#1355 Hannah Maruyama | Bitcoin Is Destroying Colleges

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

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Today's episode is with Hannah Maruyama. She is the founder of Degree Free. In this conversation, we talk about the data as to why college may not be as lucrative as people think, what some of the stories are, including an 18-year-old

• 0:43Anthony Pompliano?

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

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Propy. Imagine a world where you could buy and sell your home, wallet to wallet. With Prop keys, you can mint your home address and upgrade it to a real-world asset. This not only protects your home's title from fraud, but when you are ready to move, you could sell it through an NFT auction as well as through the traditional way. There's optionality here. Propy Keys is part of the Ecosystem. Their mission is to make home ownership more efficient, affordable, and user-friendly. Propy Keys is a fun entry point to placing title on the blockchain. Now, anyone can start their on-chain journey by minting home addresses via Propy Keys and staking them for profit until they are ready to sell their home. Visit propykeys.com to learn more. Again, that's propykeys.com to learn more.

• 2:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Supra. They just launched a brand-new million-dollar Bitcoin DeFi accelerator dedicated to Bitcoin L2 ecosystem dApps. Bitcoin builders, you can integrate with Supra's price feeds into your dApps and apply for the accelerator at supra.com/pomp-btc. Again, that's supra.com/pomp-btc. It's open for a limited time, so get moving ASAP. By the way, the program includes free access to Supra's price feeds with 600 to 900 millisecond data refreshness and next-gen accuracy, as well as low-latency verifiable randomness, both serving over 55 blockchains, including Bitcoin L2s. With these powerful services and the million-dollar Bitcoin DeFi accelerator,

• 3:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Supra is going all-in on the Bitcoin ecosystem. Here's something extra. If you're not a builder, you can earn $1,500 by referring Bitcoin L2 projects to apply to the million-dollar Bitcoin DeFi accelerator. Their projects can get financial support, and you bag $1,500 for every referral. Join Supra affiliates and spread the word. You can go to supra.com/pomp-btc to learn more. That's S-U-P-R-A dot com slash P-O-M-P hyphen B-T-C. Go check them out today. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Hannah here with me. Hannah, you have spent a ton of time with people who do not go on to get college degrees and instead get amazing jobs. And one of the things in the Bitcoin world that I find really fascinating is all about merit.

• 4:03Anthony Pompliano?

  It's not about credentialism. The blockchain doesn't ask you, you know, hey, where'd you get your degree? It doesn't ask you what your GPA was. And some of these people that you've worked with in the past are Bitcoin developers, et cetera. And so tell us a story of this 18-year-old Bitcoin developer with no college degree, completely self-taught, that seems to just be taking over the world now.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  So I am, I'm really stoked to talk about this. So Ryan and I have been running the Degree Free Podcast for almost three years now, which seems crazy to me, but we've been able to interview some just unbelievable degree free people. They just come out of the woodwork and most of the people that come out of the woodwork are tech people for whatever reason, but that makes a lot of sense. There's a big rash of self-taught tech people. The skills are very accessible, which is part of the reason that college is dying because the accessibility of the internet and ability to learn skills is kind of taking over. And a great example of that story, probably one of my favorites, is actually Damian Goodenough. And yes, that really is his name. He is unbelievable, super smart, this kid. And he actually heard me talking on the Best Business Show, this was a couple

• 5:07Speaker 02

  of years ago, and he was out on a tractor in a field. He was working and he heard, he was listening to this podcast, he has earbuds in, he was listening to the podcast, or he was listening to your show. And then he heard me just saying, you don't have to, you don't have to buy a college degree to, to learn these skills. And then he just said, okay. And then he went out and he taught himself how to code. And then he went and he went to physically networking events and he just asked people for jobs until somebody finally gave him one. And then he started building projects and started building, building portfolio. And it was so amazing. And so, and he has such a, obviously he's a maxi, but he has such a good frame for this because he just, very simply, in, in the way that only skill

