So yeah, this is the first podcast. I'm just gonna start off right here. Cool, we're doing a first podcast. I'm gonna be talking about things that I think are extremely valuable.  That's basically what this podcast is gonna be about. We have a little outline. I'm basically gonna be talking to my intern, David. Hello, the intern, David. How are you? Hey guys, it's nice to meet you. I've been working with Shane for a few years now. Got to know him really well. And we see that a lot, you know, over and over again, there's a lot of the same questions that come up about choosing a college degree. How do you choose your career? How do you find your passion and all this kind of stuff. So we decided to test out this long form podcast content to sort of answer some of your questions, do a deep dive into a lot of the content that you may or may have not seen on the main channel. We're excited to bring this to you and we appreciate any kind of constructive feedback you guys may have for us. Yeah, and David and I, like we've jumped on Zoom sessions like so many times and like I've given him advice because David's goal is to essentially, you know, be a podcaster at some point in the future. He wants to have like a big podcast and I've given him advice on exactly how to do that. And David, I think you were a fan of the channel. Like you were commenting on the channel before I even hit 10,000 subs, I'm pretty sure. So yeah. So let's get into a little bit how we got to know each other. So I will say- Dude, I kind of don't remember. Yeah, you tell me, I kind of don't remember. Yeah, man, originally it kind of started where I was consuming a lot of content on YouTube. I'd say 2019, maybe late 2018, 2019 of all these different pre-health professionals on YouTube, they were all doing long form content. And I got so interested in the interview format and all this kind of stuff. What career to choose? What profession in healthcare? I was considering all these different professions, like becoming a physical therapist, becoming a nurse, a doctor, all this kind of stuff. I ended up converging on a path of becoming a doctor, going to medical school because also that's what my older brother did. So it was kind of a clear cut path. It was around, I'd say like May, no not May, like around February, 2020 that I came across Shange channel. And I started watching a lot of his videos and at that time I was just finishing my medical experience at the hospital I was working at. And I kind of had this feeling where, I wasn't as passionate about pursuing a career in medicine as I was originally. And so I started watching a lot of Shange's videos because a lot of them were like, is getting a science degree worth it? Is getting a history degree worth it? And I was like, oh, I think I might actually be interested in that. But then after watching the videos, I was like, oh, no, I can't get a job with that. And after all these videos, I was like, you know what, it might be a good idea to comment on it. And I appreciated all of the value Shange provided through all the data analytics. I could really tell he put a lot of effort into the videos. He's comment some kind of constructive feedback. Say, hey man, good video, all this kind of stuff. And at some point towards the end of the year, Shange created a Patreon. And I was like, oh, I wanna support Shange. I think it could be a good opportunity, good idea. And after a few months, Shange ended up direct messaging me. He was like, hey man, here's my phone number. I know you've been watching the channel for a long time, haven't really been using it. But let's talk. And I was like, oh, that's awesome. So we started communicating directly. I was sharing video ideas, different concepts, trends, different business venture, anything you could think of. And we've been working ever since. The best way I would describe my skill set is probably creative manager slash director. I don't know, but it's been interesting. We've been doing everything from script writing to video editing to shorts production. I'm in charge of the podcast at this point. We wanna hop on the trend and share some advice with you guys this way. So we're excited. And what do you think about that, Shange? Yeah, and one thing we're gonna talk about is how much opportunity there is in the creator economy. And basically, I remembered a little bit differently. I think you kind of cold emailed me at one point. I'm pretty sure you cold emailed me at one point and you provided value. I don't remember that, but... Yeah, I'm pretty sure you cold emailed me. You might've, we might've already talked on my Patreon but then you cold emailed me and provided some value. But yeah, what's that? Interesting, okay. Hey, it may be true, but I remember it was through the comments and then at some point created a Patreon. You warmed me up, yeah, you warmed me up so I was much more likely to respond to you. And then I remember at some point in April, the following year, you sent me your phone number because you weren't using it that much. And so through WhatsApp, I sent you this huge, I think that's what it was. It was a huge essay. And I was like, hey, man, I'm a college student. I'm really into it. Can I intern for you, provide some kind of service? Yeah, yeah, okay, okay, okay, so. Yeah, so let's talk about how people can actually like reach out to creators, how people can hit up creators because the creator economy is like, it is, I mean, there is just so much unbelievable amount of opportunity. So David right now is holding a drink and it is prime hydration. Check it out. Okay. Prime energy, baby. You may or may not. Or hydration. Hydration. Yeah, prime hydration. They have prime energy too. Yeah, you might be familiar with that. You may or may not be a fan of Logan Paul or KSI but those guys are geniuses, I mean. But you may be a fan of their brother, Jake Paul.  I mean, they are figuring out. We got the product here. Yeah, they're absolutely geniuses. They're figuring out how to like create an entire empire off of their social media brand. Them, Mr. Beast, all these different people. I mean, these guys are employing like thousands of different people and it's all coming from the creator economy. There is literally like channels where it's just a single person in their kitchen recording videos and they're getting more views than entire news networks. Like that is happening right now. Like just a family recording videos in their kitchen. You have to understand it's such a new thing that's happening that they're not properly monetizing it yet. These news networks that are getting like maybe a million views a week in some cases or a million views a night, they're making hundreds of millions of dollars and these content creators are getting like 100 million views a month sometimes or whatever and they're only making like maybe, I don't know, like a normal wage or like maybe slightly above a normal wage in many cases. But some of them are figuring out how to monetize it and it's just a matter of time. It's getting higher and higher and higher where these guys are going to be making much, much more than what they're making right now because it's actually better to advertise on individual channels because people feel much more of a connection to a personal brand versus a random news network that you probably don't trust because I think like, what are the stats? Like over 80% of people don't trust the news. I mean, and can you blame them? Of course, that's a topic for another video. That's a topic for another podcast. My whole point here is one thing that people are overlooking is being able to get a job with creators. Right now, you do not have to be that skilled to get a job with a creator. You really don't. You have to be somewhat familiar with their channel. That helps a lot. David was very familiar with my channel and you basically have to kind of just send them like some of your ideas and stuff like that and you could probably get a job with them because there's no such thing out there. Like there's no job that exists right now. There's no easy way to become a YouTube script writer. But guess what? All the big YouTube channels have teams in many cases of YouTube script writers. They're not able to hire them just straight off, right? They have to hire smart people and then train them how to be a script writer because there is no way to just hire script writers right off the bat.  Let's say your YouTube script writing skill was like a 10 out of 100. You could probably get a job with a 10 out of 100. If you want to get a job at anything else in any like normal path, you need to be like an 80, at least like a 50 out of 100 bare minimum and probably like an 80 out of 100 to increase your chances to get a good job, right? So getting a job in the creator economy right now is insanely easy if you just do a few things. You have to learn the valuable skills that creators actually want from people and then you kind of just need to hit them up and you need to demonstrate to them that you have those skills. Now, if you don't yet have the skills or you don't know the skills, another thing you can do is kind of use David's method, which was essentially just, you know, leave constructive criticism and, you know, like say, hey, this is what I really like. This is what you can improve upon, you know, email them, hit them up, leave some comments on their channel. That was a great way. One thing I noticed about David is he actually had his real name, I believe on YouTube or at the very least something similar to his real name. And when he emailed me, it was also his real name. And then when he added to the Patreon, when he joined my Patreon, it was also his real name. So there was like a consistent brand there.  So like try to have some kind of consistent brand if you're messaging creators on multiple platforms. And a personal brand is great. You don't actually have to use your full name. You can just use like your first name and then something else, like Hummus is not my last name. Sorry guys, sorry to disappoint you. Hummus is not my last name. No way, man. I thought you liked Hummus. That's why I subscribed the first one. It's Hummuson, it's Hummuson, right? It's very close to my last name, right? So yeah, having a personal brand is incredibly powerful, but to complete my point here, yeah, just hitting people up. This is a great way to get in and learn these insanely valuable skills that are just getting bigger and bigger right now. The creator economy is going to take over all of the news networks. Mr. Beast just got offered a billion dollars for his company and he turned it down. Gary Vee was like, I wouldn't accept anything less than 10 billion and even that I probably wouldn't accept it. And that's, he's probably right. I mean, he literally is right. Mr. Beast is launching hundred million dollar companies with like one or two videos, right? So this is something where there's an insane amount of opportunity. The most common job that people want to get into is a YouTuber. Like that's the number one job. They did surveys and like all the kids these days want to be YouTubers, right? So a YouTuber isn't technically a job.  It's like a half job, half entrepreneurship. But yeah, that's like the number one job. Now David is, he is a big fan of YouTube but I think you're an even bigger fan of podcasts. So you want to have your own podcast at some point and through, you know, some sessions we kind of figured that out because you were very confused about what you want to do with your life. You were like all over the place. And I was like, I made you like nail down like what is your goal, right? Because if you don't have a goal, you're not going to get to your goal.  So David's goal is to someday have a successful podcast and this is a great way to start that off. I told him, hey, I don't have a podcast. Why don't you just go ahead and actually I think you might have, yeah, you had the idea towards me. I'm like, yeah. And that's what we're doing. He's helping me produce my podcast. He's the intern. And he knows more about podcasts than I do as well. And yeah, that is literally what we're doing right now. And that's why we're creating a minimum viable product and we are recording this video. Yeah. Why don't I get into a little bit of the context? So with podcasts, right around the time with it blew up and I was so interested because it was, you know, we all went on Zoom, all education went there, but all of a sudden you have all of these professors, all of these popular people starting to make content long form. And it was so interesting because you could basically learn anything you wanted or just sit there and it's like, it's all this free flow information, whatever, it was just very interesting. And I found myself subscribing to all these different podcasts from culture, from politics, from man, anything, channels like Shane, but then they're not necessarily podcasts. And over the last few years, I think I've subscribed to about 400, maybe 500 different podcast channels. And I've noticed how they started to grow. And short form content has become the main form of growth for podcasts in the recent, I'd say even recent year. There's a specific sort of breakdown to how you should produce it and how to create timestamps, specific editing strategies, but all of these things I just picked up through consuming a lot of content. And while I was doing that, I was telling Shane about it and I figured, hey man, I think I could provide some value by, you know, just providing this information to Shane. And over the course of let's say a year or so, Shane started to switch up his content a little bit. He started to inquire about, hey, maybe we should start a podcast, let's start a new channel, let's produce short form content and it's brought us to this point. And so I think one of the main points, if you wanna help creators and get into these businesses, what is the best way you could provide value like Shane said to creators with the current skills that you have? Whether it's sort of a consulting role, whether it's writing scripts, maybe you're good at reading, read a whole bunch, maybe check out all what are the top 10 blogs or yeah, blogs or different kinds of long form, writing that creators doing more brands that they have and then who can you tell about this stuff and then who can you provide that as a service? And I think thinking about how you could provide a service in that creative way, it starts to develop some kind of intuition because when you start consuming more content, you start to look for those little trends that you wanna essentially provide as notes for creators. And over time that becomes a value proposition that you can offer and there you go, maybe you could land a door after 10 cold emails and it's not as difficult as you would think, you just have to be a little bit more proactive. And earlier when Shane was mentioning how I reached out to him through YouTube comments and all this stuff, that was not thought through. It wasn't no meticulous like manipulative sort of, okay, I'm a comment on every single video, I'm a make sure it doesn't tend to surprise you. You were so genuine. Yeah, David was super genuine. It was very, it was natural. And I think that's why. And it all starts with giving value, right? It's all about giving value. Literally just like David was like, hey, this is what Shane's doing well. This is what I really like about his channel. Here's some things he can improve upon and he just genuinely like left comments on almost every video. I think you were kind of doing it for yourself as well, just as a way to be more active. Timestamps. Yeah, exactly. I will say this. That's another thing guys, if you're watching valuable content on the internet, you can leave like timestamps and stuff like that and like take notes for