Jason Calacanis

Today’s guest is Jason Calacanis, a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and author of Angel, a book about making investments and spotting trends. We talk about what the future holds for jobs, parenting, and education.

Jason’s 2 Cents

Kids value time the most. Love is spelled T-I-M-E in my mind. Leave your device off. Go on a hike. It’s not the number of hours, it’s how present you are. Kids are going to follow your lead. My daughter and I hike for two hours and then get lunch. I also do meditation with my daughter, which has been great for her focus issues.

Outline

The reason I wanted to have you on is because as an Angel investor you spot future trends
Anyone who is listening who is a father knows that this is the most important job title we have.

Let’s talk about the book.
* The book was my way of sharing how i went from rags to riches. But in this case from riches to mega riches.
* I had been a successful entrepreneur
* I’ve made mistakes, too, and what i have learned at the age of 42 is that people tend not to remember the mistakes, and tend to rally around your successes.
* Things right now have been a bit nasty in dialogue. I think podcasts are in renaissance right now partially because people want to have meaningful conversations.
* I’ve been ahead of the curve quite a few times, and being ahead puts you ahead of the crowd. In terms of Angel investing there are maybe a dozen people more successful than me, but none of them have chosen to write a book.
* I’ve hit six unicorns, which is what got me the opportunity to write this book for Harpercollins.
* When I was growing up I had no idea how wealth was created, and this is my way of sharing that.

How do the founders that read this book carry those principles into their company to see what’s coming?

• It’s super easy for someone who is a founder to identify who angel investors are today.
• Finding them isn’t the problem, the problem is understanding them and what they want.
• Founders tend to bend the truth to impress investors. 2 or 3% of the companies i do due diligence on i find are lying about the state of their business.
• If you’re an angel investor, the opportunity is investing in potential. The expectation is that things won’t be perfect.
• As gen Xers, we were trained that wealth is created by a good job, frugality, and owning a home, paying it off, and investing in more homes.
• My parents paid $45,000 for their brownstone in Brooklyn on blue collar jobs. Combined income was about 1x the cost of the home. If they put 10% towards the home they’d be done in ten years.
• Now that brownstone is worth about 1 million. Blue collar combined income around $100,000. It would end up being 10x blue collar income. That way to make money is gone.
• 30 million jobs in retail and driving are going to evaporate. So cashiers fight for a living wage, and then those companies replace cashiers with kiosks.
• So now people won’t have to sit in a tollbooth, drive a truck, or make you a coffee–work hard jobs. So what are they going to do?
• Our kids are going to live in a world that flips three times. Internet, AI, Biology, etc.
• How do we prepare our kids for that?

What has to change to adapt to that future?

• I believe the education system will not serve them well–reading, writing, arithmetic, socializing are all essential of course. I don’t think the school systems served us well. I see a lot of middle aged contemporaries of mine are being aged out in Silicon valley.
• I have taken it upon myself to teach my 7 year old and 16 month old twins about business.
• My daughter, I took her to my incubator and told her that she could either go to college or start a business.
• If she wants to be an artist she’s privileged enough to have a dad who can underwrite that–I didn’t have that. My options were firefighter, cop, bartender, etc. I ended up in computers and this is where I am.
• Right now my daughter is going to start an ice cream business with her $300 in savings. We’ve been doing market research, she’s going to learn cost of goods and unit economics, marketing, customer support. We’re going to go to a pop up store or farmers market. I don’t think anything she’s learning in school would allow for that kind of focus.

What are the trends in the schools that you’re seeing to help with these changes?

• I see a lot of people focused on exactly the wrong thing, which is status and competition.
  People are obsessed with kids getting into colleges, ap classes, math achievement, etc.
• They’re obsessed with their kids being in the schools of billion dollar founders’ kids.
• Lots of keeping up with the joneses
• There is a high suicide rate in Palo Alto because of high competition. For one of the most affluent places in the country to lead in suicide rates for children should make the parents reassess.
• In my mind it’s the parents’ fault. Collectively/culturally.
• I tell parents who are freaking out about where their kids will go to school, i tell them about my background. I went to public schools and did poorly in high school. I have more success than most of the people i meet from Harvard. Ivy league is not all that. The people who are happy have a sense of mastery, and a sense of joy that they get to participate in something purposeful that matters to them. We don’t need to live a Kardashian lifestyle. The Kardashians are not a happy family–that’s not what we need to be like. It’s a mixed message of what success is.
• I want my daughters to feel like they can accomplish anything and not be distracted by all the crap.
• We follow a reggio style education system. If the kids are interested in orcas, teach math or reading by using examples of orcas. It makes them excited about going deep.
• So I sit down as a mentor with some of my employees and ask them what success looks like for them. I don’t think enough people have thought about what success looks like for them.

How did you and your wife arrive at this? There’s a trend of lack of focus, people aren’t slowing down and asking themselves the important questions.

• If you look at ADD and ADHD and aspergers. This inbound existence…it’s having an impact on people’s brains.
• The idea of dying a violent death has gone down significantly, the idea of living in abject poverty has gone down, so much so that the things that will kill us are self inflicted and highly avoidable–like suicide. In the developing world where there are fewer regulations, more of these accidental deaths happen like commercial plane crashes. In Germany a suicidal pilot runs a plane into a mountain. It’s not because of the actual act of flying. It’s a long way of saying that our kids are going to live in a world where starving to death won’t be the cause of death, overeating will be the cause of death.
• I was talking to an educational psychologist about our daughter who doesn’t like to sit still in the classroom, and she mentioned medication. How will she function as an adult in the world otherwise. We thought that was crazy, that a kid who runs around at age 7 years old is broken and needs to be medicated to sit down at school for 6 hours.
• Workplaces are trending against this sit still for 8 hours thing. People are working in bust style fashions with intermittent physical activity.
• We should rethink the classroom if the kids have this much energy. We need to accommodate the kids and their needs.

I am with you, that the schools aren’t changing. Who is tackling this?

• I think the teacher to student ratio needs to be no more than 10 to 1. I would love if we would raise the tax rate on the country’s top earners, and then quadruple the number of teachers there are, and double the number of hours in school.
• School should be available 7 days a week, 7am to 7pm. If you need to work on a saturday, drop your kids off on a saturday where they’ll do project based learning.
• It would not cost that much for us to have schools available like this. Anyone who says it would cost too much just doesn’t understand the numbers.
• The tax breaks we offer are criminal. I benefit from them, and they’re terrible. If you went to the top million earning americans and told them we were going to charge 4% more on your taxes, and we’ll have 7 days a week schooling available for kids, you would have 99% say yes, and 1% say “i earned mine!”

I would agree that our investments are so lopsided, what other things should change about the schools?

• I think if you look at youtube, Lynda, conacadamy, treehouse, etc. corsera, edex, we’re living in a society where you can afford to acquire any skill online.
• If we have all the information line to learn these skills, then why aren’t people doing it? I’ve heard that people don’t have enough time, that they don’t have it available, or they don’t have the precursor education. There is always time, and $25 a month is not a lot. It’s not an insurmountable hurdle. And often it’s free.
  People ask me all the time what they should be learning, and i say look at linkedin and see what people are looking for.
• People used to be proud of working hard and acquiring skills. Everyone wants the kim kardashian private jet, but they’re not willing to put the work in.
• When I was growing up this information wasn’t available for free, you had to go to college for it. Knowledge is so cheap and available, yet people don’t want to read books or learn skills.
• So we’re at this crazy moment in time where one group of people are capitulating and feel helpless, and the other feels empowered.

Why do you think that is? What role do the parents have in that?

• I’ve heard role models is one piece, so if you don’t see someone who looks like you in a role, then you might not even consider something as a possibility. Race, gender, etc.
• I also think we live in a victim society where people feel that the world is against them. We’ve made it easier for the rich to get richer, and harder for poor and middle class people to move up. We’ve rigged the system at the same time that low income jobs will disappear at a high velocity. It’s very scary.
• But there are solutions, but people don’t want to hear the solutions to society’s problems. There’s a burn it down mentality.

It feels a bit hopeless

• It feels bad because we always expect things to get better, and for a lot of people it’s not getting better.
• We are addicted to our social media, which feeds us terrible news and great news all at once…using an algorithm that is designed to mess with our emotions on a rage, sadness, and joy cycle. People who design these algorithms need to take a look in the mirror and think about what they’re doing. Fake news plays a role in this, too, which has serious consequences.

What’s one piece of advice that you would give to a new dad?