• 5:51Speaker 02

  and youth can, just said, Bitcoin is about proof of work. Why do I have to buy something from an institution in order to show that I can do work? And the answer is you do not. And increasingly, we see that because there, there's such a rash of down credentialing in, across all industries right now. The M.C. Burning Glass Institute has been tracking this since 2014. And it's funny, a lot of people will say now that they think that job, job listings and job postings actually ask for more degrees than they used to, but that's just not the case. The numbers do not reflect that at all. There's been a steady trend of down credentialing across 51 million jobs posted in the last 10 years, specifically across

• 6:32Speaker 02

  Across finance, tech, medicine and education, which historically are very much locked up, papered positions and they're not. And, and the, the truth is too, that they actually weren't. Companies don't hire people that look like their job listings. And so they were actually weren't hiring that way. It just looks like they were because they were posting degree requirements in the job listings. And so people just have that impression.

• 6:57Anthony Pompliano?

  So that's interesting where people are actually hiring individuals for open roles that don't match the job description. It's almost kind of like, uh, you know, whenever somebody has an open role, they're like, okay, well, I want five years of experience. They need to have two degrees, uh, and we want them to have worked in this specific industry. But if a good person comes along, they're going to hire the good person, it seems like.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  Every single time. There's a really interesting study called dismissed by degrees that the Harvard Business Review did. I think it was about, I think it's about five years old at this time, but they found that across mid and high scale jobs, which is, that's a tough, that's a tough thing to pin down, but across mid and high scale jobs, according to them, they found that 67% of people employed in those jobs actually do not degrees, even if the position supposedly requires a degree. This is something that I explain a lot. Uh, I talk about this a lot on Degree Free. I talk about this a lot to the kids at my launch program, but basically a degree requirement is different from a degree request. So what a lot of these companies have up is they have a degree request. A degree requirement is something

• 7:57Speaker 02

  that is legally required. If, if a job does not legally require you to have a degree in order to do that job or get a license to do that job. So think, think actual physicians, right? Uh, CPAs, uh, FBI agents, because at the federal level, you have to have a college degree in order to become an FBI agent. But the actual percentage of jobs that require degrees, not request degrees, is actually very, very small. It's hard to run into that wall.

• 8:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Talk a little bit about this idea of like the proof of work, right? So if you don't have the degree, you have to have something to show. And in the example of the 18 year old Bitcoin developer, you were talking about like building a portfolio and you know, the paper is almost proof of work. It's like, hey, you went and you suffered through four years of school and like did everything they needed to give you this piece of paper. So like you passed the test, like here you go. Now you get a job. Um, proof of work though, as this core concept inside of the Bitcoin industry, um, how do you think about that for people who don't go and get a college degree?

• 8:52Speaker 02

  So for degree free people, and this is such a dynamic, this is such a dynamic topic, because if you don't buy a degree, you have to show your work. And therefore, you are almost held to a higher standard because you have to show that you were able to do whatever it is. And so that's why a lot of people who are degree free actually have outstanding portfolios. They have a lot of experience. They have a lot of skills to show because in order to compensate for the paper bias that does exist, we have to go out and we have to learn and we have to show that we're able to do these things. And so the way that we teach ourselves is probably a lot more aggressive and a lot more practical than a lot of college graduates, because college graduates graduate and they think that, oh, hey, if I just buy this piece of paper from a college, then that'll show

• 9:37Speaker 02

  that I can do, you know, insert skill here or insert job here. But the problem, and this is why enrollment, I think, is dropping and colleges as a whole are dying, is because there actually is really no standard and there's no real proof. You may come out of an art school with a portfolio because that's fundamentally a visual medium and they have to be able to show whatever they can do. Sometimes you're going to see that in industrial design. You may have some engineers that have really hands on things. Sometimes computer science majors have it, but, but really it's just kind of a crap shoot as to whether or not you come out of college with the ability to show an employer that you know how to do whatever the job is. And so, yeah, it's just kind of a, it's kind of an interesting thing, but I have noticed

