you know in some ways also i mean not in some ways it was certainly the most you know i would say spiritually rooted um because there was nothing

physical around me right there it was an emotional decision it was really a a feeling of um of assertion from a power that was not my own, but something outside of me that gave me an absolute confidence. I mean, not, not, I hope, you know, not like maybe this is going to work out. I'm feeling good that I'm going to, it was like, no, no, no, there's no chance that I'm perishing today. This whole ship's going to go down and everyone's going to go down with it. But something outside of myself is telling me that I have a purpose and my purpose is not to perish at sea. But something outside of myself is telling me that I have a purpose and my purpose is not to perish at sea. And so in my room, I changed into my swimming gear, which actually was long clothes. You were told during the first kind of drill on the first day that if you have to get in sea, you actually want long, thin clothing.

And so I put on a thin fleece and khaki pants, whereas everyone else was in sweatpants and sweats because you thought you're going to be waiting for a while. And I thought that's going to drag me down when I'm in the water. That's amazing. So how did that resolve itself? Because I've heard you speak about this before, but were you ultimately airlifted out of there? No, no. We went up to the fifth or sixth floor, depending on wherever you could get to. And there's about five hours of mass hysteria. I mean, the ship would tilt or list to one side, and everyone would go sliding, and you'd hear broken dishes from the kitchen.

I mean, the whole place was broken glass sliding and screams. And you just hoped that the ship didn't fully capsize when it went all the way to one side, and then it would come slowly and all the way back to left, because this is a 1,000-person cruise ship. And we were stuck in about 40 to 45- foot swells with no power to our engine for about four and a half hours. And after that, the waves just started to go down a bit and eventually the storm kind of passed and we puttered around, right. And yeah, yeah. But we didn't have enough

power or, uh, and the ship was too badly damaged to actually go on to Asia. And we spent about two days in limbo. We didn't know where we were on to Asia. And we spent about two days in limbo. We didn't know where we were going to go. And then finally they figured that they could get us to Honolulu. And so we went to Hawaii and we were basically shipwrecked there. Oh, my God. I'm super interested in moments like that that change people's lives and the innate power that they hold.

This idea that pain is a great motivator or a fearful event like that can change somebody's lives. And, and, and the understanding of course, is that you don't necessarily need those to have that kind of awareness or to make that shift, but certainly helpful. Yeah, I would agree. But you also see people that then normalize, right? Like they sort of have that moment and they think they're going to change their lives and then it quickly dissipates. So what do you, what was it about this that you were able to hold onto it and then really, you know, use that as this kind of Archimedes lever to change your trajectory? It's a really good question. It's actually not a question I've ever been asked before. So it's not something that, that I've had to think about in

years, but it is true. I mean, there were 750 students on my ship and not a lot of them went out and founded a Pencils of Promise or are now starting something like Mission U, what I'm working on now. And I think part of it was that I was going on semester T looking for a transformational experience. I wanted something that was gonna change

the way I operated and looked at the world. And maybe some other students were going for a party. Maybe they're going to get away. But I think there was a lot of other students that also felt the, you know, the pull that I was feeling. I think probably the thing that most crystallized it for me was that I didn't go back to my normal way of life when I got back home after these hundred days at sea and, you know, traveling through all the countries that we traveled through. I think a lot of people struggled, but they chose to kind of find a way to assimilate. And I held on very strongly to my new set of beliefs. And, you know, truthfully, any member of my family will tell you

this. I was a tough person to be around for the next year and a half or two years because I felt so committed to this new set of beliefs that you know in retrospect there was almost some you know self-righteousness probably to the 21 22 23 year old version of myself that criticized people for having like you know expensive drinks and clubs and um you know spending on on you know luxury I couldn't justify luxury that was really hard for me at that stage because I knew how just a few dollars could make such a big impact in someone's life in a village where I had just backpacked through and you know I think it was about two and a half years later maybe two years in 2007 when I found myself in this you know situation in Guatemala that a lot of those

beliefs that I was holding on to so tightly, but also with a bit of obligation and guilt were almost released and then just absorbed. I feel like it was almost, it's almost like that experience on the boat ripened you to have more experiences like that. And then you, you developed a, you know, a deeper kind of reservoir of self-awareness so that when other things occurred you were more able to kind of notice them right yeah not breeze past them so yeah when you're in guatemala you're able to recognize you know how that related to you know your own personal ancestry and then of course you have this experience in india with this young child that maybe you can share yeah on semester at sea, you know, most students kind

of take on one habit in each country they go through. And my thing was, I decided I was going to ask one child in every country, if they could have anything in the world, what would they want most and then have them write it down on a piece of paper. And when I got to India, I found this young boy was a street beggar. And I asked him if you could have anything, what would you want most, because it was indicative of a lot of what I was seeing there was so much poverty and in particular affecting children and his answer was a pencil and i had a pencil and i gave him my pencil and he just you know he had this big smile he was so happy and it was like this wave of possibility you know washed over this young boy and um you know as somebody who you know continues to but it's certainly back then

was not only introspective, but I was also pretty introverted. You know, I was not comfortable going up to strangers and striking up conversations, but I started carrying pens and pencils as I would travel because I was backpacking alone through a lot of these countries. And those pens and pencils became avenues through which I could go into a market and give a pencil to a child and then sit with their mother at the stall in their little market in some town in Bolivia and strike up a conversation and eventually that inspired the name Pencils of Promise for the organization and yet you still go back to New York and get a job at Bain right yeah not only that I went through investment banking and consulting interviews oh you did

yeah and I had your reintegration yeah that must have been like a little surreal it it definitely was it was very very surreal well you know i i think one thing that that was clear to me was that the more i spent time in these contexts the one thing that was really lacking was for-profit business acumen and i met so many people who had such great intentions and such great hearts and such great passion to try and serve these communities where I was spending time. But they didn't understand how to build a real organization or a business. And they couldn't scale their impact beyond, you know, just the kind of small number of people that were maybe in this local community where they have embedded themselves. And, you know, I had a professor who I told I wanted to move to this one place, Koh Tao in Thailand that I fell in love

with. And I said, I want to build a school there and live there for as long as I can and try and impact this community with one school and teach. And he said, look, I mean, the truth is there's a lot of people that can probably go do that. You, from what I've observed, have a mind for business that will enable you to potentially build an organization or a company that can create a network of schools. And you should set your ambitions much higher and enable others to go into these schools that you're going to create. But your ambition should be to get the business training to one day start a network or a system of schools rather than just building one. But the impetus behind it, like what is the driver?

I know you talk about Dan Pink's work around motivation. And as somebody who grew up in Greenwich seeing these mansions, it's impossible to not then presume that happiness resides behind the doors of these fancy houses and that's sort of, you know, propelling you towards wall street. And then you have this backpacking experience that reframes your understanding of that. But how does that impact like what your own, your own, like sort of, you know, mission purpose driven, you know, you know, seeking to find, you know, agency and mastery in your own life? Like what is, how does building a school like inform that journey? Does that make sense?

