Transcribe your podcast
[00:00:00]

Hi, guys. It's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it.

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Before we dive into today's episode, I first want to thank our sponsor, Therisage. Their Tri-Light Panel has become my favorite biohacking thing for healing my body. It's a portable red light panel that I simply cannot live without. I literally bring it with me everywhere I go, and I personally use their red light therapy to help reduce inflammations in places in my body where, honestly, I have pain. You can use it on a sore back, stomach cramps, shoulder, ankle. Red light therapy is my go-to. Plus, it also has amazing anti-aging benefits, including reducing signs of fine lines and wrinkles on your face, which I also use it for. I personally use Therassage Tri-Light everywhere all the time. It's small, it's affordable, it's portable, and it's really effective. Head over to therassage. Com right now and use code B BOLD for 15% off. This code will work site-wide. Again, head over to therasage, T-H-H-E-R-A-S-A-G-E. Com, and use code B BOLD for 15% off any of their products. Welcome to Habits & Hustle. We have a really great guest today because I'm personally invested in the topic and what we're doing. We have the founder of an amazing app for children.

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It's called Legends, Build Legends, I should say, which is a self-confidence training app. And the co-founder, founder himself is here with me. Sunny, by the way, how do you pronounce your last name? Calberwell. Calberwell. I'm so glad that you said not me, who is a serial entrepreneur, and he's made it his life mission to really help kids build their confidence and their self-esteem starting very young. I love what you're all about. I love what the platform, what the app is doing for people right now because we need it so badly. And thank you for being on the podcast.

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It's my pleasure.

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All right, here we go. All right, Sunny. Now, let's start with the obvious beginning. What made you feel that you wanted to even create a self-confidence training app for kids? Did you have issues as a kid yourself?

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No. The reason this app came to be is because I've been an entrepreneur a long time. A few years ago, I was actually misdiagnosed with head and neck cancer. I thought there was a time where I was not sure how much time I had to spend with kids. Luckily, the issue was resolved, and it turns out I didn't have cancer, which is an incredible, scary thing we could talk about later.

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But it also- Hold on. The doctor told you that you had cancer?

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He said it's very likely I had head and neck cancer, which is an extremely dangerous thing. My kids were... That was maybe four or five years ago.

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Based on what? Why did he think this?

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I had a hard lump in my lymph nodes. And we sat down and they couldn't go in and do a biopsy because of where it was. And so he said, I can't say this for sure, but based on what you've just told me, it's reasonably likely that's going to be the case. I was sitting there with my dad and my wife And my dad is a surgeon, by the way, and he's like, I don't see how you can say that. But he's like, well, we'll have to wait a few weeks because there's some inflammation near where we need to go in. And if we do that, you have a high risk of facial paralysis. So for six weeks, I thought that that might be the case. And at the time, I was working in a... I had a great job post-selling my last company, but I didn't see what I was going to do about that. I actually never went back to work after that. I thought about, what can I teach my kids about the future?

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Wait, hold on a second. By the way, in full transparency, I really love everything about what you're doing. And that's why I'm not just passionate, but I'm involved. And I've never heard you tell me the story before. I had no idea. So for six weeks, you literally thought that you were going to die.

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Yes. And my kids were all under eight, three of them. And I didn't spend that much time with them because I was super commuting. I don't know if I told you the story, but I had sold my company and I became the head, a senior executive at this big global 50,000 person CPG business. No, you never told I'm sorry to see that. And I was living in... We had just moved pre my company being acquired to North Carolina, and the company is based in New York. So I was super commuting four days a week to New York, North Carolina. And I remember when I remember when it was the weekends, my kids would say not to be jerks. Just a matter of fact, they're like, Oh, it must be the weekend because Daddy's home. And it made me feel so bad, but I was trying to figure out how we were going to bring everyone back together, and I realized that I was just spending my time wrong. I spent a lot of time thinking about time, and I spent a lot of time thinking about the future. I take these contrarian bets in technology and the way the world will work.

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Now I'm very focused on taking those bets on the way the world can work for the next generation, for Gen Alpha, because it impacts my own kids. When we started looking at it, we were like, well, what are... It's obvious the world is changing in a number of different ways that are really important. Technology changed every aspect of our lives. I don't see why our kids are still being taught the way that we were taught when we were younger. It doesn't make sense. Life doesn't operate. We don't have jobs the same way that we had when we were younger. Everything is changing, but we're not changing what we're teaching kids. I spent three years prior to this just interviewing thousands of families and experts on what kids should be learning. And when you see things like the mental health crisis taking place in young adults, 80 % of kids and young adults are as stressed as they've ever been, 34 % report depression. And even talking to the former dean of students at Duke, she said on college campus, their biggest issue is how kids feel about themselves and how they treat other people, which we've all seen in the news.

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What are we going to do about that? And so Legends is an outcropping of me as a parent trying to solve a problem for myself and then putting those tools in the hands of as many families as possible.

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So basically, this happens a lot. Out of despair, I guess, in a very low point in your life, you basically had a life-altering decision to change and pivot what was important to you, and then really decided to do this because of that, because of where you were in a bad place, and you turned it into really doing something positive.

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Yeah, I think it just helped me understand something that really everyone understands intuitively on their own, but it helped me reprioritize, I would say, where I wanted to spend my time and effort and energy. My background now for the last 20 years, I've been an entrepreneur, so I wanted to use my entrepreneurial skillset on what I think is my top priority, which is my kids. It's your kids. My job is as an entrepreneur, but my main job is as a parent.

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That's 100% true. I feel the same way. And so you said you started this three years ago. So for two years after you realized you weren't dying of cancer, what did you do? Did you stay at the job that you were doing at the CPG?

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No, I never went back. Right. So what did you do? I never went back. What So in that time, I decided to unwind a lot of things. So we were, for instance, moving back to New York, doing a bunch of things that I decided I didn't think made as much sense anymore. I worked on a project to try to build community. I have another big belief that when you're part of something bigger than yourself, there's a big epidemic of loneliness. I love building community and bringing people together. Even with Ledges, I think about the idea of, how do we help? We met each other as parents who are working together on the same problem. I worked on a community project in North Carolina where I was living at the time. Where was it? Then it was called Union. The idea was, Can you build a physical space that can bring people together? Much the It's the same way you see private members clubs, but can we make it really affordable and focused on diverse interests? For instance, right now as a parent, you meet people. A lot of times you meet people through your kids and things of that nature.

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But it makes way more sense to meet people through your own interests as an adult. I think that happens less and less. And it's very difficult, particularly the more involved you are in your kid's life. Could we find ways to use technology and physical spaces to bring communities together around adults interests?

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So what happened to it?

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Covid is pretty debilitating to the- To the in-person-in-person meetup. And the other thing I always think about is affordability in space. So I want to make things that can change how we operate as a society. But I also want to make sure they're really affordable. And creating affordable physical spaces is really difficult when costs creep. So that was a big challenge.

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Okay, so then walk me through how this started. Okay, so three years ago, you said that you started to interview a lot of people, thousands of people. So it was it that when the union idea was... When COVID hit and you couldn't do that anymore, then you started to rethink this idea. And then how did you land on doing a self-confidence training platform for kids? Where did that go? How did it go from what you were doing to what it is now?

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Yeah. So somebody reminded me by asking in COVID, what would the Boy Scouts look like if they were started today? And I thought that was such an interesting provocation.

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By the way, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, they're still around and they're thriving still. People are still doing it.

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I think that there's a variety of different opinions about the Boy Scouts have been plagued with scandal, and even the Girl Scouts, to some extent. I think they are valuable. I think the idea of preparing your kids... A lot of times, your kids aren't getting lost in the woods anymore. They're getting lost online. And so we're thinking about what are new skills? Do they need to learn how to tie a knot, or do they need to learn something else? And I think it doesn't mean that I don't think those skills are relevant, but what would be the skills you would teach if you were starting from scratch today?