• 10:19Speaker 02

  that degree free people will more aggressively build portfolios and more aggressively show their work because we have to. And yeah, I've seen that across, like I said, we interviewed a bunch of people from different big companies. You know, we've had engineers from AWS, product managers from Meta, we have a UX UI designer from Microsoft coming on, marketing manager from DEP for Dell North America, just very, very much like big job titles, big jobs. And all of them, the thing that's consistent across all of them is showing that they knew how to do whatever that job was. And they had to show it in a way that was really consumable and that was really, really good so that it got the attention of recruiters over, over other candidates. There's a problem there.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  I don't know if you've seen, but because of all of this down credentialing that's happening, IBM, Accenture, Walmart, Bank of America, Tesla, AWS, like all these big companies are removing degree requirements really aggressively. And one of the things that I have noticed is that in recent weeks, there's been, oh, this isn't working, this isn't working, this isn't working. And what's funny about that is, one, they only started doing these official removals and press releases about removals a couple of months ago. But the people largely who are in charge of hiring tend to be women that skew in a certain age range who all have one or multiple

• 11:40Speaker 02

  college degrees. And they tend to, they tend to believe that a college degree is the measurement of success. And because of that, all of these degree requirements being rolled back are only going to be effective when they retrain the bias out of all of their HR and hiring staff, which is going to be a difficult thing to do. So.

• 12:01Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you think about the people who don't have these college degrees, kind of merit, not credentialism, and doing that proof of work, getting the attention of the recruiter, right? If you don't have the resume, is it like you kind of have to network your way in? Or what is the thing that you see people be most successful with?

• 12:19Speaker 02

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

• 13:02Speaker 02

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

• 13:41Anthony Pompliano?

  That makes, that makes a ton of sense. Talk to me about some of the other data. Like, how popular is this path becoming?

• 13:48Speaker 02

  So there is, colleges are experiencing what I am really excited to call a catastrophic drop in enrollment, which they richly deserve, because colleges are just, it's wild how they can, they can have put most of the, a large percentage of the American population into 1.7 trillion dollars of student debt, while simultaneously building up their endowments to 848 billion dollars. And you'll have these college graduates screaming, eat the rich. I'm like, how about you eat the endowments? Because look at them. They're 848 billion dollars. A lot of these Ivy League colleges don't even need to charge tuition. They just do. And so what I'm seeing is parents, because who I'm working with is 16 to 20 year olds.

• 14:31Speaker 02

  So there's two different age groups that are really benefiting from the launch program, which is how I'm helping families create curriculum so they can learn skills, so their kids can get jobs without having to buy degrees. So the 16 to 17 year olds are looking for a plan pre, you know, pre-graduation, pre-high school graduation. And then I get another age bracket, which is 19 to 20, who typically has gone to college and it has already failed them. And so I think what's happening is there's two different types of people right now who are just, one, pulling their kids out of college, or their kids are breaking out of college because it's just failing them. It's not helping them get to their goals. And the other group, which is just looking at the staggering cost, because the NCES data from, from last year said that the cost of a four-year bachelor's degree is 104,000,

• 15:16Speaker 02

  which is deceptive, because no one graduates in four years. Most college graduates take at least five and a half years. And the total cost for that is $156,000 all in over a lifetime. When they lose out on wages, when they are paying interest and they're also paying the cost of tuition, the NCES and BLS data reflects that the average cost for a bachelor's degree right now over the lifetime is $500,000. And there's no way that you're going to get that amount of value out of a piece of paper from a college when the colleges cannot keep up with the speed of actual education. And I say that because college is not education. Those are not synonyms. College is a form of education, but no one owns education. No one can paywall education. And so I just feel like it's really important to distinguish between those two things because

• 16:01Speaker 02

  people will just say, oh, you know, education needs to be accessible. And I just say, well, education is accessible. College is inaccessible. Those are not the same things even at all. So.

