The Future Of Learning And Work With Jaime Casap

 

In this episode, we talk with Jaime Casap, former Chief Education Evangelist at Google. We discuss the evolving nature of learning and work, and why all students need to develop entrepreneurial attitudes and skills.

Jaime challenges us to rethink how we prepare students for today’s world, shifting the question from “What do you want to be when you grow up?” to “What problem do you want to solve, and what do you need to learn to solve it?”

Join us for this insightful conversation, and enjoy the episode!

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Listen to the podcast here

 

The Future Of Learning And Work With Jaime Casap

In this episode, I’m speaking with Jaime Casap who’s the former Chief Education Evangelist at Google. I asked Jaime to join us not necessarily for his entrepreneurial experience but to get his take on the changing nature of learning at work and why all students need to develop entrepreneurial attitudes and skills. 

In this wide-ranging conversation, we covered a lot of ground, most notably, how the underlying assumptions of the past may now be hindering our ability to prepare students to adapt and thrive in today’s rapidly changing world. As Jaime put it, we need to stop asking students what they want to be when they grow up and instead ask them what problems they want to solve and what they need to learn to solve those problems. Without any further ado, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Jaime Casap.

Before we get started, I want to take a moment to tell you about my new book, The Entrepreneurial Mindset Advantage: The Hidden Logic That Unleashes Human Potential. In this book, I combine the insights gleaned from everyday entrepreneurs with motivation research to create a practical how-to guide that shows us how to be more innovative and entrepreneurial in our own lives and how to unlock the untapped entrepreneurial potential in others.

While this book will certainly help those who want to start and grow new businesses, ultimately, the entrepreneurial mindset advantage exposes the underlying logic that has become essential for individuals, organizations, and communities to adapt and thrive in today’s rapidly changing world. The book is now available for preorder wherever books are sold. Thanks for reading, and now back to the show.

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Jaime, thanks for taking the time to join me in this episode.

Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it. It’s been great getting to know you. It’s been great getting to see what you are like on these one-on-ones, but also being able to see who you are through the book that you wrote. Excited to be here.

I greatly appreciate your willingness to endorse the book. That’s a huge boost for me and I greatly appreciate it. Jaime and I got connected with you in my pursuit of understanding of entrepreneurial mindset through a quote, which is what you’re probably most famous for, which is, “Essentially stop asking kids what they want to be and start asking them what problems they want to solve.”

I might have butchered it a little bit, but people keep coming back to me saying, “Where’d you get that quote? That’s such a powerful quote.” I want to open with that, Jaime, but I want to come back to somebody who might not look at you and say that you are a traditional entrepreneur, but your career looks very entrepreneurial to me.

Entrepreneurial Career

It’s funny that you mentioned that because I’m going to plug a group that I work with. Indigo Project, and they do assessments, like career assessments. During COVID, they had built a pathway assessment. People are losing their jobs, things are shutting down, and people are reflecting on what they want to be when they grow up. They built this pathway assessment and it was free.

It’s a nonprofit, and you go through it. I went through it during its testing phase. What popped out for me for, “What should I do in my career?” that kind of assessment, was 1) Was entrepreneur, 2) Was helping entrepreneurs, 3) Was social entrepreneurs and 4) Was helping social entrepreneurs. Those were my top four things.

Did that surprise you?

No, because to your point, I think we make an unrealistic distinction of what an entrepreneur is. I think we think that an entrepreneur is someone who starts a business. When I grew up, that’s what I thought an entrepreneur was, someone who started something from nothing, from scratch, but what you learn in your career is that if you’re good at what you do, then that should happen inside any company.

The idea of starting something. The idea of taking ownership and running with something can happen inside an organization. Most leaders should be fostering this idea of entrepreneurship with everyone that they work with. We’ll get to where that comes from because I think that comes from internal motivation, but I think that idea of an entrepreneur, when I look back at my career, when I worked for Governor Cuomo back in the late ‘90s, the first Governor Cuomo, and we were doing we’re working on welfare reform. It was a team of twelve of us who came together.

I was brought in after graduate school. I got selected for this team of twelve people from different departments, Department of Education, Department of Labor, Department of Social Services, and the Governor’s Office. For two years, we worked together on a new path of welfare. It was like a full circle moment for me because I grew up in Hell’s Kitchen, New York. I grew up on welfare and food stamps. Here I was with a graduate degree in Public Policy, now taking on this idea of welfare. It was a startup. It was, “How do we start welfare reform, again, mid-‘90s, in a different way than just cutting people off roles?”

I’ll give you just one quick example that I remember from that, which was finding low-hanging fruit that we all do as entrepreneurs. Where’s your audience? What are the things that you can take on? What are the things that bring you high value but low internal cost? It doesn’t take you a lot to do something, but you get a lot of value from that.

That’s an entrepreneurial thing that you should be focused on. What our team did, for example, if you were on social services, you were on welfare in a remote area. I grew up in New York. Cars weren’t an issue, but if you’re living somewhere in upstate New York and you’re on social services, you finally get a job and you’re doing well.

You got the training, you’re doing the work, and then your car breaks down but you don’t have any money to fix it. Now, instead, you would go to the Department of Social Services and you’d say, “I need money to fix my car so I can keep going to work.” In the old days, before we implemented this idea, it would take you 60 days to just get an appointment.

What we started doing was just write checks right there. Just write them a check. Go get your receipt from the mechanic. We will pay the mechanic the $430 to get your car fixed so you can go to work tomorrow. We did things like that, the low-hanging fruit that would keep people off of the welfare system and into the world of work. That’s just one example of what we did as a team in public service. Inside the idea, you can’t be entrepreneurial inside the public arena or in government jobs.

Would you say that was your first entrepreneurial adventure?

I would say that. I didn’t know that’s what it was, but the way I looked at it, how do we fix things? How do we solve problems? What are the big problems with the idea of social services, welfare, and food stamps? Here are some of the ideas. Here are some of the things that we can take on. We listed out all the things that we could take on.

Now, the bad part and this is true. By the way, I used to teach a class. I’m technically still a faculty member at Arizona State University and used to teach a class. I did it for fifteen years. It was one of those things that I loved to do. I loved to teach. It got to the point where the class was just called 567 Casap. Whatever I wanted to teach, I would teach this class.

One of the themes that I used to teach because I had a lot of people who worked in a public service, in a public arena working for government with this idea that you can’t do the things that are entrepreneurial inside government work. I had a whole section of my class on this idea that there is no difference between the public sector and the private sector in a lot of the things that we think about. For example, in this particular case, we did this for two years and then Governor Cuomo didn’t get reelected. It was a big surprise. Our team was dismantled. I was a political appointee because I was brought into this program.

Other people got back to the department and the thing died. You say, “Would that happen in government all the time?” That happens in the private sector all the time. This is one example of that. Back to the entrepreneurial thing, I, at the time, I don’t know, 25 years old or 26 years old. I just got my Master’s degree. I have a wife, a 9-month-old, and a 1982 Celica where the passenger doesn’t open because it’s all dented.

You’re not too far away from the people?

It was my first job. By the way, I don’t think I’ve ever told this story in public. This is the first time I’m telling this story.  The governor didn’t get reelected and they said, “We’re going to hide you.” That’s what the government does. We’re going to take you, put you on a project somewhere, and then we’re going to reassemble the team at some point. They offered me a role with Disability Determination. It was at the same salary at the time.

I think it was like $40,000. Again, this is 1995. That’s like $800,000 now. I don’t know what the inflation rate is, but whatever that is, that’s how it was enough money to survive. I said, “No, thank you.” I don’t want to answer phones. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I did not want to answer phones and I didn’t want to be the person who was going to be in the way of someone getting or not getting benefits.

That just seemed like a horrible role for me, personally. I got in my car with $60, dropped my wife and 9-month-old at her parents’ house in Buffalo, and drove across the country back to Arizona, where I got my master’s degree. There’s no internet although I searched for jobs online because there was an internet in 1995.

I just went back to Arizona and my reality distortion field told me this is where to be and ended up getting a job at Accenture. I spent seven years at Accenture. That’s entrepreneurial to me. That’s this idea, you just pack up your stuff and you take a chance. Now, could I have taken a chance and started a business? Sure, but to me, there is no separation between whether you work for a company or whether you work on your own.

I think I said this in my book, but the term entrepreneur arose at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution when, for the first time in human history, we needed a word that would distinguish the guy who organized and operated the business from the guy who worked in it. That’s why the word came about. What I’m arguing in the book is that distinction is vaporizing in front of our eyes. We continue to think of this entrepreneurship in a binary term. You’re either going to start a business or you’re going to do what someone else tells you to do. 

Correct, and to the overall point of your book, it’s a mindset. It’s this idea of being able to take risks. You have to be persistent. That’s an example even at Google when we launched Google Ads for Education. That was a new business inside Google. Even within that, when I saw the Chromebook and said, “This could be huge in education.”

Entrepreneurship is a mindset. It's this idea of being able to take risks and be persistent. Share on X

The Chrome team is led by Sundar, by the way, who’s the head of Alphabet. He was, at the time, VP of Chrome. He said, “No, we’re not. This is for business and consumers.” Education wasn’t a big play for Google at the time. We had six people, but being persistent, I said, “Just give me a shot.” If I sat down with you and told your story in detail, you’d be able to say, “You went and looked for funding.”

What I did was I went and said persistently, “I think this is good. Give me six months. Let me try this.” They said, “Okay.” Soon, they were sick of hearing from me, “Here’s a $1,000,000 or whatever the budget was for the next six months to go start.” A marketing manager and I took that funding and we said, “How do we stretch this as much as we can and use it?”

This is what entrepreneurs do. We did all our sessions in Google offices across the country so that we didn’t have to worry about renting space. We turned it into training so that in the afternoon, the participants were getting credit for training that they were doing as opposed to just coming in here and pitching about Chromebooks.

Again, this is a multibillion-dollar company, and Dana was her name. At the end of these sessions, Dana and I are packing up the boxes, putting all the gear back into the boxes, driving to FedEx, and shipping it to the next. That’s where most of the money went, believe it or not. The shipping cost of putting a show together and taking it from city to city. If that’s not a startup, I don’t know what is. I look at it like I just had a rich uncle who helped me with it.