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So it's interesting you bring that up, the Boy Scouts, right? Just because the way I would see it, forget about all the other things, but what I like about the concept of it is Getting your child involved with a team, not a team sport, but yeah, a team group of some kind. And what they do in these scouts things is that they raise money for people who need it. They come together as a group of community, and they're there for each other. They do activities together. So it really helps with the social aspect, the loneliness aspect, the confidence building, because to your point, what you said earlier is like you're doing something for a bigger cause, right? Like you're raising money for something bigger than yourself. I don't know where the money goes for these cookies or whatever else, probably to their own organization. But overall, what I like about the whole Girl Scout, Boy Scout thing is that, A, I think it's really important for kids to learn team building exercises, and that gives them these things for leadership, and they raise money, and they do things together, they learn how to socialize. There's a lot of great things about organizations like that, which I think is really helpful for confidence and self-esteem for kids.

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I think it's great when kids are involved with that versus being on an iPad.

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Yeah, we should go back to that. No, I think- We should go back to the iPad and its pros and cons. But I didn't get to the idea of Confidence only didn't emerge as the thing to teach. In the conversations we had, I talked to this woman I mentioned, Sue Wastlik. She was the dean of students when I went to Duke undergrad, and she was really impactful in how I saw the world and some of the programming I did there. She has been at Duke for 42 years, responsible for student life. In a way, she's seen 42 straight years of 18-year-olds in America, hundreds of thousands. She knows what a almost like a 1988 vintage American Duke looks like. In a 2007 vintage American Duke, she's been there, and she's been for 10 of those years, or maybe more than 10 of those years, she lives on campus in a dorm.

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What does she say? I like that. This is interesting.

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Because I only have an N of three. I have three kids. I know what I know. My friends know what they know. I was curious to know what does someone... My job is... Our jobs are to take our kids to the time they're 18, and then they're on their own. She, meanwhile, has been seeing 42 years of 18-year-olds in America. So I thought, I Yet she has an opinion that I would like to hear. I had my own thoughts what she would say, and I was blown away. It's not what I thought at all. She said that if you need to teach your kid how to take care of themselves, kids who are successful at 18 know how to take care of themselves, their family and friends, and their community. And increasingly, they're unable to do so. It's our biggest problem on college campuses. They're spending tons of money on psychiatrists and therapists and all these interventions that are taking place when there's already a problem. And it is a huge problem on a college campus. You could see it on the news. If you look at what's going on on college campuses, it doesn't matter what political spectrum you fall on.

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Nobody thinks, including people who run colleges, that the kids are okay.

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Not only that, I saw a ton of research recently, actually, talking about kids today, 18-year-olds, I should say, not kids, but people who are 18, 19, are the generation... I thought it was Gen Z. Isn't that Gen Z? Yeah. Is the most ill-prepared for life. They have all the variables to be successful, but they have almost zero self efficacy less than ever, ever before. And so they're scared to even do anything. So there's less entrepreneurs. There's less people who are trying things because they don't feel they can. And so that doesn't surprise me that she says that. What did she say? If that's happening now, let's say she's seen that in the last few years, what did she see as the evolution of that? Where did it start with social media?

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No. Well, social media has an impact. She thinks it starts with how people are parenting. She thinks that the parenting has changed a lot. There's a technique that we've seen. When it comes to a thing that's damaging to kids' confidence is actually how parents treat and talk to them. So when you snowplow and you remove the obstacles in front of your children, you remove the ability for them to have productive struggle, you're actually doing them a huge disservice. And so you've probably seen this recent study of 800 hiring managers that took place, and 20 % of Gen Z applicants attempted to bring their parent to the job interview. And that was an amazing statistic to see, and a very large percentage wouldn't turn on their cameras. Her suggestion was really the rooted in mental health and the health, generally, of kids. There's a saying that says, When you get something wrong once, it's a mistake. When you get something wrong twice, it's a choice. As a parent, we are raising the next generation after Gen Z. Gen Alpha implies a chance to start over and reconsider things.

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I have a question about that. Do you mind? Because everything you're saying is, I think this is very extremely important information for every parent to listen to because this is back by legit research. What I find interesting, so you're saying that more so the self-efficacy that has been basically completely dismissed from what's happening is really from the parents. Is it because of the woke culture? Because now I call it the coddle culture. Culture where everything is about feeling your feelings, saying your feelings, ruminating in your feelings, talking about your feelings, where it's too much of your feelings, and people are just putting too much onus on that. Well, now you're ruminating on all these bad feelings and labeling yourself as ADHD or anxious or all these things. So now we're walking around with these labels. And then because we have these labels, then we into these labels. And like I said, this idea, this coddle culture of, God forbid, we let our kid just figure something out on their own for five minutes or get their bored for a minute. We overprogram, over schedule. And these helicopter moms, you're creating, quite frankly, very fragile, weak people with zero ability for resilience, which is very dangerous for Generation Alpha.

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So here's what we did and how that ties in to, I think, what you're saying. Actually, she left Duke and runs... She's one of the first people to join the team to help build our research center. Because my role as an entrepreneurial parent who cares a lot about the solution. I think what we're talking about is what can we do about this, practically?

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When we look at- What we're talking about, actually, is you were interviewing her initially because you're curious about the evolution of 18-year-olds, and then how you came up with, Okay, what we really need is an app to train kids on self-confidence.

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The product is important, but it's at the outcome level. What I was seeking, and what I'm generally seeking is what are we going to do about Gen Alpha if we know the mistakes have been made with Gen Z? That's the broader thing that's important. Our research began to point to this decline in confidence, and it began to also point to the fact, though, that confidence is a skill that can be trained. And when we started interviewing thousands of families, what do they want out of their schools? There's so many arguments about every aspect of school. It doesn't matter where you stand on something like what should be taught, or how do you feel about bathrooms, or some other political-feeling topic. The The main thing that parents want is for their kids to feel good about themselves. Everybody knows that the system isn't working for them, no matter where you sit on the political spectrum, nobody believes that the system is constructed really well for a modern era. We can talk about the things like the issues that the kids are feeling stressed out and giving an increasing number of labels. That's creating awareness. I think that's okay.

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I don't think it's bad to be aware that you have a problem. I think Personally speaking, the challenge is creating awareness without creating solutions, because then you just drive anxiety around, Oh, I have a problem. I have a problem. I have a problem. I'll give you an example. You need to help people reframe those problems into things that they can do about them. That is where we're trying to move to a confidence building app. If confidence was the number one problem, the things that families wanted, and we see that it's important for success, we see it's decline in this generation for Gen Z. It also turns out that confidence is a skill. It's not a trait that you're born with. Athletes have it. People who think about mindset, performers, even astronauts. As we looked into the research, there are confidence coaches. There are ways to measure and assess confidence, which means it is a skill that you can practice and improve, which means if that's what people want for their families more than anything else, and it's a tactical skill that you can practice and improve, why are we not doing that as a society?

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That's where a confidence app for kids came from. It's an outcome of the research.

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It's a solution for what the problem is.

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Because otherwise, nobody knows what's the solution. I know. All we know is that there's a problem, and that's not enough anymore for us. Look, we're Gen Alpha parents. I don't have time, nor do I have faith that the powers that be are going to come up with solutions for our kids in the time frame that we need solutions. We need to take matters into our own hands and be able to go, what are real solutions and how can we give them to as many people as possible?

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You're basically saying that this is part of a bigger plan and that you just found a solution for what you saw was a real driving problem, which was the confidence has been on a nose dive, lack of confidence, lack of self-esteem. And so you figured out a way to a solution for parents to help their kids get that. But that's not the end point. That's just one solution of a bigger plan.

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Yeah. I think that ultimately, the way I see it is what kids learn and how they learn it needs to fundamentally change.

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Okay, wait. Let me just say the other part. So then the other thing is, you said that confidence is a skill like anything else. I'm a big believer in that, as you know. But I think boldness is a skill. I think these are not traits that you have to be innately bored with. I think you can work on them. But what I want to ask you, I want you to tell people, if it is a skill that you can get better at with practice, how do you practice it? How do you measure it? Because you just said that you can measure it. You can measure your confidence. I think that to me is a really fundamental piece here because a lot of these things are very much like esoteric, and we don't know how to measure it.

