James Holzhauer Explains the Strategy Behind His Jeopardy Winning Streak

Updated at 3:21 p.m. ET on April 24, 2019

On an episode of Jeopardy that aired Tuesday evening, James Holzhauer became the fastest-ever contestant on the show to earn $1 million in prize money. During his now 14-game win streak, he has seemed unstoppable, usually pulling away from his competitors early in the game and piling up money at an unprecedented rate: He’s winning more than twice as much per game as the Jeopardy legend Ken Jennings did during a record-setting 2004 run on the show. And Holzhauer’s highest daily prize yet, $131,127, exceeds the previous record holder’s one-day sum by more than $50,000.

What makes Holzhauer so dominant? When I asked him, he was able to sum up his game plan pretty easily: “I sketched out what I believed to be my optimal strategy for Jeopardy: Play fast, build a stack, bet big, and hope for the best,” Holzhauer wrote to me in an email. “In my mind, playing a seemingly risky game actually minimizes my chances of losing.”

It may be risky, but Holzhauer has the trivia chops to make it work. Mark Labbett, a British trivia pro nicknamed the Beast, has been familiar with Holzhauer since competing against him five years ago on a game show called The Chase, in which a resident trivia expert (Labbett) took on layperson contestants (including Holzhauer). The conceit of The Chase is that the expert is expected to outshine his challengers, but Labbett remembers facing Holzhauer as “the worst beating I’ve ever had” on the show.

[Read: Jeopardy wasn’t designed for a contestant like James Holzhauer]

“I’ve got to give Jeopardy immense credit, and The Chase U.S.A.,” Labbett told me. “In Britain or Australia”—where The Chase still airs—“James would not have made it onto television, because he’s just too damn good. They would never have him on.”

Labbett said that Holzhauer has “the unholy trinity” of Jeopardy skills. First, he has deep trivia knowledge. In training for competitions such as Jeopardy, trivia experts typically memorize lists of presidents, world capitals, and the like—unchanging bodies of knowledge that will pay dividends in competition. Holzhauer seems to have mastered these, but Labbett is impressed by his grasp on more topical categories of information, such as sports, pop music, film, and TV. “He doesn’t appear to have any [subject-area] weaknesses, which is very rare—a genuine all-rounder,” Labbett said.

Developing expertise like this requires a sharp memory, but also a ton of work. Labbett told me that before he became a father, he would spend 30 to 70 hours a week honing his knowledge in some capacity or another. His methods vary: Studying might mean browsing random pages on Wikipedia, watching TV (to stay current), or reading 30 consecutive pages from a reference book.

Holzhauer’s second advantage, as Labbett sees it, is the speed of his recall. “Good quizzers often need a couple of seconds to think of the answer,” Labbett told me. “James doesn’t.” This is a skill that’s not as responsive to practice, and it’s a valuable edge in a game that prizes quickness. So is a proficiency with Jeopardy’s finicky buzzers, which many contestants struggle to time correctly. Holzhauer’s mastery of the buzzer is what allows him to get in ahead of other contestants, even when all three of them might know the correct response.

The third element of the trinity is Holzhauer’s mind for strategy. When in control of the board, he rarely hesitates to pick his next clue—often doing so with an eye for Daily Doubles, tiles that essentially let players wager as much of their money as they’d like—and calibrates his bets without much apparent anguish.

“I know a lot of very good trivia players who would never be able to work out the complex wagers that he does on the Daily Double, because they just wouldn’t be able to think as fast as that,” Labbett said. The ability to make such on-the-fly calculations, Labbett noted, doesn’t necessarily overlap with trivia expertise—trivia usually doesn’t require people to do math on the spot.

What’s helpful to Holzhauer in this regard is his professional background. He is a Las Vegas–based sports gambler, and as such is comfortable not just making risk-benefit calculations, but also putting significant amounts of money on the line. Jennings, during the first 14 episodes of his 74-game, $2.5 million run 15 years ago, placed an average wager of $2,700 on Daily Doubles and $6,175 on Final Jeopardy (the show’s last clue, on which everyone bets). Holzhauer, meanwhile, has averaged $9,879 on Daily Doubles and $26,686 on Final Jeopardy as of Tuesday night. (Episodes of Jeopardy are usually taped months in advance.)

“I would never have had the stomach for those kinds of bets,” Jennings recently told Wired. If he did, maybe he’d have had a chance of winning money at the rate Holzhauer has. Over Jennings’s first 14 games, his overall net gain on Daily Doubles was $48,600. Holzhauer’s has been $319,366.

But even setting aside these successful bets, Holzhauer is outperforming Jennings—and every other contestant, ever—in providing correct responses. Jeopardy devotees tally up something called a “Coryat score” (named for a 1996 contestant named Karl Coryat), which reflects a player’s raw trivia and buzzer abilities, isolated out from the rewards of smart betting. The figure is calculated, more or less, by adding up the value of every correct response a player gives, and subtracting the value of every incorrect response.

According to Andy Saunders, who runs a site called The Jeopardy! Fan, the average Coryat score of a Jeopardy contestant is $11,300. Through 14 games, Jennings’s was $28,786. So far, Holzhauer has him beat by about $1,000—which makes his the highest Coryat score ever. (For the record, the highest conceivable Jeopardy score, wagers included, has been calculated to be $566,400, though this would require a highly unusual arrangement of Daily Doubles, to say nothing of being able to buzz in and give every single correct response.)

With a player this dominant, what could lead to Holzhauer’s undoing? I asked him this as well. “A particular vulnerability is that I can wipe out my entire score with one missed Daily Double, but I could also lose by failing to uncover any of the Daily Doubles at all, or just running into the wrong opponent at the wrong time,” Holzhauer told me.

Some of the game-show experts I interviewed noted the same risks. “The [top players’] knowledge base is vast, and so therefore it’s going to come down to the occasional random fact that they don’t know,” says David Hammett, who has worked as a mathematical consultant for game shows such as The $100,000 Pyramid and The Weakest Link. “And if it happens in particular on Final Jeopardy, against another contestant that has any relatively close degree of savviness with the buzzer and with content, that’s how Ken lost, and that’s probably how James would lose."

A major betting wipeout, then, seems the most probable unraveling of Holzhauer’s strategy. But say such a wipeout never comes, and Holzhauer remains on the show long after beating Jennings’s win streak. Perhaps this wouldn’t be boring: As Hammett noted, many people watch Jeopardy not for the contestants, but so that they can shout responses at their TV and see how they do. Yet suppose that some sort of Holzhauer fatigue sets in eventually, and his presence becomes predictable, and thus bad for ratings. Are there any dials the producers of Jeopardy could turn in order to bounce him from the show?

The game-show experts I talked with stressed that the integrity of Jeopardy is unassailable, and that the existence of cheating or bad-faith manipulation is out of the question. Still, there are ways the producers could think about trying to oust Holzhauer, or at least reduce the amount he wins each episode. (A representative of Jeopardy told me that the show’s producers wouldn’t comment on Holzhauer’s performance while shows he’s on are airing.)

One strategy might be to figure out Holzhauer’s weakest categories, and load up the board—and, ideally, Daily Doubles and the Final Jeopardy clue—with them. But Hammett thinks this would be difficult to pull off. “Those [categories] seem so few and far between. You certainly can’t make an entire game out of those,” he says. “It would probably be (a) impossible and (b) it would just come off looking very awkward.”

What about making the questions harder? Hammett says it’s not unheard of for producers to start adjusting a show’s difficulty if it’s, say, running over budget. But harder clues would likely only play to Holzhauer’s advantage, given that his trivia expertise appears to be deeper and broader than many of his opponents’.

Mark Labbett, the Beast, proposed a twist on this idea. “Do you want to know the best way to stop a superstar quizzer?,” he said. “Make it easier.” A trivia show that asks, for example, about the capital of California or the president who issued the Emancipation Proclamation would erase some crucial advantages of a player like Holzhauer. “It just becomes what we call a cavalry charge,” Labbett said. “Everyone knows the answer—it’s just who hits the button first.” (Though, of course, Holzhauer is usually the first to do so.)

Labbett also discussed the possibility of bringing on another elite contestant, a sort of assassin, to take Holzhauer down. But this would have its problems too. “Then you’ve got a new apex predator. How do you get rid of him?” Labbett said.

Given that these options are not only unlikely to be put into practice but also ineffective, Holzhauer’s streak will probably last until he has a bad day (and someone else has a very good one). When that day comes—if that day comes—Holzhauer will be left with the question of what to do with his newfound fame. Jennings, since his own run on the show, has fashioned a career as an author and a podcaster, and hasn’t restricted himself to the subject of trivia. Holzhauer could go back to gambling on sports in Las Vegas, but Bob Boden, a TV executive who has worked on dozens of game shows, says that Holzhauer might be able to go on to write books, like Jennings, or perhaps pursue a career in television.

