Interviewing Skills, Content Creation, and Why Revisiting Goals is Essential for Effective Decisions (DF#158)

Hannah Maruyama [00:00:00]:
Because if you know where you're trying to go, the decisions along the road get much simpler. They do not get easier, but they do get simpler and they get more clear. If you're trying to get to a certain place and you can go right or left and left lead you to your goal and right does not, then it does not make sense for you to choose the right side of the road because that's not going to lead you to the goal if it is to the left.

Ryan Maruyama [00:00:24]:
Aloha folks and welcome back to degree free. We are super excited to have you back. I am really looking forward to this week's episode because as I promised last week, we are going to get into you being an interviewer. I was going to say a podcaster, but you've been a podcaster for a little bit 3 years, apparently. And yeah, I'm very excited to get into today's episode. We'll see where this verbal dressing down.

Hannah Maruyama [00:00:53]:
Excellent. I love a lecture.

Ryan Maruyama [00:00:57]:
Publicly.

Hannah Maruyama [00:00:59]:
Especially in front of 100 or thousands of other people. Yeah. Hit me with your best shot.

Ryan Maruyama [00:01:06]:
For those that are new to the podcast or for even for those that are old, I guess, if you look back through our podcast history, I would say, I don't know exactly how many episodes there was, but there was like 80 plus episodes or so where it was just you and me, you and I, we would sit down together and whatever the studio was at the time. And we would talk about degree free things and how people can help their children or themselves get degree free jobs, degree free work and how to help them live the life they want. Then I started taking guests and I started taking guests. I did that for the majority of the guests that we've had for all of the guests we had until recently. And you've had 2 guests so far that have been on the podcast feed so far, and then you have another guest that's coming out soon. Then I wanted to just kind of get your thoughts on how did it go? How do I want to do this? How do I do this?

Hannah Maruyama [00:02:04]:
He's been so excited about this episode. You guys, it's crazy. He's like, I got so many notes.

Ryan Maruyama [00:02:09]:
No, no. Good question. How did it go? I want to hear how you thought it went.

Hannah Maruyama [00:02:14]:
No. I want to hear you say it. I

Ryan Maruyama [00:02:15]:
want to hear you say it.

Hannah Maruyama [00:02:17]:
So I think that the guests did phenomenal. I think that I have a lot of reps that I need to get in in order to be an effective interviewer, especially to be as effective as you are. I have a lot of questions. I'm very curious about things, but I am not great at linear storytelling because I'm curious about what they did in the sense that I want to know the specifics of what they did and how they did it. But I don't necessarily care about the order for myself because I will piece together the picture, but that's not useful when you're trying to help someone else tell their story to someone who hasn't already been introduced to them. And so that's the thing that I need to work on and get better at because the guest did great. I think with the interviewer that they were given. I think that I need to improve significantly, especially my last one, which was Joe Kowalski.

Hannah Maruyama [00:03:10]:
I definitely have some practice that I need to get in to get because he had so much to say that was so valuable. And I feel like I could have given him the opportunity to tell his even more of his story in an even deeper fashion. But I ran into my lack of experience as an interviewer, knowing how to what questions to ask at the right points in order to get that story out of them. Plus, I just get so excited because it's so cool to be talking to them that I kinda trip over my feet as an interviewer too. That's definitely something that when I was listening back, I could hear, oh, I was really excited at this point, but I didn't necessarily get to the meat of whatever it was because I was so interested. And in the next thing that they were going to say to.

Ryan Maruyama [00:03:49]:
So for those listening, if you have listened to every recent episode and you're like, who is Joe Kowalski? Where is that episode? That episode isn't released yet. You did the interview, but it is not released yet. We're still finalizing that episode. It should be the next episode after this one. I just wanted to ask you that because yeah, it's a new skillset or it's a new venture for you being an interviewer and not the interviewee. So the reason why we're having this conversation is because having wanting to interview these people or prior to you actually interviewing these people, you looked at my interview styles, you looked at the interviews that I've done, and then you said, oh, you do a good job, but I think that I could do it better. Or I think I can do it differently. And I think you did also mean better as well.

Ryan Maruyama [00:04:40]:
Like you didn't say better, but you did mean it. And I said, okay, cool. Like, so what's your idea? And you, your idea was that, oh, I'm just going to ask them whatever the amount of questions is. Let's just say it's 10 questions just for the ease of 13. Sure.

Hannah Maruyama [00:04:54]:
Yeah.

Ryan Maruyama [00:04:54]:
And so it's I'm just gonna ask each individual person 13 questions. I'm not gonna do any prep or I'm not gonna do any whatever.

Hannah Maruyama [00:05:03]:
I do some, I do read

Ryan Maruyama [00:05:03]:
about this. Is not what you said to me.

Hannah Maruyama [00:05:05]:
Yeah, you're right.

Ryan Maruyama [00:05:05]:
You said I'm not gonna do any prep. The reason why we're doing this, I'll back up. The reason why we said this is because I haven't, haven't taken a guess in a while. And the reason why I haven't taken a guess in a while is because I've been busy writing and trying to finish production on this right here for everybody watching the YouTube, the degree free way, how to help your 16 to 20 year old build the life they want. This book right here and the accompanying this workbook set, these 2, I have been working full full time for, like, full time plus on trying to get these out.

Hannah Maruyama [00:05:38]:
It's a worse subscription. Yeah. Yeah. Subscriptions nobody wants. Yeah. Right. Overtime plus.

Ryan Maruyama [00:05:48]:
Yeah. No. Thank you.

Hannah Maruyama [00:05:50]:
Sorry. Go ahead.

Ryan Maruyama [00:05:51]:
And because of that, I have just been absolutely swamped and I feel like I don't have the time to prepare for the people that I'm interviewing because it takes me a lot of time to prepare. It takes me hours and hours and hours to prepare. And that's literally just to prepare for the interview. That's not including the time that it takes me to schedule the actual time for them, for me to do their reach out, for me to do the scheduling, for me to tell them, here's how it works when you come on the degree for your podcast. And then for me to do the hours and hours and hours and hours of interview prep that I do to have them on the podcast and you were like, that doesn't make sense. You're spending too much time on the interview prep and we should just take guests. Like you're doing it wrong, basically. I'm summing up, You're not correcting me.

Ryan Maruyama [00:06:44]:
So I think that's fair. And I think that I can do it better by just asking these 13 questions, 12345678, so on and so forth. And to your credit, if you had done that, and if you do that, I know there are a bunch of YouTube channels. There are a bunch of podcasters that do something very similar. And the reason why they do it is because of the reason that you said at the beginning, one, it doesn't take a lot of brainpower. It takes brainpower at the very beginning usually, which is what are the questions that my audience cares about that they want to know and how

Hannah Maruyama [00:07:20]:
can I get those answers?