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Yeah, it's important. Because I think confidence is a word like nice. It can mean a lot of things to everyone. For instance, confidence is very obviously contextual. You can have confidence in math and not have confidence in public speaking. It doesn't mean the same thing. When we talk about confidence at Legends, it means three things: how you see yourself, so your self concept, how you treat yourself, self-compassion, and how you believe in yourself, self-efficacy. Those are the three aspects that are really important. There's very well-established research in each of these areas, and they're all measurable. A lot of that measure is done through self-assessment in points in time. But in our program, we're also leveraging artificial intelligence to help us actually measure how families actually give their responses so that we can deliver more or less content and activities based on how people are doing it. For instance, I and my daughter tend to, when we measure, we develop these confidence profiles. Again, this is coming out of the world of sports psychology. You can take a confidence profile and it'll tell you how you rank, how you rate. It's not like an absolute number.

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You can't get 100% or make 100 out of 100, you can just score in low levels, high levels, and develop a range. Things like self-compassion or self-efficacy, self-belief or self-identity. Some people tend to score low in self-compassion. I do, probably a lot of entrepreneurs do. When you think about high performance, that's an issue where you're really hard on yourself. That can be detrimental. You want to improve those areas over time. You might get in the Legends program, you might get more activities that help you work on improving self-compassion. Some people are really actually good at treating themselves well. They just don't see themselves doing great things. They have a hard time with self-concept. So they get more stories that are rooted in different things. So for instance, if you think that self-concept is rooted in narratives. So there's this idea of there's an author, what is my life going to look like? How can I stitch together the events in my life in a logical way? Then there's the actor and the agents. When the actor is like, what are the roles and values that I play? An agent is like, what are my values?

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Those are things that we don't talk about in our society. Very few adults, if you ask them, what are goals and values? How does your life stitch together in a relevant way? You have to do it, whether you're on a date, college interview, a job interview. These are really fundamental things that we should be teaching children that dramatically prove how they show up in the world, not in a theoretical way. Your performance is determined by how you feel about yourself. And any elite athlete already says that, right? Really, in the NBA, you hear it all the time. All these guys are saying, The vast majority of people who are in the NBA aren't there because of their physical capability. They're there because of their mindset. They are really good at focusing on developing these skills. I want to live in a world where we start that early on upstream. Remember, we're only talking about right now in colleges, it's intervention. Let's hire more therapists, et cetera. But what if we started practicing and doing work way earlier on? But again, using the athlete mindset thing, they say, Amateurs practice till they get it right once, and pros practice till they can't get it wrong.

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For me and my family, and for a generation of kids, I want us to be able to practice over and over and over again so that by the time they get on social media and the time they get to college, they know how to handle things. People right now in the culture wars that you hear, we're trying to legislate away the bullies and the the bad guys and the meanies. And that is doing everyone a dessert. You can't make them go away. You can't write laws to make it illegal to be mean to people. You can train people for how to remain calm and have civil discourse. That is very obviously the solution. But what to do about it? Well, that work has to be done through some set of tooling that's actionable. We can't just talk about it once or watch it on a podcast and hope it goes, Wait, we need practice. The way that we use Duolingo or Calm to help train mindfulness or languages, I believe you could use to train confidence. That's how you get to an app for building confidence. Offering directly to families instead of hoping that you get it into your school is what I think is going to happen.

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Families need choice for what they want their families to learn. The best way to do it is to bypass the system and offer it directly to families. That's our strategy. Strategy. And that's what I think the future looks like.

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That was so great. I love everything you just said, Sunny. I wholeheartedly agree with all of that. That was so good, I swear. But you said something that I want to know just tactically is Are you able with this platform, with AI, to really target someone who is, like you said, who's showing that maybe their area is self-concept, that's their struggle, versus self health, efficacy, whatever. Are you able to find out and really hone in on someone's particular area that they need, that they clearly need more help than others, and then give them the program or the training module that they need. So it's not just like an umbrella for an overarching program for everybody on day 16 or on day 12.

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Yeah. And remember, that's the promise of why we need technology in education.

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Right now, if you think about it- So yes, you can do that.

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Yes, you can do that. And increasingly, we're in an era of amazing advancement in technology. And all we do is talk about why it's so scary and it's so bad for our kids. And that is a massive mistake. All of us, okay, we grew up, you remember when people were like, TV is bad for you, rotted your brains watching TV. These screens are bad for you. We all heard that growing up. Same thing now as adults, we're going to our kids, these screens are bad for you. But just like Sesame Street was like, We could use these screens to put good content on them, it makes sense that we could use these screens and technology to help our kids. They don't have to be tools that are bad for our kids as long as we take a point of view on what is it that they're supposed to be doing.

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Instead of just painting it with a really negative brush, it's part of our society, it's part of our culture. So you might as well do the best you can with what you have and provide it with content and things that can actually up-level you.

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Deliver personalization. Personalization, whether it comes to legends or anything else, is the answer. Remember back in the early days, people used to have private education in the time of education's outset, when you're looking at Aristotle and Plato. You would get to know the child, and they would get an education education in that regard. Then as society got bigger and bigger and the needs got different, we moved it to an industrial era.

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Basically, you're saying that you guys can personalize someone's needs based on what you find through technology.

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You're going to see that happen across education. What's going to happen is education, kids are going to be able to learn more and more and more things in a more personalized way. We're going to see the move away from one one-size-fits-all education because one-size-fits-all fits no one. No one buys. Everybody gets customized things. You barely... Doordash knows what you want to eat. Netflix knows what you want. Everyone is consuming everything in highly personalized ways. It's obvious that that's going to move to education.

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You know it's so funny. But sometimes it's things that are so... Common sense is not so common. And it's interesting that you just said that because you're right. If you really think about it, everything now has become very personalized. Personalize telemedicine, personalized supplements. Everything is so customizable to exactly what that person needs and wants. But yet the single most important thing for kids is education, and it's the most archaic thing that has not been customizable yet.

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And we even say things like- It's crazy. You shouldn't even be allowed. There's a number of people who believe you shouldn't even be allowed to have a say in what your kids learned, which is a crazy thing to do. Look, if you think about it, America is built on two things, in my opinion. I grew up in rural North Carolina, and my dad came with $7 to the United States for the American dream. Actually, he went to Albert Einstein, where they just did that billion dollar... That woman just gave a billion dollars so that everyone's always free tuition, Albert Einstein in the Bronx. So he came there to his medical school.

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Wait, wait, wait. You just said that to me, but explain.

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So there's a philanthropist She just gave... She was a Warren Buffet, early Berkshire Hathaway person, and she's in her '90s, and she just gave a billion dollar grant to help so that all the students at Albert Einstein School of Medicine, you Chiva University in the Bronx, will receive- Is that where you're dad went? Yeah, will receive free medical tuition, I think, forever. But so I was talking about, I think right now, there are two important things for Gen Alpha that will dictate what the future looks like broadly. America has two things that I think are so important. There's the American dream, and there's the freedom, choice. That's what it's built upon, right? So when my dad came here, he came with $7 with the idea that he could build this amazing life for himself. And a lot of people can identify with that thought. We moved from the Bronx down to Ashborough, North Carolina, a rural North Carolina town. And people always say when they ask me now, nowadays people look and they look at me as a Sikha and they go, That must have been horrible. And it shows you where we're at. Certainly, I've had differences with people around us, but I enjoy living in that town.

