#012: John Wise (32 yrs) on NOT Going to College, Developing 1k Inventions, and Winning Racing...

Welcome to the hackiversity Podcast, where students learn how to achieve more by doing less in college. Learn the hacks from wildly successful recent college graduates as your host, Kyle Whiney, explores the colleges, majors, and paths that produce the biggest results in college using less effort. It's hacking time. Hello, all you college hackers. Welcome to the hackiversity Podcast, where I, Kyle Whiney, show students how to achieve more by doing less in college. Many of you have been asking me to advise students who are considering not going to college. Well, today is your lucky day. I'm stoked to welcome to the show John Wise, someone who never graduated from college. And no, contrary to what most people will tell you, that has not spelled immediate destruction for John's career. In fact, it's just the opposite. When I interviewed John, he was in the middle of Times Square in New York City. So that's why you'll hear horns honking and sirens blaring in the background. The reason why John was standing in Times Square was because he had just finished meeting with a panel of investors who invested $8.6 million into his company, Loki, a company that helps inventors determine whether their idea exists. Of course, $8.6 million is a lot of money, but that's only one part of the investment round projected to raise a total of $270 million. That's incredible. How could these investors give millions of dollars to someone who never graduated from college? Easy, because John has demonstrated his abilities in a variety of other ways, including by developing over 1,000 inventions, and namely, in the automobile racing industry. In this episode, John and I tackle, among other things, how students can determine whether they should go to college in the first place. As John makes clear, there is no one size fits all answer for students. However, there are certain principles which can guide this analysis. Without further ado, let's dig in. John, thanks so much for joining me today.

Thank you. Glad to be here.

John, I'm stoked to have you on because you mark the very first person on my show who's never actually gone to college. So I'm super excited to talk to you about this.

Well, that's so. That's true, but it's also not right. I went but for two and a half weeks.

And what college was that?

That was, as we called it, Harvard on the Pike. That was Montgomery College in a little crappy community college in Maryland.

Cool. Well, I'd love to get into that in a second, but before we do, let's just set the stage and tell all the listeners out There. How old are you?

I'm 32.

So as you said, you actually never went to college except for that two and a half week period. So. So here's a basic question to start us off. Why did you never go to college?

You know, I didn't really see the need. So, you know what's interesting about like, my. My age and generation here is that, you know, when we were kids, there was one real path to knowledge. There was a bottleneck. There was learning from books or school or teachers. Right? We had to learn from one of these finite sources. Now I'm dyslexic and I have really terrible add, so I was terrible at listening to begin with. And I kind of went off on my own thing most. Most days anyway. So I kind of learned how to teach myself. I had to. No teacher was teaching me adequately. And I sort of got into just absorbing this material very quickly. I learned by doing things kinesthetically, you know. And then sort of the big apex happened. The web came around, right? The Internet. And now all of a sudden, there wasn't a bottleneck of information for me to absorb. Now it was everywhere. Everything had information that I could soak up.

So you're just teaching yourself everything all the time?

Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I didn't read a book until I was about 27. Not a single book. Right. I couldn't. Now I read about three, sometimes upwards of six a week.

But.

But that's. That's the thing, right, is I learned very quickly and sort of early on how to weed out the BS online and sort of vet the material and teach myself. And I'm kind of. I kind of have a problem with authority, right. In general, I'm a terrible employee. I'm a great boss, but I'm a terrible employee. So I always had a problem with what teachers were telling me anyway because I would always question them. I'd always say, yeah, no, that doesn't really sound right. You know, something like this.

Yeah, yeah. So, John, were there people to encourage you away from opting out of college or were people okay with you just deciding not to go?

No, my mom cried for about two weeks when I told her I wanted to be a mechanic. She was really upset. So my mom used to be an English professor. Now she's a realtor. My dad has five undergrads, three masters and a JD. Now he's getting his PhD and both of my brothers have MBAs.

So you really bucked the trend.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I kind of went against the status quo. Which is pretty much my life story.

So how did you deal with that pressure of just being different from everyone in your family?

I don't really see that as pressure. That's just me.

Yeah. And you just were embracing who you are.

