How a Stanford MBA Can Ruin Your Lifeļ¼ No One Wins the Rat Race
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Summary
In this episode, we reflect on my 10-year Stanford GSB reunion, and talk about the benefits of an MBA in today's market economy. We also talk about why an MBA is not as useful as it used to be.
Transcript
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one of the, a few of my classmates got a company. It's easily a billion dollar company now. And I
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was talking to one of the guys, because when you're working on a company like this, you are
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stuck 24 seven, basically tied to your desk, extreme working hours. So I was like, so what
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are you doing now? And he goes, oh, I left to start another company. And I don't understand it.
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I don't understand why, like for me, startups were not the point of the startup. The startup
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was to get you financial freedom or to get you the freedom to do what you want to do.
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You have dreams about one day doing some big project that you haven't started on yet. You're
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never going to do that project. So go out and start today or it's never going to happen.
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I'm just telling you that right now. It's never going to happen if you aren't in some small way
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working on it right now. Jump out of the plane, pull out the parachute. No, you are the only person
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who can decide that. And I think that's important for everything. When it comes to getting a partner,
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when it comes to having a kid, you have to just throw yourself out of the plane. There's never
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going to be a time where you really feel ready. Would you like to know more?
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All right, Simone, it is wonderful to be chatting with you again today. Today, we are going to reflect
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on my 10-year Stanford GSB reunion. That's the Stanford MBA program. It's generally, I think,
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about the hardest program to get into in the world. Harder than Harvard, right?
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We went viral for one thing or another on Reddit once. And some people were like, oh, he misleads
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people in the way he talks. It makes it sound like he got a neuroscience PhD at Stanford,
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but he only got an MBA. And I'm here fuming because it is much harder to get into the MBA
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program than the neuroscience PhD program. I am like, what? Anyway, because I could have done that.
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I actually had applied to both of them, but I withdrew my application when I got into the MBA
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program because I was like, what's the point? You get into the MBA program and you can basically
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write your own check in life if you get into a Stanford or Harvard MBA. But what I want to talk
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about in this podcast is a few things. One, the utility of an MBA in today's market economy,
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because I've seen some heavily overlapped YouTuber to us was like, MBAs don't matter
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anymore. And I was like, you don't know what you're talking about? Like I am fairly against
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the university system, but he's just unaware of the opportunities.
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The doors it opens, the network, it's insane. Like basically when you were there,
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the most prestigious companies out there just lined up to try to hire you.
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My teachers included Eric Schmidt and Connalisa Rice and...
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The people that could bring in for your classes.
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Like Chamath would come in and like yell at everyone in our class. And these are small classes
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When Evan Spiegel came in and swore a lot in front of your class.
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So I want to be clear that... And people are like, oh, you get high profile. People are like,
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no, really, the classes don't matter. It's the alumni network afterwards. I guess I can start
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with this. When you cold email people, especially like right around graduation or for the first few
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years after graduation, and you include that in your subject line, you get like a 50, 60% response
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rate, actually, especially from high profile people, because they're often looking for bedded,
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hungry, young people that they can put into positions as sort of gophers. Because what you
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begin to realize is that from the perspective of many of the quote unquote elite in our society,
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what there is a shortage of is competent, self-motivated young people who don't just
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dismiss them or arrogant or working on their own projects or something like that. And to an extent,
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they're right. If you're in our current economy and you are competent and ambitious, it's a big
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question as to why you aren't just starting your own company. No, seriously. Like why aren't you?
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So this helps vet for them that sliver of competent and ambitious people who aren't just immediately
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doing their own thing, which is high utility for groups like that. Also for venture capitalists,
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it makes it much easier to raise money, et cetera. You're basically putting a modifier on everything.
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Now, this is not true for all MBA programs. This is basically only true for Harvard and Stanford
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and to a lesser extent Wharton. And then after Wharton, MBA is just not worth it because the MBA program
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isn't like an undergrad where it like declines in quality on a linear basis. It's like a logarithmic
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sloop down. And the reason is because you're sacrificing two years of your career that you
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could be using to put yourself into a higher position. Basically with our kids, you're going
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to tell them, unless you get into Harvard or Stanford, maybe Wharton, probably not. Don't
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bother, right? Don't bother. Yeah, that's what I'd say.