Entrepreneurial Mindset

Jaime, let me back you up a little bit. You got a government job. You’re right out of college. You’re making decent money in a government job. You came from a rough start. I read some things. Raised by a single mom in Hell’s Kitchen. There are drugs. There’s all kinds of crime happening around you. A lot of people who came from similar circumstances would say, “Yes. I’ll take that government job, and I’ll stay there. I’ll take that security.” Where did you get, let’s call it, the self-efficacy? What was it? Can you even speak to that? Why did you think, “No, this is not enough. There’s more.”

That’s a great question, and I’ve heard that question before, and it’s just as hard to answer now as it was twenty years ago when someone asked me that question. I’ve spent a lot of time exploring that, especially in the last couple of years, internally exploring what that is. I think it’s back to this idea of the question, “What problem do you want to solve?” is the same thing that motivates all human beings. It’s purpose, autonomy, and mastery. For me, my purpose is to look at my community, and no one has gone to college. Everyone was either on drugs or in jail. This is New York in the 70s and 80s.

I just got a movie that you could only get on DVD. It is about the Yankees in the ‘70s and what that was like. I remember, in 1977, we had the blackout, Son of Sam, and the murders on a subway. All these things that were going on. It was this internal drive. This is not the life that I want. Part of it was fear. Rikers Island is not a place you want to be. That’s a good deterrent. Jail, in general, can be a deterrent, but when you grow up in a community where people go to Rikers Island for jail.

You hear stories about what happens at Rikers Island. You’ll think, “Whatever I have to do to stay out of Rikers Island, that’s what I will do.” You’re born with inspiration. You’re born with this idea of being able to say, “There’s more to life than just this.” What is that? I think Steve Jobs. This idea of his reality distortion field. I think I had a little bit of a reality distortion field, and I’ve thought, “No. I can do better than this. I can do more than this.”

Learning And Work: You’re born with inspiration. You’re born with this idea of being able to say there’s more to life than just this.

 

You are delusional.

Yes. It’s delusional. A characteristic or a trait of being an entrepreneur is being a little bit delusional or being a little hopeful.

I’d just like to point out, Jaime, that many entrepreneurs hail from adverse backgrounds.

I noticed that.

I just don’t want that point to get lost in this conversation. It’s a situational variable that has a huge impact on the individual.

Part of it is I’m born stubborn. The idea of, your lot in life is to be a criminal, to be a drug addict, or be a drug dealer and to live that life. I’m like, “You don’t get to tell me what my life is.” A lot of it is stubbornness that comes from that as well. Intelligence has something to do with it, too. It’s funny. Some of the best entrepreneurs I’ve met were like drug kingpins in New York City.

They just wanted money now and not invested over time. They were great at what they did. You need to do these things to be an entrepreneur, and I can lay them on top of some of the best drug dealers. Not the guys on the street corner. The guy that hires the guys on the street corners. Those guys were some of the best entrepreneurs you can imagine.

That’s a natural way of survival as well. That’s part of it as well, but finally, the last component to this. Again, I’ve never sat down and put it all together. Someday, I will then write a book about this, but I remember being 16 years old and thinking there’s no way I was going to be 21 because everyone was dying around me.

Most high school basketball teams deal with injuries. My high school basketball team dealt with two murders. We lost two people on my team for murder. Not that they committed, they died. Once I made 21, once I got there, everything else felt free. When you’re growing up poor, when you’re growing up in those conditions, you’re a dead man walking.

As one of my favorite bands, the Red Clay Strays, say in one of their new songs, “I’m a dead man walking.” We’re all dead men walking whether it’s going to happen in a bad neighborhood or not. That’s our commonality. We are all going to die. We’re all the Walking Dead. What you do while you’re walking matters.

That mentality where all of this is a bonus. Once you get shot at a couple of times, everything gets easier. I told a friend once who was complaining. He was nervous that he didn’t have a college degree but was a smart technical person and would be in these rooms. He feels intimidated, “I feel like I can’t speak my mind.” He’s a Marine, too. I said, “Has anyone taken a shot at you?” He said, “No.” I replied, “Then, what’s the problem?”

What could go wrong in the room? You’ve been shot at. Once you get shot at, how is anyone going to ever intimidate you? How is anything ever going to be bad? I think a combination of all those things has put me in a place where it wasn’t enough. Then, at every stage, like any good addict, you want to go to the next level. College degree? Great. I can get a master’s degree. Great. It’s just you keep building it. You wrote a book. It’s an awesome book.

We can talk about it and happy to talk about my reflection on that, but also, I’m also in the process of putting together an outline for a book that I want to write. Just like you, in my head, that book isn’t just a book. It’s not, “I hope the book succeeds.” I want that book to be at the airport. When you walk through Hudson News. My reality distortion field says, “You’re going to have a number one New York Times bestseller, and it will be in the bookstores in Hudson Books.

I got the same vision, the same reality distortion field. I forget who it was. I’ll think about it in a minute, but somebody said, “The reasonable man conforms himself to the world and the unreasonable man expects the world to conform to him.” Therefore, all progress relies on unreasonable men. To your point, you have to be a little crazy, but there’s another. You call it a reality distortion field, which I know you borrowed from Steve Jobs.

I’ve looked at literature, Jaime, that convinced me that one of the most important things that distinguishes an entrepreneurial-minded person from a nonentrepreneurial-minded person is that we tend to use our imagination rather than just drawing from memory. Most people use their memory. They draw from the past to navigate the future.

I interviewed back in the day, the guy who started 1-800-Got-Junk?, Brian Scudamore. $1,000, an 18-year-old kid, trying to figure out how to pay for college. That was it. He said that the business wasn’t going anywhere until he sat down one day and just thought about, “If I had no limits or if I saw no limits, what could this be?” He started writing down, “We’re going to become the FedEx of junk removal.”

What the literature shows is that when you have that compelling vision, cognitively, you’re able to access problem-solving abilities that aren’t otherwise available to us. It’s like a superpower that you tap into that you don’t even know you’re tapping into. You can call it a reality distortion field, but it’s something profound and quantifiable.

I would also argue that you would think that it’s not just the reality distortion field part of it, but it’s also this idea that stops people from doing these things. What stops people from taking that chance, taking that risk, or doing those things? I would argue, especially with all my work in the last couple of years, that it’s just 100% fear. Whether they realize it or not. That fear doesn’t go away if you just get a job at a company. That fear’s still there. What ends up happening is that fear stops you from speaking up in a meeting.

That fear stops you from presenting a great idea. Even if you’re not an entrepreneur, you’re working at a company, you’ve been there for fifteen years, and you do okay. There’s this idea that you have that you want to put out there and the fear that you have drives you to not do that. That might be what separates people in terms of that mindset is the idea of not having that fear. Again, part of it is when you get shot at. What else are you going to fear?

I call those micro fears. People will say it’s the fear of failure because that’s socially acceptable. Of course, I don’t want to lose my house and push a shopping cart around, but it’s more of the micro, the subtle fears that we’re not in touch with. The fear of ridicule, the fear of judgment by your peer group, and those kinds of things.

Here’s the thing. I don’t know if we’ve talked about this in the past, but I was listening to the woman who was CEO of Pepsi for X number of years and she had she does talks. I can’t remember her name. She did a master class with that master class stuff that someone once got me a subscription to and I love it.

In that, she talks about how she would go into board meetings before she was CEO, and she would present an idea, a concept or whatever, and everyone would shoot her down. What she would say, her internal mental model was, “I am not presenting this to you in the way that makes sense to you. I’ll be back.” She made it about her, not about the people who are listening.

She took responsibility for how she was communicating it. 

Correct and she said, “I’ll be back.” She was persistent. She would go back and figure out a different way to bring up the idea. She said, “Listen. This is going to be a good idea. I presented it poorly or didn’t present it in a way that made sense to you. Let me try it this way.” She was sure about the idea because she had done her research.

She knew what she was doing. It wasn’t just like a gut-feeling idea. It was like a real idea. Then the CEO would say, “Now I understand that. Yes, let’s do that.” I’ve never had that fear of judgment or what other people think. By the way, it is the most beautiful thing to have as a parent because you not being able to ever be embarrassed or feel like a fool. Your kids say, “Please don’t bring me anywhere in public.”

If I said, “You all show up to school, wearing a Lions outfit and with a hula hoop, my kids will say, “Yes, you will do that.” I don’t care what other people think. I never have. That goes a long way and not having that fear. I remember internally at Google, I pitched an idea. This is before Chromebooks. This had nothing to do with education.

I pitched this idea to put this document together about how I think that Google’s response to Apple stores should be, “Let’s build out libraries.” “Let’s build out a Google store inside public libraries where we can put equipment in and be part of the community.” Revive libraries and communities. Let Apple buy all the anti-property on 5th Avenue, all the Michigan Ave, and all the expensive real estate.

Let’s go the other way. Let’s go and build stores in communities where our libraries are. Let’s put our video equipment in there. Let’s put our tablets in or whatever equipment we have that we want to show off or interact with the public. Let’s put those things in libraries and fund some money to bring more community members into that. They said, “No.”

I think that it was a brilliant idea, but I stopped it because everyone said no. I should have gone back and said, “I didn’t present this to you the right way. Let me go back and get different numbers, different figures, different ways of showing you this because this is a good idea.” To your point, the fear is there, but if you go in armed, if you go in prepared, if you go in knowing your stuff, that should alleviate a lot of the fear you bring into a meeting like that.

Entrepreneurial Skills

I also think that a lot of the research I did for my book, Jaime, was around the concept of social psychology and the way the situation matters a lot. We’re hardwired to coalesce with a group. That’s that’s hardcore in our DNA to to confirm. You have to train yourself to deviate in some small ways. You’re swimming upstream there.

What’s funny is I have this crazy theory. This is for parents, teachers, and work. We have the virtue that lying is bad. We have this virtue that says if you’re a liar, you’re bad. We punish liars and we tell our kids to tell the truth. They’ll always tell the truth. That’s great, but I think we have it backwards. I think nature is a lie. That’s not a stick. That’s a bug. That’s not an owl. That’s a butterfly.