I just did what I wanted to do. Right. I, I, I started a mechanic business and consulting company in high school, freshman or sophomore year, and would skip class and I'd go and work on cars and learn everything about them. And then my, what would have been my freshman year in high school, I got a job with, I, I got a job with BMW as an engineer and went from there.

That's amazing. I want to get into that in a bit. Before we do, John, let me just ask you this. So many people think that there are only two types of people who should not go to college. Those named Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. In other words, really, really, really smart people. And then on the other end of the spectrum, people who are really, really dumb. So in other words, anyone on the end of the intelligence spectrum, those people don't need to go to college. So do you hold that same belief or do you think that there are students in between those extremes who should also not go to college?

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean.

And who are those students?

Well, I mean, look, there's nothing wrong with a trade school. Learn how to do something, learn how to make something of value. It doesn't matter if you're, you know, blacksmithing knives or building race cars or coding, you know, or doing H Vac. What's wrong with that? The tradesmen used to be the most highly valued jobs and employees around the world.

So to all the students out there contemplating not going, are you suggesting. Look, don't listen to what society tells you about the stigma associated with not getting a college degree. Just focus on doing you. Is that basically the takeaway there?

Yeah, of course. Of course, Yeah. I mean, look, look, look. So, so, I mean, wouldn't you consider a nursing degree or, you know, nursing education something that's extremely important and valuable in society?

Absolutely. My mother's a nurse.

Well, exactly right. That's not technically a college degree, that's a trade school. But that's extremely important in society and in life right now. Coders are as well, coal miners back in the day. I mean, what's wrong with that? These are fundamental things required for betterment of society. In fact, these are the biggest things.

That promote gdp, gross domestic product, everything that a country sells. So, John, if there's one piece of advice you could give to students who are on the fence about whether or not they should attend college, what would you tell them?

There's no one size fits all shoe here. Just, just, just. Do you just. Do you. You know, just don't. Regardless of college or not college, don't stop learning. The first thing you need to learn is how to teach yourself. Because at some point, that flow of information, you know, that. That picket is gonna stop.

How did you go about teaching yourself how to learn? And how can students replicate that for themself?

I have a little bit more of an advanced theory on this, right? So my theory, my premise is that when you think about what the roots of information or knowledge is, right? Think of it this way. You say, all right, if I want to gain more knowledge, can you improve intelligence? Maybe, maybe not. There's no science to prove that what you can do is that knowledge or capability and intelligence and experience creates knowledge. You have to be around to experience things in order to get some knowledge and experience something out of it, right? Get some value out of it to learn. If you can't change the intelligence, then change the experience. But in order to get the most out of experience, you need to have focus. Right now, for me, focus was not a. Was not really an option, right? Having bad ADD and dyslexia, what it came down to for me was interest. Now, interest is something that I can control. That's a variable that I can do. And what I ended up realizing is that interest, ultimately the root of that is motivation. So as soon as I learned to really control my motivation, I could focus my interest on multiple things at a time. Which then would mean every life experience I could have, I could learn from at a multiple, two, three, four things at a time.

So how can students unearth what their motives are?

You know, it's really just asking the question, right? I think ultimately for a lot of people, you know, whether it's myself or Steve Jobs or not, right. For a lot of people, it comes down to fear. It comes down to fear of maintaining the status quo. So there's a theory out there that there really are two types of people. Mindsets is a growth mindset or a fixed mindset. Fixed mindsets will focus on trying to prove themselves. They assume that there is no way to fill the cup beyond its capacity. So they just want to validate that that capacity, that volume is enough. What they know is good enough. That is fundamentally flawed. And I practice this every day. Theory or not, I practice this every day. There was just an article in the Washington Post about me. It was called, I think it was titled Embrace the Pivot. And ultimately, I'm not scared of failing at all, because every failure is another step. Not to get really cliche here, but Confucius says the thousand mile journey begins with one step. You just gotta do it. You gotta not be scared of what happens or if you fall on your face. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't make some good padding so that you can land safely and not ruin your whole life. You can do that. You can think about it. Right. But ultimately, don't be scared of doing things that you might fail at. In fact, you should do things that.

You'Re scared of and start young to do those things. Right. So if you're a freshman, sophomore, get out there and start looking for opportunities where you're likely going to fail. Is that right?