Ryan Maruyama [00:07:21]:
And so you do the brain power or you do the brain work at the very beginning before you even think about the questions, Then you think about the questions and you write them down and you put them in whatever order. And, but then that's the work is all front loaded. It's all done. The second reason why you do that is because from a production standpoint, it's very interesting. And it's very easy to understand from an audience perspective. If you were to take question 1 from this interviewer, from this interviewee, and then you were able to cut that up and make a compilation video of just question 1, for example, just to make this real question, one would be is like, how much money do you make as a degree free insert the blank? And you would say, and then you can cut up the clip saying, this is how much a degree free, whatever makes, and then cut the video could be degree free salaries, whatever, from a production standpoint, it makes a lot of sense because it's multi use and you can use it in a whole bunch of different ways. And it's easy to cut up from like a conversation perspective. Those are difficult to do.

Ryan Maruyama [00:08:22]:
And I know this from experience because you're just going through and just asking.

Hannah Maruyama [00:08:28]:
You're choosing the answer, not the story.

Ryan Maruyama [00:08:30]:
Or he's talking, he's like, what is your pay? And then he says, well, at the very beginning, whatever, whatever, whatever. At the very beginning, I started as a janitor. And then I worked my way up to the supervisor of a janitor role. And then I realized like as a supervisor, I can do all of these different things. Like, I'm actually doing all the ordering and everything like that. There's an inventory system here. Then I was like, wait. I can do this inventory stuff.

Ryan Maruyama [00:08:53]:
And so then I went and I was a parts manager at an aircraft hangar. And then I realized, wait a minute, I can do this aviation stuff. And then boom, boom, boom. And then he's like, yeah. So now I make $300,000 a year doing this. And then now your second question is whatever you have already written down here. So what is typical question be then? Like a prepared question.

Hannah Maruyama [00:09:14]:
What did you decide to do after high school?

Ryan Maruyama [00:09:16]:
So then you would then just completely Not take any of those nuggets that he gives you, or they give you whoever it is. He, she, you're not gonna take any of the nuggets they give you. And then you're just going to stop them right there.

Hannah Maruyama [00:09:27]:
And that's the next question.

Ryan Maruyama [00:09:28]:
And then ask the next question.

Hannah Maruyama [00:09:29]:
Right.

Ryan Maruyama [00:09:29]:
Is that really the conversation that you Hannah Maruyama want to have?

Hannah Maruyama [00:09:35]:
Yeah. And I don't know yet. I'm working on on the format and the flow and obviously I have quite a bit of work to do.

Ryan Maruyama [00:09:40]:
And that's what I told you when you came to me just doing this. And I said, I literally said, I don't think this is a good idea because you're literally just going to be a robot. Like, why are you there? Like literally why are you there? If you're just going to ask question 1, 2, 3, 4 to 13, they can just do that in a Google form. I understand why. So everybody else can hear the argument that we're having.

Hannah Maruyama [00:09:58]:
Yeah. It's not really an argument.

Ryan Maruyama [00:09:59]:
Just a live discussion. I asked Ryan a while ago. We have waited we have waited to have this discussion.

Hannah Maruyama [00:10:04]:
He's been ready to have this out in public in front of all of you. You're getting a peek into something that we did try. So oftentimes I will say, hey, we should do this. And then Ryan goes, okay, we can do that. I don't think we should. And then I'll just say, no, no, no. We should do it. And then Ryan will say, okay.

Hannah Maruyama [00:10:22]:
I don't think we should, but I'll do it. And then he'll help me or completely build whatever the ideas. And then sometimes it doesn't work. Sometimes it does work really well, but sometimes it does not. This was one of those times where I said, hey, I think we should build a one way interview for people so they can answer these questions. It would help to raise awareness. It would help to raise awareness of different types of jobs that you can get degree free, which is something that a lot of people have said before they really wish we could do because we get people all the time say, oh, I'm degree free. And I do this.

Hannah Maruyama [00:10:51]:
I just had one the other day after the librarian that's I'm a school librarian, I'm degree free. I was like, I would love to get her answers to those questions, but it's difficult to do that at scale with a lot of people. And if people could do it one way, that'd be great, but it's to do unless you have somebody there doing it. So that's kind of why I started doing the interviews this way because Ryan said, okay, fine. You can have it, do it on the podcast. So this is my version of starting to try to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to improve the format and test it a little bit more, or or if I'm going to go more into your style because your style is very well thought out and it gets good results.

Ryan Maruyama [00:11:26]:
For me, the reason why I do my style is absolutely selfish. I try to have the conversation that I want to have. If I'm titillated by this conversation,

Hannah Maruyama [00:11:36]:
That's a hilarious. That's a hilarious word. Are you a Victorian child?

Ryan Maruyama [00:11:40]:
But, you know,

Hannah Maruyama [00:11:48]:
I'm so sorry. Continue. I'm so sorry. 10 points for that one. 10 points to Gryffindor.

Ryan Maruyama [00:11:54]:
If I'm having a good conversation with somebody, I think that the listener will also enjoy being in the room of me having a good conversation with somebody. And I think that people listen to this right now, they also want to hear what I have to ask and what we're talking about. That is the reason why I do it. And then really, I want them interviewee. I want the person that I'm interviewing to just be like, wow, that was a good interview. We just had a conversation that we just talked. And also you were super prepared. You knew things that I didn't think that you knew.

Ryan Maruyama [00:12:28]:
And we could go deeper more quickly due to me being prepared, due to me doing my research, due to the fact that, like, okay. Well, I don't really know anything about whatever it is. Let's just say, like, Drake Porter. He came on the podcast a couple of times. The reason why he hasn't been on the podcast is I haven't had time to prepare for a 3rd episode, although he is willing to come on and we will have another one soon. But for him, when he came on like product management, I myself at the time, I didn't even know what product management was. I had a vague idea of what it was, but I had to do a whole lot of research to be prepared for that interview, just of like what his freaking job is, which you and I have pointed out is the problem for a lot of people just in general, like from parents, from adults that are, like, job seekers of themselves, and then young adults who are trying to get into the workforce for the first time. The problem a lot of the times, and I know because we help a lot of people, but really because I've had this problem myself, is the lack of job awareness, is the lack of vocational creativity.

Ryan Maruyama [00:13:31]:
And if you don't know what jobs are out there, well, then you don't know what jobs are out there. Super simple, like no shit. But like, if you only know 6 to 8 jobs, then those are the 6 to 8 jobs that you're going to go pursue because you can't pursue anything else because you don't know that the job exists. Let's say you work at a bar and you start as a bar back, and then you get up to a bartender. You work at daytime shifts where all the deliveries come in and you meet these guys that come in and they give you deliveries and you're like, oh, interesting. That's a job. What do you do? Oh, I'm a distributor. I'm a rep.