You’re not the grass. You’re a leopard. Lying is built into the system. If you go to a 6-month-old or 9-month-old that you witness taking out a glass of milk and pouring it into a fish tank and you look at that kid and ask, “Did you put milk into the fish tank?” That kid’s going to say, “No. It wasn’t me.” Lying is natural. It’s a protection. Telling the truth is a virtue. Being able to tell the truth and being able to be honest is what we should reward as opposed to punishing liars.

Telling the truth is what we should say is enlightenment. It is virtuous. Lying is natural. Most people lie all the time. I just saw something that said, “When you meet somebody new, you tell 2 lies in the first 10 minutes.” I’m going to be more aware of that to see if I do that because I’m not going to do that. Lying becomes a natural state, and telling the truth becomes a virtue. Being able to walk into a room to tell the truth.

Being a liar is the default mode.

Yes, it’s the default mode. We’re born that way. What we have to do is work hard to be honest and the first place we should start is being honest with ourselves. We tell ourselves lies all the time. The fear of, “What are my parents going to think?” That fear of, “What are my kids going to think?” The fear of, “What are my coworkers going to think?” They’re going to think my idea is stupid.

The idea of you saying, at 55 years old or, at the time, 50, I’m going to leave Google, and I’m going to do my own thing now. You’ll ask, “What is wrong with you? You’re too old to do this. Why would you start now?” All that fear is what you have to recognize as the stuff that gets in your way because you can do it if you don’t have that fear. I am a huge proponent of the capacity and capability of human beings.

You’re getting an argument from me, and this is where one of the things you and I have connected on. I’ve been around the world over the last fifteen years, interviewing hundreds of underdog entrepreneurs. People overcame unimaginable adversity. I emerged from that with a completely different understanding of the untapped potential in human beings, people, and places we’re overlooking. One of the things you and I have connected on, you have a passion for helping Black, Brown, and poor people to get ahead. I see the entrepreneurial mindset as a mechanism that empowers people.

Absolutely. What you do in your book is you lay out and say, “These are the components. These are the parts of an entrepreneur, and you go into the everyday people who do these things.” Here’s the thing. You don’t have to go very far to find us. I don’t know if it still is, but Shark Tank was on the air, and it was very popular when it was on the air. Remember it before COVID?

I bring this up sometimes in a presentation. How many of you have watched Shark Tank and said, “I had that idea.” or, “I could solve that problem.” No one’s ever said no. Everyone has sat on the couch, watched Shark Tank, and said, “I had that idea four years ago.” You have to ask why didn’t you do something about it.

When they get to the truth, the answer’s going to be fear. I often discuss human skills in my talk. We can talk about those human skills. You talk about an entrepreneurial mindset. I think that’s one component of overall human skills. They’re interchangeable in lots of different ways, but I will often say and I hear people say this all the time. I’m sure you do, too, “I’m just not an entrepreneur.”

Perhaps teachers or educators will say, “I’m not good with technology.” “I’m not good with computers.” Someone will say, “You’re very creative.” “I’m not very creative.” This is why I don’t have a lot of friends. I’ll respond with, “No. Just to be clear, you’ve chosen not to be creative. You’ve chosen not to be good with technology and you’ve chosen not to be an entrepreneur.” Those are choices you make because everything you need to be good at those things is out there for you.

Yes, there are some muscles that you’ve allowed to atrophy. 

I think we’re just starting to get to this place. The promise of the Internet wasn’t to be able to scroll to see what your friends were doing on social media, which I think was a disaster. I think the Internet promises that you have all the world’s information in your pocket and you can learn anything. In keynotes that I do when I talk about the subject, I’ll often say, “You would never hear me say I’m a bad cook.

What you hear me say is I’ve chosen not to be a good cook.”Now, I’ve chosen not to spend my time learning how to be a good cook. If I wanted to be a good cook, at least, not maybe a Michelin 5-star restaurant cook, but if I wanted to learn how to cook things, make sauces from scratch, or make pasta, I could learn how to do that.

I can learn. That’s why I think the ability to learn is one of the most important things that you can build as a human skill. It starts with, “I don’t know how to do X, but it doesn’t mean that I can’t learn how to do it.” My kids won’t say, “I don’t know how to do it.” Their response to me, because I’ve brainwashed them, is, “I haven’t learned how to do that yet.”

The ability to learn is one of the most important things that you can build as a human skill. Share on X

Learning And Education

That’s a big difference. Let’s let’s dig into that, Jaime, the desire to learn. Let’s call that self-efficacy because that’s an empowering point that you’re making. You’re not attributing your inability to do it to your fundamental deficit. You’re essentially saying, “I’ve just not chosen to put my time and effort into that.”

Correct, yes, and it’s a standard deviation. I can say, “I can’t dunk a basketball.” I didn’t learn how to dunk a basketball all day. I used to be able to dunk a little bit, depending on the rim, which was just six inches lower than regulation, and the ball, which was just a little bit where I could put it in my hand. I can dunk that basketball in my prime.

I can’t dunk a basketball now. I can’t even play basketball. I shattered my ankle years ago in two places and I stopped playing after that. That’s a physical limitation, and I’ll never be able to do what some of the Olympics are doing. We were watching the Olympics, but my daughter and I were watching the American disc thrower who won the gold medal. She’s spinning in circles and she throws the disc.

My daughter said, “That looks cool.” I throw Frisbees for my dog. She said, “You should learn how to do that.” I’m never going to win an Olympic gold medal, but I could learn how to do it. I can watch videos, learn, and get trained. The point is, again, back to the capacity and capability of humans. There’s nothing that we can’t learn how to do.

There are limitations to physical things. There are limitations to some things, there is a level of intelligence, and all those things may have factors, but overall, the standard deviation, when you’re looking at that 80% chunk of things, there’s nothing on there that we can’t learn. I think we miss that with the Internet.

Here we are banning phones from schools, and I understand why, but can you imagine going to Einstein and saying, “Here’s a device, a phone. It has access to everything that we know right now. What would he do with that? Would you say, “No, I’m sorry, but you can’t use it in your class?” It’s insanity. What we’re banning is the potential for knowledge, intelligence, creativity, and innovation.

It is worse than that, in my view. We’re reinforcing because, to your point, this is the Alvin Toffler idea. At some point, when we’re there, the rate of change has exceeded our ability to adapt. That’s future shock. Toffler’s quote was, “The illiterate of the 21st century won’t be people who can’t read and write. It will be people who can’t learn, unlearn, and relearn on their own.”

I also understand the social media aspects of all that but we’re reinforcing the need for other directed learning. That’s the real underlying detrimental effects of that. That will have unimaginable consequences in my view. Jaime, I go through airports. I interact with people in low-level jobs. Baristas that have Master’s degrees. They have a lot of knowledge, but they don’t know how to make themselves useful with that knowledge without someone to tell them how to do it. 

Have you watched the Arnold Schwarzenegger documentary on Netflix?

I did.

He said that his only mission was to be useful.

He wrote a book called Be Useful. That’s it. The essence of an entrepreneurial mindset is essentially self-directed value creation.

The essence of an entrepreneurial mindset is essentially self-directed value creation. Share on X

I also think of it as a way to solve problems. For me, my ideas come from frustration sometimes. You do things this way and you’ll think, “There’s got to be a better way to do that.” You’ll go search for a better way of doing something. I think we missed that. Instead, what we do is fear again, we ban things or we don’t do things.

Even back in the good old days when I was just trying to get schools to take advantage of YouTube, which is how kids learn how to do much. The fear of YouTube was so big that the schools thought that they were going to lose funding. Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, put out a message saying that no one is going to lose funding if something inappropriate shows up on YouTube, and you must take action to correct it.

The fear was great that we were just going to ban it altogether completely. That fear drives so much, and it drives a lot. I can do a whole hour on the ridiculousness of kids and their phones. The BS that you hear and see in books. We blame our kids’ anxiety and trepidations on their phones and social media. Not on the world. We blame their phones not on what’s happening in the world and not the fact that adults are out beating each other.

There is a lot of blame-shifting. There are a lot of issues of fear that come with things like that, but you asked me about them at the beginning. I remember because I wrote it down. You asked me this idea about education being that silver bullet. The potential of education. I’ve been working on some new talks, and one of those talks is about this idea.

You got to hear me out through the whole thing, but education isn’t broken and it can still be the silver bullet it was for me. It is because I believe that education is a huge part of who I am and how I turn into who I am. A lot of it, especially for Black and Brown kids, is you got to get the credibility. I think what education does is not only open up your mind, help you think, and do all those things, but also give you that credibility.

You’re not going to take a street kid from Hell’s Kitchen and put him at Google just because you think he’s smart. He’s got two Bachelor’s degrees. He’s got a master’s degree. Those are credibility points for people of color. They’re still important, but to your point, they are losing the potential to be a silver bullet. Here’s the argument that I make. The first part of that is that education isn’t broken.

I’ll say that and people are confused because the narrative from everyone is, “Education is broken and it needs to be fixed.” Here’s the problem. Again, looking at real data, you look at data and what you see, test scores, believe it or not. A lot of this was before COVID. The whole idea of learning loss, we can talk about that, but before COVID, graduation rates for Black and Latino students kept growing. Test scores kept going.

If you look at education as a concept, it goes up. More people are educated. More people go to education. More people have a high school degree. More Blacks and Latinos graduate from high school. The problem isn’t that education is broken. The problem is that education is doing exactly what we designed it to do.

We designed it to give people basic knowledge so that they can have conversations. Where, “What happened in World War 2?” You don’t have to say, “Hang on. Let me go get an Encyclopedia Britannica and find out.” We all had basic knowledge, but you worked in factories. You worked in manufacturing. You did that work and then we had 20% to 30% of people with a higher degree to manage those people, manage the books, and manage those things.

That’s the system. That is the industrial revolution. Education in the late 1800s did an amazing job of creating a superpower, which is us. Through manufacturing, building, and all these things. The middle class and all the things that happened. Education isn’t broken. The problem is that the world has fundamentally changed and a model like that is useful.

