Adam Braun On Lightning Moments, Reimagining Education & Blazing A Life of Purpose

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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

  Eating well rarely falls apart because of one big failure. It's the daily question that wears you down. Like, what am I actually gonna make tonight? What's in the fridge? And it's exactly why we built the Plant Power Meal Planner. It's a personalized, plant-based meal planning program that matches you with recipes based on your taste, your allergies, your cooking skills, and how much time you actually have. You build, through this program, a balanced, nutrient-dense plan for your entire household in a few minutes. Then it generates a grocery list for you with one click that plugs right into our delivery partners. All the recipes in the program are built by dietitians with culinary training. Plus, you get your own food coach to help you problem-solve along the way.

• 0:44Rich Roll?

  It's kind of an amazing thing. For listeners of the show, all you special people, we're offering an exclusive $20 off an annual subscription right now. To get it, go to meals.richroll.com, take your quick personalization quiz, and enter promo code RICHROLL20 at checkout.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  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 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, not just what you are in terms of your job, or the husband or wife of person X, but really, at your core, who you are.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  And then it's your responsibility to start to kind of peel back the layers 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 feeling that I'm experiencing in this new arena. And the more you dig, you start to find, 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.

• 2:31Rich Roll?

  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

• 3:12Rich Roll?

  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

• 3:56Rich Roll?

  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 it 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

• 4:37Rich Roll?

  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 gonna let Adam tell you all about it. But first...

• 5:17Rich Roll?

  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 gonna be really captivated by the extraordinary

• 6:01Rich Roll?

  story behind it all. He's a special human, for sure. So, this is me and Adam Braun.

• 6:11Rich Roll?

  Cool, man. Let's rock it.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure.

• 6:13Rich Roll?

  Super nice to reconnect with you. We met briefly at Lewis Howes's 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 of people. But it was really cool. And I was very impacted by not just your presentation, but your book 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.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  Likewise. Thank you.

• 6:38Rich Roll?

  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...

• 6:48Rich Roll?

  I was thinking about the Emmanuel brothers and I was thinking about the Wajiki sisters. And I was like, and then there's the Brons, right? So what is, I mean, I think, you know, I think a good place to kind of launch into this is to talk about how you were brought up. I, you know, I think that you were, 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?

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:13Rich Roll?

  To be so self-directed and purposeful in the work that you do.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I'm happy to speak about my upbringing. I'm a new dad, you know, my wife gave birth to 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.

• 7:34Rich Roll?

  Forgiveness of all the mistakes.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Oh, man, it's, it's amazing how, 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, you know, my, my upbringing, I think was a unique one for sure, in, in probably a couple of different ways. Part of it was just that, 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, really on a boat, I think 14 or 15 days across the Atlantic, escaping 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

• 8:19Speaker 01

  immigrant to this country, you know, growing up in Queens. And my mom lost her dad when she was about, you know, 11 or so years old. And that also had a really big impact on her because, you know, her, 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, you know, are kind of self-made individuals who grew up in really, really strong households with a lot of focus, I think, on kind of like 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, were born about two and a half years apart. And that was in Greenwich, Connecticut. And so we grew up in, you know, this really affluent town. But the part of town we first moved to, Cas Cob, is kind of, you know, one of the more

• 9:03Speaker 01

  working-class parts of town. Historically, it's where a lot of the people that were building the mansions and backcountry Greenwich were living at the time.

• 9:10Rich Roll?

  The backbone of Greenwich.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, you know, we had a great upbringing in that our dad was very intense, very, you know, much disciplinarian in ways that a lot of my friends' parents were not. You know, he let you know when he was unhappy with you. He also coached a lot of the teams that, you know, myself and my siblings played on. And he was known as like the scary, crazy dad who was cursing people out. And, you know, you didn't want to cross ways with him, but...

• 9:37Rich Roll?

  He's still around, yeah?

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, my dad's a beast. I mean, he's sixty-four 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. 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 orthodontists 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, 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. 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. And I think her grounding and like doing what's right, and, you know, her favorite

• 10:21Speaker 01

  word is integrity. And my dad is kind of the epitome of ambition. And I think when you mix those two things together, you end up with the family that we now have.

• 10:29Rich Roll?

  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...

• 10:38Speaker 01

  Bronze are different.

• 10:39Rich Roll?

  The bronze are different.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:40Rich Roll?

  And so, as a child, how do you interpret that? Because that's sort of a way of separating you, right?

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:45Rich Roll?

  And you're in this town where there's tremendous dichotomy between the haves and the have-nots.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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, Brons are different. And you know, then when-

• 11:30Rich Roll?

  That could have instilled a new rebellion, though.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I think, I think, you know, there were certain moments where it was frustration because we weren't able to, you know, see the same experiences that maybe our friends were. And there was just this hard-line 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. 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, you know, made that racial slur,

• 12:17Speaker 01

  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, Brons 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 than 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.

• 12:51Rich Roll?