Ryan Maruyama [00:14:05]:
I'm a sales rep for X, Y, and Z. Here's a bunch of free product. Oh, okay. That's a job. You might fall into it that way. And you might become a rep, a distributor or sales rep for the company later, which is a very common path for bartenders. It starts with being aware that job exists for me. If I don't know what the job is, I have to do a lot of preparation.

Ryan Maruyama [00:14:27]:
Well, here's what the job is. Then I go into what the other person is, but then I have to do research of like who the person is and their background. And for us, we aren't having, and this is no shade on our guests. I think this is a really positive thing for our podcast is we're not having on the most prominent people in the world. Like, we're not having on Steve Jobs. I mean, I know his dad, but, you know, we're not having

Hannah Maruyama [00:14:49]:
Well, there would be some podcast episodes.

Ryan Maruyama [00:14:52]:
We're not having Joe Rogan or Mark Zuckerberg on this podcast.

Hannah Maruyama [00:14:55]:
Or mister Beast just yet. We will, though. Not yet. We're gonna get them.

Ryan Maruyama [00:14:58]:
Not yet. So to prepare, I have to go even deeper because these people aren't necessarily that prominent. It takes me a little bit more time to be a little bit more prepared. So I respect their time. And then I respect your time, the listener, because I did my preparation to have a, what I think is going to be a good conversation. What I hope you as a listener think is a good conversation as well. I've listened to the podcasts that you've done. My criticism is that you did a good job.

Hannah Maruyama [00:15:23]:
My appreciation for your skill in doing it, I already had, but it's definitely increased having tried to do it myself and knowing as I was doing it, that I was not nearly as good as you are at it. And that I have a lot of work to do to get to that level.

Ryan Maruyama [00:15:36]:
Well, that's just reps.

Hannah Maruyama [00:15:38]:
Yeah. But still though, it's a skill though. It's a skill that you've honed over years. And I now have to put in years to be as talented as you are at it. It's so funny. We get comments all the time. Like people love to do that when they disagree with us. Like, oh, you're just a podcaster.

Hannah Maruyama [00:15:51]:
I'm like, which I mean, kind of not at all. Because the thing I know, but to be a podcaster, you have to get paid to podcast. We're not professional podcasters because we do this for fun. We do this for the love. We don't get paid for this podcast. So it's funny for them to be like, oh, here's the podcaster. I'm like, I wish I was a paid podcaster. I'm not.

Hannah Maruyama [00:16:11]:
But thank you, sir.

Ryan Maruyama [00:16:12]:
That reminds me of the Tim Dillon joke from one of his specials. I think it's on one of his Netflix specials or whatever. And it is about Hillary Clinton.

Hannah Maruyama [00:16:24]:
I'm already laughing because it's Tim Dillon talking about that ends in National treasure. He's so funny.

Ryan Maruyama [00:16:29]:
And it was about, oh, she is basically on top of the world running for president and whatever. And then like 6 months later, she's just like, she's a podcaster. She's like

Hannah Maruyama [00:16:40]:
running ads for stamps.com. We have the same job. So all of you are saying you're just a podcaster. I have the same job as Hillary Clinton. Yeah. Okay? The only difference is that I'd love to read this ads for stamps.com. Yeah. I just do this for free.

Ryan Maruyama [00:16:59]:
I did want to to make this useful to people and not just addressing town, which I think that this framework or what we've talked about so far is useful for anybody who is thinking about starting their own content creation thing. And especially, I think the younger that you do it, I think that the better and the time practice, but I think with where we're going, and this is just my prediction, I could be completely wrong. Probably am. I'm just a idiot with a mic. And But just a podcaster. Yeah. Just a podcaster.

Hannah Maruyama [00:17:29]:
Just like Hilary Clinton.

Ryan Maruyama [00:17:30]:
I think where we're going is we are all going to have to be content creators or we are all going to have to be differentiated in some way. And right now, currently, at least in my mind, I don't know any other way to outwardly differentiate yourself or your child to differentiate themselves other than making content. I'm doing things in public. It's something that we've talked about before. Years ago is what we used to called it, which is doing things in public. If you don't like the whole content creation thing, like, I'm not a content creator. Okay. That's fine.

Ryan Maruyama [00:18:01]:
Like, just do things and then Work

Hannah Maruyama [00:18:03]:
where other people can see it.

Ryan Maruyama [00:18:04]:
Just do things and then just talk about the things that you're doing. That's a little bit easier instead of like these 2 huge words put together saying content creation. How do I do that? If you're seeing in your child like a little entrepreneurial spirit, they have like their own Roblox server or, and they are trying, they're selling little add ons to whatever, or they're trying to get their Chrome extension off the ground or something like that. What they could be doing is they just document the process of trying to get that out into the world and you can do it on whatever platform that makes sense to them and whatever platform is easiest to them at the time. You don't have to do a whole market analysis and be like, who is your target market and where are they and stuff like that? Is that useful? Yeah, Yeah, probably. Are you going to see a better lift because of that? Probably. Well, I'm an Instagram user or I'm a Tik TOK user or I'm on LinkedIn or whatever. I'm on Reddit, wherever they are already just start creating content there and just start talking about what they're doing there.

Ryan Maruyama [00:19:02]:
And there's many ways of doing that. Podcasting is one of them. And I think podcasting, as I've said before, 3 years ago, when we started this podcast, I think podcasting is a great, great way to get started. It is a lot of fricking work though. I mean, it is by far the hardest thing that you and I do week in and week out. Like you said, we don't make any money from this. This thing is just a labor of love, for sure. If you're listening to this episode, this episode ends up being 45 minutes to an hour.

Ryan Maruyama [00:19:31]:
It took 8 x, 10 x that amount of man hours to get an hour episode. And that's every week. It's very difficult, but it pays dividends in the long run. At least I think it will for your young adult or for yourself, even if you're thinking about the content creation process and what I wanted to talk to you about our listeners as well, when listening to your episodes and telling you at the beginning, when you were like, I'm just going to, I'm not going to prepare. And I'm just going to ask every single guest 1, 2, 3, all the way down to 13 in the same exact way without taking any regard of what they say. Basically not asking any follow-up questions, pulling any threads that are interesting. It made me think about when you and I first started making content and the moniker or the saying that has been widely used. And if you're listening to this, you might have even heard it, especially if you're in marketing.

Ryan Maruyama [00:20:22]:
In content, there is this matrix or there is this saying that all content should do one of 3 things. It should entertain, educate, or inspire. And then there's like another matrix that says like like a full 4 quadrant matrix that says like entertain, educate, inspire, convince. I'm not super convinced that there's a difference between convincing and inspiring.