Yeah, exactly. I mean, so that fear definitely starts very young. That does not mean that you can't fix it now.

Yeah, I love that. I think that's gold. Cool. John, in my book, I make the case that the purpose of college is to just get a credential because it basically says to employers in particular that you are smart or you possess certain skills. So obviously you didn't go to college, and so you don't have a degree to necessarily show people certain things that degree would otherwise say about you. So are there other resume items that you have or other accomplishments that you point to in order to establish credibility? And really, what I'm trying to drive at here is this fear that you're talking about that students might have out there who don't go to college and say, you know, I'm not going to have that degree to show someone that I actually am smart and capable. So what do you do in particular to overcome that?

It's pretty simple. I show that I'm smart and capable.

How so?

I don't ask for a resume to do it.

Right.

So let me ask you this, Kyle. What's the purpose, what's the sole purpose.

Of a resume is to convey certain things about you. Your skills, your abilities, your competency.

Okay. Is it to get you a job?

Yes.

No, it's to get you an interview. The interview gets you the job.

I like that. Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

The resume doesn't matter. Right. We've got 47 people or something on staff right now. Right. I. I hire new people. I interview new people every day, whether they're investors, they're customers, their affiliates, their employees. It doesn't really matter. I hire and interview people every day. I don't care about the resume because ultimately the resume doesn't matter if it's fluffed up and trumped up. Right. It needs to be based on. Sorry for the truck. It needs to be based on experience. I know enough about. Enough to know if you're giving me a load of. It's just that simple.

So in other words, for students out there who are worried that they might not have that fallback in a college degree, all they have to do is figure out some other way to just get themselves an interview, and from there they can establish their competency, their credibility in other ways.

Yeah. So let's boil this down to one variable. Right? Let's talk about coding for a minute. Okay. So if you were a software CEO, something along those lines, would you rather hire somebody with 4 years of coding education or 4 years of coding experience?

4 years of coding experience, exactly.

Why?

Because they have the practical skill set to actually add value.

Yeah, because you have no practical designation in a resume. You have somebody's word for it. If I know that you've been employed by somebody, that you've been doing this, that you're not afraid to pivot, that you've seen the way things can go right or things can go wrong, that's the guy I want.

So for all you college students out there looking to break into something without a college degree, go out there and get experiences in exactly what you're looking to get a job in, and that can replace the value of that college degree.

It's not about replacing the value of a college degree. What it is is both of them, both people with degrees or in school, anything, right? Go and do what you want to do. Because the other big side of it, and this is something that people rarely talk about, you don't know if you're going to like the actual business that you went to school for. And I don't know that you're actually going to be able to stick it out. If you're in molecular engineering, you may really hate doing that on a daily basis. It doesn't matter if you have a Ph.D. or master's in it. Well, Ph.D. is a little different. That's practical as well. But, you know, if you have a master's or degree in it, but you've never actually worked in the field, you may hate the infighting or the infrastructure or the way the business works. You know, I went back to school for a license to work on jets actually for a couple years. And I loved school. Right. I did really well there. I loved. I loved learning about planes, because I thought it was so applicable to what I was interested in. I got into the industry and immediately realized that it wasn't about working on planes, it was about filing paperwork.

Yeah. And that's not what you signed up for.

No, of course not.

So, John, I want to just put a bow on the subject about going to college versus not going to college. So to be clear, let's boil this down. Who do you think should go to college? And. And who do you think should not go to college?

I think anybody that doesn't know should probably continue to learn, you know, if they're going to like it. But. But at the same time, the best way to understand if you're going to like it, go and get an internship, Go and work somewhere, do it.

Yeah, I think that's so key. So, John, let's switch gears here and dive into your career. You've done some really amazing things, and you're continuing to do some really amazing things. So you founded. Which is a company that crowdsources invention and concept mapping. So tell me, what does that mean?