What we need to do is say, “What are the best ideas that we’ve had in education?” “What do we know what good learning models look like.” We know what we need to do. We know that we need to double down on human skills. Instead of saying, “Let’s fix education.” Let’s just say, “What’s the education model?” Let’s be an entrepreneur. What’s the education model that we need to solve for the future? Let’s build it from there. Let’s not blow everything up. Let’s not destroy. Let’s not say that everyone sucks. Let’s just take this idea and go forward with it.

That’s exactly what I wrote in my book. We don’t need to bulldoze a system. We need to just introduce what I call entrepreneurial discovery learning early and often in the curriculum on the fringes, and that’s what’s missing. I don’t know if you ever read anything Jerome Bruner wrote about the power of discovery learning. What’s absent from education is discovery. It’s all like memorization. It’s all the transfer of explicit knowledge. We still need that, to your point.

Yes, some of it.

We have to include the discovery skills around the perimeter.

Sure and I’ll say this about my about my daughter who’s in a Montessori school, one of the best schools in in Phoenix. I’ve worked with the American Montessori Society. I think it is the best learning model by far. I think it could be used as a foundation or a skeleton for how we do other things, which is this idea. My daughter told me about her first day. One of the things that I like is that whenever she wants, she can get up and go to the library. Whenever she’s stressed out or needs a break and goes to read at the library.

Dude, my kids went to Montessori from age 4 to age 14 or so, through grade 8. I was on the board of our Montessori school here. I think it’s because, at that time, the school only went to grade 8. In grade 9, they had to go to a public school system. I never thought about this Jaime but they were mind-blown that they had to ask permission to go to the bathroom. It seems normal to those of us who grew up in public school. You have to ask permission to do that. 

Again, that’s not bad in education. It was designed to do that because you can’t just have workers get up and leave whenever they want it because you have lines to run. In school, you taught them how to ask for permission. “Can I go to the bathroom?” “Can you?” That response. “May I go to the bathroom or do you want me to just piss in my pants?” It’s just a ridiculous thing, but it’s not education’s fault. That’s my point. It was designed to do that. What we need is designed for the future.

That is what I’m arguing in my book, Jaime. It’s other-directed. It’s top-down. It’s hierarchical. To the broader point that you brought up earlier, I want to double-click on it for a second: Is that mindset to a person, and what culture is it to a group? The way we define culture is that it’s the set of beliefs, values, and assumptions that we assume to be the correct way to perceive, think, and feel.

Once our brains accept that as the correct way, our brains automate those schemas, let’s call them, and they fall off our conscious radar. These industrial era values and assumptions of two centuries past are now deeply embedded in our individual and collective consciousness. We’re not even aware of them and that’s my point.

Education, we’re systematically creating employees without ever realizing that’s what we’re doing. We’re teaching people. We’re operating on the assumption that you are going to work in an established organization. The useful thing has already been figured out by someone else, and you’re going to be expected to fulfill a predetermined role within that organization, which is another directed predetermined role. Those are the underlying assumptions of the last century that are baked into education. They’re implicit. 

If you look at a typical high school, what they’ll tell you is that they’re focused on college and career-ready. What does that mean? What college and career? First, college, what is that? The public approval rating of higher education is the lowest it’s ever been. I put a talk together because I don’t think higher education is necessarily broken. I think they’re not focused on their true value proposition. Their value proposition has been, “Here’s a piece of paper.” “It gives you a certification. It gives you a degree.”

What they have done over the last few years is double down on it, and they said, “We could do micro-credentialing.” We can do micro this and combine certifications, or you could do it in two years instead of four years. We did all that, but the value proposition is still this piece of paper and that’s not their value proposition. They haven’t been talking about their actual value proposition because of that old model that they have in mind.

I try to cover that exact point in my book: the S curve, the values and assumptions, and the mindset that was essential for success during the growth phase, which is the very mindset that will prevent you from adapting in the face of change. That’s the George Land’s idea. Nothing fails like success. It’s human nature to respond inappropriately to change. We start blaming. We want to go back to the way it was. I think one of the most common inappropriate responses to change is what you just said, Jaime, which is to double down on prior beliefs. Let’s just try a little bit harder. Let’s make some little tweaks.

Everyone says career. What’s your career? What’s career ready? Look up that word. What that word means is that you do something. You do one thing for a very long time and you move up in that thing.

It’s linear. The underlying assumptions. I ask educators the very same question, Jaime, “Tell me what you mean when you say career ready.” I’m not trying to be an asshole. I’m just trying to get your underlying level three assumptions up into the daylight so we can talk about them.

Sure and career, again, because education is doing what it was designed to do. A career is when you give them a skill that will help them move up inside an organization. I remember when I was a kid, people told me that I would have nine careers. That was a long time ago. I think I’m up to eighteen. This idea of career is a different word. I think part of it is semantics. I’m a big semantics fan. I think part of it is the words that we use. I don’t like the word career.

Let’s use something else because there needs to be a word for what my work life will be or how I will be fulfilled through my work. I don’t know what that word is yet, but there’s got to be a word for that, but career is not it. Career means I’m going to be an accountant. I’m going to go be a police officer. I’m going to go be a doctor. I’m going to be X for 35 years, and I’m going to move up in an organization. I’m going to get a gold watch at the end of it. That world doesn’t exist anymore.

Doesn’t that connect with your idea of not asking kids what they want to be and start asking them what problems they want to solve? I think that question is impactful because it smacks educators in a way that’s, “Yes, This is not linear.” What is a career? I think of this, Jaime, as the underlying values in a managerial paradigm are based on replication and efficiency. The useful thing is already figured out.

Let’s replicate it and distribute it as efficiently as possible and that’s very important, but these paradigms tend to be intolerant of exploration, experimentation, and adaptation. That’s what’s missing from education. We can go back and talk about this if you want but even in a corporate environment or organizational environment, we say we want people to be innovative and entrepreneurial, but are we looking at the culture we’ve created and the values that are intolerant of that?

Preparing Students For The Future

A couple of things about what you just said. I just want to make sure that I wrote down some notes to do this. I think fundamentally, what we need is a cultural shift in education. Then, you have to ask yourself, “Where is that going to come from?” A lot of it is directive. You mentioned this earlier about requirements and this and that.

During and after COVID, all we talked about was learning loss. Kids and learning loss. What does that mean? What do we mean when we say learning loss? Let’s be real. What we mean is that the kids who are supposed to take the 4th-grade assessment didn’t get shoved all the things that got memorized to take that assessment. The kids in 8th grade didn’t have to take an assessment.

What they’re saying, and let’s just be real, “We haven’t had our students memorize all the facts that they need to memorize, all the figures, all the math, and all the things that they need to memorize so that they can take an assessment to see what they’ve memorized.” Do we know that six months later, they won’t remember any of those things anyway? It doesn’t matter. This is just the way we do things. We’re going to do it that way.

We have to be real because I think a lot of change gets driven through policy. Fundamentally, you can have the best culture in the school system, but if the fundamental policy is that your kids have to take a test, you’re going to start teaching to the test and that’s what teachers end up doing. They teach the test. If you assess teachers by how your classes do on those tests, you’re either going to get teachers who make kids memorize things because they get assessed by that or you’re going to cheat, which happened time and time again in school systems all over the country.

For what purpose? Who wins from that? What’s the reward? Another one of my talks is this idea around organizational culture because Google, to me, turned into a regular company after X number of years, and sometimes that’s you can’t avoid it. In this case, I think you could have, but there are things inside of a culture that, if you do right, you can have a long-lasting, very positive culture, and Google started messing some of those things up.

The point is that in the end, the policies are going to drive the culture because culture is what drives everything. Learning loss is one of those concepts or ideas. What does that mean? Even in Montessori, we just talked up Montessori. I’ll say to Montessori teachers and educators, “Here’s the thing. I don’t care what subjects my daughter learns.”

Learning And Work: In the end, the policies are going to drive the culture because culture is what drives everything.

 

It’d be great if she drove some of those subjects. She’s interested in the ancient art of pipe flying in China. She wants to learn about that. She should learn about that, but if you want to teach her what happened in America from 1960 to 1985, that’s fine. That’s a subject. Go teach her that. What I want is I want her to build what I call human skills.

You want to teach her American history in the 1960s. Great. Give my questions about education back to you. Is she learning how to solve problems? Is she learning how to learn? Is she learning how to collaborate? Has she built more self-awareness? Does she know why things happen and how history repeats itself? That’s what I want.

I don’t care about the fact that she’s going to take a test and memorize facts and figures for a test. What I like about Montessori is that she’s got to go make a project out of it and she’s got to go build a presentation out of it. She loves doing that stuff. That’s the concept that we need in education in general. This idea around not much subject, which is still important, but more around what we do in those subjects.

Keep the subjects all the same. I think you talk about this in your book. This idea of iteration versus blowing things up. Keep the subjects the same. Just start asking different questions for an assessment because, to your point, the future’s not going to care whether or not you memorize something. The future is going to care whether or not you know why it happened and how to stop it from repeating itself.

That’s that’s the value that education can bring. I think that the value of education as a silver bullet is there. My daughter just entered 4th grade. She’s still figuring out life, but when she gets to 8th grade. From 8th grade through college, you never get that time back. You have all the time in the world to learn whatever you want in so many different ways and so much. We’ve messed that up.

Can you imagine being our age, having four years to go to college and do whatever you want? That’s insanity. We give them this opportunity, and then we screw it up by saying, “You have to take these subjects. You got to learn this.” Even in higher education, the idea that it takes 120 credits to be an expert in physics and 120 credits to be an expert in American literature? What? How are we getting away with that? That’s not possible.

There are two different subjects. How can it be possible for both of them to take 120 credits? The models don’t work, given the future. I think semantics matter. I don’t say 21st century skills. We all say, “We’re teaching our kids 21st-century skills. We’re 25 years into the 21st century. It’s like being at a basketball game and the end of the first quarter, the coach says, “We need a plan now.” We’re already here. We’re we’re in the middle of a game. It’s too late.

