4 Signs That Your Child Should Break Out of College (DF#173)

Ryan Maruyama [00:00:00]:
College is the worst place to find yourself. A lot of people are saying, well, I'm going to have my child go to college because that is where they're going to develop as a person. That is where they're going to meet new people. That's where they're going to meet people that think differently than they do. College is the worst place to do all of those things. Mainly because none of that is true. Also, because you're paying for the privilege of doing it and you're paying a lot of money to do it. Aloha folks, and welcome back to degree free.

Ryan Maruyama [00:00:31]:
We are super excited to have you back today. We have a couple of things. We are going to go over the signs that your child should break out of college. And we are going to talk about a story that I had when I was a teenager and something that I wish that my parents and the people around me had helped with at that age. And so hopefully you can take some lessons away from that experience. Let's start with the signs that your child should break out of college.

Hannah Maruyama [00:00:57]:
This is something I have wanted to talk about on this podcast for a long time, because kind of similar to your story that you're going to tell you on the podcast is something that I wish my parents had seen and had encouraged me. And then not only that, but also been equipped to help me figure out and navigate after they realized it, but they just didn't. And that's okay because we are here today to break this down for parents who are wondering what to do now. Many parents who have their young adults in the launch program have their young adults in the launch program because they hated college. And this is more speaking to the 18 to 20 year olds who do come into the program after they've gone to community college, trade school, or a 4 year college that's just not working out. And usually the reasons that they give us are very similar, no matter where they're from in the country. Geographically, it's pretty crazy to see the exact same things come out of parents' mouths from Maine to New Mexico, Florida, to South Dakota, to Texas, all over the country. It's the same story.

Hannah Maruyama [00:01:58]:
And of these, and I've taken notes when I've talked to a lot of parents and I've realized that there are 4 very distinct signs that your child should not be in college.

Ryan Maruyama [00:02:07]:
I would say that these four signs aren't exhaustive, obviously.

Hannah Maruyama [00:02:11]:
Yeah. These are definitely not exhaustive, but these are the same reoccurring ones you and I see over and over and over again. So the first one is if they come to you and they ask if they can take a gap year, that one's pretty obvious. They want to leave. It's a very clear sign that college is not a fit for their goals, for their personality, or just in general, it's not a good fit. The big thing here is that there are no other places in life that we force young adults to stay against their will while putting them in bankruptcy exempt debt. It's very odd that when they express the desire not to be there, people say no stay, even as they're sinking deeper into debt. And we just say, no, no, no.

Hannah Maruyama [00:02:52]:
You just stay there, figure it out. And we don't listen. And a lot of times I've noticed that parents will admit that they just didn't listen when they asked them this the first time and they made them stay for another year, as opposed to just listening the first time they said, please, can I take a gap year? I don't know what I'm doing. I'm not sure why I'm here or literally is not a good fit for me. And I want to take a gap year to do something else really specific.

Ryan Maruyama [00:03:14]:
Hey there. I hope you're enjoying this episode of the degree free podcast. At degree free, we want to help everyone thrive and succeed without needing a college degree. And the only way to truly reach everyone is with your help. If you're getting value out of this episode, or if this is your 2nd, 3rd, or 4th episode that you're tuning into, if you could just ship this to a friend, just click that one button and share it with someone in your contacts or on your stories. It would mean the world to us. And more importantly, get our message out to more people who need help getting out of their current situation. If you could do that right now, that would mean a whole lot.

Ryan Maruyama [00:03:51]:
The closest thing that I can think of where we force young adults to do something they don't want to do is something like sports or extracurricular activities. But in that scenario, you're not going into bankruptcy exempt debt. And that's just the majority of people. Obviously, if they are not taking on student loans, then the calculation is different, but you are still forcing them to do something that they don't wanna do. Before we get more into the other things, I did wanna say for majority, if not all of the parents out there that want their children to go to college, it all stems from a good place. You just want what's best for them. And every parent does. You just want what's best for your child.

Ryan Maruyama [00:04:33]:
And you think that going to college and buying a degree is the way that you're going to do that. If you're listening to this podcast and you're already questioning that notion, and if they're overtly telling you to have a gap year, Then they're already overtly telling you, Hey, I don't want to be there right now. What I find with the gap year is that for most people, they are coming to you with at least another plan. It might not be a great plan. It might be a, not be a plan that you like, but it is a plan because what's the alternative to saying, oh, I'm done. And the verbiage that they use and we don't use this, but they say I'm going to drop out of college and it's really not a negative thing. It's good. If you don't want to be there, you shouldn't be there.