yourself. And guess what? You're gonna get a lot more out of the video because when you're taking notes from it, you end up memorizing more of it. You end up internalizing more of it. So that's one thing you were doing on my channel quite a bit. Yeah, I will say that timestamps have become a huge thing in YouTube because think about what a timestamp is. If you watch a two hour, three hour, maybe even a one hour podcast, you can create shorts like anywhere from let's say like 20 shorts to 100 shorts per video. Then that shifted when more long form content was uploaded to the platform where you started to have breakdowns of let's say minute zero to minute five, they're talking about crypto, minute 10 to minute 25, they're talking about, I don't know, politics. And it became useful. With YouTube, specifically YouTube shorts is becoming a really popular concept now. And creating short form content is the new way. So on YouTube, you can, the longest sort of time that you can allocate to a short is one minute. So if you think about a three hour podcast and you can make one minute clips or less, usually around I'd say 20, 22 seconds is usually the cutoff for the best short that you can make a little tidbit I noticed. But you could make anywhere from 100 plus shorts and you could upload two up, you know, two to four shorts a day. And if you're doing let's say two or three podcasts, you hire someone to edit and mass produce these things, your channel could blow up if you talk about something interesting and you find an issue you could target. Anyone can become a creator as long as you think about how to approach it in a genuine way as to what your interests are. Because usually if you're interested in something, you have some knowledge. That is something you're gonna be able to naturally talk about in long form. The main thing now is people want to listen to other people who are genuine. They want that long form discussion where they could kind of engage in this flow state, symbiotically or whatever, and get that collective synergy. And when you're able to get into that flow, usually it's because the person who's talking about something actually knows about something. So it's the same idea. Talk about things that you're interested in, passionate about. If it's something niche, maybe it hasn't been created or it hasn't been created in a specific way, like a long form podcast or maybe like a 10 minute video. It doesn't matter. Find something that you are interested in. Maybe it's a hobby. Start producing content in it. And then when you consume content within that sort of space that you're in, you're gonna get better and better naturally. You just have to get started. And it's not as difficult as you think. This can become a passive income stream for almost anyone. And I encourage everyone to start thinking in that sort of way.  Just start doing it. Analysis paralysis. You do not wanna get stuck in that. Why don't you go a little bit into what that means? Do not do that. The worst thing you can do is just think about it and try to plan. Oh my gosh. That's the worst thing you can do. At the beginning, this is something a lot of YouTubers argue about is quality versus quantity. At the beginning, 100% quantity. I will challenge any YouTube guru out there. I guarantee you, if I were to train 100 people and I just tell them quantity, quantity, quantity and you were to train 100 people and you're like quality, quality, quality, the people who do quantity at the beginning are gonna win. Now later on, you need to focus on quality. Like that's kind of the point where I'm at in my niche, right? Like I'm now starting to produce like more quality type videos that are gonna be coming out here pretty soon. But at the beginning, quantity. Just get content out there because there's so much of a learning curve for this sort of thing. Just talk about stuff that you're passionate about, stuff that you can literally talk about with your friends, right? Me and you, we talk about stuff we're passionate about. We could talk about this stuff hours on end. And you don't need to write like elaborate scripts. When you're talking about something you're really passionate about, you can talk about hours on end. Now we are getting a little bit more into like the creating content side of things and I wanna stay more on the like how to land a job side of things. But actually creating content is a great way to land a job as well. So one of the hacks that I teach people is to create content in order to land a job. Create content, showcase it on your portfolio in a very easy way. And that is one of the best ways you can possibly land a job. So if you wanna get a high level job doing something, let's say YouTube strategy, for instance. Start creating content around YouTube strategy. There's this guy on YouTube, Patty Galloway who started doing this and he's now MrBeast strategist. He's MrBeast content strategist. And he basically made his entire channel just like analyzing what the big YouTube channels were doing that set them apart and why they were successful. And now he's MrBeast content strategist, right? So if you wanna even getting like a super high level job this is the best way to go is to start creating content about it. So David, for instance, I don't know how much you want me to get into your specific situation. But I'll say it, stop me if I'm saying too much. But one of David's favorite content creators, podcast slash YouTuber is Jordan Peterson. And your ultimate goal is to work for Jordan Peterson. Now, who do you think's gonna win when a position comes up for Jordan Peterson? Somebody who can send them a portfolio where they're like, hey, I actually was the mastermind and the strategist behind this person's podcast, Shane Hummus, and then you send them our first podcast as proof where it's like your face on the podcast and I'm talking and I'm already a relatively big and established creator.  No, you're providing value to them. You have some really insightful things to say. You already have an in with a content creator. You have literally helped them create their podcast. That is an incredible value add.  No, of course not, but you shoot for Mars, you might hit the moon. There's a good chance you're gonna get a job with another podcast and then you can build your skills from there. These are incredibly valuable skills. You get that job with that other podcast, you build it up, eventually you can start your own podcast and do your own thing. That is the best way to learn these types of things. The best way to learn is by doing and that's why whatever your plan is right now, if you're trying to start a podcast, for instance, or start a YouTube channel, you're only gonna learn so much by watching content on how to start a YouTube channel. The best way to learn is just by to start taking action. You start taking action, you create a YouTube channel. If someone reaches out to me and they wanna get a job for me, if they're cold emailing me and they have their own YouTube channel and they send it in the email and they're like, hey, this is the content I'm creating. Me as a YouTuber, I can tell if it's quality content, even if it's not getting a lot of views. I can tell it's like, oh yeah. Hey, they know how to use a camera. They know how to edit audio. They know how to edit YouTube videos for retention. Like I can tell it's quality content. Yes, there is an element of luck to YouTube and you have to create a lot of quality content in order to get it right. But I can tell like, wow, this person is gonna be way ahead of the average Joe who's reaching out to me and like, I wanna be a YouTuber. Give me a job, right? Which is like 99% of the people who reach out to me. They have no proof of concept that they actually know what they're talking about. Shane, what exactly is proof of concept and how can someone use that in order to reach out to creators? And also you mentioned something called minimal valuable product. I know time and time after again, you're like, David, minimal valuable product. Proof of concept. Come on, man.  I have nailed this into David's, yes. Let's talk about this. Why don't you drill it into the listener's head and tell them exactly how to reach out to a creator to work for Mr. Beast, like Patty Galloway. So most people who reach out to me, like for instance, there's people who reach out to me about thumbnail creation all the time and they will hit me up and they'll be like, I wanna create your thumbnails. I wanna create your thumbnails. Now, 99.9% of them literally don't even give me a portfolio of like thumbnails they've created which is absolutely nuts. Of course I'm not gonna respond to those people. Of course. And then like 99% of them don't offer to create a free thumbnail for me. At the very least offered to create a free thumbnail. Now, here's how you actually get my attention. You create a free thumbnail or you have a portfolio of thumbnails you've already created. And if you really wanna get my attention, create a free thumbnail for me, for my channel and be like, hey, here's a video. I think this video is really good, but it underperformed. And I think the reason it underperformed is because of your thumbnail. I don't think your thumbnail is very good. So I went ahead, I created a free thumbnail for you and try it out on your video. Then I try it out. Then you have a piece of value. Even if I don't end up giving you a job, you can be like, when you reach out to the next person, hey, I created this thumbnail for Shane Hummus. You can go on his channel and check, right? Here's his thumbnail and they'll go on my channel. They'll see, oh, Shane Hummus is actually using that thumbnail and this person actually did create the thumbnail. So now you have some value, right? Now you have some proof of concept that you are actually able to create good thumbnails for YouTube channels, right? That's proof of concept. You need some level. Now there's like many different levels of proof of concept. And by the way, okay, MVP, minimum viable product and proof of concept come from the startup world, right? So startups, the difference between businesses that succeed and businesses that fail, 99% of the time is the ones that succeed have found this thing called product market fit, right? They created a product that fit the needs of the market, right? And if you don't understand this stuff, like you need to read about this stuff because this is everything in business. Like understanding business is really like all this fancy stuff they tell you on the internet, like most creators, the fancy stuff is like the last 5% that you need to understand. The first 95% is the most basic, simple stuff ever. Product market fit, minimum viable product, these sorts of things, proof of concept. This is the stuff that actually separates the channels that work from the channels that don't work or the businesses that succeed from the businesses that don't succeed. So let's talk about minimum viable product and proof of concept. Proof of concept, for instance, is there's different levels to it. But if you, David, for instance, have an idea for me, he has an idea for my channel, you need to provide some proof of concept that your idea is going to work because 99.9% of the time, ideas that do not have proof of concept will not work. Now, once in a million years, there's an idea that's just completely 100% creative, no one else has ever thought about it before. This is like once in a million years and it actually works. This is guys like Steve Jobs, for instance, right? He comes up with an idea like, everyone needs to have like this phone in their pocket. But that is the exception to the rule. Like the vast majority of the time, that is not how it works. The vast majority of the time, how it actually works, you can even look at like the greatest artists of all time, Shakespeare, for instance, he got lots of ideas from other texts and it's well documented that, you know, he basically like stole ideas in some cases because there wasn't such a thing as plagiarism back then. But of course you don't wanna steal it, but you want to get ideas from other people. And the vast majority of the time, how it works when you see a successful YouTube channel is they took a thing from this person and a thing from that person and a thing from this person and a thing from like 10 or 20 different channels, they put it all together into an original concept. They didn't just like try to copy one channel, that does not work. Even copying two channels probably doesn't work. Taking like a few things here and there from like 20 different channels, putting it together, that is something that is actually completely new. So when you have an idea for your channel, you need to make sure, especially if you have an idea you're reaching out to somebody else, you need to make sure that you have proof of concept. That is speaking the language of a business owner or a content creator, is they are going to understand that if they are successful, right? So now there's many different levels to proof of concept. Like a lot of the time, it's actually applied to like products, for instance. So I'm not going to get into this too much, but if you ever do launch a product, you need to have proof of concept for that product. So okay, there's this other product that is working pretty well. That's like level one of proof of concept and my product is relatively similar to that product, right? Level two is you would actually want to launch the product with a minimum viable product. Minimum viable product. So you do not go ahead and spend all this money creating the product and then launch it. That is a terrible mistake. It's a mistake that I've made before. It's a mistake that so many people out there have made before, never ever do that. So for instance, if I ever launch a course, I promise you this is exactly how I'm gonna do it. I am going to sell the course first and then I'm going to create the course. Once I establish that there is a need, people who actually want to pay money for that course, then I will create it, right? I'm not gonna do it the other way around, which I've done with different products before, where I create it first and then I sell it. That is a terrible way to do things. That's the backwards way of doing things. So that's proof of concept and minimum viable product. Now, that is applied to the business world, but you can apply this to basically any other concept in your life, whether it's getting a job, whether it's making decisions on what things you should spend time doing, right? You can apply this to just about any area of your life and that's why it is so incredibly important. Every time David and I talk, like if he sends me an idea, I'm like, proof of concept? Do you have proof of concept? Give me some examples, right?   And I'm like, yeah, it sounds interesting, but I want to see proof of concept, right? Yeah, so why don't I get into one of the examples? So it's kind of a funny one. It'll be a little bit full circle. So I remember back in, man, this probably like at some point, maybe later in 2021, maybe it was like August, 2021. So I'm like, you know what Shane? I've been watching all these podcasts. I think the one thing they're not doing that would make a great sort of like, there would be a good conversion ratio if you were to want to create a Patreon or want to create a Discord, which at the time we were considering, I was like, on your videos, instead of having timestamps that say, okay, in timestamp blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you talk about money or and so on and so on. You should have a quote. So within a certain, let's say five minute segment, you mentioned something about a story. And the main point of the story was a blue book. That timestamp, zero minutes to five minutes should say blue book. Or if there was a valuable idea that you said there, like, oh, you shouldn't invest in the S and P, maybe put that as the quote or something like that. And I was like, you know what? This could be a good idea. Actually, this would be a good idea for podcasts like Jordan Peterson or Lex Friedman because they have more of a philosophical audience and something like that. And that's kind of when they were getting their steam back. That's when Jordan Peterson was getting back from his illness and his podcast was really picking up again. Lex Friedman was popping off and I was like, this would be a great way if they wanna have a more positive interactive audience in the comment section.  