Episode 238: Rethinking and Disrupting Your Education with Danny Iny

[INTRODUCTION]

Hal: Goal achievers, what’s going on? This is Hal Elrod, host of the Achieve Your Goals Podcast and I am here today with someone who’s become I guess a business associate but somebody that I really respect so I kind of consider him a friend even though we haven’t had a lot of like hanging out together if that makes sense, maybe I’m giving you too much information, but my friend that I’m bringing on today is Danny Iny. He is a lifelong entrepreneur, best-selling author and CEO of the online business education company, Mirasee. And he is a high school dropout, an MBA graduate from Canada’s elite Queen’s School of Business, and he’s known for his value-driven approach to business and that’s really what I respect about Danny. We met at a mastermind here in Austin, Texas and it was the first time I had got to spend time with Danny and really was impressed with his character, his integrity, his values and the way that he cared deeply about the people that he served. And I asked him to come on today to discuss his newest book hot off the presses, Leveraged Learning: How the Disruption of Education Helps Lifelong Learners, and Experts with Something to Teach.

[INTERVIEW]

Hal: Danny, welcome to the show, my friend.

Danny: Hal, thank you so much for having me and we’re totally friends.

Hal: Yeah. We’re totally – okay. All right. Well, we need to spend more time together. You’re one of those people that it’s like a friend that you don’t talk that often but like you have such a deep affinity and respect that even if you don’t talk for a few months, you can pick up right where you left off so that’s what we’ll do today.

Danny: Well, I’ll tell you what. I’m also going to be in Austin in a couple of months, so we will get together then too.

Hal: Awesome. Maybe we can do like a friend thing like Go-Kart racing or golfing so something like that. So, let’s start talking. The new book, I just cracked it open. You sent me an advanced copy here which I’m loving it so far and I wanted to start hearing your take on why education and the job market are headed for massive disruption.

Danny: Yeah. So, thank you for asking like it’s a huge topic and it’s so timely and so important. Education is one of the biggest industries that’s out there. Education is $4.4 trillion globally every year. Trillion with a T.

Hal: Wow.

Danny: And when we go to pursue any kind of education, we’re essentially looking for a shortcut. We’re looking for a way to get to where we want to go in life and in the context of much of that education is about in some way of being more valuable to and valued by society whether that shows up interpersonally, whether that shows up with work, etcetera. It should be a shortcut. It should get us there in less time, or with less cost, or with less risk than it would be for us to just muddle it out on our own. And education is not delivering. That’s just what’s happening. Education is not delivering.

Hal: Well, what do you mean when it’s not delivering? In what ways?

Danny: So, here’s an example and this is not purely a college problem. The college is a big part of it because college is $1.9 trillion out of $4.4 trillion. So, the average college graduate comes out of their experience with just over $30,000 in debt. Now, what have they got for their trouble? They’ve also spent we say four years because college is ostensibly a four-year program but only 16% of people enrolled in a four-year program actually finish it in four years. It takes seven years to get to a small majority. So, for all the money they’ve invested plus $30,000 of debt plus four to seven years of their time, what are they getting? Well, a little less than half of recent university graduates, meaning people aged 22 to 29 with a college degree are unemployed or underemployed meaning they’re working in a job that does not require a college degree. Of the other half who are employed properly, roughly 3/4 of them are working in a field that is different from the field they studied which basically means their degree has nothing to do with their getting the job. So, we’re looking at four to seven years, we’re looking at tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, we’re looking at all kinds of debt in exchange for which basically 12.5% of people land a job in the field that they studied with the goal that they intended.

So, that’s an example of people are putting stuff in, expecting to get something back out, and it’s just not happening. And this is a huge problem for individuals who were spending all this time with their lives and incurring all this cost and all that. It’s also a big problem for companies that are looking to hire talent because in the US today, they’re just shy of 7 million people who are unemployed and looking for work, but there’s also just shy of 7 million jobs that employers are not able to fill. And that gap is again education not providing what employers need for it to provide for people for those people to be valuable. And so, when you have a scenario like that where just everything is fundamentally not working, it’s just a matter of time before it all kind of implodes.