Hannah Maruyama [00:20:46]:
Feel like those are the same convincing could be not necessarily an inspiration, but you could convince someone that something is true or something is right or something is good or bad, I guess, via marketing without inspiring them.

Ryan Maruyama [00:20:56]:
I'm not convinced.

Hannah Maruyama [00:20:57]:
Mercy. We're having fun today.

Ryan Maruyama [00:21:04]:
But, anyway, there's this saying, and it's really overused. I actually tried to track down who said it first, and it's, like, one of those things that just I'm not sure. I spent 20 minutes trying to Google this thing.

Hannah Maruyama [00:21:16]:
That's actually a long time to spend Google.

Ryan Maruyama [00:21:18]:
It's a lot. It's actually, I got to the 4th page of Google, read everything. And I was like, none of the places went back to like one person that said it, but I'm not sure.

Hannah Maruyama [00:21:29]:
It's one of those where you trace it back and you're looking at, like, quotes.com and there's, like, 4 people with the same quote attributed to them. Wayne Gretzky, Michael Scott.

Ryan Maruyama [00:21:35]:
I wanna say it was Ben Franklin. Sure. So I will.

Hannah Maruyama [00:21:37]:
That did said a lot of things.

Ryan Maruyama [00:21:39]:
Yeah. I have heard that before. And when I used to take that at face value, I said, oh, yeah, it has to do one of those three things. Well, which one are we trying to do when we're creating this content? Like any content in general, whether it be a blog post or whether it be a podcast episode, a TikTok, you name it, YouTube video, which one does it need to be entertain, educate, inspire? And then I really thought about it and I was thinking really in my mind, the content creation process is really linear actually. And in my mind, it starts with entertain. It has to be entertaining for you to watch it or for you to read it or for you to consume it for you to spend any amount of time of your day to read this thing. The pushback that I get from that is medical journal or like an economics paper or something like that. Like those aren't super entertaining.

Ryan Maruyama [00:22:27]:
They inform though. That's exactly right. Those pretty much primarily educate as somebody who has read a bunch of those things, they still have to be entertaining as well. There has to be a clear reason of why you're writing it and why as the reader, I'm going to spend my valuable time.

Hannah Maruyama [00:22:42]:
It's in the abstract. What is this about?

Ryan Maruyama [00:22:44]:
Right. Exactly. It still has to entertain. It still has to because otherwise the point of this sentence, the one that you're reading right now is to get you to the next sentence. Right. And so you have to be entertaining enough to get them to the next sentence. And this is my belief. And then the next thing is if it is entertaining and some things can just stop at entertaining, there doesn't need to go to a next phase to some ideas that come to mind as far as things that just entertain are like TikTok dances.

Ryan Maruyama [00:23:11]:
I mean, maybe those can educate and inspire to make people dancers or something like that, or maybe make great music because they're dancing to or something like that. But TikTok dances or some things of that nature, like just pure entertainment, no real value other than that. And then I think the next phase, if you can entertain is educate then since you're entertaining them, now you have the opportunity to educate them. Educating them is something like an economics paper probably. Whereas just telling you, here you go. Here's a bunch of facts. Or when we do our episodes of 10 states that'll pay you to move there to work remote or something like that. I am entertaining you.

Ryan Maruyama [00:23:51]:
But I'm also informing you. But I'm also educating you.

Hannah Maruyama [00:23:53]:
And I also might be inspiring you to move to one of the states.

Ryan Maruyama [00:23:55]:
Yes, exactly.

Hannah Maruyama [00:23:56]:
But we're not necessarily convincing you to do so.

Ryan Maruyama [00:23:58]:
And then if you can entertain and then you can educate them, your content could right there stop. It could just be entertaining and it's entertaining enough. It's holds your attention enough to get you to the next second or the next sentence enough to educate you. And then it could just stop right there. And there's like, wow, that was great. What a great read. And then I'm not going to do anything with it.

Hannah Maruyama [00:24:19]:
But you realize that this content is you convincing me that convincing is not part of the matrix. You realize that right?

Ryan Maruyama [00:24:25]:
I'm inspiring you to do better.

Hannah Maruyama [00:24:29]:
You succeeded.

Ryan Maruyama [00:24:30]:
And then after you educate them, then you can inspire them. You have to be entertaining, then you have to educate and to get to inspiration, you have to have done both of those things. Does that make sense?

Hannah Maruyama [00:24:41]:
Yeah, it does perfect sense.

Ryan Maruyama [00:24:43]:
To inspire people, they have to understand, and they have to be educated about the thing that you're trying to tell them. I want you to jump off a bridge. Why?

Hannah Maruyama [00:24:50]:
Because it's hot outside and the water's cold.

Ryan Maruyama [00:24:52]:
Yeah. Well, there's a fire behind us and it was like, okay. Well, yeah,

Hannah Maruyama [00:24:55]:
you That's educational. Yeah.

Ryan Maruyama [00:24:56]:
You've educated me.

Hannah Maruyama [00:24:58]:
I'm gonna jump first. Now I'm inspired.

Ryan Maruyama [00:24:59]:
Yeah. You've inspired me.

Hannah Maruyama [00:25:03]:
Anyway, on this episode of the degree podcast, we tell people to jump off bridges.

Ryan Maruyama [00:25:07]:
That framework is what I thought about when you were telling me about this 13 questions is I thought, was it okay? I think it might be entertaining and it might educate. I hope it inspires, but I'm not sure at the same time.

Hannah Maruyama [00:25:19]:
I think maybe what I'm going to try to do is I'm going to do a more long form prep interview. And at the end, I'll ask them if they want to do a rapid fire and answer the questions like that. So it's a sum up that way we can have both for people. We can help people discover different job options because we can cut that up. We can also tell their stories in a short form way for people that are able to do that, but we can also get the long form version. So they get all of their wisdom, all their experience.

Ryan Maruyama [00:25:46]:
That is brilliant. And I wish that I had thought about that myself.

Hannah Maruyama [00:25:50]:
Guys that have just recently come on the podcast, Quinn, Alan, Joe, I might be reaching back to you to see if we'll do a rapid fire and see if I can do that too.

Ryan Maruyama [00:25:57]:
And I don't know if he started it. I just know he's been podcasting for a really long time, but the person that has done that before is Tim Ferris and Tim Ferris. He always had, he was always incredibly well prepared. He's a very good interviewer and he has an amazing conversation with his guests. And then at the end he has those rapid fire questions.

Hannah Maruyama [00:26:20]:
I'm gonna do that.

Ryan Maruyama [00:26:20]:
I mean, it's tested.

