How a Stanford MBA Can Ruin Your Life: No One Wins the Rat Race

This episode critically explores the pursuit and impact of an elite MBA, questioning the societal and personal value it offers.

1. The perceived value of an elite MBA may be overstated, especially when considering personal happiness and fulfillment.
2. Success and wealth often trap individuals into living lives that don't align with their personal values or aspirations.
3. The allure of prestige can distract from pursuing more meaningful, fulfilling life paths.
4. It's essential to start working on personal projects and dreams now, rather than waiting for a "perfect" time.
5. Personal relationships and happiness should not be sidelined for career advancement or societal expectations.

1: Stanford MBA Reflections

Malcolm reflects on his Stanford reunion, discussing the disillusionment with the rat race among his peers. He emphasizes how elite networks don’t compensate for a lack of purpose. Malcolm Collins: "You get into the MBA program and you can basically write your own check in life."

2: Life Choices and MBA Worth

Discussion on the real benefits of an MBA and its impact on personal choices and life quality. Simone Collins: "It's harder to get into the MBA program than the neuroscience PhD program."

3: Real Costs of Prestige

Malcolm and Simone debate the true cost of pursuing prestige over happiness, using examples from their classmates' lives. Malcolm Collins: "It's worth highlighting the catastrophically poor life choices that people make."

4: Breaking the Cycle

The hosts discuss how breaking free from the prestige cycle can lead to a more authentic and satisfying life. Simone Collins: "Many of them never really sought to live a good life or even pursue happiness."

1. Evaluate personal values: Align your career and life choices with your values, not societal expectations.
2. Start small on big dreams: Begin working on your passion projects today, even in small ways.
3. Consider relationships over achievements: Focus on building meaningful relationships rather than accumulating achievements.
4. Reflect on life's true costs: Think about what you are sacrificing for your career and if it's worth it.
5. Rethink educational pursuits: Assess the true utility of advanced degrees in your specific context.

In this insightful episode, Malcolm reflects on his 10-year Stanford GSB reunion and shares valuable lessons about pursuing your dreams and finding the right partner. He discusses the importance of living a life dedicated to your values, rather than simply chasing prestige and wealth. Malcolm and Simone also delve into the challenges of finding a compatible partner, especially after achieving financial success. They emphasize the significance of starting to work on your dreams today and the power of marrying someone who believes in your potential. Join them as they explore these thought-provoking topics and offer practical advice for living a fulfilling life.

People

Malcolm Collins, Simone Collins

Companies

None

Books

"Pragmatist's Guide to Life"

Guest Name(s):

None

Content Warnings:

None

Malcolm Collins
One of the, a few of my classmates got a company. It's easily a billion dollar company now. And I was talking to one of the guys, because when you're working on a company like this, you are stuck 24/7 basically tied to your desk extreme working hours. So I was like, so what are you doing now? And he goes, oh, I left to start another company and I don't understand it.

I don't understand why. Like, for me, startups, we're not the point of the startup, the startup was to get you financial freedom or to get you the freedom to do what you want to do. You have dreams about one day doing some big project that you haven't started on yet. You're never going to do that project. So go out and start today or it's never going to happen.

I'm just telling you that right now. It's never going to happen if you aren't in some small way working on it right now. Let's just jump out of the plane, pull out the parachute. No, you are the only person who can decide that, and I think that's important for everything when it comes to getting a partner, when it comes to having a kid, you have to just throw yourself out of the plane. There's never going to be a time where you really feel ready.

Simone Collins
Would you like to know more? All right, Simone, it is wonderful to be chatting with you again today. Today we are going to reflect on my ten year Stanford GSB reunion. No, that's the Stanford MBA program. It's generally, I think, about the hardest program to get into in the world.

Harder than Harvard, right? We went viral for one thing or another on Reddit once, and some people were like, oh, he misleads people in the way he talks. That makes it sound like he got a neuroscience PhD at Stanford, but he only got an MBA. And I'm here fuming because it is much harder to get into the MBA program than the neuroscience PhD program. I am like, what?