• Kids value time the most. Love is spelled T-I-M-E in my mind. Leave your device off. Go on a hike. It’s not the number of hours, it’s how present you are. Kids are going to follow your lead. My daughter and I hike for two hours and then get lunch. I also do meditation with my daughter, which has been great for her focus issues.

Links:

https://angel.co/
https://www.crunchbase.com/
https://mattermark.com/

Schools and Organizations

https://www.lynda.com/
https://www.khanacademy.org/
https://teamtreehouse.com/
https://www.coursera.org/
https://www.edx.org/
https://www.calm.com/

Transcription below (May contain typos….) 

00:00:00] Mike: [00:00:00] Welcome to the two set dad podcast, where we interviewed dads to discuss their journeys, intentional fatherhood, while doing work they care about and living a life purpose. I’m your host Mike Sudyk. Today. I have cereal. Angel investor and author Jason, Calacanis. Now the reason I wanted to have Jason, because he’s a pretty prominent figure in Silicon Valley and wanted to get his take on what the future holds for jobs, parenting, education, that sort of thing, to hear some insights directly from broken Valley.

And so he. Recently wrote a book called angel, which is all about angel investing and seeing future trends. So this was a good interview, went a little bit long, it meandered, but it was very interesting to hear Jason’s perspective. And I think really insightful to what things we can do to help our kids and our role [00:01:00] as fathers.

So listen up

today on the show of Jason Calacanis, who I’m pretty excited have on, he is. there’s a whole laundry list of things to say about Jason, but he is a serial entrepreneur, I think first and foremost, and also author angel investor of which he wrote about in his latest book angel, I think how to turn a hundred thousand into a hundred million or something like that is the title, the subtitle of the book, but, very prolific guy in Silicon Valley.

and the reason I wanted to have you on Jason is that as an angel investor, you’re always looking to the future and what the future holds and. My podcast is all about fatherhood, especially with people that are founders and doing amazing things. And just wanted to say thank you so much for being on the show and taking the time 

Jason: [00:01:43] today.

anybody who’s listening, who’s a father understands that this is the most important job title we have. And it’s our biggest investment. So I think there’s a lot of analogies and I’m looking forward to our discussion about the greatest investment we can make, which is our kids. 

Mike: [00:01:59] Yeah. [00:02:00] So tell me about the book.

Let’s maybe let’s start there because, you’ve had quite a bit of success already with the book. I know, and it, what’s interesting to me about it is it’s a culmination of a whole career’s worth of angel investing. you’ve invested in Uber, Tesla, a bunch of other big names now, big name companies.

so tell me a little bit about the writing process, that book and the contents a little bit for the audience. 

Jason: [00:02:21] Yeah. So the book was. Essentially my way of sharing. How I went from, rags to riches essentially, or in this case from riches to be at home mega riches. I, I had been an entrepreneur and I was a good entrepreneur.

I had sold a blogging company and made a bunch of money, when blogging was just starting. And before that I had a. A publication, a physical print publication called Silicon alley reporter and had the opportunity to sell that one for 20 million. And I blew it and didn’t sell it. And then the market crashed.

So I’ve got a lot of wounds. I’ve made a lot of mistakes. And one of the things I’ve learned at the age [00:03:00] of 46 is that people tend to not remember the mistakes and they tend to who, rally around your victories. It’s a nice, it’s a nice aspect to human nature. I think in a pretty nasty, crazy environment that we live in right now, it’s a pretty toxic environment in the world.

largely due to, I think, without getting into politics, the current political climate I think has led things to be very nasty and dialogue. So I think one of the reasons why podcasts, like we both do are. so right after, and having such a huge Renaissance is because people would like to have meaningful discussions that are not screaming matches on Twitter, and we would like to hear each other out.

So I’ve gotten very lucky, seven, eight, nine times at this point, and I’ve been approached to write a lot of books about things that I’ve done in my life, because I’ve always been in technology and I’ve always been. six or 12 or 18 months ahead of the curve. And. To [00:04:00] be truthful in the internet industry.

If you’re six, 12, or 18 months of the curve of something that’s going to be big, it might as well. You might as well have 10 PhDs, and it literally knowing how the internet worked in 1993 and 94 95, or knowing how online services worked in the mid eighties. Yeah. It just puts you so far ahead of everybody else.

And if you know about cryptocurrency today, or about augmented reality, it’s the same thing. You’re just six months ahead of the curve. When it comes to angel investing, there are certainly a, a half dozen or dozen people who have more experience than me. The interesting thing is none of them have chosen to written a book.

So I’m the first successful angel really to write a book about it. there’s been one or two technical playbooks about how the legal documentation works in angel investing, but yeah, they tend to be written by people who’d have no success or modest success, at the. at the fringes of angel investing, but never by somebody who is in the heart of Silicon Valley who had six unicorns.

[00:05:00] And that’s the track record that got me the ability to write the book with Harper Collins and it’s doing really well. And the book is meant to be, yeah, extremely candid. it is no guarantee you’re going to win. There’s a significant chance you’re going to lose, but I thought it’s worth writing so that people understand how great wealth is created in the world.

Yeah. And people don’t understand that it’s a mystery. It was certainly a mystery to me. when I was growing up, I had no idea how wealth was created. and I learned it over decades and the book is my way of just paying it forward and sharing a book for anybody who is, successful. At their craft. A book is a true opportunity cost because you, if you were a director of movies to write a book for a year or six months or 18 months about making movies, you just cost yourself making a movie or two.

And for me, it costs me making another 50 angels investments, but I felt like it was a good pause for me to [00:06:00] go, what, if I write this book, I think it’ll help a lot of people. And that’s really honestly why I did it. 

Mike: [00:06:07] No, that’s really cool. I think, and I think it is from what I’ve seen it, there are a lot of people that are reading it, especially younger people that are newer to angel investing or that are newer just to tech in general.

And I think that’s pretty exciting too, to tell the story of your journey and then say, okay, here’s how here’s the nuggets of wisdom I can pass down. And basically that’s going to proliferate into the next generation, if you will. 

Jason: [00:06:29] Speaking of which it’s really designed for founders too.

that’s the interesting, I would say eight or nine out of 10 people reading. It are actually founders. 

Mike: [00:06:36] Okay. So speak to that a little bit. Then they’re seeing. they’re the ones that actually founded the company is not investing in the companies, but those principles, how do they carry that into their companies and seeing ahead of what’s coming 

Jason: [00:06:50] it’s super easy.

for somebody who’s a founder. To identify who angel investors are today. there’s different databases out there. You have something like, angel list [00:07:00] or Crunchbase, or Mattermark the, the investors finding them is not the problem anymore, but understanding. What makes them tick, how they make decisions and what they’re going through.

In other words, having empathy for them, and understanding the other side of the table. those are the things that most founders don’t take into account. So a very small example, founders tend to paint the rosiest picture possible. Sometimes they do that at the expense of the truth, the way of putting it.

In other words, out of. A hundred investments. I do due diligence on that. I’m really seriously considering investing in two or 3%. Don’t make it through the due diligence process. Because specifically of lying and, I am, the number is probably higher. I probably just don’t catch some people in lies.

And so if 5% of people, one out of 20 or maybe 10% are [00:08:00] lying about the state of their business, this is a very bad way to, operate in the world because the cost of being caught in a lie is great. And so I. Counsel people in the book by just showing deals that blew up because of just, I could say fraudulent behavior, but in most cases it’s naive attain and desperation to paint the best picture.

If you’re an angel investor, the opportunity is investing in companies that have yet to break out. In other words, investing in potential, you don’t have the expectation that things are perfect yet founders think, Oh my God, if I have. out of the 10 months of time I have, if three of the months are down and seven are up.

Something’s wrong. I have to figure out a way to prop up those three months. It’s no, you don’t, it could be seasonality. You could be bad luck. It could be tweak and an algorithm in the app store or Google’s apps. it could be any number of reasons. It could be one bad review is [00:09:00] costing you a third of your users and you got to fix that.

So it’s a lot in there for people and it’s, One of the great concerns I have. and one of the reasons I wrote the book is I’m very concerned about the future of. Jobs and the future of wealth creation when you and I were growing up, I get the sense. We’re both gen excers you correct me if I’m wrong, if you’re a millennial, but I think you’re a gen exer 

Mike: [00:09:25] the millennial.