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My parents still live there and they love their community. Even though- They still live in North Carolina? Yeah, they still live in this small town. They've lived in there for like 45, 50 years. They've been living there. They love this town, and they find that they They have a lot in common with people, even though they're really different than them. They have a lot of the same values with people. They're fundamentally different. They moved there in the '70s. What they taught me growing up at a young age was that you can see all the differences in people, but mostly you have most things in common with most people. You can see your differences as weaknesses or you can see them as strengths. Right now, we live in an environment where differences come across as weaknesses, and we look at them like, Oh, I should be a victim because of my differences. I think that's a mistake. In my own experience, the differences that I have when you are able to see them as strengths have been the reason why I've been able to achieve things. I was able to play in my favorite band growing up, The Thievery Corporation, because I played an obscure drum that I played at the Sikh temple.

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I thought, I wish I could play at the Seek Temple. I thought, I was like, I wish I could with someone. I thought, I almost manifested this opportunity to play with this band. After 9/11, there was so much backlash against Sikh people, and there was a desire to put people in different ways of being represented. That's how I did this fashion modeling then, became the first turban wearing fashion model by just taking a different perspective of how can a difference be a strength. And I think that the way that would be an important skill to teach people, that's a different version of confidence. But that American dream really is alive. The majority of Americans, I saw this thing in the Wall Street Journal the other day, that the majority of Americans think that the American dream is dead. I think that we would be doing Gen Alpha, our own kids, in that next generation, a disservice to believe that. I don't think that's true. The way we can create dreams is by teaching them that they have all of these opportunities. They have the ability to choose the things that are inside of them that are really strong and double down on making those things great.

[00:36:35]

Not looking at those, why are all the things bad? Why is everyone else making me bad? But they can look at things and go, I could do this. I am this thing that I see as a difference. I can double down on that. I think if we invested in strengthening that, what we're calling confidence and self-efficacy and capability from a young age, it can solve so many problems through really mindset training. I think that is the most important thing that we can do. Instead of trying to make everyone the same and fit into a box, I think we should be trying to lean into the differences. That's what makes America great. What makes America great is the idea that we have incredible strengths. I just watched Oppenheimer a couple of days ago, and I realized they bring the best people in the world who are very different together around common problems.

[00:37:30]

Can I just say something also? I think what's important about all of this is that people learn these lessons to later, when they've already had a lot of problems and issues and didn't really work on these very fundamental foundational things to make you go for it or ask for it or do it, right? And so what I really love about everything that you're doing and what we're talking about is because you are literally, when I say you, it's like what we're trying to do is we're trying to prime your brain for your successes in every area of your life early on. So you walk into college, let's say, with self-efficacy and through your junior high. And when you are in this world, you have a shift of how you think of yourself and see yourself and talk to yourself. And you nip it in the bud. You do it early on when your brain is forming and when you do have that ability to prime.

[00:38:38]

You just have to practice it. Look, you see in the startup world, so I come from the startup world, and I come from the performance, the fitness world. But both places say everything you want is on the other side of fear, right?

[00:38:51]

And also of fear, but also doing hard things. I think what the big thing- In failing. I think, yeah, in For sure, failure is basically your entree to success. But I also believe that the way you really build confidence is doing hard things. And when you see you can actually accomplish hard things, it builds your self-efficacy. If you see yourself being competent. I believe there's a big correlation between competence and confidence. If you see yourself as competent, that's what builds confidence. And if you can do things a little Little by little, brick by brick, and that's how you build it. And so when you're building it, when you're starting at a young age, that's why I'm such a huge believer in what this is, is because that's what I feel kids are lacking. Because for whatever reason, Because the parenting, the woke, whatever the reason is, you are now... Instead of focusing on only the problem, you're giving someone a solution. And so it's like, okay, if this is the issue and there is a real decline in confidence and self-esteem and self-efficacy. Here's how we can make it better. And you can make it better by doing this for five minutes a day, 10 minutes a day.

[00:40:10]

I really want to ask you from all the research, what have you seen and what have you seen to be the amount of time necessary? Is it a daily act of training? Do you train daily for confidence? Do you train weekly for confidence? What's the minimum amount of time that you need to do this? What's the maximum amount of time? Give me some parameters here.

[00:40:33]

Yeah. I'll say, first of all, we don't have all the answers. This is a journey that we're just beginning. We're just... We're taping this a week before we're publicly launching the business.

[00:40:44]

Okay, so I'll wait a couple of weeks until we actually- No, but I'll say, but we've been working on for three years, and we've seen in our result, we've been working with this for thousands of families so far.

[00:40:54]

I've been using it with my own family. I don't want to put something out there I don't know works. 90% A ton of people who go through our program and do at least 90 days of activities show a measurable increase in confidence.

[00:41:06]

Okay, first of all, how old are your kids and what's the age that this is really tailored for?

[00:41:11]

Let me just talk about how... Here's how Legends works. It's targeted for families with kids aged 7 to 11. We send families. It's designed for families to do together, so parents and kids. We send five-minute activities or little micro-documentaries, in a way, about a legendary person alongside of an interactive activity that are all based in research around an idea like visualization as a technique to teach self-efficacy. It makes sense? It makes sense.

[00:41:43]

My kids are doing it right now. Well, listen, I just finished saying, I'm obsessed and love everything about this. I think it's not only just brilliant, I think it's necessary and needed. I don't know why anybody would not use this tool when it's available. So it makes sense.

[00:42:02]

Yes, it makes sense to me. So the question you asked was, how often, how long? And there's no, just like we talked about, there's no right answer when it comes to the health care system and personalization and everything else. There's no real right answer, but you want to do it as much as you can. It's probably like working out and eating right. You really want to make it a part of a lifestyle, in my opinion. And the hardest thing isn't deciding whether you want to do Legends, in my opinion. The hardest thing is making it a priority, which is why we try to make it really short. We try to make it... You don't need to do it a lot. But I do think we talked about before the research around just naming and saying people have problems isn't necessarily all that helpful. There's a lot of research coming out that says just naming a bunch of problems can create more problems. But I was watching the Huberman podcast the other day where he's talking about physiology and what the next generation needs to learn. It is important that you're able to understand and be aware when you're facing a conflict or an issue.

[00:43:12]

I think awareness is a big part of it. And then Practically understanding what you're going to do, like I'm going to take a breath, I'm going to say this to myself, is really, really powerful. That is a difficult... It's easy to say and hard to do. It's like eating right every day or getting eight hours of sleep or not thinking about anything while you meditate. Being able to catch how you feel and redirect yourself in a positive way is a piece of training that is hard for adults, so it seems impossible, but it's actually very possible. Plenty of athletes and top performers do it. And it's a thing I think all kids should start. There's no downside to being able to train positive mindset.

[00:43:58]

I also want to say, the I think that I think is really important for anything like this is the idea that you're building a habit, right? And more than anything, it's that when you start doing something over and over again, that in itself yourself, even if you don't do it every day, but you become used to uncomfortable doing that thing where that in itself reminds you in itself, right? Like, oh, because even though I may not... Eating well or you were saying earlier, exercising, it's the fact that after a while, it becomes part of your routine where you just become much more conscientious and conscious of it. So if you have these negative talks or bad ideas or bad concepts or self conceptually or self efficacy or any issue that you may have that may be or not me or a child's having that may take them down the wrong path. It's a good reminder or a rejig that, oh, Oh, wait. I remember doing this, or I saw that, or I was taught that. You're giving your child these really positive feedback or memories or ideas that these things are possible tools for them.

[00:45:16]

You know, one of the things that... Does that make sense? It makes a lot of sense, but one of the unintended, one of the things I didn't realize, probably the most positive aspect, I'd love to hear your take as a customer, but when you We think it's important for kids and parents to do this together because parents have such an incredible impact on outcomes for kids. In fact, I saw the study out of Duke recently around resilience in college students. In the role of a trusted adult is the trust. Having the presence of a trusted adult is one of the top indicators of how resilient a child is. And it's the same thing happens when you think about efficacy in learning. We were like, Okay, this isn't an app that you give to your child. Because most kids at 7-Eleven, very few kids have their own phones and devices that they just do on their own. But when a child and a parent sits down together, they're able to have a conversation together, and they experience it together. We found that kids love it at that age because they don't a lot of time to just be with their parents.