Malcolm Collins
Anyway, because I could have done that. I actually had applied to both of them, but I withdrew my application when I got into the MBA program because I was like, what's the point? You get into the MBA program and you can basically write your own check in life if you get into a Stanford or Harvard MBA. But what I want to talk about in this podcast is a few things. One, the utility of an MBA in today's market economy, because I've seen some heavily overlapped youtuber to us with like, mbas don't matter anymore.

And I was like, you don't know what you're talking about. Like, I am fairly against the university system, but he's just unaware of the. Opportunities, the doors it opens, the network. It's insane. Like basically when you were there, the most prestigious companies out there just lined up.

Simone Collins
Yeah, I had to try to hire. You, included Eric Schmidt and Connalisa Rice. And the people that could bring in for your classes, like chamath would come. In and like yell at everyone in our class, and these are small classes. Too, when Evan Spiegel came in and soar a lot in front of your class.

Malcolm Collins
So I want to be clear that people are like, oh, you get high profile people? That them? No, really, the classes don't matter. It's the alumni network anywhere afterwards. I guess I can start with this.

When you cold email people, especially like right around graduation or for the first few years after graduation, and you include that in your subject line, you get like a 50, 60% response rate, actually, especially from high profile people, because they're often looking for vetted, hungry young people that they can put into positions as sort of gophers. Because what you begin to realize is that from the perspective of many of the quote unquote elite in our society, what there is a shortage of is competent, self motivated young people who don't just dismiss them or arrogant or working on their own projects or something like that. And to an extent they're right. If you're in our current economy and you are competent and ambitious, it's a big question as to why you aren't just starting your own company. No, seriously, like why aren't you?

So this helps vet for them that sliver of competent and ambitious people who aren't just immediately doing their own thing, which is high utility for groups like that. Also for venture capitalists, it makes it much easier to raise money, et cetera. You're basically putting a modifier on everything. Now, this is not true for all MBA programs. This is basically only true for Harvard and Stanford and to a lesser extent Wharton.

And then after Wharton MBA is just not worth it because the MBA program isn't like an undergrad, where it like declines in quality on a linear basis. It's like a logarithmic slope down. And the reason is because you're sacrificing two years of your career that you could be using to put yourself into a higher position. Basically with our kids, you're going to tell them, unless you get into Harvard or Stanford, maybe Wharton, probably not. Don't bother.

Simone Collins
Right? Don't bother. Yeah, that's what I said. By the time our kids are going to university, probably. Yeah, yeah.

Malcolm Collins
Because it's okay, you sacrificed two of your career years for this, so you better be getting an actual big boost, which is what causes this logarithmic scale in MBA program quality. But anyway, the reunion, because this was really interesting because I got a chance to compare myself to how other people were doing, and it highlighted to me how unimpressive the people who are objectively more successful than me are to me these days and the catastrophically poor life choices that people, even in positions of economic privilege, end up making. And it's worth highlighting this so I can go over like a few anecdotes that really got to me. One of the, a few of my classmates got a company. It's easily a billion dollar company.

Now. This was sort of about four or five of my classmates, and they've all moved on from it at this point, but they started it. They've made enormous amounts of money. And I was talking to one of the guys, because when you're working on a company like this, you are stuck 24/7 basically tied to your desk, extreme working hours. The team, they worked really hard to make this happen.

And it was an incredibly boring logistics based company on, like, the way that code travels between various, like, high performance apps. Oh, this was after a ton of pivots, not just from the, this first company, but from other companies they started. Oh, they worked so hard. Yeah, this is the first company they started with actually about dog monitoring, and. Then another one was about photo books.

Simone Collins
I mean, they were relentless. They'd done everything. So I'm going to describe the two bad idea companies that they started first. The first was not necessarily bad ideas, but just gives you an idea of how entrepreneurialism works. They started a company that was for monitoring people's dogs for, like, really obsessed dog moms that were like a baby monitor for your dogs that would monitor their health.

Malcolm Collins
I could see that doing well. They just didn't get any market traction. Then the next was like, automatically printing out your Facebook pictures as photo books for elderly relatives. Not a terrible idea. Didn't catch off.