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By the time our kids are going to university, you're going to tell them not to go to university,
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probably. Yeah. Yeah, because it's okay. You sacrifice two of your career years for this. So
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you better be getting an actual big boost, which is what causes this logarithmic scale
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in MBA program quality. But anyway, the reunion, because this was really interesting, because
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I got a chance to compare myself to how other people were doing. And it highlighted to me
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how unimpressive the people who are objectively more successful than me are to me these days.
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And the catastrophically poor life choices that people even in positions of economic privilege
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end up making. And it's worth highlighting this. So I can go over a few anecdotes that
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really got to me. A few of my classmates got a company. It's easily a billion dollar company
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now. This was started by four or five of my classmates. And they've all moved on from it
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at this point, but they started it. They've made enormous amounts of money. And I was talking
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to one of the guys because when you're working on a company like this, you are stuck 24 seven,
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basically tied to your desk, extreme working hours. The team, they worked really hard to
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make this happen. And it was an incredibly boring logistics based company on like the way
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that code travels between various like high performance apps.
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Oh, and this was after a ton of pivots, not just from the, this first company, but from
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Oh, they worked so hard. Yeah. So the first company they started was actually about
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And then another one was about photo books. I mean, they were relentless. They'd done
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So I'm going to describe the two bad idea companies that they started first. The first was not necessarily
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bad ideas, but it just gives you an idea of how entrepreneurialism works. They started a
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company that was for monitoring people's dogs for like really obsessed dog moms that were like a baby
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monitor for your dogs that would monitor their health. I could see that doing well. They just
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didn't get any market traction. Then the next was like automatically printing out your Facebook
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pictures as photo books for elderly relatives. Not a terrible idea. Didn't catch off. We actually
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had an order one. We liked the one that we were like, I think we still have the one that we got
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product. It didn't cost that much. You could do it for 50 bucks. But then the final one that they
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went into was for deep linking code between apps for, I don't exactly understand it, but if I was going to
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try to explain it, it was like, so that Facebook could like deep link contact to another system
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without using a normal type of URL deep link. I don't understand it. And anyway, so we're talking
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with the guys who founded it and he was like, yeah. So I was like, so what are you doing now?
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And he goes, oh, I left to start another company. And I was like, what does it do? And it was something
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equally boring. Like not world changing. I can understand dating yourself to a company if you're
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like trying to change the world or something like that. Or if you have full control this time, but
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no, he raised money from VCs again. He is yet a save to the entire cycle again. It's like you sell
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all, and he was still living in like Palo Alto, right? Not dating, not going out. And I was, I don't
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understand it. I don't understand why, like for me, startups were not the point of the startup.
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The startup was to get you financial freedom or to get you the freedom to do what you want to do.
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And this was actually very similar to a conversation. Just so you know, I didn't actually
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out anyone with this conversation because five people from my class were founders of that company.
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So that doesn't really narrow it down. But this was very similar to many conversations I had at the
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class. And actually somebody, simply similar was said on a couple of occasions. So another one of
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my classmates who actually was the most similar to us, moved to Napa, works around wineries, some sort
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of like winery consultant thing. And her husband does like wine sales. That sounds very romantic,
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honestly. Yeah, they're not making a lot. They're probably making around what we make as a family,
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which is... We should point out that what you, you kept telling me while you were there,
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because I stayed home being postpartum and all that with the kids. Oh, we're like the least
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successful in our class. Everyone's more successful than us. And by successful, I ultimately found out
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you meant in terms of earning. And in terms of the histogram of earnings from Stanford grads,
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you were off the charts. There's like two standard deviations from the mean.
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Class number of my class, I think, is earning somewhere half a million a year now.
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Within one standard deviation in the top range was well over a million a year per individual.
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Again, this is how useful a Stanford MBA is, right? This is what Stanford grads are earning,
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that the average is 500,000 shows you how valuable that MBA is.
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So they had told this other person and me on different cases, oh, you guys must be like
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the most successful people in our class, because you are doing what we all want to do after we make
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enough money. And this is where I was like, wait a second. You know that this other person in the
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class is doing this and I, we are like off the chart in terms of the low income group of the class.
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And then it got me thinking about the way people structure their lives more generally.
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And it made me realize that this is the way so many people structure things. Is there like, oh,
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I'll go out there and get rich and then I'll use the fact that I've gotten rich to live the life I
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want to live without asking themselves, how much does it really cost to live the life I want to live?