Hal: This is fascinating. How do you prepare students for the future when we don’t know what the future holds in terms of for jobs, technologies, or in the problems that are going to need to be solved?

Danny: That’s a really interesting question. We hear all these stats all the time with how the most popular jobs today didn’t exist five years ago and all that kind of stuff. And so, very clearly the education, the curricula that was designed to prepare people 5, 10, 15, 20, 50 years ago does not prepare people for those jobs. When I ask education experts like, “Well, then how do you suggest we change that?” often what they come back with is, “Oh, well, we really need more courses that teach about data science or AI or whatever the hot thing is today.” But if things are changing that fast, whatever our best guess is today still isn’t it. Not to mention that as hot a topic as data science or AI or whatever it is might be today, that’s not what most people are doing. It’s not like most of the US economy is data scientists.

Hal: Sure.

Danny: That’s not the breakdown. So, the way I think about it is and let’s put aside the specific skills because the specific skills you need to thrive will be continually changing and will really be moving a lot away from a just-in-case and more towards just-in-time model of education. So, it’s not we’re going to spend four years starting my career. I’m going to learn all the things I need and then I’ll be ready to do whatever I need to do for the rest of my career. No. I’m going to gain the skills I need just-in-time and we’re going to do that by working with specific experts in their fields and whatever. But the overall education that we need, you kind of want to ask yourself, imagine that you’re starting a new business or a new project. You’re starting some new important thing. It’s hugely sensitive, hugely impactful, really important to you. And you don’t know anything about it. You don’t know what exactly you’re going to be doing or who you’re going to be serving or what the subject matter is so now you have to assemble your team.

Well, since you don’t know any of the specifics of what you’re going to be doing, you can’t choose people based on or this person is a project manager and that person knows how to do copywriting and that person knows how to do web development because you don’t know if you need any of those things. So, what do you select for is you’re selecting people who are smart and quick on their feet and they’re resourceful and reliable and they play well with others. You’re looking for those things that regardless of what the project is like this is a person I want on my team. And if people come to the table with all those things, they can make up the gap of whatever specific skill they need as they’re ready to move into a role. That’s the foundational education that makes people really ready to thrive in the world that we’re growing into.

Hal: So, how would you define that in terms of is that developing, for somebody listening, whether it’s a parent that their kids are in college if it’s someone that is an entrepreneur or somebody in the job market now, how would you articulate what they need to develop? Is it qualities? Is it habits? Is it a mindset? Well, what is it that’s going to be universally applicable no matter what the skills are?

Danny: So, there are two buckets of this. One is what I call insights. Insight is kind of what lives at the intersection of creativity and critical thinking. So, you want people who develop that skill because creativity really is a skill to look for what’s missing, to come up with ideas, to think critically, to think incisively at what is possible and how the dots connect, to look at those patterns. So, that’s one bucket inside which again creates its curiosity and creativity and critical thinking. The other bucket is what I call fortitude and it’s kind of an umbrella for everything that would fall under the banner of what’s been explored over the last several decades of positive psychology research. So, if you look at things like grit and resourcefulness and mindfulness and optimism and the growth mindset, the non-attachment, all those things that a lot of data shows, that’s really more correlated with long-term success than any particular skill or SAT scores or that sort of thing.

Hal: Would you say that emotional intelligence falls under that bucket?

Danny: Absolutely.

Hal: You know, there was something that I read about in the book and I had just kind of been exposed to it, so I want to hear you go deeper into it and it’s what you call the leveraged learning triangle. It’s the three components of effective learning and I think you said only one of which is incorporated into education today and it was incorporated early if at all. So, can you talk about the leveraged learning triangle?

Danny: Yeah. Absolutely. It kind of ties back to what we were just talking about. So, where a lot of education is focused is on knowledge. Let me give you knowledge that you don’t already have and that makes sense through most of the history of education because, for most of the history of education, knowledge was scarce. The only way you could get knowledge is if I explained it to you.

Hal: Yeah. That’s true.