He was like, what's the proof of concept? What is this? What is that? It was a futile effort. But then I saw in October, so I was like, you know what? Let me try reaching out to Lex Friedman or Jordan Peterson. I couldn't really find a way. I applied to some application through Lex Friedman never got back. But I was like, man, this was a great idea. And then in October of 2021, Jordan Peterson actually started using that in his podcast descriptions. I was like, man, Shane, I told you, like this would have been a good idea. And then it kind of like diverged off, like I don't know how often it's used now, but I thought it was a great idea. But Shane was like, proof of concept, where did you see this work? And how can I use it? So that's an example of them using a minimum viable product, right? They tried it out. They tried it out. It probably didn't work. And so they scrapped it, right? Right, no, they didn't scrap it. They still use it. And now a lot of different podcasts use it. It's just in conjunction with other things. Like for maybe a few months, the whole description was quotes. And then it switched to like a 50-50 or 80-20 ratio. And it's still being used by like any podcast these days. So I will say these, this sort of similar thinking process, we went over with thumbnails, script writing, strategies, all this kind of stuff. And I will say, if you want to recommend a creator something, find another creator who has done it before, or show up very, very practically in a simple way how you can implement it based on maybe a retention curve that the creator may have or based on the certain audience that you see that engages in the comment section a lot. Find something, compile a short list and present it in a very creative way where they'll just have no other choice but be like, yeah, let's test this out, see how it goes. And you will never go wrong doing it that way. It sounds, you know, proof of concept, minimal, viable product, these sound very strange because they are related to startups. But if you apply that framework to reaching out to creators, providing value, and also when you're working with creators, this is how you bring up new ideas and you really want to be proactive, follow this sort of step-by-step framework and don't make it complicated. Don't go off on very creative ideas that no one's really done because at the end of the day, you don't want to post something that doesn't get a lot of engagement and that might have a negative impact on the channel long-term. Yeah, it's not even about having negative impact. It's about using your most valuable resource, which is your time. And people who end up succeeding in business and people who end up succeeding in the content creation, world are incredibly diligent about what they spend their time doing. That is just the facts. Most people, if you try these random things that pop into your head, if you try every single random thing, 99% of the time, they just don't work. Maybe even 99.9% of the time, they just don't work. And so if you want to sort of convince somebody else, like let's say you're reaching out to a creator and you're like, hey, I think this thing might work. The way that you convince them because nobody knows the channel better than the creator. Like I know my channel better than anybody else in the world. So if you want to convince them like, hey, this is something that I think you could be doing, you want to send them examples, proof of concept of somebody else doing it and it's working for them, right? That is what you want to do to convince a creator because trust me bro, like creators are not gonna be like, oh, trust me bro and then spend their time doing that because our time is very precious. We have to allocate it intelligently in order to get the most out of it because 99% of activities that people do are complete waste of time. Like I'm just being blunt and honest with you. And that's why 99% of channels fail is because they're just completely wasting their time. It's that 1% of things that actually work and that is what creators who are actually successful focus on. A lot of the time, the creators that are the most successful will literally identify the one thing that makes their channel successful. Maybe that's reading books, right? They read books and they make videos about those books. So that's the one thing that makes their channel successful. Maybe it's coming up with content ideas. I think Mr. Beast, for him, it's that that's like the biggest thing is coming up with ideas. So he spends a ridiculous amount of time and effort coming up with content ideas because that's the one thing that's gonna make a massive difference in his particular niche. So it's gonna be different depending on the niche and everything like that. But typically, you know, it might not be one thing but it usually is one thing at a time. But overall, if you look at the big picture, it's probably gonna be like maybe four or five different things that actually make the difference between your channel being successful and your channel not being successful. And I mean, if you guys can just learn that and internalize that, you'll be ahead of 99% of other people. Because most of the stuff out there is just noise.   Most of these tips and tricks and like strategies and stuff like that, they're just a waste of time.  And in business or content creation, find something that is a massive problem for a bunch of different people. And it was also a problem for you. So something that you're passionate about solving as well and then solve that problem for them with engaging content that reaches them. That's how you make a successful YouTube channel. So I'll give you guys an example with mine. I looked back when I was creating, you know, thinking about creating this YouTube channel and I thought, wow, I wish I had good career advice when I was in high school and college because most of the career advice out there is absolutely terrible. So for instance, I looked at the career advice you typically get from your family. And that is, you know, from people who are older, which they have your best interest in mind, but your parents and your grandparents are probably telling you, go to college and get any degree. You have to go to college. You must go to college. And that is terrible advice now. Just going to college is not enough because 70% of, I'm assuming you're in the US. It could be different if you're in a different country. 70% of people in the US go to college. 40% of them drop out. Out of the people who actually finish college, over 50% of them have regrets about going to college. So do the math there, right? Do the math there. A lot of people who go to college, 40% drop out. So now there's 60% left. And then out of the 60% that finish college, over 50% of them have regrets about going to college. Why do you think that is? You'll know if you watch my channel, right? So just the advice, go to college is terrible advice on its own. It used to be good, right? And back when your parents, you know, depending on how old your parents are, back when they were kids, that was good advice. Your grandparents, same thing. That was good advice back then. And so they have your best interest in mind, but now it's bad advice.  You're, a lot of the time you're gonna end up working at Starbucks and, you know, or in a job that you're way overqualified for and you're not gonna be happy or a job you could have gotten without a college degree. Then you go on YouTube, right? This is what I did, right? When I was 18 or when I was in high school and college.  Which is also terrible advice. Now, you can make money with Amazon FBA or dropshipping. Don't get me wrong. There are people out there that are successful with that, but it's not gonna happen in 30 days. Most people are gonna fail, right? Most people are absolutely gonna fail. That is the nature of business, especially a business that would create that kind of lifestyle. If you have a successful, like, Amazon FBA store and you're able to get it to a high level, it's like a passive income stream almost for you. So it's like literally like a 10 out of 10 lifestyle. So lots of people want that lifestyle. So of course, it's gonna be massively competitive. So I looked at the advice on YouTube, bad advice. I looked at the advice from most older people, parents, grandparents, also bad advice. And I was like, someone needs to be out there that actually gives like balanced nuanced advice on this sort of thing. And so I literally created that channel that I wish I had at 18 in high school and college. And that's why my channel was successful. It's not because I'm an editing genius. Obviously my editing isn't that, you know, on our channel, it's not revolutionary. I'm certainly not like a Peter McKinnon or anything like that. And it's not because I have incredible charisma, again, like Peter McKinnon. It's because I'm solving painful problems that a ton of people out there have. I'm creating very valuable content that solves those painful problems that a ton of people have. That is why my channel is successful. So that's just one thing to kind of keep in mind. Yes, you do want to do things that you are passionate about. You do want to do things that you really like, but you also want to solve, do those in such a way where you're solving problems for other people. And the easiest way to do that is to just imagine that you're solving problems for a younger version of yourself. Yeah, I mean, there you go. It can't get any clearer than that. I will say Shane did mention something. He said he found an opportunity essentially that no one was given good advice. He saw that there was a problem where people were going to college, getting these degrees, but they didn't really necessarily learn any practical skill sets. People who, let's say, went to college, want to go to grad school, they realized halfway through they don't, but then they have to find some kind of degree to graduate with, or maybe the college has very stringent rules about changing majors or credits, et cetera, and it becomes difficult. And people graduate, maybe sometimes they have tens of thousands of dollars in debt, especially if they want to get the college experience, which I'm not saying you shouldn't go for. All of this stuff becomes like kind of a cluster bomb and it's like, what do you do at this point? So Shane found that product market fit, which is another term that he mentions sometimes, and he decided to go all in. It was something that he was able to discuss in a creative way. He had, you know, in his videos, he's able to match his humor based on the content and the value he's provided in the videos with the data, and he found his audience. And, you know, we're still growing, we're still doing good, and that's basically it. You just have to find something that you're able to produce content about something that there's an opportunity for. Maybe Shane often mentions it has to be a problem that people are often struggling with in order to get the best outcome, but in, you know, you could basically create content about anything. And I think this is the best way to get started in any kind of business because if you are able to develop an audience, you can leverage that to create any kind of businesses. You don't want to create a bad business or anything, you know, you don't want normal level of intention, but you can leverage that in order to help the people who are willing to pay money to support you. And I think that's ultimately the best way to think about it. Yeah, and you know, I don't mention this much on my channel because I just, I don't know, I don't want to be one of those channels that like brags and stuff, right? We're consistently doing like really, really good money now. So, you know, it didn't start off that way, but guys, like my most viewed video is with a gray sheet, like a bed sheet behind me and super cheap lighting. You do not need super fancy cameras, super fan, all this sort of thing. Oh, and it was with a super cheap camera too, with a kit lens. That's my most viewed video ever. Three million plus views, right? So yes, does all this stuff help? It, you know, it does the last 5%. It gets you the last 5% of the way there. There's certain things where you want to meet a certain threshold. Like you want to have relatively decent audio, right? Because if you don't have decent audio, like people will just click off. But if you find a problem that a ton of people are having and nobody else is solving that problem, that is how you freaking start to kill it on YouTube. You do not need to have insanely good content or anything like that. The number one thing you want to focus on is solving a painful problem that nobody else is solving. So let me think about, let's think about it like this. I think about things in kind of this simplistic way. Like I always like to think of evolutionary psychology. So if you are, our brains were designed to be living in like villages of about 200 people, right? That's how our brains were designed throughout evolution. Part of our brain still thinks that we are living in a tribe, like a village of 200 people. Because that's how we were living for like millions of years back when we were, you know, monkeys and then humanoids. And then even just a few thousand years ago was very similar to that. And even today, there's people who still live in tribes, right? If you are in a tribe of 200 people and there's like 20 fishermen in the tribe and a lot of people are really good at fishing. Like imagine their skill scores were between zero and 100. Like they're all probably above a 90 in fishing, right? They're incredibly good at fishing. And then there's this one person in the tribe who is extremely good at this skill of farming, right? Or he's not even that good. He's just like relatively good at this skill of farming. And there's nobody else who knows how to do it. During half of the year when it's winter, he's feeding everybody with the grain and the stuff that he grew, right? So he's providing an incredible amount of value to the tribe.  Which way do you think you should go? Do you think you should go the way where it's like there's already 20 of them? If one of them gets eaten by a crocodile one day, are they really gonna be missed?   