• 16:10Anthony Pompliano?

  What are the curriculum in this launch program that you have? Like, talk through some of the curriculum that people are pursuing if they're not going to college. Like, what are those things?

• 16:19Speaker 02

  Oh, man. So this is, the thing I keep hearing from parents is that I'm the only one doing anything like this and they've never seen anything like this. So it's really cool. What I'm doing is I'm taking these kids one-on-one through a very intensive analysis process. And then I'm doing about 35 to 40 hours of research on the backend. So what I'm doing is breaking down their goals. So I'm figuring out where they want to live, how much income they want to make in order to pay their bills, what kind of schedule they want to have, what sort of work environment they want, as opposed to just asking these young adults and just saying, what do you want to do? Because they have no idea. And I'll get to that in a second. But what I'm doing is breaking that down. And then we narrow the list several times. And then I get them to a list of three to five jobs that they want.

• 17:03Speaker 02

  And so it completely depends on their goals. Right? So a good example is I have one girl right now who on the top of her list is actually horology, which is watchmaking. And so Rolex has actually a watch. They have, they just opened a watch school in Dallas. It's tuition free for 18 months. So my main goal is to break every single job that they want. So, so we narrowed the list to three to five jobs. Of those jobs, I give them three options to learn every single type of job that's on their list. So for example. Uh, the girl that's interested in horology where that that that made it to her end list. So for her, she has the Rolex school as her as her middle tier option. Her entry tier option is actually like a local apprenticeship at a at a watch at a watchmaker's shop.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  And the last one is a really intensive actual college because that for her is the goal that she was trying to get to. So I don't eliminate college degrees. What I treat them as is a last resort. So the way I explain education to people is that if you're trying to learn something, you can pay in two different ways. You can pay with time or you can pay with money. So if you're paying with time, what you're going to do is you're either going to do an apprenticeship where you're paying with your time. Ideally, when I'm finding these options for for these young adults, I'm trying to find something that will pay them. Because there's actually a lot of, there's a lot of apprenticeships. And that's for craft work, for trade work, for tech work. But we're breaking it down and trying to give them different options that do not cost what a college degree costs. And with how much colleges are charging, that's really not a difficult thing to do.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  It's cheaper to go to flight school than it is to buy the average bachelor's degree. Like, it's really, so there's a lot of room for me to work with. And a lot of these parents are looking, um, the most common reaction I get is in that end call when I review it with both the student and the parent. The parents laugh because they just didn't realize, they didn't realize what's out there. And it's really difficult because right now there's no good resource for finding these things. It just takes me hours of local research and calling and emailing and and double checking pricing and double checking all of these things. So this is something we're trying to build right now, but a way to make that more available to more people. Because right now it's just, it's just, you know, me and Ryan doing it and just doing all this research. But it's, the results are just so cool.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  So, um, you know, I have like IT automation specialists and finding courses for them and bootcamps for them. And then software developers, which I give them an option, here's how you can teach yourself. And I'll do a full open source curriculum for them with a current skill stack for the industry that they want to go into. So I had, uh, I had one kid that he was super interested in the wearables, like health, you know, um, healthcare tech wearables. And so I built him an open source curriculum for the most in-demand skills that I saw showing up on listings for those types of jobs. But it's just very custom, it's super custom, but it's really, really cool, you know? And so it's trades to tech to anything in between.

• 19:51Anthony Pompliano?

  College, let's say, takes four years, maybe a little bit longer depending on if they complete it in four years or not. How long do these kind of self-paced, you know, study or apprenticeships, et cetera? How long does that usually take?