Yeah, no, no, no. It's, it's, it makes a lot of sense. You know, I think coming out of all those backpacking travels and this wave experience that almost gave me a second shot at, you know, my own existence, right? What became very clear to me was that if I wasn't using my life as an instrument of service to positively impact as many people as I could, that I was not fulfilling the reason I was here. And so the question became, how do I make the largest impact in a positive way on as many people as I can? And the answer at that point in my life was,

well, as much as I would like to selfishly go and just spend time in these rural villages, I need to take advantage of the opportunities that are in front of me. Of course, because you may have the ability to be much more influential with the experience at Bain under your belt. The other thing was I knew that I didn't like asking people for money. And so I thought, well, maybe I can go make a crazy amount of money, spend 20 years building a great career in finance, and then use this tremendous wealth that I can accumulate over the next 20 years and say, I'm going to give 90% of it into this organization that I'm going to start that's going to build schools. And if I can go to my peer network at that point and just say, give me a small percent that I can have a much bigger impact. And that

was the plan until I, you know, was at Bain for a little bit over a year. And I thought, I got to find a way to dip my toe. I think there's a lot of people that probably go to Wall Street with those intentions. I mean, I, you know, I was a lawyer and law school, there was plenty of people that thought, you know, I'll do the law firm thing for a couple of years, but then I'm going to go do the nonprofit, you know, I'll go do be, you know, a do-gooder after I pay off all my debt and all that kind of stuff. And then you just get stuck, right? You know, you get stuck and you're on this path and then 20 years go by and you're like, oh yeah, I forgot about that thing that I thought I was

going to do. I've seen that happen to, you know, multiple friends. Right. So, so you have it in you to, to begin this process and it begins, you know, it doesn't begin. This is another thing that you talk about all the time. Like there's an outsider but it's not the reality is and you use this you you play that beautiful domino video and yeah some of your talks that it starts with a very small um a very tiny but meaningful gesture completely yeah in my case you know my grandmother uh was turning 80 and i wanted to find a way to honor her in in a really meaningful way and you know she was with way. Auschwitz survivor. Yeah, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen. I mean, everything she had been through, if I go even drill deeper into the personal motivations

to do the work that my siblings and I have done, a lot of it was really just to make her proud. That was such a big motivation for us always. And we lost her about three and a half months ago. She passed away about four hours before my twins were born. And I mean, I can't think of a more beautiful circle of life act that as we lost this incredible woman who in so many ways was really the foundation,

that the only way to replace her was with two, right? That's a beautiful way to look at it. Yeah, it's I think the only way that we can, you know, rationalize that that she's not with us. But, you know, at that point in my life, it was it was a situation in which 23 living in New York, working at Bain. My life was so filled with self-absorption that I thought, what if I just found a way to honor Ma? And so, you know, I didn't have much money. My friends certainly were all losing their jobs. It's October 2008 in Manhattan. I mean, that economic climate was about as bad as it gets. And so, you know, I went to the bank and said,

I want to start a nonprofit called Pencils of Promise. I want to build a school. What does it take to open up a bank account? You know, the woman said, you have to start with at least $25 to open up a bank account with Bank of America I said great I'm turning 25 and I put $25 in a bank account and then threw my birthday party which is on Halloween and I asked friends and anyone that I could reach out to to give $20 for a great Halloween party

at the door to help build the school and 400 people came and we had $8,000 $8,025 then we just did a series of basically parties in New York that all were low dollar, targeted people in their early 20s and said, you're gonna go out

and probably spend money at a bar somewhere tonight, make it have a positive impact. And so come and contribute to help us build one school. And those tiny little actions make it real. Totally. Opening up that bank account as small as it is, it's like now it's a thing. So now there's a little momentum make it real you know like opening up that bank account as small as it's like now it's a thing yeah now there's a little momentum behind it yep and i also like and appreciate

that you know i think a lot of people don't start things because they can't see their way through to the completion like they don't know all the steps involved and they it prevents them from even beginning right and you began without having any idea of what would be entailed in building a school in some third world yeah i mean when i started pencil promise i'd never been to laos and now we built you know 100 400 schools around the world um and laos was the grounding of it we have 40 plus staff we have the you know great office you know 100 plus schools and so um you know it's it's been it's almost been interesting interesting to now go through this process all over again with Mission U where you have a goal. You kind of believe that there is some reality that is to come, but you have to start with small steps.

But you've proven that you can do that. Like you've done it before. So you have like a sort of sense and i do but but the the order of magnitude feels so much bigger at each time that you try and do it if you try and ratchet up the impact that it can have so you know i started basketball uh i started doing basketball lessons in my hometown the summer entering college you know it was a nice way to make some money on the side. The next summer, I ended up doing a clinic for one parent who said, my son's on a travel team, and how about him and seven friends come and do four-on-four and you run a clinic?

And that was great because I didn't have to guard the kids all day because they could play against each other. And then the following summer, one of my professors at college, you had to write a business plan for a real business as part of the class. And I said, what if I built a real basketball camp? And he said, you should actually go do this. And so I started a basketball camp. That was the first time I built a real business.

I had a bank account and all those things. And so in some ways, Pencils of Promise was familiar to me because I'd built a business before, but the ambition was to build one school. And so it wasn't as daunting it wasn't as um challenging in my mind as you know if somebody said hey seven eight years down the line you're gonna have to find a way to build 400 schools i would say that's crazy right even though we're

now there and now with mission u it feels like the next step up because i mean i can talk about it you know we can dive into it whenever it's appropriate but you know my goal here is to fundamentally transform the college system in the united states and so it feels much that's a little ambitious bigger right yeah um and so in some ways you know what felt like small steps before now feel like bigger steps and would feel like bigger steps you know, feel almost like they have to be the starting blocks. And so, so each and every time I think you go through it as an entrepreneur, as a creator of any kind, right? I mean, even artists that are going to do their

follow up work to their previous work, you go through this same process, I think, that requires you to find the internal fortitude to go after something that inherently is going to make you uncomfortable. You had side hustles going on your whole life though, right? Like, always. So it's always, I mean, selling, you know, basketball cards. Like I used to do, um, uh, it was called BNP blanks and postage where, uh, like the kind of bootleg community of live concerts, people would send send you if you sent them blank uh like a blank cds and a return envelope they would send you for free a version of a concert and then ebay came about and i realized i had all these great concerts i could just sell them on ebay

and i was making like thousands of dollars in high school just on ebay selling live discs of like you know jam bands right that's hilarious yeah yeah well another thing that's really cool about and i want to get to mission u because i really want to focus on that but let's let's before we kind of step into that um your your life is sort of peppered with these these sort of lightning moments as you characterize them and and one of the other ones that i thought was really like kind of wonderful and informative was that moment of making the decision to finally leave Bain and jump totally into Pencils of Promise. Yeah. Yeah. That, that was, I mean, both one of the scariest decisions I've ever made. And it was also a decision that felt like it was so far out of my control because it was just what I had to do. Um, you know, I remember really distinctly, um, I mean, you were

like, like playing hooky, right? Yeah, I was a bad employee. You know, I don't think I had a single missed day at Bain for my first, you know, 10 months or so. I went on what they call their externship, which is you leave and work for somebody else and you come back. And, you know, that for me was pencils of promise. And then I came back, as I was committed to after a nine-month leave leave to finish out my last, you know, four or five months, whatever. I think it was seven months at Bain. And, you know, for whatever reason, I wasn't immediately staffed on a case and it gave me some flexibility.