Simone Collins
We actually ordered one we liked, the one that we like. I think we still have the one. That we got product. It didn't cost that much. You could do it for $50.

Malcolm Collins
But then the final one that they went into was for deep linking code between apps for. I don't exactly understand it, but if I was going to try to explain it, it was like, so that Facebook could like deep link contact to another system without using a normal type of URL. Deep link, I don't understand it. And anyway, so what's talking one of the guys who founded it and he was like, yeah. So I was like, so what are you doing now?

And he goes, oh, I left to start another company. And I was like, what does it do? And it was something equally boring, like not world changing. I can understand deading yourself to a company if you're like trying to change the world or something like that, or if you have full control this time. But no, he raised money from VC's again, he is get a save to the entire cycle again.

It's like you sell all and he was still living in like Palo Alto, right? Not dating, not going out. And I was, I don't understand it. I don't understand why. Like for me, startups were not the point of the startup.

The startup was to get you financial freedom or to get you the freedom to do what you want to do. And this was actually very similar to a conversation, just so you know, I didn't actually out anyone with this conversation because five people from my class were founders of that company. So that doesn't really narrow it down. But this was very similar to many conversations I had at the class. And actually somebody simply similar was said on a couple occasions.

So another one of my classmates who actually was the most similar to us, moved to Napa, works around wineries, some sort of like winery consultant thing. And her husband does like wine sales. That sounds very romantic, honestly. Yeah, they're not making a lot. They're probably making around what we make as a family, which is, we should.

Simone Collins
Point out that what you kept telling me while you were there because I stayed home being postpartum and all that with the kids, oh, we're like the least successful in our class. Everyone's more successful than us. And by successful, I ultimately found out you meant in terms of earning. And in terms of a histogram of earnings from Stanford grads, you were off the charts. Like two standard deviations from the mean.

Yes, you're impoverished among class member of. My class, I think is earning somewhere half a million a year. Now, can you imagine? That's, which was in one standard deviation in the top range was well over a million a year per individual. Again, this is how useful MBA is, right?

This is what Stanford grads are earning. That the average is 500,000 shows you how valuable that MBA is. So they had told this other person and me on different occasions, oh, you guys must be like, the most successful people in our class, because you are doing what we all want to do after we make enough money. And this is where I was like, wait a second. You know that this other person in the class is doing this, and I, we are like, off the chart in terms of the low income group of the class.

Malcolm Collins
And then it got me thinking about the way people structure their lives more generally. And it made me realize that this is the way so many people structure things, is they're like, oh, 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 want to live without asking themselves, how much does it really cost to live the life I want to live? What is the ideal life I have? And pursuing the lifestyle in concurrence, with wealth and prominence and everything like that, with the understanding that while you are living a lifestyle you want to live, that is going to hinder your. We'd be making so much more if we were living in, like, San Francisco or New York.

But the quality of life in those environments is terrible also. Just, it's so ugly in the Bay Area. And I don't think people realize that. They think San Francisco. You think of the most beautiful streets on San Francisco.

Simone Collins
You think of quite tower Lombard street. You don't realize that most of what people are living in around Palo Alto, in Oakland, around California, even in San Francisco, is just ugly suburban sprawl. Because soon tight indy, they're just gross looking houses that aren't getting updated because zoning is so terrible. 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 not very nice.

So it's just a terrible area. Like, the cost of earning that much is basically living in a gross area now. Yeah, well, and this brings me one of the classmates I was talking to became like a realtor type guy, and he did New York real estate, was one of the things he worked under. He was one of the, I assume, less successful people that you can make a lot of money in New York real estate. Who knows?

Malcolm Collins
And he was telling me that in the New York real estate market, you would always see the same story. People would come into New York and get a house that was like, cheap and small and far away from the center of the city, and they'd be like, I'm just getting here to find a spouse and earn some money, and then I'm going to transfer from that into, then leave and live the lifestyle I actually want to live, be financially unconstrained. And he goes, and the same thing always happened with follow ups. He goes, once you got somebody into the city, they're a repeat customer. You mean within city purchases?

