Should you go to college!? James Debates Jim Keyes

27:19But almost to your point, like tuition is 10 times higher now at the private schools like Harvard. It's like 70K a year, you know, not counting other costs of going there. And so tuition is 10 times higher, but the average income is not 10 times higher than 50 years ago. and yeah do the magic go back and look at the math books average hour back back in and when i when i was when i was yeah so seven so mcdonald's workers don't make 17 an hour or they they make whatever the minimum wage is i don't know maybe that is 17 an hour i don't know close it's getting up there it's hard to hard to hire anybody for less than 12 to 15 dollars now let's say so again it's not dollar for dollar.

28:03Yeah, there's probably some impact of higher education cost versus inflation, but it's not as extreme. My school today at$7 ,500 a year would be$50 ,000 a year. It wasn't Harvard either. And I think I sit on the board of my school, I think they're now at $70 ,000, something like that. So it's a little more, but look, it was astronomical back then. it was crazy it was impossibly expensive back then but but like so so let's say it is 70 yeah let's say i and i know a lot of colleges where they're all over the place on the academic scale harvard's you know despite recent news harvard's the first like i would say i i would agree with you harvard no matter what is worth it like people at harvard get hired by other people who graduated from Harvard 20 years ago, and it's usually, you know, top investment bank or top Hollywood studio or top, you know, Tesla or SpaceX or Google.

29:04But if you didn't go to Harvard and you went to Hartford College, which also is like, I believe 70K a year, it's just not in the same level as Harvard. They would, most colleges would agree with that. Is it, and then you're going to major in like, you know, XYZ studies, is it still worth it? I think, and it's just a person's opinion. Absolutely. Because bottom line, you're investing in yourself and it's going to be whatever you make it worth. So if you start a business and you take on a bunch of debt and you don't really dig in and run that business, you're going to fail. If you go to Harvard or if you go to Providence college.

29:50It doesn't matter. It's what you put into that effort and how much education you pull out of it that will still give you the tools to succeed. Yeah. And so let me ask you this. Is there a type of person who shouldn't go to college? And one type I think we both would agree on, if you're interested in a high paying vocation, like electrician or whatever, maybe go to a vocational oriented school because you can make a great living. You won't get into debt. It'll be much cheaper and life is good. But like what, what category shouldn't go to any of these schools? So I think, and I'm one of these people that believes, you know, we're all capable of anything we want to accomplish, you know, um, unless you have some sort of a true mental or physical handicap and can't, you know, succeed.

30:43I think anybody has the raw horsepower to be able to succeed. So I would say anyone should try, should give themselves the opportunity. Because I was one of those kids. I mean, I'd be in a factory today making, cutting big blocks into little blocks and bored out of my brain. But I took the chance and I invested in myself and I put the hard work in. Thank God I did. But I do believe that anyone has that opportunity. Now, I've got this expression, shoot for the stars and if you miss, you'll still have the moon, right? You can still do well. So if you strive for the best, if you set out and say, I'm going to go to college, and maybe you don't have the horsepower, maybe you don't have the will to put the work in to to be able to get there, then there's always still that vocational avenue.

31:37You could be a pilot today without a college degree because we have a desperate need for pilots. You can make$150 ,000, $200 ,000 a year being a pilot. I'm a pilot, but I'd rather own the airplane than work for somebody else and fly it. Right? Right. But let me, let me ask this. What was your first job out of college? What was your first job? Well, first job, McDonald's while in college. But yeah, out of college. You graduated, you had that degree, you're applying, first time applying, going to job fairs, whatever it is you did to get a job. What was your very first job out of college? I think if I'm not mistaken, it was like Gulf Oil, right?

32:16Or no? I actually had an interim before going back to grad school. I worked for a company called Curry. It was like a FedEx Kinko's kind of business. And I worked for them for about a year. Okay, and then you went back to business school or whatever. Yeah. And you ended up being a manager at a big company, and that was your career. Correct, yeah. I ended up getting an internship while in graduate school. It was Gulf Oil. And they offered me a chance to come back full-time and work for them. So I was actually planning to go back to law school and bag that because I was starving to death. So I took the job and ended up in Gulf Oil.

33:01And so my question for you then is, did you ever have a job ever again where they asked you what college you went to? Yes. Still, it matters today. So when you went to Southland, they already knew who you were, right? They knew you were great. They knew who you were. They wanted you to help run 7-Eleven. They didn't really need to see your degree. They didn't need to, but it was a differentiation factor. I'm absolutely, there's no doubt in my mind when it came down to me versus somebody else for that chief operating officer role, chief financial officer role, it still came down to, okay, so what is his academic background?

33:43And it was a factor. It may not have been the only factor, but differentiation. And this is the point, James. Differentiation is as important for people as it is for businesses or products. We have to - I agree with you on that. But now everybody's gone to college. And so how do I differentiate myself? Well, I could say, start a business. Oh, do I pick the guy who just graduated from Yale? or do I pick the person who, instead of going to Yale, started a business, okay, didn't do great, but he or she still sold it for a couple hundred thousand or he or she made a living and had like 500 customers for whatever their services were.