Ryan Maruyama [00:05:12]:
You shouldn't spend time and you shouldn't spend your money in college. If you don't want to be there, they will always take your money at a later date. They can always go back. It's always there for them. It's a business. They're going to take your money.

Hannah Maruyama [00:05:23]:
On that note. I actually just saw a post from a founder on LinkedIn who had founded a tech company, a software as a service company. He had posted about how he had dropped out of college. But then in the next sentence, he just explained that he went to go build his business. And it was so interesting to see that language because he talked about how he was ashamed of dropping out and how his parents pressured him to stay. And I thought what an interesting frame that was when you lack the degree free language. He very clearly didn't drop out of college. He broke out of college and then built something successful to the point where now he just got 3rd seed round funding or something like that.

Hannah Maruyama [00:05:57]:
He's doing very well in his startup. I think he has 30 people working for him. So he's done pretty well. And he's young. He's like 27 years old. It was very interesting because it's that frame is so sticky and really the people who can change that frame are parents. They can get in between all of this college marketing, this targeted, these young adults to force them to buy and to just push them into purchasing. And they can stand in the way of that and give their children the room they need to decide what the next move is without the pressure of the debt.

Hannah Maruyama [00:06:28]:
And that is actually the point I have under here, which is have a clear talk about what their plan is because a gap year by itself is not a plan. I know what a lot of parents are really worried about is they're worried about the gap year turning into just them never going back, but you have to be okay with the fact that whatever their definition of success is may not involve them purchasing a degree. And what we need to want as a society is for our young people to get the lives that they want. It's not to have them have a piece of paper that they bought from a college that now forces them to make other decisions in their life that do not line up with what they want. That is not success. Success is them getting what they want. The second point is that they're having to go find or create their own study material. This is such a clear sign that your child does not need to be on a college campus.

Hannah Maruyama [00:07:14]:
If they are not being taught subjects that they are interested in, they are using their free time on campus while they are digging themselves into debt to curate their own curriculum. I saw this with a young man that I worked with in the launch program who was 19, extremely passionate about self education, would read massive books about electromagnetic currents a week. And he was not being taught any of those things. He was burning his time. He was burning his energy. He obviously did not need to be there. And the biggest waste here is their energy because they're going into debt for classes that are unnecessary. And when you have that amount of desire to learn something else, it's a waste.

Hannah Maruyama [00:07:50]:
Help them get their own place, get roommates, have them come home and work on whatever they're working on, but have a plan again. If you are worried about them losing momentum, have a plan and then make sure that they understand they're responsible for executing the plan, or they have to be on their own and they're going to have to do that. Don't you think it's interesting that parents will spend $104 to $156,000 for a piece of paper from a college, but they won't pay a specialized instructor $15,000 a year to teach their child to become amazing at something. They won't find someone who's good at it and then pay them to train their child. Instead, they'll just go into debt for something that has no result, low or negative ROI, and they won't pay somebody who's really good at something they'll pay people who are mediocre or who have never been successful at the thing that they are paying their child and putting them into to learn?

Ryan Maruyama [00:08:40]:
Well, I think there's a couple of things there. One, the financing to spend $104,000 $156,000 is set up for them so they can spend all of that without ever putting any money down. And all they have to do is just sign on the dotted line and they just continue to borrow. So while they are spending that money for majority of people, it's not cash, it's debt. And the debt vehicles are there so that it's readily available. All they have to do is just sign and you get it. Boom done. And then you also get more money to pay for your lifestyle and stuff like that.

Ryan Maruyama [00:09:12]:
Whereas the other things, if you go to like the private business, let's just take our business. For example, if you want to go to the launch program, we don't have bankruptcy exempt loans backing our business. So you, as the customer have to have the money to shop with us, you have to have the credit, you have to have the cash, whatever it is that you're trying to vet. So that's one, it's the availability of funding. The second part is the vetting process. This is just my experience, which is for most of these parents and these young adults, they don't think that far ahead. They don't think that deep into it. And because it's okay, well, I'm going to pay the college and they don't even think of it as a purchase.