  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.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  I, I think to some degree with, certainly my dad, I mean, I, I pretty recently, uh, probably six months ago or so, I read Carol Dweck's book, Mindset, you know, and as somebody who works in education, it's, it's certainly a really, you know, monumental book in the field. And I start, I literally called my mom and I was 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 out 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. But, but your father instilled was a belief that you had talents and abilities

• 13:41Speaker 01

  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 would have been like, yeah, you're kind of right. She was like, no, absolutely not. We do 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, you know, 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

• 14:22Speaker 01

  and I almost expect of ourselves because of the way in which we were raised.

• 14:27Rich Roll?

  Well, it's empowerment, right? I mean, the counterpoint to Dweck's book is, is sort of the ethos that, that our mutual friend Gary Vee talks about. He always talks about how, you know, he was given this self-esteem by his mother growing up and that is really the fuel or his pilot light.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:43Rich Roll?

  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.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd love to.

• 14:57Rich Roll?

  I'll connect you. Um, very cool. But kind of the, you know, behind all of that, the engine was this focus on education, right?

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 15:05Rich Roll?

  And, 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, you know, to, I would presume, the top of your class when you're in high school and gets you into Brown and, and then it just becomes like a lockstep thing of, you know, what you do when you're in that position. Which is something, that's my own experience. You know, I went to great colleges and grad schools and all that kind of stuff and, 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. Um, but it's almost like a, you know, how do you characterize it? Like a, um, you know, a prison of privilege almost.

• 15:49Rich Roll?

  Cause you feel like you should be doing these things because you're at Brown and you have these opportunities that most people don't.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. 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, uh, when I was in my early twenties, 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 in 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, uh, 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.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  For some reason of which, you know, I had no say. I was born into a very loving family, you know, able to get a great education, you know, 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, uh, because of a man that I met in Guatemala who, uh, saw me, you know, like on the banks of this, this, uh, lake, Lake Alti Braun, and, uh, 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.

• 17:11Rich Roll?

  Right, teaching him how to, how to speak English.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, how to pronounce words in English, you know, reading his Bible into a cassette recorder. But, uh, 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. 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,

• 17:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:11Rich Roll?

  But that's a tremendous amount of self-awareness that most young people in their early twenties don't have, right?

• 18:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:18Rich Roll?

  So where does that come from?

• 18:20Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, it's weird to say it, but you know, I mean, my mom has talked to me about this a lot. But I think maybe part of it is being a middle child. 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 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

• 19:04Speaker 01

  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 that voice carries a lot of just like, deep essential truths that are tough to access unless you are

• 19:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 20:07Rich Roll?

  Becoming the observer.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:09Rich Roll?

  Of your own mind. Right. Is that, so that's something you started very early.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Sixteen years old.

• 20:14Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:14Rich Roll?

  Uh, did you, did that launch off with The Artist's Way? Have you done, you know, are you familiar with that?

• 20:20Speaker 01

  I am familiar with that, that.

• 20:22Rich Roll?

  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, you know, doing it by hand.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 20:34Rich Roll?

  Every day, stream of consciousness.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  Oh, okay. I'm not as familiar with it.

• 20:38Rich Roll?

  Unlock your, your consciousness around the ideas that are swirling in your, you know, in your subconscious, I suppose.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:44Rich Roll?

  Um, but all right. So just to, to back it up a little bit, you, you know, you're growing up in Greenwich and you're in the, you know, the hedge, hedge fund capital of the world. You're on this Wall Street track, you know, you're, you're interning at hedge funds and like 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 like you need to kind of shake things up and, and sort of.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:11Rich Roll?

  You know, reestablish a new paradigm for yourself or get out of your comfort zone. So what did that look like for you?

• 21:17Speaker 01

  Well, it, it started probably around my sophomore year in college. Uh, I saw a film called Baraka that was shot in 24 countries around the world, you know.

• 21:25Rich Roll?

  Were you super stoned when you watched that?

• 21:28Speaker 01

  I think, I think, I think half around university.

• 21:32Rich Roll?

  Well, that's like, it's like almost a trope, you know?

• 21:34Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 21:35Rich Roll?

  With that film.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I'm sure in my, in my, I don't know what I was, nineteen at the time. I feel like half the room probably was, was covered in secondhand smoke at that point, but, um, I mean, it was, it was the first time that I had really seen. Uh, I would say ways of life that existed so far beyond the realms of. What I thought existed on, on, you know, the planet right now amongst the seven 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, 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.

• 22:18Rich Roll?

  That's what I always thought.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  That's what I thought. Um, cause.

• 22:20Rich Roll?

  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.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  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, um, 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, and kind of this globalized perspective. And said how life-changing it was for them. And I thought, 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, it was a long story inherently in here, but, uh, my, my ship in 2005 is one of the three famous Semester at Sea voyages.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:15Rich Roll?

  You're in the North Pacific.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Right. We were, we were going from Vancouver to Korea in January. So this is freezing cold water. You know, we had crossed the international date line that morning. That's how, you know, at the edge of the map, basically. Uh, and so.

• 23:28Rich Roll?

  Video of that boat teetering on its side is so harrowing.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, I, 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, we were perishing that day when the announcement came, you know, get to the fifth floor higher, get to the muster stations, which is where you evacuate ship from. And you're not evacuating that scenario. 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.

• 24:05Rich Roll?