Yeah, within city purchases. No matter what they tell you, it's always, I want something a little closer to Central Park. I want something with a little better view. I want something a little bit bigger. Two, three years.

And it's just this cycle that once somebody gets into the cycle, they can't break their mind out of the cycle because of their immediate goals. And I think that this is the problem with the way goals work in somebody's mind, is that their immediate goals are usually structured around doing what they're doing now, but higher prestige and slightly better. And sometimes their long term goals are a like, leap, step away from that, if you understand what I mean. It's like a completely different type of. A thing, like a lateral move in life.

Simone Collins
It's a very different career and move. And I think one of the things that's getting in people's way is they know what they know. So the startup founder example that you gave to us, he knows how to start companies, he knows how to work his ass off. He doesn't know how to necessarily become a writer or a philanthropist or whatever. It's just so different.

And I think there's also this big fear of potentially failing, especially once you've been so successful. I think a lot of the people who get into one of the most prestigious schools in the world, like Harvard or Stanford, and then they graduate, and then they continue to succeed. The cost of then trying something new and failing, I think, becomes higher. So this is along the same lines of how they say, you should never tell a kid, oh, you're so smart. Oh, you're so smart, because then they're going to stop taking risks, because it risks them losing their identity of being the smart one.

Instead, you have to be like, oh, you're so hardworking, oh, you're so creative, oh, you're so whatever. Because that, that encourages them to take risks and try different things. And I think because these people are so successful, they are trapped in their gold plated chains. They're trapped by their success. And the cliff that they could fall off becomes higher and higher.

And so they don't really want to make these crazy lateral changes, even if they, like, have nothing to lose because they've already made it, because they've also built this life around prestige and success that. But I think it's more than that, and I think that this message is actually transferable outside of the Stanford circle. I think the Stanford, like, NBA circle just shows the comical extremes this can take in somebody's life. And I think sometimes you need to see the comical extremes to understand personally, oh, what am I doing? Because we've actually seen this in our fans, where we talk to our fans, and I go, why aren't you looking for a spouse right now?

Malcolm Collins
And they go, I'll look for my spouse once x milestone has been reached, and then I can achieve higher quality spouses. And I'm like, I literally, in my entire life, I don't know a single person who has taken that approach and ended up married, not in a happy relationship married at all. When I actually, when I was talking to the startup guy and I was like, okay, so are you gonna go look for a spouse or are you doing that? And they, oh, when I'm done with this next startup, and I should be clear, somebody be like, maybe he just really likes startups, like the grind. And he told me explicitly, no, it was hell.

He was like, I was working so hard, I'm gonna try to take it a little easier this time. And I was like, why did you do it then? Why did you start it again? And his response was, I wanted to prove to myself that the first time wasn't random chance. And I think that I totally get that there's, like, this honor in that, right?

Okay. You ended up one of the most successful people of anyone you've ever met, and now you want to prove to yourself that it wasn't just a fluke, which is okay, but if it wasn't just a fluke, then maybe have success in a different domain next time. But also it precludes. And this is where, like, the pragmatist guide to life, our first book, I consider it to be such a rudimentary book when I'm recommending it to people, I'm almost embarrassed, but because I'm like, this is something that most people should be thinking through while they're in high school, yet they don't. And essentially what it prompts you to do as an individual.

And it's got an audiobook that comes for free with the $0.99 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 get it there.

It's just that we can't keep the price that low on audible. So anyway, pragmatist guide to life, it's a book around determining what has value to you and then living a life in dedication to that. And we try not to steer people towards any specific answers. On our show, we have a strong bias against specific answers, like utilitarianism or hedonism in the guide we don't like. Utilitarians will read the book and they'll be like, oh, you.

We're trying to push everyone to be a utilitarian. And I'm like, actually, we have a pretty strong stance against utilitarianism, but it's useful because then once you adopt a framework like that, whether it's a utilitarian ethical set or like us, like trying to expand human potentiality, then you can be like, okay, now that I have achieved x, if I am doing y next in life, how do I leverage sort of the inventory of skills and advantages and resources I have to most accurately and efficaciously have my moral system enacted upon reality. And that could be like a religious system, for example. That can be a. There's all sorts of questions here, but I don't think for anyone, especially if it wasn't making you happy going back to start another startup, it's the right answer.