Ryan Maruyama [00:09:50]:
My child is going to go to college because that's what you do because that credential means that you are ready for whatever your goal is. On the other side, that credential buying that piece of paper makes you ready for the next thing. They haven't done the homework to vet whether or not that statement is true. There's that whole vetting process. So if you've already outsourced your thinking or rather if you've already made up your mind, then how are you ever going to get to the process or to the point where you then have to vet all of these other different educational options? Let's say that you aren't set on it. Now you actually have to vet all of these educational options, which is a pain. I know that it's hard to do because this is literally what we do for living. It's a pain.

Ryan Maruyama [00:10:30]:
You've got stuff to do. They've got stuff to do who has time to go and call all of these different options and figure out which one is the best for their goals. And then at the same time, how do we know that we can trust these people? How do we know that what they've curated their curriculum is correct? So it's really muddy. It's so much easier. The system is built so that you could just go to college. You trust that colleges and that piece of paper is going to get you to wherever it is that you want to go. And the whole system is set up so that you can just slide right down it.

Hannah Maruyama [00:11:01]:
It's not that we don't know that. And I do know that, but what's so hard for me to reconcile is the fact that the sheer amount of money, even if you don't use financing, even if you just save and you pay cash for something, let's say you do finance something and you pay a larger monthly amount in order to get your child $15,000 technical bootcamp or something like that for software development. It's amazing to me how much cheaper that debt is than the student loan debt and also not permanent. And it could be rolled up in bankruptcy theoretically. And it really is amazing the stranglehold that it has because they're willing to spend 15 times as much as they would spend on something that's going to get a better result for their child in education for their career vocation. And it seems like it just doesn't occur to people and we know it's difficult, but it's so worth it because of the pain that it would save families in the long run, because it's not worth $15. It's very much not worth a $100,000 which is what people are paying on average.

Ryan Maruyama [00:11:56]:
And then just one last point to add on there, just to tack on the, at the end, this is definitely true. Although people might not want to admit it, which is there is the status that is involved with your child going to college or going to do whatever program that they're doing, because then you, as a parent can say, oh, my kid is at X, Y, and Z university. Is that duke or is that UCLA? You can say that, but the alternative is, oh, well, they're doing this bootcamp thing that isn't as recognized that isn't widely accepted as the norm for people to do. We've just had enough of these conversations that we know that that's real. No matter how much people want to pretend that that's

Hannah Maruyama [00:12:37]:
irresponsibility of the debt, which is high time as a society that we flipped that because it is ridiculous and you should shame people whose kids are like, oh, they don't know what they're going to do, but they're going to go to Vanderbilt. What, why would you do that to your child? That's insane. Especially when these people are not people who are rich and they're quite literally going to put their family in a position where it is going to break them financially.

Ryan Maruyama [00:12:59]:
We'll also recognize that not everybody's forcing their kids to go to college, but I mean, this episode is not for people that are forcing them to go to college, but the young adults that feel that familial pressure. When you hear these four things come out of your child's mouth, maybe giving you a little bit of an opportunity to at least, is it one of these four things that my child is saying? And should I key in a little bit more and maybe put my bias aside for me wanting them to be there and us have a discussion on like, what do you want your life to look like?

Hannah Maruyama [00:13:29]:
Yeah, because those parents are the ones who are the most amazing to me that are able to let go of that. And even though it's scary to them and they just go, this is the best thing for my child to understand how much they're spending and then to give them back basically control over their educational future. And I will say when you brought up the familial thing, it just brought up another thought. When we talk to these parents, and I think you've probably noticed this too, but a lot of times it's not even parents. It's usually grandparents or aunts and uncles pressuring the parents to send the child to college or shaming them if they don't. I've noticed that's really common too. So if you are feeling that just feel empowered as a parent to shrug those people off because it's not their money and it's not their child's money, and it's not their house that you're going to have to take a HELOC out on. It's not their retirement.

Hannah Maruyama [00:14:13]:
You're going to have to liquidate to pay off those loans. And so just feel a sense of ownership and stewardship over the amount of money that your child is about to spend to learn a skill when they are not even going to learn a skill and how you can take back agency over what they're going to put their effort into. And you can help them be really effective at learning what they want to learn. That leads into my 3rd point, which is if your child is bored at college, that is a very clear sign that they should not be there. This is the key phrase. Why am I taking these classes? Why do I have to sit through this? If they're saying this, they should not be in a college campus. It's a waste of their time. It's a waste of their energy.