  Well, hold on a second. Let's sort of breeze past that. That's, that's, that's huge.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 24:10Rich Roll?

  And so when you think about that now, I mean, does that crystallize as some kind of spiritual experience for you?

• 24:17Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure.

• 24:18Rich Roll?

  Canonize that somehow in your mind?

• 24:20Speaker 01

  It, it was the single most.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  You know, outside of probably meeting my wife, I mean, the most 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, because there was nothing physical around me, right? There it was an emotional decision. It was really a feeling of 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 gonna work out. I'm feeling good that I'm gonna. It was like, no, no, no, there's no chance that I'm perishing today. This whole ship's gonna go down. Everyone's gonna go down with it. But something outside

• 25:09Speaker 01

  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, you know, sweatpants and sweats because you thought you were gonna be waiting for a while. And I thought that's gonna drag me down when I'm in the water.

• 25:37Rich Roll?

  That's amazing. So how did it, did, how did that resolve itself? Because I've heard you speak about this before, but were you ultimately airlifted out of there? Or how did it?

• 25:46Speaker 01

  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, you know, broken glass sliding and screams. And you just hope 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, you know, because this is a thousand 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 putter around.

• 26:26Rich Roll?

  Right it and?

• 26:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, but we didn't have enough power, or then 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 gonna 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.

• 26:40Rich Roll?

  Oh, my God.

• 26:43Rich Roll?

  I'm super interested in moments like that that change people's lives and the innate power that they hold. You know, this idea that, that, you know, pain is a great motivator, or a fearful event like that can change somebody's lives. 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.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would agree.

• 27:07Rich Roll?

  But you also see people that then normalize, right? Like, they sort of have that moment, and they think they're gonna change their lives, and then it quickly dissipates. So, what was it about this that you were able to hold on to it, and then really, you know, use that as this kind of Archimedes lever to change your trajectory?

• 27:24Speaker 01

  It's a really good question. It's actually not a question that I've ever been asked before, so it's not something 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, I think part of it was that I was going on Semester T looking for a transformational experience. You know, I wanted something that was gonna change the way I operated and looked at the world. And, you know, 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,

• 28:04Speaker 01

  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 100 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

• 28:44Speaker 01

  know, expensive drinks and clubs, and, you know, spending 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.

• 29:18Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. I feel like it was almost, it's almost like that experience on the boat ripened you to have more experiences like that.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally.

• 29:28Rich Roll?

  And then you developed, 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?

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:37Rich Roll?

  And not breeze past them. So 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.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  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, you know, as somebody who, you know, continues to, but certainly back then was not only introspective, but I was also pretty introverted.

• 30:35Speaker 01

  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, you know, town in Bolivia and strike up a conversation. And eventually that inspired the name Pencils of Promise for the organization.

• 31:00Rich Roll?

  And yet you still go back to New York and get a job at Bain.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. Not only that, I went through investment banking and consultant interviews.

• 31:08Rich Roll?

  Oh, you did, yeah.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I had.

• 31:10Rich Roll?

  That was your reintegration.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:12Rich Roll?

  That must have been like a little surreal.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  It definitely was. It was very, very surreal. Well, you know, I think. One thing 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."

• 31:59Speaker 01

  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."

• 32:35Rich Roll?

  But the impetus behind it, like what's, what is the driver? You know, it's, 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, you know, 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, 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?

• 33:18Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 34:00Rich Roll?

  Of course, because you may have the ability to be much more influential with, you know, the experience at Bain under your belt.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  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 gotta find a way to dip my toe in that water.

• 34:40Rich Roll?

  I think there's a lot of people that probably go to Wall Street with

• 34:43Speaker 01

  Those intentions, totally.

• 34:44Rich Roll?

  Those intentions. I mean, I, you know, I was a lawyer and in 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 non-profit, 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.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 35:00Rich Roll?

  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.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  I've seen that happen to, you know, multiple friends.

• 35:08Rich Roll?

  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 this misperception that if you want to start something or what you look at now as pencils of promise must have started with, you know, huge cash infusion and a press conference.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:28Rich Roll?

  That kind of thing.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  That's what I would have assumed as an outsider, I'd go where it's at, but it's not the case.

• 35:31Rich Roll?

  The reality is, and you use this, you, you play that beautiful domino video in some of your talks, that it starts with a very small, a very tiny, but meaningful gesture.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  Completely. Yeah. And in my case, you know, my grandmother was turning 80 and I wanted to find a way to honor her in, in a really meaningful way. And, you know, she was

• 35:53Rich Roll?

  Auschwitz survivor.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, I mean, everything she had been through. You know, 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, you know, we, we lost her about three and a half months ago. She passed away about four hours before my twins were born.

• 36:14Rich Roll?

  Ah, sorry to hear that.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  And, and, 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 is really the foundation, that the only way to replace her was with two, right? So.

• 36:30Rich Roll?

  That's a beautiful way to look at it.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's, 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, we're gonna pay and, you know, my life was so filled with self-absorption that I thought, what if I just found a way to honor Ma? And, 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? And they, 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, you know,

• 37:15Speaker 01

  I put $25 in a bank account and then through 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, you know, 400 people came and we had $8,000, $8,025. And then we just did a series of basically parties in, in New York that all were low dollar, targeted at people in their early twenties and said, you know, 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.