And then when they did put me on a case, I was I mean, I called in sick for like almost two weeks. And finally, they just said, you got to make a decision here and make this make this choice. weeks and finally they just said you got to make a decision here and and make this make this choice um and you know there's a there's a street artist who you know has sold works and like christie's and other kind of famous auction houses but he um does a lot of kind of chalk art across the east village uh his name is de la vega and um you know his kind of main trademarked kind of image is just the phrase become your dream and it's inside of like almost like a goldfish. And I saw it walking to work that day that I was deciding that I was going to leave Bain. And I took a photo of it and I included it in my farewell email to the entire company,

or at least the New York office. And, you know, I was hugely appreciative of everything that they did for me. And I'm still so appreciative. I mean, great friends there. You know, I've hired a bunch of people out of Bain. I will continue to. The skill set that, and just the quality of human that they attracted that company is phenomenal. But, you know, at that point in my life, you know, 24, I guess around 25, you know, the recruiters that were coming at the Bain class to join private equity funds, you knew your starting salary and bonus together was going to be about $250,000.

And instead, I was choosing to pursue this nonprofit that I'd start with $25. And it seemed like a very illogical choice. But what I valued at that stage in my life was so much more kind of meaning and mastery of, you know, a steep learning curve rather than just, you know, how much I could pad my bank account. But that was also, you know, in retrospect, a decision that I was fortunate to be able to make because I didn't have crushing student debt. Right. Which is going to get us right into Mission U. Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, but you and then you went and cut out the cardboard art, right? Yeah. In your office. And then you went and cut out the cardboard art, right?

Yeah. In your office. Right. So I mean, that's like an amazing thing. Was that? Yeah. Like that moment of seeing that. Did it hit you like that feeling that you had on the boat when it was catering? Yes.

Oh, for sure. So to explain how that happened on basically, I think it was Thursday or whatever day of the week it was that I was given the ultimatum that I was told, look, we want to put you on this case and you either have to commit to this case or else you're choosing to leave the company. As I walked home, the garbage that was piled up in front of my stoop on 10th Street, we'd seen first and second in East Village in New York, De La Vega, the actual artist who was known to tag the community, had basically graffitied on with like a marker on a piece of cardboard garbage that was gonna be thrown out the next morning those words become your dream literally written on my doorstep and so later that evening it started to snow and i went outside and i cut out that that you know

actual cardboard box the the phrase i said one day when we have a an office for pencils of promise this is going to go in the office um and then coincidentally you know i committed to leave and then as i'm walking into work for my very final day i see the same phrase written in chalk on the ground and that that was the image i sent out so it just reinforced but the universe was was talking totally i mean yes the the the signs were very clear um about the decision that i needed to make and and fortunately um you know it turned out to be the right one i think it's crazy when you look in the rear view mirror backwards, how it all lines up perfectly. And it's like, of course, this is what you were supposed to be doing. And I mean, yeah, the

chaos and the confusion and the sort of soul searching, you know, I imagine was probably pretty profound at the time. Definitely. And it's not I mean, I think a lot of people from the outside assume that other individuals who have these experiences that, you know, it's like overnight they make a decision. And the truth is you struggle and you agonize with these things for months, sometimes years on end, or you go through the hard introspective work to figure out, you know, what it is that really makes you come alive or what it is that, you know, you want to dedicate your life or the next part of your life to. It's not this kind of sudden moment. Sometimes it is, you know, I've had a few of them. That's why I call them lightning moments, because it's like, oh, my God, right now it's become abundantly clear. But you have to go through, you know, a lot of challenging nights and challenging days to get yourself primed so that when that lightning moment happens, it's easy for

you to kind of, you know, flip that switch. You're on the front lines of kind of redefining what philanthropy looks like, particularly as it connects with the millennial generation. And I think it's a really interesting time in terms of how people think about and practice giving. Yeah. in terms of how people think about and practice giving. Yeah. In a time where transparency is much more important, where people have lost confidence in a lot of the big NGOs and want to feel more deeply connected to, you know, the sort of philanthropy that they can budget into their daily lives.

Yeah. Yeah, I think, you know, for better or for worse, starting an organization in 2008 was a moment at which there was a major fracture happening, not just in our society because of the recession, but also in the way that philanthropy was going to operate for a while going forward. So, you know, previous to that, it was primarily driven by almost exclusively affluent donors. You know, small contributors didn't have much of a voice. There wasn't a way for them to actually directly contribute in the way that you could with, you know, crowdsourcing, you know, website. I mean, crowdsourcing was not a word when I found

a pencil's a promise. I would describe what I was trying to do. It was also not an economic climate in which people were, you know, really feeling that great about writing with the few dollars they had in their wallet. Exactly. But you also had direct mail as the primary source of philanthropy. You know, you'd get a kind of postcard in the mail with a very sad looking child on it and, you know, a return envelope embedded in it. And it was put your, you know, checkbook on the table, write whatever you want to give and mail it back.

Trying to activate your guilt as opposed to your agency. But it also wasn't using the internet, right, to activate donors. And so, you know, in 08, as a kid who was the same, you know, year as Mark Zuckerberg in college in one of the first 10 schools, Brown, where I was attending, we were kind of like almost the first crop of Facebook users. It was really clear to me that you could reach, you know, what would eventually become a really powerful donor base in a new way. And so, you know, we were one of the first organizations to use Facebook or Twitter, eventually Instagram.

You know, nowadays I would advocate for Snapchat and it'll be something coming up after this. But we were one of the first ones to really focus on building community first with the acknowledgement that the major, you know, kind of givers oftentimes in the corporate space, we're going to use their marketing dollars to try and reach those those millennials and those millennials cared about causes more than they cared about brands per se. And so if we just developed a really engaged community, we'd actually be able to secure major funding down the line from big corporates. Now, that wasn't just, you know, a kind of core belief that we had.

It was something that we had to enact into reality. So we spent a lot of time building this community of engaged people. And eventually we did receive now millions of dollars from corporate contributors through cause marketing campaigns. from corporate contributors through cause marketing campaigns. But we also just put a kind of stake in the sand and said, we're going to advocate for radical transparency. People can donate on our website, and 100% of that funding goes directly into our programs, no questions asked.

