A couple of years ago, I was volunteering at this public school in north Texas. It was not a good, high-performing elementary school, but through a series of connections, former President Bush -- W, not HW -- came to visit. I was never a big “W” fan because I grew up pretty liberal, but he was impressive on this visit. He didn’t understand the over-focus on lines in the hallway. I think someone even used the term “school to prison pipeline” while he was there. He had questions about the effectiveness of the curriculum. It’s all kind of ironic in some ways because No Child Left Behind was under his administration.

This all speaks broadly to the idea of “the system’ -- put that in quotes for a reason -- and how it benefits different people in different ways. Is this quote-unquote “system” broken? Perhaps. But to hear entrepreneur Ryan Narus tell it, it’s not so much “broken” as “evolved,” and that does present some new opportunities.

This is a relatively short convo of maybe 23-25 minutes, but there’s a lot of value in it around not playing the victim -- something I am often guilty of -- and how easily you can wake up in your 30s and think “Damn, I have no friends.” I’ve woken up many a morning in my 30s and felt that way. I’m actually currently using antidepressants in part because of that, which will be a topic for a future episode.