Hannah Maruyama [00:26:21]:
I'll just clear it with them first. So they know we're going to talk about your story. And then at the end, I'll just,

Ryan Maruyama [00:26:26]:
Yeah, that concept has already been tested. And I mean, he has a bigger podcast than ours will ever be. I think that's a brilliant idea.

Hannah Maruyama [00:26:33]:
We're going to do. Thanks for being part of this brainstorm with us folks.

Ryan Maruyama [00:26:36]:
I hope that you got a little bit of value out of that. If not, you can lodge your complaints in the comments. Make sure you go to apple podcasts and the best way to lodge your complaints is go down to the show, go down to rate, put a 5 star review, and then you can say whatever you want in the comments. We read every single one of them.

Hannah Maruyama [00:26:58]:
We do.

Ryan Maruyama [00:26:58]:
So I will read your complaints on the podcast given that they have 5 stars on them.

Hannah Maruyama [00:27:05]:
Yes. Bribery and Yeah. Whatever.

Ryan Maruyama [00:27:09]:
Yeah. Exactly. I don't wanna hog all the mic time here, but I did have one thing else that I wanted to talk about in this week. And, you know, we have been doing a lot of work on this, the degree freeway. The degree freeway, this book right here, if you're watching the YouTube again, we have been doing a lot. Full time plus. Yeah. Full time plus.

Ryan Maruyama [00:27:27]:
Exactly.

Hannah Maruyama [00:27:30]:
What? Paying for that subscription?

Ryan Maruyama [00:27:31]:
Cancel that. Disney's worst streaming subscription surface.

Hannah Maruyama [00:27:36]:
Over time plus. We're tired.

Ryan Maruyama [00:27:39]:
I remember at the end of the book, I'm going to make a podcast episode about the whole book writing process. And this is for anybody, young adults, parents, job seekers, career professionals, whatever, independent contractors, entrepreneurs that are thinking about going through the book writing process themselves. We're gonna do a full breakdown of how we did it, some of the decisions that we made. Lessons learned, lessons learned, challenges of which there were a lot and there were many, and there were a lot of decisions that had to be made. And I want to talk through all of that with you folks. But for this, I was thinking at the very end of writing the manuscript, we had gone through like 17 something versions of the book. I don't know exactly how many versions of it, but it was a lot to get to the point that we have it now. And if you make it to the end of this book, I kind of, we should tell you something.

Ryan Maruyama [00:28:36]:
We should write a little closing letter because you spent so much time using this. And anyway, I went towards writing this. Like I went to write this letter and I drafted it. And this is in the young adult workbook. There's a different to both readers and the parent and the young adult. They're 2 completely different books, although they look very much the same. And I'll talk about that in the episode where we go through the whole thing. But there was one quote in the letter to the young adults.

Ryan Maruyama [00:29:03]:
Once I wrote it, I kind of sat back and I was just like, woah, I need to take this into my own life. And we'll think about this for myself. And I think that if I did that, I would be a lot further in my own life. And my hope is that these young adults take this and they are able to get much further in their own lives without having made the same mistakes that I've made and that you've made. Well, the quote is your real education starts now. If you ever wonder if you're going in the right direction, go back to your goals. Only one thing matters now, keep going. And for those that don't know what the book's about, and I don't expect you to even read it, is Hannah and I have a very different view of what work is and what it allows us to do.

Ryan Maruyama [00:29:44]:
And we view work as a tool to use to live the life that you want. The, our base philosophy. And this goes for anybody, job seekers, young adults, anybody. And this goes for literally the last career change that you make before you retire. It doesn't matter who you are. You define your goals and what you want in life. And then you go and make decisions that are congruent with those goals. Usually those decisions in the context of which we are speaking about because we're the degree free podcast.

Ryan Maruyama [00:30:20]:
Usually all of those decisions or a lot of those decisions are around the type of work that you're going to do and the type of skills that you're going to learn to get that type of work. That is what I'm saying. Like, if you ever wonder if you're going in the right direction, go back to your goals. And if you're able to define your goals correctly, you will be able hopefully to then make decisions that will help you reach those goals.

Hannah Maruyama [00:30:47]:
Because if you know where you're trying to go, the decisions along the road get much simpler. They do not get easier, but they do get simpler and they get more clear. If you're trying to get to a certain place and you can go right or left and left leads you to your goal and right does not, then it does not make sense for you to choose the right side of the road because that's not going to lead you to the goal if it is to the left or vice versa.

Ryan Maruyama [00:31:07]:
Hey there. I hope that you're loving this episode of the degree free podcast. We spend a ton of time every week creating this content for you. So my only ask is you take a quick second to leave a review or thumbs up on whatever platform you're on. It's one of the best and easiest ways that you can support this podcast, and this simple action action can help bring more people into the degree free community. At degree free, we wanna help as many people as we can thrive and succeed without needing a college degree. Your review will be a step in that direction. If you could do this small favor right now, degree.

Ryan Maruyama [00:31:32]:
Your review will be a step in that direction. If you could do this small favor right now, pause this and leave a review. It would truly mean the world to us. Thank you, and back to the show. The reason why I save this for the end is because you and I get it. Your life for these young adults, it's going to change. Their goals are going to change. The things that you get out of this book when you buy this book, the degree free way, and you can do that degreefree.coforward/book.

Ryan Maruyama [00:31:57]:
When you buy this book and you go through this with your young adult, they're gonna have 3 different job options that they can do that will help them reach their goals. In this book, we take you from, I don't know what to do next. I have no idea where to start to defining your goals, to finding job options that fit those goals. Like that is what we do in this book. And I get that eventually those goals might change. And eventually your young adults wants and needs are going to be a lot different, but as long as they are continually coming back to what their goals are at the time and what their goals are in the future, they will be able to figure it out. Personally, I get it because I mean, look at my own life. Like I thought I was going to be a fireman forever.

Ryan Maruyama [00:32:46]:
I thought I was going to run into burning buildings and pound chest for the rest of my life. It's really difficult to get into the fire department and got into, it was a long haul and a long trek to go through the re regroup process and everything like that. And I was giving up a really good stable job. I thought that I was going to do that for the rest of my life. But then when I reevaluated my goals years later, they had changed and they were different because my goals were different. My actions were different. So if you ever wonder if you're going in the right direction, go back to your goals. Even if they have changed, like, go back to defining what are your goals because your goals will dictate your actions.

Ryan Maruyama [00:33:31]:
And I thought about sure. There's a fireman example that I just talked about real quick for you folks. I just wanted to talk about what this looks like in real life for these young adults that are going to be making these decisions. I thought the fireman example is a good one, but a lot of these young adults are going to be making different decisions down the road. It might not be between 2 different jobs. It might be between a city or something like that. And I thought back to my own life at the time when I was around that age, like, what were some of the decisions that I was going through? It's going to get a little personal. And I had a bunch of things that I thought about that I thought I could talk about, but I think that this is probably the best one.