If they're willing to cover some of our operations in which we're going to educate them on why that's important, then they can allocate money directly to that. We're also going to have different kind of tiers in which people get involved. educate them on why that's important, then they can, you know, allocate money directly to that. We're also going to have, you know, different kind of tiers in which people get involved. And, you know, most importantly, we were going to engage full families, which not a lot of people had done. They'd gone to like the wealthy parent. And what we found was there were 13 and 14 and 15 year olds that loved Pencils of Promise and were going to their parents and saying, I'm really excited about this cause. And I haven't seen anything that brings a family together more than philanthropic values. Well, that's beautiful. But fundamentally, it's about storytelling, right?

I feel like you guys really understood that and continue to understand that. Which is part of brand building. I think it's about brand building and an essential part of brand building. Almost the foundation of a brand is its story. And then telling new and engaging stories. And so I think we excelled at that. And understanding how social media operates to leverage those tools to really connect with people and allow those people to feel connected to the work. Right. It has to be a dialogue. It's not just you shouting to them, but allow them to feel heard. Right. All right. So you scaled this thing up. You guys have built 400 schools at this

point. Yeah. And in how many countries are you now? So we operate in thing up. You guys have built 400 schools at this point. Yeah. And how many countries are you now? So we operate in five countries. Our headquarters is in New York. We started in Laos. We grew to Nicaragua and Guatemala. And then we expanded to Ghana. And then most recently, we have a pilot running in Liberia. Wow, that's amazing.

And this isn't enough for you, right? You got to go and start something new now? Correct. What's going on? There's a lot of intrigue and also mystery surrounding this big project, Mission U. So tell me what this is all about. Yeah, I mean, so I'm excited that now we can finally talk about it and really, you know, let the word out and also let people engage and apply to, you know, join us at Mission U. word out and also let people engage and apply to, you know, join us a mission. Yeah. But, you know,

to almost start with, with where it came from, you know, to your question of why, you know, as I've alluded to, I felt very, you know, committed to working on something like Pencil of Promise throughout, certainly my twenties, even the earlier part of my thirties. But the more that I spent time traveling the country speaking about our work, trying to engage new people in it, I kept on getting asked this question around, why aren't you doing something about our education system here at home? And it was very frustrating because I didn't have a good answer. I believe in organizational focus, and I thought pencil promise should continue to focus on where it can serve, which is in the developing world. But things really shifted for me about five or six years ago when I met my wife, because my wife grew up in a family of wonderful people, but without

financial means. And, you know, she's part of the very large swath of our country that buys into college as the path out of that situation. And that's how we position, as you alluded to, the American dream has really been built for the last 50 years upon the ideology that college is the way that you were going to achieve something greater for yourself in the future and support your family and all those things. And so she ended up going to college for about two and a half years. And after two and a half years, couldn't justify, you know, taking on additional financial hardship on top of the debt that was accumulating in a massive way. And also the skills that she was learning were not particularly connected to the workforce and the kind of career that she wanted to build.

And so she had to leave school early without getting that degree. And so a couple of years later, she's paying down a tremendous amount of debt every single month. And I meet her and, you know, it just was such a burden on her life that I asked her, you know, explain it to me. And she said, well, you know, I have one hundred and ten thousand dollars of student debt and no bachelor's degree for going to college for two and a half years. And I suggested that she declare bankruptcy because then I thought at least she can start fresh and we can start fresh with our life together. That doesn't work. Right. And I didn't know that. Declaring bankruptcy has no impact on student loans right so so i think

you are one of the few people who knows that reality and in particular those who take on loans are certainly not aware of it but student debt is the only debt in the united states that cannot be discharged through bankruptcy and once i learned that which i didn't know and didn't actually believe was true at first because it just seemed so outrageous to me. That's when, you know, the kind of light bulb went off for me that this was the space in which, you know, you needed radical change, you needed probably, you know, entrepreneurs with really big ideas and a tolerance for risk to try something that nobody had before. And so, you know, I said, this is what I want to dedicate the next decade of my life to is trying to make this system not only more equitable for every single young person and their family in this country. But additionally, I want to make it relevant to that idea of the American dream that enabled my family to kind of come up from the situation that we came up in. And so I spent the last, you know, two plus years reading every

book possible, every article speaking with every single person that I could find that was deeply knowledgeable in the space. And I came up with, you know, a core belief at the end of all of this research that I don't think a lot of people hold right now, but I'm hoping more and more people see the merit of, which is that the majority of young people that are entering a four-year bachelor's degree program in the United States are making a very bad decision. You know, the data is such that, you know, nationally, those that enter a bachelor's degree four-year program in the United States, only 18% will finish in four years, which is insane. Really?

It's that low? 18% will finish in four years out of those who enter a two-year degree. So community college, the percentage that will finish in two years is 5%. So not only are we not getting to completion, that's pretty shocking, but you also have those that do complete graduate with tremendous debt and a lack of skills that are actually going to help them get the jobs in which they're going to college to achieve. So, um, mission U is a college alternative for the 21st century. That's what it is at its core.

It's a true college alternative built for the 21st century. There's nothing audacious about that. Well, the other thing is that our aim is to prepare anybody, but in particular young people, 19- to 25-year-olds, for the jobs of today and tomorrow debt-free. And so, again, I can provide a lot of detail based on, you know, what questions you might have about it, because most people are pretty curious. But I think the one thing that will hopefully, you know, not only attract students more than anything else, but also create kind of ripples throughout the entire higher education system is that at our core,

you know, our foundational belief is that, you know, we as an institution should be tied and held accountable to the outcomes of our students, that our success should only be achieved when they succeed, which is not the case for almost every single. Certainly not. And so if you get into Mission U, there's no tuition at all. We invest in you for a full year. And at the end of that year, once and only if, you know, and at the point that you have a job that pays you $50,000 or more, once you reach that point, then you commit to contributing 15% of your income for three years back to the program. Oh, wow. So if you are not successful. Online curriculum. Not entirely. Not entirely. So, so most, yeah, most people assume it has to be online for this to work.

But I'm a big believer that online education can produce some really positive and radically transformative results for people. When you remove the kind of large lecture hall model and you can get one-to-one, that's very effective. But very few people, it's like less than 5% to 10% are able to learn in a self-paced way, watching content by themselves. What you actually need is the scaffolding, the support system of a small cohort of people who are going through the same journey and you can hold each other accountable and learn from one another. So they don't just click off and start watching cat videos. Exactly. Exactly. So, so when you get into mission, you, uh, you are part of a 25 student cohort. Your cohort progresses one year program, your cohort progresses through the one year together.