Danny: Now, we live in a time when knowledge is abundant. Knowledge is all around us. Knowledge is a Google search or an Alexa query away, and it’s much less about the knowledge like what we have heard and learned and can remember and that kind of comes in two forms. There is the information and then there’s also the skill. When you show me how to ride a bicycle that’s a different kind of memory but it’s still fundamentally memory. It’s called procedural memory, so I can remember facts and figures, or I can remember processes and procedures that I can do. That’s all remembering what I’ve been given, then there is, let’s take that a level further and bring something new to the table, a new insight, a new connection, a new perspective. That’s insight we’re just talking about that lives of that intersection of creativity and critical thinking. And then the challenge with that is that it’s hard. Cultivating insight is difficult. I have a great conversation a little while ago with Steven Kotler after a presentation he delivered and he’s the guy who wrote The Rise of Superman so talking about like harnessing flow states.

So, the optimal balance, one of the core things that he talks about in achieving flow is the optimal balance of your ability, to the difficulty of the task that you’re undertaking is 104%. That’s the best balance for achieving flow so you’re basically supposed to always be a little bit outside your comfort zone. But a little bit outside your comfort zone is hard and so if you do it and if you persevere, you learn, and you grow, and you evolve your abilities, and it’s all great. But if you don’t, if you quit, then you achieve nothing. And when you’re pushing so hard outside of your comfort zone all the time, it’s very easy to just quit and so that’s where all that third leg of fortitude comes into the picture because without it you just don’t keep on going.

Hal: Got it. Why do you say that experts and professionals will make up the bulk of our education moving forward?

Danny: So, first of all, I just want to qualify that. I think that specifically if we look at all the education we get as adults so post-secondary after we finish high school, there’s kind of three categories. There’s foundational adult education and that’s something that right now we get from liberal arts degrees or generic business degrees like basically any kind of college experience that checks the box for a job that says requires a college degree but doesn’t matter what college degree like they just want to know that you’ve gone to college. They don’t care what you did there. So, that foundational adult education and that’s the idea of we train for nothing, but we educate you for everything, except that the data shows that that’s not true, and we don’t get educated for everything. We don’t get the critical thinking gains but at least in theory. So, that’s the first bucket. The second bucket is last mile education. That’s about bridging from that foundation to a vocation so that could be going to medical school or law school. That could be doing a coding boot camp or an internship that’s like learning the specific skills of the job. And then the last bucket is continuing adult education so that’s taking courses and continuing your education over a lifetime.

One of the big shifts that we’re seeing is a move like I was saying before, away from just-in-case education, a lot of education at the start of our career or it’s just in time. So, instead of four years at the start, it’s probably going to be more like six years over an entire career, over a lifetime, but most of it will be along the lifetime. Not all at the beginning. So, specifically in that third bucket of continuing adult education, which is the stuff that tends to be very specialized because that’s not like what I want to do day-to-day that is on the cutting edge. That has to come from experts and professionals because the pace of change is so high. Things are changing all the time. There’s a great quote by Larry Summers. He was the Dean of Harvard and he said, “You know, within five or ten years, everything you learned in your degree will be obsolete.”

Hal: It’s not encouraging for students, right?

Danny: Exactly, right. It doesn’t actually bode all that well coming from Harvard, but the point is true. So, everything is turning around really quickly. So, if the curriculums can be totally out of date five or ten years out and you need everything to be basically refreshed over every five or ten years, how do you stay current? Well, the only way the teachers can be current in that way is if they are on the cutting edge of their field, boots on the ground, doing the work. Otherwise, they get out of touch way too fast. So, it’s not that we want to say, well, we need expertise rather than teaching ability because teaching ability is really important. You don’t want to learn from someone who can’t teach but because things are moving so quickly, we are shifting away from meeting teachers who know the subject matter to subject matter experts who can teach.

Hal: Interesting. If somebody is listening to this and I guess the college education is something that they’re evaluating and especially like I know for my parent generation it was like you go to school, you get a degree, call it like if you were to make something of yourself, college education was required. And obviously, that’s a paradigm that is still largely present today. It’s present for a lot of reasons. College is a big business for one. Number two is if you want to be a doctor or lawyer essentially right there, there’s elements of you got to learn how to do surgery or whatever your profession entails and requires. But in the current system is college education, how does someone decide if that’s the right choice for them or for their kids?