But if that farmer gets killed by a lion or a bear one day, the tribe might starve during the winter. Like they're truly going to be missed. The value they're providing is much, much higher than the value that a single fisherman is providing. So that's just kind of an example of like where you should go in the world. Like the value that you should provide, typically speaking, should be in places that either not very many people are providing for one, or you should go in a direction where nobody's providing the value, but you have to be very careful there because there's no proof of concept, right? So you have to be very careful there. Typically speaking, it's best to just go in an area where there is some proof of concept. And the proof of concept would be the farmer, right? Everybody loves the farmer. He feeds people half of the year. You should go and intern with that farmer or be his disciple or something, whatever it would be called in a tribal setting, right? That is the way to go. That's where the opportunity is. And the funny thing is, is the farmer might only be like a 20 out of 100 when it comes to skill. Like he's not even that good. So you can quickly get yourself to that level of being like a 20 out of 100. Whereas if you went and interned or with a fisherman, it would probably take you like five to 10 years to get even close to as good as he is at fishing. Whereas with the farmer, you could probably learn everything he knows in a year, right? And then once you learn what he knows, you can actually take it to the next level. You know, content creators right now, honestly are not even that good. I'm just gonna be real with you. The industry, they are. Like it's really not that hard to get to a level of competence when it comes to content, because it's such a new industry. Whereas if you try to become a doctor or a lawyer, dude, you have to get your skill to like a 80 out of 100, at least to be even relatively decent as a doctor or a lawyer. Imagine this was like a video game where it's like zero to 100. Whereas as a content creator, you could get to like a 20 out of 100, 30 out of 100, maybe at this point, like a 50 out of 100. And you're gonna be extremely good. Now, the reason why it's harder to get to like, you know, a 20 out of 100 or a 50 out of 100 as a content creator versus getting to like a 90 out of 100 as a lawyer or a doctor or an engineer is just because there's no infrastructure in place to teach you. There's no like classrooms in place. You have to kind of figure some of it out on your own, right? That's the reason why, no, like not that many other people are doing it. And yes, it does take a lot of work, but that's why the shortcuts to all of this, kind of like we talked about, is to just go work for a content creator. So like 50% of Gen Z or whatever wants to be YouTubers, I think it's like the most popular career path. The best way to learn how to be a YouTuber is to just go work for a YouTuber. It's that simple. Go work for a YouTuber. You're gonna learn everything they know within like two to three years.  And at the very least, maybe you decide, okay, I don't want to be a YouTuber down the line, but you can be a YouTube content strategist. There's people who are absolutely crushing it doing YouTube content strategy. We're talking millions of dollars a year doing that. And they're technically still employees. I will say an aside, if there's anyone who would like some kind of freelance strategy or in the podcast space or anything, feel free to reach out.  I vouch for him. So yeah. And that's exactly what David's doing. And that's what I taught him to do, is if you want to, like his end goal is to own a successful podcast. And I hope that five years from now, we can clip this and be like, hey, David's done it, right? I really hope so. And I think if he follows this path that I've taught him through, which is actually really simple, it's not, this is not like rocket science, right? It's really simple. Go and work for an established podcaster and you're on the right steps because you're creating content, you're learning these skills and you're getting to the point where you can actually provide value to them. Go work for a successful podcaster, learn everything you can about their business. Be as valuable as you possibly can.  He owes me a six-figure career. No, be as valuable as you possibly can to the content creator that you work for.  They'll teach you everything they know. And then you're gonna learn it a lot and then that's gonna make it like, your chances of being successful are gonna go in the YouTube space from like 1% all the way up to like 80 or 90%, right? Like your chances of being successful. Yes, there's always an element of luck and probability to everything, but your chances of being successful are gonna go up exponentially if you do this. And I will say this one thing. This has been an ongoing thing with Shane and I for a long time. So I'm currently graduating this semester. I have, my technical degree is gonna be cognitive psychology and chemistry. So I just say neuroscience. And I'm considering graduate school. I have this very specific idea for a doctorate degree. And I have a nuance to have gone about it. But throughout the past couple of years, Shane was drilling and he's like, yo dude, what are you doing? He's like, don't go for this degree.  He's like, I've had people who have done a PhD, people have done a masters, XYZ, no good. Everyone said most people have had a very bad experience unless they got a great mentor, great PI. They really enjoyed doing research. And that's what they wanted to do as a career to work as a professor, doing basic science research or whatever it is. If he's like, if that's not what you wanna do, don't go for it. It's not worth the investment in terms of time, in terms of the salary you'll make, in terms of the lack of investments, in terms of all this time, prime time in 20s, traveling, et cetera. Debt, student loan debt for graduate degrees can be even more. Shane said that common misconception with doctorate degrees is that they're paid for, which is not necessarily true. But also the job you could get afterwards if you wanna work as an academia, it might not be the best paying or it might be even more competitive. So is that really what you wanna do? So Shane and I are still going back and forth on this and I think he'd love to talk about it. What is your framework with considering going for graduate school? If you should do it, if you should not do it. And I think you have quite a lot of thoughts on this. Oh my God, you wanna get me started on this? We should talk about normal degrees before we get to graduate school. Go ahead, I just extended the studio for another hour by the way, so we could, as long as you have time. That's what's up. Yeah, well let's talk about that really quick too. So David went to this super sketchy area that's like in an alley because he found this podcast studio because he didn't have my professional audio and professional lighting and stuff like that. So David is really going above and beyond to do this. I even brought my own cam. I used to use it for TikTok over here. I don't know if I can really show them recording on my laptop, but it's like this little tripod that they used to sell for TikTok. It's like all of the TikTok straight up, but it's a pretty legit setup.  Great, it's honestly a great place. I will shout them out. It was a little bit of a sketchy location because I was coming in the evening time, but great place. I don't know if you want to play, you cut this out. I got it on for 20 bucks an hour. You could do it for as many hours as you want. But yeah, Shane was like, this is a great deal. No excuses guys, no excuses. Oh, I don't have the right technology. I don't have the right camera. I don't have it. He rented this for $20 an hour guys. If he had already like, let's say he was trying to make a YouTube script, right? Or a YouTube video. If he had already written the script and everything, all he'd have to do to make three videos is just rent this for 20 bucks to make three videos. So literally all the excuses that people come up with to not start, 20 bucks an hour in New York City. In New York City, $20 an hour guys, right? Should I shout out the place? Minimum viable product. They're worldwide, I'm pretty sure. In the Europe and across, it's called pirate.com. So I mean, you can't blur it out. Oh, that's super sketchy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But hey, I mean these. Yeah, we're not sponsored by them. We're not affiliated. We're not nothing. No, no, no. If you get jumped on your way here, it's not our problem. No liability. Now I'm just kidding. It's honestly a great place. I appreciate the value that they provide.  From my experience doing podcasting, the setup that you could get if you have two microphones. Honestly, there's no barrier to entry. You could just use any of the apps online. It's pretty crisp audio. You just have to find a quiet place. Otherwise, I think a thousand dollars will get you two mics, headphones. It'll get you the pro, essentially sound mixer, audio mixer, et cetera. I think no excuses, you should just do it. Start off making just shorts, whatever. There's always a way to go about it. And if somebody's gonna comment down below, well, oh, I don't have any money. You know, I'm poor, I'm blah, blah, blah. Okay, watch my channel. I teach people how to get into high paying, entry level jobs without the need for a college degree or previous experience. The motto of my channel, I was just brainstorming this and we decided this is gonna be like the slogan of the channel. Go where the opportunity is. That's the slogan of the channel. Go where the opportunity is, right? So if you're in a position where you're really poor, guys, I completely relate to you. I was literally homeless throughout my childhood. I was living in an tent when I was a kid in a forest, right? Living in a tent in a forest when I was a kid. That happened when I was very young. And then throughout my childhood, there were many times where we slept in cars. So that's technically homeless. Many, many times. I mean, I got really good at sleeping in a car. And then there were times when we were literally on the street, right? Okay, and then I lived in homeless shelters as well, right? So I get it. I totally understand if you're saying I don't have enough money, go and provide value to the world, right? Go and get an entry level job in something where there is opportunity. Learn a valuable skill, right? Don't go for your passion, what all the people teach you. If you are in a village, you need to provide, imagine you're in a tribe. You need to provide value to the other people in the tribe. Cause that's essentially what it is. It's a tribe of eight billion people now, but you need to provide value to other people in the tribe. That is how that you're gonna be much more fulfilled when you do that for one, when you provide value to other people rather than just trying to be a little value sucker who just tries to get as much dopamine as possible before you die, not caring about other people at all, right?  I can almost guarantee it, right? But I digress. Let's get back to the topic, college degrees. Before you get into that, let me shout out a couple. You guys should go ahead and check out the Shane Hummyshow YouTube channel. That's something I've been managing. We're almost at 300 subscribers. Whoa, big deal. But some of the slogans when I was making the banner for this, I was like, what is something that Shane goes by? One quote, just get started, okay? That's something he's told me a lot. Choose the career, not the degree, which is something I think Shane's about to get into. And your greatest investment is into your skill set. That I think is like the number one thing that Shane says quite often. And I think this is applicable because it's like when you're going to college or choosing, basically deciding if you should go to college. If you're in high school right now, you're like, okay, what should I do? Okay, what are you gonna get out of college? What do you wanna do? Okay, work backwards from the career. Don't necessarily think about the degree. Let's say you wanna become an engineer. Okay, obviously you probably need a degree for it.  And what are you gonna do here? What are you gonna do there? Work backwards, engineer. What internships are you gonna get? How are you gonna use your time? So set yourself up for success, not failure, because not doing nothing essentially retracts on your time and that brings you backwards. But I don't wanna get too much into this. I know Shane is the expert here, so why don't you go ahead and sort of explain what does it mean to choose the career and not the degree? Yeah, so when you're asking yourself the question, you're in high school right now and you're asking yourself the question, should I go to college? The answer to that question is, do you need college in order to complete your goal? And a lot of people are gonna be listening to this and they're gonna be like, well, I don't know because I don't have a goal. There you go, you need to figure out what your goal is, right? And a good thing to shoot for, when I was in high school, I was actually not ambitious. I didn't think of like, I wanted to like start a business and like travel the world and like, you know, be a CEO or whatever or anything like that. I literally just wanted to have a good job. That's it, because I came from a poor background and I literally was just like, I don't wanna be poor ever again, right? So that was my mindset when I was in high school and I think that's a mindset of a lot of people. Now later on, you might decide, hey, I wanna start a YouTube channel. I wanna help other people. I wanna start a business and that's great. Maybe you're even watching this right now and you're already on that path and that's awesome. So you need to figure out what your goal is and then reverse engineer the steps it takes to get to that goal. Now if that goal does require, either requires college or college would like significantly help you achieve that goal, then go to college. But if you don't know what your goal is, college is the most expensive, least efficient, big like biggest time waste of all time to figure out what your goal is. Do not go to college to find yourself or figure out your goals or anything like that. Take a year off, work, do whatever you gotta do, learn valuable skills, do whatever you gotta do to figure out what your goal is. Check out a bunch of different things. I do have a six step guide that helps you figure out what your goal is and everything like that. I'll probably put that down in the description below. But go ahead, David. A quick aside here, this not financial advice. Do not go or not go to college based on where Talonnier primarily, Shane's telling you. And I will mention this. I am technically still a college student. I am getting a science degree. I am still trying to understand some things.  So I'm essentially the person that Shane's trying to convince and we've made a prize. But I will say go into college to try and find yourself or understand who you are, whatever. Okay, if that's what you're gonna do, just understand that that's what you're doing from the jump. Try and set yourself up with, okay, I'm gonna go to these social events or I'm gonna try getting these internships. I'm gonna make networking the bigger aspect of going to college rather than going to get this degree because I think I'm gonna go to this graduate school in order to do this. Because if I do this, then I'm gonna do that. And ultimately that's gonna lead me down the best path. Unfortunately, you know, I came out, we'll bleep that out. I didn't realize that. But okay, but you don't know what's gonna happen. And it's always important, like Shane often says on his channel, secure the bag with the undergraduate degree if that's what you're going for. Secure the bag with the least amount of investment and the most amount of upscale or ROI, return on investment. So that's what I wanna say. If that's your goal, make sure you're aware of that because if you just go to college and you don't really know what you're doing, it might not be the best investment and you also lose time. So a ton of time and time that you'll never get back because this is a time in your life that's incredibly formative. Like you're never gonna get this time back. You're never gonna feel as good. You're gonna be in your prime, right? Well, I guess it kind of depends. But like from the age of 18 to 30 to 35, that's probably like, those are probably like the best years of your life.  