• 37:47Rich Roll?

  And those tiny little actions make it real.

• 37:50Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 37:50Rich Roll?

  You know, like opening up that bank account as small as it is. It's like now it's a thing.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:54Rich Roll?

  So now there's a little momentum behind it.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 37:56Rich Roll?

  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.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:07Rich Roll?

  And it prevents them from even beginning, right?

• 38:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 38:10Rich Roll?

  And you began without having any idea of what would be entailed in building a school in some third world.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, when I started Pencils of Promise, I'd never been to Laos.

• 38:18Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  And now we built, you know. 100, 400 schools around the world. 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. 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.

• 38:48Rich Roll?

  But you've proven that it's, you've proven that you can do that. Like you have the, you've done it before. So you, you have like a sort of sense and.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  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. 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 and four and you run a clinic? And that was great because I didn't have to guard the kids all day because they play against each other. And then the following summer, um, 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 basketball camp.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  And that was the first time I built a real business. You know, I had a bank account and all those things. And so in some ways, Pens of Promise was familiar to me because I'd built a business before, but it was, the ambition was, was, you know, 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 going to 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.

• 40:22Rich Roll?

  That's a little ambitious.

• 40:23Speaker 01

  Bigger, right?

• 40:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  And so in some ways, you know, what felt like small steps before now feel like bigger steps. And what felt like bigger steps, you know, um, feel. Almost like they have to be the starting blocks. And so, um, so each and every time I think you go through it as an entrepreneur or as a creator of any kind, right? I mean, even artists that are gonna do their follow-up work to their previous work, um, you go through this same process, I think, um, that requires you to find the internal fortitude to go after something that inherently is gonna make you uncomfortable.

• 40:56Rich Roll?

  You had side hustles going on your whole life, though, right?

• 40:58Speaker 01

  Always.

• 40:59Rich Roll?

  Like, so it's, so you.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  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 you, if you sent them blank, uh, like, uh, blank CDs and a return envelope, they would send you, uh, 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.

• 41:30Rich Roll?

  Right. That's hilarious.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:32Rich Roll?

  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.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 41:37Rich Roll?

  Let's, let's, before we kind of step into that, um, your, 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.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 42:11Rich Roll?

  I mean, you were like, like, playing hooky, right? Like, you.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was, I was, I was a bad employee. Um, you know, I was, I don't think I had a single missed day at Bain for my first, you know, 10 months or so.

• 42:22Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  I went on what they call their externship, was you leave and work for somebody else, um, and you come back. Um, 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, 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 gotta make a decision here and, and make this, make this choice. And, you know, there's a, there's a street artist who, you know, has sold works in like Christie's and other kind of famous auction houses. But he does a lot of kind of chalk art across the East Village. His name's De La Vega.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  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, uh, I saw it walking to work that day, uh, that I was deciding that I was gonna 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, 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 hired a bunch of people out of Bain. I will continue to. The skill set that, and, and just the quality of human that they attracted to that company is phenomenal. But, you know, at that point in my life, um, you know, 24, I guess around 25,

• 43:48Speaker 01

  um, 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 gonna be about $250,000. And instead I was choosing to pursue this nonprofit, um, that I'd start at $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, uh, and, and mastery of, 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.

• 44:24Rich Roll?

  Right. Which is gonna get us right into Mission U.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  Right, right. Yeah, I mean.

• 44:28Rich Roll?

  But you, but you, and then you went and cut out the cardboard art, right?

• 44:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:32Rich Roll?

  It's in your office.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  Right, so.

• 44:34Rich Roll?

  I mean, that's like an amazing thing. Was that?

• 44:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:37Rich Roll?

  Like that moment of seeing that, did it hit you like that feeling that you had on the boat when it was teetering?

• 44:43Speaker 01

  Yes. Oh, for sure. So, so to explain how that happened, uh, on, on, basically I think it was, uh, 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 going to 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, you know, actual cardboard box, the phrase.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  And I said, "One day when we have an office for Pense of Promise, this is going to go in the office." 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 was the image I sent out. So it just reinforced, but yes.

• 45:41Rich Roll?

  The universe was talking loud.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  Totally. I mean, yes, the signs were very clear about the decision that I needed to make and fortunately, you know, it turned out to be the right one, I think.

• 45:52Rich Roll?

  It's crazy when you look in the rearview mirror backwards, how it all lines up perfectly. And it's like, of course, this is what you were supposed to be doing. But I mean, the chaos and the confusion and the sort of soul searching, you know, I imagine was probably pretty profound at the time.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  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, and 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

• 46:49Speaker 01

  to get yourself primed so that when that lightning moment happens, it's easy for you to kind of, you know, flip that switch.

• 46:57Rich Roll?

  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.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:14Rich Roll?

  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.

• 47:30Speaker 01

  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, websites. I mean, crowdsourcing was not a word when I founded Pencils of Promise. I would describe what I was trying to do.

• 48:11Rich Roll?

  It was also not an economic climate in which people were, you know, really feeling that great about parting with the few dollars they had in their wallet.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 48:37Rich Roll?