Danny: That’s a great question and the answer is it depends. I’m not going to say it like a blanket, college is not a good idea for anyone. I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think it’s a good idea for a lot of people. So, let’s talk about what goes into making the decision properly. So, first of all, you’ve got to have like a perspective as based on how things are now, not how things are used to be. So, it challenged a lot of people. If you’re 18 years old today and you’re thinking about college and you’re getting a lot of pressure from your parents, for example, it’s because your parents have this image of college the way it was probably about 30 years ago when they thought about it and they went through it. And 30 years ago, it was very different from how it is today. It’s much, much more expensive today. And the returns that you get in terms of employability, in terms of lifetime earnings are much worse than they used to be. So, you need the actual current data.

So that said, there are a few good reasons to go to college. One good reason is that you know what you want to do with your life and doing it requires a college degree. So, if you know you want to be a doctor, yeah, go to medical school. Absolutely, if that’s a decision that you’ve made. I think doing an internship with the doctor or spending some time in a hospital or getting a sense of how that works like make sure it’s what you really want to do before you make that decision. But if it’s what you’ve decided, then, yeah, go to medical school. Another big reason is if you can get into a really good school. So, of the many thousand schools in the US, you’re only about 200 that you can call selective, meaning they accept less than half of the people who apply. So, all the other schools it’s a very different scenario. The selective schools you get the reputation, you get the credibility, you get the alumni network so you’re getting a lot of value above and beyond just the classes. So, you can go to a selective school, there is a value with that. The third reason is if you can afford it. There’s a big difference between going to school on money that you have and going to school and going into a lot of debt in order to do it.

So, if you can either do it on scholarship or you can basically have a scenario where you graduate and you’re not saddled with a ton of debt or if you are it’s a very carefully calculated decision that you’re making. And there’s a fourth reason and this might sound a little controversial. I hope it doesn’t, but it’s just the reality. College is right now still a better idea for women and minorities than it is basically for white men and the reason for that is that college degrees had become pretty ubiquitous. There’s a ton of them out there and when something is ubiquitous, it drops in value. So, if you’re looking to get a job and you send in your resume and your resume says MBA on it, if out of 100 resumes yours is the only one that says MBA then you stand out. If they all say MBA, then it doesn’t do all that much for you.

Hal: Sure.

Danny: And so, we’ve kind of reached a place of ubiquity where basically a degree just as well you know better than anyone else.

Hal: You do. It’s a bare minimum than everybody else. Yeah. Okay.

Danny: And so, that is a lot less valuable than it used to be but for women, for minorities, basically for people who are not necessarily given the benefit of the doubt, it can be valuable to have a signal that says, “I may not be any better than my peers but I’m not any worse than my peers either,” and it really sucks to say that but that’s the reality and you see that in terms of career gains and stuff like that at the moment.

Hal: I’m sure you may have offended a few people, but I think I understand where you’re coming from and it’s not from a place to have been. So, I think that like you’re a very analytical person. Like you said, you’re going off of the data. So, for anybody listening, Danny, that listened to all of that and they go, “Well, gosh, college doesn’t sound like it’s going to separate me the way that it separated my parents and, therefore, it’s not going to provide the value for me that it provided for my parents.” Or if you’re a parent listening, “For my kids, is it good for me?” What is the alternative? So, it’s like okay so if I don’t feel like college is going to give me the return on investment that I would want, well, what do I do? What’s plan B?

Danny: So, there is a challenge there and there’s an opportunity there. The challenge is that there isn’t a good mainstream easy Plan B. I can’t say, “Well, don’t go to college. Do that program instead.” That program doesn’t really exist right now. The advantage there is that because there isn’t an easy super accessible Plan B, nobody else is going after it either and so whatever you do really sets you apart. So, what you need to do is kind of taken ownership and responsibility for your career that it is just not happening in the context of a traditional college career path. So, let’s think about what you would have otherwise allocated to college. Four to seven years, tens maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars, and you basically want to think, “Well, what was I hoping that would get me? I was hoping for an in at some companies and some knowledge that would get me good experience and some opportunities to do different things.” So, just be intentional about that and think about well, how can I get those things without having to pay for the entire college experience which is very inflated. Only $0.21 on the dollar actually go to instruction in a college context.