[00:46:33]

We've turned the screen from a bad thing to a good thing. Kids obviously love watching fun, interesting videos about what could be Taylor Swift or. About a hero, but they have a structured conversation with their parent where they're practicing something useful, and they get the positive association of that idea from someone that they really respect and care about. I think it drives learning outcomes in a way that is really positive. And it takes more learning back to the family, which is a really important thing that we're getting, we've gotten away from in the United States, where we It's where so much learning and so much of what your kid learns comes from someone who you don't spend any time with. And driving more and more that learning back home in a productive way is a extremely positive, at least from on a research basis, it's extremely positive in learning outcomes.

[00:47:34]

I understand that as a customer, what I think is also really interesting and really important is spending those... It's actually more like seven or eight minutes, not five minutes. But you learn a lot about where your child is at in their mentally, like how they think, like what they think, what they gravitate to, like where are the first thoughts they're thinking? Or you're watching their their reactions to whatever it is. So I think as a parent, again, this is another reason why I really love it, is not only am I spending that quality time that's one on one, but I'm gaining a lot of really valuable information about how my child thinks, feels in that moment because it is interactive. It asks very, very direct, specific questions, not only to the kid, but to the parent, too. So it says to your kid, what was the last thing that you did that made you feel really good or made you feel this way? When the kid answers the question, you're like, oh, it's sometimes very surprising what they come up with, right? And so I'm saying it's very valuable information. And then it turns it on the parent every time.

[00:48:50]

Still to this day, by the way, I'm on day, I don't know what day, like 91. I don't know what the day is. And it poses the question for the parent. And I'm always baffled. I'm always like, oh. I can only imagine how the kid feels because I'm always thrown off, right?

[00:49:05]

But the kid is always- But you know why that's important? Sorry, not to interrupt you.

[00:49:10]

Go ahead. No, but I was going to say, whenever I normally stay, sometimes my kid will fill it in for me You'd be like, Oh, I know, mom. It's this word that make me... That when you feel this way, you think this, or this is the event, or if I'm saying it, it opens up a dialog into why it was what it was. So like I said, why I love this is, and by the way, this is not a paid endorsement, an ad of any kind. This is legitimately something that I believe is so important for any parent. By the way, even if you're not a parent, this could be great training for confidence for even if you're older to just refresh all these very important things. Because don't forget, children are small adults. We're all the same person.

[00:50:02]

That's what I'm going to say. You don't really raise kids, you raise adults. In the number one influence, statistically, the largest percentage of how they get trained for their self-talk is how your parent talks to you. Essentially, parents are training the voice inside your head. One of the classic ways to erode a child's confidence and how they feel about themselves is to watch a parent treat themselves healths poorly. You know the idea that kids don't do what you say. They do what you do. So in order for you to help your child be a certain way, you have to be a certain way. No one wants to hear that because it's hard work. But that's why you just go on the journey together. And I think that's a net positive outcome, not for the kid, but for the whole family. But that's how you get to drive the learning.

[00:50:59]

I I 100 % agree. But can you give us some more facts? Because I mean, just to that point, just not to belabor it, but that's why my kids are pretty active, right? Because they see me very active. So my daughter's doing... My son, they're walking around the house doing push-ups or they're running around. They got a lot of energy because that's such a deeply important piece of what I do, not just what I say, but what I do. And kids are parents. They mimic, sorry, kids are parrots. They mimic what they see. So that's another thing, right? I really believe it does all start at the home. And what else have you seen from all the research? Are other things that people can do? Forget about the training, self-confidence, but to give kids more self-confidence besides the obvious things, the things that I talk about, obviously, team sports. And that's why I was saying earlier, I love even for whatever reason, the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, it's still very much a feeling of community and team building and socializing. Other than those types of things, show me and tell me other things that we can do to help our kids with our self-esteem and confidence.

[00:52:17]

I'll give you a few things that I've seen. We have obviously hundreds of examples in this program of tactical research-based things that you can practice. I'll give you one for the parent and one for the child or parent-child. There's this National Science Foundation piece of research around the voice in our heads. We have roughly 15 to 60,000 thoughts a day, which is a big range, but like tens of thousands of thoughts a day, of which on average, 80% are negative and 95% are repetitive, which is scary. Who you are is what you're saying to yourself over and over and over again, and a lot of it is really negative. So once you stop to understand that that's your own construct is who you are, and obviously then you can impact your child. So we're taking something out of like, HBR R's research and studies for leaders, for business leaders. What is the right ratio of positive to negative statements when you're trying to foster a strong sense of achievement in a person? We're applying business strategy, leveraging research. They're saying there's no perfect way to be perfect on this. But on average, if you're going to say something negative to your child, it's a good idea to be aware of how often you're saying negative versus positive things.

[00:53:47]

For every negative thing you say, you should try to give five positive pieces of reinforcement. Otherwise, you'll cycle into a place where they're just thinking about the negative thing. It's just a piece of awareness for when you're a parent, you're talking to... You are training your child's voice in their head. It is important that you recognize that. So when you're going to say something negative, which you have to all the time, it's important that you understand that you have an obligation, if you're considering this, to drive the number of positive things, which requires now awareness on you.

[00:54:23]

So you're saying for every negative thing you say, you need to have five positives to make it equal, to to balance it out.

[00:54:31]

There have been a lot of studies conducted on what is the optimal number of positive to negative things in management relationships to create a sense of camaraderie and positivity Because managers have to give negative feedback.

[00:54:47]

So it's not just for children. No, this is for everybody. So the ratio is one to five.

[00:54:53]

Yeah, it can be as high as 15 to one, but it can't be one to one. Because what happens is, based on the the mindset research, they're going to spin the negative thing way more times than the positive thing. And when it comes to a child, you're essentially setting them up to have another hurdle to overcome in their mindset.

[00:55:12]

Makes sense? Yeah, it makes total sense. In fact, actually, I had this conversation. I had a woman on my podcast who is... She had a book called Mind Your Manners, and she's got a Netflix show called the Same Thing, Sarah Janehoe. And in her book, and we talked about this on the podcast, we talked about for For every bad impression you give someone, if you're giving somebody a bad first impression, it will take you eight positive impressions. She says eight is a number to supersede that bad first impression. So the number was one to eight. So you're saying for... Or above. So there's a lot of... I love numbers like that. I think it's very important. I love statistics like that because it gives us a context to where we should be shooting for. Exactly.

[00:56:04]

And then not a statistical tactic, but a very specific tactic that you can do that I actually did, that I learned actually from Serena Williams, from the research on that. So a lot of people ask, and probably in your world as well, when it comes to, do affirmations work? So I'm going to explain how and why affirmations work and a tactical thing you could do. So there are five core ways to build self-efficacy. The first is, and Huberman talks about physiology, the ability to actually remain physically calm is the first thing you need in order to believe that you can actually, as a tool of self-efficacy, If you can't remain calm, you have no real shot of controlling whether you can believe it, you can actually do anything. Then verbal persuasion is an important part of it. That's what an affirmation is. Saying you can do this, I got this. That's a quite relevant thing. Visualization, being able to see it. Then also a mastery experience, like you pointed out, evidence, can I actually do this? Then a vicarious experience, can I see someone else do it? In this case, in an affirmation, Serena Williams changes all her passwords on her computer and her phone to a positive affirmation.

[00:57:24]

She has to reinforce positivity because in tournaments and difficult times, you can get really down on yourself. You really need to train positive mindset. I think that's the simplest hack that you can do that takes two minutes. You could just go in, change your phone, change your password. You can take, turn off face ID, and force yourself to say something. But the key to a good self-affirmation because you- I love that. But the thing is, people do self-affirmations work. There's a ton of research that shows affirmations work really well. They can improve outcomes. They can improve outcomes in school. They can decrease stress levels. There are dozens of studies if you just Google it in this area. But all affirmations aren't made the same. So people misunderstand an affirmation. An affirmation is really a value that you believe about yourself. I am hard working. I am really fortunate. I'm a good parent. These are all very good affirmations. What's a bad affirmation is is something where it's performative. I'm the champion. I am number one. I am the best. Because when you don't win, it destroys your sense of self. Those are terrible affirmations. And another bad affirmation is something that you don't believe because affirmations aren't a good way to convince yourself.