In fact, Boden was the producer of The Chase, the show on which Labbett had to contend with Holzhauer. Watching from the control room, “we were dumbfounded by how well he did,” Boden remembers. So dumbfounded, in fact, that he later had Holzhauer audition to join the show as a colleague of the Beast.

Which is to say, Holzhauer will probably have options. But first, he has to lose.

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The Media’s Post-Advertising Future Is Also Its Past

It’s my holiday tradition to bring tidings of discomfort and sorrow to my colleagues in the news business. One year ago, I described the media apocalypse coming for both digital upstarts and legacy brands. Vice and BuzzFeed had slashed their revenue projections by hundreds of millions of dollars, while The New York Times had announced a steep decline in advertising.

Twelve months later, it’s end times all over again. There have been layoffs across Vox Media, Vice, and BuzzFeed (and dubious talk of an emergency merger). Mic, once valued at $100 million, fired most of its staff and sold for $5 million. Verizon took a nearly $5 billion write-down on its digital media unit, which includes AOL and Yahoo. Reuters announced plans to lay off more than 3,000 people in the next two years. The disease seems widespread, affecting venture-capital darlings and legacy brands, flattening local news while punishing international wires. Almost no one is safe, and almost everyone is for sale.

It’s tempting to think that this is the inevitable end game of Google and Facebook’s duopoly. The two companies already receive more than half of all the dollars spent on digital advertising, and they commanded 90 percent of the growth in digital ad sales last year. But what’s happening in media right now is more complex. We’re seeing the convergence of four trends.

[Read: When Silicon Valley took over journalism]

1. Too many players

It’s not just Facebook and Google; just about every big tech company is talking about selling ads, meaning that just about every big tech company may become another competitor in the fight for advertising revenue.

Amazon’s ad business exploded in the past year; its growth exceeded that of every other major tech company, including the duopoly. Apple is building tech that would skim ad revenue from major apps such as Snapchat and Pinterest, according to The Wall Street Journal. Microsoft will make about $4 billion in advertising revenue this year, thanks to growth from LinkedIn and Bing. Uber is reportedly getting into the ad business as it eyes new revenue sources to beautify its forthcoming IPO. AT&T is building an ad network to go along with its investment in Time Warner’s content, and Roku, which sells equipment for streaming television, is building ad tech. Oracle, Adobe, and Salesforce are using their cloud technology to collect data that could be used for ad targeting, as Axios reported.

These tech companies have bigger audiences and more data than just about any media company could ever hope for. The result is that more advertising will gravitate not only toward “programmatic” artificial-intelligence-driven ad sales but also toward companies that aren’t principally (or even remotely) in the news-gathering business.

2. Not enough saviors

As advertising has migrated to digital platforms, the news media have converted to hero worship. The iPad was going to save media. Then it was venture capital. Then it was the mystical promise of “Hulu for news.” Then it was Facebook’s video platform. No, podcasts!

Each savior has proved fleeting or fictitious. The iPad is great for many purposes, none of which is the resuscitation of mid–20th century business models. Venture capitalists blithely expected media companies to produce tech-company returns, and many pulled back when they learned what any journalist could have told them: News isn’t a profit gusher. Companies such as Mic that went all in on Facebook turned themselves into glorified subletters—and they ended up on the street when the social network changed its priorities.

[Read: Facebook and Snapchat are the new television]

3. No clear playbook

News organizations are experimenting with anything and everything.

For the past two years, many newspapers and magazines have reoriented their businesses around subscriptions, asking readers to make up the revenue lost from advertisers. Some magazines and papers (including The Atlantic and The Correspondent) are asking diehards to become not just subscribers but members who pay a premium to go deeper with their favorite journalists. Axios, Crooked Media, BuzzFeed, Vice, and Vox have built out TV production studios and sold shows to HBO and Netflix. BuzzFeed is opening a store in New York City and selling kitchen merchandise with Walmart.

Ultimately, however, the market might not support some forms of journalism. For example, the number of local reporters today is at its lowest point since the 1970s, despite the fact that the U.S. population has grown by 50 percent. Research has shown a direct connection between declining local journalism and less civic engagement. If local news is a public good, it may deserve public support—perhaps in the form of government subsidies. But asking for public assistance might seem like an act of pure desperation.

4. Patrons with varying levels of beneficence

Publications that were once the crown jewels of publicly traded firms are finding refuge in the arms of affluent patrons. Many legacy titles have already landed with millionaires and billionaires, including Time (bought by Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce), Fortune (bought by Chatchaval Jiaravanon, a Thai businessman), and The Washington Post (owned by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon). Emerson Collective, an organization founded by the billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs, purchased a majority share of The Atlantic in 2017.

Those nostalgic for the lucrative old days might curl their toes at the mention of a Medici-esque sponsorship model. But billionaire-supported investigative reporting is surely better than no investigative reporting at all. So what’s the matter with patronage?

A patron is a person. A person can change his or her mind—and often does. Chris Hughes junked The New Republic when losses eclipsed his idealism. Phil Anschutz snuffed out The Weekly Standard. Michael Bloomberg has made noises about selling off his political desk if he runs for president, or offloading his entire eponymous media empire, which employs several thousand people.

[Read: Student journalism in the age of media distrust]

This sounds downright awful. But the business of news has always been unsteady. It seems safe to say that, going forward, media organizations will get by on some combination of subscription, patronage, and auxiliary revenue from sources such as events and licensed content. Whatever happens, advertising will almost certainly play a lesser role.

To understand the future of post-advertising media, let’s briefly consider its past. During a period of the early 19th century known as the “party press” era, newspapers relied on patrons. Those patrons were political parties (hence “party press”) that handed out printing contracts to their favorite editors or directly paid writers to publish vicious attacks against rivals.

That era’s journalism was hyper-political and deeply biased. But some historians believe that it was also more engaging. The number of newspapers in the United States grew from several dozen in the late 1700s to more than 1,200 in the 1830s. These newspapers experimented with a variety of journalistic styles and appeals to the public. As Gerald J. Baldasty, a professor at the University of Washington, has argued, these newspapers treated readers as a group to engage and galvanize. Perhaps as a result, voting rates soared in the middle of the 19th century to record highs.

It was advertising that led to the demise of the party press. Ads allowed newspapers to become independent of patronage and to build the modern standards of “objective” journalism. Advertising also led to a neutered, detached style of reporting—the “view from nowhere”—to avoid offending the biggest advertisers, such as department stores. Large ad-supported newspapers grew to become profitable behemoths, but they arguably emphasized milquetoast coverage over more colorful reader engagement.

As the news business shifts back from advertisers to patrons and readers (that is to say, subscribers), journalism might escape that “view from nowhere” purgatory and speak straightforwardly about the world in a way that might have seemed presumptuous in a mid-century newspaper. Journalism could be more political again, but also more engaging again.

That’s already happening.

For example, in just the past few decades, The New York Times’ revenue has shifted from more than 60 percent advertising to more than 60 percent reader payments. As its business model has changed, so has its coverage. “Look at The New York Times in 1960 vs. 2010; the reportage is more interpretive,” observed the late James L. Baughman, the communications theorist and University of Wisconsin professor.

Mid-century newspapers were as broad and unobjectionable as department stores, because department-store advertising was their business. News media of the future could be as messy, diverse, and riotously disputatious as their audiences, because directly monetizing them is the new central challenge of the news business.

Every once in a while, somebody asks me whether we’ll ever get back to a place where the country can agree on a “single set of facts.” Those asking the question tend to be nostalgic for the 1950s, when they could count the number of television channels on one hand and rely on Walter Cronkite and a local media monopoly to control the flow of information.

That past is dead and irrecoverable. We’ve accelerated backward, as if in a time machine, whizzing past the flush 20th century to a more distant, more anxious, and, just maybe, more exciting past that is also the future.

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Fighting Nazis for a Living

In 1970, crosstown busing came to Richmond, Virginia. Richard Cohen, then only a teenager, persuaded his parents to let him attend an integrated public school instead of private school. He ended up leaving high school a year early to begin college at Columbia University, where he studied philosophy.

Cohen, now the president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, worked in private law for seven years before starting at the SPLC as its legal director. He’s worked at the organization for more than half of his life. I spoke to Cohen recently about his career trajectory and how watching the 1968 Democratic National Convention as a 13-year-old changed him. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.

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Lola Fadulu: Could you tell me about your parents and their jobs?

Richard Cohen: My father ran an interior-decorating firm, and my mother was a legal secretary. I grew up in Richmond, Virginia. I was born about seven months after the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, and I went to public schools in Richmond.

