Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Explore your curiosity - Interesting people with fascinating stories.
Life consists of three things:
-The stories we tell others
-The stories others tell us
-The stories we tell ourselves.
MeiMei, welcome aboard to the show. Thanks, and thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me, Ari. I'm super excited to be here.
Speaker 1:I wanna start with your book, Bend Not Break.
Speaker 2:Alright. I coauthored that with a woman named Ping Fu. She's the CEO of one of the first three d printing company. She basically invented three d printing for the actual commercial use, which was selling the technology to Invisalign, the invisible braces that everybody wears now. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right. She's the founder of that. And it's amazing story of her growing up in China during the cultural revolution, which is '66 to '76, a time of tremendous upheaval. And basically raising her younger sister from like age 10 having very little to no formal education and making it to The U. S.
Speaker 2:In her early 20s and starting over from scratch and building this tremendously successful tech company. It's a really cool story of resilience and, inspirational tale.
Speaker 1:How did you get together? What brought you together to write this story?
Speaker 2:So I had already been ghostwriting and freelance editing and coauthoring for over a decade. I think when I met Ping Fu, you're never gonna guess where. I could give you a million guesses, and you would not guess where I met her. I met her at Burning Man.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:I would not have guessed. Regalia.
Speaker 1:Would not have guessed that.
Speaker 2:Could tell from head to toe in the middle of the desert in Nevada at our friend mutual friendship, Connolly's birthday party. And it was there that I met her, and later she said something about wanting to write a book. And I said, oh, I would love to write that story with you. So that's how we wrote that book together.
Speaker 1:What is so was this her first book?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Her first and only. Correct. Okay.
Speaker 1:Yes. What what what are the first of all, I'm I'm I'm gonna say this. Bend Not Break, Ping Fu with MeiMei Fox. Mhmm. Go this go get the book.
Speaker 1:What are the when you kinda think about writing a book, the first book is excruciating. I can I can tell you that I'm writing my first book now? My 11 year old older is worth writing her first book now. I think she's doing much better than me, honestly. She's it's for it's a book of poems what she's doing.
Speaker 1:For me, it's like a tech book. It's boring. But there's a sense of fear that who the hell are you to write a book? I'm feeling it. I don't think my daughter is, but it's a common thing.
Speaker 1:Did did did you experience that? Did, Ping experience that? How do you get from who the hell am I to write a book to basically bestseller?
Speaker 2:So I cannot tell you so often I hear this. Almost every person I've ever worked with in thirty years has had that voice in their head. Almost everyone. Right? And I always think of the Marianne Williamson quote, a return to love.
Speaker 2:If you don't know Marianne Williamson, she's a spiritual guru and she also ran for office in the state of California a while ago. She has this beautiful quote that's gone viral many times over the past twenty years that says, you know, who am I to shine so brightly, be so confident, etcetera? And they and you have to ask yourself, who am I not to? This is your reason for being on planet Earth. You have something to share.
Speaker 2:And I tell people that co authoring books, book coaching, even writing my own stuff, half of it is the writing and half of it is the psychology. And it's really true. And so I'm happy to hear you admit that. And I had it to myself so deeply within me that I had been ghostwriting and freelance editing other people's books and blogging publicly for a decade Wow. Before I started calling myself an author.
Speaker 2:I couldn't do it. I felt like a fraud. I felt like an impostor. If I I was like, I'm not a writer. I'm not Ernest Hemingway.
Speaker 2:I'm not, you know, whoever's Zadie Smith. I'm just a little old me. And so I really encourage you to think the exact opposite, which is every single person on this planet has a message to share. And you have at least one good book in you, and that is your message, your story. That's it.
Speaker 2:Plain and simple.
Speaker 1:Was there a moment that was salient for you that you can remember in which you were like, I can do this? Was there anything that kind of pushed you over that hump, or was it just gradually over time?