Maybe some people don't wanna enjoy it, right? They wanna work really hard. There are some like A-type personalities out there that's great if you wanna do that. But I think most people want to actually enjoy their youth. Be very careful what you do. And we can go over like all the objections to this because I've heard every objection a hundred times and like, trust me, I've spent so much time studying this. I've worked one-on-one with countless people. I know all the objections and your objections are just like 99% of the time they're wrong. And yes, this is not financial advice. Obviously do your own research. This is not a one-on-one consultation. I don't know your specific situation. You might be even living in a country where college is actually a really good investment. Maybe college is free in the country you live in. That's actually like the number one comment I get on my videos about American college degrees. It's like the most upvoted comment is like, this is a very American problem, right? Because a lot of people from other countries are like, I'm glad I don't have to worry about going $40, $50,000, spending $100,000 on a college degree, going $50,000 into debt, just to be able to get an education. They don't, they're like, they don't have to worry about that like we do in the United States. One of the number one comments I get on my channel is like, it's not about the money. It's about the experience. It's about enrichment. If it's not about the money, why do you have to spend $100,000? Just answer that. Maybe they're not spending it. Maybe some people are fortunate they're getting it compensated. Which is good, good for you. If you come from a privileged background, that's a different situation. If you've already, there's like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? If you already have like the three hierarchies, you don't have to worry about money, you don't have to worry about shelter, you don't have to worry about safety, anything like that. If you're a trust fund baby, then yeah, maybe my advice isn't for you and you can get better advice from that channel. I care about you guys. I, Shane is just very passionate right now, but go on. Like all the excuses they come up with, like it's not about the money. Okay, why does it cost $100,000 then? If it's not about the money. Why are other countries educating people for a reasonable amount of money? Educating in college, right? And that's another thing is like the education that you get in college is extremely dubious these days to say the least.  Well, the best universities in the entire world, MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cambridge, these universities put out many of their classes completely free online. In some cases, they'll have all the lectures free from literally the smartest professors in the entire world, the most sought after professors. And you can do the same, they'll say which book they're using, you can do the same assignments. In some cases, you can take the same quizzes and the same tests on these websites. So if you're doing it purely for the education, then just do it on these websites. So that, again, that doesn't work. That point is defeated, right? You're doing it to make money, okay? There are some college degrees that make better money.  That is a valid point. But if you dive into that a little bit more, which I've done in my videos, you'll see a disproportionate amount of the people who make money get certain degrees for one. And for two, there is no proof that it's correlation or causation. Ambitious people tend to go to college. Ambitious people tend to make more money. That doesn't mean that college is the reason why those ambitious people made more money. It's just because they were going to college because that's what their parents did. That's what everyone was telling them to do. And then they happened to make more money down the line, right? And things have changed as well. Like what worked in the last 40 years may not work in the next 40 years. Nobody knows the future, but from the trend in terms of like the value you're getting from college and the cost going up in the United States, those two trends, if those two trends continue, which I don't think anyone would argue that that's true. Like the value of a college degree has been going down since the 1970s, and the cost of a college degree has been going up disproportionately to inflation, by the way. So at some point there has to be an intersection between those two things where the value of a college degree intersects with that line of a cost of a college degree and it no longer becomes worth it. Now for many college degrees, in my opinion, that intersection has already happened, right? In fact, it probably happened like 10 years ago. And for other college degrees, it's probably gonna happen in the next 10 years. Now there are some college degrees that are definitely still worth it when you look at the numbers. But this is something you really want to research because a lot of the best college degrees and the best skills you can learn, you do not need to go to college for it. Now in some cases you might make an argument, it's still better to go to college, right? So for an example of that, computer science degree, you could make a very strong argument that even though you can learn software development, software engineering outside of college, getting a computer science degree when you look at the numbers is really, really good. So yes, you do have other options outside of getting a computer science degree for learning software development, but the going to college option is still really good. So it's definitely not a scam. It's certainly not a scam. And depending on the case, it has to be taken on a case-by-case basis, it might be the better option for you. But again, these are things that you need to approach with nuance, approach with research. Don't just assume these things, really look into it, right? Because with these types of degrees where they're kind of in the middle where you don't necessarily have to get the degree, but it could be a good idea to get the degree, the way I like to think about it is there's kind of like two paths you can go. There's a longer path that's really well paved. Like it's a really nice cement path, like super well paved. There's signs on what you should do. There's buses that you can take to go through that path. It's gonna take a long time. It's gonna take four years or whatever, but there's a nice path that you can take to get to your destination, which is getting like a software development job in computer science. And then there's the second path, which is self-learning, boot camps, taking online courses, et cetera, where it's not nearly as well paved. You know, you might have to go through a sketchy forest where you're not exactly sure what to do. You might get lost in the forest. There might be some dangerous animals in the forest. But the path is much shorter. So you can get there much quicker. You could get there in a year, maybe even six months in some cases. In other cases, maybe it takes you a little longer, like two years, to get my point. It is a much shorter path and you can get there faster, but it's also a little bit more dangerous. It's a little bit more risky. So this is something you have to evaluate on your own. You have to do your research and come up with a good plan. You have to evaluate it yourself. So yeah, I mean, I could go through literally every single point for why people go to college and almost all of them are invalid.  You might go to college, you meet a best friend for life, right? And that's something that you wouldn't necessarily have done if you didn't go to college. So the networking aspect of college is pretty powerful. You can network without college, absolutely 100%. You can network without college. You have to put yourself out there a little bit more, but you definitely 100% can network without college, but college does make that a lot easier. And then the second point, which is the most valid point, these are the only two valid points out of all the arguments. The second point is college is a unique experience. There's no other experience that's quite like college. It is 100% unique.  I wanna have like that American pie party lifestyle.  I went to University of Kansas, big time party school. They're extremely passionate about basketball, lots of parties, lots of drinking, big time party school. I'm telling you right now, the parties that I went to at the University of Kansas, which I thought were like 10 out of 10, were like a five out of 10 when I moved to Las Vegas and I started going to parties in Las Vegas. And then the parties I went to in Las Vegas, which I thought were a 10 out of 10 at the time, were like a five out of 10 when I started going to places like Bangkok, for instance, Bangkok, Thailand. And then guess what? I probably don't even know. Like maybe a place like Ibiza, for instance, makes Bangkok seem like a five out of 10. So if you're going to college because you think the party's like, oh, I'm never gonna be able to have this experience again, you're wrong, right? However, where they do have a little bit of a valid point is the college experience is unique. And if that is an experience you absolutely 100% want to have, then that is a more valid reason to go to college, but then you just have to weigh the risks and the benefits. Is that experience worth $100,000 to you? Or would you, having a different experience that's also unique, also be worth more? Because other experiences, like let's say you decide to travel the world and work remote and do a freelance job during those four years instead, that's also a unique experience. So which unique experience is the best? That's where you get into kind of like a philosophical, extremely subjective argument, right? But these are all things you need to really think about, write it down and figure out whether it's worth it for you. So when it comes to going to college to get a bachelor's degree, that's what we're talking about right now, getting a bachelor's degree. Now let's talk about going to graduate school. Same exact thing applies, except on steroids. Only go to graduate school if you 100% need it to reach your goal. That's it.  It's more expensive than undergrad. And I know a lot of people, oh, I get this comment, oh, well I'm getting a stipend, blah, blah, blah, because when I go to graduate school, well actually a lot of graduate schools you're not gonna get it paid for. You're not, okay? And that's just the facts. And I've broken this down in videos. Like people who go to graduate school end up in a lot more debt on average. Now if you are able to get it paid for, congratulations to you, but guess what? You are gonna get worked to the bone. You are gonna be in a position where you have zero leverage and zero power. And I've made videos on that where other people have almost complete control over your life.  I would say graduate school, same exact advice except on steroids. Like most people should not go to graduate school. By the way, I got a doctorate. I went to graduate school. So I can absolutely 100% speak to this. I was gonna say, Shane, it kinda sounds like maybe you did go to graduate school.  I'm a little, maybe you did go to graduate school. I went for a health degree, guys. There's only one way you can get into health professions and that's getting a degree. There is no other way to get into health professions. So there's a natural barrier to entry there, you know? So that's a completely different situation. And yeah, definitely watch my videos on is graduate school worth it? So you can understand all the nuances of that. So yeah, that's basically my opinion on that subject in a nutshell. Yeah, I mean, I don't think it's such like, it's a very nuanced take. Maybe slightly controversial. I don't think it's that unpopular. I think most people, once again, similar to mainstream news, it's like opinions like these don't get broadcasted because often long form discussion is what brings out knowledge. But in short clips, what's gonna get the views is going to be the controversial takes that are like, oh, go to college or on the other hand, ton of debt, don't do it, et cetera. Colleges scam, never go to college. Buy my course instead. Yep. That's what gets to be. That generation on YouTube from course is shifted from those people who are selling supplements. Then they got into the cryptos. Then those same people got into like self-help and now they're getting back into. It was interesting. But yeah, it's like buy my course, don't go to college or go to college best experience because these are ways companies can market. They're not gonna market by giving you nuanced takes. And that's why you see it in the media because then who sponsors the media platforms that end up talking about college? Those same companies because it's the target demographic. So you're not going to have a company that's gonna try making advertisements by telling you to oh, maybe you should consider this. Maybe you should not. Or maybe you shouldn't go to debt. Maybe go to a community school first, two years, go to state school, a second, two and maybe consider graduate. No, they're gonna tell you either go to college or don't because you need to buy my course. And actually Shane has a course in his description and you guys could check it out. If you guys are considering. No, no, no, let's not talk about it. I don't care.  So I'm probably gonna, I'm gonna put that course up on Skillshare or maybe even release it for free at some point. So yeah, let's not talk about that. But what I do wanna talk about really quickly is I have, I forgot exactly how many, but I have I think over 10 full-time employees now and there was only one of them where I actually paid attention to their degree and my businesses. And the only reason I paid attention to his degree is because I needed a person who was good at like IT related stuff, like information technology. So for instance, he helped me set up like this podcast sort of situation here where I can like live stream and podcast and like have two different camera angles and stuff like that. That's the only time I ever gave any care about their degree one time, right? And even then it wasn't like a deal breaker. It was just like, oh, that's kind of nice. That's cool. Like if he hadn't had all the other things that I liked, the degree would have made zero difference. But the degree was like a little bit of extra like, oh, whenever I need to set up like IT related stuff, technology related stuff, this guy's probably relatively good at technology because he has an IT degree. That's it. Everybody else I hired didn't care about their degree and most other business owners are the same way. We do not care about your degree. It does not matter to us.  And then once you have good skills, you have a good portfolio, then you're gonna get an interview and you have to be able to like basically speak the language of whatever those skills that we're hiring you for. And if you can speak that language and you can do all that, your chances of getting hired, I mean, you're gonna get hired. You're gonna get hired. Like a lot of the time with people I help, like typically like for random jobs out there, like good jobs, if you send out, let's say, you send out like a thousand applications, you might get like 10 interviews and you get one job for a good job. If you nail those four things that I just mentioned, those things that I just mentioned, like the, you have the skills. First of all, you like picked a specific niche, right? So for instance, let's say you're trying to become a YouTube content strategist, right? So you know what you're trying to do and you've followed the opportunity. You went for like an actual valuable thing that other people need, right? So you're not trying to become a fisherman when everyone's a fisherman. You're trying to become a farmer when there's only one farmer, right? So you do that. You learn the necessary skills, which by the way, isn't as hard as you'd think because like I said, if you're going for something that's incredibly valuable, you really only need to be like a 20 out of 100 in many cases. Whereas if you're going for like a mainstream skill, you actually have to be really good at it, right?  