The 21st century sounds like you need those skills down there. Not now, but down there. As opposed to saying human skills now. That’s why I want my kids to learn human skills now, and I want them to pursue them. Back to your idea of the question. It came from the frustration of always hearing, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

It came from understanding what’s happening. I was working at Google. I saw the future. I saw quantum computing. I saw net-based computing. I saw these things coming down the road. You can see it in the world of work. I came up with this fifteen years ago. It wasn’t like work was changing, but you could see that it was happening.

Also, it came from a place of internal identification, which is most people need that drive. They need a drive. I was reading Daniel Pink’s book called Drive when this idea came up. He had written about motivation and what motivates people. He had said this, and I followed up on research, but I did not know its purpose, autonomy, and mastery.

You can test this for yourself with anything. When I look at those things, I say, “Purpose.” Instead of saying what’s the purpose you want to solve, what’s the problem that you want to solve is the purpose? Then there are two other questions. I have another keynote that I will give on this whole thing around human skills, particularly around this idea of motivation.

The second question is just as important as the first question. What problem do you want to solve? Your kid comes to you and says, “Climate change. I want to solve climate change.” You’re going to say, “You’re a reasonable, respectful, and intelligent human.” You’re going to say, “Climate change. You need to go study STEM. You need to go study global sustainable development. “You need to go get a degree in environmental science.” “You need to go be a researcher.”

The second question we ignore is how do you want to solve it? How do you want to solve that problem? How do you want to take your gifts, talents, experiences, passions, and the things you care about and solve that problem? What if that kid is a gifted photographer? What if that kid is a gifted storyteller like my son is? What if that kid is a gifted videographer like my first daughter is?

They solve climate change by going out and documenting climate change. What if that kid is a gifted educator? They were born to be an educator. They can solve climate change by creating an educational program around climate change. Experiential program for students. They could go live in Iceland, bring students out, and show them what’s happening with rock formations and icebergs. There are a billion ways to solve a problem. How do you want to solve it?

There are a billion ways to solve a problem. How do you want to solve it? Share on X

What you’re also saying, Jaime, is what gifts you have and how you can use them to solve the problem.

I think this is a big area here where I want to focus. I want to get deeper into this. We don’t do a good job for those kids who are between the ages of, 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20. That age and helping them figure out what they’re good at. Not what they want to do or what they want to be in their career, but what they are good at. Why do people come to them?

My kid, my son, who just moved to New York, is an unbelievable storyteller. He’s funnier than I am. He tells the best stories. He knows how to set them. He’s a gifted storyteller. He doesn’t know that. These are my first two kids. One of them right now is 32, and the other one is 21 or 22. Something like that, I don’t even know their age, but when my 32-year-old said, “Alright. I figured out what my major’s going to be.”

She’s at college. She’s at ASU. She said, “I think I’m going to major in business.” I said, “Okay. Tell me more.” She said, “I looked at jobs and the things that look the closest to what I want to do in marketing and the creation of videos and these things tend to be in the marketing space. I’m going to get a degree in business, and I’m going to major in marketing.”

I said, “Not paying for that. No. Here’s the deal. Think about this as a parent. If you want to be a film major, I will pay for that. Why? It is because this kid had been making movies on any device that she could find since she was 5 years old. I know that. I can see it. What is she doing now? She runs her production studio.

She worked for Courageous Studios, which does the CNN co-branding for seven years, and now she’s out making a movie. She made edited movies. She’s done campaigns with Hulu. She’s brilliant. I remember being at her capstone project, her last film as a senior that she won, and the chair of the department was sitting next to me.

He said, “Do you know what your daughter has? She can put emotion into any film. It doesn’t matter if you make it about a dog food commercial or a documentary or if you’re talking about a machine that makes t-shirt prints. Your kid can make people cry about T-shirt printing machines.” That’s what she does. That’s what she was born to do and that’s what she was doing.

Now, my son, who just moved to New York when he started college, said, “I think I’m going to be a political science major.” I said, “Political? You don’t know who the governor is.” This is a kid who has had access. I’m in Arizona. It’s a one-degree-of-separation place. The governor of Arizona has been to my house for dinner. The mayor of Phoenix is a friend of mine.

Ruben, who’s running for senate, I’ve known him since he was an aide to a council member in the city. I could call Ruben today and say, “William wants to be in politics and do policy work. Can you put him on a team? The next day, he’d be on the team. He’s never shown any interest in any of that. While those people are here, he was in his room gaming or doing his own thing.

Kids don’t know who they are. They don’t know what they’re good at. They don’t know where their gifts are. We can either do a much better job during that time, doing more assessments around helping them figure out what it is that they’re good at. What is it that they like to wake up with? What is their passion? How do you take that passion and put it against the problem that you want to solve? The third question is, what do you need to learn to solve that problem? What are the knowledge, skills, and abilities?

I love that part of it because it’s shifting the onus.

Correct. What do you need to learn? What additional talents do you need to build? What additional skills do you need to create? Who’s solving that problem now? How do you start bugging them and contacting them so that you can start working with them today? Those three questions wrap up closely with what Daniel Pick talked about in the book Drive around motivation, purpose, autonomy, and mastery. What problem do you want to solve, how do you want to solve it, and what do you need to learn to solve it?

That’s why I love that statement I made. What Dan Pink was talking about in Drive is Self Determination Theory, developed by two guys, Deci and Ryan, who brought us out of the dark ages of behaviorism. “Do this, and you’ll get that extrinsic reward.” way of thinking. To your point, let me just back up one step.

What the data show is that two-thirds of kids leave high school not engaged in learning. The 66% to 67% of kids who walk out of high school are not engaged. You look at the data, the Gallup posts this. There’s a little bump between 11th and 12th grade. It’s the engagement that goes up a little bit and you might look at that and think that they’re starting to get engaged because they see that the end is near.

No. It’s because all the kids drop out. That’s what bumps that. That’s what gives it that little spike at the end, but, nevertheless, what’s also interesting, Jaime, is that 2/3 of workers in North America are not engaged in their work. Guess what? We are the most engaged worldwide. The number globally is 87%. 1 in 5 are hostile.

They’re actively disengaged, as Gallup describes it, and they are hostile to the work environment. Now, when you look at entrepreneurial-minded people, they’re optimally engaged. Thank god it’s Monday. They’re in it to win it, but you speak to this so well, Jaime. The way I think about it is like this. The entrepreneur is an average person of average intelligence and average means. Let’s just say that.

They unwittingly stumble into that trifecta that you just described. They find a way to use their gifts, their autonomous pursuit of the creation of value. They stumble into this situational context that optimizes the person. Do you know what I’ve been saying lately, Jaime? The subtitle of my new book is The Hidden Logic That Unleashes Human Potential.

You’ll stand in a bookstore and look at that and you’ll think that’s hyperbole, but when you read the book, it’s not. How can we infuse those ideas into education? How can we get people to realize that when we encourage people to pursue their gifts in ways that create value for others, they’ll become optimally engaged? The flip side of this conversation, Jaime, is that we’re missing the vast majority of human potential. It’s just being squandered. The cost of that is incalculable.

Also, let’s be real here. That engagement score is on track to be less than it is now.

It is to get worse.

Yes, people are going to be less engaged. Why? It is because there are lots of theories out there. I did one of my first photo shoots up in Monument Valley. Someone said it’s funny. I’ve been busy trying to get this idea up and running for the company that I launched and the work that I want to do. Writing all this content down and sitting down. I mapped out all the human skills that I wanted to focus on. I want to create this matrix when you say someone has to have thinking skills. What does that look like? Here are twenty things that look like thinking skills. If you say somebody has to have the ability to learn, what are the twenty things that look like that? Another human skill to me is getting things done.

What are the twenty things that look like that so that we could start looking at that list and saying, “Yes, this employee or this college student is doing these things, and I would rate them on the score? It’s almost like creating a performance matrix. I would say that they’re doing diversion thinking, and they’re doing that on a scale of 1 to 5. They’re doing that at a three. Let’s get them more focused on that. You can assess that way.

I’ve been building that out, working on that, and to your point, I love getting up on Mondays and looking at a blank sheet of paper and going. I haven’t been photographing this summer. My partner said, “We need to get you out. You haven’t been photographing.” Almost like it’s a bad thing, but it’s not. It’s just that my focus is this now. To your point, this is what I want to focus on. I didn’t want to go do this. I’ll go do that.

I meditate every morning in the swimming pool, swimming laps, and I was thinking about this very point this morning. Jaime, it’s like the maker’s schedule versus the manager’s schedule. You might have heard that language. I think that I got that from Naval Ravikant, but that’s what your partner is encouraging. You’re in a maker’s schedule now. You need that creative release as part of the ideation process. Managers don’t like that.

Organizational Culture

I think that that’s part of what is missing. How do organizations hire people? More importantly, how do you create a culture where that can exist? There are fundamental things that you can do for that to exist. Here’s the advantage that I have that I think I can help organizations with. Whether it’s higher ed, K-12, startups, or even established businesses, is that I got the chance to watch Google for fifteen years in what arguably would be its prime or its best years.

When it was the number one place to work for nine out of those fifteen years and six or seven straight years, and then in the top five for the rest of those years, I got to watch Google thrive because of its culture. I took a pay cut to work at Google in 2005 because of the culture. When I got there, I started in engineering. I worked for the CIO. I was doing PM work for him.

Then, I ran into Adrian Sannier, who was the CIO at ASU. I asked, “What’s the biggest problem you’re trying to solve?” At the time, it was email. He had a client-based email system with 258 megabytes of hard drive space. None of their students were using email and said that he had professors out. Laureate Nobel Prize-winning professors with spreadsheets and a piece of paper saying, “I’m sorry. What is your email? Can you repeat that? HotMama69@hotmail.com? It wasn’t working.

I said, “We got this tool called Google for your domain. Maybe we can solve the problem that way.” That was an entrepreneurial way of solving an email problem and then the rest is history. That concept of being able to look at a situation and say, “How do we solve that problem?” I remember walking up the mall at ASU. Two weeks later, we launched Google Ads for Education.