Yeah. So in between 

Jason: [00:09:27] there, in between, right? Yeah. if I’m going to put you in the, it does, it doesn’t matter for either category. The fact is. We were both trained, whether you’re a, an early millennial or a late, gen X, or we were all trained, that wealth is created largely by getting a great job, being frugal and owning a home, paying down your home, continuing to be frugal, and then maybe buying a second home and renting it out or having a.

to family residents where you rent something out and you [00:10:00] maybe start collecting some rent, and maybe when you die, you have a house or two, or maybe you hit the home run and you have five houses or three houses and some 401k and you die with a million or $5 million in the bank account. The fact is when our parents bought their homes, I discussed it with my family and they paid 45,000 for their brownstone in Brooklyn, in Bay Ridge.

Yeah. And that was 1977 when I was seven years old when they moved there and we went to public schools. So there wasn’t a cool school expense, up until high school. And there was some minor Catholic school expense for high school. and my mom was making probably $25,000 as a nurse, maybe 30. And my dad was probably making 20, 25 grand as a bartender.

Their combined income was about one X, the cost of the home. In other words, if they saved 10 or 12, if they put 10% of their income every year towards their home, [00:11:00] they’d be done in 10 years and outright. if they put five or centers, they don’t in 20 years now, people with tools, white collar or blue collar jobs, obviously to people with white collar jobs.

To be able with blue collar jobs might make 75 K each today, 50 to 75 K H. So they might be in a hundred, 250 K range. And even to blue collar people making 150 would make 300,000. If you bought that same brownstone is now worth 1.2 million. It would wind up being four times to white collar people salary.

And it would wind up being almost 10 times blue collar people’s combined household income. So it just gives you an idea of how that hack, that way to make money is gone. So how is money going to be created? I can tell you also that 30 million jobs in retail and driving are going to slowly, Or violently evaporate.

And that’s the question. Nobody can really answer candidly. [00:12:00] I think it’s going to be closer to rapidly then slowly. And you can see that in the fact that when people fought for a higher minimum wage, which does not seem like an unreasonable request. wait, just knock on up. It sparked a flurry of startups that I saw here in Silicon Valley startups that would get rid of.

Cashiers as one example. So cashiers fight for $15 an hour in, which is a living wage, in a city of barely living wage, in fact, in a lot of cities and that then motivated those same companies to invest in kiosks. So if you go to McDonald’s in San Francisco in a number of locations, the idea that you’ll order from a register from a.

A person, a cashier is just going away. I think Panera bread got rid of all of them. So there’ll be no more cashiers. Just I don’t know. The last time you went through a toll booth and actually said hi to a person and handed him [00:13:00] five bucks, but those jobs are not in a long time, but I specifically remember waving and talking to those people and being fascinated by them when I went over the verse know bridge.

Yeah. and fascinated by the line now, they’re literally not only are they using easy pass, they’re ripping out the booths because they know that the boots will never exist. And even if you don’t have an easy pass, they just take a picture of your license. Plate and send you a bill. So all of this means we’re going to live in a really horribly, a beautiful and horrible, future.

The beautiful part about it is people won’t have to sit in a toll booth or make you a coffee and sit there for 12 hours or 10 hours making coffee or driving a truck. 12 hours a day until you’re exhausted and sleeping in the back of a truck and being under massive pressure that leads to people, having massive anxiety, heart attacks, and even, taking stimulants to stay awake.

All these crises that we see they’re going to go away because robots will do that. [00:14:00] Horrible, arduous work. The downside is, what are those people going to do every day? And what will they find seeing, you can. Feel bad for a person working in tow booth. I think that’s a little bit, or you can feel bad for a bartender or a barista or whoever you want to feel bad for because of how hard the work are, but I’ve done jobs like that.

And I took pride in those jobs that my parents did jobs like that. And I know they took pride in it. we have a we’re at a crossroads and our kids are. Going to live in a world that flips three times in their lifetime and our lives are flipping once in our lifetime, the introduction of the internet and maybe AI.

So arguably twice, I think in our lifetime, we’re going to see the world flip and the internet has changed everything. And AI and robotics is going to change everything. Our kids they’re going to go through a biology revolution and implants and all kinds of other interesting revolutions. And so how do you prepare your kids for that?

Exactly. Yeah. how do you, 

[00:15:00] Mike: [00:15:00] yeah, what do you think about, because the reason I’m curious Isabella Jason’s because the things that you’re saying, so I’m in, I’m actually in Michigan, so I’m in the Midwest. So we’re a little bit behind, obviously the trends that are going on in Silicon Valley, but yet that is definitely only on the horizon.

So you as an angel investor, insider and tech, I would say, and in Silicon Valley, probably at the very. Bleeding edge of all those things and bleeding knowledge of all those things. And so it I’m really interested in saying okay, what’s the conversation about how do we prepare to prepare an entire generation for a three times, four times, five times world flip that they’re going to have because the traditional model of education or even things that they are experiencing are built for the previous, that the model you’re talking about with your parents, even, the buying the house and the, just doing the blue collar job, or just, the jobs exist today.

But if, I guess what has to change to adapt to that new, future that you’re describing. [00:16:00] 

Jason: [00:16:00] I believe the education will not serve them well. and although I think socialization and some basic skills that you learn at school, reading, writing, arithmetic, socializing, are all things that, you can’t go wrong with knowing how to do math and knowing how to read.

It’s a precursor to a lot of things. I don’t think the school systems. Particularly served us well. Our generation gen X. because I see a lot of 40 year old, 50 year old contemporaries of mine who didn’t get into the technology business who are now going where’s myself job coming from, or what am I supposed to do now?

And I think they’re going to have a hard time and you even hear about ageism and people being aged out in Silicon Valley because they’re a 50 year old programmer and they don’t have the. Ability to work the hours or, in certain people’s minds, they’re not as efficient or they don’t know the [00:17:00] skills, whatever it is.

I’m not saying I agree with any of that, but that is the complaint that you hear. So I have taken it upon myself to teach my daughters. and I have a seven year old and I have two identical twin 16 year olds. And I’m no expert on parenting, but I am an expert on entrepreneurship. And I am an expert on making your own way in the world.

And with my seven year old, I take her to my incubator and she sits in a doctor about angel investing, what I do. And I told her in the past year, she has the choice to go to college, or she has the choice to open a business with her dad and she can choose what she wants to spend that money on. And here are the pros to college and here are the pros to starting your own business.

And she can take the money and do whichever she wants. this is at the age of seven, I’m having this conversation with her and she’s very fascinated by business, obviously. and. If she wants to be an artist, that’s fine too. She happens to have a dad who [00:18:00] can afford to, underwrite that. So she’s lucky my tech couldn’t you.

I didn’t have that privilege. My dad didn’t have the ability to underwrite. the artist’s 

Mike: [00:18:08] aspirations, Jason, 

Jason: [00:18:10] I, it’s interesting you say that. I, it was never something presented to me as an actor option. And so I, sometimes I listen to Mark Knopfler from dire straits play. Telegraph road or private investigations for Shelton’s of swinging.

And I go, how I would have loved to have been able to play the guitar like that. And in writing the book, people have mentioned. I don’t know, one out of three rent mentions in the Amazon reviews, which have been just humbling, say that I have this incredible writing style and that people can’t put the book down and it’s a must read and they just love the writing style.

I go, ah, geez. Maybe I could have been a writer that was never presented to me as possibility it was presented to me as a possibility was cop fireman, maybe. If you get your together or I’m sorry, 

Mike: [00:18:59] I don’t know if this for kids, we [00:19:00] can bleep it out. 

Jason: [00:19:01] Okay. Get your sugar together. and you get your butt in gear.

Maybe you could wind up being a lawyer or, a stockbroker. And so I think the expectations were set really low for me. And I think I did, put me in a position where I just went with what I knew, which happened to be computer. So I got lucky, but that was the thing. so we’ll see whatever she wants to do, but, She’s I’ve been giving her an allowance.

So she gets the newspaper from the driveway on Sunday is when I get the New York times in print, if she brings up packages or she does some other tasks around the house, there’s a dollar available well, and, she’s stayed and then she’s babysat some neighbors, birds, and they’re super nice and give her like 10 or 20 bucks a day for doing it, which is ridiculous.

But, I told her if she wants to open this ice cream store, she loves ice cream. We will get her an ice cream machine, which literally arrived yesterday when she had $300 in savings and we bought the $300 savings ice cream. Now, if she gets out a 50 pints of ice cream to our family and [00:20:00] friends, and she’s keeping a buck with the costs, social know her cost of goods, she’ll know what she can sell it for.

And she’s going to. We’ve been doing the research phase, which has been wonderful going to the top ice cream stores and trying to, and writing notes about which flavors people seem to be enjoying. So she’s learning. A market research. She didn’t to learn some goods and unit economics, and she don’t learn marketing when she starts selling this to people and she’s going to learn customer support and success and feedback.