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What is the ideal life I have? And pursuing the lifestyle in concurrence with wealth and
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prominence and everything like that. With the understanding that while you are living a
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lifestyle you want to live, that is going to hinder your, we'd be making so much more if we were
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living in like San Francisco or New York, but the quality of life in those environments is terrible.
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And also just, it's so ugly in the Bay Area. And I don't think people realize that they think San
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Francisco, you think of the most beautiful streets on San Francisco, you think of quite tower
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on Lombard street. You don't realize that most of what people are living in around Palo Alto in
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Oakland, around California, even in San Francisco is just ugly suburban sprawl because soon tight indie
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they're just gross looking houses that aren't getting updated because zoning is so terrible.
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It is not a pretty place to live. And even if you have a ton of money, the best you can buy with that is
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not very nice. So it's just a terrible area. Like the cost of earning that much is basically living in a
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Yeah. Well, and this brings me, one of the classmates I was talking to became like a realtor type guy
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and he did New York real estate was one of the things he worked on. He was one of the, I assume,
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less successful people that you can make a lot of money in New York real estates, who knows?
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And he was telling me that in the New York real estate market, you would always see the same
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story. People would come into New York and get a house that was like cheap and small and far away
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from the center of the city. And they'd be like, I'm just getting here to find a spouse and earn some
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money. And then I'm going to transfer from that into, um, then leave and live the lifestyle. I
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actually want to live financially unconstrained. And he goes, and the same thing always happened
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with follow-ups. He goes, once you got somebody into the city, they're a repeat customer.
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You mean with, within city purchases, like they don't.
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Yeah. Within city purchases, no matter what they tell you, it's always, I want something a little
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closer to central park. I want something with a little better view. I want something a little bit
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bigger two, three years. And it's just this cycle that once somebody gets into the cycle,
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they can't break their mind out of the cycle because of their immediate goals. And I think
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that this is the problem with the way goals work in somebody's mind is that their immediate goals
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are usually structured around doing what they're doing now, but higher prestige and slightly better.
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And sometimes their long-term goals are a like leap step away from that.
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If you understand what I mean, it's like a completely different type of a thing.
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Like a lateral move in life. It's a very different career and move. And I think one of the things
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that's getting in people's way is they know what they know. So the startup founder example that you
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gave to us, he knows how to start companies. He knows how to work his ass off. He doesn't know
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how to necessarily become a writer or a philanthropist or whatever. It's just so
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different. And I think there's also this big fear of potentially failing, especially once you've been
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so successful. I think a lot of the people who get into one of the most prestigious schools in the
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world, like Harvard or Stanford, and then they graduate and then they continue to succeed.
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The cost of then trying something new and failing, I think becomes higher. So this is along the same
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lines of how they say, you should never tell a kid, oh, you're so smart. Oh, you're so smart.
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Because then they're going to stop taking risks because it risks them losing their identity of
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being the smart one. Instead, you have to be like, oh, you're so hardworking. Oh, you're so creative.
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Oh, you're so whatever. Because that encourages them to take risks and try different things.
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And I think because these people are so successful, they are trapped in their gold-plated chains. They're
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trapped by their success and the cliff that they could fall off becomes higher and higher.
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And so they don't really want to make these crazy lateral changes, even if they have nothing to lose
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because they've already made it. Because they've also built this life around prestige and success.
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That, but I think it's more than that. And I think that this message is actually transferable
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outside of the Stanford circle. I think the Stanford MBA circle just
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shows the comical extremes that can take in somebody's life. And I think sometimes you
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need to see the comical extremes to understand personally, oh, what am I doing? Because we've
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actually seen this in our fans where we talk to our fans and I go, why aren't you looking
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for a spouse right now? And they go, I'll look for my spouse once X milestone has been reached.
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And then I can achieve higher quality spouses. And I'm like, I literally in my entire life,
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I don't know a single person who has taken that approach and ended up married.
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Not, not, not in a happy relationship, married at all. When I actually, when I was talking to the
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startup guy and I was like, okay, so are you going to go look for a spouse or are you doing that?
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And it's, oh, when I'm done with this next startup. And I should be clear for somebody to be like,
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maybe he just really likes startups, like the grind. And he told me explicitly, no, it was hell.
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He was like, I was working so hard. I'm going to try to take it a little easier this time.
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And I was like, why did you do it then? Why did you start it again?