So I spent a long time working on race cars and jets and all sorts of other stuff. Right. And the big problem that I found with it was that we were all so focused on competitive advantage that even though we had amazing groundbreaking technologies, we would never file patents on them. And that was a real shame to me. So I wanted to have some way of, basically, initially was a Wikipedia for inventions that you weren't going to execute on, that you weren't going to build. Maybe you couldn't, maybe you didn't have the money, maybe you didn't have the capital or didn't know how to do the market itself. So we wanted to have a place for people to share ideas. That was quickly debunked because we realized that all of the searching processes, right, all of the search engines out there were all based on keyword searching. Well, the trouble is that in inventions, who do you think comes up with the keyword? If you invented a technology, who came up with what it's called?

The founder.

Exactly. So what search engine is going to have the keyword that you're searching for to try to find, like, things? Nothing.

So in other words, you were involved with the technical part of this idea for years and years before actually founding a company to solve a problem. In other words, you identified a problem first by actually being involved in the industry, and then you use that expertise to actually go about solving it.

Yep. Yep. Well, this is my third business, Right. So I had a Mechanical engineering consulting company for racing and aerospace stuff. And then I had a real estate investment business after that. And those were both successful businesses at the time. I mean, I was making quite a bit of money. I wasn't going to jump ship into something that I was passionate about for sure, but had no idea of the actual market. So I was waiting until the patent was actually secured and granted.

John, how long ago did you found Loki?

2015.

So you were around 30?

Yep, yep, right around there.

And so Loki was not only an extension of the knowledge that you developed by being in the industry, is also really an extension of your passion. Right, so how did you actually go about finding your passion? How do you recommend that students go about finding theirs?

You just got to look deep, man. I've been very passionate about several things and, you know, nonetheless, this is my third career, so I don't know one. I don't think I'm really qualified to answer that because at each of my careers I would have said that I was extremely passionate about them and I was and yet still went into a different business again. Pivot man.

Yeah, cool. Well, John, when we were talking about the technical expertise that you developed in the industry before founding Loki, I think what you were referencing was this. So I understand that you have over 1000 inventions which are mainly based in the auto racing industry, is that right?

Well, yeah, but we call them a couple of other things now. Right. Like IOT is one of them.

Internet of things.

Yep, yeah. And we've got autonomous vehicles. That was something from racing as well, you know, heat exchangers, mechanical engineering stuff. There's fluid dynamics, there's a lot of stuff. Harmonic frequency balancing. I mean, this is like fairly higher level stuff. But racing's a really unique industry. Typical development life cycle for any business is two to five years in racing. It was a pretty common occurrence for us to come up with a new idea, new invention, build a prototype, build a finished product and have it in the end, customer's hands in the same day.

And that was built upon these 1000 inventions that you made?

Well, those are inventions that I've come up with over the years.

And so those inventions help propel you to winning the 2016 Pirelli World Challenge Championship, Is that right?

Yeah, that was championship number 13 for me.

Thirteen?

Yeah.

Wow.

Four world championships and nine national championships.

So not only do you understand the technical parts of racing because you've developed the inventions that contribute to that success, but you're also doing it in the trenches and producing results in the form of winning championships.

Absolutely. But. But let me clarify something, right? Winning A championship has 10% or 5% to do with thinking and strategizing for winning and 80% or 90% to do with embracing losing. Right? Because you lose a lot. If you're the kind of person that falls on your face or breaks down when you lose, you'll never, ever, ever have a chance at winning something over the course of an entire year.

I think that's just a good metaphor for life and a good metaphor for college. You know, here's how I kind of see it, is you started out really early, dabbling in mechanics, in engineering, in those sorts of things, and you developed a real expertise in that. And then you went along to found companies like Loki that are doing some really incredible things. And so I think for college students, the big takeaway then to kind of follow your career track is to similarly get out of the library and actually go out and start tinkering and start building things and start dabbling and develop a real practical expertise that then can translate into value in the marketplace.