In 1970, the beginning of my sophomore year in high school, massive crosstown busing came to Richmond. They had been operating basically under a freedom-of-choice or a districting plan, but it was proving inadequate to desegregate the schools, and a very famous judge ordered crosstown busing. Now, there were a lot of people in the white community who abandoned the public schools. They moved out of the city or put their kids in private schools. My parents were really pushing me to go to a private school, and I just basically said no, and made a couple of speeches in that day to Jewish groups about the importance of staying with the public schools. Sometimes I wonder, when I look back on it, whether that was out of principle or whether it was a product of youthful belligerence. Then I left high school a year early, and then went off to college, and then into law school back in Virginia.

Fadulu: Why did your parents want you to go to private school?

Cohen: I don’t think my parents were racist people. I just think they thought, “Gosh, Richard’s a smart kid. The situation in the public schools seems uncertain, and we want to make sure he gets the best education he can. And we just don’t know what’s going on in the public schools, because of a lot of change and disruption.” So I think those were the basic reasons. I didn’t think of it as a particularly racist thing, although I just think they were concerned about how the school system was working. In the end, we argued and they relented, and I’m so glad they did.

Fadulu: How was public school for you?

Cohen: My school before that had been integrated, but had been predominantly white. My public school, by the time I was in my junior year, was probably predominantly black.

Fadulu: What was it like for you to be in the minority, as a white student?

Cohen: I don’t know if I thought about it so much as a young person. These were my classmates. These were people I knew. These were people who I smoked cigarettes in the back of the school with and things like that. So I don’t want to describe it as kind of nirvana or anything like that, but it was a different experience than I think some people had.

You know, we’re at the 50th anniversary this month of the 1968 Democratic convention. That convention was, I think, in some sense a coming-of-age moment for me. That was the convention in Chicago. Dr. King had been killed. Robert Kennedy had been killed, and the 1968 convention was a very tumultuous time. Mayor Daley is cursing at speakers from the front row of the convention. The police are rioting in the streets.

In that entire time, there were two people who stood out at the convention as kind of voices of sanity: A guy named Jesse Unruh, who was the head of the California delegation, and the other person, of course, was Julian Bond. Julian was, I think, 28 years old at the time, but he spoke with such moral force that at the convention, someone placed his name into nomination for the vice presidency of the United States. It was largely a symbolic act, because Julian was too young to be the vice president of the United States. But the nomination, of course, though symbolic, was a reflection of Julian’s stature. Three years after that, Julian helped to found the Southern Poverty Law Center. When I came here in 1986, he became a great friend. I don’t find it completely coincidental that I’m here.

That was a really important moment for me. It was really the first time I had watched a political convention, and the first time that I think I paid a lot of attention to and was excited about politics and civil rights and issues of fairness.

Fadulu: How old were you at that time?

Cohen: Thirteen.

Fadulu: Wow.

Cohen: I went to college at Columbia, and then I came back to Virginia to go to law school. I think my law-school tuition was $1,000 a year as an in-state student, which was one of the world’s most incredible deals. And I practiced law for about seven years in Washington, D.C., with a very famous civil-rights lawyer, although some people might think that we were on the wrong side of certain cases. His name was Charles Morgan. He actually represented Julian when the Georgia legislature refused to seat Julian because of his stance against the Vietnam War. He represented Muhammad Ali in the lower courts when Ali was being prosecuted for so-called draft evasion. He argued a lot of early civil-rights cases, such as Reynolds v. Sims, a case well known for establishing the principle of “one man, one vote.”

[The ]unlabeling of an “anti-Muslim extremist”

I practiced law with them for about seven years. Julian was friends with people in the firm. Then, frankly, I got a little bored doing that, too. In 1986, I found the job of my dreams as the legal director of the Southern Poverty Law Center. We were a very small organization at the time. I think we had 25 people in a single location. Today we have 300 in 10, and I never expected to be here for all this time. I’ve been here for 32 years now. In fact, I’ve been here more than half my life; I’m 63.

It’s been a remarkable experience. I think all honest work is useful. It helps make the world go round. Right now I’m looking out of our building. I see a big bank tower, and I mean, I think it’s important that our financial institutions be secure, that the legal system be predictable so people can rely on the contracts that they make with people. So I think the work that they do at that bank is important. But it’s probably not the kind of work that touches their souls. The banker might be interested in his work, might get some satisfaction from it, but I think it’s rare that you find a job that expresses your values and touches your soul, and that’s one of the great privileges I have, doing what I do.

Fadulu: Rewind a bit. You said you were practicing law for seven years and then you got bored and you moved to be the legal director. How did you decide to act on that boredom and find a new job?

Cohen: When I was in private practice, we had some very big cases that were very interesting to me. Those were kind of over at one point. I don’t want to name the company, but it came to see us to try to help them out of a jam they were in. I did some research about the company, just some background, and I did not particularly want to represent them. They would have paid us well and all that, but they had a little bit of a history of anti-Semitism. The case that they wanted us to deal with, it wasn’t a case of discrimination. It was simply a commercial dispute. But I just didn’t want to do it.

And so I started talking to some of my colleagues. I took a walk in Lafayette Park across from the White House with Joe Levin. Joe had practiced law with me for a while in Washington. He had gone off to a different firm by the time we had that walk. He told me about the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that he had helped to co-found with Morris Dees and Julian Bond in 1971. He said that the organization was looking for a new legal director, and he thought I ought to at least give it some thought and talk to Morris about it, and that’s what I did.

Fadulu: Did you have any jobs before college?

Cohen: My first-ever job was probably working for my father in his warehouse, the warehouse at his store, unloading trucks and putting cans of paint away. That was probably the first thing I ever did. And working on the delivery truck to deliver supplies to construction sites and people who were building homes.

Fadulu: Did you like it?

Cohen: I was 14. I appreciated earning a little money. The people who I worked with were good folk with a sense of humor. Yeah, I was the boss’s kid, so maybe they didn’t give me as hard a time as they could have, but it was fun. I worked hard. You would get deliveries of paint. Paint comes in four-gallon sleeves and five-gallon cans. In some ways, it was backbreaking work. I’d put hundreds of those things away over the course of the day, so it was hard work.

Fadulu: Did you learn anything from those jobs that became part of the way you approach work?

Cohen: I don’t know if I learned anything there that I didn’t learn in school just as a good student. I had an interesting teacher in the 11th grade for civics. I took the course for advanced credit. And in order to get that, I had to read Supreme Court cases and outline them. I read lots of Supreme Court cases in my junior year.

Fadulu: Can you tell me some of the highlights of your career, things that stand out to you?

Cohen: In the first summer that I was here in 1986, Morris [Dees] and I were appointed as special U.S. attorneys to prosecute two Klansmen for contempt of court. What had happened was we had secured a consent decree with them basically saying they could not operate a private army. This was a guy named Glenn Miller. He later killed two or three people in Overland Park, Kansas. None of the people he killed were Jewish, but he thought they were.

We didn’t know this at the time, but while we were trying the case, they had actually staked out the home of our local counsel, intending to kill us if we showed up. Glenn Miller went underground and declared war on the country and offered a bounty on Morris’s head. Then some of his people were arrested in connection with the plot to blow up our building. So being involved in a case with people like that was scary and memorable.

Over the years we’ve sued a number of neo-Nazi and other hate groups for the violence of their members. And for us, when we see now the kind of hate in the mainstream, when we see things like Charlottesville, it just tells us that our work is not done.

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Amazon's Autodidact Streak

Candace Thille’s mother, who had an undergraduate degree in physics and a master’s degree in mathematics, always told her that all work is honorable work, as long as you set a high standard for yourself. Her father, an electrical engineer, was the one who emphasized the importance of education: “The most important thing you can learn,” he’d tell her, “is how to teach yourself new things.”

When Thille was 11, her father quit his job working in missiles and space at Lockheed. Her parents were pacifists, and her father realized he was building systems that were being used in war. “So everybody in the family started working doing all kinds of different things to help financially support the family,” she said.

Thille has worked at Stanford University and is now Amazon’s director of learning services. I recently spoke to Thille about creating macramé plant hangers, following one’s passion while paying the bills, and lifelong learning. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

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Lola Fadulu: What sort of work did you start doing when your father quit his job?

Candace Thille: I started doing house cleaning and babysitting. And then I was 15 when I got my first real job, which was working in retail at an arts-and-crafts store. In the arts-and-crafts store, I also learned started teaching macramé classes. Macramé is essentially the art of knot-tying to create artwork. A real popular thing was to create macramé plant hangers. I actually started my own business when I was 15, creating macramé plant hangers and selling them through the local plant shops. In building these macramé plant hangers, the knotting was fine with me, but cutting hundreds of pieces of yarn for each plant hanger was really tedious. So I built a wheel whose circumference was exactly the length of the yarn piece that I needed. I could quickly put the yarn on this wheel, spin it around, and then make a single cut off one side of the wheel. So then I'd have my hundreds of pieces of yarn, at the length I needed to build my plant hangers.