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And his response was, I wanted to prove to myself that the first time wasn't random chance.
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And I think that I totally get that. There's a, there's like this honor in that, right? Okay.
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You ended up one of the most successful people of anyone you've ever met. And now you want to prove
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to yourself that it wasn't just a fluke, which is okay. But if it wasn't just a fluke,
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then maybe you have success in a different domain next time. But also it precludes. And this is where
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like the pragmatist guide to life, our first book, I consider it to be such a rudimentary book when I'm
00:16:10.380
recommending it to people. I'm almost embarrassed, but because I'm like, this is something that most
00:16:14.300
people should be thinking through while they're in high school. Yet they don't. And essentially what it
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prompts you to do as an individual, and it's got an audio book that comes for free with a 99 cents
00:16:24.240
ebook. So like you can get it. It's very easy to get. So it's, but if you want it on Audible, you can
00:16:28.240
get it there. It's just the, we can't keep the price that low on Audible. So anyway, pragmatist guide
00:16:32.740
to life. It's a book around determining what has value to you and then living a life in dedication to
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that. And we try not to steer people towards any specific answers. On our show, we have a strong
00:16:43.720
bias against specific answers like utilitarianism or hedonism on the, in the guide, we don't like
00:16:48.240
utilitarians. I'll read the book and they'll be like, Oh, you were trying to push everyone to be
00:16:51.720
a utilitarian. And I'm like, actually, we have a pretty strong stance against utilitarianism,
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but it's useful because then once you adopt a framework like that, whether it's a utilitarian
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ethical set or like us, like trying to expand human potentiality, then you can be like, okay,
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now that I have achieved X, if I am doing Y next in life, how do I leverage sort of the inventory
00:17:13.780
of skills and advantages and resources I have to most accurately and efficaciously have my moral
00:17:21.340
system enacted upon reality? And that can be like a religious system, for example, that can be a,
00:17:25.940
there's all sorts of questions here, but I don't think for anyone, especially if it wasn't making
00:17:30.660
you happy, going back to start another startup is the right answer. That is more just like you're on
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rails and your availability heuristics around the types of things you could do or attempt to do
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better is anchored to the last thing you were doing. And I think that this really comes to the
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New York housing market. You may in your mind be like one day, I'd like to live in the mountains by
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a stream. But when you're thinking, what can I do next? Your next promotion is like marginally an
00:18:01.020
easier thing to achieve and think about, or the house that's slightly closer to Times Square is
00:18:07.740
slightly easier to, or not, sorry, sorry, Central Park. Nobody in New York wants to be in your
00:18:11.300
Times Square. Sorry about that. And to just elevate how attainable our life is, we live in a house that
00:18:18.760
a lot of people would think of is quite large. It is 1700s, beautiful, old, all brick. We are
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surrounded by a state park and then a national park that surrounds the state park, thousands of miles
00:18:30.580
of walking pathways and a river right in front of our house and a creek next to our house. And we got
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this for like around half a million, 500K for this in the house next door. And that's for the house
00:18:43.560
next door, which we can use to pay taxes, which we can use to make this lifestyle even more sustainable
00:18:48.000
than it was. That is what the average classmate is earning in a year. Okay. That is like when I'm
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talking about sustainability of a life like this, like literally anyone from my class could just duck out
00:19:01.700
and then start rebuilding from an environment like this. But I think I also see this in how they're
00:19:07.240
approaching partners. They look for partners who are absolutely perfect. Because I, one thing I will
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say is that my advocacy apparently has had a big effect on my class. 82% of my classmates have had kids,
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which is actually when you're comparing it to the general population, a really high number.
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A lot of them joked that it was my advocacy. So I'm not even hated by them being in the urban monoculture.
00:19:28.360
Although I did get in a big fight with one of their girlfriends because I'm so pro-Israel in
00:19:32.960
this war and she was pro-Hamas. And I'm pro-Hamas. She did not think that Israel should exist as a
00:19:38.620
state and all the land should be given back to the Palestinian people and the Jews should be
00:19:41.580
deported. I obviously got in a bit of a fight there. And I could tell that it's one of the things
00:19:48.100
where, so this is a system where I guess they should have been more biased against me, but they
00:19:51.240
weren't because they know me or they're like, oh, this is the type of weird thing Mauka would do.
00:19:55.160
You would always say things that were controversial.