[00:58:54]

Something like, if you don't believe you're good at public speaking, and you're like, I'm a good public speaker, it doesn't help you. So when you realize that, and that's actually one of the things I've found in legends, it's not just learning a tactic, but learning the why behind the tactic for a child or for a parent can be powerful. So you can say something like, I am hardworking. It helps build that sense of self over time. And you put that in your head enough times and it works. And that's not just the science. Serena Williams will tell you that's one of the ways in which Selena Gomez, a number of extremely high performers use this science-back technique regularly.

[00:59:37]

You know how much I love that whole thing. I know. You've told me that before. I'm obsessed with that. I think it's so on the money. So you have to say an affirmation that you actually believe is true. So people have to sometimes dig deep and say, Okay, what is it? What's that one thing I really believe in myself? That really talks to me. That really is me. And that has to be the affirmation versus something that is just arbitrary because otherwise it means nothing. It's arbitrary. And the other thing, as you said earlier, it can't just be these performative, I'm the best, I'm a champion, I'm amazing. There has to be like meat on the bone, basically.

[01:00:17]

You can see how the program then is structured. You start by going, what are things that you believe about yourself and why? Then later on, you have to go, here's how you're going to go about setting yourself up to repeat those things. That's how we move through the progression of levels. So good. And I believe every child, honestly, every person should have to go through those things because those are the skills of the future. I saw this thing. You know who Jensen Wong is? Nvidia? It's the most valuable company in the world now. They make all the AI chips. Yes, I do.

[01:00:50]

And he said a couple of things that I thought were really important.

[01:00:54]

One is, they were like, Oh, would you ever start NVIDIA again? He was like, I would never start a company because it's so hard. Really, it's incredibly difficult. It requires so much belief in yourself. But he said, in the future, it does not matter to learning how to code as a mistake. The things that we're teaching kids now are a mistake because English will be the language. You just will speak. What matters is that you develop mastery in an area because the people who are masters in an area who have really done the hard work in being good in any area that they believe in are the ones who are going to then create the programs of the future. You don't need to learn how to code with AI. As we think about what the future looks like, we want to empower kids with the ability to be their best self, not with trying to teach them arbitrary skills. Our world has fundamentally changed. The skills are critical thinking and reasoning and fitness and confidence. All of those Those types of financial literacy, those are the skills that are going to matter more and more.

[01:02:04]

The skills like algebra. Algebra, I think, is used in less than 5% of jobs and is the number one reason that people drop out of school.

[01:02:14]

Algebra? Really? Yeah.

[01:02:16]

It's like one of the... It's either algebra or calculus.

[01:02:19]

By the way, I wouldn't be surprised because that was my Achilles heel, and it made my life so horrible. I wanted to drop out of school because of it. I'm not surprised, actually.

[01:02:29]

One of It's like one of the major math programs that's a foundation of learning.

[01:02:34]

Oh my God, it's so true.

[01:02:36]

Is rarely used. If you think about it, what does trigonometry mean? If we were sitting here talking about it, people study that in school. No one is using that. We need to be using our time. I think that the world of education is going to massively expand. The skills that we're going to teach is going to massively expand, and it's going to create more specialized, productive of stronger, confident individuals who are going to be able to realize greater things in the future. And I think that is the future path for America. I think that's how the American dream starts getting realized again, where people begin to go, Oh, If you're a creative and you're struggling in spite of... You're successful in spite of school, you go, why would I put my kid in the system? Why wouldn't I be able to help them amplify the things that they're really good at and be able to be great in those areas? Then you use these new technologies to be able to expand upon them.

[01:03:41]

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[01:05:04]

Trust me, you will feel incredible. What is phase two? If the Confidence app is phase one of your grand plan to overtake the world of education and how children are going to be taught, what is phase two?

[01:05:29]

I can to see what's going to happen, and I just want to be... I'm very committed to being a part of making the change. I don't think any one person is going to come along and disrupt the space. I think there's going to be a lot of players that come in. The education industry is a one and a half trillion dollar space today in America. I think it's too small because we think of it as K through 12. And it's really a space where everyone needs to be learning all the time, and they need to be learning many more things. So it needs to be for a broader range of ages, and it needs to expand into a broader degree school.

[01:06:11]

Broader range of ages.

[01:06:12]

Yeah. I think right now, if you think about it, just as us as adults, it's not normal for adults to think that they need to constantly be learning. For some adults, it is. But learning is really a lifelong thing and is really important in a time when everything is changing. We know jobs are going to look different.

[01:06:32]

Oh, I see what you mean. You mean that most people are not into personal growth or constantly, Oh, I see.

[01:06:41]

College is wasted on the young. You go back, you're like, This is what I learned now. It's because we only think of it, we think of credentialing at a certain age. Then we're like, and then you're done. Now you have a job. But really, I think you're going to be learning for a longer period of time, and you'll be learning a broader range of skills. I think, therefore, the The size of the pie is truly trillions and trillions of dollars. Right now, technology is not at the core of any of it. I think of one smart technology that said, A really good way of thinking about any industry is imagining what it would look like if it was started in the age of technology. So here's what we've seen happen in other areas where there have been a a monopoly or a government run institution that they begin to be privatized, which is essentially what school is like today. Let's take transportation. Let's take cabs. You could look at hotels and other spaces like this where a technology driven disruptor comes in. First thing that happens, Netflix. What happens is it's a small company. There's an opportunity for the incumbent to change.

[01:07:57]

Oh, I see what you're saying. So you're saying that this is the beginning of a massive overhaul in a massive industry. Just how Netflix came in as a- Category defining change. By the way, do you remember when Netflix was a red box in the front of a supermarket?

[01:08:15]

Actually, it turns out one of the Netflix cofounders started Redbox.

[01:08:20]

Yeah. Wasn't that Reid or was it the other guy?

[01:08:22]

No, I think it was a different- Mark?

[01:08:23]

I had them on my podcast. Hold on a minute.

[01:08:26]

It wasn't- I can't remember which one it was. I can't remember the story, but yeah, so Redbox was there. But obviously, Blockbuster had an opportunity to buy Netflix, and they're like, whatever. And that was a famous example. A hundred %. That story happens all the time. And it happens the same way every time We all watch the same movie. And for some reason, we think it won't happen. It happened when I was going to India. I went to India. People were like, very smart people were like, no one is going to buy things on the internet in India when I moved to India in 2010.

[01:08:59]

And You moved to India in 2010?

[01:09:02]

Yeah. And I had to start an internet company to start an e-commerce business.

[01:09:06]

You moved to India for it? Yes.

[01:09:08]

I was in India after the fashion modeling thing. It turns out it made me a minor celebrity in India. Really? I'm from the small town of North Carolina. So we went to India to go see. And everyone loved the fact that American brands had put this Indian seat guy as a fashion model, and they didn't want brands from India. But all of the stuff that we were... It was Kenneth Cole. All the products are made in India. That's so funny. And so I thought, what if you just make great products in India that people could feel good about? What does a brand really mean? And we'll sell it online. And that was in the time of fab. Com and guilt group. And people were like, You don't understand. No one buys clothes online in India. That's not what they're going to... They're never going to buy clothes. They're never going to shop online in India. And Obviously, that's not true. Everyone can see that if anything, they would... Of course, they'd want more things online. Just the infrastructure is bad. There's some very solvable reasons. That's a contrarian position based on first principles, which I took, and it's clear that that's how it's going to work.

[01:10:14]

Not because I'm a genius, but because it's obvious. It's common sense.

[01:10:19]

To you. No, yeah.