Yeah, that's exactly it. So I'd predicate that in a couple of ways, right? So first of all, focus on things that have some innate value, right? Don't go out and try to be, you know, some. One of the things that bothers me is some of the brightest minds of my generation focus on how to get more likes, retweets, and shares. That is terrible to me. There is no inherent value to that. That's terrible, right? So if your entire life goal is to try to figure out how to make an extra point in yield on some investment portfolio or how to get more shares or tweets or, you know, anything along those lines. You can. You can do more, you can do, right? So do things that have some innate value for everybody, right? The other side here is focus on making a big impact for right around a thousand people. Okay? If you can make a big impact for a thousand people, you can scale it, but you can also have the opportunity to keep it small, which gives you some flexibility. The other big side is just. Yeah, just do it, right? Just do things that are interesting and intriguing and have some real importance and can scale and can make a difference in. In somebody's life, and the value will turn around because ultimately, at the end of the day, the money doesn't matter. The money is not what you're after. What you're after is impact and value. And if you do something that has value and has impact, you'll make it work. Not a single. You Know, neither Larry Page or Sergey Brin or Steve, well, Steve Jobs maybe, But, you know, none of those guys were like, oh, you know, I'm going to start Google because it's going to make a ton of money. Like, no, I was really frustrated with using Yahoo Searching and the other options that were out there and they just wanted to make it better.

Yeah, yeah. So pursue your passion again is what it comes down to. Yeah, cool.

Or pursue what you really good at. Because honestly, and this is just a practical thing, but, but people don't focus on it enough, is if you're really good at something, you find a passion in it. You really do.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's gold in my book. I actually talk about all those things. I talk about not only having passion for what you do, but actually being really good at it. And then also what I call personal purpose, which is, you know, you're doing something externally that really matters to the world. So it's not that you just have passion, for, which I think is kind of more of an internal thing. You just genuinely like to do it. But like you're saying, John, purpose is more like, does it matter to other people? Does it make a difference in their lives? And when you fuse those ingredients together, I think you have the makings of a really successful career in life.

Yep. So the last piece of advice, unsolicited advice, Right. If you want to start a business, if you want to come up with new technology, technology follows market. Okay? So if you want to come up with something innovative, don't come up with a technology or a product first. Think about how to combine two markets, two industries.

Find a problem.

Yeah, well, find two problems that you can solve. You don't want to focus on one problem. Right. The ipod wasn't successful because it was a digital media player that existed. Okay. The ipod was successful because it incorporated great design, great marketing, which are both required anyway. But it also had the other side of it, which is the music industry backing it. So now it was a media player player and the music industry. This was combination of two industries, tech and music. Right. An iPhone was then the combination of two more variables. It was cellular service or phone calls. Media and industry tech and now cameras as well.

A good takeaway for any of the entrepreneurs in the crowd. Find industries that can be, be married together. John, one last thing before we kind of pivot away from low key. I, I, I want to continue to kind of unpack what you guys are doing. So I understand that you guys are in the process of launching your Low key coins. So tell me what those are and how did you come up with the idea and why does it matter?

Well, so I didn't come up with the idea of a coin or of a blockchain. What we had was we had an invention research tool, we had a do it yourself patent searching tool to discover simply if your invention does exist. What we ended up realizing is that the very act of doing the search to see if your invention is new or if somebody else has done it ends up granting you the same legal rights as a patent does in the first place. So we realized that if we published or if any inventor opted into publishing their technology or their idea on the blockchain, it was now going to be immutable, meaning it can never be changed. And on top of that, it gives you a legally binding and court admissible right to that technology. Now from there, what we ended up doing is creating this coin. Now valuing a patent or invention is really hard to do, but when you internalize it and you close in the system and you kind of control it on end to end, you can, you can get a very open and transparent valuation metric for everything. From there, what we ended up doing was creating our own coin that is part of, it's used for actually using the tool if you'd like to, but you can also pay 250 bucks for it a month. Or if you wanted to buy or sell an invention, you had to do it with our coin. That way we could make it transparent and nice and consistent for everybody to be able to have the same amount of value for any idea, the right value. Right. So that's been going really well. I'm out in New York, I'm in Times Square right now, as everybody can probably hear the people walking by and all that crap. But yeah, so we're, we're in the middle of our, of our pre sale of, of these coins and looks like today we've raised about 8.6 million.

You raised $8.6 million today?

Yeah.

Congratulations. That's awesome.

Thank you.

That's really exciting. So not only are you doing things that matter, John, but when you do that, other people see and, and that helps generate and build momentum for this kind of success as you just experienced today with the raising of $8.6 million. And so I think that's a key takeaway for students. And you know, we were getting at that earlier and that is, you know, if you're good at what you do, if what you do makes a difference in other people's lives, and if you're really passionate about that, success is going to come.