Speaker 2:I mean, part of it was just the darn good fortune of being thrown into the fire, which wasn't a choice. I like to say that the universe chose me. I didn't choose it because I came can I tell you a story of how I came to doing this career?
Speaker 1:Our podcast is called Story Samurai.
Speaker 2:Okay. It's the next best way to tell stories. Because I I like, answering your question a very roundabout way. So I graduated from Stanford, top of my class. I got a position at McKinsey and Company, which is a management consulting firm, very prestigious, yada, blah blah blah.
Speaker 2:I was about three months into that job, I was like, oops. This is not the right career for me. It was very clear to me that while I had brilliant and amazing colleagues who are incredible humans, I did not want to devote my life to making rich, powerful companies more rich and powerful.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And I saw my two years there. I learned a ton. But at the end of the two years, I didn't know what to do. I had a psychology degree from Stanford. I had bailed in the business world as far as I was concerned.
Speaker 2:I And was like, what do I do now? And I was just lost. And I had a friend who was a doctor who's about 15 older than me, and he knew that I loved I always loved to read and write, and I've been passionate about that. And he said, hey. Will you wanna write a book with me?
Speaker 2:I wanna write this book. It's called sexual fitness, which sounds really racy, but it's not. It's basically a health and wellness book with better sexual health as the hook, right, instead of longevity or weight loss. And I was like, great. Let's do it.
Speaker 2:So, this is pre googling everything and being able to find YouTube videos that tell you how to write a book proposal. I had to go to the bookstore and buy a book called how to write a book proposal. I read it cover to cover. I wrote a book proposal. I emailed it to everyone I knew.
Speaker 2:I said, does anyone know anyone in publishing who might be willing to give me some feedback? And my friend, Adria, wrote back. She said, my friend Nikki's at Penguin Putnam. She's she'll offer she's offered to look at it for you. So I sent it to her.
Speaker 2:A week later, I get a message back from this woman who I've never met before. She's very junior at Penguin Putnam, and she says, we never do this. We're buying your book.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:So that was it. And and Penguin has not
Speaker 1:there's not nobody.
Speaker 2:No. It was one of it's one of the big five.
Speaker 1:It is.
Speaker 2:It was a big five publishing deal from two unknown And my senior editor on that book was a woman named Amy Hertz, an amazing woman. And we finished the book together, and she said, you know, you can do this for a living. And I said, do what? Oh, wow. I mean, truly, I was like, I didn't even know this was a rumor.
Speaker 2:Did you know this was a career? I didn't know this was a career. Nobody told me this was a thing. And she's like, yeah, no, you can do this for a living. You can be a book doctor, freelance editor, you know, co author.
Speaker 2:And she said she gave me a literary agent. She set me up with my next book. So it was kind of like being pulled into that, as I said, like, more like the universe chose me. And maybe that had something to do with why I felt like such a fraud too for so long. I didn't feel like I was legit.
Speaker 2:Even though, you know, within ten years, I had, like, three or four books that I'd worked on published by big five publishers.
Speaker 1:What are the what are the secrets to become? And this isn't just like Amazon's top list. Right? This is No.
Speaker 2:This is New York Times bestseller. Right.
Speaker 1:So so so let's first of all reveal the secrets. It's not that difficult to become an Amazon top seller. Let's
Speaker 2:Anybody can do it, really?
Speaker 1:Anybody can do it. And then I'll be doing it soon. So but but anybody can do it. It's simple. There's there's techniques to do it.
Speaker 1:You know, the everybody teaches you the the the the the good the people who know how to do it will teach you how to do it. It costs a bit of money, and it costs a little bit of effort, but it's easy ish. To be a to become a New York Times bestselling author is a whole different ball game. Yes. What is so kind of read read the audience into this that kinda doesn't get the difference and tell us what that takes.
Speaker 1:What does that mean?