  Trying to activate your guilt as opposed to your agency.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  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

• 49:22Speaker 01

  dollars to try and reach 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. But, you know, we also just put a kind of stake in the sand and said, we're going to advocate for radical transparency. People can, you know, donate on our website and 100% of that funding goes directly into our programs, no questions asked. If they're, you know, willing to cover some of our operations

• 50:07Speaker 01

  in which we're going to 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.

• 50:35Rich Roll?

  Well, that's beautiful. But fundamentally, it's about storytelling, right? I feel like you guys really understood that.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:43Rich Roll?

  And continue to understand that.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  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 in that.

• 50:55Rich Roll?

  And understanding how social media operates to leverage those tools to really connect with people and allow those people to feel connected to their work.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  Right. Right. It has to be a dialogue. It's not just you shouting to them, but you know, allow them to feel heard.

• 51:07Rich Roll?

  Right. All right. So you scaled this thing up. You guys have built 400 schools at this point?

• 51:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:12Rich Roll?

  And how many countries are you now?

• 51:14Speaker 01

  So we operate in five countries. We started, 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.

• 51:27Rich Roll?

  Wow, that's amazing. And this isn't enough for you, right? You gotta go and start something new now?

• 51:32Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 51:33Rich Roll?

  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.

• 51:42Speaker 01

  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. But, you know, to almost start 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 in the country, speaking about our work, trying to engage, you know, 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, it was very frustrating because I didn't have a good answer.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  You know, I believe in organizational focus and I thought Pencil of 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. 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 are 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

• 53:09Speaker 01

  half years couldn't justify, you know, take 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, you know, 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 $110,000 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.

• 53:48Speaker 01

  Because then I thought at least she can start fresh and we can start fresh with our life together.

• 53:51Rich Roll?

  That doesn't work.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  Right, and I didn't know that.

• 53:53Rich Roll?

  Declaring bankruptcy has no impact on student loans.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  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, 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, 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, you know,

• 54:37Speaker 01

  young person and their family in this country, but additionally, I want to make it relevant to that idea of the American dream that, that enabled my family to kind of come up from the situation that we came up in. And, and so I spent the last, you know, two plus years, uh, 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, 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.

• 55:18Speaker 01

  You know, the, the data is such that, out of, you know, nationally, those that enter a bachelor's degree four-year program, uh, in the United States, only 18% will finish in four years, which is insane.

• 55:31Rich Roll?

  Really, it's that low?

• 55:31Speaker 01

  18% will finish in four years. Out of those who will enter a two-year degree, so a community college, the percentage that will finish in two years is 5%. So not only are we not getting to completion.

• 55:42Rich Roll?

  That's pretty shocking.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  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. 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 that

• 56:01Rich Roll?

  There's nothing, there's nothing audacious about that.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  Well, the other thing is that, you know, our, our aim is to prepare young, you know, 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, 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

• 56:45Rich Roll?

  Certainly not.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 57:04Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  So if you are not successful.

• 57:06Rich Roll?

  Online curriculum?

• 57:08Speaker 01

  Not entirely.

• 57:09Rich Roll?

  Not entirely?

• 57:10Speaker 01

  So, so most, yeah, most people assume it has to be online for this to work, but you know, I'm a big believer that online education can produce some really positive and radically transformative results for people. You know, 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.

• 57:45Rich Roll?

  So they don't just click off and start watching cat videos?

• 57:48Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. So, so when you get into Mission U, you are part of a 25 student cohort. Your cohort progresses, a one-year program, your cohort progresses through the one year together. And about 80 to 90% of the experience is online, but these are not pre-recorded lectures that, you know, were 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, you know, 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

• 58:31Speaker 01

  the social cohesion, you need to come together in person. And so we have our students come together for a three-day orientation, and then every month, they have a meetup. And then graduation happens 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. Career services shouldn't be an afterthought, especially because, you know, there's a big study done, and they polled entering freshmen, and 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.

• 59:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it doesn't translate. Well, the world is changing, and I want to get into that in a minute. But first of all, you know, beyond the sheer ambition of this, of this plan, like, this is a big play in terms of infrastructure building and personnel.

• 59:22Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure.

• 59:22Rich Roll?

  Is this like a venture-backed thing? And like, how far along in the process are you in terms of building this out?

• 59:27Speaker 01

  So, 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. So we are a venture-backed company. We went out and, you know, we raised a healthy seed round. And we did so with really world-class investors. I mean, our, you know, lead investor is arguably, not arguably, they are the premier seed fund in the country. Four of 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.

• 1:00:11Rich Roll?

  You haven't said anything.

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  You know, as of, as of March 21st, you know, I know this will be released after that, we will be able to open up, you know, our full application process to any student. And the first cohort will start in September of this year. And so, September 2017 is when the first cohort will begin. And so, applications are, are open for anybody that's interested.

• 1:00:36Rich Roll?

  Wow, that's exciting.

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:37Rich Roll?

  Congrats on building that. That's incredible.

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:00:47Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  Right, right. Because it made sense back then.

• 1:01:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  It made sense when I was in school, not today.

• 1:01:04Rich Roll?

  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?