Hannah Maruyama [00:14:48]:
It's a waste of their brain. You have raised a child who is an out of the box thinker. They need more intensive instruction. Their current potential is being wasted. It's being burned up these precious free, healthy years, where they have this energy and they want to learn and they're not crystalized yet. And if you get them into the right position to learn from the right person or in the right program, they can excel so much. It will be amazing to watch and you have the ability to shift that for them instead of watching them get burned out, frustrated and bored by in quotes education, you can help them find an instructor or a mentor or an entry level job, or even a specialized education program where they are excited. Imagine that they're excited.

Hannah Maruyama [00:15:31]:
They can't wait to get up and go do whatever that is because they're learning something that is their choice that works for them and you can help them do that.

Ryan Maruyama [00:15:40]:
They're bored. That is the symptom. That's what they say. For me, the cause is because they don't know why they're there. As you were saying, there's just no clear line and there's no clear logic that they've found that makes sense to them. Why am I here? What am I directly learning in these classes or throughout these semesters that is going to help me reach my goals? And so what a lot of times happens, you get the degree and then the degree helps you, and then you rationalize it away. But then that means I just have to sit here and take And I just have to get A's or get C's, get degrees or get all A's whichever one and just get through it and just getting through it. And equates to boredom.

Ryan Maruyama [00:16:18]:
Most of the time, the source of that is because they don't know why they're there. To be honest, if you don't know why you're there, you shouldn't be there. College is the worst place to find yourself. A lot of people are saying, well, I'm going to have my child go to college because that is where they're going to develop as a person. That is where they're going to meet new people. That's where they're going to meet people that think differently than they do. College is the worst place to do all of those things, mainly because none of that is true also because you're paying for the privilege of doing it and you're paying a lot of money to do it. It makes no sense where you could do all of those things is just working and your finances go literally the other way.

Ryan Maruyama [00:16:57]:
College is the worst place to be. If you have no idea what you want to do. If your child has no idea of what they want to do, they need to not be in college. They need to be out.

Hannah Maruyama [00:17:08]:
When you talk about that, that is one of the things we see often. And it's usually people who are super papered and then just go, oh, that's where you get critical thinking and responsibility. And this is where you learn to be an adult. And this is where you learn how to be insert all of these things, where they quite literally just describe aging. You're describing getting a job and moving out of your parents' house. If that's applicable, you're describing going from the age 18 to the age 22, just because you were going into debt on a college campus has nothing to do with the fact that you grew up by 4 years. And in fact, if most people are really honest, they know that a 22 year old college student is miles less mature than your 22 year old degree free kid who has been working. It's just true.

Hannah Maruyama [00:17:53]:
If I put my own sister, my sister is a structural welder right out of high school. She works a few different jobs and then went to paid on the job welding training. She now out earns the median master's degree holder. If you had put her up against another 22 year old at the same time, it would have been laughable because she was paying her own bills. She had an actual skill. She was budgeting her money. She was living on her own paying rent because of the way college is structured fundamentally and it vandalizes you because it puts you in basically a bubble with people who are exactly like you and Kellogg at Northwestern has done this and people should take this this as gospel truth, because if you believe in colleges, you would believe that this survey was right. And for Kellogg to find this and report, it means it's probably even worse than this, but they said that college students have less cross cultural, less cross race and less cross class interactions than they would in the wild because they are with people who are exactly the same as them.

Hannah Maruyama [00:18:47]:
And because colleges largely filter for people from the same socioeconomic bracket. So you're not exposed to diversity. You're not learning about the world. You're not learning how to be with people who are different than you. Different ages is another thing that I think is really not factored in here at all. If you turn 18 and you go into the workforce, you're with people who are different ages than you, which is also a huge contributor to diversity because they had very different life experiences from you. That's something that I experienced when I went into the workforce. When I was 18, I've been working since I was 16, but full time at 18 and everybody was much older than me.

Hannah Maruyama [00:19:19]:
And that taught me a lot of things.

Ryan Maruyama [00:19:21]:
When I met people at work, I was 21 years old and I think I had just graduated college or I was just maybe my last semester in college or so. And I found my roommate through work. I was 21. He was 42 years old and he was double my age. That is diversity. And I didn't find that at college because at college, I was with a whole bunch of other 20 year olds, 17 year olds. But at work, I found something to do that was 42 years old. About the infantilizing, I hear what you're saying about the college bubble and being with people that you're like.