Um, and about 80 to 90% of the experience is online, but these are not prerecorded lectures that, you know, we're shot in a studio and then you're watching whenever you want. These are live virtual classrooms where you, your peers and an industry practitioner who knows how to demonstrate and teach the skill that you're learning is able to teach you. And so about 90-ish percent is in that type of forum, live virtual classrooms. But we also think that in order to build those lifelong friendships that you develop in college or some of the soft skill development, and just also for the accountability and the social cohesion, you need to come together

in person and so uh we have our students come together for a three-day orientation and then every month they have a meetup and then graduation happens um towards the end of the year but we also don't think graduation should be at the very end of the year and then you're sent on your way to find your job uh career services shouldn't be an afterthought especially especially because, you know, there's a big study done and they polled entering freshmen. They said, why are you going to college? You know, what is the reason that you are spending all this money? What's your motivation? And 91%, the most popular answer was to get a better job. And yet colleges don't spend a lot of time. Yeah, it doesn't translate. Well, the world is changing and I want to get into that in a minute.

But first of all uh you know beyond the sheer ambition of this of this plan like this is a big play in terms of infrastructure building and personnel oh for sure it's like a venture-backed thing and like how far along in the process are you in terms of building this out so um we're a public benefit corporation that's how we incorporated from day one essentially you know a B Corp is what it's popularly known as. Um, so we are a venture backed company. Uh, we went out and, you know, we raised a healthy seed round and we did so, um, with

really world-class investors. I mean, our lead investor is arguably, you know, not arguably they are the premier seed fund in the country for the top education investment funds, you know, more than a dozen top CEOs and entrepreneurs have all invested in this, this venture because, you know, they view it as an opportunity to use their capital to create, you know, the type of impact that I think, you know, I'm certainly committed to. And so is our team. You know,

we've been building this infrastructure for a while now. We just haven't publicly shared it with anybody. You know, as of, as of March 21st you know as of as of march 21st um you know i know this will be released after that um we will uh be able to open up you know our full application process to any student and the first cohort will start in september uh of this year and so september 2017 is when the first cohort will begin. And so applications are open for anybody that's interested. Wow, that's exciting. Yeah.

Congrats on building that. That's incredible. Thank you. You know, you and I are both products of the traditional higher education system. We're successful products of that. But we're in different times now. You know, like when I'm older than you, but, you know, there was never any question that I was going to go to college. Right, right.

Because it made sense back then. Yeah. It made sense when I was in school. Not today. Things are different now. Like it's now, it's like, well, wait a minute. Like people are actually, they are asking that question. Is college the right thing?

Yeah. are asking that question, is college the right thing? And when you look at the state of higher education, at the collegiate level at least, it's still very much the same way that it was in, what, 1820? It hasn't changed that much. And yet the world has changed dramatically. And the acceleration of that change is continuing to escalate. And yet the education system is, they're not even playing catch up. They're almost static in that regard. And you're seeing the advent of these online institutions, et cetera. And that's fantastic. But I think it's worth having that conversation.

Is it relevant anymore? And it's almost anathema to even bring that up. I mean, less so than maybe it was a couple of years ago, but we're in much more of a service economy, like a practical skill economy. Like if you know how to use final cut pro or Photoshop, you can be gainfully employed in that regard. And you can, you have a choice about where you want to live and all these sorts of things like the opportunities because of the internet, which i don't really think that we fully appreciate how much this has changed culture i think open up the possibility for these kinds of things to rise to the surface and it's it's needed you know we need a refreshing approach to education and

somebody i have four kids and you know we've gone through all different kinds of sort of machinations of education with our kids from homeschooling to unschooling to progressive, you know, very, you know, off the reservation type programs. And I've learned a lot in that regard. But it's frustrating when you're looking for the solution and you're not finding it as a parent. You're looking for the solution and you're not finding it. As a parent, and as a parent, and you'll learn to appreciate this more and more, the last thing you want to do is screw up your kids. And it's easy to just default to what everyone else is doing because even if it's the wrong decision or the wrong path, there's safety in that because that's what everyone else is doing.

Yeah. I think one of the great challenges that higher education has faced over the last X many years is that, you know, it's it's started out as only being, you know, this kind of system that was meant for the select few. Right. I mean, it actually began as an apprenticeship model and then it evolved into kind of the liberal arts. And we should go back to the apprenticeship model. Yeah. I mean, that's that's part of how the year actually operates at Mission U. But within the path of higher ed, over time, really in the 60s, we kind of advocated for this national movement towards higher education for all, that everyone's supposed to go to college. And that's when the community college system was developed based on the California model. That's when a lot of the large kind of land grant state institutions were created. But we, for some reason, have held in this really high esteem that every single student

should have something that is either a liberal arts education or something close, because it was seen as kind of the elite experience. And what we now have is this construct of a bachelor's degree that requires you to spend, we position it as four years. It's no longer four years. It's much closer to five or six for the vast majority of students that are going to participate in it. And it's completely disconnected from the needs and demands of a workforce. And we've positioned it as this one size fits all system. And the reality is for some students, the bachelor's degree is going to make sense if they're able to get into a really great college and they get tremendous financial aid or

their parents can float, you know, 200 plus thousand dollars. Or if you want to be a doctor or you want to be a lawyer. Right. There's certain professional tracks. There are certain individuals who are incredibly academically inclined and want to go really deep on a Ph.D. in a certain field. And hopefully they can find a track that makes sense for them within that. But there's a huge set, I mean, millions of young people in this country that are career starters, that look at college as the pathway to employment, not as the pathway to coming of age, to fraternities and football games. And for those who do look at it as that, like more value to you, that's a great thing thing you have to make a really hopefully smart decision on how much that's going to cost right so there's a heavy price tag right but there are some students who don't really care as much about

that and what they're committed to is you know getting the skills and experience necessary to build a peer network to have a clear path to their future and to have this kind of career focused experience that gives them a leg up as they enter the workforce and gets a great first job. And there's no opportunity for that young person today. And that's really what Mission U seeks to fulfill. And beyond that, to avoid becoming an indentured servitude as a result of having to take out these massive loans to get educated so that you can just be employable. Correct. You know, it used to be sort of a scarlet letter if you said, I'm not going to college.

Right, yeah. And I think there's still a long way to go with that in terms of kind of social recognition. But you're seeing that change. I mean, what is your experience when you go around and you're pitching this and you're talking to people about education? Like what have you, in your deep dive and all the research phase and coming up with this idea like what have you

learned about the system you know where it's most broken and where it can be most fixed beyond what we've already talked about well it's a great question i think i think one of the things that i was really concerned about is that i tend to speak on a lot of college campuses because my book gets used really commonly as a common read for the all freshmen incoming you know class and you know it's just crazy by the way it is wild amazing it's it's I mean that was one of the most gratifying things that that ever happened was the first time I went to a college which I think it was St. Bonaventure and not only had they already used it as the all freshman readreshman read, but every freshman seminar had some deep-dive dissection of the book.