34:27And who am I gonna be more impressed by? I might be impressed by the entrepreneurial person. You might be in every circumstance is gonna be different. But think about it. I could also say I wanna go be a professional basketball player because I don't need to agree. I don't need to do anything. I'm just going to go be a pro basketball player and I can do my best. But what if I'm not that good, right? So we have to be careful that the outliers in business, people go, well, Michael Dell dropped out of school, you know, or this guy didn't even go to school. He just went straight to Silicon Valley.

34:59There are always in any industry, whether it's basketball, whether it's football, whether it's business, there are going to be outliers who will succeed under any circumstance. The reality, the practical, and this is where I'm coming from, James, it's the practical reality, having run two big Fortune 500 companies, you got 400 ,000 employees, right? You need a new person to do XYZ job. You don't have time to like be sitting there going, gee, I wonder how smart they are. You have to, you have to have some frame of reference.

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36:49So let's say you're going to hire someone who's going to manage some division that has 5 ,000 employees or even be the number two or number three guy in such a division. And you see, oh, here's an applicant. First, he ran a division at, I'm going to make it up, J.P. Morgan. Then he ran a division at 3M, and then at GE. He's managed 25 ,000 employees before. Is it really going to be important for you to find out what his GPA was at college? No, no. But again, the experience, think of it as two lines that cross. Early on in your career, it's going to be pretty important because what track record do you have?

37:33You ever run anything, you don't run anything, right? Right, that's why I asked what your first job was because it's the second where they know who you are by then. Exactly, exactly. So experience will get increasingly important over time. I mean, would I not hire Michael Dell or Bill Gates? Of course I would, right, if they came in and applied for a job. But Bill Gates may not have gotten to the point that he got to but for being an outlier, that he succeeded in spite of the lack of formal education. I don't know, was it Bill that dropped out of college? But anyway. Yeah, Bill, all those guys you mentioned dropped out.

38:12Yeah. But I agree they're outliers. Yeah. And at some point, experience is more important than pedigree, right? Than degree. Right. But could they get that experience without having that point of differentiation early on? Yeah, maybe. And to some extent, it depends on when you grow up. So I grew up in a little bubble. I'm not sure what vintage you are, but in my vintage, I grew up. I was following you right close behind. Okay. All right. So things are pretty good. I mean, we were in a kind of a booming economy and I didn't need to go to college. Like I said, McDonald's was banging the door down, trying to keep me from going to college, saying, you don't need that degree.

38:55And I didn't at the time. But if I sold out for the near-term opportunity, now maybe I could have run McDonald's someday. I just think my probability of success would have been exponentially lowered without the degree to differentiate. I mean, we don't really know, but I would argue against you in the sense that you clearly knew how to build something. You acquired business skills. They don't teach a lot. Like in your book, you mentioned all these things about what we need to learn, why we need to learn them, how we need to learn them. None of those things are taught in college. Like, yes, you can argue algebra teaches you some element of critical thinking.

39:37History, writing history essays and having them graded teaches you critical thinking, hopefully teaches you curiosity. That's questionable in a college environment and so on. And clarity, hopefully it teaches you. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. But I bet if you went to Hamburger University then sooner or later you would run a franchise then you would start thinking oh i can borrow off the cash flow on these franchises and i could have two franchises then three and then 10 then you could take you could sell your 50 franchise company for 100 million dollars and boom you know would it have been as hard i don't know i mean you have you worked for 21 years for running you know at different stages 7-11 you worked at blockbuster for many years like that was hard too.

40:24That was stressful. It took a long time, hard. Maybe you would have had that a hundred million much quicker if you were doing your own thing and you had that head start of not having to go to college and business school. Cause that takes six years. Very possible. Very possible. I could have. And again, it's, it's all about probabilities. I'm a business guy. I looked at it as an investment and the probabilities of success without that investment or substantially lower than the probabilities of success with it. I can start a business without having sufficient capital, whether it's debt or equity.

41:01I can start that business and struggle along for a whole lot of years, and maybe I'll get lucky. Or I can start that business properly capitalized with either debt or equity and give myself a better chance of success. Same thing with investing in yourself for education. Yeah. And, and you're even including the opportunity costs. Like you went to school for six years. Okay. I went to school also for a bunch of years and that's a lot of time. Like imagine if you had, you know, decided I want to be a business guy or an entrepreneur. And so I'm going to starting at 18, I'm going to just get experience, like learning how to run a business and studying the people around me and so on.

41:45Like, what's a scenario, what's a path where it would have been better for you not to do the education that you did? I honestly don't think there would have been a path. I think I would have been, I would have followed the same trajectory that many in my family did. You know, I would have struggled. And eventually I probably would have given into my own self-doubt because that's the biggest killer of people that aren't able to get that education. There's that self-doubt, that nagging, you know, oh, I didn't get a degree, blah, blah, blah. And they start talking to themselves and they convince themselves they're not smart enough, they're not good enough.