Ryan Maruyama [00:19:53]:
I think that was more about like you just not being exposed to different people and not so much about infantilizing. Really what it is, it's just not real. It's just a manufactured world. You are living literally off of borrowed time. You are borrowing from your future self, from your future work and from your future effort. And you're pulling all of that to the present and you are living on it right now. There are very few circumstances in which you can do that at that level. And it has everything to do with that water slide that they've created for you to make it super easy to go into bankruptcy, exempt debt at 17 years old.

Ryan Maruyama [00:20:31]:
There's no other loan that you could possibly get with 0 money down that you're not sure when you have to pay it off at those rates that's guaranteed and you can do it for 5 figures, let alone some places, 6 figures. You can get these loans written to you with no income, no job. That's crazy. You can never do that at any other point in your life. That right there, it is a manufactured world. You don't live in the real world just by definition, because nobody does that. If you do that in the real world, well, those payments start immediately. Those payments that you start, like you go to your credit card and you max out your credit card and you go open another one, you maxed that out.

Ryan Maruyama [00:21:11]:
Okay. Now you're going to the personal lines. You max those out. You go to the bank across the street. You get it from there. Eventually you go down to your loan shark and you borrow money from Rocco. If you don't pay Rocko, he's going to come kick your cap. That's how it happens right away.

Ryan Maruyama [00:21:22]:
That money is due to those people. Eventually they're not going to lend to you anymore. Well, he can just say that he's bankrupt and all of this money goes away. He can just claim bankruptcy. And then all of this that I am owed just absolutely disappears. So I'm just not going to lend him money anymore. And then the well will dry up eventually. It's called rock bottom.

Ryan Maruyama [00:21:41]:
Probably it will happen, but if you go to college, there is no rock bottom. You keep digging. It's called a master's degree. It's called a second master's degree. It's called a PhD. It's called a double PhD. You name it.

Hannah Maruyama [00:21:54]:
To call it a water slide is actually really insightful on your, because this is what I've been trying to relate. And it's occurring to me now, parents, if you really look, oh, college is going to teach my child all of these adult qualities, responsibility, and blah, blah, blah. No, they have removed every single roadblock. They have made the path so smooth for your child to walk onto campus and stay there for 10 years. That is what they want. The minute that your child leaves, they lose a customer. The longer they keep them, the longer they stay, the more degrees they upsell them, the more bankruptcy exempt loan debt that they can put your child in and keep on their college accounts. It's like Starbucks.

Hannah Maruyama [00:22:29]:
They hold your child's money. People always say, oh, the colleges don't do that. Yes, they do. That's why they have student accounts. It's so they can hold your child's money basically in escrow. That's how they do this. But that's what happens, and they have made it so easy. They have made it so that your child can stay a child who will continue to do that without realizing that it's a bad idea.

Hannah Maruyama [00:22:48]:
It's a path that leads to nowhere. I saw a comment section on a video on TikTok where a girl was saying, so am I understanding correctly that if I don't want to pay my loans, I can just keep going. And that was such a good example of how they have made this a primrose path that you can just walk down, but you can never walk back up because it's bankruptcy exempt. It's a one way road. The comments on real. There was one I'd probably never forget. They said that their colleague was 65 before they got cut off from student loans. They finally just said, we can't lend you any more money.

Hannah Maruyama [00:23:20]:
And now their balance is like $800,000 and people do not realize that this is happening all of the time. People are just trying to kick the can down the road because then they don't have to deal with the repercussions of all the loan debt and it's child's mindset because when they started, they were a child.

Ryan Maruyama [00:23:38]:
Rock bottom doesn't exist and you just keep digging.

Hannah Maruyama [00:23:41]:
And they want you to. Anyway, my final point is that if your child tells you that they hate being on a college campus, this is something that I really wanted to bring up because a lot of parents don't know. And this brings up that Scott Galloway talk that I cannot stand where he talks about how the US is ruining young people's future. And then everything that he cites essentially is a direct result of the academic system. That's so predatory on our young people.

Ryan Maruyama [00:24:05]:
And the solution is to then

Hannah Maruyama [00:24:07]:
Give him more money and make him a public employee and give the colleges everybody's name.

Ryan Maruyama [00:24:10]:
Just give the colleges more money

Hannah Maruyama [00:24:12]:
for being predatory and corrupt.