• 20:03Speaker 02

  So the type of things that I'm looking to do, so my criteria for success for the launch program is the families that come through my program, their students will save, let's save at least two years and ideally $50,000 at minimum. If I can save them more than that, then fantastic. So for a lot of the kids, what they end up doing is, it depends on your definition of employment. So if I find them in apprenticeship, technically they're cash flow positive immediately, right? But if they have, if they're going to pay to learn a skill or do something else, then it may take them one to two years. But my goal is to get them to the point where they can earn the median college graduate salary within one to three years of coming out of the launch program with plan.

• 20:48Anthony Pompliano?

  And then what are the downsides to not going to college? Like, how do you think about like the risks that people are taking by not pursuing that path?

• 20:55Speaker 02

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

• 21:37Speaker 02

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

• 22:23Anthony Pompliano?

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

• 22:44Speaker 02

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

• 23:25Speaker 02

  which are two, so there's two separate problems here. So let's do income first. Income first is that Georgetown study is measuring the earnings of people who started going to college in 1965. So you can't assess it was like all the, right? And this is just bad data, right? Because all of the data is in the past, because the only way they can get that data is in the past. And yes, obviously, if you're a baby boomer, or if you're Gen X, you know, like older Gen X, and you went to college, then there's a completely different profile for earnings. Because at the time that they were started measuring this data, only eight percent of the population had college degrees and they were only buying college degrees in the fields where you actually need them, like engineering and medicine.

• 24:08Speaker 02

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

• 24:51Speaker 02

  it out. Because if you look at who colleges accept, 75%, almost 80, it's actually 77%, almost 80% of bachelor's degree holders come from the top 50% of earners. But it's not the college that's making a kid successful. It's the socioeconomic status they're coming from prior. And that's why when people from the lower 50%, which I fall into, buy college degrees, we get terrible results. Because it's not about, it's not about the socioeconomic, it's not about the degree. The degree is not what makes you successful. It's what that is, is that people that come from that earnings bracket, their children tend to purchase this thing, or they tend to purchase it for their children. It's like saying, oh, well, people, you know, like, if you have a, if you have a Tesla, you're going to be successful. And it's like, no, you just, you just tend to buy Teslas because you're in a certain earnings bracket.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  Anyway, so there's that. The second thing, and this is something that we're actually working on right now. I'm not a data analyst. Ryan's not a data analyst, but we're working on a white paper with it, with this right now. I, this is like big, short, level crazy, what I'm about to tell you. Because when we were looking into the actual data, we're looking into the BLS data for this, what we realized was that the way that well, household wealth information, the breakdowns are done is by census data. And what's the problem with census data? Is it, it's done by household. So currently, the way it is right now, and this, this is the craziest thing, and I realized that this is what, it looks very much like this is what's going on, is that if one of the people in the household has bought a college degree, and the other person in the household is degree free, they will attribute the household

• 26:19Speaker 02

  wealth to the degree holder. So for example, Joe Rogan.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  Hundred, hundred million dollars, right? How much is his net worth? I have no idea. It's a lot. His wife has a bachelor's degree. Joe Rogan is degree free. They're going to attribute Joe Rogan's earnings and his household wealth to a college degree because his wife has a bachelor's degree. That's crazy, but that's how they're breaking it down. And so there's a, so both wealth, so both the earnings picture and the wealth picture are obscured because of the type of data, the way they're pulling it. And, and also the type of people that tend to have their kids buy college degrees. I think a lot of this is like societal and so it's coming from back in the day, you know, back in the 1960s, let's go to college. Why? Because back then those were all professions that were higher earning because they required degrees for legal licensure like law and medicine.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  Right? And so it's kind of this spillover where in 1965, the government started subsidizing student loans. And when they started doing that, there was a steep increase in purchase, which makes sense because anytime, but also anytime the government subsidizes anything, it turns into a shit show. And so immediately as soon as they started doing that, in, in, it was 19, I always say, I always say, um, 1970, but it was 1976. They then had to make a law against defaults on student loans. So actually my theory is that the ROI, that's when it stopped. That's when it started to get crisis level, but the colleges at that point were so excited to have a blank check that they just kept, they just kept doing it. And instead they went to the government and they use the government as a tool to keep people from, from, from, you know, being able to write off their student loans and bankruptcy.

