00:23:51 · Markie Wagner
[00:23:51] S1: Trey and I had a really long conversation about this thesis and ended up being this quest framing and your player card and almost seeing what kind of Pokemon you are and what superpowers you have ended up being the clearest way to talk about how we're thinking. And for me, I tend to want to stay away from overly contrived framings on what are like kind of simple problems to work through relative to simpler framing. I think it's easy to lose sight of what matters when frameworks are contrived or ways of talking about things highlight and emphasize the wrong parts of the problem. And so thinking about like, okay, how do you think about being long term? Well, why does it even matter to be long term? It matters because if you look on a wide view and if the aliens come down five hundred years from now and they're saying, hey, what happened in the 2000s? Like a couple of things will be mentioned. And I guess that means being long term. But I think there are sometimes phrases that gesture towards something important, but don't necessarily hit it on the head where it's like, is the thing that you did important or not? Did it matter or not? Was it remarkable or was it like a copycat of something? A harsher framing can kind of wither away the like cognitive dissonance that you might have about what you're doing. It's like, oh, is my work important? Okay, yeah, because like we make all this money and we make all this impact. It's like, if you didn't do it, would the world look the same? Yes. Okay, then why are you doing it? So we try to stay away from language that could be repurposed and skewed and contrived to justify something that wasn't a good quest, basically.
00:25:30 · Nikhyl Singhal, Markie Wagner
[00:25:30] S0: Yeah, and I think that in some ways, my interpretation is there's sort of almost like side quests and main quests. And maybe the thing that I realized and what language I want to incorporate from your article is, I've always said that, look, people are working in a job. Those jobs may last two years, three years, four years, five years. You work on a product moving something from here to there. And in the process of doing that, it definitely improves that product or maybe the users' lives or maybe helps your team. But over time, it's unclear that those products are even going to be around. [00:26:05] S1: It's Exactly. It's like these micro optimizations.
00:26:05 · Markie Wagner, Nikhyl Singhal
[00:26:05] S1: It's Exactly. It's like these micro optimizations. [00:26:08] S0: Exactly. And so you could argue that your job today, and this is maybe a little harsh, is your side quest. And what you really wanna do is look at the sort of the combination of each of those pieces put together to see if you are on a general good quest. Oh, there might be an opportunity for there to be a distraction here or distraction there. Maybe you need economic needs. Maybe you're starting your family and you're pulling back away. That's all went and good. But if you look over the test of time, if you're on a path that doesn't lend itself to a long term conquest, then you might look and back and feel like there's more emptiness. And the vice versa, maybe the more optimistic thing is that even if your current role or the current job or you get laid off, maybe not worked out as well, but if you were on this good quest and you feel very good about your general behavior. That's how I interpreted the note. I really like that framing of what's side versus what's main as a way to sort of help people get a little bit less tethered on the day to day and more tethered on the overall.
00:27:14 · Markie Wagner
[00:27:14] S1: Yeah. I think the side quest framing is really important. We actually didn't touch on it too much in the article, but went back and forth about a section that dove into side quests. And I think the reason why it cut out is people have different opinions about the importance of side quests. For me and a few others, side quests are fun, but I think often you'll have a new grad that's a McKinsey and they'll say, okay, this is what I want to be doing forever, but I'm just going be here for a little while. And they'll say, oh, maybe McKinsey is a side quest or going to grad school for business is a side quest. And I think calling something a side quest or saying this isn't my forever thing is almost like a stop sign to say it's okay that this doesn't matter because it's not going to be my main thing forever. I think that's really, really dangerous. And I think that the labeling of something as, oh, it's just a side quest. It's not my main quest is a really easy way to waste a bunch of years. If you're going go on a side quest, like go have fun or do something crazy. Don't do something that is both taxing and unimportant. I do think that side quests do distract from a main quest, and to do anything that enters the canon takes like extreme herculean efforts of will. A good side quest can be great and also lead to lots of other fun things. But having a suboptimal main quest and calling it a side quest, I think, is dangerous.
00:28:29 · Nikhyl Singhal
[00:28:29] S0: Yeah, I hear you. I hear you. And I think going back to your story, you had these sort of frivolous sort of fun examples of like hamsters and then you built these sort of small apps and at some point though, what I found compelling is you started thinking more about impacting the world in more meaningful ways. I know that you're known, I think if you Google yourself, you're known for some of the things that you've done in high school that are really powerful around STEM. So maybe you can share with our audience, where did that come about and how did you create that?
00:29:04 · Markie Wagner
[00:29:04] S1: High school, my obsession switched a bit from building things to thinking about institutions. So thought a lot about STEM. The origin story there was I went to a high school that was a public high school in kind of this East LA suburb that I grew up in And not particularly great. It wasn't the most academically challenging high school in the world. But I had a lot of friends there who would say, hey, there'd seniors. And they'd say, hey, I really want to go become an engineer. Or I want to go work on rockets or I want to go do these different things. Even though no one in our community had ever worked on early touch stuff like that, they had this dream of doing that. I knew who I was by the time I walked through the door of high school. I know I like building things. I knew I loved writing code. I knew I wanted to work on and in tech until forever. And so for me, I'd say, oh, great. Okay. You also know this thing that you want, like you're going to go do amazing, go after it. And they would return a year later and every single person that I met had totally dropped their STEM degree. They were all saying, Okay, engineering is not for me. I got started too late. I was on my back foot by the time I hit there. It's probably not meant for me. Everyone else had been taking APCS classes since partway through their high school experiences. How am I supposed to catch up? And to me, said, oh, how far ahead could they be, right? These things are going to even out pretty quickly. But for the person figuring out whether or not they should be an engineer, it's very overwhelming. It makes you say, oh, maybe this isn't for me. So in my mind, there was a really clear problem, which was that there was no infrastructure supporting people developing themselves and developing their understanding and way of seeing themselves as an engineer during high school. And that was leading to a huge amount of waste and lack of talent entering the industry and also mobility around those areas. So spent most of high school standing up the first STEM programs. My high school, neighboring high schools, my part of the county, that was just very, very all consuming. I was spending all my time on it outside of classes. And what that looked like was, okay, say you are a freshman or sophomore trying to stand up like 10 new classes at your high school. How do you even go about that?