Ryan Maruyama [00:34:12]:
Like when I was 21 or 22 years old, I was dating a girl. We were living together. She was 1 year younger than me. I had just finished college that may and she had one more year to go. It was always a goal of mine to move away from Hawaii. I had what they called island fever. And for those that are from Hawaii, it's just, you're born and raised on a rock in the middle of the Pacific ocean. And for some people that are born and raised there, it is amazing.

Ryan Maruyama [00:34:45]:
It's great. They know that they don't want to live anywhere else. And for other people, you got to go. It's my whole life is here. Like you run into the same people at the same grocery stores or even if you go to the different grocery store, you're still like you go to somewhere on the other side of the island and you'll walk in and you're just like, hey, what's up? Oh, god. Same guys.

Hannah Maruyama [00:35:05]:
Imagine trying to leave your hometown, but the only way to leave it is to get on a plane and fly 6 hours away. And the barrier to getting on the plane is like $500 at least.

Ryan Maruyama [00:35:15]:
That's exactly right. And so a lot of people that are from small towns can understand this to a minuscule amount, and I'm not judging you or anything like that. I've talked to a lot of people from a lot of small towns. But if you're from the US, the contiguous forty eight, then you don't understand because you can drive anywhere. I know that you can drive anywhere because I've done it. I've spent 4 months in my car driving the entire United States. You can do it. You can leave.

Ryan Maruyama [00:35:36]:
The only thing stopping you from leaving is a full tank of gas. And I mean, like, that's it. But you still understand, and you understand it to a little bit smaller extent. 4 and a half hours is the closest flight for like San Diego LA area. And then like you said, it's $500 and that's on sale now and $1,000 really to leave. It's a really big barrier to entry. Most people that are born and raised in Hawaii that aren't of any means. They've probably traveled off the island by the time that they're 18, they they've probably been to another state.

Hannah Maruyama [00:36:04]:
Once maybe.

Ryan Maruyama [00:36:05]:
I would probably say the most is like 5 times, maybe 4 times because it's expensive. It's expensive.

Hannah Maruyama [00:36:13]:
And then it's also expensive because you have to go stay somewhere if you don't have family on the mainland. And if you go to California, obviously California is expensive and usually you're on vacation. People go to Disney or whatever, and then that's expensive. So that's pretty much for people that aren't from Hawaii. That's like how it is.

Ryan Maruyama [00:36:28]:
Yeah. Anyway, that's a long story short of, like, I had island fever. It was always a goal of mine to move away at least for a little bit. And I wanted to leave at least for a little bit. My goal was always to move away once I had graduated or at least once I had secured a job and maybe I could gain some work experience and then move to the mainland with some work experience. Anyway, I wanted to move away and this was like June, July of my graduating year. So this was like 2013 or so 11 years ago, whatever it was. She had one more year left.

Ryan Maruyama [00:37:03]:
She also had visions of moving away, and she just wanted to finish college first. She had one more year. So this was like June, July of the summer of 2013. And I had the idea of moving away. Like, I wanted to go already, but she needed to stay until may of 2014. Cause that's when she graduated 1 more year. I was like, okay, what are we going to do? She got an internship in DC with, like, the senator's office or something like that, the house representative, whatever. And for the 1st semester of her senior year in college, she was gonna be gone.

Ryan Maruyama [00:37:41]:
So she was gonna be gone from like August to December. And so I was going to have to hold down the fort in the place that we were living in for 4 months by myself. You know, not that I didn't have friends or anything like that. And then I would stay till she graduated in may and then maybe it would leave together. I had 2 options in front of me. The one option was basically break up with this girl. I think a lot of people, young adults and parents are going to run into. I know not, I think from the conversations that I have, like they're having similar conversations with their young adults.

Ryan Maruyama [00:38:12]:
Just so happens that I'm having this conversation at 21. I'm like 21 or whatever, 22, because I graduated college. And so for, but for some people, this is real at 18.

Hannah Maruyama [00:38:20]:
Yeah. It's earlier.

Ryan Maruyama [00:38:22]:
Right. Exactly. For me, it was, do I stay in Hawaii or do I, you know, and try to pursue this relationship and then move later or do I move to the mainland now? And so on one side I had to stay in his house for a year with my girlfriend at the time. And the other side was I had just gotten a job at a bank. That was technically my 2nd job out of college. I got a job at a sister bank that was really, really short. And then I parlayed it into this job, but anyway, and they had a sister bank, an affiliated bank that was on the mainland. And they had this program that you could basically just switch into the bank.

Ryan Maruyama [00:39:02]:
I mean, obviously you have to apply and stuff first, but as long as there was an opening, you could just go and apply. And the people that are already hired at affiliate banks, they get priority over the people that are outside. This program didn't have a specific tenure requirement. It didn't have what do I think a lot of these programs have is, well, you have to be working at the place of business for 6 months or a year before you're able to transfer this company didn't have that. It was basically, you could get hired and you can start applying for the other roles and you get priority. And those other roles, If they hire you, you can just jump ship. And in the mainland where I was looking in California, the exact job that I was doing in California, it was literally double and they were paying double. It was $31,000 a year was the job.

Ryan Maruyama [00:39:49]:
And I've talked about how my negotiation process went.

Hannah Maruyama [00:39:51]:
Ad nauseam.

Ryan Maruyama [00:39:52]:
Yeah. Went really well and Murdered it. Yeah. Killed it. I was getting paid $31,000 a year and I was looking at these other jobs and they're getting paid $64,000 a year for the exact same role. And I was like, what the fuck? Like, this is crazy. And not only that, but the inventory of jobs or the amount of roles open that they had was also double, triple, not only were they getting paid more, but there was also more open roles for me to transfer into the likelihood of me getting one of these roles is higher because in my company it was smaller and there was only one role, my role and my partner's role. It didn't matter where in the mainland I went.

Ryan Maruyama [00:40:34]:
Like I could go to, or Cal or I can go to Northern California, or I could go to Southern California. It didn't matter to me at the time. And I can go anywhere in between. There was way more roles open. And I was like, it actually looks pretty good for me to get into one of these roles. That was the decision in front of me. These are the decisions. And I had to talk to my dad about this because I didn't know what was going on and I didn't know what decision to make.