When they give her feedback on what flavors they like. And then I told her literally that we’ll open a popup store. Or a, we’ll go to a farmer’s market and sell her ice cream. And then if that works out, maybe when she’s 10 years old and my twins are five, we’ll open a little ice cream store in our little town in the peninsula, and she can have her own ice cream store at the age of 10 and work there after school.

So I have my own plan. I don’t think anything she’s wearing, learning in school would ever allow for that level [00:21:00] of. focus and it will give her a sick advantage over her contemporaries. And that’s really what life is it’s about. As, you gotta have an edge because people don’t want to believe that the world is a zero sum game.

And I can tell you, man, It is largely a zero sum game. So what do you see? 

Mike: [00:21:18] I think that’s interesting. what you’re doing is trying to give your daughter real world knowledge and saying, this is the theory, maybe you’re getting in school, but here, this is how the world actually works.

So you’re giving her that edge and that I guess, advanced knowledge that maybe she would pick up down the road is that, do you see, Those trends in most of the people in your that you’re dealing with, the entrepreneurs that are doing that with their kids. I try to do that with some, with my children too.

but what are some of the trends even like in the schools that you’re seeing that maybe your daughter goes to that are trying to prepare her for the next generation, whether that’s, cause they talk about, information isn’t, you won’t need to be a recall, just the rote memorization and things like that.

It’s it’s more of [00:22:00] those things that you’re describing, which is the business acumen or even the ability to come up with new ideas. Yes. And logic and reasoning. What do you see in trends in that way that are changing? the actual schooling is that happening in Silicon Valley is that are people are working on that.

what do you see in those areas? 

Jason: [00:22:19] I see a lot of, I see a lot of people focused on exactly the wrong bang, which is status and competition. And they’re literally in Silicon Valley, in the Bay area, obsessed with their kids, getting into colleges, they’re obsessed with them taking AP courses.

They’re accepting. Obsessed with them hitting math achievement that is unhealthy. And I think they’re obsessed with being in the best schools and having their kids alongside other, highly affluent people. So literally [00:23:00] where do the founders of this billion dollar or a hundred billion dollar companies, kids go, I need to go there.

So there’s a lot of shallow. Trying to keep up with the Joneses. And I looked at a bunch of schools that were for gifted kids. My daughter happens to have a pretty high IQ in some areas, and then she’s got learning challenges in some other she’d like is off the charts on verbal, which makes sense. Her dad’s a writer and, her mom went to an Ivy league school.

Talk to her, we know in a certain way. And we explain what words are using our Amazon Alexa. That is a game changer in terms of vocabulary. So I’ve really, I come, I came up with a. Whole technique, which we can get into if you’re interested about verbal ability, and just making that a focus because I do then communication and verbal ability is something that will help kids get through this next challenging environment.

The ability to actually, communication. That was one of the great skills, communication and leadership skills, so that, I’m focusing on that. But. I watched [00:24:00] these kids and it’s really heartbreaking here. there’s a very high suicide rate amongst high school kids in Palo Alto.

It’s not talked about, but I think we can talk about it candidly here, because this is. Not a show for kids, but they actually don’t like to talk about the Palo Alto suicide problem, because of something called, induced suicide. but, or like a cluster of suicide, it turns out when you write about suicide, more people, will consider it as an option.

And, Palo Alto high schools are so competitive. that they lead the country in suicide death rates. Now just let that sink in for a second. Palo Alto is a place where, you know, Facebook, Google, Apple employees live, they are wildly successful and their parents are wildly successful. And kids are jumping in front of trains.

To the point at [00:25:00] which, from what I’ve read, they are putting guards at the train stations to make sure kids don’t jump in front of the trains. This is amongst the most disturbing things I’ve ever heard. And when you look at it, it all is, around a peer pressure to get into. these incredible schools.

to leave, I read from one of the most affluent places in the country to lead in the suicide rate of children is, should give, pause to the parents in this community. I’m not in Palo Alto, but I’m in the surrounding area. And. Yes. We’re literally talking about a place where a homeless go for $2,000 a square foot.

The average home in Palo Alto might be 4 million, $5 million, which would be in any other community, the most expensive now mansion and compound. you were [00:26:00] outside of the Bay area in New York city. And even in Los Angeles, it’d be pretty ridiculous play. So people are really trying to figure this out and you can look up Palo Alto, suicide rates and, It just, I’m looking at a story right now from 2003 to 2015, Palo Altos youth suicide rate per 100,000 people was 14.1.

And those are much higher than the country rate of 5.4 deaths per a hundred thousand. So they’re literally triple a. San Jose saw the most youth suicides during that period, 113 young San Jose residents died by suicide in the city or elsewhere. 19 young power or residents died by suicide in the city.

It’s just unbelievable that, This number of young people are killing themselves and it literally is over competition in school, according to what I’ve read. and they’re really trying to, the problem is so bad that they’re [00:27:00] trying to get the media to not cover it. Because it’s so difficult for people to grok or understand that they just don’t want to inspire more of it.

And I understand that, but again, I try not to talk about this issue too much on my podcast or other places, but I feel like this is a safe space or the proper place to talk about it. Show is about parenting. And why is this? Yeah. It’s it’s just incomprehensible and it’s the parent’s fault.

in my mind, when this, when you have something that’s statistically significant, it’s the parent’s fault. And I’m not saying any parent is responsible for their own child’s. Suicide. I think collectively, the parents are responsible though, because they put an emphasis on, if you don’t get into Stanford, if you don’t get into Harvard, not good enough in there.

They’re all just on this road to nowhere. And what I always tell parents who are freaking out about where their kids go to school. I remind them like, I’m a kid from Brooklyn who went to [00:28:00] public school. I went to Solvera in high school for private. I went to Fordham. I had a three year GPA, I think, I was 71, three year student that’s there in high school, like literally a 71 out of a hundred.

And I said, a lot of people who’ve worked for me, went to Ivy league schools. Yeah. And I have a large amount. I have a significantly, I have significantly more success than. Most of the people I meet from Harvard and I went to Fordham and I barely got through that. I did that There was not this correlation between, the correlation between success in the new world order and this random world and going to an Ivy league school is just, that’s going to break, I believe.

And certainly happiness has already broken. And the people who are going to be happy in life are the ones who feel a sense of mastery. That they have control over their destiny and that they don’t need to be [00:29:00] better at the SATs or have gone to a better school than the person next to them. They should judge themselves by the work they produce in the world.

How aligned that work is with their own interests. And do they wake up every day with a sense of joy that they get to participate? In some something purposeful that matters to them. And if that’s playing guitar like Mark Knopfler or writing books, Stephen King or painting or doing math or working at NASA, Or Tesla or Uber or wherever you want to work or opening an ice cream store.

All of these things are valid, but we’re living in a time where, because of things like Instagram and peer pressure, everybody thinks they need to live this Kardashian lifestyle. The Kardashians are not. A happy family or a family to aspire to be anything like it’s a disgusting, dysfunctional representation of [00:30:00] a family.

and I don’t know how much of it’s real or made up, you have a group of young kids who think I need to be like these vapid, fame balls that are just flaming out in the world and we’re sending. Very weird messages to our children because success is either being this MIT, perfect sat, Stanford track, or being the Kardashians and having, so many likes on Instagram.

This is not what life is about. Yeah. And certainly for women, and young girls, they’re pushing them toward either this. sexualized adulthood very early, where they have to be posting their pictures of Coachella and Snapchat and their self worth comes from their outfit and their lipstick and how, whatever body modifications they’re doing and not from the work they produce in the world or how deep their friendships are and how meaningful their [00:31:00] pursuits are in life.

And I’m going to raise my three daughters to be bosses, not bossy. but to be bosses like Charles Sandberg says, I want my daughters to feel like they can accomplish anything to know what it is that motivates them and what they would enjoy to do, and just make them super confident in their ability because.

The stuff in school is just it’s foundational and it’s great. I think people rely a little too much on the school and not enough on themselves. So I’m just making massive investments now in watching what they’re interested in and then trying to, based on what they show interest in. Which is a Reggio style of education, which my wife, who’s brilliant, T taught me about, she taught me about all the different educational things.

Cause she just reads all the books and then I draft off of her knowledge of it. But Reggio Amelia, if you look it up like a Montessori philosophy and it basically says, if you look at what [00:32:00] the kids interested in, they show an interest in orcas. Okay, let’s teach them math or science, or projects that are based upon orcas.