Fadulu: Were you drawn to that job because you had a passion for crafts and arts?

Thille: No, that job was because it was a job.

Fadulu: Could you tell me about one or two jobs you worked in college that were the most memorable?

Thille: One of them was I worked in the library in the government documents division. What was memorable about that was that it was so boring. Figuring out how to make something that is so fundamentally tedious and boring tolerable, because I needed the job. That was one.

And then the other extreme was I also had a job as peer sex educator, which was through Cal Hospital on campus at Berkeley. My job was to go out into the dorms and other student-living situations and hold value-clarification conversations about sexuality and decision-making about sexuality. And that job was a blast because you're a teenager or in your twenties and you're out there talking with people about sex, but also helping.

Fadulu: After college what did you do?

Thille: I graduated from UC Berkeley, and I actually immediately moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, because I was following my then-boyfriend who was in medical school in Pittsburgh. I was in a position where I was in a new place, and I needed to get a job to help financially support myself.

My first job out of college was working at a bakery and retail. I wore a pink polyester dress and my hair up, and most of the other people who worked in the bakery were 60 or 70, little old ladies. I did that, though, because we needed income.

But then I also volunteered at the local rape crisis center called Pittsburgh Action Against Rape. The reason is that I was and am a feminist, and was very much into empowering women. I started volunteering there, and shortly after I started volunteering there, their education program coordinator went out on maternity leave, and so I stepped in as the education program coordinator. Then she decided not to come back, so it was my job.

Then I totally expanded the program, and I developed trainings for hospital staff on how to do evidence collection and how to support a person who's been sexually assaulted. I developed and conducted trainings for the local police, and then the county, and then the state police, on how to interview and support people who had been sexually assaulted. Then I developed and delivered education programs kindergarten through high school in schools all over Allegheny County on child sexual abuse. So I had to redirect people’s attention away from the stranger-danger stuff that they were teaching to help getting children skills around the fact that there’s a higher probability that they might be sexually abused by people that they know.

[Read: The experiment in irresponsibility]

Fadulu: How did you go from those positions to Amazon?

Thille: When I was still in my early 20s, I moved back to the Bay Area and took a temp job as a bookkeeper. I taught myself bookkeeping because the temp rate for bookkeepers was better than the temp jobs for receptionist—but I would take any temp job that came up. I started as a half day temp receptionist fill-in at a small management consulting company that focused on leadership development and worked at that company for 18 years, starting as the half day receptionist and working my way up to vice-president and managing partner.  It was at that company where I first designed a blended e-learning experience on coaching. I saw the potential for using technology and the affordances of the science of human learning to accelerate human learning, which ultimately has become my field of research and practice and passion. Following that passion did not come without a cost. The first year I worked at Carnegie Mellon, where I founded and directed the Open Learning Initiative (OLI), my total annual income was less than what I had paid in federal income tax the year before as a VP and partner in a corporate consulting firm.

Fadulu: You now have experience in both higher education, having worked at Stanford, and the business side, as the director of learning sciences at Amazon. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about what's important for young people to know about the skills they'll need for the future?

Thille: I think there's a lot of pressure on young people who feel they have to be perfect immediately. Nobody is. I think the world would actually be a lot better if we were all a lot more humble and didn't feel like we have to present as perfect all the time. What's interesting is how the world of work is being changed by technology. We used to think about computers or technology only doing things that we would directly instruct the computer to do, just faster. The sort of work that we are always imagining being displaced by technology would be predictive, repetitive work. But now with machine learning, I think a challenge in our time is to continuously examine how we use machines and the large amounts of data to augment human decision-making—really exploring where the boundaries are between when a machine and when a human makes decisions.

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Building a Chinese-Food Empire

Andrew Cherng started working in the United States at 18, while he pursued an undergraduate degree in mathematics at Baker University, in Kansas. Starting in 1967, he began spending his summers in New York City, working in a restaurant where his father had connections. It was his first real job. The work was fast-paced, his English wasn’t perfect, and New Yorkers were ruthless, he says.

After Cherng had been working in the restaurant for six summers, his cousin, who also lived in New York, decided to open a restaurant in Washington, D.C. The new business needed a manager, and Cherng seemed an obvious choice. In 1972, his cousin moved the restaurant to Hollywood, and Cherng followed. Several months later, Cherng’s parents moved to the United States.

In 1973, Cherng and his father found a place to start their own restaurant: Pasadena, California. After six months of remodeling, Panda Inn, which would inspire Panda Express, was created. Cherng ran the dining room while his father ran the back. Cherng’s father died in 1981, before he could see the restaurant chain take off.

Panda Express now has 2,000 restaurants globally and more than 35,000 workers. I recently spoke with Cherng about his first jobs in the United States, how they differed from his father’s experience working in restaurants in China, and how he created Panda Express’s company culture.

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Lola Fadulu: What was your first job?

Andrew Cherng: I grew up in Asia. Just before coming to the United States, we actually moved to Japan from China. I was a high-school student for the most part. My father got me a job in the kitchen in a restaurant somewhere in Chinatown in Yokohama, Japan.

Then I came here, to the U.S. One of my first jobs was working in a school cafeteria as a dish washer. We had this industrial bacterial dish-washing machine. So there would be people working, and the plates, the silverware, would go onto this moving assembly-line-like thing. They’d go through a very hot wash. I had the job of picking up the hot plates at the end of it. And it was really, really hot. By the end of it, my hands got pretty tough.

Fadulu: How was working in a school cafeteria for you?

Cherng: It was okay. I mean, you know, it was a job. You’d have to be pretty quick because if the plate does not get picked up, the line stops. When I was in college, I also worked in the library. I did some filing and organized some shelves in the library and stuff like that. One of the more relevant jobs that I’ve done is that from the first summer, which is 1967. I actually went to New York and, for the first time, learned how to work in a restaurant. That was really an eye-opener, because that’s when I found out how difficult it is to adjust to working in a restaurant.

Working as a waiter—that wasn’t easy. I remember I took a job in Clifton somewhere. The restaurant was pretty big, and there were a couple people working, a couple waiters working. One minute, the restaurant was pretty slow, and within 15, 20 minutes, my section was totally full, and that’s probably 10 tables. I was like, “Are you kidding me? I don’t know how to do this.” And I don’t even know how I got through it. I worked in New York all through my college years, including graduate school. Just about every vacation, I would either fly up, or I would drive up from the Midwest—from Kansas when I was in college, and Missouri when I was in graduate school. So I worked five or six summers, plus Thanksgiving, Christmas holidays, New Year’s, and those times.

Fadulu: Why New York, specifically?

Cherng: My father knew some friends working in New York, and that’s where I knew some people who could help me. He got me in touch with the people who helped me, so that’s where I went. My father was a chef.

My dad actually started to work in restaurants at a very young age, in China. My dad grew up in the countryside, and he never went to school.

[Read: Westworld star Jeffrey Wright on the lessons he learned from sports and summer jobs]

Fadulu: How did working in restaurants in New York inform how you went about creating Panda Express?

Cherng: We always think about getting our people to adopt to this idea of I can do more than just working, I can learn to take responsibilities, I can thrive, and I can also help other people to do the same. We like people who work hard and didn’t think they could be a manager; when we suggest it to them, we have to push them a little bit. We like that because taking responsibility is something they can learn. Restaurant people, by nature, don’t mind working hard, because it is a seven-day week. You work harder on holidays—that’s expected. If you’re looking for an easy job, you wouldn’t work in the restaurant. We need to figure out how they should grow personally.

One of our values is continuous learning, whether you go back and get a degree or whatever learning they think will help them advance themselves.

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The First Black Woman to Lead the Heritage Foundation

Kay Coles James’s family was adamant that she pursue an education. James attended the historically black Hampton University, where she studied history and education. Growing up with an emphasis on education and self-sufficiency led her to a career in public policy and then the Heritage Foundation.

Coles James served during the George W. Bush administration as the director of the Office of Personnel Management. She began serving on the board of trustees for the Heritage Foundation in 2005, and became the president in 2017. In September, the White House named her to the Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission. I recently spoke to Coles James about growing up in a “dysfunctional family,” her experience at Hampton University, and serving as the first black woman president of the Heritage Foundation. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

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Lola Fadulu: Could you tell me a little bit about your parents’ work background, what jobs they were doing when you were growing up?

Kay Coles James: I came from what would be called today a dysfunctional family. My father did odd jobs. He was a guard. He worked unloading ships when he was younger. He did maintenance work. My mother was a dental tech for part of her life, working for her brother-in-law, and the rest of the time she was a domestic, cleaning houses and caring for people. So they were hard-working folks, but not with steady jobs or glamorous careers by any stretch of the imagination.

