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People with money are not buying their kids college degrees anymore, and I'm about to tell you what they're doing instead. I'm going to preface this with, I do not come from money. My family was on food stamps at one point. That's how much we do not come from money. But because I ended up in tech and I started working in AI, I've been exposed to different types of people. And then through Degree Free, I've ended up doing some more custom education options for people with an educational budget that exceeds the normal budget. Find me because no one does what I do. So this is outside of the launch program, which is goal-based, income-based. But for some people, not us, not most people, but for some people, they have educational budgets set aside to spend on whatever they want. And for those people, it's been very interesting to watch the shift at higher levels of, I wouldn't even say income, I'll call it wealth. Because something that people in a certain income bracket, and this again, I've watched and I've read a lot and I've observed this. But something with people with certain levels of wealth, they start to value time a lot more than the rest of us do. And because of that, as colleges have taken longer and they've gotten less impactful, people with real money instead are paying for their kids to get a defined outcome. And by defined outcome, I mean they are going to get better or they are going to learn something actionable from whatever education they are getting. And this is for artists, for kids interested in tech, for kids interested in music, all different types of things. They are not sending them to four-year colleges because the general education classes waste their time, waste their energy, and waste their money when they can spend it to hire people who are really good to teach their kids. Or send their kids to really specific schools that are not colleges, but are in fact teaching a specific skill. And the reason I want you to know this is because when rich people start doing things that the rest of us are not doing, there's a reason. And they usually start doing things differently first, and then it trickles down to the rest of us. And I'll again preface this with the risk calculation that if they have money to burn, they do not have to consider income in the same priority of goals that the rest of us do. So it's different for them. Instead, they can prioritize work type or industry in the way that the rest of us who do not have money to burn cannot. I'll tell you a story. I'll change her name for privacy's sake. But I was working with a young adult, 17, almost 18, out of Houston, Texas. Kyla is her name. Not really, but we're going to call her Kyla for the purpose of this. Her family has educational budgets set aside. Not a small amount of money. She wants to have flexible work, so she has most of her time. She does have to work still, but she has money set aside for her to spend to learn whatever she wants to learn, which is amazing. Some people have that, some of us don't, but she does. And because of that, what's interesting about this is the end result for her ended up being far less, far cheaper than a college degree, which is so funny. But this is why I think the rest of you need to know about this, because you can look for these types of options for your kids, save them money, save them time, and get a better result. But basically, Kyla came into the program, into the launch program, and there's an educational option if you have a different sort of budget, something the parents inform me of, and then I'm able to do different things because they have a different risk calculation, like I said, than the rest of us. And so for her, she really wanted to become a tailor. She just really wanted to do it. She wanted to make custom clothing. She wanted to design dresses. Okay, awesome. But she had only done a little bit of sewing herself, and so I was able to find for her a specific tailoring school in London. This is interesting because the cost of flying to London is very cool. It's a very custom school. There's one instructor. He's been doing it for about 20 years. It's a Seville Row tailor, so he's very experienced, and he trains. He trains. You stay in, it's almost like a bed and breakfast type of situation, and you stay there for about six months, and it's very intensive, and that is what he does, and the total cost of that was less than $15,000. Less than $15,000. It costs $26,000 on average to go to an in-state university right now. But watching this has made me realize that the rest of us can do what they're doing, and you as parents can research and find specific schools, specific instructors, and that changing the way you think about educational spend would really help with this because it is mindset, whereas it's so interesting, but a lot of people would view buying a college degree that gets no defined result and instead just causes debt as a better investment than, let's say, paying $60 an hour to a language tutor to teach your child another language so they can get a job as a translator or use that with another basic skill set in order to work for a healthcare company or a financial company that does business in other countries or anything, or anything really, and I think we just, this is why I think the definition of education is so important and how we think about it really needs to change because, and this is why you guys hear me say this all the time, but college is not education. Those words are not synonyms. College is an educational product like any other educational product, and right now, for most people, the result that you get is subpar, but what I'm telling you is that you don't need to buy it. You can look for alternative options. Call, email, vet them yourself. That's what I do. I do that for people, but that doesn't mean that you can't do it. I'm just faster at finding them. That's all. If your child wants to do something, and they're sure, again, and they're sure, and there's educational budget set aside, then please look for better options, and when I say better options, I mean things that will teach them what they actually want to learn, not make them sit through a bunch of nonsense that they don't need to hear, and when I say they don't need to hear it, I mean it's literally not education because if you were just distributed information that you find useless, that you don't listen to, that is boring or actively wastes your energy, that is not education. It is information rendered poorly, and no, there is no value in that. There is value in your child actively learning from someone who is experienced to reading and educating in a field, in a skill set that they are interested in, no matter what that is, even if that's coding, even if that's doing field operations for a mining company, even if that's basting and doing stitches, even if that's some sort of film production. It doesn't matter, but I just want people to know that there are other options out there and to know that people who have money right now, they're not sending their kids down the conveyor belt anymore. They're just not doing it because they know that that is not effective anymore. It does not have the same result that it used to, and I mean it hasn't for decades, but they know that, and so their actions are now different, and I think that approaching it more that the educational money is going to go out the door for educational spend. Because of that, even though a lot of us don't have nearly nothing close, there was nothing for me, there was nothing, there was zero dollars for me, for me and my siblings, zero dollars. All of that was on us, all of it, but if I had approached, if myself and my parents had approached the amount that I was going to spend for college more objectively, we would have spent it on different things that would have actually helped me and actually taught me more, and I think that that is something that you all should know because this is something you can do. And some of you know, Ryan and I just wrote the book on this, The Degree Free Way. It's a young adult and parent workbook set to help you figure out what jobs are going to work for your kid's life, and you can use these to figure out what options are going to work for them, and then from there, that's where you go into research mode, and you start looking for custom things that give the outcome that your child wants from education. You do not have to take all the crap. You can just look and pay for the things that you want. That's the beauty of the world we live in with all these different options, with all these amazing things. They are out there. You just have to take it. It just does take time. It does take effort to sit down with them, to work through things, and to find the right one, to vet the right one, and then set up the right one. There's more coordination, but I want to take the fear out of it because other people are doing this, people that have a lot of resources, and the rest of us can do it too. And honestly, it's kind of cool because what I see, the choices I see them making, for the most part, are actually more accessible than college. They're more accessible because they're higher quality options, but they don't cost as much because they're more targeted. You don't have to buy all the other crap. Just buy what you need. And when you buy what you need for education and you pay for educational services you actually need, it doesn't cost nearly as much as a college degree, and it doesn't take nearly as much time. And that is beautiful because what I see is it's going to usher in, as soon as this connection problem gets solved, it's going to usher in an educational renaissance. People are going to speak other languages. People are going to learn new technology so much faster, and the world is going to be bright and beautiful. It's very cool. Very cool.