ASU was the first school to go. The response from other universities, peer-based, was we’re not going to be first. Credit to Adrianne, credit to Michael Crow. I remember waking up and saying, “This is where I want to focus.” I want to help bring technology, information, and access to the people most need it. I want to help change what EdTech looks like in that space.

I went to my boss, the CIO, thinking that he was going to be upset and I said, “I think I want to leave the Engineering team, which is unheard of at Google, and go work in the enterprise. This is, again, not where Google was prime back in 2005 or 2006. “I’m going to go do this.” He smiled at me, and I remember seeing his face right now. He’s taller than me.

He’s looking down at me with a big smile on his face and saying, “Congratulations. It takes about 18 months to find your way here.” That culture, he was he was congratulating me for finding my way inside Google. That left, that went away. That culture is to hire smart people, give them space, and let them figure out what to do. They’ll figure it out. That culture is missing in the world. We don’t have that. We’re very specific about performance and metrics.

I always struggle at Google with the idea of what it is that you do here. No one can figure it out. I survived and to your point about being an entrepreneur inside companies, I never go back and watch any video I’ve ever done at Google. I’ve never used any marketing slides that were marked Google marketing slides. Never used any templates that Google gave me. The marketing team just gave up on me. They’re like, “Just let him be. Let him do him.” That’s the entrepreneurial part of it.

Stepping away from Google and doing my own thing wasn’t a big deal for me because I was doing my own thing anyway. That mindset, I think, goes back to why culture is important because if you have the right leadership team in place, creating the right culture around the right guiding principles, then what you can do is say, okay, “What culture do we need to create to thrive here?”

I got to watch Google and all the things that I did right for 15 years from the perspective of someone who spent 7 years at Accenture doing organizational development and cultural work at companies like Seagate Technology, Motorola, United Health Group, American Express, the United States Postal Service, and all these other companies that I worked. That’s the work that I did. I got to observe Google do that.

I know I can sit with you as a business owner, as someone with a 10-person team or a 100-person team, ask you 5 questions, and I can assess your culture. I can say, “Here are the five things that you need to start doing, for example, around communication.” “Here are the things that you need to start doing around how do you recruit and retain.” I know where Google screwed up. It used to take a long time to get a job at Google. It was cumbersome and it was slow. I did 12 interviews right back then.

We used to ask hard questions. Then we went away from that. We started getting them, streamlining them and just getting down to four interviewers. We went away from that. We went away from growing internal talent mentoring and bringing people along. What we can do is like the Yankees. We can hire people from Oracle, PeopleSoft, and wherever people are coming from who are sales guys. Let’s bring them in, VPs.

They would come in, but they came in with their twelve people from their old culture and screwed up our internal culture. All those things that you do, these decisions that leaders make that do not know that five years from now, that decision’s going to be a negative consequence. By the time they find out, it’s too late. I can help organizations see that because I know what we did right and I know where Google started screwing up. Now, look at where they are in the news. I think the power of culture goes so long that we don’t give it enough credit.

Yes, I’m listening to you, Jaime, and I’m thinking you got yourself in the catbird seat. You got this view of the world. You got a front-row seat at the technology of what’s coming. At the same time, you’re working in government organizations and academics. You’re seeing what the future is coming, and you’re seeing how these things are not only necessary but need to be adopted and can be harnessed.

Future Of Technology’s Human

Business leaders right now are in this weird space. They don’t know what to do with what’s happening with technology. They don’t know what to do with AI. I did my research. It was what are people talking about? What are people at conferences talking about? You’ll have experts get up on stages, rightfully so, and tell you about how to take advantage of the technology that’s coming.

I went the other way, where my main talk now is called, The Future of Technology is Human because, at the end of the day, all the technology that we see today is flip phone technology compared to what’s coming. When you think about quantum computing and what’s happening with neural technologies, you think about what’s happening, just even go further down the line, just what we did with fusion, which, to me, is the biggest story of the century. We are able to produce fusion, which is a microsecond worth of it, but the idea is that we can now make fusion. We have the power of making a sun. We know how to make a sun. That’s insane. We’re going to have unlimited energy that is nonburning and that we can do anything.

What happens when energy is free? Period? You can leave every light on forever and nothing would happen to our environment. What happens when quantum computing can process equations at speeds that make them laugh at what we can do today with technology and AI? Our leaders right now say that this is coming.

They said, “How do I take advantage of it without realizing that the most important thing is going to be those humans who do the human skill stuff, who do the planning, and who do the figuring out? How do you figure out what problem to solve in the first place? What creative stuff do we need to do? To me, the future is doubling down, letting technology happen, but building an organization of humans with human skills who are going to be able to take on any work that comes their way. Google is famous for this.

Even on the engineering side, we hired engineers who could code but didn’t matter what language they coded in because there’s no way that language would be relevant 2, 3, or 4 years down the line. We hired engineers who were smart and could learn how to code in any language. That’s why sometimes boot camps don’t work, because people take a boot camp for 3 months, learn how to code in JavaScript, and then you send them to work.

You’ll say, “Cool. That’s great. Can you code this in C-plus-plus? They’ll say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Hiring people who are smart and can find their way. I think Google did an amazing job. I was hired with no job. They said, “Just hire them. We’ll figure out where to put them.” We’ll start them here and then you’ll find your way. What organizations are built that way? The same thing with performance reviews.

I stopped paying attention to them because they didn’t have any value to them, whereas in the old days at Google, performance reviews mattered. We would shut down Google for two weeks, and I would write a book on performance reviews for people because we wanted to give them good feedback. Nobody hid from performance reviews. My performance review, “Here are the five people you work with and this is what they say about you.”

What I would do is follow my boss’s lead because this was an amazing thing. I posted my performance reviews on my internal website. We all had our own little page. I would just post my performance review right there. Do you want to hire me for a project? Do you want to bring me in on something? Here’s my performance review. Take a look.

Yes. Embrace it. 

There are things that we can do inside organizations that are more human-based, such as letting technology happen. Instead of trying to figure out how to bring the right people in for certain technologies, you hire smart people, and they’ll figure it out. We just don’t give enough credit, and we don’t give enough confidence or hope to the potential, capacity, and capability of smart humans.

Jaime, we’re almost out of time. We got a little bit of time left, but tell me about where you’re going. I love this idea of human skills. That should be in the title, if not the title of your book but, where are you going? What is the future for Jaime? How are you taking your experience, your knowledge, and your passion? What problem are you going to solve?

That’s a great question. If I say the problem that I want to solve is education, then there are so many different ways to solve that problem. You can solve it early in education, elementary, middle, high, college, and work. From a trend perspective, I see lots of companies understanding and realizing finally that the skills their employees are coming in to work with are probably not just the best skills, but they’re going to need to keep building those skills.

They’ll learn, unlearn, and relearn.

Correct. Yes. I see a lot of that happening. I want to focus on three areas. To your point, we need to keep hammering the message around why we need to transform our schools and what they look like. Here’s a big message from me because I’ve gotten this question every single time I’ve ever done a Q and A. Normally, what I love to do is do a keynote in the morning and then do a session right after, which is a Q and A session, and see who shows up because those are the people who want to have a discussion about this versus the people who usually have to sit in a keynote because they have to be there. Then, we have a conversation.

In every single one of those meetings, the question comes up, and the question is, “All this is great. The things that you and I have been talking about are good things and amazing things. We should be doing these things. I want to do this. How do you bring everyone along? How do you deal with the resistance to change?” I always say I have two answers to that question.

Answer number one, personally, I have no idea because I only work with people who want to change. As I start my company and my business, my goal is to fire more companies than I bring on. I’ll I’ll say, “You want me to work with you? I’ll bring you on.” A month later, “I’m sorry, you got to go because you’re not in this for the right reasons.” I have my personal assessment of who I’m going to work with. I’m too old. I don’t have time to bring people along. I want people who are, “I’m in. Let’s do this.” That’s number one.

Number two, I’ll say, “Here’s a better answer. I don’t believe in resistance to change.” I don’t believe that people are resistant to change. I think people change all the time. I think these people are resistant to pain. Here’s the difference. You change all the time. If you commute to work, you’ll say, “If I take 6th Street instead of 5th Street, this light turns red at this time.” “If I brush my teeth this way instead of this way, I save 10 seconds.”

You’re always process improving. You’re always trying to do better. You’re always reading self-help books. You want to change. It’s inherent in us to develop and change but when we talk about change initiatives, we’re not talking about change initiatives. We’re talking about pain initiatives. Here’s the example that I bring up. I’ve been traveling at the time, 200,000 miles to 300,000 miles a year.

I’ve been doing that my whole career. It doesn’t matter what job. I could go down the street to the Home Depot and say, “I want to be a stock boy.” I guarantee you that three months from now, somebody’s going to say, “We need you to start traveling to the other Home Depots. It’s just my lot in life. I was born to travel for work. This is what I do. I’ve been traveling the same way. I got my processes down.

Think of it as my job. My job is to travel. I know what time to get to the airport. I know where to park. If the flight leaves at 8:00 PM, I don’t leave my house until 7:37. I go through security and pre-check. They’ll announce group one, and I will get on a plane back when I used to have status. I don’t have it anymore, but I have my processes down.

At the time, I was working at Google, and I said, “Let’s say Google called me and said that you’re traveling a lot, so we’ve decided to get you a private plane that just waits for you at the airport and whenever you need it, you just call and half an hour later, they’ll have the plane ready. You can go where you want to go. How resistant do you think I’d be to that change?

How much pushback do you say, “No. I have my way of doing things. I like going through TSA.” “No. I like sitting in a waiting room waiting for group four to board.” “I like not having an overhead spin.” No. How many seconds would go by before, “Okay. That’s how I do things now.” I now travel on a private plane. I think we do a terrible job in the change management world. Whether you’re a leader or somebody who’s a consultant in this space, we do a terrible job presenting change to people.

What we present to them is pain. We say to them, “We’re going to put in a new system. It’s going to be good in the long run, but it’s going to be painful. It’s going to hurt. I’ve been in rooms with CIOs who say, “What we’re about to go through is going to be hard.” You’ve lost everyone. My pitch is simple to leaders.