Ryan Maruyama [00:24:13]:
But make it free to the people, which still gives the colleges more money

Hannah Maruyama [00:24:17]:
free, which is actually, they're going to charge us way more for a way less superior product that they're going to give to everybody, I guess, which so that's great. But anyway, in the end of it, and it's so convenient how he does this, but he just cites suicide rates and he cites eating disorder rates. What he fails to mention very conveniently is that college students are more depressed than other young adults. They do commit suicide at a higher rate and they have more eating disorders, which is one of the most fatal mental disorders that you can have. And they have done that. And he very conveniently left out. All of those things tend to skyrocket when you put them on a college campus. And so if your child is telling you they're unhappy, they're telling you they're miserable.

Hannah Maruyama [00:24:55]:
They're calling you crying. And this is common. It is not a failure on their part. The system is designed to do that to them. All they want to do is take your child, squeeze every dime out of them and then throw them by the wayside. They don't care about the result of their life. They don't care about the debt that they're putting them in. They don't care if they're unhappy.

Hannah Maruyama [00:25:13]:
They just need them to stay on campus and they think that you will make them stay even if they hate it. So as parents, if your child's saying I'm miserable, I hate this. I'm so stressed out. I can't stand this. I'm lonely. I miss my friends. I miss home. I miss you.

Hannah Maruyama [00:25:30]:
Let them come home. And this is not a weakness. This is another thing too. Like, I really want to drill home on this because this is really common. It is not weak of your child to say that they are unhappy in a system, in an institution that is fundamentally not designed for their good. That is okay. And it is fine for them to miss their home, their family, their town, and to want to come home because they don't actually feel like pretending that the campus behavior and the campus culture is something worth staying for. It is okay.

Hannah Maruyama [00:26:02]:
Don't make them do that. Let them come home, help them find roommates, help them live with a sibling and help them find a new career plan, a new vocational plan, a new educational plan to learn something practical that they are excited to learn about in an environment and in a way that they want to learn it. We have full control over that. We don't have to stay on college campuses in order to learn things. And that is so empowering.

Ryan Maruyama [00:26:25]:
Yeah. So for me, this is the opposite, or maybe it's complimentary to the bored one when I was saying like, okay, I'm bored. And that is a symptom of being, I don't know why I'm here. I feel when the young adults say, I hate it here, that type of language. It's exactly the opposite. It's not like they're questioning anymore. They've figured out that they don't need to be there anymore. Obviously I'm taking massive liberties by just painting with a very, very broad brush, but this is just my experience here.

Ryan Maruyama [00:26:55]:
If I'm bored is a symptom of questioning why you're there and really just like, I hate it here is a symptom of questioning it. And then getting on the other side of that question and being like, I shouldn't be here because this doesn't fit my goals. This isn't what I want. And for social reasons or for professional reasons, for personal reasons and professional reasons, whatever it is, this is not how I want to live my life because this is not how I want to live my life. I hate it. If I were saying these things, I would wish that the people that I were saying this to would think one thing deeper because obviously if they're having these conversations with you, it's not just as surface level as I'm bored or I hate it here. I mean, it could be, but it's probably not.

Hannah Maruyama [00:27:38]:
That's how it sometimes starts. The last point I want to make is that as parents, and I know this is hard, but let go of the idea that finishing a degree is a good use of time, money, and energy, and the freest healthiest years of your child's life. If they don't want to do it and it doesn't serve their goals, Help them make a plan and decide what they're going to do next. If they're going to use 1 of the 5 degree free pathways and get a job, fine on the job training or apprenticeship or in a license or certification, if they're going to build or buy a local business, or if they're going to learn a specific skill to either go get a job or to build a business or to learn a lot, earn a license or certification. There are so many options and the world opens up when they are not forced into one very narrow pathway that does not serve them. And it's amazing to see what happens when they are free of that.

Ryan Maruyama [00:28:28]:
Just to do a quick review before I get into my point. So the 4 things to look out for is they ask you if they can take a gap year to do something else, they are having to go find or create their own study material and curate their own knowledge. Like they're already educating themselves outside of the college system. They're bored. Once again, I'll interject and say, I think that is a symptom of asking and questioning why they're there and not having a really good answer. And then the 4th one is if they tell you that they hate being there. And I think that that's a symptom of asking the question and then having an answer, which is I shouldn't be here and I am still here and I hate it. That is the 4.