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:11Rich Roll?

  And when you look at the state of higher education, at the collegiate level at least, you know, it's still very much the same way that it was in, what, you know, 1820?

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:01:23Rich Roll?

  It hasn't changed that much. And yet the world has changed dramatically.

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:01:27Rich Roll?

  And that 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, you know, 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.

• 1:02:12Rich Roll?

  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 as 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, off the reservation type

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:43Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:52Rich Roll?

  As a parent, and as a parent, and you'll learn to appreciate this more and more, like, the last thing you want to do is screw up your kids.

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:59Rich Roll?

  And it's easy to just default to like 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.

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think one of the great challenges that higher education has faced over the last, you know, X many years is that, you know, it's, it 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.

• 1:03:28Rich Roll?

  We should go back to the apprenticeship model.

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, that's, that's part of how the year actually operates at Mission U. But, but within the path of higher ed, you know, it, 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, you know, 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, you know, what we now have is this construct of a bachelor's degree that requires you

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  to spend, we positioned 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, $200,000 plus thousand dollars.

• 1:04:39Rich Roll?

  Or if you want to be a doctor or you want to be a lawyer.

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  Right. There's certain professional tracks, there are certain, you know, individuals who are incredibly academically inclined and want to go really deep on a PhD 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, that look at college as the pathway to employment, not as the pathway to coming of age, to, you know, fraternities and, and, you know. Football games and for those who do look at it at that like more value to you. That's a great thing. You have to make a really hopefully smart decision on how much that's going to cost you.

• 1:05:17Rich Roll?

  Right. So there's a heavy price tag.

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  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 current 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 you seeks to fulfill.

• 1:05:41Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:05:52Rich Roll?

  You know, it used to be sort of a scarlet letter if you said, I'm not going to college.

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah.

• 1:05:58Rich Roll?

  And I'm seeing there's still, 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 in 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?

• 1:06:24Speaker 01

  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 freshman incoming, you know, class. And, you know,

• 1:06:39Rich Roll?

  It's just crazy, by the way.

• 1:06:40Speaker 01

  It is wild.

• 1:06:41Rich Roll?

  It's amazing.

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  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 read, but they, every freshman seminar had like some deep dive, you know, dissection of the book. And then they had all these art projects that were inspired by the books and there were like houses made of pencils and etchings that created drawings and full art exhibit based on it and.

• 1:07:07Rich Roll?

  It's become this leading book on, on leadership.

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, it was, it was wild. It was, it was, I was really, really moved the first time I went and, and certainly every time since then. 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 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.

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  But it's amazing the response that it's gotten, uh, 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've 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. Like they don't have blinders on.

• 1:08:19Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:08:19Speaker 01

  Now, I think there's maybe some, you know, 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, you know, being prepared for the workforce. And you look at the truthful answer there, you can't help but acknowledge that something like Mission U makes a lot of sense for a lot of students that we all have met.

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  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 and he was just sitting there. And, you know, he, uh, was talking about, he asked me about my backpack and I said the company he was from and, you know, he said, oh, my, my son's a musician. I said, okay, where do you go to school? And he told me the school he went to and, um, I say, 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. He said, what do you do? I said, I work in higher education. And he said, um, can you, where, what? And I, I explained, oh, I work for this company called Mission U. And uh, here's how it works. And I explained the, you know, the income share where you, nothing charged upfront and 15% of income for three years.

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  When you're making 50,000 dollars or 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, ah, gosh, this is so great. How can I learn more? I said, you know, you can go to missionu.com, just letter U and you can, you know, apply as of March 21st. And um, I've seen that reaction time and time again, you know, a lot of times I get 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 a 20% who aren't interested in it. And that's totally fine with me. But um, I think this commitment to outcomes for students is sorely um, needed.

• 1:10:15Rich Roll?

  Of course.

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  In, in the space. And it's something that hopefully, you know, challenges the existing ideology and gets people to question, you know, whether we can ask for more uh, from our institutions.

• 1:10:24Rich Roll?

  Well, you know, the typical college institution is really not that interested in reinvention. It's interested in, in.

• 1:10:32Speaker 01

  Preservation.

• 1:10:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, exactly. Preservation. Did you listen to uh, Malcolm Gladwell's uh,

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  Revisionist History?

• 1:10:38Rich Roll?

  Yes. He did a couple of episodes on this subject matter.

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. It was great.

• 1:10:42Rich Roll?

  I mean, he's very strident in his opinions on this, but it falls, you know, totally in line with the things that you're talking about. Um, so if you, 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?

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  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 uh, as deferment.

• 1:11:31Rich Roll?

  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?

• 1:11:39Speaker 01

  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, you know, a core set of technical skills, much like coding, almost, that you can learn to completely outside of a traditional college. And even if you are a math major or an econ major, you know, you probably don't have, you know, Excel modeling skills, you don't have SQL, you know, 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

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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.

• 1:12:47Rich Roll?

  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 U nonsense?

• 1:12:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I'll explain the year, and then I'll explain how we overcome that. So the second quarter is all about soft skill development, as well as kind of the coming of age experience.

• 1:13:09Rich Roll?

  Explain, explain soft.