Oh, absolutely. Make a difference for multiple people. Right. So, so for us, we cut down the cost by 90% of filing a patent. We made it so that you can make money on having an invention from what was about six years to now six seconds. And on top of that, we improved the margins for law firms to do the prosecution and we cut down the cost for attorneys, or sorry, for corporations to buy good technology and turn it into a product, which at the same time ends up increasing gdp. So yeah, all that. Now, now let me also say those, those million dollars, 8.6, I think is what I had said somewhere around there, that that money is like, I don't know, maybe day three or four of really turning this out. We've got about. So when this thing's all said and done, we're expecting to have right around 270 million raised from this. Wow.

So this round of financing. $270 million.

Yeah. And none of that's for equity, Right? That's, that's for tokens, that's for cryptocurrency.

Wow. So that just goes to demonstrate how valuable low key coins are to the market and how other people perceive them. Really, really amazing. Well, John, let's transition into the last section of the podcast, which is also my personal favorite. And that's called the rapid fire question section, which is where I offer up some quick hitting questions. But that by no means, means that your answer has to be quick hitting. So you ready to dive in?

Yeah. Yeah. Get it.

Cool. John, is there a specific career path that a college student can follow to land them where you are today? No.

Everybody's different.

John, who is the first person that comes to mind when I say the word successful?

Oh, man. You know, I really envy Jeff Bezos actually. You know, his whole success in his eyes, the way he talks about it all the time, is disagree and commit. Right. You don't need to like what your co workers or partners are doing. You just need to be able to say, you know what, I trust you. I give you the power. I'll commit, I'll move on.

I like that. Bezos is an amazing guy. John, suppose you are John Wise, the 18 year old high school senior preparing to graduate high school in about four months. But this time you are graduating in 2017. So where are you going to concentrate most of your energy?

Machine learning. Machine learning and cryptocurrencies. But blockchain coding in general, whether you're doing coding or you're doing Markets, or you're doing analysis with it, or you're converting medical records or death records, whatever that is, where it's going, no questions asked.

Ton of opportunity there for students. John, what's the best lesson a teacher, a parent, or a mentor has taught you?

I don't know if I'm qualified to answer that. Like I said, I have a real problem with authority. I don't. You know, I've had a lot of great influences in my life. I don't know that any one of them have had given me that, you know, some big impact for holy I need to clean up my act or change my life sort of story. That's not to take credit away from them. It's been sort of an amalgamation of all these lessons and teachings, but I don't know that I can boil it down to something that simple.

Yeah. Cool. So you are the product of many different life lessons accumulated over time. I like that.

I think any student in 2017 needs to be.

John, what book do you think every high school senior should read?

Drive by Daniel Pink.

I really like Dan Pink. Yeah, that book talks about motivation and why you do the things that you do and how you should think about approaching what you're about ready to do and whether or not it aligns with the right motivation.

Yep, yep. The. The second one is Moonwalking with Einstein.

Hmm. I've never read that one. Can you tell the listeners what that's about?

Yeah, so it's about Genius Loki. It's about a memorization technique for remembering anything with a unique sort of mnemonic or mental mnemonic.

John, what is one thing you want a college sophomore listening to this podcast to know?

So as cliche as it is, right. Grant Cardone's got a great phrase that he uses, and he says, I live my life now the way others won't, so I can live my life later the way others can't.

And what he means by that is he puts in. He does what matters now. He puts in the work.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, you don't necessarily worry about drinking and stuff and partying. You know, I work 120, 130 hours a week. Right. I. I have 96 flights or something booked over the next three months in 37 countries. It's just do what you got to do. You know, if you're passionate, if you're excited, if you love what you're doing, do it.

Just.

Just do it.

Yeah, Cool. I like that.

And the other side of things is. Is fail early and Fail fast. Embrace the pivot.

Man, I like it. John, last question for you. If. If you could recommend something to a college student in the form of a tweet, what would it be?

In the form of a tweet. What kind of a question is that?

Boil it down, baby.

So 200, 150 characters?

250, 140. But I won't count, John. I promise.