Like it takes a super high level of competence to be a doctor, right? You have to be like an 80 out of 100 probably. So you learn the skills, you demonstrate those skills with an easily accessible portfolio, right? You don't make them ask you for the portfolio, which is 99% of the people who reach out to me don't even send their portfolio. It's incredible. And then they're shocked when I don't message them back because I get so many emails per day. So you demonstrate it with an easily accessible portfolio. And then during the interview, you speak the language so that we know you're not a fraud, right?  So you actually speak the language of whatever you're trying to apply for. Like if somebody were to apply to me for like a YouTube content strategist position, they would need to kind of understand like, huh? Like talk about other YouTube channels that have been using these strategies. Again, proof of concept, right? Don't be giving me these like random ideas that nobody else has ever done.  Proof of concept, right?  I saw that they did XYZ in order to boost their subscribers or in order to make more money. You know, like they went on a bunch of different podcasts and then they made shorts out of those podcasts and then that's how they were able to boost their subscriber count by much more than what they were going for, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. AKA speaking the language of YouTube, knowing for instance what average view duration AVD is, CTR, knowing what click through rate is, these sorts of things. If you speak the language of the position you're trying to apply for, we're gonna know that you're not a fraud, right? And you are gonna be unbelievably more likely to get the job. So it's like, I teach people this and a lot of the time people are sending out like 20 job applications and they're getting 10 interviews and then they're getting like five job offers. So imagine sending out a thousand job applications to get 10 interviews and getting one job offer versus sending out 20 job applications to get 10 interviews and five job offers. Imagine like the difference. That is the difference when you learn valuable skills and you go where the opportunity is. Wow, that was a lot. But yeah, it's all about learning the skills. That's the one thing I would say I learned from Shane is that learn practical skills displayed in whatever context AKA portfolio, either create projects if you wanna get a coding job but also like study the questions for the interview so you could communicate during it. If you are artistic and you have a creative side, create a portfolio of maybe some kind of thumbnails that you could create or if you're interested in drawing, you have a good skill set in it, you have a good eye, maybe pick up some digital marketing skills or pick up some UX UI skills, something like that or figure out how to create thumbnails and maybe there's an opportunity for you start it off as a hobby and then maybe eventually you could market it as a portfolio, reach out to creators, be creative about it and boom, it's that simple. So start kind of thinking about it in this way that Shane went about and I don't think it's as difficult as you may think. And it's not just creators by the way, that's not the only type of job you can get. I teach people how to get into IT, teach people how to get into tech sales, I teach people how to get into digital marketing, me and my business partners do. Basically I partner with people who are really good at doing it already. So actually this leads me into kind of another subject which I wanted to cover which is what would I do right now if I were 18 years old? Because like we just said, I got a doctorate, right? I got a doctorate, I became a pharmacist, it's a good job and at the time the resources that you guys have right now I did not have at the time, right? And then another thing is at the time I was in a very, I was in a bad position, right? I was down bad at the time. Not only did I come from a very poor background but and I didn't really have any connections or anything like that. But on top of that, I actually had to take care of my dad because he had terrible health. So I was down bad at the time. And my, I did the research, I did a kind of a version of what I did now and I chose pharmacy. And I think that was a good choice. But if I were 18 right now with all the opportunities that other people have, that is not what I would do. Here's exactly what I would do. And again, this is just for me, it's gonna be different for everybody out there. So but you can just kind of model what I would do. I personally, if I were 18 right now I would not go to college, I would get a job in digital marketing. Why would I get a job in digital marketing? Because I think it's the best thing that kind of is interesting to me. And it also is a valuable skill that I could learn that's going to be something that I could use later on down the line. And it's just overall, it's also a very flexible job. So I have a lot of flexibility in the future in terms of where I would wanna go. I would learn digital marketing. I would try to probably get into either SEO or paperclick. So learn paid ads. Probably paperclick and I would, yeah, I would say probably paperclick. I would learn that skill as fast as possible by using the best resources online. I would create a portfolio that very clearly demonstrates that I actually know the skills. And then I would start applying to companies. I'd start reaching out and cold applying to different companies by sending them video messages. I would send them video messages where I introduced myself. I would tell them I have some advice for you, some value that I wanna give you, your company. And then I would give them the value. I would also introduce myself. And then I would show them a portfolio. I would give them a link to a portfolio where they can very clearly see that I have the skills that I'm talking about. And I can almost guarantee you, I would not be 19 without a job, without a doubt. No freaking way. Even if I was learning it from scratch, there's no way I would get to 19 without having a job. And then I would work in that job for a few years. I would learn these valuable skills.  But I have this really nice stable launch pad where I have a job where I'm not dead every day after I get home because I'm incredibly tired. It would also be a remote job. So I have a lot of free time. I can look at other things. I can explore other areas. And I would probably find, because as I found later on in life, that I want to start a business. And at that point, what I would do is I would start trying different business models. Now I know what business models work for me now, but I wouldn't have known that if I was 18. So I'd try a bunch of different business models. And then finally, I would find one that actually sticks, which in my particular case, it's content creation. I absolutely love content creation.  And this is exactly what I did by the way, but just later on in life. I would stumble upon content creation and just helping people solve painful problems and talking about things that I know a lot about and also things that I'm passionate about. And then I would try to get a job. Well, first of all, I would start creating content right off the bat. And if it takes off, it takes off. That's great. If it doesn't, I would use the content that I created to get a job with a content creator that I respect. Either an internship or a job, something like that with a content creator I respect. And at this point, I'm probably like 20, 21 years old. And I would get a job with a content creator that I really respect, that I want to learn from and I want to emulate. I would do anything this person asked me to do. Like I would literally do anything that they want and I would learn as much as I possibly can. I would be like a freaking sponge, just soaking up everything I could possibly learn from this person. And then on the side, I would still be building my personal brand, right? Oh, that's another thing. In content creation, personal brand is the way to go. But that's a topic for another podcast, right? Personal brand, definitely the way to go. I would be building my personal brand, creating content on the side and learning a ton from an established YouTuber or whatever I wanted to get into, maybe podcasting, but in my case, it would be YouTube, because I love YouTube. And then after a year, two, three years, it would just be a matter of time before some of my content took off to the point where I could quit my job and start doing content creation full-time. And at that point, you go pro and you try to take it to the next level and you try to just do the best possible job you can. Now, I'll be honest with you guys, I am at a point in my life right now where I truly do feel like I'm living a 10 out of 10 lifestyle. And if I tried to be like, you know, a freaking Elon Musk, do a startup, that sort of thing, I have a lot of friends who are doing that, I probably would not be living a 10 out of 10 lifestyle anymore. I might end up doing that just for the challenge if I get bored with the lifestyle I'm living.  I truly am living like my version of a 10 out of 10 lifestyle. It might not be your version, but it's my version of a 10 out of 10 lifestyle. So, you know, there's certain goals I have, I'm somewhat ambitious, but I'm definitely not trying to create like a hundred million dollar business or anything like that. Definitely not, because that would stress me out more. But yeah. It sounds like you're becoming one of those trust one babies that you were down playing earlier. I make my own trust fund. I know that's what I'm saying. It's good. I'm happy for you, man. Like I've always said, I wanted to comment on something. You were saying earlier, be a sponge. And I remember when I first officially started interning, I was like, you know what? You were asking me, is like, what can I provide you? How can I help you grow, et cetera? And I was like, man, I've been doing all these different kind of things. I just want to be a sponge. I want to attend all these different Zoom sessions, work with the editors, consulting, different brands of anything that I could get my hands on I want to learn about. And Shane was like, okay. And I mean, that's how it, you know, we led to creating this podcast channel and all this kind of stuff. So be a sponge, be open-minded, provide value. I hope at this point we kind of demystified the word value other than having a connotation of corporate lingo. It's not like that. But yeah, just provide, showcase your skills and show that you are a genuine person who has interest and is willing to learn. And with that intention, as you approach sending out emails, reaching out to creators, developing your skills, you will find that maybe you actually do have a passion or you don't have a passion. What position you would like to have in a content creating role? What position you might want to have in a business setting where you might see yourself in the future. Maybe you don't want to do this at all. Maybe you find another opportunity in a startup or maybe you decide you want to go to college or maybe do both. I mean, currently right now I'm working at a lab. I'm a student and I'm doing this. So it's possible. Anything is possible if you set your mind to it. And I think that's the main message. If you're, you know, to the kids out there and we're both calling kids, Shane and I, I think we have like what, eight, nine year age difference. Whatever, I'm 21. For the people out there I'll say, because I guess I'm a kid, if you're feeling lost, if you don't know what to do, if you're, you know, you just don't, you're trying to figure it out. I will say, do not give up hope. Try and figure out what is the next practical step you can take to get out of the circumstance you are currently in in order to achieve the goals and aspirations that you may or may not have. But you will not be able to do that just being stuck and not taking any action. Inertia will not move you forward or backwards. You will stay in the position you are in. So try, be resourceful. Try and just get out of the frame you are currently in by having some inkling of hope that we hope to have provided at least a little bit so far. And I will mention also, if you are enjoying this conversation, Shane and I were currently discussing how to transition the channel, what new content we can make to provide value, making it more entertaining. You know, we're into the personal finance, we're into different kind of topics. And if you enjoy this format, what we've been doing so far, we're considering uploading this to the main channel, seeing how it does, and if we should move forth with doing podcasts like this or not. Please comment down below your thoughts. And you know, we really appreciate any kind of constructive feedback because we both enjoy this kind of format. We both want to test it out. I, you know, I've been convinced and Shane for a long, long time to try out this format. And finally we've done it. So if you guys enjoy it, go ahead, comment down below right now. What was your favorite part? And keep going. Absolutely. One thing I love about this long form format is you have the ability to be nuanced in long form format. You really do. Whereas the truth is, and this is kind of one of the downsides of like YouTube is, and especially the downsides of shorts, is the type of content and the type of information that does well is just different. And a lot of time it's not nuanced. Like the stuff that does really well is like strong statements, you know, like Keto is the best diet. Keto is the best diet, right? When in reality, like, okay, maybe for like, you know, 40% of people, yeah, it's the best diet. But for the other 60%, it's not, right? And that's just the fact of the matter. But on YouTube and TikTok and all this sort of thing works, it's like, it's not nuanced at all. It just isn't. So YouTube is a little bit better. It's definitely a lot better than like a lot of the other platforms. But yeah, podcasts, long form content, very nuanced, much more high level, kind of like intelligent discussions. And I will say before we get into any other topic, we, Shane mentioned he has partners that he tries and provides opportunities for people to try out careers in tech, sales, digital marketing. We will leave the link in the description below to go ahead and check out their courses. They are free and they're amazing. It will give you a summary of what exactly is digital marketing, what exactly is technology sales. If this is something that you can start out in and these are great people, we've done interviews on the channel already, a little farther back if you scroll back on it. Check them out, check out some of the shorts on the Shane Hummys show as well that we've clipped up those interviews. They have done extremely well. So please go ahead and check out those links down in the description with Seth Jerry. That's the digital marketing course. And Troy Buck, Buckhold was it? Whatever, the technology sales. I remember when I was making the links for the course, I was like, I think it's buckled, but okay. Check them out. Yeah, and I just wanna say something really quickly cause I get comments, there's always that one person who comments this. There's a free introductory course for all of these sorts of things. And then there is a paid course that the free introductory