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  Skills.

• 1:13:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:13Speaker 01

  So soft skills, when you actually poll employers, is actually what they value most. These are things like collaborative teamwork abilities, critical thinking abilities, the character traits of proactivity, resit, grilling, sorry, grit and resilience, excuse me. And, 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.

• 1:13:52Rich Roll?

  Super powerful life skills that were just not part of my education whatsoever.

• 1:13:57Speaker 01

  Right, 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, in 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, and then we spend six 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.

• 1:14:42Speaker 01

  In terms of your question about how is an employer going to say, what is this mission you think?

• 1:14:45Rich Roll?

  I guess you'll find out, right?

• 1:14:47Speaker 01

  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 our talent pipeline by having students apply for open jobs. And then we give them preferred access to our, 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.

• 1:15:31Rich Roll?

  Couple of those are podcast sponsors.

• 1:15:33Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah?

• 1:15:33Rich Roll?

  So that's good.

• 1:15:33Speaker 01

  Oh, awesome companies. Well, I, 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 mission. You're much like no company commits to.

• 1:15:51Rich Roll?

  But they already get it. They, they understand what's going on.

• 1:15:53Speaker 01

  Yep. Yeah. And, and the other thing again is to your point, you know, the, the success of, of Pencil of Promise was, I think heavily attributed to our ability to create a brand that.

• 1:16:07Speaker 01

  Carried into culture and stood 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 U 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 U thing? But I think, you know, a year from now or two years from now, and certainly, you know, down the future, this is going to be a household name.

• 1:16:31Rich Roll?

  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?

• 1:16:43Speaker 01

  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 was what I referenced earlier, 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 U, the way we go about doing that is 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 email here and there and says, we have open admissions. And, you know, they're the kind of the centralized body. And what we realized 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

• 1:17:27Speaker 01

  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 could 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 on to 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

• 1:18:08Speaker 01

  give that individual who referred them $500 if that student's accepted to our program.

• 1:18:13Rich Roll?

  And how does it work if you're, you live in Kansas, or you live in Belgium?

• 1:18:17Speaker 01

  Great question.

• 1:18:18Rich Roll?

  You know, how are you going to integrate all of that into these, what did you call them? Not pods, like cohorts?

• 1:18:23Speaker 01

  Cohorts. Cohorts. So, so the one, you know, 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, to serve that area.

• 1:19:08Speaker 01

  And, you know, this isn't traditional college. We, we don't try and build big dormitories and have a big physical campus. We try and treat you like, you know, the adult that each student is. And so they can, you know, live from home, they can live with a friend, they can figure out, you know, 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.

• 1:19:33Rich Roll?

  How long is it going to take before a graduate of a Pencils of Promise school ends up in a Mission U curriculum cohort?

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  Great question. I've not even thought about that one yet.

• 1:19:42Rich Roll?

  You haven't thought about that?

• 1:19:43Speaker 01

  No, but I love that. Wow. Um, you know, I would say our kind of oldest graduates now from a...

• 1:19:49Rich Roll?

  You stay in touch with these kids? Are there certain kids that you...

• 1:19:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. In the First Village in particular, where I spent a lot of time. It's called Pat Tong and a couple of students in particular I have a big heart for. 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, sixth grade. You know, because we built primary schools, 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.

• 1:20:15Rich Roll?

  All right, I'm going to hold you to that.

• 1:20:16Speaker 01

  Hey, please. I, I, I hope I hold myself accountable. There was nothing that would make me happier than seeing a Pencils of Promise graduate join Mission U.

• 1:20:23Rich Roll?

  Very cool. I can't remember what the name of the book is, but there's the, the woman who was dean of freshmen at Stanford wrote a book about...

• 1:20:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:20:32Rich Roll?

  I forget about, I forget, but she, she, her basic...

• 1:20:34Speaker 01

  I know the exact one you're talking about.

• 1:20:36Rich Roll?

  You know what I'm talking about? And her basic assessment of the typical Stanford freshman was that they were existentially impotent, right? And that's kind of a cultural referendum...

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:46Rich Roll?

  ...on a generation of young people that are funneling into higher education. They don't understand, uh, they don't understand some of the... You know, sort of core principles from Dan Pink, right? They don't have autonomy.

• 1:20:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:58Rich Roll?

  They don't have purpose. They don't have mastery.

• 1:21:01Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:21:01Rich Roll?

  Right? So how do you begin? I guess you've already sort of answered it. Like, how do you, 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.

• 1:21:16Speaker 01

  I think soft skills are big. I think, I think also part of it is that, you know, we're a one-year program. And so in that one year, there's only so much you kind of 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, is 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 U. Um, we look at, and, and there's kind of four-part assessment, um, but

• 1:21:59Speaker 01

  it's really about identifying a 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, to their raw clay. Um, 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, um, you, you learn as much as you can and you make sure that you're addressing those challenges as you scale.

• 1:22:33Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:22:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:41Rich Roll?

  You're just, you're just creating a brand new system, right? You're outside of like seeking accreditation or any of that kind of, you know, paradigm rules that apply to higher education.