Ryan Maruyama [00:40:59]:
And it wasn't my dad that gave me this framework of going back to my goals, but it was this piece of advice that my dad gave me that led me to going back to my goals, which is a piece of advice that he gave me, which I think every day for this piece of advice is that he said, you know, Ryan, I can't tell you what to do. Like, I don't know. You know? And he's like, I saw my life. And he said, whatever you choose though, just make sure that you're doing it for you and make sure that you are fully aware of the consequences. And he was just saying consequences like good and bad. It doesn't matter. Just like the end things that are going to happen because you make this decision and you just make sure that you are doing this for you and that you accept responsibility for everything that's about to happen. I was like, okay, well, that's not too powerful.

Hannah Maruyama [00:41:53]:
Yeah. Thank you.

Ryan Maruyama [00:41:54]:
Thinking about that. I was like, okay, well, how would I be comfortable with doing this? Like, how would I be comfortable with me making this decision? And I said, well, it probably should clarify what my goals are. I should probably clarify, like, why would I stay or why would I go? And so when it came back to it, I would stay because of this girl. And I think that eventually I'm going to move up there anyway. And there's 3 times the amount of jobs, 4 times the amount of jobs up there for the exact same role that I have now. In a year, I'll be even more experienced. I can apply to even higher roles in a year, or I'll just be even likelier to get hired for these roles. And then I can stay with my girlfriend now who I love and who we're living together and who I thought was, I was going to marry.

Ryan Maruyama [00:42:42]:
And then the other thing was, but I could just get a head start right now in my career and get out there and live my dream or whatever. Start living that now. It seems to me that I have to clarify what really matters. So for me, I had to look back and I was like, okay, what really matters? Like, what is the goal? And to me, at the time, it let the line of questioning. It all started with my dad saying I have to be okay with whatever decision that I make. And then, so now for me, I'm thinking, okay, well, what is my goal? It seemed like ultimately if I had the right life partner, wouldn't that make any other decisions easier going forward? And that was my mindset at 21 year old. I was like finding somebody that I'm gonna spend the rest of my life with

Hannah Maruyama [00:43:25]:
is Pretty high up on the list.

Ryan Maruyama [00:43:26]:
Pretty high up on the list. If I think that this person is not

Hannah Maruyama [00:43:29]:
all the other things are downstream,

Ryan Maruyama [00:43:31]:
this decision is so much easier because I'm clarifying my goals. Like, I'm looking for a life partner that makes all these other decisions easier. I ultimately made the decision to stay and it ended up being a disaster.

Hannah Maruyama [00:43:43]:
I know how the story ends.

Ryan Maruyama [00:43:44]:
So this

Hannah Maruyama [00:43:44]:
is I've heard this before, but for everybody else.

Ryan Maruyama [00:43:46]:
Yeah. Mean, she met someone else while she was up there, Patrick. Wow. What was his name?

Hannah Maruyama [00:43:52]:
Not to outing him on the podcast. Man.

Ryan Maruyama [00:43:56]:
Woah. Woah. Yeah. She dumped me, I went into a little drunken spiral of unfortunate events and ended up quitting that job I was supposed to transfer out of. Ended up being a bartender for, like, 5 to 8 more years.

Hannah Maruyama [00:44:07]:
It's okay because then we met.

Ryan Maruyama [00:44:09]:
Yeah.

Hannah Maruyama [00:44:09]:
Exactly. All split out.

Ryan Maruyama [00:44:11]:
Yeah. And the rest

Hannah Maruyama [00:44:12]:
is So thanks, Patrick.

Ryan Maruyama [00:44:15]:
And and the rest is Appreciate

Hannah Maruyama [00:44:16]:
your public service, dude.

Ryan Maruyama [00:44:18]:
But the way that I made the decision, I think, was right. It was Yeah.

Hannah Maruyama [00:44:20]:
Which is what what's the goal?

Ryan Maruyama [00:44:21]:
Which was the goal.

Hannah Maruyama [00:44:22]:
Trying to get.

Ryan Maruyama [00:44:22]:
And I was correct.

Hannah Maruyama [00:44:24]:
Good and bad consequences can stem from those things.

Ryan Maruyama [00:44:26]:
Yeah. I was correct as a 21 rule too, in my thinking, at least for my life and the way that I view my life is ultimately, if I did find the right partner, it would make my life easier. And I was right about that. It just wasn't that person.

Hannah Maruyama [00:44:37]:
And also just because I can hear people's next thought being okay, well, if you adjust for a certain goal and that goal does not come to fruition or it changes now, what? Then you just adjust to the new goal. Then you just make decisions based on whatever the next goal is because that's how life works.

Ryan Maruyama [00:44:50]:
Yeah, exactly.

Hannah Maruyama [00:44:51]:
You just find it. Then you just go, alright. That's not it. I'm gonna make a new goal. And then you walk towards that one.

Ryan Maruyama [00:44:56]:
Exactly. Very hard.

Hannah Maruyama [00:44:57]:
That's how it works.

Ryan Maruyama [00:44:58]:
I thought it was a very long story, but I didn't wanna give a second one because I wanted to end on a little bit more positive note and be I had to be like, oh my god. Here we go. But, no, the second decision and this was very, very recently. It was literally for this book, The Degree Freeway, and it goes back to you and I had to make a bunch of decisions for this book, like so many, so many decisions. And the reason why was because of one big decision was we decided to self publish and because we decided to self publish, it created a whole bunch of other decisions that we probably wouldn't have had to deal with if we had gone with a publisher.

Hannah Maruyama [00:45:29]:
Just really quick. If you've ever worked in the service industry, people that are listening, you probably are familiar with the server, I'll call them server dreams. And they're the dreams where you have dreams at night where you feel like you didn't leave work and you're still waiting tables and you never put in somebody's order and you wake up in a cold sweat because you feel like you've been running tables all night. And sometimes I get those. I think you do too. But this book created something very similar to that, which I felt like we'd missed deadlines or we didn't do things. And, and Well,

Ryan Maruyama [00:45:55]:
we definitely missed deadlines.

Hannah Maruyama [00:45:56]:
Yeah. We definitely missed deadlines. It's those types of dreams, the dreams where you feel like you never stopped working and you were working all night because you were like, oh shoot. We still have to do this and this and this. So very similar, very similar experience with creating this book.

Ryan Maruyama [00:46:08]:
There's a bunch of decisions, but I wanted to talk about one in particular that we had to go through. And for anybody that has written a book or works at a publisher, you know exactly what I'm talking about. But it's not like books are gonna make you 1,000,000 and 1,000,000 of dollars. Not really. And it's a very low margin thing. There's the printing cost. There's the shipping cost to your fulfillment center. Then there's the hacking cost to pack it up and all the supplies that it takes and then shipping it out to you, the end consumers, they ship it twice.