We do a terrible job presenting change to people. What we present to them is pain. Share on X

Is the change that you’re about to introduce to your company, your organization, or your team, is your change a symbol of a private plane? Is the person going to say, “If we do this, my life is going to be better.” Is it serving a purpose? Is it serving autonomy? Is it serving mastery? Is it serving any of those things? Is it serving the organization as an employee? My life is going to be better because I do this. Electric cars are a big change. Nobody’s resistant to electric cars. They’re resistant to the pain of electric cars.

There is this idea that I can only drive 300 miles and I got to stop somewhere and fill it up for an hour. If a battery is in an electric car, you said, “Buy this car and if you spend another $2,000, this battery’s going to last five years and you’re never going to have to charge it.” Every car on the street would be an electric car. People aren’t resistant to the change. They’re resistant to the pain. I think we do a terrible job presenting change to people. I want to help with that.

I’m working with a college out. Neli, you and I have talked about this a little bit. The president’s keen on all of the things that you’re talking about. We’re using this concept called the Customer Journey Map. It’s all under the guise of service design. It gets at what you’re saying because it’s like it’s not a top-down solution. The boss said you’re going to do it this way now. It’s like this way isn’t working. We need you guys to make it better. That also, I think, is an important component of of that.

You just brought you just brought up a memory that I haven’t thought about in a while. It was one of my early days at Google, and I was meeting with my boss outside of his team meeting. There was a new person on the team who was six months in. We’re discussing some projects, and this new person said we have to do it that way because that’s how Douglas wants us to do it. Everyone in the room just laughed. We just all laughed. Doesn’t matter what he thinks. We think collectively.

He’s driving it, but if we tell him something different, it has to be a certain way because we’re using data and facts and these things. We don’t care what Douglas thinks. The problem is bigger than what this one individual wants us to do. That’s a cultural thing inside an organization. Everyone gets a voice, but not everyone gets a vote, including the leader. That philosophy is the culture that you need, which is the, “Let’s solve the problem no matter whose feelings get hurt.”

Entrepreneurial Vs. Managerial

Jaime, just to pick in on this idea a little bit, I want to get your opinion about this idea that I wrote in my new book, which is that the entrepreneurial mindset only seems enigmatic to us to the extent that we are steeped in managerial thinking. What I’m saying in my new book is that the managerial mindset was once sufficient. You could go to work at a company, follow the rules, climb the ladder, and gold watch, as you described earlier. Now, we need both entrepreneurial and managerial mindsets.

The key to our survival as leaders, as individuals, wherever we are in the organization, is to understand which situation we are in so that we know which mindset to apply. That’s my whole thesis about entrepreneurial versus managerial. I’m not saying out with the managerial and in with the entrepreneurial. It’s consistent with my earlier statement that we don’t need to bulldoze the school system.

We need to introduce entrepreneurial discovery learning so that kids can develop basic entrepreneurial competencies, which are problem-finding skills, and learning how to learn, unlearn, and relearn on their small team. Self-direction. Those basic things include learning how to tolerate ambiguity. One of the points I made in my book, which I borrowed from Tony Wagner, is that education punishes failure, and innovation demands it. We have to reconcile those things.

I used to talk about this. This is years ago. Let’s get rid of the word, failure. I used to say, I don’t like the phrase, failure. Why? It is because failure seems like it’s got an opposite word, which is success. You either fail or succeed. We don’t live in that world anymore. The word I introduced at the time was iteration.

This idea of you take something to a level and then you bring it to the next level and you constantly iterate your solution over and over again. That’s the world we live in. Even in software, the idea is that a company like Microsoft would put out a software package, Windows 95, that would be the operating system that you use for three or four years until they come out with a new operating system in four or five years.

Then, you would use that. If Apple doesn’t release a new version of iOS for their phones, their tablets, and Macs every year, they will lose. Also, I think that the model now is old. Why am I not getting updates every day? That’s the world we’re going to. It’s constant. There’s no failure and there’s no success. I don’t like those concepts.

I like the concept of iteration and that teaching our students, teaching our people, teaching our young people that you take a step, you assess it, and then you take another step, and we just are constantly iterating versus failure. I get that we have that concept. I get the word. I get what it means, but I’ve never seen anything in my life, including my career choices or the two failed marriages that I’ve had. I’ve never looked at any of those as failures. That’s all just learning.

Either you iterate up or you iterate down. Which way do you want to go? There’s failure and success. That gets me into this concept of, “What is success?” What does success mean? That you finish something? You create a new software package. You sell 10 million versions of it. Did you succeed?”

Look at Grammarly. Great software package, and a great company. I use them for doing grammar checks, and it’s dead. The new Apple OS does that all for you. They’re gone. If you’re not constantly iterating, then you’re losing. Why would we have words like failure and success? What are we using to measure those things?

That’s getting to the essence of an entrepreneurial mindset.

We talked about this because I want to make sure that I get this point in, which is that maybe it’s the word entrepreneurial. Maybe it’s this idea that we are stuck on what that means. Maybe it’s just fun to ask a group of 18-year-olds and 12-year-olds, what does entrepreneurial mean? It’d be interesting to hear what they think that word means because you and I grew up with the idea that definition means something. The problem is that the people who we’re working with are our age. They have that same definition where maybe a younger generation doesn’t see it the way we used to see that word.

That’s my biggest challenge, Jaime, is getting people to look beyond Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, high-gross venture-backed billionaires, when they hear the word entrepreneur. To go back to your iteration saying that one of the problems I’m trying to solve is small business development centers, the way they characterize entrepreneurship is pretty much divorced from the reality of what a typical entrepreneur does.

I’ll just get right to the point. This irritates people sometimes, but they’re pushing the business planning. Write a business plan, do the research, and go find money, which is very misguided and very misdirected on many levels. We’ll need another hour to get into that, but my antidote to that, Jaime, is the MVP.

What can you do with $50 if that’s all you’ve got in your spare time? You can make a whole bunch of $50 bets and lose them without harming yourself. $5 bets, 50 whatever the situation is. The MVP becomes the antidote to the business plan. If someone’s encouraging you to write a business plan, that person is trying to teach entrepreneurship with a managerial mindset. Here’s what I wanted to get to, Jaime.

The MVP creates this beautiful mechanism with which you can engage with the people whose problems you’re trying to solve. It’s a feedback loop. It’s complicated because people will say one thing and do another. People don’t know what they want or need. No one’s going to say, “Yes, I need a $5 latte.”

Look, they’re lined up around the block waiting in line for their $5 lattes. It’s that. That’s part of your conversation around iteration. It’s like creating some minimally viable product with $5 or $50, putting it out in the world, seeing it, getting some feedback from people, learning from it, and building on that. That’s what a typical cash-strapped, inexperienced entrepreneur does. 

Correct, they solve problems. I did not make a business plan. My ADHD is way too powerful for me to ever sit down and plan out something. There’s an old saying in Latino culture, I’m sure it’s in every culture, which is, “If you want to  make God laugh, tell her your plans.” To me, it’s about solving problems. It’s about creating a model. You create something that you say, “Here’s the thing that I think can solve these problems.” Then, you go out and test it. You’ll ask, “Did it work? Did it not work?”

The thing is, the people don’t understand, Jaime. It’s something that you have to go to know. With business, planning presumes that you can know before you go.

That’s the right thing to think about.

That works. That’s my Seussian way of thinking about it. You have to go to know. That’s the logic of the entrepreneur, which drives managers crazy.

My favorite quote, and I’ve used it many times. Honestly, I never even checked to see if it’s true because I’ve heard it before. I just assume it’s true and if it’s not true, I still want it to be true, which is what Henry Ford said about asking its customers for feedback. “If I asked my customers what they wanted, they’d say that they wanted a faster horse.” They don’t know. I look at suggestion boxes as passive-aggressive suggestion boxes.

This idea is that you’re only getting feedback from a certain group of people. When I work with government officials, I talk to them about their council meetings. They’ll have their council meetings. Only seven people show up in a 500,000-person town, and they’ll demand X. They respond to those seven people instead of solving the 80% problems that are out there.

I think your point, identifying the problem. Identifying enough and it doesn’t have to be data-driven. It could be by asking 100 people. We have all the tools to be able to send out an Instagram post with a poll on it and say, “Do you think we should have a blue thing or a red thing? You’ll get feedback. Just get that observation, then go out, test it, and see if it’s true or not.

Whether it sticks, that, to me, is your business plan. The idea that this is your market size, this is this, and this is that. Who are your competitors? My favorite part of a business plan is the market. What’s the market size? If we can take 1% of this $10 trillion market. We have a new video platform. Zoom makes $30 billion a month.

If we take 1%, we’ll make $3,000,000 a minute. Those are those who are stupid and they have no place in the world. I think that to your point, is there a simpler model that we can help people with? Again, it’s a mindset of how you think about things. It doesn’t mean you’re starting a business. What you wrote about has nothing to do with starting a business. It has to do with how you think.

If you start a business, it’d be great. I was working with the Hawaii school system. The Hawaiian school system is just one district. You can do a lot of cool things because it’s centralized. They did this great program where they were helping students who didn’t want to go to college. You have lots of islands and lots of family.

They helped them build practical skills, like whether they were doing air conditioning repair or whether they were doing mechanic work, they were doing this and they were teaching them all these things on how to do these skills. I asked a question and this was 10 years ago, I didn’t know you. I know my question is, “Are you teaching them how to start a business with that skill?” Maybe they can start their own air conditioning business.

They don’t have to go work as a mechanic. They can start their own mechanic company. They can do things the way they want to do things. We often talk about the differences between entrepreneurial things and managerial things. Being a manager and whether you’re starting a business, or not starting a business.

I think sometimes we miss the beauty of the entrepreneurial mindset, which is that you get to do things the way you think they should be done. You get to focus on things the way you want to focus on things. If there’s a kid out there who you’re teaching mechanic skills to and you also teach them how to be an entrepreneur and potentially set up their mechanic shop, maybe they create a shop that does overcharge people.