Speaker 2:Okay. Well, in order to be in New York Times bestseller, you have to be published by a traditional publishing house. So you cannot be self published. And I have tremendous respect for self publishing, and I encourage many of my authors to pursue that path, which we can talk about if you want. There are reasons why it's amazing.
Speaker 2:However, you can't be a New York Times bestseller without a big five publisher. Number two, you cannot game the system. And you can't game the system because they change the algorithm constantly, and they go by not just how many books are sold. Because if it's just how many books are sold, any CEO of a huge corporation just go buy 20,000 copies of the book. No problem.
Speaker 2:Right? So it can't be that. It can't be a bulk order. It has to be placed through Amazon, through bookstores. It has to be done all over the world.
Speaker 2:They've looked geographically for geographic distribution. And so you any if anyone tells you, you know, pay me $20,000 and I'll guarantee you New York Times bestseller, they are full of it. Don't believe them. It's a lie. And this is the other crazy thing.
Speaker 2:Guess how many books you have to sell to be a New York Times bestseller?
Speaker 1:50,000.
Speaker 2:10,000. It's such a tiny amount. It is such a tiny amount. So it but it has to be in one week, and it has to be from all these different sources.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So the key to success with the New York Times bestseller is number one, you already have a following. And this plays just exactly into what traditional publishers are looking for these days, which is aggravating to everyone who's grown up in publishing like me, my literary agent, you know, other publishers and agents that I know. Because in the good old days, twenty years ago, if you had a great idea and you were smart and you had some credibility from your career, you might very well get a book deal. Those days are over. They look only to the size of your following.
Speaker 2:They want you to have hundreds of thousands of followers.
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 2:that's what it takes to get a book deal. Hundreds of thousands of followers or huge platform through some other, like, you're a huge speaker or you have an email list of tens of thousands, then you will get a traditional book deal because they need you to sell your own book. They don't sell your book for you. That's a total misconception people have. They think like, oh, I get a publisher and then they'll sell my book.
Speaker 2:No. They they want you to sell your book. You sell your book. So this is the downside, but the upside is that you can self publish. And when you self publish, you own the IP.
Speaker 2:You retain 100% of the profits. Do you know how much the publishing company takes?
Speaker 1:More than 70%.
Speaker 2:85 to 90%.
Speaker 1:Sheesh. So so does this mean that all the Instagram influencers are gonna start putting out books?
Speaker 2:Yes. It means that they get approached. They get approached by publishing houses. I just edited a woman's book where that was the case. She wasn't even thinking about writing a book.
Speaker 2:She's like a breath work work coach. She has hundreds of thousands of followers. Publisher came to her, said, hey. You need to write a book. She wrote a book.
Speaker 2:It's the opposite. It's, like, flipped the entire thing.
Speaker 1:This makes me feel very, very uneasy. Gotta tell you. I'm not I'm not loving it. It feels like we're well, it's not your fault. But, to a certain degree, it feels like we're, you know, we're following the followers as opposed to finding really interesting, insightful, great stories.
Speaker 1:And then the other side of this is, okay. Now I heard I don't know if this is a thing yet or not, but I heard now Hollywood is going after the the the Insta the TikTok celebs because for the same reason that the publishers are going after them. Now Hollywood's going after them.
Speaker 2:And the same reason that the music producers started going after them five, ten years ago. Right? Because music goes first. Music's always first. It's like music got there five, ten years ago.
Speaker 2:They started pulling people off TikTok and producing their albums. Now books are there. And, yeah, I read the same thing that, Hollywood is pulling TikTok stars into shows and stuff.
Speaker 1:Okay. We're we're we're we're gonna stop talking about this before I get upset.
Speaker 2:Okay. But but because I am not a Debbie Downer. You can tell my personality and but, like, I I always lead with that because I don't want people to be I don't want them to deceive themselves about the reality. That said, you have tremendous potential to have a huge impact as a self published author. You really do.