And then they had all these art projects that were inspired by the books. And they were like houses made of pencils and etchings that created drawings and full art exhibit based on it. It's become this leading book on leadership. Right. I mean, it was wild. I was really, really moved the first time I i went and and certainly every time since then um but it's led me to spend a lot of time with college kids right and and i love that and i also spend time with college professors and

administrators in particular administrators right a dean or whoever it is when i'm kind of you know coming to the campus might be able to show me around and give me some insight into the school and you know i was really reluctant at first to say, you know, hey, by the way, I still am involved with Pencils of Promise, but, you know, I've led a search and we hired a new CEO who's phenomenal. And I'm a founder and board emeritus, but I'm working on something new. And they say, oh, tell me about it. And it was really hard to say, well, I think college is a bad idea for a lot of young people

and I'm building a college alternative. But it's amazing the response that it's gotten, which is that I would say, you know, I'm not, you know, BSing when I say 95% of the people I explain it to love it. They get so excited because what I found is that the people that exist and have committed their lives to, you know, higher education are the most service-oriented people possible. And they want the best for students and they see what's happening to them. They don't have blinders on. Now, I think there's maybe some person whose livelihood is dependent on some position and an institution. And there are many of them who are going to push back and say, I don't like this idea because my job's in jeopardy. But I do think that if you take a

hard look at the realities of what young people are being sold on today and then ask how much value are they actually receiving and are they being more harmed or more helped by the amount of debt and the disconnectedness to being prepared for the workforce, and you look at the truthful answer there, you can't help but acknowledge that something like mission you makes a lot of sense for a lot of students that we all have met um the other thing that i've seen i mean i was literally i was in new york last week and i was on the subway and somehow the guy next to me struck up a conversation he's just sitting there um and you know he he uh was talking about i don't know he asked me about my backpack i said the company is he was from. And he said, oh, my son's a musician.

I said, okay, where do you go to school? And he told me the school he went to. And I said, he just graduated? He said, yeah. And I said, how much debt does he have? Does he have debt? And he said, oh, my gosh, it's a crazy amount. And he said, what do you do?

I said, I work in higher education. And he said, where, what? And I explained, oh, I work for this company called Mission U. And here's how it works and i explained the you know the income share where nothing charged up front and 15 of income for three years when you're making 50 000 more and he was so excited about this he was like as a parent oh my gosh i wish that existed for my son you know um gosh this is so great how can i learn more i said you know you can go to mission you.com just letter you and you can you know apply as of March 21st. And I've seen that reaction time and

time again, you know, a lot of times I give a talk and I'll explain what we're doing. And I'll say, raise your hand if you're interested in this. You know, it's probably 80% of most rooms, you know, there's 20% who aren't interested in it. And that's totally fine with me. But I think this commitment to outcomes for students is sorely needed. Of course. In this space. And it's something that hopefully challenges the existing ideology and gets people to question whether we can ask for more from our institutions. Well, you know, the typical college institution is really not that interested in reinvention.

It's interested in preservation. Yeah, exactly. Preservation. Did you listen to Malcolm Gladwell's revisionist history? He did a couple episodes on the subject matter. Yeah, totally. It was great. I mean, he's very strident in his opinions on this, but it falls totally in line with the things that you're talking about. So if you're a student and you sign up for this and then you get your job and then you're sort of pledging your 15%, what if you want to quit your job? So, uh, we allow up to 48 months of deferment, uh, on the, um, basically kind of payback period.

So, you know, we don't think it's in our best interest to try and, you know, collect, uh, these contributions from a student, uh, if they don't have a well-paying job, if they've chosen to travel, if they lose their job. So, you know, for example, if you finish Mission U, you get a good job for a year and then you lose your job. You're let go for some reason and it takes you four months to find a new job. We're not going to collect anything during that period. We don't think it's in our best interest. We don't think it's in yours. So you have up to actually four cumulative years to use as deferment. And how broad are the curriculum tracks? Like, do you have enough to, you know, fulfill the needs of, you know, the typical student body? So at launch, there is one specialization, we call it a concentration, it's almost like a major.

And the one that we're launching with is data analytics and business intelligence. So this is a rapidly growing field, really high quality, well-paying jobs, a core set of technical skills, much like coding almost, that you can learn completely outside of a traditional college. And even if you are a math major or an econ major, you probably don't have Excel modeling skills, you don't have SQL foundation. So the way that we've kind of broken out the year is that the first quarter is what we call foundation. And that's really about eight hard skills that we think will make you valuable in any company and in any job setting. So those are things like public speaking, business writing,

project management, requirements gathering, Excel modeling, a basic foundation of tech, meaning HTML and CSS, how to use Keynote and PowerPoint to convey really powerful presentations. Those are things that I learned at Bain. I didn't learn in my undergrad experience, but they've been useful in almost any job that I would go for. And if someone came to me and said, I have these eight skills, they're almost unequivocally hired. Well, there's the student preparation side of this, but the other side of it is the workplace perception. So when somebody walks into an interview and the guy says where'd you go to school or he's looking at the resume and he's

like what's this mission you nonsense yeah yeah well well i'll explain the year and then i'll explain how we overcome that so so the second quarter um is all about soft skill development as well as kind of the coming of age experience what explain explain soft skills cost yes yeah so soft skills when you actually um pull employers is actually what they value most um these are things like uh collaborative teamwork abilities critical thinking abilities um the character traits of proactivity resist brilliant uh sorry uh grit and resilience excuse me um and uh you know these are the things that are not necessarily quantifiable

on a piece of paper that are not a hard skill like coding or, you know, something else, even though, again, we don't teach coding. But these are the things that, you know, really light up an employer and enable you to be successful. And these are things that are not easy to learn, but they certainly can be taught. And most importantly, they can be reinforced if they exist from day one. Super powerful life skills that were just not part of my education whatsoever. Right. How to deliver and receive feedback is really critical. These are things that you learn kind of on the job a lot of times, but are not taught in undergrad.

Then the third quarter is what we call specialization. That's the deep dive on, you know, at launch data analytics and business intelligence. As we grow in the future years, we'll have many more tracks. The fourth quarter is almost like an internship. You are broken up into teams of four and five and you act as an agency on a real business. You build a public portfolio of work on a real business. You have your basically graduation moment. Then we spend six weeks in what we call career launch.

weeks in what we call career launch. And career launch is where we support you with everything from interview preparation, interview feedback, role playing, all the way through to salary negotiation once you get a job offer. So that's how we structure the year. In terms of your question about how is an employer going to say, what is this mission you think? I guess you'll find out, right? Well, part of it is that we actually started with employers before we ever kind of moved forward with this idea, right? Before we ever started thinking about who are our students, we started by thinking about, you know, how do we build a curriculum that's going to appeal to an employer? And so we developed, you know, a series of employer partnerships.

These employers deeply and meaningfully advise us on curriculum so that our curriculum actually meets the needs of these leaders of industry. You know, we help fill their talent pipeline by having students apply for open jobs. And then we give them preferred access to our top graduates. And right now at launch, the companies that we have as our employer partners are companies like Warby Parker, Lyft, Harry's, Birchbox, Casper, Plated. You know, some really great leading companies. A couple of those are podcast sponsors. Oh, yeah?