[01:10:20]

But it's common sense when you think from first principles. Similarly, technology is going to massively change how people learn in a personalized way. It's going to expand the things they're learning. Of course, that's going to happen. When people say that's not going to happen, they are definitely wrong. I don't say that often, but they're definitely wrong. What happens in these category-defining changes, we have this one investor I learned a lot of this from, Mike Maples from Floodgate, first investor in Twitter, Lyft, Okta. He's seen this many times. He's got the just thing on the Midas list in investing. He's telling me about how they look at companies and how they see category-defining changes. There's usually a technology-driven change, and there's some societal change. And those two things, when they overlap, there's this opportunity for big change. So for instance, transportation, the gig economy, Uber and Airbnb happened after the financial crisis, when there weren't enough jobs and people were looking for ways to make money, a societal change. And then for Lyft and Uber, what happened was, it's not like people didn't have that idea before, the technological change was that everybody had a phone with a GPS embedded in it for free.

[01:11:37]

So you see how there's a technological change that mapped to a larger change that made the time is now, right?

[01:11:43]

Yes.

[01:11:44]

Let's talk about that example all the way through. In that example, first, what people were like, who is going to get, and I remember thinking this, who is going to get into a stranger's car? That's not a thing, right? Who's going to let rent out stay in a stranger's house? It's not a thing. The idea is It's missed outright. Then it gets traction, but it operates outside of the system. It's just like an alternative thing. Then what happens is it gets a little bit of traction. People start paying attention and they go, Let me tell you all the reasons that will never be a good business. That's just not going to work. These people don't know what they're doing. They don't have the right experience. Nobody's going to do this. It's just a flash in the pan. Then the thing keeps getting bigger. Years later, the thing gets bigger and bigger. And then the people start paying attention, but they go, it's not as big as we are. They don't have what it takes to get it done. So then they start going when they get just big enough to be a real threat, they start going, you can't trust these people.

[01:12:48]

You can't trust these people. They've got your data. They're bad people. So then these people have climbed up this hill, these founders have climbed up this hill, and then they become demonized. They're untrustworthy, not like the people you've known.

[01:13:03]

And then eventually, they climb over that hill because customers want the product because it's a better alternative.

[01:13:09]

And eventually, the system is forced to change. You could look at the music industry, ride hailing, Airbnb, gig economy. Now, let's take a look at our industry, education. You've got people saying, Okay, that's not a thing. People are not going to learn on their own. There's a million reasons why that's not going to But let's talk about the macro trend. Everybody has had to learn how to use technology because of COVID, which is like a life change. It's a once in a forever thing where everyone had to start by force using technology. It was bad. It was not a good experience, but everyone did it. Some people were like, Oh, I could learn stuff. I could learn on YouTube. I could learn on things like out school. I can learn on all these news types of tools, early adopters. At the same time, AI is just showing up to drive extreme amounts of personalization in how fast we can develop personalized content. So there's the two things that are going to happen right now.

[01:14:12]

Society and technology.

[01:14:13]

We're just in the first stage right now. So we're saying, Okay, here's the way that you can teach kids. People say right now about our own business. They're like, No one is going to do that. That's just not a thing people are going to do. We used to be gone. We go to the Boy Scouts. It's fine. I send my kid to karate and taekwondo. That's where they're going to learn confidence instead of learning it as a direct result. It'll continue to grow, and then people will dismiss it because they're going to say, Well, there's a bigger player. Bigger players, they never take the bait and actually change. Then it gets older. And then one day people will go, these guys have your data. They can't be trusted. We'll go from the small businesses that are on the outside.

[01:14:57]

Like the little engine that could.

[01:14:58]

We'll be the little engine entrepreneur parent parents who could, and then it will get turned into these demons who you can't trust. But you can trust us because we're the system. You've always been with the system, right?

[01:15:09]

That is such a good analogy. It won't work.

[01:15:13]

People continue to get better and better results, ultimately creating a really large opportunity. And that's when the system will start to change. It only works by doing it outside. That's how it works all the time. It's what's going to happen in education. It's a foregone conclusion, but only some people have the conviction to see it. And so we are not the education. We are one part of a broader set of movements where people who are thinking and paying a lot of attention are going, I am increasingly looking for choices outside the system that can give me skills that I need and that I want for my family that are not dictated to me, but I have the choice to learn them on my own. That perception will change, and I think that will create opportunities. That's what's going to happen. I want to participate in that, not because I think it's a good business opportunity, although I think it is. I want to do it because I need that change to happen in my kid's lifetime. Not 10 years from now. My kids are 11 and 9 and 9. I need that to happen before they get to 18.

[01:16:28]

I will be part of that early adopter set. And I hope that other people are interested in participating in whatever way, shape, or form that might be.

[01:16:36]

Our kids are exactly the same age, just by the way. But I love that way you described it. And that's such a truism in what's happened in- Music. Look at Spotify. In life, in everything. When iTunes took over the record, it made the record labels obsolete. And now Spotify made iTunes obsolete. This is what happens.

[01:17:02]

Streaming video, like movie production.

[01:17:05]

Or Netflix, or Blockbuster. I mean, all of it in every major industry or corner of life, there is something that ends up being the new way of doing it, where the other thing becomes completely obsolete.

[01:17:20]

I think Nike should run schools. I think you'll see it's possible that smart, giant private companies would begin to move into the education space. Companies that could do it are Nike because Nike is interesting because they believe everybody could be really good. They take the thesis. A lot of new education programs use the idea of coaches and guides versus teachers.

[01:17:45]

First of all, IMG runs a school. Img runs- It makes sense. Right? It's not so far fetched to think that Nike will run a school.

[01:17:57]

People would send their kids to a Nike school.

[01:17:59]

First of all, not Not only that, Nike is probably one of the biggest, I think there's a relationship between... Well, actually, maybe not. But Nike has some affiliation with IMG, or at least their athletes, at least the athletes.

[01:18:11]

I have a back of the envelope plan. If I was Nike, for what I would do to go about driving that path because you have an ultra high margin adjacenty that's all about mindset and performance and bringing out the best in yourself. And ultimately, Nike believes that everyone who has a body is an athlete. Just like We believe that everyone who's born has something that they're good at. It's a very obvious... Google could be in the school business. Youtube, over half of kids in Gen Alpha and Gen Z go to YouTube as their first source of learning.

[01:18:46]

Not only that, now when we were kids, it used to be when they say, What do you want to be when you grow up? But it was like, Oh, a doctor, a teacher, a dancer. Now people are like, I want to be a YouTube influencer.

[01:18:57]

It's the number one thing that people want to be.

[01:18:58]

It's the number one That's the thing that kids or young people want to do now when they grow up is being a YouTube influencer or Instagram influencer. That's the number one thing.

[01:19:07]

But I don't think that's why they should run it. I think why they should run it.

[01:19:10]

No, I don't think that's why they should run it. But I think that's a clear indication of where we're going in life is what I'm saying.

[01:19:18]

Yeah, and I think that that's going to continue to change. So I think that you're going to see the potential for smart, innovative companies to develop new life-skilling programs that are direct to consumer. I don't know if that's going to happen because some of those companies are so big that's not their space. And the people are being disrupted. We're asking to change our schools. I can tell you what I do know for sure is that schools aren't going to change in this way in time for our kids because they're not even designed to do this. They're designed to teach one set of things, the common core, to kids one way.

[01:19:56]

Well, I'll also say one other thing that is difficult about the the IMG schools, right? I mean, yeah, do they take scholarships? Yeah, there's some scholarships given out. But usually it's people who have some type of exceptional ability in either tennis or golf or basketball or a sport. And by the way, they're expensive. These are private schools. Most people in the world can't afford $50,000 a year for school. It's a private school. And when you go into the school system there, at the end of the day, because I have a a very close friend's kid who's there, they're still doing the same curriculum that you would get at a different school. They're still doing math, English, all the other things. But you're also playing a lot of sports. You also are doing a lot of mindset activities. You're doing a lot of exercising. So they do incorporate a lot of things. But at the core level, you're still learning what other schools are still learning. But the problem really becomes down to price. It becomes you're making it for only the elite of the elite can actually go to these schools.