So, I would say for example instead of taking a whole bunch of electives from profs that’s some are great and some are not, go to Amazon and spend $300 getting books about a whole bunch of different subjects that are interesting for you and start immersing yourself in that. Instead of getting a degree and hoping that will impress a hiring manager, think about what companies you might be interested to work in and what are the fields that interest you and start taking people who work there out to lunch to get to know what the work is like and how they operate there. But if you find a company that you really like with a culture that you really like, offer that you’ll work for them for free for six months because you want to get your feet wet and know the industry. And the first reaction people have is like, “What do you mean work for free?” and I’m like, “But the alternative is that you pay for the education is super.”

Hal: Yeah. It’s so interesting. You tell them to work for free. Like you said they’re like, “What? Are you crazy?” Or you can turn that time putting hundreds of thousands of dollars to your debt account either way and like you said, you’re putting hundreds of thousand dollars in your debt account and not even separate yourself from the other tens of thousands of students that are doing the exact same thing at the exact same time as you are. Interesting. This is fascinating, Danny. I’m so glad I had you on today. So, now I know there’s an entire, there’s an old another side to what you do and the work that you do in terms of education and that is you empower professionals and experts to take their knowledge and to turn it into courses, online courses. I don’t know if we’re planning on going down this road, but I’ve seen your work in this realm and you are one of, if not the best at this in teaching people how to create content online that they can then monetize. In fact, I’ve started going through your course myself and this is an area that I’m wanting – a road that I’m wanting to go down. So, for anybody that is listening that has work experience, they’ve been in a field for a certain amount of time or they’ve got experience like for me in my background was in sales and that’s why I’ve parlayed that into teaching of how to sell. Can you talk all about online courses and kind of what that opportunity looks like right now for people?

Danny: Yeah. Absolutely.  

Hal: And who is it for and what’s it look like?

Danny: Absolutely. So, earlier we’re talking about these three buckets of education. There’s the foundational, there’s the last mile, and there’s the continuing education. And the fact that more and more we’re moving away from just-in-case at the start of a career to just-in-time throughout a career and that’s that continuing education bucket and that bucket is exploding. We’re moving a vast amount of our interest in demand and consumption of education into that continuing education bucket and because it’s just-in-time, it’s not like one to four-year-long program. It’s 200 shorter courses over a lifetime so the total number of courses that individuals want to consume, teaching them how to do specific valuable outcome-oriented things is very high. And because of how fast things are changing, the only person that they can learn that from are real experts in the field, boots on the ground, on the cutting edge actually doing the work. And so, the people we work with in a professional capacity is experts and professionals, people who have something of value to teach to others, and we teach them how to package that into a course that is impactful, is transformative that creates a real outcome for their students and how to market that, how to sell that, how to get the word out. So, the opportunity for that is enormous right now because of these transitions in the way education is being consumed globally.

Hal: Got it. So, now your new book, again, it’s called Leveraged Learning: How the Disruption of Education Helps Lifelong Learners, and Experts with Something to Teach, what I know, obviously everything we talked about today is that book is this is the subject matter, but what else will people walk away from your new book?

Danny: So, it’s really interesting. A mutual friend of ours, Ryan Holiday, sometimes says that the path to a book starts with a dinner party conversation and then it goes to an article and then it becomes a book. And that’s usually true but I had kind of a different experience in that I would have dinner party conversations. Yeah. I work with experts. I teach them how to build courses. I have opinions about education and all the challenges there. And I would have these dinner party conversations and the response would be very polarizing. I would either get like that I’m preaching to the choir. They’re like, “Yeah. Totally. Education is broken. I don’t really understand all the specifics you’re talking about, but it doesn’t matter. I agree with you.” I’m like, “Okay,” but then I’d also get a lot of resistance like, “Well, no, college is important and, okay, maybe it’s expensive but I had a good college experience. But okay, I understand that things have changed but are people really going to learn only from online courses?” It’s like, “Okay, so you’re not saying…” Like, it would keep going in circles like that and the only way I could really flesh out this perspective was to really write it out.