Speaker 2:It's I mean, ten years ago, I wouldn't have said that. But in this world, I say that there are major there are major authors like Seth Godin, a huge marketing guru, who choose to self publish because they wanna retain the control and the profits. And you can have a book that goes viral, you know, and then later, the traditional publisher will be banging on your door and saying, hey. We wanna publish the next edition of that. You know?
Speaker 2:So, you know, you can't get too caught up in that world.
Speaker 1:I wanna talk about and keep me honest if I'm pronouncing this correctly. Is it basically fortitude with, Sara?
Speaker 2:Sara Broca.
Speaker 1:Broca. Mhmm. Okay. Little confession here. Confession time.
Speaker 1:I'm 40. We my wife and I have kind of come to the conclusion that, you know, we want to live out the rest of our lives, well. And we've started to ask ourselves, well, what does that mean? You know? So what did you learn in Fortitude?
Speaker 1:What what can we share with our audiences that are having a midlife crisis?
Speaker 2:A midlife crisis. Well, 42 just really more primarily targeted at women. So, Aria, I mean, can break it to you. But, obviously, a huge consideration for women at 40 is their fertility. So that was a big influence on me because I was 37 when I was working on 42 with Sarah, and Sarah was about 38.
Speaker 2:I think she's like a year or two older than me. And we're going around and interviewing all of these women, and we went to see a fertility doctor in New York, one of the preeminent fertility doctors, and this guy, doctor Jamie Griffo. And we sit down at the table, and he pulls out this part of the statistics. He puts it down on the table.
Speaker 1:I know where you're going
Speaker 2:with this.
Speaker 1:It's it's not fun.
Speaker 2:No. I mean, I hadn't had kids yet. I got divorced when I was 32. That's a whole another story. So I was single at the time, and it is not a gentle curve.
Speaker 2:It is an exponential curve after 38, and I was 37. And it's like, your infertility goes like, you know? Holy moly. So that's one thing to think about. I ended up being inspired by writing on that writing that book directly led me to freezing my eggs.
Speaker 2:I went and I froze my eggs.
Speaker 1:So Even when you're, like, 35, six, four, something ridiculously young, they call your pregnancy a geriatric pregnancy. And I'm like, go like, what is wrong with you people? Like, why would you do that? And my wife is a doctor, and she was upset by it.
Speaker 2:Good for her. Maybe she can help change the language on behalf of all of us women. So there's fertility. There is the midlife crisis. You know, I think, that, you know, that that of our parents generation, that was the trope.
Speaker 2:I think it's less that. I think it's more really coming into connection with who you are. Young says that Carl Young, right, that psychologist says that we spend the first half of our lives figuring out, you know, all of our stuff of just like how to deal with life and how to get through it. And then starting at age 40 is when we truly individuate and we determine like, who am I independent of my childhood and my family? And so I really thought about that a lot with 42 to just stepping into your power.
Speaker 2:It's a very empowering time. I love life after 40. Personally, I'm like, welcome to the better half of life, Ari. It's better over here on the other side. You have wisdom.
Speaker 2:You don't give a You don't This is true. Like, I don't I don't care what other people think of me. I mean, my kids are always like, aren't you embarrassed? Like, no. This is this
Speaker 1:is true. This is true.
Speaker 2:It's liberating. It's liberating. So that's what I think, are some of the things I learned from 42.
Speaker 1:Is a midlife crisis, is this reserved for men, or do women have a midlife crisis?
Speaker 2:No. It's absolutely for women too. I mean, I think what it is is a moment where you just realize, like, when you were young, people told you you can be anything, you can do anything. Right? And I think you hit 40.
Speaker 2:Right. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Sorry.
Speaker 2:And you hit 40 and you really realize like, okay, my options are limited. Like my like, I gotta kinda figure out what am I doing with the rest of my life and what is the purpose? And I think it's when we start to tap very deeply into that sense of purpose. Why am I here? What is my voice?