B and then make the whole theme of the year Arcas and then culminate the year on going and seeing an Orca on a, $20 bow cruise out of San Diego. And if he can’t afford to do that, maybe studying, orcas online by watching documentaries and just going all in on orcas because now they’ve learned, Oh my God, the pursuit of knowledge about something you’re passionate about, that could be.

So meaningful to them and they get this incredible reward of going deep on a subject. the skill, I try to explain to the founders who I work with. Cause I basically take over the parenting role. In some cases, when you’re the angel you get, I looked at as a parental figure, somebody with a mentor ship figure.

It’s not a mentor is not exactly a parent, but it’s not. It’s pretty close in many [00:33:00] ways. And I just, I sat down at lunch yesterday with a group of three of my founders who were incredibly successful. And I said, okay, where do you guys want to be in five years? What does success look? they have offers to buy their company.

And I said, okay, is success for you each to make $6 million? Is it each of you to build this company for another four years and make $60 million each. Or a success for you to work together for the next 10 years to make a company that is legendary and never goes away. And that can be your legacy. And they’re just sitting there we had questions about the pricing of our product and, should we do this business deal?

And should we hire this person? I’m like, you’re going to, you’re super qualified to make those decisions. Let’s have a let’s step back for a moment and look at the whole chess board. Let’s make a decision here and it can be a different decision for each of you. I painted three scenarios, 6 million, 60 million owning the company indefinitely.

Each of you should just honestly say which one you think you’re leaning towards or rank them. Yeah. And they [00:34:00] ranked them and they all ranked them the same. yeah. I think young people are just not even, I’m talking about 20 somethings or people in their thirties, even who just don’t have anybody sitting there saying, what would success look like to you for me?

I figured out what success looks like for me a while ago and I’m living it. And everyday I wake up with a sense of joy that, and I pinch myself, I get to do what I do, but because, 

Mike: [00:34:27] but it sounds like it, the definition of success is painted by the value system. At least right now in the current setup in Palo Alto, you’re talking about is you have all of these keeping up with the Joneses, activities where it’s like success is getting into the big school.

Success is getting the highest sat score. Success is landing a job, at some startup or tech company, post graduation from the prestigious school. So then that begets a attitude in twenties and thirties to say, I don’t know what the heck I’m supposed to do because. this value structure that I [00:35:00] had is actually not accurate.

And I never really learned how to ask myself questions or have that self guided approach of education that you described where it’s saying, Hey, I want to have someone that comes and looks alongside me and really helps me understand what it is that I’m interested in. And then gives me a framework for.

Self guided education toward that, So that’s where it’s interesting to hear you talk about the Palo Alto scenario, because it’s almost is there anyone that’s doing that? It sounds like you guys are doing that a little bit. And I would imagine there’s probably some others, in your spheres that are doing this, Montessori ask type education where you’re saying, you know what, it’s more about.

Teaching them to have intrinsic motivation and curiosity. And how do we do that? As opposed to just forcing them down this path of credentials and high scores and prestigious schools and everything. And I’m curious, like how did your wife arrive at [00:36:00] this? Or is there other people doing this? Is it doesn’t sound like any startups are trying to tackle that, or there’s not any, things on the horizon because one of the things too, Jason, is that.

You see this trend of not only keeping up with the Joneses, but also a trend of lack of focus, everyone’s add there’s no slowness to ask those questions. And that’s why people aren’t asking those questions. And so it’s almost if you can do that and you can slow down, that’s a competitive advantage in and of itself.

when you have a world of people that are chasing after these things are distracted by these things. That becomes your competitive advantage, which is interesting to me. It’s how do you build that? that’s what I’m asking for my kids. And that’s what I want to help people with, 

Jason: [00:36:43] Yeah. In there. there, you. If you look at add and ADHD and Asperger’s, and this whole spectrum, society has gone on, we study things and, people’s existence of constantly [00:37:00] having inbound email, text, Snapchat, et cetera. this is. Having an impact on people’s brains and their psychology in there.

Yeah. Anxiety as a society, the things that will kill us continue to go down. The idea of dying a violent death has gone down significantly. For many reasons you can read about Steven Pinker or listen to Gavin de Becker or re Gavin de Becker’s, talks. He just did a great podcast with Sam Harris. the idea of dying a violent death has gone down significantly in society.

The idea of living in abject poverty or starving herself. we’re starving to death famine. These things have gone down precipitously, infant mortality. A lot of things in society are trending the right way so much so that the things that are left that will kill us, are going to be.

In many ways self-inflicted and highly avoidable, a suicide being one of them. because after we get rid of drunk driving and the 30 or 40,000 people a year that die in the United States from accidents, [00:38:00] it’s happening every day, a hundred people dying from car accidents. when those things start to fade, what’s going to be left.

In fact, if you look at. Death from airplanes in the modern, or I should say United States. the, I don’t want to say a, I think the proper etiquette is to say, if you compare the Western world, today, the developing world and in third world is considered, I’m not as tactful. I don’t think it’s, but I think people in the developing world, in developing worlds where there aren’t as many laws and oversight, Yeah. Dying in an airplane. Your commercial airplane very possible. in the United States, like we have years go by where nobody dies in a commercial jet, and then we have, spiky moments where, terrorists kill thousands of people with commercial jets. And, we’ve gotten to the point where we’re just looking at that one instance.

we put lock pit, [00:39:00] we put doors. That can’t be broken down to protect from terrorists. So we kinda try to solve that problem. And then we have a suicidal pilot in general, mean who runs a plane into a mountain cause you suffering from depression. And there might have been a similar thing and I believe it was Egypt.

So now the way we’re dying in airplanes is not because of airplane malfunctions. it’s from pilots Downing the planes because they’re either suicidal or terrorists or distraught. It’s it’s not from the actual act of flying. This is getting fascinating when you think about it.

and it’s a long way of saying, our kids are gonna. In all likelihood live, in a world where the idea of starving to death is not the leading cause of death, but. Overeating is the leading cause of death, Something that is in fact, self-inflicted right. We make these bad choices. So it’s interesting as a parent or our parents were just like, how do we keep this kid alive? Okay. And that’s [00:40:00] because they didn’t have seatbelts in cars or they let kids just. Jump around in the backseat. are my parents the idea of us putting seatbelts on or anybody putting a seatbelt on the car on the seventies was like, why would you put a seatbelt on?

And it makes no sense. That’s not, why are there seatbelts in these cars? They just, literally people would tuck the seatbelts into the seats so they didn’t have to deal with them. Yeah. you probably remember this, right? 

Mike: [00:40:19] or the fold-up seats, in the back 

Jason: [00:40:20] in the back, it’s okay, this is going to work out.

there’s. Certainly like this. It was weird. I was talking to an educational psychologist cause we were talking about our daughter who has got this, She’s really high on verbal ability and certain other traits. And then does it want to sit in a classroom? Hey, Addy Phil about medicine mitigation.

And I’m like, how do you feel about medication? And I’m talking to a 70 year old school psychologist. It’s in the last 30 years I’ve seeing kids who cannot sit down and shut up, be able to sit down and shut up and pay attention in class and not be a disturbance to the class.

And. These kids are going to need [00:41:00] to learn that when they get into the workforce and they need to sit at a desk all day. Cause how are they going to function in the world? And my wife and I just started listen to this. And we got we’re like, okay, let us think about that. We got in the car and my wife’s what’d you think of that?

And I was like, that sounded pretty crazy to me. She’s that’s exactly what I thought. I was like, we’re literally thinking that a kid who wants to run around at the age of five, six or seven or eight years old, Is broken and that they need to be medicated so they can sit in a classroom for six hours without talking.

It’s crazy. This crazy madness and parents are like, I don’t have, and then you have this other problem where parents are under resourced and have to go to work. And we talked about just how people have to be dual income, just to even get by, forget about, moving up and. the ladders of society to a different station in life where they can maybe move from being poor to middle class or middle class, upper middle class, or even middle class to affluent is very [00:42:00] hard.

Mobility is hard. Is social mobility is very hard right now. it’s a challenge. And so for a parent who is exhausted at the end of the day, a single parent, or even two parents, this might seem like a pretty good option, too. Put their kid on a drug that makes them less, more manageable. So I don’t judge those parents, but I do think that as a society, the idea of people sitting in an office and shutting up for 12 hours a day is not the future anyway.