Sometimes, we miss what the beauty of the entrepreneurial mindset can be, which is you get to do things the way you think they should be done. Share on X

Maybe he or she creates a subscription service where you become a member and you can bring your car in every three months. You can do things the way you, as a mechanic, know you can add a lot of value to people, build relationships, and be part of the community. The beauty of it is that you get to do things the way you want to do things. The way you think they should be done.

I’ll just take that thought one step further if you’ll allow me, Jaime. I believe that we all come into this world with gifts that came with interest and abilities that came on the hard drive. We don’t get to pick them. Your son didn’t pick storytelling. That came on the hard drive. I believe what we should be doing in education is encouraging kids to find the intersection and figure out how to use their gifts.

This is my riff on the Jaime Casap quote. “Figure out a way to use your gifts to create value for others and to make yourself useful to other humans.” When you do that, you will flourish and if you don’t, you will suffer. I’ll take it one step further. The world will suffer. If your son becomes whatever he wants to do, like a political something or whatever, rather than a storyteller, not only will he suffer, but the world will suffer because the world won’t receive his gift. To me, Jaime, that’s an entrepreneurial mindset. It’s human flourishing.

Yes. I agree. I’ll take what you just said another step further and say that it’s never too late. Yes, it’s great to focus on education. It’s great to focus these ideas in on K-12. You can start this now in education, be in high school or college, and do this. I think that there’s no limit. You can do this whenever you want.

Having this having this mindset, you can have this mindset to run your family. You can have this mindset to run how you do things. Especially if you add in some of the work that I’ve done over the last couple of years, you’ve mentioned meditation, consciousness work, and what success is. Just as a quick story. First of all, this is not my podcast. No one’s ever seen this room. This is like our activity room, and you can see all the Legos that I haven’t built. People are, I’m sure, going to go crazy about all these big Lego boxes that I haven’t built, which is fine, but this is our activity room. This is where we hang out. I was in Flagstaff until yesterday morning. My studio is closed down.

I closed it. Putting the air conditioner back on in there and giving it three days to get back up is what needs to be done. I’m here in this activity room broadcasting, doing my meetings, and doing things from here. The point is that it doesn’t matter where you end up. It doesn’t matter where you work, wherever you focus, and whatever you want to do. What we have today are the tools to connect with anyone, to have these conversations, to watch anything, to meet anywhere, and to do anything.

There’s no one that you can’t reach out to. There’s no one that you can’t connect with. There’s nothing that you can’t focus on, and we’re just not taking advantage of that. It just feels like the world is the same as it was 20 years ago in many ways. In some ways, it is worse, but we have all this. We’re not in the aha moment anymore. Where are you calling me from? Where are you not right now?

Cleveland.

I’m going to go work with Gary in Cleveland. What did I have to do 50 years ago to work with you? Write you a letter and then three months later, you write me back a letter, and then what? I get on a train, fly, and drive. Go out to Cleveland so we can meet and work. Think about how fast the world is now and what we can do with it. I don’t think we’re taking advantage of the tools that we have at our disposal.

The Future Of Education And Work

Just as a closing thought, Jaime, I think specifically about education, where I’m most passionate about. What people don’t realize is that I hated school. I barely graduated from high school. I went off the engagement clip. I was doing fine up through middle school. The wheels fell off the wagon by high school. Boom. I was smoking weed and checked out. By being entrepreneurial, I learned that I love to learn.

I’m building on your quote, but if every young person could at least experience this once, that learning and work are supposed to be fun. They’re supposed to be energizing. They’re supposed to be self-directed. They’re supposed to be a source of energy and enthusiasm, not drudgery and toil. That’s what entrepreneurial thinking is all about as I understand it. I can’t wait to see where you go to bring these ideas into organizations and academic institutions.

We can end on this if you want because I want to build a little bit on what you just said. You and I talked about this when we talked on the phone before, but this concept of an entrepreneurial mindset, human skills, ability to learn, and all these things was nice to have in the past. These are all cool. It’s very Maslow’s hierarchy, top-level stuff that you’re focused on.

That’s great. That’s cool. My argument, to add yours, would be that the future of work is a blank sheet of paper, that you don’t have a choice. Machines are going to do everything. Right now, I can ask AI to take this recording and create a summary of it. I don’t need a human to do that. That’s going to get better and better.

I can have an AI machine say, take the summary of this meeting and bring out the main points. Compare this one to all other podcasts I did, and what do the main points look like? There’s an AI called, Yin Yang right now? You can do lots of different things with it. If you are doing any kind of process work, you go to work and you do the same thing every day, a machine will do that.

I do no question whether you are working physically and building things. If I take this cup and my job is that every cup comes up, I put a lid on it, but that’s already gone. That’s already been taken care of. I love Lucy with the chocolates at the factory. Machines do that now. That’s a given. The same thing is now happening in what I call knowledge work.

I’m an accountant. I take every day, I sit down and I go through these forms and I make sure these forms are filled out the right way. Machines are doing that now and they will continue to do that. Both knowledge-based machines and physical-based machines are getting better and better. Just go watch 60 Minutes, which has this great, four-hour segment on all the different technology segments that they’ve done.

It’s a capture of all of them, including the one at Google from a couple of years ago, where they took two artificial intelligent machine robots, physical robots, and put them on a soccer field. They put two nets on and just dropped the ball. Those machines figured out what the game was all on their own. My point is that one day soon, you’re going to go to work and not do the same thing you did yesterday because machines do that.

You’re going to have a blank sheet of paper. Your boss is going to say, “How do we open up new markets in China?” It’s a blank sheet of paper and you don’t have a choice. If you’re not in the creative space, if you can’t look at a blank sheet of paper and say, “Cool. I can build something. I can create something and do something that doesn’t exist.”

I used to say this all the time, and it’s still true today. Our job in education isn’t to put intelligence into kids’ heads. Our job in education is to help students take intelligence and create original thoughts from it. Take information and create real intelligence. Instead of putting information in kids’ heads, we can take that information, help them build that intelligence, and help them build that original thought. We don’t have a choice. We don’t. Life is going to be about blank sheets of paper and experiences.

Learning And Work: Our job in education isn’t to put intelligence into kids’ heads. Our job in education is to help students take intelligence and create original thoughts from it.

 

One of my takeaways from Puerto Rico is the big shift that’s happening in the world, which is the shift from the other direction to self-direction. If you don’t get that, you’re going to become increasingly irrelevant. That’s just the way it is, that’s it.

This is why when I started my company, I called it Autotalic. The future of work is intrinsic motivation. The future of work is what you do.

Self-directed. I love that, Jaime. Where can people get a hold of you? Want to learn more about you, and the work you’re doing?

I’ll send you all the pieces. I’m on Instagram. I’m on all typical social network sites, but also you can just email me. My work and business email, if you will, is JCasap@Gmail.com. This is what’s beautiful about the world we live in. There’s our LinkedIn. Send me a message on LinkedIn. There’s no way not to get ahold of someone and I tend to respond to a lot of different people, but it’s easy to get ahold of people. I did a couple of videos years ago about how to get people to respond to you on LinkedIn because most people aren’t very good at it. They can reach out on LinkedIn. They can reach out on my on my website.

As soon as I hang up with you, I’m taking all these talks that I’ve created. I’m putting them online because I need to get back out with some of these messages. A lot of the messages resonate with your book around the mindset of human skills and what we need. I don’t use the word entrepreneurial because I think it’s implied in all that work.

I also don’t like the term STEM. We use that in education. I have this little chunk of talk that I talk about when I talk about the future of education that STEM should be built into everything. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics is everything. There’s no such thing as STEM. It’s just the world. I used to argue that my biggest fear of education for my youngest daughter is that education would turn math into a subject for her when to her, math is just life.

I love that. I think it was Richard Feynman who said something like, “We divide everything up into these subjects, but nature doesn’t know anything about these divisions.” Nature doesn’t divide between science, technology, engineering, and math. It’s all. I love that idea.

It’s all stuff. It took me a couple of years to come back out and there are some personal stories in there that I’m going to share in the future but the reality is that I am in a place now where I think I can add the most value to your point, taking those experiences that I’ve had, taking the background that I have, and helping organizations thrive in creating a culture.

Again, here’s my business plan. My business plan is I can help you build a culture that you want to build. Whether you’re a K-12, a higher ed, a business, a start-up, or whatever it is I’m a fire you if you’re not going to do it. Not the way I do it. That’s not the point. If you’re not going to be all in. Does this have to be done with both feet in?

I would argue that the overall value of Google in those early days was those ten things we knew to be true that showed everywhere, and we stuck by those guiding principles. Almost like our ten commandments, if you will, and we stuck by those. We need leaders who can stand up and say, “Doing things the same way isn’t going to get us anything different. We need to reshape and redo how we do X. We’re going to commit to this for X number of years, and this is how we’re going to do things.”

It’s the writing’s on the wall. The future is a blank sheet of paper. The future is automated and robotic. Automation of most of the work that we currently do. Instead of looking at that as a bad thing, we should look at that as a good thing. I’ll give you my last example because I hear this all the time about, why we need technology for everything. I always say, “Cool. How did you get here today? Did you walk?” “No.”

Did you ride a horse?

“I drove my car.” “Your car. You do use technology to get things done.” We never say, “My god. I hate the fact that I get in my car and it goes 90 miles an hour to where I need to go instead of taking three months to get there.” That’s why I call cars time machines. We have to look at technology and what’s coming, not much as a detriment and not much as something that’s going to put an end to the world as opposed to how we take advantage of it. How do we take human skills, lift them up, and take advantage of technology to improve our lives? That’s what I want to focus on.

I love it, Jaime. Let’s just leave it there. Thank you so much for taking the time for this, Jaime. It’s a fascinating conversation. We’re going to have to pick it up again in a couple of years and do a part two. Thank you, Jaime. I greatly appreciate it.

Thank you very much. Thanks for all the work you do, too. I appreciate it.

 

Important Link

• Jaime Casap
• Instagram – Jaime Casap
• JCasap@Gmail.com
• Be Useful
• Drive
• Arnold – Netflix
• Jaime Casap – Twitter
• The Entrepreneurial Mindset Advantage, The Hidden Logic That Unleashes Human Potential