All right. I don't need to count either. I'd have to say, embrace the pivot.

And can you just be crystal clear with what you mean by the pivot?

Yeah. Don't be afraid to reinvent yourself. Don't be afraid to start over and admit that you absolutely sucked at what you were trying to do. Because trust me, every day, every day, people prove me wrong. Every day, I learn a new way to do something. I taught myself how to tie shoes. Again recently. Recently, because I was tying my shoes wrong. 30 years. Right? I was tying my shoes wrong.

Is there a video we could watch to learn how to tie them correctly?

So there was a cool show that was. I don't know, like. Like everyday stupid things or. No, it was called you're doing it wrong. And it was like a. There was a whole series on it. Right. So one episode would be how to open a door. Right. How to pull up a chair. And I just thought it was hilarious. Right? But it was. Every time I'd watched this episode on something ridiculously silly, I was wrong. Right. It was how to hold a knife. You know, how to hold a pen.

That's good, because I actually think I watched a TED talk on how to tie a shoe. And I remember walking away from it thinking, that's not all that impressive because I tried it and didn't work for me. So either the teacher wasn't any good, or I just didn't take away what I was supposed to take away.

Didn't embrace the pivot.

Yeah, I guess. Cool. Well, John, this has been a ton of fun. You are a fascinating guy, and I know that people can learn so much about you. So where can they learn more about you and the work that you do and anything else you want the listeners out there to know?

Learn more about me. I'm not that interested. You know, you may feel like I am, but I'm really not. There's a reason I don't tweet, because I just don't find myself that exciting. But I don't know. I've had a lot of articles recently go to the Washington Post. I was in the business section recently. There's some, there's some cool articles. You can go to our website at loci IO I'll put that in the show notes, read our white paper, you know, patents, whatever you want to do. You know. Pat, nice evening, relaxing read at 897 pages or something of dry text. Fun. Sometimes. Yeah, I don't know. I'm not that cool, man. I'm really not.

But the companies you've built are pretty cool.

Well, yeah, because I have great people that help me with them. Yeah, they're the. I'm. I'm really not cool.

Well, I like the humility too. That's cool.

No, it's. It's not really humility. It's just. I'm just not.

You're just being. You're just. You have self awareness and you're being honest about it.

And I embrace the pivot for myself too.

Right.

I recognize what I'm really bad at and talking about myself is clearly one of those things.

Awesome. Well, John, this has been a ton of fun. Thanks for coming on the show.

Thanks, boss. Talk to you later, man.

Hey, all, just something I want to quickly emphasize before I let you go, and that concerns helping students decide whether or not they should enroll in college. John and I discussed three critical principles to help students make this decision. These principles include, first, asking whether what you are pursuing brings value to the marketplace. That can include things like coding and H vac, but the market must value what you're doing. Second, regardless of whether or not you attend college, you must have the practical skills to add value. And in order to develop these practical skills, you must actually get out in the workplace and do it in the world of conventional college advice, where the library is the only place that matters. I know this sounds like a crazy idea, but to those in the real world, there is no substitute to practical skills, including to those looking to opt out of college. Third, students on the fence should actually test their desired career path before committing to college. For example, do you think you want to be a mechanic? Great. Go out and work for a year as a mechanic. But no matter what, if you're unsure whether or not college is for you, do not go. Think about it like this. If you are car shopping and unsure whether or not you want to buy a car, do you say, oh, I'm not sure whether or not I want to buy this car, but instead I'll just pay $100,000 and find out later if I like the car? Of course not. But that's the equivalent of going to college and having no idea if you want to be there in the first place, it's just plain stupid. Instead, if you're unsure of whether or not you want to attend college, stay in the job market, develop practical skills, and continue to make money later. If you decide to go to college, you will have the opportunity. Trust me. The admissions office will be happy to take your money whenever you're ready. That's all for now. I'll catch you all next time. If you want more hackiversity and achieving more by doing less in college, you can subscribe to the podcast on itunes or grab the book on Amazon. For the show notes and the latest on Hackiversity, check out KyleWhinie.com don't forget to follow Kyle on Twitter at kylewiny and on facebook@facebook.com hackaversity Till next time, Happy hacking.