Oh, awesome companies. Well, I think that they have, you know, a real sense of kind of where these industries are headed. Right. And also if, you know, you're a young person today, you'd do anything to get a job at one of those companies and, you know, they're not committing, Hey, we're going to hire X many students from Michigan, much like no company commits to that. They already get it. They understand what's going on. Students from Mission U, much like no company commits to that. But they already get it. They understand what's going on. Yep.

Yeah. And the other thing, again, is to your point, you know, the success of Pencils of Promise was, I think, heavily attributed to our ability to create a brand that carried into culture and stood for something and that people really valued and shared with one another. for something and that people really valued and shared with one another. And, you know, that's, that's certainly something that I'm willing to put on my shoulders when it comes to mission. You is making sure that people know about what this is. And I think, you know, tomorrow or the next day, somebody might say, what's this mission you thing. But I think, you know, a year from now or two years from now, and certainly, you know, down the future, um, this is going to be a household name. And how are you framing this story and using the tools of social media to get it out there? Like, what did you learn in your journey with Pencils

of Promise that's going to inform how you position Mission U? So, you know, I would say the biggest thing that I learned in developing kind of the social media and almost the grassroots movement that we built online at Pencils of Promise um what i referenced earlier you you have to make it a two-way conversation and you have to really empower each and every single individual to be a part of the story and so with mission you the way we go about doing that is um by recognizing that you know a lot of traditional colleges they have like a centralized admissions office and that admissions office just kind of you know blasts out an out an email here and there and says, we have open admissions. And, you know, they're the kind of the centralized body. And what we realize is that every single person, probably in this country knows somebody who could be a really great fit for Mission U.

And we want to empower them to help us find and support that next, you know, Mission U student. And so what we're doing is for any student that, or for any individual that refers a student, you can just go to missionu.com and you just get your own little referral link. For anyone that refers a student, first of all, that would listen to this, on that first step of the application, the application takes two minutes to do the first step, and then, you know, you can fulfill the rest on your own time. It'll ask who referred to you. And if you just put in rich roll, just one word, rich roll, we'll give you $500 towards the program. If anyone else goes onto the program and they refer a student, that student will get $500 towards the credit that they'll contribute on the backend. And we'll also give that individual who referred them $500

if that student's accepted to our program. And how does it work if you live in Kansas or you live in Belgium? Great question. How are you going to integrate all of that into these, what did you call them? Not pods, but cohorts. Cohorts. So the one real, I think, important requirement is that in order to participate in a cohort, you have to live within 50 miles of the cohort's home city. And so at launch, we're launching nationally. So anybody can apply from any geography.

We want to welcome anybody who's interested in this. And based on where the demand is, we'll make a strategic decision around, hey, there's a lot of students that are interested in this one city or within 50 miles of this one city. That's where we're going to go first. Now, our headquarters, our team is in San Francisco. So, you know, it's certainly likely that we will launch a cohort in that area. But I would say to anybody that might hear this or that knows somebody that might be a good fit,

you know, if you apply and there's demand in your region, then we're hopefully going to expand to serve that area. And, you know, this isn't traditional college. We don't try and build big dormitories and have a big physical campus. We try and treat you like the adult that each student is. And so they can live from home. They can live with a friend.

They can figure out independent housing. You just have to live within 50 miles of the home city so that you're close to the other students and so that you're close to the employers that we're going to help set up those job interviews with. employers that we're going to help set up those job interviews with. How long is it going to take before a graduate of a Pencils of Promise school ends up in a Mission U curriculum? Great question. I've not even thought about that one yet. You haven't thought about that? No, but I love that.

Wow. You know, I would say our kind of oldest graduates now from a... You stay in touch with these kids? Yeah. Are there certain kids that you... Yeah, yeah. In the first village in particular, where I spent a lot of time it's called pat tongue and um a couple students in particular i have a big heart for um so you know those first students they were it was

preschools early on so those are girls that are now you know fifth grade or so a sixth grade you know because we built primary school some of those early primary schools our students are kind of middle school high school so i would say about five years time is when it could become a feasible reality. I'm going to hold you to that. Hey, please. I hope I hold myself accountable. There was nothing that would make me happier than seeing a pencil to promise graduate join mission. Yeah. Very cool. Um, I can't remember what the name of the book is, but there's the woman who was Dean of freshmen at Stanford wrote a book about, um, I forget about yes i forget about i forget but she her basic i know the exact one you're talking about and her basic assessment of the typical

stanford freshmen was that they were existentially impotent right and that's kind of a cultural referendum yeah on a generation of young people that are funneling into higher education they don't understand uh they don't understand some of the sort of core principles from Dan Pink, right? They don't have autonomy. They don't have purpose. They don't have mastery, right? So how do you begin? I guess you've already sort of answered it. How do you take one of those people and then form them into an individual who would be desirable in the workplace. I guess it's through a lot of these soft skill programs. I think soft skills are big. I think also part of it is that, you know, we're a one-year program. So in that one year, there's only so much you can accomplish. I think you can accomplish a tremendous amount, but I don't think that we're targeting the student who

is existentially impotent. I think we're targeting the student who's incredibly self-directed, who truthfully has the self-awareness and, and the societal awareness to say, look, this college thing doesn't make a lot of sense for me. And they just don't have another outlet. And, and our admissions process, you know, it was totally different from any college. I mean, we don't look at GPA, we don't look at SAT and you don't have to have graduated from high school to

get into mission. Yeah. Um, we don't look at GPA, we don't look at SAT, and you don't have to have graduated from high school to get into Mission U. We look at, and there's kind of four part assessment, but it's really about identifying future potential in an individual, much more so than past standardized test scores. And, you know, reinforcing that kind of latent ability that that student knows is there, they just kind of like need some molding to their raw clay. And so, you know, I think over time, as we think about, you know, admitting thousands of students in the years ahead and really growing this out,

I think we'll face, you know, a couple of those really important challenges. And, you know, like any entrepreneurial venture, you start in one place, you have a core set of beliefs and you learn as much as you can and you make sure that you're addressing those challenges as you scale. Right.

Have you gotten pushback from anyone? I mean, this is outside of instead of trying to, like, you know, build a better mousetrap within the system. Yeah. You're just you're just creating a brand new system. Right. You're outside of seeking accreditation or any of that kind of paradigm rules that apply to higher education. Yeah. I mean, most of the things that are happening in higher ed that I saw from an entrepreneurial perspective were adding some type of new twist to the existing system, you know, a better, you know, kind of add on to what we have. And MissionU is certainly an entirely new paradigm in itself. And who knows what will happen, you know, in years ahead as to, you know, how this is received. My gut, my kind of entrepreneurial belief is that we're going to see a lot of traction behind this and that people, certainly from the employer side,

we're already seeing it. I think from the student applicant side, we'll see that increase more and more and more. You'll, of course, have your early adopters that, you know, I think are the innovative type and look at this and say, oh, my God, this is perfect for me. And, you know, their parents are savvy enough to understand, whoa, this thing doesn't make a lot of sense for our family to take on all these loans and whatnot. I think the pushback is certainly going to come from the traditionalists that are going to say, well, you know, this is much more skills based and career oriented. And the goal of higher education is to teach people how to learn. Right. And I valued my liberal arts education. And, you know, my counter to those individuals is that, first of all, learning how to learn

is primarily free nowadays because so much of that great content and those great professors lectures are available online in ways that they weren't. content and those great professors lectures are available online in ways that they weren't the second thing is for anyone that has the ability to say that it means that you already went through the system and the way the system looked when you graduated even if you graduated two or three years ago is fundamentally different from the cost that that system imposes on a student today. The costs are just so insanely out of control for a young person to attend college today that what for a very long time was a public good is now a private luxury.