Ryan Maruyama [00:29:03]:
Now I wanted to switch gears and I wanted to talk about something that I have been thinking about lately because we help 16 to 20 year olds in our degree free launch program, the degree free way. That is how to help your 16 to 20 year old build the life they want. That is a workbook set. Can get it at degreefree.coforward/book that walks 16 to 20 year olds and their parents through the process of finding 3 jobs that meet their life goals and deciding whether or not they need a degree for those 3 jobs. I've been thinking about child labor, I guess.

Hannah Maruyama [00:29:33]:
Perfect. They yearn for the minds.

Ryan Maruyama [00:29:34]:
Right. Right. Exactly. And for those long time listeners, you know, that I've talked about this before. And so I'm just going to go back and talk about it, which is when I was 16 years old, I remember it was like the 1st week of work or so that my dad picked me up from work. I still didn't drive, but I was a dishwasher at a local fast food restaurant. And I was upset because I couldn't pick up more hours due to my age limit. Basically, I had an hour restriction that I could not work.

Ryan Maruyama [00:30:04]:
So I couldn't pick up the shift and make more money. I remember getting in the car and just telling my dad, man, there was a shift. I don't have anything going on. My homework's done. I could stay and I could work this shift. I could work that extra 8 hours and make the money. And I remember complaining about that to my dad. And I don't remember exactly what he said, but I remember the feeling that I got from it, which is basically, it was like, that's how it is.

Ryan Maruyama [00:30:26]:
Or it was something like the laws are there to protect you. One of those things that

Hannah Maruyama [00:30:29]:
you didn't want to hear.

Ryan Maruyama [00:30:30]:
Exactly. I think that might've been his actual opinion, but I also think that he was just listening to a 16 year old son, just like complain about another thing. And he was just being dismissive. I'm not sure if that was his opinion or not. I'm leaning more on the dismissive side.

Hannah Maruyama [00:30:47]:
Just chill and do your homework.

Ryan Maruyama [00:30:48]:
Yeah.

Hannah Maruyama [00:30:48]:
Just stop.

Ryan Maruyama [00:30:50]:
1, just a quick aside about the child labor laws. Because I was thinking about it recently.

Hannah Maruyama [00:30:54]:
Is that something you think about often child labor? Because I do. I think about it all the time. So many theories.

Ryan Maruyama [00:30:59]:
I do think about it a lot and I'm going to get to why I think about it a lot. And so anyway, I chat GPT this. I didn't fact check this at all.

Hannah Maruyama [00:31:07]:
Thank you for the transparency.

Ryan Maruyama [00:31:09]:
Yeah. So I'm not sure if this is true, but this is according to chat GPT 16 to 17 year olds federally. There are no federal hour restrictions. I didn't know that. I thought that federally, that there were hour restrictions, but although it says that some states have hour restrictions that you can and can't work, but for 14 15, there are restrictions and there's a bunch of them. I'm not going to read it here because I don't know if this is true or not. I was thinking back and I was like, well, I could have swore that I was restricted in that, in the hours. So maybe I was 15 and a half then not 16.

Hannah Maruyama [00:31:43]:
This is interesting. Cause I started working at 15 and a half. I started bagging groceries at a grocery store because that was as soon as they let me work. And I do see here that I definitely worked more than this and I definitely worked longer than these hours. But what I will say is that the 16 to 17, I knew that was true because I was a hostess and a waitress at a restaurant during that time. Those are fairly long shifts that I would work.

Ryan Maruyama [00:32:05]:
Anyway, the whole point of this is that instead of my dad either agreeing with it or just dismissing it, instead of him doing that, what I wish that he had done is I wish that I was offered an alternative to my problem or a solution to my problem. If that makes sense. The thing that I was complaining about was that I was restricted. It wasn't that I was a hard worker, quite the opposite. It was that I couldn't work as hard as I wanted to, due to whatever the labor laws were. I wish that someone had told me that's just how it is. If you don't like it, then you have to figure out something else that goes around those rules, or that puts you outside of that category so that you don't have to follow those rules. You and I have talked about it before the child actors are really interesting one because child acting have standards and everything like that.

Ryan Maruyama [00:32:55]:
But for these types of things, not nearly as strict. They work a lot and nothing stops them because basically the whole point is that they're in a different category. I wish that somebody had heard me complain about that and say, okay, well, you can't complain about this because you put yourself in this category. If you actually want a solution to your problem, then find work, find something that can put you outside of this category. And so child acting is one of them. One of the simplest ones. And so if you don't want to be an actor is starting a business and just being an entrepreneur from that young, because there aren't any stipulations on how long or how much effort you can work. It's just that the pay is not guaranteed, but nobody can tell you that you can't work a 100 hours a week.