course will teach you a lot. It's gonna tell you like the different options. It's gonna tell you if it's a good option for you for instance, because for instance tech sales is definitely not for everybody but it can be an amazing option for certain people. So there's a free introductory course and then there is a paid product and I will have a coupon for the paid product with Troy for instance. I believe it's Shane 50 where you get $50 off. So yeah, it is a paid course guys. You have to pay for high level information that will change your life and an entire community of people and having guidance from professionals that is really good. Yes, that is something you have to pay for because they're giving you an insane amount of value. You're getting a heck of a lot more value than what it costs. I think they're like $450 for the Troy stuff. Shane 50 for $450 off $500 course. And if you guys have a problem with that, if you have a problem with paying cause I do get these comments sometimes. Yeah, I get it. I came from a very poor background as well but guys, the thing is is you're coming at this from the wrong mindset. And this is kind of what we talked about at the beginning. You need to come at this from the mindset of giving value first, right? In order to get value, you have to give value. And if you're not able to give value in the form of interning for them or something along those lines, giving them some sort of free value, working for them for free, something like that, you can also give value in the form of money. So that is another form of value. So I just wanna say that cause I do get comments like, oh, the course isn't free. Like there's a free introductory course and there's another course that you can buy after if you have taken the introductory course and you like it, there's another one you can buy for like $400. And I will say I've taken the introductory course. It is very, very interesting. I had no idea what tech sales was and I found it to be very interesting similar with digital marketing. I had no idea what it was but these are practical things that you interact with YouTube, you interact with all these different platforms and you don't necessarily think about the behind the scenes. You don't even think it's possible to have a career in this but maybe Shane will mention they're getting insane results for a lot of these different students that are going through the course because of the way it's modeled. You go through the course, then you are partnered with internships. You know, they help you go through them and then you could land a $50,000, $60,000 maybe even more starting salary within a very short period of time. Maybe Shane, you wanna mention that briefly. Oh yeah, I mean, we have tons of interviews on the channel. The thing is, I could literally do an interview every single day from all the people we're helping in the courses. The thing is, is these interviews don't do very well on the main channel because the main channel, I do more like educational and like listicle style content. So they don't do very well on the main channel. They only get like a few thousand views or whatever. And that is kind of another problem with YouTube is like nuanced content like that tends to not do as well on YouTube whereas podcast is quite a bit better. So I'll probably still keep doing those interviews but I'll probably put them on the podcast channel or something like that. Yeah, definitely check out the interviews that I've done on the main channel. There's so many incredible stories. There's a 16 year old who got a job in digital marketing. There's a mom who was going to college. She had a terrible experience with college and she was able to land a over $100,000 a year job in a month and a half. Yeah, there's just like incredible stories. There's like super, super incredible stories on the channel. And that's really just like just a few of them. So definitely check that out. What is your judgment on online courses, boot camps, apprenticeships? I've known you, you know, you interviewed a lot of different people on the channel but these are questions we get asked often. What, how would you differentiate between something like an internship, apprenticeship, online course of boot camp? Sort of, what's your two cents on that? And why, what's the positive? Well, I made an entire video breaking that down. It really depends on the career. So for instance, I'll give you an example. I was looking into, I was trying to find a really good like all in one zero to hero course for data analytics or data analytics. And people always say that I say that wrong. That's another comment I get, but data analytics. So great career, data analyst, awesome career to get into. I looked for a long time on a just all in like zero to hero solution for people to learn data analytics and get into it. And I couldn't find a good course online. Hopefully someone will come out with a good course and I contacted all the data analytics YouTubers and none of them told me there was a, there's like an all in one solution. But what I found, it's not a zero to hero solution but what I found is the best option to get started is the Google professional data analytics certificate. And you can also do the IBM one as well. It's pretty good too. And that's what most of the data analyst YouTubers said as well. So that's the best solution in that particular case it's a certificate and it's very cheap. It's $39 a month so super cheap. If I find a good course that it's a zero to 100 zero to hero solution, I will talk about it on the channel but I couldn't find one and I spent hours and hours searching for one in the case of tech sales. Very clearly it's a course, very clearly. Definitely a course is the way to go in the case of tech sales. It's Troy's course that I talked about. Yeah, so it really depends boot camps can be really good for software development. Also getting a college degree from a university like WGU or computer science degree is a really good option as well. You can get it much faster than a normal university. I've made many videos about that. So that would be an example where depending on your background I would either choose a boot camp or getting an accelerated degree from WGU if you want to get into software development because it's a little bit harder to get into software development. Again, if I find a good all in one zero to hero solution for a course I will definitely talk about it on the channel but up to this point that those have been the best options for most people that I've worked with. And yeah, it really just depends on the career. It truly does depend on the career. I do think the objectively the best business model and the best solution for people in general sometimes the solution doesn't exist but in general it is a cohort based course.  That tends to in my opinion in terms of the value perspective like how much you pay for it and how much value you get out of it as well as how much you know just in general the success rate that tends to be the best bet for success rate in terms of like the value and the amount of people who are successful going out of it a cohort based course tends to be the way to go. You mentioned earlier that college as the value the way you see it and you've mentioned in your videos that you've cited a lot of different sources that point to this as the value of college and the ROI in general decreases and it's sort of out of fault. The essentially the return on investment is gonna be zero. And at some point the two paths have to cross. You mentioned this earlier. Where do you see the future of education, college? You know you've mentioned the creator economy that's the new way of doing it. All of these online courses getting jobs in the matter of weeks maybe even months. Where is the future of education going and is the whole point of getting a degree or getting an education going to be to get those entry level jobs? See the words that you just said are so telling of what the mainstream narrative is. Getting a degree or getting an education because most people in the mainstream narrative is a college degree is an education. Those two things are synonymous. And that is just not true. A college degree is one way of getting an education. It is one way out of many, many different ways. And like you mentioned, certificates, online courses, apprenticeships, internships, doing it yourself, self-learning, many other ways of getting an education. And the future of this in my opinion, this of course is just my opinion, is I almost think of this from like a macro perspective. Automation is happening. Streamlining is happening. Careers are changing incredibly fast. People who were born this year might be doing careers by the time they're 18 that don't even exist now. In fact, not even people born this year. People who are like 15 right now. Three years from now, five years from now, 10 years from now. They may be doing careers that don't even exist right now. So we saw like AI for instance come out, chat GPT. That's what everybody's freaking out about. It's like blowing up right now. Prompting is a huge thing when it comes to AI. So in the future, there might be people who get hired to businesses, literally just because they're really good at coming up with prompts to give AI. And they're gonna be hired to businesses to help those businesses figure out the best prompts for the script writers, for the people who are responding to messages, for the people who are emailing, et cetera. Just coming up with the best prompts for that, right? So there are careers that do not exist right now that will exist 10 years from now, many of them. And all of this is happening incredibly fast. So let's think about this from a macro perspective. If you are somebody who is in control of your country and you want your country to do well in the world, are you gonna force everybody to go through an old, stuck in the mud, antiquated dinosaur of an education system, which is college, which is way too expensive, doesn't provide very much value. Or in order to fill these jobs in the job market that are popping up and in order to efficiently fill the jobs and teach people the proper skills so that there's not 400 people applying to a job with one position that's open. Instead, there's lots of jobs out there that there are positions open and there's a good amount of people who are quickly and efficiently learning those skillsets, which is going to value, it's gonna benefit everybody in the economy, it's gonna create a lot more value for your country. Which one of those things are you gonna do? Are you going to invest in alternative forms of education so that people can get educated quickly and efficiently and have better lives and fulfill the needs of the market? Or are you gonna force everybody through an old, antiquated system, which is losing value and is way too expensive and it's bloated and nobody likes it, literally nobody likes it, except for the people who make money from it? Like, which one are you gonna do? If there are smart world leaders out there, they're gonna go for the first option. They are gonna be looking into alternative forms of education to teach people these valuable in-demand skills so that their economy, their workforce, is more competitive than the rest of the world. So that's what I see this moving towards, is alternative education is going to take over? There's always going to be room for college, okay? College is not going away, college will always be one way of getting educated and it's really good, for instance, for health careers, in my opinion. I don't want somebody operating on me who got a certificate or took an online course. I want somebody who went to a physical college doing a surgery on me, right? So for health careers, college is probably always gonna be the way to go. But there are many careers out there where there are going to be alternative ways of getting educated and that is the future, in my opinion. I will say about, so I was originally doing pre-med. I basically completed all of the basic courses, the biology, the organic chemistries, chemistries, whatever. And you realize at some point, a lot of these classes are pretty much irrelevant, but the whole point of it is to learn critical skills. You take the MCAT, see how well you do there. You have to do all of these different experiences, then it's an entire weeding out process. And people are thinking about, they're like, is it really worth it going for a bachelor's degree investing so much time just to go through another weeding out process? So even going to college to four medical school for different pre-health professions, et cetera, soon that's probably going to be taken a more tailored approach as well, where you don't have to spend four years just taking college courses, at least in America, in other countries the systems are different. Because, I mean, it's not the best allocation of time per se. Like it's important to develop those critical thinking skills to show that you'd end up doing well in med school. And so you have the study skills once you go there because it's pretty intense. But it's not necessarily requiring four years of undergraduate coursework and then shadowing internships. Then you have to find a way to differentiate yourself. And there's so much competition. It's a very toxic environment when you consider all of these different things, especially the return on investment and the uncertainty of what's gonna happen 20 years down the line when you even finish that career because it's not as certain as it was before. So going for a career as a lawyer, as a doctor, engineer is a little bit different. You could get in self-arrange or whatever. Going into a career that would be deemed as a traditional option is not so practical as it used to be anymore. There's a whole bunch of different quotas. I don't really wanna get into that anymore. But it's not as easy as it used to be. And there's a lot of different things and factors at play. And unfortunately, if you spend all this time and you're not able to meet them, you really do have lower chances and you might end up investing more time. And it seems futile at a certain point. But once again, if that's what you wanna do, go for it, but make sure you have a plan and don't necessarily think that, oh, I'm gonna do this. Once I get the degree, I'm going to med school and I'm gonna go do this and do that. It's not that simple. But to get back to the point, it's not gonna necessarily require a whole entire bachelor's degree in the future to go into a graduate school if you wanna become a veterinarian, if you wanna become a nurse, et cetera. It's gonna be much more tailored, which is similar to the trend we see in these online courses. You take this online course, you take this boot camp, you do this internship, you pick up the skills and within a few months you could start doing a job that the return on investment is basically 100X because there's not much upfront costs or barrier to entry. Especially now that we're in a digital age and everything's on the internet. Absolutely, 100% agreed. I think you're about to run out of time at your sketchy podcast studio. It's a good podcast studio. I was gonna say, Shane, I don't know how much more time you have. I could extend it for another hour, but I still have about 15 more minutes. I wanna get a little bit more controversial in case we haven't. Oh yeah, I should look at the camera too. Let me try that. We said we were gonna try that, right? So yeah, this is a look at the camera, Chris Williamson style. Just look straight at the camera instead of looking at the conversation. We'll make sure to edit in that angle so when we make some shorts we could still see your face on because these are gonna be the controversial ones. Okay, yeah, and you don't have to answer this. I'm not sure how it's gonna do on YouTube, but it's a little bit of a difficult question. But aside from alternative education and all this, in general, what would you say is the biggest shortcoming of our generation or in terms of politics, in terms of everything that's happened in the last few years? What would you say has been the biggest shortcoming? Is it the suppression of dissenting opinions? Is it the lack of resources? Is it, I don't know, still pressures of people to go to college, people feeling laws going for these degrees, college loans increasing in interest rates? What would you say is the biggest shortcoming and something that you would hope to change in the next few years? Wow, that is a tough question. Holy cow, yeah, that's a tough one. Something, see, those are two different questions. What's the biggest shortcoming and then what would I hope to change? So I can only talk from my perspective, right? I can only talk from my perspective. I'm saying in my lane, right? Because there's a lot of massive problems out there. I think that one of the biggest problems that's not really in my lane, but it's something that I should probably talk about is just people using technology too much. Or rather, not people using technology, but people being used by technology. Instead of letting technology enhance their life, they're being controlled by technology, right? So I would say that might be literally the number one problem in the world. But in terms of like education and careers is I think the biggest problem in the United States is just people having this terrible misconception about like follow your passion when it comes to education and careers. And yes, you should follow your passion, so to speak, but that doesn't mean that you should spend $100,000 on a college degree that's something that you're interested in, right? So if like there's a, one of my passions is video games, right? I like playing video games.  