That is more just like you're on rails, and your availability heuristics around the types of things you could do or attempt to do better is anchored to the last thing you were doing. And I think that this really comes to the New York housing market. You may, in your mind, be like, one day I'd like to live in the mountains by a stream. But when you're thinking, what can I do next? Your next promotion is like, marginally an easier thing to achieve and think about.

Or the house that's slightly closer to Times Square is slightly easier. Or not. Sorry, Central park, nobody in New York wants to be in your Times Square. Sorry about that. And did you just elevate how attainable our life is?

We live in a house that a lot of people would think of is quite large. It is 17 hundreds. Beautiful, old, all brick. We are surrounded by a state park and then a national park that surrounds the state park. Thousands of miles of walking pathways and a river right in front of our house and a creek next to our house.

And we got this for like around half a million, 500k for this in the house next door. And that's for the house next door, which we can use to pay taxes, which we can use to make this lifestyle even more sustainable than it was. That is what the average classmate is earning in a year. Okay, that is like when I'm talking about sustainability of a life like this, like, literally anyone from my class could just duck out and then start rebuilding from an environment like this. But I think I also see this in how they're approaching partners.

They look for partners who are absolutely perfect. Because one thing I will say is that my advocacy apparently has had a big effect on my class. 82% of my classmates have had kids, which is actually, when you're comparing it to the general population, a really high number. Extremely. Joke that it was my advocacy.

So I'm not even hated by them being in the urban monoculture. Although I did get in a big fight with one of their girlfriends because I'm so pro Israel in this war, and she was pro Hamas and pro Hamas. She did not think that Israel should exist as a state and all the land should be given back to the palestinian people and the Jews should be deported. I obviously got in a bit of a fight there, and I could tell that it's one of the things where. So this is a system where I guess they should have been more biased against me, but they weren't because they know me.

Or they're like, oh, this is the type of weird thing Malka would do. You would always say things that were controversial. Yeah, I think it's one of those things where if you've seen our podcast, you'd be like, oh, yeah. Like, at first, people, like, hate watch us, and then they're like, oh, yeah, I get it. Of course they would promote this.

This is totally within their. But what are your thoughts on this? Like, living the good life, Simone, and how to approach it? Yeah, I think most people are not actually trying to live the good life. I think that, especially when you look at high achievers, many of them never really sought to live a good life or even pursue happiness.

Simone Collins
The objective function that they have, typically, without ever thinking about it, it just worked out this way. And was part of their disposition as well, is that they are, you could say, prestige optimizers or achievement optimizers, where they've just always done the 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 the best college. I have to have all the best, you know, extracurriculars, win all the sports games, win the science fair, whatever it might be, right? Always win. Always be number one. And that's what's happening now, is they're making a ton of money.

They have their Stanford MBAs. They have their kids. They've like, literally, like they're, they're prestige or achievement maxing, essentially. No, you're absolutely right. And that is not, that is not having an objective function, that is not having a moral framework, that is not knowing what you want and really pursuing it.

It is just being an optimizing machine. They're almost like AI's, and we all are like AI's, but they are AI's with an objective function of achievement. Paperclip maximizing. Yeah, but they're just achievement maximizers. They're the paperclip maximizers.

Malcolm Collins
Actually, a really interesting point that you're making here, and I want to be clear about what I'm saying with this, is that they, like, when I'm like, I am less impressed. Like, we have the people who we give our apartment next door to who are helping getting get on their feet and start a company, and they've recently come out of the prison system, which, by the way, they're okay with us saying, because they said it on the pitches. So I know they're okay with us saying that now. And people would be like, I genuinely, when I hear their story, I have more respect for them than many of our classmates. And people would be like, why is that?

And it's because I judge a person by their future and not by their past. And when they are thinking about their future, they have a cohesive plan of how they're going to build a good family and a good life that is realistic and they are ambitiously trying to do it. And that makes me proud for what they're attempting. Right. So I, but with this other group, and this is with classmates and stuff like this, when I'm like, I don't like, respect what they're doing, it's not a difference in value system.

