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

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.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] 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, seven, 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 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. 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: 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 [00:01:00] 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.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: All right, Simone, it is wonderful to be chatting with you again today. Today. We are going to reflect on my 10 year Stanford GSB reunion. For those of you who don't know, 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?

On 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. I'm here fuming because it is much harder to get into the MBA program than the neuroscience PhD program.

I am like, what? 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. Cause I was like, what's the point? You get into the MBA program [00:02:00] 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. Cause I've seen some heavily overlapped YouTuber to us was 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

Simone Collins: opens the network. It's insane. Like basically when you were there, the most prestigious companies out there just lined up to try to hire you.

Malcolm Collins: Included Eric Schmidt and Connalisa Rice. And

Simone Collins: The people that could bring in for your classes,

Malcolm Collins: like Chambath would come in and like yell at everyone in our class.

And these are small classes too,

Simone Collins: when Evan Spiegel came in and soar a lot in front of your class.

Malcolm Collins: So I want to be clear that and people are like, oh you get high profile people that didn't know what really you do. The [00:03:00] 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 percent response rate actually, especially from high profile people, because they're often looking for bedded, hungry, young people that they can Put into positions is 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 that for them, that sliver of competent and ambitious people who aren't just immediately doing their own [00:04:00] 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 MBA program isn't like an undergrad where it like declines in quality on a linear basis. It's like a logarithmic sloop 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. So basically with

Simone Collins: our kids you're going to tell them, unless you get into Harvard or Stanford.

Maybe Wharton, probably not. Don't bother, right?

Malcolm Collins: Don't bother. Yeah. That's what I'd say.

Simone Collins: By the time our kids are going to university, you're going to tell them not to go to university. Probably.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah, because it's okay, you sacrifice two of your career years for this. So you better be getting an actual big boost, which is what causes this logarithmic scale and MBA program quality.

But anyway, The [00:05:00] 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 started by 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, seven, basically tied to your desk.

Extreme working hours. The team, they worked really hard to make this [00:06:00] happen. And it was an incredibly. Boring logistics based company on like the way that code travels between various like high performance apps.

Simone Collins: And this was after a ton of pivots, not just from the, this first company, but from other companies they started.

Oh, they worked

Malcolm Collins: so hard. Yeah. This is the first company they started with actually about dog monitoring. And then anot