Ryan Maruyama [00:46:38]:
And there's a lot of logistic logistics, but it is a lot of costs involved for a rather low ticket item. Every dollar that you can save or every penny that you can save in the process is money. That's going to go to your bottom line. If I can cut down on the shipping, then I can just save that money. Obviously very common sense. We had to look at packaging, shipping containers, rather. We have to look at how are we going to ship these books and you and I, or I had to go through a whole bunch of different shipping package options, and I had to order a lot of different test materials to ship these books. And because once again, we're self publishing, I am the fulfillment center.

Ryan Maruyama [00:47:23]:
Like if you order these now, they're still on pre order. When they ship to you, I will have put them personally. I will have packed them and shipped them out to you. I had to do all this stuff and I was like deciding between basically these 4 different cheap shipping options. I was like looking at these 4 different packaging shipping options. I'm gonna use those interchangeably. I'm sure. And I was looking at these 4 different This one's the cheapest, but it's also really bad.

Ryan Maruyama [00:47:51]:
And this most expensive one is still economical, but it's also kind of bad. And what I mean by bad is it's not good for a softcover book and especially cause we're going to be shipping at least right now, we're going to be shipping at USPS. So they're just gonna bend it up and put it into your

Hannah Maruyama [00:48:09]:
We tested it and we just went, oh, they're 100% gonna bend that in half and shove it in a mailbox.

Ryan Maruyama [00:48:14]:
Exactly. So we

Hannah Maruyama [00:48:14]:
just had to make it so that they wouldn't do that.

Ryan Maruyama [00:48:16]:
But but but I look at it and I was like, well, the cheapest, crappiest packaging work gets the book there.

Hannah Maruyama [00:48:22]:
Yes. You know? Books all bent up.

Ryan Maruyama [00:48:24]:
It's probably gonna be bent. Yeah. And it's probably not gonna be great.

Hannah Maruyama [00:48:27]:
Difficult to actually write in if

Ryan Maruyama [00:48:28]:
it's all bad. Yeah. But it's so expensive to go with more expensive packaging, more expensive shipping. It was a decision that I had to, like, I wracked my brain over these things. I was like, man, I'm going to have to order thousands of these units. And I said, we spent a lot of money on getting these other ones sent to us. And I said, okay. Well, I gotta go back to my goals.

Ryan Maruyama [00:48:46]:
This is a hard decision. I have to go back to my goals. We went back to our goals for guidance. I had to ask myself, why did we write this book? Why are we really selling it? And did we write this book so we can make the absolute most amount of money out of every single order? Because if we did, then the decision is clear.

Hannah Maruyama [00:49:04]:
You go with the cheap shipping.

Ryan Maruyama [00:49:05]:
Yeah. I should choose the cheapest shipping material possible. The decision is made. It doesn't matter. So that's a good example of like the goals dictate your actions, or did we create this book to give to parents and their young adults as a tool to use and have these tough conversations.

Hannah Maruyama [00:49:20]:
So they can get to 3 options that work for them.

Ryan Maruyama [00:49:22]:
Is this a tool that they're actually supposed to use and be usable?

Hannah Maruyama [00:49:26]:
And be smooth and writable and readable.

Ryan Maruyama [00:49:29]:
And if so, wouldn't we want it to arrive in like the best

Hannah Maruyama [00:49:32]:
Pristine conditions that have bent in half.

Ryan Maruyama [00:49:35]:
The best shape possible so that it can actually use it.

Hannah Maruyama [00:49:38]:
Yes.

Ryan Maruyama [00:49:38]:
And if that's the case, then the answer is clear too. I shouldn't choose any of these packages.

Hannah Maruyama [00:49:44]:
And we did not.

Ryan Maruyama [00:49:45]:
Yeah. Because these packages are optimizing the wrong thing. Like all of the packages that were in front of me, these 4, they were all crappy.

Hannah Maruyama [00:49:51]:
They're not crappy. They just didn't do what we wanted.

Ryan Maruyama [00:49:53]:
I bought them originally optimizing for the wrong problem, which is I bought them originally optimizing for what is the cheapest option.

Hannah Maruyama [00:50:00]:
As opposed to what's going to get it there the best.

Ryan Maruyama [00:50:03]:
Right? Exactly. Once I realized, and once I went back to my goals, I was like, okay, well, it's clear that I have to buy more expensive packaging, more expensive shipping products so that I can get there in a more pristine condition so that it actually gets there in the way that I want it. And even though it costs more money, it doesn't matter. It didn't matter at that point because I'd asked myself like, okay, well, that's going to cut into our already thin margins because we're not like a big book publisher. We don't have those economies of scale like it costs a lot to be. 1, the books are expensive, sure. But the books are expensive because it costs a lot to print it. And if we had gone with the publisher, which I mean, maybe some days I do think that we should have the per price unit of these for the cost to us would be cheaper and therefore the cost to you, the listener would also be cheaper.

Ryan Maruyama [00:50:50]:
We just pass that savings on, but we can't because they're so expensive. And I was just like, okay, well still, if we're not optimizing for the most amount of money made, then the decision's clear. We have to get packaging, the more expensive packaging that actually gets it there to be usable. And this sounds like no duh type of stuff.

Hannah Maruyama [00:51:11]:
It does change.

Ryan Maruyama [00:51:12]:
No, but the thing is, is like, that is like, no, duh, because if you go back to your goals, the decisions become clear

Hannah Maruyama [00:51:20]:
every time.

Ryan Maruyama [00:51:20]:
Yes. Anyway, that's a long story short. You could learn a little bit about Long

Hannah Maruyama [00:51:24]:
story long.

Ryan Maruyama [00:51:24]:
Yeah. Long story long. You guys learned a little bit convinced? You learned a little bit of my life today. The decisions that I've made. I don't know if this is a good episode or not. I think it was a good episode. I feel

Hannah Maruyama [00:51:36]:
like it was. I got a lot out of it. I'm excited about our revamp of the format for the interviews. I'm gonna try it, and you guys can let us know what you think.

Ryan Maruyama [00:51:43]:
Yeah. I'm looking forward to hearing your feedback, how we did on this episode. So leave your comments, YouTube, Spotify.

Hannah Maruyama [00:51:49]:
That's ours.

Ryan Maruyama [00:51:49]:
Yeah. If you made it this far, if you have any constructive criticism to give me or you want to hate on me, that's fine. Apple Podcasts, go ahead. Go to the show. Scroll all the way down. Tap to leave a review. Five stars, and then you can say whatever you want.

Hannah Maruyama [00:52:05]:
We will read it 5 stars and above.

Ryan Maruyama [00:52:07]:
Yeah. Anyway, yeah, that's pretty much it. If you guys want to get your copy of the degree free way, you can go to degreefree.co/book and until next week. Aloha.