And I need to be very clear here. I, as people know from this podcast, I'm actually pretty open to many different value systems and I will rank them, but I'm open to many different value systems. It is that they do not have a value system. There is no value system that just says like this, logically consistent, that just says more money, better. And here I'll play a clip from an old video game where guy goes, bury me with my money, marry me with my money.

Where it's when you die and you're on your deathbed and you're reflecting on your life from all of the various things you could have valued, whether it was charity or religion or family or even personal hedonism, like I can respect at a higher level than I can respect this sort of like, mindless prestige optimization people who optimize their lives entirely around hedonism, because at least they have some, like a logically consistent value system they're optimizing around. Whereas so many people, I think even the people who are society sorting as like the best of the best per generation, which, okay, I'm not saying that Stanford is perfected who it accepts, but it's certainly accepting the top fraction of a percent of the population in terms of, like, just definitionally, in terms of various measurable tests, and looking at where they gotten in their first few years of their career, that within that population, being able to think outside of I just want more prestige is actually, it seemed pretty uncommon to me, like, maybe only 50% of the class was doing that. And I think it shows when people are like, why do you look at so much of society's actions as just mass action? Right? Like, I don't really ascribe that much to malevolent individual players behind the scenes.

And I ascribe a lot to just sort of social pressures that lead to evolved cultural subsets, which lead to a sort of broader societal action. And I think it's because you don't realize how much of the society's quote unquote elite that is. The people in the positions to change things, to move things, to deploy capital, are really just operating on autopilot to an extent. And here I should know when people are like, what makes you so happy about yourself if you have so little money? I look at what I do have.

I have financial stability for now and into the foreseeable future, which I established before putting on a podcast and everything like that. And this is financial stability that I can't be fired from, so I can't be canceled easily or anything like that, which was also really important to me, that I would never require. Because there's two bad ways that this can go. Either you're afraid of saying something that gets you cancelled, right, which leads to a form of audience capture, or you always are pandering to your audience because you've been canceled, and now you've got to appeal to a specific kind of audience. And that's another type of audience capture, which is limiting my personal freedom, which I didn't want to have.

I am living a life where through the building of the school, through the building of this sort of content, I feel I am doing a thing of value for the world. So every day I feel like I'm living a life of value through writing the books, through the media, appearances through our pronatalist advocacy. And I have a decently large family for society today, four kids and going, and a wife who I have a. I don't know. I have literally no qualms about our relationship.

I could not see. I genuinely just adore everything about her. Yeah, we're all right. We're all right. And all of this is on an upwards trajectories.

It's like, why would I want money for anything other? If I had more money, I would only want it for more advocacy. Like, we already donate like about 50% of what we earn to charity when we can. Yeah, if I had more money, it would just be for more charity. I think the big takeaway you got from Stanford was from the ten year reunion was that you don't have to first be successful in a career or insanely wealthy to pursue what it is that you care about most.

Simone Collins
That if you very intentionally set up your life in a way that allows for a sufficient amount of financial freedom, you're not running away from debt, you are able to pay for healthcare and your basic living expenses, you can pursue what you want. And this is. I think this is only really something that's important for those who are lucky enough to be a little bit wealthier. This is a problem of wealthy people and not of your typical person because the typical person is like totally just going for that. But I'm not sure what do you.

Malcolm Collins
Think here isn't a problem of wealthy people and this is a very important takeaway is it was the way that many of my classmates who were still single were relating to finding a partner.

Never ever say I will find a partner when X. You will never find a partner if that's what you are doing. And this is especially true for men. It just does not work that way. You want the type of partner who can see the potential in you and is excited to bring that potential out.

If you are looking for partners and somebody can't see potential in you, but they would marry you if you had already achieved objective success, that relationship will not be a happy relationship in a big way. The very fact that you are securing a partner before you have your wealth is securing a better partner than you can easily secure or source after you have your wealth. Because when somebody is marrying somebody younger or somebody with big ambition or something like that, their ability to vet you by your dreams and competency is part of your vetting process. Of them, are they the type of person who is going to make the sacrifices with you to get your family to the place it needs to be. And if they are not, then what you are going to end up with is one of these bimbo hussies who is really marrying you for your money.