So, the book is basically half about understanding the landscape like what is really going on. This is really important because for anyone who wants to thrive in the future but even in the present, the Wayne Gretzky quote, “You don’t skate to where the puck is. You skate to where it’s going,” and I feel like most people, they don’t understand where this is going because they’re so stuck on where it was. So, the first half of the book is just understanding where is education right now, where is it going, and all of its forms, college, online courses, everything in between. And then the second half is about how to do it really well. So, when we look at that triangle of knowledge to insight to fortitude, what do those things mean? How do you do them? How do you build them into a course? What is a process for actually developing learning materials that are effective? And so, that’s basically what the whole book is about with some guidance wrapped in there in terms of if you’re a lifelong learner, if you’re a student, what should you do? If you’re a teacher, what should you do? If you’re a business leader, what should you do?

Hal: And so, I was just going to ask you who is the book for, what type of people, what stage in their life or their career and is that kind of what you just described? If it’s a few different buckets?

Danny: It does, and this is I struggled with this because I’m a marketer, so I know that writing a book for more than one person is like as a marketer, it’s a bad idea, but it’s kind of a symbiotic circle. You’ve got lifelong learners who want to thrive in the world and so they need to learn from experts and professionals. And experts and professionals have to take their cues from business because that’s where the lifelong learners are going to thrive. And then there’s lifelong learners get hired to work in businesses. It’s this cycle. So, if you’re a lifelong learner who’s thinking, “What should I do with my education? Either I’m at the start of my career or I’m in my career and I want to stay current.” If you’re an expert or a professional or an educator, if you have something of value to teach, then you’ll learn how to do that and how to profit from it as well. If you’re a business leader who is responsible for talent, for finding great people then this is really important also. So, it’s really kind of written for those three people and hopefully that doesn’t backfire on me.

Hal: Yeah. Hey, I wrote the Miracle Morning. I wrote the most non-niche book ever, so, A, it can work and, B, we’re two birds of a feather here.

Danny: From your mouth to God’s ears.

[CLOSING]

Hal: There you go. So, Danny, what’s the best place? Where can people find you and then keep learning from you and where can they get the book?

Danny: Sure. So, my company is Mirasee and you can find me on the website, but I would love for people…

Hal: Why don’t you spell that for people?

Danny: Oh yeah. Sure. So, it’s M-I-R-A-S-E-E.

Hal: It’s dot com.

Danny: People can find the book on Amazon, wherever good books are sold, and by all means get dozens of copies for everyone you know. Really the most important thing for me is just the people to read it. I don’t make money selling books and so we actually decided to put the whole book online for free, so anyone can go to LeveragedLearningBook.com and the entire book is there for free digitally and that will be the case in perpetuity. So, presumably, if people like what they’re reading, they’re not going to want to read 65,000 words on a website. So, if they like it, they’ll want to buy a copy but if you just want to skim it or check it out or find a passage and forward it to a friend, it’s all on there at LeveragedLearningBook.com.

Hal: LeveragedLearningBook.com and I’ll make sure to put that link in the show notes and the email that goes out as well. Danny, man, it’s always a pleasure talking to you and today was really, really informative. I’ve got a page of notes here and, yeah man, thank you for all that you do and in doing it with such class and integrity, and I really appreciate you.

Danny: It was absolutely my pleasure being here. Thanks for having me and I will look forward to hanging out in Austin.

Hal: That’s right. Doing some friends stuff. All right, goal achievers. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of the Achieve Your Goals Podcast. Hope you enjoyed this conversation with Danny Iny today as much as I did and go check out the book, LeveragedLearningBook.com. It is free. The link should be in the email that you got with this podcast and I love and appreciate you. Thank you for being a goal achiever. Thanks for tuning in another episode and I will catch you next week. Everybody take care.

[END]