Speaker 2:What is my legacy? My friend Chip, who's the one who introduced me to Ping Fu, Chip Connolly, he runs a place called the Modern Elder Academy. I don't know if you've heard of it, MEA. He runs retreats for middle aged people for exactly this reason. He's he's inviting people to come and explore, you know, how do I wanna live intentionally and purposefully for the second half of my life?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think
Speaker 1:one of the biggest insights that my wife and I have had is that people are creating their own hell. And we see unhappy people, and I don't know, maybe we're being overly critical here, but we feel like it's a choice. And we feel like we've made a different choice. And and to a degree, that happened around '35 to '40 for us. And we started making different choices and kind of started seeing life differently.
Speaker 1:What do you this is a difficult topic. Right? Like, what's your stance on happiness? Like, how do we get there?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, I have very strong feelings on it because I do think that there's a biological, neurological part of the equation for some people, and I wanna be respectful of that. Like, there are people who are definitely struggling with, low levels of neurotransmitters, extreme trauma in their childhood, chronic pain. There are external factors. So I don't want to in any way say that that's not valid because it is, right? It's so real and it's so prevalent actually in today's world.
Speaker 2:I think that there's, like, there's kind of an idea of, like, you have to have a floor. Right? You have have a floor to stand on. And it sounds like you and your wife are the kind of people like, you have a floor. You have a good solid floor.
Speaker 2:You're, like, good. You know, kind of I feel that way with my husband too. Like, we're we're on solid ground. So then I feel like from there is where the choice comes in is if you're because if you're down in the hole, if you're in this sinkhole trying to claw your way out a pit of gravel, yo, somebody's gotta come along and get you medication or therapy or both or, you know, help you, give you support to, like, get you out to this floor. But once you're on that base floor, it's like, do you wanna go up to the higher levels and get the beautiful view?
Speaker 2:I know I sure do and it sounds like you and your wife do and that's where I think the choice comes in. For me it is a daily practice. Every happiness is a daily practice. I practice happiness. What do I mean by that?
Speaker 2:I start my day with a short meditation. I start my day by moving my body even if it's just ten minutes of yoga or a walk to school with our kids. We have a gratitude practice. We get out a piece of paper and we all write down what we're grateful for and we put it in a jar. And then when the jar fills up, we burn it in a fire pit and have a ritual around it.
Speaker 2:Like, it's a very conscious and deliberate practice.
Speaker 1:So so these are two really important things. Right? Exercise is something we started to do. We're walking together almost nightly. We decided that we're gonna as a family, we're gonna do a a fourteener, which is ridiculous.
Speaker 1:It's eight miles with 3,000 cane. And we have a six year old. So that includes a six year old. So we're practicing by the way, the weakest link is me and my wife, not the kids. They're gonna rock it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So so so exercise is incredibly important. There is no lack of scientific research to show that your physical well-being as you grow older, it's just like there is thousands of researches on this topic.
Speaker 2:So That is not that is not a an overstatement whatsoever.
Speaker 1:Not an opinion. Right? This
Speaker 2:is It's not an opinion.
Speaker 1:There's No. There's stuff that links, your leg muscle density to brain. It's like it's ridiculous. It's just a never ends. The other thing is you mentioned gratitude.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Here's like, you you talked about sex in the sexual wellness. Here's my theory. I'm not an expert. I haven't done research.
Speaker 1:I think that, at least in my opinion, from my limited experience, the biggest driver of a healthy relationship is gratitude. Full stop. That's it. And the thing I told my wife, I I can't believe I was this smart thirty years ago, I said, and this is very controversial maybe, I said, I I don't know that I am loving you for a lifetime. I think that love is a decision I make every day in the morning, and it's actually a decision that both of us make every day in the morning.
Speaker 1:And I can tell you one thing, I'll make that decision again tomorrow. And to me, that was a philosophical difference on how I see the world. And I I get angry when I see these Disney, Hollywood, books. They're trying to give us this picture of like, oh, happily ever after. Happily ever after is bullshit.