42:25That's where the outliers silence that fear, right? I do agree with that. Like my wife didn't go to college and I see that self-doubt in her occasionally, even though it's many, many years later. Maybe I shouldn't have said that part. That was more sensitive to say than not going to college part. You're the one in trouble. Right. But I could see how there's sometimes self-doubt because of that. But that's, again, the two main reasons you're bringing up are kind of society produced and not learning. They're not for reasons of learning, but for reasons of society. Well, you're right. And that's the practical side of my message is society is what it is.

43:10like it or not, we're going to be measured. We're going to be graded. We're going to be scored. We're going to be held to a different standard. And that's not going to change in my lifetime or yours or somebody watching likely. But there's also the non not so practical. Well, no, maybe this is practical. The things that you learn that we don't have the discipline necessarily. Some would. Some would have the discipline to get online without any instruction, without a teacher, without a formal process and learn more than you or I would have ever learned. There are some people that can do that. The average person needs a little more structure, some discipline behind it, how to study, why to study.

43:53And then there's the whole social element that we tend to forget, especially today, because it's so easy to immerse ourselves in a small darkened room with a screen. but there's the whole social side of education that forces you to work with other people. I've got a whole book on, a whole chapter on collaboration. I didn't learn collaboration until grad school. And it was all me. And all of a sudden I had to rely on other people for my grade and it was horrifying. Right. But it taught me the real world that you have to collaborate. I wish Congress would figure that out. You know, you see that that's just it.

44:33Like Congress doesn't figure that out. And I'm just wondering if you learn 10 times more about collaboration in the real world than in a college thing. Like I feel I didn't just like I feel like I didn't really learn real world computer programming till I was in the real world. I don't know if I really learned collaboration or, for instance, shortly after my first real job, I started a company and I was an entrepreneur. And I don't think I would have been able to learn any of those skills in college. you know i took some business school classes but i you know marketing the techniques of marketing change all the time you know leadership changes sales techniques it seems like it should be the same but it changes you know and i don't know i feel like i need that real world experience to really learn you need a combination a lot i i describe a college degree or even a graduate school graduate school is a little different because there you're you're generally learning a specialty.

45:30So, you know, if you were going to be an accountant, but I'm better off having had to take core accounting, at least I know of my accountants telling me, you know, something crazy or not. I describe the college degree, though, as almost like getting a pilot's license. I got a pilot's license, 40 hours, right? I was terrified. Get in the airplane and you scare the crap out of yourself the first time you're up there. And then, you know, you do things, you get pretty comfortable and then you do something else that scares you to death and you almost crash and you go, oh my gosh, thank God I learned from that, right?

46:03Or you come into a crosswind or something. The pilot's license is a license to learn. It basically gives you that core kind of skill that then turns you loose in the real world to go learn from the experience of flying. And that's kind of what a college degree does. It teaches you how to learn, but it doesn't teach you everything you need to know to be successful. It just gives you that fundamental structure and discipline to then be a license to learn when you get out into the real world and you start applying those things. Also, it depends a little bit on the quality of the professor or the professors you have.

46:46Were you encouraged to really think critically and explore things you were curious about? Or did you have to follow some agenda and mostly use rote memory and even your critical thinking. You had to kind of align with the professor's critical thinking. And I'm not saying this in a political way, but just like in any profession, you know, most of the people are mediocre to bad and very few are really good. So professor is the same thing. Oh yeah. It's a real world. It's a real world. But this is a point that I make in the book that's so important. When I say the future's in your hands, if you have a crappy math teacher, I had a really bad math teacher at one point it just frustrated the heck out of me today i could go to khan academy it's like i don't care if i've got a crappy math teacher it doesn't matter i'm going to supplement this knucklehead with my own learning but i still come out with that degree the credentials the ability to get into a quality graduate school etc if i use that as an excuse ah the teacher's junk, so I'm going to quit.

47:46I mean, what have I done to myself? Right? So there's always going to be bad teachers. There's always going to be a bad, you know, infrastructure, lots of excuses, but the power really is in our hands. Let's say you were starting a software company and one guy came to you and had a four-year degree in computer programming and another guy had a Google certificate. So Google started these things called Google certificates. And I think at a site, a learning site Coursera, you can get a Google certificate. You study different computer science things and IT things, but it takes you only like, it's almost like a pilot's license worth of work.

48:22You know, it's not going to be the 10 ,000 hours, but also it isn't that way for someone majoring in computer programming. They also have to take a language and they have to take, you know, philosophy and an English class. And they're not really spending all, you know, they're spending one fifth their time or one fourth their time on computers. So would you take someone who had a Google certificate. So this is an educational program modeled by Google about what they need to hire. Would you do that over a college degree or consider them equal or how would you consider it? You know, I honestly don't know because I think every situation is gonna be different and that may be, you know, a case where I would say, sure, I'll take that Google certificate.