No, of course I shouldn't. Unless I'm like trying to do something incredibly niche, like 99% of the time that's not the way to go. What you should focus on more, and this is just gonna be a more of a holistic solution, is providing value. Think back to the tribe, right? There's 20 fishermen, they're all incredibly good. The tribe has plenty of fishermen. There's only one farmer. If that something happens to that farmer, the tribe is screwed. Go and provide value by learning that skill first. Provide value to the rest of the tribe, and you are going to be in a situation where not only are you going to be happier, you're gonna have more dopamine because you do something that you actually enjoy, right? But on top of that, you're also going to feel much more fulfilled because you're helping other people. You're actually helping other people. You're not applying to a situation or a job where 400 other people are also applying to it and only one person gets the job. And if you didn't get the job, there'd be 400 other people who would probably do around the same level as you in that job. Go for the situation where there's not enough people. There's shortages. The economy and society needs more people in those positions. That's the kind of thing you wanna go to. And not only will that make you happier in the short term, but even more importantly, it's gonna make you much happier in the long term as well. And you're gonna have a lot more meaning and fulfillment from your job.   So think about that quote and live by that quote. Word, some people would say. Now, moving away from sort of the dreary side things, they got a little inspirational at the time there. What is the biggest upside for our generation? Gen Z, I believe, there might be another generation, what's the biggest upside? And the biggest hope you have for Gen Z in terms of the work first, in terms of education, stay in your lane. People hate on Gen Z a lot. People hate on Gen Z a lot. And I actually like Gen Z more than my generation, which is millennials. I actually like Gen Z better. I think that millennials are, we were born into a situation where it's not nearly as good as the generations before us, right? I mean, don't even get me started on Baby Boomers. They had everything incredibly easy. I mean, that is the easiest generation to ever be born into of all time, right? Baby Boomer generation, I mean, you could literally do anything. My dad told me he worked at a gas station as he would like fill people's gas tanks and like clean their cars. And he was able to like buy a house doing that. I mean, unbelievably easy, they had it. And these are the people that are telling us that we need to work harder and like get a good job and all that. They just don't understand the situation we were born into. But millennials are very negative about things, right? Gen Z, on the other hand, was also born into kind of a tough situation economically because of how unbelievably bad people have managed the country and the economy. But they're a lot more positive about it. There's something very, there's like a positive vibe to Gen Z that I really love. So it's almost like, oh, life is meaningless. This is millennials. Let me wallow in despair. And then Gen Z is like, life is meaningless. Awesome, let's have fun, right? Like that's kind of like the Gen Z vibe of approaching life, which I think is a much better way to approach a hard situation. So my advice to Gen Z, like the biggest opportunity that you have is definitely going to be all the emerging technologies as well as the creator economy. You no longer have to do a job that you don't want to do, right? You can create your own job in the creator economy by talking about things that you are passionate about, right? Talking about things that you're passionate about and things that other people are passionate about. And specifically with having this idea in mind of solving other people's problems, right? Giving value to other people. There is so much opportunity out there and the most random niches for you to just start creating content or work for somebody else who's creating content in that niche and make a full-time living and actually enjoy your life from. And you're giving a lot of value when you're doing something that's extremely meaningful. So that would be probably my biggest message to Gen Z is embrace technology, use technology, don't be used by technology.  Like seriously, TikTok is terrible.   And then also embrace the emerging technologies like AI, all this sort of thing. Don't freak out about the technology. It's only gonna create more jobs. And if it doesn't, let's just say, let's like steal man this argument as you say. Let's say AI does take away all the jobs. Well, it's gonna be a different world and who knows what's gonna happen? A world without jobs. I don't think that'll ever happen because there'll never be a time where we don't have problems, right? I don't think there's ever gonna be a world where we don't have problems and who takes care of problems? Entrepreneurs, what do entrepreneurs start? Businesses, what do businesses need? Employees, that's jobs, right? So I don't think there's ever gonna be a world where we don't have jobs. Jobs are going to change though. And you need to embrace that and just hop on that trend and just be willing to have a career where you might be changing your career five or 10 times and that's totally fine. And that's gonna be something that's probably great for you because you're probably gonna get bored with a career after a few years and just embrace that you are gonna evolve and you're gonna evolve and you're gonna change over time and that's a good thing. In the spirit of this conversation coming to a close and your most popular video, the most useless degrees with three million views, what would you say are the top five most useless degrees you could currently get? And then what are the top five best ones? Just to kind of ease the- You want me to do this off the top of my head? It's a genuine off top of the head. Yeah, I mean, this will probably not be the list. I'd have to actually think about the list, but the first ones that pop into my head, anything that has the word studies in it almost always is terrible. Yeah, anything that has the word studies in it is terrible because you can learn all that stuff online. It's a very like surface level way of learning about that sort of thing. Yeah, anything that has the word studies in it is gonna be really bad. Art degrees, I hate to say it, art degrees. I love artists, but art degrees are usually a terrible choice as well. There are many different ways of learning art other than going to college and getting an art degree. I mean, think about it. If you wanna be successful in art, if you wanna do art for a living, especially if you wanna start your own brand, you have to do stuff that nobody has ever done before. Like by definition in art, you have to do things that nobody's ever done before. So how are you going to get good at art by learning it from the most oldest, crustiest, slowest, stuck-in-the-mud organization that probably has ever existed in the entire world, which is the university system? Like you are not going to innovate or learn anything cutting edge from university, right? Go out there, make friends with other artists, network with other artists. That's where you're gonna learn the cutting edge stuff. So any type of art degree, these Build-A-Bear workshop degrees where you basically choose your own degree.  Terrible, terrible, terrible. Don't ever do that. Do not ever do that. If you, if there's a subject that's emerging, right? Like let's say YouTube studies. Like you are specifically like with these Build-A-Bear workshop degrees, like gaming YouTube studies, right? If you're passionate about that, don't go get a college degree. Make a YouTube channel about gaming YouTube channels, right? Like start making content online about it. You're gonna learn a lot more than you ever would from a degree. And on top of that, you might actually make a living from it. Or at the very least, there's a good chance you'll get hired by a gaming content creator, right? There are much better ways to study this thing if it's your passion. Another one is just super general type degrees. Degrees that just teach you very general skills. There's literally a degree called general studies. There's another degree called liberal arts studies. These types of degrees, you're gonna learn surface level stuff about a bunch of different things.  And it's called chat GPT now as well. Where you can learn surface level stuff completely free about a bunch of different stuff. The fact that people pay for this is mind blowing to me. If you wanna learn surface level stuff about a bunch of different stuff, use Google, right? Use YouTube. You do not go to college for that. And then of course, the worst one, it's become a meme on the internet. Everybody makes fun of it is gender studies.   Do I even need to say anything about that? I think that one's pretty self-explanatory. All right, to avoid some more controversy, what are the five best degrees? I already know one of them off the top of your head, but I won't say it. What would you say are the top, you don't have to go with five best degrees to get? Remember the one that's very common, it's kind of like a meme on your channel. Yeah, yeah, computer science, that's like the meme on my channel, great degree. Even though technically, you can get into software development with other methods. But when you look at the numbers, just purely the data, computer science is the number one degree. Engineering degrees are great, especially like the better engineering degrees, computer engineering, mechanical engineering even, it is a little bit of a jack of all trades type degree, but you're specialized enough as an engineer that it's extremely valuable. I would say if someone applied to a job with me and they had an engineering degree, that's like the one degree where I would be like, okay, I'm kind of impressed by that. Whereas just about any other type of degree, I wouldn't care much or just make like, it'd just be like a cherry on top, kind of like my employee that applied with an IT degree. So yeah, engineering degrees can be good, computer science of course, health degrees. Health degrees are super underrated. Again, with health, there's no other way to get into it other than some sort of like certification type program with some of the lower level health degrees or lower level health careers, I mean, or just getting a degree. Like there's no other way to get into it. So there's a natural barrier to entry. So health degrees can be really good. Now, the one that's a little bit controversial is technology related degrees other than computer science. So these can't like, when you just look at the stats, they're good, right? Technology related degrees absolutely are good, but there are other ways to get into the technology careers other than the degree. So that is one of those things where you have to take it on a case-by-case basis. And then business degrees are somewhat underrated. And one of my favorite business degrees is management information systems. It kind of combines your business knowledge with some basic technology skills as well. Business degrees, people make fun of them, but actually when you look at the stats, they're relatively good. Now again, you could argue it's correlation causation. Nobody really knows for sure, but I think some of the business degrees are relatively good. Especially the ones where you actually have to get the degree to get into certain careers, such as accounting or finance, and then management information systems is just a very good skill set to have. So those are five really good ones. Awesome. Well, I think that just about wraps up our conversation. We've talked about everything from college degrees, careers, politics a little bit. I mean, YouTube creator economy, I think creator economy is the biggest takeaway from this conversation. Alongside sort of how you think about going about degrees, but they kind of tied in. It was like a nice synergy symbiosis. I mean, this podcast was great. I had a great time, very interesting. I feel like I learned a lot and I've been watching your channel for quite a while. I've been, I mean, we're pretty good friends for quite a while too. So I mean, I think the viewers got a good amount of value from this. And yeah, I just want to say once again, we're testing out this concept. Please leave some constructive criticism, constructive feedback. Criticism is welcomed as well. But if you made it this far, we really appreciate you. Thank you so much for listening. We hope you came away with something. And yeah, anything you want to say, Shane? Yeah, hey, pleasure doing the podcast. It felt just like a typical conversation we have almost. So that's awesome. And yeah, pleasure doing the podcast with you and someone hire David for podcasting. So Jordan Peterson, hire David. Shane actually offered me a job as well. So I mean, there's some competition. Yeah. Just putting that out there. Yeah, but the job has some very specific stipulations. So yeah, but yeah. So I wouldn't be surprised if you decided to go in a different direction, but that's fine. Yeah, I mean, hey man, we're like pretty good friends. I'm always willing to help. But yeah, I mean, if anyone wants to reach out to me for any help or like if you're a student, you could add me on LinkedIn. That's the platform I've been like most active on. Recently, I just hit a thousand followers, which is pretty cool using Shane's advice. It's just my name, David Lactor, L-A-K-H-T-E-R. Reach out to me if you need some help or tips, always willing to help. And Shane, any, check out the YouTube channel. Check out the links below. Go where the opportunity is. Learn valuable skills. Go where the opportunity is. Have a good one. Peace. All right, take care. Mic drop.