Speaker 1:So I feel like I'm preaching to the choir. What do
Speaker 2:You're absolutely preaching to choir. I mean, since I was like 12, I started hating Disney movies for that. It's like, that's where the story begins.
Speaker 1:Yes. The
Speaker 2:story begins where the Disney movie ends. I completely agree with you. And I do feel like that's it all loops together with what you were saying about the choice to be happy, the choice to feel gratitude, the choice to wake up every day and say, I'm gonna make this a great day. I'm gonna be grateful for my family. Does it mean my kids drive me crazy?
Speaker 2:Of course, they drive me crazy sometimes, but I am so grateful for them. They're so good at it. Oh
Speaker 1:my god.
Speaker 2:You know, my husband, like, do we have complaints about each other? Sure. Complaints come up. But, you know, John got
Speaker 1:My wife is perfect, so I don't have that problem.
Speaker 2:Oh, I love it. Good job, Ari. Well chosen.
Speaker 1:At least that's
Speaker 2:what I'm
Speaker 1:gonna say while recording.
Speaker 2:Exactly. John Gottman talks about the four horsemen of the apocalypse. I'm sure you're familiar with his work about marital happiness. But, you know, it was a talk about it just starts with, like, criticism and complaint, you know, just plain and simple. It's and so just don't do that.
Speaker 1:Are are women much more susceptible to criticism than men in your opinion?
Speaker 2:What do you mean by that?
Speaker 1:I feel like men are more likely to be fuck off, and women are more likely to take it to heart, and and it hurts. I I feel like men can
Speaker 2:kind of
Speaker 1:josh and criticize with each other. And for women, it's it's a really stupid mistake. And I'm saying this based on a sample of one and based on mistakes that I've made myself. So I just don't know if it's a it's if it's a public thing that is true for more than more people.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's interesting question. I don't know the answer to that. I would say that if the stereotype is that women are are more empathic by and large, then maybe they're also more sensitive. You know, maybe the sensitivity and greater empathy go hand in hand. But I don't know.
Speaker 2:I don't know the answer to that question.
Speaker 1:Okay. So so believe this has been so much fun. Believe it or not, we are we are closing on the end of our time. Yes.
Speaker 2:I
Speaker 1:wanna I wanna ask you this. Your kids are how how old right now?
Speaker 2:10. They're twin 10 year old boys.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow. That opens a whole a whole new pack of stuff. Pandora Pandora box of stuff to talk about. Okay. Tell us one twin story.
Speaker 1:You gotta give us one. Like, make it a great story or a horror story, like, wherever you wanna go.
Speaker 2:Story? Oh my god. No. I will say that we had a we we they've been bickering a lot lately, which is like a new behavior. I mean, of course, they've always, like, fought over toys here and there and whatnot, but generally speaking, they're really good friends.
Speaker 2:And we travel a ton, and so we drag them all over the place with us. And they're they have to be each other's best friends because there's no one else around. And so just the other day, like, I my husband and were both getting fed. We're like, we're we're gonna have to have a family meeting about this, like, bicker bickering. I can't stand bickering.
Speaker 2:My husband and never bicker. Okay. That's one of our rules too. Don't bicker. Do not waste your life bickering.
Speaker 2:Where it's like, I told you this. No. You didn't. Yes. I did.
Speaker 2:No. You didn't. So we're gonna have a family meeting, and then the kids disappear. And then my husband and are getting we're putting the dinner on the table. We're like, where are the boys?
Speaker 2:Where are they? Like, we can't find them. They're not up front. They're not can't find them in the backyard. So we're, like, calling to them.
Speaker 2:And finally, they come marching in. We're like, where have you been? They said, we went to our secret place. And we're like, what's your secret place? And I well, our secret place is where we're gonna go when we're fighting with each other or when we're upset with each other.