49:04Again, there are too few of those credentialing alternatives to college today. So that may be one example that there may be a Google certificate that's, that is worthwhile. But if I had somebody with a Google certificate and a degree, I might take that person over both of the others. And same as a, you don't need a degree to be a pilot. But if I had a pilot come and apply for a job and he's got a college degree, you know what? Probably going to take him over somebody that just came through. Yeah. Yeah, but let's say, okay, and I'm not trying to, I'm asking questions legitimately. Like there are several categories of people.

49:46And like, for instance, we know there's a category of people who should go to vocational school as opposed to college. Sure. And I'm just wondering, like you mentioned, if someone's going to be in the NBA, maybe they don't have to go to college if their only reasons for going would have been practical as opposed to learning oriented. But what about someone who really wants to be an actor, for instance? and the years 18 to 22, that's a critical age for a lot of people who just go to LA and audition, have more opportunity than someone who waits four years and starts at 22. Because you're still going to need like five to 10 years of auditioning before you break out in many cases.

50:22So what if someone just wants to be an actor or really wants to pursue it, give it a chance? What would you tell that person? Go to college. Here's why. You can be a wildly successful actor. and you don't need a college degree, who's going to manage money? Because as soon as you get money, you're an NBA star. You're LeBron James. You have to rely on somebody else to manage your stuff because you don't really get the horsepower to do that. How are you going to know you need somebody else? There's a lot of successful people who went to college who went broke after they made money. I'm going to raise my own hand here.

51:01I went broke the first time I made money. and I didn't know I needed someone else. I thought I was smart because I ran a business. No, you're absolutely right. You can go broke whether you're rich, whether you're poor, whether you're smart, whether you're dumb. You can go broke in any circumstances. The point is, there is always a need for that breadth of education. You can either go deep and learn one thing, like basketball or be a pilot or whatever, or you can go wide and you'll learn a lot of things. And my point is, and I'm the outlier, James, I am, there are going to be people sitting here that are so mad that want to climb through the screen.

51:41And most people very much agree with you. And you're making very persuasive arguments. Well, no, I think right now the narrative is more aligned with where you're coming from, that college is not relevant. There's, there's a Wall Street Journal article that just said, like, two weeks ago, college is no longer respected, no longer important. I'm the counterpoint to that. And the reason I'm the counterpoint to that is I'm not looking at today. I'm looking at 20, 30, 40 years from now and where we are as a country. If the rest of the world is doubling down and tripling down on formal education and we're sitting here going, I'm going to go be a TikTok star, you know, I'm a little scared for where we will be in 30, 40 years as a country and as a society.

52:29really if we're not, we don't have the breadth of knowledge that you get one way or another in college. You know, I wonder, like, so they're doubling down on college, but that's mostly they're doubling down on STEM. They want the next genomicists and AI people. They don't want them to go to America and then stay in America. So they've been doubling down on STEM. But if someone here is an entertaining person and has no interest in STEM, what should they really, like I'm basically asking, is there any category of person? And I think the answer is no, but is there any category of person that you say, just start getting experience?

53:10Okay, the electricians, you're going to go here. Is it everybody else go here? Or is it these people go here, like the STEM people go here. And if you really love philosophy, also go here. But if you want to be a TikTok star, try this for a couple of years. Even the electrician, I would say, do you really want to have to be climbing through attics and wiring, you know, and doing all this hard, hard work for the rest of your life? And do you really want to be tied to whatever the current salary is for an electrician? Or do you want to have the opportunity to go own the electrician firm or build a whole chain of electrical, you know, electrical electrician services.

53:57I mean, it's, it's, my answer is for everyone, shoot for the moon, learn as much as you possibly can shoot for the stars, learn as much as you possibly can to give yourself the optionality. And this is what it's about. It's not about money. And this is the difference. Education is, it's not the book, education is money. It's education is freedom because it's that breadth of learning that gives you options, that gives you freedom to do anything you wanna do later on in life. See, I 100 % agree with that. And you lay out the things you really need to learn, how you learn them, and so on. You lay that out perfectly.

54:39Like critical thinking, curiosity, creativity, these are so important. And I just ask myself, did I learn those things in college or did I learn those things through my own initiative? But then I have to ask myself, does everybody have the same level of initiative? Some people do, some people don't. Maybe they do later in their career or maybe they do when they're younger. And so I'm just wondering what category of people, really it's a misuse of their time for them to spend six years reading books or when they could have learned what they needed to learn on YouTube videos, like your friend Will, and then they could have started some career six years earlier that needed a more youthful initiative to start?

55:29I think the simple answer is you'll know. Hopefully you as an individual know. It's not two years, four years of college, eight years of college. that that is less relevant than whatever it takes to give yourself the broadest of opportunity because that's the key none of us know what we want to do i thought i wanted to be a lawyer i would have been a terrible lawyer um but it wasn't until graduate school that i discovered hey business is kind of fun i actually like this i'd be i'd be bored to tears in in a law firm trying to read contracts. Yuck. But I didn't know that at the time until I learned more and experienced more.