Simone Collins
I would just. More broadly, once you become wealthy as a male or female, I think finding a partner who isn't after your money is really difficult. It's just a truism. And. Yeah, it is a truism.

Malcolm Collins
And the types of partners who are after your money are lower quality, often personality wise. And I've seen this. I've seen the people who marry after they got wealthy and the people who married before they got wealthy. The here's what I think is happening, though, and this is really interesting, is I think after people get wealthy, they subconsciously think that they can date out of their league. That is to say, they think that because they have more money, they can get someone who is more attractive than what they would otherwise get.

Simone Collins
However, the more attractive people that they're able to target, who are willing to date them, even though looks wise they're out of their league, are people who are only interested in money. The people who are more attractive than them, but also in their league, financially, professionally or intellectually, would still not be willing to date them. Because then at that point, that person is still under their league looks, lies. So what you end up getting is someone who's the things that matter, lower quality. But you still have this assumption that, oh, because I'm successful now I get to marry someone who's more attractive than I am.

Malcolm Collins
Yeah. And I would elevate this. The thing that I have seen is that among our friend group, everyone I know who married somebody after they got wealthy, and it clearly wasn't. Now, there's some people where it's like, clearly they knew this person beforehand. It's not like a supermodel or something like that.

I'm not counting those people. I'm talking about the people where this person is clearly more attractive or uniquely young compared to the person they married. I do not know. One of them was a happier marriage than the wealthy friends I met who married somebody before they got wealthy. All of their marriages are pretty much terrible.

And it's generally because these people who they marry have very bad objective functions. They're typically around wealth and status, and you never want to be married to somebody like that. Or they have a very poor mental health, which can just make a relationship absolutely like a trap. Or they are dumb and unable to have intellectual conversations with them. And so in a way, yeah, you're actually hurting yourself.

Further. So I say that. And then the other thing is, if you have dreams about one day doing some big project that you haven't started on yet, you're never going to do that project. So go out and start today or it's never going to happen. I'm just telling you that right now, it's never going to happen if you aren't, in some small way working on it right now.

Simone Collins
This is, with so many things, people wait for permission, right? This is something that we see. We experienced when we were, for example, looking for a company to acquire. We assumed that we would know what a come, what the company was. When our investors would say to us, hey, yeah, I like this.

You should go for this. And then we realized eventually that our investors were never going to say that. No one was ever going to say, now you're ready. Now you should go for it. Jump out of the plane, pull out the parachute.

No. You are the only person who can decide that. And I think that's important for everything when it comes to getting a partner, when it comes to having a kid, you have to just throw yourself out of the plane. There's never going to be a time where you really feel ready. Absolutely.

Malcolm Collins
Yeah. Hopefully this has inspired somebody. Whether it's a book you want to write or a company you want to start, you need to do it in some small way. The minimum viable product of it, the minimal viable version today, because there's no. Level of achievement people have reached, as Malcolm has found, where they feel like they're ready.

Simone Collins
There are people who are making insane amounts of money, who have all the power, who have all the connections, and they still don't feel ready. There's just no point at which you're going to feel ready. Really? Yeah. And it's the same with finding a partner often.

Malcolm Collins
What I find with the people who are. Who have turned, who don't have partners. Oh, you just can't get a partner. They've turned down perfectly good partners. It's their hams.

You can watch our Hamsa video if you want to see the story of somebody who did this. It is very easy if you aren't really dedicatedly looking for someone to marry and you are looking for the perfect person to marry, not just the. Whatever. Right. It's not going to happen.

It's not going to happen. Yeah. I'm glad you. I'm glad you went for it. I love you, too.

Simone Collins
Yeah. Let's see if I can adjust myself a little. All right. Is that okay? You look stunning.

Clothes is better. No. Stunning, not brave. Stunning, not brave. Stunning, not brave.

Oh, no. That's the way we ask ourselves if we're looking good to go. Do you look stunning or brave today? Yeah.

Malcolm Collins
Yeah.