• 1:22:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, most of the things that are happening in higher ed that, that I saw from an entrepreneurial perspective were,

• 1:22:59Speaker 01

  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 Mission U 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 gonna see a lot of traction behind this and that people, certainly from the employer's 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

• 1:23:42Speaker 01

  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 gonna 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. 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 this system looked when you graduated, even if you graduated two or three years ago,

• 1:24:26Speaker 01

  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-

• 1:24:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you have to run a cost-benefit analysis.

• 1:25:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:01Rich Roll?

  And you have to put that in the proper context of what is happening right now.

• 1:25:04Speaker 01

  You should be, you know, a savvy consumer of your education, because it's one of the most important decisions that you'll ever make.

• 1:25:10Rich Roll?

  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 experiences, 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, oh, I know what worked for me.

• 1:25:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:25:34Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:25:46Speaker 01

  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, um, the notion of, of doing anything as, you know, that, that is new to a space that has been historically rooted in something that people are so familiar with, um, is going to make some people uncomfortable. And those, there's a large swath of people that are gonna say, this is, you know, not my cup of tea. But then you, 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 gonna

• 1:26:31Speaker 01

  appeal to, you know, in the first couple of years of Mission U. 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.

• 1:27:01Rich Roll?

  You get it all dialed in before they're of age, right?

• 1:27:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:27:05Rich Roll?

  That's great. All right. Well, we gotta, we gotta dial it back, dial it down here. Uh, and I gotta let you go, but before we end this, um, I thought it would be good to kind of do a little mini exploration on, on kind of living a, 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 you could, 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.

• 1:27:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:27:46Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:28:06Speaker 01

  Well, at first, you know, it was really difficult to tell this story of a 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 way it 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.

• 1:28:48Speaker 01

  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 resting 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.

• 1:29:28Speaker 01

  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 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, and you know, as we talked about throughout this whole conversation, you know, journaling, I think is really key.

• 1:30:09Speaker 01

  You start to, 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.

• 1:30:18Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:30:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:30:28Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:30:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:30:38Rich Roll?

  And that you will find, you know, purpose and direction through that exploration. And it's so it's committing to the exploration above everything else, it seems like.

• 1:30:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I, I think that's beautifully articulated.

• 1:30:52Rich Roll?

  Well, that's a good place to lock it down, man. Thank you.

• 1:30:55Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:30:56Rich Roll?

  It is a 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.

• 1:31:09Speaker 01

  Likewise, thank you so much.

• 1:31:10Rich Roll?

  So if you're digging on Adam, the best way to connect with him, at Adam Braun on Twitter and missionu.com to learn more about that. Right now it's just the landing page. Is it going to be live soon?

• 1:31:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it'll be, you know, full website, you know, explaining every part of the program as well as open application for anyone that's interested.

• 1:31:28Rich Roll?

  Awesome, man. Anywhere else to find out more about what you're doing? Are you speaking anywhere soon or anything like that?

• 1:31:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I tend to travel the country throughout the year, giving talks in, in various places. But in, in general, you know, my just personal website where I write, you know, a lot of blogs and content and put up talks is adambraun.com.

• 1:31:46Rich Roll?

  Awesome, man. Thanks so much.

• 1:31:48Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:31:48Rich Roll?

  Peace. Blatz.

• 1:31:53Rich Roll?

  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 Emanuel Brothers, or the Wajiki 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 would like to support this show and my work, there's a couple of easy ways to do that. First, to share it with your friends and

• 1:32:36Rich Roll?

  on social media. Thank you to everybody who has done that. Leave a review on iTunes, subscribe on iTunes. Make a habit of clicking through the Amazon banner ad on my website every time you're going to buy something on Amazon, or just bookmarking it, or by typing in richroll.com/Amazon before going to Amazon. It doesn't cost you anything extra, but Amazon commissions us, and that's huge. Also, mad love to everybody who has gone that extra mile to support me financially, my work financially, on Patreon. That means a tremendous amount to me, and I really appreciate it. If you would like to receive a free, short, weekly email from me, I send one out every Thursday. It's called Roll Call. Basically, five or six really quick things that I stumbled across over the course

• 1:33:20Rich Roll?

  of the week, a couple of articles, maybe a podcast I listened to, a documentary I watched, a book I'm reading. No spam, and I'm not trying to sell you anything. There's no affiliate links. I'm not making any money off of this. It's just a cool way for me to connect with you guys more directly and in a different way, because some of this stuff I don't share on social media. So, if that interests you, you can toss me your email in multiple places on my website, where you can enter that. What else can I tell you? Go to richroll.com for all your plant power merch and schwag needs. If you want a signed copy of my book, Finding Ultra, or our cookbook, The Plant Power Way, we got that. We got t-shirts, we got tech tees, we got other kinds of schwag and merch and

• 1:34:00Rich Roll?

  sticker packs and fun stuff. Big love to Jason Camiolo, who is not only my audio engineer, but has taken on a more active role in the production of this show. He's helping with the show notes now, and doing all kinds of behind the scenes stuff. He's doing a great job. Shawn Patterson, of course, for all his help on graphics and theme music by Analemma. Thanks for the love, you guys. I'll see you back here next week. And until then, have an amazing week. Peace. Plants. And stay Jedi.