00:19:56.900
Yeah. I think it's one of those things where if you've seen our podcast, you'd be like,
00:20:02.640
oh yeah. Like at first people like, hey, watch us. And then they're like, oh yeah, I get it. Of
00:20:07.460
course they would promote this. This is totally within their, but what are your thoughts on this?
00:20:11.860
Like living the good life, Simone, and how to approach it?
00:20:15.600
Yeah. I think most people are not actually trying to live the good life. I think that,
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especially when you look at high achievers, many of them never really sought to live a good life or
00:20:25.840
even pursue happiness. The objective function that they have typically without ever thinking
00:20:30.620
about it, it just worked out this way and was part of their disposition as well, is that they are,
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you could say, prestige optimizers or achievement optimizers where they've just always done the
00:20:40.040
best. Okay. I'm in the school system. I have to get an A, I have to get a 5.0. I have to get into
00:20:44.880
the best college. I have to get, have all the best extracurriculars, win all the sports games,
00:20:49.060
win the science fair, whatever it might be, right? Always win, always be number one.
00:20:52.220
And that's, what's happening now is they're making a ton of money. They have their Stanford
00:20:56.920
MBAs. They have their kids. They've like literally like their, their prestige or achievement maxing
00:21:01.600
essentially. No, you're absolutely right. And that is not, that is not having an objective
00:21:06.780
function. That is not having a, a moral framework that is not knowing what you want and, and really
00:21:12.520
pursuing it. It is just being an optimizing machine. They're almost like AIs and we all are like
00:21:17.280
AIs, but they are AIs with an objective function of achievement. Paperclip maximizing.
00:21:22.280
Yeah. But they're just achievement maximizers. They're the paperclip maximizers.
00:21:25.720
Actually a really interesting point that you're making here. And I want to be clear about what
00:21:29.440
I'm saying with this is that they like, when I'm like, I am less impressed. Like we have
00:21:35.200
the people who we give our apartment next door to, who are helping getting, get on their feet and
00:21:40.340
start a company. And they've recently come out of the prison system, which by the way,
00:21:44.160
they're okay with us saying, because they've said it on the pitches. So I know they're okay
00:21:47.200
with us saying that now. And people would be like, I genuinely, when I hear their story,
00:21:52.420
I have more respect for them than many of our classmates. And people would be like, why is
00:21:58.420
that? And it's because I judge your person by their future and not by their past. And when
00:22:04.960
they are thinking about their future, they have a cohesive plan of how they're going to build
00:22:09.680
a good family and a good life that is realistic. And they are ambitiously trying to do it.
00:22:15.340
And that makes me proud for what they're attempting. Right. So I, but with this other group,
00:22:21.600
and this is with classmates and stuff like this, when I'm like, I don't like respect what they're
00:22:26.000
doing. It's not a difference in value systems. And I need to be very clear here. I, as people know
00:22:31.480
from this podcast, I'm actually pretty open to many different value systems as, and I will rank them,
00:22:37.040
but I'm open to many different value systems. It is that they do not have a value system.
00:22:43.660
There is no value system that just says like this logically consistent that just says more money
00:22:49.660
better. Um, and here I'll play a clip from an old video game where a guy goes, bury me with my money.
00:22:59.300
Where it's, uh, when you die and you're on your deathbed and you're reflecting on your life
00:23:04.800
from all of the various things you could have value, whether it was charity or religion or family,
00:23:12.040
or even personal hedonism. Like I can respect at a higher level than I can respect this sort of like
00:23:18.840
mindless prestige optimization, people who optimize their lives entirely around hedonism,
00:23:24.840
because at least they have some like logically consistent value system they're optimizing around.
00:23:29.960
Whereas so many people, I think even the people who are society sorting, it's like the best of the
00:23:34.320
best per generation, which, okay, I'm not saying that Stanford is perfect to do it accepts, but it's
00:23:38.960
certainly accepting the top fraction of a percent of the population in terms of like just definitionally
00:23:44.320
in terms of various measurable tests and looking at where they gotten in their first few years of
00:23:49.480
their career that within that population, being able to think outside of, I just want more prestige
00:23:56.520
is actually, it seemed pretty uncommon to me. Like maybe only 50% of the class was doing that.