Like everybody at work’s let’s get foosball tables. Let’s put. Volleyball outside and let’s let people work for two hours and then go do some physical acts.  stand up desks, all this stuff. So we know this in silica. Like you need, people need to go exercise. So they’re building campuses with walking tracks and tell people like work for 90 minutes, get up and go for a walk for 15, 20 minutes.

Talk to one of your coworkers and then go have a cup of coffee and then go back and maybe do yoga or go to the nap room and then go [00:43:00] work again for a couple of hours. And they work in a bursty style fashion, and some schools are. No, sit in your sit down and shut up, Is really, in the benefit of the teacher and the administration and the structure of the school, not in the, interest of the kids.

So we, we did a hard pass on medicating. Yeah. It’s and we, we talked to a lot of other parents who have done it and I think they’ve done it under pressure and duress from schools that just don’t want to deal with a student to, our Kickstarter legs under the desk. It’s it seems crazy to me.

If a kid is got energy, that’s fantastic. We should get them out there and let them play and run and do what they want to do. 

Mike: [00:43:43] Yeah. 

Jason: [00:43:44] It’s very disturbing to me like this whole med. I think the medication of kids probably, and I’m no expert, but I gotta think it’s 10 times what’s necessary 20 times what’s necessary.

And if there’s a group of kids who just have that much energy, we should just create, schools or classrooms for [00:44:00] kids who have massive amounts of energy. And just to have them be out in the sh in, in nature and learning in a literally learning in a park. And have, math be a stop along a hike, like just construct it for kids to get some exercise and all these kids are getting overweight.

So it’s this weird thing with factory farming of kids. And I’m not gonna allow that to happen to my kids. we’re not factory farming. Our kids. If a school can’t accommodate a kid, who’s got high energy, then I’ll just homeschool them. And I’m very lucky to be in a position to do that, but I’m very worried about the disadvantage.

A lot of parents are at a and M. I came out. Okay. But maybe I didn’t come out. Okay. Maybe I had a, maybe I’m not, maybe I had other options in life. you look back on your own life and you’re like, wow. I was a product of that factory farming. we were the last generation that was hit in class.

I remember kids being hit by brothers. That’s a, verein like, we were literally physically assaulted by teachers. It’s crazy. [00:45:00] That is pretty crazy 

Mike: [00:45:01] in this day and age to think back to that, 

Jason: [00:45:04] if you got hit by a teacher, listen to the teacher, Yeah. literally corporal punishment was a thing in the early eighties.

I don’t think in the nineties it was, but I think we caught the tail end of it. 

Mike: [00:45:16] so this I, and with you, I think it’s a huge issue. And I think it’s, it goes back to the angel investing really, and seeing what’s ahead and saying the landscape is changing. It’s changing for the negative on the schooling aspect.

And then it’s changing for, I think the positive in a lot of ways in the workforce and the trends in technology. But you have this mismatch of equipping the workforce and equipping the next generation to deal with this new, landscape of jobs and the professional workspace. And. who’s tackling this.

is it because there’s no money in it? Is it because no one knows what the heck they’re supposed to do? I know that like Elon Musk started a school at Astra, first, like what are they doing? are they doing anything innovative or are they it’s 

Jason: [00:45:58] who is tackling this? [00:46:00] Our kids would have went there.

I’m good friends with Elon and. He is, he basically got two or three of the best teachers in all of Los Angeles and, a couple of my friends, have kids there. And I think they do a lot of project based learning and they have incredible speakers come in and, it would be what you would expect, which when you have a very small teacher to, student ratio, I think this teacher to student ratio needs to be no more than Tend to one. And I think as a society, as far as I’m concerned and, listen, I would love if we would raise the tax rate on affluent people. And I would be in that bucket 5% a year and put that all towards education and just triple the number of teachers and society. Education is just paramount.

And we w we started the discussion talking about the 30 million jobs going away. Here’s a really easy way. For us as a society to start mitigating against that, [00:47:00] literally quadruple the number of teachers and double the number of hours in school. So as far as I’m concerned, I don’t think this is a radical, crazy value proposition.

Schools should be available seven days a week. It should be available from 7:00 AM until 7:00 PM. And. Your kids can go to it for the standard amount from eight 30 to three o’clock or if you’re a parent of limited resources and you have to work a job on a Saturday, you could drop your kids off, out on a Saturday school, where they do project based stuff.

Triple the number of quadruple the number of teachers and. Take the hours of a school and take them from whatever it is, 10 months, a year, nine or 10 months a year, and make it 12 months a year and make it available. 365 days a year, our society would be an amazing, beautiful society. It would not cost that much for us to have school available [00:48:00] for all parents.

365 days a year. It is not controversial. Anybody who thinks that’s a large expense, just doesn’t understand the numbers. The, what we spend on defense, what we spend, what tax breaks we’ve given over the years, our criminal, I’ve benefited from them. I don’t need to benefit from them to the level that they are.

anybody who’s affluent in the society would say, if you went to literally the top million, most affluent Americans and said, Hey, we’re going to charge you 4% more on your taxes. And here is what you’ll get 365 day education for every American from the age of three years old to the age of 25 years old.

And it’s going to cost you a 4% more. Every, I think out of a million, the million, most affluent people, you would get 990. Thousand say yes. In [00:49:00] other words, 99% would say yes. And 1% would be like, I am, I don’t, I believe in less government and I’m going to pull a ladder up behind me and. I earned mine, screw you.

But literally the other 99% would be like, wow, we’re going a beautiful thing to do for society. In fact, now I’m going to write that up as a blog post. 

Mike: [00:49:15] Yeah. But I agree. I would say I agree with that. I think, the, just the sheer investment in education, it’s so lopsided with other so much stuff.

We spend our money on us as a country. So I would agree with that. in principle, I think the question too, though, is what step changes are needed. In the actual schooling curriculum or the approach, to be maybe more in lines with some of that kind of thing. Sorry, self guided to say. Cause what I heard you say the keyword was available, schooling being available, if you made it so that.

It’s a resource that they could come and they could explore their interests or, not be so regimented making them sit at a desk and go through a certain curriculum. that, to me, that’s really interesting to say what could actually happen if you had a bunch of money, if you had the investment [00:50:00] money that, Uber has, or really somebody startups to just solve a problem.

Why not take some of that money, like you’re saying, and try to figure that out in the same way, tackle that problem from a technology standpoint, from a curriculum standpoint, from, 

Jason: [00:50:13] something that’s really far. if you just look at YouTube and it’s a silly example, but, or tree house or lynda.com or, if you look at, Khan Academy, a large.

And then you go onto Coursera at IDEXX and, some of those, products, we’re living in a society where yeah, sure. You can very easily, afford, to acquire any skill online. And now it’s gets been a lot of trouble when I say all this information is available out there. because. Then, of course it leads to, if all of the information on how to be a high tech worker or to learn Photoshop is online, why don’t we have people acquiring these skills and that eventually leads to be answered.

Cause I’ve heard from people [00:51:00] are, they don’t have the free time and they don’t Oh, it’s available. And they don’t have the precursor education. Those are the three things I hear most often from people who say I’m wrong about the fact that. the information on how to acquire skills is freely available online.

So what they’re right. That those, the issues they point to are, could be challenges, individuals. They’re wrong about the fact that the information is freely available online. It is you. If you want to learn any skill, your college professors will tell you. And even high school professors go online to get that there’s better information online than what I can provide to you.

So go look at it online and then I’ll maybe, talk to you about it. But literally if you want to learn any piece of software, the manufacturer of that software and countless other startup companies around that provided either for free or close to free, like $25 a month, there’s less surely [00:52:00] people who have told me people don’t have the free time and they don’t have the money.

And I say, here’s each of those arguments, minimum wage, most cities, 10 bucks, ballpark. so working for Starbucks for two hours or three hours, more than enough to pay for your monthly. Khan Academy, your monthly Treehouse subscription or Lynda subscription. Plus a lot of that stuff is already available.

Then they say, okay, people don’t have that. And then I say, they literally don’t, I don’t have three hours of work they could do. And there’s a bunch of on demand work available, and a lot of communities, door dash, Uber, Lyft, et cetera. So anyway, people talk down, I think, to the poor, and to the people who are struggling and pretend that.

$20 a month as an insurmountable hurdle to get that elite education or the fact that it’s free. So that seems to me a little disingenuous, that I said they don’t have time. the fact is the average American [00:53:00] watches, five hours of TV a day. So we have the average, American has five hours of screen time a day.

Now you’re telling me that this person doesn’t have the money, even though it’s available for free or let’s call it. Essentially free in some cases, and they don’t have the time, but the average Americans watching five hours of television and the average American is probably spending $60 a month on their mobile phone.