Speaker 2:And Z is gonna say, I feel like punching you in the neck. And the other guy's gonna say, I feel like crushing your skull. And then we're gonna go to our secret happy place, and we are going to play our we have a whole bunch of games there. We have tennis, and we have golf, and we have soccer ball, and we're gonna play a game, and we're gonna hug each other, and we're gonna drink some water, and everything's gonna be okay.
Speaker 1:So how do your kids have the emotional intelligence that many 40 year olds don't have?
Speaker 2:That's what I said to them, Corey. I was like, can I actually can you just can you, like, just do that all again and I'm gonna record that? Because where, like, where did that even come from? Amazing. So that's an amazing twin story.
Speaker 1:I I love it. So so okay. I got a few more before I wrap up. You're thinking about the future of your kids. You're a Stanford grad.
Speaker 1:You you went to the place where everybody looks like a drug addict, McKinsey. That's how you recognize them by the red around. This is probably Oh
Speaker 2:my god. I love that. That's awesome. I've never heard that before.
Speaker 1:No? But it's so obvious. Like, they if they're exhausted, they're tired, they're working their ass off, they're never gonna win the lottery, the you know what I mean? But, most of them, at least. So when you think about the future of your boys, what do you tell them?
Speaker 1:What do you point them towards? What do you teach them? Is it just like be happy, whatever? Or do you want them to a certain degree on this ambitious Stanford, McKinsey, whatever the version of it is for them?
Speaker 2:I mean, first of all, I think AI is changing everything radically to a level that we can't even conceive. And I think even the idea of Stanford or school, I think my prediction is there will be a percentage of the population for whom that's still very valuable, but more and more that's going to become irrelevant. Right. Like, I mean, I've already seen that happen. I mean, I said, I told you I'm 52.
Speaker 2:So I graduated thirty years ago and I'm part of this group called Summit Series. I don't know if you've heard of them. They throw amazing events for young entrepreneurs. Half of them didn't go to college. Half of them didn't go to college.
Speaker 2:Right. And that's already. So that's number one. And then so basically, what we encourage, I don't know about you, Ari. I'd love to hear what you encourage is number one is effort.
Speaker 2:Like, pick a thing and put effort into it. I want to see you if it's soccer, which it is for them right now. Like, I wanna see you take falls and get hurt. If it's school, great. Let it be school, but then go for it.
Speaker 2:If it's art, let it be art. But it's effort. And number two is creativity. Like, our we have a creative family, and I just think more and more in this world is AI can do more and more of the things. It can code.
Speaker 2:It can do you know, it's like the thinking big about problems, issues, communicating.
Speaker 1:Almost almost almost identical. So we call this a fat ass. I want them to have a fat ass. They can sit down and just work for hours. So every single one of my kids at age six will do math for six to seven, eight hours straight.
Speaker 1:Right? They're all like couple grades above their grade in math. They're all GT. So that's what we call a fat ass. Right?
Speaker 1:That you can just sit down and and not not move. And that's the effort aspect of it. We don't call it creativity, but for me, it's about decision making. Maybe it's slightly different. And for me, it's like, look, I don't know what your life's gonna be.
Speaker 1:I don't know what's gonna be ahead of you. I don't know what the decisions are gonna be, but I wanna give you the tools and techniques to make smart decisions. And that, you know, I've yeah, I forced my daughter, and it's coming to my son, to read Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and Emma Stravirsky. And to me, that book is the father of many sciences that came after it, like Richard Thaler's Nudge, like, the decision making sciences. If you can understand the social psychology behind cognitive biases and such, then it's the foundation.
Speaker 1:And she is well, she she was 10 when she started this, and she was crying like, daddy, you're forcing me to study grad school level psychology. What's wrong with you? A lot of stink eye, a lot of side eye. But now she's using framing and biases and anchoring and inversion effects on me. And I'm like, don't do that.
Speaker 1:Stop that.
Speaker 2:That is amazing. So
Speaker 1:she's like because because, you know, so so she's like, oh, daddy, remember when we had this night and then you made pop? Are you framing me, woman?