[01:20:59]

That's why I'm saying, look, what does technology do? What does it do? It makes your experiences easier, faster, or cheaper. That's really if you think about a technology project. It does one or hopefully all of those things. Our program, for example, is 10 bucks a month. The function that you're solving for, that's a curricular program. It's a piece of content that you're developing. The costs of schools are high, and you People need almost like a daycare function for their kids. I wouldn't be surprised if you begin to see microschools associated with offices. That's another pretty straightforward prediction I see happening in the evolution where people go in and they go, We're going to build a microschool here that's private that uses digital tools to reduce down the costs of the number of staff that needs to be involved. I bet you could cut efficacy. I bet you could cut cost in half of schools, and you could drive efficacy up 2X through using technology more effectively. Honestly, there are schools that do this right now. There are schools in Austin is a great example of a place where there are over 200 microschools in Austin doing some really innovative things.

[01:22:18]

They can do 2X, 3X learning using digital tools. I think you'll begin to see more and more of those types of programs proliferating around the country. It's the beginning of what I think will be change that will benefit people, not just at the top of the pyramid. What really happens is you benefit people who don't have access. You'll find them being early adopters. I've seen that a lot of people I talk to, they say, Oh, I'll turn And education is only for the elite, and homeschool is only for people who think about fringe tendencies. But I've talked to people. I talked to my Amazon delivery driver and I had a conversation the other day. And I was asking him what he was going to do for the Super and he goes, I'm not watching the Super Bowl. He goes, I don't really care. I'm working on an education app for my kid. Couldn't believe this. He said, The system failed me, and it's going to fail my kids. He's from a small town outside of Oakland. He spent half his time growing up in a pretty rough part of California and half the time in Jamaica.

[01:23:22]

He said, It's going to fail me. It failed me. It's going to fail my kids. So I just going to learn how to teach my kids. He taught a son algebra when he was four years old. His son has 85,000 followers on Instagram. He's like, I'm not stupid, even though everyone says that treat me like I'm supposed to be. You see people from all walks of life who are like, I could just... If the system won't serve them, They will find ways and find tools to get there on their own. It's a really diverse group of people that are looking for this. We just don't hear those stories enough. One of the things I want to do is raise those stories up because I think that when people see that they have opportunities and they have choice, going back to what I think about where the world is going to go, and they're armed with tools where they can develop confidence in their own abilities, you'll see the American dream begin to be realized more and more.

[01:24:15]

Wow. So the Amazon driver was telling you this, that he was creating an education app. Why don't you guys partner together?

[01:24:23]

I'm talking to him on Thursday. I'm actually going to do this with him when I get back on Thursday, because I don't believe that it's an accident that we started talking, and I don't believe that I'm special. I believe these opportunities exist everywhere that we look. We just don't believe those things anymore. But that is the root of America and the world that we live in. Do you see what I'm saying? That's the root of the whole place.

[01:24:54]

What made you even ask him the question in the first place? You know what?

[01:24:57]

He said, he He told me, because I did talk to him the other day before, and I was like, We need to go back and record all of this so I can help share your story. He said, I don't even like to drive in this job. It hurts. It's really hard on me. He goes, But asking for money when you're like me, and if it doesn't work out, people are going to think I stole their money. So I'm going to earn the money myself. And he goes, If I have to do this job, I might as well talk to people while I'm doing it. So he talked to me, and I I said, and I made my kids listen. I go, That is quite the life skill, my friend, because you just opened up an opportunity for us to- First of all, that is what I love about this entire story because, A, he's taking the initiative, doing it himself, self-efficacy.

[01:25:47]

But more than that, you got to throw it out there. You got to put yourself in those situations. You never know unless you ask, what's the worst that can happen?

[01:25:54]

It's like being bold. He was- Yeah.

[01:25:56]

Being bold. What's the worst that can happen? You never know unless you put it out there.

[01:26:00]

But we don't talk to our neighbors anymore. We don't talk to... People would say, You don't talk to your Amazon driver. Why not? Why wouldn't you talk to your Amazon driver? In fact, turns out, even though from different places, we look different, we're exactly the same. We're literally working on education apps for kids, and we're going to hang out on Thursday. And most people would be like, You can't do that. And the question is, of course you're supposed to do that. It's a framing thing. And I think that the more we do that, the more opportunity in merges in our communities. And that, I believe, is an important part for what happens in the future. Oh, my God.

[01:26:34]

I love that so much. You're going to go out with the Amazon driver. Of all the people that he struck up conversation with is the person who literally is trying to revamp education as we speak.

[01:26:47]

But think about how we met, right? I didn't know you before you started using the program. And then I was like, Oh, the things that you say on the podcast are very in line with the things that I believe, right? And so we're able to have this conversation. No, I agree. Not because it's a business transaction. It's because we're two parents who care about what happens to our kids in the future. I happen to have one way of doing it. You happen to have another way. We could put those things together and start thinking about how can we collectively start making change for our collective families.

[01:27:23]

I love that, Sunny. It's a great way to end this podcast. And also, again, you end being friends with or work with people that you have common interests to. And so the commonality there. And you never know who you're going to have common interests with, but those are the people you end up gravitating to. Wow, I love that Amazon story. Can you let me know what happens after Thursday? Yeah, I will. That's so good. Sunny, I love that you came on this podcast. You guys, the app or the platform, I don't care what the word is. It's called Build Legends. It is extraordinary. And I want to be able to give people some way of of trying a demo out. Can we give it away to somebody? Give it a code or anything?

[01:28:05]

Yeah. So we can set up a code.

[01:28:07]

We'll set up a code. If you have kids, I highly recommend you guys attempting giving it a try. Try it for a week two weeks, three weeks, and see for yourself how extraordinary it is. By the way, and like I said earlier in this episode, it doesn't even matter if you have kids. Try it for yourself. If you need a boost in confidence, self-esteem, and just to see out of curiosity how it works, you should try it yourself. This is the wave of the future. I love what you're doing. I love how your brain works. I love how thoughtful you are of how you perceive and move through the world doing extraordinary things for the future. And I'm very honored that you came on the podcast. I'm honored that I work with you, that I know you, and I'm just excited to see what else, how it evolves. So that is That's all I have to say. Would you like to finish with anything?

[01:29:03]

Thanks for having me. I'm excited. No, I'm excited to see how it goes. I think that the feeling is mutual. I think that there are a lot of people who collectively are working on how we can make the world a better place. I think that a lot of times we use that in a really simplistic way. But one of the best things to do is to start at home. We can't wait for a system to change or someone else to solve our problems.

[01:29:29]

Could not agree you more. Thank you, Sunny, for being here. Bye, everybody. Have a great day or evening or whenever you're listening to this. Bye. This episode is brought to you by the Yap Media Podcast Network. I'm Paula Taha, CEO of the award-winning Digital Media Empire, Yap Media, and host of Yap, Young and Profiting Podcast, a number one entrepreneurship and self-improvement podcast where you can listen, learn, and profit. On Young and Profiting podcast, I interview the brightest minds in the world, and I turn their wisdom into actionable advice that you can use in your daily life. Each week, we dive into a new topic like the art of side hustles, How to Level Up Your Influence and Persuasion and Goal Setting. I interview A-list guests on Young and Profiting. I've got the best guests, like the world's number one negotiation expert, Chris Voss, Shark, Damon John, serial entrepreneurs, Alex and Leila Hormozy, and even movie stars like Matthew McConahe. There's absolutely no fluff on my podcast, and that's on purpose. Every episode is jam-packed with advice that's going to push your life forward. I do my research, I get straight to the point, and I take things really seriously, which is why I'm known as the podcast Princess, and how I became one of the top podcasters in the world in less than five years.

[01:30:52]

Young and Profiting podcast is for all ages. Don't let the name fool you. It's an advanced show. As long as you want to learn and level up, you will be forever young. So join podcast royalty and subscribe to Young and Profiting podcast or YAP, like it's often called by my YAP fam on Apple, Spotify, Castbox, or wherever you listen to your podcast.