And so they say, they don’t have access to technology. And it’s on your mobile phone, Is YouTube and tree house and all these things, so that doesn’t actually stand up. And the idea that people don’t have access to a computer, doesn’t stand up in the age of a Chromebook being $199 or $5 a month or $10 a month.

So what does stand up in that motivation? Access to even knowing that this is a possibility. Yeah. Those things I think are very valid. There’s a large, I talk to people all the time and they’re like, what should I do with my [00:54:00] life? They acquire skills. I say, what skills? Oh, you think, go on LinkedIn and look at what people are hiring for.

Go pick 10 companies, look at their job page. And they’re like, Oh, I never thought of doing that. I’m like, Okay. Your parents never talked to you that the way you could figure out what skills are available as to look at job boards. Okay, fine. So that’s pop that is possible. And then motivation people are more motivated to, play video games, watch TV and get the passive or mildly interactive rush as opposed to the slow grind of learning.

And so I think as a society, we have to start cherishing. The pursuit of skills and education. And we used to have it in America. People used to be very proud of the fact that they were acquiring skills, that we’re very proud of the fact that they were working hard. There’s something wrong in society where people are just like, they, everybody wants the Kim Kardashian, private jet, but they don’t want, they don’t want, I put the work in that it takes [00:55:00] to get a private jet.

I don’t have a private jet, probably Jetstar, absurdly, expensive private jet. Shouldn’t be your goal anyway, but. If you did have aspirations of owning a home in Calabasas or wherever they live. And if you did have aspirations of driving a range Rover is a pretty straightforward way to do that. Pick a technical skill, acquire it, and then become great at it.

And I don’t know, I get myself in a lot of trouble, but, I do think that we live in one of the most open. society’s when it comes to access to information and how to acquire these skills in the history of humanity, it may still be flawed in some ways, but I knew when I was growing up. You couldn’t find this information.

You had to go to college to get it right. And you have to apply to a college. And I couldn’t get into the good colleges when I got into a good one for them, but I couldn’t get into MIT or Harvard or Stanford, where they really had the really great professors and the really elite knowledge. Now [00:56:00] those same professors points to the online course, which is free.

Y Combinator is running a free course on being a startup founder. If you want to learn how to be rich, you could take the Y Combinator free course that Sam Altman put together. And it’s there. You can read my book in the library for free. You can buy my book for bucks. Knowledge is so cheap and available yet.

People don’t want to read books and learn skills and it’s going to take. I think a lot of, I think we’re living in this very weird moment in time where a group of people are capitulating and giving up and another group of people are embracing it. And that’s leading to this crazy bifurcation where one group of people feels helpless and the other group of people feels empowered.

And it’s why do you think that is though? 

Mike: [00:56:47] why do you think you have a bifurcation like that? where does, 

Jason: [00:56:50] where 

Mike: [00:56:50] does that motivation come from? Cause I think it would bring it back to fatherhood. what role does. the parent, what do the parents have in that? you mentioned the parents, pitching the whole Palo [00:57:00] Alto, games, what I’ve heard, 

Jason: [00:57:02] I’ve heard role models is one piece.

So if you don’t see people like you doing something, people who look like you, gender race, et cetera, if you don’t have those examples around you, then you might not consider a possibility. Therefore it’s just not in your consciousness. Because I have no musical talent that my parents had. No. Musical talent.

The idea of me becoming Mark Knopfler and being one of the 15 greatest guitar players just never even entered my mind. I didn’t know where you got a guitar from. I didn’t know how to learn to play guitar. it just wasn’t part of my upbringing. but other people who have musician, parents, of course, that’s a possibility.

If you have parents who play chess, I suppose you look them all. My mom’s a chess Grandmaster. My dad’s a chess Grandmaster. I’m going to. Play chess. So the mentor and the models I hear from people is one of the main concerns, which is why diversity in tech, such an important issue. If you cannot see people like yourself in senior [00:58:00] positions, doing things, like becoming founders of companies will then, you may not even think it’s an option open for you.

So I do think that is valid. It seems to me logical that if you don’t. Role models, and consequent, and conversely, where I grew up role models of people who are drug dealers, bookies, bartenders cops, like I just thought that was my view, a bookie drug color bartender.

and in some cases there were people who did multiple of those. I knew cops bartended and, or yeah. And all kinds of other restorative stuff. it’s yeah, I think that’s probably a valid one, but I’m not an expert on any of this. I also think that we have lived in a victim society where it’s very easy for people to fall into.

I am a victim and the world is against me. And I think that a lot of societies that reach the level of, disparity in [00:59:00] wealth income and prosperity, that’s two things it’s like, w we have it, we’ve made it easier and easier for the rich to get richer. And we made it harder and harder. As I said earlier, for people who are poor or middle class to move up and.

Minimum wage is one of those things, the ridiculous tax rates that the rich pay, the idea that the rich guy to pay a low, a massively lower capital gains tax. While poor people don’t have the ability because of being, not being an accredited investor to even invest in private companies. The system, just to me, seems rigged so many different ways to make the rich richer that I think it’s leading to the revolution that we’re experiencing right now, which is it doesn’t feel equitable.

It is. In fact, not equitable. That’s very clear and we should just, the rich have to pay more taxes. Education has to be freer and more available. And we have to really work on upward mobility. The fact that wages for, folks are so stagnant is a problem. [01:00:00] and then on top of all this problem, we’ve rigged the system for the rich over the last couple of decades with capital gains taxes, et cetera, stuff I mentioned.

And all these loopholes, we rigged that at the exact same time that. Low-income jobs are gonna disappear at a very high velocity. This is very bad. Combination is a very scary. Cause I see it from the inside and I’m just like, wow, if you’re rich and you put your money in the stock market and you pay capital gains, you’re just crushing it.

And those companies are eliminating jobs. Therefore they’re crushing it. So you have all of this wealth and efficiency creation happening for the people who own the stocks of Amazon, Google, et cetera, and who work at those companies and who participate as stakeholders in those companies. And then you have another group of people who don’t have access to those companies.

Which is why I think the angel investing it’s this little hack. If somebody really wants to do the work, it’s not guaranteed, but it is a hack in a way to break into the system, I believe. And getting your name [01:01:00] tables. Now, I don’t think it’s going to be easy by any stretch to the imagination. It’s going to be a ton of work for people.

Sorry. I should have done a work for people to break into it, but there in the book I outline, these are a little bit. like ways you can sneak into the tent. And I’m hoping that people read the book and I hope some number of them figure out a way to sneak into the town. Like I do. I snuck my way in, it took me two, two decades, but I did.

and so I know it’s possible and I’m not saying, and some people are like, Jason’s crazy. If he thinks everybody could be an angel investor, somebody was trolling me on Facebook. I’d like to see you talk to the coal mine about becoming an angel investor. And I was like, you know what? I would like to talk to the calm on her about being an angel investor.

If there was a coal miner who actually thinks that they could become a successful angel investor and they want to transition out of that. Yeah. I would love to coach them on here’s the possible way to do it at night. I wouldn’t talk down to the coal monitor and say, just because you spend your life, pulling in gold call from the ground, you’re not going to be able to figure out what the next great startup is.

There’s a possibility that [01:02:00] somebody could do that. I know because I’m the son of a bartender in nursing. I was able to grind my way there. So maybe the call, maybe the person who digs coal right now can’t do it. But maybe their kid can. Yeah, but everybody’s against it’s just, we live in such a toxic time right now.

I just think everybody is, they don’t want to hear that there are possible solutions to society’s problems. Because things have been so bad for so long. So I think there’s like this burned it down mentality in the world right now. It’s also very disturbing. Like we’ve lost all ability to collaborate. And use common sense to solve problems.

Everything is your team’s wrong. My team’s right. Burn it down. Just completely lost. 

Mike: [01:02:41] do you think we’ve lost empathy for others? I mean that, I think so. 

Jason: [01:02:46] Yeah. It’s like social media drains, every ounce of empathy from people. 

Mike: [01:02:51] Yeah, and it’s I’m obviously one, I have a podcast and father had someone to harp on, family values and the role that fathers play and mothers play, [01:03:00] in raising their kids.

But I think. All of those trends that you’re talking about to me, I see a commonality of what are the role of the parents to teach proper values in this? And what are the downstream effects when that doesn’t happen. And not to say that there’s not externalities that are affecting that in that’s, the shifts in the job market and all that, but this burn it down mentality.