Fadulu: Did they have a specific profession that they wanted you to go into?

Coles James: I was the only girl out of five boys, and I think they were more interested in making sure that I had a good, solid education because with that, there would be lots of opportunities to do any number of things. My father left home when I was around 4 years old, and I ended up being raised by my aunt and uncle. They were professional people. He was a businessman, and she was a schoolteacher, but she suffered under the debilitating disease of alcoholism. And as a result of that, even as a young child, I had to learn to be self-sufficient and independent around the house.

So I learned domestic skills rather early: I could cook and clean and care for not only myself, but at a very early age took care of my aunt as well.

Fadulu: Did you have any jobs outside of the home before going to college?

Coles James: Not very much before college. I can tell you that being raised by an African American schoolteacher, even though she was a working alcoholic, she had all the values of a middle-class schoolteacher, and education was key. And my uncle, who was sort of the rock of the family, was very adamant about the fact that I was to get a good-quality education, and he felt that once that was done, then his task was done in that he would have equipped me for life.

[Read: The wisdom of going back to school in retirement]

So when I went off to college, he said, “No, you don’t have to work. No jobs, get your education, get that done and don’t get married. Don’t get serious about any guys. Focus.” Education was key. I grew up hearing about the United Negro College Fund. The slogan, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” I think I had my first job outside the home when I was in college, and I went to work for the Richmond public schools as an assistant for a summer reading program, where I was doing clerical work. When you are in college and you’re doing that kind of work, your job is pretty much to do everything in the office that nobody else wants to. And that’s what I did.

Fadulu: How did you cope with that?

Coles James: I didn’t expect to come in and be the manager or the supervisor or run the company initially. I expected to pay my dues. I expected to learn from the folks who were there and more experienced and older than I was. I expected to have a work ethic. The way I was brought up is, you get there early, you leave last, you do the best job possible, and all the doors will be opened for you. So for me, it wasn’t very much about coping. Those were the values that I was raised with. That was what I expected. And I heard every inspirational phrase one could hear in that kind of environment: The cream always rises to the top. The early bird catches the worm. Work hard and it’ll pay off in the end. Those were the things that were whispered in my ear from the time I was young. And so I grew up with those values and with that ethic.

Fadulu: I know that you went to Hampton. Were you considering other schools?

Coles James: I was considering other schools at that time. But I had had lots of incredible experience integrating the schools in the city of Richmond and had been through so much in the largely all-white environments that I really felt like I wanted the nurturing, caring environment of a historically black college and university, where I did not stand out as different, where I knew that the professors and instructors had my best interests in mind and at heart. They were committed to my education, and I think by the time I finished at Chandler Junior High School and John Marshall High School, I was ready for that environment. So while I had the opportunity to go to other colleges and universities, I specifically chose Hampton University because it was an HBCU and I wanted that environment.

I wanted to not be one of the two or three black kids in one class; I wanted to experience the rich culture and history and heritage, and I’m grateful for it. It came at a time in my life where I needed that.

Fadulu: Is there anything that you wish college prepared you for in your first jobs after college or your career in general?

Coles James: Well, if you know anything about Hampton University, you know that their motto is “Education for life.” And so at Hampton, not only did we get the academic skills that we needed and the knowledge, but we also got the other training that I think was so helpful for the first job. Hampton was then and probably still is now very strict about dress codes and about demeanor—about how you carry yourself on campus, how you carry yourself in the classroom—which can then translate into a work environment. And quite frankly, I’m not sure I would have gotten as much of that if I had gone to a predominantly white institution.

I think even with my middle-class upbringing, it was good to have those values reinforced, and they have served me well in a work environment. So the education for life that I received at Hampton University was truly that. It was an education for life.

Fadulu: And what was your major?

Coles James: History, secondary education. I studied history, and then [became] involved in public policy and government and watching history unfold before my very eyes.

Fadulu: To fast-forward to your time as director of the Office of Personnel Management, are there any experiences that are memorable to you from that time that maybe changed the way you view work and yourself as a worker?

Coles James: Well, I must confess that I, like everyone else who was around during that period in our country’s history, was affected in all kinds of ways by 9/11. I was the director of the Office of Personnel Management on 9/11. And on that particular day, I think every bit of knowledge, every bit of skill, every experience that I had, had to come together for quick decisions, for processing information, for inspiring a workforce, for coming together after that to figure out a pathway forward for our country. Being a part of standing up the Department of Homeland Security. And so I think every experience that I had had, and every bit of the education that I had, came together, and it was a seminal moment, I think, that changed me, and I think everyone else who was involved, for life.

Fadulu: You’ve served on the board of trustees for the Heritage Foundation since 2005, so you were already familiar with the organization. How did you feel when you found out that you were going to become president of the foundation?

Coles James: You may or may not know that I was actually chairing the search committee, and as we developed the profile of what the ideal candidate would look like, as we developed the document that talked about the culture of the Heritage Foundation and what was needed in order to preserve and grow that organization, it became clear to several of our trustees that perhaps the person they were looking for was sitting at the table. In my mind I was headed towards retirement, and I was looking forward to watching I Love Lucy reruns and researching ancestry.com, and writing my final book. So when given the opportunity, and it was a very humbling experience,  I felt that the stars were perfectly aligned.

I did have a background in public policy, had been the dean of a school of government. I did have the business experience to run a multimillion-dollar institution. I did have the knowledge of government, based on having served at the federal, state, and local levels. And I did have a love for the mission and vision and values of the institution, and as a result of that, when presented with the opportunity, I thought it was an opportunity of a lifetime. I am one of the people that has had the opportunity to do work worth doing, work that I feel passionately about and feel very equipped to do. And not everybody gets that opportunity.

Fadulu: Is there anything that has particularly surprised you about being the president of the foundation?

Coles James: There have been very few surprises as I took over the role of president at the Heritage Foundation. Probably the elephant in the room is an African American female being president of the leading conservative organization in America. I am absolutely convinced that it was a total afterthought. Having been a part of the process, sometimes we just stumble upon the right thing, and I think we did.

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Did Free Pens Cause the Opioid Crisis?

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Lessons From a Failing Company

When Leigh Radford was young, her father worked in logistics at Procter & Gamble, formulating new products and technologies for Pringles. Radford’s mother worked as an educator at the University of Cincinnati, specializing in early-childhood education. Later, Radford worked for Eastern Air Lines, which would become Continental Airlines, before going on to get her master’s in business administration and rising through the Procter & Gamble ranks to become the vice president of P&G Ventures. I spoke to Radford about her career choices and finding a job that combines the left and right brain. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Lola Fadulu: What was your first job out of college?

Leigh Radford: I went to the University of Florida for my undergrad degree. I went down there specifically because I wanted a big university with a lot of options. I went for advertising. After graduating, I went into the airline business. I started at Eastern Air Lines, which was right after deregulation, so it was a big opportunity—a little risky at that time, but I had a passion for it. After Eastern Air Lines, it turned into Continental Airlines. Then I decided to go back to business school and went to Northwestern. Then I was recruited into Procter & Gamble.

Fadulu: Were you on the marketing and business side when you were working for Eastern Air Lines?

Radford: I started in sales. Eastern Air Lines, at that time, when in my early 20s, had gone through multiple strikes, and later bankruptcy.

I gave the example to a friend recently about my Eastern Air Lines experience when we went through the bankruptcy. The airlines stopped. I was 22, and I was pulled onto the tarmac to bring in a 757, because everyone had walked off. All the gate agents, all the machinists, all the tarmac workers. You just get the job done, and we went out there and did it. And you learn a lot—I mean everything. We went from 150,000 employees to 1,500 overnight, and all of a sudden it’s about cleaning the bathrooms since you don’t have janitorial service, it’s about writing personal paychecks to try to keep the airline afloat. And when you learn that at that young of an age, it was a fantastic opportunity, but I also realize and I never take for granted what it’s like to also be beside individuals who have worked for the company 30 years with an underfunded pension. Really, the quality of the companies you work for and the obligation of leaders to take care of employees became very evident very early in my career.

Fadulu: Did you have any jobs before working for Eastern Air Lines?

Radford: I’ve been working since I was 13. Everything from babysitting to being hired for the athletic association for my school to being a lifeguard. And I think one summer I worked three jobs. I did that because I believe in a strong work ethic. I just love that sense of independence and figuring things out and being self-driven. So that’s where it all started.

Fadulu: Were there any specific professions you wanted to have when you were growing up?

Radford: I always knew I wanted to combine the left brain and right brain—the creative with the business. I always wanted to explore the world around me.

Fadulu: How much time passed between graduating from UF and starting at Northwestern for business school?

Radford: I was three years in the airline industry before I went to Northwestern.

Fadulu: Why did you decide to go back to school?