Speaker 2:That's fantastic. Be careful. First of
Speaker 1:all, be careful what you teach your children. They will use it against you. Oh, for sure.
Speaker 2:You're target number one.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So, so so yeah. I mean, I I I think I agree with you greatly. What's the what's your angle on creativity? How do you get there?
Speaker 1:Like, at high level, I think everybody gets it, but how do you teach or empower or or bring out the creativity in your children?
Speaker 2:I mean, for children, I think it's they have it in abundance. It's what you're talking about. Like, they they're not the ones going around saying, who am I to write a book? They're not saying that. No.
Speaker 2:They're not saying, who am I to do with art? And they're not drawing their art and being like, this sucks ever at the beginning anyway in the early days. So I think it's more just, you know, reinforcing, like, experimentation, play, having fun, failing. Right? I mean, that to me is really the essence of not teaching creativity, but teaching, you know, if you are gonna go on that path that you have, obviously, you're an entrepreneur and that I have like, you know, it's it's so I like your framing of it with decision making as a part of that.
Speaker 2:And and and it's looking at the bigger picture. It's this bigger picture thinking. Right? Because for me, a huge part of creativity is it's not like how well can you draw something. It's it's connecting disparate ideas, like drawing from, oh, I read this one thing in the New York Times, then I, you know, and then I saw this work of art, and I'm connecting them.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Cross cross colonization. The the if you haven't read it, this is a great one. I I've mentioned Daniel Goodman so many times. This is one I haven't mentioned, the 10 faces of of innovation.
Speaker 1:Delightful book. It talks about 10 different types of innovation. It comes from the Idaho company, which is basically like one of the most, I think, one of the most brilliant, design companies in the world ever. But
Speaker 2:Really?
Speaker 1:If you are our audience hasn't read that book, I I love it. It's it's just such a delight. They talk about reinventing, like, a a supermarket carts and stuff like that. It's great.
Speaker 2:By the way, Tversky took I took a psych class from Tversky when I at Stanford. That was that was a highlight of my undergraduate career truly. Was it was I was being taught by a Nobel laureate and it was called decision making and judgment.
Speaker 1:Oh,
Speaker 2:that was the course and it it had a huge impact on me. Not all courses did. I mean, some of them were very fascinating. But the the thing that had a huge impact on me was every economist has built all these models for how how how things work. The problem is they're based on human beings acting rationally.
Speaker 1:Yes. Irrational rationality. So so the his his partner in crime, Danny Yeah. Yeah. Daniel.
Speaker 1:Right. He he actually wrote the filtering tests for the Israeli military. And something like forty years after, they were like, oh, we're gonna redo this. We're gonna change this. And he did this when the country was basically formed, when the military was formed.
Speaker 1:And they came back. They tried to change it. They couldn't it it was just it was just the best thing that they could they could do, and they couldn't get anything better. They could not improve on what this nobody who was not yet like all that did, what, thirty, forty years before. Can you imagine that?
Speaker 2:No. I can't imagine that. That's an amazing story.
Speaker 1:Okay. So if you had to go back to 20 year old MeiMei and this is a difficult question because it's very personal, what would you tell 20 year old MeiMei?
Speaker 2:I mean truly it would be to believe in myself more, step into my power sooner, own it all. I sit and I watch these youngsters in Summit when I'm there and I'm the old lady at 50, And they're in there, like, they're 20. And they're just like firecrackers, and they're just doing it. And I just think, like, oh my god. I could have just been doing it this whole time instead of slowly, silently creeping along my way.
Speaker 2:But, you know, that's my path. That's my journey. I got here when I got here.
Speaker 1:MeiMei, thank you so much for joining our show today. This has been an absolute delight.
Speaker 2:So fun talking to you, Ari. I've come back anytime.
Speaker 1:I we'll we'll do that. We will do that.
Speaker 2:Okay.