Ryan Maruyama [00:33:36]:
If you want to work a 100 hours a week, if you're self employed.

Hannah Maruyama [00:33:39]:
Correct. And that's true. Even if they're this age.

Ryan Maruyama [00:33:40]:
And so how is this relevant to anybody's life? Basically, it's looking at what your young adult is complaining about and thinking about what the actual problem is getting to the core of the problem. And then thinking of a quote out of the box solution instead of just accepting whatever it is that they're saying instead of looking like, that's just how it is, man. The hours restriction is there to protect you so that you don't fall behind in school, whatever, whatever you think, but okay, well, what is he complaining about? Well, he's just complaining about the hours. How do we get around that? And I think a greater point to this is just honing in and being a little bit more observant of the different things that they're either complaining about or interested in. So like another arm of this would be something that they're interested in. And so for me, an example in my own life was that from a young age, maybe a little bit towards maybe 5th, 6th grade to all the way to like 8th grade, which for a kid for like 3 years, that's all pretty long time. I always had a camera in my hand. I would go through a disposable camera 1 a week.

Ryan Maruyama [00:34:42]:
It was insane. It got to the point that people would be giving me disposable cameras or I would save all my birthday money or Christmas money and I would buy disposable cameras with it, or I would buy the development of those cameras. So I would go take it to the drugstore and get it developed and stuff. So for me, nobody told me, you know, there's like a job where you could literally take photos and do that as a career.

Hannah Maruyama [00:35:11]:
And there's no hourly restrictions on it.

Ryan Maruyama [00:35:12]:
Well, nobody told me that it's not like I didn't have a skill or, and it's not like I didn't have a quote passion or an interest. I did. And it was a skillset that I could have honed. There's nobody kind of connected the 2 of like, Hey, you can go do that. And you're complaining about this, but this was later in life. I'm 8th grade and 16 years old now, but this was a little bit later in life. I still mess around with cameras a little bit, but not nearly as much because I'm a teenager now. And I didn't have a digital camera and I didn't have a computer, which has ended up being the problem going a little bit on a tangent here.

Ryan Maruyama [00:35:40]:
A lot of people in my life, super supportive of it, actually, just not as like a career or never really got me there. But one of the things that stopped me from taking it any more seriously was the lack of equipment and the lack of gear. I couldn't keep doing disposable cameras. And I mean, I could have switched to film that's for sure. I just didn't have a film camera. And then somebody did give me a digital camera as well, but I didn't have the computer to do anything with it. I couldn't take the SD card out or I don't even think it was SD cards at the time. It was flash cards, whatever they're called.

Ryan Maruyama [00:36:12]:
And I couldn't see the photos. And there's like a little screen on it there on the camera. And you know how they were really, really tiny back in the day. I mean, that's just another thing that I think if I had known that, Hey, what you need now is you need a computer to then put these on there so that you can look at them. And then there's this thing you can use to edit these photos. Somebody had a little bit more knowledge about those types of things. They would have been able to help support me and help get me to the next level. The reason why that's actually relevant is because I ended up later in my twenties doing professional photography work.

Ryan Maruyama [00:36:48]:
I picked up gig work and I would never paid all of my bills with photography. I have picked up enough gigs to know that I didn't want to do it back then. I either could have figured out that I didn't want to do it earlier and cross it out as a possible career, or maybe the reason why I didn't want to do it because I wasn't skilled enough at it. And I didn't have the years of experience that I would have had had I started 10 years before. Anyway, really it's just honing in on what your child is saying. And if they're complaining about something like getting to the problem of what that is and then coming up with a out of the box quote solution to that problem. And then secondary to that, I wasn't really planning on talking about it, but it was if they have interest in something, getting them to do it first.

Hannah Maruyama [00:37:34]:
So they can try it that way. They don't spend 4 years or five and a half years and six figures figuring out that they don't actually like it. That's exactly right. Yeah. Just trying it. Derisk the experimenting.

Ryan Maruyama [00:37:44]:
And I think that's pretty much it. For the show notes for everybody, degreefree.coforward/podcast. Until next week, aloha.