56:15And then all of a sudden it was like, wow. And I have the tools now. I have the background that lets me to pivot and go left or right or do any of these things. I'd go be a professional pilot right now if I wanted to, just because of learning, the breadth of learning. Right. And, and, but learning, as, as you mentioned, is not necessarily connected directly with, you know, with traditional institutional higher education, like a college, like you could learn like, like by, you know, there's, there's a great site. I was just playing with it last week. You'll appreciate this site. Learningverse or learnerverse.ai.

56:54You type in, I want to learn all about the Roman empire. and it'll ask you some questions and then it comes up with an entire class curriculum and it says, do you approve of this curriculum? Do you want to add anything else? No, no, okay. And then it searches for a few seconds and it curates for every class. Like maybe it'll have 20 different classes inside the category of Roman Empire. And for each class, it'll curate the YouTube videos that you should watch that it thinks are the best ones for that, you know, like social structure of the Roman Empire through the centuries. And there'll be a YouTube video on that.

57:28or three YouTube videos, or decline in the Roman Empire is four YouTube videos you should watch. So it broke down the Roman Empire into 20 categories and then it found the right videos for you to watch. It created a course for you. Like, that seems like a great way to learn now. Oh, it's a great way to learn. It's a great way to learn and a great way to supplement. And net, net, James, net, net, it doesn't matter how you learn as long as you learn, right? That is the most important message is to learn. Now. I agree with that. The practical side of that, though, is there are realities in society of measurement systems.

58:05Whether you're borrowing money for a new business or you want to get into a country club, they're going to look at who are you and what are your credentials. And maybe you're successful enough that you don't need any college because you've been so wildly successful as an NBA star or as a business entrepreneur. that you don't need anything. But most of us, most of us are not going to be those outliers. And we're going to need something to be able to say, here's who I am on paper for at least the foreseeable future. Someday, like you said, it'll be Google certificates. It'll be, you know, Khan Academy graduate because he passed all the Khan Academy things and you can be a math wizard now.

58:51But today we don't have those. And until technology progresses enough that we've got consistent measurement capabilities online and those kinds of things, it'll come. That's the future, but it's probably 20 on the road. So taking an extreme example, if you can see the future and know that from the ages of 18 to 22, you're going to succeed as an actor, then maybe it's okay to be an actor. But if you don't know, and yeah, let's say you're always interested in learning. So that's taken care of because you could just read books, watch YouTube videos. But the practical side, if you don't know if you're going to be a successful actor, but you happen to have majored in accounting, at the very least, you could get a job as an accounting firm and then a CFO and then so on.

59:38Yeah, yeah, exactly. Although there may be opportunity costs there where you could have been auditioning and instead you were in class. That's the only, that's. There may be. That's always going to be the case that you've got to measure that opportunity cost of not starting in the professional world as early. And that's always going to be the case. That's why I said, you know, you'll know, hopefully you'll know. I mean, if you're, if you're LeBron James, you go, do I go to college or do I need to? because the opportunity cost of not joining the NBA right out of high school is far greater than otherwise, right?

1:00:18It's a personal decision and he can make that decision and he was right, obviously, to go straight into the NBA. Because he also, he actually could see the future because when he was 17 or 18, he was offered tens of millions of dollars to join a team. So he knew, okay, I'm at least going to make this. Then I can go to college if I want. if I bomb out of the NBA. Exactly, exactly. So, but it is interesting because when I'm going through your book, okay, we're obviously debating about college and education right now, but your book is not really about that. Like, yes, you mentioned college a couple of times, but only a few times.

1:00:58And you really say the important thing is learning critical thinking, learning confidence, being curious, being creative. Like you have all these, and then you have techniques for how you can enhance these things, learn these things. And this is really about like meta learning. Like these are the tools you need to succeed in society in a meta way. No matter what you learn in college, you need to still be a critical thinker. You need to still be curious and creative. And so those things, why don't they teach them better in college? Or maybe someone should create a college around your book where that's the curriculum is, okay, here's what we're going to learn to be a critical thinker across many disciplines.

1:01:37Here's how we're going to be creative across many disciplines and so on. Yeah. Yeah. I wish they would. In fact, I'm talking to a number of colleges now. I actually, when I started writing this book, I targeted it at junior, senior high school to encourage them to use this roadmap, if you will, to go to college and to do well in college. But then I started realizing, you know what? They don't teach this stuff in college. These are the songs. skills. They are the soft skills. And actually it was somebody that runs a very large academic institution that said, Jim, I want to buy a thousand books.

1:02:14And I was like, really? And they said, yeah, I want to give this to every one of my professors and my administrators, because I want them to think about how we incorporate these soft skills into all of our learning in all of our classes. I was like, wow, I hadn't thought about that, but these are the things you don't learn necessarily in college. I don't even like the phrase soft skills that much because these are like meta skills. Like no matter what industry you're in, like a soft skill might be sales is a soft skill. Yeah. But like curiosity is something that's going to enhance your sales technique.