Radford: I always knew I wanted to go for an MBA. I took my test when I was an undergrad, so I think I always knew that was going to be part of my plan. Three years seemed about right. Also, living through Eastern Air Lines and then the consolidation with Continental, I realized that this was a good time. I took a leave of absence. I graduated in ’91 from Northwestern, and at that time it was right during the Gulf War, and the airline industry was volatile. P&G came knocking, and I felt like I needed to take the opportunity to really solidify myself in a good company. This goes back to my father, where there wasn’t a day he did not get up and have a respect for Procter & Gamble and his job and his career. Given the fact that the airline was different than that, I wanted to experience that. I wanted to be part of a really well-operating, well-respected company after leaving school. That’s when I decided to come to P&G.

Fadulu: You grew up seeing your dad work for P&G. When you started working there, how much of it was how you expected and which parts of it surprised you?

Radford: I always felt that I wanted to go faster, further, and I sometimes felt that not everyone was running at the same pace. I think there was a learning curve on that, but that happened very early on. And then what I realized is if I was really clear with what I was trying to do for a certain business or brand, and got the right level of data, support, and passion, nothing was impossible.

I tend to innovate, no matter what business it is, and find new ways of making things happen. If you have an idea, you still have to sell your idea. I really pushed for things that never existed before, and that was my mainstay.

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Ending Weed Prohibition Hasn’t Stopped Drug Crimes

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Start-Ups Aren't Cool Anymore

At happy hours and class breaks, at the part-time MBA program I attend through the University of Texas at Austin, the conversation often drifts toward new business ideas. A mobile app to schedule text messages in the future. (Use case: Compose your best friend’s happy birthday text the day before.) A social network that doesn’t sell your personal information or display any ads. (Business model innovation: monthly subscription fee.) A winery in a surprisingly temperate, beautiful, and affordable region of central Oklahoma. A friend of mine was once so inspired by his own start-up concept that he pulled out his phone, checked the availability of his preferred URL, and registered the domain name on the spot.

Similar scenes play out at lots of business schools. The majority of MBA students range in age from the mid-20s to the 30s; with all the discussion of start-ups and new businesses, it would seem that they’re living the Millennial dream of entrepreneurship. But it seems more often than not these days, the start-up ideas fail to take off. When I check on my peers’ start-up proposals after a few weeks, I often find that their ideas have been abandoned, and that my classmates are focused on their steady corporate jobs.

Research suggests entrepreneurial activity has declined among Millennials. The share of people under 30 who own a business has fallen to almost a quarter-century low, according to a 2015 Wall Street Journal analysis of Federal Reserve data. A survey of 1,200 Millennials conducted in 2016 by the Economic Innovation Group found that more Millennials believed they could have a successful career by staying at one company and attempting to climb the ladder than by founding a new one. Two years ago, EIG’s president and co-founder, John Lettieri, testified before the U.S. Senate, “Millennials are on track to be the least entrepreneurial generation in recent history.”

Some of the reasons have been well-documented. The romantic view of entrepreneurship involves angel investors and venture capital funds, but in fact, the ordinary entrepreneur is more likely to fund a start-up using personal savings—something underemployed Millennials simply could not build as they entered the workforce during or in the immediate wake of the Great Recession. Funding from friends and family is the next most common source, but this personal network could not help much during the most recent economic downturn, when so much home equity was underwater. Student debt worsened the underlying economic problems. According to a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, between 2004 and 2014, the number of student borrowers rose by 89 percent.

[Read: Why does Sweden have so many start-ups?]

Lately, though, it seems that even those who might typically have access to other forms of funding, like venture capital, are having a hard time getting investors’ attention. As Matt Krisiloff, a former director at the Y Combinator start-up accelerator in Silicon Valley, tweeted, “Start-ups are a lot less cool than they used to be.” Michael Sadler, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin, is concerned about the rising concentration of start-up investment in just a few super-performing regions such as Austin, New York, and Silicon Valley. As with American politics, it appears the geography of U.S. venture capital and economic growth has become increasingly polarized.

There’s more competition from abroad, too. Chinese venture capital and private-equity firms—and the entrepreneurs they invest in—are challenging America’s historic tech dominance. In the past, this kind of investing tended to involve American funders and American companies. But last year, Asian investors put nearly the same amount into tech start-ups as their U.S. counterparts, according to the Wall Street Journal, with most Chinese-led investments going into the country’s own firms. Of the top five global VC deals in 2017, three were Chinese companies: Didi (a ride-sharing app), Meituan-Dianping (an e-commerce platform), and Toutiao (a news feed reader).

Meanwhile, in the United States, products and services are increasingly being created on top of existing platforms like Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android platform. While a mobile app can make for a decent side hustle to a regular corporate job, it won’t turn into the next Apple or Google, and American investors know that. The more attractive investments are in industries like health care, where there is still opportunity to build a profitable platform. One of the biggest tech deals in the U.S. last year was Outcome Health, which installs video screens in doctors’ offices and charges pharmaceutical companies to display ads to patients. In a thread attached to his tweet about start-ups, Krisiloff, the former Y Combinator executive, added that the opportunities “to start compelling start-ups,” for college students without industry-specific knowledge, “has vastly shrunk.”

[Read: The secret start-up that saved the worst website in America]

While the Austrian American economist Joseph Schumpeter is best known for his 1942 paper describing his theory of “creative destruction,” the process of disrupting existing industries through business innovation or technological change, few people know about another prediction he made: He believed that innovation would gradually become an embedded process within large corporations. In many ways, Schumpeter predicted the internal innovation hubs of corporate giants like Amazon and SAP. With incumbents making innovation part of their established routines, he theorized, they would gradually squeeze out the traditional entrepreneur.

Some of the people who are innovating from within companies like Apple—which in August became the first publicly traded company to surpass a market value of a trillion dollars—might be glad about this development, Sadler said. “They think, ‘I don’t have to start up my own company in the garage, or worry about whether I’m ever going to survive. It’s all there for me now.’” But there is plenty of cause for concern. An economy dominated by older incumbent firms may be less likely to achieve consistently strong rates of growth, according to a 2014 paper from the Brookings Institution. Lettieri also questions whether big companies—in a world with less pressure from start-ups—“have any reason to innovate due to competition.”

When my classmates tell me about their start-up ideas, we sometimes also talk about what’s holding them back. Whether it’s student-loan payments, or the feeling of playing an impossible game of catch-up since the Great Recession, we often understand each other’s problems. Some entrepreneurs might argue that these shared generational experiences and the accompanying sense of solidarity will inspire Millennials to support one another’s business ventures. It’s a nice idea, but it’s not necessarily certain. Research into the personality traits of entrepreneurs shows that, as a lot, they trend toward optimism bias.

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Will the Next Great Tech Company Come From the Developing World?

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When Losing Your Job Is a Blessing

Tim Chen had recently been laid off from his job as a financial analyst at a hedge fund, during the recession of 2008, when his sister asked him for help finding a good credit card. Much of the information he found online was confusing and disorganized, so he decided to start a personal-finance website; it would go on to become NerdWallet, which is now worth $500 million and employs almost 500 people. I recently spoke with Chen about how it feels to get laid off, starting a business during a recession, and why workers should pay attention to who their managers are. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.

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Lola Fadulu: Your parents were computer scientists. Did they want you to go into computer science?

Tim Chen: Yes. It’s a stable job. They knew it well. They had been able to provide for our family by working in the industry. My sister and I were really fortunate. My parents paid for our college education, which is huge.

Fadulu: It sounds like both your parents were steering you toward jobs that would lead to stable futures and high standards of living. How much were you thinking about money when you were applying to jobs post-graduation?

Chen: Growing up, I never felt well off, even though in hindsight we were at least much more stable than average. I think it’s part of the immigrant mentality to be really ambitious about providing for a good future for your kids. I think people base their perception of the world on what happened in their lifetimes, and both my parents fled from armed conflict in their very early years and grew up quite poor after World War II.

Fadulu: The way you grew up was very different from the way your parents grew up.

Chen: Until 2008, I thought that the economy was this super-stable thing, and everything was good. I didn’t realize that crazy economic shocks can happen. 2008 really changed my life. I lost my job, I lost a lot of my savings. I ended up starting a company as a result. It’s funny, my grandpa used to tell me, “You should take your money and go buy gold and jewelry with it, because you never know when the government’s gonna get overthrown by communists.” I’d go, “Grandpa, that’s such outdated thinking.” But it wasn’t that long ago when that happened to a huge country.

Fadulu: Were you completely surprised when you lost your job in 2008? Did you see it coming at all?