And so I respect the notion that liberal arts is great, and I agree with it, but unless your family can pay several hundred thousand dollars out of pocket or you have a full ride to a really good school, I would say that those are decisions. Yeah, you have to run a cost benefit analysis. And you have to put that in the proper context of what is happening right now. You should be a savvy consumer of your education because it's one of the most important decisions that you'll ever make. I mean, you know, as a parent, it is a little bit terrifying,

you know, like I'm again, like going back to like my own, my own personal experience is being a product of this system and then raising children and realizing there's certain aspects of this that are not functioning properly. And then trying to step outside that system is it's scary, you know, because you, you're like, well, I know what worked for me. Right. And it, it comes with its warts and all these other things that weren't perfect, but at the same time, like I understand that. And this is something I don't understand or is totally unfamiliar. So it takes a leap of faith. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's one thing that I think all of us have had to acknowledge in starting and now building Mission U is that the the notion of doing anything as you know, that is new to a space that has been historically rooted in something that people are so familiar with is going to make some people uncomfortable. And those there's a large swath of people that are

going to say, this is, you know, not my cup of tea. But then what you always see in those instances is there's a different subset of people, usually a smaller group that cannot wait for this thing to become a part of their lives. And they run at it, you know, kind of full bore. And, you know, that's the type of student, that's the type of kind of family that I think we're going to appeal to, you know, in the first couple of years of you um but you know the goal here for anybody i'm sure who who has worked in education you kind of know that you're playing the long game and it's not something that's transactional in that you know you download an app and suddenly you have the thing in your life with education it's it's a long-term commitment and you know my commitment to this

to this uh space is you know decades um because i want to see my kids go to Mission U one day. And I got about 18 years to go. Get it all dialed in before they're of age, right? Right. That's great. All right. Well, we got to dial it back down here, and I got to let you go. But before we end this, I thought it would be good to kind of do a little mini exploration on kind of living a purposeful, you know, service-driven life. I mean, service,

purpose, that sort of is at the core of everything that you do. It's written all over your face and it's very authentic and genuine to who you are and it's your driver, right? But I think most people, that eludes most people or they have not had the sort of capacity to find that for themselves. And short of, you know, going on semester at sea and having a boat tip over, you know, I think we all have lightning moments or line in the sand moments if we're paying attention and we're kind of connected to ourselves enough to understand what's going on around us. But, you know, how do you speak to that when you get up in front of groups of people and you go to colleges, et cetera, and you're talking about leadership and you're talking about, you know, living a purposeful, service-driven life? you know, it was really difficult to tell this story of boat, you know, at sea and this kind of wild set of experiences, because I realized it was kind of disconnecting me from the people that I was talking to, because they would kind of leave the talk and be like, well, that didn't happen to

me. So why would I, you know, be able to have these same shared experiences. And what I've found over the years, is something that I've, you know, shared in front of a lot of people, which is the true self discovery begins where your comfort zone ends. And, you know, semester at sea was certainly outside of my comfort zone. Now, the wave was an extraordinary set of circumstances, but there are countless people that I've met that have just made a decision to be removed from their comfort zone in some capacity. They sign up for a night course taking salsa lessons,

and they've never been able to dance salsa in their life, and they get outside of their comfort zone. They decide to commit to a weekend retreat for, you know, I don't know, meditation or journaling or artistry. And that's not in their wheelhouse, but they suddenly find some new part of themselves that they didn't realize was there. And I think that that's when you get in touch with this sense of purpose and this kind of level of self-awareness that we've been talking about is when you discover that there was something latent within you that was just rusting there that is so true and kind of core and fundamental to who you are that was completely dormant until this thing happened and there's absolutely no way to discover that unless you get outside of

your comfort zone and so that's you know always the first step that I encourage people is to find ways to leave your comfort zone, to get into some area of potential discomfort, potential struggle. And that's when you'll learn, you know, not just what you are in terms of your job or you're, you know, the husband or wife of person X, but really at your core who you are. And then it's your responsibility to start to kind of peel back the layers, you know, of that onion and try and see what is it that actually at the root of it makes me feel so alive or in love with this, you know, feeling that I'm experiencing in this new arena. And the more you dig and, you know, as we talked about throughout this whole conversation, you know, journaling, I think, is really key. You start to find, you know, at your core kind of why you believe you're here and you know what your gifts are that you need to you know bring to the the broader world yeah it's not a magical epiphany it's tipping that one millimeter domino onto the bigger one onto the bigger one onto the bigger one in order to topple you know the empire state building right so it's having the wherewithal and the willingness to take that tiny, small action and trust and have faith that that will lead to another slightly larger action.

And that you will find, you know, purpose and direction through that exploration. And so it's committing to the exploration above everything else, it seems like. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's beautifully articulated. Well, that's a good place to lock it down. Thank you. Thank you.

It is super inspiring what you're doing. And I commend your commitment to revitalizing education. It's something we desperately need now more than ever. And it's really cool to get a chance to talk to you, man. Likewise. Thank you so much. So if you're digging on Adam, the best way to connect with him adam braun on twitter and mission you.com to learn more about that right now it's just a landing page is it going to be it'll be soon yeah it'll be you know full website um you know explaining every

part of the program as well as open application for anyone that's interested awesome man anywhere else to find out more about what you're doing? Are you speaking anywhere soon or anything like that? Yeah. I tend to travel the country throughout the year, giving talks in various places, but in general, you know, my just personal website where I write, you know, a lot of blogs and content and put up talks is adambroad.com. Awesome, man. Thanks so much. Thank you. Peace. Blatts. Okay, that rocked. I hope you guys dug it. I certainly enjoyed talking to Adam. Very inspirational.

Be sure to check out Pencils of Promise and Mission U and his book, Promise of a Pencil. You won't regret it. One thing I wanted to clarify, I realized my comment at the outset of the interview about the Braun brothers being like the Emmanuel brothers or the Wajicki sisters was a little bit vague because I failed to explain or point out that Adam's brother is Scooter Braun, who is the guy who basically discovered Justin Bieber and has been Justin Bieber's manager since day one. So in my book, that's a pretty powerful brotherly duo. If you

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And until then, have an amazing week. Peace, plants, and stay Jedi. Thank you.