1:02:53You know, curiosity is going to enhance your study of, you know, feminist studies. Curiosity will make you better than other people who are studying feminist studies because your insights will be more interesting because they're going to break the frontier wherever that discipline is. And you list in your book all the different types of curiosity there is, like different ways to kind of enhance your own curiosity. And I think your idea in listing these different ways is some people might think they're not curious, but they see these categories. You go, oh yeah, no, I do that. And so it gives them hope that they could do it.

1:03:28Like, how would you teach curiosity? You know, it's, it's, I think we are, all have innate curiosity when we're little kids. What do we do? We ask why, why, how come, why, why? And usually we tell the kids shut up because we're sick of hearing why, right? But we're curious about everything. And then eventually, I don't know what happens, but it, it, it's almost, curiosity and creativity are kind of the same. It gets snuffed out. I think as we mature and we're told, you know, oh, you're not very smart or you're not very creative. You know, I don't like your singing sort of thing. So we kind of, we kind of suppress those natural things, uh, that, that we, that, that make us kids.

1:04:14So basically what I recommend in the book is just, you know, allowing yourself to go back to asking why classic case right now. We talked about it earlier polarization that's going on in society right yeah i mean no one's asking why no one you'll watch cnn or you'll watch fox and you'll hear two different points of view and but does anybody step back and go i wonder why they reported that way that tone you know oh maybe there's maybe there's a constituency maybe there's a an advertising audience that they're appealing to or a core viewer that they're appealing to that makes them put that spin on it.

1:04:56So why did they report in that fashion? It's natural for us to be able to ask why. Now, some people actually take it to an extreme. I just read an article in the journal about conspiracy theorists. It's actually around the Taylor Swift thing. And there's all these cray cray conspiracies out there now um yeah and so that's maybe why to the extreme people are trying to make up answers to something that could be just that actually a natural phenomenon these two people like each other you know right like like the conspiracy theories around there but then you get you start to get into conspiracy theory you know probably some questions are and some questions on another extreme are mental illness.

1:05:43Yeah, I think that's where the curiosity crosses the line sometimes into serious mental illness. Yeah, but then you have to wonder, like, you look at these top schools now, and this has been kind of been in the new media lately, where there's a bias. And, okay, I agree. Just because you say the world is round doesn't mean you have to have another class saying the world is flat. Like you don't have to give every single subject both sides. But this bias does seem to be a bit extreme right now on some college campuses. And it doesn't even matter your political affiliation. Like some of it, it does seem extreme or at least extreme is the wrong word.

1:06:28There should be the alternative. Okay, there shouldn't be an alternative to the world is round because we know that that's a fact, that's really true or it's roughly round. But some of these biases, there's a legitimate other side. And you get punished if you don't adhere to just the side of the university. So it seems like there's a direction, at least some universities are going to, that doesn't seem very favorable. And it's going to hurt their job prospects. That's what's already happening. Yeah, I think. And I don't know. I sat in a board meeting. I sit on the board of an undergraduate university.

1:07:04And this topic came up and we talked a lot about this dilemma that universities have. Now look around the room, it's a very conservative board. And yet the perception is that it's a very liberal institution. And you go, wait a minute, now these conservative board members are not going to allow this to be a liberal institution. And yet the perception is there. So I step back from that. And in the book, I have a whole chapter on fear because a lot of these perceptions are fear-based. And I mean, I'll give you a classic one. It's this issue of, are socialists going to take over the country, right?

1:07:47Are we trending down this path towards socialism? And are all these liberal institutions brainwashing our kids to be socialists and all that kind of stuff. James, I'm a capitalist. I ran two Fortune 500 companies. I don't worry about socialism. I mean, if you really are a capitalist, what are you worried about? They're not going to prevail. The capitalist way is going to be better, right? I mean, that's what we grow up believing, that it's a better way of life. So I'm going to sit around and worry about a bunch of socialists? Who cares? Let them go talk, right? And yet this fear ends up making us paralyzed.

1:08:27Like, oh my God, they're going to take over. They're going to destroy the country.

1:08:47When you and I went to college, and I'm a little bit after you, but I think the same kind of environment. Yes, professors might have had a bias, but it stopped there. And I sort of feel like professors now are activists. They're not just intellectually biased, they're actions. And they require their students to take action as well and be activists. and there's often, and for professors or students who disagree, there's often now consequences on a college campus. Whereas I feel like there were more, there were more both sides when we went and, you know, like when I went to school, there was various, let's say apartheid governments and there were protests on campus.

1:09:34And, but there were professors who agreed and professors who disagreed and there was arguments and debates. and I might have agreed completely with the protesters, but you could still have both opinions. But now I feel like opinion is a little bit suppressed, which is another concern I have. I'm going to remind you of the Vietnam War and everybody believing that the world was going to hell because all of us our age were a bunch of hippies smoking dope and wearing funny clothes and growing our hair long. You still have your long hair. I don't know how you got away with that. I wish I could. I don't know either.