Chen: Absolutely not. [I was] totally blindsided. Never in a million years would I have thought that the institutions that I worked for, or the banks themselves, would be worried about going out of business. In hindsight I feel very fortunate that there was a recession, from a personal perspective, because I never would have gotten into entrepreneurship, even though it was an ambition of mine. It’s just too hard to take that risk when you have a stable job and you’re living in a really expensive city like New York. So the downturn forced me into it. In the early years, I wasn’t seeing much success with NerdWallet, and it was really the length of the recession that caused me to keep trying instead of taking another job.

Fadulu: Did you have any other business ideas you were considering, or was it NerdWallet all along?

Chen: I didn’t know that I wanted to start a business. I didn’t have anything that I was seriously considering outside of NerdWallet. It really came about when my sister asked me for help finding a credit card. I said, “Let me Google that for you.” I was kind of surprised when I didn’t find anything that helpful, in terms of breaking it down in an easy-to-understand way. I quickly realized that this is a problem with all financial products. They’re extremely hard to shop for, because, basically, there’s no incentive for anyone to provide you with an easy-to-understand way to shop for them.

Fadulu: What was the hardest part of starting NerdWallet?

Chen: I think one of the hardest parts was convincing other people I wasn’t crazy. You can’t do something like this yourself. You need to convince people with perfectly good jobs to quit their jobs and come join you, which is a lot of responsibility to shoulder, especially in the early days. Fortunately, in the early days it was much easier because many of my friends in New York were unemployed. A lot of us were affected by the financial crisis. A lot of us were just sitting around twiddling our thumbs, going to Dave & Buster’s in the middle of the day because they have half-price tickets on Wednesdays. And it was easy at least to get a few people to hang out [and join NerdWallet] until they found gainful employment. The first two years, I basically told people I was unemployed because there was really very little traction in the business.

Fadulu: You had to convince people to quit perfectly good jobs. How did you do it? What were your selling points?

Chen: In the early days, it was really just hitting up people out of my personal network from college or people who had been laid off from their jobs and seeing if they [wanted to help out]. I couldn’t pay them at the time. Later on, as we started growing, it really became more about painting the vision of what [the business] could eventually become and getting people inspired by that.

[Read: LeVar Burton on pursuing the priesthood before acting]

Fadulu: What would you say is the best piece of advice you’ve received from a mentor or a colleague?

Chen: For me, personally, it was that you can’t just put your head down and work hard and do things. You have to communicate well what it is you’re trying to do—the vision behind what you’re trying to do—to get other people inspired to understand what you’re doing and help you out. I think that really applies for NerdWallet the company because ... I, myself, have done very little. My one piece of advice from my early career is that I had no idea that my development and my happiness at each of these jobs was going to be almost completely driven by my manager. In my first job, I was in a different city than my manager, and people didn’t have time to develop me or guide me. I didn’t learn much my first two years of work. At my second job, I learned more in the first two months than I did in the first two years [of the first job]. In hindsight, my manager [at my second job] cared a lot about developing me and teaching me things, and that was huge. And then at my third job, my manager and I didn’t really get along. I got fired. I think these things are important to think about.

Fadulu: What do you think about the state of the workforce for young people?

Chen: I think what I’ve noticed about Millennials in our workforce is that they are some of the most passionate, inspiration-driven people, whereas the stereotype for the older generation is that they cared more about stability and were more willing to work in a factory manufacturing widgets all day in exchange for that stability. People are much more transitory in their careers now. If you find great alignment for three or four years with a job opportunity, and you say, “I really want to learn from the person I’m working for, and three or four years from now I’m going to come out with a different set of skills,” that seems like a great fit for three or four years. You can’t really think too far beyond that. It’s really hard to plan where you’re going to be in 30 years. If you keep on doing that, it’s kind of like rock-climbing. You’ll end up in a good place.

I think the best opportunities in 30 years, while we can’t anticipate them now, are going to go to the people who have picked up a lot of skills along the way.

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The Great Virginia Grape Heist

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The ‘Madman’ Behind Trump’s Trade Theory

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LeVar Burton on Pursuing the Priesthood Before Acting

At the age of 17, LeVar Burton was on a path to the priesthood, having entered seminary three years earlier. But Burton began questioning the Catholic point of view, and he did not receive satisfying answers from his elders. He decided to change his trajectory, and landed on acting.

Two years later, as an undergraduate at the University of Southern California, Burton got a role acting alongside Cicely Tyson and Maya Angelou in Roots, the TV miniseries. “They schooled me,” he said. He’d go on to act in Star Trek: The Next Generation and to host PBS’s Reading Rainbow.

I spoke to Burton recently about serving the greater community, his calling to the priesthood, and his advice for young people dealing with the challenges that can come with extraordinary success. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.

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Lola Fadulu: You were born in Germany. How long did you live there?

LeVar Burton: We came back to the States when I was a year old, and then went again when I was in the third and fourth grade for another two years. So it is [my father’s] second tour of duty that I actually remember.

Fadulu: What do you remember about it?

Burton: Oh my gosh, I remember so many things. I remember our first apartment, which was what they called “on the economy,” which simply meant that it was in town. It wasn’t on the military base itself. This was the 1960s and the Allies had been in Germany since the end of World War II, so there was a constant influx of GIs and their families going there. I remember the beer man who came and delivered beer, just like they delivered milk.

Fadulu: Did your parents talk to you about their jobs often?

Burton: My mom talked a lot about not necessarily her job, but her belief that one’s life should be a service to the greater community. That was certainly something I picked up and absorbed. Most of the people in my family are in the field of education in one way or another. It’s kind of the family business. We are also a family that really values education, puts a very high premium on education and its value in society and for individuals. I personally believe that education is the key to freedom.

Actually, literacy is the key to freedom because you can educate yourself. But my mom didn’t talk a lot about her job, because she worked in a [federal program] that at that time was called AFDC. AFDC stood for Aid to Families With Dependent Children, so she worked with a lot of women who were then, as today, escaping situations that involved abuse, and she was really trying to help these women and their families get back on their feet after some catastrophic event that had obviously caused them to lose their balance. She didn’t talk about those cases specifically, because, No. 1, it was inappropriate because that’s confidential information and, No. 2, it wasn’t age-appropriate conversation either.

Fadulu: As a child, you were hearing about the importance of serving the greater community and of education. Did you ever push back on those life philosophies?

Burton: You did not push back where Irma Jean Christian was concerned. I’m sorry, that was just not an option. I don’t know how you were raised, but in my family, we did not push back on our mother. My first career choice was the Catholic priesthood.

Fadulu: Can you tell me a little bit about entering the seminary to become a priest?

Burton: It was all initiated by me. I had a calling. I felt like that’s how I was destined to spend my life, and so I took steps as early as I could in that direction, and my mom was very supportive. I entered the Catholic seminary at the age of 13 in Northern California. I began my formal training as an initiate into the order of the Society of the Divine Savior. I was there for four years. During my time there it actually shifted its focus from being solely a seminary to also being a college-preparatory program.

Fadulu: What is the most important thing you learned from your four years in seminary?

Burton: That I didn’t want to be a priest. I had a lay teacher who was neither a priest nor a brother who taught my favorite subjects, a man named Lee Bartlett. He was the English teacher, he was the drama coach, he also taught philosophy, and he opened up my mind to ways of looking at the world that were separate from the Catholic point of view, and a lot of it made sense to me. I had a lot of questions that the Catholic saints and the dogma of the Church could not answer. So I decided that I needed to find some other focus for my life at the ripe old age of 17.

[Jimmy O. Yang spent years getting ready for “Crazy Rich Asians.”]

Fadulu: How did you go about finding that other focus?

Burton: I sort of took inventory: What did I feel like I was good at? Where did I find some passion, some juice, in my life? And the answer was theater arts. It was the not-being-afraid-to-be-onstage part that I found I was good at. I had a natural affinity for acting and public speaking.

Fadulu: Were you nervous at all about finding a job in acting postgraduation or during your summers?

Burton: I wasn’t, no. I’m sure my mom was. But I had gone from wanting to be a priest to being an actor. I’m sure she had some concerns about both of those choices, but she never let on. She always showed a face of loving support.

Fadulu: Did you have any jobs in college?

Burton: No. My first day as a Bachelor of Fine Arts major in drama at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, they made an announcement: “If you want to be a B.F.A., if you want a Bachelor of Fine Arts major”—and there were only two places that really offered a B.F.A. in drama at the time, USC and Carnegie Mellon—“If you want to do this, then you’ve got to commit to it. You will not have time to hold down a part-time job. You will not have time to go out for a sport. You will not have time to join a fraternity or sorority. You will be spending every waking moment in these environments, and you will be busy.” And they were right. But before I went to USC, the two summers before, I worked at Mr. B’s Formal Wear in Sacramento, renting tuxedos to wedding parties and proms. I had to wear a tuxedo every day.

Fadulu: What was it like getting Roots in college?