00:24:03.240
Um, and I think it shows when people are like, why do you look at so much of society's like actions
00:24:09.260
as just mass action, right? Like I don't really ascribe that much to malevolent individual players
00:24:14.580
behind the scenes. And I ascribe a lot to just sort of social pressures that lead to evolved cultural
00:24:20.300
subsets, which lead to a sort of broader societal action. And I think it's because you don't realize
00:24:25.900
how much of the society's quote unquote elite, i.e. the people in the positions to change things,
00:24:31.840
to move things, to deploy capital are really just operating on autopilot to an extent. Um,
00:24:37.600
and here I should know when people are like, what, what makes you so happy about yourself?
00:24:41.000
If you have so little money, I look at what I do have. I have financial stability for now and into
00:24:47.300
the foreseeable future, which I established before putting on a podcast and everything like that.
00:24:52.100
And this is financial stability that I can't be fired from. So I can't be canceled easily or
00:24:56.220
anything like that, which was also really important to me that I would never require because there's
00:25:01.340
two bad ways that this can go. Either you're afraid of saying something that gets you canceled,
00:25:05.900
right? Which leads to a form of audience capture, or you always are pandering to your audience
00:25:12.160
because you've been canceled and now you've got to appeal to a specific kind of audience. And
00:25:15.460
that's another type of audience capture, which is limiting my personal freedom, which I didn't want to
00:25:18.700
have. Um, I am living a life where through the building of the school, through the building of
00:25:24.280
this sort of content, I feel I am doing a thing of value for the world. So every day I feel like I'm
00:25:28.880
living a life of value through writing the books, through the media appearances, through our
00:25:33.560
pronatalist advocacy. And I have a decently large family for society today, four kids and going, and a wife
00:25:42.120
who I have a, I don't know, I have literally no qualms about our relationship. I could not see,
00:25:48.100
I, I, I, I genuinely just adore everything about her. Yeah. We're all right. We're all right.
00:25:55.120
And all of this is on an upwards trajectory. It's like, why would I want money for anything other?
00:26:00.760
If I had more money, I would only want it for more advocacy. Like we already donate like about 50%
00:26:05.580
of what we earned to charity when we can. If I had more money, it would just be for more charity.
00:26:11.480
I think the big takeaway you got from Stanford was from the 10 year reunion was that you don't
00:26:18.980
have to first be successful in a career or insanely wealthy to pursue what it is that you care about
00:26:26.080
most. That if you very intentionally set up your life in a way that allows for a sufficient amount
00:26:32.140
of financial freedom, you're not running away from debt. You are able to pay for healthcare and
00:26:38.460
your basic living expenses. You can pursue what you want. And this is, I think this is only really
00:26:45.700
something that's important for the, those who are lucky enough to be a little bit wealthier. This is a
00:26:52.520
problem of wealthy people and not of your typical person because the typical person is like totally just
00:26:58.420
going for that, but I'm not sure. What do you think? Here isn't a problem of wealthy people.
00:27:02.940
And this is a very important takeaway is it was the way that many of my classmates who are still
00:27:07.660
single were relating to finding a partner. Never ever say I will find a partner when X, you will never
00:27:18.000
find a partner if that's what you are doing. And this is especially true for men. It just does not
00:27:24.360
work that way. You want the type of partner who can see the potential in you and is excited to bring
00:27:33.240
that potential out. If you are looking for partners and somebody can't see potential in you,
00:27:41.560
but they would marry you if you had already achieved objective success, that relationship will not be a
00:27:49.820
happy relationship. In a big way, the very fact that you are securing a partner before you have your
00:27:57.340
wealth is securing a better partner than you can easily secure or source after you have your wealth.
00:28:06.900
Because when somebody is marrying somebody younger or somebody with big ambition or something like that,
00:28:12.540
their ability to vet you by your dreams and competency is part of your vetting process of
00:28:20.320
them. Are they the type of person who is going to make the sacrifices with you to get your family to
00:28:27.200
the place it needs to be? And if they are not, then what you are going to end up with is one of these
00:28:34.140
bimbo hussies who is really marrying you for your money.
00:28:37.020
I would just more broadly, once you become wealthy as a male or female, I think finding a partner
00:28:43.720
who isn't after your money is really difficult. It's just a truism.
00:28:49.740
And yeah, it is a truism. And the types of partners who are after your money are lower quality,
00:28:56.000
often personality-wise. And I've seen this. I've seen the people who marry after they got wealthy
00:28:59.980
and the people who marry before they got wealthy.