1:10:13But the older generation thought we were just like lost. We were lost. And that this was coming from teachers who were filling our heads with crazy stuff like, you should have moratorium day and walk out of school. And I remember walking out of school during the Vietnam because it was moratorium day and we all staged a walkout, right? None of us knew why we were walking out of school. We were kids. We wanted a day off, so we walked out of school because it was cool. And I think a lot of that's going on today. So honestly, I really don't worry about it. I worry more about fear creeping in because fear is a bigger culprit, I think, than this indoctrination stuff.

1:10:59Because if people are really thinking, and if they're using the skills that I talk about in the book, critical thinking and curiosity, they're going to have their own minds. And you know what? Most of these kids are going to grow up to be conservatives because they're going to grow up like the Vietnam kids and the hippies, dope smoking hippie freaks all grew up, made a little money and became conservatives. And now they're complaining. One of my best friends from high school, just complaining, like screaming about his kid. you know, being, being law. Yeah. I guess you're right. Like I look at my, so my father was born in 1936.

1:11:43So I look at his voting record. I know every president he's ever voted for. So you voted for Kennedy, Johnson, Eugene McCarthy slash Hubert Humphrey in 1968, George McGovern, 72, Carter, 76, Reagan. Like you just change as you get older. Yeah, you do. You do. You do. And I think a lot of that's going on now. And again, I encourage all of us just to separate out what's truth from what's irrational fear. Because a lot of this, we're bringing ourselves into issues that don't need to be. We're worrying about stuff that we really don't need to worry about. And as a result, then we're missing real opportunities, bigger opportunities to move forward together.

1:12:36Instead of complaining about schools and teachers and teachers unions and all this stuff, we should be doubling down on our investment in technology to make those schools more effective. effective, but instead of rallying around the opportunity to transform our public education system, just as we've transformed retail or automobiles or whatever, instead, now we're fighting about vouchers or, you know, teachers indoctrinating our kids or what they ban or shouldn't ban. And I mean, these are just, these are yesterday's issues, not tomorrow's. And that, that they're driven by fear. Yeah, no, I, I agree with you.

1:13:18I think, and I didn't really think of it that way before, but I look at people just simply change too. So let me switch gears for a second. As a captain of industry and with your network of people and the conversations you must have every day, do you see, like oddly a recession has not happened yet despite the Federal Reserve raising interest rates at its fastest pace in history. What do you think is happening in the economy right now? You know, I wasn't as worried about what was going to happen to the economy because, you know, the United States is very resilient. And our economy, to a large extent today, is driven by some fundamentals like technology that we, at least today, still do have an advantage in so many fronts of technology.

1:14:12And technology is not going to go back in the bottle. We're not going to go backwards, right? We're going to continue. And as long as we continue to educate our youth and stay at the forefront of innovation and technology, I think we'll be fine. So a lot of the economy was a reaction. A lot of what we've been through was a reaction to COVID. And you can't have a worldwide pandemic like COVID. And I know there's all kinds of things about, oh, you know, we screwed it up, whatever. This was worldwide. This was not just a unique United States thing. The whole world recoiled from it. The whole world shut down for a good year, year and a half.

1:14:53And so there was naturally going to be a reverberation, a bounce back from that. And it's happening. And everybody said, whoa, inflation's with us forever. No, inflation was caused because we stopped and then had to restart. And it cost more to do everything. gas. Like why do people think, why do people think inflation is just a money supply phenomenon? And I know that's from Milton Friedman and the Austrian school and so on, but it's clearly like our supply chain got disrupted. Ships backed up for months and China wasn't manufacturing things. So of course, if you don't cut down trees for two years, price of timber is going to go up.

1:15:33Exactly. Exactly. And you know, everybody was, everybody was like, oh my God, you know, having spent a lot of my career in the petroleum industry, right? I looked at, we were negative crude oil price. I've never seen that in my entire career. We were negative crude oil price. So gas prices were like a buck 90 a gallon. Well, it's amazing. They were even a buck 90 a gallon. They arguably could have been free. Here, take my gasoline because that's what they were doing on the crude oil side. And yet then people look at that and go, well, look at how much higher our gasoline prices got six months later.

1:16:08Yeah, because we went from negative crude oil prices to all of a sudden higher and, you know, and the market overreacted and no one wanted to invest now in drilling. We were drilling like crazy, but who's going to invest in a new drilling, you know, and I'm talking six months ago when six months before crude oil went negative, And who's going to go put money into that right now until you see where things stabilize out? So, yeah, as a result, we overreacted from negative crude oil prices to$100 a barrel. And gas prices went up to five bucks. And everybody blamed inflation and blamed the government, blamed all kinds of stuff.