Burton: Are you kidding me? My life was changed forever. My first day as an actor, Cicely Tyson played my mother, Maya Angelou played my grandmother. I was 19, and they embraced me as a peer. They schooled me. They certainly taught me what it meant to be a professional, but they assumed that because I was there I belonged there, and they treated me as such. It was an extraordinary experience for a young person.

Fadulu: What did they teach you about what it meant to be a professional?

Burton: So many things that it’s impossible to list. For instance, the importance of being on time; the importance of knowing your dialogue, knowing your lines; the importance of treating everybody with respect. Just things that they don’t teach you in college.

Fadulu: Do you have any advice or tips for young people who are dealing with the stresses of extraordinary success?

Burton: Extraordinary success at a young age is incredibly challenging. My advice would be to make knowing yourself, discovering yourself, and engaging in a rigorous process of introspection and personal growth your primary focus because it’s only through a foundation of knowing who you are that you’ll be able to maintain your balance in a very unstable and destabilizing career.

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The Blackfeet Brain Drain

I grew up on the high-elevation plains of northwest Montana, on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, in a culture in which English did not become the dominant language until the middle part of the 20th century. Leaving to attend the University of Montana in the mid-1990s, after receiving a tuition waiver the summer following my senior year of high school, marked my first time living away from our reservation. My graduating class was one of the first in which many of us left to seek degrees, a development that mirrored a shift taking place nationwide; by 1996, 30 percent of Native American 18- to 24-year-olds were enrolled in college, up from about 16 percent in 1989.

Some of us went to college to escape our treaty-established, semi-sovereign homeland and the social and political problems common in Indian country. Others left because there wasn’t anything else to do. Many of us, though, were driven by an idea about higher education that had recently begun to take hold on reservations—that the purpose of college was to prepare us to help our communities. Not until well into adulthood did I realize that this well-meaning notion reflected not only our communities’ need for help, but also their failure to understand that higher education, in the absence of structural change and economic opportunity on the reservation, was likelier to draw young people away from home than to help them make it better.

The relationship between education and economy is more complicated in Indian country than elsewhere in the United States. While access to higher education is a means to a better life as much for American Indians as for anyone else, connotations specific to reservation people exist that trouble the situation. Going to school means leaving a cultural context—which includes many relatives, sometimes too many—that doesn’t occur anywhere else in the country. Departing for college also means engaging with an educational system that does little to break the myth of how this country came to be, one that elides historical facts about broken treaties, Indian law, and Congress’s plenary power over tribal nations.

At the University of Montana, I found myself having to address American ignorance in an exhausting manner, explaining again and again that no, we do not go to school for free, and yes, we do pay taxes; that “blood quantum”—a measurement of a person’s “Indian blood” that determines membership for most tribes—is a colonial invention.

Prior to colonization—for millennia, in fact—the economy of the Blackfoot people revolved around the iinii, or buffalo, which provided not just food, but tepee covers, clothing, tools, and weapons. The animal’s sudden, severe decline in the mid-to-late 1800s, the result of slaughter on the part of Americans hunting for hides and so-called sport, caused enormous cultural chaos for all plains tribes. Within several years, many indigenous people in the vast region were without sustenance. In 1883, as many as 600 Blackfeet starved to death, an event that came to be known as the Starvation Winter. That time still hangs in the air, one of the few historical events discussed on my reservation.

While the recent return of the buffalo to the Blackfeet Reservation has resulted in positive PR, employment statistics in our homeland make clear that their reappearance is largely symbolic. In 2015, the poverty rate among Blackfeet was higher than 38 percent (compared with a national average of 13.5 percent), unemployment was at almost 19 percent (compared with 5.3 percent nationally), and labor-force participation was at 53 percent (compared with 62.7 percent nationally). Many reservations are in rural areas geographically isolated from stronger urban job markets. Although people sometimes perceive casinos as having brought riches to reservations, that’s true in very few cases. Meanwhile, outsiders who might consider investing on reservations have difficulty assessing the risks because tribes are separate sovereign entities, with distinct and unfamiliar laws and legal structures, so they often avoid investing altogether.

And, for various reasons, the kind of economic opportunities that might produce homegrown entrepreneurship are rare. For one thing, many reservation Indians live on land that is held in “trust” by the federal government and managed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs—meaning individual tribal members don’t own the property on which they live. As a result, they lack the collateral needed to acquire business loans, a problem compounded by a lack of financial literacy endemic to Indian country.

What no one ever told me at college, I assume because it seemed self-evident to them, is that higher education is associated with a white-collar economy. When you come from a reservation, where any such economy is unlikely to exist, understanding what a degree is supposed to do is difficult. In my case, I happened upon Jack Kerouac’s work when I was 19, and became a writer. I dropped out of school, not sure how higher education related to writing fiction, unsure if I’d ever reenroll. Thus began a pattern—drop out, reenroll, drop out, reenroll.

Each move home brought an overwhelming sense of relief after the stultifying atmosphere of attending class with non-Indian students I found bafflingly humorless. (In even the darkest of times, Blackfoot prefer to laugh at life and one another.) But returning home also showed me what awaited if I stayed there: substitute-teaching gigs, working at the diner, or managing my family’s convenience store, where I often stood in the parking lot listening to the vast, predawn silence of the northern plains, drinking coffee and waiting for the first customer. Much later in life, I recognized these experiences as my first encounters with the economic hardship that dominates Indian country.

Though the general message for people like me is that the purpose of higher education is to return home to help our community, the reality is that the economy on most reservations cannot support the work that’s needed. The kinds of jobs most Americans might associate with a healthy, middle- or upper-middle-class economy—software development, sales, marketing—are nonexistent. Other occupations so common to healthy economies that we often take them for granted, such as counselorships, managerial positions, and careers with nonprofits and the state and federal government, are rare.

Perhaps it is telling that the most lucrative job available to me, during my stints back home, involved doing controversial work in the oil-and-gas industry, acquiring lease signatures from Blackfeet landowners who lived on our reservation and around the western United States. To outsiders, Indians participating in the extraction of resources from their land by American corporations uninterested in tribal nations’ well-being might appear contradictory. The reality is that, in our devastated economies, many people have little other choice.

None of these were jobs I wanted. I craved to be around writers, and the writers I knew were on campuses and in urban areas. I felt a need to be in a culture where the fine arts were appreciated, where that type of intellectual discussion was commonplace. Each time I left school, these things brought me back. After nine years, at my mom’s urging, I finally graduated. Much later, I learned my long undergrad arc, with its staccato enrollment, is common for a reservation Native.

I often ask myself what our reservation would look like if there had been a healthy economy and a more diverse culture to welcome those from my graduating class who received college degrees. The majority of my high-school classmates who left for school did not come back, opting for stable jobs elsewhere, perhaps returning to the reservation for Christmas or the summer powwow. As for me, I kept drifting. When I was 36, a new job opened up at Blackfeet Community College, one of the few white-collar positions available to someone like me on our reservation. I applied and got the job. Directing the writing center, I hoped, would give me what I needed most: a steady income, time to write, and the opportunity to give back to people in my community. I also intensified my relationship to Blackfoot-language work, helping to start a nonprofit dedicated to the revival of our mother tongue. I went to traditional ceremonies again. I ran into cousins during late-night visits to the convenience store. For the first time since high school, I became a full-time participant in contemporary Blackfeet culture.

At Blackfeet Community College, I found that many of our young people now assume they will go to college. This is the case on reservations across the country, whether that means attending one of the 38 tribal colleges and universities in the United States or another school. In an American sense, reservation people are becoming more educated. But I soon realized that college degrees haven’t translated to Indian graduates regularly securing white-collar jobs in their homelands; years after I graduated college, reservation economies still aren’t substantial enough to provide those careers. When asked what they wanted to do with their future associate’s degrees, my students responded largely with blank looks.

In my students, I saw my 18-year-old self. Many wanted to help our community, and I was at a loss to help them understand how that might happen in a place with such limited opportunities. I didn’t know how to tell them that their basic, human desire for stability and a decent income would contribute to a brain drain that has profoundly affected our economy and politics; that the purported objective of education—that we are to become educated so we can help our communities—is difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish. Without improved economies, higher education simply contributes further to reservation students’ confusion about where they belong in this world.

Though I was one of the few who found the kind of job an educated reservation Indian is supposed to find, I remained conflicted. Due to my professional duties, along with the stress that comes with teaching students from a community broken by colonial force, I found myself writing less. So I applied for a Stegner Fellowship in creative writing at Stanford University, and was accepted.

This fall, I left the reservation again, departing with some sense of failure—of not having done enough. The Stegner Fellowship will potentially provide opportunities unavailable to me otherwise: time to write and professional advancement. Pursuing those experiences, though, will necessitate being away from my reservation for most of the rest of my life. All too often, success for reservation Indians means leaving your heart in your homeland.

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