• 27:54Speaker 02

  So anyway, there's a lot there. There's a lot that they're working on, but it's just a crazy, once we realize that that's how they were doing the, that's, that's how they were doing the household wealth. Was a pretty shocking. A lot of people don't know that and it's difficult to break down that whole million dollar earnings thing.

• 28:10Anthony Pompliano?

  That, um, that, that makes me think about, um, software is obviously a huge part. People say, hey, go learn to code. There's coding boot camps and all that kind of stuff. What, what are the other sectors where you see this really being a kind of most valuable, where people can actually skip college? Are there like trends or, or patterns that you're, uh, now starting to see?

• 28:28Speaker 02

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

• 29:12Speaker 02

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

• 29:55Speaker 02

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

• 30:36Speaker 02

  be doing that. Like you, you are, you are using paper when you are trying to build an entire system that is not based on paper where the value fluctuates. Anyway, so that just, that one gets me.

• 30:48Anthony Pompliano?

  It makes sense, though, right, from the perspective that you're presenting here. Talk a little bit about the launch program before I let you go and kind of how the program works. If people are interested in going and checking it out.

• 30:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. So and then also, we're about to have a we're about to have a book come out as well. And so that's going to be degreefree.co/otheroptions. But that the goal of that is to guide people through figuring out what options are going to work for their children, figuring out what they should do after high school, figuring out whether or not those things legally require a college degree. Because that's the first level of checking. But if people are interested in the launch program, I take rolling applications. And so the way that works is you can go to degreefree.co/launch. And then that's where you can apply for the program. But the way it works is it's four one-hour sessions. And what I do is I take I work one-on-one with your child and I generate reports and analysis for parents and children the entire way through.

• 31:43Speaker 02

  And what I do is I take their goals where they're trying to get in life. So we base work on the type of life they want to live, not pull your work out of a hat and then structure your whole life around and hope that that's going to be effective. Because goals matter a lot. And then if you don't optimize and you don't set goals, you're going to end up who knows where, which is the problem for a lot of college graduates. And so we end up what we end up with is a very fine-tuned list of three to five jobs that will help your child live the type of life they want to live in income, in location, ideally in schedule, and sometimes even in industry, right? So in specific industries that they want to work in. But that's the last factor, not the first one. Because right now, people are picking that first, and that's the wrong way to go about picking work.

• 32:25Speaker 02

  And then from there, outlining options where they can learn those things, learn those skills for much, much less and much quicker usually than buying a college degree, aside from flight schools or apprenticeships that take four to five years to become a journeyman for trades.

• 32:44Anthony Pompliano?

  And then if people want to listen to the podcast, where can we send them?

• 32:49Speaker 02

  Um, so it's degree free.co forward slash podcast. Uh, if you want to watch the video, we tend to be a lot more fun. And that's actually on YouTube. So it'd, uh, it'd be, uh, degree free on YouTube.

• 33:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. Hannah, you're doing, uh, you're doing an amazing job. I think that, uh, people are incredibly, um, uh, I, their eyes were opened when, uh, they hear kind of, uh, the data, they see what you're doing. Um, and the thing I love maybe more than anything is you have the stories, you have the anecdotes, you have the, the things that back up and, and watching this, uh, this happen. So I appreciate the work that you're doing and, and I hope that you continue. Please, please don't get, uh, burnt out. There's still a lot of work to do.

• 33:28Speaker 02

  So much.

• 33:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Ryan. Um, but no, thank you so much. Uh, hopefully this was valuable to people and, and kind of seeing this other path. And, and, you know, it goes back to kind of the, the Bitcoin ethos of proof of work and, and being able to actually show that, um, is quite important as well. So, uh, thank you, and we'll definitely do this again in the future.

• 33:44Speaker 02

  Cool. Thank you.