1:16:53But I wasn't worried because it was an overreaction that was likely to swing back into a more normalized range. Do you think the Federal Reserve was too aggressive raising rates? Because now it might artificially negatively impact the housing industry, which is such a big part of the economy. It's hard to borrow money. Yeah, the simple answer is no one really knows. You know, I'm not an economist. And all I can say is, thank God they did what they did. Because, you know, candidly, we had gotten ourselves to the point where interest rates were too low. We were almost in the Japan scenario where, you know, you can borrow money for next to nothing.

1:17:31And that created an artificial stimulus of the economy that wasn't real, that was going to ultimately cause inflation in itself. So where we are now, people forget that my mortgage 10 years ago, 8 years ago, was 6%. And it's back to those levels now. So I think where we are is a reasonable range. I do think they'll probably stop. yeah it's so interesting what's going on because it's not like a normal period no it's not it's it's it's not a normal period and i think we had a reaction and then an overreaction and now we're we're back into a more normalized range i think and my my final question i have one more question but i want to just kind of say the title of your book education is freedom the future is in your hands i think our debate hit on a lot of issues in the book but i just want to remind people again that there's these really great chapters on what to learn, how to learn, why we learn.

1:18:32And you talk about everything from being able to deal with change, how do you learn confidence, how you learn creativity, critical thinking. And as you mentioned, collaboration, there's many other chapters about these sorts of things and the role of wisdom in society. And it's a great book for educators, parents, kids. These are the real skills I firmly think you need to survive. Even if I agree with you, Jim, about college right now, I know tomorrow I'm going to wake up not agreeing with you. So I'm just easily convinced by anybody. But your book is 100 % dead on on what we actually need to learn.

1:19:10And those are the toolkits for success. I agree with you that practically a lot of people could benefit from the pedigree that college gives you and so on. But this one question I want to ask you as the former CEO of 7-Eleven, when I go into 7-Eleven, the product in my life that I have probably bought the most into 7-Eleven is Twinkies. And I'm convinced they've changed the formula sometime in the past 30 years on Twinkies because it doesn't taste as good as when I was a kid. Now, is that just because I glorified it perhaps as a kid or did they really change the formula? It feels like it tastes worse now.

1:19:51Yeah, Twinkies have changed. Hostess was, you know, forever made Twinkies and Hostess cupcakes and, you know, all kinds of wonderful treats. You know, I'll share with you that Hostess used to frustrate me because they would only bake three days a week and then they would deliver directly to the store. That was part of their magic to success because they did have good quality products and good fresh products, but I was obsessed with freshness. I wanted them every day in my stores. So I wanted fresh Twinkies. And this was like unheard of. I don't know if you've seen the thing that there's a, there's a report of somebody that found a Twinkie that was like 60, 80 years old or something.

1:20:33Yeah. Yeah. And I wonder if they went too far in that direction because it doesn't feel like as fresh. It feels like artificially fresh. Like they put flavoring in to make it flavor. This has nothing to do with Hostess. Maybe they're doing anything right. Just my experience. Well, Hostess ended up going under, changing hands, being bought out by somebody else. So it's a very different company than it was. And, you know, honestly, this is a classic conundrum between having truly fresh products. You go to 7-Eleven in Japan, they deliver three times a day. All of the baked goods in that store are off the charts fresh.

1:21:11Here in the United States, we tend to take shortcuts. So we try to add things that will lengthen the shelf life as opposed to shortening the shelf life. This will change over time and technology will enable. That's really the big enabler. Technology, that's what Japan has figured out, to enhance distribution, ordering capabilities, delivery efficiencies, et cetera, and drive freshness into the store in ways that, you know, have never been possible in the past. They're doing that in Japan. You'll see it eventually here. You'll see a fresh Twinkie one day in your 7-Eleven store. I can't wait. Well, James Keys, Jim Keys, thank you so much for coming on the show.

1:21:54Thank you so much for agreeing to kind of go back and forth with me on this issue. I think about it a lot. I have two kids, three stepkids. They're all thinking about these issues. And it's a topic of conversation a lot in my life. So thank you for humoring me on this. Your book is excellent over so many other reasons about learning and education. And also thank you for sharing your experiences. Thank you for being the CEO of 7-Eleven when I was a shareholder. And then the CEO of Blockbuster. We didn't even get to that, but I'm sure there's many interesting stories there. Oh, yeah. Well, James, thank you.

1:22:29Thank you for coming on the show. One last thing I'll leave you with. You know, we've talked a lot about education and we've talked a lot about society and we talked a lot about fear. But I'll share with you that if you're a kid and you're scared of the dark, what happens? Mom comes in, turns on a light. Light, all of a sudden you realize there's no monster under the bed or in the closet, right? Light makes you, it eliminates your fear. That's what knowledge does. And that's why ultimately the more knowledge you can get, whether from your own learning or from the structure of a formal education system, the more learning you get, the more light you shine on your fear and you eliminate fear, which is ultimately the cure for 90 % of the issues that society or humanity faces today.

1:23:20Knowledge is the ultimate solution. I 100 % agree. Thank you, Jim. and I'll leave the audience with that. Thank you. Thank you, James. Enjoyed it.