Talk about it is very toxic, but it carries over into your, all of. Life, it’s this perpetual hold state of nothing matters or I just, I don’t really care about anyone else and I just, my teams, Your teams, aren’t all about that. You’re talking about. It’s to me, it comes down to a lot of empathy and value structure and it’s, to me, seems like, how do you instill that?

In the schooling process and in raising your kids, and it’s not an easy problem to solve, but I think that is, it’s a huge issue. That’s only going to get worse in my opinion, because of the bifurcation of the haves and have nots, like exactly things you described, [01:04:00] it just gets harder and harder to have time and resources to invest in those things.

So you naturally have less of them, And it sounds like though, the halves aren’t doing much better job because. The suicide rates are really high, so it’s all bad. 

Jason: [01:04:13] Yeah. It feels like it’s all bad except, 

Mike: [01:04:16] super negative. But 

Jason: [01:04:17] here’s the thing. It does feel bad because our expectations are high, that things will continue to get better.

And it, for a lot of people it’s not getting better and we live at a time when you can open up your phone and see the worst thing that happened in the world or the funniest cutest thing that happened in the world. So we are. Addicted to these little devices, you open them up and it’s by the way, some people went to a carnival and the carnival ride broke and here’s a video of.

People’s bodies flying off of the carnival ride. And I saw that the other day and I was just like, Oh my God, I was just at a carnival and I just felt so depressed about it. And I was like, I had this whole conversation with my wife, never let our daughters on these carnival rides because they’re set up and broken down by [01:05:00] a bunch of, teenagers and they’re rusted and they’re old and they travel hundreds and thousands of miles a year, all over the place.

It’s just way too dangerous than a ride at Disneyland, which is bolted into the foundation and checked. And nobody ever dies on a Disneyland, but people die at country fair or get mangled all the time. We’re never letting our child do this. It’s a big like discussion. And then I see that video and then I send it to my wife and I’m like, Oh my God.

We’re like, actually get to see the bodies flying off the ride, but then you also see. people saving each other’s lives and incredible acts of kindness. So you have to really retrain your brain to say, okay, every death and every piece of suffering is going to be documented and served up to us by an algorithm by Facebook that is designed to.

Mess with our emotions because they want to get more people addicted to this rage, sadness and joy cycle. [01:06:00] And that’s why Facebook is growing so much because literally there’s a team of really highly intelligent people over there at PhDs and whatnot who are saying, what’s going to have the deepest impact on you right now.

And those people need to take a deep look in the mirror and say, why are we effing with people’s emotions? With an algorithm to this level. And fake news was one of the, things it’s like showing you fake news is going to make you log into Facebook more. So literally, if the Russians gave a bunch of data and, came Cambridge Analytica used that data, or, to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on Facebook essentially.

Posted fake ads that they reviewed for the fake news. This is the theory going around Silicon Valley. And it seems like it’s going to be closer to true than false. Some hundreds of millions of dollars were cashed by Facebook to post fake news [01:07:00] that were targeted at African Americans, because Facebook lets you target by ethnicity and they targeted African-Americans with ads to get them to not come out for Hillary that were fake news.

And maybe some of that money, and this is a big, maybe came from Russians or Russian interests or Russian prof profits from transactions with the Russians that maybe are not directly from the Russians, but are profits from the Russians who knows. And maybe there’s some stolen data that was used to target these people that maybe the Russians hacked or maybe the data in the ads came from Russian hacked misinformation.

So Facebook may have been. Complicit in cashing checks that they knew promoted fake news to get African Americans who came after Obama to knock them out for Hillary. Don’t let that sink in Female and Silicon Valley need to really take a deep look in the mirror [01:08:00] if that is in fact what happened.

And that’s why they’re getting subpoenas from what I understand and what you can Google. And maybe that’s why Zuckerberg is on a tour of America trying to bond with people because he knows exactly how bad this will look when the whole Mueller investigation comes out. People don’t know this listening in all likelihood, Facebook reviews, every ad on their system.

So somebody, some human, whether it’s a low level, high level, mid level, I’m sure some of them got surfaced to high level people like Hillary pizza gate, people are being molested in the basement. So pizzerias that don’t actually have basements, like those kinds of ads were on Facebook and who paid for, and how are they targeted?

It’s like Facebook needs to. Thing, should we allow you to target the African American people in a swing state were the white people without college degrees and this wing state, but political ads, is that how we really want our democracy to run? It seems like the people at Facebook may have [01:09:00] ma they might be too smart for their own good, like really smart at manipulating people and really smart at making money and damaging our democracy and the feeling.

and the goal of having an equitable society, 

Mike: [01:09:14] which goes back to the values of the structure for that. So I think we started this by saying, what values do people have and how they build those? And then what are the outcomes of that? Cause I think you’re describing is essentially a lack of values to look at yourself in the mirror and say, what am I doing here?

in the empathy for others. And what is the consequences of these actions or decisions and what, it’s, it is speculation who actually did that or how that transpired, but yeah. At the end of the day, is it a values, question and I don’t know, 

I don’t have an answer, 

Jason: [01:09:50] but so there you have it, everybody.

It’s two, no idea exactly how screwed this up it is, but we are terrified of the future and trying [01:10:00] to do our best. Try it best to make it just a little bit better for our kids. I don’t, I think maybe check back with me in 10 years and I might write a book about parenting and just what I’ve learned.

it is the most important job I literally considered it my most important too. 

Mike: [01:10:15] so I think, yeah, we’ll probably end it on that, but I typically ask someone what their 2 cents are, to send dad podcast. so Jason, someone having their first child, new dad, what is one piece of advice that you’d give to them?

Jason: [01:10:28] there is a four letter word for how, I think, kids, the kids value the most T I M E. And of course your kids and you’re going to love your kids. That’s like a default. You can’t not love your kids. there might be some educators have a psychological disorder where people don’t actually love their kids, but you will love your kids.

They will feel love. You will feel love from them. But really love is spelled T I M in my mind. And I, encourage people to take their [01:11:00] device. And when they’re out with their kids, leave it in the glove compartment. Leave it at home, go on a hike with your kids. and it’s not the number of hours. It’s how present you are in those hours.

A person on their phone. I see it with some friends of mine who are addicted to their phones. They’re playing with their kids in the backyard for three or four hours. Their kids feel ignored and they’re in a constant battle with their kids to get them off of their phones. and, kids are going to follow your lead.

So I just take my daughter on a hike where there’s no phone reception, or I just turn the phone off and we hiked for two hours, ours, and then we go have lunch. Maybe I’ll check to make sure there’s nothing going on, but I tell my wife, phone’s going to be off. We’re going to be on this trail and we’re going to be in this movie and we’re going to be going for this place for sushi or Bobo, whatever it is, just be present.

And, I started doing meditation with my daughter. which has really helped, I think, with kids, with ADHD or add or any [01:12:00] kind of focus issue. this is one of the great things you can do. 

Mike: [01:12:03] Just some resources on that with kids. 

Jason: [01:12:06] I don’t okay. 

Mike: [01:12:08] Off the Google add up though. I might put some in the show notes and try to find some, cause I think that’s a good point, cause it’s an alternative to that medication topic that we talked about.

But, yeah. 

Jason: [01:12:16] I think hiking in nature, It just is magical for kids. I take my daughter hiking every week. We go crabbing together. There’s some physical outdoor activity and also they’re going to sleep better. there’s always this like battle to get kids to sleep. It’s like your kids on an iPad for four hours.

They just ate ice cream and you’re trying to get them to bed. Good luck. if there is going to be, it’s going to be a disaster, take your kid for a three or four mile hike and then have, or go on a pier and crab with them for four hours in the sun, outside of nature. And then, you get them home and they just.

Walk to their bed and they just, my daughter, when she’s out with me for the day, she literally says, I’m going to bed now, dad and walks to bed. there’s no debate over bed. It’s I’m exhausted. Dad, can you snuggle with me and read me [01:13:00] a book? I’m like, great. I’ve read two pages. She falls asleep.

That’s meditation. Calm.com is a company I’m an investor in and they have meditation for kids and sleep stories for kids. They work really well. Just for a little plug. It’s not expensive. Okay. galen.com. Are you going to school? All right. Great talking to you, man. Hey, thanks a lot. Okay. 

Mike: [01:13:21] Yeah. Thank you so much, Jason.

Thanks for listening to the show, you can find out more about us and sign up to receive updates at  dot com. If you liked what you heard or just want to say hi, you can shoot me an email at Mike at  dot com. Please leave a review on iTunes. If you liked the show. Helps us to get the word out to the most people possible.

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