00:29:02.100
Here's what I think is happening, though, and this is really interesting, is I think after people
00:29:07.560
get wealthy, they subconsciously think that they can date out of their league. That is to say,
00:29:12.440
they think that because they have more money, they can get someone who is more attractive
00:29:16.500
than what they would otherwise get. However, the more attractive people that they're able to target
00:29:21.760
who are willing to date them, even though looks-wise they're out of their league,
00:29:29.040
The people who are more attractive than them, but also in their league financially,
00:29:33.040
professionally, or intellectually, would still not be willing to date them because then at that
00:29:37.000
point, that person is still under their league, looks-wise. So what you end up getting is someone
00:29:40.920
who's the things that matter, lower quality. But you still have this assumption that, oh,
00:29:45.280
because I'm successful, now I get to marry someone who's more attractive than I am.
00:29:49.980
Yeah. And I would elevate this. The thing that I have seen is that among our friend group,
00:29:55.000
everyone I know, who married somebody after they got wealthy, and it clearly wasn't. Now,
00:29:59.860
there's some people where it's like, clearly they knew this person beforehand. That's not like a
00:30:03.160
supermodel or something like that. I'm not counting those people. I'm talking about the
00:30:05.920
people where this person is clearly more attractive or uniquely young compared to the
00:30:09.700
person they married. I do not know one of them was a happier marriage than the wealthy friends
00:30:15.820
I met who married somebody before they got wealthy. All of their marriages are pretty much
00:30:19.680
terrible. And it's generally because these people who they marry have very bad objective
00:30:24.400
functions. They're typically around wealth and status, and you never want to be married to
00:30:28.140
somebody like that. Or they have a very poor mental health, which can just make a relationship
00:30:34.300
absolutely like a trap. Or they are dumb and unable to have intellectual conversations with them.
00:30:44.280
And so in a way, yeah, you're actually hurting yourself further. So I say that. And then the other
00:30:48.360
thing is that if you have dreams about one day doing some big project that you haven't started
00:30:54.460
on yet, you're never going to do that project. So go out and start today, or it's never going to
00:30:59.300
happen. I'm just telling you that right now. It's never going to happen if you aren't in some small
00:31:04.740
way working on it right now. This is true for startups.
00:31:07.360
This is just with so many things. People wait for permission, right? This is something that we
00:31:10.740
experienced when we were, for example, looking for a company to acquire. We assumed that
00:31:15.080
we would know what the company was when our investors would say to us, hey, yeah, I like
00:31:21.120
this. You should go for this. And then we realized eventually that our investors were never going to
00:31:25.600
say that. No one was ever going to say, now you're ready. Now you should go for it. Jump out of the
00:31:30.820
plane, pull out the parachute. No, you are the only person who can decide that. And I think that's
00:31:35.540
important for everything when it comes to getting a partner, when it comes to having a kid,
00:31:39.020
you have to just throw yourself out of the plane. There's never going to be a time where you really feel
00:31:44.180
ready. Absolutely. Yeah. Hopefully this has inspired somebody, whether it's a book you want
00:31:49.860
to write or a company you want to start, you need to do it in some small way, the minimum viable
00:31:53.840
product of it, the minimal viable version today. Because there's no level of achievement people
00:31:59.400
have reached, as Malcolm has found, where they feel like they're ready. There are people who are
00:32:05.280
making insane amounts of money, who have all the power, who have all the connections, and they still
00:32:11.060
don't feel ready. There's just no point at which you're going to feel ready, really.
00:32:14.880
Yeah. And it's the same with finding a partner. Often what I find with the people who don't have
00:32:20.700
partners, oh, you just can't get a partner. They've turned down perfectly good partners.
00:32:24.320
They're Hamza-ing. You can watch our Hamza video if you want to see the story of somebody who did this.
00:32:28.740
It is very easy if you aren't really dedicatedly looking for someone to marry,
00:32:34.340
and you are looking for the perfect person to marry, not just the whatever, right? It's not
00:32:40.340
going to happen. It's not going to happen. Yeah. I'm glad you went for it. I love you too.
00:32:48.600
Yeah. Let's see if I can adjust myself a little. All right. Is that okay?
00:33:07.340
That's the way we ask ourselves if we're looking good to go. Do you look stunning or brave today?